The Problem With Black Magic Page 21

  ***

  She hadn’t expected to be able to sleep on the plane, but the seats in first class were so comfortable, she found her eyelids getting heavy soon after takeoff. The fact that she had gotten three hours of sleep the night before probably had something to do with it.

  She dreamt of running away from demons, demons with glowing red eyes like Sam’s, but it was futile; her feet felt leaden, and every step felt like a chore. No matter how far she went, she never seemed to get anywhere: she was still running down the same stretch of sidewalk in front of the Daily Grind while the pack of monsters behind her walked towards her slowly, languidly, getting closer and closer with no need to run. Their sneering laughter rang in her ears as she stumbled away.

  When they were almost upon her, Sam grabbed her hand and pulled her aside, into an alley that ran between DG and the next building over. When they entered the alley she somehow knew, the way one could know things in a dream, that the other demons were gone. She felt the briefest whisper of relief before the man in front of her split into two, both turning to face her.

  She blinked. Two Sams?

  There was a flicker of light, and they began to change form. It soon became clear to Cassie that neither had been Sam to begin with, and she felt foolish for being mistaken. Whatever else Sam was, he didn’t immediately register to her as non-human, and these things were as far from human as could be.

  While still keeping a basically humanoid shape, the one on the right quickly morphed into a body filled with eyes, while the one on the left was all mouths. The Eyed One horrified Cassie in particular, its oversized eyes staring in different directions- some blue, some green, some red, some bloodshot with pupils and some without. Some were clearly diseased, or maimed and crusted shut. But a good number of the functioning eyeballs were focused on her face.

  She went to back up against the wall of the alley, only to find the familiar scenery gone; she seemed to be in a quarry filled with black volcanic rock, broiling under a red sky. She felt reasonably sure she was still somewhere on Earth, but beyond that, she had no idea.

  “Look upon her now, for our time is short,” said the Mouthed One. Several of the mouths spoke simultaneously, all speaking the same words but with slightly different intonation and timing, like an out-of-synch Greek chorus.

  Many of the Eyed One’s pupils flicked from Cassie to his companion, and she couldn’t tell where its voice emanated from. Nor did she particularly want to know. “I didn’t wait seventy generations merely to look at her. You will see to it that our time is long enough.”

  Several of the mouths made irritated noises, but didn’t protest further. The Eyed One took a step towards Cassie, the blue-green eyes on its kneecaps drawing her attention. She tried to step back, only to find her back against the rock wall of the quarry.

  “Do not fear, little daughter,” said the Eyed One, continuing to close the distance between them. “They like to say that the daughters of men were fair, but they were also clever: when the waters came, your kind took a deep breath and hid below until they receded. I trust you can keep your head below water for just a little longer.”

  Cassie cleared her throat. Though she was terrified, she sensed that these creatures didn’t wish her harm. The Eyed One had called her daughter; in some way, they considered her their kin. They probably wouldn’t hurt her intentionally, but they were so inhuman she wasn’t sure they could help but hurt her.

  “Who are you? Are you my ancestor?” she asked.

  The Eyed One turned many pupils to its companion. “As I said,” his inexplicable voice thrummed. “Clever.”

  “Who are you?” she repeated, surprised that she sounded demanding. In some strange way she would be unable to explain, she felt that she deserved to know.

  The Eyed One turned its attention back to her. “I will ask the questions. There is a part of you that is missing, small one. Can you feel it?”

  Cassie knit her brows. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Your kind, when you lose a part of your mortal body, you feel it— you feel a lack where it should be. Something was torn from you; you should feel its absence even though you can’t remember.”

  “Or perhaps, because you wish to remember,” said the mouths in a sing-song tone.

  Cassie’s head was swimming; this was making less and less sense the more they spoke. “I don’t understand. What do you want from me?”

  “The child asks when She has been told not to ask,” said a single one of the mouths, located on the Mouthed One’s belly. It was the first time any of them had spoken individually.

  “The child disobeys because She is ours,” corrected another mouth, this time on the neck.

  The Eyed One came to a stop in front of Cassie and, to her horror, put its hands on her shoulders gently. The tiny purple eyes on its knuckles seemed to blink their long lashes at her playfully, coquettishly.

  “I cannot tell you, because to explain in words you could understand would take longer than your lifetime; you must remember of your own accord. In the meantime, protect your birthright. It is yours alone.”

  Cassie blinked. “My birthright? My white magic?”

  “The time has come!” she heard several of the mouths hiss, this time in unison. “Make haste.”

  The Eyed One looked confused. It was strange to see a befuddled expression in a hundred pairs of eyes. “White magic? There is no such thing. There is only Magic.”

