-Ovid
Chapter Sixteen: Fabiana
It was time to scratch two names off my revenge list: Byron Bryce wasn't dead, but he'd got what was coming to him. He was currently in a terrarium in Amanda's room labeled Spenceriella gigantea. And Lucian Bryce wasn't dead, either… he was, somehow, inside of me. And not in a creepy sexual way. Though it was still a bit creepy. My best guess was that I'd somehow absorbed the asshole during my transformation from fake-Martin back into real-Natalie, that I'd consumed his essence but that his soul had somehow survived the process. When I thought about it, I could even feel his essence inside me, down in that place between my chest and my belly where I could feel the nexus of my own witch-ly powers, a feeble little bleb of energy next to mine like a remora on the underbelly of a whale shark. I thought I might be able to absorb Lucian's essence, just as I'd absorbed his body, but worried whether that would be tantamount to murder. As much as I hated the bastard, I wasn't a murderer, so I'd have to think on it.
And I was no closer to finding Cassie, beyond that the One Voice… which was apparently some sort of creepy AF collective unconscious of the Gangling men… apparently had some sort of 'tree' and that Cassie was imprisoned within, upon, or around it (however that might work). It sounded like she wasn't being vivisected bit-by-bit for reagents, but I had no way to verify that. I hadn't seen Cassie in weeks now, and all the letters of support from Magnus and Liam didn't help a bit. I barely even wanted to read them, because I could sense their anguish and it fed into my own. I wanted my Cassie back.
"Have you considered a trade?" Val asked. This was after her nascent Debate Club meeting, which I was filling in as coach for while Ms. Law was out for personal business. "You've got something they want…"
"What have I got that they want? Aside from myself…"
Val moved a desk back to its usual location and then nudged it just a bit more. She made the shape of a box with her slim fingers. "That box you took. It's… what did you call it… a curse amplifier?"
I checked our desk arrangement against how Ms. Law liked them arranged - it looked like we'd got it right. "I called it that, but I was wrong. It's actually a resistance dampener. It fractionates the internal resistance of…"
Val raised her hand. "Above my pay grade, Nat. It's a curse amplifier, okay? The point is: you've got it and they probably want it back…"
"For all I know, they have fifty of the damn things. Plus, I don't have it at the moment. Simone and I disassembled the thing to see how it worked…"
"And?"
I locked the classroom door and we headed out, leaving Bailey Hall and marching out across the commons in our winter boots and poofy parkas. "We might be able to put it back together," I said. "There were a lot more parts in it that I was expecting."
Val sighed and got a faraway look in her eyes. I put my arm around my cousin and pulled her close - I wasn't the only one who was unhappy. Val was still unhappy with her state of affairs. Whereas I'd quickly accepted my current form once it became clear that it was my best chance at getting revenge… and while I wouldn't have given up on being Natalie Bryce to be ten Martin Warners again (however that might work)… Val didn't share the sentiment. We'd changed her True Form, which meant she didn't harbor the deep dysphoria of somebody whose body was at odds with who they ought to be… but that didn't mean she didn't miss life as a hotshot lawyer. She wanted to go back to her old life and hoped that she might reconnect with Fabiana, Vince's ex-fiancée, now that she'd finally taken the plunge and decided to be a decent human being.
"It's going to happen," I said. "You just have to give me time."
We shed our coats, stomped the snow from our boots, and proceeded down to the little basement workshop in the administration building where I held electronics club (among things). Val didn't have much interest in electronics, but she liked to study her magic near me so I could help if she had questions - it paid to be related to the teacher. She set her things down and sat cross-legged in a pool of sunlight, copper hair radiant about her, green eyes hard with purpose. She looked absolutely adorable, but I didn't dare tell her that. Instead, I set my own things to the side and joined Simone at our little workstation.
"We got a new symbol, and it's a doozy," Simone said, and gestured toward our CCTV recording rig. She'd rewound the video to the spot where I could see it.
Our discovery of new symbols had slowed to a crawl - one every three or four days. That meant that we were either getting close to a full symbol set or were reaching the end of our approach's usefulness - it was hard to say which. We'd barely explored most of the new symbols and, even if I spent an hour or two every day practicing them, I'd need to start playing around with them in combination to get a good understanding for how they worked. I played the Betamax video, showing all four seconds of the symbol's rendering on the computer before its power blew right past all of our regular safeguards and fried all of the nearby electronics. Even the old closed-circuit camera experienced a bit of a glitch, though it hadn't broken. It was a doozy all right.
