Chapter 10: Cruella
“But I like my apartment,” Kirby protested, more out of resentment than conviction.
“I find that difficult to believe,” said Adelaide. “Katherine showed me photos and I could find nothing to like about your old apartment.”
Katherine, Adelaide’s secretary, wore a no-nonsense polyester pantsuit and a no-nonsense expression on her face. Her light brown hair was in a bun and her forehead was hidden by bangs that might have been described as ‘egregious’. Without much expression, she said, “As I was saying, the movers packed out your clothing, books, and other personal effects yesterday. They're boxed and waiting at your new place. The new place is furnished, and you need to decide which pieces of your old furniture you wish to move and which you wish to have put in storage—or donate to an appropriate charity.” She said this last with clipped tones of distaste.
“What gives you two the right to just…just move me?” he demanded. “You don’t have the right to do this!”
Adelaide’s tone was disappointed. “My dear Jeffrey, I thought you understood.”
“Understood what? Understood that when you asked me this weekend where I lived—and couldn’t I afford to live in a better part of town—meant that you’d send, I don’t know, stealth movers into my apartment to pack me up and move me without my permission?”
“Where do you get off—” Katherine started with more than a little anger in her own voice before Adelaide interrupted by laying a hand on her forearm.
“Katherine, dear, would you excuse us a moment?”
Kirby noted the sharp look the polyester-clad younger woman gave Adelaide and noted also the way she then lowered her eyes and said, “Yes, Miss Adelaide.”
When the secretary had gone, closing the library door behind her, Kirby started again. “Look, Adelaide, I’ve really appreciated the hospitality and the new clothes—the shoes are great, by the way—but you can’t just suddenly tell me I’m moving, that you’ve decided where I’ll live, and that you’ve even chosen the furniture. It’s not something I’m comfortable with.”
“Jeffrey, from the time you helped me out of my car last Wednesday night you’ve been thrust into a world you do not understand. I've been trying to explain, and you’ve been wonderful at taking in so much new information as rapidly as you have. So wonderful, in fact, that I may have been under the impression that you understood more than you actually do.”
“Hmph.” He was not mollified. “You can’t just up and move me without so much as a ‘by your leave’. Why the hell do you think I have to move? And what makes you think you have the right to make that choice for me?”
“Jeffrey, I apologize if I have not communicated as well as I might have. Would you please sit down and allow me to explain my reasoning, to explain why moving you could be absolutely necessary to keep you safe?”
The look in her eye and the simplicity of her gesture toward the chair were almost infuriatingly reasonable. He sat back down, put his elbows on the mahogany library table, and rested his chin on his fists, which were partly hidden by the bushiness of his beard. “I’m listening.”
“Do you recall when I told you that the Abyssal wolves were sent to kill me by another practitioner of sorcery?”
“Sure. You said you didn’t know who might have done it, but that I—”
“That you might be in danger, Jeffrey. You have been in my home, the safest place I can put you, for the past six days. Even if whoever made the attempt on my life thinks you are somehow connected to me, they cannot reasonably hope to harm you while you are here. In fact, I have used my Art to—”
“Sorcery?”
“Yes, my Art, sorcery. I have used it to create powerful protections for my home. The protections are so thorough that it's difficult to believe that another practitioner—even a powerful one—could be able detect your presence here. Jeffrey, you are welcome to stay here for as long as you like. I owe you my life and I pay what I owe. But we both know that a young man, thirty and single, doesn’t want to be a permanent guest in an older lady’s home, even if it is quite a comfortable home.”
“Wait, how do you know I’m thirty, not twenty-five, or thirty-two? I’ve never told you that.”
She picked up the briefcase from beside her chair and placed it on the table. Releasing the latches, she opened it and withdrew a bulky manila envelope, fastened by a metal clasp. She passed it to him. “Your cell phone, charger, wallet, keys, and your mail.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He was glad to have them, but the fact that someone else had—even temporarily—possessed them felt almost like a violation. So much for privacy.
“May I continue?”
He nodded.
“The best course of action in this case is to determine who made the attempt on my life that you got caught up in and to, ah, neutralize the threat they pose to us.”
She paused at that point and, instead of saying the first thing that came to mind, he let her words sink in. He might have railed against what she had just said, protested that she had just told him in as many words that she planned to kill someone. Perhaps he ought to have expressed outrage at this proposed violation of the social contract—or ridiculed the idea that this sweet old rich lady could kill anyone. He had, however, seen too much to doubt what she said. Instead, he touched the scar of his wound through his shirt and the bandage and he nodded sanguinely.
