"Saving Face," by World Fantasy Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story's also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, as well as other online retailers.
The bell above the shop door tinkled. Winston looked up in surprise. It was February, it was Tuesday, and it was raining—the hard cold downpour that made all but the hardiest locals complain. Tourists rarely came to Seavy Village in February, and if they did, they spent most of their time holed up in a hotel room staring at the ocean. They certainly didn't come to a run-down magic store in a run-down part of town.
"Thanks, Ruby," he said softly and got up from his stool. His back hurt. He'd been mixing potions all morning, filling mail orders that would go out in the afternoon's UPS. The summertime tourist trade supplemented his income. He kept the store for them, but with the advent of the internet, he really didn't need the extra advertising. The store just gave him and Ruby a place to spend their days.
He walked through the beaded curtain and stopped as he entered the narrow storefront. A woman stood near the dirty display window, studying a shelf of cut glass potion bottles. All were empty and most were antiques, things he had acquired in trade or found in the junk shops that ran along this stretch of Highway 101.
She looked up when she saw him. She was slight, with oval-shaped brown eyes hidden by large glasses. Her dark hair was pulled away from her face, in a style too severe for her round features. Still, he could see, no matter how hard she tried to hide it, she was very beautiful.
"Are you Winston?" she asked.
He nodded, his heart in his throat. People never came to the store looking for him. They came to find baubles, silly souvenirs from their vacations.
Ruby had come up beside him. She leapt on the counter and lay across it. She knew his history, knew that he had run from San Francisco twenty years before with the police on his heels. He'd always tried to convince himself that no one cared about him, no one would come to the Oregon Coast looking for him. He had changed his name, and he was twenty years older.
He hadn't made a mistake since.
It was the tiny movement, the double clasp of her hands over her purse strap, the tension in her shoulders that made him realize she was afraid of him.
No one had ever been afraid of him, even after they had found out what he was. He was a small wizard with even smaller magics, not like his mentor who could have destroyed an entire town with the snap of a finger, or the crazed woman he'd met at a Nevada roadside twenty years before, who had burned up her entire family—even the scattered members all over the country—simply by cursing them.
"Looking for me?" he repeated, rather stupidly. He felt a flush build in his cheeks. Would the police still be interested, all these years later?
Winston felt a bit of relief then. Many of his referrals came from New Orleans, from the voodoo shops and the tourist traps, places his shop had been modeled on. Many of his kind found a refuge on Bourbon Street, where no one questioned oddity of any kind.
Her gaze met his. The glasses distorted her eyes slightly, making the lashes larger than they should have been, the eyes bigger and more vulnerable.
His smile was small. This was why he hated having customers come in person. They expected more from him. They expected him to be like Gandalf the Great or like the wizards they'd seen on television. All knowing, all powerful, charismatic and forceful and strong.
"I'm afraid I'm not psychic," he said.
He was silent. He didn't diagnose. He was like a pharmacist. Someone else diagnosed and prescribed. He fulfilled the order.
He turned his back on her and parted the beaded curtain. Ruby jumped off the counter and loped toward the back.
Perhaps it was the plaintive note in her voice. Perhaps it was her beauty, hidden behind the inappropriate hairstyle and her severe clothing. Perhaps it was the way she moved, like a person who expected rejection from every place she turned.
He bowed his head. Ruby cursed softly, something about dogs and men and stupidity.
He never let anyone inside his inner sanctum. For the nineteen years he'd owned the shop, ever since he'd arrived in Seavy Village, he'd been alone except for his familiars. First Buster, who arrived with the cliff house that Winston rented and finally bought, and now Ruby, who'd appeared the day after Buster died.
The woman held the beaded curtains apart and stared at the filled bottles, the careful labels, the cluttered worktable. It seemed to Winston that her skin had paled considerably.
"I don't think this is such a good idea after all," she said.
He waited. This was new for him as well.
After a moment, she let the curtains drop. They clicked against each other. He started to follow her, but Ruby moved in his path.
The bell over the door jangled, and then he heard the door click shut.
"She came all the way from Ohio," he said.
He nodded, not quite sure how to take that, and let himself out the beaded curtains. The front of the shop felt emptier and colder than usual, and he couldn't shake the feeling that he'd made some kind of mistake.
When the bell above his door jangled the next afternoon, Winston got off his stool and headed for the beaded curtain. Ruby watched him from her basket, her golden eyes hooded. She had said nothing the night before, and her silence showed her disapproval of the woman visitor. Ruby usually commented on everything.
Winston drew the beaded curtain back, an apology on his lips, when he stopped. A policeman stood there, looking uncomfortable.
