Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic

by Meghan Ciana Doidge

  No answer.

  “No movement within,” Kandy murmured. Desmond nodded and Kandy popped the lock with a single twist of her hand. The deadbolt wasn’t engaged.

  The green-haired werewolf slipped by me and entered the apartment. I followed, not waiting for the all-clear even though I knew I was supposed to.

  A small, rather messy bathroom stood to my immediate left. The toilet seat was up. A discarded light gray bath towel had fallen between it and the tub.

  I turned right, avoiding the bedroom in front of me with its partly closed door, and walked by the tiny galley kitchen into the empty living room. I passed Kandy on her way out of the kitchen, though why she’d need to enter what her eyes could clearly see was empty I didn’t know. Dirty dishes sat in the sink, with clean ones drying on the counter.

  Two wine glasses were on the floor by the futon couch. An old, barely-used TV occupied the corner of the living room. The drapes covering the balcony doors were just as closed inside as they’d looked from the outside.

  Kandy was methodically opening the doors and checking the closets that ran parallel to the kitchen entrance. I wandered over to the west window — the one with the peek-a-boo view — and watched the sun begin to set. The dust on the drapes suggested that Rusty never bothered to close them on this window, probably because the building was angled toward a park so there were no nosy neighbors.

  The apartment was empty. I knew that the moment Kandy had opened the door. I couldn’t feel any magical signatures beyond those of the shapeshifters and the vampire. They’d probably all known it as well; they were hunters, after all, with heightened senses. I gathered that Kandy’s continued search was for clues.

  I’d always loved watching the sunset from English Bay. It was as if you were standing directly in front of the sun, with nothing but the ocean between you.

  “Witch, you’re going to want to see this,” Kandy called from the bedroom. I was very certain she had no idea what she was talking about.

  I turned from the window, unaware that the vampire had joined me in the living room. Great, he could dampen his magical signature. That wasn’t scary at all.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” I said before I could stop myself.

  Kett shrugged. He already had his arms crossed as he watched me watch the sunset. “You are preoccupied.”

  “Witch!” Desmond snapped from the other room. With a sigh, I obeyed the command in his voice.

  The bedroom barely fit the double bed and the side table. The stink of old magic hit me as I turned from the short hall.

  I stared at the furniture arrangement from the doorway. The bed had been shifted to the middle of the room and placed inside a black-painted pentagram. That paint was going to be a bitch to get off the worn cork floors. The open closet held a set of shelves containing what I guessed were spell ingredients and collectibles, as well as clothing on hangers and an overfull laundry basket. The bird wing from our spell in the bakery basement sat on one of the shelves, among other animal bones and dried furry corpses I didn’t look at too closely.

  The sheets on the bed were well mussed. Tangled, even. Kandy stood, her arms crossed defensively, as far away from the pentagram and closet as she could be and still be in the room. Desmond didn’t seem as wary, though he was careful not to cross through the pentagram as he circled the bed. He looked up to where I’d stopped in the doorway. The vampire was right behind me.

  “Sex magic,” Desmond said. He wrinkled his nose.

  I nodded and felt Kett do the same behind me. Even I could smell the stale sex that lingered in the air, but the bed in the pentagram was a dead giveaway.

  “The pentagram isn’t active right now,” I said. I crossed a couple of steps further into the room to look down at it. No vessels of any kind stood at any of the five points. I glanced around the room, but, besides the closet shelves, there was nothing else to be seen.

  “He’s using sex to power spells?” Desmond asked.

  I shrugged. “Not sure. I usually cast a circle — north, east, west, and south sort of thing — which is how my Gran taught me. And there aren’t any collection vessels, empty or otherwise.”

  “Raising Hudson had to have used up a bunch of juice,” Desmond said, but he was speaking to Kett, not me. The vampire nodded. He’d stepped up beside me. Out of the corner of my eye, he was only a couple of inches taller than me in my heeled sandals. He’d seemed much taller when I was facing him.

