Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  I paused, wincing as 1 thought of the men. “You mean they explode.”

  “Yes, that would be one such reaction.”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay. We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry if I’ve been a horrendous ungrateful bitch, but this whole thing has me royally freaked. So can we start over, and try to get ourselves out of this mess?”

  “I accept your apology. And yes, I’d quite like to get Out of here as well. I’ll find that hide you wanted.” He hopped off the car and scurried over to the grass where Smoky had made his transformation.

  I followed, and soon we’d gathered a good handful of fur and limp, bloody, stinky hide. I wished I’d thought to bring along some hand sanitizer.

  I’d never tried a control spell, and had only seen Cooper do them a few times. In theory it was all pretty straightforward: I just had to get inside the target creature’s head and take command.

  Yep. Straightforward like busting through a brick wall with your bare hands. Hell’s bells.

  I gingerly squeezed the handful of bloody hide and glanced at Pal, who was sitting on the picnic bench. “If I start barking, don’t you dare laugh at me.”

  “Perish the thought,” he said.

  “Okay then.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  I started a simple divination chant, asking the spirit residue on the hide and blood to lead me to Smoky. Palimpsest had told me the truth about the dog body being a mere puppet; though the flesh and blood was real, it felt as spiritually dead as a discarded Halloween mask. I focused on the faint, darker, alien essence that curled around the cells like aether.

  Ancient words for “hunt” spilled from my lips in a dozen languages I could never name. I felt rather than saw Smoky standing on a deserted street, belching fire.

  I knew his true name, his true nature. Kyothalahüi, Servant of Flame.

  “Become!” I barked in Smoky’s ancient, secret language.

  I felt myself slip into his scaly skin, into his fragmented mind. My senses were crippled by his anger and pain, drowned by the ocean of information from a dozen too many legs and a hundred too many eyes.

  I couldn’t control it, couldn’t understand it. The fire stopped, and the body stumbled.

  I saw a dark, twisted form. Smoky’s faceted eyes wouldn’t focus for me. What was it?

  The twisted thing darted forward. I felt a slashing pain at my throat, my belly. The thing was digging inside me, and I couldn’t stop it—

  —I broke the connection, collapsing back onto the grass.

  “Oh hell,” I gasped, rising onto my knees. “I messed up. Oh God, I messed up. .

  “What happened?” asked Pal.

  “There was this thing. A demon. Smoky was attacking it when I entered his mind, and the demon… I think it killed Smoky.”

  A brief blast of cold, sulfurous wind rippled across the landscape. In its wake, the trees and grass lost their color. In the white light from the blank sky, the world suddenly looked as though it had been carved from bleached bone.

  “Now it killed Smoky,” Pal replied. “And the demon is changing the reality in our isolation sphere.”

  My brain was just beginning to process what I’d sensed inside the dragon. “He never meant to hurt us—he was always focused on killing the monster that came into our dimension, but we all looked so alien to him, he couldn’t really see that we were his friends. Oh hell.”

  Smoky might have calmed down once the demon was dead, and I had no doubt that the demon would be dead if I hadn’t interfered.

  I swallowed down the sick bile rising in my throat. I wanted to cry.

  “Did he wound it?” Pal asked.

  “I—I think so. He was burning it. But it was still strong enough to tear him up.”

  “Let’s hope he weakened it. Because.. . well, you know what we have to do now,” Pal said.

  We had to do what strong, terrifying Smoky hadn’t quite managed: kill the demon. And hope it didn’t kill us first.

  chapter three

  Wutganger

  Something bit my finger; I did a double take when I saw that it was the grass.

  “‘What the—” I scrambled to my feet.

  The bone-gray grass had become unnaturally animated; the blades were widening, splitting open to reveal tiny, toothed maws that snapped at my sneakers.

  “Oh dear!” exclaimed Pal, who abruptly leaped off the picnic table onto my shoulder.

  The wooden top of the picnic table was shaking, tearing itself loose from the galvanized bolts holding it to the steel frame.

