“So if they’re innocent, let me prove it,” I said. “Give me a few days at least.”
“Sorry, Alma. I tried. It’s too late. They want to blame it on a demon and close the case. Destroying the town is an easy way to end the investigation.” I heard him sniff the herbs he liked up into his nose. “They’re moving in today. In fact, it may have already started.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I grabbed my staff and ran outside. The morning sky was the wrong color. Instead of a pale blue or yellowish gray, it was orange. And I smelled smoke.
Jogging to the driveway, I searched the sky to see if I was overreacting. Maybe a neighbor was barbecuing their breakfast. But no—a plume of liver-brown smoke rose up from behind the trees to the north.
They were going to burn us out? Today?
I ran in and called Birdie. In spite of her promises, I had to leave a message. “Leave now! The hills are on fire!”
Random had been restless ever since I started packing up the car, and now he was pacing and whining near the door. Concerned he might bolt in fear, I put a leash on him and locked him in the car before I ran out with the plastic storage cases of my strongest magic.
How could they burn the forest? The buildings? All the animals, humans, and fae were going to be driven away, not just demons and witches.
With the Jeep packed, I returned with my lungs burning to the backyard to say goodbye to Willy. But the area about the redwood tree was empty, and he didn’t appear when I called for him.
The thought of leaving him behind without a word made me pound my staff into the ground near the tree. Those arrogant, shortsighted witches. So much loss and destruction for something so stupid as an institution’s reputation. The Protectorate had lost its way, assuming anything it did was for the benefit of humankind just because it benefited itself.
“Willy!” I shouted again. “I’m sorry!”
If he heard me, he didn’t want me to hear him. Shaking with anger, I sprinted to the Jeep, dropped my staff in the passenger seat, and patted Random to soothe him. He’d licked and fogged the windows trying to get out.
This was wrong. Scaring my dog was wrong. Scaring my gnome was wrong. Scaring me was easy, but it was also wrong.
Somebody had to stop this. The smoke was over the ridge, showing the fire hadn’t yet struck town. There was still time. But I couldn’t leave Random alone. Was Seth— No, I’d have to ask Birdie.
Just as I put the Jeep in reverse to drive to her house, I saw her pull up behind me in the road, honking and waving as if we were going to the beach.
The beach would be perfect. Random loved the beach.
“Good news, buddy,” I said to him, scratching his cheeks. “Birdie’s here.” I grabbed his leash and pulled him with me out to Birdie’s SUV.
She waved again, smiling, and rolled down the window. “Time to go, right? I thought so. It’s terrible, but at least it looks like you’re packed.” She frowned at Random. “This smoke can’t be good for him. Where are you—?”
I opened her back seat, half-filled with her belongings, and pushed Random inside. He was worried, dancing on the seat and trying to follow me, so I latched the leash to the seat and slammed the door.
“Take him to the beach,” I called to Birdie. “Drive west!”
Birdie shook her head, her smile vanishing. “But— You—”
“I’ll follow in a few minutes!” I waved at her, avoiding eye contact, and ran back to my car. As I backed up, I glimpsed her face, still protesting. “Please? The beach! Thank you!”
Just in case she tried to follow, which would only put her in more danger, I cast an enchantment over her Toyota that should make her think driving to the coast was her idea, just like it usually was. Random’s presence at her side would enhance the illusion.
It was a very short drive to Cypress Hardware.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Would the genie stop the fire to save her store? I didn’t think so, not with the Protectorate having lit the match, given her fear of exposure.
But for a price—a higher price than my silence—maybe she would interfere. I’d have to convince her. I couldn’t bear to watch Silverpool burn.
I pulled into a parking spot and cast a spell around the Jeep to hide it. Birdie was about to drive by, and I didn’t want to risk distracting her from her desire to go to the beach, but I also needed to protect the contents. A tilted sign nailed to a lamppost in front of my bumper warned about leaving valuables unattended in your car, and all of mine would be inside the Jeep.
