My ghost was silent. Very silent. It was the kind of suspicious silence that a mother recognizes.
I shook my head. “My ghost isn’t telling me anything. Tansy’s hiding it from me. Guilty conscience, I bet.”
Charlize jerked her gaze away from her screen and stared at me. “She’s dead? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. Is she inside you now? What’s that like?”
I shrugged. “What’s anything like? There are good parts and bad parts. She hasn’t shared with me what happened to her. From what I know of ghosts, they’re confused most of the time, and they either don’t know what happened to them, or refuse to remember. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”
“You’ll get better at this,” she said, lifting her chin. “Hard work and methodical practice. Like a lion tamer. The job’s dangerous, but remember, there are lion tamers in the world.”
Lion tamers. Picturing that triggered a nagging suspicion I’d forgotten all about something. But what? The harder I tried to remember it, the further away it got. Was Tansy shuffling around my memories? Calm down in there, I thought loudly. Behave yourself. Or what? I didn’t have a good punishment, other than singing annoying pop music over and over in my head, but that would punish me as well.
The air in the small office smelled sweet, like candy. I leaned my head back and rested it against the wall.
Inside my mind, I tried to chase down that lion. It was pale and silky. But Tansy, dressed in green, kept opening doors and ushering the white lion away. She didn’t like them. Only dogs. She liked dogs first, then a whole pyramid of things. Toward the bottom were humans. Lower down were creatures like lions. She didn’t like how they hid in the darkness before pouncing.
The small office filled with the waterfall sound of Charlize typing quickly. “This encryption is going to take some time to break,” she said. “Tansy must have had her brother set up her security. I hate it when I have to admire the skill of his tech. Vincent Wick is a...”
“Dung beetle?”
“Exactly. He’s a dung beetle of a person, but he’s great with security. I don’t know where he finds the time. Did you know he also trains falcons to keep other birds away from the airport? The man has skills.”
“How big are these falcons he trains?”
“They’re not supernatural, if that’s what you’re asking. One of them’s a kestrel falcon, barely bigger than your hand, but he is ferocious.”
“Are the birds always accounted for at the airport? I’m just wondering if my dad’s story about being attacked by a bird might be true.”
“The safest place for the truth is to disguise it as a lie,” Charlize said.
She asked a few more questions about the events from earlier in the week, and I answered as best as I could.
“This woman with the boots might be the solution to the puzzle,” Charlize said. “You think she was using a glamour?” At the mention of a glamour, her own glamour either activated or deactivated—I didn’t know which version of Charlize was the truth. A dozen coppery snakes slithered from her golden curls, writhing as though stretching their muscles before snapping at each other. If anyone knew about glamour spells, it was Charlize.
“It’s just a guess,” I said. “The veterinarian’s assistant described her two different ways.”
“Intriguing.” The snakes in her hair rose up together like the leaves of a red-flowering Bromeliad guzmania caught in a breezy updraft. I had Tansy to thank for the Latin name. She was trying to help, in her own way.
“That’s our next lead,” my gorgon friend said. “These encryption-cracking algorithms will keep running whether I’m here or not.” She turned her swivel chair. “Shall we go pay that veterinarian a little visit?”
I glanced around for a clock. “Isn’t it the middle of the night? This place is like a shopping mall. I don’t know what time it is, but I’m guessing it’s around midnight.”
“Zara, you nodded off for a while when I was talking to you about encryption.”
Had I? The word encryption did make me yawn. And my neck was stiffer than I remembered.
Charlize gave me an amused look. “Let’s have a look outside.” She pressed a button on her desk, and the ceiling of her office became sky. Just like that. It had been basic acoustic panel, the type commonly found in offices, and now it was sky. Blue. With fluffy clouds and flying birds.
She saw me admiring the view and said, “Go ahead and touch it.”