  “How many magical signatures can you pick up?” Kett asked.

  I crossed the pentagram and hovered my fingers over one of the pillows. I didn’t want to actually touch the sheets. “Just Rusty and Sienna, I think.”

  “Sienna, your sister?” Kandy asked from her corner. I nodded.

  “You think?” Desmond said with a sneer as he reached over and pressed my hand down onto the bed itself. “Afraid to get dirty, princess?” I noticed how he waited to cross the pentagram until I did. He’d also wrapped his hand in a sheet before he’d touched mine — a quick move before he’d flicked the sheet corner away. Was he afraid of touching me, or simply of contaminating my readings?

  I glared at him, my clenched teeth effectively blocking my angry retort. He stepped back without ceding any intimidation ground. I refocused on the bed. “It’s old, residue. Just Sienna and Rusty.”

  “What spell were they doing?” Kett asked. He hadn’t moved any closer.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Guess,” Desmond growled. I straightened from the bed and stepped out of the pentagram. I noted he had already done the same. I guessed that standing in a pentagram with a witch could be unnerving. Too bad I wasn’t that kind of witch.

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. My jaw was starting to ache from suppressed anger. “I don’t do this kind of magic.”

  “But you know about it,” Kett said, his tone dropping to soothing levels.

  “It wasn’t really on my Gran’s syllabus.”

  Desmond glared at me from the other side of the bed. Kandy kept her eyes on the ground. Kett gave me an encouraging smile. Either that or he was thinking about biting me … again.

  I sighed, my eyes glued to the blue cotton bed sheets, and fished into the depths of my brain to try to pull out some sort of information. It wasn’t an easy task. I really didn’t retain this sort of thing, because it never much interested me. “As far as I know, sex — the energy from sex — can be captured and used to fuel a spell —”

  “But there are no vessels,” Kett said.

  “Right. So I suppose …” I swallowed, not really wanting to acknowledge the other possibility. “Sex could be used to … to directly enhance, or conversely, drain, the magic of one of the participants.”

  “One? Not both?” Kett asked.

  “I don’t think so. Like I said, I don’t know this type of magic. I sense Rusty and Sienna here, but not their purpose or their … activities.”

  Kandy snorted.

  “Is Rusty’s magic the same here as it was in the morgue?” Kett asked.

  “No.”

  “So this … whatever it was, wasn’t used to desecrate Hudson?” Desmond asked. I shuddered at his word choice, trying to shut out the image of Hudson’s beautiful body lurching up from the table.

  “No,” I answered. “It’s different, less pungent. Rusty’s magic, yes, but not that darker, deeper version of it. This is grass and fresh dirt and dew on a fall morning, and that was … was …”

  “Death,” Kett supplied.

  “Maybe. Blood, but not … fresh … not coppery, not alive, for sure. It seethed.”

  “Can you track this … scent?” Desmond asked.

  “It’s not like that. It’s not just hanging in the air, and I’m not a werewolf.”

  “It is just hanging in the air,” Kett corrected. “If you know where to look.”

  “I can’t track it. Give me a magical object or point me in the direction of a magical object and
I can find it. Like I collected the pieces for the trinkets —”

  “You’re a witch,” Desmond interjected. “Use a tracking spell.”

  “I’m not that kind of witch. I don’t do spells. Not on my own anyway. My magic doesn’t work like that.”

  Desmond looked at Kett with a raised eyebrow. Kett tilted his head in some obscure response, then crossed to look at the items on the shelves in the closet.

  “What about these? They’re magical,” the vampire said.

  “You can see magic?” I asked, intrigued despite my ire. I stepped up beside him. I couldn’t help it. I’d never met anyone who could see magic without being caught in or wielding it — and that was usually just a feeling, I’d been told. A person usually had to be connected to, or spelled by, magic to feel it.

  Kett turned his head just enough to look at me. “Not like you can. It was a gift of mine, before.”

  “Before? Before what?”

  “The turning comes with its own set of gifts, but we sometimes retain some from our lives before.”

