by C. T. Phipps
“We’re still studying the theory of magic,” I said, sounding a bit more defensive than I wanted to. “Apparently it involves a lot of theory.”
“What can you do?” Emma asked.
“I can read objects!”
“You could do that before!” Emma said, looking over at me and shaking her head.
She was right, sort of anyway. Fighting the kelpie of Darkwater Lake, I’d discovered accidentally that I could share my object readings with someone else in contact with the object. It saved my life, but it also showed me that I hadn’t really explored what I could do. With Kim’s help, I was getting better at shifting between different impressions in an object, and changing perspectives while in the vision. Still, it was arguably little progression versus being able to throw fireballs or turning people into newts.
I decided to switch subjects. “Seriously, Emma, you can’t tell me you think I should sell out to your aunt. The Deerlightful is part of my heritage.”
“I’m thinking about practicality,” Emma said, reminding me she was an O’Henry. “I get a piece of everything Alice makes with O’Henry developments. Even if most of it is tied up in trusts and lawyers, I can give you my section of whatever she makes from all this and encourage Alice to give enough so that your family is taken care of until your parents come home.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t need or want your charity. I don’t want my parents coming home to having no business to run either.”
“Will they even want to run it after this?” Emma said, unknowingly twisting the knife. “I mean, when the trial finally happens, it’s going to drag a lot of nastiness through the mud. Things like human sacrifice—”
“Stop,” I said, raising my hand. “Collaborate and something-something, Ice is back with a brand new blah-blah. I get what you’re saying. I just don’t agree.”
Emma said, unbuckling her seatbelt, “It’s just four walls and a kitchen is all I’m saying.”
“It’s more than that,” I said, remembering growing up there. “Emma, you don’t think like normal people.”
“Define ‘normal,’” Emma snorted.
“You thought Pound Puppies was a cartoon about a concentration camp.”
“It is! Think about it from their perspective.”
“Regardless of whether that’s right or wrong, that’s not thinking like normal people.”
“Normal is overrated,” Emma said. “I’m a lesbian werewolf and proud of it.”
“There’s nothing abnormal about either of those,” I said, unbuckling my seatbelt. “I mean, yeah, there’s some question about whether you need to tell a date you’ve maybe got heartworm, but you’re taking medicine for that.”
Emma glared. “Buck off.”
“Hehe,” I said, deliberately enunciating my laugh. “It’s funny because we’re both being racist to each other.”
Emma smirked. “We both have mixed ancestries in more ways than one.”
“America as it should be.”
Heading into Kim Su’s shop with Emma following me, I saw a single long chamber full of tables and shelves containing magical items. Unlike Harry Potter’s version of them, they all looked like normal objects, but they’d had special meaning to their owners that allowed mages to use them as material for their spells. Teddy bears that kept away evil spirits, lucky rabbits’ feet that were actually lucky (just not for the rabbit), playing card decks whose owners never lost, and so on. There were books of and about magic, but those were all hit or miss. Magic came from the will of the user rather than any mystical language and you could get as much oomph from saying, “El Blasto this guyo!” as an Enochian phrase.
Kim Su was sitting behind the glass counter to the left of the room. She had her feet up on the counter and was reading a newspaper. Despite being the oldest human alive, at least as far as I knew, she didn’t look all that much older than me. Indeed, she looked like a Chinese girl who’d just started college with blue jeans and a Yoda t-shirt. She didn’t acknowledge my presence and just turned the page to the comics section.
Walking up beside her and pulling over a stool to sit across from her, I said, “So where to begin—”
“There’s a murder pit, the Ultralogists are in the city looking for me with their chess-obsessed leader, and your restaurant is for sale.”
“It is not for sale,” I corrected her. “How did you know any of that?”
“I used my palantir,” Kim Su said.
I stared at her. “You forget, I know Alex and he owns an honest-to-God lightsaber. I don’t know if you’re kidding.”
“Not kidding but cheating,” Kim Su said, handing me her newspaper.
