Grave Phantoms

by Jenn Bennett

  What if he wasn’t a reporter after all?

  A faucet squeaked off. Heels clicked across the floor, and for a moment the noise of the club filled the tiled restroom. Then the door blocked it out again.

  Astrid let out a long breath and heard something else inside the restroom . . . Light footfalls. Not the click of women’s shoes. Surely Max wouldn’t come in here? Whoever it was, they approached the stalls and stopped. Blood swished in Astrid’s temples as she silently waited for the sound of a stall door opening.

  It never came. Only a brief shuffling.

  Someone was checking beneath the stall door.

  A moment later, hinges squealed. The door banged . . . and then the person stepped to the middle stall.

  Oh-God, oh-God, oh-God. Astrid lifted her legs and held them up in the air as the same noises repeated only a few feet away, shuffling, hinges squealing, door banging. Why didn’t they put locks on these doors? Why—

  The person stopped in front of her stall.

  Feet shuffled. A shadow fell across the floor beneath the door. Astrid’s heart drummed against her rib cage. The hinges began rotating.

  She didn’t think. Her legs shot forward and she pressed the soles of her T-bar shoes flat against the stall door, pushing it closed with a bang.

  Outside the door, a murmur of surprise echoed off the marble. Masculine.

  Holy living God, it was Max!

  Without warning, the door exploded inward. Astrid yelped as her legs folded back like an accordion, and she slid sideways on the toilet seat. She braced her hands on the stall walls and stared up at the dark figure of Max.

  “Found you,” he said with a dangerous smile.

  Survival instincts kicked in. A dozen scenarios raced through her mind at once. The simplest hung on a chain around her wrist: a silver mesh handbag. It was heavier than she preferred, but she’d worn it tonight because it matched the band on the wristwatch Bo had given her. A small bit of fortune. She tightened the chain, and when Max reached inside the stall to pull her out, she swung the handbag and struck him in the face.

  He cried out and stumbled backward a step, more surprised than hurt. One hand caught the casing around the stall while the other touched his cheek briefly and dabbed blood.

  “Little bitch,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

  Inside her head, she heard Bo’s voice instructing her how to protect herself if she were ever in a situation like this. Kick a man straight in the balls, he’d said. A childish thing to do, she’d thought at the time, but she didn’t much care at the moment. She started to raise a leg and do just that. But Max suddenly stilled.

  “You’re going to want to move away from her, slowly, before I blow a hole in your spine,” a familiar voice said behind Max.

  Max grunted and raised both his hands as he stepped out of the stall. Bo stood behind him in a long navy coat. The muzzle of Bo’s gun was pressed into the man’s back.

  Relief washed through Astrid’s limbs.

  “Now, then,” Bo said, patting Max’s suit jacket with one hand to search for weapons. “You want to tell me just who the hell you are and why you were stupid enough to touch her?”

  Max’s elbow swung backward and struck Bo in the jaw. Hard.

  Bo let out muffled grunt of pain as he stumbled backward. His shoulder cracked against the restroom wall.

  Shouting savagely, Astrid jumped out of the stall and tried to whop Max with her handbag. This time he wasn’t surprised. His arm shot up and he swatted it as if it were a fly. His signet ring caught her on her wristbone—the ring is inlaid with turquoise, her mind realized as pain shot up her arm.

  Pain, and something more . . .

  Time seemed to slow. In the space of a few rapid heartbeats, Astrid watched Bo shake his head like a wet dog and quickly retrain his gun on Max.

  Just not quickly enough.

  Max raced through the restroom and was already pushing open the door into the club. Chaos erupted as he plowed through the bar area. Bo growled and took off after him, only to come to a skidding stop when Astrid cried out in horror.

  Like an electric bee sting, a strange series of aftershocks radiated from the spot Max’s ring had clipped her on the wrist. The shocks buzzed and hummed until they wracked her entire body. The stark-bright light of bathroom dimmed. And all around her, dark water poured from the cracks of the tiled walls.

  Dark, odious water.

