Mulberry Wands (7 page)

Brian didn’t seem terribly disturbed by it,
but then, he used to be a cop. He fetched a pair of tweezers in his
drawer, and calmly pulled a maggot out from the corpse’s mouth. He
pulled a small jar out of the same drawer and dropped the maggot
in, then sealed it and handed the jar to her. “This will be great
practice for you to learn firsthand about investigations. Did you
say there was another one?”

“No.”

“Well, if this was a one-off, you might never
find out who did it, on account of how you messed up the murder
scene.”

“Oh, sorry,” she mumbled.

He waved off her apology. “You didn’t know.
If it happens again, take photos, lots of photos, ten times as many
photos as you think you need. Take notes as to any smells, sights,
anything unusual. If you think you sense something, write it down
and figure out later on why you thought you sensed it. Call me, and
if I have a chance, I’ll come and investigate the body with you,
show you how to estimate time and cause of death, things like
that.”

“Thanks, Brian, that’s really nice of you. I
appreciate it.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “I used to love this
sort of thing when I was on the force, except when it was kids. I
mean, not the death, but the puzzle, you know? It’s good to keep
the skills up.”

“So you said you could estimate cause of
death, how about this one?”

He winked. “That’s what the maggot’s
for.”

Susan looked at the jar and wrinkled her lip.
The maggot writhed around inside, looking for more garden fey to
eat. She found it even more disgusting than the corpse. She’d never
realized that investigating a murder would be so disgusting. “Any
idea what killed … him?”

Brian shook his head. “Broken neck, it looks
like. I don’t know if it’s pre- or post-mortem. A lab could find
out. I gotta warn you though, that costs a lot of money.”

Susan pulled her lips in. “Well, thanks
anyway.” If only there were a way of using magic to find things
out.

“It’s not hopeless, Susan. You can still
gather some facts.”

“Like what?” She put the lid back on the box.
It made it smell a little bit better.

“You can find out about their habits, basic
facts. What kind of gnosti is this?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. Some kind of
garden fey, I guess, by his size. I’ve never seen one like this
before.”

“That should tell you something, right? It’s
unusual. You’ve never seen one like this before. Could it be from
out of town?”

Susan shook her head. “Garden fey are very
local, from everything I’ve heard. Major ley lines are a barrier
for them, so they evolve into subspecies.”

“Who might know something about gnosti? Who
can see them, besides mages?”

“Anyone born with the sight, or anyone who
takes the time to learn.”

“Try ASU. There’s bound to be some grad
student who’s making garden fey his dissertation or something.
Offer to buy a grad student dinner and he’ll tell you
everything.”

“Thanks Brian.”

“See you Monday.” He waved her out. “And give
that thing a decent burial, will you?”

Griff sold all the wands that Alex gave him
in three days, and he gave everyone his number in case they knew of
someone else who wanted one, or if they wanted another one when the
first ran out. He drove home feeling stoked, racing along on his
motorcycle (which he had missed, he decided), wondering if this
would be the job that could let him quit working for Harrower Bros.
His elation lasted until he got back to Alex’s house.

Alex opened the door, attention not wavering
from the television screen, and went back to the futon couch. He
had an exacto knife and a twig of wood in one hand, a pair of
earbuds dangling around his neck, and a remote control in the other
hand. The only one he was using was the remote. It wasn’t so much
multitasking as multi-loafing. Griff shut the door behind himself
and moved some food wrappers out of the way to make a place on the
couch.

“So, made any new wands?” Griff asked. He had
to ask twice, and even then Alex only answered because the
commercial break came on.

“No, man. I can’t make that many a day. It
takes a while.”

“How long does it take? Maybe I can
help?”

Alex scoffed. “You can’t do it.”

Griff stood up and walked between him and the
television. “Then explain it to me. How do you do it?”

Blocking the view of the television broke
Alex’s trance. “Okay, so, first you get some sticks, and you cut
them kinda short. Then you bury them in the ground for a few days,
and every day I put some of this stuff on it, this potion I
make.”

“How many days?”

Alex shrugged. “I dunno. A couple, three
maybe.”

