Chapter 5

My apartment isn't exactly a penthouse. It's one of many open floor plan jobs that were built out of an old cotton mill. Its single room stretches out from the door to two giant windows overlooking a pool reserved for tenants. My furniture is all blacks and dark woods, which go well with the white walls. A small kitchenette is tucked away in a corner behind a wrought iron spiral staircase that leads up to a loft where I sleep. My desk and computer are put in a corner, and a large TV with a couple of game consoles in an entertainment center sit opposite a black fabric couch at the far end of the room near the window. Over the past couple of years I discovered that I hated leather furniture. It makes you sweat and it always sticks to you after you've been sitting on it too long. Maybe I'm picky, but cut me some slack. When you're healing from serious burn wounds little things like that make an impression.

I went into the bathroom and opened my medicine cabinet. I popped my prescribed nightly dosage of meds and looked at myself in the mirror. I could see some scars peeking above my collar. They were thin and angrily red, even fully healed. I’d gotten used to them, for the most part, but after meeting Angelica again after so long, they suddenly hurt again. I peeled off the flannel and it hit the tile of my bathroom floor with a splat. Then I slid off my t-shirt and really looked at myself for the first time since it had happened.

The scars originated in my right hand, traced up my arm and crossed down over my breasts and belly, making a V shape that narrowly avoided my heart before streaking down the opposite arm.

Calling lightning is dangerous. One screw up, one missed step and your heart falls out of rhythm, or stops outright, and that’s if you’re not served up extra crispy. I used to be pretty damn good at using lightning. At one point I could hurl bolts of plasma like it was nothing, but I pulled out all the stops and got unbelievably lucky. When I called lightning I would conjure a protective dome of yellow and blue Chaos to protect my hands and direct it towards my target, kind of like those plasma ball desk toys, only cut in half. On my last mission as an adjudicator, I called a massive bolt of lightning, bigger than anything I had ever conjured before, and to funnel the bolt towards a dark wizard, I used my own body as a conduit. I couldn’t control it with the usual spell and was barely able to redirect it away from my heart. Angelica had gotten hit hard in the preceding battle and it was me and the dark wizard going mano a mano, hence the desperate measures, and to save her life I broke one of the thirteen laws of magic set by the original seven magicians of the original Grand Coven of Sorcery: “A magician shall never tamper with the boundaries of life and death.”

I wiped tears from my eyes and turned on the shower. I finished undressing and just got straight in letting the slowly warming water caress my skin and wash away the tension of today. I tried to let my mind just go blank as I cleaned myself, but the scent of Angelica's perfume, heady and sweet and unmistakable, stayed in the back of my mind, refusing to leave me alone. I was suddenly taken back to memories from long ago. Soft grass beneath a shady tree in a park, a cheap blanket laid out on a skyscraper’s roof looking up at the stars, sitting on a bed holding hands and gossiping like school girls. Laughing. Singing. Slinging spells. Comforting and consoling each other. Defending each other.

Those were good memories, great memories, even, but they made the rest hurt all the more. Forcing their way into my brain, images and feelings came into full focus. It was like I was there again. I could feel the chains bolting my body to the floor in a kneeling position. Long, board-straight flaxen hair spilled out around me like a cape. My body burned. Lichtenberg figures snaked down my chest and arms. Bloody, oozing lightning bolts, blackened at the edges. The only things preserving my modesty were the bandages. Was my heart beating properly? Did I give myself an arrhythmia? I couldn't tell.

The Coven had done what they could about them, but magical damage is tough to heal, so they had settled on a simple numbing spell, just the slightest lick of Blue Chaos to cool my burning nerves. My glasses had shattered in the duel and were probably in the trash with what remained of my shirt and coat. I could see nothing more than six inches from my face as anything more than squirming blobs of color, but I could hear voices. I heard Angie begin to speak, retelling the events of the past three days. My heart filled with hope that I might be spared from my fate, but it was immediately deflated like a cheap balloon as she continued to speak. Angie was testifying against me. I had saved her life. She would have been dead if it weren’t for me, and this is how she repays me? She was condemning me, leaving me to the Coven’s mercy. Tears streamed down my face, but I didn’t even have the strength to sob. I was banished, branded as a traitor and a dark witch by the coven. Any adjudicator had free reign to ice me if I even looked at them funny. And what happened to Angie after this? She gets a fucking promotion. She gets made into a Black Dog. Well respected. The freaking CIA of magic, while I get to move halfway across the country and interview sasquatches in Nowhere, USA.

The hot water ran out and the shower turned cold. I had sat down in the center of my tub with my knees against my chest. My eyes burned. Probably from the shampoo I'd let dribble down my face. Yeah. That was totally it.

The arctic water snapped me out of my stupor and got my mind back on the task at hand. There was a monster in my town killing young girls. That superseded any of my personal beef with Angelica. I didn’t have a lot to go on, but I knew where to start.

After my shower I walked into my apartment's second bedroom to my shrine. A magician's shrine is a place unique to each practitioner of the Art. It is where they practice the more subtle and delicate facets of magic that require more finesse than a simple thing like a fireball.

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Mine rested on a desk made of worn dark wood in the back left corner. Resting on it were an assortment of items that would amplify and focus my magic across a long distance, and allow me to supplement most of the energy that would normally have to come from my own body and spirit. If I tried to cast this particular spell à la Carte, it was likely to kill me. I've known magicians that were old enough and powerful enough to cast a spell like this with barely a flick of their wrist, but I was far from their level. I'm good, don't get me wrong, but I ain't that good.

