Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  I shuddered to think how much he’d been consuming if he was in any danger of drinking his own bar dry. “They didn’t tell you anything?” I asked. “I thought they, you know, had to tell you something before they put you under house arrest or whatever this is supposed to be.”

  The Warlock shrugged. “I’m no poster boy for upstanding citizenship. Only the good kids get niceties like legal rights when serious shit goes down, because the Circle Jerks know they can scare the good kids into being useful to them. Us malcontents just keep being a pain in their butts no matter what. Jordan made it clear years ago he only tolerates me because everyone likes my bar. So tell me, what the hell happened to make him change his mind?”

  We both had two more drinks apiece as I told him my story. When I finished, the Warlock looked grim.

  “Not surprised Jordan’s been leaning on you like that. Good for you for not caving. I wasn’t sure you’d have it in you to fight back if something like this happened,” he said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache.

  I wasn’t sure if I should be offended or not. “You know what’s happened to Cooper, don’t you,” I said.

  “I have… suspicions, yeah,” the Warlock replied.

  “Tell me,” I insisted.

  The Warlock wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I gotta go to the little boys’ room first.” He left his seat behind the bar and retrieved the bucket from the middle of the floor. “I’ll be back in a few minutes… if you guys are hungry, there’s plenty of stuff for sandwiches in the fridge.” He gestured toward the kitchen behind a set of swinging doors, then turned and went down the hall to the men’s restroom.

  “That man’s rather frightened,” Pal said.

  “That’d be a first,” I replied. “Nothing scares the Warlock.”

  “Well, this most certainly has,” Pal said. “I can smell it all over him.”

  I finished the last of my third bottle of ginger ale and set it by my other empties. “So, you’re a giant spider.”

  “Well, that’s an oversimplification. We’re not spiders; we bear only a superficial resemblance to arachnids—”

  “Eight legs? Lots of eyes? Breathe through your abdomen? Little pinchy mouthparts?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Dude. You’re a spider.”

  “This isn’t fair. I haven’t once given you a hard time about being a hairless water ape,” Pal said.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry, but… spiders are completely inhuman.”

  “I never claimed to be human, did I?” Pal replied testily.

  “Yeah, but.. . but we get along really well. Well, now, anyway. You’re sympathetic, you understand me… how’s that possible if you’re really a big spider alien?”

  Pal sighed. “Jessie, I’ve had practice. You’ve been alive for a little over two decades—I’ve been a familiar for more than three centuries. Don’t you think I could learn a little something about human psychology and culture in all that time? And, well.. . it’s really not that hard to think and feel like a mammal once you’ve occupied their bodies for a while. Sometimes it’s rather hard to remember what it was like to live in my true form.”

  “Won’t it be weird when you finally get to go back to your own body and your own people?” I asked.

  Pal shifted uncomfortably. “Yes. I imagine I’ll have an adjustment period. Sometimes I’m… I’m not sure I can go back. I didn’t exactly fit in even before I was arrested.”

  He shook himself and bounced on the bar stool as if he was trying to cheer himself up. “Ah well! I can certainly find a position in academia eventually. I’m sure one of my nestmates will give me a place to stay until I can find a suitable situation.”

  The Warlock came back to the bar and stowed the rinsed-out plastic bucket on a lower shelf.

  “You were saying you had suspicions about what’s happened to Cooper?” I said.

  “Yeah, I was.” The Warlock poured himself another ale, looking troubled. “Did Coop ever tell you about our childhood?”

  I shook my head. “Not much. He said you two were raised in foster homes, and I got the feeling that he didn’t like talking about it, so I never pressed him.”

  “Okay, then.” The Warlock took a long drink before he said anything else. “Coop was maybe six or seven, and I was about nine months old. A sheriff’s deputy found Coop carrying me down a back road in Licking County, about eight miles outside Cedar Hill. We were filthy, thirsty, and Coop had near-total amnesia—he didn’t know anything but his own name. He didn’t have anything but the clothes on his back, and I didn’t have anything but a diaper and this on my neck.” He touched his sword-and-shield pendant.

