Finally, I placed my hands around the outside of the cauldron, like I was going to lift it to my mouth to have a drink, and read the words from the incantation: “Rhea, the great goddess mother, let the earth’s power make the drinker of this potion carry odor no longer.”
Immediately, the ingredients inside the cauldron were enveloped by a thick scarlet smoke that rose up, quickly filling the room. I coughed as I inhaled the smoke, which smelled like wood burning, but after about twenty seconds the smoke dissipated and I gazed into the bowl.
The mixture had turned a perfect scarlet red as well, and I tried not to think about the fact that I was going to have to drink what definitely looked a lot like blood. I preferred potions that looked more like fruit smoothies or fancy cocktails over the ones that looked like bodily fluids. So sue me.
Now I was all set. Tonight, I could go to coven headquarters, and none of the shifters on the second floor would be able to see me. I figured I’d be better off waiting until the sun went down, since Chief Enforcer Loeb would be more likely to be back home and I’d have an easier time getting access to all the information I needed.
There was absolutely no way this could go horribly wrong.
Chapter 10
I spent the afternoon killing some more time until finally, just after sunset, I made my way into my mother’s cottage for dinner. The aroma of lemongrass and chili rose to my nostrils, and I smacked my lips in anticipation. My mom made a mean Thai green curry.
“Good, you’re here. At least that makes one of you.”
“Grandma Rosie still isn’t back?” I asked, grabbing a large ceramic bowl from the cupboard and scooping a liberal amount of rice into it.
My mom shook her head. “I know she’s my mother and that she can take care of herself, but goodness knows what kind of trouble she gets into when she’s hanging around with that Connie.”
I had to smile to myself; it was always funny to hear my mom complain about Grandma Rosie’s friends being a bad influence. After all, the youngest of them were in their mid-sixties. The image of these sexa- and septuagenarians going around and terrorizing the town was certainly a sight to imagine.
“Well, she knows what time dinner is. If she can’t be back here in time, well, she’s just going to miss out,” my mother muttered as she grabbed a bowl for herself. I had a sneaking suspicion my mom had repeated that same line word for word multiple times when I had been a teenager.
I ladled a thick serving of curry on top of my rice and used a fork to mush it all together into a kind of thick soup. Sitting down at the table, I took a deep breath, inhaling the delicious smells of dinner and thinking about how much better this was than sitting at home eating ramen, when the front door of the cottage burst open. I looked up to see Grandma Rosie standing there, absolutely soaking wet, dripping onto the entry mat. Her hair was plastered to her face, making her look a little bit like a wet dog that had just come out from the lake.
I was pretty sure her entire left side was covered in blue paint, too.
My mouth dropped open and stayed there.
“Well,” Grandma Rosie demanded after a minute. “Are neither one of you going to get me a towel?”
My mom ran over to the bathroom and came back with a large, fluffy green towel that she handed to her mother.
“Come in, come in, and go stand near the fire. You’re going to catch a cold. What on earth happened?”
“And why are you covered in paint?” I added.
“Oh, this?” Grandma Rosie asked, motioning vaguely to her left side. “This is nothing. I just had a little accident on the way out of a house.”
“Oh, Rhea, mother of the gods,” Mom muttered under her breath. “What on earth have you gotten yourself into? Is Connie alright? Please tell me Connie is alright. Actually, I don’t want to know.”
“Connie is fine, don’t worry.”
“Does she look like you?” I asked with a smile.
“Maybe,” Grandma Rosie replied. “But the point is, I’m fine. I just need to dry off a bit. A quick spell will get rid of this paint, and then I can get some of that delicious dinner. Who knew solving crimes was such a great way to build up an appetite?”
“First you need to get some of this warming potion inside of you,” my mother said, making her way to the fridge. Why on earth my mom still kept warming potion in her fridge when both her daughters were fully grown was beyond me. It was a staple among witch mothers here, a potion that immediately heats the body up from the inside to stop young witches and wizards from catching a cold when they’d been outside for too long during the winter months. I hadn’t had any in years and years.
