Excerpt from Spellbent
by Lucy A. Snyder

Author's note: Spellbent is the first book in a new urban fantasy trilogy from Del Rey. The novel follows the adventures of appretice witch Jessie Shimmer as she tries to rescue her mentor Cooper after he's dragged to hell. If you'd like to read the first chapter of the novel, you can download it from my website. 

The scene below has easily been the most talked-about one from my novel. While to my eye there are many other things in the book that are far more horrific, this one seems to have seriously squicked out some readers and reviewers.  Enjoy.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

The Warlock shivered and pulled his robe closed, looking even sicker than he had before, and I finally put two and two together.

"You're spiritually bound to Cooper, aren't you?" I asked. "If he dies, you die."

The Warlock had gone a shade paler, but he forced a smile. "Which is good news, right? I'm still up and around, so that means hell hasn't killed him yet. And ... his death is no guarantee of my death. There are ... measures I can take."

He fingered the sword-and-shield pendant at his neck.

My mouth went dry, thinking of Mr. Jordan's story of how my mother saved me from cancer. The Warlock, for all his fighting and dodgy deals and insatiable appetite for sex, had always claimed he never committed nonconsensual violence. He never even took a familiar because he said he didn't believe in taking advantage of those who'd been forced into magical servitude.

"What kind of measures?" I asked. "Necromancy? After all your talk of not hurting other people?"

"Get off that high horse right now, Jessie," The Warlock said, softly but with real menace. "You eat meat the same as me; you're willing to accept the death of other creatures to support your own life."

"But not the death of people," I insisted. "And I know good and well it would take nothing less than human sacrifice to stop what's going to happen to you if Cooper dies."

He paused. "Come upstairs with me to our apartment. There's something you should see. Both of you, I suppose," he added, flicking his eyes toward my ferret familiar.

Pal climbed up on my shoulder, and I followed the Warlock through the kitchen to a flight of polished wooden stairs that led to the second floor. The Warlock's breathing became labored near the top. I could feel the wards on the stairs; uninvited visitors would be overcome with nausea and vertigo before they got even halfway up. His apartment entrance was certain to have a subtler and more deadly set of protections.

He unlocked the door and led me in. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of tobacco, incense, and dirty litterboxes. He flipped on the living room light. The walls were decorated with paintings and framed sketches, mainly nudes of men and women I figured were some of the Warlock's many lovers. He wasn't a bad artist, either; though some of the drawings were a little flat, he had a real talent for capturing faces and expressions. The hardwood floors were littered with piles of books and drifts of dust and cat hair. A gray Persian stared at me irritably from the black leather couch beside the huge television set.

"It's in the back," the Warlock said, beckoning me to follow him down a broad, arched hallway that was far too long to exist solely within the confines of the building.

He opened a door to room lit only by the blue glow of fluorescent aquarium lights. Four rectangular hundred-gallon aquaria were lined up against the back wall, their aerators bubbling softly. At first glance, I thought the pink things crawling on the smooth rocks and swimming through the red and green algae fronds were some kind of salamanders or frogs.

Then I took a closer look, and saw that the big-headed, short-tailed creatures had a distinctly human form. The largest was maybe six inches long, the smallest perhaps four. Their lids were sealed shut over huge dark eyes, and their toothless mouths gulped air at the water's surface or gummed juice from the algae's fronds. Fragile webbing stretched between their tiny fingers.

"We call 'em the 'Jizz Kids'," the Warlock said. "We started out with, oh, I guess fifty or sixty. Now there's two dozen. They were small as brine shrimp when we discovered them. Good thing they were that big, or Opal wouldn't have even seen 'em and would have flushed the whole batch. We lost over half in the first few weeks when we were trying to figure out what kind of environment suits them best. The water's a little salty, about what you'd get in a river delta near the ocean, but pure ocean water dehydrates them. Had to special-order the riverweed from Japan."

I was staring into the nearest aquarium, my face nearly against the glass. "Holy shit. These are homunculi."

The Warlock smiled. "Glad to see Cooper hasn't been ignoring your classical education."

"How did you get these?"

"Well, when you come right down to it, it's because me and my lady are hopeless slobs," he laughed. "It's not a story for the dinner table, that's for sure.

"Opal and I were down in this little place we have in the mountains about four months ago. Strong Earth magic site, though nothing like the Grove. Anyhow, she was on her period and really wasn't in the mood for anything, so I ended up going into the bathroom to jack off --"

"Wait, whoa. This has already gone way past the 'Too much information' line," I said.

"No, really, this is important," the Warlock insisted.

"No, really, my lunch is going to make friends with your floor if you give me any more details," I replied. "Just hit the highlights, if you feel that compelled to share this lovely story of yours."

"Well, there was some ..." He made swirling motions with his index fingers. "... mixing of male and female personal substances after we both forgot to flush, got the idea?"

"God help me, I do."

"Okay. Not five minutes later, she got an emergency call from her sister in Gahanna. Her basement flooded, you know the drill. So we had to pack up and come back to the city.

"We drove back down to the cabin the following weekend. Opal went into the bathroom. People five counties over probably heard her holler when she lifted the toilet lid and found the Kids swimming around in there. I bailed them all out and put them in a couple of mason jars, then took them back up here and started buying aquarium supplies."

"That's completely disgusting," I said.

"Yet kind of cool, you have to admit," the Warlock said. "They're coming along pretty well. Don't know if it was something in the water up there, or the shrooms we were taking, or what. We've tried to repeat the experiment --"

"Details: do not want!"

"-- but no luck so far. So what we have is possibly all there will ever be, and there's still a lot we don't know about them. They seem to be developing sort-of like regular human fetuses -- they're absorbing their tails, for one thing -- but I don't think anyone will confuse them for regular human kids once their eyes have opened and they're ready to live on dry land. If they're ever ready for land life."

The homunculi seemed to sense the Warlock's presence, and they were crowding at the glass near him.

"Looks like the kids are hungry," he said, and pushed aside his robe so he could get into the pocket of his black jeans. He pulled out a steel penknife and a purple healing crystal, then lifted the covers of the aquaria, drew the blade across his palm, and squeezed thick drops of blood into the water. The homunculi jostled each other to drink the Warlock's blood.

"They like yogurt, too," he said as he sealed the wound on his hand with the crystal. "But they like my blood best."

"So you're planning to use some of them in a sacrifice ritual?"

"If I have to. I don't want to, understand that." He turned to face me. "They won't take Opal's blood any more; they're my kids. I don't know how long they'd last on yogurt and riverweed. If I die, a lot of them are gonna die, too."