Lucy and I drove down the few blocks, her carefully holding the thermos like it was about to explode, me keeping my eyes scanning the road left and right in case one of the little weirdos went stray, and could lead us to exactly where the pack was.
“So, are we going to splash this on them like holy water?” Lucy said, tapping the top of the thermos.
I shook my head. “And what, give them second degree burns and end up in jail for assaulting minors? Hmm… though if you got the rap for it they wouldn’t send you away for too long, since you’re a minor yourself… but no, kid. It’s witch stuff, not that heavy handed slaying stuff that makes people act all mean.”
“I don’t think Sibyl’s mean,” Lucy said, very sure of herself.
“I’m almost certain just two weeks ago, when we were forced to practice grinding herbs in the back shed because Sibyl wouldn’t let us anywhere near the house with them, your exact quote, Lucy Auclair, was ‘why does Sibyl have to be so mean? All the time, she’s telling us what to do and getting in the way. Mean, mean, mean.’”
“Well, that was then. I have evolved,” Lucy said, placing such an emphasis on the word ‘evolved’ and sounding so cutely pompous that I couldn’t help but laugh at her. That kept her in a quiet huff for the few minutes it took to get us to the Royal area and see if my hunch was correct.
And her silence was perfect, because I needed to lecture her on the niceties of proper witching.
“Listen, kid, witches get a bad reputation because people think we’re always acting against other folks: blighting crops and poisoning wells. And we can, but that stuff’s not only evil, it goes against the real nature of witching that your Grand-Mere and I hold so dear. Take this tea, for instance.”
“I’d rather not,” Lucy interjected, a little self-pityingly.
“It’s not made up of tortured animal parts and dug up bodies and nasty stuff like that. It’s tea leaves, it’s some oil, it’s a little incantation and burnt paper, and it’ll work like a chest rub. These guys will just have to breath it in, and—”
“Holy crap,” Lucy said.
“And that’s another thing. Your language is getting a little— Holy crap!” I shrieked, slamming on the brakes.
My car screeched to a halt, lightly tapping the black-haired, dark clothed man who stood in the middle of the street, holding a couple of six-shooters out like a goth gunslinger, and pointing them right at us.
Behind him, milling dangerously in the middle of the road, with various weapons of various degrees of deadliness, were about a dozen clones - the three we’d seen before in the middle of the pack, others of various shapes, sizes, sexes and colors, all dressed almost identically.
Lucy gulped, and tugged on my shirt, bringing her mouth near my ear.
“I think they were sharing cookies.”
I was about to say something smart-mouthed, but shut up as I heard, loud as a tolling bell, the sound of the hammers on those guns go click.
Chapter 22
Lucy grabbed me and made a terrified wailing sound. I squeezed my eyes shut… until the picture of what I’d just seen came completely to mind, and I opened them again wide, with a growl growing in my throat. I pulled myself from my sister’s desperate grasp, popped open the door, and began to yell at the idiot pointing guns at us.
“Some nights, you listen to reason. Some nights, you just gotta shoot,” he said back, in the worst fake Clint Eastwood yet, and he pointed the guns at me and pulled both triggers. The cap of the right one went pop. On the left, it didn’t even fizzle.
“First, idiot, it’s dangerous to paint over the orange tab at the end of a pop gun,” I said, glowering and shaking my head. “Second… Lucy, thermos.”
Lucy, not quite sure what was going on, crawled out from the car and handed me over the thermos while still looking at the man, who had reared up to his full height and unloaded both barrels at us in the interim. I opened the thermos, and jammed the front into his face, splashing out some of the piping hot liquid right into the scarf that covered his mouth.
“Agh! Poison!” he shouted and backed up, falling on his butt. He waved his hands wildly, then slowed down, and started looking left and right, like he had just woken up.
By this time a couple of cars had piled up behind me and were starting to honk, drivers shouting out of their windows. Little did they know I had just saved them from having to directly confront abject stupidity. Now they had to yell at me like I was the dummy blocking everybody up with my magic-cookie induced insanity.
