“What?” Patty asked, in spite of her better judgment, by the expression on her face.
“Potent black magic, or minor black magic carried out by something very potent and very, very evil.”
“Come on! There is no such thing as black magic. You know that as well as I do, so cut the crap.”
“One. Parents are dead in a so-called car accident. Two. Grandmother is dead, probably unexpectedly and from a previously undocumented condition, unless I miss my guess. Three. Girl gets cancer. I bet there isn’t an obvious cause. Is there a family history of childhood cancer? I’d bet no. Four. House burns down with no explanation. Moreover, it happens when the family would be here, but there would be minimal traffic to alert the fire department. Five. Holy water at the site goes supernova. Even if you aren’t comfortable with the idea of black magic, can you really tell me that all that strung together doesn’t strike you as outlandishly improbable?”
Patty watched me with suspicious eyes and a clenched jaw. When she spoke, the words came through clenched teeth.
“Even if I did buy this conspiracy theory, which I don’t, I’m not buying your black magic theory.”
“Why not?”
“Because I like my job, dammit! I’ll like it even better when I’m sheriff. Nobody is going to vote for someone who goes around spouting off about black magic!”
Chapter 9
In spite of myself, I was a little disillusioned by that answer. I knew she was right. One whiff of a rumor that she thought black magic was anything more than a convenient plot device used by over-imaginative writers and her career was over. On the other hand, someone or something was targeting Abby. If it was a person, he or she had summoned darkness way beyond a run-of-the-mill demon. That teenage girl, who was worried that a crush might think she was ugly because of some scars, who had probably never done anything worse than shoplift some candy when she was five, who had suffered more than anyone that age deserved and still managed to find reasons to smile, was in very real danger.
I didn’t doubt that Patty was a decent person. I also suspected that if I could point to a human culprit who was killing Abby by inches, Patty would come down on that person like one hundred and fifty pounds of holy vengeance. She might even give me five minutes alone in a room with that person, if I asked for it. Yet, I wasn’t giving her anything she could work with inside the confines of the law. Asking her to willingly, knowingly, jeopardize the world she was trying to build for herself was asking too much. She would put her life on the line, because that was her job, but she wouldn’t help me if I couldn’t do better than fairy tales. More to the point, she couldn’t help Abby. But someone had to help that girl.
I suppose that was when I admitted the decision to myself. The decision was actually made long before that, probably around the time I turned the car around and went back to the burning house. It was a bad decision. I wasn’t at my best, not even close. My back ached and sent sharp stabs through my nervous system constantly. It wouldn’t take much for that burn to get infected. I doubted I could run more than twenty feet without getting winded. If I pushed myself beyond that, I’d probably pass out. How much help could a man in my condition be?
I could walk away. I’d done it before. There were terrible powers at work in the world. Huge, awesome powers that could literally rip a man to pieces, and they operated on both sides of the good and evil divide. I’d met a few of those powers along the way. I wasn’t one of them. I’d stumbled into a few of their conflicts and they played for stakes that made me want to wet myself. I’d walked. I had walked and not looked back. I was a middling practitioner with occasional flashes of brilliance and real power. I knew things, studied arcane lore and traditions, and that was usually enough to help me make up the shortcomings in my raw ability. At least, that was, if the people I was squaring off against were also mortals and the things they summoned weren’t too close to relative omnipotence.
I didn’t know the stakes at play around Abby. I had no clue. The smart plan was to leave, before I found myself dragged under by forces I underestimated. Whatever was at work around Abby was playing a long game. Most black magic happens on impulse in the pursuit of short-term goals. Love is patient, evil is not. Impulsive evil leaves mind-boggling amounts of human wreckage in its wake. Patient evil scared me right down to the bone. I literally couldn’t imagine what patient evil might deliver when it played out its endgame.
I don’t know how much of what I was thinking played on my face, but I think Patty read my disappointment in her. There was a telltale red across her cheeks that might have been embarrassment, but it might have been anger.
