Magic 101 (A Diana Tregarde Investigation) Read online

  “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 w
ell 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.