The Last American Wizard

by Edward Irving

  As he watched, another gang member walked up–a tall young man with intricate black tattoos across his forehead. Steve couldn’t make out what was said through the double-paned and probably bulletproof store window, but he appeared to be chastising the others for being afraid of the car.

  One of earlier arrivals gestured for him to go ahead–the car was his. He pulled a two-foot flat metal blade with heavy tape wrapped around one end and a square notch cut into the other from a special pocket sewn into his pants. From the several times he’d locked his keys inside his car in a parking garage, Steve knew this was a slim jim and could open most cars.

  The would-be thief approached the driver’s window and raised the device, prepared to slide it down between the glass of the window and the rubber seal at the bottom. A very fat electric arc shot from the radio antenna of the BMW and grounded solidly on the would-be thief’s forehead. He shook violently for a few seconds, then convulsively leaped about five feet back, and landed squarely on his back. His eyes were unfocused and blinking slowly.

  “I told you that Hans could take care of himself,” Ace said as she slid the phone over Steve’s shoulder. It was encased–no, “armored” was a better description, Steve thought, in thick layers of rubber and plastic.

  “Looks like Send Money here could survive a lot more than we can.”

  “If we survive at all, it’s going to be because of this little fellow,” Ace said. “Wear him on your belt from now on. He’s rated to stop everything up to a 9mm assault round, and every little bit helps.”

  “Yeah, that would help protect my hip,” Steve said. “What about the more important parts of me?”

  “You really think any of those parts are important?” Ace snorted as she went out the door, evidently ready to confront the young men around the car. Steve struggled to work out the complex clasp that held the phone onto his belt as he hurried to follow her, although what use he was going to be in a melee with gang members was beyond him.

  When he had finally clipped the phone on and looked up, Ace was standing calmly in the center of a circle of about a dozen gang members. She looked around calmly and then made a point of carefully counting how many men there were. Then she pointed at herself and spread her hands. Her point was clear even without a shared language; were they all going to attack just one person?

  Several of the men looked abashed. Ace held up one finger on each hand and cocked her eyebrow in question. Then she took the misshapen SIG Sauer out of her holster and laid it on the BMW’s hood. She did the same with another pistol she pulled from a holster around her ankle.

  Finally, a Ka-Bar fighting knife appeared from somewhere under her shirt in the back and was followed by two more large locking knives, a pair of brass knuckles, and a small spray can. Finally, she pulled a thin switchblade from a hidden pocket along the inseam of her pants, held it up, and clicked it open.

  Then she walked directly towards one side of the circle around her–they backed off to give her room. Standing in the center of the parking lot, she held the small knife in a loose grip and once again directed a questioning look all around the circle.

  The MS-13s looked at each other, and after a minute, one man stepped forward. Medium height and stocky, he removed his wife- beater undershirt and showed the sort of lean and corded muscles you don’t get by lifting weights. Steve could see that his entire back was covered with a beautiful red-and-blue tattoo of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The gang member then removed a folding knife from a clip on the back of his belt, snapped it open, and fell into a fighting crouch–low and taut with his left hand out and the knife in his right hand tucked against his torso.

  Ace remained standing upright–almost relaxed. Then she began to sidestep slowly to her right. Her opponent followed suit, his eyes on her face like a snake observing the mouse destined to be its dinner.

  To Steve, the actual fight was just a blur of arms and legs with flashes of sunlight off a blade piercing through from time to time. As suddenly as it started, it stopped.

  The two combatants were frozen; the gang member had his left arm up under Ace’s armpit and behind her neck in a half nelson. His knife was in his right hand and only centimeters from her neck–held back by her hand on his wrist. The man began to grin fiercely and shifted slightly to get more leverage on the knife hand.

  Suddenly, his eyes widened and he stopped moving altogether–not even breathing. Steve could hear a gentle tapping sound. He searched for the source and smiled when he found it.

  In her left hand, Ace’s razor-sharp blade was gently tapping a rhythm against the zipper of the man’s trousers. She glanced over her shoulder and raised a single eyebrow in question.

