by Joshua Bader
The trip to Oklahoma was not her favorite expedition with the BSID. She had been looking forward to a trip to the pumpkin patch with her nieces this weekend in New York, not a gruesomely weird case in Oklahoma. Picking up and leaving at the drop of a hat came with the territory of hunting serial killers and rapists. Andrea had dreams of becoming the FBI’s first female director and the BSID was a good career path for her to use to get there. But Oklahoma was making her seriously rethink her life’s direction.
The crime photos had been nasty, but not the worst she had ever seen. The trouble didn’t really start till they got to the lake to investigate the suspect’s vehicle. Andrea usually had a sharp memory, but she could barely recall the lake at all. A thick fog had settled over that part of her brain. When she tried, all she could think of was that thick leather bound book…and the terror that it conjured inside of her. It was insane to think that decorated Special Agent Devereaux could be scared of a book, but that one particular tome...
She must be getting sick. That was the simplest explanation: some bad food on the plane or an armrest she should have sanitized, but didn’t. But agents didn’t let illness interfere with their job. Andrea had absolutely bombed the interview with the suspect, Colin Fisher. Her questions, or what she could remember of them, had been all over the place. Without plan, without direction, Fisher had easily stayed ahead of her. He had gotten away with murder once from all indications…and her sickness was helping him do it again.
She stared long into the bathroom mirror after she spewed out the mouthwash. Her hazel eyes, a mixture of brown, green, and gold stared back at her, the same as they had from every mirror for as long as she could remember. Andrea hoped that whatever had gotten into her system was out of it now. She needed to be at her very best for the rest of this investigation.
PART THREE
Faeries, coworkers, and wendigoes, oh my!
“Finding a dragon is usually the easy part, just follow the path of razed towns and smoldering farms. The hard part comes after you catch up to her.”
- Jadim Cartarssi, Novice Dragonslayer
1
I expected to have difficulty cashing Valente’s check. As it turned out, that was the easiest thing I did all day. All of my past experience with banks told me that an out-of-state driver’s license plus no personal account plus a check of that magnitude would equal nothing but trouble. It had started out that way, too…until the branch manager made one phone call. From the speed and grace he demonstrated after he hung up, I decided the bank must have belonged to a subsidiary of Valente International. In less than twenty minutes, I had ten grand in my pocket, along with a debit card electronically linked to the rest of it. I just hoped that the dead wouldn’t start asking to borrow money from me while I was trying to work the ATM.
Duchess was supposed to meet me at my hotel room the next morning with the items I had requested from Lucien, most notably, the original letter. I’ve had a little practice with psychometry and, in theory, the letter could be used as a magical tether tracing back to the person who wrote it. It was a Foresight task and I was reasonably proficient with those. It was the theoretical part that bothered me. I knew enough to connect the attacks with the idea of a wendigo, but I had never seen one, let alone killed one.
“Good thing it’s only killing Valente employees…oh, wait.”
“I didn’t hear you telling me not to take his check.”
“That was before I knew it was going to involve actual work. I was hoping he had been cursed with erectile dysfunction or something lame like that. You know, burn some incense, slip some Viagra in his Kool-Aid, chant a little and call it a day.”
“Yeah, well, we’re stuck now. I don’t suppose you have any neat anti-wendigo tricks to go along with your telepathic countermeasures and knowledge of secret Indian spirit wars?”
“Never met one. I guess we’ll see when we come nose to snout. You know, we could...”
“No.”
“But you didn’t even let me finish,” my inner voice complained.
“I’ll finish for you. No. I’m not using the Necronomicon to conjure up something to fight it. Nine times out of ten, I’d end up with something worse than a wendigo at the end of the day.”
“But we know it works. The rest of your magic has always been a little bit shaky. And we wouldn’t have to bring something here. We could just open a rip in space and time and suck the wendigo through.”
“And what happens if I can’t close the rip back up and a tentacle or two comes slithering on out? No. Not unless all else fails.”
