“Catch, Jonah!” she cried, gently lobbing the ball.
The ball slipped through Jonah’s fingers. He muttered, “Oops,” and scooped it up. Then he trotted over to the fence, grinned at Kelsey, scrabbled onto a white wrought-iron chair planted beside a matching table, and threw the ball as hard as he could over the eight-foot barrier. It just cleared the top.
“Jonah,” she protested mildly. “Why did you do that?”
He covered his mouth with both hands and giggled. Then he ran around in a circle making noises like an airplane while poor Magic kept his gaze glued to Kelsey, sitting down and chuffing when no tennis ball was forthcoming.
“Do you have another ball?” she asked the wee terror-boy. He shook his head.
Magic whined.
***
“I can’t believe you bought a can of tennis balls for their dog,” Brianna said the next day.
“You haven’t done much babysitting, have you?” Kelsey said. “Sitters do stuff like this.” She tapped the can. “Three bright yellow tennis balls cost two dollars. The goodwill? Priceless.”
“Well then, well done, old chap, well done. You are perhaps sneakier than I gave you credit for,” Brianna said in a snobby British accent.
“I am often underestimated,” Kelsey said, dipping her head.
“He’ll have them over the fence in five minutes,” Brianna declared.
“He’s grown as a person since you met him,” Kelsey assured her.
“Six weeks ago? When he peed on my shoe?”
“Yeah, well.” Kelsey made a “sorry” face. “He’s just feisty.”
“You got this job to make money, not to lose it,” Brianna reminded her. “Dogs can catch sticks. Sticks are free.” She pointed a finger at Kelsey. “Don’t be too soft-hearted.”
“Me? Never.” She got out of the car and put her hand on the open window. “Drive safely.”
“Text me if you get a break.”
“Give me a break,” Kelsey said, and they both smiled ruefully.
Then Brianna’s eyes widened and she jabbed a finger through the windshield. “Witch sticks! Witch sticks!” she said.
Another triangular bundle of twigs lay on the path to the house. Kelsey shrugged.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “God, Bree.”
“They’re freaky,” Brianna said, and she drove away.
This time one of the other babysitters was on deck; she gave Kelsey the lowdown on all the nefarious things Jonah had done that day.
“So far,” she finished. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
When Kelsey entered the house, she saw why: Jonah had used chocolate syrup—no, Nutella—to finger paint on the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. She examined the brown smears and found his name and some happy faces. And was that a pentagram?
She wrote “333” with her forefinger, then filled a bucket with water and found two sponges. Then she called Jonah in.
He protested, of course he did, and then he bargained:
“If we clean it all up, can we play with Magic for hours and hours?”
She grinned at him. “Sure, buddy.”
Jonah got bored and tried to quit more times than Kelsey could keep track of. But they finally got the Nutella cleaned up. She showed Jonah the can of tennis balls and encouraged him to make every effort to keep them on their side of the fence. But as if he really was possessed, he tossed them merrily over the fence into Mr. Bright’s yard.
As she’d known he would.
***
The next day, Ms. Goode met her at the door. She was dressed in a black business suit and there was a briefcase in her hand. Her face was drawn, her manner grave. She came out onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind her.
“Mr. Bright died last night,” she said quietly.
“Oh,” Kelsey said. “That’s…terrible. How did it happen?”
“It was bad. It looks like he had some kind of stomach bug. He was getting up to go to the kitchen and he had a heart attack. And he fell…” She swallowed “…into the fireplace.”
“Yow,” Kelsey said. “Wow.”
I’m not clear how they knew to come. The EMT’s, I mean. It was two in the morning and they broke down the door. Jonah slept through the whole thing. But of course we didn’t.” She waited, and Kelsey nodded, not sure what else to do.
“We hardly knew him, but if Jonah hears about it…I mean, it was so gruesome.”
Death can be very gruesome, Kelsey thought, but didn’t say.
