by Lissa Kasey
The entire vibe of the place was dark and creepy. A handful of old dolls sat on shelves around the top of the room, staring down with blank broken faces. Statues of demons and skeletons danced little jigs in every corner. And there were half a dozen mini altars set up with tiny notes taped near them explaining which spirit guide or deity they were for. All of them requesting offerings, and had bowls filled with coins, rings, and other trinkets.
“No wonder people come to Simply Crafty,” I told Micah. “This place puts the capital S in somber.”
“She calls herself a Voodoo Queen. Says all of this is part of her practice,” he told me while we navigated the shop. There was no one at the register, no one that I could see in the shop at all. Maybe the back room somewhere? “At least she doesn’t have live snakes in here anymore. Something about zoning laws. She had to get rid of them. I think it was mostly because the neighbors didn’t like them.”
“You don’t believe she’s a voodoo queen?”
“Lots of people practice rituals. Catholic priests practice rituals all the time. Do you think they really talk to ‘God’? I think the same goes with the voodoo people. They practice rituals and proclaim they hear voices from the other side. Mary tells people she can talk to the dead. Uses it to get more money out of them. I think using people’s grief to extort money is wrong and I haven’t made my feelings on it a secret. Did you know when I went missing, she called Tim and tried to talk him into paying her to communicate with me?”
I gaped at him. “Are you shitting me?”
Micah shook his head. “Nope. Tim didn’t take the bait, but he said it made him feel horrible and he cried for days thinking that I was dead because some hack psychic claimed she could hear my voice ‘on the other side.’”
Maybe he had been on the other side, I thought briefly. Who knew where he’d been taken. Did that mean some random woman who thought she could talk to the dead had actually heard him? I wasn’t sure I believed in all that, which was funny because I might have actually been seeing dead people a lot lately.
He stopped and frowned at the shop. “Where is she?”
“A storeroom maybe?”
Micah wove his way through the maze of tightly packed shelves to a little curtain area which led to a bathroom and a small room with a microwave and table. No one was there.
“You said she lives upstairs. Maybe she ran up for something.”
“Even I wouldn’t leave the shop empty for more than it took to use the restroom,” Micah said. “Plenty of opportunistic thieves in New Orleans.”
“Maybe she has her stuff cursed so if anyone steals it they bring it back?” I half joked.
Micah looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Wonder if I could figure out a spell like that.”
“You’d have to believe in it first, right?”
“Minor technicalities,” he said and headed back out the door and around the side to another door. That outside door opened and led up a flight of stairs to another door above. The door at the top of the stairs was ajar. “She never leaves her place unlocked.”
“Let me call Lukas so he can send the police out for a wellness check,” I said stepping into the little entry beside Micah. The door closed behind us and the feeling of heat and humidity seemed to close in. I pulled out my phone and wiped sweat off my forehead. It shouldn’t be this hot in such a tiny little dark space.
Micah shivered as though he were cold and glanced up the stairs. “Do you smell something sweet?”
I sniffed the tiny area, but only smelled sweat. “No. Are you cold?”
“Freezing.”
While I was burning up. It made me think of standing in front of the voodoo museum with my hand on the window and it began to burn. “We should go.” That little feeling of doom began growing in my gut. There was some kind of energy here, that much I could tell. If Micah had been experiencing this for weeks, I could understand why he hadn’t been sleeping.
“I don’t feel anything on my skin,” Micah said. “Just cold. Do you see something?”
I peered up at the partially open door and really hoped I didn’t see something. “No. And I’d like not to. This whole ‘tuned into the supernatural’ is new to me.”
“Is it? Or are you just now realizing what you’ve always experienced and brushed off might be something more unexplainable?” he asked, his expression curious.
“Fuck…” Now I was going to question everything I ever remembered. “I’m not sure you’re good for my sanity.”
He put his hand on my arm, his fingers cold as ice on my overheated skin. “I’d like to think I help bring clarity to chaos, but it might be the other way around.” Micah took a step up the stairs.
I set the bags of our stuff at my feet and tried to pull him back. “Let’s wait for the police.”
“What if she’s hurt? She’s not young. Maybe she fell and hit her head or something.”
“And doesn’t own a cellphone?” I sighed and moved past him up the stairs. “Wait here.”
“Right,” he agreed, following me.
I groaned. “You realize it’s a soldier’s instinct to keep you safe, right? I’m not trying to be an asshole caveman. But you really should stay down here.”
“And you realize I’m not five, right?” He threw back obviously not willing to stay behind.
“Don’t touch anything,” I told him, as I turned on the light on my phone and squeezed through the narrow opening in the doorway. The apartment upstairs was as chaotic and cluttered as the shop downstairs, filled with dolls and statues of things I’d never want anywhere near my home. The walls were brown or red, and windows so tightly closed against daylight that it made the apartment look more like a dungeon than a home. The few pieces of furniture were ancient, like something pulled out of a museum or an antique shop for people who loved creepy old things.
