Ashes and Arsenic

by SM Reine

  “What do you think Domingo’s up to here?” I asked once we were out of earshot of the booth. I still kept my voice down. There were actual mourners in the graveyard, clad in black despite the heat.

  “It depends,” Aisha said. “What time is it?”

  I checked my phone. “Seven thirty.”

  “Right now, he’s not up to anything. In about a half an hour, he’ll be collecting ingredients.” She watched me as she said it, looking for a reaction.

  I didn’t give her one.

  But I got what she was trying to say, and I felt all kinds of sick about it.

  When I prepare strength poultices, I use grave dirt as one of the primary ingredients. It’s infused by the energies of the bereaved, the strength of their grief. One of the most powerful forms of earth you can use in a spell. It doesn’t have any dead human matter in it, though. I could never do a spell using human parts.

  Grave dirt was easy to come by. There were shops on Etsy that sold that shit.

  Domingo wouldn’t be in a cemetery to collect grave dirt.

  “I’ll admit that my brother’s been into some fucked-up magic before, but never with cadavers.” It was perverse to talk about that in a cemetery where people were mourning. My stakeouts had always been at night, after the gates were closed and everyone was gone. Didn’t like doing business in a place where people were hurting.

  “You don’t have to believe me. I’ll show you,” Aisha said.

  We crested the hill. There was a maze of mausoleums nestled among the trees on the other side. A peaceful village of the dead.

  The only people on the paths at the rear of the cemetery were on their way out. They didn’t even look at us as we headed down.

  I let Aisha take the lead. She was the one who knew where she was going. That, and it was better for me to watch her back, make sure she wasn’t going to sneak up and stab me in mine.

  Not to mention that the view from behind wasn’t that bad.

  Those leather pants were really tight.

  When we entered the last row of mausoleums, back where the trees were densest, my eyes began watering. My sinuses tickled. The urge to sneeze built, making my throat begin to swell.

  I didn’t see anyone casting a spell. Aside from Aisha, I didn’t see anyone at all now. The cemetery was about to close. It wasn’t exactly prime time for magic.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked. “Did you know someone would be casting?”

  Aisha looked startled. “Someone’s casting? Already?” I couldn’t breathe well enough to respond, so I nodded. “That doesn’t make sense.” She stopped in front of one of the mausoleums. “This is the one. Do you sense magic in there?”

  All I knew was that my nose was streaming, eyes watering, and the sensation of magic was still building.

  Aisha tried to open the door, but it was locked. She pulled one of those automatic lock-picking devices out of her shirt, jammed it in the lock, and started wiggling.

  After a minute, she jerked the lock pick device out of the door with a sound of disgust. “It’s not opening. Can you give it a try?”

  I hadn’t picked a lock before, but how hard could one of those things be? It was a simple device to operate. Hard to see how Aisha could mess it up.

  “I’ll give it a shot,” I said, taking the device.

  The pick slipped easily into the lock. I squeezed the trigger hard, jiggled it around.

  Magic surged.

  The padlock fell open.

  “Wow,” Aisha said. There wasn’t a lot of feeling in her voice. “You made that look easy.”

  I turned the device over in my hands, looking for a reason I might have felt magic when the lock opened. There weren’t any runes or oils on it. Just in case, I wiped my fingerprints off of the lock pick giving it back.

  Aisha pushed the mausoleum door open and we went inside.

  There wasn’t much light left outside to light our path. Luckily, Domingo had already been through, and he’d set up a few camping lanterns around the mausoleum.

  The room was filled with coffins. Closed, luckily. Didn’t have to see what was inside.

  Each of them had an engraving over it.

  “Mauricio Mejía,” I read aloud, passing the first coffin. “Belita Mejía… Huh.”

  “What?” Aisha asked.

  Mejía had been my great-grandmother’s maiden name.

  Was it a coincidence that Domingo was supposed to be at a mausoleum where people named Mejía were buried? It was a common name, but not that common—not around here.

