Leashing the Tempest

by Jenn Bennett

  He tried again. “I was doing a lot of coke. I wasn’t in my right mind. I didn’t think she really meant forever, you know? Then I got set up by that damned hedonist erotic cruise company and went to jail for six months . . .” He turned to Lon with a thoroughly misguided help-a-brother-out look. “Nothing lasts forever. Everyone deserves a second chance. I mean, obviously that kid isn’t hers,” he said, nodding back at me. “Everyone makes mistakes, right?”

  Lon gave the captain a look black enough to wilt flowers. “My kid is not a mistake.”

  “There is no mistake,” the three demon heads said. “You understood the bargain, Richard. I did not force you to make this agreement. You entered into it willingly.” The heads swiveled toward me. “And you cannot keep me here forever. This trap will eventually break, and when it does, I will take my revenge on everyone here unless you free me willingly and give me my Richard.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Don’t threaten me. I didn’t wiggle out of a bargain with you. And if we wait for a few hours, when night falls I can solve everyone’s problems and send you back to the Æthyr.”

  The captain stood taller. “You can do that? Send her back?”

  “She did not summon me,” the demon said. “Therefore she cannot send me back.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t know me: I rack up a few extra skills when the moon’s out, so that little rule doesn’t apply. I’ve sent others back. I reckon I can send you, too.”

  At that Onna turned from haughty to pleading, sounding almost like a teenage girl. “No! I do not want to go back! This is my home now, and I’ve done nothing wrong!”

  “You killed those two women!” the captain said.

  “They were whores, not women. And I was protecting what was rightfully mine.”

  “Diz-amn,” Jupe whispered.

  The captain scooted down the wall, sidestepping the binding. “You have to send her back or she’ll kill me. Probably kill you all, too. That’s why I had the ward built. Once she’s got your scent, she’ll never let you go. First it was just my room, for some privacy. Then I had to do the whole ship.”

  “Or I could just let her have you,” I said.

  The captain’s mouth fell open. “You wouldn’t.”

  He was right about that. I glanced at Jupe. That would be a fine lesson to teach the kid.

  No, I wasn’t going to feed the captain to the demon, though it was awfully tempting. I mean, on one hand, he was an asshole and had put us all in danger by not being upfront about his boat being a magnet for pissed-off three-headed zombie mermaids he’d screwed over. Then again, Jupe was the one who turned the captain into a temporary coma patient—which was the reason his weather trick stopped working and lightning took out the ward . . . so it was pretty much the kid’s fault this all happened.

  And if I’d learned one thing from my short time with Lon, it was that it’s never the kid’s fault. Sure, he’d get grounded later when—if—we made it home. But whatever brand of crazy trouble Jupe managed to kick up, Lon always took the blame. “My kid, my problem” he always said.

  Even if I wasn’t the birth mother, I supposed Lon’s problem was my problem now, too.

  But did the Rusalka deserve to be sent back to the Æthyr? After all, she was the wronged party in this whole creepy scenario.

  “I may not continue to exist if you send me back,” she said, as if sensing my sympathy.

  Super. Now I was supposed to worry about a dead demon not being able to live her carefree zombie life? “Look,” I said, feeling more like a divorce counselor than a mage. “Why do you even want this guy? Look at him. He’s fat and balding and old—”

  “I’m only fifty,” he argued.

  I shot him an annoyed look. Trying to help you, Mr. Hotlegs.

  “The point is, he’s no prize. He’s probably going to drop dead of a drug-induced heart attack before the next decade’s over.”

  “His body pleases me,” the demon said.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Kar Yee mumbled.

  “Now I understand why people need a safe word,” Jupe added. “Because if I had one, I’d sure as hell be saying it right now.”

  Lon groaned. This was not something any of us wanted to picture.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, then tried to reason with the demon again. “All I’m saying is that he’s not your soul mate. You deserve better than this. You deserve a husband that cares about you. Someone who wants to, uh, visit you every fortnight or so.”

  “You can do better,” Kar Yee said. “A lot better.”

  I shrugged at the demon. “You don’t really want this deadbeat. Do you?”

  Three heads turned toward the captain, all of them wearing angry frowns. After a long moment, she said, “I suppose not.”