“You might wait until he asks,” Kelsey said. “He might never know.” She thought about saying something then, but didn’t.
“I see.” Ms. Goode nodded as if she were taking notes. “Will you be all right if I leave? I can call and cancel—”
“I’ll be fine,” Kelsey said, mildly curious about whom Ms. Goode would call and what she would cancel. It didn’t matter. After tonight, she would give her notice. “Really.”
“Okay.” Ms. Goode smiled sadly at her, scooted into the garage, and left.
***
That afternoon, Three-Three-Three took a nap. In fact, he slept like a log. And would, until full moonrise. Kelsey had arranged it with a triangle of twigs under his bed.
The triangles were charms, which she had created to protect the Goodes from magical fallout. To keep them safe, even as she used their house for the base of her operation. That was why she had taken the job. And that was why, after tonight, she would no longer need it.
She waited for darkness to fall, and the moon to lift, and then she clambered over the fence. In her right hand was the empty tennis ball can. She carried a flashlight in her left, and she clicked it on. She supposed Mr. Bright’s relatives would show up fairly soon. Maybe the police were keeping an eye on the house. She needed to do this. She needed, in her way, to make sure that he had paid the ultimate price.
Arnold Bright’s yard was a mess, a jungle of dandelions and mustard plants. A rusty rake sat crossed over a wheelbarrow encased in pampas grass and in it, she saw Magic’s rawhide bone, perhaps a dozen tennis balls, Nerf balls, baseballs, and lots of Lego pieces. Kept out of spite. Kept because he was mean.
The three tennis balls she had brought for Magic shimmered with very faint green energy. Wisps of smoke rose into the night sky. If she had worked the spell properly, everything would dissipate now that she had completed the hex.
Magic worked in threes. Three balls. Three hexes. Stomach, heart, fire.
Her hand shook a little as she picked up each ball and put it back in the can. They bobbled like trapped birds as she sealed the end with the plastic lid. Jonah had happily tossed them over the fence for her, and so Mr. Bright had received them from the hand of an innocent. That had set the curses in motion.
She murmured an incantation in backwards Latin and if the back door was locked, it wasn’t now. It swung open as she approached.
“You’re dead, you bastard,” she whispered, and violated his house. To her surprise, it was clean, orderly, giving no hint of the destruction Mr. Bright had caused. The screaming, weeping, wishing of her parents, and her bargaining.
The plotting, the planning, and the learning:
A spell to find the driver who had hit Mark and left him for dead. A spell to kill him. A spell to send the unrepentant murderer’s soul to hell.
She had found Mr. Arnold Bright, who lived next to the Goodes on Leland Street. Now his body was in the morgue, and she was in his house.
But soon he would dwell elsewhere, somewhere horrible, forever.
There was hardly anything in his house—the kitchen counters were barren. There were no pictures on the walls of the family room. Just one easy chair, and a TV. Cursed. Miserable.
Good.
But the next room was busier; there was an old oak dining table piled high with manila folders. She crossed to it and opened the first folder:
Her brother’s smiling face stared up at her from a news clipping about the accident—the crim
e. Hit and run. Unidentified driver, who took off.
All the clippings, collected in folder after folder. She smiled grimly, glad to see that he had been haunted by what he’d done. That was the curse she had learned for the killer of her brother: that he, or she, shouldn’t have a moment of peace. In his mind’s eye, he’d see the wreck he’d walked away from, the boy whose life he could have saved if he hadn’t so callously fled.
“Good,” she muttered. “I’m glad.”
But the second stack of folders was different: they contained pamphlets from Alcoholics Anonymous about taking everything one day at a time. There was a computer chart that told a story of its own: One Day Sober, One Week, One Month, Ninety Days.
A picture of Jesus and a Bible verse:
For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
She slowly sat in the chair Arnold Bright must have sat in. She looked at the clippings, each one. She found part of an email printout:
I have to make amends. It will give the family closure if I come forward.
