Spell Song: An Enchanting Urban Fantasy

by J. F. Forrest

  She felt the pressure and blackness of an evil force holding her back. She watched in horror as the gate closed behind the truck her brother was in and she blasted it with the full force of the magic she had been building in her hands. It was almost as if the barrier of pressure keeping her out slowed and dissipated the magic she had unleashed at the gate. It fizzled and disappeared without leaving so much as a scratch on the four-meter high concrete wall.

  She dropped to her knees, spent, exhausted, and furious. She lunged forward and tried to call up her magic again, but she didn’t have any energy left to spare. Her voice sounded foreign to her ears as she growled and pushed forward. She was doing lunges, her feet scraping in the leaves and dirt. It was no use. There was some kind of warding or spell keeping her away from the door. She caught her breath and pushed again. She might as well have had her hands on the concrete itself. It didn’t budge. She screamed at the gate and passed out, exerting her limit by the spells she had cast.

  20

  Hard Landing

  Ricky made it back to the truck before Scott did. They had circled the entire wall, only fifty yards or so around, met at the back and then continued on around. There were no other gates, doors, windows, or openings of any kind except for a few horizontal cracks along the wall that must’ve been expansion joints. It was a solid concrete fortress. Walking down the path back toward the truck, they simultaneously saw Sami’s unconscious form on the ground.

  Scott took off running. He crashed to the ground on his knees beside her. She was laying face down in the dirt.

  “Sami!” He rolled her over and patted her cheek. “Sami, wake up! Sami, can ya hear me?”

  Ricky jogged up, lagging behind the college football player a good distance.

  “Dangit. She okay?”

  “She’s breathing, but she’s out cold.”

  “Christ, man. Her elbows are all scraped up too. What the hell happened?”

  “Ain’t got no clue. Let’s get her back to the truck.”

  Ricky bent his knees to help Scott pick her up, but before he could, the linebacker had hoisted her up in his arms, “Dadgum, dude. You’re a strong fella, ain’t ya?”

  Scott didn’t answer; he was jogging back to the pickup truck. As he ran, Sami’s eyes fluttered and almost opened.

  “RayRay…I saw him,” she groaned. “They’ve got RayRay. Can’t get in. Magic…dark magic.”

  And then she was out again. Her eyes closed and her head lolled backward.

  “That don’t sound good,” Ricky shook his head.

  As they got close, the door where Doris was sitting opened and she stepped out.

  “Oh, my stars.” Her hands went up to her cheeks. “What happened? I must’ve taken a little nap when she got out to look around.”

  “Not sure,” Scott said, easing Sami up into the back seat. “She said somethin’ about seein’ RayRay and dark magic.”

  “Oh no.” Doris took her scarf off and began to dab the blood off Sami’s arms. “What will we do?”

  “She needs to rest,” Ricky sniffed. “But I’ve got an idea about gettin’ in there. Scott, you ever done any rock climbing?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Wanna learn?”

  “I’m game. What you got in mind?”

  “That wall there’s got some expansion joints along the side every few feet up. I reckon we can climb up to the top and drop in. Hell, it’s just a silo.”

  “Sounds like a plan. You got a rope?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” Ricky pursed his lips. “Washed the truck the other day and took all that stuff out.”

  “No worries. Let’s get to this. Doris, pull this truck off the road and keep an eye on Sami will ya? Don’t let nobody in and don’t get out.”

  Scott thought for a second more. “And don’t let Sami get out, neither.”

  “And you think I can stop her, dear?”

  Scott shrugged, “Do your best.”

  “Aight, dude,” Ricky pointed to the right. “Let’s head around that way and see how high we can go.”

  Sami’s unexpected nap was fitful. The fascinating part about this quick siesta was that she was lucid. She knew she was sleeping. And the dark serpent-woman wasted no time in confronting her.

  “Your brother is mine,” the woman hissed through her teeth. “He will finish what I have started. I will be an immortal power like the Earth and Azuria have never known. And you are powerless to stop me.

  “Snakes,” Sami spoke the familiar line from Raiders of the Lost Ark, “why does it always have to be snakes?”

