Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (21 page)

He clearly had no idea what Jonathan wanted him to say or was even talking about.

The questions had only served to make Gerald more convinced than ever the man currently sitting across the desk from him was a crazy, gun-toting, lunatic.

More than a few people in the city wouldn’t have argued with his assessment.

Jonathan resisted sighing and shaking his head.

“One more thing, Gerald. I’m going to want to have a little chat with Orville—just him and me—so if you would be good enough to tell me where he lives . . .”

“I don’t know! Like I said, I never—”

“Never hang out after hours, yes.” Jonathan had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. “But, I’m sure you could find the information, right?” Jonathan said, looking pointedly at the computer taking up more than half of the desk between them.

“Yes. Yes! Of course, I could. How silly of me. Sorry.”

“The address, Gerald,” Jonathan said, taking the gun from his pocket and resting it on his leg.

Gerald gave a little whimper and rapidly set about clacking the keys on his keyboard.

It only took a moment, and then Gerald began to recite the information he’d called up on the screen.

Jonathan groaned in his head. He’d dealt with corpses quicker on the uptake. At least he could cross Cooper off his list of suspects with a great deal of certainty.

“Write . . . it . . . down.”

Cooper nodded frantically and hastened to do as Jonathan had instructed.

Jonathan took the piece of paper, looked at it, and put it in his pocket. He then slid the gun back into his coat pocket.

“All right, Mr. Cooper. Thank you for your time,” Jonathan said, standing.

“Really?” Gerald asked, unable to believe Jonathan honestly planned on just going.

“Have a good day, but remember what I said about meeting again. If you breathe a word of this to anyone, the next time you see me I will be far less polite.”

“Right, right. No, I—not a word,”

Gerald shook his head and then actually mimed zipping his lips closed.

He had begun to perspire since Jonathan had sat down, and now his slick, coifed hair had started to sag over his brow.

Jonathan beamed a smile at Gerald before he pulled open the door.

Leaving it open behind him, Jonathan scowled at the assistant. The young man had just managed to avoid being bowled over by Jonathan. He now scrambled to regain his seat.

Jonathan leaned over young Brown. Holding his hand up in front of the kid’s face, said the word ‘Ogya.’ A small black flame flickered over Jonathan’s ring finger.

The young man scuttled backwards in his chair. He would have toppled over if there had been the space. Instead, the top of his chair canted over and hit the partition behind him while the bottom caught on the edge of the desk.

Jonathan stopped the magic, straightened up, and casually walked back to the elevator.

As he walked away, Jonathan tried to act as though that little summoning, that spark of magic, hadn’t awakened a monkey on his back the size of a Volvo.

If Orville was behind everything happening to Wendell because of a grudge, he clearly didn’t hold the same grudge against his office pal, Gerald Cooper.

Jonathan rode the elevator down and used the time to replace his weapon in its holster.

Relieved to see no cluster of security guards, or cops, waiting for him in the lobby, Jonathan quickly exited the building. It had been unlikely Gerald would have called security; the man would be feeling far too lucky to have simply lived through the experience.

Riding the emotional storm he’d just gone through, Cooper wouldn’t be thinking about security yet, just his own snaky hide.

It had been the assistant, Brown, who had been the real risk.

Jonathan assumed Cooper was currently either holding the crotch of his pants up against the hand drier in the men’s room or working hard to block the whole incident from his memory—a thing the human mind seemed ideally suited to do for itself.

He started the Lincoln and pulled out of the parking lot with the tiniest of squeals.

He had plenty of time before he had to get back to his office to meet Wendell. This meant he had plenty of time to visit one Orville Kingston.

Although Jonathan wasn’t exactly sure how to approach the meeting, he wasn’t willing, nor did he possess the luxury of time, to let such nuances dissuade him.

If Kingston was the one behind Wendell’s problems, Jonathan was going to be messing with a practitioner on a magnitude he’d never even read about, except in fantasy novels for the truly disenchanted.

J
onathan found Orville’s residence without any difficulty and pulled to the curb a few houses down. He scoped out the place in his mirrors.

It was a little square brick thing, one of the many houses built post World War II.

A cement walk ran from the sidewalk straight up the property to the front porch. Running along both sides of the walk, neatly kept boxwoods grew, and beyond them, grass that was a little long but still quite green and healthy.

A red Porche 911 sat in the narrow driveway. Jonathan made a face looking at it. He hated that model. He had felt somehow betrayed when that version had come out with its rounded bubble-butt.

Nothing much about the place said ‘sorcerer supreme’ to Jonathan.

However, he retained a measure of caution. In New Hades, in November, no one had grass so green and healthy, especially on such a small lot surrounded by concrete.

“On the other hand, if he’s something straight out of myth, maybe the size of the place is an enchantment,” Jonathan conceded to himself. He noted the lackluster paint and the way the exhaust pipe hung low. “And the state of the car.” Jonathan remained on edge, but any real fear he had held regarding Orville began to fade.

It was like a well-told ghost story that stands the hairs up on your neck. One that makes you jump at the slightest sound during the telling, but after the conversation has gone in a new direction, you see how silly the story was.

His own mind had gone to that same state. But much like after that ghost story, even knowing it foolish by the end of the evening, you can’t help yourself from turning on the hall light on your way to bed. Everything before him said the man in the house wasn’t a practitioner of mythic proportion, and yet Jonathan couldn’t help being twitchy.

He got out of the car and closed the door a little more gently and quietly than he might normally have.

