Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Joe flushed again. Ha. With a name like O’Brian, I figured he was Catholic.

  “—but that means nothing to what people believe, and belief is impossible to budge until people are ready, on their own, to hear the facts. Sometimes that never happens.” It certainly had never happened with Memaw’s bete noir.

  He grimaced. “Would you at least check this chick out? See what she’s all about? Find out if she’s working an angle so we can shove a stick in her spokes?”

  Clearly he was not going to go away until she said “yes.” He had that look of “man on a mission.”

  Okay. What can it hurt? Maybe I can find out an angle that Bunko can get her on.

  “I’ll go have a look at her, but no promises,” Di replied. “And she had better be on a bus line, because I have no car. And it won’t be right away. I have classes.”

  It was quite clear that Joe wasn’t paying any attention to anything but the “yes” part. The tightness in his face eased, as if he had gotten some terrible burden off his back. “Here’s her card; Chris shoves these at us by the handful,” he said, sounding immensely relieved. “And here’s mine. And thank you—”

  “Don’t thank me until I come up with something,” she replied, a little sourly. She let him babble on for a little more, then he finally got the hint and said goodbye. She closed the door feeling…odd.

  Very tingly, antsy, oh-crap-something-is-up sort of odd. Storm-about-to-break odd.

  Oh, hell. Guardian odd.

  She looked at the psychic’s card, but this time whispered the mage-sight spell and waited as her vision of the world settled into a new configuration.

  The card changed in mage-sight, and it was not a good change. It was haloed in a very, very nasty black aura, with greenish edges.

  She looked at the card O’Brian had given her.

  Oh double hell. To mage-sight, the card was overlaid with a red crusader’s cross. It was a legitimate Call.

  “I do not need this,” she said aloud, with exasperation, and put her back against the door, staring up at the painted tin of the ceiling.

  She had hoped that everything would change in college. She’d never had friends in high school. She’d never had a date, much less a boyfriend. How could she? Before sixteen, she’d still been a practicing witch, in a small town, living off on the outskirts with her grandmother who was known to be strange. And she had the feeling that even if she’d still been with her parents, kids would have sensed something “off” about her.

  Until she was thirteen, for instance, she’d never really cared for popular music, preferring folk, jazz, and classical. She’d more or less gotten into popular stuff because of Simon and Garfunkle, Donovan, the Turtles, the Irish Rovers, and then she had discovered Cream and from there she had ventured into the realms familiar to her peers. But of course, her tastes were still eclectic, and even though 1968 was the height of the hippie revolution, with Woodstock a mere year away, in this small town, most of the adults voted straight Republican ticket. She was still the weird girl with the weird grandmother, the one that had been called “Wednesday Addams,” the one that made people feel just a little uneasy when they looked at her.

  Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, not even a hint of a boyfriend. No best friend. No slumber parties, no invitations to “study,” which really meant to get together in the bedroom, giggle about boys, listen to records, learn to dance by watching what the cool kids on the dance shows were doing on TV. No one hated her, but no one liked her either.

  And she was too smart. The smartest kid in the school, as it turned out, which was one reason why she was at Harvard. No guys dated a brainiac, even when she bloomed at sixteen, and had a great figure and the kind of long hair you saw in shampoo commercials.

  And not when all her clothing except the jeans and leotards she wore after school was handmade. Never mind it looked a thousand times better, and hipper, than the stuff you got at Sears; it was handmade, everyone knew her grandmother had run it up on her ancient treadle sewing machine.

  And…there was the fact that once in a while she slipped, and said things that scared people. Things she shouldn’t have known, things that people didn’t really want anyone knowing.

  Nope. No dates for Di.

  At least they didn’t egg the house on Halloween. They just kept their distance, whispered sometimes when they saw her. They never treated her badly, but they never treated her as if they thought she was one of them. She might just as well have been a Star Trek alien, blue, with antennae.

  Heck, some of them probably thought she was a Vulcan in disguise.

  Then after sixteen, well, there was never any time, even if a boy actually had approached her. Between school, learning everything she could about magic, and keeping herself and others alive, all her waking hours were pretty much accounted for.

  Isn’t a Guardian supposed to have a life? She’d wondered about that. More than once, because the other Guardians she got a chance to talk to all said that things were getting a lot more dangerous than they had been before. There were more incidents, more things waking up, more things breaking through.

  She’d asked Memaw about that, and Memaw had a theory about why so much weirdness was cropping up. She was sure it was the hippies, and truth to tell, Di was inclined to agree with her. Where once you had to go into the bad parts of big cities to find an occult store, get the mailing address of one that would ship books to you, or find libraries with really obscure collections, now occult stores were cropping up all over. The stores were in college towns mostly, but there were science fiction stores in bigger cities that would get you occult books if you knew what you wanted, and you could always mail order most of them directly from the companies that were printing them. And the hippies were buying them by the bucketload. Even the book that phony, Anton LaVey, wrote was getting snatched up, despite the fact that the former carnie was not the wholesale advocate of free love that they thought he was.

