by Jim Stein
***
Piper made sure Ralph was settled, then headed to bed for a few hours before work. I soon found myself yawning and chafing over what was taking Quinn so long. Nine would come plenty early, and I wouldn’t mind a bit of shut eye myself. It was nearly midnight when her bike roared up the drive, and my temper was frayed.
“That RV is gonna be a bitchin ride,” Quinn said by way of greeting as she hung up her helmet and jacket. “Can you believe Randy wants the bedroom for a freaking practice area and to make me sleep out with everyone else? That ain’t happening.”
“Yeah, so—”
“It’s even got an awning and outdoor big screen for movie night.”
“Right. We have a—”
“And the storage compartments beneath the thing are huge. Billy pulled up an old brochure online. There’s plenty of room for the gear. We won’t have to tow.” She pulled a can of Rejuve from the fridge, plopped into a kitchen chair, and popped open the drink while raving about the stupid motorhome. “Unless we need a car. Pete was fucking spot on about finding a diesel. That beast could pull a tank.”
“Yeah, Pete’s wonderful.” I spat the words out, bringing her up short. “Can I get a couple of words in?”
“Sure.” She raised her eyebrows and waved the can as if to say “whatever.”
Quinn took a big gulp of the energy drink. The stuff had a kick. She wouldn’t be falling asleep anytime soon, which suited me just fine. She’d been out playing all evening and could damned well take the next watch. It would give her more time to plan her trip and gush about how great Pete, Billy, and the band were.
“We have a visitor.”
“Is that so?” Quinn stretched and yawned.
Her shirt’s yin-yang symbol—flaming phoenix above red dragon—stretched across her chest and pulled up to expose a taut midriff. We only kissed and touched a bit, but I wanted to do so much more. The day and my spells left me drained. Desire flickered to fill the void but was quickly replaced by annoyance. She got a kick out of scrambling my thoughts. Did she do that to other guys?
“Yes,” I snapped, mad at myself, her, and the whole situation. “Probably some sort of witch’s familiar.”
It was an angry, hateful thing to say to a woman who had been terrorized by La Bruja Lechuza all her life. The owl witch physically and mentally abused Quinn, forcing obedience from an early age. The confident smirk slipped away, and her eyes went round. She blinked, swallowed, and pulled in a shuddering breath.
“W—what, did you say?”
“Well, if not a familiar, at least something magical,” I backpedaled, guilt clawing at my gut. “I’m keeping it in the garage until we find Pina.”
“Show me!”
Brave resolve settled over her apprehension, and a chilly curtain dropped between us. She pushed past. I followed, suddenly certain the ring sitting heavy in my pocket would never be worn.
Ralph sat among blankets in the bottom of the cabinet, a half-eaten marshmallow in one hand and an apple core in the other. He chewed placidly and watched through the expanded metal door as we approached. At some point, he’d made his way to the top of his cage. Bits of paper littered the empty shelf, and the carrots were piled off in the back corner.
“Melissa trapped him out on the farm.”
“Nothing like what Lechuza used.” Quinn leaned in, having regained her composure.
“I’m not so sure he’s evil,” I offered in a vain attempt to undo my prior comment. “Got Max pretty excited and tried to get away, but never attacked any of us.”
“Then why did you say…” Quinn trailed off with a heavy sigh. “Forget it. You’re right, Pina will know what to do with him. Speaking of which, can’t you give the poor guy a pair of shorts?”
5. Trickster
T HE TUXEDO was a sleek outer skin that made Ralph stand taller. I upgraded my original estimate of his height to better than two feet counting those bat-wing ears. Where he’d gotten the dapper outfit was a mystery, but the black top hat and cane suited him especially well. He nodded and flashed pointed teeth.
“Edan, I must speak to you.”
I blinked. The dry croak was ancient and laced with power not matching the small creature, yet I knew that voice. Ralph started in surprise and disappeared. A subtle amber light filled the room. I found myself surrounded by white adobe walls. Sand warmed my bare feet, and a cheery fire burned within the circle of stones off to my right.
