‘‘It would be one less student in the class for me to go up against on a bell curve . . .’’
‘‘You wouldn’t.’’ She knew that not every student would advance to the next level of training. There would be cuts. Elimination. A figure of speech, hopefully. But, on the other hand, Vinx might be taking this competition thing a little too much to heart. Wherever his was. Whatever his was . . . Mickey shifted uncomfortably under the demonic gaze. ‘‘Vinx?’’
‘‘Oh, I’m joking!’’
Of course he was. Mickey reined in her apprehension and told herself she was just being silly. After all, Vinx could hardly gaze at her in a way that was undemonic . . .
‘‘Cheer up, Mick.’’ Vinx’s expression shifted mercurially, and he grinned a lopsided grin. ‘‘This project is, after all, the kind of casting you’re fond of—a protective spell to ward against the blackest of sorceries.’’
‘‘Sure it is,’’ Mickey sighed, surveying the staggering array of toxic and otherwise injurious articles arranged on the table. ‘‘Only that it just happens to employ deadly poisons and other noxious substances in the process. Really, I’m tickled.’’ She already decided against all of the assorted weaponry—it wasn’t her style. Too much collateral mess. Toxins were just that much tidier, she thought as she unstoppered the clay pot and wrinkled up her nose, sniffing with great caution at the contents. The odor was pungent—sharp and bitter. ‘‘Wormwood. Isn’t that the stuff in absinthe? ’’
‘‘Makes the heart grow fonder . . .’’ Vinx fluttered his wiry eyelashes.
‘‘That was terrible,’’ Mickey groaned and resealed the pot.
‘‘And the mind go wander . . .’’
‘‘Stop it.’’
‘‘Sorry.’’ He stifled another rumble.
Mickey put the wormwood aside. Mild hallucinogenic properties notwithstanding, that darling of the Victorian artiste wouldn’t do. It might be the bitterest herb known, but it was hardly lethal. Next.
Vinx nodded silent approval as she rejected the ‘‘greene faerie’’ and handed her the next item on the table—a small bunch of leaves, stems dotted with white berries, tied neatly with a silver wire.
‘‘Mistletoe,’’ Mickey correctly identified the bit of shrubbery.
‘‘For the kissing thereunder.’’ Demon lips twisting, Vinx puckered up into a grotesque parody of kissyface and dangled the foliage over his head.
Mickey shuddered. ‘‘I will exact a terrible revenge, you know.’’
‘‘Sorry.’’ Vinx appeared instantly contrite. ‘‘Truly.’’
Mickey wasn’t fooled for a second. She also wasn’t buying those wares. She waved off the mistletoe. To be sure, there were rare cases where the ingestion of mistletoe had caused cardiac collapse, but usually only with preexisting conditions, and you had to have eaten an awful lot of the stuff. Mostly though, ingesting mistletoe usually just resulted in some unfortunate intestinal discomfort. It was not, in and of itself, lethal. And lethal was what Mickey needed. She must choose her spell-cipher carefully.
The whole idea behind this particular spell-casting was to create something protective out of something destructive—to render something lethal harmless by releasing its killing spirit and capturing that essence in the amulet. Harnessing deadly power to protect against deadly power. Or something like that . . .
Mickey ran her fingertip along a line of spidery calligraphy on the weathered page of the ancient spell book. Her eyes were stinging and there was an itchiness in her sinuses that was either an oncoming cold or—and this was probably a good deal more likely— she was allergic to one or more of the ingredients in Vinx’s purple whammy-dust. Great. Just what she needed—another distraction. She pushed aside the sense of discomfort and furrowed her brow with renewed concentration. She really hoped she could nail this amulet spell, mostly because if she didn’t, there was no way she could pull her sagging grades out of the fire. The Conclave would fail her. And that was not a prospect that rewarded protracted mulling. Mickey scrunched up her nose, snuffled fiercely, increased brow-furrow depth by 10 percent, and calmly asked her demon helpmate to hand her the next candidate ingredient.
Vinx removed the glass cover from a small platter and passed the dish over with a flourish. It contained, at first glance, a small bundled sheaf of innocent un-winnowed barley heads. Except that, upon closer inspection, the bearded grain appeared to be covered with a faintly iridescent, grayish slime that resembled snail trails. Even Mickey could recognize that.
