Magic 101

A Diana Tregarde

Investigation

Mercedes Lackey

Copyright © 2014, Mercedes Lackey

CONTENTS

ARCANUM 101

WITCHING HOUR

These are the first Diana Tregarde stories in decades. And in a sense these are the first Diana Tregarde stories, period.

They take place in the early 1970s and it will be hard for anyone younger than thirty to realize what a very different world that was. Computers were the size of buildings. We were still putting men on the moon, but there is more computing power in a common iPhone than there was at all of Cape Kennedy. Watergate was about to happen. Nixon hadn’t yet resigned.

U.S. soldiers were still fighting and dying in Vietnam. There was no such thing as being “openly gay.” There also was no such thing as HIV.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones were all recently dead of various self-indulgences, but John Lennon was still alive.

The only time you saw windmills was on a farm or in Holland.

Gas was twenty-five cents a gallon, threatening to go up to thirty. No one had ever heard of, much less seen, a Japanese manga. Britney Spears wasn’t even born. Neither was Leonardo DiCaprio.

Stand-up comedians only performed in nightclubs with bad reputations, or in Las Vegas. No one would consider going out for a night of comedy.

There was no MTV. Anytime there was a rock-themed television program, it was an event. There was barely cable TV. Most people made do with three channels and what was not yet called PBS. When you had cable TV, you had a whole twelve channels!

“Portable” music was via a transistor radio.

No one had ever heard of rap. And if anyone had heard a rap song, they would have considered it a quaint offshoot of beat poetry, which was so, so 1950s.

You bought most of your reading material at the drugstore from revolving racks, or digest-size monthly fiction magazines in a small magazine rack, unless you were really lucky and were in a town big enough to actually have a bookstore.

Research meant going to the library and looking things up in books.

So as you read this, if you find yourself thinking, “Well, why didn’t they just—” the answer is probably, “Because they didn’t have it then.”

Enjoy.

ARCANUM 101

As apartments went, it wasn’t much; a third floor studio that had as its main attractions the fact that it was within walking distance of Harvard Square and the University, and that it had a fireplace. If you were a witch, a fireplace was a necessity. Some things just couldn’t be done over the stove.

Not to mention that some things would be pretty dangerous without a chimney to carry off the smoke. It worked, she’d seen to that. Hers did, anyway. And she’d had a repairman in to make sure the dampers worked too. No point in sending heat up the chimney when she didn’t have a fire going.

She put her back to the simple cast-iron fireplace with its chipped stone hearth and painted wooden mantel and surround and surveyed her tiny sanctuary.

It had no view, in fact, the only window looked right at the brick wall of the building next door. It got next to no natural light. Both of these reasons were why it was cheap—or cheaper than the apartments that had more “ambience.” No matter how Spartan a place was, you were going to pay for a place close to the University.

The floors were wood, but that was only because the place was so old; there were still the remains of gaslight fixtures in the room. Those floors were scarred and the varnish was nearly black. The walls had been painted so many times that the paint was nearly a quarter inch thick. The current color was sort of cream. The building dated to 1881, a fact Diana knew because the cornerstone had that date carved into it. It was a real apartment building though, and not a house carved up into apartments. She was pretty sure that this one had been occupied steadily by poor Harvard students—or possibly poor clerks or poor shop-employees—since the building was new. There was no “Victorian charm” about this place. It was a plain little painted box.

Diana Tregarde really didn’t care that the place had no “ambience” to speak of. What she cared about was the location and that it came unfurnished—which meant she could move in her bed and desk and anything else she could squeeze in—and that it was cheap. She had done the math, and an apartment close to Harvard and no car was cheaper than a cheaper apartment farther away and the cost of owning and running a car.

She had her double inheritance squirreled away, but it was going to have to last not only through her college years, but probably a few months past them, for at least as long as it took for her to figure out how she was going to make a living, unless she could pick up a part time job somewhere.

No one was going to pay her to be a practicing witch, after all.

At least, with her furniture in it, and the things that she couldn’t bear to put into storage, the place almost looked like home.

Almost, because Memaw wasn’t here, and no place would be home for a while without Memaw in it, and even after a year that was still hard to get used to.

She shook off her melancholy. Memaw hadn’t been young when she’d had Di’s father, and he hadn’t been young when he and Mom had produced Di. She’d been 93, very tired, very worn out, aching in every joint and needing a walker or a wheelchair—it wasn’t easy raising a budding witch and a probable Guardian—and she had been more than ready to go when Di could fend for herself. It wasn’t fair to be unhappy because Memaw had gone on to the Summer Country. But it was so hard…this year since she’d been gone had been the worst of all. No Memaw to laugh at her mistakes and her jokes, to know exactly what to do when something magical was baffling Di—

You’re just feeling sorry for yourself. Stop it.

She took stock of the place that was certainly going to be her home for the next four years, and probably beyond that. Under the window, the battered old rolltop desk that had been Memaw’s held her typewriter, and beside the typewriter was the neat paper stack of her current project. In the bookcases on either side of the desk were all the books for all her classes this semester at Harvard.

She couldn’t help her smug smile. She was a freshman. She wasn’t supposed to be living off-campus, she was supposed to be living in a dormitory. The only freshman that were allowed to live off-campus were those whose homes were in Cambridge, and who, presumably, were “properly supervised” by adult guardians. It might be 1972, but colleges still took in loco parentis seriously.

Well, she was legally an adult with her own means of support (even if it was an inheritance) and no legal guardian, and this apartment was, now, her home. Harvard didn’t have rules covering this particular contingency. And after floundering for some time, the University reluctantly gave her off-campus privileges and assigned her to Dudley House, the House for a handful of graduate students and those others who weren’t resident in any of the other twelve Houses.

Oh yes, the Houses. Harvard, unlike ninety nine point nine percent of the other colleges and universities in the United States, operated on the English model. After your freshman year, you moved to a House, which had a Junior Common Room and a Senior Common Room and Tutors and…well, it all sounded like a Dorothy L. Sayers novel. But it would have been damned inconvenient for a practicing witch, and…dangerous too, for the people around Di. She didn’t dare have a roommate, didn’t dare be in a space where people could just come waltzing in or would be suspicious of a locked door.

She sighed. This is a bloody inconvenient life, if you ask me, she thought, not for the first time, and went back to her survey of her domicile to see if anything could be improved. So, desk, flanked by bookcases and the radiator under the window, which was the west side. A kitchenette with a tiny range and sink, fridge, and the doors to her bathroom and closet on the north, with a Memaw’s huge old kitchen cupboard in between. Bed on the east wall, flanked by more bookcases, a canopy bed she had built herself with the help of a carpenter friend of Memaw’s when she was fourteen and decided that what she wanted for her birthday was a medieval canopy bed with a bookcase headboard and heavy bedcurtains all around it. Memaw had insisted it be a bolt-together thing “in case you ever need to take it somewhere;” at fourteen she hadn’t been able to imagine that contingency, but now she was glad Memaw had insisted. So there it was, looking wildly incongruous in here. And on the south, the fireplace, her loveseat and two comfortable chairs in front of it, and on either side of it, locked cupboards that held her…supplies. A black-and-white television sat on top of the lower cupboard, her stereo next to it. The latter was going to get more use than the former. Right now the radio in the headboard of the bed was playing; the classical station. Not that Di disliked rock, but she wasn’t in the mood.

The ceilings here were very high. If I can get the wood in here I can probably build a free-standing loft. That would be good for storage anyway. As it stood, she’d have to go down into the basement and the storage units if she wanted any significant amount of firewood. Her unit was top to bottom with firewood she’d had loaded into the back end of the moving truck. She’d paid for a full load, so by golly, she made sure she got one.

A huge braided rag rug covered most of the floor. The walls had reproductions of Alphonse Mucha posters. The curtains on the window were from her old bedroom; Memaw’s house had been an old Victorian too, and the windows of her old bedroom were just as tall. This was as homey as it was going to get.

She lit some cinnamon incense to give the place a scent, then went to the big cupboard to get out some candles. She’d made them herself, made a huge stock of them one year when she got the bug to try candlemaking. The ones for “public use” were all creamy white bayberry-scented. She’d even gathered the bayberries herself. Memaw had been big on doing everything you could for yourself. Especially when it came to your magic supplies.

After placing the candles around the room, she went to the bookcase to give a quick read of the first chapter of one of her course books. At Harvard you were expected to declare a “concentration” and Di had been torn between something practical, like—oh—law—and something she actually wanted to study. Maybe if Memaw was still alive, she’d have been able to face four years of something she really didn’t want to do—

No, probably not. And she knew what Memaw would say. Had said. “Choose what makes you excited. You can always bag groceries if you have to.”

If she could have, she’d have flung caution to the wind and asked for special studies in magic…

Bad idea, Di. Really bad idea.

So she picked the concentration she thought was closest to that: Folklore and Myth. She was by no means an expert in any other belief system than the more-or-less Celtic version Memaw had taught her, and knowing what critters might come out of you from another mythos was a very good idea. Especially for a Guardian. Too bad there wasn’t a chance anyone was ever going to hire a Resident Folklorist…

But the only other thing that appealed, Fiction Writing, was…not an option either. She rather doubted that her professors would approve of the sort of fiction she wanted to write, and the sort they would want her to write would make her open a vein. Literary fiction—well, from all her research, besides being the sort of thing that she loathed reading, let alone writing, Literary Fiction was not the stuff that put food on the table on any kind of regular basis.

Romance writing, however, did. Reading it, historical romance anyway, had been Di’s secret guilty pleasure, shared with Memaw who was an avid Georgette Heyer fan, and Memaw had encouraged her in trying her own hand at writing it. What was more, Memaw was a good, and picky, critic. Di sometimes wondered if magic wasn’t the only thing she’d gotten from her grandmother; many times she had wondered if Memaw herself had cherished the notion of being a writer, but had never gotten the encouragement and excellent critique that she lavished on Di.

She gave a look of longing at the typewriter, but picked up the book instead. Studies first.

It would take a while to get the first book sold, and more time to get to the point where she could make a living at it, and meanwhile, a degree from Harvard was not chopped liver. Once the country got out of that rat bastard Nixon’s recession, which according to her prognostications should be about when she graduated, she ought to be able to find something. Substitute teacher; a lot of places only required a sub to have a bachelor’s degree and not in teaching. Librarian, maybe.

What the heck. I can always work in an occult bookstore.

She buried herself in the first chapter, taking notes as she did so. But when she was done and she had closed the book, she found herself staring into the dark fireplace, pondering.

Because here was the problem. She was a Guardian. She’d been one since she was sixteen, which, Memaw had said, was about the right age for something like that to happen. Job? Well, whatever it was. Commitment, vocation…even though no one would ever, ever actually pay her to do this. In fact, that was the point. You did this because it was the right thing to do, not because you were going to be rewarded in any way.

She was pretty sure that her parents had not been Guardians, though Memaw had never said. In fact, though she had only been three when they died, she was pretty sure they hadn’t had so much as a hint of magic about them. They had both died when a train derailed and went into Newark Bay in 1958 in a terrible accident that killed forty six other people. Ironically, the only reason her mother had been on the train was because she had wanted to go into New York City to shop. And there was no great anti-Guardian conspiracy at work in the deaths of her parents, either, just a terrible accident that had taken one or more of the parents of a lot of kids. Ordinary parents, as ordinary as hers.

Intelligent, without a doubt, and they had to have been good people, given Memaw, but utterly ordinary. Nothing in any of their belongings—and Memaw had faithfully saved anything she thought Di might want to see one day—gave her any indication that they even knew Memaw was anything besides a good mother and kind mother-in-law, much less that they had known she was a practicing witch.

Well, men did tend to be oblivious. From all the pictures in the family photo albums, Memaw had been the perfect housewife, even if she had been a single one, what with her husband never coming back from the Normandy Invasion. Di could not even begin to imagine how hard it must have been to keep the fact that you were a witch secret from your husband. It was all very amusing in the movies, but in real life it must have made her inclined to tear her hair out.

The room was getting chilly as well as dark, and in accordance with some time-honored agreement among all landlords, the heat was not due to be turned on for a couple of weeks. Another good reason for the fireplace. Di had anticipated this, and laid the fire ready; now she used the first spell she had ever learned to ignite the tinder beneath the logs and the wicks of the candles.

“Fiat ignis,” she murmured, and pointed her finger at the fireplace, like a gun. The tinder went up with a whoosh, and the logs “took” immediately. So did the candle wicks, and the pleasant bayberry scent joined the cinnamon and woodsmoke.

She pulled the crocheted afghan she’d gotten at a church sale over her legs and curled up, staring at the flames and thinking. The afghan was warm and soft, and had been made by someone who loved the feel of the yarn in her fingers as she worked. It had, as they said, “good vibes.”

She couldn’t recall a moment from the time she’d entered Memaw’s home to stay that she hadn’t known that her grandmother could do magic. She remembered Memaw soothing bumps and bruises with a touch and a murmur of words, remembered Memaw lighting candles and the fireplace, and remembered the teddy bear that Memaw had persuaded a house-spirit to “animate” once when Di was sick. Nothing like singing and dancing, just curling up, cuddling and crooning. So Memaw must have known that Di had the gift too, and that the best way to teach her was to keep it from being something scary. On the other hand, Di also couldn’t remember a time when Memaw hadn’t made it very clear that this was something to be kept between the two of them. “Not everyone can do this, sweetie. Keep it secret so they aren’t jealous.” Or—“The neighbors think we’re strange enough, don’t say anything about this, okay?”

She had learned how to keep secrets from a very young age. Probably some child psychologist would make much of that, but she couldn’t see that it had harmed her any.

Then again, there weren’t a lot of kids who grew up being able to see things that no one else could, and going “Look at that!” and pointing at the creature that was perfectly clear to you, but that everyone else couldn’t see, taught you pretty quickly to keep your mouth shut.

Good thing that most people go “Oh what an active imagination!” when you’re a little kid, not “Lock her up, she’s nuts!”

Not that she could actually do magic until she was old enough to realize that it really did matter what the neighbors thought about you. That was the year that the other kids started calling her “Wednesday.”

Memaw wasn’t big on family photo albums, but they did have one, and now she could admit that the nickname was apt. There were three photos of her from that year, two of them the mandatory class and school photos, and there she was, a stick-straight, solemn-eyed, dark-haired child with her hair in two equally straight ponytails. And while the teen-glamour magazines were showing straight, straight mod hair, either long or short, no one around her town wore their hair like that. The flip was very much the thing, with some teasing on top. Not Big Hair, like the fifties, but not ironed-flat straight either.

She hated the nickname and she hated Wednesday Addams. But most of all she hated Jimmy Mason, who was the one that had first started calling her that.

She sighed and rested her head on her hand, elbow on the arm of the loveseat.

She had Memaw cut her hair off boyishly short, but nothing would get him to stop. Finally she decided she was going to curse him.

It wasn’t hard to get “something” from him. She used her big vocabulary for once, standing where the teachers could see her, but not necessarily hear her, and started taunting him. Finally, as she had known he would do, he flew into a rage and came at her.

She’d been dodging worse things than him for two years at that point (though never, never as bad as the things she encountered once she was a Guardian). She was coming into her magic, and arcane critters smelled that, and scented her youth, and came hunting. She easily dodged him, but while he was windmilling away, trying futilely to hit her, she snatched a tiny handful of hair. He squalled and came at her harder, which was when the teachers finally took notice (or resignedly knew they were being forced to take notice, they didn’t care for her either) and pulled him off.

She had her prize.

She took it home and began to construct a Curse Doll. Memaw caught her at it of course, because there were all manner of tiny little nasty things flitting about her the moment she began doing something that dark. Rather than stop her, though, Memaw just stared her down until she stopped of her own accord.

Then Memaw told her, in blunt and no uncertain terms, about the Threefold Law. “Now,” she finished. “I don’t for a minute think that boy doesn’t deserve a set-down. But if you give more tit than he gave tat, you will be getting every bit of that, times three, right in your face. Reckon you want that?”

Now, by this point, she was accustomed to actually stopping and thinking things through when confronted by such a question, and it didn’t take much thinking to realize that no, she didn’t want that. All he’d done was taunt her. Well, she’d taunted him back, she’d made him furious, and gotten him in trouble at school for fighting on top of that. The score was probably even at this point.

But Memaw hadn’t let it rest there. “You want to teach some sprout a lesson, you put the Mirror on him,” she continued, an ever-so-slightly malicious smile on her face. “I’ll show you.”

So that afternoon she had taken the doll and showed Di how to cast the Mirror of Consequences on someone. It was hard. It was the hardest spell she had ever done to that point even with assistance, and it was still hard, to this day, because you had to be absolutely fair about it, or it wouldn’t work, it would be flawed, and the flaws would break it. But what it did was to reflect everything that someone did right back at him. So there were immediate consequences to his actions and words, instead of delayed. If he taunted someone, those taunts would be reflected back on him, so that instead of getting the laughs he’d gotten before from calling her Wednesday, people wouldn’t find it quite so funny, and would think about the time he’d called them, or a friend, similar names. If he tried to fight, he would lose; either his opponent would suddenly find more strength and skill than he normally had, or an authority figure would take notice and intervene right away. The more he hated, the more he would be hated.

But it wasn’t all one-way, this Mirror. If he started acting nice to people, that would be reflected too. People would like him more, just for starters.

Now they call that “Instant Karma,” she reflected.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” she’d said to Memaw, who only smirked.

Well Jimmy got his dose of instant Karma when everyone started calling him “Mason Jar.” It was a stupid name, it wasn’t even that much of an insult except that Jimmy was built like a fireplug. But it got his goat. And when he came at people, the teachers noticed instantly. He didn’t have any time to taunt her anymore, and without him to keep it going, people stopped calling her Wednesday.

Later that year his dad’s job moved them down south, so she had no idea what happened to him. But Memaw had reminded her to take the spell off him, so she did. Reluctantly, but she did. Did he ever learn his lesson? Maybe. Maybe not. Whether he did or not, as Memaw reminded her, was up to him, not her.

“You can’t make someone change,” she’d said. “All you can do is make it uncomfortable for ‘em not to. And if you aren’t around to supervise, well, better take the heat off before they boil over.”

Memaw had let Di read virtually anything she wanted to, from the old grimoires in spidery handwriting to the comic books that she got with her allowance money. And maybe that was the reason why, all those comic books, and the idea that if you had power you had to do something good with it, that she’d done what she had done. She still could not imagine herself saying anything but yes to the question that had been posed to her, the night she turned sixteen.

She didn’t remember most of it, actually. Which, so the few other Guardians she had spoken to so far had told her, was pretty typical. Mostly they all remembered very intense light, the sense that they were being offered enormous power if they only used it to keep ordinary folks safe, and someone or something waiting for an answer. And then the next day…well, there it was. Where there had been a little warm glow of magic inside, there was now this—atomic reactor. And there was the certain knowledge that if it was ever used selfishly it would be abruptly taken away. There were no second chances when you were a Guardian. And Di suspected that if you said no, you wouldn’t ever remember getting the offer.

Memaw had recognized it, whatever “it” was, that had happened to her. The moment that Di came down to breakfast, Memaw had given her a strange look…and from that moment, treated her, not like a teenager, but like an adult that simply didn’t have as much experience as she did.

She had shown Di some passages in some of those old grimoiries, about how to call the Guardians if you were in trouble. There was even something like it in a Dione Fortune book, although Fortune didn’t call them “Guardians,” and her ritual was dorky and awkward as well as sincere and nothing like the ones the witches used. By that point, of course, Di had known that the ritual itself didn’t matter, it was that you knew Guardians existed, and that if you got into occult trouble that you hadn’t caused, and you called on them, they’d come.

“But what if what happens is your fault, Memaw?”

“Depends. But everything has consequences, my girl, and those consequences fall harder on those who meddle with magic. Just bear in mind, when you get the Call, you must answer.”

Within a week of accepting the power and the job, she had gotten the call.

That memory was as clear as the one of being offered Guardianship was vague.

The funny thing was she had half expected to be jolted awake in the middle of the night, or to see some ethereal creepy-crawly come smashing through her bedroom window. It was all much calmer than that, and it happened in the middle of the day. A strange woman had come up to the door, and knocked on it. When Memaw answered, the woman had said, hesitantly, “They say someone here can help me—”

Then she had seen Di, standing behind Memaw, and nodded. And Di had known.

“I can,” she said, steadily, and stepped forward. And Memaw, who otherwise would have had all manner of questions, simply moved aside.

It had been a matter of a family curse, which Di had never felt was a particularly fair situation, and in this case, where the woman was someone’s illegitimate child, the daughter of a man she didn’t know, it was particularly unfair. This first time—other Guardians told her the first time was always easy and clear-cut—the solution was simple and straight-forward. She offered herself as the woman’s Champion, was accepted, and fought a mage-duel with the revenant that kept the curse going. It fell and dissipated, and that was that. Well, not quite that simple. But she had never had a moment of doubt that, as long as she kept her head, she was going to win.

The big deal was that, as “just” a witch, she would never have had the strength to fight off a revenant like that. It probably would have taken an entire coven to take the thing down—maybe not even then. Most of the times that a family curse was involved, all a coven could do was shield the individual from the effects of the curse; the next appropriate family member would then find the full curse descending on him or her. And it was heartbreaking, utterly heartbreaking, to see someone who was the last in a line have to decide whether or not to risk having a child. Not children, because it would be difficult to protect two people from a powerful, generational curse with the resources of a single coven; three would be almost impossible. A single child would be all that a cursed individual would dare to have. And then that meant that eventually the parent would have to subject that child not only to the need to protect itself but the decision of whether or not to have a child of its own. And so on…

But no. Di was a Guardian. And if the person in question was truly innocent, and the curse in question entirely unfair, she could end it by ending the thing that powered it.

Even if…as this case…the thing that powered it was the tattered and bitter remains of the spirit that of the person that had created the curse in the first place. It had been simple. It had been very clear-cut. The solution was obvious and well within her arsenal of spells. As other Guardians said, the first time was always clear- cut and easy in the sense that the solution was obvious. But easy in the sense that it was effortless? Not even close.

#

It’s raining. Why does it always rain when the shit hits the fan?

And night. It was always night when bad things happened, but that was kind of par for the course. Bad Things liked the night. The few Bad Things that didn’t like the night generally preferred the other extreme, burning down sun and destructive heat. She didn’t think it was likely she was going to run into any ancient Egyptian demons any time soon, so she had better get used to after-hours work.

Mind you, she was having no trouble actually seeing. There was so much lightning that it was like a disco or a rock concert.

It was midnight, she was in the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t just raining, it was bucketing down. If Di hadn’t been reasonably sure that some Guardianly immunity from lightning strikes was going to protect her when she was doing Guardian business, she’d have been flat on the ground praying she didn’t get hit.

She slogged through knee-high weeds in her toughest (soaked) jeans and the rubber stable-boots she was glad Memaw had insisted she wear, with a sledgehammer in one hand and a duffle in the other, making her way by what she could see in the flashes. She was in the barren graveyard of an old farmstead, which itself was nothing more than the stump of an old chimney and a riot of blackberry vines. The graveyard was so old and abandoned that the headstones were all but unreadable, but she didn’t need headstones to tell her where her target was. The spell she had cast to allow her to see magic left no doubt as to where she was going. She crossed the line where the old wooden fence had once been, and onto the graveyard soil and paused.

A heavy black miasma hung over the grave she was seeking. She approached it, keeping her shields up against a thick fog that actually resisted her as she pushed her way to the headstone. It couldn’t touch her though, not with the protections she had on herself. It kept clear of her by a good three inches, trying to surge forward, but not getting past her shields.

Once she reached the grave site itself, she put down the bag of tools she was carrying in her right hand, and took the sledgehammer she had been carrying in her left into both hands. It was as heavy a hammer as she could manage to swing. Memaw had suggested it. “Some people would leave the headstone, but since there isn’t anyone going to notice out there, I say, be sure.” Di had agreed, and together the two of them had consecrated it.

Lightning flashed as she swung it grimly over her head, and the thunder boomed down just as the hammer hit the stone.

She didn’t think it was coincidence.

With the next three blows, she was pretty sure that it wasn’t coincidence—but given the surge of energy she felt each time she hit the headstone, she was also sure that whatever was in control of the lightning was also on her side. She wasn’t a weakling…but she wasn’t all that strong either, and the granite headstone shouldn’t be shattering the way it was, like a Hollywood rock in a movie about chain gangs. With exactly nine blows, it was obliterated, no piece any larger than a quarter.

She reached into her bag, and pulled out the shaker jar of consecrated salt. Ordinary salt would do, according to the grimoire, but as Memaw said, why take chances? Sheltering the jar from the rain so it didn’t clump and clog the holes in the top, she shook the jar vigorously and mixed the fragments and rubble of the headstone with the salt.

Nothing really happened when she did that, but she hadn’t really expected anything to. The real fight was about to start.

She was soaked to the skin despite her raincoat, her hair was plastered flat to her head, and it was a good thing she’d tied it back hard or she’d never have been able to see. The miasma roiled in protest, rising up in waves that threatened, but did not actually wash over her. And dear gods, it was freezing. Much colder than it should have been. This was a cold she knew; she’d felt this before around ghosts. But what was new was the fury she felt directed against her, like a blizzard wind, ice-edged and lethal.

She put the sealed jar back down in her bag. She was going to need it again in a while. Then she took out the shovel.

Bloody hell, I don’t know why they didn’t issue me with a little Guardian ditchdigger while they were giving me the rest of it…

This time there were no timed rumblings in the heavens when she took the first shovelful. Once again, though, it was as surprisingly easy to dig as it had been to shatter the headstone. This wasn’t like moving heavy soil loaded with rain, it was more like shoveling sand at the beach. Maybe they weren’t giving her a little work crew of her own, but at least they were “helping.” Whoever they were.

The rain pounded on her head, and the black fog circled her, hating her, but still unable to touch her. She figured that since no one had come after this thing before, and it had never encountered opposition, it wasn’t sure what to do about her. She wasn’t one of the ones that had been cursed—but she was marked as the woman’s protector. The rules had been abruptly changed, and it didn’t yet know how to react.

