Hexes and Hemlines

by Juliet Blackwell

“Enough,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe more than enough.”

  “But there are a lot of different types of Gypsies, though, right?”

  “Plenty. My family’s mostly Gitan, Cale from Spain.”

  “And the language? You speak it?”

  He shook his head. “Just a very little bit. A lot of it’s dying out, anyway. And even among people who speak Rom, a lot of the words are borrowed from the host country language, so much so that the different dialects can be unintelligible.”

  I found the whole Rom culture fascinating. I had met a lot of them as I wandered the world, in Spain and France and North Africa. I’d heard they were originally from India, but they’d been wandering for so many generations it was hard to say. Like a lot of wandering peoples, they didn’t recognize any particular governmental authority. They often deserved their reputation for being thieves and liars—as far as I could tell, they did what they had to in order to maintain their cultural integrity. And if that meant breaking the law, then so be it.

  We wound through nice large homes with well-tended yards and expensive cars in the driveways before pulling up to a two-story structure behind ornate iron gates. The house was painted a bright bubblegum pink, and a large hand-painted sign, decorated with curlicues and flourishes, read: Fortunes Read, Desires Fulfilled.

  When I pulled up to the gates Sailor leaned out and pushed the buzzer for the intercom. “It’s me,” he said. The wrought iron swung open slowly.

  There was a line of salt across the threshold of the front door.

  “Sastimos,” Sailor said by way of greeting. “Sar san?”

  “Sastimos,” said the man who answered the door. He was short and stocky, wearing jeans, athletic shoes, and a sweatshirt. His coloring was dark, Mediterranean. He gave Sailor a manly backslapping hug and invited us in. Sailor introduced him as his uncle Eric, though he didn’t look any older than Sailor, probably midthirties.

  “Renna’s just finishing up with a client,” Eric said. “Coffee?”

  “Sounds great. It’s Turkish coffee, really strong,” Sailor said to me.

  “I’d love some. Thank you.”

  Eric led us into the well-appointed kitchen, which was outfitted with maple cabinets and filled with bowls of fruit, painted china, and carved brass knickknacks. I also recognized charms against the evil eye, along with bundles of rosemary. Everything carried the aroma of cloves and cardamom, and then of strong coffee as Eric brewed it in a brass coffeepot.

  I noticed a copy of the Guardian facedown atop the counter. At the back, circled in red, was an advertisement for Renna’s “Gypsy Fortune-telling” services.

  “You have a lovely home,” I said, making conversation. “Have you lived here long?”

  “Long enough. Neighbors hate us.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up from the coffee-making equipment, met Sailor’s eyes, and smiled.

  “Because we’re Rom. And because we painted the house pink, I imagine.”

  I thought of Prince High’s black abode. I was willing to bet those neighbors would be happy to trade one Devil’s House for a pink structure owned by Gypsy fortune-tellers.

  On the stool sat a very old accordion. It looked like an antique. “Do you play?”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “Really? I love accordion music,” I said.

  He picked it up in a practiced swoop, looped the strap over his head and adjusted the fit. Then he started playing, swaying slightly. The accordion is an all-body instrument.

  He played what sounded like a flamenco tune. The music carried with it history, and dancing, and sultry nights. Suddenly I was transported to a summer’s night, heady with the scent of grapes and the lingering heat of the day, in a little plaza in a village in the south of Spain. I remembered a young man playing the accordion, a very old woman dancing, the crowd keeping time with loud, rhythmic clapping.

  I glanced over to find Sailor’s dark gaze on me. It made sense, somehow, that he had this blood running through his veins. Whether he wanted to admit to it or not.

  Just as Eric launched into a second song, a door down the hall opened and a young woman emerged. It was clear she had been crying. She clutched candles and flowers to her chest as she hurried past us and out the front door.

  Sailor’s aunt appeared to be in her late forties, at least ten years older than Eric. She was curvy, ample, wearing a long skirt and a vest over a white shirt, and an elaborate multitiered necklace of gold coins. Her dramatic dark eyes were lined in kohl.

