He sneezed, and like a normal cat backed away from the sneeze, as if he could somehow escape his own nose. This sent him one foot over the edge of the desk, which he caught by digging his claws into the soft wood.
“Hmm,” he said, not reacting at all to his almost-falling off the desk. I was reacting to everything, my mind reeling a mile a minute. I unlocked the door and started out before I had any idea where I was going.
“Wait!” Kashmir called behind me. “We need to decide what to do next.”
“I’m calling the police. I’m calling anyone I can, that man collapsed!”
Kashmir shouted other objections, probably all very reasonable and right, to my back as I raced out of there. I didn’t care - I needed to do something. I’m not one of those people who can see an accident and just drive on by.
Except… No, I ignored the nagging voice that was threatening to fill my head with reasons to slow down. No excuse for not helping somebody.
I rushed through the kitchen, startling Lucy who had just slammed shut an oven. She barked and stood upright, looking at me with an enormously wide-eyed expression that carried something… was it guilt? But I didn’t have time to pursue.
“My purse!” I said, and she pointed to a counter. I grabbed my purse, yanked out my keys, and with a flick of my wrist sent the back door of the kitchen open with magical force. I was in my car, my phone to my ear, before some semblance of sense started to come to me.
“What are you going to tell the police?” sensible self said. “That you were looking in a window through the eyes of a bird when you saw a man collapse in his hotel room?”
“No,” I replied. “I’ll just say I was looking in his window, and saw it.”
“Looking from where? It was a second story window. Were you hiding in a tree, like a peeping tom?”
“No, I was birdwatching.”
“And now you’re driving across town to make a phone call instead of being there on scene, pounding on the door, talking to people in the immediate vicinity?”
“Shut up, self,” I growled out loud, and punched a number into my phone.
It was not the police.
“Max, pick up!” I shouted into the phone.
“Agh!” came the reply. Max Ransom had, indeed, picked up on barely the first ring and I had just shouted right into his ear. Max was a special friend to me since I’d come back to Lafay after being away in Los Angeles. He was a newspaperman who practically ran the Lafay Examiner single handedly, and he was a snoop even in his off hours. We’d made kind of a habit of looking in to things that happened in town, especially if they were related to magic.
“I need help,” I said, pulling my car out into traffic. I glanced over my shoulder, making sure there weren’t any police around to see me illegally talking on my phone while I drove around.
Or that might be an idea. Lead cops on a high-speed chase to the hotel! Then they’d be on scene… and arrest me. That was bad. My brain wasn’t thinking good things.
“Well, are you going to tell me what you need help with?” Max said, sounding a little put out.
“What? Oh, um… Through a certain method, I’ve seen a certain thing and—”
“You cast a magic spell and saw things through a cat’s eyes. I saw you do that once already, you know. You don’t have to be coy with me.”
I winced. Magic may have been, as I like to say, kind of an open secret, but even open secrets are still, at least kind of, secret. As in not talked about casually, or blurted about over some open phone channel… but then that was being really paranoid. Did I think that someone could actually be listening in to my phone? I took a deep breath, and then, as quickly and calmly as I could, gave Max the few details he needed to know about the situation.
“Huh,” he said, and then, “Where are you right now? What street?”
“Heading down Monte Vista right now, toward Main. Where are you?”
“Stepping out of my office two blocks away from the hotel. I’ll probably beat you there. By the time you get in sight, I’ll have things set up.”
“Things set up? I don’t even know what we’re doing. Max? Max?” But he’d hung up on me without giving me an inkling of what he had planned.
Typical. Max thought dangerous and intriguing things were ‘fun’. Instead of to be avoided at… if not all costs, then most costs, like normal people. Except I had teamed up with my talking cat to hitch a ride in the brain of a small bird to follow a man carrying a magic parcel that was taken (stolen?) by some balcony diving woman, seconds before he had collapsed in a hotel room. I wasn’t operating anywhere near the same zip code as normal people.
I was within sight of the hotel, barely half a city block away, when I saw Max walking into the front. He was wearing his normal everyday wear - a beige sports coat and jeans combination that looked vaguely respectable, a mane of hair that grew puffier and less ruly as the day went on - right now, from this distance I couldn’t quite tell but I think it was a little tangled, not yet in full wild-man territory.
And I was relieved that he wasn’t wearing some kind of costume, like I’d seen him do before. He didn’t dress up as a lineman to go climb a telephone pole, or have on some kind of construction worker’s outfit. Which meant whatever he had planned, it wasn’t going to be terribly elaborate.
I parked on the street just outside the hotel. My parking space wasn’t directly out the door, but from where I was I could see the alleyway behind the hotel, and the balconies for the upper level rooms. If push came to shove, I might have been able to hoist myself up on the half-fence that surrounded the ground floor patios, then take a leap and get on to one of those balconies.
Then slip, fall, and break my neck on cheap patio furniture. Again, my brain was not supplying me with with the plans to win the day, just nightmare visions of everything that could go wrong. And I would have to be sly as I got into the hotel, because I didn’t know what the plan was. Max had used me as a second in his undercover schemes before. I’ve been a secretary, a camera girl, a drinking companion. What was his Girl Friday going to have to cope with this time? I thought as I pushed open the front door.
