Charming Blue

by Kristine Grayson

  She probably did.

  She kicked the socks into the mound of clothing that looked (and smelled) like a live thing. Through the half-open door she could see drawn curtains, a faint light, and an unmade bed. The television was on low, sending its light across the tangled sheets.

  She had a sense—and her senses were generally good—that no one else was in that room. (If they were, she had no idea how they could handle the smell of those clothes.)

  She pulled the door closed all the way, then closed the bathroom and closet doors. Then she surveyed the area.

  It was small and cramped, and it made her uncomfortable. It had been designed for the doors to stay open. With the doors closed, the suite’s flow got compromised.

  “Let’s step into the living area,” she said. “I’m not sure if I want to perform any kind of magic in a space this small.”

  Young Gregor almost hopped into the living area. Jodi looked down. The floor had the remains of pretzels and chips and half a dozen “meals” of dubious nutritious value.

  She felt a similar pity for him that she had felt for Blue after she had met him but before she really knew him. The reality of Young Gregor’s situation was that he had been heading the same way, into a lonely, confusing exile.

  She wondered if it was even harder to survive this sort of thing for those with Charm. Their magic required interaction with others, which meant that on some level, they needed people (of course, on some level everyone needed people, but she suspected folks with Charm needed people more). Blue had mentioned suicide; she knew he had considered it. She wouldn’t be surprised if the thought was lurking in the future for Young Gregor if she couldn’t help him reverse this spell.

  Young Gregor stood between the coffee table and the ugly industrial-strength couch, which bore an indent from his rather slender body. All around her, she saw examples of a life in hiding, a life filled with fear and confusion and hopelessness.

  Maybe that was why he let her in. Because she had once represented hope to him. Certainly that was why he was letting her help him now. He probably saw it—rightly so—as his only chance.

  Blue still stood near the door, his legs spread just a little as he braced himself. He seemed to believe that Young Gregor might try to leave, and it was pretty clear that if Gregor rushed Blue, Gregor wouldn’t get anywhere.

  In the past, Jodi had noticed how trim and well-muscled Blue was, but she had not realized until now how physically strong that made him. She kept seeing the possibilities on him, the possibilities for his future, and the lost opportunities of his past.

  But she couldn’t focus on Blue right now. She had to think of Young Gregor. Although she was grateful to Blue for getting Young Gregor’s real name. Jodi didn’t need it for the spell she was going to do, but if something went wrong, it was better to know who she had been working on than having to get help finding out his history.

  “All right then,” she said to Young Gregor. “You ready?”

  He didn’t look ready. He looked scared. And very young. She hoped that, at some point, Young Gregor would be able to drop the “young” from his name and live a real life. Maybe she could help with that.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” he said with obvious bravado.

  She smiled at him. “I’m not sure how this will feel. I suspect you’ll have some kind of pain. I’m going to try to keep it at a minimum.”

  He nodded once, nervously. Then he swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.

  She focused her vision so she could see his aura again. It was dark amber now, with sparks flying off it, almost as if it knew what she was going to do.

  Maybe it did. The aura was part of Young Gregor, and Young Gregor knew what she was about.

  This evil spell was insidious. It apparently had some defensive as well as offensive capability.

  She took a deep breath and raised her hands, touching the outside of his aura. It was hot and prickly, and whenever it sparked, it felt like she was trying to grab a Fourth of July sparkler.

  But she didn’t pull away. Instead, she brought her hands inward, compressing the aura a bit until the amber couldn’t hold its defensive shape. Through it, strands of blue appeared, pale and faint, but visible.

  With one hand, she took a strand of blue, and with the other, she grabbed some amber. Then she peeled them apart, the way you’d peel the protective layer off the sticky part of an envelope.

  The amber felt like the sticky part. It tried to cling to everything. She had to concentrate hard to separate it out. As she did, she followed the threads of amber with her eyes. The threads led back to a gigantic fat thing sitting in the middle of Young Gregor’s aura like a huge spider.

  She let out a small sound of recognition. This explained the corporeal nature of the spell, and it also explained how the spell could disappear over time. And how that the spell could make defensive action.

  The spell wasn’t the amber threads. It was the little creature, which was a magically created representation of the spell. It had rudimentary thought processes, and it had a kind of life as well.

  This spell was of a type called parasitic spells. Parasitic spells were particularly tricky to deal with, and very hard to see. Like so many real parasites, the spell could masquerade as many things just to remain alive.

  But she had chatelaine magic, and that made her deadly to parasites. Because parasites—bugs of all types, really—made a homey environment impossible. So she had not just the magic to defeat them, but the magical knowledge.

  She knew the worst thing she could do was grab the thing and pull. Her action might actually shred Young Gregor’s aura, killing him.

  Instead, she wrapped some of the blue of his aura around her wrist, so that she didn’t lose her place, then made a pistol with her thumb and forefinger. She shot a magical dart, filled with the magical equivalent of pesticide, at the creature.

  The dart hit the spider-thing directly in its underbelly. Eyes opened all over its body, dark, black eyes that she knew were not a part of the spider-thing at all. The spider-thing had amber eyes above some pincers. These black eyes looked at her, hard, and with complete fury.