I picked up the newspaper and stared at the date. “This is tomorrow’s newspaper.”
“Yep,” Kim Su said. “The clock tower is going to be destroyed by a lightning bolt at midnight, so if you want to get back to your time, you’ll have to hit eighty-eight miles per hour perfectly.”
I stared at her. “You know, it’s funny when I make the pop-culture references. Not so much you.”
“That’s because you don’t get my Jack Benny and Sun Wukong references.”
Emma didn’t respond to our conversation and, instead, wandered around the shop looking for new knick-knacks to fill her collection out. Despite having no talent for magic, my bestie loved how enchanted objects felt to her shapeshifter senses. Mostly she bought small but useless things like a sweater that was always snug and warm or a chocolate bar that renewed every night if you didn’t eat all of it.
I leaned in on the counter and looked at her. “Well, obviously, I’m going to need your help in solving the problem.”
“That’s too bad,” Kim Su said, taking back the newspaper. “Because this is really not my scene.”
“Oh come on, Alex said you have a soft spot for children!”
“I do,” Kim Su said, frowning. “But there’s nothing that can be done for these fallen ones.”
“Prevent their killer from striking again.”
Kim Su’s eyes turned to me and I got a sense of just how old she was. While she never talked about it, she occasionally dropped hints about just how much rape and murder she’d witnessed across the millennia. Enough to break a thousand mages, let alone one, but she’d kept on trucking regardless. “Are you familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac?”
“From the Bible?” I asked, wondering about this sudden change in topic.
Kim Su’s gaze narrowed. “No, the two guys who tend bar down at Applebees. Yes, of course from the Bible!”
I raised my hands. “Okay, okay. Yeah, I know the story. God asked Abe to sacrifice his son, Abe tried to, and God said, ‘Just kidding. Lol. Take a goat instead.’ Not my favorite passage in the book.”
Kim blinked a couple of times. “Not quite how I remember the story, but essentially, yes.”
“I always felt God was being a bit terri-bad there.”
Kim frowned. “The common interpretation was that God was testing Abraham’s capacity for obedience and trust in his deity.”
“Isn’t that right?”
“It is if you’re trying to apply it to twenty-first-century values. The truth is there were another lesson people my age would pick up on.”
“Which was?” I asked, genuinely surprised even if I wasn’t a big fan of theology. I mean, I knew millions of gods and spirits existed, so the issue of faith was kind of a nonstarter with me. I mean, hell, my gun was an angel.
Don’t mention Hell in the same sentence as me, the Merlin Gun projected to me.
What if I said, ‘and my gun helped me shoot up Hell’? I suggested back to it.
That is acceptable.
“The passage can also be interpreted as the more straightforward: don’t sacrifice your children,” Kim Su explained.
I looked at her sideways. “Did that really need to be said?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Kim Su said, sighing as she picked up a bottle of whiskey from behind the counter. “The cult
of Moloch, more a series of practices than a god, was one of the most popular religions at the time. It managed to last right up until Carthage when the Romans exterminated it. The Romans were no strangers to infanticide themselves, but even they thought the group was sick. The Romans and Jews were pretty much the only people at the time who thought baby sacrifice was a bad idea. Strange bedfellows.”
“So this could be related to Moloch?” I asked, blinking.
“I knew it was Satanists!” Emma called from the back of the shop.
“No,” Kim Su said. “I eventually destroyed the last of the spirits tied to the cult with the Merlin Gun in 1945. However, those babies out in Shadow Pine Forest were laid out before an altar. I don’t think whoever was doing it expected them to die, though. Someone was meant to pick them up, but that person or persons weren’t there anymore.”
I blinked. “Wait, someone was dumb enough to leave children exposed and never pick up on the fact that they were dying?”
Kim shrugged and went back to reading her paper. “I cannot say more.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.
“Can’t,” Kim Su said, pointing to the television set behind the counter. “The Vanilla Ice Project is on. He flips houses now, you know.”
