by C. C. Mahon
“In the evening, more likely. These people prefer to practice at night. I don’t know why.”
“Okay. So, on a moonless night, our necromancer goes into the desert, a living rabbit under one arm and a dead rabbit under the other? And a few hours later, the rabbits switch states?”
“I suppose so.”
“It could be anyone…”
“Anyone with a good grimoire or a good teacher. Both, preferably.”
“Wait… Do you mean we’re looking for two necromancers? A student and a teacher?”
She seemed to think for a moment then shook her head. “No. A master necromancer would not have gone unnoticed. Not in a city like Vegas.”
I tried to drown my discouragement in coffee and found that my cup was empty. I was starting to have too many problems on my hands: finding a necromancer before they killed again; surviving the magical apocalypse; offering shelter to my friends and as many people as possible at the club. And then there was this whole magic drug thing that was bothering me, too.
“What do you think a magic overdose feels like?”
“Are you talking about your new drug? I guess we’ll find out soon.”
“You know what I like about you?”
“My infallible faith in human nature?”
24
Britannicus arrived half an hour later. I hardly recognized him; his short, usually frizzy hair was sticking up on his head. He was not wearing a jacket or a vest and had loosened his tie, which was askew. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up and stained with soot.
He crossed the threshold of my loft without waiting to be invited and exclaimed, “Did you see that? The number of anim per second ejected by this flaw…”
“Look at the way the jet hits the dome,” Lizzie added, pointing to the phenomenon. “Such a force could break a ritual in an instant, and yet the dome still holds…”
“Brit,” I said, “how is it going over there?”
“Customs have sealed off the area to keep civilians at bay.”
“I noticed that several members of the rescue services could see the magic,” I said. “Do you know what happened to them?”
“If they make too many waves, the Guild could take care of them. It is still too early to say. When I left, the site was quiet—except…you know.”
“Do you think we should expect another explosion?” I asked.
“This is beyond my competence. There is the question of the ley lines, of course, but also the geology of the place…”
“And the presence of Vegas Underground,” Lizzie added. “Such a void under our feet could be an echo chamber…”
“How big is this ‘Vegas Underground?’” I asked.
Lizzie mimed her ignorance.
“The Guild has maps,” Britannicus said, “but I never had access to them. And nothing says they’re reliable.”
“I thought wizards were very proud of the accuracy of their maps,” I said.
“True. But the people of Vegas Underground are suspicious. They know what a wizard can do with a good map. I suspect them of issuing false maps to fool the surface dwellers.”
“These people from Vegas Underground,” I said, “what are they? Demons?”
“Some are, yes. Other creatures live there, too, away from the human city but close to the ley lines.”
“Do you think they were shaken by the explosion, too?”
I imagined a horde of demons coming out on the streets of my city, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Big rats, with horns and magical powers.
“I heard about a tremor underground,” Lizzie said.
“When?” Britannicus asked.
“It’s a rumor that’s been going around. I don’t know if it’s true.”
“If Vegas Underground ever had to be evacuated…” I said.
Britannicus raised his hand to interrupt me. “We are not there yet.”
“Dale said we’re all going to feel the effects of the magic spill,” I said. “What do you think of that?”
“It’s obvious!” exclaimed Lizzie. “If you were worried about spell dealers before, expect worse now. Any idiot can find a spell on the Internet and conjure up an abomination. The silver lining is that it usually ends with a good meal for the conjured and one less fool for the community.”
“Not to mention the supernaturals,” Britannicus intervened, “who will probably see their powers multiply.”
“And then there are the infected humans,” Lizzie said.
She suddenly seemed much less enthusiastic.
“Like the paramedics who woke up as wolves?” I said. “Or the nurse who jumped at his patient’s jugular?”
The wizard and the witch nodded. Their faces were dark.
“Is it serious?” I asked.
“It is difficult to say,” Britannicus answered. “As long as the magic leak was…let’s say ‘moderate,’ we had managed to calculate the number of anim per day it transferred into the snippets of ritual and…”
I raised my hands to stop his speech. “In other words?”
“In other words, I have no idea what’s going to happen now.”
“Can you try to guess?”
He frowned, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then said, “Personally, I expect chaos. Dozens of contaminated humans who will have to discover their new nature without anyone to guide them. Hundreds of supernaturals who will have to deal with a sudden increase in their magical charge. Beginner sorcerers who will now be able to feed spells that exceed their competence…”
“And humans who will end up noticing all this mess, without understanding what’s going on,” added Lizzie. “They’re going to talk about ghosts, curses, and I give it a week before they launch the first witch hunt in Las Vegas.”
I felt exhausted. “Any idea what we can do?”
“I think I understand how to reverse the ritual,” says Lizzie. “So in principle, if a human wants me to rid him of his new magical powers, it’s possible.”
“But?” I said.
I could see from Lizzie’s face that there was a “but,” “But before that, we have to find the victims, explain what is happening to them, and convince them to let themselves be treated.”
