Dead witch in the librar.., p.11
Dead Witch in the Library, page 11
“You expect a puppy to use a ladder?”
“So that means he…”
“Fairy style. Winked out and found himself trapped up there with the stuff you don’t care about but can’t seem to throw away. Poor little dude was really confused and lonely about the whole thing. I had to hold him and sing for two hours,” he said. “It was only after I’d calmed him down that I saw the text from Birdie about her store disappearing.”
I quickly checked the notifications on my phone. “I’m surprised she didn’t reach out to me about it too.”
“The store reappeared at midnight,” he said. “She probably didn’t want to bother you, knowing you’re busy with Protectorate tribulations of your own.”
“How can you be sure it was Cathy who did it?”
“Feels like Protectorate, don’t you think?” he asked. “Underhanded, unilateral, unapologetic, unnecessary.”
I ran a nervous hand through my hair. Making the store temporarily invisible was a minor inconvenience, but if it was a preview of what she might do to my boyfriend…
“You should get out of town,” I said. “Until we know what she’s planning, it’s not safe for you to be there.”
He was quiet. That made me more nervous than a passionate argument.
“And take the dogs with you,” I added.
He replied in a low, calm tone that raised my anxiety to outer space. “Random can stay with Birdie. He’s just a regular dog. But I agree it might be a good time for me and Fergus to take a little trip.”
I let out my breath, trying not to panic. I’d hoped he’d disagree with me. Now the urge to start the car and race north was overpowering. “Did you make eye contact with her when you were in the store?”
“We chatted about goldfinches.”
“The bird?”
“No, the elephant. Alma, sweetheart,” he said gently, “it’ll be okay. I’ve already got the car loaded. Fergus and I will be out of here as soon as I hang up.”
My eyes burned with tears. Seth was my soft spot, my vulnerability. I could be tough with witches who wanted to kill me, tough with Raynor and heartless Helen and elderly vampire witches, but when it came to Seth, I was as weak as all the snide Flint agents thought I was.
I didn’t say anything, knowing my voice would crack.
“What’s going on with your investigation so far?” he asked. “Has there really been no attempt on your life yet?”
“Don’t worry about me. Why don’t you walk to the car while you’re talking to me?”
“I’m waiting for Birdie to come over and pick up Random. Any minute now. I promise.”
I heard his footsteps through the house, dog feet scrambling over hardwood floors, the sound of the zipper being drawn on his leather jacket.
“The conference starts tomorrow, so most of the witches are arriving today,” I said. “Raynor told me the VIPs are staying nearby. There must be a B&B or something up the pedestrian stairs from where I’m sitting right now.” I peered out the window, comforted by the healthy population of fairies in the trees and flowers leading up the hill. If any demons were stalking the conference, the fairies would’ve run away to safety.
“How many witches are invited?” Seth asked.
“Only forty-nine. It’s a small conference.”
“Only? Forty-nine of the most powerful witches in the country—no, the world—in a city that has a long history with that number,” he said. “Forty-nine square miles. Gold Rush of 1849. I hear there’s even a football team using those digits. So arrogant and typical for the Protectorate to play around with the forces of the universe. Why do they insist on asking for trouble?”
“I’ll be careful. They’ll be busy hexing and charming and arguing among themselves,” I said. “Nobody will notice me. I’m just the incapable nepo baby.”
I’d been watching the fairies around the pedestrian stairs leading up through the trees and foliage, and now they suddenly scattered. On impulse, I quickly reached up to my redwood bead necklace and darkened the windshield to stay out of sight.
Five witches were coming down the stairs, a magical glow around them. The oldest one was in the front, followed by a woman, a younger man, and then a trio of Flint agents carrying bags and boxes. Even from a distance I sensed a storm of power in the older man.
I slid down in my seat, flinging up more defensive spells.
“What’s happening right now?” Seth asked.
“I might get to make some new friends,” I whispered.
Chapter
Seventeen
“Alma,” Seth said, his tone showing a loving blend of irritation and worry.
“It’s fine.” I watched a cloud of shimmering wings return to the top branches of the trees over the staircase. “The fairies are coming back. They were just a little startled.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he said. “Forget what I said about Raynor protecting you. As soon as I find us a hideout, you should hit the road and join me and Fergus. I can watch over you until the Protectorate drama settles down.”
“Don’t be clingy,” I said.
“You have no idea how clingy I can be, Alma.”
The roughness in his tone made my heart feel funny. “I’ll be fine. I will. Don’t you trust me?”
Seth was quiet for a long moment. “That goes both ways. Promise to contact me immediately if something happens.”
“I will.”
“Answer all my calls,” he said.
“I will if I can.”
Seth’s voice sharpened. “If you can?”
“What’s the matter with you? I’ve done this before, going off to investigate witches killing each other. You’ve always been cool with it. But this time, why are you being so… so…”
“Clingy.”
I swallowed. He was scaring me. “Yeah.”
“I don’t know, but there must be a good reason.”
“Text me when you know where you’ll be staying.” I ended the call before he could stress me out further.
