Geekomancy (18 page)

When Ree came to, the first thing she saw was a derby girl on the ceiling. Derby girl had impossible features, exaggerated waist-to-hip ratio and too-big eyes. Derby girl was hunched over in ready-to-skate position, winking down at her.

Ree blinked, but derby girl was still there. As her eyes continued to focus, she saw it was a painting, one of many on the ceiling, which she hadn’t noticed when she first arrived.

Dear Derby Girl,

Why do I have to fall unconscious so much? I appreciate the sleep, but I imagine there are better ways to get some Z’s. Speak to me, O painted muse.

Big fan of your sport,

Ree

Her shoulder and leg felt numb, but numb was a damn sight better than “burning hotter than the flames of Mount Doom.” She scanned left and right, looking for Eastwood or the doctor. Eastwood was standing in the corner, leaned up against the wall and fiddling with a smartphone. He looked up and caught her gaze. “Good morning.”

“Morning?”

“It’s 7 AM, Sunday.”

Crap.
Ree was on the schedule to be at work approximately now. With the look of panic on her face apparently clear as daylight, Eastwood raised his hand. “It’s fine. I called your roommate and told her you’d gotten into a small fender bender, nothing serious, but that she could call off for you.”

“Invasive much?”

“It means you get to keep your job for another day.”

“Does anyone in this world hold down a regular job?” Ree asked, trying very slowly to sit up. Her sight lagged behind her head, but one inch at a time, she righted herself.

Eastwood walked to a coffee mug on a table and poured a cup, then walked to Ree. He offered the Styrofoam cup, which Ree took with reverence. “Not many. Those who do are their own bosses.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Ree took a whiff of the coffee, regretted it, then sipped some anyway. Caffeine was a mistress cruel enough to shame the most aggressive dominatrix in Amsterdam. Colors brightened, and her head cleared slightly, despite the terrible smell and taste.

“Where’s the doc?” Ree asked.

“Sleeping. She said you’d be free to go when you woke up.”

Ree pulled the sheet back enough to make sure she was wearing clothes. A hospital gown could barely be called clothes, but it covered enough for her to pull the sheet back more and check her legs. They were bandaged, but when she tried moving her feet, they seemed to work fine. “Is she magic, too? Aesclepomancy or something?”

Eastwood cracked a smile. “She doesn’t call it that, but yeah. The rituals of medical science are more than enough to charge up her magic. We need to get back to the Dorkcave and put this”—he held up the Claddagh ring—”to work.”

Ree held up two fingers. “Two things. One, where are my clothes? And two, how are we getting out through the gnomes? The rings again?”

“The rings will take a while longer to recharge, plus I won’t know if Lucretia permanently broke the enchantment until I do a study at my lab.” Eastwood reached under an adjacent examination table and pulled out a bag. “These are your clothes, and I spent the last three hours working up a ritual that will keep us safe from the gnomes long enough to get out.”

“Why couldn’t you—”

Eastwood cut her off. “—have done that earlier? I didn’t know we’d be going through gnome territory, since I expected a quick in-and-out, not your ‘heroics.’ Anything else?” He was more terse than usual, each new word jumping in at the end of the last, leapfrogging in a race to finish.

Ree took another sip of coffee, then set it down to rummage through the bag. The pants had been shredded but might be salvageable as jean shorts. The rest were dirty but intact. “Changing room?”

Eastwood shook his head and turned around, walking toward the corner.

Fair enough.
Ree slid down from the table, cautious about putting weight on her legs. They supported her well enough, though all the sensations were fresh, heightened, like the just-shaved-your-legs closeness. She pulled off the gown and started dressing.
Something will need to change if I’m going to keep doing this crazy stuff and not lose my job. It’s not like Eastwood is paying me. Well, maybe.

“You make your money with the memorabilia and props, right?” she asked.

“Yes. Can I turn around?” he asked.

“Not yet.” She ripped off the bloody scraps of the jeans, making a rough approximation of cutoffs.
Geek tested, Punk approved.

She checked to make sure everything was in place, then said, “Go ahead.” Eastwood turned around as she continued, “There’s no way I can keep regular hours at Café Xombi and be a magic super hero or whatever you put in the Career box. So I need another job. Could you use another hand around the shop, help move lots, maybe drum up some buzz?”

Eastwood narrowed his eyes. “I’m doing fine as is.”

“If I lose my job and get evicted, I won’t be able to help you. No more snappy Sherpa, no more ground-pounding kung fu investigator. Sandra doesn’t make enough to float me for rent more than once a year, and my dad the hairstylist isn’t exactly swimming in cash.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. Now here’s how this is going to work.” Eastwood pulled out a makeup kit from his vast trench coat. “Ever play in the Camarilla?”

“I was One World all the way.”

“Same difference. We’re going to obfuscate our way out of here.” Eastwood pulled a folded paper from the kit. “Here’s your character sheet. I’ve already taken the liberty of doing the makeup.”

Ree took a hand mirror from the kit and saw what Eastwood had done. Her face was dusted white, eyebrows accented, and she had a general pallor that screamed Nosferatu, the clan of horrifically ugly vampires who, in the game, were masters of the arts of disguise and stealth.

“Okay, so with this makeup, we can obfuscate our way out?”

“That’s the idea,” Eastwood said.

Ree raised an eyebrow.
I smell a
but
.

Eastwood shrugged. “But I’ve never actually tried this. Symbolically, it matches up with things I’ve done before. Now I need you to do mine. I always screw up if I do it myself.”

Ree sighed and took the makeup kit.
Shot in the shoulder, trudged through sewers, attacked by cannibal gnomes, and now I’m doing some guy’s makeup. At least one part of my day makes sense.