“Oh, here she is,” Max said to the young man at the hotel counter as I strode confidently into the lobby, ready for most anything. The man looked like he had barely broken out of his teens, and the suit he wore had a kind of aspirational feeling to it - like it was something to grow into.
He gave me an appraising look, and turned to Max.
“So, that’s a witch,” he said.
I stopped in my tracks, my eyes opening up wide.
“Uh…”
“And you spied on a guy looking through a bird’s eyes? Wild. Okay, let’s go and see if he’s okay.”
The desk man pulled a key ring from his desk, set a sign on the counter that said, “Back in 5 minutes” and walked to the single elevator that served the entire building.
After a moment of stunned silence, I shuffled behind Max, who had a grin on his face that… I did not appreciate.
“I cannot believe,” I said, through gritted teeth, “that you think you can just blab about this to anyone.”
“Julio’s savvy,” Max said. “He’s a… what do I call you, Julio? Clandestine reporter?”
“I’m a snitch who takes your money to tell you about things that go on in this hotel,” he said, with perfect complacency. “And I know about a lot of things that go on in town, too. Like the fact there’s a low key magic rivalry that’s getting hotter and hotter.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, with a very prim sniff.
“No? You and the Jiggs aren’t all like, pow pow pow?” He punched the air, in a mock-boxing match. “Because I’ve been hearing things…”
“From where? From whom? Forget it, there’s nothing to hear.” I felt more mortified by the word. I was acting foolish, but dang it, it was dangerous to have everybody know about what was going on with me. That someone I’d never met before could appa
rently know all about it…
Before Julio could insinuate anymore or Max could spread his grin wider, the elevator let us off on the second floor.
“Now this guy checked in under the name Fritz Lang, so I knew that he was hiding something from the beginning,” Julio said.
“How do you know that’s not his real name?” I said.
Both of the guys gave me a weird look. “This guy isn’t Fritz Lang. That’s a movie director.”
I looked at them, still blank.
“Metropolis? Dr. Mabuse?” Max said, as if those words were supposed to mean something to me. He looked at Julio.
“How about that Spencer Tracy movie, Fury? He did that when he first came to America, after fleeing the Nazis—”
I shrieked. “Boys! I don’t care about ancient movies! There’s a man who might be hurt in there.” I managed to control my voice down to something like a whisper.
“Oh, right. But his real name’s not gonna be Fritz Lang, is all,” Julio said, knocking on the door at the end of the hall. “Sir? I need to check on something in your room. I’m going to be using my passkey, sir.”
Julio didn’t wait for anything like an answer. He used his key - actually a card that, I supposed, opened every door in the entire hotel, and the latch on the door clicked open. He opened it, peered inside, and grimaced.
I charged by him and was hit full in the face with a smell - garlic. Tomato. Melted cheese. And something else, some sort of perfumed scent I couldn’t immediately place. Lavender, maybe rose.
“This room,” I said, my voice full of portent, “smells like pizza.”
Then I looked down the hall and saw the fallen form, laying just like it had when I’d seen it through the eyes of the cute little bird. Not-Fritz Lang’s hand stretched out toward the sliding glass door, his other hand was crumpled around something near his heart. Inside it, in a literal death grip, was a half-eaten slice of pizza.
His eyes were open and stared at me in the doorway, but they didn’t see a thing.
Chapter 6
“No,” I said, taking a step back away from the room.
“Yeah, I think he is dead,” Max said, dispassionately but not cruelly. He wasn’t a bad guy, all told, but I didn’t care. The only word that was in my head was a big fat loud red NO.
“I have to call the police, Max,” Julio said, and I saw him give me a look, like he was afraid I was going to start crying or shouting or something, and he needed to do something manful about it. Heck, I’d very happily describe myself as a girly-girl, but at the moment I did not need some man patting me on the head and telling me things were going to be okay.
I needed to follow the sign in my mind, the one that said, NO.
“I’m not going to touch anything, Julio,” Max said, even as the flash from his camera went off. I glanced up at it, and the entire scene flared up in my head, caught in that single, almost jagged moment of bright light. Details stood out to me, things that for an investigator would be clues.
The name on the closed pizza box. The scent of something like perfume that mingled with the pizza scent. Connections to memories from just minutes ago, forever it seemed, that I flew with a bird and watched…
I saw that bird in the camera flash. He still waited on the balcony, looking confused as to how he got there and a little lost. Bouncing around on a strange place far from where he normally roosted. I’d wrapped that bird up in all this, and now what was going to happen to him? A loose end in an investigation…
“No!” I said aloud again, and turned away from the awful scene and the awful business that it implied - the business of piecing together murders, sifting through clues and putting your head in the worst mindset it was possible to have it in - that of the murderer, so you can figure out why they did what they did.
“Mimi, look at this,” Max said, not having heard my declaration, so I answered him by turning my back to him and charging out the door, turning the other way away from the elevators and toward the stairs. I pumped my legs as fast as they could take me away from death, toward the outside light.
