Spell Blind

CHAPTER 6

I know precious little about Namid’s life as a Zuni shaman. I’ve studied the A’shiwi, as the Zuni people call themselves; I’ve studied most of the native peoples of the Southwest. But the K’ya’na-Kwe clan has been extinct for centuries, and since the ancient A’shiwi clans left no written histories, information on the runemyste’s people is pretty scarce. And it’s not as though Namid spends a lot of time talking about himself. I’ve asked him questions now and then, but he’s about as forthcoming with information about his own life as he is about anything else.

In many ways I learned everything I needed to know about the runemyste the very first time I saw him. Most of my memories from those days are obscured by the residue of too many phasings, but this one remains as clear as fresh rainwater. I was at home-my old home, on the west side of the city, in Buckeye. I had started on the job only a few months before and was learning a good deal from Kona. We were in robbery detail then, although she was already angling to get us moved to Homicide. But I had yet to tell her that I was a weremyste and she was growing tired of having to explain to others why her new partner disappeared every few weeks. Friendship only goes so far, particularly when I’m nothing more than some dumb rookie cop, and she’s well on her way to a promotion for which she’s busted her butt some seven years. It was just a matter of time before she was going to dump me as a partner. No doubt I would have deserved it. Rule seven: Never keep secrets from your partner.

It was late, and the moon was full. I was in the midst of a hard, dark phasing, sitting on my living room floor, trying to resist the urge to grab my weapon and put a bullet through my head. Often my phasings are filled with delusions, and on this night my mom, dead some twelve years, was standing in front of me, telling me that I was exactly like my old man and that I’d wasted my life. And staring down at my hands, I could see that they were wrinkled and covered with age spots. The hair on them had turned white. Somehow there was a mirror beside me-at least I believed at the time that there was-and as I gazed into it, I saw that I was twin to my dad, my hair gray, my face slack. I remember crying, and screaming myself hoarse, begging her to go away. But she wouldn’t leave me alone. I thought about using magic to burn my house to the ground. Really, I did. Magic is stronger during the phasings, and I could feel the power churning inside me. I was itching to use it. I had to remind myself that burning down the house would be a bad thing. Which is why I’d started thinking about the weapon. Not that shooting myself was much better, but at the time rational thought wasn’t my strong suit. All I could think was that if I couldn’t get her to leave, I’d leave myself.

But before I could climb to my feet and retrieve my pistol, my mother vanished, replaced by what appeared to be yet another delusion: a translucent figure, shimmering and liquid, and yet seemingly solid.

I didn’t speak. I stared up at that face, at those glowing eyes, waiting for him to do or say something.

“Taking your own life would be a waste. You should reconsider.” His voice was like rushing water, musical and random, soothing and exhilarating.

“Wow,” I said, breathless. As delusions went, this was a good one.

“The moon-time is difficult for you, I know. I have seen it. But part of being a runecrafter is enduring the dark nights. What you call the phasings.”

“What are you supposed to be?” I asked. I reached toward him with an open hand, wanting to touch his watery skin. I wasn’t close enough, though, and I didn’t have the strength to stand up.

“My name is Namid’skemu. I am a runemyste. Long ago by your reckoning, I was a runecrafter-a weremyste-as you are. More recently I gave aid to your father. I would do the same for you, but you must swear to me that you will not do harm to yourself.”

“Namid’skemu,” I repeated. “That sounds Native American.”

“It is A’shiwi.”

“A’shiwi?”

He nodded.

“You’re Zuni?”

“I am of the K’ya’na-Kwe clan. The water people.”

“The water people are extinct.”

“Yes.”

I let out a crazed laugh. I was starting to sound like my dad. “So you’re telling me that I’m speaking to the ghost of some ancient Zuni?”

“I am no ghost,” he said, sounding angry for the first time. “I was once what you would call a shaman, as weremystes often were. I am now a runemyste, chosen by the Runeclave to guard against the use of dark magic in your world. And I have come to you because I see great darkness in you. I fear that you will not survive this night.”

