Ice Cold Death

by Razevich, Alexes

  “What is it?” he said.

  For a moment, I thought he knew I’d had an insight and was asking specifically about that. Then I realized his question was general—was I thirsty? Did I need the toilet? Was I trying to puzzle out how I’d gotten to his bedroom when I’d fallen asleep on the couch?

  “Dee,” I said, my voice low, not wanting to shatter the peace of the night, though there was no way not to now. “The klim brought itself over. No help from anyone on this side.”

  “Yeah,” he said sleepily. “Makes it easier for us.”

  “No,” I said. “It makes it just as bad or worse. If the klim came over, so can anything else that figures out where the breach is.”

  He sat up nearly as fast as I had.

  “Jesus,” he said. In the dim light, I saw him push a shock of hair back from his forehead.

  I rubbed the sides of my face with my hands. “What do we do?”

  “Stop the klim. Close the rift.”

  He said it like: go to the bank, then the market. Step one. Step two.

  “How do we do that?”

  In the silence, I listened to him breathe. Drew in the heady fragrance of his scent. Felt his mind racing, looking for a plan. Felt my own mind spin in circles.

  “I have no idea,” he said, “but we’ll figure it out.”

  * * *

  Dee had French toast and coffee on the make when I came downstairs in the morning. He nodded toward a mug he’d set out for me. “There’s milk in the fridge. No sugar, but there’s honey on the table if you want it.”

  I filled the mug with coffee and sat at the dark walnut table in one of four comfortable chairs with padded seats and backs. Sleep had helped. The klim might want to kill me, but that didn’t mean it would—or could. All it meant was that we had to get it first. We might not know now how to close the rift, but we would learn.

  A large window behind the table looked out into Dee’s small backyard. His wizard’s lair, I realized, was directly above. The backyard was landscaped and manicured like the front.

  I half-wanted him to have a yard that was wild and untamed. To think that within this very in-control-of-himself man lurked a feral garden.

  “How many?” he said, nodding toward the griddle.

  “Two, thanks,” I said.

  He used a spatula to lift two pieces onto a plate, then set the plate in front of me. He took four pieces for himself, took the chair closest to mine, and handed me a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin.

  No feral garden in this man. No wild, untamed side at all.

  I thought again that his need for control in his outer life was probably to balance the wildness of the magical power raging inside him. Some of which now lived in me. Maybe I’d become a neater housekeeper out of all of this.

  “Good to see you smiling,” he said.

  Good thing he wasn’t psychic, to know what I was smiling about.

  “After yesterday, it feels pretty good to smile. To find things worth smiling about.”

  When we’d finished eating, Dee picked up his plate and mine, rinsed and washed them, and stacked them in the drain board. He came back to the table and said, “We need to formulate a plan for catching the klim, unless you already have one.”

  I shook my head. “I can maybe trace his signature to where he is, especially if you give me a little magical push. After that …” I turned my palms toward the sky.

  “If you can find the klim, and if I can sneak up without it knowing,” Dee said, “I can send it back to the Brume”

  “What happens if it knows we’re there?”

  “Things get a lot harder. And it’ll be me there, not we. If the klim is out to get you, having you near it isn’t a good idea.” He thought for a moment. “Can you do a location reading with a map?”

  Map-based location readings involved using a small pendulum dangled over a map. The pendulum swings in the direction you need to go. Once you move the pendulum over the final destination, it swings in small circles. I’d seen friends of my parents find lost objects using the technique.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way for me. I have to physically follow the signature.”

  He pressed his lips together. I felt his thoughts churning.

  “This will go faster if you let me read your thoughts while you’re having them,” I said. “Save you explaining whatever plans you’ve discarded or why you think a specific idea might work. It lets me hear the process. You might be throwing away an idea, or the spark of an idea, that we could make work if I know about it.”

  He went very still and said, “Just the thoughts specific to the klim, or do you get everything once you’re in my mind?”

  I felt how invaded my suggestion made him feel. What lurked in his very controlled mind that he didn’t want me to know about?

  “Everything, I’m afraid,” I said. “I can’t filter things to one subject and tune everything else out. It doesn’t work that way.”

  I shrugged. “All I’m saying is, it would save time and maybe save a good idea from being thrown away.”

  He thought about it. “We can talk things over at the same time, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll try hard to focus on just the klim, but if your thoughts skitter off in other directions, I’m going to hear that, too.”

  He seemed ready to say yes but snapped his fingers. He pushed back his chair and stood.

  “We need to go see Sudie,” he said. “Damn. I should have thought of her sooner.”

  “Sudie?” I said, following him as he bounded up the stairs.

  “She runs the bookstore for wizards and witches on Pier,” he said over his shoulder.

  I knew Pier Avenue as well as I knew my own block of the Strand. There was no occult bookstore there. I said as much.

  “It’s behind where the old Either/Or bookstore was. Where the Subway and the tchotchke shops are now. It takes a spell to get in. If you don’t already know the bookstore is there, you’d never know it was.”

