Valuable as in family heirloom or valuable in terms of magic?
For the moment, I was too tired to care. And I still had dough to set to rise at Magical Brews.
Why had Gayla and I ever decided to call our little coffee shop and bakery Magical?
By the time I’d set out the leftovers for the kids to reheat in the microwave and put plates, cutlery, and paper napkins for them in the kitchen nook, I’d had enough. I couldn’t face their bright eagerness or the way they looked to their father with adoration.
I needed to bake—smell sifted flour, feel dough kneading beneath my fingers, dust something with cinnamon sugar. Beat my frustrations into cake batter with my wooden spoon. For as long as I could remember, I’d turned to baking to sort my thoughts and bring order to my world. My Granny had taught me to bake before Dad sent her to the asylum for electrical shock treatments to cure her of her second sight.
I fled to Magical Brews on foot—it was only three quarters of a mile away, and the evening was warm. The century-old Gothic horror house that G’s family had built and added onto with each new generation of extended family sat smack dab in the middle of the Ferry Street Bridge area, at the base of Skinner Butte Park. G didn’t talk much about his family. I’d gleaned information over time that he’d lost his parents when he was young, and his grandparents shortly after he married his first wife, D’Accore (I imagined her as an exotic French beauty with an impeccable sense of style and elegance I’d never achieve). He’d never had siblings, other than a foster brother, and only a few cousins who were scattered across the country.
What was so special about Eugene, Oregon, that a family of magical practitioners had settled here? We were a university town with a winning football team and a world-class track program. The town began in the nineteenth century as an agricultural crossroads, important in its own right but not special enough to need magical protection. Or feed magic.
I crossed into the old downtown neighborhood that housed my shop. Each block was lined with long, two- or three-story buildings of side-by-side shops opening onto sidewalks with broad overhangs. Above the small businesses, mostly independently owned, were apartments for the business owners or rented to college students. An alley ran between the two halves of the block for deliveries and dumpsters and an extra fire exit.
Yesterday’s tiny fire preyed on my mind. I needed to examine the entire kitchen again for the source of the oily substance I’d cleaned off the stove top. Grease needed heat to ignite. A spark from somewhere. Where did the heat or spark come from?
Where did the grease come from?
Early Sunday evening the sidewalks of this part of town were still filled with people, dressed in tie-dye and exotic beads. Nearly every man wore a beard and a ponytail, and the women wore their hair long with ribbons, beads, feathers, and streaks of color. The aroma of incense wafting out of various and sundry shops couldn’t mask the distinctive acrid odor of marijuana. Pot was legal now, both medicinal and recreational, and more prevalent here than elsewhere in town. Flute and drum music completed the background.
My insides vibrated in the rhythm of a small drum echoing a heartbeat with an occasional flutter that sounded like a little bird taking flight.
Flutes and drums. Coyote Blood Moon’s shop was right there in front of me. I’d turned right without thinking at the last intersection rather than going straight two more blocks to my shop. Was the universe telling me I needed to talk to this man?
Whatever.
I wandered through the open door, pushing aside long strands of beads that kept the bugs out. They clattered together in a distinctive jangle, announcing my presence.
“Hello,” I called into the dim room lit only by fading sunshine through the big display window and a series of votive candles inside multicolored glass bowls. The little flames sent arcing prisms in every direction.
I turned in a full circle, looking at the dancing rainbows in wonder.
“Good evening, Ms. Deschants,” a deep and mellow male voice said from the portal to the back room.
“How . . . how did you know my name?” I spun sharply until I found him just emerging from a series of shadows. Then he stepped into a patch of light, and I recognized him as a regular at Magical Brews. “Oh, hi, John. Two shots, caramel mocha, no foam. I didn’t realize you owned this shop and wrote those books.” I pointed to a shelf that contained six copies each of his six published titles.
