“Auclair of Auclair tea, so you own that shop. And you’re in this hotel… seeing somebody? A chance meeting with an out of town lover? Hmm?” he smiled, and was obviously amused at his own gentle (if annoying) teasing.
But I remembered why I was there, and why I had to leave there, so I just smiled back, a tight-lipped smile, leaned backwards, against the door, and let myself out into the sun.
My phone rang almost as soon as I stepped out into the parking lot. Max calling. He could have stuck his head out from the window and yelled to me directly, I was still so close to that awful room and its occupant. Former occupant. And that’s how he’d have to call to get me to respond, because I wasn’t going to pick up for him. I wanted nothing to do with, this whole…
Hmm. I’d turned from the hotel toward the street, where I was parked. While the hotel itself didn’t have any restaurants, there were plenty of good ones within walking distance. Just outside of one of them I saw the delivery boy who had brought the pizza to Not-Fritz. He was older than me, actually, more a delivery man than boy, but his little Vespa was parked semi-legally in a spot outside of Tony Brother’s Cucina Italiana.
Who worked there? Could the pizza itself have had anything to do with the unfortunate fate of…
NO! The sign appeared there in my mind, and I turned bodily away from the main street and just started marching. It didn’t matter if I was marching away from my car, toward residential parts of the neighborhood that I’d just have to go back past to get out of here. I wasn’t going to look at anything that reminded me of this case.
“You’re kind of wandering around here,” Hank said. He’d emerged from the stairway exit, but hadn’t moved to follow me. I waved a hand in his direction, dismissing him as non-rudely I could while still, well, making it clear it was a dismissal.
“And you’re upset. You really need to talk about these things, out loud.” Despite my obvious reluctance to be bugged by somebody, I could hear his voice coming closer. He was following me into the alleyway…
The same alleyway the mysterious woman who took that package which Kashmir insisted was a book of magic disappeared through. Everywhere I stepped I was landing feet first in clues, in reminders of The Case that I wanted nothing to do with.
Something else started nagging me, things that the man had said when he came to the tea shop, looking for who? “Still the sister does not arrive.”
Lucy had assumed he meant Sibyl. I hadn’t assumed any such thing because that would have meant getting involved. And I still didn’t want to be. If the woman who had done those gymnastics out the balcony and then the sprint down this alleyway had been Sibyl, I would have recognized her immediately. Right?
NO. I walked forward, into a growing gloom that seemed to be coming on too fast. The sun wouldn’t set for half an hour, and it should be light for at least another half hour after that, but today the night seemed in a big hurry to get started. Heck, maybe I was doing it. Old-style witches would claim they could influence the weather, the sun and the stars. Maybe my bad mood was bringing out the night a little early here in Lafay. Or my mood was clouding my perceptions. I tried not to think about that, just like I ignored the light touch on my shoulder from Hank, and kept on pushing forward.
“Hey, Mimi?” Hank said, stepping in close next to me. “Mimi, don’t you think this is a little weird?”
“What’s a little weird? That some woman doesn’t want you following her around and wants to go off and do some thinking without you? That I’m not dropping everything for you just because you waggle a finger at me?”
“No, that’s it’s getting really dark all of a sudden,” he said.
I looked up from my determined not looking at anything, and saw it wasn’t just my bad mood making everything seem dark. It was honest to goodness really dark around, like someone had turned out the light on the alleyway. Hank was just a couple feet from me and I could barely see him.
Even weirder, just a few feet back down where I’d come, out into the street with all of its case-related information I did not want, there was no darkness. It was still bright day out there, the long shadows of a low sun cutting patches of only mild dimness across the still very sun-lit pavement.
“Um… oh,” I said, and suddenly shook with the cold of this weird, localized darkness.
Hank grabbed my shoulder, not a gentle and probing touch, but a hard, muscled hand clamping down on me and forcing me to turn, while I could barely make out his other arm extended, and pointing.
