Vincent pulled up to the old plantation in a sleek new hovercar. Being the apprentice of the Magician was not the funnest of times but the pay was excellent. He grabbed his side bag and approached the old planter’s house, its great white columns built on the back of the Louisiana slave trade. This place was creepy as hell, even nearly two decades after they’d dragged the Seraphites out of it and shot them like dogs.
He walked into the building, which was poorly lit and poorly maintained. The Magician would’ve said it was spite at its old owners, Vincent felt sure that he was just a slob. It smelled like cigarette smoke, even worse than usual today as he walked into the building.
“Hello!” he called out, his side bag rubbing up against his thigh.
“What the hell do you want?” came his master’s creole accent in response. Vincent went into one of the Magician’s studies which was thick with cigarrette smoke, full of loose papers on desks next to the great black bookshelves.
“You’re back,” the Magician groused from his center as the eye of the smoke storm. He was tall, thin man with dark skin and a short gray beard. He had a nasty smile, when he bothered to use it, that no matter how friendly managed to make Vincent feel he’d gotten one over on him. Right now, though, he looked displeased.
“There isn’t a spell that makes you immune to cigarette smoke, is there?” Vincent asked as he raised his hand to cover his face. He usually managed not to, but today was particularly noxious.
“Only smoke spell I know is that infinite smoke spell I taught you, Harvard,” the Magician replied, his voice annoyed.
“Are you using it right now?” Vincent asked in reply. He wondered what it would be like to have a good relationship with the old man but only six months of dealing with him had made him as caustic and mean as the old man himself. It was better than wussing out and going to college like a normal person.
“You just come around to insult me, Knight of Wands?”
“I found the book you wanted,” Vincent replied, grabbing the little black book from his bag without much hesitation and handing it to the Magician.
The Magician took the book and flipped through it for about thirty seconds before casting it onto a desk and a pile of papers in exile. “Worthless.”
“You know, that took me a week of work and a year’s salary for the average person in this country,” Vincent said. Prying the personal diary of a practicioner out of an heir’s hands was more difficult than almost anything else you could do.
“It was a dud,” the Magician said, “Gerald took you for a ride if he got you to pay that much. You need to get better at haggling in this business.”
“He said stuff might be written in cypher,” Vincent replied.
“It wasn’t, work on your cryptography next time,” the Magician said, taking another drag of his cigarette with annoyance.
Vincent said nothing and waited.
After several moments of quiet smoking, the Magician sighed. “You know I told you when you took the job it wasn’t glamorous.” Vincent nodded. “Being the Magician is mostly research and note taking and artifact retrieval these days. The Memetic Protection Service cleans up anything real dangerous for me afterward, so there’s been a precipitous decline in the possession of dangerous arcane secrets.”
“Are you going to teach me a new spell or can I go?”
The Magician “hmmmm”ed at that, thinking it over between puffs of his cigarette. He could afford nice imported cigars, he didn’t need to smoke a cheap pack every day, but that was what he preferred. “I don’t think a botched mission is worth a whole spell,” he said, his voice even. “If you’d gotten the book at a reasonable price, maybe. Drawing on the Order’s treasury that flagrantly is bad form. Makes us look rich.”
They were rich, what was he going on about. “Alright, send me a message when you want me to play fetch again.”
The Magician laughed at that, “Consider this a message, come here.”
Vincent went over to the Magician and he pointed down to a desk. Human bones had been surfacing in western Pennsylvania, it seemed. Vincent looked at the coroner’s report for several seconds. “Multiple sets of human teeth marks?” Vincent asked, disgusted. “I know there are serial killer cannibals out there, but that’s almost certainly some sort of mystical thing, right?”
“I knew you weren’t totally worthless,” the Magician said proudly, as if he had anything to do with it. “Yes, that’s right, I think these might be Maeanads.”
“The followers of Dionysius in greek myth?” Vincent asked, his curiosity peaked. This was the sort of thing that he had imagined he would be investigating when he signed on for this.
“Yes, full of terrible fury and hunger. Utterly deprived of sense. They seem to be eating random people in western Pennsylvania now. Quite the fall from rending old Orpheus to shreds.”
Vincent didn’t know what to do with that comment so he ignored it. “You want me to find them and stop them?”
“Oh, for stopping them I could just send in the MPS,” the Magician said. “But I do appreciate your oafish attempts to follow my instructions Harvard, so I’m gonna give you another chance. I will teach you another spell if you can find them and wrench the ambrosial drink from their possession.”
