“Thanks for your help,” I said dryly.
“My algorithms detect sarcasm,” Codex replied. “Is there some other way I can offer assistance?”
“You’ve done enough,” Bentley said.
“More sarcasm,” Codex noted.
He put his hands on his hips and growled up at the ceiling, “Did you have to tell the ghost he was dead? You scared him off.”
“Detective, I was complying with your request.”
He sighed and dropped his arms limply at his sides. “Yes, I suppose you were. What else did you pick up on that scan of yours?”
“I detected that Zara Riddle’s witch powers have been restricted.”
“We know about the dampening field,” I said, nodding. “I found out in the cafeteria. I guess your shifter bosses don’t like us witches and our witcher-i-doo.”
“That’s not the restriction I’m referring to,” Codex said. “You have been altered.”
Bentley gave me a quizzical look. “What’s she talking about?”
“Uh...” I was reluctant to admit I might have messed up my own powers.
Codex said, “Zara Riddle, you have been significantly altered recently. There is a rezoning spell in effect.”
“Oh, that.” I waved a hand casually. I could feel Bentley’s eyes on me. And Codex’s. Assuming she even had eyes. I tugged at the back of my collar to let out some steam that was forming. “Yeah, there might be a rezoning spell in effect. I was kind of, um, trying something.”
Bentley’s eyes bore into me. “You were trying something?”
I felt my cheeks flushing with embarrassment. “Just a wee little transformation spell. It was supposed to help me get control over my powers. Nothing too crazy.”
Codex said, “On the contrary. The rezoning spell you have cast upon yourself is, by your own definition, crazy. It is unadvisable for supernatural beings to take such measures. The suppression of powers may lead to permanent injury, or death.”
I waved my hand again in the air. “Yeah, yeah. Lots of things lead to permanent injury and death.” I coughed into my hand. Sniffing the ghost had given me a dry throat. I desperately wanted to change the subject. Anything to get Bentley to stop staring at me that way.
I coughed again, then asked, “Codex, do you have any idea where Greyson went after he flashed out of here?”
She replied calmly, “My sensors are restricted to this facility.”
Hearing that she was limited to the facility did offer me some small comfort.
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I guess we’ll show ourselves out now.” I turned to leave Greyson’s tiny, claustrophobic office.
Bentley stretched out an arm and barred my exit. “Is it true? What she said about you doing something dangerous to yourself?”
“She’s just a computer built by shifters. What does she know about witchcraft?”
Codex said, “I am Codex. I contain the collected works of millennia. I know more about witchcraft than any witch, alive or dead.”
I snorted. “Good thing you’re not full of yourself,” I said.
“My sensors detect sarcasm,” Codex replied, almost playfully.
Bentley hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Zara, it’s probably not my business what spells you cast on yourself, but as your friend, I’m concerned.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” I crossed my arms. “And you’re right about it not being any of your business.”
He winced. “Don’t be so sure of that. If you’ve done something to yourself, and you’re unable to communicate with ghosts, then I have no use for you.”
My cheeks, which had been hot from embarrassment, suddenly burned with rage. “You have no use for me?”
He dropped his arm from the doorway and took a half step back into the hallway. “I misspoke,” he said. “What I mean is, the department has no use for you.”
“Just like that?”
“Don’t get nippy.”
“Nippy? You’re lucky there’s a dampening spell on this facility, or I’d show you nippy. I have just the spell to show you nippy.”
“Zara,” Bentley said in what he probably felt was a very reasonable tone. “We don’t involve civilians in investigations without good reason.”
“No. You just like partnering with them so you can dump them. Twice in one day.”
“I haven’t dumped you once, let alone twice.”
“Check your math, Detective.”
“I’m not dumping you. I just need to know more about—”
I lurched past him and stomped down the hallway.
If I’d had better control over my emotions, I might have explained to him that I didn’t have control over my emotions.
