A Spell to Die For

by Gretchen Galway

  I stared past her at the body of Kurt Bosko, demon killer. He was flung out on his back, his head facing the door, twisted at the shoulders with his neck and limbs in an unnatural position. There was no blood. His hands were bare of all rings but one, a simple platinum band. He wore black knit pants and a T-shirt, probably what he wore to bed.

  The only furnishings in the room was a narrow futon along one wall, a leather trunk near the door, and a meditation cushion and yoga mat under the windows that were both surrounded with bottles and drinking glasses of a liquid I sensed was springwater.

  “He does look like he fell,” I said.

  “But from what?” Flor asked.

  The three of us looked up at the vaulted ceiling, higher than the rest of the house, about twenty feet at its peak. “Maybe it was an accident,” I said. “He was doing some spells—using wellspring water—and landed on his head. Maybe he was doing some crazy yoga pose.”

  “All right, stand back,” Raynor said. He took out a black bag and began setting pale round pebbles in a spiral pattern on the floor in front of the door. When he had a pattern about as large as a human head, he set a ruby in the center, an emerald at the tail, and then dusted it with a fine sand.

  The spell was supposed to illuminate the magical imprint of any spells done recently—the time frame and accuracy depended on the skill of the witch, the stones, and the crushed minerals that were used. I watched the air above the spiral and in the room for any sign of activity. Like hitting the rewind button on a video, it took a few long moments before we reached far enough back into the past to see any sign of life.

  But it was only Bosko’s magic that had left its ghost in the room. A mist near his hands appeared, then grew thick and cloudy as if remembering his life force. The same cloud moved around the room, tracing Bosko’s steps to the trunk, the cushion, the drinking glasses, the bathroom, and then to the door where we stood.

  “So maybe it was an accident?” Flor asked, watching the smoke. “I’m not an expert on memory mist charms, but isn’t that what it’s showing? That he was alone when his spirit went out?”

  “It only shows the magical residue of the witch casting spells. If a person was in the room but wasn’t casting any magic, we wouldn’t see them.” Raynor let out a slow breath. “Flor, go get my agents. You two need to be probed officially. And the housekeeper needs to be wiped and sent home with a gift bag or something.”

  “I can wake her,” Flor said.

  “Might as well let her sleep,” he said. “Is his jewelry in the trunk?”

  I looked over at the area below the light switch at the entrance of the room. Tristan had kept his own magic trunk in a similar position—as far from the sleeping Protector as possible while still being inside the warded room.

  Witches took off most of their powerful amulets before bed because its magic couldn’t be fully controlled by a sleeping human brain. I left my beads on because I’d made them myself, but if a witch had a large collection of silver, gold, and platinum jewelry well-adorned with diamonds and other gems, they would store them overnight in a safe place. I kept most of my uncontrollable magic in my steel filing cabinet.

  “Yes, everything went into that trunk,” Flor said. “Except the platinum band he’s wearing now.”

  Raynor glanced at me, no doubt thinking about the opal ring. To Flor, he said, “Get Agent Ironford. I’ll take it from here.”

  When Flor was gone, Raynor turned to me and spoke with a very quiet voice.

  “He had the ring when you saw him?”

  “Percy brought it,” I said.

  “Did you shake his hand?”

  “Before he got it.”

  “Good. Safer that way,” he said. “See him shake anyone else’s?”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t take it out of the package.”

  He tapped his lips and turned back to the room. “We’ll look for it.”

  “Percy would know if he stored it in the chest or was wearing it,” I said.

  “Or the new assistant. Your friend, Florence.” He pointed at the bottles discarded around the room. “Long day, but he still found time to have a solo cocktail party before kicking off.”

  “Maybe that’s why he wanted the job in Silverpool. He’s a springwater addict.”

  “Maybe he was,” Raynor said.

  “Was,” I echoed. Past tense.

  “I came up here today with five agents, but there will be more.” He gave me a worried look. “This is bad for you, Alma.”

