by Amie Gibbons
“There’s something off here,” a cold, faintly accented voice said.
Natalia.
I mostly hadn’t been able to place the accent before, but now I’d bet my lunch, what I wasn’t about to lose anyway, on her being from Russia, or one of those little countries close to it.
“There’s an energy I can not place,” she said, kneeling next to me. “I can’t say it’s magic per se, but something is off.”
“I don’t think that makes me feel better,” I said.
“Has anything else gone wrong here?” Natalia asked.
“What do you mean?” Mama said.
“I mean accidents, random bad things, I don’t know what to say that’d be more specific because it could be anything.”
“I…” Mama shook her head. “Just the stupid, random fire this morning. You think this is magic?”
“I don’t know what to think. It feels like a net of something, but there is nothing I can really pin down. It’s very strange. It’s almost like… like the feel of a tornado coming. It’s not wrong in the sense that it is unnatural, but it certainly isn’t good.”
“There’s a tornado coming?” I asked, taking another sip. “I mean a magical, metaphorical one?”
She shrugged. “I can’t say. I can only say things feel off.”
“They are,” Carvi said, hanging up the phone and kneeling in front of me.
I took another sip and raised my can at him to indicate he should go on.
“Quil said he’s seeing something over the city, there’s something already laid out here.”
“The grid I saw?” I asked.
“Possibly,” Carvi said. “But he said it’s showing up as a field. It’s closer to the EMF a ghost gives off, without being EMF, than an actual spell.”
“It’s a field of influence?” AB asked.
Carvi turned his head and I knew he looked impressed by the way she blushed and smiled as she kneeled next to him in front of me.
“Study a lot, remember?” she said, blushing harder. “I’ve read about them. Certain creatures or spells can create fields around them. Kinda like on Halloween when the spell Dr. Donahue made was randomly made worse by just dumb luck. There’s spells where they leave… a mark, if that makes sense, that spreads out around the spell, and generally affects things.
“Kind of a like an electric field. It may not really do much, and you may not feel it, but it will throw off your cell phone when you try to use it, or it’ll mess with your equipment’s calibration. Stuff like that. Spells can do the same thing, just leave a general field that will affect other things.”
“Is that what happened here?” I asked.
She shrugged. “From what Quil said, maybe. If it was a spell to do something for luck, like win the lotto, technically it could leave a field of bad luck around the area if someone didn’t know how to balance the forces.”
“Okay, that sounds specific,” I said. “Is that what we think is going on here?”
AB and Carvi traded a look and Carvi finally nodded. “Quil thinks it is something similar, based on what he got when he laid out our spells. He thinks there’s a general net of bad energy, or bad luck, if you will, spreading around this town. He said he can see flashes of, not magic, but something off.”
“What aren’t you saying?” I asked.
Carvi sighed. “He said… he said Karma is in town. And she’s pissed.”
Chapter three
“Wait,” I said. “Karma, as in a person? Karma’s real? There is no karma. Come on, that’s not…”
“Possible?” Carvi asked. “I can assure you Karma’s quite real. Sometimes what goes around comes around. Sometimes you are what’s coming around, and sometimes, you get to sit back and watch the justice unfold.”
“Do you really believe in all that? That there's karma, there's something out there balancing? Seems a little woo woo to me, even for a world with magic in it.”
“I know there is Karma. I've met her.”
“I have no idea if you're joking or not.”
“Not. And you know what they say about Karma? They aren't joking. She's a bitch! And she cheats at poker.”
I stared at him.
“Let us all take a minute and appreciate the irony that Karma cheats,” AB said.
“So, she’s, what?” I asked.
“Karma doesn’t like it when people mess with magic without balancing the scales. Most of the time, they get theirs by the way the world works. It smacks the people down without help, but sometimes, Karma has to send minions to make sure what’s going around actually comes around.”
He paused. “And sometimes she comes herself.”
“And Quil saw her?”
“Quil said he sensed her. He isn’t positive, but he remembers her scent from the last time he ran into her.”
“I don’t… I can’t… what is she?”
Carvi snorted. “Quite simply, she’s a demigod. As in, can mess with lives, and does, and she takes it really badly when people cross her. If she’s in town… things are going to get much worse than some spilled coffee.”
Oh.
“Is that what the field was?” I asked. “Her scales or balance or whatever?”
“Possibly.”
“What brought her here?” AB asked.
“That is the question of the day,” Carvi said. “She only comes out when someone has cheated fate. I don’t mean skirted around it, or got randomly lucky, I mean, ripped up the fabric of reality to change their fate and was not subtle about it.”
“Like what?” Mama said. “If you can be specific.”
Carvi took a deep breath. “The last time I saw this happen was when I went back in time. She really hates time travel.”
My jaw dropped. “So that wasn’t a joke? Okay. Time travel’s real. I can deal with this. What… what did you do when you time traveled!”
Carvi met my eyes and grinned. “Let’s just say, you’re welcome. And it was worth it.”
I stared at him.
He really wasn’t gonna answer, was he?
