“Help yourself, but no smoking,” she answered and secured a feathered tiara atop her head.
JuJu kissed Yvette on both cheeks, waved at Elena, then stepped out of the wagon with every curve of her body on display for the world to see.
“I can’t stay in this cramped wagon all day,” Elena said, letting the curtain drop.
Yvette stoked the tiny stove with wood kindling, then struck a long matchstick. “Well, you can’t leave. You’re not getting me arrested again because you can’t stay put until dark,” she said and blew out the match.
Elena wondered if it was possible to cast a spell big enough to stun an entire carnival. Obviously not with what little supplies she had to work with. Still, she wasn’t above muttering a bruising spell in such stifling quarters. All it took for that was a reverse spell and a little comfrey leaf, which any witch should have. The temptation made her fingers itch to open a bottle of the stuff.
But on a secondary search of the wagon she noticed something was missing. “Your roommate said she didn’t throw out any of your things, so where are your stores? Your herbs, your charms, and amulets?”
The young woman shrugged. “Don’t have none of that stuff.”
“But you must have a Book of Shadows. How do you do your spellwork?”
Yvette crossed her arms and shifted her weight to one hip. “Not everyone’s as fancy as you vine witches. I know the spells I need to get by, and that’s been plenty good enough for me so far.”
Elena suspected the young woman had little training, but she’d never run across an illiterate witch before. She sank on the cushioned bench. She’d assumed Yvette would have a spell book she could use, a book of the occult, something that might give her a head start in unraveling how the blood magic was used in the killings. It was one reason she’d agreed to spend the night squeezed between half a dozen pointy shoes and a trunk that smelled like an undertaker’s basement. If she had to lie low, at least she could spend the time trying to understand how and why she’d been framed.
There was nothing for it. She had to leave. Elena ran her fingers through her hair, twisting it into a respectable updo. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the luxury of waiting until dark.”
Yvette banged the kettle down on the stove. “Do you want to get caught, is that it?”
“You obviously can take care of yourself, but there are things beyond my knowing that I need to figure out. Now rather than later.”
“What sort of things?”
“Theories about animal killings and blood magic for a start.”
Yvette rubbed the gooseflesh on her arms. “What the hell are you involved in?”
Elena explained about the murder and her arrest, and about the cats, the blood, and the witch that was still free to kill again. Yvette listened as she prepared the tea. To her credit, she never flinched, even when Elena admitted at one time she had meant to kill Bastien.
Yvette handed Elena her tea. “Like I said before, I didn’t know my maman. If she had a spell book, she never left it to me. That doesn’t mean I don’t know how to get my hands on one, though. I’m not the only witch traveling with this bum carnival.”
She’d thought Yvette was an isolated case, someone who’d fallen through the cracks too early to know where she belonged in the world of magic. Carnival life had a way of attracting those who’d shrugged off conformity. A place where the odd duck could find its flock. She supposed it made sense there would be others, but would they know anything more than the young woman?
“So how do we find this other witch if we can’t leave the wagon?”
Yvette eyed the racks of pretty costumes lining the wall. “Maybe there’s a way we can go out after all.” She set down her mug and pulled out a sparkly green outfit, leveling a lopsided grin at Elena. “How do you feel about peacocks?”
An hour later Elena stepped out of the wagon in borrowed shoes. They were soft and flat heeled, made for performing on acrobatic mats. She rather thought they were an improvement over the toe-pinching shoes most women wore. The outfit, on the other hand, would take some getting used to.
She’d successfully protested the cape of peacock feathers but was unable to fend off completely the outlandish taste of her cellmate. The price of leaving the wagon early meant donning a pair of risqué harem pants, a feathered turban, and a silver-beaded bodice that thankfully covered most of her stomach, though her arms were left bare. The silky trousers swished as she walked, mimicking the familiar flow of a skirt, yet she found they provided far more freedom. Her legs absolutely dared to leap off the last step. But the silver veil draped from cheek to cheek was what ultimately gave her the most freedom. Only her eyes, which were now rimmed in the same dark kohl as Yvette’s, showed above the silk.
