“I can’t say I’m surprised. We need to get that infection taken care of. Our best option is wood ash and moldy cheese, as Mother Karen suggested.”
“Well, if these guys have cheese, it’s almost guaranteed to be moldy,” I replied as I finished up. “So we should be safe there. If not, I’ll go door-to-door and pretend I’m a member of the Cheese Scouts or something.”
Pal and I left my room and made our way downstairs. I was starting to notice flittering things lurking in dark corners that scuttled out of sight when I tried to look at them directly.
Oh, good, now I’m seeing little flitty things in the dark places—I’m hallucinating those, right? I wondered to Pal.
“Actually, probably not,” he replied from his perch on my shoulder. “The world is full of fey creatures that normally even strong Talents don’t see. Best to pretend you don’t notice them, because to observe them is to affect them, and they don’t like that.”
Oh. I prudently stared down at my feet on the stairs, which was just as well because my balance as well as my depth perception were totally shot and I felt like I might trip at any moment.
Nonetheless, I got downstairs safely and wobbled through the living room into the kitchen. Mikey was on the couch drinking beer and watching two sweaty guys in tight shorts pummel each other in a cage fighting match; he didn’t so much as grunt at me as I passed. Something that looked like a fleshy daisy with octopus tentacles instead of roots clung to the bottom of his beer. Its twin dozed on one of his hairy feet.
Shoals of indistinct fey creatures fled my feet as I entered the kitchen. I made a beeline for the old May-tag refrigerator, opened it, and ignored the weird mantis-like creatures lurking behind the pickle jar and a Taco Bell bag. A spiky little fey that looked like a cross between a mushroom and a puffer fish flopped away from the light as I pulled open the vegetable crisper. Bingo. Beside some flaccid carrots was a Ziploc bag of shredded cheddar; a full two-thirds of the cheese was mottled with green-gray Penicillium mold.
I grabbed the cheese and found a discarded Popsicle stick and disposable lighter in the huge pile of dirty dishes and debris on the kitchen counter.
“Better get a bowl, too. Some garlic wouldn’t hurt, either,” Pal said.
I found a relatively clean glass mixing bowl in one of the cabinets and some garlic powder.
All right, let’s get this done, I thought to Pal. I’d very much like to not be seeing the fey anymore. It’s kind of hard not to stare at them. What would they do if I bothered them?
“I’m surely not an expert, since I’ve never been able to see them myself,” Pal admitted. “They share our plane but are not fully part of it. We’re furniture to them, but nobody really knows how they perceive the world we interact with. Still, I’ve heard that in their perception, sentient attention is the equivalent of a strong spotlight shining down on them. They tolerate that sort of thing for a little while, but then they’ll look for ways to make the light go away.”
Lovely. I left the kitchen and went back into the living room.
Mikey glanced over at me, then belched and set his empty beer down on the coffee table. The tentacle daisy leaped off the bottle at the last second and scuttled away to hide somewhere on the underside of the table.
“Y’know, if your face wasn’t all fucked up, and if you wore some makeup and did something with your hair; you might be kinda hot,” Mikey said, sounding bored.
I felt a sudden surge of anger rise through the haze of my fever. “And I might be vaguely attracted to you, if you weren’t such a dick.”
I said that last part with a lot more force and venom than I’d intended.. . and it didn’t come Out in English.
“Oh, Jessie,” Pal sighed.
I’d turned Mikey into a giant, saggy, sweaty smelling uncircumcised penis lolling on the couch. His hairy feet, looking ridiculous and tiny, stuck out where the testicles should have been. The tentacle daisy still clung to his toes, unperturbed.
Huh. This magical kick I’m getting from the fever is kind of handy, I thought to Pal.
“Your increased power is simply a temporary survival mechanism,” he replied. “You’re probably just a few hours from incapacitating delirium and coma.”
Oh, goody.
Kai came down the stairs; he stopped dead on the landing when he got a clear view of the couch.
“Dude … that’s just wrong,” he croaked. “Is—is that Mikey?”
