Hexes and Hemlines

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Was that the first time?”

  She nodded. “But it’s been one thing after the other. And now . . . I can’t believe this! It’s like we’re cursed. I’m almost ready to believe mom’s right—maybe we’ve got bad juju or something.”

  “Who was the murder victim? Someone Gregory knew?”

  “His name is—was—Malachi Zazi. He and Gregory went to high school together, and Gregory attends dinner parties at his house every month.”

  Coincidences in my life did not bode well. They usually added up to something fishy, something that a witch had to get involved in, whether she wanted to or not.

  Did SFPD inspector Carlos Romero know about my connection, through Bronwyn, to Gregory? Was that why he asked me to look at the crime scene? I felt my own spikes of orangey-red anger and disappointment rolling off of me. Carlos was smart. It was hard to believe he would overlook something like that. So what was he doing, involving me? Did he think that since Bronwyn was a member of a coven, and I was a witch, and we could be linked to the man accused of killing Zazi . . . then what?

  I let out a deep breath of consternation. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  “What can you tell me about Malachi Zazi?” I asked.

  Rebecca shrugged, blew on her tea, took a sip, put the mug back down. There was a faint damp ring on the tabletop where it had been before; I watched as Rebecca set the mug in exactly the same place, tweaking it until it was precisely where it had been. Her graceful hands were tipped by a perfect French manicure; a thick gold wedding band and a huge diamond and emerald ring glittered on her finger.

  “Rebecca?” I urged.

  “Do you know there used to be a thirteenth sign of the zodiac? Malachi put together these dinner parties and called his little association the Serpentarian Society, after that sign.”

  “What was the purpose of the society?”

  “The idea was to debunk superstitions, to prove that the world is ruled by rational science, rather than magical traditions and old wives’ tales.” She glanced over at her mother, and then at me. She shrugged. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  I wondered how much Bronwyn had told Rebecca about me. We had only met a few times, at the shop, and since she was so clearly not a believer—and so invested in her own lifestyle—I had immediately put her in the category of people around whom to maintain a nonmagical façade. But Bronwyn wasn’t known for her discretion. Her openness, so appealing under normal circumstances, could also be something of a drawback.

  I made a mental note to talk to her about that. Yes, I was opening up more about my abilities, hiding less, but even in this day and age—even in a place as accepting as the Bay Area—one didn’t bandy about the notion of being a witch. At least I didn’t. Lessons learned early ran deep.

  “So Gregory joined these dinners?”

  “Every month, on the thirteenth, always at midnight. I found it to be rather ridiculous, but like Gregory said, the dinner invitations were basically a who’s who of San Francisco movers and shakers.”

  “More like the children of the movers and shakers,” said Bronwyn.

  “Some of them are doing things in their own right. Like Gregory,” Rebecca said. “It’s just . . . people don’t understand what it is to be raised in that kind of privilege. It can be its own burden.”

  Bronwyn snorted and rolled her eyes in an exasperated gesture so un-Bronwyn-like that it took me aback.

  Our eyes met, and she explained: “All I know is that any one of those kids could be out changing the world with their resources, and instead they party and play around with things they don’t understand.”

  “Okay, let’s back up just a second,” I said. “Are we talking about children or adults here?”

  “Adults who act like children,” said Bronwyn. “They’re in their thirties, but they grew up with everything, in complete privilege, and they can’t seem to get past it. They go to all the right society events to be photographed: the Black and White Ball, the openings of the symphony and the ballet. Then they snort coke and stay out all night getting into trouble.”

  For someone as typically nonjudgmental as Bronwyn, this was saying a lot.

  Rebecca shrugged. “They’re overshadowed by their parents—that much is true. It can’t be easy growing up as the child of a U.S. senator, for instance. Or even Gregory—his parents were never there for him. He had money, but he practically had to raise himself. They’re just all getting their footing, that’s all.”

