Death Metal (Eastwind Witches Book 2)

by Nova Nelson

  But it was still lovely. Lush gardens surrounded it—a byproduct of Lucent’s job at the garden center, I suspected. At the start of the walkway leading to the front door were two stone wolves, just like those outside Veronica’s home, except smaller, no more than the side of a standard mailbox.

  “Will he be home?” I asked. It was half past seven and the sun was closing in on the horizon, reminding me that we needed to hurry if we were going to make it to Atlantis before it closed at eight thirty.

  “Fifty-fifty chance, I’d say. But if he’s not here, he’s at Sheehan’s. He shouldn’t be hard to track down either way.”

  I doubted we had the time to spare for another stop, even if it were just at Sheehan’s Pub. Hopefully, Lucent had taken the night off drinking, or at least did it in the comfort of his own home.

  I knocked on the front door and waited, my mind already turning toward the quickest route to Sheehan’s.

  The door swung open, and Lucent’s wild eyes stared back at me. “Not interested,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  He looked me up and down. “You’re looking for a naughty night, right? I’m not interested.”

  “I … what? No! That’s not why I’m here.”

  But also, who the heck was he to say I wasn’t good enough for him? He was only a four, maybe a five if he showered. I was at least a five point five.

  “Then why else you banging on the door of a widower at sunset? What’s wrong with you? Not enough to come harass me at work?”

  “Lucent!” Heather chastised, though he couldn’t hear her.

  So, I echoed it. “Lucent! Knock it off. I know who did it, but I need your help. The evidence is inside your house, and if I can find it, I can give it to Deputy Manchester and prove to him that your wife didn’t kill herself.”

  He swayed lightly. Oh. He had been drinking. I hadn’t noticed at first. In my defense, it wasn’t like he was the most pleasant guy when he was sober, if that’s what he’d been at Whirligig’s, which, now that I thought about it, wasn’t all that likely. Not with what Grim said about his silver scent.

  “Deputy Manchester is so full of unicorn swirl, he’s got rainbows coming out of his ears,” he said.

  “I … wouldn’t say that. But okay! Let’s prove it. I just need to look around inside for a second.”

  “Sounds like we’re on the same team. Come on in.” He stepped to the side and I brushed past, accidentally catching a whiff of stale beer on his breath.

  “Upstairs,” Heather said, giving me directions. I climbed the grand staircase, which split off in two directions toward the top. “To the right.”

  In another context, I might have enjoyed taking my time, appreciating the many features of this marvelous home, but not now. Not when I was under such a time crunch to find the evidence and give Heather and Lucent one last moment of closure before she moved on, assuming Deputy Manchester did as he was asked and showed up at Atlantis Day Spa in time. Otherwise, Heather might be stuck between planes for a while longer.

  I shuddered to think what would happen if I went through with this plan, laid bare the evidence to the killer, and then didn’t have anyone protecting me when I needed it.

  “There.” Heather pointed to a small cream-colored tin on her bathroom vanity. The Atlantis logo with its visual hint at an ocean wave was emblazoned on the top. I grabbed the tin and opened it. The facial cream looked like every other one I’d ever seen, meaning I couldn’t actually see any silver. But that would’ve been stupid on Frankie’s part if she made it that obvious, and she didn’t strike me as unintelligent.

  “It won’t harm you,” Heather said. “Unless she put something in there that’s poisonous to psychics.”

  I jerked my head around toward her floating form. “Like what?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, I’m not sure. Shouldn’t you know that?”

  Yes, she had a point. Add it to my ever-expanding to-do list. Or rather, my to-know list. Discovering how my body worked, now that I was dead and in Eastwind, was like being a teenager all over again, and naturally that was horrifying. No one wants to relive those days.

  “There’s one more thing we need to do, Heather,” I said. “If all goes according to plan and we’re able to prove Frankie is the one responsible for your death, you’ll move on.”

  “To what?” she said softly.