“Fine. But I’m going to kill you if we become wendigo chow.”
I needed to come up with a game plan. I’d have to learn everything I could about wendigoes (wendigi, wendigoose…let’s stick with wendigoes). I was in an unfamiliar city, against a foe I’d only read about in stories, pretending to be a professional wizard. Oh, and the FBI still thought I was a serial killer in the making. Harry Potter I was not.
I started with the only thing I could think to do. I grabbed a phone book and checked under “Native American.” I don’t know what I was hoping for, but there were no shamans, raindancers, or medicine men listed in the yellow pages. There was a listing for a Red Dirt Native American Museum and Cultural Center. It sounded as promising a place as any to start, so I wrote down the address. On a lark, I flipped to “Wizard”, but no one was brave enough to advertise as such. In L.A., Chicago, or New York, maybe, but apparently I was the only professional wizard in Oklahoma City.
My first difficulty came in buying a map of the metro area. When I started driving as a teenager, all I had to do was stop at any gas station and they’d have three different versions for whatever city I was in. If the station was near the Interstate, there would undoubtedly be a state map, plus another one for the nearest neighboring state. This made good business sense—everybody gets lost from time to time. Apparently, paper maps were going the way of the dodo and the typewriter. The first two store clerks both told me about this great map app on their phone. Numbers three and four weren’t as obnoxiously techno-savvy, but their stores didn’t carry maps, either. A customer behind me in line said that she was addicted to her DumDum GPS or something to that effect. In an Internet age, my inability to use the web was becoming a serious drawback. In the myths, Merlin never had to deal with a demon-possessed messenger pigeon.
At the fifth convenience store, I finally found a paper road map of OKC. I was so delighted to get it that I didn’t even mind fighting with the creases to fold it back up when I was done. However, with traditional map in hand, my second challenge was obvious: Oklahoma City is huge. It doesn’t seem that way. It feels like a quaint, small country town, like Mayberry with more cowboy hats and a handful of skyscrapers. But in reality, it’s one of the biggest cities in the world by total land area. It took me over an hour to drive from my hotel in Midwest City to the museum in Edmond. My only hope was that they didn’t have a rush hour or travel time was going to eat up my entire day.
The museum itself was something of a disappointment. If I had gone there to learn about the contributions of Native Americans to modern society, it would have been a great educational experience. But I had wendigo and spirit wars on the brain. Unless using a flint knife proved to be the secret to killing a cannibal winter spirit, Red Dirt wasn’t much help. I checked the calendar outside the cultural center. There was a lecture on Great Plains Rain Dances set for next Monday, but even that was a long shot. The rest of the schedule was more social than religious. The gift shop didn’t have any relevant books, but I did pick up some animal figurines: a bear, a wolf, and an eagle. I didn’t have any immediate use for them, but with magic I never knew when a good symbol would come in handy.
I was going about this the wrong way. I needed to talk to an expert, someone familiar with Native American cosmology. Unfortunately, finding one who would talk to me would take time, years maybe. Unlike the Indo-European traditions I was familiar with, the Native A
merican mystics didn’t feel the compulsion to put everything into writing. Being able to read all the archaic languages in the world didn’t help if no one had ever written a book on the subject.
I needed a way in: an intermediary who knew the lay of the land but who understood my side of the street, too. I needed a spirit guide.
2
It was after noon by the time I reached the occult shop. Even in the heart of the Bible Belt, there was a demand for witchcraft and the accompanying paraphernalia. Granted, Gaea’s Treasures was far more family-friendly than some of the stores I’d visited in New Orleans or New York, but it was still decisively pagan.
I’m not Wiccan; I’m Catholic. Any time I start to talk about magic, people make the assumption that I don’t believe in Jesus or that I’m into goat sacrifices. Don’t get me wrong. I think Wicca is great. Anybody who really lives their life by the code “And do no harm,” is probably a decent neighbor and a good human being. My standard was love God and love the person standing next to me, but I was the first to admit I didn’t always hit the mark.
