“Seriously, please don’t tell anyone about this,” I replied, rubbing my hand against my jeans to warm it up a bit. Cooper and I had never felt comfortable putting the silencing spell on Bo; it just didn’t seem neighborly. Maybe that had been a mistake, but I’d asked so much of him I wasn’t going to gag him now.
“I won’t, I won’t,” he said. “But for real, you could make a killing doing that moving-and-storage thing.”
“I could, except for the part where I can’t let people see me doing this,” I replied. “Or at least not very many. I can do magic for money as long as it’s on the down low. I can’t take an ad out in The Columbus Dispatch or anything.”
“People not supposed to know there’s real magic in the world, huh?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s too bad. Might give some folks hope who don’t got it otherwise.”
“Or it could scare people, or make them resentful that we can do things that they never can.” I shook my head. “The ‘why’ doesn’t matter—we’ve got pretty strict rules, and I could get in trouble.”
“More trouble than you in now?”
“I could get thrown out of the city, or I could get sent to prison.”
“You folks got your own prisons?”
“Yeah. People die in them.” A lump rose in my throat as I thought of the father I never had a chance to know.
“I can see not wantin’ to risk that,” Bo said. “Jail ain’t no fun even when it’s safe.”
I was eager to change the subject. “Well, if I could get you to hold a couple more boxes for me, I think I can get the rest of this place packed up…“
By 3 PM the apartment was empty and I held the plastic jar with the two miniaturized suitcases nestled against each other inside. At a casual glance, they merely looked like shaving kit bags.
“That is the coolest damn thing I seen all week,” Bo marveled. “And it don’t weigh a thousand pounds or nothin’. Perfect size to take with you.”
“Well, actually, I can’t take this with me,” I replied, then thought to Pal, Tracking charms probably all over my stuff, right?
“Right,” Pal replied.
“Well, you can leave it with me,” Bo said. “That won’t take up no space at all.”
“Bad idea,” Pal warned. “Don’t involve the poor man more than he is.”
“Once again, I really appreciate the offer, but having this could be real bad luck for you,” I said. “I’ll just… I don’t know, I’ll probably put this in a locker at the bus station or something.”
“Them lockers ain’t real safe,” Bo said, “and they don’t let you keep them more’n a couple days at most.”
“Why not get a safe-deposit box at a bank?” Pal asked.
Oh yeah, I thought back. Good idea.
“I’ll think of something,” I told Bo.
We all left the barren apartment, and my eye fell on my Celica and the Dinosaur.
“Darn jt, I should have left room in the jar for the cars,” I said.
“Just take ‘em ‘round to the back lot,” Bo said. “There’s cars back there ain’t been moved in a year. The management don’t pay no attention at all.”
It didn’t take me long to drive the cars to the other side of the complex.
Are you going to get in trouble for showing me that packing charm? I asked as I locked up the Dinosaur and started walking slowly across the hot blacktop back to Bo’s place. I carried the plastic jar in the crook of my arm.
“Possibly,” he replied, “but that will surely pale in comparison with the trouble I’m about to get into.”
What do you mean?
“Clearly, Mr. Jordan is up to something, and I believe he has somehow managed to trick the Virtii. Someone needs to get to the bottom of this.”
By “someone” you mean me, right?
“Indeed. But Mr. Jordan will track you wherever you go because of the anathema spell,” Pal replied.
Well, maybe if I just, you know, keep moving, he’ll lose track of me?
Pal shook his head. “Men like him don’t lose track.” He paused. “But I know how to defeat the anathema spell they’ve put on you.”
I stopped in my tracks. You’re kidding.
“Indeed I am not.”
Where’d you learn a thing like that?
Pal took a deep breath. “I’ve never liked. restrictions. I’ve gone out of my way to learn how to get past them, and my predilection for such things is what led to my being sentenced to several hundred years of indentured servitude as a familiar.”
“I will likely go to prison if I am discovered assisting you,” he continued, “but I’ll be ashamed of myself if I don’t lend you my full knowledge and abilities.”
Wow. I sure do appreciate that. So how do we get this spell off me?
“There’s something you need to know first,” Pal said. “The removal—really, it’s a spiritual transference—is only good for a day or so. You’ll have to keep performing the spell, particularly if you’re otherwise spotted and they get wise to what you’ve done.”
What about you? Isn’t someone keeping tabs on you?
“Not directly, and under normal circumstances they shouldn’t be allowed to relay that information to people like Jordan,” Pal replied. “But that wall of privacy will fall in a hurry if Jordan convinces my overseer that I’m helping you break the law.”
I’ll work fast, and stay out of sight. So what do we need to do?
“Well, there’s no point in doing any of it until you find a place for your jar,” Pal said. “You’d likely be tracked and the spell discovered almost instantly.”
Right, I replied. But what will we need to do?
“We’ll need to find tissue from a mundane human female, preferably blood instead of hair or nail clippings,” he replied. “And then I’ll show you how to perform a ritual to foist your anathema off onto the other woman temporarily. In essence, you’ll be hiding your spiritual profile beneath that of the other woman, and vice versa.”
So what happens to this other woman?
