Strange Magic

by Justin Gustainis

  “Sure it does. A virgin sacrifice just won’t do it,” Ashley said.

  “I thought virgin sacrifices were the norm,” Peters said. “I mean, for people who were into that sort of thing.”

  “For pleasing a god, sure. It’s a way of saying, ‘Nobody else has fucked her, Lord—we saved her just for you.’ The sacrifice, whether human or animal has got to be a ‘pure victim.’ The ancient Hebrews knew that—the goats they sacrificed to their version of the Big Guy had to be the best of their flock, without blemish or defect. But none of that’s any good for invoking the powers of Hell.”

  “Everything’s got to be opposite, you mean,” Libby said. “Like in the Black Mass.”

  “Exactly, sweetie. Of course, if your kidnap victim, Carol, um—”

  “Kayla,” Libby said. “Kayla Holloway.”

  “If Kayla was a virgin, that’s easy enough to take care of before the sacrifice. But they’d have done better to just grab a streetwalker. The virginity issue is pretty much moot, abduction would be easier, and her pimp wouldn’t be likely to hire someone as skilled as you to find her, Libby.”

  The matter-of-fact way she’d spoken sent a shudder down Libby’s spine. Because Ashley looked like a human—and such a beautiful one, at that—it was easy to fall into the error of assuming that she was human. Libby had the tendency to do that, herself. But every once in a while, Ashley would do or say something to remind her of what she really was.

  And a good thing, too. Otherwise I might one day make the catastrophic mistake of falling in love with her.

  “Okay, so these guys were inept sorcerers,” Peters said. “I understand that. What I don’t get is why the last guy stuck the gun in his mouth, or why he said what he did just before doing it.”

  “That stuff about fucking America?” Ashley said. “What was it, exactly?”

  “He asked Peters and me if we were Americans,” Libby said. “When we said yes, he told us, ‘Then you’ve just fucked your country up the ass.’ Or something like that.”

  “Interesting turn of phrase,” Ashley said. “It conjures up the image of Lady Liberty, skirts pushed up over her hips, bent over a bed while some guy spreads her ass cheeks apart and—”

  Even Peters seemed embarrassed by this turn in the conversation. “All right, Ashley, we get the idea. Give it a rest, will you?”

  “Colorful phrasing aside,” Libby said, “what does it mean?”

  “It sounded like something you’d get from a spook,” Peters said. “One of those goons from Homeland Security, or some other hush-hush agency.”

  Ashley gave him a raised eyebrow. “Like the CIA, you mean?”

  “The Central Intelligence Agency does not, and, by charter, cannot, conduct operations within the confines of the United States.” Peters delivered this little speech with a straight face, but couldn’t suppress a grin once he’d finished. “I thought everybody knew that.”

  “In other words, those may have been CIA guys in that apartment,” Libby said.

  “Sure,” Peters said. “It doesn’t sound like CIA’s kind of thing, but I’ve been away so long that I’m no longer sure just what their kind of thing is, anymore.”

  “Is conjuring demons any government agency’s thing?” Ashley said.

  “Didn’t use to be, far as I know,” Peters said. “But, like I said, I’ve been away.”

  “All right, let’s put that question aside for a moment,” Libby said, “and look at another one. Corny dialogue aside, why did the bald man kill himself?”

  “We’re assuming he was a government agent, yes?” Ashley said.

  Libby nodded.

  “So, under what circumstances would one of those guys take his life?” She turned to Peters. “That puts the ball back in your court, sweetie.”

  “The short answer is,” Peters said, “to avoid being captured and tortured for information. That’s why some spooks carry cyanide pills. Hell, I used to pack one, myself.”

  “Because you were afraid that you’d talk if things got rough?” Libby asked.

  “Not necessarily. Thing is—you’re in for a real bad time, whether you ultimately talk or not. And if you break early, they’ll probably assume you’re lying and keep working on you, anyway. Either way, all you can expect is a lot of agony, followed by a bullet to the head when they’re done—if you’re lucky.”

  “Were you ever tortured?” Libby asked him.

