Binding the Shadows

by Jenn Bennett

  “Sorry to interrupt, but here it is,” Bob said, looking at the x ray of Kar Yee’s chest on his flickering computer screen. On the wall above, several framed certificates hung in black frames. Universities and state licenses . . . all belonging to his father, Hector Hernandez. Bob had gone to medical school when he was younger—he was in his thirties now—and dropped out. My guess was that he had a good deal more medical knowledge than the average person, but healing surface wounds or simple bone breaks was one thing. Messing around with hearts and brains and complicated diseases was another matter altogether.

  Lon and I looked at the screen over his shoulder. “Find anything?”

  “Look, right here. Clean fractures”—his fingernail tapped the screen twice—“one and two. You were right, Kar Yee. Both clavicles.”

  “Can you heal them?” she asked.

  Bob’s mouth twisted to one side as he smoothed a palm over his dark hair. “I healed Tamille Jackson’s broken toe two weeks ago.”

  “So, that’s a yes?”

  “Doesn’t look like any bones shifted,” he mumbled to himself, squinting at the computer screen. “And I think it usually takes two or three months for this kind of fracture to heal naturally. I might be able to cut that down to a few weeks.”

  “Weeks?” She sounded horrified.

  Bob’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. You could feel back to normal in a few days, but you certainly aren’t going to be able to unload a truck at the bar.”

  “Cady unloads the trucks,” she said, all matter-of-fact. “How long before I can move my arms?”

  Bob looked at me and shrugged, the grinning Tiki masks on his Hawaiian shirt moving up, then dropping.

  “Probably a few days, yeah, Bob?” I said, rolling my hand in an encouraging gesture out of Kar Yee’s sight.

  “Definitely,” he said, shaking his head with a panicked look on his face.

  Didn’t matter if it was true or not. It was just what she wanted to hear.

  “Let’s get to it, then,” she said. “I’ve got to work tomorrow.”

  The only work she’d be doing was sleeping. I wondered if I could pay Bob to sit with her and make sure she didn’t leave her apartment—I certainly couldn’t babysit her and take care of all the crap at the bar. I still had to call the employees who were scheduled to work and tell them what happened. Find someone to clean up the red latex pool on the floor. Contact the artist who originally painted the binding traps. And as Bob cracked his knuckles and prepared to work his healing mojo on Kar Yee, I added another line to tomorrow’s ever-expanding to-do list: talk to the owners of the convenience store down the street.

  I sat on a rickety examination stool, Lon’s hands on my shoulders as we watched Bob leaning over Kar Yee. And even with everything going on, all I could think about was the eerie whispering I’d heard when I used the Moonchild power in the bar . . . and the terrifying feeling that something had jumped through the Æthyr and crawled down my leg.

  Bob did his healing mojo on Kar Yee, then we knocked her out with some oxycodone he found in his father’s prescription drug stash. We figured that was more stable than my home-brewed medicinal. And though Lon offered to hire a nurse to sit with Kar Yee for a few days, Bob volunteered before I even had a chance to ask.

  The next day, I woke thinking about my mother and the last time I’d seen her, when I was handing her over to Nivella, the albino demon who took her and my father to the Æthyr. If anyone could confirm my mother had died after she’d crossed the veil, it would be the demon who killed them. And, since I was a talented magician, I could simply summon up Nivella by using her glass talon, now sitting in a safe in Lon’s library.

  Easy peasy.

  But when Lon swung open the heavy door to the wall safe, he spotted a problem I hadn’t anticipated: the glass talon no longer had a soft pink glow of Æthyric Heka surrounding it.

  “This doesn’t look good,” I said, hefting the crystal claw in my hand. “Why would the Heka disappear?”

  Lon stared at it for several moments. “Only one reason I know of.”

  Me too, but I tried anyway, just in case. I spent half an hour constructing a strong binding inside a summoning circle. I had Nivella’s name, class, and her talon—everything that should’ve been needed to call her from the Æthyr. But the albino demon did not come when I called.

  Nivella was dead.

  • • •

  Anxious and stressed, I rode back to Morella with Lon that afternoon in his black pickup. In the back was a generator he had in storage, just to help me get some temporary lighting in the bar. I spent most of the ride thinking about my mother. Just because Nivella was dead didn’t mean that my mother was necessarily alive. The demon could’ve tortured my parents to death and died later of something unrelated.

