Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 12 (3 page)

He entered the palace
. The guards disarmed him, but he had abilities the rumors didn't reveal.

He knelt by the foot of Jainor
's bed. He half-expected the man to wake up, to make his argument again, to affirm what had to be done, somehow to absolve Eridanus. "I would rather see her happy without me," Jainor had said, "than trapped and miserable with me."

"
That's one thing we have in common, my friend," he said, laying a hand on the slick brow. He remained motionless, listening to Jainor's breathing, and somewhere hoping maybe they would be all right, maybe...

He could hear the guards in the other room turning restless
. They would interrupt any second. He had no more time.

"
I love her," he said to silence, "more than life itself."

His hand moved down to Jainor
's heart. He released himself from the bound and glassy form of a Lthieryn on earth and blazed like a star. A spear of light struck home like a dagger. The young man jerked, a single breath expelled from his body, and then no more.

Eridanus rose, shaking
. It would appear natural, but he could not lie. He could only confess to Adiarwen, bow under the weight of her ire, and then flee. He said a silent farewell to humanity as he moved for the door.

Voices outside made him pause
. "You are allowed to see him, star-heiress, but you must remember that—"

"
I know perfectly well I can do nothing against you." Adiarwen's voice promised vengeance, though it shook as she spoke.

Eridanus stepped back
. There was no way to avoid this scene, short of abandoning his physical form, and he owed Adiarwen closure. He closed his eyes and waited, but could not blot out the image of Jainor's face.

"
Eri?" The puzzlement in her voice passed as her steps advanced to the bed. "Jainor, love, I—" A sharp intake of breath, a rustling of fabrics, fingers scrabbling. "Jainor!" she shrieked.

Eridanus
' eyes wrenched open as if Jainor's spirit had drawn a hand over them. He could not have gone to her if he wanted to, for the guards, alarmed by the shouting, crowded her, checking what he already knew. One guard straightened. "Your highness, please believe us when we say—"

She raked their faces with puffy eyes and nodded stiffly
. "There was a chance. We always knew there was a chance he would not make it."

She whirled to Eridanus, her body crushed to his, her sobs in his shoulder
. He flinched without noticing any pain. He couldn't bring himself to touch her, his arms limp at his sides. What could he possibly say?

Adiarwen noticed his distance in a way more instinctive than conscious, eyes coming to his
. "Eridanus? Please...you're the only thing I have left."

The words, the simple words, swept away his resolve and all the noble intentions
. Some day, some time...but not now, not one more betrayal. He would keep his peace until he could not. In the meantime, knowing the truth and bearing the weight of false pretenses would have to be punishment enough.

He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight
. "I'm not going anywhere."

Adiarwen straightened, eyes flaring in fury
. "Nothing holds us here," she said, celestial fire building in her voice. "We leave now. We'll take him home to be sent to the winds as his people would want. Most importantly, Eridanus...we ride." She was free, and even in the grip of shock and loss, she glowed. For an instant, Eridanus let himself forget the price that had been paid.

Then it swallowed him, and she was the only, untouchable light in the darkness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LINDSEY DUNCAN is a life-long writer and professional Celtic harp performer, with short fiction and poetry in numerous speculative fiction publications.
  Her contemporary fantasy novel, Flow, is available from Double Dragon Publishing.  She feels that music and language are inextricably linked.  She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is currently attending culinary school.  She can be found on the web at
http://www.LindseyDuncan.com

Take Two Sips of Witch’s Brew

By John H. Dromey

It's hard to get good help these days, especially if you live in a cave. Actually, Agatha doesn't really reside in a hole in the ground; she only works there. Most of her leisure time is passed, pleasantly enough, in an enchanted cottage equipped with all the modern conveniences. That's a far cry from how it was for her in the beginning, though.

As a child, Agatha was a good little girl, but that was just a phase she was going through. Although in her outward appearance she was the spitting image of her mother, she was rebellious enough not to emulate her mom in chewing tobacco, even after it became abundantly clear just how handy that habit might be for someone of her heritage. When an angry mob tried to immolate the materfamilias, that resourceful matron spat on the ringleader's burning matches, one after another, thereby delaying the ceremony long enough to untie herself from the stake and escape. Consequently, before hanging up her lightly-singed black dress and taking early retirement, she was able to teach Agatha nearly everything—strictly old school, of course—that she knew about the family enterprise.

In Agatha's profession, image was everything. That's why she stayed away from the general public, whenever possible, and avoided traditional doctors like the plague. She had good reason to be standoffish. Ordinary people were turned off by her trademark wart, and physicians with itchy scalpel fingers had trouble keeping their hands off of her crooked nose and pointy chin.