The entire place was maybe twice the size of Micah’s, but felt smaller due to the clutter. I glanced carefully in each room as we passed, pausing when I saw a blond head that made me jump back two feet and shriek like a newborn baby.
“Fuck,” I said, my hand over my chest. “Mary?” I called, easing back around the corner, Micah close behind. If my shriek hadn’t woken her, I wasn’t sure anything would. My heart thudded in my chest, racing like we’d just survived a head on collision. “Not good for my heart either,” I muttered.
“Or my eardrums,” Micah added.
Throwing my snark back at me. The little shit… If we weren’t standing in the house of the creepy lady, I’d have kissed him stupid.
Mary, if it was Mary, appeared to be sitting at a small desk, half slumped over it like she’d fallen asleep there. But the light made her look eerily still in the dark room. Her long flowing dress splayed around her feet more in display than careless sleep, and the sweet smell, I finally noticed, was coming from her, or at least the desk. Something with nutmeg, cinnamon, and a bit of sugar.
Her blond hair was spread out around her head like a halo and since she was face down, I couldn’t tell much about it. I reached out carefully to touch her shoulder, hoping she’d wake up and rage at us for being in her space, but had to step forward a half foot to make contact.
Two things happened at once. First the sticky sensation of something thick and viscous under my shoe made me wince, and second my hand on her shoulder made her fall away from the desk like a rag doll, flopping to the ground beside it with a thud.
Micah gasped, fingers digging into my shirt and side as he clung to me while I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Blood coated her face like she’d been crying the stuff. It soaked the hair at the side of her head by her ears and even trickled down her upper lip. While she appeared lifeless, I feared she might actually still be alive and carefully leaned over to check for a pulse from the nearest wrist.
I counted, waiting, straining to feel anything or hear beyond my own trembling breath. There was nothing. She was gone. Her skin had already begun to cool, though she was still pretty pliable. Not l
ong dead then. I stepped back, pushing Micah out of the room with me and dialed Lukas instead of waiting for his text reply. Two bodies found in a few days didn’t look good for us, and I wasn’t taking chances.
Chapter 19
The police descended again like locusts, swooping in and dragging us outside for questioning, scouring the place of everything, even hauling things out in boxes. At least we didn’t have to go to the station this time, instead we sat on the sidewalk and answered questions with all the neighbors.
“She was taking her mail upstairs,” one of the neighbors said. “Saw her not an hour ago.” The nearby shop sold T-shirts and other mass market stuff. The Cajun man had told the police that he was keeping an eye on the shop while Mary had gone upstairs, though there were never many customers in Mary’s shop before dark.
I watched as they carried Mary out in a body bag and wondered a thousand things. Some of the cops murmured that she might have poisoned herself, or mixed up the wrong concoction. A few implied she’d been a witch of sorts and her potion to keep her alive and full of power had accidentally killed her. It was stupid and made me mad enough that Micah had to grip my hand to keep me from screaming at them.
One of my biggest pet peeves is disrespect of the dead. I’d seen it a dozen times at military funerals. People were either severe in their respect or completely disdainful, and commenting things about how he or she must have gotten himself blown up. Often followed by the comment “When I served we never…” and then some bullshit about the handful of much easier weapons they’d had. Now it was all bombs made from spare parts and sprays of bullets from one hundred plus round capacity magazines. Nothing was simple about modern war, but death.
“Would they say the same stuff if it was you or me?” I asked him. “No, because they’d be saying stupid shit about how we got what we deserved because we’re queer.” We sat close enough together that no one would mistake our relationship as simple co-workers. Especially not since Micah had his arm wrapped around mine, his cheek resting on my shoulder, and his hand firm within my grip.
“Give me some shit about how my pansy ass could never have served our country properly…”
Micah lifted my hand and kissed the back of it. “Hey,” he called.
I looked at him feeling like I wanted to kick some cop ass.
“Dead bodies make you cranky, yeah?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Most people don’t see dead bodies in everyday life. I’d think it would make anyone cranky.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “But getting mad at the cops is going to help who? Remember, your brother is a cop and you don’t want to make his co-workers pissy with him because you were pissy with them.”
Lukas was not on duty, though he’d shown up when called. Since I was once again involved, even if it was simply finding the dead woman, he’d been shoved to the sidelines of the case again. Which I didn’t think made him all that happy. He had also not been thrilled that we’d been there at all. But since Micah and Mary Lamont worked in the same industry, part of four, well now two remaining tour guides certified by the city, it was stupid to think they’d never speak to each other.
He’d given me the side eye that said he didn’t believe we had come to talk shop at all, but left me to the rest of the cops for questioning. While we hadn’t been stripped and taken anywhere, the questioning had been brutal. Probably a half dozen guys asking the same things over and over. Micah and I were separated, though I kept him in my line of sight. We told as much of the truth as we dared. Just that Micah had come to ask why Mary had been in the cemetery on his scheduled night. It was a simplified version of the truth, but still the truth.
