Muddy Waters (Otherwhere Book 1) Page 8

  “I’d like to invite you to one of our meetings. For my group. Others’ Little Helpers?” Mark said, his forced casualness endearing him to me. Just a wee bit.

  “Why? Is it show-and-tell day?”

  “No. It’s just that I… I mean we, we in the group feel like we helped get you free. And we’d like to say how glad we are that you are. Free, that is.”

  For a split second, I was thrown backward in time to my junior year in high school. I was at Taco Bell with Vail Paquane. We were guzzling Pepsi and laughing, I forgot about what. But I won’t forget him. My first love. My first real boyfriend. Technically, my last real boyfriend, too. He was so sweet. Until the day my mother caught him preparing to perform a ritual that would have killed me and blasted him to Kingdom Come. Vail never knew what hit him.

  And here was Mark, being sweet.

  I just wanted to run.

  People aren’t nice to you unless they want something.

  Or they’re nice to you as a prelude to your death.

  “I suppose you all want me to thank you so very kindly for springing me from my unfortunate incarceration?” Bitterness shaped my words.

  I don’t think either of us noticed the man who stomped up to the bar until he was reaching over the seat to grab me.

  “You! You sold out your own people!” he blared in my face. He had me by the shoulders, three feet off the ground, and was shaking me like a ragdoll. My glass smashed on the floor. The guy had to have been six feet tall if he was an inch―albino and thickly muscled. Suddenly, people had gathered and were shouting things and throwing beer. The accordions stopped their honking. “You killed them! All of them!”

  The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. You can’t really do magic in the Three Libras, but there’s nothing preventing bodily harm, wild haymakers, or flying malt brew. A stocky man with long tangled mane came up behind the albino. The noise grew to a harsh roar. My brain had been so vigorously scrambled, I couldn’t have reacted even if I’d wanted to. The stocky man sank a swift kick in my captor’s kidneys, and he let me drop like a sack of potatoes onto the floor.

  Immediately, Mark shoved his way to my side and helped me up.

  “You jackwagons!” I hollered over the din. “You cannot possibly still believe I killed my family, you morons! I’ve been released! By the ever-loving FBI! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Nona wrung her hands, waving another bouncer over.

  “Come on, Tessa. Let’s go.” Mark pulled me toward the door. The stocky bouncer took my other arm and led us out. Behind us, the bar descended into a brawl.

  Outside, the air lightened, and I sucked in a breath.

  “Look, I don’t have an opinion about you one way or the other,” the thick lion-haired man said. “For what it’s worth, I know you didn’t cause that ruckus in there, but I think you’d better watch out. Nona will talk to Morty and Deci, but maybe give it a couple of weeks?” He did seem apologetic.

  “Your drinks are crappy anyway,” I muttered and stalked off toward my car.

  “Hey, Tessa, wait,” Mark said. I didn’t stop. I charged toward the Camry and flung myself in the driver’s seat.

  “Stop!” Mark grabbed the door and held it open.

  Not taking my eyes off him, I put the key in the ignition and put the car in reverse. He yelped in protest, but let go. As I pulled the door to, he shouted, “Be careful, Tessa. They’re coming after you.”

  Researchers at the Karolinksa Institute in Sweden remain puzzled as to the inability of Human–Other embryos to be brought to term in either species, or in lab-controlled environments. So-called “hybridization” research continues.

  ―News item from the Max Planck Demographics and Research Newsletter

  CHAPTER FIVE

  emphatically wasn’t ready to go home after that, yet clearly unwelcome anywhere there were people, so I made some inquiries via my cell phone’s GPS system. Within moments, I was heading toward the future site of the Louisville Botanical Society’s conservatory.

  River Road was deserted, and I knew the curves pretty well. Thank all the tiny gods for full moons. I mashed the gas.

  I turned south onto Frankfort then east up an unpaved road. The area was silent but for the rustle of dead leaves and the occasional car. It was quite a drive back into the bluffs. I parked near some bulldozers. The glass fairly glowed in the light.

