Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation)

by Mercedes Lackey

  She cast it quickly, and without any fuss. She was done by the time he said “Well, when are you going to make me the Invisible Man?”

  “I already have,” she replied. “Be careful.”

  “I will,” he replied fervently, and slipped away, leaving them all in a huddle in the dark.

  She tried to sense just what was in that house, but other than the general aura of inimical magic, she couldn’t get much without pushing. And right now, she didn’t want to push. Tamara, though powerful, was clearly not very skilled—or else she had picked up her knowledge piecemeal and had never actually been formally trained. There was a lot of emotion fueling that power, and it wasn’t just Chris Fitzhugh’s anguish. Some of this had to be Tamara’s own, and what that said to Di was that she had better tread very cautiously. She might be the proverbial blunt instrument, but an untutored lout with a sledgehammer could kill you just as dead as an assassin with a stiletto.

  What Di didn’t sense was anything outside of that house. Mind, that didn’t mean anything. There could be traps. There could be things that were hiding from her, as she had hidden Marshal.

  Or maybe, just maybe, Tamara was arrogant enough to think that she wouldn’t be found, or felt she had to conserve her magical resources.

  Di was used to waiting, though the others were fidgeting long before Marshal came back. The whippoorwill whistle preceded him and he slipped in beside them in the shelter of their bushes with only a little rustling of dead leaves.

  “The side facing us is the front. There’s a wooden porch covered with Virginia Creeper which looks like a death-trap; half the supports are busted and I wouldn’t be any too sure of the floor. The windows are all boarded up, and I couldn’t see any sign of anyone fighting through the weeds and the Virginia Creeper to get to the front door. Around left is that cellar door you were hoping for and someone did use that, the weeds are all busted down. There are a couple windows on that side where the boards are off the windows, but the windows are dark. The back, there’s a car back there, an old beater Buick, a back door with cement steps going up, and the windows back there have light. It looks like a Coleman or a kerosene lamp, not electricity. The last side is all boarded up, and full of blackberry bushes; I didn’t even try to get around it.”

  Di let out her breath in a sigh. “All right then. We’re hitting this blind, and I’m sorry. My best guess is the kid is in that cellar. It’s where I’d stash her if I was hiding her. So what we need to do is provide a distraction at the kitchen door while we snatch the kid from the cellar—”

  “And we provide the distraction,” Emory interrupted, and started to stand up.

  “Oh hell no!” Di hissed, and pulled him back down again. “If she’s got the kind of juice I think she does, she’ll be able to bring in stuff that make that dybbuk look like Captain Kangaroo! No, I want you guys to put the grab on the kid, while I do the distraction! Chances are the kid’s farther back in the cellar than where that door is. There might be locks, if there are, the door’s probably old enough and the frame’s dry-rotted enough you can bust it off the hinges, but I can’t. And I’m leaving you with the guns. If there’s a confederate, he’ll be down there.”

  “Oh,” said Emory. “Ah…”

  “All right. I’ll go hit the back door and start a ruckus, while you wait at the cellar. As soon as you hear the noise start, break in, try and find the munchkin in the cellar. If she’s not there, head up into the house and stay clear of where the noise is. Zaak?”

  “Yep. Got the kit.” Zaak sounded steadier than she thought he would. Excellent.

  “Remember, blessed salt and holy water will probably chase off anything she’s left on guard. If that doesn’t work, try the horseshoe nails. If that doesn’t work, try brute magical force and bullets. And if those don’t work—try what worked on the dybbuk. It’s worth a shot, and unholy things usually will at least react to the holy backed by faith.”

  “Gotcha. Give me a sec…” Zaak rummaged in the bag and came up with the salt container, which he proceeded to empty into one pocket of his jacket. She nodded with approval. “Got the squirt gun of holy water in the right pocket, and the horseshoe nails in a bag on my belt.”

  Horseshoe nails—better make sure they all had them. “Yeah wait a sec, give everybody one of those. You guys stick them in a pocket. Cold Iron is pretty effective a repellant for the things I can think of she’d have as guards—they can still lob stuff at you, but they won’t be able to get close enough to slash at you, and claws and teeth are generally their weapons of choice.” She took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s do this.”