I nodded calmly. “He seems to be… in his element.”
“Why did you do that?” Kai sounded close to panic.
I decided I felt too sick and tired to apologize for anything I had done or was going to do that day. “That’s what he gets for being a prick to me.”
“But… but he ain’t got no mouth! Or nose! How can he breathe like that?”
I hadn’t considered the respiratory consequences of turning somebody into giant genitalia.
How is he able to breathe like that? I asked Pal.
“He’s able to breathe just fine,” Pal assured me. “You didn’t really turn him into a penis.”
I didn’t? He sure looks like a gargantuan wang to me.
“I believe you just put a perceptual charm on him. Anybody who looks at him thinks he’s been transformed. He thinks it, too, or at least he thinks he can’t speak or get off the couch. No harm done unless he needs to urinate or defecate while he’s lying there, and honestly given the state of the couch I doubt anybody else living here will much notice if he does.”
If it’s just a Perceptual thing, shouldn’t I be able to see through it myself? Especially since I’m seeing the fey all over everything?
“Well, no, it doesn’t work that way,” Pal replied. “If a chair was painted red, it’d look red to you whether you were the painter or not, right? You could certainly cast a charm you could see past, but that would generally require an incantation with some conscious thought and planning put into it.”
Huh. How easily do you think I can remove the charm?
“Obviously you didn’t exert a lot of magical energy on this, so I’d say it should be fairly easy to reverse,” Pal replied. “It might even wear off on its own after a while.”
Cool.
I turned toward Kai. He had purple starfish riding in his dreadlocks. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’m having a craptabulous day, and I could use some help. So if you help me for a couple of hours, I’ll put Mikey back to normal.”
Kai paled. “Okay..
I led him upstairs to my room. The two flights winded me terribly, and bright spots bloomed in my vision.
“You okay?” Kai asked as I leaned against the door to catch my breath.
“Not so much, no,” I replied. “But I’m gonna fix that.”
I handed him the bowl with the spell ingredients and opened my door. “Please wash your hands, and then get the Leatherman tool out of that pile of stuff over there.”
“Whoa!” Kai exclaimed, looking around the room. “When did you bring all this in here?”
“I had it with me when I arrived last night. It was in that cup of soda.”
“No way!”
“Yes, way. After you’ve washed your hands and gotten the Leatherman out of the package, I need you to carve that Popsicle stick into little slivers in the bowl. And then I need you to burn the slivers down to ash, then knead the ashes, the moldy cheese, and a bunch of the garlic powder until you’ve got a paste.”
“Uh, okay. How much is ‘a bunch’?”
I eyed the jar lying atop the bag of cheese. “About a third of what’s left in there. I’ll get you guys more when 1 have the chance.”
I walked over to my stuff pile and got the carton of Epsom salts. “I’ve got to take my bandages off and soak my arm for a little while before I do the spell. I look pretty gross under all this, so don’t freak out, m’kay?”
Kai looked lost. “Okay..
He went into the bathroom. “Whoa, you really cleaned in here!”
“Well, somebod
y had to,” I replied.
“Did you, like, use magic?” he asked as he started washing his hands.
“Yeah, I did.”
“Could you do this to the whole house?” he asked, excited.
“Possibly. Maybe. Let’s talk about that in a couple of days, all right?”
He shook the water off his hands, and we traded places. I eased the sling off and carefully unwound the bandages on my arm. A sour stench slid up my nose as I peeled off the last of the gauze. The stump was well and thoroughly infected. The puckered scar had split open and was leaking brown pus, and angry red streaks ran up my arm clear to my shoulder. The lymph nodes in my armpit felt like grapes sliding around under my skin.
Kai stared in horror at my arm, but apparently curiosity kept him rooted to the spot.
“So, like, what happened to you?” he asked as I closed the stopper on the sink and turned on the hot water.
“I got my arm chomped off by a demon,” I replied as I opened the carton and shook several ounces of Epsom salts into the steamy water. “Its blood burned my eye out of my head when I killed it.”
