Jake's Women (Wizards) Page 18

  Betty shook her head. She reached out and placed two fingers of her right hand on my forehead and her eyes glinted gold.

  “When you hear the words ‘I used you as my gun’ it will be time to let go. Remember that.”

  I closed my eyes and I drifted to sleep for a few seconds. When I opened them again Betty had moved even closer.

  “Jenny is waiting for you at her parents. She knows you will discharge yourself as soon as you find your clothes.”

  Betty stooped lower to kiss me, and it wasn’t a kiss on the cheek. When she let me up for air I was gasping.

  “You’re much more fun now your magic has stopped making you stupid.”

  She left the room with a cheery wave while I tried to make sense of those words. What did she mean? My magic had made me stupid?

  Discharging myself proved difficult. The nurse called a doctor who told me that I was anemic to the point of death with no sign of what had caused it, and that I should stay in for further tests. When I said ‘no’ they got in a legal guy who made me sign a release that said the hospital would be blameless if I dropped dead at the exit. Eventually they brought me my clothes and I left the hospital to find a quiet spot to hop to Jenny’s bedroom.

  The room was empty, but there were voices downstairs. As I approached the lounge I heard Esmeralda shouting.

  “Next time I’m going to pin him. He can get the bolt removed after he’s recovered.”

  I walked in to find my in-laws doting over Morgana and Merlin while Jenny and Esmeralda stood facing each other with their arms folded across their chests. Now I am not the best judge of these things, but it looked as though they were fighting as much as agreeing with each other. They turned to face me as I walked in.

  “I knew you wouldn’t stay in hospital,” Jenny said and opened her arms to me.

  I gave her a quick hug and a kiss. Esmeralda’s arms stayed firmly crossed though it must have cost her a great deal to let Jenny get one up on her by a hug and a kiss.

  “Do you have any idea how worried I have been?” Esmeralda said coldly.

  I was lost for an answer so I said nothing.

  “I watched you being nailed to a cross.”

  Esmeralda’s arms fell to her sides and she burst into tears. I stepped forward hesitantly and she came into my arms as sobs wracked her. Then she pushed me away just far enough to start hitting me, and she wasn’t pulling her punches.

  “Never, ever, do that to me again. Do you hear me?”

  I hugged her again, mainly to stop her hitting me. After a while she calmed and I was able to disengage.

  “It must have been horrible for you,” Jenny said quietly. “To have to watch Jake being hurt like that and stand helplessly by.”

  “We threw the bodies in the cesspit.”

  Jenny’s mother looked a bit upset at that comment. I was surprised Esmeralda hadn’t fed the bodies to the dogs. Probably afraid they would make the dogs sick.

  “Do I have to steal more ammunition for Captain Assad? His men must be running low on shells.”

  “That will not be necessary, Lord Wizard,” Esmeralda was back in Heir to the Throne mode.

  “I’ve got to go to the Bat Cave.” The need to escape from my wives was becoming unbearable. Especially from Esmeralda, as she was bringing back memories I didn’t want to remember. For a second I was back on the cross looking at my blood pooling below.

  Jenny reached over to the sideboard and handed me my mobile phone. For obvious reasons it wasn’t much good to me and I rarely carry it.

  “Take this. The estate agents are going to ring me back with another viewing time and I want you there. I’ll send you a text.”

  I took the phone and hopped before Esmeralda came up with a reason for me to stay.

  Fluffy was happily munching a flame grilled sheep and the smell was horrendous. I cleansed the air before addressing my dragon.

  “How dare you hop Esmeralda to Jenny’s house? Facing the two of them at once was a real pain.”

  [Jenny has been worried about you, though I do not know why. She did not call me and I have not been to Salice in days.]

  If Fluffy didn’t hop Esmeralda to Wales, then who did? I stored it in my unanswered questions to resolve list and apologized to my dragon.

  “Sorry. I thought it was you. I had a close call yesterday. The Cult again.”

  [It is hard to keep track of all your enemies, Jake. Perhaps we should make a chart?]

  “The walls aren’t big enough.”

  Fluffy snorted in laughter and flames shot across the room. I protected the furniture.

  [You appear troubled. Is there something I can do?]

  I sat on the sofa arm and eyed up my dragon. His iridescent orange and green scales glistened in the reflected light of the cave. The glass like walls reflected far more light than the old cave had done.

  “Betty told me that my magic has been making me stupid.”

  It was bothering me. I’d never been much of an academic and C was my best grade at school. Suppose I had stopped myself from being a genius?

  [Stupid is a harsh word. Your magic was not making you stupid. Well, not really, though I suppose it could be described as that.]

  Talk about splitting hairs, dragons can split hairs that have already been split earlier.

  “What was it doing then?”

  Fluffy hunkered down on the floor and put his head between his front legs and tilted his head up towards me. I automatically checked on how well his eyes were healing and saw they were almost grown.

  [You were… incurious, unimaginative, uncreative.]

  That sounded a lot like stupid to me. But what do I know?

  “And you’ve known all along?” That was worse somehow. That he’d known about the magic and not told me.

