“Get out of here! No one wants your kind around.”
I stared at the shouter in shock. That sort of hatred was so rare here — and no one else seemed bothered by it. It took a minute for it to sink in that he was talking to Haris and me. That bottle had hit me harder than I thought.
The man saw me looking and clenched his fists, then took a step forward. People behind him pressed forward, too.
Trying not to panic, I spun around. “Come on, Haris. We don't need this crap.”
“That's right, get out of here!”
My shoulders tensed, waiting for him to throw something else, but nothing came.
“No one said anything to him,” Haris said sadly. “Too busy with their own anger.” Her voice dropped. “Part of me envies this witch, this patron. To inspire this much passion…”
“You inspire plenty of passion.”
She chuckled ruefully. “You know that's not what I meant.”
“Yes.” But I firmly believed in my gut that love, art, joy, all the best things in the world would always win out in the end over hate and anger. A conversation to have with Haris another time, when we weren't walking through a crowd barely one insult away from a mob uprising. I was frankly amazed that Ximena was holding it together as well as she was. If she was living with this much hate pouring into her on a regular basis, how was she coping?
We paused away from the crowd to survey where we were going. The parking garage was down the block, surrounded three or four thick by crowds of protesters, no two of whom seemed to have the same agenda.
“It's learning,” I said.
Worse, it was reaching through to affect the world in a way that Maggie had repeatedly told me patrons couldn't. I'd have to have a talk with her on the difference between couldn’t and wouldn’t, but that depended on me getting through the next few hours. And being on speaking terms with Maggie again.
“What do we do now?”
“We join the crowd.” Raise our fists, chant something, see if we could steal someone's sign — we’d fit right in. Be a part of the mob, then try to destroy it from the other side.
I rubbed the side of my head. We’d also have to watch out for more bottles.
Hiding in the crowd was easier said than done. We were walking in from outside without signs and, at best, only mild irritation on our faces. Just as we had been singled out inside the T station, the mob focused on us as we neared the garage.
“Do we have a plan B?” Haris murmured.
“Not yet. Just keep walking.” I kept my eyes on the gathered crowd, searching for an opening. “Let me know if you have any brilliant ideas.”
“I have some ideas for after.”
Before I could decide what to say, I saw a familiar flash of green. “This way.”
“Plan B?”
“Plan G.”
The intermittent color led us around the block to an apartment building. I hoped we wouldn't run into Ximena or Missy. The door was locked, but I buzzed us in. Electronic locks were a gift.
We walked inside as if we belonged and headed for the stairs. I hadn’t seen any green flashes, but maybe I’d know where we were headed when I saw it. Sure enough, on the third floor, when I glanced down the hall toward the parking garage, I saw that someone had run a couple of two-by-sixes across the gap, presumably so they could get from their car to their apartment faster.
“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?” I asked Haris.
“I guess we’ll find out.”
The window latch was broken, probably by the tenant so they could open it from the other side, and the window opened easily. I popped out first and crossed, trusting Haris to follow. When she caught up with me, she said, “No, not afraid of heights.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I left it open in case we want to get back in a hurry.”
“Good plan.”
The inside of the garage was as empty as the last one we’d been in, of cars and people, anyway. Menace, on the other hand, it had in plenty, almost visibly so.
Without discussion, we headed toward the door for the closer stairs. This patron liked the dark and dank, so the odds were good that this corpse would be in the basement as well. The sounds of the protestors outside echoed up the stairwell, and I wasn’t terribly surprised to find the door at ground level open. The few people with line of sight to the stairs saw us coming and set up a commotion. We hadn’t avoided a confrontation; we’d merely shifted its location.
And given us a slight strategic advantage, I suppose. “It’s over. We have the high ground.”
Haris looked at me sideways. “They still outnumber us.”
“Never mind.”
If we stayed on the stairs, they couldn’t all attack us at once, and even if I was nothing more than a barista, I could push people down the stairs. The problem was that we couldn’t stay where we were if we wanted to find the corpse and cut off the patron from this spot. I eyed the door. It opened away from us, and I’d have to step out to grab the door handle. Stupid fire codes.
Even if I managed to close it, we only delayed the inevitable — some of the protestors could go up the other stairs, cross the garage, and come down at us. I’d figure out how to deal with that if and when it happened. This door first.
“I don’t suppose you could inspire them to go take up graffiti or something?”
“Not until the other influence is out of them.”
Leaving and coming back later was out of the question. So was demolishing the garage — even if I could think of a way to bring it down, we’d still have to get to the body, and it would be even harder with the entire garage on top of it.
I couldn’t fight people off; I was going to have to use some magic to keep these people away from me. I had absolutely no experience using it this way — I just hoped I didn’t permanently hurt anyone. The bigger worry, of course, was that I didn’t have energy to spare. I could only hope using the phone as a magic battery was going to work.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped away from Haris, thinking of anger, magic, and sparks — picturing one of those plasma globes that would zap anything that touched the outside. The air crackled around me, and I could smell ozone. I walked out to close the door.
