Witch Craft

by Caitlin Kittredge

“Blood is thicker,” Fagin said. “She must have kept tabs on him her whole life.”

  “That is so creepy,” I muttered. “Imagine holiday dinners with that family …”

  “Parents died when Grace was eight,” said Fagin. “Massive coronaries in both cases.”

  “Gee, what are the odds of that?” I said.

  Fagin looked at me. “You thinking she had something to do with it?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time a talented witch lost control when they were young,” I said. “Sunny had some issues in that area when we were kids.”

  “She ever whack anyone with her evil brain powers?” said Fagin.

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “Pull up Hartley’s financials and let’s try to figure out who else is in bed with her.”

  Fagin jabbed at the computer and then sat back. “Mostly clean. Trust from her dead husband, alimony from the live one, a few expenses here and there …”

  I pointed at her bank statement. “What’s this?”

  “She made a donation every six months to the Center for Mind-Body Awareness, here in Nocturne,” Fagin said, expanding the transaction. “Same amount. Never took a tax deduction.”

  “Address?” I said. A donation with no deduction from someone in Hartley’s income bracket wasn’t a charity; it was a front.

  “Cedar Hill,” said Fagin. “Where all the ex-hippie rich folk go to expand their minds.”

  I pushed back from the desk and picked up Fagin’s car keys. “Feel like taking it for a spin?”

  He raised his eyebrow. “Let’s go.”

  The Mustang had enough power under the hood to press my spine into the bucket seat, and I pushed it through the gears like it was an old friend. Fagin hung on to the door handle, looking like we were in danger of imminent fiery death.

  “You know, I took the same driving courses as you did,” I said. “I even got to visit Quantico when I was on SWAT and drive the FBI cars. I am not going to dent, ding, grind, or otherwise harm your baby, so stop looking like I’m gonna get girl cooties all over the steering wheel.”

  I came up on a stop sign and popped the emergency brake just to be mean about it. Fagin winced.

  The long climb to Cedar Hill is like the climb out of the pits on a distant, dystopian planet—going from the grime and desperation of downtown to the tiers of wood-frame houses in cotton-candy colors set into the hillside, their napkin-sized yards a riot of late-fall flowers and pumpkins, and finally the drives get longer and homes larger, the tall cedar trees hiding the iron gates and the slate rooftops of the mansions that industry, smuggling, timber, and greed built in the nineteenth century.

  The Center for Mind-Body Awareness was not in keeping with the rest of Cedar Hill. The house was a sprawling mid-century wreck, adobe walls and angular glass windows, all covered with a thin scrim of moss and mold. Needles covered the driveway and the few cars parked to one side, and the sign advertising what lay within was crooked.

  “They don’t even try to hide the fact that it’s a front,” I said. “Time was, criminals had a little bit of self-respect.”

  “What is the world coming to?” Fagin agreed. He popped the passenger door and stepped out. I followed, checking for security cameras. None were trained on the front lot, but the door had a pin camera next to the bell as well as heavy-duty locks and an alarm system that would make a drug lord feel at ease.

  “Come on,” I said, starting down the side path between drooping Japanese pines that looked like they belonged in a late-night samurai film.

  “Wait!” Fagin jogged after me. “We don’t have a warrant. We also don’t know how these people take to trespassers.”

  “You don’t need a warrant to investigate a suspicious dwelling,” I said. Pulling the law out of my ass usually worked, for a little while. If we did get caught, I’d probably get screamed at by a lawyer in a cheap tie and that would be the end of it. “And if they do take exception to us looking around, I’m an armed werewolf and you can’t die.”

  “Yet,” Fagin said darkly.

  “Well, if you gotta be all Dark Shadows about it—”

  Fagin stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Look.”

  The back of the house was as decrepit as the front, moss and weeds growing from a cracked driveway, with garbage piled high at both sides of a sagging garage door. The shaggy berm we were standing on overlooked the drive, which resembled some horrific sacrificial pit from my vantage.

  “They should fire their landscaper,” I said, with great disappointment.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Fagin. “There’s nothing.”

