by Olivia Boler
Tess looks around. “Who are these people?”
“That is Dexter Berdin, Cheradon’s manager, and that”—I point—“is Isaac LeBrun.”
Tess swears under her breath.
“I’m pretty sure they killed Bright Vixen. The others were enchanted, including Cheradon.” I indicate Horatio and Babs. “I haven’t figure out what’s controlling them yet. If it’s tattoos, they’re in for some pain.”
“It’s probably those bracelets,” Tyson says as he gets to his feet. “They were gifts from D.B.”
He looks a little wobbly, not all that threatening, but I do a read on him anyway. He’s himself again—sad but relieved. Before any of us moves, he walks over to his bandmates and removes the bracelets from their wrists, heavy leather cuffs about three inches wide. Nothing happens right away, but soon they start to blink like swimmers emerging from water into open air. Tyson hugs them and they put their arms weakly around his back. They look warily at the animals surrounding us. Even though I know whatever was binding them is broken, I’m glad for the wilderness backup.
Some of the fairies have stayed behind to guard D.B. and Cheradon, who are still out of commission. Xien is conferring with his comrades. I call him over.
“Do you really think we have to worry about her?” I nod at our fallen rock star.
Xien hovers next to me, considering. After a moment, he shakes his head.
“Me either,” I say. I’m pretty sure she’s just as innocent as Ty and the rest of Arsenic Playground. But him.” I nod at D.B. “I think there’s some rope in the trunk of my car.” I pull the keys out of my pocket and Xien hoists them over his shoulder, zipping away with five other fairies to my parking spot.
In that one idle moment, pain from the gash on my abdomen starts to burn again.
“Take this.” Cleo stands up and hands me a little vial. I recognize it as Isaac’s sleeping draught. “Just a little bit or you’ll…” She shuts her eyes and snores. She opens her eyes again. “It’ll help with your ouchie. Cooper’s too.”
“Thank you.” I don’t even bother to ask how she knows this. I put a little on my tongue. It sizzles, like baking soda, but with a sweet honey flavor. In the moonlight, Cooper’s face is starting to look ghostly. I kneel beside him and swab a dab of the elixir inside his mouth. He barely swallows. I force myself to watch and hope. It’s probably just a minute or two, but time seems to crawl by before his breathing grows more regular.
Cleo and Romola lean into me on either side.
“He’ll be okay,” Romola says.
I look at her, and she’s blurry through the tears that have started to pool in my eyes. I hug her to me and she wraps her arms around my neck. Cleo pats my shoulder.
“Girls, will you stay with Cooper? I need to help out here.”
They agree, and sit on either side of his head, every now and then patting his cheeks or shoulders.
Tyson is giving Babs and Horatio some water. I tap his arm to get his attention. “Will you be all right getting everyone back?” I realize I don’t know where they’re staying or if they even have somewhere to go.
He looks puzzled. “You mean you’re not going to put a voodoo curse on us?”
“I don’t do voodoo. No. You’re okay.”
An awkward silence follows. Tess rescues us by asking, “What do we do now? Banish them to another dimension? Curse them with goat feet?”
I squeeze her hand. I know for a fact that Auntie Tess couldn’t transmogrify goat feet onto a goat. I pull Isaac’s phone from my pocket. “Let’s tell the police that the murderers of Gladys Jones are hog-tied in Lindley Meadow.”
Tess smiles and her shoulders sag a little. “The police? Sometimes, lamb, you’re the most mundane witch I know.”
Epilogue
Everything happens too late for the story to hit the major newspapers the next day, but the Internet and the local TV stations carry the remarkable tale of two scrofulous dudes tied up in Golden Gate Park and found by SFPD after receiving an anonymous phone call. They are believed to be the killers of a Santa Barbara woman.
One online report states Gladys Jones, formerly of San Mateo and a retired software developer, was presumed killed by an explosion due to a gas leak in her home. But an email sent to the Santa Barbara News-Press with an attached movie clip showed a man snooping around her house in the middle of the night, and according to reports from an unnamed source at the FBI, the man is one Isaac LeBrun of Salem, Oregon. He is a known member of the occult, and one of the men found in Golden Gate Park.