  Her opponent slowly released the pressure on her neck and stepped back. Ace turned around, bowed slightly, and then the hand without the knife twitched in a lightning series of signs. There was an intake of breath from around the circle.

  When she stopped, her opponent asked in English, “Really? Manolo in LA trained you? Prove it.”

  “Well, when I last saw him, he still had ‘USMC’ tattooed under his tongue.”

  The man laughed. “Yeah, a puta would see something like that.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then she said. “No, I saw it when I had my arm across his throat and he was about to choke to death. That’s also when he got all that blood in his right eye. In a manner of speaking, it was my graduation.”

  There was a murmur of mixed doubts and laughter. “Come on. Do you really want me to go through this with each and every one of you?” Ace looked around the circle slowly. “Because we need to leave and I tend to get…messy…if I’m rushed.”

  There was a dead silence. Ace turned, walked back to the car, and began to pick up and reposition her weapons.

  Another of the gang members stepped forward. He had a horrendous scar running from above his left eyebrow almost to his right ear–just missing his eyes. “Nice fight, bruja.”

  Ace didn’t look up from checking her backup pistol. “I’m not a witch. Just good at what I do.”

  “You are susurros de Muerte, si?”

  “Whispering Death?” Ace laughed. “Man, that’s really old- school. But what the hell, it’ll do.”

  “But you can’t be. A woman is never allowed on the beach at Coronado.”

  “Well, I guess I’m just special that way. Learn to live with it.”

  “You must meet with Carlos, our primera palabra. That was his brother Hector that you fought. I am Jairo, segunda palabra.”

  He shrugged. “Otherwise, we cannot let you leave. There are strange things. Magia negra. We have seen the cadejo. Carlos needs to get some answers.”

  Ace looked at Steve, who shrugged. They both got in the BMW and Ace shouted out the open window, “Bien tipos, vamos a dejar de perder el tiempo. Conduce, vamos a seguir.”

  A pickup truck with a custom painting of brilliant flames all along the bottom swept into the lot and stopped in a cloud of dust. About half the gang members jumped in, and it took off in a jackrabbit start so fast that one man fell off the back.

  Ace drove carefully around him.

  After a moment, Steve asked. “What’s a ‘prima palumbo’?”

  “Primera palabra. First speaker. The Boss. The second in command is the segunda palabra, naturally.”

  “And ‘Whispering Death’?”

  “Yeah, that’s what they called SEALs back in the Vietnam days. Used to crawl through the swamps and collect Viet Cong ears.”

  Ace abruptly changed the subject. “Let’s get some intel on this meet. Pull Send Money off your belt and let me see the screen. Hey, Money, do a random pull from a tarot deck and show me what you get.”

  When he held out the now-armored phone, it showed five men holding wooden staves fighting each other.

  Ace snorted. “Well, that figures. Five of Wands. That’s strife and battle or, at best, just argument.”

  She thought for a moment. “Hey, Money, pull another card, the five is j
ust too obvious.”

  The phone’s screen flickered. Now, it showed a man looking definitely sneaky, carrying a bundle of staffs away in his arms. Ace laughed. “Now that’s more like it. Seven of Wands. Betrayal.”

  Steve asked. “Why do Wands come up so much?”

  Ace began to speak in the regular tempo of a drill instructor. “According to the OTN manual Section 50, Subject Matter: tarot, Wands are related to Fire. Fire is the element of violent change and destruction, which pretty well fits MS-13 gangbangers. Also describes the kind of people who’d sacrifice an airplane full of people to get their way, now that I think about it.”

  “I must have forgotten my college courses in Thaumaturgy and Divination. Run through the other suits and their elements, will you?”

  “Well, Pentacles is the Earth suit and that’s solidity, reliability, and money. Most Republicans would fall into that group. Cups are Water, of course, and that’s change, persistence, and the emotions.”

  Steve said. “That’s got to be Democrats.”

