Magic Steals (7 page)

“It's okay,” I murmured. “It's okay. I'm here. I won't go anywhere.”

“Please,” he said. “Why me? Why . . .”

I felt so terrible for him. He was so scared. But it was the only way. “Let it happen,” I murmured.

Gradually his eyes lost their light and turned glassy. He blinked, then blinked again, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.

“If the myths are true, she has to become corporeal to kill him,” I said. “When that happens, we have to get her first.”

Jim pulled a second knife from the sheath on his hip.

We waited. The shop was quiet around us.

“I don't get it,” I said. “It has to be connected to Eyang Ida. That's just too big of a coincidence. But jenglots and the old hag are literally from opposite sides of the planet. No magic user should be able to summon both.”

“We need to look into that law firm,” Jim said.

“He did say he saw the hag in a painting before?” I asked.

“Yes.”

It meant something. We sat and waited.

•   •   •

I
had no idea how much time had passed. It had to be close to an hour. Jim brought my cursing kit to me and I sat with it, my ink, brush, and papers ready, staring at the deli meat cuts behind the glass under the counter. I was hungry. The rest of the shop was filled with shelves crowded with canned goods, Slavic-themed snacks and every fruit and vegetable that could be pickled. I really wanted to try some, but taking without permission was stealing.

A few minutes after Mr. Dobrev's breathing had evened out, the furry magic began to crawl ever so slowly, shifting from his back onto his chest, and finally now it sat right under his neck, a big ugly blob that took up all of him all the way to the waist.

The roar of a water engine came from the outside. I glanced through the glass storefront. A yellow school bus rolled down the street.

The sack on Mr. Dobrev's chest trembled.

I leaned forward.

A ripple shifted the fur. Another. It looked like a tennis ball rolling under some revolting blanket.

I pulled a paper out and began writing a curse. The curse
had to be fresh, so I would finish it the second before I actually slapped it on her. I paused with my brush in the air. One stroke left.

Outside a boy, about ten or eleven, turned the corner and walked toward the building. Must be Cole and Amanda's son.

A thin black talon broke the surface of the fur. Something was about to come out.

The air in the middle of the street wavered, as if suddenly a cloud of vapor had escaped from underground and got caught in a dust devil. What in the world . . .

The air turned, twisted, and shaped itself into a car. What the hell? I've never heard of a magic car appearing out of thin air . . .

My brain blazed through the evidence, making a connection.
My older brother died on his way from school,
Amanda's voice said in my head.
He was run over . . .
Oh my gods.

The car turned solid. Its engine revved. There was nobody behind the wheel.

“Jim!” I pointed at the boy. “Save him!”

He whipped around, saw the car, the boy, and leaped right through the window into the street, shards of glass flying everywhere.

A knobby elbow pushed its way out of the sack, followed by a bony hand, each finger armed with a two-inch, black talon. The hag was coming.

Jim dashed across the parking lot. The car, a huge '69 Dodge Charger, snarled like a living thing, racing straight for the boy. Jim sprinted, so, so fast . . .
Please make it, honey. Please!

The head of the hag emerged, one baleful pale eye then the other, a crooked long nose and wide slash of a mouth filled with shark teeth.

The muscle car was almost on the boy. Jim was ten feet away.

Please, please, please don't get killed.

Jim swept the boy off his feet and the car rammed him and smashed into a pole.

It hit him. Oh gods, the Charger hit him. Something inside me broke. I froze in agonizing horror.

The hag crawled out of the magic and perched on Mr.
Dobrev's chest, clutching at him with her long, creepy toes. She was my size but emaciated, bony, her meager flesh stretched too tight over her frame, while her skin sagged in loose folds and wrinkles.

The car revved its engine. It was still there. It didn't disappear and that meant its target was still alive.

Jim leaped over the Charger's hood, the boy in his arms, landed, and sprinted to us.

The hag reached for Mr. Dobrev's throat. I painted the last stroke on the curse and slapped it on her back. “Poisoned daggers!”

Three daggers pierced the hag, one after the other, sticking out of her back.

The Charger reversed and chased after Jim.

The hag screeched like a giant gull, spat at me, and kept going. It didn't work.