While she worked, she talked. She had very little expectation that the revenant was going to listen to her, but hey, it was worth a shot. No matter that she could hardly hear herself over the thunder, the revenant would hear her no matter what was going on. It didn’t have a choice in the matter. She was in its space. It had to hear what she was saying.

“I understand why you’re angry,” she said, punctuating each word with a shovelful of dirt. She was already knee deep in the grave, and very glad that she was used to a certain amount of physical labor. Never thought I would be grateful to Memaw for making me chop all that firewood…. “Silas Macreedy was a horrible, horrible man. I am sure that he is some version of hell, and he deserves to be there.” She dug into the sides, lengthening the hole and making it wider. “He preyed on you and your family in every way possible. There was no excuse for what he did. In a fair and just world, he would have been caught and punished. I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it was for you, to see what he did to them, and as for what he did to you—well, I’ll be honest with you, I’d have shot him too.” Of course, it wasn’t just that you shot him. It was that you served as his guide out into the woods, then shot his ankles, then spent three days torturing him before you killed him. On the other hand, I can’t really blame you too much. He was a beast. She put her intent behind the words. Maybe, just maybe, that would get through to the revenant. ”His son was just as bad. Even after all that came out, you got no justice at all. The Macreedy family used their money and influence to get you hung, to discredit everything you said, managed to sweep everything Silas had done under the rug, and a death curse is exactly what they deserved.”

The miasma didn’t seem mollified.

“But only the first generation. That was punishment enough. Your curse ruined them, they all died in painful, awful ways, and no one that was responsible for what happened to your family escaped. But it should have ended there. The second generation was more honest, and before he died, Everett Macreedy told his wife and children what had happened and charged them with making it up to your family. That’s where it should have ended.” Why punish the innocent? That’s like the Mirror Curse, left on someone when you know you won’t be there to take it off if things go too badly. Only much worse.

“You shouldn’t have continued the vendetta past them. Not like this. Brenda didn’t even know she was a Macreedy until she found an honest psychic. She never did anything to you or yours. She is a good woman. How can you blame her for simply having the misfortune to be born to an idiot who vanished on her mother? I’ve looked into every nook and cranny of her life, and she has never been anything but a good person. There’s no one left of your family to make further atonements to. You have to stop now.”

This really was going faster than it should have. Then again, the hard part was yet to come. She’d been afraid as she got deeper that the walls of the hole she was digging would collapse in on her, or that she’d be digging in a rapidly deepening pool of mud and water, but the earth stayed firm, and the water drained away, leaving her with just wet dirt under her feet. The hole that was waist deep now.

“Six feet” was the prescribed depth of a grave, but not in this soil. Bedrock was only four feet down, which was good, since her kit bag was on the side of the grave and she would be able to reach inside easily. She’d hit the coffin soon—

Her shovel scraped along something that sounded hollow.

And that was when the miasma came together into a shape and loomed over her from where the headstone had stood. Vaguely human, with burning, hot green eyes. She looked up at it.

”You know nothing!”

The words didn’t so much resonate in her ears as in her head. She was expecting that. The very few immaterial things she’d spoken with “talked” like that. Memaw said that some things could make real sounds, but not many, and most of those had a way to become fully material, like the banshee. But this one’s words were laden with terrible anger, as if it was trying to frighten her out of the grave. And each word hit her like a blast of ice.

“Then tell me I’m wrong about Brenda, and I’ll leave you alone,” she replied calmly, although every hair on her body was standing straight up.

“Unto the Seventh Generation!” it spat at her. “Unto the Seventh Generation! That is the curse!”

No. The revenant was not listening. There probably wasn’t much there to listen. What was left of the spirit had devoted so much of itself to revenge that revenge was all that was left. But she still had to try. “Prove to me that I’m wrong about Brenda and I’ll leave you alone,” she repeated.

Instead of replying, it attacked.

It moved with unbelievable speed. One moment, she was staring at the vaguely human shape, she only had time to register that it was moving before everything went black. It flung itself on her, enveloping her, trying to suffocate her as it had so many of Brenda’s relatives, after it had destroyed their lives, driven away everything they loved, and made their sleeping moments fraught with nightmares and their waking moments a misery. It managed to cover her completely; and although it couldn’t actually force its way down her throat past her shields, it did cut off her air, along with her senses.

But she’d been ready for that. And now that she knew the lightning was on her side, so to speak—

She fought down the immediate rush of I can’t breathe! and concentrated. There was a spell, if she could keep from panicking to remember it…

Then the words formed in her mind, and the signs and sigils, and she dropped the shovel, got the hilt of her sacred knife, her atheme, in her hand. She pulled it from the sheathe at her side, thrust it towards the heavens, and shouted—as best she could, with fading breath and against the muffling of the thing that had wrapped itself around her—the words to call the lightning to her.

White.

It wasn’t a flash so much as a moment of searing whiteness. A moment when everything stopped and she stood there, blinded, transfixed, like a bug on a pin of power, at the heart of the blaze of a light that was so much more than light, with more light beating down on her.

And then—

Then she was standing in the rain with her right hand stretched up, knife pointing at the sky, her clothing steaming.

The miasma was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean it was gone. Just temporarily dispersed. She had maybe ten minutes before it was back.

Better dig faster.

So she did. She dug as fast as she could, uncovering the coffin, then prying up the lid. It should have rotted away by now, but it hadn’t. It hadn’t, because the revenant needed the coffin and what was in it to survive and keep killing. And with every kill it made, it got stronger, so it could keep the coffin and its contents intact, to keep killing. It was a vicious cycle and one that needed to end now, or it would not end until the last person with Macreedy DNA in his or her body died. “Unto the Seventh Generation?” That was a joke. This thing wanted to live in the only way it knew how. And it wasn’t going to abide by any term-date. Once it got done with Macreedy descendants, well, it might find some other targets. That was how these old curses went—if they didn’t get weaker with age, and this one hadn’t, the thing behind the curse had found the way to a mad immortality.

The miasma began to form again as she levered the coffin lid up, and it was no surprise to her to see the intact body of Taylor Marcham inside, the marks of the rope that hung him still on his neck.

The rain stopped, cut off abruptly. The graveyard went deathly still.

The miasma poured into the grave in a flood of fury and hate.

Poured into the body.

Taylor Marcham sat up in his coffin, face contorting in a spasm of rage.

Di jumped on his chest, driving him back down.

The body struggled insanely for a moment, clawing at her boots, shredding her jeans with its fingernails. But she was a lot stronger than she looked, she had leverage, and although the century-old body was intact, it was fragile. It broke several fingers on her boots and tried to buck her off, unsuccessfully, while she beat at it with the shovel. Abruptly it went limp.

Di wasn’t fooled. She drove the shovel down, decapitating the corpse. In the moment of relief that gave her, she groped in the bag for the jar of salt, the jar of blessed water, and the rope from the noose that had hung him—which, bizarrely enough, she had found in the little wreck of a county museum down the road. Shouting the words of banishment and blessing, she doused the body head to toe in the salt, then the holy water; she dropped the rope on the body’s chest as the miasma surged out of the neck-cavity and went for her again.

This time she didn’t need the lightning. “Fiat lux!” she screamed, and another burst of white-hot light erupted from her, fueled by whatever that power was that inhabited her.

The miasma, again in vaguely human shape, was flung from her, breaking up a bit as it was repelled. She took that opportunity to get out of the grave, snatching up the jars of lighter fluid from the bag, and flinging them into the grave so that they broke and splattered all over the body.

Then she called fire.

“Fiat ignis!” she screamed, pointing at that thing in the grave.

The body went up in a sheet of flame all out of proportion to the amount of lighter fluid she’d thrown in there.

There was the worst scream she had ever heard in her life, and a final bolt of lightning cracked out of the sky and slammed into the grave, flinging her backwards on her ass in the mud, blinding her again. Her nose filled with the smell of ozone and she blacked out for a moment.

When she came to, there was rain in her face, mud in her ears, the smell of burned bones and burned hair in her nose, and the graveyard was empty of menace, dark clouds, or anything else.

And she had to explain to the nurse at the emergency room why she had flash-burns on her face.

Fortunately she didn’t have to explain to Memaw.

#

She came to herself with a start, staring at the dying flames in the fireplace.

Crap. Tomorrow is the first day of classes.

Well, if old memories are the worst the universe is going to throw at me tonight, I guess I’m going to be all right here.

#

Phooey. I am cream-crackered. She dropped her books on the top of the bookcase next to the desk, and stared at the little kitchenette with a frown. Lunch. Must make lunch. And my brain is full. Finally, after a moment of indecision, she went to the stove to start hot water for tea. Tea and a PB&J was about all her brain was up to for the moment. She had known intellectually that college was going to be hard, but she hadn’t really grasped that it was going to mean a racing-start right out of the gate.

Speaking of racing starts… This building was full of other students, and there was no elevator. The staircase was at the far end of the hall, but she could still hear people running up or down it to get to or from their apartments for lunch. She could see now why the House for the off-campus types was a good idea. It had a library, a lounge, and a cafeteria…and when winter came in earnest, parking there between classes instead of going home was beginning to sound like a good idea.

As she made the sandwich, she cocked her head to the side and listened to the sounds from her upstairs neighbors. There was only one floor above hers—she’d really wanted a studio on the fourth floor, to prevent the inevitable herd-of-elephants above her head, late-night party noise, and bathroom leaks, but there weren’t any available. So far, though, they hadn’t been too bad. Or else the floors were thicker than she thought. They mostly didn’t seem to use the floor as a trampoline, or a football field.

They were men, though, so their footfalls weren’t exactly light.

Their names were Itzaac Meyer and Emory Sung, and she imagined that mealtime up there probably got pretty interesting. Probably American, maybe New York deli versus—well, she didn’t know Emory’s exact nationality, “Sung” could be Korean, Chinese…probably not Japanese. Kimchee versus sauerkraut.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they both like the same food. Hell for all I know they both like Italian.

Wait, they were men. They wouldn’t cook. Would they?

The kettle whistled and she made herself tea. She amused herself with those thoughts while she ate the sandwich in neat little bites while working her way through the Moral Reasoning course homework. That was one of the Core courses that all Harvard students were required to take, and she had figured she would get it out of the way as quickly as possible. She hadn’t quite known what to expect from the title “Moral Reasoning” until she’d seen that it wasn’t just one course, but that she could choose one from among several courses. She’d opted for “Human Rights, a Philosophical Introduction.” It seemed like a good solid choice, something she wasn’t likely to flounder in.

That was her first course of the morning. Then came one of the Historical Study track courses, another Core Requirement: those assumed that you had a general foundation in history and elaborated on what they figured you knew. They were supposed to give you insight into how major issues had developed. She’d picked the course on Japan. She didn’t know very much about Japan, and now would be a good time to work on that before she had to deal with Japanese Folklore in class, and nasty Japanese critters on the street.

I need to take a martial arts course.

Judo? Probably. Nasty critters were sometimes very physical in nature. It would be nice if she could ever find someone who actually believed they existed to teach her, but that was like hoping for a money tree to sprout.

The third course that rounded out her morning was a science class, also in the Core Curriculum. She’d picked a basic Archeology course, which looked pretty interesting, and once she got into it, looked as if it was going to be more physical than mental. She needed something that wasn’t going to make her brain explode before lunch. And who knew? She might be able to use some of it at some point. Guardians kicked around a lot of strange things.

The afternoon was her first Folklore course, followed by nothing. Which would give her most of the afternoon for homework, and most of the evening for writing. Assuming that—

There was a knock on the door, which made her jump and spill her tea a little. She sighed at the inevitability of the interruption, swiped at the tea with her napkin and got up. Well, maybe it would be the boys upstairs. Maybe one of them would be nice. Even handsome. Maybe he’d ask her out.

Maybe pigs will grow wings.

She opened the door, eyeballed the man standing there, half-illuminated by the staircase window at the end of the hall, and immediately knew it was not the boys from upstairs.

It was a cop. She knew cops, how they stood, dressed, moved. She could spot a cop at five hundred yards, and be right every time. Even if this one was in his civvies, she knew cops, and this was one.

“Miss Tregarde?” the cop asked. “Diana Tregarde?” He had a nice voice, a calm tenor. He did not flash a badge. So whatever he was here for, either he was trying to find out something without being official, or he really was off-duty. In either case, he knew her name, and obviously where she lived—and why did he know these things? She didn’t have a car to be illegally parked, she was just another Harvard student. Her suspicion meter went up a couple of notches.

She nodded, but did not step aside. Nor invite him in. Until she knew why he was here, she wouldn’t, either. Not just because she was paranoid—you couldn’t live in Nixon’s USA and not be paranoid—but also because she wanted no part of some fishing expedition. She didn’t know anyone here in Cambridge, and she hadn’t had any real friends to speak of back home, but that didn’t mean that a cop wouldn’t try to make something out of nothing.

And he knew her name.

For all she knew, that flashback last night had been a warning, telling her that something out of the past was going to come calling and make trouble for her.

The hallway was very, very quiet. So she wasn’t the only one around here who had spotted him for what he was. Lovely.

The cop smiled, looking embarrassed. “I know you don’t know me, but Lavinia Thurgood sent me. I asked her for a little help with something, and she told me you were in town and that you were better suited to what I need than she is. She says you’re pretty good at exposing phony tea-leaf readers and Gypsys.”

Well that was a bolt out of the blue. She blinked at him. “How do you know Lavinia?” she asked cautiously.

“She’s a cousin,” he said, and coughed. “I, ah, ask her for help sometimes when I get the kind of…you know…weird stuff. Stuff no one can explain….” His voice trailed off.

That made sense, since Lavinia was another Guardian. One of the handful that Di had actually talked to. In fact, one of the first ones she had talked to, who had given her what she called “Arcanum 101,” walking her through the basics of what it meant to be a Guardian.

She nodded. “I understand.” For all that Lavinia knew her Ritual High Magic, like no one else Di knew, she was not good with real-world stuff.

Oh phonies. That had been Memaw’s pet bugaboo.

This had nothing to do with Guardians, and everything to do with the fact that Memaw had debunked many a “trance medium” in her time. She took a very dim view of people exploiting other people and giving magic a bad name. Real magic, that is. Her pet peeve was the kind of charlatan who would use stage magic in to convince people in some of the new witchcraft circles—people who didn’t know any better—that he was the Real Deal, then take everything he could get from them.

There was one guy Memaw really, really, hated. He’d been all over the country—he’d pull his song and dance number on some “New Pagan” group, milk them blind, seduce anything with boobs, then do a vanishing act. Then he’d turn up in some old lady’s Tea and Séances Spiritualist group, and do the same there, minus the sleeping with women part. And then he’d vanish and turn up at some Bible-thumping church begging to be Saved from Satanism and use the same stage magic malarkey to convince them that he was really being besieged by demons and into their pockets (and sometimes their beds). She still hadn’t managed to nail him when she died, but not for lack of trying.

Memaw had taught Di everything she knew about debunking.

“First you probably should tell me the problem.” She still didn’t let him in, even though he was kind of cute. Actually really cute. Black hair, faintly tan, young Ricardo Montalban. Black Irish, obviously—the many-times-removed descendant of some of the Spanish sailors from the Armada wrecked off the shores of Ireland back in the fifteenth century. Very, very cute. Still.

He stood in the hallway, looking uncomfortable, but did not ask to come in. He shoved his hands deeply into the pockets of his blue Members Only jacket, and shifted his weight to one foot. “I’m one of a bunch of guys on that kidnapping case,” he said, slowly.

He didn’t have to say more than that, because you would have had to have been living in a cave not to have heard about it. She drew in her breath in a hiss. The kidnapping had been everywhere, and it was making even the Harvard students nervous, though they were way, way outside the age of the victim.

Melanie Fitzhugh was eight years old; she wasn’t a particularly pretty little girl, she was actually fairly ordinary, but that just made it all the worse. Every parent with a child could imagine the same thing happening. She hand her mother had been shopping, and the little girl had gotten permission to play in a designated play area in the mall. She knew not to leave, but when her mother came back, she was gone. Other children at the play area told Mrs. Fitzhugh that a “policeman” had come to take her to her mother and that she had gone away with him. There had been no other adults at the play area at the time, but it was supposed to be a very safe place, surrounded by stores, the perfect place to leave a responsible child for a few minutes.

Unless, of course, there was a predator in the area who was very, very clever. One who knew exactly the kind of middle-class child to approach that would trust someone dressed like a policeman.

Still, what did that have to do with debunking psychics?

“I’d like to know who I’m talking with and why before this goes any further,” Di began.

“I’m not asking you to help with the case,” the cop said, and finally produced his badge and ID, flushing. “Well, not directly. This would be strictly off the books.” He handed her the badge and ID to look over, and shifted his weight to the other foot. “If you can, I’d like you to give me a hand with Chris, Melanie’s mother. Some creep of a so-called ‘psychic’ got to Chris Fitzhugh and now we can’t get anything out of her but ‘Tamara says’ this and ‘Tamara says’ that and ‘Did you look into Tamara’s leads yet’?”

“Has she been asking for money?” Diana asked, cautiously examining the ID. Joe O’Brian. Well it looked genuine; she handed it back and he shoved it in his pocket again. “The psychic, I mean. That’s what they usually want.”

“No, which is why we can’t get Bunko on it.” O’Brian did look incredibly frustrated. “You’d think she was one of God’s own Saints, to hear Chris rave about her. I just…” He shook his head. “It’s making us crazy.”

She refrained from commenting.

“Her husband, too. This Tamara is the only person that Chris is listening to, she’s not even talking to him anymore.” Joe ran his hand through his hair, disturbing it from its “regulation” comb. “If you can just prove she’s a phony, I mean prove it in a way that Chris can’t help but believe—”

Di shook her head. “I don’t know. You’re talking about someone who is desperate, and this psychic is giving her answers of the sort she wants to hear. That’s like arguing with someone’s religion. I mean, using only empirical evidence I can prove that half the saints in the Catholic calendar either never existed or were nothing like the legends—”

Joe flushed again. Ha. With a name like O’Brian, I figured he was Catholic.

“—but that means nothing to what people believe, and belief is impossible to budge until people are ready, on their own, to hear the facts. Sometimes that never happens.” It certainly had never happened with Memaw’s bete noir.

He grimaced. “Would you at least check this chick out? See what she’s all about? Find out if she’s working an angle so we can shove a stick in her spokes?”

Clearly he was not going to go away until she said “yes.” He had that look of “man on a mission.”

Okay. What can it hurt? Maybe I can find out an angle that Bunko can get her on.

“I’ll go have a look at her, but no promises,” Di replied. “And she had better be on a bus line, because I have no car. And it won’t be right away. I have classes.”

It was quite clear that Joe wasn’t paying any attention to anything but the “yes” part. The tightness in his face eased, as if he had gotten some terrible burden off his back. “Here’s her card; Chris shoves these at us by the handful,” he said, sounding immensely relieved. “And here’s mine. And thank you—”

“Don’t thank me until I come up with something,” she replied, a little sourly. She let him babble on for a little more, then he finally got the hint and said goodbye. She closed the door feeling…odd.

Very tingly, antsy, oh-crap-something-is-up sort of odd. Storm-about-to-break odd.

Oh, hell. Guardian odd.

She looked at the psychic’s card, but this time whispered the mage-sight spell and waited as her vision of the world settled into a new configuration.

The card changed in mage-sight, and it was not a good change. It was haloed in a very, very nasty black aura, with greenish edges.

She looked at the card O’Brian had given her.

Oh double hell. To mage-sight, the card was overlaid with a red crusader’s cross. It was a legitimate Call.

“I do not need this,” she said aloud, with exasperation, and put her back against the door, staring up at the painted tin of the ceiling.

She had hoped that everything would change in college. She’d never had friends in high school. She’d never had a date, much less a boyfriend. How could she? Before sixteen, she’d still been a practicing witch, in a small town, living off on the outskirts with her grandmother who was known to be strange. And she had the feeling that even if she’d still been with her parents, kids would have sensed something “off” about her.

Until she was thirteen, for instance, she’d never really cared for popular music, preferring folk, jazz, and classical. She’d more or less gotten into popular stuff because of Simon and Garfunkle, Donovan, the Turtles, the Irish Rovers, and then she had discovered Cream and from there she had ventured into the realms familiar to her peers. But of course, her tastes were still eclectic, and even though 1968 was the height of the hippie revolution, with Woodstock a mere year away, in this small town, most of the adults voted straight Republican ticket. She was still the weird girl with the weird grandmother, the one that had been called “Wednesday Addams,” the one that made people feel just a little uneasy when they looked at her.

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, not even a hint of a boyfriend. No best friend. No slumber parties, no invitations to “study,” which really meant to get together in the bedroom, giggle about boys, listen to records, learn to dance by watching what the cool kids on the dance shows were doing on TV. No one hated her, but no one liked her either.

And she was too smart. The smartest kid in the school, as it turned out, which was one reason why she was at Harvard. No guys dated a brainiac, even when she bloomed at sixteen, and had a great figure and the kind of long hair you saw in shampoo commercials.

And not when all her clothing except the jeans and leotards she wore after school was handmade. Never mind it looked a thousand times better, and hipper, than the stuff you got at Sears; it was handmade, everyone knew her grandmother had run it up on her ancient treadle sewing machine.

And…there was the fact that once in a while she slipped, and said things that scared people. Things she shouldn’t have known, things that people didn’t really want anyone knowing.

Nope. No dates for Di.

At least they didn’t egg the house on Halloween. They just kept their distance, whispered sometimes when they saw her. They never treated her badly, but they never treated her as if they thought she was one of them. She might just as well have been a Star Trek alien, blue, with antennae.

Heck, some of them probably thought she was a Vulcan in disguise.

Then after sixteen, well, there was never any time, even if a boy actually had approached her. Between school, learning everything she could about magic, and keeping herself and others alive, all her waking hours were pretty much accounted for.

Isn’t a Guardian supposed to have a life? She’d wondered about that. More than once, because the other Guardians she got a chance to talk to all said that things were getting a lot more dangerous than they had been before. There were more incidents, more things waking up, more things breaking through.

She’d asked Memaw about that, and Memaw had a theory about why so much weirdness was cropping up. She was sure it was the hippies, and truth to tell, Di was inclined to agree with her. Where once you had to go into the bad parts of big cities to find an occult store, get the mailing address of one that would ship books to you, or find libraries with really obscure collections, now occult stores were cropping up all over. The stores were in college towns mostly, but there were science fiction stores in bigger cities that would get you occult books if you knew what you wanted, and you could always mail order most of them directly from the companies that were printing them. And the hippies were buying them by the bucketload. Even the book that phony, Anton LaVey, wrote was getting snatched up, despite the fact that the former carnie was not the wholesale advocate of free love that they thought he was.

So this was the heart of Memaw’s theory. That all the weirdness and problems cropping up was a result of all these people dabbling in what used to be the provenance of a few who were trained and knew what they were doing. They were supplying the raw energy for things that had been dormant to wake up and start making trouble. According to Memaw, the same thing had happened back after World War One, and the Spiritualists had been tilting tables, trying to get hold of loved ones on the Other Side. And again after the Civil War. And to be honest, Di couldn’t see anything wrong with this theory.

Especially now, when she was looking at the card of a supposed “psychic” that was radiating Bad Juju.

Bloody hell.

Was this just a case of some manipulative bitch who happened to be dabbling in real magic seeing a hole to exploit? Even though she hadn’t asked for money yet, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be; she could just be working a longer game than O’Brian was going to spot.

Or was it something more than that?

Or was it just a coincidence that this psychic was also into Bad Things as well as going after a woman at her most vulnerable?

Well, Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation was probably the best one, and this “Tamara” was probably just taking advantage of a grieving and frightened mother, and the nasty magic she was using had nothing to do with the missing child. She’d probably been a phony psychic for a lot longer than she’d been a dabbler in the black arts.

Actually come to think of it, she might be getting paid—of a sort. Black magic worked best when you had a source of negative energy, the sort produced by anger, hate, fear, grief. Chris Fitzhugh would have plenty of that, and Tamara could just be using her as a spiritual “battery.”

If that was the case, well, it could be difficult to pry her off. Difficult, but not impossible; the trick would be doing so without spooking Chris Fitzhugh in the process.

Dammit. It didn’t matter. The Call was genuine, the real thing. As a Guardian, she didn’t have a choice, and too bad if her regular life had to suffer for it.

As a Guardian…

She closed her eyes for a moment and sagged against the door.

She’d never had a “normal” childhood. She’d been on the front lines of a nasty war for a fourth of her life. She knew exactly how Vietnam vets felt.

Tired.

She could give it up. Guardians had, and she wasn’t a sixteen-year-old steeped in comic-book superheroism anymore. She had a life now, and she needed to think about how she was going to keep herself fed. Guardians didn’t get a salary; there was no “Guardian Company.”

Face it, as long as you’re a Guardian, your life is never going to be your own.

She opened her eyes again, and stood there for a long moment, cards in her hand, her eyes going from the cards to her books, back and forth. She could quit. She would never taste the headiness that was Guardian magic again, but she could quit. Right now.

Lavinia could take this on. Right?

Well…not really.

Well, someone could. Someone else. There had to be someone else with the skill set needed to pick this thing apart and see Tamara separated from her prey.

Maybe.

She took a long, deep breath. She could hear the line from “Spiderman” echoing in her head, only it was spoken by Memaw.

Dammit. No, she had the power, she had the skill set, and she had the responsibility and she wasn’t going to turn her back on people that needed her now.

#

“Tamara Tarasava” was, indeed, on the bus line. And for once, Di realized that it was not so bad to have an aura that made people uneasy around her. She had no problem getting a seat, and not even the crazy-eyed guy in worn-out fatigues wanted to sit next to her. She stared out the window and watched as the streets they passed became progressively rougher and grimmer. Di realized immediately that she should have assumed it would be on a bus route from the start. After all, most clients that a “psychic” sees are not really the upscale sort. Most of them, if they owned a car, couldn’t afford to drive it much. And that was a big “if.”

She got out at the stop and walked the three blocks to the address listed on the card. This wasn’t Skid Row but it was clearly a lower blue collar neighborhood; there were signs of children everywhere, and the children themselves, playing on front stoops, having a stickball game in the street, a bunch clustered around a basketball hoop nailed to the side of a house. Sniffing the air told her a lot; soul food, corned beef, hot dogs and beans, all in the same block. And beer. Cans had piled up in the gutter. People here apparently liked to party, but their preferred brand was “whatever is cheap.”

