by Jenn Bennett
“Hold on, let me put on some shoes.”
Flip-flops it was. I grabbed a rolled-up piece of canvas and a small caduceus, then followed Mrs. Marsh across my dark driveway and through a narrow hole in the shrubbery to get into her side yard.
“Where is it now?”
Before she could answer, one of her two large cats sprang from the hood of a rusted barbecue grill at the side of her house. Mrs. Marsh groaned as she bent low to scoop the cat into her arms; it nestled against her neck with its arms lazily dangling over her shoulder.
I hate cats. I try to tell myself that it’s because of their contemptuous attitude, or their sneaky manner, but in reality it’s probably just that I can’t control them. Demons I can bind, humans I can outrun with spells, dogs I can call and they come, but cats …
The tinny sound of something metal crashing on Mrs. Marsh’s patio startled both of us. Our heads whipped around in unison toward her backyard.
“It’s outside on my patio,” she whispered loudly.
We walked past the rusted grill and slowed at the corner of her house. I held my hand up to tell her to halt while I peeked around the corner. My eyes scanned the night shadows made by the oak trees; they cast a black, lacy pattern on her lawn until they ended abruptly at the small, yellow circle of light that radiated out from the bug light at her back door. Her green city-issued garbage can stood inside the yellow circle.
An empty can of cat food came to a slow, rolling stop on the cement patio nearby.
The sooner this imp was gone, the sooner I could get some sleep. I unrolled the worn canvas square, revealing a small circle bordered by runes and symbols that had been stained into the cloth with a mixture of red ochre and pig’s blood. No, I did not kill the pig, thankyouverymuch. I bought a small jar of blood from a local occult shop that gets their supply from a slaughterhouse across town. Working with animal blood isn’t something I savor—I’m sure there are plenty of things about your job that you don’t enjoy—but that particular kind of circle requires it.
Triangles are commonly used to bind, but the circle on my canvas has a little something extra. Once charged, it creates a generic gateway leading into the Æthyr. A quick, one-way portal back home, otherwise known as a banishment.
She who summons must banish. That’s the unchangeable cosmic law that applies to most anything summoned from the Æthyr. If a magician summons any demon from one of the hundreds of Æthyric classes, that very same magician must send it back. No one else can step up and do the job for you. That’s why there are so many Earthbounds running around the States these days. Some idiot magician working for Queen Elizabeth summoned a group of lower-echelon Æthyric demons and trapped them in human bodies, thinking they’d make pliable subjects when America was being colonized. However, the newly invoked Earthbounds lost their ticket home when the magician died of smallpox before he could send them back. A few hundred years of breeding, and here we are. At least, that’s how the story goes.
Imps, though, are different.
The cockroaches of the supernatural world, imps slip in and out of the Æthyr at will. Since no one summons them, anyone could banish them; they’re fair game, and my spiffy canvas portal worked like a charm. Sure, the imps that I trapped could still come back to earth on their own, but not for several days—or weeks, depending on the strength of the charge that I gave the circle—because my portal left an imbedded blocking spell on the imps. It took me several years of experimentation to find the right combination of sigils that would accomplish this, and I was damn proud of my ingenuity.
I tiptoed around the corner, staying in the shadows as I approached the patio, then laid the entrapment canvas on the cement in front of me. A single scratching noise emerged from the garbage can several feet away. Maybe this would be easy.
I retreated back to Mrs. Marsh again and reached for her cat.
“No!” she whispered. “Not Tiddlywinks!”
“I need bait, Mrs. Marsh. He won’t be hurt, promise.” Well … hopefully.
She reluctantly handed over the cat, which I held at arm’s length in front of me like a baby with a dirty diaper. Tiddlywinks began growling at me, so I rushed to put him down near the canvas portal before he tore my eyeballs out. After sniffing the canvas and retreating a few steps, he settled down and began licking his butt without a care in the world. Plumped with cheap cat food and content to live his life in a near-coma state, Tiddlywinks barely had a pulse; with any luck, he’d stay put.
