Cursed Moon

by Jaye Wells

  If I hadn’t been old enough to take custody of him, we both would have ended up in foster care. Most likely separated. Like so many other of the Cauldron’s children, we probably would have ended up in homes with Mundanes who would have forced us to use our right hands so we’d fit in.

  Kids like that? The lost kids Danny and I almost were? They were one of the reasons I kept fighting against the covens. Because I’d seen what almost was and it scared me more than standing up to bullies like Uncle Abe for the kids who couldn’t fight for themselves.

  “Thank you,” I said, finally. “I needed that.”

  “You don’t have to do it all yourself, Kate. We’re here for you, too.”

  “Right,” I said, bitterness creeping into my tone. “What would happen if I just threw my arms in the air and gave up?”

  “Dunno, why don’t you try it?”

  I shook my head at her. “Stop, okay? Just stop. It’s so easy for you to tell me to surrender, but you don’t have the responsibilities I have.”

  “You mean like caring for a kid that’s not mine?”

  Ouch.

  “Or helping my friend with an addiction keep off the potions?” She pointed an arthritic finger at me. “Or having to watch someone I care about self-destruct because they’re in denial?”

  “I’m not in denial.” I set my jaw. “I’m exhausted.”

  Her shoulders drooped. “Then go to bed.”

  “Look,” I said with a sigh, “I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. It’s just been a long night—hell, it’s been a long month.”

  “Blue Moon’s in two nights. It’s almost over.”

  I blew out a shaky breath. “But when it is, who will be standing?”

  Baba shook her head sadly, as if apologizing for not being a psychic. “Go to bed, Kate. This won’t all feel so overwhelming after a long nap.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Baba. Thank you for having my back even when I’m being an asshole.”

  She chuckled. “Ah hell. What else would I be doing with my time?”

  “Harassing the eligible bachelors at the senior center.”

  She winked saucily. “Damn straight.” She held out the vial of Gideon’s Dew.

  I sighed, but couldn’t help a smile at her insistence. While she watched, I used the tiny loop on the vial’s lid to add it to the AA token necklace. Putting magical dew next to an Arcane abstinence symbol felt a little sacrilegious, but it was also kind of fitting given my life lately.

  “Good night, Baba. Thanks for kicking my ass.”

  “Anytime, doll.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I woke up feeling like a small animal died in my mouth. I washed away the funk with a liter of soda and a piece of cold fried chicken from the fridge. Danny watched my afternoon breakfast with a sneer. He must have gotten home from school at some point while I napped. But I was saved from having to talk to the kid when Baba arrived. She shooed me out the door to go do what needed to be done. I knew I’d need to have a reckoning with Danny eventually, but for the moment I needed to focus on making sure there was a city to hold that conversation in once Halloween was over.

  Since I had no leads, I decided to check in with LM and Mary. A quick call to Morales confirmed he was busy chasing down leads with Shadi, so I told him I’d hit up the Wonder Twins alone. Frankly, it was a relief to know he wasn’t going to be joining me. After the clusterfuck the night before, I wasn’t ready to play the awkward-silence-all-day game with him—or worse, the let’s-joke-about-it-all-day game.

  I called ahead just in case LM and Mary were in a running mood again, and was told to meet them at an address on the east side of town instead of at the park. After our last meeting I’d demanded they give me a phone number in case they decided to pull a disappearing act again. I didn’t question the change of location since they were already so worried about Dionysus finding out they were talking to the cops.

  On my way across the Bessemer Bridge, I got a call from my good friend Val, who was a lab rat for the BPD. “Prospero, you got a minute?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Got some labs back from items collected at that college thing last night.”

  I turned right off the bridge. “Okay,” I said slowly. I’d left before the CSI team arrived, but I figured with the confession from the satyr and all there wouldn’t be much to need processing through the lab.

  “Eldritch said we’re not supposed to share this with the MEA, but he’s an asshole.”

