Binding the Shadows (Arcadia Bell) (6 page)

While she did, I made a phone call to an electrician to replace the fuse box and get our lights back on, but the soonest he could make it was tomorrow afternoon.

What a mess. The red paint under the barstools had already dried in spots. The barstool legs were going to have to be stripped, the binding sigils repainted. The floor refinished. Once the cops had taken statements from some of the customers and told me they’d be in touch, I put a sign on the door that said Tambuku would be closed several days for repair. Then I locked up the bar and headed to the Metropark.

Bob called. The ER was slammed. A local overpass had inexplicably collapsed, causing a multi-car pileup that closed down the highway and brought in dozens of critically injured passengers. He talked to an Earthbound doctor who’d told him that the recent slew of petty crimes around the city was becoming a nightmare for the hospital. Patients arrived with fatal burns, unexplainable plague-like diseases, internal bleeding, and more broken bones than the man had ever seen in his career. I was starting to think that Dare was right to be worried about all this. Not that I was going to change my mind about working for him, but Jesus. There was definitely something weird going on.

A nurse examined Kar Yee, gave her ice packs and pain meds, and told her it’d be two hours before she could get an x ray. Bob was taking her back to his place, so I hopped in my old Jetta and sped to meet him there.

Bob lived in his parents’ old house in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Morella. At one time, it was probably a grand, lovely house, but Bob’s inheritance was dwindling, and home-maintenance was not his top priority. I’m sure all his über-successful doctor and lawyer neighbors loved the fact that his gutters were overflowing and his lawn was overgrown, but they were probably all jerks anyway, so I told him he shouldn’t care.

Ever since the night he’d saved Lon’s life, he’d been going to an alcoholic support group twice a week. I tried to tag along with him every other meeting. I couldn’t be his sponsor, as I’d never had a substance abuse problem, but I figured since I was the one who’d served most of his drinks over the last couple of years, I could take the time to help him stop. He still came to Tambuku every night—which was totally against the support group’s rules—but I made him virgin drinks. And, with his permission, I’d been adding a small dosage of a medicinal tonic I’d brewed up with milk thistle and kudzu root, which was purported to cleanse the liver and reduce his cravings for alcohol. He said it helped; he’d been sober for five weeks now.

I knocked on the front door and opened it. “Hey, it’s me.”

“Back here,” Bob called out.

His house was messy and always smelled like a combination of spoiled picnic basket and elderly shut-in. I suspected he had something dead inside one of the walls—a rat, bat, or cat—and told him to call an exterminator, but he said I was imagining it. (I wasn’t.)

A long hallway led past the living room to his deceased father’s home office. A desk sat in front of a wall of anatomy books and medical periodicals, and at the far end of the room was an examination table, a glass cabinet filled with half-empty pharmaceutical drug bottles, and some random medical equipment, including a portable x-ray machine. Bob stood in front of a computer screen. Kar Yee reclined on the examination table, which had been adjusted so that she was almost sitting.

Dried red paint clung to her hair, hands, jeans. It was spattered over her gold coat, which was draped over a nearby chair. She stared straight ahead, unmoving, her arms flopping at her sides. She looked awful. I swallowed hard and tamped down worry.

“Hey,” I said, padding across the room to stand next to her.

“I’m never going to the emergency room again,” Kar Yee answered, her voice weary and cracking. “They are all assholes. ‘Put some ice on it,’ that’s what they told me. And the ambulance ride was worse than Bob’s car. A waste of insurance money.”

“They were understaffed,” Bob said, his focus remaining on the computer screen. “But it’s fine. I’ve already x-rayed her. Pulling the image up now.”

“I probably have radiation poisoning,” Kar Yee said, blinking lazily.

I forced a smile. “You sound like Amanda. Before you know it, you’ll be drinking green protein smoothies and riding a bike to work.”

“Bikes are for schoolchildren and poor people,” she said tartly. “I will saw off my legs before these feet touch pedals.” Her sarcastic snobbery lifted a small weight from my chest. I’d take that over tears any day. “So, did you bring it?” she asked.