  “Wish I could tell you. The next life? But before you face that mystery, we have a little bit of time for you to say goodbye.”

  She bowed her head sadly. “It’s almost easier not to.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s better that way.”

  “You’re right.”

  She followed me back down the stairs, where Lucent was waiting, bracing himself on the banister and ogling me. “You find what you need?”

  I held up the tin, wiggling it slightly. “Yep. One more thing, though.”

  “Yes?”

  I looked around for a better spot. “Let’s, um, sit down?”

  “I won’t fight you on that,” he said, leading me through a formal dining room and into the kitchen, which was so beautifully decorated with the last beams of the day’s sunlight streaming in through the windows that it would have broken Pinterest if someone from my world had been lucky enough to go in there with a camera.

  “Where’s Reatta?” I asked.

  “Gone for the night.” He chuckled dryly. “She doesn’t appreciate my habits, so she prepares dinner early, before I get to drinking, and leaves instructions for reheating it.” He smacked the table hard, causing me to jump. “I lose my wife, so all I have left is her money, and I can’t even use that to get hot meals prepared?” His voice cracked. “I always knew money was worthless, in the end.” He pressed his lips into a thin line, his nostrils flaring.

  Poor Lucent. He was a mess. And what I was about to initiate wouldn’t make it any better. At least, not at first. Over time, yes, I believed this would help him move on.

  “There’s something you should know about me, Lucent.”

  He glared at me, his eyes thin slits of suspicion. I needed to finish the thought quick or he might hurl accusations (and other, more physical things) at me before I explained myself.

  “I’m a medium. A Fifth Wind witch. It means I can speak with ghosts. They come find me when they need my help, and your wife—”

  His eyes were already glistening. “Is she here with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my poor Lucent,” she said. “Tell him how much I love him. Tell him I would never have left him on purpose.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and did as Heather asked, watching Lucent carefully.

  For some reason, I still expected people to doubt my abilities. This wasn’t Texas. This was Eastwind. Everyone could do weird things. But it was a relief all the same when he took it at face value.

  “Can you tell her that—”

  “She can hear you,” I said. “You tell her.” I indicated the space she occupied beside me to give him a hint as to where he could direct his reply.

  He nodded, staring into what appeared to him to be empty air. “Heather, baby. I miss your body. I miss running my paws over the smooth, naked curves of your—”

  “Actually,” I said, holding up a finger, “let’s maybe do this another way. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen around?”

  He jumped up, grabbed some from the corner of the kitchen—perhaps the same supplies Reatta used to write his reheating instructions—and flopped back down into his chair.

  “Just write what you’re thinking,” I instructed, “then show her the paper.”

  As he began scribbling furiously, I congratulated myself on dodging a bullet in the form of a detailed retelling of these two werewolves’ sex life. If I had to pick a single word he’d used that had tipped me off to things being well on their way to a serious X-rating, I’d go with “paw.”

  But then the obvious occurred to me. Even if I didn’t have to read what Lucent wrote, Heather would
still have to respond. And since she couldn’t hold a pen, I would have to translate.

  Was there a way around that?

  A strange memory surfaced, although I was fairly certain it wasn’t my own. Maybe it was something from a movie I’d seen? No. It felt more real than that, and I couldn’t pinpoint precisely where it was coming from. Maybe it wasn’t a memory after all.

  The picture I was seeing was a woman in a heavy dress, sitting at an old wooden drawing desk in a dusty and dimly lit room while her hand, gripping a feather quill, scribbled frantically at a piece of parchment. She didn’t look down at the paper. Instead, her eyes were shut and though her arm and hand moved frantically, the rest of her body seemed totally relaxed.

  Who was that? Why was I seeing it?

  But it gave me an idea. No, more than that. A new understanding. It was like a seed of knowledge had waited dormant inside me for years and only now pushed above the soil to reveal the first sprig of life.

