Witch Craft

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I’m just here to be a good citizen, miss. I want to help in any way that I can.” He looked back at Bryson. “Is there somewhere that we could talk? I assume you need background information on me and on the property, to rule out a revenge attack?”

  “Andy!” Bryson barked. “Show Mr. Morgan to the interview room.”

  Zacharias took charge of Morgan, and Bryson turned back to me, rolling his eyes to high heaven.

  “Not only a macho ass but a cop groupie,” I said. “Must be your lucky day, David. You should ask him if he wants to hold your gun.”

  “Look,” he said. “Morgan calling in the dead of night isn’t the only reason I’m here.”

  “Oh?”

  Bryson looked back and forth, as if ninjas were waiting in the corners to record our conversation. “I did some work last night after we got the call about you and the burn-unit sausage. Did you know Narco had a watch on those warehouses?”

  Maybe this day wouldn’t be all ass-kissing and bad coffee. “Really. They think Brad Morgan is a drug smuggler as well as a jerk-off?”

  “Not him, but his employees at the center,” said Bryson. “Been getting a lot of traffic from the port. Cargo. Not enough for a search warrant—just surveillance.”

  I tapped my teeth. “Can you get Narco to give us what they have?”

  “Doubtful,” said Bryson. “They hate you just as much as the rest of the department.”

  I flashed him a thumbs-up. “Way to go, David. Need I remind you that your fat ass sits at a desk in this den of iniquity, same as me?”

  “Shit, Wilder. I’m just being honest.”

  “Then allow me to do the same: Get me those goddamn surveillance tapes before I slap you in the head.”

  Bryson grumbled his way back onto the elevator, and I downed the last of my coffee and went to interview Brad Morgan.

  He stood up again when I walked into the interview room, pressing his hands together in the movie-actor version of contrite. “Is there any chance I could get one of those lattes?”

  I gave him my granite glare. “No.” I took the high-backed leather chair at the head of the table, forcing Morgan into one of the 1970s-vintage plastic and metal contraptions designed specifically to numb someone’s ass.

  “Listen, I want to help,” said Morgan. “Nick was one of my success stories—he came to the center as a very troubled high school sophomore and now he’s a teaching assistant at Nocturne University, after completing a psych major. He wants to get into social work.”

  “Mr. Morgan,” I said, leaning across the table, mimicking the posture he used to interview unsuspecting victims on his news show, “why would our Narcotics squad have your warehouse under observation?”

  I was taking a huge risk, and no doubt Captain Hollings from Narcotics would call me up and scream his choice slurs at me until he had another heart attack, but I was tired of games. I’d been through fire, not to mention ineptly cursed and attacked by carnivorous seals. This case was getting on my last nerve, and if Brad Morgan showed his stomach to me I was going to sink my teeth into it.

  Morgan, for his part, recoiled, shock springing into his eyes. “Drugs? Nick was not a drug smuggler, nor were any of my employees.”

  “Fine. Your delinquents aren’t dealing to their emo-kid pals, but what about the other two warehouses?”

  “I … I lease them,” Morgan said numbly. “I have no idea what goes on apart from collecting the rent and doing credit checks on the leaser.”

  His eyes dipped, and his right ring finger had started up a tapping that I was sure he didn’t notice. I did, because they’re two of the textbook hallmarks of a fibber. I scented Morgan, and got sweat underneath his botanical body wash and tony aftershave. The interview room was cool. My arms had gooseflesh.

  “You want to tell me the truth now, Mr. Morgan? You’re a bad liar, so just come clean and stop wasting my fucking time.”

  He flinched. Obviously, this wasn’t playing out like his favorite episode of CSI.

  I tapped my wristwatch, a 1940s army officer’s model that I’d treated myself to on my thirtieth birthday. If I had to watch time pass me by, at least it would be aesthetically pleasing. “I’m waiting, Mr. Morgan. Or should I call you Brad?”

  His jaw twitched. “I don’t know anything.”

  I shoved back the rolling chair so it hit the whiteboard mounted at the front of the room, and grabbed Morgan by the elbow. “Let’s take a walk.”