  “We’re going to see her because …”

  He stripped off the gray T-shirt and pajama bottoms he’d slept in and started pulling on a fresh shirt and jeans. “

  “If anyone would know how to close the rift, she would,” he said and blew out a breath. “I need to call the office, let them know we won’t be in for a while.”

  Dee was moving fast now—a man on a mission. Too fast for me to slow him with questions. I put on street clothes and we drove back into Hermosa Beach.

  16

  We parked on Pier Avenue in front of the Subway. The moment I got out of the car, I felt the magic coming from the back of the building. I’d walked this block hundreds of times. Why hadn’t I felt the magic before?

  I followed Dee into a short, messy alleyway behind the shops. He stopped at a spot that didn’t look any different from the rest of the building’s back wall and muttered a spell under his breath.

  I jumped back when the wall seemed to disintegrate, revealing a tiny shop filled with books, fetishes, feathers, along with boxes and bottles of who-knew-what. A large birdcage stood in front of a wide window—I couldn’t figure out how there could be a window when I’d clearly seen a solid wall. From inside the cage, a mynah bird watched us with head-cocked interest.

  The woman leaning on the wooden counter looked up and grinned. Slim with long, straight black hair and brown eyes, she looked at least part Asian. She wore black skinny jeans and a fuchsia T-shirt partially obscured behind a denim motorcycle-style jacket.

  “Diego!” she said and held out her hands. “So good to see you.”

  We walked through where the wall should be and into the shop. The moment we stepped inside, the store grew in size, spreading out the whole length of the building. Dream catchers and mandalas decorated the walls. Crystal, brass, and silver wind chimes hung from the ceiling. The scent of herbs, incense, and books was heady.

  “Hey, Sudie,” Dee said. He took her hands in his and leaned over the counter to gi
ve her a peck on the cheek.

  “And who is this?” she said, pulling her hands back and eyeing me head to toe.

  I felt the crush she had on Dee and her assessment of me as just another in a long line of women who’d passed through his life. She was curious about me though—because Dee hadn’t brought any of his women to her shop before.

  He touched my shoulder and said, “This is Oona Goodlight, psychic. She’s learning a little magic.”

  Sudie held out a surprisingly long-fingered hand for as petite as she was. I blanched, as I usually did when a hand was extended to me. It’s normally so quick the other person doesn’t catch it.

  But Sudie said, “Touch psychic, yeah? I have a friend in Chicago who’s the same way. Hates shaking hands. Won’t even go to the mall for fear of bumping into a stranger and being flooded with too much information.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said and shook hands with her, even holding on a moment longer than I wanted to, just to be polite.

  “Should I mind?” Sudie said. “All my secrets revealed to you in an instant?”

  A few things had been revealed—not just her intense crush on Dee, but that she was annoyed with her roommate for letting Sudie’s cat out the back door again, and that she had a dentist appointment that afternoon she was dreading. And that the two things she wanted most in life were for someone to love her dearly and to be a help to the magic community. I could appreciate both desires.

  “Not at all,” I lied. “I have to turn on the psychic stuff for it to work. Your secrets are safe from me.”

  She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe that for an instant but was willing to let it go.

  She turned her gaze to Diego. “What can I do for you today?”

  “I need something special,” he said. “A spell to seal a breach between worlds.”

  Sudie’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “There’s a breach between our world and the Brume. Something has already crossed over. Oona and I will take care of sending it back, but I need a spell to make sure neither it, nor anything else, can come over again.”

  “What came over?” Sudie’s voice was a whisper.

  “A klimertin. A klim. Oona drew a picture of what she saw. Maurice identified it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” she said, ‘but Maurice knows his stuff. If he says it’s this klim thing, then it is.” She lifted her long black hair off her neck and then let it fall back into place. “What’s it doing here?”

  “It was hungry. It feeds off negative emotion—anger, fear, jealousy, and the like. It’s getting people to murder their closest friends and devouring the emotions.”

  “Holy shit,” she said. Her face grew thoughtful. “That’s going to take some research. I know there is a way. Give me a day to dig through the books.”

  “Give me a call if you find anything,” he said.

  Sudie nodded and said something under her breath. A sudden breeze cooled my back. I turned and saw the wall had dissolved again.

  “I’ll call,” she said behind us as we walked out into the crisp, autumn day.

  We were getting into Dee’s car when a little brown and gray house sparrow darted in before he completely shut his door. I leaned back in the seat, startled. The bird perched on the steering wheel and turned its head, looking first at Dee, then me, then back at Dee.

  “What’s up?” Dee said to the bird. “Did Sudie think of something?”

  The bird nodded its head and chirped.

  “Okay. Thanks.” He opened the car door wide. The bird took wing and was gone in an instant.

  “Sudie wants us back in the store,” he said.

  “Yeah. I got that.”

  He laughed. “The look on your face—”

  “You magic folk.” I shook my head.

  We made our way back toward the short alley again.

  “I thought you had mages in your family,” Dee said as we turned the corner and I looked again at the building’s seeming blank back wall.