As soon as she got to her goal, she recognized something interesting.

It wasn’t the fact that it was a typical two-story house in a run-down neighborhood; most “psychics” worked out of their houses. It wasn’t that there were no signs advertising “Psychic Readings” in the window. Lots of fortune-tellers didn’t advertise in their windows. It was still against the law in some places, even if the law had better things to do than bust a five-dollar fortune-teller.

It was that the area around the house was preternaturally quiet. No kids playing in the street or the yards. The houses on either side were shabby, but very quiet, and seemed to lean away from the one in the center.

Di loitered in an inconspicuous spot for a while, watching the place, putting up a little “avoidance” aura to keep people from noticing her. She checked out the visible windows, while a cold breeze snuck in around her collar. The upstairs ones were all tightly curtained, but with sheers of the sort that would hide anyone who was looking out while giving the person inside a reasonably good view. The ones downstairs were also tightly curtained in red velvet. So when Joe O’Brian had said Gypsy, he was being literal, or at least, that was what this woman was passing herself off as. Frankly, Di doubted that she was actually Romany.

Then she watched the people on the street as they neared the house, and what she saw was even more interesting. Everyone hurried past the house. Some even crossed the street twice to avoid it, or cast an uneasy glance or two at it as they did so. A cat, however, merely sauntered past. Mind, that didn’t mean much. For all their reputation as “psychic” animals, cats were completely indifferent to anything that didn’t directly threaten them.

So, Tamara has all the neighbors spooked, literally. And I don’t think it’s because any of them are sensitive. There couldn’t be that many people here who are even marginally psychic. So if it’s not outré, it’s mundane. Something she’s done has got them scared to confront her in any way at all.

Given all of that…no way she was going to walk through that door right now. Mage-sight showed her nothing except some of that same black-green aura that surrounded Tamara’s card also enveloped the house. Di picked up no clues about what the woman was doing, whether it was garden-variety black magic, or just the residue of someone using her powers to exploit people. Mage-sight generally didn’t tell Di anything about the strength of magic if it wasn’t being actively used. So she could walk in there and find someone who had picked up The Satanic Bible and discovered she really did have the Gift and was gleefully using it to get whatever she could, or she could find someone who was more than that. Potentially, much more than that.

If it was someone that was more than that, without better preparation and shielding, Di was going to stand out like a neon sign. Possibly she would even if she shielded. Guardian magic could be damned inconvenient that way. It often decided to advertise, and the sign it put out often read “GOOD EATS” to things that liked to snack on magicians.

Dammit.

The best thing to do would be to get more information from that cop. And the best way to do that was not to invite him into her apartment. Oh hell no. That was not going to happen. No one was getting past her threshold right now; she still didn’t know if this was one of the cops that occasionally harassed Lavinia, and he’d just used her name to get himself in Di’s door. So Joe O’Brian was not a welcome visitor in her humble little home

Right-oh, then. Make an appointment to meet him at the station.

For which she needed a phone, and she was not going to use a pay phone in this neighborhood. She had a healthy sense of where it was and was not safe for a woman to stand around on the street, preoccupied with talking. So, back home, phone the number on the card…or rather, hope that she had the line free, because she had a party line, and then call the number on the card…

Oh jeez. Another complication. Hope that no one is listening in, accidentally or on purpose, because the very last thing I need is for my neighbors to decide I am a narc, an informant, or both…

All right, set up a spell to tell her if someone on the party line had picked up.

I hate party lines. But it was all you could get at short notice in that building. And it was much cheaper than a private line.

Do the magic. Then phone Joe O’Brian. Complications. Always complications. Bloody hell.

Set up an appointment that wasn’t going to conflict with her classes. Unless she could get him to give her more information over the phone, which wasn’t likely. Maybe phone Lavinia and ask her about O’Brian, see if he really was her cousin, or if Di was being set up.

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and headed for the bus stop. There went an hour wasted that she could have used on studying. And it was getting colder.

The ride back mirrored the ride out; the only person that wanted to sit by her was a tired-looking woman who had some sort of uniform on under her shapeless coat. Probably a maid, and she was so happy to have a seat on the bus that she would happily have sat next to a wino who drooled.

Maybe Di was a little more sensitive than usual, but as she approached her building, still brooding about Tamara, she began to get prickles on the back of her neck. Not bad prickles as such, but there was no doubt that someone in the building was fooling around with magic, and inexpertly. Fantastic. Just what she needed. Another do-it-yourself-wizard trying to vibrate his way to Middle Earth. By the time she was in her apartment, the prickles had localized.

To the apartment directly above hers.

She groaned. Great. Just great. I have a budding wannabe Gandalf living upstairs. Just shoot me now.

She waited apprehensively for some sign that this was yet another mess she as a Guardian was supposed to take care of, and finally breathed a sigh of relief when no such sign came. So she made sure all the wards were up on her space, and strengthened them until she couldn’t feel the tingle anymore.

There. That should keep what he was doing from interfering in what she was going to do.

Well, first things first. She set up a little ritual circle around the phone, using birthday-cake candles, since they came in the right size and colors for such a small bit of magic. First, the chalk circle—inside her personal wards, this was more of a size-limiter than meant to serve as protection. She used a simple piece of blessed chalk and a string as she muttered the circle-spell under her breath. Then she set up the candles and evoked each Element in its proper space—yellow in the north for Earth, blue in the east for Air, red in the south for Fire, and green in the west for Water. With all that in place, she was ready to work the actual spell. This was all personal; there would be no Guardian help here. Which meant that she needed to be as economical as possible.

“As economical as possible” meant minimal use of energy, and minimal use of energy meant that she needed to set this up for exactly what she needed, and no more. Now, it would be possible to control whoever touched the phones on this party line while she was on, and give them the illusion that they were hearing nothing but static when they picked it up. But that would take a more energy than she was proposing to use, and on top of that, it might have repercussions. If someone picked up the line and wanted to make a phone call and only heard static, that might send him or her going from door to door to find out who had left the phone off the hook. And while that might not be a big deal, it just might, because it might lead someone else to find out she was a witch. And that someone else might not be the friendliest of sorts.

So the best, safest, “cheapest”, and simplest thing was just to set something up to tell her when someone was listening. It was a spell that witches had been using for hundreds of years, and it was pretty obvious why a witch would want a spell like that. When you were doing something that was going to get you hung, burned at the stake, or otherwise shuffled off the mortal coil, it was a good idea to have a way to tell when someone was snooping around.

After casting wards around the phone, she touched it, infusing it with a bit of power, and with her finger, drew the sigil against eavesdropping on the middle of the rotary dial—and actually felt the energy leaving her, making her feel a little bit more drained than she had the moment before.

Well, at least it worked.

She picked up the handset and dialed Lavinia’s number first, watching the sigil, or rather, where the sigil was. Only if there was a third party on the line would it flare into life.

It rang twice, and someone picked it up; the moment the person’s hand touched that phone, Diana knew it was Lavinia. Just as Lavinia knew it was her.

“Good heavens, Diana, you are a suspicious little creature. The sigil against eavesdropping indeed.” On the other end of the line, Lavinia chuckled. “And of course you are calling about young Joe, because you cannot believe I would have sent him to you. If you had bothered to call me when you first moved here I would have told you all about him.” Oh, dear. A social faux pas. The Queen was Not Amused.

Di rolled her eyes. “And you are entirely too credulous for a Guardian,” she said crossly. “For one thing, I’m on a party line. And for another, you should know better by now. For all I knew this Joe O’Brian found your name on a casebook and—”

“And how would he have gotten your address then, if I hadn’t given it to him?” Lavinia replied, archly. “Really. You hippies—”

Diana suppressed the urge to make a rude noise. “I am not a hippy. But I’m considering becoming one, if only to irritate you.” She settled down into the chair next to the phone, and prepared to take notes. “Tell me about O’Brian.”

“He’s not really a cousin, he’s the son of a very dear friend who always called me her cousin. He’s a good boy. And more to the point, dear, he has had his share of cases he couldn’t explain, and he’s quite ready to Believe.” The way Lavinia said the last word, you could hear the capitalization. “I have worked with him a time or two when I got the Call. Mind you, I never, ever let him see just what we were getting into, but he certainly knew that there were things that I took care of that he would never want to put down on his reports.”

Well if he’d gotten even a glimpse of what most Guardians got into, his hair would be white. “All right so far. You absolutely vouch for him?” She didn’t need to capitalize anything. “And did you get—”

“Yes. And Yes. This is something that needs to be Handled, and not by me.” Unspoken was the “by you.” Di felt a headache coming on. Lavinia was a hell of a Guardian and the fact that she was still going strong at 50 and not dead was a mark of that. But her Royal attitude sometimes left something to be desired.

Lavinia’s tone softened. “Diana, dear, I don’t have the right skills. Your grandmother taught you how to debunk, yes, but this may be a situation where more than mere defensive magic may be needed, or even magic of the combative sort. Or as you have put it in the past, it is going to require mundane defenses—and perhaps, offenses as well. I know very well you have, and know how to use, firearms. I suggest that you get whatever you brought with you out and make certain it is cleaned and ready for use.”

Di got cold chills then, not just at Lavinia’s words, but at her tone. “I will,” she said slowly. “Is this just a premonition, or have you gotten some sort of warning?”

Lavinia paused for a moment. She was probably trying to get a feel for the situation, which was what Di would have done in her shoes. Di let her take her time; this wasn’t something you wanted to rush. “For now, just a premonition. Now call Joe, and tell him whatever it is you’ve seen or need to know. The two of you should take it from there.”

Di knew a dismissal when she heard one. The Audience with Her Majesty was over. “Thank you, Lavinia,” she said, “Goodbye for now then.”

“Goodbye, dear.” Di waited for Lavinia to hang up, before doing so herself. One retreated from the Royal Presence properly, after all.

Then she dialed the number on the card Joe O’Brian had left with her. With a much more businesslike manner, she arranged to meet him in the library of Dudley House between classes. That should be an appropriately neutral spot. She still wasn’t going to let him in her apartment. Not yet, anyway.

Then she sat back with a sigh and erased the sigil on the phone, extinguished the candles in the right order, and wiped out the chalk circle.

Which left her with—

The tingle from upstairs upstairs, currently blocked by her general wards, but she knew it was still there.

Which wasn’t going to give her any peace for studying unless she looked into it. It was just going to nag at her until she found out which of the boys it was, how deeply into magic he was, and as much detail as she could get without either of them thinking she was either a busybody or a nutcase.

Curses.

But if she was going to go charging up there, she had better do it with a peace-offering in hand. People were more likely to think well of you if you came bearing gifts.

One came immediately to mind, too, because if one of those guys had ambitions to be the next Merlin, her candles would be especially welcome.

She delved into the cupboard and came up with two of the plain white “smells good” unconsecrated ones, a couple of fat pillars that would fit very nicely in a bowl. She stuck her keys in her pocket, made sure the door locked behind her while she juggled one in the crook of her elbow, then made her way down the hall, up the stairs and back down the hall. The halls in this place were virtually identical, floor to floor. She wasn’t sure what they had looked like in their hay-day, but at some point in the fifties they’d gotten a renovation and hadn’t been changed since. Linoleum floor, old tin ceiling with tiny, inadequate single-bulb lights, white painted walls, green-painted doors.

She could see now why there were studio apartments on the third floor and none to be had on the fourth. There simply weren’t any studio apartments at all on this floor. Well, there was no accounting for what people in the early 1900s had wanted in their apartment buildings. Maybe the view, the sunlight, and the breeze made up for the inconvenience of four flights of stairs.

Or—she tried not to grind her teeth a little, as she spotted an elevator door. One which did not have a corresponding door on the third floor. So that was how it was. If you paid the higher rent, you got to ride in style instead of schlepping up four flights of stairs.

On the other hand, do you really want to trust your safety to an elevator old enough to be your great-grandpa?

Maybe not.

So, Emory and Itzaak were in 4C. And there it was. 4C in old brass on the door. She knocked on it.

It opened immediately, and the face that topped the tie-dyed t-shirt could only belong to Emory, who was an exceedingly good looking Asian man, taller than she was, with slightly shaggy hair. And it appeared he had been expecting someone besides her, because the first words out of his mouth were “Em! You’re ear—” Then he blinked. “Oh. Sorry. I was expecting someone else.”

And it was pretty obvious that the “someone else” was not male. Not from the sheepish grin on his face.

Dammit. He has a girlfriend. He also was not the would-be magician. There were absolutely no “vibes” of any sort coming from him.

“Sorry, I’m your downstairs neighbor, Diana—”

“Oh geez—” He ran a hand through his hair, looking distressed. “Are we making too much noise? Is it the stereo? Is it us? I keep telling ’Zaak—”

She had to laugh, and interrupted him. “No, no, not at all! I just thought I should introduce myself so if I do come pounding on your door, you’ll at least know who I am. And I brought—”

By now the door was standing wide open, and she could see right into the apartment. And she was jealous, because it was huge. A living room twice the size of her entire place, a big kitchen, and it looked like at least two bedrooms and the bath between. A shaggy, curly head popped out of one of the doors, pretty much confirming her guess as she held out her peace-offering. “—candles—” she said.

The round little face beneath the head lit up with a smile. “Candles! That’s exactly what I needed for my ritual!”

It was Di’s turn to blink, her mouth almost falling open in astonishment that someone would just come out and say something like that in front of a stranger.

And her vibe-o-meter started to edge over into the red. It wasn’t exactly going wild, but there was no doubt. Itzaak was the one trying to be a wizard.

Hoo boy…

Emory rolled his eyes. “’Zaak, how many times have I told you that you need to censor that mouth of yours before it gets you into trouble? What if this was a Jehovah’s Witness?”

“Then I’d say I was glad our virgin sacrifice got here.” Itzaak’s grin was infectious, though Emory still looked a bit annoyed. The rest of him came out of the bedroom; he looked a bit like Paul Simon, only with black hair instead of red. He approached with his hand held straight out. “Hi! I’m Zaak, Comparative Religion. This is Emory, Applied Mathematics. He thinks I’m crazy.”

She transferred the candles to Emory and shook the hand. Oh yes. Up to his neck in magic, and gods help me, he has the gift for it too. “Di Tregarde. Folklore and Mythology. Why does he think you’re crazy?”

“Because I don’t believe in all that woowoo crap,” Emory said with a touch of irritation, dumping the candles into Zaak’s hands the minute Di let go, and shaking her hand himself. “This is all just a phase. He does this every year; we’re juniors. Last year it was Buddhism. God only knows what it will be Senior Year.” He rolled his eyes again. “Probably the Flat Earth Society.”

“Aw, come on, Emory, you know I’m onto something this time!” Zaak didn’t seem at all put out by Emory’s attitude. “Did I, or did I not, manage to magic my way into that closed class?”

“Well…you got in. It might have been a lot of reasons—”

“And I’m going out with Angela Harris!” The grin got larger and more triumphant.

“Now that, I must admit, is close to a miracle.” Emory shook his head.

“It wasn’t a miracle, it was magic! The stuff works!” Zaak crowed triumphantly. “You just watch, my man, it won’t be long before you’re begging me to help you!”

At that moment the elevator door opened and they all turned to see who it was. From the happy look on Emory’s face it was exactly who he was hoping to see. Zaak reached for Di’s arm and pulled her inside the apartment.

“Come on in, sit down,” he urged. “Are these candles handmade?”

“My grandmother and I made them,” she said, “Beeswax and bayberry. We got the wax from a honey farm.”

“Better and better! Do you believe in magic? Not stage magic, that’s Marshal’s thing, I mean the real stuff.” He waved at one of the somewhat battered armchairs and perched eagerly on the corner of the equally battered sofa, putting the candles down on the door on two stacks of cinder-blocks that was serving as a coffee table. They might have a lot of room, but her furniture was better. She really didn’t want to know what the Indian bedspreads that covered the chairs and couch hid.

At least there weren’t any busted springs poking her.

“Who’s Marshal?” she asked. Someone who knew stage magic? That could be incredibly useful about now…

“Friend of ours, he’ll be over tonight probably. So, do you?”

She shrugged. Okay. Don’t lie. It’s never a good idea for a mage to lie, especially not around another mage…

“There’s a lot of things you just can’t explain by scientific means,” she temporized. “I’m studying folklore, and you have to wonder where some of that stuff came from, you know? Every culture has some form of ghost, every culture has some form of shapeshifter, or vampire. Every culture has good and bad magicians. So, I guess—”

She didn’t even need to go further. With a potential believer in front of him, Zaak was off and running. All she had to do was listen and make vague noises once in a while. It was too easy, and (not for the first time) she was just a little appalled at how naïve these self-taught occultists were. She wasn’t going to have to pry, Zaak was practically pouring everything she wanted to know right into her lap. And if she’d been the sort of creature he was likely to run into, a magician that got his power by draining it out of others, who got what he wanted by controlling them, she could have made him hers within an hour.

It was quite possible that the only thing that had saved him so far was the simple fact that there were relatively few of that sort of predator…and so very many willing victims.

As she had feared, he had picked up a handful of fairly dubious books, and now he was convinced he had The Answer. It wasn’t that the books in question were bad, it was that like him, they were incredibly naïve. These “new Druids” and “modern pagans” wanted to believe that everything “out there” was just waiting to welcome you into a joyful realm of harmony, peace and love.

Well, they were right about one thing. There was a great deal “out there” that was waiting to welcome you. And not just the predatory human types either. The universe was not a friendly place, all sweetness and light, and ready to welcome the budding would-be magician with open arms. It was, in fact, like a tough neighborhood, filled with things that would be only too happy to mug you and take your metaphysical wallet. If you were lucky. If you weren’t so lucky, they would beat you up and leave you bleeding in the metaphysical gutter. If you were really unlucky…

As it happened, she could do something about that. And there was no question of should she, because as sure as rain on your picnic, anything bad that Zaak got into was going to end up involving her no matter what she did. Just on the basis of pure practicality, all morality aside, it was going to spill over on her just due to physical proximity. And as for morality? Well, you didn’t let a five-year-old toddle out onto the highway, now did you? Not if you were the sort of witch that Diana and Memaw had been before Di became a Guardian.

The big question was how she was going to handle this. Her mind was going a million miles a second, trying to juggle it. The obvious was to take him aside and play the Great and Powerful Oz with him and make him her student. It wasn’t as if she didn’t actually have the ability. And it wasn’t as if she couldn’t do things that right now he could only dream about, and show him too. The drawback was that she had no idea how good or bad an apprentice he would be. He could turn out to be nothing but trouble.

I don’t need an apprentice. I don’t want an apprentice. I could use some help, but right now, this kid is just more trouble, not more help.

Okay, then maybe the subtle approach. He didn’t get into Harvard by being stupid. So perhaps the proper approach was to remind him that, like mundane physics, there was a physics of the metaphysical as well, and every action did have a reaction, every deed a consequence.

“I’m not saying I totally buy into this,” she replied, when she could get a word in. “But aren’t you mostly talking about influencing the way that people think? I mean I assume that magic has to mostly work in small ways, and that would be the most logical, right? So what you’re doing now, that would be going and changing how people react to what you want. You are changing their minds for them.”

That brought him to a screeching halt. “Uh,” he said after a moment.

“Well, doesn’t it make sense? The class you got into, and the girl that you got to go out with you…if magic did that, wasn’t it by changing what they were thinking?” she persisted.

“I…guess…” By this point, Emory and his girlfriend had stopped sucking each others’s faces, and had closed the door, and both of them were actually listening.

“And is that ethical? I mean, this is Harvard and they make us take courses about that sort of thing. So shouldn’t you apply that Moral Reasoning class you took? They make us take it for a reason, you know, it’s not just to bore us to death. Is it ethical to go into someone’s head without their permission and monkey around in there?” Zaak looked as if she had just smacked him in the face with a fish, as if none of this had even occurred to him. Probably because it hadn’t. After all, when the toddler gorges on candy, he’s not thinking about the possible stomach-ache to follow. Over his shoulder, Emory was grinning.

“She’s got you there, Zaak,” said Emory’s girlfriend, who hadn’t yet been introduced. She took care of that herself. “Hi, I’m Em.”

“Di.” She smiled, then turned back to Zaak. “And did you really think it through? I mean, there are consequences to changing things. What if someone who needed the course more than you got bumped? What if what you did caused someone to fail or get sick so the course slot opened? And what if you’re preventing the guy this girl is really meant to be with from ever meeting her because you’ve got her going out with you instead?” Not that she believed that anyone was meant to be with anyone else—but she would bet that he did.

Zaak was really looking ill now. “I—uh—”

“Isn’t the law of magic supposed to be ‘do what you will as long as you harm no one?’ I don’t think that means ‘trampling all over someone else’s life is okay.’” She raised her eyebrow in a Spock-like gesture she had perfected over years of practicing it in the mirror. It was usually pretty effective.

It was this time too.

“You seem to know a lot about this,” Zaak said weakly.

“My Field of Concentration is Folklore and Myth,” she pointed out. “I mean, come on.”

She might have said something more, except that there was a knock at the door, and when Emory answered it, the newcomer turned out to be none other than Marshal, the guy whose “thing” was stage magic.

Zaak was only too pleased to get the heat taken off of himself and quickly introduced her to Marshal, and vice versa.

Marshal was not as good-looking as Emory, but he was attractive in a mismatched-features, cute-like-a-hound-dog way. He also had a sense of self-confidence about him, not cocky, just that he wasn’t naïve and he generally knew what he was doing. Emory had that sense too, but not to the extent that Marshal did.

“I should probably go,” she began, shoving herself out of the couch, which was no easy feat since it had tried to swallow her the moment she got off the edge of it.

“Hey, stick around, you’re the first person to talk sense at Zaak since he started in on this magic kick,” Emory replied cheerfully. “If you haven’t got anything you have to do tonight, that is.”

“Or someone you need to meet,” Marshal added, looking at her with thinly disguised hope.

Marshal was someone else she was beginning to think she needed to talk to. “Well, the rest of my reading eventually, but…”

“Great! Let me get the beers.” She managed to conceal a wince. Of course. These were college guys. College guys and beer went together like peanut butter and jelly. Where there was one, there would be the other.

She didn’t much like beer, but on the other hand, a little lubrication might help her interrogation. And since she didn’t care if her beer was warm, she could make one last quite a long time.

And at least they aren’t breaking out the roach clips and the rolling papers. If there was one thing that a practicing magician shouldn’t mess with, or at least, not without a lot of preparation and safeguards, it was drugs. Of any kind. A magician was all about control, and when you smoked, or dropped…your control went right out the window.

And that was bad, because when your control went, sometimes your protections did too.

Which was a little like being a drunk white guy, staggering into Bed-Stuy, wearing a Dixie-flag t-shirt with twenty dollar bills hanging out of his pockets. You were bound to attract attention, and most of it wouldn’t be friendly.

Not a good idea. Oh no.

Emory came back with both hands full of open bottles; she took hers, and settled in for the next few hours as the couch slowly pulled her into its saggy depths.

It didn’t take much to get Marshal going, either. He loved stage magic. And like his idol Houdini, he loved debunking, or at least the idea of it. He didn’t bad-mouth Zaak’s magic, though; he confined his ire to the “mediums” and “psychic readers.”

After two beers she was able to steer him right in the direction she wanted, which was to tell her the stage-magician’s perspective on how they did what they did. “The best and least harmful of ‘em are no more than good psychologists,” he said with a shrug. “They tell you what you’d get from a good shrink, but they wrap it up in a much more palatable package, palatable for people that don’t believe in psychiatrists, that is. Like, if the good advice is coming from the Great Beyond, they’re more likely to follow than if it came from the guy on the chair next to the couch.”

“Especially if you believe in the Great Beyond and not in shrinks,” Di replied dryly. She shifted, and held on tight to the bottle. There was nowhere safe to put it down, so eventually she was keeping it clamped between her knees.

“Exactly. Not to put down religion! But—” He shrugged. “I go along with Ben Franklin. ‘The Lord helps those that help themselves.’ You know? And even when it’s done with good intentions, how ethical is it to toy with peoples’ feelings about the ones they’ve lost? How ethical is it to give them ‘false contact?’ I think it’s immoral, personally. Even Houdini said that he had to stop proving to people that mediums were phoney by working the same tricks, then revealing he wasn’t a medium and showing them the trick. He saw that they’d have such hope, such happiness to think they were in contact with a loved one before he pulled the reveal. And even though they learned not to get tricked by mediums again, fooling with their feelings like that was a crime.”

“So what about the bad mediums?” Em asked the question that Di wanted to, and Di silently blessed her for it. “I mean, what is it that they do that has you so riled up about them? If someone wants to just waste money getting their palms read, is that so bad?”

Marshal’s homely face darkened. “I’d like to string them up by their thumbs,” he growled. “They’re parasites. They’re worse than—than—Nixon! Worse than the Mafia. They give people hope, and rob them blind, and it’s all a lie.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Look, there’s all kinds of scams. Some mediums, they research you, or get someone to do it for them, then they use stage magic to make you think that they’re actually bringing in ghosts. These days, they’ll have microphone pickups in the waiting rooms, have a stooge in there pretending to be another client who’s there to dig for information. Sometimes they’ll make you leave everything in the waiting room and the stooge will go through pockets of coats and purses. Then, wow, you get in the dark room, and there’s stuff floating around, there’s noises, you might even see the dead person! Right, what you’re seeing is a projection of a photocopy of the personal photo they got out of your wallet. And the rest, that’s all sleight of hand, escape tricks, even some of the kinds of special effects you see on stage shows.”

He spent a lot of time then, explaining how some of that stage magic worked—levitation, misdirection, table-tapping and tilting, the “medium” managing to get free of the restraints put on him. In theory, Di knew how these things worked, but not the mechanics, and it was fascinating. To be honest, it made her admire stage magicians even more. So far as she was concerned, knowing how something was done didn’t bother her—in fact, knowing how a trick was worked was only going to increase her appreciation of the skill involved in making it “invisible.”

