Heists and Homicides

by Lily Webb

  “Well, that’s the thing that got me thinking, actually. When I was doing all that research on your family history and the Black Brotherhood, I came across some mentions of magical artifacts that I remembered hearing about when I was a kid,” Mallory said.

  I shuddered at the mention of the Black Brotherhood — a shadowy group of warlocks seeking to increase warlock power in Moon Grove through less-than-civil ways, namely the use of blood magic.

  “Anyway, my mom used to read me these silly children’s stories and I always thought they were just life lessons wrapped up in fantastical fairy tales, but after reading about them again recently, I don’t know if that’s true,” Mallory said.

  “What kind of artifacts are we talking about?”

  “Unrealistic stuff, even by magical standards. Stones that can bring people back from the dead, wands that can’t be broken or beaten by any other. You know, heroic stuff like that,” Mallory said.

  “Do you really think something like that is real? And even if it was, would anyone be foolish enough to store it in the Bank of Moon Grove?”

  “I dunno, but where else could they put it if it was real? You couldn’t exactly leave a dead-raising stone lying around in your house for anyone to find,” Mallory said.

  “Slow down, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” I said. “I’ve seen enough in Moon Grove to challenge pretty much all of my preconceptions about, well, everything, but this is a stretch.”

  “Is it though?”

  “It is. If you want to dive into researching mythical objects, I won’t stop you, but I have to stay focused on reality and tracking down people I can talk to,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “An employee from the bank — well, I guess he’s a former employee now — named Xander,” I said.

  Mallory’s brow furrowed.

  “Wait, Xander who?”

  “I don’t know his last name, I barely know the guy at all. I had one interaction with him at the bank before it was robbed,” I said.

  “I have a cousin named Xander. He used to work at the bank, or at least he did the last I talked with him, but that was a while ago,” Mallory said.

  “No way,” I breathed. It couldn’t possibly be the same person, could it? Trying to track down a warlock in Moon Grove without at least their last name would’ve been like looking for a wand in a haystack — unless he really turned out to be my best friend’s cousin.

  “Would I lie to you?” Mallory asked.

  “Do you know where he might be these days? I mean, now that he’s jobless? His old boss, Victor, didn’t have a clue.”

  “Probably the same place he always hangs out, even when he’s working: The Magic Touch pub,” Mallory said and I sighed. I hadn’t set foot in the dingy, smoke-filled warlocks-only pub since dealing with Professor Frost’s death and I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of going back — nor coming up with a reason for them to let me inside again.

  “No rest for the witchy,” I said.

  “You know what, let’s go. If he’s newly unemployed, I’d bet my wand he’s there sulking about it over a beer right now. Besides, there’s no way he’s gonna want to talk to you alone,” Mallory said.

  “Wait, are you suggesting we skip class after the disaster that was our last one?” I asked. “Don’t you think we should have our noses in our books right now?”

  “As someone who spends nearly every waking moment reading books, trust me, there’s plenty of time for that later,” Mallory said and took me by the hand to charge down the spiral staircase.

  Chapter Seven

  The dingy exterior of The Magic Touch, a fallen-down, lopsided cake of a pub, was almost completely overrun by moss. The stump of its structure was so textured with lichen that it seemed to be growing down into the soil.

  Looking at it again, I realized I hadn’t missed the place.

  “Wait a second, we don’t even have a plan to get inside,” I said, pulling Mallory to a stop as she charged ahead.

  “Who says we need one?”

  “Don’t you remember the last time we were here? The warlocks aren’t going to let us walk in there without a reason. We only got inside last time because someone vouched for us, and we don’t know if your cousin’s in there, so it’s not like we can ring up as a lifeline,” I said.

  “Oh, you, always with the technicalities,” Mallory said, waving me away. “If our words don’t do the trick, I’ve got several hundred Moons in my pocket that will.”

  “Bribing the bouncer? Seriously?”

