by T. S. Mann
“Yeah,” he thought. “Let’s see how you like it!”
After several seconds of electrocution, Mickey ended the attack and let Tsang fall to the ground. He heard crashes behind him as normal gravity reasserted itself and all the objects which had collected in the front corner dropped as well. Mickey did not fall but instead floated gently down, solidifying as he touched the wooden floor.
As he passed by one of the intact glass cases, a reproduction of a Spanish rapier with an elaborately designed hilt caught his eye. He gestured and grunted a command, causing the rapier to smash through the glass and fly towards his hand pommel first. As soon as he gripped the hilt, he held the blade up before him and studied it. “En fuego,” he said, and the blade was suddenly sheathed in flames.
Tsang was still lying on the ground, twitching and smoking. Her glasses had been blown off by the lightning, along with a big chunk of the spell that concealed her true form. Her eyes were now bright yellow and obviously reptilian, and patches of green, scaly skin showed through where her false human skin had been incinerated. Mickey pointed the flaming rapier at her throat.
“Stand down, dragon. I’m not here to end you, but if we continue this, your glamour will fail, and reality will crush you like a bug. Just let me have the Birmingham Stapler, and I’ll leave.”
She hissed at him in rage, and a long, forked tongue shot out of her mouth menacingly and then retracted. Her voice was no longer that of an elderly Chinese caricature. When she spoke, it was with normal diction marred by rage and an inhuman sibilance.
“Mammalian filth! You would have me sssstand by as you defile my preciousss hoard with your thieving monkey handssss?!?”
“Thieving ... monkey hands??? No! What?!?” He rolled his eyes. “Listen to me, you crazy dragon bitch. I didn’t come here to steal anything. At least, not unless I had to. I came here to buy the Birmingham Stapler off you. I was going to offer you $25,000, which is a hell of a lot more than anyone else is going to pay for cursed office equipment. But since you threw a damned armoire at my head, I am now only offering $15,000, which is still a good offer. Do we have a deal, or do I just cut off your head and leave your body for the Ministry to find?”
She looked at him balefully. “You are not with thossssse who would hound me from this plane?”
“Do I look like Immigration to you? I’m not with the Ministry of Continuity, I’m not with the Unity Blade or the Cult of Mammon, and I’m not some random dracophobic bigot who wants to kill you because he thinks he’s St. George. Unless you’re planning to exterminate all us ‘stupid apes’ so you can reclaim Pangea in the name of Empress Tiamat or some other such bullshit, I really don’t care what you do.”
Tsang slowly climbed to her feet, and Mickey backed away, still holding the flaming sword. She gestured and summoned the shades back to her, and after she put them on, an incantation in some forgotten pre-Atlantean tongue transformed her exposed dragon scales back into human skin. She still moved a bit slow – the lightning had really hurt her – but she was unbowed. Once her disguise was restored, she regarded Mickey with disdain, her accent now uninflected English.
“Twenty thousand. You must also swear a binding oath that you will never again refer to me or to any other dragoness as ‘bitch.’ That word is highly offensive to us.”
He considered. “Eighteen thousand. And you throw in the sword.”
She glanced at the rapier, which was still burning brightly. “It has no magical properties, save for the spell you just cast upon it. It is not even an antique.”
“Don’t care. It’s a rapier. I’ve always wanted a rapier.”
She crooked an eyebrow at him. “Your terms are acceptable. I shall fetch the anomaly you seek.” She turned and walked somewhat unsteadily back towards the beaded curtain.
“Thank you. And I apologize for calling you ... that word. I didn’t realize dragons were sensitive to gender issues.”
She turned and looked at him imperiously. “Gender is irrelevant. ‘Bitch’ refers to the females of certain mammalian species.” She raised her chin in fierce pride. “If you would dare to insult a dragoness, the proper English term is ‘crazy dragon cow.’”
She turned and exited with as much dignity as was possible for a 4'9" woman in curlers wearing a muu-muu that still smoked from where lightning had struck it. Mickey held up his new rapier, admired it for a moment, and then blew out the flames as if it were a birthday candle. All things considered, the transaction had actually gone much better than he had expected.