“Whoa, you killed a demon? Like from hell?”
“Well, it sure didn’t come from Cleveland.” I stirred the salts in the water with my fingers to dissolve them, then eased my stump into the basin. My nerves were so damaged by the infection I barely felt the heat. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the cool mirror.
“How do you kill a demon?” he asked.
“Depends on the demon,” I replied. “The one I dealt with took magic, a silver dagger, an4 a bunch of dumb luck.”
“Was it going to kill you?”
“It killed three guys in a parking garage, and it wanted to exterminate the entire planet. It probably wasn’t going to actually have the chance to kill anyone else besides me and Pal here, but we sure didn’t want to die.”
“Could you have, like, reasoned with it?” Kai asked.
“Not in this universe. It was about as reasonable as the black plague,” I replied.
“So, I have a question about this magic stuff…“
“Shoot.”
“In my physics class, my professor said that any kind of action takes energy. So where does the energy for magic come from?”
“Well, a chunk of the power for a spell always comes from the speilcaster. But that’s usually just another thing to use calories on,” I replied, shifting my arm. The warm salty water seemed to be drawing a lot of the crud out of my stump. “Strong spells take outside power, but there are all kinds of sources for magic. The kind you use depends of the type of magic you’re doing.”
“Like how?” Kai asked.
“I did some charms this morning that use heat from the air;” I continued. “That’s great on a hot day like today, but sucks when it’s cold out. That’s why haunted houses seem so chilly; poltergeists and wraiths tend to use heat to sustain themselves. Some spells use solar power … lots of full-moon rituals really source from reflected sunlight. Necromancers kill people or animals and use their life force. That’s really powerful magic, but it trashes your soul. On the other hand, a lot of the magic people like me perform uses ambient spiritual energy, and that usually doesn’t cost anybody anything.”
“What’s ambient spiritual energy?” Kai asked.
“In a way, it’s a lot like solar power, only it’s made by people. You know how the sun gives off a lot of energy just shining in space? We can use sunshine, or not use it, but it doesn’t matter to the sun. People are the same way. Concentrating, dreaming, hoping, loving, getting mad, getting excited, it all gives off a kind of energy that hangs like an invisible cloud in areas where there are a lot of people.”
“But what if you were out in the middle of nowhere? What would you use then?”
I shrugged. “There’s always something a Talent can use. Sun. Wind. Heat. There are creatures all over this house that you can’t see or touch, and they give off energy, too.”
Kai glanced around the room, looking a little uneasy. The purple starfish in his dreadlocks breathed silently. “So how do you use spiritual energy and stuff like that?” he asked.
“It’s not really a conscious thing if you’ve got magical Talent,” I replied. “You don’t have to think about metabolizing the Pepsi you drank to help you run down the block, right? You just do it, because that’s how you’re built.”
“Did you have to learn this stuff, or did it just sort of come to you?”
“Oh yeah, I had to learn a lot. I was a teenager before I had any clue I could do any of this,” I replied.
“Could you.. . could you teach me how to do some magic?” He bounced on his toes nervously.
Sophomores, I thought to Pal. They look so cute when they get all hopeful like that.
“Maybe,” I told Kai. “I’ve got kind of a lot on my plate right now, but when things settle down I can give it a shot. First things first, though: Why don’t you make the wood ashes and mix up the paste? I’m kinda gonna pass out soon if you don’t.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.”
Kai shaved and burned the Popsicle stick and made the paste while I kept soaking my arm. Soon he brought in an unappetizing orange-gray mush in the glass bowl.
“Fantastic,” I said. I lifted my stump from the sink, popped the drain, and gathered up a handful of the gritty, pungent paste. I closed my eyes and held the paste against the infected wound, beginning a chant much like the one I’d used to heal the wound from Smoky’s tail in the Riffe Tower.
As I chanted, the swelling in my arm gradually went down and the fever left my head. When I looked up again, the starfish in Kai’s dreadlocks had disappeared. I pulled the gooey handful away, shook it off into the toilet, and rinsed myself in the sink. My arm looked healthy and pink.