  I hurried over to the relative safety of the road. The toothy sod was trying to heave itself free of the soil.

  “What in the hell is this?” I asked Pal.

  “I’m afraid I misjudged the nature of the reality shift,” he said, his voice quavering. “I don’t think Smoky was the cause of this; I think he was holding the decay in check.”

  My heart sank. “Great. How bad will this get?”

  “Very bad, I expect. The demon’s affecting organic matter. It’s only a matter of time before the very asphalt holding this road together is corrupted,” he replied. “Do you know where Smoky fell?”

  “Yeah. It’s not far; I’m pretty sure he was just a few blocks south of the mall on High.”

  I crept down the street with the Mossberg on one shoulder and Pal on the other. The air hung damp and still and stank of ozone and sulfur.

  “I had a bad thought,” I said, scanning the nearby buildings nervously.

  “What?” Pal asked.

  “The grass—it died. Whatever it’s turning into, it’s not alive in the strictest sense of the word, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “So okay. If we don’t stop the demon, it’ll keep doing what it’s doing, right? Killing things and reanimating them?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “So could the demon, you know, trick whoever’s monitoring the sphere into thinking everything in here’s good and dead and it’s A-okay to lift the barrier? And then all this shit could spill out into the rest of the world?” I asked.

  Pal paused. “I would think that whichever magical hazards specialist your governing circle has monitoring the situation would be canny enough to recognize that threat.”

  “And I’d have thought they’d have, you know, helped us, instead of leaving us in here to get slurped by the glop. But hey, I live on Naïve Lane in Happy Candycane Acres, what do I know?”

  Something screeched; I turned my head toward the noise. One of the trees by the Statehouse sidewalk had torn itself free of the ground. It was scrabbling toward us on a snaky mass of muddy roots. The trunk had split open lengthwise into a seeping mouth lined with thorny teeth. Its branches flailed at us.

  “Oh look, isn’t that nice? The tree is screaming at us. Eat a bag of hell, Mr. Tree!”

  I took aim with the shotgun and blasted it once, twice. The tree blew apart. Pinkish gray bits of fleshy wood twitched on the pavement.

  “Oh look, Mr. Tree’s still moving!” I fired into the largest nearby chunk, the butt of the gun slamming hard into my shoulder. The pain was deeply satisfying.

  “Stop, you’re wasting your ammunition,” Pal hissed. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter with me, Mr. Ferret?” I asked, plucking cartridges off my bandolier and shoving them into the gun’s loading tube. Both my shoulders hurt now, and my fingers were tingling. “Why, I guess I’m feeling a little hostile about this whole situation.”

  The murderous rage coursing through my veins was nothing short of exhilarating. I wanted to tear the world open and dance in its guts.

  “Stupid girl, it’s affecting you! Keep your head!” Pal snapped.

  “Keep your own damn head, weasel.”

  He was digging his little pinprick claws into my skin, and I’d have liked nothing better than to pick him up and slam him down on the dinosaur-blood asphalt and see his stinking little brains splatter e
verywhere—

  “Are your fingers going numb? That’s the nerves dying. You let the rage take you, your flesh will turn to cold meat, and he’ll shape you as he pleases.”

  I stared down at my fingertips. They had gone pale; the blood had been squeezed right out of them. Fear squelched my anger. I slung the shotgun over my shoulder and rubbed my hands together to try to get the circulation going again.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Because I can’t feel my paws.” Pal took a deep breath. “The demon’s broadcasting rage and hate. If we let ourselves indulge in either of those emotions, we’re gone.”

  We started down the Street again.

  Be serene, I told myself. Be cool. Be calm and collected as a cow in a field. A cow waiting to be led off, get bashed in the head and carved into steaks.

  Images of abattoir carnage filled my mind, and in an instant I pictured myself blasting the heads off chain-saw-wielding slaughterhouse workers.

  “This is not very damn easy,” I said, desperately forcing my mass-murder daydream away. “I’ve got to go kill a demon that’s much, much stronger than I am, and I can’t get angry? How am I supposed to get my adrenaline going if I can’t get angry? I’ve got a lot to be angry about right now.”

