Dirty Magic

by Jaye Wells

  “Tell me about it,” Danny said with a sage nod. “Miss Bell gave us a pop quiz in calculus today.”

  I snorted as I kicked off my pumps. After I spent my day chasing junkies down alleys and investigating the scum of the earth, coming home to someone so naive about the realities of the streets was nice. Yet another reason why I was determined for him to have a normal life—far away from the corrupting influence of magic.

  “Yeah, that sounds pretty brutal.” My tone was sarcastic but not mocking. I barely passed statistics in night school and would rather face down a hexhead with a knife than a calculus test.

  Now that I’d shaken off the bitch funk I’d walked in with, I refocused my efforts on putting away the groceries. The delicious scent of chicken was making my stomach growl.

  We worked in companionable silence for a few moments. “So how do you think you did on the quiz?” I asked.

  He opened the cabinet to put away a box of snack cakes—I’d finished the ones we had for breakfast that morning. “Pretty well.”

  I lifted his backpack off the table. The zipper was open and a book fell out on the floor. “Crap.” I bent down to pick it up without looking at the title. “Anything else happen at school?” I started to shove the book back in the bag, but he grabbed it from me before I could manage it.

  “I got it.” His voice was an octave higher than usual. Cue the police instincts.

  “What you got there?” I said casually.

  He froze and his gaze flicked to my face, which I purposefully kept clear of emotion. He tensed, as if bracing himself. “Nothing.”

  I stayed quiet but raised a brow.

  Finally, he sighed. “It’s a stupid book I found,” he grumbled, eyes focused on his sneakers.

  The hair on the back of my neck prickled. “Hand it over.”

  “Kate, it’s just a—”

  I snapped my fingers, trying to keep a lid on my temper. I had a really bad feeling I knew what kind of book he had, but I wanted to see it before I boiled over. He handed it to me the way one might a piece of dynamite.

  When I saw the title, I wanted to throw the book out of the window. No, that was too nice. I wanted to light it on fire and spread the ashes to the four corners of the earth.

  In truth, the term “book” applied in only the loosest sense. Really it was a pile of mimeographed paper with a flimsy cover stapled along the spine—more of a pamphlet, really. A pamphlet I unfortunately knew by heart.

  The Alchemist’s Handbook was the bible of the dirty magic underworld. Potion cookers, street-level spell dealers, and all manner of lowlifes referred to this piece of trash constantly for recipes, arrest-evasion strategies, and general criminal inspiration. Every cop who worked the Arcane beat knew and cursed the existence of the textbook for criminals.

  The clock on the wall tick, tick, ticked like the bomb’s timer counting down to explosion.

  Danny crossed his arms and slouched against the counter. A bullish expression told me he’d convinced himself he had a fighting chance of winning this battle of wills.

  Dumb kid. You’d figure he’d have learned never get into a silent standoff with a cop. Especially when the proof of his guilt had just been in his sweaty palms.

  He cleared his throat. “I can explain.”

  Bingo. Cop face one, the kid zero.

  “Save it.” I held up a hand. Using the same tone I employed when interrogating a hostile suspect, I pointed to the table. “Sit.”

  He looked taken aback that I hadn’t started screaming. He dropped into a chair with a sigh.

  I lifted his game player off the table. “Do you know who bought this?”

  His head tilted to the side like he suspected it was a trick question. “You?”

  “Do you know what I do for a living to earn the money that paid for it?”

  He crossed his arms. “I know,” he grumbled.

  “Do you? I think I need you to say it out loud just to be sure.”

  His lips puckered and he rolled his eyes. “You’re a cop.”

  “Where am I a cop, Danny?”

  A martyred sigh. “The Cauldron.”

  “Right. I patrol slums filled with Arcane criminals who learned the tricks of their trade from that book.”

  “I got it, Kate,” he snapped.

