We ended up sneaking out the side of Pinehold with the aid of Alex’s magic and a bit of old fashioned, “look like you’re supposed to be here.” I was probably going to get fired for this but it was a small price to pay for my family. I will say, though, I was less than pleased with Alex’s choice of escape vehicle.
“Seriously?” I said, sitting in the passenger’s seat, looking out through the Falcon’s windows into the dark clouds beyond. “We have an entire fleet of cars to choose from, all the O’Henry family’s, and you choose mine?”
The four of us were packed into my car and we were driving through the worst storm I’d seen hit Bright Falls since, well, at least a decade. The rain was pouring down so hard it was hard to see a foot beyond the windshield. It was almost noon but it might as well have been early evening for visibility.
Emma had changed out of her housekeeper’s uniform into a pair of jeans and a gray hoodie with the Bright Falls Wolves logo on the front. We’d managed to get Maria out of bed into some of Emma’s clothes that she presently wasn’t bleeding into. She was suffering from magic withdrawal, though, which manifested in wearing black sunglasses while complaining of a massive headache.
I’d changed into a pair of Capri slacks and a white blouse I’d very much like to have saved for an occasion other than this. It was the clothes I’d been planning to wear for a meeting with my literature professor today to explain why I hadn’t done any work on my last assignment.
“Your 2001 Hummer is a very formidable vehicle,” Alex said, his voice calm despite the fact he’d just spent the past few hours patching up Maria and was now heading out to prepare for a rescue attempt of four hostages. “Fuel efficient? No. Formidable? Yes. The latter may be more important now.”
I felt my face. “I am surrounded by Hummerdinger fans.”
“Seriously, we could get trampled by a herd of buffalo and be fine,” Emma said, bouncing in the back.
Maria, meanwhile, banged her head lightly against the left rear door window. “Magic…magic…my kingdom for some magic.”
“Sorry,” Alex said, shaking his head. “All tapped out. Besides, you’re almost healed.”
Maria snorted. “Almost is not completely, Harry Potter.”
I was grateful, in a way, to have a distraction like this. It kept me from thinking about the fact my family was tied up and held prisoner by a murderous werewolf possessed by two spirits. One who had the full authority of the law behind her, so there was no chance of calling the police on her.
“May I ask where we’re going?” I asked, having realized I hadn’t asked beforehand. “I know we have our work cut out for us in convincing your brother to be our hostage, but I’m sure with him as backup—”
“We’re not going to Lucien’s,” Alex said, squeezing the steering wheel hard.
“We’re not?” Emma asked. “But they totally helped us last time.”
“We can,” Alex said, correcting himself. “But I want to take us somewhere else first.”
“Disneyland?” I asked, unsure where my favorite FBI agent could want us to go. He’d already said we couldn’t get ourselves reinforcements.
“My master, Kim Su.”
“The lady who was supposed to teach me magic but never called?”
“It’s been a weekend, Jane. It’s not like she’s going to e-mail you a response.”
“Why not?” I said. “Archmages can use the internet.”
“I sent her a message,” Alex said, sighing. “However, while she’s sent me a response, it requires a bit more to get her to come to a new location.”
“Can we can the mysteriousness of mysteriousness? What do you mean?”
“I want to physically summon her tower to this state and town so we can talk to her. If she can help directly, that’d be great, if not then I’d love for her to give us an item or spell to exorcise Clara O’Henry so we don’t have to kill her.”
I blinked, processing that. “Okay, maybe there’s a reason wizards talk cryptically. Summon her tower? Like Isengard?”
“That will be awesome!” Emma said, grabbing the headrest of Alex’s seat. “Will it have a flaming eye?”
“No,” Alex said. “It takes whatever appearance would be appropriate for a location.”
“Boring!” Emma said, falling back into her seat.
“Can you please stop talking?” Maria said, feeling her head. “I need an ice compact and maybe a hundred Bloody Marys.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re faking now,” I said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.
“Who was stabbed by the magic knife of stabiness?” Maria asked. “The one that killed my brother?”
There wasn’t much you could say to that. “You were.”
“Damn right,” Maria said. “So let’s go find this old wizard lady and kill Emma’s sister.”
“We are not killing my sister!” Emma snapped.
“We’re killing one of them but it doesn’t count because she’s dead!” Maria said, turning to her. “That’s fine by me.”
Alex smiled and laughed, which I did not think to be an appropriate reaction. “Like road trips with my sister.”
“You have a sister?” I asked, surprised by this revelation.
