by R. L. King
“I met him briefly. And…I don’t know. But I think the odds are pretty low that he’s in the middle of this mess with Selene. Nick trusts him, and I trust Nick. So what do you say?”
She considers. “Bron…I know he’s your friend, but you said he reads Tarot. Is there any chance the message could be about him? Or…from him? I know that sounds crazy, but…”
I blink. I hadn’t considered that, but immediately I shake my head. “No. No. Nick’s not like that. Yeah, he reads, but a lot of people do around here. And the Tarot has always been connected with the magical world. I’m sure a lot more people use it than just him. And besides—I haven’t known him very long, but we’ve been through some pretty hairy shit together. I would stake a hell of a lot on him not being anywhere near this.”
The silence stretches out for almost a minute, broken only by the soft crooning of some pop diva I’ve never heard of. “Okay,” she says at last. “Okay. Do it, before I change my mind.”
I look at my phone, at the lock screen with a closeup of Rory’s face on it. She looks out at me with her big gold eyes, and I can’t tell if she’s encouraging or accusing. Before I can decide, I stab my finger down on Nick’s number.
Maybe he’s already home, and turned his phone off for the night. Maybe I’ll get voicemail, giving us a few more hours to get some sleep and think this whole thing over. Maybe—
“Hey, Bron. Didn’t expect to hear from you this soon. Did you get home okay?”
Suddenly I’ve gone all tense. I don’t say anything.
“Bron? You okay? Are you there?”
I swallow. “Hi, Nick. I—uh—need another favor. And this one’s a lot bigger than a ride home from the airport.”
Chapter Twelve
We go to Nick’s house because it’s closer to our current location than either my shop or my apartment. As we roll up the road toward Maddy’s rambling old mansion, Twyla whistles. “You didn’t tell me Nick was loaded.”
I snort. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But the first thing you have to learn about Hollywood is that nothing’s what it seems. Keep going, up the drive there and around the back.”
We crawl up the gravel driveway past the house. All the lights are out, so Maddy’s probably already gone to bed. As we pull clear of the house, I point to the right. “There, on the other side of the pool. See it?”
“That little thing?” She carefully steers around the pool and pulls the car to a stop in front of a tiny cottage in the same style as the mansion. Unlike the house, lights shine from behind closed blinds. “What is he, the pool boy?”
“No, he’s the owner’s resident fortune-teller. But the rent’s cheap and he likes the old lady, so it works for him. Park over there.”
I see Nick’s car in the carport; as we pull in behind it the front door opens, framing his familiar tall, thin figure. He strides out to meet us. “Hey. So what’s going on?”
“Don’t get too close,” I warn, hurrying to get between him and Twyla with her bag. “We’ve got something we don’t want you to glitch.”
He stops immediately. “What is it? You wouldn’t tell me anything on the phone. I’m dying of curiosity. What did you do after I left?”
“Well…uh…yeah. We’ll tell you, but not out here. Can we go inside?”
“What about—whatever you don’t want me to mess up? You want to leave it in the car?”
“No!” Twyla says, too quick and too loud. She clutches the bag tighter to her. “I’m not letting this out of my sight.”
“Oh, right. The…uh…lettuce.” Nick nods knowingly. He’s changed out of his working clothes now, and wears jeans and the same hooded sweatshirt he wore on the raid with the Happenstances last month. I wonder if he owns another one. “But I can’t affect that, can I?”
“It’s not that.” I ponder. “Your limit is about ten feet, right?”
“Ten or fifteen, near as I can tell. I haven’t done a lot of experimentation with it.”
I look at the outside of Nick’s cottage. It’s not very big, so it’ll be close. “Can I go in and stash Twy’s bag in your bathroom? We should be okay in the living room if you stay on the kitchen side.”
Nick’s looking more and more confused. “Uh—sure. Okay, go for it. I’ll get us something to drink.”
