Rowan Blaize and the Hand of Djin Rummy by Jonathan Kieran (free novel 24 .txt) 📖

and that miserable Mephisto beat you at cards, and, on account of you being the loser, he gave you the choice of getting turned into a skinny black swan for a hundred years or else going upstairs to his room and …”

“Shut up about that, you sour old gossip!” snapped Letty. “This is something completely different.” She sat down with a thud on their blue velvet settee, staring at the hem of her housecoat and then at her slippers, as if the solution to her sudden panic might be found amid the worn tufts and tattered edges of terry cloth. “Something big is comin’ into this town, Gertrude. I can feel it in my marrow.”

“Whaddaya mean by ‘something big,’ Letty?” Gert reached for a datil pepper gumdrop in the crystal candy-dish near the sofa. She was entranced. Forget about the dance show. Letty’s forebodings were always top-notch entertainment. “What do you see? A storm brewin’ out over the ocean? A bad Northeaster, maybe? It’s a little early, yet, but you always did get a crick in your back when a nasty wind was about to blow. Remember when the old pier got taken out back in 1984 and you warned everybody who’d listen that—”

Letty waved her crabbed hands as if swatting away some invisible, buzzing cloud of gnats. “Nothing like a storm,” she said. “A storm is occasion for concern, sure, but not for outright foreboding.”

“Then what, exactly, are you feeling, girl?”

“I wish I knew, exactly.” Letty nibbled with vexation on a bony knuckle. “I’ve been feeling some sort of weird vibe coming on ever since we closed up the shop this afternoon, but at first I thought it was just my eyes getting tired, or that we weren’t clucking at each other like old hens, as we normally do. Now it’s gotten bad. Real bad. There’s this huge sense of trouble, Gertrude, just at the very outskirts of my intuition. But it’s massive. I been trying to focus and get some kind of hold on it, but it’s eluding me. I even tried the nightshade compress, but nothing clear is coming through.”

“Could be those cabbage rolls you ate last night,” ventured Gert. “They fairly gave you the head-sweats, you put so much Boomslang Curry on them.”

Letty shook her braid-reinforced head and placed her hands around her ears, wincing in terrible pain. Gert began to actually worry about her friend for the first time in ages.

“Hey. You ain’t kidding when you say there’s something off-kilter somewhere, are you?”

“No,” croaked Letty, lowering a hand and motioning to Gert. “Give me a sip of your drink. I’m too dizzy to get up and fetch my own. Ain’t even going to try and levitate it over to me.”

Gert carefully handed Letty the sloshing, ice-cold martini and watched with fascination as her companion took a long, burning draught.

“Here. That seems to have hit the spot for now. Thank you, Gertrude. Oh, I say. Yes. That hit the spot and then some.” Her eyes widened as Gert took back the empty glass. “Say, do you remember that feeling both of us got just around the time Rowan Blaize first came to St. Augustine? Only it wasn’t necessarily an uncomfortable feeling?”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Gert. “It was just a sense that something, well … BIG … was on the scene and we didn’t know what it was. But we could feel the weight of it, couldn’t we? We could feel the power. That’s how we knew Rowan was one of the real Old Ones, one of the Mighty Ones, once we met him in person. Only we never give him the satisfaction of telling him that we knew—and that we know—how powerful he really is. You said we didn’t want him putting on airs, no matter who he was, and you were right about that, Letty. But sure enough, that was the feeling we felt when he came. Something big. And you’re saying this premonition or whatever it is you’re having right now is like that, too?”

“In a way, yes. In a way, no. This is big trouble. Danger, even.”

“To the city?” asked Gert. “You positive it ain’t no hurricane the mortal weather people might’ve missed on their Doppler? Surely you can’t be feeling anything that’s a danger to the two of us. What have we got to be afraid of?”

“I tell you I don’t know, yet!” snapped Letty. “But I know enough to know that we would be well advised to feel afraid, Gertrude Gokey. Possibly very afraid, from the feel of things.”

“Blast it all!” said Gert, chewing her gumdrop and gathering the folds of her housecoat and nightdress. She, too, could intuit momentous things and events, being a witch of considerable skill and experience, but she did not have a knack for getting a preview of coming catastrophes the same way Letty did. Her inner spirit was too optimistic—or, at least, more optimistic than Letty’s—to be an Oracle of Impending Cataclysm. Leticia Beauregard, on the other hand, had been predicting plagues, wars, earthquakes, eruptions, and everything from mob uprisings to mudslides since they had been girls back in the Old Country. If Letty hung her head in her hands and told you that trouble with a capital T was on the way, you would be wise to sit up and take note, because it was on the horizon.

“Something outrageous would have to crop up now, just as we’re ready to get some nice rest after a busy summer,” griped Gert. “Just as all my programs are getting really good and even that Pint-Sized Princess pageant is coming to town!”

At this, Letty’s hands flew again to her temples and she was wracked with pain.