  “Were you ever invited to these dinners?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t a ‘date’ kind of evening. There were only thirteen slots—twelve, actually, since Malachi was always there. It was considered quite prestigious to be invited. I thought maybe it was like a modern version of playing golf, a chance to get to know the next generation of San Francisco’s leaders.” She fiddled with her teacup. “Besides, they aren’t all slackers. The head of Perkins Laboratories was there.”

  “Mike Perkins?” Bronwyn asked. “Isn’t he Gregory’s boss?”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “Who’s Michael Perkins?” I wasn’t exactly familiar with San Francisco movers and shakers.

  Rebecca looked at me, eyebrows raised in surprise, as though I’d asked her to name the current president of the United States.

  “Seriously? Mike—not Michael—Perkins, head of the huge pharmaceutical company? He’s one of the richest men in America. They’ve got that antiaging serum? He and his wife are forever giving charity balls, taking part in public events. They’re in the Chronicle society section every week.”

  “Lily’s been out of the country,” Bronwyn came to my rescue. “She’s not exactly up on such things.”

  “It’s true. I’m about dumber than dirt when it comes to this sort of thing. So, Perkins and his wife went to these Serpentarian dinners?”

  “Just Mike. There were no married couples.” She took a sip of her tea, then added with an edge of bitterness, “Or at least that’s what Gregory told me. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “Who else came to the dinners? Do you know?”

  She sighed. “A lot of them knew each other from way back. They went to the best schools. Oliver Huffman, the senator’s son, for instance, was an old high school friend of Gregory’s and Malachi’s; Oliver’s a venture capitalist, but lately . . . it looks like he has a drug problem. Another dinner participant with a string of bad luck. His sister used to come to the dinners as well.”

  “So there were a number of women there.”

  “Oh, yes, always. Half and half. I think that was part of the problem, it was harder to find women interested in attending. But on top of everything else, they dressed for dinner.”

  “As in tuxes and tails?”

  “In vintage clothing. Stuff from the era, Gregory said. I guess that would be right up your alley, right?”

  “Any idea where they got the clothes?”

  “Zazi provided them. He took care of everything.”

  I thought about the silks I had seen in Zazi’s armoire. I’d like to get back into that apartment and take some more time with those clothes, or bring them back to my place so I could perform a proper spell, see what they could tell me. With everything else so perplexing, they might be able to give me a sense of what was going on.

  “Will you help us, Lily?” Bronwyn was asking. “Do you think you could ask around, try to figure out what’s going on?”

  When I first arrived in San Francisco, still somewhat shell-shocked from my wandering life, afraid of myself and my own powers, Bronwyn had greeted me with bear hugs and unconditional love. She introduced me to her friends in the Haight, invited me to join her Wiccan coven, and showed me that I could develop friendships, even admit that I was a witch, without putting myself at irredeemable risk.

  How could I say no?

  Besides, Carlos Romero had already asked me to weigh in on the crime, so I was even sort of legitimate in making inq
uiries. Tomorrow I should go talk to him, and to Gregory, and see what I could figure out. True, I was no psychic—I couldn’t read people’s minds—but I was a powerful witch. I had skills.

  And maybe I could make sense of that vision of Malachi, which I couldn’t seem to get out of my head.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning I awoke to the upside-down face of a goblin.

  Perched on the brass headboard of my bed, Oscar hung over so his face was almost touching mine.

  The first few times he had awakened me thus I had jumped with fright, which often resulted in books flying across the room, and once, a broken windowpane. But by now I was getting used to it.

  I groaned, squeezed my eyes shut, and hoped he’d go away. After a long moment, I could still feel his breathing. It smelled vaguely—disturbingly—of fish. I opened one eye. He hadn’t moved.

  “I take it you need something, Oscar?”

  “That cat touched my tuna.”

  That would explain the fish breath. The coziness of the bedcovers beckoned. I rolled over and snuggled deeper. “Uh-huh, well, open another can.”

  “That’s my tuna fish! The feline touched it with its nose! Now it’s contaminated!”