  The captain slumped against the wall, a look of absolute relief slackening his face.

  “Release him from his pact and find someone new,” I encouraged the demon.

  She paused for a moment, thinking. “On one condition. He must bring me new men every fortnight until I chose a new husband.”

  The captain made a face.

  “Sounds fair to me,” Kar Yee said.

  “Only if you give me your word that you will not kill him, or the men he brings,” I said. Then added, “Or anyone else on this boat.”

  “I give you my word and solemn oath,” she said.

  I nodded, then spoke to Christie. “Go on. Promise her you’ll bring her potential husbands.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “You’ll think of a way. Start your own ‘hedonists cruise’—I don’t care.” The local Hellfire Club would be all over that shit; he could make a small fortune.

  “All right, I promise,” the captain said unhappily.

  I looked at Lon. “Can we trust her?”

  “She’s not lying.”

  “I do not break my promises,” Onna said, slanting accusing eyes toward Christie.

  A loud noise made me jump. It took me a moment to realize that it was a horn blaring, and it was coming from outside the yacht. Jupe stood on the bunk and stuck his face in the porthole window. “Coast Guard! We’re saved!”

  A collective sigh of relief circled the room. Holy Mother of God, was I happy.

  “You’d better hurry,” Lon said.

  Yeah. Probably not wise to have a demonic monster trapped inside the boat while we were being rescued.

  Lon skirted the trap and stood guard in front of Kar Yee and Jupe, flare gun in hand, while I palmed his pocketknife . . . just in case. Then I did my best to look at all three pairs of Onna’s eyes and said, “I accept your oath and honor mine in return. You are free to go.”

  I swiped one bare foot across a corner of the triangle, breaking the binding.

  Onna shook herself like a wet dog and jumped out of the trap. Quick as a whip, she lunged at Christie and pinned the man to the wall. He shouted out in terror and turned his head to the side.

  Onna wrapped webbed fingers around his chin and forced him to look up at her. “You broke all three of my hearts, Richard. If you fail to honor this new oath to me, this time I will tear your skin from your bones and bury you alive at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” he mumbled.

  “Goodbye, Richard. I will see you in a fortnight.”

  She spun around and surveyed the room, then bowed her heads at me, one after the other. “If we meet again, I will hold you in regard as an honest mage.”

  Awesome, and God I hoped that never happened.

  And with that, she exited the room and disappeared down the hallway as a muffled voice called out to the Baba Yaga through a megaphone.

  • • •

  It took hours to sort everything out with the Coast Guard. Lon gave them an official statement about the lightning strike—omitting details regarding both Jupe’s and the captain’s knacks and, of course, Onna. While Christie led them around for an inspection of the yacht’s damage, we waited for a dispatched towboat
to haul the dead Baba Yaga away. Once we got back to La Sirena, Christie was taken to the hospital for concussion tests. He started to tell us goodbye, but took one look at the displeasure on Lon’s face and thought better of it.

  After seeing Kar Yee back to her car, Lon, Jupe, and I piled in Lon’s SUV and headed back home. The dashboard clock said it was after nine. It felt like one of the longest days of my life.

  “Seat warmers, please,” I begged. My clothes were still a little damp beneath the blanket the Coast Guard had provided.

  “On it,” Lon said as he fiddled with controls and pulled out of the nearly empty boardwalk parking lot onto Ocean Avenue. Everything around was closed and dark, apart from the lights crowning the walls of Brentano Gardens Amusement Park across the street.

  “Okay, lay it on me,” Jupe said from the backseat. “How much trouble am I in?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Lon said as headlights from a passing car beamed slices of light across his face. “But it’s probably going to involve manual labor and all of your weekends until Christmas spent indoors.”

  Jupe sighed dramatically. “I thought so. I bet Kar Yee never wants to spend time with us again.” Oh, he was probably right about that. He blew out a long breath and crossed his arms over his chest. “I wish we’d never gone.”

  Dammit. Even though he’d acted like an asshat today, I hated seeing him all dejected and mopey. He was a hot mess, sure, and I knew his dad was secretly fantasizing about dumping him on the side of the road, but I just couldn’t help it: the kid turned me into Silly Putty.

