Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  Mt Jordan got up and left the room, left me staring down at the parchment. A few moments later I distantly heard him speak a few curt words to Mother Karen, and then the slam of the front door echoed down the hallway. Pal crawled out of the fern pot and onto my shoulder. My blind eye socket ached, and my missing hand felt like it was on fire.

  “You should sign that so we can get Mother Karen to take care of your arm,” Pal said.

  “No. I can’t. It’s not right.” I shook my head, trying to clear the cloud of regret and anxiety Jordan had stirred up. “I can’t believe the nerve of that guy, making me feel all guilty about letting Vicky down and then telling me I should abandon Cooper. And he comes in here acting like this bullshit is for my own good—does he really think I’ve forgotten he left me out there to die? Damn him to hell if he thinks I’m going to sign this.”

  I grabbed the parchment and tried to tear it in half with my teeth. It wouldn’t rip. Swearing, I balled it up in my hand and threw it behind the fern.

  “You do realize that signing that agreement is in your best interests right now?” Pal said, shifting his paws nervously.

  “You don’t actually think that jerk’s right, do you?”

  “No. I think he’s railroading you,” Pal replied. “It’s clear he’s going to do anything he can to keep you from even starting to look for Cooper. Which, considering you lack the experience to successfully find your master on your own in the first place, much less do battle with the horrors that surely lie wherever he’s gone, strikes me as a very suspicious kind of overkill.

  “But I think things will go badly for you if you don’t bow to Mr. Jordan’s wishes. And we have at best a slim chance of getting Cooper back in one piece. So I’d be derelict in my duties if I didn’t tell you that for your own sake you should sign the paper, find a new master with whom you are not likely to become romantically involved, and get on with your life.”

  “You said ‘we.’ Does that mean you’ll help me find Cooper, at least?” I asked.

  “It’s my mission to help you in any way that I can,” Pal said. “But I need to know that you understand that from here on out, life will be hard for you, and there might be no -good outcome to this. Your eye, your hand—that’s just the beginning of what you might lose.”

  I squeezed my fist. “I have to find him. It’s as simple as that. But first I gotta get myself bandaged back up; I wonder if Mother Karen has a sling?”

  chapter eight

  A New Record

  “I really think you should reconsider,” Mother Karen said, worried, as I worked at getting the Dinosaur’s dented door open. “You realize that, five minutes from now, I won’t be able to so much as take you to hapkido practice, right?”

  “I’m not going back to the dojo, not until this is over, anyway. Please give my apologies to the sensei, if you’re allowed to do that kind of thing,” I replied, alternately yanking and kicking the door.

  “Why not use a spell for that?” Karen asked.

  “Not as satisfying as brute force right now,” I replied, the door finally coming open with a metal-scraping squeak. “Hop on up,” I said to Pal, who jumped off the car’s roof to my good shoulder.

  Karen handed me my cell phone and a couple of extra boxes of gauze. “Don’t forget these—and try to keep that arm in the sling as much as possible the next few days.”

  “Thanks. And I will.” I tossed the boxes on the passenger seat and turned on my cell phone, expecting to see a message or two from the Warlock wondering what had happened to me and Cooper. But there was nothing: no messages, nor any missed-call alerts.

  “Did the Warlock call you while I was unconscious?” I asked.

  Mother Karen frowned. “No, he didn’t… were you expecting him to?”

  “Well, yeah, kinda. Cooper and I were supposed to get together with him for dinner, but then all the shit downtown happened.. . ah, hell, he probably met someone new at his bar to fall madly in bed with and he forgot about everyone else.”

  Feeling abandoned and frustrated, I clipped the cell phone to the waistband of the cast-off jeans.

  Mother Karen reached up and adjusted one of the bandages on my head. “The tissue’s still really thin over the bone, and if it tears you could get a pretty nasty infection. You won’t be able to get proper healer care, so if anything goes wrong you should see a physician.” Karen made a face. “They’ll want money—a lot of it—and half the time they don’t know what they’re doing. If all this goes on for more than a week, though, you’ll need to see someone about getting a proper glass eye and some corrective surgery.”

