Rashad counted off the seconds in his head. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.
Jerald removed his cap.
A sudden, deafening roar boomed. The men froze, staring atthe night sky as if a thunderstorm had managed to sneak up on them. The dogs fled. A terrible buzzing, the sizzle of lightning crackling like a living thing, rose from all about them. Confused, Monteleone turned around, perhaps to check for cover. Or run. His men began a slow retreat. A massive ominous plume carried the smell of burning chemicals. Yet it seemed to hover, a thick cloud unmoved by the wind, settling over the Three Percenters like a living shroud.
Panic erupted.
As the men clawed at the air, their screams were choked off by their gagging coughs. The eerily iridescent cloud clung low to the ground, creeping across it like a vengeful lion on a hunt. Some clutched their throats, their eyes bulging, the veins in their necks engorged, desperate to draw breath. They stumbled about, lost in the haze, blinded by the treatment. Monteleone scrabbled toward Rashad but stopped at his feet before collapsing into convulsions. His lips twitched in a cruel spasm.
The plume rose, leaving nothing but agonized bodies writhing on the ground. It hovered briefly above Rashad before it dissipated in the heavens.
Rashad sifted the black soil of the Blufton farm through his hand, snapping the image of it with his camera. He needed the shot for his exhibit documenting the stories of Lyles Station. The news reported waves of cancer deaths in Princeton. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had dispatched a team to investigate. He couldn’t help but be reminded of how when crack swept through his community, the powers that be called it a “crime epidemic,” but when opioids ripped through other communities,authorities deemed it a “health crisis.” The moral arc of the times changed only in inches.
Dusting his hands off, he swaggered toward a truck being loaded with fruit for a farmers’ market. Glancing at a crate, he began to sing to himself.
“Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ ’em in a basket.”
Dog-Eared
Kim Harrison
Part 1
Al stared in horror at his book, his frock coat’s tails swishing as he snatched the demon text from the scratched floorboards where Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos had left it. The need to break the fluid bubble of energy he’d been summoned into so he could strangle the scrawny human became an ache. His book was ruined, the handwritten pages swelled from water and the binding nearly falling off. True, it was over two thousand years old, but it had been intact three days ago.
“What did you do to it?” he croaked, his gloved hands shaking as he found a page bent to mark a favored spell.Mother pus bucket. How big a cretin do you need to be to dog-ear a curse?
Thin and heavily scarred, the magic-using human ran a nervous hand over his jeans and resettled himself in the folding chair set to face the well-drawn, blood-enforced circle. The lights were low behind him, probably to hide that his one-room apartment was just above the poverty line—even if it was filled withesoteric books. At least the wizard wasn’t summoning him into a closet anymore. “Sorry?”
Al dropped the book in disgust, simultaneously materializing an ornate podium for it to land on. The heavy tome hit with a thump, and Nick jumped.
You should be nervous, little wizard,Al thought, the lace at his cuffs shaking as he cataloged the damage, easing out the earmarks as he found them. “This is not the condition in which I lent it to you,” he said, his pretentious, Victorian-age British accent clearly conveying his disgust. The scent of burnt amber rising from the damp pages was making his eyes water. No wonder he had been summoned early. The stench would travel through the thin walls like an ugly argument.
“Oh. Sorry,” Nick said again, smiling to show his teeth. “I fell asleep reading it.”
“In the tub? You were reading a two-thousand-year-old demon text in thetub?”
Nick stood, his motions holding a worried quickness as he went to tweak the ratty curtains shut more certainly. “Are you saying you never have?”
“I have never dropped it!” Al flipped the book closed and held it close, not surprised to feel an ache running through it, stemming from the nearby ley lines. The once-smooth energy flow was erratic. It might even out when the pages dried. It might not. It was as if the book was in pain, and Al forced his jaw to unclench. There was a time to be the all-powerful demon bent on destruction…and there was a time to be the helpless slave caught between a salt circle and the ever-after. But really, there was no difference between the two but for attitude.
“I didn’t write it,” he said, teeth clenched. “Which means Ican’t repair it. Banish me. We are done, Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos. The cost of dealing with you is too high.”
Nick’s eyes widened as he stood before Al, his fingers twitching. “What’s the big deal? You can still read it.”
“I assumed it would be returned in the same condition I lent it to you.” Al’s breath shook as he exhaled, breathing upon the barrier between them until the thin haze of distorted time began to hiss and pop.Testing…
A smile quirked the annoying human’s lips. “You said it. Only an ass assumes. I returned it. It’s in your hand. Do you want to know more about Rachel or not? I’m the only one with enough guts to summon you and close enough to her to give you what you need.”
Al pulled back from the barrier, his goat-slitted eyes narrowing. It was irritating, but the wizard was right. The man before him was a supreme example of how thin the population of acceptable familiars had become. But all things bow before an all-consuming goal, and Rachel Mariana Morgan was worth a book or two.As long as I’m the only one who knowswhatshe is…
Hiding his ire, Al brushed a fluff of nonexistent fluff from his overdone Victorian finery. It was criminally outdated, but Ceri liked it. Chin high, he snapped his fingers, and both the book and the podium vanished. “That depends,” he said with an affected calm. “There will be no more mutilating of my books. And there will be no books at all unless you are willing to give me something truly worthwhile.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not telling you how she likes her sex, so forget it.”
A smile, ugly and mean, cracked Al’s expression. He would. Eventually. With the right bait. “Then banish me,” he demandedagain, knowing it wouldn’t happen. Not yet. Nick was too greedy, too selfish. “Or I will claw my way out of this circle and breakyourspine. See how you like me folding your arms backward to mark my favorite parts of your screaming.”
Nick paled, and Al’s eyes closed as he relished the scent of the wizard’s sweat making it through the barrier. “If you could get out, you would have already.” Nick settled his feet firmly on the old oak floorboards as if he had control of the situation. He didn’t. “What will you give me for how she likes her coffee?”