I shook my head, averting my eyes, feeling ashamed that he had read my thoughts with such ease. “This is getting weird. I need something to drink.”

I forced myself up, staggered into the kitchen and splashed water on my face. That helped some, but the tirade from my mom’s ghost still echoed in my head. I knew that I couldn’t kill myself; my new delusion had convinced me of that much. But I wasn’t going to make it through the night if I didn’t do something. Still leaning against the counter in front of the sink, I reached up into the topmost cabinet and pulled out a bottle of bourbon.

When I turned to get a glass, he was standing right in front of me. I should have been startled, but I wasn’t. Somehow I had known he’d be there.

“That will not help you through this night,” he said pointing at the bottle.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “It’s helped before.”

“That is an illusion.”

I laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

“You believe I am an illusion.”

“Delusion is the word I’d use. But, yeah, I do.”

“You are wrong. I am as real as you are. Your father knows me.”

“My father’s a loon,” I said, not meaning it kindly. “So we’ve had the same hallucinations. Not very surprising. I bet he’s seen Mom yelling at him, too. Doesn’t make her ghost real.”

“I am not a ghost,” he said again. “And you must ask him about me when you can. I assure you I am real, and I can help you, just as I did him. I can teach you to harness the powers you possess, to become a skilled runecrafter. But you must learn to endure the moon-times without resorting to alcohol and without doing harm to yourself.”

I glared at him, but then I put down the bottle, walked back into the living room, and dropped onto the couch. Sleep. That’s what I needed. Come morning, I’d feel better. The phasing still had one more night, and even the days of what my new ghost-friend called the moon-time were difficult-trouble focusing, forgetfulness, fatigue. They were better than the nights, though. And this hallucination would be over.

“You cannot escape me,” he said. I opened my eyes and found him standing in front of the couch.

“Stop doing that! Leave me alone.”

“Why do you refuse the Abri?”

I frowned up at him. “The what?”

“The drug that can keep you from suffering during the moon-time. Why do you not take it?”

Blockers. That’s what he was talking about. My gaze slid away again; I had no easy answer. I could have said I didn’t take them because my father hadn’t taken them, but I’m not sure I was even ready to admit as much to myself. At that point, we didn’t get along, and I blamed him for everything I hated about my life. I also could have said I wasn’t ready yet to give up wielding magic, but I was still learning to cast spells, and back then I wasn’t sure I believed I would ever become much of a runecrafter. The truth was, I sensed the runemyste wanted me to say that I was determined to retain whatever powers I possessed, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right. Even then I was a stubborn son of a bitch.

“You are a runecrafter,” he said after some time, his voice as soothing as the sea at dawn. “You have some talent with magic. With my help you can become a more accomplished crafter.”

“You’re an illusion,” I said, closing my eyes again.

“And you are a fool.”

“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”

He said nothing and at last I opened my eyes again, thinking that perhaps he’d gone. When I saw him standing over me, as patient as the tide, I knew a moment of profound relief. I realized then that I wanted him to be real. I wanted to believe I could be a powerful sorcerer, that there was more to being a weremyste than these miserable nights around the full moon. But after suffering through the phasings for so long, I had lost hope. That month’s phasing hadn’t been the first time I considered putting my pistol to my head.

He still stared at me, and now he said, “You are trying to learn something of a theft. It has been many turns of the moon since last you learned anything of importance, but still you try. There is a single token from this theft that you possess; a knife with a broken blade. Get it now.”

I started to say something, then stopped. He had described a robbery Kona and I had been struggling with for the better part of six months. His understanding of the case was crude, but detailed enough to be convincing. This proved nothing, of course. My delusion, my knowledge. But that broken knife was in the house, just as he’d said. Kona and I were certain it had been used to jimmy a window or door and had been broken in the process. But we’d yet to figure out where the thieves had entered the building. We had stopped by the warehouse again the day before. We wandered around for a while, but found nothing new. When we were done, Kona asked me to return the knife to evidence. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I wasn’t all that dependable in the middle of a phasing.

