It didn’t make sense to Cadi. “But why would anyone choose to become that? No matter how selfish they are?”
“They’re hungry for life because they’re born empty inside. You were born with a personality, likes and dislikes, malleable but you were you. They fill up on what they can take in their spells from human emotions and traits. Dad said . . .” Torvi trailed off, trying to remember. “He called them echoes. Echoes of personalities they took from humans. To charge their emblems, like the one for glamour, Cthalu sigils procure emotions like joy or excitement, easily done in a few visits to an ice cream store or amusement park. Then they use that glamour to acquire the best material goods for free, furniture and jewelry and cars and houses, whatever their glamour is strong enough to pull off. They see that many humans favor children and often have an excess of their own through spells, looking around to human children who appear bright, confident, whatever they favor. Then they give their own child an echo of that personality. If they don’t like it after a time, they give the child a new one. Selfishness is a natural consequence when it’s easy to get whatever you want. To live in celebration and come to the end, to give it all up and go into the night . . . It’s too much for the weakest of them. After a life of gratification, they’re ill equipped to deal with death. It cannot be glamoured away or made palatable, and they have a magical option that a Ceilidh does not. They can stay celebrating, but now as Nychos they’re celebrating death, and using it to feed their life.”
“They don’t have to seem like they enjoy it!”
“But most of them do, like a cat might enjoy toying with a mouse before the kill. It’s their nature. Whatever scrap of conscience a Nychos had as Cthalu is gone, so they don’t care whom they torment or kill, or that their former family and friends among the Cthalu shun them. It’s about survival and trying to gather back the wealth they were accustomed to having, but now without the help of glamour. What I’m curious about-” He stopped as the waiter came for their orders.
The menu was overpriced, but money wasn’t a problem. Liking to feel spoiled at restaurants, Cadi smiled to receive a prompt refill of her cider from the manager himself. In Alary, they’d eaten out almost every night. On weekends they went out for lunch as well before spending the afternoon shopping for luxury items. They could blast five thousand dollars on clothes in three hours, and their Christmases were easily fifty thousand.
When the waiter departed, Cadi said, “What are you curious about?”
Torvi glowed to discover a second glass of wine deposited without his awareness. “They’re not pouring me the cheap stuff. We’ll have to come here again. No, no bread, thank you! We’re gluten-intolerant.” A third busboy went away. “A little too solicitous.”
“You are a war hero, Lieutenant Torvi Shaw.”
“I’m curious about what brought them to Murphy. It isn’t Nychos style, to storm into a new town and make demands of a half-Ceilidh to procure. Admittedly, I don’t know that much about Nychos, but they should have their own procurer, a corruption of a person poisoned with their magic and doing their will. They shouldn’t need us for anything.”
“These ones do.”
“Nothing about them makes sense. Nychos are attracted to one another; they form packs under a leader. It’s lonely. The only ones who can stand diminishments are other diminishments, and Aposha are solitary. All they have is each other. Nychos are attached to their packs, to their friends among the Korkori. Delyth and Vastax seem to listen to Kalanthe as their senior, but she’s not their leader. Nychos packs are led by males.”
“How sexist.”
He laughed. “When they were Cthalu, they lived in families most often led by females; becoming Nychos reverses that to packs of friends led most often by males. Dad told me that. It isn’t true in every case, but it’s how they usually trend. That doesn’t mean in either case that the non-leading sex is subservient; there is considerable power behind the throne. But, about eighty percent of the time, Cthalu females have slightly more magical power than Cthalu males, and about eighty percent of the time, Nychos males have slightly more magical power than Nychos females. It’s a quirk of their biology, and their cultures value the strength of this magical power above all else. So these three are young Nychos, very young Nychos to my reckoning, and where is their head male?”
“Or head female,” Cadi said. “There’s a chance.”
“And where are the rest of them? Their pack should be four at the least in order for them to combine enough magic to control a procurer. Nychos packs can hold up to eleven members. Usually at twelve power struggles develop, and it’s common then to split into two groups of six. But three wounded Nychos? That isn’t a pack. Young ones should have older ones guiding them, teaching them. They saw some bad business before Murphy, I wager. Maybe sacrili are coming.”
“Kalanthe said they were states away. Could the rest of the pack have lured them off?”
“It’s not their style, to break up under any circumstance, bar numbers growing too great. They fight to the bitter end as a pack. Three young Nychos stranded in the world would seek a Korkori to introduce them to more Nychos. Coming to us . . . this is strange.”
“Spencer screamed,” Cadi blurted. “They all scream.”
He squeezed her hand. “We can drive away tonight. You have to keep driving this time.”
She pressed her napkin to her eyes, whispering, “Then I’ll be alone.”
“But you’ll be free. This is only going to get worse.” They broke apart for the arrival of the appetizer. An older couple stopped by to thank Torvi for serving his country. Cadi kicked him under the table as he accepted their praise. Usually he blamed his imaginary burns on a car accident, or told kids not to play with fire-breathing dragons. The couple blessed him and walked away, Torvi saying, “My, those shoes of yours are pointy.”