I got to my feet and reached up. I saw only open blue sky, yet my fingers bumped the nubby plastic covering of an overhead light. If I focused, squinting, I could see the sky and also see the true physical ceiling at the same time, but holding both images simultaneously was difficult, like trying to believe that two plus two equals five. Like doublethink. That was the term used by author George Orwell in his classic novel, 1984.
“This is beautiful,” I said. “And I bet it really helps with Seasonal Affective Disorder in the winter.”
“Since we’re underground, it’s practically a necessity.” She clicked the button again, and the skyscape shifted to a star-speckled sunset sky, then gray storm clouds, then another azure wash of pure blue with no clouds. “These are all real-time images from our other departments around the world.”
A shadowy figure appeared at the ceiling’s edge and drew closer. It was a flying creature, dark green, with the head of a dragon, bat-like wings, two scaly legs with sharp talons, and a long, snakelike tail. Instinctively, I ducked toward the doorway to take cover.
Charlize giggled. The beast loomed larger and larger, its gleaming eyes scanning the room. Or at least it appeared to be scanning the small underground office. But how could it be seeing in, if the ceiling projection was a glamour?
I whispered hoarsely, “Can that thing see us? Are we in danger?”
She snorted and waved one hand. “That’s just Ribbons. He likes to perch on the roof of the castle where this camera is located. It must be part of his wyvern magic that he can sense when someone’s accessing this channel, because I swear he’s always flying in for a landing whenever I flip over to this view. Cheeky wyvern.”
From the false safety of the doorway, I watched in awe as the dragon-like creature leaned in over the camera, its head expanding to take up a third of the office’s ceiling. A long purple tongue slipped out between green, scaly lips. The creature delicately licked the surface of one gleaming black eyeball and then turned its head for an unobstructed view as it licked the other. Up close, its head looked more like that of a seahorse than a mythical storybook dragon.
Charlize asked, “Cute, isn’t he?”
“Darling,” I said with a snort. “Is he named Ribbons because he rips people and horses to ribbons?”
She smirked. “Zara, he’s only about seven inches tall. Haven’t you ever noticed that when things get closer to your face, they appear larger? Camera lenses work the same way.” She stood and circled around her desk. She snapped up a red apple from the top of a stack of file folders and brought it close to my eyes. “See? Big.” She stepped back and held the apple away from me. “Now it’s small again. It’s called perspective.”
“Ha ha.”
She leaned in, giddy about teasing me. We’d had a few moments like this at the slumber party in Chessa’s cottage, only there’d been wine involved as our excuse.
“Big,” she said, bringing the apple to block my view. “Small.” She yanked it away.
I used my magic to snap the apple from her hand and slice it into quarters with a blade spell that had become a new bread-and-butter addition to my spell library. I hadn’t mastered the round melon balls my aunt was so proud of, but I did manage to magically scoop out the apple’s seeds with minimal waste.
Charlize clapped her hands girlishly. “Neat trick! Halfsies?”
“Halfsies,” I agreed. It had been her apple, after all. We each munched on two quarters.
Ribbons the Wyvern watched the apple being eaten with keen interest. He l
icked his scaly lips left and right and then over his eyes once more before giving the camera a slow, deliberate wink. He could see me, all right. I gave him a timid wave. He responded by whipping out one bat-like wing and wiggling tendril-like green fingers at the tip of the wing.
“Well, aren’t you the sweetest little baby,” I said. “I could put you in a big tin of peanut brittle and scare the sassafras out of my coworker, Frank.”
Ribbons turned his head to peer at me with the other eye, puffed out his green-scaled cheeks, and blew a tendril of smoke from both nostrils.
“Goodbye, Ribbons,” Charlize said. She licked the apple juice off her fingertips before leaning over her desk to click the button again. “Say hello to the rest of the gang for me.”
Ribbons made a gesture that looked a lot like the rude one made iconic by New York City taxi drivers.
“Cheeky wyvern,” she said. “I think he’s been up to something, but I don’t know what.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“Anything can be dangerous if it wants, but I wouldn’t worry about Ribbons,” she said and clicked the ceiling back to plain acoustic tiles again. The sudden transition from sky to mundane materials was surprising. “The projection is a drain on the power supply,” she explained. “We’re trying to go green here.”
