“Aw, you say the sweetest things. I’m all aglow with that special feeling only someone who’s been haphazardly chosen at random to win the booby prize can feel.”
Somehow, I’d figured there’d been much more thought to this decision he’d roped me into. Obviously, almost anyone would have done. I cracked my knuckles and stared out into the street, but Win was all business.
“But hold on. Now that I think back on it, I remember one woman, Marjorie Biddlesworth, I believe. Just before she walked into that annoying glare of a light, she said that you were railroaded. Does that have to do with what you’re about to tell me?”
My memory of Margie was a fond one, making me smile. “Margie was an adorably cranky quilter who wanted to be sure Sissy-Sue Leeland didn’t get any of her originally designed quilting patterns. She was adamant Sissy-Sue would steal them and call them her own.”
“So what did Marjorie mean when she said you were railroaded?”
“Aside from my medium duties, I was a 9-1-1 dispatcher in my small town of Paris, Texas. One night I took a call from a very frightened little boy…” I bit the inside of my cheek to keep tears from forming in my eyes.
“And then?” Win asked with a much gentler tone.
“It was a domestic dispute, and when we take a call from the home of an authority figure in the coven, we’re supposed to notify a superior immediately. Which I did, but I didn’t do as I was told when handling the call.”
My stomach began that infernal rumbling of turmoil and the wave of nausea not even a purging spell would rid me of.
Belfry rustled a wing, his indignant tone in full swing. “Those crackpots told her to tell the poor kid help was on the way and then hang up! To this day, I still can’t believe they dismissed all the good Stevie did all those years just because she wouldn’t leave a freaked-out seven-year-old in a state of hysteria without anyone to comfort him.”
I nodded my head. “Belfry’s right. They did tell me to hang up because the caller, a little boy named Peyton, was a council member’s son. He was hysterical, sobbing almost so uncontrollably I couldn’t figure out what he was saying, but it was clear he was petrified. I couldn’t just leave him like that. Not even for a second. Help was well on its way, but he kept begging me to help him—to stay with him. Even when I told him someone would be there in seconds. I heard his mother screaming in the background and his father yelling…and Peyton was so terrified. He made me swear on my favorite candy I’d stay on the phone with him…”
There was absolutely no way I was letting go of a connection with a little boy who’d likely seen more in his seven years of life than I had in over thirty-two on this plane. So I did. I stayed right until the bitter end. And make no mistake, the end was indeed bitter.
“So you disobeyed a direct order and stayed on the phone with the little chap. Then what?”
My hands tightened into fists, the way they always did when I retold this story. “I did, and I damn well won’t apologize for it. I hung up the official line, but I dialed him right back on my personal cell. He was so, so scared. At that point, I’d managed to calm him enough that he explained he just didn’t want to be alone anymore when the ‘bad’ things happened. He said he usually hid in the closet when they fought, but this was the ‘worstest’ fight they’d ever had. He said his mommy always had bruises on her and broken bones from his daddy ‘playing too rough.’ It was all I could do not to snap my fingers and summon him from that despicable pig, but…”
“But council business is council business.” Belfry chirped his mocking disdain.
Shaking off my reverie, I nodded. “Yes. That’s the rule, but there was just no way I was hanging up. He never had anyone he could trust all his life, but in that moment of sheer terror, I vowed to be the first. Anyway, to make a very long, gruesome story short, help arrived just a little too late.”
I had my suspicions about why help arrived so late, but that was neither here nor there at this point.
“Please don’t tell me the little fellow was harmed, Stevie. Just don’t. I’ve been to hell and back. I’ve seen things that would curl your pretty toes. But children are sacred. They must always be protected at all costs.” Win’s voice was thick with emotion, surprising me.
I wondered about his vehemence on Peyton’s behalf and what incident in his past had brought him to such strong words, but then, I felt the same way he did.
“No. Thank the goddesses, he wasn’t harmed,” I reassured.
I heard him release a breath in my ear, his presence once more warm. “So what happened next?”
