Power Mage 3 Page 7

  “You open your mouth again, and I’ll blow your damn brains out,” Loretta crowed, yanking a revolver from the bag and pointing it at Brawley.

  Brawley looked at her.

  Maypole said, “Loretta, put that damn gun away before you get us both killed.”

  For a few seconds, Loretta held the weapon in shaking hands. Then she eased the hammer down, dropped the revolver back in the bag, and rolled it shut. Without another word, the woman stood, disappeared into the bedroom, and closed the door softly behind her.

  “Don’t mind Loretta,” Maypole said. “She’s a bit possessive and maybe a touch antisocial. But she treats me good and cooks nice and rubs my feet when they get to hurting, so I love her. Let me see the damn thing again.”

  Brawley handed him the book, and for the better of a minute, Maypole leafed through the pages, studying them in silence.

  Then the old Cosmic quit turning pages and seemed to stare through the book, and Brawley knew the man was weighing things in his mind and coming to a decision.

  Maypole sighed and closed the book and set it on the countertop between them. “This thing’s locked up tighter than a clam with lockjaw. We’re talking layered defenses. Cosmic, Seeker, something else. Must be powerful shit inside for them to ward it so hard. See that seven-pointed star on the cover? I suspect this book is full of special magic. Spells usable only by power mages, maybe. We’re talking highly forbidden shit here.”

  Maypole opened the book again and pointed at the shifting script. “Can you read that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you’re sure the book was meant for you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Maypole shut the book and thought for a while. “Some books are tailored to single readers. But if you can’t read the script, something’s missing.”

  “My parents said they left me two other things besides the book,” Brawley said, “but they weren’t there.”

  “Where are the other two things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Maypole frowned. “Could be the book’s waiting on one of them. Or both. Or neither. Could be you that’s missing something.”

  “Is it because I haven’t opened my Cosmic strand yet?”

  “Mayhaps it is,” Maypole said, trailing off.

  “And mayhaps it ain’t?” Brawley guessed.

  The old Cosmic grinned at that. “Pretty much. See, I wouldn’t expect you to be able to use the book without cracking your Cosmic strand, but you should be able to see the writing.”

  Brawley shook his head. “I see symbols and stuff, but they keep moving.”

  Maypole tapped another Pall Mall from the pack, snapped off the filter, and lit it on the stove burner. He blew a line of smoke at the ceiling and said, “Something’s missing. Not just the strand. The book needs something. Could be that it can only be read in a specific location or a certain hour of the day. Or it might be waiting on something from you. Proof, maybe.”

  “Proof of what?”

  Maypole shrugged and took another drag. “That’s what it feels like, though. Like the book is waiting on you. Like you have to do something or say something or pass some kind of test.”

  “How do we figure out what it’s waiting on?” Brawley said.

  Maypole looked at him, looked at the book, shook his head, and stared at the floor. “I hate like hell to get tangled up in this. I really do. This shack ain’t much, and my wife’s crazier than a shithouse rat, but this is my life, and I love it. I really do.”

  Brawley nodded, waiting.

  “If the Order catches wind of me giving you a hand, you know what they’ll do?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But you still want me to help, don’t you?”

  “I’d be grateful if you would.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, son,” Maypole said, staring into his eyes. “You might think you’d be grateful, but you won’t be. Some books are not meant to be read. Some gates should remain unopened.”

  “If you can’t help me, I understand,” Brawley said. “A man cuts his own path in life whether he admits it or not. Everything we do, we do because we choose to do it. I could use your help, but with it or without it, I’m going to unlock this book. If I don’t, I’m a dead man, and my women are all dead, too.”

  Neither man spoke for the better part of a minute. The kitchen was silent, save for the hum of the air conditioner and a distant crinkling from the bedroom, as if Loretta was opening and closing the paper sack indecisively.

  Finally, Maypole broke the silence, speaking without looking at Brawley, without even lifting his head. He stared at the floor, an inch of smoldering ash sagging from the tip of his cigarette.