Fifteen minutes later, Mickey St. Angel was walking down the street whistling cheerfully. Under his left arm, he carried his sexy new rapier already packaged for his flight. In his right hand, he carried a plastic bag containing the infamous Birmingham Stapler wrapped up in tissue paper and packed with some ginseng and rock salt to keep it dormant.
If he could just catch a cab soon, he might even have time to catch a few hours of shut-eye at the airport hotel before catching the next flight out of town. Then, he could deliver the anomaly to his client, some poor sap in Tallahassee who’d accidentally created the damned thing fifteen years ago and had been trying to recover and destroy it ever since. The Stapler was a surprisingly powerful anomaly, and Mickey would have been curious as to what sort of failed magic had created it if the client not paid extra for discretion.
He was just approaching a main thoroughfare where there was some possibility of getting a cab when his cell phone rang. He shifted the bag to his other hand and pulled out the phone. He didn’t recognize the number.
“Scramble,” he said, activating the phone’s built-in encryption and defensive spells before he hit the answer button.
“Mickey St. Angel. Weirdness investigated. Problems solved. What do you need?”
The smile faded as the other person spoke. Mickey recognized the voice all too well despite the passage of years.
“Mickey, it’s me. You need to come back to Boston. There’s been a ... development.”
Mickey listened in silence before tersely replying that he’d catch the next red-eye. Then, he hung up, rubbed his eyes, and wondered what he’d done to deserve this new catastrophe. Idly, he wondered if it was the Stapler, already infecting him with bad luck despite its dormancy. Then, he shook his head and resumed his search for a cab. He didn’t need a cursed anomaly to generate bad luck. He was quite proficient at doing that on his own.
CHAPTER 2:
RITES SACRED AND PROFANE
29 October 2010 (two nights earlier)
Boston, Massachusetts
Matt Sullivan softly entered his bedroom without turning the light on. It was late, and he hoped his brother Luke was already asleep because he was not in the mood to talk about his day. Suspended, kicked off the football team, and grounded all in one afternoon was a lot to take in. Plus, Mom cried, and that always tore him up. Whenever Mom cried, it always felt like he was letting Dad down.
He undressed in silence and got into bed, hoping he could just fall asleep and forget this whole day had happened. On a shelf across the room, dimly illuminated by the city lights of Boston sneaking in through the window, was an official Patriots football autographed by Tom Brady. He looked up at it and thought: “Well, Tom, guess I won’t be playing for the Pats someday, after all.”
Naturally, his twin was still awake after all. “Matt? What happened today?”
"Wonderful," he thought.
“It was nothing. I got into a fight. It was stupid. I’m grounded, suspended for two days, and off the football team. I never got any playing time anyway.”
“I heard you punched Tommy Romero.”
“Yes, Luke. I punched Tommy-freaking-Romero, Coach Wilkerson’s All-State quarterback, right in the face. Which somebody should have done years ago. Now go to sleep.”
“Come on, man. What happened? What did he say that pissed you off so bad?”
“Go. To. Sleep.”
Luke was silent for a few seconds, long enough to give Matt hope t
hat he would let it go. He didn’t.
“I heard that ... it was something to do with me.”
Matt closed his eyes.
“Please, Matt, I want to know. What did he say about me?”
Matt exhaled deeply. “He called you a ‘faggot,’ okay? He came up to me in the locker room in front of everybody and said ‘Hey, Sullivan! I heard your brother is a faggot!’ and I punched him in the face. And because I didn’t want to tell Mom what started the fight, she grounded me. Now can we please drop this?”
After a few seconds, Luke gently asked, “Matt, would it really be that bad if I were gay?”
“No, of course not! But that’s not the point. When Tommy called you that, he meant it as an insult whether it was true or not. You’re my brother and I love you, and it doesn’t matter to me if you’re gay. Now, if you are, at some point you’re gonna need to man up and tell Mom, and I’ll be there to back you up when you do. But it sure as hell isn’t any of Tommy Romero’s business.”
