Mulberry Wands (5 page)

He remembered a television show once where
the detective used magic-detecting powder to prove that the chief
of police was the one casting curses, and not the little old lady
that everyone suspected. He and Carlos had been terribly
disappointed to find out that there was no such thing as
magic-detecting powder, at least not like they showed it on
television. The one thing that the television show did get right
was that magical energy created faint traces, ridges, and these
lines solidified when the power got expended. Concentric lines
rippled along the surface of the wand, like a topographic map. The
lines were denser on one half of the wand.

The last time he’d been called out of the
light to answer a question for the parliament, it was because
someone had put a twinge trap in a garden. A twinge trap was one of
the most basic kinds of spells. He and Carlos used to make them all
the time to keep people out of the secret clubhouse they’d made in
the abandoned lot near the school. You took two sticks and put your
curse into them. Then you tied thread to each of the sticks and
stretched it across the area you wanted to protect. When someone
tripped over the thread, the spell would release onto them. He and
Carlos knew diddly about magic. What usually happened is that
they’d have a faint line on the ankle when they broke their own
spell, and claim success.

A real twinge trap, made by a skilled mage,
could cause flightlessness (in the case of the owls) or paralysis,
or even brain damage. The owls had called him to find out why
another Sunward had been grounded. He’d snooped around the mage’s
house at night until he found the remains of the twinge trap. Those
sticks had dark lines where the string had been tied. If the sticks
had been used in a protection amulet, they’d have even ripples,
like a stylized wood grain, because the power in an amulet is
expended evenly. If they’d been used in a curse against a specific
person, the ripples would thicken around the letters where the mage
had written the target’s name on the wood, and might even be dense
enough to show the mage’s handwriting.

He placed his knuckle over the densest
portion, placed his fingertips over the three other denser circles,
then wrapped his palm to cover the larger dense part, and suddenly
found himself gripping the wand as if he were going to wave it. In
this case, the lines were thickest where a hand had gripped it. Did
that mean it was a trap meant to discharge when someone picked it
up? Paul set the wand down and mimed picking it up. He touched it
lightly at first, only gripping it when it was off the table. If
that had been a curse, it would have burned just his fingertips,
because when you pick something up you touch it lightly at first.
It hadn’t discharged until someone held it and pointed it at
something.

It took him a minute to figure it out, even
when all the pieces were in place, because such a thing didn’t
exist. Couldn’t exist.

“Someone made a magic wand,” Paul said. “They
put catalyst energy into this wood, so that someone else could
discharge it.”

Fox nodded. “I couldn’t tell anything about
it except that it’s been held by more than one human, both males
and females. The parliament wants me to find out where these are
coming from. They assumed that Susan was the maker, and didn’t
believe me when I told them what my nose said.”

“Why is she under so much suspicion?”

“She killed the translator that was sent to
ask her questions about this,” Fox explained. “That means that
she’s hiding something. It must be something terrible if she’s
willing to kill a translator. Even I won’t kill translators, no
matter how hungry I am, even without the treaty. They are quite
useful.”

“She didn’t seem like an evil person.”

“Does evil have a smell?” she asked. “You’re
distracted by her young, healthy body.”

“She is pretty, and I do like her, but I’m
not blinded by that. It takes an evil person to kill a translator,
and I don’t think she could be that evil. Maybe the translator just
died for some other reason that had nothing to do with her.”

Fox barked, sounding exactly like a human’s
cough of disbelief. “The translator just happened to die on the
same day he went to ask her questions about the wooden wands, and
you think that she didn’t kill the translator?”

“You’re the one who said she didn’t make the
wands.”

“I didn’t say that she didn’t make them, only
that there is no proof that she is the only one doing it,” Fox
said. “The parliament is upset about these wands. They are going to
demand that we stop the mages responsible, perhaps with persuasion,
perhaps with a claw in the night.”

“I won’t let them hurt Susan,” he said.

Fox laughed. “You sound like you’re defending
a mate,” she said. “Worry about that later. If she is the one who
murdered the translator, the translators will enact their own
revenge.”

