Spellbent (10 page)

I
rubbed my good eye. “So he’s going to, what, make me pay it all off somehow? I couldn’t do that even if I lived two hundred years.”

“I don’t know what he’s going to do,” Pal replied. “Would you like to play chess while you wait for him?”

I shook my head. “You’d beat me. My concentration’s shot. I think I’ll just watch the pterodactyls and the sunrise.”

The exterior of Karen’s house couldn’t accommodate the conservatory addition, so she had it enchanted so that the windows looked eastward over the ancient, majestic Appalachians. As the sun rose above the verdant evergreen forests in the valleys, quetzals wheeled on updrafts between the peaks, large and in charge of the blue Cretaceous skies. Pteranodons dove and cried near their huge cousins, their membranous wings striped with bright blues and greens. A few drab, primitive crow-like birds flapped awkwardly in the magnolias near the windows.

“Magnificent creatures,” Pal said, watching a quetzal maneuver delicately with its twenty-foot wings, light and diaphanous as a living sail. “A pity they died out on this world.”

“Well, they lasted way longer than we’ve been around,” I said. “If humans survive another fifty million years on this planet,
then
we can start feeling sorry for them.”

“Your people will survive,” Pal said. “You’ll change and evolve like any species, and you might find your descendants physically unrecognizable. But the spiritual elements that make your people unique will survive.”

“You’re sure about that? We do seem to have an endless capacity for boning things up.”

And by “we” I mean “I,”
I thought miserably.

“The higher entities have invested too much time in humanity to let it destroy itself. If the Virtii felt your people were doomed, familiars would be nothing more than animals, nothing more than handy vessels for wizards to extend their senses. We indentured spirits would be assigned elsewhere.”

“How did you get here?” I asked. “I mean, I sort of understand the process of a spirit entering a familiar, but how did you come to be mine?”

“Why was I assigned to you? It was purely random, as far as I know,” Pal said. “How did I become an indentured spirit? Erm. Well. Let’s just say that humanity has no particular monopoly on messing up.”

I smiled despite myself. The ruined muscles in my left cheek cramped sharply. “Ow.”

“Try not to hurt yourself,” said Pal.

I heard a small child skipping through the dining room, chanting, “Birdy lizard birdy lizard birdy lizard.”

A little girl in pink Powerpuff Girls pajamas ran into the conservatory, holding her arms out to the flying dinosaurs beyond the glass. Then she realized she wasn’t alone and stopped in her tracks. She stared openmouthed at me for two beats, then let out an ear- bleeding shriek.

“Monster lady!”
the little girl yelled. She ran away wailing in terror.

“Oh good,” I said, holding my ear. “I’m scaring off little kids. I’m just all set for Halloween, aren’t I?”

Karen came in through the dining room.

“I called Mr. Jordan’s office,” Karen said. “He’ll be here very shortly.”

“Swell. Hey, could I get you to help me bandage this back up?” I gestured toward my face. “My ‘little bit of a scar’ is making me feel pretty gruesome right now.”

Karen looked pained. “He said he wanted you without bandages.”

I felt intensely uncomfortable, as if he’d demanded to see me naked. “Why?”

“He does damage assessment. He wants to see the damage.”

“That’s nice. Does he want my shirt off, too? ‘Cause I think my boobie got burned.” I angrily pulled out my collar and peeked down my shirt. “Yep, I see a new Band-Aid! More scars he’s gonna wanna see! I could totally do the Big Damage Lapdance for him. I could see if I can pop my fake eye into his waistband or something.”

 “Jessica!”

“No, really, I can totally do this. It’ll be a
hoot.”
I pressed on my spongy left temple, and the white plastic ball popped painfully into my palm. I stared at it.

“Is this a Ping-Pong ball?” I asked.

“I washed it first!” Karen said, exasperatedly snatching it out of my hand. “Let’s get this back in, because Mr. Jordan will be here any minute. You need to straighten up and take this seriously. Believe it or not, your life could be much, much worse than it is now if Mr. Jordan decides he doesn’t like you. That means no cussing, no talking back. Hold still.”