  It flowed down the mirrors. Flooded the sinks and overflowed, cascading black waterfalls onto the floor until it began filling the restroom, rising and rising, covering her feet and climbing her legs. It was briny seawater, reeking of salt and rotting fish, and it quickly rose over her knees.

  She tried to wade through the icy water, tried to get to Bo. He looked so confused. Why was he just standing there, staring at her like she’d lost her mind?

  Then she realized that she might actually have lost it. Out of the floodwater, a dark shape bobbed to the surface.

  It was the size and shape of a human body, and it was encased in a burlap sack.

  Astrid swayed and fell into blackness.

  EIGHT

  Bo holstered his Colt and squatted by Astrid’s collapsed body. His shoulder ached where he’d slammed it against the tiled wall, but he ignored its protest and flipped her faceup.

  It wasn’t like the first time on the yacht when she was unconscious. Her eyelids were fluttering, the whites of her eyes showing. He shouted her name, and ice blue irises rolled back into view and stared up him.

  His head dropped in relief.

  “Bo,” she said weakly before turning her face to survey her surroundings. “The water is gone? My clothes are dry?”

  “Whoa, now. Don’t try to sit up.”

  “Did you see the water? Did you see . . . the body in the sack?”

  “What?” His fingertips skimmed a red spot on her forehead that was already swelling. She flinched and muttered a weak complaint.

  “You hit your head,” he told her.

  She made a frustrated noise and pushed herself up to sit, despite his protests. “You didn’t see it,” she said miserably.

  Another vision.

  The door to the restroom burst open, and noise from the club blared. One of Gris-Gris’s enforcers, Joe, lunged through the doorway. “Bo? What’s going on?”

  “The man who ran out of here . . .” Bo said. “Someone stop him. He attacked Miss Magnusson.”

  Joe didn’t question him or ask for more information. He just shouted over the clamor and disappeared into the crowd. Bo knew everyone who worked at Gris-Gris, from the janitors to the house band’s drummer, and any one of them would pitch in to help.

  “What is happening to me?” Astrid whispered. Long lashes, thick with mascara, blinked up at him, a pleading anxiety behind her eyes.

  He couldn’t bear it any longer. Screw decorum. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her against his chest. She didn’t resist. Slender arms circled his back as she lay her head on his aching shoulder and buried her face in the collar of his jacket.

  She felt impossibly good, soft and warm, clinging to him. His heart was an overexcited child that raced madly with the thrill of possession, no matter how fleeting.

  He heard the door open. Knew Astrid heard it, too. Yet both of them were hesitant to release each other.

  “Bo Yeung,” a commanding feminine voice called out. “I leave Gris-Gris for two hours and come back to pandemonium. Should’ve known you’d be involved.”

  He glanced up to see the owner of the club standing in the doorway, arms crossed over her breasts. Her eyes fell on Astrid and all her irritation turned to worry.

  “Lord,” she swore. “What kind of trouble have you been into?”

  —

  Bo didn’t believe the attacker could just disappear into the night after runn
ing through a club half filled with people, but he had. According to Astrid, “Max” was the only name he’d given her. It didn’t matter. Bo had tracked down people with less information than that, and for far more trivial reasons. He’d find him. No one hurt Astrid and got away with it.

  No one.

  Following Velma’s efficient strides, Bo ushered Astrid through a door behind the bar and into a short hallway. To their right, the club’s bustling kitchen gleamed bright behind a windowed swinging door, but they were headed left. A tall painted bookcase was empty but for a small stack of old menus and a metal dustpan. Bo released a hidden latch on the side and swung the bookcase away from the wall to reveal a doorway and a low-ceilinged room. He turned on the lights. Rows of shelves lined with Magnusson-imported liquor bottles led to an open area with a desk, where the club’s bar manager did the accounting.

  Bo had spent a lot of time back here over the years, unloading crates and taking orders. He turned the desk chair around and urged Astrid to sit while Velma squinted down at her with a troubled look on her face.