A burly construction worker yelled and swung his arm at me. Electricity arced between us, and he jumped back, yelping in surprise.
The next pair swung objects at me — one, a board, the other, her purse. Points for not wanting to make contact with me directly, but the magic only cared about the intent. The people were zapped, not the objects they swung.
Unfortunately, that meant my arm went a bit numb where the board connected. I reached for the door handle with my other hand. Sparks leapt wildly, and the nearest people backed off.
I eased the door closed without turning my back on the crowd.
“They’re just going to open it as soon as we’re gone.”
“They can try.” I focused my hand over the lock, picturing an arc welder. Light flared, and I closed my eyes, hoping I hadn’t damaged them permanently. Still with my eyes closed, I pushed with the magic, sealing the door, lock, and frame into a solid mass. Releasing the magic, I dropped my hand and opened my eyes. I had to blink a couple of times, and I still saw spots, but I thought I would be okay. “They’ll have to go around.”
Which they would.
Haris still looked worried. “Are you going to be strong enough for this? We can come back.”
“And give the patron time to put more defenses together? No. We go on.” I slid my still-numb hand into my pocket, groping for my phone. “I’ll manage.”
The pulse I sent into the phone was weaker than I usually managed, but I could feel my own magic there, tethered, circling the battery. I reached for the tether, and the magic jumped at me, eager to come home. At the same moment, I heard a loud crack and felt sharp heat through my pants.
I pulled the phone out — wisps of smoke came off it, and the screen was completely shattered. I’d fried my phone.
Okay, then. I could store my magic outside of me and retrieve it later, but I was going to destroy the receptacle I used. That was going to get expensive fast. Maybe time to hit the $5-and-under store, see what cheap electronic games I might be able to pick up. And replace the phone. Later, assuming there was a later.
Chapter 28
To her credit, Haris didn’t ask what had happened, just led the way down. The basement atmosphere crawled up the stairs to meet us, dark and moist, not really visible to the eyes, but still present with coils that wanted to crush us. I moved closer to Haris, as close as I could get without actually touching her yet. That would come.
Once out into the basement, I saw that the darkness was literal — no lights shone, and only vague hints of sunlight filtered down near the ramp up to the ground level. Liquid dripped from the ceiling, making it feel even more like a cave hidden from the world.
We both nodded toward the far side of the basement — the deepest dark, and the farthest spot from the entrances. We would be vulnerable while crossing, but it couldn't be helped. Wordlessly, we walked.
The fetid odor of the dead body was strong, stronger even than the one from last week. Didn't corpses eventually start smelling sweet? I’d read that somewhere, I was sure, but I couldn’t remember where. It hadn’t seemed important.
As we got closer, I saw that the door was open and the dead woman’s body lay in plain sight, closer than I expected. I didn't need Admiral Akbar to tell me it was a trap.
“No flies,” Haris murmured.
I frowned. She was right — no buzzing, no cloud in motion. Where were the insects? “Second generation spawning?”
“Maybe. Or maybe touching the body sucked the life out of them.”
That was a cheerful thought. Easy enough trap to avoid, too, since I wasn't about to touch the corpse physically.
I called my magic to the fore, ready to reach out — and a black coil sprang from the body, slamming me sideways into the ground. My head didn't slam into the concrete floor, but it was awfully close. As it was, I did have the air knocked out of me. I lay still for a few seconds, and the coil hit me again.
I lashed out without thought, striking through the coil. It dissolved into smoke and faded into the blackness around us. The air of menace and almost physical presence of hate didn't lessen, however.
Haris said, “That was new.”
I grunted in response and pushed myself to my knees. I knew what was coming, and it would be hard enough to face without trying to stay on my feet. This time, I was determined to do it right — cut the ghost from the patron, push the ghost into a receptacle, and bind her there to dissipate after we dealt with the witch. I dug into my pocket and pried out the marble.
This was going to be harder. Already, I could barely breathe against the pressure. Taking shallow breaths and reminding myself not to panic, I set the marble on the floor before me, then turned to look at Haris. “Ready?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “What's the marble for?”
I shook my head. “Later.”
She knelt next to me. “All right. I'm ready.”
Part of me said I should have warned her first, asked her permission, talked to her. The rest of me had framed her face with my hands and drew her toward me. The skin-to-skin touch blossomed with heat, but that was nothing to the effect of her lips on mine.
Lava flowed through me, hot, molten, setting me aflame so my only thought was of Haris. Hate could not survive against this. There was a video I saw on YouTube of a volcano that generated its own thunderstorms, so lava, lightning, and rock all exploded from it. That’s what this was. That’s what we were, a force — of nature? of magic? — a force that would be reckoned with.
If I had not had the tea from Carole’s recipe or the power I'd stored in the phone, I would have been swallowed in the fire, lost to endless possibility. Instead, stronger than I'd been before, I turned outward, boiling the liquid from the air and striking with a glowing sword of will.
The black coil rose up again, a shield of smoke to bar us from the victim. I gritted my teeth and tried to push through the shield, but I made no headway at all. Then the smoke uncoiled and struck toward us again, and I quaked in fear. The patron had taken a personal interest, and it was going to break us, hard.
