Mulberry Wands (34 page)

Maggie took a seat on the bed and opened the
carton of cigarettes. She had the television on loud, what looked
like one of the reality shows where has-been actresses go to drug
rehab. After she got out a pack, she opened it and put the paper on
the floor.

“So, I guess you know Susan is back.”

“Yeah,” she said. She fumbled around in the
blankets, then came up with a zippo. She hesitated before putting
the pack on the table, and shook out a second cigarette. “You want
one?”

He shook his head.

She lit a cigarette and inhaled. “What do you
care?” she said, but she wasn’t talking to him, she was talking to
the lizard clinging to the window curtain. “Yeah, whatever, old
man.”

Griff wondered what the lizard had said, but
he didn’t wonder so much that he’d be willing to breathe that nasty
smoke again. He took the amulet off his neck and set it on the
table. “I brought this back for a recharge.”

She pulled away from the skinny women on the
reality show long enough to glance at the amulet, puzzled, like she
couldn’t remember ever seeing it. “What’s that?”

“The amulet you made me. To keep the owls
away.”

“The owls are gone. We had a talk. It’s cool
now.” Maggie laughed and pointed at one of the actresses, who was
vomiting into a vinyl diner booth. “Damn, Miles, you called it!
Puke-o-rama.”

“You had a talk. Um, great.”

Maggie grabbed an empty Coke can to ash in,
then turned the volume up even louder.

“Maggie, um.” Griff cleared his throat. “I
wanted to ask about the rumblers. The fey. You didn’t kill them,
did you?”

Maggie made a grunt that could have been a
no.

“So, where are they?”

She shrugged and breathed out smoke. “I
dunno, I put them outside after I’d trapped them. They’re probably
around here somewhere. The trap’s still under the trailer, if you
wanna take it back to Susan.”

Griff went outside and circled around the
trailer until he found where a panel was loose and leaning instead
of attached. When he moved it, there was a small opening about two
feet wide by eighteen inches high. He crawled underneath. It was
dusty and dark, and he could still hear the television through the
floor of the trailer above. The trap had been set to one side, open
but not set, and two small creatures were licking the
bait-plate.

Griff wriggled further underneath and let his
eyes adjust to the darkness. Susan was right. The fey had been
demagicked, and were now completely visible. The creatures were
unlike any he’d seen before. They looked a little like hedgehogs,
just as Alex had said. Like pets that had been released into the
wild, they didn’t run away from him. They milled around, making a
sound halfway between a cat’s purr and a man muttering “rumble
rumble”.

“Rumblers,” he said out loud. “That’s why
they call them that.”

The rumblers shied away from the sound of his
voice, but only briefly.

Griff backed out from under the trailer and
got his work gloves from the storage bin on the back of his bike.
He had half a Powerbar too, so he grabbed that to use as bait. Did
rumblers eat Powerbars?

Turned out that they did. When he put the
Powerbar on the ground, the nearest rumbler waddled over, sniffed
it, and started eating, muttering happily. The other rumblers
approached, cautiously at first, then with enthusiasm when they
figured out there was food. They seemed remarkably tame. Maybe that
came from being invisible to most creatures.

“Okay, easy now,” he muttered, as he picked
the nearest one up.

He gently put it inside the cat trap, where
it squeaked and tried to escape. Once he’d put the others in there,
(and most importantly, the food) they settled down. He found nine
total, five healthy, three lying on their side and lethargic, and
one that looked dead but was breathing shallowly. There were other
dead ones, but he wasn’t sure how many because insects had eaten
everything but a pile of spines. He caught every one that was still
alive. Even the healthiest ones couldn’t move fast enough to get
away from him. Without their magic, they were as defenseless as
flightless parrots.

He put them all in the silvered cat trap,
then used a bungee cord to hold it on to his bike. He went as
slowly as he could back to the house, avoiding major streets and
speed bumps. The poor little things had suffered enough.

After he took them home, he put them in
Nullus’ larger cage, moving the rat to the tiny travel cage. Nullus
squeaked in protest at his eviction.

“It’s only for a little while, buddy,” he
told the rat.

