Skunk Man Swamp

by P. D. Workman

  “Any of us,” she insisted.

  He scowled. “Any of you.”

  “Swear it on your powers.”

  He was silent.

  “If you want me to let you go, then swear on your powers that you won’t hurt any of us.”

  “Fine, I swear it.”

  Reg waited.

  “I swear on my powers I won’t hurt any of you,” he muttered angrily.

  Was it enough? Reg looked at the soldier. He made no sign. She looked at Harrison. Did it make any difference at all what Wilson’s words were? Could he lie and just go ahead and do whatever he liked anyway? Was swearing on his powers enough to bind him?

  “Harrison?”

  Harrison gazed at Wilson and shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  His level of unconcern was unsettling. Reg knew from what Harrison and others had said in the past that he really didn’t care what happened to humans. But she knew that he had great affection for Starlight. And possibly some feelings toward Reg. He took another chunk of cake on his serving fork and nibbled at it, waiting.

  “You promised,” Reg reminded Wilson. “You promised on your powers.” And then she dropped the shield.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  It was a relief to be able to let the shield go. It had taken a lot of power to be able to maintain it. It was like putting down a heavy weight after having to hold it out in front of her for an extended length of time, a favorite punishment of one of her foster families.

  Wilson looked around at them one at a time, weighing his options. He was, Reg knew, reduced in his powers. But she didn’t know how long that would last or how much it would limit him. And if he tried to attack one of them? Would the universe prevent him from using his powers in a way he had sworn not to? Did the oath bind him or not?

  “You will live to regret this,” Wilson told Reg.

  He looked at the others. Harrison, in particular, drew another long glare. Wilson would never forgive him for being one of the immortals who had cursed Wilson for fifty years, no matter how Harrison spun it.

  “You will leave here,” Harrison said.

  It was more in the flat tone of an observation than a command. Wilson looked at him for a minute, and then he was gone. Reg steadied herself on the back of a chair and looked around, waiting for a renewed attack. There was no sound. There was no sign of Wilson anywhere.

  Damon moved, standing up suddenly, and then sitting back down when there was nothing for him to do, no one for him to fight. “Okay… where did he go?”

  Harrison shrugged. “We do not need him.”

  Reg let out a measured breath. “Well… I’d like to know if I have to worry about him coming back here. He wasn’t too happy.”

  “He won’t ever be happy again,” Harrison speculated, “now that he knows who he is.”

  “He really was better off without any memories? Not knowing who he was?”

  “Better off,” Harrison repeated, and he shook his head, indicating he didn’t understand what Reg meant.

  “He was better wandering the Everglades, not knowing who he was, than having his memory restored?”

  “Definitely better,” Harrison said firmly, nodding.

  Reg sighed. “This stuff is so confusing. I thought I knew what I was doing, but it turns out… I didn’t have a clue.”

  Harrison’s nod was sympathetic. “Most humans don’t,” he consoled.

  “What if he comes back?”

  “It will be some time before he gets his strength back, and you continue to grow in your powers. He did give his oath. Perhaps that will be enough.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “You are never safe in this world, Regina. That is the nature of being mortal. You could be killed tomorrow stepping in front of a bus. Drinking poison. Tripping over your cat.” He gestured to Starlight, once more sitting where he had been, washing one of his back feet, toes spread wide. Starlight stopped and looked at Harrison and then Reg.

  “Was he… did you turn Starlight into a man?” she asked Harrison.

  “You simply saw another form. You should not assume that a being will always be in the same form.”

  Reg blinked, looking at her cat. “That was weird.”

  She turned her attention to Damon. He flushed pink.

  “This whole thing… was my fault. Do you believe me when I say that I didn’t know that he was like that? I just… I just thought he was lost and I could get the reward.”

  “I guess any reward is out of the question now.”

  Damon nodded, looking abashed. “I’ll have to check the language to make sure, but yeah… I don’t think just finding him and letting him go fulfills the terms of the reward. He has to actually participate in the Spring Games.”

  Reg gazed out the window, making sure that Wilson wasn’t there, right outside the house, waiting until they were off their guard to attack again. But the person he wanted to harm the most was Harrison, and Harrison never left by the door.

  “I don’t think having him participate in the Spring Games would have been a good thing, would it?”

  “Uh… no,” Damon agreed. “That probably would have been a bad idea.”

  “They must know what kind of a person he was before he disappeared. Didn’t they understand how powerful he was? What he could do to them? Why would they want someone like that to participate?”

  “They must not have known. And since then… most of the people who were in charge of the Spring Games back then aren’t involved in it anymore. It’s only an eighteen-year election period.”

  She would have expected a position like that would be a two or four-year term of service, but she supposed that with the slow aging process and long lives of the magical practitioners, two years would hardly have been a blink.

  “So it was just a publicity thing. To get people’s attention.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Harrison, do you think—” Reg turned to speak to him, but he was no longer there. The piles of gold coins and gems were gone. All that remained was the half-destroyed chocolate cake.

