Summoned by Anne M. Pillsworth Page A

around Sean’s hand and drove him straight to his aunt’s. Sean told Celeste he’d cut himself slicing a bagel. East Side Ph.D.’s were always butchering themselves that way, so she had no trouble believing her dumb-ass nephew had. She hustled him to her office, where her partner Dr. Goss sutured him up.
    Celeste insisted he stay overnight at her house, which meant he couldn’t clean up at the industrial park. No worries. Anyone was welcome to the stinking grill, and as for the magical circle, Gus said there were going to be afternoon thunderstorms. The rain would wash away Sean’s pentagram, and that would be the end of the ritual.
    Eddy came over in the afternoon. Sean told her the whole story, except for the hard-on part. She was cool and didn’t say, I told you so . Instead she tore into the Reverend and Geldman. “It’s no joke, angel dust. You could have brain damage.”
    “I had a wicked headache, but I feel all right now.”
    “We should call the police.”
    Sean gave his bandaged palm a painful flex. “I threw the powders away. There’s no evidence.”
    “We could place an anonymous tip.”
    “Eddy, we don’t know it was drugs. Even before I burned any powder, I was feeling weird.”
    “You probably inhaled some getting ready. I mean, how else do you explain the hallucinations?”
    He didn’t want to say it, but he made himself: “Magic?”
    “Real funny. You inhaled some when you poured the powders into the pots.”
    Last night he would have agreed. Now he’d had time to think about everything that had happened, and drugs wouldn’t explain why he’d gone from jittery Sean to fearless Sean the very second he’d stepped into the magical circle. “I still don’t want to report Geldman. Plus I’d have to tell the police about the Reverend, too, right?”
    Eddy paced, too indignant to sit down. “I’ve been thinking about the Rev. Know what I think? I bet he’s really Mr. Horrocke.”
    Maybe Sean’s brain was damaged, because it sure wasn’t following Eddy there. “The old guy at the bookstore?”
    “It makes total sense. Where’d you find the Witch Panic book? Horrocke’s. Who’s an expert on old books, probably knows all about forgeries, probably could make his own forged shit, like the ad? Horrocke.”
    “Jeez, take a breath.”
    If she did, it didn’t slow her down. “Horrocke puts the book and ad out for bait, and you take it. Then he pretends he doesn’t know anything about them and lets you have them for nothing. And—” Eddy suddenly turned and pointed at him, like she was the prosecutor and he was a crook on the stand. “And he tells you they’re your destiny. Then what’s the Rev tell you? He left the book and ad for you in particular. That’s the destiny thing again.”
    Yeah, brain damage. His headache was even coming back. “I don’t know.”
    “But it makes sense, right?”
    “No, because why would Horrocke do all that?”
    “All those books he’s around. They’ve cracked him. He thinks he’s a genuine wizard. He meets Geldman, who thinks he’s a genuine wizard. They, what d’you call it, they reinforce each other. Or if they don’t think they’re wizards, they just like screwing around with kids. Maybe they’re pedophiles.”
    That was a nice thought, not! “I’m not sure about Horrocke being the Reverend. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m done with both of them.”
    Eddy finally let it go, though Sean could tell she was dying to spearhead a major police crackdown on magic pushers.
    Over the next four days, while he was off work because of his bum hand, he worked on his project report. The pictures of his magical circle looked good, but as he’d expected, no amount of fiddling could save the three time-delay photos. He deleted them from Dad’s camera. If only it was that easy to get the stink out of his clothes. After the third wash, he buried his jeans and T-shirt in a chest of old sweaters, hoping mothballs would conquer the lingering