Science and Sorcery (8 page)

“Matt Coombs, NYPD,” Matt said.  He found himself
liking
Buckley, yet he couldn't banish the sense that something was badly wrong.  “What exactly happened to you?”

“I thought this was Washington,” Buckley said.  “I refuse to go to New York on moral grounds and because of several outstanding warrants..oh, I shouldn't have told you that, should I?”

He laughed.  “
Butt Monkey
– that’s my tank – needed some servicing,” he added.  “We’re meant to be exercising against the jarheads in a couple of weeks and the CO insisted that everything had to be perfect, or the Marines would kick our asses, so we were checking and rechecking everything.  I was bent over and fiddling with the tank when something bites my bum and won’t let go, so I scream like a little girl and look behind me.  There’s a fucking great black dog there with eyes like burning embers and it won’t let go.  My partner smacks it with a wrench and the dog-thing howls and runs for it, leaving me bleeding out on the tarmac.”

Matt frowned.  The dog-thing sounded alarmingly familiar.  “Next thing I remember,” Buckley said, “I was in the hospital.  There’s nasty marks on my bum, but everything else seems to have healed.  I want to go back to duty and instead they ship me up here.  God alone knows what is going to happen to my tank without me to look after her.”

“I see,” Matt said.  Now Buckley had told him where the marks were, it was alarmingly easy to isolate the sense of
wrongness
.  Something very unpleasant seemed to be spreading through the Specialist’s body.  “Have you been watching television?”

“The bastards don’t let you have television in this dump,” Buckley said.  He snorted.  “Come on!  It was all I could do to convince them that I needed a book to read.  I’d bust out of here in a moment if I had my clothes.”

“I think they may have made a mistake,” Matt said, tightly.  “How long ago was it when you were bitten?”

“Five days,” Buckley said.  “Why?”

Matt scowled.  That meant that Buckley had been bitten around the same time as he’d shot the werewolf girl.  But how had a werewolf gotten onto a military base?  Stupid question, he told himself, a moment later.  One of the soldiers had been a werewolf without having the slightest idea – and, if he or she hadn't come forward afterwards, they probably
still
didn't know that they were a werewolf.  And Buckley had been bitten, and Matt was
sure
that he could sense the taint...there was no escaping the conclusion.  Buckley had been turned into a werewolf.

Buckley must have seen something in his face, for he reached out and gripped Matt’s arm.  “What happened to me?”

“It’s a long story,” Matt said.  He wasn't sure if he should say anything, but Buckley deserved to know.  “You may be a werewolf.”

He ran through the entire story, from the werewolf he’d shot to the other strange reports and Kaleen the Healer.  It struck him that they could ask Kaleen, once she woke up, to see if she could do anything for Buckley, but if not...he’d done some reading on werewolves after shooting one and discovered that legends tended to disagree on some details.  Some werewolves only transformed during the full moon; others, it seemed, could transform at any moment they chose.  God alone knew how reliable the legends actually were. 

“That’s not possible,” Buckley said, when he had finished.  “They put me in the freaking madhouse, not the hospital.”

“I wish I was lying,” Matt admitted.  The world had definitely turned upside down.  Meeting someone who was effectively from a time before the world turned weird had brought that home to him, even though he was surprised at how quickly he’d accepted the change.  “I think that you had better be put somewhere safe before the next full moon.”

“It’s still bullshit,” Buckley said.

Matt stood up, walked over to the end of the bed and retrieved the medical records.  He was no doctor, but learning to read them was an essential part of police training, mainly for when criminals claimed to be ill, insane or tried to make other excuses for their crimes. 

“Read this,” he said.  The first doctor had written a whole string of question marks; the second had written a note questioning the first doctor’s competence.   He hadn't believed that someone could recover from having their butt cheek torn free so quickly.  Matt, who had seen how odd the first werewolf’s body had been, believed it.  “I think that you’re not entirely human any longer.”

He passed Buckley the record and frowned, inwardly.  If Buckley had been tainted by magic, and Matt could
see
the magic...what the hell was
he
?

Chapter Eight

New York, USA

Day 6

Calvin awoke at 11am, much to his surprise.  His mother normally bellowed at him to get out of bed to go to school, but she hadn't said a word in the morning.  Puzzled, half-convinced that the events of the night had just been a dream, he pulled on his shirt and jeans before walking down to the kitchen,  A pair of notes sat on the table; one from the school, informing his parents that the school would remain closed until Monday, the other from his mother, telling him to behave himself.  Calvin found himself chuckling as he realised that it had been real after all.  Moe and his cronies would never pick on him again.

Pouring himself a cup of milk, he picked up the paper and looked at it.  The front page was dominated by a story about a woman who had developed the power to heal people with her bare hands, something that he would have found unbelievable if he hadn't somehow incinerated Moe with his own magic.  Glancing inside, the next few pages constituted of related stories, some of them thoroughly confusing.  Strange lights had been sighted at legendary places of power, followed by a number of incidents and deaths.  The paper was short on detail, but Harrow had told him enough to read between the lines.  Magic was flowing back into the world and the old places of power were coming back to life. 