Alex paused. “No.”
There was a finality to it which put me in mind of Maria.
“She died?” I asked.
“Yes,” Alex said. “I killed her.”
Suddenly six eyes were staring at Alex.
“Not willingly,” Alex said, his voice low. “I’ve been party to your tragedies so I feel it only right you know some of mine. I tried to save her from my father once. He was beating her badly and perhaps worse would have happened. That was when my powers first manifested. I willed him to die. Samantha…she died too.”
“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. That is messed up,” I said, before realizing that wasn’t exactly a sympathetic response.
Alex made a turn down a road that I knew led nowhere. “Yes. It left me traumatized and hearing voices which, combined with the fact I’m neuroatypical, led them to misdiagnose me with something much worse. I spent a year in a mental institution as I mentioned. I eventually returned to my mother’s home but it was never the same between us. In fact, I believe that’s part of the reason she adopted Lucien. It was her chance to have a do-over with a child she hadn’t utterly failed or hated.”
Yikes. “I’m sorry, Alex. That’s…terrible.”
“It is what it is,” Alex said. “After I finished high school, my mother and I parted ways. I sought out a mentor for sorcery and ended up studying under Kim Su after a particularly grueling series of tests. I completed my degree in psychology simultaneously with finishing my final test to become a master of spirit magic. Given my family history, nobody wanted me joining up. I managed to just squeak by, though.”
“Because you were a wizard?” Emma asked.
“I speak fluent Spanish and know a little about forensic accounting,” Alex said. “That put me over the edge with the other magical candidates.”
I saw there was more to the story. In my head, I saw a vampire rapist being stabbed with a wooden dagger in a sorority house by a trench-coat-and-hat-wearing Alex, a pair of police officers behind him. The idea of Alex being a vigilante fighting evil in the post-Reveal world amused me before I remembered “hunters” had always existed and tended to target people like me.
That explained how he’d managed to get in the FBI. It was just an irony that he was probably a guy who was more liberal than most in supernatural law enforcement. A part of me envied him. How could it not since I was ready to track down and murder my second evil god of the week.
“Wait, if you’re a master of spirit magic, then why can’t we just use you to exorcise the Red Wolf?”
“I don’t have the juice for it. Not a spirit as powerful as it.”
Huh, well, that was honest. “So if we don’t get Kim Su’s help we’re—”
“Yeah,” Alex said.
Well, we had the Merlin Gun. I wasn’t going to let my family stay endangered. I just hoped Emma would be able to forgive me, though I doubted she would. I really hoped Alex’s Yoda would come through for us.
The car pulled to a stop in the middle of an empty trailer park which was set for demolition. It had been taped off with signs built around it. The O’Henrys had plans to turn Bright Falls into a resort town like New Detroit, but so far, they’d only managed to make one enormous hotel which had never been more than half full until this week. The fact they were planning on building another hotel here by the look of the signs said they sometimes had more money than sense.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“The summoning,” Alex said.
“Ooo, Grandpa isn’t going to like that,” Emma said. “Do it!”
“It’s going to take a lot out of me,” Alex said, raising his hands. “I’m also going to need everyone else to do something.”
“What?” I asked. “Chant? Hold hands? Pray?”
“Close your eyes.”
“Okay,” I did so.
“Everyone,” Alex said. “That means you, Maria.”
“Aww!”
A second passed.
Alex said, “Okay, you can open them now.”
“What?” I said, opening my eyes. “You can’t have…what the holy hell?”
A strip mall had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the woods, displacing the deserted trailer park and surrounding us with a road to town. Even the weather was different as the rain had suddenly let up even though I could hear it just a few hundred yards away. A patch had emerged in the clouds above us.
The strip mall wasn’t particularly impressive with a Dollar Store, Big Buy, an IHOP, a beauty salon, a game store, and a few other strip mall sort of places. All of the businesses seemed open and there were people in the parking lot we’d suddenly found ourselves in. I also noticed, at the end of the half-square of stores was a small store called “KIM SU’S THE TOWER - FOR ALL YOUR OCCULT AND SCENTED CANDLE NEEDS.”
I did a double take between it and Alex. “Are you frigging serious?”
“I’m afraid so,” Alex said.
“You conjured this?” I asked, stunned. “Just how powerful are you?”