She gave each end of the veil a secure tuck under the band of the turban as Yvette shut the door to the wagon and skipped down the steps.
“This way.”
The young woman didn’t seem to be the least bit self-conscious about strolling out in broad daylight wearing a skintight harlequin bodysuit. If she had any shame, it was well hidden behind the black eye mask as she led the way, quickly adjusting to the freedom of her own immodest trousers.
After squeezing between a pair of wagons, Elena got her first proper look at the carnival grounds. Two enormous red-and-white-striped tents rose in the center of a grassy area encircled by a dozen or more caravans. Many of them had their sides painted with symbols for luck and good life—a star, a moon, a five-petal flower. Something about the images ticked open a memory in Elena’s mind, but it slipped away with the morning mist.
Not many stirred outside their cabins yet, but those who did inhabited the world as if they were creatures from a fairy tale come to life. A man with a twirled mustache tromped the ground on three-foot stilts, towering over a wagon to stow sleeping gear atop the roof. On the far side of the green a tattooed woman stoked the flames of a cook fire, while a young girl did a backbend in the grass with a boa constrictor draped around her middle. The woman smiled approvingly while spreading honey on bread for her breakfast.
Elena’s stomach clenched at the sight of the food, but even hunger couldn’t distract her from the specter of a clown passed out drunk under a wagon wheel. His white face paint had smeared in the dewy grass, creating a grotesque swirl of mouth, nose, and eyes. Whatever whimsy he’d worn the night before, the morning had unmasked a ghoulish face lurking beneath. He roused to stare bleary-eyed at her.
“What’re you looking at?” He raised a gin bottle to his lips. Finding it empty, he tossed the bottle into the grass, grumbled, and rolled over.
“Don’t mind him,” Yvette said with a flip of her hand as they stood over his prone body. “Jacques might look a mess now, but he’ll be sober by showtime and smelling like a daisy again. He’s a lovable Pierrot when he’s on his feet. A regular Doctor Jekyll and Monsieur Hyde, that one.”
Two beings living inside one body. Elena had to shrug off the convulsive shiver that followed, recalling her cramped view from behind the toad’s eyes.
Yvette nudged the clown’s foot with her shoe to get his attention again. “Which way’s Rackham’s trailer?”
“What you want with that shriveled old prune?”
“He’s got some books we need to borrow.”
Jacques growled animallike deep in his throat. “Got a whole fucking library, but he ain’t never cured my headache.”
Elena lifted an eyebrow at him. “Try massaging the bottom of your left foot just below the third and fifth toe. And drink a few cups of willow bark tea. Your head will clear soon enough.”
“She one of your lot?” he asked with a chin-thrust aimed at Yvette. She nodded, and he shrank back a fair few inches behind the wagon wheel. “He’s on the back end by the snake charmer,” he said and then crawled off in the other direction.
Yvette pulled Elena aside by the arm. “Listen, don’t do that with Rackham. Best if you play it dumb with him. He knows what a piss-poor witch I am,
but that’s why he helps me. He likes being all superior and reminding me how much I don’t know.”
“So you’re saying he’s a man?”
Yvette smirked. “Right, and the way to get what you want from him is to keep his bread buttered on the right side, if you know what I mean.”
Elena knew what she meant and agreed to slather him with just enough praise to distract him from her motives.
THE AMAZING PROFESSOR RACKHAM, SEER OF THE OTHER WORLD! The hand-painted lettering on the side of the wagon shimmered in gold. The paint had been magicked, of course. At night, under the flickering torchlight, it would shine like an electric sign in the city, drawing the lovelorn, the forlorn, and the simply curious like moths. The entire spectacle had a tawdry commercial quality that had Elena doubting this Professor Rackham was a real witch. The “third eye” painted above the door practically winked at her as they climbed the stairs.
Yvette knocked on the door bordered, naturally, in the requisite astrological symbols.
“Matinees begin at ten,” replied a male voice. “You may come back then.”
