by Ira Bloom
“We’re fine,” Veronica assured.
“Let’s take my car. I know where all the potholes are in our driveway.”
“Gimme the keys, Esme,” Veronica demanded. “I need to get something out of the Subaru.”
Esme was sorting through her purse for the keychain when they heard a loud engine roar up, and a squeal of brakes. A shiny black Dodge Ram backed up noisily, engine revving. Mud was artfully splattered on the lower half, as if it had been washed and waxed and then taken off-road into a mud puddle just long enough to prove the driver was a rough-and-tumble sort.
“That’s him!” yelled Logan Rehnquist, riding shotgun. The door flew open and Logan jumped out carrying a baseball bat. A second later, Danny Long opened the back door on the passenger side and followed. Jackson Gartner backed the truck up over the curb at an angle and parked it halfway across the sidewalk.
Zack dropped his elbows and pushed the girls behind him protectively. It was surprising, how strong he was. Veronica and Esme were just moved back like children.
“Hello, gents,” Zack said amiably. “Lovely day for a drive.”
“We’ve been looking for you all over,” Logan growled menacingly.
“And now you’ve found me,” Zack acknowledged.
“What did you do to Sandy?” Logan raged. “She was with you, and now she’s gone.”
Logan crowded Zack, chest to chest. Esme had seen Logan pick fights before, but this was different. This time he had a crazed look in his eyes. He had spittle in the corners of his mouth. Zack did not back down, though Logan had four inches and fifty pounds on him. He placed a hand on Logan’s chest and pushed him back. Logan’s body remained rigid, but his feet slid backward in the hard-packed dirt. Esme couldn’t work the physics of that. No matter how much force was applied, the smaller body should be the one to move backward. People don’t just go around breaking Newton’s Laws of Motion.
“You were the one sent the police ’round me house, weren’t you?” Zack accused. “The police were satisfied that I ’ad nothing to do with Sandy’s disappearance.”
“You did something, I know it,” Logan hissed, struggling against Zack’s palm. In his right hand Logan held the baseball bat, and he looked angry enough to use it.
“You better back off now, Logan, okay?” Veronica said. “I know, you’re upset about Sandy. We all are. Everybody liked Sandy, okay? But Zack doesn’t know anything about it. If he did, the police would have taken him in, don’t you think?”
“I saw her get into her car and follow him,” Logan accused.
“She did,” Zack replied calmly. “I saw her in the rearview mirror, and I sent her home. I already explained all this to the police. They found her car, in Miller’s Field.”
“He’s lying,” Jackson said.
“We can make you tell us the truth,” Danny snarled.
Esme tugged at Zack’s elbow. “They’re always starting fights, Zack. Let’s just go, okay?” It was like trying to push a statue with a feather duster. Zack was rigid.
“I’m not intimidated by you oafs,” Zack said calmly. “I don’t have to explain myself. So I suggest you all sod off. Or else.”
Boys. So pretty to look at, so impossible to reason with. “Zack, there are three of them.”
“And they’re much bigger,” Veronica added. She pulled at Zack’s other arm, to no effect.
Zack turned his back to the bullies. “You girls don’t think I can beat them, do you?”
“Zack, that’s not the point,” Esme said.
“Come on,” Veronica coaxed. “You don’t have to prove anything.”
Zack looked from Esme to Veronica and back. “Apparently, I do.” He turned back around to face Logan. “Name the time and place.”
“Right now,” Logan said decisively. “At the cove.”
“Do either of you know where this cove is?” Zack asked the girls.
Neither Veronica nor Esme would answer him. They tried to look away. It was tragic. He was so young, so beautiful. What would his face look like, after? Esme wondered.
“I’ll follow you in my car,” Zack suggested to Logan.
Veronica and Esme didn’t want to watch Zack get creamed, but they got in the car with him. There was nothing they could do to stop him. Esme tried to think of a spell or anything she could do. Veronica was working through playing the heroine, boldly stepping in at some point and putting herself physically between Logan and Zack, before things got out of hand. And then nursing her poor broken boy back to health with hugs and kisses.