“You think that’s what happened here?” Daddy asked. “You think someone time traveled?”
Carvi took a deep breath we all knew he didn’t need. “I don’t know. I can’t say, but if Quil thinks Karma’s in town, we’re all in trouble.”
“Why?” Daddy asked.
He had a point.
It’s not like any of us did this.
Well, that we knew of.
What if something happened and one of us came back to fix it?
The thought made my blood run cold.
The only reason I could see any of us doing that would be if one of us died.
We’d go back in time for that.
“Because,” Carvi said, “until whatever was changed, screwed with, whatever, is fixed, everyone around the anomaly is affected by the field, like AB was saying.”
“So bad luck’s gonna keep happening?” I asked.
Carvi shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t even say it’s really Karma. We need to talk to the boy who had the heart attack and go from there.”
“That,” Mama said slowly, making me turn to look at her, “isn’t going to happen.”
She stood with her hands clasped on her phone in front of her like she was praying with it.
My heart sunk.
“Natalie, she’s on the track team with him and they’re pretty good friends, texted that he didn’t make it.”
Her voice broke and she bent her head, but not before I saw tears starting.
Daddy marched up to her and pulled her into a hug, holding her tight and whispering as he stroked her hair.
“Carvi,” I said after a moment, “what would it take to get Karma to come down for a chat?”
“No,” he said.
“We can talk to her, find out what’s going on.”
“Did you miss the part about her being a bitch? She might drop a piano on you from ten stories up just for daring to summon her.”
Okay, he may have had a point.
“Is there anything she likes that we can use to butter her up?” I asked.
Carvi sighed and pulled a pack of smokes outta his jeans pocket. He lit up and took a long drag, letting the smoke out in a heavy breath.
If anyone had a problem with him smoking inside like this, they weren’t saying anything.
“She likes baked goods. Good ones. And I don’t mean bought from a good bakery. I mean, she wants you to put in the work yourself and present the gift of the goodies and your time to her like she’s fucking Santa Clause and you’re begging for a pony. So unless you know someone who bakes…”
He took another long drag, giving me a pointed look.
Yeahhhh, my idea of cooking was making eggs, frozen dinners or soup. Other than that, I did a lot of salads, sandwiches, and take out.
I mean, Mama could cook, and cook well, but she wasn’t a baker either.
AB raised her hand. “Um, guys, I bake.”
We looked at her.
“How well?” Carvi asked.
She grinned. “I won the Vandy Charity Bakeoff three years in a row, and wasn’t in the fourth year because I got the flu.”
I grinned. “Mama, Daddy, y’all have a kitchen where you’re stayin’ down here?”
###
“It smells like heaven in here!” I said, walking downstairs.
Turns out Mama and Daddy had rented a house for the duration of his time spent in Montgomery. They knew I’d be coming down to help, and two of my siblings lived near enough to not need to stay, and the other two weren’t coming, but Mama knew I’d be coming with friends, so they’d sprung for the big house.
There were six bedrooms between the two upper floors, and the downstairs was a huge open layout beauty with twenty-foot ceilings and giant sliding doors leading to the wraparound porch.
I loved this house.
And the rooms were easier to divvy up than I’d thought they’d be.
Carvi and AB took one and I put my bags in another. When Natalia took Quil’s bags up to my room and then grabbed one for herself, nobody said anything.
Not even Daddy.
Which really made me wonder if he was accepting that I was a grownup and he couldn’t say anything about it, or if I was gonna get a lecture later on when there weren’t others around.
The two sets of guards split, one set each took a room, and the others said they’d be on watch and rotate in to sleep while the others took over, so they didn’t need their own rooms anyway.
After we got settled in, AB got to work on the baked goods and I’d called Quil to see how the spell sensing was going. He said nothing besides the strange grid so far, but he was still looking.
Mama whipped up something for dinner. We ate pretty quickly, and I’d run upstairs to shower.
I don’t know why, but I felt like I needed to get the sadness and worry hanging over us off me before we tried anything tonight.
Or I just didn’t like smelling like plane.
Either way.
AB grinned at me from the kitchen as I cleared the stairs and walked in.
It was a chef’s dream kitchen. It was bigger than some student apartments, with marble counters and hardwood floors, and everything was state of the art, with two stoves and so much counter space, I was surprised the owners rented the place out instead of using it as a B&B.
Based on the smells as I sat down, AB wouldn’t do half bad running a bakery.
You know, if she wasn’t busy saving lives in cancer research.
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “Carvi said Karma likes variety, and the time put in and all that. So I have red wine chocolate cupcakes in one oven, an apple-pear cobbler in the other one, a pumpkin caramel cheesecake ready to go in, and right now, I am whipping up some meringue cookies.”
“I can’t even comprehend how you did all this,” I said, holding up my hands and bowing so my forehead and palms touched the counter. “I bow down to the master.”
She giggled as I pulled up.
“Did Carvi say how we summon Karma?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said. “And he’s not going to, from what I can tell.”
“Why not?”
