by Nalini Singh
I sat still, sinking into meditation, and let my magic permeate the lawn. It flowed through the soil, touched the tree roots, and spiraled up the trunk into its leaves. A subtle change came over the magic emanating from the tree. The spirits noticed Jim and pondered his connection to me. If there was enough of a bond, they would recognize it. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure if there was enough of a bond.
“So is the sugar-glazed donut a traditional Indonesian offering?” he asked.
Smart-ass. “No, the traditional offering calls for cakes. In this case I’m offering something that I like very much. The effort in making canang, the offering, is what counts.”
“Why don’t you just do your sticky-note thing?”
The last time we went into a house corrupted by magic, I had written protection kanji on a sticky note and stuck it to his chest.
“Because this dark magic is of Indonesian origin. I’m much stronger at my native magic than I am at writing curses on pieces of paper.”
The spirits still weren’t sure. I couldn’t just leave him on the lawn here. He would beat his chest and follow me into the house. I had to show them why he was important.
“Jim?”
“Yes?” he said.
“I need help.”
“I’m here,” he said.
“I need you to think about why you first asked me out. Like really think about it.”
“I asked you out because—”
I raised my hand. “No, please don’t tell me.” I was too scared to find out. “Just think about it.”
“Okay.”
I knew exactly why I had a crush on Jim. It wasn’t just one thing, it was the whole thing. He was one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. When Curran painted himself into a corner, he went to Jim and trusted him to think of a way out of it. He looked . . . Well, he was hot. Unbearably hot, like the kind of man you might see in a magazine or on TV. There was this raw masculinity about him, a kind of mix of male confidence and power. He was so unlike me. I was small and slight, and he was large and corded with muscle. I liked that duality, the contrast between me and him. It turned me on and I watched him when he wasn’t looking. I knew the way he held his head, the angle of his shoulders, the way he walked, unhurried and sure. In a crowd of identically dressed men, I would instantly know my Jim.
But what made me fall in love with him wasn’t his smarts, his looks, or even the fact that he was lethal. All that was great, but that alone wasn’t enough. So I opened my heart and let the spirits look within. My life was often chaotic. I got scared. I lost my temper. I freaked out. I was never sure if my curse magic would work or not. I was helpless without my glasses and that scared me, too. But Jim . . . Jim could take a single step into my chaos and suddenly my problems sorted themselves out. He tackled them one by one with his calm logic and then he would turn to me and say, “You can do this.” And I realized that he was right and I could. He believed in me.
A warm feeling spread through my bare feet and streamed through me, all the way into my fingertips until they were tingling.
“Something’s happening,” Jim said, his voice calm.
“Let it happen.”
Jim sat very still. Muscles tensed and gathered on his frame, as if he were about to pounce. The spirits were touching him and he clearly didn’t like it. Apparently “let it happen” meant “get ready to kill.”
The amulet on his chest shuddered. The Barong Bali’s eyes snapped open with a metallic click. The spirits recognized our bond and granted their protection to him. Of course it also meant that Jim would see things through my eyes now. It would be a bit of a shock.
“The spirits granted you the gift of sight,” I said. “Now you can see the world as I see it. It’s only temporary. If you take off the amulet, you will become magic blind again. Also it will likely stop as soon as this magic wave is over.” I rose to my feet. “We’re going to enter the house now. You might see some really weird stuff. Don’t freak out.”
He gave me another flat Jim look.
We walked to the door. I put the key in, turned it, and swung the door open. The house lay before us, dark and cold. A faint stench of carrion drifted through the air. Jim shifted his stance, falling into that loose, ready pose that meant he was ready for something to leap on him and try to rip his neck open. I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and let my power roll in a wave from me.
Jim snarled.
I opened my eyes. Viscous, fetid magic dripped from the walls all around us, sliding along the panels, translucent and dappled with blotches of darkness.
“What the hell is this?” he growled.
“This is you dipping a toe into my world. Stay close, Jim.”
