Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Joe nodded, slowly.

  “Despair’s not as common an emotion to feed off, but it’s just as strong. If that’s the case, Tamara won’t care that her leads turn out to be thing. From her point of view, even better will be to raise Chris Fitzhugh’s hopes, then dash them again. That might be why she keeps bringing Chris these so-called leads, to keep her on that emotional rollercoaster.” Di pulled a strand of her ponytail over her shoulder and wrapped it around her finger. “If that’s the case, she’ll keep glued to Chris Fitzhugh for as long as she can milk what she wants.”

  Joe made a face of disgust. “Great. Just great. So—”

  “So if that’s the case, the solution is to get the poor woman so tranked up she isn’t a tasty meal anymore,” Di said bluntly. “If I were you, I’d call in the family physician. Talk her husband into it. Hell, get her checked into the hospital for a while. It shouldn’t be hard, and it’s not as if she’s any use to the case at this point.”

  Joe groaned a little, but nodded. “All right. Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  #

  It seemed that Di’s hunch was right. There was not one damned useful thing in any of those so-called ‘leads,’ and between them, she and what she was beginning to think of as her “gang” managed to run down every possible interpretation and investigate it. She had the whole group in on it now, even Zaak, and despite Zaak’s sometimes credulous nature, he had a good mind. He came up with possible interpretations even she hadn’t thought of.

  A lot of them were just ridiculous. This was Cambridge, and “look by flowing water” not only could mean the river, it could mean sewers, gutters, even water-pipes. There was absolutely nothing to be done with anything that vague, but the Gang sat down and made a list of every possible interpretation, and every possible location in the city that it fit, in exacting detail, just to prove how ridiculous it was. As Marshal pointed out, it wasn’t always going to be necessary to do an actual search. It was only necessary to prove how impossible a search would be.

  But what Di hadn’t counted on was how personally involved all four of them were getting, including Zaak. Particularly Zaak. There were times when an outsider would have thought that Zaak was Melanie’s older brother, not a complete stranger. Unlike Marshal, who was still focused on debunking the leech, Zaak was getting more and more impatient with them for not doing something about Melanie. He kept trying to talk them all into doing a “ritual of finding,” though how he expected to get any real results when he had nothing personal from the missing girl, Di had no idea. Zach didn’t always think rationally.

  In retrospect, Di should have expected him to try something she would really rather he wouldn’t. But hindsight is always perfect, and it wasn’t as if she had—yet—appointed herself as his mentor.

  #

  When the time came for all of them to get together for the evening, Zaak was nowhere to be seen, even though Di had come bearing the gift of pasta.

  “He said he’s tired.” Emory shrugged. “I think he’s more frustrated than tired. He wants to actually work on the kidnapping case, and that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing, right?”

  Di nodded, and dumped cheese on her spaghetti. “Joe’s made that pretty clear. The department doesn’t even want him doing anything serious about this case, much less a bunch of meddling kids.”

  “Ro-roh, Raggy,” said Marshal in a Scooby-Do voice.

  Honestly, she didn’t much blame Zaak. This had her frustrated too. Was there more to Tamara than just being a psychic vampire? She’d gone out to that address three times now—though she had never yet dared to go in—and still had not come up with anything more conclusive than this woman is bad news.

  She thought she knew what Zaak thought. He had said several times that he thought Tamara was behind the kidnapping. And yes, it was certainly possible, but why? She didn’t have a motive, not even as a psychic vampire; there were plenty of other desperate people in this city without taking the risk of kidnapping a little girl. And how had she done it? Had she used a confederate? The little girl had been taken by a cop; the other children were unshakable on that point. If she had a confederate, by now the cops should have gotten some clues to that, because surely they were as suspicious of Tamara as Zaak was. And you would think, with all of the publicity about the case, a confederate might be getting nervous.

  It just seemed unnecessarily complicated. Occam’s Razor.

  Zaak wasn’t sulking, he was in his room attempting something magical; the energies in there were certainly building up, and that was the likeliest. She figured he was trying a ritual to find the little girl, probably using her photo from the newspapers and a dowsing rod or a pendulum. He wasn’t nearly trained and focused enough to pull that off, and it was going to be about as effective as walking the streets and calling her name. In fact, that was a pretty good analogy. She debated interrupting him, but it didn’t seem all that important and it would make him feel effective.

  Joe had another so-called “lead” for them to check out; this one was a bit more specific, and it was going to require some good maps and possibly some legwork. Supposedly Tamara had “seen” a vision of Melanie in a room, crying and screaming; the room had a tall, narrow window that faced south, and she had heard a train in her “vision.” She was sure it was in Cambridge proper, not outside it. So they had to check neighborhoods near enough to train tracks to hear trains that had late Victorian buildings with tall, narrow windows. This was, of course, a lot.

  However, buildings where someone would ignore a strange child crying were a lot fewer, especially now. One of the other teams that the cops had out there was literally investigating every single report of someone hearing a child crying. Nothing had turned up, of course, except for a lot of exasperated parents and children delighted that they’d gotten so much attention for a tantrum, but this did narrow down things considerably, not the least because they could cross off their list every building that team had visited.

