Bad, Dad, and Dangerous

by Rhys Ford

  “That will never happen. You may stay to visit with us, but if the shop bell rings, you go upstairs or in back. You’re a secret, remember?” As a member of the Mages Council of North America and Star’s father, he would be held responsible for the abuse of dark magic that his little girl used to bring her cat back from the dead. Their punishments were nothing to laugh about. He could be stripped of his powers. They could take Star. They’d certainly kill the abomination. Only the last option was acceptable.

  TWENTY MINUTES later the shop bell did ring. With the sun behind the man who entered, Thomas couldn’t see his face, but there was a slight tingling at the nape of his neck that told him he’d been touched by real magic in the past. It was faint, like the brush of a butterfly’s wings or the soft velvet of a baby’s ear. He’d finished the trinkets and was now adding a pinch of another magic-blocking powder to the inside of “voodoo” bags to prevent any sorcerous accidents.

  “Good afternoon,” he said as he set the container of dust under the counter, which was when he noticed Nation was not in hiding. The fucking cat was curled into a naked pancake in a sunbeam in the main window to the shop. Son of a bitch, or whatever the feline version is!

  “Hi.” He was about six feet tall, and Thomas could see a strong reddish cast to his dark hair as he came closer. “We’ve met before. I’m one of your daughter’s teachers.”

  Thomas stood a trifle straighter and held his hand out when the man was close enough to reach. Once he stepped out of the sun, Thomas recognized both his face and the faint tingle of magic he’d felt before at parents’ night at the high school. “Of course, Mr. Beshter. You just missed Star. She went off to summer camp a few hours ago.”

  Beshter’s grip was strong, but not in a bad way. It was strange to see him in regular clothes instead of the suit he’d worn at the school when he’d sung Star’s praises. “That’s too bad. I’d’ve loved to say hi.”

  “I want to thank you,” Thomas said as he made his way around the counter. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Nation stretching like he didn’t have a care in the world, which Thomas knew was a lie. Nation’s cares normally equated to raising Thomas’s blood pressure.

  “No need to do that.” Beshter’s grin was bright, and Thomas couldn’t help but return it. “She was the best in my class.”

  “I know she’s brilliant, but you managed to make her feel normal even though she was so much younger than the other students. That was above and beyond in my book.” Thomas leaned against the counter, tapping his fingers against the glass for a moment to make sure Beshter kept his eyes on him instead of Nation’s shenanigans.

  “It’s hard when you’re different. I know what that’s like.”

  “If you’re talking about being gay,” Thomas said, “then yes, I know exactly what that’s like. It was different for us back in the dark ages of the 2000s.”

  Beshter let out a bark of a laugh that spiked the magic in his aura to a point where Thomas could actually see it. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his gift card. “Do you think you can help me spend this? It’s my best friend’s birthday tonight, and I flaked on shopping.”

  “What are you interested in?” Please say me! Really, Thomas, she’s only been gone a few hours! Good goddess, slow down, and he just said he has a friend with a birthday.

  “It’s funny. I do a lot of magic research for my YouTube channel, but I’ve only been to three shops in the area over the past few years.” Beshter nodded toward the shelves of books and artwork on the walls. “Books are normal, but your atmosphere’s a lot nicer than the last shop I was in, but then they were leaning toward black magic. Doesn’t feel like you do any of that here.”

  “Are you a sensitive, Mr. Beshter?” It seemed like the logical question, and it would explain what Thomas was sensing.

  “Please, call me KJ. I’m off duty for the summer, and I’m not Star’s teacher anymore.” He meandered a bit through the shop, stopping before a display of altar supplies. He picked up a statue of the triple-faced goddess and tilted it upside down to check the price. “My YouTube channel is about the paranormal. I saw something when I was a kid, and I want to prove I wasn’t imagining it.”

