"I hope that witch topples off her broom and then a house falls on her," commented a prominent fairy we'll call Tinker, since she spoke to this scribbling scribe on background. Dill reportedly rang Tinker's bell during the gargoyle incident. Tinker looks forward to Dill being punished with relish.
This statuary lover and annoyed author cannot help but conclude this entire gargoyle incident is grotesque.
I groaned, both at the terrible puns and the information. If the Conclave had already made a preliminary determination of a First Rule violation, that meant I would go to sleep in my own bed one night and wake up to find I was in a Conclave prison awaiting trial, a trial in which I was presumed guilty and would have to prove my innocence. And since I was guilty, proving I was innocent would be like proving the sky wasn’t blue.
I was tempted to drown my mounting dread in more wine, but I resisted the notion. With everything in my life spiraling out of control, I needed to keep my wits about me. Such as they were.
I tugged on the stop request cord, and the bus ground to a halt at my stop. I got off, and the bus continued up Georgia Avenue with a loud hiss and the smell of exhaust. The Maryland state boundary line and the town of Silver Spring were farther north. I looked at the bus wistfully, dreaming of getting back on it and escaping from the District and my troubles. Alas, the Conclave did not care two diddly-squats about mundane jurisdictional boundaries. If I knew where Millennium was successfully hiding from Ghost and the Heroes’ Guild, maybe I’d go there.
I walked down Tobacco Place. The entire tree-lined street was occupied by rowhouses of differing colors and levels of upkeep. Like the surrounding area, the street was transitioning from being poor and mostly black to middle class and racially mixed. The local news called it gentrification. Longtime residents who were being priced out of their own neighborhoods and displaced called it something far more vulgar.
Two structures were stubborn reminders of what my entire block used to be like years ago: Chocolate Thunder on the corner of Georgia and Tobacco, and a run-down house on the other end of the block that the local drug dealer operated out of. Chocolate Thunder was a strip club with only black dancers. I went in there once, for a goof. Never again. I don't shock easily, but I had been so mortified by what I saw I had a hard time looking black women in the eye for a while afterward.
The evening had cooled off considerably, and a lot of people were out, enjoying the mild temperature. On the other side of the street from the house I lived in, a young black accountant sat on his porch, reading something on a computer tablet. In the house next to him, a white teacher played in the yard with his young son. Ebony and ivory, living together in perfect harmony.
Or not, I thought when I saw my black landlady sitting on the porch of the well-maintained gray rowhouse I rented the basement of. Though the Conclave was a problem, getting into my apartment without the formidable Vidalia Leverette harassing me about my unpaid rent was suddenly the more immediate problem.
Mrs. Leverette was a woman in her seventies who’d lived on this block since she and her husband Vernon moved here from the Deep South as newlyweds over fifty years ago. Vernon was a courtly old gentleman who was as sweet as pie. His wife was as hard and tart as raw cranberries. A Vidalia onion was a sweet onion. Whoever had named it that had never met this human Vidalia.
I wished my knowledge of magic was advanced enough that I could cast an invisibility spell. Maybe if I walked really quietly, Mrs. Leverette wouldn’t see me.
Nope, no such luck. Mrs. Leverette looked up as I crept up the stairs to the house’s small yard. I froze like a deer who had just been spotted by a hunter.
“Hiya, Mrs. Leverette,” I said, forcing a cheeriness I did not feel. “Mighty nice weather we’re having this evening.”
“Be nicer if my bank account weren’t emptier than it should be,” she harrumphed pointedly. She folded the newspaper she had been reading and impaled me with her steely gaze. Why did I get the feeling she had been sitting here for hours waiting for me to show up? Ambush predators could learn a lot from this lady.
I laughed nervously. “Yeah, well, money’s tight for everyone these days.” Even the rare times I wasn’t behind on my rent, Mrs. Leverette still somehow made me feel like I was a jewel thief with a pocketful of loot who had run into a cop—nervous and eager to not draw attention to herself.
