She spun around and marched away, outmatched by me. Which I felt at once proud and a little sickened by. She’s 16, I’m… older. And Hank wasn’t in any way shape or form mine, nor was I sure I wanted him.
And why not, a rather interested part of me asked. After all, men like this didn’t spend time with me all that often.
The answer came to me with a word, a word of wisdom brought down from the grandmother to me:
“Mimi, whatever you do, never date a warlock.”
Which was exactly what I was sitting across from: a warlock. A man witch.
Chapter 8
“You’re a warlock,” I said, not even bothering to keep my voice low. There wasn’t likely to be anybody around who would know just what that meant, anyway, and fewer who would understand why it was something that ought to be kept secret.
Hank smiled, and spooned in some more ice cream. “Don’t you think that people should get beyond labels, and really learn what ticks inside someone else before dispensing out any judgment?”
I smiled, and spooned at my own ice cream, but I was shaking my head. “That’s the kind of line I used to get from producers when I was working down in Hollywood. ‘It’s called flirting, kid, not sexual harassment.’ The sort of people who think that if you change something’s name, you’ve changed its nature. Whether or not I call you a warlock, you’re doing black magic.”
As I spoke, I realized that this revelation meant more than it seemed. It wasn’t just that Hank happened to stumble into my shop, and happened to be a black magic user. In magic, for your own sanity you learn to sort out causes from coincidences. If I cast a spell to bring the sun up, and at 5:45 the next morning it does, well… good for my little ego, but I didn’t make it happen. A warlock wandering into a tea shop run by a good witch, that was not a coincidence.
Which meant…
“You brought that thing here,” I said, suddenly feeling chill. My body tensed. The little bird made a slight chirp and wriggled in my pocket, sensing my shift in mood. “You brought that demon.”
I was thinking about how I could get out of there, and then knew that I couldn’t. You can’t leave a warlock alone with innocent people. This was bad.
“You look like a rabbit in a foxhole,” Hank said, his smooth voice still maddeningly alluring. “So, let me tell you a bit about myself. I do magic, yes, just like you do. It comes from a different place than your herb garden stuff, but it’s no more inherently ‘black’ than, say, taking over the mind of an innocent animal to be your spy is ‘white’.”
I put a hand over my little bird, so he couldn’t hear what Hank was saying.
“Shh,” I said. “I didn’t take over anything. I asked Coney to do me a favor, and he did so completely willingly.”
Who knows, it might have even been true. I didn’t want some warlock lording over me, in any case.
“Okay. But I didn’t bring any demon here, I don’t truck with demons.”
“You recognized one quickly enough.”
Hank sighed, tapping his spoon on his rapidly emptying dish. “I run in dangerous crowds. I’ve even done some work alongside Malties, when they could get off their high horse and work with a witch.”
“Maltese? You work with little doggies? What the heck is it you warlocks get up to?”
His calm facade grew a little strained, as did his smile. He shook his head. “Malties. Malleus Tenebrae. Wow, there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“I do know when I’m being condescended to, and don’t appreciate it,” I said, very firmly. “So we’re going to take this very slowly, and in whatever order I want. First, why the ice cream?”
“Oh, that’s easy. Spells like that take a lot of energy out of me, elemental energy. And so I need elemental food to get me grounded again. There is no food more elemental… than vanilla ice cream.”
I stared at him, waiting for the grin or the punchline. He nodded sagely, but didn’t grin or gag at me.
“It contains roughly the same ratio of sugar, fat and protein as breast milk. Seriously. It’s the single most foundational food you can get, and when you deal with elemental magic the way that I do, you need to pay attention to these things.”
“Hmph.” It seemed… plausible, in a magic sort of way. Magic isn’t science. If it were, it wouldn’t be magic. So little connections like that (vanilla ice cream is breast milk? Weird) can mean as much as any chemical reaction. Speaking of which…
“You work with elements?”
“Fire, earth, air, water.”
I nodded. Of course, everyone knows that those weren’t the real elements like one would find on the periodic table, but again: magic. Not science. Elemental magic had worked long before anyone had discovered the atom, it will work until long after we find out there are no atoms and that we’re all just made up of waves, or something. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. I’m a magic gal.
“So explain what happened. You put a big ball of green fire around us, and then… presto?”
“It’s really complicated to explain magically. I… let’s see… the green fire was under my complete control, okay, and if you’re clever with your magic, you can make it do things. Like form a shield to keep all the demonic power from hitting us too hard. Then, when I made that ball, I turned that shield from blocking the energy to redirecting it. Like… if a wave hits a big rock, it breaks against it. If it hits a boat, it shoves it along. I turned the sphere from a rock to a boat. Simple as that.”
“Simple as that. We were slammed through walls without breaking anything and came out on the street right outside here as if we’d just strolled over. Simple as that.”
“Okay, part of the spell I wove made the elemental fire move between spaces and times so that what perceptually to us was a big ball ramming through buildings was actually a…” He talked on and on and on, saying thing about particles and hyperdimensionality.