His rumpled uniform proclaimed him a member of the small Seavy Village police force, but Winston had never seen him before. The man was red-headed, freckled, and young enough to be his son.
"Mr. Karpathian?" The young man stood in the center of the store, his cap beneath his arm like a recruit at graduation.
"Yes." Winston let the beaded curtain close behind him.
This was it, then. He had thought the statute of limitations was up, thought, perhaps, times had changed just enough. In his first days on his own, he had believed he didn't need a familiar to keep his magic from curdling. He had mixed potions and fulfilled orders, but they had spoiled. A young woman who had special ordered an aphrodisiac nearly died. Fortunately her boyfriend hadn't tried it, and he had gotten her to the emergency room. The cops thought it a drug overdose, and thought Winston the supplier. He had left San Francisco on a dead run, stopping only when he saw Seavy Village and its gothic landscape.
He realized he hadn't answered, hadn't done anything except stare into space like a man numbed by time.
Winston felt his shoulders relax slightly. Ruby leaned against his lower leg. He hadn't even realized she had come out of the back room.
He still couldn't bring himself to offer information to the police. Perhaps it was his natural caution, perhaps it was his generation, or perhaps it was that experience in San Francisco, which taught him he would always be misjudged.
"Is this her?" The officer held what looked to be a blow-up of a driver's license photo. The woman in it didn't wear glasses, and her hair flowed about her shoulders, but she had that stricken look most people got before the flash at the DMV.
"Yes," Winston said, still not sure what this was about.
"Trouble," Ruby whispered from the floor.
Winston drew in his breath, and gripped the edge of the counter. I didn't do it, he wanted to say. I didn't sell her anything. I only spoke to her for a few minutes.
"What happened?" he managed to ask.
Winston shook his head. He felt slightly sluggish. He didn't want to leave Seavy Village. He'd lived here too long. But he didn't want to be associated with a murder. He couldn't afford to have attention drawn to himself.
That was what he told all the locals. Most of them bought it.
Winston nodded. "You know," he said. "Specialized tricks." He could say that without lying because he did send out a few, usually to a tourist who had stopped in during the summer, and wanted to learn a few special moves to impress the neighborhood children or the bar crowd.
Ruby sat up and stared at him. Winston knew the posture. It was the one she always used when humans treated her like an animal instead of a person.
"She's only six months old," Winston said.
The officer nodded as if that explained everything. The tip of Ruby's tail twitched.
"You've been here a long time," the officer said.
"Hmm." The officer turned, started for the door.
Winston waited until Park walked past the dirty display windows, then leaned against the counter.
"It means maybe," Winston said.
Winston shook his head. He wasn't ready to hire anyone. In a world filled with fingerprints, hair fibers and DNA testing, it was a long way from suspicion to arrest.
I don't think this is such a good idea after all, she said to him.
Sure it is, he said in his imagination. Come sit with me. We'll figure it out.
But he hadn't said that. He hadn't reassured her, hadn't taken care of her. He had let her leave, and she had died.
He had small magics. What had she thought he could do?
He placed the call from his store. Ruby already had him thinking of covering himself, of a future trial that might or might not happen. He could say on the stand in his own defense—honestly and rightly—that he called Boyce Theriot to gossip, and to place a long overdue order for some ingredients for his love potions, ingredients Theriot sold cheaper than anyone else, thanks to the large voodoo culture in New Orleans.
Winston couldn't tell if Boyce was teasing or not. They'd only met briefly, in San Francisco, twenty-five years before. Both had been apprentices, and both had been very, very different. Even at twenty, Boyce had been a sophisticated and charming mixture of cold disinterest and sudden warmth.
"Who was she?" Winston asked.
"You saw it?" Winston asked.
"This here's just what she told me." Boyce spoke in a tone that said he didn't really believe her. He would have done as any good white magician would have done, helped her realize her problem was more a lack of confidence than a single scar alongside her face.
"I don't like the sound of that," Winston said.
Winston shuddered. Nothing seemed worse to him than unwanted attention.
"Why didn't she get him to reverse it?" he asked.
Winston was silent for a moment. Ruby tilted her head slightly. He would have. Yes. He would have.
Her reasons. Winston couldn't get that phrase out of his mind. He went through the next few days with a sort of watchful numbness: filling his orders, taking care of Ruby, following his routine. In his spare time, though, he found himself tinkering with a potion that would neutralize both a beauty and an attraction spell, a potion he would never ever sell, never ever use.
Ruby watched him with a sort of sadness in her eyes.