  “Yep. Swords are the Air cards. A Sword cuts through air– among other things–and so it tends to be tough, biting, and martial. Swords also cut complex things into simpler things–thus all those computers at NSA and the geeks who love them. Air is also everywhere and sees everything, so journalists fit in that category as well. Air creatures are things that fly, naturally, like pixies or fairies–real fairies, that is, not to denigrate many of my fellow warfighters.”

  Steve snorted. “How real...wait, that’s the wrong question. How reliable is all this tarot crap?”

  “Most of the tarot books were written by crazy people in the 1800’s–not by any mysterious prehistoric masters.” Ace shrugged. “For all we know, tarot decks may have been used for some sort of card game with an element of the mystical added for a little extra excitement.”

  “So, why use them?”

  “Because it’s an easy way to identify and classify OTN phenomena.” The pickup truck pulled into a space in front of what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse and Ace followed. “In the end, the primary reason is that we really have no freaking idea what’s going on, so it’s as good as anything else.”

  She opened the door and stepped out. “Let’s go see the Big Dog and then we can get out of here, OK?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The gang members piled out of the pickup, and Hector, the man who had fought Ace, knocked on the battered door of the warehouse. Steve noticed that the door–in fact, the entire place– was nowhere near as flimsy as it first appeared. There was a sequence of knocks from inside and a response from Hector. Steve heard a chorus of metallic squeals and the door opened.

  As they entered, Steve noted that the outer door was made of triple layers of heavyweight plywood buttressed by cross-bracing on the inside surface. When the door closed, the gang members on guard duty shoved slide bolts into slots cut into the top and sides of the doorframe and deep into the solid wood floor.

  “This place is not only tough to get into,” he thought. “It’s going to be hell to get out of.”

  There was a short corridor ending at another door, evidently there just to block the interior from anyone watching from outside.

  Passing through the second door, they came into a single room that took up the entire interior of the warehouse and was lit by skylights cut into the roof and windows set high on the rear wall. Along the right wall, there were a rudimentary kitchen and an extended table. “Clearly,” Steve thought, “for those cheerful dinners that make a drug gang just one big happy family.”

  In the center of the room was a large chair mounted on a wooden platform. If it hadn’t been an extremely battered orange La-Z-Boy recliner, it might have looked like a throne. Surrounding it in a semicircle was an assemblage of worn furniture that Steve guessed had been taken off the streets before the trash trucks could pick them up.

  Counting the contingent from the pickup truck, there were a couple of dozen young men in the room. All of them sported elaborate tattoos.

  In the center sat a massive dark-haired man who had been radically affected by the Change. He was shoeless and his bare feet had pulled together and hardened–Steve guessed that they would look like horse hooves in a matter of minutes. Short dark fur was growing on all visible parts of his body, covering his multicolored tattoos. He was clearly not enjoying any of this transmutation; he looked as if his back was killing him and was sitting hunched forward with the recliner set as upright as possible.

  All the changes to his body were nothing compared to what was going on with his face. The eyes were light red with deep crimson pupils, and in the growing twilight, Steve had no doubt that they were actually glowing. You couldn’t really say he had a nose any longer; it was a long muzzle with a flat, black end that he licked continuously and apparently unconsciously. His lips and gums were black and drawn back to reveal a very white set of very sharp teeth.

  He was turning into a dog and evidently was not happy about it.

  Steve had a thought. Putting the phone to his ear, he said softly. “Send Money, check the references for cadejo. Just show it to me on the screen.”

  The now-expected flicker of web pages and translator icons only took a minute before the screen showed

  CADEJO–A FAKE DOG CREATURE

  This changed quickly to

  CADEJO. A MYTHICAL ENORMOUS DOG WITH HOOFS

  Send Money added,

  FROM EL SALVADOR

  “Wonderful,” Steve muttered as he clipped the phone back onto his belt. “And me without any Milk Bones.”