I waved them around, dipped into my car to turn on my emergency flashers, then headed into the middle of the scrum. It wasn’t much of a scrum, because though everyone in earshot was talking in their toughest, scraggliest voices, most of them were preteens, half of them were girls, and all of them were awkward nerds more likely to hurt themselves if they threw a punch than anyone who got in the way of their fist.
Lang’s Tasties did, indeed, seem to be the goal destination for these wannabes weirdos, but the Lang folks weren’t having any of it. I could see three employees in their handsome green shirts and black aprons, looking out through the windows. There were a few patrons, and they looked like they had been through the war. All of them were practically pressed against the windows, watching the convention of darkly dressed oddballs spout slogans at each other.
I saw Carol Lang, with whom I was vaguely acquainted, standing behind the counter, on the phone, presumably describing the scene to policemen. I had a vision of Officer Mustache coming onto this group of silly, slightly deranged cookie-cultists, and bringing out the billy club.
“Lucy, round them up,” I said.
“How?” she said, with a voice that sounded somewhere between fascination, laughing fits and some kind of low terror.
“You watch that stupid show, I don’t, so—”
“Whoa, whoa! First of all, this show is not stupid. It’s got layers and resonances and references to myth and OMG I figured it out,” she said, suddenly grinning from ear to ear.
There was a set of tables in front of Lang’s, the kind that were cemented in and that the local restaurants shared access to. There would normally be kids sitting at them, sucking down drinks and making fun of anybody not in their clique, but I guess the dozen fake vampire slayers of various ages freaked out even the freaky teens, because the area had been abandoned.
Lucy jumped on top of one of these tables, raised up her arms, and proclaimed in a deep voice I would never of guessed her capable of producing: “Lo, mighty hunters! Slayers of the night! The Angel Sariel comes to command you the with words from on high!”
There had been a general cacophony of different bad, low grouchy voices proclaiming low, grouchy things at each other through the entire block. All at once, it stopped, and the Slate the Nightwalkers, all dozen of them (except for the one I’d dosed, who was walking around like he’d had a massive head injury) stared up at her.
“You don’t look like Sariel,” one of them said, an Asian girl with enormous glasses to distinguish her from the other Slates (besides also being barely halfway past four feet tall).
That was Michi Saito, who Lucy had brought around to the house more than once. If she recognized Lucy, and didn’t by her ruse, this could get ugly quick. But Lucy was thinking quickly.
“Your eyes deceive you,” Lucy said, very loftily. “For do you not see a dozen versions of yourself, every which way you turn?”
An uncomfortable murmur, scratchy voiced and ridiculous, grew up from the throng. I stepped to Lucy, trying to look as invisible as possible, and handed her the thermos.
“I have a cure, a balm. Simply breathe it in, and all will become clear.”
She jumped down from the table, an aggressive move that brought out a bunch of different improvised stakes - there were baseballs bats, table legs, very long dowels. Michi Saito had a violin bow in her hand, ready to pound into some nefarious beast of the night’s heart. She was the first that Lucy approached, opening the thermos s
lowly, very dramatically.
The girl looked at her, looked at the thermos, breathed it in, then coughed. She blinked, looked around herself, and suddenly became very confused.
“Oh gosh,” she said, in a much tinier, much more natural voice than she’d used before. “I’m surrounded by weirdos.”
“Come here, sweetie,” I said, moving slowly through the surly, on-looking crowd. It was like the end of that old movie, with all the birds. Y’know, The Birds? Where the characters at the end were walking through a crowd of scary looking birds, not doing anything. Just standing silently. I grabbed the girl’s wrist, very gently, and inclined my head to the side, away from the crowd. She moved in a very dazed way.
