Sigils and spells, p.40
Sigils & Spells, page 40
He scribbled something on a piece of paper as he talked, and then folded it back into a little square, and put it into an envelope.
“Just because I don’t know anything doesn’t mean there is nothing to know.” he sealed the envelope by folding it in half, and walked back to where Minho and I sat. “Take this to Ruby. She might be able to tell you something more helpful.”
I frowned. “Ruby? Minho’s girlfriend?”
They both ignored me. Minho looked from the envelope to Sterling. “What is it?”
“My notes. Things she might be able to use to help you figure out what’s going on. “Sterling gave me a warm smile. “I hope you figure out what is happening to you. And even if you aren’t a werewolf, if you think it would be beneficial to you at all, feel free to come with Minho to a W. A. meeting. We spend a lot of time helping people who have been suddenly shoved from what they thought was the real world into this one. It can be a lot to handle.”
I nodded numbly. “Thank you.”
“Thanks Sterling.” Minho stood, and I followed suit. “I’m sorry to wake you up so early.”
The older man waved him off. “No problem. My gates are always open to my pack.”
Minho’s face shifted a little, and it looked almost like he was glowing. He looked proud. Like his father had just patted him on the back.
The two men led us to the door, and we thanked them as Kent handed me a baggie full of crackers.
When the doors closed behind the old werewolf couple, Minho and I looked out the front window and stared. Night was turning gray around us, and I could feel the dark circles hanging from my eyes like weights. The ease Sterling’s presence had brought me was gone.
“He’s cool.” I said finally. It didn’t seem to properly match how I felt about that man. In awe was more accurate. I’d met him for only a second, but I’d probably march off a cliff if he told me it would be okay. “So the people who come to the W.A. are like a pack?”
Minho rubbed his eyes aggressively with both fists, looking a little like a child. “Yeah. I love them. Not everyone that comes to the meetings are part of the pack. And there are members who don’t come to the meetings. The W.A. meetings are just for support. There is, like, a ritual for joining the pack. ”
He yawned. I yawned.
“How did he do that?”
“Do what?”
“I don’t know he just…” I rolled my hand, looking for the word, “he just felt so… important. Like he could have said anything and I would have had to listen. He felt calm, I guess. Being near him made me feel better?”
“Oh, right.” Minho started the car. “It’s because he’s the Alpha. They don’t work the same way they do in like those horny books. He’s not, like, dominant, I guess. Like I said, it works more like real wolves, he becomes like the parent of the pack. He’s the caretaker, and some werewolves just become an alpha, or a caretaker when they’re made. He doesn’t dominate, he guides and soothes, I guess. The effects work on everyone. That’s how he’s so rich, he’s a celebrity therapist.”
“Huh.” I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Just that I’d gladly tell that man every thought I’d ever had. Or even give him all my money if he told me he was proud of me. “Universal dad.”
“Basically.” Minho started towards home.
After a few minutes of dim sky and the flashing of trees out the window, I said, “What now?”
Minho yawned again. “Now we find Ruby. She’ll have the answers. She always does.”
“Oh yeah, what on earth does your girlfriend have to do with any of this?”
Minho’s face cracked into a little smile, “You’ll see.”
YOU’VE GOT TO BE SHIFTING ME
The sun had just crested its head over a pink horizon when we pulled down the gravel driveway of the Brambles farm. Even so, a few people already milled around the animals and their pens. A distant moo mingled with the familiar snap and pop of gravel under the tires.
I’d been on the farm a few times. It was always picturesque and pleasant like something out of Little House on the Prairie. Minho and I had gone to school with Ruby, and we’d been almost friends for a few years when she and Minho dated in high school.
I recognized her as Minho’s truck came to a stop by the end of the driveway, near a pen where a few dairy cows dozed. Ruby stood at the end of the driveway like she’d been expecting us, a pissed looking rooster tucked under one of her arms like a misbehaving child.
