“I got into his hotel room. It was strange, in the way hotel rooms are, do you know what I mean?”
I shook my head.
“Like, life goes on in those rooms. People live, sometimes die. Honeymoons happen there, trysts, business deals. All kinds of things. Hotel rooms are vibrant with life if you’re sensitive to the signs of life.”
“Okay,” I said, still not quite getting it. His magic must be a lot different from mine.
“But that room felt like it had been scrubbed clean. It should have been suffused with the life force of that man, that Lang. He ate in there, right? You said you saw pizza in his hand?”
I nodded, but I still hadn’t found anything to say.
“Okay, that’s one of the major signs of civilization. If you eat in a place, sleep in it, bathe in it, meet someone in it and spend time with them, you leave some force there. But it was blank. Like it had been bleached.”
“Okay, but if these forces are so present, and so powerful, what could do something like that?”
“There’s only one force in the world I know.” He held his hand out. Beckoned me closer, brought his face down near mine to whisper. “It had to be—”
“Hi-ya!” A blur thundered in from the unlocked door, which slapped open like a hurricane gale was ripping it from its hinges. It hit Hank full force in the back and sent him sprawling to the ground. A pant-suited flurry whipped into the room like a spirit of vengeance, and drove its knees into the man’s back, one hand coming forward and slamming his head into the ground.
I screamed, loud as I could…
“Sibyl, no!”
Chapter 10
After that initial scream right from the center of my consciousness, I kept my mouth shut. If I said anything, it would come out as an incoherent whimper, or just a shout of the madness I was feeling encroaching on my poor brain. PTA Sibyl, who’d just left out the back door had come back in the front, and was beating the heck out of Mr. Handsome.
Then the beating stopped, and she dragged his now stunned form toward the kitchen. She looked up at me with the same ice-cold expression she wore when I’d questioned the efficacy of public education:
“The door. Lock it.”
I rushed backward, following orders and locking the front door while she dragged poor Hank through the swinging kitchen door. After a few feet, his hands raised up and he shook his head from side to side, clearing out cobwebs and looking like a man just woken up from a dream… or I supposed a nightmare. The nightmare of former slayer Sibyl Tanner, who, despite having had two kids and years of mostly easy living, was taut and strong as wire.
“I need rope and a chair. Do you have rope and a chair?” she said, when we’d all gotten into the kitchen and Hank had come enough to his senses to start making sputtering sounds, like a man just pulled out of a pool.
The door from the kitchen closed, and like that was my cue, I let out an enormous, ear-shattering scream of, “What?!”
Sibyl blinked at me, and nodded. “A rope and a chair. I require a rope and a chair, do you have these things for me?”
“Why would I have rope?” I said, my volume so loud it made my voice bounce off the metal cabinets of the kitchen, creating a maelstrom of cacophony.
“Because when bad guys come around, they need to be tied up. You play detective, you should have rope. I may have some in my car, hold on. Don’t let him get up.”
Sibyl sprinted out the back, slamming open the doors as if she was suddenly in a game of tackle football, and determined to show the boys she could hold her own. My mouth had dropped open like some screw in my jaw had been set loose, and I didn’t know how to get it back tight again. I stared at the doors as they slammed open then closed. Then I stared down at my feet, at the prone man who was up on one elbow, shaking his head.
“What the…” was all I said, and then I looked at Hank again. A little blood trickled from his nose, and he looked distinctly wall-eyed, but other than that it didn’t seem like Sibyl had caused any permanent damage. Nothing that I could see, at least, though I bet his ego was black and blue.
“Who was that?” he said, in a voice that sounded dry and dusty. It made his normally dulcet tones sound a little scratchy and unpleasant.
“Um… that was my sister,” I said. “She’s got something against you. And has a lot of training and… well…”
I was debating whether or not to just spill the beans on Sibyl being one of the demon hunters that Hank had claimed he’d worked with. It would explain things to him…
But I was at cross-loyalties here. On the one hand Hank had just saved my life from a demon that had been sent… to do what? Not kill me, I don’t think. It had to be connected to the man who died in the hotel, the man who had, as far as we could tell, been looking for Sibyl.
