Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  I don’t glance at the mountainous thug, but I remember his too-tight coveralls. Coveralls meant for a smaller man.

  “Screw this,” I say. “When you’re ready to pay, you have my number. I’ll expect cash. Dora will expect freedom. She’ll get the latter when I have the former.”

  I turn to walk out, and the thug charges. I expect that and hit him with a knock-back. I’m ready to follow it up with something stronger when fingers grab my arm. I spin, a spell at the ready, but my attacker’s other hand claps over my mouth, his fingers searing hot, and I yelp in spite of myself. It’s the guy I secured outside—apparently he burned his way free. The half-demon only clamps down harder. I grit my teeth against the pain as I kick, punch, and bite.

  The bite has the half-demon pulling back enough for me to cast a binding spell, but then the mega-thug grabs me from behind, and I curse myself for holding back and not hitting him with something truly dangerous, even deadly if necessary. Hell, I have a damn gun in my waistband. The problem is that I don’t know how to use it, and I’d probably shoot myself instead.

  As the two thugs subdue me with a gag and cuffs, another man walks in. He’s older, bordering on elderly, a silver-haired man with a cane. He walks up to me and, without a word, points at the gun hidden under my untucked shirt. One of the thugs pulls it out. The old man takes it and walks toward Fosse.

  “Mr. G-Glennon,” Fosse stammers. “I wasn’t going to let her leave. I have everything under control.”

  The old man lifts one gloved hand and shoots Fosse between the eyes. I don’t even realize what’s happened until Fosse collapses against the wall, a red hole blossoming on his forehead. His shooter pockets the gun, turns to me and smiles.

  Harry Glennon. A collector who’s been trying to buy from me for years, and I’ve ducked contact, knowing even to speak to him and refuse, however politely, could put me right in Lyle Fosse’s current position.

  “Eve Levine,” he says, and something in his voice… I’ve never met him before, but that voice…

  “You didn’t return my call this afternoon,” he says. “That was most impolite.”

  The message on my answering machine. The one offering to buy and “destroy” the grimoire pages. Not “Harold Palmer.” Harry Glennon.

  “I’ll take those pages now,” Glennon says, “at half the price Mr. Fosse was offering, but I believe you’ll agree that’s very generous of me, considering I don’t need to pay anything at all.”

  He orders his two goons to pat me down. They find only my car keys. As they hold them up, Glennon studies me with reptilian-cold eyes. Then he reaches into my shirt. His bony fingers are as icy as his eyes, but I don’t flinch. I can see by his expression he’s not doing what he might seem to be. He reaches into my bra and pulls out a key engraved with a number.

  Glennon sighs. “Please don’t tell me the pages are in a train-station locker.”

  “Bus depot,” I say when one thug ungags me. “The number is on the side of the key. The address is—”

  “Do you really think I’m going to fall for that, my dear? The locker is empty. Or it contains a trap spell that will trigger when I open it.”

  I start to object, but he cuts me off with, “We’re taking a trip, Miss Levine. And if those grimoire pages are not there, I have other ones requiring human sacrifice.”

  “And you’ll use me for them,” I say.

  “You?” He smiles, all too-white teeth. “No, Miss Levine. I have spells that require something much more difficult to come by. The life of a child. I believe you have one of those.”

  I wrench away, casting under my breath, but the thug slaps the gag over my mouth and drags me from the body shop.

  * * *

  We’re in the bus depot. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead but do little to illuminate the gloom in this corner. While they ungagged me in the car, the mega-thug has his arm firmly around my waist, fingers biting in. Glennon left the half-demon at the body shop, presumably to torch the scene. His type are very good at that.

  Glennon finds the locker and hands me the key. They stand back as I swing open the door, taking a bit of malicious pleasure as they both jump when the hinges squeal. I reach inside, pull out the papers and hand them over.

  “No trap,” I say.

  Glennon leafs through the pages. “An honest thief. I’m shocked.”

  “I’m not a thief. I came by those pages semi-honestly.”

  He laughs. “I like your style. I believe we’ll work very well together.”

