Spellbent (14 page)

I frowned.
So how much are they pressuring you?
“Quite a lot, actually.”

That definitely wasn’t good news.
Are you going to leave me?

Pal looked at me as if I was slightly crazy. “Of course not! First, it wouldn’t be the right thing to do, and second, if that scaly bastard thinks he can treat me like a slave. . . well, I suppose I
am
a slave . . . but still.”

Scaly bastard?

“My overseer is a white wyrm. I’ve had to suffer through his supercilious, egotistical twattery for nearly three centuries. I’ll be damned if I let him get the upper hand in this.”

But don’t you have to do what he tells you to do?

“I have to make him
think
I’m doing as I’m told, yes,” he said. “But unless you complain to him, or unless Mr. Jordan’s agents catch you doing something illegal, he’s none the wiser. During the first century of my sentence, I was directly monitored, and most everything I said or did with my master was recorded. My master joined a group of other witches and wizards who objected to the invasion of their privacy, and they lobbied the Virtii until the rules were changed to eliminate the eavesdropping.”

Pal drew himself up proudly. “I have kept my nose impeccably clean until now. I have earned my right to privacy, and I will continue to use it to do what I believe is the morally correct course of action. Which is to help you out of this mess.”

But what about the governing circle?

“Ah, see, that’s the blind spot. The Virtii have never given local governing circles the right to track or interfere with familiars, and we trust-boon familiars are only subject to renewed monitoring if local officials can provide conclusive evidence of misdeeds. So if they don’t catch you doing anything illegal, they won’t catch me, either.”

Pal cocked his head, seeming to consider his own words, and his whiskers twitched nervously. He jumped off the bed and hopped up on the windowsill, peering out anxiously as if scanning for strangers watching the apartment. “But therein lies the rub— unless we’re very careful, you
are
likely to be caught doing something they can declare is illegal. I don’t like what’s happened here at all. Mt Jordan couldn’t have managed all this in the space of just a few days. . . he’s had to gain influence in some very high, very specific places. I think he planned for all this a long time ago.”

Are you saying that Jordan caused the accident at the park?
I asked, dumbfounded.

“No,” Pal replied. “I don’t think that at all. It was far too messy and destructive. But I do think that Mr. Jordan suspected something like this might happen, and he put in place a contingency plan to deal with you very aggressively in case it did.”

If he thought Cooper was going to do something, why did he let it happen at all?
I wondered.
Why not simply warn us?

“I don’t know,” Pal said. “But for both our sakes, we’ve got to figure it out. Did Cooper ever speak of Mr. Jordan?”

No, never. He only met him once at a big to-do downtown, as far as I know. They never had anything to do with each other.

“Well, we should get this apartment sorted,” Pal replied. “Do you know any packing charms?”

No, not really..
.
we mostly did things the mundane way when we moved in here.

“Strictly speaking I’m not supposed to show you that kind of thing, though it’s really not that hard... but first, you need to box up all your smaller breakables.”

We didn’t keep any of our moving boxes, but Bo might have something at his place,
I replied.
I need to see if he wants our food anyhow.

We went downstairs and into the kitchen. A sour, funky smell assaulted my nose; had Cooper left the milk sitting out again? No, the counters just had a couple of dirty plates, and we’d emptied the trash the previous day.

I pulled open the fridge, and the stench made me gag. My jar of gherkins were covered in fuzzy mold. The milk we’d bought three days ago was solid gray- green sludge in its translucent plastic jug. The plastic bag of baby carrots had turned to rotting brown goop. And the bag of Mrs. Sanchez’s tamales—oh God.

I quickly shut the door, swallowing bile.

“There goes my damage deposit,” I coughed.

“We can clean that with a spell,” Pal said.

“Not if it means having to open the fridge again.” My eye was watering.

Clearly, whoever had torched the shack had decided to add that extra little bit of spite and spoil our food. Probably they accelerated time within the refrigerator. I opened up the cabinets to check our dry goods. The soup and tuna cans bulged with botulism gas, and the oatmeal teemed with weevils.