“I see you understand.” Without waiting for him to respond, she continued. “I am still pursuing my inquiries as to the identity of the person or persons who sought to have me rent asunder by the wolves and to have my essence consigned to the Abyss—a horrifying end. Until I discover their identity and deal with them, there is a chance you might be targeted. I will not allow you to come to further harm. My first thought was to create some sorcerous protections for your former apartment, but it’s all wrong. The way the building and the apartment itself are situated would require massive investments of energy and would still have weak places and flaws.”
“Can you explain that at all?”
“If you were to become a full-time student of sorcery and study diligently, I could likely explain a basic outline of it to you two years from now, once you had the background knowledge to understand the barest fundamentals. Of course, you still wouldn’t really understand it until you had studied the Art for a decade or more.”
“Fair enough,” he allowed. “So, your plan is to move me into a place where you can use sorcery to protect me.”
“Precisely!”
“Is it going to be like here, or will I be able to leave?”
“As I said before, Jeffrey, in all likelihood the person trying to kill me doesn’t know that you even exist and—”
“And I’d like to keep it that way!”
“As would I,” she agreed. “But even if our mysterious malefactor is aware of you, I’m still the one they’re after and they are unlikely to believe that going after you would be worth their while. Regardless, this is all supposition. In all likelihood, as long as you take some basic precautions that I will have Amy go over with you, you should be able to live in your new place and come and go as you please with little chance of any danger to yourself.”
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That afternoon Amy came for him and led him into a different elevator than the one he had been using each day. It had mirrored walls and a marble floor. Amy used the mirror and her hand to make unnoticeable adjustments to her short hair. Kirby looked at his reflection. It was time to run the clippers over his head again, and maybe shape his beard. It was bushier than he preferred.
The elevator opened onto an underground parking garage that held six vehicles and had room for two more. In the space closest to the elevator sat the yellow Cadillac Coupe DeVille. The car looked new, unblemished by its run-in with the dumpster. Its front end looked factory original. He stopped to examine it.
He whistled. “Is this the same car?”
Amy stopped. “That Miss Adelaide brought you here on Wednesday in? Yep, that’s Cruella.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Cruella, the Coupe DeVille?”
“That’s what she named it,” confirmed the diminutive doctor, who flashed a grin of her own. “Miss Adelaide has a pretty kickin’ sense of humor—and always when you least expect it.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“So, she used, ah, sorcery to fix it?”
“Was it damaged?” Amy asked, eyes wide.
“Hell, yeah, it was damaged. Adelaide rammed it into a dumpster doing about forty.” He smacked his fist into his palm to illustrate. “You should have seen the dumpster.”
She fixed him with a look, the kind of look that he understood meant she was in earnest. “Kirby, it’s amazing that there was any dumpster left at all if it got in Cruella’s way. You said she’d had a blowout when you woke up on Thursday, but I just figured you were confused or something. There’s no fucking way this car had a blowout!”
“Uh...way! I was there.” He emphasized his words by indicating himself with his thumb. “The front end of this car was smashed.” He crouched down beside the right front wheel and thumped it with his thick left forefinger. “This tire was in shreds. Didn’t she tell you any of this? Didn’t you see the car when she brought me here?”
“This car is protected by dozens of layers of enchantments. It’s like a sorcerous fortress on wheels, dude. I saw the car less than an hour after she brought you in and it looked just like this.”
“‘A sorcerous fortress on wheels’?”
“It’s her favorite car, Kirby, and the only one she drives regularly. It has almost as many kinds of protections on it as this house does. I’m surprised you can’t see anything. You’ve had your cherry popped, after all.”
Instead of responding he turned and studied the car, tilting his head this way and that, closing first one eye and then the other. There was...something. It was like not-seeing the glowing aura around Amy, when she used sorcery to locate a book in the library. He could not-see something when he looked at the Cadillac. He could feel Amy waiting for him to say something, but he did not have the words to tell her about what he was not-seeing. He put his hands on the fender and stood up.
“Kirby?” she said as he went rigid, then leaned on the car. “Kirby!” she repeatedly more urgently when he did not move. After a moment, he shook his head slowly, dazed. “What?” she asked.
He looked at her and spoke, his troubled tone of voice matching his troubled expression. “I think I just saw sorcery.”
“On Cruella?”
