Null Witch: Secondhand Magic #1

by Lori Drake

  “Did you roll in some catnip on the way over here?”

  He laughed, shaking his head and giving Barrington’s fur a backward ruffle. That was all it took. The cat hopped up and shook himself, then disappeared under the coffee table to start licking his fur back down. Lord Barrington was particular about his coiffure.

  “I’m good with animals. I was K-9 before this opportunity came along.”

  “Why’d you take the job?” I asked, with caution. “It couldn’t have made you very popular with anyone.”

  This time it was Escobar that was rescued by the door, but this time it wasn’t a knock. The door simply opened and Matt came inside with a take-out bag in one hand and an all too carefully surprised look on his face. “Oh, hey! I didn’t know you had company.”

  It was all I could do to keep from snickering. The gust of cold air from outside was all it took for Barrington to disappear under the couch.

  I didn’t bother getting up, just smiled over at Matt. “It’s okay, hon. This is Detective Escobar. Detective, Matt.”

  Matt closed the door and crossed the room with long strides, offering a handshake to Escobar who stood and accepted it. I watched the two men size each other up over the handshake with amusement.

  “We were talking about that Jane Doe thing I told you about. The detective was just about to tell me why he became a magic cop.”

  “A magic cop? That sounds… enchanting,” Matt said, with a grin.

  I groaned while Escobar chuckled politely. Like he’d never heard that one before, right?

  “You really can’t help yourself, can you?” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Well, right now I’m going to help myself to a plate. You two finish up your chat. Ignore me.” He squeezed my shoulder in passing, then headed off to rattle around in the kitchen. I heard Barrington meow a moment later and knew he was in there checking out all of the smells.

  “You were saying?” I prompted, studying Escobar as he sat down again. The reprieve turned out to be temporary, at best.

  “Sorry. I was going to say that it didn’t. Make me popular. But I wasn’t trying to be popular. I just wanted to do the right thing, to protect all the people of Santa Fe, magic-using and otherwise,” he answered, with every outward appearance of honesty. I can’t read auras or anything, but I believed him.

  You’d think that badass spell-slinging witches wouldn’t have much to worry about from Joe Normal, but there was a significant spike in violence against witches after they were thrust into the spotlight. Witches are just people and as vulnerable to surprise attacks as anyone else. It didn’t take long for hate groups like the Sons of Humanity—basically the KKK without the white sheets and long, sordid history—to start popping up, and they weren’t content burning broomsticks on lawns. Witches who used magic to fight back did so at great risk. There are strict laws about how a witch can and cannot use their magic against others, even in self-defense. Technically, I could have pressed charges against Hector for assault, but it would have been his word and Tracy’s against mine.

  Escobar continued. “So, please. Help me figure out what happened to Tori, so I can give her family some closure and make sure whatever it is isn’t still a danger to others.”

  Another point for him, even if he was using interrogation tactics on me. I’d seen my share of procedural police dramas. Use the victim’s familiar name to humanize them, right? Even knowing that, he was making it really hard to say no, especially given that I knew what happened to Tori might not be an isolated incident. He didn’t know about Christina. Yet.

  I sighed and rose from the couch to walk over to the window, looking out on the snow-covered city from my semi-scenic perch. I didn’t want to get involved. The tussle I’d had with Hector was fresh in my mind, a reminder of just how powerless I was in their world. But Escobar was in the same position, and he’d lost his backup. Maybe I could help in some way.

  “I’m not a witch,” I said, finally. “But I may be able to help. I have a, well, I guess you could say it’s a magic sensitivity. Plus I know people, people who could maybe supply information if they didn’t have to worry about being persecuted—or prosecuted—for it.”

  I turned from the window to the sight of Escobar turned toward me, a look of relief clear on his face, and Matt standing in the kitchen doorway his mouth hanging open. Apparently, I had defied his expectations.

  Great. I hate being predictable.

  Chapter 13

  I really didn’t want to work on my day off, but that’s what I ended up doing the next morning. One of the downsides of working in nursing is that it’s not like an office job where you can call in sick and catch up on missed work the next day. The patients aren’t going anywhere, and they still need someone to care for them. If the ward is short-staffed, it’s that much harder for everyone. I try to be willing to cover for people when they ask because it makes them more willing to cover for me when I need to take a day. Unfortunately, it meant I had been the designated driver the night before, sipping ginger ale while Matt enjoyed the margaritas. I’d left him sleeping it off on the couch this morning. Lucky him, he didn’t have to work today.

  Escobar had taken the news about Christina well. He was annoyed that I hadn’t brought it up sooner, but more determined than ever to find out what had happened to the two witches. I also explained to him that I was positive Tori had burned out before she died, because I could tell she had no magic left in her. Just like Christina. Burnout wasn’t so rare that no one ever saw it happen, but for two witches from the same coven to burn out within a week of one another… something was definitely hinky about that. He said he’d do some digging, and I promised to stop by the police station after my shift. Hopefully, I could fit in a shower, a change of clothes, a meeting with Escobar, and a bite to eat before I was due to meet Barry at the bar where his friend’s band was performing.

