Chapter 68: Five Colored Push-pins
In Which Miss True wakes for the second time from an enchanted sleep and needs to go in search of Magical Tech Support.
Cassandra groped her way through a dim passageway. She wasn't sure where she was going, only that she was late. There was something she needed to do, but what? She couldn't remember. She passed by grey, indistinct figures of people who seemed to ignore her. Should she ask somebody? And why was she the only person wearing a swimsuit? She wondered if she could change into something different without anybody noticing.
She came to a tall vertical curtain. When she pulled it aside a bright light hit her eyes. She was looking out on the stage of the Alhambra Theater. Was tonight the performance? She hadn't been to any of the rehearsals. She didn't even know what part she was playing.
Strephon stood on the stage, dressed as a jester. That didn't seem right. Strephon should have been a lonely curate. He was speaking to a broad-shouldered fellow in Elizabethan hose and doublet who stood facing the audience. The man seemed familiar, but his back was to her. As Cassandra tried to place where she had seen those shoulders before, he turned to face her.
“True? Don't you have anything to say?”
She'd missed her cue. Why hadn't she rehearsed her part? She must have read the script at some point. The man's voice seemed familiar, deep and booming with just a touch of sardonic humor, but his visage lay behind a mask crowned with a stag's horns, like Cernunnos, the Forest God, or Herne the Hunter, or like Togwogmag–
A hand clasped over her mouth and a voice very close to her ear whispered, “Don't say it.”
Cassandra opened her eyes.
She lay on the divan in Strephon's parlor. Just like before, only this time Devon leaned over her with his hand pressed over her mouth.
“Not a word. Not yet. Just remain calm.”
She didn't want to remain calm. She wanted him to take his hand off her. She grabbed him by the wrist to pull it off her face, but his grip was unexpectedly strong.
“No! Wait! Let me explain!”
“Dffn?” Cassandra mumbled through his grip.
“Yes, it's really me. Cecily checked.”
Cassandra gave him a hard look. Yes, there was a smudge on the corner of Devon's mouth where he had evidently failed to wipe off all of Cecily's lipstick. Cecily peeked over Devon's shoulder and gave Cassandra a cheesy grin and a 'thumb's up' sign.
“Wrrz Strphn?”
“Strephon's presumably at that damned Council meeting. I couldn't get in. They had some damnable wards around the place that gave me no end of trouble.” So that part of the story Saul had told them was true. “I just got back here a couple minutes ago and your friends have been briefing me on your adventures this evening. It seems I should have hung around after all.”
Cassandra was a little more cognizant of her surroundings now. She saw Mrs. Palmer and Grandma Simms and Theodora, all watching her with concern. She didn't see Reverend Palmer or his furry friends.
“Gnna limmigo?”
“Just a moment. Stay calm. You are under an enchantment. There's a spell embedded in your mind. Stay calm, I said!”
If he told her to stay calm one more time, Cassandra thought she'd bite his fingers.
“Okay. Now I'm going to remove my hand. Whatever you do, don't say the spell! Do you understand?”
Just do it already! Cassandra wanted to scream.
“Okay, here we go.' Devon withdrew his hand.
“TOGWOG-hkkk!” It just burst from Cassandra's lips, but she quickly stopped herself. She swallowed hard and took a couple deep breaths. “I'm okay,” she said.
Mrs. Palmer glanced apprehensively at Grandma Simms. Cecily bit her lip.
It took a couple more breaths for Cassandra to compose herself. “So, what happened exactly? There was a note. I thought it was from Strephon.”
“That friend of yours brought it in when he was disguised as Mister Devon,” Mrs. Palmer said. Cassandra's ears burned. Saul was no friend of hers. Well, not any more. “He had a glamour on it to make it look like a matchbook so no one would notice it until he was gone.” Of course. It had seemed to Cassandra at the time that there had been something odd about that business with the cigarette and tossing the matchbook on the table. At the time she had put it down to Devon being overly dramatic.
“I saw that something was wrong when you looked at the note,” Mrs. Palmer continued. “You didn't seem yourself. And when you started uttering the incantation, well, that sort of thing is never good. I put a sleep spell on you. It was the only thing I could think of.”