All but one. I reached behind the passenger seat and snapped open the top box. The torc rested inside its velvet bag on top of my baby blanket, a jewelry box, bottles of wellspring water, and a chunk of my house’s window trim.
Please, I asked all things Bright in the universe. Please help me fix this.
I got out and locked the car, setting up several wards around it, wards that wouldn’t be enough to stop wildfire, and jogged over to the sliding glass doors of the main entrance. The smoke filled my lungs; unaccustomed to running, I coughed. Darius was right; I needed to walk more.
There should’ve been a crowd of people coming in and out of the big hardware store with supplies, residents and emergency responders shouting at each other to hurry, asking for help, but it was dark and quiet. Only the smooth-moving traffic on the road behind me suggested anyone had noticed the fire.
Covering my mouth with the collar of my shirt, I peered through the glass into the darkness. Was that a glow in the back near the clearance patio supplies?
“Hello, Jen,” I said softly but urgently. “I’ve got a deal for you.”
I was about to break the most important rule of negotiating with a genie: not acting in a moment of crisis. It would be so easy for her to take advantage and walk away.
Was I willing to risk my life to save a tiny town filled with misfit humans and supernatural oddballs in the forgettable edge of nowhere?
Of course I was.
Leaving the torc in its velvet bag—it was dangerous to remove it too soon, because she might confiscate it and make her own terms—I tapped it against the glass.
I waited, breathing through my shirt to filter the smoke, but nothing happened. Behind me, the flow of traffic moved east, toward the winery, toward the freeway to San Francisco, to civilization, where people had been making terrible decisions since the beginning of time.
When I moved the torc to strike the glass a second time, it swung through open air. The doors had vanished. I glanced behind me at the orange sky for courage, then stepped into the store. Given the daylight and row of windows, it was impossibly dark, and I had to wait for my eyes to adjust. The glow led me to the place she’d been before, but now the patio throne room was a rainbow-colored hammock supported by a freestanding gold frame. The genie held a bottle of Russian River beer in one hand and a vape pen in the other as she reclined in the hammock, wearing denim shorts and a tie-dyed sweatshirt. One shapely leg, barefoot, dangled over the side.
Although my limbs were shaking with the urge to flee—I felt as if the blaze was going to sweep down the hills and ignite the first houses on the ridge any minute now—I forced myself to sit on a tilting recliner with padded arms and two extra-large cupholders. I couldn’t rush. She could probably feel my accelerated pulse, knowing I was an easy mark, but I had to control myself.
I leaned back in the recliner, holding the torc in my lap. “There seems to be a bit of a fire up in the hills,” I said casually.
She lifted the pen to her lips, nodding. “Seems like it.”
As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I realized that in spite of her recreational posture, her facial expression was miserable behind the billowing white vaping smoke.
I played with the velvet cord holding the bag closed. If she’d sensed what was inside, she hadn’t let on. “Can you do anything to stop it?”
She lifted her beer and sipped it, then shook her head. “Can’t pay my own price. Paradox in the
space-time continuum.”
“That’s from Star Trek.”
She shrugged. “Art reflects life.”
Her attitude was probably just a negotiating trick. She could snap her fingers and put out the fire any second; she just wanted all the humans to come in and offer her their treasures first. Win-win.
“I’d really tried to make a go of it this time,” she said. “I thought I’d found a system that would work long-term for me and for my customers. Nobody would feel tricked by the evil jinn—we’d all walk away happy.”
“You really can’t help yourself?”
She lifted her legs up and curled into a ball. “That’s my curse.”
Watching her sink deeper into her hammock, the white smoke forming an opaque cloud around her entire body, I started to believe her. Maybe she really couldn’t help herself.
I took the torc out of the bag.
The cloud of vape smoke vanished. She sat up, swinging both legs over the edge of the hammock. Suddenly she was wearing an expensive-looking black pantsuit, her feet shod in patent-leather ballet flats. “You’d offer such a thing?”