Close proximity to ghosts who were upset tended to stir up my own feelings. When Ishmael had gone all ghost-inferno before leaving, a part of me had caught fire as well.
But, since I didn’t have control over myself, I didn’t explain any of that to Detective Bentley. What I did do was call him a few bad names and threaten to cast a whole bunch of painful spells on him as soon as we were topside.
Chapter 24
Ice cream. I needed ice cream. What do you do when you feel like you’re an erupting volcano? Cool the lava. With ice cream.
“Mom?”
I looked up from my sundae to find my daughter, in her pajamas, staring at me. Her hair was tangled on one side from sleep.
“Did I wake you?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she said. “Technically, it was the doors that woke me. The front door. The cupboard door. The freezer door.”
I winced. “Sorry about that. Will you accept half of this delicious sundae as an apology?” I used magic to open the utensil drawer across the kitchen and lift out a long-handled sundae spoon. After having my powers dampened underground, even the smallest touches felt luxurious.
My sleepy-eyed daughter looked down at the sweet peace offering. “Are those gummy bears in your sundae?”
“You bet. I love how they get extra firm when the ice cream partly freezes them.”
“Ooh. That is nice.” She plucked the floating spoon from the air and joined me at the kitchen island. “Apology accepted.”
We excavated our way through a third of the sundae, reaching the ladyfingers and jam layer, before she spoke again.
“How did date night at the morgue go?”
“As you may have guessed by the girth of this planet-sized sundae, it did not go well.”
She smirked. “No kiss goodnight?”
“Bentley didn’t even drive me home. He passed me off on Persephone Rose.”
“Who?”
“Persephone Rose.”
“I heard you the first time. Who is he or she?”
“Persephone Rose is a silly young woman from the Wisteria Police Department who has a giant schoolgirl crush on Bentley. She did nothing but talk about how wonderful and brilliant he is the whole way home.”
Zoey’s eyes twinkled. “Now I understand the door slamming. You’re jealous.”
I snorted. “She can have him. If he has any use for her. He has no use for me, apparently.” I stabbed through the ladyfinger and jam layer, into the granola. “Can you believe that? I spent my entire Saturday helping him with his homicide case, and just because I didn’t do the witcher-i-doo song and dance at his command, he dismissed me! Not once, but twice. Like I didn’t have anything else to offer!”
She gave me a puzzled look. “Song and dance?”
“The ghost thing.” I waved my spoon, dropping chunks of granola and beheaded gummy bears on the counter. “The whole Spirit Charmed thing.” I took another bite. “You know, there’s a lot more to me than my ravishing good looks and my wicher-i-doo.”
“Mom, I love this thing where you start at the end of the story and rant like a crazy person, but it’s two o’clock in the morning. I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think we should go to bed and talk about this tomorrow, when you’ve calmed down.”
/> “I’ll never calm down. Never.”
She raised her eyebrows.
I sighed. “Okay. I’ve already calmed down a bit.”
“What happened? Did Bentley really kick you off the case again?”
I growled. “Now I’m riled up again! How dare he take up my whole Saturday, then give me the bum’s rush out of there just when it gets good?!”
“Start at the beginning,” she said. “You seemed happy enough when you left here tonight for your date at the morgue. Start there.”
“Good idea.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “You’re such a brilliant kid. So logical and thoughtful.”
“You left here with Bentley. Then what?”
“We drove to the WPD, where we used a secret elevator to go underground to the DWM.”
Zoey cocked her head. “It’s underneath the police department, too? Wow. It must be enormous. It must run underneath half the town.” She looked down as she dug through striated layers of sundae. “Like an ant colony. Or a mole burrow.” She met my gaze, her hazel eyes twinkling. “Did you know that animals that burrow underground are called fossorial?”
“Fossorial. I feel like I should know that word, but I don’t.”
She beamed. Zoey loved springing new vocabulary on me as much as she loved beating me at Scrabble. I used to think she was the reigning champion at the game because she dominated the board spatially, but I was starting to think she also knew more words than I did.