“Ambrosial drink?” Vincent asked. He knew what ambrosia meant, obviously, but he had never actually seen it.
“It’ll look like alcohol of some kind,” the Magician said, “You’ll know it when you see it. Bring me the ambrosia and I’ll teach you a spell that let’s you steal a man’s voice and use it till the next sunrise. You would not believe how many different situations that can be useful in.”
Vincent nodded. That was a good spell. The Magician tended to guard his spells quite jealously, since everyone drew from the same well of energy for any given spell. Even his apprentice using it meant he would be able to use it less often and effectively. “Do I have to do this alone?”
“Are you crazy?” The Magician asked, offended, “Take your little team with you, to keep yourself safe. The Maenads are group creatures. Most of them are addicts, in their own way, and you’ll be doing them a favor if you can take away their metaphorical needle. One or two of them are going to be the dealer, as it were, the one who got them into this whole affair. With her, be a little harsher.”
Vincent sighed a, “Yes sir,” and went out to work on the situation.
Vincent managed to round up his team fairly easily. Stopping a bunch of psycho magical cannibals was the sort of thing that people admired the Order for. It was a core part of the whole idea. Saving the Maenads, retrieving a powerful magical artifact, and learning a new spell? Vincent was feeling like he might have become the Knight of Wands for good reasons once again. The constant abuse from the Magician was wearing him down.
“I tracked the missing persons down to their last credit card purchases,” Sophia said as they pulled into a parking space outside of a glowing neon building that seemed like it ought to have been on the Vegas strip and not in a midsized city in western Pensylvannia. “All of them had eaten here in the last six or seven days.”
“Any other distinguishing features?” Vincent asked. He had gone over the victims himself, but Sphinx was a Knight of Saint Galahad. They were as legendary as the great Sherlock Holmes when it came to this kind of stuff.
“Nothing on social media, inside their phones, or anything like that that we could find.”
“What kind of restaurant even is this?” Boy Titan asked, looking at the building with faint distaste.
“It’s an all-you-can eat buffet, actually,” Sphinx said. “I’ll stay outside and monitor, you guys head on in.”
Vincent and the rest of team walked into the all-you-can-eat buffet with a degree of nonchalance. It was a gaudy place, with bright lights and an overpowering waft of smells. “This does not feel like a spooky place where dark magic is happening,” Boy Titan said, looking a little bit skeptical.
“The appearance of a magical location is really based on the tradition it is a part of,” Vincent said, grabbing a plate as they walked down the long cabinet line. “Magic of this sort requires a certain amount of resonance between the user and the magic itself. Appetite specifically.”
“So what, we’re here to eat drink and be merry?” he asked.
“You and Molly are the biggest eaters I have ever met in my life,” Vincent said. Their powers kept their metabolism in top form. Boy Titan had put on probably fifteen pounds of pure muscle since he had started working out with proper weights for his strength. “Who could possibly be better targets for recruitment?”
They gathered up food like it was reagents for a potion, trying to find a good balance of meat and carbs for Boy Titan. Molly was trailing along, grabbing sweet after sweet after sweet. Her power, in addition to being stronger than most peoples, was also one of the ones that gave you a near perfect metabolism. It was frustrating for Vincent as he grabbed a salad for himself.
Once they had collected everything, they went to a table Leah had claimed. She took a drink of her water and smiled at them, “Got enough there?”
“It’s a good first course,” Boy Titan said loudly before they sat down. He almost managed to pull it off in a convincing way but didn’t quite nail it in Vincent’s opinion. Maybe they would get lucky and the promise of opportunity was enough to lure the Maenads in.
“I’m hungry,” Nereid said with gusto, dropping her three plates worth of cookies onto the table.
Leah raised an eyebrow to Vincent who shrugged. He sat down and tucked into his meal of salad with a dour look. Leah could eat a reasonably comfortable amount and still be in good enough shape, but for Vincent (as for Sphinx), the meal was all self management.
“That’s such a sad meal,” Leah said, trying to keep up conversation.
“We can’t all have miracle metabolisms like these two,” Vincent said, keeping his voice even. They were being watched, he was sure of it. “I wish I could eat like these two,” he groused, not having to act too much to sell it. “I’ve seen them put away more food than I could have ever hoped for.”
Leah smiled sympathetically, “It is a little impressive,” she said, looking the two over with a quiet envy.
