by Unknown
“Bassets weren’t imported to the US until the late eighteen hundreds,” Regan said, her shotgun broken open and resting on a table, her eyes on her tablet.
“Incorrect,” Shaddock said, as if a discussion about Bassett Hounds was the purpose of this gathering. As if he hadn’t just threatened my baby. “George Washington himself received a pair of Bassets from Lafayette.”
“Huh. Yeah. You’re right. Legend, unsupported.”
“Truth,” Lincoln said.
I asked, “What did you hope when you felt the magic last night?”
Shaddock shook his head slowly, in sorrow. “The foolish dreams of an old man. When my Dorothy rejected me, she threw out a … it was as if I was hit with a bolt of lightning. I never saw the like, not before, not after. When I came to, my wife was gone, along with the teapot she had been holding, and the old dog. Gone and never returned, never seen again. Last evening, I felt the same jolt of power, of lightning, and I ran to the old log cabin, hoping … hoping foolishly.” He shook his head. “Hoping that my Dorothy had come back to me. Somehow.”
Dacy Mooney, said, “By all that’s holy. That’s why you kept that old cabin? Hoping your wife would come back?”
“Tis so, Dacy. Foolish. I know. Foolish.” He shook his head. “She returned to her husband. She lived on until her natural death.”
“Had you been bleeding, when you woke from your wife’s …” Temper tantrum wouldn’t work. “… anger?” I asked.
“Yes. I had healed but I could still smell my blood, going sweet and rancid on the air. How did you know?”
Because wild magic did this. And wild magic is even stronger with blood, I thought, though I didn’t share this with Shaddock. Carefully, feeling my way, I said, “There is a spirit trapped in this teapot. It isn’t human. It’s possible, maybe, that the dog’s soul is stuck in the teapot and it is tied to your blood.”
“George doesn’t like you,” Angie Baby said. “Weeell, he likes you, but he’s mad at you.” Her eyes went wide. “He’s pooping on your pillow!”
Lincoln dropped to the floor, sitting on a level with my baby, eye to eye, on the far side of the ward. He looked awestruck, if vamps could look struck with awe. “I went away for a week,” he said, “to do business in town, to register to fight in a war I never wanted. George was but a few months old. When I returned he raced to our marriage bed and he …” Lincoln’s smile went wide. “He defecated on my pillow.” Lincoln’s eyes rested on the teapot in Angie’s arms. “Oh, my God. It’s George.” He held out his hands, beseeching. “I never wanted to leave you. Never. War was never my desire.”
Angie scowled so hard she looked like that Celtic warrior, fierce and unyielding. My baby was going to grow up … a warrior. A true warrior. Pride filled me. I said, “Angie? What do you think?”
Still scowling, Angie walked to the edge of the ward and I quickly dropped it. For all I knew, my powerful child could walk straight to them with no ill effect, but I didn’t want that to get around, if so. Grudgingly, she placed the teapot in Lincoln’s outstretched hands and he gathered the brown and yellow teapot close, stroking it, murmuring, “I am so sorry. I beg your forgiveness. And yours, little witch child. Most earnestly.” To me he said, “I owe you and yours a boon, whatever you may want, at a time of your choosing. If it is within my power to provide, it shall be yours. ”
I wasn’t holding my breath for that. “Angie, go to your Aunt Regan.” My daughter walked around Lincoln, sitting on the shop floor, cuddling a teapot, and took her aunt’s hand, her face long and woebegone. I was pretty sure Regan hissed a threat to beat her black and blue if she ever jumped out of a moving car again. And then hugged her fiercely. I’d deal with my daughter later. For now, we still had vampires in my family business and vamps still drank blood. Dangerous, even if they did look cute and defenseless sitting on the floor.
“Ummm,” I said. “We may have a way to free George.” If it really was the spirit of a dog stuck inside the stoneware teapot. “But we need the teapot back for a bit.” Without hesitation, Shaddock placed it on the toy box and took a step back to the tables and chairs that we had placed along the wall. Holly pulled out a chair and Link sat, his eyes never leaving the teapot.