Mrs. Marsh and I stood together behind a bush and waited, our eyes fixed on the garbage can. Come out, little imp. Get the nice kitty cat. After a few seconds, I thought I spied some movement behind the garbage can, then a clammy chill ran up my arms. I looked down as Mrs. Marsh yelped, only to see the wispy trail of an imp dart out from between my legs.
“Motherfucker!” I yelled. Tricked again. For a brief moment, I pitied the people on Paranormal Patrol. I ran after the imp, rounding the corner of the house with as much speed as I could manage wearing flip-flops. Tiddlywinks was in a compromising position, with one leg up in the air, paused midlick. His ears were cocked in my direction as I ran toward him at top speed. Then I realized the imp was stopping in front of the cat. He wasn’t going to bail; he took the bait.
I slid across the damp grass. To avoid running into the imp and the cat, I half fell, half lunged near them in an awkward dive. I tried to pull an action-movie stunt roll. Big mistake. My upper arm hit the edge of the cement patio. As I cried out in pain, the caduceus flew from my hand and landed somewhere in the shadows. Smooth move.
I curled up into a ball on my side. When I glanced toward my feet, I was surprised to find Tiddlywinks still there, ears flattened and the hair on his back standing on end. The imp was circling the cat like prey. Only a couple of feet tall and mostly transparent, he was tubby, with rolls on his arms and legs like a pudgy baby. He had a bulbous nose and floppy ears, one of them torn, as Mrs. Marsh had noted.
Ignoring the pain in my arm, I reached for the canvas entrapment portal, grabbed the edge of it, and slung it over the imp. And the cat. I couldn’t help it; he was in the way.
Without time to find the caduceus, I’d have to release the kindled Heka without a filter. The danger of electrical shock wasn’t in the pull as much as the release. As long as I had the caduceus to even things out, the release was relatively painless. Without it, I risked burning myself up from the inside out.
I quickly tapped into the current from Mrs. Marsh’s house. Too fast. The raw surge of electricity mixed erratically with my inner Heka; my body stiffened and began shaking.
Ever been shocked with electrical current? I mean, really shocked, as in a jolt up the arm, can’t let go, can’t breathe, life flashing before your eyes kind of shock? Not something most people would want to willingly do. You have to be a little crazy to practice hard-core magick: It’s not for the weak. The only thing in my favor was the high electric resistance that Heka-rich bodies tend to possess. Current flows differently in me.
But not so differently that I was indestructible.
At this point, all I could do was release the Heka, but it wouldn’t be pretty. I gathered all my willpower, flung myself up and over toward the imp, and muttered the entrapment spell as my hand came down on the canvas and released the energy.
My teeth clattered as the kindled charge left my body, hit the canvas, and exploded into a small fire.
“Shit!”
A muffled howl came from underneath the burning canvas as Tiddlywinks shot out and sped off toward the front yard. Before the entrapment portal could burn away, I said one more spell and banished the imp back into the Æthyr.
“Tiddlywinks!” Mrs. Marsh yelled as she ran after her cat.
I leapt over to the canvas, removed one flip-flop, and used it to beat the fire down. It took several slaps to extinguish. Putrid-smelling smoke trailed up into the air from the blackened hole in the middle of the cloth. Smoked pig’s blood. Disgusting.
As I
slid back on my soot-smeared shoe, Mrs. Marsh appeared with Tiddlywinks in tow.
“Guess you’ll have to make another circle, sweetie,” she said as we both looked down at the smoking cloth. “But at least I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
And at least I wasn’t wasting my magical talent on supernatural pest control. Oh, wait—I was. I found my caduceus in the grass and stalked off toward my house, one charred corner of the barbecued canvas dangling between the tips of my fingers.
6
Exhaustion set in as I locked my side door. On the way upstairs to my bedroom, I gathered up my pet, Mr. Piggy, a rescued hedgehog. Not much bigger than my hand, Mr. Piggy is a cute thing with a petite pink nose and dark, beady eyes. I scratched him on the underside of his little pointy chin and he yawned. At times he can be downright grumpy, but as far as roommates go, he’s a pretty good one.
