Hex to the No

by Constance Barker

  Amadeus didn’t care that Francine clearly didn’t want to have anything to do with him. He ignored her tears and her pleading to let her go. Instead he was happy getting what he wanted. He was always happy getting what he wanted, despite the cost to others. No one believed her and he got away with it again.

  The third and arguably most important moment in Amadeus’s life came when he was a senior in high school. His grasp of the puppet spell was so advanced that he figured out how to make people do things without them even knowing it. It was an ability he used to skew his grades and control his teachers.

  One teacher didn’t fall for Amadeus Essex’s puppet spell tricks. Yes, he got controlled same as the others but Deacon Thorne actually realized it. After a confrontation, he took the young man under his wing. Because Deacon saw limitless potential in Amadeus, potential to help him get what he wanted and further his goals. Ultimately, Throne groomed him to be his partner in rising to the top of the high table.

  Deacon helped Amadeus learn how to cast his puppet spell without uttering a single word. They went to a tattoo shop in the Midnight Markets. For the price of a sliver of his already black soul, Amadeus got the spell tattooed on his chest. Whenever he needed to cast it, all he had to do was think the words. Suddenly he went from mischievous to one of the most powerful and dangerous warlocks on earth.

  From there, Amadeus’ life was a series of escalating criminal acts. He started robbing casinos, convincing poor unsuspecting dealers to just hand him chips. Amadeus was suspected but never convicted in his brother Harold’s death. That was what got him ostracized from his family, never welcomed back to Castle Essex. In an act of spite, he convinced an adult Francine Marsh to take her own life.

  “You’re nothing Amadeus, a stain on our family name and a failure as a man and as a warlock. You are not my son and have no place here in Essex Castle.” Those were the last words Amadeus heard from his mother Lisabeth before their next meeting in the high table’s meeting room.

  Deacon Thorne asked Amadeus to join the Cold Dawn. Though no one else was to know about his membership, not even the other members or their leader, Marcus Blackward. Amadeus would be his own personal secret weapon, deployed whenever a seemingly insurmountable obstacle stood in his path to the top. And his first order was to make Basil Augustine step down from the high table and believe it was his own idea.

  Eventually Amadeus was paired with Detective Theodus on a mission to not only find Winter Krueger but the location of Heinrich Talon’s spell. Keen to keep his abilities secret, Deacon insisted on Amadeus’ involvement being privileged information only for him.

  Under other circumstances, Lilith Blackward could have easily been Amadeus Essex. Or vice versa. Both of them were extremely talented witches/warlocks. Both of them tended not to follow the conventions of the coven. Both of them were clever and ambitious when it suited them. But Lilith had a conscience. Amadeus did not.

  Chapter 7

  Family Troubles

  Security in this place seems to be lacking. Not only did that guy Amadeus just waltz in but Eve too? Is it because she’s not strictly human or a witch right now? Or is this little rascal really that good? The gargoyles didn’t catch her after all.

  “Can you catch Armando...your pack leader’s scent?” asked Lilith. Her mind was in turmoil. Between hearing about her father’s demise and Deacon Thorne’s takeover of the coven, she needed a distraction. Otherwise she’d give into her desires which was simply to curl up into a ball and cry.

  The case, finding Armando Lobos, that was a fine distraction for Lilith. But the hallway beyond the high table’s meeting room was long, impossibly long. Like her first time at the Talon House, looking for the library, there were doors upon doors with no end in sight.

  “This must be some kind of security measure. We want to make sure we don’t open the wrong door Eve. Use that nose of yours, find him.” Lilith knelt down and petted Wolf Eve on the head. In response she rubbed up against the young private eye while wagging her tail.

  Wolf Eve barked than ran off down the hallway, nose to floor. She sniffed everything and after a minute or so, Lilith thought that her new friend caught a scent. And she did.

  “What’d you find there girl. Sorry. I didn’t mean to...” Lilith forgot for a second that Eve was also a person, well, sort of.

