I managed to close my eyes, but when I opened them a moment later, the thing was still there, glaring at me accusingly in the way that cats can and that cockroaches are not supposed to be able to do.
“Oh, no,” I said. “That’s not right.”
Donny gave me a look almost as accusing at the cat-bug’s, but he had a real disadvantage in his execution of it.
I tried to sit up, deciding I should tackle that before I started on the puzzle of the cat-bug. To my surprise, my non-misshapen limbs were fully functional, and my not-shattered bones supported me once I got upright.
That meant it was time for the cat-bug.
“You stomped the roaches,” I said. “They were tied to me via the spell. And to the kitten, once she was in the circle. When the spell was broken halfway through and the energy released and the roaches killed, all at once, there was….”
“A rebound,” offered Donny. He didn’t know a lick of magic, but he watched a lot of movies.
“A rebound, sure,” I repeated, because it didn’t make any difference if we called it by the right name or not. It was done. Where was the tattoo?
I held out my hands. “Let me see her.”
Donny passed me the kitten-insect, and I’m not ashamed to admit I flinched as she touched my hands. Sure, roaches are kind of gross on their own, but I’d held one of the giant hissing kind at the zoo once and I’d lived in this apartment long enough not to be freaked out by roaches. But a calico kitten roach, man, that’s a little different.
Her multiple legs seemed to be confusing her as she scrabbled softly at my palm. I checked her over, looking for the tattoo. “Is this her normal coloration? Are the patches in the right places?”
Donny scowled. “They’re not in the right places. She’s a roach.”
I shook my head. “Where’s my tattoo?”
Donny gave me a look that I probably deserved.
I extended the cat-bug. “Here, you hold Gregor Samsa for a moment and look at my back.”
“Her name is Tart,” he said, accepting the kitten. “What about your back?”
I pulled up my shirt. “Do you see a tattoo?”
“Huh?”
“Just tell me!”
“No, there’s no tattoo. What was it, a tramp stamp?”
I didn’t answer, letting my shirt fall. Where was the tattoo?
It was about then that I realized the cockroaches were smoking, soot drifting toward the ceiling like Mrs. Thompson’s incense always seeping into the hall.
Whatever else had gone wrong with the spell, that wasn’t normal. I bent over and poked at the nearest flattened roach with a reluctant finger, flipping it so I could see the scorched lines of the tattoo’s design on its back. I arranged the rest of the roaches, forming the complete tattoo.
Nearly complete. Two bugs were missing, and a glance at Tart made it obvious where they had gone.
I looked back at the smoking roaches and realized, seeing the pattern straight for the first time and not distorted with twisting in a mirror, that the tribal geometric design was not just a catchy visual. In my defense, I’d rarely seen one, and certainly not in a tattoo aesthetic, so it took me a bit to recognize it was a stylized constellation, a star circle, a really freaking high tier of magic way beyond my skill level.
And we’d just removed part of it by vanishing it into a cockroach kitten, breaking the circle and whatever spell it held.
The burning away of the remaining lines was speeding up, and I sat back as the cockroaches smoldered. My floor was beginning to smell worse than usual. “Hey, Donny,” I said, my voice strange in my ears, “something magical is about to happen.”
Donny brightened. “Are we going to get together?”
“What? No! I mean, this spell’s about to open up, and I have no idea what it is except that it’s big.”
A star-circle was major league spellwork, and constantly fueled by a live body—this could be big. Like, really big.
“How big?” asked Donny.
The last time I’d heard of a star-circle, an article was postulating in purely hypothetical terms that it could be used to seal a natural portal. My body wasn’t typically a portal, so that couldn’t be it, but if we were talking that kind of range and power, then—
The cockroaches burned away, and the smoke dissipated into the apartment air. There was someone standing in the bathroom door. I looked up and got a full upward view of naked man front.
I looked away—I mean, seriously, that’s a kneejerk reaction, because that is not the introductory view anybody wants—and saw Donny screwing up his face like he was about to sneeze. Apparently he wasn’t keen on the upward angle, either. But there was a strange super-pale white guy in my tiny apartment and it seemed slightly more likely that he had something to do with the unsealing tattoo than that he’d climbed up the fire escape and into my bathroom in his current condition.
“Who are you?” I asked with dazzling originality.
He was looking down at himself—wondering, I hoped, where he’d left his clothes and how to put them on again as quickly as possible. He stared down his arms and splayed his fingers. Then he seemed to notice me. “What year is it?”
Well, this day wasn’t going to get better any time soon. “Yeah, I love that movie, too. What are you doing here?”
He turned and looked out the bathroom window, not caring about anyone who happened to be looking in at the same time. “This is still Adams Square, right? I’m in the right place?”
“Not sure if Adams Square is the right place, but yeah, this is the Square.”
He turned back to me. “Did you break the spell?”
“To be strictly honest, I think it was the cat.” I pointed.
That was maybe a little mean of me. But he started it, showing up naked in my apartment.
He followed my gesture toward Donny and the ex-kitten and visibly started. “What—what is that?”
Donny stroked Tart’s bristly fur. “She’s a catroach now.”