My mom brought a vial of the stuff over to Grandma Rosie, who downed it in a single big swig. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” she said, handing the empty vial back to my mother, who put it in the sink, shaking her head. Grandma Rosie pulled out a wand and pointed it at herself, muttering an incantation. A moment later, the paint on her side disappeared. A quick second incantation later and Grandma Rosie was back to being completely dry and looking completely normal.
Well, mostly, anyway. Her hair looked like she’d decided to take a bath with a toaster. And like she’d soaked it in bleach for a while. But apart from that, at least she wasn’t dripping onto the floor anymore.
“Excellent, I love Thai food,” Grandma Rosie announced, sauntering toward the kitchen and grabbing herself a plate while Mom and I looked on. She was acting like literally nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.
“Alright, you sit down, eat some food, and tell us what on earth happened,” Mom finally ordered, sitting back down in front of her bowl.
“Oh, it was nothing,” Grandma Rosie said with a wave of her hand as green curry sploshed into her bowl.
“Tell us all about the nothing anyway.”
“Did you know your daughter lost her job?”
Now Grandma Rosie was deflecting? How on earth was I the more mature of the two of us?
“I do know, and we have already discussed it. Now, tell me what the two of you were up to, or I will go to Chief Enforcer Loeb.”
“You’d really snitch to the po-po on your own mother?”
“That’s right, I would,” Mom replied, her arms crossed. I took another delicious mouthful of food as I watched the show, wondering who was going to hold out the longest. I was cheering for Mom; I genuinely wanted to know what Grandma Rosie had gotten herself into.
Luckily for me, the threat of being turned over to the authorities was enough for Grandma Rosie, and she muttered under her breath about how her own daughter was willing to abandon her before regaling us all with her tale.
“Now, you all know that weasel Jason Oakland?”
“Yes,” I nodded. “He was seen having a fight with Blaze not long before he was killed.”
“Don’t tell me you’re also trying to get at the reward money?” Grandma Rosie said, shooting daggers at me. I rolled my eyes and ignored her, not wanting to invite her wrath. “But yes, Althea is right. I found out he and Blaze had a fight, and I didn’t know about what.”
“So you went to investigate,” Mom said with a sigh. “What happened?”
“Well, we didn’t want to be rude about it. So Connie and I found out where he lived from Antonia, who we ran into at the hairdresser. Connie thought we should dye our hair to look more inconspicuous.”
That explained why Grandma Rosie’s hair looked like lightning streaking out of her head.
“So your idea of blending in was trying to look like Bebe Rexha,” I said.
“Who?”
“Exactly,” I deadpanned. “Besides, it’s not like you and Connie blend in at the best of times. Literally every single person who lives here knows you. You’ve been staples of the town for longer than most people have been alive.”
“That’s why we needed to disguise ourselves. Everyone knows me as a sultry redhead. No one was expecting to see me as a blonde.”
I was pretty sure “sultry” wa
s not the first thing that came to mind when describing my grandmother.
“So you got your hair dyed, and Antonia told you all about Jason Oakland getting into a fight with Blaze, so you decided to hassle him.”
“Hassle is a strong word,” Grandma Rosie said. “We simply found him at work and asked him a few questions. Let me tell you, he acted very suspiciously. Didn’t want to tell us a thing.”
“Gee, I wonder why,” I said, rolling my eyes once more.
“Well, after that, we thought he was our main suspect, and we wanted to go see what he was going to do. After all, we must have put the fear of Rhea into him, what with our pointed questions and his marked desire to avoid answering them.”
“So you followed him,” I finished.
“We did. Do you know how boring stakeouts can be? I thought it would be like in the movies, where you can sit in a car and enjoy copious amounts of snacks, then after a minute or two the perp comes out and you catch him in the act.”
