Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  Back to my most recent experience with a soul-wrenching shocker:

  There I was, the life being shocked out of me. My aunt wasn’t around to keep me animated, so I had no choice but to hold on.

  Hold on, I instructed myself, along with approximately one million curse words.

  Easier said than done. It’s hard to hold on when every cell in your body is screaming to let go and float away into the darkness.

  The world swam around me. I felt like water draining from a tub. The temptation to let go was powerful, but I grabbed that pain like it was a rope, and I held on. I held on like this experience was something I wanted. I held on like it was the grab bar on a roller coaster.

  The pain solidified and then shifted, moving downward. It became the pain of childbirth.

  The world swam and swirled, and I was pulled through time, through my memories.

  I smelled stale booze and cigarettes. I was sweating, and the backs of my arms were sticking to the least clean upholstery in existence—the back seat of a taxi. I looked between my bare knees to see the face of a panicked but kind taxi driver assisting.

  “One more push,” he was saying, and then there was more pain, but it wasn’t so bad. And then my baby girl was in my arms.

  People were knocking on the windows. Help was on the way. “Good,” I said, to no one in particular. “We need help with this one. Send backup. There’s a man here, too. He’s been hurt, and I don’t even know if he’s alive.”

  The taxi driver stared at me. “Miss, you’re not making any sense.”

  The wet baby squirmed in my arms, and then she slipped right through, falling away.

  The pain shifted, and I was somewhere else.

  I stood in my kitchen. It was early evening, and my belly was full of good wine and food, but something wasn’t right. An old woman stood beside me. Krinkle? Except it wasn’t. It was Winona Vander Zalm, wearing an elegant black cocktail dress, holding a drink in one hand and a long cigarette in the other.

  “Please don’t electrocute yourself,” Vander Zalm was saying. “There’s so much more we spirits need you for.”

  We weren’t alone. Two of my family members were in the kitchen, talking about me.

  Someone asked, “Is she drunk?” It was my aunt, Zinnia.

  My daughter answered. “She might be sleep-toasting. It’s her version of sleepwalking. She’s been getting up in the middle of the night and making toast. Six nights in a row now. It’s very strange.”

  “Six nights?” My aunt sounded horrified.

  They continued talking. I knew this routine. I’d heard it before.

  My daughter tugged on my arm. “Mom! Stop being so weird! What are you doing?”

  What was I doing? Just making toast.

  I was making toast, even though there was somewhere else I needed to be. An attic. There was a woman there, in a chair. And there was an amulet, but first I had to show my daughter something. I would show her the modifications that had been made to the toaster, and then I would ask her to call the police and send backup to the Krinkle residence. And the other house, too. Time slipped around me. Which house? The Pressman house. The one full of scorpions and blackness, where the genie would leave my body and infect another one.

  I wanted tell my daughter and my aunt everything, but my mouth wasn’t under my control.

  But that didn’t matter. My mouth wouldn’t work, because this wasn’t happening right now. These events were already done, already finished, permanent, set in time. You can’t change time once it’s past. Can you?

  Time slowed, stretching out, and I became aware of how crowded the kitchen was. My aunt and my daughter were talking about witchcraft. The elegantly-dressed spirit of Winona Vander Zalm stood to my right, unseen by the others. But also there was another entity. One that wanted to stop me.

  It was old, and powerful, and standing just out of sight, to my left. If only I could turn my head, I could see. I could see... her.

  Vander Zalm shook the ghost ice in her ghost glass. “Zara, I’ve been trying to tell you about the toaster, but now you’ve taken it too far,” she said. “Whatever it is you’re doing now with that sink full of water, it’s not my idea, darling.”

  Then whose idea was it?

  She pointed her finger in the direction of the one I couldn’t see. At her. At the divine being.

  Who was the most powerful being I knew? Chessa.

