Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation)

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Wow. Remind me never to do anything to get searched,” Marshal said, blinking.

  “That’s just a good basic rule to live by,” Di replied, and picked her way across the floor. “Remember we need to clean our shoes off when we leave.”

  “So we don’t have evidence of being here—“

  “So we don’t track sugar into you car,” Di corrected. “Roaches in your car?”

  Marshal shuddered. “Right. So we’re looking for personal stuff. You go left, I’ll go right.”

  They divided at the entrance to the kitchen; Di immediately found herself in a small hallway, and the first room she came to was the bathroom. It, too, had been pretty thoroughly trashed. She found the hairbrush on the floor, couldn’t find the toothbrush, and stuffed the hairbrush in her pocket.

  Then she got the oddest feeling. As if…the hairbrush wasn’t what she needed. She took it out of her pocket and looked at it closely, then pulled one of the long, black hairs out of the brush.

  It didn’t look right.

  “Uh, Di? I think you need to see this.”

  She followed Marshal’s voice to a bedroom which for a moment looked as if it was the site of an Indian massacre. There were scalps everywhere.

  Not scalps. Wigs.

  That would be why the hair didn’t look right…

  Scattered among the clothing and other things on the floor were what must have been a good dozen wigs; all black, but as near as Di could tell, each one had been cut and styled a different way.

  “Pretty useful if you’re being followed or watched,” Marshal observed, poking one with his toe. “Especially if you have one of these with you.”

  Di nodded.

  Marshal picked his way across the bedroom floor; there was an old-fashioned “vanity” in one corner, a real beauty of an antique, and it seemed that Tamara had made daily use of it, for there was a litter of makeup of all sorts on and around it. Most of it was spilled. Clearly the cops had been on a fishing expedition, hoping to find something, probably drugs, that they could use to charge her with.

  One entire end of the bedroom looked as if it had been converted into a closet with louvered doors closed in front of it. Marshal opened up one set, revealing a closet full of clothing—not just the gypsy-hippy things Tamara had been wearing when Di met with her, but everything from sequined evening gowns to sharp business suits, to a couple of antique-style Victorian dresses. And above the clothing, ranged neatly, were more wigs in every possible color.

  “What the—” Di stared.

  “Chameleon,” Marshal guessed. “I bet she did more than just tell fortunes.”

  “I’m beginning to think that the psychic scam was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.” Beneath the clothing were shoe racks, which were just as full as the shelves. “I’d love to know where someone with feet that size found shoes like that.” She shook herself out of the contemplation of all of that clothing. “Never mind, we don’t have time to sort through all the hair around here to figure out what’s hers. You check in here for a wastebasket, maybe you’ll find some used Kleenex. I’ll find the laundry hamper. And we should both look for things that look like they might be keepsakes.”

  Di found the laundry hamper, and it looked as if Tamara sent her clothing out to be cleaned. There was a commercial laundry-bag next to it, stuffed full. She extracted a pair of lacy undies that were just beginning to fray a little. That would have to do, since Marshal came up empty-handed.

  Di was hoping, but not really expecting, to find Tamara’s ritual space or tools. She had the feeling that Tamara kept such things far separated from her living-space. And if she was working left-hand path, well, that was probably wise. The residue of nasty magic was apt to attract equally nasty things, and you didn’t want those things sniffing around the place where you lived and slept.

  She checked her watch, with an increased sense of urgency. “I think we’ve spent as much time here as we can. We have something, anyway. Let’s get out of here.”

  Marshal locked up behind them, though there wasn’t anything he could do about the deadbolts. They both remembered to clean off their shoes, and then sprinted down the alley to his car.

  They found the others waiting somewhat impatiently for them, and by the time they got there, Di had a pretty good idea of what she was going to do, at least so far as finding where Tamara was.

  “Help me move the furniture,” she said, and when they had gotten it all cleared to the sides of the room, she flipped the rug.

