Aftertaste Read online

  “If there’s a health concern, I need to know about it now.” She folded her arms. “Otherwise, maybe I should let the winged monkeys know that you’re a problem.”

  “I told his mother I would stay with him.”

  “You told his mother a lot of things.”

  “What happened to not taking chances?”

  “I’m thinking I’ll start with you.”

  I felt tired. I needed sleep. I inhaled and exhaled slowly.

  “Nurse,” I said. “I care about the kid, too. I don’t dispute your medical knowledge or authority over him. I just want to stay close to him until his mom gets here. That’s why I was hired.”

  Nurse Jen eyed me askance. “What do you mean, it’s more than mono?”

  I folded my arms. “Um. Irwin is a nice guy. Would you agree with that?”

  “Sure, he’s a great kid. A real sweetheart, thoughtful.”

  I nodded. “And he has a tendency to attract the attention of . . . how do I put this?”

  “Complete assholes?” Nurse Jen suggested.

  “Exactly,” I said. “People who mistake kindness for weakness.”

  She frowned. “Are you suggesting that his sickness is the result of a deliberate action?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t know that it isn’t,” I said. “And until I know, one way or another, I’m sticking close to the kid until the Doc gets here.”

  She continued looking skeptical. “You won’t if I don’t think you should. I don’t care how much paperwork you have supporting you. If I start yelling, the winged monkeys will carry you right out to the street.”

  “They’d try,” I said calmly.

  She blinked at me. “You’re a big guy. But you aren’t that big.”

  “You might be surprised,” I said. I leaned forward and said, very quietly, “I’m not. Leaving. The kid.”

  Nurse Jen’s expression changed slowly, from skepticism to something very thoughtful. “You mean that, don’t you.”

  “Every word.”

  She nodded. Then she called, “Steve.”

  The security guard lumbered into the room from the hall outside.

  “Mister Dresden will be staying with Mister Pounder for a little while. Could you please ask the cafeteria to send over two dinner plates instead of one?”

  Steve frowned, maybe trying to remember how to count all the way to two. Then he glowered at me, muttered a surly affirmative, and left, speaking quietly into his radio as he went.

  “Thank you,” I said. “For the food.”

  “You’re lying to me,” she said levelly. “Aren’t you.”

  “I’m not telling you the whole truth,” I said. “Subtle difference.”

  “Semantic difference,” she said.

  “But you’re letting me stay anyway,” I noted. “Why?”

  She studied my face for a moment. Then she said, “I believe that you want to take care of Irwin.”

  The food was very good—nothing like the school cafeterias I remembered. Of course, I went to public school. Irwin woke up long enough to devour a trayful of food, and some of mine. He went to the bathroom, walking unsteadily, and then dropped back into an exhausted slumber. Nurse Jen stayed near, checking him frequently, taking his temperature in his ear every hour so that she didn’t need to waken him.

  I wanted to sleep, but I didn’t need it yet. I might not have had the greatest academic experience, in childhood, but the other things I’d been required to learn had made me more ready for the eat-or-be-eaten portions of life than just about anyone. My record for going without sleep was just under six days, but I was pretty sure I could go longer if I had to. I could have napped in my chair, but I didn’t want to take the chance that some kind of attack might happen while I was being lazy.

  So I sat by Bigfoot Irwin and watched the shadows lengthen and swell into night.

  The attack came just after nine o’clock.

  Nurse Jen was taking Irwin’s temperature again when I felt the sudden surge of cold, somehow oily energy flood the room.

  Irwin took a sudden, shallow breath, and his face became very pale. Nurse Jen frowned at the digital thermometer she had in his ear. It suddenly emitted a series of beeping, wailing noises, and she jerked it free of Irwin just as a bunch of sparks drizzled from its battery casing. She dropped it to the floor, where it lay trailing a thin wisp of smoke.

  “What the hell?” Nurse Jen demanded.