A dog barked, and a black and white shape
bounded towards them across the irrigated park, dangling a leash. A
man ran after it, but it was clear he wouldn’t reach the dog before
the dog reached Paul and the fox.

“I gotta go.” Fox flicked an ear and loped
away.

On Saturday morning, Susan put her cell phone
in her pocket (in case Paul called, not that he had yet, the jerk)
and went outside to search for clues that might lead her to the
discovery of the murderer. Zoë didn’t believe in hiring someone
else to do anything she could do herself, so instead of spending
her free time renovating, she spent her evenings filling cardboard
boxes with junk. Susan was still trying to pretend they weren’t
moving, so she ignored the packing proceedings and sat down on the
gravel path next to the spot where she’d found the body.

She pushed aside the lavender plant and the
rosemary bush, finding pillbugs and releasing the lovely scents of
crushed herbs, but except for that, she found nothing. No tiny
footprints, no bloodstained garrotte, no incriminating letters.
Plenty of fey hung around, as they always did, but they were the
normal kind. Flamesprays (which looked like miniature hummingbird
harpies) clustered around the lantana flowers, prying the flowers
apart as though hunting for bugs. Bramblemaes chattered in the
trees and groomed one another, occasionally dropping down a tuft of
fur or a loose feather when their play turned to a fight. A
graebnor sulked under the aloe vera, looking like a stone until it
gaped toad-like at passing birds or thornwights and tried to snatch
them to eat. Gnosti were usually cute, and occasionally icky, but
they were almost always harmless and small. Once Zoë said she
wished she could see them too, but Susan didn’t think she was
missing much.

Not that they weren’t useful. Ruby said that
the common garden fey were good in that they helped make earth
energy useable, like the way beans fixed nitrogen in the soil. Most
of the time Susan just drew her energy for spells directly from the
earth, but there were less skilled mages that needed to use a
shortcut. Also, hexelmoths could eat the remnants of curses and
spells you didn’t want, which meant you could catch them and put
them in a jar, keeping them going on nothing but the scraps of
spells that didn’t turn out right.

Susan watched the garden fey for half an
hour, (trying to ignore the pointed glances Zoë gave her when she
walked past with yet another box to put in the storage shed), but
she didn’t see any fey that looked anything like the dead one. It
seemed logical that the way to find out about who murdered someone
was to start talking to their nearest and dearest, looking for a
motive. That’s what the detectives on TV always did. But what if
the nearest and dearest didn’t talk? Not just wouldn’t, but
couldn’t. Susan was stumped.

Darius hopped the fence into the backyard.
Since the walls were as tall as him, and the gate unlocked, his
climb was as athletic as it was pointless. He was a few inches shy
of six feet, but he appeared much taller because he was still in
that adolescent growth phase where only his hands and feet had
reached their full size. He had medium-brown skin, wide African
features, and frizzy white hair which he unsuccessfully tried to
slick back against his head.

Susan had moved out of Maggie’s trailer when
she was seventeen, and Zoë had offered to rent her a bedroom. Zoë,
unlike Maggie, was stable and predictable, and let Susan do her own
thing as long as she paid the rent on time. She’d also gently
prodded Susan into staying in high school rather than quitting to
get a full-time job, and she’d helped Susan polish up her résumé so
she could find work that didn’t involve deep fat fryers and
nametags. Susan had needed that environment like an aloe needs
shade, and she’d never forget that Zoë had been there for her when
she really needed someone.

Darius, who’d had difficulties with both his
parents, had been kicked out that summer and needed a place to
stay. Darius was like Susan in that he’d been asked to care for his
mother for so long that he was losing the ability to care for
himself. He, too, seemed to be thriving under Zoë’s laissez faire
stability.

Darius walked, loose limbed, across the yard,
leaping from one side of the flower bed to the other. Also athletic
and pointless, since he could have gone around. Susan grinned at
his energy.

“You could have gone through the gate,” Susan
said.

“Nah, I don’t want Zoë to know I’m here.
She’ll make me help pack.”

“You don’t want to move?”

Darius shrugged. “I’m cool with it.”

