Gary was reluctant to say anything about magic. But it was a seven hour drive. I wore him down. I goaded him really. I kept digging at him about blood magic and he kept insisting that what he did was black magic. Eventually he had to explain the difference.
Blood magic, as we know, is powering magic with blood. Pretty simple. Kill a rabbit, do some magic. Kill a person, do bigger magic. As explained by Gary the evil sorcerer, black magic isn’t about killing, it’s about bending people to your will. Breaking them down so much that they’ll give up everything they love just to make you happy. The key to black magic is getting satisfaction out of suffering. Basically it’s what people do on social media.
I guess that’s better than killing people? Gary was shaky when he was talking about it. Maybe it is like a physical addiction. It’s pretty fucked up whatever is going on.
I told him he was doing it wrong. You don’t need to be an asshole to do magic, it just takes practice. He said that he was the one with all the money and power so how could he be the one doing it wrong? I reminded him how the entire reason we were in the car together is because the way he was doing magic made him try to kill his ex-wife and then hate himself so much he was going to commit suicide. He may have been on the debate team at Cornell but I’m pretty sure I won that exchange.
I did my best to explain magic to him the way Obaluaiye and Royale did to me – as a gift to be cherished. He asked me how that was working out for me. He won that debate round.
I asked him about his cabal of black magic friends from Cornell. He said that he hadn’t kept in touch with them. He knew they were successful business people like him. Black magic doesn’t encourage collaboration. He knew the professor that taught him had died. As had two of his fellow cabalists. Half the crew being dead seems suspicious to me. He shrugged it off.
He refused to help me with the spell again but I was able to manage on my own and it kept us heading to Del Rio. When we got there I saw that “there” was a strip club called Tassels. Do you ever wonder why they call these places gentlemen’s clubs? I’ve never met a gentleman in one. Dadum dum tss.