The dreamscape was instantly recognizable; I was in Kokopelli’s domain. My father liked to speak in dreams, but he hadn’t bothered much lately. I surveyed the empty room, breathing desert air and burnt wood.
“Koko?” The flat tenor of my voice wavered with the firelight.
Being alone in the adobe room made me nervous. In prior true dreams, Koko always stood by the fire or sat at the table playing games with Pina. Silence hung heavy over the scene, and it took me a moment to realize the fire wasn’t even crackling. I moved to the small wooden table. Its two chairs stood empty, but the game board I had come to expect sat upon the weathered surface. I traced a finger along the edge of the inlaid board, not daring to touch. The figures set upon its surface were of different shades and shapes. Several were little people clothed conservatively and in different poses. Some stood, others sat, and a few slept.
Perhaps six figures were darker than the rest, with stylized features and grim expressions—all quite detailed. The board looked like a map with rivers and mountains, but the boundaries between areas shimmered and shifted. Of course a god would have a magical game. Each time I saw the game board the scale was different. This time the figures were larger, more like chess pieces. A handful of prominent features on the map-board were highlighted in yellow, yet stood empty as if reserved for special characters.
“Intriguing, is it not?” Koko stepped up behind me.
“A version of chess?”
“Of sorts.” He waved a gnarled hand over the table and the board faded from sight.
Kokopelli hunched forward, studying the empty table. He was a bent old figure, but I had come to appreciate his outward appearance didn’t mean much. He moved like lightning when necessary and wielded dreadful power through his carved staff and the wooden flute that appeared at his bidding. In my world, Koko normally sported a fur coat and black fedora with feathers sticking out of the satin band. Here, he wore traditional bleached buckskin consisting of a tasseled breechcloth and laced shirt. A medicine pouch hung by his side, looking much like the one he and my birth mother gave me on my eighteenth birthday. His eyes were beady and unreadable as ever, and his hook of a nose sat amidst the ageless ravines of a weathered face.
“What’s up?” I figured he would badger me about my training, tell me to use my powers more, and maybe make another pitch for me to move out west. But the old spirit was strangely quiet and shifted his scrutiny from the table to look me up and down—as if looking through me rather than at me. “Any word on the bad guys?”
“Yes.” His slow nod released me from examination.
I blinked in relief and surprise. Koko was normally evasive about the supernatural beings who disagreed with his attempts to repopulate humankind. As I understood it, the loose collection of darker gods, spirits, and other creatures were all too happy to let humanity dwindle into extinction. They would eventually strike at me and my half-siblings to derail Koko’s plans and get rid of us before we started having kids of our own. Since the witch and her mistress left, he hadn’t shared specifics, just vague warnings sprinkled under his urging for me to practice my spells. The direct answer set me back, and I guess it showed.
“Don’t look so shocked, Edan.” A trace of the old, affable Koko showed through a smile I had not seen in months. “We knew Lechuza was just the first.”
“It’s not that. I thought…” I resisted using the dream to ask why he was suddenly talking, because the old spirit didn’t sense time passing the same way as we puny humans. “You have news?”
“The D
ark Court is agitated, and I fear another opponent rises. You need to stay put and stay hidden. I have a new exercise for you, Spirit work to mask you from scrutiny. Master it quickly so I can shift my attentions elsewhere.”
That was his big news? “What opponent? Will they come after me directly or my family again?”
The old man stared at me, or rather around me, as if I had bluebirds perched on my shoulder or something. A curtain of annoyance descended, smothering the last of my patience.
“Perhaps, but I think not soon.”
Wonderful. I had no idea what the word “soon” meant to the old spirit, but badgering him did no good. He didn’t so much evade my questions as ignore them. In the end, he showed me the new spell of hiding and insisted I practice. As before, I applied my music and followed his instructions until I could direct the glimmer of Spirit energy to cloak me in a protective bubble. Better than the prayer bundles Pina used to protect my home, this spell moved with me. It wouldn’t block a physical attack, but if cast correctly in the waking world, it should keep them from finding me.