  Before she realized what she was doing, she raised her hands in front of her. They were glowing with the familiar sigils of magic and she formed the power into a ball between them. She hurled it straight at the snake-woman. In a nanosecond it flew toward her and then, and in the blink of an eye the woman raised her hand. The ball of flaming magic froze in mid-air in front of her.

  “A lovely spell,” she inhaled, “but largely ineffective against my power.”

  She flicked the ball with her finger and it shattered into a million tiny glowing pieces. Each piece floated and danced in front of her and began to flash on and off in perfect, synchronous rhythm. It looked like the fireflies that were common to the park. Eventually, it dissipated harmlessly, but Sami didn’t give up. Without hesitation, she flung two more fireballs at the woman. She batted the first aside and the second, she stopped and held it out in front of her, hovering an inch above her wand. Wait, Sami thought, she has a wand? I never noticed that before…she’s a witch. Some kind of shape-changing, dark magic witch.

  The woman twirled her wand around and around and the fiery blue and purple globe danced up and down in front of her.

  “Well-formed, powerful.” The woman’s eyes glowed with the reflected flame. “You’ve had some training. That much is obvious. I wonder what you could do if you trained with me?”

  Training? Sami didn’t remember any training. What was this woman talking about? As if reading her mind, the woman grinned and shook her head.

  “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I’ve always lived with my parents on The Farm.”

  “They hid it from you.”

  “Nonsense,” Sami said, but began to feel a tinge of doubt.

  “Let me guess. From time to time, you cast a spell without ever having known how to do it before and the words come to mind without conscious thought. Am I right?”

  Sami had given little thought to the fact this was exactly what had been happening lately. Spells she had never known before were springing to her mouth without warning. But she searched her memory and found nothing. There were no training sessions of magic, only a few times when something happened on accident. Mary would warn her of the danger and show her how to control it. And then there was the glamour on her ears to hide the elven points.

  The woman waved her wand to the side and the fireball moved a few inches away and hovered, flickering and smoldering as it floated there. She pointed the smooth black stick at Sami and twitched it up and down.

  “Memini.” The word drifted out of her mouth like smoke tendrils from a burning ember.

  Sami flinched expecting the spell to be an attack, but it wasn’t. Something strange happened to her mind. It was that feeling when someone tells you a story from your past about an experience you shared that you had completely forgotten. But then, it’s there again and you remember detail after detail of something that had long been lost to you.

  Sami saw herself as a little girl, sitting in the woods with her mother. Mary would recite the spell and show Sami how to hold her hands if the magic called for that. Then there was the time her father had shown her the spell every magical child knew to make someone act like a farm animal. There were dozens of such memories and they flooded her mind as if she was watching them on an old reel-to-reel movie projector. Tears welled in her eyes…tears of joy and excitement.
It was a whole new world. She felt power releasing throughout her body. Wave after wave of new magical abilities filled her from her head to her toes.

  “Seeeeee?” The snake witch smirked. “Your parents lied to you. They must not love you at all to hide such things from you.”

  Sami looked down at her hands. The symbols were different now and they glowed with an intensity that she had never seen in them before.

  “My parents love me.” Sami raised a bright glowing fist in front of her face. “And my brother.”

  A twitch on the witch’s face cracked her confidence, but then it was gone.

  “And I may have been powerless to stop you before, but by helping me remember my training, you just gave me back my magic…all of it.”

  Sami slammed the fist toward the serpent-bodied woman and an explosion filled every square inch of her vision. Light flashed and flared out of her fist in wave after wave of magical power. She hadn’t even given the spell a name, but she knew the sheer wall of blue and purple flowing from her hand would blow the witch away.

  In a split second, the light went out. It was dark and the woman was still standing in front of Sami. Oddly, the woman’s head, which had been topped by a multitude of writhing snakes, had turned into Doris’s head. Then she remembered it was a dream. All of this, as real as it may seem, was in her mind…a dream.

  “Doris?” Sami arched an eyebrow.

  “Honey, I’m sorry to do this, but you need to wake up.”