  My ears pricked to an encroaching noise, and I grabbed Fagin’s arm. “Wait just a second.” An engine with a shrieking fan belt grumbled down the backstreet behind the house and Fagin grunted as I jerked him down behind me overgrown berm and out of sight.

  A windowless van creaked into the drive, and a sleazy little guy with a combover who couldn’t have looked more like a pimp if he walked out of a seventies B movie hopped from the driver’s seat. He rolled back the doors, ushering out five girls in various stages of teased, painted, and junkie. One extinguished her cigarette under the cork wedge of her cheap shoe, and glared at the house.

  “I thought you said this was a nice place, Lenny.”

  “Shut up,” Lenny said. “You’re not getting paid by the word.” He snapped his fingers at the women. “Listen up. These clients are paying you a flat grand each for the weekend, so do what they say when they say it and no shooting up in the house.” He stalked over to the garage and buzzed the bell. “Spit out that gum,” he told the youngest, skinniest girl. She flipped him off, and he slapped her.

  It was Fagin’s turn to jerk me back down as I started upward. “You go down there now and we’re blown.”

  “I don’t go down there and those girls get taken in by the Thelemites,” I hissed.

  “Yeah,” Fagin said.

  I turned to look at him. “Are you insane? You’d knowingly let innocent women walk into that place, after what we’ve seen?”

  “I think that we’re not getting in there …” he said, as the garage door rolled up and the girls filed in, slump-shouldered and in a line like a chain gang. “And they are. So, what does that tell us?”

  “That we should call Vice and order a raid?”

  Fagin stood up and dusted off his suit, helping me to my feet. “No. That’s our way in. You want to find out who’s at the top of this, then we’re going to have to give them what they want.” He looked me up and down.

  I glared. “I am not dressing up as a hooker. That’s for amateurs.”

  “You’ll put on a short skirt, I’ll put on a silk tie and too much pomade, and bada-boom. We’re in.”

  I pushed past him and went back to the car. We were driving away before I spoke again. “If this is going to work, we’re going to need someone else. You look more like a priest than you do a pimp—at least one from this century.”

  “Met your share on the force, I take it?” Fagin said.

  “My ex-boyfriend,” I said. “Before I knew him.” I dared Fagin with my silence to make a comment.

  “Maybe I don’t know everything about you,” he said finally.

  “Trust me, you don’t,” I snapped. The ATF building loomed on the left and I jerked the Mustang into the garage.

  “So tell me who we need,” Fagin said. “Since you seem so intimately versed with that section of the world.”

  “Like you never spent any time with a whore or two,” I said. “Mr. English Lord.”

  “I did my time in the brothels and the alehouses, true,” Fagin said, “but then I devoted my time to helping people, not knocking all sense and dignity out of them.”

  “You know what I realized that I hate today?” I said, stabbing the button for the elevator.

  “What?” he said.

  “Preachy immortals who think that talking down to us human beings somehow makes their pathetic lives less of a sad, gray road that
goes on and on with no exits. I hate that.”

  The elevator arrived and I stepped in, hitting the button for the lobby. Fagin made to follow, but I held up my hand. “You can wait for the next one. You’ve got the time.”

  Twenty

  I walked up the hill to Bryson’s neighborhood from the federal offices, my footsteps in angry time with my heartbeat. Maybe Will was right about the prostitutes. We needed a way into the house, and I didn’t have a better idea than the short skirt. But not with Fagin. He’d blown his chance.

  I sat down on Bryson’s front steps, wishing I had a double-dipped chocolate cone from the Devere Diner. Or a stiff drink. Or both.

  “Long day?”

  I rocketed off the steps, pulling my gun. “Hex it, Lucas, you cannot keep showing up here!”

  “You look upset,” he said, stepping from the shadow of the locust tree in Bryson’s yard.

  “That’s because I am,” I said. “I’ve had a really shitty day and I had a fight with someone I may actually sort of like, when he’s not being an insufferable jackwad.”

  “These nonjackwad periods are few and far between is the problem?” Lucas said. He sat on the steps and looked expectantly at me.