“Sure,” I said, my eyes glazing over. “But I didn’t see you using anything but your hands. Magic needs more than words and hand motions.”
“Secrets of the order,” he said, glibly.
I folded my arms, and glared.
“Okay, look at my hands.”
I did. I hadn’t noticed it before, but they were smudged. There were lines drawn up the fingers running from the center of the palm out to each fingertip.
“I burn my own specific charcoal for whatever spells I have to prepare for that day. So they’re the medium. The way you use herb and spices, I use charcoal and things around me. Just different tricks of the trade.”
“Hmph.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t buy his answers, but they all felt like they were glazing over important things. And of course there was the most important question of all.
“You’re not in Lafay for no reason. So tell me what you’re doing here, and why you were in my shop.”
Hank twiddled his thumbs, and looked over my shoulder, like he was hoping to distract me. He glanced at me once or twice, his chest heaving like he was making a grand and weighty decision. Then he leaned in.
“I was following that guy. The one who left the second I arrived, with your cat chasing after him.”
I stared at him, waiting for more. Wondering if this was some kind of confession I was hearing, or just a small part of a larger story. After a few moments of my unrelenting gaze, he chuckled and brought up his hands.
“Look, that’s the truth. Whoever he is, an associate of mine knew that he was carrying something powerful and magical, and that it had to be watched after. Crimes of magic are very serious, and if somebody that doesn’t know what they’re doing gets their hands on a book of magic, then it has to be dealt with.”
‘Associate’. ‘Book of magic’. ‘Dealt with’. I swallowed, and tried to keep my eyes on his. That part was easy. Not getting lost in those dark blue pools was the hard part. I had to remain objective… but objectively speaking, he was hella handsome. That could not be denied, by magic or science. And it’s co
mpletely not fair, but in this world you want to give beautiful people and things the benefit of the doubt.
“You weren’t staying at that hotel,” I said.
“No, there’s a motel out of town. For investigations, it’s usually a good idea not to be too visible, and to have a bolt hole to escape to. I was just going to talk to him when we got interrupted. Which is what I still have to do… if that were possible. The demon could have gotten to him. He might have heard what we were up to. Oh, have you noticed the time, by the way?”
I shook my head, looked at my watch. It was about 5:30. All this had happened so fast tonight.
“No, not your watch. That was caught in the spell. Look at the clock over there.”
He pointed to the wall behind me. I turned and craned to look at the big Professor Freezerton’s wall clock, which had the professor (a cartoon version of the old guy back by the cakes, only the cartoon looked a lot friendlier) with his arms for the hour and minute hands. And it said it was 9 o’clock.
“What the…” I looked out at the street, and saw darkness. Street lights kept it bright, but beyond it was all inky black night.
“Another side effect of the spell. To be invisible and move through spaces like that takes a lot of calculating, and a lot of time. We didn’t perceive it because of…”
“No more. Please, no more,” I said, practically banging my head against the table. I don’t care what anybody says, guy magic and girl magic was different. Witches were gardeners, warlocks were guys who worked on cars all weekend to squeeze out an extra dozen rpms, or whatever. We worked with implicit truths of nature and guided things toward our desired ends. They shoot fire out of their fingers and make spells that change space and time. It might have looked cooler, but now my life was short three hours I would never get back.
“Okay, so… I guess I can only hope the demon isn’t going to be there when I head back to the hotel.”
“Hmm?” I said. “You’re going back?”
“There’s not much else for it. I have to talk to that guy, feel him out. You were there, I bet you were trying to do the same thing with your little flying spy in your pocket. What did he have to say? Could you get him to admit he had a magic book, or which one it was?”
I blinked, surprised. Was he playing a game here or… did he really not know that Not-Fritz was not living? I had all but assumed he had something to do with the murder, him and his associate, the girl jumping out of the balcony. But… this changed things.
“You haven’t seen him at all?” I said.
“No. I was actually hanging around outside that parking lot for a while. I had a bead on where the source of magic was coming from, but just as I got to the hotel some other magic went and warped it all, so I couldn’t tell where to go. I think that was your friend in your pocket. So… save me some hassle. What room was he in?”
I stared, and tried to figure out if this was a trap. If I was being lied to, conned. And, Handsome though he might be, he seemed like the kind of man ready and willing to con me, so I had to play smart.
“You don’t know.”
“His room number? No, I don’t know. Come on. I did kinda save you from being shoved into traffic by a demonic specter from beyond man’s world. That oughta be worth a room number. A phone number?”
“Whose, mine or his?” I said, suddenly giggling.
“I’ll take both,” he said, his hand suddenly clasping down on mine, his eyes going for mine like he was working another kind of spell. The sort that isn’t magic, not really, but can still be so effective it feels like magic.
“Oh,” I said, and half-heartedly pulled my hand away. His disappeared instantly, and if he was disappointed he didn’t let it show in his expression. “He’s dead.”
I blurted it out like it was a cough, and Hank’s brow furrowed at the sudden explosion of sound.
“Who’s what?” he said.
