Johnny took a big sip of his soda and started to laugh as the police headed back. “I love this part.”
Sven settled back in his seat to watch. This sort of thing wasn’t what he normally did these days. It made him feel like a teenager again, someone who had just gotten into the game. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed those days.
Both of their phones buzzed, and Sven motioned for Johnny to check the message.
Johnny made an annoyed noise. “That bitch.”
“One of your models?” Sven asked him.
“Jealous?” Johnny sounded insufferably smug.
He was a little bit jealous. It bothered Sven how someone as unremarkable-looking as Johnny managed to have the luck he did with women. Of course, he supposed he only had Johnny’s word for it that any of the events described actually happened.
Sven shrugged. “So, who was it?”
“Any time I say ‘that bitch,’ I’m talking about our boss.”
“What is your problem with her?” Sven asked him.
“What isn’t yours? She’s crazy.” Johnny watched as the policemen came back to their cars and had a shouted conversation over the roofs, gesturing about which road to drive down.
They hadn’t noticed the tires yet.
“Okay,” Sven said, “so…what did the crazy bitch say?”
“Now you’re getting it.” Johnny shrugged. “She wants a status update. Hey, look, they’re figuring out the tires.”
Sure enough, both sets of policemen had gotten back out of their cars and were gesturing at the tires. Both Johnny and Sven sank down in their seats as the policemen looked around.
They seemed to hope that the criminal would be waiting there with a knife, ready to be apprehended.
“She’s been right so far,” Sven said, gesturing at the police. “Took them fifteen minutes to get here. Then they only nabbed the guy who’d gotten knocked out at the start of the fight, and the rest of them are already off mugging tourists again. Game, set, and match.”
“So, how are we going to calm it down?” Johnny asked. “Now that we’ve given them a taste of the good life.”
On this point, Sven wasn’t quite as certain. He shook his head. “I hope she’s got a plan for that.”
He pulled out his phone and sent a status update for the two of them since Johnny hadn’t. It wasn’t long before their phones buzzed again.
“She wants all of our original sites locked down and in distribution tonight,” Sven said. “She moves fast, I’ll give her that.” Normally, courting business owners was a multi-week process.
“When she starts bringing in cash, we’d better get a cut,” Johnny growled.
“Uh-huh. As soon as this mess is cleared up, I’ll get you back to your car.”
Johnny was staring into the middle distance.
Sven snapped his fingers in front of the other guy’s face. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Thinking about how to lock down the Mermaid.”
Sven groaned. “You struck out. It happens. Anything more than half is good; you and I both know that.” He looked at his friend. “Johnny. Don’t go back there.”
Johnny smiled, and Sven knew this was going to be a mess.
He just hoped it wasn’t a mess Pauline would pin on him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kera awoke feeling terrible again, probably because it was morning. She always felt like shit when she got up during the morning hours.
In this case, 10:22.
“Ugh.” She sat up and rubbed her eyes, then waved a hand in front of her mouth. “Morning breath. Wait, did I eat last night?” The rumble from her stomach suggested she hadn’t, but the past few days had made her wary of trusting it.
Shaking her head to clear it, she glanced toward her table. The bag with her food was still sitting there, cold and possibly inedible now. She had a memory of downing the other gyro in record time, but she might as well not have eaten anything, given how ravenous she was.
“Oh. Well, then.”
Standing up with a creak of leather, she realized that she’d slept the whole night in her new outfit. It had gotten filthy in a hurry and would need to be cleaned, despite having been in service for less than twenty-four hours. She stripped the leathers off, an elegant process that involved hopping, overbalancing, and flopping onto the bed, and draped them over her dresser, then wobbled over to the table.
Her body was desperate for calories by this point. She picked up the gyro and slung it into the microwave, giving it two minutes to kill any bacteria that might have shown up while it sat out overnight. There was still a possibility that her digestive tract would get angry at her, but she didn’t care. She was famished.
While the food heated, she made herself a quick pot of coffee. She’d need it to come back to the proverbial land of the living.
This was like the worst hangover ever. She pillowed her head on her arms. Well, minus the nausea.
Small blessings.
Speaking of which… She threw a glance over to where her motorcycle stood and smiled. “Good morning, Zee. Nice to have you back. The place wasn’t the same without you.”
Once the food was ready, Kera didn’t even bring it to the table. She ate standing at the counter, downing bites of pita, gyro meat, and tzatziki with ravenous speed and washing it down with scalding black coffee. Even wincing at the hot food couldn’t slow her down. Everything tasted fantastic to her despite the less-than-optimal conditions. Deprivation made the body more appreciative.
When she was done, she stared forlornly at the empty plate for a moment before washing it. She’d get herself more food after a shower, she decided.
But first, she was going to let the food and the coffee do their job. She crumpled her wrappers and returned to her bed with a second cup of coffee, then located her tablet and fired it up. Out of dull curiosity, she opened an Internet browser and perused the morning news.
Her eyes grew wide.
