The final box held a bone shard strung on leather. Its label read Death. There was no price. He thought at first it was a murder weapon. But there was no feeling of darkness to the magic.
“Don’t touch that,” said Tag. “It’s a cyanide pill.”
“She didn’t wear it,” murmured Charles. “Unless she made a second one.”
“It’s not the kind of thing you’d make two of,” Tag said. “One is useful, but you can’t commit suicide twice. She left it here in the end. I hope she didn’t regret that.”
“I thought you said you could detect witchcraft, but you didn’t know anything about it?” Charles asked.
Tag shrugged. “Maybe I picked up a thing or two along the way. But it’s not anything like vast knowledge.”
Outside of those two boxes, none of the charms would have been enough to get anyone into trouble. Even taken together, there was no harm in them. The purpose of each was very carefully set, and they would have been impossible to use additively. One charm for good health was as effective as wearing sixteen at the same time. It wasn’t Carrie’s doing—it was just the nature of this kind of charm.
They could have left the bin, minus the two small boxes, to the storage manager’s care without worry. But after exchanging a brief look with Charles, Tag moved it into the pile of things to take with them. Charles wasn’t sure what tipped the balance for Tag, but Charles didn’t want Carrie’s careful work to go to people who would not appreciate it.
Anna showed up, parking the SUV in front of the next unit over because they had filled the available space in front of Carrie’s unit with approximately half the contents of her locker. Anna looked tired, and the expression on her face when she got out of the rig made him open his arms.
She walked into them and buried her face in his shoulder and relaxed against him.
“She didn’t know,” she told him, her voice muffled. “They figured out she was pregnant after we left them yesterday—apparently she’d gone to see a doctor about her unusual tiredness and upset digestive tract. On the good side, her wife now believes that Sissy didn’t cheat on her and then lie about it. That is, believe me, the only good side.”
“Abortion?” Charles suggested.
Anna shook her head. “Apparently Dr. Connors has protested and fought for reproductive rights for others, but finds the idea personally unacceptable. Tanya disagrees. I found them fighting about one thing and left them fighting about another. If they aren’t careful, this will destroy them.”
She stepped back and gave him a smile that was a little thin around the edges. “And there’s nothing more I can do to affect that one way or the other.” She rubbed her upper arms and said briskly, “Have you found anything interesting?”
She looked over at the smallish pile of things he and Tag had set aside and let out a pleased sound. She knelt by the antique spool cabinet. It was about two feet square and a little older than Charles was, clearly a family heirloom. It had six drawers, and Anna opened each one and took in the spools of thread set on individual dowels—organized by color, black in the top drawer working down to white.
“Is it the thread or the cabinet that is magical?” Anna asked, brow furrowed. “Even calling on my wolf, I can’t tell for sure.”
“Both, we think,” said Charles. “But neither Tag nor I have a clue what they would be used for.”
Her fingers traced the bird’s-eye maple appreciatively, but she said, “What happens if Carrie wants her stuff back? Or one of her relatives?”
“I don’t think Da will agree to give back the grimoires,” Charles said in what he was fairly sure was a massive understatement. Anna’s quick grin told him she agreed with him.
“As to the rest …” He looked at the spool cabinet, then shrugged. “If she is not dead, we’ll give it back. If she is dead and there is a will—we are not thieves. Anything that isn’t dangerous we’ll hand over.”
She listened to his tone as much as his words—that was one of her gifts. “You don’t think that there’s anyone.”
He shook his head. “It feels like she was alone.” He tried to explain why he felt that way, but failed.
“Other than Daniel Green,” said Anna.
“We wouldn’t give him anything,” Charles said. “But I don’t think that will be an issue.”
“I wonder,” said Anna thoughtfully, “do you think that Carrie knew what she was doing when she entrusted him into the loving arms of the witches who run Angel Hills?”
“Yes,” said Charles. Someone as organized and thorough as the woman whose life he’d been invading was not the kind of person who would make a mistake on that scale. He wondered what Daniel Green had done to his granddaughter.
“He said she was Wiccan,” Anna said. “How does leaving him there jibe with ‘An it harm none’?”
“Even the most peaceable people have their limits,” Charles suggested. “And putting him there certainly reduced the harm that he could cause.”
“You like her,” Anna said.
He considered that. “I like what I know about her.”
“You gonna sit around, or are you gonna work?” asked Tag, hauling a wingback chair out to the bigger pile.
Anna snorted a laugh at Tag, so Brother Wolf didn’t remind Tag who gave the orders.
“Sissy translated the letter her father wrote. She said there were a few differences between the letters, but most of it was word for word.” She pulled a couple of pieces of paper out of her back pocket and handed them to Charles. Tag took up a position where he could read them, too.
Dear Dr. Connors the Younger,
My daughter. So much has gone wrong I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t even know if you’ll get this letter, but I live in hope.
First, I love you. I take joy in every day because I had you, your brother, and your mother in my life. I do not think that I will survive this coming night.
