The photographs on the mantel went as far back as sepia, well-dressed men and women playing croquet and sitting stiffly at formal dinners, and one posed portrait in long black robes. The picture was grainy, but the robes each bore a small symbol over the left breast and the background was a blank stone wall, hardly the sort of place where a rich society woman would hang around.
Before I could exercise my larcenous talents and get the thing out of the frame for a closer look, someone spoke up behind me. “Please don’t touch that.”
I jerked my hand away like the guilty teenager shoplifting cigarettes that I once was. “Sorry. Just trying to take a good look.”
Grace Hartley glided into the library, and I say “glided” because she had one of those Miss America walks, hips swaying and feet that never seemed to leave the ground. She was twice my age if she was a day, but the expensive clothes combined with the frosted hair and flawless makeup made me feel like a housewife who’d decided to say, Hex it, and gone out in pajama pants and her husband’s sweater.
“I trust you’re still young enough to get a good look without putting your hands on other people’s property,” she said, and then turned on a megawatt smile and extended her hand. “Grace Hartley.”
“Lieutenant Luna Wilder,” I said, and squeezed her hand a lot harder than I really had to.
She flinched, but the smile never did. “How can I help you, Lieutenant?” When our hands parted, a prickle of magick went from her palm to mine. Grace Hartley had the blood. It was my freakin’ day for witches.
“This is Agent Fagin with ATF,” I said, indicating Will. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Hartley made a show of checking the hands of the Tag Heuer paperweight on her wrist. “I have some pressing appointments today, Miss Wilder. Can we conduct this quickly, or at a later date?”
“What’s your relationship to Milton Manners?” I said bluntly. “We know that you bailed him out after his drug-trafficking arrest, so don’t bother lying to us. You’re not a very good actress anyway.”
Bryson snorted, and two blooms of color appeared in Hartley’s cheeks. “Milton is a friend of the family.”
“Were the two of you close?” I watched Hartley carefully. She was staring everywhere except my face, and her eyes kept darting to that damn picture.
“Not at all. Milton was eternally in flux, a crisis case who only asked for money to finance his latest schemes. He had nothing but that wretched antique shop and he saw not a penny from it.”
“And yet you bailed him out,” said Fagin. “You must have held some fondness for him. As a friend.”
“I have a fondness for not seeing my family’s good name splashed across the police blotter in the Nocturne Inquirer,” Hartley sniffed. “Milton had a fondness for spilling nasty secrets when he didn’t get his way. Why are you pestering me about my relationship with him?”
“Because he was found dead,” said Fagin. “Yesterday. It was not natural causes.”
Hartley sank into one of the leather chairs, pressing a hand to her mouth. She shut her eyes for a moment and then composed herself.
She still wasn’t a very good actress.
“I always knew that Milton would bring himself to a bad end,” she sighed. “Poor boy. So troubled, always. His mother … she was a common thief and gold-digger, you know, but my dear father saw some hope for the boy, so I endeavored to be charitable.”
“Where’s your bathroom?” I said abruptly. If I had to listen to one more second of this, I was going to reach over there and slap her across her nipped and tucked face.
“I … it’s down the hall, on your right. The last door.” Hartley gestured. I gave Fagin the eye, and he glared at me. Oh well. I couldn’t care less what he thought about me lying to nice old ladies.
I ventured down the hall, which held the same entombed elegance as the library, and was self-consciously sprinkled with memorabilia on small tables and alcoves in the wood paneling. A curved dagger with a blood groove and daemon sigils carved into the handle. A dog’s skull with the teeth painted black and the veve of a loa spirit painted in some dark tarry substance across the crown. An iron caster, probably as old as the house. I brushed my finger over it. It was dead and cold, the witch who had owned it dust by now.
Whatever kind of craft Grace Hartley practiced, she sure kept a lot of creepy shit around to do it with.