Molly shrugged her shoulders and Boy Titan muttered, “Sorry,” between his bites of macaroni and cheese.
They ate for about fifteen minutes before Boy Titan and Molly had managed to work their ways through the whole miniature of the buffet that they had brought to table. It was intense work, they were practically inhaling the stuff. Vincent wondered if they were hungry all the time if they could eat like this. That wouldn’t be worth it, not even to be skinny the easy way.
Vincent and Boy Titan got up to get food, “I’ll get your stuff Molly,” Vincent said as he left. They walked to their own sections – Boy Titan had gone back to his meat and potatoes section of the buffet and Vincent made his way to the dessert section. While he piled on sugar cookies and apple pies, a woman walked up next to him and started dispensing ice cream on the soft serve machine.
Vincent would have been afraid to say so out loud but she was stunning. She looked like someone who honestly spent too much time at the gym for a civilian with cream colored skin and large, dark eyes. “Hey there,” she said, noticing him notice her.
“Oh, uh, sorry,” Vincent said, hurriedly returning to the cookie piling.
“Is the cookie girl your girfriend?” the woman asked, taking a lick of ice cream as she did so.
“No,” he said after a moment. “She’s just a friend with a big appetite.”
“And there you are eating salad, not very considerate of her,” the woman said, her voice sympathetic. She must have been a good bit older than him, maybe thirty, though it did not detract at all from the response that the nineteen year old Vincent was having to her physical presence.
“It can make a man a little jealous, but it’s not a big deal,” Vincent said, getting ahold of himself. “We’ve all got our own burdens to bear, right?” He was here to search for dangerous cannibals, not ogle women.
“Well,” the woman said conspiratorially, “It must be difficult to stick to a diet like that when your friends don’t have to.”
Sphinx did have to, so it wasn’t like Vincent was soldiering alone in the matter, but it was worse when she was absent. “It is,” Vincent said, beginning to feel like this conversation might have more significance for his investigation than he had thought. “How do you manage it?”
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“Oh I eat whatever I want,” she said, grinning with lovely, pearly white teeth that instantly made Vincent think of the cannibalized remains.
“I wish I could do that,” he said, seeing how blatant he could be and get away with it. His master’s counsel that people seldom were suspicious until you gave them reason to be.
“Really?” she looked him up and down, “Seems like you put a lot of work into your physique already.”
“Yeah, and I’d like to do a lot less,” he admitted. It wasn’t like he didn’t do a lot of work to keep his body in peak functioning condition.
She laughed, “Yeah, I remember those days. Here’s a card for my gym,” she said, extending him a card. “We start with a big meal at six, then work out, then another big meal.”
If he hadn’t been here to investigate this whole thing, Vincent would have had so many alarm bells ringing and screaming scam that he would never have considered it. “This isn’t some multi-level marketing scheme is it?”
“No, and I’m not just saying that because they’re illegal,” she said. “I didn’t get these curves you were admiring earlier through hard work.”
Vincent coughed a little at that but the woman smiled, winked and walked away looking just as lovely as ever. He sighed and went back to the table with the card. Silently, he put it onto the table and tapped it, trying to pretend that it was nothing important.
Leah grinned and nodded as Molly looked at her disappointingly small stack of sugar cookies. “I’m ready to eat!” Boy Titan said, speaking a little too loudly as he returned.
“I’m tired of this joint,” Leah said, her voice echoing. “We’re not all garbage disposals like you, my man.”
They wrapped up their food in to-go containers, left a hundred on their table, and walked out the door. When they got back to their makeshift operations hub, Sphinx was waiting with their costumes ready.
The evening prep for the trip to the gym was going relatively quick. “These are probably maenads or something like them,” Vincent said as the others suited up. “I need you guys ready to come and bail me out if possible.”
“Can’t you just use the paradox spell on them if things get messy,” Boy Titan asked as he pulled on his second costume as Boy Titan, though the design hadn’t changed.
“Oh, I wish I could,” Vincent said. “The frenzy is a barely conscious state – The paradox spell would only work on them for a few seconds at best.”
Leah frowned, “I don’t like sending you in alone.”
“I appreciate the concern, Gate, but I should be fine. Maenads are dangerous but unless they start a bachannal while I’m right there, it shouldn’t be a big deal. And if it is, I still have my manacle and earth wall spells to get between me and them.”