  Before he became a vampire, he meant. He’d been turned, not born a vampire. I thought vampires had to born to be as powerful as Kett. That anyone who’d been badly bitten, and managed to live, just carried the secondary effects such as light sensitivity or the need for blood, and not much of the magic. The magic was what gave Kett his strength, immortality, and other vampire gifts as he called them.

  “What is this? Show and tell?” Desmond snapped.

  “Take these items and make one of your trinkets to track Rusty,” Kett said, as if just saying such a thing would make it possible.

  I stared at him, then laughed. It was a short laugh. “I don’t make magical objects. We’ve been over this before. No one does.”

  “Someone does, because such things exist.”

  “Fine. Someone powerful, maybe. You can’t just infuse magic into inanimate objects. It’s not compatible, and energy can’t be created or destroyed —”

  “But it can be directed —”

  “Magic can tint or tinge the things we hold close to ourselves over a long period of time. Like these wedding rings. Or it can occur naturally, such as in a piece of jade I find in a river. But you can’t take that rock and just tell it to find someone. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No. I think you can do it.” Kett spoke as if I was five years old. “I think you made this …” He reached up to touch my necklace. “And your knife.”

  “And you make these,” Desmond said, gesturing toward a trinket that was hanging off a nail on one of the shelves. Yeah, I’d noticed that. I’d also noticed that there were more empty nails with nothing hanging from them. I’d kind of hoped no one else would notice, though.

  “I cobble together items that hold bits of residual magic. I placed some spells on a knife I carved. I don’t make these things function as something they aren’t, like a tracking device.”

  Kett didn’t speak further. He just looked at me, as if waiting for me to have some sort of epiphany.

  Desmond batted at the trinket so it swung off its nail with a series of clicks and chimes. “You owe me, witch.”

  “I can’t do it,” I snarled. “No one can.”

  “What good are you, then?” Desmond spat.

  “Well, I have a cell phone, why don’t I use it? That would be the sane, modern thing to do.” I shoved passed Desmond — aware that he was letting me go, or I wouldn’t have been able to move him at all — and pretty much ran into the living room. The bedroom was just too filled with magic, both stale and radiating off the shapeshifters. It was claustrophobic.

  I dug my cell phone out of my satchel. But instead of calling Sienna, I opened my browser and googled the hotel my Gran was staying at in Tofino. Yes, I was utterly aware I’d been stupid not to do so before. I should have begged her to return a day ago, but I so wanted to handle this on my own. I’d wanted to prove I could do more than just make pretty window decorations and yummy cupcakes. Was I going to spend my entire life hiding behind my Gran’s skirts or in her shadow? Probably, yes. But I wasn’t going to risk Sienna’s safety any further than I already had.

  Kandy and Kett joined me in the living room. Desmond stormed out of the apartment — slamming the front door like a child — as if he couldn’t stand another moment inside. The other two werewolves, Lara and Jeremy, hadn’t entered the apartment at all.

  I found the number for the Long Beach Lodge and dialed. The hotel operator answered, but I barely heard her greeting.

  “Pearl Godfrey’s room, please,” I blurted into the phone.

  “One minute.” The phone clicked and some saccharine music blared in my ear. My thoughts drifted to the mussed bed in the other room … of how tired but happy Rusty had been the last two times I’d seen him … of Sienna wearing my trinkets like they’d protect her. In fact, she’d been wearing a lot of my things lately … had she needed protection? How could I’ve missed it? I was freaking blind to anything outside my own tunnel vision.

  “My sister,” I whispered as I met Kett’s eyes. He nodded. I almost believed he, too, was a little worried.

  “The coven should have dispersed by now,” he said, rather incomprehensibly.

  “What? What coven?” I asked, but then the phone clicked.

  “That guest has checked out, ma’am,” the Hotel Operator said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “This afternoon, a late check out, about two hours ago.”

  “Thank you.” I hung up. I hadn’t taken my eyes off Kett. “You’re suggesting my Gran is in some sort of coven? Rather than surfing?”

