The Flower Bowl Spell (19 page)

There’s Gru anointing young priestess Bright
Vixen in a candlelit ceremony in Golden Gate Park, both of them
wearing their hair long and adorned with circlets of woven flowers.
There’s Gladys in her corporate casual attire, sitting in a
conference room arguing with colleagues at a table full of legal
pads and official-looking documents covered with schematics of
computer bits—microchips or nanobots or some other tech ephemera.
There she is in a dark bedroom in bed with a man, the two of them
naked, their limbs entangled as they make love. There’s middle-aged
Gladys in this house, sitting at her dining room table with a bunch
of jewelry—not only lockets, but necklaces of garnet, amethyst, and
moonstone—placing them into dozens of shipping boxes labeled Foxy
Lady Designs. And there she is sleeping at night, peacefully at
rest until she starts to cough and gag, waking from her slumber.
Her eyes dart around in bewilderment as her mouth and nostrils fill
with water that doesn’t spill out. Her cat, meowing outside her
bedroom window, starts to hiss, but gloved hands grab it, fastening
something around its neck, and it is the last thing Bright Vixen
sees before she stops struggling and falls back onto the
pillow.

This last image startles me, and I
involuntarily suck in some of the smoke, snapping the
connection.

“No friggin’ way,” I breathe. My dream last
night about being paralyzed—it must have been a premonition.

I turn and run, calling to the girls in the
living room to get out of the house, never mind turning off the TV,
just go, go, go. Their faces as they join me at the front door are
startled and exhilarated by my urgency, by the very fact that I am
moving faster than they’ve ever seen me move in our short
acquaintance.

We trip over ourselves getting out the door,
and there’s the cat, still on the mat, cowering at our noisy
departure. I scoop it up, fumbling with that heavy, whirring
collar, and the girls are running safely ahead of me, almost to the
car, where Tyson stands, leaning again the passenger-side door.
He’s watching us with his mouth open as I finally yank the collar
off the cat and release it, but not before it scratches me all down
my stomach, its claws hooking for a sharp, painful second into my
thigh. I fling the collar back into the house, slam the door, and
run. Behind me there’s a boom that rumbles through the earth, like
a moan a wounded animal would make, and it carries me forward so
that I think stupidly,
I don’t need a broomstick—I can fly all
by myself
. But I can’t, not really, and I land with a thud—my
wrists and hands taking the brunt of my fall as I protect my
head—at Tyson’s feet.

Chapter Seventeen

The girls are safe in the car, and I’m behind
the wheel. From the backseat Romola screams, “The kitty!” and Tyson
grabs it one-handed, dives into the passenger seat, and pulls the
door closed. As I drive, the cat snarls, scratches him, and makes a
beeline for the gas and brake pedals. I scuffle my feet at it until
it scrabbles under the seat.

“What the hell?” Ty shouts at me.

“Later,” I say, my voice surprisingly quiet
and firm.

There are some things magick can control and
some it can’t. That’s why, as I grip the steering wheel and drive a
cautious three miles over the speed limit, I comb my memory for
everything I touched in Gladys’s house. I peeled out of there like
a drag racer, and who knows whether the neighbors saw us, noted our
looks or the license plate?

I was able to do a very quick read of the
immediate area, and picked up only mere traces of activity. It’s a
Sunday morning, so maybe people are at church or synagogue or
brunch. Maybe the traces were just pets. There was one, however,
two doors down, that was pretty powerful—a man, I think, surprised
but not afraid of the explosion. I got pictures from his
speculative imagination of a car backfiring, an unusually loud
video game, and, unpredictably, an opera performance with a singer
dressed like Napoleon Bonaparte.

I drive for a while, taking right turns, left
turns, going straight. I have no destination in particular. Just
away.

“What are you doing here?” I ask Tyson.

“Why did you ditch me?”

“You saw what happened.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s the answer you’re going to get.”

Tyson tells me he already had his bag packed,
and, guessing I’d take off on him, he followed us from the hotel in
a cab. This surprises me. He’s been so readable, but apparently
there’s more deviousness in him than I thought—almost as much as in
me. Tyson got chatty with his cab driver, who happened to recognize
him—his daughter is a fan. In light of Gladys’s bombed-out house,
we have to take care of that. I zone in on Ty’s story about the
cab, which leads me to an image of the yellow car, and then I’m
able to get a fix on the cabbie himself.