Sleep. That was what I needed. Once I got to my bedroom, I maneuvered my bra from underneath my shirt, dropped it on the floor, and ditched my jeans before crawling under the bedcovers. The small, sagging mattress felt like heaven. Mr. Piggy huffed and puffed as he climbed the set of pet stairs that I kept at the foot of the bed; he waddled across the covers and stopped when he found an acceptable spot to settle near my feet. Then he turned three slow circles before finally plopping down.
My hair stunk of smoky pig’s blood, but I didn’t have the strength to care. At that moment I just needed rest; I figured I’d wash off the funk when I woke up.
I drowsily made plans for the next day. First I’d contact Father Carrow and ask him to put some pressure on Lon for me. Then maybe I’d call Kar Yee to arrange for a part-time bartender to take a couple of my shifts. My thoughts roamed and faded. Just when I was at the cusp of succumbing to the heavy pull of sleep, a loud knock sounded from downstairs.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” No way on God’s green earth was I getting out of bed to run after another damned imp for that woman. All my charity and goodwill were gone. If I didn’t answer the door, maybe she’d go away. I waited and heard nothing, then settled back into my pillow while Mr. Piggy grumbled his own protests.
Not for long.
Another knock came, this one louder and more insistent. Furious, I threw back the covers and stomped downstairs. I really didn’t think I could be nice this time. I made my way down the side hall, turned the lock, and flung the door open with nothing short of malice.
“Mrs. Marsh—” I hissed.
It was not Mrs. Marsh standing in my doorway. It was Lon Butler.
“Expecting someone else?” he asked with an amused look on his face.
“What the hell are you doing here? How did you—”
“I’ve just been over at Father Carrow’s house down the block and …” He hesitated as his eyes skimmed over me. I followed his gaze and peered down at myself. Nothing but my T-shirt and panties. A blowtorch warmth spread up my neck, over my cheeks. “Father Carrow,” he repeated, still not looking at my face, “pointed out which house was yours, so I drove over.”
I stealthily attempted to tug down the hem of my T-shirt, but it barely covered my waist.
“Looks like you’ve stuck your finger in a light socket,” he observed, tearing his eyes away from my hips to stare at my hair. Damn Mrs. Marsh and that imp. And damn myself for kindling raw electricity without a caduceus.
“Well?” I prompted.
“You gonna invite me in, or you wanna talk out here?”
I moved from the doorway and gestured for him to come inside. Ten o’clock on a Friday night, and I was letting strange men into my house while I was half dressed. I reminded myself that he had, at one time, been studying to become a priest. That meant he took a vow of chastity, didn’t it? I idly wondered if he stuck to it after he got kicked out, then decided that he didn’t look all that chaste to me.
“Have a seat,” I said, pointing toward the sofa in front of the television. At least the downstairs wasn’t too messy. My bedroom looked like a bomb had gone off in it, and the master bath was disgusting. “I’ll be right back. I need to … put something on,” I murmured as he sat down.
The trek up the stairs was excruciating. Why a thong— why today? I guess it could have been worse. I mean, yes, the lower half of my rear was hanging out, but at least I wasn’t wearing cheap multipack cotton panties, full of holes with the elastic worn out, like half of my others. When I got the nagging feeling that his eyes were on my backside, I wondered if it would look cowardly if I took two stairs at a time.
“Nice ass.”
My bent leg hesitated on the step. I turned my head to glare, but found him staring intently at the screen of his cell phone—as if he’d never said a word. For a second, I wondered if I’d imagined it, but I hadn’t. Thoroughly uncomfortable now, I continued my climb in silence without responding.
After I’d finished dressing, I started running a brush through my frazzled hair, then stopped myself. What the hell are you doing, primping?
Mildly irritated at myself, I walked back downstairs and found Lon right where I’d left him. He was leaning down, face-to-face with Mr. Piggy. My curious hedgehog was standing on his hind legs and sniffing the air, trying to flirt his way into the man’s lap.
