That left me alone with a stack of paperback westerns, and I’d have been just as happy if the status had stayed quo, but the phone rang a second time. Since I was theoretically there to serve our customers, I reached for the green glass spray bottle my sister Ennis had left for me. She’d thoughtfully written out a label, in calligraphy, with the instructions.
For Maura:
Apply to both hands before using phone.
Do not let phone come into contact with bare skin.
“Because of course I’d forget how to use the stuff if she didn’t write it down,” I muttered as I spritzed first one hand and then the other. It even smelled nice. After a second of waving to make sure the potion had dried, I gingerly picked up the phone and put it to my ear. “Witch’s Haven.”
“Maura, that’s great,” Ennis chirped. “Your voice isn’t breaking up at all. I knew that potion would help. Now if I can just teach you more control . . .”
“I have plenty of control,” I said between clenched teeth. It might have been more convincing if there hadn’t been a loud snap at that moment.
“Control, Maura. Just keep repeating that chant I taught you.”
I took a deep breath, and managed to stop the feedback on the line. “I can’t chant and talk on the phone at the same time.”
“You can mentally chant while you speak—it’s really not that hard if—”
“What’s up, Ennis? Is something wrong?”
“No, of course not. What could go wrong with this many of the Kith in one place?” She giggled at the very thought. “The retreat has been just wonderful, Maura. I really wish you’d change your mind. Close up the shop and join us.” I might have been touched by her invitation if she hadn’t added, “Even you’d be able to sense the richness of the vibrations.”
“I don’t want to let our customers down,” I said, managing to cause only a couple of pops. “In fact, I can’t talk long—the store is so busy today.” Fortunately, Ennis couldn’t smell a lie over the phone.
“Well, if you’re there anyway, you can take care of that herb delivery from Rodric.”
“He hasn’t brought them yet.”
“Well, duh! He can’t come to the shop—he’d have to cross ley lines, and that would diminish his powers for a week! You have to go pick them up and get instructions for storage.”
Slight crackles. “You said he’d call when he had the order ready. He hasn’t called.”
“Bother! He said it would be this week.”
Since it was only Wednesday, it was hardly reason for concern, especially since Ennis was going to be gone for another week and a half. “Anything else?”
“Don’t forget that we’re setting up the circle tonight, which means we’ll shut off our cell phones and—”
“I know what happens in a circle,” I said. Just because I had no power to add to the ritual didn’t mean I hadn’t seen plenty. I’d even enjoyed them—it was the rest of the retreat that I dreaded, when people talked about techniques and methods that were meaningless to me or, even worse, stopped talking about them whenever I came near. Of course, even that was better than when I was a teenager, when the Elder Sisters of the Kith took turns trying to coax an Affinity, any Affinity at all, out of me.
“Of course you do,” Ennis said in that soothing tone that made me want to pull every hair out of my head or, far more satisfying, hers. “I just wanted to remind you that you won’t be able to get in touch with us by mundane means, and since you can’t use magical methods, I don’t know what you’ll do in an emergency.”
“I think the Salem Police, the Massachusetts State Police, the National Guard, the Coast Guard, and the Girl Scouts will be able to take care of anything that arises,” I said.
There was a pause as she tried to figure out if I was joking. “Well, I suppose you could send somebody to find us, but that would disrupt our—”
“I’ll be fine.” Despite my best efforts, there was a particularly loud pair of pops. “I better let you get to the circle.”
“One other thing. Aunt Hester asked me to give you a message. She had a premonition, something about a man wanting your help.”
“Seriously?”
“I know.” Ennis giggled again. “Her record isn’t very good when it comes to you, is it? But you know Aunt Hester—she insisted that you needed to be told.”
The phone line crackled ominously. As far as I knew, the only one of Aunt Hester’s predictions that had ever failed to come true was the one about my Affinity. She still insisted that I was destined for great power some day. Not even my mother believed her anymore.
Ennis went on. “Anyway, she said you should do your best for him. Which is silly. Even if somebody did ask for anything important, you’d know better than to get involved. I mean, what could you do?”
“Bite me, plant girl,” I muttered, wincing at the resulting sound effects from the phone.
“What? There’s a lot of interference.”
“Just trying a new chant. Anything else?”
“No, that’s it. But if anybody does ask for help, just take his info and tell him somebody like me will be in touch after the retreat. You stay out of it, okay?”
The phone crackled so loudly I had to pull it from my ear, and I said, “Gotta go. There’s a customer waiting.” Then I slammed the handset down before it started sparking. If we ended up needing a new cordless phone, Ennis could pay for it. Did she have to be so freaking superior? Sure she had one of the most powerful Affinities of our generation. Hell, she could make plants do anything for her short of dancing the lambada whereas my only talent seemed to be destroying telephones, modems, and anything connected to them. Did that really make her better than me? I decided against answering that question.
I managed to get through the next couple of hours without having to use the phone, and the only customer was a bus-trip refugee looking for “real witches.” The herbs that make up most of our stock didn’t hold her attention for long, and Aunt Phoebe’s anti-theft spell meant that I didn’t have to keep an eye out for shoplifting, so I ignored her until she got bored and left.
