The Warlock was waiting outside the restroom, slowly swirling the foam atop another tall mug of ale with his index finger. “That’s a very pretty aura,” he said to me.
“Yeah. I’m gonna try not to get anything on it.”
He coughed into his fist, looking uncharacteristically worried. He stared at the bandage across my eye socket for a couple of beats, then let his gaze slide to the floor. “Did Cooper ever see anyone about getting rid of his nightmares?”
I shook my head. “Not that I know of. He just tried to ride them out.”
“Figures. He was always so stoic about that stuff.” The Warlock chewed a corner of his mustache and stared off into the distance. The dark circles had deepened around his eyes.
Pal sniffed the air and shifted on my shoulder. “Ask him how long he’s been having the nightmares”
“Have… have you had a problem with bad dreams, too?” I asked.
The Warlock laughed humorlessly. “You could say that.”
“For how long?” I asked.
He shrugged. “On and off, as long as either of us could remember. Cooper’s had really flared up bad lately, huh?”
“You could say that,” I replied. “I started having them, too, but I can’t really remember them. Not sure I really want to. I got the impression that he tried to get rid of them a few years ago, but they wouldn’t budge, so what could he do?”
“He could have seen someone to have them amplified and illuminated,” the Warlock replied. “He could have done what I did and gone to see a dream specialist. It was hard, and not much fun, and yeah, a lot of the time it was a crapshoot. But after I learned about the little ‘problem’ with my soul, I started to wonder about what else I might be missing, and how my ignorance might end up biting me in the ass. So I went looking for people who could help me remember my dreams.”
He took a long drink from his mug. “I know why Cooper wouldn’t ever go with me to see the dream witch. It’s not easy learning things you never wanted to know. It was hell to bring all that crap up day after day. His soul was fine, far as either of us could tell, so I quit bugging him about it. But maybe it would have helped him head some bad stuff off at the pass, you know?”
Where’s he going with this? I wondered to Pal.
“I can’t fathom it yet,” my familiar replied.
“Do you think Cooper could have kept the accident downtown from happening if he’d had his dreams examined?” I asked the Warlock.
He ran his free hand through his curly hair and scratched his scalp, as if the subject made him itch. “It’s possible. No guarantees, though. Dreams for people like us are seldom pure prophecy. Glimpses of possible futures get jammed together with old memories and pure fantasies, and it’s hard to make useful sense of it all even if you can remember everything perfectly. But…”
I prompted after he’d been quiet for several seconds: “But what?”
“But. This day, the one you and I are having right now? I’ve dreamed a lot of this. At least fifty, sixty times. I’ve met you at this restroom door before. I know that I take you back upstairs next. I know what I’m going to show you next. And the dream always turns into any of a few nightmares after that.”
“Oh dear,” said Pal.
My mouth went dry. “So let’s do something else. Let’s not go upstairs. Let’s get out of here.”
He smiled at me grimly. “I learned to be a lucid dreamer. I’ve tried plenty of other paths before, and you know what? The nightmare’s worse if I don’t follow the script.
“So let’s go on up to my closet. If you’re going to Coop’s hell, we better kit you out properly.”
Should I go with him? I asked Pal, feeling shaken.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” he replied, “but if you’re still determined to find Cooper, I’m not sure we have many other options at the moment.”
I followed the Warlock upstairs into the apartment. He led me back down the impossibly long hallway to a wooden pocket door on the left side. The door unlatched at his gesture and slid open. Beyond the doorway was a spacious room of polished oak cabinets, shelves, and wardrobes. Clear, square skylights showed a majestic blue mountain vista—whether it was the Rockies or Himalayas or someplace unearthly I couldn’t tell. Boxes and books were stacked neatly on the shelves, and a variety of clothes and costumes hung from gleaming brass closet bars arranged in staggered layers from floor to ceiling.
“Nice closet,” I said.
“Thanks,” the Warlock replied. “Come on in and have a seat.” He made another gesture, and a red upholstered stool slid from beneath one of the shelves. I sat down while the Warlock opened a set of wardrobe doors. The brass handles were made to look like dragon’s heads.