  Peters shook his head. “No, fortunately—unless you count those times when Ashley was in in one of her S&M moods.”

  This earned him a stinging slap on the upper thigh that made even Libby wince. All Peters did was grin. “Not now, honey—we have company.”

  Libby absently scratched her chin, something she only did when thinking hard. “Maybe we’ve been going at this all wrong,” she said. “Let’s try and see it from the bald man’s perspective. At the moment he killed himself, what did he know about us?”

  “Not a hell of a lot,” Peters said. “I’d never met him before, and there’s no way he could have been briefed about us—hell, even we didn’t know we were going to that apartment until about an hour before we got there.”

  “That’s what he didn’t know,” Libby said. “Let’s try to focus on the information he did have. What did he learn about us from the moment we walked in the door?”

  “I think I see where you’re going with this,” Ashley said. “Okay, for starters, he’s just watched three of his associates get mowed down in quick succession. So he knows Peters has a gun and knows how to use it, and he probably has bullets left. That’s one fact.”

  “Right,” Libby said. “And a second one is that he knows I’m a witch.”

  Ashley frowned. “He does?”

  “Sure, he does. He sees me raise my wand, right? I had a spell prepared, and I was going to freeze all four of them in place, which would have avoided the need for any violence. But I never get a chance to cast it, because as soon as I raise the wand, the bald guy takes the knife he’s been holding and throws it at me. Why would he do that, unless he’d recognized the wand for what it was? Peters was holding a gun, for crying out loud. He was the logical target.”

  “Could be the guy thought you were holding some kind of a weapon of your own,” Peters said. “A mundane weapon, I mean.”

  “I doubt it,” Ashley said. “In physical terms, a magic wand is no more than a sharp stick. The closest thing it resembles in the everyday world is the baton used to conduct an orchestra. I can’t see how baldy would mistake it for something dangerous—he sounds like a guy who might know something about weapons.”

  “And don’t forget what happened afterward,” Peters said. “The bald guy’s got a gun out, and the two of us are in a Mexican standoff. Libby’s hand is hurt, but she says something about, “I’ll go get my wand.’”

  “That’s right,” Libby said. I remember now. And as soon as I say that—”

  “Baldy starts to swing his gun in your direction, even though I’m pointing the Kimber right at his face.”

  “So he recognized the threat,” Ashley said. “He knew what he was dealing with.”

  “And even if he didn’t, I made it clear a second later. I told him, ‘You blast her, and I’ll blast you,’” Peters said. “Then I told Libby—”

  “You said, ‘Go get your wand. We could use a little magic around here.’ Or something like that.”

  “And that’s when baldy gives us that ‘fucking your country up the ass’ stuff,” Peters said. “Then he sticks the gun in his mouth. Bam! End of story.”

  “Interesting,” Ashley aid. “He took his own life rather than face your magic, Libby. Do you suppose he knew you were a white witch?”

  Libby thought about that. “No way to know. I mean, white and black practitioners use different kinds of wands, but you’d have to be an expert to tell the difference just by looking.”

  “He and his buddies were messing around with black magic,” Peters said. “Maybe he was an expert.”

>   “I doubt it,” Ashley said. “An expert in the dark arts would know how to conduct a proper demon summoning. From what those photos show, this was more like the gang that couldn’t cast straight. But, let’s say he thought you were a black witch, Libby. What would he expect to happen?”

  “You’d know more about that side of things than I would, Ashley.” Libby shrugged. “But I suppose I could have committed any number of atrocities on him, depending on how much preparation I’d done. Struck him blind, set him on fire, blast him through the nearest wall. All kinds of nasty stuff.”

  “All kinds, indeed,” Ashley said. “Including interrogation, since black magic allows one to inflict all kinds of pain.”

  “Obviously,” Libby said.

  “But since you’re a white witch, what would you really have done, once you got hold of your wand? Would your damaged right hand have been a hindrance?”

  “Not really. We’re trained against just such a possibility, so I can cast spells holding the wand in either hand.”