  She felt hands grasping her arms shaking her.

  “Dear, I need you. There are men here.”

  The dream faded and Doris’s head now appeared attached to her own body. The inside of Ricky’s truck began to materialize around the old woman. Sami was awake. She was groggy and exhausted, but she pulled herself upright and saw what Doris had been talking about. A group of four men surrounded the truck with machine guns pointed at them. Sami raised her hands to summon her magic and felt the last bit of her energy fade away. The blackness returned as she passed out again.

  Not enough time had gone by to restore her after the spells she had used or maybe she had used them in her sleep and sapped the energy there. Was that even possible? She didn’t know for sure.

  “Oh, dear,” was the last thing she heard Doris say as the darkness closed in around her.

  “Okay, what now, Ricky?” Scott asked, peering down into the tall shaft down into the silo.

  Ricky scratched his long chin-beard, “Hadn’t really thought that out yet.”

  Climbing the structure, that seemed maybe thirty or forty feet high, had been slow going but easier as they got used to the distance between the expansion joints in the concrete tower. But the outside of the silo had a slight angle to it as it rose up…now that angle was going the wrong way on the inside of it. Scaling the inside on a negative incline was not something either of them was prepared to do.

  “Any idea what’s down there?” Scott nodded into the black hole.

  “Nope,” Ricky inhaled. “Could be corn, or grain, somethin’ like that.”

  “Well, this little mission is off and runnin’ like a herd of turtles, ain’t it?

  “It is.” Ricky kicked his legs over so they were both hanging inside the silo. “And we’re up here relaxing while they’re torturing RayRay.”

  Seeing him turn inward, Scott did the same. Ricky took a couple of quick, deep breaths and squeezed his hands on the top of the tower’s wall. For a few long moments, neither of them said anything. The wind whistled around them reminding them of how cold it was to be up here with no cover.

  “Here’s hopin’ whatever’s down at the bottom is somethin’ soft.” Without warning, he jumped.

  “I do hope so,” Scott said, as he followed him.

  Lucky for both of them, it was a big pile of corn in a cone-shaped mountain. Even so, Scott hit it hard, twisting his ankle when he hit. It was that dadgum sprain that kept him out of four games last year coming back to haunt him.

  “Crap!” he yelled as the pain shot into his leg. “I sprained it, Ricky. Done twisted my dang ankle.”

  The sound of corn sliding down the sides of the cone echoed in the silo. Ricky said nothing.

  “Buddy?” Scott called into the dark.

  “I’m here.”

  “You okay?”

  “I guess you could say that. I’d be more okay if these two fellas didn’t have their guns pointed at me though.”

  Scott’s eyes adjusted to the waning light coming from the top of the silo. Two men dressed in black did indeed have machine guns pointed at Ricky who had his hands up in surrender.

  “Get your ass down here and don’t make any sudden moves,” one of them called to Scott.

  Sudden moves, Scott thought, with this ankle?

  “I’m a comin’,” he said. “Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

  “Some plan, eh?” Ricky shook his head as Scott limped up beside him.

  “Yup. I think we blew that one.”

  “Shut up.” Soldier number one shoved the barrel of his gun into Scott’s chest. “Move it. Now.”

  They ushered them over to an open door that led to a spiral staircase and down they went.

  Scott wondered if Sami and Doris would know to get out of here if he and Ricky didn’t come back tonight. He hoped they wouldn’t try anything stupid.

  21

  Trouble Calling

  Sami woke up to find her arms and legs bound with large plastic zip ties and a strip of silver duct tape covering her mouth. She wrestled with her bonds, but they were tight. She let her magic flow into her hands and arms, but it was weak. She was still spent from the spell casting outside and the dream. But something was happening, she felt as if she was a cell phone recharging its battery. Energy was pulsing up from under her feet, from under the ground. It’s a Caulla, she thought. Haw Ridge is a Caulla. And it was slowly refreshing her magic. She decided to let her power build up before expending it again.