  “No,” I said. “We’re not sitting here like we’re waiting for the ice-cream truck. What if someone recognizes you and calls my team?”

  “I’ll run fast,” he said, taking my wrist and tugging at me until I sat down next to him.

  “Hex it,” I moaned. “I’m tired of sitting around, and I’m tired of these Thelemite bastards being ahead of me.” I looked at Lucas. “You work for Hartley.”

  “Did,” he corrected. “Incarceration sorta voids my contract.”

  “Well, you’re going to pretend for one more night,” I said. “Because I need your help.”

  Lucas slung his arm around my shoulder. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Get off,” I warned. “It’s not that kind of help.”

  He moved his arm, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Tell me the plan. Why do I already have the feeling it will be risky and full of people who want us dead?”

  “I need to get inside the house the Thelemites are using as their central collection point,” I said. “They got an order of five hookers earlier today—gods know why—so I’m going to be the bonus round and you’re going to be my, well …”

  “I don’t have any bling, FYI,” Lucas said. “I tend to stay low-profile. And gold teeth are right out. Sensitive gums.”

  “I just need you to stand around looking like you sell sex for a living,” I said. “And we’ve got to go soon. A too-large gap in time and they’ll get suspicious and probably peel our skin off with pliers.”

  “Your team must have great morale,” said Lucas. “Because I sure feel inspired.”

  “Just wait in the kitchen while I get changed,” I said, opening Bryson’s front door. “And if Bryson comes home early, shift out through the wall and wait for me in the alley.”

  “Risky and dangerous,” Lucas muttered, following me. “Just like I said.”

  I got him one of Bryson’s cheap beers and left him in the kitchen, praying that this flimsy plan would pay off. Sometimes they did, and sometimes they self-destructed.

  When they did, it usually tended to be spectacular and life-threatening. Nobody ever said that my job was easy or particularly good for my health. If it were, I would have retired a long time ago. A desk job was not the world for me, not the dead-end life both of my parents had been consigned to. I liked the threat of fire, the knife’s edge. Sometimes I just wished I didn’t dance it quite so often.

  I went into Bryson’s room and searched through the closet, hoping he was the kind of guy I thought he was, one who liked his girlfriends to dress trashy on occasion.

  The closet yielded a multitude of tacky—shredded denim miniskirts, cheap nylon halters, a bustier for someone both rounder and more bountifully endowed than I, lace leggings, a few pairs of spike-heeled shoes. There was even a French maid outfit.

  “Gross, David,” I muttered, shoving it to the back of the rack. I chose a pair of fishnet leggings, platform sandals in pink patent leather, and a black vinyl tank top that laced at the sides with strategic holes. I dressed and messed up my hair with a comb and spray, and then painted the new makeup I’d bought after the fire on thick enough to look like it had been done in a hurry, in a half-lit gas station bathroom.

  The trick to undercover is not trying too hard—costume yourself up and the bad guys will smell you coming a mile away, sometimes literally. You want to change yourself just enough to be unrecognizable to strangers but not to yourself. Pull a character around you like a cocoon, but keep yourself inside. If you slip on an undercover investigation, it usually means that the medical examiner is digging your body out of the gutter the next day. If they find you at all.

  “Louella,” I said, making my crooked lips into a pout. I added a touch of East Coast whine to my voice and the lilt to my body that suggested pharmacy whore. My sloe-eyed pill popper might not pass muster on a Vice bust on the mean streets, but for a nest of magick users I thought it would do fine.

  I tottered down the narrow stairs in the high shoes and tapped Lucas on the shoulder. He nearly spit out his mouthful of beer. “Holy shit, Luna, Halloween’s tomorrow.”

  “You’re funny,” I said. “Louella likes funny guys. Want a date?”

  Lucas frowned. “That’s creepy. My mother would have said you were letting a ujuk, a bad spirit, talk out of your mouth and that you were letting yourself in for trouble.”

  “Your mother sounds like a piece of work,” I said.

  “She was that,” said Lucas. “She wouldn’t have approved of you at all.”