“Yeah. I touched the car with this hand.” He held up his stained right hand. “I could see things.”
“Like what? What did it look like to you?” She sounded excited.
“It was like chains wrapped around the car. In different colors. And ropes—all different thicknesses—some glowed and some moved. Lots of little strings were tied around it too. And fabric, something like a bolt of fabric, wrapped around the car like you might wrap a watermelon with a roll of plastic wrap. Other stuff was there, but I can’t really describe it. Do you see it? Is that what you see?”
She shook her head. “I see lines. Some are fat, others thin. Some are wavy or fuzzy and others, especially the ones I recognize, are very clearly defined.”
“Ones you recognize?”
“The enchantments I—”
“The spells?”
“Yes, ‘the spells.’ The spells I know, that I’m familiar with, are in-focus, crystal clear. The ones I don’t understand as well are blurrier. Some of the other ones, ones I can tell are potent, are frighteningly vague. Whoever fucked with this car was either stupid brave or crazy powerful.”
“‘Fucked with’,” he repeated. “You’re saying that whoever sent the wolf-things got through all of the protections on the car and caused the blowout?”
“Yeah, I think so. They made Cruella lose control. With these enchantments, she shouldn’t lose control even if she had four blowouts driving on a sheet of ice, down the face of a cliff, in an oil slick the size of the Exxon Valdez.” She looked at him funny, as if a thought had struck her. “Touch the car again.”
“Why? It’s weird.”
“Just do it.”
He complied. Again, when his stained right hand touched the car, the things he had described to Amy were superimposed upon his vision. He studied them but was unsure of their meaning.
“What do you see here?” Amy pointed to a place on the fender near his hand.
“It’s a thick chain. It’s green, kind of like a luna moth, maybe glowing a little bit. There are four different kinds of links that I see.”
“Do they follow a pattern?”
“Well, um, yeah,” he told her.
“Describe the pattern.”
“There’s a long fat link, then two identical thinner, shorter links that are almost perfectly round. They’re a slightly different green than the rest of the links. After that, there’s what just looks like a normal oval link of chain—”
“But glowing luna moth-green,” she said.
“Yep, and after that is sort of a double link in the shape of the number ‘8’—one side bigger than the other, not like an infinity symbol. Then it looks like the next section of the pattern is a reverse of the first, a mirror image. There’s the ‘8’, then the oval, the two circles, and the long, fat one. Then, it—”
“—repeats as a mirror image of the mirror image, a duplicate of the first pattern you described,” she finished for him.
“You’re as bad as Adelaide. Do you have to finish my sentences?”
She ignored the jibe. “This is really cool. You are seeing sorcery. The enchantment I pointed to is one I know pretty well. What you describe as a chain is the pattern in which the spell’s component elements are laid down.”
“And you don’t see it like that, I take it.”
“Not really, but I could understand the way you were describing it. It’s a regeneration spell that maintains the car and that would repair just about any damage within moments of the of it happening, if the car could even get damaged through all the other enchantments. That’s a mystery to solve another time, though. Anyway, you’re seeing sorcery. Pretty nifty, eh?”
There was the brief honk of a car horn from farther down the row of cars, near the closed metal doors that, presumably, led to the outside. “That would be Katherine,” said Amy.
“Katherine?”
“Yeah. She’s driving us to see your new place. I guess she’s getting impatient.”
“Well,” he said, “anybody with that bad a case of resting bitch face might just have to wait a few more minutes.”
“Ha! I know, right? She always looks kind of pissed off, like the only thing that might cure her is the toe-curling orgasm that she’ll never unclench enough to have.”
“Well, you know her better than I do,” he demurred.
“I don’t think anyone has known her that well.” They both laughed. “But, in all seriousness, if Miss Adelaide hasn’t told you, Katherine handles a lot of Miss Adelaide’s personal business, but she is not ‘in the loop’ with regards to the whole sorcery thing. We can’t talk about that stuff in front of her.”
“Why would Adelaide hire someone as her private secretary, to handle her personal business, if sorcery is part of her personal business and has to be kept a secret? Why not hire someone who was in on the secret?”
Amy stared at him, then shook her head. “Gee, why didn’t I ever ask that question? Durrr, I must be a dum-dum?” The face she made, one eye squinted, upper lip curled, tongue half-hanging from her mouth was an almost impenetrable mask of idiocy.
