Dead Witch on a Bridge

by Gretchen Galway

  Lorne frowned. “Don’t you know?”

  I raised my voice. “I don’t know what power the torc holds. I don’t know who took it. I don’t know where it is.” My words bounced over the modern Scandinavian design like marbles on concrete. Surely somebody was sitting there, under magical cover, listening to me and weighing my honesty.

  Lorne’s expression, which until now had been conciliatory, even bargaining, became contemptuous. “You don’t know,” he said sarcastically.

  “I don’t.”

  There was a long silence. No reply from the invisible truth-screeners.

  He scowled at something behind me, his face reddening. “Get her out of here. She’s lying to us.” There was a pause. “I don’t know how, but she is. Put her upstairs until you figure out how.”

  I glanced at the black, armless leather sofa. “Who are you talking to?”

  “You went too far, Alma,” Lorne said. “I might have believed you if you hadn’t gotten carried away.”

  I felt my arms and legs grabbed by invisible clamps—like fingers but icy cold and hard—and jerked upward. My butt came out of the chair and bumped a silver orb off Lorne’s coffee table as I floated past.

  “Careful,” he snapped.

  I hung my head back and met his gaze. “I’m more graceful when I’m allowed to walk myself.”

  “Enough. Shut her up.” Lorne pointed at the sofa again, and in a moment I felt my lips glue together.

  The invisible hands hauled me out of the room and into the hallway and up another flight of stairs to the attic. Oh, not good. Maybe I should’ve made something up, something they wanted to hear.

  How could I convince them? Would they ever believe me? Nobody would come fight for me, certainly not my father.

  Adding insult to injury, a dozen agents, some I recognized, stared at me with narrow-eyed suspicion from three rows of desks. Most of them, I knew, had invisible blankets and pillows hidden under their chairs. Lorne only pretended to mind. The dormer windows and their lovely view were heavily curtained to encourage work and prevent daydreaming.

  Their beds were more comfortable than mine was likely to be.

  Wrists and ankles stinging from supporting my own weight, I floated away from my old pals toward a door at the other end of the attic. It flew open, I flew in, and then everything went dark.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I don’t know how long the sedation spell kept me dazed and stupid on the floor, but when I came to, I felt as if I’d been in a drunken bar brawl. After taking a moment to remember where I was, I turned my attention to my surroundings.

  I felt rough wooden planks under my hands, heavily grooved and pitted with the years, but no dust or grit. I could smell flowers, a burnt potion. A dove was cooing nearby.

  Opening my eyes, I saw I was alone in a tiny room, perhaps a converted closet. It wasn’t completely sealed away; a window was closed and shuttered, but not magically. The old building had shifted more than enough over the decades to leave a gap around the frame.

  I got to my feet and crept over to investigate. Very carefully I held my hand over the latch of the shutter. A small buzz shot out and bounced against my palm.

  It didn’t hold. I smiled and cracked open the shutter. The sky was bright with midday sun shining through a heavy layer of fog.

  The spell set into the metal plate at the front entrance had been designed to prevent me from touching any boundary object inside the house—door or window. But my bare skin hadn’t touched the plate the night before. The spit had worked.

  Don’t get cocky, I told myself, wiping the smile off my face. I was still trapped in the attic, and my head was pounding.

  But it had been so sweet to fool Raynor, the famous demon hunter.

  I lifted my wrist to my face and sniffed the residue of magic clinging to my skin. The shackles he’d carried me with had been a powerfully unpleasant touch. No furry padding for Raynor’s bondage gear; it had been horribly plain. A man who was comfortable with his role as a judge, jury, and executioner, with the power to act like a god.

  But not this time. I unlatched the window and pushed it open as high as it would go. There was no screen, no security bars.

  I indulged in another smile. There were advantages to being underestimated. But now the hard part would begin.

  As a security precaution, the Protectorate didn’t allow shape-shifting within the walls of its offices and had global spells woven into each structure. Too distracting for daily business to wonder if that mouse skittering by your desk was a rodent, a Shadow witch, or your boss.