  The bottom side was a single piece of white canvas, with her own ritual circle beautifully embroidered on it. She and Memaw had spent all of one year making it. It was, of course, a “broken” circle; the actual circle part was outlined in a nine-part braid of silk with some of her own hair braided into it, and it was completed only when she tied the loose end of the braid to the rest of the circle.

  She unlocked her cupboard while Zaak examined the rug with interest and envy, and got out her supplies. She took everything she needed to the middle of the rug, and raised an eyebrow at Zaak. “Watch and learn,” she said, tied off the braid and cast her circle.

  The moment she did so, she sensed that little door opening up in her again. This time the movement of power was slower, more deliberate, but it was obvious that she was finally on the right track, or it wouldn’t have come at all.

  Once her circle and wards were in place, she sat down cross-legged in the middle of the circle and cut the crotch out of the panties with a silver—literally silver—knife. Not her atheme; that was reserved for other things, and she didn’t want to contaminate its potential power with anything of Tamara’s.

  She pulled several threads from the scrap of cloth, then disassembled her compass.

  It looked like an ordinary compass; a glass cover, the needle resting delicately on a spindle, and the base. But there was no “compass rose” painted on the base; it was just a blank piece of white stuff. Ivory, in fact, though the elephant that had left that tusk had died of natural causes long before there was any ban on importation.

  Everything but the lid was ivory, including the needle. The lid was a glass disk set in bronze. It was very, very old. Di wasn’t sure how old, but the ivory had mellowed to a creamy shade all over.

  She took the needle out, and opened the bottle of rubber cement she’d brought in with her. Delicately dabbing a line of the stuff on the needle, she carefully laid three of the threads along it, and set it back on the spindle, then put the compass back together again.

  She switched her position from cross-legged to kneeling, facing south, the direction of the Protector and Avenger, who could take many names, but answered as often to “Archangel Michael” as any. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands over her atheme, its point down above the compass. She took in a long breath, threw everything out of her mind except the need to find Tamara’s power, and released her own power through her knife into the compass.

  When she opened her eyes and looked down at it, it was pointing between West and South.

  “Right,” she said, realizing from the looks on their faces that there had probably been a physical manifestation of that discharge of power. “Now we have a guide. Saddle up, and move out.”

  #

  Zach, Em, and Emory somehow squeezed into the back, though Em was mostly on Emory’s lap. Di and Marshal were in the front, following, as best they could, given the roads, the guidance of the compass. Streets around Cambridge were not exactly laid out in a logical fashion.

  That was the least of their worries. Once they actually got close to Tamara’s power—which was incorporated into the shields themselves—the shields would begin to interfere. Eventually the compass needle would start to spin. Diana could only hope that the area they ended up in was something like warehouses—places without a lot of people in them. They certainly couldn’t call the cops and start a house-to-house search in a crowded residential neighborhood on the basis of three underwear threads glued to a compass needle
.

  But as the needle continued to point steadfastly in one direction, and they moved out of the city into the suburbs, and then out of the suburbs of Cambridge into the suburbs of Boston, past Boston College—

  “We are way out of Cambridge jurisdiction,” Emory said from the back seat, sounding muffled.

  “So less we have to explain,” Di replied, bending intently over her compass. It was getting darker now, the sun going down, dusk closing in. That was both good and bad. Good, because it meant if they actually found the right place, they could sneak up on it without Tamara seeing them. Bad because Tamara was clearly working some bad juju, and evil things were stronger when the sun went down.

  By the time there was nothing left of the sun but some red streaks in the sky, they were out in rural Massachusetts. Farm country, lots of woodland and orchards. The lights, slowly coming on as darkness fell, were few and far between. Diana’s hopes rose a little.

  They turned down a little two-lane road, barely paved, and traveled about two miles along it without seeing any lights at all other than their own headlights. Orchards? The trees were spaced too regularly to be woods, but if these were orchards, they were long abandoned. She felt in her kit for her flashlight and trained the yellow beam on the compass, and it was a good thing she did, because within moments of her doing so, the needle began to spin wildly.