‘‘Ergot!’’ she exclaimed. ‘‘Jeezus, Vinx!’’
‘‘Yessss . . .’’ Vinx had earned an A++ last semester in poisons—they were a passion of his—and he positively beamed at the stuff in the dish. Like the proud owner of a darling new puppy. ‘‘In the proper proportions—’’
‘‘In the proper proportions,’’ Mick interrupted with a squeal, ‘‘it can cause convulsions, hallucinations, extreme fiery pain in the extremities and—if you’re really lucky prior to it killing you horribly—gangrene!’’ She stared in horrid fascination at the harmless looking stuff.
‘‘Oh, yesss,’’ the demon hissed gleefully. ‘‘Marvelous, isn’t it?’’
Okay. Granted, she needed something lethal. Not necessarily lethal and violently, devastatingly painful! Ergot was out. Not in the least because if this spell were performed incorrectly, instead of providing a charm to ward off death, the enchantment would often turn and inflict death upon the hapless practitioner by whatever means naturally employed by the cipher element. Mickey had, on more than one occasion, overheard the more advanced students telling horror stories about such cases. And, frankly, gangrene?
No. Ergot was definitely out.
The young sorceress shook herself out of a gruesome reverie and looked over at her lab partner. Vinx was staring at her from under the shadowy escarpment of his browridge, his expression unreadable.
‘‘You’re learning, Mick. Quickly and well.’’
She ignored the uncharacteristic praise and turned back to the table, picking up a carved wooden box with a brass identifying tag. ‘‘So tell me, Vinx, just what are the proper proportions for—’’ she translated from the Latin automatically ‘‘—Destroying Angel? Sounds delightful. What is that, exactly?’’
‘‘What does it look like?’’
She lifted the lid and peered inside. A fecund, peaty smell assaulted her nostrils. The box was half full of soil from which sprouted a solitary occupant.
‘‘A mushroom, Vinx?’’ Mickey said, raising an eyebrow. ‘‘An armed and dangerous side dish? I’m terrified. Truly.’’
‘‘Would you care to test that theory?’’ Vinx leaned closer, fetid demon breath undisguised by the handful of catmint he’d filched from the stores of herbs and had been munching on idly.
Mickey blinked, eyes and nasal passages burning. ‘‘Uhh . . . I don’t like mushrooms.’’
‘‘Then you have nothing to fear. It isn’t a mushroom. Not really.’’ Vinx plucked it out of the dark soil and held it up to the light of a torch.
‘‘It looks like one.’’
‘‘That is its power.’’
Terrific, Mickey thought. Fungi power. Shazam!
‘‘It masquerades as one thing when it is, in reality, something quite different,’’ Vinx continued on casually. Conversationally.
And yet there was something in the tone of his voice that made the pit of Mickey’s stomach all squirmy. She tilted her chin up so that she could look him square in his glowy red eyes. ‘‘You don’t say.’’
He grinned and, shrugging, plunked the thing back into the soil of its box. ‘‘The only visible disparity between this—you might call it a toadstool—and what you might call a mushroom is a slight variation in the color of its gills. And it is very slight.’’
‘‘So?’’
‘‘So the one goes very nicely with a steak, sautéed in a little butter. Maybe a touch of garlic.’’
‘‘And?’’
‘‘Right.’’ Mickey slammed shut the lid on the box and put it up on a shelf. A high shelf. Hypertoxemia? Higher than the ergot shelf. She turned back to the table. ‘‘This is the last one,’’ she said, poking at another bunch of twigs, this time labeled with a small, white tag with the words Taxus baccata written on it in careful, somewhat childish block letters.
‘‘Ah, a branch of the wondrous yew.’’ Vinx scooped up the shrubby, dark green bough festooned with bright red berries. He looked as though he was about to wax positively rhapsodic, so Mickey figured this stuff must be particularly dangerous. More particularly dangerous. If that was possible . . .
‘‘That’s lethal?’’ she asked, sceptical. ‘‘It looks like a Christmas decoration.’’
‘‘Bite your tongue!’’ Vinx actually shuddered at the word ‘Christmas.’ ‘‘This is yew! It is a symbol of immortality. It is sacred to the Druids. It is highly toxic in leaf, bark, and stem!’’ His expression actually got a little misty at that point. ‘‘Nary an inch of this little tree that won’t kill you! It’s one of my personal favorites. If you couldn’t dispatch a man with the poison of the yew seeds or tea made from yew bark, you could always dip an arrow in yew sap and shoot him with a yew bow. So versatile in its lethality!’’