“Get it,” Namid said, his voice like white water on the Colorado.

I retrieved the knife from my jacket pocket, pulled it from the evidence bag, and held it out to him.

“What do you see?” he asked, making no effort to take it from me.

I glanced at it, lifted it closer to my eyes. “Son of a bitch!”

“Tell me what you see.”

I wasn’t even sure how to describe it. A faint glimmer of yellow light danced along the edge of the blade, like fire. It was brightest at the broken end, but it radiated all the way up the hilt. How had I not seen this before? How had Kona missed it?

“It’s glowing,” I said at last.

“What color?”

“Yellow.”

“That is magic, or to be more precise, the residue of magic.”

“What?”

“Yellow is not a strong color. Had the conjuring been done by a more accomplished runecrafter, the color would be red or green, perhaps even blue. And it would have vanished long ago. Someone with true craft can mask his conjuring. You are searching for a crafter with the most rudimentary skills.”

“You’re making it do that. What am I saying? I’m making it do that. I’m imagining all of this.”

“No. You see it because you are a weremyste. Your magic allows you to see what is left of spells conjured by others. It is part of your gift.”

“Then why haven’t I ever seen this before?”

“Because you did not know to look for it. And I was not there to show you. You will never fail to see it again.”

I shook my head. “I’m not a sorcerer.”

“Not yet. But you have power. If you did not, you would not see anything more than a broken knife.”

Despite what Namid had shown me, I was slow to believe he was anything more or less than a product of my own psychotic imagination. I’d seen my dad lose his mind, the process slow and painful, and I had known for years that this was my fate, too. I knew my dad was a weremyste, and that I was as well, but I had never given much thought to what that might mean. I certainly hadn’t ever believed that much good would come of whatever powers I possessed. Magic had been the source of too much pain in my life for me to see it in any other way.

After some time that first night, Namid left me, no doubt fed up with my stubborn refusal to acknowledge that he was real. But he appeared again the next morning and we resumed our argument. At first, I took his return as evidence that my descent into permanent insanity had already begun. But Namid was persistent to the point of relentlessness, and with time I came to believe that he was real and that all he’d been telling me about magic and my own gifts was true.

Even more, everything he said about the warehouse robbery turned out to be dead-on accurate. The knife hadn’t been broken jimmying anything; it had been part of a talisman-a small statue of a Maori god-that the warehouse manager kept on his desk. Namid told me as much, and I confirmed it when I examined the idol more closely and found the rest of the blade imbedded in the stone base on which the figure stood. Namid also told me where we could find the man responsible for the break-in. Within a week, Kona and I had arrested Orestes Quinley, a small-time thief and weremyste, who’d stolen a bunch of stereos and TVs to cover the theft of that talisman. Turns out there are more weremystes in the Phoenix metropolitan area than one might think. They’re not in the yellow pages, of course. Finding them can be tricky. You have to rely on word of mouth and, since most weremystes use blockers, and since those who don’t aren’t eager to be found, it becomes a matter of finding the right mouth, as it were. But there is a network of sorts, one that I’ve tapped into in recent years. Early on, though, I had to take a lot on faith. So did Kona. She was pretty skeptical about all of it, although Orestes’ confession helped.

As I came to spend more time with Namid I began to sense an ulterior motive of a sort in the lessons he gave me. He himself had told me that he worked with my dad, and though he never admitted as much, I was convinced that he held himself responsible for my father’s premature descent into insanity. I believe Namid felt that he had failed one Fearsson. He wasn’t about to fail another. That was why he worked me so hard and so often. He wanted me to hone my power. From what I understood, as a runecrafter grew more proficient, he also developed some resistance to the long-term effects of the phasings.

But on this night outside my office, with the phasing still a few days off, and Claudia Deegan’s murder on my mind, I was more concerned with what Namid had said to me in the car. In the years since he appeared to me that first night and kept me from killing myself, I had never known Namid to be wrong about anything. Until tonight I’d never heard him express even the slightest uncertainty. I do not know. . It was like being a kid again and finding out my father wasn’t stronger and smarter than every other man on the planet.

