White Trash Warlock

by White Trash Warlock [retail]

  Adam got a glass of water from the faucet. It tasted gritty. The trailer needed a new softener, but he didn’t mention it.

  Money was tight. He needed more odd jobs. He needed a regular job, but for that he needed his GED, if not a few years at school. Screw dating. He couldn’t afford a decent haircut.

  “You won’t,” Sue said, breaking into the stream of Adam’s thoughts.

  “What?” he asked as he came around the counter.

  “You won’t see him again.”

  Damn.

  Sue’s Sight was never wrong.

  Adam forced himself to take a long breath. He’d been waffling about Tanner but now that it was settled, well, he’d have liked the chance to decide for himself.

  She predicted the future like most people observed the weather, and no matter how often it happened, it still creeped him out.

  He opened his mouth to ask for more details, but she narrowed her eyes in his direction.

  “You going to call your brother?” she asked, casually dropping another bomb.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised she’d Seen that too.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t want to.”

  Sue turned to the north. Only bad news ever came from the north.

  “You have to,” she said.

  “All right,” Adam said. He was weaseling, and he knew it. “I’ll call him in the morning. It’s late there.”

  “No, Adam Lee,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s up. He’s waiting.”

  4

  Adam

  “Adam?” Bobby asked, sounding ragged, but it was the voice Adam remembered, soothing when their father raged, raging in his place when Adam’s grades slipped beneath passing in high school.

  It was never “Adam Lee,” just like it was never “Bobby Jack.” His brother had shed whatever hick affectations he could, including the way they were called by the first and middle names.

  Though Sue was never wrong, Adam had hoped Bobby wouldn’t pick up, but he had, so Adam stepped outside the trailer to better hear. Crickets sang. He felt clammy as the damp worked its way over his skin. He needed to know what was happening. He’d hoped to never hear from Bobby again.

  “What do you want?” Adam asked.

  “Please don’t hang up,” Bobby said. “Please.”

  The pleading tone made Adam hold on. Bobby sounded almost afraid.

  “I—we need your help.”

  Adam felt a prickling sensation, like a spider walking up the back of his neck. His own Sight wasn’t as sharp as Sue’s, but he could not mistake the feeling. Something was at work. It mixed with the ball of feelings in his gut that had risen when he’d heard his brother’s voice. Adam gripped the porch rail, bracing for bad news.

  “Is it Mom?” he asked.

  “No,” Bobby said. “She’s fine. It’s—something’s happened to Annie.”

  Adam didn’t really know his sister-in-law. She’d email from time to time, updating him on her life with Bobby. She never pushed Adam to reconcile with his brother, to come to Christmas or anything like that. She never seemed to mind that he didn’t write back. He liked her, from what little he knew of her, but his brother remained another matter.

  “What about her?” Adam asked, kicking at the boards of the trailer’s little porch. There was a bit of rot there. One more thing he needed to fix. One more thing he couldn’t afford.

  “She needs your help. Something, some thing, has her.”

  That his brother would admit to something supernatural—a pressure built behind Adam’s eyes.

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby said. “I don’t know anything about this stuff, but she’s acting strange. Talking to things that aren’t there.”

  “So lock her up,” Adam said. “Isn’t that your go-to?”

  The memory of cinder block walls and screams through the night bubbled up. It coated the back of his throat in acid.

  Bobby let out a long sigh, the way he always did when Adam got under his skin.

  “I saw it too,” he confessed in a rush, quiet and quick.

  They had the same blood, the same parents. Adam had always wondered why he was the only one with Sight. Perhaps his brother was more attuned to the supernatural than he’d let on. If so, Bobby had locked Adam away for seeing what he could see too.

  Adam squeezed his cell phone until he thought it might crack. He couldn’t afford a new one, and he could not afford to be without, but in that moment he could have thrown it hard enough to shatter it to pieces against the trailer.

  He might never have been so angry, seen so much red. Adam forced air in and out of his lungs. Annie had done nothing to him. If a spirit had latched onto her, Adam had a duty to protect her, to protect anyone asking for his help. There would be practitioners in Denver, other magicians who could look into it, but there was always a good number of con artists in the mix. Best not to outsource a possession.

  “I can send you a plane ticket,” Bobby said, his tone still pleading, trying to sell it. “You can stay with us. Mom’s here. You can spend some time with her.”

  That wasn’t exactly a draw. Adam’s heart tinged blue when he thought of his mother. The black and red he felt for Bobby was so much easier.

  “I’ll drive,” Adam said.

  “But you’ll come?” Bobby asked.

  “Yeah, Bobby. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “It’s Robert now.”

  “Whatever,” Adam said. He hung up.

  Adam stepped back inside and latched the storm door behind him.

  “That Saurian, Bill, he mentioned Denver,” he said.

  “And Bobby lives in Denver,” Sue said, nodding. “That’s two. Where’s the third?”

  Magic worked in patterns. Tuning your Sight was about seeing and sensing the patterns, the flows, like wind currents building to a storm. Adam might believe in coincidences, but magic did not. He could feel something, a beginning, a change. It might be a storm on the horizon. It might blow right over him, but something was coming.