And his powers were real.  Feeling a strange sensation in his chest, he picked up a bowl of water and triggered the spying spell, looking for Marie.  Unsurprisingly, she was running down the street with a pair of girlfriends, exercising for cheerleader practice.  Calvin fought down a flash of disappointment, almost laughing at himself.  It was nearly noon; she wasn't going to be naked right now, was she?  Some fiddling with the spell allowed him to see her covered breasts, bouncing invitingly under her shirt as she ran, but it wasn't quite the same.  Shaking his head, he looked for three other girls he knew from school; two of them, like Marie, were taking advantage of their time away from school.  The third, Sandra, looked up the moment the spell formed, as if she was looking back at him.

Calvin cancelled the spell frantically, irrationally convinced that Sandra had sensed the intrusion, perhaps even sensed
him
.  She was the smartest of the cheerleaders, a group for which he normally had nothing but abject contempt; it was possible that she too had the smarts to make magic work.  Or maybe she had some inherent talent that was coming to life as magic flowed back into the world.  Calvin found himself shaking as he poured the steaming water into the sink and found himself something to eat from the fridge.  What if Sandra drew the connection between Moe’s death, someone spying on her, and Calvin himself?

He mulled it over in his mind as he ate breakfast and then wandered back upstairs.  What exactly was he doing?  Magic, Harrow had said, and he had no reason to doubt her, but how did it actually
work
?  He’d burned Moe to death, along with two of his cronies, and later somehow created water from nothing.  Or had he?  The water had been real, but where had it actually come from?  A little imagination provided too many ideas for comfort.  If he could make something out of nothing, where could he stop?

“
Mana
is the source of magic, the power behind the spells,” Harrow had said.  Calvin took that to mean that humans, magical or mundane, didn't produce
mana
for themselves.  That had to be true, or the utopia where brains, not strength, determined social position would never have fallen.  There had to be an outside source of
mana
that, for whatever reason, had stopped working for thousands of years.  And now it was back.

Thoughtfully, he opened his wallet and produced a ten-dollar bill.  Harrow hadn't mentioned any spells for counterfeiting money – there might not even have
been
money when she’d been free, although he found
that
hard to believe – but more money would be very useful.  Calvin’s family might not have been living on the streets, yet he’d felt the shame of poverty and of being bombarded by the taunts of those who were granted bigger allowances by their parents.  What if he could produce a duplicate ten-dollar bill?

Concentrating, he tried to focus on what he wanted.  There was a surge of
mana
and a second bill appeared in front of him, only to fall into dust when he caught hold of it.  Calvin swore out loud and tried again, but the second result was no more successful than the first.  But then, he
was
trying to get something out of nothing.  Snorting, he picked up a sheet of paper, held it behind the original bill, and tried again.  This time, he produced something that
looked
like a ten-dollar bill, and remained fairly stable, but it
felt
wrong, as if an incompetent forger had tried to print out fake money on ordinary paper.  Calvin experimented with crumpling it up, rumpling the paper, before admitting that forgery didn't seem to be very easy.  There had to be some trick he was missing. 

Or maybe there just wasn't enough
mana
in the air yet.  Harrow had said that the
mana
was flowing back into the world, enough to trigger dormant werewolf genes in people who had had no idea that they were werewolves.  And many other mystical creatures too.  The newspaper had reported vampire attacks in Chicago and San Francisco, sightings of mermaids in the Potomac and even zombies in Haiti.  How long would it be until there was enough
mana
to turn someone into a snail?

He allowed himself a long moment to imagine Moe being turned into a snail and being crushed underfoot, before pushing the thought aside.  Magic didn't make someone all-powerful, or whatever had happened to Harrow and her friends would never have happened.  The thought was entertaining, but if someone happened to be turned into a snail, what happened to the rest of their body mass?  Even the smallest human was a giant compared to a snail, far heavier than the crawling creature.  Did
mana
interface with reality itself and change things, or were some magical tales nothing more than legends? 

Harrow had told him to practice, so he started by summoning fire and – this time – trying to deduce what actually happened when he used his magic.  The air seemed to grow very hot, very rapidly, before the flame actually came into existence.  No wonder Moe had burned so fast, he realised, as he cancelled the spell.  The
mana
had generated so much heat that the real question was why the school itself hadn't burned to the ground.  Or, for that matter, why Calvin hadn't been scorched by being so close to the fire.  Clearly, there were laws at work that he didn't even begin to understand. 

Twenty minutes later, he had run through every spell Harrow had taught him that could be used without a human target and felt tired, almost dizzy.  Magic clearly exacted a price, he realised as he walked back downstairs and retrieved a bar of chocolate from the fridge.  His mother would be unhappy to learn that he had eaten a whole bar, but there was no choice.  He needed a sugar rush and he needed it now. 
Mana
ebbed and flowed around him as he ate the chocolate and drank a glass of milk, before walking back upstairs and turning on his laptop.  Logically, he couldn't be the
only
magician whose magic had started coming to life – and if there were others, they might be trying to reach out on the internet.  He knew better than to make contact after what had happened to Moe, but he could certainly browse the bulletin boards and see what they said.