I reached over and mock strangled her. “Kim, this is serious.”
“So is this!” Kim Su said, lifting up her remote. “I have every confidence you can handle this, Jane. Hunt a demon for a man and you’ll be hunting them for a lifetime. Teach a man to hunt demons and it’s not your problem.”
“That is terrible advice,” I said, appalled.
Kim Su’s voice lowered as she stared forward. “All I can tell you, Jane, is that the situation with the fae-blooded has been resolved.”
“Resolved,” I said, at first skeptical then angry. “How exactly does that resolve a century or so of child murder? Because I’m hoping it involved a flamethrower.”
Kim Su went back to watching her TV show. “I can’t say any more about it, Jane. I gave my word.”
That was the end of it. I wasn’t being sarcastic either. One thing you learned when dealing with older supernaturals was that they all put really big stock in their word being trustworthy. It wasn’t about personal honor or anything so easily discarded either. It was a simple matter of, when you could alter reality with your mind, you tended to not need much from or fear anyone but another magic-user. The only way such encounters could progress was if the other party could trust the other’s promise.
“Well, dammit,” I said.
“Don’t worry, Jane,” Kim Su said, briefly looking back from Robert Van Winkle’s show. “I meant it when you said you’ll be able to handle this. He’ll probably start killing innocent people to lure me out, but I can handle that.”
“That’s a little cliché,” I said, thinking about all the various shows I’d seen people doing that on.
Kim Su didn’t bother to look away from the TV as she circled a personal ad that contained a chess move as well as a loose description of a young female in her late teens who was presumably the intended victim. Apparently, this was Dr. Jones’s plan to lure her out. Keep killing people until she came to the rescue. The sad fact was that I wasn’t sure it would work as she was a big-picture sort of gal and greatly attached to her own life. You needed to be if you were willing to live past your first hundred years, let alone a thousand.
“John Winston Jones isn’t exactly a fountain of originality,” Kim Su said, frowning. “He couldn’t even come up with his own religion. It’s just a shapeless combination philosophy of a bunch of other people’s ideas. Like Jeet Kune Do except sucking instead of being awesome. Mmm, Bruce Lee.”
I hesitated in my next question. “Do you need help with him?”
“He’s a pussycat compared to his master, but is too dangerous to directly attack, especially with his followers serving as walking batteries. Worse comes to worst, I’ll leave Bright Falls and lure him away so he won’t be a threat to the people here.”
“Alex says he’s immortal.”
“Everyone is immortal and everyone isn’t.” Kim Su shrugged. “I’m more concerned that Alex is going to try to do something stupidly heroic.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh yes, it would be terrible for him to stop the bad guy from murdering people.”
“I know, right? You’d think he’d have learned by now,” Kim Su said, probably joking. She turned back to me. “Okay, I’ve seen this episode. How are you and Alex doing anyway? Have you told him you slept with his brother yet?”
I blinked. “Wait, what? Who told you about that!”
“Sorry!” Emma called from the comic book aisle. “She tricked me into telling her.”
“Asking is not tricking, dear,” Kim Su said, turning around to face me.
“She’s the deer!” Emma said.
“Oh, Goddess,” I said, covering my face.
“I don’t see what’s to be ashamed of,” Kim Su said, smirking. She then adopted a dramatic and exaggerated speech pattern. “Weredeer are creatures of wild untamed passions, the succubi of shapeshifters, prone to uncontrollable torrid love affairs as well as luring men to their doom!”
I stared at her then raised one eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”
“It’s all true,” Kim Su said, smirking. “Go read the myth of the Deer Woman in any book about Native American mythology. Besides, female Cervid should only hook up with men during mating season and raise their children alone if American. In Europe, you would be part of a stag lord’s harem. Which would be a good basis for a story where you led a bloody revolt!”
