Faith Hunter: Have Stakes Will Travel

That was a surprise. Humans can only feel magics when the spell is directed at them, as in a keep-away spell that shocks anyone who touches the spelled item. But then, Jane Yellowrock isn’t human. I can do magic—it’s in my very genes, passed along on the X-chromosome from parent to child—but Jane is magic. And scary sometimes.

“Okay.” I sat on the floor in the foyer, outside the opening to the parlor, and reached out with my magics. Immediately I saw the spell. It was mostly green, smelling of pine and hemlock and holly, marking the caster as an earth witch, like me. I held out my hands and touched the edges of the conjure; it flashed against my fingertips painfully, hot and cold together, with minute darker green flashes of deeper pain. Once I concentrated, I could see the parameters of the incantation and the place it was protecting, the far corner of the room where the dust was deepest. A bit of cloth was in the corner, like a man’s old-fashioned handkerchief, and an old newspaper, the rubber band disintegrated into blue goo from the heat and moisture of the long-sealed room. A curl of wallpaper had fallen across it too. I guessed that the spell was tied to an amulet, probably hidden beneath the trash. I stood and brushed the dirt off my jeans.

“So,” I said, “I guess I need to push through the spell and get a feel for what is causing the problem.” The instant I said the words, a sense of dread fell on me. I knew , completely and totally, that if I went into the room, I was going to die . Worse, my child would die . I sucked in a breath, and it burned my throat. My husband would die . Tears stared in the corners of my eyes. And the deaths would be horrible, painful, tortured deaths . It was illogical and stupid and clearly the results of the spell. But it was also real . I backed away, three unsteady steps. And the spell faded.

“Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed.

Jane was leaning against the molding in the opening, arms crossed, watching me. “Bad?”

“Totally and completely sucky.” I described what I had been made to feel by the spell. “Whoever created that spell was good. Really, really good. And frighteningly inventive.”

Jane nodded, only her head and the tip of her long braid moving. “The worker who nearly got brained by the magical, flying hammer, was he getting ready to go in here?” she asked.

“Yes. Why?” I asked.

“Because that ladder,” she tilted her head to the metal step ladder, “wiggled when you decided to go in. I figured it was going to fly across the room and hit you if you didn’t back off.” Her lips pulled again in that half smile that was uniquely hers. “I was going to catch it before it hit you, of course.”

“Thanks,” I said, eyeing the ladder. “Like I said. That is a really good spell.” I pointed to the corner. “I have a feeling that the original incantation is tied to something in that corner. Maybe an amulet hidden under the trash.”

Jane nodded and uncrossed her arms. Stepping close, she pushed me farther away from the parlor opening and into the dining room opening on the other side of the foyer. Out of the way of flying carpenter tools, I realized. It was an odd dance-step-of-a-move and Jane grinned down at me. She was a dancer, and I had three left feet and couldn’t follow her; I nearly fell. “Careful,” she said, holding me steady.

“Don’t get hurt,” I blurted.

Jane chuckled softly. “My reflexes are fast.”

“Yeah,” I said hesitantly. “Still…”

Jane shook her head in amusement and dropped to her knees again. She crawled into and around the parlor, one shoulder and hip brushing against the walls, just the way a cat would explore a room, around the outer edges first. When she reached the wallpaper and cloth on the far side, she batted the paper away in a move so catlike I covered my face to stifle a giggle. Then Jane grabbed up the cloth in two hands, held like paws, and rolled over with it, sending up clouds of dust. When her sneezing fit subsided, she batted the cloth away too, revealing a snake.

I lifted my hand to warn Jane, which was stupid as she had already lifted the snake to expose it as dry, cracked rubber tubing and small pieces of corroded metal. Jane said, “It looks like some weird kind of stethoscope. And this is the amulet, for sure. My hand is stinging, and some kind of green magic is running all over my skin.” She crawled across the room on three limbs, the stethoscope in her left hand.

It was a weird design, with two earpieces and two flat chest pieces. Near where a doctor’s chin might go, the two pieces were connected with a metal tube that had been wrapped in a circle, like a trumpet’s body, and, like a trumpet, the connecting part was clearly designed to increase and maybe modulate sound waves. The dangling pieces seemed longer than most stethoscopes, and the little circular chest pieces were decidedly old fashioned.

Green magics emanated from them and were climbing Jane’s arm and wrapping around her body. Before she reached the doorway, and before the magic reached her head, she dropped the device and swatted it, just like an irritated cat. The spell instantly went still, into stasis, and Jane crawled out of the room, shaking her head, muttering, “I know. I know. I don’t like it either.” She crossed the entry to the room and stood, brushing off her clothes, scowling. But with Jane a scowl meant nothing; an expressionless face meant even less. At her best, Jane was inscrutable, and I’d always put that down to her being found in the mountains by park rangers, with no memory of anything, no language, no people, no nothing, and then being raised in a children’s home and learning how to socialize—or not socialize—in an artificial “family.”

Now that the amulet was closer, I knelt and studied it. From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased, but when I looked up, nothing had changed. Outside the windows, the wind picked up, and buffeted the house. I shrugged and went back to studying. The chest-pieces were made of some kind of plastic, maybe like that Bakelite stuff that was so popular in the early nineteen hundreds. If so, then that dated the device to that era. My grandmother had Bakelite jewelry and it was quite collectable. The stethoscope was in fairly good repair, even the rubber parts, which one might have expected to disintegrate.

I heard clicks to my side and looked up to see that Jane had pulled a small digital camera out of her boot and was taking pictures of the house and the amulet. I made a small mmm of approval, but the photos might be blurred. Magics did that to photos sometimes.

From upstairs the creaks of the old house increased again, and developed a distinct rhythm. “Molly!” Jane shouted. Suddenly she was standing over me, her arms lifting high. She caught a wooden headboard as it roared down the stairs and slammed at me. “Out!” she shouted again, as she tossed the headboard and caught the flying footboard, using it to deflect a flying drawer or three from a bedroom upstairs.

Crouching to make a smaller target of myself, I raced for the front door, which flung itself open to allow me passage. Jane followed and the door slammed behind her. She pulled me to the street fast, the winds I had noted only moments before dying when we reached the curb.

“Is that the spell or is the house alive?” she demanded.

It might be a dumb or bizarre question to most people, but not to me, and clearly not to Jane. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed to ask Evangelina, my older sister and our new coven mistress since mama retired and moved two towns over to take care of grandma.

“Great. Just ducky.” Jane scowled as she brushed more dust off her clothes. “Fine. One thing I can tell you. A vamp owned that stethoscope. I could smell him all over it.”