Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  I put on my friendliest smile and pushed through the door.

  The young woman at the counter looked up. “May I help you?”

  “Yes, hi, my name’s Karen, and I was staying at home with my little girl—she’s just turned two—but I was in this bad accident recently and I just can’t keep up with her anymore. She’s staying with my sister, but that’s really not working out, so I’m looking for a good day care for her. Just for a couple of days a week.”

  The woman at the counter smiled at me pityingly. “Well, that’s certainly understandable. I can give you a tour if you’ll just give me your driver’s license—”

  “I lost it in the wreck; I haven’t got a replacement yet, sorry,” I said.

  “Do you have any other form of picture ID, like an old student ID?”

  “No, I’m sorry, it all burned up with my purse.”

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t let you look around without it.”

  I sighed. “I was afraid of that… oh well, I can come back after I’ve been to the DMV. Just hate dealing with the lines down there, you know? And the people are so grouchy. Do you have any brochures or anything like that I could take home to show my husband?”

  “Sure.” The woman brightened. “I can do that.” She pulled a glossy Welcome to Mon Petit Chou! brochure out of a cubbyhole behind the counter and folded up a Little Cabbages Newsletter to go along with it.

  “Thank you so much.” I took the papers and slipped them into my sling. I paused, hoping I looked queasy.

  “Is everything all right?” asked the young woman.

  “I’m a little… the medicine they gave me, it doesn’t, you know, sit right sometimes.” I made the universal motion for “projectile vomiting” with my hand. “I think I need to get to a toilet… is there a ladies’ room I could use?”

  “Sure, yes, go down the hall to your right, the staff toilet’s the first door on your left,” the woman said quickly, leaning back in her chair away from me.

  “Thanks so much.” I hurried down the hall to the single-toilet restroom and locked myself in. There was a small stainless-steel trash can with a step-open lid between the toilet and the sink. I fished out my plastic bag and one of the latex gloves, pulled the glove on with my teeth, pressed the pedal to open the lid, and started sifting through the trash.

  I quickly found a freshly used maxi pad, thoughtfully folded and wrapped in a layer of toilet paper. Setting the pad aside on the floor, I poked the baggie inside out. I picked up the pad through the bag and pulled it through, turning the bag right-side out again with the pad nestled neatly inside. I sealed the plastic zipper against the floor, then rolled my glove off against my jeans and tossed it in the trash. I stuck the bagged pad in my back pocket, flushed the toilet for effect, and left the restroom.

  “Thanks again!” I waved cheerfully to the relieved looking woman at the desk on my way out the door.

  “Mission accomplished,” I told Kai and Pal as I got back to the car.

  Can I wait until I get back to our room to perform the counter-charm? I wondered to Pal. It’ll freak poor Kai out something fierce if I whip out a bloody maxi pad here in the car and start chanting.

  “You have a little less than an hour before yesterday’s counter-charm runs out,” Pal replied. “You should be safe, unless Kai makes an unexpected stop.,,

  “Home, James!” I said. “I’ve got potions to make and spells to break.”

  Kai got us back to the house with thirty minutes to spare. Mikey was back to his old self on the couch, seemingly unaware that he’d been the biggest dick I or Kai had ever seen. I thanked Kai for his help, locked myself in the attic room, and foisted my anathema off on an OSU student who was supervising the children running amok in the play yard behind the day-care center.

  “Your aura looks fine,” Pal said after I finished the incantation and disposed of the ashes in the toilet. “Though having to do this every day will become tedious if this situation drags on much longer.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “So let’s get started on that dematerialization potion.”

  I started to gather the herbs and other ingredients together when Pal said, “Oh. We’ve forgotten the rat.”

  “That’s totally your department,” I replied.

  Pal sighed. “I suppose it is. I’ll see what I can find under the house.”

  I took Pal downstairs and sat in one of the battered lawn chairs beside the front door sipping a Gatorade while he humped down the creaky wooden steps to slip under the porch.