Around four, the phone rang again, and as I reached for it, I managed to knock the spray bottle off the shelf. It promptly fell onto the floor and shattered into a ridiculous number of pieces. Ennis’s potion spread over the floor, which would now be impervious to my phone-destroying powers until the end of time.
“Shit!” I could ignore the phone and let it go to the answering machine, except I’d probably short out both machines when I tried to retrieve the message, and it might be important. Or I could dip my hands in the pool of potion in the floor, and get cut by the glass shards. Or I could answer the phone like a normal person and hope for the best. But what I did was to pull down the arm of my long-sleeved Witch’s Haven T-shirt so that my hand was covered, and use the makeshift glove to hold the phone in the general vicinity of my ear.
“Witch’s Haven. Can I help you?”
I had no idea if the person on the other end understood me. I mostly got pops and snaps and ominous crackles, but just enough syllables crept in to confuse me. “I’m sorry, we have a bad connection,” I said. There were more noises and garbled words but eventually I heard “herb,” which was good enough to convince me that my caller was Rodric, Ennis’s herb supplier. “Fine, can you give me the address?” I held the phone as far away from my ear as possible, and actually heard the address clearly. I scribbled it down on a pad, and said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I’d been planning to shut down early anyway, so after I cleaned up the spilled potion and broken bottle, I made a quick sweep to make sure everything was locked, put up the closed sign Ennis had made—in calligraphy, of course—and headed for my car. Thankfully, my non-Affinity had no effect on cars, but of course any kind of GPS system was right out. Instead I had an actual paper map of Salem, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out how to get to Rodric’s house.
When I got there, I was sure I’d he
ard the address wrong after all. I was expecting enough land for a garden and a greenhouse or two, but I was in a suburban neighborhood and the address was a double-decker house in the midst of a forest of double-deckers, all of them so close together that I could nearly have stood between any two and stretched my arms far enough to touch both.
Well, it couldn’t hurt to check. The door opened as soon as I rang the bell, which was a good sign, and a man looked at me expectantly. He was a couple of years older than I was, and not bad looking, though nothing special: medium height, with medium-brown hair, and a medium build. It would have been funny if he’d also been a medium, but I didn’t sense even a little bit of magic from him.
“Hi, I’m Maura Allaway from Witch’s Haven. I’m looking for—”
“Come on in,” the man said. “There isn’t much time. My mother will be home soon.”
I didn’t know what his mother had to do with it, but stepped inside. Like most double-deckers, the building was split into two apartments. The first door in the foyer apparently led to the downstairs home, while the one the guy opened led to a flight of stairs. He started up in a hurry, and I followed as fast as I could. Even when we got into the apartment proper, he kept leading the way down a short hall, through the kitchen, and toward the back of the place.
I was accustomed to odd manners from the practitioner community, so I wasn’t too surprised until the moment he opened a door and practically pushed me into a bedroom.
I backed out into the hall. “Slow down, tiger! Aren’t you going to at least buy me dinner first?”
“But this is where it happened,” he said, his brow furrowed in confusion.
“I’m sure it is, but it’s not going to be happening there today. Look, Rodric, Ennis said there’d be special instructions for the stuff she ordered, but this is going a bit beyond the pale.”
“Who’s Ennis? And why are you calling me Rodric?”
Shit! Was I in the wrong house? “Didn’t you call Witch’s Haven?”
“Yeah.”
“And you gave me this address?”
“Yes.”
“So I could pick up a batch of herbs?”
“I don’t know anything about herbs.”
“But you said—”
“I said my name is Herberto, Herberto Rocha, and that I need your help. That connection was really bad.”
“Yeah, we’ve been having problems. Let’s start over, Herberto.”
“Everybody calls me Rocha.”
“Okay, Rocha. What kind of help do you need?” I still wasn’t thrilled by the proximity of the bedroom.
“I’ve been asking around town, and the word is that you people—you people at the store, I mean—are, you know . . . real.”
Okay, maybe he wasn’t after my body. “As opposed to imaginary?”
“Real witches. You can do real magic.”
“Says who?”
“The Goodwins. They said you were able to help them when nobody else could.”
I sniffed the air delicately, but there was no falsehood in his words. The Goodwins were trustworthy, and would never purposely send anyone to the Kith who wasn’t in true need, but anybody can be fooled. So I phrased my questions carefully. “Do you mean me harm? Do you mean harm to any of the Allaway Kith?”
“What? No! Of course not.”
He was still telling the truth, which was a relief. Over the years, we’d encountered some nutcase fundamentalists out to burn witches—or even to follow Salem tradition and hang them—and I didn’t like the idea of facing somebody like that on my own. “Good. So what kind of help do you want?”
He took a deep breath. “Two weeks ago—two weeks yesterday—my niece was found dead in her bedroom.”
“And that’s her bedroom?”
He nodded.
Now I was even less inclined to go in. “What happened to her?”