  I gazed into the room, watching the remainder of Bosko’s faint, ghostly mist moving around. “If it had been a demon, there should be some sign of it entering,” I said. “The magic would’ve left a trace.”

  “Should be,” Raynor said.

  “Is there magic that can evade your spiral’s detection?”

  He gave me a look. “The daughter of Malcolm Bellrose is asking me that?”

  I flinched and turned away. My father was a whiz at escaping detection. It had been his key to evading imprisonment. There was never enough evidence to convict him.

  “Go get yourself scanned and go home,” he said. “Enjoy your life while you can. Things might get uncomfortable for you. And for everyone in town.”

  “Everyone? Why?”

  He slid a hand over his bare scalp. “New York is tired of hearing about this little backwater. There’s no telling what they might do now.”

  The Protectorate agents let me go home less than an hour later, which made me suspicious. In case they had me under surveillance, I didn’t go to Seth’s to tell him about the short-lived Protector. As a fairy at heart, he had his own ways of finding things out, and the death of the powerful witch would send shock waves through the supernatural community for miles. I told myself I’d already given the changeling every warning I could give.

  Because of my stash of wellspring water, I parked the Jeep inside my detached garage—after spending an hour moving aside my worktables, storage boxes, bulk toilet paper, an old bicycle, spare lumber, dirty garden tools—I used the rust for spells—and a rechargeable lawn mower without a working battery.

  I’d only lived there a couple of years. How had I already collected so much junk? If anyone looked inside my garage, they’d see immediately what a powerful motive I had to kill Bosko: moving it all would’ve been a nightmare.

  With the Jeep safely hidden inside the garage, I walked over to the redwood tree and squatted down near Willy’s door with a bottle I’d filled just for him. He didn’t come out to see me, however, even after I waited awhile and called his name, so I left it propped against the shaggy, massive trunk and went inside the house. When I let Random out a minute later, the bottle was gone.

  He’d gone underground. That itself made me more nervous than anything else I’d experienced in the past week.

  I wanted to talk to Birdie, but as with Seth, I didn’t want to draw a target on her back. They almost certainly had me under watch. Anything I did inside my house was private, but the moment I interacted outside of it, they’d know.

  And so I stayed inside, fretting and casting misleading, ineffective spells in an effort to see into the future. They never worked, but it was impossible not to try sometimes. It was past midnight while I was watching a distorted maybe-future unfold in the steam rising from a whistling teakettle filled with wellspring water when Darius dropped by.

  Random loved Darius, and told me my former partner was outside by suddenly rising from his cozy bed near the heater and whining to be let out. I picked up my staff, grateful Bosko hadn’t confiscated it the night before, and opened the door.

  He was standing in the driveway ten feet away. “Quite some wards you’ve put up,” he said. “Will you let me into the house, or do we need to talk out here?”

  Thumping my staff, I dismissed the spells that kept people from touching my land. “Hi Darius. Come on in.” I was glad to see him. Although he wasn’t always on my side, I trusted him. “Do you have news for me, or should I fi
nd a dog sitter for Random because you’re dragging me into custody?”

  He came inside, flinching from the screening spell at the threshold and then frowning at the teakettle. The prophecy I’d called forth in the mist had dissipated, but he’d be able to feel the residue of magic. “So you look into the future now?”

  I shrugged, pretending not to be embarrassed. It was an inaccurate, exploitative magic, as scorned among witches as it was among nonmagical humanity. “I got bored.”

  “What did you see?”

  I pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and got him a bottle of mineral water—he preferred Calistoga to Silverpool. “The usual crazy stuff,” I said, thinking about the contrary futures the teakettle had displayed over the past few hours. “In the last one, Seth seemed to become Protector of Silverpool.”

  “Very realistic,” he said. “And?”

  “Unfortunately, Silverpool was swept away by the Vago River like a sandcastle at high tide.”

  “Sounds like what happened over the summer when the fae revolted,” he said.