“I have many personae, only one of them mystic and magical.” He grinned, showing amazingly bright and straight teeth behind his neatly trimmed beard and mustache. His hair, too, looked freshly barbered.
“Is one of your personae a businessman for a Fortune 500 Company?”
He laughed long and loud. “You are as observant as you are expert with an espresso machine.” He gestured toward two comfy looking chairs in an alcove between bookshelves, away from the wooden flutes and hand drums. “Actually, I’m a real estate broker and developer and have to wear suits to that job. I own this entire block and other rental properties in town. I bought them to ensure that developers did not try to move in and destroy our unique little neighborhood.”
“So this shop is a part-time business for you?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I have hired help during the week and can only immerse myself in the magic of my shop and my music on weekends. And wear comfortable clothes.” He opened his arms wide to display his batik caftan. Then he paused, looking . . . contemplative but not sad. He’d carved out his place in the universe to his satisfaction. “Enough about me. What brings you to Mystic Music?” He flashed that amazing smile at me, and suddenly he seemed younger and more vibrant than I remembered him at six in the morning when he was in too much of a hurry, ordering coffee and buttermilk biscuits with butter and jam.
“I think I need to know something about the magical properties of jade.” That’s what Belle needed to know. But as her mother, I did, too.
“Ah, jade. Balance and wisdom, protection from fear. I have just the book, right here.” He leaned forward and plucked a book off a shelf, not one of his own, and handed it to me. “Is this for yourself or your daughter, Belle?”
“Both. But how did you know about my daughter?” Maternal protectiveness prickled my back.
“I’ve seen her around town, and her father has brought her in once or twice. Everyone in our . . . community knows G and his offspring. This summer, Belle has begun wearing the Chinese hair sticks with the jade charms. I know something about those sticks and the antique mall where she purchased them for the exact price she could afford. I own that building as well, but not the business. That I leave to someone who knows mundane old artifacts better than I do.”
“But you know about the magical artifacts and keep track of them.”
“I find it useful to poke my nose in there occasionally. G is a frequent browser. We were close in high school, but our lives went in opposite directions soon after. We wave and speak casually now but don’t socialize much.”
Pieces of the puzzle that were my children began to fall into place.
“I suspect that G has finally had to give you nuggets of information. I’m surprised it took him this long,” John said, peering acutely at the space around my head. Looking at my aura?
“I have been willfully blind to him and his work for too long.” And his lies and the bimbos he took to no-tell-motels.
“But now you are no longer blind, and you seek information on your own. G rents an apartment from me on the upper floor of this very block. He needs to remain close to the center of our community.”
Was that where the incriminating photos were taken? And, if so, who was the photographer?
“Are there many participants in your community?” He’d mentioned it twice.
“Not as many as those who want to have the ability to belong. We find it easier to hide among the many pretenders. Invisible while
in plain sight.”
G had said that part of his job was keeping magic invisible. Where better to hide than amongst the wannabes holding a street party outside this shop, drinking and smoking and dancing in the street. It happened nearly every summer weekend evening. I’d just never paid it much attention.
“I look forward to you making my coffee tomorrow morning. You combine everything perfectly, just the way I like it. No one else seems to know how to do that. Take the book. It’s free to members of the community.”
“Am I a member?” That scared me. I had no magic of my own and didn’t want the talent. My fundamentalist family had filled me with childhood nightmares about the sins of witchcraft and the necessary punishment of burning at the stake to cleanse the soul of the taint of Satan. They’d separated me from a beloved grandmother when she started predicting the future for our neighbors and her prophecies came true—especially the bad ones. Until recently, the world of magic was a fantasy found only in books. But I’d been a history major, and I knew how real magic had been to older civilizations and cultures. Maybe it had been with us all along, just driven underground by the fearful and paranoid.
My parents would rant long and loud about the evils of magic, at the same time declaring it would not, could not exist. Modern science had proven that.
Yeah, right.
“You are G’s partner. That makes you a member of our community, knowingly or not,” Coyote Blood Moon said, disrupting my fearful looping thoughts.
