by Ari Marmell
She sat.
And I couldn’t help but smile.
“You ain’t really cut out for this business, are you?”
“I was when it was just a few protective charms, or reading the cards to tell Mr. Scola if a job was a good idea or not.”
“Before me, you mean?”
Gina nodded once, then shrank back as if worried I might take offense.
“Trust me, babe, it was never just me. If you knew the sorta mojo Fino Ottati had access to… Well, that ain’t here nor there.” I pulled out a chair and sat down across from her, trying to decide the best way to tackle this.
All right, quick refresher. Gina was a witch, though not exactly a potent one, in the employ of one “Bumpy” Vince Scola. Scola was the capo of his own crew, and one of Fino Ottati’s biggest rivals in the Outfit.
Fino has a lot of rivals, come to think of it, Outfit and otherwise. Cost of doin’ business in his, uh, business, I suppose.
Anyway, last time we’d met, Gina and some of Scola’s boys had come real near to getting in so far over their heads they were getting shoe prints in their hair. I’d made it clear in the nicest way possible—by which I mean I hadn’t croaked any of ’em or used their minds as bongos—that they didn’t want any further part of Chicago’s supernatural community.
Judging by her reaction to seeing my puss in her doorway, Gina’d taken me seriously. Smart girl.
Probably wisest to just get right to the point, then. Get in, get out, not drag her any deeper in when she’d tried to keep out.
“I’m lookin’ for someone who makes a habit of snatching some pretty select merchandise. Talismans, relics, anything with a legit occult pedigree. Rap on the streets is that you lost something that answers to that description.”
Then, when she hesitated and her expression started goin’ a bit wild again, “Gina, I appreciate the instinct as much as the next guy. Right now, though? You wanna protect yourself, you do it by singing, not clamming up on me. For a whole number of reasons.”
“I… take your point. Yes. I’d recently gotten my hands on an old grimoire. Nothing of any real power, nothing you’d have heard of, but enough to enhance some of my spells, maybe make me a little more of a player.
“Not—not to challenge you or your people,” she clarified quickly. “Just, I thought I maybe ought to get better at protecting me and mine, you know?”
If she felt the need to tell me at every step of the way that she wasn’t my enemy and wasn’t trying to be, this was gonna take all day.
“Yeah, makes sense. I take it you didn’t get to keep your new book for long?”
“I still don’t know how they did it,” the witch confessed. “It took me weeks of constant searching to find anyone who had one and was willing to sell, and then it was gone ten days later. Bump—that is, Mr. Scola’s always got a guy watching my place, and he swears he never saw anyone suspicious. Though I guess he wouldn’t really know what ‘suspicious’ looked like in this situation.”
A guy, huh? Interesting. That could mean at least one of the two ginks outside was here on someone else’s say-so. Not my circus for the moment, though.
“Any idea who mighta wanted it?” I asked. “Maybe the seller decided to take it back and keep the dough?”
Gina rested her hands on the table and stared off into nothing—specifically the nothing over my left shoulder.
“I shouldn’t think so. The man I bought from is… reputable, in my circles. And I can’t think of anyone else who’d particularly want this grimoire, or even could’ve known I had it!”
I figure anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone she asked during her search coulda learned she had it, but I kept my head closed on that one. No sense making her feel any more of a bunny about it unless I couldn’t stir up any other leads.
“The police were in here briefly,” she admitted after thinking on it. “Several of Mr. Scola’s places got raided or searched a few days after I got the book. Just one of those things you gotta put up with now and again. But they only took a quick look around, since most people think I’m just some crook’s skirt, you know? Far as I could tell, none of them found it, and I don’t figure they’d have known what it was even if they had.”
“You’re probably right.” And she was, too; a police raid wasn’t a probable source of the leak. I’d keep it in the back of my noggin, though, since it wasn’t impossible, either. “What about a rival? Sounds as though a skilled practitioner probably wouldn’t go outta his way to get hold of your grimoire, but what about an up-and-comer? Any new witches or warlocks in town you know of?”