Smelling the burning forest outside, I swung the recliner into a more upright position. It wobbled, but I clung to the armrests to hold myself up. “Yes. The torc in exchange for—we’d have to negotiate exactly what. I haven’t agreed yet. Something to protect the town.”
“But why? You don’t own your house. You don’t particularly care for the springwater. You have a car. You could use the torc at a different wellspring. You’re free to leave and start over somewhere else.”
“Aren’t you? You’re a genie.”
She brushed lint off her shoulder. “Yes, well. You see, I have a few geographical limitations at the moment.”
“You’re stuck here?”
“This store is my power and my prison. Like a lamp in the stories, I am rather… imprisoned.” She lifted her chin proudly. “At the moment.”
“How long is this moment going to be?” A moment in genie time might be a century. For me to negotiate safely, I needed to know what her limitations and motives were.
“There is a small matter of business that needs to be settled before I can depart.” She touched the choker around her neck, then smoothed her hand over her hair with a sigh. “Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to be resolved before that fire gets here.”
“Your curse won’t let you save your own life?”
“Life?” She laughed, kicking the ground to swing the hammock. “You humans have life. What I have is something else.”
I looked over my shoulder toward the entrance, imagining flames licking at the first houses up in the hills. “All right,” I asked, “will you continue to exist however it is you exist now?”
“What do you care?” she asked. “Am I your new project, like the changeling?”
Clutching the torc with one hand, I clambered out of the lawn chair and stood in front of her, my throat burning with smoke and anxiety. I could simply offer the torc to extinguish the fire, but she’d said something important. She was imprisoned because of unsettled business. Like me, in a way. I needed to prove who killed Bosko, not just put out this fire, or the Protectorate would come back and do it again, and in her reluctance to interfere, I couldn’t count on her indefinitely. The torc was valuable, but it wasn’t as if I was offering the ultimate price: my life.
Life. There had already been one life given. “Did you make a deal with Kurt Bosko?” I asked suddenly. “Was that why he died?”
“Is that what you wish to know?” she asked sweetly.
I quickly put the torc under my jacket. Holding her gaze, I unfastened a beaded bracelet and held it out to her.
She shook her head.
I clutched the bracelet in my fist. I wouldn’t give her my beaded necklace, which held strands of my own hair and could give her power over me. The car had a few items she might value, but there was no time to run out and get them, especially without any guarantee she’d take them.
The copper ring. Raynor would be annoyed with me, but I had no choice. I slipped it off my finger and extended it on my palm. I needed to ask a better question than a simple yes or no. “Who—?”
She flung up a hand. “Speak carefully. I can’t tell you about any fulfilled wish that has been paid for. That copper is quite nice, but it’s not enough to loosen my tongue completely.” Stroking her neck, her eyes held mine, unblinking and intense, as if she was trying to tell me something.
Maybe in a strange way we were on the same side. I just had to find a way to make it an equal exchange for her to be able to deal with me.
My mind raced, trying to function under the pressure. Percy could’ve made a wish for Bosko’s death, then hidden it with his mind magic from probing. But if she’d done that for him, he must’ve offered something of great value. The opal ring?
No, Raynor had the ring.
Watching Jen’s fingers play with her red choker as she sipped her beer, acting as if she had all the time in the world, the gears in my brain finally began to turn.
Click. A memory of a fairy house in the vineyard. The way Flor had stopped on the path for a moment as if she’d seen it too.
Click. The red hair bow Flor had worn on the night before Bosko’s death, the same color as the velvet choker around Jen’s neck today.
Click. If the genie had killed Bosko, Flor’s alibi was irrelevant. And if Flor had better fairy sight than I did—she’d been studying fae for years in countries I’d never visited—she might have detected the jinn’s presence at Cypress Hardware when she arrived.
