Magie Noire

By Rurouni Star

Chapter Nine

I dropped the skull.

"Oof," it said.

What the hell. What the hell. What the hell.

I belatedly realized I was muttering out loud.

"Man, you grew up to be a klutz," the voice inside the skull whined. "You gotta be more careful with my anchor, I don't exactly have a bunch of extras laying around."

"What the hell?" I said again, because my mouth seemed to be stuck on endless loop.

The skull paused. The little orange fires in its eye sockets flickered in my general direction. "Wow," it said. "You don't look so hot, kid. What happened to your Third Eye?"

That snapped me out of my loop. I snatched the skull from the floor. "What do you know about Three-Eye?" I demanded.

"Oh come on," the skull sighed. "What's it been, years? Decades? Not even a hey, Uncle Bob, great to see you, sorry I left you in a trunk all this time?" The eye sockets flickered again. "Where'd your mom get off to, kid? At least she knows better than to manhandle my anchor."

First, I'd interrogated a shadow. Now I was interrogating a skull. It didn't escape my notice that I had way less control over the second interrogation than the first. Bob the skull was turning out to be a flighty subject, and I was feeling a little too out of my mind to rein him in.

"My mom?" I said.

Even as I thought of her, her image blurred past me, reaching down to pick something up. An echo of the skull in my hands rested in her palms. "Hello, Bob," she said with a smile. "This is Karrin. Say hello to Bob, Karrie."

I didn't remember that. I knew in a crazy, certain way that it had happened. The image wouldn't be there if it hadn't happened. But I didn't remember it.

"Yeah, okay," Bob was saying. "It's not your fault, I get it. You're busted. I don't know how you managed to get your Third Eye cracked like that, but you really gotta get it under control. I can basically see your brains melting out of your head."

"My Third Eye?" I said dimly. "Not Three-Eye?"

"Huh? Yeah, your Third Eye. Second sight. Psychic sense. Geez, kid, you must have really scrambled your brains, I'm positive we went over this. Then again, I keep forgetting you humans have leaky memories."

"Bob!" I said, frustrated. I had another of those weird feelings of déjà vu. I'd said that word before, in that exact way. A lot.

"Right! Closing the Third Eye. Back to elementary school for you." The skull made a sound like it was clearing its throat. I wasn't sure how it managed that, given that it didn't have a throat. "Clear your mind, grasshopper. Allow your thoughts to pass through you like air. Focus on letting them all go. Then… you know. Close it."

"Close… close it?" My head was throbbing again, and I was pretty sure it had more to do with the skull in my hand than it had to do with my cracked Third Eye, whatever that was.

"The extra sense you've got. You should be able to feel it kind of… right between your fleshy human eyes, maybe a little bit above them. Focus on shutting it again."

I tried to do as the skull said. I focused specifically on my breathing, letting go of the past and the future, living in the moment. I'd never been that big a fan of the spiritual, meditative aspects of Aikido, but that didn't mean I hadn't listened when my sensei went over them.

The images around me blurred and sped up. I let them — stopped paying attention to them. I focused inward, searching for the crack he'd mentioned, somewhere around my forehead.

It was there — the source of my headache. I felt it, now that I knew where to look for it. It was tingling, giving me a steady, low-key stream of overwhelming amounts of information. There was a soreness to it, as I tried to tug it closed. It resisted my efforts, and I winced.

"That is so super weird," Bob said cheerfully. "But interesting! I've never seen something jam someone's Third Eye open like that before. Is it painful? Annoying? Is it driving you crazy? I bet you've got a headache, right?"

"I've definitely got a headache now," I muttered. I tried to refocus, to zone out Bob's constant chatter.

I tugged at my Third Eye more emphatically. Something snapped. A flash of sudden white-hot pain overwhelmed me.

I found myself sitting on my ass on the dusty floor of the attic, staring down the skull in my palms. The ghostly images were gone. My head still hurt a little bit… but the original source of the pain had finally vanished. My whole body relaxed, relieved, as though I'd pulled a giant splinter from my soul.

"Great!" Bob exclaimed. "So, uh. You gonna stop giving me the third degree now?" If skulls could waggle their eyebrows, I was pretty sure Bob would have been doing it.

I blinked slowly. "Did you just pun at me?"

Bob cackled. "Yeah — yeah I did! I mean, it wasn't my best, but it was an okay warm-up, right?" The skull glowed a little harder. "No smile? Not even a little one? Okay, well, try this on for size." A pause. "What do you call a can opener that doesn't work? A can't opener. Hiyo!"