I leaned my head back as Karen inserted the ball back in my eye socket.

“I
am
taking this seriously. And I can’t believe you stuck a Ping-Pong ball in my head.”

“It was what I had, and it filled the space. The eight-ball was a little too big.”

“You could’ve shrunk it. Just sayin’.”

“No, I
could’ve
given you the potion downtown and left you lying there on the pavement with an empty socket,” Karen replied crossly. “And I didn’t, did I?”

I sensed real anger and regret behind her words. “Whoa, what did I do?”

“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what I’m afraid you’re
about
to do. Which is to make a very, very powerful wizard your enemy. I love you to death, Jessica, but I’ve got eighteen kids to worry about, and I love each and every one of them with all my life.”

“I know that, Karen. . . you know I’d never do anything to put your family in danger.”

“Make this man happy, Jessica. Give him whatever he wants, and we can all get on with our lives.” Karen paused, seemed to listen to something in the distance. “He’s on the front porch. I better go let him in.” She disappeared down the hall.

A few minutes later a tall man in a dark blue Armani Suit with a red silk tie strode into the sunroom. His face was smooth, his short, wavy hair dark with just the right amount of gray at the temples. He had the kind of broad white smile you see on presidential candidates, and he carried a glossy burgundy leather portfolio that probably cost a hundred bucks in some executive store downtown.

“You must be Jessica!” he boomed, sticking his hand out to me. I uncertainly shook his hand. His grip was dry and painful, the back of his hand furry with dark hair.

“Let’s sit down and get started, shall we?”

When Mr. Jordan spoke, Pal laid his ears back. I hoped the lawyer wouldn’t hold our entire conversation twenty decibels louder than necessary. I sat down in the wicker chair on the other side of the chessboard.

He’s trying to make you feel small,
Pal said inside my head.

Mr. Jordan gave Pal a laser-like glance with his icy blue eyes. “Why don’t you run along and play with the cats?”

Had Mr. Jordan heard Pal? No, that would be fifteen shades of illegal. Not even a bigwig like Jordan was allowed to listen in on telepathy between a familiar and master.

“I’d like him to stay here,” I said, my voice shakier than I’d have liked.

“Fine.” Jordan sat down in the chair facing me. “So, tell me, what brought you to our fine midwestern city?”

“What? Urn, well, I came here to live with my aunt Vicky when I was in high school.”

“Things not going so well back home in Texas?” Mr. Jordan flipped open the portfolio.

“Things were okay, really.. . it’s just my dad remarried, and his new wife had a young daughter, and she got pregnant right away with the twins... it was just sort of. . . crowded, I guess. It seemed best for me to come out here.”

I tried not to think about how sour my home life had turned. Mom died suddenly, just a month after my eleventh birthday. My relationship with my father had always been a little uneasy, tainted with impatience and resentment. We never seemed to have much in common, and I would have suspected I was adopted, except that I looked so much like both my parents. I mostly resembled Mom, but nobody denied my physical resemblance to my father.

After my father met Deborah at his company, he had less and less time for me. I was thirteen when they got married; my father moved us away from our cozy Craftsman home (and the few friends I had) in Lakewood out to a cookie-cutter neighborhood in Plano so that he and my stepmother could be closer to work. By the time the twins were born, I felt like a ghost in their four-bedroom house.

“I suppose that fire you started in your bedroom had
nothing
to do with Mr. Feathers sending you here, then?” Jordan asked.

I gave a start. How did he know about that? “It— it was an accident,” I stammered. “Nobody knew I had a Talent, and I had a bad dream about fire, and—”

Jordan waved my explanation away. “Of course, of course. An accident. Pyrokinesis is quite common among certain teenagers who are denied regular outlets for their abilities. Mr. Feathers sent you here to live with your mother’s sister quite soon after, correct?”

“He called her that day and they made arrangements, yeah.”