Just like a regular, non-magical corporation, I noted.
Corporations will never go green, Tansy noted right back. The only green they care about is money.
I was starting to see why Tansy lived by herself out in the country.
Charlize stepped out of her office and led the way down the hallway. “We can check in with the medical bay then hit up your veterinary clinic.”
“I can’t believe it’s morning already.”
“Believe it. The first sky shot was real-time, above the building. Our sister Chloe’s already been up baking for hours.”
“This place is like a casino,” I grumbled.
“If by like a casino, you mean a drain on financial resources and an exploiter of human gullibility, then you can say that again.”
“I meant the no-windows and no-clocks part.”
“That, too,” she agreed.
We got our medical update from Dr. Ankh’s intern, a willowy blond woman with elfin ears.
Rhys Quarry was a tough fox. He was still alive and getting stronger by the minute. He would not, however, be wagging his foxtail for a few more hours, as he was heavily sedated. And he needed to wait days, if not a full week, before shifting back to human form.
The willowy blond intern with the elfin ears, identified on her security pin only as Ubaid, reported that my father’s original wound had been deep and nasty. The veterinarian had done an adequate job treating the wound, but the stitches had been no match for my father’s premature transformation into human form. Ubaid asked me several more questions about the circumstances surrounding Rhys’s harm-causing shift. She kept drilling me, until finally Charlize snapped at the woman to let up on me.
“Can’t you see she feels terrible enough as it is?” Charlize snaked one arm around my shoulders and hugged me to her side in a sisterly gesture. “We take care of our own here, and Zara is one of us.”
“But she’s a witch,” said the willowy intern.
“She is one of usssssssssss,” Charlize hissed, her hair snakes joining in the chorus.
The intern trembled visibly before retreating.
Charlize gave my shoulder another reassuring squeeze. “Let’s go pop in on that vet. What’s his name again? Dr. Puppies? Dr. Octopus? Dr. Cheese and Lettuce Sandwich?”
“Dr. Katz.” My stomach growled. “But I’ve never wanted a cheese and lettuce sandwich more in my life.”
“We’ll stop by Gingerbread on the way to the vet.”
Chapter 30
MONDAY... APPARENTLY.
Since the last time I’d been in Charlize’s car, a current-model Beetle, she’d acquired more debris in the backseat.
“Did you go camping recently?” I asked, eyeballing the top layer of the junk, which included a tent, a sleeping bag, and a plastic baggie of what I hoped was charcoal briquettes.
“I go camping all the time. I love to get out in the woods, where I can think and breathe and enjoy the quiet contemplation of nature.”
A stone squirrel in the backseat caught my eye. The expression on its pointy rodent face was one of surprise. Or so I guessed. Squirrels always look a bit surprised.
I asked cagily, “And how do you enjoy the quiet contemplation of nature, Charlize? By turning small creatures into garden tchotchkes?”
Ignoring my question, she gushed, “You should come with me some time! We can roast marshmallows and tell spooky ghost stories.”
“Spooky ghost stories?” I gave her a you-must-be-joking look. “You must mean tales from my regular, everyday life.”
“Sure, why not? We’d have so much fun.”
“Sure,” I said, because why not? Even in nothing more than a flimsy tent, we’d be safe. I had my powers. Plus any bear or cougar that messed with us would quickly find itself embarking upon a new career as a concrete lawn jockey.
We stopped by the Gingerbread Bakery for a quick breakfast with Charlize’s sister, Chloe, and baby Jordan Junior. The pastries and coffee were excellent, as always.
I still didn’t have my purse or phone, so I used the bakery’s phone to check in again with my daughter. She was even more concerned than she’d been the night before, but I convinced her to go to school like it was a normal Monday morning.
We thanked the Taubs for the breakfast, I gave Chloe a sisterly hug goodbye, and then we were off to the veterinary clinic.