“Look,” she said, trying to sound reasonable, “I think you’re trying to watch out for that girl. If you want official police involvement here, you’ve got to give me evidence I can work with. I can’t flip an alarm based on a flash of light and a lot of bad luck.”
“Alarm,” I repeated, as if the word was something I’d never heard before.
The word tickled something in my memory of the fire. There was something about the fire that hadn’t been right. It was something about antiques. I remembered dashing through the high grass in the front yard and the vague sense of neglect about the house. That seemed out of character, but maybe not. Paint and the lawn were cosmetic and they were hot work. Paul was old, maybe waiting for better weather. Or maybe he was just more concerned about his cancer-ridden granddaughter. Who cares about the paint when your primary family member might be dying?
“You remembered something, didn’t you?”
“Maybe,” I said. “There was something off about the fire.”
“Other than black magic,” offered Patty, dry as sand.
“Patty, how long have you known Paul?”
“About eight years,” she said, all caution. “Why?”
“He struck me as a conscientious, old-school guy. The kind of man who takes pride in his home.”
“Yeah, that sounds like Paul.”
“He’s not the sort of man to let his granddaughter live in a house with subpar wiring or bad plumbing.”
“No, he isn’t. In fact, he had his electrical completely redone around the time I came to town. Where are you going with this, Hartworth?”
There had been so much noise when I opened the door to the house. God that fire had been loud, deafening really. There was something off about the memory. Something that I had expected that wasn’t there. I’d been so focused on the old man, the girl and surviving, that I hadn’t pieced it together. Still, something had been wrong. It was one of those essential things that you just expected during a fire. It clicked.
“He’s definitely not the kind of man who lets every battery in every smoke detector go dead,” I said.
Patty squinted at me. “Come again?”
“There weren’t any smoke alarms going off when I went into the house. I had other things to worry about, so I didn’t notice then. Still, not a single one going off? Should have sounded like a damn air raid in there with a fire like that. Plus, the house was full of antiques. Not millionaire expensive, but not chump change either. No way a guy invests all that money and doesn’t invest five bucks for the batteries to protect it. Check the alarms. Maybe there isn’t any evidence that someone set the fire, but if someone messed with the alarms that would be suggestive. Might even be attempted murder, right?”
Patty started nodding about halfway through my train of thought. She probably saw the angle before I did.
“Yes,” she said. “That would be suggestive enough to warrant some official attention, I think. I might need you to make another statement to get the ball rolling.”
I thought about the sheriff and frowned. I couldn’t get a read on him. He wasn’t outright hostile when we talked, but that didn’t mean he wanted me kicking hornets’ nests.
“See if you can avoid it for now. I suspect that the less involved people think I am, the better.”
“Why’s that.”
“Call it an int
uition. I don’t understand what’s happening here. I don’t want to advertise until I do.”
Patty slid her hands into her pockets and gave me an uncertain look. “I shouldn’t trust you. I know I shouldn’t, but you don’t strike me as a crazy person.”
“That’s good, since I’m not.”
“So you say, but you’re serious about this black magic stuff, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “Let me worry about that. If it’s black magic, it’ll be my problem to deal with in the end.”
“I can’t have you taking the law into your own hands,” said Patty with stern, quiet determination. “I won’t tolerate a vigilante.”
“You sound like a sheriff already,” I said, avoiding the implied question.
The back of my neck prickled as a wave of cold washed over me. If Patty felt it, she gave no outward sign. It was possible that I was just being paranoid, but the sun was setting and I didn’t want to take unnecessary chances. A lot of things came out to play at night and I was pretty sure we were being watched.
“I guess you were right,” I said, loud enough that my voice would carry. “Your arson guy knows his business. You’ll give him my apologies?”
Confusion crossed Patty’s face before she masked it with an annoyed scowl. “You big city assholes always think you know better than we do. Yeah, I’ll tell John you’re sorry.”
