Strange Brew

by P. N. Elrod

  “Oh,” Dahlia said, “I think I can guess.”

  “Why’d you want to know where the Circe’s spellbooks are hidden?”

  “Because we need one.”

  “But they’re going to be protected by all kinds of magic,” Clifford said.

  “Yes, it is. But the magic will be geared to live people.”

  “How can you be sure?” The young Were was doubtful, and Taffy was clearly anxious.

  “The original Circe never met a vampire,” Dahlia said. “Her descendant told me so. It stands to reason that the spells to safeguard the grimoires do not protect them from the dead.”

  “You’re willing to risk it,” Taffy said. “And I have to thank you, sister, because I’m too frightened.” She looked ashamed. “But I know my husband is the one in danger, and whatever else you tell me to do, I’ll do it well. You’ve never let me down.”

  Dahlia did not mind one bit that Taffy had failings. She herself was simply more self-sufficient and ruthless. “Was Bart there?” Dahlia asked Clifford.

  “Oh, yeah. He’s our second in command, so he’s supposed to hang with us since he’s a Swiftfoot now. But no, there he was with his old pack acting large and in charge. I saw him doing imitations of our pack members. I mean, I could recognize them, he was so good. The Rippers were laughing their asses off.”

  “How could you see that?” Dahlia said. “We told you not to risk getting close.”

  “The gym is a big glass cube,” Clifford said reasonably. “It’s the second floor of an office building, and the Fitness Firm is a very highfalutin gym. Between nine and ten every night, it’s open only to select parties. That’s when the Rippers go.”

  “Well, how very obliging of them,” Dahlia said, and Taffy began laughing.

  “Do you have any idea where the Circe is now?” Taffy asked Clifford when she’d calmed down.

  “She’s out with her boyfriend,” Clifford said. “They’re at the movies. You want I should delay them on their way home?”

  “Yes, please,” Dahlia said.

  She left twenty minutes later, dressed head to toe in a very becoming facsimile of Kate Beckinsale’s skintight outfit in Underworld. Dahlia could tell Clifford’s mouth was watering when she strode into the darkness. It perked her up no end.

  The Circe had a little house on a cul-de-sac in a bland suburb of Rhodes. As camouflage, it was perfect, and the taxes would be reasonable, too. Dahlia could appreciate the choice, which definitely looked more Kathy Aenidis, Schoolteacher, than Circe, Dread Sorceress.

  Kathy’s defenses were formidable, but the Ancient Pythoness had supplied Clifford with a charm, and it seemed to work for a vampire as well as it would have for a werewolf. Dahlia was still uncertain if Kathy would have thought about defending her family records from a dead creature, but at least Dahlia had managed to cross the deck to the back door without being turned into a lizard or impaled on a sliver of bamboo. Dahlia crept close to the door and listened intently. A cat was meowing inside. Whether it was sounding a warning, like some kind of feline burglar alarm, or simply talking to itself, Dahlia couldn’t tell. She was not a pet person.

  Just before she was about to pick the lock, Dahlia had second thoughts. Second thoughts were rare for her, and she listened to them when she had them. The door was simply too obvious, too likely to be booby-trapped. In one smooth leap, Dahlia made it up onto the roof. She moved lightly across the shingles, noting that Kathy Aenidis needed to get a roofing crew in pretty soon. To avoid the loose shingles, she lifted herself off the roof and flew to the chimney. Pulling away the screen designed to keep out birds and bugs, Dahlia peered down into the heart of the house. The flue was open, and she could see light. Ooooh, Miss Scary Witch left a night-light on. Dahlia dropped a piece of shingle down the aperture. The piece of shingle exploded in a puff of bright light.

  Okay, so the chimney was protected. If the magic would explode a chimney tile, it would certainly deal with Dahlia, too. Time to regroup.

  Dahlia floated down to the grass and circled the house. The backyard was fenced in, and Dahlia felt less conspicuous there, so after one circuit she found herself sitting on a large wooden bench in the middle of the Circe’s herb garden. The bench was probably also storage for garden tools; she was sitting on the lid, not a true seat, as she stared at the back wall of the house. With her excellent night vision, she watched bugs enjoying the spring garden. Bugs had short, short lives, especially if they encountered a bug zapper, like the one she saw hanging on Kathy Aenidis’s deck. One flash, and they were gone.

