Six Times a Charm

by Deanna Chase

“Anaconda Spell.” Frieda’s voice dripped with fear and contempt.

  “How’d she beat it?” Betty challenged, pointing at me.

  “Who cares?” Frieda said, crouching down next to me. “You gotta go back in there.”

  Pirate had curled on his back, fighting for every breath. I never should have brought him here.

  Frieda touched me on the arm. “You let loose one of the death spells. You’re going to kill Ant Eater and your little dog, if you don’t reverse this now. Find the white jar. Betty, you get the matches. Go!”

  “So much for trusting the universe,” I muttered.

  “Accept the universe,” Frieda and another witch said in unison.

  Like I had time for that. I dashed back inside. The air felt wet with smoke. It reminded me of the way Hillary used to make me steam my pores. But it wasn’t hard to breathe. If anything, it was easier. Seeing was another matter. I stumbled over Ant Eater’s body. I found her arms and struggled to drag her out of the trailer. I had her head onto the front porch when Frieda started screaming again. “Get the jar. Now!”

  A cloud of red smoke churned inside the trailer. I couldn’t see a foot in front of my face. I felt my way along the wall next to the door, nudging the floorboards with my feet until I knocked up against a pyramid of jars. I grabbed as many as I could carry and headed for the front porch. I lined them up on the weathered gray wood. Two blues, a pink and the ear jar. No good.

  Ant Eater’s finger tips had turned blue. Her face wedged against the open screened door.

  I ducked back inside. On the fourth trip, I found the white jar. While the contents of the other jars swirled and smoked, I could have mistaken this one for a jar of white paint. But then I noticed the tiny bubbles, like soda fizzies.

  Frieda grabbed it from me. “You can’t look at it too long.” She’d pulled off her hair scarf and used it to shield her face from the smoke pouring from the front door.

  We left Ant Eater on the front porch, half in and half out of the trailer. By this time, the crowd had swelled to a throng as every witch and werewolf within ten miles gathered to see what Frieda would do next.

  Frieda dumped the white liquid out near the front steps of the trailer. “Let death be broken. Let life surmount.”

  Her face took on a look of panic. She turned back to Betty and me. “Shit. We don’t have a death. We need a death. Betty?”

  The other witch stammered. “I think I have a squirrel tail somewhere.”

  “No, wait.” I had a better idea. I dashed up the front steps of the trailer and found the ear.

  She nodded. “Drop it in.”

  I twisted the jar open. Formaldehyde fumes burned my nose. Eyes watering, I dipped my fingers into the liquid and retrieved the ear. I threw it down onto Frieda’s soup and tried not to wince as it flopped wetly into the white goo. She struck a match, dropped it and the whole thing went up like she threw lighter fluid onto a burning barbeque pit. Energy rushed past us in a soundless wave. I found myself holding my breath for no reason as I reached down for Pirate. I scooped him up in my arms as he hacked up a storm. Finally, he opened his eyes. “Are you alright?”

  He blinked, his eyes watering. “Oh yeah, sure,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I get whacked by crazy ladies all the time.” He sneezed.

  I hugged him to my chest.

  “Now that’s nice. I like that,” he said, his cold nose finding my collarbone. “Anyone ever tell you how pretty you smell?”

  Like road kill and severed ears, I imagined, wiping my free hand on my ruined pants. The outfit Frieda had lent me was a total loss. Of course so was the outfit Frieda had on, I noticed, as she knelt over a coughing Ant Eater, who was still half in, half outside the trailer and holding the screened door open with her head.

  “How are you?” I asked, careful to stay out of her reach.

  Ant Eater hacked like a seasoned smoker and looked at me through bloodshot eyes. “They tell me you walked right through a death spell.”

  I hadn’t really had time to think about it until right then. But I had. Several times if you wanted to count my trips in and out of the trailer, trying to track down the white jar to reverse the spell. “I guess it doesn’t work on me,” I said, in the understatement of the year.

