He shook his head.
“Thank you for inviting me,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
I pulled up before a small yellow house and turned off the engine. “This is it.”
The house sat in front of us, a typical one-story ranch-style home, its walls bright with cheerful chicken yellow paint. A neat front yard, recently mowed, stretched to the front door, shadowed by an old redbud tree. A dozen bird feeders and wind chimes, some plain, some with shiny colored-glass ornaments, hung from tree branches. It looked so neat and bright, just the way you would imagine a grandmother’s house should be.
I really hoped nothing bad had happened to Eyang Ida.
“Roll down your window,” I asked.
He did. The air drifted in, baked in the relentless heat of Atlanta’s summer. I closed my eyes and concentrated. In my mind, the cheery front wall of the house fell forward. Inside foul magic waited, rotten and terrible. It dripped from the furniture, slid down the walls in thick, dark drops, and coated floorboards with its slime. Every house has a heart, the echoes of its owner’s presence, and simple magic that turns a building into a home. The heart of this house was rotten to the core. Something had fed upon it and now it was dying.
Fear raised the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. This was bad. This was so bad.
The ugly magic noticed me. Hundreds of mouths appeared all over the slime, dark slits armed with sharp, black teeth. The slime stretched toward me, trying to take a bite. It felt familiar. This was Indonesian black magic. Things were out of balance here, way out of balance.
I opened my eyes. The house appeared so welcoming from the outside. Just you wait, you nasty thing. You have no idea who you’re trying to eat. I don’t know what you’re doing in this house, but I will purge you out. You don’t get to defile the home of someone I know.
“What is it?” Jim asked.
“Eyang Ida is a nice lady,” I told him, my voice tight with anger. “Something evil is squatting in her house and feeding on it. I’m going to get it out. This is going to get creepy fast. Do you want to stay in the car?”
Jim looked at me, his face completely flat.
“Jim?”
He leaned toward me and said in a quiet, scary voice, “I don’t stay in a car.”
Well of course. That would be ridiculous. Big Alpha Man does not stay in car. Big Alpha Man roar and beat manly chest. He’d locked his teeth. Jim was an incredibly smart man. That’s why I fell for him so hard. He was also incredibly stubborn.
I sighed. “Look, this is something I do. If you come with me, you have to do it on my terms. I’m going to do some magic and you will have to go along with it and not act like it’s stupid.”
“It’s your show.”
Say what you want about Jim, he always treated my magic with a healthy dose of respect. My calligraphy didn’t always work, but my Balinese magic was a different story. He had never seen that side of me before.
I popped the trunk open and got out of the car. Two chests sat in the trunk, the small one with my calligraphy supplies and the large one with all of my Balinese items. A box of donuts sat on top of the bigger chest. Jim’s eyes lit up. He reached for the box and I slapped his hand lightly. “No. Offering.”
I opened the large chest, pulled out a necklace of iron wood beads with a large black amulet hanging from it. A stylized lion, bright red with details painted in gold gleamed on the amulet. The lion had large round black eyes half covered by bright red lids, a wide nose with two round nostrils, two wide ears, and a huge open mouth filled with bright white teeth.
“Barong Bali,” I told Jim, as I put the necklace over his neck. “King of spirits and sworn enemy of Rangda, the Demon Queen.”
Jim studied the amulet. “So how often do you do things like this?”
“About once every couple of weeks,” I said. “There is usually something untoward going on.”
“And it’s an insult to offer you money for it?”
“The legend says that a long, long time ago on the island of Bali, there lived an evil sorcerer. He was a terrible man who summoned demons, cast curses, and stole children and young pretty men and women to drain them of their blood so he could use it in his dark rituals. A man called Ketut had had enough and he asked Barong Bali for the strength to destroy the sorcerer. Barong Bali spoke to Ketut and told him that he would grant him powers to banish evil, but in return if any villagers came to Ketut for help against the dark magic, neither he nor his family could turn them away. Ketut agreed and Barong Bali made him into Barong Macan, the Tiger Barong. Ketut defeated the sorcerer and his descendants have guarded the balance between evil and good ever since.”