  The creature in the central chair gave a low querulous growl, and Ace turned to Steve. “I don’t mind doing the heavy lifting, but I think you’re better at witty conversations with pseudo-mythical creatures.”

  “Oh, is that the division of labor?”

  “You want to take over the fighting?”

  Steve didn’t have an answer to that, so he stepped forward to address the gang leader. The transformation he was undergoing was speeding up; Steve could see definite changes in the few minutes since they had walked in. He had a sudden thought that he’d better get the conversation over before this guy needed to be walked.

  “Mr. Cadejo,” he began. “Nice to make your acquaintance.”

  The only response was silence. Everyone in the room was tense, hanging on every word.

  “We’re coming down from Fort Meade to investigate the wave of...change that’s gone through here today. You’ve probably noticed a few changes yourself–”

  He was interrupted by a whining bark.

  Steve thought, “Glorious ancestral beast or not, this guy isn’t exactly jubilant about turning into the Great Dane from Hell.” Aloud, he asked, “Can you tell us what’s happened here?”

  Carlos shook his massive shaggy head. Then he flopped forward out of the chair. Steve could see that his hands were also massive cloven hooves. When he finally stood on all four...feet...he was still tall enough to look Steve in the eye.

  After a moment, he yawned, showing a truly stunning array of teeth, and curled down to lie on his stomach on the floor. He turned his head and jerked his chin at the segunda palabra.

  Jairo stepped forward. “It is you who should tell us about what has caused these changes! Have those bastards up at the NSA released some secret weapon? A poison gas or something?”

  “We know it’s not coming from the NSA,” Steve said. “But beyond that, we don’t know all that much, I’m afraid. That’s why we’re here–to find out.”

  “That’s bullshit. Those pendejos fresa up there have been fucking around and they’ve let something out. We know what it is sabes? No estamos de mierda estúpida. Es magia maldita. Black magic. Our primera palabra is turning into the cadejo of the old stories and many of our soldiers are growing teeth and long ears like dogs.”

  The phone buzzed and Steve looked at the screen.

  HELLHOUNDS

  “Wonderful,” Steve thought.

  The big d
og stood up and began to pace back and forth, growling angrily. As he passed, he snapped his teeth at his lieutenant.

  “Yes.” The man seemed shaken. “Can this be changed? Carlos...er...el Cadejo...is not pleased. Being a big dog might be useful in fighting, but the chicas are terrified.”

  The phone on Steve’s belt vibrated suddenly and Barnaby’s voice came out of the speaker. “I’m sorry to interrupt but it’s important. Carlos, or Mr. Cadejo, if you prefer, I don’t know if we can reverse the change completely–it’s a fairly essential part of your character–but we think we have worked out something that can make you much more of a man and less of a dog.”

  The cadejo came over and suspiciously sniffed at Steve’s belt. Suddenly, a flurry of idiomatic Spanish came out of the cell phone’s speaker. At first, the enormous dog reared back then sat on his haunches and listened with concentration.

  He didn’t even notice when two of the gang ran up behind him, each carrying thick ropes with nooses on the ends. They dropped the loops around his neck and immediately pulled hard in opposite directions.

  The dog-monster roared and whipped around, trying to reach the traitors, but they were already out of reach. Now other gang members grabbed onto the ropes and added their strength. Steve thought he could pick out the ones who had been affected by the Change–the muscles in their legs were corded and straining. The big dog monster stamped and snapped but finally was held motionless, howling in frustrated rage. Steve thought he could hear the shadows of human words in the howl–promises of terrible vengeance.

  Ace had stood quietly through all this and now nodded her head, and said, “Betrayal. I thought that was meant for us, but it looks like number two wants to move up.”

  Jairo heard her and laughed. “Indeed. Carlos was a problem long before he became a monster. Sangron, you know? Thought his shit didn’t stink. All agreed it was time for a change.”

  There was a strangled cry from behind Steve; he turned to see Hector, Carlos’s brother, stumbling back as he tried vainly to hold back the blood flowing from a knife wound that ran most of the way across his throat.