“Houdini spent a big chunk of his time showing these crooks up for what they were and you’d think by now no one would believe in them but they’re worse than ever. Like cockroaches. You stomp on one, but there’s a zillion under the cabinets.”

He finished off his beer with a frown. Di prompted him into describing some of the ways that Houdini and others had caught the phonies, and took a lot of mental notes.

“Those are the old-style mediums. A lot of times these days the mediums and psychics just do away with the stage-magic—hell, most of ’em don’t have the skills to pull it off anyway—and just concentrate on hot readings.”

“What’s a hot reading?” Zaak asked.

“Just what I told you earlier. They get their information way in advance. Most of these people talk to each other, okay? They swap files. It’s to their advantage to cooperate with each other. So you can get tired of going to Madame Zuzu, and decide you want to visit Psychic Clarabell instead, well, Clarabell is going to call up Zuzu, offer to split the take, and get Zuzu’s file on you, and when you walk in thinking she knows nothing about you, bingo! What amazing revelations! How could she know these things?” He snorted. “Then Clarabell ponies over part of what she got to your old psychic, and you think she’s got a better connection than Zuzu.”

“I don’t get why you’re so mad at these people though,” Em put in. “I mean, aren’t they offering a kind of comfort? Like a priest would?”

“Well even at their best they’re still offering comfort for money,” Marshal pointed out, frowning. “And it’s dishonest comfort. They don’t want to comfort you, they just want your money. If you believe in all that psychic energy stuff, you know, and karma? They’re giving you something that’s counterfeit when it all comes down to it. It’s not real, and when people find out it’s not real, they are just shattered. At their worst, well…then there are the outright crooks. Besides having pickpockets and thieves going through your pockets for information, they have pickpockets and thieves getting a couple checks out of your checkbook to forge, credit card numbers, lifting your cash. And then, they get into the ‘curse’ scams.”

This was the sort of thing Di knew about, and she watched the others’ jaws drop as Marshal told them about the “cursed money” fraud, the “psychic surgeons,” and all of the ways people were convinced that they needed to be rid of non-existent “demonic influences.” These were what she and Memaw had debunked, but it was all new to Marshal’s friends.

“Hey, look, let me just show you something. Gimme a couple of seconds in your fridge, okay? Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.” With Emory’s wave of a “go-ahead,” Marshall rummaged around a bit and came back. “Zaak, you’re going to be my patient. Pull up your shirt, okay?”

Embarrassed, Zaak did so, revealing a bit of a belly. Marshal kneeded at it for a minute with his fingers, then suddenly seemed to plunge them halfway into Zaak’s stomach! And even more astonishing, a few seconds later, Marshal pulled out—

A meatball…

“I’m telling you, Zaak, you really have to start chewing your food before you swallow it,” he deadpanned, as all four of them laughed, even Zaak.

“That was all sleight of hand. If I had time to prepare, I’d have some blood in the tip of a surgical glove, or even just some cotton soaked in blood that I palmed along with what I was going to remove. Usually that’s a piece of liver. Liver looks generic and really icky, and it’s not hard to believe it’s a tumor. And this is how I did it.” He took the meatball and hid it in the palm of his hand. He kneaded the surface of the couch, creating a crease. This time though, he did the “plunge” in slow motion, and without concealing what he was doing with his other hand, so they could see all he did was fold his fingers up into his palm, then “withdraw them” with the meatball in them.

He did a “slam-dunk” with the poor abused meatball into the trash. “These guys are the worst. They make you think you’re possessed by demons. They take your money until you don’t have any more. You’re scared to death. And you just might actually be sick, with cancer or something, and by the time you find it out, you’ve got no money and you’re probably so far gone you die.”

Evidently this was the first time Marshal had ever expanded on his particular hobby-horse, and soon even Zaak was leaning forward to listen, his embarrassment mostly forgotten—except for a flush, once or twice, that suggested to Di that he’d fallen for one of those tricks.

Eventually, though, the reading assignments overrode her intense interest in Marshal’s stories. She finished the last of her beer, put the bottle down on the table—the good thing about using a door for a table was that no one cared about bottle-rings—and stood up.

“I really need to get,” she said regretfully. “College is a lot more intense than I thought it would be. And this is my dime I’m dropping here, so I’m not into pouring it down the drain…”

“The voice of conscience,” Marshal said, with a laugh. “Tell you what, I’ll walk you to the stair. I’m 4A, right by the stairwell.”

She clasped her hands under her chin. “Oh thank you, gallant sir!” she said in a breathless voice. “How ever will I repay you?”

“Don’t answer that, Marshal,” Em laughed. “I’ll kick your ass.”

Marshal put his hand over his heart. “I swear, I had no intention of—”

“Yeah right.” Emory snorted. “Get outa here. See you tomorrow.”

But as soon as the apartment door closed behind them, Marshal lost every semblance of even mild intoxication, and turned to her with an intense look on his face. “All right, you wanted to know waaaaaay too much about psychic debunking. What’s going on?”

Di hesitated for a very long time. Should she trust this guy she’d just met?

On the other hand, nothing about any of these four had set internal alarm bells going off. And he knew more than she did by a good mile. Intuition sez—

Before she could answer, Marshal persisted, a worried look on his face. “Someone you know getting scammed? Friend? Relative? Seriously, if I can help—you know, use the powers only for good?”

That decided her. “Come on down to my place,” she said. “This is going to take a while.”

#

The next day, she wasn’t alone when she was waiting for Joe O’Brian; Marshal was with her.

The library seemed to be frozen somewhere in the ’50s, with hard-upholstered chairs and sofas with spindly little Swedish-modern wooden legs, covered in beige fabric and what might have been leather. They clashed with the Victorian architecture, but then, Dudley house was, well…not the typical Harvard House. As the painting of Karl Marx downstairs, and the fact that for years in the ’60s the SDS had a mimeograph machine in one of the bathrooms might have told you.

Joe eyed Marshal, but didn’t say anything as Di introduced them. When they all sat down, however, he leaned forward over his knees. “I thought I was just meeting you, Miss Tregarde—”

“Marshal’s a stage magician,” Di interrupted him. “I don’t know enough about the situation yet to know what questions to ask, but he knows about the sorts of stage-magic deceptions that this Tamara might be using, so I thought I’d bring him along to help us both out.”

She gestured to Marshal, then sat back and listened as the two men slowly pooled their knowledge. Finally Marshal shook his head. “All right. This one just might beat me. Partly. I can’t see immediately either her angle, or where she’s getting her information; she isn’t extorting money from the mom, and she’s not getting publicity out of this.”

“If she’s really smart,” Di said slowly, “She’s got a confederate. Someone that can go around, maybe posing as a cop or a reporter, and get at least some of the detail about Melanie from schoolmates or playmates or their parents. I’d bet on posing as a reporter, everyone wants to get his name in the paper, not everyone is comfortable talking to a cop.”

Marshal nodded. “But what’s her angle? That’s the question.” He drummed his fingers on the table beside him. “Thinking aloud here…I’d think she was just throwing random stuff out as these ‘leads,’ figuring to get some publicity if one of them actually pans out, except that from what you’re telling me, the leads are anything but random. Most of them are typically vague, but they don’t seem random, and they do seem to mean something to the mom. Nothing to cops, probably, but either mom is convinced that there’s a hidden message there, or your phony is just doing a combination of hot and cold reading and coming up with things off the cuff that mom zeros in on.”

“Yeah, I don’t get it either.” Joe tried to get comfortable in the hard chair, failed, and tried another position. “That’s what’s so frustrating.”

“So go at it another way,” Di said, finally. “Follow up on these so-called ‘leads.’ Prove they’re dead-ends.”

Joe shook his head vehemently. “We’d look like a bunch of idiots, the papers would have a field day if they found out we were spending men on a psychic’s tips. And we can’t waste the time—”

“Not you,” Di interrupted. “Me. And Marshal, if he wants to.”

“I’m in,” Marshal said instantly. “I’ve done some searching for lost kids, so I kind of know what to look for and if we find anything that looks right or wrong, we’ll stop and phone you. And no one is going to know we’re associated with the cops. Come on! A couple of Harvard kids? Helping the cops? Never happen. Right? If we actually find a lead, which I very much doubt, if the press asks you can call us ‘private investigators for the family.’”

Joe sucked on his lower lip for a moment, then gave in. He got out his notepad and case-file, and made a copy of the list of “leads” that Tamara had so far pressed on Chris Fitzhugh; Di made a second copy and gave it to Marshal. The lanky junior glanced at his watch, and shrugged. “I’ve got a lab,” he said. “I’ll catch you back at the apartment, Di. We’ll figure out what we can do with this, if anything.”

Only when he was well gone, did Joe turn back to Diana. “How much does he know?” the cop asked. “About—“” he wiggled his fingers in a way probably intended to convey “the supernatural.”

“Nothing,” Di said. “But Lavinia said you—”

The silence hung between them for a moment, interrupted only by the sizzle of a fluorescent overhead bulb going out somewhere in the library stacks. Then Joe sighed.

“Cops don’t like things they can’t explain,” he said, sourly. “So when they find things they can’t explain, they make a little division of people that don’t quite fit, people they can’t actually fire, and they shove the things they don’t want to think about at those people. And they hope that if the people in question can’t make those things go away, they will at least be—or become—people that no one will listen to. In my case—I had the misfortune to be the guy on the beat that solved a murder because a ghost told him who did it.”

“A ghost.” Di nodded. “I can see where that would be a problem.”

“It was worse because the ghost told me where to find the murder weapon, which was not what the lab said it would be, and which was right in plain sight in the home of someone who wasn’t a suspect.” Joe grimaced. “So I got put in that little department, and we are all considered borderline loonies. And if we actually aren’t borderline loonies to begin with, we sure are after we see a few cases. This means we get to be the ones that deal with psychics. Such a treat.”

“I’ll do my best for you,” Di promised. “It’s entirely possible if we treat these things as serious, and investigate them completely, and give you all of that, this Tamara will dry up and blow away. I—” She hesitated, then plunged on. “However, there’s one angle to this that I didn’t want to go into in front of Marshal. I went by the address you gave me for her, and I have to tell you, without even seeing this woman, she gave me the creeps. And I can think of something she might be getting from Chris Fitzhugh that would be as good as money.”

Joe’s brow furrowed. “Which is?”

“Despair. Some people…they can feed off that. It’s a powerful emotion—and feeding off it is more common than you might think. You ever know anyone who would start an argument for no good reason, get people so angry they’re about ready to kill something, then cut the argument off with some sort of apology and walk away looking like they just had a turkey dinner?” She waited. She was pretty certain that Joe had had an experience like that. Maybe more than one. And when she saw the light of reluctant agreement in his eyes, she continued. “And I’ll bet at least one person you’ve seen pull that particular stunt leaves everyone that was involved in the argument feeling exhausted.”

Joe nodded, slowly.

“Despair’s not as common an emotion to feed off, but it’s just as strong. If that’s the case, Tamara won’t care that her leads turn out to be thing. From her point of view, even better will be to raise Chris Fitzhugh’s hopes, then dash them again. That might be why she keeps bringing Chris these so-called leads, to keep her on that emotional rollercoaster.” Di pulled a strand of her ponytail over her shoulder and wrapped it around her finger. “If that’s the case, she’ll keep glued to Chris Fitzhugh for as long as she can milk what she wants.”

Joe made a face of disgust. “Great. Just great. So—”

“So if that’s the case, the solution is to get the poor woman so tranked up she isn’t a tasty meal anymore,” Di said bluntly. “If I were you, I’d call in the family physician. Talk her husband into it. Hell, get her checked into the hospital for a while. It shouldn’t be hard, and it’s not as if she’s any use to the case at this point.”

Joe groaned a little, but nodded. “All right. Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

#

It seemed that Di’s hunch was right. There was not one damned useful thing in any of those so-called ‘leads,’ and between them, she and what she was beginning to think of as her “gang” managed to run down every possible interpretation and investigate it. She had the whole group in on it now, even Zaak, and despite Zaak’s sometimes credulous nature, he had a good mind. He came up with possible interpretations even she hadn’t thought of.

A lot of them were just ridiculous. This was Cambridge, and “look by flowing water” not only could mean the river, it could mean sewers, gutters, even water-pipes. There was absolutely nothing to be done with anything that vague, but the Gang sat down and made a list of every possible interpretation, and every possible location in the city that it fit, in exacting detail, just to prove how ridiculous it was. As Marshal pointed out, it wasn’t always going to be necessary to do an actual search. It was only necessary to prove how impossible a search would be.

But what Di hadn’t counted on was how personally involved all four of them were getting, including Zaak. Particularly Zaak. There were times when an outsider would have thought that Zaak was Melanie’s older brother, not a complete stranger. Unlike Marshal, who was still focused on debunking the leech, Zaak was getting more and more impatient with them for not doing something about Melanie. He kept trying to talk them all into doing a “ritual of finding,” though how he expected to get any real results when he had nothing personal from the missing girl, Di had no idea. Zach didn’t always think rationally.

In retrospect, Di should have expected him to try something she would really rather he wouldn’t. But hindsight is always perfect, and it wasn’t as if she had—yet—appointed herself as his mentor.

#

When the time came for all of them to get together for the evening, Zaak was nowhere to be seen, even though Di had come bearing the gift of pasta.

“He said he’s tired.” Emory shrugged. “I think he’s more frustrated than tired. He wants to actually work on the kidnapping case, and that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing, right?”

Di nodded, and dumped cheese on her spaghetti. “Joe’s made that pretty clear. The department doesn’t even want him doing anything serious about this case, much less a bunch of meddling kids.”

“Ro-roh, Raggy,” said Marshal in a Scooby-Do voice.

Honestly, she didn’t much blame Zaak. This had her frustrated too. Was there more to Tamara than just being a psychic vampire? She’d gone out to that address three times now—though she had never yet dared to go in—and still had not come up with anything more conclusive than this woman is bad news.

She thought she knew what Zaak thought. He had said several times that he thought Tamara was behind the kidnapping. And yes, it was certainly possible, but why? She didn’t have a motive, not even as a psychic vampire; there were plenty of other desperate people in this city without taking the risk of kidnapping a little girl. And how had she done it? Had she used a confederate? The little girl had been taken by a cop; the other children were unshakable on that point. If she had a confederate, by now the cops should have gotten some clues to that, because surely they were as suspicious of Tamara as Zaak was. And you would think, with all of the publicity about the case, a confederate might be getting nervous.

It just seemed unnecessarily complicated. Occam’s Razor.

Zaak wasn’t sulking, he was in his room attempting something magical; the energies in there were certainly building up, and that was the likeliest. She figured he was trying a ritual to find the little girl, probably using her photo from the newspapers and a dowsing rod or a pendulum. He wasn’t nearly trained and focused enough to pull that off, and it was going to be about as effective as walking the streets and calling her name. In fact, that was a pretty good analogy. She debated interrupting him, but it didn’t seem all that important and it would make him feel effective.

Joe had another so-called “lead” for them to check out; this one was a bit more specific, and it was going to require some good maps and possibly some legwork. Supposedly Tamara had “seen” a vision of Melanie in a room, crying and screaming; the room had a tall, narrow window that faced south, and she had heard a train in her “vision.” She was sure it was in Cambridge proper, not outside it. So they had to check neighborhoods near enough to train tracks to hear trains that had late Victorian buildings with tall, narrow windows. This was, of course, a lot.

However, buildings where someone would ignore a strange child crying were a lot fewer, especially now. One of the other teams that the cops had out there was literally investigating every single report of someone hearing a child crying. Nothing had turned up, of course, except for a lot of exasperated parents and children delighted that they’d gotten so much attention for a tantrum, but this did narrow down things considerably, not the least because they could cross off their list every building that team had visited.

Tamara might have overstepped herself this time. She was adamant that the location was in Cambridge—not Boston, not outside the Cambridge city limits—and there actually were not as many places that qualified as someone might have thought.

And of those that qualified? Well, as they worked their way across the map, crosschecking with the police reports, they were discovering that up to ninety percent of that ground had already been covered. What hadn’t been covered was beginning to look like a wash. The buildings were the wrong sort, industrial, windowless, too modern, or the windows were the wrong shape.

Di gathered up the plates and took them to the sink, and was just turning back to say as much when—

Every internal alarm she had shrilled at her. A fraction of a second later, an icy wind literally tore through the apartment.

Bloody hell!

The lights all flickered and dimmed. It wasn’t an illusion, either, the wind was there, it picked up the papers and sent them all over the living-room. Di’s breath streamed away from her in a mist of ice-crystals, it was suddenly that cold in the room.

Em shrieked, Emory reacted as any good boyfriend would by trying to shelter her, Marshal just looked frantically around, trying to find a source for the wind and failing.

Reflexively, Di called up mage-sight and immediately put up her shields, because the place was literally full of malevolent energies, tearing around the place, razor-edged dark things—

They’re hunting—but for what—

She didn’t have a chance to think further, as in the next instant, they all arrowed straight through the door of Zaak’s room. The wind died. The temperature dropped further.

And the door burst open.

Any other time, she might have laughed, for Zaak was wearing what he probably fondly hoped were ritual robes, and in fact looked like nothing so much as an old fashioned granny nightgown. His hair was standing straight out too, giving him the look of someone trying to ape an afro and not doing too well.

But she was not going to laugh. Because there was something in Zaak now. And it was not nice, and definitely not happy.

It glanced wildly around the room, and its eyes lit first on Di.

It couldn’t have liked what it saw, because it immediately switched its gaze to Em. With a horrible laugh, Zaak leaped at the girl before Emory could react, and tore her out of Emory’s arms. Em opened her mouth to scream, and so did Zaak, though his scream was silent—

And a thick column of oily black smoke laced with that same malevolent energy poured out of Zaak’s mouth and into Em’s.

Zaak staggered back, as Em straightened, looked around, and laughed, harshly, angrily.

But it was like nothing what should have come out of Em’s mouth.

It was a male laugh, a horrible baritone.

And with that, Di’s memories solidified from what the hell is this? to oh hell no—

Di knew what it was. Or likely what it was. She’d been studying these things long before she ever came to Harvard, and an interest in old horror movies had led her to this particular menace years before she was ever a Guardian. It hadn’t been easy, doing that research in a small town, but Memaw had access to the libraries of a lot of friends, and many of them had books going back a long, long way.

This was a dybbuk, a possessing spirit, a kind of angry ghost, laden with hate and guilt, that walked the earth until it could find someone to posses. Whatever Zaak had been doing in his room had called it, given it an opening, but dybbuks never permanently possessed anyone of the same sex, and this one was male. With only two females in the room to choose from, one of them protected, it had leapt to Em. And it was a good thing that Di had obsessively researched them back when she first discovered they were real and not the figment of some movie writer.

Sulfur! I need sulfur!

She also needed to keep it here, and there was one good way to do that quickly; the means were even close at hand.

She turned and snatched up the familiar blue-and-white cardboard container of table salt from its place next to the stove. With a fast gabble of the words of consecration, she blessed the stuff and before the dybbuk could move to run out the door—and from there, gods only knew where it was going to go—she jumped over the couch and poured a line of blessed salt across the threshold. And then, in quick succession, she poured more lines across the windowsills, the fireplace, and the doors into the bedrooms. Only then did she turn, heart pounding, to see that there was no danger that it was going to escape at just that moment.

The dybbuk had no intention of leaving just yet, because it was chasing Zaak. And in Em’s hand, it had the knife she’d been using to cut up the garlic bread. Whatever Zaak or Zaak’s family had done to tick this particular spirit off, it clearly wanted Zaak’s head on a platter.

“Grab her!” Di shouted. Zaak was just shrieking. And Em was screaming furiously in that low baritone and waving the knife. But the dybbuk was not used to Em’s body yet, so it wasn’t so much chasing Zaak as stumbling after him like a movie zombie. So far Zaak was able to keep well out of reach.

She dashed into Zaak’s room, hoping that she was going to find what she needed in there. Behind her, she heard Emory and Marshal shouting Em’s name, and the thing that was in Em roaring furiously. She blinked in the dim light, trying to get her eyes to adjust to only candles.

Zaak dashed into the room and slammed the door, panting and leaning on it. “Light!” she snapped, and he flipped on the light switch reflexively. The overhead bulb, like all the overhead lights in this old building, was dim and very yellow, but at least now she could see. More to the point, this was Zaak’s room and now he was in it.

“I need sulfur, a shofar, a Torah scroll, candles. Now!” she snapped. He blinked at her for a moment, then began scrambling in a cupboard by the door. He had as much space in his bedroom as she had in her whole studio, and most of it was empty. The bed was up against the wall, and the cleared floor held his “ritual space.” She looked at his ritual circle and gritted her teeth. Idiot. Candles, little brazier with charcoal and wormwood on top of it, circle drawn in paint on a piece of oilcloth, candles at the cardinal corners, and she recognized the glyphs chalked in around the periphery. A Kabalistic summoning circle and he didn’t even specify what for!

Now, a Jewish exorcist would have to confine the spirit, interrogate the dybbuk, then persuade it to leave by sheer force of argument.

She wouldn’t. Which was just as well, she wasn’t going to have three or four days to talk the thing out.

She’d have to fight it. And probably its friends.

Zaak turned back to her with his hands full of the stuff she had asked for. She snatched the shofar out of his hands, said “Find the Ten Commandments and make up a cherem. I want this thing to know we are not going to play nice! When I say, read the Commandments and tell the thing we are not going to accept it and help it find a home.” She dumped the sulfur on the little circle of insta-start charcoal in the brazier and picked the brazier up by its wooden handle. She wished she had her own atheme with her, but there was a sword on the wall that would do. She pulled it down, put the brazier right by the door so the sulfur smoke would billow out into the room and grabbed the chalk off his dresser. Then as Zaak shrieked “What are you doing?” she yanked the door open and jumped out into the living room.

As she had hoped, although the dybbuk was strong, Emory and Marshal together had gotten Em pinned to the floor and gotten the knife away from her. Just as she managed to fling them both off, Di shouldered them aside, and blew the shofar, the sulfur smoke blowing out into the living room behind her. Damn good thing that she had a great embrasure; there were a lot of ceremonies that involved blowing hornlike objects. Doing this cold, what she produced was kind of a blat rather than a trumpet sound, but it was no worse than trying to blow a Hawaiian conch shell or a Celtic lur.

The dybbuk then froze for a moment, giving her enough time to enclose it in a chalk circle. “Light two candles and start reading!” she shouted at Zaak, and jumped over the chalk line to face it with the sword.

She couldn’t understand a word, of course. She didn’t know Hebrew. But the dybbuk did, and Em’s face contorted in a hideous snarl, going so flushed and inflamed she looked like a demon.

“I know you can understand me,” Di said sternly, holding the sword up in the proper guard position for a broadsword. “Out! Because I can, and I will, force you out.”

“You are no rabbi,” the spirit growled.

“I don’t have to be.” They stared at each other across the blade of the sword, and Di hoped, hoped, hoped that one of the three would realize that she knew exactly what she was doing, and ask….

And bless him, it was Zaak who stopped reading the Torah for a moment and sobbed, “This is all my fault! Di, you gotta help her!”

Ah, Bingo.

There it was, the magic words, or the variation on them. “Please help me.” She felt the hidden door inside her fly wide open, and Guardian power flood into her. When she was not actually Called—that was how she got the mojo. When someone had gotten in over his head and begged for help.

Immediately she felt warmer, as if she was encased in a second protective skin of invisible armor. Which, in fact, she was.

“Zaak! Start invoking Holy Names!” Didn’t matter that she wasn’t Jewish. Zaak was, and so was the dybbuk. She was just the Champion, and that was all she needed to be. He supplied the religious fuel, she supplied the muscle.

Zaak started gabbling out more Hebrew, and when he got to “Michae-el” the sword went up in a blaze of fire.

Nice.

“Out!” she repeated.

“You will not use that blade on your friend.” It laughed at her.

“I don’t have to. Oh ye who are condemned to wander, because of countless sins against your fellow man, oh unclean spirit, oh evil one, behold! Ye may not withstand the sound of the horn!”

Again, she blew the shofar, but this time the creature paled and shrank back, because it wasn’t just the feeble blat of an amateur, this was the clarion call to arms that had taken down the walls of Jericho.

She took the horn from her lips and faced the creature again. “Zaak, more reading. El Melekh and va-ya’avor.” She had no idea what she had just asked for, but there were things moving through her now that knew a lot more than she did, and the words popped into her head. Zaak began to read in a steadier voice. The thing straightened.

“I will not be cast out!” it snarled. “Behold, my name is Legion!”

With that, it opened Em’s mouth, and a torrent of malevolent things in shapes of black smoke poured out of her. Em dropped to the floor, out cold, leaving Di trapped in the circle with not only the dybbuk, but as she had suspected, all his friends.

But the dybbuks, even if they had encountered exorcists before, had never met up with a Guardian. And they had only dealt with old scholars who seldom saw anything more lethal than a carving knife wielded against a chicken.

She actually knew how to use that sword.

She danced with it, in a pattern that owed as much to katana practice as to classical western sword-play. The horde of shapes, confined by the circle, whirled around her, trying to reach her through her armor and past the lethal edge of the blade. But every time one tried, she sliced—there was a sizzle and a line of fire, and the shape was gone. She wasn’t quite sure how many there had been in the first place, but soon enough there were only a dozen.

Then six.

Then three.

And at last, only the one, which hung in the air, as if stunned.

Now if this had been a movie, Di would have paused and said something significant, and the thing would have pulled some unexpected ability out of its ectoplasmic ass.

But it wasn’t a movie and she didn’t give it a microsecond to recover.

The sword flashed across the intervening space and cut the last of the dybbuks in two. It vanished with a shriek that practically deafened her, and a stink worse than the sulfur that was still fuming.

And all the power drained out of her at once, as the “door” slammed shut once again.

She dropped to one knee, exhausted, and Emory ran to Em, who was starting to sit up.

“Somebody open a window,” she panted. “And put out that damn fire before we all choke.”

#

Nobody said a word for a good long time, while the sulfur fumes cleared out and Di stumbled to a chair, laying the sword down next to it as she slumped into it. Emory helped Em to the bathroom, and a moment later, Di heard the shower running. Yeah, after that, the poor girl probably needed a shower. And then a second one to get the sulfur stink out of her hair.