  They did their best to slip through the brush and weeds in Marshal’s wake, though only Di was as quiet as he was.

  Their eyes had adapted to the darkness while they waited for Marshal without lights. The house had probably been white, and probably was now the silver- grey of bleached wood, so it stood out pretty well—and it helped that there was a vague haze of light at the back of it. She left them all at the cellar door, an old-fashioned double-door that looked, thank heavens, like something that had stairs behind it and not a coal-chute. There was a padlock on it, but Marshal was already at work on it.

  “Whistle when you get the lock off,” she whispered; he nodded, and she moved quietly on to the back of the house.

  Sure enough, there was a chunky old car back there, something from the ’50s, not iconic enough to be cool, too lumpy to be good-looking. There wasn’t enough light to tell the color, but Di guessed it was probably a faded turquoise.

  She scooted around its side so that it was between her and the house and studied the area around the back door. And now she could detect wood smoke; the light wind had probably been carrying it away from them. So there was some form of lantern in there, and a wood fire.

  There weren’t any moving shadows. Did that mean anything? She peered in the car windows; the back seat was loaded with dark bundles. Smart; the house was probably stuffed with rats and mice; anything Tamara wanted to keep safe—like food!—she was better off keeping in the car. Carefully she tried a door; it opened easily, letting out a whiff of apples and salami.

  The whistle she was hoping for sounded softly from the side of the house. All right. They were waiting for her. Time to light up some fireworks.

  Tamara clearly was not expecting anyone to find her here. So chances were, she hadn’t locked the back door, if indeed it could be locked. After all it would be a nuisance to have to unlock it just to get into the car for breakfast.

  Showtime.

  She brought up all of her defenses, and walked quickly around the car and up the cement stairs. Bringing power into both hands, she kicked at the door.

  As she had hoped, it flew open and smashed into the wall, sticking there. She jumped across the threshold before Tamara could do something to block her—

  Most of the light in the room was coming from a Coleman lantern in one corner and a wood stove on the opposite wall; this was a kitchen, but there was no furniture in it—and the reason she had not been able to see any moving shadows was because Tamara was kneeling on the floor, naked, with her back to the door, in the center of a piece of canvas. Painted on the canvas was a ritual circle, though Di didn’t recognize the signs painted around and inside the circle. Tamara leapt to her feet as Di crossed the threshold, and whirled.

  And that was when Di froze, because the very last thing she had ever expected Tamara to have was a penis.

  It was a good thing her defenses were already up, because that moment of paralysis would have cost her dearly. As it was, when Tamara screeched an obscenity and blasted her, it pretty much all splashed off her shields. The attack steadied her, though, and she gave back as good as she got.

  Tamara’s shields were nothing like as good as Di’s, but they were insanely strong, so the result was the same—nothing got through. They battered at each other for at least five minutes, when a volley of gunshots under their feet startled them both for a moment. The sound ra
ttled Tamara more, though, and Di got in a hit that sent the kidnapper staggering back, narrowly avoiding the stove.

  Tamara pushed off the wall and snatched something out of the old zinc sink under the window, then lunged for Di, an enormous butcher knife catching the light from the lantern as it passed way too close to her eyes. It was Di’s turn to flinch back, her concentration broken. Then Tamara was on her again, and it was pretty clear that no matter what other skills the kidnapper had, Tamara was a skilled knife-fighter.

  It was all that Di could do to keep out of reach of that blade while she tried to refocus her power. But as she had pointed out, shields didn’t do squat about material things, and that knife was as material as you could get. All she could do was fall back on the half dozen ju-jitsu lessons she’d had—

  Which seemed pitifully few now. Her side hurt, she was panting, and she was sweating, while Tamara was just as energized by rage and insanity as when this fight had started.

  And then—miracle.