  The mausoleum wasn’t big, but it was feeling smaller by the moment. The coffins took up too much room. The aisle between them was narrow. Not enough room to escape if someone blocked my path back to the door.

  “He’s not here,” I said. My voice came out raspy. The sense of magic still hadn’t faded. “Whoever’s casting spells must be somewhere else.”

  “He’s here. Actually, he’s down there.” Aisha moved one of the camping lanterns to the back of the room, illuminating a trap door that had been in shadow.

  A mausoleum leading to a room underneath a cemetery.

  That wasn’t suspicious at all.

  It took all my willpower not to draw my gun when Aisha beckoned me onward. I’m not claustrophobic; I’ve gone into haunted basements and abandoned mines with equal levels of gusto. But there might have been more bodies down there. More death.

  And maybe my brother.

  I crouched beside the trapdoor. Aisha handed me the camping lantern and I angled it so that I could look down the ladder. It was a pretty recent addition, all metal with rubber grips on each step. Probably bought at Home Depot. Not creepy at all.

  The darkness beyond was creepy. All I could make out was a narrow square of dirty floor about ten feet down.

  I heard scuffling rising from the basement. Something down there was moving.

  I started to say, “You think he’s collecting ingredients underground?”

  Two words into the sentence, white pain exploded through my skull.

  My body pitched to the floor. I clutched my skull, groaning.

  Aisha started climbing down the ladder. I struggled to focus on her. My blood spattered her hand, which was curled around a gun. She had fucking pistol-whipped me.

  “Thanks for letting me in,” Aisha said before dropping out of sight.

  The way the lock had opened for me. The magic surge. All the dead members of the Mejía family.

  She hadn’t been able to get into the mausoleum because it had been warded against people who weren’t related to the Mejías. Those kinds of spells fed off the protective energy of the dead for fuel in much the same way that my strength poultices used grave dirt.

  With half a dozen Mejías inside the mausoleum, the wards would have been really secure.

  Bet it would have made a great hiding place for Domingo if I hadn’t let his enemy inside.

  Fuck everything.

  I rolled onto my stomach, pushed up on my hands and knees. My head felt like it was stuffed with shards of glass, but my arms worked. I crawled to the trap door, grabbed the camping lantern, dropped onto the rungs of the ladder.

  My grip wasn’t good. My fingers just wouldn’t hold my weight. I slipped to the bottom, hit the dirt on my knees.

  The lantern rolled away from me, lighting my path.

  The room underneath the Mejía mausoleum was bigger than the mausoleum itself. The walls were packed dirt with a few wooden boards for support. It was definitely intended to be a hiding place, judging by the cot in the corner, the bucket that smelled like shit, the deck of cards on a fruit crate.

  Aisha was nowhere in sight.

  But I could still hear motion deeper in the room, back where the light from my lantern didn’t touch.

  Firelight flickered over there. Not a candle, but something much larger.

  I abandoned the lantern and crept toward the fire. The Desert Eagle was heavy in my hand, fully loaded, waiting for me to shoot. My h
ead was still ringing. My nerves were on edge. I was ready to open fire on anything that moved.

  The sight that greeted me at the back of the room didn’t help.

  It was a ritual scene a lot like the one at the warehouse, including the big fire pit, the candles, and the artifacts scattered around the circle in a seemingly random pattern.

  But this one was also painted with blood. There was also a body on the altar and a witch standing over him.

  “Shit,” I breathed, taking cover behind the wall.

  The hooded witch wasn’t Aisha. The shoulders were too broad to belong to a female and there was graying hair on the back of his hands. He wore a UCLA sweater.

  His fists were lifted above his head. They clutched a knife.

  “Drop the weapon!” I shouted, rounding the wall with my gun aimed.

  He twisted to look at me. The hood shadowed his face, but I could feel his eyes on me, feel the power of his magic.

  And when he focused it on me, it brought me to my knees.

  I’d never met a witch that powerful.