We were finally released right before eight and told to stay out of the cops’ way. “That’s the plan,” I told them as I dragged Micah with our batch of retrieved shopping items toward his shop. They’d taken my shoes again, since I had blood on them. Lukas had given me his since he had more than a dozen to choose from after sending a rookie to grab him a pair.
I would have stopped to talk to him, but he waved us off, with a comment of “Later.”
At the shop Sky looked at us with wide eyes while Micah stalked to the back room to drop off the bags of stuff that had been searched a dozen times.
“Another body?” Sky asked.
I wondered how she could tell, but then I realized there was blood on my shirt.
“Dammit. This job is hell on my clothes,” I said, trying to make light of it. I followed Micah to the back room and stripped off the shirt, throwing it in the basket in the small washroom, and washing my hands and face.
“Still think I’m not a curse?” Micah asked standing in the doorway watching me.
“No more than I am. Hell, maybe it’s the combination of the two of us together that fucks people up. We could offer our services as political assassins. Drop us off in a random country and watch their world erupt.”
“You’re not funny.”
“No?” I asked, drying my hands and crossing the room to tower over him. I grabbed his waist and pulled him against me, staring down into those wide blue eyes.
“No,” he breathed, though it felt like a lie. He relaxed in my arms a little, tilting his head up. I rewarded him with a gentle kiss on his forehead, then one on each cheek before finding his mouth and teasing his lips with my teeth. His mask had gone back up while the cops questioned us, but I was beginning to see around it now, the small breaks of emotions he let through when less people were around.
“It doesn’t have to be anything supernatural.”
“Sure,” he said. “Just dead people everywhere.”
“Um, don’t we live in a city full of dead people? Graves above ground, ghosts, and all that jazz? Oh and real jazz too. Didn’t you tell some story about ragtime—the actual menstrual cycle ragtime—, prostitutes, and the growth of jazz?”
He gave me the narrow eye of judgment again. “Your brain is like a sponge.”
“Thick and sopping wet?” I inquired teasingly.
He sighed and started to complain about my sarcasm again, but I kissed him soundly instead. Not a gentle play of control, but a full dive into his mouth with my tongue kiss. He relaxed into it, closing his eyes and returning the exploration with his own. We stayed together that way for a time. In the moment with each other. Not only was it calming, but clarifying. The chaos around us be damned. “I hope we’re more than just a spark,” I whispered when the kiss ended and I rested my forehead against his.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I think we are.”
And that was the best news I’d heard all day. I pulled away to do a little dance. “Micah likes me, I like Micah, woot woot,” I sang a little made up song and probably looked like an epileptic chicken while I danced.
“Dork.”
“You had one hundred percent disclosure.” I pointed at myself. “Crazy man.”
He gave me a half squint. “I don’t get you.”
“What’s to get?”
“You play broken pretty well, but you’re one of the calmest, most put together guys I’ve ever met.”
I grinned. “Really? You must know some really messed up people then.”
He mock-growled and shoved me away, then made his way back to the main part of the shop to plug his phone in.
“Can we listen to some rock?” I called after him as I went to find another T-shirt. “Instead of Justin Fest?”
He turned up the volume and restarted his Justin playlist. At least there was a little Maroon5 mixed in. I hid my grin and went back to cleaning up shelves and organizing stock in between helping customers, while watching him sway sexily to the music.
Sky took a handful more Tarot customers, and I danced with Micah around the shop. The scent of incense was becoming familiar and I really was starting to know where things were. Watching Micah’s cute little ass wiggle around the store turned me on and made me smile all at once. He wasn’t focusing on the one terrible event of the day, which I thought was a step in the ri
ght direction.
A text noisily interrupted the music and was persistent enough that Micah finally had to check it. He stared at the phone for a minute, then glared.
“What?”
He held up his phone and in a text from Tim was a little video of the front of Micah’s house. A giant orange tabby cat wove through the garden décor of cats like he owned the place.
“Huh… No wonder Jet was hissing and spitting. That tom is encroaching on his territory.” I took the phone and zoomed in and out to watch the cat.
“A cat did not rattle the doorknob,” Micah said, indignant, his cheeks pink.
“Maybe not, but this guy may have knocked the gnomes over. I wonder if he belongs to one of your neighbors.” I thought back to the first night and the horrible noises coming from outside. A cat? Maybe. Somehow, I didn’t think what Micah had been hearing for the past two years was a cat, following him from place to place. Though having a more benign answer certainly eased some of the stress of worry over him being home alone at night. “Maybe Jet wants a friend.”
Micah folded his arms across his chest and frowned. “Tim probably thinks I’m some total moron.”
“Does it matter?” I asked. “Is he going to stop showing up when you call?”
“No,” Micah admitted. “Probably not.”
“Then he’s a friend and that’s all that matters.” I turned off the video and handed the phone back to Micah. “We’ll have to plant some catnip in your garden to keep your visiting friend stoned. All is well.”
“Jerk,” Micah grumbled. “I haven’t simply been hearing a cat in my garden.”
