Blood Like Ice

by Lee Hayton

  Asha’s voice came booming at me out of the darkness. “Rise and shine, children of the night.”

  She slapped her hand flat against the side of the coffin, making me jump. It had been a long time since I’d slept so profoundly that I’d needed that level of wake-up call. As I clambered out, I saw that the sunlight had only just started to pick up speed.

  “Hey, mister? Did you want to come upstairs and see what we’ve got planned?”

  “His name’s Percival,” I said as I swung my legs out of the coffin. “He doesn’t like it when he gets less than ten hours’ sleep.” Asha raised her eyebrow, either at the slight remonstration or the bizarre sleeping arrangements but wisely held her tongue.

  “What about it, Percival? Are you ready to see your little friend transformed into one of the very creatures who want to lock you up?”

  I gave Asha a nice view of my middle finger, then slowly stood. The hunger had taken residence in my belly while I was asleep, reminding me that things still weren’t back in the balance I was accustomed to.

  “I’d be interested to see it.” Percival stood and pointed his finger into my face. “But you’d better promise me right now that there’s no turning me into the authorities just because you go and get yourself humanized. I’m off-limits.”

  “Of course, you are.” Asha looked shocked. “If he tries that, you have my word that I’ll kill him. No more immortality for you, Norman. You’ll have to toe the line from now on.”

  Percival and Asha seemed to think the joke was far funnier than I thought it. Only the mounting excitement thrumming in my torso enabled me to overlook the slight.

  “How does it work?” I asked as we mounted the stairs, too eager to have to wait until we were in the kitchen.

  “Miss Tiddles!” I cried out as a familiar ginger cat came trotting over to me from the dining table. “You’re alive!”

  She jumped into my arms, and I cuddled her up against my face, loving the way her silky hairs felt pressed against my cheek.

  “Yeah. She came to a few hours ago.” Asha reached out a hand and scratched Miss Tiddles behind the ears. “I think that’s life number four, if I’m not mistaken. We’d better try to leave a bigger gap before number five.”

  “No more superhero for you,” I said, poking my finger into her face. She meowed and flicked her whiskers against the side of my hand. I don’t know whether that counted as an agreement or a denial.

  “We’ve got a whole lot of stuff here that we’ve collected from the woods,” Asha said. “Dory thinks it should help out with the spells.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt, anyway.” Dory’s eyes shifted away from mine as she said it, focusing instead on the dying foliage spread out in front of her.

  “So, you found the instructions, then?”

  “I don’t need any instructions,” Dory said, drawing herself up to her full height and puffing out her chest. Between the crick in her neck and the sunken ribcage, it wasn’t very spectacular. “I know what I’m doing, young man. I’ve been casting spells like this for over a hundred years. What I don’t know about magic could be written on the head of a pin.”

  Dory’s eyes shifted away again, her tongue flicking out to lick her lips, reminding me of a lizard baking under the heat of the noon-day sun.

  “Okay,” I said. “I didn’t mean to challenge your authority. Shall we get started then?”

  Dory nodded, helping me onto the table and then laying me flat.

  “Are you comfortable?” she asked. I nodded. “Then, let’s begin.”

  Dory closed her eyes and pressed a closed fist up against her forehead. After a minute, she frowned and popped her right eye open to peer down at me. “I’m not used to doing this stuff with an audience,” she murmured. “Would you mind shutting your eyes rather than staring at me?”

  While she turned and shooed Miss Tiddles and Asha out of the room, I lowered my lids down to slits, just enough to keep an eye on her. When Dory walked back to the table, she appeared far more relaxed. She grabbed a handful of leaves with a smile and began to shake them over my body.

  A few moments later, she put them aside and grabbed a small vial. Whatever was in it smelled noxious. I gagged in distress while she shook a few drops of the liquid out over my body.

  “Just ignore it,” Dory said. Her voice had fallen into a singsong quality. She sounded like the fortune teller that my parents had once let me waste my allowance on at the county fair.

  She picked up another bunch of leaves, these ones dried and crumbling. After chanting in a language I’d never heard before, Dory set the tip of the bundle alight.

  The fire caught and whoomph! The whole bundle was ablaze. Dory gave a cry, dropped it, and stepped back, running to the sink to plunge her hand under the cold tap.

  Burning leaves dropped on my clothes, setting the cheap fabric on fire.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I cried out, sitting up and stamping them out with my palms.

  “What the hell was that for?” I asked as the last bit gave up and winked out from orange flame to black ash. “Are you trying to burn me alive?”

  “It’s for…” Dory trailed off and stared down at the floor, shrugging. “It’s for some magic thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

  Dory crossed her arms over her chest and began to shake her head. “The information online was no help to me. A bunch of gobbledygook at best. I tried to formulate it into something I’d done once before, but I don’t know what’s missing.” She flapped a hand at me. “This same spell does wonders if you want to change a frog back into a tadpole. I don’t know why it isn’t doing something similar.”

  So many reasons why crowded into my head at once that I couldn’t list them—instead I barked with laughter. “So, all this has been a wasted trip. You don’t know how to do anything like this at all.”

