Skin Trade

71

I WAS SITTING in the passenger seat of Rocco’s car when I got a glimpse of something. I thought at first I’d seen it out the window in the bright Vegas sun, but then it moved across my vision again, and I realized it was in my head.

“I’m seeing things,” I said, out loud.

“What kind of things?” Rocco asked. Davey leaned forward on the backseat. It was a good question; I didn’t have a good answer.

“I don’t know; it’s gone now, but it was bright.”

“Tell us when and what you see.”

“Will do.” I was secretly hoping not to see anything else, but it was just nice to be working with police who didn’t think I was crazy for being psychic.

My phone rang, and it was Phoebe Billings returning my message. She started with, “No police have come to my door. You didn’t involve me and my group.”

“Didn’t see a purpose to it, but I found out what killed Randy, and what he was doing when he died.” I explained.

“Jinn, truly, in America?”

“Honest.”

“Wait a minute, and I’ll look it up. I know the spell you mean, but it’s very old, and it’s in a book here. Randy was always very into the history of our craft. I remember a night that we talked about the jinn and how much of the legend was true.” I heard her moving around. “Here it is. Do you speak Arabic?”

“No.”

“Randy did; it was one of his specialties in the army. Does anyone else on the SWAT team speak Arabic?”

I asked that out loud to the others.

“Moon does, but then his mother’s family is from Iran,” Davey said.

“I can read it,” Rocco said, “and Moon says my pronounciation is okay.”

I handed the phone to him, and Phoebe repeated the spell to him. He repeated it back, and it made the hair on my arms stand up, like in my dream. “She wants you to write the spell down.”

“I can’t write Arabic.”

“Just write it as she tells you, one letter at a time. She’s going to try to give it to you the way it’s pronounced. She wants to see if saying it without knowing what it means will still work.”

“Oh, like a real magic word, that has power even if you speak it by accident,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Those are really rare,” Davey said. “Most spells don’t work at all without some power behind them.”

I was letting Phoebe dictate letters to me, one at a time. It didn’t make any more sense made into mock English than it did in Arabic, but I was willing to try. When I had it all, I repeated it back to her.

“Now, read it faster,” she said.

I read it faster. There was no tingle; it was just noise.

“Tell me what it’s supposed to do,” I said.

“It sends them back through Solomon’s shield. It traps them outside our reality again.”

“It’s a banishing spell, like for a demon.”

“Yes, that will do.”

I tried again; thinking what it was supposed to do, I put intent into the sounds that were supposed to be words, and it still didn’t work for me. I handed the notes to Davey, and again there was that hair-raising energy. “I think you’re not pronouncing here and here right,” he said.

I kept practicing as we drove, hard and fast, trying to catch up with everyone. We had Davey, and we had a spell. Guns wouldn’t stop these things.

“Call Moon,” Rocco said, “give him the words. He’ll know how to pronounce it.”

Davey made the call.

I asked Rocco, as he screeched around a corner and I clutched the door, “What made you learn to read Arabic?”

“I wanted to be able to read the Qur’an and the Bible for myself without translators messing with it. Most people don’t realize that some of the original books of the Bible were written in Aramaic.”

“I knew that, but I don’t read it.”

“I also read ancient Greek for the same reason.”

“You must be a heavy churchgoer,” I said.

“Every Sunday, unless I’m on a call.”

I smiled at him. “Me, too,” I said.

“I’m Lutheran, what are you?”

“Episcopalian.”

He wasted a smile on me. “Fat Henry’s church.”

“Hey, I know my Church history, and I’m okay with it.”

“As long as you know, it’s cool.”

“Yeah, my church exists because Fat Henry couldn’t get a divorce as a Catholic.”

I heard Davey repeat the syllables over the phone. It danced down my spine. “Wizard died trying to say those words,” Rocco said.

“Yes, he did.”

“This one’s for Wizard.”

“For Wizard,” I said, and though I’d never met him alive, I meant it. Of course, I had the weretiger who had cut him up in my room, but he was as innocent as the vampires we were trying to save, and the humans we’d let go last night. Somehow I didn’t share Sebastian with Rocco and Davey. What would I have done if it had been Edward on a gurney, and the wereanimal said he had no choice, he was forced to do it? Easy answer: I’d have killed him.