I could see—and even taste—her indecision as to whether or not she oughta take offense at that, before she decided, nah, it was a pretty accurate assessment.
“I haven’t heard of any. But,” she admitted, “that doesn’t mean a whole lot. We don’t necessarily go around announcing ourselves, and I don’t have the power to just ‘sense’ someone unless they’re real careless, making a whole lot of noise.”
So, this was all real fascinating, except the parts that weren’t, but it didn’t seem to be gettin’ me any nearer to an answer. Time to change tacks.
“You’re a witch.”
Gina blinked at me. “Good of you to notice.”
“What I mean is, if you dunno who took your spellbook, why not do some magics to locate it?”
She smiled—a sad, limp expression with nothin’ pleasant behind it.
“Don’t you think that was the first thing I tried, Mr. Oberon? I even tore part of a page out of the grimoire—blank, I assure you—when I acquired the damn thing, so I’d have a focus if I ever had to ward it or scry for it. Whoever’s got it hid it, though, and they’re a better practitioner than I am. Not that that’s real difficult, I guess. I’ve tried three different times, but I just don’t have what it takes.”
Yeah, in case you’re wondering, I did feel sorry for her. Poor girl’d found a talent that made her stand out, made her important, and then learned the hard way—multiple times—that she was a teeny fish in a deep and very dark pond, and was never gonna be anything more’n that.
I didn’t guess she’d appreciate hearing that from me, though, and she sure didn’t need her confidence shook any more’n it already was.
“I think I got us a way around that,” I said instead.
That got her attention.
“Oh?”
“Sounds to me as if you need some extra mojo and a lot of extra luck.”
“Uh, well, yeah.”
I slowly—no need to spook her again—drew my wand from under my coat.
“Guess what I’m real good at providing?”
For the first time since I’d showed up at her place, her smile felt genuine.
CHAPTER SIX
“So why’re you searching for this ‘talisman thief,’ anyway?” Gina asked me a while later.
“’Cause I dunno where he is.”
“Ah. Right.”
I’ll say this for the baby witch. She’d been working with the trouble boys long enough to know when a wise-ass comment meant “Stop askin’ questions.”
We were sittin’ at her table again after forty minutes of gathering gewgaws and whatsises from around Gina’s place. A bowl, a tiny mortar and pestle, some rose petals, a silver chain, chunk of quartz, buncha other ingredients and components and whatnot. Centered in the middle of it all was a scrap of old paper with nothin’ written on it, nothin’ to make it stand out, except it had sort of picked up a tang that didn’t belong to it. You ever keep a couple fruits too close together and one adopts the other’s flavor? (No, I don’t eat fruit—not in your world, anyway—but I do talk to people, and guess what? Most people eat.) Like that, but with magic instead of flavor.
So, I ain’t gonna bother talkin’ through the whole rigmarole, see? There was chanting in three different languages, there was burning of this and stirring of that, dripping oils into water, and more or less a bunch of rituals that may or may not actual
ly’ve been necessary. Through it all I had the L&G out and aimed, carefully drawing currents of luck and magic from our surroundings—never enough from any one spot to cause problems—and carefully feeding it to Gina, layering it on top of her aura so she could draw on it as if it were her own.
Then a china cup-and-saucer toppled from an open cabinet where it shoulda been secure, shattering into a psychotic jigsaw puzzle, startlin’ the hell outta both of us and queering the whole effort so we hadda start over from scratch.
More of that free-floating bad luck I told you about. That was starting to get aggravating, I don’t mind saying.
Once I’d explained it to Gina—I wasn’t real comfortable doing that, but I didn’t have much choice if it was gonna be interfering with us working magic together—she tossed a couple quick charms at me. They mighta been helpful if I’d been a human having a normal run of misfortune, but since I wasn’t, they weren’t. Nice of her to try, though. And then we started all over.