“See? Lots nicer than a trip to the emergency room, and quicker than a shot of penicillin,” I said. “Could you bring me a towel, the boxes of fresh bandages, and the antibiotic salve?”
“Sure.” Kai left the doorway and came back with the items I’d requested. I put salve on my scars, and Kai helped me put on fresh bandages and get my sling back on.
“I need to change the bandages on my head, too,” I said, “And make sure I haven’t got an infection started there, either.”
“Have you considered brushing your hair while you’re at it?” Pal asked drily.
Shush, I thought back. This whole bed-head thing I’ve got going is part of my new look.
“Oh, so this sweaty unkemptness is a ‘look’ now, is it?” Pal replied.
Well, I’m too poor and damaged to manage “pretty” or “fashionable,” so I might as well just go with “scary” or “eek, a witch!”
“Right now, it’s more like ‘plague victim.’ Seriously, brush your hair.”
Fine. “Hey, Kai, could you bring me my brush as well?” I began to unwind the bandages on my head.
“Okay,” Kai replied.
I’d gotten the bandages off when Kai returned. He flinched when I turned toward him to take the brush from his hand.
“Sorry,” I said. “I did warn you it was a bit gross.” I brushed out my hair and smoothed my unruly auburn locks in place behind my ears. My ruined face was indeed fairly horrifying, but didn’t look infected. I popped the ball out to check my eye socket. As far as I could tell, it was fine.
“Is that a Ping-Pong ball?” Kai asked.
“What can I say? My health plan sucks.” I slipped the ball back into my socket and put some of the salve on the worst parts of my face. Kai helped me with the bandages again, and soon I felt and looked quite a bit better.
“Give me a minute to change clothes, and then if you don’t mind, I need you to give me a ride up to Worthington. There’s a little errand I need to run. Won’t take long, I promise.”
“Uh, okay. I’ll meet you downstairs. .
Kai left, and I shut the door and dug out some fresh clothes while Pal got a snack at his bowl.
“The anathema counter-charm w
ill work best if you can get close to the little girl’s location and hand your aura off to somebody nearby,” Pal said as he crunched on his kitten kibble. “Can you sense where she is?”
I closed my eyes and let my mind wander away from my body. “Yes. I’m pretty sure I can find her.”
“Good. After that, we’ll need to get back here as quickly as possible to get the potion started.”
I shucked off my sling and sweaty clothes and put on fresh jeans and an olive-green T-shirt. It took me a couple of tries to recite Mother Karen’s shoelace-tying charm correctly, but in the end I got my sneakers back on. I stuck my much-used plastic bag, a pair of latex gloves, and the little bottle of hand sanitizer in my pocket, just in case.
“Let’s do this thing,” I said to Pal. He hopped up on my shoulder and we went downstairs to meet Kai.
chapter fourteen
Potion Motion
I splurged on some burgers and sodas for Kai and myself at a nearby McDonald’s drive-through, and then I directed him up High Street to Worthington.
Once we got onto the side streets, I gave directions with my eye half closed as I concentrated on the little girl’s location. “Take a left when you can, then go straight for a while… okay, take another left, and then… stop.”
The girl was close by. I looked around, and across the street was the Mon Petit Chou Child Care. Bingo.
“I need to go into that day-care center, but don’t park right in front. Please go around over there to the side where it’s sort of out of sight.”
Kai parked in the shade of a tall elm and killed the engine.
“I won’t be gone very long. Pal, you stay here with him, please.”
Pal climbed down off my shoulder, and I got out of the car and walked across the street and through the day care’s parking lot toward the front doors. Cooper and I had talked about having a baby in a few years once our living and work situations were a bit more stable. I dearly hoped we’d still have the chance to make a family someday. Mon Petit looked like a nice place, at least from the outside; I couldn’t see any kids from the parking lot but I could hear happy shrieks and laughter coming from the fenced play yard in the back.
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