  I nodded. “It’s probably picking up the memory of that.” I sat across from him. “I know it’s ridiculous. I couldn’t resist. Is there any news?”

  He uncapped his water bottle. “I’m sorry, Alma.”

  “You didn’t come all this way to tell me you can’t tell me anything,” I said.

  “No.” He met my gaze. “They’ve arrested Malcolm again.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I thought you should know.” He started to stand up.

  “Wait! You have to tell me more than that.”

  “I don’t know any more. They took him into custody because he has motive and opportunity. I wasn’t there, but Bosko didn’t have to take down the demon like that, on display in the Circle where everyone could see and nobody would forget…” Darius took a long swallow and wiped his lips. “Maybe your dad didn’t appreciate being humiliated like that.”

  I stood up. “My father wouldn’t murder somebody for embarrassing him. He’d be a serial killer if that was the case. He’s shameless! That’s his superpower.”

  “There’s some jewelry missing,” Darius said, raising both eyebrows.

  My stomach tightened. I was afraid to know more. “How would the Protectorate know what was missing?”

  “That opal ring from Mendocino was released to him yesterday. Now it’s gone.”

  Oh Shadows inside Shadows, I thought. “The room was warded. He was alone.”

  “Your father can apparate. Hardly anyone can do that.”

  “There wasn’t any trace,” I said. “Raynor cast the spiral himself.”

  “Malcolm is famous for getting around magic like that,” he said, then added when I began to argue, “Don’t blame me. I don’t think he did it. I’m just explaining how they see it. Did you ever get that New York advocate like I told you to?”

  “He didn’t need my help after all,” I said. And I’d been unconscious for a full day after the wedding.

  “He might need it now, but who knows?” Darius said. “He’s a lot better at taking care of himself than you are.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I had trouble sleeping again.

  Was Darius right? Did I need to get my father an advocate? I’d avoided interfering—helping—in Malcolm’s life for a reason, but my rational mind couldn’t get my heart to stop worrying.

  Malcolm had already spent time in Protectorate custody, as well as house arrest, and they might see that as an excuse to prevent him from seeking counsel from his current defenders. They’d been known to accuse the witch lawyers of being accomplices, and therefore deserving imprisonment themselves. Who else was able to help him? His cronies wouldn’t stick their necks out. His bride, a demon, was dead.

  Surely my own situation was more secure now that Bosko was dead. The Protectorate would come in and make a fuss, but I wasn’t in personal danger. I had time to help my father. It was for my own peace of mind, not his.

  Luckily nobody had explicitly commanded me to stay in Silverpool, so after we’d both had a good breakfast, I loaded Random in the car and hit the road for San Francisco. It was almost noon when we reached Diamond Street in Noe Valley.

  But I wasn’t going to the Protectorate office. Just next door, in an unmodernized Victorian, lived Helen Mendoza, an irritable, cynical but brilliant witch who would help me if it somehow helped her. She’d become a mentor of mine over the years, first when I was a lowly trainee agent next door and then more recently as I struck out on my own. I believed she secretly liked me as a person, not just a source of payment, but I had brought several vials of torc-drawn wellspring water to make it easier for her to be nice to me.

  I wasn’t technically hiding from the Protectorate agents, but I parked several blocks away and then got my cardio workout in for the week by trekking back over the hills to knock on Helen’s door. The bribes I hoped to tempt her with were tucked away in the pockets of my leather jacket.

  She opened the door on the fifth round of my knocking. “How’d you get out of Silverpool?” Helen demanded. She wore jeans and a royal-blue sweatshirt that flattered the silver of her short, spiky white hair.

  “Nobody told me I couldn’t leave,” I said. She always seemed to know everything, which was why I’d come to her. “May I enter, Dr. Mendoza?” I really didn’t want agents from next door to see me on her front step, and I couldn’t get past her wards until she invited me.

  She waved Random in first, rewarding him with a piece of cheese. Although she pretended she didn’t like dogs, she always had a snack ready for Random when I visited. All I got was a shrug and a head shake, but it was enough to let me step past her boundary spells.

