SonofaWitch! Read online

  Zax propped himself on the edge of the desk and shook his head. “No. That is, yes, I did hire her, but I didn’t think it was really you. I thought it was someone pretending to be my brother to get close to me. As you can see, my line of work requires certain security precautions.” He gestured to the wide building and the wizards.

  Abel took one of the chairs. “And you thought you needed protection from me?” He sounded hurt.

  Zax looked almost sorry. “I heard you were an agent,” he said, more quietly. “And I didn’t know if it was really you.”

  “You could have met me to find out.” Abel’s words came slowly, thickly. This was hard for him.

  “Even if it was really you, you’d still be an agent.”

  I didn’t want to drink anything—I wanted to keep all my brain cells at peak performance—but there was nowhere to set the drink down. I looked at the wizards and they looked back at me, all of us feeling a bit weird about the family drama we couldn’t walk away from.

  “I’m nun agent.”

  That didn’t sound right. I looked at Abel, sitting in his cheap chair.

  He shook his head. “Cope right.”

  “How’s that?” asked Zax.

  Abel bobbed his head slightly and stared straight ahead, slouching a bit in his chair. Zax extended an arm and snapped. Abel didn’t react.

  Zax sighed and sat back. “Poor Abel,” he said. “Never could leave something alone.” Then he looked at me.

  “What’d you do to him? What’s wrong?” I asked, mostly to buy some time. I knew exactly what was wrong.

  “Special K works pretty fast,” he answered. “Of course, that kind of dose can be bad for you, but I don’t think we’re going to worry about long-term effects.”

  I threw my untasted drink into the face of the wizard on my left and flung up a shield with my tattoo-powered right hand. That was just in time for the other wizard to slam a magical punch into me and knock me backward.

  The shield took the brunt of the impact and while I was thrown back, it didn’t really hurt. I tried to throw a spell back, but there were two of them, and—

  Okay, let me just be honest here, it’ll save time. I had a phenomenal amount of power in that tattoo, and that was good. But I also wasn’t practiced at this sort of thing. A huge bodybuilder is not necessarily going to be good in a street fight, because that’s a whole different skill set. It’s not all about power. And these two guys were professional magical street brawlers.

  And that’s why about thirty seconds later I was in a fetal position on the floor, a spherical shield around me because that’s the most efficient, burying my head in my arms and wishing desperately I was anywhere else.

  Zax had enough sense not to shoot at me, lest his bullet ricochet off the shield bubble and into something important like his wizard or his liquor cabinet. But the two wizards were laying magic on pretty fast and while my tattoo-powered shield was holding back most of the force of them, I wasn’t able to return fire. Eventually my shield battery would run dry, and I would be in big trouble.

  “Help,” I whispered into my arms. “Help. Big help. Summons. Need a summons.”

  I wasn’t thinking clearly, okay? Have you ever tried to think through a summons while two beefy guys take baseball bats to your piñata? Then don’t you judge me. I mostly just wailed inarticulately and let the star-circle do its thing.

  Why I thought of Tart when I needed help, I really can’t explain. Familiarity? Comfort? Doesn’t seem like she’d qualify. Seriously, I can’t say.

  But the fact that I was thinking help, big help is probably why she appeared at least a hundred times larger than normal.

  The magical attacks stopped at the same time that Zax and the wizards started swearing. I looked and they were backing across the room, staring above me. I looked up and oh hell no. Yeah, even looking up and seeing naked man front is not as bad as looking up and seeing a four-hundred-pound mutant kitten-roach.

  She made a weird mew-click sound and lifted an enormous grippy leg, and she batted my shield like a ball.

  The shield was a perfect sphere, extending through the floor, and while it could shift through non-living matter, non-living matter could not shift through it, so the force of Tart’s mutant-paw-whack tore free the section of floor inside the bubble as I went rolling crazily across the office floor. There was some shouting and some spell throwing, but I was distracted by the fact that I was rolling around like a marble. Tart followed me and pounced, sending me spinning again across the room.