  “No, Danny. You don’t fucking got it.” My voice rose and I leaned across the table. His eyes shot toward the curse jar, but he thought better of mentioning my slip. I rose abruptly, shoving my chair back, and stuck my hand in my purse. From it, I removed a handful of bills. As he watched with his mouth hanging open, I dropped probably ten crumpled ones in. His eyes widened. Without missing a beat, I continued, “Because if you fucking got it, there’d be no way you’d bring the motherfucking Alchemist’s Handbook under my goddamned roof!”

  “It’s just a book. Jesus, don’t be such a fascist.”

  “This isn’t just a book, Danny. There’s nothing in here that won’t get you into a world of trouble with the law.” I paused to get control of my temper. Releasing a great sigh, I dropped into the chair across from him to get on his level. “Where’d you get it?”

  His eyes shifted left. “Found it.”

  I snorted. “Please don’t insult me.”

  He threw up his hands. “I found it in the attic!”

  My mouth fell open. With trembling hands, I opened the cover. Sure enough, there was the familiar inscription.

  Welcome to the magic game, Katie-girl.

  My stomach dipped. Shit. He’d found my copy. The one Uncle Abe gave me on my birthday when I turned eight. I had clutched it to my chest like a precious treasure while I blew out the candles on my pink princess cake.

  I shook off that nausea-inducing memory and frowned at my brother. “Why were you in the attic?”

  His discomfort was palpable and not just because he knew what he’d done was wrong. There was something underneath the defensive posturing. His reddened cheeks hinted that he was embarrassed. “I needed to find a picture of Mom.” His gaze was hot, like he hated me for making him say that out loud. “In history class we’re doing a genealogy project and I needed a picture.”

  I chose my tone carefully because this conversation was the verbal equivalent of thin ice. “Why didn’t you just ask me?” I sat down heavily because the turn the conversation had just taken made me feel sucker punched.

  “Because you never want to talk about her. Or anything having to do with the past or the family. Whenever I try to bring it up, you give me that look.”

  I pulled back and relaxed my face, knowing I’d just been giving him the look in question. Here I thought I’d been so clever and in control, but my little brother just managed to gain the upper hand. If there was one topic sure to cripple me it was a discussion about “the family.”

  With a sigh, I placed my elbows on the table and looked at my brother. “Look, Danny, I—”

  Before I could continue, he shoved his chair back. The wooden slats banged into the fridge. “Just forget it, okay? I’m sorry I took the stupid book. I was just … curious, I guess, since it’s, like, part of my heritage or whatever.”

  I rose slowly, scrambling to think of the right thing to say. “No, I—”

  “I already took the picture of Mom to school, but I’ll give it back to you after I get the assignment from my teacher.” He grabbed his books off the table and his backpack from the floor.

  “No, it’s okay. You can keep—”

  “I gotta finish my work.”

  With that my little brother stormed out of the kitchen. I looked up at the ceiling for help. Luckily, I still had some credits left in the curse jar. “Fuck, fuck, shit, shit, damn it, fuck.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Two hours later, the argument with Danny chased me down the concrete steps into the basement of the Sacred Heart Church. Despite the Catholic setting, recovering dirty magic abusers of any faith could attend the weekly Arcane Anonymous group meetings.

  I was late, so I slid
in as quietly as I could and took a seat beside Pen. She glanced over with raised brows. I mouthed “Later.” A very loud, very pointed throat clearing sounded. I glanced up and shot an apologetic smile to our fearless leader, Rufus Xavier.

  He sat in a blue plastic chair—the kind found in every school cafeteria in America. The other chairs were formed into a circle so you couldn’t really say he sat at the front, but his sheer size and bearing left no doubt about who led this support group. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans with a crocheted slouch hat done in stripes of red, green, and yellow perched on his braided hair. The meeting had only just begun, but already he was worked up into a feverish sermon as if he were standing in a pulpit on Sunday morning.

  “Everyone has a hole in their center,” he said, placing a fist over his diaphragm. “A gaping shadow that demands to be filled. Some people fill it with faith and God. Others with money or fame. Then there are those who fill it with food, alcohol, nicotine or, yeah, potions.” He looked around the circle to each of our faces. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t keep much from Rufus. He had an almost preternatural ability to see through people’s bullshit.

