The air turned, twisted, and shaped itself into a car. What the hell? I’ve never heard of a magic car appearing out of thin air . . .
My brain blazed through the evidence, making a connection. My older brother died on his way from school, Amanda’s voice said in my head. He was run over . . . Oh my gods.
The car turned solid. Its engine revved. There was nobody behind the wheel.
“Jim!” I pointed at the boy. “Save him!”
He whipped around, saw the car, the boy, and leaped right through the window into the street, shards of glass flying everywhere.
A knobby elbow pushed its way out of the sack, followed by a bony hand, each finger armed with a two-inch, black talon. The hag was coming.
Jim dashed across the parking lot. The car, a huge ’69 Dodge Charger, snarled like a living thing, racing straight for the boy. Jim sprinted, so, so fast . . . Please make it, honey. Please!
The head of the hag emerged, one baleful pale eye then the other, a crooked long nose and wide slash of a mouth filled with shark teeth.
The muscle car was almost on the boy. Jim was ten feet away.
Please, please, please don’t get killed.
Jim swept the boy off his feet and the car rammed him and smashed into a pole.
It hit him. Oh gods, the Charger hit him. Something inside me broke. I froze in agonizing horror.
The hag crawled out of the magic and perched on Mr. Dobrev’s chest, clutching at him with her long, creepy toes. She was my size but emaciated, bony, her meager flesh stretched too tight over her frame, while her skin sagged in loose folds and wrinkles.
The car revved its engine. It was still there. It didn’t disappear and that meant its target was still alive.
Jim leaped over the Charger’s hood, the boy in his arms, landed, and sprinted to us.
The hag reached for Mr. Dobrev’s throat. I painted the last stroke on the curse and slapped it on her back. “Poisoned daggers!”
Three daggers pierced the hag, one after the other, sticking out of her back.
The Charger reversed and chased after Jim.
The hag screeched like a giant gull, spat at me, and kept going. It didn’t work.
I grabbed a new paper, wrote another curse, and threw it at her. The curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls had worked for me before. The hag clawed at the paper. It pulsed with green. Strips of paper shot out and fell harmlessly to the floor. They should’ve tied her in knots. Damn it!
The car was feet behind Jim. Please make it! Please!
The hag clawed at Mr. Dobrev’s neck.
I grabbed a pickle jar and hurled it at her head. It bounced off her skull with a meaty whack. She howled.
“Get off him!” I snarled.
Jim leaped through the broken window. The Charger rammed the opening, right behind him, and stopped, its engine roaring, wedged between the wall and the wooden frame. Stuck!
I grabbed another jar and jumped on the counter. The hag screeched in my face and I pounded her with the jar. “Get off him, you bitch!”
The Charger snarled. The metal of its doors bent under pressure. The car was forcing its way in.
The jar broke in my hand. The pickle juice washed over the hag. She clawed me, too fast to dodge. Her talons raked my arms, searing me like red-hot knives. I screamed. She let go and I saw the bones of my arms through the bloody gashes.
Jim released the boy. The child scrambled to the back of the store. Jim leaped to the Charger and hammered on the car’s hood, trying to knock the vehicle back. The Charger roared. Jim planted his feet, gripped the hood, and strained. The muscles on his arms bulged. I’d seen Jim lift a normal car before, but the Charger didn’t move.
I punched the hag in the head, putting all my shapeshifter strength into it. She wasn’t getting Mr. Dobrev as long as I breathed. The hag clawed at me again, screaming, slicing my shoulders, her hands like blades. I kept punching her, but it wasn’t doing me any good.
Jim’s feet slid back. A moment and the car would be through.
It was a car. I knew cars and Jim knew hand-to-hand combat. “Switch!” I screamed.
Jim glanced at me, let go of the car’s hood and leaped onto the counter. His knife flashed and the hag’s right hand fell off.
I dashed out of the store, jerked a mirror off Pooki’s driver side, and ran back in. The Charger was halfway in, its wheels spinning. I wrote the curse, slapped the paper onto the hood, and planted Pooki’s mirror on it.
Magic crackled like fireworks.
The car’s hood buckled, as if an invisible giant punched it with a fist. Its left front wheel fell off. Its hood bubbled up, as if another punch had landed. The windshield cracked. Something inside the car crunched with a sickening metallic snap. Water shot out through the hole in the hood. The roof of the car caved in. Both passenger and driver doors fell off. The headlights exploded. With another crunch, the entire vehicle shuddered and collapsed into a heap, looking like something with colossal teeth had chewed it for a while and spat it out.
Jim stopped next to me. He was carrying the hag’s head by her hair. We looked at each other, both bloody and cut up, and looked back at the car. Jim raised his eyebrows.
“The curse of transference,” I said. “This is everything I’ve ever done to Pooki. Except all at the same time.”
Jim looked at the ruined car. His eyes widened. He struggled to say something.
“Jim?”
He unhinged his jaw. “No more racing.”