  “Look on the bright side,” I said. “We did learn a few things today.”

  “Like that I was right about the mermaid ghost?”

  God help us, we’d never hear the end of that.

  “Like that your knack doesn’t last forever,” I said. “And you might not be able to correct a command once you’ve given it.”

  “In other words, never tell someone they’re brainless when I’m using my knack.”

  “No,” Lon corrected. “Never use it in anger.”

  “Or carelessly,” I added.

  “Just don’t use it at all,” Lon said gruffly.

  Jupe grimaced. “I’m actually okay with that. But I do have one request.”

  “What’s that?” Lon asked.

  “Let’s forget about buying a boat.”

  “Forgotten.”

  Jupe stuck his head between our seats. “Instead, I think we should bring the water to us. How ’bout a swimming pool in the backyard? You know, like Jack’s? An infinity pool.”

  “Not a chance,” Lon said.

  “Hot tub?”

  “How about we just go home, light a fire in the fireplace, and watch a movie?” I said.

  “Wine,” Lon added. “Lots and lots of wine.”

  Jupe raised his hand. “Only if I can pick the movie.”

  “Fine,” I said, reaching back to twine my fingers around his. “Which movie?”

  “It’s an Italian horror flick from 1973. It’s about a photographer who falls under the spell of a witch.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  “Sounds familiar,” Lon said, darting his eyes toward mine.

  “What’s it called?” I asked.

  “Baba Yaga,” Jupe said with a grin.

  I groaned as Lon slowly shook his head at Jupe in the rearview mirror. “I should’ve sold you to the Russians when I had the chance.”

  Check out where it all began with an excerpt from the first Arcadia Bell Novel

  Kindling the Moon

  I knew better than to be preoccupied when Tambuku Tiki Lounge was overcapacity. Crowds are ugly; it doesn’t matter if they’re human or demon.

  Our bar held a maximum of sixty-five people per California fire code. My business partner treated this rule as more of a suggestion on Thursday nights, when Paranormal Patrol made us a midtown hot spot. Easy for her; all she had to do was sweet-talk the county inspector out of a citation. She wasn’t the one being expected to break up drunken, demonic brawls.

  “Hey!” My eyes zeroed in on a college kid stealing a drink off the bar. “Did you pay for that? No, you didn’t. Get your grubby paws off.”

  “That woman left it,” he argued. “Possession’s two-thirds of the law.”

  “Nine-tenths, jackass,” I corrected, snatching the ceramic Suffering Bastard mug out of his hand. An anguished face was molded into the side of the classic black tiki mug, half filled with a potent cocktail bearing the same name. When I dumped the contents in a small bar sink, the kid acted like I’d just thrown gold in the trash. He glared at me before stomping across the room to rejoin his broke buddies.

  If I were a bartender in any other small bar in the city, I might be encouraged on occasion to double as a bouncer. As the only trained magician on staff at Tambuku, I didn’t have a choice; it was my responsibility. After two years of sweeping up broken glass and trying to avoid projectile vomit, I’d seen enough demons-gone-wild behavior that would make a boring, corporate desk job appear attractive to any normal person. Good thing I wasn’t normal.

  “Arcadia? Cady? Hello?”

  Amanda leaned across an empty bar stool, waving her hand in front of my face.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said that I need another Scorpion Bowl for booth three. Jeez, you’re distracted tonight,” she complained, unloading two empty wooden snack dishes from her tray before circling around the L-shaped bar top to join me.

  “How wasted are they?” I craned my neck to see the booth while scooping up Japanese rice crackers from a large bin.

  “They’ve passed over the halfway mark, but they aren’t there yet. No singing or fighting.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with a dirty bar towel. Amanda was one of three full-time waitresses we employed at Tambuku. Tall, blond, tan, and permanently outfitted with a stack of worn, braided hemp bracelets circling her wrist, she looked like the stereotypical California girl.

  Her family had lived on the central coast for several generations in La Sirena, a small beach community thirty minutes away from the city; it captured its bewitching namesake with photo-worthy vistas of the rocky coastline and the blue Pacific that bordered it. Her parents had a ceramics studio there, and we’d commissioned them to make most of our tiki mugs and bowls, which now sat in neat rows on bamboo shelves behind the bar.