And if she was demon printed like me and Raynor… She’d feared exposure. I didn’t know why she’d risked working for a man she’d already witnessed using the ring to kill, but I believed she had. I’d been there when she saw Percy bring the ring and give it to Bosko. Right afterward, Bosko had sent her out to find him a meal, and she’d walked up and down Silverpool streets, unsure what to do. That was the panic I’d felt in her trail around town—not about the food, but about her career, maybe her life.
And then, outside the hot dog truck, she’d had an idea. She’d gone into Cypress and made a wish.
I remembered something the genie had said on my first nightly visit. You witches are strangely nocturnal, aren’t you? Yes. Flor had visited her on the night before Bosko’s murder. Why hadn’t I considered that?
And something else the genie had said. Every once in a while, a human figures out I’m here.
Honestly, had the genie done something to my head to keep me from seeing the obvious? I set the ring on a patio table between us. “Did you kill Kurt Bosko to fulfill a wish made by Flora Werner, and what payment did she offer?”
“Are you sure you want to offer your treasure?” she asked. “I will be unable to tell you the truth about any wish that has been fulfilled and paid for. You might not know if it’s the truth or not.”
She was trying to scare me, but with Bosko dead, I could risk giving up the copper ring. “I repeat my question. I wish to know if you killed Bosko because of a wish Flor made, and what she promised to pay you in exchange.”
Jen nodded once with visible satisfaction, then leaned forward to take the ring. “Yes. It was Florence Werner’s wish that Protector Kurt Bosko be permanently unable to implicate her with having any so-called demon ancestry or damage her career in any way, forever and ever.” She slipped the ring on her finger and admired it. “She assured me an unusual trinket would be in the room, one that didn’t actually belong to him, and it could be mine. In a few days or weeks, his ownership would’ve been strong enough to make it his. But he’d only had it less than a day.”
“She didn’t ask you to kill him? Just that he be unable to implicate her?”
“At first, no. But when I suggested that the only ‘permanent, forever and ever’ cure for a human like that was death, she said nothing.”
“But she never actually said ‘kill’?”
“She knew what she was doing. I’m a
genie. She made a wish.” Jen stretched her arms wide. “Look around. My store fulfills the material needs of every human in this town. How do you think I manage that? I don’t need to hear them say it in words. I don’t interrogate people when they walk in the door. My customers come in with a wish in their heads. In fact, oftentimes they don’t even know what it is they’re looking for. But luckily, they also walk in with a method of payment.” She made a graceful gesture toward the registers at the front. “It works beautifully.”
I thought back to what she’d said earlier, about wishes that hadn’t been paid for. “You’re telling me this because you didn’t get the ring,” I said. “You’re waiting to collect.”
“In my eagerness to provide quality service, I killed him before I claimed the ring.” Her lips pressed together. “It was not in the room as she’d promised. The debt remains unpaid.”
“Why didn’t you just… take it from the person who had it?” I thought it might’ve been Percy, but I wasn’t sure. If he’d taken it, he’d returned it before Raynor looked through the trunk.
“She’d promised it would be in the room. It was not.” Jen gave me an incredulous look. “I can’t just steal things from one person to make another one happy. There are rules.”
“Rules,” I repeated. I didn’t trust her rules. They seemed to result in people dying.
She scowled and tore the velvet band from her neck. “I never should’ve allowed her into the store, but the witch knew a few unusual words to summon me. She’d done her research.”
“That’s her specialty,” I said.
“The price must be paid.” She saluted me with the hand wearing the copper ring.
“But why did you risk killing a Protector when you fear exposure so much?” I asked. “You must’ve known killing Bosko would bring more Protectorate attention here.”
“Once summoned, I’m not at liberty to refuse a good deal. The ring is quite valuable, especially to your kind. Extremely valuable.” Her gaze dropped to the region of my jacket where I’d hidden the torc. “Like what you have there. So? Are we ready to make another deal?”
A Spell to Die For Page 23