"Shit!" I exclaimed. The moment I got the symbol right, a wave of magical energy pulsed across our workbench, pausing the VCR and giving all of our tools, screws, and assorted doodads on the surface a strange glint about them.
Simone reached across the bench, grabbed a handful of little 1/2" screws, and lifted them a few inches off the bench. And they just… stayed there. They hovered in the air, motionless, for a few seconds before slooowly starting to spin and then slooowly descending to the bench with a drawn out tap… ta-tap… ta-tap… of slowly-falling bits.
"I was going to call it tempura," Simone said.
I laughed. "I like it. It even looks like… hmm… it looks like the symbol on the turn-plate of the box."
"Shit, you're right," Simone said. She crouched at the spot in the wall where we'd hidden the Gangling Men's curse amplifier (to use Val's term) and tapped it with a little magical perturbation, causing the solid wall to vomit out the shoebox we'd been storing the magical box in. Simone lifted the lid, cleared some space, and started setting the parts out in neat little rows. Simone was absolutely meticulous, whereas I was less so - she'd frequently warned me that I was going to lose a part, but I hadn't done so yet. She pulled out the turn-plate and tapped on it, causing the almost-invisible symbol engraved upon its surface to glow. "Look at that."
"Is that your magical box?" Val asked. She set her book aside and padded over, biting her lip as she scrutinized the thing, something like awe in her expression. Admittedly, it was a pretty neat box… but it wasn't that neat.
I nodded. "What about it?"
"Fabiana's got one like it."
"She's got a jeweled box?" I asked.
"No, you don't understand, Nat. She's got one exactly like it. I used to tease her about having a Fabergé box, and she would laugh and tell me she'd got it off a shifty guy in a Turkish market for like three hundred lira. It looked impressive, but it didn't do anything. At least not that I could tell - she could never get it to open, so it's not like she used it for keeping her jewelry in, and when I gave it a gentle shake once upon a time, it had some heft but the thing sounded empty…"
"Why would your ex-fiancée have a resistance-dampener?" Simone asked. "No offense, but that's sketch as shit."
It was sketchy as shit. And that's all it took to get my (metaphysical) antennae wiggling and my curiosity stoked. Val had wanted me to check up on Fabiana for some time now, and I'd been putting it off. True, she hadn't responded to any of our messages, but that wasn't entirely unexpected. And I'd had other things on my mind. Namely, my single-minded devotion to rescuing Cassie from the creepy pale motherfuckers. But getting our curse amplifier working again was an important piece of that - it gave us a bargaining chip, a weapon, and a potential means to track the Gangling Men (assuming they had more such devices in sympathy with this one) all at once. I was going to have to check up on Val's boo.
"It would be irresponsible to take you off campus," I stated.
"Even Doc Savage admits I'm my own legal guardian," Val said. "I can go where I want."
I held up two slim fingers. "First off, I'm not arguing whether you can go where you want. But let's not forget that you're here for a reason, Val - to stay safe and hidden. And second, don't you dare give Prudence Sauvage a cool nickname. She doesn't deserve it."
"Agreed," Simone said.
"But we're going to check up on Fabe, right?" Val said hopefully, bouncing on her toes, sporting a beaming smile, bright eyes, and wobbling breasts. Christ, did I look like that when I was excited? No wonder I got my way so often.
"Simone and I are checking up," I said. "You're not coming."
Val held up two slim fingers. "I'm coming. First, if I'm not safe with Natalie Bryce and Simone Clayton at my back, I'm not safe anywhere. And second, if we need to convince Fabiana of our bona fides*, who but me knows her well enough to do that? And third… third, how are you going to find her? I'm the only one with the sympathetic connection needed to get your witch's cardinal to point to her. Frankly, it would be irresponsible not to take me."
(*Val always pronounced 'fides' as FEE-days, and it sounded very official)
"Jesus, fine," I sighed. "You're such a fucking lawyer."
+++++
Val was an expert lawyer but a novice witch. She wasn't even an initiate - and would never be one as long as she thought she might someday swap back to her old form. Even if you ignored the fact that we were a sisterhood, no boys allowed, when you became a Sister of the Starry Sky, you received (or chose) a new True Name from the Vault of Stars. No sane witch ever gave another her True Name since this would, in essence, put you under permanent obligation to that witch (as Marie von Schurr was with me). But if Val wanted to turn back, she'd have to give her True Name to the witch running the transformation ritual, since even the most powerful witch couldn't run the ritual while being its subject. Right now, Val could change her True Name whenever she wanted by swearing fealty to the divinity of her choice, but once 'locked in', nobody had ever figured out a way to change it again. In all likelihood, you'd have to kill your patron goddess - good luck with that! So you never revealed your True Name. Unlike me, many witches would be all too happy to exploit it, and I was too paranoid to give anybody, not even Lily or Simone, my True Name… though Cassie might get to learn it some day. My Cassie, who I was going to rescue from the Gangling Men.