“Ohhhh, shit!”
Good Samaritan saves desperate family from burning car on Interstate, the headline announced.
Kera gawked at the screen while she read it. Her stomach roiled with faint nausea, but mostly she just found it bizarre—nearly surreal—to be reading about her own exploits on the news.
Which, in all truth, hadn’t been what she’d wanted. It seemed ridiculous to her that she had expected to do that without the press getting wind of it, but she really had.
“For God’s sake!” She groaned. “I decide to do anonymous vigilante stuff and fail to be anonymous about it.”
At least they hadn’t identified her yet as far as she could tell. She scanned the article three times, afraid she was missing an identifying detail, but all anyone seemed to know was that someone in a black motorcycle helmet was riding around and saving people from problems. The article also stated that the bike was black, but there weren’t any more details.
Kera was generally annoyed when people couldn’t distinguish between different types of motorcycles, but right now, it was pretty convenient.
“So, Kera,” she told herself, “I guess your idiot ass shouldn’t have made the grand announcement that downtown is now the LA Witches’ hood. Not sure if the article mentions that part, but still.”
She skimmed the rest of the story. It contained, mercifully enough, no mention of her excursion into gang warfare. She doubted that reporters, cops, or regular citizens had made the connection yet if they’d even heard about it.
After all, who were the gang members going to go to? The police? What would they say, that some chick had been mean to them while they were trying to steal a car? She snickered.
Her smile died. They would have paid attention to her little ass-kicking, though. They wouldn’t forget.
Her mind drifted away from the brawl, however, as she read the Good Samaritan article in more detail, no longer focusing solely on descriptions of herself. Since the journalists had known nothing about the mysterious “hero,” aside from the
ir assumption that it had been a man, they’d filled out the story with details about the family who’d crashed.
Kera was drawn in. While she’d been happy to help, there hadn’t been time to think about who the three individuals in the wreck were.
It turned out that they were siblings. The two who’d been injured in the crash, she discovered, had gone to the hospital to pick up the other man, the one who’d been in comparatively good condition. He, their brother, had been admitted for extensive testing for a cancerous tumor, and the doctors had not yet decided if it was benign or malignant.
“We went there,” the woman was quoted as having said, “totally fixated on him and whether or not he’d live. Mel and me were too upset to drive while we were bringing him back. I couldn’t handle it, and the crash was my fault.”
Her brother Mel, who’d dislocated his shoulder, had added, “And us two were the ones who got injured in the crash. Ironic, right? If that guy in the black helmet hadn’t come by, it might have been us who died, while Jerry lived with his cancer, completely alone, without us.”
Kera’s gut clenched. She wasn’t the overly sentimental type, but there was no way to read about the family’s plight without being affected. A lump formed in her throat and her eyes began to water. This put a different spin on things.
The article’s authors went on to describe in an updated section how the car had been deemed unsalvageable. More importantly, they’d received word right after publishing the story that the doctors had determined that Jerry’s tumor was benign.
Mel and the woman, Daniela, might have perished for nothing, Kera concluded. Their brother was going to make it, yet without her intervention, the two might have ended up trading their lives for their brother’s in a way.
Instead, all three would live.
Kera leaned back and allowed the facts and implications to sink in, trying to be stoic and mature about it. Then she burst into tears. She didn’t cry easily, but with the aftereffects of adrenaline and exhaustion, she wasn’t as balanced as usual.
They weren’t bad tears, at least, since the family’s story had a happy ending.
“Oh, hell.” She sniffled and wiped her hand over her nose. “I wasn’t,” she swallowed, “expecting this.”
For once, just once, she had done something purely right. That something wasn’t a mere by-product of being a stupid, pretty, privileged rich girl, either. It had nothing to do with the fact that her parents were wealthy or that she got good grades and high test scores in school. Or that most people thought she was attractive. Nothing like that. In fact, they’d assumed she was a dude.
She’d helped someone she didn’t know and would likely never meet again. It was as though a need inside her had been fulfilled, but she hadn’t grasped until this moment that it had been a need. She had felt good when she fixed Mr. Kim’s arthritis, but this was even better. Something about the anonymity of it felt purer.
Trying to calm herself, she looked at the description of herself in the article. It made her chuckle. “I guess the ta-tas aren’t that obvious in the leathers? Sure, we’ll go with that. Feels kinda nice.”
She sniffled for another minute or two, then got herself under control. Rational thought returned, and she sighed. Chances were the confusion was worse because it was dark, there was fire and smoke everywhere, and everyone was panicked and confused, not to mention she was hauling around huge pieces of metal like the Hulk. In their position, she’d probably have assumed the mysterious motorcycle person was a guy, too.
So much for anonymity.
She wiped her eyes, washed her face in the bathroom sink, and came back into the main room to look at her leathers again. They definitely needed cleaning, being covered with debris and grime and soot from the ravaged car as well as condensed exhaust fumes, random road spray from wet patches on the asphalt and concrete, grass stains from the fight over the Mercedes-Benz, and of course, sweat.