  “I knew a power mage once, back before the Culling,” Maypole said. “Guy by the name of Hempstead. Lived just down the road, believe it or not. Good guy. Liked to fish. Ran a bait shop. Wasn’t hardly ever open. Guess Hempstead liked fishing better than selling bait.

  “Tell you the truth, I never even knew Hempstead was psionic, let alone a damn power mage. I mean, he seemed common as dirt, except everybody said he was shacked up with two different women. He talked regular and dressed regular. His johnboat was so banged up, I used to wonder how it even stayed afloat.”

  For a second, Maypole’s eyes went out of focus, spiraling into old memories. “Then, the night of the Culling, the Dragon herself showed up and killed Hempstead and his women and kids and burned their house to the ground.”

  Maypole shook his head, his eyes a thousand miles away. “Those kids were just little. One almost ready to start school, the other two still in diapers. Just babies. They might have never even cracked a damn strand, but that evil bitch McLeod killed them deader than hell.”

  Maypole lifted his eyes, and Brawley was surprised to see tears streaming down the old man’s cheeks. “You understand what I’m saying, son? These people were just plain folks was all. Just regular folks living their life and raising their kids as best they could. I came running outside and heard one of the women screaming as the house burned.”

  Maypole’s eyes glanced past Brawley as if he were looking through the door out into the graveyard. “They talk to me sometimes,” he said in a haunted voice. “Well, Hempstead and his wives and their oldest. The younger kids couldn’t talk much. They were too little. When I hear them, it’s mostly just crying.

  “Some nights the middle child, this pretty little toddler, she’ll start laughing, you know? The way kids do sometimes when they have it rough but can’t take the pain anymore. Like she’s pretending, even just for a few seconds, that the Culling never even happened. But her laughter never lasts. Those are the nights she cries the hardest, once she breaks down. The poor little thing howls like she’s burning all over again.”

  The old man shuddered, wiped the tears from his face, and started fumbling in his bathrobe for another cigarette. Once he got it lit, he took a long drag and stared Brawley in the eyes. “I’ll help you, damn it,” he said, “but do me a favor, if you get the chance, and kill that murdering bitch they call The Dragon.”

  Brawley nodded. “I promise.”

  Maypole opened a cabinet, removed a pile of baking sheets and muffin tins, and detached a false panel from the wall. Reaching into the space behind, he withdrew an unremarkable shoe box, which he tucked under one scrawny arm.

  “Come on, son,” Maypole said, and walked outside.

  Brawley followed him deeper into the cemetery. When the path stopped, they continued, twisting circuitously through what looked increasingly less like a graveyard and more like what it was, a tangled slashing growing up with briars and saplings and clumps of bamboo with an occasional tombstone jutting up as lost and lonely as a cloud in a clear sky.

  Maypole stopped before a rank of graves marked only with pyres of rubble. He opened the shoebox, revealing what looked like the stash of a strung-out pack rat: dozens of pill vials and plastic baggies and an assortment of unidentifiable items wrapped in aluminum foil.


  The old man brushed his fingers over the jumbled contents with the curiously dexterous purposefulness of a blind man reading Braille.

  Maypole selected a few items and set them on the ground and closed the case. Then he pointed at the central grave and told Brawley to sit.

  Brawley lowered onto the grave.

  Maypole peeled the foil from a cylindrical package, revealing a long coil of dark cordage that appeared to be constructed not of fibers but strips of dried flesh.

  “What’s that?” Brawley asked.

  “Don’t ask,” Maypole said, shaking out a short length and laying it on the ground beside Brawley. Little by little, the old man stretched the grisly rope upon the ground until he had surrounded Brawley in a rough circle.

  Maypole started speaking in low mumbles, uttering a string of what to Brawley sounded like pure gibberish. As he spoke, the old man moved in an odd choreography of gestures and positions. Finally, he stepped one foot into Brawley’s circle, tapped the soil, and withdrew his foot quickly. “Belst,” Maypole said, drawing out the word, “Veel etton agreel belst-vadoon.”

  The soil beneath Brawley trembled. It was a subtle thing, there and gone, like the whispering aftershock of a distant earthquake.