The bathroom was right where she told me it would be, but I ignored it and stepped through a pair of double doors into a large kitchen. It was a kitchen, normal, and a quick look in the cabinets and pantry didn’t turn up anything except pricey organic food and dust.
I stepped onto the rear porch, which looked at a backyard overrun with weeds and browned plants swaying in the breeze.
Even though they were dead, I recognized a few of the blooms—nightshade, vervain, rosemary. Witch’s herbs. The porch was rotted and the roof creaked in the wind, but I spotted the remains of a shipping crate in the brown grass beyond, shattered wood and packing straw strewn like someone was in a hurry.
I stepped off the stoop and into the grass, dead and crinkling under my feet with the sound of something burning. The box was stamped in black with Cyrillic and English lettering, too obliterated to understand except for CROATIA as the country of origin.
Bending down to pick up the shattered pieces of wood and try to make sense of them, I felt something slip over my foot, like a snake across my ankle.
I lurched backward, but it was too late. The binding grabbed me and sucked me down to my knees and then onto my side, my cheek pressed into the dead grass. The working circle hidden under the flora snapped closed around me and I felt it on my skin, all over my face and hands like a thousand venomous spiders.
The back door of the Hartley house banged open and a long shadow fell over me as someone approached. “Fucking cops,” the voice sighed. “You people always go where you’re not wanted.”
She was taller than I was, and from my vantage the first thing I saw was her boots—Nixon-era Doc Martens, the kind self-conscious kids trying to look punk wear. Skinny legs in skinny jeans, and an impressive chest topped by a glaring face.
“Oh, man, did you fuck up,” I told her, even though the binding was tight and bit liked barbed wire against my exposed skin. I’d been held in a binding once before and it was exactly like being paralyzed. Your mind goes into overdrive to compensate for your body being numb and still, and you can hear your heart pounding furiously.
“Yeah?” she said, taking out a pocketknife and picking at her fingernails. “Tell me exactly how I fucked up, Detective.”
“It’s Lieutenant,” I snapped. “And you are?”
“Talon,” she said, with a porn-star pout. “Like it matters.”
“Well, Talon, my two partners are in there talking to Mrs. Hartley. Let me out of this goddamn binding and maybe I won’t knock your teeth in when they get here.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder—it was the plasticky red of extensions—and I saw the four circular scars on her neck. The mark of the Serpent Eye were pack, four fangs. The same four fangs that had given me the bite.
I started to agree with Talon, the smallest bit, that I might just be fucked.
“Make me,” she said, in a startling display of originality.
I wriggled some more against the binding. I was lying on my SIG and my backup .38 revolver was on my ankle, as far as if it had been locked in my desk at the Plaza. Shooting the bitch in the head was out. That sucked.
The binding itself cut cold and sharp, not like any magick I’d felt before. Usually it was warm and a loss of feeling on my skin, like a bad case of hypothermia. This just hurt, raw and powerful as if someone had wrapped me in barbed wire.
Talon paced carefully around the circle, which was important. It meant that the witch who’d cast the binding circle wasn’t choosy about who it locked down.
“I think we’ll just wait here until the Maiden comes back,” Talon said, crossing
her arms over her impressive chest. “She’ll know what to do with you.”
“I can’t tell you how much I enjoy it when you people give each other silly names,” I grunted. “It makes me feel like James Bond. Is Jaws going to come with her?”
My chattering was just a front for what I was doing with my hands, digging through the grass and the earth, trying to find the actual circle cut into the clay beneath. For my Pathing to work, I have to touch something physical.
Not that I thought Pathing this particular brand of iron-cold magick was the greatest idea I’d ever had, but I didn’t have a lot of options. If Fagin and Bryson came looking for me, all three of us would be stuck, bound with a pissy fashion-victim were looking down on us. Better it was just me.
“You probably think you’re really fucking witty, huh?” Talon inquired. “That’s so lame. People are just being nice to you, sweetie.”
