by Ira Bloom
Veronica was sobbing desolately, to the point of hiccupping violently between sobs. Esme came in and put her arm around her for comfort. Though it soon became apparent that her big sister did not regard the disaster on Veronica’s face with quite the gravity the situation called for. In fact, Esme was positively smirking at the sight of Ronnie’s zit.
“Are you laughing at me?” Ronnie accused.
“Oh, sweetie,” Esme reassured her. “You know I’ll always be there for you, because I love you, and nothing can ever change that. And you also know I’ll always make fun of you, because I’m your sister.”
To say that Veronica Silver had good skin was an understatement on the scale of saying that Christina Aguilera had a good voice, or that Stephen Hawking was a clever chap. Veronica had skin like one of those freakish, unfreckled redheads the mascara companies were always scouting, a creamy epidermis as taut as the skin of a Celtic drum with pores the size of sub-atomic particles, offset by natural blond hair and cerulean blue eyes. The honking crimson zit in the middle of her alabaster forehead looked like the red rising sun on the white Japanese flag.
“Oh, honey,” Esme said. “It’s not so bad. We all go through it. It’s part of growing up.”
Ronnie sniffled, inconsolable. She looked closer, and the tears started to well up again. “What am I going to do?” she wailed.
“Consider it part of your spiritual path. You’ll be a better person for it,” Esme cajoled.
Ronnie sniffled again. “Do you think?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Esme reassured her. “You’re due for a spiritual awakening. Just as soon as that third eye growing in the middle of your forehead opens up.”
There was no time for breakfast, what with Veronica’s grandiose insistence that everybody stop whatever they were doing and deal with her problem. In the kitchen, Esme swallowed a handful of supplements with a glass of water, checking her watch, and offered some to Katy. “Neuro-enhancers? Katy? I have a new stack I researched. You should take them every day, they’ll improve your cognitive function.”
Katy turned up her nose at the fistful of vitamins and nutraceuticals. “No thanks, I’m done with those. The last time you gave me gingko, it improved my memory so much I can still recall how much I hated it.”
On the way to school, Katy mentioned wistfully that she wished she’d at least had time for coffee before they’d hit the road, and Ronnie chimed in that she could certainly use a cup to settle her nerves after her ordeal. Esme suddenly had a perseverative image in her mind of sipping a comforting latte, and then all Ronnie and Esme had to do was convince Katy that there was plenty of time to stop for some.
They parked in the student parking lot and Veronica practically leapt out of the car, book bag swinging, still blowing on her coffee and testing it with tentative sips, walking with bold ballerina strides in her stiletto heels. She wore a head scarf to cover her zit. Veronica had taken to hanging out at the base of the steps in the mornings before school, at the very spot where she’d first talked to Zack. Girls all over the school had similar spots staked out. Ronnie was hurrying, as she only had a few minutes to get there.
“Come on, Esme,” Katy said, picking up the pace to follow.
Esme and Katy followed their sister along the sidewalk. It curved up and around, and they noticed Ronnie slowing as she approached the stairs, trying not to look too eager. Zack was approaching from the opposite direction, a few girls in tow.
“Hey,” they heard him say. Esme couldn’t figure it, after the kiss she’d seen. Certainly Ronnie had earned something more intimate than “hey.” She was ten feet away and closing, her arm positioning itself for the hug, coffee in one hand, cell phone in the other, bag at her hip.
“A klutz, a klutz,” Katy intoned under her breath. Then she held her hands before her and made a motion, bringing her two fists together and snapping the wrists, as if she were holding a pencil in her hands and breaking it in half.
Esme heard the sound of something snapping. Veronica’s stiletto heel broke and her ankle twisted. Veronica’s coffee went flying out of her hand and the cup exploded against Zack, soaking his leather jacket, which was open in front, and his white button-down shirt underneath. Ronnie went down, catching herself on one knee, which she scraped on the sidewalk.
Katy caught her kid sister before she could face-plant on the concrete, yanking Ronnie to her feet with one hand as she swung her pack off her back. With the other hand, she reached into her open backpack and removed a small first aid kit, which she handed off to Esme. She reached back into her pack and removed a pair of sneakers, which she also handed to her older sister.