It discovered that we had broken our bargain, before I knew there was a bargain to be broken. Remember, if something is too good to be true—it is a lie. Do not come here.
I have not spoken to you about the Singer, have I? I suppose that must mean that I understood there was something wrong before I admitted it to myself.
We tried to kill ourselves, we tried to kill each other, and it would not let us. Nor will it let us leave.
I woke up this morning and I looked for your mother because I thought that it was the morning after we got married. I looked for her for an hour before the Sign Maker found me. He is deaf and it seems to make him immune to most of what the Singer has been doing to us. The Opera Singer has been crying for two days because she thinks that her daughter died today instead of twenty years ago.
It feeds upon music, but I think it also feeds upon emotions. I don’t think it eats memories, because we wouldn’t get our memories back if it could feed upon them. And mostly we get our memories back.
We all know there are black witches here now—but we don’t remember them.
Sometimes some of us remember that it plans on killing us when it’s done playing. We can’t prevent that, but we need to prepare. We, Sign Maker and I, killed all of the animals last night because once we are dead, they will suffer. The coven lay wards around the bodies and we mourned. I don’t think there was anyone there who did not wish to trade places with those animals.
I don’t think we will meet again in this life, my daughter. I wish you joy and happiness. I am so proud to call you my daughter. So proud of the man my son is, too. Please let him know in case I don’t get a chance to write to him tomorrow.
With love,
Dr. Connors the Elder, aka Dad
“It would have been nice if he’d spelled everything out,” Charles murmured.
“At least we know what happened to the pets,” Tag replied.
“Has Mercy called you back?” Anna asked.
“She says she’ll try, but Coyote doesn’t carry a cell phone and is usually disinclined to be useful.”
&
nbsp; “So no help there,” translated Tag.
“Not yet,” Charles said as he read the letter a second time, looking for anything that might be of use. “Mercy will figure out how to get in touch with him. After that, it’s up to Coyote.”
He folded the pieces of paper, and, as Anna had, he put them in his back pocket. “We should get back to work here.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Anna asked.
Charles shook his head. “Carrie is pretty good at hiding her magic. I don’t think you’d be able to find anything unless you changed to wolf.”
“I can’t open boxes or move them easily in wolf form,” Anna said regretfully. “There’s a pizza place down the block. How about I get some food for us?”
Tag staggered over—a huge old cauldron over his shoulder—and dropped to his knees in front of Anna. “Food?” he said in a quavery voice. “Food for us, mistress?”
He never played the fool around Charles unless Anna was present. Charles couldn’t decide if it was because Tag only played like this in front of Anna or if it was because he figured Charles was less dangerous if Anna was in the vicinity.
She laughed at him. “Two large pizzas, loaded,” she said. She rose on her tiptoes to kiss Charles and climbed back into the Suburban.
Tag waited until she was backing up before popping to his feet without effort. The cauldron was doubtless heavy—anything cast iron and that big had to be—but Tag was a werewolf.
“Magic?” asked Charles.
Tag gave the cauldron a surprised look, as if he’d forgotten he had it on his shoulder. “No—though it’s old,” he said, and carried it over to the proper pile. He set it down and contemplated it.
“Everyone should have a proper cauldron,” he said, picking it up and putting it in their keep pile.
“You want to cook beans over a campfire?” Charles asked.
“Was that a joke?” asked Tag, sounding truly dumbfounded.
“Would I tease you?” Charles said, picking up a box of things that were not magic and hauling them to the pile of boxes they were just going to have to carry back.
The freshness of the breeze caught Brother Wolf’s attention, and Charles looked up into the sky with a frown at the gathering clouds. “I hope the rain holds off until we get this done.”
Tag glanced up, too. “Not supposed to rain, according to my weather app.”
Charles said, “It’s going to rain. Help me get the dining table out.”
It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward. It marked the edge of how far they’d gotten in their hunt for what turned out to be the grimoires. When they’d refilled the unit, he and Tag had put the table over the top of where the grimoires had been. They’d found the books in the center of the unit, surrounded by a pair of room dividers and a chalk circle.
It had been a good circle, competently drawn—as far as Charles could judge. It wasn’t a pattern that he’d seen before, but the intent had been obvious. Such a circle should have cut off the effect of so much magic—but he’d felt the grimoires when he’d stepped foot on the ground at the storage center. He didn’t think it was a problem with the magic Carrie had used, only the length of time since she’d renewed her protections.
They had taken out one of the dividers and set it aside but left the second one up. Now Charles took down the second one—and found himself confronting a small open area that someone had clearly set up as an office.
Had there been a path from the door to here before they had destroyed Carrie’s organization? He couldn’t say one way or the other. He inhaled and caught a hint of vanilla and also a woman’s scent. Carrie Green had definitely used this.
It was an area about five feet square, with a six-foot-tall bookshelf filled with books shoved in every which way, in direct contrast to the order Carrie had imposed upon her storage unit. But the battered old Steelcase desk—a relic of the Cold War era, complete with government serial plate along the edge of the desktop—was tidy enough.
