by Nova Nelson
This felt a little like that—silly, mostly for show, created by a bunch of people whose need for superiority was so intense that they’d concocted this scheme and made everyone else follow along.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said, but before I could go on, Liberty Freeman stood from his seat and hurried down the dais stairs, approaching with his arms wide and his grin wider. “If it isn’t Lunasa’s cook-off queen!” He waved me over to meet him halfway, so I did. Turning down a genie’s request, no matter how friendly he may seem, is a stupid idea.
He wrapped me in his arms so tightly, pressing me up against his firm chest, that all I could do in return was bend my wrists and flap him a few times on the back.
He let go, but gripped my arms just under the pits and held me at arm’s length to get a good look at me. “When can I look forward to another taste of that queso?” He pronounced it wrong, but I let it slide.
“As soon as we sort things out today, I think,” I said.
He dropped my arms and clapped his hands then rubbed them together. “Okay! Let’s get to it! I’ve been dreaming of that stuff since I first tried it.”
Once he was back up on his pillar and I’d returned to my place, I turned my attention to the woman sitting in the centermost dais: Mayor Esperia. As with her fellow council members, save Liberty and Sebastian, the Guilt Gale was still in full swing as spirits hovered just over the shoulder of each afflicted.
The susurrus of their voices could have easily been mistaken for wind, were we not in a windowless chamber.
“According to your letter,” said the mayor, “you believe you know who is responsible for inflicting a Guilt Gale upon specific members of the High Council. Is that correct?”
“Yes”—I wasn’t sure how to address her, so I went with the standard for someone who feels the need to sit on a raised platform—“Your Honor.” She didn’t seem displeased with the honorific, so I continued. “I believe the person who did it placed the curse on my cook-off entry as a way to frame me for it.”
“You have to admit,” said the mayor, “that it does seem likely anything having to do with ghosts would lead back to you.”
“I do admit that, which is why I bothered looking into it at all.”
Quinn Shaw leaned forward to get a better look at me over the high railing of his throne. “You said you know who did it. Care to enlighten us? I’m more than ready to move past this.”
I suspected the High Council wouldn’t like what I was about to say, Quinn Shaw least of all, but there was nothing I could do about that. Too late to back out now. “Before I say who it was, I think there’s something else you should know.”
Count Malavic’s head quirked slightly to the side as he stared down at me. I knew that would pique his interest.
“And that is?” the mayor said.
“I believe that the person who cast the Guilt Gale was the same person responsible for stealing the town’s gold reserves.”
“Ha!” Count Malavic threw his head back. “Oh, this is fascinating.” I assumed part of his amusement was due to the fact that he knew I wasn’t about to point the finger right at him. He couldn’t cast a Guilt Gale if he’d tried, therefore, he knew I wouldn’t be accusing him of stealing the gold.
Mayor Esperia narrowed her eyes, leaning so close to the edge of her dais, I worried she might tumble off. “Are you sure about that?”
Sure about it? About as sure as I could be about anything. After all, I’d been sure ghosts and werewolves and witches didn’t exist only seven months ago. Yet here we were.
“Fairly.”
“Explain yourself then, Ms. Ashcroft.”
“As I’m sure you’re aware, the sheriff’s department is stretched a little thin. Deputy Manchester has been working tirelessly to figure out who took the gold, but he’s only one man. Sheriff Bloom is buried so deep in paperwork that I’d be worried about her suffocating if she weren’t immortal. And so long as that remains the case, the thief could get away with it. Unless there was someone else in town who might be able to figure it out.” I presented myself to the Council with a downward flourish of my hands. “I’m not the world’s best detective, but I have solved a couple murders in the few months since I’ve arrived in Eastwind. And you know as well as I do that news travels fast around here. I believe the thief wanted to keep me distracted so I would stay off his scent with the gold, and the best way to do that is to commit a secondary crime, one that seems to point right at me as the prime suspect. That way, I’d be so distracted trying to clear my name and clean up the mess that I wouldn’t have time to worry about the missing gold. Seems like a good plan at first blush.” I paused. “Except in doing so, the thief allowed me to pair the crimes together as carried out by the same person. And that essentially allowed me to triangulate the perpetrator.”
