Spell Blind - eARC

by DAVID B. COE

  In many ways I learned everything I needed to know about the runemyste the very first time I saw him. Most of my memories from those days are obscured by the residue of too many phasings, but this one remains as clear as fresh rainwater. I was at home—my old home, on the west side of the city, in Buckeye. I had started on the job only a few months before and was learning a good deal from Kona. We were in robbery detail then, although she was already angling to get us moved to Homicide. But I had yet to tell her that I was a weremyste and she was growing tired of having to explain to others why her new partner disappeared every few weeks. Friendship only goes so far, particularly when I’m nothing more than some dumb rookie cop, and she’s well on her way to a promotion for which she’s busted her butt some seven years. It was just a matter of time before she was going to dump me as a partner. No doubt I would have deserved it. Rule seven: Never keep secrets from your partner.

  It was late, and the moon was full. I was in the midst of a hard, dark phasing, sitting on my living room floor, trying to resist the urge to grab my weapon and put a bullet through my head. Often my phasings are filled with delusions, and on this night my mom, dead some twelve years, was standing in front of me, telling me that I was exactly like my old man and that I’d wasted my life. And staring down at my hands, I could see that they were wrinkled and covered with age spots. The hair on them had turned white. Somehow there was a mirror beside me—at least I believed at the time that there was—and as I gazed into it, I saw that I was twin to my dad, my hair gray, my face slack. I remember crying, and screaming myself hoarse, begging her to go away. But she wouldn’t leave me alone. I thought about using magic to burn my house to the ground. Really, I did. Magic is stronger during the phasings, and I could feel the power churning inside me. I was itching to use it. I had to remind myself that burning down the house would be a bad thing. Which is why I’d started thinking about the weapon. Not that shooting myself was much better, but at the time rational thought wasn’t my strong suit. All I could think was that if I couldn’t get her to leave, I’d leave myself.

  But before I could climb to my feet and retrieve my pistol, my mother vanished, replaced by what appeared to be yet another delusion: a translucent figure, shimmering and liquid, and yet seemingly solid.

  I didn’t speak. I stared up at that face, at those glowing eyes, waiting for him to do or say something.

  “Taking your own life would be a waste. You should reconsider.” His voice was like rushing water, musical and random, soothing and exhilarating.

  “Wow,” I said, breathless. As delusions went, this was a good one.

  “The moon-time is difficult for you, I know. I have seen it. But part of being a runecrafter is enduring the dark nights. What you call the phasings.”

  “What are you supposed to be?” I asked. I reached toward him with an open hand, wanting to touch his watery skin. I wasn’t close enough, though, and I didn’t have the strength to stand up.

  “My name is Namid’skemu. I am a runemyste. Long ago by your reckoning, I was a runecrafter—a weremyste—as you are. More recently I gave aid to your father. I would do the same for you, but you must swear to me that you will not do harm to yourself.”

  “Namid’skemu,” I repeated. “That sounds Native American.”

  “It is A’shiwi.”

  “A’shiwi?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re Zuni?”

  “I am of the K’ya’na-Kwe clan. The water people.”

  “The water people are extinct.”

  “Yes.”

  I let out a crazed laugh. I was starting to sound like my dad. “So you’re telling me that I’m speaking to the ghost of some ancient Zuni?”

  “I am no ghost,” he said, sounding angry for the first time. “I was once what you would call a shaman, as weremystes often were. I am now a runemyste, chosen by the Runeclave to guard against the use of dark magic in your world. And I have come to you because I see great darkness in you. I fear that you will not survive this night.”

  I shook my head, averting my eyes, feeling ashamed that he had read my thoughts with such ease. “This is getting weird. I need something to drink.”

  I forced myself up, staggered into the kitchen and splashed water on my face. That helped some, but the tirade from my mom’s ghost still echoed in my head. I knew that I couldn’t kill myself; my new delusion had convinced me of that much. But I wasn’t going to make it through the night if I didn’t do something. Still leaning against the counter in front of the sink, I reached up into the topmost cabinet and pulled out a bottle of bourbon.

  When I turned to get a glass, he was standing right in front of me. I should have been startled, but I wasn’t. Somehow I had known he’d be there.

  “That will not help you through this night,” he said pointing at the bottle.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “It’s helped before.”

  “That is an illusion.”

  I laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

  “You believe I am an illusion.”

  “Delusion is the word I’d use. But, yeah, I do.”

  “You are wrong. I am as real as you are. Your father knows me.”

  “My father’s a loon,” I said, not meaning it kindly. “So we’ve had the same hallucinations. Not very surprising. I bet he’s seen Mom yelling at him, too. Doesn’t make her ghost real.”

  “I am not a ghost,” he said again. “And you must ask him about me when you can. I assure you I am real, and I can help you, just as I did him. I can teach you to harness the powers you possess, to become a skilled runecrafter. But you must learn to endure the moon-times without resorting to alcohol and without doing harm to yourself.”