Val was an expert lawyer but a novice witch, which meant Simone and I spent about an hour and a half teaching her to do quartopus and, even then, her casting was so iffy that we decided to revisit it the next day after Val had some time to practice and cogitate upon it on her own. Then I arranged for Amber to take over my last class and my clubs the next afternoon while we went to check on Fabiana. If Amber wasn't already enthused about getting classroom time in, she was very agreeable now that I'd saved her bacon from Byron Bryce in a display of audacious witchcraft. She now viewed my witchcraft abilities with something like reverential awe and I didn't have the heart to tell her that I'd managed to turn Byron Bryce's mega-curse back at him out of sheer, incredible luck.
Amber eagerly accepted my lesson plan and looked it over. She glanced to me and asked in a conspiratorial whisper: "Are you taking off to go on adventures?" She said it like I was a swashbuckling pirate captain scouring the Caribbean for poorly-guarded doubloons and not a young witch going to Palm Beach (probably) to check up on Val's ex.
"I'm taking off for the only reason I ever take off," I said. "I'm going to find Cassie and I'm going to make the fucks who took her sorry. And I hope this'll be a step toward doing that…"
Amber sighed. "Wow. You're kind of a big deal. Did you know that?"
I tried not to blush. "Don't inflate my ego. She's already big enough. So… any questions before I head out?"
She glanced back to the lesson plans. "How's Gracie coming along on her symbols?"
With a twirl of my finger, my notes from three days ago slid out of the binder - I had the pages magically-coded by date so I could retrieve them at a moment's notice. "She's coming along but still a bit behind. Carla's a bit ahead, and I've got the two of them paired together, which seems to work well if you can tolerate the occasional conspiratorial giggling. Oh, and we're going by Grace now, not Gracie."
"Grace. Good to know. Okay, Natalie, I'll do you proud. Now go out there and kick gangling…" she glanced to the doorway and brought her voice to a whisper… "ass." That was a lot of profanity for Amber Grim.
It was mid-afternoon when I met up with Simone and Val in A012 to check up on Fabiana. We set the quartocompus on our fold-out map and waited for Val to get the symbol right, which she did on the third try. We were starting to make a lot of marks on the maps, and it was getting harder to read, even with the addition of extra colors for our markings. I made a mental note to order a new map and some transparency sheets for direction finding… though I hoped I wouldn't find myself in a situation of having to track things across the country too often. When Val concentrated on Fabiana, as expected, the needle pointed south-southeast, so we hoofed it out to the standing stones and transported ourselves to Palm Beach.
We left our winter coats magically hidden in the bushes by the park. In the unlikely event that anybody found and took them, we could always shiver our way back to the chapel and get replacements from the school wardrobe, where school-issue coats didn't count against the student or teacher clothing limits. We walked through the mild sixty-degree weather of Palm Beach with our umbrellas out - we'd come prepared - for five blocks before realizing that the needle hadn't moved an iota.
"Hmm… we sort-of assumed your boo…"
"Don't call her that," Val said.
I rolled my eyes. "Fine… we assumed Fabe would still be in Palm Beach, but she could be anywhere in the direction our needle was pointing. This looks like she's considerably farther south. Any idea where?"
Val chewed on her lip and tapped purple-pink fingernails against one another - you'd never guess she wasn’t a girl. Those Physical Conditioning classes paid dividends. "She lived in Miami before she moved north. That's where I met her, actually… maybe she moved back to her old place?"
Simone huffed. "Things it would have been nice to know before we walked through the damn rain for half a mile."
"Look, it's no big deal… we'll go to Miami and, if the needle points us back toward Palm Beach, we'll come right back here. Though, uh…" I glanced to Simone. "Unless you've got some connects in Miami that I don't know about, we're going to have to teach Val the symbology for the 'portal-to-anywhere' ritual."
So that cost us another hour. If we'd been self-respecting teenagers and had smartphones on us, we could have just paid for a Dryve or whatever down to Miami and tracked the needle as we went. But there wasn't one smartphone between us, so we didn't. Simone and I set up the portal ritual and waited for Val to get it right… and, honestly, only taking an hour to learn the right symbols was pretty impressive. Never mind that I'd learned the thing in two minutes and Simone had laughed at how simple it was when I taught her. At this point in her magical tutelage, Val should have been getting around to tracing out halepha-sigmus, not performing moderately advanced symbology and stepping through portals to Miami. She was incredibly talented by any reasonable standard.