A man who was apparently harried and paranoid because somebody had been following him. The very somebody who was getting up onto his feet, shaking his head. His eyes darted to the door, then to mine. “Lock it. Keep her out of here. She’s a madwoman.”
I surprised myself by shaking my head. “No, Hank. We’re going to hear her out.”
“You can do whatever you want, I’m getting out of here. Right now.”
I grabbed the nearest thing, a rolling pin that sat in a basket on one counter, and held it out like a sword.
“No, you’re not,” I said.
Hank looked at me with complete incredulity, and then his knitting brow relaxed. His stance changed, rolling forward on his feet. I didn’t know anything about fighting, for real, but this looked like a fighter’s stance to me, who was armed with no training, no spells prepared, and a rolling pin that was not, on balance, the most formidable of weapons.
I must have looked ridiculous to Hank, but he spared me the indignity of smirking, or outright laughing at me. He kept his eyes locked on me, as his left hand reached for his right.
“Take that glove off, and you’re going to regret it,” I said. I brandished the rolling pin in what I’d hoped was a threatening manner, and wondered what the heck Sibyl was doing that was taking too long.
“Look, little witch, did you forget what you saw this afternoon? I have absolutely no desire to hurt you. Far from it, I like you, kid. But if it’s a question of me being safe, then the gloves are literally coming off. Or you can step away from the door.”
I shook my head. Hank sighed, and pulled his right glove off.
“You’re forgetting something, yourself,” I said.
“What’s that?” Hank lifted his hand up and move his thumb and middle finger together. He was preparing to snap his fingers, and probably unleash something deadly and dangerous.
“You’re forgetting that you’re in my kitchen.”
Then I whispered a power word, and imagined that the floor beneath Hank’s feet was not made of hard tile, but of very, very slippery tile. Wet and waxed and covered with ice. Then I stepped away from the door.
He kept his eyes on me, kept his fingers together, and stepped toward the door leading out of the kitchen. The clamor that followed was as if someone had tied a rope around his legs, and then pulled on it, very hard. He flew forward and slammed into the ground. His glove went flying. There was a shock of sound, like a tiny, localized clap of thunder, as whatever spell he’d prepared fell apart when he fell. He hit the ground harder than Sibyl had hit him, and he groaned harder, too.
The back door flung back open and Sibyl raced in, something plastic wrapped around one shoulder, like an extension cord.
“Did you get a chair?” Sibyl said. “Wait, I didn’t hit him that hard. What happened?”
“The fella tried to get fresh. I laid him out.”
“With a rolling pin? You could crack his skull with that, it’s too dangerous. I need to ask him questions first.”
I was about ready to get dangerous with Sibyl, if that was the attitude she was going to take when I knocked a man down without all of her super-training and experience. Then I grinned, because I knew what I co
uld say that would really get her goat.
“I knocked him down with magic. Very practical household magic that I use every single day.”
She glared at me, and shook her head. Like I’d just told a dirty joke at some meeting of the Proper Young Women Acting Like Old Biddies or whatever organizations she joined or ran. Her disgust was all the more grating when I realized what she had wrapped around her shoulder wasn’t an extension cord. It was jumper cables.
“What are you going to do with those?” I said, completely unable to keep my voice calm. Sister looked like she was going right off the deep end.
“I’m going to tie him up, because I’m a normal suburban person who doesn’t keep tons of rope around in her car. But there’s, like, three of Cathy’s shoelaces in the backseat. How do you lose a shoelace? What kind of effort did she put in to get this out of her shoes, and then…”
“Sibyl, focus,” I said, just as Hank groaned and tried, again, to get to his feet. They slipped out from under him, again, but he caught himself on tiles that I hadn’t pulled my magic whammy on, and was able to tentatively balance himself.