The five witches coming slowly down the steep concrete stairs finally reached the sidewalk. When the older one paused to check his phone, the other four witches gathered around and cast a cloud of supportive spells around him. Fairies descended from the trees and flew around the cloud, dipping in and out to collect some of the magic for themselves.
The central figure turned toward me. The face was invisible under the magically darkened safety of his deep hood, but I felt a beam of attention pierce the Jeep’s boundary spells and strike the thick defensive layer I always kept around my head.
My pulse jumped.
He saw me. I could feel his eyes, even though I couldn’t see them, and suddenly knew they were green. As unnaturally green as processed food on Saint Patrick’s Day.
Morris White. He should’ve looked twenty years older than the photo I’d seen of him that morning, but his face was the same, his visible aging probably halted by magic.
Afraid of making eye contact, I looked down at my phone like any other random person parked in a car and tried to appear oblivious to his presence. Although I was curious to figure out where the emerald was on his body—a belt pouch? An inside pocket? It would probably be too huge for a necklace—I couldn’t risk drawing his attention any longer than I had already.
I scrolled through the San Francisco news. Oh, look at that, it might rain next week. And there was a review of a Burmese restaurant in the Richmond. Fascinating. I forced myself to read the words and imagine in detail how delicious mango salad and chili jumbo prawns would be. My head began to ache, maintaining just enough of a boundary to protect myself while allowing Morris to think he’d broken all of it.
Silently I begged the witch to keep walking. I tensed, temporarily blocking the flow of power inside me, the magical equivalent of holding my breath.
His attention on me didn’t break all at once, but gradually, like the sun setting behind a row of leafless trees in winter. I felt like any moment could bring that blazing curiosity onto me again.
I held still, my palms sweating, and didn’t look up until I felt the heat of his presence had gone completely cold. Finally risking a glance, I confirmed the sidewalk was empty and sucked in a deep, cleansing breath. I didn’t look forward to meeting Morris White again.
My phone vibrated with a text message from Seth.
What just happened? he wrote.
I paused, not sure how to reply. His fairy radar was working unnervingly well today.
Powerful witch went by, I replied. Gone now. I’m fine. Are you on the road?
Yes.
I stared at the screen, waiting for more, but that was it.
Relieved he and Fergus were getting away from the new Protector, I set down the phone and turned my attention to the potential murder investigation.
If I got the chance to meet some of the VIPs, I might find a clue to Luana’s death. And I needed to talk to Raynor again. He wanted me to investigate Protectorate witches but, as usual, hadn’t given me the time, information, or other resources to do it.
Still a little unbalanced from the brush with Morris White, I sent Raynor a text asking him to come outside for a quick chat. Given all the VIPs, it could be hours before he found time for me, and the last thing I wanted was to chase after him with snide Flints and dangerous VIPs thick on the ground, watching m—
There was a knock on the passenger-side window of my Jeep. I looked up from my phone and was shocked to see Raynor standing there on the sidewalk. He glanced at his watch, then gestured impatiently for me to join him.
“How’d you get here so fast?” I asked, climbing out.
“Not here,” he said. “Follow me.” He strode away to the base of the steps where Morris and the others had just descended.
I jogged after him, flinging protective spells at my Jeep behind me, then around myself, wondering how he’d managed to get to me in less than a minute without me noticing him. Had he learned how to apparate short distances like my father? It was a rare but not impossible talent, one I’d never mastered.
He glimmered ahead of me, semi-invisible in a low fog that had crept in. To either side of the steps were leafy evergreen shrubs, late-blooming flowers, and small trees. A ginger cat—a real one—darted out from behind the bushes, then spun around to avoid Raynor’s quick movement up the steps.
Did he have to move so fast? I was going to lose him. Wait—I did lose him. Where’d he go?
“Over here.” Raynor’s voice came from a misty blob above to my right.
Ah, of course. He’d created an enchanted space where we could talk in privacy. And true to character, he hadn’t explained anything to me beforehand.
I hiked up the steps, climbed over a railing, and joined him inside the bubble of protection he’d made. There was a comfortable camping-style chair for him and a simple wooden stool for me. He carried a cup of something hot—but not two. He cradled it between his hands and nodded toward the stool.
“You’ve already made an impression on Morris White,” he said.
“I tried not to.” Ignoring the stool, I looked down the hill toward the Protectorate building.
“Do you try to get yourself killed, or is it instinctive?” he asked.
“It was just a few minutes ago. You wouldn’t even have had time to say hello at the door first, let alone gossip about a weird girl sitting in her Jeep.”
“I happened to already be outside.” He held up the cup, showing the logo from a café on 24th Street.
I stared at him, skeptical. If he’d learned new spying tricks, I wanted to know. “How do you know Morris noticed me?”
“How do I know anything?” Raynor asked. Then he gave me a patronizing smile as if answering my questions was a chore but he’d indulge me. “His app texted me right before you did.” An app was the traditional witch nickname for an apprentice, an abbreviation coined long before a big local tech company had started using it.
“The app is a friend of yours?” I asked. Raynor hadn’t become Director of the San Francisco office without networking and exchanging secrets with people at all levels.