  Tamara made a stab at Di that was identical to something the ju-jitsu instructor had taught her to counter. And everything just snapped into place, as if it was all preprogrammed. With focus and complete confidence, Di moved out of the line of Tamara’s stab. She grabbed Tamara’s wrist at exactly the right moment to catch the kidnapper off her balance. She pulled, ducked under Tamara’s arm, and flipped the kidnapper right over her shoulder and into the wall.

  There was a shuddering whump as Tamara hit the wall, and a strange, gurgling noise.

  Di straightened, as Tamara slid down the wall, flopped over—

  With the knife driven into Tamara’s chest, the kidnapper’s hand still clenched on the hilt, eyes already glazing over with death.

  There was a strangled little sick sound at the door. Di whirled to see Marshal and Emory already moving to block the sight of the body from the child in Zaak’s arms, and Em holstering her gun.

  “Um—we came to see if you needed—guess you didn’t,” Marshal gulped.

  “Thirty seconds ago I did,” Di replied, feeling as sick as Marshal and Emory looked. “Move. Out. Over by the car. Quick.”

  She started for the door, which got them moving. Her mind raced; she needed to figure out a plausible scenario, and she needed to figure it out fast and make sure it was simple and that they were all letter-perfect in it.

  By the time they were all in a huddle at the car, she had it.

  “Okay, we need a story that is going to hold up enough to get us off. Marshal, you need to get your car and bring it to the front of the house; you and Emory and Em will take the kid to the last town we passed and get hold of the law. Wait!” She held up her hand. “Wait and hear me out. We can’t exactly turn up with a kidnapped child and a dead body unless we’ve got a good explanation, but one cops will buy. Here’s ours. We came out here because we heard the place was abandoned and we were gonna scout it out for throwing a party. Confess to the lesser crime they can turn us loose for, see?”

  “Okay, give me the guns. What were you shooting at, anyway?”

  “There was something guarding the kid,” Emory replied, his voice sounding a little shaky. “Something bigger than me, and hairy. We emptied on it, it went down, Zaak hit it with water and salt and it just melted away.”

  She nodded. No idea what it was—only that it was a good thing they’d had all that weaponry. She took the guns back, including Zaak’s squirt gun, and shoved them all back in the bag Zaak had been carrying.

  “So the story is you three got here and you heard the kid screaming and crying, you busted into the basement and got her and ran. Zaak and I will go back to where we parked the car the first time and wait for you. The cops will want you to take them to the house, you will, they’ll find—that—and assume Tamara was too late to stop you so she killed herself. Himself.” She paused, thrown for a moment, then picked up the plan. “Zaak and I will get rid of anything that looks occult and set up a bucket or a tub or something and put some water to heat on the stove in there, so it looks like you interrupted Tamara in the middle of bath time. Got it?”

  They nodded, but Marshal asked, hesitantly, “But why—I mean getting rid of—“

  “Because this is freaky enough without starting a big old Satanic witch sacrifices scare,” Di said bluntly. “Now I want to figure out what the hell she—he—was doing and why, and for that I need to grab the evidence. But the cops don’t need to know that—if they did, sure as anything, they’d start looking for a cult, and there isn’t one. Just one lunatic, but looking for a cult will start them sniffing around anything from Halloween supplies on up, and none of us need that kind of scrutiny.”

  She looked directly at Zaak when she said, that, and he nodded.

  “So, are we straight?”

  They all nodded. Marshal took the best of the flashlights and went off at a run after handing the kid to Di. The poor thing was so exhausted by all she’d been through that she’d actually fallen asleep while they were standing around talking. She was heavy and more than a bit smelly by now, and Di didn’t care—because she was alive, and safe, and she had completely beaten the odds on this one.

  Marshal came back a lot sooner than any of them had thought he would, headlights blazing with welcome light. That would leave the tire tracks that would give veracity to their story. Emory and Emily got in, wrapping the little girl in a blanket from the boot of the car. She didn’t even wake up. And then they were gone, Marshal revving the engine as hard as it could go.

  #

  They didn’t get back to their respective apartments until dawn. The telephone shrilled, waking her up about noon. She fumbled her way to it—she’d fallen into bed still clothed and just rolled up into the blankets—and answered it.