I grabbed a new paper, wrote another curse, and threw it at her. The curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls had worked for me before. The hag clawed at the paper. It pulsed with green. Strips of paper shot out and fell harmlessly to the floor. They should've tied her in knots. Damn it!

The car was feet behind Jim. Please make it! Please!

The hag clawed at Mr. Dobrev's neck.

I grabbed a pickle jar and hurled it at her head. It bounced off her skull with a meaty whack. She howled.

“Get off him!” I snarled.

Jim leaped through the broken window. The Charger rammed the opening, right behind him, and stopped, its engine roaring, wedged between the wall and the wooden frame. Stuck!

I grabbed another jar and jumped on the counter. The hag screeched in my face and I pounded her with the jar. “Get off him, you bitch!”

The Charger snarled. The metal of its doors bent under pressure. The car was forcing its way in.

The jar broke in my hand. The pickle juice washed over the hag. She clawed me, too fast to dodge. Her talons raked my arms, searing me like red-hot knives. I screamed. She let go and I saw the bones of my arms through the bloody gashes.

Jim released the boy. The child scrambled to the back of
the store. Jim leaped to the Charger and hammered on the car's hood, trying to knock the vehicle back. The Charger roared. Jim planted his feet, gripped the hood, and strained. The muscles on his arms bulged. I'd seen Jim lift a normal car before, but the Charger didn't move.

I punched the hag in the head, putting all my shapeshifter strength into it. She wasn't getting Mr. Dobrev as long as I breathed. The hag clawed at me again, screaming, slicing my shoulders, her hands like blades. I kept punching her, but it wasn't doing me any good.

Jim's feet slid back. A moment and the car would be through.

It was a car. I knew cars and Jim knew hand-to-hand combat. “Switch!” I screamed.

Jim glanced at me, let go of the car's hood and leaped onto the counter. His knife flashed and the hag's right hand fell off.

I dashed out of the store, jerked a mirror off Pooki's driver side, and ran back in. The Charger was halfway in, its wheels spinning. I wrote the curse, slapped the paper onto the hood, and planted Pooki's mirror on it.

Magic crackled like fireworks.

The car's hood buckled, as if an invisible giant punched it with a fist. Its left front wheel fell off. Its hood bubbled up, as if another punch had landed. The windshield cracked. Something inside the car crunched with a sickening metallic snap. Water shot out through the hole in the hood. The roof of the car caved in. Both passenger and driver doors fell off. The headlights exploded. With another crunch, the entire vehicle shuddered and collapsed into a heap, looking like something with colossal teeth had chewed it for a while and spat it out.

Jim stopped next to me. He was carrying the hag's head by her hair. We looked at each other, both bloody and cut up, and looked back at the car. Jim raised his eyebrows.

“The curse of transference,” I said. “This is everything I've ever done to Pooki. Except all at the same time.”

Jim looked at the ruined car. His eyes widened. He struggled to say something.

“Jim?”

He unhinged his jaw. “No more racing.”

•   •   •

BEING
a shapeshifter had its disadvantages. For one, smells ordinary to normal people drove you nuts. If you burned something in the kitchen, you didn't just open the windows, you had to open the entire house and go outside. It meant the dynamics within the shapeshifter packs and clans were unlike those of a human society. And by the way, most of those dynamics were bullshit. Yes, we did take some of the traits of our animal counterparts: cats had a strong independent streak, bouda—the werehyena—females tended to be dominant, and wolves exhibited a strong OCD tendency, which helped them survive in the wild by tracking and then running game over long distances. But the entire pack hierarchy was actually much closer to the dominance hierarchy of wild primate groups, which made sense considering that the human part of us was in control. And of course, the most important disadvantage was loupism. In moments of extreme stress, Lyc-V, the virus responsible for our powers, “bloomed” within our bodies in great numbers. Sometimes the bloom triggered a catastrophic response and drove a shapeshifter into insanity. An insane shapeshifter was called loup and there was no coming back from that road. Loupism was a constant specter hanging over us.

But right now, as I poured water over my arms to wash away the blood, I was grateful for every single cell of Lyc-V in my body. My gashes were knitting themselves closed. If you watched close enough, you would see muscle fibers slide in the wounds. It was incredibly gross.