“His name’s Julian,” Raynor said. “Don’t trust him just because I mentioned him. His first loyalty is always to his boss.”
“But he contacted you privately behind his boss’s back.”
“Only to get information. He’s always on guard for potential threats.” Raynor gestured at the stool again. “Sit. You’re giving me a sore neck.”
I’d resisted because of the obvious power play in giving me a little child’s seat next to his comfortable manly one, but I needed to choose my battles carefully—getting information out of him was more important than looking cool. But when I finally squatted down, the stool lurched under my weight and made me yelp. One of the legs had sunk into soft soil while the other two were on paving stones.
Typical Raynor move. I pretended not to be annoyed, which might amuse him.
To regain my temper, I studied the stones, noticing they were actually repurposed cobbles from an old part of the city. Out of curiosity, I lowered my hand to touch it directly, pulling the energy of its old magic into my skin. A vision of horses and leather shoes came to me.
“Hey,” Raynor said. “I’m using those. Don’t drain out the power.”
I retracted my hand. “Sorry.” Then I realized he’d done it again, making me apologize. “No, forget that. If you’d just explain things directly instead of letting me stumble around—”
“Anyway, Morris and his app are the last witches we want looking at you too closely.” He reached out his fist. “Open your palm.”
I took a calming breath. It was no use losing my temper with him. “What is it?”
“It’ll help block his interest in you.” He grabbed my wrist with his free hand and put something in my hand. “It’s not pretty, but it’ll do.”
Chapter
Eighteen
On my palm was a ring of uneven copper wire holding a tiny bead of jet. Among gemstones, jet was especially good at repulsing Shadow.
Raynor was urgently giving me an amulet to protect me from Morris White?
“Is Morris a bad guy?” I asked.
Raynor groaned and flung a secondary silence spell at my head. “Don’t say things like that out loud. He’s powerful. Power makes anyone dangerous.”
“Is he the reason why you gave me”—I poked the copper wire, roughly looped into a circle—“a ring? Is that what this is supposed to be?”
“Of course it’s a ring. It will pair with the other copper ring I gave you,” he said. “And it will work on all witches, but that witch in particular. He’s known for messing with people. Avoid him.”
He and I both wore copper rings (from the same source) that blocked other witches from sensing the demon ancestry in our blood. Once I’d lost it and had worked to earn it back, hearing from another witch that it could hide other things as well.
“Did you make this yourself?” I laughed. Before my undercover assignments for Raynor, I’d relied exclusively on my handcrafted jewelry business to pay the bills. The thing he’d put in my palm wouldn’t earn a penny. “It looks like you had some copper wire lying around and just wrapped it around a Sharpie a few times.”
“You should be honored and thank me,” he said, “rather than criticize.”
I held the so-called ring up to my face to study it closer. “And where did you get the jet?” It was a perfectly round bead with a small hole drilled in the center. “Did you take it from something else? It feels like it’s one of a pair.”
He didn’t answer.
I continued to probe it with my magical senses. A porcelain face flashed in my mind, prompting me to ask, “Did you maim a doll in the Protectorate vault?” A doll with its eyes gouged out was nightmare fuel.
He brought a hand to his face and snorted a pinch of herbs up his nose. Wiping his nostrils, he looked up into the tree branches with an expression I thought was supposed to be disdainful but I suspected was embarrassment.
“Your ingratitude is breathtaking,” he said after a pause.
I suddenly felt bad for mocking his creation. He’d tried. Not everybody was artistic or had a diverse collection of beads at hand.
“Sorry,” I said, rolling the copper wire between my fingertips to form a smoother circle. “I appreciate your help. Which finger should I wear it on?”
His nose was still in the air. “Which do you think?”
“Next to the other copper ring is my guess.” I slipped it on. It didn’t sizzle or glow or anything, but I felt some muscle tension ease a little, the way you relaxed after locking the car doors in a dark parking lot.
“Nobody will be able to sense you’re wearing it,” he said. “Not even Morris.”
“What are you afraid he’d see?”
“Exactly what everyone else might see,” he snapped. “But he’s a connected busybody, the last type of witch you want taking any interest in you.”
That matched what Helen had said. “But what am I afraid others might see, my demon ancestry or my magical abilities?”
He stared at me. “Are they really two different things?”
I lifted my chin. “Yes. I’ve worked hard to develop my hearth magic.”
“It will hide your power,” he said. “I know you don’t want to admit it, but that’s a lot more likely to be coming from your mother than from your kitchen.”
“Hearth magic is real. It has nothing to do with… Vera.”
Vera was the current name of the demon who had possessed my biological human mother when she’d been pregnant with me. Mother-daughter relationships often had dramatic swings, but ours was especially unpredictable.
He gave me a patronizing nod, not wasting time on an old argument. “When’s the last time you heard from the old girl?”
I glared at him. He had the advantage on me of knowing my family story when I didn’t know his. There was a demon in his family tree as well, but I didn’t know who or how long ago it was. “She’s still recuperating from her last possession,” I said. “She won’t be able to visit me in corporeal form for a while.”
