The Undead Pool

“He’s just sitting on the bottom,” I said, digging for the source of his mood. “Maybe I should take him home. I think it’s wearing on him.”

Al peered sourly over his book at me. “He’s a fish. What would wear upon a fish?”

“No sun.”

“I know the feeling,” he murmured, apparently not caring as he went back to the book.

“His mouth is funny,” I prompted. “And his gimpy fin is the wrong color.”

Al’s breath came out in a growl. “There’s nothing wrong with that fish. Teaching you how to identify the maker of a spell by his or her aura is a bloody hell waste of time. As you have an interest, I will indulge you, but I’m not going to do it myself. If you’re done playing zookeeper, we can begin.” He looked pointedly at me. “Are you done, Rachel?”

Silent, I took the mangled ball out of the brown lunch bag I’d brought it in and nervously set it on the table beside the magnetic chalk, a vial of yellow oil, and a copper crucible.

Al’s eyebrows rose. “Since when do you golf?”

I knew Al didn’t like Trent. I knew that the source of his hatred was more than five thousand years old and hadn’t lessened in all that time. “I was on a job,” I said. “It exploded under a deflection charm. I think it might have triggered an assassination spell.”

Shoulders stiff, his eyes narrowed. “You were Kalamack’s caddie?”

“I’m his security,” I said, voice rising. “It’s a paying job.”

Standing, Al’s lips curled in disgust. “I said avoid him, and you take a subservient role?” My breath to protest huffed out when he slammed the book in his hand onto the table. “There’s only one possible relationship, that of a slave and master, and you are failing!”

“God, Al! It was five thousand years ago!” I exclaimed, startled.

“It was yesterday,” he said, hand shaking as it pinned the book to the table. “Do you think the fact that there can be no viable children between elf and demon is an accident? It’s a reminder, Rachel. Lose him or abuse him. There is no middle ground.”

“Yeah?” I exclaimed. “You’re the one who offered him a circumcision curse. I thought you two were BFFs.”

Brow furrowed, Al came around the table, and I forced myself to not move. “You’re making a mistake. There’re already concerns that we moved too fast in killing Ku’Sox.”

I drew back. “Excuse me!”

“That we were taken in by elven trickery and lured into killing one of our own.”

“That is so full of bull!” I could not believe this. “Ku’Sox was trying to kill all of you and destroy the ever-after!”

“Even so,” he said as he put a threatening arm over my shoulder. “It would be better if you simply . . .” His words drifted off into nothing, his fingers rubbing together, then opening as if freeing something.

“You spent a thousand years with Ceri. What’s the difference?”

His arm fell away, and I felt cold. “Ceri was my slave. You’re treating Trent as an equal.”

“He is an equal.”

Motions brusque, Al reached for his book. “No, he isn’t,” he growled.

“Yeah? Well, you loved Ceri,” I accused. “You loved her for a thousand years.”

“I. Did. Not!” he thundered, and I cringed when dust sifted from the rafters.

“Fine,” I muttered. “You didn’t.” This had been a bad idea, and I grabbed my golf ball to go home. He was my easy ticket out of here, though, until the sun set and Bis woke up.

Seeing me standing there, chin high and pissed, clearly wanting to leave, Al relented, stiffly pointing for me to take his chair. Relieved and uncomfortable, I did, setting the golf ball back down with undue force before I sat on the hard stool. The spell book was splayed out in his thick, ruddy hand as he came to stand behind me, and I could smell the centuries of ever-after on him, soaked in until it couldn’t be washed off. He’d teach me this, but I was sure our conversation was far from over.

“It doesn’t look like much,” I said as I looked at the spell laid out before us.

His hand hit the table beside me, and he leaned uncomfortably close over my shoulder. “Good curses don’t.”

The slate table shifted as he pushed back up, and still lurking more behind than beside me, he peered at the book over his glasses. “Step one,” he said loudly. “Sketching the pentagram. You can do that, yes?”

I blew across the table and picked up the magnetic chalk. “You need a book for this?”

“No.” He pointedly dropped a colorful square of silk, and I wiped the slate free of stray ions. “I’ve not done it the long way for ages. Any more questions? Then a standard pentagram of comfortable size. The point goes up if the ley lines are flowing into your reality, but down if they are flowing out.” He hesitated, then said sarcastically, “Which way are they flowing, Rachel?”

