Trio of Sorcery (10 page)

Now, a Jewish exorcist would confine the spirit, interrogate the dybbuk, then persuade it to leave by sheer force of argument.

She wouldn't. Which was just as well, she wasn't going to have three or four days to talk the thing out.

She'd have to fight it. And probably its friends.

Zaak turned back to her with his hands full of the stuff she'd asked for. She said, “Find the Ten Commandments and make up a
cherem
, I want this thing to know we are
not
going to play nice! When I say, read the Commandments and tell the thing we are not going to accept it and help it find a home.” Then she grabbed the shofar, took the sulfur and dumped it on the little circle of instant-start charcoal in the brazier, and picked the brazier up by its wooden handle. She wished she had her own
atheme
with her, but there was a sword on the wall that would do. She pulled it down, put the brazier right by the door so the sulfur smoke would billow out into the main room, and grabbed the chalk off his dresser. Then as Zaak shrieked,
“What are you
doing?”
she yanked open the door and jumped out into the living room.

As she had hoped, although the dybbuk was strong, Emory and Marshal together had Em pinned to the floor and had gotten the knife away from her. Just as she managed to fling them both off, Di shouldered them aside and blew the shofar, the sulfur smoke blowing out into the living room behind her. Damn good thing that she had a great embrasure; there were a lot of ceremonies that involved blowing hornlike objects. Doing this cold, what she produced was kind of a
blat
rather than a trumpet sound, but it was no worse than trying to blow a Hawaiian conch shell or a Celtic
lur.

The dybbuk froze for a moment, giving her enough time to enclose it in a chalk circle. “Light two candles and start reading!” she shouted at Zaak, and jumped over the chalk line to face it with the sword.

She couldn't understand a word, of course. She didn't know Hebrew. But the dybbuk did, and Em's face contorted in a hideous snarl, going so flushed and inflamed she looked like a demon.

“I know you can understand me,” Di said sternly, holding the sword up in the proper guard position for a broadsword. “Out! Because I can, and I will, force you out.”

“You are no rabbi,”
the spirit growled.

“I don't have to be.” They stared at each other across the blade of the sword, and Di hoped, hoped, hoped that
one of the three would realize that she knew exactly what she was doing, and ask…

And bless him, it was Zaak who stopped reading for a moment and sobbed, “This is all my fault! Di, you gotta help her!”

Ah, bingo.

There it was, the magic words, or an acceptable variation on them.
“Please help me.”
She felt the hidden door inside her fly wide open and Guardian power flood into her. That was how she got the mojo when she wasn't actually Called. When someone had gotten in over his head and begged for help.

Immediately she felt warmer, as if she was encased in a second protective skin of invisible armor. Which, in fact, she was.

“Zaak! Start invoking holy names!” Didn't matter that she wasn't Jewish. Zaak was, and so was the dybbuk. She was just the Champion, and that was all she needed to be. He supplied the religious fuel, she supplied the muscle.

Zaak started gabbling out more Hebrew, and when he got to “Michaeel” the sword went up in a blaze of fire.

Nice.

“Out!” she repeated.

“You will not use that blade on your friend.”
It laughed at her.

“I don't have to. Oh ye who are condemned to wander, because of countless sins against your fellow man, oh
unclean spirit, oh evil one, behold! Ye may not withstand the sound of the horn!”

Again, she blew the shofar, and this time the creature paled and shrank back, because it wasn't just the feeble
blat
of an amateur, this was the clarion call to arms that had taken down the walls of Jericho.

She took the horn from her lips and faced the creature again. “Zaak, more reading.
El Melekh
and
va-ya'avor
.” She had no idea what she had just asked for, but there were things moving through her now that knew a lot more than she did, and the words popped into her head. Zaak began to read in a steadier voice. The thing straightened.

“I will not be cast out!”
it snarled.
“Behold, my name is Legion!”

With that, it opened Em's mouth, and a torrent of malevolent
things
—shapes of black smoke—poured out of her. Em dropped to the floor, out cold, leaving Di trapped in the circle with not only the dybbuk, but as she had suspected, all his friends.

But the dybbuks, even if they had encountered exorcists before, had never met up with a Guardian. And they had only dealt with old scholars who seldom saw anything more lethal than a carving knife wielded against a chicken.

She actually knew how to use the sword she held.

She danced with it, in a pattern that owed as much to kata practice as to classical Western swordplay. The horde
of black shapes, confined by the circle, whirled around her, trying to reach through her armor and past the lethal edge of the blade. But every time one tried, she sliced—and there was a sizzle and a line of fire, and the shape was gone. She wasn't quite sure how many there had been in the first place, but soon enough there were only a dozen.

Then six.

Then three.

And at last, only one, which hung in the air, as if stunned.

Now if this had been a movie, Di would have paused and said something significant, and the thing would have pulled some unexpected ability out of its ectoplasmic ass.

But it wasn't a movie and she didn't give it a micro-second to recover.

The sword flashed across the intervening space and cut the last of the dybbuks in two. It vanished with a shriek that practically deafened her, and a stink worse than the sulfur that was still fuming.