“Ooh,” said a female ghost hovering behind the mayor. “That’s clever. I believe you’ve met your match, Cordelia. Though, that doesn’t say much. Perhaps if you’d studied just a little harder for your Mancer Trials, you wouldn’t be outsmarted so frequently and the money we spent on your education would not have been entirely wasted.”
Mayor Esperia swatted at the air around her head like it was a fly and not a dead ancestor buzzing around.
While she was distracted, the count jumped in. “I assume you did not come up with that theory all by yourself,” he said. “Let me guess, Ruby True? Oh, certainly not the Culpepper boy. Wait!” He licked his lips. “Stringfellow. It was him, wasn’t it? I’ve heard the two of you have been getting into a little … trouble together lately, and he’s a clever one.”
Definitely did not appreciate his tone. “Nope. None of them. It was Landon Hawker who came up with that theory.”
Mayor Esperia’s eyes popped open. “Landon Hawker? The North Wind witch down in the catacombs?”
“Same one.”
“Good for him, then. Did he also tell you how to banish the Guilt Gale?”
“Hold on just one second,” interrupted Darius Pine while the werebear spirits behind him tussled for dominance. “Nora still hasn’t said who did it. Let’s clear that up first.”
Siobhan nodded and Octavia pounded her fists against the stone arms of her chair, shouting, “Arr!”
“Fine, fine,” the mayor said, snarling with annoyance. “We’ll get that out of the way.” She nodded at me, and I snuck a quick glance at Quinn before saying, “It was Seamus. Seamus Shaw.”
“Oh fool’s gold!” shouted Quinn. “My boy’s too dumb for that, and we all know it.”
“Huh. I thought he’d be upset about the accusation for an entirely different reason,” said Grim.
“Same.”
“No,” I said, trying to stand firm. “I’m fairly certain it was him.”
“Not without help, it wasn’t,” insisted Quinn. “My guess is that no-good Lovelace he pals around with was in on it.”
“Lucent?” I asked, and Quinn nodded. “That could be. I’ll leave that up to Sheriff Bloom to determine whenever she arrests Seamus, which will probably be right around now.”
“She already knows about this?” Mayor Esperia snapped. “You told her before you told us?”
Ah yes. There was that tension. “She is the one in charge of maintaining law and order in this town.”
Darius Pine swiped at the space behind his head, shouting, “Hush, Dad! I know!” He pressed his lips together, snorting air from round nostrils. “Great. Let Sheriff Bloom deal with Seamus. Are you able to remove this curse? I don’t think I can take another day of my father and grandmother asking me when I’m going to meet a nice girl and settle down.”
“Yes, I know how to remove the curse.” This was the part I was dreading the most. Ruby’s warning rang loudly in my ears. I didn’t want to open the past life door. Not yet.
So I wouldn’t.
For once, I would take Ruby’s advice. The accidental quenching was a bit of a wake-up call and I’d explored my powers beyond my ability to cont
rol them one too many times.
“But I won’t do it for you. I’m not trained enough yet. It would require things of me that are too dangerous. Seamus can do it, though. If he has the ability to cast it, he has the ability to remove it. And it won’t be nearly as dangerous for him.”
Quinn blew a raspberry at that. “You’ve clearly never tried to get Seamus to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”
“True, but I have full confidence that between the seven of you, you can think of a way to outsmart him and get him to lift the curse.”
Malavic was enjoying this just a little too much, a luxury afforded to him by the fact that the Guilt Gale didn’t affect him at all. He bit back a grin.
“You came here just to tell us that,” said the mayor.
“In person. Yes.”
“And you’re absolutely sure you can’t lift the curse from us right away?”