“Take Ronnie to the school nurse and bandage her knee,” Katy instructed. “Are you okay Ronnie? You can wear my new gym shoes; I have my old pair in my locker.” She handed Veronica off to Esme and turned to Zack, startled and soaked in steaming hot coffee.
“Come with me,” Katy insisted, reaching into her magician’s hat of a backpack and removing a bottle of club soda and a clean dry hand towel. “I have a shirt in here you can borrow.”
Esme stared, mouth agape, as Katy grabbed Zack’s arm and led him, unresisting, off to the boys’ bathroom, where she would have the pleasure of patting him down and drying him off and touching up his clothes with club soda. She would take off his shirt and rinse off his chest and lean in too close while she buttoned up the replacement that she “happened” to have in her backpack. Katy would get Zack fixed up, too late for first period, so they probably would decide to ditch, and they’d take off and he would want to kiss her, because people always did what Katy wanted them to do. Because Katy had the universe in her pocket and people were just kidding themselves to think she wouldn’t win. They’d fall in love and get married and that would be the last Esme would ever hear from Katy or Zack, until they needed a babysitter for their three perfect children. Or so Esme imagined, as she helped her limping, wobbly baby sister off to the school nurse. She’d never in her life seen such perfect planning and execution of magic and acting. Katy was unbeatable. And incredibly devious.
Ever since Detective Sharp’s visit, the Master had been prone to fits of mercurial rage. After Zack had buried the remains of poor Sandy Hardesty deep in a fallow field off a country road, he’d returned to find another fresh corpse in the cellar. Chang Lee had been nearly drained and her neck broken like a twig. She’d displeased the Master somehow. The Master had been hard on all the brides. Miss Edwards was bruised from head to toe, and Lisa, the newest, was wearing bandages on her neck to cover a wound that was slow to heal, where the Master had bitten her far too carelessly.
Drake explained that there were certain people who were not susceptible to mesmerism. These rare types were always intelligent, analytical, skeptical men, difficult to fool in general. There were a lot of them in law enforcement, where they tended to rise to the upper echelons. Drake had been to the police station previously for purposes of mesmerizing the entire staff, but Detective Sharp represented a threat that they could not ignore.
“Master, I know it isn’t my place, but I think we’re making a mistake,” Zack said gravely.
“Explain yourself.” The Master had his feet up on the coffee table in the living room.
Zack paced, relieved at the reprieve. The Master had threatened, just the day before, to end him. “Master, it’s barmy to attack the police in their station. They have security cameras all over the place. Even if we were to get in and out and kill everyone without taking too many bullets, the FBI would just come in the next day and find out about us.”
“I’ve dealt with security cameras before,” Drake argued. “We have only to go to the room where they keep the tapes, and destroy all the evidence before we depart.”
“Master, they haven’t used tapes for decades.” Zack was treading on thin ice. The Master could be off the sofa faster than a wink, and Zack’s head would be watching his body on the floor from the vantage of the Master’s hand, hanging by his hair. “Everything’
s digital now, and it probably backs up to the cloud. So we can’t destroy the evidence.”
“The cloud,” Drake repeated ominously, weighing the truth of the word on his lips. Kill Zack, believe Zack: a flip of the coin. “Yes, I’ve heard of this cloud.” He stood abruptly. “Very well. We shall do the other thing, then.”
At 2:09 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning, the Sharps’ German shepherd, Roscoe, started barking. Roscoe slept in the living room but had a doggie door to a fenced dog run along the side of the house. The barks were aggressive, with snarls. “Stupid dog,” Detective Sharp muttered, rolling out of bed and hunting with his feet in the dark for his slippers. His wife, Janet, rolled over and went back to sleep. Roscoe barked at all sorts of things at night, usually raccoons or possums.
As Sharp opened the bedroom door, he heard Roscoe make a whimpering sound. He couldn’t imagine what would intimidate a police-trained German shepherd. He went back into the bedroom and slipped into the master closet. He had a 9mm Glock hidden in a pile of winter clothes on a shelf in the back.
“Wha’ honey?” Janet asked, still half-asleep. “What is it?”
“Probably nothing,” Robert reasoned. “Go back to sleep.”