When all was finally said and done, I’d stripped enough luck from her apartment that she’d need to walk on eggshells for the next day or two, since the tiniest bump or trip would probably cause something or other to collapse. But it’d worked; I’d fed her enough mojo to punch through whatever protections Ramona—or whoever, but c’mon—had raised to keep herself hidden. Gina, forehead glinting with sweat, handed over the quartz, which was now wrapped up in one end of the silver chain.
“Whenever you need to get your bearings,” she told me, “hold the chain in your left hand and spin the crystal widdershins. Uh, that’s counterclockwise.”
I’m pretty sure my face was so still I didn’t actually have an expression when I looked back at her.
“I’m a goddamn aes sidhe, doll. I know what the fuck widdershins means. We invented the concept.”
“Um. Okay.” Then, with reluctance thick enough to lie down and nap on, “So, what do we…? I mean, should I bring…? Where…?”
“Forget it, sister. No way are you comin’ with me. I appreciate your help, but you did your job. You’re out.”
She argued with me a minute, mostly because she felt like she should. Her relief when I refused to take her along was intense.
“I’d lie dormy a few days if I were you,” I said as I got up to dust out. “Ain’t any reason the people I’m gunning for should know to look you up, but better safe. Oh, speakin’ of…” I didn’t want to spook her any more’n she already was, but it’d be pretty low not to give her a head’s up. “You said Bumpy had a guy watching your place?”
“All the time, at least when I’m home. Why?”
“’Cause you got two of them out there right now.” Then, when she started to pale again, “I don’t guess it’s got anything to do with me or your occult practices. Didn’t get any sense of that from ’em. I figure it’s either the law or one of your boss’s rivals. Have him look into it, maybe.”
I didn’t really care to answer any more questions about it, especially since I didn’t know anything more about it. I’d collected my coat and was almost out the door when I remembered one last thing that I really oughta ask her. Dammit.
“Say, I don’t suppose you got a spell available to you that’d let you pick out a shapeshifter hiding behind somebody else’s mug, do you?”
“Pick out a… You mean those are real? Some of you can actually do that?”
Right. So much for that, then. I told her to keep herself safe, stuck the crystal dingus in a flogger pocket, and blew the joint.
* * *
Hey, whaddaya know? More hoofin’ it block after block. More planting my keister on the L and letting it trundle me across town, tryin’ to ignore the buzz of technology scratching like a starving cat in the back of my melon. More apartment buildings. I felt like a tourist without a guidebook.
But yeah, Gina’s dingus worked. Every time I spun it, it’d stop short, pointing the same way. I hadda circle back around a few times, since the trains sometimes didn’t run in precisely the right direction and I didn’t figure folks’d appreciate me traipsing through their houses, but eventually it did lead me on to yet another tenement.
And for a spell, no pun intended, I wondered if maybe the pendant hadn’t worked as well as it seemed. I didn’t know Ramona as well as it felt like I did, but I’da wagered a pretty thick wad of kale that she’d never bunk in a place as rundown and dingy as this one. It was only about two steps up from the slum Lenai’d gone to ground in. If this building’d been in any more of a shambles, the rat droppings would’ve been load-bearing.
Then again, it was the last place anyone’d look for her—whether they knew her as Ramona Webb, or just as “that person what snatches magic trinkets.”
The next spin ended with the quartz not just pointing forward but slightly up, so I pointed my Oxfords toward the stairs. A gaunt, pasty-faced gink was smokin’ a butt in the stairwell, turning the whole thing into a stinky chimney. He glared at me. I glared back, lettin’ enough of the real me show in my peepers until he dropped his cigarette and bolted, whimpering.
What can I say? I’ve had more’n enough years to perfect the art of being petty. I stomped out the cherry-glow of the ember on my way; that counts for something, don’t it?
Fourth floor: men’s shoes, polish brushes, the stench of poverty, and femmes fatales. Everybody out.
I was fairly sure from the minute I left the stairwell that she wasn’t home; I think I’d have sensed her if she were that close. When I got to her door, or at least what my spinning crystal guide told me was her door, I was damn near positive.