G’s partner. Not his wife. His partner.
What had he gotten me into?
Ten
“ANOTHER DEAD MAGICIAN?” G asked the familiar voice at the other end of this phone conversation. He flicked several keys on his laptop, zeroing in on a map of Australia. A red star blinked rapidly in Melbourne. He clicked it and brought Zeke into video conference mode.
“What do you mean another?” G’s deputy replied, his Aussie accent came through thicker than his usual Oxbridge affectation. “This is the first one I’ve been called in on.”
“First one in your jurisdiction, Zeke. I’ve investigated five others in the past three months. When did she die?” Not recently, he surmised. “What was the deceased’s talent and her wand?” All magicians powerful enough to register with the Guild had an acknowledged wand that needed to be grounded and cleansed upon the death of the practitioner. He pulled up a spreadsheet on another screen.
If this murder followed the same pattern as the other five, D’Accore would have stolen the wand and absorbed most of its stored magic before dumping it on the body. She had to restore the talents stripped from her when the Guild incarcerated her in their inescapable dungeons. How she escaped and who helped her was still a mystery. He knew the killer was D’Accore.
No one else could have cast an illusion to make him think he was meeting Daffy for a quiet romantic interlude without the kids. When he’d seen the photos—the camera couldn’t record illusion—he’d seen her for who she was.
She’d tried to drain some of his power. But she needed too much energy to maintain the illusion and didn’t get much from him other than fast sex that wasn’t as clandestine as he imagined.
He could only guess that his bosses hadn’t told him of her escape out of embarrassment, and the long-ingrained habit of secrecy. But he knew now who his enemy was, and why she was gathering wands.
What he didn’t know was who helped her. Someone with a lot of money for bribes, fake ID, and travel around the world to steal wands.
Wands only had echoes of their owner’s power. D’Accore would need hundreds to bring her up to the levels she’d lost. She lost a lot of borrowed power each time she used it.
That meant she had to keep killing, keep absorbing power from stolen wands and from her victims. Death held its own energy.
But the D’Accore of old knew how to harness the power of death. Dangerous energy that didn’t last long, but demanded release. Like to like. Death causing death.
G brought up a third screen with his database cataloging the murders, their location and time, wand, and talent.
“Jilly. She tamed fire.” Zeke interrupted G’s musings, caught in a circle of dread. “Mundane police think she’s been dead four months.” That sounded about right. “Jilly lived in an isolated rural area. No one thought to check on her until a client needed to take delivery of a metal sculpture. Jilly used the fire of a tamed welding torch to make the most amazing symbolic structures that speak to the heart.” He paused and sighed with regret. “I got called because I’m listed as next of kin—a nephew for the record, but no blood relation.”
The timeline fit D’Accore’s movements. One of D’Accore’s first kills after escaping would be to work with fire again.
“Wait. She tamed fire?”
The opposite of D’Accore’s original talent. She’d conjured and released fire to work its own will. Taming meant controlling. D’Accore reveled in fire running wild. As wild as she wanted to be. The Guild had stripped her of that ability first when they found her guilty of using black magic.
“This Jilly. Could she start fires as well as containing them?”
G found the name and talent on the registry. Not much info other than name, date of birth—and now death, location, next of kin—no family other than the Guild’s local deputy, and two words about talent and level. Fire mage.
He really needed to expand this database.
“Starting fires? Not so much,” Zeke said. “We’re pretty dry out here and starting a fire can be disastrous. Controlling or stopping a fire is crucial. She needed the aid of an old Zippo lighter to start a fire, but she could put one out or contain it with a flick of her fingers. Sometimes, all she needed was a thought.”
“A vintage Zippo?” All the heat drained out of G’s face and hands. He had trouble typing the new information into the database with his suddenly numb fingers. “Was the Zippo found with the body?” He had to control the trembling in his gut.
This was getting worse.
