A Cast-Off Coven

by Juliet Blackwell

  “Let’s go,” I said, leading the way down the corridor, which ended in a T not far ahead.

  Suddenly I heard something—the muffled sound of a woman weeping.

  “Ya’ll hear that?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” Ginny said, “but that’s not what we usually—”

  I gestured for them to stay where they were and peered around the corner. A young woman leaned against the wall, crying. Pink feathers swayed as her shoulders shook.

  “Andromeda?” I said, approaching her. “What’s wrong?”

  She sniffed, wiped her arm over her wet face, threw her shoulders back, and looked up at me, as though she hadn’t been sobbing a moment ago.

  “Nothing. Hey,” she said to the others with a slight lift of her chin.

  “Hey,” said Kevin, mimicking her chin- rise.

  “Hey,” repeated Ginny.

  “Hey,” echoed Maya.

  I gritted my teeth. I’ve been in California only a couple of months, so perhaps with time I’ll take to the local manner of exchanging “heys” instead of actual greetings. But really . . . would a simple “How are you?” or “Pleased to meet you” kill these people?

  “Gotta bounce,” said Andromeda, rushing past us. “Later.”

  We watched her retreat down the corridor and disappear around the corner.

  “Drama queen,” Ginny muttered under her breath.

  At my questioning look, she shrugged and clarified. “Daddy’s little girl has to get everything she wants, exactly when she wants it. I should be so lucky.”

  “This way to the tower?” I asked, not wanting to engage in student rivalries.

  Kevin nodded. “Straight ahead and to the right.”

  I set off down the hall, the security guard behind me, Maya following him, and Ginny taking up the rear.

  I was starting to wonder if we would find anything at all. From the students’ stories, I had expected to sense something the moment I set foot on campus, but so far the only odd behavior I’d seen came from flesh-and-blood humans. Maybe it was the spooks’ night off, or maybe the students had freaked themselves out with too little sleep, too much caffeine, and forlorn tales of lost loves—a potent brew, I knew from personal experience.

  We turned the corner into a short hallway that ended in a small, windowless square room at the foot of a circular stone stairwell. Ginny screamed.

  Chapter 2

  Jerry Becker—multimillionaire, womanizer, Big Cheese—was sprawled faceup on the hard stone tile. His eyes were open, unblinking, staring into nothing-ness. Blood seeped from his thick white hair and pooled under his head, looking black in the dim light from the hallway. I felt a shimmering energy emanating from the blood. Essence of life.

  “Eeuuuwww! Ew, ew, ew!” Ginny started dancing around like someone who’d gotten caught up in a huge spiderweb, flailing her arms and shuddering in an attempt to shake off the sight of the dead man. “Yuck, yuck, yuck!”

  “Ginny,” I said through clenched teeth, “you need to calm down.”

  “Ew! Gross! Yuck!”

  I looked at Maya imploringly. Her trusty cell phone in one hand, already ringing 911, she wrapped the other arm around Ginny’s slender shoulders and started murmuring to her, leading her over to a bench by the wall.

  Kevin was silent, but his ashen face spoke volumes. He stood as if rooted in place, swaying slightly in his size-twelve work boots.

  “Why don’t you sit down, too, Kevin,” I said, worried that at any moment he would topple over in a dead faint. “I’ll handle this.”

  Despite my brave words, inside I felt like screaming or fainting right alongside them. I stroked my leather medicine bag for strength and concentrated on steady breathing. It might seem strange that finding a dead body could throw me so off balance, but dealing with creatures from other dimensions is not at all the same as dealing with sudden death. The former is a state of being, whereas the latter is a process—in this case, a violent one. I didn’t have much experience with it, and I didn’t want any. But I had to be sure Becker wasn’t still alive. He looked dead as a doornail, but if finding a dead body was bad, mistaking a live person for a dead one was much worse. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecies.

  I studied Becker for a moment, trying to work up my nerve. I noticed a red mark around his neck, as though the chain of his heavy gold medallion had been pulled tight. One leg was twisted at an abnormal angle, obviously broken. On top of his chest was an open briefcase, and papers were scattered around the body like supersized confetti.