“And there is nothing to say that humans will not be ‘contaminated’ again by a piece of ritual,” Britannicus added.
“And then there are the risks of mutation by simple exposure,” Lizzie added.
“It has never been proven,” Brit said.
“It may be soon!”
I raised my hands so that they would let me speak. “So there is nothing we can do to stop this magic spill or to mitigate its effects? We have a necromancer, a handful of new undead, dealers of all kinds on our hands, and soon the average citizen will be pushed into new powers. Did I forget something?”
“The effects on the supernaturals,” replied Lizzie. “Their magical part may overtake their humanity.”
Like Nate, who was having trouble containing his bear.
We had to find a solution.
I got up and approached the glass wall. The magic geyser looked like…
“A spill!” I shouted.
Lizzie and Britannicus shot me worried looks.
“It’s a spill, like from an oil well,” I said.
“Yes?” said Lizzie.
“In the 1990s,” I said, “you remember the oil wells that burned in Kuwait?”
“Not really,” Britannicus admitted.
“Yes, that’s it!” exclaimed Lizzie. “Of course. The Iraqis had set fire to Kuwaiti oil wells. It burned for weeks; the pollution was incredible. In my memory, engineers eventually blew them out with dynamite, like candles.”
Britannicus’s forehead wrinkled. “You want to blow up the geyser?”
Lizzie frowned. “I don’t think it works in our case.”
“But we could set it on fire,” I said. “Not literally, but…if we could find a spell or ritual that uses a lot of magic energy, maybe we could lower the concentration of magi
c in the air…”
Brit and Lizzie looked at each other. They seemed skeptical, but I could almost see the workings of their minds moving forward.
“To ‘burn’ magic,” Lizzie began, “would require a large-scale ritual. The most voracious rituals are the ones that create something in a place where it has nothing to do.”
“For example?” I said.
“Fish or frogs in the sky,” she said.
“Has it been used in similar cases before?”
“Sometimes,” Britannicus intervened. “This is the origin of many stories. Like the plagues of Egypt in the Bible or other more recent phenomena.”
“But that would not be enough,” Lizzie said. “A simple frog rain would only use a fraction of the energy we have at our disposal. And if the ritual went wrong…” She made a face.
“What?” I said.
“We could end up with a shower of whales or dinosaurs,” Britannicus explained.
“That would consume a lot of energy!” exclaimed Lizzie. “The simple fact of recreating animals extinct millions of years ago…”
“Maybe we should avoid it,” I said.
If a couple of nervous shapeshifters and a few undead could be a problem, I couldn’t imagine what a bunch of dinosaurs on the streets of Vegas would do. “Perhaps it is better to leave things as they are,” I concluded.
Lizzie breathed a sigh of disappointment. It seemed that the prospect of making dinosaurs rain was particularly enticing to her.
25
My phone rang. I answered and took a burst of spitting static in my ear.
“Lola? I can’t hear you! Are you at the crater?”
The communication ended.
“Is there a problem?” asked Britannicus.
He and Lizzie were leaning over the notebook where Britannicus had noted his observations near the crater. They spoke in a low voice, pointed at numbers, scribbled calculations.
“Lola called me, but I didn’t understand anything.”
“Magic scrambles the airwaves,” Britannicus explained. “The magic cloud has reached a mass sufficient for magic to create magnetic phenomena like a natural storm would.”
Above the glass ceiling, the cloud of magic took on the purple hue of a hematoma. As I was looking up, a lightning bolt tore through the sky.
Thirty seconds later, a text message from Lola summarily summoned me to a school I didn’t know. I left the two wizards to their calculations and took my motorcycle. I was hoping I wasn’t going to get drenched on the way.
After going round in circles in the suburbs of Vegas, I finally found the school in question. Lola was waiting for me in the parking lot, between an ambulance and two police cars.
“What took you so long?” she asked as a greeting.
“We’re not far from Jeffrey and Alicia’s, are we?”
“That’s right. That’s why I was there when the switchboard routed the call.”
“What call?”
She waved to me to follow her. I complied, grumbling. I liked to have my questions answered, and I moderately appreciated the riddles.
Lola led me in the school hallways. A crowd of overexcited teenagers had gathered in front of a door, similar to the other class door. A uniformed cop was blocking the access.
The cop greeted Lola and stepped aside to let us through. As I crossed the threshold, I turned back to the crowd in the hallway. A flash of purple hair and I thought I saw Chloe’s worried face. But the anonymous teenagers bumped and jostled again each other to see inside the classroom, and the purple-haired girl disappeared into the crowd. The cop closed the door.
We were in a chemistry room, like the ones I was familiar with in high school: whiteboard on a wall, teacher’s desk, and double rows of white-tiled benches. On the benches, assortments of Bunsen vials, notebooks, and spouts.
Several chairs were overturned. The others had been pushed back in disorder. There was broken glass on the floor, where students had dropped their vials.
