Ritual Magic

EIGHT

THE room was cold and dirty. Julia couldn’t see the walls. This was supposed to be her room, but she couldn’t see the walls or her bed, and if she couldn’t find the walls she couldn’t turn the light on. It must be getting dark outside because it was sure dim in here.

She was supposed to get her room ready. They’d moved to this big, dirty house for some stupid reason, and she had to get her stuff unpacked. There were so many packing boxes . . . boxes piled up and tumbled around everywhere. Boxes taped up tight. Julia pulled and tugged and tried really hard, but she couldn’t open any of them. “Mama,” she called. “Mama, I need some scissors. Where are the scissors?”

Her mother didn’t answer. That made her feel cold all the way down, so cold that she started shaking. Why had they moved here? Why couldn’t they live in their old house? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t make sense and she couldn’t remember and that scared her. “Mama?”

No one answered. Julia scrambled over some of the boxes and saw the door. She gasped in relief and yanked it open.

The hall was dark, too, even darker than her room, but Mama was out there somewhere. Julia looked both ways as if she were crossing a street before she stepped out in that dark hallway. She couldn’t see the end of it, but she could see doors on either side, so she opened one. More boxes. Big and little boxes, some in tidy stacks, some looking like they’d been tossed in every which way. All of them taped shut and she didn’t have any scissors, so she closed that door and went to the next one.

Another room full of boxes. After that, another one, and she stopped calling for her mother, who never answered. She wanted out of this terrible house, but none of the doors led out, they just opened up on more taped-up boxes, and she was sobbing as she yanked open yet another door.

This room was different. These boxes weren’t taped shut. The flaps gaped open in a spooky way that made her think of when her hamster died and its eyelids were stuck halfway open. She shivered and she wanted to close the door, but maybe some of her things were in those boxes. If she could just find some of her things, she’d feel better. Slowly she moved into the room.

The first box she peered into was empty. She started shaking because that was wrong. Horribly wrong. She grabbed another box and its weight told her the truth even before she looked inside. Empty. Another box, and another . . . empty, empty, empty.

All the boxes in this room were empty.

Julia staggered back, away from the plundered boxes. Horror stopped her breath and she didn’t even want to suck it in again because everything was wrong, everything—the boxes she couldn’t open and the boxes that were so very empty and her Mama wouldn’t answer, wasn’t here—either Mama was lost or Julia was lost and she wanted out, out of this terrible place, and—

“Julia!” a man said sharply.

She gasped and spun around.

Standing in the doorway was an ordinary-looking man. Everyone-else ordinary, that is, not Chinese ordinary. He wore an ugly suit and a big frown. He was kind of old, at least as old as her parents, with dark hair that started way back on his forehead. “Breathe,” he said sternly.

“Go away!” she said, her voice high and shaking. “You’re not supposed to be here!”

“Yeah, normally that would be true, but things aren’t normal. I got special permission to come talk to you.”

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Who are you?”

He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a little leather folder and held it out. “Al Drummond. I’m an FBI agent.”

She reached for the ID he was holding out—or tried to. Her arm moved, but somehow she couldn’t quite reach him.

“We can’t touch.” It sounded as if he didn’t like that. Like he was sad about it even if his face didn’t look sad. “I have permission to talk to you, but that doesn’t let us touch.”

“I met an FBI agent once, but I don’t remember when. I don’t remember how come I’m here and my mama isn’t. I hate it! I hate it so much! Why can’t I remember?”

“Because a bad guy hurt you. That’s why I’m here. I’ll be working with that other FBI agent and some more people to catch the bad guy, and we’re going to try to fix things for you, but it’s going to take time. You’re going to have to stay here while we’re working.”

Julia’s lower lip quivered. She didn’t know if she could do that.

“Look.” He crouched down, which he didn’t really have to do. She’d grown so much the past year that she wasn’t much shorter than him. She was five feet, five inches tall now. Mama sometimes shook her head and said if she didn’t stop growing she’d have trouble finding a man who was tall enough for her. Mama . . .

“It sucks, doesn’t it?” the FBI man said. She nodded, not able to talk because she was too close to crying. “We’ve got someone who can make this place better. He can’t fix everything, but he can make it so you won’t be too uncomfortable staying here awhile. But you have to give permission. He can’t help if you don’t. Will you let him help?”

“Yes! Yes, where is he?” She looked around. “Can he make it not so dark and dirty and scary? Where is he?”

“His name is Sam. Remember that.” He straightened. “He’s not here right now. You won’t meet him until you wake up.”

“Wake up? You mean—you mean I’m dreaming? You’re not real?” That was awful, because this place was real. She knew it was. Even if she was dreaming, this house was horribly real.