  I glared at him, but then I put down the bottle, walked back into the living room, and dropped onto the couch. Sleep. That’s what I needed. Come morning, I’d feel better. The phasing still had one more night, and even the days of what my new ghost-friend called the moon-time were difficult—trouble focusing, forgetfulness, fatigue. They were better than the nights, though. And this hallucination would be over.

  “You cannot escape me,” he said. I opened my eyes and found him standing in front of the couch.

  “Stop doing that! Leave me alone.”

  “Why do you refuse the Abri?”

  I frowned up at him. “The what?”

  “The drug that can keep you from suffering during the moon-time. Why do you not take it?”

  Blockers. That’s what he was talking about. My gaze slid away again; I had no easy answer. I could have said I didn’t take them because my father hadn’t taken them, but I’m not sure I was even ready to admit as much to myself. At that point, we didn’t get along, and I blamed him for everything I hated about my life. I also could have said I wasn’t ready yet to give up wielding magic, but I was still learning to cast spells, and back then I wasn’t sure I believed I would ever become much of a runecrafter. The truth was, I sensed the runemyste wanted me to say that I was determined to retain whatever powers I possessed, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right. Even then I was a stubborn son of a bitch.

  “You are a runecrafter,” he said after some time, his voice as soothing as the sea at dawn. “You have some talent with magic. With my help you can become a more accomplished crafter.”

  “You’re an illusion,” I said, closing my eyes again.

  “And you are a fool.”

  “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”

  He said nothing and at last I opened my eyes again, thinking that perhaps he’d gone. When I saw him standing over me, as patient as the tide I knew a moment of profound relief. I realized then that I wanted him to be real. I wanted to believe I could be a powerful sorcerer, that there was more to being a weremyste than these miserable nights around the full moon. But after suffering through the phasings for so long, I had lost hope. That month’s phasing hadn’t been the first time I considered putting my pistol to my head.

  He
still stared at me, and now he said “You are trying to learn something of a theft. It has been many turns of the moon since last you learned anything of importance, but still you try. There is a single token from this theft that you possess; a knife with a broken blade. Get it now.”

  I started to say something, then stopped. He had described a robbery Kona and I had been struggling with for the better part of six months. His understanding of the case was crude, but detailed enough to be convincing. This proved nothing, of course. My delusion, my knowledge. But that broken knife was in the house, just as he’d said. Kona and I were certain it had been used to jimmy a window or door and had been broken in the process. But we’d yet to figure out where the thieves had entered the building. We had stopped by the warehouse again the day before. We wandered around for a while, but found nothing new. When we were done, Kona asked me to return the knife to evidence. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I wasn’t all that dependable in the middle of a phasing.

  “Get it,” Namid said, his voice like white water on the Colorado.

  I retrieved the knife from my jacket pocket, pulled it from the evidence bag, and held it out to him.

  “What do you see?” he asked, making no effort to take it from me.

  I glanced at it, lifted it closer to my eyes. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Tell me what you see.”

  I wasn’t even sure how to describe it. A faint glimmer of yellow light danced along the edge of the blade, like fire. It was brightest at the broken end, but it radiated all the way up the hilt. How had I not seen this before? How had Kona missed it?

  “It’s glowing,” I said at last.

  “What color?”

  “Yellow.”

  “That is magic, or to be more precise, the residue of magic.”

  “What?”

  “Yellow is not a strong color. Had the conjuring been done by a more accomplished runecrafter, the color would be red or green, perhaps even blue. And it would have vanished long ago. Someone with true craft can mask his conjuring. You are searching for a crafter with the most rudimentary skills.”

  “You’re making it do that. What am I saying? I’m making it do that. I’m imagining all of this.”

  “No. You see it because you are a weremyste. Your magic allows you to see what is left of spells conjured by others. It is part of your gift.”

  “Then why haven’t I ever seen this before?”

  “Because you did not know to look for it. And I was not there to show you. You will never fail to see it again.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a sorcerer.”

  “Not yet. But you have power. If you did not, you would not see anything more than a broken knife.”

  Despite what Namid had shown me, I was slow to believe he was anything more or less than a product of my own psychotic imagination. I’d seen my dad lose his mind, the process slow and painful, and I had known for years that this was my fate, too. I knew my dad was a weremyste, and that I was as well, but I had never given much thought to what that might mean. I certainly hadn’t ever believed that much good would come of whatever powers I possessed. Magic had been the source of too much pain in my life for me to see it in any other way.

  After some time that first night, Namid left me, no doubt fed up with my stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he was real. But he appeared again the next morning and we resumed our argument. At first, I took his return as evidence that my descent into permanent insanity had already begun. But Namid was persistent to the point of relentlessness, and with time I came to believe that he was real and that all he’d been telling me about magic and my own gifts was true.

