The Flower Bowl Spell (23 page)

“To attract the opposite sex.”

“Only problem is”—he gives a wry
chuckle—“they haven’t mated in over a hundred years.” His finger
traces the fairy’s bloodied back. “They just stopped.”

“You mean they’re infertile?”

“No. I don’t think so. They just don’t want
to have any more little fairies.”

“But why?”

“They won’t tell me.”

I feel a surge of something—excitement or
hope. “They talk to you?”

“Of course. Don’t they talk to you?”

“They communicate. But I haven’t heard them
speak.”

Tucker lifts his gaze from the body and gives
me a sharp look. “You haven’t?” I shake my head and he considers
this for a while.

I have so many questions—too many, and I’m
afraid of wasting time with the wrong ones. “I thought fairies were
immortal.”

“Well, they live a long time. But something
kills them eventually. For a while it was lung cancer. Fairies are
heavy smokers, even if they claim it’s medicinal.” He makes air
quotes with his fingers on this last word. “I don’t care if you
call it a peace pipe or glaucoma treatment, burning leaves sucked
into your pulmonary system over time isn’t healthy.”

I must have a look of disbelief on my face
because Tucker chuckles and adds, “They don’t smoke as much as they
used to. There’s a big campaign in the fairy community, actually,
to give up smoking in favor of fermented honeysuckle drops.”

“What do they smoke?”

“Ragweed mostly. Sometimes fairy’s fire.”
Tucker starts tapping his finger on his chin, his eyes glazing over
in thought.

Part of me—the fairy lore junkie—could sit
here all night soaking up these tidbits of pixie trivia, but the
other part of me—the one that is running on little sleep and fast
food—mentally bitch-slaps the junkie back to the here and now.
“What do you think happened to this fairy?”

The question brings Tucker out of his
reverie. “This fairy was murdered.”

“By the cat.” I look up at the ceiling where
the beast is prowling above somewhere, and a sudden panic takes
hold of me. If the cat is capable of taking down a fairy, what can
it do to two little girls?

My panic is short-lived because Tucker says,
“I think not,” and I let that thought go.

“Yeah. I think so too.” The girls are in the
kitchen eating, and when I reach out I find them easily, struggling
with their chopsticks.

I tell Tucker what I wanted to tell him
earlier, about going to Bright Vixen’s house and what we found
there, including her dead body, the doll in the pool, and the
bomb-collared cat. Tucker’s eyes widen.

“Magick and petards. Sounds like a holy war.”
He sighs and runs his hand back and forth roughly through his hair.
“If anything, the cat helped us by preserving the victim. Maybe
unintentionally, but nonetheless…” Tucker beckons me closer. “See
here, on the back?”

The fairy is female, wearing clothes the
color of lilacs. Her skin is russet, covered in a fine, downy fuzz.
The nails of her hands are indeed rodentlike, like a bat’s. At the
end of her long legs her feet are bare, and the bottom pads are
sweetly pink, reminding me of a gerbil in my third-grade classroom
that often escaped from his cage. He would wind up in my desk,
usually wearing a miniature shako and nibbling a tiny baton. The
colors of the fairy’s clothes might have matched her wings, but I
can’t be sure because they’re gone, broken off with nothing left
but stumps that have long stopped bleeding.

“The cat must have chewed off the wings,” I
say.

Tucker shakes his head. “No. There would be
teeth marks. These breaks are too clean for that.”

“Then what?”

Tucker goes to his cabinet and pulls open the
enormous doors. Inside are approximately a thousand bottles of
brews, herbs, and instruments—at least two-dozen wands alone, and
thirteen pentacles, one for each moon cycle. An odor of decaying
flowers gives way to the scent of baking cinnamon cookies. On the
bottom shelf are more books, a collection of small, handsome,
leather-bound volumes. Tucker runs his fingers along the spines
before pulling one out. He flips through the pages quickly, and I
see that the print within is handwritten. Fountain pen.

“Your book of magick,” I whisper, slightly
embarrassed by the nerdy reverence in my voice but unable to help
it. My own book of magick is an old-school blue, fabric-covered
binder with an Independent Trucks skateboarding sticker on the
front as well as lots of random, inartistic ballpoint doodles. It’s
from my high school days, and I never bothered to upgrade. I gaze
at Tucker’s face, and he looks absolutely cuckoo with those goggles
on.