  “Feel that, son?” Maypole asked, uncapping a pharmaceutical vial.

  Brawley nodded.

  “You right-handed?”

  “Yeah,” Brawley said. “Well, ambidextrous, mostly, but I favor my right.”

  “Hold this in your right, then,” the old man said. Tilting the vial, Maypole dumped a tiny, black shard into Brawley’s palm. “That’s obsidian. It’s pure and elemental, forged by fire and earth, with a cutting edge finer than steel.”

  Brawley nodded, pinching the flake of glassy stone between his thumb and forefinger.

  “As you have likely gathered, I speak with the dead,” Maypole said. “But the answers you’re hunting, the dead will never give me. You will have to ask yourself.”

  “All right,” Brawley said.

  “You’re sitting on Hempfield’s grave. He deserved better, but there wasn’t any money. I put them in the ground and said some words, and it was the best I could do.”

  Maypole lifted a little leather pouch from the case. He opened it, reached inside, and withdrew a pinch of yellow powder. “Augustus Lamar Hempfield,” Maypole intoned, sprinkling what looked like mustard powder onto the ground inside Brawley’s circle, “we call to you from the other side. Hear our words.”

  Again, the ground trembled.

  “Now I need some of your blood, son,” Maypole said, and made a slashing motion across his palm.

  Brawley drew the obsidian across his palm, opening a line that welled crimson.

  “That’s good,” Maypole said. “I’m going to say some words. When I’m done, you sprinkle some of that blood on the ground. Then ask me about the book. If you’re lucky, I’ll answer, but it’ll be Hempstead’s voice, not mine. You follow?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, then. When it’s time to ask questions, be quick about it. These gates don’t stay open long.”

  Brawley nodded to show that he understood.

  Maypole unhooked the chicken foot from around his neck and started rattling away in that strange language and striking weird poses again. Only one phrase was recognizable, and he repeated several times.

  Augustus Lamar Hempstead.

  When Maypole finished, Brawley shook blood from his healed hand onto the grave.

  For a second, nothing happened.

  Then the ground shook beneath him, harder this time, and Maypole moaned eerily. The man tottered, mouth slack, eyes rolled back.

  “Maypole?” Brawley asked.

  The old man shook his head.

  Brawley was tempted to ask the possessing spirit’s name and location but remembering Maypole’s directions, cut to the chase instead. After all, he wasn’t here to plumb the depths of the spirit world; he was here to unlock the secrets of the strange and powerful books his parents had left him.

  “What is this book?” Brawley asked.

  Maypole’s arm lifted in Brawley’s direction. The hand opened.

  Brawley handed him the book.

  A shudder went through the zombified Cosmic, and another moan rose from his throat.

  “I need to use the book,” Brawley said. “Can you help me?”

  “You aren’t ready to use the book,” Maypole said. As predicted, it wasn’t his voice speaking. The voice didn’t sound like that of anyone named Augustus Lamar Hempstead, either. It was decidedly feminine and vaguely familiar. Perhaps one of Hempstead’s wives?

  “Why not? What do I have to do?”

  “You must first secure the two missing items,” the spirit said, “Son.”

  Brawley’s heart jumped. “Mom?”

  Maypole’s mouth opened again, but the voice of Brawley’s mother faded, undecipherable beneath what sounded like the howling of a winter wind. The sound ebbed away, and Brawley caught the tail end of what his mother’s voice, reduced now to a whisper, was saying, “… after the Culling.”

  For a second, everything was silent.

  “Mom?” Brawley called. “Are you there?”

  Then his mother’s voice returned, so faint now that he caught only patches of what she was saying, words and phrases whispered between stretches of breezy silence. “Seek the second item… Thibault, Louisiana… rest stop off Interstate 10.”

  7

  Jamaal pulled into the strip mall, killed the engine, and sat for a minute cycling through his sensors.

  Dutchman was fishing. He’d left this morning after unleashing his creepy-ass Cosmic hitman.