  A couple of spells hit Tart, but she didn’t much care. I mean, really, ordinary cockroaches can withstand nuclear radiation. A street-level force punch isn’t going to faze a four-hundred-pound version.

  I went careening across the office and crashed into Zax behind the desk, crushing his knee and pinning him against the wall. “Sorry!” I said automatically before I remembered that he was trying to kill me and I wasn’t sorry at all.

  Tart followed me, preparing to whack my bubble again, and one of the wizards moved to protect his boss by delivering her a magical punch right in the face. Tart whirled on him and hissed with a sound like only a four-hundred-pound angry catroach can make.

  The wizard realized his mistake, but it was too late. Tart switched from playful kitten to angry cat with size and roach bonuses.

  The wizards had armored up when the brawl started, the whole-body shields that wrap like an extra layer of skin, a lot more energy-intensive than my spherical shield but much more conducive to movement and fighting. The armor kept the first from dying immediately when Tart darted forward and swiped an enormous sticky foot at him. He flew across the room and assaulted the concrete block wall.

  The second wizard saw that he couldn’t make the door, as Tart was between him and the exit. He looked at Zax, who would terminate his contract for running out but who was unlikely to be writing paychecks for long anyway if he stayed within reach of the catroach, and then made a break for the perfectly round hole in the floor my shield had ripped out. He dove into the exposed basement.

  He’d apparently forgotten that as Tart was part cockroach, a hole into a basement was as good as a highway to her. She followed him, squeezing through the hole with disturbing speed and disappearing along the underside of the floor. A moment later she returned, the mage caught firmly between her mandibles.

  There’s no real reason anyone should know this, but roaches can bite with fifty times the force of their body weight. And Tart’s body weight was pretty huge just then. Mr. Wizard was throwing all his energy into his shield and he was screaming as it flexed inward.

  The second wizard, pressed against the wall, threw a pretty hard concussion and the impact rocked Tart, tilting her to the side and then over onto her back. The wizard cheered himself as she kicked her pointed feet and lashed her furry tail.

  But her distress ended a second later, when she discovered she could grasp and kick her captive wizard like cats like to do, clawing the bowels from their opponent or just having fun with a toy. Tart kicked her toy gleefully, bouncing him toward the ceiling again and again.

  His shield held, taking the worst of the physical impact of her bites and kicks as he was flung up and around. I was impressed at how solid it was, keeping tooth and claw out and vomit in.

  Abel sat still in his chair, lazily following the action around him with a very faint, very dopey smile.

  Zax pushed my bubble away from him and limped away from the wall, heading for the door while Tart was distracted. His hobble caught her eye, though, and she twisted up exactly as a cockroach cannot but a cat can, springing for Zax. The remaining wizard—the one by the wall, I mean, because the one she dropped wasn’t going to do much of anything for a while—threw a magical bolt which shoved her off her aim just enough to miss Zax, showing a loyalty to his boss I wouldn’t have suspected.

  That meant Tart landed beside Zax, who recoiled before he realized that motion cost him his chance of escape. Tart put her fuzzy tail t
o the door and eyed her playthings.

  It was a very long few minutes after that.

  I rolled my bubble into a corner—no way was I dropping my shield, not for a second—and hoped the catroach wouldn’t notice me. Or Abel. But at least Abel was keeping a low profile, sitting still and silent, not attracting her attention by running around and screaming like Zax and the wizard.

  But after a few minutes, the screaming was penetrated by the sound of sirens, and not long after that a heavy duty shield fell over the office, noticeable even through my bubble. That was some big magic going on. I heard a rumble of angry sound from an overpowered PA speaker and sighed with relief. The police. Or FBI. Abel’s buddy must have come through, after all.

  The first of the MSWAT team came through the door, guns and magic ready, and then the battle-hardened men and women froze with a lot of radio-buzzed profanity and reports back to their MSWAT leaders. Tart paused, her mouth full of wizard whose shredded clothes showed ragged body armor underneath and one grippy-foot pinning Zax, screaming like a toddler watching Chucky against his mother’s recommendation.

