Spellbent Read online

  But to the city’s Talents, the Grove is the focal point of a strong upwelling of Earth magic and is one of only two places of power in the entire state. It’s home to some of the oniy enchanted trees left in the Midwest, and, as the occasional normal kid on a ghost hunt finds out, the Grove is a lot bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. The Talented families in the city have worked hard behind the scenes to make sure the Grove stays wild and unmolested by developers and Parks Recreation officials bent on “improving” it.

  The problem was, if any of the vast majority of the populace who didn’t know wizards existed saw us performing magic, Cooper would get into quite a bit of trouble with the local governing circle. A few people, like the farmers paying us to call down some rain, know Talents exist. But those few are put under a geas to keep the secret and not speak to outsiders about magic. In the wake of the medieval witch hunts—which murdered a lot of harmless mundane women and almost nobody using actual black magic—Talent leaders had decided it was best that most mundanes knew as little as possible about the magical world.

  “If we get a really good storm going, the skyscrapers will give better lightning protection,” Cooper said.

  He put his right hand on my leg and moved his fingertips in a light, teasing circle on the inside of my thigh. Tingly. “I have a feeling we’re going to get things very, very wet tonight, don’t you?”

  You just want to fuck me downtown where someone might see us, I thought, then found myself sitting there with a dirty grin on my face as my inner exhibitionist pushed my worries under the covers. Erotomancy was just the thing for working forces of nature. I lifted his hand and put it over my left breast so he could feel my nipple hardening beneath my thin T-shirt.

  “Why, ah have no idea what you are talkin’ about, Mista Marron,” I said. “Ah think you might be trying to take advantage of me. Ah think you are planning to put that great big ol’ cock of yours inside me and make me just scream.”

  His fingers gently squeezed my nipple, sending a shiver of delight down my spine. “Stop with the southern belle dirty talk.. . you know it gets me hot.”

  “Why, Mista Marron, isn’t that what you want?”

  “What I want is to stop this car, throw you onto the hood, and take you right here by the side of the road.”

  He had that certain horny-loony gleam in his eye; he wasn’t kidding one little bit about stopping the car. He was going to do it—do me—right out there in the light of the Oncoming traffic so the truckers could get a quick rearview mirror peep show at seventy miles an hour. And he’d be able to get us both off before the highway patrol showed up—and if he couldn’t, he’d be able to cast a mirage spell and make the cops and everyone else think the car was parked miles away from our actual location.

  You should stop this, I thought. Take his hand off your tit and put it back on the steering wheel.

  Instead I squeezed his hand tighter against my breast and said, “I want you.”

  It was the nightmares’ fault this was happening. I knew he woke up so crazy with relief at finding himself alive with all parts intact that he wanted to send us both into orgasmic oblivion right out in the open where gods and monsters and mundanes could see us.

  I knew because I felt exactly the same way. Cooper had always been a bit of an exhibitionist, but I had warmed to it during the year of nightmares as my own way of giving the Darkness the finger. The Darkness could take us to dreamland and torture us, it could murder us in a thousand ways and leave us shivering on our sheets in confusion and terror, it could leave us psychically scarred, afraid to sleep, but it could not break us. We wouldn’t let it.

  As Cooper’s foot touched the brake, my ferret wiggled out of the crook of my right arm, hopped onto my chest, and nipped Cooper’s thumb.

  “Ow! Dammit!” Cooper jerked his hand away.

  The ferret chittered at both of us, his little beady eyes glittering.

  I laughed. “Guess he doesn’t want us getting our freak on until it’s rainstorm time.”

  “Just what I need, a weasel chaperone,” Cooper grumped. “But at least it’s a sign of intelligent response. Is he talking to you yet?”

  “No, not yet. Should I be worried? I mean, I could’ve picked wrong.”

  “You got a good strong empathy buzz off him at the animal shelter, right?”

  I pursed my lips. We’d gone to dozens of shelters and pet stores looking for an animal to be my familiar. Birds, snakes, rats, cats, frogs, dogs, rabbits, iguanas… my mind was reeling by the time we’d gotten to the Ferret Rescue League. When the attendant put the second slinky ball of fluff in my hands, I felt a strange warm humming buzz along my spine. And before I had a chance to think, I’d already said This is the one. Let’s take him and go home.

