by SM Reine
David Nicholas popped the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Not since you killed her.” The words fell hard, like he’d just swung a sledgehammer and smashed into both of us with the accusation.
I didn’t know how to respond. The nightmare was looking at me—looking into me—and it felt like he knew everything rattling around inside my head.
“He knows that Connie is dead but not how it happened,” Fritz said, his voice tinny and distant. “That means he doesn’t know anything at all. Don’t worry about it.”
I wanted to ask Fritz what the hell he meant, but I couldn’t talk to myself without looking crazy.
“We were in contact with Connie because of concerns about unusual infernal activity in the Reno-Sacramento territory,” Suzy said. “Do you have any information about that?”
“Reno-Sacramento territory,” David Nicholas echoed. His eyes flicked between us and then settled on me. “You a kopis?”
I didn’t need Fritz’s definitions to understand that question. Kopides were a class of super-strong, super-fast humans that were born to hunt demons. All of them were men—something about the ability being carried on the Y chromosome. Many of them were employed by the Union. So I understood what he meant when he asked me if I was a kopis, but I didn’t understand why he would ask that in response to Suzy’s question.
I hesitated to answer, hoping that Fritz would fill in with more information. He didn’t.
“We’re witches,” I finally said.
David Nicholas snorted and sat back without continuing that line of thought. Smoke curled out the opposite corner of his mouth. “Always thought it was queer to call men ‘witches.’ Should be sorcerers or something. Unless you’re queer, mate?”
He was trying to provoke me. He was going to have to accuse me of something actually insulting if he wanted to do that. “Everyone who casts magic is called a witch.”
“Queer,” he said again. “Very queer.” The last millimeter of cigarette burned away, smoldering at the filter. He flicked it into the brass bucket of sludge. “You’re not a kopis and aspis trying to take up residence in the territory. So who the fuck are you, and why is any of this your business?”
“He doesn’t know about the OPA,” Fritz said immediately. “Don’t tell him.”
Shit.
I couldn’t whip out our usual cover story, which was that we worked for the FBI. Demons knew that the FBI was officially unaware of the preternatural.
I looked to Suzy for a suggestion, and she looked back at me. Her face was colorless. She was being hit by the horrible aura of David Nicholas’s office just as bad as I was, and she looked like she was on the verge of passing out.
Double shit.
I said the only thing I could think of saying. “We’re concerned citizens.” Smooth, Cèsar.
The weight of the air in the office grew as David Nicholas stood. I tensed, but he only drew out a pack of cigarettes.
He said nothing as he extracted a new cigarette, lit it, stuck the box back into his pocket.
Lots of small, mundane gestures. Nothing out of the ordinary. But for a moment, I imagined a knife in his hand. I imagined him leaping across the desk, burying it in my chest, watching the wound flake and rot.
Fear flushed over my skin, making my heart accelerate. Suzy actually made a tiny noise in the back of her throat.
Our reactions didn’t go unnoticed. David Nicholas took a long drag off of his cigarette as he smirked. “Okay,” he said. “You’re new here. This is how it works: You want information from me, you pay for it. Cash first. Then I’ll tell you what I want you to know.”
Suzy didn’t hesitate. She pulled out her wallet.
“Five hundred,” she said.
My surprise barely dented the fear choking me. Suzy was better at bribery than that. She knew to start low, use the figures to manipulate the informant, get what we wanted cheap.
Guess she wanted out of the manager’s office as much as I did.
David Nicholas was suddenly standing in front of us and I hadn’t seen him move. I jerked back in my chair. If it hadn’t been for the trash pressed against the back, I might have fallen over.
He plucked the money out of Suzy’s hand.
“You detected a surge of infernal energy because the territory’s overlord is waking up,” David Nicholas said, thumbing through the twenties. He seemed satisfied. He tucked them in his front pocket.
He was standing too close to me. I needed to get away.
