Dead Set Page 13

  “You aren’t human.”

  “Ah, I see. So politeness doesn’t extend to—”

  “No, it doesn’t extend to things like you,” I said, floating past the mostly burned woman and down the narrow hall toward the seats.

  The projector’s flickering beam cut through the smoke and ash of the theater, covering the silver screen with what I could only guess was Demon High.

  “I know we’re from different worlds, but why won’t you go to Prom with me?” said a forlorn high school boy, his face tinged purple and his head sporting a pair of curving horns.

  “What the—”

  Claudia pushed her way past me. “I remember this part… ‘We aren’t from different worlds—we’re from different planes of existence. It’ll never work, Trevor,’” the manifestation said, quoting the cheerleader who appeared just off frame.

  “This is a thing?”

  Claudia nodded. “Yeah—we’re human too, you know.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “Right, but we do have feelings.”

  “Murderous feelings?”

  “They count.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes, then investigate the theater itself. The seats were empty, but a decent number of seat bottoms were flipped down, as if someone was sitting in them.

  I willed myself higher, passing through the projector’s beam while the film continued to play.

  “But Cindy—”

  “No, Trevor, I’m going with Bryan. He’s captain of the football team, and his skin won’t clash with my dress.”

  Looking down from the highest point gave me an excellent view of the seating—but more than that, this view made it easy to see the pattern.

  “It’s a sigil…”

  “What?” Claudia said from below. “A sigil? Of course Cindy’s wearing a sigil on her shirt, Trevor made it for her.”

  “The chairs…”

  The seats were raised and lowered like placards at a stadium, and at this position it was easy to see the symbol they spelled out.

  “It’s a conjuring circle,” I said, hovering above the design. But it wasn’t just any circle. The sigil’s complex whorls and curving lines brought with it memories of my college days, of mistakes, and of dark power my old girlfriend had given her life for a taste of—Ten Spins Infernal Constructs.

  Much like all of the ancient Magician’s works, the sigil was a masterclass of precise design. Whoever had drawn it though, had gone ever further. They’d used the seats themselves in a complex pattern of crooks and turns, and combined with the master Magician’s seal, the overall result was a perfectly designed pattern for calling and trapping a very powerful being.

  The half-melted Claudia shuffled over to examine the circle. “Wow, now that’s one hell of a conjuring circle—Magician’s got talent.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, the House was right. Conjuring circles were all about confusion and mental gymnastics. Honestly, that’s why some of the best conjurers in the world were just a hair shy of bat-shit crazy—or actually psychotic.

  “But what are they conjuring?”

  Claudia placed brittle digits against what remained of her chin. “You mean who… Hmm, you know, I think—and I’m just spitballing here—I think they’re trying to get in touch with Asaroth.”

  “Wait, Asaroth… The Defiler?”

  Claudia rolled her undead eyes. “Okay, let’s set something straight. It’s not a nickname if you give it to yourself. You do know he gave himself that name, right? Just up and said ‘call me The Defiler.’ I told him that’s crap, that no one gets to go around giving themselves nicknames.”

  “Yet here we are, calling him The Defiler…”

  “Well, you are. Don’t lump me in with your stupid,” Claudia said, crossing her boney arms.

  “Why would someone summon The Defiler?”

  Claudia shrugged her shoulders. “Why do some kids pull the wings off butterflies when they could just burn ants with a magnifying glass?”

  I floated closer to examine the sigil.

  “Don’t get too close. It was built to summon and hold The Defiler—damn it, now you have me calling him that—it’ll hold you just the same.”

  “But I don’t get it… why the New Dead?”

  “Asaroth has been hoarding New Dead for centuries—built his own personal army. Not my style, of course, but it suits him just the same,” Claudia said, placing a hand on my silver cord like a kid with a Eugene-shaped circus balloon. “Hey… what’s this?”

  I felt it too—something soft, loving, and innocent at the end of Ariadne’s thread.

  Cathy.

  “Oh, man. Do you feel that?” Claudia said, rubbing the silver cord against her decaying face. “That’s some serious innocence.”

  She pushed the thread against her nose hole. “The bouquet. I’m getting hints of willful righteousness, a dusting of fiery compassion, and—oh, this is too much—virginity!”

  “Stop, don’t even—”

  Claudia placed a burnt and spindly leg on one of the seats of the sigil. “I know this is going to be hard for you, Gene, but I think it’s time we see other people—”

  “No, you stay away from—”

  “Don’t get all uppity about it. I’ve given you countless opportunities, and just like Cindy the Cheerleader you’ve kicked me in short hairs. Well, I know when I’m not wanted, and I also know tasty potential when I smell it.”

  I scrambled down the thread. “Don’t you dare—”

  “Goodbye, Magician,” Claudia said, pressing down on the seat bottom and closing the sigil’s pattern.

  Demon High vanished, and in its place the screen filled with an uncountable mass of black and twisted tentacles.

  “So that’s what he’s going like these days. Odd,” Claudia said, taking a seat in the newly turned down chair and guiding my floating body toward the screen. “Tell The Defiler—damn it, I did it again—I said hey.”