  “Do you have any better ideas? Money talks where losers walk,” Mallory said with a shrug and turned to walk to the pub. Sighing, I followed after her, not wanting to be left alone in the Warlocks’ Quarter. We weren’t far from the bank, and I wondered if that might’ve played a part in things.

  Like last time, Lazar the bouncer stood outside, his arms crossed over his chest, his bald head shining like a Bat Signal in the moonlight. He scowled at us as we approached, though it was barely noticeable behind the reflective sunglasses covering his eyes.

  “And here I thought I’d seen the last of you two,” Lazar said.

  “Think again,” Mallory said and the corner of Lazar’s mouth curled into a smile. Did he begrudgingly like us, loathe us, or some combination of the two? It was impossible to tell.

  “Have any friends inside to save you this time?” Lazar asked.

  “No, but I’m pretty sure my cousin’s inside and I think he might be in trouble,” Mallory lied and I kept my face as straight as possible to avoid giving her away.

  “Yeah, right, nice try. I think if anybody inside the pub were in trouble, I would know. I’m part of the security team, remember?” Lazar asked.

  “Okay, fine. No one’s in danger, or at least not that we know of yet. I’m here to talk to my cousin. Is that really a crime?” Mallory asked.

  “Who?”

  “Xander Crane,” Mallory said. Lazar’s bushy eyebrows wiggled up from behind his sunglasses, a pair of caterpillars on the move.

  “He’s a little busy at the moment. He specifically asked not to be disturbed,” Lazar said. Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “Why?” Mallory asked. “You know what, never mind, doesn’t matter. Please just tell him I’m here, I’m sure he’d want to know.”

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  “I told you, I’m his cousin. Mallory Crane,” Mallory said impatiently, her hands resting on her hips.

  “I’m still not letting you inside,” Lazar said. Mallory stared at me sideways, her irritation as plain on her face as the moonlight that danced across it, and reached into her robes for her wallet. She counted out two hundred Moons — and Lazar’s eyes sparkled as he smiled.

  “Will this change your mind?” Mallory asked as she shoved the cash at Lazar. He glanced down at it and turned his nose to the sky.

  “No, but three hundred might,” he said. “The extra hundred will help me pay for whatever damage I know you two are going to cause.”

  Mallory sighed and fished out another hundred Moon bill. Lazar snatched all three from her hand and stepped away from the door.

  “If anyone asks, you snuck inside. Got it?” Mazar asked.

  “Understood,” I said, and ushered Mallory through before she said anything to make him change his mind.

  The air changed immediately, choking my lungs with the acrid stench of stale smoke; it hung so thick in the air that we might as well have been walking through Jell-O. We weaved through a tangle if magical pool tables where I’d once watched Mallory completely school a couple of warlocks in a game.

  “Any sign of him?” I asked and Mallory shook her head as she stood on her tiptoes to glance around the room. Along the sides, tables as rickety and stained as the building itself were framed in the dim, yellow light from above, but all of them were empty.

  “Maybe he’s upstairs,” Mallory said; I’d forgotten there was another level. A mangy bartender’s eyes crossed the room wit
h us like those of the Mona Lisa on our way to a knotted, arthritic hand of a staircase — it probably wasn’t every day a couple of witches traipsed through the pub, after all — and I froze at the foot.

  Though Mallory bounded up the stairs two at a time, paying no mind to the holes and nails sticking up everywhere, I stepped carefully to avoid losing a toe. I exited into a carpeted room that was only slightly less smoky than the lower floor. Chess tables littered the space, forming their own kind of checkerboard. At the back left corner, two warlocks sat hunched over one of them, immersed in a hushed conversation.

  “There he is,” Mallory said. Thankfully, neither of the warlocks had noticed us.

  “Who’s the other guy?” I asked about the older, grizzled warlock who sat across from Xander, a cigarette dangling between his fingers. Smoke curled upward from its lit tip to join the storm cloud already gathered above them. Based on that mass alone, the two of them must’ve been talking for hours.