“Thanks, Matt.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re welcome. Besides, nobody picks on my brother but me. Now go to sleep.”
Several minutes passed silently, and Matt was on the verge of nodding off when Luke spoke up again. “Matt?”
Sigh. “What, Luke?”
“I’m not gay.”
“Well, okay. That’s fine too. Go to sleep.”
“I’m serious.... Actually ... I’ve been having sex pretty regularly for a few months now. Straight guy-girl sex.”
Matt’s eyes popped open in surprise. “Really?!? With who?”
Now, it was Luke’s turn to take a deep breath. “With some of the girls in my coven.”
Silence ruled for several seconds, followed by a click. Luke shielded his eyes from the bright light of Matt’s bedside lamp. When his vision cleared, Matt was sitting upright and staring at him in consternation.
“With some of the girls in your what?”
Two nights later (on Halloween) ...
“You are going to get us both killed. You know that, right? Or worse, grounded forever!”
Luke grinned smugly. As the Sullivan brothers walked down Dorchester Avenue, they hardly looked like siblings, let alone fraternal twins. Six weeks past his 17th birthday, Matthew Sullivan was tall, broad-shouldered, and athletic. Luke Sullivan was twenty-three minutes younger but almost two inches shorter and far leaner. Where Matt’s auburn locks popped out against a dark blue Patriots jersey (bearing his hero Tom Brady’s name and number), Luke’s spiky black hair seemed to blend perfectly with his all-black Urban-Goth ensemble. The weather in Boston was unseasonably warm for late October, but that didn’t stop Luke from pulling out a black trench coat and combat boots. Style before comfort.
“Just relax, okay," he said. "You’re already grounded. What else can Mom do to you?”
Matt glared at him. After Luke dropped his little bombshell two nights earlier, they stayed up for hours talking about this whole coven thing. It turned out that Luke wasn’t just a self-described “creepy little Goth kid.” Rather, he had in recent months become a full-blown Wiccan. His coven met once a week in an abandoned church on Dorchester Street to pray to various fertility deities. “Pray” in this context apparently meant “ritual sex.”
Matt had started in on a lecture about how crazy it was to have sex with a bunch of total strangers, but Luke cut him off, explaining that the coven used protection (which was, of course, against Catholic doctrine, but then, so was witchcraft).
Luke went on to explain that he finally decided to tell Matt about the coven because he wanted Matt to come to their next ritual. Apparently, Halloween was an important holiday for which they’d been preparing for months, and since one of the male coven members had broken his leg in a skateboarding mishap (of all things!), they were “a man down” as Luke put it.
More importantly, Luke said that he felt guilty over Matt getting suspended and he wanted to pay Matt back for standing up for him. Arranging some "pagan nookie," as he called it, was his way of doing so. Eventually, Matt agreed, mainly to come and see for himself what his brother had gotten himself into.
And so, on this Halloween night, the Sullivan boys found themselves walking down Dorchester Street towards the long-abandoned St. Mark’s Catholic Church, armed only with a handful of Trojans to share between them. Luke walked with a spring in his step, his beloved trench coat swirling in the breeze. Matt was more cautious and also full of questions that Luke was happy to answer.
“Listen, Matt, Mom won’t find out if you don’t tell her. She’s working the late shift tonight and won’t be home until dawn, so your curfew is basically on the honor system. Honestly, what were you planning on doing at the apartment tonight, anyway?”
Matt answered with a sulking grumble. “I dunno. Work on my term paper probably.”
“Wow. I thought I was the nerd of the family. What’s it on?”
“Aztec mythology.”
Luke’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? How the hell did you get stuck with that?”
He shrugged. “I had a choice between Aztec mythology or the life of Emily Bront,” he answered, mispronouncing the name of the author of Wuthering Heights. “The first one sounded like it had a lot more gore and action to it.”
“True. And since it’s pronounced ‘Emily Brontë,’” Luke replied, emphasizing the last syllable, “you probably made the right choice.”