  “Wanna tell me what this is all about?” she asked, glancing from Astrid to Bo.

  Velma Toussaint was a former dancer in her mid-thirties who moved to San Francisco from Louisiana after inheriting the club from her former—and now deceased—husband. She was elegant and beautiful, with pale nutmeg skin of indeterminable ancestry and shiny brown hair sculpted into a short Eton crop. And she not only single-handedly ran one of the most successful clubs in the city, but was also a hoodoo—or a root doctor, as she liked to call herself. Her talent was magical spellwork, mostly herbal in nature. She was well versed in curses, hexes, jinxing, and unjinxing.

  In other words, you did not want her for an enemy.

  Bo leaned against the edge of the desk and let Astrid tell the story about the yacht, only interrupting when she chattered too far off into tangential territory, which Astrid often did, no matter the subject. He secretly enjoyed listening to her talk. She had opinions about everything and rarely kept them to herself, even when she was wrong, and he liked that. But Velma didn’t share his amusement or patience.

  “So this Max fellow knew who you were?” Bo said when Astrid finally got around to explaining what had just transpired in the club’s restroom. “But why do you think he had anything to do with the people on the yacht? He wasn’t one of the survivors, was he?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Hard to tell in the rain, with all that blue makeup smeared on their faces. Now Bo wished he’d taken a second look at them at the hospital. “He was probably just a reporter.”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” she admitted. “But I started feeling funny when his ring hit my wrist.” She quickly rubbed her hand over the spot, as if she could erase it. “The symbol on the ring could have been the symbol on the idol. And, Bo, the inlay was turquoise.”

  Shit.

  “Just where is this so-called idol?” Velma asked.

  Bo retrieved it from his coat pocket and unfolded the handkerchief wrapping. “It doesn’t seem to have any sort of charge anymore. I’ve touched it several times without incident.”

  “No magical energy,” Velma confirmed as she peered at it for a moment, and then picked it up. “Heavy,” she noted, weighing it in her hand. “Solid turquoise, you think? If it’s old, could be worth a pretty penny.”

  “No doubt,” Bo agreed.

  “That’s it! That’s the symbol that was on the ring,” Astrid said, pointing to the gold disk on the idol’s belly.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  She stared at the bright blue statue, biting her bottom lip. Doubt crept in. “I think. It was dark in the club, and everything happened so fast in the restroom . . . Do you know what the symbol means, Velma? Is it bad?”

  The conjure woman gestured for Astrid to move out of the way so that she could switch on a lamp. The three of them hunched over the desk as Velma examined the gold disk under the light. “Sorry. This is no symbol I’ve ever seen,” she finally admitted and turned the idol around to study the back. “What’s this?”

  “I think that says ‘NANCE,’ but it’s hard to read,” Bo said. “I wasn’t sure if it was some kind of magical word or part of a larger spell. Maybe the other idols Astrid saw in her vision had other words on them, too.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” Astrid confessed.

  “Strange,” Velma murmured. “The figure’s overall design looks primitive. Ancient. Asian or South American, perhaps. But these are clearly English letters. It seems like a mishmash of styles. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  Astrid groaned. “So you don’t know what kind of magic it would be used for? What about the ritual I described? Have you heard of anything like that?”

  Velma absently stroked her collarbone with her thumb. “I can’t say that I have, but I don’t think you’re wrong about the iron boots and the burlap sacks. It sounds like those people were drowned as some kind of sacrificial offering.”

  “But why?” Astrid asked.

  “That, I don’t know. And I don’t understand why they’d be missing for a year at sea, either.” Velma put her hand on Astrid’s forehead and held it there, as if testing for fever. When she withdrew it, she tilted Astrid’s chin up and studied her face. “However, I think I know where the magical charge in that idol went.”

  “Where?” Astrid said.

  “Inside you. Don’t be alarmed, dear, but you have two auras.”

