“Oh, sure, of course. Let me just finish this up and… sent. That should cool her britches for a bit. Can I admit I am a little excited? Do you think there will be strippers?”
I choked at the thought. “Not if we’re in charge of them. Do you really want to watch a naked man dance?”
“No! Not totally naked.” She waggled her eyebrows at me.
“I’ll pass.”
Vanessa tapped the pen on the pad. “Do you want me to take notes or not?”
“Sorry. The thought of a stripper sent all the thoughts from my head. So I gave everyone my card, but only about half of the stores had a manager or owner in. But for the ones where someone in charge was in, they all confirmed that they carried at least one item that they claimed was unique. The florist had a rare orchid. She gave the scientific name, which I would never remember, but also called it a monkbird orchid. The stationary store had some gold-ink potion. The health food store had free-range, cage-free gryphon eggs. Does she mean the bird lion thingy?”
“Yep.”
“Huh, I would have thought that since they have the back end of a lion, they would have live birth.”
“Then you would have thought wrong. Did you talk to Mary?”
“I stopped in, and she had gone for the day, but they said we could swing by tomorrow. Her husband, Dave, was there and did not seem happy about us talking to her, but he didn’t literally throw me out the door though he is strong enough to. Dang it. I didn’t think to ask him if they had any special imports. Though a martial arts studio isn’t really the kind of place to import anything.”
“Who knows? I’ll start a page of all the questions you forgot to ask.” She flipped to the back of her notebook and, in an exaggerated voice, sounded out what she wrote. “Ella’s screwups.”
“You’re just so smart, aren’t you? I was the one who got us a place for the bachelorette party.” I pulled into the parking lot and scanned for an open spot but didn’t immediately see anything. Why did hospitals never have enough parking?
“No, your psychic friend saved your butt. You were lucky.”
“I’d rather be lucky than good any day. Speaking of luck.” I pulled into a spot in the front row right by the entrance. “There were two more items. I remember because there were a dozen stores, and we talked to two, and half of the rest had owners out of the store, so that’s five, and I told you three. Give me a second to think.”
“How is that complicated math any easier to remember than just remembering the items?”
“I’m an accountant at heart. Numbers are my jam. Now hush.” I screwed my eyes shut, hoping that would help me focus. “The ink, an egg, and the orchid. Then the next two places didn’t have an owner in then…”
My eyes flew open as I remembered. I unbuckled my seatbelt and grabbed my purse. Patagonia leaped into the front seat and wedged herself between me and the steering wheel. She rubbed her tail across my lips, leaving cat hairs stuck to my lip gloss. I managed to get her out the car door then turned to Vanessa. “There was a game store that had some special dice carved from living rock that she said can change your future and a pet store that sold a fire salamander. It was made from actual fire. Weird that I could possibly forget that.”
Vanessa and I went through the lengthy check-in process. Even though Dr. Trout had left our names at the front desk, they still had to check our IDs then print out an enormous sticker that covered my entire right breast when I adhered it to my shirt. It was bright orange with inch-high letters indicating that we were high-security visitors.
Being that this was a mage-only hospital that only took in humans in life-and-death situations, Patagonia was mostly left alone. Familiars were impossible to control, with their ability to appear and disappear according to their will, but Patagonia still pushed the nurse to the limits of her patience.
Patagonia walked across the desk and started pushing file folders onto the floor then knocked over a cup of coffee. The final straw was when she flicked her tail into the nurse’s ear. The nurse tossed a stuffed bear with a sign that said “I love you beary much.” The bear hit Patagonia right in the shoulder, and both of them disappeared off the counter top with a fantastic yowl of disapproval. A few moments later, she sauntered back to me casually, as though nothing had happened, though she cast angry glances back at the nurse.
The nurse was more than a little curt as she said we could go on to Dr. Trout’s research center. When I had previously visited, they had insisted on escorting me, but Patagonia was probably responsible for our trek through the hospital alone. Normally I wouldn’t mind except this hospital, being that it was primarily for mages and specialized in magic, was different.
With the white walls and identical doors, it would be easy to get lost without the paranormal elements. Making four left turns a hundred yards apart would not return me to the same spot but rather a totally unique location. After visiting with Dr. Trout, I had become hopelessly lost, ending up at the morgue no matter which way we turned. A literal dead end.
That was until I followed the signs. I was sure I made the same turns, but as long as I paid attention to the signs, I ended up in the right location. The mythical labyrinth had nothing on this place.
Dr. Trout’s research center had additional security, and when we arrived, I buzzed at the door to be let in.
A beautiful, plump brunette threw open the door and, with a gigantic smile, sprang at Vanessa and me, wrapping us in a hug.
Vanessa squealed. “Beth, you look great.”
Beth? Last time I had seen her, she had been nothing more than skin stretched tight over a skeleton, deep in an addiction to Legacy. She had apparently been using Legacy the whole time I had known her, and I had never seen her more filled out.
She was soft in a way that made it easy to hug her, and the weight on her face made her look younger than she had when I dropped her off for drug treatment six months earlier.
I looked her up and down. “You look amazing! What are you doing here?”