I hadn’t seen Ruby since high school. She and Minho had only started dating a few months ago and we had just kept missing each other until now. She looked different but not unrecognizable. She’d always been small and slightly round, with not a single sharp edge on her. Even her glasses were big and round with thin wire frames. Her hair was shoulder length and pink. She’d always been cute, but the couple years since I’d seen her had done her well. She looked more comfortable in her skin than I remembered.
Minho hopped out of the truck before I did and I saw Ruby smile as he kissed her on the cheek.
I clambered out of the truck, catching the end of Ruby saying, “—this early in the morning?”
“What? I can’t just visit my girl?” He seemed revived by seeing her, but I was still just as sleepy and almost lost my balance as my feet hit the gravel. I could feel Ruby look at me.
“Julian?”
I straightened. “Hey, Ruby. Looking good.”
She smiled, but the smile faded as she looked at me. I wondered briefly what the state of my hair could possibly be, before she looked at Minho with a stony expression.
“Minho what happened?” Stony didn’t fit her face well. Her face was made for soft expressions, but somehow I knew that if she looked at me like that I’d have to answer her.
Minho grimaced and fished in his pocket for the envelope from Sterling. “That’s the problem. We’re not sure.”
Ruby looked at me again, accepting the envelope, and set down the chicken, who walked away clucking grumpily. “Come with me, and tell me everything.”
Ruby read whatever was on the paper while we walked and I talked. She led us around the back of the farm house, to what looked like a vamped up shed and ushered us inside while I still talked. I still didn’t know why Ruby would know anything about the situation, but I understood as soon as I stepped inside. The inside of the shed for a moment confused the hell out of my brain.
For one, the shed, from the outside, couldn’t have been more than ten by ten feet, but inside…it had to have been as big as our apartment. There were bookshelves and desks, a cauldron, bundles of scented herbs hung from one wall, and jars of who knows what.
Ruby was a witch.
I must have been slack jawed, because Ruby had to shoo me further into the room. She scanned the note again and again, though it really didn’t look like there was that much on it.
“Ok.” She furrowed her eyebrows, and pointed to a purple arm chair that sat in the middle of a detailed chalk circle. “You. Sit.”
I resisted the urge to say ‘yes ma’am’ and sat, “-and then Sterling told us to come to you.”
“Well, you’re not a werewolf.”
Minho collapsed onto a couch that matched the chair. “That’s the problem. But no, that’s too easy.”
Ruby hushed him, and walked over to a chalkboard, and reached into her rainboot, pulling out a stick about as long as her forearm with twisting designs I couldn’t make out from here, and a honking huge red gemstone—most likely a Ruby. A wand. She waved the wand at the board muttering to herself and a piece of chalk floated up and started writing in a legible cursive.
It wrote: Flour, Apples, Titania, Maeve, Toad Stools, Horse, Strawberries, and Elfhame. Then under the list, it wrote fairy dust put in his drink.
“What does that mean?”
Ruby put the note in her overall pocket and put her hands on her hips, “This is what Sterling smelled on you that he thought might give me some idea about what’s going on.”
“Does it?”
Ruby turned back to me, and I couldn’t read the expression in her face. “I don’t know. Maybe a bit.”
“Exactly what happened between you leaving the bar and you going home? Tell me literally every detail.”
So much had happened since then that I’d forgotten about the dream entirely, but it all came rushing back to me suddenly. I told Ruby about jumping out of the car, and falling asleep in a ring of mushrooms and the dream I’d had after I passed out. The ethereal party. The apple I’d taken a single bite of, and the woman made of a tree who seemed like she wanted to kill me before I woke up.
Ruby’s face morphed from ambiguous to absolute horror as I talked, and I found my own chest clenching as I described the dream. It hadn’t felt relevant until this moment, but now… it was probably important.
Ruby closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She took a long breath. “Julian Sanchez. Have you read any book ever?”
“Well, yeah, but The Martian doesn’t really give any helpful pointers on the situation.”
