Nightwise (15 page)

“Huh?” I said, looking up.

“You're a country boy,” he said. “Why do you speak your spells like you're late to Snape's potion class?”

“It's a focus, a trigger,” I said as I studied the complex knot of frozen will around the lock through the lenses of my Ajna and Sahasrara chakras overlapping. “Different workers do it in different ways. A lot of magic is based in belief and perception married to will. I've known some spell-lobbers who pray to a god or sing hymns, some chant mantras, or fall into glossolalia, others evoke Satan or Cthulhu. It's all a matter of what makes the power work best for you, through you—it's what you believe in. The guy who taught me a lot of the basics used Latin. He was kind of old school like that.”

“So what do you believe in?” Trace asked.

I held the key up again and spoke to the padlock.
“Cincinno, vos nominantur a me, et ego EXTEXO incantatum est illud tenet vobis. i provocare voluntatem urget vobis. Ego sum superior! Yield! Et cum clavis nodum nostra. Aperi!”

The padlock snapped open, and the lock and chain clattered to the damp stone floor.

“Me,” I said with a tight smile and fire in my eyes. “I believe in how amazingly badass I am.”

Far off in the darkness, past the circle of Trace's phone light, there was a chorus of howls.

“Shit,” Trace said, “they found us.”

“Come on,” I said, pushing open the door. “Let's finish this.”

The chamber beyond was a network of aluminum tubing, meters, and junction boxes housing cables—the arteries and veins of the city, the thrumming heart of Times Square.

“The ritual requires that once you decapitate the dogs, you bury their heads under a busy street, so the spirits can know no peace,” I said.

“That's why Times Square.” Trace nodded, then he gagged. “Oh, God, I'm going to be sick!”

The stench hit both of us. Rotting meat, putrid blood. The air was filled with flies. The light of Trace's screen panned down to reveal four decaying dog heads, the shiny white bone of the skulls peeking out between bloody fur and the squirming attentions of maggots. The soft jelly of the eyes still held the dumb, confused look of the dead. The heads were arranged in a circle, each laid on top of Japanese kanji, painted in blood. Small scraps of paper containing spells and phrases of power were placed between the heads, completing the circle of the spell. The papers were also in each dog's mouth. A traditional Shugenja ritual arrangement.

The howls again, growing closer. I closed my eyes and tried to remember my Japanese. It was always better to try to unweave a spell using its own traditions, if you knew what, or who, you were dealing with. The lock spell had been Western tradition, I'd bet good money on it. So a different caster had secured the room, or … I dismissed the thought. I didn't have time for it right now, but it troubled me.
I said. The spell papers all flared to life and began to blacken to ash.

There was a chorus, a quartet of mournful wailing in the darkness just outside the door, and then it was gone, only an echo that was smothered by the weight of the earth. Then silence.

“Thank God,” Trace said.

I looked up from the flickering flames of the broken spell and smiled at Trace. “Thank me. I told you I'd get you out of this,” I said. “Now let's—”

Trace's head exploded. Hot blood and brains splashed over my face and chest. As his body crumpled, I heard the thud of the silenced gun that had ended him. At the doorway stood a group of NYPD SWAT. I could see the bouncing flashlights of more beyond the door. They were in full combat gear: night-vision goggles, gas masks, helmets, and body armor—giant insects with Kevlar carapaces. One of them held up a small black box.

Two sharp stings in my chest and I was suddenly on fire, shaking, convulsing, as every nerve, every muscle in my body was sheathed in tingling, throbbing agony. My legs betrayed me and I fell, twitching.

“He's down!” a voice said. All I could see were black combat boots and the bloody body of the man I swore to save illuminated in the flames of a burning dog skull. Voices, shouting.

Hands grabbed me, pulled me. A black bag was slipped harshly over my head and another charge of current applied to me. I fell into oblivion; my last thoughts were a realization that the darkness was just. It came to saints and villains equally, and a sad wish passed through me that the darkness would never end.

 

TEN

Granny passed away in 1974. She came back to visit in the summer of '75. Probably getting a little ahead of myself.

I was ten years old in 1975 and unable to articulate, even to myself, the alien feelings I experienced near Kara May Odam—my first awkward brush with my slumbering sexuality and my first, and last, babysitter.

