Martin Greenberg - Crime Spells

I did.

I spent a lifetime making it real.

And someone had to be accountable.

Someone had to do the accounting.

Reunion, indeed. Everyone just the same as twenty years ago… until I was through with them.

I pushed the screens down and caught a sheen off Gary’s sweaty forehead. “Ain’t so funny this time, is it, pal? I mean, what the hell was that, you having a character in the damn party. Everyone knew you were angling for Mourne Blade, sister sword to Stormbringer. You can’t do both, man! You can’t play and DM. You’re either in or out. You’re either playing or making it happen!”

“You’re not talking about a game anymore, are you? We can talk about that.”

“Save the counsel, Gary. The semester of psych won’t work on me. Maybe your twelfth graders, but I graduated from that business twenty years ago…”

Gary sat frozen for a long time, his eyes darting back and forth like a rabbit in a trap. Loved that. Then he asked, “What do you want?”

I knew he was stalling, but I also wanted to tell him. And besides Brian’s burning body, there wasn’t anything else to be distracted by, so I let it out. “I wanted you to take it seriously, man! No bullshit pacts with members of the party. You were supposed to be above that!”

“But-”

“You sold me out!”

That’s when I pulled the deli toothpicks from my bag. The ones with the little frayed ends, used to hold large sandwiches in place.

Like little arrows, they are.

I didn’t really notice Gary’s pleas. That’s typical, I imagine, of those receiving a reckoning, right: pleas. I’m pretty sure the Assinians told me that, too. The power of God manifest to men in the flesh was about reckoning-thus sinners wanting restitution when they think God’s a wink away.

So, he was blubbering something, his eyes darting again and again. And in the end, just as I called forth the most inane spell imaginable to put an end to the miserable son-of-a-bitch, I think his face was less concerned with dying and more with something he was looking at.

Magic missile.

Three arrow ‘’ideas” pulled from smaller forms lit the room and air and dove into Gary’s face and chest. He gurgled a bit as he fell to the floor. I believe he flopped once or twice with indignity.

Liked that, too.

And that’s when the first of two things happened.

As I stood and looked down at Gary’s body, feeling vindication at last, I felt my vision tug around to the place he’d been spying as he prepared to die.

Peering around the entry to the kitchen were two small faces, both agonized and wanting to run to their father, both afraid to enter the room, frozen in their pain and fear.

I hadn’t known Gary was a dad.

I felt the pain of it hit me. A goddamn game. Old Ironsides. Revenge pushing me to Rome and a hundred nights in a dark forest reading and studying the ancient ritual for calling the form from the artifact to impose my will on another.

Lusts in the body and the blood that might have lain dormant until this friggin’ reunion.

It was just a stupid sword.

Why did I care?

Before I could answer, the second thing (the last thing) happened that night.

Dave showed up.

The screen opened slowly-he must have seen Daryl and Trent out on the lawn somewhere-screeching on its hinge. And when he stepped inside, I smiled in spite of myself.

Seeing me standing over Gary’s body, he asked in a calm voice, “What the hell happened here?”

“A bit of vengeance a long time in the coming.”

Dave looked down at the two kids, who immediately ran for the safety of his strong legs.

It took him only a moment to put it together. “All because of a sword?”

“Your character was asleep, but I think you’d have stopped it. Paladins are Lawful Good.”

Which was why I smiled and what made it so ironic that Dave should come late again, tonight. Somewhere along the way, he’d made his own transition from fantasy to reality in the form of a Utah State Patrolman.

And me without anything to do a Knock spell as Dave pulled out his cuffs.

The blonde girl in the faded green sweatshirt couldn’t have been more than nineteen. She handed over her grandmother’s mirror with the same desperation all Adeline Morgan’s pawn customers brought into her kitchen.

Despair was Addie’s particular magic, after all. She drew it to her. Held it close. She could smell desperation like dry rot wafting under the scent of the chocolate chip cookies baking in her oven.

Her magic had given her purpose. Once upon a time, she’d had nothing to call her own. Now, among her many treasures: A book of prophecy that only worked if you sacrificed a human heart. A glass eye that blinded everyone it regarded-in an opaque case, of course. The oldest written love spell in the US of A, on yellowed, brittle paper. It had caused a murder-suicide, last Addie knew.

All of these things were more precious to her than a whole bankful of hundred dollar bills. All of them evil.

This girl’s mirror with the silver waves carved into the back, this prized possession? Evil. If the girl didn’t pawn it here, it would destroy her life.

Addie gazed into the mirror by the dappled midwinter sunlight that streamed through the window. Her reflection looked exactly fifty years younger than she actually was. Hmm. The Mirror of Memory Lane. Clever, clever. After all, who at her age wouldn’t kill to look twenty-two again? Or to be twenty-two again? Some previous owner of the mirror had probably done just that.

“I’ll give you fifty bucks,” Addie said.

“But it’s special.”

To the kid, sure. Damned if Addie could remember her name. “I’m telling you what it’s worth on the street.”

The girl’s eyebrows climbed all the way to her hairline. “You’re gonna sell it?”

Not on a cold day in hell. She never sold the items her customers brought her. She kept them here. Safe from their owners, and their owners safe from them.

“You have a month to buy it back,” Addie said. “Those are the rules. You knew ’em when you came here.”

The girl nodded. Jennifer. That was her name.

Jennifer would pawn her precious, poisonous heirloom. Then she’d forget about it as soon as she walked out the door, like all the rest of them. She’d go on to live a happy life-or whatever life fate had in store for her.

“Seventy-five,” Jennifer said.

“Fifty-five. Not a penny more.” The timer on the counter buzzed. Addie grabbed a pot holder.

Jennifer glanced away, gaze moving over the small, homey room, its walls of shelves filled with previous acquisitions. “What you saw, that’s not all it does.”

Addie wouldn’t be surprised. Still, she shook her head and pulled the sheet of chocolately, gooey goodness from the oven.

“I got rent to pay,” the girl said.

How original. “So do I.”

The girl rocked forward and craned her neck to take in the narrow hallway off the kitchen that led to the rest of the house. It was much bigger inside than out, deceptively so. In point of fact, the inside of the house went on for nearly a mile. An unwary stranger could (and had) easily become too lost to ever find her way out. Some of them, Addie had never found their gnawed bones.

Jennifer shivered, settled back on her heels, and frowned. “But you’ve lived here forever. That’s what they say.”

Addie’d been here so long this part of Houston had not only grown up but gentrified around her. From the outside, her little shotgun house on its small overgrown lot with its peeling brown paint was an eyesore. The city kept trying to tear it down. Bulldoze a house of magic? Good luck.