  [That magic was on you before I was hatched. It’s not something another wizard would see unless they knew it was there. But we are brothers and eventually I saw the magic for what it was.]

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

  [It was your magic. At first I thought you had put it there yourself. Later, I decided not to tell you because it was keeping you safe. It’s been dissipating of its own accord since the day you met Jenny.]

  I was lost. What did he mean?

  “How does being stupid keep you safe?”

  [Consider Bronwyn; a case of having too much power and imagination before she was able to handle it. All those abilities and no self control: The ability to hurt your parents if they discipline you, to take revenge, and exert mind control on the normal people. And last, but not least, the multiverse is not kind to hedge wizards. Other wizards hunt them down and kill them when they dare to stick their noses above the parapet.]

  I reran our conversation in my mind. Something I was prone to do these days.

  “You said, ‘at first I thought you had put it there yourself’. Who do you think put it there now?”

  Fluffy shook his head as if trying to drive away the question.

  [There are two possibilities. That you put it there yourself because something happened that traumatized you. The other option is that the magic put it there to protect you.]

  It was my turn to laugh out loud.

  “Magic isn’t sentient.”

  It occurred to me as I said it, that a couple of years ago I would never have used a word like sentient. Two years ago I wouldn’t have known what sentient meant.

  [Now we are talking theology. Some of the peoples of the multiverse believe that magic is alive. The Elves believe that living things and magic are indistinguishable, two sides of the same coin. That is one reason they live so close to the natural world.]

  “I don’t believe magic is alive and I don’t believe I put this spell on myself. I always wanted to do better at school and even tried using magic to make me cleverer.”

  [In that you were doomed to fail. While magic can affect the brain and make people appear stupid, it cannot change intelligence. What it can do is increase knowled
ge.]

  “Is the spell gone now?”

  I felt magical fingers probing into me and it was difficult not to throw up a shield.

  [Nothing remains of it.]

  A shiver ran through me. I had no idea why.

  “We shall have more words on this later.” I needed to get to the bottom of what my magic had done to me and why, but I’d just had an idea about how to help Auntie May.

  I took my mobile phone out of my pocket. “I’m going to try something that I don’t think has ever been tried by a wizard. I’m going to call a phone on another continent and see if I can hop to it.”

  Fluffy shook his head in mock sorrow. [The old dumb Jake has finally died. For better or worse the multiverse will have to live with the consequences.]

  “I’m sure I can keep on making mistakes, my friend. That doesn’t seem to have anything to do with intelligence.”

  [If anything, your imagination has got you into even greater trouble in recent times.]

  35. Through the Looking Glass

  I dialed the number and listened. After some rings that sounded nothing like the rings I was used to, the answer phone kicked in and I attempted to hop to the destination.

  I was disoriented for a few seconds as my consciousness seemed to be bouncing all over the place. Bursts of energy raced ahead of me while other energies slammed into me. I wasn’t in the real world and I certainly wasn’t in hop space, or not fully. I was following a pale yellow energy thread that was the echo of the bright white energy I was crashing through.

  None of it made any sense. Something in my head told me the yellow energy led to my destination. It was a tortuous trail, the yellow almost vanishing as it performed loops that somehow made it brighter. Where it went I went too, through filters and amplifiers that stretched, squeezed and boosted me every bit as much as they did the yellow light.

  I performed a million loops that made me dizzy before darting forward with increased vigor. There was no sense of size and I had no body. My consciousness was operating on its own and I wondered where the real me was. Was I in hop space or was I still sitting in the Bat Cave staring down at my phone?

  The yellow light disappeared into a matrix of tiny lights. About half the lights were dark; the others twinkled in a display that ran to the horizon and beyond. This must be my destination in the electronics, probably where the recorder was storing my message. There didn’t seem to be a way out. I was in a universe of electrons and I needed to get outside it.

  I imagined my consciousness growing in size and the matrix shrank from being the universe to becoming a small grey square plate about where my feet ought to be. My mind slipped through solids to immerge into a vast open space. I continued to expand and without warning the vast space became a room and I felt my body hop and reconnect with my mind.

  “What a rush,” I told the room before the after effects of my journey arrived. Doubling over, I felt as if I had just run a race. Struggling to avoid retching as everything appeared to be spinning; I waited for the nausea to go. The room finally came back into focus and I found myself staring at an answer phone. The number of unheard messages had reached fifty five according to the LCD counter.

  “I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore.” No one responded to my words because this room hadn’t had anybody in it in weeks or maybe months, based on the thickness of the layer of dust that covered everything.

  The air was musty, which was enough to bring me close to being sick again. I refreshed the air from outside and was struck by the tang in it. Running the air though the equivalent of a carbon filter, taking out the pollution and carbon monoxide content made it just about breathable. There could be no doubt that this apartment was in the middle of a city with a lot of cars.

  I was finally in a state to investigate the room. It was furnished in an anonymous style with generic couch, chairs and table. There was nothing of the individual about it. It could have been a hotel room almost anywhere. No books, no magazines, no personality of any kind. If Dafydd Williams lived here, he only used it as a stopover, not as a home.