  This from the creature who regularly rooted through the garbage for scraps.

  “Did you offer the cat some?”

  “No.”

  “Oscar, think about this for a moment. Have you ever known me to fix myself something to eat without offering something to you?”

  He scrunched up his face, as though pondering.

  “The answer is no,” I prompted. “I have never eaten in front of you without sharing. Where I’m from, that just isn’t done. The cat is our guest. It’s hungry. Share your tuna with him.” How can you tell gender with cats? “Or her. I think it might be a her.”

  Oscar leapt off the headboard, trampolined off the bed, and galumphed out of the room in high dudgeon, muttering something under his breath about the multiple ways of skinning a cat.

  “Be nice, Oscar. That’s an order.”

  The warmth of my cozy bed was seductive, but once I’m up . . . I’m up. I had to push aside the books I had been reading late into the night when I couldn’t sleep, including a heavy tome on Roman gods that contained a detailed section on Serpentarius.

  In The Sigils and Seals of Solomon, I had read:

  The image of Serpentarius is a man holding the head of a snake in his right hand and the tail in his left: it is in the sign of Scorpio and is a Northern constellation of the nature of Saturn and Mars; its power is that if this image is carved in a stone that protects against poison, it protects against death from poisonous animals, and also protects against poison if you drink liquid that the image has been washed in.

  Serpentarius was said to have been a gifted medical man who revived the near dead and recently dead with the blood and venom of snakes. According to the story, Hades, god of death, worried that Serpentarius would eventually keep anyone from dying. Hades begged Zeus to kill Serpentarius, which he did, but then Zeus honored the talented human by setting him in the sky as a constellation and giving him the Greek name Ophiuchus, which means “the Serpent Bearer.” The Romans called him Serpentarius.

  Serpentarius is now considered the patron of physicians. The American Medical Association, even today, uses a staff wrapped with serpents as its symbol in his memory.

  All of this was fascinating, but it didn’t tell me anything about why Malachi Zazi would be organizing dinners in the man’s honor. Did Zazi simply enjoy the idea that Serpentarius was the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, and through the association with the number thirteen that it was thought to bring bad luck? Or was this somehow related to medicine and healing, a subject near and dear to my heart? Or could it involve the association with snakes?

  Unfortunately, though I riffled through all the books at my disposal last night, I found few answers relevant to this case. Much less the one I really wanted: What was it about my involvement with Malachi Zazi that had made Aidan so furious?

  The brass headstand of my bed glinted in the rare early-morning sunshine that streamed in through my bedroom’s multipaned window. It was well past time to start the day. I liked to get downstairs to cleanse Aunt Cora’s Closet and light a candle of protection before opening for business.

  First things first, though. Time to negotiate with the animals.

  I walked into the kitchen—my favorite room in the apartment—which I had painted in shades of bright pink, canary yellow, and chalky turquoise, inspired by the cheery colors I saw during my sojourn in Jamaica. Bundles of herbs hung from overhead beams, and a motley assortment of jars contained everything from cooking spices to freeze-dried bats. The lunar calendar hung near the sink, a pot of live basil attracted good luck, and my iron cauldron sat at the ready.

  At the moment, a black cat also adorned the tile countertop. Upon seeing me it let out a raspy squeak. Unless I managed to find a home for the cat soon, I would need to buy some actual cat food. In the interim I opened a can of sardines and poured a saucer of the raw milk I kept on hand for spells. Other than the leftovers from a gumbo dinner I had made on Saturday, my refrigerator contained more ingredients for spell casting than for cooking: raw milk, fresh spring water, fresh herbs and roots of all kinds. Still, I kept a lot of canned foods and frozen items on hand, for what Graciela used to call “pantry cooking.” She always seemed ready for the apocalypse with all her canned and dried foods—and for all I knew, that’s exactly what she was waiting for.

  The cat purred so loudly while eating, it made me wonder how often it had been fed. Its sleek black coat was soft as velvet. Allergies be damned, I spent a few minutes doting on her . . . or him. It lifted its head and bumped its wet little nose against mine.