  I chuckled. “Go ahead. I won’t tell him.”

  “The unis from the scene brought me some of the wine bottles from the sorority party. I know the perp said he potioned everyone, but I tested the bottles just in case.”

  “And?”

  “And from what I can tell, the potion was already in the wine before it was opened.”

  My foot lifted off the accelerator. “Are you sure?”

  “Yep. There were traces of the same potion stolen from Aphrodite Johnson’s temple inside the bottle and embedded in the cork.”

  “Could it have been added to the bottles by sticking a needle through the cork?”

  “Definitely possible.”

  “Can you e-mail me the report and a picture of the bottles? Oh, and copy Mez so he can see it, too.”

  The click-clack of fingers tapping on a keyboard came through the phone. “Done and done.”

  “Thanks, Val. You’re a peach.”

  “No problem. Just remember this next time I need some DNA run through your lab.”

  I chuckled and promised I’d pass that on to Mez. After we hung up, I parked down the street from the address LM had given me. I opened my e-mail to find the picture she’d sent. Squinting at the small screen, I tried to read the label on the bottle in the picture. It featured a dancing satyr playing a flute.

  Chewing on my lip, I tried to figure out how Dionysus could have gotten that potion into those bottles. The labels could easily have been printed off any color printer and attached to the bottles. I cursed myself for not investigating the wine bottles at the college the night before, but I’d been too busy trying to shove my hands down Morales’s pants to do any quality police work.

  I pushed that thought aside and tried to see the clue Val had just provided as a blessing. It was more than I’d had an hour earlier, and hopefully I’d have even more to go on after talking to LM.

  Blowing out a breath, I shoved the phone in my pocket and exited Sybil. The address led to an apothecary in the heart of Votary Coven territory. The storefront had a large plate glass window out front with gilded lettering that identified it as the Black Cat Commissary. I wasn’t familiar with the place, but I knew the type. They specialized in filling prescriptions from med wizes and selling over-the-counter herbs and tinctures. I also knew plenty of these apothecaries also had a side business out of a back room or basement where a wizard with enough scratch could score some harder-to-find illicit ingredients for dirty potions.

  I parked a little ways down the street from the store. The bell over the door dinged when I walked in, but the long-haired wizard behind the counter didn’t look up from the potion he was cooking over a Bunsen burner. Judging from the bite of isopropyl alcohol on the air and the Soxhlet apparatus on the counter, he was making a Spagyric tincture.

  The wall behind the counter was covered in rows of shelves bearing glass canisters of herbs and other components for homemade remedies. The rest of the store was filled with low shelving units bearing packages of arnica pellets, witch hazel, and various other legal herbal remedies for common ailments.

  I took all this in quickly, noting as I did that Little Man and his sister were nowhere to be seen.

  “Help you?” the guy behind the counter said in a bored voice. His hair was straight and black as an asphalt highway, and the butt-cut part harked back to a painted lane divider. His name tag identified him as Zane, but his ironic mustache labeled him as a total douchebag.

  “Little
Man around?”

  He pressed his lips together. “You gonna buy something?”

  I squinted at him. “No.”

  He crossed his arms and sat back on his stool. “Then I ain’t seen him.”

  There was no use in getting pissed. The Cauldron was the kind of place where even the old ladies sweeping their front stoops were on the make. I grabbed a pack of clove gum from the display at the front of the counter and slapped it on the surface. “How much?”

  “Two.”

  I fished two crumpled bills from my pocket and tossed them. “Well?”

  He raised a brow. “Plus tax.”

  My squint became a glare. I shoved my hand in my pocket and came up with two quarters, which I dropped one after the other onto the counter. “Keep the change.”

  His eye roll told me he was unimpressed by my generosity. “Upstairs.” He nodded toward the steps at the rear of the store.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Whatever.”