  I rose to my feet, looking around the room. “Use a mercury thermometer next time,” I said. I didn’t have much in the way of magical gear on me, but I wasn’t going to need any for this. I could feel the presence of the dark, dangerous magic, radiating through the room like the heat from a nearby fire.

  Nurse Jen had pressed a stethoscope against Irwin’s chest, listening for a moment, while I went to the opposite side of the bed and waved my hand through the air over the bed with my eyes closed, trying to orient upon the spell attacking Irwin’s aura, so that I could backtrack it to its source.

  “What are you doing?” Nurse Jen demanded.

  “Inexplicable stuff,” I said. “How is he?”

  “Something isn’t right,” she said. “I don’t think he’s getting enough air. It’s like an asthma attack.” She put the stethoscope down and turned to a nearby closet, ripping out a small oxygen tank. She immediately began hooking up a line to it, attached to one of those nose-and-mouth-covering things, opened the valve, and pressed the cup down over Irwin’s nose and mouth.

  “Excuse me,” I said, squeezing past her in order to wave my hand through the air over that side of the bed. I got a fix on the direction of the spell, and jabbed my forefinger in that direction. “What’s that way?”

  She blinked and stared at me incredulously. “What?”

  “That way,” I said, thrusting my finger in the indicated direction several times. “What is over that way?”

  She frowned, shook her head a little, and said, “Uh, uh, the cafeteria and administration.”

  “Administration, eh?” I said. “Not the dorms?”

  “No. They’re the opposite way.”

  “You got any lunch ladies that hate Irwin?”

  Nurse Jen looked at me like I was a lunatic. “What the hell are you talking about? No, of course not!”

  I grunted. This attack clearly wasn’t the work of a vampire, and the destruction of the electronic thermometer indicated the presence of mortal magic. The kids were required to be back in their dorms at this time, so it presumably wasn’t one of them. And if it wasn’t someone in the cafeteria, then it had to be someone in the administration building.

  Doctor Fabio had been way too interested in making sure I wasn’t around. If it was Fabio behind the attacks on Irwin, then I could probably expect some interference to be arriving—

  The door to the infirmary opened, and Steve and two of his fellow security guards clomped into the room.

  —any time now.

  “You,” Steve said, pointing a thick finger at me. “It’s after free hours. No visitors on the grounds after nine. You’re gonna have to go.”

  I eased back around Nurse Jen and out of the room Irwin was in. “Um,” I said, “let me think about that.”

  Steve scowled. He had a very thick neck. So did his two buddies. “Second warning, sir. You are now trespassing on private property. If you do not leave immediately, the police will be summoned and you will be detained until their arrival.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out making sure the boys aren’t sneaking over to the girls’ dorms and vice versa? Cause I’m thinking that’s really more your speed, Steve.”

  Steve’s face got red. “That’s it,” he said. “You are being detained until the police arrive, smartass.”

  “Let’s don’t do this,” I said. “Seriously. You guys don’t want to ride this train.”

  In answer, Steve snapped his hand out to one side, and one of those collapsible fighting batons extended to its full length and locked. His two friends followed su
it.

  “Wow,” I said. “Straight to the weapons? Really? Completely inappropriate escalation.” I held up my right hand, palm out. “I’m telling you, fellas. Don’t try it.”

  Steve took two quick steps toward me, raising the baton.

  I unleashed the will I had been gathering and murmured, “Forzare.”

  Invisible force lashed out and slammed into Steve like a runaway car made of foam rubber. It lifted him off his feet and tossed him back, between his two buddies, and out the door of the infirmary. He hit the floor and lost a lot of his velocity before fetching up against the opposite wall with an explosion of expelled breath.

  “Wah,” I said, Bruce Lee style, and looked at the other two goons. “You boys want a choo-choo ride, too?”

  The pair of them looked at me and then at each other, gripping their batons until their knuckles turned white. They hadn’t had a clear view of exactly what had happened to Steve, since his body would have blocked them from it. For all they knew, I’d used some kind of judo on him. The pair of them came to a conclusion somewhere in there—that whatever I had pulled on Steve wouldn’t work on both of them—and they began to rush me.