  “All right, then. So you pick up your wand with your left hand. Than what?”

  “First thing I’d do is get baldy’s gun away from him. Next, I would have frozen him in place—although, come to think of it, that wouldn’t be necessary, would it? Peters already had him covered.”

  “Keep in mind, we didn’t have a lot of time to hang around,” Peters said. “Like I told you at the time, the cops were probably on their way by then.”

  “In that case, I’d have probably put a Compliance spell on him, to make him obey me. Then I suppose we could have walked him out of there, right along with Kayla. Once we had him alone someplace, I’d add a Truth-telling spell, just in case the Compliance spell wasn’t enough to get him talking. Then I’d start asking questions.”

  “Like what?” Ashley said, but not as if she were actually curious. Libby assumed she was trying to make some kind of a point. She wished Ashley would hurry up and get to it.

  “I’d want to know who he was, who—if anybody—he was working for, why he was trying to summon a demon, and what all that ‘fuck your country up the ass’ stuff was supposed to mean.”

  “So, whether you were a white witch or a black one, the bald man could have found himself under interrogation which he would be powerless to resist, yes?”

  “I hate it when you get all didactic, Ashley. But—yes, he could have been successfully interrogated, either way.”

  “Do you suppose that idea might possibly have occurred to him?”

  There was a long silence in the room before Libby said, “You mean... he killed himself rather than be interrogated—because he was determined not to reveal what he knew?”

  “It seems the most reasonable conclusion, don’t you think?”

  “Quod erat demonstrandum,” Libby said.

  Ashley smiled at her. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  LIBBY CHASTAIN POURED Quincey Morris a cup of coffee, put the pot down, and resumed her seat across from him on the couch.

  “Weaponizing demons, may the Goddess help us,” she said, and shook her head. “I wish I could say I’m surprised.”

  I know,” Morris told her. “Somebody once said that desperate times call for desperate measures, and quite a few people in Washington are feeling pretty damn desperate these days. From what I see on the news, I guess I don’t blame them.”

  “‘Desperate’ and ‘insane’ are two different things,” Libby said. “At least, they should be.”

  “Maybe insanity is desperation carried out by other means, to paraphrase von Clausewitz.”

  “Wasn’t there some Senator who had the bright idea of infecting all the ISIS fighters with the Ebola virus? There was a story in Yahoo News a few weeks ago.”

  “I read the same one. I think it was a Congressman from Louisiana or Arkansas or someplace.”

  She gave him half a smile. “Or Texas?”

  “Oddly enough, no. I’d have recognized the name in that case. Which is not to say that my home state doesn’t have its share of loony politicos.”

  “Like the guy who compared gay marriage to the zombie apocalypse? He was one of yours, wasn’t he?”

  “Afraid so. A state rep from the Fort Worth area named Joe Bob Riggins. I was hoping that it would stay a local idiocy and contain the embarrassment, but then some guy in Dallas blogged about it, and the wire services picked the story up.”

  “Before an effective treatment was found, lots of these fundamentalists used to say that AIDS was God’s judgment on homosexuality. Remember?”

  “Oh, sure. You could hear that bullshit from the pulpits every Sunday—even in Austin.”

  “I wonder if it ever occurred to them to wonder why lesbians didn’t usually get AIDS, if God was punishing people for homosexuality. You’d think He would be an equal opportunity avenger.”

  “A couple of friends of mine and I were talking about that over drinks one night, years and years ago. After about the fourth round, or maybe it was the fifth, we thought we’d figured it out—the inconsistency, I mean.”

  “And what did you decide? Theologians around the world are waiting with bated breath to hear. Or not.”

  “Well, according to most of the major religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—God is portrayed as a male figure, right?”

  “Hinduism has goddesses, Quincey—not to mention Wicca.”

  “I know, that’s why I didn’t mention them. But for millions, maybe billions, of people, the deity is seen as masculine.”

  “Okay.” Libby shrugged. “So?”

  “So we figured out why lesbians don’t get AIDS—God’s a guy, so He likes to watch.”

