“Did anybody else use this room?”
“Just Carmen. I mean, Ma came in, but she wouldn’t . . . Why are you asking?”
“I’m sensing erotic emotion in this room.”
“What does that mean?”
So much for subtlety. “Sex. Somebody had a lot of sex in here.”
“Carmen? No way. Ma kept a tight leash on her—maybe too tight—but she didn’t want her ending up like my sister. Besides, I live in the apartment downstairs, so it would have been hard for Carmen to sneak somebody in.”
“Hard, not impossible.”
“No, but—I just don’t see it. And even if she had, what did that have to do with her dying?”
“I don’t know. The impression is so strong it’s masking everything else. I would expect to get more from the actual death, but all I’m getting is sex.” I shrugged. “I told you I’m not the best choice.”
“Not the best choice for what?” a voice demanded.
An older woman with the same coloring as Rocha was standing at the door, her hands on her hips. We’d been so distracted—me by what I was sensing and Rocha by what I was saying—that we hadn’t heard her coming in.
She said, “Herberto, what are you doing now? Did you find another detective to waste your money on? How many people do you need to tell you that Carmen is dead?”
“Ma—”
“What gives you the right to bring a stranger into my house, into my granddaughter’s room? Why do you do this to me?”
“It’s not about you!” Rocha said. “It’s about Carmen.”
“No, it’s about you. You think my heart isn’t bleeding for Carmen? It will always bleed, but I have let her go. Now you must let her go!” She crossed over to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Please, Herberto. I cannot lose my son, too.”
For a moment, I thought he was going to relent and abandon whatever it was he wanted me to find out, but he stepped away. “I can’t, Ma. Not yet. I have to know.” He turned, and I heard him going down the steps.
Leaving me alone with his mother. She was angry, and I was way out of my depth.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should go.”
“What are you? A detective?”
“Not exactly.”
“Don’t tell me. A psychic?” She rolled her eyes.
“Something like that,” I said. For some reason, people are more willing to accept practitioners if we veil ourselves in pseudoscience. “Your son wanted me to see if I sensed anything about your granddaughter’s death.”
“What is there to sense? I get home from work, and come to check on her. She’s on the bed, a schoolbook across her chest. I think she’s fallen asleep while studying, but when I go to touch her, I know. I know she’s—”
The scent of falsehood filled the room. “You’re lying,” I blurted.
“What are you saying?”
“What you just said was a lie.”
“How can you—I would never—”
I waited until she sputtered to a stop, then asked, “Did you lie to your son, too?”
She looked toward the doorway, as if afraid Rocha had returned, but said nothing.
“No wonder he’s making himself crazy. Don’t you think he can tell that you’re hiding something?”
“I did not want him to know,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “Carmen would not want him to know.”
Again, I waited her out.
“When I found Carmen, her clothes were open. Her hand was— I could tell what she’d been doing. I called 911—don’t think I wasted any time. But while I waited for them, I covered her so nobody would know she had sinned.”
“Sinned? Then she was having sex?”
If looks could kill, I’d have died that instant. “I said she sinned, not that she was a whore!”
That’s when I realized what Mrs. Rocha was talking about. “She was touching herself?” That could explain what I’d picked up from the room. A girl’s early experiences with masturbation could be even more intense than actual sex.
“It was nothing to do with her death. I spoke to a doctor privately and she told me Carmen’s heart just stopped.” Then she looked at me. “Will you tell Herberto?”
“Why didn’t you tell him yourself? Maybe you think it’s a sin, but—”
“The Church says it is an offense against chastity!”
No smell of deception there—she believed it. “Okay, but doesn’t your Church say we’re all sinners? Do you think it would make any difference in how he felt about her?”
“It would make a difference in how he feels about himself! It was his fault.” She picked up the purple cell phone that was on top of Carmen’s dresser and waved it at me. “I tried to protect her, but he gave her this for her birthday. He said all the kids had them and that she should, too.”
“What does that have to do—?”
“It was in her other hand. Do you understand? She was playing with herself while talking to some boy. She died sinning because of this thing.” She flung it to the floor. Then, as if she’d spent all her emotion, she walked away as calmly as if nothing had happened.
Ennis had been right—I should have stayed out of it. I hadn’t helped. In fact, I’d probably made things worse, and I’d definitely heard things I had no business hearing.
I had to get away from that house. I started out of Carmen’s bedroom, leaning down almost automatically to pick up her phone and put it back on the dresser. And nearly dropped it again. I could feel a residue of magic that had flowed through it, power so strong I expected to see scorch marks on the plastic.
Looking up to make sure Mrs. Rocha was gone, I dropped the phone into my purse. Then I hurried out of the room, down the stairs, and outside to the street.
Rocha was waiting by my car. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Ma got off work early or something. I didn’t mean for you to get mixed up in all that. And maybe she’s right. Maybe—”
“I found something!”
“What?”
“Carmen’s phone has been used for magic. I don’t know if it had anything to do with her death, but since it was found in her hand—”
“It was in her hand?”
