In the morning, Griff felt a little ashamed of how freaked out he had been. After all he’d been frightened of a couple of pretty girls, who weren’t even armed, and so what if there had been owls? Everyone knew that owls didn’t hurt anyone. Alex probably thought he was a coward.
Alex didn’t call him. Griff hadn’t meant to contact him anyway, not before the wands ran out, and thanks to Griff making the wand blanks, Alex had been able to make an inventory of nearly fifty. After another week or so, Griff had sold all but a dozen wands, and he had an envelope with Alex’s carefully counted-out share. He went to Jake’s house in the afternoon, knowing that Alex wouldn’t be awake in the morning.
But Alex wasn’t there, or at least he wasn’t answering.
So Griff came by again that evening, reasoning that even a crackhead would be awake at seven pm after sleeping all day, and Alex was somewhat more straitlaced than a crackhead.
Jake answered the door. He was wearing his work clothes but no shoes, and the start-screen music from Need for Speed hummed from his surround-sound speakers. “Oh, hey, Griff. Good to see you. What’s up?”
“I came to give Alex his money.”
“Alex took off,” Jake said, and turned away from the door. He sat on the couch and picked up a controller, so Griff followed him and took the other one. “Good riddance. He didn’t steal anything this time, at least.”
“This time?” Griff typed his name into the player two slot and started to play. He didn’t have an account on Jake’s system, so his car avatar didn’t have any upgrades, but he was pretty good at racing games so he thought he’d do well against Jake anyway.
“Yeah, don’t you remember?” Jake leaned over to one side, as if his own motion would make his car take the turn better. “Oh, wait, that was when I was living in Phoenix, the house up on Indian School.”
“You had that night shift,” Griff said. “We were kind of out of touch then.” As with many people he knew from high school, his friendship with Jake had waxed and waned based on proximity and convenience.
“Yeah, well Alex came to town after couch surfing his way through the Colorado branch of the family, and my aunt started giving me shit about family obligations. I said he could crash with--whoa!” Jake’s car careened off the road in a fiery explosion, allowing Griff to gain a few more seconds of lead time.
Griff had now edged into first place. Jake concentrated on his driving to get into a close second before resuming his story. “Alex has always been like this. When he was a kid he was in some special school because of behavior problems. I don’t know how he graduated, but he’s never held a real job, even though he’s older than me.”
“He’s older than you?” Now it was Griff’s turn to crash, and he cursed playfully as Jake zoomed past him. He got stuck behind another car, and found himself in fourth place. “I thought he was our age.”
“No, dude’s old, like almost forty.” Jake sped over the finish line. “New match?”
“Sure,” Griff said, hitting the button to start a new game.
“I don’t get why we’re expected to let him couchsurf every time he comes into town. I was gonna tell him to just get a job and stop mooching off people, but the next thing I know, he’s moved in. Maybe he cast a spell on me,” Jake said in a half-serious tone.
Griff concentrated on driving. It was something he hadn’t considered. Something quite likely. Like most people, his knowledge about mages had come off of television shows. He was cynical enough to realize that television, especially prime time dramas, wasn’t exactly full of facts, but they had enough in common that some of what they said about mages was probably true.
One common theme was that mages could and did control the minds of people around them, often in very subtle ways. Like that one time on ‘The Simpsons’, where Bart had a new friend that ended up living with them for a year before people figured out that he wasn’t really their long lost cousin. Come to think of it, they’d used the same plot on ‘How I Met Your Mother’, and ‘Sopranos’ too. And he could remember at least one show in which a mage convinced characters to give them money, and the characters spent the rest of the show trying to figure out where the money went. Of course, on sitcoms, the mage always got caught, and they found a funny way to wrap it up before the end of the show. In the ‘Sopranos’ episode, they just shot him.
Everything else, television had gotten wrong. Alex couldn’t fly through the air, and he couldn’t turn into a lion. He couldn’t make other things float across the room to him, no matter that he was lazy and the beer was always on the other side of the counter. But what if the television shows were right that mages manipulated people into providing for them? It would explain why Alex was still couch surfing, though you didn’t have to be a mage to be a deadbeat.
“If he did cast a spell on you, he might not even be related to you,” Griff said. “Anyone else in your family a mage?”
“Not really.” Jake’s car sped into view on Griff’s half of the screen. “But I know he’s my cousin, I remember playing with him as a kid. Besides, guy’s got the same chin.”
Griff smashed his car into Jake’s to try to get some advantage. They were tied for first, but Griff edged into the lead just before the end of the game.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that Alex just took off?”
Jake tossed his controller on the couch and laced his fingers behind his head to stretch. “He does this shit all the time. He’ll be back in a few months, and he’ll pretend like he was never gone.”
“Well, that sucks.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m glad he’s gone. The dude doesn’t shower enough,” Jake said. “Don’t tell me you loaned him money or something?”
“No, but I quit working for my dad to sell wands, and the last thing I want to do is ask my dad for more hours again.”
“That sucks,” Jake said. “Can’t you find another mage to make them for you? You kind of know how he did it, right?”
“I don’t know any other mages,” Griff said. But as soon as he said it, he realized that wasn’t true. Hadn’t Fallon mentioned someone named Susan Stillwater? Stillwater wasn’t a common surname. He could probably find at least an address or a phone number.