The man found with Mr. LeBrun was identified as Dexter Berdin, manager of the popular rock band Yeah Right. While Berdin was not known to be involved in any sort of religious sects, he and LeBrun share a similar tattoo of some kind of oriental gryphon. Which is, of course, closer to a makara and nothing like a gryphon, but I’m certainly not going to write a complaint to the editor.
The report goes on: Near the spot where the two were found was evidence of a campfire, along with a stolen elephant tusk and a pair of stolen Chinese foot-binding shoes. Both items will be returned to their rightful owners pending the police investigation.
There’s something else that makes my skin go creepy-crawly for a second: The email with the video clip came from an untraceable email account that originated in a Mellora Islands Internet café. The clip of the video, shown on TV and the Internet, is the exact same snuff vision Tucker pulled from Beulah the dead fairy’s body.
As far as I know, Viveka is still in the Mellora Islands.
I just want to know how Tucker got a fairy’s last memory onto his hard drive. Magick is getting so techie these days.
****
It’s a few days later, and I’m sitting on a bench on 24th Street near the Saturday farmers market, my freshly repaired laptop tucked into my messenger bag at my side. I play with the locket, which I’m holding rather than wearing, winding the chain around my fingers a bit like a cat’s cradle.
Today is the Harvest Festival, an annual street fair held just before Halloween. Happy New Year, all you witches, I think to myself. Happy Samhain, happy Dia de los Muertos, happy-go-lucky. I’ve skipped the holiday these last two years, except in the most mainstream way, putting out bowls of candy for the treaters and hooligans. Not sure what I’ll be doing this time around, but I will probably at least do a little moon-bathing. Maybe I’ll even go to a party. Put on a pointy witch hat and cackle.
Viveka’s daughters are with Jesus Christ and Cooper in the market, grooving to the beat of a kettledrum band. Cleo wears a purple nightie and says she is a pilgrim. Romola has painted whiskers on her face with my eyeliner and wears a pair of bunny ears from Hillary’s old dress-up trunk. Before I walked over to this sitting area to meet Tyson, Cleo was drawing a series of proto-ankhs in chalk on the ground in the children’s arts-and-crafts zone of the market while Romola sketched out a forest of trees.
Cooper’s recovery is clipping along, the wonders of modern medicine dovetailing with the old-school folk remedies Tess heaped upon him—barley tea and whiskey, mostly. Tylenol is his new favorite candy.
He wants to have a talk with yours truly about what went down. Now that the excitement is over, I’m not so sure I want to break up with him, and I haven’t been brave enough to delve into his ideas on the subject and find out if he wants to break up with me. I’m considering putting a Forget About It Spell on him and sweeping the whole thing under the metaphorical rug with my metaphorical broomstick. Sure, I’m down with my witchosity, but who says openness and honesty are always a good thing for the old psyche? I’m still not sure.
Still, messing with his memories is probably not my best option, morality-wise.
Jesus Christ arrived late last night and slept on our couch. We called him after Cleo told me I didn’t need her anymore—at least for now—and that it was time to go home. They’ll be flying back tonight. I miss them already. I wonder if she regrets sending her mother away. No one seems to know how much time it’ll take unti
l Viveka comes back. I can’t dismiss the idea of her never coming home. Since the night we foiled Isaac, I’ve been able to get a better sense of Viveka, and I know she’s considering giving up her life with her girls and her husband. And I hate that. There are already too many motherless daughters out there, too many neglected little girls.
I feel a nudge on my shoulder and look up into Tyson’s smiling face.
“Sorry I’m late.” He checks the time on his cell phone. “Two minutes to be precise.”