We pull to the curb on State Street, flanked
by chic shops and cafés. I turn to Romola. “Sweetie, do you think
you could give me one of your shells?” She has about twenty in her
little pink backpack, some that I bought her in the San Francisco
aquarium gift shop. Romola reluctantly passes me the saddest,
smallest, dullest shell in her collection. I cup it in both hands,
closing my eyes, and whisper an incantation over and over:
“
Secret wishes…rebirth of hope…midlife mope…
” I feel Tyson
watching me, but I shut out all static. When I open my eyes, Ty’s
cab has just pulled up in front of us and a passenger climbs
out.

I hop out of my car and run over, leaning
into the driver’s open window. His face is startled and a little
delighted by my smile. He opens his mouth as if to ask a
question.

“Here’s to a fresh start,” I say, and hand
him the shell. Before he can utter a word I jog back to my car, get
in, and drive away. I hope all he does is blank out on Tyson’s ride
instead of, say, quitting his job or walking out on his family. I
would have preferred the Forget About It Spell, but that takes a
lot more equipment, including aluminum foil, moonwort,
antiperspirant, and, ideally, a new moon. Going back to Gladys’s
house for supplies is out of the question—the front door and
windows are blown out, the house is on fire—so the New Beginnings
Charm will have to do. I would have liked to hit
all
of
Gladys’s neighbors with the Forget About It, but c’est la vie.

So, we’re rabbiting. Heading out on the
Pacific Coast Highway for who knows where. South for now, like
bandits. If the cops get a bead on us, I’ll just deal with them
head-on.

Tyson and the girls are being very quiet, and
I realize that they’re in shock. This is a good thing. Not the
shock, but the quiet. It gives me headspace to think. Actually, the
shock isn’t so bad either. Their bodies are taking care of them,
cocooning their sensibilities, for the time being at least.

I drive past lunchtime. I’m not hungry and
neither are they. We’re getting close to Santa Cecilia, but the car
needs fuel so we stop. Ty mans the gas pump while I take the girls
to the bathroom. They each pick a snack in the mini-mart and I get
icy cold bottles of water for Tyson and me. We get back in the car
and drive on. The cat hasn’t budged.

Tyson turns on the stereo and the music of
Arsenic Playground fills the car. He pops out the CD, the twist of
his lips showing his embarrassment and pleasure. My dream of us
doing the nasty pans through my mind, and I feel suddenly
flushed.

“Research for the piece,” I say. “And the
girls like it.”

“We like the Beatles too,” Cleo says through
a mouthful of trail mix.

Tyson flips through my CD case and inserts
the Beatles. He adjusts the sound so that the music comes out
mainly through the rear speakers right next to Romola and Cleo’s
heads. He turns to me.

“You said we’d talk later. It’s later.”

“You have questions.” I keep my eyes on the
road. “I get that. But I can’t talk to you when you’re wearing
those sunglasses.”

“What do you have against my sunglasses?”

I think about how to answer this. “Just take
them off.”

“No, tell me.”

“You look like a poser.”

He doesn’t say anything, nursing a wounded
silence.

“Not really,” I say, toning it down for the
sake of harmony. “But I can’t see those old windows to the soul, as
it were.” I wonder how much he knows about his purported love, Ms.
Badler. It’s likely not much, with that glamour on her.

“I sure as hell hope you can’t see my eyes,”
Tyson says as he removes the glasses. “You’re
driving
. Keep
‘em on the road, Zhang.”

I’m a little disappointed to find out that he
has control issues. As if she senses my distress, the wobbly hula
girl doll on my dashboard nods her agreement, and then she steps
down from her pedestal. She hulas with gentle undulations of her
arms and hips until she’s swaying right in front of me. In one
elegant move, she hops from the dash to the steering wheel, spins
on her toes, and climbs down the wheel until her feet are resting
on the top of the horn. She places her hands on the wheel, her eyes
on the road. Without thinking, I take my hands off the wheel and
turn to look at Tyson as Hula Girl steers the car into the next
lane.

“What the—what the hell are you doing?”