Marshal, his eyes as big as dinner plates, brought her a beer, then sat down as far from her as he could get, staring at her. Zaak, on the other hand, sat down as close to her as he could get, though he looked at his hands, not her.

Emory came back with more beers, set them down, and sat down himself. He was the one that finally broke the silence.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked, quietly.

Di slumped a little further into the chair and gave Zaak the Evil Glare. “Gandalf there decided that normal detective work wasn’t getting anywhere. Didn’t you, Zaak? What did you try to call? Specifically?”

“I thought—” Zaak gulped. “I thought I’d get a wandering spirit. Cause, y’know, something like that could go hunting for Melanie—”

“Give me strength,” she groaned. “Haven’t you ever paid any attention to your own peoples’ folklore?”

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Uh. No?” he said weakly.

She sat up and pointed at him. “When you do an unspecified summoning, you moron, you get what your heritage calls. And in your case, the only ‘wandering spirits’ that the Jews have, specifically the European Jews, are the dybbuks. And the dybbuks are not particularly cooperative. What did I tell you about thinking things through?”

“I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice.

“Well, you had better be sorry. Because the unrestful, unconsecrated spirit of one of your people found himself in the body of a tref-eating shikse, and he was not even remotely happy about that. Which is why he attempted to cleave a pound out of your butt with that knife.” She slumped back down again. “Add to that fact that he and his friends are out and about for reason—said reason being that they were such pieces of crap on earth that they can’t rest, and I trust you get the picture. I’d smack you like your old granny, but I’m too tired.”

“Wait—” said Emory. “Spirit? Dybbuk? I’m lost.”

It was going to be a long night.

Thank gods it’s Friday.

#

Be careful what you ask for. You might get it. Di had wanted a little help, now she had more than she had bargained for. Or she would, when the quartet got over being rattled and started to realize that they had just witnessed some real magic, that there was such a thing, and that—because face it, they were all under twenty-five and three of them were laboring under a burden of testosterone—it had been pretty damn exciting.

Which meant that she wasn’t going to be able to pry them off of her now. Zaak was already a Believer, and the only thing more fanatic than a Believer who gets evidence that he’s right, it’s a Skeptic who gets evidence that the Believers are right. Ah, the zeal of the newly converted.

Which of course was what Emory and Marshal were. Maybe Em too; for the moment she was being really quiet, and seeing as she was the one whose skin the dybbuk had tried to take over, Di didn’t blame her.

When she had finally made all of the explanations she cared to, she stumbled down to her own apartment to sleep like a stone, leaving them to clean up the mess. Fortunately there wasn’t much of it.

She hoped it was Zaak who had to clean up the lion’s share.

She really, really wanted to go straight to bed, but she knew that if she did, she’d wake up with the whole apartment smelling like sulfur, and it would be weeks before it aired out of the bed-curtains. So she stood under the shower until she started to go all pruney, and then fell into bed with her hair still wrapped in a towel.

She must have been so tired she didn’t even move all night, because she woke up in the same position she’d fallen asleep in.

All righty, then. She lay there, just enjoying the fact that she didn’t have to get up for class, and that although she hurt, it was that good sort of after-workout hurt. She’d done a good job last night.

Trouble was, it hadn’t been what she’d been Called to do.

And in the cold light of morning, she knew what she had to do. She had to stop dancing around the situation and stop trying to pretend that there wasn’t some sort of magical connection here.

She had to visit Tamara.

With a groan that was strictly internal, she pried herself out of bed and went hunting for some clothes. When you had hair as long as she did, it took some time to brush it out after you’d washed it, and that gave her time to think.

Occam’s Razor.

What if the simplest solution was the one that Zaak kept insisting on? What if Tamara was tangled up in the kidnapping? Forget that it had been a male “cop” that took the kid, forget that it didn’t look like there was any connection between Tamara and the Fitzhughs…forget hunting for motives. Motives were what you figured out after you caught the bad guy. Concentrate on finding the kid and catching the bad guy. They were getting it all backwards.

So she put her hair up in a bun, grabbed a bagel-and-tomato for breakfast, went out and did her shopping at the Star Mart. She was pretty sure that Tamara wasn’t an early riser; most of her kind weren’t.

Once everything was put away, she took some of her purchases and made a little “special” preparation. A picnic-shaker of salt got consecrated, and so did the water that went into a tiny spray bottle meant for perfume. Then she made a little corsage out of the oak, ash and thorn leaves she’d picked up off the street on the way home and pinned it to the shoulder of her poncho. An iron horse-shoe nail went in one pocket, and a silver crucifix in the other.

She called the number on Tamara’s card. She wanted to do this before the Scooby-Do team woke up and decided to go with her.

The woman who answered had a curiously deep and throaty voice, and an accent that was as phony as a plastic flower. Yes, there might be a booking free. She would go and see if someone had canceled. Why, Susan was in luck, one of Tamara’s clients had phoned in to say she was ill. If she hurried, she could just make the appointment. “And bring a fresh egg,” she added.

Well, well. I know where this is going.

The first, the very first thing she did was to write out exactly where she was going. She distributed the copies around the apartment. There was one pinned prominently to the bulletin board, one on the kitchen table, and in case something happened to her and Tamara actually figured out her actual address, one under the pillow on the bed, one in the stack of manuscript, and one rolled up and stuck into the laundry hamper. She’d never had much patience for the sort of book or movie where the hero wandered off into danger without telling anyone where he was going.

Then she called Lavinia and told her.

With that done, Di got a shoulder-bag bought at Goodwill, and stuck the perfume bottle and the salt-shaker in it, and the egg wrapped in tissue to protect it. Besides that, for verisimilitude, she dropped in a pack of gum from which she removed two sticks, a new (cheap) lipstick, matching nail polish, a new clean comb, a pack of tissues that she opened first, a used paperback romance, and a bandana with peace signs all over it. Besides those, there were only three things that she actually needed. Enough money for bus fare, and Tamara’s fee, and maybe a cup of coffee and a donut. Her keys. And a wallet with a phony ID. She had a stash of them from when she and Memaw had gone after the phonies. This one was from when she was seventeen—perfect for the purpose now.

According to her ID, her name was Susan Rutherford and she lived in Boston. In the wallet were more things from those days. When you expected that a crook might be going through your purse, pictures were very important in firming up your faux self. She chose a few from a whole box of photos she’d picked up at flea markets; a kid in a high school football uniform, a generic middle-aged couple, and someone’s granny. She also had a boy’s class ring she’d gotten at the same place, wrapped with angora to make it fit; she wore that on her right hand.

She shielded herself to a fare-thee well. No way she was going to walk into that snake-den without every protection she could muster. She even had her atheme tucked into the top of her boot. She hoped she wouldn’t need it, because it would be bloody awkward to get at if she did, with the boots being under the bell bottoms of her jeans. Still, it wouldn’t show that way, at least.

Simple turtleneck sweater, black of course. Nondescript gabardine jacket. And gloves, the all-important gloves. If she managed to get some evidence she didn’t want her own fingerprints on it, and it was cold enough that thin gloves wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. One thing she totally refused to do, not even to complete the disguise of being a high school senior. There was no way in hell she was going to totter around on a pair of three inch platform shoes.

So Susan got on the bus, and read her used romance book all the way to her stop while thinking very hard about being Susan.

If Tamara’s house had been creepy before, she had to force herself up the steps now. And that made her wonder…what had changed? Was it just that the woman was sucking so much misery off Chris Fitzhugh that she was getting more powerful by the day? Or was there something else going on?

The door was answered by someone who could only be Tamara herself, and she ushered Di into a non-descript entryway, maybe five by five, painted beige, with a little bench too narrow for anyone to sit on against one wall. And if there was a Richter Scale for “something weird,” Tamara pegged it at 10.

Physically, she wasn’t tall, but she gave the impression of being tall. She had shoulder-length black hair cut in a Mary Tyler Moore flip, square, Slavic features, and deep-set dark eyes. She wore a purple turtle-neck tunic over a calf-length Gypsy-hippy skirt with a print of tiny purple flowers on black, over black moccasin-boots. She had a fringed purple sash around her waist, a tangle of “amulet” necklaces and love-beads around her neck, big gold hoop earrings, and a dozen Indian bangle bracelets on each wrist.

She was a fraud. The fact she had asked for the egg proved it.

It wasn’t just that—There was no doubt about it, Di could already sense the emotional whirlpool there, the woman was a psychic vampire. And it wasn’t just that she was no more a Gypsy than Di was. Nor that there was a whiff—just a hint—of real magic about her, and it was not nice.

There was something else that was completely off about her. And Di, normally able to put her finger on the cause of any weirdness, could not pinpoint this.

Tamara looked at her for several minutes in absolute silence. Then without a word, she crooked her finger at Di and led her into the “consultation room,” which in any other house would be the living room.

As Di had expected, it was dim, lit by candles, the curtains were drawn across the windows, the air was smoky and thick with patchouli incense. The only way in which it really differed from far too many rooms of the same sort that Di had been in over the course of her life, was that this room had been decorated in purple, rather than the usual red.

And what Di noticed, which very few people other than someone like Marshal would have, was the strategic placement of mirrors behind her, near the ceiling. In the dim light, and with all that dark purple, it was very difficult to spot them unless you were looking for them. But with the way that the few lights were placed, anything in the “client’s” hands would reflect very nicely in them.

The table, covered with a purple cloth, was bare except for an egg-cup and a white saucer set to the side. Those were for later.

“Please,” Tamara said, with a toothy smile. “Sit.”

Di sat in the indicated chair, and put her purse on the table next to her. Tamara looked at it with arch significance, and Di pulled out her wallet and put the requested fee on the table. It was quite modest, only ten dollars, but of course, Tamara expected to make a good deal more from this particular pigeon. Tamara nodded, took the two five-dollar bills (which Di had marked, though Tamara wouldn’t know that), and tucked them somewhere under the tablecloth.

What, not down your cleavage? You missed one of the Gypsy clichés? You haven’t been watching nearly enough bad horror movies. Of course the cleavage would be hard to reach wearing a turtleneck.

“I would like you to take out of your bag some object that means much to you, and the problem you have come to me about,” Tamara continued. “But do not show it to me. Merely hold it in your hand in a way that I cannot see it. The spirits will tell me all that I need to know.”

That, and the mirror behind me.

Di pretended to fumble through the purse, going through the photos until she came to the one of the boy. She pulled it out of the bag and held it in her hand, shielded from Tamara’s direct gaze—but no doubt visible in the mirror mounted above and behind her seat. Tamara gazed over her head, as if off in the distance. But of course Di was well aware that she was looking in the mirror.

“You have a lovely grandmother, and loving parents,” said Tamara. “They care much for you. So much, that they are concerned about your love for a boy. No?”

Di “gasped.” “They want me to go to college,” she whispered. “But if I do—he’s not going, he has to go to work for his dad. If I go away, will he forget me?”

So she had just told the Gypsy that there was money enough to send her to college. That would probably be bait she could not resist. Tamara closed her eyes and began to sway. “There is another, a rival to you,” she intoned.

Di allowed a tiny whimper to escape.

“She has designs on this boy. She is not good for him, this girl. She does not love him. She only wants the things he will have, when he takes his father’s business. But he does not see this.” There was a sly little smile on Tamara’s lips.

Di really, really, did not like her. If there was ever a story designed to make a young girl paranoid and fearful, it was one like that. It didn’t even matter if there was no other girl in the picture. Given a story like this, the victim would find someone she knew that matched the description of a man-stealer.

“Oh, and she is, is not good for this boy. She will get him to do things that are wrong. To steal from his father so he can buy her presents. To go to places with her that he should not. You are a good girl; she will make him to think that good girls are dull. You know her, she is taller than you, not so pretty, sly, and—“ Tamara made a cupping gesture at her own breasts that seemed faintly obscene. “Big bosoms.”

“Juliet Whately!” Di exclaimed, making up the name on the spot.

“Yes…yes…but there is more…” Tamara frowned. “The spirits tell me there is more about this girl than you know. She has bad blood. Bad Gypsy blood. There is good Gypsy blood, and bad Gypsy blood, and hers is bad, bad, bad…”

Okay, here it comes.

“This girl—bad things follow her. Bad things come when she calls. That is how she will get this boy, not just with her bosoms and letting him do what he wants with them. No, no. She has more.” Tamara leaned over the table now, and stared into Di’s eyes. “She is evil! Quick, take out the egg I told you to bring, and the spirits will show you!”

Di fumbled out the egg and handed it to Tamara. And Tamara was as good or better than Marshal; Di didn’t see it when she swapped it for the egg she had prepared earlier.

But Di had no doubt that it was Tamara’s egg, and not her own, that was placed in the incongruous little egg-cup on the table between them, with the white saucer to one side.

“Think about the boy!” Tamara urged. “Think about the girl! The spirits will show us if he is in danger!”

Di clutched the picture hard enough to crease it, and stared at the egg as Tamara chanted. And it was all she could do to keep from breaking up laughing when she recognized the words.

“Ue o muite arukō, namida ga kobore nai yō ni, omoidasu haru no hi, hitori bocchi no yoru.”

Ten years ago she’d learned that song. The only song sung in Japanese to ever hit the bestseller charts in the US. “Sukiyaki,” was the nonsensical title they had given it, probably since that was one of the few Japanese words that Americans would recognize in 1963. Di supposed that, droned as the words were and without a tune, there weren’t too many people who would realize where they came from.

All they would know was that it sounded exotic, nothing like any language they’d ever heard. Tamara was supposed to be a Gypsy, they would assume it was a Gypsy spell, and not that she’d learned the words from some sheet music she’d probably picked up at a used book store.

Tamara repeated the words three times more, each time getting louder, and on last time, picked up the egg, and on the final yoru cracked it into the saucer.

DI faked a shriek, as any teenager would have, seeing the blood, the black sludgy stuff, and the hairy fibers along with the half-formed chicken embryo splayed out over the white china. Most teenagers from the heart of Cambridge wouldn’t even know that it was a chicken embryo; all they would see would be something fetus-like.

“You see! You see!” Tamara said in triumph. “Already she has him! Already she places her curse on you and your love for him, and on him to draw him to her! Oh, you are in danger, and he is in danger, terrible, terrible danger!”

“Oh God! Oh God!” Di cried hysterically. “Tell me what I have to do! You must know what I have to do!”

“Fear not, I can save him, and you,” Tamara crooned soothingly. “Listen to me—I will tell you what to do.”

But Di feigned more hysteria, her hands shaking, repeating only that Tamara had to tell her what to do, had to write it down for her, finally convincing Tamara to write down her instructions when she shook and wailed too hard to “listen.” With her lip curling a little in a veiled sneer, Tamara printed everything out on a sheet of paper on a yellow pad, tearing it off and folding the paper in half and sliding it across the table.

Di made very sure that not only did their hands not touch—they didn’t even have their fingers on that piece of paper at the same time.

“Do not tell your parents,” cautioned Tamara. “They will not believe, and they will not understand. But you must find someone that can help you get the money to take the curse away. We will put it back of course, but this girl, she puts the curse on money, for money is all she cares for. Your grandmother, maybe—?”

“Oh yes! My Gramma is the one that told me to find a Gypsy!” Di babbled, scrubbing at her face with the tissues from her purse—which she put right back in the purse when she was done. “Gramma will help me!”

There was a sly smile. “Trust in your grandmother,” she crooned. “The old ones, they know. They have seen. They believe in curses, in the power of evil ones. Your grandmother will help you.”

Di babbled some more, thanks, sobbing, then grabbed her purse and rushed out before Tamara could tell her the time of her next appointment. She literally ran out the door, down the steps, and down the street, and only stopped running when she knew she was out of sight.

Not that Tamara would be concerned about her victim returning. She knew that the sort of child that Di appeared to be would phone as soon as she had her hands on the money.

But Di was only too happy to get out of that place, because she knew that Tamara had been concentrating so hard on the money that something had escaped her. Di had not been hysterical, and had not given her the sort of feeding that she usually got from her clients. She only hoped that Tamara was so sated on what she got from Chris Fitzhugh that it continued to escape her until it was too late, and Di had turned over this paper—written in Tamara’s own hand, with her fingerprints all over it, to Joe O’Brian and the Bunko Squad.

She went straight to Joe’s station, hoping he was on duty. Like most police stations, it was a little shabby, and very busy. Like most precinct houses, it was a little shabby and very busy. The Desk Sergeant even had one of those tall desks of the sort you saw in movies from the 1940s. He looked a little surprised to see someone like her walking in, and even more surprised when she asked for Joe. As it turned out, Joe was on duty, although he was not in the station at the moment. Di was sent to Joe’s Captain.

He raised his eyebrows when she came into his office; she stuck out her hand and introduced herself as he rose. The office was scarcely big enough for his desk and a visitor’s chair; the desk was one of those dreary gray metal things, and the visitor’s chair, when she sat down on it, was enough to give someone back problems. She felt sorry for the captain if that was the sort of chair that he was stuck in.

The Captain himself, Irish like Joe, but big and ruddy, was named O’Grady. So the Eastern Seaboard tradition of Irish Policemen was still alive and well here in Cambridge. Well, so close to Boston, she shouldn’t be surprised. “So, there was something you wanted to see Detective O’Brian about, Miss Tregarde?” he asked carefully.

“Yes, but you will do just as well, sir.” She smiled. “I just did a little poking around on his behalf; I just moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard and a mutual friend of ours introduced us; Detective O’Brian was looking for someone who could expose a phony psychic, and she suggested me. I did a fair bit of that sort of thing with my grandmother, mostly around Waterford.” She watched his eyebrows climb a little further. “If you check with Detective Gabrielli in the Waterford Bunko Squad, he’ll vouch for both of us.”

O’Grady made a note of that, but she was pretty certain that when he got done talking to her he wouldn’t bother with calling up Waterford PD. “The woman in question is Tamara Tarasava. He didn’t go into details, he just told me that he’d like to have her discredited at least, and possibly arrested on fraud at best.” All right, that was a bit of a fib, but Joe hadn’t gone into a lot of details so it was technically true. “He gave me her address, I did some preliminary work, then this morning I set up an appointment under an alias and posing as a teenager.”

“Oh?” O’Grady looked a little more relaxed about this, though his tone was still a little guarded.

“A teenager is naïve and vulnerable. I dressed so that she would have some expectation of money. As you see.” She gestured at her clothing. “About an hour ago, I kept my appointment with ‘Tamara’ woman, and she pulled the ‘egg-trick’ on me. I got you this—”

She carefully took the paper out of her purse by the very corner, and put it down on his desk, then explained in detail exactly what she had done, from the pictures in her purse to the phony ID. “I got her to write out the instructions as to what I was supposed to do next. She wanted me to get five thousand dollars, which I believe is in the felony range. I wore gloves, so the only prints on that paper are hers, it’s in her handwriting, and it was taken from a legal pad that should be in her ‘consultation room’ so you should be able to get the impressions of these instructions from the top sheet. Will that be enough for Bunco to act on?”

The eyebrows stayed well up on the Captain’s forehead, but the smile he gave her was genuine. “I was skeptical when you first started to talk, Miss Tregarde, but I can see you know your business. We don’t often get that kind of cooperation out of Harvard students.”

She didn’t comment on that. “Just call me a public-minded citizen,” she replied. “Now, if it were me, and I needed to actually get Tamara in the act, for the second round it would be Gramma, not the girl, that showed up with the cash. First of all, a teenager wouldn’t have that kind of money to give her, and secondly, with that kind of money at stake Tamara might have a confederate to make sure the pigeon doesn’t get away if she has second thoughts about the deal. A young girl could probably outrun her and would certainly attract unwanted attention by screaming. Gramma would probably be easier to control.”

The Captain nodded. “Then if you can leave your name and address if we need you to testify—” He handed her paper and a pen, and she wrote both out for him.

“Good luck with this,” she said when she was done, and stood up to go. “Tamara is a piece of work I would like to see locked up.”

They shook hands. Then the Captain hesitated a moment. “If…we needed to do something like this again, on one of Joe’s cases, would you be available?”

“Possibly,” she temporized, and smiled ruefully. “It kind of depends on classes and exams. School comes first, and they aren’t going to give me that degree for being public-spirited.”

“Of course.” This time the smile was quite warm. “I wish my daughter had your attitude about classes and exams. Thank you, Miss Tregarde. You’ve been very helpful.”

With the Captain’s approval, she stopped at Joe’s desk and left him a note. On impulse, she picked up one of his cards from the holder on his desk.

And inwardly cursed.

Because superimposed on it was still the equal-armed red cross.

She wasn’t off the hook yet.

#

The upstairs gang wasn’t in; not Emory and Zaak, and not Marshal. After knocking on Marshal’s door, she began to have second thoughts about their own will to be involved. It certainly seemed as if the lot of them had debunked once they’d awakened, and were staying away. Probably to avoid her.

Not that she blamed them. What had happened last night had been pretty damned scary. Emily was probably frightened out of her mind, as well she should be, and the guys, once they got over the kind of numbed, shocky state that always followed an experience like that, might have decided that they wanted no part of her. She trudged down the stairs and back to her own place, carefully locking her door behind her, and sat down on the couch in a dispirited state of mind.

Not that she was to blame for any of this—she’d tried to keep their involvement strictly mundane—but they probably wouldn’t remember it that way. Until she showed up, the worst thing that had ever happened to Zaak would have been acute embarrassment if someone walked in on him while he was wearing that ridiculous “ritual robe.” It was unlikely that he would ever have tried anything as ambitious as conjuring a “wandering spirit,” and there would have been another new thing to catch his interest soon enough. There had never been any manifestations of anything outré in their lives, and if they had not gotten involved with her, there never would have been.

Then Di had moved in downstairs and all hell broke loose. In this case, quite literally. She wasn’t personally to blame, but on the other hand, it wasn’t difficult to make the connection.

I wouldn’t want to be around me either.

And if she was going to be honest with herself…avoiding her from now on would be the best possible thing they could do. She could not honestly say that her presence was not in some part the catalyst for what had happened last night. If they hadn’t gotten involved with her, Zaak would never have tried that ritual, that much was a certainty. And if she, with all her potential Guardian power bottled up inside her, had somehow served as a kind of magnet for the dybbuks, then she actually was obliquely part of the cause. She couldn’t say for sure. She didn’t think so; she was pretty sure with Zaak’s own high potential, he would have gotten then anyway—

—but she could not honestly swear that the fact that she was something of a beacon wasn’t a contributing factor.

If that was the case then, the best thing she could do for them was to stay away.

She rubbed her eyes with one hand, then got up to get water boiling for tea, fighting down an unexpected lump in her throat.

It wasn’t as if she couldn’t do this without them. She could. She’d been flying solo, more or less, since she’d become a Guardian. It was more that…she’d liked hanging out with them, and it had been kind of fun working things out with them, even while it was a serious situation. They all—even Zaak—had sharp minds, and different angles on the problems than she did. It was good being able to bounce things off them. Marshal’s knowledge of stage-magic was priceless.

But beyond all that, she liked them, for themselves. She had assumed that they were friends, her friends. She liked having friends; she actually hadn’t had any since—well—grade-school. In a way, Zaak blowing things up had been good; while it added to her burden of worry that they would insist on helping her, and she would have to keep them safe as well as herself, it meant she would not have to hide her secrets from them. Well, other than being a Guardian; no one really needed to know that but another Guardian. But for the first time since Memaw died, she’d have someone she didn’t have to hide that from. And for the first time ever, she would have someone her own age she didn’t have to hide that from.

But it seemed that once again, she was going to be the weird one, the one people avoided.

She wasn’t particularly worried that any of them would spill the beans—who would believe them? Hell, they could even go to Joe, and he would blow them off, not because he wouldn’t believe them, but because he would. And he would want to make damned sure they didn’t go shooting off their mouths any further than him. People in general were not supposed to know that there were things out there like dybbuks and curses—and worse.

“Bloody hell,” she said aloud, near to tears. She was just so damn tired of being alone…

At least, before, she’d had Memaw. Now she had no one. She was going to end up like Lavinia, behind a façade that she never dared crack, knowing that one day she was going to have to face off against something she couldn’t handle, and then she’d die the same way she had lived.

Alone.

She turned away from the stove, leaned her forehead against the glass of the window pane and cried, quietly. She knew she was feeling sorry for herself, and right now, she didn’t care.

The cold glass was soothing, and the sound of the water coming to a boil at least forced her to turn away and pay attention to it. By this time, though, she just had no appetite, so she poured out part of the boiling water into her tea-mug, got a hard boiled egg and a banana out of the fridge, and ate both without tasting them. It was completely dark when she finished, and she stripped to her underwear and crawled into bed without bothering to go back upstairs to see if one of the others had come back. What was the point? Even if they were there, they’d probably pretend not to be.

She cried herself to sleep, which was stupid, and again, she didn’t care. Tomorrow she could cowboy up and be the big bad brave Guardian that nothing bothered. Tonight she was going to feel sorry for herself until she got it out of her system.

She didn’t stay asleep—not truly asleep—for very long. A Guardian’s dreams were seldom “just” dreams, and especially when a Guardian had been Called, the dreams were as much a part of the job as anything done during the waking hours.

She woke to hear the sounds of a small child crying; the crying sounded exhausted, hopeless. She sat up, and realized that she was still asleep; she wasn’t in her own bed, she wasn’t in a bed at all, she was on a nasty-smelling couch, a broken down piece of furniture that stank of cat pee. There was no light here, and she couldn’t make out a lot in this room, until she concentrated, and even then all that she could see was that it was cold, and mostly empty. The crying came from the left-hand corner of the room where there was something piled up on the floor; she got up and cautiously felt her way to the source.

There was a small mattress there, or at least something shaped like a mattress. As she concentrated on it, she was able to see a little better. Definitely a mattress, maybe from a kid’s bed or a crib; it was smaller than a twin and looked as dirty and stained as the couch. There was a heap of ratty blankets there, the child huddled in them, sobbing.

As her foot moved into the mattress, she knew something else immediately; nothing she could do here would affect anything. She wasn’t actually here at all in any way; even if she had been an astral projection, she had experience enough with that state to do small things, be seen, or be heard, and the physical world would affect her unless she decided otherwise. This wasn’t an astral projection, this was a vision. What she would be able to learn would be limited by a lot of things—for instance, she might not be able to move past the walls of this room to find out exactly where it was.