“You can’t go to hell in a pair of old jeans and Chuck Taylors. What you need is dragonskin.” He reached inside the wardrobe and pulled out what looked like a frogged, high-collared Chinese jacket and drawstring pants made from smooth, iridescent brown leather instead of silk. They looked like they were tailored for a Mongol marauder the size of an NFL linebacker. “Here, try these on. I won’t look, promise.”
“Uh, those are like twenty sizes too big. . “They’ll be fine. Trust me. King Arthur would’ve given his right nut to own leathers like these.”
I looked from the Warlock to the dragonskin clothes. Do you think I should? I asked Pal.
“I don’t see any danger in this so far,” he replied.
The Warlock turned around. Pal ran down my right arm and hopped onto a nearby shelf, and I shucked off my shoes and jeans. I took the dragonskin pants off the steel hanger and pulled them on. To my surprise, they fit perfectly. I pulled off my sling and carefully slipped on the jacket. The left sleeve immediately shrank up to match my truncated arm.
“That’s pretty coo1,” I said, looking at the inside of the jacket; there were several small pockets sewn into the lining, two of which I could access by slipping my hand between the frogs when it was buttoned up.
“Good dragonskin is way more expensive than regular leather,” the Warlock said. “It’s waterproof, and resists fire, cold, and corrosives, and it’ll stop a knife blade or a .44 magnum. Do you think anyone wants to run the risk of their kit not fitting anymore just ‘cause they started hitting the gym or started tossing down one too many beers and burgers? Any decent set comes with a sizing enchantment.”
He ducked back into the wardrobe. “If you’d been wearing that when you faced the Wutganger, you’d probably still have your arm.”
“Then it’s a real shame you didn’t drop this little ensemble off for me a couple of weeks ago,” I said, bitterness filling my voice despite my best effort to keep it down. “Or warn me and Cooper not to go downtown in the first place.”
“That’s the bitch of dreams,” he agreed, still rummaging in the wardrobe. “Most times you can’t tell a serial nightmare from a precognitive alarm until the shit’s already dribbling onto the fan. Believe me, if I’d realized what was happening I would have gotten the word out to you two. Ah, here they are.”
The Warlock backed out of the wardrobe and straightened up, holding a pair of dark gray knee-high leather hobnail boots with English firedrakes embossed on the vamp and shaft. “These are older, and from a different dragon. Better protection from heat and cold and acids.”
He tossed the boots at my feet. I slipped them on over my pant cuffs, and they molded comfortably to my feet and calves.
“So how much did this stuff cost you?” I asked.
The Warlock laughed. “I won most of my dragon gear in card games when I was on my walkabout overseas. It pays to have a good bluff.”
“So how much would it cost you if you found it in a shop someplace?”
“Oh man, that’s hard to say… I’m guessing maybe fifty or sixty grand.”
“Sixty thousand dollars?” I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Right in that vicinity, yeah. It’s all a couple of centuries out of style, and well used—ob
viously— but wild dragons are a lot rarer than they used to be, so new stuff is really expensive.”
I stared down at the warm, shimmering leather. “I couldn’t pay you back in a zillion years if anything happened to this outfit.”
He laughed again. “Darling. Honey-buns. Sugar-pie. Please. I’m taking you to a hell. I don’t need another chunk chiseled off my immortal soul because I sent you in with less than all the protection I could give you. And it’s not like I’m using the gear for any death-defying heroics these days.” He looked a lot less cheerful than he sounded.
“Okay,” I replied, doubtful. I stuck my hand in the square front pocket and felt a piece of folded leather. Upon pulling it out, I saw that it was a thin, elbow-length dragonskin glove. I used my teeth to pull it on, then shook my sleeve back into place to cover it.
“Does he have any head protection for you?” Pal asked from the shelf. “You do have an unfortunate tendency to lead with your face.”
He barely managed to dodge the sneaker I threw at him.