He pointed to a shape at the other end of the darkness. It stood at the end of the alley, and behind it the residential street with houses and fences and a woman walking her big white dog was there, as lit as the busy town street.
The shape was of a person, a woman, but without any features. No clothes, no face, no body parts. It was like a crude, ancient charcoal drawing of a person on a cave wall, smears of darkness going out in a few directions to suggest arms and leg, curved slightly with just the barest hint of femininity. One crude hand waved in the air, and darkness flowed out from it.
The other hand was free, and pointing at me. Just like Hank was pointing at it.
The dark oval at the top of the shape split. Black teeth showed, barely perceptible against the other blacknesses, and a black-red tongue darted out.
“Auclair,” the thing said, then it clapped its hands together with a sound like thunder. The world shook.
“What is it?” I screeched.
Hank yanked me to himself hard, and whispered in my ear, “That’s a demon. Now, hold still, or we’re not gonna make it.”
Chapter 7
Hank snapped his fingers, and a fire burst from them like they were match heads. A green fire, with a white center that almost hurt to look at, and which flew out in a weirdly liquid way when he flicked his wrist, like he was throwing lava around. It shot forward, up and down, making a shape in the darkness, just as the power of that charcoal-thing at the end of the alley flowed toward us.
That felt like being caught in a wave on the beach, most of the power hitting me right at my legs and nearly knocking them out from under me and carrying me away. Away toward where, I had no idea. I had no idea what Hank was doing with the fire, or what anything I was looking at meant. Everything in my world had gone a very specific brand of crazy, and it threatened to go crazier.
“Can you do anything?” Hank shouted back at me.
Through the whirling noise caused by the demon’s dark tunnel, I could barely make out his words. They were lost like a scent in a hurricane, barely registering before they were completely dispersed. I shook my head, tried to get to my feet, and then another rush of power whipped by as the demon waved its arms.
I fruitlessly put my arms in front of my face, hoping to get some sort of protection while my legs were yanked out from under me.
I was never supposed to deal with demons. Any more than I was supposed to solve murders or any of this stuff. I was meant by life to be a village witch! Someone who nobody believed had magic but everybody secretly went to her for tinctures and unguents and potions and all of that stuff. Laughed at in the street and winked at in the shop. Not this horrible stuff!
Sibyl fought demons, or so she’d told me, once, under duress. And never talked about it again. Was it all this awful? Would I be tossed out into some sort of weird demon dimension, never to be heard from again? Or was the demon going to throw me across the street? It’s the sort of thing that happens to heroes in movies and on TV all the time, but in real life it probably meant a broken neck at best.
Except, though my feet had gotten off the ground, and were very much in the air, I was not hurtling through space. I risked opening my eyes, and saw Hank was there, one strong hand clutched around my wrist. The other hand pointed out the other way, his fingers very precisely positioned in something that looked like a Yoga pose, but just for his hand.
He was straining mightily as that greenish light spread further up and curved back toward us, like a shi
eld.
It struck me, suddenly, that he was doing magic. I mean, of course it was, why else does green fire shoot from your fingers but from a spell? But it was just so… unexpected. And so different from any magic I’d done or seen up close. I wondered for a second about just how he did it.
Then I screamed, grabbed onto his arm, and pulled on it as hard as I could, all sense completely gone from my mind. I just needed to get closer to him, where it seemed safe. Thankfully, he pulled me in against him, and put his face right against my ear, warm and strong.
“Can you do anything? Do you have anything prepared?” he said, his voice rough and ragged, almost entirely breathless.
“I make tea,” I said, which I hoped would be explanation enough for him. This was some kind of magic that was nothing like I did. “I talk to animals. Ones that can talk.”
And just as I said that, something flitted down from above, and landed on my shoulder. My eyes stung so with pain from the wind and dust that I could barely see it, but it had a familiar feeling to it, one I instantly recognized. This was the cute little bird, who had been my eyes on this most unpleasant afternoon’s journey. He looked like he’d been knocked out of the air with some violence, and the edges of his gray-blue feathers were all tinged black with the burning power of the demon.
