Witch Craft

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Pete nodded. “The drive shows a large wire transfer, but I can only get the bank, not the originating account number. They did a pretty thorough job of wiping this thing down. Not cheap to get your hands on that kind of equipment—mostly used by intelligence agencies.”

  I cocked my eyebrow. “Are you saying that we have to deal with spies now, in addition to witches and the goddamn ATF?”

  “Nope,” said Pete. “Just someone who’s rich and smart.”

  Like Grace Hartley. The woman with the working circle and the werewolf in her backyard.

  Tomorrow, I’d find out who Grace Hartley really was and rattle her cage. Now, I had to go get ready for dinner with my cousin and her new boyfriend.

  Joy.

  Mikado was a fusion Japanese place done entirely in white and gray, at the top of an old office building in the part of downtown where Jaguars and Mercedes slumbered at the curb like sleek racehorses and every door had a doorman in full livery.

  I let one help me through the revolving door in the lobby and another push the elevator button for the penthouse. In my Dolce&Gabbana dress and matching red satin pumps, I looked like one of the six diners sharing the car with me. Just another idiot with too much free time and money.

  The woman closest was wearing too much of a perfume with some kind of animal gland base, and I sneezed. She curled her delicate Botoxed lips and moved away from me. I put my head down and fled across the restaurant to where Mac and Sunny were sharing a window table.

  “Give me something with booze in it,” I told the waiter when he approached, bowing. He was tall to be Japanese, at least four inches taller than me, and built like the evil henchmen from a karate film, but he gave me a dazzling smile. It didn’t do anything to change the fact that I was in a royally bad mood.

  Sunny cocked her eyebrow at my lushly ways. “Rough day at the office?” She had done her makeup, and her hair was sporting new golden highlights, swept up and off her face. Mac had found a suit without wrinkles at the elbows and knees. Wonders never cease.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I muttered as the waiter set a jar of hot sake and a cup in front of me.

  Mac helped himself. “Let’s just enjoy dinner, Sun. Cops don’t like to take their work outside the office. Especially not when they’re paying this much for the privilege of chewing on raw fish and sea life.” He nudged Sunny and she broke into a smile.

  “This was all your idea, and you know it, Troy McAllister.”

  I waved the bottle at the waiter. “Sumimasen. This is not going to be anywhere near enough for me.”

  “Luna.” Sunny reached across the table and took my hand. “I want you to be okay with this. It’s important to me and it’s important to Troy.”

  “Gods!” I exploded. “Date whoever you want, Sunflower. I couldn’t give a crap. I just want to know why someone cursed me, and who’s setting fires and killing people. Okay? Is that what you wanted? Can I go across the street and get a cheeseburger now?”

  I shoved back my chair and threw my napkin across my empty plate, while Sunny watched me with tears brimming in the corners of her eyes. I pressed my hands over my face, willing myself to be somewhere else.

  “Luna, you need to apologize,” said Mac. “Your cousin is upset.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. This was just not the right night for this. Good luck, to the both of you.” I turned before I made things any worse and walked toward the door. The woman overloaded with perfume glared at me. I snarled at her, showing fang. “See something you like, bitch?” She dropped her eyes to her plate.

  I strode for the door, tangling my heel in the gaps of the tatami mats and almost falling into the arms of one of the silent, white-kimonoed waiters. He was white, and when he grabbed me I felt something sharp dig into my arm.

  “Hey,” I growled. “Watch it.”

  The waiter stared at me, his eyes glassy, like looking into the eyes of a particularly lifelike statue. “Excuse me,” he murmured, at length.

  I pushed away from him, felt wetness on my arm where he’d touched me. I looked down and saw a long bead of blood from a scratch in my forearm, welling a truer crimson than my dress.

  The waiter’s lips peeled back to reveal a row of teeth that belonged behind the counter chopping sushi, not in the mouth of a person. “So sorry,” he intoned in the same voice made of dust. “I seem to have slipped.”

  His eyes changed, the pupils shrinking down to nothing, and I felt myself unable to move as a gray forked tongue rolled from his mouth. I wanted to scream, but I just stood there like a stone.