  I took a deep breath, reached out, and touched his cheek.

  Cold. The chill beyond life.

  I closed my eyes and willed myself to focus on his vibrations. I sensed anger, but no fear. My gaze shifted to the steep stone staircase. Had Becker simply tripped going up them, struck his head as he tumbled, and lost consciousness before he knew what was happening? Or had he been pushed, and his last emotion was the simmering anger I sensed? And what was he doing in the bell tower in the first place?

  The sound of far-off sirens approaching wrenched me from my thoughts.

  Turning to look behind me, I glanced at Maya, Ginny, and Kevin. They sat huddled together on a wooden bench against the wall, eyes wide and faces green.

  “Was it the ghost?” Maya whispered.

  “You said they weren’t malevolent,” accused Ginny, flinging her arm and pointing at the corpse in high dudgeon. “That—ew! That looks like malevolence to me!”

  “There are exceptions to every rule,” I mumbled. “Still, we don’t know that a ghost did this.”

  Somewhere up the stairs, a door creaked open and slammed shut. My eyes flew toward the sound, but the stairs were empty and I couldn’t see around the curve.

  Loud steps echoed in the tower, descending toward us.

  “You guys hear that, right?” Kevin said, looking about. “It’s not just me?”

  “It’s not just you,” Maya whispered.

  “It’s coming back!” Ginny yelled.

  “Hush, all of you!” I said sternly, trying to get a bead on what might or might not be there. I heard loud, harsh breathing, some of it my own. But not all.

  I moved to the center of the hallway and stood still, arms outstretched, trying to discern what in the world—or beyond this world—we were dealing with.

  The breath became a low moan, bouncing off the corridor walls, growing in intensity, surging and swirling until it felt as though it were inside my head. The walls began to seethe with the sound, swelling and waning as though they were made of a pliable membrane rather than stucco and stone. Everything vibrated with sensations of anger, despair, and fierce jealousy.

  “This is crazy!” Kevin sprang to his feet. “Let’s go!”

  He grabbed Maya’s hand and yanked her down the hall, Ginny close on their heels.

  “Run, Lily!” Ginny yelled. “Come on!”

  The moaning became a roar, filling the hallway until it screamed like a runaway freight train. And just as suddenly it stopped.

  I turned tail and ran.

  I may be a witch, but I’m no fool.

  Within half an hour the first black and white police units to respond to Maya’s 911 call were joined by the medical examiner, the coroner, the photographers, and the fingerprinters. Now I knew where all those taxes went: There must have been two dozen official personnel responding to this call in the middle of the night. Was this routine, or did it have to do with the identity of the victim, the Big Cheese?

  To make the evening complete, I spied a familiar face. As always, he wore his version of a uniform: a thigh-length black leather jacket over khaki chinos, a black T-shirt, and black running shoes.

  “Well, well,” said Carlos Romero, SFPD homicide inspector. “If it isn’t Lily Ivory.”

  “Inspector Romero,” I said with a nod.

  “You wanna tell me what you’re doin’ here in the middle of the night? Or wait—is this the witching hour?”

  Romero and I met n
ot long ago when he thought I might be involved in a suspicious death. One thing had led to another, and I wound up spilling the beans about being a witch. I’ve regretted it ever since.

  “Witching hours vary. They’re culturally defined,” I said primly, as if lecturing an Anthropology 101 class. Carlos had that effect on me.

  “That a fact? You know, that’s what I like most about this job,” Carlos mused. “I learn something new every damned day.”

  “My friend Maya goes here.” I ignored his sarcasm. “The students have been hearing strange noises and footsteps, that sort of thing. I said I’d try to see if it was a ghost.”

  “Okay. . . .” Skepticism shone in his dark eyes. Romero was not much taller than I—short for a man—but he carried himself as if he were six foot four. Homicide was a tough beat, and even as beautiful a city as San Francisco suffered the modern plagues of drugs, crime, and random violence. “Did you find said ghost?”

