by Karen L Mead
“I know, right?”
Chapter 17
“And make sure to get high-quality coffee, something expensive grown on a mountain somewhere. Don’t try to save a buck with instant coffee, it will backfire.”
“Yes, I imagine that instant coffee is a pretty ineffective ingredient compared to the real thing,” said Sam, taking notes.
The old woman glared at him over Skype. “What are you, stupid? Instant coffee is excellent in curses; just drinking it normally is practically a curse already. If you use instant coffee in this spell, it will be too powerful, and your animal will go down to the size of a gerbil.”
“Oh,” Sam said sheepishly. He dimly remembered reading about the many powers of freeze-dried coffee in one of the Spellcraft Secrets books, but unlike, say, history, details from those books never seemed to stick in his head. In any case, after screwing up the charm that was supposed to calm Cassie’s parents, he’d decided not to do any further crafting without proper supervision. Fortunately, he still had Georgette’s number.
“Um, what else do I need? Do I need Belladonna? These things seem to always call for Belladonna.”
“No, not this time. Let’s see, I’ve never been asked how to make a charm to stop an elephant from growing before…I did a horse and his jockey once, but that was many years ago…hmm….”
Sam made a pained face. “Are you sure you can figure out how to do this? Because if I do something wrong, and this spell hurts the animal in any way except keeping it small…”
“Your witch will kill you, yes, I am aware. You think I would let any harm come to the charming little baby? Don’t be ridiculous. I just need a moment to think….”
“Necromancer?” called a sing-song voice from the kitchen.
“Please stop calling me that,” Sam called over his shoulder.
“How do you make popcorn?”
“You know what a microwave is, right? Press the ‘popcorn’ button on the microwave!”
Over Skype, Georgette glared at Sam over the tops of her glasses.
“Young man, do you have a fairy in your house?”
“No,” Sam blurted out without thinking.
Georgette crossed her arms. “If you have one of those cursed fairies in your home, I swear I will hang up this call right now.”
Dot poked her head out from the kitchen and looked at the screen. “Good day, I am not a cursed fairy, just a forest fairy. Cursed fairies are not allowed in my forests.”
“Oh,” said Georgette, changing her posture. “Why didn’t you just say so? Forest fairies are perfectly respectable.”
According to whom? How should I know?
Georgette clicked her tongue and looked up, thinking. “Let’s see, in addition to the coffee and all the ingredients for a standard diminishing spell, you’ll definitely need something else…what is it again….”
“Samuel, does the popcorn button on your microwave work?” Dot called again. She sounded like she was enjoying herself.
“Of course it works! My microwave works.”
“No, I mean, does it give the popcorn enough time to finish? Sometimes with the popcorn button on these machines, I have noticed it does not give all the kernels enough time to pop.”
Sam looked from the fairy in his kitchen to the old witch on his computer screen, and shrugged.
“I don’t know if I ever made popcorn with that thing, I don’t remember. You’ll have to try it and report back.”
Georgette chuckled. “Always with the snacks, the fairies. They may look small, but they’ll eat you out of house and home if you let them.”
“For me to eat him out of house and home, he would have to have actual food in his kitchen,” Dot called back in a dry tone.
“Okay, no more cross-conversation between you two,” Sam said, turning his laptop so it was facing away from the kitchen. “Do you have the last ingredient, or do you want to call back later after you’ve thought of it?”
“Yes, yes, I have it, it’s a bonsai tree. That should work beautifully. That was what I used on the horse, back then.”
“Okay…do I just throw the whole tree into the cauldron, or…”
“Yes, of course you do. Don’t worry, your cauldron will be bigger on the inside. They all are.”
“Great, thanks,” said Sam, writing down mini tree in his notes. “I can’t thank you enough for helping me out with this, Georgette. Serenus used to help me with crafts but he’s been…hard to reach lately.”
He put his notepad down on the table and scratched behind his ear, thinking. “Err, have you been in touch with him?”
The old witch shrugged. “Professor Zeitbloom? Somewhat. I think I talked to him for five minutes last week.”
“Do you know what’s going on with him?”
She made a dismissive wave with her hand. “Don’t know, not interested. More important is the issue of my payment.”
Huh?
“You weren’t helping me for free?”
“Of course not, silly boy. No, I need you to make some black curses and mail them to me. Something very dark, that shrivels the hands and makes them unusable…temporarily. Well, preferably temporarily.”
“What do you need something like that for?”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed.
“Some ladies in my bowling club need to be taught a lesson.”
Sam rubbed his forehead with his fingers.
“You want me…to curse…your bowling league…”
“Not the whole league, just the nuns. Whole team of nuns, they’ve taken a vow of humility, but would you ever know it? No, they walk around like they own the place, just because one of them is good at bowling. I’m going to show them what happens when nuns mess with witches.”
“Georgette—”
“Every time one of them gets a strike, they all yell ‘praise the Lord!’, it’s so irritating you could just hurl. I want to see if they blame it on God when their fingers fall off.”
Sam’s cell phone rang. “Listen, I owe you for your help so I guess I’ll have to do…something, but can we discuss this some other time? I have another call.”