  “No clue. I’ve never seen him before, but he looks serious,” Mallory said. She had that right. While Xander moved one of his pieces across the board, the older warlock glared at him like he hoped to intimidate Xander into making a different move.

  “What we do, barge into their game?” I asked.

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Mallory said and strolled across the room, weaving between the chess tables. Halfway there, just as I had caught up with her, Xander’s head bobbed up and his eyes turned as white and wide as plates.

  “Mallory, Zoe, what are you two doing here? How did you get in?” Xander asked as he scooted back from the table to stand.

  “Checkmate,” the elder warlock said as he tipped over Xander’s king with one of his knights. He took one last drag on his cigarette before scrubbing it out in the ashtray beside him. He beamed as smoke rolled out between his teeth like a fog.

  “Is now a bad time?” I asked, though I had no intention of leaving regardless.

  “That depends,” Xander said.

  “Nonsense, don’t be rude, Xander. I was on my way out anyway now that the game is over,” the elder warlock said. He groaned as he stood, cracked his back, and stood staring at Xander while he waited for him to introduce us.

  “Zoe, Mallory, this is Ash Norwood,” Xander stuttered. Ash offered us a hand to shake and though I recoiled at his tobacco-stained fingers and gnarled nails, I took his claw of a hand in mine to get it over with as quickly as possible.

  “Zoe Clarke,” I said, nodding. Ash’s smile widened, revealing jagged, broken teeth that were as stained as his fingers.

  “Of course, I thought I recognized you,” Ash said.

  “I was chatting with Ash about a potential job opportunity, since I’m on the market again,” Xander said and I didn’t miss the bitterness in his voice. I had no idea who Ash was, nor what kind of job he could possibly offer Xander, but I decided not to ask.

  “Ash works in finance,” Xander explained. It was a good thing I hadn’t asked.

  “Indeed, I do,” Ash said. “But I won’t for much longer if I keep sitting around smoking and playing chess all night.” He flashed his ghastly smile again and tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing down at Mallory and me as if he were saying goodbye.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you both, but I really need to get going. I’ll be in touch, Xander. Thanks for taking my mind off things for a few hours,” Ash said. He picked up his cane that dangled from the corner of the table and stumped away toward the stairs — but vanished before he got there.

  “What a weird dude,” Mallory whispered and I nodded.

  “What are you doing here?” Xander asked.

  “We came to talk to you, actually,” Mallory said. She sat down in Ash’s newly-empty chair and pulled over another for me, which she patted.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I think you can guess,” Mallory said as I lowered myself into the chair. Xander sank back into his and glared at us across the table, the dim light casting harsh shadows down his face and making him look more tired than he naturally did.

  “Is this about the bank?” Xander asked.

  “It is,” I said. Xander sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “I know Victor Thornheart fired you today.”

  “He sure did, the jerk,” Xander laughed. “I’m surprised he told you though, as paranoid as he seems to be about secrets leaking.”

  “I have a way of getting what I need out of people,” I said, smiling, and the color drained from Xander’s face.

  “Look, before you get started grilling me — because I know you’re going to — I didn’t have anything to do with the robber yesterday,” Xander said.

  “That’s what everyone has told me. It’s starting to get old,” I said. I wasn’t yet convinced that Xander was responsible, but someone had to be or had to know who was — and Xander knew a lot of secrets others didn’t, if what Victor told me was true.

  Xander scoffed and shook his head. “Fine, ask away. Whatever you need to know to get you off my back,” Xander said. “I mean, I was there with you when the place got robbed. I don’t really know what else you need from me to convince you I’m innocent.”

  “Since you mentioned secrets, let’s start there,” I said, leaning over the table to get a better look at him.

  “Sure. I’m an open book, especially now that I don’t have a job,” Xander said.

  “I’ve heard that every employee at the bank has to take a vow of secrecy, is that true?” I asked. Might as well start things off nice and easy, get him to trust me a little bit, before I went for the jugular.