  “I get that a lot from mothers,” I said. The keys for the LTD were at the bottom of my purse and I realized that the stupid car was actually going to do me a service for once—it was the perfect generic beater. The Mustang and my dearly departed Fairlane would have stood out like hammered thumbs.

  “You drive,” I said. “Girls like Louella don’t drive.”

  “Got it,” said Lucas. “You, uh … you gonna tell anyone what we’re up to? Even I like to have a backup plan.”

  “Someone knows,” I said, gritting my teeth. Fagin and his high-handedness could go Hex themselves. I shoved my BlackBerry deep into my purse. If anyone spotted the designer, I’d tell them it was a knockoff, insulting as that was to my inner fashionista. “We’ll have backup if we need it.”

  Lucas jangled the car keys. “Day’s not getting any longer. If I’m going to do my killer pimp impression I’d prefer to get it over with.”

  The drive back to the Thelemite compound seemed disproportionately long, the shadows along the road nightmarish, with teeth. The were in me was on edge, every sound and passing scent a cause for alarm, for battle.

  Lucas fiddled with the radio, his lanky frame slung back over the seat as he drove with one hand. “Nervous?” he said.

  “Not really,” I lied.

  “Sure you are,” he said. “I always get nervous before a job. Must be worse for you, with the were inside. Pacing back and forth always.”

  “You don’t have that?” I asked. “That feeling of something clawing at your skin?”

  “I’m at peace with what I am,” said Lucas. “I am Wendigo, and that’s a fine thing to be. The hunger in me is the same as the spirit in me. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Or afraid of.”

  I leaned over and patted him on the knee. “You have it easy, Lucas.”

  “I suppose I do,” he said. “No one ever pressured me to be a human being.”

  “Being human isn’t as bad as you might think,” I told him. “There are some definite benefits.”

  “I don’t wear a mask,” Lucas said. “And you shouldn’t, either.”

  “Lucas?”

  “Hm?”

  “If you spend enough time around me, you’ll learn the hard way I don’t like being told what to do, so since
I like you I’m giving you the advice for free.”

  The LTD groaned in protest as we climbed the driveway to the compound. Lucas stayed quiet and I did the same. I was 0 for 2 with interpersonal relations today.

  “Park here,” I said, and he pulled the LTD into the last spot before the driveway spilled into the street. No way to block us in if we had to run for it.

  The front of the house, when I got close, was even more like a stitched-over wound than it seemed from afar, broken shades pulled over windows with security mesh bolted to the frames, rusted and weeping down the sides of the adobe.

  I rang the bell and stepped back behind Lucas, letting him be the first thing they saw.

  The door cracked and an eye and sliver of face appeared, washed out and suspicious. “What do you want?”

  “Hear you got a delivery earlier,” said Lucas. “Thought maybe you’d like some real quality goods.”

  The scent of someone else behind the door filtered to me, coffee and cigarettes, like the inside of a diner just before closing, and I nudged Lucas in the back. “Two of them,” I murmured in his ear. His muscles tightened and his skin got cold.

  “Just a minute,” said the face, and the door slammed. I pricked my ears and got snatches of conversation, the gist of which was, “Fucking Lenny.”

  The door swung wide again and I got a good look at the body that belonged to the face. Another anorexic, over-tanned specimen of Nocturne City’s top income bracket, her tightly pinched face in a frown. The guy next to her was big and blocky in that ex-military way, too many muscles crammed onto a frame that bowed under its own weight. A crew cut did nothing to dispel the notion that he was made out of stone.

  “We don’t want what you’re selling,” said the woman. “We get our order from Lenny.”

  “Wait a minute, now,” said the man. “One more can’t hurt.”

  “You tell that worthless piece of street trash that the next time he divulges a private business transaction to his colleagues,” said with the same tone and sneer you’d apply to disease-ridden snuff porn enthusiasts, “that he can kiss our arrangement good-bye.”

  The bodyguard rolled his eyes. “Come on in,” he said. “We pay a grand for the weekend, and there are no limits. Your girl isn’t delicate, I hope.”