The Mage

one-2

“The mature North American nosferatu patrols the borders of his territory, ever wary of rivals.”

He paused beside his mailbox and looked up with a frown, and Kim ducked down out of fear that, somehow, he had heard her. Their hearing couldn't possibly be that sharp, could it? But he turned away and raised a hand in greeting to the very, very old woman across the street. Mrs. Meers, Kim thought. Or maybe Meyers. Anyway, the woman smiled right back and pushed her walker down the sidewalk to strike up a conversation. The vampire met her halfway so she wouldn’t have to negotiate the street and bent low to speak into her ear. Kim could see the exaggerated movement of his mouth as he over-enunciated to cut through senile deafness. Mrs. Meers dug through the basket on the front of her walker and handed him a plastic bag full of leathery, dark orange strips of something Kim couldn’t identify. Dried fruit, maybe, though Kim wasn’t sure what kind of fruit dried to that color. Papaya, she decided. The old lady gave the vampire a plastic baggie full of dried papaya. Okay, then.

They kept talking a few minutes longer before saying their goodbyes and turning back to their own homes. Kim lost sight of him and moved away from the window, finally bored enough to start thinking about picking up a school book. She didn’t have to worry about pop quizzes, or anything, but it would mightily suck to start school next year and, somehow, find that she had fallen behind. Extremely unlikely, but mightily sucky, all the same.

She had just stuck a pan of Jiffy Pop onto the stove and scrounged up a can of ginger ale when the doorbell rang. She froze. The walls around her shivered… But no, that was just her spine. But it was definitely the bricks that broke out in goosebumps… or was it her skin? She shook herself and backed up against the counter, taking a moment to get a grip. She felt tight, like she was being squeezed, or like she was doing the squeezing, constricting so the infection couldn’t get in…

“Ugh!” she groaned, pressing the heels of her hands hard against her temples. All of her was cold and clammy, like the beginnings of a fever. “Holy beans!”

She knew what it had to be, of course, but that didn’t make it any less strange. Her mother had done something to the house, laid some kind of protection over it, a warning system, and in Cynthia’s absence, the spell did the next best thing and warned Kim, instead. There was danger outside.

She was pretty sure she knew what kind of danger, too, and it occurred to her that having a warning system that made you feel the need to puke was sort of counterproductive. Maybe that sort of thing worked better for the person who had actually created it.

She took a few deep breaths until it no longer felt like her stomach was trying to climb up her throat and crept to the front door to peek out the peephole.

But all she could see was a shoulder.

Said shoulder was very high up, and despite the peephole’s distortion, she might have said it was thin, so she was reasonably certain that, if she opened the door, it would be Daniel Leland on the other side. She wasn’t certain, though.

If it was, she wasn’t too worried. A vampire couldn’t come in unless invited, and as long as she stayed on one side of the threshold and he stayed on the other, he couldn’t touch her. She didn’t think he would, anyway, not in broad daylight when any one of the neighbors might look out a window at an inopportune time. It wouldn’t have been logical.

If it wasn’t, though, opening the door might be a mistake. Vampires were monsters, and monsters followed certain rules. Creepers of the human variety typically did not.

But the shoulder wasn’t going away, and she had already stood there waffling long enough that most people would have given up and left. The shoulder’s owner wasn’t giving up. Possibly because he knew she was there, because he was someone who could hear almost-silent footsteps and almost-silent breaths through a closed door.

She slid back the chain, unlocked the door, and opened it a fraction of an inch, pressing her eye to the crack. It was the neighbor, all right, staring at her with suppressed distaste. She opened the door a little further.

In one hand, he held a rolled-up newspaper. In the other, he grasped a fistful of Bud the Cat. Bud dangled morosely by his scruff, tail flicking back and forth. There was some kind of foul, viscous, black fluid on his paws and around his muzzle, and more of the same in dark streaks across the backs of Daniel Leland’s hands and along the left side of his jaw. There were also loose loops of thread all up the left sleeve of his blazer, and Kim had a sinking feeling that she could piece together the chain of events perfectly.

“Your animal,” he said in a slow, deliberately calm voice, “was in the process of leaving a present on my porch.” He dropped the newspaper. A few cat turds rolled out. “When I attempted to remove it, it attacked me.”

“I am so sorry,” Kim hurried to assure him. “Are you okay?”

But he cut her off. “If I find that thing on my property again, I’ll kill it.”

He dropped Bud, as well, and the cat rocketed past Kim’s ankles and disappeared into the house. Lost and gone forever, Kim suspected. At least until dinner. But Bud wasn’t an attack cat. He was too lazy to catch a snail and too cowardly to go after anything even as big as a bird, and the thought that he might have attacked a six-and-a-half foot man was ridiculous.

The popcorn started popping on the stove, making her jump.

Daniel Leland stared at her coldly. Waiting for something.

“Understood,” she said finally, and he nodded and turned to go. Not the shortest way, across the grass, she noted, but down the sidewalk.

“Rat bastard,” she muttered under her breath. There was no way he could have failed to hear, but he didn’t respond. What kind of jerk couldn’t accept the fact that animals poop, and not always where you want them to?