“So, Adelaide’s not telling why she hired Katherine. Then, I guess it’s going to be ix-nay on the orcery-say in front of Atherine-kay.”
“Ep-yay. Oh, and by the way, there’s probably a reason Miss Adelaide hasn’t mentioned the blowout or losing control of Cruella or that the car took damage. We probably shouldn’t talk about it with anyone but her.” She turned and started to walk towards the end of the row of cars where a black Toyota Land Cruiser sat idling with Katherine behind the wheel.
Kirby placed a hand on her shoulder. “Wait, what does that mean? Is she afraid that... what... this may be an inside job? Do you think she’s keeping quiet about the details of the attack because someone in her house might have sent those things, or might have been working with whoever sent them?”
“I can’t even guess, but when it comes to things like this, I can guarantee you that the smartest thing you or I could possibly do is to follow Miss Adelaide’s lead and keep our traps shut.”
“That makes sense,” he said, and it did.
Amy moved to take the front seat, so Kirby opened the door behind the driver and climbed into the back. The tan leather interior was spotless. Before either of them could speak, Katherine said, “Seat belts.” She made no move to shift the Land Cruiser out of park until there were two clicks indicating that her passengers had complied with the directive.
Katherine reached up and pressed a remote-control button near the rearview mirror. The metal door at the end of the garage opened. Where Kirby had expected to see daylight and a ramp, he saw instead a small space with concrete walls and a metal floor. Katherine pulled the car forward into this space and closed the door with another push of the button. She pressed a different button the floor began to rise.
He tried to see out of the window, to look up, but he couldn’t see much. The lift was quiet and moved steadily. He heard a second quiet mechanical noise as doors at the top opened. When the lift stopped, the car came to rest in the far-right spot of a normal-looking thee-car garage.
“Wow,” he said. “That garage is like the Batcave!”
“Yeah,” agreed Amy. “It’s amazing what you can do if you’ve got enough money to take advantage of the loopholes your lawyers find in the homeowner’s association agreement.”
“I haven’t known her for very long,” said Kirby, “but I’ve gotten the distinct impression that Adelaide is someone who gets her way.” Amy looked at him and winked. Katherine said nothing as she pushed yet another remote-control button and opened the garage door.
Most of what he had seen of the grounds of Adelaide’s estate had been a carefully cultivated English-style garden visible through the library windows. As he took in more on the ride up the driveway, he saw that the perfectly-manicured little garden viewable from the library was writ large in the form of the estate’s grounds, which seemed no less perfectly manicured, despite their relative immensity. He looked ahead and saw a gate in the fence of black iron bars opening before them, allowing the Land Cruiser access to the street. Quickly, he turned around to have a look at the exterior of Adelaide’s...mansion was the only word for it. Much of the view was blocked by trees, but the impression he got was of a place somewhat smaller than “stately Wayne manor” from the old Batman T.V. show, built in the first half of the 20th century.
They drove past other expensive mansions with exquisitely maintained grounds and decorative-but-practical fences of wrought iron bars. It only took a couple of turns before they turned onto a street that Kirby recognized. When they did, he knew at once where they were: Nichols Hills. Yeah, okay. Makes sense. Where else is somebody as rich as Adelaide seems to be going to live in Oklahoma City?
Katherine steered the vehicle south and the three of them were quiet as she drove. The phone in his pocket vibrated. He was proud of having survived nearly a week without his all-in-one device for communication, his social life, and entertainment, but he was grateful to have been reunited with it. He eagerly swiped his thumb on the scanner and saw that his aunt had had been trying to call him and had just left another voicemail.
The first thing he had done when he had finished speaking with Adelaide that morning was to return to the room he had been using and charge the phone. He had found a few dozen notices and messages on his social media accounts and voicemail, mostly from his friends back in Houston. Nothing urgent. From his email account he harvested the usual crop of spam, annoying notices from his bank, and special offers from his credit card company. He ignored his Aunt Priscilla’s latest message, just as he had all her messages since April. He thought he knew what she was trying to contact him about. I’m not ready to deal with that just yet. I might never be ready.
Kirby tuned out the scenery while he delved once again into social media in the Land Rover’s back seat. This might have been a mistake since they were driving to his new home. He probably ought to pay attention to find out where it was. He had a fairly solid notion that they had driven down Classen through the Asian District and turned left, so they were somewhere near midtown. The area they were in was not comparable to Nichols Hills, but no place in the city was. It was, however, a world or two above the neighborhood he had lived in for the past five years.