The walls near the door were lighter, the foul magic patina thinner, but at the end of the hallway, the magic grew thick. I could see the open kitchen window from where I stood, and the dark slime pouring through the frame into the house. Whatever it was came from the backyard.
Small fang-studded mouths formed in the slimy magic, stretching toward me. Jim jerked his knife out. It was huge, dark grey, with a curved tip and serrated metal teeth near the handle.
I took a deep breath and raised my hands, my movements slow and graceful, hands bent back, fingers wide apart, trembling.
The evil magic paused, unsure.
In my head the bamboo flutes sang, with the metallic sounds of the xylophone setting the beat. I opened my eyes wide, bent my knees, my toes up off the floor, and turned. Magic pulsed from my body. The slime around us evaporated, as if burned off by an invisible fire. Bright sunlight spread in a wave, rolling over the walls, floor, and ceiling purging the rot. It cleared the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and slid over the window frame. The dark slime dropped out of sight.
Weird.
“Holy shit,” Jim said.
I frowned. “This is wrong.”
“What do you mean wrong? That was fucking unbelievable.”
“Usually when a house is this corrupted, the magic is deeply rooted. It should’ve taken more than two dance steps to clear it. I don’t understand this. There is so much corruption, but it’s all really shallow.”
I marched to the kitchen and opened the door to the back porch. The backyard opened onto a stretch of woods. A wrought iron fence separated the grass from the trees, a narrow gate ajar. The foul magic hovered between the trees, coating the bark, dripping, and waiting. It felt me and slithered deeper into the woods.
Where are you going? Don’t run. We’re just starting.
I crossed the grass, walked through the open gate, and kept going into the forest, Jim right behind me. The magic streamed away from me. I chased it down a path between the massive oaks. The same scent I had smelled on the coarse hair in my kitchen filled my nostrils: dry, acrid, bitter scent. Almost there.
The path ducked under the canopy of braided tree limbs bound together by kudzu. I followed it, moving fast through the natural tunnel of leaves and branches. The green tunnel opened into a clearing. A massive tree must’ve fallen here and taken a neighbor or two with it. Three giant trunks lay on the grass. The surrounding trees and kudzu laid claim to the light, greedy for every stray photon, and the leaves filled the space high above us, turning the sunlight watery and green. The air smelled wrong, tainted with decay. It was like being in the bottom of a really deep, scum-infested well.
Eyang Ida sat on the trunk. Her skin had a sickly grey tint, her eyes glassy and opened wide. She stared right at me, but I didn’t think she could see me. The magic swirled around her, so thick, it was almost opaque black.
I stopped. Jim paused behind me.
“Is that her?”
“It’s her.” I raised my hand to stop him if he tried to go to her, but he didn’t move. He really did trust me. I had asked him to stay close and he followed my lead.
Ferns rustled to the left of me and a creature stepped into my view. About ten inches tall, it looked like a tiny human, with dark brown skin, two legs and two arms. Long,
coarse hair fell from its head all the way past its toes, dragging a couple of inches on the ground like a dark mantle. It stared at me with two amber eyes, each with a slit, dark pupil like the eyes of a blue temple viper, then it opened the wide slit of its mouth, showing two white fangs, and hissed.
“What is that?” Jim asked.
“A jenglot,” I said. Just like I thought. This was one of the traditional Indonesian horrors. Except that judging by the amount of magic in that house, there had to be more of them. A lot more. “It’s vampiric.”
Another jenglot crawled out onto the trunk. A third pair of eyes ignited in the hollow of a tree.
“It and its family stole Eyang Ida out of her house,” I said. “They will feed on her blood’s essence and when there is no more essence left, she’ll become one of them.”
The woods came alive with dozens of eyes. Big tribe, at least fifty creatures. I had expected fifteen, maybe twenty. But fifty? Fifty was bad.
“Are they hard to kill?”
“Yes. They are hardy. Setting them on fire helps.”
“There are a lot of them,” Jim said.
“Yes.”