• • •
BEING a shapeshifter had its disadvantages. For one, smells ordinary to normal people drove you nuts. If you burned something in the kitchen, you didn’t just open the windows, you had to open the entire house and go outside. It meant the dynamics within the shapeshifter packs and clans were unlike those of a human society. And by the way, most of those dynamics were bullshit. Yes, we did take some of the traits of our animal counterparts: cats had a strong independent streak, bouda—the werehyena—females tended to be dominant, and wolves exhibited a strong OCD tendency, which helped them survive in the wild by tracking and then running game over long distances. But the entire pack hierarchy was actually much closer to the dominance hierarchy of wild primate groups, which made sense considering that the human part of us was in control. And of course, the most important disadvantage was loupism. In moments of extreme stress, Lyc-V, the virus responsible for our powers, “bloomed” within our bodies in great numbers. Sometimes the bloom triggered a catastrophic response and drove a shapeshifter into insanity. An insane shapeshifter was called loup and there was no coming back from that road. Loupism was a constant specter hanging over us.
But right now, as I poured water over my arms to wash away the blood, I was grateful for every single cell of Lyc-V in my body. My gashes were knitting themselves closed. If you watched close enough, you would see muscle fibers slide in the wounds. It was incredibly gross.
Amanda was sitting on the floor, holding her son and rocking back and forth. The boy looked like he wanted to escape, but he must’ve sensed that his mother was deeply upset and so he sat quietly and let her clench him to her. Cole hovered over them, holding a baseball bat and wearing that tense, keyed-up expression on his face men sometimes get when they are terrified for their families and not sure where the danger was coming from. Right now if a butterfly happened to float past Cole on fuzzy wings, he would probably pound it into dust with his bat.
Mr. Dobrev was staring at the hag’s head Jim left sitting on the counter. He’d walked around the store for a minute or two, surveying the damage, and then come back to the head and stared.
“Mr. Dobrev,” I called. “She’s dead.”
“I know.” He turned to me. “I can’t believe it.”
“You said you saw her in a painting before?”
“When I was a boy. She looked exactly lik
e that.”
I was right. I was completely right. Good. Good, good, good, I hated not knowing what I was dealing with.
Jim stepped through the door, pale-faced Brune behind him.
“Where is Steven?” I asked.
“He grabbed a bicycle and went to his daughter’s school to check on her,” Brune said.
Well, I could certainly understand that.
Jim came over to me. I poured water from a bottle onto a rag Mr. Dobrev had given me and gently cleaned the blood from his face.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
“I’m okay,” I told him.
For a tiny moment we were all alone in the shop, caught in a moment when nobody else mattered, and I smiled just for Jim. And then reality came back.
“We thought it was spell based or talent based,” I said. “It’s not. It’s curse based, Jim.”
He waited. Oh. I probably made no sense. Sometimes my brain went too fast for my mouth.
“Most magic is very specific. For example, someone capable of summoning jenglots would have to be a practitioner of Indonesian black magic. He couldn’t also be an expert in Japanese magic or Comanche magic, for example, because to reach that level of expertise, he had to devote himself to Balinese magic completely. You can’t be a master of all trades. Makes sense?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“So when I saw jenglots, I assumed that they had been summoned by a person skilled in spells or a person with a special summoning talent. But then we ran across the hag. The hag made no sense. She is of European origin. We knew it was connected to Eyang Ida, because it would be just too big of a coincidence otherwise.”
“Logically, that means two different magic users are involved,” Jim said.
“That’s what I thought, but then I saw the car. I don’t know of anyone who can summon killer cars. It’s not a mythological being. That’s something out of horror fiction. Then I remembered that first, Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots because she saw a fake one as a child, then Mr. Dobrev told us that he had seen a hag in a painting, and then . . .”
“Amanda said her brother was killed by a car on his way from school,” Jim said. “I thought about that.”
“This magic isn’t spell based or talent based. It’s curse based. I know curses. They work like computer programs used to: they have a rigid structure. If a set of conditions is met, the curse does something. If it isn’t met, the curse lies dormant. For example, let’s say I am targeting a person whose left leg has been amputated. I could curse that doorway so any creature missing a leg would get gonorrhea.”
Jim raised his hand. “Wait. Can you actually do that?”
I waved my hands at him. “That’s not the point.”
“No, that’s the kind of information I need to know.”
“Okay, probably I could.”
Jim’s expression went blank. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
“Jim, will you stop worrying about me cursing you with gonorrhea? You can’t get it anyway; you’re a shapeshifter. Anyway, under the conditions of that curse, any one-legged person would come through and get the plague. If a three-legged cat came through, it would also get the plague.”
“Can cats be affected by human gonorrhea?”
“Not necessarily, but the curse would still try to infect the cat. If I wanted to make a curse more specific, I would define it as ‘any creature with only one leg,’ which would spare the three-legged cat. Even more specific: any man with one leg. There is a limit to how specific you can get. Back to our current situation. I believe someone has cursed these people to fall prey to their worst fear. I am not sure exactly how this curse was structured, but I think it manifests the irrational fears they had since childhood. The curse relies on them to supply it with the details of their worst fears. Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots, so she got a giant swarm. Dobrev was afraid of a hag, so it gave him a hag. And when it came to Amanda’s fears, it made a living car. That’s what Amanda saw in her mind when she worried about her son.”