“Chair?” she said.
“You don’t need him sitting, just attached to something it’s not easy to move, right?”
Sibyl nodded, stepping closer to the man. He looked winded, but he could be putting it on, and if he grabbed one of us he wasn’t going to just be making a pass. Especially with that one ungloved hand he could conduct spells through. Dangerous and deadly.
I raced to the corner of the kitchen, and grabbed a big metal cart. It wasn’t one of the tiny, dainty and cute looking tray carts we would move around in the shop proper, with elegant curlicues and lattice in the design. This was for putting food in and away. It was big, it was heavy, it had locks on its wheel and if it accidentally ran over Hank, it would probably compress him flat as a dime.
So, if all we needed was a thing to attach to him, this was the best thing.
I clicked off the wheel locks, and pushed the thing over toward the two of them. Hank still on his hands and knees, Sibyl a wary distance away from him, the jumper cables held out and weirdly menacing. I knew she wasn’t going to do more than attach him to the cart, but it sure looked like she had something more… I don’t know, more like something you’d see on a cable TV show than our normal, nicer, broadcast TV lives.
Hank must have thought so too, because the second he realized what was coming at him, he began to scramble again, and again went down. The instant before Sybil stepped on the same patches of ground, I canceled the spell. It happened right when Hank was slipping, so when he expected to slip, his foot met solid floor, and it propelled him upward, and backward and right into the enormous cart.
It became easier to tie him to it when he was leaning against it and groaning, the wind knocked out of him from banging right smack dab into the thing, going at full power.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” I said to him, looking down at his strained, haggard face. “You’re just gonna get yourself hurt some more, and until we figure out what’s going on—”
“I know what’s going on,” Sibyl said, darkly. “Wilhelm Spengler was murdered in my town. He’d been running from something, pursued across the country, and it finally caught up to him here. But you shouldn’t have let him get this far, Warlock. Because now you’re going to pay for what you did.”
“Okay, fine,” Hank said a little of the old aplomb back in his voice. “Let me know what that was, and I’ll pay for it.”
“You know what you did,” Sibyl said, practically spitting. Filled with righteous fury like this, she did not look like the PTA-mom who tut-tutted at every single thing someone else might be doing. She had fire in her eyes and her voice, and was getting ready to spit it out all over this man here.
It was impressive. It was scary. And if I didn’t intervene somehow, it was going to cause all kinds of problems for everybody.
“Sibyl, take a breath. Use your inside voice. What are you accusing Hank of?” I said, trying to sound very reasonable.
“Hank? Hank?” she said, turning some of her fire on me. “Has he already gotten to you?”
“Nobody’s gotten to me. But he did happen to save my life this evening, when a demon tried to… throw black air at me. Or something, I don’t know what it was, but it was scary and I was in no way prepared for it. He saved me.”
That hot rage turned into something different, colder. It was almost the same expression that I’d seen on Hank’s face when he got the notion he was going to have to fight through me. Holy heck, my sister was turning on me? No, this had to be a mistake, this…
“Leave, Mimi,” Sibyl said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Leave, right now. You can go away and then I’ll do what I have to do. This is a demonologist, or something, and he’s hiding things. I’m going to make him talk.”
Sibyl took another step toward Hank, who was lashed to the cart. I… made a quick decision, said a quiet word under my breath, and my sister’s feet fell out from under her.
“What the…” she said, and went down like a ballerina in a tub of sardines. Oddly graceful and ridiculous at once.
Sibyl did some kind of acrobatic move, the sort I’d never ever seen her do but what must have been second nature to her from all of her demon slaying training. If her hands could have found some purchase on the floor, it probably would have looked really cool. As things stood, she just fell more and more spectacularly.
“Sibyl, I think you should stop moving.”
She looked at me with a glare that had all that fire, all that rage she was building up inside her. Then she dropped it with a sigh, and sat down. She still slid a couple of feet forward.