  Evil, pure and unfiltered, oozed from the undulating mass of slimy flesh, but it didn’t stay on the screen. The snake-like arms reached out, testing the air, and looking for me.

  I tried to will myself away from the reaching tentacles of Asaroth, but Claudia had the thread, and kept guiding me back.

  “He’s over here… Come on, Gene. Maybe Asaroth just wants to take you to the Prom?”

  A tentacle passed close to my face, sending a cold shock of pain through my overheated translucent body.

  “There you go, now you’ve said hello. I’m sure he’d love to give you a nice hug.”

  More tentacles broke free of the silver screen and reached for me. I tried to scramble down the thread, but Claudia kept giving me more line.

  “Where are you going, Gene? He’s right there! Don’t be like Cindy.”

  I willed myself along the thread, but The Defiler was unrelenting, and quickly filled the air with glistening black feelers.

  “Stop fighting and just let it go—aargh!” Claudia snapped her fingers off the thread. “What the… that daughter of yours has some talent,” the woman said, blowing on her fingers.

  I didn’t have time to respond. A sharp tug on Ariadne’s thread and I was whisked off, pulled past the reaching barbs of the Defiler, and over the head of one very displeased Claudia-shaped house.

  “Tell Cathy I’ll see her soon!” the undead manifestation shouted, just before my world went white.

  I opened my eyes to find my daughter, still in her pajamas, holding my hands. “Dad?”

  “Cathy?” I said, my voice rough around the edges. “How did you—”

  “How did I what?”

  “How did you pull me back?” I said, blinking the sweat out of my eyes—my body was soaked in it. If I’d taken a dip in the Gulf with my clothes on I’d have likely been less wet than I was right now.

  “Um, I don’t know.”

  I let go of her hand and stood, my knees popping like packing bubbles. “You had to have done something.”

  “I got
up to get some water and saw you on the floor. You were breathing really strange, and I tried to get you to wake up. I grabbed your hand and—”

  “And what?”

  “And that’s it.”

  Wild Magick.

  “That was dangerous.”

  “What were you doing, Dad?”

  How do I tell her? How do I tell my daughter that the House has developed a taste for her?

  “I’ll explain it later—you need to get some sleep. Your training starts tomorrow.”

  Cathy turned back toward her room, her tired feet shuffling on the bare wood.

  “Wait, honey—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  My daughter smiled before disappearing in the darkness of her bedroom.

  What have I gotten myself into?

  I located my phone and fired off a quick text to Adam.

  Are you awake?

  I waited patiently for the three dots to appear that told me my apprentice was burning the midnight oil.

  Yeah wots up?

  Would it kill you to use whole words?

  U txt lyk my mom

  My knuckles whitened against the phone, but I resisted the urge to hurl it across the room.

  The theater is one massive Thinning. If Claudia Wilson is a dead end, find out what you can on any employees.

  Wow wot hapnd?

  That one I didn’t need mental gymnastics to translate, and I hoped he’d understand my response.

  Evil. A whole lot of it.

  28

  Big Truck Belvin

  Sand hill cranes, oversized brownish-gray birds with red feathered crests, strutted across my front yard, while behind them a watercolor-pink sunrise hinted at the day to come. Occasionally, one of those prehistoric beasts would needle their sharp beaks into my unkempt grass and come back with a bright green lizard, only to toss it into the air and gobble it down.

  Red sky at morning; lizards take warning…

  I slipped Porter’s car quietly out of the garage and on to the street. Sure, I hadn’t slept, not after the night I’d had, but the spike was too close to pass up—with any luck I’d be at the yard sale and back before anyone noticed.

  I’d stuffed a decent bit of cash in my wallet, but that was to pick up a few last-minute breakfast items for the kids before I got home. This was a Magick yard sale—cash wasn’t going to do me any good there.

  Yard sales were a competitive sport in Florida—Magickal or otherwise. The trick was to arrive at least an hour before the established start. If the flyer said six in the morning, you’d best be there by five. It had gotten so bad that a few years ago people started showing up the day before to try to talk the owner out of the best items early. Based on the printout I knew better than to try such a stunt—the little people don’t take kindly to cheaters.

  I turned Porter’s car onto the yard sale street, and my heart sank. It might have been only just now five minutes to five, but there were already a few cars idling along the side of the road.

  So much for getting there early.

  I pulled up behind the last car and waited, letting the engine rumble and the air conditioning hum. The sun hadn’t come up completely yet, but the humidity was already climbing.

  I found the house exactly as marked on the photos Adam had sent me. It was a small yellow bungalow, with a car port on one side, and a luxurious green lawn on the other. The driveway wasn’t paved, just simple bleached-white shells with two narrow tire grooves. Large accordion-like awnings sat propped up above each window—old-time hurricane protection that more often than not ended up as a hornet homes most of the year.

  There was nothing outside to indicate a yard sale, which wasn’t surprising given what this was, and who was putting it on.

  Magickal yard sales worked a bit differently than the regular kind. First, there would be no items on display until the seller decided to make it visible. No sense in scouting out from the street, since there would be nothing to see—nothing that is, except for my competition.