“It’s Yvette, Professor. My friend and I need your help with something. You know, magic.” This last part she said in a hushed, secretive tone, like honeyed bait.
A man wearing a shimmering green-and-gold robe and matching turban opened the door. Hawkish eyes rimmed in black kohl stared out under a pair of pasted-on eyebrows that shot up in devilish exaggeration. The glue adhering the similarly pointed mustache and cone-shaped goatee in place oozed out below his bottom lip. He stood back and held the door open. “Of course. I’m always available for students of the craft requiring professional assistance. Come in.”
Elena took a seat beside Yvette on the built-in sofa as instructed, while Rackham reclined in a plush velvet wingback chair and crossed his legs. The scent of ambergris, fragrant yet animalistic, stirred in the cozy space, awakening in her an odd sense of déjà vu. She knew better than to ignore the feeling, but she found nothing about the wagon familiar. Well, except for the nature of the furnishings. Rackham did indeed own an entire library. Old books. New books. Some bound in leather, some in cloth, and one or two wrapped in the scaly skin of some long-dead sea creature. They filled the shelves behind his chair. And where there weren’t books there were herbs, charms, a scrying mirror, and tiny soft-bellied frogs bottled up in formaldehyde displayed in built-in nooks. And in the center of it all, propped up by a pair of golden hands, sat an expensive crystal ball atop a small mahogany table. A touch out of reach for a carnival psychic, she thought, but perhaps he was better at his art than his sham stagecraft would imply.
Rackham seemed to absorb her appreciation of his things, showing the bare minimum of a smile when her eyes met his. “Terribly rude of me to bring it up, I know,” he said, turning to Yvette, “but aren’t you supposed to be incarcerated?”
Yvette pushed her mask up on her forehead. “Got out early on account of my good behavior.”
“Ah.” He gave a slight flinch of his shoulder, dismissing the subject as no concern of his. “So, what sort of help may I offer you and your acquaintance today?” His hawklike eyes traced their silhouettes as Yvette pointed her thumb toward Elena before reaching for the deck of tarot cards on the side table.
“I’d like to borrow a book,” Elena said. She kept her face covered, preferring to address the professor from behind her veil. He could stare at her aura all he liked, but he’d not see beyond the purple veil there either.
“Any particular volume you’re interested in?” He folded his hands in his lap, his long fingernails yellowish against his pale skin. “Love potions, luck amulets, or moon magic perhaps?”
“May I?” She leaned forward and tilted her head to the right to read the titles on the spines: A Compendium of Herbal Magic; Lady Everly’s Grimoire; Shamanic Practices in the Southern Hemisphere; Book of the Dead. There were treatises on voodoo, necromancy, shadow vision, and one palm-size book entitled Curses and Maledictions that made Elena blink twice. In truth, his collection rivaled Brother Anselm’s library of magic at the abbey, save for a copy of The Book of the Seven Stars, though as she examined the lower shelf it was apparent Rackham’s taste skewed much more toward the dark end of the spectrum. A fortunate omen for her particular need. She pointed to a black-and-red leather book labeled Sanguinem Artes Ocultus. “That one would make a good start.”
Rackham did a double take, his eyes shifting between her and the book. “Not the usual fare for a young woman on a beautiful summer morning.” He plucked the volume from the shelf, though he didn’t hand it over right away. Instead, he casually flipped through the pages, as if reacquainting himself with the subject matter. “Might I inquire what this is about? It’s rather complex magic, requiring a firm mind.”
Despite her promise to Yvette, she didn’t have the time to play the coy dumpling, not with so much rich information just outside her grasp. “Exsanguination, to be precise. I’m interested in how it works in ritual spellcraft, and to what purpose.”
Yvette tapped the cards against the table and stared at her with angry owl eyes.
Rackham, on the other hand, no longer tried to control the smile that had lodged in the corner of his mouth. “Ah, if this is in reference to the cat mutilations and recent murder in the valley, you wouldn’t be the first to speculate on the subject. It’s been the driving talk among magic folk across the countryside for years. Though I hear they’ve made an arrest to spoil all the fun of guessing who the culprit might be.” He handed the book over. “At any rate, chapter thirteen likely has what you’re looking for.”