  Eve barked, tongue sticking out of her mouth, happy as can be. She jumped up and scratched at a door about forty yards away. Lilith walked up to it and upon seeing it figured she must’ve had the right one. Why? It read:

  Armando R. Lobos

  My keen detective skills are telling me that this might be the one. Lilith reached for the door knob then stopped, fingers centimeters away from grabbing it. What if it’s booby trapped?

  “Remember what our father taught us,” suggested OLG in a somber voice. She might not have remembered losing her father, same as her present version, but she remembered the feeling.

  “Now you got to promise me that you won’t use this to break in anywhere,” Lilith heard her father’s voice in her head.

  Lilith was six and locked herself out of Blackward Manor. Normally Sir Kain was there to let her in but on that Spring afternoon, he was with her parents at the store. So she waited, and waited until they got back.

  When Lilith’s parents got back, her father, Marcus Blackward, taught her a trick to get past any locked door. It was a hold over from his days on the coven police force, centuries before she was born.

  “I pwomiss,” answered eight year old Lilith with a wide grin that was missing a couple baby teeth.

  “You pwomiss? Well that’s good enough for me ya little monster. First, you wanna make sure there isn’t any protection spells on the door.” Marcus knelt down next to his daughter at their manor’s front door.

  “Why?”

  “Well if you don’t and there is, you’re gonna get hurt when you try and open it. It’ll be a real owie.”

  “I don’t like owies.”

  Marcus laughed. “I know you don’t. So first you need to recite a reveal spell. Repeat after me: Neddih si tahw laever.”

  “Neddih si tahw laever!” yelled young Lilith, enthusiastically. It worked.

  Backwords writing appeared around the seams and frame of the Blackward Manor front door. They glowed orange and red and kept rotating around it. Marcus wasn’t surprised his daughter got it on her first try. Since she was even younger than this she was a bit of a prodigy. He knew she was destined to be a great witch, greater than him and greater than Alizia.

  “That’s my girl!” Marcus’s approval meant the world to young Lilith. Her little face lit up. “Now, you see these words here, they are just a spell, same as what you’d say, what you’d recite but in energy form. Next is your favorite part. You need to break it.”

  “How daddy?” Young Lilith looked up at her father.

  “Our family, the Blackwards, we have a...sordid past.”

  “What’s a sordeed?”

  “Sordid. It means, my father, your grandfather, he was naughty. He used to be a thief.”

  “He stole?”

  “Yep.”

  “But that’s bad. You said never stweal.”

  “I did and that’s true. Don’t ever steal Lily. But he lived in a different time. He stole because he had to, to survive. And he developed a spell that could get him in anywhere. Do you know what that is?”

  Six year old Lilith adorably put her index finger on her chin and searched her brain for an answer. “Uhm, uh.....a hammer!”

  “That’s right. He called it the Black Hammer and it can smash through just about any protection spell. And only our family knows how to do it. But it comes at a cost honey.”

  “Wha?”

  “It takes a lot of energy to summon it and use it. You might become very sleepy afterwards if you don’t master it. So I’ll show you. You watch and listen.”

  “You need to break it.” That still is my favorite part. Lilith looked the door to Armando Lobos’
office, up and down.

  “Neddih si tahw laever,” seconds after Lilith recited the words, the myriad of protection spells revealed themselves. Now the hammer. Lilith gently pushed Wolf Eve back. “Watch out. This can be...violent.”

  “Yrubretnac fo remmah kcalb eht nommus!” Just as with Sir Kain’s sword, Wolfsbane, Lilith’s Black Hammer appeared above her hand, formed out of the thin air itself. But she was not at all prepared for how heavy it was. She almost broke her wrist trying to catch it.

  Eve began to change back to her human form. Lilith made the mistake of peeking. It was a horrific thing. She kind of felt bad for her but the girl didn’t seem to mind. The weirdest part though was...

  The clothes? How did her clothes come back? What the freak? Oh lawd...One mystery at a time Lil. Lilith stood in amazement as not only did Eve’s clothes grow up back in her human form. But they were still dirty. But of course they are.