  I’d spent enough time on the streets as both a pseudocriminal and then as a cop to know his words were true. It was the eyes. No matter how tough you acted or how much you tried to disguise it with makeup or a strut or other masks, the eyes always exposed the void. Generally, it was whatever the perp used to disguise or fill the hole that got me called out by Dispatch, but I could always see the shadows in their eyes. The darker secrets behind the violence and addictions.

  “But the potions and sex and the religion, they’re just symptoms,” he continued. “Truth is, the real problem is whatever created that crater in your chest. Most of us got ours ’cause our mamas had their own holes they was trying to fill and didn’t have enough time to prevent ours from forming. Or maybe it was our daddies. Maybe he left when we were too young. Or maybe he stayed around too long.”

  A couple of ironic chuckles filtered through the room. Several studies had been contracted by the government to figure out a link between upbringing and magic addiction. I’m no scientist, but from what I’ve seen, the most common denominator for addiction was simply being human.

  “Maybe you weren’t born into poverty and maybe your daddy didn’t sneak into your bedroom at night to touch your no-no place,” Rufus continued, “but somewhere along the way some other human fucked you over but good. Probably lots more than one. And getting fucked by your fellow man drills a hole in your center. So you either find a coping mechanism or you check out early.”

  He let that settle over us like a gray cloud. Most of us gathered that night were veterans of the group. Addicts with lots of years between them and the rock-bottom moment that made them finally seek help. But magic sank way down deep inside and it was almost impossible to exorcise its roots completely.

  “So what do you fill your hole with now that you’re off the junk?” he asked.

  I chewed my lip and thought it over. Justice, I thought, feeling smug. Problem was, the longer I was a cop, the harder it was becoming to keep my faith in that particular religion. Not when I saw justice fail so many people so often.

  “Maybe you joined a gym,” he said. “Maybe you spend most of your Sundays on your knees praying to the good Lord. Don’t matter what it is, long as it’s legal and healthy and doesn’t hurt anyone—specially your damned self. You just got to fill it with something or else that blackness gonna rise up and consume you whole, brother.”

  My inner skeptic snorted. She reminded me that I was never addicted to potions. I never shot up, lit up, or snorted up. Unlike the rest of my companions, I wasn’t a Mundane looking to recover from addiction to dirty magic. Instead, I was an Adept trying to overcome an addiction to the power I felt from cooking. An addiction’s an addiction, but I never pretended my struggles compared to theirs. It was easy to find other sources of power. Not so easy to replace the chemical changes forced on one’s body from dirty magic.

  Now that his introductory speech was over, Rufus raised his hands and invited us to join him in reciting the credo of Arcane Anonymous. “Everything I need to transform myself already exists within me. I am enough.”

  When we sat back down, Pen nudged me with her elbow. She looked over and nodded to a new member across the way. The girl couldn’t be more than eighteen. Her hair hung in long greasy ropes around her pale face. Her irises were still the cornflower blue of a heavy potion-user and her hands shook as though she’d been stricken with palsy. Scabbed-over track marks peeked over the top of the black turtleneck she kept tugging up.

  Poor kid, I thought, she couldn’t be more than a week or two sober. She had a tough road ahead.

  Closer to us, a few people over, was a guy in his mid-forties. His skin had a definite yellowish tint, except for where the angry flush into his cheeks made them appear orange. His arms were crossed and the foot perched on his knee bobbed up and down. I’d come to enough of these meetings over the years to recognize a court-order case when I saw one. Probably he’d be defiant and sullen during the meeting until it was time to ask Rufus for a signature on his forms.

  “Welcome, everyone. Congratulations on taking the first, most important step in recovery: showing up. We gather here every week to share our experiences and help each other through the maze of recovery from dirty magic.” He paused and looked around the circle. Naturally, the new people kept their eyes downcast. Typical. They thought not making eye contact would spare them from having to share, but Rufus always called on those types first.