I dropped to one knee to get a good slant on the lock and, oh, yeah, this was the right place. She’d made a pretty good effort to stain and score the brass, so it looked a lot rougher’n it was, but the quality of the lock was way too high for a garbage dump like this place.
The teeny Aramaic, Latin, and even Enochian glyphs etched into the brass were something of a clue, too.
Under normal circumstances, the lock woulda been eggs in the coffee. I ain’t come across one yet I couldn’t get through with the right juggling of luck inside the tumblers. Those wards made it tougher, by a lot. I’d have to slowly draw the magic out of ’em, layer by layer, peepers peeled the whole time in case some of ’em were designed to react to exactly that sorta tampering. Plus I hadda figure out what kinds of energies were involved, whether it was safe to just pump ’em back out into the air and let ’em dissipate or if they needed more ornate methods. In a perfect world, I’d scribe some counter-runes over ’em, maybe surround the whole thing in protective circles of salt or whatnot. Even without those precautions, though, it’d be doable, just painstaking, nervous work.
Notice that real important key phrase, though? “Under normal circumstances.” Even for me, nothin’ about today qualified as normal, not with that haze of bad luck that’d been clinging to and sucking on me like a leech. A leech made of… haze… Okay, that one got away from me. You get what I mean, though.
At this point, some of you are wonderin’ why I hadn’t taken any steps to shake it off. Truth was, I had made a couple gestures in that direction. Handful of salt over my shoulder after the first couple days, wanderin’ clockwise around Mr. Soucek’s building one morning with my shirt inside-out—and lemme tell you, that ain’t a comfortable thing for the Fae to do, either—stuff like that. And if this’d just been a typical run of misfortune, that woulda fixed it right up. We may get stronger “streaks” than you do, good or bad, but it’s still chance; just a tad less random.
But that hadn’t fixed it, which was more evidence—still not proof, but gettin’ there—that I was laboring under some sorta hex. And if that were the case, no way did I wanna try countering it with magic until I had a better idea what it was. There’s about a zillion different traditions of magic out there, human and Fae both, and every one of ’em has multiple ways of giving someone a rough time. Use the wrong sorta mojo tryin’ to fix it, you risk makin’ it worse. And I simply hadn’t had the time t
o investigate it, not with everything else goin’ on.
But with the interruption of Gina’s scrying spell, and the necessity of dealing with these friggin’ wards, it had now become less an irritation than a genuine threat. Maybe I couldn’t shrug it off, but it was time to devote some real effort to mitigating it.
And hey, what’d I have right in front of my mug but a whole damn reservoir of mystic energies that I hadda put somewhere. Two birds, one stone.
I drew the L&G, jabbed it against the lock like I was tryin’ to stab it into opening, and started—real slow and real careful—to siphon the magic.
Can’t say how long it took, but I know it hadda be at least fifteen minutes. Slow, gradual, like removing the rind from an entire watermelon with a potato peeler. Tiny slivers of magic, sliced right off the top, fed through the wand and into my own essence where I transformed ’em into tiny puffs of good fortune to smother the stains of bad luck infusing my aura… Yeah. Tough to explain in terms that have any meaning to you, but you get the gist.
On the square, I don’t even know for sure what the wards woulda done if I’d triggered ’em. Cursed me? Alerted Ramona from wherever she was? Blown up the apartment in a burst of profane fire? I was too focused on suckin’ ’em dry without settin’ ’em off to really sniff out their nature. I was curious, sure, but not so curious it was worth interrupting what I was doing.
I thought I got lucky, that the fortune I was manufacturing from the shreds of magic in the lock kept me from bein’ spotted by anyone on the floor, despite how long the damn process took. Turned out not to quite be the case, but I’ll come back around to that.
Finally, after however long, the glyphs gave up the last of their mojo with a sorta protesting hiccup and the lock just smelled of brass and old oil and steel springs. I took a sec to unknot some mental muscles, zapped the lock with the wand so the tumblers broke down, and walked in like I owned the place.
And then took a few just to stare, try to take in what I was seein’, as the apartment reminded me real firmly that I did not, in fact, own the place.