The Flower Bowl Spell (31 page)

Tyson lifts his face to mine. He looks
confused and lost and embarrassed. But he also looks glad to see
me. I’m kneeling, my hands still on his head, and he reaches up to
encircle my wrists with his fingers, and kisses me on the mouth. We
part and smile at each other.

I pull Xien’s sword from his wrist, and just
as I’m about to steal another kiss, never mind my wounded boyfriend
lying a few yards away, a tremendous pain stabs me in the tendons
of my shoulder. I look up and a bloodied Isaac is standing by my
side pinching me with his long, elegant fingers. A Vulcan pinch? A
Jet Li acupressure squeeze?
Just
great
, I think
through the pain, as Isaac coughs, a long, sickly sound that goes
on and on and on, so long that I almost fight off the agony to ask
if he’s all right.

“Good work, Ty,” he says once the hacking fit
is pretty much over. “You got her.” He blinks, tears of blood
running down his cheeks, but clearly he is not blinded. With one
swift move, he pulls another forked scalpel from a bright leather
sheath in his pocket, knocks me over, and pulls up my skirt. The
foot-binding shoes tumble out. He starts to yank at my underwear,
but doesn’t pull it off. He presses the knife a couple of inches
below my belly button and a line of blood springs up. I turn my
face to Tyson, who looks paralyzed by what is happening. A tiny
arrow pierces the skin of Isaac’s hand, but he doesn’t stop, even
as Xien attacks him with his sword.

“Stop it.”

We all look around, wondering who has spoken.
It’s a high, sweet voice, like a child’s. And then I see that it is
a child. Cleo, in fact, and she’s walking across the darkened
grounds of the park flanked—yes, flanked—by Auntie Tess and Romola.
Surrounding them like a glorious cloud is a multitude of
fairies—the ones from Tucker’s fairy aviary. They hold swords, bows
and arrows, daggers, and even dart shooters. Two or three brandish
the tiniest six-shooter guns I’ve ever seen, their cowboy hats
sitting back gallant and cool on their heads.

All together, they look very much like an
entourage. Actually, more like an army. My army or Cleo’s, it’s
hard to say.

Chapter Twenty-six

Man oh man. I must admit, I wish I had even
just one thimbleful of the mojo Cleo possesses at the tender age of
three-point-five. Because as soon as Isaac sees her, he stops
slicing me.
Wow
, I think.
She did it
.

Then he starts cutting again. The pain is
beyond the worst pain I’ve ever felt, which was a tooth extraction
when my dose of Novocain wore off and my herbal tea potion did too.
This pain is way past that. I see the blood spilling over my skin
and imagine a shimmer of flesh and fat separating from each
other.

Cleo stares at Isaac. I think she is going to
cry, her eyes bright with unshed tears. She opens her mouth, to
weep, I’m sure, and I wish Tess would take her away so she wouldn’t
have to see this. Romola has already hidden her face in my auntie’s
side, the way I did when I was her age and something scared me.

“Stop it,” Cleo says again. Isaac looks at
her. “Please.”

“Or what, little girl?”

“Or you will get dead.”

Isaac sits back on his haunches as if
considering this. We all wait, wondering what he will decide.

After a moment he says, “I was told to fear
you. But you are unworthy of my fear. You are even unworthy of my
notice.”

Cleo breathes fiercely through her nose,
which would be adorable if her glare wasn’t so menacing. “I said
please,” she says.

Isaac almost smiles. “Enough.” He turns back
to me.

“How cheerfully he seems to grin,” Cleo says.
“How neatly spread his claws.”

Where have I heard this before?

“And welcomes little fishes in—”

Oh yes.

“With gently smiling jaws!”

Just as the words
Alice in Wonderland
flash in my mind, a rumbling shakes the ground beneath us.
Something reddish and furry streaks over my head, and Isaac is gone
from my side. I turn and see that a coyote has tackled him to the
ground, its teeth bared. Isaac doesn’t scream, even as an owl
swoops down from a tree and pecks at his eyes. The fairies join in,
and they aren’t shy about using whatever weapons they’ve brought.
Now Isaac howls as his arms, back, and legs are pierced with tiny
yet effective darts and bullets and arrows. But it’s not until the
gophers emerge from their holes, biting his cheeks and neck, that
he begs Cleo to make them stop.