  A few minutes later there came a quick rustling, followed by a terrified squeak and a furious thrashing. Pal popped up shortly thereafter, his teeth buried in the neck of a small dead rat. He dragged the corpse up the stairs between his front legs. I collected the little rat in my plastic bag.

  “That should give you enough blood,” Pal said, seeming sheepish.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “It… it’s delicious,” Pal admitted. “I’ve never tasted anything as wonderful as that little rat.”

  “Well, see, there you go! Natural prey. Of course it tastes good to you. Nothing to be ashamed of,” I replied. “Let’s go back upstairs.”

  I set up the camp stove upstairs under an open window. Pal showed me how to mix the ingredients for the potion in the Pyrex saucepan and led me through the two hours of incantation to prime the raw slurry for brewing. Then I set the saucepan over the stove’s low propane flame and flopped down on my cot to have a rest.

  “So what do we do for the next twelve hours while that’s cooking?” I asked Pal. It was just past seven, and the low-hanging sun’s rays were long and golden through the trees outside.

  “We keep an eye on the pot and stove to make sure it doesn’t overcook, or overturn and start a fire,” he replied.

  “I should have stolen something to read,” I said, rubbing my good eye.

  “They probably have books downstairs,” Pal said. “They are students, after all.”

  “Hm. There’s probably nothing but current-semester textbooks and Sports Illustrated downstairs.”

  “Kai seems literate. Surely he has some Marx or a copy of The Motorcycle Diaries. Or you could practice your parakinesis. Regaining even part of the use of that arm would be quite handy, no pun intended.”

  I sat up. “Now, that’s a good idea.”

  I spent most of the evening and night alternately napping and trying to pick up and hold one of the empty plastic grape juice bottles with my phantom limb. By the time the potion finished brewing shortly after sunrise, I was able to pick up a bottle and carry it around for two minutes before I lost my concentration and dropped it.

  “That’s really quite impressive,” Pal said as I turned off the flame to let the potion cool. “If you keep that up, you’ll be able to eat with that hand again in less than a week.”

  “Is it supposed to be this color?” I asked, staring down into the pot of pinkish translucent potion. It smelled like rotting curry.

  “Well, the color varies depending on the liquid base, but for grape juice, pink is a good color,” Pal assured me. “Colorless is best, but you don’t get that with anything less than twenty-four hours of brewing.”

  “No time for that,” I replied. “This should give us two minutes of dematerialization per dose, right?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Is there a way to test it?” I asked. “I don’t want to go down there and find out this stuff doesn’t work.”

  “Yes. Once it’s cool enough, dip one of your fingers into the potion, quickly. Make sure your hand’s clean first.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then wait a couple of seconds and see if you can move your finger through nearby objects.”

  “Okay.” I washed and dried my hand at the sink, then went back to the potion pot and stuck my index finger in up to the second knuckle. The liquid was still quite hot; I yanked my hand away, then boggled as I saw that the skin on my finger had disappeared.


  “Burn yourself?” Pal asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied, fascinated by the sliding yellow tendons and pulsing blue blood vessels in my seemingly skinned digit. “But is it supposed to tingle?”

  “A little, yes.”

  I made a fist; my index finger went straight through my palm. “Oh, weird!”

  I pressed my finger into my thigh; it passed through my flesh as if it was air until my knuckle hit my skin. I wiggled my finger through the floor, the walls; after a minute or so, it became more difficult, and I started to feel the texture of the plaster and wood I was moving through.

  “You’d better stop now, or you’ll get stuck,” Pal warned.

  “Right,” I replied. I pulled my hand away from the wall, my skin visible again, and spread my fingers wide until I was sure the potion had worn off. “Well, it seems to work fine. Do I just bottle it up now, and.. . what? We can go back to the Warlock’s bar and check the place out?”

  “Certainly.”

  I let the potion cool a bit more, then poured it into the six plastic grape juice bottles and capped them tightly. I loaded the bottles, my extra bandages, medicines, the Leatherman, some clean clothes, and some snacks for me and Pal into my knapsack. The ferret climbed up to my shoulder and we headed downstairs.