  As Heather read the words of her husband, her chest began to heave in deep, lustful breaths. “Tell him that I want nothing more than to—”

  “Hey, I have an idea,” I said cutting her off. “I’m not sure if it’ll work, but if it does, you and Lucent can have a private moment alone.” I explained to her what I’d seen, and asked if she wanted to try it, to manipulate my hand rather than relay the message verbally.

  “You can do that?” she asked.

  “Not sure, but it’s worth a try, right?”

  “I suppose so.” But her concern was unmistakable. “It won’t hurt you?”

  “Huh?” Shoot. For some reason, I hadn’t considered that possibility. The women in my mind had seemed so relaxed, not in pain. Maybe not even feeling her body at all. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said, growing more unsure by the millisecond.

  It took a few tries of me shutting my eyes, trying to ignore the chill of her presence as she aligned her arm with mine, but as I cleared my mind, finally using the meditative techniques I’d learned years before to manage the stress of being a young female business owner, I was vaguely aware of my hand holding the pen moving over the paper, though I wasn’t willing it to do so.

  “There,” she said when she was done.

  I opened my eyes and was embarrassed by how awful the handwriting was—not representative of my practiced penmanship at all—but it got the job done. I’d done it.

  I didn’t understand what “it” was yet, but I’d managed it nonetheless, so that was pretty cool. Also, it hadn’t hurt, so that was an added bonus.

  Lucent turned the paper so he could read it and then began scribbling his reply.

  They went on like this for a few more minutes before my anxiety overcame my meditative abilities. We were cutting it dangerously close to arriving at Atlantis after it’d already closed, leaving Deputy Manchester cranky at me for having woken him up for nothing, and probably losing our chance of catching Frankie before she knew what I was up to and disappeared.

  Then what? Heather would be stuck here? A murderer would be on the loose?

  Nope. Not happening.

  “We need to get going,” I said, opening my eyes, catching a few choice words on the piece of paper and immediately wishing I could unsee them.

  “Okay, one more thing,” Heather said.

  “Fine, one more.” I shut my eyes and tried not to think about what wifely duty she was describing in lurid detail.

  This time, when I opened my eyes, Lucent’s tears had broken free and fell down his cheeks. “I love you, Heather.”

  She reached forward and attempted to brush away his tears, but only sent a powerful shiver through his body. He shut his eyes and indulged in it.

  “We need to be going,” I said, partly because my emotions were about to get the best of me, but also because we were on a time crunch to get to Atlantis.

  Lucent nodded, but Heather said, “Can I stay?”

  Her request caught me by surprise. For some reason, I thought she’d want to be present when justice was meted out … assuming I could make it happen. But I considered it and couldn’t come up with a reason why not. “You won’t have that much time. Assuming I can convince Deputy Manchester that Frankie is responsible—”

  “I disappear. I understand. I want to be here, in my home, with my husband when that happens.”

  That made sense, and the fact that I hadn’t considered it before she’d brought it up only went to show how little I understood about love. But, duh, of course it was more important than vengeance. Or even justice.

  “Lucent,” I said, “Heather is staying here. Even if you can’t see her, I’m sure you’ll be able to tell.”

  “I sure can,” he said. “Thank you.”

  I don’t want to say I ran out of the house, but I definitely picked up the pace, especially as I began to suspect that some of the emotions I was feeling weren’t my own. My best guess? They were the remnants of Heather’s spirit inside me—her love, her sadness, her fear, her lust—and it felt like a gross violation of her privacy.

  As I hurried down the walkway, away from Heather’s old home, trying to clear my head and prepare for what came next, the reality of what had transpired set in. There was a name for the experience, one even I knew. It was “channeling.”

  I’d just channeled my first spirit.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Summoning calm and courage, I sucked the early night air into my lungs before walking under the magical waterfall of Atlantis Day Spa and into the relaxation cavern beyond. It was two minutes before closing. I’d only just made it in time.