“Can I use this on Piper and my folks?” I asked through the bluish glimmer of the spell.
“Possibly.” Koko cocked his head in thought. “You need to tie off the magic, or it will quickly leak away and leave your subject exposed.”
“Let me guess, something else to practice.” The answer was never simple.
“Exactly! You have the basics. Continue working on strengthening your layers. Wrap yourself in Tokpela. Let nothingness from the great void before creation conceal you.”
I promised to work on it. Though excellent for feeling out a new spell, casting in a true dream was ultimately useless and created no effect. I had to be awake in the real world for my magic to do anything. I didn’t have a clue how to tie off a bubble of nothingness. Hopefully something would come to me, because the dark players didn’t have any qualms about going through friends and family.
An important detail niggled at my mind. Remembering things from the waking world here was like trying to remember a fading dream there. I felt the true dream ending. Koko turned back to the table, again hovering over his game board, and I wondered if Pina would be joining him. The memory had something to do with the forest sprite and with concealing veils…
“Wait! We found something.” I reached toward Koko, and the dissolving scene stabilized as he turned. “A creature out on the farm. Pointy ears, likes sweets. It casts illusions. I need to know if it’s dangerous.”
“Not now.” He dismissed my question with a wave, turned back to the game, and moved a small figure.
“Not now? How do you…”
The adobe walls vanished, leaving me alone in a grassy field. Flowers sprung up around my feet. As I brushed past, they withered and died. A cottage squatted at the bottom of the gentle slope along the bend in a stream. I headed down to see if anyone was home.
***
Singing birds woke me. Light filtered through the blinds, so it couldn’t be all that early. But my eyes refused to focus, and it felt like I pulled an all-nighter. The very first time Koko had me practice in my dreams, I awoke refreshed. I missed those days. Lately, the magic took more of a toll. But to be fair, I was using it an awful lot. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand, swung my feet to the floor, and nearly jumped out of my skin. A small woman sat at the foot of my bed.
“Good morning, sleepy head,” Pina said and began poking around my bedsheets, her tiny hands darting dangerously close to my butt.
The sprite wore a stylish green smock tied at the waist with an intricately woven belt of grass and flower stems. It was an upgrade from the traditional homespun outfit she wore when we first met. Piper must be coaching the sprite on wardrobe.
Pina led the local clan of forest sprites, a magical race that lived peaceably in the woods—when they weren’t converging on my house to “help.” After the excitement last fall, Pina moved in with us. Nowadays, she was gone more than not, but her bedroom—in actuality the hall closet—stood ready for the adorable, almost-three-foot-tall woman with blond hair, porcelain skin, and enchanting emerald eyes. She was playful, loyal, and liked to hunt for loose change and other treasures in my furniture.
“Hey, watch the hands. Nothing good in here,” I assured her, wishing I had worn a shirt to bed.
I scrambled to my dresser and pulled on a green tee. The bug-eyed clown from the Rejuve energy drink ads leered from my chest, making me feel doubly foolish.
“He said you caught something.” Pina stopped rifling through my bedding and sat with legs scissoring prettily over the edge.
Pina often referred to Koko as ‘He’ or ‘Him.’ The sprite was fiercely devoted to her lord. Someday I had to get the story of how an east coast forest sprite got hooked up with a deity out of the Southwest, but for now I was happy Koko hadn’t totally ignored my plea for help.
“Sure did. Let me brush my teeth.” I hesitated, remembering the tuxedo dream and Ralph’s lack of clothing, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now. “We have him in the garage.”
A few minutes later, we watched our visitor tear into a chicken leg near the back of his cage. Piper left a note saying she tried to wake me, fed our guest, and left for work. I was relieved to see he wore a pair of homemade denim jeans, which the note explained came off one of my sister’s voodoo dolls, a statement that didn’t worry me nearly as much as it would have a year ago.
“We named him Ralph,” I said by way of introduction.
