Spellbent

by Lucy A. Snyder

  I was staring into the nearest aquarium, my face nearly against the glass. “Holy shit. These are homunculi.”

  The Warlock smiled. “Glad to see Cooper hasn’t been ignoring your classical education.”

  “How did you get these?”

  “Well, when you come right down to. it, it’s because me and my lady are hopeless slobs.” He laughed. “It’s not a story for the dinner table, that’s for sure.

  “Opal and I were down in this little place we have in the mountains about four months ago. Strong Earth magic site, though nothing like the Grove. Anyhow, she was on her period and really wasn’t in the mood for anything, so I ended up going into the bathroom to jack off—”

  “Wait, whoa. This has already gone way past the ‘too much information’ line,” I said.

  “No, really, this is important,” the Warlock insisted.

  “No, really, my lunch is going to make friends with your floor if you give me any more details,” I replied. “Just hit the highlights, if you feel that compelled to share this lovely story of yours.”

  “Well, there was some…“ He made swirling motions with his index fingers. “… mixing of male and female personal substances after we both forgot to flush, got the idea?”

  “God help me, I do.”

  “Okay. Not five minutes later, she got an emergency call from her sister in Gahanna. Her basement flooded, you know the drill. So we had to come back to the city.

  “We drove back down to the cabin the following weekend. Opal went into the bathroom. People five counties over probably heard her holler when she lifted the toilet lid and found the kids swimming around in there. I bailed them all out and put them in a couple of mason jars, then took them back up here and started buying aquarium supplies.”

  “That’s completely disgusting,” I said.

  “Yet kind of cool, you have to admit,” the Warlock said. “They’re coming along pretty well. Don’t know if it was something in the water up there, or the ‘shrooms we were taking, or what. We’ve tried to repeat the experiment—”

  “Details: do not want!”

  “—but no luck so far. So what we have is possibly all there will ever be, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. They seem to be developing sort of like regular human fetuses—they’re absorbing their tails, for one thing—but I don’t think anyone will confuse them with regular human kids once their eyes have opened and they’re ready to live on dry land. If they’re ever ready for land life.”

  The homunculi seemed to sense the Warlock’s presence, and they were crowding at the glass near him.

  “Looks like the kids are hungry,” he said, and pushed aside his robe so he could get into the pocket of his black jeans. He pulled out a steel penknife and a purple healing crystal, then lifted the covers of the aquaria, drew the blade across his palm, and squeezed thick drops of blood into the water. The homunculi jostled one another to drink the Warlock’s blood.

  “They like yogurt, too,” he said as he sealed the wound on his hand with the crystal. “But they like my blood best.”

  “So you’re planning to use some of them in a sacrifice ritual?”

  “If I have to. I don’t want to, understand that.” He turned to face me. “They won’t take Opal’s blood anymore; they’re my kids. I don’t know how long they’d last on yogurt and river weed. If I die, a lot of them are-gonna die, too.”

  chapter sixteen

  Manic Mechanic

  The Warlock led me and Pal down to the basement garage. Opal, a tall, attractive, whip-thin woman with a shock of short bleached white hair, was hunched over the silver Land Rover’s huge engine. She wore a grubby blue mechanic’s jumpsuit and was smoking a clove cigarette and muttering a steady stream of automotive obscenities. I had often thought that if the Warlock and Opal were alcoholic beverages, the Warlock would be a smooth but strong stout-and-cider Snakebite and Opal would be a shot of Strawberry Surprise—the surprise being that the high-proof drink contained pure mouth-torturing capsaicin and not the slightest bit of strawberry, despite its pretty pink appearance.

  I didn’t doubt that they loved each other, in their way. But their open relationship got so volatile at times that I’d asked the Warlock on one of our Panda Inn evenings how he and Opal had managed to share space for so long. He’d given me and the rest of the bar a long, drunken, pornographic oratory. Apparently Opal fucked like a mink in heat and as far as the Warlock was concerned, any amount of her crazy, caustic behavior paled in comparison.