Leah did not looked convinced at all and neither did anybody else. “You guys have a better plan?” he asked and that finally shut them up. They looked away and went back to working on their things.
Beating Maenads meant more than arresting all the members at an opportune time. The brides of bacchus were not easily imprisoned and chaos followed in their wake if they were not satiating themselves. Of course, they could have put bullets in their head this afternoon, but that seemed like an unrealistic, not to mention despicable plan.
No, to beat the Maenads you needed to take the pitcher of ambrosia that drove the whole feast. It transfigured fine wine and mead into the drink of the gods.
So there was no other plan and Vincent would be going to the gym alone. He walked in a little early in gym shorts and a shirt, but the place didn’t have big gym vibes. It was a nice place, definitely, with the internal plant life of a neuvo medieval building, but Vincent didn’t see a single piece of workout equipment.
“Welcome,” said a young woman who looked just as curvacious and lovely as the one who had given him the card. “Are you a visitor?”
Vincent nodded and held up the card he had been given, “Someone said the workouts here made the diets more, uh, livable.”
The young woman grinned wide, “Oh, Anastasia mentioned you were coming. Dieting at an all-you-can eat buffet is a little Catholic isn’t it?”
“I’m not religious,” Vincent said. He believed in spirits and powers and beings of light but he didn’t believe in anything like providence or some deep truth to reality hidden behind revelations.
“Oh I just used to be catholic,” she agreed hastily. “This isn’t a religious place. For me, the body is a temple and I worship it all day long” she shook her hips with a grin.
The brides of bacchus are a dangerous people and Vincent was not enough of a hormonal teenager to not notice the gleam in her eye. He wasn’t here as a recruit, not that Bacchus would have turned him down. He was here as a new appetizer. He felt a bit of sweat and nerves hit him, “Wow,” he said, trying to figure out how to tell the others what was afoot. “You’re quite forward. I wasn’t expecting a come on that strong.”
The girl smiled even wider for a moment, making Vincent worry that her mouth was going to unhinge and she was going to leap at him right then. “I don’t see why not, you’re great looking guy, got me over here licking my lips. If I see something I want, I go for it. We’re not big believers in self-control here. The course to happiness is to follow your desires. So do you desire me?”
“At least buy me a dinner first,” Vincent said, trying to stay calm as his friends assessed the situation.
“Mm,” the girl said, her voice non-committal. “Not sure you’re worth that much work.”
Vincent shrugged, “I came here for a workout session?”
She nodded her head and said, “Come with me.” Vincent followed behind her down the faux stone facaded halls, walking along on the tile floor with the faint scent of sweat and alcohol on the floor. They reached a large room with a long table and Vincent walked inside without hesitating. If he was to be the object of the Maenads hunger and fury, than he would certainly be able to find the ambrosia and get out of here.
He went in and sat down, looking around – The room did not yet have a quorum for the feasting. There was the girl, yes, and the woman who had invited him Anastasia, but there were clearly many empty seats. He felt a flush of relief and also dread – Perhaps they were going to eat him after all. His wand sat comfortably underneath his basketball shorts and he resisted the urge to draw it.
The rest of the maenads started to trickle in, each of them a gorgeously fit woman with hungry eyes. They might have looked him over a bit too hungrily, but besides that nothing much happened. After about fifteen minutes, a tall, gaunt woman walked into the room. Her knuckles looked permanently bruised, her eyes were sunken with hunger, and her face was almost skeletal as she took a seat at the head of the table. This was the mother of the feast, the leader of the Bachannal, and perhaps even a lover of Dionysius himself – If the stories were true.
There was a certain appreciation of the wonders of his job that never left Vincent. Even as he knew the dozen or so women in this room were here to kill and eat him, it was a wonder to touch ones so close to the beings once worshipped as divine. It was flattering, in a way, to be targeted by them.
Of course, when he put a wand to their faces and said the words, he’d definitely be able to handle the situation. The air of the room was pregnant with anticipation as waitresses under veils walked into the room. They brought large haunches of meat, lavish dishes of bread and cheeses, smoky roasts and steaming soups, setting them out across the dinner table. But Vincent did not yet see the ambrosial wine that would charge the feast and he was here to capture it.
At last, an attendant brought the ambrosial wine in a tall, thick whiskey bottle. Alcohol was a baseline ingredient of ambrosia but it needed to be an enviable quality to be made into a festal form. The mother of the feast took the bottle from her attendant and held it aloft.
