After an hour of hard work on the text, with no further results, Lemuel was so tired that he left the pawnshop for three hours straight. He hunted. He ran through the scrubby bushes and cacti, he leaped over rocks, unseen and ecstatically himself. He found four passed-out teens camping out to the north by the Río Roca Fría. He took blood from them but left them alive.
Lemuel felt much better after that. Energy was good, reviving; but sometimes, he just needed the blood. He would have enjoyed killing the teenagers, because the energy of the passing was an incredible rush. However, these kids were so well nourished and glossy that he knew they would be missed.
On his way back to the pawnshop, Lemuel thought about the conversation he’d had with Olivia. It had been a long, long time since he’d thought about his past. It was a great thing, to be able to read. He thought of the computer, and how Olivia used hers all the time, while he let Bobo do the computer work for the pawnshop. He felt uneasy using the machine, though he knew the basics. It seemed likely that Olivia could look up his sister’s descendants somehow on the damn thing.
Descendants, Lemuel thought. Descendants. And suddenly, he had an idea. Olivia had gone to bed, but he went down the stairs to wake her up.
15
Fiji was holding Mamie’s hand. Mamie was restless in her dozing state, her legs moving feebly as if she were walking. Her hands were still, though, and Fiji felt how soft Mamie’s skin was, how thin over the bones. Sometimes old people got worn down from the inside out, and that was the case with Mamie. The former Las Vegas showgirl was a shadow of herself.
“She’s only eighty-five,” Tommy Quick said hoarsely.
“She’s always been so tough,” Suzie said. The rhinestones on her glasses frames glittered in the overhead light. “Real tough. Till she had that fall in Vegas on the stairs. And now this obsession with Midnight. Can’t you stop it, Fiji?”
Fiji considered. None of Aunt Mildred’s spells would cover this. Mildred Loeffler had had spells of cooling and heating, spells to freeze people in their places, spells to hold things just as they were until the spell was rescinded (useful in keeping food from spoiling), spells to make the subject more attractive, spells to make the subject more hateful, spells to help your garden grow, spells to protect you or others from harm . . . and a lot of herb work to combine with the spells for better effect. One or two of these had been lethal. But Fiji could not recall any spell that would take away a dangerous and painful call from some supernatural source. If she had known such words, she would have used them on herself.
Fiji didn’t think Mamie was hearing the voice she heard, but clearly, Mamie was experiencing a summoning. Probably the same one all the suicides heard, she thought. Luring them to Midnight and to their doom. But why Mamie, of all people?
Fiji knew two Mamies. If the one being summoned had been the other Mamie, Price Eggleston’s mother, Fiji would have understood. You didn’t raise a son that hateful unless you had an overabundance of hate yourself, in Fiji’s opinion. But this Mamie seemed so helpless and frail! It was hard to remember that she hadn’t always been that way.
Now Fiji had to comprehend that, because Suzie was thrusting a picture in front of her, a picture of a young woman with a pert round face, heavily made up, and clad in a plumed headdress, high heels, and very little in between.
“Wasn’t she gorgeous?” Suzie demanded.
“She was,” Fiji said, keeping her voice quiet. She didn’t want Mamie to rouse completely, because she was going to try a spell of her own.
“Aren’t you going to say some words?” Suzie asked.
“Magic is will, my great-aunt always told me. You may have a set of words to say, but you may not.” At first this had been incomprehensible to Fiji, but now she got it. If you had the magic, the will and intent would form the words, or the sounds, to bend the magic to do what you wanted. She wanted Mamie to forget about Midnight. She began to hum, moving back and forth a little, as she forced her will into a magical channel and put Mamie at the end of that channel.
The magic formed up nicely and began flowing toward the old woman. Fiji held Mamie’s hand, and rocked and hummed, and after a time she became aware that Mamie’s legs were quiet under the white bedspread, and that Tommy and Suzie were slumped in their chairs, asleep.
Her magic had slopped over. Not very professional.
At least Fiji herself was awake. She extricated her hand from Mamie’s and sat back. Getting to her feet, she retrieved her purse and tiptoed out of the room. Once in the bright hall with its gleaming linoleum and constant bustle, Fiji breathed a long sigh of relief.