  “Joe O’Brian,” came, after her bleary “hello?” “Don’t bother trying to tell me you had nothing to do with it. Lavinia says otherwise. Am I welcome in your apartment yet?”

  “Uh…yeah?” she said.

  “Good. Get your Spook Squad together in an hour. I’ll bring the grinders and beer.” Before she could respond, he hung up.

  When Joe arrived, he had two big sacks of grinders and a case—and Lavinia in tow. He wasn’t in a uniform either. Di had managed to wake everyone up and get them assembled, though there were dark circles under their eyes and all of them—including her—were still feeling kind of shocky.

  Joe didn’t say much after she let him in, he just distributed the sandwiches and beers, and let everyone settle down first.

  “Right,” he said, taking charge of things. “First of all, is there any evidence I have to make disappear?”

  Di shook her head. “Zaak and I were careful. We wore gloves, I never had any blood on me and I made sure Zaak didn’t get any on him, I don’t think the little girl has any idea how many people there were, and I think I left a pretty plausible looking scene. I even polished my prints off the car where I touched it.”

  Joe let out his breath in a sigh of relief. “Good job,” he said, breaking into a smile for the first time since Di had met him. “All right, here’s what I know. Tomas—that was Tamara’s real name—was turned down for sex change operations three times. No one would talk on the record but the last shrink said off the record that no doc in his right mind was going to do that kind of operation on the sort of raving loony that Tomas was. And after going over the house, we found all kinds of things. First, a rent-a-cop uniform, so now we know there wasn’t a confederate. But the big one—Tomas was operating as a Tomas-the-bookie as well as Tamara-the-tea-leaf reader, and one of the clients was named Fitzhugh.”

  As one, their jaws dropped.

  “Well…that explains a lot,” Zaak said, recovering first.

  Di nodded. It did—how Tamara knew about Melanie and Chris, probably how Tamara knew about the shopping trip too—

  “We’re getting the details out of Fitzhugh now, but damn if Tomas wasn’t slick. He—Tamara, that is—was never around when the old man was, so he never laid eyes on his wife�
�s pet psychic. We’re gonna spin it as debt and extortion, and that’s what the Fitzhughs think it is, but I want the real reason. That’s why I brought Vinnie.” Joe nodded at Lavinia, who was casually, but fastidiously, eating her meatball grinder with a knife and fork.

  Di put down her sandwich and got up to the still unopened bag into which they had stuffed Tamara’s canvas circle and every bit of occult paraphernalia they could find. She spread it the canvas out on the floor first, and was reaching into the bag, when Lavinia exclaimed, “Of course! Cybele!”

  “Who?” said Joe, as Di snapped her finger snapped her fingers and exclaimed “Of course!”

  “Cybele is the Phrygian earth-goddess, which is not important. What is important is that like most ancient goddesses she has both a light side and a dark side—and that historically her male followers castrated themselves to turn themselves into priestesses.” Lavinia was off and running then, explaining that Tomas was probably invoking Cybele’s dark side in hopes of getting the sex change he wanted by magic, then diverting into the realms of Anatolian mythology. The others were following her explanations and digressions—Zaak with great interest, Emory and Marshal with frowns of concentration, Em and Joe nodding but looking vaguely lost whenever Lavinia swerved off the modern path.

  Now Di was very glad Joe had brought Lavinia, who was, aside from being a Guardian, a first class scholar of Indo-European religions and mythology. She’d never have figured out “Phrygian” from those glyphs on the canvas, but once Lavinia did, it all made perfect sense. So to speak.

  She had to wonder, after all, if Tomas was not a gypsy at all, but some wandering Anatolian…even a descendant of those long-ago priests of Cybele.

  Whatever the case, one thing was absolutely true. It was seldom wise to awaken one of those old, old gods and give them footholds in the modern world. Their worship was often violent and bloody, and the sacrifices they demanded were generally extravagant. The Greeks and Romans had given Cybele room among their gods as the Magna Mater, or Great Mother, but there were dark things said about the worship of the Magna Mater, and human sacrifice was the least of those things.