And knowing that, she invoked mage-sight, and saw the walls, floor and ceiling of the place glowing with the same black-green energy that Tamara’s card had, just as the child turned her head enough to wipe her streaming nose that Di could recognize her as the missing Melanie.

And over her was—a sense of deadly peril. A sense that something truly worse than death was in store for her. For a moment, a sign formed over the child, superimposed on her tiny form, one that Di didn’t immediately recognize, but which she instinctively knew meant, well, doom.

Mentally, she cursed. So Tamara was the kidnapper, and she had warded this place strongly against detection. She was smart and probably paranoid; she was a magician, so she assumed there might be other magicians that would look for the child. It was a logical assumption, since there was currently a huge reward for her return, funded by one of the TV stations, there were going to be people looking for the child. Since she was a magician, it was logical to assume there were others out there, and so close to Boston, there were bound to be magicians that would want that reward. There was no other reason to have warded this room so heavily.

And if she had warded it magically, it was also warded psychically. The two abilities were often linked, and if you were a magician it was easy enough to add wards against mental intrusions. You just specified as much in your ritual. If Tamara was that smart, and that paranoid, this room was probably hidden in a place where no one would look.

Not surprisingly, the room itself looked nothing like the room that Tamara had described to Chris Fitzhugh. It might be a storage room in a basement, or a really big storage closet, or even some sort of storage shed; it had no windows at all. The floor was wood, and old, the floorboards were worn with spaces between them. The walls were painted, and cracked and peeling. There didn’t seem to be a source of heat or light.

Then the door opened.

Well, there was light outside; the person who had opened the door was silhouetted against it. It seemed bright, but only in comparison to the darkened room. If it was electrical, it couldn’t have been brighter than a 40 watt bulb, and it might have been from a kerosene lamp. Di tried to move past the door to see, but couldn’t get near it, because of the personal wards on the person standing there.

The person in the doorway was Tamara. But in mage-sight, she was haloed in that awful energy. She didn’t see Di, which meant this really was a vision—if part of Di had been in this room in actuality, there was no way that Tamara would have missed her.

Tamara strode into the room, skirts swishing angrily, heels pounding on the wooden floor. She bent down, pulled the little girl out of her nest of blankets by one shoulder, and shook her until her teeth rattled.

“Shut up, you little bitch,” Tamara snarled, and dropped her back on the mattress. Terrified into silence, the little girl curled up into a ball and pulled the covers over her head.

Without another word, Tamara turned back around and stalked out the door, slamming it behind her.

Di really woke up this time, head aching and her heart pounding. She sat up slowly, trying to extract every bit of information she could from that dream.

Tamara definitely had something to do with the kidnapped Melanie; at this point, there was no telling exactly what her role was. Di was betting on the original, even the sole, kidnapper, but it was possible that Tamara was in collusion with someone. And at the moment, Di had no idea why she had snatched the child…but based on the little she had seen, it wasn’t just to leech her misery along with that of her mother, nor was it to “discover” her and claim the reward. Melanie had seen her, and could identify her; there was no way that Tamara was going to turn her over alive. So Tamara had other plans for the child, probably awful ones, plans that required her to keep the child alive for some unknown time.

If the vision was right.

Sometimes the visions weren’t. Even though Di had “seen” Tamara, it didn’t follow that Tamara had actually been there. Someone else could have been responsible, but was using Tamara’s powers to keep the child hidden. Or, it could be someone connected with Tamara, living in the same house perhaps, but because Tamara’s was the only face Di knew, that was the face the vision showed her.

Twice in the past, she’d gotten it wrong. Once, when she thought she’d pinpointed a murderer, and once when she thought she had witnessed a particularly brutal rape. Fortunately Memaw had stopped her before she had gone rushing out to report what she had “seen” to the police. In the first case, it had been a murder that was long solved; the vision had only been meant to warn her not to stir up old, terrible memories for someone. In the second, she had been right about the rape, but wrong about the rapist; what she had seen was what the victim “remembered” and the victim herself had been wrong. Of course, neither of those had been connected to a Guardian thing, but it just proved that the visions often only showed you things shaded by what you yourself knew.

But there was a connection to the kidnapping, and Melanie was in danger. That much she was completely convinced of.

The problem was, she didn’t have a shred of evidence. There was no point in taking this to Joe; without evidence, he couldn’t do anything either. For that matter, she didn’t even have a location, so all she could do was to tell him that what everyone hoped was right—Melanie was alive—and what everyone feared was right—she was in great danger. What could she do with her information other than make Chris Fitzhugh more miserable?

For that matter, although she herself was strongly convinced that this vision had taken place in present/concurrent time, it might be in the past.

“Damnit,” she said aloud into the dark. She tried to think. What could she do? There had to be something…

Maybe protection? Could she do something that would make it difficult, or even impossible, for anyone to harm the child for a while?

Not through those shields…at least, not without something that belonged to Melanie. That was the problem, she had no personal connection to the girl. She’d need something very personal, hair, saliva, blood, to get through the wards in place around her.

She ground her teeth until her jaws ached, then went to the locked cupboard that held her magic books and grimoires, brought them all into the bed, and spent the rest of a sleepless night leafing through them, looking for something, anything, that would help, and coming up with nothing at all.

#

She didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep over those books until she woke with a start, books piled around her, a crick in her neck, and the phone shrilling away. Heart pounding, she shoved everything aside and scrambled out of the bed, hoping to get to the phone before whoever was on the other end gave up.

“This is Joe O’Brian,” said the tinny voice on the other end of the line in response to her “Hello.” “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Good news?” she faltered.

“The bitch won’t be bothering Chris Fitzhugh anymore.”

The way he said it made her heart sink.

“Because?” she asked.

“She’s bolted. We got a warrant for her based on your work—good job, by the way, the Captain’s impressed—and came around for her last night. We knocked on the front door, and near as we can figure, she went out the back.”

Di closed her eyes as her heart plummeted. She wanted to ask, “Why didn’t you have someone watching the back?” but in the first place, that wouldn’t do any good, in the second place it wouldn’t win her any points with Joe, and in the third—only she knew that Tamara was something more than just a fraud and an extortionist. It all came back to the evidence, of which she had exactly none.

“Any idea where she might have gone?” she asked instead.

“She’s a gypsy, she’s probably halfway to Chicago by now.” She could almost see him shrug. “At least that is one complication in this case that we won’t have to worry about. Thanks, Tregarde. I owe you.”

“That’s all right, Joe, I wish I could have done more—” she said, but he had already hung up the phone.

She put the receiver back carefully down on the cradle, because if she wasn’t careful she was afraid she just might smash it.

So, there it was. Tamara gone—and maybe that vision last night had indeed been of reality, in fact, in sync with reality. She could well imagine why Tamara was angry, if she’d had to flee a half step ahead of the law.

Now she cursed herself for not taking something of the woman’s with her when she had had the chance. With a physical object, she might have a chance of finding her. Without one? Not with those shields in place. She stood there next to the phone in her underwear, feeling utterly helpless. And again, utterly alone.

Why am I doing this? she thought in despair. Why? What’s the point? I’m not actually succeeding at anything. Tamara isn’t in custody, I have no idea where Melanie is, something horrible is going to happen to her and I can’t stop it. What good is all this power, all this sacrifice, if I can’t save one little girl?

She wanted to howl, scream, tear handfuls of her hair out, break something. She wanted to hurt something.

And she couldn’t help it. How much of her life had she given up? The chance for a normal life, for friends, for guys, for—well, everything that everyone else took for granted. She’d done it all in the name of helping people.

And now she couldn’t even manage that.

What good was all this if whatever had given her this power couldn’t even give her the tiniest little sign, the smallest bit of help, so she could—

Her thoughts shattered at the tentative knock at the door.

“Um. Di?”

It was Emory’s voice.

Flustered, she looked around frantically for a bathrobe.

“You there?”

“Just a second, I’m not exactly decent—” She wrenched open the closet door and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, one of her old granny-dresses, and pulled it on over her head. It was a light yellow cotton with short sleeves, wildly inappropriate for the season, but at least now she wasn’t three-fourths naked. She ran back to the door, and flipped the locks, then opened it.

She didn’t think it was possible for her heart to sink further, but it did. All four of them were there, looking somber, and very much as if they, too, had had a sleepless night.

“Can we come in?” Emory asked, somberly. “We’d like to talk to you.”

Numbly, she nodded. So they’ve come to tell me to bugger off in person…

At least they were going to give her that much courtesy and not treat her like she had suddenly contracted leprosy.

They filed in, and she closed the door behind them, then turned to face them.

They exchanged a look, then Emory took a deep breath.

Here it comes. “Sorry, we just can’t handle—what happened. So…just let’s say we don’t know each other, okay?”

“We talked things over last night,” Emory said, brows creased. “All four of us. We went off to the Dudley and stayed there most of the night, talking. That stuff that happened—it was kind of hard to—” He took another deep breath. “I mean, it’s not something that’s easy to accept, even when it happened to you and you’ve got the evidence right in front of you—and—we wanted to talk it over somewhere normal, where we could look at things objectively and—”

“We want to help,” blurted Marshal.

That was so unexpected that for a moment she didn’t believe what she’d heard. “Um—say again?” she said stupidly.

“We want to help you,” Emory repeated. “That’s what we were talking about all last night. I mean, you didn’t just pull all that stuff last night out of your ass. You weren’t surprised, you weren’t running around screaming, you recognized what you saw and you knew what to do about it. You’re like Dr. Paranormal, or something. You do magic to help people, and we think you’ve been doing it a while. So we want to help. Not sure how, but somebody like you shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

All she could do was stand there and blink at them.

“Look,” Emory said, “I know the only one of us that can actually do anything like you do is Zaak and he’s like the bumbling apprentice—”

“Hey!” Zaak said indignantly.

“Shut up, Zaak,” all three of them said, simultaneously.

“Anyway—” Marshal made a helpless little gesture with his hands. “The thing is, we know this stuff is real now, and we can’t un-know that. It’s got to be a pain, not being able to talk about it, right? And we all work pretty good together. I mean, when you’re running the show. So—um—can we, like, sign on?”

She felt as if her jaw should be hitting the floor and shattering at this point, she was so shocked. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening—

She watched their faces start to fall in reaction to her stunned silence, and realized that she had better say something before they walked out the door, thinking that she had rejected them.

“Yes!” she blurted. “Oh hell yes!”

For a moment, they stood in stunned silence. Then Zaak let out a whoop, and the others began punching fists in the air and generally carrying on as if she had just offered them all brand new Ferraris.

For the life of her, she could not imagine why they would feel that way—but she joined the celebration.

#

The celebrating didn’t last forever of course. In fact, it didn’t last for very long. She took a minute to change into something more practical, then brought them quickly up to speed, including that horrific vision of last night. They all sat around on the floor, using pillows from the bed, while they ate deli bagels and cream cheese and lox that Marshal brought down from his place. Marshal took notes—it turned out he knew shorthand—while the other three listened with frowns of concentration.

“So why can’t you just find Tamara or the kid?” Em asked, finally, before she had a chance to get into explanations of what she could and could not do—mostly, could not do. “Zaak found my keys this morning.”

“Because she needs something personal either from Tamara or Melanie,” Zaak supplied before Di could say anything. “The more personal the better. Right?”

“Sort of,” Di replied. “The problem is that if my vision is right, Tamara has her place shielded, and even if I had something from either one of them, I still wouldn’t be able to find them, though I might be able to affect them. It’s like…okay, like they’re lights, and the shields are like boxes. I can’t see anything past the boxes. Better yet, camouflaged boxes. They blend in with the background.”

Marshal was drumming his fingers on the floor. “Okay, but can you tell one box from another? Could you tell by looking at the outside if Tamara was the one that made the box?”

She grimaced. “Technically…yes. Practically speaking…I’d still have to have something personal of hers. I could look for her signature energy, it’s pretty unique, if I had that.”

Marshal got up. “Then let’s go.” He offered her his hand; she stared at it.

“Go where? Tamara’s place? The police have probably got it locked up tight—”

Marshal snorted. “I doubt there’s any lock in this town short of a bank vault that I can’t pick. Come on. We’ll take the car.”

She took his hand and scrambled to her feet. “Car? You have a car?”

Emory made a face. “Why do you think we let an egghead like him hang out with freaks like us?”

Marshal swatted him. “Di, have you got some kind of traveling kit? You know, magic emergency supplies? From what you were saying it sounds like we’ll have to move fast if we can get something.”

Wow. Marshal was good. And sharp. “Yeah, it’s under the bed—but I’m out of consecrated salt and water—”

“Zaak, you can do that right?” At his nod, Marshal made shooing motions. “Make with the magic.”

“Can any of you use a gun?” Di asked, deciding that if they wanted to be in, they were going to be in.

Emory and Em both raised their hands. She looked from one to the other of them. “Bottom drawer of my dresser. Should be two handguns in there, one’s a .38, and one’s a .45. Make sure they’re clean, I can’t remember if I cleaned them when I put them away last, and make sure they’re loaded. Then make sure the reloaders are full, you’ll find the ammo in there with them. Special loads. Every other bullet should be the silver ones.”

Emory stared at her for just a fraction of a second, then nodded. “We’ll take care of it. You guys go.”

Marshal headed out the door at a trot, Di hard on his heels; Zaak closed the door behind them, and they pounded down the staircase to the first floor entryway. “Ya can’t pahrk yer cahr in Hahrvahrd Yahrd,” he deadpanned, as they sprinted past the wall of mailboxes and shoved open the door, getting a slightly hysterical giggle out of her. “But I have a secret parking place. Tell no one.”

Considering that parking places were more valuable than diamond-encrusted platinum tiaras, she wasn’t at all surprised at his admonition. What was absolutely astonishing was that he had a parking place for his tiny little Austin Mini-Cooper within a quick sprint of the apartment building.

It was a little nook that would never have fit a car that was any bigger, in an alley half a block away. He rolled a dumpster out of the way, pulled the car out, and she helped him push the same dumpster back into the nook he’d just vacated. They both squeezed in and he shot the tiny car out of the alley and into Sunday morning traffic, what little there was of it.

“I give magic lessons to that building’s super’s kids,” he said, maneuvering the little beast around a dinosaur of a station wagon.

“What?” she said absently, trying to think how she could use Tamara’s object to find something that didn’t want to be found.

“The parking space, that’s how I got it. I use my powers only for good.” He glanced over at her. “Sorry, bad time for a worse joke.”

“No, it’s okay. I’m just thinking—”

“That’s fine.” He grinned. “You do the heavy lifting, I’ll do the driving.”

It took a lot less time driving than by the bus route. When they arrived at Tamara’s street, though, he didn’t stop, even though the house was obvious even if he hadn’t known the address, because of all the yellow “crime scene” tape crossing the door.

“But—” she protested as he drove past.

“We don’t want to be seen, do we?” he countered, and she subsided.

He circled around the block and ended up tucking the car into another alley, parking between two garages. All the houses here had walled-in back yards; they counted houses until they came to Tamara’s, and tried the gate.

It was locked, but Marshal solved that in next to no time. They slipped inside and closed it behind them.

There was police tape over the back door too, but they simply took it off, carefully, so that they could replace it, and Marshal went to work on the locks of the back door. There were glass panes in the door, and she supposed that they could have broken one to get in, but then the cops would know someone had broken in and….

Not a good idea.

This took a little longer; there were three of the locks, including two dead-bolts. But out of his jacket he took a roll of felt, and in it was a complete set—so far as Di could tell—of professional lock-picking tools.

“Funny thing, not even the police would ever question you about these if you have business cards showing you’re a pro magician,” he said, under his breath, as he worked on the locks. “I’ve even gotten gigs doing kids’ parties when cops asked me about it. And that’s one.”

She heard the lock click open.

“Back home, all the neighbors knew to come get me when they locked themselves out of their cars, or their houses,” he continued. There was another click. “And that’s two. We’re lucky, these are really old-fashioned. She never changed them.”

“Maybe she didn’t think she needed them,” Di said dryly. “She might have had other protections.”

He froze. “You don’t think she—”

Di shook her head. “I’m not getting a sense of anything dangerous waiting, at least not on the door and not for a good way beyond it. For one thing, anything that was there, the cops probably already sprung, tossing the place. For another, I think she left in too big a hurry to actually set something up. I honestly think she thought she was immune from getting arrested, and it never occurred to her that her house could be invaded. Gods know she’s got the entire neighborhood spooked. I bet there isn’t anyone around here who would dare break in even if she left her doors wide open.”

“That’s comforting.” He finished with the third lock, and the door swung open. “Nevertheless, after you.”

She gave him a little mock bow, readied her defenses just in case, pushed the door completely open with her foot and stepped inside.

She knew as soon as she crossed the threshold that whatever had been here was gone. There wasn’t even that faint sense of menace there had been when she’d come here as the faux teenager.

But the cops had done a real number on the place.

They stepped into a kitchen that looked like an explosion had gone off. Tamara hadn’t been all that good a housekeeper, but drawers and cupboards were all yanked open and left, pots, pans, and dishes had been pulled out, canisters dumped out, flour and sugar and coffee all over the floor—

“Wow. Remind me never to do anything to get searched,” Marshal said, blinking.

“That’s just a good basic rule to live by,” Di replied, and picked her way across the floor. “Remember we need to clean our shoes off when we leave.”

“So we don’t have evidence of being here—“

“So we don’t track sugar into you car,” Di corrected. “Roaches in your car?”

Marshal shuddered. “Right. So we’re looking for personal stuff. You go left, I’ll go right.”

They divided at the entrance to the kitchen; Di immediately found herself in a small hallway, and the first room she came to was the bathroom. It, too, had been pretty thoroughly trashed. She found the hairbrush on the floor, couldn’t find the toothbrush, and stuffed the hairbrush in her pocket.

Then she got the oddest feeling. As if…the hairbrush wasn’t what she needed. She took it out of her pocket and looked at it closely, then pulled one of the long, black hairs out of the brush.

It didn’t look right.

“Uh, Di? I think you need to see this.”

She followed Marshal’s voice to a bedroom which for a moment looked as if it was the site of an Indian massacre. There were scalps everywhere.

Not scalps. Wigs.

That would be why the hair didn’t look right…

Scattered among the clothing and other things on the floor were what must have been a good dozen wigs; all black, but as near as Di could tell, each one had been cut and styled a different way.

“Pretty useful if you’re being followed or watched,” Marshal observed, poking one with his toe. “Especially if you have one of these with you.”

Di nodded.

Marshal picked his way across the bedroom floor; there was an old-fashioned “vanity” in one corner, a real beauty of an antique, and it seemed that Tamara had made daily use of it, for there was a litter of makeup of all sorts on and around it. Most of it was spilled. Clearly the cops had been on a fishing expedition, hoping to find something, probably drugs, that they could use to charge her with.

One entire end of the bedroom looked as if it had been converted into a closet with louvered doors closed in front of it. Marshal opened up one set, revealing a closet full of clothing—not just the gypsy-hippy things Tamara had been wearing when Di met with her, but everything from sequined evening gowns to sharp business suits, to a couple of antique-style Victorian dresses. And above the clothing, ranged neatly, were more wigs in every possible color.

“What the—” Di stared.

“Chameleon,” Marshal guessed. “I bet she did more than just tell fortunes.”

“I’m beginning to think that the psychic scam was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.” Beneath the clothing were shoe racks, which were just as full as the shelves. “I’d love to know where someone with feet that size found shoes like that.” She shook herself out of the contemplation of all of that clothing. “Never mind, we don’t have time to sort through all the hair around here to figure out what’s hers. You check in here for a wastebasket, maybe you’ll find some used Kleenex. I’ll find the laundry hamper. And we should both look for things that look like they might be keepsakes.”

Di found the laundry hamper, and it looked as if Tamara sent her clothing out to be cleaned. There was a commercial laundry-bag next to it, stuffed full. She extracted a pair of lacy undies that were just beginning to fray a little. That would have to do, since Marshal came up empty-handed.

Di was hoping, but not really expecting, to find Tamara’s ritual space or tools. She had the feeling that Tamara kept such things far separated from her living-space. And if she was working left-hand path, well, that was probably wise. The residue of nasty magic was apt to attract equally nasty things, and you didn’t want those things sniffing around the place where you lived and slept.

She checked her watch, with an increased sense of urgency. “I think we’ve spent as much time here as we can. We have something, anyway. Let’s get out of here.”

Marshal locked up behind them, though there wasn’t anything he could do about the deadbolts. They both remembered to clean off their shoes, and then sprinted down the alley to his car.

They found the others waiting somewhat impatiently for them, and by the time they got there, Di had a pretty good idea of what she was going to do, at least so far as finding where Tamara was.

“Help me move the furniture,” she said, and when they had gotten it all cleared to the sides of the room, she flipped the rug.

The bottom side was a single piece of white canvas, with her own ritual circle beautifully embroidered on it. She and Memaw had spent all of one year making it. It was, of course, a “broken” circle; the actual circle part was outlined in a nine-part braid of silk with some of her own hair braided into it, and it was completed only when she tied the loose end of the braid to the rest of the circle.

She unlocked her cupboard while Zaak examined the rug with interest and envy, and got out her supplies. She took everything she needed to the middle of the rug, and raised an eyebrow at Zaak. “Watch and learn,” she said, tied off the braid and cast her circle.

The moment she did so, she sensed that little door opening up in her again. This time the movement of power was slower, more deliberate, but it was obvious that she was finally on the right track, or it wouldn’t have come at all.

Once her circle and wards were in place, she sat down cross-legged in the middle of the circle and cut the crotch out of the panties with a silver—literally silver—knife. Not her atheme; that was reserved for other things, and she didn’t want to contaminate its potential power with anything of Tamara’s.

She pulled several threads from the scrap of cloth, then disassembled her compass.

It looked like an ordinary compass; a glass cover, the needle resting delicately on a spindle, and the base. But there was no “compass rose” painted on the base; it was just a blank piece of white stuff. Ivory, in fact, though the elephant that had left that tusk had died of natural causes long before there was any ban on importation.

Everything but the lid was ivory, including the needle. The lid was a glass disk set in bronze. It was very, very old. Di wasn’t sure how old, but the ivory had mellowed to a creamy shade all over.

She took the needle out, and opened the bottle of rubber cement she’d brought in with her. Delicately dabbing a line of the stuff on the needle, she carefully laid three of the threads along it, and set it back on the spindle, then put the compass back together again.

She switched her position from cross-legged to kneeling, facing south, the direction of the Protector and Avenger, who could take many names, but answered as often to “Archangel Michael” as any. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands over her atheme, its point down above the compass. She took in a long breath, threw everything out of her mind except the need to find Tamara’s power, and released her own power through her knife into the compass.

When she opened her eyes and looked down at it, it was pointing between West and South.

“Right,” she said, realizing from the looks on their faces that there had probably been a physical manifestation of that discharge of power. “Now we have a guide. Saddle up, and move out.”

#

Zach, Em, and Emory somehow squeezed into the back, though Em was mostly on Emory’s lap. Di and Marshal were in the front, following, as best they could, given the roads, the guidance of the compass. Streets around Cambridge were not exactly laid out in a logical fashion.

That was the least of their worries. Once they actually got close to Tamara’s power—which was incorporated into the shields themselves—the shields would begin to interfere. Eventually the compass needle would start to spin. Diana could only hope that the area they ended up in was something like warehouses—places without a lot of people in them. They certainly couldn’t call the cops and start a house-to-house search in a crowded residential neighborhood on the basis of three underwear threads glued to a compass needle.

But as the needle continued to point steadfastly in one direction, and they moved out of the city into the suburbs, and then out of the suburbs of Cambridge into the suburbs of Boston, past Boston College—

“We are way out of Cambridge jurisdiction,” Emory said from the back seat, sounding muffled.

“So less we have to explain,” Di replied, bending intently over her compass. It was getting darker now, the sun going down, dusk closing in. That was both good and bad. Good, because it meant if they actually found the right place, they could sneak up on it without Tamara seeing them. Bad because Tamara was clearly working some bad juju, and evil things were stronger when the sun went down.

By the time there was nothing left of the sun but some red streaks in the sky, they were out in rural Massachusetts. Farm country, lots of woodland and orchards. The lights, slowly coming on as darkness fell, were few and far between. Diana’s hopes rose a little.

They turned down a little two-lane road, barely paved, and traveled about two miles along it without seeing any lights at all other than their own headlights. Orchards? The trees were spaced too regularly to be woods, but if these were orchards, they were long abandoned. She felt in her kit for her flashlight and trained the yellow beam on the compass, and it was a good thing she did, because within moments of her doing so, the needle began to spin wildly.

“Ha!” she said, and Marshal glanced over at her, taking his foot off the gas—not that the car was going all that fast.

“Keep going,” she told him. “It’s around here somewhere, but I want to mark where the—”

“Where the effect ends.” He stopped the car anyway, and zeroed the odometer. “Now we have where it begins marked.”

She shook her head ruefully. “I think you’re smarter than I am.”

“Naw. I was an Eagle Scout.” He made a face. “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”

“I was just imagining you in short pants.” That broke the tension a little as Em giggled and Emory guffawed. “Carry on, Scoutmaster.”

Marshal growled something unintelligible, and sent the car creeping forward again. It seemed forever before the needle stopped spinning and pointed back the way they had come.

“Stop,” she said, and Marshal peered at the odometer.

“One point two five miles to the midpoint,” he said. “Roughly.” He maneuvered the car carefully in an effort not to get off the pavement, taking so long to get going in the opposite direction that Emory made the impatient suggestion that they just get out, pick it up, and turn it around that way.

Finally they were underway again.

“Stop us a little short, look for some place we can pull the car off the road where no one is going to notice it.”

“You’re asking me to pull this poor little thing off the road—” the car bumped and lurched around a pothole. “Lady, the springs in ballpoint pens are stronger than the ones in my car!”