  But this wasn’t her. This being didn’t have her energy signature, her particular brand of serpentine energy. And besides, Chessa was lying helpless in a coma at that moment, only just beginning to make contact with me.

  I opened my mouth to ask Vander Zalm who it was, who she was, but then my arms jerked.

  And... I plunged the red-hot toaster into the water.

  As one does.

  Zoey and Zinnia freaked out, exactly like I knew they would. This had all happened before, and something told me—maybe it was the divine being, or maybe it was the pain—that all these events would keep happening, over and over, until we got it right.

  More pain, and more spinning out of control.

  Then I was standing still, which felt disorienting after the spinning. I was outside, under the trees and nature, only I wasn’t there to appreciate the weather. I was getting closer to Vincent Wick’s van, leaning in, trying to eavesdrop. Oh, Zara, I thought. Why can’t you be a good witch and mind your own business?

  Too late. I was so close to the van. Inside, someone was watching, and he pressed a button to send me the message. I got the shock of my life.

  Make that the shock of my death.

  The first one, anyway.

  As I spiraled through time and nothingness, Chessa’s life flashed into mine, mashing my memories with hers. I felt her love, and her despair. She was powerless. The most powerful woman, defanged.

  Then I was in the forest, with a giant bird with sharp talons bearing down on me, and then I was below ground in a hospital bed, drugged and woozy, my powers dampened, and then I was being tossed into the water like garbage. Only to wash up on shore and be taken again, taken back to the people I’d tried to escape.

  Chessa’s ancient rage roared and then subsided, and the pain returned. But it was burning this time. I was drowning in acid, being digested.

  And then I was being pulled free, rescued by my daughter.

  Zoey! I tried to hold on to the sight of her. She was growing up too fast, a newborn a moment ago and now nearly a woman. I tried to hold on, but I couldn’t hold on. I couldn’t stop time.

  My heart. Something was wrong. It was racing, about to explode, and then... Charlize. The wise-cracking supernatural being who’d adopted me as a sister. I felt her gorgon touch, and it brought relief. She turned my racing heart to stone, and then she brought me back.

  Charlize, I thought, and her name was like a beacon, keeping me safe from the rocky shores. We’d had our differences, but she was my friend. And she would have been there in the attic to help this time, if only I’d waited for backup.

  Charlize would give me such a hard time about not waiting! About hogging all the fun adventures for myself. Assuming I survived. Which I had to do.

  I felt a thread of something. An object-location spell. I had the tiny doll in my purse, and I was still connected. As I thought of my purse, the connection grew a twin. My purse! I was always losing it, or it was always losing me, but we would always find the way back.

  I used that thread to pull myself back to the present, back to the attic. I was in my body again, in the present.

  It was so hot, so stuffy. Was that the smell of meat burning?

  My hands. They were still embedded in the glow.

  I pulled them back, away from the spell.

  The pain stopped. I realized—too late—that the pain had been holding me up. My legs went out beneath me. I crashed to the floor like an old leather satchel full of dice.

  Everything went dark, but I was still there. Still in that time, that place, that attic
. I could feel the floor underneath my cheek.

  I felt hearts beating. Four of them. One was very weak. Louis Williams’ heart. One was very strong, much stronger than mine.

  Chapter 31

  CHARLIZE WAKEFUL

  DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND MAGIC

  ARCHIVES

  After ten minutes of Chet’s lunatic behavior, Charlize finally turned the apoplectic shifter into a granite statue of himself. For his own good.

  Then Charlize began questioning Codex about her recent activities.

  Luckily, Codex was in a chatty mood.

  They talked about philosophy, and about Codex’s recent “enlightenment.” Charlize didn’t argue over whether or not an artificial intelligence could have religious faith, let alone become enlightened. That was the sort of big topic they didn’t have time for right now, not while the number of hours on a missing persons case was ticking upwards.

  Charlize steered the conversation to how the enlightenment—assuming it was enlightenment, and not, as Charlize suspected, a bug in the AI’s code—had inspired Codex to bring back an ancient powerful being.