  Ant Eater nodded. She coughed several times, without covering her mouth. When she finished, she used the back of her hand to wipe away a clump of spit from her bottom lip. She eyed me like I’d grown four feet and gained two hundred pounds. “How about I don’t try to kill you and you don’t try to kill me?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Now get me up,” she said, struggling to sit. “And get some of the young ones in here to clean up the place. I want all my jars in my room. If I gotta live here with this pain in my ass, we might as well keep a tidy living room.” She snapped my bra and chuckled when I jumped. No way I’d ever understand Ant Eater.

  “You still want to live together after I nearly choked you to death?” If anything good had to come out of the afternoon, I hoped I could at least end the nightmare roommate situation.

  She adjusted the American flag bandana around her neck. “I don’t want your dirty undies hanging next to mine either, hot stuff. But I don’t see anyone else around here who wants to live with you while Rex is out for blood.”

  “What?”

  She seemed to enjoy my shock. “Yeah.” She paused for a long, hacking cough that brought tears to her eyes. “Assholes like that will zero in on a weak spot. You.” She braced her hands on her knees. “I was getting to that in the diner before your boyfriend pulled a gun on me.”

  I wanted to remind her she had a shotgun pointed at my chest at the time, but I stopped myself.

  She grinned and wiped her eyes on her bandana. “You might be from another world, but after today, I got hope.”

  “Me too,” I told her. I may not have mastered my powers, but I had a feeling I was on my way. Or I could at least handle myself. As for Rex, well, we’d just have to see.

  Ant Eater seemed to read my mind on that one. “Rex won’t come round.” She eyed her shotgun. “Mine’s bigger than his.”

  I’d known we weren’t completely safe here, or anywhere, but…I glanced back at the rapidly thinning crowd. “Don’t we have a deal with the werewolves?”

  Ant Eater succumbed to another coughing fit.

  “It should be no sweat,” Frieda said. “Frankly, I’m more nervous about the politics. The Alpha wants to use you to clean up the place. Only Rex is gunning for him hard. If you screw up, or if Rex kills you, the Alpha looks weak.”

  Oh great. Kill me to get to some guy I’ve never even met before.

  Frieda tugged at her soot stained corset top. “You okay, babe?” she asked Ant Eater, who nodded, face red, as she hunkered over to catch her breath. “Come on inside. Both of you. You’ll feel better after a shower and a change of clothes. Andrea and some of the wolves headed to the Goodwill in Monroe City.”

  While Ant Eater shuffled inside, I turned to Frieda. “I’m sorry about these,” I said, rubbing at the leather pants she’d lent me. A hunk of gravel dislodged from the pants and clattered to the deck.

  “Well,” she said watching the gravel bounce under a petrified towel, “like the saying goes: it’s not what you lose, it’s what you do with what you have left.”

  “Who said that?” I asked, following her through the screened door. “Maya Angelou?”

  “Oprah.”

  Amazingly, the red smoke had whooshed away as fast as it had appeared. But dang, we’d sure made a wreck out of the place. Frieda helped me hoist the saggy brown couch upright. We planted Ant Eater on it. I helped Frieda and a few of the younger witches clean up the broken glass, then they headed out, leaving me with a sleeping Ant Eater. I was about ready to sit down myself when Andrea the Annoying banged on the screened door. I don’t know why she bothered because she barged right in before I could invite her…or tell her to scram.

  She stepped her high heeled boots daintily
around an overturned coffee table. “Heard about your accident.” She tried to contain a snigger but couldn’t. “Pity. Power struggles are always so messy. I wouldn’t want to end up on the wrong side of one…bloody, bloody, bloody.”

  “Thanks for the sentiment. Now leave.”

  “I brought you some new clothes. Alpha’s orders,” she said, dumping a bag on the floor.

  I wondered what was behind the personal delivery.

  She flipped her platinum blond page boy hair. “Good thing you didn’t kill Ant Eater,” she said, breezing over to the couch with a paper shopping bag. “We had to make a special trip to Leather Up for her. My boss has a thing for the ladies.”

  Oh, this was getting old. “Pack up your fake boobs and your fake hair and your fake attitude and scram before I show you what I did to Ant Eater.”

  Andrea opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again.

  “Now,” I said.

  “Enjoy your new clothes,” she grumbled, the trailer door banging on its hinges behind her.

