The Fiddler's Dagger

by W H Lock

  Those who survived the ritual became lumberjack-like forest gods. Muscled men and women, that looked like they'd been carved from centuries-old hardwood. But not Eno. He'd gotten lankier. His Adam's apple had gotten more pronounced. His eyes had bulged a little more.

  And his allergies had gotten worse. Things had not gotten better in his wolf form.

  "Wow. That is the ugliest dog I've ever seen. It's like someone shoved a German Shepard and a Mexican Hairless Dog in a room. And it wasn't a good mating. They were snipping and biting at each other the whole time. Then they took it out on the pups." A man stopped and stared wide-eyed at Eno.

  "Oh, bless his heart, he's got a little sign!" The woman bent over with her hands on her knees. "Hey, Bobby, give me a dollar, so I can put in his bowl!"

  "Shoot, Kelly, what for? I ain't giving him a dime." The man crossed his arms over his chest.

  Eno sat up on his haunches and held his front paws out in front of him. He pawed at the air as if he was trying to be a good boy and shake hands. He whined like a puppy.

  "Aww!" the woman said. She pulled a wallet out of her purse. She fished a few dollar bills out of the wallet and dropped it in the bowl.

  "Baby, we got to go. Don't give that dog any money. It's just some stupid prank show. If you do that, they'll dump a bunch of confetti on our heads, and it'll end up on YouTube."

  The woman stopped and looked around. When nothing appeared, she dropped the bills into the bowl. The couple hurried off without a second glance at Eno.

  As a werewolf, Eno had senses that extended well beyond the normal range for both human and wolf. The park and the surrounding city was a symphony of sound and scent. If he focused, he would still be able to hear what the couple talked about as they crossed the park. At night, he could see the heat that bodies gave off and follow their footsteps. Their scents would leave an unmistakable trail for days or even weeks. The world was an open book to Eno in wolf form.

  Except for the house across the road. It was shut off from the world. The well maintained garden-like yard around the older house was filled with appropriate scents. There were seasonally flowering plants and bushes. The house itself smelled of brick, mortar, and wood. But nothing came from inside the house. There were no smells of cooking or people. He couldn't see the heat of bodies through the shuttered windows as people moved around inside. He couldn't even detect the ionized scent of electricity from the house’s wiring. Nothing normal or usual came from inside the house.

  One thing did come from the house. It wasn't something that Eno could quite put his paw on. It wasn't a smell, movement, or a sound. Eno couldn't shake the feeling that something inside the house knew he was there and was watching him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Elly Barnes had been a special agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation for six years. Elly had grown up in a coven and was a witch herself. Three weeks ago she knew several things. She knew the world wasn't going to end. She knew not wearing white after Labor Day was a load of crap. She knew a proper Ritual of Bacchus took the better part of a year to prepare the proper materials and location. She knew engaging in a criminal enterprise required operating in secret.

  Now having spent time with Quinn, she felt that the only certainty left in life was the dubious nature of the rule about white shoes after Labor Day.

  When they had been at the Ransom Center, she asked him how he planned on finding someone to steal the book for him.

  "Oh, that's the easy part," he said. "We will throw a huge party."

  "Really? You're going to throw a massive party, in a town where you don't know anyone, and somehow that will get you a Nazi bible?" Elly said. She put every ounce of sarcasm she could in her tone.

  Quinn looked at her out of the side of his eyes, ducked his head down and gave her his 10,000-watt smile. It was a smile that made her want to curl her toes and laugh but she never did. She kept her face stone cold and even threw in an arched disbelieving eyebrow.

  He winked at her and pulled out his phone.

  An hour later they were on the east side of Austin standing in a warehouse space that Quinn rented.

  The promoter talking with Quinn looked at her once and immediately dismissed her. Like most men who made a living on the party scene, he thought he knew what he was looking at when he saw Elly. She was an aging club girl that was too much into the Goth scene. When his eyes didn't leave her chest, Elly knew he'd written her off. Which worked for her because he'd be more likely to speak freely in front of her.