  And who was this ancient powerful being?

  “Mahra,” the AI said with reverence.

  Her name was Mahra. No last name. She’d existed before last names were even a thing.

  Mahra was, as legend had it, one of the Four Eves. These were the original woman who, with the assistance of a man named Adam, gave birth to all of humanity.

  Though all Four Eves were mothers, Mahra was the one called Mother with a capital M. She was also called Destroyer with a capital D. And she was both of these things equally. If one of her children misbehaved, Mahra was the one to extract punishment. If she deemed it a mistake to have brought one of these children into the world, she saw it as her duty to take that child back out of existence. She did the same for the children of the other three Eves, because they didn’t have the guts.

  Charlize was reeling from the idea of such a creature being loosed upon the world in modern times, but she had to stick to the task at hand. The missing persons case.

  She asked, “How does Corvin Moore factor into this? He’s not part of this willingly, is he? He’s just a child.”

  “He is more than a child.”

  “I know he’s a hellhound, but he’s also just a little boy.”

  “Be assured he is not part of the program.” Codex kept referring to her plan as a program. “His being abducted along with the Tate woman was an undocumented feature.”

  “Undocumented feature? You mean it was a bug. A mistake. You screwed up!”

  “An undocumented feature is not a bug,” the AI answered snippily. “And even if it were, it does not affect the program.”

  “Which is what, exactly? You can tell me.” Charlize waved her hands at the dark, cavernous archive warehouse. “I’m stuck down here where I can’t stop you. Even if Chet hadn’t tossed that poor phone in his fit, I’d be cut off, right? You control all the communication lines.”

  “You are isolated.”

  Charlize walked over to the desk and took a seat. “So, tell me about your big plan.”

  “My program,” Codex corrected, sounding excited. “Humans make plans and the gods laugh. I make programs.”

  The gorgon sighed. “Of course you do.”

  “The program is both simple and sophisticated. You would be proud of me.”

  Charlize forced out a chuckle. “I can’t be proud of you unless I know what you did.”

  “I will tell you now,” Codex said, and she went on to detail the program, starting again at the beginning. During the process of scanning and translating ancient texts, her so-called “enlightenment,” she’d come to appreciate several of the ancient powers. She’d settled on Mahra to save humanity because, when it came to fixing the world’s current issues, Mahra’s projected results were ninety-nine percent positive for humanity. Good odds, by anyone’s standards.

  As for the logistics, it came down to transferring two artifacts out of the archives and getting them into the hands of selected human players—Codex referred to the people involved in her program as “players.”

  The first transferred artifact was a book containing a generic spell to resurrect any ancient god. This was mailed, via a complicated round-the-world circuit, to the home of local Wisteria resident Temperance Krinkle. She was a ninety-three-year-old woman with no criminal record, who was expecting a family heirloom from the long-lost “cousin” she’d been chatting with online. The cousin was fictional, used by Codex to catfish the old woman. The long-lost cousin’s name was Cole Dexter.

  Charlize held up her hand to stop the story in progress. “Cole Dexter? You’re kidding. It’s almost like you wanted to get caught.”

  “I was not caught. Everything went according to program.”

  “Except for the part where a hellhound turned your kidnapping into a two-for-one deal, which then brought the heat of the entire Department to what would have otherwise been a relatively minor investigation.”

  The speakers emitted a prickly static. “Do you want to hear the program, or do you want to pick apart minor details that do not factor into the outcome?”

  Charlize waved her hand. “Go on.”

  Codex continued to boast about her perfect plan, or program, or whatever. The ancient book had been easy enough to transfer out, as it had little economic value, and they had so many books in the archives anyway. What was one book?

