The Dragon's Playlist

by Laura Bickle

  “Thirteen dollars an hour.”

  “That’s great...why are you unhappy? That’s good money...”

  “Look, Mom, I don’t want to talk about this now.”

  “Honey, I know you’re worried about school. But this is only temporary.”

  “Sure it is.” It came out more bitterly than I’d wanted, sarcastic.

  Something in my mother snapped. She pulled me out of the fridge and slammed the refrigerator door shut. Her eyes blazed, and she stabbed a finger in the direction of the next room. “After all your father has done, one season of your time—”

  I brushed past her, heading for the door. I didn’t want to fight, but she seemed hell-bent on it. The stress of the past weeks crackled in her voice: “Don’t be a brat about this.”

  A silhouette appeared at the screen door, and the door opened. Jason was in his filthy mining jumpsuit, eyes wide with concern. “I just heard what happened—”

  “Yeah, she got a job,” my mother snapped.

  I tried to push past him, but he caught my wrist. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” My cheeks burned. I don’t know if it was from his touch, from embarrassment, or anger. Probably all three.

  “What happened?” The idea that something wasn’t right had apparently dawned on my mother.

  “She got attacked by the crazy protesters on the way out. The place is crawling with rent-a-cops and sheriff’s deputies. Peters sent me to find you—”

  “I’m fine. Why do I have to keep repeating myself?”

  “I saw your windshield. Are you hurt?” He pushed a strand of blue hair that had worked free of my headband behind my ear. I squirmed under that strange familiarity.

  Mom went to the kitchen window and peered out at my parked car. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, Jesus. How could that happen?”

  Anger boiled up in me. It scalded my throat and tongue, and came out in a viciousness and resentment I’d been biting back for days: “It’s what you wanted for me, Mom, isn’t it?”

  I twisted away from Jason, ran to the car. I had it in reverse by the time he reached my bumper, and backed all the way out of the driveway faster than I’d driven there.

  *

  I went looking for magic.

  First, I stopped by the nursing home, to see if Grandpa wanted some musical company. But visiting hours were finished. I wrinkled my nose at the noxious glow-in-the-dark yellow gravy on mashed potatoes and limp asparagus, and fled.

  Instead, I went looking for more exotic magic.

  Though the sun was lowering on the horizon, the Enchanted Broomstick was open. White Christmas lights tangled in the rhododendrons out front glittered brightly. The yellow shop cat who’d been napping the last time I visited was now stalking mice in the shrubs, tail lashing. He walked around empty beer bottles. The window facing the street was broken, and plywood had been nailed over it. A yellow light shone within, and I pushed the door open, rattling the jingle bells tied to the doorknob.

  The place was different at dusk. The gathering darkness seemed to come alive, seething with a subtle restlessness I hadn’t seen in the daytime. It churned around the books and jars, bits of the sunset that reached the tops of the transom windows, illuminating dust motes, and sparking off bits of quartz.

  But maybe it was just a trick of the candlelight.

  Lit candles were perched on bookshelves, at the edges of tables, on windowsills. Once I crossed the threshold, I had the weird sensation of moving through a slightly denser atmosphere. Not quite as thick as water, subtler than that, but more viscous than ordinary air.

  Why had I come? Maybe to page through the books, find some spell that would change my life or transform me into a toad. Maybe to have Julie thumb through the Tarot cards again and give me a different future. Maybe for more information on Buzzard Bill. Maybe a bit of all three.

  Julie wasn’t behind the counter. A candle crackled on the glass countertop, flickering in the faces of the gemstones spread out on velvet beneath the glass. My gaze slid back to the plywood covering the front window, and I thought of my own windshield, broken in sudden violence. Had something happened to her?

  “Hello?” I called softly.

  Light glittered through the beaded curtain partitioning the storefront off from what might’ve been the dining room of the old house. I crossed behind the counter, brushed the clattering beads aside.

  “Oh,” I breathed.