All the power drained out of her at once, as the “door” slammed shut once again.

She dropped to one knee, exhausted, and Emory ran to Em, who was starting to sit up.

“Somebody open a window,” Di said, panting. “And put out that damn fire before we all choke.”

Nobody said a word for a good long time, while the sulfur fumes cleared out and Di stumbled to a chair, laying the sword down next to it as she slumped into it. Emory helped Em to the bathroom, and a moment later, Di heard the shower running. Yeah, after that, the poor girl probably needed a shower. And then a second one to get the sulfur stink out of her hair.

Marshal, his eyes as big as dinner plates, brought Di a beer, then sat down as far from her as he could get, staring at her. Zaak, on the other hand, sat down as close to her as he could get, though he looked at his hands, not her.

Emory, who had left Em on her own in the bathroom, brought more beers, set them down, and sat down himself. He was the one that finally broke the silence.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked quietly.

Di slumped a little further into the chair and gave Zaak the evil glare. “Gandalf there decided that normal detective work wasn't getting anywhere. Didn't you, Zaak? What did you try to call? Specifically?”

“I thought”—Zaak gulped—“I thought I'd get a wandering spirit. 'Cause, y'know, something like that could go hunting for Melanie….”

“Give me strength,” she groaned. “Haven't you paid any attention to your own peoples' folklore?”

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Uh, no?” he said weakly.

She sat up and pointed at him. “When you do an unspecified summoning, you moron, you get what your
heritage
calls. And in your case, the only ‘wandering spirits' that the Jews have, specifically the European Jews, are the dybbuks. Dybbuks are not particularly cooperative. What did I
tell
you about thinking things through?”

“I'm sorry,” he said in a small voice.

“Well, you had better be sorry. Because the unrestful, unconsecrated spirit of one of your people found himself in the body of a
tryf
-eating
goyim
, and he was not even remotely happy about that. Which is, I expect, why he attempted to cleave a pound out of your butt with that knife.” She slumped down again. “Add to that fact that he and his friends are out and about for a reason—said reason being that they were such pieces of crap on earth that they can't rest—and I trust you get the picture. I'd smack you like your old granny, but I'm too tired.”

“Wait—” said Emory. “Spirit? Dybbuk? I'm lost.”

It was going to be a long night.

Thank gods it's Friday.

Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
Di had wanted a little help, now she had more than she had bargained for. Or she would, when the quartet got over being rattled and started to realize that they had just witnessed some
real
magic, that there was such a thing, and that—because face it, they were all under twenty-five and three of them were
laboring under a burden of testosterone—it had been pretty damn exciting.

Which meant that she wasn't going to be able to pry them off of her now. Zaak was already a Believer, and the only thing more fanatic than a Believer who gets evidence that he's right, is a Skeptic who gets evidence that the Believers are right. Ah, the zeal of the newly converted.

Which of course was what Emory and Marshal were. Maybe Em too; for the moment she was being really quiet, and seeing as she was the one whose skin the dybbuk had tried to take over, Di didn't blame her.

When Di had finally made all the explanations she cared to, she stumbled down to her own apartment, intending to sleep like a stone. She left them to clean up the mess. Fortunately there wasn't much of it.

She hoped Zaak had to clean up the lion's share.

She really, really wanted to go straight to bed, but she knew that if she did, she'd wake up with the whole apartment smelling like sulfur, and the curtains would stink for weeks. So she stood under the shower until she started to go all pruney, and then fell into bed with her hair still wrapped in a towel.

She must have been so tired she didn't even move all night, because she woke up in the same position she'd fallen asleep in.

Alrighty, then.
She lay there, just enjoying the fact that she didn't have to get up for class, and that although she
hurt, it was that good sort of after-workout hurt. She'd done a good job last night.

Trouble was, it hadn't been what she'd been Called to do.

And in the cold light of morning, she knew what she had to do. She had to stop dancing around the situation and stop trying to pretend that there wasn't some sort of magical connection here.

She had to visit Tamara.

With a groan that was strictly internal, Di pried herself out of bed and went hunting for some clothes. When you had hair as long as she did, it took some time to brush it out after you'd washed it, and that gave her time to think.

Occam's Razor.

What if the simplest solution was the one that Zaak kept insisting on? What if Tamara
was
tangled up in the kidnapping? Forget that it had been a male “cop” who took the kid, forget that it didn't
look
like there was any connection between Tamara and the Fitzhughs…forget about hunting for motives. Motives were what you figured out after you caught the bad guy. Concentrate on finding the kid and catching the bad guy.

Di put her hair up in a bun, grabbed a bagel and tomato for breakfast, and went shopping at the Star Mart. She was pretty sure that Tamara wasn't an early riser; most of her kind weren't.

Back home, she put almost everything away, then used
some of her purchases to do a little “special” preparation. A picnic shaker of salt got consecrated, and so did the water that went into a tiny spray bottle meant for perfume. Then she made a little corsage out of the oak, ash, and thorn leaves she'd picked up off the street on the way home and pinned it to the shoulder of her poncho. An iron horseshoe nail went into one pocket, and a silver crucifix into the other.