“Do you think she could do something from inside a prison?” I asked. It sounded like Jakob had spent some time looking things up. I wasn’t too proud to find out what he had learned.
“Perhaps. Voodoo is technically a religion, so she could demand spell components as part of her right to practice her faith. Of course, I’m assuming she goes to prison. They still burn people for witchcraft, don’t they?”
I nodded. There was always a chance that some citizen I arrested would claim I had supernaturally assaulted them. The punishment for that crime was death by fire. There was a sex witch awaiting trial who would probably be burned. I had helped put him there, and really, he deserved nothing less, but the thought still turned my stomach.
“I’m sorry, I’ve upset you,” he said. He touched my cheek softly, and I turned to kiss his hand.
“Don’t be sorry, the whole day has upset me. If it weren’t for the chocolate and the time I’ve spent with you, I’d gladly start over. Sometimes I think the world is a horrible place.”
“It’s a good world, but there are some people who make it harder to enjoy.” He smiled at me. “Would it help if I bought you the chocolate shop?”
“I know women use chocolate as a crunch, but I don’t think I need that much,” I laughed.
“I meant the whole shop,” he grinned at me.
“I, you mean, just like that? Sight unseen, just buy me a business?” I gaped. I’d never found out how much money Jakob had. It didn’t seem to matter most of the time. Then again, most of the time he wasn’t offering to buy me an entire store. He pulled up in front of my apartment.
“Think about it: the ugliest thing you would deal with each day would be demanding chocoholics.”
I leaned over and kissed him. “I think I’ll stick with my current job for now. Thanks for the offer though. It made my day.”
“I’ll look into it at work, just in case.” He kissed me again, and then put on a stern look. “I’ll be back by six, be safe.”
“I promise, I will,” I said and walked inside.
My answering machine held half a dozen messages, none of them threatening. One from Anna was vaguely aggressive, demanding I call her back. I gave into her pressure and picked up the phone. She gave me half an hour to shower before she showed up with Thai food and fashion catalogs.
A model with a brain and a fire witch to boot, Anna had recently started writing a fashion advice column for the local paper. I could see how someone who was a perfect size four with lush red hair could feel that the rest of us were desperate for help.
After all, no one stopped to stare when I walked into a room the way they did when she did. Still, I expected to be the beneficiary of some advice soon, whether I wanted it or not. Sure enough, she arrived with printouts of my TV moments. I cringed looking at them.
“You’ve got a great ass, Mal, but you can’t see it in half your clothes. These pants are too baggy, and this jacket hangs on you like a sack. All of your clothes look like they were made for a size eighteen,” she announced.
“That’s because I am a size eighteen,” I quipped.
“No, you’re not. You were a size eighteen, back when you were a depressed housewife. Now you’re a death witch who burns through enough calories that she risks passing out. Or didn’t you think that would make the news?” Her eyes danced as she ribbed me.
“Again?” I groaned and flopped back on the couch.
“Yup. Don’t worry, I recorded it,” she said with a laugh. “Seriously, Mal, you haven’t bought any new clothes since I met you, and you’ve dropped at least fifteen pounds since then.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t own a scale.” She looked so shocked I kept going. “And I don’t have any idea what my measurements are either.”
“How do you live?” she sputtered.
“It’s surprisingly easy.” I started to take a spring roll but realized we were out of napkins. I got up to get more from the kitchen at the same time the phone rang. “Can you get that? I’m going for napkins.”
“Grab me a fork!” she called back, going for the phone. When I came back to the living room, her face was tight.
“What?”
“When did you start getting threatening phone calls?” she asked, her voice tight and hard.
“Two days ago. I stayed at Jakob’s last night to avoid them.” I put the forks and napkins down on the coffee table, my good mood gone. “How did they know I was home?”
“Someone could be watching the place, or they could have randomly called.” She shook her head angrily. “That’s not the point, Mal, You have friends who care about you. We can protect you, but you have to tell us what’s going on.”
Her voice was a mixture of anger and hurt. I felt bad that I caused that. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone other than Jakob would ever use that voice on me. Of course, Anna might be the only one I had hurt. Phoebe always kept things light, happy. Isaura and Rhythm, my other girlfriends, thought life was a party.
“It’s only been two days. The first zombie call came in on Tuesday, yesterday. The thing today wasn’t even a call. It just happened.” I tried to justify my actions even though I knew I should have kept my friends up to date. I felt like a heel.
“Look, you’re an adult. I’m not going to yell at you about it. But know that we can’t save your butt if we don’t know you need saving.” She took a breath and changed her tone. “But I am going to yell at you about your clothes.”
“Go ahead, I deserve it,” I said, glad to have gotten off so lightly. By the time Anna left, I had promised to throw away every garment that didn’t fit me and go shopping for new things. We’d even spent some time upstairs in my closet, trying things on. Only a handful of my clothes made the cut. Not surprisingly, all of them came from the bag of skinny clothes that lived in the back of my closet in my former life.
For years I’d been dumping clothes in there when they got too snug so I didn’t have to admit my size was changing. I hadn’t packed when I escaped my old life. I just grabbed that bag and left. Now thanks to the way magic made me burn calories my go-to-court-black suit and my trust-me-navy suit fit again.
