A Mate Worse Than Death

by J. L. Ray

“What about Serena?”

  “She thinks she has us duped. Mephistopheles did not tell her where he was going, simply that he was going out of town. She doesn’t know that he has been to see Adonis. As long as Adonis has no one to contact her...”

  The Lieutenant paused. “Yes, I see where this could become an issue.” He paused a minute longer. “I’ll call in a stakeout on Serena--have her tailed.”

  Cal looked thoughtful. “Who you got?”

  “The McKneeleys are back.”

  Cal grinned, “About time! I know St. Patrick’s Day is a big thing for them, but a two week bender? In Ireland?”

  The Lieutenant just looked at him and suddenly Cal remembered he was with his boss, not his partner.

  “Uh, sorry, sir.”

  Azeem looked at him another thirty seconds before he nodded and broke eye contact, having established dominance. He took out his f-light and contacted the desk sergeant, Old Mother Hubbard. “This is Azeem. I need to have the McKneeleys follow Serena Melinoe at Monster-Mate.” He listened for a moment. “Starting as soon as they can get their tails over to that office. Yes. They can play it however they like, but they need to be there an hour ago.” He closed the line.

  “They still undercover?”

  Azeem nodded. “Connected to the Irish Leprechauns’ Mob as runners and informants, and their covers are still intact, which is why they were in Ireland for two weeks, to maintain their cover with that bunch of hooligans. I’d like to keep things that way and keep them alive, so refrain from any conversations about the McKneeleys that might compromise their usefulness.” He paused and added dryly, “Or get them caught in some Irish rat trap, yes?”

  Cal nodded a bit shamefaced as he admitted, “Sorry sir, I lost track of the cover.” “You’re in Homicide, not Vice. But Lieutenant O’Neill is very kind about loaning his officers for side jobs, if it doesn’t compromise their current cases. This should not. The death of old Bane of Limerick has the entire D.C. clan in flux right now. The three could claim they were tracking Monster-Mate or Serena for someone in one faction or the other and everyone would be satisfied. Besides, I can’t call in Anderson and Perrault on this. Stealth and giants don’t work. And Detectives de Groot and Falk are on another case right now.

  Cal grimaced but said nothing. He knew Joe Anderson could follow a tail, no problem, but Jaques Perrault wasn’t the most practical choice for Homicide. Still, the big guy had a good arrest record. He didn’t know about De Groot and Falk, who were still too new to the department to get a good idea of their approach. All Cal knew was that, usually, he and Tony worked cases on their own, and so far they had solved those cases within the allowable period. No Geas-induced smackdowns had occurred on their watch. He had a bad feeling that this might be the end of their long run of cracked cases. And given the time his partner was spending with one of the potential recipients of Geas “justice”, he also had a feeling Tony wouldn’t be okay with that. As much as he disliked Phil, he just knew that if that Being got caught up in the fry from the Geas, Tony wouldn’t be able to let it go. He had heard of humans leaving their SCI divisions over situations like this, and he didn’t want their partnership to become another statistic.

  His dark thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a flying monkey from the armory, bringing Glinda’s Visi-Charm to the Lieutenant. The creature came in through a window in the stairwell, which the Lieutenant had left open. It dropped the charm into Azeem’s hand, then leaped back through the window and was gone. Cal gave a little shake. He had seen The Wizard of Oz a couple of times with his kids, so working with the monkeys always gave him the heebie-jeebies. He knew that the movie was full of Baum’s own propaganda from the time he spent trapped in Fairie before he got home and wrote his popular “fiction” novels, but despite knowing that the monkeys wouldn’t start grabbing Beings and flying around with them, he instinctively ducked whenever he saw one.

  The Lieutenant turned the charm over in his paw and found the trigger for it. He nodded, then gestured to Cal. “I have called in for uniformed officers to be placed in a two block radius in case she stays on the ground. The T-Charm is ready to activate,” and he handed that to Cal. “If she takes to the air, it is your job to knock her to the ground.” Cal tried to keep a look of terror off of his face, and he must have only partially succeeded since the Lieutenant grinned and patted him with one paw. “You’ll be fine, Detective. Just another perpetrator.”

