Magic City: Recent Spells

by Simon R. Green

  “Charmed,” Sheila said, trying to sound like she meant it.

  “No,” said Lyle, “that’s what you’re supposed to do to me, right?” He winked. Sheila’s smile felt frail, as if it might begin to splinter.

  “How do you know I’m a witch,” Sheila asked, “when my mother specifically told me not to bring it up?”

  “Don’t know why she told you that,” said Lyle. “First thing she mentioned to me was that’s what you are.”

  “Great,” said Sheila. “And I know nothing about you to make it even, and here we are, standing in my doorway like we’re new neighbors instead of going somewhere.”

  Lyle nodded his head in the direction of the staircase and said, “I got us a reservation at a great steakhouse downtown.”

  Sheila smiled. It was a lip-only smile—no teeth—but she followed Lyle down the steps of her apartment to the front porch, where she found Gary dragging Snowman up the steps by his collar. The dog had its ridiculous grin plastered on as usual, but started to yap in the direction of Lyle as soon as he noticed him. Gary himself was grimacing with frustration. “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

  “This guy,” said Gary. “When he ran off last night, he really ran off. Someone on the neighborhood Facebook group messaged me to say she had him penned in her backyard. Three blocks from here. You’re a bad dog, Snowman. A bad dog, you hear?”

  Snowman was barking like crazy now, twisting around Gary’s legs. He looked up at Lyle and for the first time in Sheila’s experience, the dog did not look like it was smiling, but was baring its teeth.

  “Woof!” said Lyle, and Snowman began to whimper.

  “Well, it’s a good thing she was able to corral him,” Sheila said, even as she attempted to telepathically communicate with Gary: Did this guy just woof? “I’ve never gotten along with dogs, so he’d have probably run away from me if I were the one to find him.”

  “Oh, really?” Lyle raised his brows, as if Sheila had suddenly taken off a mask and revealed herself to be an alien with tentacles wriggling, Medusa-like, out of her head. “You don’t like dogs?”

  “And dogs,” Sheila said, “don’t like me.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said Lyle, shaking his head and wincing.

  Sheila shrugged and said, “That’s just the way things are, I guess.”

  “Who are you again?” Gary asked, looking at Lyle with narrowed eyes, as if he’d put Lyle under a microscope.

  Sheila apologized for not introducing them. “This is my date,” she said, trying to signal to Gary that it was also the last date by rolling her eyes as she turned away from Lyle.

  “A date?” Gary said, clapping one hand over his mouth as he said it. “Sheila is going on a date?”

  “That’s right,” said Lyle. He nodded curtly. “And we should probably get started. Come on,” he said, pointing toward his car parked against the curb. Sheila inwardly groaned when she saw that it was one of those muscle cars macho guys collect, like they’re still little boys with Matchbox vehicles. “Let’s go get some grub,” Lyle said, patting his stomach.

  “Grub?” Gary whispered as Lyle and Sheila went past him, and Sheila could only look over her shoulder with a Help Me! look painfully stretched across her face.

  The steakhouse Lyle took her to was one of those places where people crack peanuts open, dislodge the nut, and discard the shells on the floor. The lighting was dim, but the room was permeated with the glow from a variety of neon beer signs that hung on every wall like a collection in an art gallery. Lyle said it was his favorite place to dine.

  He said it like that too, Sheila could already hear herself saying later as she recounted the evening to Trent and Gary. He said, “It’s my favorite place to dine.” Can you believe it? What was my mother thinking?

  “Oh, really,” Sheila said. The server had just brought her a vodka martini with a slice of lemon dangling over the rim. Sheila looked up at her briefly to say thank you, and noticed immediately that the server—a young woman with long mahogany hair and caramel-colored skin—was a witch. The employee tag on the server’s shirt said her name was Corrine; she winked as Sheila grasped after her words. “Thank you,” Sheila managed to say without making the moment of recognition awkward. She took a sip, licked her lips, then turned back to Lyle as the server walked away, and said, “What were you saying?”