  Tamara might have overstepped herself this time. She was adamant that the location was in Cambridge—not Boston, not outside the Cambridge city limits—and there actually were not as many places that qualified as someone might have thought.

  And of those that qualified? Well, as they worked their way across the map, crosschecking with the police reports, they were discovering that up to ninety percent of that ground had already been covered. What hadn’t been covered was beginning to look like a wash. The buildings were the wrong sort, industrial, windowless, too modern, or the windows were the wrong shape.

  Di gathered up the plates and took them to the sink, and was just turning back to say as much when—

  Every internal alarm she had shrilled at her. A fraction of a second later, an icy wind literally tore through the apartment.

  Bloody hell!

  The lights all flickered and dimmed. It wasn’t an illusion, either, the wind was there, it picked up the papers and sent them all over the living-room. Di’s breath streamed away from her in a mist of ice-crystals, it was suddenly that cold in the room.

  Em shrieked, Emory reacted as any good boyfriend would by trying to shelter her, Marshal just looked frantically around, trying to find a source for the wind and failing.

  Reflexively, Di called up mage-sight and immediately put up her shields, because the place was literally full of malevolent energies, tearing around the place, razor-edged dark things—

  They’re hunting—but for what—

  She didn’t have a chance to think further, as in the next instant, they all arrowed straight through the door of Zaak’s room. The wind died. The temperature dropped further.

  And the door burst open.

  Any other time, she might have laughed, for Zaak was wearing what he probably fondly hoped were ritual robes, and in fact looked like nothing so much as an old fashioned granny nightgown. His hair was standing straight out too, giving him the look of someone trying to ape an afro and not doing too well.

  But she was not g
oing to laugh. Because there was something in Zaak now. And it was not nice, and definitely not happy.

  It glanced wildly around the room, and its eyes lit first on Di.

  It couldn’t have liked what it saw, because it immediately switched its gaze to Em. With a horrible laugh, Zaak leaped at the girl before Emory could react, and tore her out of Emory’s arms. Em opened her mouth to scream, and so did Zaak, though his scream was silent—

  And a thick column of oily black smoke laced with that same malevolent energy poured out of Zaak’s mouth and into Em’s.

  Zaak staggered back, as Em straightened, looked around, and laughed, harshly, angrily.

  But it was like nothing what should have come out of Em’s mouth.

  It was a male laugh, a horrible baritone.

  And with that, Di’s memories solidified from what the hell is this? to oh hell no—

  Di knew what it was. Or likely what it was. She’d been studying these things long before she ever came to Harvard, and an interest in old horror movies had led her to this particular menace years before she was ever a Guardian. It hadn’t been easy, doing that research in a small town, but Memaw had access to the libraries of a lot of friends, and many of them had books going back a long, long way.

  This was a dybbuk, a possessing spirit, a kind of angry ghost, laden with hate and guilt, that walked the earth until it could find someone to posses. Whatever Zaak had been doing in his room had called it, given it an opening, but dybbuks never permanently possessed anyone of the same sex, and this one was male. With only two females in the room to choose from, one of them protected, it had leapt to Em. And it was a good thing that Di had obsessively researched them back when she first discovered they were real and not the figment of some movie writer.

  Sulfur! I need sulfur!

  She also needed to keep it here, and there was one good way to do that quickly; the means were even close at hand.

  She turned and snatched up the familiar blue-and-white cardboard container of table salt from its place next to the stove. With a fast gabble of the words of consecration, she blessed the stuff and before the dybbuk could move to run out the door—and from there, gods only knew where it was going to go—she jumped over the couch and poured a line of blessed salt across the threshold. And then, in quick succession, she poured more lines across the windowsills, the fireplace, and the doors into the bedrooms. Only then did she turn, heart pounding, to see that there was no danger that it was going to escape at just that moment.

  The dybbuk had no intention of leaving just yet, because it was chasing Zaak. And in Em’s hand, it had the knife she’d been using to cut up the garlic bread. Whatever Zaak or Zaak’s family had done to tick this particular spirit off, it clearly wanted Zaak’s head on a platter.

  “Grab her!” Di shouted. Zaak was just shrieking. And Em was screaming furiously in that low baritone and waving the knife. But the dybbuk was not used to Em’s body yet, so it wasn’t so much chasing Zaak as stumbling after him like a movie zombie. So far Zaak was able to keep well out of reach.

  She dashed into Zaak’s room, hoping that she was going to find what she needed in there. Behind her, she heard Emory and Marshal shouting Em’s name, and the thing that was in Em roaring furiously. She blinked in the dim light, trying to get her eyes to adjust to only candles.

  Zaak dashed into the room and slammed the door, panting and leaning on it. “Light!” she snapped, and he flipped on the light switch reflexively. The overhead bulb, like all the overhead lights in this old building, was dim and very yellow, but at least now she could see. More to the point, this was Zaak’s room and now he was in it.