“What’s that all about?” the Warlock asked. “Pal’s being a smart-ass. Yet he has a point. Do you have a helmet I can borrow so I don’t lose both eyes?” I asked.
“I have a lot of helmets you can try out. But… funny you should mention your eye.” He shivered, suddenly looking like a man on his way to the gas chamber.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“There’s… something I have to show you.” The Warlock went to an ornate wooden chest on a nearby shelf and unlocked it. He pulled out a red velvet bag, opened it, and dropped a pale green cat’s-eye chrysoberyl orb into his palm. It was about an inch in diameter. He held it up, the bright line in the middle of the silky stone glowing in the sunlight filtering down from the skylights. I could feel positively ancient magic humming inside the orb.
“That’s a most unusual piece,” Pal whispered from his perch, his eyes huge.
“I picked this little gem up twelve years ago,” the Warlock said, sounding strangely distant as he stared at the stone. His eyes seemed to go out of focus. “You ever see something and know you had to have it? Yeah. Only I knew it wasn’t really for me, it was for a girl I hadn’t even met yet. A girl with one eye. Funny… how… these things… work out…“
I couldn’t pull my own gaze from the gem. Mesmerized, I peeled the bandages off my face and head and dropped them on the floor. Popped the plastic ball out of my eye socket and carelessly let it fall to the carpet, then stood up and stepped toward the Warlock.
“Jessie, no!” Pal squeaked. “I can’t tell what that thing does!”
The Warlock dropped the orb into my outstretched palm.
“Jessie, for God’s sake stop!” Pal leaped off the shelf onto my arm. He bit down as hard as he could, trying to break the trance, but his small teeth didn’t even dent the dragon leather.
I impassively shook him off and slid the enchanted stone into my socket. It was like sticking a live wire into my raw skull. My head was humming, crackling with a witchfire net of fey lightning. Suddenly I was able to see through my dead socket, but what I was seeing couldn’t be the inside of the closet; it was way too bright, too many colors.
I let out a wordless scream and stumbled backward, clutching my socket, tripping over the stool, landing hard on my back. What the hell just happened?
The Warlock shook his head and blinked rapidly. His trance seemed to be broken. “Are you okay? Is it hurting you?”
“Get it out!” I pressed on my temple, but the orb didn’t budge. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, but it was sending an unpleasant electric buzz through my head into my spine. My tormented optical nerve was sizzling with hallucinatory ghost-images.
The Warlock bent over me and pulled my hand away to gaze down at the gem in my skull. He appeared in a weird double exposure. I saw him normally through my good eye, but the gem showed me a glowing black outline of his body with a small undulating blue torus floating inside. A section of the torus’s smooth surface was pitted as if a mouse had bitten into it and gnawed off a small piece.
“I think I’m seeing your soul,” I said, dazed.
“You’re supposed to be able to see a whole lot through that gem,” the Warlock said. “I never tried it out myself; didn’t feel like scooping out a perfectly good eye. But the guy who sold it to me said you change the magical aspect view by blinking hard. I mean hard hard; wouldn’t do for the thing to get triggered every time you get a bit of dust under your lid.”
“I can’t blink. I lost my eyelid along with my eye,” I replied, feeling increasingly upset as I realized what had just happened. I’d been charmed, tricked into putting a strange magical device inside my own body. The situation was a hundred shades of wrong. The Warlock frowned. “But your eyelid’s right there.”
Pal ran up onto my chest and peered at me anxiously. He was outlined as a spider through the gem, his soul a blooming rose of intricately looped rotating golden chains. “He’s right. Your eyelid’s grown back.”
“For real?” I tried to close my eye; the muscles didn’t respond right away, as if the nerves had been miswired, but after a couple of seconds I managed a hard blink. When I opened my eye, the gemsight showed the room glowing in various shades of gold. I was fascinated despite myself. “Weird.”
Pal cocked his head at me. “I have to say that eyelid looks a bit, er, abnormal.. .“
“Abn—oh fuck me.” I lurched to my feet. Pal scrambled to cling to my shoulder. “I need a mirror.”