“Ow!” Cadi hissed about her burning emblems. Heat radiated down to her elbow and fingers before looping back and scorching through her body. It ebbed at her midsection and retreated, made another dive that reached farther and fell back again.
“I felt sorry for you right after you were born,” Torvi said. “Told Mom you’d have practically no power at all, but she bet you’d develop more emblems later, and you did. She thought your dad might have had some old Ceilidh blood in those birthmarks of his, and him being a doctor. Oh, he thought Mom had the coolest Halloween costume ever! Thank God for alcohol.”
“Heard it all before,” Cadi said, rubbing her shoulder.
The meal was delicious, tender cuts of meat and spicy vegetables, potato soup with quail eggs on the surface, confirming this restaurant as their new favorite place. Afterwards, the valet brought the car around. Cadi did not mention leaving Murphy and distracted Torvi with complaints about school, and talk of the homework he needed to complete because it was due tomorrow. Having kept her old schoolwork, he planned to rifle through for a poem that could be refurbished. Mr. Mitchell irritated Cadi with his endless poetry assignments, forcing them to sit in a circle and read their work aloud. She had taken creative writing since it sounded fluffy, but learned all too soon Mr. Mitchell took it with deadly seriousness. Poems were a punch where books were a lazy massage, and he wanted their writing to strike a blow! All through September they’d worked on haikus, and now in October he was enthused about rhyming couplets.
When he was really irritating Cadi, it was due to their poems being paired with art assignments to further their expressive power. Boxes of markers on the table, he expostulated about visual poetry and how talented they all were. It was still better than her history class with Ms. Stevens, who did not allow her students to answer a question with I don’t know. Instead, they had to say I don’t know yet. When Cadi truly didn’t know an answer, she gave one that she knew damn well was wrong just to avoid the yet. It was dumb and embarrassing, and she was too old for this.
Torvi composed couplets as they got caught up in traffic backed up for a crash. “I never knew that love so
true; as when I first laid eyes on you; alarmed at wishes to acquaint; you served me orders of restraint.” He giggled at himself.
“Your couplets suck.” Cadi detoured through sleeping streets and steadily passed by the freeway entrance. That was what she’d do at the next text from the Nychos, drive and drive until Torvi died and she had no one. But there were usually two weeks between orders, and she wasn’t going to kill him any sooner than that.
Why had the Nychos come to Murphy of all places? The draw might have been the size of the city, just like it had been for them. Tons of people meant tons of customers for the store; tons of people meant tons of crimes, thinning the focus of the cops and attracting less attention from sacrili. It wasn’t fair that of the hundreds of communities in California, the Nychos managed to land upon the same one as the Shaws. Why not the city of Los Angeles itself? It was far bigger. She did not want to think that the draw to Murphy had been the Shaws, the Nychos knowing about them somehow. It wasn’t a question Cadi would bring to Kalanthe. Passing house after house, she wondered if the three Nychos were squatting in one of them.
Back at the apartment, she changed into Mom’s old sweatpants and a tank top before wiping the last of the foundation from her right shoulder to inspect the emblems. The heat had lost its intensity throughout dinner but grew again on the drive, burning down her hand and through her body. The top symbol was now clearly defined. Within the circle was a coil of black, growing larger and larger as flashes of other insignia hovered at the periphery. Since deciphering them was not her strong point, she called for Torvi. He stepped in without his shirt on. “Do you mind? I have homework. Once there was a man named James, his sex life going up in flames-”
“I’ve got a better image now on one of them.”
“Let’s see.” For a long minute, he watched the revolving shapes.
“Make any sense?”
“It’s a string spell of some kind. Mom had a trio of them on her right forearm. But this isn’t any of hers.”
“What were hers?”
“One was basically obsolete. She charged a string with her need for some odd procurement, and it made its way to her. But we don’t live in remote villages with a hundred people any longer; we’ve millions of neighbors. Another was to ward off nightmares. She used that on you. The last was emotional, worn as a necklace as a calming agent. All three showed a coiling string like this one, but these other symbols . . . As the string grows, it bumps this shape out of the emblem and gathers another to it. The first shape returns and wobbles back and forth before slipping right while the second is hidden by the coil.” They watched as it started again with the coil growing at the center. A pair of other insignia jockeyed about at the top.
“What ingredients are those showing?” Cadi asked.
“This is dog hair. The sprinkling next to it is water. It’s a protective spell, I believe. String spells appear in every sigil kind born of Tythan, but not much of Ceilidh magic is based in it. Shang do string magic, though not protective . . . how odd!” He peered at the middle emblem. “This one has finished, too.”
“It has?” She looked at the circle within it growing smaller until it was a point at the center, whereupon it vanished and a larger circle began to shrink again.
Torvi tapped it. “That isn’t Mom’s either, but she had a similar shape in her string spell for procurements. It means to summon, but this emblem doesn’t say what you’re summoning, and it lists no procurements so it must be in your blood.” When his finger slid back to the top one, he exhaled in recognition. “This is accidental! Some spells between Shang, Ceilidh, and Chwi are very similar, and on rare occasions, they cross from one kind to another just as a harmless mutation. So a Shang might get a Ceilidh healing emblem purely by mistake, or a Ceilidh might get something Chwi. That’s what this is, one of Mom’s Ceilidh string spells to protect against nightmares that mutated into a Chwi protection spell.”