  Lilith shrugged and held the Black Hammer, carved from the core of a distant star, up as high as she could, so about shoulder level. She pictured Deacon Thorne’s face in the middle of the door. That’s all it took for her to swing it with the force of a conqueror, shattering the protection spells in an explosion of sparks and light.

  “Wooowwww. Can I have one?” asked Eve. She stood next to Lilith slack jawed, literally.

  “Have what? A hammer?”

  “No, that hammer,” corrected Eve. “Well, not that one of course. That’s yours. But one like it maybe? Or if you would be cool with me having that one I’d...?”

  “No.”

  Eve’s head dipped down. “Okay. What’re we doing?”

  “We are breaking into here,” Lilith smashed the door handle breaking it off and out. It clanged when it hit the floor. She pushed said door open. “Shall we?”

  Eve ran in first in front of Lilith. She sniffed everything. Lilith followed her and saw what looked to be a very normal office. There was a desk with a phone and computer on it, file cabinets and paintings of wolves and dogs.

  Bingo! The computer and phone. Lilith focused in on the desk and what was on top of it. The possibility that there could have been clues in those file cabinets was completely counted out.

  Lilith turned on Armando Lobos’ computer. Immediately a log in screen came up. That would have impeded her progress except he was the type of man who’d often forget his password and user name. So, he had it written down on a post-it-note, stuck to the bottom corner of the monitor.

  USERNAME: ARLOBOS1

  PASSWORD: **********

  Once signed in, Lilith started browsing the computer’s contents. It took a good ten minutes before she found anything of interest. It was an email he received from a sandylobos@witchfire.com.

  Sandylobos@witchfire.com? Not sure who that is but they share the same last name. Eve would know.

  “Eve?” asked Lilith.

  “Yeah?” Eve froze. As Lilith was doing her work, Eve was making a mess of the file cabinets and the contents inside. Those contents were now outside and all over the room.

  “Who’s Sandy?” Lilith turned around in Armando Lobos’s office computer chair. She shook her head as she saw papers everywhere and a guilty looking Eve. “What’re you doing?”

  “Nothing. Sandy’s my brother, the pack leader’s son. But don’t call him Sandy, Sandy doesn’t like it. He’ll get angry.”

  “Armando Lobos’ son, hmmmm.” Lilith turned back to the computer screen and the email. It read:

  We have the map, cut loose the dead weight. Meet me at the Grand Theater at 9pm. And you better keep your word. Father or not, no one double crosses me.

  “The map? Oh crap,” Lilith realized what Sandoval Lobos was referring to. They must be talking about the map to Heinrich Talon’s spell. I didn’t think it was possible but everything just got worse.

  “What map?” asked Eve. Lilith ignored her. She kept scrolling through the emails until she reached one from Marcus Blackward earlier that same day. That obviously caught her attention. It read:

  Armando, I missed you at the meeting today. I wanted to invite you over to Blackward Manor for dinner. We have much to discuss. Please come alone.

  Lilith leaned back in the computer chair. She thought she had two leads, not exactly solid, either of them, but they were something. The question was, which to pursue first?

  Figuring she got everything she needed from the computer, Lilith moved on to the phone. It was an old school land line with an attached answering machine. Matching the wired phone, the answering machine was unintentionally retro with tapes that recorded messages. A flashing light with the number “3” on it indicated there were three unlistened to messages.

  Lilith pressed the play button on the answering machine.

  “First message,” said a calm, automated woman’s voice. “Armando? We missed you at dinner. We need to talk. Deacon told me about what happened in San Francisco. We need that map. And I don’t know where Detective Milo Theodus is. How about sending your son, the tracker? From what I hear he’s very good at what he does, can find anything or anyone. Anyway, call me back.”

  The first message was very upsetting to Lilith. It wasn’t so much the contents of the voice message but who was talking. Hearing her father’s voice, maybe for the last time was hard for her to take. But she had a job to do, swallowed back her tears and continued to the second one.

  “Second message.”

  “Pops? I found em. Your wayward detective and his lil friends. They had the map but...one of them, he, he got away with it. The Essex kid. I don’t know what happened but he’s gone. We were double crossed. You won’t pick up your cell phone or the phone in the den, just, call me back. Okay?” The second voice message came from Sandoval Lobos.