On the fourth day, she sprawled across his worktable, her hind feet pushing against some of his more expensive potion bottles. He caught the bottles and put them on a shelf behind her.
She blinked at him. Her sphinx look.
"For you," he said, leaving off, but implying the last: You're a cat.
She heard it anyway, and stood, licking her shoulder as she often did when she was offended. Then she sat down and wrapped her tail around her front paws.
"She'd clearly been in a lab before," Winston said.
In the end, he decided, as he always had, that it was none of his business. His business was simple, it was small, it had only to do with him and Ruby and the clients he never met. He did his work in peace, and he never bothered anyone. He went to his stone house on the cliffside, built fires against the cold, rainy nights, and listened to the ocean pound the beach below.
He tried not think of Gwen, just like he tried not to think of that girl in San Francisco, the one who had almost died.
It was nearly March when the bell above the door tinkled again. That day's rain was a light mist, slanted sideways, annoying only because it made a man wet in the space of five minutes. People didn't shop in that kind of weather; they didn't browse either, and Winston knew, with that subtle certainty he sometimes got, that his visitor had come because of Gwen Winnick.
He wiped his hands on his work towel and hung it over the small sink. Then he pulled back the beaded curtain.
Winston froze. Only Ruby moved forward, her tail held high, as if she really were a store cat who wanted to greet a customer.
Winston's heart was pounding. He had to keep himself from speaking. If he opened his mouth, he would say that he had never seen her before, that he hadn't given her a potion. He had a familiar this time, so it wouldn't have mattered if he sold her something or not. This time, he would say, he was innocent.
Winston blinked. He had to think. Ruby sat down and looked at him over her shoulder.
"Do I need a lawyer, Officer Scott Park?" Winston asked softly.
Ruby's tail twitched, ever so slightly.
"No." Even with in that short word, Winston's voice shook.
Winston drove the Gremlin to the police station in the center of town. The car was now belching blue smoke, and he knew it wouldn't last much longer. He wanted a car with a magical name, but he doubted he would find one, not in the bright new century with its focus on the future.
Ruby hid beneath the dash. She didn't like the idea of Winston going to the station, she didn't like Officer Park, and she hadn't liked Gwen. Ruby hadn't voiced her opinions, but she didn't need to. She thought Winston was taking an unnecessary risk.
The station was a new fake brick construct near the Factory Outlet mall. There was a spacious parking lot near a grove of trees, and that lent the place a certain privacy Winston had never seen in a police station before.
He went inside, Ruby at his heels, to find Park waiting for him near what looked like a reception area. There were plants and double-paned windows which he had read in the local paper were bullet proof. The only thing that made it look like a police station at all was the double-reinforced steel door leading to the back.
"This sure ain't Hill Street Blues," Ruby said under her breath. Only Winston heard her. But that was enough. He had to choke back a smile, and then he vowed to stop watching so much television in the evening.
Winston's gaze met Ruby's and hers had warning in it. But he picked her up anyway, not because he was afraid she'd be spooked but because he worried that she would go exploring on her own.
They walked through the double doors into a mazelike corridor. Park led him to an office toward the back. It had a view of the trees, although the glass seemed to let in almost no light at all. The desk was covered with files, and toasters flew across the screen of the old computer sitting atop the credenza.
Park closed the door and sat behind the desk. Winston took the only chair in front of it. Ruby jumped out of his arms and began pacing the room as if she were under arrest.
"I guess I do," Winston said.
"No." He threaded his fingers together. It still felt like he needed a lawyer.
Park sighed and walked to the window. Ruby followed him and jumped on the sill. She sat down in front of him, and let him pet her. She rarely did real cat things like that. Maybe she was afraid he'd arrest Winston too.
"Because you understand this world and I don't. I probably never will." Park scratched Ruby's back and she arched in pleasure. She shot Winston a glance to see if he was watching. He was and he felt vaguely jealous.
Ruby sat down and stared out the window as if the news didn't concern her at all, but her ears went flat back. Winston frowned. No rituals should be performed around the first of March. Any sensible mage would wait until solstice, and then not do it on the beach.
"Did he say pain?" Winston asked.
"What does this mean to you?" Park asked.
"What exactly was he doing?" Winston asked.
"This isn't enough to convict?" Winston asked.
"I didn't know police worried about motives and proving court cases," Winston said.
Ruby huffed. Apparently she knew, from her vast television watching experience.
"I think this guy is a real danger. I want him put away." There was fervor in his voice, a certain hunching about his shoulders. Something that made this case mean more to Park than solving Gwen Winnick's murder.