“And what’s in this potion?” Griff turned the
television off and scanned the room, looking for something to write
on. One table had several boxed games, and a notepad with the
scores from what looked like Scrabble, but the pen next to it was
dead.

“Tea, some ink, three drops of attar of
roses. Grandma said it had to be three. Three drops of bile, some
garden fey.”

“Bile?” Griff went into the kitchen. Jake was
sitting at the table, eating a bowl of cereal and reading the back
of the box. They nodded and grunted at each other. Griff found a
pen and shook it, then wrote down the ingredients on the score
pad.

Alex nodded. “Stuff’s nasty, man. Grandma
said she used to make herself throw up and use that, but I just get
it from a friend who has a bulimic girlfriend.”

“That’s disgusting,” Griff said. He wasn’t
sure if Alex was kidding or not. “So you bury it, and after two or
three days, you just dig them up?”

“No, I have to put them under a block of ice
until the ice melts. Then they’re charged. Well, some of them.
There are always a few duds.”

“We gotta see how we can improve the
process,” Griff said. “How many can you make at a time?”

Alex shrugged. “Whatever I got.”

“How much of it do you have to do yourself?
Like, what you’re doing with the exacto knife. What’s that,
whittling it? If I cut the twigs, and give them to you, will it
still count as if it’s you doing the spell?”

“I dunno, maybe.”

“Let’s try. I can do this in about twenty
minutes with a miter saw.” Griff took the stick away from him. “And
we have to figure out how to have fewer duds. What other variables
have you tested?”

“Variables?”

“How thick does the ice have to be?”

Alex shrugged again. “I don’t know, I just do
it.”

“You do magic, but you don’t know how it
works?”

“Pretty much.”

Griff took a deep breath and let it out
slowly. “Where are the duds? Have you thrown them out yet?”

“Nah, they’re in the Arizona room.”

Griff went out into the screened-in porch and
found the sticks wedged behind a trash can filled with Styrofoam
takeout boxes, as though Alex had tossed them towards the trash and
missed. He took them out in the yard to inspect them under the
light. The duds were a different kind of wood than the working
ones, mesquite and some sumac. The ones that worked had a dense,
smooth gray bark. Ash? Maybe mulberry. Yes, he thought it was
mulberry. He brought the box back into the house.

“I’m gonna prepare the spell blanks for you,
but I want a larger cut if my plan shortens the prep time.”

“Okay,” Alex agreed, hesitantly. “But I don’t
know if it’s gonna work.”

“If you’re just doing this for fun, you can
muddle through, but if we’re going to make a business out of this,
we have to get serious. I have the afternoon free, so I’m going to
get more wood for you to work on. What I want you to do is make a
test plan, so we can find out what parts of the spell are
necessary, and what parts you can leave out.”

“Yeah, whatever, man.” Alex leaned back and
dug in the couch for the remote again. He turned the television
back up. “Let me know when you’re done with the sticks.”

Griff went back home to get the truck. Then
he cruised around the residential neighborhoods, hoping he’d get
lucky and find the right kind of branches in the alleys. He
inspected the bark closely. Mulberry, as he guessed. Mulberry trees
grew pretty well in the valley, and they were green and leafy
enough that they went with the lawns and hedges you see in the
older neighborhoods. For some reason, people cut the branches way
back every year, pollarding he thought it was called, so that
instead of a beautiful branching tree, you had an ugly stump with
what looked like maimed cat’s paws protruding from it. Lucky for
him, they piled the branches in the alley for trash pick up, which
meant that they were free for the taking. He saw a couple of people
coming down the alley, a young woman and a black kid with white
hair. He didn’t want to have to make up a lie about what he was
doing (or tell the truth). He managed to get a big stack of
branches before they caught up with him.

Griff dropped off forty-five trimmed branches
that afternoon, along with his test plan and his demand for a
twenty-five percent commission. He thought Alex might balk, or
haggle him down to twenty percent, but Alex just nodded, grabbed
the twigs, and walked off, muttering to himself.