The perp? Grandma Rosie really had been watching too much television.
“So how long did it take?”
“He still had a few more hours left of his shift at work.”
“I didn’t realize Jason had a job right now.”
“Yes, even someone like Jason Oakland managed to not join the ranks of the unemployed,” Grandma Rosie said pointedly. “He works as a plant collector for Magical Pharmaceuticals. Apparently they were hiring in town.”
Oh, you had to be absolutely kidding me. They fired me and hired Jason Oakland instead? Well, I supposed they reaped what they sowed. He was probably going to start planting weed in the forest so he could hide it from the Enforcers.
“So if he’s working as a plant collector, how did you follow him?” Mom asked.
“Connie cast an invisibility spell on us both. We think he suspected we were there, since he kept moving around, but we were subtle.”
“The two of you are about as subtle as a pair of hippos going off a diving board,” I laughed, earning myself a glare from my grandmother.
“Where did the paint come from, then?” Mom asked, wincing slightly as though she were afraid of the answer.
“I’m trying to get there, if your daughter would finish besmirching my good character.”
I motioned for Grandma Rosie to continue, and she did.
“Anyway, before I was rudely interrupted, I was saying that the two of us snuck around, but he just seemed to go about collecting more plants. Although he did manage to confuse silverweed for white hemstail.”
I was hit with the briefest feeling of satisfaction at hearing that. Silverweed and white hemstail looked quite similar, but silverweed smelled like roses when you broke a stalk of it. That was how you could tell the difference. It would figure that Jason wouldn’t know that, and I hoped it ruined a whole bunch of Magical Pharmaceuticals potions when he handed them in. It would serve them right for firing me and hiring him as a replacement.
“When he was finished for the day, he went home. He lives on the first floor of one of those buildings downtown, but the problem was, his living room window is about six feet off the ground, so Connie and I couldn’t see inside.”
“So, of course, you didn’t decide like normal people to just go home and call it a day,” my mom sighed.
“Well, we’d come this far. We weren’t about to give up now. What if there was blood all over his apartment? You can’t make half a million abras without breaking a few laws along the way.”
“There are actually a lot of ways to make that much money without committing felonies,” my mom said with her arms crossed, glancing at me. She was obviously not particularly pleased with the life lessons her mother was teaching me.
“We didn’t actually commit any crimes, unless looking through someone’s window at night is a crime now.” My mom buried her face in her hands as Grandma Rosie continued. “Connie went down on the ground on her hands and knees, and I was able to stand on her back and peek through the window to have a look at what Jason was doing.”
“And Connie’s back managed to support you?” I asked skeptically. I mean, Grandma Rosie was a tiny little thing and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, but that’s still quite a bit for a woman in her mid-sixties to hold up on her back.
“Well, for a little while. We’re old, not decrepit,” Grandma Rosie shot at me. “Anyway, Jason moved into the other room, and he looked inside this chest he had in there. I couldn’t really see it from where I was, so I adjusted my footing, and then Connie started complaining that her back hurt, and next thing I know I’m falling to the ground. There were a bunch of old cans of paint stacked up next to the house, and I tumbled into them. That’s how I got the paint on me. He came out to investigate the noise so we scrambled out of there as fast as we could.”
“So, basically, you spied on a guy who owns some stuff in his house,” I summarized. “And you found absolutely nothing that proves he might be the killer.”
“You never know,” Grandma Rosie replied.
“Right,” I said, hiding a smile. Well, I still liked Jason Oakland as a suspect, even if Grandma Rosie hadn’t found anything that might have implicated him in the murder. I ate my soup and prepared for my own night of crime, hoping mine wasn’t going to end with me covered in paint, or worse.
Chapter 11
After heading back to the shed feeling full and satisfied—and with a Tupperware container full of leftovers that were definitely going to be tomorrow’s lunch—I measured out a vial full of the potion that I had made earlier, held my nose, and drank it.