An awkward silence fell in the attic.

Bob groaned. "What happened to you, kid? That was a gem. I'd normally have you rolling on the floor laughing by now." There was a real hint of disappointment in the skull's disembodied voice. For some reason, I felt guilty. I buried the feeling under two metric tons of confusion.

"So you knew me as a kid," I said. "And… my mom? But I don't remember you. And I'm pretty sure I'd remember a talking skull."

"Yeah," Bob said. "Geez, that seems like a pretty big thing to forget."

I frowned. "Well… I kind of remember you. I think. You're definitely familiar, but I don't remember actually meeting you or talking to you."

"Ah," said Bob sagely. "Your episodic memory is missing."

I knitted my brow. "Is that another Third Eye kind of thing?" I asked.

"Nah, no. It's a medical term, actually. See, your brain stores memory in lots of different places. Like, you know how they say you never forget how to ride a bike? That's because riding a bike is stored in your procedural memory. So even if you don't remember the day you learned to ride a bike, you still remember how to do it." Bob seemed to relish the explanation, like each word was a rare delicacy. "Your episodic memory would be the day you first rode a bike, what you ate for breakfast that day, the fact that you skinned your knee, and so on. Got it?"

I nodded, dazed. The explanation made me wonder — I tried thinking back to my childhood. Had I ever come up into the attic when I was young? Did I have any memory of it?

A blank spot.

There was a reason I'd never noticed it before. It was subtle. Even as I tried to focus in on the idea of what this attic might have looked like in my childhood, my brain did its best to sidetrack me seamlessly on to other related thoughts. It focused on the way the wallpaper used to look in the kitchen, the sound of my dad's car in the driveway, the smell of Chinese takeout food…

"This is nuts," I mumbled.

"You're telling me," Bob said. "Now I have to teach you everything all over again." He paused, then brightened. "Hey, wait! That means you don't remember any of the jokes I already told you! I get to tell 'em all over again!"

"Bob," I said. "Can we backtrack some, please? I'm kind of… missing memories, remember? Why don't we start with what you are?"

The little lights in Bob's eye sockets blinked. "Oh, yeah. Whew, remedial class. I'm a spirit of intellect. Phenomenal cosmic knowledge; itty-bitty living space." My lips twitched just a little. Bob caught it. "Aha! I knew you still had a sense of humor hidden in there!"

I ignored him. "So, the skull is like your genie lamp? Do you grant wishes?"

Bob made a psh sound. "I grant knowledge, kid! That's way more important than wishes. Think about it: we just figured out you're missing memories! Given time, we can probably figure out how to get 'em back. If I was a genie, you wouldn't even know you had memories you needed to wish for in the first place!"

I furrowed my brow, attempting to follow his logic. Eventually, I nodded. "Game theory," I said. "In a direct competition, the player with greater knowledge generally wins."

"Ooh, fancy!" Bob cooed. "Where'd you pick that one up?"

"Interrogation training," I said. "Real cerebral stuff. Not practical at all."

"Ah," Bob sighed. "My favorite sort of knowledge. I love useless trivia. It's like junk food for the brain."

That, I thought, explains a lot.

"Okay," I said. "So you're a spirit of intellect. How did you end up with my mom?"

"Oh, that's simple. She—" Bob cut off abruptly. The twinkling in the skull's eye sockets flickered unsteadily.

"...Bob?" I asked carefully.

"...ooh. Uh. Can't go there, kid. Sorry." The skull sounded sheepish. "I've got, um. Limits. Stuff I'm not supposed to talk about."

I narrowed my eyes. "Who decided those limits?" I asked.

Bob remained silent. I figured that was his way of implying he wasn't allowed to say.

"...okay," I said again. I still felt like the world had gone mad, but at least I had a little bit more control over myself now that my Third Eye was closed. That was something. "I'm gonna need to have a long sit-down with you sometime really soon. But it's been kind of a crazy few days, and first I think I need to figure out what's going on now. Can you help me out with that, Bob?"

"Can I?" Bob scoffed. "Of course I can. And I totally will! On just a few conditions."

I raised my eyebrows. "Fair enough. What are they?"

"One: you have got to put me somewhere other than that trunk. It wasn't such a bad place when I was getting pulled out every other day, but I am dead sick of it now." He paused, and it took me a second to realize that he'd made another intentional pun.

"...dead sick," I said. "I got it. You're a skull."