  “I need sulfur, a shofar, a Torah scroll, candles. Now!” she snapped. He blinked at her for a moment, then began scrambling in a cupboard by the door. He had as much space in his bedroom as she had in her whole studio, and most of it was empty. The bed was up against the wall, and the cleared floor held his “ritual space.” She looked at his ritual circle and gritted her teeth. Idiot. Candles, little brazier with charcoal and wormwood on top of it, circle drawn in paint on a piece of oilcloth, candles at the cardinal corners, and she recognized the glyphs chalked in around the periphery. A Kabalistic summoning circle and he didn’t even specify what for!

  Now, a Jewish exorcist would have to confine the spirit, interrogate the dybbuk, then persuade it to leave by sheer force of argument.

  She wouldn’t. Which was just as well, she wasn’t going to have three or four days to talk the thing out.

  She’d have to fight it. And probably its friends.

  Zaak turned back to her with his hands full of the stuff she had asked for. She snatched the shofar out of his hands, said “Find the Ten Commandments and make up a cherem. I want this thing to know we are not going to play nice! When I say, read the Commandments and tell the thing we are not going to accept it and help it find a home.” She dumped the sulfur on the little circle of insta-start charcoal in the brazier and picked the brazier up by its wooden handle. She wished she had her own atheme with her, but there was a sword on the wall that would do. She pulled it down, put the brazier right by the door so the sulfur smoke would billow out into the room and grabbed the chalk off his dresser. Then as Zaak shrieked “What are you doing?” she yanked the door open and jumped out into the living room.

  As she had hoped, although the dybbuk was strong, Emory and Marshal together had gotten Em pinned to the floor and gotten the knife away from her. Just as she managed to fling them both off, Di shouldered them aside, and blew the shofar, the sulfur smoke blowing out into the living room behind her. Damn good thing that she had a great embrasure; there were a lot of ceremonies that involved blowing hornlike objects. Doing this cold, what she produced was kind of a blat rather than a trumpet sound, but it was no worse than trying to blow a Hawaiian conch shell or a Celtic lur.

  The dybbuk then froze for a moment, giving her enough time to enclose it in a chalk circle. “Light two candles and start reading!” she shouted at Zaak, and jumped over the chalk line to face it with the sword.

  She couldn’t understand a word, of course. She didn’t know Hebrew. But the dybbuk did, and Em’s face contorted in a hideous snarl, going so flushed and inflamed she looked like a demon.

  “I know you can understand me,” Di said sternly, holding the sword up in the proper guard position for a broadsword. “Out! Because I can, and I will, force you out.”

  “You are no rabbi,” the spirit growled.

  “I don’t have to be.” They stared at each other across the blade of the sword, and Di hoped, hoped, hoped that one of the three would realize that she knew exactly what she was doing, and ask….

  And bless him, it was Zaak who stopped reading the Torah for a moment and sobbed, “This is all my fault! Di, you gotta help her!”

  Ah, Bingo.

  There it was, the magic words, or the variation on them. “Please help me.” She felt the hidden door inside her fly wide open, and Guardian power flood into her. When she was not actually Called—that was how she got the mojo. When someone had gotten in over his head and begged for help.

  Immediately she felt warmer, as if she was encased in a second protective skin of invisible armor. Which, in fact, she was.

  “Zaak! Start invoking Holy Names!” Didn’t matter that she wasn’t Jewish. Zaak was, and so was the dybbuk. She was just the Champion, and that was all she needed to be. He supplied the religious fuel, she supplied the muscle.

  Zaak started gabbling out more Hebrew, and when he got to “Michae-el” the sword went up in a blaze of fire.

  Nice.

  “Out!” she repeated.

  “You will not use that blade on your friend.” It laughed at her.

  “I don’t have to. Oh ye who are condemned to wander, because of countless sins against your fellow man, oh unclean spirit, oh evil one, behold! Ye may not withstand the sound of the horn!”

  Again, she blew the shofar, but this time the creature paled and shrank back, becaus
e it wasn’t just the feeble blat of an amateur, this was the clarion call to arms that had taken down the walls of Jericho.

  She took the horn from her lips and faced the creature again. “Zaak, more reading. El Melekh and va-ya’avor.” She had no idea what she had just asked for, but there were things moving through her now that knew a lot more than she did, and the words popped into her head. Zaak began to read in a steadier voice. The thing straightened.

  “I will not be cast out!” it snarled. “Behold, my name is Legion!”

  With that, it opened Em’s mouth, and a torrent of malevolent things in shapes of black smoke poured out of her. Em dropped to the floor, out cold, leaving Di trapped in the circle with not only the dybbuk, but as she had suspected, all his friends.

  But the dybbuks, even if they had encountered exorcists before, had never met up with a Guardian. And they had only dealt with old scholars who seldom saw anything more lethal than a carving knife wielded against a chicken.

  She actually knew how to use that sword.

  She danced with it, in a pattern that owed as much to katana practice as to classical western sword-play. The horde of shapes, confined by the circle, whirled around her, trying to reach her through her armor and past the lethal edge of the blade. But every time one tried, she sliced—there was a sizzle and a line of fire, and the shape was gone. She wasn’t quite sure how many there had been in the first place, but soon enough there were only a dozen.