“Sent you by Greyhound bus, didn’t he? Just a week after the fire?”

“Yeah.

“You’d think a man with his income could have afforded an airplane ticket, wouldn’t you?”

“It was Aunt Vicky’s idea—they didn’t know how bad my nightmares might get, and what might happen while I was asleep, so they thought the bus might be less dangerous.”

“Ah. Do you speak with Mr. Feathers often?”

Why was he calling my father “Mr. Feathers”?

“Sometimes,” I said. I belatedly realized it had been well over a year since I’d even tried to contact him. The last two times I’d called the house, he hadn’t picked up or replied to my voice mails. My e-mails had also gone unanswered. “He’s pretty busy with his job and my brothers and sisters—”

“They’re not your siblings.”

“What?”

“Joseph Feathers is not your biological father. Your father was Ian Shimmer.”

“What?”
I felt profoundly shocked, but the shock was mixed with a weird sense of relief and vindication. My real father hadn’t rejected me after all. Or had he? Did my biological father even know I existed? Did my mother have an affair? I couldn’t believe she would cheat; she and my father—I mean, Joe—always seemed perfectly happy together.

“I suppose you want proof.” Mr. Jordan pulled a sheet of paper out of the folder and handed it to me. I took it with a quivering hand and scanned it. The only thing I could really see was Shimmer’s picture; I had his eyes and nose. Which, possibly not coincidentally, looked an awful lot like Joe’s eyes and nose. The brief text was hard to read, hard to take in.

Shimmer had been my mother’s first husband. I’d never known she had a previous marriage. Maybe Joe hadn’t, either; it seemed like the kind of thing he’d have thrown in my face sooner or later.

“Shimmer died. . . in prison? Why was he in prison?” I asked.

“The case has been sealed and I cannot divulge any details,” Jordan replied, “except to tell you that your mother was convicted in the same case. Due to her pregnancy, she was not incarcerated, but she was forbidden from performing any magic under pain of death. She married Joseph Feathers very soon after. Apparently she met him at a coffee shop.”

Jordan’s expression was scornful; clearly he thought my mother had hooked up with the first likely guy who came her way after the trial, a man of means who would keep her comfortable and who could be duped into thinking the baby she carried was his own.

“She was a witch?” I had always thought my Talent was from some long-recessed family trait.

“A sorceress, actually. A necromancer, the same as Ian Shimmer.”

Black magic? Death magic? I remembered my mom as a warm, loving person. No. It wasn’t possible.

Is he lying?
I desperately thought to Pal.

No, I don’t think he is.
Pal was sitting on the edge of a fern’s pot, his eyes wide.

“She. . . she never did any of that kind of magic that I ever knew,” I faltered.

“Of course not,” Mr. Jordan replied, his voice hard as a judge’s gavel. “She was completely forbidden from performing even the simplest charm, although we couldn’t prevent her from using mundane emotional and psychological manipulation on your stepfather. She was forbidden to possess magical materials or spell books or to teach others magical arts. And as a consequence of her finally disobeying her orders, she was dead less than an hour after she cast her last spell.”

I had never been able to forget coming downstairs in the morning to find my mom cold and still on the kitchen floor; the coroner told the family she’d had an undiagnosed brain aneurysm that burst.

“What spell?” I asked.

“Do you remember feeling sick and having headaches in the month before your mother died?”

Was there
anything
this guy didn’t know about? “Yes; she told me the doctor said it was a sinus infection.”

“It was, in fact, brain cancer. An aggressive ependymoma. Even with surgery, radiation, and the best hospital care, you had a vanishingly small chance of survival.”

“She . . . she gave her life to cure me?”

“Oh, not just
her
life; she was a necromancer, remember? She slipped into Children’s Medical Center of Dallas that night and smothered a young boy named Peter Gonzales who was awaiting a heart transplant. Your mother stole his life energy to cure you. She managed to ward off the automatic death- spell invoked after she completed her incantation; the Hunter spirit didn’t catch her until she was back home.”