  "Look, Quinn," he said. "I know you want the stuff on the walls, but I don't think we can get that done in time, especially with this lighting. I mean, it will look..."

  "Like you're tripping balls in a campfire at Coachella," Quinn said.

  The promoter rolled his eyes and said, "Don't talk to me about Coachella, Quinn. Just don't. Okay, I will get the graphics printed but we have to have the pool separated by gates, or you're just going to have dead kids floating in there. And no one wants to see a dead sorority chick," he winked at Elly.

  She didn't wink back.

  "Hey!" someone shouted from the front of the warehouse. Several men in their early twenties came in, pushing black boxes with wheels attached at the bottom. "Where do you want us to set up?"

  "You the DJ, right?" Quinn shouted back.

  They nodded.

  "Where ever you want but make sure you stay back behind that set of pillars right there," Quinn shouted across the room, pointing at the steel beams that held up the roof at the front of the vast space.

  The young men nodded. Some turned around to head back to whatever truck they'd come in, while the other had pushed the large wheeled cases to a spot they liked. As they worked, yet another young man pushed his way through to Quinn.

  The years that Elly had spent undercover and her training with the FBI told her one inalienable fact about the young man: he was a low-level drug dealer. He was a white kid that wore a surplus US Army jacket, a hand-knitted Rasta beanie, dock-worker pants, tough leather boots, and some janky-looking dreadlocks. He did the up nod at Quinn as a way of greeting.

  Quinn gave him the once over. Elly could tell from a sudden cough, he'd had a hard time not laughing at the boy. She liked Quinn just a bit more for that.

  The kid held his hand out too-wide out from his body for a handshake. Quinn reached out, and the kid slapped his hand into Quinn's. There was a rustle of plastic.

  Quinn, to his credit, didn't even look around as if there might be cops watching. Elly had to admit that he didn't have to; he knew she was watching him. They spoke quietly together as Quinn looked at the contents of the small press lock baggie the kid had given him. After a moment or two of haggling, the Rasta kid from the suburbs nodded and left.

  "What was that about," Elly asked when Quinn came over to stand close to her.

  "He was delivering the cocktail I had asked for."

  "Which is?"

  Quinn gave her the small bag. It had three pills. A red gel-cap, a small white cross, and a small stamp-like piece of paper. "It's a very nice mix of pharmaceutical grade GHB, Ketamine, and just a little bit of LSD."

  "Wow," Elly said. "You're working up the felony points today, aren't you? That's a date-rape cocktail with a dash of hallucinogenic as a side order."

  "Relax," Quinn said. "This is all low mixture stuff. Anyone walking in here gets told what to expect up front. No one gets dosed unless they want it."

  "What's it going to do?"

  "Make them feel like they want to dance, and they're gonna be in tune with an alternate level of reality," Quinn said.

  "Oh, you're going to put them in a pliable state, siphon off ley energy from the dance, and use the energy to drive the summoning even faster than normal," Elly said.

  "That too," Quinn said.

  "Can't be done," Elly said.

  "Oh yeah?"

  She nodded and crossed her arms. "You need to have a Ritual of Bacchus for that, and not the shitty ones a magician wi
ll throw but a proper witch one. You'll need a cauldron in the middle,"

  "Or kiddy pool."

  "You must inscribe the lines using the purest and most refined chalk."

  "Or use ultra-white primer paint from a home improvement store. But you have to use the shaggy rollers. Those cheap ones won’t get the job done in one swipe."

  Elly gave Quinn the eyebrow again. "You have to take this seriously. You're summoning a god, Quinn. Not fucking around with a fire elemental or whatever it is magicians do. A god. You cannot wing this."

  Quinn's smile changed. It went from the grin that Elly had labeled Mr.-Too-Much-Fun to the one she'd labeled Mr. Sly. He stepped closer to her, moving so he stood just an inch away from her. Elly was used to men trying to get close to her. Usually, she would slip away but damn if she would give any ground at all to Quinn. Especially when he was smiling like that. Elly lifted her chin in defiance.