The man opened his mouth, hesitated, and then turned back to me. By then I was on my feet, and I jabbed a finger at him. “Shut up until you put on some clothes.”
He looked down and seemed faintly surprised to see more than he should have. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” I sighed and grabbed my towel from the bathroom. “I’ll want that back.”
He gave me a dubious look and then wrapped the Salvation Army towel with the Frozen snowman, what’s-his-name, around his waist and tucked in the end to secure it.
“Okay, I feel a little more able to have a conversation,” I said. “Now, who are you?”
“Abel Countelbuck.”
I stared. “Any relation to Zax Countelbuck?” But of course there was. It wasn’t a common name, and not with an A-Z coincidence to boot.
He nodded. “My younger brother.”
“Younger? Well, that explains the attitude.”
“You know Zach?”
“Zax, he goes by around here. And no, I don’t know him, not really. That is, we’re not on speaking terms. He just takes my paycheck.”
“What do you hire him to do?”
I stared. “Are you really his brother? Where have you been?”
“I was sealed,” he said. “I came here to see my brother, all the family we have left, and while I was waiting for him, I got a bad drink, paralyzed me. I was just aware enough to know this strange woman was doing magic, but I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t stop her. I knew it was a seal of some sort, but there was nothing I could do.”
“Woman,” I repeated. “Describe her.”
“Caucasian, dark wavy hair, tailored suit—”
“Mole on her left cheek?”
“Yeah, I think so. You know her, too?”
“Only incidentally.”
“Who is she?” asked Donny.
I had nearly forgotten Donny, so caught up as I was in working out the mystery of the naked stranger. “Oh, Donny, I—this is Donny.”
“
Pleased to meet you,” said Abel, polite in his snowman towel. Olaf, that was the snowman’s name. Or was that the reindeer?
“You too,” answered Donny, still cradling the catroach, as he’d called her.
“Donny,” I said, in what I thought was a very reasonable tone, all things considered. “How about you leave Tart with us for a bit so we can talk about how to fix her? It’s going to be some fairly complicated magic.”
“I’ll keep out of the way,” he said.
I fixed him with a look. “The way you kept out of the way of my spell with the roaches?”
He had the grace to look sheepish, but only slightly. “How was I supposed to know?”
“I dunno, maybe the chalked circles and me frantically flagging you down like a cheerleader doing semaphore?”
“What’s—”
“Another time, Donny. Just let us work, okay?”
He handed over the kitten-bug, a little reluctant, and headed for the door. “You’ll bring her down when she’s okay again?”
“As soon as she’s herself,” I promised. Then I locked the door behind him.
I turned back to face Abel and Olaf.
Now that I could concentrate on his face, and not just as an avoidance mechanism, I saw that he was about forty-five, maybe fifty. Twice my age, in other words. If this were a typical Hollywood movie, we would be beating my air mattress into deflation in about five minutes, but fortunately we had more important things to talk about. “I think you came out of the cockroaches.”
He stared at me blankly.
I pointed at the circles on the floor. “I was transferring my tattoo to the cockroaches when Donny interrupted the spell. It went wrong, and they burned up, breaking whatever spell the tattoo was sustaining. I think it was sealing you.”
He nodded very slowly, either working through the magic himself or wondering if I needed a basket to weave.
“I should call in,” he said after a moment.
He didn’t have a phone hidden in the towel, or anywhere else, so I fished mine out of my pocket. “No phone plan,” I said. “I just use wi-fi, mostly at the café. I don’t have access here.”
“No one in this building has a network?”
“Not that they’re sharing with me. But we can go down to the café and you can text from there.”
He glanced down at Olaf’s smiling buckteeth. “That sounds awkward. And chilly.”
“So you’re saying you’d feel a bit frozen?”
He gave me a dark look. “Don’t do it.”
“You should let it go.”
He sighed. “Look, where am I? Who are you?”
“This is my apartment, and I’m the girl your brother is starving out.”
“Just ‘the girl’?”
“No offense, but I don’t give my name to just any naked man who asks for it.”
“I didn’t actually plan to be naked.”
“Again, no offense, but that doesn’t really make your case any stronger.”
He considered. “Okay, I can see that.” His hand moved automatically to his buttock where a pocket would be, but he arrested the movement halfway. “Well, no ID, obviously.”
“What good would a driver’s license do? I still wouldn’t know you.”
“I was actually thinking of showing you my FBI credentials. Pretty hologram and everything. I thought it would make me a bit more acceptable.”
I stared at him for a moment, trying to wrap my brain around this. “You’re a federal agent?”
“Yeah. Or I was, before I disappeared and undoubtedly got suspended.”
“And you just walked into the Square?”
“I wasn’t here in an official capacity. I came to see Zach, like I said.”
I turned away, took a step, turned back. “Look, what do you know about your brother Zax?”
“Zach and I didn’t really grow up together. Our parents divorced early, but we saw each other now and then. Now that Mom’s gone and we’re the only ones left, I thought it’d be good to come out and see him.”
“And you told him you were coming out?”
“Of course.”
I hesitated. “Abel, what do you remember of your brother? What do you know about him?”