“During the course of the call, Peyton’s father had no idea he’d called 9-1-1 and—”
Now Win gasped. “His father caught him, didn’t he, the slimy arse?” he growled low and feral.
Gulping, I nodded once more. “Yes. He caught him talking to me. Something he was strictly forbidden to do. Tell…he wasn’t ever supposed to tell,” I whispered with a shiver.
“But that jerkface, power-trippin’ megalomaniac got his, didn’t he, Stevie!” Belfry cried.
Closing my eyes to ward off the visions I’d created in my head about that night, I shivered. “Through an ironic turn of events, Peyton’s father dragged him out of the closet and started down the steps with him. But in his rage, a rage so real and so terrifying I heard it clear through the phone, he tripped and fell down the steps and broke his neck.”
We sat silently for a moment; me, reliving little Peyton Westfield’s screams of horror, Win, clearly absorbing my words.
“How—how could this coven of yours have possibly blamed you for the death of a monster, Stevie? Is there no justice even in the paranormal world?” he bellowed into my ear, making me jump and wince.
I shrugged. It was the only way to express how utterly defeated and boggled by the event I still was. “It wasn’t so much his death as it was the fact that Peyton’s mother denied all of it. She denied her husband ever laid a hand on her. Even though I heard her screaming to stop. Despite the fact that I sat with Peyton for those terrifying three minutes while he begged me not to hang up and I heard every single threat that pig made.”
“But wasn’t there a phone record of what he’d done? How could one deny the physical proof of his brutality? Surely there were marks on her? Bruises?” Win spat.
“You forget, we’re witches, Win. We can heal plenty of things with just a spell. It just takes a flick of the wrist. As to a record of the call? Yes, there’s the first thirty or forty seconds of the official 9-1-1 call Peyton made to me. But the threats his father was making weren’t clear. There was a lot of fuzzy yelling, and Peyton’s mother claimed they were just having a heated discussion about football.”
And that had been my downfall, the beginning of the end. Ann Westfield’s staunch denial that her husband, the esteemed, Adam Westfield, council member extraordinaire, was anything but a good, kind husband who’d slipped and fallen down the stairs, and her insistence that little Peyton had just misunderstood the situation.
What hurt worse was the fact that Peyton’s mother didn’t address his trauma. She’d swept the whole mess right under the rug, as if the first seven years of his life had all been a figment of his imagination. She’d gaslighted Peyton to save her own dang hide—to avoid the retribution of the coven for not taking little Peyton far away from his father. For not protecting him. She was the very definition of battered-wife syndrome.
Yep. That happens in the witch world just as often as it does in the human.
“So the bloody bastard ended up dead. Good on him,” Win growled. “But I still don’t understand how that’s enough cause for your witch powers to be taken away. Were they taken from you because you disobeyed an order from a superior?”
And here’s the most ironic part yet of my return to the human world. “No. I knew I’d be punished for disobeying, but nothing so severe as what happened next.”
“Because that’s when pow!” Belfry yelped for effect.
“Pow?”
Win asked.
Squeezing my temples with two fingers, I sighed. “Peyton’s father wasn’t just a council member—he was a very powerful warlock. One of the most powerful. And obviously he was angry about me comforting his abused son. So angry, he had another soul contact me once he’d arrived in the afterlife. This soul, no doubt held hostage by Peyton’s father, was forced to fool me into believing he needed my help.”
The wind whistled as Spy Guy digested. “You helped, I gather?”
I squirmed on the bus shelter’s hard seat, locking my cold fingers together. “Of course I did. It’s what I do.”
“And the powerful warlock stole your powers.”
“Slapped ’em right out of me straight from the afterlife.”
Literally, he’d taken his hand, palm open, wound his arm up, and laid one on me. Adam Westfield hit me so hard, he’d stripped me bare of every last power I’d ever cultivated.
He left me naked. He took my home, my job, my life, in just the way he claimed I’d taken his. My throat tightened as I tugged on my scarf to stave off my helplessness. I would not cry. Not today.