  “Determination doesn’t have to be anger,” Pal replied. “Think about how much you love Cooper and want him back. Keep that love front and center, and know that you will get him back, and nothing will stand in your way.”

  Okay, feel the love, I thought, shifting the ever-heavier shotgun to my left hand. Feel the love, feel the love. Bunnies in shining armor. Love love love.

  We walked down High Street past the mall. The store windows were eerie in the flat light. A dead sparrow flopped toward us, chirping hatred. When we turned right on West Town, I beheld a sight I was completely unprepared for.

  Smoky lay dead on the sidewalk, and a scorched thing was tearing off his scales, gnawing his flesh. My eyes just wouldn’t focus on it.

  What is it? I thought to Pal.

  The thing sensed me, shrieking as it pulled its jagged head from the corpse and turned on us.

  Suddenly I was sitting in a filthy stone-lined pit, staring down at a bloody hacksaw in my left hand and my own sawed-off leg in my right.

  “Don’t make me do the second one,” I heard myself plead to someone standing above.

  And then the pain hit me.

  I screamed and fell to my knees, shutting my eyes as if that could shut out the agony sawing on every nerve. The shotgun clattered to the pavement.

  “It’s a Wutganger,” Pal squeaked, his voice thin and shaky. “It’s an illusion! See past it! Fight it!”

  How could I stand and fight when my guts were falling out? I tried to gather them up, but something clamped down on my left forearm.

  The lance of pain as the Wutganger bit through my ulnar nerve jerked me out of the illusion to a far worse reality. The Wutganger was the very incarnation of Cooper’s blotted-out nightmares. The face was a leathery patchwork of dead cooked flesh stitched together with twisted wire, the teeth broken shards of glass pounded into pustulant gray gums. Its eyes were live coals, steaming hate and sulfur from the dead sockets.

  I screamed as it worried my arm, my bones crunching. I scrabbled at my waist, found the sheathed silver dagger, and pulled it free. The monstrosity tore my forearm apart and howled in my face, its blast-furnace breath blistering my skin.

  Mouthing an ancient word for “oblivion,” I rammed the dagger deep into its charred chest, right where its heart ought to be.

  The Wutganger exploded. Its molten-lava blood spurted across the left side of my face, down my shirt and pants.

  I fell backward, clutching my eye with my right hand.

  One moment the sky was the flat condemning white and the next it was open and vast and black. Lightning flashed and sheets of rain pounded down on me, washing away the hideous blood.

  I did it, I thought.

  Then I heard the freight-train roar. Oh God. The governing circle had called down a tornado.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” Pal barked, tugging at my shirt.

  I couldn’t see out of my left eye at all, and there was nothing below my left elbow but a few inches of ragged, bleeding stump around jutting fragments of bone. Shards of broken plate glass gleamed in the wound.

  I’m going to bleed to death, I thought numbly.

  “You’ve got to move!” Pal bit my side.

  I lurched to my feet and staggered away from the corpses of Smoky and the Wutganger. Pal clung to my waist.

  The tornado roared behind me, loud as an apocalypse. I turned and saw the huge, ropy black funnel descend on High Street. The cloud-bound top was big as a city block, and seemed to fill the entire sky.

  The funnel plowed into the Riffe Tower. The skyscraper’s windows exploded into wet glitter and the pink marble façade blew away like a dusting of talcum power. Steel beams screamed as the tornado twisted them, tearing the huge building up by its roots to get at Smoky’s pups.

  I turned and ran from the monster storm, blood and God-knew-what-else running down my face, my arm a torch of pain, my heart straining in my chest.

  I kept running after my vision went entirely black, kept running until I hit a curb and went sprawling on the sidewalk. The tornado roared nearby, the ground shaking.