  Fear twisted her stomach, but she didn’t move. Instead, she stared back at all of those eyes.

  The poison from the dart threaded through the creature’s body, bright green against its amber frame, illuminating all of the complex pieces of the spell. The green lasted only for a moment, then it turned black as parts of the spider-thing died off.

  The amber strands collapsed, broke, and vanished. Then the spider-thing exploded, sending bits of magic all over the room.

  Jodi ducked, but she felt some of it hit her. It burned, like some kind of toxic slime. The explosion sounded loud in the small room, but she wasn’t sure if she was the only one who heard it because of her magic.

  Then the black, the green, and the amber disappeared. Young Gregor’s aura retreated, like injured auras did, and Jodi smiled.

  Young Gregor’s gaze met hers. It was glassy. His lower lip moved. Then his eyes rolled back, and he collapsed.

  Chapter 45

  For the longest time, Jodi had stood with her hands spread six inches away from Young Gregor’s biceps. Then she had taken a step backward, tilted one hand, and raised the other, moving methodically.

  Blue had watched, trying not to hold his breath, trying to be prepared for whatever was about to happen. He had no idea what he needed to do. He wouldn’t know until he was needed. If he was needed.

  Sometimes it was impossible to see magic, even if you were magical. When someone experienced was doing their job, you simply had to trust them, to believe that they knew what they were doing, even though there was no way to see the actual work.

  Young Gregor had watched Jodi too, his body rigid. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead and had started running down his face. He had grown pale. He was already shaking, but it seemed to Blue that the shaking had gotten worse.

  He had clearly been in pa
in. Jodi had warned him that this might hurt, and it clearly did. Blue wasn’t sure how long Young Gregor could stand there, absorbing the pain. Jodi didn’t even seem to notice.

  But she wasn’t focused on Young Gregor. She was looking at his aura. She probably had no idea the effect her work was having on him.

  She moved her hands like she was weaving or conducting a very slow symphony. She was clearly working on something, and occasionally, little flashes of amber would appear.

  The amber didn’t look healthy to Blue. It looked… alive, almost. It felt malevolent. He had no idea how a color could be malevolent, but this one was.

  Then Jodi had raised her right hand, and with her thumb and forefinger, she formed a small gun. She moved her hand as if she had fired a gun, and Blue thought he saw a tiny green bullet disappear into the area in front of Young Gregor. A hole, small and black and smoke-filled, appeared in the air where the bullet had disappeared.

  Blue saw eyes in that hole, dozens of eyes, all glinting with that same malevolent blackness. They looked up as a unit, saw him, and a shiver ran through him.

  He recognized those eyes.

  He’d seen them in his sleep.

  Then they vanished.

  Young Gregor was twitching, his skin so pale that it had turned a bluish gray. Even his lips had turned blue.

  Then something popped, and Jodi ducked, and shards of amber flew at Blue. He couldn’t quite back away. They hit him like magical shrapnel, sending reverberations through him.

  Only, they hadn’t quite hit him. They hovered in front of him as if they were plastered against something. His aura? He didn’t know, since he couldn’t see auras.

  The gobs of amber turned green, then black, and slowly slid off whatever it was that had kept them in the air. Some of them hit the floor before they had turned completely black, and in those spots, they left little smoky slime trails that seemed to be burning through the surface.

  Jodi stood up slowly, looking at Young Gregor as if she was seeing him for the first time. Young Gregor couldn’t even look at her. His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes rolled back, and he passed out.

  At least, Blue hoped he had passed out.

  Blue hurried across the floor to catch the poor kid, but he didn’t get there in time. Young Gregor plummeted downward as his muscles failed him, his back and shoulders bouncing off the couch, his arms hitting the coffee table, his head landing with a thud on the floor.

  Jodi had tried to catch him too. She bumped into Blue, nearly knocking him aside.

  “Is he all right?” Blue asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jodi said. “I hope I didn’t kill him.”

  Then Blue understood why she had worked on Young Gregor first. She had been afraid that the power of the evil spell would kill whoever was hooked into it. Young Gregor’s spell was new, and disarming it had done this.

  What would disarming the spell enveloping Blue do?

  He couldn’t think about that. He moved the hair away from Young Gregor’s forehead. Young Gregor’s skin was clammy and he was shivering.

  He was clearly alive.

  “He’s breathing,” Blue said.

  “Oh, thank the Powers.” Jodi touched Young Gregor’s face as well, then cupped his chin.

  Blue eased Young Gregor upward, so that he wasn’t crumpled between the couch and the coffee table. Blue braced Young Gregor’s neck on the edge of the couch, then extended his legs outward. Young Gregor would be bruised and he probably would have a headache from his fall, but he would be all right.

  At least, physically.

  “Is he supposed to be out like this?” Blue asked.

  “It’s probably best,” Jodi said. “I really messed with his aura.”

  “What exploded like that?” Blue asked. “I thought I saw eyes.”

  Jodi looked at him sideways. “You saw that?”