  That’s what I told myself, several times, until Lon turned on the radio to distract me. A local news station was reporting Tambuku’s robbery, along with several others in the area. It pissed me off, to be honest. Why couldn’t we make the news for winning some award or hosting a noteworthy event? Seemed like my failure to catch the robbers was being broadcast for the world to hear. Look at the mighty magician: she couldn’t stop two douchebags from maiming her business partner and making off with the register!

  After we set up the generator in the alley, I left Amanda and one of our busboys to wait for the electrician to show up and fix our fuse box. Lon and I walked two blocks over to the corner shop that had been robbed.

  Like many of the businesses in this area of the city, Diablo Market had a small Nox symbol on its sign, indicating it was demon-friendly. It had once been a run-of-the-mill place to buy Cokes and candy bars, and beneath the counter, cheap valrivia and the latest issue of Savage Shemales. Last year it remodeled and started carrying overpriced organic juice and Brazilian chocolate. I liked it better when it was trashy.

  We waited in front of a coffee house for the walk signal to flash so we could cross the street to the market. One of the baristas waved at me through the front window. Davey. He was a couple years younger than me and cute in a starving-artist, nice-guy kind of way.

  Lon made a small noise. Passing cars kicked up a wind that blew open his thin, brown leather jacket, revealing a taupe T-shirt tucked into jeans. My eyes dropped to his fly. This particular pair of jeans, though pricy enough to be hanging around the hips of a male model, had a permanent, whirlpool-shaped dark mark below his belt buckle, caused by developer chemicals in his darkroom. I swear he wore them on purpose to distract me.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Huh?” I tore my eyes away from Lon’s hypnotic dark spot to see him jerking his head toward the coffee shop window, his gold-and-green halo trailing. “Oh, that’s nobody.”

  “Well, nobody sure is staring pretty hard at you.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  Green eyes squinted down at me. “Then why are you embarrassed?”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” I protested, but I totally was.

  “And why is he jealous?”

  I glanced at Davey through the glass and gave him a tight smile while speaking to Lon. “You can’t possibly read his feelings this far away . . . can you?” We were a good twenty feet from Davey. No way his empathic knack worked from this distance.

  “He’s got a jealous look on his face,” Lon explained.

  “Oh,” I said, a little relieved. For a moment, I wondered if Lon’s knack was getting stronger. If this enhanced-knack phenomenon was affecting all Earthbounds, I’d be in some major trouble. “Davey and I went out once. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “He’s a kid,” Lon grumbled. “Probably doesn’t even have to shave.”

  And a year ago, I would’ve laughed at the idea of dating a man Lon’s age, but now . . . well, I couldn’t disagree: Davey seemed like a kid to me, too. “I said we went out once. There was a reason for that.”

  “Which was?”

  I glanced down at his dark swirl again, then met his gaze.
“No chemistry.”

  Lon tried—and failed—to suppress a cocky look while the streetlight turned yellow. I pulled his jacket closed, then jumped when he cupped two bossy palms around my ass.

  “Hey,” I protested weakly.

  He gave my cheeks a slow squeeze. “Just want to show the scrawny barista what he’s missing.”

  “If I knew you were so fond of PDA, I’d have never taken up with you.”

  “Liar.”

  I chuckled.

  “Hey,” he said. “Stop worrying about things you can’t control. If your mother is alive, we’ll deal with it.”

  I gave him a soft smile. “You’re my favorite person, you know.”

  “You’re my favorite person, too.”

  Our private code. A normal couple would’ve already exchanged the L-word, but Lon was uncomfortable expressing emotions. Being constantly bombarded with everyone else’s feelings made him apprehensive about wearing his heart on his sleeve. I also wondered if his failed marriage made him guarded. Understandable, if it did. But no way was I saying it first, regardless of how I felt. Besides, this worked just fine for us.

  “Light’s changing,” he said, letting his fingers trail over my back as he released his grip on me. “Come on.”