  “Ha!” she said, and Marshal glanced over at her, taking his foot off the gas—not that the car was going all that fast.

  “Keep going,” she told him. “It’s around here somewhere, but I want to mark where the—”

  “Where the effect ends.” He stopped the car anyway, and zeroed the odometer. “Now we have where it begins marked.”

  She shook her head ruefully. “I think you’re smarter than I am.”

  “Naw. I was an Eagle Scout.” He made a face. “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

  “I was just imagining you in short pants.” That broke the tension a little as Em giggled and Emory guffawed. “Carry on, Scoutmaster.”

  Marshal growled something unintelligible, and sent the car creeping forward again. It seemed forever before the needle stopped spinning and pointed back the way they had come.

  “Stop,” she said, and Marshal peered at the odometer.

  “One point two five miles to the midpoint,” he said. “Roughly.” He maneuvered the car carefully in an effort not to get off the pavement, taking so long to get going in the opposite direction that Emory made the impatient suggestion that they just get out, pick it up, and turn it around that way.

  Finally they were underway again.

  “Stop us a little short, look for some place we can pull the car off the road where no one is going to notice it.”

  “You’re asking me to pull this poor little thing off the road—” the car bumped and lurched around a pothole. “Lady, the springs in ballpoint pens are stronger than the ones in my car!”

  “Just—there!” She pointed ahead, to what looked like an overgrown gravel road intersection with this one. Obediently he eased off the road onto the track, which was a lot better than it looked; hardpacked dirt nearly as good as the pavement, the weeds growing up over it being weak and giving no resistance. There had once been a fence here, but it had fallen down a good while ago. Once they were under the trees and away from the reach of the headlights of any car on the road, it would be hard to tell they were there.

  They all got out; Diana passed out flashlights from her kit to the others, who played them on the ground. There was a litter of cigarette butts and crumpled packages, beer cans, food wrappers and a couple of empty bottles of harder stuff mixed in with the weeds.

  “Well, that explains a lot,” said Emory.

  “Good thing it’s Sunday night, otherwise we’d have company.” Marshal got the rest of their gear out of the car’s tiny “boot,” and looked to Di. “All right, Fearless Leader, what are we looking for?”

  “Bonehead. Since there’s no Haunted Amusement Park around here, it has to be the Abandoned Farmhouse. Don’t you ever watch any Saturday morning cartoons?” Emory shook his head sadly. “No wonder the only culture you have is the stuff growing in your fridge.”

  Di shivered, and not from the cold, though it was icy out here, and the darkness wasn’t helping. “Let’s get going,” she said, wincing at the sound of her own voice. It sounded too loud. Instinctively, she wanted to whisper.

  She led the way back to the road, then turned off her flashlight; the others did the same, though she could sense their uncertainty. “Wait for the moon,” she told them. “It’s almost full, and it should be coming up in a second. Em, Emory, you guys got your weapons?”

  “Yep. We want to know where the rest of you are before we start going all Dirty Harry, though.” Emory’s voice sounded subdued. “So how do we do that?”

  “You guys stick together; you’ve seen enough horror movies to know not to lose each other in the dark. If you do, those of you that are still together stop and freeze and let the stray find you. If I have to split off, I’ll yell before I come anywhere near you.”

  “Got it.” The moon was rising above the trees now, and as she expected, it flooded the road with light. With their eyes adjusted they could see reasonably well, enough to keep from spraining an ankle in potholes or falling over a rock. They made their way cautiously down the road—there was no point in trying to stumble through the grass and weeds beside it, when they would be able to see any vehicles coming long before the occupants could see them. It was…spooky. Far off in the distance it was possible to hear the sounds of cars and trucks on the highway, but nearby? Only the occasional noise of an animal, small or medium-sized scuttling through the dead vegetation, or farther off, the noise of something larger moving away from them.