  It was like someone had dosed my sake with GHB. I could see, but I couldn’t speak as the waiter’s eyes irised and became the eyes of a serpent.

  I dug down deep, past the paralyzing fear that rushed up at me out of nowhere, to the beast within me. My claws and teeth grew, and I dug my fingers into the wound in my arm. The pain ran up my arm and into my heart like a flash flood, slamming me back into reality.

  People all around me were screaming, dishes crashed from the kitchen, and the bitch from the elevator nearly bowled me over as she made a run for the door.

  The waiter shoved me aside and grabbed her. I went down hard, my ankle twisting under me. Last time I wore three-inch heels in public.

  Elevator Lady froze, choking, and then went rigid. Her face grew soft and dreamy, her skin turning from Tanorexia Orange to Goth Alabaster, her veins popping black. The skin on her face started to flake, like she was decomposing, and the waiter shuddered, releasing her with a satisfied post-orgasmic grimace. Elevator Lady toppled backward. One of her arms snapped off and rolled over to rest against my leg.

  “Oh, hell no,” I snarled, kicking off my shoes and scrambling away from the thing wearing the waiter’s uniform. There were three of them, hissing and snatching at the patrons of Mikado. I fought my way through the tide back to our table. “Mac!” I bellowed. “Sunny!”

  Mac had his arm thrown over my cousin, his sidearm in his free hand. “Luna, what the fuck is this? Does trouble just follow you like a stray dog?”

  “We have to get these people out of here,” I said as a fat middle-aged guy fell over, like a badly made statue from an amateur ceramics class.

  “Great thought,” said Mac. “Not so clear on the execution.”

  I eyeballed the distance from our table to the swinging door of the kitchen. “Give me two minutes and then get people ready to run for the fire stairs,” I told Mac. I wish I could say I had some daring plan in mind, worthy of the best spy movie, but in reality, I was closer to John McClane in Die Hard—crashing the party without a goddamn clue.

  The kitchen was empty, the chef and sous-chefs gone. There were plenty of blades lying around, knives, and hot burners, but I wasn’t a circus performer.

  I spun, looking for any sort of weapon, and let out a scream. A chef in a plain black uniform was standing behind me, a cleaver clutched in his fist. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were one of them.”

  A hiss like skin on sandpaper sounded from the dining room, and the waiter’s lip curled back over an impressive set of fangs. I blinked.

  “And you are?”

  “Akira,” he said shortly. His ears, underneath his shaggy mane of hair, were pointed, and a hint of burnished red tattoos crept out of the mandarin collar of his uniform.

  “I’m Luna,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what the Hex are you supposed to be?”

  He growled under his breath, big shoulders hunching.

  “Oni.”

  “Werewolf,” I said, tapping my chest. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I smelled those beasts this afternoon, when I came to my shift,” he said. “But I couldn’t pinpoint them until they showed their faces. What do we do?”

  “Get the diners down the fire stairs and don’t make eye contact?” I suggested.

  Akira raised his cleaver. “I can make a path.”

  “Wait!” I lunged for the fire extinguisher ha
nging next to the range. “Let me go out first.”

  Fire extinguishers are great for impromptu weapons.

  When I was on patrol, I cleaned up more bar fights than I could count where some slap-happy biker got his hands on the fire-safety equipment at his watering hole of choice.

  I kicked open the kitchen door and one of the waiters launched himself at me, toadlike, his long forked tongue lolling from his toothy mouth. I pulled the pin and let loose, giving him a face full of stinging foam.

  “Hey!” I bellowed at the other two. They both turned, the cold reptile intelligence in their faces making my stomach quiver. But I kept talking. “That’s right. Come on over here and make me pay for my mistakes. Give me a look at those big, pretty eyes.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Akira as the two remaining waiters bounded toward us, down on all fours now like some sort of bizarre carnival attraction. “Really fucking crazy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. The extinguisher sputtered, useless as it ran out of foam, so I spun it in my grasp and hit the second waiter in the face. His nose crushed inward and he lost a couple of those oversized teeth, but he kept coming. “Mac,” I bellowed. “Go!”