For the first time I’d bumped up against Namid’s limitations, and I found it unnerving. I think he did, too. Along with his certainty on all matters relating to magic, Namid had also been fearless. He was a runemyste. He’d been chosen by the Runeclave because even in life his mastery of the craft had been exceptional. As a member of his council, his powers were beyond anything I could imagine, although as I understood it, he and the other runemystes were forbidden to use their magic directly on our world. Still, I couldn’t imagine there was much that Namid feared. There could be no denying, though, that he had been scared tonight, or as close to scared as a runemyste could get.

Mercifully, Namid didn’t stay with me long. The last thing I needed was a thousand-year-old ghost commenting on my driving. But long after he left me, I continued to think about our conversation.

I got home and cleaned my knee, first with water and soap, and then with hydrogen peroxide, which was no picnic. Usually these things look better once you wipe away the dried blood, but this one looked like hell even after I’d cleaned it up. I wished I had hit Robby harder.

Then I did something stupid. I went online, found Billie Castle’s blog, and read her piece about the murder of Claudia Deegan. Most of what she wrote focused on the Deegans and the history of the Blind Angel killings, but she got me in there near the end.

Sources close to the probe indicate that Justis Fearsson, a private investigator and former Phoenix Police Department homicide detective, has been brought in to work on the case. Fearsson, who worked on the Blind Angel murder investigation before being forced to leave the department for undisclosed disciplinary violations, has denied having any connection to the Deegans, and refused to speculate as to why the case had not yet been solved. Others with connections to the PPD were less reticent.

I wasn’t mentioned again in the story, but my name was hyperlinked. Clicking on it, I was directed to another page that had some basic information about me-my service record, my office address and phone number, and a poor reproduction of the picture from the phone book. Considering the way my conversation with Billie had ended, I’d gotten off easy. But I had a feeling I’d be appearing in future articles at “Castle’s Village.”

I was tired and thought about turning in early. But my mind was churning. For the past few months, I’d managed to put the Blind Angel case out of my head. But with all that had happened today, it was front and center again, and I knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily.

Instead, I put on a pair of jeans that wasn’t torn and stained with blood, grabbed my bomber jacket, and left the house.

When I lost my badge, I also lost access to many of the sources a cop uses for information. But there was a whole other network in the city that had nothing to do with the PPD and everything to do with magic. Parts of that network were in neighborhoods that even I didn’t like to visit at night; others were only available after dark. One of these was a place called, appropriately enough, New Moon.

The Moon was a small dive in Gilbert, not too far from my home in Chandler. It was open most nights, except when the moon was full, and it catered to weremystes and people who liked to pretend that they had magical abilities, or who just enjoyed hanging out with those of us who really did. Not much happened there. It wasn’t like weremystes got together to plot a magical takeover of the world, or something like that. But at times there was something to be said for being able to talk about magic and the phasings with people who understood from their own experience, and who didn’t shy away from me like I was already nuts. We tolerated the wannabes and groupies because they listened and they didn’t judge us, and because they tended to buy rounds for everyone as a way of compensating for their lack of actual magical ability.

The bar was also where I went when I needed information about what was happening in the streets: new weremystes in town, rivalries among sorcerers, unexplained magical attacks, that sort of thing. My visits to the New Moon hadn’t turned up anything about the Blind Angel Killer back when I was on the force, and I didn’t expect this visit to be any different. But it was a place to start.

There were only about ten cars in the gravel parking lot and about the same number of people inside. A few of them tore their gazes from their gin and tonics and beers as I walked in, but they showed little interest in me and were soon focused once more on their glasses and bottles. I didn’t recognize any of the customers. It had been a while since I’d been there.

I stepped to the bar and sat. The Diamondbacks were on TV, getting clobbered by the Giants.

“Jay Fearsson, as I live and breathe.”

