Brewing Trouble

by Katherine Kim

  “I remember that entry, that’s one of the ones I was looking for!” Sarah put her book aside and hurried over to lean on Kai’s shoulder and peer into the book. “Yeah, if the pouch really represents the person, I’d think it would be a doll. You could sew hair from the victim to the doll’s head, and so on. It’s creepy as hell, and I bet Gran would have skinned me alive if I’d suggested using something like this against someone.” She shuddered at the idea of having something like this cast against her.

  “Why would your grandmother know so much about something she disapproved of so strongly?” Gabe asked.

  “It’s along the line of understanding the attack so we can discuss protection against it better,” Sarah said. “The thing is, that all the protection I’ve found in here is about how to prevent the hex taking hold. If Doc got hexed by something like this, then we’d need to find a way to break it rather than fend it off, if that makes sense.”

  “Got it,” Gabe said.

  “Here, let me read that. I’ll add this to my notes.” Sarah picked the book up, keeping her eyes scanning Gran’s words.

  16

  The rest of the room faded around her as she puzzled through the magic involved. This felt like she was on the right track. The mechanics of the spell that Gran described here, along with what Sarah had seen in Doc’s hospital room and at the Apothecary before that, seemed to fit. A hex tied to Doc with some sort of personal object could be adjusted on a whim once it was established. It didn’t have to be cast from nearby, since the personal item— and it didn’t have to be actual genetic material, it could be something that was of great value to the target— was the connecting factor.

  Sarah frowned. How would Angela have gotten her hands on… Meg. This brought her back to the question of whether Meg was a willing double agent or a hapless pawn. It really depended entirely on whether she thought Meg was an amazing actress or not. Sarah really didn’t want to believe that someone could be that manipulative and heartless.

  The other option is that Meg is an unwitting player being manipulated herself, and honestly, that felt more likely to Sarah. Meg was far too consistent in her behavior to be faking her eager earnestness. She’d been genuinely hurt yesterday, both physically and emotionally, by that rude customer. Another foot soldier for Angela to throw at Doc. This time rather than attacking her personally, Angela attacked her shop and her friends.

  Finding and destroying the talisman was another problem. She’d need to ground the magic that was powering the hex, and disperse the energy somehow. It could be fairly dangerous. She shivered as the memory of dismantling the curse that was cast on Sebastian all those months ago. Granted, she’d had advice from Sebastian’s memories of some very powerful spirits, as confusing at that thought was. Still, she’d had guidance to safely deconstruct the spell without harming either herself or Sebastian. She didn’t have that luxury this time, and if she did this wrong, she could get hurt or Doc could be killed. Even Angela was at risk in this case.

  And all that was the step she needed to take after they found the stupid thing! Assuming they could find and identify the talisman or voodoo doll or whatever Angela constructed to anchor the hex, Sarah would need to study it and try to figure out how the spell was put together in order to be able to take it apart. Just tossing it willy-nilly on a fire or something would be incredibly reckless.

  So, to that end, Sarah wanted to reconstruct the likely steps that led up to this point. Doc first started feeling off… when? She thought back. They took her to the hospital last Thursday. She’d been feeling sick enough the day before to stay home, and had mentioned feeling a bit sick the night before that, so that was last Tuesday. So, sometime before that, somehow Meg ended up with something of Doc’s and Angela relieved her of it. What was it that Meg took, though? And when?

  “Sarah, pizza’s here!” Sebastian’s voice cut through her thoughts and she blinked back.

  “What pizza?” Sarah looked around. Sebastian was walking back from the front door with three pizza boxes and Gabe was putting out plates at the table. The rest of the journals were back in their box on the floor next to her feet.

  “The pizza we ordered about forty minutes ago when we realized that you weren’t going to come up for air to have an opinion on dinner. You’ve been scribbling your notes there for two and a half hours.

  “Wow. Guess that explains the crick in my back.” She groaned through a stretch. “Where’s Kai?”

  “Ran out to check on Doc then pick up some beer on the way back. He called about twenty minutes ago to say he was heading for BevMo,” Gabe answered.

  “I’ll wait till he’s back then. I think I have a few ideas, but maybe you guys can help me reconstruct the timeline a little for clues,” Sarah said. “Just to make sure I’m not crazy, what do you two think? Is Meg a double agent?”

  “Meg?” Sebastian cracked up, and even Gabe rolled his eyes.

  “I think that’s a no from both of us,” Gabe said. “I doubt she’s that good an actress. Nobody could be that oblivious on purpose.”

  “I don’t know. It would explain a lot about the witches and covens chatter,” Sarah said. She flipped open the lid of the top box and grinned at the Hawaiian pizza. “Best toppings ever.”

  “Yeah, you go ahead and think that, lady,” Gabe smirked. “Give me meat lovers any day.”

  They divvied up the pizzas and spent the next few minutes eating rather than talking.

  “So, what’d you figure out?” Gabe finally slowed down enough to ask.

  “Well, basically, I think Kai found the key to it all. I think Doc’s been hexed with something like a personal item or something like that. How Angela Davila got her hands on anything of Doc’s, I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet she manipulated Meg into it.” Sarah said.

