The Problem With Black Magic (2 page)

Sam had slipped under the wooden board that employees flipped up to enter the bar area from the café. He pressed his back against the wooden storage unit and extended his arm to Cassie.

"You can get under the counter here," He said.

Cassie hesitated; she wasn’t stupid enough to let her discomfort around Sam stop her from taking shelter, but for some reason, her body didn’t seem to want to move when she tried to go to him. Whenever she tried to take a foot off of the shaking tiled floor, it was like a voice in her head that she couldn’t recognize screamed at her to stop.

Before she could get ahold of herself, the shaking abruptly stopped. Dwight and Khalil waited a few moments before getting out from under their tables.

"Nothing like an earthquake on the east coast to wake you up in the morning," said Khalil, indeed looking wide awake
now. He was trying to make light of it, but it was obvious from the dullness in his normally twinkling brown eyes that he had been scared.

"That's the first time
we had a real one," said Dwight, brushing dust from the floor off the knees of his black jeans. "We got earthquakes before, but they were so tiny, you didn't know they'd happened until you read about it online. That one though, that was serious. That was like a California earthquake.”

Cassie walked out into the café area and stood next to Khalil,
choosing her steps carefully to avoid all of the broken glass and plastic. Now that the danger seemed to be over, her relief was tempered with the knowledge that this was going to be an incredible pain to clean up.

Through the shop window, she could see a bunch of people milling around
nervously out front. It seemed that dozens must have emptied out of the surrounding office buildings once the shaking started. Maybe on the west coast, people could shrug this sort of thing off, but they weren’t used to earthquakes in Sterling; everyone had vacated their buildings as fast as possible, undoubtedly thinking of the day the World Trade Center Towers fell in Manhattan.

Sam hadn't gotten up from under the counter, able to see them all from his position. After a moment of silence, his brows crossed as though he was concentrating on something. "Do you hear that?"

At first, Cassie didn't know what he was talking about, but it didn't take long for her to hear the creaking noise too. It started out quietly, but then rapidly became deafeningly loud. The group shared horrified expressions-- except Sam, who was looking down. Even through the window, Cassie could hear panicked noises coming from the crowd in the street. Several people pointed towards something Cassie couldn’t see.

"Oh my God, I think one of the buildings came loose from the earthquake," said Khalil too calmly, as the whites of his eyes became more visible around his irises. "We're
gonna..."

Just then there was a crack of thunder-
- out of nowhere, as the sky was utterly blue and cloudless-- and everything went dark for a moment.

Cassie was never sure afterwards, but she thought that she must have lost consciousness for a few seconds. When the world came back to her, she was on her hands and knees on the cold tile floor
, a shallow cut on her knee where a piece of glass had nicked her, and something felt odd; there was a weird buzzing between her shoulder blades that hadn't been there before. As if the atmosphere in the room was somehow on a different frequency than just a moment ago.

"The hell
was that?" said Khalil, running his hands through his short black hair as he regained his balance. "You guys feel that?"

"Aftershock from the earthquake?" suggested Dwight, hands under his armpits for warmth. It felt like it the temperature had suddenly dropped twenty degrees in the shop.

"That wasn't the earthquake, the shaking stopped. It just felt...wrong," said Khalil, wrapping his arms around his torso. "And why's it so freakin' cold all of a sudden?" He turned toward the front window. "Oh my God," he said softly, and Cassie and Dwight followed his eyes.

The crowd of people in the street was motionless. They weren’t just standing still, but frozen as though they were wax sculptures in a museum. Several people were frozen with their arms raised, pointing at something off to Cassie’s right. On the other side of the street, Cassie thought she could see a pigeon
frozen in mid-flight.

"It's like they’re frozen," said Khalil, his voice barely above a whisper as he stepped toward the window. "It's like everything outside this room has stopped."

"It has," came Sam's voice from behind them. "Khalil, go outside and see if you were right. See if that creaking noise was one of the buildings falling." He had pulled himself up and was leaning against the counter with his back to them, his hands massaging his forehead, like he had a terrible headache.

Khalil whipped a
round in Sam's direction. "You insane? I'm not taking one step outside this room. We don't know the hell's going on-- for all we know, those people could be--"

"Just do it," said Sam quietly, still keeping his back to them. Cassie felt her stomach lurch as the realization that this situation was Sam's doing, somehow, sank in. She couldn't imagine how, but she knew that the weird buzzing
sensation she felt originated with him.

Whether Khalil had just realized the same thing Cassie wasn't sure, but something in Sam's voice made him decide to listen. He ran out the door,
picking his way carefully through the frozen people, clearly trying not to touch them. He made his way across the street, turning with his back against the window of the jewelry shop across from DG to get a look at the sky above the shop, following the direction of the pointed fingers with his eyes. When he came back inside, his normally dark skin had taken on a grayish hue.

"The Dowling building, on the corner
-- it's falling. It's frozen like everything else, but it's keeled over like the Leaning freakin' Tower of Pisa."

"Faulty construction," said Sam
quietly, rubbing his face. “It won’t fall over on its side, but it will collapse downwards. A skyscraper should be able to withstand an earthquake, but if they took shortcuts….” He turned to face them gingerly, as though moving hurt, still using the counter to support his weight.

Cassie heard herself gasp, and put her hands to her mouth; instead of his normal, dark eyes, Sam's irises were an unnatural color-
- somewhere between the garnet earrings she sometimes salivated over at the jewelry store across the street, and glowing red LEDs. They gave off a light strong enough that it turned the top of his white shirt pink, and cast a red sheen on all the glass surface of the pastry case nearby. Though she'd never seen him like this, Cassie had a nagging feeling that this was what he had always looked like-- and she would have noticed if she'd ever really paid attention.