  “The last time we talked about this, Coop still said that he couldn’t remember a thing from his life before he was walking down that road. The story goes that he freaked out when the child psychologist was talking to him at the sheriff’s station and Coop set the room on fire. The local Talents got involved after that, and got us out of there. They figured out that we were brothers, but didn’t think Coop and I had the same father, so I was John Doe for a long time.

  “That’s why I just go by Warlock—I figure if I can’t use my given name, might as well call myself what I am and nothing more.”

  “Couldn’t they use a spell to find out who your parents were?” I asked.

  “That’s where the Circle Jerks and our foster folks got suspiciously hazy,” the Warlock replied. “Anytime I asked, they just hemmed and hawed about it. Coop—he just flat didn’t want to know. That pissed me off for a long time, till I got a bit older and figured out that some things really are best to let lie. But when I was sixteen, I was mad that the people around me were lying to me, so I started trying to find out on my own where we’d come from.

  “I got hold of some old spell books and tried doing divination spells on my blood to trace my lineage. But no matter what I tried, I just couldn’t get the magic to work. So then I tried to find a diviner to do the spells for me, but everybody wanted way more money than any teenager could come up with, or they told me they didn’t have time, or whatever. One way or another, I got the brush-off when they figured out who I was.

  “So I started doing mundane detective legwork as best I could. I didn’t get any answers—I kept running into dead ends and locked doors. The only thing I found was a newspaper story in the Cedar Hill Ally from the same day the deputy found us on the road. The story talked about a fire in the woods, and a farmhouse the firefighters found out in the middle of nowhere that had burned straight to the ground. I figured out that the fire was less than three miles from where we’d been picked up, so I decided I’d go Out there myself and have a look around.”

  The Warlock took another long drink from his glass.

  “So what did you find out there?” I asked.

  “It took me a while to find the place,” the Warlock replied. “It’s far out in the hills in a tangle of woods and dirt roads that nobody’s ever going to pave. But I knew it the moment I saw it: a half-acre clearing, still charred and lifeless after fifteen years, with the burned wreck of a house and stone-lined basement out in the middle. I took one step onto the bare dirt and the evil of the place hit me like a punch in the gut, and before I knew it I was back in my Mustang burning rubber to get back to Columbus.

  “I didn’t sleep right for months after I went to that place. I don’t know what happened there, but it was very, very bad, and Coop and I were part of it.”

  The Warlock was silent for a moment. “I quit looking for answers after that. Scared, I guess. But I came to realize I have certain… shortcomings when it comes to magic. Dirty gray and red magic I’ve always been good at, but the high-end white stuff has always been hard for me. Never been able to heal for shit; if it weren’t for Opal, I’d be dead from a pickled liver by now.”

  “Is she any good at regrowing arms or eyes?” I asked, hopeful.

  The Warlock shook his head. “She’s good with your typical bar fight injuries because, surprise, th
at’s what we get around here. If your arm was busted she could fix it, but complex regeneration’s a little more than she’s had to deal with. Sorry.”

  “No problem. Thought I’d ask the obvious,” I replied, pushing down a sudden swell of frustration. “So what’s the deal with ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’? Cooper’s always hated that song like crazy.”

  The Warlock shook his head. “Can’t say I like that tune much myself… makes me want to puke every time I hear it. I don’t know why. But I’m sure it’s because of what happened to us. About ten years ago I decided to get myself an in-depth spiritual exam, and I didn’t get half the answers I was looking for… but I did find out I’m missing a chunk of my soul.”

  I was boggled. “How can you be missing a part of your soul?”

  “Trauma. Black magic. Probably a mix of both,” the Warlock replied. “I’m not missing a big piece, mind you, or I wouldn’t much seem like a human being. But it was enough to screw up my ability to use white magic from the get-go, because it makes me look like a demon to the spirits that be.”