  "Oh, I'm taking this very seriously," Quinn said still grinning like Mr. Sly.

  "Kiddie pools? White paint?" Elly said, cocking her head to the side. “That’s serious?”

  "It's primer and paint, all in one application. It dries fast too," he said. He reached up to brush a lock of her hair back behind her ear.

  "No," she said as she batted his hand away. "You need dancers in a trance after at least three days of fasting. You have none of the blessed wine. There’s no way that this is a sacred space."

  "Club kids don't eat. The EDM should take care of the trance state. And there will be a lot of wine. Although probably a cabernet. That’s only a few bucks a bottle. Bacchus doesn’t care what kind of wine. As long as it gets you drunk, that’s sacred enough for him. Look," Quinn said, not moving away. "I'm a sorcerer. That means I get to ignore the rules you're stuck with. I use what works. This will work."

  "You're only a sorcerer because there isn't a word that covers what you can do," Elly said. She'd seen the magical circles he summoned. Something about it was familiar to her, but she couldn't place, like an actor in a movie but you couldn't remember their name or where else you had seen them. "And the rules are there because of centuries of trial and error, Quinn. You can't just toss them aside because they're inconvenient."

  "Watch me," was all he said in response.

  So she did.

  Over the next few hours, she watched him put together a massive Ritual of Bacchus disguised at a flash rave. Every time she thought he'd hit a stop because he didn't have the right elements, someone would walk in with a slapped-together solution that shouldn't work but somehow did. Contractors showed up and painted the lines and runes needed for the ritual. Others followed along behind with industrial floor heaters to speed up the paint drying. They put decals on the walls at the proper locations to channel the energy of the ritual back into itself. Either this would be the most amazing party she'd ever been to, or they'd all be mindless husks burned out from contacting a god.

  By the time the door opened, it was no surprise to her there was a crowd waiting outside. The kids streamed in, each one getting a stamp on their hand declaring if they were partaking of the pills or just here for the dance.

  And in the center of the vast warehouse, Quinn waited. He was in all white. In the black light and lasers, he glowed. He was the unmistakable and undeniable master of this realm. A lord of light and dance. And they loved him. The music drove the crowd to dance with the relentless beat. The lights dipped and flowed like the flicker of a massive bonfire, the illumination bouncing and jumping from face to face through the crowd. Quinn stood on the dais in the middle by the cabernet-filled kiddie pool filled. Several women joined him.

  Which, Elly noticed, they weren't capable of dancing more than hip grinding and thrusting their butts at him. They didn't know how to use their bodies to dance with abandon. Elly had been to her first Ritual when she was fifteen. Her mother was the leader of the coven and the ritual. Elly had gone with a boy she was close with. She'd gone every year after that, sometimes at the one her mother organized or to another coven's. She could feel the ecstasy and energy building like heat in the room.

  At the edge of the seething crowd of unwitting worshipers, Elly pondered which was the better course of action. The witch in her said it was important to perform the ritual and summon Bacchus properly. Summoning a god-spirit was a dangerous thing even in the best of circumstances. The federal agent in her said that would be participating in an unlicensed avatar summoning, facilitating an illegal gathering, and distribution of illegal narcotics. Any of that would end in an investigation.

  Quinn was in the middle of it all, channeling as much of the energy as he could into the kiddie pool full of red wine. And he was missing most of it. As with everything Quinn did, his natural talent for showmanship and enthusiasm would carry him through it all, but the sloppy work drove Elly mad.

  She found one distributor at the front by the door. She pulled a packet out of his hand and washed it down with a swig from an unopened water bottle. Then she entered the crowd, going in the opposite direction, moving against the flow.

  Quinn's mistake was that he was only drawing the female energy of the room by making himself the focus. It wasn't his fault. Like most men raised outside the covens, they thought the rituals were about one thing: male sexual energy. They weren't. The rituals were about the ecstasy that people could create together.