  “ ‘This is my favorite place to dine,’ I said. I come here a couple of times a week,” said Lyle. “Best steaks in town.”

  Sheila said, “I don’t eat meat.”

  To which Lyle’s face dropped like a hot air balloon that had lost all of its hot air. “Your mother didn’t tell me that,” said Lyle.

  “No,” said Sheila, “but for some reason she did tell you that I’m a witch, even after she forbade me from speaking of it. Clearly the woman can’t be trusted.”

  “Clearly,” Lyle agreed, which actually scored him a tiny little point for the first time that evening. There it was in Sheila’s mind’s eye, a little scoreboard. Lyle: 1. Sheila: Anxious.

  He apologized profusely, in a rough-around-the-edges way that seemed to be who he was down to his core. He wasn’t really Sheila’s type, not that Sheila had a specific type, but he wasn’t the sort of guy she’d ever gone out on a date with before, either. Her mother would have known that too. Sheila’s mother had always wanted to know what was going on, back when Sheila actually dated. When Myspace and Facebook came around, and her mother began commenting on photos Sheila had posted from some of her date nights with statements like, “He’s a hottie!” and “Now that’s a keeper!” Sheila had had to block her mother. And only weeks later she discovered that on her mother’s own social networking walls, her mother was publicly bemoaning the fact that her daughter had blocked her.

  But really, her mother would have known that Lyle wasn’t her sort of guy. “So what gives?” she finally asked, after Lyle had finished a tall beer and she’d gotten close to the bottom of her martini. “How do you know my mother? Why would she think we’d make a good pair?”

  “I’m her butcher.”

  Sheila almost spat out the vodka swirling in her mouth, but managed to swallow before saying, “Her butcher? Really? I didn’t know my mother had a butcher.”

  “She comes to the West Side Market every Saturday,” said Lyle. “I work at Doreen’s Meats. Your mother always buys her meat for the week there. As for why would she think we’d make a good pair? I don’t know.” Lyle shrugged and held his palms up in the air. “I guess maybe she thought we’d get along because of what we have in common.”

  Sheila snorted, then raised her hand to signal Corrine back over. “I’d like another martini,” she said, and smiled in the way some people do when they need to smother an uncivil reaction: lips firmly held together. She turned back to Lyle, who was cracking another peanut shell between his thick, hairy fingers, and said, “So what do we have in common, besides my mother?”

  “I’m a werewolf,” said Lyle. Then he flicked the peanut off his thumb and snatched it out of the air, midflight, in his mouth.

  Sheila watched as Lyle crunched the peanut, and noticed only after he’d swallowed and smiled across the table at her that he had a particularly large set of canines. “You’re kidding,” said Sheila. “Ha ha, very funny. You might as well start telling witch jokes at this point.”

  “Not kidding,” said Lyle. Corrine stopped at their table, halting the conversation as she placed another tall beer in front of Lyle, another martini in front of Sheila, and asked what they’d like to order.

  “I think we’re just here to drink tonight,” said Lyle, not taking his eyes off Sheila.

  Sheila nodded vigorously at Corrine, though, agreeing. And after she left, Sheila said, “Well, this is a new achievement for my mother. Set her daughter up with a werewolf.”

  “What? You don’t like werewolves?” Lyle asked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a 1970s drug dealer grin.

  Sheila blinked a lot for a while, took anot
her sip of her martini, then shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever thought about, you know,” she said. “I mean, werewolves aren’t generally on my radar. I get a lot of people who come around with minor psychic powers, and they’re attracted to me because they can sense I’m something out of the ordinary but can’t quite place what exactly, and of course I know a decent amount of witches—we can spot each other on the street without knowing one another, really—but werewolves are generally outside of my experience. Especially my dating experience.”

  “From what I understand, your dating experience has been pretty non-

  existent in general.”

  Sheila decided it was time to take yet another drink. After swallowing a large gulp of vodka, she said, “My mother has a big mouth for someone who hasn’t gotten back in the saddle since my father left her nearly two decades ago. And you can tell her I said that next time she comes in to stock up on meat.”