“A sleep spell,” Cassandra repeated dully. This was the second time she'd been zonked that evening. It was becoming an unpleasant habit.
“All this rigmarole with the werewolf army and the love-sick vampire was all planned to maneuver you into reading that spell,” Grandma Simms said. “And if they've gone to all that trouble, it can't be for a good reason.”
“It was freaky,” Cecily said. “It looked like you were possessed or something.”
“In a sense, she is,” Devon said. “The note contained a sort of self-casting spell that etched itself upon her mind the instant she saw it..”
The group was silent for a moment. Then Mrs. Palmer said, “Perhaps I should call Arthur. I don't think he's ever done an exorcism before. The C of E doesn't do that sort of thing as a general rule; it's more in the Roman Catholic line; but he might know a bit about the theory.”
Grandma Simms disagreed. “This ain't a spirit you can just shoo away.
“It's more like a computer virus,” Theodora suggested. “It's like you clicked on a dodgy link in an email and it downloaded something nasty into your system.”
“Yes, Arthur is always warning me about those. It happened to him once, and it was terribly embarrassing.”
“Can we remove it, then? Is there some kind of magical anti-malware spell?”
“It's not something you can erase,” Mrs. Simms said. “It's there, and it will stay there until you finish it. I put a spell of my own on you to try and block it to help you resist it, but that's the best I can manage.”
Cassandra's head was throbbing. Nonsense syllables kept bouncing around in her brain, and her rational self kept trying to string them together into something that made sense. It was like trying not to think of a purple elephant. The pressure kept building.
“I wish people would stop mucking about in my head!” she shouted.
The others stared at her in shock.
“Not you, Mrs. Palmer,” Cassandra added, seeing the wounded expression of the Vicar's wife. “Or you, Mrs. Simms. You've been a tremendous help, both of you it's just...” She gestured helplessly. “It's been so much.”
Mrs. Palmer reached over and squeezed her hand. “It's all right, dear. You're not alone. We'll give you whatever help we can.”
“If only we knew more about the spell,” Theodora said. “Who is responsible and what do they intend to do? It might give us a clue.”
Cassandra put her fingers to her skull. The togwogmoggery yammering just beneath her consciousness kept nagging at her. Don't think of the purple elephant, she told herself. She squinted. Why was everything purple? She hadn't noticed before because she'd been so full of her own crisis, but the concerned faces surrounding her all had a purplish tint to them. Looking closer, she saw a lavender glow emitting from the drawer of the end table next to the divan, the drawer where Strephon placed the talisman Saul had given her.
She opened the drawer. When she had shown the talisman to Mrs. Palmer earlier it had felt warm. Now it was glowing with a radiance atypical of an ordinary paperweight.
She plucked the talisman from the drawer. “Mrs. Palmer, you said this was an anchor point for a pentagram, didn't you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Do the other anchor stones have to be identical?”
“Not necessarily. That's more of an aesthetic choice on the part of the caster. But usually they are similar in size and shape. The geometry of the angles is the important part.”
Mrs. Simms gave a cynical snort. “A line of salt on the floor is good enough for most purposes. If a spirit don't respect that, they won't care about concentric parallelograms or the square of the hypotenuse or any such diagramming.”
“I suppose this started glowing as soon as I read the spell?”
Mrs. Palmer nodded. “It's pretty obvious that the stone is connected to the spell, but then where are the rest of the anchors? If our sorcerer intended to use a pentagram in the casting of this spell, certainly he would have set up the pentagram ahead of time.”
Devon took the stone from Cassandra's hand. “We don't know that this rock is really connected to Cassandra's spell. Oh, yeah, it's glowing, but that might just be a reaction to the ambient magic in the area. These are fae runes on the stone and it is definitely radiating fae magic. But the Fae don't do pentagrams.”
“That's true,” Mrs. Palmer admitted. “My understanding is that Faerie magic is more intuitive in its practice. To a certain extent, so is the Craft, but some magic traditions take a more analytical approach. A mortal practitioner, like Belladonna Morrigan, who was familiar with Faerie magic might use drawn circles and pentagrams to focus it.”
