Death Warmed Over - By Kevin J. Anderson Page 0,32
my best to sound reassuring. “You just let us handle that. Robin will know how to respond.”
Robin stood with a pencil stuck behind her ear, preoccupied with rereading the letter. She looked up at the dejected witch, and I could see the wheels turning in her mind. “Don’t be surprised or disheartened. I told you to be prepared for a blanket denial in response to our demand letter.”
Mavis lovingly patted the sow’s broad head, scratching her behind the ears. She tossed one end of the starry blue scarf over her shoulder. “We’ll try to be strong.”
Robin continued, “This is just standard procedure. Every publishing house has boilerplate letters, and they respond to complaints with categorical and vehement denials. It doesn’t mean you have any less of a case just because they say so, but they hope you’ll give up. We are not going to give up.”
The sow grunted and snorted as if reciting a long paragraph in pig language. Mavis interpreted. “I know we have to pursue this case, Ms. Deyer, but my sister and I are just two witches trying to get by. We don’t have the money for a protracted legal battle.”
“Don’t you worry about that a bit. If necessary, we’ll finish your case pro bono.”
“She means on a contingency fee basis,” Sheyenne interrupted, rising from her desk. “One-third of the monetary award, plus costs, but only if we win.”
“We’ll fight for Justice, “Robin said. “Alma has been wronged, and you have been wronged. The publisher’s mistake caused your suffering, and I won’t stand for that.” Robin put her arm around the witch’s shoulders. “Come and sit down, and we’ll talk about the next step.”
With a wan, stiff-upper-lip smile, Mavis trundled toward the conference room with a swish of her black gown. The door to the room wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the large sow and the large witch at the same time, so Mavis let the pig walk in ahead of her. After they invited me to join them, I moved one of the chairs away from the long table so that the pig would have a place to stand.
Alma was Mavis’s sister, just as largely built, although she’d had blond hair (with occasional black roots, which might be the reason for the dark spots on the sow’s hide now). The two witches had bought a new book of obscure spells released by Howard Phillips Publishing—“We Love Our Craft.” But due to an unfortunate typo in the incantations, one of the spells had gone horribly wrong: Instead of turning the two rather homely witches into svelte Aphrodite look-alikes, the spell backfired and transformed Alma into a fat sow. She’d been that way ever since. All of Mavis’s attempts to reverse the spell had failed.
I remember how distraught the witch was when she first led the large pig into our offices, weeping. This was exactly the type of case that got Robin’s passion. “A spelling error in a book of spells is a clear example of gross negligence,” she said. “Look at the damage it caused! The publisher hasn’t even offered to correct their mistake. We have to stop this before others suffer the same fate.”
“I don’t think the book had a very large printing,” Mavis admitted. “We had to special-order it.”
“They could at least have used a spell check,” Robin said.
I offered, “Let me make some calls, put you in touch with witchcraft troubleshooting organizations that could help you find a reversal of the spell.”
“Sheyenne will get you a list of support groups, too,” Robin added.
Once the Wannovich sisters became our clients, I did some investigating, discovered that Howard Phillips Publishing specializes in collectible editions of arcane works, and they have offices here in the Quarter. So far, their largest seller has been an annotated but abridged edition of the Necronomicon bound in alligator skin (they had announced, but never published, an extremely limited numbered edition bound in human skin). Recently, the company had begun to offer publishing services, for a substantial fee, to print and distribute the memoirs and ruminations of unnaturals. Everybody, it seems, wants to write their life, and death, story. Most of these memoirs were available only in e-book formats and print-on-demand. Despite their fancy logo, Howard Phillips Publishing was little more than a vanity press.
Robin passed me the response letter, which was written in flowery legalese on formal stationery. The publisher’s legal department—probably one guy in a back room somewhere—insisted, “Witchcraft is a dangerous hobby, and every practitioner should use appropriate caution.