  I would have to find another way to get down to the ground.

  Above me in the hills, the thick fog covered Sutro Tower and Diamond Heights, limiting my view to the neighboring houses, the elementary schoolyard up the hill, the Protectorate backyard, Helen’s rooftop garden next door, Helen…

  Helen.

  A floor below, she was sitting on the glass roof of her conservatory, feeding parts of her bagel to a dove perched on her knee. Once again I was impressed with the irritable woman.

  She caught me watching and waved. After shoving the rest of her bagel in her bra, she made the old-fashioned hand gesture for telephone, thumb and pinkie extended at the side of her face.

  For a second I thought she was actually suggesting I pick up the phone. Then I remembered that I was, like her, a witch, and although the Protectorate had cast countless spells over the house, communication might not be one of them. They’d taken my beads, but those were primarily for amplifying my power. I didn’t depend on them. Helen was strong, and she was close—I could try to use her the same way.

  I propped my elbows in the open window and focused on her eyes.

  “Hello,” I said softly. At the very least, we could try to read lips.

  Frowning, she wiggled her hand, still splayed out next to her cheek.

  She was old and eccentric and seemed to want me to do what she was doing. I brought my hand to the side of my head in the same gesture. “Hello,” I said into my pinkie finger, feeling ridiculous.

  She grinned. “That’s better.” Her voice was muffled, as if we were children in a swimming pool, playing games with each other under the water.

  “They’re convinced I know something,” I said. “I need to get out of here.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “No kidding.”

  “I’m going to land on your roof.”

  She flapped her hands and shook her head. “No, no. Not mine.”

  “I have to,” I said.

  Helen pointed at the neighboring property on the other side. Even if I could’ve reached it, landing there would be pointless; when I’d worked at the Protectorate, the Emerald-level witch in charge of security had lived there.

  “You don’t have to do anything, just let me—” I began.

  Helen flung down the imaginary phone and turned her face away, reclining on her chair as if she were on the beach in Maui, not a care in the world.

  For Shadow’s sake. I turned away myself and paced around the little room. Who else could rescue me from the Protectorate? My own father would sell me out if it would help him. Jasper was nice, but he had his own life, and we weren’t close enough for him to risk his neck for mine. Birdie was sweet but knew nothing of magic. Even if she had inherited power from Tristan, she didn’t know about the Protectorate and certainly not how to get me out of it.

  I’d let myself become too isolated in the world. In limited ways I’d leaned on Tristan, but Tristan was dead. I had to look out for myself.

  The window had been charmed to keep me from opening it, but I’d opened it. If I’d been able to turn into a cat, I’d take my chances with the gutters and drainpipe and wall trellis, and climb out.

  But I couldn’t shift. I stuck my head out the window and looked down, left, right, and up. The only witch I saw was Helen, still on her roof. She’d retrieved the bagel from her bra and was eating it.

  I stuck out a hand, then an arm. No resistanc
e, no magic. The only security was the spell they thought they’d put on me at the front door.

  To my surprise, I felt insulted. They never expected me to be daring. To them I was just a coward with an Incurable Inability.

  And if they couldn’t get anything out of me to solve the mystery, they would keep me in custody anyway, even if they didn’t think I had anything to do with it. Lorne could assure New York that they’d apprehended an accomplice, possibly the culprit herself. A disgruntled former employee. A born criminal. Nobody from New York would have to come and poke around San Francisco Protectorate business. Lorne’s magical ineptitude could go unchallenged another day.

  Something furious and powerful rose up from deep inside me. I retreated to the room, audibly buzzing with rage magic. This was the feeling you were supposed to tap into before you killed a demon. Zap. Boom. Dead. Until now, I’d never felt it.

  Until now.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I stopped pacing and sat cross-legged on the floor. Holding my breath, I pulled nine long hairs from the crown of my head and spread them carefully on my thigh.

