by Lisa Edmonds
Sean parked at the curb and turned to the others. “Jack, keep an eye on things outside. Ben needs to come in with us. We’ve got our radios and we’ll be on channel two.”
“Got it,” Jack said briskly.
We got out of the SUV and went through a little gate. Jack stayed in the yard as Sean, Ben, and I followed a stone path toward the front steps.
We needed one more person at this meeting: Malcolm. The new wolf tattoo would summon him without making him jump to my bracelet, but I didn’t want to just yank him across the city, since he might be in the middle of spellwork back at my house and broken spellwork was volatile and potentially disastrous. The wolf spellwork was designed to be used in an emergency.
Since this was not an emergency, I found Malcolm’s blue-green trace in my mind and gave it two gentle tugs. I hadn’t gotten much sleep, but we’d eaten a good lunch so the dizziness was minimal.
My bracelet buzzed as we reached the front porch, indicating Malcolm had jumped to me. I sensed witchy wards on the house, which wasn’t surprising. They felt low-powered, though, which was surprising. I wondered if they were designed to be almost dormant unless triggered, like the wards on my yard.
The door opened before I had a chance to knock, revealing Carly. On her day off, she wore jeans and an oversized button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her feet were bare.
She smiled at us. “Hello! Come on in, everyone.” She gave Sean and I quick hugs as we entered, then waved at Jack and offered her hand to Ben. “It’s good to meet you, Ben. I’m Carly Reese.”
Ben shook her hand. “It’s good to meet you too, Carly. Thank you for helping our Alice get de-hexed.”
She closed the door. “Given everything that’s happened this week, I can’t help but think the hex was meant to bring us together. Lily’s selfish act had a bigger, more important purpose—we just didn’t realize that at the time. Sometimes plans take time to reveal themselves.” She gestured for us to go into the living room. “Please make yourself at home. There’s coffee and tea on the table and some scones.”
That was the best news I’d heard all day. I touched my bracelet. “Release.”
Malcolm appeared next to me. He looked around in awe. “Wow. This house has awesome energy. Hi, Carly.”
She smiled. “Hi, Malcolm. Welcome.”
We went into the living room. Sean handed me a cup of coffee with cream and sugar and a little plate with a scone. He poured himself some coffee, grabbed two scones for himself, and sat next to me on the couch. Ben poured a cup of tea, took two scones, and sat on the loveseat.
As we settled in, I looked around the house. Even if I hadn’t known Carly was a witch, I would have been able to guess. Plants filled every windowsill. Herbs hung drying in the kitchen. Everywhere I looked, I saw nooks she could use for reading or crafts. One had a mobile made of feathers from different birds. It looked like a comfortable place for meditation. Crystals of every size, shape, and color were placed carefully to promote energy flow. Malcolm was right: the energy in Carly’s house was awesome, like a slight electrical charge that grew stronger toward the back of the house. I imagined that was where her sacred room and altar were.
Her home was cozy and comfortable. It was a very different feeling from my own house, which sizzled with the power of my wards—and not in any kind of welcoming way to anyone but me and maybe Malcolm. Carly’s home felt like a warm hug. Mine wasn’t designed to be welcoming; it was designed to keep people out. The thought made my heart heavy.
“Take this,” Carly said abruptly, handing me a jar of what turned out to be fluffy white dandelion heads.
I blinked up at her. “What’s this?”
“Pure magic. Hold it and look at it while we drink our coffee and tea and eat our scones.” She settled into an armchair with a cup of tea.
I was impatient to get to the reason we’d come here, but Sean and Ben had settled in with their drinks and scones and Malcolm was frowning at me, so I sipped coffee, ate my scone, and pondered the jar of dandelions, which didn’t feel like it had any magic per se, but did seem to be draining the sorrow from my heart. Maybe it was pure magic. It felt like a jar of hope, as strange as that sounded.