“I’m sorry, Stevie. What an abominable way to lose something so integral to you.”
I heard the remorse in Win’s apology. I even felt the warmth of his aura surrounding me, and for some reason, it was important that he believed me.
“May I ask why you left your hometown and the people you love?”
Scraping a thumb under my eye to keep my tears at bay, I finished my story. “I was shunned. Told to pack my bags and leave because I was no longer like everyone else.”
“Baba Yaga, The Imperial Empress of All Things Witch, booted her butt out without so much as a thank you for keeping that poor kid calm and alive. Little Peyton would be dead if not for Stevie. I told that stupid bunch of crusty old bones as much when I called council, but they wouldn’t listen. Not that Peyton’s testimony helped Stevie’s cause any. His mother coached him to say nothing happened, and I’ll swear that’s what she did on my dying breath. None of the good Stevie did mattered. Not a dang shred of it. So essentially, they said it was her own fault the Wingnut Warlock stole her powers. I told them to stick their witch powers in their dusty you-know-wheres and I left, too. Not a chance in seven hells I was letting Stevie go off alone.”
I still couldn’t believe the ruling. I know the council’s claim I didn’t follow protocol was true, if not completely ludicrous. I did refuse to leave Peyton alone with his fears and his tyrannical father.
But to dismiss that disgusting piece of garbage after meting out a punishment so severe, from the afterlife no less? I was still blown away by Baba’s disregard for my years of service with not an infraction in sight.
“This Baba Yaga, she’s your ultimate…ruler? What do you call the leader of the witch world, anyway?”
“Misguided? Stupid? Meaner n’ a snake cornered in a crawlspace?” Belfry quipped.
I tapped one of my familiar’s ears, chiding him. “Knock it off, Belfry. Don’t speak ill of her because she’s essentially still your leader.”
I didn’t know what to think about Baba’s stance. That she’d sent me away was so unlike her…
But that Belfry had chosen to stick by me meant more than he’d ever know. He’d left his world, his friends, his life behind the same way I did. But I was ever so grateful he’d jumped into my purse without my knowledge and come with.
“Anyway, yes, she leads our community. And while I disagree with her kicking me out of Paris ten thousand percent, I understand the pressure Peyton’s mother put on her. I don’t have to like it, but it wasn’t as though I could have done much about it. Shunned means there’s literally no way back in unless I become a witch again. It’s sort of like an invisible fence I can’t climb over.”
“And you miss it?”
Closing my eyes, I nodded. “I miss my friends. I miss helping people on the other side the most, though. I miss it like I’d miss a limb. Anyhow, I left and came back here. I’ve never lived anywhere else—so choosing Ebenezer Falls felt right. But after yesterday, I’m thinking maybe Mars is the ticket.”
Win barked a laugh, the vibe between us easing from intense to more relaxed. “Mars is bloody hot, Stevie. Besides, we made a deal. A deal you can’t break because your strict code of ethics says you can’t. As for the rest of it, I say bollocks. A pox on the loathsome lot of them!”
“Hear-hear to poxes!” Belfry cried.
“You don’t need any of them, Stevie. You have a home and enough money for five lifetimes. So do you feel better for telling me?”
I actually did, and I couldn’t help but tease Win because of it. “You know what would really make me feel better?”
“What’s that?”
I smiled coyly. “Telling me how you died. Were you on a crotch-rocket, racing along an opening drawbridge trying to escape the bad arms dealer, saw an opening on a big oil tanker in the water ahead that turned out to be the Exxon Valdez, thought there was a slim chance you could stick the landing, but because your timing was totally off, you fell to your watery death in the Pacific Ocean?”
“My timing is never off,” he offered dryly. Which meant, he wasn’t going to tell me today. “Now, lovely lady, we brush ourselves off, pick ourselves up and get to the business we need to attend. We have to clear your good name and any further suspicion of wrongdoing, but more importantly, we have a killer to catch in order to free up your taco-buying privileges. So our first order of business? Connecting you with a lawyer I have on retainer, on the off chance Sardine comes looking for you again.”