  Julie sat in the center of the scarred wooden floor, boxes of stock lining the wall behind her. Her hair had slid partially loose of her chignon, and strands floated to her shoulders. The floor surrounding her was marked in multicolor pastel chalk, a series of interlocking circles with strange sigils I couldn’t read. Four white pillar candles were stationed equidistant around the circle, with a fifth before her, casting moving shadows against her closed eyes. In her hands, she held an apple and a dagger. Blindly, she placed the apple on the floor in front of her and struck it with the dagger once, twice. It split into two pieces then four, its sharp scent mingling with the beeswax of the candles. She hummed a low, atonal chant that sounded like bad Gaelic.

  I had the sense of intruding on something incredibly intimate. I took a step backward, intending to flee. The floor creaked beneath me, and Julie’s eyes snapped open.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, rooted in place. It felt like that time in high school when I’d walked in on my English teacher and French teacher making out in an empty classroom. Shocked...and fascinated.

  “Di.” Julie set down the dagger. “It’s okay.”

  “What are you doing?” I squeaked.

  “Asking for protection,” she said.

  I squinted at the candlelight. “Asking...who?”

  “The Divine. God and Goddess. The powers of nature.”

  My parents strictly went to church on Christmas and Easter, but that was mostly a going-through-the-motions tradition. I was curious. But also cautious. “Protection from what?”

  “Folks who chuck beer bottles into my front yard. Their aim got better, and they hit my window.” She picked up the remains of a broken bottle, showed it to me with the neck dangling from her polished fingernails.

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “Nah. I don’t think they’re much interested in petty vandalism.”

  There were generally two types of people in town: those who were steadfastly religious, and those who steadfastly weren’t. The two groups pretty much left each other alone. I hadn’t encountered any kind of religious violence, and the idea of it shocked me. I’d run into violence on a lot of other topics, to be sure, fueled by alcohol, lust, and covetousness...but never abstract philosophy. People usually dealt with those differences through the law, their fists, or the distinctive ratchet of a shotgun.

  “But…that’s what they’re there for.”

  “Meh. They’re just kids. I know who they are. Nothing good would come of reporting them to the cops. That would just further screw up their lives.”

  I could probably figure out who they were, likely the younger siblings of people I’d gone to high school with. There was a limited pool of suspects in this town, and the cops already knew who the troublemakers were. Julie was just being really, really kind in not pursuing them. “And you’re protecting yourself with...an apple?”

  “Not just an apple. What it represents. It symbolizes wholeness. Protection. Harmony. Divided, it shows the strength of the elements.”

  She gathered the pieces of apple in her hands, murmured something to them, and placed them on a silver dish. With her sleeve drawn up over her knuckles, she reached forward and erased part of the chalk outline with her palm.

  “You can come in and sit if you want.”

  I paused. It had the same tone as a child inviting another child into her tree house.

  I had nowhere else to go, so I crossed into her circle.

  I sat down beside Julie as she picked up a piece of sidewalk chalk and filled in the lines she’d erased. T
he scrape of chalk on the floor reminded me of my elementary school teacher at the chalkboard. The thickness that hung in the air was stronger here; I felt a bit lightheaded, as if I’d had a couple of beers. I tucked my knees up to my chin.

  “This is a magic circle,” Julie explained. “It’s a barrier of protection. It keeps negativity at bay and draws friendly powers near.”

  “Friendly powers?” That was too vague for my tastes. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I glimpsed something scuttling along the edge of the floor. When I turned my head, it was gone.

  “God and Goddess. The elements.” She pointed to the candles at the rim. “There’s a candle for each cardinal element: earth, air, fire, and water. The elements have their own personalities—whole books have been written on them. But they’re represented by gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and undines.”

  “I’m imagining garden gnomes.”

  Julie chuckled. “More like...brownies. They control prosperity and practical things.”

  “And sylphs?”

  “Like zephyrs. Air spirits. They’re about speed, the intellect, and messages.”