Amanda was sitting on the floor, holding her son and rocking back and forth. The boy looked like he wanted to escape, but he must've sensed that his mother was deeply upset and so he sat quietly and let her clench him to her. Cole hovered over them, holding a baseball bat and wearing that tense, keyed-up expression on his face men sometimes get when they are terrified for their families and not sure where the danger was coming from. Right now if a butterfly happened to float past Cole on fuzzy wings, he would probably pound it into dust with his bat.

Mr. Dobrev was staring at the hag's head Jim left sitting on the counter. He'd walked around the store for a minute or two, surveying the damage, and then come back to the head and stared.

“Mr. Dobrev,” I called. “She's dead.”

“I know.” He turned to me. “I can't believe it.”

“You said you saw her in a painting before?”

“When I was a boy. She looked exactly like that.”

I was right. I was completely right. Good. Good, good, good, I hated not knowing what I was dealing with.

Jim stepped through the door, pale-faced Brune behind him.

“Where is Steven?” I asked.

“He grabbed a bicycle and went to his daughter's school to check on her,” Brune said.

Well, I could certainly understand that.

Jim came over to me. I poured water from a bottle onto a rag Mr. Dobrev had given me and gently cleaned the blood from his face.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

“I'm okay,” I told him.

For a tiny moment we were all alone in the shop, caught in a moment when nobody else mattered, and I smiled just for Jim. And then reality came back.

“We thought it was spell based or talent based,” I said. “It's not. It's curse based, Jim.”

He waited. Oh. I probably made no sense. Sometimes my brain went too fast for my mouth.

“Most magic is very specific. For example, someone capable of summoning jenglots would have to be a practitioner of Indonesian black magic. He couldn't also be an expert in Japanese magic or Comanche magic, for example, because to reach that level of expertise, he had to devote himself to Balinese magic completely. You can't be a master of all trades. Makes sense?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“So when I saw jenglots, I assumed that they had been summoned by a person skilled in spells or a person with a special summoning talent. But then we ran across the hag. The hag made no sense. She is of European origin. We knew
it was connected to Eyang Ida, because it would be just too big of a coincidence otherwise.”

“Logically, that means two different magic users are involved,” Jim said.

“That's what I thought, but then I saw the car. I don't know of anyone who can summon killer cars. It's not a mythological being. That's something out of horror fiction. Then I remembered that first, Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots because she saw a fake one as a child, then Mr. Dobrev told us that he had seen a hag in a painting, and then . . .”

“Amanda said her brother was killed by a car on his way from school,” Jim said. “I thought about that.”

“This magic isn't spell based or talent based. It's curse based. I know curses. They work like computer programs used to: they have a rigid structure. If a set of conditions is met, the curse does something. If it isn't met, the curse lies dormant. For example, let's say I am targeting a person whose left leg has been amputated. I could curse that doorway so any creature missing a leg would get gonorrhea.”

Jim raised his hand. “Wait. Can you actually do that?”

I waved my hands at him. “That's not the point.”

“No, that's the kind of information I need to know.”

“Okay, probably I could.”

Jim's expression went blank. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

“Jim, will you stop worrying about me cursing you with gonorrhea? You can't get it anyway; you're a shapeshifter. Anyway, under the conditions of that curse, any one-legged person would come through and get the plague. If a three-legged cat came through, it would also get the plague.”

“Can cats be affected by human gonorrhea?”

“Not necessarily, but the curse would still try to infect the cat. If I wanted to make a curse more specific, I would define it as ‘any creature with only one leg,' which would spare the three-legged cat. Even more specific: any man with one leg. There is a limit to how specific you can get. Back to our current situation. I believe someone has cursed these people to fall prey to their worst fear. I am not sure exactly how this curse was structured, but I think it manifests the irrational fears they had since childhood. The curse relies on them to
supply it with the details of their worst fears. Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots, so she got a giant swarm. Dobrev was afraid of a hag, so it gave him a hag. And when it came to Amanda's fears, it made a living car. That's what Amanda saw in her mind when she worried about her son.”