  “This really is going to be a Haunted Farmhouse, isn’t it?” Emory said quietly.

  “Well, it’s pretty likely Tamara has holed up in the farmhouse that this orchard belongs to,” Di told him. “Or at least, something like that. I’d have suspected an old trailer-home, but what I saw in my dream looked older and more permanent than that. I can’t see her camping.”

  “Me either, not after that bedroom. I don’t see anyone with that many wigs knowing how to rough it.” Marshal peered up the road. “I think that might be what we’re looking for—on the left. See where there’s no drop-off at the edge of the pavement, like there is everywhere else? Like there used to be an access road there, or maybe a driveway.”

  They picked up their pace a little—as much as anyone wanted to, given the dim light. Sure enough, there was something like an overgrown track there. There was no sign of a gate, but Marshal and Di evidently had the same idea at the same time, for they both went straight up to what looked like an impenetrable barrier of bushes and weeds and discovered that the “impenetrable barrier” was just a screen of dead stuff piled up to hide the road.

  “Bingo.” Di shivered again. “Either we have a really antisocial old man, someone farming weed, or Tamara. So wait—”

  She closed her eyes and tried to see if she could sense anything. Other than a vague but powerful feeling of menace, though, she couldn’t get a thing.

  “Anything on the radar?” Zaak asked. She shook her head.

  “Sometimes these access roads go for half a mile,” Marshal observed. “We might be too far away. Can we use flashlights?”

  “I think we’re going to have to,” she replied. “But…be careful, because that’s just going to advertise we’re coming…”

  “Like falling and breaking an ankle wouldn’t?” Em put in. “Still, it might be worth it for someone to scout ahead of the group.”

  “That’d be me,” Marshal replied. “Eagle Scout, remember? I’ll keep my eyes dark-adapted, I won’t go farther ahead than twenty yards. When I know that stretch is clear, I’ll whistle a little, and you can come catch up to me with the lights, then I’ll go ahead again.”

  The sense of urgency that had driven Di out he
re argued against such caution, but the rest of her was in complete agreement. So that was what they did; the group huddled together, listening to the faint crackle of weeds being trampled underfoot as Marshal forged ahead, then at his excellent imitation of a whippoorwill, they would move forward to his position, then wait for him again as he went ahead.

  That continued for a while—it seemed like a very long time, but it was actually a lot less than an hour—right up to the point where, instead of hearing his whistle, they heard him furtively making his way back to them.

  “There’s a farmhouse there, all right. Some lights at the rear, not many and not bright, and it looks like most of the windows are boarded up, so it’s not as if someone is living there that has a right to be there. I think.” He was whispering, and they all kept their voices just as low. “Di, you getting anything now?”

  “This doesn’t exactly work like radar,” she whispered back, but she couldn’t deny the heavy feeling of menace all around. “All right. We need a plan. Does that place look like it has a basement? Maybe a root cellar or something? And do you feel comfortable prowling around it a little? If not—”

  “I’m comfortable, providing no werewolves jump me.” He tried to make a joke out of it.

  “I can try to do something to keep that from happening,” she said, quite seriously. “I can make you invisible to supernatural things, but so far as you making perfectly ordinary noises and alerting killer German Shepherds or anything like that—”

  He sobered. “If you can do that, I’ll take my chances. I was pretty good at teenage sneaking around.”

  She nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see it, then remembered and said, “All right. We just need to know the general layout of the place and where the doors and accessible windows are. And if there is a basement with outside access.” Right now a basement room was the likeliest match for the room she had seen in her dream.

  This was magic she could do quickly; she’d done it a thousand times, although usually on herself. It simply made the person in question blend in with the background, chameleon-like, at least to the senses of anything magical. Not so much invisibility, as making the eyes slide away, a forceful “not noticing.” It wouldn’t last long on Marshal, but then again, it wouldn’t have to.