  Holding his hand, I matched his stride, ponytail swinging across my shoulders, and stuffed my free hand inside the pocket of my black hoodie. It had an embroidered dragon on the back and the word KOREA curved over it in big block letters—something Jupe and I found in a Morella thrift store a couple weeks back.

  The handwritten sign on the market’s door looked similar to the one I’d stuck on my bar’s: CLOSED TEMPORARILY FOR REPAIRS. WILL REOPEN NEXT WEEK. Yet, the lights were on inside, unlike at Tambuku. I rapped on the door until a stooped-over elderly Latino man with a dark green halo peeped from behind a rack of freeze-dried fruit snacks. I waved and smiled.

  “We’re closed,” he shouted through the glass. He was dressed in a loose pink panama shirt and khakis. No shoes.

  “I’m the owner of Tambuku Tiki Lounge down the street,” I yelled back.

  He looked at me as if to say “So?”

  “We got robbed last night, too.”

  That got his attention. He clicked open a lock and cracked the door, tossing a wary glance over my shoulder at Lon. “You got robbed, you say?”

  “Yeah. Around midnight. I was wondering if I could talk to you and compare notes. Maybe it was the same people.”

  He glanced up and down the block, then waved us inside and locked the door behind. I winced at the smell. Rotten milk? A large plastic bin on casters was filled with leaking melted gourmet ice cream and boxes of no-cheese gluten-free frozen pizza. A couple of young boys were emptying their freezer display.

  “Our electricity was out for too long,” the man explained, waving a grizzled hand toward the boys. “We lost everything perishable.”

  “Us, too. My lights aren’t back on yet. I’ve got a guy replacing the fuse box. My name’s Cady, by the way, and this is my boyfriend, Lon.”

  “Andrew,” he answered, glancing up at Lon’s strangely gilded halo, then at my silver one—clearly he was curious, but not enough to straight-up ask. That was my general experience, anyway. Many Earthbounds even assumed I was one of them, just . . . different. “They did a number on us, as you can see.” He pointed toward the checkout counter. The entire area looked as if a tornado had ripped through it. The glossy wood countertop was splintered and tilted into an upside-down V. The register was missing, and a big black safe jutted up out of the middle of the destruction.

  “Christ,” Lon muttered.

  Andrew settled both hands on his hips and sighed dramatically. “My wife and I have owned this store for twenty years. We’ve been robbed at gunpoint twice. Thought we were done with that after the remodel.” He turned to me. “How did yours happen—your robbery? Guns?”

  “No guns,” I said.

  He gestured to my halo, finally acknowledging it. “You’re the magician who binds Earthbounds.”

  I gave him a soft smile. “I am.”

  “People talk,” he said by way of explanation, turning his attention to re-stacking a fallen display of all-natural beeswax lip balms. “Tell me about your robbery.”

  “Two Earthbound kids. Late teens, maybe. One blond, one dark-headed. Both faces were painted in theater makeup. A reindeer and an elf.”

  “A horse and some sort of frog,” he said in agreement, referring to his robbers.

  Could’ve been the same get-ups. It was, after all, really bad makeup.

  Andrew’s mouth twisted briefly. “Did the blond boy poof! your electricity?”

  “Yep. I’ve never seen a knack that powerful. The other boy used telekinesis to lift my till drawer across the room.”

  The shop owner nodded slowly. “He tried to lift the damn safe straight up through the counter.”

  Thank God we kept Tambuku’s safe in the back office. Those punks might’ve made it out of the bar with a thousand dollars or so, but they missed five grand in the safe. Idiots.

  Andrew continued, saying, “He nearly killed one of my girls who was stuck behind the register when he was trying to lift that thing. Thank God she had the sense to crawl away.”

  “He slopped paint all over our floor and my partner slipped and broke her collarbones.”

  Two thick gray eyebrows shot up. “The pretty Chinese gal?”

  I nodded.

  He made a sympathetic noise.

  “She’ll be okay,” I assured him. “A healer is helping knit her bones back together. She’s at home resting right now.”

  “Poor thing. What’s wrong with kids these days? No respect. No caution.” He waved an angry hand, gesticulating wildly. “In my day, we were taught to hide our knacks at all cost. You start flaunting it, you draw attention. No one cares anymore.”