  And honestly? I’d sort of been hoping for a cat or dog. The ferret was sheer adorableness, sure, but we couldn’t let him out of his cage without him immediately finding the most damn inaccessible place in the apartment to dive into and hide. Like the bedsprings, or the coils behind the refrigerator. Cooper finally had to cook up a ferret retrieval charm.

  However, the ferret was still a bit stinky. The musky oils in his fur took half a dozen hand washings to get off my skin. Cooper refused to do a deodorant charm on the grounds that a ferret ought to smell like a ferret, and I was Just Being Picky. So I became resigned to the ferret funk, and waited for the magic to happen.

  “Yeah, I think I did,” I said. “But how do I know what something’s supposed to feel like if I’ve never felt it before?”

  Cooper shrugged. “You just know. I’ve seen a dozen apprentices pick their first familiars, and so far things seem normal to me. I wouldn’t worry about him yet. He isn’t fully grown. Sometimes it takes a while for a familiar to awaken. Probably he just needs a little more exposure to magic.”

  Cooper snapped his fingers and the radio tuner’s face lit up, the dial spinning over to his favorite oldies station. “Stairway to Heaven” was just fading out.

  The DJ’s voice broke in. “Hope all you night birds have found your own little bit of heaven tonight, even if it is too darn hot out. Don’t you wish it was Christmas? A little Christmas in July? Here’s some Doug and Bob McKenzie to make you think cool thoughts …“

  “The Twelve Days of Christmas” lurched through the speakers.

  Cooper jerked and swatted the air. The speakers squealed as the radio sparked in the dashboard. The stench of scorched wiring filled the car.

  “Jesus, Cooper, you didn’t have to break it!”

  “I hate that goddamn song.” The color had left his face, and a muscle in his left eyelid was twitching.

  “I know. But jeez.” He’d never been able to explain to me why he so disliked any version of the song, no matter how silly, but usually he could suffer through a few stanzas until he could change the station or leave the room. I’d never seen him react so violently to it before.

  “What are you going to do if we get carolers next December, kill them?” I asked.

  He didn’t reply. The bad post-nightmare madness was back in his eyes. I rolled down my window to air out the car.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I asked him gently. “If you’re not feeling well, we should put this off until tomorrow night.”

  “No.” He shook his head as if to clear it. He gave me a quick, unconvincing smile, then fixed his eyes back on the road. “I’m fine. Let’s do this thing. I told the Warlock we’d hit the Panda Inn for karaoke and a late dinner tonight.”

  You mean late drinks, I thought, irritated, but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t really fault Cooper for wanting to hang out with his half brother; it was good to see Cooper happy, and he and the Warlock always had fun. The Warlock’s boozy come-ons were tolerable. I Just wished their nights out didn’t always end with Cooper puking up Suffering Bastards and Mai Tais at five in the morning. As with stinky ferrets, Cooper refused to use any anti-poisoning charms on the grounds that a night of drinking ought to feel like a night of
drinking.

  We left the freeway and drove up Broad Street. On one side loomed the St. Joseph Cathedral, which had been home to more than its share of miracles because it was so close to the Grove; on the other was the high stone garden wall that surrounded most of the park. The fence had gone up in the 1960s when traffic got bad enough that wandering Grove creatures started running a real risk of getting squashed by cars.

  The only open side faced the Statehouse, and it was also the only part that attempted to masquerade as a standard city park. There was half an acre of mowed lawn, some decorative cherry trees, a goldfish pond surrounded by concrete benches, and a few picnic tables. A line of ward-charmed rocks marked the border between the lawn and the western edge of the Grove. The wards were subtle, but effectively kept most mundanes out of the Grove and reminded most Grove denizens to stay put.

  Cooper turned the Dinosaur left onto Third Street and then took another left into Taft Park’s tiny parking lot. He gunned the motor to get the huge car over the curb and drove it across the grass, dodging picnic tables and startling a small flock of sleeping Canada geese. The tires left no marks on the turf; Cooper had long ago enchanted the wheels.