  Happiness, at least as far as Harrison was concerned, was a chocolate cake.

  Epilogue

  Morning, Reg,” Sarah greeted, as Reg made her way out of the bathroom, robe wrapped tightly around her.

  Reg yawned. “Morning.” She blinked hard, trying to get her eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight. “Is it still morning?”

  “It is.” Sarah looked at her watch. “For… almost another hour.”

  “I’m up in good time, then.”

  Sarah laughed. “I brought you your mail. And you have a delivery from Amazon.” Sarah put the box on top of the kitchen island.

  Starlight meowed piteously, looking up at Reg from in front of his bowl of kibble. Which was of course, not empty. Reg leaned down to scratch behind his ears. Then she plucked a pair of scissors from a drawer and tackled the tape sealing the Amazon box. Curious, Starlight jumped up to find out what was in the box.

  Sarah stayed around for long enough to see Reg pull a 36-count box of Hershey bars out, followed by a box of 48 packets of Quaker apple cinnamon instant oatmeal. Sarah raised her brows.

  “I didn’t know you like oatmeal. You hardly ever have anything but coffee and leftovers for breakfast. Or lunch. Whatever it is.”

  “I don’t. I hate oatmeal. This is for… a friend.”

  Sarah frowned, looking at the Hershey bars and oatmeal. Then she gave a little smile. “A friend in Everglades National Park?”

  “Or maybe… two friends.”

  “I see.” Sarah nodded understandingly. “Well, good for you, Reg. Good for you.”

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  Preview of Magic Ain’t a Game

  Chapter One

  You should print up some flyers or brochures for the Spring Games,” Sarah told Reg, as she bustled around tidying up. The older, gray-haired woman opened the planner on Reg’s kitchen island to review her appointments.

  “I don’t have anything to do with the Spring Games,” Reg said, frowning and rubbing her sticky eyes. “Why would I print flyers for it?”

  “It’s a good time to get those tourist dollars! People come from all over to watch the games, and they love to get in on the action and get a psychic reading or some other taste of the unseen world.”

  “Oh.” Reg nodded. She tripped over Starlight, her tuxedo cat, on her way to the coffee machine. Even though it wasn’t early by Sarah’s standards, it was still before noon and Reg wasn’t quite ready to take on her day. She had never seen the Spring Games. Damon had described them as a sort of magical Olympics. Witches and warlocks from around the world gathered to participate in friendly competition to pit their magical abilities against each other.

  Reg herself was still just learning about the unseen world. She’d had various encounters with abilities and magical beings that she had always assumed were only the stuff of fairy tales. But apparently, the magical races were just as real as Reg’s ability to read people. What she had always assumed was a talent for cold reading was, apparently, actual psychic ability. And then there were the ghosts. She had grown up being told that the voices she heard and people she saw were either the results of vivid imagination or mental illness. It had never occurred to them that she simply had sight that others did not. There wasn’t anything wrong with her brain—or not that, anyway—it was just a paranormal ability that most of the world did not possess.

  But she still had a lot to learn, and she was looking forward to the Spring Games not just for entertainment value, but to educate herself more in what was possible in the magical world.

  “You really should take advantage of the opportunity,” Sarah pressed. “It will be a good time to pick up some more clients outside of Black Sands as well as locals.”

  “But if they’re not here, I’ll only be able to meet with them once,” Reg pointed out. The real bread and butter was in repeat clients. Those who came back again and again to learn more about their future or their past, or to communicate with lost loved ones.

  “You can do phone contacts. Lots of psychics do phone readings.”

  “Oh. I guess I never thought about that.”

  “Sure, it’s big business. You even see advertisements for them on late-night TV, running up against all of the dating app commercials.”

  “I always thought those were just scams. Another way to get money from lonely hearts.” Not that Reg was averse to a good con. Scams of one kind or another had kept her off the street in her lean years before moving to Black Sands. “They always seemed sort of sleazy.”

  “That’s why I didn’t recommend going that way. But getting face-to-face contacts here during the Spring Games and then converting them to phone clients who you talk to once a month or even once a week, that’s good business. And they’ve seen you face to face, so they are far more likely to keep in contact with you, rather than calling a hotline when they have a problem.”

  Reg watched the coffee dribble into her mug, eventually pulling the mug out a second or two too soon, impatient to get the mental boost she needed. Coffee dripped onto the counter. Starlight jumped up to the counter to watch the growing puddle.

  Reg took a few sips of the hot coffee. “I’ll do something up on my computer then,” she agreed, “and then get it over to the printer to make some copies. What do I do, just… hand them out to anyone I see at the Spring Games?”

  “Pretty much. Anyone you talk to or who is sitting close to you. Don’t worry about offending; people are there to see magic. They love to get a little taste of psychic powers for themselves.”