He pulled his Ptolemy book off the shelf, and
pulled one of his emergency twenties out. He looked over at the
rumblers, who were climbing over each other and squeaking, trying
to huddle in a ball. Nullus was standing on his back paws, sniffing
for a way out of the plastic aquarium. Griff shook the book to
release more bills, then put them in his wallet.

At the pet store, he bought another water
dish, and a hollow log for them to hide under. The aquariums were
expensive, even the used ones, far more than he could afford
especially now that he didn’t have the wand-selling business, but
he bought one anyway, along with some pine bedding and a package of
sunflower seeds. He bought some crickets, and rabbit kibble too,
and sugar-glider food, and ferret chow, not knowing what rumblers
ate.

When he took it home and transferred the
rumblers to their new cage, they seemed much happier. They ate
everything, except the crickets, which they weren’t fast enough to
catch. He force-fed the lethargic rumblers water with the
eye-dropper he used to give Nullus medicine.

Zoë knocked on his door. She was wearing a
tight pink camisole and some cargo pants. She’d recently cut all
the black off her hair, so it was short and white-blonde. “I hear
you have some new pets.”

“I’m sorry about the stink,” he said. He
tried not to stare at Zoë, as much as he liked looking at her. Zoë,
like a wild animal, got skittish if you showed too much attention.
“Since they got de-magicked, they can’t survive on their own. I
feel responsible for them. I’m hoping I can rehabilitate them.”

“De-magicked?” she asked, coming into the
room. She peered into the cage and tapped on the glass. “Are these
the garden fey Susan was talking about?”

She bent over with her face close to the
glass, enrapt, which gave Griff a few moments to stare at her.
“They’re so cute!”

“You, uh, you want to hold one?” he
asked.

Zoë nodded, and stepped away to make room for
him. Griff lifted the lid and chose the healthiest one, picking it
up carefully so that its spines didn’t prick him. He laid it in
Zoë’s small hand. His fingertips brushed hers as he pulled his
hands away, and he met her eyes.

She held his gaze for a moment, then looked
down at the garden fey. She stroked it on the forehead, and the
rumbler rumbled in pleasure. She touched its spines too, gently,
laying them flat against its back like fur.

“You have a way with animals,” he said. “They
must sense they can trust you.”

She held it without moving, patient and so
quiet that it curled up and fell asleep in the warmth of her hand.
Zoë’s face melted in amazement.

If Griff were a rumbler, he would have been
rumbling in pleasure just to see that expression on her face.

“Thank you,” she said. She set the rumbler
down in the cage so gently that it didn’t wake up. “I’ve always
wanted to see a garden fey.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m glad I could
make you happy.”

She was already on her way out, but at the
door she paused and looked at him, holding his gaze just long
enough to fan the spark of hope into a conflagration.

END

Read on for a sample chapter from the sequel
to MULBERRY WANDS, THE HEAT STEALER.

On the third day that the temperature in the
house got body-warm and stayed that way, Susan packed a bag and
went to stay with her mom.

Maggie’s trailer had been parked at the tiny
trailer park a couple miles north of where Susan lived now. Decades
before, when it was first able to actually move, the trailer park
had been out in the suburbs, but the city had grown so much that it
was now on a very busy intersection behind an auto parts shop and a
rental storage place.

Susan turned the air conditioning vents on
herself for one last blast of coolness, then grabbed her bag and
dashed from the car to the shade. Her feet echoed hollowly on the
Astroturf covered porch. She pounded on the screen door, then let
herself in.

Maggie was sitting on her bed, drinking
whisky and Coke and watching one of those shows where people call
in to vote for their favorite wanna-be pop star. The bedclothes
were cohabitating with towels and dirty laundry in a tousled orgy
of poor housekeeping. She had jute twine in her hands, and was
tying it in a series of knots, looking at a piece of paper for
reference.

Susan pushed aside the ashtray and half eaten
taco on the banquette table and set her bag down. Then she squeezed
into the bench, skootching around until she was sitting under the
air conditioner vent.

“What’cha doing?” Susan asked, fluffing her
blouse open to let the air dry the sweat on her chest.
“Macramé?”