I considered the navy suit for a second remembering how I bought it when Mom was sick all the time. I wore it to impress her doctors, the ones who couldn’t understand why she didn’t die. I guess they didn’t know she had a death witch for a daughter. I shuddered at the thought. Was it possible I kept my own mother from dying? Kept her alive in great pain, even when she begged me to let her go?
I happily dropped the suit into the rejects bag. Anna hadn’t quite summed it up right. I wasn’t a depressed housewife, but a depressed social worker married to an auto mechanic in a small town. I didn’t want to think about that any more, didn’t want to dwell my painful past. The clothes needed to go. They were the last part of my old life I brought to Baton Rouge and I wouldn’t miss them.
Of course, the purging Anna had started didn’t make it easy to get dressed the next morning. It was hard enough to leave Jakob sleeping peacefully in my warm bed, let alone face a closet with only half its normal inventory. I managed to put together an outfit but realized on the train it made me look like a dominatrix - all black with pointy black heels.
I sat back people watching. Witches were at least 10% of the population, maybe even 25% depending on how you defined witch. Was the guy with the green thumb an earth witch or a great gardener? Your cousin who burned his bedroom down five times, was he a fire witch or a clumsy pyro? Either way, packed into a train with twenty people meant there was at least one other witch. Most people said there wasn’t a way to tell who that statistical other witch was, but I still scanned faces for clues. Before me, no one had seen a death witch in thirty years. You never know what might happen.
After the train and a walk to the police building, the elevator dumped me out on the fifth floor. Danny grunted and raised his coffee cup as I walked in. My partner was not a morning person, but the guy across from him had it eve
n worse. Detective Auster was sitting patiently by my desk waiting.
“Hey Ben, what’s keeping you up? Have we got a vampire in the house?” I asked. Ben Auster was an SIU night shift detective. Normally he’d be falling asleep right now. And Ben worried about his sleep, well, he worried about anything that might hurt him in the gym. The native Hawaiian was a lifter, hefting weights five days a week to maintain his bulk. Despite his solid physique, Ben was a powerful air witch. Vampires who turned into a mist to escape were out of luck in his interrogation rooms.
“We brought in your zombie maker last night. I decided to stay on in case you needed me.” He emphasized the ‘you’ a little strangely.
“Needed you for what?”
“I know you had some trouble breathing yesterday. I figured I might be able to help out with that.” He said it casually even though he knew it would have an impact on me.
“I didn’t think the EMTs let the details out,” I tried.
“They didn’t,” he replied.
I didn’t know him well, so I couldn’t know if he was Pagan enough to believe that the air god, Anu, whispered the information to him or if he just knew it, the way I could look a corpse and tell how it died. Either way it was slightly disturbing. Danny raised his eyebrows at me over his coffee cup. How do you thank someone for offering to protect you from something so weird?
“Thanks for staying. Not being able to breathe was less than fun. When do we interview her?” I asked.
“Soon I hope, she creeps me out.” He shrugged. “I’m going to grab some breakfast downstairs. Don’t go in there without me.”
Danny and I both nodded. I looked over at my partner with a hard look.
“You know about that?”
“Yeah, the report about bringing her in is in front of you. She showed up at a homeless shelter, talking nonsense, acting crazy. One of the workers called her in, she didn’t cause any trouble. It makes me wonder how much of her stuff is mechanical, you know, like she couldn’t raise the dead without the altar.”
“I meant about Ben.”
“Oh, that?” Danny acted nonchalant about the idea that someone who hadn’t even been on the same block had known I was choking. “No idea, I figured it was some bizarre witch thing you guys shared, like where to buy eye of newt cheap.”
“Very funny.” I turned to the report. I was a few sentences in when a young black woman walked by my desk. I looked up, but she had already walked away. I went back to the reading and discovered I had a golden opportunity to get Danny back. “Turns out ‘Madame Marie’s’ real name is Mary Laverna.”
“I saw that,” he said, not looking up.
“Laverna? Like Laverne, as in Laverne and Shirley? Now where have I heard that before?” I leaned back in my chair with a grin across my face.
“Maybe Laverna, the Roman Goddess of trickery?” he offered.
“Maybe a spooky little old lady we talked to yesterday. By the way, you read too much. Most people don’t know the entire Roman pantheon.” Danny refused to take the bait, either to be ribbed about how much the old lady hadn’t liked him or about his habit for trivia. I tossed the report down. “So does Miss Laverna have a record?”
“Oh yeah, a long one, with a history of fraud and supernatural assault. The last time she was a guest of the state it was for extortion. She’d offered protection spells to criminals, then after the crime, she wanted more money to keep the cops away. She thought no criminal would go to the police. I guess her psychic abilities didn’t warn her about the undercover cop.”
“Extortion? Like asking business owners for protection money?”
“Exactly the same thing, only now she’s targeting law abiding citizens.”
I hefted the report in the air, deciding it was easier to ask Danny than to read it myself. “Is there anything in that that helps us? Maybe they found out she was a death witch?”