It was a wild magic spell, somehow tied to Shaddock, for him to have felt the reappearance after so many years. I didn’t ask where the teapot had been, but I had a bad feeling that Dorothy’s wild magic had knocked it out of its own timeline and into the future a century and a half or so. The four of us witches stood at the four cardinal points, circled around the toy box, hands clasped. As eldest, I took north, even with my magic so damaged and me having to rein in my death-magics beneath fierce will.
Together, we said the words to an old family spell, softly chanting. The wyrd spell was originally meant to heal that which had been wounded by black-magic. “Cneasaigh, cneasaigh a bháis ar maos in fhuil,” we said together. The rough translation, from Scots Gaelic: “Heal, heal, that which is soaked in blood.”
We chanted the words over and over as our power rose. And rose. I closed my eyes, feeling my sister’s magic flow through me and through the floor, into the earth. Fecund and rich and potent. Power. Life. And when our massed magics were meshed and full, we directed the working, like a pin, a pick, an awl, directly at the teapot.
It shattered.
Pieces flew through the air, and beyond the circle, breaking it. The power that we had been using blazed up and out in a poof of heated air and broken stoneware. We ducked. Shattered pottery crashed into the floor and walls. And into Lincoln Shaddock’s bony knees.
The vamps reacted faster than I could see, racing at us, weapons to hand. Ready to kill.
“George!” Angie Baby shouted, and broke free from a dumbfounded Regan to throw herself at the multicolored, long-eared, dog standing on the toy box. He licked her face and nuzzled her. And then he turned to stare at Lincoln. He sniffed, smelling, tasting the air, redolent with the ozone of burned power and vampire blood.
“Son of a witch,” Carmen muttered. “It worked.”
George slowly dropped his front paws off the box and waddled to his old master, to Lincoln, licking the trace of blood off Lincoln’s bleeding knees.
“Son of a witch,” Carmen muttered again. “It really worked.”
Lincoln Shaddock dropped again to the floor and pulled George into his arms. He was crying, purely human tears, and the old dog licked them from his cheeks. Lincoln chuckled and rubbed the Basset behind the ears. “You are a sight for sore eyes, you are, old boy. Good old boy. Good George.”
It was the first major working we had done as a family since we lost our coven leader and big sister. Tears fell down my face in joy and delight and excitement. My earth magics weren’t what they had been before. But they weren’t dead. Not yet.
oOo
One week later, to the day, there came a knock on the wards. Holly and Jerel stood there, in the dusky night, waiting patiently. Carrying KitKit, I went to the front door and dropped the wards. When the vamps reached the porch, Jerel bowed again, stiffly formal, and opened a folded note. Vamps have great night vision and when he read, I had no doubt he could see the words.
“Lincoln Shaddock, Blood Master of Clan Shaddock, does not forget his promise of a boon to Molly Everhart Trueblood and to Angelina, her daughter. But he offers this small token of thanks, for the memories and humanity gifted by the child and her tender care of his beloved dog, George.”
Holly knelt and set a small bundle on the grass at the bottom of the low porch. “He is from a line of champions. And his name is George.”
From behind me, Angie squealed and threw herself off the porch and directly at the Bassett puppy. The two tumbled across the night-damp grass and rolled, the puppy licking her face. In my arms, KitKit struggled and scratched and hissed, and made a twisting, leaping, flying movement out of my arms, over my shoulder and back inside. The puppy, seeing the movement raced after, managing to trip over his huge paws, and step on his
own ear, sending him flying. Angie, to my horror, whirled and threw herself into Holly’s arms for a hug that left him shocked and motionless on his knees, and then into Jerel’s knees for another hug. And then she was gone, inside, chasing after the pets. Oh dear. I had a dog. Big Evan would be home tomorrow and … we had a Bassett.
Before he stood, Holly removed something from his pocket and handed it to me. “Final thanks,” he said, backing away, “but not a boon.”
I looked down at my hand and saw what looked like a diamond. Payment for an old dog was a diamond? A diamond? When I looked up, the vamps had gone, disappeared into the shadows. I closed the door and reset the wards. And went to check on my enlarged family.