“Don’t worry, I will email you a list of all the ingredients,” said Georgette, then she ended the call.
Sam answered his cell with trepidation.
“Sam, you have to do something!”
It was Ethan, sounding panicked. Sam immediately tensed as though for battle.
“What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“It’s Eugene. There’s going to be a big Sorcery tournament soon, and he won’t let me go, even though I always do all my homework and clean up in the living room.”
Sam heard a crunching sound and turned around; Dot was sitting on his couch, munching on popcorn. Apparently the button had worked.
“That’s what you’re calling me about? Listen kiddo, I’m not your mom; don’t call me every time Eugene says no to you about something and try to get me to overrule him. It doesn’t work that way.”
“But you don’t understand,” Ethan continued breathlessly. “The prize for the tournament is a Fantastic Foil, and there’s only like a hundred of those in the whole world, and the tournament is right nearby, but Eugene won’t let me go because—”
“Eugene is your guardian; I stand by his decision, whatever his reasons.”
“But Saaaaaaam---!”
“Goodbye, Ethan,” Sam said, hanging up.
He put his phone down on the table next to his laptop, then collapsed backwards onto the couch. For a while, he just lay there, looking at the ceiling while the forest fairy ate her popcorn.
“For someone who says he never eats popcorn, you had quite the selection.”
“That’s because I didn’t buy it for myself; one of my vampires did.”
There was a thunk as Dot let the bowl of popcorn drop to the floor. Sam groaned.
“Oh come on, Miri just bought the boxes at the supermarket, she didn’t individually open every package and touch it with h
er little undead fingers.”
“Still, I have eaten food procured by an undead,” Dot said, hugging herself as though she were cold. “If I were home, I would submerse myself in a clear stream for three hours until I felt clean again.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not home. And the vampires seem to like you about as much as you like them, so it looks like you’re stuck with me, lady,” Sam said, standing up. “Now, you may want to leave the room, because I’m about to start crafting and I bet the smell of dark magic makes you break out in hives or something.”
The fairy looked thoughtful. “Crafting. That takes energy; you should not do this on an empty stomach.”
Sam raised an eyebrow.
“Are you saying we should order in dinner?”
For a moment, Dot’s expression reminded Sam of one he’d seen on Ethan many times; the look of a mischievous little imp who’s getting very excited, but trying really hard to hide the fact that they’re getting really excited.
“If we must, shall we get the round food? I can’t remember what it is called, but it is round, comes in a paper box?”
“Do you want pepperoni on it?”
“I want the kind that has all of the things.”
Chapter 18
Sammael was busy playing miniature golf when Azrael disturbed him. Typical; he couldn’t even get a decent game in these days without getting dragged into nonsense that didn’t concern him.
“What do you want?” Sammael asked, still lining up his putt. “I’m having a very good time and I don’t need you ruining it.”
He hit the ball; as he’d planned, the ball ricocheted off the stomach of a prone, bound and gagged businessman, went under the platform with the little waterwheel, and sank into the hole. In the past, he had tried setting it up so that the ball dropped into a prisoner’s open mouth, but while that had merits as a method of torture, it was gross whenever he needed to reclaim the ball. This way was much cleaner.
“We have need of you.”
“As you can see, I’m in the middle of a game of Torture the Unscrupulous Oligarchs. I’m busy.”
Azrael looked at the mini-golf course, filled with the souls of crooked businesspeople trussed up into strange shapes, and sighed. “You know, this isn’t even very effective torture. Even with the spikes, getting hit with the ball doesn’t hurt nearly as much as anything you have in the basement.”
“I like to make it up in volume,” said Sammael, moving to the start of the 59th hole. “See that guy in the fashionable gray suit? This is his fiftieth straight year of being part of my golf course. He’s been here from the moment I took up mini-golf.”
“Always the stupid games with you,” said Azazel, shaking his head. “But maybe that’s why He likes you.”
Sammael froze; there was only one being whose name was pronounced in that tone. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Azrael swallowed nervously. “We need his knowledge. The Watchers are planning something, uncivilized beasts that they are, and he’s the only one who might know what. Go talk to him.”
Sammael threw his golf club in frustration; there was a grunt as the metal rod hit a bound prisoner. “That guy’s crazy! Maybe he does know things, but he talks so much nonsense, it’s impossible to tell. Why did I get picked for this job?”
“Because he’s willing to talk to you.”
“He hates me!”
“Perhaps, but he seems to hate you slightly less than the rest of us.”
Sammael turned to face Azrael, getting genuinely angry. “And what’s in it for me? You expect me to mediate with the Devil just out of the goodness of my heart?”
Azrael’s voice was calm and even. “If the Watchers are planning something, it will affect your offspring as well. And your familiars….”
“Well then, I’ll just have to live with that uncertainty,” said Sammael. He thrust out an arm and created another golf club, then turned to go back to his game.
Azrael swallowed. “Please. It is of the utmost importance.”
Sammael looked over his shoulder. Did Azrael…just say “please” to me? “You’re really scared of what those stretched-out bastards are gonna do, aren’t you?”