  On the whole, it was going to be a long day, and my work week hadn’t even technically started yet. Maybe I could slip out a little early if things were slow.

  The morning passed fairly uneventfully, at least for the ER. We got steady traffic but no big traumas or major drama. On my lunch break, I spent some quiet time in one of the on-call rooms after consuming a healthy but bland sandwich from a vending machine in the cafeteria. Or, at least I tried. I was drifting on the edge of a midday snooze when I heard the door open.

  “Hey Emily, you awake?” a male voice said, quietly.

  Opening my eyes, I turned my head and glanced over at the door. “Yeah, what’s up?”

  The man the voice belonged to slipped into the room and closed the door, leaning against it. “Sorry to bother you. I know you’re on break. I saw you come in here and I thought it’d be a good time to talk.”

  Now that I had a better view, I could see that it was Russell.

  “Talk?” I rolled onto my side, facing him, and curled up some. “About what?” No, I wasn’t worried about people thinking we were up to something in the on-call room. That shit only happens on television.

  “I hope you’re not upset or anything, I looked your number up in the hospital directory for Suzi. She was getting really worked up about those dreams, and I thought it might be good for her to get it off her chest.”

  Oh right, that. I smiled and shook my head, rubbing my cheek against the pillow in the process. “Well, I guess since you apologized I can cancel that HR complaint.”

  The color drained from his face, and his eyes went wide, but he processed my smirk a moment later and groaned. “Don’t do that.”

  Last year one of the nurses had filed a completely bogus sexual harassment claim against Russell, and it had caused him a major headache. If she hadn’t recanted, it would have ended up in his permanent file, and he would have had to deal with disciplinary action. In retrospect, it was mean of me to tease him like that.

  “Sorry.” I pushed myself up to sit and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Yawning and leaning back on my hands, I looked up at him with an
apologetic smile. “I was just teasing. It’s fine. Does she have those sorts of dreams often?”

  He gave me a chiding look for my little jab at his expense, then relaxed against the wall. Folding his arms across his chest, he shrugged. “I wouldn’t say often, but… fairly regularly, I guess. As long as I’ve known her. I don’t know if it’s just her imagination or something more. A few years ago I was heavily leaning toward the former, you know? Now…”

  “All bets are off,” I finished for him, smiling gently. “I don’t know, honestly. You had her checked out, medically?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, just to be safe. She’s fine, she’s just, I dunno. Suzi.” But he smiled, and I knew that it was just one of those things he accepted about her because he loved her. Men like Russell gave me hope for the rest of humanity.

  “I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.”

  “Thanks.” He turned toward the door, then stopped and turned back. “Actually, I’ve been wanting to ask you about something else. The other day, when that witch went crazy… How did you know?”

  I bit my lip, floundering for a reasonable explanation. “He was levitating, Russ. You saw it the same as I did.”

  “Not when you started chasing us out. I’ve played it over and over in my mind, trying to figure out what I missed. It was like you saw something we didn’t.”

  My heartbeat kicked up, anxiety flooding my veins as I tried and failed to come up with a good excuse. I liked my job. No, I loved my job. But there was a reason I kept my co-workers in the dark about my background. I didn’t want them to look at me differently. I liked being Emily the nurse, judged for my skills and attitude rather than who I shared DNA with.

  A knock on the door saved me from having to answer.

  A muffled voice asked from the other side, “Emily? Are you still in there? There’s a police detective here looking for you.”

  Russell shot me a quizzical look. Usually, he was the one getting pulled out of conversations, though in his case it was for medical purposes rather than law enforcement ones. So far, anyway.

  I just shrugged and gave him a long-suffering smile. “Sucks to be popular, doesn’t it?”

  It turns out, it didn’t take an act of Congress to get me out of work that afternoon. All it took was an act of Escobar. While I stood leaning against the wall at the other end of the hall, trying but failing to eavesdrop, the detective had a brief but serious conversation with my supervisor. Whatever he said, she didn’t look happy about it, but she nodded and waved a hand at me before walking off in the other direction.

  “So, what would’ve happened if she’d said no?” I asked as he joined me at the end of the hall.

  “Well, I do have handcuffs,” he said, a little too deadpan.

  I laughed. “Man, I’m almost tempted to ask you to do it anyway. It’d give the whole hospital something to talk about for weeks.”

  He let me change clothes, at least, before whisking me off to his generic sedan. I had barely settled in the passenger seat when he threw the transmission into reverse and backed smoothly out of the parking space.

  “So, do I get to know where we’re going?” I asked, glancing over at him while I gave the seatbelt a tug to adjust it.

  “Crime scene,” he said. “We’ve got another dead witch on our hands. I’m not sure if it’s connected…”

  “But it’s been that kind of week?” I probably shouldn’t make it a habit of trying to complete peoples’ sentences.

  Chuckling, he nodded. “Yeah, exactly. At least this time he was a registered practitioner. I don’t know if it’s the same coven or not. Maybe you can confirm that when we get there.”

  “Do you have a name?” I turned my attention out the passenger window as we accelerated into traffic.