The internet had never been as restrained as the mainstream media.  Where the newspapers had reported werewolves, vampires and outright magic in a tone of mild disbelief, the internet gleefully picked up and magnified each and every rumour.  He looked up the incident at his school first and recoiled in shock when he discovered that a number of internet forums had made the correct deduction; Moe had been a bully who had finally been killed by one of his victims.  Any rational discussion was effectively obliterated by two sets of trolls; one in favour of killing bullies on sight, the other shocked by the deaths and the seemingly tacit approval offered by many posters.  But there was nothing, thankfully, that linked Calvin specifically to Moe. 

Breathing out, he concentrated on reading as many stories as he could, even though it was impossible to determine which ones might be true and which were nothing more than the product of mass hysteria.  Police departments had reported a higher percentage of people winding up trapped outside naked, as if they’d been drunk – or werewolves.  The federal government was still flapping about just what was going on, but various police departments had asked people who thought they might have been werewolves to report to them for medical attention.  One rather sarcastic poster pointed out that they’d been swarmed with people claiming to be werewolves, including several who hadn't transformed at the light of the full moon.  The
real
werewolves were either unaware of their true nature or were keeping their heads down.  They might be charged with murder because of what they’d done while under the influence. 

Those weren’t even the weirdest tales.  A doctor reported a girl who seemed to have drowned, in the middle of the Nevada desert.  The police suspected that it was murder, but they didn't have any clues that might lead them to the perpetrator.  Calvin couldn't imagine what sort of spell would do that to someone, if it hadn't been a case of the poor girl discovering her hidden heritage at precisely the wrong moment, but he suspected that he could learn.  Clairvoyants were reporting that they actually
could
talk to the dead, although the dead weren't always happy about being disturbed.  One report stated that a clairvoyant’s house had been torn apart by invisible forces, while the woman herself – and her clients – had been stripped naked, pinched so badly that their bodies were still bruised, and then dumped outside.  Calvin would have found that absurd, if he hadn't read the line that stated that the clients wanted to know where their uncle had hidden his money.  Maybe you could take it with you when you left after all. 

And then there was the story of a girl who had grown bigger breasts, or the girl who had suddenly become the most attractive woman in the world, or the folksinger whose voice seemed to be able to perform magic, or the swimmer who had grown gills and a tail...

A crash from downstairs interrupted his musings.  Calvin stood up, wondering if the police had finally drawn the connection between him and Moe and come to arrest him.  Killing Moe had been a service to humanity, but he wouldn't expect the police to see it that way.  They served the established order, the same order that wanted to keep the nerds and geeks and everyone else with brains firmly under control.  Feeling magic billowing around him, he advanced to the top of the stairs and sighed in relief when he saw Mindy.  His sister might be irritating as hell – little sisters always were – but she wasn't the police.

“You’re so lucky,” Mindy said, as Calvin walked downstairs.  “They didn't cancel
my
school.”

Calvin shrugged.  “You don’t go to the same school,” he reminded her.  “No one died at
your
school.”

“Petal might have,” Mindy said.  She smiled, expecting her brother to listen to her.  “No one has seen anything of her for three days and the teachers are worried.”

“I bet they are,” Calvin said sardonically.  No one had given a shit when Moe had treated him like dirt, but someone as attractive as Petal...well, it would be a different story for her.  “I’m sure she’s fine.”

“She normally goes on Messenger or Yahoo Chat as soon as she gets home from school,” Mindy said, seriously.  “Right now...she’s been completely silent.  No one knows what has happened to her.”

“She’s probably ill,” Calvin said.  He found it hard to care.  Petal was seven years younger than him and went to a different school.  Either one would have put a barrier between them, even if Mindy and her friends hadn’t tormented him during one of her birthday parties.  It had just been another reminder that he didn't have any friends to attend a birthday party of his own.  “Why don't you go see her after school?”

“Because mom says that I am to come home and not dawdle on the way,” Mindy said.  Their mother hadn't quite believed most of the reports sweeping the nation, but she’d believed enough to insist that her children came home before dark.  God alone knew what was going to happen during the next full moon.  “And I have tried to call her and there was no answer.”

Calvin sat down at the table as Mindy started to prepare canned soup.  His kid sister got to come home for lunch, unlike him, something else that rankled even though his school was too far away for him to get home for lunch and then back again before classes resumed.  There were times when he wondered if he had been adopted, or if there was some dark secret behind his conception; Mindy took far more after their mother than Calvin did after their father.  But they did look alike...if only he’d had their father’s muscles instead of the face.  His life would have been much easier.  What if his mother had cheated on his father and the man he’d been raised to call daddy wasn't his real father?  The fact they shared the same looks could be the product of wishful thinking.  Or maybe it was the other way around.