“Well, the anathema spell will be in full effect on her for a time,” Pal said, “so she must be someone who doesn’t come into regular contact with Talents. And it should be someone relatively close by at the time you perform the spell.”
Will the contract follow her around like it’s been doing to me?
“Presumably, yes. It might be alarming, but since Jordan didn’t leave any of his mundane contact information on the parchment, I doubt she could ring him up to complain.”
But what if someone else signs the thing?
“It wouldn’t be your signature, would it? So it wouldn’t matter,” Pal replied.
But this other woman will have my spiritual profile, won’t she? Won’t that make her signature binding for me?
“No, not unless she forges your signature exactly,” explained Pal. “Mr. Jordan will have created the charm to reject a signature that isn’t legally yours. He’d have to consider your signing somebody else’s name to the thing to get it to go away.”
How would the spell know what my signature looks like?
Pal sighed. “Jessie, your signature is on every form you ever signed for college, for banks, for your apartment. It’s on every receipt for everything you ever bought with your credit card. It’s not that hard for even a mundane to dig up.”
Oh. I suddenly felt naked under the hot sun. So, aside from being haunted by a legal form, will anything bad happen to the woman I dump my anathema on? Will other people treat her badly?
“Well, it’s certainly possible,” he said.
So I foist my anathema off on some other woman, and then she might go interview for a job she desperately needs and not get it? Or maybe she gets stopped for a traffic ticket and the cop decides to search her car? Or some jerk in a bar decides to harass her?
“Yes, all those things are possible.”
Well, that just sucks! I don’t want to mess up a stranger like that, and I su
re as hell don’t want to do that to a friend.
“Do you want to find Cooper or don’t you?”
Of course I do!
“Then you have to get rid of your anathema,” Pal said. “I don’t like this any more than you do.”
Could the person I switch with be dead? I asked hopefully, thinking that surely somebody in the apartment complex had an urn of their mother’s or grandmother’s ashes. Or maybe someone almost dead, someone stuck in a nursing home?
“Dead people don’t make good spiritual trades,” Pal replied. “And you need your trade to be up and moving around to draw your trackers away from you. It’d look suspicious if you suddenly appeared to be bedridden.”
Oh. Well, crap.
We’d reached Bo’s apartment. Bo had let Gee out onto his front patio and was sitting in his lawn chair brushing her brindled coat. Gee spotted me and came bounding over. I set down my jar and scratched the dog between the ears.
“Can I ask one last favor of you?” I asked Bo.
“Sure, what?”
“Can you take me down 161 to the Ohioana Bank on the intersection at High Street?”
“No problem. Mind if Gee comes along? She sure does like riding in the car.”
We went to Bo’s rusty old Chevy truck. Gee leaped in the moment Bo opened the driver’s door and wedged herself behind the passenger seat. I climbed in cradling the jar, the sun-hot vinyl seat uncomfortable even through my jeans.
“I still think it’d be better if y’all folks could, you know, do your thing in public,” Bo said as he started his truck and pulled out of his parking space. “Folks need magic and miracles to keep ‘em going.”
“I don’t know. We have the rules for a reason. If witches were allowed to come Out of the broom closet, sorcerers would take over pretty quickly,” I said. “I mean, guys like Mr. Jordan have already taken over, but without the restrictions it’d be even worse.”
“I can’t see how having wizards in charge would be worse than the buncha fatcat crooks we got in charge now,” Bo said. “Maybe it’d be better having a guy in charge who really could get stuff done.”
“You’d just be trading mundane but mostly functional corruption for a magical dictatorship,” I said, leaning back against the seat’s headrest and closing my eye.
“Yeah, but your folks got actual skills ‘n’ wisdoms,” Bo said. “They’re better than regular politicians.”
I cracked my eye open and gave him a hard look. “Do you think rich white people are better than poor black people, Bo?”
He gave a start, and stared at me as if I had sprouted devil’s horns. “Hell no! I ain’t never gonna believe that!”
“But rich white people pretty much control everything, right?”
“Yeah, ‘cause they got to the American Pie first, and they cheat to keep it for themselves. They got The Man working for them. We just as good as they are. We just can’t get in on the game most of the time ‘cause it’s rigged from the day we born.”
“So you’re saying that rich white people are born having most of the power, and they spend their money looking out for their own interests so they keep their power. And they mostly don’t give a damn about anyone who isn’t just like them, right?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Bo, any wizard who’d want to be in charge is gonna be even less like you—and less interested in your problems—than the guys in power now,” I said. “You think The Man’s keeping you down now? Wait until The Man can turn you into a toad, or make you into his very own zombie slave. Trust me, you don’t want wizards running your world. You just don’t.”
“It don’t sound like you have much pride in your own people,” Bo said.
I shrugged. “Before I knew I had Talent, I grew up like almost everybody else in my town. In my school, we had a few kids from richer families who rubbed it in our faces all the time that they were better than anyone else because they had cool toys and designer clothes their parents bought for them. I thought at the time that it was a load of crap to feel proud and superior about something you got handed to you as a matter of blind, dumb luck. And I still feel that way. My having magical Talent was just a roll of the dice. I can’t take credit for it, and I’m an asshole if I start acting like I can.”