Big Evan would have a cow.
BATTING OUT OF ORDER
by Edmund R. Schubert
Fifteen-year-old Jerome Howard leaned against the small wooden desk in the bedroom of his family’s Brooklyn apartment. The lamp to his right pushed back the darkness and illuminated the lone, baffling baseball card that lay before him—at least visually. In all other ways the card remained a dark mystery.
At the base of the lamp sat the rest of the holographic cards, the full set from 2049, stacked tall and neat. Instead of arranging the cards in numerical order, Jerome had grouped the players into their respective teams: the New York Mets on top, then the Baltimore Orioles, then the New Orleans Dodgers, starting with his favorite teams and descending to those he had no interest in.
To the left of the stack, directly in front of him, rested the baseball card that had foretold his doom: card #874, Frank Ryan; pitcher; New York Mets. The card’s voice-over had said that in ten years Jerome would suffer permanent brain damage at Ryan’s hands.
There had to be some way to find out if that card was … was … what? Defective? A joke?
An impossible, unwelcome messenger from the future?
Jerome weighed the idea of sneaking back into his father’s room and using his 3-D nano-printer to create another set of cards, wishing there were a way to print singles. Maybe another Ryan card might tell him something more helpful, more hopeful. But the program he’d downloaded didn’t allow for that. It was the full set or nothing.
Earlier that day he’d watched his father install a fresh cartridge of nanites into the family’s 3-D nano-printer and then print a replacement for his broken geniusphone, so Jerome knew there were nanites to spare. The question was, could he get away with printing a whole new 1,048-card set without his father catching him? It had been risky enough to do once. Nanite cartridges were expensive and his ex-Navy father was notoriously tight-fisted—a dangerous combination.
On the one hand, the idea of brain damage was terrifying—especially if it was going to happen by the time he’d celebrated his 25th birthday. Jerome was as good a student as he was an athlete and he’d quickly calculated that was barely one-quarter of his expected lifespan.
On the other hand, even news of his semi-impending doom wasn’t enough to squash the excitement of the fact that the card had said he was going to be a Major League baseball player. A Major Leaguer! He’d dreamt of playing professional ball ever since his mother put a first-baseman’s mitt on his tiny hand on his second birthday. He’d immediately grabbed a huge hunk of cake with the glove, and his mother crowed hysterically at the sight of icing all over the webbing, even as his father barked in his most commanding, military voice about damaging the leather. It was the beginning of the baseball dream.
Of course, Jerome had no actual memory of the event, but his grandfather had taken a holo-vid of the party and Jerome watched it so often that it felt like one.
His mother was gone now, his parents long ago separated for reasons he didn’t know. That’s why he watched those holo-vids as often as he did. He hadn’t seen his mother in a decade.
So he’d make it to the bigs. An All-Star no less. At least, that’s what the card had said, right before adding that his promising career would be cut short by a fastball to the temple.
But how could the card know what would happen? Was he even the Jerome ‘Cal’ Howard the card referred to?
That last question was the easiest to guess at. Jerome’s all-time favorite player was Cal Ripken, the Iron Man, whose record of 2,632 consecutive-games-played was over fifty years old and still standing. Jerome had always planned on calling himself ‘Cal’ in honor of his hero if he ever broke into the Majors—and how many “Jerome ‘Cal’ Howards” could there be?
So the card was talking about him. It had to be.
And the rest? The bigger questions? Death by fastball would have been better; at least that would be quick and clean and truly over with. But brain-damaged? How badly? How long did he have to live with it? Jerome could imagine more options that were horrifying than ones that weren’t.
Jerome snuck down the hall and peered into the living room where his father was watching baseball on the wall. The Dodgers were playing the Astros, the biggest rivalry in the Gulf of Mexico Division. His dad became a big Dodgers fan while stationed outside of New Orleans for three years.
Just above his dad’s new geniusphone a holographic image of a cartoon balding man in a toga said, “Pizza pizza, delivery in twelve point five minutes.” His father disconnected the call by swatting away the image with an openhanded swipe like he was snatching a fly out of midair.
