Spell Blind - eARC

by DAVID B. COE

  I took the phone back into my bedroom and dialed Kona’s number.

  Margarite answered and I went through enough of the niceties so that I wouldn’t sound rude when I asked for Kona. I love Margarite, but at that moment I didn’t feel much like chatting.

  “You survived,” Kona said when she picked up.

  “Barely.”

  “That bad, eh?”

  “As phasings go it was all right. But Red showed up. If it wasn’t for Namid I’d be dead.”

  “Damn, Justis! This guy has it in for you, doesn’t he?”

  “So it seems.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What I have to,” I said. “I’m leaving the house, going somewhere I know he’ll find me. And when he does, I’m going to do my best to kill him. Before I do that, though, I need my weapon.”

  Kona took a long time to answer, and when she did it was in a tone I knew all too well. “And what does Namid think of this idea?”

  “He thinks I’m throwing my life away for nothing.”

  “That sounds about right,” she said.

  “What should I do instead? He’s coming after me anyway, and Namid can’t protect me forever.”

  “I don’t know. Leave town. Get away from here.”

  “Is that what you’d do?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “This isn’t a guy you run away from,” I said. “He can find me anywhere I go. Distance and time don’t mean much to him. And besides, if I leave, he’ll kill again. Guaranteed.”

  “He will if you’re dead, too. And the rest of us won’t stand a chance of stopping him.”

  “I’m stronger right now than I’ll be any other time for the next four weeks. This is my best chance.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. It was amazing how much sarcasm she could pack into two syllables.

  “I’m coming over now. I need my Glock.”

  “What if I don’t give it to you?”

  “Then I’ll have less of a chance of killing him, won’t I?”

  “It doesn’t sound like you have a much of a chance now!”

  “Thanks for the pep talk. Between you and Namid I’m brimming with confidence.”

  “This a mistake, Justis. It’s suicide and I won’t—”

  “I’m coming over now,” I said, raising my voice, which I almost never did with Kona. “I’ll expect you to hand over my weapon when I get there!”

  I hung up before she could say more. For a minute or two I stood in the middle of my bedroom, staring at the phone, wondering if she would call back, and not certain whether or not I wanted her to. At last, I tossed it onto my bed, changed my clothes, and headed out into the living room.

  “Your friend tried to dissuade you,” Namid said from where he still sat on my floor.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She didn’t have any more luck than you did.”

  “The magic he used on you two nights ago is rudimentary for my kind, though quite effective. A simple shield warding will not work, nor will deflection or reflection. But if you can shield your heart, that might protect you.”

  I gazed back at him, not bothering to hide my surprise. “Are you trying to help me with this?”

  “Of course I am. As I have told you before, if you die it will put to waste all the time I have spent trying to teach you.”

  “I can use a shielding spell against that magic?”

  “Yes, if you shield only your heart. Warding your entire body will weaken the magic too much, but if you focus the warding entirely on your heart it might work.”

  “I’ve never done that before. I’ve never even tried it.”

  The runemyste shrugged. “You may have to, if you insist on facing him.”

  I took a long breath. Maybe I was crazy to try this. “All right. Anything else?”

  Namid started to say something, then stopped, his bright gaze snapping toward the front door of my house.

  “What?” I said, fear gripping my heart. “Is he here again?”

  “No,” he said. “The woman is.”

  “The woman?”

  He glared up at me. “Your friend. The distraction.”

  Billie.

  “Damn,” I whispered. I went to the door and pulled it open.

  Billie stood on the path leading up to my house, staring at the burn marks and the squares of cardboard that covered the empty panes of my living room window. She glanced my way as I stepped outside and joined her there, but she didn’t say a word. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was thinking.

  “Like what I’ve done with the place?” I asked. Kind of lame, I know.

  She didn’t deign to respond.

  “I’ve been pretty tolerant so far,” she said instead. “All the talk about magic, that scene in the bar, your night in jail. You know, Fearsson, I’ve never been with anyone who was arrested.” She turned to me. Her face was pale, her eyes hard. “I’ve been thinking about all the other things that make me like you so much,” she said. “The desert. The way you are with your dad. The fact that, when the rest of this crap goes away, you’re a lot of fun to be with. You make me think about * * * about everything, in ways I never have before. And I’ve been getting through this week by thinking that once this case is over, and your life gets back to normal, it’ll all be great.” She looked at the door again and shook her head. “But there’s no such thing as normal with you, is there? It’s all like this.”

  “Billie—”

  “What the hell was with you on the phone last night?”

  And there it was. The Question. I doubt that she knew it, but she’d come to the very crux of it all: of me, of us, of any future we might have together.

  “Was it this?” she said, gesturing at the door. “Were you attacked again? Were you hurt? If so, tell me. I don’t know how much more I can deal with, but I know that I can’t even try if you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “Come inside with me,” I said, gesturing toward the door.

  “Not until you explain what happened last night.”

  I faced her and our eyes locked. “I will,” I said. “But not out here.”

  “Why? Are you in danger again?”