  Libby covered her eyes with one hand and made a sound that resembled a chuckle combined with a groan. “Here have some more coffee,” she said. Pouring, she chuckled once again.

  “What?”

  “Just an image I had—an old guy with a big white beard, sitting atop a cloud in his Barcalounger, a stack of DVDs from Girlfriends Films piled next to his TV.”

  “Girlfriends Films?”

  “One of the few studios producing good quality lesbian porn.” Libby may have blushed a little as she said it.

  If Morris noticed the blush he made no mention, but he did say, “And you know about this how?”

  “I read a lot.”

  Libby stirred milk into her own coffee. After a few seconds, in a more serious tone she said, “Do you think that vampire—what was his name? Perez?”

  “Muñoz. Ignacio de la Muñoz. Or so he claimed.”

  “Do you think Muñoz was telling you the truth?”

  “I’ve been turning that over and over in my mind ever since I met him, and it always comes out the same—I can’t see what he has to gain from spinning me a yarn.”

  “To get you into trouble with the feds, somehow?”

  “Seems pretty damn complicated, if his goal was to fuck me up. Hell, he could’ve killed me himself, right then and there—or, if he wasn’t hungry, just stand back and let the ghouls do it for him.”

  Libby nodded slowly. “So, we’ll proceed on the assumption that this taming demons stuff is really going on.” Libby nodded slowly. “I wonder if what Muñoz told you has any connection to something Peters and I stumbled on to the other day?”

  Morris looked at her. “You... and Peters? Working together? When did this start?”

  She gave him a smile of mild exasperation. “Untwist your knickers, Quincey. You were on the other side of the country, right? And by the time I’d narrowed down the target location, I had a strong feeling that there wasn’t any time to waste. I was right, too.”

  Morris’s expression became rueful. “Consider my knickers untwisted. Sorry for the moment of... whatever it was. Now maybe you’d best tell me what went down.”

  “It started when I got a call from this couple whose daughter had gone missing...”

  Libby told him everything, stopping only to answer Morris’s occasional q
uestions. Finally, she said, “Then I brought Kayla home, and worked a little magical amnesia on all three of them. So, unless I missed something, there’s nothing to connect me with Kayla, nor is there anything to connect Peters or me to the four dead bodies in that Village apartment.”

  Morris was silent for perhaps ten seconds, eyes narrowed in concentration. “So Peters thinks the suicide of that last guy means he was a government agent, in effect taking the cyanide pill to avoid giving anything up under magical interrogation.”

  “That’s what he said. It makes a certain amount of sense, I think.”

  “Yeah, it does—but it’s not the only possible explanation. Could be the guy was some kind of religious fanatic, which might help explain the ritual that the four of them were attempting. And a lot of religious nuts have a death wish, whether conscious or not—it’s not restricted to members of Al Qaeda or ISIS.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Libby said. “I suppose it’s possible. Although I’m not aware of any modern religion that calls for demon-conjuring. There’s the so-called Church of Satan and its imitators, I guess, but I doubt that any of those people could conjure a demon on the best day they ever had. Every Satanist that I ever met was either a nihilist or looking to get laid, or both.”

  “You can’t say that about the bunch we encountered a couple of years ago, in Iowa.”

  “Idaho.”

  “Whatever,” Morris said. “Pardee and his cronies weren’t amateurs—far from it.”

  “No, but they weren’t religious fanatics, either. Pardee was a black wizard motivated by hubris and greed. His boss, the rich guy with cancer, uh...”

  “Grobius. Walter Grobius.”

  “Yeah. Grobius paid Pardee a pile of money to conjure up Satan so that Grobius, that moron, could bargain with him. And Pardee was arrogant enough to think that he could do it—call up the devil himself and keep him from laying waste to the entire fucking world once he got here.”

  “Maybe those guys in the apartment had something similar in mind.”

  “I dunno,” Morris said. “From what you’ve told me about their skills, or lack thereof, comparing one of those guys to Pardee is like putting a Little Leaguer in the same category as Roger Clemens.”