“Your house is lovely,” I told Carly as we finished our scones and Sean refilled my coffee cup and his own. “Such wonderful energy, and it smells like…” I paused and frowned. “I’m not sure what it smells like exactly, but it smells amazing.”
“Apple pie,” Ben said.
“Old books,” Sean said at the same time. They both looked puzzled.
Carly smiled. “It probably smells like a little bit of everything, especially to werewolf noses.” She turned to me. “Your energy feels a little different today, Alice. What’s hidden under your sleeves?”
I pushed up my sleeves to reveal the cuffs I’d bought from Benjamin Winchell.
“Lovely,” she breathed, leaning forward to get a better look. “They’ll store energy?”
I nodded. “And the torques will focus it.” I showed her how they’d closed around my arms. “I’ll cram as much stored energy into these as I can between now and tonight.”
“Excellent.” She smiled and reached for two large fabric-lined baskets waiting near her chair. “I have gifts for each of you.”
As she sorted through small and medium-sized velvet bags to find what she was looking for, three tabby cats sauntered into the living room: a gray striped, an orange, and a black. I wondered what they’d think of the werewolves. Cats generally avoided werewolves, even in human form.
The gray and orange tabbies jumped onto the arms of Carly’s chair, one on each side of her, and sat at attention like guardians. The black cat circled the room, giving each of us a good sniff, and then jumped onto the arm of the couch next to Sean, settling in with her paws tucked under, as casual as could be.
“Your familiars?” I guessed.
Carly nodded. “The gray tabby is Basat. The orange is Loki and the cat who’s taken a liking to Sean is Heckate. We’ve been together almost ten years.” She held up two bags, each closed with a drawstring. “For Sean and Ben.”
Sean got up and took the bags. “Which is which?”
“The green is yours. The blue is for Ben.”
Sean handed Ben the blue bag and sat back down next to me. They opened their bags and took out what looked like leather collars with two round amulets dangling from each—one stone, one gold. Sean’s had an extra loop that was currently empty.
Ben grinned. “A collar? Uh-oh. My fiancée, Casey, is going to want to take me for walks.”
“We could make it a double date and take you both to a dog park,” I suggested.
“Somehow I don’t think the other dog owners would appreciate that very much,” Sean said dryly. “What will these amulets do, Carly?”
“Both are protection amulets.” She leaned forward, her arms on her knees. “The stone is protection against fire. The gold one protects against silver.”
Ben blinked. “I didn’t know that was even possible.”
“It’s possible, but tricky to do. The spells require a lot of power, so they’ll probably only last for about one hour once you invoke them.” She sighed. “I wish I could do better.”
“Thank you,” Sean said firmly. “This is an enormously helpful gift, far more than I’d even hoped for. The collars are spelled too?”
“Yes, so they won’t disintegrate or fall off when you shift. Yours has an extra loop for your wolf amulet. I spaced the loops far enough apart that the amulets shouldn’t touch or knock against each other.”
“What about Malcolm?” I asked. “How are we going to protect him?”
She picked up a tube of henna and waved it. “We’re going to put a tattoo on you that will protect him against blood magic and banishments. I’m assuming you’d be fine with that?”
“I’m definitely fine with that.” I paused. “But if I’m understanding your magic correctly, in order for that to work, we’ll have to inscribe Mal
colm’s name in the tattoo, right?”
“Yes.”
I glanced at Malcolm. “His full name?”
She looked at me and then at where Malcolm floated. “Will that be a problem?”
Malcolm thought about it. “Can Alice write it in later?”
She nodded. “Yes. I can do the spellwork now and then all she’ll have to do later is add your full name and invoke it. Will that be all right?”
“That’s fine,” Malcolm said. He didn’t sound fine, but we’d talk about it later, in private.
She reached back into one of the bins and withdrew a purple bag.
“You’re like the wizard in The Wizard of Oz with your bag full of surprises,” I said, smiling.
“Wizards are a bit different than you or I.” She rose and handed me the purple bag. “I’d advise you to be cautious if one ever offers you a gift. Their gifts tend to be…not what they seem.”