  “Hm. My parents had a car called a Zephyr, once upon a time.”

  “That’s what it was named for.”

  “I know salamanders. They live under rocks in clear streams.”

  “They do. But elemental salamanders are born of flame. Ancient people associated them with fire when they crawled out of fireplace logs. They’re about creativity and passion.”

  “And undines?”

  “Think mermaids. They govern love and other emotions.”

  “Interesting.” I was reminded of the complicated lore of Catholic saints. My roommate in college had told me a bit about it, let me read her dictionary of saints. “And God?”

  “For witches in my tradition, spirit is everywhere. Sort of like the Force in Star Wars. But we believe in a God and Goddess, male and female aspects of the Divine. And they wear whatever faces they choose to, or whichever we can visualize them with.”

  I wrapped my arms around my knees. “Sounds a little like...” I struggled to find the correct term.

  “Idolatry? Yeah, that’s a common criticism from many other religions. I might ask Isis for love tonight and Bastet to heal the cat’s sniffles tomorrow. But having a lot of folklore to draw upon...it helps me connect to divinity.” She shrugged. “There are witches involved in high ceremonial magic, who don hoods, cast astrological charts, and carefully monitor the auspicious hours of the day. And then there are kitchen witches, like me, who toss in ingredients and stir.”

  “And the apple is an ingredient?”

  “Yes.” She glanced at the plate. “I’ll bury one at each corner of the property as a little magic spell to drive ’em off.”

  It seemed like a very passive way to deal with the problem. But thinking of how I’d fled the tree huggers, maybe it made sense.

  We sat in glowing silence for some minutes, listening to the flames gutter and wax hiss. “Why did you come here?” I asked. I could envision this store in a university town, like the one I’d lived in. But not here, tucked away in the middle of nowhere.

  Julie smiled. “I grew up here. I moved away, came back. I always felt that there was something special about this place, and wanted to run a shop here.” She planed her hand in the air, as if tasting it with her tattooed palm. “I wanted to see if magic here was different.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “This place doesn’t feel so special to me.”

  She laughed. “It is. Do you know what ley lines are?”

  “No.”

  “They’re an alignment of energy. They used to be called ghost roads... It happens when geological forces cross. This area has an odd intersection of straight lines of valleys and rivers. Plus, it’s on the edge of the continental divide.”

  “The county straddles two plates. That’s why some streams flow in one direction and the rest in the other.”

  “Right. If you map a lot of the old Native American mounds, the maps get really interesting. They line up very oddly, as if the builders knew about the plates. This is a place of power, whether people know it or not.”

  The back of my neck prickled. “Why come here? To work what magic?”

  Julie looked down. Her eyes flicked back and forth, and I could tell she was weighing how much to say. “For just as selfish a purpose as anybody else. I found out I had cancer last year. Ovarian cancer. There isn’t anything to be done for it, medically.”

  She didn’t look sick, but in this light, there was a shadow under her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, blew out her breath, which disturbed a tendril of hair hanging across her cheek. “Don’t.”

  I didn’t know if she meant not to be sorry or not to have pity on her. She continued: “I’ve been bathing in all the hidden little streams that taste like iron, eating the walnuts...” Her eyes grew distant. “I don’t feel the pain like I used to. So I think it’s helping. This place, in its own slow fashion.”

  I reflexively reached out to touch her hand, sticky with apple. I was unused to thinking of this place as magic. Real magic. I’d seen snake handlers at summer festivals dance with copperheads and not get bitten, speak in tongues, and swear that they heard the voice of God. I guess splitting apples and drinking the same stream water others were baptized in was really no different.

  “And Buzzard Bill?” I wound my way to what I suspected was my real reason for being here, in this quiet bubble of candlelight. “Is he part of this magic?”

  “I think so,” she said slowly. “I believe there’s something here. Some atavistic, elemental force in the hills. Too many people have spoken of seeing things for the woods not to be haunted.”