“No, she’s a Bokor, a normal voodoo priestess who spends a little too much time on the bad side of the street.”
“So no mention of werewolves then?” I asked.
“Not a word.” Danny nodded toward the squad room door where Ben was taking up the entire doorway with his six foot three inch frame. “What do you say we go ask her?”
We grabbed Ben and headed toward the interview room. It wasn’t even nine a.m. yet, and I was about to face the crazy Bokor who had tried to kill me yesterday. Sometimes my job didn’t make a bit of sense. As we walked into the doorway, I glimpsed the woman again out of the corner of my eye, tall with light brown skin and long hair.
“Hold on guys, I think someone’s looking for me.” I ducked into the hall, but she had already gone. I checked both sets of stairs but must have missed her. I went back to the interview room and found Danny about to go in. Ben was already stationed inside the observation room. We wouldn’t be able to see him from inside the interview room, just a wide mirror, but the glass didn’t stop mystical abilities, so he could still help us.
I ventured into the room, unsure of how to handle this. Danny usually took the lead on interview. I was the junior officer in so many ways. Training classes aside my experience in this sort of thing was pretty slim. In my other jobs, you asked questions to see how people felt, not to get cold hard facts. My questions were usually things I blurted out by mistake, but with the supernatural angle, I wondered if I should be in charge. We’d dealt with witches before that didn’t respect anyone who was ‘normal’. I was in the middle of my musing when Madame Marie took matters into her own hands.
“You have no right to harass an old woman this way! You leave me in here without a cup of water or a clock. You know how long I’ve been awake? I need my sleep!” she screamed.
“I’m sorry about that, we don’t work night shift, so we weren’t here. Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Danny took over.
“Coffee? You hunt down an old woman who didn’t do anything, and you offer me coffee? Ha, no. I don’t need any coffee, thank you.” She softened her voice but not her tone.
“Well, I need answers, so let’s work on that. Did you send zombies to the QuikStop convenience store two days ago?” he asked.
“You have no proof of that.” Her accent was heavy enough that the final word of her sentence came out as “dat.”
It would have been comical if she hadn’t tried to kill us yesterday.
“Did you attack us yesterday?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” she spat back at him.
“Never? Not yesterday afternoon in your apartment?” he asked, incredulous.
She stared hard at his face, then studied mine for a minute. “Never, never seen you before, yesterday I was ridden by the spirit, I don’t know what happened.”
“Ridden by the spirit?” Danny asked, his voice filled with disdain.
She drew herself up and spoke like a queen. “I don’t expect you to understand. I am the reincarnation of Marie Laveau. I am her inheritor. The saints and loas, they use me to do their holy work. I remember none of it.”
“Why would attacking two police officers be holy work, ma’am?” he asked.
“I don’t know. You have to ask the loa that.”
She was stonewalling him and talking nonsense. I’d seen people who channeled a god, she hadn’t looked like one. I had sat quietly in the interview room too long.
“Does the loa have anything to do with the protection scheme you’re running with the werewolves?” I kept my voice quiet and threatening.
She snapped her head toward me. “How do you know about that?”
“Answer my question.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She sat back, haughty.
“You just proved you did.” I leaned forward on the table looking her in the eye. It was an aggressive gesture, but I was tired of her running the interview. I let a slow smile drift across my face. “I found your altar to Baron Samedi and Santa Muerte. I took it apart. Any protection it held is gone now.”
He
r dark skin went pale, and her eyes went big. “What have you done? They’ll come after me.”
“Not if you help us,” Danny took over; eager to play the good cop. “We can protect you.”
“Of course, if you really don’t have anything to say to us, we can put you in an open cell block someplace big, with a nice view of the moon. It’ll be full tomorrow night.” I smiled again trying to look cruel. Honestly, there was no way she’d go into an open cellblock, but it seemed like the only way to get her to talk. I would apologize later. For now, I wanted to know what scared someone who could raise the dead.
“No one can protect me. You don’t understand what you’re dealing with, you think it’s me but there’s so much more.” She wrapped her arms around herself and began to rock gently.
Danny shot me a dirty look. My bad cop act had gone too far.
“Tell us what else there is so we can protect you,” Danny started. I tuned him out and looked at the mirror. I wished I could tell Ben to go home for the day. Madame Marie was a paper tiger, whatever violence she’d had in her had left last night. In the mirror I saw the woman I’d seen on the stairs. She was standing behind Madame Marie. I spun my head back, but the woman wasn’t there, just Danny and the now weeping suspect. I looked back into the mirror, but the woman was gone.
The interview was over. Danny and I left together, with no promises to Madame Marie about what would happen next. We met Ben in the hallway, and we all agreed he could go home. I thanked him again for covering for me. He seemed more worried about working four hours of overtime then about having offered to save my life. He told me not to give it another thought, but I knew I would. Danny and I went over the important points of the interview and decided it was up to the lieutenant. We filled him in on the details and waited for his wisdom.
“So, what are the chance someone else is involved? Is she playing us for fools?” he asked.
“Fools,” Danny decided.
“I’m not sure yet. There could be someone else,” I said, thinking of the woman I saw in the mirror.
Under a Blood Moon Page 6