Dumb old tears started to fall from my eyes as I leaned against the metal bar of the door that would take me there, to the fresh air and the parking lot. Well, I wasn’t going to go outside crying like some foolish girl, but the tears also wouldn’t stop.
Not that I knew the strange man, not that I was affected personally by him dying. But then a decent voice in the back of my mind called me out for that: why shouldn’t you be affected? Somebody you didn’t know but who might have been decent and kind, and was at least alive enough to be weird and memorable, and now he wasn’t. Where did you, Mimi Auclair, get the idea you shouldn’t feel bad for seeing a man dead?
And then, like lightning the root of the problem came to me. These words came to my brain:
“It’s not like he’s the first dead body I’ve ever seen.”
Not acceptable! I am not a hard-bitten investigator with years of doing this stuff under my belt. I make tea. And I’m a witch, but not some witch like you’d see on TV shows that have witches and they’re always killing people and summoning demons and the like. My sister Sibyl’s claimed career as a teenage demon slayer notwithstanding, I wasn’t sure there was any such thing as demons, anyway. I’d never seen one, and, and, and…
With a big sniff, and a dab of my eyes, I stood up straight and looked tough. Ish. Toughish, and determined. There were police coming and they could figure this out. Max would be disappointed in me, but I couldn’t help that. This wasn’t the business I was in. I was in the being nice business, and this stuff was as far from nice as the world got. So, I took a deep breath, pushed on the metal bar latch that kept the door closed, and took a step out into the world.
And was almost immediately bowled over by someone rushing to get into the stair-well from the parking lot. He hit me hard enough that I fell back on my posterior, slamming against the hard concrete at the bottom of the stairwell with a loud smack.
“Ah!” I said, and my hands flung out to ward off the attack.
“Oh crud,” the man said, barely able to stop himself from falling head-long forward into the waiting concrete stairs. Would have served him right, too.
“Small female, knocked over. Can’t breathe,” I said, the words just kind of coming out while I tried to choke out some sense. “Ow.”
“I’m really awfully… hey, Tea lady.”
My eyes, fresh with tears from pain now, instead of emotional frustration, blinked up at a vision above me that first was blurry and waving, then solidified into something that still didn’t look real. It was too perfect.
Mr. Handsome stood above me, his blue-black hair somehow shining in the darkened stairwell, his look of abashment somehow still seemingly cocky. He reached out a hand for me, and I moved my own hand to it with the intention of pushing his away, showing how independent I was even if I was knocked on my tuffet.
When I waved my hand, he caught it in his own rugged grip and pulled me up with so little effort, I might have been a small child. He smiled at me, then suddenly his hand was on my back. I yelped, and jumped back. His hand came away a piece of dark tape that had stuck to my jacket.
“You look a little dusty,” he said, still smiling. “You want I should help pat you down?”
“Oh, you think just because you’re the handsomest guy around, everything you do is completely charming?” I said, wapping my own hands on the butt of my jeans and glaring at him. He was hard to glare at - something about looking at him just made you want to smile and giggle, even if he hadn’t said anything.
“I think what?” he said, cocking his head to the side.
“You think that just because you’re so good looking—”
“I’m good looking? Hmm, good to know.” And now he smiled in earnest.
He must have been some kind of Warlock, because while totally not meaning to, I smiled right back. Then I broke my smile and looked fierce.
My idea of fierce and Mr. Handsome�
��s must be different, because he broke out in an enormous, genuine, ego-bruising laugh.
“So, what are you even doing here?” I said, still being very gruff and not at all nice. “Have you been following me around? And what’s your name, anyway? I can’t keep thinking of you as Mr…”
I cut myself off before I gave him even more of an ego trip than he was already apparently having.
“Mr. What? You have to tell now, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Mr. Ego,” I said, my chin moving to the air so I looked defiant. Unfortunately it must have brought my eyes into some light because Mr. Hand… Ego... Mr. whomever moved forward suddenly, a look of genuine concern on his chiseled features.
“Here, you’ve been crying, and not just because of a little bump. If I tell you my name, will it make everything better?” He touched my chin lightly and turned my face. It was such an invasive gesture I should have completely shied from it. But something in me did not mind.
“Why would me knowing your name make me feel any better?”
“Because it would help you to know that Henry Kramer, sometimes Hank to my friends, isn’t the sort of guy to be following ladies around a town that he’s just visiting.” He waited a beat, then let go of my chin. I’d inadvertently been leaning into that slight grip, and I stumbled a little as he let go.
“Henry Kramer?”
“Sometimes Hank, and I’m here because I’m not from around here.”
“That doesn’t make…” I began, then stopped, and felt a little dumb. “It’s the only good hotel in town.”
“The lady gets it in one. Now, since I’m paying rent to have a little space here to my own, I’d better ask why you followed me here and what you intend to do to me. Especially now that you have an advantage over me.”
I looked at him, completely baffled. He smiled and said, “You know my name, and have never given me yours.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Right. Mimi Auclair, if you please. Or if you don’t, I can’t help that.”
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 4