  So this was the heart of Memaw’s theory. That all the weirdness and problems cropping up was a result of all these people dabbling in what used to be the provenance of a few who were trained and knew what they were doing. They were supplying the raw energy for things that had been dormant to wake up and start making trouble. According to Memaw, the same thing had happened back after World War One, and the Spiritualists had been tilting tables, trying to get hold of loved ones on the Other Side. And again after the Civil War. And to be honest, Di couldn’t see anything wrong with this theory.

  Especially now, when she was looking at the card of a supposed “psychic” that was radiating Bad Juju.

  Bloody hell.

  Was this just a case of some manipulative bitch who happened to be dabbling in real magic seeing a hole to exploit? Even though she hadn’t asked for money yet, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be; she could just be working a longer game than O’Brian was going to spot.

  Or was it something more than that?

  Or was it just a coincidence that this psychic was also into Bad Things as well as going after a woman at her most vulnerable?

  Well, Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation was probably the best one, and this “Tamara” was probably just taking advantage of a grieving and frightened mother, and the nasty magic she was using had nothing to do with the missing child. She’d probably been a phony psychic for a lot longer than she’d been a dabbler in the black arts.

  Actually come to think of it, she might be getting paid—of a sort. Black magic worked best when you had a source of negative energy, the sort produced by anger, hate, fear, grief. Chris Fitzhugh would have plenty of that, and Tamara could just be using her as a spiritual “battery.”

  If that was the case, well, it could be difficult to pry her off. Difficult, but not impossible; the trick would be doing so without spooking Chris Fitzhugh in the process.

  Dammit. It didn’t matter. The Call was genuine, the real thing. As a Guardian, she didn’t have a choice, and too bad if her regular life had to su
ffer for it.

  As a Guardian…

  She closed her eyes for a moment and sagged against the door.

  She’d never had a “normal” childhood. She’d been on the front lines of a nasty war for a fourth of her life. She knew exactly how Vietnam vets felt.

  Tired.

  She could give it up. Guardians had, and she wasn’t a sixteen-year-old steeped in comic-book superheroism anymore. She had a life now, and she needed to think about how she was going to keep herself fed. Guardians didn’t get a salary; there was no “Guardian Company.”

  Face it, as long as you’re a Guardian, your life is never going to be your own.

  She opened her eyes again, and stood there for a long moment, cards in her hand, her eyes going from the cards to her books, back and forth. She could quit. She would never taste the headiness that was Guardian magic again, but she could quit. Right now.

  Lavinia could take this on. Right?

  Well…not really.

  Well, someone could. Someone else. There had to be someone else with the skill set needed to pick this thing apart and see Tamara separated from her prey.

  Maybe.

  She took a long, deep breath. She could hear the line from “Spiderman” echoing in her head, only it was spoken by Memaw.

  Dammit. No, she had the power, she had the skill set, and she had the responsibility and she wasn’t going to turn her back on people that needed her now.

  #

  “Tamara Tarasava” was, indeed, on the bus line. And for once, Di realized that it was not so bad to have an aura that made people uneasy around her. She had no problem getting a seat, and not even the crazy-eyed guy in worn-out fatigues wanted to sit next to her. She stared out the window and watched as the streets they passed became progressively rougher and grimmer. Di realized immediately that she should have assumed it would be on a bus route from the start. After all, most clients that a “psychic” sees are not really the upscale sort. Most of them, if they owned a car, couldn’t afford to drive it much. And that was a big “if.”

  She got out at the stop and walked the three blocks to the address listed on the card. This wasn’t Skid Row but it was clearly a lower blue collar neighborhood; there were signs of children everywhere, and the children themselves, playing on front stoops, having a stickball game in the street, a bunch clustered around a basketball hoop nailed to the side of a house. Sniffing the air told her a lot; soul food, corned beef, hot dogs and beans, all in the same block. And beer. Cans had piled up in the gutter. People here apparently liked to party, but their preferred brand was “whatever is cheap.”

  As soon as she got to her goal, she recognized something interesting.

  It wasn’t the fact that it was a typical two-story house in a run-down neighborhood; most “psychics” worked out of their houses. It wasn’t that there were no signs advertising “Psychic Readings” in the window. Lots of fortune-tellers didn’t advertise in their windows. It was still against the law in some places, even if the law had better things to do than bust a five-dollar fortune-teller.

  It was that the area around the house was preternaturally quiet. No kids playing in the street or the yards. The houses on either side were shabby, but very quiet, and seemed to lean away from the one in the center.

  Di loitered in an inconspicuous spot for a while, watching the place, putting up a little “avoidance” aura to keep people from noticing her. She checked out the visible windows, while a cold breeze snuck in around her collar. The upstairs ones were all tightly curtained, but with sheers of the sort that would hide anyone who was looking out while giving the person inside a reasonably good view. The ones downstairs were also tightly curtained in red velvet. So when Joe O’Brian had said Gypsy, he was being literal, or at least, that was what this woman was passing herself off as. Frankly, Di doubted that she was actually Romany.