I take a quick, nervous glance at the main house—the last thing we need right now is nosy Maddy waking up and wanting to know why Nick has late-night guests—and then snatch Twyla’s leather purse from her hands. “It’s okay,” I assure her. “Nobody’s gonna break in here and take it, and it’s safer to keep it away from Nick until we know our next steps.”
She’s obviously reluctant to let it go. She hangs on to it a beat too long, then sighs and releases it. I think she’s relieved to actually be doing something, though.
I hurry inside, making a wide circle around Nick, who obligingly steps out of the way, and dash down the short hall to the bathroom. I drop the bag on the rug next to the vanity and hurry back out.
Nick’s place is small, except for the living room. It has a single bedroom (which I haven’t seen) and a tiny bath, but the rest of the space is taken up with a little kitchenette and a spacious front room. As I come back down the hall, I see Nick in the kitchen putting together glasses of iced tea.
Twyla’s in the middle of the living room, eyes wide as she scans the three walls of crammed bookshelves. “Wow,” she says. “You weren’t kidding about his collection.”
“Not bad, huh?” Nick says proudly. He brings out two glasses and offers them to us, then returns for his own. “Have a seat. It’s not much, but it’s home.”
“Not bad at all,” Twyla agrees, her gaze still roaming around. Now that she’s gotten her first impression of the bookshelves, she’s moved to the framed Tarot card prints, the cards, dice, and crystal ball on one of the small tables, and Nick’s makeshift attempt at a Wiccan altar on the far side of the room, complete with the skull of some animal I haven’t been able to identify yet. “This is…pretty amazing for a guy who didn’t even know he had any magic until recently.”
Nick shoots me a look, and I can tell he’s wondering how much I’ve told her. He doesn’t look too worked up about it, though. “It’s always been an interest, and then there’s the whole professional curiosity thing. I can write off anything to do with fortune-telling on my taxes.” He leans against the breakfast bar separating the kitchenette from the living room. “Okay, so what’s up? What did you guys find, and how do you think I can help with it?”
Twyla looks nervous, probably because she’s not crazy about the idea of revealing our crime to somebody she barely knows.
Looks like it’s up to me, then. “Get comfortable,” I tell him. “This is a pretty strange story.”
“Stranger than cannibal zombies and secret fifty-grand cash payments?”
“Oh, we haven’t even gotten started yet.”
By the time I finish giving him the account of our eventful evening of B and E, he’s forgotten all about his iced tea. He barely blinks as he listens to the whole thing, and doesn’t interrupt even once. The only part I leave out, at least for now, is the card we found in DeVries’s mouth.
“Uh…Wow,” he says when I finish and give him a ‘okay, now it’s your turn to talk’ look.
“Wow? That’s all you’re going to say? I can see why you don’t write novels.”
“Wow,” he says again, refusing to take the bait. He shuffles over and drops onto one of the stools. “So…let me get this straight. The guy Twyla met with today—the guy she was supposed to give the fifty thousand from her mentor to—is now in his office with his guts spread all over his desk.”
“Yeah. Well, he was about an hour ago, anyway. I doubt anybody else will find him till tomorrow morning.”
“And you guys think magic was involved.”
“We know magic was involved,” Twyla says. “I don’t think there’s anything physical that could have done what they did to Mr. DeVries. Show him, Br
on—you took a picture, didn’t you?”
I’d forgotten about that. I pull out my phone. “You want to see? It’s pretty gory, I warn you.”
Nick doesn’t look thrilled, but he nods. “Yeah, let me have a look.”
I show him. He studies it for a few seconds, swallows hard, then waves it away. “Okay, yeah, I see what you mean. I don’t even think Ivan Drago would be strong enough to do something like that with nothing but muscle.”
“Ivan who?” I tilt my head at him. Sometimes his references fly right over my head.
“You know, the big Russian guy from the Rocky movie. Dolph Lundgren.”
Nick’s always had a thing for movies, but I thought he mostly stuck to horror and fantasy. “Okay, whatever. But yeah, we agree. Twy says it’s got to be either a spell or…” I hesitate.
“Or what?”