  “Do you have any idea where the rest of your soul is?” I asked.

  “Based on the dreams I’ve been having lately, I’m pretty sure the rest of my soul is in a hell. I think Cooper’s in there, too. All of him. I got the feeling that his getting dragged in there was inevitable if it didn’t happen during his life, it’d happen when he died. You get touched by something that turns into a hell, it’s not gonna let you go easy. It’s probably got my number, too, and it’s just waiting for me to screw up a big spell or die. I know damn well that if I try to go rescue him, I’ll be just as stuck as he is.”

  I thought of the Wutganger and wondered whose soul it had been a piece of. “That demon I fought downtown—”

  “Not mine,” the Warlock replied. “That I’m very sure of.”

  He paused. “I love my brother, Jessie, I do. But. I can’t go after him. I just can’t. I’d lay down my life for him if I thought I stood a chance of helping him, but I’m Mr. Snowball here. And.. . there are things worse than dying. Even if it’s inevitable.. . I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”

  “You don’t have to go after him,” I replied. “I’ll do it. I’ll bring him home, one way or another.”

  “Jessie, this is hell we’re talking about. There are lots of hells in this universe—anybody who dies with a big load of guilt or hate’s just as likely to create their own as they are to pass on to the Great Beyond—but the one thing they’ve all got in common is that they’re worse than most people can possibly imagine. You go looking for Cooper—even supposing you don’t get killed right away by whatever’s in there, supposing you get out alive—you’ll be changed by it. Cooper will have been changed by it. Your lives will not be the same. You don’t want to do this, trust me,” he finished, not really sounding like he thought he’d be able to talk me out of anything.

  “I can’t leave him down there,” I said. “I can’t live with myself knowing I could have done something, but wasn’t brave enough to try. I should have helped my aunt Vicky, but I totally failed her; I can’t do that to Cooper. I have to do this. Can you at least help me find a way into where he’s trapped?”

  “Yeah. I… I can find that field again. Opening a portal there shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “You’ve done portals before?” I asked.

  “No… but the barrier between that hell and our world is precious thin out there.”

  The Warlock shivered and pulled his robe closed, looking even sicker than he had before, and I finally put two and two together.

  “You’re spiritually bound to Cooper, aren’t you?” I asked. “If he dies, you die.”

  The Warlock had gone a shade paler, but he forced a smile. “Which is good news, right? I’m still up and around, so that means hell hasn’t killed him yet. And … his death is no guarantee of my death. There are… measures I can take.”

  He fingered the sword-and-shield pendant at his neck.

  My mouth went dry, thinking of Mr. Jordan’s story of how my mother saved me from cancer. The Warlock, for all his fighting and dodgy deals and insatiable appetite for sex, had always claimed he never committed nonconsensual violence. He never even took a familiar because he said he didn’t believe in taking advantage of those who’d been forced into magical servitude.

  “What kind of measures?” I asked. “Necromancy? After all your talk of not hurting other people?”

  “Get off that high horse right now, Jessie,” the Warlock said, softly but with real menace. “You eat meat the same as me; you’re willing to accept the death of other creatures to support your own life.”

  “But not the death of people,” I insisted. “And I know good and well it would take nothing less than human sacrifice to stop what’s going to happen to you if Cooper dies.”

  He paused. “Come upstairs with me to our apartment. There’s something you should see. Both of you, I suppose,” he added, flicking his eyes toward Pal.

  Pal climbed up on my shoulder, and I followed the Warlock through the kitchen to a flight of polished wooden stairs that led to the second floor. The Warlock’s breathing became labored near the top. I could feel the wards on the stairs; uninvited visitors would be overcome with nausea and vertigo before they got even halfway up. His apartment entrance was certain to have a subtler and more deadly set of protections.

  He unlocked the door and led me in. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of tobacco, incense, and dirty liner boxes. He flipped on the living room light. The walls were decorated with paintings and framed sketches, mainly nudes of men and women I figured were some of the Warlock’s many lovers. He wasn’t a bad artist, either; though some of the drawings were a little flat, he had a real talent for capturing faces and expressions. The hardwood floors were littered with piles of books and drifts of dust and cat hair. A gray Persian stared at me irritably from the black leather couch beside the huge television set.