Matt’s lip curled. “Ass.”
Luke laughed. “Sorry. Anyway, you’re seventeen and as horny every other guy our age. Are you telling me that you are morally opposed to no-strings-attached sex with a group of hot Goth chicks?”
Matt was silent for several seconds. “How hot?”
Luke simply smiled back at his brother and wriggled his eyebrows. Finally, Matt took a deep breath and exhaled as he accepted his situation.
“Alright, I’m in. So, explain this whole ritual sex thing to me again.”
“The coven leader is named Lindsay. She’s in grad school at Fisher College. Women’s Studies, I think. Basically, we all tell her what sort of things we want in the future – making money, finding true love, getting into Harvard, whatever – and then, we all start making out while Lindsay sits in the middle of the room meditating and chanting. She draws on the spiritual energy released when we all get off and uses that to fuel her magic.”
“Do you seriously believe that crap?” asked Matt dubiously.
“I believe that of the two of us I am officially and by far the more sexually experienced.”
“Classy. So, we’ll all be doing it in front of each other? In the same room?”
“Performance anxiety?”
“Fuck you. I just think it’s a little weird is all.” Matt’s brow furrowed in thought. “I’m not gonna have to touch some naked dude or anything am I?”
Luke gave an exasperated sigh. “No. God, you are such a big sexually-repressed baby! Lindsay’s beliefs about magic requires both the male and female principles to work, so no one involved is gay. Actually, come to think of it, I suppose some of the other guys could be gay. I never asked. But the sex at our Sabbat meetings is guy-on-girl.”
“Uh-huh. And should I be wearing a lot of black nerd-wear like you are?”
Luke laughed at Matt, whose football jersey probably was not the standard attire for a pagan ceremony. “Don’t worry about it. Before too long, you won’t be wearing anything at all.”
Matt gave a wan smile but didn’t respond. To pass the time as they walked, Luke asked him more about his term paper. Strangely happy to change the topic, Matt related what he’d learned so far about the myth of Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly. He also openly conceded he was probably mispronouncing the goddess’s name. Itzpapa-whatever was one of the “star demons” that constantly sought to devour the sun.
As he understood the myth (admittedly from just a week or so of research), this was the reason the Aztecs relied heavily on human sacrifice. They thought it gave power to their sun god so that he
could drive the star demons away and the sun could continue to rise in the morning. She also looked like something out of a horror movie, with a skull-face, clawed hands, and enormous bat-wings. Luke agreed that Itzpapalotl did indeed sound like a far more interesting topic of research than Victorian authoress Emily Brontë.
Moments later, the younger twin turned right to head into the courtyard of the abandoned church where the group’s rites were to be held. Matt stopped for a minute to look up at the empty building. The cracked stained-glass windows over the entryway seems to stare down at him in judgment like an angry nun. He shivered.
Though he’d never admit it, Matt was at heart a good Catholic boy, and he was not at all comfortable with any of what Luke had told him. He had only come along to see for himself what was going on in Luke’s little group before he talked to their mother about it. And possibly have sex with some hot Wiccan girl if circumstances absolutely demanded it.
Matt took a deep breath. "Hail Mary, full of grace," he muttered under his breath. "Please don't punch me in the face." He followed his younger brother into the abandoned and desecrated church.
Inside the sanctuary, the pews and other furnishings had long since been cleared away. Matt could see ten or so other people in the room, all busy setting up candles and incense burners. A lithe young woman, the only person in the room who looked old enough to buy beer, came over to greet them cheerfully.
“Hi there! You must be Matt. I’m Lindsay Forrester. Luke’s told us so much about you.”
Matt tried to hide his nervousness. Lindsay was not at all what he expected. But then, he wasn’t sure what to expect, so perhaps that made sense. The coven leader was a petite and freckle-faced redhead who looked closer to Matt’s own age than a grad student. Her clothing was more “crunchy granola Wiccan” than Goth, with a flowing linen skirt and a tight pullover sweater with a floral print. Idly, Matt noticed that she was barefooted.