  I try not to tense and say, as politely as I can, “My plate is full right now, but I’d definitely like to exchange contact information. If I come by something you might want in the future, I can let you know.”

  “That wasn’t an offer of employment. I shot Mr. Fosse with a gun you’d handled, one bearing your prints. And my employee stayed behind to ensure Mr. Fosse’s security tapes show only you arriving, incapacitating his employee and then entering through the back. My man is now waiting for my call. If he gets it within the next twenty minutes, he’ll take the tape and gun as he leaves. You may work to buy those from me. If he does not receive my call, he’ll phone the police.”

  “What? No. We had a deal—”

  “You had a deal with Mr. Fosse. My terms, as you’ll discover, are very different.”

  He motions for the thug to take me. The man wraps one meaty arm around my waist. I dig in my heels, but after a glare, I go along with it. I hold off until we’re in the waiting area, where a couple of people sleep on the benches. Behind the counter, a middle-aged, heavyset woman watches us.

  I meet the clerk’s gaze, my eyes going wide, conveying a story every woman recognizes. Her gaze shunts to the mountain with his arm around my waist. I mouth, “Help me,” and she lumbers to her feet, barking, “You there!”

  A security guard appears from a side hall, cardboard coffee-cup in hand. His gaze goes to us.

  “Hey! I’m talking to you,” the woman says as Glennon and his thug keep walking. “I know you, girl. You stiffed the fare last week. Get your ass over here.”

  The security guard approaches. My captor looks at Glennon, who says, smoothly, “There must be some mistake. My granddaughter—”

  “—is a hustler,” the woman says from her cage. “You don’t exactly blend into a crowd, girl. What are you? Six feet tall? Get your skyscraping ass over here.”

  “If my granddaughter forgot to pay her fare,” Glennon begins, “I’ll gladly reimburse—”

  I hit Glennon with a knock-back. He falls, and I’m about to wrench from my captor, but the guy sees his elderly employer go down, and he goes to his aid, releasing me. I still give him a shove… nicking the car keys from his pocket as I do. Then I freeze Glennon in a binding spell, and I run.

  The security guard gives chase, but the woman shouts, “Let her go! It’s these two who are the problem. I’ve already hit the alarm. Police are on their way.”

  I glance back once to see the thug helping his employer up, ignoring me because the old man isn’t giving him any orders to do otherwise. He can’t.

  The binding spell snaps soon after I get out the door, and I hear Glennon’s enraged shout even through the bus depot walls. But by the time the thug comes after me, I’m in the car, and the police are whipping into the lot. I back out as quietly as I can and then slip through the rear exit.

  * * *

  I reach the body shop no more than fifteen minutes after leaving the bus depot, but it’s too late. Police cherries cut through the night, and an ambulance whips past. I park in the next-door lot, near my own car. Then I jog to a building across the way and watch the scene, my heart hammering.

  My prints aren’t in the system. I’m relatively sure of that. But someone is bound to recognize the photo if the police go wide with it, which they will. Glennon will probably call Crime Stoppers and ID me himself.

  Get Savannah and run. That’s all I can do. Run faster and farther than I ever have before.

  When foo
tsteps sound behind me, I wheel, binding spell at the ready. Dora lifts her hands. “Don’t cast. I come in peace.”

  I snort and turn away.

  “So you did leave that razor blade for me,” she says as she walks over. “I thought it was too convenient, lying six inches away under a rock. Why’d you do that?”

  I don’t answer. The truth is that part of me will always be a Coven witch, believing that we are more together than we are separate. The Coven institution wasn’t for me, but the concept still resonates. I didn’t trust that Fosse would let Dora go, so I’d hidden that blade for her to cut herself loose if she had the initiative to find it.

  “You might want this.” She holds up the tape. My gaze goes to the burn around her wrists. “Yep, the tape didn’t come easily. But I know a few tricks and convinced the guy to talk. I even called the police for him… after I knocked him out, wiped down the gun, put his prints on it and stuck it in his waistband. There was also a small fire.” She nods to the fire engine pulling in. “His fault. Mostly.”

  “Thank you.” I pocket the videotape and put out my hand. “The money, please.”