“The man. He’s dead. Completely. Like… dead dead. Murdered, I think.” Then I looked at my dish of ice cream, which had melted into a colorful sludge that I suddenly couldn’t imagine eating. “I thought you knew. I thought you even maybe did it.”
I tried to make what was a murder accusation sound casual, even light. Then I looked at his face to see his reaction.
He… just looked thoughtful. Then he nodded.
“When you learn to do magic,” he said, leaning forward and bringing his voice low to make it confidential (and sexy, honest truth to tell), “you learn one thing is more important than anything else: separate cause from coincidence. You wave your hand and a door blows open, you have to know that it was your skill, and not a random wind. Only way to make sure you know what you’re doing.”
I found myself nodding just as if I hadn’t had this exact same thought, only minutes ago. Was he some kind of mind reader? No, of course not. He’s just in the same business. It would be like one baker talking to another one about the importance of precise measurements.
“So it wasn’t at all a coincidence that I was at the hotel. That you were there at the same time, again, not a coincidence. But I didn’t kill that man. How did it happen?”
All of my previous personal assurances that I was out of the murder discussing game flew out the window. I was circumspect, I didn’t mention anything about Max or the overly-knowledgeable man at the desk, but I told him basically what I saw - the man collapsing through the eyes of the bird. I came to the room, found him dead with pizza in his hand, and I left. Then we bumped into each other, literally.
I did not mention the delivery boy, the weird guy in dark clothes, or the woman escaping with the package. A girl knows when she needs to hold back some information.
“Then the book could still be in the hotel room. Unless the demon got it… which isn’t likely.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Hank leaned back, and looked at our empty bowls. “We’re taking up space here, and I want to get out into the night air. Put my sniffer to the sky, see if I can get some bead on where that book could have gotten to. Let’s talk out there.”
This felt like a dodge of my question, but I was going to allow it. For about 37 seconds, then I was going to need some answers, Buster.
We went out into the night which, in Lafay, was never quite bustling. It wasn’t a dead town, just a small one, and shops were starting to close. There was a bar at the end of the block, but it was a closed in affair that always seemed almost like a private club to me, and I’d never gone in. There was a witch-related establishment a few blocks down that I’d gone too not so long ago with Max, but that was on a case and I do not do cases anymore. I’m just a regular witch, not a crime fighting demon kicker.
“Okay, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I want straight answers.”
“Sure,” Hank said, taking a deep breath. “But first I just want to say I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t kill people.”
“You’re a warlock,” I said, as if that settled the matter.
“And you’re a witch. You poison your neighbors crops and make their children born blind. You’ve got a wart on the end of your nose and are mean to girls in red shoes with small dogs.”
I rolled my eyes, though I caught his drift. Stereotypes about witches bugged me, I supposed I could understand he felt the same thing about his kind. Except…
“But witches could do those things. If they wanted to. The power’s there, but you have to be a bad person to use it like that. I think I’m answering my own complaint,” I said, quieting down.
“Exactly. I’m not some monster just because I have abilities and knowledge. And I don’t kill people. Like I said.”
“But you were following this man, a man who looked very paranoid and scared. Was that because a warlock was hot on his tail?”
We’d made it to the end of the block, and Hank waited on the street corner for a second for the light to change. He might have been a warlock, commander of the dark arts, but when he was in somebody else’s town he was apparently very
conscientious about their traffic laws.
We crossed, heading through a stretch of house-lined streets before heading back to the main street. I noticed, as we walked in silence, three things. One, he was not answering my questions. Two, we were walking back toward the hotel. And three, we’d just stepped out of the light into the darkness, away from where, even though the shops were closing, there was still some people around. I was on a dark street with a stranger.
I swallowed, reached my hands in my pockets for something, anything that I could protect myself with. Just in case. But there wasn’t anything. My purse was in my car, my car was in front of the hotel, and for all I know there was a demon sitting on the hood, waiting for me to return.
“We’re going to be safe,” Hank said, pulling me a little closer to his strength and warmth as we walked. “Demons are terribly dangerous, but they’re also not supposed to be here, in our world.”
“Oh, so, what, they feel guilty about intruding and excuse themselves?” I said, maybe a bit too sarcastically.
“No, for them, as I understand it, it’s like diving into the ocean. You can go into the ocean for a while, a great while if you’ve been trained. But it’s not your environment.”
“Maybe that makes sense, or maybe I just don’t know enough to see through the nonsense. But you were following this guy, and a demon just happens to show up. Remember what we were saying about coincidence and causes?”
Hank nodded, slowing down as we got closer to the end of the block. I wasn’t actually feeling scared of him, which might have been me being stupid. But there was plenty else to feel scared about.
He stopped at the corner, right at the edge of a head-high wall that surrounded a little commercial center. It was a handsome little building, two stories with a parking lot that went under half the building. Beyond that, just a block away was the hotel. Hank looked around the corner, then took a step back.
“Police cars are out there. There’s an ambulance, but its back-door is closed. I’m figuring the body is already in there.”
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 6
