Rune magic counterfeit p.., p.1
Rune Magic (Counterfeit Psychic Book 2), page 1
Rune Magic
Counterfeit Psychic, Volume 2
Thea Atkinson
Published by Thea Atkinson, 2022.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
RUNE MAGIC
First edition. January 4, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 Thea Atkinson.
Written by Thea Atkinson.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
MORE FROM THEA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter One
I EXPECTED A DEATH mask to be more frightening, to be honest. As it was, the life-sized mask just looked like a plaster cast of a mannequin's face with about as much vitality as a plant pot. There was no life in it. Nothing to fear in the least as far as I could tell.
And yet it terrified the woman standing in front of me. She had brought the thing into my shop twenty minutes earlier in a fabric bag that she probably got at a boutique store since the handles were gold satin ribbon. The bag sat on my counter a hand span away. The mask resting in my palms did not feel boutique. It felt rough and homemade.
"You say your grandfather made it of your mother when she died?"
The blank expression molded forever into the plaster effigy I held looked fairly serene. I turned it over as I waited for the woman to say more. The faint markings of skin texture captured during the molding faded away at the edges. I thought I could detect a few hairs stuck in the plaster.
I was considering running my finger over what looked like a red strand until she spoke, distracting me.
"He was old when my mother died," she said. "Probably seventy."
A sharp glance up at her proved she had to be at least seventy herself. The well-coiffed hair cut into a neat bob was completely white, but it had a youthful curl on the ends that curved around her earlobe where she'd tucked it back. Snappy black eyes peered back at me with a girlish vigor. I was willing to bet she was a fire cracker in her day.
She must have caught some expression of surprise on my face because she sighed with resignation.
"I know what you're thinking," she said and shifted her handbag to her elbow from her wrist. "The mask is very old. My mother died in childbirth. Teenage pregnancy. I never knew my father." A small flicker of humor played in her eyes. "I never knew my grandfather either, really. I was ten when he passed away."
The mental math on that one made me wonder if she had lived with the old man until that time or if she'd been passed off to the care of another relative. Then my mind went to all sorts of possibilities. That was the trouble with a traumatic childhood; you saw bogeymen everywhere.
I placed the benign looking object on my counter with incredible care. Knowing it was a relic with a fair amount of age, no matter how scared she was of it, added the need for an extra layer of caution. I'd hate to break the thing when all she'd asked me for was a good old fashioned exorcism.
My gaze studied it instead, inspecting curves of features from a few inches away as I leaned over and panned across it with a practiced air. I wasn't averse to performing an exorcism, it was just that I'd decided to try to go the straight and narrow, and exorcisms definitely weren't on my newfound high road to goodness.
She waited patiently while I noted the grime around the edges of the facade, oiled from too much handling. The patina matched certain colors in my burled wood counter top. The surface had cost me a pretty penny, but I didn't regret one coin because I loved it. It reminded me of a short time in my life when things felt normal.
Now, catching sight of it, I inhaled sharply at the sight of a huge gouge in the surface, a leftover gift from the man who had tried to kill me two months earlier by swiping at me with a scythe and digging it into the top. A grim reminder that my present was anything but normal anymore.
I straightened up a little too quickly at the memory, and blackness swam around the edges of my vision.
I kept my gaze away from the gash in the center that ruined the shellac and the river of blue paint that had been artistically poured into the crevices left behind by bugs and decay when the wood was a living tree.
Reminders of the psycho who tried to end my life, and who left that huge dig marring the surface were about as wanted as a seven year itch. I tried to keep a desk blotter over it so I wouldn't end up spoiling the whole counter.
The blotter usually did its trick but sometimes, like today when a client ran their hands over the surface, it got pushed aside and the memories came flooding back. I still had no idea what the man had wanted or why he was killing psychics and witches, and neither had the police.
That mystery looked like it was going to go unsolved. The newspapers mentioned it now and again, but people seemed to have breathed a sigh of relief and went on to worrying about crimes that affected them and not a caste of society they thought of as charlatans anyway. Seems we were as disposable as prostitutes.
I was of the mind that if it never got solved but never fell at my doorstep again, I could be OK with the mystery going cold too.
I settled my gaze on the mask. "He must have loved her very much," I said to the woman, swaying a bit as my blood pressure normalized.
"I would assume so," she said. "Although I haven't seen the thing in decades. I thought it had got tossed when he died, but I found it in a box of things in the attic when I had to clean everything out."
She eyed me as though she expected me to ask for more information, and then added in the answer I didn't ask for. "I'm not getting any younger and his house is far too big to stay in alone anymore. I'm moving to a nice senior's apartment."
