by Gary Jonas
I followed her into the room and reached for the box. “Give me that.”
She held it out of reach. “It’s not yours.”
“It’s not yours either,” I said, trying to grab it. Sabrina’s arms were too long. I poked her in the side and she flinched. I grabbed the box from her hand.
“Hey!” she said.
“I signed for this,” I said. “And I live here, so it’s mine.”
“Like hell!” She tried to snatch it back.
I held the box tightly. She tried to pry my fingers open. A feeling from the cards shot through the box, and I knew I could trust Sabrina. Blood magic doesn’t lie. That didn’t mean I’d let her take the cards, though. “They’re mine,” I said.
“That will be quite enough of that!” a voice said.
“Did you say that?” Sabrina asked.
“I said that,” the voice said.
“And who the fuck are you?” I asked.
“Your uncle.”
“Where are you?” I asked, looking around. There was nobody else here.
“Laptop.”
A MacBook Air sat open on the desk, and while the screen was dark, the light at the top glowed green.
“Privacy much?” I asked.
“You left the computer open, Brett. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can hack into the camera to see what’s going on. You two need to get along. Tap the trackpad.”
Sabrina reached over and tapped the pad. The screen lit up and revealed Uncle Paul on a webcam. He had thin gray hair and a neatly trimmed Van Dyke. His bifocals perched on the edge of his large nose.
“Hi, Dad,” Sabrina said.
“Hit command, shift, and hold down the P and M keys.”
“That doesn’t do anything,” Sabrina said.
“It does when it’s been programmed. Please do it.”
She did.
The screen went blank for a moment, then Uncle Paul’s face appeared again, but the window around his image glowed green.
“Privacy Mode engaged,” he said. “We have a good two minutes before anyone can hack in.”
“You think someone’s trying to hack in?”
“Sinclair already did. I booted him out, but he’ll try again.”
“He wants the cards,” Sabrina said.
“Desperately. He sold them to an unsavory client, but I took them off his hands before the client could arrange a pickup.”
“So you stole them,” Sabrina said.
“He stole them from us.”
“And you stole them from him originally, right?”
“Who can remember who stole what when? It doesn’t matter, Bri. You need to set wards, and close up the house for shielding before Sinclair’s goons get there.”
“Oh, Mr. Russo and Mr. Toscano won’t be eating anyone else,” I said.
“I don’t know them,” Paul said. “I was referring to—”
The screen went dead.
“Dad?” Sabrina said. “Dad?” She tapped the keys.
The green light was no longer lit and the screen shimmered and went back to the normal desktop view.
“Must have lost signal,” I said.
“Not in Privacy Mode,” Sabrina said. “We still had a minute.”
The screen shimmered again, and another window appeared. The green light glowed at the top once again, but now a tanned man with dark hair and bright blue eyes stared at us.
“Sabrina Tenn,” the man said. “And Brett Masters. I’m sending an agent over to retrieve the package. You would be wise to allow the agent to take it. I will not be held responsible for your safety should you decline.”
“Blow it out your ass, dickhead,” I said and closed the screen.
“Brett,” Sabrina said, “that was Joseph Sinclair.”
“I don’t care if it was Clint Eastwood. These cards are mine. They’re freaking cool.”
“Why would you care about… Oh shit, you handled them.”
“Well, yeah. So?”
“They’ve matched your temporal frequency and are currently vibrating in line with your chakras and sending tendrils of power through your bloodstream, which will radiate energy at a rate of—”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying.”
“Didn’t your parents send you to class to study magic?”
“I was never big on school,” I said.
“This is basic Magic 101.”
“Cut to the chase, Cheese Puff. Give it to me in six words or less.”
“Fewer.”
“What?”
She sighed. “The cards are tuned to you.”
“What does that mean?”
“In six words or fewer?”
“Yeah.”
“How about two words? You’re fucked.”
“How so?”
“Sinclair wants those cards.”
“I got that.”
“They’re tuned to you.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“There’s only one way to get them untuned.”
“That’s eight words, but go ahead.”
“They have to kill you.”
CHAPTER THREE
“That’s not cool,” I said. “I don’t want to die.”
“What are we gonna do?” Sabrina asked.
I considered what I knew. It wasn’t much at this point. “Was that really Sinclair on the computer?”
Sabrina nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Why is he sending an agent when he already sent two guys over here earlier?”
“What two guys?”
“Talk about me not paying attention. Russo and Toscano.”
“My dad didn’t know them, and neither do I.”
“They were Mako Clansmen.”
“Were?”
“They were going to shoot me and eat me and kill me in that order, so I got rid of them.”
“You killed two Mako Clansmen?”
“Not me personally. Let’s just say I facilitated their demise.”
“How did you do that?”
I grinned. “I fed them to Mangani.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What? You don’t think I should have disposed of them? They were going to kill me.”