The Warlock beckoned me to a jewelry chest and raised the lid so I could look into the mirror inside. I tried to ignore the gemsight as I stared at my socket. The eyelid that had grown back didn’t look like anything that ought to be on a healthy human being. The skin was red, the ragged lashes pointing out in all directions. At first glance the lid looked as though it might simply be scarred, but I realized the skin was mottled and covered with a fine layer of translucent gray scales. I pulled off the dragonskin glove with my teeth so I could touch my new eyelashes; they felt more like spines than hairs.
Suddenly feeling very, very cold, I grasped the orb with my thumb and forefinger and tried to pull it out. It was firmly rooted in my head.
“It’s hooked into your muscles and nerves by now,” the Warlock said, sounding resigned. “It’s not going to come out without surgery.”
I turned on him, scared and furious. “What the hell did you put inside me?” I hollered.
“I didn’t—”
“Yes you did! It was yours and you knew what would happen! It took me over and now it’s stuck and I hate it!”
“But in the dream—”
“Fuck you and your dream!” The bright ghosts from the orb lit my rage like a blowtorch on dry tinder. I hauled my arm back and socked him in the mouth as hard as I could.
“Jessie!” Pal exclaimed.
My punch rocked the Warlock backward on his heels, his lower lip split. He tried to grab my arm. “Whoa there—”
I stepped forward and kneed him in the groin. The Warlock grunted and doubled over in pain. I kneed him in the side of his head, knocking him over, and fell on him in a blind rage, punching him in the head again and again. I felt his nose crunch beneath my fist. Blood spilled down his face onto his chest and his velvet bathrobe.
“Jessie, no!” Pal shrieked, clinging to my collar and trying to avoid the Warlock’s defensive flailing. When I didn’t stop, Pal bit me on the ear, hard.
“Ow, crap!” I exclaimed, swatting Pal.
That was enough distraction for the Warlock to knock me sideways and get my arm and wrist in a joint lock behind my back. I swore at him long and hard and struggled to get free, but he forced me down on my knees.
“Cool. De fug. Down,” he said sternly. “You broge my node.”
“So did your dream warn you about that?” I snapped.
“Yes, as a madder of fag Id did.”
“Jessie, for goodness’ sake calm down,” pleaded. “You’re not helping anything.”
I trembled in the Warlock’s grip. “What’s in my head?”
“No more hittig?” he asked, shaking me. “No more hitting,” I agreed, slumping forward. He released me and pulled a crumpled light blue bandanna out of the left pocket of his black jeans and gingerly blew some of the bloody Snot out of his nose. “I godda get Opal to figs dis. Stay here. Don’ touch anythig.”
He strode past me out the door as I tried to shake off the soreness in my fingers, wrist, and arm. My knuckles were swelling red and blue, bruised despite all my heavy bag work at the dojo. Hoping the pressure would keep my hand from swelling up too much, I pulled the dragonskin glove back on. I blinked through several gem views until the room around me looked mundanely normal.
“Well, that could’ve gone better,” Pal said. “I understand your being frightened by the compulsion charm on that Stone, but our allies are in short supply right now. It’s best not to attack them, yes?”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Your apologies are best given to the Warlock when he comes back.”
“Yeah. I know.” The gem was still jittering little waves of not-quite-pain through my head. I pressed against it to see if pressure would make it stop. It didn’t help a bit. “What is this thing, anyway? Should I be worried it’s going to take over my brain or something?”
“Well, it’s obviously an ocularis; they used to be much more common centuries ago when people were more prone to losing eyes than they are now. Back then, it was often far cheaper to purchase a used ocularis than to seek the assistance of a master healer. The most common types simply gave the user normal sight; multiple viewing modes are hard to enchant, and expensive to acquire. They typically do not come with compulsion charms, much less charms strong enough to influence trained Talents. That’s certainly worrisome,” Pal replied.
I continued to press on the stone in the vain hope it would stop humming. “So do you think this ocularis was built with the charm from the start, or reenchanted?”
“I couldn’t say. I’m far from an expert on these things, I’m afraid.”
Spellbent Page 20