Feeling like a cockroach scurrying away when the light has been turned on, I tried to hasten down the walkway leading to my apartment door on the side of the house.
With speed that belied her age, Mrs. Leverette glided off the porch and blocked my path. Less than one hundred pounds dripping wet, even at her age she was as lithe as a dancer. She had short salt and pepper natural hair, brown eyes that missed nothing, and dark skin dotted with moles. She had a knack of making me feel tiny even though I was much taller and heavier than she. Maybe it was a trick she mastered over decades of teaching in public schools.
Mrs. Leverette looked me up and down with obvious disapproval. Her broad nose wrinkled as she got a whiff of me. I felt like what the cat dragged in under her gaze.
“What in the world happened to you?” Her teeth were white and perfectly even. Dentures, probably.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Well, it’s been nice chatting. Good night.” I tried to sidestep her. She blocked me again. Maybe Ghost should sic Mrs. Leverette on Millennium.
“Where’s the money you promised you’d have for us? You’re already two months behind on your rent.” It looked like the small talk portion of the conversation was over. I mourned its passing.
“A few things came up. I’ll have it for you as soon as I can. I already worked out a grace period with your husband.” I tried moving around her again, and she blocked me again. It was worse than trying to shake a cold.
“As soon as you can is not good enough. It’s always the same story with you. ‘I’ll have it for you tomorrow.’ ‘I’ll have it for you next week.’ Yet tomorrow and next week never seem to arrive. I know you have a good paying job. What in the world do you spend your money on? It’s certainly not your rent.” Mrs. Leverette shook her head in disgust. “As for Vernon, you leave him out of this. He’s a good man. Too good for his own good sometimes, I fear. You bat those pretty blue eyes of yours at him, give him a sob story and a backside wiggle, and suddenly he’s looking out for you more than he is for himself.”
“I don’t bat my eyes. And I certainly don’t wiggle my backside,” I protested, outraged. Who was I, Willow Wilde?
“Please,” she scoffed in disbelief. “I haven’t always been old. In my time I did my fair share of eye-batting and backside-wiggling to get what I wanted, so I know what it looks like. I’m not as innocent as my Vernon. Or as vulnerable to your wiles and sob stories. In the time you’ve lived here, you haven’t paid your rent on time. Not once.” She shook her folded-up newspaper at me. I felt like a dog who had taken a crap on her carpet. “I’ve had enough of your freeloading. You have exactly one week to get current on your rent, plus all the late fees our lease calls for. It’s a week more than you deserve. If you don’t pay up, I’ll throw you out. Given your record and your rental history, it’ll be tough for you to find another place, especially a place as nice as this one. But you can go live on the street for all I care. At least then you’d be somebody else’s problem.”
Something inside of me snapped. Being spoken to like this after the day I’d just had was too much.
I stood up straight so I towered over Mrs. Leverette even more. If she found me intimidating, she did not show it. “Listen, I realize that I’m in the wrong here. But I’m doing the best I can to get the money together. I’ll get it to you guys eventually.” Now seemed a bad time to admit I had been suspended from work. Occasionally—but only occasionally, unfortunately—I was capable of self-editing. “But in the meantime, I know something about D.C. landlord-tenant law. If you want to evict me, you must first give me thirty days written notice. This browbeating you’re
giving me right now does not count as such notice. After the thirty-day notice period passes, only then can you file an eviction action with the court. It will take a while for the court to schedule and then hold a hearing. Then, and only then, can I be evicted. Call it four or five months from now.
“So, you can go through the time, expense, and stress of jumping through all those hoops, or you can be a little more neighborly, stop hassling me, sit back in your rocking chair, bounce your grandkids on your knee, and take it easy while I finish getting the money together.” If I had a mic handy, I would have dropped it.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Leverette was not as impressed with my speech as I was. Her eyes flashed with anger.