“Rat bastard sons of bitches.”

The only food the goon squad had left untouched in the kitchen was the forty-pound bag of Smoky’s Science Diet. My mood sank even lower when I saw the dog kibble. Poor Smoky...

No. I blinked down the tears welling in my eye. I couldn’t afford to get depressed. I swept the ruined spices, cans, and boxes into the kitchen garbage can.

I probably can’t trust my toothpaste or lotions or anything like that, can I?
I thought to Pal.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he replied.

Fine. Makes packing simpler, anyway.
-

I pulled a handful of garbage bags out of the box and stomped through the apartment bagging tubes of cream, tins of powder, and bottles of soap, shampoo, and lotion. Even the
brand-new
bag of ferret chow we’d bought for Pal was moldy. It took me most of an hour, and at the end I had three bags to haul out to the Dumpster.

Bastards probably blanked all our DVDs,
I thought bitterly as I heaved the bags into the top of the steel bin. My stump hurt worse than ever, and my good arm and lower back ached.
They probably zapped our electronics and crapped spyware all over my hard drive.

“Well, once the wards are deactivated, burning a building and spoiling food are fairly easy,” Pal replied. “They might have left the rest alone. Pack everything you want to keep unless something seems obviously compromised.”

I pondered the bag of dog food when I went back into the kitchen. Do
you think that’s really okay? I wouldn’t want to give it to Bo and have Gee get sick, but I wouldn’t want to waste it, either.

Pal crawled down off my shoulder and hopped onto the bag. He sniffed at the kibble, licked a piece, then bit into it.

“It’s not very tasty, but I don’t think it’s been tampered with,” he said.

Why’d they leave the dog food alone?
I wondered. “So they could say that technically they didn’t leave us to starve.”

“Creeps.”

I hefted the bag against my hip and went next door, Pal following behind. Bo answered my knock.

“Hey, you okay? You lookin’ kinda pale,” Bo said. “I think so.” I couldn’t hold the bag up any longer, so I let it slide down my leg to the concrete porch. “Hey, can Gee, eat this brand? Smoky, urn, he. . . he didn’t make it the other night.”

“Your little dog got killed? Man. I sure am sorry to hear that.” Bo shook his head.

“Yeah, me, too.” I couldn’t fight back the tears this time, couldn’t fight back the soul-deep fatigue of everything I’d been through. My vision swam, and my knees buckled.

“Whoa, got you!” Bo exclaimed, catching me before I could pitch backward.

I clung to his broad shoulders, tried to pull myself up, got a whiff of his aftershave and sweat that suddenly reminded me so much of Cooper, reminded me so much of what I’d lost and might never have again, and before I knew it I was weeping like a child into Bo’s T-shirted chest.

He held me and patted my back awkwardly. “That’s okay. You been through a lot. Let it all out.”

I was finally able to take a deep, ragged breath and stand up. I’d left the wet outline of my nose and eye on his green shirt. “I got snot on you.”

He shrugged and smiled. “If that’s the worst I get on me today, then it’s a pretty good day.”

My socket and arm were hurting worse than ever. “I hate to ask, but do you have any ibuprofen?”

“Like Advil? Yeah, I got that. You look like you could use somethin’ to eat, too.”

“I sure would appreciate it,” I replied. “The creeps trashed all our food while I was gone, except for this.” I nudged the dog food bag with the toe of my sneaker. “Everything else is rotten.”

Bo frowned. “Why they do that?”

“Showing me who’s boss. Trying to scare me away from looking for Cooper, I guess.”

“That ain’t cool,” replied Bo. “You’d think they got better things to do.”

“Yeah, you’d think,” I agreed.

“Well, come on in,” Bo said, lifting the dog food easily. “I ain’t got no more tamales, but I can make you a ham sandwich.”