  They thought wrong. I repeated the spell, only with twice the energy.

  One of them went out the door, crashing into Steve, who had just been about to regain his feet. My control wasn’t so good without any of my magical implements, though. The second man hit the side of the doorway squarely, and his head made the metal frame ring as it bounced off. The man’s legs went rubbery and he staggered, bleeding copiously from a wound that was up above his hairline.

  The second spell was more than the lights could handle, and the fluorescents in the infirmary exploded in showers of sparks and went out. Red-tinged emergency lights clicked on a few seconds later.

  I checked around me. Nurse Jen was staring at me with her eyes wide. The wounded guard was on his back, rocking back and forth in obvious pain. The two who had been knocked into the hallway were still on the ground, staring at me in much the same way as Jen, except that Steve was clearly trying to get his radio to work. It wouldn’t. It had folded when the lights did.

  I spread my hands and said, to Nurse Jen, “I told them, didn’t I? You heard me. Better take care of that guy.”

  Then I scowled, shook my head, and stalked off along the spell’s back-trail, toward the administration building.

  The doors to the building were locked, which was more the academy’s problem than mine. I exercised restraint. I didn’t take the doors off their hinges. I only ripped them off of their locks.

  The door to Doctor Fabio’s office was locked, and though I tried to exercise restraint, I’ve always had issues with controlling my power—especially when I’m angry. This time, I tore the door off its hinges, slamming it down flat to the floor inside the office as if smashed in by a medieval battering ram.

  Doctor Fabio jerked and whirled to face the door with a look of utter astonishment on his face. A cabinet behind his desk which had been closed during my first visit was now open. It was a small, gaudy, but functional shrine, a platform for the working of spells. At the moment, it was illuminated by half a dozen candles spaced out around a Seal of Solomon containing two photos—one of Irwin, and one of Doctor Fabio, bound together with a loop of what looked like dark grey yarn.

  I could feel the energy stolen from Irwin coursing into the room, into the shrine. From there, I had no doubt, it was being funneled into Doctor Fabio himself. I could sense the intensity of his presence much more sharply than I had that morning, as if he had somehow become more metaphysically massive, filling up more of the room with his presence.

  “Hiya, Doc,” I said. “You know, it’s a pity this place isn’t Saint Mark’s Academy for the Resourceful and Talented.”

  He blinked at me. “Uh. What?”

  “Because then the place would be S.M.A.R.T. Instead, you’re just S.M.A.G.T.”

  “What?” he said, clearly confused, outraged, and terrified.

  “Let me demonstrate,” I said, extending my hand. I funneled my will into it and said, “Smagt!”

  The exact words you use for a spell aren’t important, except that they can’t be from a language you’re too familiar with. Nonsense words are best, generally speaking. Using “smagt” for a combination of naked force and air magic worked just as well as any other word would have. The energy rushed out of me, into the cabinet shrine, and exploded in a blast of kinetic energy and wind. Candles and other decorative objects flew everywhere. Shelves cracked and collapsed.

  The spell had been linked to the shrine. It unraveled as I disrupted all the precisely aligned objects that had helped direct and focus its energy. One of the objects had been a small glass bottle of black ink. Most of it wound up splattered on the side of Doctor Fabio’s face.

  He stood with his jaw slack, half of his face covered in black ink, the other half gone so pale that he resembled a Renaissance Venetian masque.

  “Y-you . . . you . . .”

  “Wizard,” I said quietly. “White Council. Heck, Doctor, I’m even a Warden these days.”

  His face became absolutely bloodless.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “You know us. I’m going to suggest that you answer my questions with extreme cooperation, Doctor. Because we frown on the use of black magic.”

  “Please,” he said, “anything.”

  “How do you know us?” I asked. The White Council was hardly a secret, but given that most of the world didn’t believe in magic, much less wizards, and that the supernatural crowd in general is cautious with sharing information, it was a given that your average Joe would have no idea that the Council even existed—much less that they executed anyone guilty of breaking one of the Laws of Magic.

