The Troll-Demon War Read online

  Quite frankly, Christine wasn’t convinced that Tina would still have the will to live if she could no longer perform magic.

  “The thing is, I’d had that big fight with Nicky, right?” Tina said all in a rush. “So I was looking for some comfort. Now, normally I’d be able to scry in just about anybody. I tried to look in on one of my old mentors. Malcom. I’ve told you about him, right?”

  Christine nodded. She’d actually met Malcom at one of their shared birthday parties. He’d been a lovely older gentleman who treated everyone with dignity. She couldn’t think of another way to describe him.

  She could totally understand why Tina had felt the need to look in on Malcom, how that might bring her some peace. Malcom was like that.

  Hell, if Christine really needed that sort of calm, she might go and visit Malcom. And be welcomed, she was certain, even though she wasn’t a human magic user.

  “But my spell fizzled when I tried it.” Tina shook her head. “I still don’t know why. Maybe he’s gotten himself some stronger protection. It didn’t feel that way, though. The spell didn’t bounce off something hard. Instead, it felt like I was trying to shoot a tiny stream of flame through a waterfall.”

  “Okay,” Christine said. That struck her as odd. Tina was the strongest magician she knew. That most people knew. What was going on?

  “So I needed to check and see if it was my magic that was being wonky or if it was Malcom. I tried the scry spell again on someone else.”

  Christine heard the guilt in Tina’s voice. “Who?” Christine asked, her curiosity warring with her sense of dread.

  “Your dad. Our dad,” Tina said, a touch of defensiveness creeping into her voice.

  “Okay,” Christine said. “Did you get through?”

  “I did,” Tina admitted. “But this is where it gets weird.”

  Though Tina shouldn’t have done it, because it was such a violation of her parents’ privacy, Christine was kind of glad that Tina had tried. It meant that Christine needed to improve the spells protecting her parents. Strengthen them. While there weren’t going to be many demons who were stronger than Tina, if she could get through, others might as well.

  “What do you mean by weird?” Christine said, bracing herself.

  “So your—I mean, Dad was there in the living room, working on one of his models. This was Monday,” she added.

  Christine nodded, slightly concerned that Tina hadn’t called her with the news of something weird with her/their dad.

  “And it was like he could see me. He walked right over to the spot I was scrying through and put his thumb up over it, like he was squashing a bug,” Tina said.

  “Maybe your scrying spell had a reaction with one of the protection spells that I already have set up in the room,” Christine speculated. “So maybe it was visible or something.” It didn’t seem likely, but it might have been possible. She’d have to check with Nik to see what he thought.

  Tina looked surprised. “I hadn’t considered that!” She paused, then shook her head. “No, that wasn’t the weirdest part.” She seemed to be bracing herself as well. “When he touched the spot, the spell collapsed. It shouldn’t have done that. Not at all. The spell should have remained intact.”

  “What does that mean?” Christine asked slowly, a sense of dread crawling up between her shoulder blades, making her palms itch for her ax.

  “It means Dad might have magic,” Tina finally replied.

  “Magic?” Christine said. Okay, possibly shouted.

  “Shhhh,” Tina said, lowering her head as if to hide herself. “Yes. Magic.”

  “Swell,” was all that Christine could think to say. “How do we check?”

  “I think we should arrange for him to meet Malcom for coffee or tea or something. Malcom would know,” Tina said.

  “How about I just take him to see Nik?” Christine offered. “Shouldn’t he be able to detect it as well?”

  Tina shrugged. “I don’t know. Nik isn’t human, after all. If the magic is really faint, he might not be able to catch a trace of it. Only a human magician would be able to do that.”

  “Okay,” Christine said easily, though she was planning on taking her dad to see Nik as well.

  Nik had reiterated more than once that Christine could never trust a human. After Tina had turned on Christine and started trying to kill her because of demonic influence, Christine had come to understand exactly what Nik had meant.