“Do you think it’s true?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m a tiger, I have the power to banish bad magic, and people come to me for help.”
“Are you afraid that if you started charging for the services, you would be tempted to prioritize?”
I glanced at him in surprise. Wow. Nailed it. “Yes. Right now rich and poor are equal to me. I get no compensation either way, except for the satisfaction of restoring the balance and doing my job well. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“There should be some reward for this,” he said.
“People leave gifts,” I told him. “Sometimes money, sometimes food. Mostly on my doorstep or with my mother. I never know who they are from but I appreciate it always.”
I opened the large chest and took out the statue of Barong Bali. It was about a foot tall, but size didn’t matter. “Please put him under the tree.”
Eyang Ida had loved the tree. It grew with her as she aged, and I could feel traces of her in the tree’s branches. The tree’s spirit loved her. It would help us.
Jim set the statue by the tree roots. I slipped my shoes and socks off and took my offering out of the chest. I had made it in the house before I left. Jim regarded the banana leaf twisted into a small basket, the elaborate palm leaf tray, and the arrangement of flowers and fruit, and raised his eyebrows. I added a donut to it, took it to the statue, knelt, and placed it at Barong Bali’s feet. Jim knelt next to me.
I sat still, sinking into meditation, and let my magic permeate the lawn. It flowed through the soil, touched the tree roots, and spiraled up the trunk into its leaves. A subtle change came over the magic emanating from the tree. The spirits noticed Jim and pondered his connection to me. If there was enough of a bond, they would recognize it. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure if there was enough of a bond.
“So is the sugar-glazed donut a traditional Indonesian offering?” he asked.
Smart-ass. “No, the traditional offering calls for cakes. In this case I’m offering something that I like very much. The effort in making canang, the offering, is what counts.”
“Why don’t you just do your sticky-note thing?”
The last time we went into a house corrupted by magic, I had written protection kanji on a sticky note and stuck it to his chest.
“Because this dark magic is of Indonesian origin. I’m much stronger at my native magic than I am at writing curses on pieces of paper.”
The spirits still weren’t sure. I couldn’t just leave him on the lawn here. He would beat his chest and follow me into the house. I had to show them why he was important.
“Jim?”
“Yes?” he said.
“I need help.”
“I’m here,” he said.
“I need you to think about why you first asked me out. Like really think about it.”
“I asked you out because—”
I raised my hand. “No, please don’t tell me.” I was too scared to find out. “Just think about it.”
“Okay.”
I knew exactly why I had a crush on Jim. It wasn’t just one thing, it was the whole thing. He was one of the smartest men I’ve ever met.
When Curran painted himself into a corner, he went to Jim and trusted him to think of a way out of it. He looked . . . Well, he was hot. Unbearably hot, like the kind of man you might see in a magazine or on TV. There was this raw masculinity about him, a kind of mix of male confidence and power. He was so unlike me. I was small and slight, and he was large and corded with muscle. I liked that duality, the contrast between me and him. It turned me on and I watched him when he wasn’t looking. I knew the way he held his head, the angle of his shoulders, the way he walked, unhurried and sure. In a crowd of identically dressed men, I would instantly know my Jim.
But what made me fall in love with him wasn’t his smarts, his looks, or even the fact that he was lethal. All that was great, but that alone wasn’t enough. So I opened my heart and let the spirits look within. My life was often chaotic. I got scared. I lost my temper. I freaked out. I was never sure if my curse magic would work or not. I was helpless without my glasses and that scared me, too. But Jim . . . Jim could take a single step into my chaos and suddenly my problems sorted themselves out. He tackled them one by one with his calm logic and then he would turn to me and say, “You can do this.” And I realized that he was right and I could. He believed in me.
A warm feeling spread through my bare feet and streamed through me, all the way into my fingertips until they were tingling.