I don’t want to say it, especially after what we just went through a month ago.
Twyla, who doesn’t know anything about that, beats me to it. “Demons.”
Nick pales at that, and shoots a glance my way.
Once again, I shrug. “Probably magic,” I say quickly. “But either way, it’s bad. Somebody out there didn’t like Arthur DeVries.”
“No kidding. But I still don’t see what you think I can do about it.” He waves vaguely at his bookshelves. “Yeah, I know a lot about magic stuff, but most of it’s bullshit. I’m still trying to sort out which of my books are even worth keeping.”
I look down at my hands. Here goes… “Well…honestly, it’s not exactly you we’re hoping can help us.”
For a second, he doesn’t seem to get where I’m going with this. When he does, he erupts off the stool and glares at me. “Come on, Bron, seriously? You want me to take this to him?”
“I don’t like it any better than you do. Believe me, we’ve been trying to figure something else out ever since we left DeVries’s office. But we’re not coming up with anything that isn’t likely to blow up in our faces or get us both killed. Your grandfather might be a crime lord, but you said you trust him. Have you ever heard of him getting involved with bloody murder like this?”
Nick paces, remembering to stay on the kitchen side of the room. “I don’t know, Bron. I mean, what am I supposed to say? ‘Hey, Grandfather, my friends found this dead guy in his office they broke into, after they were supposed to give him fifty thousand dollars in cash. And oh, yeah, one of them got kidnapped, turned into a cannibal zombie, and almost ate us until my glitch power messed it up’? That’s gonna go over so well…”
“There’s more,” I say softly. “I didn’t tell you the whole story yet.”
“Oh, great, there’s more. Don’t tell me—you’ve got the dead guy in your bag. Twyla did some kind of Harry Potter shit and reduced him down to the size of a mouse, right?”
“No. That would take a pretty big ritual.”
He looks at me like he’s trying to figure out if I’m messing with him. “Well, that’s good, because I’d hate to have him suddenly revert to full size in my bathroom. It would take days to clean up all the blood.”
I sigh. I don’t blame him for the way he’s acting—this is a lot to drop on somebody, especially somebody who’s still getting his mind around the whole world of magic. “No, no bodies. But we found something in his mouth, and that’s what we brought with us in Twy’s bag.”
He spins around. “Wait. Wait. I’ve got it. It’s a death’s-head moth cocoon, right?”
That one I actually get. Hey, I do watch movies sometimes, and that one is pretty good. “No, and nobody’s planning to wear DeVries’s skin as a suit and dance around in it, at least as far as I know. It was a Tarot card.”
His eyes narrow. “A…Tarot card? In his mouth?”
“Yeah. It was kind of folded up, but it’s one of those plastic ones that holds its shape pretty well.” I pull up my phone again and switch to the photo I took of the front. “It was the Wheel of Fortune. Does that mean anything to you?”
He shrugs. “Luck or change. Gambling, maybe. Could DeVries have gotten on the wrong side of somebody for gambling debts? That could explain the fifty grand.”
“Good point. I hadn’t thought of that.” I flip to the next photo, showing the back. “What about this? There’s a lot of blood on it, but it looks like some kind of knotwork pattern, with a stylized ‘L’ or ‘I’ in the middle.”
He looks at it for several moments, but then shakes his head. “Never seen it before, and I’ve seen a lot of Tarot decks. Most of them have a fairly standard back on them, like the one on the table next to you. The ones that don’t are either promoting something—like a special print run for a specific person or company—or else they’re specially made for some individual person. I’ve even thought about getting one of my own. Never got around to it, though—I like the deck I use for my readings. We go way back.” He returns to his perch on the stool. “I know a lot of the readers around this area, but I’ve never seen that design. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Like I said, I’m hoping maybe your grandfather can help us, if you’re willing to contact him. Even if he doesn’t know the point of leaving that particular card, maybe he knows somebody who can do a ritual to track it back to whoever left it.”
“Can’t you do that? You, I mean,” he adds quickly, nodding toward Twyla. “I thought you were a fully trained mage.”