"Did it work?" Val stood on her tiptoes to see the witch's cardinal in Simone's hands.
"Yes," Simone said. "It shifted from south-southwest to south-southeast, so it can't be too far off. Is her place south of here?"
Val looked around for a street sign. "That depends on where 'here' is… I'm not exactly a Miami native. We should ask for directions…"
"You girls look lost… you need a helping hand?" a deep voice drawled out.
It so happened that we were in Little Haiti, or so Jameson Jeantil told us. He was happy to take us south in his Prius if we'd walk the block and change back to his place. I evaluated him - tall, early twenties, ebony-skinned, and seemingly genuine. It was a classic setup to a good porno or an unfortunate story on the eight o'clock news. The fact any one of us (let along all three together) posed a far greater risk to Jameson than he posed to us, though he might not have known it, took a bit of the edge off.
It was a nice neighborhood, if not overly safe: squat, stucco buildings gone rose gold in the late afternoon light, most of them with hefty fences and barred first floor windows. There were plenty of people on the street, many of them walking home from the bus stop after work, some of them just heading out. Three women lazed about a nearby porch, one of them strumming away on a guitar while the other two chatted, occasionally humming along to the tune.
"Ma, I'm driving these girls downtown!" Jameson shouted, and one of the women waved him away. "You girls go to school around here?"
"I'm a teacher. We're… we're on a field trip," I explained.
Val still had her school uniform on, whereas Simone had changed into dark jeans and a sweater, and Jameson couldn't get enough of it. He certainly had eyes for Simone, stealing sidelong glances as he drove us south, but he seemed content with only glances. For that matter, he was giving Val and me eyes in the rear view, though not half as many. And, as we went stop-and-go down Biscayne Boulevard, he explained to us that his neighborhood wasn't a safe place for 'pretty rich girls' to go wandering around. I chose not to point out that it also wasn't safe accepting rides from mysterious Jamesons.
"We're not 'pretty rich girls'," Simone stated.
Jameson countered with the obvious: "You're pretty and a girl. You telling me you ain't rich?"
How could Simone possibly deny it? Her father was worth tens of millions. I was the pauper in our trio, and I'd spent exactly zero cents of the St. Circe's adjunct money I'd been pulling in since the beginning of the school year, so my finances were rosy. We were pretty rich girls. Simone blushed and played with her hair, and I had to nudge her to get her to stop doing subtle hair magic where Jameson could see it. We weren't supposed to do obvious magic in front of normal folks, as per our treaty with the Gangling Men (which I gave less and less of a shit about by the day).
"Simone, the quartocompus," I said - we'd told Jameson it was a school project and kept the details as vague as possible. Well, now our school project was rapidly changing direction. Jameson intuited that the needle was pointed toward our goal and steered us toward it, taking the opportunity to take even less covert glances at Simone. We eventually pulled alongside a very nice bayfront condo complex across from a seaside park and surrounded by high-end street-level storefronts. This was the sort of place that pretty rich girls frequented - I could see two of them, toned and tattooed, strolling hand-in-hand down the parkway. I couldn't decide if I wanted to cry or be happy for them.
"Wait here just a sec!" I said, and dashed out of the car and to the nearest ATM, gawping at the account balance it displayed. St. Circe's paid its staff, even its junior staff, very well - and they could afford to. I withdrew the maximum amount and considered glitching the ATM to withdraw more - but I had no idea what effect that would actually have.
I jogged back to the car, sea breeze flapping my hair every which way, bills clenched in my little hand. It was, I realized, very much the opposite of the direction the transfer of wealth usually went here, me leaning into the window of Jameson's decade-old Prius and pressing a wad of bills into his hand.
"I can't accept a thousand dollars," he said.
"It's two thousand. And I insist."
He did not object a second time - wise man, that Jameson. Then, with a goodbye wave and a third and fourth glance back to Simone, he started to drive off… only to stop at the last moment, much to the chagrin of the guy trying to nab our curb space. "Hey, Simone, can I get your number?"
And Simone just gave it to him… well, I assume it was her number. She and I didn't exactly trade many phone calls, us being very witch-ly witches. Then Jameson finally pulled away and we strode into, according to our quartocompus, Fabiana's condo building.
"Did you give him your real phone number?"
"I did," Simone said. "Why?"
I snorted. "What, are you going to cheat on Wyatt with some random boy from Little Haiti?"
Simone sighed. "No. No I'm not. It's just nice to feel wanted, you know?"
Fair enough. I'd given guys my number for less.