  “I don’t think these are normal knacks,” Lon said. “I’ve never seen anyone lift anything that heavy.”

  Andrew grunted an acknowledgment as I squatted near the splintered countertop, inspecting the damage. “Korea, huh? Ever been?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. “Oh, that. No. Just liked the dragon.”

  Andrew nodded as a strange look pinched his face.

  “Not a dragon fan?” Lon squinted at him with his Emotion Detective face, like he sometimes does when he’s trying to suss out the source of my bad mood.

  “No, it’s not that.” Andrew shook his head. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “You sure?” I said, suddenly interested in what Lon was sensing.

  “It’s silly.”

  “Maybe not,” I encouraged.

  “It’s just . . .” Andrew scratched his ear. “The blond boy dressed like a frog . . . it’s hard to be sure, but he sounded like . . .” Andrew shook his head. “Ah, never mind. My wife says old age is ruining my hearing. Have to turn up the TV to hear the news.”

  “Go on,” I encouraged. “The blond boy sounded like what?”

  “Not a ‘what.’ A who.” Andrew squinted one eye shut as he studied my face, then looked away. “I didn’t realize this until now, but he sounded like a boy who used to come in here after school. Been a few months since I last saw him. Think he might’ve started college. Don’t know his name. Only know that his father drives a beautiful old Plymouth Road Runner.”

  I gave him a blank look, but Lon was grunting in appreciation.

  “An old racing car from the seventies,” Andrew explained. “Prettiest shade of sky blue you’ve ever seen with a black stripe down the center of the hood. The kid sometimes drove it here—parked it outside by the curb. Had a dragon bumper sticker on the fender. The dragon on your jacket reminded me.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  “And you don’t know his name?” Lon asked.

  “Sorry.” Andrew said.

  I looked at Lon. “Unusual car. Can’t be that many of them in the city.”

  “I don’t know,” Lon said.
“A lot of car collectors in Morella.”

  “Especially the old muscle cars,” Andrew agreed. “They race them every month.”

  “Where?”

  “Speed Demon Rally. Down at the Morella Racetrack, on the highway going out toward La Sirena. I go sometimes. Next one’s tomorrow night.”

  “Have you ever seen that boy there?” Lon asked.

  “Saw the car there a few weeks ago, but not the boy.”

  Couldn’t hurt to check it out. At the very least, one of the collectors might know the name of the kid’s father.

  I thanked Andrew and told him I’d let him know if I found out anything. On my way out, I paused at the door. A dark sedan was parked across the street where we’d seen Davey through the window. The driver was staring at the corner store, but ducked when he saw me through the glass. Huh.

  “Hold on,” Andrew called out from behind me.

  I pulled my attention away from the car and watched him hurry down the candy aisle. He returned with a white plastic tub that fit inside my palm and rattled when he handed it to me. “For the Chinese girl,” he said.

  I looked at the label. It was the cantaloupe gum from Hong Kong that Kar Yee loved.

  “On the house,” he said. “Tell her Mr. Andrew says to get better. And if you find that boy and it was him who robbed us, you bring him here to me.” He lifted the hem of his pink panama shirt to reveal a giant jeweled belt buckle shaped like a cobra head. “My kids are too old to get a whipping, but he’s not.”

  I grinned. “Sure, I’ll let you have him, but I want the telekinetic boy.”

  Lon and I exited the corner shop. As we discussed tracking down the Road Runner at the racetrack, I glanced across the street. The dark sedan was gone.

  “This place is bananas!” Jupe shouted over the rumble and roar of muscle car engines. His spiral-curled, bushy dark hair was limned in both the lime-green of his halo and the megawatt halide lamps lighting up the night sky inside the Morella Racetrack.

  Jupe was tall for his age, only a few inches shorter than his dad, and though he was skinny as hell—all legs and arms and slender fingers—a masculine build was blooming beneath his lankiness. He had Lon’s green eyes and his African-American mother’s alluring mouth—well, as best as I could tell from photos; I hadn’t actually met the woman. Yvonne used to be a model when she was younger. And though she’d pretty much given up her visitation rights (it had been a couple of years since she’d bothered coming to see Jupe), her mother and sister remained close—they were the ones coming to spend Christmas with Jupe and Lon.