  “That’s fascinating. I don’t think there are a lot of believers in the world anymore, or those who admit it. Sadly Prozac and other chemicals seem to be the standard cure for us crazy magical con men, which is what I’ve been called more than a few times.” It was insulting, and Thomas had been tempted to show some rude normal that magic was very much real.

  “We should talk about it sometime.” Beshter switched to another goddess statue, one with only one face, and a pair of candleholders that represented the god and the goddess, which he took to the counter.

  “As an interview for your channel?” Thomas wondered if he could do that. He’d need to ask the council. “It would be good for business. It’s rather slow this summer. Most of our sales are online these days.”

  “The anonymity of the internet. Great for buying sex toys, magic supplies, and watching porn,” Beshter said as he pulled the gift card from his pocket and handed it to Thomas. There was a charge like static electricity when their fingers touched, but beyond that Thomas felt something else—he felt Star.

  My girl, what did you do this time?

  “Your total is $28.75,” Thomas said after running the card through the scanner.

  “Great.” Beshter dug out some change to pay the difference while Thomas wrapped the items carefully in tissue paper imbued with more of the antimagic dust. “Here you go. Maybe we could catch dinner? I’m busy tonight and on the solstice, but I’m free tomorrow and the night after the solstice.”

  “Tomorrow night sounds lovely. Let me give you my number, and we can decide where to meet.” Thomas pulled out a business card for the shop and wrote his personal number on the back. He handed the card and the shopping bag to Beshter and then walked the man out of the shop.

  “Cute,” Nation said from the top of one of the bookcases. “Don’t screw this up, Thomas. He smells good.”

  Five

  WITH A slim plastic box cutter caught in his lips, KJ yanked open the trunk of his old Toyota and frowned when he discovered his trunk light was no longer working. He’d need to make sure they had flashlights on the solstice. He did not want to run about in the park, if something scary did happen, by the light of his phone. He grabbed a smallish Amazon Prime box and started slicing through the black paper tape. Inside he could hear the solar-powered motion sensors he’d ordered by the dozen rattling while he worked to get it open, and said a silent prayer to the powers that be that at least half of them were functional.

  You never could tell when you bought anything by the dozen. Hell, half the time a carton of eggs had a broken one hiding in the corner by the time you got it home, and he knew he was more careful than the delivery guy who’d left the boxes on his stoop that afternoon. At least it’d been on the porch and not tossed in the neighbor’s yard where their dogs would’ve had a cardboard-munching party like they’d had last week when he’d ordered new underwear. As pissed as he was at the delivery guy, he couldn’t help but smile at the horrified look on his neighbor Diana’s face when she’d brought the one and only survivor of the underpants-pocalypse to his front door.

  Not that he wasn’t grateful for the single pair, since he was currently wearing them under his sweatpants. At least the undies were clean, unlike the rest of his clothing. KJ saw no point in wearing clean clothes to prowl around before sunset to install hidden cameras in the groves around Pioneer Park.

  “If this place doesn’t give you the creeps,” he said into the night-vision-capable camera he’d hooked over the edge of the trunk while he assembled his toys for the hunt, “you’ve never heard about the hundreds of corpses left behind and paved over when the land was donated to the city and turned into a park. They’ve even got a little monument made of old gravestones at the entrance that I’ll show you along the way. When I was a kid, I refuse
d to play in this park. Pissed my mom off, since it’s pretty close to where we lived, but the place made my skin crawl. Hopefully that’s a good thing now, and David and I’ll be able to show you something that really goes bump in the night.”

  A real shiver ran down his back as the breeze rustled the leaves overhead and ruffled through his auburn hair, so he reached for his hoodie’s hood, tugged it down to his forehead, and then started shoving the motion-detecting cameras into the pouch. He decided to plant the first dozen to test how they worked overnight before he opened the other two boxes. It didn’t matter if he caught anything on the trial. He just wanted to make sure they worked.

  “Hey, dude,” David said as he slipped around an SUV that was too big for the parking space it was sprawled in. “How do they look?”