I put up my own weak sphere of magic to protect us and felt it shudder apart as the patron struck.
The tip of Haris’s tongue touched mine. The shock of it pulled my attention away from the impending doom and back to this wonderful person I was touching. If this was going to be death, I did not want to waste my last moments thinking about hatred and anger. If I was kissing Haris, I was damned well going to enjoy it.
My eyes closed, and I inhaled her scent. Lemon and almond and a hint of spice, like fresh-baked baklava, but then that faded into grappa, then hyacinth, and finally, just sun-warmed skin and sweat, with a hint of some flower I didn’t recognize from her shampoo — white and purple, cheerfully covering an entire hillside. That last was her true scent, I was sure, the others some trace of magic, the muse inspiring warm and familiar thoughts, comfort and welcome. I didn’t need the illusion of home to want to be here.
I pulled back, just the merest fraction, far enough to murmur her name, then kissed once, twice, quick, then slow, enjoying her warmth and the taste of her lips. She responded by placing her own hands at my waist, balancing me, drawing me nearer.
The coil of hatred, possibly annoyed at being ignored, struck again, but this time, it fell apart as it touched us, like so much spray hitting a beach, powerless to do more than drag at us, unable to pull us from our anchor in each other.
Without me even really thinking about it, our magic brushed outward, dusting off the hate and anger that wanted to cling to us. A quick thought, with intention this time, and it arced to the body, slamming gold and blue fire through the corpse, freeing it from the other magic’s hold. No physical contact this time, but I grabbed the ghost and siphoned it into the marble on the floor before us, binding it with a circle of warm magic.
The atmosphere around us popped, and the sudden surge made us break apart. Both of us collapsed, not looking at each other.
After a minute, Haris asked, “What now?”
“You said you had some ideas for after.”
“Judging from that kiss, so do you. I didn’t think you were ready to take that step, though.”
Her words hit me like a blast of cold water. She wasn’t wrong — I did have things I wanted to do to — with — her, and I wasn’t sure we were at the point in our relationship where that was going to work. We didn’t know each other well enough yet. She didn’t know my kids at all.
I dropped my head into my hands. The kids, with all their recent push to get me and Matt back together. They wanted me with their father, and they were not going to be happy about me dating someone else. Not at all.
She twined her fingers around mine and pulled one of my hands free so she could look me in the eye. “It’s okay. I’m in no rush.” She pursed her lips. “Although maybe we shouldn’t kiss like that again. You might change my mind.”
Shakily, I laughed. “Should’ve guessed that my stalker would say she couldn’t help herself.”
The corner of her mouth twitched up, exposing her dimple. “You have no idea how close you are.”
She turned away, exhaling noisily. “Give me a couple minutes here. I’m not ready to stand up yet.” Her gaze drifted across the corpse, and she froze, then tilted her head back and forth. “You know she looks like you.”
“You sure know how to flatter a girl.”
A shake of her head. “Not in the dead, bloated, and discolored way. Her height, her hair color, her eyes — I’d be willing to bet her natural skin color wasn’t too far off, either.”
I leaned forward, staring at the dead woman’s face, trying to see what Haris saw. Instead, I saw the woman in the Cambridge garage, black hair falling across her body to mask her, and the first one, still recently enough dead
that I could notice her skin color was similar to mine, darker, but not much more than if I were outside often enough to tan. I sucked in my breath.
When I finally managed to speak, my voice was a whisper. “They all do. Did. At least superficially.”
“This really is aimed at you, then.” She looked at me seriously. “Don’t walk into any parking garages by yourself.”
“I won’t.” I licked my lips. “It doesn’t seem too likely that the killer, the witch, just happened to find women who looked like me when they were ready to cast the spell. I’d say the women were found elsewhere and brought to the garages to kill.”
“You're a target. You can't just brush it off.”
“I don’t have a choice. I have to keep going.” I shrugged. “This whole thing was set up to look from the outside as though I'm responsible, to separate me from other witches who might be my allies. It worked, too. A delegation of witches dropped into my work last week to tell me they'd be happy to kill me if I didn't clean up my mess.”
She looked at me oddly, and I said, “What? It's true.”
“I'm sure it is. I simply find it confusing that in the impressions I gleaned when we touched, a death threat from witches was nonexistent.”
I shrugged, uncomfortable. “I suppose that’s my pride. I might be outraged at the thought, but I don’t think they’re really any danger to me. So it wasn’t pressing.”
“And painting the coffee shop was?”
“Rich would make a terrible boss.”
Though now I had to wonder — what if one of those witches was a threat to me? Dorothy hated me, and I was willing to believe she would kill me if she had the chance. And she wasn’t above using subterfuge to get the others on her side. I weighed the idea.
But I knew what Dorothy’s magic felt like, knew her devotion to Hekate, knew that she thought using magic to harm others was an abomination. Reluctantly, I had to admit this wasn’t her doing. Of course the simple answer couldn’t be right. I would have to search farther afield.
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