  Unfortunately, it meant that no clients were around, which also meant I was probably alone in a veritable cave with a murderer.

  The sitting room was silent except for the sounds of flowing water in the back of the cavern. The light from the floating orbs reflecting off the water and onto the ceiling, which I’d previously viewed as magical (not literally) and whimsical, now gave the impression of specters convulsing in a torturous dance.

  “Nora,” said a soft voice on my left.

  “Oh, hi, Frankie.”

  She smiled politely, and then, after a split second, smacked her forehead. “Oh shoot! The facial cream, right? For Veronica. That’s why you’re here?”

  I nodded.

  She grimaced apologetically. “It was a crazy day, and I haven’t had a chance to make it. If you want, though, I can do it right now. You’re welcome to come into the back and watch me make it. I always appreciate the company.”

  “Yeah, that sounds great,” I said.

  Oh yes, I knew this was a bad idea. My survival instinct was practically smacking me between the eyes, yelling, You idiot! It’s a trap! Stay by the exit!

  Why didn’t I listen? Because my Insight told me not to. If I didn’t follow her, she would know. Instantly. Not only because women traveling in pairs to do anything is about as natural as yawning when you’re tired, but because the only reason I wouldn’t follow her back would be because I knew what she’d done.

  I didn’t yet have what I needed from her to guarantee that she went away to Ironhelm Penitentiary for life and Heather was able to move on to the next plane.

  So I followed.

  When Frankie disappeared through the waterfall doorway, I hurried after her, but remained on alert. If she suspected what part I played in all this, this would be a prime moment to strike when I wasn’t expecting it. I didn’t want to give her time on the other side to ready an attack on me the moment I emerged.

  But, of course, I was just freaking myself out for no reason, and when I opened my eyes on the other side, she was making her way down a circular hallway carved from thick marble. “These are our private rooms,” she explained, gesturing to the doorways we passed on the left and right. The doors to each were heavy and round, reminding me of a bank vault. Or what movies taught me a bank vault looked like, at least. “When you come in for your massage, we’ll be in one of these. Oh, and did I mention,” she said, pausing sharply and
turning to me, “you should bring a bathing suit. Complimentary use of the hot springs with every appointment.”

  “The hot springs?”

  “Yes. The area just behind the desk is fed from a natural hot spring that flows right underneath us.” She pointed to the floor. “Very relaxing. Not enough of our clients take advantage of it.”

  “It does sound nice.” I meant it. Of course, I wouldn’t be taking advantage of it until I was sure Frankie was locked away. No doubt Aeldoran would hold a slight grudge against me for getting his co-worker locked up for murder, but he struck me as someone who would care less about that and more about the money I offered for the spa’s services. Also, still a dumb name, so.

  The end of the hallway teed, and we took a right which immediately opened into a well-lit room that clashed with the rest of the spa. This space looked more like a storehouse, almost like the dry storage area in the back of Medium Rare. With its casks of bulk materials lining the walls and shelves of strange glass bottles, it also reminded me of the apothecary.

  “The trick to good facial cream isn’t how well it works,” she confided in me with a mischievous but pleasant grin, “it’s in how it feels going on and how it smells. It’s about the experience, not the outcome.”

  She grabbed an empty tin and crossed the room, prying the top off a large wooden drum. She set it aside then dipped the tin into the drum. When she brought it back up, a thin white cream coated the sides. She wiped it off with a rag, leaving only the cream in the tin. “The base is simple. Mostly beeswax.” She brought the tub over to a counter near the shelves along the wall. “The rest is just flourish. Veronica loves pine and rosemary—a typical werewolf preference.” She plucked two small bottles off the shelf and brought them over to me where I stood, still near the door. “Here, smell.”

  I hesitated. This could be a trick. If she knew what I was up to, there could be something in those bottles that knocked me flat on my butt.

  But if she wasn’t onto me, refusing to sniff something as basic as pine and rosemary would surely trigger her suspicion.