Cleo stands over him as the animals continue
their attack. “I don’t like you.” She looks like the youngest
zookeeper in the world. “London is the capital of Paris, and Paris
is the capital of Rome.” With these nonsensical Lewis Carroll
words, the animals back off but still hover over their prey. The
fairies though, are apparently not under Cleo’s magickal
jurisdiction, and continue to attack until Xien flies in and seems
to convince them to let it go.

Tess is by my side, removing a handkerchief
from her pocket and pressing it to my wound.

“It’s not deep,” I say in response to her
unasked question. “What are you doing here?”

“They woke up.” She says it almost as if I
have chastised her for having the kids out so late at night.

“It’s okay, Auntie.” I mean my wound
and—well, everything else. “Please check on Cooper. His head and
wrists.”

She goes to him, doing a quick examination.
She zips open her pack and takes out a bunch of homeopathic vials
and tubes. “I had a feeling I’d need my first aid kit.”

I take a moment to catch my breath before
getting to my feet. I clamp the handcuffs on Isaac who remains
under the guard of fauna and fay. He won’t look me in the eye. He
mutters, but whatever power he had over me has vanished.

Cooper groans and I sit next to him, cradling
his head in my lap as Auntie Tess slathers on an ointment that
smells like pot roast.

“What happened with the girls?” I ask
her.

“Cleo asked for a drink of water and she saw
those bones you left in the kitchen. It’s like they triggered
something in her. She said she needed to get to you, that you were
in danger.” Tess fixes her gaze on Isaac, surrounded by a menagerie
of coyotes, owls, hawks, and gophers. There are even a few
raccoons. “You know, it turns out she’s been protecting you. Not
the other way around.”

I glance at Cleo, who is sitting on the
ground with Romola. They are both petting a fox: Romola with a look
of amazed delight on her face; Cleo like it’s no big deal.

“She told you this.”

“She said you needed her, that you’d get hurt
without her. It’s like she finally figured out how to say it.”
Auntie Tess points to Isaac. “Do you think she could really kill
him?”

I think about how just about every bad thing
that’s happened since this all started took place when Cleo wasn’t
there. How D.B. backed away from her at the concert and Isaac
attacked me at the housing project. How Tyson wanted me to abandon
the girls and how Cleo didn’t want to leave my side. “Hell to the
yeah,” I say.

Tess looks around. “Who are these
people?”

“That is Dexter Berdin, Cheradon’s manager,
and that”—I point—“is Isaac LeBrun.”

Tess swears under her breath.

“I’m pretty sure they killed Bright Vixen.
The others were enchanted, including Cheradon.” I indicate Horatio
and Babs. “I haven’t figure out what’s controlling them yet. If
it’s tattoos, they’re in for some pain.”

“It’s probably those bracelets,” Tyson says
as he gets to his feet. “They were gifts from D.B.”

He looks a little wobbly, not all that
threatening, but I do a read on him anyway. He’s himself again—sad
but relieved. Before any of us moves, he walks over to his
bandmates and removes the bracelets from their wrists, heavy
leather cuffs about three inches wide. Nothing happens right away,
but soon they start to blink like swimmers emerging from water into
open air. Tyson hugs them and they put their arms weakly around his
back. They look warily at the animals surrounding us. Even though I
know whatever was binding them is broken, I’m glad for the
wilderness backup.

Some of the fairies have stayed behind to
guard D.B. and Cheradon, who are still out of commission. Xien is
conferring with his comrades. I call him over.

“Do you really think we have to worry about
her?” I nod at our fallen rock star.

Xien hovers next to me, considering. After a
moment, he shakes his head.

“Me either,” I say. I’m pretty sure she’s
just as innocent as Ty and the rest of Arsenic Playground. But
him.” I nod at D.B. “I think there’s some rope in the trunk of my
car.” I pull the keys out of my pocket and Xien hoists them over
his shoulder, zipping away with five other fairies to my parking
spot.

In that one idle moment, pain from the gash
on my abdomen starts to burn again.

“Take this.” Cleo stands up and hands me a
little vial. I recognize it as Isaac’s sleeping draught. “Just a
little bit or you’ll…” She shuts her eyes and snores. She opens her
eyes again. “It’ll help with your ouchie. Cooper’s too.”

“Thank you.” I don’t even bother to ask how
she knows this. I put a little on my tongue. It sizzles, like
baking soda, but with a sweet honey flavor. In the moonlight,
Cooper’s face is starting to look ghostly. I kneel beside him and
swab a dab of the elixir inside his mouth. He barely swallows. I
force myself to watch and hope. It’s probably just a minute or two,
but time seems to crawl by before his breathing grows more
regular.