“Keeping my eyes on the road.”

“The hell you are.”

I press my foot on the accelerator and keep
looking at him.

“Memphis—shit—cut it out!” There is true
panic in his voice. He’s gripping the dashboard with one hand, the
back of my headrest with the other and his feet are all over the
place—the glove compartment, his duffel bag on the floor, his car
seat—stabbing at an imaginary brake. He checks his seat belt. Cleo
is laughing and Romola says, “Whoa.”

“You have to trust me,” I say. “It’s all
right.” I release pressure on the gas pedal and we slow down,
coming up on a slow-moving hatchback. I flip the signal, and Hula
Girl steers around it. All the while, my eyes are on Tyson. He’s
still tense, but now he’s watching me watch him. He relaxes his
grip on my seat a little.

“That was fun!” Cleo says, still giggling. I
look back at the girls. Romola has a tentative smile on her face,
like she’s trying to decide if she should be worried or not.

“What is going on?” Tyson says, as if talking
to himself.

I turn back to him. “I’m trying to figure
that out.”

“How can you drive without looking?”

“I could probably drive in my sleep, but I’ve
never tried it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Too cliché.” I study his eyes. They look
sticky and bloodshot, and for some reason I feel like crying, as if
my tears could wet his stressed-out eyes. I look at the car in
front of us and then at the lines on the freeway.

Coming out is never easy. I’ve only done it a
few times, with varying degrees of revelation and success. Cooper
knows, of course, but not about my true abilities. Alice knew. One
of the salesgirls at my local independent bookstore sort of knows.
She’s rung up my magickal almanacs in the past and, being a Wiccan
herself, has chatted with me about things, but only surfacey
stuff—birch wands versus cherry (hey, no wand at all works for
me!), beeswax versus conventional candles. But coming out to a
person I’ve known for most of my life, if not all that well, and
who is clearly in someone else’s thrall (I just don’t know how
deep), is no cakewalk.

“I take it that Alice never told you I was
brought up as a witch,” I say.

“Alice? She…yeah, she mentioned
something.”

I’m surprised. “Really?”

“Well, I
thought
she said you were a
Goth. Which never made much sense since you didn’t have all the
metal shit in your face.” He laughs. “But yeah. Witch makes more
sense.”

I think about what this could mean as I crack
the knuckles of my fingers. “My mother was experimenting with
paganism when I was born. But she was more into the costume drama
part of it than the real thing. You know, she had one of those
‘Pagan and Proud’ bumper stickers. ‘My Other Car is a Broomstick.’”
I shake my head. “That’s my mother. She eventually got bored with
it and moved on to something else. I think tennis. But to me,
witchcraft made sense.”

“How’s that?”

“It works for me.”

“And that’s why you can drive without looking
at the road?”

“I can drive without looking at the road
because I have help.” I point to the empty base glued to my dash.
“See my Hula Girl?”

“What Hula Girl?”

I frown. “Put on the glasses.”

His hands are shaking but he does it.
“What?”

That’s interesting. The glasses don’t give
him the power of magickal sight. I guess the glamour doesn’t run
too deep after all.

“You can take them off.”

He does.

I lean back. “Cleo, who’s driving the car?” I
hope, fleetingly, that I’m not wrong about her.

“The pretty dolly with long black hair and a
green skirt,” she answers cheerfully.

Romola looks at her sister as if she doesn’t
know what to think.

I turn back to Tyson. “See?”

“No.”

“I know you don’t. But that’s what’s going
on.”

“Are you high?”

I shake my head. “How else would you explain
me driving without my hands or without looking?”

“You’re a witch. Maybe you’re doing it with
your mind.”

I consider this. I never thought of it that
way. Maybe I’m controlling Hula Girl. Maybe she’s not just doing me
a huge favor. Somehow, I don’t buy that. “No. I don’t have that
power. But I’ve heard of it.”

“Okay then.” Tyson’s laugh is
semi-hysterical. “If you don’t have
that
power then what
power do you have?”

“Well…I can read the facts of a person if
they’re near me. Sometimes even if they’re far away. Unless they’ve
put a blocking spell on themselves.” That’s got to be what’s going
on with Viveka—she’s got clairvoyant caller ID on me and she’s not
picking up.