No, Jerome thought. He’d better not try printing out another set of cards right now. His father would be too alert listening for the approaching pizza-oven truck. Those trucks didn’t ever want to stop rolling, so if you met them by the curb, delivery was free; if they had to wait for you for more than thirty seconds it was a huge extra charge. The Howard family wasn’t poor, but they also didn’t pay extra charges. Jerome’s father saw to that.
Jerome returned to his room. To the card.
It lay there, inert, looking like an ordinary piece of plasticardboard with an old-fashioned color photograph printed on the front. Jerome picked it up and studied it.
It weighed next to nothing, was slick on both sides, and was artificially impregnated with the scent of bubblegum for a retro smell to match the 2-D retro look. The stats listed on the back were pretty standard.
2046: Games, 23; Innings, 132; Wins, 6; Losses 9, Strikeouts, 144, ERA 3.55
2047: Games, 26; Innings, 147; Wins, 9; Losses 14, Strikeouts, 171, ERA 5.42
2048: Games, 29; Innings, 208; Wins, 10; Losses 11, Strikeouts, 195, ERA 4.33
And that was that. It was this year’s set, 2049, and Ryan had been pitching for three full seasons. He’d come up rapidly through the Mets farm system because of his 100-mph fastball, but he lost more games than he won because that fastball was his only pitch. If he couldn’t effectively move it around the strike zone, a lot of hitters would launch it out of the stadium. The announcers had even taken to calling them ‘Home Ryans’ because of their frequency. He could ring up the strike-outs, but strike-outs alone didn’t win games.
Jerome gripped card #874 between his thumb and forefinger and accidentally slapped it down on the desk harder than necessary. The embedded nanites required only the slightest impact to activate, but Jerome knew what was coming and was anxious about it.
As the nanites worked their digital voodoo, a full-color 3-D hologram of Frank Ryan sprang to life above the card.
Holographic Ryan nodded to an invisible catcher and went into his wind-up while a voice-over announcer called the play—just as it had the first time Jerome activated the card. And just as had happened the first time—and the second, and the third—as Ryan reached full extension, the card glitched, white static and digital square blue sparks flying above his desk like a miniature fireworks display. Jerome didn’t flinch this time; he knew the square sparks were coming. This time he studied them, trying to figure out what was happening.
But he didn’t understand what occurred this time any more than previously. The square blue sparks were too bright to look at for long, and when they subsided, a haggard and clearly older Ryan stood on the mou
nd, halfheartedly doffing his cap to an invisible but adoring crowd. Through the cheers, Jerome heard the announcer:
“After several years of mediocrity as a starter, Frank Ryan was converted into one of the most dominant relievers in baseball history. But early in 2059, his seventh year as a reliever, Ryan put a fastball into the temple of 2058’s Rookie of the Year and one-time All-Star, Jerome ‘Cal’ Howard. Unable to shake off the effects of causing permanent brain damage and ending the promising young slugger’s career, Ryan once again became ineffective and announced his retirement before the end of the 2059 season. Who knows what records the fireballer might have broken if not for that one ill-fated pitch.”
The voice stopped, the hologram collapsed, and the card sat in plasticardboard silence. Jerome stared at it, Ryan’s flat, unblinking eyes returning his gaze.
Impulsively Jerome grabbed a fistful of other cards—Mets players all—and slapped down one after another after another onto the desk, watching as they sprang to life. All projected as they normally did; all delivered last season’s information: 2048. Most modern holocards gave stats for the current year, updated daily through the nanite’s online link as the season progressed. Not using this year’s data was intended to be part of the set’s retro feel, but the idea hadn’t been well-received by fans—they were too accustomed to immediate updates—which is why Jerome had been able to download the program so cheaply.
More than anything else, right now he regretted buying the stupid program, because the more he watched this one particular card, the more convinced he became that the story it told was real. But what was he supposed to do? How was he supposed to react? Could he change it, stop it? What if he simply chose not to play baseball?