The cove was on the east bank of the Susquahilla, about two miles north of town. The river bent in at the spot and a crescent-shaped beach of soft, dirty-blond sand provided a bathing spot in the summer. There was an ancient red oak tree bent out over the water with a rope swing for jumping off, and a clearing off the beach among the trees where people parked their cars away from the road. In the fall it was usually deserted in the daytime, though it was a frequent arrest spot in the evening, because police patrolled a service road on the opposite bank and watched for beach fires or the flash of blunts being lit. Stoners rarely thought these things through.
Logan still had his baseball bat in his hand as the three got out of Jackson’s truck. Danny pulled off his warm-up jacket, tossed it aside, and rolled his shoulders back and forth, the muscles rippling under his tank top. Jackson held back a bit and circled behind Zack.
“All three at once,” Zack commented. “I’d expect no more of a bunch of Yanks. Explains how we lost a war to you.”
“I’m going to beat the crap out of you,” Logan explained, “and then we’ll keep beating you until you tell us what happened to Sandy.”
“Lovely,” Zack replied. “Is the baseball bat necessary? Because if you try to use that on me, I promise to take it away from you and ream you a new orifice.”
Logan looked at the bat in his hand, then tossed it aside. “Maybe later, if my fists get tired.”
Zack turned back to Esme and Veronica. “I wish you two hadn’t insisted on coming. Please don’t judge me too harshly for what I’m about to do to these chaps. I grew up in a rough neighborhood, I don’t know how to play gentle.”
“Let’s do this,” Danny said.
Logan was bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet. He was too riled up to worry about proper martial arts form. And anyway, Zack was much smaller. Logan charged in, fist drawn back. Zack took a quick step forward at the last possible second and met Logan with force. With unnatural speed and agility, Zack dodged the descending fist and bashed Logan with an open palm squarely in the chest. Logan was lifted two feet off the ground and propelled backward at least three yards. There was a popping sound, like a string of small firecrackers going off in quick succession: all of Logan’s ribs breaking like tumbling dominoes.
“Make sure he’s still breathing,” Zack instructed Esme, as he moved toward Danny Long.
Esme ran to Logan’s side and checked to see if he still had a pulse. Danny was stumbling away, dazed by the sheer brutality of the strike. Zack pursued him. Danny changed direction and charged forward, head down, with the same force he used to barrel through offensive lines of very large high school athletes. Veronica shut her eyes. Danny had a hundred-pound weight advantage. Zack swung an uppercut with precision at Danny’s jaw. It was like a charging rhino meeting a swinging wrecking ball: The rhino’s head snapped back. When she opened her eyes, Danny was lying on the ground, colder than a polar vortex, an assortment of teeth scattered around him and blood puddled from his distorted, shattered jaw. Her stomach churned in revulsion and she turned away. Why had Danny made Zack do that to him?
Jackson Gartner was no hero. He eyed the fallen bat on the ground but had enough sense not to pick it up. Danny’s face was just a bloody, shattered mess, and Logan was lying at a very unnatural angle. And the most devastating, vicious fighter he’d ever seen was walking casually toward him. He held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, Zack … ”
“Ja
ckson,” Zack said. “I want you to tell your friends, when they wake up”—he looked over his shoulder at Logan and Danny—“if they wake up, that is. Tell ’em I don’t know what happened to Sandy, all right? I told her I wasn’t interested in her as a girlfriend. She’s a nice girl, but not really my type. She was crying; I hope you don’t think I’m a cad, I had kissed her a few times, but I didn’t want to lead her on. And after that, nobody ever saw her again. I feel a little guilty about what happened, but I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. If you blokes had asked me nicely, I’d have told you that.”
“I believe you, Zack,” Jackson sputtered, still moving away defensively. He’d believe anything that left his teeth in his mouth.
“Do you want to help me get them into the truck? You can drive them to hospital.”