“Do you ever hit the mark?”
The Bible and magic aren’t opposed. The original authors clearly believed magic was possible, so much so that they were very specific about what forms of sorcery were not allowable. As far as I can tell, I’m not permitted to invoke other gods, practice necromancy, conduct séances with the dead, brew poisons, or offer human sacrifice. That leaves me a whole lot of room to work with. There are even stories in the Bible about divination, transmutation, and animal magics. Within the bigger picture, though, it’s all about love. Any magic must be practiced within the confines of love towards God, myself, and my fellow man. Again, I was not one hundred percent on the mark, but I tried, and I liked to think the Big Guy gave me credit for that. Most of the sins I struggled against were a lot more mundane than necromancy.
“Lust, for example. Do you have any idea what you could get a girl to do for half of what’s in your wallet right now? What about five girls and all the money in the ATM?”
I ignored him and got back to my shopping. Gaea’s Treasures had a homey feel to it, probably because the owners lived out of the back half of the building. The right wall was given completely over to glass jars stuffed full of herbs. The combined smell was pleasant but pungent, like plowing head first into a field of wildflowers. I skimmed through their offerings and knew I’d end up back at the herb counter. They had quite a few items I thought I might need before the business with the wendigo was all said and done.
Herbs were a must-have for any magical practitioner. Shamans have been working with plants for hundreds of thousands of years, allowing humanity to accumulate a wide knowledge of herb lore. Beside their chemical properties, most herbs have well-known associations with certain spiritual essences. Take the rose, for instance. Love and romance are nowhere in its molecular makeup, but they still embodied the romantic archetype. Unfortunately, herbs were not the friend of the vagabond wizard. My trunk held enough questionable smells without adding valerian root to the mix…and I dreaded traffic stops without carrying extra green leafy substances. Consequently, I usually traveled with only a small stash of catnip and feverfew. Don’t look at me like that. Catnip is well known for its soothing properties. And I like cats.
“Sad, but true. Why couldn’t you be an animal hater like most serial killers?”
For what I planned, I needed a wider palette to work with. Summoning and the protection spells required by summoning were not my strong suit. Magic, at its heart, was about will and belief. Everything else (swords, staffs, athames, wands, altars, etc.) was basically props. In theory, I could perform any spell entirely within the confines of my psyche, the way I did my defensive shell. Unfortunately, most spells involved a lot more elements and could go really, really bad if things weren’t perfectly precise. Trying to track more than about three details at a time was generally more than my imagination could handle. By using physical representations, instead of mental ones, it left my brain free to attend to other aspects of the magical working.
Of course, I could be full of shit. Most of my notable arcane achievements range between dubious successes and horrific backfires. I hear this is quite common for rookie wizards, which may explain why there are so few seasoned veteran wizards running around: unnatural selection in action. Any sane person would have called it quits long ago.
“Good thing we’re a French fry short of a Happy Meal.”
I breezed past the candle aisle wistfully, then reversed march as I realized two things. First, I had a room! A hotel room is, granted, not ideal for magic, but it would offer me privacy and a controlled environment if I wanted to try something complex. Second, my magical experimentation now had funding! I could buy every item in the store if I wanted to…on my first week’s salary. I loaded up my arms with different colors, sizes, shapes, and scents of candles, then gave up and went back to grab a shopping basket.
The new books didn’t offer anything wendigo-specific or eye-catching, but the used book section took a little longer to go through. Even in specialty stores, people didn’t always realize just how rare a book they had sitting on a shelf, especially when it came to books in foreign languages. That’s part of how I had survived on the road for so long with so little money. I would buy something like the Rhine faeries book for twenty bucks, read it, and when I was done find the right sort of place to sell it for what it was really worth. A third of my library in Dorothy’s backseat was devoted to faeries, but an Illustrated Catalog of the Fae had one thing the rest of my books didn’t: pretty pictures, full page and in color. It was the first thing I had seen which I immediately knew how I would use. I wedged it carefully into the basket amongst my horde of scented candles.