  “Do you know them all by name?”

  “Touché.”

  The rest of the ride passed in silence, and it was blessedly brief. Escobar was an aggressive—or maybe I should say assertive—driver. He didn’t speed, much, but he took corners a little fast and followed the car in front of him too closely for my taste. When he parked the car outside a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood on the east side of town, I pried my fingers off the “oh shit” bar and briefly inspected it for indentations I was sure my fingers had made. If he noticed, he didn’t comment.

  There were no fewer than three police cruisers, an ambulance, and a fire truck parked outside the house, which wasn’t quite the sum total of the emergency response team in Santa Fe but it was not an insignificant number.

  “What happened here?” I asked as I joined Escobar on the other side of the car. He was fishing in his coat pockets for something, eventually producing a laminated consultant badge attached to a lanyard that would clue everyone in that I was allowed to be there. I put it on obediently, trying not to think of it as a collar. Heel, Em.

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.” He held up the crime scene tape that had been strung up at the edge of the lawn for me to pass under it.

  Tabling the rest of my questions for now, I accompanied him across the snow-covered lawn in the direction of the front of the house. A few short steps led up to a wide but shallow porch lined with terra-cotta pots bearing flowering plants in open defiance of the wintry weather. There was a spiderweb of magic coating the outside of the pots, keeping the soil warm and the air around the pots a good forty degrees warmer than everywhere else. One day, someone’s going to figure out a way to monetize that sort of thing and make millions, but spells like that don’t last without regular maintenance. At any rate, it was clear that a witch lived here. One that specialized in earth magic, specifically.

  This impression didn’t change as we stepped into the house, which was warm enough that it was practically a sauna. There was greenery everywhere, decorating the living room in various shades of green interspersed with vibrant blooms. There were vines literally climbing the walls. It didn’t faze Escobar. He glanced around on his way through the living room, obviously expecting me to follow him. I did.

  I could hear conversation elsewhere in the house from the moment I walked in. The kitchen turned out to be the epicenter of the activity. There was a body on the floor, a bunch of those numbered evidence tags littered around the room, and a handful of people at work processing the crime scene. There was also a nasty smell in the room, but it wasn’t one I’m entirely unfamiliar with in my line of work. Death isn’t pretty, and from the glance I took at the body, it looked like it’d been there a few days.

  “Looks like the cavalry is here,” someone said, and those present chuckled.

  Well, everyone other than me and Escobar, anyway. “What do you have for me, Anderson?” he asked, simply.

  A tall, thin man with a shaved head and a chip on his shoulder detached from the wall and approached us, eyeing me. I stared back without comment. Dismissing me for now, he shifted his attention to Escobar. “Bringing your girlfriend to crime scenes now, Esco? That’s new.”

  To his credit, Escobar didn’t rise to the bait. “She’s consulting,” he said simply and waited for the other man to get on with it.

  Smirking, Anderson lifted a tablet in his hand and started to read off the pertinent information. “The deceased’s name is William Hines. He works for J&L Paper Products. His boss called in a missing person when he didn’t come into work for three days. Unmarried, no known relatives. But he’s registered, so we called you. Patrol officer found him face down on the kitchen floor.” He motioned at the body with one hand. “Obviously dead for several days. Paramedics called, per procedure, to confirm. Body’s awaiting your release for transfer to the morgue. No signs of a struggle or forced entry.”

  “Alright, I’ll take it from here,” Escobar said, and the other cop presented the tablet to him for a finger signature. Bureaucracy in action. Within minutes, everyone but the crime scene techs had cleared out. I heard the sound of car engines rumbling to life outside moments later. I kind of wished I was in one of them. The novelty of
getting out of work to be whisked away on official police business was wearing off fast.

  “Emily?” Escobar’s voice pulled me back to the here and now. He was holding a pair of latex gloves out to me, and I took them, slipping them on with the ease of familiarity.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, which earned me a curious glance from one of the lingering techs. Some consultant I was turning out to be.

  “Just look around. See if you sense anything or notice anything that seems odd or out of place. Can you tell if he burned out?” He motioned at the corpse, but I shook my head.

  “No, not when he’s already dead. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” He started to move carefully around the room. I stayed where I was, not wanting to contaminate anything and wondering if I should be wearing a pair of those little booties on my shoes or something. But I did as instructed, looking around the room for active spells. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything that wasn’t obviously related to the plants in some way. It was possible for something to have been hidden amongst those, but I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for. Just because I could see spells didn’t mean I could necessarily understand them.

  We spent about an hour at the crime scene, then headed to the police station.

  “Now what?” I asked, settled in Escobar’s cubicle in the squad room. There was enough of a mess littering the desk and walls that I couldn’t help but feel a sort of newfound kinship with the detective.

  Escobar settled behind the desk and set to clearing a space amongst all the unfinished paperwork where we could work, then dropped the case files onto the desktop, where they landed with a solid thud. “Now we look for something that ties the victims together. Can you find out if Hines was in the coven?”

  Finally, something I could do. Nodding, I whipped out my shiny new phone and dialed Hector. He picked up on the first ring.