  Yes. So are you. I had a feeling that right then, those words would have sent her away for good. “I don’t want to have this conversation in front of my neighbors,” I told her instead, which was also true.

  She twisted her mouth, but when I walked back up into the house, she followed me. As I closed the door again, a small cloud of plaster fell to the floor, like a tiny flurry of snow. I hoped that she hadn’t noticed.

  Not that it would have mattered. Taking in the appearance of my living room, making myself see the damage from last night as Billie must have seen it, I felt my heart sink. I wouldn’t want any part of this life either.

  “Good God, Fearsson,” she muttered. “You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

  So many secrets. So many lies. I was on the verge of losing her, and I had no idea how to keep it from happening. The truth would drive her away, but I wasn’t at all certain that piling on more lies would do any different. And even if I had been, I didn’t want to build a relationship on deception and half-truths. So I began there, with the simple statement. You’re lucky you’re not dead.“To be honest, luck had very little to do with it.”

  She turned, perhaps hearing something in my voice. “What do you mean?”

  I wanted to sit on the couch, but it was covered with shards of glass and dust from the cracked plasterboard.

  “When I got home last night, I saw that the same sorcerer who tried to kill me in Robo’s had put a spell on my house. The magic’s hard to explain, but it was as if he’d rigged a magical bomb to the whole place. If I’d opened the door or tried to break in through a window, it would have blown up, taking me with it.”

  I could see the skepticism in her eyes. “So what did you do?”

  “I did this.” I closed my eyes and began to chant aloud. I knew I was scarin
g her, but with her there in the house, and the phasing underway, I was having trouble concentrating. And I couldn’t think of another way to make her believe me. The living room, where I was; the kitchen where I wanted to be; and me. I must have said it eight times before the spell worked. But at last, for the second time in as many days—the third if you count what I did to get Cahors out of my bedroom—I pulled off a transporting spell. One second I was standing in front of her in the living room, and the next I was in the kitchen behind her.

  “Fearsson?” she called as soon as I vanished, or at least appeared to. Her voice was high; she sounded terrified.

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  She spun and stared at me, her eyes so wide I almost laughed out loud.

  “How the hell did you do that?”

  “Magic,” I said, smiling.

  “I—” She stopped herself. But I knew what she had intended to say.

  “You don’t believe in magic.”

  She hesitated. “No, I don’t. I didn’t.” After a moment she frowned. “Can you do that again?”

  I walked to where she was standing. “Do I really need to?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “So you’re a * * *”

  “I’m a weremyste. Not a very good one. But I’m working on that.”

  “A weremyste,” she repeated. “You’re better than most of the ones I know.”

  I grinned. At least she could still joke. “I used a transporting spell to get from the living room to the kitchen. Last night I used it to get into the house, past the magic of the red sorcerer’s booby trap.”

  “The red sorcerer?”

  “Sorry. To those who can see it, magic shows up as a sort of colored light. Different sorcerers have different colors. The guy who’s been giving me such a hard time—his color’s red.”

  “All right.”

  “After I was inside—”

  “What color is your magic?”

  “Bluish green. Like the sea. Once I was inside, I set up a warding—a shield of sorts. Also magic. Then I managed to open the door to set off his conjuring. If I’d opened the door from outside, I’d have died. I guess Red didn’t know that I could do transporting spells.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Are you following any of this?”

  She shrugged. “More of it than you might think. Last night, after you dropped me off, I spent some time online, looking for information about magic. You’d be surprised at the number of sites there are for people who want to be sorcerers.”

  I started to respond, stopped myself. “So you already knew most of this stuff.”

  “Not really. As many sites as they were, they weren’t very helpful. They were vague and more New Age than nuts and bolts. None of them said anything about transporting spells or colors or any of that. You should start your own site; you’d get lots of hits.” A faint, thin smile drifted across her face, but I could tell that she was brooding on what I’d told her. “A few sites said that you had to be born a sorcerer; others said you could learn spells and train. Which is it?”

  “Both. You either have Runeclave blood in your veins or—”

  “Runeclave?” Before I could answer, she shook her head. “No. I don’t want to know right now. Just go on.”

  “Either you have it or you don’t. But then, you need to learn to use it.”

  “And you do this by * * * reading books? Talking to other weremystes? Going to Hogwarts while the rest of the world goes trick-or-treating?”

  “Mostly you’re taught by others.”

  “So you have a teacher.”

  Once again, like the night outside of Robo’s, I was reluctant to tell her about Namid and the other runemystes. That struck me as a bridge too far. “Yes, I have a teacher,” was all I said.

  She let it go. “How many of you are there? Weremystes, I mean.”

  “A lot. Far more than you’d think.”

  “Give me a number. In the Phoenix metropolitan area, are we talking twenty? Two hundred? Two thousand? More?”

  “Probably somewhere between two hundred and two thousand. Those are active weremystes; people who are using their magic. There are more out there—a lot of people have Runeclave blood in them but don’t use it. Others have it in them, but it’s so weak they’re not even aware of it.”