  I split the nine into three piles of three and then slowly knotted all hairs together at the top, having to stop several times to lick my fingers to keep them from floating away. When they were all tied together, I brought the knot to my lips with a spell of intention, imagining its length and strength, and then lowered my hands.

  A loud banging drew my attention to the door. It wasn’t on my door but in the hallway outside, where the apps would be walking during their daily grind. There was an explosion, a long pause, then laughter. The distinct odor of pizza wafted through the cracks in the doorway.

  Lunchtime. Pizzas at the Protectorate weren’t usually acquired legally. Somebody would wait in the windows of the top floor until a car delivering takeout for one of Noe Valley’s restaurants approached. Everyone would gather, link hands to enhance their talents, and practice teleportation. The results could be messy—thus the explosion—but something edible usually made it through.

  If the agents were busy fishing from Uber Eats cars for lunch, they might be too distracted to notice anything odd happening in the backyard. Now was the time to move.

  I braided my hair into a focus string, careful not to fumble in my haste. Each turn of the plait was stronger than the one before, and as I worked I sent a Rapunzel vision into my hands, filling each hair with ambitions of grandeur. When I ran out of hair, I pinched the ends together and brought them to my lips. Holding them in my mouth, I walked over to the window and slung a leg out without looking down. If I thought about what I was doing and how I’d never done it before, I might lose my nerve.

  As the wind blew the featherweight braid against my cheek, I pulled my other leg through and sat on the sill, bent over to fit in the window, remembering what it was like to be a cat. A graceful, fearless cat. I couldn’t be one, but I could evoke the attitude.

  I flipped onto my belly, butt in the air, and dangled my legs out the window. Then I pinched the braid, removing it from my lips, and reached it into the room as I cast a small gravity spell to pull the window down.

  Just as the window shut, I brought Rapunzel to life. My delicate braid became a monstrous rope with a life of its own, rippling and grasping, swinging outward. I didn’t want it to fall down into the Protectorate backyard, which was surrounded by high fencing on all sides—I needed to get about twenty yards to the right. To Helen’s roof. She might not help me, but she wouldn’t actually act against me, right?

  I told myself to think cat, kitty, feline. Nine lives. Meow.

  Helen frowned at the end of the rope as it landed beside her. Shaking her head, she picked it up, turned away, and climbed off the roof of her conservatory, dropping out of sight.

  For a few terrified breaths, I waited to see if she would anchor her end of the rope. If not, my journey would be brief and much more vertical than I preferred.

  And then: a sharp tension in the rope told me she’d done as I hoped. I nearly fell out the window in relief.

  Now I had to try another trick: invisibility. Raynor—I assumed he was the other witch in Lorne’s office—had given me the idea. If he could do it, why not me? My father had never succeeded at invisibility, much to his shame because he’d attempted it many times, so I’d never really tried myself.

  Nothing like the threat of imminent, painful death to clarify the mind. As I turned my focus to camouflage, I discovered the rope of my own hair was like an antenna for my powers, providing more amplification than my confiscated redwood beads. Had I known that, I would’ve extended the enchantment to the rope itself before I’d jumped out the window. Too late now. I drew the bubble of invisibility around myself and hooked a leg over the rope to begin my journey. When it seemed to hold, I grabbed it with both hands, swung my other leg over, and began wiggling my way beneath it down the line.

  My first thought was that I needed to go to the salon for an intensive conditioning treatment. On my head, my hair seemed silky enough, but under my bare hands—damn. Tree bark would’ve been softer.

  Kitty, kitty, I’m a kitty, I told myself.

  But the amplification of the rope had changed the balance of power, and now as I clung to the rope, more than twenty feet of open air beneath me, I felt my fingers tingle with the beginning of emerging claws.

  Not now! I wrapped my hands with its opposable thumbs around the rope and told myself I was a human being. I only needed to slide upside down a few seconds longer. A minute at the most. I was wriggling as fast as I could go.