  Lyle laughed. It was a full, throaty laugh that made heads turn in the steakhouse. When he realized this, he reined himself in, but Sheila could see that the laugh—the sheer volume of it when he’d let himself go—was beyond ordinary. It bordered on the wild. She could imagine him as a wolf in that moment, howling at a blood red moon.

  “So what is it? Once a month you get hairy and run around the city killing people?” Sheila asked.

  Lyle leaned back on his side of the booth and said, “Are you serious?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Sheila. “I hear it’s quite difficult to control bloodlust in times like that.”

  “I make arrangements for those times,” said Lyle.

  “Arrangements, huh,” said Sheila. “What sort of arrangements?”

  “I rent an underground garage, have it filled with plenty of raw steaks, and get locked in for the night.”

  “That’s responsible of you,” said Sheila.

  “What about you?” Lyle asked. “Any inclinations to doing evil? Casting hexes?”

  “No bloodlust for witches,” said Sheila, “and I gave up the vicious cycle of curse drama in college. Not worth it. That shit comes back on you sevenfold.”

  Lyle snickered. He ran his thumb and forefinger over his scraggly goatee, then took another drink of beer. “Looks like we’re a pair,” he said, “just like your mother imagined.”

  “Why?” Sheila asked. “Because you put yourself in a werewolf kennel on full moon nights and I don’t dabble in wreaking havoc in other people’s lives?”

  Lyle nodded, his lips rising into a grin that revealed his pointy, slightly yellowed canines.

  “I hardly think that constitutes being a pair,” said Sheila. “We certainly have that in common, but it’s a bit like saying we should start dating because we’re both single and living in Cleveland.”

  “Why are you so single?” Lyle asked. His nostrils flared several times.

  Oh my God, he is totally sniffing me! “I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said.

  In the restroom, Sheila leaned against the counter and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a short black dress and had hung her favorite opal earrings on her earlobes. They glowed in the strange orange neon beer-sign light of the restroom. She shouldn’t have answered when he knocked. She should have kept things in order. Weekend BBQs with Trent and Gary, even with the obnoxious Snowman running between their legs and wanting to jump on her and lick her. Working a few hours a day with clients, helping them to love or be loved, to find love. Evening runs in the park. Grocery shopping on Wednesdays. That’s what she wanted, not a werewolf butcher/lover her mother had found in the West Side Market.

  The last time Sheila dated someone had been slightly less than underwhelming. He’d been an utterly normal man named Paul who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland downtown, and he talked endlessly of bank capitalization and exchange-traded funds. Sheila had tried to love him, but it was as if all the bank talk was more powerful than any spell she might cast on herself, and so she’d had to add Paul to her long list of previous candidates for love.

  There had been Jim, a guy who owned a car dealership in Lakewood, but he always came off as a salesman, and Sheila wasn’t the consumer type. There had been Alexis, a law student at Case Western, but despite her girlish good looks and intelligence, Alexis had worried about Sheila’s under-the-table Paranormal Romance business—concerned that she was possibly defrauding the government of taxable income. There had been Mark, the CPA (say no more). There had been Lola, the karaoke DJ (say no more). And there had been a string of potentials before that, too, once Sheila began sorting through the memories of her twenties, a long line of cute young men and women whose faces faded a little more each day. She had tried—she had tried so hard—hoping one of them would take the weight of her existence and toss it into the air like a beach ball. The love line went back and back and back, so far back, but none of those boys or girls had been able to do this. None of them.

  Except Trent and Gary, of course. Not that they were romance for Sheila. But they did love her. They cared about her. They didn’t make her feel like she had to be anyone but who she wanted to be, even if who Sheila wanted to be wasn’t entirely who Sheila was.

  Sheila washed her hands under the faucet and dried them with the air dryer, appreciating the whir of the fan drowning out the voice in her head. She would walk out on Lyle, she decided. She’d go home and call her mother and tell her, “Never again,” then hang up on her. She would sit in front of the blank television screen, watching her shadowy reflection held within it, and maybe she would let herself cry, just a little bit, for being a love witch who couldn’t make love happen for herself.