  “Not much of it. Just a pile of eyes. And then a bunch of goo came at me. I think it’s eating through the floor over there.”

  She looked behind him. The smoking continued near where he had been standing. She got up and peered down at it. Then she ran her hand over the floor, and the smoking stopped.

  “This is one powerful spell,” she said.

  Blue could almost feel the weight of the spell gathering around him. He had been carrying something with eyes like that? For centuries? He didn’t quite shudder.

  She came back over and crouched beside him.

  “The spell is dangerous and difficult,” she said, putting her hand on Young Gregor’s face, as if she could touch him back to consciousness, “and I could have killed him.”

  “But you didn’t,” Blue said. “You saved him.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “His aura is so small right now.”

  “But no eyes in it, right?”

  She gave him an odd look. “That’s right,” she said after a moment. “No eyes in it. I got everything. But what it did to him, I have no idea. I wish he would wake up.”

  Blue patted him on the face. He wanted Young Gregor to wake up too.

  “C’mon, kid,” he said. Because now, to him, Young Gregor wasn’t a threat or even a stalker. Just a poor unfortunate who had a mild version of the evil thing that Blue had been living with. Blue wanted the kid to be all right. “Wake up.”

  Young Gregor moaned. Then he turned his head away from Blue’s hand. Young Gregor’s eyes blinked open, and Blue saw no amber, no weird eye reflection, nothing except fear.

  “What happened?” Young Gregor asked. He put a hand to his face. Then he squinched his eyes shut as if they bothered him and opened them again. “Is it—did it work?”

  He looked from Jodi to Blue.

  “You tell me,” Jodi said.

  Young Gregor looked almost as if he was going to cry. “I don’t know. I never could feel it in the first place, whatever it was. So I don’t feel any different. Except I have a headache.”

  “You fell,” Jodi said. “I didn’t catch you in time.”

  “Then that’s not it,” Young Gregor said. “How am I supposed to know if you got it?”

  Blue had an idea. He hadn’t felt the spell either, but he knew its effects.

  “Think for a minute,” he said. “Think about those so-called attacks. Can you remember them?”

  Young Gregor didn’t even try. “I never could remember them,” he said.

  “Except for bits and pieces,” Blue said, “flashes so real that you thought you had been there. After all, how could you know what those rooms looked like? And in one case, you told the woman at the last minute, you said if she didn’t watch out, you would treat her like Bluebeard did.”

  Young Gregor’s cheeks turned a light pink. It was the first color he had shown since Jodi started working on him.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Access the memory,” Blue said. “Is it there?”

  He was asking with a bit too much hope. He wanted the memories gone more than anything. But he also knew that the memories were the only real tangible thing about the evil spell—tangible to him, at least.

  Young Gregor was frowning. Then the frown grew deeper, and he let out a small sigh. “I—you—it’s not the same,” he said after a minute.

  “What’s different?” Blue asked.

  “This is going to sound weird,” Young Gregor said. “I remember having the memory. I even kinda remember the memory, like you do when someone tells you what happened. But I can’t access the memory. At all.”

  “Try the others,” Blue said.

  Young Gregor kept frowning. He rubbed his temple. His head was clearly hurting him.

  Jodi took his hand and pulled it down. “That’s enough,” she said. “You can’t access it.”

  She sounded both convinced and relieved.

  “What you did worked,” Blue said to her.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Why would the memories go?” Young Gregor asked, not like he wanted them back, but more like a man who couldn’t believe
his good fortune—a man who didn’t want to believe his good fortune, not right yet, at least, in case he might be disappointed.

  “They weren’t yours to begin with,” Jodi said. “They belonged to the spell.”

  That sentence chilled Blue. “How can a spell have a memory?”

  “It’s not a standard spell,” Jodi said. “That’s what we missed. It’s a parasite spell.”

  Blue rocked back on his heels, nearly lost his balance, and had to sit down. A parasite spell. And he’d had the damn thing for centuries. How big was it? And how hard would it be to dislodge?

  If it was anything like a physical parasite, the older they got, the stronger they got. And the more they had woven their way into their host. He knew of some physical parasites that, once they were in place, they couldn’t be removed without killing the host.

  No wonder Jodi had been worried.

  She was watching him now. She understood exactly what he was thinking. She had probably been thinking the same thing.

  “Did you know that before you tried this?” Blue asked.

  She shook her head. Of course she didn’t know. If she had known, she would probably not have tried.

  “So, I had the spell’s memories?” Young Gregor asked. “It was an actual thing?”

  “It had a life of its own,” Jodi said.

  “What was that, then, that appeared to those women?” Young Gregor asked, his voice trembling. “Was it me under the influence of the parasite?”

  “It was another part of the spell,” Jodi said. “It had several forms. I’ll have to look it up, but I suspect that it can exist in more than one level at once. And it uses some kind of raw emotion to go after the women.”

  She spoke so dispassionately, as if she wasn’t one of the women it went after.

  “And then creates what?” Blue asked. “Some kind of avatar?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Jodi said. “But what I saw—”

  She was looking at Young Gregor now.

  “—was spiderlike, sending little tendrils out around it, weaving them into your aura.”