There was only one student left in the classroom, a tall beanpole of a teenager, his brown hair disheveled, glasses crooked on his frozen face. He had collapsed on his bench over an experiment in progress. A blue liquid formed a small puddle on the white tiles. I watched the liquid’s progress on the grout that joined two tiles. Soon the blue would touch the other puddle—the red one. Blood had been spilled on the bench, but there wasn’t much of it…
“According to the witnesses,” Lola said, “he did this to himself.”
She was pointing at the kid’s ears. From the right ear, blood had trickled and coagulated. From the left ear emerged a metal bar, visibly inserted in the skull.
“Did he stick this in his ears?” I breathed.
“The witnesses all describe the same thing: restless behavior, screaming, hallucinations…”
“What kind of hallucinations?”
“Apparently, the poor kid was hearing voices. I think he destroyed his eardrums to make them stop.”
“What is this metal bar?”
“It is used to hang the test tubes above the flame.”
She pointed to a small scaffolding on another bench that held a test tube above a Bunsen burner.
“What am I doing here?” I asked.
“Come with me.”
She led me down the hall, through the small crowd of fascinated students, into the administration offices. Parents with closed faces were recovering their offspring. Some kids were crying; others were very pale, and their minds seemed to be somewhere else. A lady in a suit, her gray hair cut short, was talking with other adults.
“The principal,” Lola breathed. “You can imagine that the parents have some questions.”
“I have some, too,” I said.
Against a wall, four chairs formed a small waiting area, the one where troublemakers usually squirmed while waiting to be called into the principal’s office. On that day, three of the seats were occupied by pale teenagers—two girls, one boy—their eyes reddened with tears.
“Have your parents been notified?” asked Lola, her voice softer than usual.
The teenagers blinked at her as if they were having trouble understanding the question. One of the girls, a pretty blonde with too much makeup on, shot a glance at the principal, who immediately came to us.
“I am Vera Appelbaum, the principal of this school. Until their legal guardians arrive, you cannot question them.”
“I’m not accusing them of anything,” replied Lola. “I would just like them to repeat what they told me earlier. The quicker this investigation progresses, the sooner we will leave your school.”
The principal turned to the students. “You are not required to answer questions from the police. I can stay with you…”
“What do you want to know?” asked the other girl in a flat voice.
Her brown hair was cut short everywhere except in the front, where a long lock of hair concealed half of her face. She was not wearing any makeup, no jewelry, and hid her bitten nails into the sleeves of a sweater far too big for her.
“The voices your classmate seemed to hear…” said Lola.
The boy intervened. “His name is…his name was Dan.”
The teenager who had just spoken had all the makings of a jock: square jaw, broad shoulders, blonde hair, and a red jacket in the school colors. All he lacked was the conquering attitude that his fellow young men usually displayed.
“Okay,” Lola continued. “The voices Dan seemed to hear, what were they saying?”
The three teenagers seemed to consult each other in silence.
“You’ll think we’re crazy,” grumbled the boy.
“Who cares what they think?” said the blonde, the one who had not yet spoken. “Dan put a fucking iron rod in his head. If that’s not crazy…”
The other two seemed to accept the argument.
“It sounded like he heard what we were thinking,” whispered the first girl.
The other two nodded.
“Dan cou
ld hear the thoughts of the other students in the class?” asked Lola.
“It’s the damn pills,” said the boy.
“Shut the fuck up!” said the blonde.
She looked at Ms. Appelbaum with concern. But the principal was again besieged with questions from worried parents.
“Are you talking about this new ‘help’ for the exams?” I asked. “Unicorn horns?”
“You know about that?” said the boy.
“I’ve heard of it. Was Dan using it?”
“We had this chemistry test, and Dan was in a panic. His parents…anyway. Dan absolutely wanted to pass this stupid test. He took the pills just before class.”
“‘Pills?’”I said. “Several pills at once?”
“Two. I told him to be careful. I told him…”
The kid collapsed into tears.
“I need a sample of this drug,” I whispered.
I had to get Britannicus and Lizzie on it. Maybe even the Guild or Customs. I needed to go back to Alicia and get her to talk. I had let Jeffrey’s situation soften me up when we met. I put the cute couple’s comfort before the lives of the users of this drug. I was wrong.
I offered my condolences to the three high school students and left them to their pain. Lola was in the middle of a conversation with the principal. I joined the two women. They were dealing with procedural issues, and I immediately lost track of their conversation. I thought about Dan, his expression frozen by death, the panic he must have felt to end up sticking an iron bar in his ears… My mind then turned to Jeffrey. Was Alicia right when she accused drug dealers of shooting Jeffrey? For this new drug? How could a high school student have such a coveted substance?
“Do you have an Alicia Perez here?” I suddenly asked.
Lola and the principal stopped talking. After a second of dazed silence, the principal replied, “The Perez girl? She hasn’t been to school in a few days. I left messages for her mother. The poor kid witnessed the death of her boyfriend…”
“Jeffrey Brown?” said Lola. “Was he one of your students?”
“Yes. Two such violent tragedies in a few days… We’re going to have trouble getting over it.”
“What kind of girl is Alicia?” I asked.