On the upper left corner of the desk was a black coffee cup with Witch scrawled across it in red letters. It held two pens, a pencil, and a highlighter. On the lower left corner was a lined notebook. When he opened it, it proved to be blank, though roughly half of the sheets had been torn out.
On the upper right corner of the desk were three books that had never been commercially produced. He held a hand over them before he picked up the first one. It looked to be a handwritten diary, but he couldn’t find the date because it was in Russian—or some other Cyrillic tongue. There were five bookmarks that each marked a passage that Carrie had highlighted.
“Do you read Russian?” Charles asked Tag, who had paused in his own work to look at Carrie’s workspace.
“No,” he said. “But the next one down is in English.”
And so was the third one. Charles handed one to Tag and took the other. Charles’s looked to be a detailed study of the deaths of various fae. It didn’t appear to be a fae-hunter’s diary but a scholarly study based mostly upon folklore. The methods of killing (or manner of dying) were all highlighted.
“How to kill a fae,” Charles told Tag. “Though I didn’t see anything that someone who wasn’t armed with a supernatural weapon could manage.”
“Her bookmarks in mine are all about how to kill vampires,” said Tag. “Some of the methods I know are effective. Some of them I’ve never heard of. But there are enough here that I personally know do not work that it might as well be a study on how to get yourself killed.” He pulled out a folded sheet of lined paper that had been tucked in the back and showed it to Charles.
Back-slanted script, messy but easily readable, covered the page.
Interesting that wooden stake kills vampire when steel or silver does not. What is the difference in the materials? Silver is purifying—which is why it works on werewolves. So why doesn’t it work on vampires? Wood doesn’t work on werewolves. Why doesn’t it work on werewolves?
Why does nothing not magical work on all fae? Not even cold iron.
Then in overlarge letters, as if in frustration:
How do we kill it? Will it stay dead? Emma thinks the Singer is like some of the Native American entities. In the stories, Coyote comes back if he is killed. How do we kill the Singer so he doesn’t come back?
There was a lot of space, and then on the bottom were the words:
I figured it out. But do I have the courage? I don’t know.
Anna drove up with pizza and water bottles—and when Charles kissed her mouth in thanks, she tasted like bubble gum. He pulled back and frowned at her.
“Bubble gum?”
She laughed. “While the pizza was cooking, I bought a snow cone.” She gave Charles a smile. “But the reason I went there was to tell Zander I knew why his song sounded familiar.”
They sat down at the dining table—it was handy—and ate.
“What song?” asked Tag.
“When I talked to Zander yesterday, he was playing guitar,” she explained around a bite of hot pizza. “He was noodling around on a piece that sounded familiar to me—and he didn’t know what it was, either, just something he was working on. You know how it is when you can’t quite remember a song …”
Tag shook his head.
“And you know what it is now?” asked Charles. He was glad that the shadow of telling Dr. Connors what she was pregnant with had left Anna, even if he’d rather it hadn’t been the pretty boy selling snow cones who’d accomplished that.
She laughed. “It is such a relief. It was the chord progression: D major, A major, B minor, F sharp minor …” She raised her eyebrows.
He closed his eyes and “heard” the progression in his head. “Pachelbel’s Canon, among other songs,” he said.
“And a dozen other songs at least,” she agreed. To Tag she said, “It’s one of those chord progressions that just sounds good—so it was stolen by a whole bunch of pop musicians. I have no idea what song Zander’s mother sang to him—but I know Pachelbel.” She mimicked pla
ying the cello.
“Why didn’t you pick it up sooner?” asked Tag. “It’s mainly a cello piece, right?”
“For sure,” she said. She shook her head. “I have no idea why I couldn’t figure it out.” She looked at the unit and asked, “Are you going to be able to get all the way through that before the rain hits?”
Charles said “Yes” and Tag said “No” at the same time.
“What he means,” said Tag, “is that we aren’t going to keep going through it. We’re putting it all back. There’s too much to put in the SUV. We found a cache of historical diaries written by the Green family of witches. They aren’t magic per se, but we aren’t leaving them for anyone. We’ll get a crew in here to clear out the whole unit—take ’em home and sort them out there.”
Charles nodded. “I’ll pay to keep the locker and we’ll take what we’ve already sorted out with us now. Once we do that, there isn’t anything with enough magic left here to draw predators.”
Tag tilted his head and then looked at Anna. “Do you know that he doesn’t talk unless you’re present?”
She laughed, and the sound made Charles and Brother Wolf happy. He wasn’t sure he’d known what happy had felt like before they’d found her.
C H A P T E R
11
Anna and Charles went to the office to find the manager while Tag continued repacking the storage unit. The manager was not pleased to learn they had decided to keep the contents—but he was too intimidated by Charles to argue. Charles further softened the blow by paying him six months of rent, sixty dollars (refundable) for the key Charles had been using, and a hundred dollars for the manager’s trouble.
“Bribery is bad,” chided Anna as they walked back to Tag.
“Bribery will keep him happy and out of the storage unit,” said Charles.
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