After Logan and Danny were loaded into the bed of the truck, Zack spoke privately to Jackson and Logan. The Master had taught Zack the ancient technique to put the terror into a person. Zack spoke in an ominous voice, low pitched and deadly solemn. The voice caused such fear in Jackson that he lost control of his bladder. It was like worms crawling through his skull. Logan cringed in fright. The idea of defying Zack would never occur to either of them.
“You will tell nobody what happened here today,” Zack intoned. “You three ran into some tough blokes in town for the football game, and you got into a fight with them. You don’t know who they are, and you can’t remember what they looked like, or what kind of car they had.”
“Sure, Zack,” Jackson agreed. His quick acquiescence did nothing to ease the fear.
“Because if you don’t, I will hunt you all down,” Zack portended. “And I won’t take it easy on you, like I did this time.” And then Zack punched Jackson, not hard enough to concuss, but hard enough to crack a cheekbone and loosen half his teeth and blacken his eye. “Sorry, I had to do that. Nobody would believe you were in a fight otherwise.”
“I’m truly sorry you had to witness all that,” Zack apologized as he drove the girls back to their car after the fight. “I simply cannot abide bullies. Sandy was a wonderful girl. I cared for her a lot, as a friend. I’d never harm her. It was a right awful thing to accuse me of.” He spoke in a low hypnotic tone, repeating himself several times until he could extract, with confidence, promises from Esme and Veronica, who agreed not to discuss the fight with anyone. Zack seemed so remorseful that he’d allowed himself to be drawn into a fight, and horrified at how he’d lost his temper and injured the boys so severely. But both sisters, independently, had the same thought: There was something terribly dangerous, and at the same time devastatingly attractive, about a boy who could fight like that.
As they said their good-byes at the coffee shop, Veronica watched Esme move in for a hug. Esme promised Zack that they’d watch the soccer game another time. She kissed him on the cheek, and he kissed her the same way.
And then it was Veronica’s turn. She gave Zack a hug, and then kissed him. On the lips. She put one hand on his neck, holding him there, and he kissed back, parting lips. Tongues came into play. It was hard for Veronica to remember later, because her mind was entirely blown. She knew unambiguously that it was love; she felt it in every fiber of her being. As if a big dish of quivering Jell-O could have fiber. He encircled her waist with his hands, hands that had felled Danny Long with a single blow. It was indescribable, the kiss. Time stopped. Her heart was pounding like a farrier’s hammer on a white-hot horseshoe, sparks flying … She’d kissed at least a dozen boys, playing spin-the-bottle or seven minutes in heaven, but this was different. This was real. They might have been there for hours, for all she knew. All she could remember later, when they came up for air, was the expression on Esme’s face.
Veronica sat at her vanity that evening, gazing at her reflection dreamily. Her room was lacy and girly, all in pink: bubblegum walls and hot pink semigloss window trim and floorboards. The pink was offset by sharply contrasting black accents: stark, bold curtains and contemporary black furniture that cut into all the cute and made it edgy, despite the stuffed animals and dressage ribbons and trophies on all the shelves and stacked on her dresser.
She had a boyfriend. The one boy who every girl in school wanted, who her two big sisters wanted. Veronica fiddled with her bottles of nail polish, her lipsticks and eyeliners, tubes of moisturizer and bottles of toner. She’d chanted allure charms and glamour spells and placed hexes of enticement over every item on her vanity, and she always chanted more, sing-song, while applying makeup or brushing her hair. Grandma Sophie had taught her that repetition and redundancy added layer after layer of potency to magic. Ronnie had one particular bloodred Yves Saint Laurent lipstick that could practically go out and pick up boys on its own.
Veronica had feared Katy at first, and her talent. All the witches in the Wiccan community were always going on about Katy. But when she’d found out that Esme was actually going out on dates with Zack, she’d had to reevaluate the competition. Esme was intimidating in so many ways. Ronnie never could figure out what was going on in the chewy center of that Tootsie Pop head. But ultimately, they hadn’t stood a chance. Katy was talented, sure, and Esme was smart. But Ronnie was the most beautiful, and in the game of love, beauty would always win.
