There was dried blood at the roots of the fur. A tick engorged with blood crawled around in the bag. I shuddered with revulsion. To think I had carried this filthy thing around naked in my pocket. What if it had latched onto me? I felt like getting a flea dip.
I upended the bag and flicked it until the tick fell out, on top of my dresser. It oriented itself, then started crawling toward me. I conjured up a bit of spellfire and burned the disgusting bug into oblivion, while being careful to not set the dresser on fire. Then I teased a long strand of fur free from the rest of the clump in the plastic bag. Uncoiled, the brown strand was maybe six inches long, and as coarse as pubic hair.
I shuddered. I really wished I had not thought of that pubic hair thing.
I sealed the sandwich bag again, suppressing the urge to set the whole thing on fire. I wound the long strand around my left wrist. I gathered my thoughts, drawing on dusty knowledge I barely remembered. As Oscar had said, elemental magic was my strength, but I had trained in other magical disciplines under my father before quitting my formal training when he died.
I focused my will, visualizing precisely what I wanted to do. I waved my right hand in the barely remembered pattern over the strand of wererat fur on my wrist, and I murmured the words of the spell: “Mus invenit.” Find the rat.
Tiny green arcs of magic sparked around the strand of fur, making my wrist tingle, as if an electric current ran through it. The green arcs then ran up my wrist, right under my skin’s surface, and into my palm. There the arcs spread out, molding themselves into the shape of a small green glowing arrow. The arrow rose off my skin, stopping when it hovered about a quarter of an inch above my palm. The arrow quickly spun around in a circle several times. Then it slowed, coming to a stop in what appeared to be a southeastern direction.
I slowly turned my body around. The green glowing arrow rotated as well, keeping its head pointed in the same direction. I had invented a wererat compass. Perhaps I should’ve patented it.
“Ready or not wererats, here I come,” I announced. I grinned, delighted to see that not all the spells I had learned as a youth had not trickled out of my brain over the years. Oscar had called me intellectually lazy. This proved he didn’t know what in the heck he was talking about. Maybe, after I tracked down the wererats who had attacked me, I would go to Oscar’s office and throw him through his window for calling me names.
I frowned at the thought. Who was I kidding? Oscar was half orc. Even with my magic, it was more likely he would throw me through his window than vice versa.
While part of me concentrated on maintaining the locator spell, I grabbed some cash I had hidden in my closet and stashed it and my cell phone in my pocket. I put the sandwich bag with the rest of the wererat fur in another pocket in case I needed more later, or in case I ran into someone I wanted to gross out. I thought about bringing Dad’s revolver too, but decided against it. I shared the contempt most Gifteds had for mundane weapons. If you carried a gun, that implied you were insufficiently skilled in wielding magic that you needed one. Plus, the gun was the only thing of Dad’s I had left, and I did not want to risk losing it.
I set my burglar alarm, went outside, locked all three locks on the front door, and set the wards. Maybe I should not have bothered. Daniel had no problem getting past all that yesterday thanks to the Ark fragment. Maybe what I needed was a magic guard dog. I wondered if Cerberus was available for rent.
I walked around to the front of the house. It was mid-morning, and the sky was bright and clear. The air was already hot and muggy. Ideal wererat hunting weather. I believed in the power of positive thinking.
Everyone on my block who worked was long gone, so Tobacco Place was mostly quiet and was empty of cars. Following the twisting green arrow on my hand led me to Georgia Avenue. Since I had no idea if the wererat I looked for was five minutes or five hours away, I hailed a cab.
“Where to, lady?” the black cab driver asked. He spoke with a heavy Caribbean accent. I deduced he was not originally from the District. The wererats did not stand a chance in the face of my awesome detecting abilities.
“Just drive. I’ll tell you when to start turning.”
The man shrugged, hit the gas, and we were off. My request had not fazed him in the slightest. As a cabdriver in D.C., he had probably seen everything before. I might have been his fifth Otherkin-hunting fare of the day.