“I’m a research assistant. I finished up my in-house treatment last week, but I’ve been working here for months. It’s actually not that different than my baking, as you’ll see.”
Vanessa lifted her nose and sniffed the air. “Do I smell cake?”
“You can’t possibly be hungry again. If you make yourself sick, I’m not helping you this time.” I followed Beth back through the lab to a conference table, where Dr. Trout was eating a rich chocolate cake.
“Glad you guys could come right over. Grab some cake while I explain.”
Vanessa leaped to fill a plate with a generous slice of the thick, gooey dessert. She cut her eyes to me. “We haven’t even had lunch yet.”
I rolled my eyes at her but got my own plate and sat down. I probably didn’t need more sugar, but Vanessa was right. We hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and I needed my strength to deal with the party later. I bit into it and closed my eyes for the full effect.
The cake was moist and the texture perfect. The chocolate flavor flowed over me, and I could imagine an ocean of chocolate carrying me on its waves. The frosting was a sweet addition, and I licked my lips to get every molecule that was left.
“This is great, Beth. Is this the same recipe as what you used to make at Isadora’s Ristorante?”
“Yes, without the spell this time. But the spell was the clue to breaking open the whole Legacy situation.”
Vanessa looked ready to speak with her mouth overflowing, so I cut in. “What do you mean?”
Beth looked to Dr. Trout, who signaled for her to continue the story, which she did. “How much do you know about the mage medical community?”
“Let’s just assume I know nothing.” It was true because I grew up as a human, and though I had been in the hospital more times than I preferred in the past eighteen months, I still didn’t know very much. And an even bigger deal was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
“That is one area that I really envy humans. They publish pap
ers and share knowledge. We don’t have that. I mean, here in the hospital there is some sharing, but mostly it is the wild west, each doctor for themselves. Each hospital does its own thing, each doctor, each sickness. I feel like I am constantly reinventing the wheel. Now magic makes up for a lot of what we lack but not always. All of this is what is making this Legacy problem so difficult.”
I picked at my cake. Each bite should have been my last. Even a mage’s metabolism couldn’t fight against an endless supply of calories, but it was too tempting to stop. Plus, it gave my mouth something to do instead of interrupting with a million questions.
“I used to go out with the ambulance but not recently. I’ve had to focus all my attention on Legacy. I was unable to break Beth’s addiction to the drug despite trying all the methods that had worked for my patients in the past. And I wasn’t making any headway on figuring out what Legacy did and why. I had those three tablets you gave me, and I started experimenting on capturing the activated spell to figure out what it did, how, and possibly who made it.”
I had managed to get three tablets of Legacy during an investigation at the Magia Casino. One from a dealer and two during a fight to the death, luckily not mine. Dr. Trout had explained her goal when I handed them over. Based on Bear’s comment that he didn’t understand the process, I felt safe in asking. “How do you capture the magic?”
She blew out a long sigh. “That’s the problem. You have to devise a new spell for each spell you intend to capture. Okay, when a spell is cast or activated, depending on the spell, it creates an aura and action. You can make another spell that just records the spell. It won’t replicate the spell, but it will let you watch over the spell and deconstruct it. Generic spell makers do that all the time. Buy a popular spell, deconstruct it, and make their own version.”
“So like a videotape of the spell?”
“Yes, but instead of getting the visual of the something, you get the magic that happened.”
I rolled it over in my head. It reminded me a bit of Auntie Ann’s natural ability to create spells that she had seen or needed, the reason why she was a great teacher. But it also reminded me of my own gift. It wasn’t something I shared freely with everyone though. “I’ve heard about people that can read the death scene of someone murdered by magic. Is that similar?”
She gave me a sharp look, and for a moment, I wondered if I had tipped my hand, but a moment later she nodded. “Good thought. It is similar. They don’t need a spell though. From what I’ve heard, the death magic leaves an imprint that they can read as long as they get there soon enough. Would be a very useful gift around here.”
She gave me a lot of eye contact but didn’t seem to push the issue if she had any suspicions. Perhaps I was projecting my own fears onto the conversation. “So you’re putting together a spell to capture what happens with Legacy. Is it different from other spells because it’s a drug?”
She waved a hand in the air. “Not really. Saying that Legacy is an addictive drug is more a description of what we think of its effect rather than how it is made. Magic is magic. But this spell has some nasty effects. I did try twice to capture it and failed horribly. With only one tablet left and the supply seemingly gone, I started working with Beth more.”
She looked at Beth, who picked up the story. “I was not getting better. The withdrawal symptoms seemed to ebb and flow. One week I would think I was practically back to normal, then suddenly I would be crazy to get more. It was… hard.”
The weight of the understatement hit me, and I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I wish you had told me.”
“What could you have done? I was in good hands. Dr. Trout figured out why the Legacy withdrawals were so bad, and I helped her crack the spell.”
“Beth and I work really well together. That’s why I ended up hiring her on. Most spell addictions are a mix of emotional and physical. The standard practice is to get the body healed up and the emotions back on track, but even when we did that, Beth was getting withdrawal symptoms. We put a magic detector in her room and found she was getting a small spike of something when sleeping. For lack of a better explanation, Legacy had pricked a hole in her soul, and she was leaking out happiness.”