  “It is. Although, clearly, it hasn’t done them a whole lot of good, no thanks to Percy himself,” Xander said. “I honestly don’t think anyone in the bank opened their mouths, but they didn’t have to. Percy did it for them.”

  ”What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. Percy was a blabbermouth, always was, boastful to the very end,” Xander said. “I really don’t think he was happy unless he had something to hold over someone else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’d tell you to ask him, but, well…”

  “Did he have something to hold over you? Maybe a relationship with his brother he wasn’t fond of, for instance?” I asked. Xander clenched his jaw.

  “So Victor told you about that too? Lilith, he really is trying to throw me under the bus,” Xander sighed.

  “I told you, I have a way of getting what I need from people,” I said. “He also told me he suspects you’re the one who might’ve been leaking critical information that led to the robbery.”

  “Like what? You don’t understand, and evidently, neither does he. The magical vows we take when we’re hired don’t allow us to share anything we learn about the bank with anyone,” Xander said. “The spells will literally lock your tongue if you try and send a breach alert back to management.”

  “And there weren’t any alerts about you, at least that you know of?” I asked. Of course, he wouldn’t know about it even if there had been, but I wanted to see his reaction to the question. Xander didn’t disappoint.

  “No, not to my knowledge, but like I said, I didn’t say anything to anyone,” Xander said. “Look, Mallory, you’re my cousin, you know me better than that. I wouldn’t risk my job by running my mouth to some random person.”

  “Not even a grizzly old warlock at The Magic Touch when you were deep in your cups?” Mallory pushed back, staring at the empty, foam-crusted mug beside him. How many had he drunk? Xander scowled.

  “No, not to anyone in this place,” Xander insisted. “Look, it’s no secret that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Percy, but to be fair, neither was Victor.”

  “How do you know that? Did he tell you himself?” I asked.

  “On more than one occasion. In fact, I’m almost positive you overheard us talking trash about Percy yesterday,” Xander said. Indeed, I had, but I wasn’t going to bring it up because it was the trump card in my back pocket.

  “Why didn’t Victor like
his brother?”

  “For the same reasons I didn’t. Could you imagine trying to run a bank together with a man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about anything?” Xander asked. “Worse yet, the only guiding principle Percy had was increasing his wealth, at any and all costs.”

  “Sounds like a good businessman to me,” I said.

  “You’re wrong, he was the worst. It would’ve been a different story if he didn’t run every Moon he ever made through a slot machine at the casino,” Xander said. He definitely wasn’t the first person to mention Percy’s gambling to me, but I was starting to think it was more of a serious problem than the others had said.

  “I’m not saying you’re guilty, but you’re talking like somebody who could be,” I said. Xander sighed and rested his head in his hands.

  “You’re not listening to me. If I’d told anyone a single thing about the bank, Victor and the rest of the management would know. It’s literally impossible to hide,” Xander said. “I highly doubt I’d be sitting here as a free man talking to you right now if they got an alert that I’d breached my vows. They would’ve told the police.”

  “Okay, fair enough,” I said with a shrug, though I didn’t know what to make of his version of events. Would the police really have cared that an employee let something slip?

  “Let’s switch gears a little bit then. You’re not the first person to tell me that Percy had a gambling problem. What do you know about that?” I asked; I didn’t want to fluster Xander too much. He might shut down before I got what I really needed.

  “Probably more than anyone else outside of his family,” Xander said. “Victor trusted me, he told me things that I don’t think he’d ever shared with anyone else.”

  At least Victor and Xander agreed on that point.

  “Like what?”

  “I shouldn’t even be saying this,” Xander said, and my ears perked up. “For Lilith’s sake, the poor guy just passed away.”

  “What is it? If it’s important, it could help,” I encouraged him.

  “Percy and his wife were on the verge of losing their house,” Xander said. “Victor told me it was because Percy had been gambling away the money he should have been using to pay for their mortgage. I don’t know for sure whether or not that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”