  Opal held a replicator wand, and she’d created a marble-sized version of the anathema sphere at the tip. The concrete floor was littered with tools, greasy shop rags, plastic vials of spell ingredients, and crushed cans of Diet Mountain Dew.

  “Hey, uh, baby—” the Warlock began.

  “What what WHAT ALREADY?” Opal screeched. The mini sphere at the wand’s tip went out. “Can’t work with you breathing up my coo—oh, hey, Jessie, ‘sup?”

  I pointed to my knapsack. “I got demat potion. Enough for everybody. But it expires tomorrow morning around seven o’clock.”

  “Booyah!” Opal yelled. “You got any Einhorn powder? Gotta have that. Gas tank’s gonna blow the moment we hit the sphere if I don’t have that.”

  “I have some back at the house—”

  “Rock. Go get it. Get me some cigs, too. Down to my last pack. Jakarta Blacks.” Opal spoke hard and fast as a machine gun. She looked at the Warlock, irritated anew. “Told you we should stock those in the machines.”

  “I can’t go get it right now—I’ve got to go up to Worthington first,” I replied. “I can bring the powder with me when I come back.”

  “Hm. Guess I can wait. Rather have it sooner. Gas tank’s easy if I got the Einhorn; the electrical’s making me nuts.”

  “Why don’t you take a break, try to get some sleep, baby?” the Warlock asked gently.

  Opal sucked her clove down to the filter, crushed it against the sole of her left combat boot, and flicked it aside. “Sleep’s for the weak and sickly.”

  “Yeah, and if you don’t get some sleep, you’re gonna be weak and sickly,” the Warlock replied. “Go on upstairs and lie down for a bit, will you?”

  Opal sighed. “Fine.” She walked over to a nearby workbench and sorted through the debris of parts and tools and manuals until she found a small notebook and a pencil.

  “Catch,” Opal said, throwing them to the Warlock. “Make a list. Cigs. Coffee beans, French roast. Couple of other things I’ll be needing, too…“

  I gave two bottles of the potion to the Warlock for his and Opal’s use in case something bad happened to me, and then Pal and I left the bar. My dematerialized trip through the sphere went slightly better this time, and after I quit heaving into a nearby trash can, I caught a cab back to Kai’s house. He was sitting on the living room floor in gray gym shorts and a faded Scooby-Doo T-shirt eating Corn Pops and watching cartoons when I came through the front door.

  “Hey, G.G., ‘sup?” Kai asked sleepily.

  I pulled one of the Warlock’s twenty-dollar bills out of my pocket and held it toward him. “Mind driving me around to a couple of places?” I asked. “It can wait until you’ve finished breakfast and stuff.”

  “Uh, sure,” he replied, taking the twenty from my outstretched hand. “Where we going?”

  “I just need to go back to the place you took me yesterday, and to a grocery store, and then you can drop me off in Victorian Village if you don’t mind.” I paused. “Listen. I gotta go do this thing tonight, and.. . well, I might not be coming back. After tomorrow, if it’s been more than, say, a week and you haven’t seen me, just figure I’m gone for good. You can have what’s left of my stuff upstairs; it’s not much, but there’s a little refrigerator up there you could sell or use or whatever. Oh, yeah, there’s a bottle labeled VHDN in the fridge—don’t just throw it in the trash, or it might explode and catch the house on fire. Safest thing to do is to flush it down the toilet a spoonful at
a time. Don’t dump the whole thing down at once, or it could explode in the plumbing.”

  “Oh. Explode.” Kai looked dazed. “Uh, when you say you’ll be gone for good… what do you mean?”

  “My… best friend is in some trouble. I’m going to go try to bail him out, but I stand to get into just as much trouble as him if I get caught,” I replied.

  “Are, like, the cops after you?”

  “Not exactly… it’s more that I might have to keep an appointment in Samarra,” I replied darkly.

  “Oh. Is that, like, in Thailand?”

  I winced inwardly and bit my lip. “No. Strictly speaking I think it’s in Iraq.”

  “No way! That’s, like, totally dangerous. Be careful out there, G. G.”

  “As careful as possible, trust me.”

