I’m no magician, but I’ve read a lot of comic books and I know a magic circle when I see one—as long as the circle is drawn by someone with a taste for 1970s Marvel comic villains. This one passed my very limited quality control.
Greg had dabbled in magic when we were in high school, so he had more actual knowledge of the mystical arts than I did. Of course, a retarded orangutan that has walked through a magic shop once has more knowledge of the mystical arts than me. Still, I felt qualified to make this call. “A protective circle?”
“No, it’s wrong.”
“Nope, pretty sure it’s a circle, bro.”
“Yes, I know that. But look at these symbols.” He pointed to several scribbles and squiggles around the inside of the circle. “These should be on the outside of the circle, so that whatever was summoned into the circle couldn’t scratch them out and alter the protection of the circle.”
“What if you weren’t trying to pull something into the circle?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Greg looked at me with eyebrows raised.
“Well, couldn’t you cast the circle around you, then do a summoning spell so that whatever you summoned couldn’t get you before going off to wreak havoc? You’d be safe. It’s probably not foolproof or exactly the safest thing in the world, but would it work?”
Greg’s sat down on the roof with a thud. His eyes got big. “I hadn’t even thought about that. That’s so awful I didn’t think anyone would consider it.”
“I think someone did. You don’t get eaten, and when you send the whatever back to wherever all you have to do is erase the circle, right?” I wasn’t sure what I was missing, but it looked like it was going to be bad. I hate having smart friends.
“What’s so bad about that? Really? You don’t get it?” Greg replied. I mentioned I hate having smart friends, right?
He went on. “What’s so bad is that once you summon a whatever from wherever without a circle to bind it, then that whatever is free to do whatever it likes to whoever it wants to do it to, without you being able to banish it to anywhere, much less to wherever it came from in the first place!”
“Not to be the king of understatement or anything, but that doesn’t sound good,” I said as Greg’s explanation began to sink in.
“Yeah. If you hide in a circle and don’t bind a demon, for example, into another circle, then that demon is just set . . . free. It can’t get you, but it can do anything it wants and you don’t have any control over it, except maybe where and when you summon it.”
“The timing. The girls,” I said in almost a whisper.
“Yeah, the girls,” Greg agreed. “Whoever summoned the demon must have waited until they were the only ones left around, then cast the spell.”
“But how would they know they were getting the right girl?” I asked.
“I don’t think it mattered. I think the summoning party wanted to be sure the demon took an innocent. Which innocent it got was irrelevant.”
“So some little—this little girl just drew the short straw?” Even with everything I’d seen, that didn’t sit right with me.
“Pretty much.” Greg sat there on the roof, looking at the circle and shaking his head. I reached out a hand and pulled him to his feet.
“Come on,” I said, walking toward the edge of the roof.
“Wait a sec. I gotta blow this up first.” He reached into his utility belt and sprinkled a white substance on the circle. A pale blue smoke hissed up from the roof, and the circle disappeared.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Salt. It’s bad juju for magic stuff. Now this circle can’t be used again.”
“Good deal. Now let’s get moving.” I resumed walking to the edge of the roof.
“Where are we going?” He asked, falling into step beside me.
“Back to the playground. I smelled something funky, and we might be able to trace this thing by the scent.”
“Sometimes I think you only keep me around for my nose,” he grumbled.
“And your car. But you’ve got a better nose than me, so I need you to take a whiff, tell me if it’s important, and if it is, you need to track the whatever it is to wherever it went.”
“All right, I’ll play bloodhound, but if you try to put me in one of those stupid doggy Christmas sweaters again, I’m gonna stake you in your sleep.”
Chapter Eighteen
We circled around the playground a couple of times before I caught the scent again. I waved Greg over to where I had smelled it, and he took a deep breath. “Smell that?” I asked.
“Yeah, dude. Smells like vindaloo.”
“Good. We know the kind of demon then.”
“No, you magic-backward moron. Chicken vindaloo. It’s an Indian dish with a lot of curry. Should be pretty easy to follow in this white-bread part of town.” Greg took off toward the fence and I followed, trying not to lose him while still keeping an eye peeled for the cops.
Trailing the Big Bad was always so much easier when the Scooby gang on Buffy did the trailing. They rarely had cops crawling their turf. Of course, Buffy was usually trying to kill guys like us. I probably shouldn’t enjoy the Whedonverse as much as I do.
We hopped the fence and followed the trail of Indian cuisine into a patch of woods separating the school from the neighborhood where Marjorie lived. Our vamp night vision is equal to any human’s day sight. Unfortunately, our trail navigation skills were piss-poor. We went stumbling through the woods like a pair of drunken rhinos.
After about ten minutes, Greg held up one hand. Since I was looking at my feet and not at his hand, I walked into his back. Laid him out like a pin at the bowling alley.
“Dammit, Jimmy, would you watch where you’re going?” He picked himself up off the ground and brushed twigs and leaves off his knees.
“I was watching where I was going, but I wasn’t watching where you were stopping. So why are we stopping?” I helped him up, figuring it was the least I could do.
“I heard something. It sounded like someone trying to be stealthy in the woods.”