Ruby made a sound of exasperation, and pointed at the board, yelling, “You dumbass! That wasn’t a dream! You went to Elfhame!”
“Where?”
“Elfhame!” Ruby waved her wand again and the chalk circled the world in the list. “Fairyland! You can’t go in a fairy circle after midnight! You especially can’t fall asleep in one!”
I blinked at her. “Fairies?” I looked at Minho who was watching the conversation with a stunned exhaustion. “Fairies?”
Minho rubbed his eyes again. “Fairies, man.”
“So… What” I looked at the board. “What does that list mean? I’m still super lost.”
Ruby huffed, pushing some of her pink hair behind her ears. “Okay, so fairy circles—or fairy rings, or mushroom circles—are entrances to Elfhame. And they are the worst way to get there because they are normally directly tied to one of the Fae Nobles who enslave humans by tricking them into thinking they’re at parties and getting them to eat something. Once you eat something in Elfhame you can’t leave, and that Noble owns you forever. When humans consume fairy dust they get drawn to Elfhame. Sometimes they go crazy if they can’t get there. The dust pulls at them from the inside.”
“So, that’s what happened to me?” I sat forward in the chair. My heart was beating fast in my chest. Ruby nodded.
“That’s my working theory. Whoever that guy was, he was a Fae of some kind sending humans to Elfhame on purpose. The drink wasn’t meant for you, but when you drank it you got sent to Elfhame instead. And the only reason you were able to leave was because you didn’t actually finish the apple. That’s why she got so angry. Most people can’t stop themselves after they’ve taken a bite. You must hate apples.”
“I do, but,” I pointed at the board over her shoulder, “What are those names? And what do strawberries and flour have to do with it?”
“I don’t know about the last two, but Sterling thought it was important. As for the names.” Ruby flicked her wrist as she talked, and the chalk circled the names. “Titania and Maeve. Maeve is a Fae Noble. A nasty one too. Titania is the Fae Queen. The head honcho. Sterling smelled both of them on you.”
My eyes felt like they were bugging out of my head again and I had to sit back. “How… why… there was only one fairy lady in my dream… I mean my not-dream. And none of this explains how I keep waking up naked in random places.”
Ruby pursed her lips, pinching her chin in deep thought. I sat back in my seat and reread the board. Flour, Apples, Titania, Maeve, Toad Stools, Horse, Strawberries, and Elfhame. Everything on it made sense. I’d been near them all in the past two days, and if Sterling’s sense of smell was really that strong it made sense. I tried to place them all. The flour from when I’d been kneading dough with Magnolia, and the strawberries from the scent in Alice’s apartment. Horse from waking up naked underneath one.
As important and riveting as the conversation was, it looked like my roommate had fallen asleep on the couch behind Ruby. His feet were propped up in a way that made it look like he should have a cowboy hat over his eyes.
Looking at Minho, I missed Ruby walking across the room to a table full of jars and bottles. She gathered a handful of what looked like roots, petals and spices, and poured them into an empty mug with a cat wearing a scarf on the front. Ruby put her hands on her hips and looked at the table for a second, before reaching into a drawer and pulling out a small bottle of purple liquid that seemed to swirl and sparkle on its own. She uncorked it, a little swirl of purple smoke floating past her head, and stirred about half of it into the mug with the end of her wand, muttering something I couldn’t understand and came back to me.
“Drink this.” She handed me the drink which smelled awful. Like cough syrup’s evil older brother. I raised my eyebrows and she gave me a look that convinced me very quickly to drink. I plugged my nose and threw the weird potion back like a shot.
It heated and gurgled in my stomach as soon as it went down. I shifted uncomfortably on the chair, pressing a hand into my abdomen. Ruby stepped back, out of the chalk circle and closed her eyes. She drew something in the air with her wand that left a fiery red ghost mark behind. She kept her eyes closed and whispered something I couldn’t understand under her breath over and over.
For some reason I closed my eyes too. Listening to the sound of her voice. It was almost like I could hear the sizzle of the magic trace in the air. She chanted for what could have been a moment, or what could have been eternity, I was so tired they blended together.