“You might need some help . . .” Jim’s voice was very calm. He weighed our odds. The numbers weren’t in our favor.
With a soft whisper, a creature slithered onto Eyang Ida’s lap. If it had legs, this jenglot would stand at least a foot tall, with hair twice as long, but it had no legs. Instead it had a snake’s tail, long and brown, like the body of a spitting cobra. The royal jenglot.
The jenglots rustled through the greenery, circling us. They would swarm us in a moment.
Normally when I changed shape, for a minute or two, I had no idea where I was or why I was there, but in this case, with Jim next to me, I had to take a chance.
I took off my glasses and handed them to Jim. “Here, hold this for a second.”
He raised his eyebrows and took my glasses.
I let go. The world swirled into a thousand blurry lights in every color of the rainbow. Ooh, so pretty. Pretty little color bubbles.
A familiar scent swirled around me, captivating. Ooh, Jim. Jim. He was here, with me! Jim . . .
What is that smell?
Ugh. Nasty, disgusting scent. Unclean. Ew.
A jenglot! There was a jenglot coiling on Eyang Ida’s lap. Gross. Wait, what was Eyang Ida doing here? Where was I?
The Queen Jenglot raised her head, opened her mouth, and hissed at me, the black magic behind her flaring like demonic wings.
What? Outrageous. The nerve. Who did she think I was?
I stomped my huge white paw onto the ground and roared. The sound of my voice rolled like the toll of a giant’s gong, deafening, and my magic followed it like a blast wave. It touched the closest jenglot. The ugly creature hissed in panic, broke into pieces, as if instantly turned to ash, and disintegrated. All around me, jenglots vanished, breaking into ash and melting into thin air. The Queen Jenglot hissed, flailing. Its magic tried to fight me, but my roar swallowed it like a raging forest fire swallowed a puddle. The Queen vanished.
The disturbing stench disappeared. The woods exhaled, liberated of the evil taint, but Eyang Ida didn’t move. She was still bound. Not for long.
I padded to Eyang Ida on my big soft paws and curled by her feet, my left front paw on my right. Hold on. I will free you, too.
I faced Jim and let my magic spread from me. Flowers pushed through the moss at my feet, blooming into tiny yellow and white blossoms. A blue butterfly floated next to me, bouncing on soft wings. A white one joined it, then another and another . . .
Jim stared at me, his jaw hanging open.
My magic slid up the tree trunks. The oaks above us groaned, their branches moved, compelled by my power, and a ray of sunlight, pure and warm, fell on the old woman’s face. Eyang Ida took a deep breath and blinked.
Jim dropped my glasses into the moss.
THE problem with being a shapeshifter is that you can never keep your clothes on, which is why I always carried a spare outfit in my car. So when we pulled up in front of Eyang Ida’s son’s house and Jim carried the fragile old lady to the front door, I was able to knock with my modesty intact.
The door swung open and Wayan, Eyang Ida’s son, saw his mother. He grabbed her from Jim and ran inside. The family swarmed us and pulled us into the house. The air washed over us, bringing with it aromas from the kitchen: tumeric, garlic, onion, ginger, lemongrass, cinnamon, and the roast duck. Bebek Betutu was cooking somewhere nearby.
Everyone was talking at once. What happened, why, does she need to go to the hospital? I answered as fast as I could. She was attacked by black magic; she will be okay; no, the hospital isn’t needed, just bed rest and lots of love from her family; no, thank you, I wasn’t hungry . . . After the first twenty minutes, the storm of questions and excitement died down and Iluh got through to us.
“Thank you for saving my grandmother!”
The relief on her face was so obvious, I hated to shatter it. “It’s not over yet.”
Iluh’s face fell. “What do you mean?”
“I need to talk to you,” I told her.
A couple of minutes later Jim, Iluh, her mother Komang, and I sat in the wicker chairs on the back porch, away from the family’s buzz. Iluh and Komang looked alike: both pretty, graceful, and tall. Komang held a degree in chemical engineering. My mother and she had come to Atlanta as part of the same corporate expansion just after the Shift.