“Makes sense,” Jim said. “But wouldn’t that take a lot of magic?”
“Yes and no. Cursing is a pay-to-play magic. If there is a curse, there must be a sacrifice. My curses don’t always work, because the price I pay is small: special paper, special ink, special brush and the years I spent learning calligraphy. This”—I raised my index fingers and made a circle, encompassing the ruined shop—“this would take a real sacrifice. Blood or flesh or something.”
Jim frowned. “What’s so important about the building that makes it worth that kind of sacrifice?”
He read my mind. “Exactly. I don’t know. But whoever this person is, they are committed. This isn’t going to stop. There will be more. What is Brune afraid of?”
“Brune!” Jim barked.
The comic book owner stopped. “Yes?”
“When you were a kid, what were you afraid of?”
“Being short.”
“You are short,” I blurted out.
“Yes, but I’m ripped.” Brune flexed behind Jim. “So I’m okay.”
I had no idea how being short could kill you. My body still hurt all over as if someone had put me through a meat grinder and thinking about it made my head hurt.
An imperceptible shift rolled over us, as if the planet somehow turned over in its bed. The magic vanished. The electric lights came on in the shop.
Everyone exhaled.
• • •
I dropped Jim off near a Pack safe house. He wanted to take a shower and change clothes. I drove to the meat market and bought another big steak. And then I drove home. I needed to take a shower and make dinner.
Magic always had a price, but in cursing that price was very clearly defined. Pay the right amount of the right commodity—the more precious, the better—and get desired result. And whoever was cursing the store owners knew exactly how far he or she could push it. The curser had cursed for their worst fears to manifest, trusting that the manifestations would kill them. He or she didn’t curse them to die. That would’ve required even greater sacrifice, his life or the life of a loved one. Just any life wouldn’t do. A sacrifice had to come at a real cost to the one casting the curse.
All of this made me anxious. We’d stopped three attempts to murder the store owners. That meant three sacrifices wasted. The person would come after us. I had no idea what my worst fear was. Well, no, I knew. My worst fear was that I wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t woman enough, sexy enough, hot enough. I’d analyzed myself to death. I had the kind of brain that refused to stay quiet, except when Jim was near. Then it shut up and let me bask in my quiet happiness.
I got home, took a shower, and inspected the kitchen. My mother had been through it. There was cooked rice and a vegetable curry on the stove, and the fridge had been restocked with everything from tofu and cucumbers to apples and watermelon.
I’ve learned that Jim, like most shapehsifters, didn’t care for overly spicy food. He would eat it heroically, but he preferred lighter seasoning. I filled a pot with water, unwrapped the steak and dropped it in.
Blood. Ew. The scent drifted to me from the water. I got a wooden spoon and swished the steak around to get all of the blood and possible contaminants off. I pinned the steak with a spoon and poured the water off, then I got a clean towel, laid it on the counter, slid the steak onto it and patted it dry with the towel. So far so good.
I transferred the steak to a cutting board; got some garlic, squeezed it through a press; added a little tiny bit of pepper, salt, and a little bit of olive oil; smushed it all with a spoon and spread it on the steak.
I could still smell the meat.
And now I reeked of garlic. Hi, Jim, I’m your sexy garlic-smelling date.
I went to the phone to call my mother. My purifying magic came to me from my father’s line. But the curses, spells, a
nd the systematic approach, that was all my mother. She saw things clearly, the way I did, and she had more experience.
My answering machine blinked with red. I pushed a button.
“Dali, this is your mother.”
Like I wouldn’t know.
“Komang called. She says you were there with a man.”
I leaned against the island.
“She said the man was very dark and said he was your boyfriend! I want to kno . . .”
I clicked the next message.
“This is your aunt Ayu . . .”
Click.
“Dali!” My cousin Ni Wayan. “My mother told me that you have a boyfriend . . .”
Click.
“Boyfriend? What?”
Click.
Click.
Click.
“Dali,” my uncle Aditya said. He was all the way up in North Carolina. The magic has been down for an hour. How did they even get ahold of him this fast? “I am so happy for you.”
I pressed Delete All and dialed my mother’s number. I didn’t know what was sadder, the fact that my family lived to gossip or that all of them were so overjoyed that some male person finally took an interest in me.
She didn’t pick up.
I listened to the answering machine come on with a click.
“Hi, Mom. Thank you for the food. I found out what’s wrong with Eyang Ida. Please call me back when you get in. I need some advice.”
I hung up and looked around the kitchen. I felt so alone all of a sudden. Was this what it would be like when Jim and I broke up?
Sometimes it was best not to get into relationships in the first place. Then you never had to deal with heartache. And we hadn’t even had sex yet.
Not that sex always improved relationships or somehow magically fixed them. My first sexual experience wasn’t amazing. I was fifteen, my then-boyfriend was sixteen, and it was the first time for both of us. We were both awkward and nervous enough to turn the whole thing into one long fumble. He kept asking me if I liked it and I kept thinking, “If that’s all there is to it, wow, that’s a letdown.” When we finished, he asked me if it was good for me and then he asked if I thought he had a small penis.