I headed back around the side of the house with Patty shadowing me. The sense of cold observation followed us until we got to the cars, then it evaporated. I let out a little puff of breath and fought off a dizzy spell. I made a mental note that holding my breath was off the approved activities list for a while.
“Thanks for playing along,” I said under my breath.
Even if I couldn’t feel an observer anymore, it didn’t mean that there wasn’t one out there in the descending darkness. One that might be exercising more caution with a stranger that seemed to be showing too much interest in Paul and Abby.
“You think we’re being watched?” Patty asked in the same hushed whisper.
“Could be,” I hedged. “Why chance it?”
I unlocked the Neon and slid into the driver’s seat. Patty hovered by the door and I raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Was that really holy water?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It really was.”
“Christ. Black magic. Guys wandering around with holy water. Evil conspiracies. When did the world lose its mind?”
“The world was always insane,” I said. “Always. We just started tricking ourselves into thinking it wasn’t. Helps people sleep better, so it’s not a totally useless lie.”
“You’re a real bundle of comfort.”
“I hear that a lot.”
“I bet you do,” said Patty.
I waited as Patty pulled the cruiser out the driveway and headed back toward town. As the last remnants of sunlight vanished on the horizon, I watched the house. A few days before, it was a home. Maybe not a happy home, precisely, what with all the death and sickness and black magic that seemed bent on destroying a teenage girl, but a good home. A home where an old man was willing to die to save his granddaughter. All that was left was a burned out shell that would, in all likelihood, be torn down. Maybe Paul would rebuild, maybe he wouldn’t, but it would never be the same home. A lifetime of memories etched into those walls, a psychic protection all their own, was gone.
I jerked forward in my seat. That made sense. The house shielded the girl to some extent, blunting whatever dark mojo was being hurled at her. Take the house out of the equation and it forced Abby into the open all the time. It made her more vulnerable. What I couldn’t fathom was why anything or anyone would want to inflict such pain on her. She was a sweet kid that would, if she beat the cancer, probably grow up to be a kind adult. She wasn’t powerful, though. I’d have sensed that, even if her power was nascent. She wasn’t a threat to anything that crawled the outer darkness and the bowels of creation. Why the hell was she on the receiving end of so much evil attention?
“I guess that’s what I’m supposed to figure out,” I muttered to the steering wheel.
Then again, I thought, did I really need to know why it was happening? Knowing might make it marginally easier to stop, but that knowledge wasn’t critical to derailing dark magic. Finding out might take more time than the girl had to live. The why of it could wait until after. What Abby needed was for the magical attacks to stop. I wasn’t sure I could do that, but replacing the protective blunting influence the house had provided was in my reach. I could buy Abby some time while I worked out a permanent fix.
Chapter 10
Patty had been right that dropping her name would get me a cabin with both electricity and running water. I tossed and turned, though. Pain and worry gnawed at my limited peace of mind. In principle, giving Abby some protection was easy. The right combination of symbols, spells, and objects would go a long way toward warding off evil directed at her. The problem was that she was in a hospital, constantly surrounded by people, and more problematic, cleaning staff. I could get around some of those problems, but I wouldn’t be able to perform a ritual purification of the room.
No matter how friendly Abby and Paul might be toward me, I was confident that lighting a bundle of sage in her hospital room would have three inevitable results. The fire alarms would go off with a possible bonus of triggering a sprinkler system. I would be banned from the hospital premises. I would spend a much less amicable night in one of Sheriff Barnes’ cells, with the door closed. The cleansing wasn’t an absolute necessity, but I was loath to do less than I was able to do. I decided that practicality was the greater part of valor and set my mind to developing a combination of protections that didn’t end in any of those less-than-stellar results. I dropped off to sleep amid a mental swirl of runes, incantations and dead languages.