  Gabe nodded. “She’s always absently stuffing things into her pockets when she gets distracted.”

  “That’s true. She could have picked something up completely innocently and just stuck it in her pocket and Angela snagged it,” Sarah agreed. “I don’t think that it was something Angela could plan on, you know?”

  “So, what? You think that maybe Angela sent Meg in to see what Doc was up to and saw an opportunity?” Sebastian chimed in. The door opened as Sarah started to nod her answer, and Kai came in carrying couple of six packs of beer. His phone was perched between his shoulder and his ear.

  “Hang on, Mom. I just got here. I’m going to—”

  Sebastian snagged the phone from his brother’s shoulder. “Hey, Mom! You did? Awesome, I’m going to put you on speaker. We’re having dinner.” Sebastian swiped at the screen then propped the phone up on the side of a pizza box. “We’re all here now, Mom.”

  “Who is ‘we all’ tonight?” the woman’s voice held amusement.

  “Good evening, Ma’am,” Gabe said.

  “Hey, Miss Sachiko. It’s just your sons, me, and Gabe. We’re all at my place right now,” Sarah piped up. “How are you guys doing?”

  “Oh, Sarah! We’re reasonably well, thank you sweetheart. I hear you’ve been having some more excitement,” Sachiko said, her amusement draining away. “I’m so sorry all this has been happening to you all.”

  “Well, we can’t say it’s alright, but I think we’ve got an idea of what’s going on now,” Sarah said. “Just not why.”

  “Well I can’t help you much with that, I’m afraid,” Sachiko said. “But I did confirm my memory of the name. The Davilas are a family that once had a number of powerful witches in their ranks. That was several generations ago, however, and they’ve been losing power since.”

  Kai frowned. “How does that work?”

  “Nobody knows, really. It’s not like there is a lot of research out there on the genetics of magic,” Sachiko answered. “Why is Sebastian so powerful when most spirits’ grandchildren have barely any magic? Why does Gabe have visions at all in the first place? It’s impossible to say at this point. What I can say, though, is that for the most part the D
avilas are perfectly lovely people and it doesn’t seem to bother them much but there is a small group of the Bay Area family— one particularly sour woman and her children— who resent the decline of their powers. Not that there’s much of anything they could do about it, but I tell you for whatever help it may do. I believe this Angela Davila is one of the daughters.”

  “How do you know all this?” Gabe asked.

  “I went to high school with John Davila. I went to dig up my yearbook to make sure I remembered his name right,” Sachiko said. “He was a sweetheart, and was one of the few others in the school that I didn’t have to hide around. His sister was a witch, but like I said, not very powerful. I didn’t know her much— she had graduated college already and moved away. David complained about Thanksgiving every year because he would get stuck listening to his cousins complain about how unfair everything was anytime magic came up in the conversation. They were all about the same age, so they would be contemporaries with me and Doc.”

  “That sure fits,” Kai said. He put his empty beer in the sink and leaned back on the counter.

  “Hey, do you suppose you could get in touch with David? Maybe he knows where his cousin Angela is?” Sebastian asked.

  “I could certainly try. There’s a Facebook group for our class, but I don’t know if he’s a member. You know I don’t look at that site very often.” Sachiko said. A sigh came over the phone and Gabe grinned.

  “If you could check we’d really appreciate it.” Sarah raised her eyebrows at Gabe and he shrugged. “We can find her the old fashioned way, but if we can make this faster at all, that’d be really helpful. I don’t like Doc stuck in the hospital any longer than necessary.”

  “I’ll do what I can, sweetheart. Doc means too much to us to let her suffer.” Sachiko agreed. They all said their goodbyes and cleared away the remains of dinner silently, all of them lost in thought.

  “Hey,” Gabe said slowly, after the dishwasher was loaded. “I could try to find her the magically old-fashioned way. I mean…” He shrugged and ducked his head. “I know that the visions I call up deliberately are much fuzzier and more disjointed than the old ones, but it’s worth a try, right?”

  “Anything we can do, I think. What do you need from us?” Sarah asked.

  “Well, from all the work I’ve done, I know I’ll need a specific question,” Gabe started. He frowned at the table for a moment. “It would be easiest if I had an object to focus on, but I think if I just hold your hand, that’ll work. You and Kai talked to her, right?”

  “Yeah. I also think that she probably knows more about me than him, since I work there. I’d guess Meg talks about me a fair bit,” Sarah nodded. She sat at the table, across from Gabe and stretched her hand out over the top. Sebastian came to sit by her and Kai hovered behind Gabe who grinned.

  “Now, tell this old fortune teller what sort of palm reading you want,” he said with a laugh.

  Sarah rolled her eyes, but let him take her hand in his own.

  “How do you want to phrase this?” Sebastian asked. “We don’t have a specific question to ask, really. We just need all the information we can get.”