“My father gave these books to me. He kept
almost eighty of them himself. Had a guy in Florence make them up.
A good Italian
strega
near the Piazza del…Ah. Here it is.”
His goggled eyes stare. “Of course. How could I have been so
blind?”

“What is it?” I ask, wanting to pinch him, to
hurry him the hell up with clueing me in on his discovery
already.

“I think someone is trying to do the Flower
Bowl Spell.”

“Sounds pretty.” Which means it’s probably
not.

Tucker shakes his head and I wait for him to
explain, but instead he turns to an ancient rolltop desk tucked in
another corner of the room—also piled with books and dust and old
candles—and rolls the top back. Inside is a pristine, glossy work
surface. Interior lights go on, illuminating all manner of
gadgetry—an expensive laptop, the latest iPad, a sleek little
smartphone, and a fancy digital camera, among other electronic
items I can’t identify except as very, very expensive. Tucker boots
up the computer.

“Why don’t you keep your cell phone upstairs?
You can’t possibly hear it ring down here.”

He pops it out of its charger cradle. “This
is my magickal cell phone. I rigged it so that whenever it rings,
it just shows up in my pocket. Then I don’t have to go hunting and
I have less to carry around.”

“Cool. So, what is the Flower Bowl
Spell?”

“An abomination of power.” The laptop is done
warming up and he goes to an online Wiccan encyclopedia, which I’ve
consulted now and then but found a bit sketch since it’s maintained
by Wiccans and pagans with little if any sort of fact-checking or
accreditation (meaning, freaks and wannabes troll its virtual
pages, mucking up the genuine stuff), and taps in the words
Flower Bowl Spell
. “This gives you a synopsis.”

I lean over and scan the text, which is
highlighted with little black cats and pentacles along the margins,
along with some sort of audio file of chirpy,
Renaissance-faire-sounding panpipes.

Believed to have first been developed on
the Asiatic continent, specifically northern China, the Flower Bowl
Spell is one of power building, particularly for a fallen
practitioner of magick. The tools, incantations, and ingredients
have been adapted over time and by the various traditions and
cultures through which the spell has passed (one Masonite found the
pickaxe a most efficient addition), but it’s generally agreed that
a fertilized chicken egg, filet of mermaid, a piece of elephant
tusk (the whole tusk is preferred, but the endangerment of the
animals makes this prohibitive), a fairy’s wings, and a pair of
Chinese foot-binding shoes are essential. These last were the
original tool used by once-scorned Imperial Court Sorceress YiYi,
known in the Occident as Snow Lotus, and give the spell its name.
If a pair of shoes cannot be found, one shoe will do
.

Water runs through the pipes overhead, and
through the ceiling I hear Romola’s muffled voice directing Cleo to
help clean up the dishes. I look up from the computer. “Fairy’s
wings.”

Tucker nods.

“There’s something else.” The memory comes
back to me quickly. “Auntie Tess told me someone stole a carved
elephant tusk from a store in Chinatown.”

Tucker nods again. “Read a little more.”

The spell is, in fact, so named for the look
that foot-binding was to render in a girl or woman’s foot after the
bones in her feet had been broken over time by the binds and the
foot placed in a shoe called a flower bowl, the look of a lotus. It
is also known as the “Spell of Loss” and the “Sacrifice of
Presence” because the common denominator of the elements is things
that are missing.

In the late 1800s, a walk-in known as Bapho,
who thrived in the Caribbean islands, added a fifth element to the
spell. Bapho is said to have risen to power at an early age,
garnering many followers with black magick, particularly animal
sacrifice. After his arrest by authorities in Cuba, the stories go
that he executed a prison escape through transmutation, taking the
form of a cockroach and slipping through cracks in the walls to
freedom. His followers, however, had lost faith in their leader,
for his arrest reportedly came about after he used the favorite
schnauzer of a visiting cinema star, rumored to be Rita Hayworth,
on a hunt for gold, and severed the dog’s head with a pickaxe (see:
Masonites). The scandal was too much for the intellectuals and
peasants who had been under Bapho’s thrall. In order to restore
their faith, he invoked the Flower Bowl Spell, adding the newly
aborted fetus from a Cuban society girl (he claimed that a more
easily accessible prostitute’s abortion would be too “low and
unclean” for his needs). The spell was a resounding success. Bapho
regained his followers and his power, and went on to great and
awful deeds and achievements throughout the islands and the Gulf
region of the United States before walking out after 112 years in
the earthly realm.