  I shook my head. “Just the . . . body.”

  “And now you’re going to tell me the victim was killed by a ghost?”

  “Of course not.”

  But I wondered. Might a ghost have pushed Becker down the stairs? We did hear a door slam, followed by footsteps, the breathing, and the moaning . . . but ghosts were spirits, and spirits had no mass. As far as I knew, spectral hands would have passed right through Becker. He might not even have noticed. But then again, if a powerful spirit could open doors and windows, what would keep them from going after a human?

  I was out of my league. I really didn’t know that much about ghosts.

  Still, even assuming a ghost could kill someone, why would it? Ghosts might frighten folks, of course; mess with their minds, sure thing; damage property—especially when remodeling projects disturbed their surroundings—why not? But they rarely had anything to gain by murder. And why target Jerry Becker, who had only recently flown into town?

  No, I doubted it was a ghost. If only it were that simple. Truth was, I sensed something else within these walls; something beyond a ghost. A presence any sane person would fear. Something I didn’t want to admit to myself, much less to homicide inspector Carlos Romero.

  An evil energy, perhaps even . . . a demon.

  “Was Becker killed in the fall?” I asked. “Or could it have been a heart attack, something like that?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me everything you saw and did here tonight, from the start?” Romero liked to ask the questions, not answer them.

  I gave him the rundown: seeing Becker in the café with Walker Landau, the argument with Professor Lucwith-a-“c,” and our brief ghost-hunting tour, including running into Andromeda near the bell tower stairs. He jotted notes on a thick pad of paper that had molded to the contours of his hip pocket.

  “Hi there, Lily,” boomed a deep voice behind me. I looked around to see Romero’s partner, Inspector Neil Nordstrom, approaching us with a huge smile on his face. “How you doin’?”

  “Hi, Neil,” I said. “Nice to see you. Did your sister decide on that French maid’s outfit?”

  “She’s still wavering.”

  “It looked great on her. Thanks for bringing her by the shop.”

  “Sure thing. She was happy to find it. Hey, I was thinking, do you have any outfits from the twenties? There’s this big event coming up right—”

  “If old home week’s over,” Romero interrupted, glaring at his partner, “we’ve got a death to investigate.”

  “Right you are, big guy,” Nordstrom said with a wink and a jaunty salute. After I’d been cleared in the last murder, Neil had brought his sister by my shop, and we wound up chatting. He was a good guy who had a habit of bursting into song when the mood came over him, which struck me as hilarious, given that he was built like a Norwegian linebacker. Now that he wasn’t threatening to haul me off to jail, I quite liked him.

  I liked Romero, too, for that matter. He was smart, and no doubt a top- notch cop. I felt about police officers a lot like I did about the folks who worked urban sanitation systems: Their jobs needed to get done, but I sure as heck didn’t want to deal with sewage of either the raw or the human variety. I was grateful they had my back.

  “What did you do when you found the body?” Romero continued.

  “I felt his neck, looking for a pulse.”

  “Find one?”

  I shook my head. “He was cold to the touch.”

  “Cold? But you said you saw him fifteen minutes earlier, at the café.”

  “Not cold as in rigor mortis. Cold as in he had kicked his last bucket.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “He felt dead, Inspector. I don’t know how else to describe it. He felt cold and dead.”

  “Did you see or hear anything else? Anything at all?”

  “I didn’t see a thing.” I stopped there, not sure whether I wanted to admit to what I’d heard. Romero picked up on my hesitation.

  “You didn’t see anything. Did you hear anything?”

  “Noises.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “A door opening and closing, footsteps on the stairs, heavy breathing.”

  “Heavy breathing?”

  I nodded. “Abnormally heavy. Moaning. And then the sound of something falling down the stairs.”

  “Something fell? What was it?”

  “I don’t know. I turned tail and ran, scareder than a cat in the dog pound.”

  A slight smiled hovered on Carlos’s face. “A what, now?”

  “Cat. In a dog pound. You know, scared witless.”

  “Was someone after you?”