  We walked to the stop on High Street and caught the next bus; we got off near the Warlock’s place just a little before 9 AM. Traffic nearby was still fairly heavy, but relatively few people were on the sidewalks at that hour, since almost everyone who had to be up in the morning was already ensconced at work.

  “He’s even more of a night owl than we are,” I said, taking a quick peek around the corner of a nearby building at the pulsing, horrible anathema sphere surrounding the bar. We were maybe fifty yards away. “He won’t even be awake at this hour.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Pal replied. “It would be pretty hard to sleep inside that sphere. It can’t be pleasant, though if he has any skill, he’s likely been able to buffer the effect somewhat.”

  “Right.” I fished one of the bottles out of my knapsack. “So we take this and run for it?”

  Pal nodded. “You’ll need to be closer, though, and start running right after you drink the potion so you have some momentum; it’s hard to get any speed going if you try to run after the potion takes effect. You’ll have maybe three or four seconds. While you’re enchanted, it will feel more like swimming, and you might sink through the ground. When you feel yourself coming out of it, try to jump into the air so you don’t get stuck in something when you rematerialize.

  “Give me the potion first,” he continued. “I’ve used it several times before, so don’t worry about me; I can hang on. The last of your enchantment should be enough to carry me through as baggage. Just focus on getting us into the empty space of a room and not the floor or a wall.”

  I set the bottle down on the pavement, secured the zips on my knapsack, then eased my arm out of its sling and through the other shoulder strap of the sack. I tightened the straps as best I could, then retrieved the bottle and gripped the cap in my teeth to unscrew it.

  I spat the cap aside and angled the bottle so Pal could drink from the wide mouth. My hand trembled. “Cheers.”

  “It will be fine,” Pal reassured me, shuddering as he lapped up the nasty pink liquid. “Start walking toward the sphere. Drink the potion as fast as you can, then start running.”

  “Okay, here goes nothing.” I strode down the sidewalk toward the sphere, trying not to look at it directly. I tipped the bottle back into my mouth and swallowed the bitterly foul solution in three big glugs. Almost immediately, my stomach cramped and began to tingle.

  I’m gonna throw up, I thought.

  “Don’t,” replied Pal, his voice strangely distant. “Surely you can keep it down for two minutes. Grit your teeth and run!”

  I ran. My stomach felt like it was full of angry buzzing bees, and the bees spread from my stomach to my intestines and liver and up my throat and the bees were in my brain and in my legs oh God I couldn’t feel my legs and the world around me looked strange and dark like the negative of a photograph—

  “Keep going! It’s not far now!” Pal said.

  —every cell in my body was vibrating, shimmying Out of phase with the world as my legs lost touch with the ground. I was swimming in a vacuum, my bee-filled stomach twisting, and then there was a blue flash and faint static shock as I passed through the anathema sphere, what was that, a wall? A wall, black lights, everything looked wrong, I was spinning, spinning into shining white earth—

  “Go up! Go up!” Pal yelled in my ear.

  I swam toward where I thought “up” was.

  “No, you’re still going down! Go the other way!”

  I turned myself over, starting to feel the faint texture of the soil and rock, and desperately swam up through the strata, through the damp basement, and popped up into the dimly lit barroom just as my body shifted back into proper phase—

  —and suddenly I was falling.

  chapter thirteen

  The Warlock

  I hit the polished wooden floor hard, cutting the inside of my lip on my front teeth. My vision didn’t clear right away, but my innards rebelled against both potion and sudden gravity and started heaving.

  “Here, use this.” Somebody set a plastic bucket down on the floor beside my head.

  I tried to say thanks but suddenly everything in my stomach was coming up and I just had time to get up on my hand and knees before I started vomiting, copiously and painfully. First came the potion, now dark and bitter as nightshade wine, then orange bile, then nothing. My body was racked with dry heaves a full three minutes after my stomach was empty.