That was the joke, of course. Seavy Village's force was small and rarely did more than vandalism, drug possession cases, and traffic stops. Seattle handled everything from vice to murder.
"And that's why you're in Seavy Village," Winston said.
Park's eyes were old. How had Winston not noticed that before? The age in them was the result of guilt, not of years.
Winston considered for a moment. He could walk, even now. But he wouldn't. Each man had his own reasons for solving this case. They needed each other.
"No," Park said, frowning at Winston as if he were doing a ventriloquist act.
"He didn't believe me," Ruby said, from her spot under the dashboard.
He couldn't tell if she sounded excited or disappointed. Probably neither.
"I won't testify in court." She said that as if someone were going to ask her, as if she were turning them down.
He could feel Ruby's scrutiny.
He pulled the car into its spot behind his shop, and opened his door. Ruby zoomed out of it, dashing so quickly across puddles that he doubted she touched them at all. She huddled against the back door of the shop and he unlocked it, letting her in.
It seemed so familiar, and so warm. His place. He had risked it, by letting Ruby talk to Park. Fortunately he hadn't misjudged the man, a man with enough curiosity to save them all. Winston had given Park a motive, and Park had given Winston a headache.
Winston closed the door, and leaned on it. He would have explained what happened to Park, except that it sounded too unbelievable, too crazy. And Winston placed a value on sounding sane.
So he had let Ruby speak. After a few sentences, when Winston had excused himself and gone to the men's room, Park started to believe. By the time Winston came back, Park believed entirely and seemed at a complete loss as to what to do—about Ruby, not the case. Winston helped him with that last part.
It was so simple and so sad. The suspect—the murderer—was named Eugene Grimsrud. His fiancé was one of the most beautiful women in Columbus, and she had had a run-in with "a crazy man" at one of the local art fairs. Apparently, the crazy man had decided to get back at her. One morning, she woke up, her face shriveled and misshapen, her eyes too big, her nose so small as to be nonexistent, her teeth crooked and yellow. Doctor after doctor couldn't explain it.
At least, that was what Grimsrud had said. It wasn't until the crazy man had shown up at their door to see his "handiwork" that they began to understand that the force they dealt with had nothing to do with modern medicine and everything to do with one of the darker forms of magic.
That was the suspect's story, which Park told them after he heard Ruby talk. All Ruby had said was this: it was clear Grimsrud was trying to reverse a beauty spell. Beauty spells, done by dark practitioners, take the essence one person's beauty and give it to someone else. Such a spell is reversed by mixing the blood of the two, and boiling it over a real fire at twilight. Dolls placed in the water had to have pictures of each person—as they originally were—and those pictures would guide the spirits to put things right.
Grimsrud had taken no chances. He even had a magic charm to help. But it hadn't. For Grimsrud had no magic of his own, and didn't know there were rules other than the ones he'd been told.
All magic gained more power on the solstice.
And a successful spell reversal was impossible, whenever one of the parties to the original spell was dead.
Grimsrud's fiancé was doomed to wear her new face forever.
Unless Winston could come with something that even he, with his small magics, could perform.
For that, Winston needed the answers to a few questions.
For that, Winston needed to speak to Grimsrud.
Park arranged it, against his will. But, Winston said, it might help with the consult. It also, Winston said, would help if he knew the details of the murder.
The papers had been vague about it. Woman found dead in her hotel room, attacked by stalker. People in nearby rooms heard screaming, shouting, and by the time the police arrived, she was dead and he was gone.
Dead. Beaten about the face and shoulders with a blunt object. Skull crushed. Murdered, it seemed, in a rage.
And Grimsrud looked like a man who could kill that way. He sat in one of the fancy new cells in the back of the new police station, waiting to be sent somewhere else to await trial. He was large and bony in a rangy sort of way. His eyes had an edge to them, the look of a man no longer quite sane.
Winston was glad he hadn't brought Ruby with him. He was glad she wouldn't have a chance to worm her way into the cell, and let that man touch her.
"Does Hubble have a last name?" Winston asked. He couldn't do much: just report the unorthodox methods to his colleagues, and see if someone stronger, someone with more magic, decided to pursue punishment.
Winston nodded, took note, and then folded his hands behind his back.
Grimsrud winced. The expression seemed off somehow, as if it weren't natural.
"Tell me about your fiancé," Winston said.
Grimsrud shook his head and lowered his gaze. "I think she might want to be," he said.
Winston stiffened. Something in Grimsrud's tone, something in his manner, made him pause. Black magic was so beyond him. He almost wished Ruby were here, to listen to this. To figure out what lurked.