Hesitating, I tried to guess. We were about four stories deep. “Has the sun set yet?”

He cleared his throat in disapproval, and when I turned, he said, “No.”

“Then it’s point up,” I said, mostly to myself as I began to sketch. I’d only recently found out that the ley lines, the source for most if not all magic, flowed like tides between reality and the ever-after. Energy streamed into reality at night, and flowed out when the sun was up, but since there were lines scattered over the entire globe, it evened out unless a line was unbalanced. And if it was, it wreaked havoc.

I don’t know which is worse, I thought, the soft sounds of the sliding chalk mixing with the snapping fire making a singularly comforting sound. An attack on Trent, or that my line might be wonky. The misfires were coming from Loveland. Damn it, it was my line. I knew it.

“Better” was Al’s grudging opinion as I finished, but I could tell he was pleased. I’d been practicing. “Crucible in the center, ball in the crucible. As you say, simple stuff.” The snap of the book make me jump, and he added, “Step two. Burn the object to ash. Use a spell to avoid contamination.”

The crucible was cold against my fingers as I placed it in the cave of the pentagram, and I tried to fold the ball so it would all fit in the copper bowl. We needed the ash, apparently. “Do I need a protection circle?” I asked, and then remembering having burned my fingers this morning, I wedged a tiny portion of the ball off to use as a connecting bridge.

Al leaned over my shoulder, his lips so close to my ear that I could feel their warmth. “Do you make a pentagram for any other reason?”

I turned to face him, not backing down. “I do, yes.” Maybe bringing Ceri up had been a bad idea, and I looked across the table to the cushy chair that had been hers, still there although the woman was not.

Grumbling, he waved his hand in acquiescence, and using the outer circle linking the points of the pentagram as the circle base, I touched the nearest ley line and set a protection circle. Energy seeped in, connecting me to all things, and I let it flow unimpeded as a reflection of my aura stained the usual red smear of ever-after now making a sphere half on top, half underneath the table. I scooted the stool back a smidge so my knees wouldn’t hit it under the table and accidentally break the spell. As I watched my thin layer of smut skate and shiver over the skin of the molecule-thin barrier, I tasted the energy for any sign of bitterness or harsh discord. It was fine. The lines were fine.

But the fear of being trapped in that inertia dampening charm gave me pause. My nudge to Limbcus’s golf ball had blown it up, and I was gun-shy.

“We’re waiting . . .” Al drawled.

Well, it was in a protection circle, I thought, and maintaining my grip on the line, I held the small bit of the ball I’d peeled off in my hand as I carefully enounced, “Celero inanio.”

A puff of black smoke enveloped the ball, and for a moment, the reek of burning rubber outdid the stink of burnt amber. The heavy smoke rolled upward, curling back as it hit the inside of my small circle until it finally cleared.

In the center of the pentagram and the crucible was a pile of ash. For an instant, relief filled me. My control was fine. And then my mood crashed. Something from Loveland had caused the misfires. If it wasn’t me, what was it?

“Very good.” Book in hand, Al sat down before me in my usual chair, and I wondered if he’d been hiding behind me this entire time to avoid a possible burn if I did it wrong.

Peeved, I eyed him, the length of the table between us. “You’re such a chicken squirt.”

One eyebrow went up, and he pushed the oil across the table at me. “Anoint the ash with oil of marigold,” he said dryly. “Don’t ask me why, but it has to be marigold. Something to do with the linkages in the DNA allowing a hotter burn.”

Unsure, I picked the oil up. “How much?”

Al opened the book back up and peered at it over his blue-tinted glasses. “Doesn’t say, love. I’d use an amount equal to the mass of the ash.”

My palm itched as I broke the protection circle, carefully spilling what I thought was the right amount of oil onto the ash. This was kind of loosey-goosey for me, but demon magic had more latitude than the earth witch magic I was classically trained for, being a mix of earth and ley line and whatever else they cobbled together.

“Burn it using the same charm you use for making a light,” he said, and I touched the oil/ash mixture to make a connection to the slurry so the next curse would act on it and not, say, my hair. But when I reset my circle, he reached out and broke it, shocking me with the reminder that he was still stronger than me—unless I worked really hard at it.

“No protection circle,” he said, and I slumped.

“Why not? Something is causing misfires, and I don’t want to blow you up. I mean, you just got your kitchen looking halfway decent again.”