  I didn’t even get an opportunity to sneeze. One minute I was breathing, and the next, I wasn’t. My lungs had shut down. Immense weight crushed my chest. My vision darkened around the edges.

  The witch advanced on me. I could only watch his feet as they approached. He was wearing brown loafers and pinstriped slacks that didn’t match his collegiate sweater. There was a drop of blood on the leather toe of his right shoe.

  Can’t breathe.

  I had seconds until I was unconscious.

  If I went down now, I’d never get back up again.

  My hands clenched tighter on the Desert Eagle. I rolled over, chest hitching, vision blurred, and aimed between the C and the L on the college sweater. Right smack in the middle of the chest.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  A bullet exploded from my gun. My aim was shit—blood splattered from the witch’s left shoulder. He cried out, staggering.

  Shit. That wasn’t a killing shot. I hadn’t even gotten his dominant arm.

  But now I was fading, muscles weak from lack of oxygen, and I couldn’t aim again. My hand was too heavy. It flopped to my side.

  The witch crouched over me, clutching his wounded arm. Blood spilled from between his fingers. In the light from the fire, it looked black. “You’ve made a mistake in coming here, Agent Hawke.”

  Well, he wasn’t wrong about that. I was about to die, after all.

  Another gunshot.

  The witch moved just in time. The second bullet missed him.

  My lungs suddenly expanded, sucking in oxygen. It hurt to breathe in after so long without oxygen—the sweetest kind of pain. I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, kept breathing. Each inhalation was easier than the one before.

  I even managed to roll over so I could see Aisha fighting the witch.

  She’d pistol-whipped me one minute and saved my ass the next.

  I would never understand women.

  The witch knocked Aisha’s gun away, punched her in the gut. She doubled over but didn’t fall. She drove herself forward, slamming her body into his. Her momentum carried both of them into the wall. The wooden boards groaned.

  He tossed her off. He was strong—really strong. She practically went flying.

  And in a blink, he was gone. I glimpsed a flash of him scaling the ladder before he vanished into the mausoleum above.

  Aisha swore, struggling to her feet. She followed him up the ladder.

  I almost went with her.

  Then I remembered that the witch hadn’t been alone. He’d been preparing to drive that knife into a body on the altar.

  Aisha had dropped her flashlight nearby. I grabbed it, shone it on the sacrifice victim.

  It was Domingo.

  “Jesus!” I broke the circle of power by scuffing it with my foot and ran to my brother. His face was sticky. The ground underneath him was dark with bile. I smelled the powerfully rank odor of feces and realized that he’d shit himself.

  He was limp. Didn’t respond to my touch.

  Every thought of how much I hated this asshole flew out of my mind.

  The fact that I found a heartbeat on his wrist didn’t make me feel much better. I couldn’t find an external injury, which meant that whatever had him exploding out both ends was insidious and internal. Something I couldn’t fix.

  He needed a doctor. Now.

  “First you steal my car, now I’m carrying your ass around,” I said, pulling his body over my shoulders. “Don’t you fucking think about dying, because you owe me big time.”

  Domingo was a big guy, like me. He didn’t work out as much as I did, but he was young, strong, and usually healthy. It was wrong to see him in a hospital bed, connected to a thousand different tubes, his eyes deeply bruised and breathing shallow.

  “Goddammit, Domingo,” I muttered, sinking into the chair beside him. He wasn’t awake. He hadn’t stirred when I’d carried him out of the basement, when the ambulance shrieked to the cemetery, or even when the EMTs had been working on him.

  Nobody knew what was wrong with him. They were running labs while keeping him hydrated and breathing. Seemed like a pathetic effort.

  The doctors were miles ahead of me, though, because there was absolutely nothing I could do, no magic I could cast. I wasn’t a healer; that shit was too hard. And the witch who’d been about to sacrifice him hadn’t caused Domingo’s condition magically. I couldn’t reverse a spell that hadn’t been cast.