  The MSWAT team barked some orders, fanned across the doorway and wall, and took aim at Tart. They didn’t fire or launch magic, not yet, lest they hit the humans or provoke her to kill them, but they were ready.

  “No!” I shouted within my bubble. “Don’t hurt her!” And only then did it occur to me that I was the one who had enlarged her in the first place.

  I concentrated for a moment and Tart began to shrink, releasing the wizard as he sagged away from her, fortunately not thinking to strike her as she was vulnerable. She scuttled off the prone Zax and disappeared into the hole made by my shield.

  “It’s shrunk!” reported a woman into her mic. “It’s in the floor. No, I don’t know what it is. Some sort of mutant thing.”

  “It’s a kitten-roach,” I said, straightening and standing as my bubble faded. “Thank you for coming. Please arrest those men. And my friend’s been drugged, so he needs medical help, too.”

  They arrested all of us, of course, at least until things got sorted out.

  It turns out it wasn’t Abel’s Bureau buddy at all. He ignored the messages just as we suspected. But when I summoned Tart, that triggered something on the police magical surveillance network, something about a physical size threshold. And no surveillance network is designed to filter out four-hundred-pound cockroaches as common white noise. “The bacteria load was so heavy, it registered as its own entity,” explained one of the geeks to me during my interview. “We thought there was a plague demon or something in the Square.”

  When we were brought out of the building, most of the neighborhood was gathered around and watching. Zax, the wizards, and Abel were promptly bundled into ambulances full of police. I alone was unharmed, which probably would have made me suspicious except that the MSWAT team had seen me huddled in a corner in a fetal position, and because we had magic-handling personnel on site instead of the vanilla-force officers, they knew enough that my story made sense. My report about a missing FBI agent checked out, and state level officers put together that Zax wasn’t one of the good guys. Abel and I were potentially up for some breaking and entering, some assault and battery, but Zax and his hired thugs were going down hard.

  Plus, they were high-end magic users. When I explained that we were conscripted by a supernatural entity whose name Zax had posted online, they slapped their foreheads, groaned, and laughed. He was going into the local stupid-criminal hall of fame.

  I was sitting on the back step of an MSWAT van when I saw normal-sized Tart peeking out from beneath a broken piece of concrete foundation. I kept quiet, but a moment later someone else spotted her. “Is that the thing?”

  “Mother Mary, it’s got cat ears.”

  “What did we tell you?!”

  “Don’t hurt her!” I called. “She’s not dangerous, not when she’s kitten-sized.”

  “Leave her alone! She’s mine!” called Donny, coming forward from the spectators. “She’s mine!”

  The officers all went for their guns again.

  “No, no!” I said quickly, rising from the van step. “Donny owns the kitten part of her. The cockroach part of her was a magical accident. Not his fault, not his doing. He just wants his kitten back.”

  The grim-faced woman who’d led the team frowned. “That’s not exactly a kitten.”

  I nodded. “He doesn’t even know what happened in there.”

  She frowned. “That animal—creature—thing is evidence.”

  Tart, with typical cat and cockroach disdain for attention, had disappeared again into the foundation. “You wanna reach in after it?” I asked.

  She frowned again. “We’ll put an alert out for it. The clean-up guys can look for it when they do a magical sweep of the site.”

  I nodded.

  But that night I returned with Donny and a can of tuna, and we called her out again. Assuming our benefactress honored her bargain, I had a day of power left to burn, and that should be enough to fuel a spell to take Tart apart into her composite parts again.

  I sketched a chalk circle on the sidewalk and gave Donny a killer warning glance, and he took a step backward. I placed the kitten-roach in the pattern and called upon the tattoo to power the spell.

  It worked, far better than I feared, and I wondered if I’d had some supernatural aid beyond the battery, maybe as a sort of gratuity for my service. I handed the calico kitten to Donny and told him to keep an eye on her until she realized she could no longer run along ceilings.