Fossorial, I thought. Now use it in a sentence. “After we left here, Bentley I went down into the DWM’s fossorial lair.”
“Burrow,” she corrected.
“If you saw it, you’d agree it’s more of a lair than a burrow. Concrete walls, not dirt.”
“Lair it is. Keep talking.”
“So, we went down there, only to be given a hard time by a computer. A computer! Its name is Codex. Well, her name.”
Her eyes widened. “Artificial intelligence?”
I nodded.
“Keep talking,” she said. “Keep talking and don’t stop.”
I grinned. “Sweeter words have never been spoken.”
I did as requested. I told her all about the underground building’s new security system, the spell-dampening measures, the interview with Carrot’s lawyer boyfriend Steve, and my visit to the morgue. Zoey was just as fascinated by the bell-wearing cow in the alpine meadow as she was about the medical examiner using the karambit to behead a dummy made of headcheese.
When I got to what happened in Ishmael’s tiny office, she found the encounter both spooky and fascinating. She giggled at the image of Bentley drawing his gun and blindly aiming it at a ghost’s temple—for all the good that did. But when I relayed the very worst part, the part about me getting booted off the case for the second undignified time, she only shrugged.
“Bentley does have a point,” she said. “If you can’t charm the victim’s ghost into communicating with you, you’re basically just a civilian.”
“But we did communicate! I could see Ishmael when nobody else could. Plus, we had a bit of a dialog. He mouthed some words at me.”
“Sure, but only enough to make it clear he doesn’t know who murdered him.”
“True.”
“The killer must have snuck up behind him and done it... lickety-split,” she said.
“So to speak.”
“That means the killer must have skipped that whole speech-from-the-villain thing. That’s when the bad guy in a James Bond movie explains his whole evil plan.”
I gasped. “People actually do that in real life,” I said. I had witnessed it myself, at least once. “I guess, deep down, everyone wants the world to know they’re good at stuff. Even killers.”
Zoey nodded. “But poor Ishmael Greyson doesn’t know who killed him, so whether you can sniff him into your head or not, you’re not much use to Bentley, the WPD, or the DWM.”
“What you’re saying makes perfect sense. I agree with your logic. But answer me this, smart child of mine. If Bentley was only doing the logical thing by dismissing me, why do I still feel like slamming doors?”
“Maybe it was the way he said it to you.”
“He did eventually come around and thank me.” I wrinkled my nose. “Probably out of self-preservation, due to all the spells I threatened to cast on him once we got above ground.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“And he even apologized before he shipped me off with Persephone. He was actually quite apologetic, now that I think about it.”
“Then you must feel all door-slammy because of the ghost.” She gave me a pointed look. “And not out of any romantic jealousy over young Persephone.”
I struck the air with my finger. “You’re right. It was entirely from Ishmael. I’ve settled down, but his emotions are still affecting me.”
She studied me thoughtfully. “Auntie Z says ghosts can have powerful tantrums.” She lowered her voice. “She told me a story about something that happened to a friend of hers. There was once a ghost who used its own cremated ashes to form a body, and take revenge.”
I shivered. The massive quantities of ice cream combined with the passing of time spent with a sympathetic listener had cooled off my rage.
“That’s disturbing,” I said. “The ghost made itself a body out of ashes?”
Zoey nodded. “And I don’t think it happened to Auntie Z’s friend, if you know what I mean.”
I did know what she meant. “Your great-aunt has more secrets than a librarian has unread books on her nightstand.”
Zoey got up from her chair and went to the cupboard. “I’ll make you some coffee,” she said.
I yawned and checked the time. “It’s too early. I can still get a few hours of sleep before the next thing goes wrong.”
“No. You need to go downstairs with your spell notes. You need to set things back to normal.” She quickly added, “And by normal, I mean normal for you. Not normal-normal. You need to reverse that library rezoning spell that you shouldn’t have cast in the first place.”