  One flash.

  In a jiffy she was back up on the roof, looking down into the chimney. She had another piece of tile in her hand, and she tossed it down. Ha! No flash! The Circe’s alarm didn’t automatically reset. It needed to be charged up again, now that it had gone off.

  Dahlia looked at the dimly lit brick and had another rare moment’s misgiving. But then she squared her shoulders and plunged into the chimney, twisting her flesh and bones with a fluidity even a shapeshifter might envy. By the time she landed in the fireplace — she was grateful that the house-proud Kathy had cleaned it out after the last fire of winter — she was battered and her black leather suit was scuffed and scraped far beyond its previous pristine smartness.

  Dahlia crouched in the semidarkness, listening and looking with all her senses on alert. The only thing living in the house was the cat, whose mewing had gotten quite aggravating. Dahlia emerged from the fireplace and straightened gratefully into her normal shape and size. A clock ticked, the cat kept making noise, and somewhere a faucet dripped. She waited for five minutes, and no other sound intruded.

  First, silencing the cat. Dahlia found the animal caged in the basement. Dahlia had taken the precaution of bringing down the box of hard cat food she’d seen in the kitchen, and she poured some into the bowl which protruded out from the cage. The food slid into the inner portion of the bowl, and the cat began eating immediately. It had water in a bottle suspended from the side of the cage. At least the animal was temporarily quiet.

  The Ancient Pythoness had told Clifford that the grimoires were “sealed in a dark place under the light spell.”

  “Thanks, oh wrinkled one,” Dahlia said out loud, and the cat paused its eating for a moment to take a look at her. “That means absolutely nothing,” said Dahlia, and began to search the house’s dark places. There were a few in the basement — closets and the like. Upstairs, in the very flowery living room and the gleaming little dining room, no dark places after she’d looked under the couch. Dahlia was a good searcher, and very swift and sure, and it didn’t take her long to go over the house in detail, including the two bedrooms and the attic, which contained only (empty) luggage.

  Dahlia stood in the middle of the bedroom and pondered. She couldn’t rest her soot-stained bottom on the high bed; it was covered with a flounced white spread. Dahlia was not surprised it had a matching canopy. All the bedroom furniture was painted white and gold. The bathroom was pink, with red roses stenciled around the ceiling. Dahlia hated the decor with a passion. The only illicit thing she’d found had been a wood box of sex toys pushed discreetly under the ruffled bed. She’d tapped the floors for hidden compartments, checked for pockets in the walls, thumped the stairs, and opened the suitcases. Grimoires had to be bulky. Though Kathy had a computer, she wouldn’t have committed the grimoires’contents to such a hackable machine.

  Admitting defeat, Dahlia prepared to wriggle up through the chimney. As she braced herself to dislocate her shoulder, she muttered, “Charon’s balls! Where could the damn thing be?”

  The cat began meowing down in the cellar.

  Dahlia cursed in a several ancient languages and stomped down the stairs again. It was the work of a second to weaken the clasp on the cage so it would appear the cat had butted against it once too often. Then Dahlia opened the wire door and the animal leaped out.

  “Come on, then,” Dahlia said, and went back upstairs to the chimney piece. Befor
e she began working her way up the narrow opening, she held out her arms and the cat leaped into them. The added burden made the upward trip even more difficult, but when Dahlia set her mind to something, she generally succeeded.

  After some painful minutes, she was again in the garden, again sitting on the wooden box, this time with the cat leaning against her legs and purring. Again, she stared at the house. Dahlia was beginning to feeling a bit discouraged. There was no garden shed, no garage.

  The cat stretched up to begin sharpening its claws on the hinged wooden lid. It howled. Dahlia glared down at the animal — and then she got the message.

