Spellbent (5 page)

My foot hit something soft and slippery, and I nearly twisted my ankle. I looked down and realized I was standing in a pool of blood.

“Jesus! What the...”

There were three corpses, best as I could tell. It looked like they’d been turned inside out, exploded. Bits of flesh and bone were everywhere. I saw shreds of gray maintenance uniforms amid the gore. I felt intensely sick and fought down the urge to vomit.

“God. Poor guys. How—how could Smoky
do
this?” I asked the ferret. “We were barely thirty seconds behind, and these guys look like they swallowed dynamite sandwiches. . . how did this happen?”

“I don’t know,” Pal replied, his sinuous body weaving to and fro as he sniffed the air.

The rest of the garage was empty except for a maintenance van and a motorcycle. A wide smear of blood trailed to the far end of the garage, where Smoky was nosing around the underground entrance to the Riffe Center. I didn’t see any blood on his muzzle. The glass doors to the center were smashed; huge pieces of thick plate glass lay shattered on the concrete.

“I didn’t hear him do that,” I said. “Is there something else out, here? Is he tracking something? Did something come through the portal?”

The ferret sniffed the air. “I can’t say.”

How could he not know? I tried to force down my panic. “Are you saying you don’t know, or you know but won’t tell me?” My words came out angrier than I intended, but I didn’t feel like apologizing for my tone. I began to walk toward Smoky, hoping he wouldn’t slither into the Riffe Center before I got close enough to either shoot or try some kind of a binding spell.

“I don’t know if anything else is here,” the ferret replied. “Why would you think I’d withhold information from you?”

“Let’s see,” I replied. “Cooper’s been sucked away to God-knows-where by some evil force and his little dog’s turned into a monster. Tom, Dick, and Harry on the night cleaning crew just got turned into stew meat. And my familiar suddenly wakes up and starts telling me what to do. . . yet won’t tell me what it really is. And it can’t tell me the most
important
thing I need to know, which is whether or not I’ve got some other freak show to deal with besides Hopalong Smaug here.”

“Are you saying you don’t
trust
me?” The ferret sounded supremely offended.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” I said, stopping. “Fear? Check. Worry? Check. About to pee my pants? Check. Trust in my new mystery familiar? Nope, sorry, just ran out. How do I know you’re not some. . . some evil spirit who came through the portal to possess the body of my ferret?”

“You’re paranoid,” he said.

“Convince me,” I replied.

“I’m not sure how I can do that,” the ferret said, agitated. “There are spells to prove I’m telling the truth, but I imagine you don’t know them. And we can’t spare the time to perform them.”

“Okay. Go back to the car and wait for me. I’ll come back for you when I’m done.”

“You can’t do this by yourself, you’re not experienced—”

“I know how to shoot. And I know Smoky. Go.” The ferret reluctantly climbed down my back and humped back up the garage ramp into the rainy night.

Did I just do a phenomenally stupid thing?
I wondered.
He’s right, I can’t do this alone.
..
but I guess I’m going to have to try.

I paused. Maybe I didn’t have to do this Palimpsest’s way. Maybe Smoky was still sane enough to listen to me and stay put. Maybe I could find a landline in the building that actually connected to the real world. I could phone Mother Karen to find someone who knew about this kind of stuff and could put things back the way they were supposed to be.

And then we could figure out how to get Cooper back.

Maybe.

Slaying the Dragon

I Lifted the shotgun to my shoulder and trotted toward Smoky, who was still sniffing the pieces of shattered door glass. Smoke rose from his nostrils with each exhalation.

I am
so
about to get myself barbecued,
I thought.
I wish Cooper were here; he’d know exactly what to do.

Tears welled up in my eyes. Where was he? Was he okay? If he’d been sucked into that black pit of nightmares I’d seen. . . dammit, I should have insisted we wait another day to summon the rain. We never should have gone out that night.