“I’m real, but yeah, you’re dreaming. You need to remember . . .” He stopped and looked over his shoulder as if someone was behind him, talking to him. But no one was there. “I’ve got to go. Remember the name. Sam. You need to let Sam help you, okay?”

“Okay, but—wait!”

He was fading. She forgot what he’d said about touching and reached for him, but it didn’t do any good. He faded out like he’d been nothing but smoke and a breeze had blown him away.

“Wait,” she whispered. But it was too late. She was alone.

Julia.

That was a man’s voice, too, but not the same man. She knew this voice. He was really nice and . . .

“Julia, I need you to wake up now.”

She blinked her eyes and everything was bright again. Too bright for eyes barely awake, and she was staring up at a white, white ceiling and someone was holding her hand, so she wasn’t alone, and that felt good, but . . .

“Back with me now?”

She could hear the smile in his voice so she turned her head on the pillow and there he was—the gorgeous man she’d first seen in the hall in the restaurant. The man who was the one good thing in her crumbling life. Mr. Turner. She managed to smile at him, but it felt wobbly.

She remembered some things now, and she didn’t want to.

“You seemed to be having trouble waking up,” he said, and he smoothed her hair back from her face in the way her mother sometimes did. Not her father. Father was as hard to reach as the FBI agent in her dream. Harder, because he never tried to reach back. “Maybe you didn’t want to.”

“No,” she whispered. “It’s okay you woke me up. I had . . . bad dreams.”

He nodded as if he understood, and even though she knew he didn’t, not really, it helped that he wanted to. “That’s not surprising. Julia, we’ve found someone who can help. He can’t make things right, but he can help, if you want him to.”

“What—what’s his name?”

“Sam.”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Yes, please.”

IT was after midnight when Lily stepped out of the bright-ly lit emergency room at Scripps Mercy to go to UCSD Medical Center, where Barbara Lennox lay in a coma. Surprise stopped her steps. It had rained while she was inside—not a lot, judging by the dearth of puddles, but enough that the pavement was wet and the world smelled wonderful.

She drew in a lungful of air scrubbed clean, perfumed with ozone and humus. Night air slid like cool silk over the skin on her face. Earlier she’d gotten her shoulder harness and a slightly wrinkled jacket from the trunk of Rule’s car because she was damned if she’d work a case without having her weapon at hand. Now she wanted to take that jacket off and let the clean air wash over more of her. She didn’t; people got jittery if they saw her weapon. But she did suck in more of that crisp air.

Scott made a motion and Mark loped around her. Mark would use his nose to make sure no one had messed with the car while they were inside. “You drive,” she told Scott.

He nodded. “Where are we going?”

“UCSD Medical Center.” Her feet didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to see the woman in a coma. Was that what awaited Lily’s mother if she didn’t allow Sam to help? Why was one victim comatose, another shaken but functional, and a third somewhere in between?

Stupid feet. Those questions wouldn’t get answered by standing here in the parking lot. Lily made herself start for the car.

A wisp of fog drifted in front of her and quickly shaped itself into a man—a hard-faced man with dark hair wearing a dull gray suit with a wrinkled shirt. “It’s Drummond,” she said quickly to Scott, then: “You’d better not wink out right away. I didn’t get to ask you anything, and—”

“Things are different this time.”

“Different how?” She cocked her head. “You look younger.”

“Never mind that shit,” he said, but he ran a hand over his hair—which he had more of than he used to. He looked maybe forty, she thought. Not a lot younger than when he died, but some. The age he’d been before his wife died? “I’ll mostly be working things on my side. I may not even hear you call me like I used to. I’m not tied to you the same way. Because we used to be tied I can find you, but I couldn’t talk to you if not for the way you died once. You didn’t tell me about that.” He scowled as if she’d withheld facts pertinent to a case.

“So who did?”

He waved that away as unimportant. “Someone on this side. The thing is, having died once, you’ve got this little open place in you. It lets me get close enough for you to hear me.”

She scowled. “I am not turning into a medium.”

“Okay, fine. I doubt any ghosts are going to find that spot, anyway. Only reason I can is because of that tie we used to have.”

“But if the tie is gone—”

“It left . . . call it a path. Or a habit. Same difference. Would you quit worrying about the shit I can’t explain and pay attention? It’s a lot harder for me to manifest this time and I can’t do it for long, and there’s stuff you need to know. First, you’re dealing with something Friar got from that elf before he escaped from the warehouse. An artifact.”

“Did you see it? What does it do?”

“I didn’t see it. I felt it. It feels, uh . . . evil, I guess you’d say.”