This bird would not be here had I not involved it in my machinations. More than fear for my own life, that little thing’s peril galvanized my resolve. “Do something, get us out of here,” I said.
“We gotta fight this thing or—”
“We can’t! Just get us away alive.”
I held tight to Hank, trying to transfer all my wildly whipping emotions to him, as wild as the maelstrom that was beating against us just outside of Hank’s green glowing sphere. I was scared. Of course I was. And I was confused, and if there was one thing I knew from reading Grand-Mere’s journal and from what I knew of performing magic, you cannot do it well in anger. You can’t do it well when you’re just guessing. The best way to keep from hurting yourself and others in a situation like this was to accept it and deal with it, not sling around spells and hope nobody and no thing (and especially no cute little birdy) gets caught in the middle.
“Get us away!” I shouted. Hank clamped a strong arm around me, and I could feel his chin as he nodded, pushing into my own neck.
“This will feel super weird. Best to keep your eyes closed,” he said.
Which, of course, forced me to open them wide, just to see what he was going to do. It involved him moving his fingers around in other crazy poses so flexible it looked like his five fingers were about three dozen. The green fire closed around us entirely, and become a kind of sphere around us. We were in a big bubble of green flame.
Sweat broke out all over Hank’s forehead, even though he barely moved. I could feel tension ripple through his body. Then he whispered to me, right in my ear, “Two blocks from here, there’s an ice cream shop. Point me in its direction.”
I glared at him, but his eyes were closed tight, like he’d told me to do. But people who do magic can know things without seeing them, sometimes and so I just pointed in the direction of Professor Freezerton’s Ice Cream Parlor.
One second later, the green sphere lifted in the air, just an inch off the ground. We were floating!
And I could feel as Hank changed where he was directing his power. In that instant the full brunt of the demon’s magic slammed against the big ball of fire that was not being used as a shield against it.
In that instant, I had a sudden, deep understanding of exactly how the 8-ball feels, when it’s hit directly by the cue ball and slammed, hard, into a pocket. I didn’t do the smart thing that Hank was doing and keep my eyes closed, so I watched as we whipped out of the alleyway, and headed right into the wall of Tony Brother’s.
Then right through…
Completely through. Like it were made out of water, and we were a glass bead. We shot through the restaurant like a cannon ball except nothing blew up, least of all us. We flew over the heads of the people dining there. I even recognized some of them. The Principal from the high school sat with the team coaches, three gourmet pizzas on elevated little platforms in the middle of their table, two pitchers of beer resting in between.
Trish and Randall were there, too, sitting in a corner booth with Randall’s parents. Trish was talking, talking, and they were listening but I couldn’t tell if they were enjoying themselves. We flew above them, and flashed by in an instant. Then we were in the small parking lot behind the restaurant, then in the trees beyond that, whipping over Lafay in our green fire sphere.
That was when I closed my eyes, because I’d seen enough. I clung to Hank tight, holding onto him like he was a ladder and I was about to fall off of a building.
For all the movement, for all the feeling of gravity pulling at my body, there wasn’t the other stuff you’d associate with flying through the air. My hair was not whipping around my head, my clothes were not torn at by fingers of wind. It was so weird. It was magic, but not my magic. My magic was a warm and cozy tea cup. This was something wilder, weirder… and a heck of a lot more masculine.
Just as suddenly and wildly as it began, my feet were on the ground, and the flames around us were glowing different colors now. Hank touched my cheek, and said, “Laugh, like I said something funny. Arm in arm, we walk. Now.”
He grabbed my arm, and, too surprised to do anything else, I followed directions. I laughed like he’d just recited my top five Friends jokes, and then touched him on the chest in a girlfriendy way.