  “They’re not? How can—?” She stopped, staring at me. “Don’t you dare tell me that I—”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t see any magic in you.”

  “Thank God.”

  She eyed me for several moments. I could see her working it all through, processing everything I’d told her, and all that she had encountered on the net. She was smart as hell, and it wouldn’t be long until she caught up with the conversation. And then we’d be right back where we began, which was what I dreaded most.

  Sooner even than I’d anticipated, she said, “So when I called, you were still doing magic?”

  That was one way around it. Technically, the phasings are caused by magic—my magic—so I could have said that I was doing magic when she called. But again, I didn’t want to play games with the truth, not about this. I wasn’t even thinking about the relationship, or about our future. I was simply remembering that I’d gotten her in the house by promising to answer her questions. If I couldn’t do that much without misleading her, how the hell was I going to make anything else work? I also had a feeling that she was testing me; if she’d read about weremystes, she might well have read about the phasings, too. The strange thing was, I knew how the conversation would end, and still I chose to tell her the truth. I guess I was in love. Nothing else explains the choice I made in that moment.

  “No,” I said, “I wasn’t doing magic. Not really.”

  “Were you still with Kona?”

  “No. She’d left by then.”

  “Then what? Tell me.”

  “I was in the middle of a phasing.”

  Billie frowned. “I found that term last night, in several places, but the sites that mentioned it didn’t offer many details.”

  Not surprising, really. This was the secret every weremyste wanted to hide.

  “The word weremyste is pretty similar to the word werewolf,” I said. “And our magic works kind of the same way. I can do magic all month long, but when the moon waxes full, I lose control. All of us do. Our magic gets stronger, but our minds weaken.”

  It crashed over her like a wave. I saw it happen. The color in her cheeks, which had returned during our conversation, drained away again. She took a step back from me, frightened of what she saw. That one step hurt more than anything she could have said.

  “Weaken?” she repeated, a quaver in her voice. “What does that mean?” But she knew. I’d seen this coming. A part of me had watched the entire exchange unfold, anticipating every question, every twist and turn that steered us to this point. It was like I’d scried the whole thing. And still, even preparing myself, I hadn’t been able to keep my heart from being torn apart.

  “It means that I had * * * an episode.”

  “What does it mean?” she demanded again, biting off each word.

  I exhaled. “I was hallucinating. I couldn’t talk to you because I was too far gone in moon-induced delusions to carry on a conversation.”

  “The psychological problems you told me about,” she said. “The ones that cost you your job on the police force.”

  “Yes. They’re not really psychological problems so much as magical ones.”

  Billie turned and started toward the door. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. Maybe that makes me weak, or heartless, or something. But I can’t do it.”

  “Billie, wait,” I said, walking after her. “All weremystes have this. It’s why we hide the fact that we can do magic. It’s the price of the power I wield. I could take medication for it, but then the magic goes away, and I need to have access to it.”

  She was out the door and striding down the path toward her car, but she stopped now, tu
rning to face me again. “You said you had this under control. You said you were seeing someone. A therapist.”

  “I do get help,” I said, cringing at yet another lie, or at least the shadow of one. “Not from a psychologist, but from someone who teaches me magic and helps me through the full moons.”

  “That’s not the same, and you know it.” She started toward her car again. “You lied to me, Fearsson,” she said over her shoulder. “Or was that some kind of magical lie, so it doesn’t count?”

  “I told you that the problem never goes away, that I’d learned to control it, to live with it, and that’s the truth.”

  She had nearly reached her car, but she stopped once more and spun toward me. There were tears on her face, though she didn’t bother to wipe them away. She might not have known they were there. “You have problems. They cost you your job. And they’re still affecting you. You can call them anything you want. You can pretend that you’re facing them. But the truth is they haven’t gone away, and you haven’t learned to control them. That’s why you couldn’t talk to me last night.” She shook her head and started to turn back to her car.

  I stepped in front of her. “Billie, please. Let me try to explain this to you. If after I’m done, you still want to leave, then fine. I’ll never call you again.”

  “I can’t, Fearsson,” she said, crying now. “I just can’t. Let’s say I believe you. Let’s say I accept that the whole magic thing is something more than an excuse not to confront your problems. I still can’t live with it. I grew up with an alcoholic. His sickness was everywhere. I’d hear it at night when he was yelling at my mom, or hitting her again. I’d see it in the morning, when I had to clean up the empty glasses and bottles, because he was sleeping it off, and my mom was so scared of waking him that she couldn’t bring herself to move, much less take care of his mess. I’d smell it in the afternoon when I got home from school and found him slumped in front of the television with whiskey on his breath. It was all over and I nearly drowned in it.

  “Dad always denied he had a problem, and Mom let him. They spent their entire marriage living a lie, and they nearly dragged me down with them. I know that mental illness is treatable, and I know that people who have problems like yours can lead healthy, normal lives. But first they have to face their problems head on and get help. You won’t do that. You’re standing there in front of me telling me that it’s all right, and clearly it’s not.” She shook her head. “I can’t live that way. I’m sorry.”