“Stop being a hind,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Kim Su sighed. “You see? That’s why I don’t interact much with shapeshifters anymore. You’ve all gone soft. Werewolves should be wild and vicious predators who smolder with generic rage! Not…”
Emma opened a jar on a shelf that contained a butterfly, causing it to fly up above her head as she batted it several times.
“I like Emma just the way she is,” I said, smiling. “Well, if you’re not going to help, then I’ll shop around for some goodies to help me with my investigation. Alex is going to need my help and while I believe you that it’s been resolved, the Merlin Gun says there’s been a terrible atrocity that needs avenging.”
“The Merlin Gun thinks Velcro is a terrible atrocity that needs avenging,” Kim Su said, her sarcasm even more biting than mine. “Don’t always believe it.”
I didn’t but it was hard to think there could be any circumstances that could justify what I’d seen. Those bones would haunt my nightmares for decades to come. “By the way, while your prices are pretty reasonable, uh—”
“You can’t pay for anything,” Kim Su said.
“Err, no,” I said, blanching. “I could, however, get you a nice discount at the Deerlightful on some delicious cherry pie. If I don’t eat it all bringing it to you, at least.”
Kim Su shook her head. “Take what you need, Jane. I’ll add it to your tab. Just beware it’s not a good idea to be in debt to a wizard. Even one as affable as me.”
“For you are subtle and quick to anger. Gotcha.”
Kim Su snorted. “I much prefer Galadriel to Gandalf. She should have taken the ring and laid waste to the countryside. Would have made a more interesting story.”
I was about to respond when the front door of Kim Su’s shop opened. I turned to look at who had arrived, half expecting Alex, since only certain people could see her store, but was instead stunned by the appearance of the purple-haired girl from earlier. Robyn. One of Dr. Jones’s cultists had found us.
Crap.
“Uh, hi,” Robyn said, looking around. “This is going to sound crazy but is one of you Jane Doe the shaman? I need her help.”
Chapter Six
The sight of one of Dr. Jones’s cronies in Kim Su’s shop made me immediately reach for my gun, hidden in the back of my pants underneath my t-shirt. I wasn’t going to let that crazy cult leader get anywhere
near my mentor. As soon as my fingers touched the Merlin Gun, though, I heard its voice in my head. She is not evil.
Oh, cool, it was rare that the Merlin Gun gave a straight answer like that.
It continued speaking in my head, She is lustful, vain, materialistic, and rude. In other words, she is a typical twenty year old of this time period.
Grading on the curve, huh? I asked.
No, the Merlin Gun responded.
“I’m Jane the shaman,” I said.
The woman named Robyn looked at me then Kim Su then at Jane. “No, seriously.”
I glared. “I really am.”
Robyn raised an eyebrow. “Is this one of those magically young sort of things? You know, where you look like a teenager but are actually ancient?”
“Don’t you hate those?” Kim Su said, turning around on her stool. “I mean, who would want to look like a young adult for millennia? I mean, you’d get no respect from anyone and have to constantly assert yourself.”
“No,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I am a shaman and I am nineteen.”
“She’s the shaman because her mom got sent to jail,” Emma said cheerfully.
I shot her a glare.
“To testify!” Emma corrected rapidly. “Not to jail. It just feels like she’s in jail because she’s in Witness Protection and she would have gone to jail unless—”
“Stop helping, Emma,” I said, sighing.
“Wow,” Robyn said, blinking. “Well, that makes things easier a bit. This is going to sound strange—”
“It probably won’t,” I said, interrupting. “I live in a world of incredibly surreal and supernatural things.”
Emma lifted up a golf club. “Like this driver is blessed to kill demons! It’s not just a joke in Dogma anymore!”
Robyn looked over at Emma. “And she is?”
“Emma O’Henry, werewolf slayer of darkness!” Emma said proudly. “I have wounded and bitten many an unholy thing! Like six!”
“Uh-huh,” Robyn said, clearly taking Emma’s posturing as seriously as it deserved.
“Jane Doe,” I said, introducing myself.