In the hallway outside the master bedroom, he paused to listen. The dog wasn’t making any noise at all. He turned on the hall light and headed down the stairs. “Roscoe?” he whispered. At the foot of the stairs he flipped on the living room lights. The room was empty. His brain subconsciously processed a hundred little signals that his conscious mind couldn’t put a finger on. Everything was entirely still. He raised the Glock in front of him, edging into the living room. There was no element of surprise, with the lights on.
In a blur, something all in black jumped out from behind the curtains and crossed the room on the opposite side so fast he couldn’t draw a bead on it with the gun. And then something came from behind and tore the Glock away from him, breaking his wrist in the process, and clamped a steely hand across his mouth.
“I suppose I might as well confess now,” a soft, hypnotic voice whispered in his ear in an amorphous accent. “We did actually kidnap those girls.” But Detective Robert Sharp was dead with a broken neck before he could make any sense out of the whole thing.
“Upstairs,” the Master whispered to Zack, motioning with the gun in his hand. He turned off the living room lights. “Go through those rooms and kill everyone.”
Zack got the end with the master bedroom. He killed Janet Sharp quietly, in her sleep. He did not like killing people, but it was Drake’s command, and he could not defy the Master. She would die anyway, at his hand or Drake’s.
At the opposite end of the hall, Drake opened the first door. On a twin bed, a boy of about middle-school age lay sleeping with his mouth open, snoring softly, covers kicked this way and that. There was a cluttered desk in the corner of the room and model vintage American muscle cars on shelves. Drake tore out the boy’s throat with his teeth. He did not usually drink the blood of males, but had few qualms with children of either sex.
The next door in the hall opened into a room with bunk beds. Drake killed the boy in the upper bunk first, with his talons. Blood leaked into the mattress and over the edge of it, and it spilled hotly onto the hand of little Billy below. Billy was a floppy sleeper. The boy’s eyes opened, startled from a shallow dream about pumpkin pies and whipped cream and the Macy’s parade, which they always watched. Billy’s eyes adjusted quickly to the dim light of the nightlight. There, above him, was a stranger with blood on his hands. Billy let out a little scream then, but it didn’t matter at that point. Nobody would wake up. Nobody would come to help. Everyone else in the house was dead already.
The fire they set on their way out was attended by nearly every police vehicle, fire truck and ambulance in the county, but there was really nothing left to save. The bodies were burnt beyond all recognition.
“Ronnie, is this a good time?” Esme asked, peeking her head into the doorway on Thursday morning. Veronica was at her vanity, chanting over a tube of benzoyl peroxide.
“I think it’s getting worse,” Veronica said, on the verge of tears. On her cheek was a red, slightly raised bump.
“Oh, Ronnie.” Esme hated to see her sister in such pain, even if she totally deserved it.
“Maybe the one on my forehead is going down a little.”
“Listen,” Esme said quietly. “I have something for you.” She was carrying something large against her chest, wrapped in a bath towel. She laid the package down on the vanity, sliding bottles and tubes aside. She opened the towel to reveal the huge, ancient book.
“The grimoire? Why are you giving me the grimoire?”
“Because you need it more than I do. Somebody has been cursing you.” Esme did not speak a name. Rather, she rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling. She made the motion three times, so Ronnie would get the gist.
“Katy?” Ronnie whispered. “No way.” Then she thought about it. “How come she had all that stuff in her backpack? Katy’s never drunk club soda in her life. She made me scrape my knee!”
“Yeah, you need to protect yourself.”
Ronnie pulled up the leg of her sweatpants. “Look at that!” she seethed. “I could get a scar! I might be a model someday, did she think of that?” She shoved the pant leg back down forcefully and stalked around the room. She wheeled on Esme. “How come you know so much?”
“Ronnie, settle down.” Save some for Katy. “Look, honey … I feel just awful about this whole thing. It could be partly my fault. I … told her about you kissing Zack. I mean, she really likes him, you know about that, right?”
“So you got her to curse me?” Veronica accused. “You like him, too, don’t you? Admit it!”