I smiled, as much at the New York accent as at the greeting. Sophie Schaller was about as unlikely a candidate to be tending bar in a place that catered to weremystes as a person could imagine. She was a Jewish grandmother from Brooklyn, who had moved out to Phoenix for the warm air and sunshine. She had to be in her late sixties; maybe even older. Most weremystes her age were already crazy, or they were dead. But she’d once confided in me that her phasings were milder than most, and I believed her. Her mind still seemed as sharp as the day I met her.

“Hi, Sophe,” I said, leaning over the bar to give her a kiss on the cheek. “How are you?”

She shrugged. “Eh, not bad.” She had white hair, warm brown eyes, and a smile that could melt glaciers. Like all weremystes, she had that slightly blurred appearance, though the effect was pretty weak on Sophie, probably because she wasn’t a powerful sorcerer. I imagined that the Blind Angel Killer would have looked like little more than a smudge.

Sophie’s face was lined and she wore too much makeup, but I could tell that she’d been a great beauty as a young woman.

“What’ll you have, dear?” she asked me.

“Beer. The darkest you’ve got on tap.”

She grinned, her eyes twinkling in the dim light. “We just got something new in. I think you’ll like it.” She had to use a step stool to get a mug down, and then she walked to the tap and started to fill it. “You here on business or out for a drink?”

“Business.”

Sophie nodded, but didn’t say anything more until she’d filled the mug and put it in front of me. “Whaddya wanna know?”

“You heard about the Deegan kid?” I asked in a low voice.

“Oy.” She grunted the word, as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “’Course I have. Who hasn’t?” She narrowed her eyes. “You still think those kids are bein’ killed with magic?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Sophie shook her head. “People around here didn’t like it when you were saying that a couple of years ago. They won’t like it any more now.”

“I know.” I stared back at her, waiting for her to tell me something, knowing that she’d give in eventually. Sophie had always liked me, and whatever the rest of the magical community thought of my efforts to find the weremyste responsible for the Blind Angel murders, she wanted this guy caught.

At last she sighed and began to wipe up the bar with a white towel. “Luis is in back,” she said, her attention on her cleaning. “He’s playing cards, but he’ll talk to you. I think.”

“Thanks, Sophe.” I tasted the beer. “That’s good.”

She grinned. I dug into my wallet and threw a ten spot on the bar before walking to the back room. It was filled with cigarette and cigar smoke, which barely masked the smell of stale beer. Five men sat around a table playing poker with those old chips that always reminded me of Necco Wafers. Luis Paredes sat at the far end of the table behind a wall of chips, chewing on a stogie and staring hard at his cards. He was a short, barrel-chested Latino, with a scruffy beard and mustache, and dark eyes that were hard and flat, like a shark’s. I saw that heat-wave effect with him, too, and with the other guys at the table. It was strongest by far with Luis.

The other poker players were all Latino, and they turned to stare at me as I stood in the doorway. I can’t say that they made me feel welcome.

“Fearsson,” Luis said. “You want to sit?”

“I want to talk.”

Luis said to his friends, “El gringo no tiene el cajones jugar con nosotros.” The gringo doesn’t have the balls to play with us.

They all laughed. I kept my mouth shut.

Luis met my gaze again, his smile fading. I’d busted him years ago for possession of pot, and he’d managed to get probation and community service. Later, after I’d opened my business, I helped him track down an employee who had stolen from the bar. So he had as many reasons to like me as not. And he knew that I wasn’t someone who would have shown up here without good reason. At last he muttered, “Maldita sea,” and put his cards on the table, face down. “Nos dan cinco minutos.” Damn it. Give us five minutes.

The other men eyed me again, with even less warmth than before. Then they put down their cards, stood, their chairs scraping on the wood floor, and filed out of the room.

Luis indicated the chair nearest his own with an open hand. “Mi amigo,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I sat and sipped my beer. “You’ve heard about Claudia Deegan?”

Luis’ expression hardened, if that was possible. “No tengo nada hacer con eso.” That’s not my problem.

“I know that, Luis. But I think she was killed by magic, like all the other Blind Angel victims. So that makes it a problem for all of us.”