“So it sounded nothing like us?”
“Not a thing like us. Now shut up and let me try to hear it again.”
We heard the exact opposite of someone trying to be stealthy—several loud gunshots came from about a hundred yards in front of us. Greg and I looked at each other and then bolted toward the sound.
That’s either brave or stupid for most people, but we aren’t people and can’t be killed by bullets, unless they manage to completely destroy our hearts or sever our heads. Since those kinds of bullets are pretty rare, running toward the sound of gunshots is generally worse for those doing the shooting than for us.
We hauled ass through the woods, managing to only trip on two or three exposed tree roots in the process, then drew up short at the edge of a clearing. Detective Law was in the clearing, apparently the source of the shots. I say “apparently” because she was no longer holding her gun, and from the looks of her, barely holding on to consciousness. She was lying on the ground in a circle of little girls. None of them looked older than nine, and they were beating the crap out of her.
You didn’t have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out pretty quickly that these were not ordinary little girls. Even the village idiot would have guessed something was amiss when one of them picked Law up and threw her across the clearing at a huge tree. I nodded to Greg, and he jumped over to intercept the flying detective before her head became one with the splinters.
I stepped into the clearing, and tried to buy some time with my wits and humor. God only knew how that was going to go. If I was ever going to be universally funny, it was time for the comedy gene to kick into high gear.
“Now, girls, I don’t like curfew any more than you do, but that’s no reason to beat up a cop,” I said, leaning against a pine tree in what I thought was a jaunty fashion. I felt far less jaunty when a bunch of little girls, all sporting glowing eyes à la Children of the Corn,
turned to me and started walking in my direction.
I thought for a second about what it had taken to subdue the last one of these possessed super-brats and decided discretion was the better part of valor. I waited until the first couple of them were close enough to almost reach me, and then I jumped straight up into the tree. I cleared a good fifteen feet and swung up onto a branch, looking down to see the girls surrounding the base of the tree like little pigtailed bloodhounds.
“Greg, you got any brilliant ideas? Now would be the time to send ’em my way!” I yelled across the clearing.
“I was thinking ‘run like hell’ sounds like a plan,” he shouted back.
“I don’t think that is an option, gentlemen.” The woman’s voice came out of the darkness on the edge of the clearing. A middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun stepped into the circle of trees and said, “Come to me, my children.”
The little girls with the creepy eyes formed a double rank in front of the woman and stood there, so silent that I couldn’t tell if they were breathing, even with my heightened senses.
“Okay, lady. We don’t have any quarrel with you. Let the kids go and we can all be on our merry way.” I tried to hold my voice steady, and really hoped that my coat had enough drape in it to hide the fact that my knees were shaking to a marimba beat. Greg looked up at me from across the clearing and mouthed something at me, but even if I had been able to read lips, he was too far away for me to understand what he wanted.
Any hope of getting out of the woods without a serious fight, and probably a serious beating, went out the window when the bun-head opened her mouth again. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere, vampire. You got lucky the last time we met, but I don’t see any automobiles around for you to hit me with tonight.”
Crap. Just crap. In my experience anyone who felt comfortable delivering a monologue before the punching started was strong enough to wreck my day. Plus the middle-aged woman was clearly possessed by the demon that had gotten us into this mess in the first place.
I took stock of the situation from my elevated vantage point in the tree. I was facing a bunch of possessed little girls and what looked like one really pissed-off cafeteria lady. Greg was trying to help Detective Law to her feet, and I had no random automobiles to throw at the rug rats from hell.
I decided to try and talk my way out of trouble. It used to work with principals, so why not crazed cafeteria-lady demons? “What’s the plan? You’ve gotten one step closer to your quota tonight, and then what? You turn in the box tops for an iPod?”
“Fool!” shouted the woman. “Do you have any idea the forces you are tampering with?”
“None whatsoever. Why don’t you enlighten me.” The longer I kept her talking, the better the chances Greg would think of something brilliant. I hoped. Boy, did I ever hope. I also hoped that this curry-scented psycho had seen all the same movies I had and knew her role was to provide a soliloquy on her plans and motives, giving me enough time to avoid being killed.
“Foolish vampire, the world as you know it is coming to an end. The reign of mankind is over. When I complete my ritual and bring my father forth, all will kneel before the Dark Lord, and Belial shall be favored among all the Host!”
I had no idea what the “Host” was, and the very sound of “Dark Lord” made me more than a little uncomfortable. And she was yelling. In my experience, supernatural bad guys yell right before they hit you very hard, or at least try to kill you in some unpleasant fashion. I thought I’d pre-empt her hitting me and take the fight to the bun-head.
I hopped down from the tree with a nice cape-billowing move and drew my weapons. With a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other I felt marginally better about my chances of surviving the next thirty seconds. All that good feeling evaporated when Detective Law spoke from behind me.
“Drop the gun, Black.” I heard her chamber a round, and sighed.
“Greg, why is she pointing a gun at me?” I asked without turning around.
“Because I don’t like people threatening the possessed bodies of innocent little old ladies on my shift. Now drop the gun,” Detective Law repeated.