Al’s grimace as he looked over the space was telling. “Your magic is fine,” he said, but he was edging backward. “You can’t put it in a circle. If you do, then the color of the flame will be distorted from your aura.”

My fingers twitched. That was how it worked, eh?

“But I don’t think it matters,” Al said with a false lightness. “That ball was not charmed by anyone but you.”

Which would mean the misfires were responsible for it. Taking a steadying breath, I renewed my hold on the ley line. “In fidem recipere,” I said, smearing the ash and oil between my fingers for a good connection. One eye squinched shut, I finished the curse and made the proper hand gesture. “Leno cinis.”

The ley line surged through me as the oil and ash burst into flame, and I wiggled at the uncomfortable sensation. Almost two feet tall, the flame burned with an almost normal gold color, hinting at red at the edges, and black at the core. I cut back on the energy flow, and when the flame subsided to three inches, both Al and I leaned over the table to get a closer look.

There was the bare hint of a mossy scent coming from Al, so faint I thought I might have imagined it. I must have done something, because his gaze slid to mine, making me shiver at his eyes, again back to their normal goat-slitted redness thanks to a costly spell. “That’s your aura,” he said flatly, and I began breathing again. “Your aura alone, and very little of it,” he added. “You hardly tapped it, indeed. You say it made a crater?”

“And knocked me on my ass,” I whispered, wishing the black smut wasn’t there at all, but I’d become so used to doing curses that I didn’t even consciously accept the smut anymore. It just kind of happened. “This is dumb,” I said, depressed, and Al snuffed the flame with his hand. “What could you do just knowing the aura of a practitioner, anyway? Even if it did show something, I can’t comb the city with my second sight trying to find a match.”

Al took the still-hot crucible up in his bare hand. “You’re missing the point, itchy witch,” he said, tossing the entire thing into the fire. “Once you know a person’s aura, you simply tune yours to it as if it was a ley line and pop in.”

He was smiling with a wicked gleam in his eye, and I sat up, seeing the beauty in it. “That’s how you always find me,” I said, and his devious expression blanked.

“Stop!” he said, hand up. “Don’t even think to try it. You or your gargoyle don’t have the sophistication to differentiate between auratic shades to that degree. Line jumping is one thing, jumping to an aura is something else. It’s like saying the sunset is red when it’s thousands of shades.”

I could see his point, but hell, I knew Ivy’s aura pretty well. And Jenks’s.

“Student!” I started as his hand hit the table inches from me, and irate, I looked up. “What did I say?” he asked, leaning over me, his smile nasty.

“Not to think about it,” I said calmly, but I was, and he knew it.

Back hunched, he spun away. “Fine,” he grumbled. “Go ahead and burn another line into existence. Let me draw up the papers to annul our relationship first. I’m not paying for another one of your life lessons. Have you seen my insurance premiums? My God, you’re more expensive than a seventeen-year-old working on his third car.”

I had precious little ever-after income from my tulpa at Dalliance—which went to Al, incidentally—but he’d never mentioned insurance before now, meaning it had to be embarrassingly costly. “I’m not thinking about it,” I said softly, and he looked at me over his shoulder, slowly spinning to gather the rest of the spelling equipment and lovingly set each precious piece back in its proper spot.

“So if the ball wasn’t an assassination attempt and I did the diversion charm correctly, then why did it misfire?” I asked as he slid the curse book away and locked the cabinet.

“It didn’t.” He slid the key into a pocket, and I felt a tweak on my awareness as the little bump of fabric vanished. “It was overstimulated, not misfired.”

My lips pursed as I saw the news reports in a new way. Not misfired, but overpowered? “But I’m better than that!” I protested.

His back was to me, and he lined his chalk up with the rest. “Yes, you are.”

It was a soft murmur, and I crouched before the fire to pull the crucible out before it tarnished too badly—since I was the one who’d probably have to clean it. “Then why? Al, we had thirty misfires over a twenty-mile stretch in the span of an hour. Ivy worked it out. Whatever it is, it’s moving almost forty-five miles an hour.”

“Ivy, eh?” he said. “I’ll take that as a fact, then. Perhaps whatever disturbed the energy flow is gone.”

My gut hurt, and I set the fire iron aside. “Al, the misfires are coming from Loveland.”