Cleo and Romola lean into me on either
side.

“He’ll be okay,” Romola says.

I look at her, and she’s blurry through the
tears that have started to pool in my eyes. I hug her to me and she
wraps her arms around my neck. Cleo pats my shoulder.

“Girls, will you stay with Cooper? I need to
help out here.”

They agree, and sit on either side of his
head, every now and then patting his cheeks or shoulders.

Tyson is giving Babs and Horatio some water.
I tap his arm to get his attention. “Will you be all right getting
everyone back?” I realize I don’t know where they’re staying or if
they even have somewhere to go.

He looks puzzled. “You mean you’re not going
to put a voodoo curse on us?”

“I don’t do voodoo. No. You’re okay.”

An awkward silence follows. Tess rescues us
by asking, “What do we do now? Banish them to another dimension?
Curse them with goat feet?”

I squeeze her hand. I know for a fact that
Auntie Tess couldn’t transmogrify goat feet onto a goat. I pull
Isaac’s phone from my pocket. “Let’s tell the police that the
murderers of Gladys Jones are hog-tied in Lindley Meadow.”

Tess smiles and her shoulders sag a little.
“The police? Sometimes, lamb, you’re the most mundane witch I
know.”

Epilogue

Everything happens too late for the story to
hit the major newspapers the next day, but the Internet and the
local TV stations carry the remarkable tale of two scrofulous dudes
tied up in Golden Gate Park and found by SFPD after receiving an
anonymous phone call. They are believed to be the killers of a
Santa Barbara woman.

One online report states
Gladys Jones,
formerly of San Mateo and a retired software developer, was
presumed killed by an explosion due to a gas leak in her home. But
an email sent to the
Santa Barbara News-Press
with an
attached movie clip showed a man snooping around her house in the
middle of the night, and according to reports from an unnamed
source at the FBI, the man is one Isaac LeBrun of Salem, Oregon. He
is a known member of the occult, and one of the men found in Golden
Gate Park.

The man found with Mr. LeBrun was
identified as Dexter Berdin, manager of the popular rock band Yeah
Right. While Berdin was not known to be involved in any sort of
religious sects, he and LeBrun share a similar tattoo of some kind
of oriental gryphon.
Which is, of course, closer to a makara
and nothing like a gryphon, but I’m certainly not going to write a
complaint to the editor.

The report goes on:
Near the spot where
the two were found was evidence of a campfire, along with a stolen
elephant tusk and a pair of stolen Chinese foot-binding shoes. Both
items will be returned to their rightful owners pending the police
investigation.

There’s something else that makes my skin go
creepy-crawly for a second: The email with the video clip came from
an untraceable email account that originated in a Mellora Islands
Internet café. The clip of the video, shown on TV and the Internet,
is the exact same snuff vision Tucker pulled from Beulah the dead
fairy’s body.

As far as I know, Viveka is still in the
Mellora Islands.

I just want to know how Tucker got a fairy’s
last memory onto his hard drive. Magick is getting so techie these
days.

****

It’s a few days later, and I’m sitting on a
bench on 24th Street near the Saturday farmers market, my freshly
repaired laptop tucked into my messenger bag at my side. I play
with the locket, which I’m holding rather than wearing, winding the
chain around my fingers a bit like a cat’s cradle.

Today is the Harvest Festival, an annual
street fair held just before Halloween.
Happy New Year, all you
witches
, I think to myself.
Happy Samhain, happy Dia de los
Muertos, happy-go-lucky
. I’ve skipped the holiday these last
two years, except in the most mainstream way, putting out bowls of
candy for the treaters and hooligans. Not sure what I’ll be doing
this time around, but I will probably at least do a little
moon-bathing. Maybe I’ll even go to a party. Put on a pointy witch
hat and cackle.

Viveka’s daughters are with Jesus Christ and
Cooper in the market, grooving to the beat of a kettledrum band.
Cleo wears a purple nightie and says she is a pilgrim. Romola has
painted whiskers on her face with my eyeliner and wears a pair of
bunny ears from Hillary’s old dress-up trunk. Before I walked over
to this sitting area to meet Tyson, Cleo was drawing a series of
proto-ankhs in chalk on the ground in the children’s
arts-and-crafts zone of the market while Romola sketched out a
forest of trees.