  KJ rested his hip against the edge of the trunk and handed David the one light and camera he’d completely unwrapped. “There’s a small scissors on top of the box if the box cutter’s not good enough. These things have a lot of tape on them. I probably should’ve checked when I was home. Hopefully we can get a good test if we unwrap half a dozen.”

  “We also should’ve met earlier so they could get more sunlight. I don’t think we’ll be testing much tonight. But they will get a full charge tomorrow.” David began carefully trying to cut the thin tape and paper from another of the cameras. “I’ll do this. You sync them to your phone and tablet. If you put them on the roof of the car, we might catch enough light.”

  “Sundown’s not until almost eight. That gives us at least ninety minutes. We can do it.”

  “We have the technology.”

  “God, you’re more of a geek than I am,” KJ said as he placed the cameras on the roof with their little solar panels facing west. “And that’s not easy.”

  “We all have our talents,” David answered with the scissors caught between his lips. “These are a bitch!”

  WITH THEIR pouches and pockets filled with the cameras and sensors, now synced to KJ’s devices, the two men stood in front of the plaque that held the names of almost two thousand people who were still buried under the park. Just the thought of it sent goose bumps up KJ’s spine.

  “Obviously these people did not see Poltergeist,” David said while testing the mic on his camera. No phone taping for their channel. Only real equipment could handle what they filmed, or more precisely what they prayed they’d be able to film in the future.

  “This place is a hell of a lot older than Poltergeist,” KJ replied as he pulled back his hood for his opening monologue about the history of the old Catholic cemetery under their feet. He never scrimped on history. How could he? It was the closest he could get to chasing ghosts in real life.

  It might not be considered a science, but what was geology? The study of the Earth’s history by studying stones. Anthropology, paleontology, the study of bones and how the people and animals who left them lived and died. Hell, even the light from the sun was from eight minutes in the past. As far as KJ was concerned, history was the most concrete science of all. Sure, it was written by the winners, but if you were willing to read between the lines, you could learn the truth.

  “The ground for the original Catholic cemetery was broken in the 1870s,” he said while looking into the camera, listing off facts he’d memorized from his research while trying to make them interesting. No one watched a history lecture to the end, but they did love a good haunting. Or a nasty serial killer, but KJ wasn’t into profiling anyone who might still be alive and scary. The dead were safer, and so far he’d never met a witch who was into human sacrifice, which David said they should find because the ratings would be epic.

  “At least eighteen hundred people were buried here, and they still are. It was easier to level the land for picnic areas and tennis courts that way. It’s not that rare an occurrence either. There are quite a few parks, housing tracts, and schools built upon the graves of indigenous people and pioneers. These are the only tombstones they kept.” He motioned with his hand, and David moved the camera to the line of crumbling relics. KJ crouched before them, dusting his fingers over the names that were mostly unreadable from the passage of time.

  “It’s sad that you can’t make the names out on all of them. They stopped taking care of the cemetery over the decades, and in the 1970s they shoved the tombstones into a ditch and broke ground for the park proper. These are all that’s left, but there are still small bits and pieces to be found at the outskirts of the park. Kids used to play over them in the ravines until the eighties. Coincidentally, the movie Poltergeist came out in 1982, right before the real construction of the park began.”

  KJ paused, staying quiet while David walked the row of tombstones, taking pictures of the names and dates on the readable ones and taking other images before it got too dark for them to see. He felt the hair on his arms quiver at one point, when David was shooting the best preserved of them, but he didn’t think much of it. He’d already had a weird enough day without looking for the strange and unnatural. He just wanted to set the cameras and go home.

  “We should get those in place,” David said almost like he was reading KJ’s mind, but after being friends for so long, that kind of thing happened. “We don’t have much time.”