“I don’t care about that. I just think your parents let you read too many Tarzan books when you were a kid. Mangani is a stupid name for a rug,”
“I happen to like it.”
“Same way you liked running around in a loin cloth?”
“I was five.”
“Yeah, but you probably still have a loin cloth.”
I refused to dignify that with a response. Especially since I did have one, but that was because I dated a girl named Jane for a while, and if you’re tapping a girl named Jane you kinda have to do the Tarzan thing. Am I right?
“Maybe you should go away for a few weeks until things settle down,” Sabrina said. “You could give the cards to me, and I’ll take care of them.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“What do you mean?”
“The whole card tuning thing. Shouldn’t I keep them close to me? Isn’t there something in magic about will and proximity or something?”
“If you’d bothered to pay attention in magic studies, you’d know that.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I can’t do it in six words or fewer.”
“If you understood it, you could.”
“Not where you could understand it. I do think you should relinquish the responsibility for the cards to me and go take a vacation or something.”
“I have band practice tonight and a gig at a club tomorrow night. I’m not backing out on the guys. Not gonna happen.”
“You can’t let those cards fall into the wrong hands.”
“Why? Because your dad stole them?”
“He might have taken them, but he wasn’t stupid enough to touch them.”
“Maybe I should hide them in the basement safe?”
“I
don’t see how that would help.”
“But it wouldn’t hurt, right? I mean, if no one can find them, it’s all good.”
“Whatever. Lead the way,” she said. “Let’s get this done.”
“You’re not the boss of me.”
She held up her right index finger and grimaced. A flame sprouted from her fingertip.
“Did you really just bite the inside of your lip to turn your finger into a lighter?” I asked.
“I did,” she said with pride.
I pulled a lighter out of my pocket and flicked it to life. “Well, would you look at that,” I said. “Fire. No blood price required. Costs a buck at the gas station, and you can light it a couple hundred times.”
“My point is that I can work magic quickly and easily, so that makes me qualified to be your boss.”
“Think again. The way I see it is that your lip is going to hurt for a few hours just so you could do a stupid parlor trick. That makes you unqualified to lead anyone.”
“And if Sinclair’s agent shows up and can work powerful magic?”
I grinned. “One thing I’ve learned is that people who rely on magic leave themselves open for more mundane attacks. Pop them in the nose. They never expect that.”
“I’m above such violence.”
“Good for you,” I said. I left the room and went to a particular spot in the hallway. After knocking three times on the wall, a door appeared. I pushed it open and went down the stairs to the basement.
Sabrina followed me.
The basement was loaded with junk. Tons of old ceremonial robes hung on rolling hanger racks. Boxes filled with old books were piled up in rows and some of those rows were connected by spider webs. A sarcophagus stood against the far wall. When I was a kid, it graced the hallway of my parents’ New Orleans mansion. I always thought someone was hiding inside it and kept expecting the eyes to follow me the way they did in the old Scooby Doo cartoons.
Trunks were stacked atop each other along one wall, and a weapons rack filled with swords and daggers stood next to a cabinet filled with a variety of old spices and rare ingredients for spells. Most ceremonial magic didn’t require blood, but it was a real pain in the ass to get the tools, and do the rituals, and speak the proper words in the correct order, and it rarely had any real power. Much ado about nothing, even if you could remember all the words to the spells. Let’s face it, an iPhone is more impressive.
I stepped over a toolbox and bumped into one of the rolling hanger racks loaded with black robes. The rack rolled over and bumped into a stand that held a white Fender Stratocaster. The guitar shook and suddenly broke into “The Star Spangled Banner.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Is that the Hendrix guitar?” Sabrina asked, pushing past me.
“Yeah,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the song.
“What’s the deal?”
“If you bump the damn thing, it plays ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ the same way Hendrix did at Woodstock. It’s like the memory is still in the instrument.”
“Wait a minute, this is the actual Woodstock guitar?” she asked, staring at the maple fingerboard.
“You’d know better than I would,” I said. “I think it’s the real deal. Check out the burn marks from where Hendrix stuck his cigarette under the sixth string there.” I pointed.
“Why would I know better than you?”
“Because the word on the street is that your father stole it from Mitch Mitchell back in the seventies. He swapped it out for a similar axe when he was visiting.”
“Who’s Mitch Mitchell?”
I rolled my eyes. “Drummer for Hendrix. Jesus.”
“I’m not much of a rock fan. How long does the damn thing play?”
“Three minutes and forty-six seconds.”
“Remind me not to bump it.”
I moved a stack of old blankets out of a plastic laundry basket that sat on a black sewing table. Pin cushions and stray bits of fabric were tucked away on the broken Singer machine. “I’ll put the cards here,” I said.
“That’s the safe?”
I nodded and reached into the basket, peeled the bottom up to reveal a gap of three inches from what appeared to be the bottom of the basket to the actual bottom of the basket. I set the cards inside, pushed the plastic back into place.