  The spell I needed was an oldie but a goodie. It amazed me, how quickly it was coming back. Scared me a little, too, since I’d thought for so long I’d never want to do magic again.

  I held up my hand, palm out toward the woods, and whispered, “Magic leaves a magic trail, through fog and wind and icy hail. Make this one strong so I might see, the magic hiding here from me.” Yes, it’s corny, but that’s how it works―you build your own spells because they’re more powerful that way, and I built that one when I was about ten so rhyming was super important.

  It pleased me to see a pale lavender path through the trees begin to lighten, softly at first, then brighter. My gut tightened. The moon was helpful, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I took out my compact LED flashlight, so I didn’t end up head-down in a sinkhole or knee-deep in a pond. The trail led back away from the main greenhouses, through the woods between them and the river, for perhaps a half a mile or more. I don’t know, I’m not good with distances. Certain I was making an enormous racket, crunching through the woods, I did a little noise reduction charm on my feet. “Mousy feet, so mousy mousy, let me go quiet ‘round this housey.” (Don’t judge. I was perhaps seven when I wrote that one and we lived in a really old place with creaky floorboards. I needed a way to have a brownie at one a.m. if I wanted it without waking up the whole house.)

  Eventually, in a clearing on the far end of the glass buildings, I found it.

  It was like someone had toilet-papered the trees and the huge greenhouse structure with magic. It hung in thick swags from the branches and coated the ground like sheer green-purple snow. But it took on a distinctly green sheen that deepened the closer I got to the clearing. It meant one thing: dark magic. Very dark. And by the looks of it, done here often in the last few months.

  Magic, at its simplest, is focused energy. When energy touches something, it changes it―the trees, skin, water, whatever. People who are really good at it can focus this energy and manipulate it with laser-sharp accuracy. As with anything, some folks are better at certain kinds of magic than others. Elves, for instance, are good with air. Incidentally, we Reddicks are also masters of the air. Nickers, like Papa Myrtle, are expert water-crafters. One of the hallmarks of dark magic is that it doesn’t dissipate easily. The bad juju does its job, but then it just sticks around and rots, for lack of a better description. It’s like plastic in a landfill; it gets used and just never goes away. The remnants of light magic burn off like fog in the sun.

  Something drew my attention to the trees. It kept itself just out of my line of sight, but if I didn’t try to look at it, I could make out dim shapes. A tiny wave of relief washed over me when I realized they were just Animotoids, feeding on this old, dead black magic. They’re not very smart, but they are harmless and startle easily.

  Even with the Animotoids’ efforts to consume all the leftover magic, my skin crawled as I walked into the circle. My tattoos aren’t just decorative or to piss off a parent. (Not that Mama Reddick minded at all.) I have seven, and they’re all imbued with protection, the way defensive house spells keep the inhabitants safe. Besides the pentacle and triskelion, I have an Irish cross on my left shoulder, a triple moon on the right, a Heka hieroglyph on my lower back, and the Buddhist sanko and West African nyame dua on my right and left ankles respectively. Evil is evil in any religion and on either side of the Rift.

  I nosed around the conservatory grounds. The leaves and sticks had been cleared away and the dirt swept smooth. Lines snaked, carved in the earth, but not in any pattern I could discern―lacking perspective. I turned the doorknob; it was, of cours
e, locked. I tried a simple unlocking spell and was surprised when the greenhouse bit back. Someone had set up the magical equivalent of an electric fence. I didn’t try anything else to get in, for fear it might trip some kind of an alarm. I would wait and learn more before I went busting through.

  Near the back edge against a tree trunk, a sheet of plastic rustled in the breeze. I crept over and peeled away one corner. Underneath, was a big smooth block, cool and clammy to the touch, like the forehead of a sick person.

  On closer inspection with my LED, I saw the plastic covered a huge cube of reddish clay. I smelled my palm to confirm it, inhaling the telltale scent of earth. The plastic featured a label proclaiming this was Sedona Red Clay, by way of Spot’s Art Shop. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I muttered, scraping some of the thick earth into a little in-case jar I carry in one of my cloak pockets.