The tips of my fingers hit earth, felt the pop of magick as my were blood connected with the witch’s power that held the binding. I let it come, let it flow into me and make me stronger and better and faster and, if I wasn’t careful, much crazier.
My eyes burned from the sudden overload of light and color, staring straight into the sky, and I bunched myself and tugged against the binding. It felt so much like something was cutting me I swore lines of blood broke all over my skin, but I kept Pathing, draining the working and making myself stronger.
Talon stepped closer, curious. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The binding snapped with a sting of ice across my face and I rolled over, grabbing her legs in a scissors hold and jerking with my new strength. As I rolled out of the working circle, Talon fell in, and screamed as the magick caught her. I saw it shimmer above the girl’s prone body, black knots like the legs of a phantom spider twining the air itself into a net to hold its newest prey.
I leaned over Talon, careful not to slide my foot over the edge of the circle. “This is where I say something witty.” I straightened and brushed dead grass off of myself, my hands shaking. “But I’m fresh out. Have fun explaining to the Maiden how you got yourself tangled in that, bitch.” I opened the rickety gate and went to the car, sitting on the hood and putting my hands on my knees.
There, in the open street, where I knew I was safe, I let myself finally break down. The shuddering consumed my whole body and I felt blood trickle from my nose as the magick worked its way out of my system. Too much and I could have fried myself into a permanent vegetable. Too late and Talon could have done whatever she wanted to me. All of the what-ifs scrolled past, ugly and gruesome, and I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes to stop stress tears.
It’s the same when you have to shoot someone, or get shot at. You start seeing paths not taken whether you want to or not and wondering, Why am I still here?
“Luna.” Fagin and Bryson came out the front door, watched by Grace Hartley and the maid. Once he’d blocked their view with his back, Fagin reached out his hand for me, and I let him touch my shoulder. “Where did you get off to?”
“You don’t want to know,” I muttered. “You really don’t want to know.”
Eleven
Fagin and Bryson got the story out of me by the time we were back in the SCS offices.
“We have to be able to run that Hartley bitch in for something,” said Bryson. “Obstruction?”
“She wasn’t hiding the shipping crate,” I reminded him. “It was right there, in plain sight.”
“Inside a working circle that almost killed you,” Fagin reminded me. “Like bait in a cop trap.”
“That’s a tad overdramatic,” I said. “Look, aside from hiring were goons and having a snooty attitude, Grace Hartley’s done nothing wrong that any court will hold her for.”
“Maybe we can dig something up on the were bitch,” Bryson said, and then flinched, looking at me. “No offense, Wilder.”
“I can try,” said Fagin. “Someone moonlighting as muscle, chances are they’ve got an odd assault charge or two.”
“There was something else,” I said, thinking back to Talon’s calm face. She’d known I was a cop from the moment we clapped eyes, that she could go away for assaulting me, and yet she’d been utterly calm, right up until she found out I was a Path.
“What?” Fagin said. “What is it?”
“She talked about someone else, a third person.” I chewed on my lip for a second. “Called her the Maiden, like we’re all in Avalon or some crap.”
Bryson snorted, but Fagin’s face went hard and gray, set in stone. “Did she say anything else?” he ground out.
“Not about that specifically, no. The conversation was not the most stimulating I’ve ever had.”
Fagin stood up, paced rapidly back and forth, and shoved a hand through his hair. Blond strands dropped into his eyes. “You’re sure. Nothing else?”
“No,” I said again, frowning at him. “Something the matter?”
Fagin grabbed me by the upper arms. “You’ve got to think, Luna. Think of what else that she said or did that could tell you anything.”
“You’re hurting me,” I said quietly, as his thin fingers dug into my biceps. “Don’t make me turn this into a scene in front of my guys.”
Zacharias and Annemarie were at their desks, watching us with large eyes. Fagin darted his gaze to them and then locked back on me. His eyes were terrifying, dark and intent as a predator’s.
“The Maiden is here? She said it just like that?” he demanded, from between clenched teeth.