Surrounded by enemies, Vincent thumped his chest three times to set off the small bug they had put inside his shirt. Eyes glanced toward him, angry and hungry, but the feast had not yet begun.
He whipped his hand down and drew his wand forth without a flourish. It was the same perfectly practiced move he had done before. He stood up with a start and looked at the mother of the feast.
“Surrender the wine and come quietly, and the Order will take Bacchus’ influence into account,” he commanded, holding the wand.
“Oh little knight,” she said, “You ought to know better than to attack a queen.” She pointed at him with one finger and something pulsed in the room, dimming the lights that hung along the walls. The screaming began immediately.
It had been worth a shot, Vincent assured himself as he landed a jab into the face of one of the women next to him. She continued to hold onto his arm and he muttered out the spell that called for his chains. Not next to him though, no, he wanted that new spell. He brought them up next to the festal mother and they lunged around her like coiling snakes.
She screamed in fury, thrashing against the chains, but they had been formed in Abaddon long ago and they would not break so easy. Vincent got to enjoy that smug confidence for only a few seconds before two of the women dragged him up against the wall and held him there. “Ladies, please,” he said in mocking jest. They didn’t respond. Vincent didn’t understand Dionysius at all – What was the point of a party when the guests were this insensate?
He breathed deep and gripped his wand tight, chanting quickly. His earth wall spell was always short and meager, a few too many people knew its trick and incantation, but it rose up and knocked both the women holding him off their feet. He breathed frantically and used his air walking spell.
The thing about his air walking spell was that, as powerful as it was, it was not an air running spell. The two women were tripped over, yes, but there were nine more where they came from. He stepped up and up, reaching level with their chest before one more grabbed at him. He gave a little hop to dodge her and immediately lost his balance in the air.
He focused himself, reaching outward to face plant early and managed to hold himself on a floor that was roughly level with the women’s thighs. He rolled out of the way when they grabbed at his face but he could feel himself getting winded. Whatever else one might say for the Maenads, they were fast and fierce and wholly out of control.
He whipped his wand outward and poured a thick mist out into the room, covering the scene as he tried to make his way upward once again. The ceiling was not too high but it would serve to make them only target his feet. He stepped up quickly, moving toward the screaming of the festal mother.
“Wands!” a voice shouted in the room’s far corner where he had entered. He winced and kept moving without responding. His allies did not know that he was here to get the ambrosia as much as to stop the Maenads and that would have been inconvenient to reveal.
Smoke had filled the room now, which was unfortunate for Vincent since smoke rose, and it was going to keep going. The spell did not really put on a limit on smoke output, that was one of the funky bits of its magic. It was supposed to drive people away but without being turned off it might go for hours before running short.
He reached the festal mother in the dark as her maenads began to choke. They didn’t have the sense to run away of course. “Surrender! End the feast!” he demanded, putting his wand to her head.
The woman wrapped in chains spat in his face, “I’d rather we all choke than concede anything to you.”
He reached his hand out and wrenched the whiskey bottle from her. She screamed as if he had killed her own newborn child. He grinned confidently and turned around to leave. “Wait!” she called immediately, “Please! Pour the ambrosia on the ground and I swear to by Dionysius and almighty Zeus that I shall do this day as you demanded and put an end to this, so the girls do not die.”
Vincent flinched. The cacophony of screaming from the women was dying down. The smoke was becoming genuinely too much for them. He himself was immune to the stuff but everyone else was not. He grimaced. He had the ambrosia and the Magician had said it would be useful to the Order and to their cause and he would teach him a new spell if he went and got it. But the Maenads would surely die if he didn’t do as the festal mother asked.
Vincent continued to walk away. He wasn’t going to stop for this woman’s mad slaves. The Maenads might not even be able to be slate-cleaned, for all he knew. They had gone in for an addictive substance abused even by the gods themselves. It might not be a curable condition. The festal mother’s screaming became louder and more wretched, more desperate, pleading and begging, “They’ll die! They don’t have to, I swear, I swear I’ll let them live, I will, I promise you that Knight of Wands, I promise you.”
Vincent wanted to keep walking. It wasn’t good for the Order if he saved these women. It was better, much better, that the Order be strengthened than that these women live. He believed that on an objective level. But Vincent had never killed anyone before and he did not like the idea of starting now. He turned around and walked back toward the woman, the thick pillows of smoke now almost so thick that he couldn’t see anything.