“You think?” I gave her a defiant look.
“Don’t you?” She measured coffee grounds into the filter compartment. “A highly advanced computer intelligence was able to scan you and detect that something was wrong. What more evidence do you need that what you did was wrong? I don’t want you to get sick and die like Gigi did. I don’t want to lose you.”
I bit my tongue. We hadn’t lost Gigi, technically.
“I think you should see Gigi’s friend, Dr. Ankh, for a consultation,” Zoey said. “Gigi says she knows a lot about witches.”
I gasped in horror. “Since when do you trust the opinion of the woman who turned your grandmother into a you-know-what?”
“You don’t have to do what Dr. Ankh says, but it might help to get a medical opinion.” She turned on the coffee maker. “Or you could just reverse the spell tonight. The coffee will be ready in a few minutes.”
“Even if I wanted to reverse the spell, it might take me a few days to work through the counterspell.”
“I could call Gigi and get Dr. Ankh’s phone number?”
“No way. You haven’t met her yourself, but if you did, you’d agree with me that Dr. Ankh has a strong evil vibe. She’s always talking about the purity of bloodlines.” I gave Zoey a mother-knows-best look. “Throughout history, that sort of talk is rarely associated with good things. For example, the royal families kept marrying their own cousins to produce their pureblood offspring.”
“They wouldn’t have, if they’d known what we do nowadays about DNA.”
I pulled a face, sticking out my tongue. “Some of them even married siblings.”
Zoey shrugged. “Maybe with genetic engineering, they can eventually get right back to it.”
“How can you be so calm and logical about it? Cousins getting married. Siblings having babies together!”
She rubbed her chin with her index finger. “I think because I don’t have any cousins, let alone siblings,
I haven’t experienced the feelings associated with that taboo personally.”
“Just because you haven’t met them doesn’t mean you don’t have tons of...” I realized what I was saying only after it was too late to stop myself.
Zoey pounced. She was on me like white lightning. Like Boa on unguarded deli ham. “I have siblings? Do you mean I have half-siblings, on my father’s side?”
My throat tightened. Now I’d done it. Zara tries to be a good mother. Zara tries not to blurt out family secrets in the wee hours of the morning.
If only we could get back to trashing on Bentley or arguing about my rezoning spell. But it was too late.
I tried to play it off casually. “We can’t really know for sure that you don’t have any half-siblings. But, I assure you, the possibility of you bumping into one of these theoretical half-siblings, out of all the billions of people in the world, is highly unlikely.” I tilted my chin up and proclaimed, “Please feel free to date whomever you want.”
She gave me a deadly serious glare. “You said my father died a long time ago. That’s what you told me. But now you’re saying he’s been around, having kids?”
“He did disappear,” I said. “That’s as good as dead. Basically. After enough years missing, a person can be declared legally dead.”
Her voice became quieter and colder. “That’s not what you told me.”
“You were just a little girl,” I said. “You already had enough things working against you, by which of course I mean being raised by me.” I forced a laugh. “Not that there’s anything wrong with you, in spite of having me for a single parent. You’re brilliant, and strong, and healthy, and—”
“Mom.”
I blinked repeatedly and took another angle. “So I told a little white lie. What sort of mother would I be if I let you grow up feeling abandoned? Forgotten? You know how hard that was for me. I only saw my father one day a year. I know from personal experience what it feels like to mean so little to your father.”
Zoey shook her head. She opened her mouth and then closed it.
“What?” I asked.
Another head shake, and then finally the words poured out. “Pawpaw loves you, Mom. He only saw you once a year because that was all Gigi and the family would allow. They had something on him, Mom. He tried to fight them, but he didn’t have the resources, and they threatened to take away his one day. That’s why he tried to cram so much into the times he saw you. He was trying to make up for a whole year of missing you.”
Wardens of Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries - Daybreak Book 1) Page 18