“We need to talk.” I realized he was looking over my shoulder, and turned to see his mother watching us from the front porch. “Why don’t you follow me back to the store?”
“Yeah, that would be better.”
After I’d made sure he knew where Witch’s Haven was, I took off, getting to the store enough ahead of him to get the lights switched on and a pot of coffee started. I didn’t know about Rocha, but I needed a good dose of caffeine. When he tapped at the door, I let him in, but kept the closed sign up and the window blinds down as I locked the door behind him. Then I led the way to the nook, which is what Ennis calls the room in the back of the store where the Kith holds consultations. It’s as twee as hell, with a foursome of overstuffed chairs surrounding a coffee table covered with an embroidered tablecloth. The coffee maker is on a small end table, with cups, napkins and such on the shelf underneath, and when my mother is in town there are usually fresh cookies, too.
Rocha accepted the coffee I offered and said, “What’s this about Carmen’s phone?”
“There are some circumstances your mother has been keeping to herself. When she found Carmen, it was pretty clear that she’d been . . . pleasuring herself.”
I was afraid I’d been too circumspect, because it took a moment for him to get it. Then he blinked, and found an urgent need to look directly at his coffee cup.
“Anyway,” I hurried on, “she had her phone in her hand, as if she’d been talking to somebody. And when I touched the phone I felt power. Magical power.”
“In her phone?”
“Not everybody uses a wand or a crystal ball. My aunt Kristi’s Affinity is for cars. She can fix them, make them run when nobody else can, and knows where they’ve been and who’s been in them.”
“Her Affinity?”
“Everybod
y in the Allaway Kith has some basic abilities—that’s how I could sense the sex in Carmen’s room and the magic on the phone. But we also have specialties, our Affinities. Each one is a little different, and they vary widely in strength, too.” I went on before he could ask what mine was. “The point is, magic can manifest in just about anything, including a phone.” I was reluctant to touch Carmen’s phone again, both because of how it had been used and because I didn’t want to destroy it. So I got a cloth napkin and used that to pull the phone from my purse and lay it on the table.
“Is it dangerous to use?” Rocha asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your mother held it, and it didn’t affect her. How long had Carmen had it?”
“Since the summer. Her birthday was in June.”
“Then I don’t think it’s dangerous that way. If it was, Carmen would have died a long time ago.”
He didn’t say anything as he picked it up, but I could tell he was relieved—he hadn’t bought his niece a cursed phone. “The battery is dead. I guess Ma didn’t bother to plug it in. Do you have a charger I can use?”
“Sorry, no cell phone.”
He looked surprised. “I thought everybody had a cell phone. That’s what I told Ma when she didn’t want me to get one for Carmen. All her friends had them, and I didn’t want her feeling left out.”
“I guess I’m just left out,” I said, “but my mother and sister have phones, and I think they keep spare cords in the back.” I went to the back office and rummaged around until I found a trio of cords from various phones. Rocha picked one, attached it to Carmen’s phone, and plugged it in next to the coffee maker.
“We should wait a little while,” he said.
We both drank coffee without speaking until the silence got to me and I floundered around for a topic. “Rocha . . . is that Puerto Rican?”
“No, Portuguese.”
“We’re Irish. And witches, of course.”
“You all work here in the shop?”
“No, this is my mother’s place. I work here, and so does my sister. How about you? What do you do?”
“I’m an electrician.”
I nodded. Had Rocha not known it before, it would have been clear that small talk was not my Affinity. But in my defense, it was an unusual situation.
Ten minutes was all either of us could stand before Rocha announced there should be enough juice for us to check the phone. “Now what?” he asked.
“You can tell who the last person who called Carmen was, right? Or who she called?”
“Sure, easy,” he said, looking at me as if I were an idiot. Was it my fault that all I knew about cell phones was from TV commercials? Nobody in the Kith would let me touch theirs, for obvious reasons.
He pushed a few buttons, and then aimed the tiny screen in my direction. “It says the last call was to somebody named Alejandro.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Carmen never mentioned an Alejandro to me. There’s no address—just the phone number.”
“Can’t you look up an address from the phone number?”
“Sure. You got a PC?”
“There’s one in the back, but I don’t know how it works.”
“You don’t use a computer, either?”
I just shook my head.
“Even Ma knows how to use a computer.”
We left the phone to charge more, and I showed Rocha to my mother’s office, staying safely out of range as he did whatever was required.
“No address listed,” he said. “Must be a cell phone.”
We went back to the nook. “How come you don’t use a computer or a cell phone?” Rocha asked. “Other witches can, right? Or you wouldn’t have them here.”
I sighed. I’d dodged as long as I could. “The thing is, I’m not a good witch.”
He blanched. “But the Goodwins said you guys used white magic.”
“I don’t mean like ‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?’ More like, ‘Do you have enough magic to light a freaking match?’ Which I don’t.”
“But you sensed things in Carmen’s room. And the magic in the phone. You weren’t just making it up, were you?”
“No, it’s like I said. We’re all born with that stuff. But that’s all I got. Most of us get an Affinity by puberty. My sister’s came when she was six. But me? Puberty came and went, but the Affinity fairy never came calling. That’s what I mean about being a bad witch.”