  “Lily, this is my aunt Renna. Renna, Lily Ivory,” Sailor introduced us.

  “Welcome to my home,” she said with a sweeping gesture, inviting me into her room. And then in a nononsense voice: “Eric, put the accordion down and finish building those shelves in the basement. And all that new equipment needs to be unloaded from the Honda. Sailor, make yourself useful.”

  He rolled his eyes but followed Eric.

  Renna shook her head as she led the way down the hall.

  “Try to get anything done around here,” she groused. “A witch’s natural enemy is time—or actually, the lack of time. You watch, you’ll see. The need to share oneself drives us, but it takes from us as well.”

  As I walked into the room, I realized we were in her bedchamber. I tried to cover my shock at how open Renna was, to allow clients into her sleeping chamber, her inner sanctum. The house was large; surely there was no necessity to meet in this room. I wondered if perhaps she gleaned some of her power from the intimacy.

  There was a shallow bowl of water and flower petals on the dresser. Renna dipped her fingertips in it and invited me to do the same.

  “Dewdrops and rose petals,” she said, sitting on the king-sized bed, which was covered with a velvet faux tiger-print. “As the flowers bloom, so does the love and happiness of my clients.”

  I smiled as I dried my hands on a nearby embroidered tea towel.

  “Are you in search of true love?”

  “I . . . at the moment I’m looking for something else.”

  “Ah! You are afraid of true love,” she said with a nod.

  “No, not really, I—”

  “Do you know love?”

  “Of course. But . . . there are all kinds of love.”

  “I mean true love, romantic love, but real romantic love. Love to the point of sacrifice.”

  I thought of Max, our talk. About his wife, and what he was looking for now. We barely knew each other, really, but I was certain of one thing: If Max Carmichael were in love with a woman, he would stand by her no matter what. He would remain loyal to the point of true sacrifice. In that moment I finally understood why this was so hard for him, why he was trying to go so slow, to be sure of what he was doing rather than just jumping in. He had to know he was pursuing the kind of relationship that would reward such love.

  “That . . . that is a tall order, indeed.”

  “You will need an amulet made of coins, four white candles, a garland of spring flowers, orange blossom honey, the sweetest slice from the center of a watermelon, and you take it all—”

  “I’m really not here for a love spell,” I interrupted. We didn’t have the time for such things. But in part, I didn’t want to think about it. I was holding myself back from casting my own love spell on Max—or anyone else, for that matter—and didn’t want to be further tempted. It was hard enough to deny my own abilities.

  Renna looked disgruntled at my outburst. Our mentor-mentee relationship wasn’t off to the best start.

  “Sailor tells me you are a witch. In what tradition?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. My father’s people were in the European folk tradition, I believe, but I didn’t really know him. My grandmother, who trained me, comes from Mexico.”

  “Ah, the Mexicans,” she said, nodding. “Good with botanicals.”

  “Yes, I brew.”

  She nodded some more, then passed her hand in a circular gesture over a human skull. A live toad sat, fat an
d brown, on the table.

  “Sit, sit,” she said, gesturing to the other side of the bed. As I sat, she began to sing:

  I’ve seen you where you never were

  And where you never will be

  And yet within that very place

  You can be seen by me

  For to tell what they do not know

  Is the art of the Romani.

  She laughed, almost like a cackle.

  The whole shebang—the skull, the toad, the cackle—would have impressed me, except that I knew it was an act. Like my friend Hervé, Renna made her living by peddling her magic to the general public. Paying customers seemed to get a lot from the impression that they were stepping into a sometimes frightening world of the unknown—perhaps such a setting helped them to open themselves to the magic. I could sense Renna had true powers, but she was also vested in the showmanship of her profession.

  She sat, her perceptive dark eyes holding mine. Her vibrations were calm, confident. She was a powerful woman.

  “May I see your hand?”