Honestly, I had no idea if it smelled or tasted bad, but since potions tended to be a bit of a mixed bag, I never really took the risk anymore. I did my best to never smell potions if I could help it. After gulping down the mixture, which according to my book would last six hours, I didn’t look or feel any different. That was one of the interesting things about potions; a lot of the time, they didn’t have any noticeable effect, and you had to simply trust that you’d made them properly.
Luckily, while I was often fairly terrible at following instructions in everyday life, when it came to potions, I didn’t mess around. I was fairly confident this one was made correctly and would act exactly as planned.
Unfortunately, there was no way to tell without actually running into a shifter.
I made my way casually down the dark street toward the town hall. The streets were lit with old-fashioned lamps that magically cast a warm glow on the cobbles, giving the whole town an ethereal feel. The streets were practically deserted, everyone inside for the night, and I didn’t come across a single other paranormal as I made my way toward town hall.
The front door to the hall was open, and I stepped through as quietly as I could. A wolf shifter guarded the door, although rather than standing at attention, he was currently sitting on a nearby bench, stifling a yawn. I couldn’t exactly blame him; the night shift had to be significantly less interesting than the day shift here.
Still, if my potion hadn’t worked, he should have noticed me. Just to be sure, I waved my arms around in front of him a couple of times, but there was still no reaction. I grinned. Perfect. My potion worked. I was now invisible and scentless to all shifters, and at this time of night, there would be no one else in town hall except for the night shift Enforcers.
I made my way to the stairs and bounded lightly up them, careful not to make a sound. After all, wolf shifters had a heightened sense of hearing as well, and I didn’t want to risk getting caught because I bounded around like a hippo.
Reaching the second-floor landing, I paused and looked through the hallway that led to the Enforcers’ office. The door was still open, and I didn’t like that. It meant that in all likelihood, there was a ward to alert someone of any intruders. I pulled out my wand.
“Rhea, mother of the gods, if this doorway is warded, allow me entry.”
I whispered the incantation so as to avoid being heard by the gua
rd below, and it worked. As soon as I finished the chant, the doorway flashed red for an instant, then changed to green. I was in.
Doing a happy dance—quietly—I snuck into the Enforcers’ section of the town hall. I figured there would be no information on any of the regular desks. A murder was firmly in the “higher-ups” category of importance. So I made my way to Chief Enforcer Loeb’s office, repeated my spell to kill the ward, and entered, closing the door behind me. After all, I couldn’t be too careful; I didn’t want the shifter down below to do the rounds, see the open door, and find me. I knew he wouldn’t be able to see me, but that didn’t mean I had to flaunt my presence.
I made a beeline for the desk and my eyes scanned the myriad of papers, looking for anything that might have to do with Blaze’s death. They landed on a folder with the local hospital’s logo, and I grabbed it, opening it and scanning the top sheet.
“Jackpot,” I muttered under my breath. It was the report from the Healer who had looked at Blaze’s body. I sat down at the Chief Enforcer’s desk and read everything I could.
Blaze had officially died from poisoning. My eyebrows rose as soon as I read that. Seriously? I could have sworn he had been stabbed. Or, at the very least, had his neck broken. But no, the report was clear. He was poisoned, then stabbed—because it was post-mortem, that was why there was very little blood—and then his neck had been broken in the fall onto the ledge.
Someone really wanted to make sure they had done the job right.
But then, that meant that Blaze would have had to have drunk the potion. It had to be someone he was close to who had given it to him. After all, Blaze was in the middle of the woods when he died. No one drinks strange potions in the middle of the woods at night from someone they don’t trust. That’s some horror movie stuff right there.
I wondered if maybe there was a more accurate time of death, as well. After all, right now I had an approximately ten-hour window during which Blaze could have been killed. I scanned the report further. Sure enough, Blaze had been killed at eight in the morning.
Going through the Potions Page 6