Flashing back to her One World by Night days, she put on foundation, applied a white base, and did detail work around the eyes to make Eastwood look at least good enough to be a Boris Karloff cosplayer at Gen Con.

When she was done, Eastwood evaluated her work with the hand mirror, nodding. “If somehow this doesn’t work, I’ll hold them off, and you bust a move to the nearest manhole.”

She didn’t argue. He handed her a chicken-scratched character sheet with dots for Obfuscate, her skills and stats. Her name was Ignatia. Eastwood showed her his own sheet, folded it, and replaced it in his breast pocket, then said, “Cross your arms and think ugly.”

Trying hard not to think of how ridiculous she felt for using live-action role-playing sign language as stealth magic, Ree followed Eastwood out of the doctor’s bolt-hole, arms crossed in front of her, hands on opposite shoulders. She stayed a single pace behind him, repeating in her head,
Please let this work, please let this work.

She continued the mantra as she saw the first gnome ahead. Another two appeared behind the first. Nestled in an alcove left by a collapsed wall, they fought halfheartedly over a bloody bone. As they passed, Ree watched for any indication of their presence being detected, but there was none. One of the gnomes slammed a concrete chunk onto another’s head and grabbed the bone, sucking at it like a kid would a straw in an empty glass.

They hustled another couple hundred yards before Eastwood stopped her and gestured up to a manhole. “This is our exit. Should dump out near Wilkerson, and we can hop a cab.”

He hustled up the ladder and moved the manhole cover, letting in a swath of cloud-dimmed sunlight. The alley was empty except for graffiti and a stencil of the starfleet symbol.

“Was that you?” Ree asked, trying to wipe off the assorted muck from the sewer.

After a quick sidelong glance to check, Eastwood shook his head, walking toward the street. “I use a different color of spray paint. Don’t know who did this one. Might not even be someone in the know.”

Daydreaming of the empty-the-hot-water-heater shower she was planning to take, Ree scanned Wilkerson for a cab. “How long will the Claddagh thing take?”

“Several hours, at least. I have to gather the other materials, pop in some Mists of Avalon to set the mood, and go through some books to refresh myself on the ritual. It’ll go faster with you to help me fetch things. We should know the likely next candidate by dinner.”

At the mention of food, her stomach reminded her of the cruel neglect she’d heaped upon it. Eastwood flagged a cab, and that hunger stayed with Ree all the way across town to the Dorkcave.

Step 1: Food. Steps 2 & 3, shower. Step 4, Claddagh-ring-magic thing. Step 5, stop suicides. No biggie.

•   •   •

All Eastwood had to eat were protein bars, chips, and a week-old pizza. The protein bar proved very tough, so Ree gnawed determinedly while stripping down for the shower. It was very much a stereotypical dude shower: more than a bit dirty, with only bar soap and an off-brand shampoo in the white plastic rack that hung from the neck of the showerhead. Eastwood had one ragged black towel and a far more pristine sky-blue towel. The blue one was a bit dusty but smelled clean.

Branwen’s, perhaps?

Stepping into the shower, Ree wondered who this woman was, where she’d gone, and what her relationship with Eastwood had been like. She had a reputation in the area as a badass, but when she’d disappeared, what had the locals done? Nothing? That didn’t sound like much of a community. Or maybe it went to show how much trouble she’d gotten herself into.

Ree didn’t believe that Eastwood would have simply sat by, so wherever Branwen had disappeared to, they must have covered their tracks damned well.

From Branwen, Ree’s thoughts turned to the Moorelys. Was there some secret connection between the three victims? If the ring didn’t give them any information, how could they even
attempt
to search the whole city for the next person likely to commit suicide? She wondered how many people in a city this size committed suicide anyway, and how had Eastwood figured out or decided that this was a pattern?

She was riding damn close to blind, always playing catch-up or second fiddle or something else frustrating.

The shower worked nearly as well as a cappuccino in helping her wake up. She’d expected soreness, tenderness in her shoulder or legs, but they just felt tender, like new skin. Either Dr. Wells’s mojo was damn good, or Ree was on some kind of painkiller.
Something else to ask.

She didn’t have anything to change into, but she felt far more human after the shower. If she was lucky, Eastwood would decide to put together materials for the ritual on his own so she could go home to change. If she was
really
lucky, the ritual would determine that there weren’t going to be any more suicides and they could console the families of the dead and move on. Ree wasn’t betting on either.

Now cleaner and less starving, she made her way back through the stacks and found Eastwood flipping between several books. Behind him, there was a cauldron sitting on top of a space heater.

Eastwood spun in his chair. “Great. I need you to find these books. They’ll be two rows over, on the top shelf. There’s a ladder in the corner,” he said, gesturing to the opposite corner of the Dorkcave with a paper in his hand.

Ree grabbed the paper as he spun back to resume poring through the books.

Scanning the list of books, she sighed.
Innocently Irresistible: Gypsy Love Spells and Emotional Magic in the 19th Century, Sympathetic Magic, Empathetic Efforts,
and
The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems
.
Huh.

She found a ladder on rails and dragged it behind her, scanning the stacks for the appropriate section. She’d already seen that Eastwood’s categorization system was more associative than alphabetical, so she searched for the L
OVE
section.

She walked past the sections of J
OKES,
P
RACTICAL
; J
OKER,
T
HE;
and K
EYZER
S
OZE
, as well as K
ING,
S
TEPHEN
, a section sporting an impressive hardcover collection as well as several boxes of props labeled P
ET
S
EMATARY
, C
ARRIE
, and T
HE
M
IST
.