  “If it was easy,” Dory pointed out, “then everybody would be doing it. Unless you have a better set of instructions than what we found, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

  I shook my head, disappointment welling up inside me, tempered with the thought that I’d known something was out of kilter. After a second, I put my hands over my eyes to shut out the woman in front of me. If I stared at her too much longer, I’d blame her for everything and want to tear her limb from limb.

  “Just a moment.” A lightbulb flashed in my head. “Does that spell ever work on other things?”

  “Eh?” Dory stared at me. “The frog one?”

  I nodded and jumped down from the table. “Yeah. Have you ever tried it on an inanimate object, say?”

  Dory’s face screwed up in thought. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “I suppose that could work,” she said after so long a pause I expected nothing. “Did you have something in mind?”

  I took a towel hanging from the side of the stove. Goodness knows how long it had been there. With no food in the house, there was little need for dishes. On second thought, I could imagine old Percival pimping up his routine by drinking blood from a nice glass.

  “Here.” I handed it across, dripping wet from a quick run under the tap. “Can you do your spell thing on that and make it dry again?”

  Dory shrugged and pushed aside the ashes from her last attempt. “Stand back, then,” she muttered. “Give me a bit of room.”

  In five minutes flat, she had it dry, and not through setting fire to it like she’d tried with me. I looked around for something else. “What’s the drawback with this one?” I asked as I opened and closed cupboards, searching for a suitable second test.

  “I don’t know.” I gave her a quick check, but she just shrugged again in response to my visual interrogation. “I can’t ask a frog or a tadpole what’s going on. I presume that there’s something, but it’s in a blind spot for me.”

  At that, I stopped searching. My mouth dropped open in disbelief. “You were going to try something out on me without knowing the full effects?”<
br />
  “Happens every day,” Dory said. “How do you think they develop drugs to treat illnesses or programming to test systems? Everything’s got to be tested in real life before you can hunt down the side effects. You’ve got to press play to find the bugs.”

  “You inspire confidence.”

  “Hey, I’ve been the guinea pig for a whole swathe of my spells, and I’m still standing here, aren’t I?”

  “In which number body?”

  “Pfft. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You’ve got some extreme ideas for someone who turned up at my door asking for help.”

  I laughed and went back to searching. Dory was as impossible to argue with as Asha or the cat. Perhaps I should hang around men more often. It would be nice to win at verbal sparring sometimes.

  “Here.” I found a packet of teabags and split one open, then strewed its contents over the bench.

  “Hm. I’m not sure you understand how much of my energy is required in these things,” Dory said, screwing up her nose. Her long, warty nose. “You do realize that spells aren’t for housecleaning, right? If I do this, then the next thing you ask me better get straight to the point.”

  I held up my hands, palms out. “I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  That got a laugh out of her again. Shaking her head, she went to work. A few minutes later, she threw the reassembled teabag at my chest.

  “Have I passed your test?”

  I nodded and fished the flash drive out of my pocket, laying it down on the countertop.

  “Well, before you tell me what you want me to do, why don’t you boil some water and stick that”—she jerked her head at the tea—“into a pot?”

  My hands were shaking when Dory went to work on the memory stick. Asha poked her head into the kitchen to see if we were all right, and withdrew it a moment later, mostly bitten off.

  “Why don’t you give that a go?” she suggested at last, pushing the flash drive toward me. It looked exactly the same. My fingers turned into thumbs that fumbled as I tried to insert it into a port on the side of the laptop. I held my breath as the cursor went into a spiraling circle once more, then it popped up with a display folder.

  “It’s worked!” I clapped Dory on the back, probably a bit too hard considering her current age. From the flush growing up the side of her sagging cheeks, she didn’t mind. I clicked on the screen to open up the documents and revealed row after row of audio files.

  Dory scowled. “If that’s some sort of mix-tape, then I hope you’ll excuse me while you listen.”

  I double-clicked the first one, and a light and pleasing old woman’s voice danced out of the speaker.

  It wasn’t a mix-tape. Not at all.

  “How old were you when your dad transformed?” the voice from the recording asked. “Do you remember?”

  “Not old. Maybe seven or eight. I’d been in school for a while—seemed like an eternity—but you know what it’s like when you’re about that age.”

  The man on the drive was a lot older than seven or eight. Maybe ten times that or even more. The labels on the files didn’t offer any insight into the subject. Even identifying the interviewer as Esme, Jimmy’s granddaughter, was guesswork. An informed one, but still nothing about it could be definite.

  “And did you know beforehand what they were attempting?”

  The male subject shifted in his seat, picked up by the speaker to my right while the female interviewer sounded closer to the left. Or my brain designated them to those positions to make them easier to visualize.

  “I knew that Dad wanted to change. He wanted to be there more for us as a family.” A soft laugh. “At least, that’s what Mom insisted that he wanted. I don’t know what his mind would have been if she’d allowed him to make it up alone.”

  “Did you know what that entailed?”

  There was a muttered, no, then Esme tried again. “At that age, did you understand what your father was?”