“You’re right about how the landlord-tenant system works,” she said. “But you’re wrong that I’m going to wait that long. If you have not paid up in a week, I’m going to have my three sons come over here and have every stitch of your things thrown out on the street. Then we’ll change the locks.” She punctuated her words by tapping me in the chest with her newspaper. If she were not an old woman, I would have put her in the obituary section. “Then you would be in the position of suing me over your stuff and to get back into your space. By then, your stuff will be long gone, taken by your fellow ne’er-do-wells wandering the streets who’ll take anything that’s not bolted down. And I wonder how much sympathy a court will have for someone who can’t be bothered to pay her rent due to her elderly landlords.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” I hissed.
“Watch me.”
We stood there for a moment, glaring at one another, neither of us wanting to give an inch. Then, before I completely lost my temper and did something I couldn’t undo, I stepped around Mrs. Leverette and continued toward my apartment.
I seethed. I’d been bested by a mundane septuagenarian. Thank God my coworkers weren’t here to see this. Loopy would never let me hear the end of it. First Oscar, then the wererats, then Ghost, now this. Some days it did not pay to get out of bed.
“One week from now, I said. And not a second longer.” Mrs. Leverette’s voice trailed after me like a banshee’s cry.
I fumbled for my keys, muttering darkly to myself about Mrs. Leverette and her sons as I went down the short patch of stairs to my apartment’s front door. She brandished her boys like they were a weapon. Nonetheless, I knew I could handle three brawny mundanes as long as they didn’t bring a few wererats or an intangible Hero along with them to help. I could not handle them, however, without exposing the fact I was no ordinary woman. I remembered what the National Inquiry column said about the Conclave. This dill was already in a pickle without adding to the brine by sending a bunch of mundanes to the hospital. On top of that, I did not know if I could bring myself to rough up three guys who would only be trying to rid their parents of what they perceived to be a deadbeat.
I took a long, calming breath as I stood in front of my door. Mrs. Leverette was right—I did have a good paying job. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from spending a ton of money on non-essentials like designer clothes, absurdly expensive Elven wine, and eating out at pricey restaurants. I didn’t need to consult a therapist to know I was trying to fill a hole in my heart with stuff I didn’t need.
I’d deal with my collapsing financial house later. Tonight, I would take a nice hot bath, one or two or two dozen aspirin, and get some sleep. My ever-expanding list of problems would wait until tomorrow.
I gave the door a quick glance to make sure nothing had been disturbed. A horseshoe hung above the heavy wood door, and above the shoe was a large cross. I was not particularly religious. When I walked into a church, God probably elbowed Saint Peter and asked him who I was. Plenty of other people were religious though, and those billions of believers gave religious symbols like the cross lots of protective magical power.
A small bundle of rowan twigs and a sprig of wolf’s bane hung from nails on the left doorframe; a small bagua mirror and a head of garlic hung on the right. The Leverettes thought I was just overly superstitious of things that went bump in the night. Little did they know I’d seen the things that went bump in the night, and those things did not always confine themselves to just the night.
Also, every three months or so I sprinkled on and around the door holy water from the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a mouthful of a church that was about a thirty-minute walk from here. The Basilica was the largest Catholic church in the country and the second largest in North America. God never smote me during one of my jaunts to the Basilica, so I guess Saint Peter vouched for me.
I waved my hand, exerted by will, and said “Resero.” I felt the wards on my apartment unlock and slide away. The same Capstone ward specialist who had put the wards on the panic room at the Institute of Peace had done me a favor and warded my apartment for me.
Now that the wards were deactivated, I used my keys to unlock the door’s three locks. I went inside and deactivated the burglar alarm before it started shrieking at me. Despite being a sorceress, I did not sneer at technology’s usefulness.
Between my alarm, locks, wards, door talismans, holy water, and the residual protective threshold magic built up over the years of the Leverettes living in this house and raising a loving family in it, good luck to any person or creature who tried to get in here without my consent. I was as well-protected as a secret sorceress could be. As the last few days showed, I made enemies as easily as a baby made diaper doo. My apartment being so hard to get into let me sleep easy at night.
Tired, I yawned so wide that my jaw cracked. I stretched, and I regretted it. My whole body ached. It had been a long, eventful, stressful, and strange day. The adrenaline I had been operating on much of the day was receding, leaving exhaustion in its place. Sleep would not be a problem tonight.