“Not as much as you’d think,” Alex said. “Kim Su keeps an extra-dimensional pocket of time and space around her so she can move around at will without discomfort. I didn’t create this, just called it to Bright Falls. It exists in other places simultaneously at her will and time. However, for the purposes of Bright Falls, you could go down to the mayor’s office and find it’s always been there.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “What do they sell in the stores here? Mogwai?”
“Mostly toilet paper and liquor,” Alex said. “When you get to be as old as Kim Su, you want access to all of the stuff you like without difficulty.”
“It is wrong I find this both awesome and incredibly lame?” I asked, trying to take it all in.
“I was hoping for a real tower,” Emma said.
Maria stepped out of the car. “If anyone needs me, I’m going to be buying liquor.”
“That’s probably not good given your condition,” I said, watching her leave.
“It’s antiseptic!” Maria called back.
I watched her depart into the liquor store by the Big Buy.
“I like her!” Alex said, smiling.
I rolled my eyes. “Is it safe to let her go wandering about with evil gods in the woods? Which I’m really upset isn’t a euphemism.”
“This is probably the only place in Bright Falls which is one hundred percent safe from the Red Wolf,” Alex said,
“Call it the Big Bad Wolf,” Emma said, her voice low. “It hasn’t been the Red Wolf in a very long time.”
I looked over at the Tower store. “Does your master know we’re coming?”
“Now she does,” Alex said, frowning. “Mind you, it may be on the other side of the line between polite and incredibly presumptuous to summon her home to this place. We didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms.”
I felt my head. “Now you tell me. What did you do?”
“I kinda-sorta stole the Merlin Gun,” Alex said. “I wanted to hunt evil with it.”
“You are not nearly as nice and law abiding as an FBI agent should be,” Emma said, frowning.
“You’re right about that,” Alex said, unbuckling his seatbelt. “But I try.”
I reached under the passenger’s seat and pulled out the Merlin Gun before making sure the safety was on and hiding it in my purse. I didn’t normally carry one, but I was dressed up for today’s meeting. Thankfully, I’d brought my work shoes so I wasn’t stuck wearing high heels trying to save my family. “Yeah, giving me your gun feels a whole lot less cool now that I know it’s hot. Also, was asking her to teach me an apology?”
“No,” Alex said. “I believe you have a talent which should be nurtured.”
“What was yours?”
Alex paused. “I thought it was to bring justice. Now I think it’s more to be a defender of humanity in all of its forms.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Emma said.
“Sometimes,” Alex said.
I tried not to gag at the righteousness on display. Then again, I didn’t blame Alex for wanting to go out in the world and slay monsters. If I’d had his childhood, I’d try to make up for what had happened to me too. I couldn’t imagine being responsible for the death of…oh wait, yeah I could. Huh, maybe the FBI agent and I had more in common than we thought.
The three of us headed through the glass door of the Tower shop and I was immediately overwhelmed with the auras within. The Tower looked like a combination of knick-knack shop and one of the post-Reveal occult stores which had popped up in recent years. There were a variety of knives, swords, and axes on the wall but no guns.
I saw dozens of ordinary objects on tables, marked with little cards and tags ranging from teddy bears to expensive jewelry under glass. Bookshelves were filled with spiral notebooks next to expensive medieval-looking volumes and those were next to regular shelves of the store’s titular scented candles. I also saw a comic book rack with Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #1 that didn’t look like reprints but were next to more recent comics (also a few Playboys).
And everything inside this place was magic.
Having the ability to sniff out magic, I found my attention going in every direction around me, trying to trying take in all of the auras about me. I accidentally bumped into a table that caused a baseball to roll against me and I was filled with an image of it being used to win the World Series. The item had since been enchanted to bring general good luck and success to any contest one engaged in. My hand also waved over a key that I found out had been carried by a thief for decades as a good luck charm that could increase one’s ability to not be seen. Another item was a lucky rabbit’s foot which, ugh, made a person able to have sex for hours. I paused, thinking about that, then checked the price. Really? Ten bucks? I needed a shopping cart.
No, Jane, focus!
“I think Stephen King wrote about this store,” Emma said, looking around. “Except this is a lot trashier.”
“If we can’t get Master Kim’s help in defeating the Big Bad Wolf, then maybe we can find aid in the objects here. Everything has a price.”
“Our souls?” Emma said.
“No,” Alex said, pulling out his credit card. “Something much costlier.”
That was when I heard a deeply annoyed young woman’s voice with a…Southern accent? “A werewolf, a wizard, and a weredeer walk into my shop. It sounds like a joke but I’m not laughing.”
That was when I heard a shotgun cock.