“Something’s happening,” Jim said, his voice calm.
“Let it happen.”
Jim sat very still. Muscles tensed and gathered on his frame, as if he were about to pounce. The spirits were touching him and he clearly didn’t like it. Apparently “let it happen” meant “get ready to kill.”
The amulet on his chest shuddered. The Barong Bali’s eyes snapped open with a metallic click. The spirits recognized our bond and granted their protection to him. Of course it also meant that Jim would see things through my eyes now. It would be a bit of a shock.
“The spirits granted you the gift of sight,” I said. “Now you can see the world as I see it. It’s only temporary. If you take off the amulet, you will become magic blind again. Also it will likely stop as soon as this magic wave is over.” I rose to my feet. “We’re going to enter the house now. You might see some really weird stuff. Don’t freak out.”
He gave me another flat Jim look.
We walked to the door. I put the key in, turned it, and swung the door open. The house lay before us, dark and cold. A faint stench of carrion drifted through the air. Jim shifted his stance, falling into that loose, ready pose that meant he was ready for something to leap on him and try to rip his neck open. I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and let my power roll in a wave from me.
Jim snarled.
I opened my eyes. Viscous, fetid magic dripped from the walls all around us, sliding along the panels, translucent and dappled with blotches of darkness.
“What the hell is this?” he growled.
“This is you dipping a toe into my world. Stay close, Jim.”
The walls near the door were lighter, the foul magic patina thinner, but at the end of the hallway, the magic grew thick. I could see the open kitchen window from where I stood, and the dark slime pouring through the frame into the house. Whatever it was came from the backyard.
Small fang-studded mouths formed in the slimy magic, stretching toward me. Jim jerked his knife out. It was huge, dark grey, with a curved tip and serrated metal teeth near the handle.
I took a deep breath and raised my hands, my movements slow and graceful, hands bent back, fingers wide apart, trembling.
The evil magic paused, unsure.
In my head the bamboo flutes sang, with the metallic sounds of the xylophone setting the beat. I opened my eyes wide, bent my knees, my toes up off the floor, and turned. Magic pulsed from my body. The slime around us evaporated, as if burned off by an invisible fire. Bright sunlight spread in a wave, rolling over the walls, floor, and ceiling purging the rot. It cleared the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and slid over the window frame. The dark slime dropped out of sight.
Weird.
“Holy shit,” Jim said.
I frowned. “This is wrong.”
“What do you mean wrong? That was fucking unbelievable.”
“Usually when a house is this corrupted, the magic is deeply rooted. It should’ve taken more than two dance steps to clear it. I don’t understand this. There is so much corruption, but it’s all really shallow.”
I marched to the kitchen and opened the door to the back porch. The backyard opened onto a stretch of woods. A wrought iron fence separated the grass from the trees, a narrow gate ajar. The foul magic hovered between the trees, coating the bark, dripping, and waiting. It felt me and slithered deeper into the woods.
Where are you going? Don’t run. We’re just starting.
I crossed the grass, walked through the open gate, and kept going into the forest, Jim right behind me. The magic streamed away from me. I chased it down a path between the massive oaks. The same scent I had smelled on the coarse hair in my kitchen filled my nostrils: dry, acrid, bitter scent. Almost there.
The path ducked under the canopy of braided tree limbs bound together by kudzu. I followed it, moving fast through the natural tunnel of leaves and branches. The green tunnel opened into a clearing. A massive tree must’ve fallen here and taken a neighbor or two with it. Three giant trunks lay on the grass. The surrounding trees and kudzu laid claim to the light, greedy for every stray photon, and the leaves filled the space high above us, turning the sunlight watery and green. The air smelled wrong, tainted with decay. It was like being in the bottom of a really deep, scum-infested well.
Eyang Ida sat on the trunk. Her skin had a sickly grey tint, her eyes glassy and opened wide. She stared right at me, but I didn’t think she could see me. The magic swirled around her, so thick, it was almost opaque black.