Elena turned to the pages, scanning quickly, feeling him watching her as she read.
“Blood,” he said, “is neither good nor evil in spellcasting. It’s simply a highly concentrated conduit for energy. Blood is life, after all. Where and how one directs that energy is what determines its effect.”
“None of these spells have any continuity to them,” Elena said, looking up from the chapter. “They’re one-offs with specific outcomes in mind. But the cat killings present themselves as ritualistic, repeated over and over. Perhaps timed with the moon or some other cosmological signal.”
“You seem rather well informed on the subject.”
Elena felt a pinch on her thigh. A signal to dumb it down. “Just curious how it works.”
“Bit of dabbling in the dark arts, is it?” He ran his tongue over his eyetooth. “Everyone comes around to shadow magic at one point or another. No harm in appeasing one’s curiosity. After all, without the dark the good would never shine.”
“I’d never keep body and soul together if people didn’t get curious about the dark side now and then,” Yvette added, adjusting the exposure of her cleavage before shuffling through the tarot deck again.
Rackham’s eyes lowered perceptibly. “Quite.”
“Why would there be so many animals involved?”
“Several deep thinkers on the craft, myself included, believe the cat killings may have been a mere flourish, a setup for the real murder. To establish a ritualistic pattern, as you noted.” Rackham ran his hand over the shelf and then slid a folded page out from between a pair of books. “Others suspected a timed relationship with the moon or Saturn or even Jupiter,” he said, spreading the paper open to reveal a list of dates and locations. “But you can see by the entries of when each known animal corpse was reported in the valley, there’s no precision to the killings. And as I said, they’ve already arrested the guilty party, so there’s little point in dredging the matter all up again. It’s been solved. All we can do is hope she reveals her methodology before she’s executed.”
Elena gripped the edge of the bench and fought back her own grim urges. “You honestly believe all those cats were killed to cover up a single premeditated murder? Nothing to do with a blood ritual? That’s a lot of dead animals, Professor. Half a dozen would have been enough to form a pattern and get tongues wagging, if that’s all the murderer had wanted.”
> Rackham shifted his weight in his chair uncomfortably. “There are others who entertained the idea there was something more sinister going on. But there was never any real proof.”
“Sinister how?” she asked and thought again about the Charlatan sisters and their appetite for hoarding dead animal parts.
He narrowed his eyes at Elena. “Do you mind removing your veil?”
She supposed this was dangerous talk. Not the sort of thing discussed in polite company. Or with a stranger you’d just met. Yvette put a hand on her arm to stop her, but there was no real harm in showing her face to Rackham. He didn’t know her. And she’d be gone by nightfall anyway. If that was the price for the information she wanted, it was a paltry sum. She pulled the corners of her scarf loose from her turban. “Sinister how, Professor Rackham?”
He stared at her lips as they moved in the dim light, and his throat convulsed in a hard swallow behind his fake goatee. His brow puckered ever so slightly as he twisted the ring around his finger. A toadstone, Elena noted. Just the sort of useless amulet a carnival witch like Rackham would put his faith in. Though she wondered who he thought might be out to poison him.
“I really couldn’t say.” He released the ring and twisted his neck to look at the clock on the wall. “And it appears I’ve run out of time. The gates will be opening soon, and, as you may suspect, I am often besieged with people seeking their fortunes.”
There was more behind what he’d hinted at, she was sure of it, and she wasn’t going to let him get off that easy. “Sinister how?” she repeated, bleeding any submissiveness out of her voice.
He hesitated, avoiding her eye. Something about their conversation had spooked him. Whatever he knew must be disturbing indeed.
He checked the clock again and then relented. “There are said to be spells that have never been written down in any book,” he said at last. “Old magic. Bound in the earth. Held in a crevice of time. Some call it conjuring the Devil, because to see the spell rendered, one must enter into an exchange. It’s the blackest of magic. The kind that can eviscerate the soul if even a word is out of place.”
The Vine Witch Page 17