  At the top of the stairs, there was a hallway leading to a door at either end. The one on the right had a simple welcome mat out front, and the one on the other end had two trash bags. The scent of dirty diapers permeated the air on that end of the hall, which told me I had the right place.

  After a quick knock, a shadow moved behind the peephole. “Who is it?” a suspicious female voice shouted from inside.

  “It’s Kate, Mary.”

  The door opened quickly and I was pulled inside by a meaty hand. I stumbled in and blinked against the dim light. The hulking form in front of me helped me gain my balance. “Hi, lady.”

  I forced a smile despite the overpowering stench of body odor and something similar to dirty cat litter. Little Man wasn’t in his normal baby carrier. Instead, Mary cradled him in her arms like a baby doll. He was shirtless and wore nothing but a diaper. The bruises from the beating Dionysus gave him had dulled into sickly green-and-yellow smears across his face. Seeing him look so vulnerable was unsettling. Instead of a street-wise homunculus, he looked like a battered infant.

  I pushed that disturbing thought aside and tried to be thankful that Mary, at least, had a shirt on. She was not, however, wearing any pants. Luckily the T-shirt was long enough to cover her to midthigh.

  “Yo, Prospero,” Little Man said in a drowsy voice. “You caught us just waking up.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was five in the afternoon, but considering I’d only woken up an hour earlier myself, I couldn’t really fault them. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice.”

  “Come on in.” He waved to instruct Mary to move farther into the apartment. I followed more slowly, careful to breathe through my mouth and not touch anything.

  The room they led me to had a single recliner, a TV tray, and a small television perched precariously on a two-by-four and a couple of cinder blocks. The walls were yellowed from cigarette smoke, and the carpet looked like a breeding ground for pubic lice.

  Mary lowered her bulk into the recliner with a groan. Her legs fell open to reveal a pair of tighty-gray-ies. I forced my eyes upward to where Little Man leaned back against her chest. He crossed his bare legs at the ankle and rested his feet on Mary’s impressive belly. “I don’t know where he is.”

  I blinked. “I know.”

  “How?”

  “Because you’re smart enough to understand that if you did know where he was and didn’t tell me, it would not go well for you.”

  He laughed. “You ain’t as scary as you let on, Prospero.”

  “You haven’t given me a reason to show you how scary I can be.” I crossed my arms. “Yet.”

  “And I don’t plan on it neither.”

  I raised a brow.

  He waved a tiny hand. “Relax, Kate. You’re too good a customer for me to fuck over.”

  I nodded. “So you don’t know where he is, but you gotta know something.”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Believe me, I wish I did. We barely left this shithole for days now.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes widened. “You been out there? The moonies are going apeshit.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I been out there. Which is why I really need you to tell me what you’re hearing. We have to stop this asshole.”

  Little Man heaved a sigh from his tiny chest. “Shit, Prospero. He’s a ghost. Just ask your boy.”

  I frowned. “Which boy?”

  The homunculus’s smile bordered on evil. “Volos.”

  I pressed my lips together and let the jab lie like a pile of shit on the floor between us. “What about him?”

  “What? You ain’t heard?”

  I shook my head.

  “Motherfucker got robbed.”

  Shock prevented me from schooling my features in time. “You’re fucking with me.”

  “No, ma’am.” LM shoved a tiny hand in the waistband of his diaper.

  I blew out a big breath. “When did it happen?”

  LM smiled, obviously thrilled he knew something I didn’t. “Last night.”

  In other words, while most of the police force had been busy dealing with a sex riot at the college, Dionysus had been knocking over one of the Cauldron’s most powerful citizens. Problem was, the Raven obviously didn’t know Volos well enough if he’d thought John’s first move would be to call in the cops. He preferred to handle things himself. So my next question was, when was Volos going to make his move? And, more to the point, what did he know that I didn’t?

  “That’s a huge help, LM. Thanks.”

  The homunculus cleared his throat. “You could show your gratitude in a more material way.”