  “It’s in the back,” the Warlock said, beckoning me to follow him down a broad, arched hallway that was far too long to exist solely within the confines of the building. “You want anything to eat? I think Opal made some tuna salad.”

  “No, I’m good, thanks. Where is Opal, by the way?”

  “She’s down in the garage. The anathema sphere cranked her claustrophobia up to eleven, so she’s been messing with our Land Rover. She’s trying to get it magicked up so it can get through the sphere without frying out the electrical system or blowing up the fuel tank. I was glad she found something to keep her occupied, but I figured it wasn’t gonna help us much since we didn’t have the stuff on hand to keep the sphere from frying us. But now that you’re here, and you brought goodies, maybe all that work wasn’t for nothing.”

  “If she doesn’t finish, we can just shrink the Rover down and stick it in your pocket and walk out with it,” I said.

  “When you’ve got a new hammer, everything looks like a nail, doesn’t it?” Pal commented.

  Shush. It’s a most excellent hammer, I thought back.

  The Warlock looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “Surely you don’t think the sphere is the only barrier Jordan’s put up between here and there, do you?”

  “Well … no, I suppose not,” I replied, feeling sheepish.

  “Then I’d really feel much better about our chances if she got the Rover magicked up before we buzz on out of here to take you to certain death.”

  “Gosh, thanks, Warlock, that just warms the very cockles of my heart—have you ever considered selling the bar and starting a new career as a life coach?”

  “Y’know, I keep suggesting that to Opal, but for some weird reason she thinks it wouldn’t go over too well.”

  “Seriously, though,” I said, “the potions I made expire tomorrow around sunrise—do you think she’ll actually have the truck properly enchanted by then?”

  The Warlock nodded, looking distracted. “I have a feeling she’ll get it worked out in time. She’s been at it for thirt
y hours straight. She yelled at me to quit looking over her shoulder last time I went in there. Lady’s gotta have her space when she’s like that.”

  “You’re going to have to deal with your anathema before then,” Pal reminded me.

  “Oh, crap, yeah, my anathema,” I said. “I’ll need to leave to get some tissue in Worthington and do another counter-spell before four PM.”

  “Do you have enough potion to get in and out of here and still cover us?” the Warlock asked.

  “Yeah. I’ve got enough left—we should be good, as long as we’re out by tomorrow morning. Do you have forty dollars I can borrow for the cab?”

  “How ‘bout I give you sixty, and you can bring us back some pizzas for dinner. There’s a place called Antolino’s just around the corner. I want mine with anchovies and black olives. And here’s the room I wanted to show you.”

  He stopped and opened a door to a room lit only by the blue glow of fluorescent aquarium lights. Four rectangular hundred-gallon aquaria were lined up against the back wall, their aerators bubbling softly. At first glance, I thought the pink things crawling on the smooth rocks and swimming through the red and green algae fronds were some kind of salamanders or frogs.

  Then I took a closer look and saw that the big-headed, short-tailed creatures had a distinctly human form. The largest was maybe six inches long, the smallest perhaps four. Their lids were sealed shut over huge dark eyes, and their toothless mouths gulped air at the water’s surface or gummed juice from the algae’s fronds. Fragile webbing stretched between their tiny fingers.

  “We call ‘em the Jizz Kids,” the Warlock said. “We started out with, oh, I guess fifty or sixty. Now there’s two dozen. They were small as brine shrimp when we discovered them. Good thing they were that big, or Opal wouldn’t have even seen ‘em and would have flushed the whole batch. We lost over half in the first few weeks when we were trying to figure out what kind of environment suits them best. The water’s a little salty, about what you’d get in a river delta near the ocean, but pure ocean water dehydrates them. Had to special-order the river weed from Japan.”