“Thanks for the tip.” I opened my bag and took out a new amulet of my own. Like the others, mine was round, inscribed with a circle and runes. I studied the runes, frowning. “I don’t recognize this spellwork, but I see runes for water and protection. What am I looking at?”
“This is new spellwork, as far as I know,” Carly told me. “It took me the longest to make and I just finished it about an hour before you called. I’ve not been able to test it, obviously, but if I’ve made it correctly, it should allow you to borrow some of Malcolm’s water magic to protect yourself against fire.”
Malcolm muttered an expletive. At Carly’s questioning look, I explained, “He’s been working on spellwork that would let me borrow his water magic for the last week.”
“More like the last month, and I’ve got jack to show for it,” the ghost griped. “Let me see that spellwork.”
I held up the amulet. He floated to my side and looked it over, frowning. “It’s not our magic,” he said finally. “Can’t tell if it will work just by looking at it. But if it works…Alice, that’s big. Down the road, maybe it will help me figure out spellwork using our kind of magic so we don’t need an amulet.”
I closed my hand around the amulet. “Carly, this is really fantastic. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Having you all come back safe and sound will be all the thanks I need.” She finished her mug of tea and set the empty cup on the table beside her. “I’ll explain how to charge and invoke the amulets before you leave. But first, I have a few more goodies for you.”
“Do any of these goodies go boom?” I asked hopefully.
She winked.
“Awesome.” Malcolm rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re talking.”
Carly held up a brown cloth sack containing a baseball-sized amount of something heavy. We stared.
“Is that…a bag of sand?” I asked finally.
“Yes.” She brought it over to me and deposited it in my lap. “And it’s also what I hope will break the building’s wards.”
Okay, I was willing to accept that a doll stuffed with hair and dirt could spell me into sabotaging my own relationship, and Carly could see glimpses of the future when she touched people, but spelled sand?
“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour,” she quoted, reseating herself in the chair. At my quizzical look, she smiled. “William Blake. Don’t underestimate sand, Alice. It’s one of nature’s most powerful forces. You know the magic that broke your amulets in half?”
I nodded.
“Imagine that, but in each grain of sand in that bag.”
I lifted the bag and studied it with new respect. “Tiny but mighty.”
She smiled. “Exactly. And just like a team, much mightier together than separately. Now,” she added briskly, “How about we go over the rest of the goodies?”
I set the bag of sand carefully on the floor at my feet. “Sounds like a plan.”
Two hours later, I stood in my basement in my bra and jeans, with my arms crossed, a tube of henna in my hand. Upstairs, Sean, Ben, and Jack were mulling over the intel we’d received from the Vamp Court and Bell’s people about Moses’s meeting tonight.
Malcolm floated back and forth in my spellwork area, the ghost equivalent of pacing.
“You have my word that I’ll never tell anyone your full name or misuse this information in any way,” I told him. “You believe me, right?”
“Yes.” He stopped floating. “What’s weird is that I never told you my full name and you’ve never asked. I don’t know why but I’m worried about telling anyone, even you.”
“A full name has power, especially for a ghost.” I leaned against the work table. “Someone with your full name could summon you or even try to break our binding, so you’re absolutely right not to share that information with anyone. I always figured you’d tell me when you wanted to, and until then, I was fine just calling you Malcolm. In order to protect you using this spell Carly made for us, however, I need your full name. I want you to be safe and this is the only way, other than leaving you behind, that I know to keep you safe.”
“You’re sure as hell not leaving me behind, so full name it is.” He floated over to me. “Trade you—your real name for mine.”
I smiled. “I’m getting there, Malcolm. I’m just not quite there yet.”
“Do you think I’ll tell anyone your real name?”
I shook my head.
“Do you think I’ll misuse that information in any way?”
I laughed. “I see what you’re doing.”
“You believe me when I say I won’t tell anyone—living, dead, or undead?”
My smile faded. “I do believe you.”