  The rest of the apartment turned out to be equally unlived in. The bed was made and ready for occupancy, the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom was full and had a thin layer of dust on it. There was no food in the kitchen, though the refrigerator was on and there were no clothes in the bedroom. When I opened the fitted wardrobe I found a safe taking up most of the space inside. There were no coat hangers on the rail, which was fortunate as they would have been touching the top of the safe.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I told it, continuing my new quote fetish. With a physical effort I forced myself to say something that wasn’t a quote from a film. “I wonder what’s in you?”

  The safe had an electronic panel, a traditional tumbler, and a big key hole, not to mention its own opening wheel. I briefly considered cracking it in a traditional manner before curiosity got the better of me and I sliced off the door panel. Magic lifted the front of the safe away and I left it hovering by the bed.

  The half of the safe was filled with neatly stacked piles of paper money. They were in bundles and I picked up the nearest one. It was made up of hundred dollar bills. I started counting, but gave up at twenty. My guess was the bundle contained at least ten thousand US dollars.

  The next bundle was in sterling and the one below that was in euros. I picked up the top bundle at the other side and while it had the feel of currency, the notes were in no language I recognized and there was no Arabic number on it.

  That made me suspicious enough to scan the room for magic. Some of this money might be from other worlds. There wasn’t the slightest trace of magic except for the things I’d been doing. Scratch that idea.

  The middle of the safe was stacked with coinage wrapped in plastic in neat mostly cylindrical tubes. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. The bottom of the safe had metal bars of various sizes. The bars were of different metals; gold, silver, and other metals that could have been anything.

  All in all, there must be millions of whatever currency you fancied in this safe, but it was stored as impersonally as a bank. I maneuvered the front of the safe back to the body of it and did an invisible mend. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I removed all traces of my magic from the room and did the same for all the rooms in the apartment.

  Then, making sure I didn’t leave a trail, I hopped back to the Bat Cave.

  “Auntie May is going to be disappointed,” I said after fully briefing my dragon. “If he ever lived there, he doesn’t now. Maybe he’s a spy.”

  [It would not be impossible that he is also a wizard.]

  “I thought of that, because it might explain the money. But…” I scanned the cave, which was alive with traces of performed magic. “Wizards don’t clean up after themselves like that. There wasn’t a trace of magic in the room except for what I brought with me.”

  [A paranoid wizard might. And your bomber appears paranoid.]

  “He doesn’t have a motive to hate me. Unless you can think of one?”

  Fluffy shook his head.

  I picked up the phone and looked up Auntie May’s number. A few seconds later I was talking to her.

  “The apartment is empty and there’s no sign anyone has been living there recently.”

  Auntie May sighed. She sounded at the end of her tether.

  “There is no trace of him anywhere, and the place he worked isdenying he ever worked for them. I don’t know what to do.”

  “If I have any ideas I’ll get back to you.”

  Auntie May thanked me and hung up.

  “So that’s that then,” I said, dusting my hands together.

  [I doubt it, Jake. Not with your track record.]

  Before I could construct a suitably cutting remark the phone rang. A picture of Jenny appeared on it and I touched ‘answer’.

  “Jake, there was a cancelled viewing this morning and the estate agent says we can see the house now.”

  “Be with you in a moment
.”

  I ended the call and turned to Fluffy.

  “I’m going to see a house with Jenny. Do you think you can keep the cave free of Cultists until I get back?”

  [Can I roast anybody who drops in?]

  “Fine with me.”

  My dragon grinned evilly.

  I hopped.

  Jenny’s father eyed me up as I stood by the car.

  “No diversions to the hospital this time?”

  “I’ll try not to bother you.”

  Jenny said goodbye to Merlin and her mother, who had drawn babysitting duty. Jenny gave me a hug and dragged me into the back of the car.

  “Esmeralda’s gone home?” I asked.

  “Yes, about an hour ago.”

  I should have asked how, but Jenny dumped a couple of brochures in my lap and insisted I look through them with her.

  The house was located at 1, The Mount, which was an impressive sounding address, but was just the name of the road that led to the top of the hill where the house was located. And as the house was at the very top it got the number one. To buy it would cost us most of the money we had from the government. I had no idea if that made it a good deal, but Jenny believed it was a bargain.

  “It’s barely been touched since the sixties. The woman who owned it had lived there since the fifties and her family don’t want to spend money renovating it now she’s dead. Given I have my very own wizard it should be quick to fix up.”

  “Wizardry is a high calling, not to be used for designer kitchens.”

  “Well, you can just make an exception in this case, Jake Morrissey. If you don’t, I shall invite Esmeralda round all the time.”

  “Consider me your new interior decorator.”

  “Provided you use my designs,” Jenny said primly, but she looked delighted.

  “It has lots of land behind it and it’s secluded from the neighbors by leylandii hedges.”

  “This dead woman sounds like she was a bit of a recluse.” I hated those kind of hedges and wondered if I could do a bit of stealth gardening if we bought the place.

  “All the better for when Retnor comes to visit. Merlin dotes on him, you know.”