Just the three of us.
Me, Charlize, and the surprised squirrel. I wondered if he was Petey the Squirrel, the one Bentley carried peanuts for.
We arrived at the clinic and parked the Beetle in front. The vet’s lights were on already. All along the street, the other shopkeepers were shaking out their welcome mats and getting ready for another busy week.
Charlize switched off the ignition and yanked out her key ring, which was accessorized with a plush orange octopus. She looped the ring over her index finger and swirled the mass of keys and octopus three times noisily.
Her blue eyes twinkled as she asked, “Ready to roll, partner?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be. How are you planning to jog the assistant’s memory? Do you have one of those neat clicky pens or something else to break the glamour spell?”
She blinked innocently and drawled, “Why, just my Southern charm.”
“You’re Southern?” I hadn’t detected any sort of accent before—not in Charlize or either of her sisters.
“Zara Riddle, you don’t have to be Southern to have Southern charm.”
“No, I think you do. That’s sort of the whole schtick.”
She tossed her head back in laughter before drawling, “Well, shut the front door! You can just watch me work my charms in there and decide for yourself, Little Miss Doubter.”
She popped open the Beetle’s door and stepped out into the bright morning sunshine. Wincing under the harsh rays, I followed.
As soon as I walked into the clinic, the short assistant greeted me cheerfully. “Welcome back, Ms. Riddle! How is your little fox man?”
“Perfectly healthy,” I lied. “And so well behaved. I really lucked out with that one.”
Charlize leaned on the counter and looked down at the assistant, who looked shorter than ever in proximity to Charlize.
Fatima said, “H-H-How can I help you, ma’am?”
Charlize looked at the young woman’s name tag. “Are you working alone right now, Fatima?”
“I-I-I think so,” Fatima.
“That’sssss nice,” Charlize said with a hiss.
Fatima’s round face relaxed. Her wide-set brown eyes relaxed to a semi-lidded state behind oversized white glasses.
Charlize moved her head rhythmically. The hidden snakes within her golden curls b
egin to undulate.
“I have a question to assssssk you,” Charlize hissed.
“Yessss,” Fatima replied in a monotone voice. “Asssssssk me anything.”
“Who paid for Zara’s bill last week?”
“A woman,” Fatima said without hesitation. “A woman like both of you. She had great power.”
“She looked like us?”
Fatima swayed from left to right, like a snake being charmed by a flute player.
“I don’t know,” Fatima answered. “Like her.” The short assistant pointed a stubby finger at me. “Like her, but different. Older.”
I groaned. “Aunt Zinnia. I should have known.”
Charlize asked if the clinic had security cameras.
“No cameras,” Fatima said.
“Did she pay by credit card?”
I nudged the gorgon on the arm. “I already covered this the first time around.”
Charlize poked my shoulder, turning my flesh to stone. It wouldn’t last, but it still hurt, like walking on your numb foot when you have pins and needles in your leg. I decided to keep quiet and let her ask the questions.
She repeated the question, getting the same response I had. The stranger had paid in cash. Charlize asked again about a physical description, a scent, a type of clothing style, anything at all.
“Black hair,” Fatima said. “She had long black hair.”
“Are you sure?”
“Like yours, but black,” Fatima said.
Charlize hissed with frustration. “I need something physical,” she said.
“Like a tooth,” Fatima said.
Charlize and I spoke in unison. “A tooth?”
Fatima opened a drawer and passed us a plastic bag containing a large tooth. A fang.
Charlize picked up the bag. “The black-haired woman left this?”
“Yes,” Fatima answered, then, “No.” She shook her head. “I’m so confused. It was... left behind that day.”
I whispered to Charlize, “Ask her if it was found inside the fox’s wound.”
My snake-haired partner asked.
Fatima’s brown eyes sparkled. “Yes,” she exclaimed. “That’s where it was. Whatever tried to eat the fox must have left it behind.”
Watchful Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries Book 4) Page 22