I crouched down and opened a military footlocker that came from some time between World War II and the Korean war. Its hinges creaked and its lock jangled. From inside I pulled out a gray robe made of Elven spider-silk. I stood and draped the cool garment over my naked flesh. The feeling of the fabric sliding over my bare skin was soothing, but at the same time it was deliciously sensual, particularly across the more sensitive areas of my anatomy that had seen agonizingly little attention in recent years. I tied the robe's belt and then sat down in the comfy chair in front of my shrine, gathering my focus and preparing to call upon my familiars.

Thaumaturgy on this scale requires five ritual objects to perform the spell: A cauldron, an athame, a chalice, a wand, and a flame. Despite the esoteric, witchy-sounding names, the ritual objects can be anything, so long as they serve their purpose and are significant in some way to the magician. For example, my cauldron was a ceramic blacksmith's crucible that belonged to my father, stained, scratched, and scorched by years of potion making and spellcraft, as well as actual forging.

I reached under the desk beside my left leg and drew out a large black suitcase. Inside it were five crystal skulls, each of a different animal. They were all unpolished and carved by hand, with plenty of nicks and imperfections, and plenty of what real artists would call “character”. I drew out a skull modeled after a German Shepherd and put away the suitcase. I gingerly set the skull on the desk in a copper circle set into the wood. I took up my wand, a long thin shaft of polished blackthorne, and waved it over the bunsen burner at the back of the desk.

“Durza-pal.” I whispered, the elvish word conjuring small blue flames to flicker to life, no gas required. From the desk’s drawers and shelves on the walls I pulled out small vials filled with various herbs, essential oils, and other assorted arcane accoutrements. I meticulously added ingredients to the crucible, focusing on aspects of the animal I wished to summon, muttering a string of Elvish words in a slow chant. When all of my ingredients were in the crucible, I set the vessel on the burner. Holding the crucible with a pair of tongs, I stirred the concoction with my wand, sending energy through it. The smell of it was strong, and it only increased as Chaos was added to the mix. A corona of golden light appeared and a green fog poured out of the crucible as the mixture began to boil. With a slight effort I willed the flames to lessen and set the mixture to simmering. I then turned to the crystal skull, removing the top of the cranium to access the hollow space inside where the brain would normally be. Using the tongs, I slowly poured my concoction into the cavity and then picked up my athame. I placed the thin stiletto blade against a prominent scar on my left thumb, a remnant of many such rituals performed over my lifetime. I didn’t even really feel the pain anymore. I let a few drops of blood mingle with the concoction, adding a swirl of scarlet to its green glow.

Capping the skull, I slowly moved it to another circle set in the center of the desk, this one made of silver. I held both hands out over the skull and my chanting came to a crescendo. The skull began to glow and shuddered, clattering against the table. Phantom muscles began to slither into life, coating the skull. Crystals seemed to form out of thin air to form the rest of the canine skeleton and more muscles formed over that. I slowly rose, careful not to break my rhythm. I guided the floating skeleton off of the desk and onto the floor to give it room to fully materialize. White skin and fur began to sprout from the creature's body and its limbs began to twitch, the motion almost disturbing in how lifelike it was. Before long, there was a dog sitting before me, jaws open, panting and sweeping his tail across my floor. It looked just like your garden-variety German Shepherd, but its fur was solid white, with a slightly opalescent sheen to it. All except for a red spiral on his forehead, the representation of my blood, and what would allow me to command the dog to do what I needed it to.

“Hey, buddy!” I said, genuine happiness touching my voice. I knelt down and held out my hands. The dog padded over to me and I gave him scratches behind his ears. He let out a little yip and licked my face in a doggy kiss.

“I know, long time no see.” I smiled and stood up, leading him back over to the shrine. “We got some work to do, Virgil.”

From a drawer, I produced a map of Three Trees and a blue collar with Virgil's name engraved on a little plate and small shard of crystal attached to the collar's D-ring. I opened up the map and found the general area where Jenny had said the murder had taken place. I circled it with a red colored pencil and showed it to Virgil.

“I need you to go here, buddy. You're gonna find a scent there. Not quite human. Mark it and follow it. See where else this creep’s been. Got it?”

Virgil yipped and did an adorable little hop in an affirmative. Virgil was much smarter than the average mutt. Hell, he can read a map better than I can.

I whispered a word and the crystal on the Dog collar shimmered faintly. I withdrew a bottle of red ink from another drawer and dipped the crystal into it. I placed the bottle of ink on the table and put the collar around Virgil’s neck.

Geometry is intrinsic to magic, particularly circles and star shapes. We still don’t know exactly why, but it is. The best way to sustain a thaumaturgic spell, like the one that would draw a path on the map following my familiar around town, is to lock it in with a circle, and that circle could be anything, even a dog collar.

As I snapped the clasp of the collar around Virgil’s fluffy throat I felt the spell flow through the dyed leather and used the circuit it created to continuously transfer power back into itself. I was able to release the spell and it would fuel itself throughout the night. I checked to make sure it was working, and sure enough, the red ink had flowed from the bottle into a fog that hovered over the map. A small splotch had formed over the area of the map where my apartment rested.

“Alright, buddy, we’re in business. Be back in the morning.” I told Virgil.

I led him out to the living room and opened up a section of one of the massive windows. Virgil barked and jumped out the window. The dog fell twenty feet, stuck the landing on the concrete by the pool and ran off in the direction of the park, all without making a sound. I smiled, satisfied, and went to sleep