  “Yuck. Grass is probably covered in goose shit,” he said as the geese flew off, honking alarm. “Annoying birds.”

  “Could we use it for anything?”

  “Use what?” he asked. He hit the brake and put the car in park. We were about a dozen yards away from the fishpond.

  “Goose poop.”

  That’s the core of ubiquemancy: Magic is in everything. The spellcaster just has to figure out what kind of magic, how it can be used, and then invoke it in a spur-of-the-moment chant that sounds like a Pentecostal speaking in tongues to those who can’t understand the primal languages. Unlike other magical disciplines, ubiquemancy seldom involves calling on spirits directly. Instead it relies on instinct, improvisation, and imagination to focus ambient magical energies.

  Some people think that we can do any kind of magic with ubiquemancy, and while that’s theoretically true, in practice it’s a whole lot trickier, especially if things have Gone Terribly Wrong. It’s not just about coming up with the right words. It’s a lot like singing—some spells are about as hard as “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but some of them are as challenging as La Bohème. Few singers can do a difficult aria the first time out of the gate, and if they don’t have the right natural range they might never be able to. do it. And even if a singer has range and skill, being able to improvise and perform a brand-new aria right there on the spot while the audience is ripping the chairs out of the aisles and throwing them at your head… well, like I said, it’s tricky. But then again, you can get lucky sometimes.

  Ubiquemancy worked very well with Cooper’s manic, live-for-the-moment mind-set. People who dismiss the style call Cooper and our kind Babblers; the name’s stuck enough that even those who respect the art use it.

  Magical talent is the biggest thing that makes a good Babbler. And Cooper had talent in spades. On his good days, he was one of the best wizards I had ever seen; I couldn’t have asked for a better master. Unfortunately, on his bad days he had a tendency to give in to his self-destructive streak and drink himself senseless. At least after we became lovers he’d cut way back on his alcohol intake.

  I sometimes got frustrated with ubiquemancy’s magical anarchy and Cooper’s pat “Oh, you just know” replies to my questions. Sometimes I thought I would have been better off learning a more formalized magic like Mother Karen’s white witchcraft.

  But darned if Cooper’s crazy magic didn’t work. “Goose shit,” Cooper mused. He turned off the ignition. “It’d be great for curing barren earth.. . fire tricks.. . controlling geese… summoning predatory animals.. . Spoiling food and water… plant growth… and maybe flight. Lots of stuff we don’t need to do tonight.”

  “Should we go to the pond?”

  “No, we don’t want to be right by water. Over there by those oaks looks good. Let’s get undressed.” I tied the ferret’s leash to the stick shift and pulled off my T-shirt, sports bra, and sneakers. I shimmied out of my cargo pants and panties, folded my clothes, and stacked them on the dashboard.

  Cooper was already standing naked on the grass, stretching and scratching his back. “No, it’s better if you stay in here,” he told Smoky.

  The dog whined.

  “What? Oh, right.” Cooper opened the rear door. Smoky jumped out, ran over to a picnic table, and peed on the tubular steel leg. He gave himself a good shake, kicked grass onto his mark, and happily trotted back to the car.

  Cooper shut the car’s doors after Smoky was back inside, then met me on the other side.

  “Think wet thoughts,” he told me, lightly touching the small of my back and running his hand down to my ass. My skin prickled into goose bumps at his touch. “Think low pressure. The clouds are our audience; make them come.”

  We walked across the grass to the edge of the trees. Cooper backed me up against the trunk of a red oak.

  “This tree’s roots touch those in the heart of the Grove,” he whispered, planting small kisses on my face. “We’re all set to broadcast; let’s make it good.”

  He closed his eyes and started planting soft kisses down my neck, over my breasts. My hormones lit up like Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve.

  This is the best job ever, I thought.

  He started moving against me, breathing rhythmically in preparation for the chant. I closed my eyes and followed his body’s rhythm. There was a brief, stretching sting as he pushed up into me, but after that it was beautiful. I wrapped my legs around his waist and ignored the scratching of the bark against my back. Once we really got going the pain might actually start working for me. I don’t think of myself as a masochist, but my wires sometimes get a little crossed.