“No, I’m pretty sure I could if I tried. I read how to do it last night. But I won’t. Because it’s too risky, and what’s the point of all the tedious tutoring sessions if I’m going to jump into the deep end before I’m ready anyhow?”
The mayor cleared her throat and spoke with authority as she concluded the meeting. “I’m glad to hear someone has talked a little sense into you, Ms. Ashcroft, whether it was Ruby True or Oliver Bridgewater. Your lessons seem to be taking, and that’s all the Coven can hope for.”
“We’ve been over this,” Darius said, “no mixing Coven business with High Council business. One is a government-sanctioned entity and the other is not.”
“Technically,” Liberty interjected, “the term ‘government sanctioned’ is meaningless, as government in itself is nothing but a shared idea among people, and ideas cannot sanction anything. Only the people can do that.”
“Not again,” moaned Sebastian Malavic. “Your anti-government sentiment is among the most tedious things I have ever experienced, and I was present at the Thirty-Year Congress where Eastwind’s bylaws were first created. Need I remind you that you are a part of the government you so detest?”
“Only because someone has to speak on behalf of the people.”
“We all speak on behalf of the people,” moaned Siobhan. “We’re elected officials. Who do you think elects us?”
Liberty leaned forward to see past Malavic, Esperia, and Shaw as he pointed at Siobhan. “I know exactly who elects us. A populous who has never in their lifetime experienced slavery and doesn’t understand that we’re only ever a few ill-advised laws away from returning to it!”
As Liberty and Siobhan continued back and forth, Mayor Esperia leaned forward and said, “I’ll check in with Sheriff Bloom, and should we need anything else from you, Ms. Ashcroft, we’ll be sure you let you know.”
Epilogue
“Another order of the queso,” Tanner said, breezing into the kitchen and sticking the full ticket on the turnstile for Anton.
We’d only rolled out the appetizer three days ago, and already Anton refused to deal with it, saying, in so many words, that he was sick and tired of maintaining the hot cheese while he was trying to cook everything else.
“I think I pulled a muscle in my forearm,” I said, dipping the ladle into the vat and grimacing as I twisted my wrist to pour it into a small dish. “I’ve never had to serve up so much queso in such a short timeframe.”
Tanner approached the newly constructed queso station in the kitchen. “There are worse problems to have than too many rabid customers.” I handed him the dish and he stuck it on his tray.
He was right, of course. A worse problem, one that immediately came to mind, would be having to solve another spirit-related crime in Eastwind. There was just no time for that in my life now. Not with the overtime to cover Jane’s shift while she and Ansel were on their honeymoon plus the exhaustion from people demanding más queso.
Then there were my lessons with Ruby, which had become nothing short of brutal. It was obvious that my question about quenching had tipped her off to the fact that I’d accidentally done it. Or maybe the increased rigor was because she knew that me taking her advice once, and not diving into past-life magic, was about as much as she could hope for, and I likely wouldn’t listen a second time.
(She wasn’t wrong.)
But sweet baby jackalope, did that woman grill me.
And on the nights she wasn’t pushing me, Oliver was.
Apparently, Mayor Esperia had spoken with my nerdy tutor directly and asked him to do a little less book learning, and a little more practicum. The fact that the mayor had taken the time to speak with him directly put the fear of god, goddess, and golem in the poor guy, and I’m not sure he’d blinked once during our lessons since.
But only a few moments ago, Oliver had sent an owl to Medium Rare, saying he’d come down sick and had to cancel our lesson that night. That meant I finally had a night off. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.
Tanner entered the kitchen again. “Another queso,” he grunted.
As I served it up, I said, “Hey. Oliver canceled.”
“Huh?” He looked at me like he was looking through me. Poor guy. I don’t think he’d ever experienced being this far in the weeds. He blinked. “Oh, that’s good for you.” Then he stuck the ticket for Anton.
“It occurred to me that I never got your surprise.”
He shook his head rapidly, squinting at me like he didn’t have time for this. “What surprise?”
“The one you planned after Lunasa. You said it’d be there whenever I wanted it. Well,” I held out the small bowl, but not far, so he had to walk over to get it, “I want it tonight.”