I could have been curled up on the couch with Cooper, watching an old movie with little terrier- sized Smoky on his lap and my ferret on my lap, eating popcorn and laughing and smiling and kissing instead of being wet and scared and alone and not knowing what the
hell
I was doing in this stinking parking garage.

I was about a dozen yards from Smoky. Close enough for a clean, strong hit with the shotgun, although I didn’t want to do that. In the yellow lights of the garage, he was truly frightening: part dog, part Asian dragon, part centipede, all wrong. Green slime caked the edges of his lips—blood, poison, or both?

His eyes, I realized, were faceted like an insect’s. Would he recognize me through his new eyes, or would I look as monstrous to him as he did to me?

I set the shotgun muzzle down and leaned the stock against my damp leg so it would be close at hand. While Smoky had never been able to speak to anyone but Cooper, I hoped to get some kind of friendly response, and I figured pointing a firearm at him wasn’t the best tactic.

I whistled at him. “Smoky! Smoky, whatcha looking at there, buddy?”

His head jerked up from the smashed glass, and he stared at me. His lips drew back from his dagger-like teeth in a snarl. Green poison dripped from the tips. A growl like an anvil dragging across concrete rolled out of his throat.

Not the response I’d been hoping for.

“Smoky, don’t be like that. It’s me, Jessie. You know me, I’m your
friend.
I fed you just this morning. Cooper’s missing, and I need your help if we’re gonna get him back.”

I slowly reached into my pocket, hoping I had a rubber band or hair tie in there, but could only find a loose thread from the stitching. It would have to do. I broke it off and began to chant old words for “bind.”

At the first weak touch of my magic, Smoky lunged at me, fast as a striking cobra.

No time to finish. I snatched up the shotgun, swung the muzzle up toward Smoky, and squeezed the trigger. It blasted into his open mouth.

Smoky roared and jerked back, shaking his head like a dog with a wasp-stung nose. I pumped the gun, aimed for his eye, and fired again.

Smoky bucked, and I didn’t see his tail flailing toward me until it was too late. The tail slammed into my left shoulder, knocking me off my feet and the shotgun out of my hands.

I tumbled across the Concrete and landed back-first against the cinder-block wall, knocking my head painfully. I lay there, dazed, expecting to feel Smoky’s hot breath on my skin as his jaws clamped down on my prone body—

—but instead I heard glass breaking. I turned my head in time to see Smoky’s tail disappearing through what was left of the doors to the Riffe Center. The shotgun lay ten yards away from me.

“Oh great,” I moaned, awkwardly sitting up. I’d banged up my knees and elbows and hands pretty well during my tumble.
“This
is going well.”

At least you’re not barbecue,
I reminded myself. Or
giblet surprise.

I scratched an itch on my left forearm, and my hand came away sticky with blood. Smoky’s tail had torn my T-shirt and opened a three-inch gash in my shoulder. I couldn’t see anything but blood in the wound.

I tried to raise my left arm and was answered with a bright blue spike of pain from the muscles and joint. It even hurt to make a fist. I had to take care of the arm before I could think about tracking down Smoky.

Bracing myself against the wall with my good arm, I climbed to my feet. There was wriggling movement on the floor near the broken glass. I retrieved the shotgun and slowly approached it.

Smoky’s green blood had spattered on the floor, and a strange moss was growing from it. As I watched, the moss sprouted thorny tendrils that wiggled out across the concrete like earthworms seeking dirt. Or tentacles seeking meat.

I stepped back out of tendril reach.
You don’t know
what
that is; don’t even
think
about touching it,
I thought.
This ain’t biology class; don’t experiment.

But if a few drops of blood produced
this.
. . he was bound to bleed a lot more if I had to kill him. Would the reality warp end with him, or would the moss survive him and sustain it?

I jogged through the broken doors and entered the basement floor of the Riffe Tower. Moss was spreading across the pinkish marble stairs leading to the foyer. I hoped he wouldn’t go too far before I could catch up.

To my right was the locked gate to a little cafeteria; I’d eaten there after I’d been to an art exhibit on the main floor. It wasn’t exactly gourmet dining, but I knew the place would have what I needed.