  Abel had gotten a big dose of ketamine, enough to potentially kill him. But some medically-induced purging and other prompt treatment saved him, and the next day I was able to visit him in the hospital. “How are you feeling? Better?”

  “It’s hard to say,” he answered. “I don’t remember enough to compare. How’s your tattoo?”

  “Starting to fade.” I showed him. “It was nice while it lasted.” I sat down beside his bed. “Getting your life back?”

  “I’ve had someone asking a lot of questions and fingerprinting me and talking to the Bureau. Looks like I’m positively identified. I expect there will be a lot of paperwork.”

  “Well, at least it’s the good kind of paperwork, right?” I passed him a small gift-wrapped box. “I got you a present.”

  “Aw, thanks.” He started to tear the paper. “This had better not be a gift certificate for a tattoo or something.”

  He removed the wrapping and revealed a packet of date rape drug detector strips.

  He stared at them a moment. “I’d like to tell you that you’re a jerk,” he said, “but I’m not sure that would be justified.”

  “An FBI guy should know better,” I said. “I’m just saving you from future embarrassment.”

  “Or,” he said, “when I get out of here and go out for my first drink, I could make sure an experienced magic user is with me, to handle anything.” He raised an eyebrow. “To talk about plans at the Bureau, or state law enforcement, or whatever.”

  I gave him a smile. “Or that.”

  Laura VanArendonk Baugh was born at a very early age and never looked back. She overcame childhood deficiencies of having been born without teeth or developed motor skills, and by the time she matured into a recognizable adult she had become a behavior analyst, an internationally-recognized and award-winning animal trainer, a popular costumer/cosplayer, a tabletop gamer, a chocolate addict, and of course a writer. Find her at www.LauraVanArendonkBaugh.com

  The Trouble With Love Spells

  Sara Dobie Bauer

  Violet tapped her nonexistent fingernails on the table beside her coffee mug and wallowed in unrequited attention. Coffee Boy did his usual thing at Brew Coffee Bar in downtown Charleston: he ignored her, despite the low-cut black shirt she wore and five-inch fuck-me heels. The only person better dressed than Violet at Brew was Coffee Boy, otherwise known as Maxwell James.

  She watched his tan, freckled forearms as he steamed
milk.

  “How can veins be sexy?” she muttered.

  Her best friend and fellow witch, Zoe, glanced up from her book about astral projection spells. “You’d think his boogers were sexy.”

  “I would not.”

  Zoe smirked.

  “He probably has really cute boogers.” Violet sighed. “He looks hot today.”

  The topic of Maxwell’s looks was enough to keep Zoe from her reading. “The man looks hot every day.”

  Violet huffed in agreement as she chewed her fingernails. A student at the Culinary Institute of Charleston, she didn’t have a lot of free time. She was almost finished with her program, which meant plenty of late hours spent slaving over a stove, gas grill, hibachi—whatever the school demanded. Yet, she made time every morning to meet Zoe for a coffee at Brew, with the added benefit of Maxwell James.

  A year earlier, she’d never expected to order a tall redeye and meet the man of her dreams, but one look into those big, gray eyes, and she was done for. Maxwell was hipster hot, and he walked like he knew it, in his tight trousers, vests, and multi-colored button-downs. He kept clean-shaven, without the traditional hipster stubble, but his hair was long on top, short on the sides, and it often flopped down over his eyes.

  “Have we decided if his hair is black or brown yet?”

  Zoe sipped her chai tea. “I vote brown. I saw him in the sun once, and it was reddish on the ends.”

  Violet gawked at her friend’s good fortune. “You saw him in the sun?”

  “Yeah, it’s official, he’s not a vampire. Have you tried this spell before?” She extended the book across the small wooden table.

  Violet skimmed the incantation, an easy one for dream manipulation. “Yeah.”

  “Successfully?”

  Violet nodded and chewed on the jagged edge of her thumbnail. “Are you having bad dreams?”

  “No, but I could go for some better ones.”