“But you aren’t going to tell me.” He frowned. “Is this the monster thing again?”
When I didn’t respond, he sighed. “Okay, you’re still working on that. Or maybe it’s because your real name is something like Eunice. Or Daisy.”
I rolled my eyes. “You caught me. I’m really Daisy.”
“You are definitely not a Daisy. Fine, here goes.” He squared his shoulders. “Malcolm Earl. It was my grandfather’s name,” he added.
“Malcolm Earl what?”
A long silence. He was really struggling to say the words.
“Selene,” I said softly.
He stared at me.
“My middle name was Selene.” My heart lightened just a little saying it out loud. It had been a very, very long time since those syllables had been on my tongue.
“That’s…wow. Alice, thank you.” He straightened. “Malcolm Earl Flynn.”
“Hey, Malcolm Earl Flynn.” I smiled and took the cap off the tube of henna.
Years of practice had given me the ability to write upside-down, backward, or sideways with either hand. I wrote Malcolm’s full name into the middle of the spellwork Carly had drawn on my abdomen. I sensed the spell closing with the addition of this last remaining element and warm magic coiled around both of us as the protection spell activated.
I finished writing and capped the tube, then used air magic to dry the henna quickly. “Thank you, Malcolm.”
“Thank you, Something Selene.” His tone was joking, but his expression was serious. “We’re going to get this done, Alice.”
“Then we’d better get upstairs and find out what they know about the target location.” I put my shirt on and headed up the basement stairs. “Then I’ll need to siphon power from a ley line to charge these cuffs.”
When I opened the basement door, I found Sean, Jack, and Ben in the kitchen, looking at a bunch of photos and reports spread out on the counter.
“What’s all that?” I asked, coming into the kitchen.
Sean moved aside so I could look at the documents and pictures. “The Vamp Court just sent over a courier. They don’t consider e-mail a secure form of communication for something like this, so we’ve got hard copies.”
“So where is the meet taking place?” I asked, picking up an aerial image of
what looked like a large Victorian-style home with a glass conservatory on the back. I frowned. “A residence? That’s unexpected.”
“It’s even more unexpected than that.” Ben grinned. “It’s a bordello.”
I blinked. “A bordello bordello?”
“A very haunted bordello bordello.”
Malcolm perked up. “Haunted?”
“Super haunted,” Ben confirmed, holding up a very official-looking report with the SPEMA seal at the top. “The feds catalogued more than three dozen spirits on the premises, though their team estimated there might be twice that. And you want to know what’s even weirder? They can’t get any of the spirits to leave.”
“There must be a nexus of power nearby.” I stared at the aerial photo, puzzled. “So why would Moses Murphy choose a ghost resort for this meeting tonight?”
“He owns it.” Sean tapped another of the reports. “The property was purchased about six months ago by a company the Court linked to Murphy. Apparently someone planned to do renovations and turn it into a destination resort for the adventurous, but the spirits interfered so much that all the contractors said no thanks and returned the deposits they’d been paid. It’s been sitting untouched since.”
I picked up another aerial photo, this one taken from farther up so it showed the surrounding acreage. The bordello was a good quarter-mile from the road and there were only a few trees near the house, making it difficult for anyone to sneak up without being spotted. The sweeping lawns were immaculate, though, and the exterior of the house looked well-maintained.
“The house was built in 1886,” Ben informed us, reading from the SPEMA report. “It was a well-known brothel for decades, operating under different names, but always catering to what you might call a better class of customers than your average den of iniquity. One of the reasons it stayed open in plain sight for so long was that many of its most loyal customers were local politicians and the madams made sure there wasn’t any trouble that attracted negative attention. It was renovated several times, obviously, but when the ghosts started causing trouble, the customers stopped coming.” He coughed. “So to speak.”
“So it’s been more or less empty ever since,” Sean added. “Bought and sold a half-dozen times until Murphy bought the property, thinking he could maybe turn a profit and instead ended up with a haunted mansion no one wants to go near.”