It must have been tough, waking up from this kind of mental confusion. I wondered if it was like waking up from a dream, where you saw yourself doing these odd things, dressing this odd way, but having no control over it? Or was it worse, like being brainwashed into acting ways that felt normal at the moment they happened, and then having this kind of zombie self in your head, who knew why you acted like you did, but couldn’t explain it?
“Why are they all here? What are they doing?” Michi said, sounding genuinely frightened.
“Look at your clothes,” I said, trying to talk to her like you would an elderly person in a home whom you thought might potentially hurt himself.
“What?” she said, then she looked down. Her eyes became like giant saucers behind her amplifying glasses. She looked at herself, looked around, and just started shaking her head.
By the time I had gotten her to a safe distance from the square, Lucy had spread the cure to about half the fake Slates. With a little bit of corralling, I got them to stand in front of the defunct, empty arcade, where they could stare at each other in various stages of bewilderment, no one really saying anything but confused half-sentences.
I was gentle and kind and very peremptory… until Lucy got to one of the originals. It was the guy who had sat inside our shop, waiting for his delivery of cookies. So far as I knew, he was one of the original customers. The ur-crazy.
He was also the one that I had seen, distorted and weird through a bird’s eyes but still very plainly, walking out of the hotel room with the delivery boy. He’d been there at the spot. If the hunch I was working on was right, and that all of this was more deeply connected to the problems than it first appeared, he might have known, or seen, something.
Lucy touched him on his forehead, said something in what sounded like pidgin Latin, and then put the tea up to his lips. It had cooled down enough that it wasn’t like throwing scalding water on anybody, and this man had been a deep consumer of her cookies. It probably needed more than just a whiff of the spell to break him out of his trance.
I caught him as he began to stumble, gave Lucy a look that I hoped she read as “Take care of the rest of this yourself, I’m busy” and guided him to a table. The first few steps he leaned on me like a wounded man. Then, quickly, he found his own feet and was hurrying to the table, and inadvertently pulling me along.
I sat next to him, and tried to read what he was going through, inside, by the expression he wore. For a long while, it was blank, as if he were sleepwalking. Then he began to blink, like someone was blowing a fan right in his face, and he seemed to be seeing more of what was around him, as if with each blink another layer of fog burnt away and revealed a few more feet of sight around him. He looked at me a couple of times, but I don’t think he really saw me until about a solid minute had passed.
He stopped the slow turning of his head, the long gathering of his wits, and focused on my face. One hand went up to his mouth and he grabbed at nothing at all there. His eyes unfocused a bit, like he was trying to remember something, really hard.
He muttered, “When did I shave my beard?”
His voice had nothing in common with the gravelly put-on that he and every other black-dyed weirdo in the shopping center had put on. It was a little higher, a lot more natural, and had none of the jack-sure movie star confidence the scratchy voice enjoyed. He just sounded like a kid (one on either side of 20 years old) who didn’t know what he was doing there, or why.
“You’re confused right now, right?” I said.
“Uh, if I was confused, would I know if I was confused, or would the confusion be part of the—”
“Okay,” I said, raising up my hand. “You’re bright, and you’re confused. Just take my word for it. I need to ask you some questions, and I think I don’t have much time.” He looked at me, eyes going up and down my face like he was trying to place it. “Tea shop.”
“Oh, right, where I get the coo…” He closed his eyes like a bright light had just been shone, painfully, in them, and squeezed hard.
“Yes, the cookies. The cookies made you feel a weird way, and dress up and things like that. It was like mass hypnosis,” I said, hoping very hard that in his current state, he wouldn’t remember everything I was saying and file it away for the eventual lawsuit.
“Look at all these people,” he said. “They’re all dressed like that guy from that stupid TV show. Have you ever seen it? It’s like something exploded at the fairy tale factory. The third season was all about Norse gods for some reason. It’s all totally random, nothing coherent. I’ve blogged about it.”
“If you don’t like it, why did you watch the third season?”