Kara May. Sweet Jesus in a Mustang. Jailbait-ponytail-wet-dream-prom-princess. All hay-colored hair, halter-top tits, and bare, tanned legs that were slender and firm and kept on going like a John Bonham drum solo, all the way up to her Daisy Duke perfect ass. She smelled of Bubble Yum bubble gum, strawberry lip gloss, pot smoke, and stale sex. Seventeen years old with vacant brown eyes that shifted between dull incomprehension and a fluid, sensual cunning. No disrespect intended there, Kara May. Most of the people I grew up around were pretty damn stupid, but many of them possessed acute and often uncanny instincts, and those instincts served them in good stead more often than any fact, figure, or tome. There is book learning, and there is knowing things. Thinking back on the whole incident with Kara May and Granny, I was the stupid one. Again, getting ahead of myself.

To my eyes, Kara May was the perfect woman, a goddess. If I had been a bit older, she would have been the stuff of epic jerk-off fantasy. I never did, though, because of how things turned out on Halloween.

I was a little shit at ten. Made it hard on my momma. Pa had been dead five years, Granny, not even a year. Ma lost everyone she counted on to keep her safe and sane, and was left with my vicious, useless, whiny little ass to take care of. Some of the men Pa used to work with who hadn't died in the mine with him would come around. They'd knock on the door of the trailer, holding a six-pack of PBR. They'd smile and sit for a spell. Ma was thankful for the attention and the help they would offer—fix the old Nova, keep it going for another inspection, mow the lawn, and the occasional friendly date to avoid the madness that comes with death and loneliness.

So when Cecil Wheeler came up with two tickets to go see Conway Twitty Saturday night at Lakeside Amusement Park over in Roanoke, across the Virginia border, Momma jumped at the prospect. Her friend Gloria from work over at the Destiny Lounge had a niece, and she babysat. That was Kara May, and she had kept me a few times over the years when I was sick and Mom couldn't get out of a shift at work, or simply couldn't afford to miss work. It had been a few years since I had seen Kara May—Granny had kept me, but now Granny was gone.

After what happened with the squirrel, Granny had tried to work with me as much as she could, and as much as I'd let her. I actually got tired of Granny's little tests and games and practice. It had started out as something secret and fun and had suddenly turned in to a chore. There were so many rules, so many things I was never supposed to do or even think. Eventually, by the time I was seven or eight, I told Granny I didn't want to be a Wisdom.

“Now Laytham, honey,” Granny said. “You can run from the things you can do, pretend it isn't real and ignore it. But it won't ignore you, darlin'. The power doesn't really care what you want; it's like water in a flood, looking for a way to flow. Like water, it can be a comfort or it can be destructive. Sooner or later, you will have to deal with it. I'm just trying to help you, sugar. I know it's difficult, especially to have so much talent and to be so young.”

“I don't want it, Granny,” I said. “It's hard. I don't like it no more.”

Granny sighed, and I waited for the guilt and the sermon. They didn't come. She smiled at me. “Want to play checkers?” she asked. I hugged her and went back to being a little boy.

She was right. I wished I had listened to her, wished I had taken the time to learn more from her. Not the lessons about focus and projection, no, the real lessons she tried to teach me—about compassion and wisdom, patience and humanity. The ones I really needed were the ones I failed at, still fail at. I didn't learn them, though, and a few years later, she was gone. Like the old Merle Haggard song says, “Mama tried.”

So there I was with my long-lost babysitter making me feel all kinds of things for the first time, and Momma and Cecil headed out the door to the concert and then some square dancing. Cecil looked and tried to act as much like Richard Petty as he could, he had on the Ray-Bans, the big cowboy hat, and the mustache. A toothpick danced at the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

“We'll be back by two or three in the mornin',” Cecil said.

“Your momma knows and that's okay with you, Kara May, honey?” Mom asked. “Laytham usually goes to sleep watching them monster movies, and that's fine. He ain't got no bedtime on the weekends. You leave him be to watch those silly things and he'll drop off before midnight.”

“I understand, Mrs. Ballard, and it's okay,” Kara May said, smiling. “Me and Laytham are gonna git along jist fine.”

Momma kissed me, and I hugged her, and then her and Cecil were gone. Kara May went the kitchen and made us popcorn and cracked open one of Mom's beers.

“Let's watch some TV, Laytham,” she cooed and plopped down on the couch. It was Saturday evening, so we watched
Hee Haw
and then
Emergency!
on WSAZ, and then
Mary Tyler Moore
on WOWK. It was dark by then.

“Kara,” I said, “I'm hungry. What's for dinner?”

She finished her beer and nodded toward the half-empty popcorn bowl. “I made yew popcorn, Laven, that's plenty. Now hush.”

“Laytham,” I muttered under my breath. “It's Laytham.”

The front door was still open, with the screen door closed. It was July and still hot as hell. Outside, the trailer park was quiet except for the cicadas. Fireflies, like orphan stars, drifted across the field where all the kids who lived here played football and pretended to be Evel Knievel on our bikes.