“But you can take credit for what you do with what God gave you.”
“Sure. I try to do the best I can with what I’ve been given. But almost everybody feels that way, don’t they?” I asked. “I read this article in Forbes about women who are supposed to be the ten most accomplished heiresses in the world. One of the women won a bunch of awards for riding horses in steeple-chases. Another woman is an actress who’s won a couple of Emmys for a show she was on. And the rest are magazine models, or manufactured pop stars, or they’re presidents of some company or other their families founded.
“And so I’m reading the article, thinking that these women come from families that are worth billions of dollars, families that have huge financial and political power. Huge. They could afford the best education, the best of everything. For the amount of knowledge and sheer opportunity they had at their disposal growing up, you’d think some of them could have become important inventors, or doctors, or renowned poets, or something really cool. But the most radical thing any of them has done is become a moderately successful TV actress. As a group, they’re mostly good at being decorative and spending money to maintain their family’s power and Forbes is hailing them as heroines for this? That’s some real gold-plated bullshit they’re selling. Other people might buy it, but I sure don’t.”
“You real opinionated today,” Bo observed as he turned right onto High Street.
“I get ranty when I’m in pain,” I replied, rubbing my stump lightly through the sling.
Bo pulled into a tree-shaded parking spot by the tall brick bank building.
“Speaking of rich movie stars, think I got time to go see what kinda DVDs they got on the shelves?” Bo asked, nodding toward the Old Worthington Library across the parking lot.
“You don’t need to wait for me, so you’ve got as much time as you want. I’m not going back to the apartment,” I replied, “and I’ll catch a bus or take a cab to wherever I go after this.”
“I couldn’t just leave you here… ,“ he said.
“No, really, I’ll be fine. You and Gee and your boys are better off this way. And if everything goes okay, I’ll see you guys again really soon.”
I gave Bo a light hug and opened the truck’s door. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. Take care, okay?”
I got out, shut the truck’s door, and went around to the side of the bank to their ATM with Pal riding on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. Nobody else was in sight.
“I bet they’ve already nuked my credit union bank card,” I said to Pal as I set my jar down on the sidewalk, then pulled my small leather change purse out of my front jeans pocket. I awkwardly worked the bank card out of its pocket with my thumb, stuck it in the ATM, and punched in my PIN. Rejected.
“Figures.” I sighed, shoving the card back into the pocket on the side of the purse. I got out my MasterCard. “Maybe I’ll luck out with this one?”
The credit card was still good; I took out a four-hundred-dollar cash advance and stashed everything in my change purse. “That’s not much, and if I survive all this my credit’s probably wrecked forever, but if I’m careful it’ll do for now,” I told Pal.
I picked up my jar, and Pal and I went back around to the front of the bank and went inside. A security guard stared at me and stepped forward.
“Miss, you can’t bring pets in here,” he said sternly. “He’s a service animal, like a guide dog,” I replied smoothly. “If I was blind instead of a cripple, you wouldn’t make me leave my guide dog outside, would you?”
The guard blanched when I said “cripple.” “I, uh, but … but it’s a rat.”
“It’s a ferret, not a rodent.” I set my jar down on the carpeted floor. “He e
ats rats.”
“I do?” asked Pal. “That’s right, I do. How revolting. I must speak to my overseer about this business of being assigned to the bodies of small verminovores.”
I reached into my pocket, pulled out my ATM receipt, squished it into a ball, and tossed it on the floor.
“Fetch,” I told Pal.
He climbed down from my shoulder, humped over to the receipt, took it in his jaws, and returned to my shoulder. When I held my hand out, he obligingly dropped the paper in my palm.
“See? He’s very helpful.” I stuck the wad in my pocket and picked up my jar.
“Well, I suppose it’s okay,” the guard mumbled, uncertainly hitching up his gun belt, “but if it starts running around in here bothering people, you’ll have to take it and leave.”
“No problem; he’ll stay put on my shoulder unless I tell him otherwise,” I replied.
I went over to the couches beside the glass cubicles holding the empty banker’s stations and sat down. A woman in a dark suit, who’d watched the entire exchange between me and the guard, hurried over, her hard heels tut-tutting across the polished floor.
“Can we help you?” the woman asked, eyeing my bandaged face, faded clothes, mystery jar, and ferret with a mixture of bafflement and distaste.
“Why yes. I need to rent a safe-deposit box,” I replied.
“We require a cash deposit—”
“I have cash. Look, the sooner you help me get the box, the sooner you’ll have my unattractive, proletarian self Out of here and never see me again,” I said, suddenly feeling too tired for tact.
The woman’s tone turned wooden. “One of our banking specialists will help you soon.” She turned on her Ann Taylor stilettos and strode toward the offices in the back.
A short time later a young man about my age in a brown suit came out of the back offices, smoothing his tie. He put on a nervous smile and held out his hand to me, although he didn’t manage eye contact. “Hello, I’m Philip. My manager said you want to rent a safe-deposit box?”
I shook his sweaty hand. “Yes, I do.”
My anathema must be tweaking these people out something fierce, I thought to Pal.
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