  After the previous day’s events, Jamaal now knew that Uno was a dark summoner. A rare breed these days, thanks to “The War of the Wizards,” which had wiped out many Cosmics and most of the dark summoners, Eleazar Blackthorne chief among them.

  All Cosmics were strange, but dark summoners were the strangest of all; eerie bastards who used psionics to open gateways to other realities, drawing power and sometimes actual beings from alternate planes of existence.

  Now Uno was out in the world, using all that dark, hocus pocus bullshit to track down the power mage and his women.

  Jamaal turned his attention from Dutchman and opened the sensor he’d attached to Krupski’s cufflink. Instantly, he found himself in that perspective, jostled by his young partner’s bouncing leg.

  Jamaal took in the stained beige carpet, the row of chair backs, and shoulders and heads of the agents sitting in front of the Krupski. Short haircuts for the men, bobs and ponytails for the women. Jamaal smelled coffee and spearmint gum, these smells merciful distractions from the backdrop odor of a roomful of Order personnel who’d worked all night trying to untangle the clusterfuck in Miami.

  Jamaal listened for just a moment, which was long enough to confirm what he’d already suspected: the Order had no real leads. They were stumbling forward, as blind as a man with his head shoved up his ass all the way to the shoulders.

  Which was fine by Jamaal. Because he really didn’t feel like telling little David Mack that his sister was dead.

  Though with the big-ass bounty Janusian had announced, Nina Mack’s survival was merely putting off the inevitable.

  Sad, that. If Jamaal had had his way, they’d have clipped her wings long ago, and she wouldn’t be in this mess. Now the poor girl was going to die, and it would fall to Jamaal to deliver the news to Xander, who was still searching frantically for his daughter, and young David, whom Jamaal had placed, along with the boy’s vicious she-bear of a mother, into protective custody.

  Jamaal listened for a few seconds longer, but the stench of the unwashed, stressed out bodies filling the hotel conference room turned his stomach. With the incessant bouncing of Krupski’s leg and the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, Jamaal started feeling sick.

  Just as he was preparing to retract his consciousness, a voice at the front of the room called ev
eryone to attention. The agents stood as one. Jamaal’s perspective rose with Krupski’s cufflink to reveal the officer walking to the podium.

  Danica “The Dragon” McLeod was a lean redhead in a dark business suit. She had the spare build of a runner and a hard face punctuated by a pair of close-set eyes devoid of mercy or humor or anything recognizably human. Her best feature, a Roman nose that could’ve been downright fetching, was wasted amid a visage that inspired only fear and loathing.

  “Be seated,” the world’s scariest pyrokinetic said, and those in attendance complied.

  The Dragon debriefed the agents, repeating Janusian’s message to the public and adding details Jamaal would have assumed. Her delivery was coldly robotic as she listed the things the Order had done, was doing, and would do.

  It was mildly surprising that such a terrifying individual could be so very, very boring.

  But then Danica “The Dragon” McLeod said, “At this point in time, we are not ready to confirm or deny reports concerning the so-called Tiger Mage.”

  Jamaal sat up straight in his seat. What the hell?

  He listened as McLeod gave them what little information she had. Or rather, what little information she had been told to share.

  Holy. Fucking. Wowzers.

  Jamaal reeled.

  The Tiger Mage. Back after all these years.

  It was like learning that all those laughable childhood bogeymen were real after all. The monster under your bed; the thing in your closet; the mournful, hungry creature howling outside your window during the windy midnights of your youth. McLeod’s mention of the Tiger Mage was like reaching late adulthood only to learn those childhood spooks were actually real, and hey, they were getting the band back together.

  But who was he kidding? This was worse than that. Far, far worse.

  Because the Tiger Mage hadn’t just been a monster. The Tiger Mage had also turned Jamaal and his colleagues into monsters.

  The psionic community had known very little about the Tiger Mage because he was, among many other things, a powerful Seeker who took great pains to cloak his existence and disguise his acts.

  But enough of his acts had been observed to create the terrifying urban legends surrounding him. These stories varied wildly but agreed on one point. The Tiger Mage was somehow related to the late Eleazar Blackthorne.