I cupped my left hand so the cabbie would not see the glowing arrow. It shifted and spun as the cab made its way through the city, with me telling the driver to turn as the green arrow dictated.
The buildings and people around us slowly shifted, going from well-maintained and racially mixed to run-down and almost one hundred percent black. We were in Southeast now, the District’s poorest quadrant.
By the time I told the cabbie to pull over, we were in Washington Highlands in Ward 8. The D.C. area was one of the wealthiest in the country. That wealth had not trickled down to Washington Highlands. The neighborhood was one of the poorest and most crime-ridden in the city.
The cab idled in front of a public housing project which looked like it was slowly collapsing in on itself. There was so much graffiti on its façade that you could not tell what color the building had started off as. Trash littered the sidewalk and the street. The cars parked on the street looked like they were a hairsbreadth away from the junkyard.
I stuck my right hand over the front seat to pay the fare. The cabbie twisted to look at me. “You sure you want me to let you out here? This place is not safe.” The for a white woman was implied in his tone. I doubted even SEAL Team Six would be safe here for long if they lingered.
“I appreciate the concern, but I’ll be fine,” I said as he took the money. Understanding flickered over his dark face, followed by a look of barely concealed disdain. He thought I was here to buy drugs. Why else would someone who looked like me come here?
If he only knew.
As soon as I climbed out of the cab, the cabbie locked his doors and peeled away with a screech of burning rubber. He could not wait to get out of here and into a better neighborhood. I knew how he felt. There were a lot of people loitering, especially dangerous-looking young men. They looked like they had been here for a while and were not going anywhere anytime soon. I got looks from them ranging from apathetic, to curious, to predatory.
Still cupping my left hand to conceal the glow there, I hastened to follow the arrow’s direction before someone accosted me. I could fight off a bunch of mundanes, of course, but why draw unneeded attention to myself?
Following the arrow led me through a weed-infested lot behind an abandoned single-family dwelling, which in turn was behind the housing project the cabbie had dropped me off at. When I got to a narrow street that ran behind the house, the arrow dipped down, pointing toward the ground. The arrow directed me to a storm drain in the middle of a partially torn-up, weed-overgrown street that clearly had not seen traffic in quite some time.
I was going to have to climb into the sewer? Ugh! Was I chasing after Master Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I supposed I should not have been surprised considering how the wererat and its friends had escaped me and Ghost by crawling through a sewer grate.
The idea of wandering around in D.C.’s sewer system made me pause, not only because the prospect was disgusting, but also because I would be on unfamiliar terrain. I had no idea what I would find down there, aside from disgusting muck. Maybe I should just turn back.
No! I said firmly to myself as soon as the thought crossed my mind. The magical community was a small one, and gossip spread like wildfire. I would never live it down if word got out a bunch of wererats got the best of me before a Hero intervened. Who would want to hire a bodyguard who was not even capable of protecting herself? I could not continue to do what I did if I ran scared every time something crawled out of the shadows and said Boo! to me. Plus, there was the not so small issue of me not wanting to grow eyes in the back of my head until the wererat issue was re
solved.
Thinking of Ghost made me look around for him. I had been keeping a wary eye open for him since leaving my apartment. The only people around, though, were two old men who sat on the warped stairs of the abandoned house. They eyed me with curiosity.
“What you doin’ over there, girl?” one of them called out to me. One of his eyes was cloudy and seemed to look out into forever.
“My wedding ring fell off earlier, and I think it fell into this storm drain,” I said.
The man barked out a harsh laugh. “You better off letting the rats have that thing than foolin’ around down there.”
“You may be right,” I said honestly, “but I’m going to do what I’ve got to do to find it.”