"I live in a skull," Bob grumbled. "Which brings me to condition two: you have got to stop being so serious. It's a bummer, kid. You're the toughest room I've had since mmph." The spirit choked on whatever he'd been about to say, and I assumed it was something else he wasn't supposed to talk about.

I sighed. "I can't promise that one. My job isn't exactly happy-go-lucky. But I'll try to work on it."

Bob let out a kind of sputtering sigh. A tiny puff of air whiffed out from between the skull's jaws. "All right, I guess that's as good as I can ask for. Anyway — grab the bracelet, shut the trunk, and let's go sight-seeing in the living room, huh?"

I followed instructions, settling into a general sense of credulity. For just a little bit, I was too tired to wonder whether I was going crazy or not.

I needed to consult a skull about a murder case.

0-0-0-0

Bob let out a low whistle.

I tried not to think too hard about how he'd managed it, without lips.

"You want the good news or the bad news first?" he asked.

I'd spent the last thirty minutes or so giving him the detective's cliff's notes on everything from the last few days. It would have taken less time, but Bob was endlessly excitable, and he kept trying to interrupt before I was done, sidetracking the conversation into things like Japanese cultural associations between blood types and personalities and popular radio shows from the 1930s.

"I feel like I just said that to someone earlier today," I muttered. "Okay, bad news first. May as well get it over with."

"All right. You're definitely dealing with a practitioner. That's a mortal who uses magic. This guy's got a lot of breadth and power, too — he might even be a full wizard. Between the heart exploding stuff, the shadow sending, and the Three-Eye, if you want to assume that's his direct doing… he's definitely got his hands on some nasty knowledge. That's all Thaumaturgy: your complex, slow and steady magic."

Magic. Great. Somehow I'd figured we were headed here. And why not, right? Second sight, living shadows, talking skulls. If someone didn't bring up the word 'magic,' it would have been even more shocking.

"How the hell do I fight that?" I asked. "He can do all this stuff from a distance. I haven't even seen him in person yet."

"Oh, well. He can do it from a distance, but he can't do it with nothing," Bob said. "Thaumaturgy is about forming connections. If you want to affect someone with it, you need a piece of them. Fresh blood is best, but any part of the body will do it. Sometimes, you can use a possession with a strong emotional or spiritual attachment, but that's way more dicey."

I considered that. "So he's having trouble getting his hands on a piece of Marcone," I said. "If he wants to get at him, he's going to have to start taking risks to try and get his blood or something."

"Bingo," Bob said, enthused. "But I haven't even gotten to the good news yet!"

I blinked. "I thought that was the good news. All right — go for it."

"The good news is, he's a hack!" Bob chortled. "You can tell from his choices. Hearts exploding? I mean, sure, it takes a lot of power to pull that off, but it's way inefficient! Any actually well-trained wizard would know that you go for the path of least resistance. If I had mortal magic and I was trying to kill someone, I'd go for the brain. A million little delicate electrical signals there, and all it takes is one screw-up to cause permanent damage. No kinetic energy, just zap—!"

"—Bob." I'd already said that word an awful lot the last half-hour. "So, to sum up. You're saying he's untrained."

"Not just untrained," Bob said. "Probably plain old stupid, too. I mean, he's broken at least one Law of Magic already in a really flashy, public way. I'd be shocked if the White Council hasn't sent a Warden after him by now."

I rubbed at my forehead. Bob was a fantastic ally, and a really great eleventh-hour find. But sometimes he felt a little too helpful, spewing all these terms I didn't understand in the least. "Law of Magic," I said, tasting the capital letters on my tongue. "White Council. Warden."

"Seven Laws of Magic," Bob told me. "The most obvious one being don't kill with magic. The White Council is kind of like a worldwide wizard's union, except with way less democracy and way more chopping people's heads off. The Wardens are the ones who do the head-chopping — mainly when someone violates a Law of Magic."

I reached up to rub at my neck uncomfortably. "These guys have existed my whole life?" I asked. "How come I've never heard of them?"

Bob made a frustrated noise. "You have heard of them," he said. "I told you about them when you were six years old. You went and forgot."

"I didn't mean that," I said. "I meant… if they're chopping people's heads off, wouldn't someone notice?"

"Oh, psh," Bob said. "You're a homicide detective! Can't you think of a few creative ways to get rid of a body? These guys are fully-fledged combat wizards, too. That adds a few options to the old toolbox."