I didn't want to judge, but I thought it odd that a man would memorialize his daughter that way; evidently, she did too because she made a sound deep in her throat that caught my attention. When I looked at her, her face was pinched, as though she wanted to be done with the transaction and flee back into the street.
"When you phoned, you told me it was cursed," I said, trying to segue back to the issue at hand.
She nodded and I noticed she wouldn't look at the mask as it sat between us.
"Do you think you can neutralize it?" she said. "I don't really want to get rid of the mask but..."
I sighed heavily. I never really did anything magical no matter what my shop sign declared. Everything I managed came from the practiced art of misdirection and character study blended with a host of skills and knowledge that lent me the air of a true spiritualist.
I'd got good at that sort of thing over the last three years. And I wasn't ashamed to admit to myself that much of the skill had come from my mother. She'd claimed to be a witch and kept a trove of relics and books that would put a horror movie to shame. It was only lately, after her death that I began to think there was more to her claims than I'd realized.
Even so, I'd worked at cultivating a reputation as a woman of power because even if my mother might have had some magical abilities, I did not. I'd duped a good deal of people in the name of paying my mortgage. I'd even recently managed to pick up a little work through the police, lending them insights into cases that I touted as magical but that were just plain old psychology. Things they could have figured out for themselves if they'd taken a step back from the evidence.
But some things had changed. After discovering my mother's amulet and grimoire possessed real magic, after the police officer who had requested my insights into a series of murders turned out to be a wolf shifter, I didn't take things at face value anymore.
As incredible as it was, I'd had to face the fact that magic existed. That didn't mean I had to face what I thought about my mother or the things she'd done to me as a kid that sent me on the run and then into the foster care system. I didn't think I owed her any more than a passing interest in the things she'd left me that allowed me to pretend to be the kind of woman my clients needed.
Admittedly, I'd used more than just my good instincts with my clients. Recently, I'd used a bit of psychedelics to aid me in my 'magic', offering those who were resistant to believing but who desperately wanted to believe, some way to get there.
I didn't use the psychedelics anymore. It had never felt right anyway, and nearly getting caught and convicted of the offense had set me on the good and righteous path. But I did still practice the art of the con when I had to in order to keep my shop running, and I tried to keep the majority of my revenue to innocent sales of candles and potions and paraphernalia.
I couldn't afford to be picky, and I would rather put my talents to use helping people instead of duping them, but the bank didn't care about my druthers whatsoever.
What this elderly lady was asking of me was something I would have charged a fair bit for in my previous life. Anything that required research and spiritualistic connections brought in a pretty penny. Add in a bit of mystique and danger and you had the makings of a full months' mortgage.
This woman was exactly the kind of client I preferred. Namely, a woman who needed help healing when she thought she needed something else. I might not have true magic, but I did know a thing or two about human nature, and while I was far from a therapist, one thing I was good at was helping them come to terms with their past.
I didn't want to admit to myself that some of that might have come from the psychedelics, but I supposed it didn't matter in the end. So long as they went away more at peace than they'd come, I didn't feel bad taking their money and they always left feeling better than when they'd come. Win win in my book.
So when she'd phoned, I'd agreed. In the past, I'd have tried to eke out as much service revenue as I could. Now I gave her what truth I knew and let her decide what direction this would go.
"I don't specialize in that sort of thing," I said as I ran my finger down along the inside of the mask's cheekbone. Yes, definitely a hair. I had to fight the urge to scrape it out of the plaster cast. "Exorcisms are difficult and unreliable."
"I'm willing to try if you will," she said. "I'd like to keep the mask since it's the only thing I have of my mother's." She gave me a wry smile. "You must think it's creepy to want to keep a death mask, but..." she trailed off with a shrug.
"I don't think it's creepy at all." I pulled my hands back across the counter to shove in my pockets. It was the only way I could keep from digging into the plaster to extract that hair. "I just don't know if I can do anything about the— what did you say it was doing again?"
Her gaze dropped to the mask sheepishly. "It watches me," she said. "There are times when I look at it that I can swear the eyes are moving."
"Painters study how to create that effect," I said, remembering a visual artist who once told me it was easy to make a painting's eyes follow you through the room once you knew the trick.
She tapped the counter in the direction of the mask. "But this one isn't painted," she said countering my rationale. My fingers curled and uncurled in my pockets as I resisted the urge to pick it up again and scratch at the hairs on the edge.
"You can leave it here with me if you like. Pick it up in a week."
I gave it a thoughtful glance, assessing the amount of time it would take to figure out how to dissuade the woman of the trauma that no doubt fostered her suspicion of the thing without faking some mojo to make her believe I'd exorcised it.