  At the elevators I turned us left and pushed through the old door sprayed with the symbol for a fallout shelter. It was supposed to be locked, but I’d learned that some long-ago janitor had jammed the lock open during my time on SWAT.

  The old tunnels lead a quarter of a mile down the road to the Nocturne City morgue, spitting halogen lights and exposed pipes creating slices of light and dark. Every few hundred feet, a cage used for bunks or supplies leered out at us with rusted metal mesh for teeth. Instead of cans of supplies for the post-apocalyptic Nocturne City, the cages now held old files, ruined mouse-chewed furniture, and the detritus of thirty years of police work.

  Morgan eyed his surroundings like he was the star of a slasher film and I was the hockey-mask killer. “This is … unusual, Lieutenant.”

  “You have no idea,” I muttered, shoving open the red door marked EMERGENCY. We came face-to-face with a surprised morgue attendant, but he waved us on when I showed him my shield.

  Dr. Cordova was on duty, slicing up a fat retiree with the purple, swollen face of a heart attack victim in the autopsy bay. Cordova’s pug face wrinkled up even further when he saw me. “What do you want?”

  He and I go way back, all the way to the Holly Street shootings, where Cordova had done his best to paint my shooting of a suspect as a bad one.

  “Doc, someone might think you weren’t happy to see me,” I said. Cordova never stopped working on the old man. Next to me, Brad Morgan blanched.

  “Spit it out, Wilder,” Cordova grunted.

  “What drawer is Howard Corley in?” I asked.

  “Fifteen,” he snapped, and yanked the mask back over his face. I dragged Morgan over to the alcove that held a bank of freezers, each stamped with a number and labeled by hand with the name and case number of the corpse within.

  I yanked drawer fifteen open with a clang, cold and sharp in the hard-walled room. Corley was covered by a plain paper sheet, and I jerked it off.

  Morgan clapped eyes on the body, and his face went slack. “Dear gods!”

  “This is what happened to someone else who got caught up in whatever you’re lying to me about,” I said. “This is what’s going to happen to another person if you don’t come clean with me right now.”

  Morgan’s throat worked, and I could tell from the waxy color of his face that he was trying heroically not to vomit. I didn’t blame him—Corley was stiff and brittle, his skin boiled into a carapace by the fire, lips pulled rigid over blackened teeth.

  “So,” I said softly. “Are you going to tell me what was really going on at your property? Or do you need some alone time with Mr. Corley?”

  Morgan buried his face in his hands, his fingers leaving purple indents on his forehead as he let out a shuddering sigh. “I’m a witch.”

  “Pardon?”

  “A witch!” he bellowed, loud enough to bounce his voice off the tiles that lined the freezer alcove. “I have the blood!”

  “That explains why you’re twitchy—sort of—but what got your warehouse burned?” I said.

  “They told me it was for the cause,” said Morgan. “That I just had to look the other way for one night.”

  “They?” I covered Corley back up and shut the freezer, mostly so I didn’t have to smell him anymore.

  Morgan slumped down on the rolling stool next to the freezers. “I’m mixed race, Lieutenant. My father is Afro-Cuban and my mother is Irish. Morgan is just some bullshit name I took when I got on my university radio station. Ditched the accent, wore white-guy suits, and here I am, fiftee
n years later, and no one except my wife knows.”

  “Are you blood or caster?” I asked, rubbing the point between my eyes.

  “Neither,” said Brad. “I’m a shaman. From both sides … my abeula was an old hoodoo witch and my mother was a shaman from the Old Traditions.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Never met a shaman before.”

  “There’s more to the blood than just casters and black magick,” said Morgan, almost testy.

  “Yeah, okay, whatever,” I said. “You’re a shaman. What cause were you contributing to by lighting your own volunteer on fire?”

  “Someone contacted me a month ago. They knew everything about me, and the price for not sending proof to Channel One was that I look the other way while a shipment from the port came in to one of my rental properties.”

  I drew in a breath. This was getting better by the second. “You have anything more specific than someone?”

  Morgan rubbed his forehead. “The man I met with was named Milton. That was all I got.”

  “Well, you can rest easy,” I said, tapping on the drawer labeled MANNERS in crooked Sharpie printing. “He’s number twenty-two.”