“Shame on you.” I put the necklace in my sweater pocket and stand to hug him, a long one with lots of squeezing of shoulders and rubbing of backs. It feels friendly, I tell myself. Nothing more. We sit down in a relatively quiet, sunny corner of a horseshoe-shaped minipark just off the sidewalk. I note Tyson’s sunglasses are new and transparent, a lovely shade of amber. There are about half a dozen groups of people around us with baby strollers or dogs, couples sharing lattes and scones, dads and moms chasing blissfully oblivious toddlers. Tyson hands me a to-go cup and a paper bag with a piece of coffee cake in it and—presto—we’re just like the other folks around us, blending in on a weekend morn.
Tyson drops today’s copy of the Golden Gate Planet in my lap. “Nice scoop on the Ana & Co. sweatshops thing, by the way.”
My article is front page, above the fold. Auntie Tess got me an interview with Gil, her boss. It was all very public relations. “Thanks. Investigative journalism is not really my thing.”
“No matter. It’s good.”
“So,” I say, after a sip of my ginger tea latte. “Your engagement is off.”
He nods. “Yup. My sham of a love affair is over.”
“I saw the news online. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It wasn’t…meant to be.”
Understatement. I respect that. “How is Cheradon?”
He shrugs. “She’s at her Anderson Valley place. Recuperating. She’s seeing a shrink. I think, aside from being embarrassed, she’s cool. And she should be. Cool, I mean. No one knows about any of that occult crap or her connection to Isaac.”
“You mean, no one in the music biz knows.”
“Right.”
Poor Cheradon. And I thought my dad was wanting.
We’re quiet for a while. Cheradon and I had a brief conversation while I drove her, Tyson, and his bandmates to the W Hotel after leaving Golden Gate Park that night, after Auntie Tess poulticed me up. She told me she had been under the thrall of her father since he made contact with her a few years ago. Isaac convinced her to leave home a few months’ shy of her high school graduation, then put her in some sort of brainwashing lockdown where she was humiliated and possibly sexual assaulted (she was vague on the details, and I didn’t feel ghoulish enough to try reading her). She emerged from the experience a devout follower of her own dad, doing whatever he wanted her to do. But when she started to gain fame and power of her own, he decided he needed to control her better and gave her the nose ring, which included the glamour. She told me it was indeed Isaac in the Muni station who tried to grab me last summer, and Auntie Tess guessed that his putting my life in danger broke my magick banishment spell, which meant Xien, my counselor fairy, was able to appear to me and assist me.
After the Muni day, Isaac regrouped, Cheradon said. He really wanted me for the Flower Bowl Spell. He did some research on my background, found my connection to Alice and Tyson, and arranged for Cheradon to fall in love with her fellow rock star. Isaac’s continued interest in me prompted Cleo, in a way we still can’t figure out and she still can’t explain, to come to my aid. Her protective presence was even more powerful than a fairy’s. In fact, it seemed nearly invincible. She might be the most formidable witch I know.
“I have something for you,” Tyson says. He takes my hand and puts something in it, curling my fingers around the object. I uncurl them. It’s Alice’s amulet. The one I made for her.
“I found it in her room at my parents’ house,” he says. “It was hanging on this little board she used to use for her special jewelry. It’s been there since she left for Africa.”
I process this. After a long time I look up at him. “You mean…?”
He nods. “She never took it with her.”
“She didn’t have it when she…when she went to…”
He shakes his head. We’re quiet for a while as he gives me time. Maybe my magick would have protected her. Maybe Alice would have lived. My thoughts turn pink, but I can’t tell if it’s from love or the beginnings of rage.
“Well,” Tyson says. “Are you going to tell me what the hell was going on? And I don’t mean just to me, but…” He waves his hand in the air. “You know, everything.”
I pick some of the delicious crumbled topping off my coffee cake and crunch it between my teeth. “I’ll try. It’s only what I’ve pieced together after conferring with Auntie Tess and Tucker. They’re privy to the word on the magickal street.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah. So. Cheradon’s manager—D.B.—and Isaac were trying to put together a spell that would make them super-duper powerful witches. They were already pretty powerful, but you know how power breeds greed and all that. They were using Cheradon to get to you to get to me because they—” I interrupt myself with a laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. “Because they wanted to kill me and use my uterus and feet as a key ingredients for their spell. Yuck.”