Griff checked his messages to see if Dad had
any more jobs for him, but his voicemail was empty. He thought
about going home. He’d only been there long enough to feed his pet
rat. Nullus seemed a little lonely. Maybe Griff should go home and
play with him. Then again, hadn’t he heard his roommates say
something about having friends over? Griff decided he’d go to the
Game DeSpot instead, to see who was there and maybe get into a game
of something.

The Game DeSpot had a handful of customers in
the front, and a group of gamers in the back. He saw a couple guys
he knew by sight, and Al, who owned the place. The popular rail
game Empire Builder had just come out with a Middle Earth version,
so they played for two hours, transporting goods and orcs by rail
from Rohan to the Shire and back again. Griff had never really been
a Tolkien fan, but he liked the strategy of all the Empire Builder
games, and had a good time. He came in a close second.

The young woman appeared gradually as the
light faded from the parking lot outside the store front. At least,
that’s how his memory had it, though she must have been there the
whole time. He wasn’t so into the game that he didn’t notice a
hottie like that in the generally male-only province of the Game
DeSpot. If someone had asked Griff before that day what kind of
girl he liked, he would have said ‘smart’ followed after a lengthy
pause by ‘friendly’ and ‘maybe a little on the petite side.’ After
he saw this girl, all his preferences got colored by the image of
her, arms folded across pert high breasts, luscious black hair
falling over the cap sleeve of her tight t-shirt, sloe eyes,
Mediterranean coloring, and her way of watching for a long time
without moving or saying anything.

He tried to watch her without being obvious,
and failed, stopping just short of stalker-staring.

She stared right back at him, and when the
game was over, she approached.

“Hello. My name is Fallon,” she said, when
they were finished putting away Empire Builder. She had an accent.
Her vowels were all slightly off, and she held them a hair too
long, so “hello” sounded a little like “halluu” and “Fallon”
sounded like “Fahloun”. The accent, he decided, was adorable. “I
would like to play a game.”

“Sure,” Griff said. “What do you want to
play?”

Fallon walked to the shelf in the back.
Perusing for a few minutes, she selected Advanced Third Reich, an
old school tabletop war game. Pulling it down, she wiped the dust
off with her hand and set it on the table.

“You sure you want to play that one?” Al
said, saying without saying that a seven hour division by division
re-enactment of the Second World War in Europe wasn’t something an
inexperienced girl might like.

“I know how to play,” Fallon said.

“Suit yourself.” Al shrugged, and cleared a
spot for the game.

She chose the French, the side that was
expected to do well if it lasted for the first five turns of the
game. Griff felt disappointed that she’d have no reason to stick
around the whole game, as he would have rather spent time with her
than with Al. He tried to convince her to take the Germans instead,
but she had a way of stating her opinion that made it clear she was
going to get her way. Al got to play, since it was his shop, and
Griff, since she was the one he had asked, and two other guys did
rock paper scissors for the right to play Mussolini or the
US-British alliance. Everyone else grumbled for a moment, then set
up Zombie Munchkin, which would let them be loud and argumentative
so they could more easily pretend they weren’t checking Fallon
out.

The game took forty minutes to set up, as the
three of them took turns consulting the rule book and placing their
tank divisions on the hexes. Griff was trying to decide if it would
insult her to go easy on her, or if it would help his chances of
getting her phone number, but as soon as they started playing, his
competitive spirit took over and he played ruthlessly.

And she kicked their asses.

The dice were on her side, which helped, but
it also helped that she didn’t make a single mistake. She risked
nothing she didn’t have to, and everything to win the crucial
battles. Even Al all but accused her of cheating when she pulled
out the tank division she wasn’t supposed to have, until one of the
guys watching the game reminded him that she’d won the first battle
with no casualties. She stormed through Al’s unstoppable German
army and forced him all the way back to Berlin. Griff’s Russian
forces sat in their barracks and drank vodka, as the Germans
ignored the eastern front entirely. All the other guys, who had
long since finished their card game, held their keys and jackets in
hand, arrested on their way out the door by this spectacle. Any one
of them, Griff was sure, would have given his left nut to be able
to have Fallon as his girlfriend. Al’s wife showed up silently, and
flipped the sign to ‘closed’ and locked the door, but she, too, got
caught up in the game and the unusual sight of light blue cardboard
squares trouncing across Europe.