  “Sandy!” Eve’s head popped up when she heard her brother’s voice.

  “Sandy? Is this your brother Sandoval?” asked Lilith.

  “Yup!” Eve looked around the room. “Where is he? I can hear him but I can’t see him.”

  “It’s a voice message.”

  Eve didn’t understand.

  “On the phone.”

  “Oh... say hi for me!” It was clear that Eve didn’t even know how phones worked. Lilith was amazed she’d lived that long being that oblivious to the world.

  “Wayward detective”? He must’ve been talking about Detective Theodus. So it wasn’t my father who sent them but the Lobos’? Lilith took another look back at Eve who had climbed on top of and sat on one of the file cabinets. Shelf out and between her legs. Could she trust her?

  Is it all an act? It would make sense. It’s all an act. She pretends to be stupid and innocent but really is a spy.

  “Ow!” cried out Eve as she accidentally closed the file cabinet shelf on one of her fingers.

  ...Or maybe not. Do or did they all work for my father? Or did they work with him. Sounds like they worked with him. But what was in it for the Lobos’. One more message, then we’ll get the heck out of here. We have most definitely over stayed our welcome.

  “Third message.”

  “They got it. Just like you asked. There was three of them-” Lilith quickly pressed the pause button. Her eyes were wide and her already tumultuous mind was thrown into an uproar. The voice on the third message, she knew it well. It belonged to...

  Winter? No. It can’t be. What does she, what did you do? Even though she didn’t want to, Lilith pressed play again and waited for her heart to be broken once again.

  “They are probably rushing back to Devil’s End and Deacon Thorne. Or Marcus Blackward. Either way they can not be allowed to get that map. Maybe you can send someone to intercept them. Don’t call me here, I’ll figure out a way to contact you.”

  Winter... Lilith got up. She’d confront Winter about that voice message when she saw her again. In order to ever see her again though, she needed to find a way out of the Talon House that didn’t involve trying to swim out.

  “Are we leaving?” asked Eve as Lilith opened the door to Armando Lob
os’ office.

  Lilith looked both ways down the hall, it was empty. With the coast clear she was ready to get out of there. “C’mon Eve.”

  “Where we going?” Eve hopped off the file cabinet.

  “Besides out of here? We’re going to the Grand Theater”

  “Okay. But...I can’t swim.”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t have to. One of these doors must lead out of here. It’s just a matter of finding which one.”

  Chapter 8

  The Grand Theater

  Sir Kain’s car came screeching around the corner in downtown Devil’s End. He stepped on the gas. The tires threatened to loose their grip on the slick freshly rained on streets. Laid across the backseat was his sword. Next to him, slumped in the passenger seat was a gravely injured Basil Augustine.

  “Stay with me Basil!” Sir Kain was speeding not only to the hospital but away from Sandoval and his two wolf friends. “I’m so sorry, it’s been awhile since I actually fought a werewolf. I was rusty. And now you’re hurt.”

  Sandoval Lobos came speeding after Sir Kain and Basil Augustine. He was on his motorcycle, quickly gaining on them. Angry before he came to the Midnight Bar, the son of Armando Lobos was now furious and extra determined.

  “Just hang on! We are almost there!” Sir Kain was heading for the one hospital in Devil’s End, Saint Mercy Hospital. Though he wasn’t looking for a normal doctor but one more familiar with the bodies and wounds of those touched by magic.

  “I... it’s so cold Thomas.” Basil was fading fast.

  Sir Kain didn’t have any way to get Sandoval off his tail. And the angry son’s bike was faster. It was only going to be a matter of seconds before he caught up. And the hospital was still a minute or two away.

  Sandoval Lobos wasn’t in the greatest shape himself. Sir Kain might’ve thought he was rusty but Sandoval thought he lived up to his reputation. Their fight was quick but violent. Wolfsbane cut him across his face, diagonal from his right eye down across the bridge of his nose, past the opposite corner of his lip.