I stopped. Jim paused behind me.
“Is that her?”
“It’s her.” I raised my hand to stop him if he tried to go to her, but he didn’t move. He really did trust me. I had asked him to stay close and he followed my lead.
Ferns rustled to the left of me and a creature stepped into my view. About ten inches tall, it looked like a tiny human, with dark brown skin, two legs and two arms. Long, coarse hair fell from its head all the way past its toes, dragging a couple of inches on the ground like a dark mantle. It stared at me with two amber eyes, each with a slit, dark pupil like the eyes of a blue temple viper, then it opened the wide slit of its mouth, showing two white fangs, and hissed.
“What is that?” Jim asked.
“A jenglot,” I said. Just like I thought. This was one of the traditional Indonesian horrors. Except that judging by the amount of magic in that house, there had to be more of them. A lot more. “It’s vampiric.”
Another jenglot crawled out onto the trunk. A third pair of eyes ignited in the hollow of a tree.
“It and its family stole Eyang Ida out of her house,” I said. “They will feed on her blood’s essence and when there is no more essence left, she’ll become one of them.”
The woods came alive with dozens of eyes. Big tribe, at least fifty creatures. I had expected fifteen, maybe twenty. But fifty? Fifty was bad.
“Are they hard to kill?”
“Yes. They are hardy. Setting them on fire helps.”
“There are a lot of them,” Jim said.
“Yes.”
“You might need some help . . .” Jim’s voice was very calm. He weighed our odds. The numbers weren’t in our favor.
With a soft whisper, a creature slithered onto Eyang Ida’s lap. If it had legs, this jenglot would stand at least a foot tall, with hair twice as long, but it had no legs. Instead it had a snake’s tail, long and brown, like the body of a spitting cobra. The royal jenglot.
The jenglots rustled through the greenery, circling us. They
would swarm us in a moment.
Normally when I changed shape, for a minute or two, I had no idea where I was or why I was there, but in this case, with Jim next to me, I had to take a chance.
I took off my glasses and handed them to Jim. “Here, hold this for a second.”
He raised his eyebrows and took my glasses.
I let go. The world swirled into a thousand blurry lights in every color of the rainbow. Ooh, so pretty. Pretty little color bubbles.
A familiar scent swirled around me, captivating. Ooh, Jim. Jim. He was here, with me! Jim . . .
What is that smell?
Ugh. Nasty, disgusting scent. Unclean. Ew.
A jenglot! There was a jenglot coiling on Eyang Ida’s lap. Gross. Wait, what was Eyang Ida doing here? Where was I?
The Queen Jenglot raised her head, opened her mouth, and hissed at me, the black magic behind her flaring like demonic wings.
What? Outrageous. The nerve. Who did she think I was?
I stomped my huge white paw onto the ground and roared. The sound of my voice rolled like the toll of a giant’s gong, deafening, and my magic followed it like a blast wave. It touched the closest jenglot. The ugly creature hissed in panic, broke into pieces, as if instantly turned to ash, and disintegrated. All around me, jenglots vanished, breaking into ash and melting into thin air. The Queen Jenglot hissed, flailing. Its magic tried to fight me, but my roar swallowed it like a raging forest fire swallowed a puddle. The Queen vanished.
The disturbing stench disappeared. The woods exhaled, liberated of the evil taint, but Eyang Ida didn’t move. She was still bound. Not for long.
I padded to Eyang Ida on my big soft paws and curled by her feet, my left front paw on my right. Hold on. I will free you, too.
I faced Jim and let my magic spread from me. Flowers pushed through the moss at my feet, blooming into tiny yellow and white blossoms. A blue butterfly floated next to me, bouncing on soft wings. A white one joined it, then another and another . . .
Jim stared at me, his jaw hanging open.
My magic slid up the tree trunks. The oaks above us groaned, their branches moved, compelled by my power, and a ray of sunlight, pure and warm, fell on the old woman’s face. Eyang Ida took a deep breath and blinked.