He had personally thrown D’Accore’s Zippo into a vat of acid.
“No. It looks like Jilly was strangled, then set afire with her own wand. There’s a blank spot in the charring over her heart, the same size and shape as her wand. That’s where she kept it, in her shirt pocket. The wand had created a small area of protection from fire.” Zeke turned his phone so that G could see the grisly remains.
“What kind of decoration did the Zippo have?” G fought to control the shake in his voice.
“It had a skull medallion soldered to the metal case. And it had a bullet hole through it from a Japanese machine gun. Supposedly the lighter had saved the life of Jilly’s father during World War II.”
G gulped and looked deep within to find calm authority. “Zeke, I can’t come to help you right now. I trust you to investigate this. I want a full autopsy and all the crime scene photos on my desk ASAP. Scrutinize every detail. Observe everything. I really need to know anything out of the ordinary. Use all of your senses on this one.”
“Yes, sir. And, um, thank you for your trust. I’ve never known you to delegate before. I’m proud to be your deputy.”
“Just do your job and get back to me. Don’t expect to spot the perpetrator or capture her. She’s moved on. I’m zeroing in on her location as we speak.”
“Yes, sir. I do know that the murderer is a female. Blonde hair. Long legs and a figure to stop traffic. She was seen hanging around Jilly’s metal sculpture studio around the time of death.”
“That sounds like our perp. But I am surprised she hasn’t disguised her true appearance as she murders her way across the world.” She’d done it here in Eugene.
“Holding a disguise, either magical or mundane takes a lot of energy. She needed to conserve her power in order to get around Jilly’s defenses and get close enough to kill.”
“Get me as much information as you c
an gather. Deputize others if you need to.” G thumbed his phone off, severing the connection to the computer. His hands shook so hard he needed three swipes to manage the disconnect. He had to close the laptop to silence it. He couldn’t manage to power down or turn it off.
Whatever, D’Accore was up to, he had a bad feeling that he was not her ultimate target—just a nasty piece of revenge along the way. While trying to escape her magically locked straitjacket, she’d burst blood vessels behind her eyes. She could only restore her eyesight by stealing it from a blood relative. He now knew that she’d killed her entire family when she manifested her talent at twelve, the only magician in her genealogy. Without training, her talent had driven her insane. Jason, her son, was the only genetic connection she had left.
Would his inheritance from his mother eat his brain as well?
I thought about my conversation with John—Coyote Blood Moon—all the way to Magical Brews, only a few blocks away, on the edge of the busier newer section of town. Certainly, I was G’s partner in raising our children. But now that they had all manifested—all at once seemingly—they must come under his influence much more than mine.
I realized with mind-numbing shock, they were no longer my babies. They’d grown beyond needing their mother as the center of their universe. Right now, they needed to send out feelers into the big, bad, real world, and G was the one to help them master their talents. They needed to use them for good and be useful. And they need to keep their talents hidden for the good of the normal world.
G had probably known this moment would come when he married me, a normal person. I’d fallen madly in love with him the moment I’d met him. But had I truly been in love, or had he manipulated me because he needed someone to raise his toddler son after his first wife died in childbirth?
That day was deeply ingrained in my mind. Toward the end of summer just before my senior year at U of O. I was working as a barista at a coffee shop frequented by students and business people alike. Gayla managed the place but didn’t own it. Maybe Coyote Blood Moon had owned that shop, too. He seemed to own most of this neighborhood. But not my building. Gayla and I had purchased our shop—along with a hefty mortgage, which G helped negotiate. He got the percentage down to affordable levels. When Shara entered first grade and didn’t need me home all day, we’d pooled our combined savings. Renting was the usual option, especially for first-time business owners. But since the place had the right feel, and the elderly owner of the building wanted to sell off the entire block piecemeal to make it harder for developers to move in, we purchased one sixth of the building. Gayla lived above the shop.
A Spoonful of Magic Page 8