  “I’m more concerned about the couple at hightop three.” Amanda peered into the cracked mirror over the cash register that allowed me to watch the bar when I had my back turned; she poked a few stray wisps of hair back into her braid.

  Keeping our specialized clientele happy without sending them into a drunken frenzy was difficult at times. I strained to get a look at Amanda’s hightop couple, two women who were red-faced with laughter. One of them had dropped something under the table and, after retrieving it, was having trouble getting her ass back up onto her chair. They were verging on sloppy drunk, so I made a mental note to cut them off. Still, my money was on the obnoxiously loud group at booth three.

  Amanda waited while I constructed the four-person Scorpion Bowl from brandy, two kinds of rum, and fresh juices. When no one was looking, I smuggled in a few drops of a tincture derived from damiana leaf, one of my medicinals that I kept stashed away in a hidden compartment behind the bar. Most of these were brewed from basic folk recipes, steeped herbs and macerated roots. They soothed nerves, calmed anger, or sobered the mind. Nothing earth-shattering. Well, mostly . . .

  A few were intensified with magick. Spells in liquid form, I guess you might say. Just as perfume smells different in the bottle than on a person’s skin, magical medicinals react with body chemistry and produce unique results; the same medicinal that creates a mildly lethargic feeling in one person might put someone else in deep sleep. Sometimes I had to experiment to find the right one for the job. The one I was using now, the damianatha, has a calming effect that usually wears off pretty fast; I often use it to quell potential bar fights.

  I didn’t fe
el guilty about dosing people without their permission. I had a business to protect, and the sign at the entrance—marked with the two interlocking circles that formed a Nox symbol, identifying us as a demon-friendly establishment—did clearly say ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  After putting away the damianatha, I strained the enhanced concoction into a serving bowl. Inside the ceramic volcano that rose up from the center, I floated a sugar cube soaked in 151-proof rum on top of an orange slice. When we first opened Tambuku, I’d light the Scorpion Bowls right there at the bar, until Amanda once caught her hair on fire during the trek to the table. Now I make her light it herself once she gets there. Not as dramatic, but much safer.

  “Almost time for the show,” Amanda noted as she searched her pockets for a lighter. “I think there’s only that one table of savages to get rid of before it starts. Can you check?”

  Savages. Slang for humans who didn’t believe in anything paranormal . . . which would be most humans. Savages didn’t believe in magick, and they certainly didn’t believe that a small but growing group of the population was made up of demons.

  I double-checked to make sure Amanda was right about the lone table of savages, and she was. Just a group of women dressed in corporate-gray suits, probably trying out the “wacky” tiki bar down the street from their office. “They’ll leave. Shouldn’t be an issue.” And apart from them, Amanda and I were the only nonsavage humans in the bar. I tossed four extra-long straws into the Scorpion Bowl, and she whisked it away on her tray.

  Now, when I say demons, I don’t mean big, bad evil creatures with horns and tails and rows of bloodstained teeth. Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of demons exist, safely tucked away on another plane; Æthyric demons can be summoned by talented magicians, such as myself, with the proper rituals and seals. Nevertheless, the Earthbounds that patronized my bar were much lower down on the supernatural food chain.

  Apart from their minor demonic abilities, which vary from demon to demon, the only distinguishing feature of an Earthbound demon is a glowing arc of light around the head: a halo.

  Yep, that’s right. Demons have halos. Everything preternatural does. Not a static, detached ring like you see in religious paintings, but more of a diffused, colorful cloud. Surprised? I might have been, the first time I saw an Earthbound, back in Florida, when I was a kid . . . that is, if I hadn’t already seen my own halo in the mirror. I’m not demon. Just different. My conception was kinda weird. Okay, it was really weird, but the point is that my parents weren’t all that surprised to discover I had a halo; they were just surprised that I could actually see it. They couldn’t, but that’s because humans can’t see halos. They are basically color-blind when it comes to detecting preternatural visual markers. But just because you can’t see ultraviolet light doesn’t mean it’s not there.