Letting his thoughts drift back toward the girl wasn’t as distracting as the weird compulsion that had left him like a dream as soon as he touched his lighter, but it was a perfectly kosher way of occupying his mind while he waited for a plan to occur to him. Habit made him pat his breast pocket and he was pleasantly surprised to find a pack of ectoplasmic cigarettes in there.
He patted again, his hopes rising, but he no longer seemed to have his lighter. He remembered why and looked over at it, tied shut and imprisoned under glass up on Lia’s crowded bookshelf. He sneered bitterly.
“Story of my goddamn life,” he muttered.
Chapter Ten
Potter’s Yard was fast becoming a seductive oasis of deepening shadow and saturated color by the time the women emerged from the doortube, swinging first one leg and then the other out over its concrete lip, but Lia could only look pensively up at the still-bright sky. Her tom twined about her ankles, anxiously.
Hannah, as shaken as a martini by the experience of meeting Dexter Graves, didn’t quite know what to say.
“We don’t have much time,” Lia murmured, talking mostly to herself. There were only a few hours left before dark. It wasn’t yet two in the afternoon, but night fell early at this time of year.
Hannah looked back at Bag End’s doortube: that innocuous concrete cylinder poking up out of the earth. “Are you really gonna leave him down there?” she asked, in reference to the magically-incarcerated Mr. Graves.
“I guess,” Lia said absently. “It’ll keep him out of the way. Right now I’ve got other things to worry about.”
Hannah followed when Lia strode off through the plants, headed toward the parking lot and the distant office shack.
“Lia?” she said tentatively, brushing aside the foliage that swatted at her as she hurried to keep up. “How’d you know you could, you know, do what you did? To him, back there? Trapping him like that, I mean. Dexter.”
“I could do as much to you if I wanted.”
Hannah stopped in the middle of the path.
Lia realized what she’d said and stopped, too. She turned and saw that her friend was genuinely frightened- this time of her. It was not a nice feeling. “I don’t, though,” she said quickly. “Want to. I won’t. I mean, I
“I don’t know what I know right now,” Hannah said.
Lia winced. She wondered, not for the first time, if telling Hannah the truth about what she was had ever been a good idea. They’d discussed it before, a time or two, but the poor thing had never fully accepted that being a ‘witch’ entailed more than wearing too much black and enjoying books about mythology.
“Hannah, look, I’m sorry,” she said, striving for patience despite her own growing anxiety. “But there’re more things like your pal Dexter on the way and I have to be ready for them. Before dark.”
Hannah looked unwell. “More?” she gulped.
“Yes, and we can talk about it all later, but right now I have a lot to do and it might be safer if you’re not here.”
“But… I can help,” Hannah said. “I can stay. I
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to, though. I do.” She added: “I can’t just
Lia had to smile. Hannah was more fascinated than afraid. Lia was both touched by her concern and proud of her excitement in the face of events that went far beyond the scope of her previous experience. “Okay. Good,” she said. “I don’t really think I have time to finish everything by myself anyway. I can use a hand.”
Hannah nodded, looking both pleased and apprehensive, like a soldier hand-picked for dangerous duty.
“You go home, though, if you get scared, okay? I won’t hold it against you.”
Hannah nodded again. “Just tell me what we need to do,” she said.
Lia tied a hasty dreamcatcher from red thread and gave it to Hannah, who hung it, alongside many others, high up in the trees. They looked like scarlet webs spun by nightmare spiders.
It was arts and crafts time for Lia, with an emphasis on the Craft.
Tom hung about, watching the women work as the day’s late light grew warmer and the shadows grew longer, pointing like heavy, black fingers toward the east. There wasn’t a lot he could do to assist; it was now up to Lia to apply the knowledge he’d given her over all the years of their acquaintance.
The first task she assigned herself was to spraypaint creepy, staring blue eyes, dozens of them in many sizes, all down the outside of the nursery’s wooden fence. Hannah consented to the vandalism without so much as a word about property values.
Tom’s (and now Lia’s) theory was that to ‘Those Who Are Not Our Brothers,’ even rudimentary symbols are alive and imbued with power. It meant that the unblinking stares of her warding eyes would be agony for Mictlantecuhtli’s demon women to endure, and best of all, with a little deflective hex added in they wouldn’t even understand why.
Lia next decided a little math magic might be in order. The number Pi, she’d been told, represents a crack in reality’s mathematical rationality, one that unwary otherworlders might easily stumble into. She therefore instructed Hannah to paint a string of red numbers all around the eyeball-bedecked fence. 3.1415etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and so on. Han checked the digits against a computer printout as she went, starting at the top of the front gate and spiraling them around the Yard’s perimeter in descending rings, all the way down to the ground.
Encountering such a sequence, the cut-down consciousness of a typical imaginal feels compelled to follow it all the way out to its logical end. Pi, as far as Lia knew, had been calculated well past its billionth decimal, although the actual end was nowhere in sight.
Next, she stuck a USB drive into the aging computer attached to the office cash register. A Solitaire window popped up on the screen and laid out a game, seven cards, face up. Lia saw a story in the sequence. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Then the program glitched, blanked, and restarted in a new window, laying out a new game. Another window popped up, and then another, each dealing out a hand of cards and disappearing, but not before two new games opened in its place. They rapidly filled up the screen.
The program on the portable drive was something she’d gotten from her old friend Riley, who was, by his own description, an accomplished mathmagician. (Or technomancer-he’d vacillated between the terms for years, like he meant to put the to-be-determined favorite on a business card someday.) It was essentially a magic trick, an illusion, one designed to make the area around its point of deployment look like Union Station at rush hour, to a certain sort of eyes. It made the cash register’s old computer system into a large-bore conduit for a constant stream of fresh identities-symbolized lives dealt out by the score and swept away again just that quick. Playing cards were originally derived from the symbols of the Tarot deck, and so otherworlders feel inclined to link them with personality traits and potential destinies. The point of the buggy software was to weave an opaque curtain from false threads of fate.
Lia watched hand after hand, life after life, cluttering up the computer screen. She nodded in satisfaction and quit the office, leaving the program to run unsupervised. Finding her through such an elaborate screen of semiotic disinformation should’ve been impossible, now.
But then, these Tzitzimime were surprising things. Witless and not that hard to manipulate, but surprising, too. It was hard to know if what she knew was going to be enough to deal with them.
She sat down in a little clearing she’d arranged at the quiet center of the Yard, on the bare ground and amidst a profusion of foliage that blazed in tones of green, gold and delicate orange as the smoldering, late-day light poured through it. She closed her eyes to compose herself. Her tom sat down beside her and dropped into a similar state of psychic quiescence (which comes naturally enough to a cat), and together they activated Lia’s symbolized intentions.
It was a sacred, silent moment for the both of them. Lia fancied she could feel the pull of the imminent moon