  With that, he leaned in toward her, several of the lower eyes on his face dissolving, forming a mouth-like hole. As he kissed her on the forehead, with only a gaping absence where his mouth should be, Cassie lost all sense of herself, knowing only that she was screaming uncontrollably.

  She jerked awake with a start. She felt chilly, her body covered in layer of cold sweat. She pulled her complementary blanket tighter around herself and snapped her head over to the opposite row, and immediately calmed; Khalil was talking to Dwight about something on the private screen on the back of the seat in front of him. They appeared to be watching some kind of cooking show, snorting about how there was no way this particular recipe could be made in “less than thirty minutes!” if you included all the prep. The sheer banality of the conversation was infinitely comforting.

  She turned back to look at Sam in another row, who appeared to be engrossed in a paperback history book, oblivious to anything else.

  Cassie took a deep breath, then another; whatever that nightmare had been, she was pretty sure Sam had nothing to do with it. In fact, she was pretty sure it didn’t have much to with demons at all, leaving her confused. She wanted to ask Serenus about it later, but she couldn’t shake the strange feeling that it was none of his business; that this had been a vision for her alone.

  That is, assuming her overactive imagination hadn’t simply fabricated the whole thing. When the familiar tingling in her back started up again, she shivered, remembering the Eyed Ones words.

  Something was torn from you; You should feel its absence….

  Shifting in her seat, she made a decision not to worry about it for at least the next 48 hours; whatever it was, she was pretty sure it wasn’t going to help her out in court. If she could emerge from court in one piece, then she’d decide whether or not to share the contents of her strange dream with anyone else. She had a vague idea what the Eyed One and the Mouthed One might have been, but she was content to push them both to the back of her mind for the time being.

  Finally calm, she turned to Jay in the window seat next to her.

  “Did I miss anything?” she asked, surprised to notice that his game system sat in his lap, untouched.

  He flicked his eyes to her momentarily, then back to the window. “You have to see this.”

  She leaned over him towards the window, glad she was sitting next to him; this would be awkward with anyone else.

  She must have been asleep longer than she thought, because they were coming into La Guardia airport. The lights from Manhattan shone like thousand
s of jewels, reflected over the water of the harbor. A city girl all her life, not easily dazzled by urban grandeur, even she felt a shudder of excitement go through her at the sight. For once, that icy-hot surge in her belly was from pleasure, not fear.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said quietly, to which Jay nodded. They had both lived in a decent sized city all their lives, yet as far as this sight was concerned, they may as well have been country bumpkins; nothing prepared you for flying into New York City over the ocean on a clear, moonlit night.

  Over the intercom, the pilot told them that the local temperature was 57 degrees, making Cassie glad she’d had the foresight to bring her denim jacket, and wished them a pleasant evening in New York. Yeah, we’ll see about that, she thought crossly.

  When they landed, the other first-class passengers went to get their luggage in the overhead compartments, which Cassie’s group had all skipped; only staying two nights, they had all only brought carry-on luggage.

  “So, where to for dinner?” said Khalil, tossing his book bag over his shoulder as they made their way down the passenger boarding bridge ahead of the other passengers.

  “Check-in is at the hotel; I’m sure they have food there,” said Sam.

  Khalil turned to walk backwards, facing Sam. “Really? We’re in the culinary capital of the United States, and you want to eat hotel food tonight?”

  Sam shrugged. “What does it matter? Food is food.”

  Khalil made a horrified face like Sam had just admitted to eating babies. “As a dedicated Food Network viewer, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that.”

  “Actually, we have time,” said Serenus, checking his watch. “It’s dinnertime now, and most of the other guests won’t show up for check in at the Regencia until at least nine or ten p.m. If everyone wants to take advantage of this opportunity for some fine dining, I have no objections.”

  Khalil fist-pumped. “I knew there was a reason the professor was my favorite customer!”

  “You hate customers,” snapped Dwight.

  “Well, yeah, except Professor Zeitbloom. That was the point I was making, see?”

  When they reached the terminal, Khalil motioned for them all to surround him in a football-style huddle by the waiting room. “Okay, so which Michelin-starred restaurant are we going to go for: Le Bernardin? Le Cirque? Per Se?”

  “We could go to the Hard Rock Café,” Jay said excitedly. The group exchanged glances and made a mutual, unspoken agreement not to respond to that particular suggestion.

  “Whichever one of those has dessert,” said Cassie. Nightmares tended to leave her craving sugar, and she was learning that was especially true for the supernatural kind.

  Khalil clicked his tongue at her. “Silly Cassie, you don’t only have dessert at the restaurant. After the last course, you go to a specialty bakery—"

  “No,” Sam snapped. “One restaurant. We don’t have all night.”

  “Oh, Sam,” Khalil chided. “All work and no play makes you a dull Hellspawn.”