Dwight was unmoving on the
spot, while Khalil swore and put his hands up in supplication. "Uh, hey man, all those times I called you a pretentious asswipe-- it was a term of endearment. You know that, right?"

Sam looked down and gave a weak smile, beads of sweat becoming visible on his forehead. "I
t's not for your benefit. I can't waste the effort to keep up the disguise anymore." he sighed. "Listen, I'm sorry but I screwed up. You all should start running, now."

"Run where?" said Cassie, somewhat proud of
herself for finding her voice. Sam fixed his garnet eyes on her, and she suddenly felt uncomfortably hot despite the cold temperature in the room.

"Far enough away that you won't be trapped in th
e rubble when that building collapses. I wanted to fix it, but I messed up; I froze time in too big an area. Now I don't have the strength left to brute-force that thing back to stability. At least you three can still get away, though." He took a deep breath, which seemed to hurt him.

The three of them exchanged glances while Sam took deep, gasping breaths and winced in pain. Maybe someone should have been the one to say "You can't freeze time! That's absurd," or something skeptical like that, but hadn't they all sensed that something was really strange about Sam? They never talked about it, but they had all suspected.

It was little things; the way coffee always seemed to spill on customers who particularly annoyed him, the way he seemed to be able to fix anything quickly, from the espresso machine to a leaky faucet without providing any specific explanation of what was broken or what he had done. A few weeks ago, a customer who kept his eyes fixed on Cassie’s chest while he ordered was nearly maimed when a light fixture fell on him, even though Dwight said he’d just had the lights replaced six months ago.

Not to mention, if there was any doubt Sam was telling the truth now, the frozen people in the street made it kind of hard to indulge in skepticism. With
only their eyes, Dwight, Khalil and Cassie all made a silent agreement to skip the "indignant disbelief" phase of the process and trust what Sam was saying.

Dwight walked up to Sam's place at the counter, slowly so as not to spook him. "What about you? Can you get away?"

Sam shook his head. "I can't move fast like this, and I don't know how much longer I can even hold it. Go now."

Cassie swallowed. "That can't be right, there's got to be a way to save you too
," she said. Sure, he was a tool, and apparently some kind of literal monster now as well, but if it weren't for him, they'd all be dead already; it wasn't fair for him to die.

Sam grimaced. "What part of 'I screwed up' do you not understand?! I told you, I don't have enough power left to right the building! The only way I could do it is if I....took it from someone else," he finished quietly.

"We don't have powers, man-- I'm pretty sure that's just you," said Khalil gently.

Sam shook his head
slowly. "You do, humans have latent magic. You can't use it, but it's there," he said, struggling for breath now. "I-if you let me tap into it, there might be enough between the three of you for me to do what I need to do. I don't know though; might not be." A small trickle of blood began to drip down from his nose. "But if you want to try it, decide NOW, because there's no time to debate this."

"We have to try it," said Dwight immediately. Cassie and Khalil snapped their heads towards their normally taciturn manager. "It's not
just him; if the building collapses, everyone nearby….”

"Could be hundreds of people..." Khalil swore under his breath. "Yeah, if we ran now I'd go crazy from wondering. Let's do this thing."

If Sam was relieved they were sticking around, he gave no sign. "Fine, person with the most magic first: Cassie."

Cassie stared. She was the person with the most magic?

"Are you waiting for a written invitation?" Sam said through gritted teeth, stretching his arm toward her like he had during the earthquake. "If you're going to do this, then do it!"

"Okay, okay!" Cassie yelled, swallowing as she took his offered hand. Sam leaned his back against the counter and slid down, leading her with him.

"Best we do this sitting down so we don't fall," he said, the effort to talk making him slur his words slightly; the effort of holding time in this state was obviously taking a toll on him. "Just try to think of something...pleasant, okay? Something nice."

"What are you going to...
." Cassie started. Then, the strange vibrations she'd been feeling for the last several minutes dialed up in intensity, first a little bit, then to the point that it felt like her brain was shaking inside her skull. She screamed until the blackness mercifully came and took the pain away.

***

Cassie awoke to find herself in a faded My Little Pony T-shirt and a pair of beat-up lacrosse shorts. She was reclining in an Adirondack
chair, the ground around her strewn with fall leaves and squashed crab apples. She recognized the hilly vista before her as the view behind her grandparents’ country home upstate, where she used to visit all the time when she was little. The air smelled aggressively of fall, like fresh Macintosh apples and campfires dialed up to eleven.

Cassie yawned and stretched. Wasn't she doing something, important?
Something about work, and coffee?

She picked up the book on the side table next to her and did a double-take when she saw the title:
Demon Bound and Other Stories
, by Dr. Serenus Zeitbloom.

"Nice place," said Sam, and Cassie realized that he was in the Adirondack chair next to her, the one usually reserved for her Grandpa Earl. Seeing him, details of the situation at the Daily Grind began to come back to her, slowly.

"What are we doing here?" she asked, pulling her bare knees up to her chest.

Sam didn't look at her. "Your brain can't process what's happening to you right now, so it's drawn this place for you. Not the typical defense mechanism, but it's a good one, I think."

"Oh," she said, feeling dumb. It would help if she could remember more. "So are you really here, or are you like...the voice of my inner child or something?"

Sam sputtered. "No, I am not your inner child, where do you get this stuff," he muttered. "I'm here because my mind isn't a happy camper right now either, and this is as good a place to relax for a few minutes as any," he said quietly. "I hope it doesn't bother you."