This was another thing she could do herself, though, and she knew from experience that doing something would help steady her. She started off by wiping the surface down with paper towels, spraying it, and rubbing carefully to remove the filth without compromising the integrity of the leather. Cevin had provided the outfit as a gift one measly day ago, and she didn’t like the thought of it being reduced to hand-me-down levels that quickly.
But the process of cleaning it all was tedious as fuck.
“Wait,” she said with a sudden swell of excitement. “There might be a spell for this. I could’ve sworn...”
Kera left the leathers where they were and checked her spellbook. Sure enough, buried near the end of the contents was a formula for “cleaning organic material.”
She grinned. “Hah! They thought of everything. This is going to work. I know it.”
She hesitated for a moment, then left the tablet where it was and rummaged around in the cabinets. She didn’t have much that was very caloric, but she found a bag of Halloween candy that she had intended to pass out.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and she knew her body was going to rebel if she tried to do more magic without adequate energy. She was pretty sure she hadn’t recovered from last night’s expenditures yet. She wolfed down a few fun-size bars and several tiny bags of M&Ms.
“The things I do for magic,” she murmured. “And might do again, just because they’re tasty.”
After a few days of trying spells, she decided to go back to the introduction and the “Philosophy of Thaumaturgy” chapter, both of which she had only skimmed. After all, they had seemed like wishful thinking at the time, the sort of thing people talked about before trying to sell you crystals.
Except that Kera now knew this book was for real.
Perhaps she hadn’t given it a fair shake the first time because on this read, she found that it had a simple, straightforward template for its spell descriptions. The authors always began with a quick summary of what the magic was intended to do, then they detoured into the underlying theory and philosophy behind the spell—the arcane significance of it, though they didn’t spend too much time on that. In Kera’s opinion, that was wise. One didn’t want to bore the reader, after all.
She pored over the pages in which they described the casting time, the hand gestures involved, the materials the thaumaturgist would need—in this case, none—and finally, the incantations to be spoken. Following this, they included final comments, including safety recommendations.
Kera made sure to read the short chapter in detail, then re-read it for good measure. The essence of the miracle-work involved had to do with calling upon the ancient spirits who were traditionally associated with whatever material needed cleaning and employing their help in “purifying” the structure of the substance. That made sense to Kera, though she hoped the ancient spirits didn’t object to being used for something this mundane.
She read the closing commentary before she started the hand gestures.
The authors admonished the reader that this spell, like the healing formula and many others, involved a “pull” of magical energy from outside sources, which in turn pulled energy from the caster. Thus, it was wise to know one’s limits.
Kera recalled the earlier portion about contacting the spirits.
So, is it really simply a case of me grabbing their power and stuffing it into the spell, or is it more that I’m politely asking for their help? Maybe thinking of it that way is the key to getting the amounts right. Worth a try.
Rather than risk ruining the beautiful new leathers, she opted to test her hypothesis using one of the fire spells. She was very familiar with the gestures and the energy expenditure, but she had spent her time perfecting the gestures, the words, and her control, and she hadn’t thought to examine her motives.
“Knowing what you want to achieve,” Kera said aloud, “while trusting the powers you’re invoking. Maybe that’s it.”
She reviewed the chapter on the ignition spell, then took a deep breath and mounted a candle on her small dining ta
ble.
“Here goes nothing.”
While forming the gestures with her hands and intoning the words, she imagined a tiny puff of flame and heat. She put her confidence in the elemental spirits of fire to understand her intention.
A fireball the size of a modest ice cream cone erupted in the air directly over the candle. Though it was bigger than Kera would have preferred, it nonetheless ignited the wick without harming any of her other stuff.
She smiled. “All right, then. Let’s move on to Phase Two.”
The girl turned to the bare brick wall at the far end of the warehouse, equidistant from both Zee and her stash of workout gear, and started the spell again. This time, she envisioned a blast that, while specifically not powerful enough to destroy a structure, would suffice to kill a large animal.
The air in front of her blazed and shimmered and a roaring cloud of fire erupted over half the wall, the flames filling her apartment with heat and light, only to die a second later as they found nothing flammable to feed upon. The bricks were scorched, but otherwise, there was no damage.
She sighed. This time, though she had summoned the spell with finesse and efficiency, she still found herself trembling. She made her way over to the candy shakily and ate a few more mini candy bars, resisting the urge to write a sticky note that read, Magic as a way of losing weight?
Once the energy had gotten into her bloodstream, she practiced her magic further with a handful of other cantrips and parlor tricks. She used a telekinetic spell to gather the random ashes, summoned a light breeze to then blow them out the window, and tried to combat the smell by conjuring a nice lemony aroma.
The last one failed at first due to a lack of material components as a frame of reference, but then she remembered she had a lemon-scented candle. Using that and trying again, the witch quickly had the space smelling as though she’d recently made a batch of lemon meringue pies.
How to be a Badass Witch Page 17