Even though from her early teens on she had ostensibly belonged to an elite sisterhood, Agatha was mostly on her own. A loner. She followed her mother's independent ways and paid little heed to either tradition or precedence. As a grownup, she wouldn't have known which way to point her broomstick to find the nearest coven.

While still a relatively young woman, Agatha became the sole proprietor of an apothecary shop which specialized in hard-to-find botanicals, various and sundry animal parts—from eye of newt to powdered unicorn horn—along with rare minerals and alchemical concoctions of all kinds. Right from the start, her shop attracted an unusual clientele, including some customers with exceedingly odd sleep patterns, so that keeping regular nine-to-five business hours was totally out of the question. Her clients ran the gamut from people with a morbid fear of darkness, at one end of the spectrum, to creatures of the night at the other. Some days Agatha ran herself ragged while trying to run down their special requests. She needed help in the worst possible way and that's what she got. Her familiar was a cat. Nine lives, but not a good shopper in any one of them. What she really needed was a reliable human assistant. Sorcerers have apprentices, so why shouldn't she? Agatha put on a hat with a veil and went to a temp agency.

The first young woman Agatha interviewed literally laughed in her face. Needless to say, she didn't get the position.

The second jobseeker was much more subtle and likewise more pernicious. She waited until she'd actually arrived at Agatha's place of business before showing her true colors. From the newly-hired shop girl's perspective, Agatha could do nothing right. Heating a cauldron with a wood-burning fire was both old-fashioned and inefficient; the noxious fumes given off by the contents of the kettle added to air pollution; dumping the dregs behind the shop was bad for the environment; and so on. Her harping was relentless.

Agatha finally had enough. She confronted her querulous employee. "You'd like for me to go green, is that right?" she asked.

"Yes."

"You first," Agatha said, and with a wave of her hand turned the temp into a garter snake.

"The freshness date on this spell will expire in about six months," Agatha explained to her squirmy protégée. "Maybe by crawling around on your belly eating bugs for that length of time you can develop a true closeness with Mother Earth."

A wary Agatha returned to the temp agency and tried again. She asked pointed questions and was pleased when her latest applicant gave sharp answers.

"I can offer you room and board and decent wages. The job's yours if you want it," Agatha said, after the interview.

"I do, but I should warn you, I come with a lot of baggage."

"That shouldn't be a problem. I have a big storage room."

"That's not what I meant. I have a stalker."

"Oh? Well, don't worry, I'll make short work of your stalker if he ever dares to show his face anywhere near my shop."

Those words would soon come back to haunt her.

In the meantime, her new assistant, Marigold, was worth her weight in moon dust. She turned a blind eye to Agatha's appearance and a deaf ear to all of her spells and incantations. Without that latter virtue, Mari would have shape-shifted more often than the pantyhose of a yo-yo dieter who also suffered from gas.

Although otherwise highly compatible in the workplace, the two women were quite different in one regard. While Mari was computer literate and technologically savvy, Agatha was not. Using her laptop computer, Mari surfed the internet to find suppliers of arcane amulets and artifacts with which to restock the shelves in the curio section of the store. In addition, she routinely logged onto social networks in search of potential customers. After a series of not-so-subtle hints about a pressing need for efficiency and the value of at least every now and then getting a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, she even persuaded her boss to take a reluctant baby step into the information age: with Mari's expert coaching, Agatha managed to record a message on the shop's answering machine. It stated: "For non-emergency situations, take two sips of witch's brew and call me in the morning."

Mari was good with people face-to-face, too. Despite a significant amount of foot traffic through the shop, she instinctively distinguished between casual tourists and those visitors who were the real McCoy in need of special attention. Soon Agatha's business was booming.

The first indication of trouble came one afternoon when Mari returned from a routine trip to the grocery store. "I think I was followed," she said.

"By your stalker?" Agatha asked.

"No, by somebody I've never seen before."

"Could it be your stalker in disguise?"

"I'm sure it isn't," Mari said emphatically. "Maybe I should have tried to lead him away from here, but I didn't know where else to go. I think he may still be hanging around outside."

"If he is, I'll deal with him," Agatha said. She took a pinch of powder out of an unlabeled canister.

Once she herself was outside, Agatha had no difficulty whatsoever in spotting a man who was trying just a little too hard to be inconspicuous. She walked right up to him and blew some finely-ground powder into his face. The man gave a little shake of his head, and then stood quite still.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" Agatha demanded to know.

"I'm Sam Parker, a private investigator. I was hired to locate Marigold Jones."

"And do what to her?"

"Nothing much. I'm to follow her everywhere she goes and report in by cell phone any time she stops someplace."

"Who do you report to?"

"A cash customer. I don't know who he is. I only met him once."

"What does he look like?"