He scowled, but after a moment he nodded for me to go on.

“You know of anyone in town who’s been playing with dark magic? Maybe showing signs of power that he shouldn’t have?”

Luis shook his head. “No.”

I would have preferred that he give the question more thought, but I didn’t sense that he was hiding anything from me. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have been fool enough to call him a liar in his own place, with his friends in the next room. Luis was as skilled with his magic as I was with mine, maybe more so. And I didn’t think the weremystes listening from the barroom would be siding with me if it came to a fight.

“Can you think of any reason why someone would kill with magic on the night of the quarter moon?”

He sat forward. “The first quarter?” Clearly I’d gotten his attention. “El Angel Ciegos?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Every time.”

He sat back again, rubbing a hand over his mouth.

I took another sip, watching him. “What does that mean, Luis?”

“No estoy seguro.” I’m not sure. “The first quarter-that’s a powerful night. Not like the full, but strong, you know? If I was doing magic and I needed it to be just right-perfecto, you know? — that’s when I’d do it.”

“I think he’s using these kids to make himself stronger,” I said. “I have no proof, and I don’t know what kind of magic he’d have to do, but that’s what I think. Call it the hunch of an ex-cop. I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

“I don’t talk to cops, Jay. You know that. And private eyes are no different in my book. But this. .” He shook his head. “Esto suena mal.” This sounds bad. He stared at the table for several seconds, seemingly deep in thought. “You talked to Quinley yet?”

“Brother Q?” I said with genuine surprise.

Luis laughed. “Yeah, Brother Q.” He said it in a way that made me think he didn’t like Q very much.

Orestes Quinley was the weremyste Kona and I arrested after my first conversation with Namid. He was a minor conjurer then, still new enough to his power that a jail would hold him, and he served a couple of years at Eyman State Prison.

Within a few months of his release, he started getting in trouble again; small time offenses primarily. He’d never been a violent guy, and for the most part he was accused of stealing esoteric stuff-strange pieces of jewelry, unusual gems and stones, rare herbs and oils. On several occasions, the victims dropped the charges as soon as they recovered the stolen goods. Many of them seemed reluctant to tell us too much about why Orestes might have wanted them, or why they were so anxious to have them back. Even in those cases where the charges weren’t dropped, it never seemed that we could find enough evidence against him to get a conviction. And since I was the one guy in the PPD who could track magical crimes, after I left the department he stopped getting caught at all. Those twenty-six months at Eyman still represented the only time Orestes had ever done.

To this day, whenever something strange happens in town-strange in a magical sense-Kona will ask me to go around and speak with Orestes. On a few occasions he had been able to help us out, but always for a price, and, of course, never in any way that implicated himself. To be honest I was glad I hadn’t been able to prove anything against him. I liked Orestes, and despite the fact that our friendship began with me arresting him, I believe he liked me, too. But I hadn’t talked to him about the Blind Angel case since I’d left the force, and before then he hadn’t been particularly helpful.

“You think he has something to do with this guy?” I asked.

Luis gave a noncommittal shrug. “I just said you should talk to him.”

“Yeah, all right.” I drained my beer and stood. “Thanks, Luis.”

A sly grin carved across his face. “You sure you don’t want to play a few hands?”

“Weremyste poker, huh? I don’t think so.”

He laughed. “By the time we’re done for the night, the cards are glowing with so many colors you can barely tell which suit is which.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said. “Goodnight, mi amigo.”

“Jay.”

I halted in the doorway. His expression had grown deadly serious.

“This guy-this killer. . he loco peligroso. Crazy dangerous, you know? Watch yourself.”

I nodded once, and left, pausing at the bar long enough to give Sophie my empty mug and wish her goodnight.

Once outside, I had to resist the urge to jump in the Z-ster and drive straight to Q’s place in Maryvale. But it was late and I’d had a long day. I’d find him soon enough, and if it turned out he’d been lying to me when I was on the job and asking him about the Blind Angel case, he was going to wish he’d never left Eyman Prison.