  “Best as I can figure it, they planned that pentagram so that you’d have to be a target,” I said. “One of the points was your house. And then I found you getting sacrificed at our family mausoleum. How the hell did you even know we had a family mausoleum, Domingo? I didn’t know anything about it.”

  He didn’t respond. Still felt good to talk.

  “This is a big spell, Domingo. Too big a spell to take down one guy. You’re not that important. If Lenox wants Los Angeles, she doesn’t need to get you out of the way to do it. So why you? Why the vengeance? What’d you do to piss her off?”

  Damn, I would have given an important limb for Domingo to wake up and tell me.

  The curtain swayed as a doctor passed on the other side. She poked her head around the side. “Hi, I’m Dr. Rashida. I’m treating your brother. Do you have a minute?”

  I got up, followed her into the hall outside the door. “Got news?”

  “Yes and no,” the doctor said. “Does your brother ever talk about harming himself?” She was talking gently, like she was afraid I’d break if she wasn’t careful.

  “Harming himself? You mean like suicide?”

  “I understand that it’s a difficult subject.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Domingo. He’s not like that.” At least, he’d never been like that before. Just the suggestion of it had my head aching. “Why do you ask?”

  The doctor lifted the top page on her chart to look at whatever was underneath. “We don’t often see isolated cases of arsenic poisoning. Sometimes families show up with arsenic poisoning because of a contaminated water supply, or—”

  I cut her off. “Arsenic. Are you sure?”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “Does that mean something to you?”

  I couldn’t tell her about the dead bodies that had shown up with arsenic in their systems.

  “No. It’s just weird, is all.” I needed to check under Domingo’s fingernails, have someone swab his nose, look for rowan ash. “Is he going to survive, Doc?”

  “There’s been internal damage. He’ll need to be in the hospital for a few days at the very least.” I noticed that Dr. Rashida was careful not to make any guarantees about his condition. That was always a bad sign.

  Even if his prognosis had been good, getting stuck in the hospital for a few days was bad right now. It made Domingo an easy target. Lenox only needed to send someone to finish the job while he was immobile.

  I couldn’t leave Domingo unsupervised. But I also could
n’t stop Lenox if I spent all day and night sitting outside Domingo’s door.

  I’d have to enlist help.

  “Thanks, Doctor,” I said.

  She took that as the dismissal it was meant to be. She backed away. “Please call if you need anything. The nurses will be happy to help.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I waited until she was out of sight before grabbing my cell phone.

  Not my work phone. The other one with the private line.

  See, I could call the office, tell them we had a suspect in the case. They’d send out some Union guys to guard Domingo until he was completely healed. And then they’d take him away.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  But there was someone else I could call who’d sit with Domingo—the one person I trusted to be able to deflect any magical attack. The most powerful witch I’d ever known. A force of nature in both personality and magic.

  Our grandfather, Pops.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I DIDN’T SPEND A lot of time with Pops these days, but there used to be a time when Pops was my judge, my life, my god. Just like any good father figure.

  He’d gotten custody of my siblings and me after my mom went to jail for drug possession. It had been her third strike. She went away for a long damn time. Our dad had already run off with another woman, had a whole other family, didn’t want to take on the kids from his first wife.

  I don’t think Pops would have taken us if there had been anyone else to do it. He was already taking care of his mother, whom we called Abuelita. Neither of them were mobile enough to chase around three children. Especially children who were massive pains in the ass like Domingo, Ofelia, and me.

  But they had their ways of making us behave.

  Abuelita had her chancla. If we mouthed off, she’d take her sandal off and hurl it at us, and I swear to every deity that’s ever existed that the chancla had homing powers. It could turn corners and strike us square in the face when we were trying to run away.

  Pops didn’t have a chancla, so he had to settle for using magic if we broke one of his rules.

  The rules were like this: We had to go to school, we couldn’t get arrested, and we had to call him if we were leaving the neighborhood. And as long as my siblings and I were behaving, Pops let us do pretty much anything.