  She let the energy move through her as she danced through the crowd. It led her to the first one; a young man that looked overwhelmed and lost. His eyes were wide with the power he could feel in the room. Elly came out of the crowd, a lustrous goddess in human form. His eyes couldn't leave her as she danced. She moved up next to him and pulled him in to her embrace. She kissed him and tethered the energy of his body to hers. Unable to stop himself, the boy fell in with her and followed her through the crowd.

  Elly moved through the crowd and drawing the energy that Quinn left in the air to herself. Men and women both fell in with her. She drew them along, keeping them on the edge of forever by dance and touch. And when the moment was right, she pulled all of her followers into the middle of the room where Quinn had gathered women around him. The two collided and mixed, couples forming of their own accord.

  She met him in the middle of the mass, a dark goddess of the moon to match his glorious lord of light. She ran her hands across his chest, feeling the blood and warmth of his heart. Elly ripped his shirt open, causing the buttons to pop off and fly away.

  "Elly," he said. "I don't want to make you-"

  She twisted his nipple and grabbed the back of his head to pull him into a hard kiss.

  "Shut up," she said and bit his lip. Then she showed these sorority chicks and club girls how to dance with a man. She led him and the others through the ritual that had been done yearly for thousands of years. A dance by men and women at the side of a fire in the dark. A dance that pulled the ecstatic joy of life and summoned a god.

  Quinn pulled a massive goblet out of the kiddie pool. Wine flowed down his face and across his chest as Quinn drank from the goblet. She pushed him down to the ground while she wrapped her arms around him. She saw the exact moment that Bacchus gave him a vision. It was only a second later that Elly lost herself to the ecstasy of the moment.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Savannah, GA

  Max had found several books from the right era on eBay. He'd taken each of the books apart to separate the pages from the binding. Max arranged them by size along the three workbenches the others had placed end to end for him.

  Rube sat on the other side of the bench, watching him. Karen lounged over on a couch, her phone propped up on the arm of the couch.

  Max cleared his throat and nodded at Rube. In a quiet voice, Max asked “If you could hand me that brake fluid, please? And if it’s not too much trouble, could you hand me some of those blue shop towels? I don’t want to make a mess on these nice tables you fellas got for me. Mother always gets mad when I make a mess and don’t clean up after myself. Don’t you, Mother?” Ma
x patted the overly large locket tucked under his collar.

  "Sure," Rube said. "So are you using the acetone in the fluid to remove the ink but not disturb the paper like rubbing alcohol would?"

  Max paused and looked at Rube in mild surprise. “That is exactly what I’m doing, Mr. Rueben. Have you made copies of things before?”

  "My pa worked with a bunch of people. I helped make a few things now and then.”

  "Who is your daddy? Maybe I know him?"

  Rube nodded. "Him and my moms used to work with Boss Johnson over in Tupelo."

  “Oh, I know Boss Johnson. I did some work for him a ways back. Say, is your daddy named Reuben too? I ain't heard about your dad for a long time. What happened to him?

  Rube looked at Max with no expression on his face and said, "Oh, he died in prison a few years back."

  “Oh, that’s sad. I am sorry I mentioned it. I hope you can forgive me. I understand the pain of losing your parent.” Max sniffed and touched the locket, “Mother died a few years ago, and my heart just broke. I didn’t know what I would be able to do without her, but…, now she’s with me all the time. It’s wonderful having her with me. A boy shouldn’t ever be without his mother.” He accepted the bottle from Rube and tipped the fluid onto the cloth. He nodded at one of the other bottles and said, “If you don’t mind, I sure could use the help. Get yourself a cloth and give each page a wipe down. Less than damp. Just run it over. The fluid will seep into the page, and we’ll be able to wipe the ink off in a few hours.”

  Freddy wandered by the table where Max and Rube were working. He stopped and sniffed the air. “Uh, that stuff stinks. Hey, I’m headed out to get a bite to eat. Anyone want anything while I’m out?”