“Who is the overlord?” Fritz asked over the earpiece. Suzy’s jaw was hanging open. Her pupils were dilated. “Hey! Listen! Ask him who the overlord is!”
My mouth worked silently. I licked my lips, but my tongue was dry. “What is—who’s the overlord?”
Speaking made David Nicholas turn his black gaze on me, and all I could see was his skeletal face. “The Night Hag. She’s been sleeping for decades, but she’s starting to stir.”
Fritz was muttering in my ear. “Night Hag… Night Hag? Hmm…” He wasn’t going to be any help. He didn’t have any information about her that we didn’t.
We were alone—at David Nicholas’s mercy.
“Why are you telling us this?” Suzy asked. She was bolder now that the demon wasn’t looking at her. She actually managed to stand up, straightening her suit. “Connie thought this was fatal knowledge.”
Everything’s so dark.
“It is,” David Nicholas said. It sounded like he was talking at us from a million miles away.
I imagined those long, slender fingers ripping out my throat. I imagined the wound blistering and rotting away until there was nothing but cracked spine under my chin.
“You want more information about what’s going on, who she is, what happened to Connie? There’s a mine a mile north of Fallon. Silverton. Go take a look at it.” His smile was the yellow crescent of the waning moon, teeth stubby and brittle and pocked. “Everything you need to know is in the Silverton Mine. Every little bit of fatal knowledge you bitches could possibly want.”
I stood. Felt Suzy’s hand grab my shoulder.
The trash in the manager’s office was swelling, closing in on us. The roof was dropping as the floor sank under our feet. On the game room floor, dealers flicked cards with the devil on them at the players. I glanced over my shoulder. The exit was so far away. I pushed Suzy toward it.
“Call me if you have any other questions,” David Nicholas said pleasantly.
CHAPTER SIX
TO SAY I SLEPT poorly after my meeting would be an understatement.
What do you think about when I say the word “nightmares?” Whatever you think of, I’m sure it’s plenty bad enough. Showing up at the office naked on the day of a big presentation. Losing all your money. Death by fire. All the normal mortal fears.
Those are good fears to have. Loss of life, or loss of security. Bad dreams were a way for our subconscious to help us prepare for the unlikely worst. Unlikely, unless you’re the type that routinely shows up for meetings naked. More power to you. I won’t judge.
Until the night I met David Nicholas in Craven’s, that’s how I would have thought of nightmares, too.
Now, that word meant skinny skeleton-men with sallow flesh, and the utter, absolute suffocation of darkness. The nothingness of death. The inescapable everything of pain.
I dreamed horrible dreams and couldn’t wake up. David Nicholas haunted my night, and all I knew was rotting, boiling, suffering, sinking. Over and over again through the eternity of sleep.
And the case had barely even been started.
“You look like crap.”
I tried to focus on the woman who had spoken to me. I’d finally escaped the black pit of my bedroom, but I wasn’t really awake yet. “Huh? What?” I asked, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.
Finally, I managed to focus on Isobel. And that woke me up real fast.
It looked like she’d already been awake long enough to shower and exercise. She was wearing nylon shorts with sli
ts up the sides that went all the way to the elastic waistband, giving lots of breathing room to her meaty thighs. I could watch the concussions ripple through her creamy brown flesh with every step she took.
She wore a white tank top on top of that, sheer enough that I could see the pattern on her sports bra—sheer enough that I could see her navel, for fuck’s sake—and the cloth could barely contain her breasts. Those jiggled when she walked, too.
Isobel had headphones around her neck. A morose Arcade Fire beat thumped from the speakers. The cable disappeared into the back of her shorts, where it must have connected to an MP3 player, but I couldn’t see it, no matter how hard I looked for the lump. And I was definitely looking hard.
After a long night of dark dreams, Isobel was vibrant life. Young and gorgeous and ripe.
Pretty funny for a woman that spoke to the dead.
“Pick your poison,” she said, lifting her hands. She had a cereal box on one side and a carton of eggs on the other.