  Tucked under the plastic was something else―a piece of paper with ragged edges and writing I couldn’t see in the dim yard. Carefully, I teased it out and stepping behind a substantial oak tree, turned the flashlight toward it. The tree should block anyone from the road or building site from seeing me.

  The page was clearly ancient, with mystifying markings. For starters, the diagram featured several pentagrams with circles in them, and a curved line in the middle and two sets of arrows around the edge, one clockwise and one widdershins. More markings dotted the edge of the circle. A couple of figures and paragraphs of writing scribbled all over the page, too small to read. A vaguely humanoid figure was drawn under the central line. Four triangles pointed toward the center of the circle. There were other runes and markings I couldn’t see very well. Others I could, but didn’t recognize. Some were protective sigils, a few were banishing runes that would probably have been used for controlling an entity. But what where they doing here? And together?

  “What’s this?” a smooth voice inquired. “Knee-deep in dark magic in the middle of the night, are we?”

  I readied a spell as I pushed my back against the tree. How the hell did I let myself get so distracted?

  “Cherubim know the divine secrets above all, while Seraphim excel in that which is greatest of all, namely in being united with God himself.”

  –Saint Thomas Aquinas

  CHAPTER SIX

  ortunately, it was only Gideon. “Fortunately” being a relative term.

  “Shush, you bleached-out, self-important idiot!” I hissed. He was leaning against a tree. Glowing. Because Celestials just can’t resist showing off. I stomped over and gave his shoulder a little shove.

  Gideon put his hands on his hips. “Now is that any way to behave toward your Watcher? Especially one who’s going to put you in a maximum security Otherwhere lockup guarded by hell trolls as soon as I prove you’re behind this?” He waggled his manicured fingers at the clearing. “Whatever this is. Looks like trouble.”

  “What are you even doing here? I just saw you yesterday.” He smirked. “Look, it’s not what you think. There was a fight at the bar and… Oh here.” I pulled out the page I’d been looking at.

  Gideon’s eyebrows rose so high, they nearly hit the back of his head. “And she hands me a receipt for her wrongdoing! The proof!” He waved it around like a prosecuting attorney in a based-on-real-events movie.

  “Be careful!” I screeched. “I don’t know what that is!”

  “I do.” He stopped waving it so vigorously.

  “Oh, you do?” I demanded.

  “It’s obvious what it is.”

  I crossed my arms. “Go on.”

  “It’s an ancient document,” he said grandly. “Well, a copy of one.”

  “And it does what, exactly?”

  “It’s evil, I can tell that much. That’s a symbol for evil right there. And here’s another one. Oh, and one more.”

  I grabbed the paper carefully and stowed it in my cloak before he could react. “You have no idea. I told you. I just found it. Just give me time to figure this out, okay?” Gideon was sort of a narcissistic prick, but most of the time, he could be reasoned with. He wasn’t bad at his job, exactly. I guess it’s not his fault he can’t stand me.

  “Well…” Gideon made a show of sighing and rolling his eyes. “Okay. You have seven days. I haven’t met my quota for this month and just between you and me―” He leaned in closely and stage-whispered, “I have money riding on this.”

  Poof. He was gone.

  By the time I got home, it was near three a.m. Dorcha was sitting in the living room in front of the door like a sphinx―head up and staring. When I came in, she bounded up, knocking me over.

  “Mmmmphh, get offa me, you beast!” I huffed through a mouthful of silky black fur. She gave me another hard bonk in the chest with her head and trotted off, clearly assured of my alive-ness and now ready for her nightly excursions.

  I wasn’t even close to tired, so I put my cowboy boots by the door, changed into comfy clothes, and made some coffee. Then went back into the library to continue where I’d left off, bringing with me the little container of clay.

  My library is the master bedroom of the apartment. Mom and I had installed floor-to-ceiling shelves and cabinets. A big heavy table sits in the center, along with a squashy armchair and a couple of lamps. One wall is books I inherited from my family. All my surviving grimoires and books of shadow are there, dating back centuries. Some of them I can’t read since I’m not up on my Latin or old English or high German.