  “By what?” I pressed.

  “Something old, I think. Older than us, all of us who live here. Maybe the Native Americans are right. Maybe it’s a thunderbird. But whatever it is, I think it wants to be left alone.”

  “Is it evil?” That came out as a whisper.

  Julie’s mouth flattened. “I don’t know. Most things I run across in magic—like the undines, and sylphs, and salamanders, and gnomes—are impartial. It’s how they’re used that makes magic good or evil, light or dark. The intent. A salamander can be asked to toast your marshmallows, or he can be asked to burn a house down.”

  “So...natural forces are true neutral. It’s our push, our design to call them into good or evil. “

  “That assumes, of course, that humans control nature. That we can coax it to do us favors or put it under the spell of our will. There’s a lot of literature about binding and the letter of deals made with spirits. As we have our agendas, spirits have their own. And their own free will.”

  I rubbed my temple. I was so used to things being black and white in my everyday world. Good or bad. In this circle, everything was gray. And I didn’t know how I felt about that.

  “Where do I find Buzzard Bill?” I asked.

  She stared hard at me, like she was looking into the darkness at the back of my skull. “You’ve seen him.”

  “Yes.”

  “He seems to travel along the same ley lines. The group tracking him has drawn some pretty impressive maps where they’ve marked sightings.”

  “How do they track him?”

  “They guess, based on his movements. And they try to summon him, call him with their electronic equipment. I don’t know that they have any pictures, yet. But they’re convinced a picture of him would be worth millions.” Her mouth turned down.

  “You don’t like that idea.”

  “I can’t fault the curiosity, but I would hate to see any creature exploited, no matter what he is.”

  “I just want to see him.”

  “The group meets tomorrow night at seven. Come by. You can make your own assessment of their aims and methods. Bring a flashlight and boots.”

  I nodded. I wanted to go.

  Julie turned her attention to the apple in the silver tray. “God and Goddess,
please bless these fruits as seeds of peace and understanding. Bring blessings upon this site and all who visit here. Thank you for your power, for the power of air, earth, fire, and water. Blessed be all those who gather here to help, seen and unseen. And so it is.”

  My skin crawled a bit. By entering the circle, did I enter into an agreement to help her somehow? Or was she going to continue to treat me as a bystander?

  Julie reached forward to scrub the chalk marks away with her sleeve, beginning in the east, and moving in a counter-clockwise direction. She snuffed the candles as she worked, leaving the room in darkness.

  When she flipped on the overhead light, I was kneeling in chalk dust, like a child playing a game. Julie carried her apple pieces in their silver dish to the register area. I followed, still a little dazed by that odd shift in reality.

  So dazed that I didn’t know how to react when I saw my angelic enemy standing on the opposite side of the counter. The blond hippie guy who’d pulled his rock-flinging buddy off my car was now holding a brochure on Buzzard Bill and a bag of black stones. A massive shiner bloomed over one blue eye.

  I caught my breath, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me, but he hooked a thumb toward my Chevette out on the street. “Look, I’m sorry about your car.”

  My face hardened, and I said nothing.

  “Some of those guys get completely out of control and don’t realize we’re out there to get people thinking, not wage war.”

  “You sure could’ve fooled me.”

  He sighed. “Martin is a complete moron. He needed to be knocked down a peg.”

  I gazed at his shiner. “Looks like he knocked you down a peg.”

  “I told you guys to behave yourselves.” Julie peered at his face and headed to the back. “I’ll go get you some ice for that.”

  He gave a sheepish, charming grin. “Oh, this? This would be a gift from the police. Who will now be keeping us two hundred feet from the entrance, per a judge’s restraining order.”

  It seemed justice had been done for everyone...except my poor windshield.

  He reached into his wallet, which was pretty expensive, not the simple billfolds men around here usually carried. I thought he meant to pay Julie for his bag of stones, but he laid three crisp hundred dollar bills down on the counter. “That’s for your windshield.”