  “Yeah,” Cal agreed, trying to smile. “Just another perp, sir.”

  They opened the door and entered the hallway as silently as two large Beings could. Then Azeem hit the trigger for the Visi-Charm and tossed it at the area that seemed like empty space. As he ducked, he pulled Cal down with him. Cal was so intent on being ready to throw the T-Charm that he’d forgotten to duck for the first one. Once Heraphina realized that her invisibility spell wasn’t working, she might start throwing hexes and curses. Best to not be standing tall when those came flying.

  But in the minute or so after the Visi-Charm nullified the invisibility spell, nothing happened, other than the reappearance of a wall and a door. The two detectives stood there, waiting for some reaction. When none came, they looked at each other and went to the door of the apartment. Azeem knocked. “Heraphina Caster, this the the Supernatural Crimes Investigation Bureau. Open the door.” Nothing. Azeem nodded to Cal, who felt like he was about to hyperventilate. He nodded back to the Lieutenant, then backed up a few steps, leaned down to concentrate his body mass, and ran at the door. It banged open just as he got to it, and he went flying through the door and landed on a couch, busting it to pieces.

  The witch standing there wasn’t Heraphina. It was Scarafina, the prettiest sister of their familial group. And she looked very, very pissed off. Especially when Cal crawled off the top of a handsome fellow who had apparently been on Scarafina’s couch when Cal demolished it. That fellow on it sat up carefully, looking a bit crushed and dazed.

  “Oh Sugar Pie! Honey Bunch!” Scarafina darted over to him and led him to a chaise longue by the window. “Are you okay?” she asked in dulcet tones as she ran her hands up and down his body. She probably meant to check him for broken bones, but to Azeem and Cal, it looked less like a medical check and more like an excuse to feel the guy up.

  “I’m...I’m fine, I guess,” he said to her, shaking his head to get some of the couch’s stuffing out of his golden curls. “What happened, Sweetness?” he asked her.

  “I woke up with a, an,” he looked over at Cal and winced, “an ogre on top of me.”

  Cal and Azeem gave each other a look. Apparently, the sister here went for looks over brains, any brains at all.

  “It’s okay, little Num Num,” she muttered and brushed back his curls while chanting under her breath. Just like that, he was out, asleep. She lay his head back carefully on the back of the chaise longue. Then she turned around and glared at the two officers.

  “What is this all about?” she screeched, knowing that her paramour would not wake and hear her regular voice.

  “This apartment is registered to Heraphina Caster,” Azeem told her. “We need to speak to her.”

  She cackled. “Heraphina went to the family cabin for the weekend so I could borrow the apartment.” She gestured to the man, “As you can see, I am a little busy.” Cal tried very hard not to crack a grin. He knew better than to laugh at a witch. That led to warts, lots and lots of warts. His hand started up toward his face, but he twitched it back down. He could hear Tony in his head. Maybe this wasn’t the bad sister.

  “With what, exactly, are you busy?” Azeem asked, and even Cal couldn’t blame the witch for the cackle that followed the question.

  “You need to get out more, police Sphinx, if you have to ask that question,” she told him as she reached over and stroked a hand over the man’s body suggestively.

  Azeem’s tail twitched. “This looks like kidnapping to me. Doesn’t it look like that to you, Detective?”

  Cal wanted to bab
ble “No!” and leave the old witch to her paramour, but he harnessed that paranoia and nodded thoughtfully instead of running out the door. “Yes, sir. It looks like assault. She had to put the guy out to keep him here.”

  “What!” she screeched. “What are you talking about? He doesn’t know anything about anything! He’s a simple creature. I didn’t want to bother him with this. He wants to be here!”

  “Then wake him,“Azeem told her calmly.

  She glared, but few Beings won a stare-down contest with a Sphinx, and she blinked first.