  I picked my way past broken glass to retrieve the bag. All things being equal, I would have rather collapsed in a chair and slept for a week. But I did need to get cleaned up, and we had a lot bigger problems than my lack of sleep. Once Dimitri hauled his butt back here, I had to learn how to throw switch stars. And I had to somehow loosen up and let my powers flow—that was on me. Good thing I’d never backed down from a challenge, whether it was a room full of sugar-crazed three-year-olds or an out-of-control death spell.

  At least I’d gotten something out of Ant Eater’s rampage. When I stopped worrying about myself and focused on the problem, I did get better at fighting her. Look to the outside.

  An uncomfortable thought struck me. Perhaps Dimitri had been right to leave me on my own this afternoon. He’d given me a powerful instructor—me. I’d learned to trust my instincts. It was an unspoken kind of learning, a feeling that can’t be taught from the outside.

  Accept the Universe. I toyed with the plastic handles of the bag.

  I did get help in the form of a power I didn’t even know I had. And even though I still couldn’t pry it off, the helmet had come in handy against Ant Eater’s sword. While I was feeling brave, I looked inside the bag. Eek.

  A pair of stained men’s cleats sat on top of what could best be described as a mumu.

  “What am I, Mrs. Roeper?” I griped to myself. Nobody else was listening. I held the nylon day dress out in front of me. Yellow birds paraded, beaks open, over a loud green and blue checkered background. It would have made an ugly table cloth. As a sack-shaped dress? It was the most hideous thing I’d ever seen. As usual, Andrea had gotten the last word.

  The final item in the bag—much to my relief—was a pair of granny panties. Those I could wear.

  But I had bigger things to worry about than fashion. I took a shower and donned the mumu. It fit like a Hefty bag and was almost as attractive. I paired it with the scarf Frieda had used as a face mask. Lovely. At least the scarf around my waist gave me a hint of a figure, even if it was eerily reminiscent of a twist tie. I swung my arms. At least I could move in it.

  I tugged on the cleats, along with the men’s gym socks I’d found rolled up inside. They were certainly more comfortable than my ruined oxfords and besides, they might help with my training. Athletes wore cleats when they threw baseballs. I’d wear them to hurl switch stars. Andrea, the tarnished angel of mercy, had actually given me a pretty good demon slayer outfit.

  Pirate lifted his head. “Dimitri’s back.”

  “Now how could you possibly know that?” I asked, moving toward the window.

  “Doggie intuition,” he said, following me.

  Darned if he wasn’t right. I pulled the dusty curtain aside and saw Dimitri and Scarlet pulling up in the Shoney’s parking lot. Well thank goodness. We had work to do.

  ***

  Dimitri went straight into the Shoney’s and I decided to join him. In the time it had taken me to make it across the field, he’d settled into a back booth with a man who could have been Mister T’s evil twin. The guy wore stacks of jewelry, and his foul temper made me want to take three steps back.

  Dimitri raised a brow at my outfit. “Lizzie, this is Fang. He’s the Alpha of the Blue Moon Pack.” He shook a packet of sugar into his coffee and stirred it, as nonchalant as if he were catching up with an old friend. I didn’t buy it for a second.

  Fang, huh? So this was the wolf Rex needed to beat. Yikes. I hoped Fang held on to power long enough for us to rescue Grandma and get the heck out of Dodge. The large werewolf looked me over like I’d escaped from the loony bin. “This is the slayer? Not what I expected.” His eyes narrowed.

  “I get that a lot,” I told him.

  I slid into the booth next to Dimitri. This had disaster written all over it. If the Red Skulls didn’t need this guy’s protection, I would have been out of there faster than you could say “dead demon slayer.”

  Fang leaned his meaty arms on the table. “The black souls hovering around here are a threat to my pack. Get rid of them by midnight tomorrow, or all bets are off.” He glared at us, clearly expecting a challenge.

  Dimitri merely raised a brow.

  “Fair enough,” I said. I’d have to trust myself on this one.

  “We’ll throw some switch stars after this,” Dimitri said, as if we did it all the time.

  “Sure,” I said a little too quickly, “I might as well take some target practice.”

  Dimitri’s hand found mine and gave it a squeeze. “You ready, Lizzie?”