  “Are you okay?” a voice said over the whir of the hand dryer. Sheila blinked and turned. Behind her, Corrine the server was coming out of a stall. She came to stand beside Sheila at the sinks and quickly washed her hands.

  “You’re a witch,” Sheila said stupidly, and realized at that moment that two martinis were too many for her.

  Corrine laughed, but nodded and said, “Yes. I am. So are you.” Corrine reached for the paper towel to dry her hands, since Sheila was spellbound in front of the electric dryer. “What kind?” she asked Sheila as she wiped her hands.

  “Love,” said Sheila.

  “Love?” said Corrine, raising her thin eyebrows. “That’s pretty fancy.”

  “It’s okay,” said Sheila.

  “Just okay?” said Corrine. “I don’t know. Sounds nice to be able to do something like that with it. Me? I can’t do much but weird things.”

  “What do you mean?” Sheila asked.

  “You know,” said Corrine. “Odds and ends. Nothing so defined as love. Bad end of the magic stick, maybe. I can smell fear on people, or danger. And I can open doors. But that’s about it.”

  “Open doors?” said Sheila.

  “Yeah,” said Corrine. “Doors. I guess it does make a kind of sense when I think about it long enough. I smell danger coming, I can get out of just about anywhere if I want to. Open a door. Any old door. It might look like it leads into a broom closet or an office, but I can make it open onto other places I’ve been, or have at least seen in a picture.”

  “Wow,” said Sheila. “You should totally be a cat burglar.”

  Corrine laughed. Sheila laughed with her. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “It’s okay,” Corrine said. “It was funny. I think you said it because it was funny.”

  “I guess I better get back out there,” said Sheila.

  “Date?” said Corrine.

  “Blind date,” Sheila answered. “Bad date. Last date.”

  Corrine frowned in sympathy. “I knew it wasn’t going well.”

  “How?” Sheila asked.

  “I could smell it on you. Not quite fear, but anxiety and frustration. I figured that’s why you asked for the second martini. That guy comes in a lot. He seems okay, but yeah, I couldn’t imagine why you were here with him.”

  Sheila loo
ked down at her hands, which were twitching a little, as if her fingers had minds of their own. They were twitching in Corrine’s direction, like they wanted to go to her. Sheila laughed. Her poor fingers. All of that love magic stored up inside them and nowhere to go.

  “You need help?” Corrine asked suddenly. She had just taken off her name badge and was now fluffing her hair in the mirror.

  “Help?” said Sheila.

  Corrine looked over and said, “If you want out, we can just go. You don’t even have to say goodbye to him. My shift’s over. A friend of mine will be closing out your table. We can leave by the bathroom door.”

  Sheila laughed. Her fingers twitched again. She took one hand and clamped it over the other.

  “What are you afraid of?” Corrine asked. Her eyes had started to narrow. “I’m getting a sense that you’re afraid of me now.”

  “You?” Sheila said. “No, no, not you.”

  “Well, you’re giving off the vibe,” said Corrine. She dropped her name badge into her purse and took out a tube of lipstick, applied some to her lips so that they were a shade of dark ruby. When she was done, she slipped the tube into her purse and turned to Sheila. “What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.

  Sheila was still fidgeting. “I think,” she said. “I think they like you.”

  Corrine threw her head back and laughed. “Like?” she said, grinning. “That’s sweet of them. You can tell your hands I like them too.”

  Sheila said, “I’m so sorry. This is embarrassing. I’m usually not such a weirdo.” For a moment, Sheila heard her father’s voice come through—Creepy weirdos. Whatever the hell else is out there—and she shivered.

  “You’re not weird,” said Corrine. “Just flustered. It happens.”

  It happens. Sheila blinked and blinked again. Actually, it didn’t happen. Not for her. Her fingers only twitched like this when she was working magic for other people. Anytime she had tried to work magic for herself, they were still and cold, as if she had bad circulation. “No,” Sheila said. “It doesn’t usually happen. Not for me. This is strange.”