Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation) Read online

”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—”