Everyone always expected Esme to just bow out gracefully, to be reasonable. Katy always got her way, and Esme was supposed to just shrug and give in, because the cosmos favored Katy, and who could argue with the cosmos? Or Veronica, who never quit until she got what she wanted. And Esme always let her get away with it, to keep the peace. But not this time. Esme knew she had something special with Zack. Veronica had to be using her little allure spells and beauty magic to steal him from her. There was no other explanation for what she’d seen when her sister had kissed him. Obviously, Zack was under Ronnie’s spell.
Esme had gone to Katy’s room and told her about the kiss, and how Ronnie had broken the Wiccan Rede and used spells to get Zack to like her. They could only use spells to defend a member of the coven, or a female in distress. Using spells to steal a boy from your own sister was strictly taboo. Esme confessed to Katy that she was still working through her feelings about Zack, but felt that Ronnie had crossed the line. Before she left Katy’s room, she gave her sister a hug, and promised that whatever happened with Zack, she would abide by his decision. Then she returned to her room. She sat at her desk, riffling through the pages of the grimoire, looking for ideas. All the puppet master had to do now was sit back while Katy and Ronnie went at each other, and then use her superior brains to win Zack once and for all. She had to make sure her sisters never suspected, though. She was well aware of the dynamics of three sisters. As soon as two joined against one, it was all over.
Kasha tried to make himself useful. “Here’s one that’ll make Veronica’s hair all fall out,” the cat suggested, looking over Esme’s arm at the grimoire.
Esme imagined, briefly, what Veronica would look like bald. Still pretty damned hot, she decided. “I’m not cursing my sister,” she said, turning to the next page.
“Try to find one that will make someone’s butt smell like carrion,” Kasha suggested.
“For Ronnie, or Katy?”
“For me,” said the cat. “The ladies likey.”
“Your butt could already gag a maggot at fifty paces.”
Kasha rubbed his neck against her face. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Esme turned to the next page. It was the start of another potion, and it went on for four pages, with all kinds of notations from generations of great-great-aunts and great-great-great-grandmothers, scrawled in tiny script on scraps of paper. “Here’s one. A love potion.”
Kasha’s eyes gleamed. “Perfect. I was hoping you’d turn dark. I haven’t had any action for ages.”
Esme was trying to translate the Latin names of the ingredients, which took up almost two pages. There were dozens upon dozens of steps to the potion. “Turn dark? What do you mean?”
&
nbsp; “Dark, light … just two sides of the same coin,” Kasha said dismissively.
Esme noticed the word CAVEAT in big script on the first page, right below Amatorium. She flipped to the next page. She could get a lot of the botanicals from her mother’s apothecary chest. “Why would you turn dark for making a love potion?” One of the mustiest-looking notes stuffed into the grimoire by an ancestor had warnings not to use the potion, on threat of damnaƒion of thyne immourtal ƒoul.
“Making the potion isn’t too bad. It’s when you sneak it into someone’s drink that you go over to the dark side. To defy another person’s free will by corrupting his love? But it’s a hoot to make, invoking iffy spirits, slathering on the blood of innocents … really fun stuff. Just ignore all those old rumors about how enslaving someone for your selfish desires is seven times worse than murder on the karmic scale.” Kasha stood and stretched. “Of course, with a demon cat for a familiar, you can skip a few steps, but you still have to convert some of your shiny white creative energy into dark entropy to make the potion work. Let’s get started!”
Esme looked up from the book. She had the creepiest sense of foreboding. Perhaps it was the shadows in the room, but Kasha was looking far more menacing than usual. “What do creative energy and entropy have to do with it?”
“Don’t you find your mind-numbing ignorance embarrassing? Try to keep up: There’s chaos, or entropy, and there’s order, or creative energy. I’m a demon, so I’m on the side of chaos. The angels like to use the words ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but that’s just propaganda—”
“Wait. There are angels?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” he chastised. “There can’t be creation without destruction. These forces we’re playing in are the exact same energies and entropies that have been roiling around for billions of years. The tides shift back and forth a bit, kind of a cosmic tug-of-war, but everything falls apart eventually.”