“Just—there!” She pointed ahead, to what looked like an overgrown gravel road intersection with this one. Obediently he eased off the road onto the track, which was a lot better than it looked; hardpacked dirt nearly as good as the pavement, the weeds growing up over it being weak and giving no resistance. There had once been a fence here, but it had fallen down a good while ago. Once they were under the trees and away from the reach of the headlights of any car on the road, it would be hard to tell they were there.

They all got out; Diana passed out flashlights from her kit to the others, who played them on the ground. There was a litter of cigarette butts and crumpled packages, beer cans, food wrappers and a couple of empty bottles of harder stuff mixed in with the weeds.

“Well, that explains a lot,” said Emory.

“Good thing it’s Sunday night, otherwise we’d have company.” Marshal got the rest of their gear out of the car’s tiny “boot,” and looked to Di. “All right, Fearless Leader, what are we looking for?”

“Bonehead. Since there’s no Haunted Amusement Park around here, it has to be the Abandoned Farmhouse. Don’t you ever watch any Saturday morning cartoons?” Emory shook his head sadly. “No wonder the only culture you have is the stuff growing in your fridge.”

Di shivered, and not from the cold, though it was icy out here, and the darkness wasn’t helping. “Let’s get going,” she said, wincing at the sound of her own voice. It sounded too loud. Instinctively, she wanted to whisper.

She led the way back to the road, then turned off her flashlight; the others did the same, though she could sense their uncertainty. “Wait for the moon,” she told them. “It’s almost full, and it should be coming up in a second. Em, Emory, you guys got your weapons?”

“Yep. We want to know where the rest of you are before we start going all Dirty Harry, though.” Emory’s voice sounded subdued. “So how do we do that?”

“You guys stick together; you’ve seen enough horror movies to know not to lose each other in the dark. If you do, those of you that are still together stop and freeze and let the stray find you. If I have to split off, I’ll yell before I come anywhere near you.”

“Got it.” The moon was rising above the trees now, and as she expected, it flooded the road with light. With their eyes adjusted they could see reasonably well, enough to keep from spraining an ankle in potholes or falling over a rock. They made their way cautiously down the road—there was no point in trying to stumble through the grass and weeds beside it, when they would be able to see any vehicles coming long before the occupants could see them. It was…spooky. Far off in the distance it was possible to hear the sounds of cars and trucks on the highway, but nearby? Only the occasional noise of an animal, small or medium-sized scuttling through the dead vegetation, or farther off, the noise of something larger moving away from them.

“This really is going to be a Haunted Farmhouse, isn’t it?” Emory said quietly.

“Well, it’s pretty likely Tamara has holed up in the farmhouse that this orchard belongs to,” Di told him. “Or at least, something like that. I’d have suspected an old trailer-home, but what I saw in my dream looked older and more permanent than that. I can’t see her camping.”

“Me either, not after that bedroom. I don’t see anyone with that many wigs knowing how to rough it.” Marshal peered up the road. “I think that might be what we’re looking for—on the left. See where there’s no drop-off at the edge of the pavement, like there is everywhere else? Like there used to be an access road there, or maybe a driveway.”

They picked up their pace a little—as much as anyone wanted to, given the dim light. Sure enough, there was something like an overgrown track there. There was no sign of a gate, but Marshal and Di evidently had the same idea at the same time, for they both went straight up to what looked like an impenetrable barrier of bushes and weeds and discovered that the “impenetrable barrier” was just a screen of dead stuff piled up to hide the road.

“Bingo.” Di shivered again. “Either we have a really antisocial old man, someone farming weed, or Tamara. So wait—”

She closed her eyes and tried to see if she could sense anything. Other than a vague but powerful feeling of menace, though, she couldn’t get a thing.

“Anything on the radar?” Zaak asked. She shook her head.

“Sometimes these access roads go for half a mile,” Marshal observed. “We might be too far away. Can we use flashlights?”

“I think we’re going to have to,” she replied. “But…be careful, because that’s just going to advertise we’re coming…”

“Like falling and breaking an ankle wouldn’t?” Em put in. “Still, it might be worth it for someone to scout ahead of the group.”

“That’d be me,” Marshal replied. “Eagle Scout, remember? I’ll keep my eyes dark-adapted, I won’t go farther ahead than twenty yards. When I know that stretch is clear, I’ll whistle a little, and you can come catch up to me with the lights, then I’ll go ahead again.”

The sense of urgency that had driven Di out here argued against such caution, but the rest of her was in complete agreement. So that was what they did; the group huddled together, listening to the faint crackle of weeds being trampled underfoot as Marshal forged ahead, then at his excellent imitation of a whippoorwill, they would move forward to his position, then wait for him again as he went ahead.

That continued for a while—it seemed like a very long time, but it was actually a lot less than an hour—right up to the point where, instead of hearing his whistle, they heard him furtively making his way back to them.

“There’s a farmhouse there, all right. Some lights at the rear, not many and not bright, and it looks like most of the windows are boarded up, so it’s not as if someone is living there that has a right to be there. I think.” He was whispering, and they all kept their voices just as low. “Di, you getting anything now?”

“This doesn’t exactly work like radar,” she whispered back, but she couldn’t deny the heavy feeling of menace all around. “All right. We need a plan. Does that place look like it has a basement? Maybe a root cellar or something? And do you feel comfortable prowling around it a little? If not—”

“I’m comfortable, providing no werewolves jump me.” He tried to make a joke out of it.

“I can try to do something to keep that from happening,” she said, quite seriously. “I can make you invisible to supernatural things, but so far as you making perfectly ordinary noises and alerting killer German Shepherds or anything like that—”

He sobered. “If you can do that, I’ll take my chances. I was pretty good at teenage sneaking around.”

She nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see it, then remembered and said, “All right. We just need to know the general layout of the place and where the doors and accessible windows are. And if there is a basement with outside access.” Right now a basement room was the likeliest match for the room she had seen in her dream.

This was magic she could do quickly; she’d done it a thousand times, although usually on herself. It simply made the person in question blend in with the background, chameleon-like, at least to the senses of anything magical. Not so much invisibility, as making the eyes slide away, a forceful “not noticing.” It wouldn’t last long on Marshal, but then again, it wouldn’t have to.

She cast it quickly, and without any fuss. She was done by the time he said “Well, when are you going to make me the Invisible Man?”

“I already have,” she replied. “Be careful.”

“I will,” he replied fervently, and slipped away, leaving them all in a huddle in the dark.

She tried to sense just what was in that house, but other than the general aura of inimical magic, she couldn’t get much without pushing. And right now, she didn’t want to push. Tamara, though powerful, was clearly not very skilled—or else she had picked up her knowledge piecemeal and had never actually been formally trained. There was a lot of emotion fueling that power, and it wasn’t just Chris Fitzhugh’s anguish. Some of this had to be Tamara’s own, and what that said to Di was that she had better tread very cautiously. She might be the proverbial blunt instrument, but an untutored lout with a sledgehammer could kill you just as dead as an assassin with a stiletto.

What Di didn’t sense was anything outside of that house. Mind, that didn’t mean anything. There could be traps. There could be things that were hiding from her, as she had hidden Marshal.

Or maybe, just maybe, Tamara was arrogant enough to think that she wouldn’t be found, or felt she had to conserve her magical resources.

Di was used to waiting, though the others were fidgeting long before Marshal came back. The whippoorwill whistle preceded him and he slipped in beside them in the shelter of their bushes with only a little rustling of dead leaves.

“The side facing us is the front. There’s a wooden porch covered with Virginia Creeper which looks like a death-trap; half the supports are busted and I wouldn’t be any too sure of the floor. The windows are all boarded up, and I couldn’t see any sign of anyone fighting through the weeds and the Virginia Creeper to get to the front door. Around left is that cellar door you were hoping for and someone did use that, the weeds are all busted down. There are a couple windows on that side where the boards are off the windows, but the windows are dark. The back, there’s a car back there, an old beater Buick, a back door with cement steps going up, and the windows back there have light. It looks like a Coleman or a kerosene lamp, not electricity. The last side is all boarded up, and full of blackberry bushes; I didn’t even try to get around it.”

Di let out her breath in a sigh. “All right then. We’re hitting this blind, and I’m sorry. My best guess is the kid is in that cellar. It’s where I’d stash her if I was hiding her. So what we need to do is provide a distraction at the kitchen door while we snatch the kid from the cellar—”

“And we provide the distraction,” Emory interrupted, and started to stand up.

“Oh hell no!” Di hissed, and pulled him back down again. “If she’s got the kind of juice I think she does, she’ll be able to bring in stuff that make that dybbuk look like Captain Kangaroo! No, I want you guys to put the grab on the kid, while I do the distraction! Chances are the kid’s farther back in the cellar than where that door is. There might be locks, if there are, the door’s probably old enough and the frame’s dry-rotted enough you can bust it off the hinges, but I can’t. And I’m leaving you with the guns. If there’s a confederate, he’ll be down there.”

“Oh,” said Emory. “Ah…”

“All right. I’ll go hit the back door and start a ruckus, while you wait at the cellar. As soon as you hear the noise start, break in, try and find the munchkin in the cellar. If she’s not there, head up into the house and stay clear of where the noise is. Zaak?”

“Yep. Got the kit.” Zaak sounded steadier than she thought he would. Excellent.

“Remember, blessed salt and holy water will probably chase off anything she’s left on guard. If that doesn’t work, try the horseshoe nails. If that doesn’t work, try brute magical force and bullets. And if those don’t work—try what worked on the dybbuk. It’s worth a shot, and unholy things usually will at least react to the holy backed by faith.”

“Gotcha. Give me a sec…” Zaak rummaged in the bag and came up with the salt container, which he proceeded to empty into one pocket of his jacket. She nodded with approval. “Got the squirt gun of holy water in the right pocket, and the horseshoe nails in a bag on my belt.”

Horseshoe nails—better make sure they all had them. “Yeah wait a sec, give everybody one of those. You guys stick them in a pocket. Cold Iron is pretty effective a repellant for the things I can think of she’d have as guards—they can still lob stuff at you, but they won’t be able to get close enough to slash at you, and claws and teeth are generally their weapons of choice.” She took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s do this.”

They did their best to slip through the brush and weeds in Marshal’s wake, though only Di was as quiet as he was.

Their eyes had adapted to the darkness while they waited for Marshal without lights. The house had probably been white, and probably was now the silver- grey of bleached wood, so it stood out pretty well—and it helped that there was a vague haze of light at the back of it. She left them all at the cellar door, an old-fashioned double-door that looked, thank heavens, like something that had stairs behind it and not a coal-chute. There was a padlock on it, but Marshal was already at work on it.

“Whistle when you get the lock off,” she whispered; he nodded, and she moved quietly on to the back of the house.

Sure enough, there was a chunky old car back there, something from the ’50s, not iconic enough to be cool, too lumpy to be good-looking. There wasn’t enough light to tell the color, but Di guessed it was probably a faded turquoise.

She scooted around its side so that it was between her and the house and studied the area around the back door. And now she could detect wood smoke; the light wind had probably been carrying it away from them. So there was some form of lantern in there, and a wood fire.

There weren’t any moving shadows. Did that mean anything? She peered in the car windows; the back seat was loaded with dark bundles. Smart; the house was probably stuffed with rats and mice; anything Tamara wanted to keep safe—like food!—she was better off keeping in the car. Carefully she tried a door; it opened easily, letting out a whiff of apples and salami.

The whistle she was hoping for sounded softly from the side of the house. All right. They were waiting for her. Time to light up some fireworks.

Tamara clearly was not expecting anyone to find her here. So chances were, she hadn’t locked the back door, if indeed it could be locked. After all it would be a nuisance to have to unlock it just to get into the car for breakfast.

Showtime.

She brought up all of her defenses, and walked quickly around the car and up the cement stairs. Bringing power into both hands, she kicked at the door.

As she had hoped, it flew open and smashed into the wall, sticking there. She jumped across the threshold before Tamara could do something to block her—

Most of the light in the room was coming from a Coleman lantern in one corner and a wood stove on the opposite wall; this was a kitchen, but there was no furniture in it—and the reason she had not been able to see any moving shadows was because Tamara was kneeling on the floor, naked, with her back to the door, in the center of a piece of canvas. Painted on the canvas was a ritual circle, though Di didn’t recognize the signs painted around and inside the circle. Tamara leapt to her feet as Di crossed the threshold, and whirled.

And that was when Di froze, because the very last thing she had ever expected Tamara to have was a penis.

It was a good thing her defenses were already up, because that moment of paralysis would have cost her dearly. As it was, when Tamara screeched an obscenity and blasted her, it pretty much all splashed off her shields. The attack steadied her, though, and she gave back as good as she got.

Tamara’s shields were nothing like as good as Di’s, but they were insanely strong, so the result was the same—nothing got through. They battered at each other for at least five minutes, when a volley of gunshots under their feet startled them both for a moment. The sound rattled Tamara more, though, and Di got in a hit that sent the kidnapper staggering back, narrowly avoiding the stove.

Tamara pushed off the wall and snatched something out of the old zinc sink under the window, then lunged for Di, an enormous butcher knife catching the light from the lantern as it passed way too close to her eyes. It was Di’s turn to flinch back, her concentration broken. Then Tamara was on her again, and it was pretty clear that no matter what other skills the kidnapper had, Tamara was a skilled knife-fighter.

It was all that Di could do to keep out of reach of that blade while she tried to refocus her power. But as she had pointed out, shields didn’t do squat about material things, and that knife was as material as you could get. All she could do was fall back on the half dozen ju-jitsu lessons she’d had—

Which seemed pitifully few now. Her side hurt, she was panting, and she was sweating, while Tamara was just as energized by rage and insanity as when this fight had started.

And then—miracle.

Tamara made a stab at Di that was identical to something the ju-jitsu instructor had taught her to counter. And everything just snapped into place, as if it was all preprogrammed. With focus and complete confidence, Di moved out of the line of Tamara’s stab. She grabbed Tamara’s wrist at exactly the right moment to catch the kidnapper off her balance. She pulled, ducked under Tamara’s arm, and flipped the kidnapper right over her shoulder and into the wall.

There was a shuddering whump as Tamara hit the wall, and a strange, gurgling noise.

Di straightened, as Tamara slid down the wall, flopped over—

With the knife driven into Tamara’s chest, the kidnapper’s hand still clenched on the hilt, eyes already glazing over with death.

There was a strangled little sick sound at the door. Di whirled to see Marshal and Emory already moving to block the sight of the body from the child in Zaak’s arms, and Em holstering her gun.

“Um—we came to see if you needed—guess you didn’t,” Marshal gulped.

“Thirty seconds ago I did,” Di replied, feeling as sick as Marshal and Emory looked. “Move. Out. Over by the car. Quick.”

She started for the door, which got them moving. Her mind raced; she needed to figure out a plausible scenario, and she needed to figure it out fast and make sure it was simple and that they were all letter-perfect in it.

By the time they were all in a huddle at the car, she had it.

“Okay, we need a story that is going to hold up enough to get us off. Marshal, you need to get your car and bring it to the front of the house; you and Emory and Em will take the kid to the last town we passed and get hold of the law. Wait!” She held up her hand. “Wait and hear me out. We can’t exactly turn up with a kidnapped child and a dead body unless we’ve got a good explanation, but one cops will buy. Here’s ours. We came out here because we heard the place was abandoned and we were gonna scout it out for throwing a party. Confess to the lesser crime they can turn us loose for, see?”

“Okay, give me the guns. What were you shooting at, anyway?”

“There was something guarding the kid,” Emory replied, his voice sounding a little shaky. “Something bigger than me, and hairy. We emptied on it, it went down, Zaak hit it with water and salt and it just melted away.”

She nodded. No idea what it was—only that it was a good thing they’d had all that weaponry. She took the guns back, including Zaak’s squirt gun, and shoved them all back in the bag Zaak had been carrying.

“So the story is you three got here and you heard the kid screaming and crying, you busted into the basement and got her and ran. Zaak and I will go back to where we parked the car the first time and wait for you. The cops will want you to take them to the house, you will, they’ll find—that—and assume Tamara was too late to stop you so she killed herself. Himself.” She paused, thrown for a moment, then picked up the plan. “Zaak and I will get rid of anything that looks occult and set up a bucket or a tub or something and put some water to heat on the stove in there, so it looks like you interrupted Tamara in the middle of bath time. Got it?”

They nodded, but Marshal asked, hesitantly, “But why—I mean getting rid of—“

“Because this is freaky enough without starting a big old Satanic witch sacrifices scare,” Di said bluntly. “Now I want to figure out what the hell she—he—was doing and why, and for that I need to grab the evidence. But the cops don’t need to know that—if they did, sure as anything, they’d start looking for a cult, and there isn’t one. Just one lunatic, but looking for a cult will start them sniffing around anything from Halloween supplies on up, and none of us need that kind of scrutiny.”

She looked directly at Zaak when she said, that, and he nodded.

“So, are we straight?”

They all nodded. Marshal took the best of the flashlights and went off at a run after handing the kid to Di. The poor thing was so exhausted by all she’d been through that she’d actually fallen asleep while they were standing around talking. She was heavy and more than a bit smelly by now, and Di didn’t care—because she was alive, and safe, and she had completely beaten the odds on this one.

Marshal came back a lot sooner than any of them had thought he would, headlights blazing with welcome light. That would leave the tire tracks that would give veracity to their story. Emory and Emily got in, wrapping the little girl in a blanket from the boot of the car. She didn’t even wake up. And then they were gone, Marshal revving the engine as hard as it could go.

#

They didn’t get back to their respective apartments until dawn. The telephone shrilled, waking her up about noon. She fumbled her way to it—she’d fallen into bed still clothed and just rolled up into the blankets—and answered it.

“Joe O’Brian,” came, after her bleary “hello?” “Don’t bother trying to tell me you had nothing to do with it. Lavinia says otherwise. Am I welcome in your apartment yet?”

“Uh…yeah?” she said.

“Good. Get your Spook Squad together in an hour. I’ll bring the grinders and beer.” Before she could respond, he hung up.

When Joe arrived, he had two big sacks of grinders and a case—and Lavinia in tow. He wasn’t in a uniform either. Di had managed to wake everyone up and get them assembled, though there were dark circles under their eyes and all of them—including her—were still feeling kind of shocky.

Joe didn’t say much after she let him in, he just distributed the sandwiches and beers, and let everyone settle down first.

“Right,” he said, taking charge of things. “First of all, is there any evidence I have to make disappear?”

Di shook her head. “Zaak and I were careful. We wore gloves, I never had any blood on me and I made sure Zaak didn’t get any on him, I don’t think the little girl has any idea how many people there were, and I think I left a pretty plausible looking scene. I even polished my prints off the car where I touched it.”

Joe let out his breath in a sigh of relief. “Good job,” he said, breaking into a smile for the first time since Di had met him. “All right, here’s what I know. Tomas—that was Tamara’s real name—was turned down for sex change operations three times. No one would talk on the record but the last shrink said off the record that no doc in his right mind was going to do that kind of operation on the sort of raving loony that Tomas was. And after going over the house, we found all kinds of things. First, a rent-a-cop uniform, so now we know there wasn’t a confederate. But the big one—Tomas was operating as a Tomas-the-bookie as well as Tamara-the-tea-leaf reader, and one of the clients was named Fitzhugh.”

As one, their jaws dropped.

“Well…that explains a lot,” Zaak said, recovering first.

Di nodded. It did—how Tamara knew about Melanie and Chris, probably how Tamara knew about the shopping trip too—

“We’re getting the details out of Fitzhugh now, but damn if Tomas wasn’t slick. He—Tamara, that is—was never around when the old man was, so he never laid eyes on his wife’s pet psychic. We’re gonna spin it as debt and extortion, and that’s what the Fitzhughs think it is, but I want the real reason. That’s why I brought Vinnie.” Joe nodded at Lavinia, who was casually, but fastidiously, eating her meatball grinder with a knife and fork.

Di put down her sandwich and got up to the still unopened bag into which they had stuffed Tamara’s canvas circle and every bit of occult paraphernalia they could find. She spread it the canvas out on the floor first, and was reaching into the bag, when Lavinia exclaimed, “Of course! Cybele!”

“Who?” said Joe, as Di snapped her finger snapped her fingers and exclaimed “Of course!”

“Cybele is the Phrygian earth-goddess, which is not important. What is important is that like most ancient goddesses she has both a light side and a dark side—and that historically her male followers castrated themselves to turn themselves into priestesses.” Lavinia was off and running then, explaining that Tomas was probably invoking Cybele’s dark side in hopes of getting the sex change he wanted by magic, then diverting into the realms of Anatolian mythology. The others were following her explanations and digressions—Zaak with great interest, Emory and Marshal with frowns of concentration, Em and Joe nodding but looking vaguely lost whenever Lavinia swerved off the modern path.

Now Di was very glad Joe had brought Lavinia, who was, aside from being a Guardian, a first class scholar of Indo-European religions and mythology. She’d never have figured out “Phrygian” from those glyphs on the canvas, but once Lavinia did, it all made perfect sense. So to speak.

She had to wonder, after all, if Tomas was not a gypsy at all, but some wandering Anatolian…even a descendant of those long-ago priests of Cybele.

Whatever the case, one thing was absolutely true. It was seldom wise to awaken one of those old, old gods and give them footholds in the modern world. Their worship was often violent and bloody, and the sacrifices they demanded were generally extravagant. The Greeks and Romans had given Cybele room among their gods as the Magna Mater, or Great Mother, but there were dark things said about the worship of the Magna Mater, and human sacrifice was the least of those things.

Who knows what that thing was that was in the basement. There wasn’t a lot known about Phrygian myth, so it could have been a satyr, some sort of minotaur, or something Di had never heard of.

Lavinia finally wound down, and Di packed the stuff from Tamara’s lair back up in one of the bags the grinders had come in. At Joe’s look of inquiry, she said “Incinerator in the basement,” and he nodded. He even helped her take the rest of the burnable trash down there, and they stood together to make sure it all went to ash.

“So. Can I count on you and your Spook Squad again?” he asked, casually, as they watched the flames. “Can’t exactly ask Lavinia to go hiking across country in the middle of the night or breaking into spooky old houses in the middle of nowhere. She’d probably break her hip.”

Di snorted. “She’s tougher than you think. She’s more likely to bitch the whole time, but…yeah.” She thought about it a moment. Even after being confronted with a very dead body last night, the four of them had handled themselves well. They hadn’t been put off by the dybbuk. They hadn’t made any noises about bailing or not wanting to be involved this afternoon. Finally, she nodded. “You can count me in. I’ll have to talk to the others first, but—”

It was Joe’s turn to snort. “After being in my department all these years, kid, I can tell you there’s two kinds of people out there. The ones that see the weird shit and just block it out and never want to think about it, and the ones that get addicted to it. Your bunch is addicted. You’ll see.”

By the time they had gotten back up to Di’s apartment, Lavinia had gotten her coat on and was saying goodbye. Zaak was promising to take the bus to visit her next weekend. “A pity I cannot manage to get Diana to do the same,” Lavinia said dryly.

“Diana has only just moved here and hasn’t figured out the bus schedule yet, old woman,” Diana replied just as dryly. “I’ll let Zaak be the trailblazer. Thanks for coming over and giving us the low-down, Joe.”

“My pleasure. I just like to have all the pieces to put together, you know?” He shook hands with everyone, there was the usual jockeying at the door, and then he and Lavinia were gone.

This time it was Emory who put his back to the door. “Okay, we have to know. Are we still in?”

I guess Joe was right. “You’re in as long as you want in,” she affirmed. “Joe was just asking if he could count on us for next time.”

“There’s going to be a next time?” Emory exclaimed with glee.

“Idiot.” Em punched him in the bicep. “He wouldn’t have asked if there wasn’t.”

But Zaak looked as if he had suddenly run out of steam, though not enthusiasm, and yawned hugely. “I think I need to sleep lunch off,” he said ruefully, as he set off a chain reaction of more yawns from the rest of them. “Good thing I don’t have Monday classes.”

Di groaned, as did Marshal. There was some more congestion at the door, then they were all gone, and she went to grab her book bag. She had her hand on the knob when there was another knock.

It was Marshal.

“I figured we could go together,” he said. “I’m going to introduce you to the guy that organized a karate club, so you can get hooked up for when you can’t carry a gun. And maybe I could find out if you’d rather go to the Carlos Montoya concert or something else with me Friday.”

She stopped dead in her tracks. “Marshal, are you actually asking me on a date?”

He tugged her elbow to get her going again. “Is that so strange?”

“It is for me,” she admitted. Then she grinned. “Carlos Montoya sounds great!”

And the possibility of having something like a real, normal life?

Priceless.

WITCHING HOUR

Diana Tregarde sat in the middle of her king-sized, medieval canopy bed, with cinnamon incense making the studio apartment smell like buns baking. She had pillows piled up against the headboard, and the thick upholstery-velvet curtains half closed against the draft. There were built-in lights glowing on either side of her, giving exactly the right amount of illumination to read by, and lined up to her left was a pile of books and notebooks.

A “scholar’s mistress,” was what they used to call that arrangement. Students and academics seemed to have had a habit of going to bed with books for—well, since there had been books, it seems.

The curtains were keeping drafts at bay nicely—which was, after all, what they had been invented to do. That, and give the better-off, couple or single, some privacy from children, servants, or both, who might be sleeping in the same room. She was wrapped in a second-hand men’s kimono of heavy silk, over her jeans and leotard. Just visible to her left was the fireplace, with a cheerful fire going in it, and her ritual sword propped next to it, for later. It had been Zaak’s but it was hers now; he’d given it to her. She rather liked the idea of having a ritual sword as well as a dagger. For one thing, swords were intimidating; for another, they kept things physically at bay a lot better than a mere knife. This was a real sword, too, not some replica piece of crap. A real Toledo blade. She had no idea where he had found it, but then, Zaak was from New York City and the strange things that came into pawn and second-hand shops there were the stuff of legend. The door to the hall was hidden by the bedcurtains. There was no distraction from the window in the west wall at the foot of the bed, and not only because it was dark and the velvet curtains that matched the ones on the bed were pulled shut. There was never any distraction from that window; it looked onto the blank brick of the building opposite.