“Hate-watching,” he said, sounding a little more lucid. Then he looked down at himself, and made a groaning sound.
“Quick, before you…” I avoided saying, get sane again. “Before it goes away. Two days ago, you were outside a hotel, with a delivery boy. Right? Do you remember?”
“Lady, I don’t know if… wait.” His eyes looked skyward, like he was searching his brain’s memory banks for this piece of information. He blinked a few times, keeping his pupils pointing up, in what was a very odd, vivid gesture.
“I was heading home from somewhere… I had eaten some cookies, and was feeling so weird. Dark, mysterious, and then I saw a man walking down the street, holding on to a package. And something told me I needed to follow him. I needed to see what he had, where he went.”
He stopped, and looked at me. There was a kind of pleading in his expression that was a little heartbreaking. I can’t imagine just waking up one day, like you’d been asleep for weeks, and then remembering things that you’d done, even when it wasn’t you. But I also needed to know, so I had to push.
“Okay, this is weird. I’m a specialist in weird things. Me and my associate figured out how to fix this mass hysteria, and now we’re going to go further and figure out what caused it, but we need complete information. Why did you chase this guy?” I said.
“Not chase, just followed. Like I’d done it a hundred times before, you know, when I’m stalking the creatures of the… do you have any idea how stupid this sounds?”
“I am intimately aware. Please continue.”
“Well, it was like a voice told me. A voice said, that guy’s important, probably bad. Go see what he’s up to. And then I did it. I followed him to his hotel, I figured out which room it was and when someone came to the door, I took my chance to walk by and look inside. He was there, getting a pizza delivered. There was a girl in the room with him, and she was opening the package. Total luck, I guess, that I walked by right at that time. She took out the book, a bunch of envelopes, and then saw he’d opened the door and ducked into a back room. I guess she was his—”
“Don’t speculate,” I said, a little too quickly. I didn’t want anybody, even just a bit of a brain case coming down from a cookie high, to start saying things about my sister I didn’t want to hear. “Just tell me the facts. There… wait, a book and some envelopes?”
He nodded. “And then I walked out with the delivery boy.”
“You didn’t see him before you got there? You didn’t… The voice didn’t tell you to do anything to the pizza?”
“What?” he said, his face screwing up in confusion. “Why?”
“Never mind,” I said, tossed again on the confusing storm that was the sea of information. At least some poor innocent cookie dupe wasn’t brought into this web of weirdness to commit murder by demon suggesting voices brought on by my sister visiting the neighbor of a monster-infested house.
That was a sentence no sane person should have to think. Really, all I want to do is sell tea. Not fight demons, not solve murders, not distrust handsome strangers with interesting magic.
And I definitely did not want to have to do the very thing I had to do next: find out why the sister with whom I had just come to a new understanding was lying to me, again.
Chapter 23
My earnest conviction to go give Sibyl a brand new talking to (what fun I have) was held up by two things: first, I saw Lucy standing in front of the inoculated group of former weirdos, passing out more tea and looking like she was preparing a stemwinder of an apology.
The next was the very unfortunate, very inopportune appearance of a newspaperman with a camera in one hand, a camera phone in the other, and the obvious intent to film my sister in the middle of her confused throng. If Lucy was going to be doing what I thought she was going to be doing, then this would just be the very ice-berg tippy-top of a bunch of problems we did not need right now. Or ever.
And though we were friends, Max Ransom believed in doing his job. He believed in telling the people who live in Lafay just what’s going on in their sleepy little burg. If it involves a bunch of strange people apparently trying to break down the doors of a bakery to get to the sweet, sweet cookies inside? Great. That they were ensocrceled into doing it and the magic user who did it happens to apologize right when he’s filming her? All the better.
Our friendship only stretched so far.
My first stop was to Lucy, right as she threw her head back and said, in a voice that was trying to be all loud and authoritative and barely made it to squeaky: “Guys, just listen to me. I’ve got something real important to talk to you about.”
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 18