I woke up to blinding pain. My back was on fire again. Some rational part of me knew it wasn’t literally on fire, but my body made no such distinctions. I managed to crawl across the bed in little spurts between explosions of agony that left me breathless and on the verge of tears. I clawed open the bottle of painkillers the doctor had prescribed. I had no memory of actually going to the pharmacy, but I must have done so. I dumped one of the pills into my shaking hand and almost popped it straight down my throat. A moment of clarity took hold then. I’d be performing magic later that day. High Magick, by most people’s measure, and that kind of magic could backfire in horrifying ways if I did it wrong.
I closed my fist around the pill. The pain verged on unbearable, but I rode it out. I needed to know if I could endure it. It wasn’t some machismo thing. I’ve got absolutely nothing against pharmaceutical solutions to that kind of pain. Hell, it was the exact reason pills like those existed. If I could endure it without the pill, though, it meant I didn’t need to take the whole thing. I expected that the full dose would leave me in a more or less drug-induced stupor. Half a dose would probably cut the pain to a livable, if very uncomfortable, level. I lay there for a minute, as the pain cascaded across my body in great waves that made my muscles knot to the cusp of cramping up. I endured for two minutes and then for three.
I won’t claim that the pain was less. It wasn’t. What happened was that I started to get a little bit inured to it. It was a close call, but I forced myself to bite the pill in half and dry-swallow it. The idea of getting up to find water was almost enough to cause tears. I lay very still and breathed as steadily and deeply as my injured lungs would allow, meaning not very, for fifteen minutes. The drug started to kick in and the pain receded. It didn’t recede as much as I would have liked, not even close, but enough that I was functional.
I went through the burn treatment routine. The burn’s location on my back added challenges to applying the antibiotic cream and securing a fresh bandage, but I muddled through. I’d have given serious money to be able to take a shower. It wasn’t practical, though, so I settled for a makeshift sponge bath in the cabin’s tiny showe
r. I changed into the last of my clean clothes and made a mental note to find a laundry or dry cleaner in town. I sat on the edge of the bed. Twenty minutes drifted by without anything like a substantive thought crossing my mind. I snapped out of it with an effort. While some of my drifting was the medication, I thought the real culprit was the pain itself.
Pain exhausts your mental and physical resources. The act of experiencing pain was a trauma that, in many ways, was worse than the original injury. It was one of reasons why people who had experienced severe pain and trauma found action movies so implausible. People that have been shot know that you don’t proceed to have a twenty-minute, running gun battle followed by hand-to-hand combat. You go into shock. If you don’t get treatment very quickly, the shock will kill you before the bullet does. If you manage to survive the bullet and the surgery to remove it, then you experience the pain. Mind-numbing, body-debilitating pain that you believe, in your true heart, will never end.
You do not go out to settle scores. You don’t even think about pulling out the IV that is delivering the pain medication that keeps you sane. You lie in bed and do everything possible to avoid feeling any more pain than you absolutely must. You move only when a doctor or nurse insists that you move. Afterwards, you collapse back into bed and embrace that pain stupor. My theory was that the stupor conferred an evolutionary advantage. It prevented you from going out and doing stressful and damned fool things like riding horses, hunting, or in my case, driving cars and engaging in higher order magic.
The problem with that evolutionary advantage was that it assumed your comfort and survival were the paramount concern. The real world didn’t work like that most days. My comfort was all well and good, but it didn’t account for Abby’s survival. If I didn’t get up and do something, I was sure that her life expectancy was going to drop into the days and hours category, rather than whatever the doctors had told her and Paul. I had to do it, because I seriously doubted anyone else in town had the necessary esoteric knowledge to act. My body voted to stretch out on the bed and sleep. My brain voted to do something. Those contradictory votes ended in a stalemate with me standing in the middle of the room and staring into space. I might have stood there for hours, if a confused bird hadn’t flown against one of the windows. The noise startled me out of my near hypnotic state and sent my heart pounding.
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