  “Mr. Callahan?” Ru said finally. “Do you have anything you’d like to share tonight?”

  The jaundiced man shook his head, refusing to meet Rufus’s gaze.

  “Just so you know,” he said, his tone friendly, “I don’t sign court documents for people who don’t do the work.”

  Callahan’s head snapped up. His lids squinted over ice-blue irises. “What do I have to talk about?”

  “Anything that’s on your mind.” Ru spread his arms wide. “We’re here to listen.”

  “I shouldn’t even be here.” His lips puckered like a bitter lemon. “That fucking judge had it out for me.”

  Ru’s expression remained calm. He’d heard all of this before. “So you don’t think you have a problem with potions?”

  Callahan adjusted his ass in the chair, warming up to having a sympathetic ear. “Of course not. I mean, sure, I take a little nip of a virility potion every now and then. Just to give me a little edge with the ladies.”

  That explained his color. Virility potions attacked the liver first. However, if he kept up with it, he’d turn bright red, like a horny baboon’s ass.

  Rufus looked down at the clipboard in his lap. “According to the notes I was sent, you were arrested for masturbating in your car at a red light.”

  Callahan’s cheeks pulsed orange. “I was in the privacy of my own vehicle. Wasn’t my fault that school bus pulled up next to me. I don’t have a problem.”

  “When the medic wizards checked you out, your penis was covered in friction blisters.”

  Callahan started rocking back and forth. “I can’t help it that I have a healthy libido.”

  On my left side, Jacob, who used to be addicted to sex magic, too, snorted. “Is that the same excuse you’ll use when you rape someone?”

  “Hey!” Callahan’s eyes flared. “I would never—”

  “Before you started that virility potion, I bet you also swore you’d never masturbate in front of school kids, either.” Jacob was six feet tall, covered in tattoos, and bald. He’s served five years in the pen for stalking a woman after he’d taken a dirty love potion to attract her. After he’d been released, he joined the group and redirected his addiction into a successful career as a sculptor. “Face it, man. You’re an addict. Unless you stop taking that shit, you’re going to end up seriously hurting someone besides yourself.”

  “Can he talk to me like that?”
Callahan sputtered.

  “Yep.” Rufus smiled. “This isn’t show-’n-tell, brother. Recovery ain’t pretty. Jacob there has been potion-free for three years now. You’d do well to listen to him.”

  Callahan crossed his arms and scooted farther into the seat. The move revealed that he was sporting an erection. He quickly realized his mistake. Scooting his butt back, he lowered his head into his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know how to quit,” he whispered.

  I pressed my lips together. Part of me wanted to shake the guy and tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself. The other part felt some compassion for him. Using potions changes who you are in the most fundamental ways. Probably Callahan was a guy who lacked self-esteem and started taking the virility potion to feel more confident and attractive. He’d had no idea when he started using that he’d turn into the type of guy who’d jack off in front of kids.

  “Being here is the first step,” Rufus said. “Come talk to me after and I’ll hook you up with some other resources, okay?”

  Callahan nodded and wrapped his arms around himself protectively.

  “Miss Pen?” Rufus prompted.

  Next to me, Pen sat up straighter. “I’ve been feeling really tested lately. Some of these kids I talk to at school?”

  Rufus nodded.

  “Their parents got them so messed up they don’t know their assholes from their elbows.”

  “That’s horrible.” This from Darla, the fortysomething mother of four, who’d been sober for six months after kicking her addiction to vanity potions. When she’d first attended group, her size 42 GG breasts had defied several laws of physics, but now the pendulous lobes drooped over the distended shelf of her stomach.

  “It’s the truth,” Pen said. “Some days I don’t know why I even try. Money doesn’t buy class or morals. Today, this kid was brought into my office because she got caught taking a diet potion. She’s eleven.”

  Darla made a distressed sound and shook her head. I raised a brow, but not much shocked me anymore. Working the Cauldron beat helped me develop a nice, tough callous where my naïveté used to live.