  In a flash, Dahlia had leaped off and raised the lid, felt a shift in the atmosphere that indicated the presence of magic, and tossed out trowels and saws to find books wrapped in heavy plastic. They were bound in different ways, in different materials. But one was clearly the most ancient. Dahlia hugged it to herself for a moment of triumph. Then she reloaded the garden tools in the box. I only hope she doesn’t need it tonight, Dahlia thought, and gripping the book and the cat to her body, she rose into the sky. Under the black leather of her jumpsuit, her arms were feeling curiously itchy. She wondered if there’d been bugs in the wooden box, bugs with a fondness for dead flesh. Or perhaps she was allergic to cats? She snorted. Vampires didn’t have allergies.

  ______

  THAT NIGHT KATHY’S boyfriend’s car had two flat tires when he and Kathy emerged from the cinema. He was burly and strapping, a dark man with enough chest hair to stuff a mattress. When he saw the tires, he cursed fluently and called AAA. Kathy took the opportunity to practice an inflation spell, but it didn’t work well enough to get the car out of the parking lot and into the street.

  Clifford watched from a restaurant across the busy street while the two waited for the AAA truck, which was forty minutes in arriving. When the truck pulled in, the young shaman called Dahlia, who had consented to carry a cell phone that night just for the occasion.

  “They’ll be out of here in thirty minutes,” he said. “You through?”

  “Yes, I’m out of the house and I have it with me,” she said, though her voice sounded funny to Clifford. He thought he heard a cat mew in the background.

  “Well, see you tomorrow,” he said.

  “YES,” DAHLIA SAID, and clicked end. She couldn’t concentrate on flying anymore, so she walked through the streets carrying a large and ancient book swathed in plastic and followed by a black cat. As if that weren’t conspicuous enough (very dusty tiny woman carrying huge whopping book through the night), Dahlia had another problem. She was clinging to every bit of available shadow for a very good reason. Her arms were covered with vines that had erupted from her skin.

  Some magic did work on dead flesh. It had been a spell of light, just as the Ancient Pythoness had predicted. Light meant growing things. A garden meant vines; vines that itched.

  The rest of the night was extremely painful. After she had crept into Taffy’s room and frightened Taffy in the middle of having a weepy phone conversation with Don, Dahlia had conscripted her friend for surgery duty. It took an hour and more, but finally Taffy finished shearing off the vines at skin level. Dahlia was so battered by that time that Taffy gave Dahlia a drink from her own wrist. Even Cedric, who wandered into Taffy’s room in search of diversion, was surprised enough to donate some healing blood to his nest child.

  Once Dahlia had quit cursing, and after the open cuts began healing, she opened the spell book and began to translate, slowly and painfully. There were advantages to being extremely old and to having friends who even more ancient.

  “We’ll be ready tomorrow night, right?” Taffy asked anxiously. “I don’t want Bart to challenge Don. He’ll use some trickery to defeat him.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Dahlia said. “My husband is dead, but we’ll save yours.” Truthfully, though Dahlia loved Taffy, she didn’t give a rat’s ass about Don. Her goal was vengeance, just as she’d told the Circe. She was just aiming that vengeance in a different direction, and she planned on doling it out in different amounts.

  CLIFFORD WAS RELUCTANT to stay with the two vampires the next night, to Dahlia’s exasperated amazement. He’d kept surveillance on the Fitness Factory off and on since his shaman class let out earlier in the afternoon, and when full dark fell, he’d rendezvoused with Dahlia and Taffy.

  They’d already performed one errand together, the three of them, and Dahlia was carrying a big sack over her shoulder. It snorted, from time to time, in a sleepy way.

  But when they hurried back toward the gym, Dahlia heard Clifford whimper as he looked up at the sky. It was the moon night. From the corner of her eye, she caught him almost twitching with anxiety to be away, to have his run with the rest of the Swiftfoot pack, even though its new second in command would have to be included with the pack tonight.