‘‘Ohhh, yah. I remember now.’’ Mickey frowned, recalling details from her spell tome cram session of the previous night. ‘‘And death from yew poisoning is almost always asymptomatic: sudden and without warning.’’
‘‘Such elegant efficiency, Mick!’’ Vinx cooed. ‘‘Use this one. For me? Please?’’
‘‘Gah!’’ Mickey shuddered. ‘‘All right, all right. Yew it is. Just quit with the kitten face, will ya?’’
‘‘Oh, goody!’’ The demon clapped his meaty mitts together like a little girl at a birthday party who’d just gotten a pony.
Mickey plucked up the branch and placed it a shallow bronze dish. ‘‘Is the circle ready?’’
‘‘Drawn from the finest sea salt and bonemeal.’’
‘‘Why do you always have to make it sound like you’re baking cookies when you spell-cast?’’ Mickey sniffed, her head feeling stuffy.
‘‘Would you rather have me intone gravely and with menace?’’
‘‘Uh . . . no. Actually. Cookies are good.’’ She put the dish down in the center of the circle. The pressure in her sinuses was actually becoming painful. Concentrate, dammit! Mickey admonished herself sternly. She took up the beaker of green liquid, the medium used for all student spells; it was a brew of mystic and highly secret substances, ladled out in carefully controlled portions by the Conclave Grande Sorciere at the beginning of term. The stuff smoked and hissed a little as she poured enough into the dish to cover the shrubbery. For all the dire warnings that accompanied the use of the beaker’s contents, Mickey had always had a sneaking suspicion that it was probably nothing more than the magical equivalent of Pop Rocks and Mountain Dew, meant to scare the apprentices into cautious behavior when spell-casting (it was a theory she kept to herself).
Over in the corner of the cavern, Vinx lounged casually against the wall, watching.
Mickey drew the amulet receptacle from an inside pocket of her robe and held it over the dish of yew. It was beautiful—a rainbow-colored empty glass bulb about the size of a Victorian locket, hung from a delicate, box-link silver chain. She carefully filled it with more of the chartreuse liquid and, leaving it unstoppered, placed the amulet around her neck.
Then she stood and prepared to speak the enchantment.
The thing about casting, Mickey always thought, was that to the untrained eye it looked so damned easy. A few ingredients, a couple of muttered phrases, and whammo!—instant spell. Except that everything important that took place in a casting really went on behind the scenes—in the spell-caster’s mind and heart. Even in her or his soul for some spells. That was the hard part. The words? They were more of a focus for the power. A lens used to capture the picture. Which was why spell chants could come off as a little . . . dull. And that was the reason so many sorcerers spoke their spells in Latin. Or ancient Greek or Gaelic. Mickey even knew one hotshot who did all his casting in Toltec—and he was from Winnipeg! Contrarian that she was, Mickey did all of hers in plain ol’ English. With really simple rhymes. Because— hey—just ’cause they were the easy part, it didn’t meant you couldn’t seriously screw ’em up.
She took a deep breath.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Vinx lean forward.
‘‘Fire burn bright!’’ she began.
‘‘Flame burn true!’’ She wished her nose would stop itching.
‘‘Keep me from harm’’—Oh, God! Not now—the sound of her sneeze echoed off the cavern roof, and a cloud of sparkly purple danced before her eyes. There was a tingling in her skull, but she pushed on, desperate to finish the chant—‘‘Ashes of you!’’
And Vinx burst instantly into flame.
Mickey was still standing there, stunned, when the air shimmered, and the Conclave Elders appeared to grade her on her project results.
The letters appeared before her eyes in a silvery burst of light.
A++ across the board.
What? she thought. I just flambéed my lab partner! How is that a good thing?
‘‘A clever ruse, Michaela,’’ Chya, her primary instructor was saying, his voice pitched so that the other sorcerers could plainly hear. ‘‘Using a Karnalaq curse to alter the meaning of your chant.’’
‘‘Wha—?’’ Mickey murmured numbly.