“Wait a minute. You can smell lies, and sense magic, and tell when things have happened. And you say that’s being a bad witch?”
“It is compared to the rest of the Kith.”
“Compared to the rest of the world, it’s pretty damned good.”
“Yeah? I never thought of it that way.”
“Then maybe you need to hang around some regular people sometimes.”
That sounded suspiciously like an invitation, but I put it aside for the moment. “Anyway,” I said, “it would have been bad enough to just not have a Affinity. There have been others in the Kith who didn’t get one, or got one so useless as to be meaningless. But what I got instead is a special sensitivity to phones. Most of the time when I use one, I screw it up, which is why our connection was so bad earlier. I don’t use computers because of the internet tying in with phone lines.”
“What about wi-fi?”
“Funny thing. Once you’ve ruined three computers as a kid, you’re not tempted to risk another every time the technology improves.”
“That’s rough.”
“I would love to go online,” I admitted, “but not having a cell phone isn’t that big a deal. Half the people I hear on theirs are just telling their friends how bored they are. Anyway, I’d probably fry Carmen’s phone if I tried to use it.”
“No problem. I’ll do it. You think we should call this Alejandro?”
“Definitely.”
Rocha dialed the number, then said, “I’ll put it on speaker.”
After only one ring, a voice answered. “This is Alejandro,” he purred, and I felt my pulse quicken. “Is that you, Carmen? I’ve missed you.”
The guy had, without a doubt, the sexiest voice I’d ever heard, with just a hint of some exotic accent.
Rocha did not seem affected. “Who is this?” he demanded.
“Give the phone to Carmen,” Alejandro ordered. “I don’t do boys.”
“Listen to me, you son of a—”
There was a click as Alejandro hung up.
Rocha reached for the phone again.
“Let me talk this time,” I said. I thought I could speak loudly enough to be heard on the speaker without coming close enough to hurt the phone.
Rocha pushed redial.
Again, Alejandro answered after the first ring. “Carmen?”
“No, this is a friend of Carmen’s,” I said. “She can’t talk right now.”
“But she’s sharing you with me,” he said with obscene insinuation. “What’s your name, Carmen’s friend?”
“Maura.”
He breathed deeply. “What a lovely name. And I can tell you’re just as lovely. Tell me what you look like, Maura.”
It was so unexpected I didn’t have time to come up with a lie. “I’ve got dark red hair—”
“Long and luxurious, or short and sassy?”
“Um, about halfway down my back. My eyes are green, and I’m five foot seven.” I shrugged at Rocha, not knowing what else to say.
“What are you wearing?”
“Jeans and a black T-shirt.” The shirt had the Witch’s Haven logo on it, but I didn’t want to broadcast that.
“I’m starting to get the picture, and it’s a beautiful picture indeed. Do you want to know what I look like?”
“Sure.”
“I look like a man with no interest in the world but you.”
It was so cornball, but I shivered again—his words were affecting me like nothing I’d ever felt before.
He went on to tell me what he’d li
ke to do to me, which involved an outrageous amount of licking, plunging, and straddling, all of which sounded wonderful, even the parts I wasn’t sure were physically possible. I was beyond aroused. I forgot Carmen, I forgot why I’d called Alejandro, and I forgot that Rocha was in the room with me. Until he disconnected the call.
The shock was as sudden as if he’d thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over my head. I was so angry I actually slapped his shoulder. “You asshole!”
He jerked away, taking the phone with him. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re the one who—” I stopped, and swallowed hard. “What the hell was that?” I looked at Rocha, who was staying out of reach. “I am so sorry. I don’t know what—I never hit people!”
“Could have fooled me,” he said, but he was giving me half a smile.
“It was Alejandro’s voice. Have you ever heard anything like that?”
“You really need to get out with normal people, Maura. Haven’t you ever had an obscene phone call?”
“Oh, come on. This was way beyond some heavy breather humping his hand over the phone.” But Rocha was looking at me as if I were crazy. “You didn’t feel it?”
“It was just some guy talking dirty.”
“No, it was more than that,” I said slowly. “This guy was magic. Real magic.”
“Then why didn’t it affect me?”
“He said he doesn’t do boys. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Hang on.” I had an idea, but wanted to verify a vague memory first, so I headed for the shelves where my mother keeps her reference books. I grabbed the biggest, then brought it back to the nook. It only took a few minutes to find the page I was looking for, and another moment to read the section. “Have you ever heard of an incubus? Not the band, the demon.”
“A demon?”
“Don’t freak out on me now, Rocha. If you can handle witches, you can handle demons. There are lots of legends and myths about incubi, but one of the Kith encountered one a couple of hundred years ago. She wrote that incubi seduce women, with a preference for the chaste and innocent. With every encounter, they drain a woman’s vitality, bit by bit. Eventually the women die.”
“You’re saying that guy on the phone was a demon?”
“If my aunt can charm her 1975 Mustang, why can’t a demon use a cell phone?”
The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge Page 8