He held up the whiskey bottle where the woman could see it and poured just a little on the floor.
“Sisters!” the woman shouted immediately and the cacophony of screaming came to an abrupt halt. She then paused and stared at Vincent.
They moved together then, her dribbling out words as he dribbled ambrosia down onto the ground where – mixed with base earth – it could never be drunk. “We lay down this feast of Bacchus, we lay down this festal meal, we drink no more the wine of his cup, we eat no more the meat of his table, we are done, we are done, we are done. Fill our cups with water and stomachs with breath, we want no more feasting.”
When the woman finished her sentence and the last of the ambrosia touched the floor, something awful happened. Fire seemed to dribble out of her mouth like drops of spittle burning the scant skin of her face and tears of the same fire rolled out and burnt her eyes. Vincent panicked, reaching out to put out the fire with his hands, but yanked his hand back with the scorching heat. The stench of burning flesh filled his nostrils and he started to scream as he watched the woman’s body leak fire that devoured her whole.
By the time he had whipped off his shirt to make a second go of putting out the fire, the woman was entirely gone. He reached out and dismissed the smoke spell. It didn’t dissipate what he had created but it did stop the spell from choking out all the unconscious bodies already on the floor.
“Wands!” a shout came again and Vincent wondered how long it had been.
“Here!” he shouted back and they pinged off each other until the others reached his location. Vincent felt sick to his stomach. He hadn’t wanted to watch the woman die. “We need to get the women out of here before the choke to death!” he said once the others reached him. They cleared out the room after that – the Maenads had dropped into unconsciousness.
After he had said goodbye to his team, he felt the stomach churning sickness in his stomach when he returned to see the Magician. He was sitting on a rocking chair on the porch of his conquered plantation, smoking like a chimney once more, and he looked displeased when he saw Vincent.
“You saved the Maenads,” he said, his voice disdainful.
“I did and I don’t regret it,” Vincent said, which was mostly true.
“Then you’re a fool boy,” the Magician said, puffing out smoke from his mouth. He rocked back and forth for a moment thinking, “The ambrosia would’ve been invaluable to our research. There are many powerful things that will do anything to get it.”
Vincent felt his heart squirm at that, “I joined the Order to help people,” he said after a moment.
“If you are to be the Magician after me,” the Magician said, his voice almost compassionate for once in his sorry old life, “You will have to learn to weigh the needs of the many and the needs of the few. Ours is not a kindly world where justice reigns, not unless you and I make it so by force. We do not often succeed.”
That sent a shiver down Vincent’s spine. Whatever else he could say about the Magician, he was a clever son of a bitch, and when he set his mind to work his will he often succeeded where it seemed impossible. “I made a call, if you’re going to keep haranging me about it, I’ll leave and you can call me when you need me.”
The Magician sat up a little straighter at that. Part of why Vincent had grown so caustic with the man was that these outbursts of cruelty seemed to win more respect from him. “I would have done the same thing at your age and that’s how I ended up the way I am now. You’ll forgive me, Knight of Wands, but I don’t think you want that.”
Vincent would have taken a blow to the face with more aplomb. If there was one thing that he did not want to be, it was like the Magician. He did not like the man’s attitude or his cruelty or his chain smoking, he was not someone who had much to like about him, in full honest. “Won’t doing what you would do just end with me being like you anyway?”
“Fool,” the Magician said. “You think that the thing that matters most for your happiness is what you do? It is the ghosts and bodies that I piled up behind me that I want you to avoid. I have no desire to deprive you of your choices, but soon enough if you go soft on all these supernatural creatures, one of them is going to leave a trail of bodies that you’ll have to see.”
“And making a bunch of bodies myself wouldn’t leave me with a similar trail?”
“You got lucky that the costs of your actions today are invisible to you. I promise you, if you act that way again and again, your mercy will fill graveyards.”
Vincent shook his head. “I assume I will not be learning the spell then?”
The Magician took a long drag from his cigarette and stared him. His eyes were cold, his frown permanent. “Magic is nothing to wisdom, Knight of Wands, be grateful that I have given you the… better portion as my grandmother used to say.”
Vincent was not nearly servile enough to clap and jaw, “I’ll think about what you have said, Magician.” He turned away from the house at that and began to walk away. He half-hoped that the Magician would yell after him to scold him or mock him or otherwise do something that would let him get the words he had said out of his mind.
But the whole way out to his vehicle, the silence ensured his thoughts followed him.