He was so excited that when she began to ask a protection against what, he interrupted. “Even Dad in his whole long life had only met a single Chwi, and that one was half-human so he didn’t have many emblems. But I know what this is! It’s a shield created by a magical push. Here, I’ll run downstairs and get a string-”
Remembering the night with the Nychos, Cadi said, “No, let’s find something up here.”
Stripping the cord from a pair of sweatpants in her discard pile, she coiled it on her desk as Torvi instructed. He stepped into the kitchen and came back with a glass of water and a container labeled DOG. “It’s a human protection against diminishments, what you have. That’s what the insignia show, that the string is a weak concealment. Their eyes will slip off a human wearing it, and they’ll move on to other prey. This is a defensive protection, not an offensive one. Dad’s Chwi had one like this; it was a common emblem among their kind just as stopping bloodflow is to Ceilidh. Run straight up to some Aposha while wearing a string charged with this emblem and you’ll be noticed. But a diminishment slinking along looking for prey, it will choose another human.”
She looked over the two ingredients. “Barely any physical input into this spell.”
“That’s normal for Chwi emblems, to require little to nothing. Shang need the most; Chwi need the least; Ceilidh fall in the middle range. Put a pinch of the dog hair into the water and mix. You’re confounding the diminishment’s sight with the energy of the dog, something that they can’t procure from and aren’t interested in, creating almost a blind spot where the human is standing. A true blind spot and the human figure in your emblem would have vanished. This is useless for a hunter going after them, but not regular people. Pick up the coil whole and dip it into the water. Let it soak through, and then touch your emblem.”
When she touched it, there was a flash of light within the circle. The glass of water was suddenly empty of its contents, as dry as bone. The pink cord of her sweatpants was back on the desk in a coil like she’d never touched it. “Neat, I guess, but big deal. You’re not human, I’m only half.”
Picking up the string, Torvi said, “Think of others, Cadi. You could make these and I’ll include them as a gift with each purchase at the shop. It’s all we can do right now, unless you want to get in that car and start driving like you didn’t tonight.”
In a weak voice, she said, “I thought you’d forgotten.”
“I know what you thought, baby sister. You’ve been glued to my side since you were tiny. So which is it going to be?”
“You can’t just give people strings and expect them to be excited.”
“That’s why we’ll use those necklace cords in the stock room, and hang some silly pendant from them: astrological signs, runes, God and Goddess figures, whatever we have. Maybe one day someone will be wearing one when a Korkori or Aposha comes prowling. Maybe without you, the Nychos will be left to jump people. That’s hard when their repulsion pushes people away, and a necklace like this will make it even harder. It’s this or the car. But I’m not going to let you live as their procurer any longer. You can’t be part of their hunts, and I won’t be the reason you are.”
Pushing away from the desk, Cadi yelled, “But you’ll die!”
He threw out his arms, not in anger but intensity to make her understand. “What is this? Me sitting on the sofa watching television while you’re out there helping them to kill people so that you can keep me alive? This is death! So until those next orders come, we’ll make necklaces, you’ll go to school and I’ll work the store, we’ll go out every night to eat and shop until we’ve nothing but pennies in our pockets, and when your phone chimes, it’s done! We’re done. We get in the Pantheon, and we drive. And every time you think about turning around, you consider how many more people you’re willing to kill because you love me. You think about them, not me, not you! Them. Now go to bed. You’ve got school in the morning.”
Appalled, Cadi said, “How can you talk about school? I’m not going!”
“You are. I need an ampoule of virgin blood, twin spi
t, and a lot of hair. You’ll have procurements all week long. If I’m dying soon, there are some orders I’d like to leave behind to my favorite customers. Think about what you want to do that can be done in Murphy, Cadi, and we’ll do it every afternoon. I’ll call in Catskill to run the shop; he’s wanting week hours anyway.”
She cried then, her face pressed to his shoulder as she sobbed like a child.
Chapter Three
“So it’s about a tree, but what is the poem really saying? What feelings has T. H. Byly evoked within you?” Cross-legged on the floor, Mr. Mitchell looked at them expectantly. Thirty-six people rustled or fixed their gazes to the text in the hopes that they would not be called upon. Cadi flicked through the poems Torvi had written for her, the topics ranging from short pieces about shoes to an epic concerning the revived sex life of James and his satisfied, bowlegged girlfriend. It was fairly racy, considering the author had never even held a woman’s hand, let alone shown her to his bed. That one she wouldn’t give to the teacher, selecting a milder one about flowers.
Hearing her name, Cadi looked up. “What?”
“Would you join us? What do you think Byly was trying to convey with his poem?”
“That he really likes trees,” Cadi yawned, making students titter.
It had been a long day. She and Torvi stayed up most of the night before making necklaces, plowing through all the dog hair they had in storage and going on a walk when they needed more. Dogs weren’t hard to find. Wolfing down gobs of raw hamburger meat purchased from the store, they happily submitted to haircuts. Cadi’s emblem eventually ran out of energy, forcing them to quit.
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