  Ten

  Brad Morgan was silent and waxen-faced as a mannequin while we walked back to the SCS offices. He and I parted ways with me shoving a business card into his hand with my home number scribbled on the back, and knowing I’d never see him again except from my TV screen after the doors rolled shut on the elevator.

  Bryson stuck his head out of the bullpen. “Wilder. Nick Alaqui died. Just got a call from the hospital.”

  I’d done so well, all day, for Fagin and for Brad Morgan. Holding it in. Being the professional. Running my squad like a lieutenant, not a were.

  I turned around and punched the wall next to the elevator.

  A few chips of brick rattled to the floor and pain blazed to life across my knuckles. “Hex it,” I said plainly, then turned and walked back to my office, measured. Bleeding knuckles leeched all of the rage from me, and now I just felt like a rag doll.

  Bryson appeared a minute later with a roll of gauze and some peroxide. He set them on the corner of my desk. “You wanna put some ointment on that, or it’ll hurt like hell.”

  “It already hurts like hell,” I muttered, taking the peroxide and holding my hand over the wastebasket. The bathrooms were two floors up, and I wasn’t about to risk running into someone who would want to know what happened.

  The peroxide sizzled as it hit my gashed hand, and I hissed, clamping my teeth together. Bryson shut the door behind him as I wrapped my hand and shuffled from one foot to the other. “Wilder, you gotta do something. We’re sitting around playing grab-ass while the feds walk all over us and a witch with a pyro fetish runs around the city like motherfucking Godzilla.”

  I pushed my chair back. “I am doing something,” I said. My stomach was dancing, but Bryson was right. Nothing was going to happen while I sat around bleeding and feeling sorry for myself. I picked up the phone with my good hand and debated, then punched in the number.

  “Fagin,” I said when he answered. “I’m going to speak to Grace Hartley. If you want to be there when I do, drive fast.” I hung up and jerked my chin at Bryson. “Come on.”

  “Does the fed have to come?” Bryson complained as we went to the car. “That kid is so slick that if you put a condom over him you could—”

  “I’m gonna stop you there,” I said with a grimace. My hand stung when I gripped the wheel and put the LTD in gear. The bandages were already red across the knuckles. I’d heal up, but now I just felt foolish. There had been a time when I barreled around hitting walls and people and snapping at anyone who got in my way, and it was, indeed, my way. But that was before I’d lost Dmitri to a daemon bite. Before I’d ended it because he needed a pack to survive with the daemon inside him and no pack would accept an Insoli as his mate.

  If I could live through that, I could leash the were. Every time I held on to my human side instead of my monster, I felt something inside me wither a little bit.

  But it was for the good of everyone, I reminded myself as my gut clenched again. The old Luna destroyed what she touched. The new Luna protected, and she did it by being a person and not a werewolf.

  “You okay, Wilder?” Bryson said after a time, as we drove toward Bonaventure Drive. “Usually you’re yakking my ear off.”

  “Fine,” I said shortly, and turned up the volume on the dispatch radio. Robberies and traffic accidents and domestic disturbances filled the space around me, their cadence far better than the heavy nothing that I felt on my skin.

  “Alaqui’s funeral is on Saturday,” Bryson said, opening my glove compartment and taking out a granola bar I had stashed. “The mosque on Tenth, and a memorial afterward.” He bit into the bar without further comment and then made a face. “This tastes like moose crap.”

  I pulled to the curb in front of Grace Hartley’s house and shut the engine off, staring straight and not really seeing the street ahead. Orange and brown and blood-rust leaves danced across my field of vision from the oaks along the curb, and I breathed for a second before I looked at Bryson and past him to the house. “Thank you, David.”

  Bryson shrugged. “Yeah. We gonna talk to this gal or what?”

  Fagin’s Mustang pulled in behind me, and I got out of my car, putting on a pair of aviator shades as an afterthought. The October sun wasn’t strong enough to warrant them, but I wanted answers and I wanted them fast, and if I had to intimidate the crap out of Grace Hartley to do it, then I could play Bad Cop for a few minutes.