Lily turned that word over in her mind. “Evil is a pretty broad category.”

“On this side, evil means something specific. Evil affects . . .” His mouth kept moving, but she didn’t hear anything.

“Back up. I lost some of that.”

He scowled. “There’s stuff I can’t say. Not won’t. Can’t. Just take my word for it—what Friar got hold of is evil in a way that upsets the heavy hitters on my side of things.”

“Heavy hitters?”

He looked down and muttered. “Angels. Sort of. Not really, because they aren’t . . . oh, hell, call them whatever you want, or don’t call them anything at all. That might be best. The thing is, everyone on this side is real restricted in what we can do on your side. Even the heavy hitters. It’s all about choice. Choice and time. On your side, time’s like a funnel that lets only one drop of now through at a time, and choice is what you do with that drop. No one gets to take away the choices other people make—only, that object Friar got hold of does just that. I don’t know how it works, so don’t ask, but by wiping out memories, it robs people of all the choices they made.”

Lily thought about her mother. All the choices Julia Yu had made over a lifetime, wiped out. Disintegrated. Her throat tightened. She managed to push a couple of words out through her tight throat. “Yeah. That’s evil.”

He nodded. “It affects this side of things, too. That’s why I can be here. There’s a . . . it’s like a fissure or a crack. A break created by that artifact.”

“But why you?” She waved vaguely. “I mean—there must be lots and lots of dead people who could—”

“Watch who you’re calling dead. I died, sure, but I’m not dead.”

“We’ll talk about terminology another time. Why you?”

He shrugged. “Mostly because I can. Most folks on this side can’t interact with your world at all, but because of the way I died, that tie we used to have, I’ve got a toe in the door. All that death magic stirred things up, plus there’s the way I . . .” His mouth kept moving, but silently.

“You went mute again.”

“Shit. The stuff I can’t say . . . anyway, I’m not as rooted on this side as I’m supposed to be. I could’ve gotten that fixed, but I’m needed for this. I’m small enough that I can slip through that crack to work with you on your side. The heavy hitters can’t. They . . . there’s so much of them, see. They’re part of your world, but it’s just their shine you get, not all of them. They can’t be squeezed into the funnel of time without breaking it.”

“So instead of an angel, I get you.”

He grinned crookedly. “That’s pretty much it.”

“You grinned.”

That brought back the familiar scowl. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t think I ever saw you grin. Smirk, yes. Grin, no.” She tipped her head. “Did you . . . there at the last, I mean, at the warehouse, you said her name. Just before you poofed out. Sarah. You found her?”

“Yeah.” Softness seeped into his face the way light seeps into the sky at dawn. “Yeah, I did. I don’t remember much, but I know I found her.”

“You don’t remember? But that—that’s like my mother—”

“No,” he said firmly. “It’s not the same at all. My memories of that other place don’t fit into this place, that’s all. They aren’t gone. They’re sort of packed up, waiting for me.”

A cold hand gripped Lily and squeezed. “Then my mother’s memories are gone. Not damaged or lost. Gone.”

“Not exactly. I mean, they’re gone, but . . .” He ran a hand over his hair. “I can’t explain, mainly because I don’t understand. The idea is to get her back to being herself. To get all of them back to themselves. I don’t know how we do that. I don’t know if that’s something that can even happen on your side of things. Might be the missing pieces can’t be returned to her until she’s on my side.”

“Until she dies, you mean. Even if we do everything right, she may not get her memory back while she’s alive.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I mean. I know that’s hard to hear, but it’s one possibility. Lily, there’s a lot more affected than your mom. A lot more than you’ve found so far.”

God, could it get any worse? “How many? Who are they?”

“Can’t tell you that. And remember, when I say can’t, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“What can you do?” she cried, frustrated.

“Not much. I can watch your back. I think I’ll know if I get near the object. It has . . . I don’t know what to call it. A spiritual signature or color or . . . see, on this side we use spirit instead of light to see things. Sort of. It isn’t really seeing, but you can think of it that way, and that’s how I’ll know if the artifact is nearby. Otherwise . . . they didn’t exactly give me a training manual, so I don’t know what all I can do. No, wait, there’s one more thing. I should be able to let you know when your saint shows up.”

“My saint? What the hell are you—”

He smirked at her. “You wanted one. Pissed you off that you got me instead.”

“Yes, but—hold on a minute.” Lily’s phone dinged to let her know she had a text. Her heart started pounding. She snatched her phone from her purse.

It was from Rule. She read his message quickly, then read it again. Her shoulders slumped in relief.

“Good news?”

“My mother . . . Julia agreed to let Sam help her. They’re checking her out of the hospital now.”