  I settled in for a browse.

  Luckily, some of my ancestors enchanted their books of shadow, which, while being a super-neat trick, is also incredibly handy. I started with great-great-auntie Sheridan, who is almost always the most helpful.

  Her book of shadows is huge. Probably, a thousand parchment pages all covered in her elegant script and vivid illustrations. This is one of the reasons I love Auntie Sheridan’s book―because it’s so pretty. The book itself is green leather with the face of a green man worked in the cover, his mischievous features poking out from a pile of oak leaves. Another reason is, she was so meticulous in her detail.

  I undid the latch and opened the book.

  A fine mist leaked from the binding, swirling and drifting until it finally coalesced into a woman in Victorian garb, bustle and elaborate hairdo included. She stood about two feet high and was rendered in shades of gray and white.

  “Tessa, my darling! It’s been too long!” She always says that. I don’t think enchanted books have much sense of time.

  “Hello, Auntie. How are you?”

  She sighed, patting her ornate coif. “I simply must get these spells right or mother will be quite cross.” The book’s spirit will create sort of a composite personality of its owner over time. Auntie lived to be almost one hundred, so she had a lot of time with this tome. It had soaked up an extremely accurate version of my ancestor. “I haven’t much time, dear, so tell me, to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

  I quickly got her up to date on the situation, leaving out some of the more anachronistic details. These book spirits were sort of stuck in the time they were created, so Sheridan didn’t understand things like computers or the internet.

  Then, I held up the page from the conservatory.

  “That symbol upon your paper there is a hamsa.” I knew that. I have a tattoo of one. A hamsa looks like a hand with an eye in the palm. “It’s a protection sigil.” She frowned. “This is ancient Hebrew, and I believe it’s a diagram for calling forth a spirit of some sort. I cannot tell if it’s evil or not. Now, I don’t know Hebrew very well. Hold it closer, would you?” I did. “Hmm…” She made a squeal of discovery. “I wonder if someone has unearthed a Book of Creation.”

  “A Book of Creation,” I scribbled it down on a notepad. “Never heard of it.”

  “Legend has it, they were the first books, scrolls really, written by the first holy men. They were reported to have unlocked the… well, ultimate secrets of life, and these books described various rituals to do with the very creation of life
or destruction of death. Only the most trusted holy men, those pure of intention and clean in spirit, could produce or use them. At some point, it was decided Humans shouldn’t wield such power. Various religious factions banded together to have them outlawed and declare their contents dark magic. All the books were said to have been destroyed, but of course, there are always copies of such things floating about where one least expects.”

  “What exactly was in them?”

  “An excellent question. Supposedly all manner of rituals, incantations, hexes, and curses. Spells to call Demons and bind them. To banish Angels. To give or take magic. Hard to say, exactly. It’s nearly all rumor and legend, to be sure. None of us could ever find one. We did think we came across a few pages here and there. Let me show you.”

  The book flipped itself to a point near the end.

  “I believe the pages from which I copied this are from a Book of Creation dating around perhaps two thousand years ago. I saw it in the private collection of an archaeologist in Nepal. He said he found it in a cave near the sea in India.”

  The page had a similar diagram to the one from Mark’s book. But it appeared simpler somehow. Not as many sigils.

  “That symbol means ‘earth’,” Sheridan said. “And that one means ‘fire.’ I don’t know much else. Oh, I am sorry, dear.”

  “Auntie, what are you talking about! You were such help. Oh, are there any spells I should have handy if I wanted to maybe stop a ritual like this?”

  She frowned slightly. “I would say some sort of water-courting spell would be helpful, if fire and earth are on that chart. Not wind. Earth, of course, you can fight earth with earth. That is all that is coming to mind right now.”

  I scribbled some notes. “Auntie Sheridan, thank you so much!”

  The little figure on the table beamed her misty gray smile. “It is always my pleasure, darling. Do be careful, and let me know how you come out in the end, won’t you?” She blew me a kiss and dissolved back into the page.