  “If any of this goes bad on me, I’ll have to try to take care of it myself… I don’t know anyone who has the money for regular surgery, much less plastic surgery,” I replied. “Our next-door neighbor got a bill for ten grand when he busted up his leg in a motorcycle accident. They only kept him overnight. We did what we could for him afterward, but if he’d had to rely on the hospital for care, he still wouldn’t be walking right.”

  “I’ve heard that hospital work is quite lucrative for healers,” Karen admitted. “I’ve never done it myself. I feel bad for all the people dying and crippled out there, but there’s not enough of us to take care of all of them. How do you choose who gets helped and who doesn’t? It seems to all hinge on money and class status; I’m just not comfortable with that.”

  “Cooper told me that most religious hospitals don’t let witches help, so I figure that limits things.”

  “Not as much as you’d think,” Karen replied. “The modern popes have gone from promoting witch hunts to publicly pretending we just don’t exist. Some doctors at Christian hospitals make quiet referrals for their sickest patients. Other hospitals have an attached wing that isn’t technically part of the hospital where they can do procedures that the church frowns upon. Important people can’t just be left to die, can they?”

  Karen looked sad and disgusted.

  “Speaking of fixing things,” I asked, eyeing the bandages over my stump, “got any advice for what to do if I do get an infection? I think this is starting to seep a little.”

  “I’d try a little spell with moldy cheddar and wood ash. But I’m afraid my time is up, and you’ve got to go.” Karen smiled sadly. “Your anathema light just came on.”

  “My what?”

  “Your anathema light,” Pal said. “It’s a sort of red, pulsing glow.”

  I looked down at myself; I didn’t see anything. “It’s all over me?”

  “All over, I’m afraid,” Mother Karen said. “Any Talent will see it, and know that they’re supposed to stay away from you. Nonmagical folks won’t be able to consciously sense it, but you might make them nervous. Strangers, anyway.”

  “Lovely. Well, we better get on home.” I got into the Dinosaur and awkwardly heaved the door shut. Pal hopped into the backseat.

  “Good luck to you, Jessica. For what it’s worth, I hope you can bring Cooper back.”

  “Me, too.” I started the car. “But if I don’t make it through this.. . name a kitten after me or something, okay?”

  Driving the Dinosaur with only one arm was rough, but I quickly learned to steady the steering wheel with my knees when I had to shift. I was halfway to the apartment when I realized the parchment and black-feathered pen were lying on the passenger seat beside the boxes of gauze. The contract still bore faint wrinkles from my attack on it in the conservatory.

  Had it followed me into the car?

  Was that thing in here when we left Mother Karen’s place? I thought to Pal, who was curled up in the backseat.

  “No,” Pal replied. “The seat was empty three minutes ago.”

  How did it find me? Are we being tracked? I thought of the phone at my waist—someone like Mr. Jordan could pretty easily tap its GPS chip to keep tabs on me.

  At least nobody else could listen in on what Pal and I were talking about, as long as I kept my own mouth shut. Although my brain interpreted his remarks as regular spe
ech, everything he said came to me telepathically, and the confidentiality of his discourse was protected by some of the most fundamental rules of our magical society. I remembered Cooper telling me that nobody on Earth—not even the governing circle—was allowed to tap telepathy between a familiar and his or her master. In extreme circumstances, the familiar’s otherworldly handlers could record the discourse, but there was a lot of wizardly red tape involved, and the handlers didn’t share information with Earthly magical authorities unless serious formal charges had been made.

  “There could be tracking spells on the car, or your clothes, or the parchment could be attuned to your unique physical or spiritual profile,” Pal replied. “Most likely, though, the tracking charm is simply part of the anathema spell.”

  Swell, I thought back. Well, for now, let’s pretend we don’t notice it. I bet they have the car bugged, too. I’d rather Mr. Jordan didn’t know what I have planned.

  “What do you have planned?” Pal asked.

  I’m still working on that one.