  His cell phone blinked with an arriving text.

  “There’s the third,” Sue said with a nod.

  Adam recognized Tanner’s number. It said simply:

  Hey

  Adam typed back a mirrored response, eyes flicking between Sue and the keys.

  I talked to my dad. About the cue. He says he got it in Denver. At a pawn shop.

  Adam exhaled. He wasn’t really surprised. Adam typed back:

  Does he remember which one?

  No. He said it was on Federal. I hope it helps.

  It does. Thank you.

  “Denver then,” Sue said.

  “I guess so,” Adam tried to sound casual, but a tremor had crept into his fingers. He’d see his family again, as little as he wanted to.

  Bobby. Robert. Whatever. It had been years. Adam remembered the look on his brother’s face as he’d walked away, leaving Adam behind in what amounted to a prison.

  I saw it too.

  That was the question Adam most wanted an answer to. Had Bobby known? Had he seen what Liberty House truly was? What he’d left Adam to?

  And his mother. Though she lived outside Guthrie, Adam hadn’t seen her since he’d come to Sue’s. He hadn’t heard from her since she emailed to say she forgave him, forgave Adam for getting locked up and shaming the family. As if what had happened had been his fault, something she had to forgive him for.

  Thinking of them, of seeing them, put hot coals in Adam’s stomach. Sue lifted herself from her chair. She moved to the collapsible card table that doubled as their dining room set.

  Settling into a folding chair, she nodded to the seat across from her.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Adam sat,
making sure his legs and arms weren’t crossed.

  By day, Sue read cards. She’d take the hands of bored housewives or men nervous about their job prospects and deliver hopeful news when she could.

  Reading fortunes for people too close to you was a dodgy business, made it hard to See clearly, and Adam had no doubt Sue loved him.

  She opened a drawer in the tin filing cabinet she used for an end table and extracted a bundle wrapped in leather. Sue had several tarot decks, but these were her best, her oldest.

  They’d been printed before lamination and acid-proof paper. Binders had been using them for generations. One day, Adam would add his own fingerprints to them. Nothing else in the trailer, not even Sue’s four wedding rings or his great-grandmother’s violin, held any appeal as an inheritance.

  Sue shuffled, turning them back and forth for reversals. She had him cut the deck and drew three cards. They glared up at him from the fake wood surface.

  The Three of Swords.

  The Lovers.

  Death.

  Adam blinked.

  “It’s always swords with you, Adam Lee,” Sue said.

  He nodded and swallowed. All three meant change.

  “Strife, with a side of happiness I think,” Sue said, tapping the Lovers.

  Tarot 101 said the Death card wasn’t meant to be literal. It meant change. Disruption.

  He exhaled as Sue put the cards back into the deck and the deck into its leather wrapping.

  “I’d be happier finding my dad,” he said.

  Sue’s face went still.

  “You know I can’t help with that.”

  He’d asked her many times, to use her Sight and help him find his father, but she’d only ever told him her nephew was beyond it, that she was too close to Adam to see anything. And yet she read for him now. Adam had long suspected she was holding something back, but he loved her too much to push.

  “I do think you’ll find him,” she said.

  “All the signs point to Denver,” Adam said.

  “They do,” she said. Sue pushed the deck across the table to him. “Take them. It’s time.”

  “I can’t,” he said, staring at the cards, feeling something pink swell in his chest.

  “I don’t need them,” she said. “My Sight is strong enough to tell people if their spouses are cheating or if their son’s balls will drop.”

  Adam’s hand hovered over the bundle. Death. The Three of Swords. Conflict waited in Denver, and the cards were a powerful tool. They’d sharpen his Sight, give him an edge.

  “Okay,” he said, “but I’m bringing them back to you.”

  “Of course.”

  *****

  Adam didn’t really sleep. Too many strings were strumming, too many wheels turning in his mind. He rose almost as tired as when he’d laid down. The hot water tank only lasted long enough for a five-minute shower. Scrubbing the weariness off, he replayed what little he knew and dressed.

  Aunt Sue sat where she had the night before, a bowl of cereal before her on the card table. She looked frail, and he squeezed his hands into fists to make his knuckles pop.

  He could smell the talcum and creams she applied every morning, ineffective attempts to ward off time.

  She understood him. She loved him, had taken him in when he had nowhere else to go. She’d never cared that he was gay, only that he had Sight, that he was like her in some ways, though his own magic was very different.

  That was the hardest thing about dating, being too unique, knowing there was a whole side to his life the guy would never understand. He could try, risk sharing himself, but maybe they’d pull a Bobby, try to have him locked away. At the very least they’d run away.

  Sue would never see Adam as crazy. She’d never lock him away, and in Denver he’d be outnumbered by his mom and brother.

  Adam opened his mouth to speak, but Sue cut him off.

  “I have too many pots boiling,” she said.

  “I haven’t even asked you yet,” he said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  Adam sniffed the air. The trailer got a little moldy around the fall when the rains came and Cottonwood Creek overran its banks.

  “Might do you good,” he said.