“Does he have any eggs?” Pal asked. “I’m feeling a bit peckish myself.”

“Do you have a raw or hard-boiled egg I could give to my ferret in a little bowl?” I asked as I followed Bo into his apartment.

“I think I got some left.. . you go on, have a sit on the couch.”

I went into his living room, stepping over toy trucks and wrestling action figures. “Are your kids with you this week?”

“No, they with their mama,” Bo replied, sticking his head out the kitchen pass-through. “I guess I should gather up all those toys, but I kinda like havin’ ‘em out. It’s like my boys is still here even though they ain’t, ya know?”

 “Yes, I think I do,” I replied.

The coffee table was strewn with empty Zima bottles and Subway sandwich wrappers.
Playboy
magazines were scattered across the threadbare tan couch; I stacked a few of them to the side and sat down.

I heard Bo crack open a can of soda, and then he came into the living room carrying a Coke and a bottle of Advil.

“I found you some pills in the kitch—oh.” He froze openmouthed for a moment as his eyes fell on the stack of magazines. “I forgot I had them things out. I, uh, I just—”

“—read them for the articles, right? No big thing, Bo.”

Lips pursed in embarrassment, he cleared away some wrappers and set the pill bottle and Coke can down on the coffee table in front of me. I popped the lid off the bottle with my thumb and dumped four pills onto my lap. I set the bottle aside, popped the pills into my mouth, and washed them down with a slug of soda.

“You want cheese on this?” Bo called from the kitchen.

“Sure.”

“Mustard?”

“No, thank you. I only use it for medicinal purposes.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Looking puzzled, Bo brought in the Velveeta and ham on white bread on a paper plate and a bowl of egg, then sat across from me in an old leather recliner. We chatted about the weather and the sorry state of the apartment complex while I ate and Pal lapped up his egg.

“They got a devil’s nerve to evict
anyone
after all they ain’t fixed ‘round here,” Bo said. “There’s leaves and bugs in the pool all the time now—and my boys want to go swimming, you know? If they ain’t bothering to get the bugs out, how do we know they’re bothering to keep up with the chlorine and what-all to keep the germs down?”

“Don’t worry,” I replied. “Cooper took care of that when they filled the pool for the summer. The water might have trash floating in it, but nobody’s gonna get hepatitis if a junkie takes a crap in it some night.”

Bo wrinkled his nose at me. “That’s a
nasty
thought, girl.”

“Well, it could happen,” I protested around a mouthful of sandwich. “My point is, the pool won’t make your kids sick. Cooper made sure the water is and will remain fundamentally clean no matter what happens to it.”

“Can I have some of that ham?” Pal asked as I was about to finish off my lunch.

Sure.
I pulled the quarter-sized remnants of the lunch meat off the bread and laid it on the edge of his bowl.
But it’s really not very good for you.

“It’s not that good for
you,
either.” He chewed the rubbery ham daintily.

“I wondered if I could ask you another favor,” I said to Bo as I set the paper plate on the coffee table.

“Sure, what?”

“I’m not going to fight this eviction thing, at least not right now, so I need to pack up my stuff. Do you have any moving boxes? And could I borrow you to help me get a few things packed today?”

“Sure,” Bo said. “I got a bunch of boxes in the basement. I’ll dig ‘em Out an’ bring ‘em up. You can hang up here if you want.”

“Thanks, Bo. You’re a sweetie.”

After Bo went downstairs, I laid my head back against the couch, my eye half closed. The Advil was starting to kick in with a faint ringing in my ears along with sweet ebbing of the pain in my eye and arm.

I eased my arm out of the sling to stretch my elbow and shoulder and laid my crippled arm on the stack of magazines.

“Packing your things won’t take very long,” Pal told me. “Particularly if you don’t mind him seeing you perform charms.”

Well, he’s seen them before,
I thought back.
I don’t see how it would hurt anything. I want to get this done, find a new place, and start looking for Cooper.