  Then she watched the people on the street as they neared the house, and what she saw was even more interesting. Everyone hurried past the house. Some even crossed the street twice to avoid it, or cast an uneasy glance or two at it as they did so. A cat, however, merely sauntered past. Mind, that didn’t mean much. For all their reputation as “psychic” animals, cats were completely indifferent to anything that didn’t directly threaten them.

  So, Tamara has all the neighbors spooked, literally. And I don’t think it’s because any of them are sensitive. There couldn’t be that many people here who are even marginally psychic. So if it’s not outré, it’s mundane. Something she’s done has got them scared to confront her in any way at all.

  Given all of that…no way she was going to walk through that door right now. Mage-sight showed her nothing except some of that same black-green aura that surrounded Tamara’s card also enveloped the house. Di picked up no clues about what the woman was doing, whether it was garden-variety black magic, or just the residue of someone using her powers to exploit people. Mage-sight generally didn’t tell Di anything about the strength of magic if it wasn’t being actively used. So she could walk in there and find someone who had picked up The Satanic Bible and discovered she really did have the Gift and was gleefully using it to get whatever she could, or she could find someone who was more than that. Potentially, much more than that.

  If it was someone that was more than that, without better preparation and shielding, Di was going to stand out like a neon sign. Possibly she would even if she shielded. Guardian magic could be damned inconvenient that way. It often decided to advertise, and the sign it put out often read “GOOD EATS” to things that liked to snack on magicians.

  Dammit.

  The best thing to do would be to get more information from that cop. And the best way to do that was not to invite him into her apartment. Oh hell no. That was not going to happen. No one was getting past her threshold right now; she still didn’t know if this was one of the cops that occasionally harassed Lavinia, and he’d just used her name to get himself in Di’s door. So Joe O’Brian was not a welcome visitor in her humble little home

  Right-oh, then. Make an appointment to meet him at the station.

  For which she needed a phone, and she was not going to use a pay phone in this neighborhood. She had a healthy sense of where it was and was not safe for a woman to stand around on the street, preoccupied with talking. So, back home, phone the number on the card…or rather, hope that she had the line free, because she had a party line, and then call the number on the card…

  Oh jeez. Another complication. Hope that no one is listening in, accidentally or on purpose, because the very last thing I need is for my neighbors to decide I am a narc, an informant, or both…

  All right, set up a spell to tell her if someone on the party line had picked up.

  I hate party lines. But it was all you could get at short notice in that building. And it was much cheaper than a private line.

  Do the magic. Then phone Joe O’Brian. Complications. Always complications. Bloody hell.

  Set up an appointment that wasn’t going to conflict with her classes. Unless she could get him to give her more information over the phone, which wasn’t likely. Maybe phone Lavinia and ask her about O’Brian, see if he really was her cousin, or if Di was being set up.

  She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and headed for the bus stop. There went an hour wasted that she could have used on studying. And it was getting colder.

  The ride back mirrored the ride out; the only person that wanted to sit by her was a tired-looking woman who had some sort of uniform on under her shapeless coat. Probably a maid, and she was so happy to have a seat on the bus that she would happily have sat next to a wino who drooled.

  Maybe Di was a little more sensitive than usual, but as she approached her building, still brooding about Tamara, she began to get prickles on the back of her neck. Not bad prickles as such, but there was no doubt that someone in the building was fooling around with magic, and inexpertly. Fantastic. Just what she needed. Another do-it-yourself-wizard trying to vibrate
his way to Middle Earth. By the time she was in her apartment, the prickles had localized.

  To the apartment directly above hers.

  She groaned. Great. Just great. I have a budding wannabe Gandalf living upstairs. Just shoot me now.

  She waited apprehensively for some sign that this was yet another mess she as a Guardian was supposed to take care of, and finally breathed a sigh of relief when no such sign came. So she made sure all the wards were up on her space, and strengthened them until she couldn’t feel the tingle anymore.

  There. That should keep what he was doing from interfering in what she was going to do.

  Well, first things first. She set up a little ritual circle around the phone, using birthday-cake candles, since they came in the right size and colors for such a small bit of magic. First, the chalk circle—inside her personal wards, this was more of a size-limiter than meant to serve as protection. She used a simple piece of blessed chalk and a string as she muttered the circle-spell under her breath. Then she set up the candles and evoked each Element in its proper space—yellow in the north for Earth, blue in the east for Air, red in the south for Fire, and green in the west for Water. With all that in place, she was ready to work the actual spell. This was all personal; there would be no Guardian help here. Which meant that she needed to be as economical as possible.

  “As economical as possible” meant minimal use of energy, and minimal use of energy meant that she needed to set this up for exactly what she needed, and no more. Now, it would be possible to control whoever touched the phones on this party line while she was on, and give them the illusion that they were hearing nothing but static when they picked it up. But that would take a more energy than she was proposing to use, and on top of that, it might have repercussions. If someone picked up the line and wanted to make a phone call and only heard static, that might send him or her going from door to door to find out who had left the phone off the hook. And while that might not be a big deal, it just might, because it might lead someone else to find out she was a witch. And that someone else might not be the friendliest of sorts.