  Astrid tucked her chin and peered down at herself. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Everything living gives off an emanation,” Velma explained, putting her hand on Astrid’s shoulder to calm her down. “An aura is someone’s personal energy. And your aura has always been red, as long as I’ve known you. Now you’ve got a second layer . . . almost like it’s a shadow. Something that doesn’t belong.”

  Bo didn’t like the sound of that.

  Neither did Astrid, apparently. She shook herself like a dog, as if she could rid herself of it. “Am I cursed like Winter?”

  “Winter was hexed with magical poison,” Velma said. “You aren’t hexed. This sounds accidental to me. And it doesn’t look bad or evil. It just looks different, is all.”

  “Can you get rid of it?” Bo asked. “One of the unhexing baths you gave Winter?”

  The conjurer’s brow furrowed. “Like I said, Astrid’s not hexed. I can give her some herbs to drink for purification, and I can pray over her. But unless we know what kind of ritual they did on that boat—and, more specifically, what this symbol on the idol means—I can’t offer counter magic. And maybe she doesn’t need it. Like anything else, magic fades over time. Maybe this will, too. Might be a bigger risk to stick your nose into these people’s business. If you stumbled upon whatever it was they were doing, you might want to stumble your way on out of it. Cut your losses. Return the idol to the survivors and wash your hands of it.”

  Bo threw a hand up in the air. “And what? Just go about our merry way and hope that Astrid hasn’t taken on permanent spiritual damage?”

  “Don’t get snitty with me, Bo Yeung,” Velma warned.

  “You’re telling me there’s a group of people in town practicing some sort of big, dark ritual and despite all the mediums, clairvoyants, and oddball spiritual healers you book at this club, no one’s heard a thing about it?”

  She settled a hand on her hip. “I’ll see if any of my contacts around town have heard rumors about these idols. But you play with fire, you’re liable to get burned. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Bo snorted. “If I listened to all your warnings, I’d never leave the damn house.”

  “Ungrateful miscreant.”

  “Mean old witch.”

  “Old?” Velma huffed.

  He squinted at her. “Not too old to appreciate an extra case of ten-year-old single-
malt Scotch, on the house?”

  Velma smiled slowly. “That’s more like it.”

  “Now, about those herbs you mentioned . . .” Astrid said.

  Velma smoothed a hand over Astrid’s back. “Come on upstairs and I’ll mix you something up.”

  Snappy footfalls made them all swing around. Stopping near a shelf of liquor was Sylvia, escorted by the club’s master of ceremonies, Hezekiah.

  “There you are, Ah-Sing,” she said sweetly, using a familiar form of Bo’s given name—an intimacy that wouldn’t be lost on Astrid. “I was beginning to think you had abandoned me in the middle of our date. Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

  Bo squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. Long enough for his “date” to take matters into her own hands.

  “I’m Sylvia Fong,” she said brightly.

  Bo winced.

  Blond eyebrows shot up sharply. “Sylvia?” Astrid said in disbelief. “Sylvia?”

  The already-stifling air in the small room seemed to congeal like gelatin and wobble with tension. Well, he’d wanted to make Astrid jealous, hadn’t he?

  Wish granted.

  NINE

  Astrid was the very picture of restraint and good manners. She’d ignored the beautiful Miss Fong while Velma mixed up a batch of herbs. She’d smiled pleasantly while Bo helped both women into their coats and led them outside Gris-Gris just before midnight. He informed Astrid that he’d not driven “Sylvia” (the Buick) tonight but had instead ironically brought Sylvia (the Glamorous Woman) here by taxi—which meant now they’d all three be sharing a cab home, what marvelous fun! Astrid had refrained from demanding which of the two women would be dropped off first. Because that would sound jealous and petty, and Astrid was neither.

  She merely wanted to club him to death with her umbrella.

  Bo sat in front with the taxi driver, leaving her to cozy up to Miss Fong in the back. He rattled off an address that sounded an awful lot like his Chinatown apartment building. Was he taking Sylvia there with him? Surely not. And if so, he would die where he stood when Astrid got her hands on him. But she didn’t say this, of course. She only sat stiffly, pretending to stare out the window through the rain.