  “Are you telling me they didn’t set up a blockade to keep witches from coming in and out of town after the Protector—another one!—was killed violently and mysteriously, possibly due to a demon possession or revenge for same?” Helen locked the door behind me and recast the spell.

  “Well…,” I said. “They weren’t really serious about it. Nobody stopped me.” There had been a PG&E truck at the road out of town, with a few cones and a sawhorse, but I’d been able to drive around it.

  “What did you use?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the truth charm she was using on me. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll tell you the truth without it.”

  “Well?”

  “I bungeed my staff to the roll bar. It was just a small bit of extra magic to help me over the hump, so to speak.” It had gotten me past the PG&E truck, and then when I’d parked in San Francisco, I’d left it there to guard my Jeep from all trouble, magic or nonmagical, while it was parked on the street. Car break-ins were common, tickets were expensive, and it was likely an agent or two would be out combing the city for it within the next hour. I’d evaded the first agent tailing me in Occidental and the second in Robin Williams Tunnel in Marin, but there would be more.

  “Great, so now you’re an outlaw too. How exactly is this going to help your father?” Helen ushered me through the old house stuffed with dusty antiques to the kitchen in the back. Like me, she was a hearth witch, and had a rooftop garden to grow and harvest her herbs, roots, and other magical tools from living things.

  “I’m not an outlaw.” I helped myself to a glass of tap water. I didn’t trust anything she poured for me. “If they’re going to blame Malcolm for the murder, then they’ve got a weak excuse for grounding me in Silverpool. I’m his daughter. Naturally I want to be by his side.”

  Helen snorted. “Why are you really here?”

  “Seriously. I want to help him.”

  “Why?”

  I patted my jacket pocket. “I brought you springwater I got with the torc.”

  “You’re going to pay me, all right, but not with wellspring water. I’ve got plenty of that now, thanks to you,” she said. “What I want is knowledge. The real stuff. The truth.”

  “I want to help my father,” I repeated. “Scan me. Prob
e me. You’ll see I’m telling the truth.”

  “I get that—but why? Why now?”

  I sipped the tap water, my pulse rising. Did she know something I didn’t? As far as I knew, I wanted to help my dad so he wouldn’t be tortured, brain-scrubbed, or sent to retire permanently in Death Valley.

  But was that really it?

  I closed my eyes and turned my own truth spell inward. I let go of what I thought I knew and focused on my breath. It came in, went out, in again, out again.

  And then I saw something I didn’t expect. Although it was mostly true I didn’t want him being locked up… I would appreciate the peace and quiet. But beneath that… deeper than that… truer than that…

  “I want to find out about my mother,” I whispered, each word hurting as I spoke it.

  “Ah,” she said, long and slow.

  The truth spell continued to work. “If they do something to Malcolm, I might never find out the truth about my mother. He might not even know it himself, not consciously. And whatever he does know… I don’t want them to wipe his memory. And they might find…”

  “The Protectorate might find out something about your mother you don’t want them to know.”

  “If they find out I’m part demon, or my grandmother or great-grandmother was, then I’ll be the one sent to the Mojave or stabbed in the heart.”

  “And even if they don’t do anything with the information, they might not share it with you,” Helen said. “You want the truth more than you fear them knowing it. You’re a witch, Alma. You need to know. Of course you do. That’s a motive I can believe in. So. What can I do?”

  Helen let me stay at her house while I found an advocate to defend my father. She even let Random run loose in the wild garden beneath her deck and greenhouses. When I’d been a trainee agent, I’d paid her a nightly fee to sleep in her basement, a better location than the under-the-desk arrangement most young witches put up with during their early years at Diamond Street. San Francisco rent was too expensive for underpaid witches who weren’t allowed to hex or steal from their landlords. Now, however, Helen let me stay in one of the many small bedrooms on the second floor—and I even got a bed.