After crossing the street, Jonathan walked up the straight path and climbed the four steps to the small porch. The front entrance had an aluminum screen in front of a wooden door with three narrow inset windows. With great care, he examined the screen door. A hex sign or knot spell could easily be weaved into a screen. Such a soft metal, aluminum could be carved into easily without any special tools. A flathead screwdriver would do the job just fine.

He couldn’t see anything. However, that didn’t prove much.

Putting a hex on your front screen ranked not only as overly paranoid, it was bad practice.

Delivery people often left packages between the screen and inner door and it would be troublesome for a defense spell to activate whenever they did.

It would be a little conspicuous if every time someone running for the city school board swung open his door to knock, smile, and blather, and then turned into charred meat. Or if a girl scout came toting her boxes of overly priced crack-in-cookie-form and got cursed and turned into a toad, it would garner a bit of attention—even in this city.

Jonathan opened the screen and, as he suspected, nothing happened.

He set the little tab on the pressure arm so it would remain open without having to touch it, and began to study the inner door.

It could have been made from one of a handful of trees with strong natural magical properties. Oak, ash, or even hawthorn—the trio said to be sacred to the good people, the Fay—were first to come to mind.

Again, symbols could be placed to blend into the darker grain of the wood. A clever person could set them on the edge of the door, thus protecting it from being forced physically or tampered with magically.

Jonathan wasn’t sure if he had the time to examine this as carefully as he might like; he had to meet with Wendell shortly.

He still needed to actually speak with this Orville Kingston person. Who knew how that would go? Jonathan decided to speed things up a little.

If the door had protection by sigils or enchantments, then he’d just have to set it off with as little chance of backlash to himself. He ran through a couple of possible spells which could work for what he had in mind and finally settled on a concussion spell.

He planned on creating a sonic boom, in essence. It would be a tiny one, but it wouldn’t just be sound waves rippling out. Riding on the sound waves would be energy of a different nature.

Tiny pieces of the energy used to create the spell would be carried along with the wave. A good spell for knocking out a window or cracking a crystal, he had even used it to break protective circles in the past.

Jonathan raised his hand and bent his middle and ring finger over his palm. He began to recite a musical passage while rubbing his fingers against each other.

Something about this spell always gave Jonathan more than the usual payoff of endorphins, the White Dragon leaping and spiraling wildly under him as he summoned it.

Swirling out from between his fingers, a pearlescent, soft blue-green film began to pool in the palm of his hand and, as it grew, became spherical.

Slowly, Jonathan raised his fingers and held what looked like nothing more than a large soap bubble.

He stopped speaking and stepped back. He stood with his back against the wood pillar supporting the front corner of the porch.

Jonathan tossed the translucent orb at the wood door.

Still a foot from contacting the wood, he spoke the word which triggered it to pop.

Unfortunately, at the same moment, the door swung open . . .

And a man suddenly appeared.

He managed to say, “What—” before the blast wave used him as a material representation of physics.

He disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.

The spell had lifted him off his feet and tossed him backwards into his own house like a dirty sock. Jonathan warred between the urge to rush forward and apologize or to jump off the porch and run for cover.

The words “Oh, my,” wheezed from within the house convinced him walk over to the doorway.

Inside, lying on a carpet runner on the hardwood floor was Orville Kingston.

Grey hair, now a rat’s nest, and a twitching moustache. A red-checkered cardigan and brown corduroys. The front of the man’s white shirt had been untucked. One shoe appeared to be completely missing.

Orville had just got his elbows under him as Jonathan looked in.

“I was going to ask just what you were doing hanging about my front porch,” Orville said, looking up at Jonathan. “But I think I’ll change my question, if it’s all the same to you.”

The man looked a little angry, sufficiently disorientated, and quite harmless.

Jonathan wondered how anyone could suspect the man of stealing money from his job. Thinking that very question made Jonathan decide he wouldn’t let appearances deceive him. How something manifested was something he should know better than to place any trust in, in the first place. He cursed himself for letting this case mess him up.

Jonathan strode through the door and, extending his hand, began to incant in Sumerian. He moved his fingers so slowly it appeared as though they didn’t move at all.

Immediately, a deliciously rich power rolled into him and the White Dragon lifted him higher.

His fingers may not have been moving fast, but that didn’t stop a thick, dark red substance from oozing out of the flesh of his two fingers, as if his blood were turning to tar. The spell was a strong one, and he could feel the draw on his bones immediately.

The taste of iron filled his mouth. He knew, in part, the taste came from the energy of the spell itself, but only part. He had ruptured something; it might even be the spell corroding his flesh. It wasn’t a pleasant one.

Jonathan continued to speak the words of the plague summoning. Carefully keeping his eyes on Orville, he eased forward. He kept going, step by step, until he got close enough for the substance gathering on his digits to drop in a slow trailing tendril, like blood molasses.

The substance seemed to hypnotize Orville and he stared with wide eyes. Still on the floor, propped on his elbows with his legs awry, Orville watched—even as the first drip oozed off Jonathan’s hand.

As the drop fell, Orville followed it, as fascinated as he was disgusted.

What he wasn’t? Scared.

At the last moment, Jonathan shoved Orville’s corduroy covered hips out of the way.

That first drop fell to the floor and appeared to sink right through, leaving behind only the slightest discoloration.

“What the—? Who are you?”

“No one,” Jonathan quickly scooped his own hand around to stop the second drop from falling. He marched from the house, leaving the doors wide open, and the owner on the floor of his front hall. As he strode down the walk, he spoke the words to stop the spell.