  “I didn’t see a soul. If something was there, it wasn’t a who. It was a what.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Ghost, spirit, some sort of entity.” I shrugged, not wanting to invoke the name of demon. “Or maybe it was all some kind of practical joke. I really don’t know what caused the sounds; I just heard them. I was here to investigate some noises. We heard some noises, we found a body, and then we heard some more noises. You wanted to know everything; that’s everything.”

  Romero nodded and blew out a breath. “Okay, thanks. I take it you’re still at the same place in case I need to ask more questions?”

  I nodded. “Aunt Cora’s Closet, on Haight near Ashbury.”

  “Sounds like Neil, here, remembers the way,” Romero said with a sarcastic twist of his lips.

  “She has an iron maiden outfit that would suit you, Carlos,” Neil suggested.

  Romero had the grace to smile.

  “Is that all you need from me tonight?” I asked. “I don’t mean to rush you, but I’ve got a miniature potbellied pig waiting for me at home.”

  Oscar wasn’t always a potbellied pig. In his natural state he resembled a cross between a goblin and a gargoyle, or maybe a gnome, but he appeared that way only to witches, and select witches at that. He was not, at any rate, conventionally handsome. His tough hide was greenish gray; he had a short snout, big batlike ears, and scaly claws on his hind legs. His hands, though, were outsized and humanlike. He was not big, at full height barely reaching my belly button.

  He had barged into my life not long ago, thanks to a powerful witch named Aidan Rhodes. I wasn’t sure what to make of either of them, but somehow the dynamic duo had managed to assign Oscar as my witch’s familiar before I knew what hit me.

  Before arriving in San Francisco a scant three months ago, I had traveled the world for years, always solo, and I’d fought against the enforced companionship of a familiar. But now . . . I still didn’t trust Aidan as far as I could throw him, but I had to hand it to the little porker; Oscar had worked his way into my heart.

  At the moment, the little fella was crouched on top of my old Wedgewood stove, where he was frying a grilled cheese sandwich, my old red-checked apron tied around his neck like a bib and a big spatula in hand. Melted cheese seeped out from between the slices of bread and sizzled on the hot cast-iron pan.

  “Mistress!” he greeted me i
n his gravelly voice. “I made my own dinner!”

  “I fed you hours ago, Oscar. It’s nearly two in the morning.” I spied the crusts of another sandwich on a plate, evidence that this wasn’t his first go-round with the skillet.

  “I woke up and you weren’t here.”

  Oscar gets hungry when he’s nervous. Or scared. Or happy. Or unhappy. He was pretty much a hungry guy all the way around.

  “Cheese is good.” He snorted happily. “Not stinky cheese. American cheese and Wonder Bread. Builds strong bodies. And butter! Heh, butter. I said ‘butt.’ ”

  He also wasn’t the most mature familiar in the world.

  I smiled and tried to ignore the mess he’d made. It was my own fault for teaching him to cook before training him to clean up.

  “Oh, that man called earlier. It’s on the machine.”

  My heart sped up, just a tad. “What man?”

  “That man. The one who thinks I’m a dog.”

  “Max doesn’t think you’re a dog, Oscar. He just thinks you’re cute. To be more precise, he thinks your piggy form is cute. I’m sure if he saw you in your natural state he would think you were very frightening indeed.”

  Oscar shrugged and refused to meet my eyes. Apparently familiars don’t like to share.

  I crossed over to the counter and hit the Message button on the sleek black machine I had installed just last week.

  “It’s Max. Just wanted to say hi . . . let you know I was thinking about you. Are we still on for brunch tomorrow? Bring your appetite; leave the pig.”

  Max Carmichael was a journalist and a self-proclaimed “mythbuster” who didn’t hold much with magick, much less witchcraft. Typical of me to develop a crush on a man who doubted everything I held near and dear.

  But that voice . . . Max’s voice was deep and sexy, with a hint of weariness that made me want to tuck him into bed . . . and curl up right next to him. Some people had bedroom eyes; Max had a bedroom voice.