  The room she was in reminded her of her lab at the University of Tennessee vet school: white, clean, sterile, and almost empty. To her left, also bound and gagged, sat Doris. The older woman looked at her with wide eyes. She was beyond fear, terrified. It was likely Doris had never been in a life or death situation as dire as this and it showed in her slack face. Sami used a very small bit of magic to pop the duct tape off their mouths.

  “What are we going to do, dear?” Doris croaked.

  Sami did her best to reassure her. “Don’t worry, Doris. I’m going to get us out of here.”

  She refrained from making any comments about her magic. She wasn’t completely sure who or what they were dealing with yet. From one of the new memories that had come back, she heard her mother say, sometimes the best spells are the ones we do not use. Sami felt a new fondness and admiration for her mother. She wanted desperately to talk to her, to tell her she remembered everything and that she was grateful for all she had taught her.

  “How long have I been asleep, Doris?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Say about three hours, give or take.”

  “Has anyone been in here besides the machine gun gang?”

  “No one else. Just them.”

  Sami looked around the room. The chairs they sat in were the only things in the room. She couldn’t quite turn far enough to see the wall behind them, but the walls on either side were solid, no doors or windows. A sudden knife of fear jabbed Sami. She didn’t have her backpack. There was no sign of any of their belongings. She hoped the men had left it behind in the truck so Mikki could run away and get help.

  In front of them, there was a large mirror about ten feet long and six feet high covering most of that wall down to the floor, two-way glass. Someone was likely watching them on the other side, but who?

  As if reading her thoughts, a light went on and the room behind the mirror appeared. Doris gasped and Sami felt her shoulders slump. The scene on the other side was surreal. It was like an odd concert hall with a one-foot high stage.
An empty chair behind a music stand sat in the center of the riser. Beside that chair, on a black metal stand, was the artifact. Matilde, the name Wilmot Proctor had given the violin, gleamed with a fresh coat of wax. Lined up in front of the stage, Sami saw three chairs with figures bound to them.

  Though they were looking at the figures from behind, she could tell that the first man was Scott. She’d recognize his broad shoulders and shaggy blond mop of hair anywhere. But something was different. His shoulders, strong as they were, looked slumped. His hair had an odd texture to it, like it was wirier than she’d expected, and his skin was ruddy and splotchy.

  Next to him sat Ricky, scrawny as ever and still wearing his riveted jeans, looking very much like Ricky always looked. Beside them was another man Sami didn’t recognize. Even from the back, the guy looked to be a hundred years old with shriveled skin sagging on his neck and thin, wispy white hair ringing a bald spot on his head. All three of the men seemed to be unconscious.

  Behind them was a lab table of some kind. On it, Sami could see a big leather book, a clipboard, a big garden gnome statue, and a backpack. Crap! My backpack! Sami’s heart leapt and she almost blasted free of her bonds, but Doris spoke first.

  “Shhhhh,” she said. “Let's stay calm for a minute and see what’s going on here. Then when you feel like it, you can unleash hell.”

  Sami gritted her teeth and watched the backpack for a minute. It didn’t move at all. She hoped Mikki had gotten away. It didn’t look like she was in there anymore. The garden gnome statue came to life and began flipping pages in the book.

  “Now, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Doris said.

  Agent Carter Cross eased his white rental Toyota Camry up beside the black F-150 pickup on the trail out at Silo Road. All four doors were open and it didn’t look like anyone was inside. He jumped out and scanned the front and back seats for something, anything, to tell him who had been driving the truck. He was careful to look under the truck, but there was nothing, and no one there. He suspected it was Sami and maybe her friends. He’d tried to tell them how dangerous coming here would be, but Elke did have her brother after all. Soon, he found what he was looking for tucked up in the driver’s side visor mirror. An old, yellow Polaroid photo of five people. RayRay, some guy with jeans that said Ricky on the side, a big blond kid, a grandmother looking lady, and Sami. Carter thought it was very likely that this was Ricky’s truck. He looked like the F-150 dually type of guy. He tucked the photo in his jacket pocket and hurried back to his car, never realizing that he’d dropped his company issued cell phone in the driver’s seat when he’d bent down to look under the truck.