  Fagin looked me over when we met on the sidewalk. “I like it. Very Dirty Harry meets Charlie’s Angels. All you need are the bell bottoms.”

  Bryson made a sound under his breath, and Fagin grinned. “Detective, haven’t you heard? All real men can talk fashion nowadays.”

  “Fuck you,” Bryson said clearly. “I’m not a twenty-year-old titty-bar waitress, so you can stow the charm shit.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Fagin. “I think you missed your career calling with that one, David.”

  “Both of you shut the Hex up,” I said loudly, when Bryson made a move toward Fagin. I pressed my hand into Fagin’s chest, aware of how he’d tossed me on my ass earlier. This time I’d be ready.

  Fagin put up his hands. His smile never wavered. I was starting to think Agent Will Fagin, ATF, was a little bit crazy.

  “Bryson, let it go,” I ordered again, still seeing murder in his eyes. “At least pretend to be a professional, if you can.”

  After a moment Bryson rolled his shoulders and turned his back on Fagin. Whatever else Bryson had to say was lost to the wind.

  Fagin started up the walk and I followed, my palm still warm from where it had touched his chest. He was built spare, but solid enough to stop bullets from what I’d felt. I let myself think, just for a second, what might be under the expensive suit and the slick smirk, and decided it probably wouldn’t be all that unpleasant.

  Then I decided I also had a job to do, and should stop behaving like one of Fagin’s twenty-year-old waitresses. If I was ready to start dating again, it wouldn’t be with anyone as smug as Will Fagin.

  “Christ on a cracker,” said Fagin, gesturing at the house. “Could this place be any more perfect for the lair of a sinister old lady?”

  The Hartley manse was an expansive old firetrap, cobbled together from a variety of architectural periods and materials, all of it topped off with black slate tiles, gingerbread, and a turret like a tall crooked finger against the sky.

  “Feels like I came through the woods to Grandma’s house,” Fagin muttered, mounting the sagging steps and pressing the bell. Piles of newspapers drifted around us, and porch furniture covered liberally with rust crouched sadly at the other end of the veranda. “Guess that makes me the Big Bad Wolf.”

  “There’s only one Big Bad Wolf here,” I told him. “And I’m pretty sure it isn’t you.”

  The curtains behind the stained-
glass rosettes in the door twitched, and then it opened a crack. An honest-to-god maid peered out, uniform and all, complete with a little cap over her wispy bun of hair. “Yes?” Her accent was strong Eastern European, maybe Romanian. It wasn’t the slightly nasal twang of Dmitri’s native country, but the girl’s big eyes and thin mouth would have made her model pretty, if she didn’t look so depressed.

  Bryson, Fagin, and I flashed our various IDs. “Police,” I said. “We’re here to speak with Grace Hartley.”

  The maid bobbed her head and opened the door all of the way. “Please come in. I will inform Mrs. Hartley of your presence.” She talked like she’d been coached, badly, and heaved a resigned sigh as she disappeared down the hallway into the back of the house.

  “Not bad,” said Bryson, of the girl’s retreating rear end. “Needs a little meat, though.”

  “You’re a class act,” Fagin informed him.

  Bryson’s comments had become so much white noise during my time with him that I didn’t even bother with a return. Me personally, I checked out the house. The dilapidated outside was a world away from the inside, which was like the sets of those period dramas that Sunny sometimes forced me to sit through. I expected Mr. Darcy or Heathcliff to pop out at any second.

  A library sat through a pair of rolling doors carved with frolicking nymphs and satyrs, the shelves heavy with the sort of books that people actually read. I peered in the crack and saw a pair of leather chairs flanking a fireplace and mantel heavy with memorabilia.

  “Where are you going?” Fagin hissed as I rolled the doors open just wide enough to pass through and stepped in.

  “She didn’t tell us to wait here,” I said with a shrug. Fagin shoved his hands in his pockets and looked over his shoulder as if Grace Hartley might appear and rap him on the knuckles.

  I explored the library, my feet silenced on the thick Persian rug. Everything in the room was heavy and real, left over from a time when homes were stately and women wore corsets. Books on the shelf were leather-bound, plenty of volumes on spiritualism and the occult, by Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley and all of the rock stars of witchcraft.