“I am,” she says. “But I’m also a long way from home, and I don’t have access to any of my gear or facilities. Plus, this kind of magic’s tricky, and if there is any connection to me—or if Selene is involved somehow—I’m really scared of having something get back to her.”
“Oh, I get it.” He picks up another deck of cards from the breakfast bar and starts doing graceful one-handed cuts. “So you think if somebody in my grandfather’s organization does the ritual, it won’t be connected with anybody involved, so even if they trace it back it won’t point to you.”
“Yeah. Plus, I’m guessing if your grandfather is a big-deal mage, he’s probably got warded ritual areas. That will make tracing it back to anybody a lot harder.”
“Huh. I guess I have a lot to learn. I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or excited about that. But anyway…what makes you think he’ll just do it? I mean, I can ask him. I’m not nuts about the idea, but I’m willing to do it. But I’m not sure he’ll just agree to go along with it. He’s my grandfather, sure, but we barely know each other. And if I start trying to call in favors, that could put me in a pretty uncomfortable position.”
He has a point. I remember our conversation at the seafood place in Newport Beach, before any of this stuff started—how he’d mentioned his reluctance to get in too deep with Happenstance and risk being drawn into things he didn’t want to be involved with. This would certainly raise that risk, especially if we don’t have anything to offer him for his trouble. “Yeah…” I say reluctantly.
“Wait!” Twyla raises a finger, and I can almost see a bright little lightbulb appear above her head. “I know how we can do this.”
“How?”
“We can give him the money.”
“What money?” And then I see it. “Twy—no. You can’t—”
“Why can’t I?”
“Are you guys talking about the fifty grand from your trunk?” Nick asks, looking startled.
“Yes, and she can’t—”
“I can,” she says firmly. “Think about it a minute. We can’t keep it. I certainly don’t want to try to keep track of fifty thousand dollars of bribe money. Who knows where Selene got it? It was supposed to go to DeVries, and DeVries is dead. Either the murderers want it and couldn’t find it, or else nobody’s looking for it. We can’t put it in the bank because the government flags transactions that big. So why not put it to good use?”
I stare at her. This isn’t the Twyla I used to know—the one who loved hanging out with rich, handsome guys and living the good life. Hell, she’s not the one I knew less than half an hour ago, when she got noti
ceably disappointed to find out Nick lived in a guest cottage instead of a grand mansion. If she’s willing to give up fifty thousand dollars of untraceable cash, she’s got to be scared shitless.
“I don’t know, Twy—”
She addresses not me, but Nick. “What do you think? Will he do it if we give him the money?”
“Maybe. Like I said, I can ask him—but I don’t think we should lead with the cash. He’s curious about magical stuff, so he might do it just because he wants to find out what’s going on.” He still looks reluctant, though.
“Look,” I say, getting up. “You don’t have to do this. I know why you don’t want to, and I get it. I think it makes good sense, actually. Getting in too deep with the Happenstances might be a bad idea.”
“Yeah, it might. But…” He sighs. “I can’t deny it anymore, Bron—I’m in the middle of this shit now anyway. I can’t just wave my hand and put the world back to the way it was before I knew magic existed. I’m not even sure I’d want to, to be honest. Plus—well, I’m curious about what’s going on with all this too. So yeah. I’ll do it. I’ll talk to him.”
“We’ll talk to him,” Twyla says firmly.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“I’m not sure any of this is a good idea,” I say. “But Twy’s right—this is her thing…and mine. We need to stay involved.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll call him. You want me to do it now?”
I look at my watch. It’s already late, but I suppose Quentin Happenstance isn’t the kind of guy who tucks into bed early with a glass of warm milk and a teddy bear. “Probably best. The longer we have this stuff on us, the more nervous I get.”
Chapter Thirteen
Twyla’s silent next to me. I’m driving her rental car now, since I know the area much better than she does. She’s got her bag back, clutched in her lap like she’s afraid it’s going to fly out the window.