“Morrigan!” Cassandra grabbed her handbag and dug through it for her smart phone. The mention of Morrigan and pentagrams reminded her of something. “Maybe the pentagram is already in place.”
Cecily was puzzled. “Then where are the rest of the anchor points?”
“We don't know how big the pentagram is.” Cassandra selected the map app from her phone's menu and called up a map of the city. “When Morrigan held me captive, I saw something pinned to the wall in her workshop. It was a street map torn out of the phone book with a pentagram drawn on it. The points of the star were marked with colored pins.”
Cassandra typed the address of Strephon's house into the app and a flag icon appeared on the map to mark it. Considering for a moment, she went into the app's customization menu and changed the flag into an icon of a push pin. She made it purple.
“What are you doing?” Theodora asked.
“I think I know,” Devon said. He drew a rectangle in the air and conjured the image on Cassandra's phone to appear in it like a magical screen.
“Cool beans!” Cecily said. “We'll have to invite you over next time we want to watch videos.”
“Strephon said the paperweights were significant,” Cassandra said, placing a pin at the address of the Club Cyba-Netsu – a red one; Kurayami’s was red – “but he wasn't sure how.” She selected a yellow pin to represent Simon Knox's golden paperweight – or orichalcum, whichever – at the Morning Star's address. “Strephon said that Melchior Dusk's paperweight was iron.” She chose black to mark the offices of Vanir Technologies. “That leaves Lukas Biaka, number five. I don't know his address.”
“It's near Fellwood,” Mrs. Palmer said, pointing to a spot on the map. “Arthur's been to his house for social gatherings. As a clergyman, he's considered an honorary member of Bianka's Decency League. It's rather expected of him,” she added apologetically.
Devon nodded his head. “I think you have something. I'm convinced.” With his finger he traced lines connecting the five points to make a star and then a circle around them to contain it. “And right in the middle is Castle Redemption.”
“That's it,” Cassandra said. “This is the diagram Morrigan had up on the wall in her workshop.
“So Morrigan made the spell?” Cecily said.
“At least she was involved in its crafting.”
“But how does that help us?” Mrs. Palmer asked. “Poor Belle disappeared. Nobody knows where she went.”
“We have an idea,” Cassandra said grimly. “She was taken off to Fairy-Land, wasn't she, Devon. And we know who took her.”
Devon frowned. He obviously didn't like where this was going. “The Wisp and the Banshee that Morrigan was passing off as her nephew and niece. I don't think they'd want to help us.”
“We won't know until we ask.”
“We, meaning me. Do you have any idea how vast the Faerie Realm is? Or how many Fae there are? Don't you know that every time a wee babe blows its nose a Faerie is born?”
“You made that up.”
“No, you mortals did. The point is that finding two Fae among all the myriad motes of Faeriedom is nigh impossible.”
“Well, we know their names: Wisp and Banshee.”
Devon scoffed. “Those aren't names, they're classifications. Like 'Tory', or “Orthodontist'.”
“And Morrigan said they were from Australia.”
“Oh, well throw a dinkum diggery-doo on the blessed billabong! That's a great help! Morrigan probably made that up so that the neighbors wouldn't wonder if they seemed odd.”
“All right!” Cassandra said. “I thought that with your connections in the Fairy Court, you might be able to find them. But if you're incapable --”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I'm not saying you're incompetent or anything...”
“Incompetent?”
“I'm just saying there's no point in asking you to do something you can't do.”
Devon glowered at Cassandra. “I ought to give you ass's ears for that remark. I will refrain only because you're a friend of Cecily's. And because Strephon would have a snit.” He straightened his coat and brushed back his hair. “Very well. I’ll do it.”
Cecily threw her arms around him and gave him a hug. “I know you can, Devon!”
Devon gave a noncommittal grunt; then said, “Never mind cold iron, we never should have allowed you mortals to discover psychology. I'll be back when I find something.”
NEXT: A Jarful of Spite