“No,” I said, never taking my eyes off the little old lady, who was the source of much greater concern than the cop with a gun pointed at my back.
“No?” She sounded surprised.
I suppose people don’t typically decline when she points a weapon at them and orders them to disarm, but I didn’t have a lot of time for verbal sparring. “No. Greg, get the nice police lady out of here before she gets killed.”
I raised my pistol and took aim at the bun-lady’s head. “Last chance, Mrs. Butterworth. Let the kids go and I won’t ventilate your forehead.”
Bun-head wasn’t impressed. “Your policewoman is right, you won’t shoot an innocent body, and you still have too many of your idiotic human ideals.”
I hate it when the bad guys have a good read on me. Maybe I should start wearing a mask.
“Children,” the bun-lady demon called. “Kill them all.” She waved one hand at the three of us, and the entire cast of Annie rushed us.
Chapter Nineteen
Most nights I have qualms about hitting kids, but this wasn’t one of those nights. I holstered my weapons and kicked the first brat all the way across the clearing, as gently as I possibly could. The second one to get within arm’s reach ended up as a projectile, too. The two of them hit trees and slumped to the ground, momentarily stunned. That only left about eight attacking the three of us for the moment, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Detective Law wasn’t going to be much use in this fight.
A glance behind me confirmed my suspicions, as several of the brats had her down on the ground and were beating the crap out of her. Again. I couldn’t concentrate on her plight for long, though, because there were three of the little ankle-biters swarming me, and the two I’d incapacitated earlier didn’t have the courtesy to stay down for long. As much as I hated it, the gloves were going to have to come off.
“I really hope you’ve got a good idea, bro!” I heard Greg yell from behind me, then I heard a loud oof! and a thud that let me know he was off his feet. I jumped back into my tree to get a second’s breathing room, only to have company on my branch almost immediately.
“Not fair!” I yelled. “No fair chasing me when I’m trying to figure out how to kick your aaaaa—” I was trying to say something witty (and distracting) when the branch broke and dumped me and the kid who had jumped after me fifteen feet onto the forest floor. I could have been hurt if I’d landed wrong, but at the last minute I twisted and landed on the kid instead.
A remnant of morality twinged, but then I remembered that I eat people. It’s not like I was interviewing to be her babysitter, and she started it by invading my tree. She puked a little from my having landed on her, and seeing that gave me an idea. It also made me a little nauseous.
I had to get free of the fray for a second to clear my mind. I picked the girl up by her ankles, and twirled in a circle, swinging her like a hammer toss in high-school track and field. After I’d leveled the three other kids surrounding me, I tossed her at the bun-demon and yelled over to Greg.
“Dude!”
“Yeah?” he croaked. He had a kid in each hand by the scruff of the neck, and one was on his back choking him with one hand and hitting him in the head with the other. I would have laughed if I hadn’t seen four crumb-snatchers running back toward me full tilt.
“What was that crap earlier about salt breaking spells?”
“Salt—urk—disrupts the flow of magical energies. It’ll break almost any spell.” He managed to throw off all three kids for a second, but then two more dropped on him from a tree.
“Will it screw up stuff like summoning and possession?” I asked, jumping and weaving as the little girls closed on me once again. I needed to end this quick, before I killed a kid or before one of them decided that a broken branch would serve as a stake. Or beat the helpless detective to death.
“I think so!” The response came from under the pile of bodies where Greg was lying.
“This would be a good time for you to—oof—tell me you’ve got more in your utility belt!”
The whole pile of possessed bodies flexed, then flew apart as Greg jumped to his feet. The little rug rats immediately headed back at him, but Greg was ready. He reached into a pouch on his belt and tossed white powder into the faces of the girls attacking him, and they immediately slumped to the ground unconscious. Right at that moment I felt a tremendous pain behind my left knee, and looked down to see one of the brats had actually locked her teeth into my hamstring.
“Oh, that is it!” I bellowed. “Biting is my gig, you little urchin!” I snatched her off my leg and threw her over to Greg. “Salinate this little brat, please!”
“I don’t think that’s a word, Jimmy.”
“I don’t have time to call Webster’s, man, just make with the salting!”
“Happy to help, bro,” he called back.
A few minutes later we were panting in a clearing surrounded by eleven unconscious, salty little girls. Bun-Head was gone. She must have decided that discretion was the better part of whatever and hauled ass out of there once we started dispelling the kids. Apparently, all it took was a good dousing with sodium chloride to toss the demons out and turn them back into normal children.
It was probably going to take a lot more work to get Detective Law back to normal. She was sitting with her back to a tree and her gun in both hands. The slide was back and the gun was obviously empty, but that didn’t stop her from pointing the weapon at us and dry firing frantically as we approached.
“Shhhh . . . it’s okay. We’re the good guys. We’re not going to hurt you, I promise.” I kept my voice low and slowly moved to sit down next to her. All I really had to work with was a little experience working with frightened animals, and reruns of Dog Whisperer on Animal Planet. I thought it might be a good idea to get down to her level and look as non-threatening as possible. That was a little tough, since I was fairly bloody. At least it was all my blood.
Modern Magic Page 31
