Spellbent (15 page)

“You can’t search for Cooper if Mr. Jordan is monitoring your movements,” Pal replied. He twitched his tail anxiously, as if he was trying to decide to do something risky but didn’t want to say what.

I wasn’t in the mood to have to pry out whatever was on his mind.
Well, I guess I don’t have a choice, do I? I’ll figure something out. One thing at a time.

The ibuprofen was making me feel a bit sleepy and light-headed. I sank down deeper on the couch. The magazine was cool under my palm, and I could feel the smooth ridge of the spine. I absently started to pick at the staple with my thumbnail.

“Jessie!” Pal exclaimed, hopping up in my lap.

“What?” I sat up in alarm.

“Did you do that?” He was staring at my stump.

What?
I looked around, trying to figure out what he was going on about.

“The magazine moved. You moved it.”

I looked at the stack of magazines under my hand. . . no, it was under
nothing.
The hand was gone, yet when I closed my eye again I could still feel the slick paper, the cool ridge of the staple. I grasped the spine with my thumb and forefinger, lifted the magazine an inch and dropped it with a soft thud.

I opened my eye and stared at my stump, tried again. Nothing.

“That’s a most unusual thing you just did,?’ Pal said.

Well, apparently I can only do it with my eye closed,
I replied, baffled.
This doesn’t exactly help me drive stick any better.

“I’m serious—reflexive parakinesis is quite a rare natural ability, even among Talents.” Pal beat a little tattoo with his feet and then hopped sideways across the couch, back arched in ferretish excitement. “This is wonderful! Only some Talents can learn to do it at all. And most everyone who does has to concentrate and practice for dozens of hours before they manage as much as you just did.”

Pal stopped his weasel war dance, shook himself sternly, and returned to my lap, apparently trying to look as dignified as possible. “Were your parents—?”

Transvestites? Elvis impersonators? FBI agents? You know as much as I do right now,
I thought bitterly.
Seriously, though, what’s the big deal? Cooper moves things telekinetically all the time.

“Yes, but he does it through charm shorthand, which he had to spend months learning and internalizing like most anyone else,” Pal replied. “What you just did wasn’t a charm. It wasn’t learned. It was natural to you.”

I don’t mean to be dense, but.
. .
so what? I ever- so-slightly moved a magazine with my mind. We’re having a whole conversation with our minds. When I was sixteen I set fire to my freakin’ bedroom with my mind. We’re a mind-y bunch. This seems a little underwhelming by comparison.

“It’s fairly impressive that a tiny monarch butterfly can migrate thousands of miles, is it not?” Pal asked. “It’s fairly impressive that a circus dolphin can leap twenty feet out of the water through a flaming hoop, is it not?”

Well, yeah, we sure can’t do those things without magic or technology, so it’s plenty impressive.

“But most any monarch can fly thousands of miles, and most every healthy dolphin can leap high from the water, correct? No monarch would be particularly impressed by one of its brethren flapping from Brazil to Canada, would it?”

I guess not...

“So what would you think about an otherwise mundane monarch that could naturally fly fast enough to break the sound barrier?” he asked. “Would you sit there and say, ‘Oh well, we have airplanes that can fly much faster than that little butterfly, and they can transport cargo and bomb cities and lots of other things. That little monarch couldn’t carry a single grenade!’”

Hell no, if I saw a supersonic butterfly I’d be completely impressed. I’d be plenty impressed even if it was just wearing a little jet pack. Are you saying that my moving the magazine is up there with a Mach One monarch?

“It’s nearly that rare, yes,” Pal replied.

You asked about my parents. Why?
“I’ve been here on Earth for quite some time now.

“I’ve met thousands of Talents. I’ve met one other natural parakinetic, a Hawaiian boy whose family was supposed to be descended from the goddess Pele.”

Are you saying my great-great-whatever was some kind of deity?

“Or possibly an incubus or some other type of spirit entity,” he replied. “Studying the hereditary implications of spirit—human offspring is a bit of a hobby of mine, and I do get excited when I find new potential subjects.”

I shifted in my seat, suddenly feeling a bit like a guinea pig.
I never really understood how that god— human thing was supposed to work anyway. Genetically, I mean. As I understand it, lesser deities are mostly natural forces that people worshipped and believed in for so long that they became aware and intelligent, right?

“In most cases, yes. Imagination can be a powerful thing, even in mundanes.”

And spirits like demons are the projection of souls or soul particles that can’t exist in their natural state in this world, right? So gods and spirits don’t have genes to pass along, unless they possess the body of some poor schmuck, and then they’d just be passing on the schmuck’s genes, right?

“Well, it’s not quite that simple. Spirit entities can certainly impregnate women—or any female animal, really—without having to possess the body of a man. What they do through their natural magic is to duplicate the genes in the woman’s egg so it can start dividing into a blastula . . . but they have the power to make extreme changes to her genetic structure.

“Take Jesus the Christ, for instance,” Pal continued. “My sources agree he must have begun as Mary’s clone, but it’s an utterly simple matter for a deity of Jehovah’s power to turn an X chromosome into a Y. The human genome is just so much modeling clay to the creator entities.”

Huh. Cool. So what generally happens to the descendants of a god’s child?

“Well, it’s highly unpredictable, which is why studying them is so interesting to me. You can have a hundred generations of perfectly mundane humans descended from a godchild, and then suddenly a baby will be born with wings, or the ability to pass through walls.

“The Virtii are nothing if not mathematically precise,” Pal went on, “but even the Talent genes they wove into your species millennia ago have proven to be surprisingly variable in their expression. If we can learn the rules behind the seemingly random expression of godchild genes, we will understand life and magic that much better.”