  “Yes,” I said, getting up to leave. I was as ready as I’d ever be.

  Chapter 12

  Well thank God and hallelujah. I slipped two fingers into the delicately carved holes of the switch star. Think of it as a tricked-out Frisbee. The switch star was flat and round, about the shape of a small dinner plate. Five blades curled around the edge. They’d been dull in Dimitri’s hands. When I touched them, they glowed.

  Dimitri guided my shoulders into position, his grip firm. “Remember your stance.”

  The evening breeze whipped a few loose tendrils of hair into my face, tickling my nose. I resisted the urge to scratch and instead studied the target, a fifty-gallon plastic drum that had once held Grade A Lard, or so it said in industrial block letters on the side. Cliff and Hillary’s tip-top arteries would have clogged at the sight of it.

  We stood far back from the village of trailers that dotted the grassland behind Shoney’s. In theory, we were at least a football field away from prying eyes. In reality, several of the werewolves had followed us. They’d pulled up a few ramshackle sofas and chairs and, of course, Andrea perched on the end of the shabby gold divan closest to Dimitri. She wore a leather bustier overflowing with cleavage and had kept busy painting her nails and flirting loudly with every werewolf within a half mile.

  Like I cared. She was small potatoes compared to what Grandma was going through. Scarlet had spent the afternoon in the nearest thing she could find to a Yardsaver shed, an empty dumpster back behind the restaurant. She’d reported Grandma was still trapped in the first layer of hell, holding on with everything she had, fighting Vald as he tried to suck her down into the second level with him. I had to get Grandma out of there.

  The witches had gathered in the nearby woods for a purification and strengthening ceremony. Seems I wasn’t invited to that one.

  “Give me some space,” I told Dimitri. Only one way to tell if I was getting the hang of this.

  I eyed Pirate, sitting obediently on Sidecar Bob’s lap. Pirate liked to holler out words of encouragement right as I was throwing. “You hush now, Pirate,” I said, drawing back to throw. He wouldn’t last a minute on a golf course.

  “Me? I didn’t say a word. Except to wish you good luck. What’s the matter with good luck? You could use some luck right now.”

  I brought my throwing arm down, re-focused. A little bit of magic wouldn’t hurt either. Look to the outside. Accept the universe.
Sacrifice yourself. As much as I wanted to save Grandma, I wasn’t too crazy about that last one.

  The star felt weightless in my hand. I can do this. I was born to do this. I was the only one who could kill a demon. Once I figured out my switch stars. I whipped the star back and fired it toward the target.

  “Incoming!” Pirate hollered. The witches scattered as my switch star hurtled toward their sacred circle. Blast! I cringed as it crashed right through one oak tree, then another, and another, cleaving the tops right off.

  “Watch it!” I yelled as tree limbs rained down on the coven.

  The switch star circled high in the air like a boomerang and plunged straight for my head, its razor-sharp blades a whirl of lightning. I ducked. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. The star smacked into the ground in front of Dimitri. I glanced back. He didn’t look happy.

  Andrea’s laughter rang out, clear and bright, above the guffaws of the other werewolves.

  Dimitri dug my star out of the dirt and handed it back to me.

  “Don’t say anything,” I warned him.

  “I’m not,” he said. Then he leaned close, “relax,” he said, low so that even the wolves couldn’t hear. “Stop trying to control it so much and let it fly.”

  I sighed. Easier said than done.

  Sidecar Bob’s wheelchair crunched over the discarded plastic cups and rusty beer cans littering the ground. “You got some distance on that last one.” He shook his head. “They’ll just have to remember, no matter how bad it looks, you are the fated slayer.” He tugged on his gray goatee for a moment. “You are the slayer, right?”

  “So they say,” I told him. “You should have been there this afternoon.” If that hadn’t proved I was up to the job, nothing would. I’d shown I could live through a death spell. Of course in the last half hour, I’d also managed to decapitate the Shoney’s Big Boy. No getting around it. Those switch stars were unpredictable. According to legend, I was supposed to be a natural at this. My Great, Great, (however many Greats) Aunt Evie had practically popped out of the womb throwing switch stars.

  I blew out a breath. Focus.