And then she did something very, very, very stupid. It only took an instant, the briefest moment of not-thinking, for her to lose control of her temper, squeeze her eyes shut, and do her damnedest to hex the rotten leech’s hair off. A charge of magic built up in her chest, wriggling around without form or order, not like the fine, precise work her mother could do, and she sent it shooting invisibly off across the yard to splash against the man’s back. She knew it was a bad idea the moment it happened, but it would have taken a much more experienced wizard than Kim Reed to call magic back once it was let go, even though she tried.

But to her surprise, it just beaded up and rolled off him, like water off plastic. No incipient baldness.

It didn’t affect him, but the man stopped dead all the same and turned slowly to face her with ice in his stare. “What did you just do?”

He left after a while, after Kim had locked herself inside and refused to open the door again. Bud the Cat huddled, shaking, in her lap, until she stood up and retreated to her closet. He wove back and forth between her ankles, doing his best to trip her, and curled up again on top of her when she had settled back down – as comfortably as she was able – on top of a pile of shoes and unfolded clothing.

The vampire had threatened her cat. As far as evil vampire things went, it could have been far worse, but that look in his eyes, like the cat and every other living thing in the universe could just go and die for all he cared, like he'd be a-okay with doing it himself, if necessary... He didn't care. He could watch the world burn all around him and wouldn't feel the need to shed a tear, not even if he knew he'd burn with it. The man didn't feel at all.

Not a man, Kim reminded herself. She felt wrong, somehow, just thinking it, but it ceased to be prejudice when it was justified by observation. Those pale eyes masked something that relished the thought of death, its own and that of everything it had ever encountered.

It must have been hours she sat there in the dark, in the musty fug of a teenager's dusty shoes and dirty laundry. She sat there with Bud's warm weight pressing down on her legs until she felt a shudder in the spells guarding the house, and the front door opened and shut with a bang, and her mother's voice ripped through the stillness.

“Kimberly!”

The voice was furious. But there were tears in it, too. It cracked and broke.

“Kimberly! God damnit, Kimberly!”

Cynthia Reed swore liberally when she felt like it, but never at her daughter. Never.

Kim uncurled herself from the bottom of the closet, dislodging Bud, and crept out into the hall.

Cynthia had dropped her purse and jacket where she stood. Her personal effects lay in a crumpled lump by her feet, and she wobbled dangerously in her high heels. The door was still open, having bounced back from its frame when Cynthia had tried to slam it shut, and just outside stood Daniel Leland, flush with the door frame, like he had tried and failed to follow Cynthia inside. He pressed against the invisible barrier of the threshold, unable to enter.

“Mom!” Kim raised a hand in warning, and Cynthia followed her gaze and sent the door flying shut with a flick of her wrist, snapping it shut on Daniel Leland's face.

That didn't seem to be the problem, though.

Cynthia passed a hand over her eyes, shivering as though it weren't August outside, then strode down the hall and grabbed her daughter's shoulder with a vise-like grip. Kim gasped and tried to pull away, but Cynthia held her fast.

“Who struck first?” Cynthia asked, half demand and half plea.

“What?”

The grip tightened and Cynthia dragged Kim up close so their faces were only inches apart. “Who struck first?” she repeated. “Tell me you were defending yourself.”

“What? No, I...”

Wrong answer. Kim still wasn't even sure what the question had been, but she knew she had given the wrong answer when her mother spilled out of her high heels and sat down heavily on the floor, trembling.

“It's okay, Mom. Nothing happened. It's okay.”

“You attacked him. Oh, God, Kimmy, please tell me he threatened you, at least...”

Kim pulled up short, confused. “I didn't do anything! He said he was going to hurt Bud, and I didn't even do anything, it didn't even work...”

“It didn't work?”

“No.”

Cynthia took a deep breath and gnawed her lip. She refused to raise her head. Kim sank down to the floor to be on the same level, but Cynthia turned her head away. She was crying, though. Kim could tell.

“What did you try to do, honey?”

Kim shifted uneasily. “Nothing. Nothing, it didn't even work...”

“Don't you dare lie to me, Kimberly Michelle. Not right now. What did you do?”

Kim's chest felt tight, but she didn't know why. There was something she felt she should have remembered, something vitally important, but the connection just wouldn't come. It wouldn't click. She had obviously done something horrendously wrong, but she had no idea what it was.

“Triedtomakehishairfallout,” she mumbled. “Didn't work, though. Just kind of bounced off him. I didn't do anything, I swear.”

That should have invited laughter, either because it was such a stupid attempt at a curse, or because it was so stupid that she had failed to make such a simple curse stick, but no laughter emerged. Cynthia crumpled a little further, her face buried in her hands.

“Mom... It's okay, Mom. Nothing happened. He's a jerk, but nothing happened.”

Furious hammering rattled the door on its hinges. Yesterday, Cynthia would have dug her fingers into the carpet and the noise would have died away to silence, but now she couldn’t seem to muster the will.

“For a stupid cat,” she whispered. “You threw your life away for a stupid cat…”

“Mom. What are you talking about?”

The hammering on the door intensified, mixed now with muffled shouts. It was becoming a downright disturbance. What if some neighbor called the cops?