  Anyway. I was glad to have the chant to focus on, or else it would all be over too quickly. Cooper could last for hours, provided I came quietly. But the nightmares had left me with too much pent-up anxiety to have a nice polite little orgasm. I’d be biting, screaming, demanding the obscene application of Popsicles. . yeah, I figured the distraction of the spell was going to be a good thing. Silly me.

  The old, old words started tumbling out of him, first as sounds that might have been little more than grunts of the ancient pre-humans who lived at the sea and rivers, worshipping the spirits they saw in the cool waters. Then his round grunts grew angles, grew more refined; my mind was filled with an image of a sunburned warlock standing in the reeds of the Nile, begging the gods for rain.

  The words were coming out of me, too; my language was different, a tongue that spoke of mists and crashing waves, of broad, gray thunderstorms rolling over windswept North Atlantic islands.

  I felt the air around us stir, felt the tiny hairs on my arms and the back of my neck rise. The tops of the trees began to rattle as the wind rose.

  Cooper’s chant rose to match, changed to something more musical, Western and Eastern in the same breath. I caught a flash of storm clouds boiling above a vast American plain as a medicine man dressed in deerskin and buffalo hide raised his ropy arms to the sky. I could smell the damp plains earth and sweating leather on Cooper’s skin.

  My chant shifted to match; I spoke the shadow of an old priest in a bear-pelt cloak, standing in the dry forest of a new, green land, pouring the last of his mead on the thirsty earth and asking the Father God to grant him and his men a touch of rain.

  Then Cooper’s body jerked, and his chant was chopped short by his sudden, pained gasp. I heard the scream in my mind, smelled entrails being pulled from a still-living body and thrown on a charcoal fire.

  “Oh God!” Cooper turned and gave me a hard shove away from him. I tumbled backward over the grass.

  I rolled to my feet, feeling confused and exposed, wishing my clothes weren’t all in the car. “Cooper, what the—”

  His body had gone rigid; the cords of his neck stood out, and his tattooed sigils glowed faintly pu
rple in the dim light. The air was growing ominously electric, the clouds above them darkening into a slate-gray spiral.

  “Get away!” He sounded as if something was choking him. “Far. Fast. Now!”

  I knew better than to argue or waste time asking questions. I sprinted back for the car, fear churning in my stomach. Nothing like this had happened before. Cooper had said that the ritual couldn’t be interrupted, no matter what.

  I got to the Lincoln, ran around to the driver’s side, and dove into the seat. Smoky was whining on the front seat, his paws pressed against the window. Before I could get the door closed, he’d jumped over me and was running toward his master.

  Cooper started to scream. His voice sounded like a band-saw blade grinding against a rusty iron post.

  Should you run away like this? I wondered as I cranked the key in the ignition and slammed the car into drive. Don’t think. Just do it. Cooper knows this stuff way better than you do.

  The storm was gathering with alarming speed. Thunder rumbled.-In the rearview mirror I saw the wind whipping a dust devil around Cooper’s rigid form. The sound of the gale was drowning out his scream.

  I hit the accelerator just as a massive bolt of lightning shot down from the sky.

  The earth around Cooper exploded. A shock wave whipped across the park, and I was thrown forward into the steering wheel as the back of the Lincoln jerked off the ground.

  Ohshitohshitohsht!

  The car tilted, and the gale blasted into the Lincoln’s passenger side, lifting it and knocking it over onto the driver’s side. I fell hard against the window, helpless, as the car spun like a carnival ride across the grass. My clothes and the ferret flew off the dashboard. The weasel scrabbled for purchase on my sweaty skin to keep from being hung by his leash. The car slammed into a steel-framed picnic bench bolted to a concrete slab beside the goldfish pond and stopped.

  I untangled myself from the steering wheel and set the frightened ferret on top of the passenger-side headrest. I grabbed my scattered clothes and got dressed as quickly as I could. The ferret had left a dozen pinprick scratches on my side and hip. Once I was no longer in danger of being arrested for public indecency, I unrolled the passenger-side window and stuck my head out to see how Cooper was doing, hoping against hope this would turn out to be just another one of those funny little Babbling-gone-wacky incidents where he’d be standing there amid smoke and debris with singed hair and a sheepish Oops did it again look on his face.