“What’d I say?” gasped Gert, now thoroughly perplexed. “Can’t be the pageant coming to town that’s got your feathers ruffled. I know you don’t approve of all that mortal fuss and vanity, but it’s just a two-bit kiddie show meant to tickle softhearted old gals like me. Ain’t nothing evil about it.”

“Don’t you think I know that, Gokey?” Letty’s voice was now husky and subdued. “Fact is, I’ve been getting odd little jolts all day, now that I think about it. Ever since you started watching that ridiculous business on the TV down in the shop, when Rowan came in for a visit. I’m sure you mentioning it again is just some reminder that set me off automatically, some awful reflex, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m getting one doozy of a dark message, loud and clear, but without any actual shape or shine to it. You wouldn’t believe the pain caused by being unable to get a grip on the exact form of it, whatever it is. I feel like my head has either been split wide open with an axe, or else I’m gonna be begging you to split it open, before all is said and done!”

Gert set her slightly mole-addled and somewhat stubbly jaw with determination and leaned forward on the sofa. “I may not understand the frustration, Letty my girl, but sure as Saturn’s Seventh Sister I believe it’s real, and that means we have something well worth a proper investigation!”

She rose with buxom enthusiasm and stalked into the kitchen of their spacious quarters. In a moment, Letty heard the sounds of pots, pans, and various other items of a culinary character banging and clanging against each other and the cheerfully painted pastel cupboards. A dish crashed onto the rust-red tile and shattered.

“Drat,” grumbled Gert.

“What in the world are you doing in there?” called Letty. “The headache’s bad enough as it is. When I said I might need my skull split with an axe I didn’t mean for you to go rummaging around for one. Get back in here and help me talk this thing through! Ain’t no time for you to prepare one of your evening snacks, not at such a troublesome hour.”

“Not looking for no axe or snacks, Letty, though a slice of that key lime pie in the fridge would be just the thing right now, what with my nerves. And it is way past time to ‘talk things through.’ I do believe you have said enough.”

Gert emerged a moment later from the kitchen, triumphant. Her bosom swelled with take-charge confidence in the doorway. “You think we need to talk, Letty, when what we really need to do is … wok!”

Letty rolled her eyes and flung herself backward in a show of despair upon the settee, lanky legs sprawled out across the faces of the jolly monkeys sewn into the pattern of their tropical-motif area rug. “Why, by the treacherous trade winds of Tartarus, did you go and fish that ridiculous thing out at a time like this?” she asked, forlorn.

“Because we need it at a time like this,” said Gert, brandishing the most powerful and magically utilized member of her vast collection of kitchen utensils, gadgets, gewgaws, knick-knacks, and novelties. It was a large, dented, heavily tarnished, and not at all well-scrubbed wok. Her nephew had sent it to her all the way from some crowded, dingy street market in Peking nearly a century ago, and though she had since used it only half a dozen times in her desultory experiments with Chinese cooking (a cuisine Gert never cared for in the first place, but how was poor Horatio, her least-attentive nephew, to know a private thing like that?), she had nevertheless found the clumsy, shelf-hogging object to be a most unexpected and indispensable talisman.

While the dusty spell-corner in Gert’s otherwise spotless bedroom was stocked to the ceiling with crystal balls, obsidian shards, silver-lined jade bowls, and ampullae full of exotic inks meant specifically for purposes of diehard divination, ethereal eavesdropping, and surefire second sightings, the wok was not to be trumped. Never, in all of her years as an enterprising and methodologically inquisitive witch, had Gert managed to conjure up more accurate and informative visions than she had in her wok. It wasn’t much to look at, and not the least bit esoteric compared to her other, more overtly enchanted and mysterious implements, but she would not trade the wok for all the Magic Mirrors in the entire panoramic history of Wicked Queendom.

“Oh, for crying out loud, Gert,” bleated Letty from the settee. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna start playing around with that beat up oriental cooker!”

“I am,” asserted Gert, clearing off the coffee table and arranging her warped wok upon the thick glass surface between them. “We’ll both feel a heck of a lot better for a little stir-scrying, tonight, don’t you think? Why, the way this thing’s worked for me in the past, we might even get to the bottom of your migraine premonition toot sweet! You could irritate the tar right out of them pits in LaBrea, but you are my best friend, after all. I can’t rightly stand to see you so bent out of shape. Besides, if there’s something nasty on the way that can put a couple of old pros like us to serious inconvenience, then I’d prefer to get me a good solid look at what it is, ahead of time, so we can figure out a way to calculate an ounce of prevention, if necessary, or ponder, if at all possible, our pound of cure.”

Letty groaned as she pulled herself into an upright position and hobbled over to the recliner to retrieve the nightshade compress, which was still visibly steaming due to the intensity of her oracular fever. She placed it back atop her sweat-soaked braids, anyway.

“You really think you can tune that dumb thing well enough to get a decent read on what’s eating away at my brain?” she asked, sitting down stiffly next to Gert on the sofa. “If I recall correctly, the last time you fetched that cooker out of the cupboard to have a gander at something unforeseen, you claimed a great brush fire was gonna sweep through Marsh Creek all the way to Crescent City when, in fact,