  “V-v-venator,” he said. “I was a Venator. One of the Venatori Umbrorum. Retired.”

  The Hunters in the Shadows. Or of the Shadows, depending on how you read it. They were a boys club made up of the guys who had the savvy to be clued in to the supernatural world, but without the talent it took to be a true wizard. Mostly academic types. They’d been invaluable assets in the White Council’s war with the Red Court, gathering information and interfering with our enemy’s lines of supply and support. They were old allies of the Council—and any Venator would know the price of violating the Laws.

  “A Venator should know better than to dabble in this kind of thing,” I said in a very quiet voice. “The answer to this next question could save your life—or end it.”

  Doctor Fabio licked his lips and nodded, a jerky little motion.

  “Why?” I asked him quietly. “Why were you taking essence from the boy?”

  “H-he . . . He had so much. I didn’t think it would hurt him and I . . .” He cringed back from me as he spoke the last words. “I . . . needed to grow some hair.”

  I blinked my eyes slowly. Twice. “Did you say . . . hair?”

  “Rogaine didn’t work!” he all but wailed. “And that transplant surgery wasn’t viable for my hair and skin type!” He bowed his head and ran fingertips through his thick head of hair. “Look, see? Look how well it’s come in. But if I don’t maintain it . . .”

  “You . . . used black magic. To grow hair.”

  “I . . .” He looked everywhere but at me. “I tried everything else first. I never meant to harm anyone. It never hurt anyone before.”

  “Irwin’s a little more dependent on his essence than most,” I told him. “You might have killed him.”

  Fabio’s eyes widened in terror. “You mean he’s . . . he’s a . . .”

  “Let’s just say that his mother is his second scariest parent and leave it at that,” I said. I pointed at his chair and said, “Sit.”

  Fabio sat.

  “Do you wish to live?”

  “Yes. Yes, I don’t want any trouble with the White Council.”

  Heavy footsteps came pounding up behind us. Steve and his unbloodied buddy appeared in the doorway, carrying their batons. “Doctor Fab
io!” Steve cried.

  “Don’t make me trash your guys,” I told Fabio.

  “Get out!” Fabio all but screamed at them.

  They came to a confused stop. “But . . . sir?”

  “Get out, get out!” Fabio screamed. “Tell the police there’s no problem here when they arrive!”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell them!” Fabio screamed, his voice going up several octaves. “For God’s sake, man! Go!”

  Steve, and his buddy, went. They looked bewildered, but they went.

  “Thank you,” I said, when they left. No need to play bad cop at this point. If Fabio got any more scared, he might collapse into jelly. “Do you want to live, Doctor?”

  He swallowed. He nodded once.

  “Then I suggest you alter your hairstyle to complete baldness,” I replied. “Or else learn to accept your receding hairline for what it is—the natural progression of your life. You will discontinue all use of magic from this point forward. And I do mean all. If I catch you with so much as a Ouija board or a deck of Tarot cards, I’m going to make you disappear. Do you get me?”

  It was a hollow threat. The guy hadn’t broken any of the Laws, technically speaking, since Irwin hadn’t died. And I had no intention of turning anyone over to the tender mercies of the Wardens if I could possibly avoid it. But this guy clearly had problems recognizing priorities. If he kept going the way he was, he might slide down into true practice of the black arts. Best to scare him away from that right now.

  “I understand,” he said in a very meek voice.

  “Now,” I said. “I’m going to go watch over Irwin. You aren’t going to interfere. I’ll be staying until his mother arrives.”

  “Are . . . are you going to tell her what I’ve done?”

  “You bet your ass I am,” I said. “And God have mercy on your soul.”

  Irwin was awake when I got back to the infirmary, and Nurse Jen had just finished stitching closed a cut on the wounded guard’s scalp. She’d shaved a big, irregularly shaped section of his hair off to get it done, too, and he looked utterly ridiculous—even more so when she wrapped his entire cranium in bandages to keep the stitches covered.