And an answer:
—Yes, but it will ruin your life if you do. Do other things, great things, and find peace.
Then there were clippings about donations to charities, about an anonymous “good Samaritan” who went around cleaning up trash and performing good deeds. Never identified. Never discovered. What a saint.
Another email:
—I’m so proud of you.
Another answer:
I never dreamed my life would turn around so completely because I did something so wrong. I’m forgiven. I’m happy. Fulfilled.
She clenched her fists and clamped her jaw in fury.
“No,” she said, “this is wrong.”
The moon blazed full through the window. Three tennis balls to curse him, and a soul to seal the deal.
A weakened, aching, miserable soul.
She had thought it would be his, Mr. Arnold Bright’s.
But now…she wasn’t so sure.
She stared down at her dead brother’s happy face. At the emails.
The can of tennis balls wiggled on the table.
She smelled the sulfur. She felt the heat.
The One was standing behind the chair. Her hair stood on end and she began to shake.
She said, “You said that if I served you, you would take the soul of the unrepentant murderer in payment.”
There was a chuckle. And then a low, evil voice whispered fire and brimstone and damnation in her ear:
“Let’s go.”
Introduction to “Somebody Else’s Problem”
Annie Bellet may be a Pixie. When I met her I could see she was a kindred spirit and had the spells within her. “Somebody Else’s Problem” confirms my suspicion, but if I tell you why it’ll ruin the magic (magic with a c when I describe emotional magic).
Annie is a full-time speculative fiction writer and author of the Gryphonpike Chronicles and Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division fantasy series. She has sold short stories to more than a dozen magazines and anthologies. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horseback riding, video games, comic books, tabletop RPGs and many other nerdy pursuits. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat. About “Somebody Else’s Problem,” Annie writes:
“I read an article about rats being trained to detect landmines and it got me thinking about how that could translate over to a fantasy setting. I took inspiration from that idea and put it into a future/alternate Detroit where magic is only somewhat legal and rats are used to sniff out the illegal magic. I also had tattoos being used, because I love tattoos and am fascinated by the many ways in which they are represented in various cultures.”
Somebody Else’s Problem
Annie Bellet
Roosevelt Park slid by outside the bus window as Verity Li found her usual seat five back from the driver and sank down onto the scarred plastic. It wasn’t a long bus ride home from the Office of Banned Magic satellite building adjacent to Michigan Central Station, but every afternoon it seemed to stretch on a little bit longer. Knowing they were on their way home, her magic-sniffing rat, Ruby, stirred inside Verity’s sweatshirt pocket, sticking the tip of her pink nose out.
Verity glanced around, the bus interior shadowed and dull from behind her sunglasses. Most of the seats were full, some people already standing as preference, but no one paid any attention to her. At work she had to wear the lettered jacket that said Detective and OBM in big, easy to read letters. Here she was just another commuter in jeans and a hoodie, bundled up against the September chill.
She leaned back and closed her eyes, opening her mind to Ruby’s through their tattooed spell-link, letting her cat-sized friend tell her about the world through their joined noses.
Someone had stuck fresh gum to the bottom of the seat. Ruby was interested in that but Verity slid a hand inside her sweatshirt pocket and stroked the rat’s super fine white fur, keeping her in place with a little tug on her harness. Grease. Dust. Human sweat. Stronger smells of charms, the fresh mint of protection charms and the pine sol bite of charms that were supposed to ward off the common cold. All legal magics, the kind of minor things that anyone over the age of eighteen could purchase from licensed venders.
The bus stopped and a new wave of scents slipped over her. Wet cement. Half-eaten yogurt. Then a sharp, fake-watermelon scent found Ruby’s nose. She twitched and gave her signal squeak.