  Finally, my innards relaxed, and I rolled away from the bucket onto my back, drenched in clammy sweat. The bottles in my knapsack dug uncomfortably into my ribs, but I didn’t have the energy to care.

  The Warlock stood over me wearing old black jeans and a black velvet bathrobe that was loosely belted beneath his thickly pelted chest. He carried an unopened dark glass bottle of ginger ale. His fingers were armored with silver rings, and on a silver chain he wore an oblong bronze pendant of a bas-relief sword against a shield. Where Cooper was wiry and smooth, the Warlock was burly and furry, but they both had the same curly black hair, sharp gray eyes, and quick smile.

  As I looked at him more closely, though, I realized he seemed sick: He was much paler than usual, his lips slightly blue, and his eyes looked sunken. His full beard and mustache were sprung with loose curls and wild hairs. It looked like he hadn’t trimmed or waxed them in days, and usually he was quite vain about his facial hair.

  “Looks like somebody’s been home-brewing demat potions,” the Warlock said, glancing into the bucket. “The question is, did you bring enough for the whole class?”

  “I’ve—I’ve got five doses left,” I coughed.

  “Good girl,” the Warlock said, flicking the metal cap off the bottle with his thumb and offering it to me. “This should make you feel a little better.”

  “Thanks.” I managed to sit up and took the bottle from him. The ginger ale was sharply sweet and cool, and felt wonderful going down.

  The Warlock frowned at the bandages on my face. “Did… have you lost your eye?”

  “Unfortunately, yeah. Why?”

  A terrible realization seemed to eclipse his face for a moment, but his expression quickly cleared. “It’s … nothing. I’ll tell you later.”

  He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Well, I’m glad to see Cooper’s been teaching you the good stuff, unless the potion was Spiderboy’s idea.” He jerked his head toward Pal, who was sitting on one of the bar stools, looking a bit woozy.

  “Spiderboy?” I asked, completely baffled.

  “Your familiar’s a quamo. If he were in his real form, he’d be a big arachnid, tall as me.”

  “This fellow is quite perceptive,” Pal admitted.

  “How did you know?” I asked the
Warlock.

  “When people come into my bar, I like to know exactly who they are,” he replied, then raised his hands to the rafters. “We seek, and magic almost always provides the solution. And speaking of knowing who everybody is—you’re not wearing your own aura, young lady. What’s up with that?”

  “Mr. Jordan put an anathema on me after the accident downtown. He doesn’t want me looking for Cooper. Pal showed me how to dodge the curse by trading spiritual profiles with other people.”

  The Warlock shook his finger at Pal in mock admonishment. “You’re a naughty one, aren’t you? Clever, but very naughty. Wouldn’t want to be you when your jailers get wise to what you’ve been doing.”

  The Warlock walked behind the bar and poured himself a tall glass of dark ale from the tap. He toasted me with the glass before he took a drink:

  “Here’s to our health.”

  He drained half the ale, set the glass aside, and said, “Tell me what happened downtown. Everything.”

  I got to my feet and sat down at the bar beside Pal. “I figured you’d heard all about it by now.”

  The Warlock shook his head grimly. “No, nothing, though of course I got some ideas. Coop and me, we’ve always had this connection, since before I can remember. Something big happens to either of us, the other feels it. So last weekend, I was in here working the room, making the new customers feel at home, when boom, I feel like I been hit by lightning, and I know Coop’s in trouble. But before I can do anything else, I’m down for the count. Opal gets me awake maybe half an hour later, but goons from the Circle Jerk are here herding my customers out the door. They’ve got a scroll from a Virt saying they’re putting the place under indefinite isolation. Won’t say why. Won’t say shit to me. They just clear out everybody but me and Opal, and then slap the sphere on the whole building.”

  The Warlock shook his head and took another long drink of his ale. “Phones don’t work, cable doesn’t work, can’t get anything but static on the radio. At least we got electricity and running water. They had a mundane kid drop some groceries in the front foyer yesterday, so I guess they don’t mean to starve us. Don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do if I run out of decent beer, though.”