  Sarah was Reg’s landlady. She was the one who rented the cottage in her back yard to Reg at a price that she had been able to afford when she first came to Black Sands, penniless but for her haul at the last town she had stopped in to make some ghostly contacts and maybe to leave with a few pieces of jewelry that people didn’t need anymore. Sarah was a witch and lived in the big house at the front of the property, and she had taken it upon herself to help Reg establish her business, keep the cupboards and fridge stocked, and do anything else around the cottage that she thought needed doing.

  So far, she had never steered Reg wrong. If she said there was money to be made off of the tourists coming to see the Spring Games, then there was.

  Sarah was the only other person who knew about the gems hidden in Reg’s cottage. She knew Reg didn’t need to grow her psychic services business. But she kept Reg’s secret. Reg did not want it to become known that she had valuables secreted away.

  “I haven’t seen Damon over lately,” Sarah commented. “Are the two of you… on the outs?”

  Reg considered her response carefully. “We were never actually that close… he helped me in my trip to the dwarf mountain, I helped him in his trip to the Everglades… so we’re even now. I don’t think we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the near future. Besides, he’s busy with security for the Spring Games, and I take it that’s a pretty big responsibility.”

  “He will be busy with that,” Sarah agreed, puffing out her cheeks and then blowing out the air in a whistle. “It’s really too bad that you couldn’t find that wizard for him. That would have been a big deal.”

  Reg nodded. “After fifty years, though, who could have expected to find him?” she said in a neutral tone.

  “Ah, well, I know young folk and their magical quests. It doesn’t really matter how impossible they are.”

  Sarah, though gray-haired, did not look anywhere near her age. She claimed centuries, though Reg wasn’t sure if she believed it. Sometimes she wondered how much of the time the supposed witches and warlocks of Black Sands were just putting her on, seeing how much she would believe. She’d seen a lot of weird stuff, so she knew it wasn’t all made up. But she couldn’t help wondering if she was just as naive a mark as she had ever targeted herself. Regardless, anyone under sixty, or who looked under sixty, was definitely ‘young folk’ to Sarah.

  “I don’t think you’ll see Damon around here any time soon.”

  Sarah nodded. “Just as well. The two of you always were a little rocky.”

  Reg wanted to like Damon, she really did. He was handsome and funny and seemed like a nice guy. As Sarah said, they had gotten off to a rocky start, with Damon disregarding Reg’s feelings. They had become closer during and after the road trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But Reg couldn’t let go of how he lied to her, not just with words, but by putting visions into her head that were impossible to differentiate from actual experiences or psychic visions. She couldn’t trust him or anything that happened when she was around him.

  And there was the fact that as a diviner, he could tell whenever she lied, which under normal circumstances, was pretty often for Reg.

  It was pretty hard to have a successful relationship under those circumstances.

  Chapter Two

  Reg thought that the new flyers for the Spring Games looked pretty good, if she did say so herself. She tapped the edges to the coffee table to square them up and set them down in a pile. She looked at Starlight, who was snoozing in one of the wicker chairs that caught the afternoon sunshine. Starlight opened his blue eye to look back at Reg.

  “I think I’ve done pretty well today,” Reg told him. “I got these all put together and printed so I’ll be ready to hand them out at the Spring Games. I could have just sat around all day in my pajamas thinking it was too late to get them do
ne, but I didn’t.”

  Starlight closed his eye again and started to purr. His aura was cool colors, relaxed and unbothered by her chatter. He was good at reading her moods and was probably happy that she was calm and relaxed instead of worrying about any of the things that could go wrong.

  And there were a lot of things that could go wrong. Reg wasn’t in charge of the Spring Games, she didn’t have any role to play in it, but it could still affect her. If one of the powerful beings that she had encountered recently decided to show up at the Games and disrupt things, it could have long-reaching effects. That wouldn’t be her fault, of course. But she still felt a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach.

  Because if one of the powerful beings that she had encountered did show up at the games and cause chaos, injuries, or death, she couldn’t help feeling like she was a little bit responsible. It wasn’t her job to go around banning or binding magical creatures, but if she had the ability and didn’t, then that was sort of like a doctor walking away from a traffic accident, wasn’t it?

  But what if she only thought that she might have the ability to stop them but was afraid to put her powers to the test? Or if she was afraid that doing so might harm her, so she didn’t get involved or didn’t put all of her power into it? There were a lot of less powerful and more vulnerable victims out there. If she chose not to lay it all on the line, what did that say about her?

  That she was wise?

  Or that she was a coward?

  The phone rang, jolting Reg out of her dark thoughts. She picked up her phone and looked at the screen. It was Officer Marta Jessup, a friend. Or as much of a friend as a police officer could be to a con man. Jessup was too honest to let Reg get away with much of anything, but did try to look the other way when she could. Reg didn’t know if she was too naive about Reg’s somewhat checkered past to believe that she would do anything really wrong, or if she knew too much about Reg’s history and knew that sooner or later, she would. And she just didn’t want to have to be the one to report it.