“Mr. Dobrev,” I called. “She’s dead.”
“I know.” He turned to me. “I can’t believe it.”
“You said you saw her in a painting before?”
“When I was a boy. She looked exactly like that.”
I was right. I was completely right. Good. Good, good, good, I hated not knowing what I was dealing with.
Jim stepped through the door, pale-faced Brune behind him.
“Where is Steven?” I asked.
“He grabbed a bicycle and went to his daughter’s school to check on her,” Brune said.
Well, I could certainly understand that.
Jim came over to me. I poured water from a bottle onto a rag Mr. Dobrev had given me and gently cleaned the blood from his face.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
“I’m okay,” I told him.
For a tiny moment we were all alone in the shop, caught in a moment when nobody else mattered, and I smiled just for Jim. And then reality came back.
“We thought it was spell based or talent based,” I said. “It’s not. It’s curse based, Jim.”
He waited. Oh. I probably made no sense. Sometimes my brain went too fast for my mouth.
“Most magic is very specific. For example, someone capable of summoning jenglots would have to be a practitioner of Indonesian black magic. He couldn’t also be an expert in Japanese magic or Comanche magic, for example, because to reach that level of expertise, he had to devote himself to Balinese magic completely. You can’t be a master of all trades. Makes sense?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“So when I saw jenglots, I assumed that they had been summoned by a person skilled in spells or a person with a special summoning talent. But then we ran across the hag. The hag made no sense. She is of European origin. We knew it was connected to Eyang Ida, because it would be just too big of a coincidence otherwise.”
“Logically, that means two different magic users are involved,” Jim said.
“That’s what I thought, but then I saw the car. I don’t know of anyone who can summon killer cars. It’s not a mythological being. That’s something out of horror fiction. Then I remembered that first, Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots because she saw a fake one as a child, then Mr. Dobrev told us that he had seen a hag in a painting, and then . . .”
“Amanda said her brother was killed by a car on his way from school,” Jim said. “I thought about that.”
“This magic isn’t spell based or talent based. It’s curse based. I know curses. They work like computer programs used to: they have a rigid structure. If a set of conditions is met, the curse does something. If it isn’t met, the curse lies dormant. For example, let’s say I am targeting a person whose left leg has been amputated. I could curse that doorway so any creature missing a leg would get gonorrhea.”
Jim raised his hand. “Wait. Can you actually do that?”
I waved my hands at him. “That’s not the point.”
“No, that’s the kind of information I need to know.”
“Okay, probably I could.”
Jim’s expression went blank. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
“Jim, will you stop worrying about me cursing you with gonorrhea? You can’t get it anyway; you’re a shapeshifter. Anyway, under the conditions of that curse, any one-legged person would come through and get the plague. If a three-legged cat came through, it would also get the plague.”
“Can cats be affected by human gonorrhea?”
“Not necessarily, but the curse would still try to infect the cat. If I wanted to make a curse more specific, I would define it as ‘any creature with only one leg,’ which would spare the three-legged cat. Even more specific: any man with one leg. There is a limit to how specific you can get. Back to our current situation. I believe someone has cursed these people to fall prey to their worst fear. I am not sure exactly how this curse was structured, but I think it manifests the irrational fears they had since childhood. The curse relies on them to supply it with the details of their worst fears. Eyang Ida was afraid of jenglots, so she got a giant swarm. Dobrev was afraid of a hag, so it gave him a hag. And when it came to Amanda’s fears, it made a living car. That’s what Amanda saw in her mind when she worried about her son.”
“Makes sense,” Jim said. “But wouldn’t that take a lot of magic?”
“Yes and no. Cursing is a pay-to-play magic. If there is a curse, there must be a sacrifice. My curses don’t always work, because the price I pay is small: special paper, special ink, special brush and the years I spent learning calligraphy. This”—I raised my index fingers and made a circle, encompassing the ruined shop—“this would take a real sacrifice. Blood or flesh or something.”
Jim frowned. “What’s so important about the building that makes it worth that kind of sacrifice?”
He read my mind. “Exactly. I don’t know. But whoever this person is, they are committed. This isn’t going to stop. There will be more. What is Brune afraid of?”
“Brune!” Jim barked.
The comic book owner stopped. “Yes?”
“When you were a kid, what were you afraid of?”
“Being short.”
“You are short,” I blurted out.
“Yes, but I’m ripped.” Brune flexed behind Jim. “So I’m okay.”
I had no idea how being short could kill you. My body still hurt all over as if someone had put me through a meat grinder and thinking about it made my head hurt.