  “What money?”

  I give her a look. I know Fosse would have brought the money there to pay her, and she wouldn’t have walked away without it.

  Dora sighs and takes a wad of cash from her bra, and I have to chuckle at her choice of hiding place. She hands it over. I count off a thousand and give it back to her.

  “You know,” Dora says as she bra-pockets the money. “We make a pretty good team.”

  I shake my head. “I work alone, thanks. But I’m not your enemy.”

  “Just my competition.”

  I shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not. Plenty of other competitors out there. Plenty of jobs, too.”

  “Don’t step on your turf, and you won’t step on mine?”

  “Something like that.”

  Dora invites me for a drink, but I decline. Savannah is at the home of a suburban witch I’ve been teaching. I need to pick her up. And then I need to tell her that we’re running. Again.

  She won’t complain. She never complains. This is just a fact of her life, and I hate that. I hate that my kid won’t beg and plead to finish her term, won’t rage and threaten if I don’t let her, because nothing in her life has taught her that such a thing is a possibility.

  My hand moves to the money in my pocket. Between this and what I’ve saved, I don’t need to work for a while. I will, though. We’ll move to a new city, and I’ll work my ass off until fall, when we’ll move again, and she can start school, and I won’t take any jobs until spring. That’ll keep her safe.

  Safe as long as Kristof doesn’t find us.

  Safe as long as Glennon doesn’t come after us.

  Safe as long as no other lowlife I’ve crossed paths or locked horns with or just plain pissed off doesn’t decide to track us down.

  There is no “safe” for my daughter. Not unless she’s at my side, ready to run at a moment’s notice. That’s how it has to be, how it always has to be.

  I climb in the car and prepare to pick up my daughter and flee in the dead of night. Again.

  I just hope someday she’ll understand.

  I hope someday she’ll forgive me.

  THE NIGHT NURSE

  Sarah Langan

  Before

  When the night nurse first told Esme that she was a witch, Esme did not believe it. Or at least, she hadn’t envisioned the dark arts. She’d pictured a group of Waldorf School mothers sitting in a circle, knitting boiled-wool dolls and talking about their menstrual cycles. They had trust funds, smelled like patchouli, and they were gentle as pillows.

  Esme first met the night nurse at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. She’d been seven months pregnant with baby number three. Baby one too many, in other words.

  It had been one of those school holidays that wasn’t really a holiday: White Hegemony Day or Teachers Hate Their Jobs and Need Four-Day-Work-Weeks Day. The museum had been a mob scene of kids with no place else to go, their moms and babysitters punch-drunk with anxiety. She’d lost five-year-old Lucy as soon as they got there. The kid ran straight past the ticket line and into a black-hole-dense crowd of humans. Ten minutes later, Esme assumed the worst: a sex-crazed pervert had stolen her child. Right now, he was speeding across the Lincoln Tunnel, her lovely daughter hogtied in the back of a van.

  “LUCY!” she’d screamed while carrying Spencer, who’d been too heavy to carry but had walked too slowly to keep up. Two-year-olds, constitutionally, are passive-aggressive. It’s literally a hallmark of their personalities.

  She found Lucy in the Tots section, dressed in Native American garb and reading Babar Goes to Paris to a rapt three-year-old, the picture of maternal sweetness. At this, Esme cried with relief while trying not to cry, because when moms cry it’s very upsetting for their children. To an outsider it had looked like hiccoughs, or else those shivers you get when you suddenly have to pee.

  The trip ended at the gift shop, where both children conspired against her, begging for an ant farm colony because it was educational. They promised that they would name and love these ants like pets. She’d been blanking out, adrift in a mental vacation along the Amalfi Coast, when the old lady at the register had taken her by the elbow with a plump, callused hand.

  Wendy, her nametag read, and Esme had been reminded of the last scene of Peter Pan, Wendy all grown-up and shriveled.

  “You’re goina need some help,” Wendy had said in a thick, southern accent. She was about six feet tall and strong-looking, her face wrinkled and her eyes bright blue. Her hair was shocking white, like someone had scared the hell out of her thirty years ago, and she was still getting over it.