“Whoa!” I sat back in surprise. “I haven’t heard of that before.”
“It’s certainly not common. Once we knew what to look for, we were able to neutralize the spell, and within a week, we were free and clear.”
Beth shook her head. “No more spells for me unless I make them myself. Or trust the person. But realizing how close I got to never shaking the addiction was pretty sobering. We started talking more, and I shared some of the things in my life that I regretted. And that brings me back to the chocolate cake. I told Dr. Trout the secret to how I was able to make the cakes for Isadora’s Ristorante, the ones that made you feel lust, happiness, motivation, remembrance.”
I nodded. During my first case, I had tasted them, and for a while, I had even thought the cakes were responsible for the deaths, and in a way, they had been, though it wasn’t Beth’s fault. “Of course.”
“I’ve felt pretty guilty that Isadora was able to use my spell to hurt people. Normally spells can’t be attached like that to another spell. They sort of repel each other. Dr. Trout was really interested, and we started talking about it more. I never mentioned this, but the basis of the chocolate series of spells came to me because of my Legacy use.”
Dr. Trout nodded along and cut in, her excitement evident as her voice rose in volume and she spoke faster. “That is when my research really took off. Her chocolate cake recipe is in the same class as the Legacy spell, or at least one part of the Legacy spell. Somehow the basis of the Legacy spell allows other spells to be connected without affecting the original spell and, even more importantly, without the mage knowing. Usually people can feel if their spell is being altered. But I’m getting ahead of myself. We worked together to break down and reverse engineer it. I don’t think I ever could have broken it down alone without a lot more Legacy to test, but with Beth’s help, I was able to activate the last Legacy tablet and record the magic.”
“That’s great! Congrats. So you know how it works?”
Some of the excitement went out of her face. “Not really. I mean I made some big advances but exposed just as much that we didn’t know as what we learned. The base spell makes the user feel good, but then there are several spells attached that we haven’t been able to crack. One caused the continued withdrawal symptoms along with a few others. These secondary spells have a different signature to the primary spell, so it looks like one person made the main spell and someone else added some rider spells.”
“Do you think that was planned, or did someone add spells without the first person’s knowledge?”
Dr. Trout shrugged. “No real way to tell. But the person had to have access to the tablets after the main spell was added.”
“So the part of the spell that made you feel good was the primary spell, and the secondary spell was the one that caused all the magic to leave the mage’s body and the bit that made Legacy addictive.”
“Yes, though we’ve only just started to sort through the data, so there could be more spells. We do know there was a third spell that DJ Wiz added on to this particular tablet to make people overdose. It was pretty sloppy and theoretically shouldn’t have worked, but it did.”
Everyone looked down in a moment of silence. DJ Wiz had modified Legacy and used it to kill off people that crossed him. He had gotten away with it several times until he had used it enough in a short time that Bear had suspected that the overdoses weren’t accidental.
“Have you figured out anything so far?”
Dr. Trout flipped open a notebook to reveal a mess of chicken scratches that appeared to be notes. “Not a ton yet. But we do know it worked, and we have maybe found a few ingredients that make the potion the tablet was soaked in. Nothing concrete yet—something from an animal and plant, maybe something alcohol based,
something inorganic. That pretty much covers everything on earth that might have paranormal ingredients. But we’ll get there. It will just take time. I’m sorry we don’t have more to report, but I thought you would want to know.”
“I do. And there was cake, so I can’t complain. I’ll pass this on to Bear.”
She nodded and diligently attempted to look calm and collected though there had been a spike of emotions at his name.
Vanessa’s phone rang, and she stepped away to answer. We finished off our respective slices of cake, and I listened to Vanessa’s half of the conversation.
She rolled her eyes at me, and I guessed it was Tiffany. “Uh-huh… well, we… no, of course… but I guess we could…” She pulled the phone away from her ear then slid it into her purse.
“That seemed to go well,” I teased.
“She went by the Snakebite Room and was just horrified to see that it wasn’t decorated at all.” She put on a falsetto to imitate Tiffany. “If you think I’m going to have a bachelorette party with it like this, then you have another thing coming.”
I rolled my eyes, and Patagonia made a gagging noise on the ground. I had gotten her special hairball-preventing food, which she occasionally ate if she was in the mood, so I felt her reaction was a reflection of her opinion of Tiffany. I couldn’t disagree.
I had almost forgotten the paper bag we had brought in from the car. “We brought you guys this because I thought Beth would be interested, but now it can be a congratulations gift. It’s a bird’s nest from Ellen’s newest location.” I passed them the bag.
Beth peeked inside. “Oh, it’s gorgeous. And warm? Can I refrigerate it?”
“It has dragon spit in it.” The thought still made my stomach flip, but no one else seemed bothered.
“Oh, fancy!” she said as she went to put it away.
“We also got a few bottles of dragon-heart wine, but I wasn’t sure…”
Beth shook her head. “I can’t have any. My partying days are over. The risk of relapse is just too big. But that is quite the haul.” She eyed the bottle with a small smile. “Let me know if it’s any good.”
Casino Witch Mysteries Box Set 2 Page 26