There was a telling instant of silence, and then Al turned away, his shoes scraping softly. “Your ley line is fine.”

“What if it isn’t?” I stood, afraid to tell him that my aura had gone white. If it was overstimulation, then probably everyone’s had.

“You fixed it.” Eyes averted, he sat in his chair, fingers steepled. “Your line is fine!”

I pulled his coat from the bench, the crushed velvet smooth against my fingers. On the mantel, Mr. Fish swam up and down, his nose against the glass, ignoring the pellets. I didn’t say a word. Just stood there with his coat over my arm.

“You want to go look at it?” he finally asked, and I held his coat out. “Okay, we’ll go look at it,” he conceded, and I quelled a surge of anxiety. This close to sunset, there’d be surface demons, but I was more afraid of what my ley line looked like.

“Thank you,” I said, and he grumbled something under his breath, shoving his arms in the sleeves and leaning to throw another log on the fire to keep it going until he got back.

“There are no monsters under your bed, Rachel, or in your closet.”

Mood improved, I waited as he checked the buttons on his sleeves and fluffed the lace at his throat. “I found Newt in my closet once.”

He gave me a sideways look and grabbed a mundane oil lamp from a shelf. Nose wrinkling, he did an ignition curse and the lamp glowed. “Damn surface demons. If it’s not the sun burning your aura off, it’s the surface demons harrying you at night.” He stood poised, arms wide. “Well, let’s go! I’ve got things to do tonight that don’t involve you and your pathetically slowly evolving skills.”

I felt better as I came forward to stand with him on the elaborately detailed circle of stone he used as a door. I must have done something right. Sure enough, I felt his satisfaction as the line took us, his kitchen dissolving into nothing as he flung us back to the surface and some place distant from his underground home.

Reality misted back into existence with a gentle ease that made it hard to believe that we had moved. A red-tinted haze struck me, and the gritty wind. Squinting, I turned to the sun still hanging over the horizon. The heat of the day continued to rise from the dry, caked earth, but I could feel a chill in the fading light. Red soil looked as black as old blood in the shadows.

We were at Loveland Castle, and the slump of rock that was all that was left of it here in the ever-after loomed behind us. My ley line hummed at chest height, looking, as Al sourly informed me, as right as rain in the desert, and could we go home now?

Arms about my middle, I spun. Almost unseen in the distance were the crumbling towers of Cincinnati. Nothing but dry grasses and the occasional scrubby tree filled the space between here and there. And rocks. There were rocks. It was the savanna in a decade-long drought.

Except for that odd green circle . . .

“What is that?” I whispered as I realized there was a figure upon the grass, withering on the ground, and Al grunted as he followed my gaze.

“Mother pus bucket,” he muttered, head down as he began stomping toward it. “She’s at it again.”

“She?” But Al hadn’t stopped, and I hastened to catch up. Oh God, it’s Newt, I thought as I saw her unmistakable silhouette standing just outside the circle of green, her arms raised, bare where her androgynous robe had slipped to her elbows. She had short, spiky red hair today, a squat, cylindrical cap done in shades of black and gold atop her head, the colors repeated on her sash and slippers and stained red with the setting sun. A black staff was in her hand as she gestured and chanted at the figure on the living green, crazy as a loon in spring.

“What is she doing?” I said, shocked more from the green grass than anything else.

“Calibration curse,” he said softly. “Maybe she heard about the misfires.” And then he raised his voice. “Newt, love! What has the poor devil ever done to you?”

Clearly knowing we were here, the demon shifted her staff to both hands and held it level before her to pause in her magic. Within the fifteen-foot circle, the surface demon looked up, his thin chest heaving as he panted. His aura looked almost solid, the hatred from his eyes clear. There was a sword at his feet, the red light of the sun gleaming cleanly on it, and as I watched, a sun-brown hand crept out and gripped it.

“It exists,” Newt said, her voice feminine even if the rest of her looked ambiguous. “It’s an affront. What will happen to them when the ever-after collapses? That’s what I want to know. Poor fools.”

Fear rippled through me, and I looked behind me to the ley line. It was collapsing. It was falling apart! I knew it!

“We fixed the line,” Al said, as much for her as for me. “Remember? We had a fine hunt. Rachel’s line is within tolerance.”