Suddenly Ruby stopped chanting and yelped. “Oh my god!”
I opened my eyes in time to watch Ruby scramble back, tripping over the carpet. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but I realized that something was wrong with me. I felt weird, and everything looked different. Like I’d suddenly gotten taller. Like the room was smaller.
“What’s going on?” I tried to say but it was like my mouth didn’t work right and the sound that came out was… a whiney?
“Oh my god!” Ruby repeated. “Julian, you’re not a werewolf. You’re a HORSE!”
If I’d had a human mouth a lot of expletives would have come out of it, but instead, for some reason all I could make was loud snorts and whinnies. I am not a horse!
I tried to turn around, but I found that I was so much larger than I had been a minute ago. My butt knocked something over, and then I realized how far away my butt was. It was not normally that far away from my head. Neither were my legs.
Oh my god. I was a horse. A loud whinny escaped my mouth and I realized I was only kind of in control of this body that wasn’t quite mine, and I reared up on hind legs that had never felt so powerful. Terror filled me, and my heart felt so much louder than it had before, but I also felt… different. I felt so much stronger than I had. There was power in my legs. I could feel muscles move as I fell back to all fours. I was breathing hard. The world looked weird. I was seeing so much more of it than I was used to. I could see around me, but not straight in front of me. I blinked hard, trying to make sense of what almost felt like a fish lens. I saw Ruby. I tried to focus on her. The longer I looked the easier it got to understand what I was seeing.
Ruby approached me with one hand out like she was about to bond with a dragon for the first time. “Julian. Hey, it’s okay. I think I know what’s happening. I can undo this, ok? At least for now.”
She put a hand on my snout—I had a snout—and pet it gently. It was very calming, and since I was a horse, not at all weird somehow. Though absolutely all of this was weird as balls.
“Close your eyes and listen again, ok?”
I did what she said, and heard her step back and mutter the same things she had before, and the air sizzled around the end of her wand as she traced the spell in the air.
I took a deep breath, and all at once I felt normal again. I couldn’t place what it was, but I felt weaker again, and the world smelled different.
I cracked my eyes open. I was laying sprawled on the ground like a giant had tossed me. Worried I was naked again I sat bolt upright, covering my privates, only to discover I was still dressed.
I tried to stand, but my legs were noodles gave out from under me. I ended up sitting cross-legged. Ruby was looking at me in deep thought, wand tucked under her arm.
“Huh.” She said.
“Huh? What do you mean huh? Why am I a horse!” I demanded.
Ruby made a face and sat on the ground across from me, resting her head in her hands. “Ugh, I don’t know, let me think.”
I sat and I let her think. Not even a second later Ruby sat upright and swung her wand in the air, saying in a very clear voice, “Go Fish.”
From across the room, a thick leather-bound book with yellowing pages floated off a shelf and into Ruby’s raised hand.
She placed it on the floor and I had just enough time to see the title, “Fae Folk: Laws and Elfhame Customs” before she flipped it open and scanned down the table of contents and flipped to the part she needed.
“How is ‘go fish’ a spell?”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s about intention,” she said distractedly. “It’s complicated but I can prepare a bunch of spells for basic things that I have associated with the action the spell performs. Go Fish, Open Sesame, Firefly. It’s different for every witch, because you can make up your own. Sometimes they’re pop culture references. It’s about channeling the magic into the intention of the words.”
She said it like she’d explained it a million times before. I had a million more questions about witches and magic and what else was out there besides witches and fairies and werewolves, but before I could ask them Ruby turned the conversation back to the topic at hand.
“Ok, so it says here one of the enslavements that the Fae use sometimes is one of transformation. It’s trickier than regular enslavements. I spent months learning about Fae shit from my Uncle, but I don’t remember talking about this. It looks like it’s normally used when Fae want a new cat or dog or…” She trailed off and looked at me. “Or horse.”