"Happy to," she said with a shudder that made her necklace move against the lily white of her chest. "I'll pay in advance."
She started digging through her purse, a name brand that I knew was being knocked off and sold in the tourist section, and yet this one was the real thing. The suppleness of the leather was the first giveaway, and when she ran her fingers over the clasp, it drew my eye to the logo stamped into the metal. The stitches were even and the label on the inside was crisp and clear.
The woman had money.
She pulled out a wallet equally as authentic as her bag and rifled through it. I wanted to tell her she shouldn't be carrying around such a wad of cash so close to the docks, but she pulled out the entire wad instead of selecting a few bills.
She held them over the top of her purse with a flourish. The bills smelled of spearmint and old fabric. A flash of memory made my cheeks water as I tasted again the cloistered taste of gum harbored in the depths of a purse for months on end.
I squeezed out the image of the mother who'd passed a stick to me from her side of the car as she pushed me out into a hostile schoolyard with the comment that if I went to school like a good girl, she'd put a hex on the bullies for me.
"I want to keep this memento," the woman in front of me said, pulling my attention back to the present. "I don't care if you can or can't exorcise it, but I'm happy to pay for the attempt. If you can actually clear it of its bad energy, there will be another five thousand when I take it home with me."
I blinked. This woman hadn't just wandered into the area with a stash of money; she had decided before she'd even left the house what the service was worth and probably slipped exactly that much into her wallet before leaving.
I hesitated over the fold of bills. Five thousand was a lot of money to pay without expecting a result. I stole a glance up at her and wondered, not for the first time, if she had some sort of mental issue that was seeding the haunting. She could be schizophrenic, or suffer from dementia.
I thought of the bad trip a former client, Sherry, had taken while on my mushroom tea and did not relish a repeat. If I merely suggested to a woman with mental illness that I'd performed the exorcism successfully and I hadn't done a thing, it might backfire later.
"Are you sure all the mask does is watch you?" I said, testing the limits of her story just in case.
She laid the bills on the counter and closed her wallet with a snap. After she had tucked it back into her purse, she pinned me just as effectively with her black eyes.
"Isn't that enough?"
I let slip a thoughtful murmur that it might be more than enough and she chuckled.
"I'd destroy it but there are also times when I feel as though it comforts me. I know it's weird, but it's not all bad."
She gave a sad little smile that looked as though she might be thinking of those moments. "Let's see where things go," she said. "And if you need more information, you can phone me."
At that, she dug back into her purse and extracted an elegant looking black business card with gold lettering. No business name, just a lovely monogrammed A and a phone number. I took it with a reverent air I didn't expect I could muster and tucked it beneath the mask.
"It's Maureen," she said. "Maureen Attenburg. Text me if you make any progress; otherwise, I'll just check in this time next week." Her gaze flicked to the mask again and she shuddered. "Be careful," she said and turned on her heel.
Her palm ran over my custom counter as she spun around and she let her fingers trail along the surface the entire way to the end. She knew quality when she saw it, and I bet she couldn't help the admiring touch.
She headed out of my shop with a staccato clicking of heels and turned to stride up the street. I watched her go, the sun catching the crown of her hair and lighting it like platinum, and then I heaved a sigh.
Five thousand dollars. Just to try. I pulled the stack of bills from the counter as my foot tapped thoughtfully. I couldn't just leave this much money in the register. My Buddha urn was home, relegated to the dark confines of my closet until I could prove to myself that I didn't need the psilocybin as a crutch to help my clients make the leap to belief and then to healing.
Pity. It might be just what I needed to help her. Most folks who sought magic in the first place had a special sort of desperation that traditional therapy couldn't touch. Psilocybin possessed more therapeutic properties than the suggestion of magic did, and recent research had borne me out on that score.
I stepped out from behind my counter and headed through the shop to my apothecary galley. There were a few pottery jars with cork tops that were empty and labeled with impossible ingredients that no self-proclaimed witch or norm would be interested in. I kept them for their aesthetic quality, never planning to sell them to anyone who came in. And no one ever asked to buy them.
One of them, neatly labeled DEAD MAN'S SWEAT would do just nicely as a hiding place for a few hours.
I shoved the money inside, figuring I'd extract it at the end of the day, then for good measure, I moved the jar to the top shelf behind one that said ZOMBIE VOMIT.
I almost laughed at my own ridiculous caution, but growing up in foster homes, you knew to take precautions with valuables no matter how ridiculous. Once, I'd even had a foster brother steal the five dollars I'd hidden in the nook above the inside lintel of my closet.
After that, I got more particular about where I hid things, and sometimes in plain sight was the best. The ten dollar bill I taped to the top of a potato bin stayed there till I retrieved it weeks later.