Diana had looked at the apartments over there, because they were a bit cheaper than this building, but one quick tour had convinced her that cheaper rent for more square footage was not worth it. For one thing, the building was mostly tenanted by very loud male students. For another…when she stepped in the door, she could smell the mice, in the entryway, in the hallway, even in the studio open to look at that had (allegedly) been cleaned. Where there were mice, there was probably a thriving population of roaches. And rats. The hall carpet didn’t look as if it had been cleaned since it was new, and she wasn’t altogether certain that the brown color of the carpet in the apartment was its original color.

This place might be old, and might be shabby, but it was clean to a fault. At the first sign of a roach, the management came in and laid down boric acid along every baseboard, and left you a bottle of it to use inside your furniture. There were no mice, because they had a very civilized, one-cat-per-apartment rule; with that many cats in the building, including three enormous, wary beasts in the basement who were the responsibility of the super, mice and rats didn’t have a chance. There were no carpets, only ancient hardwood floors that were easy to clean. Di could sleep at night without worrying about waking up to something running over her face—or having something living in her underwear drawer.

Her floor was quiet tonight; so was the floor above her, where Emory Sung and Itzaak Freiburg lived in the apartment directly above, and Marshal Stevens—who she was currently dating off and on—lived next to the staircase. She already knew that Marshal, Zaak and Emory were out. In Marshal’s case, he was working, since there was a lot of work on Halloween for a good amateur stage magician. And as for Emory and Zaak, there were a lot of parties going on tonight at the twelve Harvard Houses, and if you didn’t like the music at the first one, or the snacks they were serving, or the brand of beer in the keg, it would be easy enough to find another. Normally, of course, it being a Tuesday night, there would be no parties at all—but this was Halloween, and not even the fact that some sadist professors were holding exams November First was not going to deter the merriment. Lucky for the lads, not one of the three had a midterm tomorrow. Di’s course in Moral Reasoning did. So did her math class.

On the other hand, this means I didn’t have to find an excuse to break away at midnight.

Diana Tregarde was the last in a long, long line of family-tradition witches—pagans, they would have called themselves nowadays, she supposed, since the tradition she’d been taught was, more or less, Celtic and Druidic. It was a long, long way removed from its origins, however. Something she was only starting to realize as she continued in her Celtic Folklore course.

Halloween—or Samhain, as she knew the original name to be—was an important night in the pagan calendar. The Christians had usurped it and turned it into the Eve of All Hallows, the night before the celebratory Mass of all Saints, known and unknown. Which, when you came to think about it, was a neat double trick. Grab Samhain for yourself, then cement yourself a little more good karma by making sure you gave worship to Saints you might not even know existed, or had forgotten to thank during the rest of the year. Then, while you’re at it, turn it into a double-hitter on November Second with the Feast of All Souls, which remembered all those who had passed on. A two-day celebration—granted, you spent most of it on your knees in church, but that was two days in the middle of harvest when you weren’t working sun-up to sun-down. And they were feast-days, which meant that the church itself would provide you with a meal if you sat through the mass. The Druids and other pagan priests couldn’t match that.

Clever, those early Christians, Di thought, with a wry half-smile.

Well, for her, and for Memaw, and for all the ones that followed the old ways, Samhain was the night when the veil between the world thinned, and spirits slipped across. They could go either way, actually; it was easier at Samhain and Beltane for ones that had gotten stuck to cross over, and easier for the spirits of their loved ones to come and fetch them.

It was also the night for spirits to visit their loved ones, but Di already knew not to expect her father and mother, or her grandmother. In all the Samhains that had passed, her parents had never turned up, and as for her grandmother…Memaw never looked back.

In fact, Memaw might well be one of the ones out tonight, finding the lost and giving them an escort to the other side. No use to look for her; she knew very well that Di was capable of taking care of herself, since Di was a Guardian. She knew Di didn’t need the comfort of seeing her. Nor did Di need to see her to know she was in the Summer Country.

So, tonight what Di would do—at midnight or thereabouts—was create a safe space for spirits of good intent to cross, and a beacon to help them. The beacon would burn until midnight tomorrow, when Samhain ended.

Until midnight, however, she was going to stay right where she was, cuddled in the featherbed that softened her mattress, warmed by her afghan, soothed by incense and candles, calmed by classical music, studying her notes. And nibbling on just a little Halloween candy she’d helped herself to before she left Dudley Hall, the Hall for students who lived off-campus.

My student fees paid for it, I might as well eat it, she thought, and allowed herself a moment of bliss as a bit of chocolate-covered toffee melted in her mouth.

#

Mark Valdez was looped; Tim, Phil, and Quasi were a good bit farther along than that. There had been a lot of parties on the Harvard campus. A crazy lot, considering that tomorrow was a class day. But maybe some of the profs decided there was no point in holding a midterm the day after Halloween, Mark thought fuzzily. ’Cause they wanted to party too.

Well, it was possible.

Mark hadn’t bothered with a costume for the ones he’d crashed before he met up with his three friends. There had been the Adams House official party, which had been a lot more fun with the new House Masters, the Kielys, at the helm. It was still in full roar when he’d gone to sample some room parties. He told everyone he was in costume, though; in his Grateful Dead shirt, he said he was a DeadHead. Most people had had enough of whatever their chosen vice was at that point that they just nodded solemnly and offered a beer. The fact that the drinking age in Massachusetts was eighteen had been no small consideration to Mark when he had considered colleges and universities…

From dinner until eleven PM, when he’d promised to meet up with the guys, he wandered the five buildings of Adams, maintaining a level of intoxication that was just right on the edge of losing focus. Looped, pleasantly buzzed; he wouldn’t drive but he wasn’t incapacitated.

Once it got past ten, he started checking his watch, although at that point he’d hit on a party that seemed to have a higher than normal number of girls in bikini-based costumes, so he was somewhat distracted. There were a bunch of “Laugh-In” girls, a couple of hillbilly girls from “Hee Haw”, some surf-bunnies, some “hippie-chicks.” In short, the scenery was good. Good enough that he stopped drinking and started to sober up.

Sober enough that he heard the bell at Memorial Church toll eleven times before he happened to glance down at his watch.

Okay. I can get there in about ten minutes at a fast walk. He chuckled to himself. It’s not as if Quasi can start without me.

#

Di looked up from her book and rubbed her eyes just as the bell at Memorial Church struck eleven. She stretched, relieved that she didn’t feel too sleepy, and closed her eyes, taking the general occult “temperature” of the area around her building and outward.

It was gratifyingly neutral, which was good.

She opened her eyes again, and wiggled off the bed to get herself a fresh cup of spiced-orange tea. Having a fire in the fireplace served several purposes; warmth, atmosphere, and a good place to keep the teapot so the tea would stay hot without boiling. She poured herself another cup, added a spoonful of honey, and went back to the shelter of the bed.

Sometimes I wish I never had to leave this thing, she thought, as she nestled down into the pillows and featherbed again, and took up her notes.

On a night like tonight, that felt especially true. Halloween was one of those problematic, liminal times. Because the barrier between the “real” world and the world of occult entities was so thin, there was the potential for a lot of problems. People who were naturally—even marginally—gifted had a much greater chance of dragging something across the divide, if they just believed in it hard enough. And when you were a bit drunk or stoned, sometimes you could believe in something with a lot more force than when you were sober.

Will was a huge component of being able to work magic. Belief was powerful, more powerful than most people realized.

Thin the veil, get a lot of people together, and convince them to make something happen…even if they don’t know what they’re doing, on Halloween, they can make it happen. Add in booze or something more potent…

It was a recipe made for trouble. And this was a campus just full of people with active imaginations, looking for—well, many of them didn’t know what they were looking for, only that they were looking. Look in the wrong places, and things will find you, she thought, sipping her tea.

But maybe tonight, with a full day of classes looming, people were confining themselves to partying and not dabbling.

One hopes. At least tonight, it wouldn’t be her upstairs friends that invoked it, if trouble came.

Ever since she had become a Guardian—at a remarkably tender age—there had been exactly one Halloween that she hadn’t been forced to bugger off and put something down. Usually because of teenage girls, playing with Ouija boards, with books of spells they had found in second-hand shops or had ordered through an occult catalog, or—the worst case scenario, had found in an attic. What is it about teenage girls? The boys who fiddled around with the occult never seemed to get in nearly the same amount of trouble.

….except Zaak. She shivered a little, thinking about the dybbuk he had managed to call up.

Well, Zaak was an exception. Very talented, very passionate, and with a surprisingly strong will, considering how he had flitted from interest to interest until he had hit on magic. And he had passed the ripe old age of twenty-one. Most teenage guys couldn’t seem to keep an interest in magic going if they didn’t get an immediate result.

Maybe it’s the hormones that make teen girls such naturals at magic. No, that couldn’t be it. Boys and girls alike had raging hormones in their teen years.

Hormones plus…focus? She’d once seen a cartoon of the diagram of a dog’s brain side by side with a teenage guy’s brain. Tiny slivers devoted to everything until you got to “ball sports,” and “sex” at which point the two sections together represented about ninety percent of the brain. She chuckled to herself. That could be it. If it’s not a ball sport or getting laid, a teenage boy isn’t interested.

She debated starting the ritual. Any time from midnight to around five or six in the morning would do, though the closer to midnight it was, the better. Still, in the old days there was no way to tell when midnight was, exactly, and the rituals had worked just fine….

Better safe than sorry, she decided. If anything bad is going to break loose, it’ll be around midnight. And if nothing does, I’ll have gotten another good hour of study in.

She opened her book again, and hoped for the best. A nice, quiet couple of hours.

#

Mark trailed along behind his three friends. As he had expected, they’d been waiting for him down by the car, drunk enough not to be worried about whether or not he’d show. They hailed him cheerfully as soon as he got within sight, and Phil popped the cap off a beer and handed it to him as soon as he reached the car.

Now they were on their way to their destination, an off-campus apartment belonging to Quasi, the senior among them. Quasi—short for Quasimodo—was carrying the booze-box, for the reason that he was the only one of them capable of toting that much, drunk or sober. Quasi was built like a gorilla, and just about as hairy.

He was also on a full academic scholarship to the anthro department. Phil claimed it was because he was the only living specimen of Neanderthal and they wanted to study him. Mark knew better—he'd seen Quasi's marks so far this semester. Impressive.

It was three flights up to Quasi’s apartment, and this old wreck of a building didn't have an elevator. Normally, this was no big deal, but half blitzed, it was an adventure. The staircase was lit only infrequently, and poorly; the stairs were worn and slippery. Mark was clinging to the banister with both hands, but frankly wondered if it would stay attached to the wall if it had to take his full weight.

“This,” Tim announced to no one in particular, “is 1970. The Age of Enlightenment. The Age of Illumination. This is the dawn—”

“Of the Age of Aquarius, Age of Aquar-i-uuuuus—” Phil warbled. He was, as usual, off-key.

“Shut up, dork,” Tim said, glaring at him from under an untamed thatch of thick black hair.

“Sir, yessir!” Phil saluted—which struck Mark as hilarious, since Phil, flatfooted, four-eyed, and a genuine asthmatic, had about as much chance of being drafted as a nun.

“You were saying—” Quasi prompted, shifting the box a little, and pointedly ignoring Mark’s snorts of laughter.

“My point is, what the hell are we doing having a seance?” Tim demanded, squinting almond eyes at their host.

“One,” Quasi replied amiably, “This is Halloween. It is traditional, as it were, and I am all in favor of tradition. Two, I’m curious about that ‘spell’ I dug up. My anthro prof claims he’s seen magic work—you know, stuff that had no rational explanation. The way I see it, if a magic spell ever works at all, I'm betting it will work on Halloween. Three, I'm paying for the booze.”

“And very good booze it is,” Phil agreed, nodding so hard his glasses slid down his nose. “Well worth a bit of cavorting and chanting.”

“Okay,” Tim replied, mollified. “That's a good reason.”

“Hey, we're here—” Mark interrupted, hauling himself up the last few stairs and getting to the door on the landing ahead of them all. “I want to get this over with.”

He held the door open for the other three. Phil had been entrusted with the key to the apartment, and skipped to the front of the group. The hallway was even dimmer than the staircase; Mark suspected that the bulbs in the light fixtures were at best fifteen-watt refrigerator bulbs. It was probably just as well; by the musty smell, nobody had cleaned the hall carpet for years. Mark was just as glad he didn’t have to look at it. It might be growing something.

Phil fumbled with the lock while the other three made rude comments, and finally got the scarred and gouged door open. Quasi shouldered him aside impatiently; Mark trailed in behind his three friends.

Quasi had obviously been hard at work earlier today; his usual clutter of Salvation Army furniture and books had been pushed up against the wall. The couch was shoved against the wall next to the door they’d entered. It was absolutely covered with junk. The chairs and orange-crate tables were piled up against each other on the back wall. The curtains were tightly closed and then pinned shut with enormous safety pins.

It was, without a doubt, the cleanest this place had been in weeks.

Drawn on the anonymously brown rug in colored chalk was an intricate diagram. Placed at the four corners of the design were rickety candlesticks apparently salvaged from a church; they stood as tall as Mark’s shoulder and held black candles as thick as his wrist. In the center of the diagram was a hibachi stoked with instant-starting charcoal. Beside the hibachi was a sheet of newspaper with a neat arrangement of little piles of unidentifiable flotsam on it.

The three invitees stared at the bizarre setup. Quasi set the box down on his cracked vinyl sofa and took control of the situation.

“Okay, since you want to get this over with, let's move it. Phil, you go stand in the south—”

“Right.” The bespectacled Chem major made a face. “Which way is south, Leatherstocking?”

“Behind the candlestick in front of the record player.” Quasi cast his eyes up toward the ceiling. “Give me strength.”

“If you’re gonna raise a demon, you should be looking in the other direction,” Tim pointed out.

“How many times do I have to tell you cretins? We’re not raising a demon, we’re trying to contact a dead person. That’s what this book says—” Quasi waved a thick paperback at them; the cover said Voudoun Today. Mark squinted at the letters, which wavered in front of his eyes.

“Voo-doon? What's that?” Mark wanted to know.

“It’s not ‘voo-doon,’ dummy, it's voodoo. Sheesh. You go stand to Phil's right.”

“Over here—” Phil flapped his right hand helpfully. Tim took the other open position without being directed.

“Shouldn’t we be wearing robes or something?” Mark asked, looking down at his jeans and Grateful Dead T-shirt doubtfully. It didn't seem like the right outfit to be talking to a ghost in—even if he didn't believe it would work. Well—the skull on the front was okay, but the outfit itself seemed kind of—disrespectful.

“Nah—you'll be okay.” Quasi dismissed his objection with an airy wave of his hand, and took a healthy slug of whiskey directly from the bottle. “Now, don’t move, or you’ll ruin the pentacle.”

Quasi moved unsteadily around the diagram, closing up lines they’d erased by walking on them, lighting the candles, and giving each of the participants a carefully printed slip of paper.

“Okay, when I point at you, say what’s on that. I wrote it down pho-net-ic-al-ly—” he had a little trouble getting the word out “—so just say what’s there. If this works—”

“If? Why shouldn’t it?” Phil wanted to know. “My sister gets answers on her Ouija board all the time!”

“Well, I didn’t have everything, so I had to make some substitutions in the formulas,” Quasi admitted. “But I did it logically, okay? So it should work. Anyway, if it does, the ghost will show up in the middle, in the center of that five-pointed star. I’m trying for Julius Caesar—” He lit the hibachi; there was a sharp chemical smell and a sparking line traveled across the surface of the charcoal.

“You wanted me ’cause I know Latin, right?” Phil blinked owlishly.

“I wanted you ’cause you’re a Scorpio, okay? Now shut up, I’m gonna start.” Quasi palmed the light switch, and suddenly the only illumination in the room was coming from the four candles and the hibachi.

Mark went very cold; with the lights out this was beginning to seem like something other than funny. The Scotch he’d downed had worn off all too quickly, and with it his bravado. He wanted very badly to walk out that door, but didn’t dare. He knew what the other three would say if he did. He’d never live it down. He was supposed to be studying Criminology; it wouldn’t look real cool if he couldn’t handle a spooky situation.

Quasi, looking warped and sinister in the flickering candlelight, began chanting and throwing various substances on the coals in the brazier. Some of them smelled vaguely pleasant; some stank to high heaven. All of them produced a good deal of smoke, further obscuring vision. Mark could scarcely see when he pointed dramatically in his direction.

He stammered out what was written on the notebook paper, not feeling at all ashamed that his voice shook. This wasn’t funny anymore. He waited, feeling a cold chill ooze down his backbone, as Phil and Tim said their pieces. Then Quasi intoned a final sentence—

Everything—just stopped. No sound, no nothing. Then Mark’s stomach lurched, and every hair on his arms stood straight up. The temperature in the room dropped at least twenty degrees. But that was only for openers.

Without warning a soundless explosion in the center of the diagram knocked Mark right off his feet.

By some miracle, he didn’t turn over the candle behind him; as he staggered upright again he saw that Phil and Tim hadn’t been so lucky. His candle and Quasi’s were the only sources of light—

Then something at the heart of the diagram flared greenly; the remaining two candles were snuffed out by the hurricane wind that followed that flare of sickly light. For with the light came a tempest.

#

Di’s head came up abruptly, as a sudden shift in the arcane atmosphere sent it from “nothing to see here” to “Danger, Will Robinson!” Even though the velvet curtains over the window were still shut tight, she didn’t need the curtains open to sense the surge of energies as something very close at hand attracted a lot of nasty attention. Something powerful and evil had found something to exploit, and it was homing in on it very, very quickly.

Without even thinking about it, she flung herself out of the bed, grabbed the sword, and was out the door.

#

Mark dropped back down to his knees and sheltered his head in his arms. There was a whirlwind raking the room; it was centered by a vortex in the heart of the diagram. The wind was sucking anything loose into that vortex—papers, bits of herb, posters torn loose from the walls. Quasi was staring at his handiwork with a face that was panic-stricken and utterly dumbfounded.

There at the heart of the vortex was the source of the evil light—it was—

Mark didn’t know what it was, only that it was a dark, amorphous blot that smelled utterly foul and made him sick to his stomach. It had eyes that glowed a vile, poisonous green; eyes that he could not look away from.

He found himself rising again to his feet, and realized with cold and helpless horror that he was being pulled toward it.

Phil screamed; an incongruously girlish sound. Mark heard him clearly above the howl of the wind.

And then Mark heard the sound of his footsteps fleeing toward the back door. A splintery crash marked the slamming of the porch door against the wall—then Tim followed Phil, backing put slowly, unable to take his eyes off the apparition. Tim was not screaming, he was giggling hysterically. Quasi held out a few moments longer, but when the thing turned its horrible eyes on him, Quasi howled like a mad dog and followed the other two.

Mark fought the fascination as best he could, but found himself taking a slow, deliberate step toward the thing—then another—and another—

He was too frightened to cry out, too terrified even to pray. He could only fight against the pull, and know his fight would be, in the end, useless.

The creature in the vortex chuckled wetly, and Mark felt his whole self become one inarticulate and soundless cry for help.

And—like a miracle—help arrived.

#

Di raced across to the neighboring building, then up the stairs, cursing the lack of an elevator. Whatever idiot was working magic on the third floor had somehow—probably by accident—managed to replicate the spell that opened a door in the Veil that would allow any spirit that wanted to possess a human being across. And on any other night but this, well, it still probably wouldn’t have worked.

But this was Halloween.

The Veil was thin, it was midnight and this was when the Veil was thinnest. Where before it might have taken the equivalent of an ax to hack across the Veil, tonight all it took was a butter-knife.

She reached the third floor. She didn’t need to go door to door to look for the culprit, she could feel it. And she didn’t wait to be invited.

“Agor!” she screamed furiously, letting the force of her own anger hit that door. And as the power left her, she felt something else—

Guardian energy!

It flooded through her, and exploded against the door.

The door didn’t just open, it very nearly splintered as it was hurled against the wall on the inside. And Diana stepped across the threshold, sword at the ready.

#

The front door literally exploded inwards, with a force that dwarfed the initial explosion that had brought the thing, and the compulsion and the whirlwind weakened as the thing turned its attention to the newcomer.

Light—light against the awful darkness.

Brilliant, clean white light poured in the open portal. Standing in the light—or had she brought the light with her?—was a young woman. A very angry young woman.

Some unencumbered part of his mind recognized her as one of Quasi’s upstairs neighbors.

Her waist-length hair stood out from her head as if she had taken hold of a static generator. She was wearing ballet slippers, jeans, a leotard, and an ancient Japanese kimono that whipped wildly about her in the screaming wind.

She was holding what could only be a broadsword.

The sword was glowing. Blue-green flames flickered all up and down the blade. The thing in the vortex saw that, and snarled at her.

The girl sidestepped into the room, slowly; she looked like she knew exactly what she was doing. She was holding the sword in both hands, and Mark had the relieved feeling that this was not the first time she had fought this particular battle. She eased along the edge of the diagram until she stood a few feet from Mark—

Then she suddenly dashed the remaining few feet toward him and slashed the fiery blade down into the space between him and the thing, as if she was cutting a line that was binding him and the thing together.

The compulsion to join the thing snapped so abruptly that he stumbled backwards into the wall.

#

If she hadn’t been busy fighting with every iota of her attention, Di would have groaned. There could not have been a more potent combination for attracting a Yeth Hound than a drunk conducting a half-assed version of a Jamaican ceremony designed to invoke a loa, but calling on an unspecified “spirit of the Old Country,” with a completely wide-open and untrained medium in the circle. Normally a Yeth Hound wouldn’t try to possess someone, because normally, a Yeth Hound couldn’t. Except, thanks to whatever idiot had put this together, and the thinning of the Veil, and the presence of the medium, a creature that desperately wanted to live, at any cost, was going to get the chance.

“Ci drygionus o farwolaeth, troi i ffwrdd ac yn wynebu i mi!” she screamed. And the fell beast turned, and its baleful glare fell on her.

#

The girl was shouting words that he couldn’t quite make out—and didn’t really want to—above the howling of the wind and the higher wailing of the apparition in the vortex. He crouched and covered his ears with both hands, unable to look away. She gestured with the sword, drawing fiery lines in the air between herself and the creature, lines that glowed and continued to hang suspended before her long after any afterimage should have faded. The thing’s wailing grew in intensity—and so did the sucking wind. Mark huddled against the wall, his heart pounding with absolute panic.

#

She had to seal the rupture in the Veil. That was the only way to get the thing’s ectoplasmic claws out of its would-be victim. And this was the sort of thing only a Guardian could do….

She felt the power pouring by itself into the sword, and instinctively, she knew what to do.

#

Then the girl changed her stance, balancing the pommel of her sword in her hand as if the whole massive piece of metal was nothing more than an oversized throwing-knife.

Mark stared at that; the back of his head was insisting that you couldn’t do that, but his eyes were telling him that she was, and logic be damned.

She held it that way for only an instant—then cast it, throwing it as if it had no weight at all, aiming it at the darkness between the thing’s eyes.

There was a third explosion and a flash of light that left Mark half blinded and half-deafened, and not a little stunned.

When he finally came to himself again, the electric lights were back on. There was an awful stench filling the apartment, like burned and rotting meat.

There was nothing in the middle of the room except a blackened spot in the center of the rug, a spot that had a sword sticking out of the middle of it. Mark stared at the blade with a slackened jaw; it had buried itself into the floor for a depth of at least two inches. He couldn’t imagine how the hell she had tossed it that hard.

The girl was again standing between him and the spot where the thing had been, surveying the wreckage with her feet slightly apart, and her hands on her hips. As he stared stupidly at her back, she turned to face him.

She was not happy.

“Well,” she said at last. An angry frown marred her otherwise pretty face as she grabbed the hilt without looking at it and wrenched the sword from the floor with an audible crack. “You sure blew my study plans all to hell. I’m not too thrilled about having to drop everything to rescue an almost-damned fool. What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Uh—” He swallowed hard. “Thanks?” She stared at him for another long moment, then began laughing.

“There had better be some booze here,” she said, when she stopped. Wordlessly, he pointed, and she looked over at the box in the corner. She walked over to it, still carrying the sword in her right hand, transferring it to her left when she reached the booze box. She looked down. And smiled, just a little.

She bent down and picked out a bottle by the neck, holding it up to examine the label. “Well,” she said. “Glenmorangie.”

Just then Quasi, Tim, and Phil peeked around the splintered door to the porch.

God knows what they thought they were doing, running out there, Mark suddenly realized. There’s no way down to the ground from there. They were as trapped as me…

The girl looked up at them, and frowned. “So. This would be the rest of the Four Stooges.”

Quasi’s mouth opened and shut, but nothing came out. Phil and Tim were as white as plaster.

“I’ll be taking this to make up for the crap you put me through tonight,” she continued, hefting the bottle, then pointing at them with the neck of it. “If you ever do this again, I won’t be coming to rescue you. I will seal this room off with you and whatever you call up inside of it, until it and you are gone. Understand?”

Tim fainted. Quasi’s mouth opened and shut several times before “Yes, ma’am,” came out in a whisper.

She glared at them, until they retreated to the porch, dragging Tim with them. Then she looked around until she spotted the desk shoved against the wall. She stalked over to it and rummaged until she found a pencil and a loose index card. A little scribbling and she stalked over to him and shoved it into his hand. “You,” she said, pointing the hilt of the sword at him. “You will be at my place tomorrow at 7 P.M. You will not be late.”

“Yes ma’am,” Mark whispered.

She turned and stalked out, kimono wafting behind her, bottle of extremely expensive single-malt Scotch in one hand, sword in the other.

#

Di finished the ritual, and with satisfaction, saw the portal between the worlds standing open. Well, there it is, my work as a Guardian is done until tomorrow night.

This, of course, was nothing like the jagged hole that those morons in the other building had torn open. This would only let those spirits who should be crossing pass from one side to the other. There were proper guards at the gate, so to speak—and the guards on the Other Side were a great deal more powerful than she was.

She propped the poor abused sword back in its place beside the fire, and poured herself a stiff double of the confiscated Scotch. Because I’ve earned it, by the gods, she thought.

And just as she picked it up, she heard someone—a very familiar voice—call her name.

She whirled. Standing in the portal was—

“Memaw?” she gasped.

Her grandmother grinned broadly, and mimed tossing back a shot.

And then she was gone.