Verity opened her eyes and tightened her grip on Ruby’s harness. That was the smell of a banned kind of magic, invisibility. She looked around, spotting the offender by where her eyes refused to stick, the person a blurry outline that her brain didn’t want to focus on. Ruby could have taken her right up to the person, if she’d asked. She reached into her jean’s pocket and pulled out a Pez dispenser, dropping a banana pellet into her sweatshirt pouch and mentally sending calming thoughts to her rat.
It was misdemeanor level magic. And she was tired, off duty, and wanted to stick it in her SEP file. Somebody Else’s Problem. If the kid, because it was probably some stupid kid, was over twenty-one, he or she would be fined and have to register in the Spell Offender list. Cameras would catch anything they did, since charms like that only really worked on the human eye, and not perfectly.
At her stop, she walked past the blurred shape of the kid to exit the bus.
“You overpaid for that spell, idiot,” she said over her shoulder.
Her building was a new high-rise, part of the “urban renewal” effort a few blocks from One Detroit Center. Half the floors had been designated as affordable housing, with a break for government employees. Which meant that no one bothered to renew charms against leaks, breakages, outages, and anything else, or do the manual labor half the time. Tiny HOA fees, tiny benefits.
At least Ruby was always happy to be inside the dingy walls. This was her favorite time of day. Home meant pineapple treats and videogames on the giant touch-screen television that Verity had sunk three month’s overtime into.
Images of Ruby’s favorite matching game, red, blue, green, and purple squares with simple shapes on them, flashed through Verity’s mind. The moment she had the door open to her tiny one bedroom, Ruby leapt free of her pocket and raced across the oatmeal-colored carpet to the TV, reaching up to push the power button. Then she danced in tight circles, her leash trailing and tangling in her long, scaly tail, sending her desire to play across the mind link.
“Let me get my shoes off. And your harness. Brat.” Verity smiled, unable to maintain her exhausted, annoyed mood in the face of this after-work ritual.
She turned on the game and unbuckled Ruby’s harness, some of the tension draining out of her shoulders as the familiar dings and beeps from the game came on. The tattoos that let her and Ruby sh
are senses and communicate in basic ways were visible on the large rat’s body, showing black through her snow-white fur. Verity had the same tattoos in the same places, on her back, ribs, and down her scalp from top of head to base of spine, though her thick black hair had grown back in to hide it.
No one else at the academy had wanted the runty albino rat. Their loss. Ruby, which Verity called her due to the rat’s bright red eyes, had excelled as a magic sniffer and their link was stronger than normal, flowing both ways instead of just from rat to human handler. She and Ruby had more collars than anyone else who had graduated from the Detection program.
Spells had a smell, each one subtly or not so subtly different. Once people had figured that out, they’d started trying to train animals to detect magic, same as they used them to detect land mines, drugs, and some kinds of disease. Her, and Ruby’s, job was to sniff out magic, sorting the legal from the illegal and signaling her enforcer partners to take down those who broke the law. Her guideline was that if it was a magic that could harm someone or be used to invade privacy, like the bus kid’s invisibility charm, it was probably on the books as illegal.
Not that it matters, she thought as she pulled herself away from watching Ruby match shapes and colors to see to her own needs. The late twenty-first century’s war on magic was about as effective as the last century’s war on drugs. No one knew why all the magic had, well, magically started working. No one knew how to turn it off. So they tried to control it, and when that didn’t work very well, they regulated the hell out of it. The laws of what was and wasn’t allowed in the States changed almost daily it seemed, with both the lawyers and the criminals getting fat on the results.
Just a job to Verity, though she wouldn’t give up Ruby for anything. She stuck to it, though the exciting new car smell was long gone. Ruby made up for a lot of disappointments in life.
She opened the fridge and grabbed a small bottle of orange juice from the pack of fifty that took up the whole top shelf. Snagging the vodka from the freezer, she dumped out half the orange juice and refilled the bottle with booze. She was half way to the couch when a woman next door started screaming.
Fiction River: Hex in the City Page 5