“Mr. Piggy, get down,” I scolded, reaching to pull him away.
“What is that?”
“It’s a hedgehog.”
“Is he your familiar?” he asked with a lopsided smile.
Funny. My “other car” was not a “broomstick,” and if I saw that sticker on one more bumper in my neighborhood, I was going to ram somebody. I had nothing against Witches, Wiccans, Pagans, or anyone else on their own spiritual path, but my mother always taught me that “witch” was a slur; serious magicians were not witches. I didn’t spend Beltane dancing around in the woods naked or calling up friends to hold a fucking drum circle: I do real magick with real results.
I glowered at Lon without answering the taunt. His eyes narrowed to slits in what I suspected was silent humor. Was he laughing at me? It was hard to tell. After a moment, he cleared his throat and glanced at the hedgehog.
“I didn’t know they were so small,” he admitted as I scooped up Mr. Piggy by his belly.
“He’s a pygmy.”
I shuffled over to a small gated pen set up in the corner of the adjoining dining room and placed him inside. He had a small bed, a couple of toys, a miniature litter box, and a water dish there. If I let him roam free all the time, he’d tear the place apart.
“Are you going to help me find my demon?” I asked. “Because if you are, I’ll offer you something to drink. If you aren’t, I’m not gonna bother.”
He chuckled once and leaned back into the sofa. “Straight to the point, I like that.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’ll take coffee,” he said.
Was that a yes? I wrinkled up my nose. “I’m out.”
“What do you have, then?”
“Water or Coke.”
“No liquor? And you’re a bartender?”
“I don’t drink liquor. I might have a beer, but—”
“I’ll take it.”
I stared him down for a few seconds, then retreated to the kitchen. I returned with two cans of PBR that were abandoned in my fridge by one of my hipster friends; the look of disdain on Lon’s face was priceless. He set his beer on the coffee table like it might explode.
I stepped over his legs and alighted at the far end of the sofa, sitting with my back against the arm and my feet tucked under my legs. “So, you’re going to help me.”
“I talked to Father Carrow.”
“Yes, you mentioned that.”
“He seems to trust you, but he doesn’t know exactly why you want the albino demon.”
No, he sure didn’t. I reached for my beer, cracked it open, and swigged. It tasted like dirty water and sweat.
“I decided that I would help you—”
“Great,” I said with a fake smile, setting my
beer back down.
“—if you are honest and tell me the real reason you want it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
Tired and angry, I began speaking louder. “You mean to tell me that you’re some ex-priest, and you’re not only refusing to be helpful, you’re holding information hostage unless I give in to your demands?”
“I was never a priest.”
“Oh, that’s right. You were kicked out, weren’t you? What could you have possibly done that was so bad, they sealed your records? That’s like a dishonorable discharge, right?”
His eyebrows lowered as he scowled at me. After a short pause, he answered, “One of my teachers suspected I was a demon.”
Oh.
“Are you?” I squinted at his strangely colored halo.
“Are you?” he countered, looking up at mine.
“Of course not.”
“Well I am,” he said. “So how come you can see my halo if you aren’t?”
“I was … born different. That’s all.” You know, just your average magical breeding experiment.
“I asked around,” he said after a long pause. “Lots of stories about bindings in your bar, but most Earthbounds seem to respect you.”
Yeah, that was about right. “I’m a magician, and damn good at controlling demons—Earthbounds or Æthyric. Historically, our kinds have never been best buddies,” I said, pointing back and forth between the two of us. “Once demons realize that I’m not a power-crazed mage forcing them to give up some divinatory vision or alchemical secret, they’re usually cool with me. As long as they don’t break shit in my bar, I’m cool with them.”
He looked at me thoughtfully, then pulled out the same silver cigarette case he’d had earlier in the day. “Can we smoke inside?”
“Sure.” Maybe it would get rid of the burnt-pig stench in my hair. I reached to open a nearby window, accepted his offer, and lit up with my own lighter before sliding it toward him.