  I sneezed and washed my hands thoroughly.

  “Gesundheit,” Oscar said as he glowered at the cat. “If you’re really gonna keep that . . . animal here, you should at least cast a spell against your allergies.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that easy.”

  “But, Mistress, couldn’t you just brew . . . ?”

  “To change an inborn trait requires strong, continuous magic. It’s costly.”

  “But you wouldn’t charge yourself, would ya? It’s free to you.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of cost. I meant it would be exhausting, and it would sap my energy for more important things.” No, by far the best idea would be to find her a loving home with people who don’t have an exaggerated immune response to her very presence.

  “You’ve got lots of magic, though, Mistress. Like what happened with the wax figures with Aidan.”

  “The wax figures?”

  He looked suddenly guilty, as though perhaps he’d said something out of turn.

  “I just meant, the way when your magics mingle, all hell breaks loose.”

  “You’re saying when my magic mingles with Aidan’s?”

  He nodded. “I guess you’d be hard to stop, you and Aidan as a pair.”

  Is that what happened with the candle sconces? Could that be why Aidan was helping me—did he have some sort of “use” for me or my power?

  I couldn’t think about this right now. I needed to open up shop, then go talk to Gregory and see what I could figure out about Malachi’s murder. I only hoped Gregory wasn’t guilty.

  Most mornings I walked a couple of blocks to a local café called Coffee to the People for caffeine and breakfast. But since I was already tending to the animals, I brewed coffee and ate a leftover biscuit with a slice of cheese.

  “We should at least name the poor little thing,” I told Oscar, looking at the cat while I prepared a peanut butter and jam sandwich with the last of my homemade wheat bread and apricot preserves.

  “We don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  “True. How about this: You pick a name for it.”

  “Me?” Huge shiny eyes stared at me. “How could I pick a name?”

  “Why not?”
<
br />   “But that’s . . . it’s like adopting it if I name it. Like when you named me Oscar.” His gnarled face screwed up in a smile. “That was a good day.”

  “Just think of it as a friendly gesture. For all we know, it already has a name. Maybe it will find a way to let us know, but we need to call it something in the meantime.”

  “Let’s call it LTN, for ‘Less Than Nothing.’ ”

  “Very funny.”

  “How ’bout ‘Thing that crawled out from under a rock’?”

  “Oscar . . . ,” I warned.

  “Or Beowulf.”

  “Beowulf?”

  “It’s from history.”

  “I know where it’s from. I just think it’s an interesting choice.”

  “Is it a bad choice?”

  “No,” I said, laughing. “It’s not a bad choice at all. It’s a great choice.”

  “I’ll keep thinking. Maybe that’s not right.”

  “Does it look like a Beowulf to you?”

  “Not sure. How about Napoleon? Or Genghis Khan? Reginald?”

  “So you think it’s a male cat?”

  “Dunno. Pandora, maybe?”

  “Tell you what, Oscar. You think on it a while,” I said, patting his scaly shoulder. “No need to rush into anything.”

  I left him staring at the feline. I found it interesting that the cat didn’t appear to notice any difference between Oscar the pig and Oscar the goblin/gnome/ gargoyle. It was a good thing—I could only imagine trying to coax a frightened cat to come out from under the bed and visit with a creature like Oscar.

  After showering, I put my long dark hair up in a loose knot, swiped a quick bit of mascara on my eyes, and dressed in a green tweed two-piece with a wide skirt and bolero jacket with pointed tips, which I pulled on over a crisp white blouse. Studying myself in the antique standing mirror, I decided I looked downright businesslike. I hoped it would give me courage in my new role as detective.

  When I emerged from my bedroom, Oscar was still staring at the cat, reciting a whole stream of names. Now that Oscar was interested in it, the pet acted completely oblivious to him. It walked away, leaving Oscar to trail behind it like a confused, rejected little monster.