He shrugged. “I know he got into some trouble as a teenager, like most kids. Hung out with some bad kids, smoked some weed, the usual rebellious phase. But he was a good kid.”
Rebellious phase. “Abel, your brother’s the local crime lord.”
“What? No.”
“He’s collecting protection on most of the businesses around here. He’s getting most of my pay straight from my boss just because he blames me for a deal gone bad three years ago. He’s not a good kid.”
Abel stared at me.
“I wasn’t there, but I can tell you what happened. You told him you were coming to the Square, and he got twitchy—didn’t want his brother the fed turning him in, or maybe he was even embarrassed with some weird younger sibling hang-up, who knows—and he arranged for you to get lost. Got a sorceress or a witch or someone to slip you some club drug and then magically disappear you. He didn’t kill you, because you’re family. That was nice.”
Abel was still staring. I felt a little bad; he’d appeared out of limbo into my scuzzy bathroom, got handed an Olaf towel and a mutant kitten-bug, and heard his little brother was a Grade A felon who had tried to remove him. It was a lot in ten minutes.
“Who was she?” he asked flatly.
I shook my head. “I don’t know her. I saw her only once, when she asked me if I’d get a tattoo for money.” I snapped a few puzzle pieces together in my mind. “She knew I was hard up for cash, because of Zax. She paid me to wear and power the spell that kept you sealed out of Zax’s hair. She paid me enough to ensure I wouldn’t hesitate, and problem solved. Way simpler than having to maintain the spell herself, and Zax wouldn’t know the difference.”
“And how long would it have lasted?”
“Oh, until I died, I guess. Unless sunlight degrades it, in which case until I couldn’t stand wearing jackets anymore. Or in this case until I decided to transfer it onto a bunch of cockroaches and then my clueless neighbor stomped the spell and broke everything.” I looked down at Tart trying to groom an antenna. “Which reminds me, we should be doing something about the catroach.”
He looked down at the thing in his hands. “What can we do?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to tell Donny that she’s stuck like this. Plus, none of this was her fault, she shouldn’t have to be a catroach forever.”
He watched the cat a moment, and then he turned and set her on my air mattress. It seemed reasonable. He turned back to me. “We need to contact the police.”
I stared. “About a half-kitten, half-cockroach?”
“About the abduction. I was drugged and kidnapped, remember? And you said your money is being stolen, right?”
“Oh, man, no, no, no way. You don’t call the police on Zax Countelbuck. Not more than once.”
He hesitated, and I could see him processing what I’d already told him. “It’s that bad?”
“It’s that bad.”
“We don’t actually know that he’s connected to my abduction and magical imprisonment.”
“I can appreciate your desperate final attempts to believe in your little brother, but trust me, it’s not worth the time or effort. It’s gonna be him behind it. And even if you can find a clean cop in this jurisdiction, he’s not going to be able to do much about it. Zax has a pet wizard for local work and more magical muscle on hire, and that’s before we even get to the sorceress or whoever it was who sealed you and put your tattoo on me.”
“It’s the magic giving him the edge?”
“Oh, sure, magic and money. Money’s always a good motive, no matter what else. But even if a cop might not want to take dirty cash, he’s not going to want to risk his car blowing up one night as he drives his kids to a movie. And yeah, the state’s got the means to deal with
real magical threats, but how likely are they to blow those resources on Adams Square, with turnout for voting lower than for a sale at the vape shop and a tax base equivalent to whatever change they can get in a good sofa cushion shakedown?”
Oops. I might have gotten a bit personal and bitter there.
Abel watched me a moment, maybe waiting for me to moderate or soften my political rant. I kept quiet, forcing him to deal and answer.
But when he finally spoke again, it wasn’t about the tax base. “If it’s all about the magic, then I guess you’ll have to do something about it.”
The world went a little gray for a moment, and I shook my head. “I’m sorry, what?”
“If you don’t think you can call the police until the magic-users are neutralized, I guess you’re going to have to neutralize them. Since you’re the local white-hat magic user.”
“Um, no. Nope. No way. Dude, I had a star-circle tattooed on my back. A star-circle. Do you know what that means?”
“No.”
“And that’s why you don’t get to make ridiculous suggestions about me getting myself killed. That is way over my head, even if I wanted to go there. Which I don’t. And hold the phone, aren’t you a fed? Why don’t you go in guns a-blazing and set everything right?”
His eyes shifted. “I’m… not that kind of agent.”
“You said you’re FBI.”
“Yeah, I am. But I’m a desk jockey.” He twisted his mouth into an admission. “I work in copyright crime.”
“Copyright crime.” I took a breath and tried to give him a withering look like Tart could have been capable of, were she not kicking and chewing on an origami crane on my bed.
I must have done an okay job, because Abel flinched. “Look, it’s true. But that just means there was even less reason for Zach to take me out, if he did. I clearly wasn’t coming for him.”
“Like he was going to take that chance.” I put on my best stern-elder-sibling face. “You wouldn’t steal a car…” I mocked, wagging my finger.
“Hey, copyright crime is real crime, and it does hurt people.”
“I know, I know. But what Zax does also hurts people, and it needs heavier interference.”
SonofaWitch! Page 2