I raise my eyebrows. “Jailbreak as a
cockroach? That’s pretty brilliant.”

Tucker shakes his head. “Indeed. But it’s not
the point. The point is someone is trying to recreate this spell.”
He picks up his notebook as something else in my memory clicks into
place.

“Wait a minute. The
Planet
did an
article about a pair of foot-binding shoes that were stolen from
the Asian Art Museum.”

“Has the thief been caught?”

I shake my head. “Last I knew they had no
idea who it could be. Do you think whoever it is killed this fairy?
And Gladys?
And
stole the elephant tusk?”

“Maybe.”

“Could it be this walk-in? This Bapho dude?”
Walk-ins are witches who appear out of nowhere with no history or
lineage, not even a childhood or parents or foster home. I’ve only
heard of walk-ins in a general way. Bapho is the first one I’ve
heard named.

“Anything is possible,” Tucker says. “Perhaps
he has decided it’s time to return. We could try to find out.” He
looks at the mutilated body of the fairy, his fingers rubbing
together.

I’ve already had to read one dead body today,
I tell myself. What’s another?

I look in Tucker’s magickal cabinet for
supplies, wondering what adjustments will be needed. “How do we do
this, Tucker?”

He doesn’t answer, so I turn to ask him
again, and see that he has his hands on the fairy and his eyes are
closed. It’s really only the tips of his fingers pressed softly all
along the little body. Tucker’s lips move in silent incantations,
and I watch as translucent Luna moth wings form above the body,
about a foot across and nine or ten inches high. They flap once,
bodiless, and go still. Superimposed over the wings is the image of
a man standing next to a rectangular swimming pool. He’s shrouded
in night’s darkness as well as a black ski mask, but as he steps
under a light, a reflection flashes off his face, illuminating his
black eyes.

He places a poppet on the ground and presses
a rock into its chest. After tying a cord around it to keep the
rock in place, he suddenly stands up and hurries out of sight. Bill
the bellhop wanders into view, smoking a doobie. He doesn’t notice
the poppet.

“I know him. That’s the LeRoy Hotel,” I say.
“In Santa Barbara.”

“Where you stayed.” Tucker doesn’t look at
me, his fingers still on the body.

“Yeah.” I’m distracted by the fact that the
doll has short, dark hair.

After a couple of hits, Bill saves his butt
and meanders back to the building. A fairy swoops into view. I
recognize it as my fairy with hummingbird wings.

The fairy pulls the cord off the doll and
kicks the rock away. He then drags the doll into the bushes next to
a building. He looks into our eyes and says something I can’t hear
before flying up and away.

The scene changes to a car driving quickly
down residential streets. We’re following the car, but the back of
the driver’s head is clearly our mystery man’s. The ski mask is
pulled back like a cap, but we’re behind him and can’t see his
face.

It suddenly hits me: we’re seeing through the
dead fairy’s eyes. We’re flying.

The car pulls up in front of a house. It’s
Bright Vixen’s home. The man gets out and walks up the front walk
holding a flashlight, illuminating the darkness. He circles around
the back, opening the unlocked side gate. Instead of following him,
we swoop down through a drain hole and into a blackness I can
actually smell. It’s damp, like wet earth, copper, and concrete. An
occasional flash of light confirms, now and then, that the space
we’re traveling through is narrow and wet.

Before long, we emerge into an imperfect
whiteness—a porcelain kitchen sink blued by night. We fly through
the hall to the bedroom where Gladys sleeps, and we see her lying
there, her breathing regular and steady. We go to her—we are so
close, we can almost touch her. We look out the window and see the
man next to her kidney-shaped pool. He tosses something in.

We fly through the house, back through the
sink and the pipes and out. We are zooming to the thing in the
pool, another poppet. We are almost there—

And then.

And then we stop and for a moment everything
is dark. When we regain our vision, all we see are those black eyes
looking into ours. They stare at us and narrow, the corners
crinkling in a smile.