“Said he doesn’t want you getting any ideas about summoning her on your own in the future. He said he’s keeping the how to himself and no, you won’t be able to watch even if you wanted to. He told me to tell you that specifically.”
“Is it just me, or does that sound like a challenge?” I asked. “Like, he really does want me to try, because he’s been working with me to learn how to manage my powers?”
She grinned and turned the beaters back on. “I wouldn’t.”
“You scared of him?” I asked loud so she could hear me over the noise.
“Oh, yeah.” But she grinned.
I shrugged. “Me too. Does that make sex better for you? Cuz I’m thinkin’ it’d get in the way.”
She blushed and looked down at the bowl of shiny white meringue mix.
“Don’t want to answer,” I said. “Interesting. Did he say where he was going?”
“I think he’s outside somewhere.”
I nodded and walked to the sliding door and went out onto the porch. Down this far south, it wasn’t chilly in November, but it still wasn’t up to my level of warm, and I wrapped my arms around myself.
The house was in a suburb of Montgomery, more an estate carved outta the woods than anything else, with trees and wildlife separating the house and grounds from the main road.
It was beautiful.
Like we were in the middle of the woods, miles away from anything.
Giving the place a sense of privacy and peace.
I sat on the porch swing overlooking the steep hill of grass leading down to the fence separating cultivated grass from the wild freedom of the tall trees and undergrowth.
I couldn’t see Carvi, but since when has that ever stopped a psychic?
I closed my eyes and pictured him, focused on his thick lips and sharp eyes. Those golden eyes sure could hold a lot of smolder.
Flash.
The world went gold and settled into a real-world setting, but with everything awash in that golden tint, like being in a lighted studio where they were going for some kind of heavenly soft light and got it off by a few degrees.
“Nice try, lea,” Carvi said. “You aren’t going to be able to see if I don’t want you to.”
I looked around.
The voice came from all around me, but he was nowhere to be seen, even on this plane.
“Carvi, where are you?” I asked.
“Where you’ll never find me. Stop trying.”
I could hear the laughter on his tone.
“Are you waiting for AB to say she’s done to summon Karma?”
“Yes, for one, but I also need to gather the ingredients.”
Wait, was he still around the house, or was he at some kind of store?
I caught a glimpse of a shelf with spices on it in a long aisle with harsh lighting before it clipped off like Carvi’d slammed the door in my face, and the golden lit woods and porch came back on.
“Stop it,” he said, voice sharp, all teasing gone. “I’m not joking. You don’t need to know how to do this.”
“Says who?” I crossed my arms.
“Me.”
His voice brooked no arguments and I swear I felt him shove me out.
I opened my eyes in the real world.
And sighed.
So much for that whole, I could do anything I set my mind to mentality he’d been shoving down my throat the past few days.
I opened the door and closed it as something broke through my thoughts.
It was the faint buzz of someone’s voice, but like it was over a phone and I could barely hear it.
It turned off a moment later, and I wondered if I’d imagined it for a second before I walked around the half wall separating the main living and
kitchen area from the tucked away hall with the laundry room and bathroom, and saw AB leaning against the washer.
Her face was twisted up, and she looked like she was trying not to cry.
“That’s not what happened!” she snapped, looking at me.
Her eyes met mine with a plea.
I couldn’t tell if she wanted me to stay or go.
“No, no, no!” she said. “You’re getting your nights mixed up, for one. We were talking about that after the trivia night, not… Yes, it matters!”
Ohhhhhhh crap, she was talkin’ to her ex.
I pointed behind me, mouthing if she wanted me to go and she shook her head, waving me to come closer.
She put her finger to her lips and put the phone on speaker.
“…ing. So why does it matter?” her ex, Thomas, was asking, voice sharper than I’d ever heard it.
Then again, he liked me, so he tended to sound pretty nice and flirty when talking to me.
His accent was harder here. It still didn’t sound German to me, but he could’ve been from a different area than what I normally thought of when I thought of German accents.
“Because you were saying I was trying to talk about these things on Friday when you were tired and said you didn’t want to have any heavy conversations then, and then I took the things you said out of context,” AB said, voice high and strained.
“I didn’t,” she continued. “You said all that shit on Tuesday, after trivia, when you weren’t tired but you were… I don’t know what your problem was! You were being a dick that night, and you know it. But it wasn’t on Friday. You picked the fight on Tuesday.”
“You were the one who started that,” he snapped.
Oh yeah, the you started it defense.
Didn’t work in first grade, wasn’t gonna work here.
“You brought up the damn boards in front of everyone,” he said.
“I didn’t realize saying that was that bad,” she said. “You still passed, didn’t you? But me saying you were running late and almost got locked out, well that just wasn’t acceptable. Can’t have anyone seeing the great Thomas Muller as anybody who’d screw up like that. I was telling a story, and after that, you started to attack me!”
“You were attacking me!”
“No, I wasn’t! You just saw it that way, for some reason. Then you went after me, going off on my anxiety, saying it was contagious, saying you didn’t want to be around me sometimes because it wound you up! And then you went after my mom! Who does that if they’re not trying to pick a fucking fight!”