  “Ghetto, sweet ghetto,” I said aloud as I into the Northglade Apartments’ parking lot.

  The complex had been the pinnacle of trendy yuppiedom around the time I was born; now it was near the bottom of its slow decline. The air stank from the Budweiser plant down the street. Gutters glittered with bits of broken bottles. Tired-looking mothers watched broods of shrieking kids pounding across the weed-riddled blacktop in their supermarket sneakers.

  A couple of South American men in undershirts sat smoking Lucky Strikes on the front porch of one of the three-bedroom units. I knew they had probably ten guys sharing the place; they all held down two and three jobs apiece at nearby fast-food joints. What they didn’t spend on smokes or beer or food, they sent back home to their families. Half would come home to sleep while the others worked, hot-bunking like sailors on a submarine at war.

  The apartments had survived a decade of neglect because they were well built. They were quite spacious for the money, and in a complex full of screaming spouses and booming stereos and barking dogs, nobody ever complained about Cooper and me chanting (and sometimes blowing things up) at odd hours of the night.

  My neighbor Bo was out on his front porch in a frayed lawn chair, petting his pit bull Gee. She started wagging her tail furiously when she saw the Dinosaur pull up in the spot between Bo’s old truck and my little Toyota Celica.

  Gee was the sweetest-tempered dog I had ever known. Bo found Gee out in the country two years before; she’d been shot through the lung, and two of her legs and most of her ribs had been broken. Some Neolithic asshole had been beating and starving her to try to turn her vicious, and when she still wouldn’t fight, he shot her and left her for dead on the side of the road. Bo came knocking on our apartment door that night to see if we knew of a good veterinarian. Cooper numbed the dog’s pain, set her bones, and healed her.

  Later, when Gee was resting comfortably on a pile of old blankets in Bo’s apartment, Cooper told me he had an errand to run and left in the Dinosaur. He came back three hours later with swollen knuckles and something that might have been blood on the toes of his Doc Martens.

  He slept more peacefully that night than I had ever seen.

  “Yo, Jessie, ‘sup?” Bo waved at me as I killed the engine.

  “Oh, this and that,” I said as I forced the door open and slowly got out. The arm was starting to hurt something fierce again. Pal hopped up on my shoulder, mostly to avoid being slurped on by Gee as she came bounding over to greet me.

  “Sweet Jesus in heaven, girl, what happened to you?”

  “Had a little accident.” I paused, considering whether to tell Bo the truth or not. He’d known ever since we fixed up Gee that we used magic, but he’d agreed to keep quiet about it and hadn’t asked too many questions since then. I always got the feeling he was trying not to seem nosy.

  “Like a car accident? Where Cooper at? He okay?”

  I decided I was too tired and sore to lie. “You know the other night when there was that tornado downtown?”

  “Holy Jesus, you get caught up in that?”

  “Well, sort of.” I glanced around to make sure nobody else was in earshot. “Cooper and I were trying to call a rain shower, but we got a demon instead. The tornado was to cover up the damage the demon did. I got munched by the demon and Cooper got sucked off to another dimension. I don’t know if he’s okay or not.”

  Bo looked aghast. “You got your hand bit off?”

  “Lost my eye, too. Not a good night, all things considered.”

  “Can your folks fix that, like y’all fixed Gee and her leg?”

  “Yeah, they can, but for right now they’re not gonna. I’m kind of on everybody’s shitlist right now.”

  “Cause of all the damage downtown?”

  “Mostly because I want to find Cooper and bring him back, and Mr. Jordan doesn’t want him found.”

  “But Cooper’s your man, you got to try and find him. You gotta do right by family. It ain’t right that they wanna keep you from helping him.”

  “Yeah, it ain’t right, but that’s what they’re doing.”

  “Can I do anything? You two been real good to me and Gee. I got maybe fifty dollars to help with that,” he said, pointing at the paper taped to my door, “and I’ll get more at the end of the week. Miz Sanchez might be able to help, too. I know she’ll want to.”