  Dahlia remembered Todd’s erratic behavior on moon nights, and she felt some sympathy for her partner in crime. But Dahlia figured magic might need to be cast by a live person; she was worried that her essential deadness would pervert the effects of the spells. Clifford, though he hadn’t completed his training, was as close to a witch as she could get on short notice, so she ruthlessly exerted her charm, along with a little bullying, to ensure his help for just a little longer. She had a three-pronged plan that would punish all the wrongdoers with the correct degree of severity. Once she had made sure that earlier that afternoon Clifford had told Don exactly how Bart had been able to defeat Todd, she and Taffy herded the young Were along with them.

  “You’ll get to go run, very soon,” Taffy reassured him. “We just need one more little thing, and then you’re off to join the others.”

  The Rippers had been gathering since the evening began, most of them stopping at the Fitness Firm when they got off work. Clifford told Dahlia and Taffy, “I think they’re going to change in their gym. Then they can just slip out into the park when it gets dark enough.” A large city park was less than a block away.

  The Rippers had thought their procedure through, but tonight, Dahlia had developed other plans for the pack.

  When the three decided the pack had completely assembled, they waited ten more minutes to be sure. Then Dahlia and Taffy drew specific patterns in chalk all the way around the building. They had studied the pattern and they were steady and swift, but it was still quite a job. When they finished, Dahlia glanced at Clifford’s watch, which conveniently lit up. “They’ll be changing any minute,” she said. “We have to proceed.”

  “Did you check to see no one else was in the building?” Clifford asked in a whisper.

  Dahlia looked a bit surprised. “No,” she said. She shrugged. “Whoever’s there must take his chances along with the Rippers.”

  Clifford huffed a little over this, but Dahlia fixed him with her glowing green eyes and he subsided. Dahlia could tell the young Were was not so enchanted with her as he had been; he undoubtedly thought he understood a little better now why his elders in the pack avoided the undead.

  But Clifford had promised he’d help tonight, and he would complete his task. Unless Dahlia’s observational skills were faulty, and she didn’t think they were, the young Were was also a little excited by the prospect of the special hunt later on.

  The three stood across the street in a recessed doorway, watching the Ripper pack in their very own gym. Suddenly, the lights in the gym went out. Clifford almost howled. He knew the Weres inside were changing into their other forms, and he longed to change, too.

  “Just a few more minutes, young Were,” Dahlia said, gripping his arm with a force that recalled Clifford to his duties. “Now’s the time to use the grimoire.” Clifford had been studying it most of the day. The words he had to repeat seemed to hurt his throat when he spoke them, but Clifford persevered. When the last word had clicked the spell into place, he heard a dismal howl float through the air. It was faint because it issued from the glass-walled second story of the building across from them. A chorus of other how
ls followed in its wake.

  Dahlia and Taffy smiled at each other.

  Taffy, and then Dahlia, embraced Clifford.

  “Thank you, friend,” Taffy said. “We owe you.”

  Dahlia gave him a cold kiss on the cheek, having to stretch up on her toes to deliver it. “I won’t forget what you’ve done for Todd these past few days. Now, go enjoy your moon time.”

  Clifford didn’t need telling twice. In a flash, he was bounding down the street to find his pack, who ran out by the reservoir. He could hardly wait. The Swiftfoot pack was going to have a special hunt tonight, though the chosen prey didn’t know it yet. He’d be told soon enough.

  The pack would give Bart a head start, because that was only sporting. The packmembers had been democratic about it; they’d voted on whether or not to accept a cheater as their second in command. Unfortunately for Bart, who hadn’t been invited to the pre-change meeting, the vote against him had been unanimous.

  THE PUBLIC DOOR into the building lobby was still open, and Dahlia and Taffy entered as silently as snowflakes. They took the stairs up to the gym, just in case any Weres were trying to slink down. They found one confused female, and they herded her back into the large open room to join the others.

  “We need more light,” Taffy said, and found the switch. She could see wonderfully well without any help. The moon’s radiance was flowing through all the glass walls. But she wanted to view the whole picture, and then she wanted to take a few. She’d brought her Nokia camera along.

  They were all hairless, all the wolves. They were embarrassed and horrified and naked and bare, because they retained just enough of their human selves to understand their condition. Taffy laughed until she felt sick, and even Dahlia had a broad smile.