“Just making a spell,” Maggie said. “Trying
to get Lottie’s migranes to clear up. She can’t afford the
prescriptions, so she asked me to see what I can do. Can you get me
my cigarettes?”

“I just sat down,” Susan said, but she got up
anyway and handed the ashtray to her mom. Then she passed over the
cigarettes, which had a plastic lighter tucked under the cellophane
wrapper. She helped herself to a diet Coke from the fridge, then
squeezed herself back into the banquette.

“So, you out of work again?”

“Data entry place let me go. The temp place
said they’d call me if they had anything new.”

“Whatever happened to that job you had with
the private detective?”

Susan felt around for a pillow to put between
her head and the trailer’s window. “Brian filled it when I
disappeared. He said he’d call me if he had an opening.”

The television burst into applause and then a
commercial break. Maggie put it on mute. “You think about doing a
spell to get yourself a new one?”

“Don’t want the karma payoff,” Susan said.
She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“You and your karma. I don’t know where you
got that idea. There ain’t no payoff. The universe provides.”

“I got a couple other spells going right now
anyway,” Susan said. She lifted her hair off her neck and leaned
forward to let the air blow against it. She saw a lizard skitter
across the floor then slip in a crack between cabinets, but the
lizard didn’t say anything.

“Oh yeah?” Maggie took a sip of her drink and
started sucking on one of the ice cubes. “What kind?”

“Get a new roommate, get the air conditioner
fixed and, uh, well, see Jess and Christopher again.” She mumbled
the last part.

“Ha!” Maggie flipped the macramé out, then
held it up to look at it. “Bet Ruby’s pissed off about that.”

“Yeah.” The air conditioner switched off, so
Susan took the cold can of soda and held it against her neck. “She
told me not to. Said it wasn’t what I needed, that what I needed
was to get out of the house.”

Maggie laughed. Maggie’s relationship with
Ruby was like her relationship with Grandma had been. Grandma had
been something of a control freak, and the only things she and
Maggie had in common was mage craft and chain smoking. She’d
constantly ordered Maggie to straighten up and fly right, and
Maggie constantly snuck out to smoke and hang around with boys.
Susan had been terrified of Grandma as a child, and had felt
relieved (and guilty about being relieved) when she was in
Kindergarten and Grandma died of lung cancer.

“How’d you craft the spell? Did you make a
portal?”

“Tried that. The other Susan blocked it, said
she doesn’t like me spying on her.”

“See, I told you you ought to lighten up. You
even annoy yourself!” Maggie cackled. “No, but seriously, Sue, you
didn’t do any necromancy, did you?”

“Hm?” Susan was feeling sleepy, and had her
eyes closed. “Did a finding, just altered it to make it people
specific, used some old letters as a focus.”

“You know that’s going to raise them from the
dead.”

“What?” Susan sat bolt upright.

Maggie laughed again. The commercials were
over, so she turned the television up.

“Don’t freak me out like that, Maggie. It’s
not, is it?”

“No, of course not.”

“You ever raised the dead?”

“Once. Made me kinda nervous and
jittery.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Even the idea of it gave
Susan the creeps. She’d been very careful not to make it too
specific. Just see her brother and sister. That’s all.

“I was drinking coffee for weeks,” she said.
“You need like eighty pounds of used coffee grounds, and this was
in the days before Starbucks gave you their old ones so I had to
drink the java myself. You have to bury the body in the coffee
grounds and then drop blood on it while you chant this poem. It’s
not a great spell though. The corpse can’t say anything, and it
tends to fall apart.”

“Oh that is total bullshit. You’re making
that up.”

Maggie laughed again and turned the
television up louder so she could hear some kid demonstrate her
yodeling.

Susan closed her eyes. The banquette wasn’t
very comfortable, but she’d been sleeping poorly for weeks now. It
was just past midsummer and had edged into the beginning of the
monsoon season. It had rained the day before, and the temperatures
had fallen from the teens to the low hundreds, but except for the
humidity and the fact that the cacti looked a little cleaner, you
couldn’t really tell it had rained.