Ronnie’s mood had strayed into something a little more dangerous than Esme had anticipated. The girl really had it bad. She was bordering on hysteria and paranoia. “Ronnie, calm down already. Yes, I do like him. He’s a great guy, anyone would like him. But I wouldn’t resort to hexing my own sister. That’s why I came to tell you. Katy crossed the line.”
Veronica went back to pacing. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. You wouldn’t give me the grimoire otherwise. You wouldn’t tell me.” She turned to Esme again suddenly. “Are you still trying to get him? After you saw how he kissed me you don’t actually think you … ?”
“Aw, honey,” Esme cajoled. “I like him, but no boy is worth coming between me and my baby sister.” I don’t actually think I what? Can get him?
Veronica unwrapped the grimoire and started leafing through the pages. She could barely make out the writing, it was all old script. It was mostly Latin and other arcane languages she couldn’t make head or tail of. She closed the book and sighed. “I don’t understand a word of it,” she complained. “Katy’s going to destroy me.”
“There are some simpler spells, here in the front,” Esme mentioned, leaning over her sister’s shoulder and flipping through pages. “Here’s a charm—you’re good at charms, aren’t you?—for protection against the evil eye. And an incantation to protect you from curses and hexes. Just look up the Latin online.” There were also a few very nice spells, in that general vicinity of the book, for retaliation. Esme was confident Veronica would find them.
At two in the afternoon, Barry got a call from Nancy Armond, one of his clients. Nancy was Robert Sharp’s sister-in-law, mother to Wilson. “Barry, did you hear about the fire?” she asked, openly crying into the phone. “It was my sister Janet. And Robert, and the boys. Barry, they can’t get into the house yet, the roof collapsed, but they think everyone’s dead.”
“Oh my god, Nancy, I’m so sorry. I hadn’t heard.”
“Barry, we’re all outside the house. The whole family, and dozens of neighbors, and reporters. And there’s a film crew from channel five. The police have taped off the whole area. Do you think you can come down? I know you handled all Robert’s legal affairs.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes, Nancy. Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”
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“They’re trying to interview us, can you make them leave us alone? They’re like vultures.”
Barry went to his bedroom and put on a jacket and tie. Before leaving, he told Esme to watch the turkey. “You know how to use the meat thermometer, don’t you?”
Esme’s thumbs flew over her smartphone. “Here’s a link … with pictures. Fattest part of the thigh, one hundred sixty-five degrees … I’ve got it. Just … go. Give Wilson a hug for me. I’m so sorry.”
He mussed her hair, daddy style. “Sorry about Thanksgiving. Maybe next year, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad. Katy would just complain she couldn’t eat anything anyway. And Ronnie wouldn’t go near a carbohydrate in a hazmat suit. Go. Take care.”
Esme walked through her parents’ master bedroom, checking her iPhone for the list of ingredients she needed, past the large bookcase with Melinda’s collection of ethnic ceremonial figures displayed on shelves. A large, rustic Lega fertility fetish was the centerpiece of a long, low mahogany cabinet against the far wall, displayed on an old Kuba mat. In the little office off the master bedroom was Melinda’s humongous old Chinese apothecary chest and a roll-top desk full of other requirements of the craft.
Esme’s mom, Melinda, had moved out. She and Barry were not divorced or even separated; Melinda had basically just stopped commuting back from her apothecary store in the city. They owned a duplex there, and aside from rare visits home, that’s where she lived.
Melinda had imparted some basic knowledge about the craft, but had been cagey with details. It was almost as if she didn’t want her daughters messing with it at all, for some mysterious reason, but Esme had deduced certain things. There were sources of power in nearly everything in the world, especially in nature. The pagans called it divine vitality. Certain things, some animal, some mineral, and some vegetable, had specific properties. Pharmaceutical companies were very good at exploiting these properties. Physicists were better, hence the atom bomb. Alchemy, up to a point, was just an enlightened approach to pharmacology and physics. The art of it all was knowing how to coax these properties out, how to combine them to finesse or magnify their powers, how to extract them, how to distill them. The oldest families of witches, families that predated modern Wicca by centuries, had multi-generational lore that was passed down, improved upon, and kept in the family grimoire. Esme had just spent the last two weeks scanning the entire book and all the notes and uploading it onto her computer, in a system of files that had utilized her particular genius for organization.