  Even more, everything he said about the warehouse robbery turned out to be dead-on accurate. The knife hadn’t been broken jimmying anything; it had been part of a talisman—a small statue of a Maori god—that the warehouse manager kept on his desk. Namid told me as much, and I confirmed it when I examined the idol more closely and found the rest of the blade imbedded in the stone base on which the figure stood. Namid also told me where we could find the man responsible for the break-in. Within a week, Kona and I had arrested Orestes Quinley, a small-time thief and weremyste, who’d stolen a bunch of stereos and TVs to cover the theft of that talisman. Turns out there are more weremystes in the Phoenix metropolitan area than one might think. They’re not in the yellow pages, of course. Finding them can be tricky. You have to rely on word of mouth and, since most weremystes use blockers, and since those who don’t aren’t eager to be found, it becomes a matter of finding the right mouth, as it were. But there is a network of sorts, one that I’ve tapped into in recent years. Early on, though, I had to take a lot on faith. So did Kona. She was pretty skeptical about all of it, although Orestes’ confession helped.

  As I came to spend more time with Namid I began to sense an ulterior motive of a sort in the lessons he gave me. He himself had told me that he worked with my dad, and though he never admitted as much, I was convinced that he held himself responsible for my father’s premature descent into insanity. I believe Namid felt that he had failed one Fearsson. He wasn’t about to fail another. That was why he worked me so hard and so often. He wanted me to hone my power. From what I understood, as a runecrafter grew more proficient, he also developed some resistance to the long-term effects of the phasings.

  But on this night outside my office, with the phasing still a few days off, and Claudia Deegan’s murder on my mind, I was more concerned with what Namid had said to me in the car. In the years since he appeared to me that first night and kept me from killing myself, I had never known Namid to be wrong about anything. Until tonight I’d never heard him express even the slightest uncertainty. I do not know * * * It was like being a kid again and finding out my father wasn’t stronger and smarter than every other man on the planet.

  For the first time I’d bumped up against Namid’s limitations, and I found it unnerving. I think he did, too. Along with his certainty on all matters relating to magic, Namid had also been fearless. He was a runemyste. He’d been chosen by the Runeclave because even in life his mastery of the craft had been exceptional. As a member of his council, his powers were beyond anything I could imagine, although as I understood it, he and the other runemystes were forbidden to use their magic directly on our world. Still, I couldn’t imagine there was much that Namid feared. There could be no denying, though, that he had been scared tonight, or as close to scared as a runemyste could get.

  Mercifully, Namid didn’t stay with me long. The last thing I needed was a thousand-year-old ghost commenting on my driving. But long after he left me, I continued to think about our conversation.

  I got home and cleaned my knee, first with water and soap, and then with hydrogen peroxide, which was no picnic. Usually these things look better once you wipe away the dried blood, but this one looked like hell even after I’d cleaned it up. I wished I had hit Robby harder.

  Then I did something stupid. I went online, found Billie Castle’s blog, and read her piece about the murder of Claudia Deegan. Most of what she wrote focused on the Deegans and the history of the Blind Angel killings, but she got me in there near the end.

  “Sources close to the probe indicate that Justis Fearsson, a private investigator and former Phoenix Police Department homicide detective, has been brought in to work on the case. Fearsson, who worked on the Blind Angel murder investigation before being forced to leave the department for undisclosed disciplinary violations, has denied having any connection to the Deegans, and refused to speculate as to why the case had not yet been solved. Others with connections to the PPD were less reticent.”

  I wasn’t mentioned again in the story, but my name was hyperlinked. Clicking on it, I was directed to another page that had some basic information about me—my service record, my office address and phone number, and a poor reproduction of the picture from the phone book. Considering the way my conversation with Billie had ended, I’d gotten off easy. But I had a feeling I’d be appearing in future ar
ticles at ‘Castle’s Village.’

  I was tired and thought about turning in early. But my mind was churning. For the past few months, I’d managed to put the Blind Angel case out of my head. But with all that had happened today, it was front and center again, and I knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily.

  Instead, I put on a pair of jeans that wasn’t torn and stained with blood, grabbed my bomber jacket, and left the house.

  When I lost my badge, I also lost access to many of the sources a cop uses for information. But there was a whole other network in the city that had nothing to do with the PPD and everything to do with magic. Parts of that network were in neighborhoods that even I didn’t like to visit at night; others were only available after dark. One of these was a place called, appropriately enough, New Moon.

  The Moon was a small dive in Gilbert, not too far from my home in Chandler. It was open most nights, except when the moon was full, and it catered to weremystes and people who liked to pretend that they had magical abilities, or who just enjoyed hanging out with those of us who really did. Not much happened there. It wasn’t like weremystes got together to plot a magical takeover of the world, or something like that. But at times there was something to be said for being able to talk about magic and the phasings with people who understood from their own experience, and who didn’t shy away from me like I was already nuts. We tolerated the wannabes and groupies because they listened and they didn’t judge us, and because they tended to buy rounds for everyone as a way of compensating for their lack of actual magical ability.

  The bar was also where I went when I needed information about what was happening in the streets: new weremystes in town, rivalries among sorcerers, unexplained magical attacks, that sort of thing. My visits to the New Moon hadn’t turned up anything about the Blind Angel killer back when I was on the force, and I didn’t expect this visit to be any different. But it was a place to start.