  I retrieved the Einhorn powder and a few other herbs from my attic room, then went downstairs to meet Kai. He drove me back up to the day care center and waited in the car with Pal while I left to find a new tissue sample.

  As I walked across the parking lot to the front doors, I saw the same young receptionist sitting behind the front desk. I belatedly realized that my previous bluff wasn’t going to work twice, and I still didn’t have any identification.

  “Hello again!” the woman said. “Did you get your driver’s license replaced?”

  “Yep, sure did.” I smiled at her as I approached the counter, wracking my brains to figure out what the heck I was going to do.

  Then I spied a dead leaf that had blown inside. It was lying on the floor against the bottom of the counter.

  “Let me get my ID out for you—oh, darn it, my shoe’s come untied,” I said, bending down to grab the leaf. “My husband ties my shoes for me when I leave, but this pair’s always coming undone. I need to get some loafers, or something with Velcro.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined the veins pulsing quietly inside the receptionist’s pert nose. Whispered an old word for “hemorrhage” as I snapped the leaf’s stem.

  “Oh!” I heard the receptionist exclaim.

  I straightened up. Blood was spilling from the young woman’s nose, down her chin and neck, and onto her pretty white blouse. I felt a pang of guilt; her clothes were probably ruined, and they didn’t look cheap. The receptionist seemed to shake off her shock, then grabbed handfuls of Kleenex from a nearby dispenser and pressed them to her face.

  “Oh my goodnez,” she said. “Dis has nebber happened to be before. Maria! I godda bad nosebleed an’ godda go do de res’room—cub help dis lady!”

  “Okay, be out in a sec,” Maria called from what I presumed was an interior office.

  The receptionist didn’t wait for Maria; she pushed up from her seat and hurried down the hall. I peeked over the ledge. Drops of the woman’s blood had spattered on a couple of brochures; I snatched one up and headed back to the car.

  Kai drove me to a small grocery store on North High in Clintonville to get the odds and ends on Opal’s list. Kai agreed to go to the pizza shop with me and help carry the pies back to the Warlock’s bar. I left Antolino’s pizzeria with Kai following close behind, the three medium pizza boxes stacked in his arms. I rounded the corner toward the bar, and the red glow of the anathema sphere spiked into my retina like an ice pick.

  “Ugh.” I flinched and looked away.

  Kai nearly ran into me. “What’s the matter?”

  “Do you see that bar up ahead? Lingham Liquors?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you see anything weird around the building?”

  Kai looked puzzled. “No, why?”

  “Long story. Can you.. . can you go through the glass doors, put the pizzas on the cigarette machine in the foyer, and ring the bell on the second set of doors that goes into the bar?”

  “Uh, sure, I guess . .

  Kai walked past me toward the bar. I couldn’t watch to see what happened when he crossed the sphere’s barrier. He came back a couple of minutes later, empty-handed.

  “All done,” he said. “Is there something I’m missing here?”

  “Did you feel anything when you went up to the front door?” I asked him, then thought to Pal, He should have felt something if he had any sensitivity, right?

  “Right,” Pal replied from my shoulder.

  Kai shook his head, looking puzzled. “Like what?”

  “A headache, or chills, or maybe just a case of the heebie-jeebies,” I replied.

  He shook his head again. “No, nothing.”

  “Then there’s nothing for you to worry about,” I said. I extended my hand to him. “Listen, if I don’t see you again, it’s been nice meeting you. Have a good life. If I do see you again, I probably won’t be able to help you learn any magic, but I’ll clean the house for you, how ‘bout that?”

  Still looking supremely confused, Kai shook my hand. “Okay, G.G., take care of yourself. See ya later, I hope!”

  Kai went back to his car, and I ducked into a nearby alley so Pal and I could take another dose of the demat potion.

  After I got over my rematerialization sickness in the women’s room of the bar, I checked the front entrance and discovered that the pizzas were still sitting on the cigarette machine. I brought them inside a pie at a time, set them on the bar, and went upstairs to the apartment. The door was open, and the Warlock and Opal were standing in the living room, arguing.

  “I’m not letting you go out there by yourself!” Opal declared. “I’m coming with you. End of story.”