He left with fiancé Kelly's last name, and a headache so fierce he doubted any spell could cure it. His stomach was in knots. The drive home was longer than usual, and by the time he got in the house, he was almost physically ill.
"I wouldn't have gone in the cell," Ruby said. She was sitting on the rug in front of the fireplace, waiting, he knew, for a real fire. No little snap of the fingers and magical sparks for her.
She would have to wait a moment. He was feeling faint.
"So he killed her, huh?" Ruby asked, studying his face.
"I thought so," he whispered. He bowed his head, felt the tension in his neck muscles.
"He wasn't getting revenge for his girl friend's disfigurement," Ruby said.
"He didn't expect to get caught?" Ruby asked.
"And what else?" Ruby asked.
Ruby was silent. Winston thought there was judgment in that silence.
Winston looked at her. She seemed less like a cat now. More like a familiar. Like she was tapping into an area he didn't quite understand.
"What do I suggest?" Ruby asked. She tilted her head as if listening to a voice inside her. Then her whiskers twitched. If she were human, Winston would have thought he saw the trace of a smile.
At first Winston thought it wouldn't work. He thought any woman—any person—who'd been injured by magic would reject magic out of hand. But he sent Kelly flyers advertising his website, and then he sent offers for free samples. He got testimonials from a few clients, and built a small newsletter—which he liked so much he sent it to other clients, and found that they passed it on.
For months, he tried, and for months, he did not hear. A year went by. Grimsrud had his day in court, and was presented as a psychopath who dabbled in black magic. Winston did not have to testify, but he read his words in the prosecutor's case, saw how his insights—minus the fact that magic really did exist—created the motive that brought Grimsrud down. There was no mention of a beauty spell, no mention of reversal, no mention of Kelly at all. Just of craziness and witchcraft and destruction.
It was enough to put Grimsrud away for life.
And to make Park, who occasionally bought Winston lunch along with salmon for Ruby, lose some of the sadness around his eyes.
But the true victim, the one Winston had never seen, the one he had only imagined, remained out of reach.
Until one afternoon in late February. It was Tuesday, and it was raining—the hard cold downpour that made all but the hardiest locals complain. Winston was working in the back of his shop, when he heard the bell above the door tinkle. He looked at Ruby; she looked at him, and he knew they were remembering a February Tuesday one year ago, a day they both hadn't yet put behind them.
This time, he stood, and opened the beaded curtain. A woman stood near the dirty display window, studying a shelf of cut glass potion bottles. She looked up when she saw him. She was slight, with mismatched blue eyes. Her dark hair fell in waves about her face. She wore a lot of makeup, but it didn't hide the fact that she was one of the homeliest women he'd ever seen.
He nodded, his heart in his throat.
He wished that were true.
She had checked on him. Of course. She would be very, very cautious.
Ruby came out of the back. She leapt onto the counter and sprawled across it, the picture of relaxation.
He was making no sense, as usual.
She put a hand on the edge of the counter, and it took him a moment to realize she was holding herself up.
A wealth of emotions crossed her face. Temptation. Joy. And then a sadness that she couldn't seem to shake.
He didn't argue the point because he didn't know her. Ruby was watching him and he wondered if he were missing another opportunity, if he were making another mistake.
He wasn't thinking of her. Instead, he was thinking of a woman so beautiful she felt she had to hide it, a woman who only wanted the face she'd been born with, not the one that had been stolen for her at such great cost.
This time she really smiled. It didn't make her pretty, but it brought her features together into something better than they had been before.
Ruby preened, but Kelly made no move toward her.
"I'll think about your gift," she said, in a tone that let him know she already had. She started for the door, and stopped with her hand on the knob. Her gaze met his. In it, he saw something soft and grateful and sad.
And then she slipped out, into the rain.
Ruby gave him a small feline frown and closed her eyes. His familiar was too young to realize that Kelly needed the chance to regain her beauty, not the beauty itself.
Just like he had needed this day. He'd needed her to come, if only for a brief moment in the space of a rainy afternoon.
He stared at the door, the small bell on top, eloquent in its silence. Then he turned away from the rain, from the gloomy February afternoon, and went through the beaded curtains into his lab. Into the place where he spent most of his life, practicing his very small magic, for people he never met—and never would.
Glad this was still up this morning. I forwarded to my mother and my aunt who are both cat lovers. I get to send links from you to them quite often since felines figure prominently but not intrusively in your short work. Mom and Aunt seem to take more interest if they see a cat is involved.
An excellent story on many levels. I enjoyed it greatly.
You're welcome, Matt. Thanks for the kind words.