“So I gathered,” I said, in the same tone. “Now. Let go of me.”
Fagin held on to me for another second. It was the third time I’d been close to him, and the only time he’d made my heart beat faster. My were commanded me to close the distance and put my lips on his and my hands on his skin.
I told it to shut up.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed finally, letting go of me and stepping back. “Sorry … I’ll … I’ll see you later.” He turned and practically smashed into Batista before making his escape.
“Fuckin’ weirdo,” Bryson said, straightening his forest-green polyester jacket over his weapon. “Thought I was going to have to get all noble and pop a cap in him for you, Wilder.”
“The women you date find that charming, do they?” I murmured, with no real bite behind the words. I was looking at the spot where Fagin had stood, thinking about his eyes. He was spooked, no question. “The Maiden” meant a hell of a lot more to him than it did to me.
Deciding to focus on what I could actually solve, I walked over to Annemarie. “Grace Hartley had a shipping crate on her property from Croatia. If it came into the warehouse Brad Morgan owned, like he said, there’s no record, but there should be an outgoing manifest.”
Annemarie smiled. “I’ll get right on tracking down the original, Lieutenant.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Thanks, Annemarie.”
My phone buzzed, and I ran for my office, picking it up as the last ring died.
“Yeah?”
“Luna, you sound out of breath,” Sunny scolded. “What’s wrong?”
“Not everything is an emergency, Sunny,” I told her. “I was outside getting some information.”
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m meeting Troy for an early dinner and the two of us would like you to come.”
Great. Spend the evening watching my cousin make kissy faces at my ex-boss. Where was my cyanide capsule?
“Luna?”
“I’ll think about it, Sunny, okay? I’m not entirely comfortable with your and Mac’s epic love just yet.”
“Maybe if you got out a little bit more, you wouldn’t have such an issue with me dating Troy,” said Sunny placidly. “It has been almost six months …”
I was about to swear at her and hang up, but I remembered Fagin’s face. I’d had enough boiling-over rage for the day. “Sunny, does the designation the Maiden mean anything to you?”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” she sai
d after a second. “I have a hair appointment, so I have to go, but I’ll look it up for you in Grandma’s books.”
“You told me hair and makeup were tools of the patriarchy.”
“We’re having dinner at Mikado. The patriarchy has nothing to do with me wanting to look presentable.”
Fantastic—now I’d not only have to endure Mac and Sunny playing footsies; I’d have to do it in a dress and heels.
“Eight o’clock,” she said. “Be there, Luna. This is important to me.”
“Fine, fine. See you and Captain Wonderful at eight.”
“He’s a lieutenant, like you,” she reminded me before she hung up. Smart-ass.
Pete Anderson stuck his head into my office. “Wow, it’s messy in here.”
I cast an eye on my papers and piles of files, overflowing trash can, and spare raincoat hanging from a corner of the closet door. “Thank you, Pete. Very astute. Are you shooting a special for the home and garden channel, or was there something you wanted?”
“I finished running through Milton Manners’s computer hard drive,” he said. “There’s something you’ll want to see.”
“Finally,” I said. “Something that isn’t about dating or magick.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Pete. He led me into his office, where Manners’s laptop was hooked up to an array of cables and external drives. “Whoever killed him wiped the hard drive,” said Pete, “but I was able to recover his e-mail from the last few months and a few fragments of data. Here it is …” He popped up a box on the screen. “Manners and Corley were pen pals.”
The text was partially corrupted, just lines of wingdings, but the bottom half of the e-mail was visible.
… found what you asked for in Croatia. Dead witch’s estate. Expensive to get out of the country—bribes, shipping, secure rec’ing warehouse. Can she cover it?
Manner’s reply was succinct, and uncorrupted.
You know she can. How soon?
The message was dated eighteen days ago. Two days ago, whatever it was had arrived in Nocturne City. I rubbed my forehead and looked at Pete. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re talking about collectible Star Trek plates.”
Witch Craft Page 9