  It took all my strength to avoid hitting the lattice top of the fence between the Protectorate and Helen’s house as I glided past, and then I was accelerating through potted lemon trees and vertical trellises heavy with bougainvillea to the deck.

  The rope came to an end near a yellow lawn chair. To function as an anchor, she’d placed the remains of her bagel, little more than a mouthful, on the loose end, and now stretched out in full recline as she waited for me to arrive.

  I landed on my butt, let go of the rope, and collapsed spread-eagled, breathing hard and maybe whimpering a little.

  “Alma?” Helen was staring at my general direction but not into my eyes.

  I sat up, proud of myself. “Can you really not see me? Or are you just humoring me?”

  She blinked hard a few times. “There you are. Good one.” She scowled. “Where’d you learn that trick?”

  “Oh, it’s just a little something I picked up.”

  “You forgot to hide the rope,” she said.

  “I needed you to see it, didn’t I?”

  She removed the bagel from the rope, which went flying into the air. “Now would be a good time to make it invisible. I don’t want the Protectorate agents climbing over to bother me.”

  “I don’t think I can. It’s too big now.”

  “Do something. It’s your hair.”

  The rope was swaying over our heads like a water snake. “If I could touch it, I could shrink it back into its original size.”

  “Put your hand on your head, you fool. That’s the only hair you need.”

  I did as she said, felt the hum of the power in the massive hair extension, and reluctantly sent the enchantment into itself. On my next breath, it was gone. All that remained were the original nine strands of my hair, in its natural size, wedged into the attic window next door.

  It took me a moment to recover from the loss of so much power. In fact, I had the sudden need to sit down and found myself collapsed in a ball under the lemon tree planter.

  A heavy jacket fell over my head and shoulders. “Take this,” Helen said. “And then get the hell out of here.”

  “I don’t feel very good. I think I need to stay”—I yawned—“a few minutes. Just a few minutes.” My vision was going dark.

  “You have to pay the price for that pretty spell, but not yet. Tell your body to wait until you’re safe to let yourself rest,” she said. “This is the first place they’ll
come looking.”

  Knowing she was right, I staggered to my feet and took deep, invigorating breaths. I’d been up all night, knocked out, magically drained… I was running on fumes.

  I pushed my arms into the jacket, a fleece anorak that reeked of sage. Some kind of burr, clinging to the cuff, scraped my wrist. Turning my face away from the Protectorate house, I walked inside to Helen’s kitchen.

  Helen closed the door to the deck and waved her hand over the latch. It made a sizzling sound like eggs on a hot griddle. Then she walked over to the table and sat down, brushing imaginary crumbs off the surface, still not answering my question. Knowing Helen, she was probably thinking about demanding payment for my trespassing.

  “I don’t have any wellspring water with me this time,” I said. “You’ll have to help me out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “Do you have the torc?”

  “Of course I don’t have the stupid torc.”

  “Don’t get snippy. It was a simple question,” she said.

  “If I had it, I wouldn’t be here. I’d hand it over to Lorne and be cleared.”

  “Oh, don’t do that,” Helen said. “You’re much better off keeping it for yourself.”

  “I would?”

  “You would.” She raised an eyebrow.

  I slapped my hands on the kitchen counter. “You know what it does!” I declared. “Tell me.”

  “One condition.”

  I thought of the Protectorate building next door. Any minute now they would notice I was gone and send up the alarm. “Name it,” I said.

  “One vial of springwater, drawn at midsummer under a full moon.”

  “There is no springwater at midsummer,” I said. “That’s—”

  “There is with the torc,” she said.

  I paused to absorb the implications of that. “The torc makes a wellspring in summer?”

  “Not just anywhere. It has to be a natural site already, like the one in Silverpool. The torc can draw it from deep underground. Not just a little trickle, but deep, unlimited quantities. Water drawn that way at midsummer should have special qualities. I’d like to learn what.” She nodded, scratched her armpit. “So that’s what you’ll get for me. Please don’t get caught before you can make it happen.”