  I hesitated. Then I held my hand out and she cupped it in hers.

  She took a deep breath, still looking at my eyes. Finally she glanced down, but the smile fell from her face. Her gaze flew back up to meet mine.

  “No lines.”

  “I have lines,” I protested. “Just not fingerprints.”

  She traced my lifeline, her eyebrows raised.

  Then she dropped my hand and tapped the stack of oversized, dog-eared Tarot cards sitting between us.

  “Make the sign of the cross over the cards.”

  I hesitated, glancing up at the huge crucifix hanging over the bed. I wasn’t familiar with any kind of witchcraft so closely allied with Christianity.

  “Like this.” She showed me, with one hand in the palm of the other. She made a slicing, chopping motion, then came down in a fist, then a slice again. “Three times atop the cards.”

  I made the sign: chop, fist, chop, fist, chop, fist.

  She spread the cards before us in a practiced motion that produced a smooth arc.

  “Think of your situation, and choose one.”

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and concentrated on communing with Renna, rather than fighting her.

  “Ask your question, and pull a card.”

  “Could you see who murdered a man named Malachi Zazi?”

  I pulled a card from the center of the arc, and she took it from me with a flourish, holding it up to look at it, pursing her lips slightly, then setting it down. It was the Three of Wands.

  She shook her head. “The cards cannot tell us this. Perhaps if you had something of the victim’s—a tooth, fingernails, something like that. You could bring me something of his—”

  “No, that’s all right.” It was a long shot anyway. I hadn’t really believed she could give me a name out of the blue—if only all police work was that easy. There was another reason I had come to see her.

  “Renna, I know this is probably unusual, but I’d like to ask you for your help. In finding a murderer. It entails casting a spell from afar.”

  She got up and spun a whirligig made of wooden spikes and crosses. Finally, she nodded, and sat back down on the bed.

  “Tell me your proposition,” she said.

  “I have to identify a murderer. I want to use the Living Things in You spell. Do you know it?”

  She nodded.

  “I know that normally the brew would be put into food, but since I don’t know who he—or she—is, I have to tweak the spell a little.”

  “To cast from afar, you must use a poppet.”

  I nodded. I had thought as much. “I can’t do it alone—I don’t really understand poppet magic.”

  “If you get me something of the victim’s, I could create a poppet of wax and wood. If you brew well, properly, you would then melt the poppet in your brew.”

  “And what about casting the spell without knowing the identity of the target?”

  “The mamioro is a spirit that carries illness. We could call upon it to carry it for us.”

  “We could do that?”

  “Yes, but it is only possible once.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me as though I’d asked her to explain rain. “The mamioro will do us this favor only once. When the sky opens and direct connection between heaven and earth is possible, I shall call upon the forest and the field spirits, woods folk, and faeries to keep us safe.”

  As I was thanking her and standing to leave, she stopped me.

  “The cards have told me something else.”

  “What?”

  “Someone has taken earth trodden on by you, they have spit on it and put it into an empty walnut shell and buried it in the garden of a dead man. You shall have no happiness until you find this, place it on a tray with a garland of three different-colored flowers, nine white candles from a church, and put it out to water with honey and a blood sacrifice. I can get all this together for you for a very small fee. Doing this shall cleanse you of all evil spells.”

  Much like I did with the suffering root. Another curse, another hex. I forced myself to breathe. “Couldn’t I just cast an antidote spell and let the dirt mingle with the earth of the dead man’s garden?”

  Renna looked a little disgruntled. She shrugged.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Sailor is indebted to a man named Aidan.”

  I nodded. “He talked to you about it? I told Sailor I’d do what I could to free him from Aidan. I don’t suppose you have any idea how to approach that?”

  “‘By a spell to him unknown, he could never be alone,’ ” she intoned. “A vila follows him about.”

  “What’s a vila?”