“What have you done to this floor? I feel like I’m sitting in tapioca.”
“I… how would you know what sitting in tapioca felt like?” Her response was not filled with gentle good humor, but I let it slide. “Anyway, this whole kitchen is wired with spells from Grand-Mere, and I’ve augmented it with a number of my own. So I can make the tile soft, so stuff I drop doesn’t break. Or slick, because… because I can do cool things as a witch.”
“You didn’t make it soft for me,” Hank said, his strained voice sounding almost like a wheeze.
“That’s because you were gonna spell at me. You took the glove off, I had to teach you a lesson. I’m teaching both of you a lesson because you’re both so big and tough and want everyone to know it, but weak little me is going to hear things out before anyone does anything they can’t take back.”
“He killed Wilhelm,” Sibyl said, a little of her heat coming back.
“Did I? Could you tell me who Wilhelm is first, so I can know who it is I’ve killed?” Hank said.
“Obviously, Wilhelm is Fritz Lang,” I said.
“What?” Sibyl said, looking at me quizzically. “Like the movie director?”
Am I the only person around who doesn’t watch ancient movies and memorize the credits? Sheesh.
“That was the name he used at the hotel. Where he brought the package that wasn’t there when I saw his body.”
“You saw his body? What had happened to him? How did this warlock kill him?” Sibyl said, her voice becoming lower, more choked with emotion.
“Wait, you don’t know? You didn’t come from the hotel?” I said.
“One of us is a respectable citizen who doesn’t barge in on crime scenes and get in the way of the police doing their jobs. The other is you, Mimi. But when that other snoop Max couldn’t find you, he called me and told me what happened. Then I talked to Lucy and knew just who she was talking about from her description.”
“So you didn’t go and see him?” I said, with that one thought that had been nagging me through the whole night - who was the woman I’d seen going out the balcony? With the way the bird saw things, recognizing her face was impossible, and her build and movement didn’t look particularly like Sibyl.
But it could have been. And almost the ins
tant that woman left, the man had died.
Hearing that she hadn’t even seen him was a great relief. But then…
“Wait, you said he’d been followed. How would you know that if you hadn’t seen him?”
“Because I called some of my old contacts. And learned things, particularly about a warlock that had been shadowing his steps since he set foot in the country.” She turned her dark glare to Hank. I looked at him, too, and tried to see if I could read anything in his expression.
He looked tired, and patient, and a little like a man who was certain something bad was going to happen to him, no matter what, and so he wasn’t going to get too excited.
But he’d saved me from the demon. He didn’t get a chance to go up into this Wilhelm’s room, and he certainly wasn’t the woman who had escaped from the balcony.
The bird and I had looked in the room and the door was closed. No one else was in there. I was sure of it.
I loosed the cables that connected Hank to the large cart.
“What?” Sibyl shouted, struggling against the tapioca floor. I leaned down toward her.
“He couldn’t have done it. Wilhelm was poisoned, I’m sure of it. He was clutching a piece of poisoned pizza that did him in.”
Sibyl stared at me, hard, angry, betrayed. I closed my eyes, I couldn’t look at her anymore.
“And I’ll prove it to you,” I said. “I’ll find out who did it to him, who hurt him. I’ll find his murderer.”
Sigh.
Chapter 11
“But you said no,” Max said, looking at me with a blank expression that was threatening to turn into a big ol’ face splitting grin that said, cheek to cheek, ‘I told you so.’
“I know what I said. Circumstances have required me to… revise my… damn it, Max. I gotta do it, so just let me do it without making me feel like a big dummy.”
We were both in the front of my tea shop, me with two notepads in front of me. One of them was a list of all the stuff I had to do to prepare for the Tarkington wedding. The other was my murder investigatin’ book. Both of them were things I had to do, without fail, and on a strict deadline, or else either my business would go under, or my sister would do something nasty and permanent to a man I was sure in my little pitter-pattering heart was innocent.
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 8