  Sunny shoved open the fire door and an alarm began to whine. Good. The fire department would come, and backup would come with them.

  I fended off another swipe from the second waiter, smashing the butt of the extinguisher down on his hand. Knuckles crunched, and he howled. Akira whipped a smaller knife out of his apron and pinned the critter’s limb to the floor. The last one landed on his back, digging its teeth into the oni’s meaty shoulder. The fabric of his uniform tore and I saw more of the tattoo, demons and dragons and smoke, all done in red.

  A bottle of sake sat on the nearest table, one of the pricey ones that the waiters had hand-carried and fussed over before they started eating people. I grabbed it and smashed it across the waiter’s skull, then picked up the lit paper lantern from the same table and tore it open, touching the bare flame within to the swath of alcohol.

  Blue flames went up with a whoosh, shooting toward the ceiling. I gagged on the scent of burning hair. The waiter lost his grip on Akira, and the chef gripped his cleaver and drove it between the waiter’s beady lizard eyes with a crunch of skull.

  “We should go,” I said when Akira turned back, chest heaving. “That fire might spread.”

  “You come to Mikado often?” Akira asked as we trailed the group of traumatized diners down the fire stairs.

  “I’m more of a bacon cheeseburger kind of girl,” I said. “And tonight hasn’t really done a whole lot to change that.”

  “I just like working with food,” said Akira, easy as if we were strolling along the sidewalk, rather than finishing a fight with a trio of flesh-hungry, stone-gazed monsters. “I’d be happy in a diner. It’s why I came to this country, to go to culinary school.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “You’re not, I dunno, freaked out that we almost got killed horribly during the aperitif?”

  “I’m an oni,” said Akira. “In my country, plain humans would spit on me. Here, no one looks twice. I can deal with the occasional upset.”

  I kept my thought to myself, that if he thought Nocturne City was so great, his corner of Japan must really suck. A ladder truck and a pair of ambulances greeted us when we reached the street. I found Sunny and Mac, Akira trailing me.

  “You’re bleeding,” Sunny said. She was unhurt, just shaking.

  Mac put his suit jacket around her. “What the Hex were those things, Luna?”

  “Basilisks,” Sunny answered for me. “I’ve read about them, but I didn’t think there were any in this country. In Europe, they’re practically extinct. They come from the daemon realm and interbreed with human women. They birth stone eggs and set their spawn on humans to feed.”

  “Filthy, unnatural things,” Akira said. “I’m glad that we killed them.” He hissed when he saw the cut the basilisk had left on my forearm. “Do you need to get that looked at?”

  The wound was long but not deep, and I pulled away. “I’ll be fine. It’s already healing.”

  “One of the benefits of your species?”

  I gave a curt nod. I really wasn’t up to discussing biology with a six-foot-four Japanese fairy-tale creature.

  “How long have you been a werewolf?” he asked. “Were you born this way?”

  “No,” I said shortly. “How long have you been in Nocturne City?”

  “Five years.”

  “Ever seen anything like what happened tonight?” I said, looking at the revolving lights of the fire trucks reflected in the coffee shop window.

  “No,” Akira said. “Never.”

  “Thank you,” I said, sincerely. “If you need anything … anything at all …” I felt for a card in the pocket of my dress.

  “Maybe a cup of tea,” said Akira. I looked to Mac and Sunny.

  “I’ll take her home,” said Mac. “Once we give our statements.”

  I spotted the coffee shop across the street and touched Akira on the arm. “It’s on me.”

  After I got a tall black coffee to go and Akira a hot tea, I unlocked the car and sat behind the wheel for a minute, letting myself come down from what had happened in the restaurant. My hands were shaking. It was the third time I’d almost died in as many days.

  I could go home, but home was vulnerable, held the memory of the curse working and the selkies on the beach. I drove to the office instead, and instead of going into my private space, I turned on the lights in the briefing area and kicked off my heels to do some thinking.