  “Very well,” she grumbled. She smoothed her garments, which were actually quite nice. Most witches went for the stereotypical rusty, black, draping garments that hid everything about them. Scarafina had on a deep purple bustier, so dark it was almost black, but the purple highlights gleamed in the light. Her bodice was tricked out with silver threads that depicted the zodiac signs. Her skirt, instead of being a shapeless black sack that fell to her feet, was a poison green velvet that ended a good six inches above her quite lovely knees. Her surprisingly excellent legs were encased in black fishnet stockings and her feet, Cal noticed, in peep-toe, platform stiletto pumps, the same poison green, and easily five inches high. He had to give her snaps for rocking a pair of shoes that totally awesome.

  She turned to the beautiful man lying on the chaise longue and touched his brow, muttering a few words as she did so. Then she leaned over and proceeded to kiss him like she was auditioning for some kind of witchy porn film.

  Cal lost some of his paranoia in an attempt to avoid seeing any more of her moves, “Okay, okay, break it up, there. Get a room.”

  Scarafina growled at him as she turned away from the doe-eyed man blinking awake beside her, “We had a whole apartment before you crashed in. Now what do you want?” Her voice was back to a higher-pitched, breathless, baby-doll cadence, reminiscent of the women in anime cartoons. It just didn’t convey the kind of menace that normally exuded from the cackling of witches. Cal guffawed before he could stop himself, but her narrow-eyed glare stopped him. His hand drifted up to his face again.

  Azeem nodded to Cal to take the lead, and he decisively moved his hand back to his side and away from his face. “When did you and, uh, your boyfriend get here?”

  “Last night. Late last night. Herry called me and told me I could take the apartment for a week or so while she was on vacation from Monster-Mate,” Scarafina told them. “Bernard and I came up from Pineville, and it’s a long drive.” Scarafina’s companion, Bernard, stared at her the whole time she spoke, a look of blatant adoration on his otherwise vacant face.

  Scarafina lacked the usual look of most witches. While in general, and because of extreme inbreeding, they tended toward having a hooked nose and curving chin, narrow eyes set under exaggerated occipital ridges, and an unfortunate number of facial moles that were generally mislabeled warts, Scarafina had only the narrow eyes. Her brows were fairly open, her chin simply sharp, and her nose straight though large. She did have the typical bright green eyes, but unlike most of her sisters, her inky black hair was silky and long instead of short, tangled and full of split ends. Basically, Scarafina was the sister who would continue the family line. If rumor was true, then Bernard, while not directly related, was one of the few boys born to a witch. He might or might not have any magic-holding ability, but he looked to be typical male progeny--he could pass magic on, but couldn’t do a thing with it himself. If he had been born a wizard, then, in all probability, he wouldn’t have survived infancy.

  In the old days, in Fairie, witches had frequently killed all of their male offspring if they had magic. Wizards are still about the only thing most witches truly fear. But only a very few males both and could wield their magic, and eventually, the various witch covens, which were actually family clans, realized that they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If they killed all the males, the coven lines died out. They had to breed with male nulls or magic holders in order to continue the various magic lines.

  Quite a few coven lines had been caught on the Mundane side when the Geas went into effect, and the witches had proved to be a huge problem for the Supernatural Crimes Investigation divisions all over the world. They flew under the radar when it came to crime--keeping to the kinds of illegal acts that the Geas would ignore but that cops couldn’t. Their treatment of male children was one of those areas. They had to take care of them, raise them, and prepare them for a life reminiscent of that of a male praying mantis. The witches didn’t actually behead them, but after years that led to the witch producing at least six children or more, and once the sister had the number of daughters and at least one magic-carrier son, the coven shipped their sister’s former lover off to a retirement home to work puzzles and watch old shows until he died. Basically, the magic-holder males were breeding stock and nothing else.

  Cal had assumed that there was a certain amount of cruelty in this, but now he really wondered. It looked to him like old Bernard was perfectly happy and, “Hey, Bernard! Hands to yourself,” Cal told him as he noticed those hands slipping up the leg and under the green velvet skirt next to him.

  Bernard turned a bit red but pulled his hands and twined them as if he had to put them on lock down to keep them off his lady. Scarafina glared at Cal, but continued to answer the question. “Pineville is on the South Carolina, North Carolina border. I have a little business down there, making charms for Nattys,” she told them. “As soon as Herry offered us the apartment, we came on up. We just love being in the city. There’s so much to do!”