I quieted at that. There's a whole lot of people who go missing and are never really found. Was it really so weird to think that just a handful of them had fallen afoul of this White Council?

"Right? Yeah, I thought so. Point being, some Warden's eventually going to key in on this guy, if they haven't already. Then it's silver swords and snicker-snack."

I frowned. "I hate to admit it, but maybe that's the angle I should be pursuing, then. I'm an amateur at this magical sleuthing stuff. If there's a proper magical police force — as, uh, medieval as they might be — shouldn't I ping them and let them know they've got a problem in the area?"

Bob sucked in some air between the teeth of the skull. "Ehhhh, I don't know, kid. The best way to get in contact with the White Council would be to go to Edinburgh. Second-best would be to figure out who the closest Warden is, but they might be a few cities over. That'd be an investigation all its own. You got time for that?"

I was silent for a moment. We both knew I didn't have time for that.

"Anyway, uh. I don't think you want to have a run-in with a Warden. They don't like mortals knowing about them. And I figure by your reactions so far, you never did manifest any magic." Bob sighed. "Man. I spent so much work helping teach you, too. How'd your mom deal with you taking after dear old dad instead of her?"

I pressed my lips together. "Mom disappeared," I said. "Dad died."

I had the impression of the skull's eye-lights slowly blinking. "...woah," said Bob. "Major bummer."

"That's one way to put it," I said.

"I've never been so glad I don't have mushy human emotions," Bob said. "I figure I'd be pretty upset, otherwise." There was an odd pitch to his disembodied voice as he said it. I frowned.

"You don't get upset?" I asked.

"Nah. Spirit of intellect. Pure rationality, all that jazz. No room for emotion." Bob's voice was uncertain, though, and I thought I detected a hint of unsteadiness in it.

"...but you can tell jokes," I said slowly. "And you know what a bummer is."

"Intellectually," Bob said in a small voice.

Huh, I thought. The skull was in denial. That is so a problem for a later date, I told myself.

"Hey Bob," I said. "If I'm not a… wizard." I winced on the word, though I suspected it was the appropriate technical term. "If I'm not one of those. How come my Third Eye got opened? Does that happen to normal people?"

"Nope!" Bob said brightly. He seemed relieved at the change of subject. "Should be totally impossible, actually. I'm really curious how you managed it."

I chewed on that implication. "I took a drug," I said. "I mean. Not on purpose. But it still got into my system, so I guess it counts." I frowned. "But that was the first time. It's been months since then. I've been feeling mostly better. Then it happened again last night, out of the blue. I got… I guess… hypnotized. By this woman." I cringed. "Maybe she was a vampire." I really didn't like that word, either.

"Oh. Huh." Bob thought on this. "Well, your Third Eye looked kind of damaged to me when you had it open. If this drug cranked it open unnaturally, it'd make sense if that left some problems behind. Not sure how you got it closed again in the first place, but it's probably prone to popping open again whenever you're under extra psychic pressure."

If skulls could squint, this one did. "That's kind of dangerous, kid. You better be careful. Once you See something with the Sight, you're stuck with it forever. If your Sight pops open around the wrong thing, you could go permanently cuckoo."

"I'm not sure how to be careful about something I can't control," I said.

"Uh… as your professional air elemental, my advice would be to stop investigating the warlock," Bob said.

"Noted," I muttered. "Discarded. Assume I can't not investigate. Got any other advice for me?"

Bob considered. "...don't look anything in the eyes," he said. "And don't take any more drugs."

I checked the clock. Five-thirty. Damn it. I could have spent all night asking questions, but I didn't have that long. I needed to get to my meeting with Marcone.

"Thanks Bob," I said. "You're a lifesaver."

I picked back up the skull — gently, this time — and placed him on the mantle over the fireplace. He would have looked pretty classy there, if it weren't for the lace doily underneath him.

"No problem, kid. Though… you mind doing me a solid?" Bob's eye-lights flickered worriedly. "Just don't let it get around you found me. There's some folks out there that can really hold a hundred-year grudge, if you know what I mean."

I nodded. "Lips sealed. I owe you that much."

A tiny sigh of relief whiffed through the skull's teeth. "Great. Uh." He paused. "Good luck, kid."

I grabbed my coat. "I don't do luck," I said. "I do stubborn. Like a, uh. Dog with a bone?"

Bob chuckled. "Aww. Okay, that was a cute try," he said. "I'll take it. Bone voyage!"

What the hell. It'd been a hard few days. I let myself laugh.