Surprise showed on Newt’s face, and a small rock clinked as she turned to the line behind us. The surface demon hammered at the circle to get out, the heavy blade doing no damage, even if it was as tall as he was. “That’s right,” she said, peering at me with her all-black eyes that gave me the creeps. “I forgot, and yet we’re both up here in this putrid filth we wallow in.”

The sun turned me red even as I shivered in the chill of the coming night. “What is that?” I asked, looking at the demon, but what I really wanted to know was how there was living grass.

As distractible as a child, Newt turned, beaming. “It’s a calibration curse,” she said in delight, oblivious to the anger of the surface demon beating upon it. I could almost see clothes, so distinct was he in the low sun.

“It doesn’t look like the curse I know,” I said.

“That’s because it’s calibrating space and time, not balance and skills.”

“Space and time?” I breathed as she began chanting. Immediately the demon dropped his sword and fell to the ground, writhing in pain. Neither Al nor Newt seemed to care. “Al,” I almost hissed. “What is she doing?”

Frowning, Al put a fist to his hip. “She’s moving a bubble of time into the past. The surface demon is caught up in it intentionally, as a marker.”

That explained the green grass, but how far back had she needed to go to find it? “You can do that?”

“She can.” Al pointed with the lantern, the flame pale in the remaining sun. “By comparing the rate of adjusted time to a known span, we can see if anything is out of balance.”

I shuddered when the sun touched the rim of the earth and bled all over it. Newt thought something was wrong, too. “You do this a lot, right? Like a monthly siren test?”

“No,” she said, and the surface demon behind the barrier scrabbled at the edge, his motions becoming erratic. “It hurts.”

“I’ll say,” I whispered.

Newt gave me a sharp look. “Not the demon,” she said sourly. “Me. Pay attention. You might have to do this someday. Each surface demon comes into existence at a specific, known time. This one has a particularly long life: watch now. We’re close.”

With no warning, the surface demon vanished, the grass under him springing up as if he’d never been there. Newt set the butt of her staff on the ground, clearly pleased. Beside me, Al fussed with his pocket watch, making a show of opening it. Not knowing why, I looked at it, glancing up to see Newt had a watch locket on a black chain around her neck.

“Ready?” she said, and Al nodded.

I had no idea what to expect, but as Newt pointed at the bubble and indicated “go,” the demon reappeared. I watched in a horrified awe as he flung himself against the barrier, clearly in pain as the green grass grew sparse about him and the sword that had glittered so beautifully tarnished and became dented. With a sudden shock, I recognized it as the one the gargoyle had dropped when he’d come to find out who’d damaged my ley line.

His aura failing, the surface demon fell and a layer of black ash covered him. A bright light crisped the remaining vegetation to ash. Dead-looking sprigs appeared, and then the twisted figure with the tattered aura vanished.

“Mark!” Newt said, and Al nodded sharply, holding his watch out to Newt as the demon hiked her loose-fitting clothes up and came closer. “Perfect,” she said, and Al closed his watch with a snap. “Time and space are moving concurrently, i.e., not shrinking,” she said, seemingly perfectly sane. “Your line isn’t impacting the ever-after, but it feels odd at times.”

Scared, I spun to Al. “I told you. I told you something was wrong!”

Newt sniffed as Al frowned at me to shut up. “He didn’t believe you?” she said, staff planted firmly before her as the setting sun cast her shadow over both of us. “You should listen to her, Gally. If you had listened to me, we might have survived.”

Al shifted to get out of her shadow, screwing his eyes up at the last of the light. “We’re not dead yet, Newt, love.”

Newt’s expression became sour. “Oh, so we are,” she said, her gaze dropping to her foot nudging a rock deeper into the grit. “I suppose . . .”

Frustrated, I slumped. “Newt, what’s wrong with my line?”

“Nothing is wrong with your line!” Al bellowed.

“He’s right,” she said, and his bluster died in a huff. “There’s nothing wrong with it, but everyone else’s is fine.”

Okay. I rubbed my forehead. Newt wasn’t known for her clarity of decisions, but she was a font of knowledge if you could understand. The concern was in how she might react to whatever she might suddenly remember.

I jumped when Al grabbed my arm and rocked us back a step. “Yes, yes. Everything fine,” he said jovially. “Rachel, ready to go?”

My gaze was fixed on that ring where the grass had been. “That’s what the ever-after used to look like,” I said, stumbling when Al gave me a yank.