  “Baby, come on, I really think it would be better if you stayed here and watched the critters,” the Warlock protested.

  “This goes right, we’re only gone overnight,” she replied. “The kids and the cats can deal.”

  “But if this goes wrong, we could be gone forever,” he warned.

  “If that happens, I wanna be with you!”

  I cleared my throat from the doorway. Between the Warlock and Opal, they’d surely had sex with a quarter of the Talents in Columbus. “There must be somebody you could call to come critter-sit once you get outside the sphere.”

  The Warlock looked at Opal. “Well, there’s Oakbrown…“

  Opal shook her head. “Couldn’t cook a demat to save his own life. And the Jizz Kids freak him out. Wouldn’t even go in the room. Mariette?”

  “She’s not talking to me right now,” the Warlock replied, looking embarrassed.

  “How come?” Opal asked, frowning.

  “I kinda put the moves on her boyfriend, and he didn’t turn me down. He said she’d be cool with it, and.. . well, she wasn’t.”

  “Then Rosko?” Opal asked.

  “The last time he was up here, a ring of mine went missing. I don’t trust him not to shop through our stuff.”

  “Hey, I got your Einhorn powder, and the pizzas are getting cold downstairs,” I said. “Mother Karen would probably come house sit, but Jordan put a geas on her and house-sitting might violate that. There’s a mundane kid named Kai I could call… he’d probably be able to look after the place for a while.”

  The Warlock frowned. “The sphere’s strong enough to hurt a lot of mundanes.”

  “Not this kid,” I replied. “He brought the pizzas up to the front door and didn’t even get a twinge.”

  “He reliable?” Opal asked.

  “So far he seems pretty darn reliable for a pot-head,” I replied.

  “There’s no way that would work Out.” The Warlock shook his head. “Even if he follows directions, even if he shows up right when he’s supposed to, no mundane’s gonna be able to take care of the kids properly. Not even if he’s a science whiz or veterinary student, which I’m guessing this guy is not. There are just too many weird little details to watch out for.”

  “Would a random Talent really be any better, then?” I asked. “You said a whole bunch of the kids died while you were trying to get their needs figured out. Considering all of what’s going on, is there anyone you could really bring in? Could anyone realistically take care of them with jus
t some written directions and crossed fingers?”

  “No,” the Warlock replied, his eyes downcast.

  Opal sucked on her cigarette noncommittally.

  “Then it seems to me that you’ve got to stay here to look after the family, Opal,” I said.

  Opal turned on me, scarlet-faced and scowling. “No way, I—”

  “Look, I know you don’t want to lose your man, believe me, I know!” I shouted back, meeting her fury. “But Cooper is the Warlock’s only brother, his very own flesh and blood, and he is surely no less deserving of his love and help than you are!”

  Opal was still shaking her head. “I can’t—”

  “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears,” I said, exasperation making my tone harsher than I’d have liked. “Tell me how you’re going to keep the kids from dying if you come with us. Tell me how you’re going to come with us and single-handedly protect your man from everything Jordan might throw at us. If you can’t tell me that, tell me how you’re going to leave the Warlock here and lead me to the farmhouse. Answer any one of those and we’re good. Otherwise, the best thing is for you to stay here and watch the kids. And I promise you, I will do all I possibly can to keep the Warlock safe.”

  Opal sucked her cigarette down to the filter. “Fine,” she replied tightly. She almost looked like she was going to start crying. “I’ll… I’ll stay here. But you—” She turned toward the Warlock and shook the remains of her cigarette at him “—you promise me you won’t get yourself killed. Promise!”

  He crossed his heart. “I swear I’ll do my best.”

  “Okay.” Looking miserable, Opal tossed her spent cigarette into a nearby pile of butts. “Let’s go eat some goddamn pizza.”

  chapter seventeen

  Mysterious Ocularis

  I took a nap after lunch on one of the smoky leather couches in the dark lounge and had Pal poke me awake when it was three thirty according to the bar clock. We went into the ladies’ room to dump my anathema on the receptionist at the day-care center. I hoped it wouldn’t bring the young woman any lasting bad luck.