Makes him work on “the plum,” wrestling your opponent’s head forward in the A-shaped trap of your arms so you can knee the face and head.
Chancho leaves.
The coin that turns bullets arrives by UPS.
The driver honks cheerily as the brown truck lumbers off.
Morning.
Andrew stands before his brass mirror, surveying himself. His bruising has mostly gone greeny-yellow or faded out. He heals quickly with the youth magic running. He’s about to amp that up, ink in the runners of gray that he allowed in.
Then he remembers a sound.
The sound of glass breaking.
The glass that he charmed not to be broken.
This is what’s draining the magic.
My vanity.
He knows that youth spells burn a lot of fuel; he’s had to finesse his apparent age up a bit—looking twenty-five burns almost everything you’ve got when you’re over fifty, but thirty-five is doable.
Was doable.
It gets exponentially harder every year.
I wonder if you’re too pretty to fight?
He lets a little more gray in.
Feels the house get stronger around him.
It had weakened by degrees, so slowly he hadn’t even noticed.
Only things he used stayed strong, like the gate in the tub.
Would the things in the attic still work?
The vacuum-cockatrice?
The doll’s house?
And now he is going to need offensive magic.
As much as he can muster.
Where else could he economize?
The hiding spells.
I spent months on those!
They’ll be so hard to raise again.
But you know good and goddamned well she’s the one you’re hiding from.
She already knows where the house is.
Fine.
Fine.
I’ll make the house visible.
I’ll shut down the youth spells.
What you see is what you get.
He lets himself get older.
Feels his body stoop just a little.
Feels his muscles thin, develops a pain in his knee.
He sees the fifty-two-year-old smoker with the long hair looking back at him, bruised and hollow in the jaws.
He wants to pin his gray, dry hair up with his cherrywood fork, samurai-style, but sees this as vanity, too. Hair is an antenna for magic; Indians knew this.
Wizards know it.
He leaves his hair down, fans it over his shoulders.
I’m older than my dad ever got.
I’m an old man.
But I’m strong now.
Stronger than ever.
I’m not a fucking user.
I’m a warlock.
He spends the next three hours unweaving the spell he cast to hide the house. The neighbors could already see it, but now passing motorists and kids on bikes would see it, too. Anyone can find it now without first being told or shown.
But if they have bad intentions toward Andrew Ranulf Blankenship, they might wish they hadn’t.
It’s high time to make war magic.
78
1978.
Yellow Springs, Ohio.
October.
The wizard with the potbelly and the bald head has his shirt open even though the leaves in Glen Helen have yellowed. He and the boy and the girl can all see their breaths.
Andrew’s in sweatpants, wearing a terry cloth headband.
“Try again,” the older man says.
Andrew doesn’t want to try again.
A big, dirty smudge on his left buttock and thigh evidence the outcome of his last try.
He steels himself, runs at his mentor again.
Runs like his brother used to run at tackle dummies.
When he leaps, he leaps at waist height just to the right of the shorter, stockier man, seemingly at nothing, his face scrunched up for impact.
He makes impact in midair, and the world around the three jerks with the characteristic bad-splice jerk that happens whenever reality and illusion collide. The man winks out from where he was, winks in again falling with Andrew, going “Whooof!” but it looks like he was always in Andrew’s path.
The mind smooths things out.
The instructor’s false teeth come out.
He puts them back in, untroubled.
He also picks up three quarters that fell into the grass.
Leaves the penny because it’s tails up.
Stands up.
“That’s it!” he says, claps his meaty hands twice. “Well done!”
Addresses the girl as Andrew brushes himself off.
“How do you think he did it?”
“Listened for sound? I’d say watched your breath, but your breath was coming out of your mouth. I mean, where your mouth seemed to be.”
“Was it sound, Blankenship?”
He shakes his head, pulls a twig out of his hair.
“I watched the leaves. You crunched leaves under your actual feet.”
“Good,” he says. “Can’t argue with results.”
They wait.
“Displacement works nicely against human, nonmagical attackers, and it’s a cheap spell. Not much gas. You should be able to run a couple of other things at the same time, once you practice.”
He lisps a little.
Adjusts his false teeth.
They wait.
Cats before a can opener.
“Now,” he says. “If you should chance to tangle with another user, what’s rule number one?”
“Don’t,” they both say quickly, as they’ve been taught. Not because they mean it, but because they want to get to the good stuff.
“Right. Don’t. And why not?”
“Both are likely to die,” they say in stereo.
“Yes,” he says. “Fighting another evenly matched user with magic is like driving head-on into another car. You might come out a little better, but, unless you get lucky, you won’t come out well.”
“And if you’re not evenly matched?” Andrew asks.
“Then it’s either stupid or unsportsman-like, and I disapprove of both qualities. Sometimes, however, stupid and unsportsman-like conditions arise. And so, your third lesson to date on black magic. To the pine grove with you, and find the most swordlike stick you feel you can levitate nimbly. We’re going to do some fencing.”
79
Dog Neck Harbor, New York.
Today.
Andrew jabs his index finger with a pub dart, old-school, wooden handle. He bleeds twelve drops into a hole he cut into an apple. He sings “The British Grenadiers” as well as he can, trying to really boom out the With a TO-RO-RO-RO-RO. Any pub song would work, but he rather likes that one.
He eats the apple.
Andrew goes to a farm on 104A, a farm where he knows he can buy a live chicken. Butchers it. The farmhand asks if it’s for eating, and when he says “yes,” the kid offers to butcher it for him.
“Prefer to do it myself,” he says.
Something about the way he says it makes the kid look at him funny.
He takes the hen home, cores her eye out. Pronounces a spell in Russian, the words of which he has to rememorize from a book. Burns the eye on a sliver of wood taken from a lightning-struck tree, mixes the ash with rainwater and magic oil, smears the grimy black balm on each of his eyelids. The spell calls for the eye of an eagle, owl, or hawk. Bald eagles nest near the bluffs, but he just can’t bring himself to do that to an eagle.