  “A kind of spirit. You must find the charm Aidan has hidden in Sailor’s apartment to control him. If you find this, and bring it to me, I can lift the curse from Sailor. But this is important: Sailor must not know you are doing this, for he is bound to Aidan whether he likes it or not. This will serve as payment in return for helping you.”

  “What kind of charm is it?”

  “This I don’t know. It’s your system, not mine. Aidan is one of yours”—she smiled, her gold tooth glinting—“whether you like it or not.”

  Chapter 26

  I hadn’t been back in Aunt Cora’s Closet ten minutes before Carlos Romero walked in.

  “Were you perchance the person who called in a 911 last night for something going on in the Presidio, citing possible animal sacrifice?”

  “I . . .”

  “The truth, Lily.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay.” He let out a loud, exasperated breath and passed a hand over his eyes, red with lack of sleep. “I’m going to need to get a statement from you. An official statement. And do I even want to ask why you didn’t just call me directly?”

  “I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to talk to you just then. And I needed . . . it’s hard to explain, but animal sacrifice is powerful. I couldn’t just wait around until you came. It wasn’t safe.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Something prickled along my neck. “What was it? What was the sacrifice?”

  “If her brother hadn’t shown up, it would have been one Nichol Reiss, née Huffman. But they did have another body.”

  “A body?”

  “Malachi Zazi.”

  “They had it there, in the woods?”

  “Yep. So, the good news is we got it back. This time they did an immediate autopsy on it. Turns out he is a human, thank you very much, so at least we can rule out the whole vampire deal. Death by stabbing, we pretty much knew that. They did find one interesting thing, though: The reason his palms have no prints is because they were burned.”

  “Why would he have burned his palms?”

  He shrugged. “To avoid fingerprints, maybe? Lots of folks think they can get out of databases, that sort of thing, if they can’t be tracked through fingerprints.”

  “Was he some sor
t of master criminal or something?”

  “More likely it was some injury left over from childhood. I looked up the poor bastard’s records—there were lots of allegations of child abuse, and this was back when you didn’t get so much of that sort of thing.”

  “Poor guy,” I said. “No wonder he was so close to his school friends. At least he had them.”

  “I guess that’s true. I hadn’t thought of it like that. Oh, by the way, you know that rattlesnake in Malachi’s apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “We couldn’t find it. Anywhere. Had the exterminators in there for a couple of hours, but no dice.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Isn’t it? You can’t think of any reason that might be? Didn’t have a chat with it somehow, anything like that?”

  “Very funny. But listen, Carlos, I think I can find out who killed Malachi.”

  “Isn’t that what you were trying to do all along?”

  “Well, sort of, yes. But this, if I do it right, is almost foolproof.”

  “Oh, yeah? What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you, exactly. But I need something from you.”

  “Oh, boy. I can hardly wait to hear this one.”

  “A lock of Malachi Zazi’s hair, and a piece of that mirror from the crime scene. Preferably bloody.”

  Carlos stared at me for several seconds.

  “I know it sounds weird,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What can I tell you, Carlos? I’m a witch, as you know. Witchcraft is odd. I need a little part of Malachi Zazi to make the spell work.”

  There was another awkward pause, but I was losing patience. Carlos knew what I was. Why did I have to keep apologizing for being a witch?

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Carlos said. He paused in the doorway as he was leaving. “It sure is interesting knowing you, Lily Ivory.”

  Presuming Carlos came through with the crime scene supplies, Renna would create the poppet. In the meantime, I had to find whatever charm Aidan was using to control Sailor. And I couldn’t let him know what I was doing.

  I had to break into Sailor’s place.

  Most nights he spent at the bar. But how could I be sure? I considered sending in Oscar to find out, but a miniature potbellied pig couldn’t just saunter into the crowded Cerulean bar without creating a ruckus. A cat or a dog, just maybe, but not a pig. This was one of those things that would have been easier back in the old days, the burning times. Back then, witches’ familiars often spied on people—a cat could wander through a village, even in and out of homes, and come back to inform on the populace. But in our urban existence, things had changed.