“But why you?”
I can’t say her name. Not yet. “Because someone told them I’m all organic and free-range.”
He looks at me as if he’s not sure whether I’m serious or not.
“Kidding. Because…I'm a good witch.”
He takes this in.
“Anyway,” I continue, “I was getting a lot of warnings from the universe at large that there was some bad mojo going down. I started seeing things.” I remember the clothes-wearing ducks that crushed that egg in San Luis Obispo. Their warning makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Of course, in hindsight it would.
“I seem to remember you telling me that you could do that, and me freaking out like a pants-pisser,” Tyson says, bringing me back. He blushes a little.
“I chalked it up to you being under a hex.”
“I wish I could use that excuse with all the girls.”
“You know, if you really want to, you can.” I bump his shoulder with mine. We sit for a while, and I have an inkling of his thoughts—his aura is a blooming fuchsia sparkled through with gold. A crush that will most likely fade with time and separation. I recall, once again, my horny little dream about us, and the kisses we’ve actually shared. Maybe I’m a little fuchsia too. I clear my throat. “What I can’t figure out,” I say, “is Gru.” There. I’ve said her name.
“Cheradon’s grandmother.”
“And my high priestess. She’s always been one of the good ones.” At least, so I’ve thought. I pull the necklace out of my pocket. “I’ve been wanting to ask you…that day at Gladys’s, why did you take this?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember much of what they told me to do.” He snaps his fingers. “Gladys was Isaac’s girlfriend, right? Maybe that’s why.” He reaches for the locket, and I hesitate only a second before giving it to him. He turns it in his hands, opens the locket door, shuts it, and opens it again. “What’s this?”
“What?” I bend my head closer, trying to see what he sees.
He puts his finger near the edge of the locket. “That.”
There’s a small indentation I haven’t noticed before, kind of like a reset button or the hole in a computer’s disk drive when you can’t get the disk out and you have to stick an unbent paperclip in it.
I look in my bag and find a brooch—a pink poodle I thought I had lost. I poke the pin into the opening, and an image appears where a photo should go.
It’s Gru. She’s moving—she brushes some of her long gray hair away from her face.
“I wonder if you’ll ever see this, Memphis,” she says. “I
put a Dreamweaver Charm on Cooper suggesting he buy it for you, and Bright Vixen will make sure you get it, but we can’t let them know I sent it to you. If they find out…” Her eyes dart away, then back.
“By the way, this is a prototype. The one I gave Viveka is just an ordinary locket, but yours has a microchip in it. It’s Bright Vixen’s invention. Isn’t it clever? I don’t understand it, but she’s going to sell them for lots of money, and call them Memory Lockets. We’re going to use the money to get the coven going again.” She smiles for a moment, then turns serious again.
“Darling, you are in danger. I did something very foolish. You see, my son Isaac, he wants to come back to me. He wants to be a part of my family again, but only if he can start his own coven, one that oversees all the others—a kind of head council. The thing is, he’s gotten into some trouble, which I won’t go into now, but it’s very bad.” She pauses.
“Memphis. He’s after you, I’m afraid. And part of me wants him to find you but the other part regrets I ever mentioned you. He’s determined. He won’t stop. So you’ve got to be careful, my girl. Be careful. And be strong. I know you can look out for yourself. But, Memphis…he’s my son. Since Sadie…since she…drowned”—she almost chokes on the word—“he’s all I have left. Someday, when you’re a mother you’ll understand.” The recording cuts off.
When it becomes clear that there’s nothing more, I yank out the brooch and snap shut the locket. That day in the hotel, when I saw the hazy figure in it, I must have tripped the starter, but not fully. My head feels suddenly heavy with anger and sadness. I toss the locket into my bag.
“You’ll understand?” Tyson says. “How will you understand if you’re dead?”
“I can’t believe she played the when-you’re-a-mother card. I really hate that. I might not be one, but I have one, and I don’t think she’d have anyone killed for me.”
“Mine would.”