Small fang-studded mouths formed in the slimy magic, stretching toward me. Jim jerked his knife out. It was huge, dark grey, with a curved tip and serrated metal teeth near the handle.
I took a deep breath and raised my hands, my movements slow and graceful, hands bent back, fingers wide apart, trembling.
The evil magic paused, unsure.
In my head the bamboo flutes sang, with the metallic sounds of the xylophone setting the beat. I opened my eyes wide, bent my knees, my toes up off the floor, and turned. Magic pulsed from my body. The slime around us evaporated, as if burned off by an invisible fire. Bright sunlight spread in a wave, rolling over the walls, floor, and ceiling purging the rot. It cleared the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and slid over the window frame. The dark slime dropped out of sight.
Weird.
“Holy shit,” Jim said.
I frowned. “This is wrong.”
“What do you mean wrong? That was fucking unbelievable.”
“Usually when a house is this corrupted, the magic is deeply rooted. It should’ve taken more than two dance steps to clear it. I don’t understand this. There is so much corruption, but it’s all really shallow.”
I marched to the kitchen and opened the door to the back porch. The backyard opened onto a stretch of woods. A wrought iron fence separated the grass from the trees, a narrow gate ajar. The foul magic hovered between the trees, coating the bark, dripping, and waiting. It felt me and slithered deeper into the woods.
Where are you going? Don’t run. We’re just starting.
I crossed the grass, walked through the open gate, and kept going into the forest, Jim right behind me. The magic streamed away from me. I chased it down a path between the massive oaks. The same scent I had smelled on the coarse hair in my kitchen filled my nostrils: dry, acrid, bitter scent. Almost there.
The path ducked under the canopy of braided tree limbs bound together by kudzu. I followed it, moving fast through the natural tunnel of leaves and branches. The green tunnel opened into a clearing. A massive tree must’ve fallen here and taken a neighbor or two with it. Three giant trunks lay on the grass. The surrounding trees and kudzu laid claim to the light, greedy for every stray photon, and the leaves filled the space high above us, turning the sunlight watery and green. The air smelled wrong, tainted with decay. It was like being in the bottom of a really deep, scum-infested well.
Eyang Ida sat on the trunk. Her skin had a sickly grey tint, her eyes glassy and opened wide. She stared right at me, but I didn’t think she could see me. The magic swirled around her, so thick, it was almost opaque black.
I stopped. Jim paused behind me.
“Is that her?”
“It’s her.” I raised my hand to stop him if he tried to go to her, but he didn’t move. He really did trust me. I had asked him to stay close and he followed my lead.
Ferns rustled to the left of me and a creature stepped into my view. About ten inches tall, it looked like a tiny human, with dark brown skin, two legs and two arms. Long, coarse hair fell from its head all the way past its toes, dragging a couple of inches on the ground like a dark mantle. It stared at me with two amber eyes, each with a slit, dark pupil like the eyes of a blue temple viper, then it opened the wide slit of its mouth, showing two white fangs, and hissed.
“What is that?” Jim asked.
“A jenglot,” I said. Just like I thought. This was one of the traditional Indonesian horrors. Except that judging by the amount of magic in that house, there had to be more of them. A lot more. “It’s vampiric.”
Another jenglot crawled out onto the trunk. A third pair of eyes ignited in the hollow of a tree.
“It and its family stole Eyang Ida out of her house,” I said. “They will feed on her blood’s essence and when there is no more essence left, she’ll become one of them.”
The woods came alive with dozens of eyes. Big tribe, at least fifty creatures. I had expected fifteen, maybe twenty. But fifty? Fifty was bad.
“Are they hard to kill?”
“Yes. They are hardy. Setting them on fire helps.”
“There are a lot of them,” Jim said.
“Yes.”
“You might need some help . . .” Jim’s voice was very calm. He weighed our odds. The numbers weren’t in our favor.
With a soft whisper, a creature slithered onto Eyang Ida’s lap. If it had legs, this jenglot would stand at least a foot tall, with hair twice as long, but it had no legs. Instead it had a snake’s tail, long and brown, like the body of a spitting cobra. The royal jenglot.
The jenglots rustled through the greenery, circling us. They would swarm us in a moment.
Normally when I changed shape, for a minute or two, I had no idea where I was or why I was there, but in this case, with Jim next to me, I had to take a chance.
I took off my glasses and handed them to Jim. “Here, hold this for a second.”
He raised his eyebrows and took my glasses.
I let go. The world swirled into a thousand blurry lights in every color of the rainbow. Ooh, so pretty. Pretty little color bubbles.
A familiar scent swirled around me, captivating. Ooh, Jim. Jim. He was here, with me! Jim . . .
What is that smell?
Ugh. Nasty, disgusting scent. Unclean. Ew.
A jenglot! There was a jenglot coiling on Eyang Ida’s lap. Gross. Wait, what was Eyang Ida doing here? Where was I?
The Queen Jenglot raised her head, opened her mouth, and hissed at me, the black magic behind her flaring like demonic wings.
What? Outrageous. The nerve. Who did she think I was?