“We don’t know. Nothing showed on the autopsy—no injury, no illness, no nothing. She just . . . died. She was only fifteen years old, Miss Allaway—”
“Maura.”
“Maura. Her name was Carmen, and she was only fifteen years old, and now she’s dead.” He looked down, and it didn’t take my special senses to know that he was fighting back tears. “She was my goddaughter. I don’t know if you have anything like godparents in your, um, religion, but—”
“We have godmothers,” I said. Mine was Aunt Hester, a flake even by Allaway standards, but I knew she’d do anything for me.
“Then maybe you understand how important Carmen was to me. I need to know how she died.”
“The cops must have some idea. What did they put on the death certificate?”
“ ‘Heart failure due to an undetected defect,’ but I don’t believe it. She was as healthy as a horse. Besides . . .” He hesitated. “Something else was going on. The last few weeks Carmen hadn’t been herself.”
“How so?”
“Distracted, not paying attention in school, forgetting her chores, not interested in spending time with her friends.”
“Sounds like drugs.”
I could tell he didn’t like me saying that, but he kept his temper. “The cops thought that, too, but there were no drugs in her system—not so much as a Tylenol. No sign of booze, either.”
“So what do you think happened?”
He rubbed his hand over his face, and I noticed he hadn’t shaved that day. From the look of the bags under his eyes, he wasn’t sleeping well, either. “I don’t know. Maybe the cops are hiding something. Maybe the medical examiner botched something in the lab, missed some kind of poison.”
“Or maybe it was an evil spell?”
“Yeah, no offense. I mean, that makes as much sense as anything else. All I know is that Carmen is gone, and I need to know why. The cops think I’m some kind of nut, and the medical examiner threatened to take out a restraining order if I didn’t stop calling him. I don’t know who else to ask for help.”
Since most people who come to the Kith do so as a last resort, I had a canned answer ready. “Look, I can’t guarantee anything. My family will try to find whatever answers we can, but you’ve got to realize that nothing we learn would ever stand up in court. It might enable you to get better evidence; then again, it might not.”
He nodded.
“That doesn’t mean that you can use what we tell you to try for payback. We’re big into the Law of Return. Do you know what that is?”
“It’s like karma, right?”
“More or less. Whatever we send out, positive or negative, comes back to us. So before the Kith even thinks about investigating, you’ve got to promise not to do anything stupid.”
“I promise.”
My sister Ennis would have insisted that Rocha swear on a Bible or whatever book he held holy, but I could tell he meant it. “Okay, then I’ll get somebody from the Kith to talk to you as soon as possible.”
“Why not you?”
“We all have our specialties,” I hedged, not wanting to tell him that my specialty was random destruction. “Somebody else will be able to help you more.”
“Is there somebody you can call right away? My mother is due home in an hour, and I don’t want her to know what we’re doing.”
“Here’s the thing. I’m the only one of the Kith who’s currently available. The rest are at a retreat, and they won’t be back until the end of next week.”
“I can’t wait that long. My mother—you see my sister took off after Carmen was born, so Ma is raising her. Was raising . . .” He stopped to take a breath. “Ma is going to clear out Carmen’s room this weekend—she says it’s morbid to leave it this way. Don’t you need the room intact to do whatever it is you do?”
“It usually helps.”
“Then I need somebody now. Is there somebody else I can call?”
“There are other practitioners,” I said, “but honestly, there’s nobody else I would recommend. Maybe a regular PI?”
“I talked to a couple. They talked to
the cops, and now they think I’m nuts, too.”
“I’m sorry but—”
“Come on, you’re here. Can’t you at least look around Carmen’s room? Maybe you’ll be able to, um, See or Sense something.”
I could tell the poor guy was capitalizing words, trying to describe something he’d probably never even considered believing in before this. It made me feel awful, and I was about to make more excuses and get the hell out of there. Then I remembered the call from Ennis. Aunt Hester had predicted that somebody would ask me for help, and she thought I should help him. Of course, Ennis would disapprove. So did I want to follow Aunt Hester’s advice or Ennis’s? When I looked at it that way, it was a no-brainer.
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt for me to try,” I said, and stepped inside. I should have realized before that it wasn’t Rocha’s bedroom. The Taylor Swift poster and pink-and-purple striped curtains were dead giveaways. “Where was she found?”
“On the bed,” Rocha said. “Ma got home from work and went to tell Carmen she was back. She knocked, but Carmen didn’t answer, so Ma went in and found her lying there. She could tell Carmen was . . . gone, but she called 911 and they tried to revive her. It was too late.”
I stood still and opened myself up. Though I’d been short-changed in the Affinity department, I did have the usual senses of the Kith: I could smell deception, I could sense vibrations from places and sometimes people, and I could detect magic. It took a moment, but when the sensations from the room hit me, I shuddered.
“Did Carmen have a boyfriend?” I asked. “Or a girlfriend? Anybody she would have been sexually active with?”
Rocha’s face turned pink, and I was still open enough to tell it was from a combination of anger and embarrassment. “Not that I know of.”
The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge Page 7