I tugged a brown vial out of my jean pocket—a magical medicinal, fairly strong if unpredictable. “What did they give you at the ER?”

“Something that should wear off in about an hour,” Bob said. “Let’s wait, to play it safe. If she overdoses right now, she’ll have to spend all night in the waiting room before they can pump her stomach.”

“I’ll take the risk,” Kar Yee said. “Dope me up, Cadybell.”

She
never
called me that. No way was I giving her the medicinal now. I leaned against the examination table and ran my fingers over the long lock of hair at the front of her bob, now tipped in red. “I think you can use WD-40 to get latex paint out of your hair.”

Her gaze tilted up to mine. “Really?”

Pity and guilt knotted my stomach. “I’m sorry I didn’t get them,” I said. “Your knack caught me off-guard, and when you fell . . .”

“They’d destroyed your binding triangles,” she said.

“I know, but I’ve been experimenting with a different kind of magick. Something that doesn’t require—” I hesitated, wanting to tell her more than I should in front of Bob. “It doesn’t matter,” I finally said. “I should’ve been able to stop them. I’m sorry I didn’t. And I’m sorry you got hurt.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Bob said. “It’s like I told you on the phone—these robberies are happening everywhere. I’ve never known an Earthbound who could short out electricity like that. I thought that was something only
you
could do, Cady.”

“Me too,” I admitted.

“You think it could be magick?” Kar Yee said. “A talisman?”

I brushed a paint-tipped lock of hair off her cheek. “Something that boosts the potency of the wearer’s knack?”

“Is that possible?”

Not that I knew. I mean, there was the Hellfire Club’s transmutation magick. But even if it wasn’t a closely guarded secret only doled out to select members, even if it didn’t bring out the horns and the fiery halos, that kind of magick—a permanent spell cast on a person’s body—couldn’t be replicated in a temporary sigil worn around someone’s neck.

“I seriously doubt it,” I told Kar Yee. “But something weird’s going on.”

“And Tambuku’s not the only business on the block to get hit,” Bob said. “Right before we left the ER, I heard someone saying that the corner shop two blocks away got robbed earlier today.”

“Diablo Market?” I said.

“Ooh, they carry that cantaloupe-flavored gum from Hong Kong I like,” Kar Yee said. Yeah, she was definitely doped up, missing the point.

“Did you hear any details about their robbery?” I asked Bob. “Maybe it was the same kids.”

“The woman didn’t say. I just know they’re closed for a few days. A lot of broken glass.”

“Not us. We’ll be open tomorrow,” Kar Yee said.

Like hell we were. “Let’s not worry about that right now,” I told her.

A loud knock rapped three times on Bob’s front door. The door slammed shut and heavy footfalls sounded. I peeped my head out into the hallway. Lon’s honey-brown head bobbed in out of shadows.
Oh, thank God.
Just the sight of him filled me with relief.

“Hey,” I called out as he approached.

“You all right?” he said as he reached for me.

“I’m fine.”

He held my face in his hands and tilted it up for his inspection, then pulled me against him. I hugged him briefly then led him into the room. “She’s in here.”

“Hello, Lon.”

Lon nodded a polite greeting. “Bob.”

“Hey,” Lon said to Kar Yee, towering over her. “Hanging in there?”

“This? Pfft. It’s nothing,” Kar Yee said with a silly grin. “How’s my favorite pirate captain? Did you come to give me something nice to look at? A little pirate booty?” She snorted a laugh at her own joke.

Lon stared at her in horror for a moment then said, “What’s she on?”

“Dilaudid,” Bob answered from the computer. “She’s just experiencing a mild euphoria. It should wear off soon.”

“Where’s my future boyfriend?” she asked Lon. “Did you leave him at home?”

