Page 39 of Killian
“Sorry,” he said. Something was tickling at the back of his brain. Some way of solving this. He needed… crafts. No. He needed… crochet. No. Fuck. What was it?
“Well, stuff of nightmares aside,” said Moira. “How are we supposed to find them if we can’t smell them? Get off at every level? That won’t take forever or anything.”
A memory began to seep through the shadows into the forefront and he finally grasped the quite literal thread that he’d been looking for.
Killian turned back to the elves. “I’m going to need a really big ball of yarn.”
“Do we think this is going to work?” asked Killian, looking at the diagrams in the book. Alekos had spent a fair amount of money and time acquiring Supernatural artifacts, records, and spell books. In Greece, it wasn’t hard. The Night of 1000 Deaths and WWII had put a lot of artifacts out into the human marketplaces. Although not all the books were comprehensible. At least not to him.
Pellos laughed. “All of you are the biggest skeptics!”
“Yebo,”agreed Killian, looking over the top of the book to where Pellos, suntanned and scruffy was making chalk marks on the floor. Pellos was thirty. A few more years and he’d start to look older than the rest of them. Killian tried not to think about his best friend dying, but the thought popped into his head more often than he would have liked.
“It’s magic,” protested Pellos. “You are magic! How can you not believe?”
“You know what? Just between you, me, and the wall, I don’t think shifting is magic.”
“What the fuck do you think it is then?” demanded Pellos.
“I don’t know… It just feels like me—like my left foot.”
“I’m sorry, shifting is like your left foot?” Pellos scratched a heavy eyebrow leaving a blue chalk mark.
“Your left foot doesn’t feel magical, does it?” asked Killian.
“No more than my right,” said Pellos, laughing again.
“Well, that’s what shifting feels like to me. It’s just this other bodily function. But mucking about with all this mumbo jumbo seems… what is it the kids say? Suss. Like really, I’m going to draw some pictograms, mutter some words, and then a ball of yarn will tell me where to find warlocks?”
“Well, I have mucked about with some of this mumbo jumbo, as youcall it,” said Pellos. “And you’re right, it doesn’t always work. But I think some of that might be my fault. I’ve noticed that I have better luck with Greek spells than I do with some of the spells from other countries. I think there are some cultural properties that I’m not grasping. But I think this one will work for sure. You can’t get much more Greek than the ball of yarn thing.”
“You have more patience than I do,” said Killian, tossing the book down. “My brain shuts off after about two seconds of trying to decipher this gibberish. I don’t understand how every Shifter I know can read Latin and all this crap. Why can’t I get that magical power?”
“Well, every shifter you know is Alekos and Sebastian.”
“I’ve met others,” said Killian. Pellos snorted.
“Yes, and just like Alekos they’re of a generation that thought a classical education included Latin. It’s not a magical power,” said Pellos, as he chalked out another symbol. “It’s having actually gone to school. I mean, what did you do? Spend hours at a library so you could pass the secondary equivalency exam?”
“Well, yeah,” said Killian, feeling embarrassed.
“Well, I don’t think spell casting was covered on that test, so it’s not exactly surprising you missed it. On the other hand, it fucking pisses me off that if I tell you what to do you’ll remember everything off the top of your head next week. Your auditory learning is annoyingly good.”
Killian laughed. “Sorry, but I didn’t have a lot of paper to make notes on. I had to memorize a lot.”
“Yeah, well, I practiced picking pockets, reading Latin, and sweeping up a lot of wolf fur. You people shed a lot. The Roomba is an invention of the gods. Anyway, I believe that you could say that our childhoods were not the standard.”
“I’ve always felt stupid,” admitted Killian, feeling cheered up by Pellos’s outlook.
“Don’t be an idiot,” said Pellos, going back to chalking out the circle around the yarn.
Killian chalked the Greek symbols around the ball of yarn, stared at one, erased it, and drew it the other way around. He hoped Pellos was right about his memory because otherwise he was going to look like a complete idiot. The yarn was a vibrant leaf green and Killian hoped that didn’t matter because Pellos’syarn had been cheap craft-store red. The elves and Moira were watching the procedure with interest. Cynog was jotting down notes and drawing pictures to record the event and practically vibrating with excitement.
“The ball of yarn spell issucha classic,” Cynog whispered hoarsely to Moira. “But I’ve never actually seen it done. Well, I mean, I wouldn’t have, would I? Not many people building labyrinths these days. What a brilliant repurposing. This is so exciting!”
“Labyrinths?” repeated Moira.
“With minotaurs?” offered Cynog. “Is Earth not doing those anymore?”