  “Yeah, we knew. If nothing else, we’d heard Mom shouting it at him like it was an insult. Back in those days, no one really talked about the vampires at all, you know. If they did, it was in hushed tones full of respect. Mom wasn’t having a bit of that.”

  The man issued another laugh, this one carrying on for close to a minute.

  “I used to think with the enslavement going on all around that she’d arranged for the whole lot to be packed off to the camps, just by herself. She hated them that much. I don’t remember a time before, with Dad starting off human, but I knew he must have. There’s no way she would have married him if she’d known he’d turn into that.”

  “On the night of the ceremony—should I call it that?”

  “What? Yeah, sure. I guess that’s what it was.”

  “On that night, do you remember much preparation beforehand?”

  Another soft laugh. “No. Nothing like that. It was just a friend of Mom’s from the village, an ancient lady that she visited after church most Sundays. She came along, but there wasn’t anything strange about that, anyway. We sometimes had her over for dinner when she was having trouble keeping her household running straight.”

  “That was Mrs. MacAfee?”

  “That’s the one. I know they call her a witch in the urban legends that spring up around Dad, but I don’t know that she was, not really. She was just an old woman who’d seen a lot of things and remembered most of them in detail.”

  “What happened next?”

  The man shifted in his chair again and cleared his throat. He made a small humming sound under his breath, then coughed and sniffed. “Sorry, I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “The pollen’s been really bad this spring. Did you want me to fetch you a glass of water?”

  “Nah, you’re right. There wasn’t a lot more I remember happening. Dad came home and Mom was sitting there with her friend, a smile on her face like a cat who’d been at the cream. She also sat with her back ramrod straight, ankles crossed, and her hands folded on one knee. I don’t recall her ever relaxing. If she wasn’t playing mother of the year for us, she was playing best neighbor ever for the folks around town.”

  “And what happened in the ceremony?” A trace of irritation had wormed into Esme’s voice. Even listening, probably decades after it had been recorded, I could tell that she just wanted him to stop reminiscing and get to the truth.

  “Well, Mrs. MacAfee made my dad lie down on the couch and got my mother to sit with his feet on her lap. She said a whole lot of stuff about letting the spirits know what they wanted and how living a clean life would be the only reward she’d take for her help.”

  “And?”

  “And that was pretty much it. The old lady told Dad to concentrate on how much he wanted it. If he needed to change enough, then he could manifest it through his fervent wishes.”

  This time, Esme shifted in her seat. The flutter of papers told me she was flipping back through her notebooks. “What else? There must be something else?”

  “No. That’s what I meant, there wasn’t much of a ceremony to it at all. The old lady told him to wish for what he wanted, and if it were his deepest desire, then it would come true.”

  “He wished himself back to being human?”

  A small cough. “Well, the old lady must have done something, as well. Perhaps she was a witch, after all. My dad had wished the same thing for as many years as I could remember, and he’d never changed back to human just off the back of that.”

  “There must be something more.”

  Esme spoke the words as statements of fact. When the male subject tried to contradict her, she cut him off and the recording stopped. I looked through all of the files, that was it. The beginning, the middle, and the end.

  “Oh,” Dory said. “Of course. That’s a simple one after all, then.”

  I turned warily, expecting to see the curve of a smile that meant she was pranking me. Her smile told me something else entirely.

  “What? Do you know what some of that
means?”

  She laughed and nodded. “I know what all of that means. Why it’s barely a spell at all. No wonder I didn’t think of it.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “It used to be very popular back in the eighties.” Dory paused, pursing her lips and frowning while she stared into the middle distance. “Or the nineties, or even later. The craze took the entire country by storm.”

  “What craze?” Asha asked. She and Miss Tiddles had been allowed back in the room. Apparently, their assistance now outweighed their nuisance value.

  I looked with interest to Dory, waiting for the answer. Although I was grateful that the witch finally seemed to know what she was doing, it wouldn’t be right to pretend that I wasn’t still scared of what havoc she might cause.

  “All this stuff about if you believe and visualize it you can make things happen, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “It’s so wide of the mark that it’ll make you cry to think of all those people spending their lives wishing for something that would never come true.”

  “And what does that have to do with it?” I rubbed my hand over my belly. Even from the outside, it felt like it was tying itself in knots.

  “Well, the people who put forth the idea were witches, not that they knew it,” she hastily added. “Not by a long shot. Nobody really paid attention to their lineage after all the hoohah in the middle ages died down. You’d have these people, thinking that they were doing something that everybody could get right and really, they had a special talent that they barely knew how to harness.”

  Dory stepped back from the couch and put a hand on her hip. “It’s sad to think of it from either side, really. All those folks whose wishes went unheard, and all those witches who never knew what they were really capable of. They spent all their energy chasing money when they could have had so much more.”

  “Money would be fine,” Asha said dryly. “If you ever want to bestow any my way, you go right ahead.”

  But Dory flapped her hand at her to shut up. “Anyway, for a witch to answer a wish is easy. Once you have a clear visualization of what you want in your head, I just get in there”—she tapped my forehead—“and sort out where to put it. Voila! A wish comes true.”