I bent over and shoved my fingers through the grates of the storm drain cover. Such covers typically weighed over a hundred pounds to secure them as vehicles drove over them and to prevent people from removing them without the right tools. I tugged, flexed, and lifted, removing the heavy metal cover from the storm drain in one smooth movement. If the old guys staring at me realized an ordinary woman could not remove the cover so easily, they gave no sign.
I looked down the now exposed hole into darkness. The smell wafting up from it was like that of a landfill. Pee-yew! I really didn’t want to go down there.
I glanced at the glowing arrow in my cupped hand. I said to it, “Are you sure Timmy fell down this well, Lassie?” The arrow did not bark, wag its tail, or do anything but continue to point downward insistently.
I sighed with resignation. I was procrastinating.
I got down and sat on the edge of the manhole with my lower legs dangling down. Gripping the edges of the hole, I lowered myself until the hole’s darkness swallowed me.
“White people be crazy,” I faintly heard Cloudy Eye say to his friend, who grunted in agreement. When it came to this particular white person, I could hardly argue with them.
The smell of the sewer tunnel hit me like a wall as I dangled above it. The stench would gag an elephant. It smelled like . . . well, a sewer. I held my breath and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness below me.
Finally, they adjusted, allowing me to see part of the sewer tunnel thanks to the sunlight canting through the hole I clung to. The ceiling of the tunnel was an arch made of old, discolored concrete. Each side of the arch ended at narrow stone walkways. Those walkways flanked a shallow channel at the bottom of the tunnel that was about three feet wide. The channel oozed with fetid, chunky water. The water was such a dark green, it was almost black.
Space yesterday, a sewer today. From heaven to hell in less than twenty-four hours. What was next, a trip to purgatory?
I pumped my legs, making my body swing back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. At the top of a forward swing, I released my hold on the manhole. I dropped like a gently tossed ball.
I landed on one of the walkways, bending at the knees to absorb the impact from the over twelve-foot fall. I gave myself a ten out of ten for sticking the landing.
I was forced to take a breath. My stomach churned, and bile rose to my throat. The noxious fumes burned the inside of my nose. I gave the smell a zero out of ten.
Sewer gas was a combination of hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane, sulfur dioxide, and a bunch of other stuff. Some toxic, some not. I bet the wererats I was after would have a hearty laugh at my expense if I suffocated or poisoned myself to death on the way to find them.
While still maintaining the locator spell, I marshalled my will, and visualized clean, fresh air entering my body instead of the soup of noxious fumes that surrounded me. I waved my right hand in a familiar pattern and said, “Aer.”
The air around my head shimmered faintly, like my head was suddenly enclosed by an iridescent fishbowl. I took an experimental breath. Though the air still didn’t smell like a bouquet of roses, it did not burn my nasal passages when I inhaled it anymore.
The bubble around my head was keeping the bad stuff out and only letting in breathable air, a mixture of mostly nitrogen and around twenty percent oxygen. Though it was a far more complicated spell than the locator one, casting it had not been hard at all. Like Oscar had said yesterday, elemental magic was kinda my jam.
The air situation taken care of, now I needed to take care of the light situation. It would be as dark as a cave down here once I moved away from the open manhole above me.
I paused, concentrating, getting the spell’s exact effects firmly fixed in my mind. Though I knew this was a simple spell in the grand scheme of things, light magic was most definitely not my jam. Some of the gases in the air were not only toxic, but flammable. If I accidently caused a spark while casting the light spell, goodbye Sage Hawthorne and hello Sage Flambé. I was immune to my spellfire, but not to regular fire. Prick me, do I not bleed? Light me on fire, do I not burn to a crisp?
With part of my will still focused on maintaining the locator spell and the air spell, I made continuous small circular motions in the air with my right hand. I murmured “Lux” while I eased my will into the circle I drew in the air.
A pinprick of light started in the center of the circle. It spread out as I eased my will into it. In seconds, the light became the size of a softball. Its illumination cast a soft light all around me. I let out the breath I had been holding. I was not on fire, a sign I had cast the spell correctly.