  “Man, some of those old Greek stories are making way more sense now. Asking an oracle a question is some heavy pressure. How about something like…” She stared out the window for a moment, vaguely appreciating the sunshine outside. She thought of Doc, sitting on her patio with her, commenting on something or other that happened at the shop or chatting about magical theory. She remembered the crazy days she’d had trying to handle both the shop and the back room witcheries all by herself, and how Doc had been doing just that since Gran got so sick. She pictured Doc lying so still and thin in the hospital bed, and then Angela’s smarmy false sympathy from the other day.

  “Gabe, can you tell me how to save Doc?” Sarah asked. Gabe’s fingers tightened around her own and his eyes lost focus.

  “The house looks like any other. It’s farther out so there’s a little more distance to her neighbor than here, but everything looks normal. The door is opened and you go in. Marcus is right by you in the living room, and it’s bright. Colors and textures and a bamboo grove. It’s a big room, like your house, with a door to the side and a hallway on the far side of the room. There’s a man. He’s aggressive. A woman dressed like the room laughs, then snarls. There’s—” A shiver ran through Gabe and Sarah squeezed his fingers. “Kai finds a box of dolls. They’re dangerous. Sarah takes the box, surrounds them with black. She covers them in light, then when the danger is past, they are returned to the earth.” With that last word, Gabe shuddered and yanked his hands back.

  “Okay, it is officially horrible to look into some place that evil. That woman is not okay,” Gabe said. He dragged in a few deep breaths, then put his head down on his folded arms. Kai moved off to grab a glass of water.

  “Well, that’s not the sort of information we were hoping for, but I’ll definitely take it,” Sebastian said. Kai put the glass on the table in front of Gabe and rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “We know to take Marcus with us,” Kai said.

  “And we have a clue about how to break the hex on Doc. And apparently several other people, which is horrible. I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but…” Sarah shook her head. “I always tend to see people as basically good, but then I meet someone like Angela, and I’m surprised that people are like this in real life.”

  “I know what you mean,” Kai said. “But for now, do we have enough to work on?”

  “I think so. First step, try to track down where her house is.” Sarah said. She glanced at Gabe, who had put his head back down after chugging the water. “I’m wrong. First step is to get Gabe lying down on my bed for a nap. Then we start trying to track down this witch.”

  17

  “So, what’s your diagnosis?” Gabe asked. He was perched on the stool by the work table in the back of the Apothecary while Sarah rummaged on the shelves.

  “Well, you had some pretty interesting things to say about those fetishes. Well, about destroying them, anyway.” Sarah sneezed when she moved something on the bottom shelf that had clearly been there too long. “You said I would surround them with black. That’s not very specific, but it gave me a few ideas.”

  “Yeah? I wish I could remember these visions. They’re just so blurry, and all I’ve got is a vague impression. I know I saw Angela, right? And you guys? But I gave you ideas about what to do?”

  “You did. You had a few things to say about who was there when we confront her. And about how I deal with these fetishes. You said that I’d surround them with black and there’s at least one black thing that I can think of that would suit, and I thought we had some,” Sarah said, half to herself. She moved to another shelf and started moving things around and peering behind them. “Doc and I don’t do a lot of magic that needs careful handling, though, so I guess we ran out and never replaced it. Last time I remember using any was when Doc was showing me how to set up a decent ward. She basically set a small one up and then threw a bunch of terrible stuff at it, and we had the whole thing circled around with salt. But it wasn’t, like, table salt, it was special. Blessed and infused with purification magic and all that stuff. And it was black.”

  “And you don’t have any,” Gabe guessed.

  “Looks like I do not, no.” Sarah huffed a breath out and rearranged the shelf. She grumbled and ran a cloth over everything while she was back there, because honestly. There was no excuse for that amount of dust.

  “Can you get more?”

  “If I can’t get it already made, I can make some myself,” Sarah said. “I think.” Sarah leaned on the shelf and thought. It was actually a pretty simple process that started with plain old salt. The part she wasn’t sure of was the other ingredients. In theory, anything she used would lend its energy to the salt and the spells she would cast over it. But which ingredients to use?

  Sage felt like an obvious choice. There was a reason that even non-magical peo
ple knew of its abilities to purify a space when used for smudging. But what else? She wanted to make sure that this was effective and safe for everyone who was hexed. There wasn’t a point to even try this if they were going to harm the victims, and that was the whole concern in the first place. Suddenly breaking a hex like the one that put Doc in the hospital could backfire horribly.

  “You seem deep in thought,” Gabe poked her in the side. She hadn’t even noticed him getting up and wandering over to where she stared at the shelves.

  “Yeah. Just trying to think of what ingredients I should use. This black salt isn’t a spell, per se, it’s more of a component that is often used on it’s own. It’s good for protection and absorbing negative energies and so forth. It’s pretty popular in the wider human community, as well, and works for them just fine, but since I have a specific use for it— breaking the hex and disrupt the evil spell energy— I want to make sure I get the right energies into it. It’s a little like picking off the shelf cold remedies, you know? A lot of them are really similar, but each is just a little different.” Sarah kept rummaging.

  “How do you tell them all apart?” Gabe asked, watching her shove things around. She peered into another empty jar.

  “Man, we need to get some orders in. This is getting silly,” she muttered. “Well, I guess you do it like you get familiar with anything else. Study up and learn it.”