Cackles and Cauldrons

by Sarina Dorie

  He was so happy. I stared at him, perplexed. I hated to break the news to him. “I didn’t—I mean, well, I tickled you, but I didn’t give you a hand job. I thought you were the one touching me.”

  The delight in his eyes faded. “I didn’t touch you. Not after I squeezed your knee to get your attention. Anything more I worried would have been . . . invasive. As it was, I was surprised. . . . Oh.”

  My stomach felt as though it were shrinking inside me, a gnawing fear consuming my body. She had done this. She hadn’t radiated rage and poison as she had before. Somehow she’d concealed herself and disguised her essence enough that it had felt like Thatch.

  Thatch sat up. I projected my awareness out of my body, tasting the magic in the room. I didn’t feel her, but she had fooled me before as well.

  “You should probably dress,” Thatch rose. “We need to go to the administration wing and file a report.”

  “If you do, Khaba is going to blame you. He’ll say anything I felt was you.” Elric had already convinced Khaba that Thatch was molesting me during meditation. He would say this was Thatch as well.

  “Indeed. I will leave some details out. I shall say I was psychically attacked before I felt the presence move toward you.”

  Josie already knew I had left dinner early because I didn’t feel well. I could say I felt a presence. I didn’t need to be explicit about how it had touched me. I wrapped my arms around myself, the afterglow I’d felt moments earlier replaced by ickiness.

  Thatch scooped up my clothes and handed them to me. “I believe it is in our best interests to cease being physically intimate in our dreams. It may be opening us up for further vulnerabilities.”

  I stared at my pile of clothes, but I didn’t see them. My thoughts were still on the Fae. “I thought you warded my dreams.”

  “Indeed. The school is also warded, but this Fae has nonetheless gotten in multiple times. It may be so with your dreams. She is toying with you now because that’s what Fae like to do. She’s like a cat playing with a mouse, batting it, letting it go so it can make it a few steps before she catches it again. Sooner or later she will tire of games, and you’ll see her teeth.” He dressed himself in the suit he’d been wearing earlier.

  “So should I stop practicing lucid-dreaming techniques?”

  “No. You should continue to practice control of your subconscious and awareness. Learn to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Practice sensing my essence versus someone else’s.” His words came out sharp. It sounded like he thought it was my fault.

  “I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t tell the difference. You couldn’t either.”

  He sat down beside me, his vest not yet buttoned, and his cravat loose around his neck. He hugged me around the shoulders. “I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming myself. I’ve been attempting to teach you a skill that I have neglected because I do not excel at it, nor have I had a need for it. I have learned other magics that have similar results, but do not work in this circumstance with a Fae.” He kissed the top of my head. “Get dressed, Clarissa. I will take you to the administration wing with me, and we’ll see if Khaba has returned from his meeting. If not, I will leave you with Josephine Kimura. I don’t want you to be alone.”

  I dressed and went with him to the office. No one was in. I sat with him as we both filled out our incident reports. Thatch wanted me to stay with Josie or Pinky, but I had other things I needed to do.

  “Will you walk with me to the library instead?” I asked.

  “I don’t want you alone.”

  “I won’t be alone. Students will be in the library. Gertrude will be there.”

  He stared straight forward, not looking at me. “How long do you need to be there? I’ll walk you to your room when you’re done.”

  He was putting a damper on my research. Truth be told, I would have stayed in the library all night if I had been allowed, but teachers were supposed to be in bed before curfew. I didn’t know if anyone was going to check to make sure I was in bed among the administration staff. If Vega told Thatch, he’d worry. If she told someone else, I’d get in trouble.

  I gazed at his grim expression. “How about eight?” That still gave me some time to get ready for bed before I had to be inside my room.

  He agreed he’d return for me at that time. Gertrude wasn’t in the library, but the door to her office was open. She had to be around somewhere. There were enough students in the library, I didn’t know if I would be able to sneak in and out of the library crypt without being noticed. Plus if I did go downstairs, I wouldn’t be able to get started on anything useful without that Celestor spell to do the keyword search. I used the card catalogue, trying combinations of words I hadn’t thought of the last time I’d attempted to find information in the library.

  It felt like I’d been waiting forever for Gertrude to show up when I heard a noise from her office. I looked over to find she’d closed her office door. I only had half an hour by this point before Thatch picked me up. I could still get some research done in that time.

  I rushed over and knocked on Gertrude’s door. She didn’t answer.

  “Miss Periwinkle. It’s me, Clarissa Lawrence. I need your assistance finding a book.”

  Papers shuffled on the other side of the door.

  “I know you’re in there,” I said.

  The door opened. Gertrude yanked me inside. Her eyes were red and puffy. Tears streamed down her face. She closed the door behind me.

  “Is it true about what they said about you?” Desperation filled her voice. “That you resurrected Vega from the dead?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t use forbidden magic.”

  She grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me. “You don’t have to lie to me. I already know what you are. I need to know if it’s true. Can you bring the dead back to life?”