  I tried to get up, but I’d lost too much blood. Consciousness failed me, and I knew no more.

  chapter four

  Palimpsest: The Cavalry

  I only just barely managed to avoid being crushed when Jessie tumbled onto the pavement; I cannot tell you how much I loathe and despise being put into small animals. You can’t carry anything of any consequence, and people are always accidentally stepping on you. Bad for your dignity, worse for your bones!

  But that’s a tangent. I was scrambling for a hold on her wet shirt as she rolled over onto her back. She made a valiant effort to get up, then collapsed. The Wutganger’s blood had burned away half her face; what remained was white as library paste. I could feel her heart slowing like a watch winding down.

  The tornado roared through the intersection where the Wutganger and the slain flameservant lay, then sucked back up into the black sky.

  I wondered what kind of dubious magic Cooper had been meddling in to bring on the demon. It couldn’t have just been a garden-variety imp, oh no— it had to be a Wutganger. They are one of the worst kinds of demons, created from a strong, Talented soul that has been tormented so terribly and for so long that it breaks. The sane, rational part of the soul projects all its capacity for evil and destruction into the lesser fragment to keep itself from being entirely destroyed.

  Wutgangers are spirits of mindless rage, pain, and hate. Usually they possess the bodies of the living— and clearly this Wutganger had tried that in the garage. But for one to pull itself together out of dead flesh and inanimate objects like that.. . sweet Goddess.

  I knew I had to try to get help, so I wiggled into Jessie’s pocket, grabbed the antenna of her cell phone with my teeth, and backed out. Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate small-animal bodies? I was starting to wonder which ancient, vengeful god I’d offended to end up in this predicament. It was unusually bad luck to have been spirited into a little vermin-eater, worse luck to be mastered by such a young, inexperienced Talent in such a whacking mess of danger. My previous master was an old, sedate wizard, and I had lived a very comfortable existence in the body of a bear.

  If Jessie died… oh Goddess, if she died I’d be trapped in the ferret, mute and practically powerless, for who knew how long. Even worse, the time wouldn’t count toward ending my servitude. I still had sixty years left on my sentence; if Jessie lived, she might be the last master I’d ever need to have before I earned my freedom.

  All that sounded a bit selfish, didn’t it? Of course I cared whether she lived or died—I’m not a monster! But I had only known her for a few hours; she was still virtually a stranger. Jessie
hadn’t yet had the chance to grow on me, not unlike a winsome fungus.

  So: I was determined to summon the cavalry, as Jessie would put it. I braced my back paws on the bottom of the phone and heaved it open. The buttons and screen lit up, and for a moment I could do nothing more than gape dumbly at them, trying to make sense of the device. I’d only seen cellular telephones on television. My previous master lived in the wilderness outside Whitehorse, Canada, and saw no need for modern technology. The old wizard had only grudgingly subscribed to satellite TV to keep his grandchildren entertained; I found myself watching quite a lot of American programming during my master’s afternoon naps.

  I had seen Jessie answer the call from the woman she called Mother Karen; perhaps I could get through to her. But how could I possibly communicate? The ferret’s throat could only produce clucks, chuckles, and hisses. What else would she understand? The old telegraph code, maybe? Would she understand the code for “SOS”? It was the best I could think to do.

  I found the button I hoped would redial the phone and pushed it with my forepaws. Soon I heard the other phone ringing.

  An older woman answered the phone: “Hello, Jessica?”

  I started clucking the short-short-short, long-long- long, short-short-short of an SOS.

  “Hello, who is this?”

  I kept clucking the SOS. A few seconds later the line went dead.

  I hissed in frustration, then crawled up under Jessie’s burned, sodden shirt and curled up over her heart. What little magical power I possessed in this wretched wisp of fur and meat I could use to keep her heart beating, but for how long? Her heart couldn’t pump air, and air was all she’d have left in her veins if her arm didn’t stop bleeding. If I’d still been in a bear—or better, an ape or monkey—I could have fashioned a tourniquet. Given my overseer’s dislike of me, though, I suppose I should be glad I hadn’t been put into a snake or toad.

  An eternity later, I heard a truck or van pull up close by. Booted feet thudded onto the pavement.