  “Ancestors,” I said. “My mother’s gift is healing. She does it by touch. She has a few shifters as patients, so I know about that, and a few wizards and witches as friends, but as a kid I hardly paid any attention to them; they were my parents’ friends and it wasn’t like they sat around conjuring puppies and ponies in the living room. My parents had lots of non-magical friends, too, some of whom I now realize were famous in their fields. They were just Mr. or Ms. So-and-so to me. I guess I was pretty self-absorbed as a kid.”

  “Self-absorbed or self-protective?” Dee said.

  I frowned. “Some of both, I guess. I’ve been overwhelmed by others’ thoughts and emotions for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been a bit of a recluse. Being plunged into all this magic is …” I didn’t know what word to use. Weird? Exhilarating? Scary? Fascinating? “It’s a constant surprise.”

  “I grew up in a commune,” Dee said. “Five families living together, practicing their arts together, raising and homeschooling us kids in the ways of magic together. This world is my normal. The only time I mixed with anyone not magical was at hockey.”

  I took that in. Dee hardly ever spoke about his family or his history. Those few words probably tripled what I knew about him outside of direct experience. It was funny how our lives seemed almost to be mirror images—he was raised in magic; my parents sought to make my childhood as ordinary and non-magical as possible. He only mixed with the non-magical through sports; I only mixed with the magical through my mother’s patients and a few of my parents’ close friends. He took the magical world for granted; I found it strange—equally as exotic and tempting as it was weird and frightening.

  He muttered the spell to open Sudie’s door.

  “I’ve got it,” Sudie said as soon as we came inside. A large book lay open in front of her on the counter. “I’m glad the sparrow caught you. I think I’ve got the spell you need.”

  The mynah bird that had been silent while we’d been in the shop earlier now said, “I helped.”

  “Major did help,” Sudie said. “He reminded me about an old book I had in the back room. He said the answer was in there. I already knew about the spell, but it had slipped my mind until he mentioned the book.”

  “What sort of spell?” Dee said.

  “A mending spell. For fixing big rifts. Multigenerational family feuds. Countries after war. That sort of thing. I’m pretty sure it will mend the rift between the worlds.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  She shrugged. “Any spell being used for a new purpose, you never know how well it will work until you try it.”

  Dee didn’t look convinced.

  “Take a look at it,” she said.

  Sudie rotated the book around so that the text was right side up for him. Dee bent forward and read.

  “This spell needs a tool to make it work,” he said, looking up from the book.

  Sudie grinned. “Fortunately for you, I happen to have a mending orb.”

  She reached under the counter and then handed something to him. He rotated his wrist so his palm was up and opened his hand to show me what she’d given him.

  The orb looked like a pigeon egg-sized ruby ground into a perfect sphere.

  Dee shivered and passed the orb from his right to left hand and back again.

  Sudie laughed. “Jam-packed with magic, isn’t it? I could barely hold the orb long enough to carry it out from the back room.” She reached under the counter again. “Here.” She handed him a small, blue velvet sack with runes stitched on it in gold thread.

  Dee dropped the orb inside and tugged the drawstrings closed.

  Sudie set her hand on the opened book’s page. “Do you want me to make a copy of the spell for you?”

  Dee shook his head. “I’ve got it.”

  “Of course you do.” She looked at me. “Did you know Diego has a photographic memory? Really useful for a wizard.”

  I nodded, but my thoughts weren’t on Dee’s seemingly endless bag of trick
s. I was focused on the spell and the orb. Wondering how we were going to get the klim back into its own world and hold it there—and hold off all the other things that lived there—while we stitched up the rift.

  And once that was done, how were we going to get back?

  17

  Back in Dee’s car again, he said, “I’m famished. How about Good Stuff for breakfast?”

  I blinked, confused by his change of attitude. “I thought you said you didn’t want me out in public any more than necessary?”

  He half-shrugged. “Things have changed. We need to draw out the klim now. Bring it to us.”

  “So, we’re going to dangle me as bait?”

  “You can say no.”

  He didn’t say it like a challenge. I took it that way, though.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fine. Let’s get this bastard.”

  We parked on the second level of the parking structure at Thirteenth. When we reached the street, Dee took my hand. I shot him a look.

  “Just a normal couple out for breakfast,” he said and smiled. “Nothing to see here.”

  “The klim won’t be fooled,” I said. “It feeds off emotions. Real emotions. It won’t buy some fakery.”

  “Is it fake, Oona?” he said. “There seems to be some spark between us.”

  I spotted an open table on the Good Stuff patio and motioned toward it with my head. I liked sitting in the patio, only a short wall of separation between us diners and folks out to enjoy the beach. I liked watching the people strolling, rollerblading, skateboarding, biking by in the sunshine.

  People watching counted as safe social interaction for me. No one touched me. If I was lucky, no one talked to me. For the most part, the emotions swirling around and poking at my consciousness this morning were positive.

  Except Dee was still touching me. Not physically now, but his question jabbed like a feather—not painful but insistent. Answer the question: is it fake?

  “We hardly know each other,” I said as I sat.

  He smiled and settled in the chair on the other side of the small table. “And yet you’ve given me a pet name. Do you always give pet names to people you hardly know and have no feelings for?”