That was the point where he should have kissed me. Duh. Kiss me, then get the queso. It wasn’t that hard.
But the flirtation was one-sided. “Can’t. Won’t be leaving here till one in the morning, then I have to be back at five. Maybe some other time.” He grabbed the dish before scooping out chips and disappearing into the dining room.
Should I read into that?
I definitely could without much effort. I could read way into his disinterest. But I wouldn’t.
I was going to be emotionally mature about this. We were both swamped. People handled stress differently.
This was definitely not about the fact that I still hadn’t completely explained why Donovan and I were at Sheehan’s together without him.
I hurried out of the kitchen before Tanner could call in another queso order and I got stuck in an endless loop of dishing it out.
As I made a round, checking on my tables, refilling coffee mugs, and fielding compliments on Medium Rare’s award-winning dish, Grim walked in, looking worse for the wear, and Sheriff Bloom and Deputy Manchester followed close behind.
“Sheriff Bloom!” I said. “Morning. What a pleasure to see you out of the office.”
She beamed. “What a pleasure to be out of the office.”
I cleared empty dishes from the counter, giving the two of them a place to sit while Grim loped around to his usual place behind the counter.
“All set with your familiar,” Stu said as I poured them each a cup of coffee.
“I appreciate it,” I replied. “He was getting a little like Lady MacBeth and Tell-Tale Heart fanfic.” The quizzically raised eyebrow of Stu’s reminded me that no one here got my references. “Never mind. Old world joke. Anyway, I appreciate it.”
“It was my pleasure, Ms. Ashcroft.”
Sheriff Bloom leaned forward. “It really was. I could tell. Making Seamus go to the trouble of reversing the spell on a grim was enjoyable in a not-so-pure way.” She leaned back again. “Or so I assume.” She winked.
I pointed from Stu to Gabby. “Cherry pie and…?”
“Actually,” Stu interjected before Sheriff Bloom could respond, “we’re here for the queso. I told Gabby about how amazing it is, and she insisted we come by.”
Bloom said, “It is safe for consumption, right?”
I shrugged. “As long as you’re not lactose intolerant
, yeah, it’s good to go.”
When I returned with it a moment later, I set it between them and said, “On me.” I owed them one for their help. Or, no, actually they owed me one for my help.
Regardless, this was more bribe queso than gratitude queso. Because I wanted the scoop.
Pun intended.
(Sorry.)
I waited until Gabby tried her first bite, watched her eyes shoot open before rolling back in her skull. It was a pretty typical response. “I’ve been wondering,” I said, taking the opportunity as they became progressively more queso-drunk, “did Seamus act alone?”
Sheriff Bloom spoke around a mouthful. “Course not. Lucent and Slash were in on it, too. They just weren’t as showy about their newfound wealth.”
I wasn’t surprised. “Lucent wasn’t exactly hurting for money before.”
“And Slash is a pugnacious liability,” Bloom added, “but he’s no idiot. He let Seamus keep picking up the tab. Meanwhile, Slash was hoarding his money away in the Deadwoods where no one would find it.”
“You left out the best part,” Stu added, tilting his head back to drop in another chip. He crunched down on it, moaning, then looked at me. “I don’t know what you said to the High Council, Ms. Ashcroft, but we owe you one. Those stingy politicians just amended the budget to include salary for another deputy.”
“Whoa, you don’t say!”
Gabby Bloom nodded happily. “Now all we have to do is find some unwitting fool in this town who loves having too much responsibility, not enough power, and zero glory.”
“Hey Tanner,” Stu called, as Tanner walked by.
“Huh?” Tanner did a full three-sixty looking for the source of the voice. “Oh, hey, Deputy.” He smiled wide as he added, “and Sheriff! Good to see you, Bloom. How you liking the queso?”
“It ought to be illegal.” She grinned. “But I’m glad it’s not.”
“You still got any interest in law enforcement?” Stu asked.