Are we just an experiment to the Virtii? My teachers and the pointy-hats always made a big to-do about us having some highfalutin role in the fate of the Universe and whatnot, but I can’t see the Virtii needing our help, you know? Or really caring about what happens to us. I’ve never seen a Virtus for real, but from all I’ve heard they’re heartless as rocks.

And why give just part of the human race Talent, and then turn around and micromanage us like they do to keep us from taking over the world from the mundanes?
I continued.
They gave all the faery races some kind of Talent, and from what I hear they pretty much leave them alone. I know we humans are flawed and petty and power-hungry, but goblins are even worse.

“I can’t disagree with you. It has seemed to me that the Virtii are studying Talents—human or otherwise—for their own ends, but what those might be I couldn’t say.”

I was still thinking about godchildren.
I read an article that said there are about sixteen million descendants of Genghis Khan alive in the world today. I get that he was big into the raping and pillaging. But could he really outdo Zeus? Or even just a really determined incubus?

“Probably not,” Pal replied. “At this point most humans, mundane or Talented, have got some kind of spirit or deity tampering in their genes.”

So my talent is rare.
. .
but almost any baby conceived might have the potential for it? You’re saying we’re living in a world where almost any butterfly could be supersonic?

“Well, yes,” he said. “We live in a world of infinite possibilities.”

Disappearing Act

I was trying to wrap my mind around everything Pal had just told me when I noticed that Mr. Jordan’s parchment and pen had materialized beside me. With a sigh, I shoved the contract behind the couch and threw the feathered pen into the litter on the coffee table.

Is that jerk ever going to give up?
I wondered.

“Lawyers don’t come with an off button,” Pal replied, “so I’d have to say it’s not very likely.”

Bo puffed up the stairs with an armload of a dozen flattened boxes and a roll of clear packing tape around his sweaty left wrist.

“Found these under the stairs,” he said. “Will these be enough?”

“Well, it should be a decent start. Thanks a bunch.” There was a Budget/U-Haul rental place across the road; if worse came to worst I could always buy some extra boxes. I set Pal on my shoulder and got to my feet. “Got time to help me pack for a while?”

“Sure.”

I led Bo next door and put him to work reassembling the boxes and packing up our CDs, DVDs, and remaining books. Pal told me to get the box of trash bags, and then we went upstairs to practice my packing charms.

“See those boots in the corner?” Pal asked as I shut the door to the bedroom.

I followed Pal’s nod to Cooper’s battered old black engineer’s boots in the corner of the bedroom by the closet. “Yes?”

“Can you make them float? Not to make them rise like helium balloons, but to make them neutrally buoyant.”

Yes, I’ve done that before.
I closed my eye and remembered a long-dead word for “weightless.” As I chanted it softly, the boots rose slightly off the floor and drifted to the wall.

“Very good,” thought Pal. “Now, let’s work on your sweep. Do you have some suitcases?”

Sure.
I slid open the closet and pulled our two rolling Samsonite cases down from the top shelf. One was a big gray hardcase, and the other was a smaller soft-sided model made from red ballistic nylon.
Now what?

“Now you need to float everything in your closet and sweep it into those trash bags, then sweep the bags into that smaller case,” he replied. “We’ll save that big case with the combination locks for later.”

Uh, no way that’ll all fit. In case you hadn’t noticed.

“So you’ll just have to shrink the bags once they’re full,” Pal replied.

Oh.

“After that, you’ll need a good, sturdy, shatterproof container. Preferably nothing with holes, preferably something with a lid that can close very tightly.”

How big does it have to be?

“No bigger than a shoe box,” he replied.

Well, we’ve been buying liter-sized tall plastic jars to keep spell ingredients in. Most of them burned with the shack, but I have an empty one under the sink that I was using to store our Epsom salts. Will that work?

“It should work perfectly,” Pal replied.

I went into the bathroom and dug the jar out from under the sink.

And now what?
I came back into the bedroom.

“Well, you float your clothes and other belongings, sweep them into the trash bags and boxes, shrink the bags and boxes, sweep them into the suitcases, shrink the suitcases so they fit snugly in the jar, seal the jar, and you’re done.” Pal acted as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

Ah. Gotcha.
I tried to think of a chant sequence to accomplish all that. My mind was a perfect blank.
Urn.

“Think of fall leaves, floating and swirling into a neat pile,” Pal told me helpfully.

Right. Leaves. Floaty. Swirly. Shrinky. Yeah.
My brain had seemingly transformed itself into an empty bait bucket.

“We
are
in a bit of a hurry, yes?” Pal prompted.
Look, I’m sorry, I haven’t done this before, okay?
“Got a bit of Babbler’s Block, have you?”
Shut up! Jeez! Give me a moment, would you?
Pal sighed. “Why don’t I just teach you a standard packing charm instead? The English version involves double hand movements, which you can’t do, so how about the Danse d’Emballage?”

“Danse”? This involves dancing?

“It’s fun,” Pal replied. “And it’ll do something about the dreadful heat in here. Trust me. Just step left, step right, hop back, and spin while you repeat after me:
‘Volez, mes effets, mouche, pesanteur de defi et rétrécissez les espaces vides

After a few awkward missteps, rhythmic trips, and tongue slips, my clothes and knickknacks were flying off the hangers and Out of my dresser drawers, shrinking to the size of fluttering moths, and diving into neat rows in the trash bag I’d laid on my bed.

“That’s pretty slick,” I panted, taking a rest. My breath fogged in the suddenly cold air; apparently the packing charm drew power from ambient heat.

“You should put the furniture into boxes instead of bags,” Pal said, shivering despite his fur

“Okay. Let’s go see how Bo’s doing.”

Pal crawled up on my shoulder. We went back downstairs and found that Bo had reassembled all the boxes. He was sitting by the stereo, sorting through my and Cooper’s DVDs.