  Most of the cars I didn’t know, but the vehicle right in front of me was all too familiar. That monster-sized pickup gobbled up our lane, and a little of the one next to it, and that was with three of its six tires in the swale.

  Horatia.

  I didn’t know her last name—not only because I didn’t care to, but because I was pretty sure Belvins didn’t have last names. Horatia wasn’t one of those sweet fairies that pranced under the full moon, she was the real deal, a fully retired house sprite from upstate New York.

  A fat, ruddy, and long-nosed Belvin, Horatia was mean and cantankerous down to the core, but damn good at one thing—making a deal. She’d been at more than half the yard sales I’d hit ever since she’d moved into town, and somehow that Belvin always had what the proprietors traded in—she was flush with it.

  Memories.

  That was a currency for Magickal yard sales: memories, either yours, or someone else’s you’d come about through some less-than-savory means. It was easy to see why, if you stopped to think about it. Cash was too cheap and easily lost, and gold was a proper twist of Magick or alchemist’s trick away, but memories were irreplaceable.

  It’d been said that no one can really trade away their soul; instead, what they are really doing is trading away their memories. In the end, our memories are who we are—you lose enough of them and you stop being you, and become someone else entirely.

  At that point haven’t you really lost your soul anyway?

  Horatia’s scraggly hair jutted out in random directions from behind the driver seat. Belvins were an intractable lot, fickle and hard to follow. I’d never owned a house with one, and I most likely wouldn’t. You didn’t find them often in Florida, as the heat and humidity really got to them, and there just weren’t enough old houses. Too much of the state was brand new construction, and Belvins hated new construction. More than that, the little buggers live to clean, and most new houses had so many cleaning gadgets and amenities it became next to impossible to keep them busy.

  Want an angry house sprite? Take away their work.

  Horatia leaned a stubby arm out her window and flicked ash from a smoldering cigar.

  What’s she here for?

  I couldn’t imagine any reason why John Henry’s last spike would be on her list, but she was a Belvin, so she might just have been here to screw with the other buyers.

  That’s a Belvin for you.

  If she did have her beady little eyes on my prize, I’d have to hustle if I wanted to outbid that cranky old house sprite.

  Are we here for the same thing?

  The digital clock in the dash of Porter’s car switched to five AM, and what had been a barren shell-stone driveway was now a hoarder’s paradise: stacks of boxes burgeoning with oddities; long card tables covered in trinkets, figurines, and knickknacks; and more than a couple hanging racks of clothing—none of which I paid any attention to.

  My eyes never left the small table by the register where an old rotten block of wood sat with a perfectly bent railroad spike that practically beamed at me.

  I wasn’t even out of the car before Horatia waddled into view, heading toward the register, and my spike.

  29

  Deal and Dash

  The yard sale was impressive, even by Magickal standards. Our host had pulled out all the stops in providing quite an array of the mystical and the mundane—none of which I stopped to admire. On any other day I’d be lost for an hour exploring the table of yard art alone, but this wasn’t any other day. There was a spike by the register that had my name on it, and I wasn’t losing it to anyone, especially a cranky upstate house sprite.

  “Morning,” our host said, appearing almost magically behind the register. A small and youngish looking man with fair skin and short hair, he sat perched on a high stool, letting his sandaled feet dangle casually. He may have appeared harmless, but I knew better than to mistake his pleasant demeanor for weakness.

  L
eprechauns were just as inscrutable as Belvins, but also far more Magickal. If they wanted to ruin your day, week, month, or year, they could without so much as breaking a sweat. For the most part they kept to themselves, and like most Sunshine State transplants, they enjoyed the warm weather and ample bar scene.

  Now, regardless of how you cut it up, the fact that our host was a Leprechaun was actually quite fortunate for me. Hundreds of years of blood-feuds between Belvins and Leprechauns had resulted in a rather strained truce, one that gave me a perfect opening.

  That you Porter for insisting on that trip to Ireland.

  “What can I do for you?” our cherubic host asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “I’d like to purchase that old log with the rusty nail,” Horatia said, her voice oddly high-pitched when compared to her dumpy frame.

  “I see. Well, that’s not a small-ticket item. What do you have to offer?”

  The Belvin’s stubby fingers dug into a dusty fanny-pack around her ample waist. “What do you fancy? I’ve got weddings, funerals, first loves… and first lovings,” she said with a wink.

  “I most certainly do not want your first loving—you’d have to pay me to take such a thing.”

  “It’s not mine, you idiot. I only deal in premium memories.”

  Old feuds rarely stay buried.

  “I will not be insulted on my property, Madam. If you would please take your—”

  “I’m sorry, did I forget to mention I only deal in premium rich people memories?”

  Shit. If there’s one thing Leprechauns love it’s laughing at the expense of the rich and famous.

  “You did,” our host said, leaning forward ever so slightly. “So, intrigue me; tell me something that will change my mind.”

  Horatia removed a glass bead from her fanny pack and placed it on the table. A small swirl of color twisted inside like a cheap toy marble. “How’s this?”

  The Leprechaun picked up the marble and turned it over in his hand. “Unfaithful idiots—not interested.”