“I hate this part,” I said, and took one of the pins from a red cushion. I took a deep breath, jabbed the needle into my palm, and stuck it back into the cushion. I squeezed a drop of blood up on my hand and dabbed my index finger into the wound. Then I pressed my bloody finger against the plastic bottom of the container. The blood disappeared instantly and I set the blankets back into the basket.
Now, I was the only person who could open the safe. Well, unless someone got my blood and used it. But Sabrina and I were the only ones who knew, and thanks to the cards, I knew she wouldn’t betray me.
“Are you sure you want them to be that far away from you? If someone kills you, the tuning will fizzle out in moments and the cards will be up for grabs.”
“Other than you, no one knows I touched them.”
“What if they can sense it?”
“That’s stupid.”
The strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” finally ended and the basement was suddenly quiet.
“What if Sinclair was watching you over the computer?”
“They’re staying here and that’s that. Got it?”
“Your call. This place is dusty,” she said, “and it smells like something died in here.”
“Probably snakes,” I said, remembering that as a kid, she was afraid of all reptiles, especially slithery ones.
She gave an involuntary shudder. “Let’s get upstairs then.”
A yellow measuring tape sat coiled on the sewing table. I grabbed it and followed Sabrina through the maze toward the stairs. As she neared the staircase, I uncoiled the tape and tossed it on her shoulder.
She screamed and swatted at it, nearly falling down.
I laughed my ass off and picked up the measuring tape so I could show it to her.
“You’re an asshole,” she said.
I draped the measuring tape over the closest rolling rack. “I may be an asshole,” I said, “but that was funny.”
“To you.”
“That’s what counts.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Sabrina unpacked and made herself at home in her room on the third floor, which had its own half-bath and access to a private deck. We’d have to share the full bathroom on the second floor. Meanwhile, I kicked back on the lower level deck where I smoked a joint and tried to relax while waiting for the band to show up.
The joint was a terrible idea. I mean, it seemed like a great idea at the time, but those damned Tarot cards with family blood were on my mind, and ancient magic is a bad thing to blend with any mind-altering substance. Normally, a quick doobie is nice and relaxing, but thanks to the stupid magic in those cards, each toke made me tense up and I started wondering when Sinclair’s agent was going to arrive.
If he burst onto the scene, would he torture me? Would he kill me? Should I call the cops? They’d smell weed and I’d get arrested, so I took that off the table. Should I call my parents? Hell no. My father would tell me to lay off the Mary Jane. My mother would be worried, asking if my glaucoma was too bad because she actually believed the prescriptions were for real. Never mind that in Texas, medical marijuana was only approved for intractable epilepsy. She didn’t know that and wasn’t likely to ever look it up.
My cellphone rang. Delta Poe. He was the lead singer of our band, Delta Poe and the Magicians. His first name was Alexander, but everyone called him Poe. He claimed to be related to the actual Edgar Allan Poe, but quoth the raven, cough cough, bullshit.
I dropped the doobie into the ashtray, and answered.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Dude, I’m gonna be late to practice.”
“What’s her name?”
; “Jennifer.”
“Is she hot?”
“Oh, dude, she’s a hammer.”
“And you’re going to nail her,” I said.
He laughed. He always laughed at that lame-ass joke. Poe wasn’t the brightest guy in town, but he had perfect pitch and amazing range, and he could jump around like David Lee Roth in his prime. “That never gets old,” Poe said.
“It’s been old since before either of us were born, Poe. What time will you be here?”
“Nine? Ten?”
“Michael made special arrangements to get here at seven because you wanted to start early.”
“Dude, this chick is an eleven.”
“Bring her over.”
“Fuck that shit,” Poe said. “I do that, Michael will do his eye thing on her and she’ll go to him. He ain’t hooking up with Jenny.”
I couldn’t resist, so I said, “The Jenny?”
“What do you mean, man?”
“Blonde who keeps herself fit and has legs that go all the way up to heaven?”
“Holy shit! You know her?”
“Hate to break it to you, Poe, but we’ve all had her. She wrote her number on the bathroom wall at Dixie’s.”
“I don’t know about that. I ain’t got her number yet.”
“867-5309,” I said.
“Damn, dude, you still remember her number? She must be a wildcat in the sack.”
I sang it to him and he finally recognized the song.
“Dickhead.”
I laughed. “Yep.”
“Then how did you know what she looks like?”
“Every girl you bang looks like that.”
He laughed. “I guess I do have a type.”
“You have fun, Poe. I’ll fill in for you until you get here.”
“Thanks, bro.”
Michael was not going to be happy. I considered calling him, but it was only four o’clock, so he’d be tucked away in his storage unit. Don’t ask.
I took another toke.
A man walked along the street with his golden retriever. The dog barked at him and he tossed a stick. The dog chased after it. The man looked over at the house and waved.
Was he just being friendly or was he Sinclair’s agent?
I lifted a hand and gave him a wave back.