I giggled, rising from the seat, the heavy weight in my chest easing. “Sandwich. His name is Sandwich.”
“Everything is a blur after mayonnaise and sardines and vomit.”
“Speaking of Sandwich, he told me something interesting. I don’t know if you heard, but he said Madam Z had been strangled.”
“Wait! Shhh!” Win ordered, making me stand up straighter at the urgency in his tone. “Madam Zoltar! It’s smashing to see you. You look lov—What’s that, Madam Zoltar?”
There was a pause as the wind howled and the rain fell, one I strained into as I rigidly stood at attention while I waited for a communication from MZ.
Win made me jump when he blurted an astonished, “Cluck-cluck?”
“What?” I asked. “Are you hearing her right?”
“Madam Zoltar, have you been dipping into the wine? What do chickens have to do with this?”
“You have wine in the afterlife?” I asked.
“A buffet table, too. Quite an abundant spread, in fact,” Win responded, and then he groaned. “She’s off on a tangent again. I think she’s well knackered.”
I began to walk again with determination, this time directly across the street with the idea I’d head back to Madam Zoltar’s and see if I could sneak my way in there somehow. I needed to look more thoroughly at the crime scene. I still didn’t understand how Madam Zoltar had been electrocuted and strangled at the same time, sitting at her tarot card table.
My mind raced, replaying visions of the scene, but all I could recall was poor MZ on the floor.
“So what does a chicken have to do with any of this, do you suppose?”
“Who?” Win asked.
“A chicken,” I repeated.
“Not you, Stevie. I’m still talking to Madam Zoltar. Say the name again, MZ,” he encouraged.
Another long pause filled the air, making me wish I still had a way to communicate one on one with the spirit world. Everything was always so much easier if I could see an apparition’s face and read their expression.
“Dan. She said Dan knows.”
I stopped just as Madam Zoltar’s store came into view, a frigid chill running up my spine, making the hair at the back of my neck stand on end. “Who’s Dan and what does he know?”
Win groaned. “Aw, hell.”
“What? Tell me! Who’s Dan?”
“Dan is her son.”
Chapter
9
“Crispin Alistair Winterbottom?”
“You’re using my full name. As I recollect from my childhood, this is a parental tactic used to show one means business.”
“Shut. Up. Shut up now. Stop reciting your spy DIY tips. I don’t know if it escaped you, but I don’t have a bungee cord I can repel down the back of the building with.”
“Oh stop. Don’t exaggerate. I didn’t tell you to use a bungee cord to do anything. That’s only for the skilled, and while the time will come when all my secrets will be revealed, you haven’t earned your wings just yet. I said, dig a hairpin out of your purse to pick the lock, and make sure you use a tissue so you don’t leave behind fingerprints on the doorknob.”
I rolled my eyes, keeping them peeled in the alleyway behind Madam Z’s. “And then you went on and on about types of locks and cylinders and torque or something. What’s next? Lipstick machine guns?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Stevie. I never used a lipstick gun for anything. It’s a pen. Ball point, to be precise, and if you’re not ready for bungee cords, not a chance in all of my mother country would I allow you a pen gun at this stage of the game.”
“That’s not my point. My point is, shut up. All your gibberish about locks is making me nervous and confusing me. Now be a good lookout and cover me!”
I knelt down again and looked at the lock, forgetting Win’s advice and remembering what Jo-Jo Swenson taught me in the sixth grade about breaking into my locker because I could never remember the combination. I jammed my hairpin into the lock and lifted, saying a small prayer.
The tension eased on the lock’s pins and my hand twisted the doorknob with ease. “Hah!” I yelped triumphantly before covering my mouth and taking another furtive glance around.
I scooped Belfry from my purse and set him in the corner under the awning of Madam Z’s back door, stroking his tiny head. We’d agreed prior to this break in, he’d be our lookout. He’d make the sound of a crow if trouble were afoot.
Witch Slapped (Witchless In Seattle Mysteries Book 1) Page 9