"He was dressed entirely in black. Other than that, he reminded me a lot of my uncle Ambrose," the private eye said. "Especially his smile."

Agatha would have compelled the investigator to call in a false report to say that he was mistaken about the identity of the woman he'd followed, except the man would be unable to tell a lie until the effects of the powder wore off. She let him go.

After a couple of quiet days, Agatha assumed the matter had been put to rest.

She was sorely mistaken.

Early one morning, her assistant looked perturbed as she came haltingly down the stairway into the shop.

"Did you sleep well, Mari? I thought I heard you thrashing around in your bed last night."

"That's possible. I was having a really bad dream when your cat woke me up. By the way, you haven't told me your feline companion's name."

"I don't know what it is," Agatha responded. "She won't tell me. I just call her Cat. You were saying?"

"When I awoke, there was an afterimage of a man hovering over me."

"Naked?"

"No, fully clothed."

"Not an incubus then. What did you do?"

"What could I do? I kneed him in the groin. Then when I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, I realized it was all in my imagination—there was nothing there."

"Have you been favoring your right leg this morning?" Agatha asked.

"A little bit perhaps." Mari pulled up her dress. There was a dark bruise on her right knee. "I don't remember getting that. I must have bumped into the furniture yesterday and then forgot all about it."

Agatha shook her head. "I don't think so. What did the apparition look like?"

"Except for the red eyes it looked an awful lot like my stalker," Mari said.

"Curses! An astral projection! Does your stalker dabble in the occult?"

"Not that I know of, but then he told me very little about himself."

"How did you two meet?"

"I was set up by a married friend of mine who said the guy had a beautiful smile."

"Did he?" Agatha asked.

"Not in my opinion."

"Why didn't you continue to see him?"

"I didn't like his rude and arrogant behavior. He snipped off some hair without asking me first. Then he put it in a gold locket and told me he'd keep it next to his heart so we'd always be linked."

"Well, at least we're not dealing with a warlock. If one of them had a sample of your hair, he wouldn't have needed a private eye to find you."

"It wasn't my hair. I was wearing an extension."

"A thousand curses!"

"What's wrong now?" Mari asked.

Agatha hesitated. "Maybe nothing."

"What are you thinking?"

"Your stalker's powers are uncommon. It's likely he's made a diabolical pact that calls for a human sacrifice, and you're it."

"Why me?"

"Because you're special in some way. It's odd, though. Now that he knows where you are, I'm surprised he doesn't meet you face-to-face in the temporal plane."

"He already did," Mari said. "He came by here to invite me to dinner at his place, but I turned him down."

"Was he anywhere close to the counter where we keep the cashbox?"

Mari nodded her head. "For as long as it took me to persuade him to leave. About five minutes maybe."

"Come with me," Agatha said. "Maybe I can put a face to the evil that pursues you. Let's go look in the mirror." 

"You mean that really big one with the twenty-two-karat gilt frame? Does it have a security camera built in?"

"Something like that. How do you know the purity of the gold?" Agatha wondered.

"I tested it, right after I finished polishing the mirror."

"Did you get a shock?"

"That may be too strong a word. I did wonder, though, how you felt secure enough to leave such a valuable object unattended in a shop that's never locked."

"I meant an electrical shock that's powerful enough to knock you off your feet," Agatha explained. "I guess you really are immune to my magic."

"You're a magician? I thought you were an herbalist, a homeopathic practitioner, or—dare I say it—a witch?"

"I'm all of those things. They're not mutually exclusive, you know."

As soon as they were positioned in front of the mirror, Agatha waved her hand. An image appeared of a dark-clad figure with a scowling face.

"See what I mean about his smile," Mari said.

"Yes, it's more like a rictus, or a risus sardonicus. That expression would feel right at home on a death mask. He looks like evil incarnate."

"Why don't other people see him that way?"

"Apparently, he alters their perception somehow."

"Can you do anything about him?"

"Possibly. Did your stalker give you anything personal?" Agatha crossed her fingers. "A lock of his hair, perhaps?"

"No, nothing like that."

Agatha sighed. "We'll have to do it the hard way then. I know a surefire method for breaking through his defenses, but first I need to go to the desert for a special ingredient that's far too dangerous to keep in stock. While I'm gone, I want you to stay wide awake and not let Cat out of your sight."

"That's easier said than done. Cat likes some private time with her litter box."

"I don't care if you do it the other way around. You stay where Cat can see you at all times."

"I'd like some private time, too," Mari said.

"All right, already. Leave the door open and make sure Cat is within shouting distance."

"How am I supposed to manage that?"

"I'll explain it to her. She'll listen to me without asking a lot of fool questions. For your part, Mari, under no circumstances are you to leave the shop before I return. If all goes well, I'll be back long before sundown."