“Oh.” Pina’s dark emerald eyes went round as she studied him. “This is an imp from the old world. He shouldn’t be here.” Her voice held a kind of hushed reverence—or fear.
“Is he dangerous, one of the dark powers?”
“I wouldn’t think so.” She screwed up her pretty face in concentration. “Certainly not a lone imp, but we haven’t seen any in ages.”
“He probably won’t do it in front of us, but Ralph can cast illusions. He disappeared and had us chasing after copies that weren’t really there. Imps come from Europe?”
Ralph finished stripping the meat and crunched on the bone, making me wince. Hopefully he wasn’t susceptible to internal damage from the sharp shards like a dog.
“Not across the ocean, Ed, just long ago, when I was young.” The way she said it made me wonder if sprites aged like regular people, or if they were near immortal like Kokopelli. The distant look of remembrance on Pina’s face made me think it might be the latter. “They are little devils sometimes, but only small mischiefs to trick people out of food. They will eat almost anything. You did a good job capturing him. Imps are immune to most magic. He won’t be able to do any of his own tricks in there. Pina rapped on the wire mesh door, startling an inquisitive look from our guest. “Not inside a metal cage.”
“Should we dump him back out at the farm where Melissa trapped him?” I wanted to get my house back to normal.
“It is difficult to say.” Pina shook her head and huffed out a breath. “This isn’t right, but he likes your food. Keep him until I can figure out why he’s here. My lord will know what to do.”
“Yeah, Kokopelli didn’t seem too interested in my problems.” She glared daggers, and I softened my tone. “He’s busy with his own projects.”
Pina studied me for a long moment before speaking as if sounding out the thought for the first time. “He has been a little…distracted of late.” Then her unshakable loyalty snapped back in place and her tone turned brisk. “There is much stress and strain. I should attend Him more.”
“He did say a faction of dark forces is moving,” I admitted, to make up for my blunder, but the words made her frown.
“He has not told me of this.”
The fact Koko spoke with me about something he had not shared with his loyal sprite clearly hurt her feelings. I felt like crap, but didn’t know how to make things right. An uncharacteristic awkwardness settled between us. It was painful, but we managed to discuss the imp’s living arrangements and problems t
o watch for. We both sighed in relief when I ended the strained conversation on the pretext of heading to work.
***
Walking into the office was a lot like going to my basement. The place bustled all morning, and then the band showed up. The A-Chords didn’t work for Main Line Studios, but the station owner, Mr. Conti, decided to help sponsor their tour. He was anxious about losing Billy, his lead engineer, to a three-month road trip, which made his willingness to help all the more sincere.
Double-M Records coordinated logistics from their headquarters out west. Not only did the station provide a convenient address for the band, Mr. C had a suspiciously useful stockpile of amps, cables, and other gear required for stage performances. I wondered how long the old Italian had shared my dream of resurrecting music.
“Mr. C is hunting up interns for you,” Billy told me as the band sorted through gear in the back storeroom.
“But I thought…maybe I could be your sound guy.” My eyes kept straying to where Quinn bent over a hard-shelled case to inspect patch cords. The image of her having to fend off groupies and finally giving in to some California Don Juan made me sick.
“Double-M has people meeting us along the way,” Billy countered. “I’ve put Mr. C in a real bind. You gotta cover my six and train the summer help. Don’t worry about the hard engineering stuff. Jack Bishop down at Fix-all can handle major repairs. But someone needs to set up the sound stage, align antennas for broadcast, and keep the daily ops rolling smoothly.”
“Billy, get your ass over here,” Quinn called. “You have the mixer specs. Am I looking for optical or electrical cables?”
Billy gave me a hopeful suffering look and strode over to help the others.
“They will do good things, eh?” Mr. Conti snuck up behind me and dropped a fatherly hand on my shoulder.
He was a short man of perhaps seventy, one of the older pre-virus millennials. The salt and pepper stubble on his lined face never changed, and his gray eyes were always alive with sparkling mischief.