  I cursed myself for not bringing Morales—and his wallet—along. Removing my too-thin billfold from my pocket, I pulled out a five-dollar bill. When I handed it to LM, he shot me a look like I’d offended him. Rolling my eyes, I removed the gum from my pocket, as well. “Here.”

  I half expected him to throw it in my face. Instead his face lit up like a kid at Christmas. “Ooh! Look, Mary. Clove!”

  The silent partner’s large paw snatched the gum from his hand with surprisingly agile fingers. “Mine.” She tucked the package into her bosom.

  I filed that little tidbit away for future use. If I’d known all it took was gum to make her happy, I would have been using that instead of my beer money all this time.

  “Yo, Prospero,” LM said after I turned to go. I looked back to see uncharacteristic candor and a touch of fear in his gaze. Or maybe it was just the shadows from the bruises around his blue eyes. “You catch this motherfucker, okay?”

  I nodded and forced confidence I didn’t feel into my smile. “Sure thing, LM. You stay loose, all right?”

  He scratched himself and burped his acknowledgment.

  “Later, Mary.”

  She pulled her gaze away from the grainy black-and-white images flashing on the TV. For a moment I could have sworn I saw shrewd brightness in the eyes lurking behind those heavy lids. “Bye-bye, lady. Don’t get dead.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I hadn’t called ahead to warn Volos I was on the way. I’d found it was best to keep him off kilter in order to keep an upper hand. The man was frustratingly hard to faze, so I’d take any advantage I could get.

  I parked Sybil at the curb across from the luxury apartment building. Compared with the scene there a few nights before, the place looked quiet. There was a single cop car parked down the block. No doubt the uni was posted there to keep nosy citizens and even nosier journalists away from the crime scene on the fourth floor. I didn’t bother stopping to say hi. I knew Eldritch had started pulling guys from the other Babylon precincts to pitch in on the Owens case since all the Cauldron guys were busy keeping up with the moonie freaks.

  I also didn’t stop to greet the guy because I wasn’t real eager for it to get back to Eldritch I was on the scene. No doubt he’d see my presence as a threat to his jurisdiction, and that would prompt a pissing match between him and Gardner that would only result in me gettin
g drenched.

  By the time the elevator dumped me off on the fourth floor, I was wondering if I’d made a mistake going there alone. Probably I should have called Morales and asked him to come play mediator. But I wasn’t real eager to drag him into the middle of the personal shit this conversation was bound to dredge up.

  I took a deep, cleansing breath. The kind they teach in meditation workshops and 12-step programs to help you find your center. I took a few more because my center was getting harder and harder to access lately. But before I could exhale the third breath, the door opened and John was staring down at me with a curious expression.

  “Why are you doing deep-breathing exercises in my hallway?”

  I blew out the breath. “How did you know I’m out here?”

  He jerked his head. “I have a video console that lets me see who’s in the elevator.”

  I froze. “Does that mean you saw who came up to Owens’s apartment?”

  “As I told the cops, I was asleep and didn’t hear or see anything during the hours the event occurred.” His tone lacked the practiced cadence of a lie, so I let it go. He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. “You been talking to your favorite snitch?” He didn’t sound surprised to see me at all.

  I crossed my own arms and squinted at him. “You leaked the robbery to him?”

  The corner of his mouth lifted. “No one has to leak anything to Little Man. I swear that tiny bastard is psychic.” He hesitated. “But I’ll admit I was hoping he’d tell you.”

  “Why not call me yourself? Or the cops?”

  He stepped back in a silent invitation to come inside. I walked into the hallway and waited for him to lead the way inside. It’s not that I didn’t want to turn my back to him. More that I didn’t want to get into the habit of making myself at home in his place.

  “I knew you wouldn’t take my call.” He shut the door and moved past me toward the living room. “And I didn’t call the cops because I didn’t want them involved.”

  I didn’t bother asking why. Volos only used cops when he thought he could control the outcome.