‘‘The other Elders were not sure that you would recognize your fellow student as the most deadly cipher in the room—and therefore the most useful for your warding amulet.’’ Chya bent low and scooped up the branch in the dish, from which the red berries were beginning to drop. ‘‘Nor were they certain that you would deduce that the demon had substituted a harmless, costumed evergreen for the Taxus baccata, meaning to destroy you utterly after you had spell-cast a useless warding amulet. Which, of course, would have earned him the A++.’’
‘‘He wha—?’’
‘‘I, of course, never doubted you for a second.’’ Chya’s black eyes glittered in the torchlight. Mickey could have sworn that he winked at her. ‘‘Congratulations, First Apprentice duLey. Enjoy your summer break!"
And then they were gone.
Mickey stumbled out of the circle and over to the pile of smoking, aubergine ash that had been her study buddy. ‘‘Demented demon spawn,’’ she said, shaking her head half in anger, half in sadness. Of all the dirty, rotten . . .
But then, out of the corner of her eye, off to one side of the worktable, she spotted the leather pouch that Vinx had always worn on his belt. She picked it up and opened it. Inside was the vial of purple crystals and a tiny scroll of parchment. She unrolled it and read the block-lettered script:
Mick ~ Congratulations!
I hope they gave you an A++.
Here is the rest of the ex-Karnalaq.
Use it sparingly . . . who ‘‘nose’’ when you might need it again!
Cheers,
Vinx’ythnial Warburton-Smythe III
With a tear in her eye (just one, mind you—were the situation reversed, he would have killed her horribly, after all), Mickey knelt and carefully scooped up a bit of what was left of her lab partner and added it to the glass amulet hanging around her neck, stoppering it tightly. Then she poured a pinch of Vinx’s purple powder into the palm of her hand and, as she felt the familiar tingling snap in her head, Mickey could almost swear that the amulet on her breast bubbled with the faint echoes of a deep, rumbling laughter . . .
Narrator: Competition can be a healthy thing— for the winner. Fortunately for Michaela duLey, a misspell was exactly what she needed.
LESLEY D. LIVINGSTON is a writer and actor living in T
oronto, Canada. She has a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Arthurian literature and Shakespeare. For over fifteen years she has appeared in lead roles on Toronto stages, chiefly as a principal member of Tempest Theatre Group. Fans of Canada’s nationally broadcast SPACE Channel may remember her as the SpaceBar’s Waitron-9000, a holographic barmaid with an encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure B-MOVIE trivia. Lesley’s short fiction has appeared in On Spec magazine, and her debut novel Wondrous Strange, a young adult fantasy, is soon to be published. She is thrilled to be a part of the Misspelled crew.
8 rms, full bsmt
Kristine Smith
Narrator: Selling a house involves attention to those little details, the ones that make such a difference to prospective buyers. Fresh paint, tidy cupboards, enhanced curb appeal. And, of course, don’t forget to call the house cleaners.
"That makes five so far." I ducked down behind the storage bin just as a gout of flame jetted through the space my head had occupied. It struck the wall behind me with a sound like a thousand metal zippers opening at once, a brilliant orange fireball that blazed, then vanished in a puff of wet, black smoke.
I stared at the chrysanthemum-shaped char that blistered the paint to the base cement. Started breathing again, and coughed as the burned hair stench of the smoke drifted around.
‘‘He’s gone.’’ Jamie dove in beside me from his hiding place behind the washing machine. ‘‘I saw him scoot back down the hole.’’
‘‘Probably went back to his nest for reinforcements. ’’ I scrolled through scuttle demon characteristics in my head. It kept me from thinking of other things, like how we were going to get out of this basement alive. ‘‘How do you know it’s a ‘he’? You can only sex a scuttle surgically.’’
‘‘Alliterative today, aren’t we?’’ Jamie chuckled and rocked his head back and forth. ‘‘Sex, scuttle, surgically— that’s good.’’ Soot coated a wide-eyed, pale face framed by spiky red-brown hair, a shirt that had once been orange, and khakis that would never be khaki again.
Bambi, I thought, caught in the path of a blowtorch. I’d met a few Bambis over the years, but they had all been women. It always seemed to slip everyone’s mind that the Bambi of the movies was a guy. Try naming a boy ‘‘Bambi’’ these days and see what happens. The poor kid would—I stopped the panicked giggle in my throat. Breathed deep. Coughed.
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