I dropped my keys on a stand by the door. Seeing a glow of lights, I chided myself for leaving the lights on in the room that served as everything but kitchen, bedroom, and bath. Someone with my money problems needed to be more frugal.
I stepped out of the gloom of the short hallway and into the light of the room.
“Hi!” a middle-aged stranger dressed in only my crimson bathrobe said cheerily. He sat in one of my kitchen chairs with his bare feet propped up on another chair. He was surrounded by empty beer bottles.
The man looked me up and down. “You look terrible,” he said. “Oh, I had a few of your beers. Home invasion makes me thirsty.”
CHAPTER 8
Cursing, I sprang for my end table. I ripped its drawer open and shoved my hand inside.
The man said, “Looking for this?” He brandished the Smith and Wesson 629 revolver my father had shot himself with. He didn’t point it at me; he held it as if it were a baseball, with his fingers around the barrel and trigger guard. The fact this guy was touching Daddy’s gun made me madder than the fact he had broken in, and I was plenty mad about that.
I leaped over my small couch like it was an Olympic hurdle. In a wink, my hands were on the stranger—one on his hand with the gun, one around his throat. Beer bottles went flying.
I jerked him off my chair, surged forward, and slammed him against the wall. My robe parted, exposing the stranger’s hairy chest and naked white flesh. There were scars all over his body, but especially on his torso. Five silver coins fell out of the robe’s loose pockets and hit the linoleum floor with a clatter. Though shiny, something about the coins made them seem ancient. On the face of the coins was a man with laurel leaves on his brow; on the back was an odd-looking bird. It’s weird the little details your mind noted in the heat of the moment.
I sharply smacked the man’s wrist against the wall twice. He dropped Dad’s gun with a pained cry. The weapon clattered on the linoleum floor. I kicked it across the room.
The man was slightly taller than I and wiry. I had him pinned to the wall like he was a bug in a collection, holding him up so his feet were off the ground. My fingernails dug into his neck, drawing blood. My palm shoved h
ard into his Adam’s apple. His neck’s skin was soft and smooth, like it was freshly shaved.
The man struggled against me, kicking. I brought a knee up, ramming it into his exposed genitals. He yelped and stopped struggling as hard.
“You’ve got five seconds to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here, or I’ll ram your balls into your throat,” I snarled.
“My child, I can explain,” the man gasped hoarsely. His brown hair was damp, making it look almost black. He smelled of lavender. The scent was all too familiar. Unless this guy shopped at the same high-end soap store I did, he had taken a shower in my bathroom. His breath was minty, like he had just gargled with mouthwash. It smelled like mine too.
Breaking into my place, using my things, touching Dad’s gun . . . everything about this guy was a violation.
“Two seconds.” My knee lifted on its own accord. I was pissed, acting on auto-pilot.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something fly across the room. It smacked into the man’s hand I had knocked Dad’s gun out of. It was a long staff of gnarled, old wood, so dark it was almost black. It started shimmering slightly in the man’s hand in all the colors of the rainbow, like rainbow swirls on a soap bubble’s surface.
I slid my hand across the man’s wrist, intending to snatch the staff out of his hand. The staff’s rainbow colors flashed brightly when my hand touched the wood. A massive invisible force hit me like a tidal wave. I was flung backward through the air, head over heels.
I slammed into my couch. Cushions went flying. The couch tipped over backward, spilling me onto the floor. I hit the linoleum hard. The couch added insult to injury by falling on top of me. Jarred, I felt the wererat wound on my arm reopen.
I stood, stiff-arming the couch off me. My head swam for a moment before the world snapped back into focus. The man was still by the wall where I had held him. He was doubled over, coughing, clutching his throat. He looked at me through teary eyes. His hands were up in what was probably meant to be a pacifying gesture. I was not pacified, though, especially not with that staff in his hand. I wanted to pick the couch up and shove it down his throat.
Sorceress Super Hero Page 8