“We have intelligence that suggests they are becoming very active; we can’t assume it will all come to naught, as it has in the past.”
Intelligence? How do you get ‘intelligence’ about what a bunch of cursed monsters tied up in an unreachable pocket dimension are doing? But he kept that thought to himself. “Fine. I’ll talk to the Devil. Get my weekend off to a solid start.” He turned around and addressed his golf course full of prisoners. “Hear that, rich people? I’m going to go hang out with the Devil. When I come back, I expect each of you to write me an essay about how grateful you are that I own you, and not him. Two pages, double-spaced,” he said. He pointed to a servant on the side of the course. “Get me a typewriter, one that makes a really nice clink-clink-clink sound. Untie them one at a time and let them write an essay. Anyone who makes a grammatical error gets fifty lashes with the Hot Whip.”
The servant, an elderly woman dressed in her church-going best, nodded her head in assent. “What if they make typographical errors?”
Sammael snorted. “Typos? The Rack. As if it needs to be said, Sylvia!” he exclaimed, then turned to walk with Azrael, who had already started to leave. The golf course shimmered out of existence, to be replaced by a narrow path into the forest.
Normally it wouldn’t take very long to reach anywhere on this plane of existence, since space was malleable in Realm. However, to reach the chamber where He was imprisoned, they had to take a specific route; that meant having to make small talk with Azrael for several minutes. Not good.
“So, who are you rooting for? I think the Red Sox are looking really good this season.”
Azrael made an exasperated sound. “As usual, your obsession with human culture baffles me.”
“Really?” said Sammael, stepping over a rock. The path to Satan was strewn with obsidian rocks: very pretty, but painful if stepped on. “You remember that the Almighty basically abandoned us because he liked them better, right? It never occurred to you to consider why that might be?”
“Only you would talk about him here,” said Azrael, angrily kicking a scrap of obsidian out of his path.”
“Why not? It would only be a problem if I tried to pronounce the Divine Name.”
Azrael’s expression became troubled. “He’s done that, you know.”
“What?”
“The Devil. He said the Divine Name once, and lived. I saw it, I was there.”
“No waaaaaaaay,” said Sammael, running in front of Azazel and turning to face him, walking backwards. “That can’t be right. Doing that would be the end of any of us.”
“He’s not like us,” Azrael said.
Sammael nearly tripped over a large piece of obsidian and turned back around to face the path, perplexed. The next few minutes were spent in (nearly) companionable silence as both demons were lost in thought.
When they reached the mouth of the cave, Azrael stopped as though hitting an invisible barrier. “This is as far as I go.”
“If he eats me, I want you to take over my mini-golf course.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Why do you hate fun?” Sammael asked, jumping down into the cave.
In truth, he didn’t feel as jovial as he was pretending. Talking to Lucifer was always unnerving, and he was beginning to wish he’d refused Azrael’s request. As usual though, his curiosity had gotten the better of him.
Before long, the obsidian walls glowed orange and he had reached the fire pit. He’d always been curious about the human propensity to associate the Devil with fire; as usual, they had it partially right, but backwards. Only by bombarding Lucifer with an inferno, where he constantly had to fight to keep from being incinerated, could the other inhabitants of Realm keep him prisoner. He was simply too strong to be restrained any other way.
When Sammael jumped down to the lowest level of the pit, Lucifer had his back to him. He could see that the other demon was sitting cross-legged, but the flames obscured his view any further. Sammael knew that Lucifer managed to keep a few inches of space all around him at a pleasant temperature, at great effort; from the outside, it still looked like the demon was consumed by flames.
Before Sammael could think of what to say, Lucifer addressed him.
“Ah, Grandpa has come to visit me. How nice.”
Sammael barely resisted a shudder. Lucifer’s voice, simultaneously young and old, had always sounded bizarre. “Don’t call me that, I don’t know where you get that from.”
He wasn’t sure, but he got the impression Lucifer was looking at him over his shoulder. “It’s because you are my father’s father. Not everything is complicated, Gramps.”
“No, we’re all the same age, we all came into existence at the same time, I remember it quite well. You were next to me, at the Dawn of Creation,” said Sammael, slipping his hands into his pockets. It felt odd to mention that; he remembered it like it was yesterday, but he hadn’t thought about it in some time.
“And you’re confident that’s the first time I ever existed? What proof do you have of that?” said the Devil, his tone curious.
Sammael rolled his eyes. Is this what Azrael feels like when he talks to me? No wonder he can’t stand me. “Not even you existed before Creation, Lucy-goosey. Not even you are that special of a snowflake.”
“I never claimed to exist before Creation, merely that Creation wasn’t the beginning of my life,” said the Devil patiently. “Sometimes I think there’s hope for you, Gramps, but where time is concerned, you’re as clueless as all the others.”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to talk to you, because it’s always these nonsensical riddles with you that are just annoying,” said Sammael, scratching the back of his head.
Lucifer laughed; it was an odd sound, like two coils of metal being rubbed together. “Riddles, hmm? What if I’ve been telling the plain truth this entire time, and you all simply refuse to listen?”