  “Yeah,” Bernard said, staring at Scarafina’s cleavage. “So much to do here.” Cal rolled his eyes. He might need some therapy after this interrogation. “So, Herafina didn’t mention why she was going out of town?”

  “Of course she did. She finally took a real vacation at the family cabin from that horrible job at Monster-Mate,” Scarafina huffed. “She took a long weekend and went up to the cabin a week ago, but this time she has decided to take a whole week. She hasn’t had any vacation in all the years she has worked at that stupid company.”

  Azeem and Cal looked at each other. Azeem asked, “Where is the cabin?” “Past Charlottesville, near the Washington National Forest.”

  Cal took out his f-light and held it up to her, “We’ll need the exact location.”

  Scarafina got a sly look on her face, “Of course, Detective. I’ll make sure you find it.” She wiggled her hands at the f-light, and it pulsed for a minute.

  Azeem growled and paced over to the chaise longue so that he sat directly by Bernard. The implicit threat of charging her with something hung in the air.

  “I am not doing anything wrong,” she told him, so angry she screeched it in a normal tone.

  “Oh Sweetness! You might be getting a cold! Your throat sounds sore! Let me make you a nice, soothing drink for that,” and Bernard hopped up and went into the kitchen.

  More quietly and back in character, Scarafina repeated herself in a sweeter tone, “I am not doing anything wrong. He is perfectly happy with me.”

  “Your relationships are none of our business,” Azeem told her with perfect dignity. “But Heraphina may be in some trouble, and I think we might be able to help her.”

  Scarafina made a snorting noise. “Since when does anyone help a witch? Unless it’s to help her fall into an oven or a pot of boiling water!”

  Cal made calming noises with his hands, “Hey, hey. We’re not the bad guys here.”

  She gave him another green-eyed glare. “Ogre, for a witch, almost everyone is a bad guy.” She slumped a bit and grimaced, “Herry has been acting quite oddly. Asking for the strangest ingredients. If I didn’t know better...”

  “What?” Azeem asked.

  She looked up at their eager faces and shrugged off what had been a kind of defeated attitude that might have led her to confide. Then she cackled, “I suppose you’ll have to go to the cabin in the woods to find out, won’t you!” and she fell back against the chaise longue
laughing. That brought Bernard out from the kitchen, and after one glance around the room, he shooed the two detectives toward the door.

  “You have what you need? Good, then go.” And he turned back to the chaise.

  Realizing that they would get nothing else from the two, who seemed ready to pick up from where they had to leave off when Azeem had knocked on the door, whether they were alone or had an audience, Cal and Azeem left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When Tony and Phil got back to the Bureau, Tony checked in with Old Mother Hubbard.

  “Hi, Sergeant Hub, any word from Cal?”

  The Sergeant dropped her head so that her metal-rimmed glasses slid down her nose and looked over them at Tony, and then very pointedly at Phil.

  Tony colored up a little because at this point, she seemed to keep losing track of the fact that he was a civilian and still a potential suspect, though really, she thought they had no reasons left to keep him on that particular mental list.

  “The Lieutenant has graciously allowed me to assist in this investigation,” Phil leaned forward and made eye-contact with the Sergeant. “I have a rather large investment in making sure the outcome meets the requirements of the Geas.”

  Sergeant Hubbard continued to look at him over her glasses, a look that had quelled many a fight amongst her numerous progeny and brought more than one spouse to babbling apologies over the years of her various marriages. Phil’s charm certainly had met its match, but eventually the old woman snorted and pushed back her glasses before she turned to Tony.

  “Well, little girl, about time you got back from your field trip,” she scolded. “The Lieutenant and Cal, your partner,” her verbal inflection underscored the words, “are on their way back from Heraphina’s apartment.”

  “Have they got Heraphina?” “If you will let me finish?” Tony nodded. “Heraphina is apparently up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her sister Scarafina was at the apartment with a young man.”