  “Do you think that Dad has always had some sort of magical abilities? Or was it latent until now? Only expressing itself because he’s been exposed to so much magic these last five years?” Christine asked.

  Tina shrugged. “That’s something we can ask Malcom about.”

  “Maybe Dad would have come into his magic earlier if we hadn’t been switched at birth,” Christine said without thinking about it. “Didn’t Mrs. Zimmerman once complain about how you would even glow in your crib?”

  Tina’s smile was brittle. “Maybe.”

  Christine reached over across the table and squeezed Tina’s hand, despite the fact that neither of them much cared for being touched.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Christine insisted. “Don’t take it like you messed up his life by not being there. You were a baby. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Tina nodded and said, “I know.”

  Christine just managed to avoid not rolling her eyes. Tina was obviously lying. The possibility that she’d messed up Dad’s life by not being there, despite the fact that she had been just a baby and that the Zimmermans had been the ones to cook up the scheme, would drive Tina into a fast downward spiral.

  “You be sure you tell your therapist,” Christine insisted. She squeezed Tina’s hand one more time before releasing it.

  Though Christine would stand by Tina through thick and thin, there really wasn’t much she could do about some of Tina’s issues.

  Nik’s words came again, ringing through Christine’s head. Though she knew that Nik was wrong, she had to acknowledge that in this, he was also right.

  Never trust a human.

  Chapter Nine

  Vern Tuckerman wouldn’t admit it to anyone, not his daughter, his son, or even his wife. He could barely admit it to himself.

  But Vern no longer felt, well, swell all the time.

  It had been part of the reason why he’d taken a partial retirement from the insurance agency. He found he had a lot of difficulty concentrating on the paperwork, on clients, gosh, on anything. He kept getting distracted by absolutely nothing, like the other day when he could have sworn there was a spider on the wall, even though there wasn’t, not even after he’d squashed it. Even his beloved RC planes were getting more and more difficult to put together.

  After he assembled the wings, the next step had been to glue on a strong, bright red, plastic. Then he would use a steamer to shrink the plastic tighter between the struts.

  For the craziest time, Vern had thought about not using the steamer, but just running his hand over the plastic to see if he could get better results. As if he could somehow superheat his palms or something.

  Crazy talk, right?

  Vern didn’t think he was just getting old and forgetful, though he suspected that his son Dennis believed that. Lizzie, his wife, also sometimes gave him strange looks. Well, stranger looks than usual. You’d think that after enjoying holy matrimony with him for almost forty years that she would have gotten used to him by then.

  That afternoon, Vern sat in the living room on the sofa, looking out over the lake. Which was another difference. Since when had he gotten to be the guy who stared off into space, communing with nature?

  He’d kind of been switching over his wardrobe as well. Gone were the nice long-sleeved shirts that he wore into the office. He found himself favoring, well, T-shirts. That just wasn’t cool. He was the kind of guy who was into short-sleeved Polo shirts. The jeans were the same. And barefoot was everybody’s thing, right?

  Vern knew that he should
be getting up, off the couch. Both Christine and Tina were coming over later that afternoon, taking him out for happy hour at Mike’s Pub, just down the street. They did that from time to time, just hanging out with ol’ Dad.

  But Vern found his butt planted firmly in the couch, attached there with straps. He wasn’t exhausted. Not really. Just…something inside him felt tired all the time. Like he was fighting something off. He wasn’t sick, at least not as far as he could tell.

  He sniffed experimentally, only smelling the baloney, garlic mayonnaise, and cheese sandwich that he’d had for lunch, along with a handful of carrots and two sour dill pickles. But he wasn’t congested. He went jogging most every morning and still managed three miles every day, even though he had to be much more careful about not actually running into the lake now than ever before.

  Without telling anyone, Vern had made an appointment with his doctor the next week to get some blood tests done.

  Better to find out the worst now rather than later, particularly if it was the big C word.