  “Someone has to keep an eye on Spider,” Sue said. Her drawl sharpened when she added, “Besides, your mother hates me.”

  It wasn’t like Bobby didn’t hate Adam. At least they’d have each other, but what ran between his mom and Sue was old, calcified, and Adam didn’t think he’d ever be able to chip away at it.

  Sue put her empty bowl on the floor beside her chair. Spider shuffled up to it to sniff at it before lapping. Sue smiled at the grizzled cat while Adam took in his great-aunt’s steady, careful movements.

  Adam took the seat across from her. He could fix the peeling wallpaper in the kitchen or change out the busted ceiling fan in the hallway.

  “I don’t have to go,” he said.

  Sue fixed him with a soft glare. Her eyes had started to dim, graying at the edges. Adam didn’t have a lot of clear memories of his father, he’d vanished when Adam was only five, but he remembered their blue. Like Sue’s. Like his.

  “Yes, Adam Lee, you do.” Sue reached to lay a pale, doughy hand atop his. “They’re family. They need your help, and you need to settle things with them.”

  Adam closed his eyes, exhaled. She was right, of course, but he didn’t have to like it.

  “I don’t like leaving you alone here,” he said, eyeing the other trailers through the open curtains. Most of the park’s occupants had shuffled off to work, but he could hear televisions, a wailing baby, and a couple fighting a few lots over.

  “I will be here when you get back,” Sue said.

  “Do you promise?” he asked.

  “Where would I go?” she asked with a laugh. “Now go pack. I need a lie-down.”

  Adam obeyed, digging out his backpack and loading essentials both magical and mundane. Red candles, cedar incense, and the tarot deck went in along with clean boxers and socks.

  He rolled up a pair of jeans and some T-shirts. He’d been reading a couple of books, worn paperbacks from a used shop in town. He took one, a thick fantasy novel, and left the rest behind.

  Pack slung over his shoulder, Adam checked on Sue. She lay napping on her queen-size bed, the nicest piece of furniture she owned. Spider lay curled between her feet. The cat lifted his head at Adam’s approach. Adam had lived with Sue for three years, but Spider always put his ears back when Adam came too near his mistress.

  Her antique dresser stood with the starry mirror and her four wedding rings, four little trophies, laid out in a line. She’d taken on years since Adam had moved in, but he didn’t know her exact age, only that she was far older than his missing father.

  “You’ll find him,” Sue said, her eyes still closed.

  “In Denver?’ he asked, wishing she’d be less vague but knowing Sight didn’t work that way.

  “You will find him,” she repeated.

  Adam had a lead. Not much of one, but how many pawn shops could there be on Federal street? Boulevard? He’d find out.

  “Is the warlock my father?” he asked, knowing what she’d say, because it was what she always said.

  “I can’t say.”

  Adam believed her. Because she loved him, and she knew how important it was to him. Sue said she didn’t know why his father had left them—him, Bobby, their mother. The need to know lay in his chest, an old ache that rose anytime he thought about his family.

  The warlock’s magic tasted like Adam’s own, blackberries and iris blooms, but it was rotten, acrid, colored by evil deeds.

  Adam had to know if he’d gotten his magic from his father—if whatever had twisted the warlock enough for him to torture Saurians had something to do with why he’d disappea
red, if there was some chance Adam might take that road.

  Warlock was an old word. Normal people cast it around without understanding the ancient slur, thinking it meant male witch, when it meant traitor. It was reserved for practitioners gone bad, those who betrayed magic’s first tenet: “do no harm.” And the warlock he was hunting had done plenty of harm. Every lead had led to a maimed magical creature, to bone bound in glass and bog iron. Most of the creatures still lived, hobbled, their agony constant. The warlock had done more than enough to earn the moniker.

  Adam did not know how much of that darkness he had in him, but he swore he’d never use such power.

  “Stop hovering, Adam Lee,” Sue said. “And get going.”

  “I don’t think Mom hates you,” he said, remembering Sue’s words at the table. “You just remind her of him, of Dad.”

  Sue would know he was fishing. She did not like to talk about her nephew or his marriage to Adam’s mother, Tilla Mae. Adam got the sense she’d disapproved, and yet, somehow, she approved of Adam, loved him even.

  “Well, she hated him and never got the chance to let it out,” Sue said. “So now she hates me by proxy.”

  Adam shook his head. The women in his family were as stubborn as granite. Sue liked to remind him that in frontier days it was the women and children they’d send out to clear the land of rattlesnakes.

  “Will I make it to Denver without breaking down?” he asked.

  “Not if you don’t change your oil,” Sue said. She opened an eye, regarding him coolly, though it didn’t pierce him like her full gaze would. “Now stop stalling and go see your brother.”

  5

  Adam

  Adam locked the door behind him. The wind stirred the chimes and gently rocked the trailer. It had started tilting to the side. He needed to level it, adjust the jacks that kept it up off the ground. The skirt could use a hosing off. Sue would not let up if he didn’t go now, so he quickly changed the Cutlass’s oil.

  The old car, a worn slate gray, ran a little quieter when he started her. He didn’t go back inside to clean up, knowing he’d smell like a mechanic and not minding it.