  “Um. . . .” I could have said “only temporarily” but I had a feeling that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “What’s going on? Did someone get hurt?”

  “I don’t know what to do. I killed Rudy McDougal.”

  Craptacular. Why couldn’t I have decided to go to the library another night?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Over My Dead Body

  “They’re going to blame me.” Gertrude Periwinkle was hyperventilating as she sobbed. “They’ll say it was magic. Murder. Everyone already knows how mad I was at him. Because he took my books. They’ll say I had a motive.”

  I doubted anyone was going to think she’d commit murder over library books. “Calm down,” I said. “Sit down. Take a deep breath.”

  She sat in the chair and wept. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I hugged her.

  Half her hair had fallen from the messy bun on top of her head. The buttons of her high-collared blouse were askew, and the bottom was only partially tucked into her long skirt. She didn’t look like she was wearing a bra or corset.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  I handed her a mostly clean tissue from my pocket.

  She blew her nose. “We were having intercourse, and he collapsed. I couldn’t hear his heartbeat or feel him breathing.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Forty minutes ago.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

  Apparently Thatch and I weren’t the only ones who thought dinner break was the perfect time to sneak away.

  She sniffled. “I kept trying to use healing magic to see if I could revive him, but he was already dead, so it wouldn’t work. Can you use that Morty magic? The Heimlich maneuver?”

  “That isn’t going to work.” Having lived in the Unseen Realm this long, she was ignorant of most Morty medicine. CPR and first aid were not going to cut it.

  “Do you know what killed him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She shook my arm. “They’ll blame me. Principal Dean already questioned me this week because of . . . I didn’t commit that murder either. Felix knows. He�
�ll vouch for me. He was a teacher here at that time. He’ll tell them I didn’t kill anyone. They just blamed me because I’m a siren and those boys were my lovers.”

  “Slow down. Let me think.” I already knew about the accidents that had happened when she’d been a student. Thatch had told me she hadn’t been the killer. Teachers who had worked at the school at the time still remembered. Some of them had still blamed her. I could see if the new principal thought she was behind those deaths, he might also jump to conclusions about this.

  It probably wasn’t in Gertrude’s favor that more recently she’d seduced Sebastian Reade and Brogan. Both of them had ended up dead. Both had been murdered by Derrick, which Khaba was in denial about. This wasn’t going to help her.

  “Will you try to resurrect him? Please?” she asked.

  “How about I take a peek at the body? Will it be too hard for you to see him again?”

  Her voice rose in agitation. “He’s invisible. Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  “Heh. No pun intended.”

  Gertrude inserted her key into the wall. A door materialized and opened. We walked the short distance down the hall to her private living area.

  The room smelled musty, like rancid sweat. She’d left candles burning, a major fire hazard considering everything in her room was made from books. I might have mistaken the giant pillars stretching from floor to ceiling to be Greek columns had I not previously seen her room in daylight to know they were actually stacks of books.

  Her room was made for a single occupant, but far larger than my own, with a kitchenette and a comfy reading chair next to a fireplace. She had her own private bathroom that was way better than the one I had to share with other female teachers.

  As I stepped closer to the bed, it was obvious where Rudy had fallen from the depressed shape made by his body in the bed. I tentatively reached a hand toward him, recoiling when I made contact. His back was cold with sweat.

  It was bad enough I had to be touching a dead body, but a naked dead body was worse.

  I didn’t know if I could resurrect him in the same way I had with Vega. He’d been dead for too long. It was possible I might resurrect him as I had done with Galswintha the Wise or Sebastian Reade, but that was only temporary.

  “Help me roll him over, and I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Wait, first, do you have any gloves?” I didn’t particularly want him to wake up while we were rolling him over.

  She gave me a pair of gloves. Just turning him took us ten minutes. His clothes had turned visible, apparently after he’d shed them. We dressed him because I couldn’t handle a naked resurrected body. He must have had some kind of special spell that turned his garments invisible when he wore them, because they slowly faded out of sight after we dressed him.

  “I don’t suppose you can just use magic to do all this,” I said, waving a hand at pants I could no longer see.

  “No, he has too many wards. They didn’t all fade when he died,” she said. “I couldn’t use a spell to dress him or move him.”

  When we at last finished, I removed the gloves.

  “Stand back,” I said.

  I had enough touch magic in me stored from my earlier exploits with Thatch that I was able to send a jolt of electricity into his chest. Nothing happened.

  I tried placing my hands on his bare feet. Still nothing happened. Maybe I’d used up too much magic. I didn’t know why it wasn’t working. It had worked before, even when I hadn’t wanted it to.

  “Rudy?” I said. “Are you there?”

  Still nothing.

  “Try shaking him,” Gertrude insisted.

  Why wasn’t it working? Was it his wards or his invisibility? Maybe I had to wait until after rigor mortis had set in.

  I pushed my awareness into him to try to determine the problem. This was different from traveling through a wall or even when I had felt that shard in Vega’s soul. He was a big slab of cooling meat. Cholesterol clogged his arteries. His heart felt as though it had ruptured in his chest. I wasn’t a doctor, but I guessed he’d died of a heart attack. I didn’t feel the presence of his soul.