My eyes trailed to the space between her arms. The two pleasantly round objects between her arms, to be exact. “Eggs,” I said automatically, before my brain actually processed the question. “Wait, why?”
“I’m preparing breakfast for both of us. You look like you’re barely alive, much less up for cooking.”
“I’m not much of a morning person.” Even when I wasn’t being tormented by nightmares every second that I was asleep.
“Luckily for you, I am,” Isobel said. “Pick your pleasure.”
Now that was a loaded offer. “Are you an angel?”
She just laughed at me. But I stopped her when she moved to get a skillet out of the drawer. I was still caught up in the murky haze of nightmares, thinking of the brown fluid in David Nicholas’s spittoon, the deep shadows in his eyes. My stomach was a hard knot.
The fact that Isobel was about to cook in a kitchen where Fritz had dissected a demon the night before wasn’t whetting my appetite, either.
“Help me find the biggest stockpot we’ve got,” I said.
“Huh?”
“For potions.”
“Breakfast potions?” she asked.
“No, just potion-potions. I’ll skip eating this morning.” And maybe for the rest of the week, I thought as my stomach lurched again. I couldn’t get David Nicholas’s thrashing black tongue out of my mind.
Isobel squeezed my bicep. “How do you have these if you don’t feed yourself properly?”
“Magic,” I said. No, really—it was literally magic. I lifted some weights, but I didn’t have time to work out enough to pack the kind of muscle I was carrying.
But she laughed like I was joking. “How about you find the stockpot? I can’t learn on an empty stomach.”
I searched through the cabinets while she cooked breakfast for herself. Most of the cookware was hiding in the pantry, including a stockpot big enough to cook an ostrich. I set it on the burner next to Isobel’s and grabbed my herbs.
The OPA had sent us a package of everything the average witch needed to cast spells. They hadn’t sent us a couple of my usual mainstays, like oak ash or grave dirt, but I picked out a few substitutes and arrayed them over the counter in the order that I’d need to use them.
Isobel sat at the kitchen island with her breakfast and watched me bring the water in the stockpot to a boil. She’d produced a notebook from somewhere.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Taking notes.”
I grinned. “No way. Only one way to learn, and that’s by getting dirty.”
She scarfed down her eggs. “Okay,” she said, around a mouthful of sautéed mushrooms. She swallowed. “I’m game.”
“This one is yours.” I slammed a smaller pot on the burner next to my industrial-sized stockpot. “This one is mine.”
She hopped off the barstool, bridge of her nose wrinkling. “Why do you get the big one? Is this a manly pride thing?”
“You’re not going to produce anything we can consume on your first try. Better to waste a smaller amount of herbs.”
“That’s nice,” Isobel said.
It was the truth. No matter how smokin’ hot Isobel was—and she was, trust me—I wasn’t going to handle her with kid gloves during potion making.
Getting it right was more important than flattering her ego.
Brewing a potion was a lot like high school chemistry. There were actual formulas that you could use to figure out the herb ratios, which involved a lot of almanacs, careful measurement, and scales. Abuelita, who had taught me most everything I knew about magic, had an entire Book of Shadows with formulas.
But heck, I’d failed chemistry. I never whipped out a calculator to figure out how to make my potions.
I preferred to listen to my intuition.
I started running powdered herbs through my fingers, feeling their energies, sensing the potency. Not bad. It was all fresh. “So do you want to know the trick to brewing a perfect potion?” I asked, portioning out the sage.
“Nope,” Isobel said. “I only asked for lessons so that I would have an excuse to stand next to your sexy body.”
“Uh,” I said. Eloquent as always.
“I’m joking. How do I brew a perfect potion?”
“Listen to the herbs.”
She burst out laughing.
“I’m serious. For once. Hold this and tell me what it says to you.” I dropped the rest of the bag of sage in her hand.