  Though no one in his family had ever had cancer, at least as far as he was aware. His own father had owned a car dealership and been a complete alcoholic, dying young from cirrhosis of the liver. His mother had passed over a decade before, unhappy to the very end.

  It was part of why Vern made his own language, his own fun. Why he refused to care what other people thought of him. Both his parents had been far too concerned with what the neighbors thought, and had spent money on things for keeping up with the Joneses instead of on what would bring them joy.

  Vern, if he was truly being honest with himself, didn’t give a fuck about the Joneses, or anyone outside of the family, for that matter.

  Something else he had never bothered saying out loud to anyone, not even Lizzie.

  The door opened before Vern could completely lose his head in his own meditations.

  “Hey, pumpkin!” Vern said, surging off the couch and coming over to greet his daughter.

  No, both of his daughters. He considered Tina as much a part of the family as Christine, even though she’d been raised by other humans.

  “How are you?” Vern asked, first giving his troll daughter a quick hug, then his human daughter.

  And that was one of the weirdest things of all. Vern had always been a touchy-feely guy. He loved holding hands with Lizzie when they walked. Yet, he now no longer wanted to even shake hands with his co-workers.

  “Good, good,” Tina said. She seemed shy this afternoon. Well, more shy than usual.

  “So let’s go!” Vern said after he slipped on his coat. The sky was only overcast at the moment, but they’d surely get more rain before evening.

  “You’re ready?” Christine asked, giving him a strange look.

  “Ready as ever!” Vern replied happily.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Christine said, looking down pointedly at Vern’s feet.

  “Oh. Oh! Gosh darn it!” Vern said. He gave a shrug. “I’ve just been feeling so carefree these days! Not having to work all the time,” he added with a wink as he slipped his loafers on. “Do I pass inspection?” Vern asked. He spread his arms wide and invited them to look closely at him. “Am I groovy enough to hang out with you two cats?”

  Christine rolled her eyes at him. “You know that no one ever used that language except in movies, right?”

  “Whateves,” Vern said, deliberately using the modern vernacular.

  “It won’t just be us, this afternoon,” Christine warned as they walked out the door. “We’re meeting one of Tina’s old mentors for drinks as well.”

  “Is everything okay?” Vern asked. He wished that Tina hadn’t just turned her back to go down the stairs. He wanted to be able to read her expression.

  And where had that come from? It wasn’t that he couldn’t read faces. But it had never been as important to him before.

  “Malcom is getting older,” Tina explained. “And he’s really important to me. So I want to make sure that you get to meet him.”

  “But I did meet him already,” Vern said. “Tall black gentleman? It was at your shared Brightday party. Two, no, three years ago.”

  “That’s right,” Christine said. “You did meet him at our birthday party.”

  “No,” Vern said, shaking his head. “It was a Brightday party. Where you celebrate the light captured inside each of you.”

  Christine and Tina exchanged a glance, but Vern knew he was right.

  His daughters, both of them, shone with such an incredible light and grace, brightening up even the most cloudy of days.

  He could see it almost all the time now, which was one of the changes that he was actually thankful for.

  “Magic? Really? Me?” Vern said. He tried to keep his voice down. They were in a public place after all. They sat in a circular booth in the far corner of the pub. The windows nearby showed that it had, indeed, started raining in earnest. The rest of the room was half filled, surprising for a Friday night. Then again, given another hour or so and the party was likely to have started in earnest. In the meanwhile, there was one office group nosily toasting each other at the far side of the room, another couple of tables were filled with tourists, while four of the regulars sat at the bar.

  “Yes, sir, you,” Malcom said. His quiet, gentle voice was easy to pick out, even in the loud pub. “Now, I don’t detect a great deal of magic there. But you have a spark buried deep inside of you.”

  “Well, gosh darn it all!” Vern said. He just couldn’t believe it. “Has it always been there?”