  “Help?”

  Wendy’d reached lower, and pressed her hand flat against Esme’s belly. It felt awkward and inappropriate, the hand radiating a damp ick. But Esme didn’t mind. It’s nice, sometimes, just to be noticed.

  “I can help. I’m a night nurse. Trained and licensed.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m broke,” Esme had answered.

  Wendy’d reached into the pocket of her green corduroy dress and produced a soft and wrinkled business card that smelled like lilacs. “We can work somethin’ out. I’ll bill your insurance for ya.” Then Wendy waved and smiled wide at the kids. Her too-cheerful manner reminded Esme of all her still-single friends who liked kids only in theory. In reality, they preferred something that stuck to a script. A Japanese hug robot, for instance. Or a boyfriend that didn’t live with you.

  The kids, sensing this, had looked away.

  “I should warn you. I’m a witch,” Wendy had said. “Some mothers don’t like that.”

  “Like, a feminist?”

  “No. A real witch.” She had this glimmer in her eyes. Delight or something deeper, an emotion that hewed to her bones.

  Creepy!

  Esme bought the stupid ant colony, then put Spencer in the stroller and Lucy on the kickboard and they took the handicap ramp heading out. “Thanks, anyway!” she called behind her shoulder.

  * * *

  She got a text from Mike that night, saying he had to work late. After she put the kids to bed, she discovered the lilac-scented card in her back pocket and Googled Wendy Broadchurch, Night Nurse. The website showed pictures of the woman from the museum, tall and strong, holding tiny babies with loving skill. Under these were testimonials about how she’d saved families by allowing frazzled parents to sleep, helped babies bond and latch, worked miracles.

  WENDY BROADCHURCH, NIGHT NURSE

  SHE’S MAGIC!

  Literally, every testimonial said she was magic. Her fee was on a sliding scale. New moms, and she dealt only with new birth mothers, could pay whatever price they were able to afford.

  Weeks passed. Esme thought about Wendy when she woke early to do her exercises, which included labor-prep squatting and shoving her legs up a wall to drain the swelling from her sad, sick cankles. She thought about her while getting the ki
ds ready for school. She thought about her while cooking dinner, and she thought about her when collapsing onto the couch at night, too tired to make it to the bed. The woman had smelled rich as a pine forest, and the touch of her hand had been so soothing. She hadn’t really been creepy. It’s a special skill to be good with infants, and that skill doesn’t often translate to being good with kids or even adults. The woman’s words haunted her: You’re goina need help… Even a stranger could see it: this third child was going to sink her.

  Esme rubbed her thumb along the wrinkled card as she dialed the number. “Just let me know when you’re home from the hospital,” Wendy told her. “I’ll be right there.”

  “I’m worried my husband won’t be happy about the money. Can he meet you?” Esme asked, and partly this was true, but she also wanted to interview this woman who’d be holding her infant half the night, alert in her home full of sleeping loved ones. But she didn’t know how to come out and say that. She was out of practice negotiating with adults.

  “I don’t deal with husbands,” Wendy said, then hung up.

  * * *

  Month One

  Esme felt a cool hand on her forehead. Callused yet strong. She rolled to her side and pulled down her soft, cotton nightshirt. A suckle. It hurt the way it always hurts when newborns first start nursing. The way no one ever tells you, just like they don’t tell you that delivering a baby feels like smashing a basketball through a buttonhole.

  The baby bit too hard, latching more with skin than nipple. Esme’s eyes popped open, and there was Wendy, the white-haired night nurse, her head bent low, holding baby Nicky in place. When she saw Esme’s pain smirk, she slipped her thick index finger inside the baby’s mouth, un-suctioning the latch and then refitting it.

  Before kids, Esme would have been appalled by such intimacies between strangers. But your body’s less precious once someone else has lived inside it. A man on the subway might squeeze your ass while you’re too busy wheeling the stroller to fight back. Everybody you ever meet might feel obliged to comment on the size of your boobs, your baby weight, how much of it you’ve lost. You feel you belong to the world, and so it’s especially wonderful when someone notices you in particular.