As if we had walked down the block, and hadn’t hurtled out of the air in a ball of green fire, we headed down the street, right into Professor Freezerton’s Parlor, getting in just ahead of a mother with her three kids, two girls and a boy, all jumping up and down and shouting and making her look like she was a monkey trainer, second day on the job.
We got into line, and I nudged Hank.
“Maybe we can let her go first,” I said, angling an eye toward the mom. Then I saw the expression on Hank’s face, the strain in his features and the sweat on his brow. When he shook his head in a tight-lipped no, I didn’t question it.
“Welcome to Professor Freezerton’s,” the girl at the counter said, her brace-mouthed smile looking so gawky and awkward that it somehow made her seem immediately friendly. She had a name-tag that said Soony, and somehow that struck me as hilarious, but I held back on guffaws.
“Hello, Soony,” I said, barely making it through the name. “I need a double scoop of Pecan Praline and mint chip, while my fella here will have…”
He whispered in my ear, a voice so rough and strained I hardly recognized it.
“Double vanilla with hot fudge,” I said.
“Okay, thanks, we’ll get that right for you. How did you train it to do that?” she said, all her words blurring together into a kind of word-swirl so it took my brain an inordinate amount of time, staring at her, to figure out what they were. Then I still had no idea what they mean.
“Train who to do what?” I said.
“Train a birdy to sleep in your pocket. He doesn’t look too well. He’s not dead, is he?” she said, her brace-face smile never slipping for an instant.
I blinked at her, then looked at my front breast pocket. At some point, the poor little birdy had slipped from my shoulder, and had made a little home in there, his tiny, cone-shaped head sticking out.
“No, he’s fine. You’ll bring the ice cream to our table?” I said, and without waiting for an answer dragged Hank to a table, and we both sat down.
I stared at him for a second. Mr. Handsome he might have been, but he looked like he’d gone several rounds with an elite kangaroo boxer. His head listed a bit to one side, and his eyes were not focusing. I needed him to focus… and to tell me why we shouldn’t be screaming and running, with that horrible thing we’d just seen out on the loose.
“Will it find us here?” I said, trying to be matter of fact about my ultimate terror
.
Hank blinked, and just kept staring. He shook his head, but I wasn’t sure if it was at my question, or to clear some cobwebs. I pursed my lips, fretted. I absent-mindedly touched the top notch on the bird’s head, and was gratified to feel it move, slightly, toward my touch. That was a bit of a relief, at least. Not to have my finger immediately bitten off by a tiny, vengeful bird.
Our ice cream was brought to the table by Soony, whose smile faltered a little bit as she took in Hank’s completely wasted looking expression. She looked at him, at me, glanced back toward the far counter where an older man with a white beard was tending to a case filled with ice cream cakes.
In one of those flashes of insight that sometimes strike a woman seeing another woman in distress, I knew what she was thinking.
She thinks Hank is drunk. She thinks her boss, who is over there with the expensive items, has told her to signal for help if she ever has to deal with a drunk, because they have no place inside a kid-friendly establishment with Professor Freezerton’s. She’s weighing possibilities.
“Hank, ice cream,” I said.
Hank grabbed a spoon in a fist, and pulled out an unseemly large dollop of iced cream and hot fudge, which he shoved in his mouth in a manner not entirely dignified.
“Um…” Soony said, “I think I need to talk to my…”
She stopped. After swallowing the bite of ice cream, Hank seemed entirely transformed. He took a deep breath, and when he exhaled all the exhaustion and worry and seeming illness leapt out of him like a demon had been exorcised.
He looked at Soony, said, “Thank you darling,” and I swear I could see Soony age before my eyes. Her expression went entirely from, ‘is this a drunk?’ to ‘Oh my God the handsomest man there is looked at me, how do I steal him from this crazy bird lady?’ in an instant.
Which triggered in me a completely irrational feeling of possessiveness. I said, “Thanks, honey. You got folks waiting at the counter,” with my words, while my eyes told her, ‘lay a finger on him and you’re not getting that finger back, sugar.’
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 5