  A black marker lay abandoned on the table from my rousing speech about the Corley case. I picked it up and wrote selkies on the board, and added basilisks and a big question mark for the thing that had killed Milton Manners. The two fires went on the board, the deaths of Corley, Manners, and Nick Alaqui. Fagin’s gunrunning investigation, the Narcotics watch on the warehouse.

  When I was done, it looked like chaos writ small. My arm hurt and I could feel exhaustion creeping around the edges of my vision. I was no closer to finding anything out about my case, anything real, other than that three people were dead and someone had tried to both kill me and curse me.

  “Crap,” I sighed, and went into my office to catch up on paperwork. If someone was going to shut us down, our records would at least be meticulous.

  I’m not sure when I dozed off, but all I dreamed of was fire.

  Twelve

  A persistent beeping from the bullpen woke me, the direct line of one of my detectives sounding in the empty bullpen. I unfolded myself from my ergonomic chair and padded across the office on bare feet. Annemarie’s phone was beeping. I scooped it up. “Detective Marceaux’s desk.”

  “This is Commandant Ivanović with the Croatian customs office. I would speak to Detective Marceaux.”

  “Annemarie isn’t in right now,” I said. “This is Lieutenant Wilder, her commanding officer. Can I take the message?”

  “I require only to inform you that fax of information you requested is coming,” said Ivanović. “Have a nice day.”

  The connection clicked off, and the fax machine whirred to life behind me. I turned toward it and let out a shriek as I nearly plowed into Hunter Kelly’s barrel chest. He laughed, low in his throat.

  “Overdressed a little bit today, ma’am.”

  “Hex me,” I shouted, thumping Kelly’s pectoral with the back of my knuckles. “Stop sneaking around like that!”

  I stepped around him to the fax machine, aware of his eyes on my back. “What are you doing here so early, Kelly?”

  “I’m a morning person, ma’am.”

  “Then why don’t you make yourself useful and get us both a coffee?” I said, pulling the cover sheet and the twice-copied, blurred Croatian forms off the fax tray.

  “All due respect, ma’am,” said Kelly. “I’m your detective, not your cabana boy.”

  “All due respect, Kelly,” I said, looking to the last page, which had a low
-quality photo of the crate I’d seen dismantled at Grace Hartley’s home, “I don’t like you much and if you don’t get me some caffeine I’m going to come over there and beat your head against the desk to vent my frustration.” Smile, after you threaten someone. It’s very important because it keeps the someone, particularly someone bigger and badder than you, off balance if you don’t show fear.

  I gave Kelly a wide grin. “I take two sugars in the morning.”

  The air between us got thick, and not in the metaphorical way. My exposed skin crawled with magick as Kelly glared at me, his big flat face not at all hiding the fact that he wanted to smack me across the room. My Path ability picked up on the power surge and my heartbeat got loud in my ears as all of my body’s were parts came awake.

  Then, everything went away and it was back to silence except for the whir of the HVAC and the click of the computers in the bullpen. “You gonna be wanting a pastry?” Kelly growled.

  “No thanks,” I said absently, still staring at the photo from the customs office. “But you’re a big strapping boy, Kelly. You should eat.”

  He stomped off toward the elevator, and I went back into my office. I’d have to keep an eye on Kelly. If he was a trained witch and he kept it from me, we might have a problem when his anger management issues finally blew up all over the SCS.

  For now, though, I had something more pressing. I turned on my desk lamp and held the photo under it. The crate was open and the thing nested within was plain gray stone, oval and slightly off of symmetrical. It was the carvings I was interested in. They were blood witch lettering—something I’d seen enough of investigating the Skull of Mathias, another blood witch artifact, to know on sight. They meant that whatever Grace Hartley was messing with would get bigger and uglier and meaner, until the whole city burned.

  Danger I recognized from long experience, but I still had no clue what the fuck I was looking at. I looked at the time and called Sunny’s cell.

  “Hello?” she mumbled. “Luna?”

  “You’re still asleep?” I said in astonishment. It was nearly six-thirty and Sunny was usually up with the sunrise.