It took me a couple of minutes of searching for words for “rust” to rot the steel Master Lock enough that I could bash it open with the butt of the shotgun. I heaved the gate out of the way. The kitchen was locked, too, but I was getting better at finding good words for “corrosion.” The doorknob’s comparatively flimsy lock gave after a minute of chanting.

The kitchen was lit in the red glow from the EXIT signs. I set my shotgun down by the door. A white steel medical kit was bolted to the back wall between the grill and one of the prep tables; I opened it and found a roll of gauze and an Ace bandage.

“Mustard, mustard, where are you, mustard... ?“ There it was, right below the prep tables. I pulled the huge plastic jar off its shelf and set it on the steel tabletop.

I heard a roar and frightened shouts upstairs.

Three firecracker pops of a pistol. Then a loud thumping and shattering glass. The scream of a man in pain.

Girl, you better hurry,
I thought.

My arm ached, and my palm had gone numb. Maybe Smoky
had
put a little something special into my wound. Or maybe his cut had damaged a nerve.

Cooper had shown me how to make a healing poultice out of mustard and onions from our weenie roast fixings when we’d gone swimming at Buckeye Lake and I cut my foot open on a broken bottle. But mustard and onions weren’t much use for poison. Would ginger work? Garlic? My memory pinged: basil. People once used basil in poultices to draw out venom. Hindus? Medieval Europeans? My memory failed. No matter.

I found all the herbs I needed in a cabinet; the powdered garlic was relatively fresh, but the dried basil was sad and stale. I dumped what was left of the tin onto a cutting board, mixed in an equal portion of chopped onions from the refrigerator, a few pinches of dried garlic, and enough mustard to make a paste. I kneaded the mixture as I spoke the ancient words for “health” and “healing,” then pulled up the remains of my T-shirt sleeve and pressed a handful of the paste against the angry wound.

Pain jagged from the wound down my arm and into my chest. I managed to keep from screaming, kept up my chant as I tried to think cool thoughts, healing thoughts. I visualized the pain and poison leaving my body and my flesh closing beneath my fingers.

It was done. I pulled my hand away. The wound had knitted into a red seam. It looked like it might not even scar. As a precaution against the wound being pulled open, I wrapped my shoulder in gauze and then the Ace bandage, then flexed my arm. I felt a twinge when I rotated the arm backward, but all things considered the joint felt pretty solid.

There was a phone bolted to the wall near the door; would I be able to get through to anybody on a landline? I lifted the receiver and put it to my ear. Instead of a dial tone, I heard a hollow, faint roar.

I jiggled the cradle. “Hello?”

“I need to get warm.” My aunt’s voice was thin, barely more than a whisper. “It’s so cold in here. Let me warm up inside you. I can slip in through your ear and you’ll hardly know I’m there at all—”

Shit.

I slammed the receiver back in its cradle, grabbed the shotgun, and headed back to the stairway.

Then stopped.

The marble steps were completely covered in waving, curling vines and meat-purple fern-like fronds. The vines shuddered and stretched out toward me, yearning for my heat or blood or both.

I backed off and ran down the corridor to the other set of stairs that led up to the first floor. I jogged up the steps and peeked out around the corner.

The entire floor between the basement stairway and the entrance to the art gallery was covered in a jungle of undulating fronds. A viney lump twitched in the middle of the floor. The vines shifted, and I saw a section of white uniform shirt. A walkie-talkie crackled.

I forced my gaze from the dying security guard and realized that half a dozen round pods were growing near his body. They looked like football- sized red grapes. As I stared at the translucent pods, I realized I was seeing tiny embryos like curled eels growing inside. Thick, thorny umbilical vines pulsed between the guard’s body and the pods.

Oh hell. How fast were Smoky’s pups growing? I raised my shotgun and took aim.. . then lowered it. Jesus. I didn’t have enough ammo if every drop of his blood was going to turn into a hungry, babyspawning briar patch.