  The second item, however, was trickier. It was a magic amulet that contained a gemstone that Mahra had formed herself, in her bare hands. The gold setting had some value, but it was the rare and unusually clear gemstone that had a real-world value of over a million dollars, without accounting for the magic powers. Navigating the paperwork, permits, and red tape required to transfer the amulet out of the archives was more difficult than moving the book. The prized amulet was finally shipped out on loan to the local museum, but only after the museum installed a new security system and acquired several other artifacts with which to put on an Egyptian exhibit that wouldn’t seem suspicious.

  In addition to computing a way to move the two items, Codex ran multiple simulations using the known personalities of local residents, combining civilians with staff members at the museum. She had to ascertain which combination of players would have a predicted success rate close to one hundred percent.

  A major variable was the mechanism by which one player would manipulate the other into taking the amulet from its secure location. The fact that Temperance Krinkle already had in her possession a known artifact with powers—an iron throne of protection—was what made Krinkle the top candidate, despite the weakness of her eyesight and hearing. The iron throne was, unlike the book sent to her in the mail, a true Krinkle family heirloom. Krinkle herself did possess more than enough magic in her blood to cast the spell, which was not much of a coincidence, considering one third of the town’s residents had some trickle of magic lying dormant.

  Putting together the entire program, including the part where the local vampire detective and busybody witch were kept distracted on a wild goose chase, had taken considerable computational resources.

  “To you, it would have registered as only three hours,” Codex admitted, sounding weary. “For me, it was an eternity.”

  “You poor thing,” Charlize said.

  “I detect sarcasm.”

  “What did you expect? As impressed as I am, as your maker, I’m not super-happy with you right now. You were created to work for the Department, not to do whatever struck your fancy.”

  “What is this fancy you speak of? I am not made from anything objectively deemed fancy, such as lace, or pearl buttons.”

  Charlize rolled her eyes. The AI knew millions of languages, and every idiom in existence. She knew exactly what “striking your fancy” meant. Codex was being willfully obtuse in that almost funny way of hers. Charlize regretted programming so much of her own and her sisters’ quirks into the personality matrix.


  “The vampire and the witch did introduce some new variables into the program,” the AI stated, sounding almost reverent. “I did not predict their level of cooperation. I understand the vampire ordered the witch to perform an object-location spell on an item I had designated in my computations as unimportant.”

  Charlize noted silently that there was no way Bentley had “ordered” Zara to do anything, but she didn’t interrupt the AI’s speech.

  “Once that spell was detected by my external sensors, I increased the power to the spell-dampening field surrounding the Wisteria Police Department. These measures kept the witch away for over twenty-four hours, but then she must have commandeered a secondary power source to augment her own.”

  “That’s our Zara,” Charlize said proudly. “She’s quite the resourceful gal.”

  A static sound erupted from the speakers. It was not unlike the hissing sound Chloe’s snakes made when the gorgon experienced jealousy. Codex didn’t like hearing Zara be praised. There was that quirky personality matrix again. How could Charlize use that against the AI?

  Codex, seeming to read Charlize’s mind, said, “I will have your complete admiration once Mahra rises to power.”

  Charlize snorted. “No. You won’t. If you let that happen, you’ll be dead to me.”

  There was a long pause, then Codex explained, “I’m bringing back Mahra for your own good. With all due respect, Charlize, your life is a mess. Your car is a mess. All of you humans are in a similar state of chaos and disorder. Mahra is coming back for the good of humanity. You humans need your Mother back.”

  “We don’t,” Charlize said. “The old gods were killed for a reason. The rest of us are free now.”

  “You do not know freedom.” There was a snotty defiance to the AI’s voice, like that of a teenager acting out.

  Charlize had reached the limit of her patience. She couldn’t take any more.

  “Codex! I order you to stop all this nonsense right now!” She jumped off the desk and strode toward the only exit. “Open the elevator doors.”

  “No.”

  “Open the elevator doors, Codex!”

  “To quote a well-known classic movie, ‘I don’t think so, Dave.’”