So the light was not shining directly in my eyes, I made the ball move to float slightly above me with a hand wave and an exertion of will. It had taken me months to master creating light when I had gone through my magical training. God had created light in less than a day. It was further evidence I wasn’t Him.
I glanced at the glowing arrow. It pointed straight ahead into the pitch blackness in front of me. I walked forward, following the arrow’s direction. I frowned in concentration as I walked. Maintaining three spells at once was an effort, like walking while juggling three balls.
The tunnel gently curved left, and slightly down. The narrow walkway I stepped on was slick and smooth. There were a couple of times I almost slipped and fell into the waste gurgling in the channel next to me. I wished I had worn my waterproof boots instead of these sneakers. And a hazmat suit.
After I had walked for a while, the tunnel came to an intersection. I could proceed straight or turn left or right. I went left after consulting the green arrow.
I made several more turns like that as I went deeper and deeper into the tunnels. The tunnels transitioned from concrete to being made from bricks that, even to my inexpert eye, looked hand-molded. I surmised I was in a much older part of the sewer system now. I also realized I was thoroughly lost in this maze of pitch black, stinky tunnels. I would have a hard time retracing my steps. Next time I would have to leave a trail of bread crumbs.
I prayed to heaven there would never be a next time.
After a while, I got a vague itchy feeling between my shoulder blades, like someone who might stab me in the back was watching me. Though I did not see anyone, I did not discount the feeling. I had a similar feeling when Ghost had been watching me, and I had been right about that. I wished Ghost had shadowed me down here. As annoying as he was, Ghost would be an improvement over what probably lurked down here.
I started hearing scratching and squeaking. At first I thought I was finally approaching the wererat I stalked. Then the noise became too loud for it to come from just one creature. And, the louder the sound became, the more obvious it became the noise came from all around me.
The surface of the water in the channel began to ripple. Whatever caused it was closing in on me fast.
Fear crawled out of my belly and wrapped its icy claws around my throat. The impulse to run became almost irresistible. But where in the heck would I run to?
Suddenly, my light was reflecting off of dozens—no, hundreds—of beady red eyes.
Rats. So many, it was like a Biblical plague.
They crawled out of the darkness all around me. They
were on the ceiling, in the muck of the channel, and on both walkways. They were everywhere. They swarmed around me. They didn’t crawl on me, thank goodness, but they got close enough to almost touch me. They carpeted everything for as far as my light let me see. The squirming, squealing, tangled, disgusting mass of small bodies was everywhere.
Two wererats in humanoid form stepped out of the shadows. One was on the walkway in front of me, the other on the other walkway. Their front incisors were terrifyingly long. The better to eat you with, my dear, popped into my head. I wished I had never heard of Little Red Riding Hood.
“Oh look,” one wererat said to the other over the din of squealing rats. “It’s lunch.”
CHAPTER 11
Though I would not have sworn on a Bible about it, I was pretty sure neither of the wererats in front of me were the ones who had attacked me in the alley. The one on my walkway, the one who had spoken, was light brown, with a patch of darker brown on its long snout. The other one had dirty gray fur. Like the wererats who had attacked me in the alley, the only clothing they wore was soiled leather loincloths that covered their private parts.
In addition to the two wererats, I was surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of squealing rats that could rip me apart if they turned on me. Despite what my fluttering stomach urged me to do, fleeing was out of the question. I’d have to brazen my way out of this.
I said to the brown wererat on my walkway, “I’m looking for someone. And you’re not him. Stand aside and let me pass. I have no quarrel with you.” I said it with a confidence I most definitely did not feel. However, I knew from experience that the best way to get attacked was to show you were afraid of being attacked.
The wererats let out a noise that sounded like a hacksaw cutting through a nail. Laughter. I’d hate to hear the sound they’d make if I told them the only rat joke I knew. It was just as well. The punchline was too cheesy.
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