  I walked to my door and pulled the paper off. It was an eviction notice. “Oh, this is just getting better and better.”

  “Don’t go gettin’ all stressed about that, now,” Bo said. “They always give an eviction notice first moment you’re late ‘round here. Takes ‘em six weeks to evict anyone, so they want to get a good early start on laying the hammer down on folks.”

  “They want a seventy-five-dollar late fee on top of the rent and the water bill,” I said, reading the notice. “That comes to seven hundred and thirty dollars. And they want it as a cashier’s check. Joy. I might be taking you up on that offer, Bo.”

  “No problem, just let me know,” he replied.

  I unlocked the door and stepped into the apartment. It had been built as the mirror image of Bo’s rental: a fairly basic two-bedroom town house with a drafty cinder-block basement. The bedrooms were spacious enough for most people, but got pretty cramped in a hurry if you had to find a place to put a library of arcana and a few hundred canisters of spell ingredients.

  Cooper and I had decided not to magically expand the interior of the apartment as Mother Karen had done with her house. We didn’t know if we’d be staying there more than another year or two, and undoing that kind of enchantment was complicated and noisy and tended to leave magical residue that would be disconcerting for future tenants.

  So Cooper bought a two-bedroom shack way out iii the woods in Athens County for a few thousand dollars, banished the termites and roaches and mold, and set up warding spells that would dissuade any rural burglar. He set up a trans-spatial door in the upstairs hallway of the apartment, and we were able to use the shack as our library, storeroom, and practice room.

  We could have expanded the shack and just kept a one-bedroom or efficiency apartment as a portal into the city, but we were concerned about people seeing us carry in boxes and furnishings that the apartment couldn’t possibly hold. Curious neighbors usually became nosy neighbors. Northglade was in a handy location and allowed dogs. At the time, the extra expense seemed trivial.

  “I better call Mr. Handley and see when I can get my paycheck,” I said to Pal as I locked the front door behind us. Pal clambered down and humped over to Smoky’s water bowl.

  I sat down on our love seat by the living room phone and punched in the number for my day job.

  Maria, the secretary, answered the phone. “Handley Construction, how may we help you?”

  “Hi, Maria, it’s Jessie… look, I had an accident earlier this week, and that’s why I missed work and didn’t call in. Is Mr. Handley there? Can I talk to him?”

&n
bsp; “Oh. Jessie.” Maria sounded uncomfortable. “I’ll … see if he’s available.”

  The line abruptly switched to easy listening.

  Pal humped into the living room. “I think something went bad in the kitchen… what’s going on?”

  “Not sure… she put me on hold.”

  The phone clicked silent for a moment, and then Mr. Handley was on the line: “I’m surprised you’d be calling here, Miss Feathers.”

  What was with the “Miss Feathers” stuff? “Hello, Mr. Handley, I just wanted to—”

  “Apologize for stealing three hundred dollars from petty cash? It’s a little late for that.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play innocent with me. Not after you lied on your job application about your criminal record,” he said.

  “I’m not a criminal. I didn’t steal from you,” I said, feeling lost at sea.

  “I’ve got a copy of your arrest details right here in front of me,” he replied sharply. “Don’t you know this kind of thing is a public record? You were convicted of misdemeanor theft twice in the past three years.”

  “No, I never—”

  “Stop. Please. The police tell me there’s not enough evidence to have you charged. And you’re not worth suing. I don’t want to see you or hear from you again, clear?”

  The line went dead. My heart was pounding in my ears.

  “What was that all about?” asked Pal.

  “I suddenly have a police record,” I replied, acid rising in my throat. “Everybody at Handley thinks I’m a liar and a thief. I’m a hundred shades of fired. Oh God. Where am I going to get rent money?”

  The farmers. Cooper and I did manage to call down rain, after all, and the tornado didn’t touch the farms. The three-thousand-dollar fee would solve my most immediate problems. I flipped through the telephone book until I found the co-op’s number.

  After a couple of minutes on hold, I was connected with Cooper’s farm contact, Mr. Maedgen.