“He’s got school tomorrow.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but here it is,” Bob said, looking at the x ray of Kar Yee’s chest on his flickering computer screen. On the wall above, several framed certificates hung in black frames. Universities and state licenses . . . all belonging to his father, Hector Hernandez. Bob had gone to medical school when he was younger—he was in his thirties now—and dropped out. My guess was that he had a good deal more medical knowledge than the average person, but healing surface wounds or simple bone breaks was one thing. Messing around with hearts and brains and complicated diseases was another matter altogether.

Lon and I looked at the screen over his shoulder. “Find anything?”

“Look, right here. Clean fractures”—his fingernail tapped the screen twice—“one and two. You were right, Kar Yee. Both clavicles.”

“Can you heal them?” she asked.

Bob’s mouth twisted to one side as he smoothed a palm over his dark hair. “I healed Tamille Jackson’s broken toe two weeks ago.”

“So, that’s a yes?”

“Doesn’t look like any bones shifted,” he mumbled to himself, squinting at the computer screen. “And I think it usually takes two or three months for this kind of fracture to heal naturally. I might be able to cut that down to a few weeks.”

“Weeks?” She sounded horrified.

Bob’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. You could feel back to normal in a few days, but you certainly aren’t going to be able to unload a truck at the bar.”

“Cady unloads the trucks,” she said, all matter-of-fact. “How long before I can move my arms?”

Bob looked at me and shrugged, the grinning Tiki masks on his Hawaiian shirt moving up, then dropping.

“Probably a few days, yeah, Bob?” I said, rolling my hand in an encouraging gesture out of Kar Yee’s sight.

“Definitely,” he said, shaking his head with a panicked look on his face.

Didn’t matter if it was true or not. It was just what she wanted to hear.

“Let’s get to it, then,” she said. “I’ve got to work tomorrow.”

The only work she’d be doing was sleeping. I wondered if I could pay Bob to sit with her and make sure she didn’t leave her apartment—I certainly couldn’t babysit her
and
take care of all the crap at the bar. I still had to call the employees who were scheduled to work and tell them what happened. Find someone to clean up the red latex pool on the floor. Contact the artist who originally painted the binding traps. And as Bob cracked his knuckles and prepared to work his healing mojo on Kar Yee, I added another line to tomorrow’s ever-expanding to-do list: talk to the owners of the convenience store down the street.

I sat on a rickety examination stool, Lon’s hands on my shoulders as we watched Bob leaning over Kar Yee. And even with everything going on, all I could think about was the eerie whispering I’d heard when I used the Moonchild power in the bar . . . and the terrifying feeling that something had jumped through the Æthyr and crawled down my leg.

Bob did his healing mojo on Kar Yee, then we knocked her out with some oxycodone he found in his father’s prescription drug stash. We figured that was more stable than my home-brewed medicinal. And though Lon offered to hire a nurse to sit with Kar Yee for a few days, Bob volunteered before I even had a chance to ask.

The next day, I woke thinking about my mother and the last time I’d seen her, when I was handing her over to Nivella, the albino demon who took her and my father to the Æthyr. If anyone could confirm my mother had died after she’d crossed the veil, it would be the demon who killed them. And, since I was a talented magician, I could simply summon up Nivella by using her glass talon, now sitting in a safe in Lon’s library.

Easy peasy.

But when Lon swung open the heavy door to the wall safe, he spotted a problem I hadn’t anticipated: the glass talon no longer had a soft pink glow of Æthyric Heka surrounding it.

“This doesn’t look good,” I said, hefting the crystal claw in my hand. “Why would the Heka disappear?”

Lon stared at it for several moments. “Only one reason I know of.”

Me too, but I tried anyway, just in case. I spent half an hour constructing a strong binding inside a summoning circle. I had Nivella’s name, class, and her talon—everything that should’ve been needed to call her from the Æthyr. But the albino demon did not come when I called.

Nivella was dead.

•  •  •

Anxious and stressed, I rode back to Morella with Lon that afternoon in his black pickup. In the back was a generator he had in storage, just to help me get some temporary lighting in the bar. I spent most of the ride thinking about my mother. Just because Nivella was dead didn’t mean that my mother was necessarily alive. The demon could’ve tortured my parents to death and died later of something unrelated.