  “Yeah, and this is not where you want to spend your birthday.” KJ woke up his tablet and showed David the map of where people had felt or “seen” spirits over the years. “These are the cold spots. Not a lot here by the monuments, which isn’t a shock. We won’t be able to plant anything on the flats because the cameras will either be stepped on or stolen.”

  “Pretty sure we’ll lose more than a few to theft as it is. This is not a safe place after dark.” David stowed his camera in its case, slung it across his back, and started walking for the nearest cluster of trees near a cold spot. “Come on. I can boost you into the branches, and you can set the cameras.”

  KJ twisted the mounting wires around a small branch, aiming the solar panel toward the east to make sure the camera charged as much as it could when the sun came up. The lens was aimed toward the ground, where he thought he saw a glint on the twisted roots of the tree. There wasn’t anything there when he dropped down beside David. There never was, but he decided trusting his gut wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Sun’ll be down soon,” David said, pointing with his chin toward the darkening clouds and sky. “Time to split up for the rest.”

  “Yeah.” KJ reached into the pouch and counted three cameras waiting to be planted. “I’ll hit the side toward the ravine.” It was the farthest from the entrance and memorial, and he hoped it might be a good spot to catch something on camera besides a mugger or other paranormal hunters. There were almost always people walking through the haunted sites they visited with homemade PKE meters and other ghost-hunting equipment.

  He loped across the grassy area to the tree line and crouched near a dark spot on one of the trees. From across the way he’d thought it might be a hole, but now that he was close, he discovered it was a puddle of black wax. Someone had burned a candle there. It was still warm and kind of soft, which might mean it hadn’t been done too long ago, but as hot as it’d been all day, that was hard to judge. Using the camera on his tablet, he captured the evidence of what might’ve been black magic and then set up one of the cameras from his pouch near the spot.

  “Hope you come back,” he said to himself. “Might end up being something interesting.”

  “Who?” a voice whispered, and a cold hand brushed the back of his neck.

  “Hello,” KJ said, holding as still as a deer in the headlights. His breath steamed as the air around him went cold. “I’m sorry to disturb you.” He caught a glimpse of a tattered white lace-trimmed sleeve out of the corner of his eye and slowly twisted on his heels to get a better view of the woman in white. Please be on the camera. Please be on camera.

  She solidified as he watched her, which was not at all what he expected. Any other time he’d seen a ghost, they’d faded away once they noticed he could
see them, though that might’ve been because David was usually with him with the big camera.

  “Darkness,” she said, pointing at the wax.

  “Yeah, I think so too,” he said, agreeing with her while his guts turned to ice. “Something bad is going to happen here.”

  Six

  “DID YOU just make a date?” Marjorie and Nation asked in unison after KJ left the shop. Thomas couldn’t tell who looked more surprised.

  “It’s not that kind of date.” Thomas went back behind the counter to retrieve the gift card KJ just used. “He’s one of Star’s teachers.”

  “He was one of her teachers,” Marjorie pointed out while Nation hopped onto the counter and stuck his face into Thomas’s long-empty teacup. “One of her hot teachers. I’d ask him out, but he’s on your team, not mine.”

  Thomas brought the card to his nose, sniffing the edge of it, and then ran it along his tongue. He closed his eyes, tracing the touch of power he detected on the card. His shoulders slumped slightly when he opened his eyes to meet Marjorie’s gaze. She was looking at him like he was insane. “She put a spell on it.”

  “She? Star?” Marjorie came closer and took a look at the card. “Some kind of love spell? Those don’t work. You can’t make someone love you. You taught me that.”

  “I’m not sure what spell it was. I’d have to cast something bigger to figure it out, or I could just bloody text her at camp.” His sigh was heavy as he dropped the card back into the register. “I tried to teach you both the rules. Apparently you pay more attention than my daughter. First she does that.”

  “I am not a that. I am a cat!” And to prove his point, Nation reached out and knocked a jar of polished stones from the counter to scatter on the floor at Marjorie’s feet.