Isobel straightened her face. “Okay. I’m listening to the herbs. They say…” She closed her eyes, shut her fist around the bag. I kept holding on to her. “They say that the Cubbies are never going to win the pennant.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” I muttered. Of course, the Giants weren’t doing much better this season. We couldn’t talk.
Her eyes popped open. “I’m not getting anything. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it’ll come to you,” I said. “Follow my lead.”
I started mixing herbs in my stockpot and listed off the amounts that I thought Isobel should use. Once we actually got down to mixing, she was serious and attentive. She watched me closely, mimicking my gestures, stirring the way I stirred.
“Making potions isn’t magic in the same way casting spells is magic,” I said. “Spells require ritual, some kind of fuel. Right? But we’re encouraging the energy inherent in the herbs to react and change. The result is shaped by the world around us and the way we interact with it. The phase and position of the moon, whether Mercury is in retrograde…”
“Is it?” Isobel asked.
I wasn’t actually sure. I was mostly talking bullshit, recalling things Abuelita had told me, rattling off random witchcraft facts. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
But I could feel that the atmosphere was right for brewing a strength potion. There was tension in the air. Even without grave dirt, we were sucking the force of the earth from far below, the power of the wind.
Isobel started zigzagging her spoon through the potion.
I grabbed her wrist. “Careful!”
“What?”
“Stir clockwise for potions that give you something. Counter-clockwise for taking something away. I usually do clockwise—strength, energy, luck. If you’re healing, you want the other way to remove illness.”
“What happens if I mix back and forth like that?”
“Apocalypse and destruction and making tiny kittens weep, probably,” I said. “You starting to simmer?”
Isobel leaned over her pot to look inside. “Um.”
I glanced into it. She wasn’t just simmering—she was at a full boil.
That was my fault. I should have been watching her more carefully. “We can fix this.” I reached over to turn down her heat. “Throw in a little… Shit, try some vervain. There’s essential rose oil in the box, too. That might balance out the energy. Plus a quarter cup of distilled water—”
“Rose oil,” she said. “Got it.”
She seized a bottle from the coffee table, uncor
king it. Good quantity of rose oil. Way more than I could use in even a year.
My potion was starting to bubble, too. I turned the heat down. “Just add one or two drops of the oil so that—”
She dumped the entire bottle in. Blue smoke gushed out of her pot like a mini-mushroom cloud.
I jerked my pot off the stove, rescuing it from the fallout. “Jesus, Izzy!”
“Sorry, sorry! The bottle’s so small that I figured the whole thing had to go in!”
“Small?” It had probably taken at least a couple thousand roses to produce that much oil. Not that Isobel could have known that—she didn’t know anything about magic. And I was starting to understand why she might not have been able to learn before. The woman was a walking disaster zone.
Setting my stock pot aside, I removed Isobel’s potion from the heat, turned on the steam hood, and fanned away the smoke.
Her mistake had caused a reaction. A big one. It was hard to tell if it was because she’d started to burn the potion or added too much oil, but something had catalyzed. What had been a murky gray mess a moment before had somehow become red. The still-popping bubbles were almost gold.
It didn’t look bad, but it definitely wasn’t a strength potion.
“Huh,” I said.
“What is it? Did it work?”
“Not exactly.”
She leaned around my shoulder, cheek warm against my bicep. “Is it an actual potion?” I looked down at her pressed against me and caught a whiff of her sweat. It was amazing. I was convinced that females didn’t have actual body odor—just pheromones specially designed to drive guys like me insane.
Wait, she’d asked me a question. “Despite your best efforts, this is definitely a potion of some kind.” I lifted a spoonful for a sniff. It didn’t have a horrible smell. Kind of sweet.
“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” Isobel said dryly. “I’m bad at magic. I’m sorry.”
I bit back an agreement. “You’ve just gotta be more careful.”
I set the spoon in the pot and went to test what I’d made. I was more cautious than usual. I’d normally guzzle it down like a protein shake after a workout, but since I’d brewed this close to Isobel’s clusterfuck of a potion, I didn’t trust that the energies would be right.