  Malcom shrugged his elegant shoulders. He wore a nice white shirt under an actual argyle knit vest, done in a diamond pattern of gold on navy blue, with green highlights. Silver tipped the black hair at his temples. His face was long and expressive, kind eyes peering out of a broad forehead, with lots of laugh wrinkles creasing his the corners of his eyes and mouth.

  Vern guessed that Malcom was probably in his sixties, though he could have been eighty. Despite the wrinkles, his black skin still had a youthful appearance to it.

  “We don’t know if you’ve always had magic, Dad, and we possibly never will,” Christine said. “If it’s okay with you, we’ll go visit Nik later, have him take a look too.” Christine raised her chin stubbornly, glancing at Tina, who just rolled her eyes.

  “That would be swell,” Vern said. He remembered the little wooden man, and had been fascinated by the magic shop.

  “So, Vern, have you been distracted lately?” Malcom asked.

  Vern thought for a moment before deciding to tell the truth. “I have been,” he admitted. “I was afraid it was something else. You know. Something much worse.”

  “It’s probably just the magic awakening inside you,” Malcom said.

  “I don’t have to go to the doctor then?” Vern said, wanting clarification. Would the doctor be able to detect the magic in Vern’s blood? Probably not, not if they’d never been able to detect the troll in Christine’s.

  “Oh, I’d still go see your doctor,” Malcom said, smiling at him. “Better to make sure that the old engine is still ticking along without an issue.”

  “Got it,” Vern said. He took another sip of his mojito. Golly willikers! Magic! He just couldn’t get over it. What was he going to tell Lizzie?

  “What’s the next step?” Vern asked after a moment.

  “That depends on you,” Tina said firmly. “You should get some basic training, though.”

  “She’s right,” Malcom added. “An untrained magician can be a danger to himself and his family.”

  “What kind of danger?” Vern said, alarmed.

  “You won’t be burning down the house anytime soon with some sort of accidental fireball,” Malcom said, trying to reassure him. “You just need some focus training so you’ll be better able to concentrate.”

  “That would be great,” Vern said. Anything would be better than feeling as though he was losing his groove.

  “Will he be able to check and strength
en the protection spells around the house? Once he gets some training?” Christine asked.

  Vern nodded. Though he didn’t understand his daughter’s apprehension about this Great War that was supposedly coming, he knew it was real enough to her. He would love to be able to take on some of her worry, to lift at least some of the stress off her shoulders.

  “I don’t know,” Malcom said. “Are the charms human in nature?”

  All the time before, when Christine or Tina had talked about the differences between human and troll magic, Vern had tried to stay politely interested.

  Suddenly, he might have a vested interest in the subject.

  “Mostly trollish,” Christine admitted. “But there are a couple of human distraction charms thrown in as well.”

  “You need to take those down,” Malcom said urgently. “Those will inhibit your father’s ability. Particularly while he’s so new to magic.”

  “All of the house defenses?” Christine asked.

  Vern didn’t like how worried she suddenly got.

  “No, not all of them. The troll ones should be fine. Just the human spells,” Malcom said slowly.

  “It all seems so complicated,” Vern said after a moment. That he had magic! And now had to have training. It might explain a lot of things, such as why he’d always felt so disconnected from his own parents. Why he’d been so diligent at forming his own use of words and language.

  “It isn’t,” Malcom assured him. “Your magical nature will rise quickly, once you start training.”

  “Okay,” Vern said. “So, where do I find a teacher? Do I advertise on Craigslist or something?”

  Tina laughed. “No, silly. Malcom will teach you.”

  Vern was pleased that Malcom looked as surprised as he felt.

  “I don’t want to be an imposition—” Vern started to say.

  “No, no, I think she’s right,” Malcom said after a moment. “I trained Tina when she was young, just learning magic. Though I’m officially retired,” he said, pausing to give Tina what could best be called a stink eye, “I believe that training an old dog new tricks might be fun.”