The lot was just as bad. Though clearly once a fanciful garden full of benches, stone paths, and cutesy statuary, the side and front yards were now a jungle of ornamental plants gone wild. Bushes ten feet tall battled elephant-sized tufts of pampas grass for every inch of arable land, devouring the poured cement garden statues of cupids and angels until all that remained were their weather-stained hands reaching up out of the vegetation like victims of the Blob. And then, of course, there were the cats.
Julius didn’t normally see cats. Felines of all types had a natural nose for magic that could sense a dragon a mile away, sealed or not. Here, though, there were catseverywhere. Maybe they were too muddled by the thick magic of this place to notice his arrival, or maybe they just didn’t care, but everywhere Julius looked, there they were, hiding in the overgrown bushes and peering out through the ivy of the collapsed roof. Still more watched from the house’s dusty windows, their eyes bright with feral wariness as they followed Marci’s car around the back of the house where it eventually rolled to a stop in front of the collapsing back porch.
“I can see why you were desperate,” Julius said as they got out of the car.
“Yeah, well, a roof’s a roof,” Marci grumbled, walking around the tree sized azalea bushes to the dug in cement stair that led down to the house’s basement, scattering cats as she went. “Mrs. Hurst was my first customer when I got into town. I took care of a spirit that was giving her trouble, but she didn’t have the money for my fee. We were still working it out when her son heard about the incident and sent his mother a plane ticket to come live with him in Chicago. So, since she wasn’t going to be here anymore, the old lady said I could stay rent-free in lieu of payment until they sold the house. Free was about my price range at the time, so I took it. Not exactly the Ritz, I know, but something’s better than nothing, right?”
Not always, Julius thought, casting another skeptical look at the house’s sagging foundations. He didn’t want to be insulting, though, and it wasn’t likehewas going to be living here, so he followed Marci down the steps and into the basement without a word.
Given the state of the house above, he’d braced for the worst, so Julius was shocked when he stepped through the basement door into a neat, well-lit space. It was still a basement with a cement floor and ground-level windows set high on the cracked brick walls, but unlike anything else he’d seen in this place, it was immaculately clean. Or, at least, part of it was.
The basement was as huge as the house above it, but only half of it was nice. The half by the door was bordered by a strip of yellow plastic caution tape covered in spell scribbling. On their side of the plastic line, it was a clean, orderly space that smelled faintly of artificial lemon. On the other side, it was chaos.
Beyond the line made by the yellow tape, filthy, sodden trash lay in huge piles. Julius couldn’t even see far enough back to spot the stairs that led up to the house itself. His view was blocked by mountains of discarded boxes, old clothes, broken furniture, stacks of old magazines, and cats. Uncountable cats, their eyes gleaming from the shadows as Marci clicked on the tall parlor lamp sitting on top of the mini fridge in the corner.
“Don’t worry,” she said, nodding at the caution tape. “The cats can’t get through the ward. It keeps out the smell, too. You would not believe what this place was like when I got here.”
Julius believed it just fine. “Free or not, why would you live down here?”
If he’d thought better of it, he wouldn’t have put the question quite that way. Fortunately, Marci didn’t seem offended.
“It fit my needs,” she said with a shrug. “My father died suddenly Tuesday night, and I ended up having to move in kind of a hurry. I haven’t had time to pick up my Residency ID yet, and I don’t have a stable source of income, which makes it kind of hard to get a lease even in the DFZ. I’ve just been trying to roll with the punches and make do.”
She’d certainly done that, Julius thought, looking over the tiny island of order and cleanliness she’d carved from the vast, disgusting sea of trash and cats. In addition to the mini fridge and the lamp, she’d acquired a couch and a gigantic wooden wardrobe that looked like it might contain Narnia. There was also a large, open square of floor off to the side that was covered in chalk casting circles, which he assumed must be her workspace. Not bad at all for someone who’d only been here…
“Wait,” Julius said. “Tuesday? Like, three days ago?” When she nodded, he cursed himself for an insensitive idiot. “My condolences for the loss of your father.”
Marci’s face fell for a split second, but then she was right back to business, throwing open the doors of the huge wardrobe to reveal, sadly not fur coats and a snowy forest with a lamppost, but a neatly organized collection of magical paraphernalia, which was far more useful at the moment. “Thanks,” she said. “I miss him a lot. But hey, at least I haven’t had time to dwell on it, right? Hard to be sad when you’re under an endless siege of cats.”
Her voice was bright and cheery, but Julius’s ears were tuned for dragons, and he could hear the falseness of her words clear as a bell. But it was neither his problem nor his place to call out her deception, so he let it go. He had to, anyway, because Marci was shoving an intricately carved wooden box into his face. “Hold this a sec.”
He did, using both hands when the box proved much heavier than it looked. It was also vibrating slightly, the little motions making the paper seal on the lid flutter like a flag in a high wind. Julius grimaced and moved the box to arm’s length. Family competition aside, this sort of creepiness was the other reason he’d stayed away from serious magic.
“So,” he said as Marci climbed up into the wardrobe to grab a meticulously labeled box of multicolored casting chalk off the top shelf. “You’re from Nevada?”
“Las Vegas,” she said proudly. “My dad and I used to have a magical solutions business there.”
That explained her card. “What kind of solutions?”
“All kinds,” Marci said. “Though we specialized in curse breaking. Las Vegas is a vengeful town, and that makes good business for both sides of the curse market.” She paused. “I was also going to school at UNLV for my doctorate in Thaumaturgical theory, but I had to quit when my dad died.”
“That’s too bad.”
She shrugged. “Nothing to be done. It was probably for the best, though. I was getting tired of the limits of academic magic.”
The false ring in her voice was back again when she said this, and again, Julius ignored it. He didn’t think she was lying outright this time, more like telling only half the story. That was still enough to make him uneasy, but considering he hadn’t told her a hundredth of his story, it was far simpler to just let it lie. He kept his mouth shut as he followed her over to the interlocking magical circles she’d drawn on the cement.
“Give me a moment to redraw these and we’ll get started,” she said, grabbing a dry mop from the corner and using it like an eraser, scrubbing the circles off the cement with a few deft strokes.
“What was wrong with the old ones?”
“Totally inappropriate initial casting parameters,” Marci said, putting the mop away and selecting a fresh piece of gold-colored chalk from the box she’d pulled out of the wardrobe. “Is this your first time watching Thaumaturgy in action?”
This was his first time watching a human cast anything, but before he could say as much, Marci charged right ahead.
“Thaumaturgy is the best form of magic,” she said in the bright, excited tone of someone getting a chance to explain something she truly loved. “It’s the process of using logical spell notation to create detailed instructions that tell the magic how to behave. Watch, it all starts with a circle.”
She grabbed a metal folding chair leaning against the wall and taped the stick of chalk to its leg. Before Julius could ask why, she unfolded the chair halfway, stamped the back leg down, and then, using the half-folded chair like a protractor, she touched the foot with the chalk taped to it against the cement floor and spun the chair like a top, drawing a perfect circle. Julius watched, dumbstruck. Apparently, Marci Novalli’s ability to make do extended to all sorts of things.