  “Perhaps she surfs as well,” he answered.

  “And this coven was meeting in Tofino?” Kett furrowed his brow and didn’t immediately answer. “How would you know?”

  “The first step of any investigation I conduct is to open communication, or check in, if you will, with the proper people when I arrive in any given city or territory large enough to host a magical community.”

  “And my Gran is on the Vancouver list?”

  “Your grandmother is the list. There was a notation about your mother, of course, but I understand she isn’t in residence.”

  “That’s why you showed up at the bakery.”

  “The building is listed among your grandmother’s properties.”

  I suddenly felt a little ill. I was aware I’d been in blind denial with all the things Kett had been suggesting about my powers, my magic, and parentage. But for some reason, this news that my Gran was someone the vampires had on a list, let alone on a list they considered important to speak to … I knew how political the vampires were supposed to be.

  “It is odd that someone of your grandmother’s prominence chose Vancouver as her territory.”

  “She met her husband here …”

  “I see. It was also odd that your existence didn’t even warrant a footnote. Hence my surprise in meeting you.”

  “My magic isn’t foot-notable, I guess.”

  “No? I certainly wouldn’t agree. I plan on correcting the list as soon as it is appropriate.”

  That was just peachy. I loved the idea of being on a vampire list. I swallowed the bile that rose unbidden in my throat and powered forward with the information gathering. “Sienna and Rusty also don’t appear on any list.”

  “No. They were of little consequence.”

  “And Rusty’s mother?”

  “The necromancer? Why would I ever need to speak to her?”

  “She would be on another list?” I asked. And the vampire grinned as if he was proud of my deduction. The vampires must like their lists, and I’d guessed they had one noting who to avoid as well.

  “If she was powerful enough.”

  “Like my Gran.”

  “Yes. But anyone on the Convocation would be considered among the most powerful.”

  “The Convocation. Is that different than the coven you mentioned?” Kett inclined
his head. I hated his serenity as I worked to piece everything together. “A witches Convocation, as in a governing body?” I added. “Like your vampire Conclave?”

  “If you wish.”

  The idea of a governing body rang a dim bell for me, of course, as in it had been somewhere on Gran’s syllabus years ago. Seeing as I had no interest in anything I wasn’t good at — such as magic — I never paid very close attention to such things. But my Gran was supposedly some sort of a member of this Convocation? That didn’t sound right, the vampire must be confusing his witches.

  “What I would find more intriguing is why they all seem to be hiding you,” Kett said, casually dropping his next mind-boggling bomb.

  I thought about sitting down and not getting up for a while as I pieced bits of a lifetime of secrets, and maybe even betrayal, together. But Kandy shifted impatiently in my peripheral vision and called me back to the more immediate concern. Sienna, my sister, who might be drained of magic and helpless somewhere.

  I dialed her number.

  Muffled music started to play nearby — “Die Young” by Kesha. Sienna’s ring tone.

  Kandy crossed to the futon and pulled Sienna’s cell phone out from underneath it.

  Damn it. I held out my hand for the phone, and Kandy gave it to me without question. As I scrolled through Sienna’s favorites, Rusty’s number appeared just under my own. I dialed it without hope of him answering. He didn’t. I hung up without leaving the vicious message on the tip of my tongue.

  I put both phones in my satchel and looked at Kett. “It’s seven hours from here to Tofino, if the ferry’s on time and there are no issues with the roads.” He nodded his head as if I’d just gifted him with some valuable piece of information. “Sienna might not have seven hours, or even five more if we assume my Gran is already on her way.” Kett didn’t react to this. I thought furiously about what to do next … the implications were staggering and piling up … the sex-mussed bed, the pentagram, Sienna’s ‘lost’ phone … my trinket hanging off the nail in the closet …

  Then, fishing my phone back out of my satchel, I made a last-ditch effort to avoid involving myself further in this growing nightmare, and I did something I had never done before in a crisis. I called my mother.