I faced Komang and spoke in English for Jim’s benefit. “This is Jim. He is . . .”
Oh gods what should I call him . . . If I introduced him as my boyfriend, it would get back to my mother.
“We work together,” Jim said.
Nice save.
“And we’re dating.”
Damn it!
Komang raised her eyebrows. “Congratulations!”
Argh! I almost slapped my face with my hand.
“Won’t it cause an issue at your workplace?” Iluh asked.
“It won’t.” Jim gave them a smile. “I’m the boss.”
I glared at him. What the hell are you so happy about? He grinned at me and patted my hand with his.
I turned to the two women. “Your mother was attacked by jenglots.”
Komang blinked at me. “A jenglot? How bizarre. She was always afraid of them. She saw one when she was a child. It wasn’t real, just something a taxidermist made out of some horsehair and a dead monkey, but it terrified her. She had nightmares about it for years.”
There was no such thing as coincidence when it came to magic. “Usually when a jenglot tribe appears, it begins with a Queen. She enchants a person and begins to feed. When the magic essence of the person is exhausted, he or she becomes a jenglot. The jenglot magic begins to poison the area. One by one the tribe grows. A typical tribe is about five to eight members. More than twenty, and the tribe becomes a swarm. We saw at least fifty jenglots around your mother.”
“Fifty?” Komang opened her eyes wide.
“Yes,” Jim said.
“A swarm of this size would have to steal a person every week,” I said. “There is no way fifty people vanished in Eyang Ida’s neighborhood and nobody noticed. Not only that, but because jenglot magic is so toxic, it poisons the area around their nest. It is difficult to purge. The purification in Eyang Ida’s house took very little effort.”
“What are you trying to say?” Iluh asked.
“Someone summoned the jenglot swarm. I think someone deliberately targeted your grandmother.”
The two women looked at each other.
“But why?” Komang asked.
“Eyang Ida has no enemies,” Iluh said.
“No personal grudges?” I asked. “No irate neighbors? Nobody jealous or mad at her? Any frenemies?”
Komang glanced at Iluh. “Frenemy?”
“A fake person who pretends to be nice but secretly hates you,” Iluh said. “I don’t think so.”
Komang shook her head.
“No, she would’ve told me.”
“It doesn’t have to be someone with a grudge.” Jim leaned back in his chair. “Most homicides are committed for three reasons: sex, revenge, or profit.”
“We can rule out sex,” Komang said. “My mother was happily married for over fifty years. My father died two years ago and she isn’t looking for romance.”
“Revenge is probably not a factor either,” I said. “Your mother was universally loved and respected.”
“That leaves us with profit,” Jim said.
“She had a life insurance policy,” Iluh said.
Komang drew herself back. “Are you suggesting . . .”
Uh-oh. “It’s not connected to the life insurance,” I said quickly. “You need a body for the life insurance, and if everything had gone as planned, Eyang Ida would’ve become a jenglot. She would be declared missing and the family would have to wait years before she would be officially listed as deceased.”
“What other things of value did she have?” Jim asked.
“Well, there is the house,” Komang said. “You’ve seen it. It’s not something I would expect anyone to kill her over. People don’t murder each other for thirty-year-old three bedroom, two baths. Her car is safe and runs well, but it’s not expensive.”
“Any artifacts?” I asked. “Cultural items? Sometimes people don’t realize they own things that hold valuable magic.”
Komang sighed. “She collects My Little Pony toys.”
Iluh nodded. “You should’ve gone to the bedroom. She has shelves of those. She thinks they are pretty. She sculpts them out of modeling clay and paints them.”
That’s something I would’ve never guessed.
Iluh bit her lip.
Jim focused on her. “You thought of something.”
She exhaled. “It’s probably nothing. Eyang Ida owns part of the building where her salon is located. A few months ago a law firm contacted her asking if she would sell it.”
“I remember that,” Komang said. “We’ve looked over the proposal. She owned that place for years, so she turned them down.”