  Gertrude started shaking again. I was afraid she was about to relapse into tears. I stepped away from Rudy.

  “I’ve done everything I can think of. We need to get help from someone else.”

  “No,” she said quickly.

  “We can ask Thatch what to do.”

  “No!” she said louder. “I can’t tell him a man died in my bed.”

  “Look. He knows you’ve had sex with other men since you broke up. It isn’t a problem.”

  She threw her arms around me and hugged me. “I just can’t tell him. I don’t want him to look at me like he does, all pitying.”

  “Who else are you going to ask? Vega?” I patted her back. “Get yourself cleaned up in the bathroom and meet me in your office. Thatch will be here in a few minutes whether you like it or not.”

  I went to her office without her. Thatch hadn’t arrived at the library yet, but I still had two more minutes before it was eight o’clock. I didn’t see any students left in the library, but I did a psychic sweep anyway.

  When Gertrude emerged, she was dressed in fresh clothes, and her hair was tidied. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were still puffy. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would figure out something was wrong just by looking at her. She locked the library and put up the closed sign, but she didn’t extinguish the candles or dim the magical glow coming from the false windows.

  I sat behind the counter with her, waiting for Thatch. She tapped her foot anxiously. The minutes ticked away. It wasn’t like him to be tardy, but he was in the habit of not showing up at all. Every time a magical occurrence happened in the Morty Realm that he needed to investigate, he had to leave the school, and sometimes it took hours for him to return. I wanted to believe that was what had happened, not that he’d been harmed by the Princess of Lies and Truth.

  I wanted to ask Gertrude to use that spell for me to locate the Princess of Lies and Truth’s name in books so I could go downstairs and do research, but I supposed a true friend wouldn’t have abandoned her—even if it was important research. I stayed with her and held her hand.

  Each second on the clock lurched with a loud clunk that filled the silence.

  I felt like one of us should say something. “So . . . did you ever get those library books back?” I asked by way of small talk.

  She shot me a disgusted look. Probably it wasn’t the most appropriate question.

  I shrugged. “Sorry. None of my business.”

  She stared down at her hands. “No. He didn’t give them back.”

  “That’s too bad. Is that why you were sleeping with him?” Maybe that was too personal, but my epic awkwardness couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to ask.

  “I didn’t use siren magic to seduce him, if that’s what you think. I have better control of myself these days now that I’m not involved with Felix. I do fine when I’m not around one of you for too long.”

  I think I could have been friends with her if my passive magic didn’t make her want me. Having a friend who wanted to turn into a spider and either eat me or mate with me wasn’t much better. It was hard having friends when I turned them into monsters. Vega might have been the only seminormal one around me, but that was probably because she was already a monster all the time.

  Gertrude’s lips puckered as she pursed them. “I didn’t use siren magic. I wasn’t coercing anyone. I thought about it, but I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t say you had.”

  “It was Rudy’s idea. The bargain. He wanted to know if I would sleep with him if he gave them back.”

  I hadn’t particularly liked Rudy, but now I thought he was a complete sleazebag. “Why did you agree?”

  “I wanted my books back.” Her lips twitched. “And it’s been a month since I’ve had sex. I thought it might be interesting with an invisible
man. You know what they say about invisible men, right?”

  “Um. No.”

  I wondered if she knew Derrick had been an invisible man.

  She opened her mouth but stopped, listening. A creaky voice outside the library said something. It was the door announcing its riddle.

  Thatch came marching in a few seconds later. He halted in his tracks, looking us up and down. I hopped out of my chair.

  “What happened?” I asked at the same time he did.

  We both answered at the same time as well, drowning each other out.

  Gertrude snorted out a laugh. “Aren’t the two of you adorable?” Her smile was wistful.

  I suspected she still had feelings for him. That was why this was going to be so hard for her.

  “I needed to run an errand. I returned as soon as I could. I apologize for my tardiness.” He looked from me to Gertrude. “Is everything . . . all right?”

  She swallowed.

  “Gertrude had an accident,” I said.

  The worry lines in his forehead smoothed. He forced his face into an expressionless mask that hid all emotion.

  “Explain,” he said.

  “I did not murder him,” Gertrude said with a façade of measured calm.

  Thatch stiffened.

  I explained quickly, before he could jump to any conclusions. “He died of a heart attack,” I said. “Rudy McDougal. Gertrude didn’t kill him. She’s just afraid other people will think so because of her reputation as a siren and because of the past murders people blamed her for.”

  “Where is he now?” The look he gave her was so full of pity, she couldn’t meet his eyes.

  She hung her head in shame. “In my bed.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “He was actually the one coercing her. It wasn’t her fault.”

  She nudged me.

  “Are you certain he died of natural causes?” Thatch asked.

  “Mostly certain,” I said. That was the way it had felt.

  We returned to Gertrude’s room. Thatch muttered spells and searched for curses and hexes before coming to the same conclusion I had.