The head of Zoë’s black Siamese cat appeared
out of thin air, followed by furry shoulders and body, then finally
her kinked tail. It freaked Susan out to see the cat just step out
of nowhere like that, even though she was the reason for it. When
Susan had been practicing with small mirrors, trying to make a
portal back to the non-magical universe she’d come from, she’d made
one that functioned as a portal to a spot in the garden, halfway
between the rosemary bush and the pecan trunk. Sphinx was unusual
for a cat, in that she could both see the fey and was comfortable
with magic. Typical for a cat, she wanted to go outside whenever
she felt like it, so she had taken to using the mirror portal as a
cat door.

“You seen the new place yet?” Darius
asked.

“No.” Susan scratched Sphinx’s ears briefly,
but didn’t pet her any more than that because she didn’t want
Darius to think she liked cats.

“It’s big.” He flopped down on the ground
beside Susan. A moment later, he fished out a stick from underneath
himself that he had accidentally sat on. “You’re gonna like it,
Sue. Stop moping.”

“I’m not moping.”

“Yeah you are,” Darius said. Darius broke the
twig into pieces and tossed it into the branches of the orange
tree. Sparrows and bramblemaes chirped and fluttered in agitation
with each piece of wood he threw. “I know you’re pissed off, but
it’s gonna be cool.”

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

“Ignoring it won’t make it go away. Few
months, this house ain’t gonna be Zoë’s anymore, and unless you can
pony up the dough to buy it, you aren’t gonna be here either.”

Darius leaned forward to pick up a pecan
shell from the ground next to Susan. He muttered something at it
and wound a bit of energy around the hull, then tossed it into the
leaves next to where Sphinx was lying down waiting for more
attention. The pecan skittered like it had feet, causing the leaves
to rustle and Sphinx to go predatory. Her ears perked up and she
crouched down, tail thrashing. A moment later, she pounced in the
leaves and tore through them, trying to find the moving shell.

“Your mom teach you that?”

“Yeah. She can turn a nut into a beetle, but
all I can do is make it move.”

Darius’s mom was one of the rare human-sized
gnosti. She looked almost perfectly human, like an albino
West-African woman, actually, but Darius said she was actually a
gnosti from the Elsewhere. She was a skilled mage, inhumanly
beautiful, and quite the bitch.

“How’s your mom doing?” Susan asked, to get
him to shut up about the move.

“Same old, same old,” Darius said, flopping
to the ground. “Said she’s clean, but dad caught her with some
Sudafed. They had a big fight, and he threatened to kick her out if
she couldn’t stay off the meds, then they threw out all the cold
medicine in the house. Won’t last though.”

“I’m sorry,” said Susan.

Maggie, Susan’s mom, did a lot of pot, and
drank too much, but neither one of them messed her up as much as
Nyquil and Sudafed did to Darius’s mom. It was worse than if
Darius’ mom was a junkie, because she could get what she needed on
every corner, legally. Susan hoped Darius would be less stressed
about the situation now that he was moved out and didn’t have to
see it every day, but no matter how screwed up his mom was, he
still visited her.

Susan knew what that was like.

Zoë walked into the backyard again, carrying
yet another cardboard box. “Are you two going to help pack?”

“Didn’t you say we had till Halloween?”

“There’s a lot to do,” Zoë said. “I’m almost
out of boxes, and I’ve still barely touched the living room.”

Susan elbowed Darius. “We’ll uh, we’ll go get
more boxes then, okay?”

“Yeah,” Darius agreed, following Susan to the
back gate.

Zoë snorted and went back into the house.

Darius and Susan went out through the back
gate into the alley. When she was a child, Susan used to walk in
the alleys all the time, thinking of them as her ‘secret passage’.
In reality, they were anything but secret. The alleys were thirty
feet wide, lined with the back walls of the yards on either side,
and improved with sand and gravel that had been condensed into
packed earth by this point. Every third house had a giant black
plastic dumpster, which got emptied every week. Anything too big to
fit in the dumpster, like tree branches or furniture, got collected
from the alleys once a month. A neighbor four houses down had piled
junk next to their wall, so Susan walked toward it and began poking
around. She did have another reason to go in the alleys.