The clothing and jewelry section was new turf for me. In the past, I skipped over such places without a second thought. But now that I was a professional wizard with a major league salary, it might not hurt to be able to look the part when the occasion required. I got the feeling that Lucien employed a lot of powerful, dangerous individuals with abilities that could make Duchess’ telepathy look downright secretarial. A little bling, plus a Wendigo kill, might go a long way in establishing my street cred. I didn’t want my new coworkers to lump me in with the other con men and one-shot wonders who had held my position previously.
“And I thought I was cocky. You’re already shopping for the victory party,” my inner voice taunted.
“Power of positive thinking, right?”
“Sure. Wishing everything was nice and pretty and perfect has worked so well for us in the past.”
3
After I picked my herbs, the total on the register made me wince out of habit. All totaled, the damage was less than a tenth of what I had in my pocket, but it was still more than I had spent in the last month. I tried to comfort myself that I could spend this much on a daily basis and it wouldn’t even come close to my weekly salary…and it would take a month of nothing but rituals to use up all the supplies I bought.
I put on the silver moon-and-stars ring and tucked the silk handkerchiefs into my jacket pocket. The rest was patiently stacked away in a trio of paper bags by the older man behind the counter. His hair was white and frazzled, but all still there. If he had written a book in his youth, it was either on an antique typewriter or papyrus, I wasn’t sure which. I thanked him for his help, a half-assed apology for how many times I had changed my mind while he was bagging the various leaves, roots, and powders for me.
I was trying to figure out how to balance all the packages in my arms when he spoke. His voice was rough as sandpaper; his tone slow and sleepy. “Son, do you want some advice?”
It caught me off guard. He had been friendly while I shopped: smiles, nods, and grunts that conveyed more than most people’s sentences. But hearing him speak, I realized those were the first words he’d directed at me. “Why do you ask?”
“You look like you could use some. But advice don’t do no good unless a person wants
to hear it.”
“Shoot.”
He looked me in the eyes, a long, hard look, before he spoke again. “My wife and I have been running this shop for thirty years now. Most people come in here, they’re looking for excitement, a curiosity. Others are simple folk, just wanting to keep their home and loved ones safe from the evil eye, or the boogeyman. The one thing both types have in common is they ask questions, ‘What’s this do?’ ‘What’s that do?’ You ain’t asked squat. Means you know what you’re doing.”
“Or think you do, at least.”
“I hope so, but I’m not so arrogant as to think I don’t have lots to learn.” I mentally noted that I just learned yesterday that there really are living, breathing people with fae blood in their veins.
“Uh-huh. I ain’t gonna try and teach you. Best way to learn is by doing.” He paused. “You’re fixin’ to do some summoning.”
I nodded.
“Thought so based on the shopping list. Look, there’s some weird stuff out there. They’ll tell you all kinds of things, offer all sorts of power. They’ll threaten, cajole, beg, demand. Just remember two things.” He took a sip out of his chipped and stained coffee mug. “You sure you want to hear this?”
I smiled. “You certainly know how to bait a hook. Yes, I’d like to hear it.”
His laugh came out as a heh. “I suppose. One, they can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. That’s where the whole devil-made-me-do-it excuse falls apart: he couldn’t make you if it wasn’t in your heart already. Two, no matter what you do, there’s always a way back. As long as you’re still breathing, there’s still a way back. You understand?”
“You’re talking about forgiveness.”
“Something like that. The worst lie spirits like to tell you is that what’s been done can’t be undone. It’s such a terrible lie, because it’s partly true. The effects you have beyond you, the ripples in the pond, you can’t take back. But inside of you…you can make it back if you want to.”
