toad witch 04 - aunt tilly were canning demons

by Christiana Miller

  INSIDE, the store was surprisingly clean, except for dust and cobwebs. But the ritual area/classroom next to the store smelled horrible. It smelled like death, like someone had left out some type of meat offering to some deity, and it had long since rotted.

  We finally found the offending piece of liver over by a gold-covered black rock. Gus didn’t want to pick it up without tongs or a hazmat suit, so I used a broom handle to knock it into a trash can.

  There was another exit behind the temple room, that led outside, to the lounging area and ritual space. There was a fence between the store and Mama Lua’s cottage, but the gate in the front, on the store side, was slightly open.

  Gus walked over and closed it. “The padlock’s busted. This must be how people are getting into the back to party.”

  “You think people broke in?”

  “Why not? There’s couches, a kitchen, a bathroom. A washer and dryer. It’s always warm in Los Angeles. With Mama Lua gone, someone could move in and live in the back, easily. She keeps her wards focused on the store, not the outside.”

  There was a second gate, further down the fence, that led into the cottage’s back yard. We opened it and walked in. Mama Lua’s cottage was old, small and surprisingly ramshackle. The fence around the property had fallen down in places, and there were piles of poop in the yard.

  “Does she have a dog?” I asked.

  Gus hesitated. “No…you probably don’t want to touch that. I’ll clean up the yard and fix the fence.”

  “You think she would have warded her cottage,” I said.

  “Maybe she doesn’t have anything worth stealing here,” Gus suggested. “So she focused all of her energy on the store.”

  Just when I thought Mama Lua’s living quarters couldn’t get any worse, Gus opened the back door to the cottage. The smell coming out of the kitchen was so horrendous, I started to retch.

  Gus sucked in a hard breath, and I looked up from my dry heaves to see what could have possibly shocked him.

  The kitchen wall was covered in blood.

  CHAPTER 5

  Thankfully, there was a trash can by the door, because my stomach couldn’t take any more.

  “You are so gross,” Gus said.

  “Me?! I am the least gross thing in this place. What the hell happened in here? We can’t stay here. We need to call the cops.”

  “She may get mad if we call the cops,” Gus said.

  “What are you talking about?! Look at all that blood. What if Mama Lua’s corpse is in here? She could be hacked up in pieces in the other room.”

  “No, look,” Gus pointed at the wall. “It’s not just weird blood spatter. Those are sigils. She may have put them there herself, for a reason.”

  “Would she have done that before or after someone killed her? We need to call the cops,” I repeated.

  “Would you stop panicking and look?”

  I took a breath and tried to calm down. “Okay, so her wall is covered in bloody sigils. Why? What do they mean?”

  “I don’t know. We should take a picture though, so we can find out.”

  I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the wall. As I put the phone back in my purse, the shadow of a cat zipped past me, and ran for the refrigerator, where it vanished.

  “Holy crap, did you see that?!” I asked Gus.

  “See what?”

  “It was a cat’s shadow, with no actual cat attached to it.”

  “It may be some kind of fetch Mama Lua created.”

  “I need to get out of here.” I backed out of the kitchen door, and stood outside in the poop-filled lawn, trying to find fresher air.

  Between the smell from the cottage, the stench from the yard, and the exhaust fumes from the street, it was difficult.

  “Look, you stay out here,” Gus said. “I’m going to go through the rest of the place. I’ll let you know if I find a body.”

  Within a few minutes, he was back. “Broken furniture, piles of garbage, but no body. There’s not even a bedroom. It’s just a kitchen, living room and bathroom.”

  “I’m not staying here,” I told him. “And we can’t sleep in the car.”

  “I know. Let me see what I can do.” He pulled out his cell phone, put it on speaker and dialed.

  “Hello?” a sleepy voice answered.

  “Hi, Mom? It’s your favorite prodigal son.”

  “Gus! My baby boy. What a joy to hear your voice,” she said, and yawned.

  “Isn’t it late to be sleeping?”

  “More like too early to be woken up,” she said.

  Gus looked at me and whispered: “Old people.”

  “Mara and I are in Los Angeles, and we thought we’d come over and stay with you for a bit.”

  “Oh, my darlin’, I would love that. Unfortunately, the house is being tented. We had a bit of a termite problem.”

  Gus looked puzzled. “Where are you then? Maybe we could drop by your hotel room and visit.”

  “You’d have to get on a plane, love. Your dad, grandmother and I are in London.”

  “How…great.” Gus gave me an apologetic look. “You’ve been talking about going back to England since I was a boy. I’m sure Gran’s happy being there.”

  “She is.”

  I loved Gus’s family. I know it’s completely selfish, but I wished they were here, termites and all.

  “Is Lorelei staying with you, too? Or is she here?”

  Lorelei was Gus’s younger sister. She was the baby of the family. Even though Gus acted like the baby most of the time, he actually wasn’t.

  “She went to Hawaii to get over her latest romance. She was such a wreck after she found out her new boyfriend was married. Can you believe he had a pregnant wife and kid at home? Some men aren’t worth the DNA it took to make them.”

  Gus rolled his eyes. “How did she not know? She’s just as much a witch as we are. She should have been able to sense that he was hiding something.”

  “She’s been trying to shut that part of her down. Can you believe it? Claims it’s an invasion of other people’s privacy. I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She thinks reading people is unethical now, unless they ask you to. So, she didn’t pry into his life the way she should have. It was foolish.”

  “Good, I’m glad she got hurt then. I hope she learned her lesson about trusting men who want to hook up with a pretty girl. Most of them have a shady, self-serving sense of ethics. Better she learns it now than later.”

  “Surely, not most of them, dear. That’s not fair. Most of the men I’ve met are lovely, giving people. It’s just…every now and then…you run across a bad apple.”

  “So, it’s you. You’re where she gets her naïveté from.”

  “Is that any way to speak to your mother?”

  “Yes, it is. If you have special talents, you can’t just not use them, because it gives you an unfair advantage. That’s even more irresponsible and unethical. Think of how much pain she caused his poor wife by not taking a few minutes to snoop in his head. Using second sight is Witchy Self-Defense 101.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, dear heart. But let’s agree not to rub it in if you speak to her. She’s been through enough.”

  Gus sighed. “Fine…I guess. But only because it’s you asking.”

  “Thank you, dear. I’ll take that as your word. Now, it’s very late, and I’m very tired, so I’m going to go back to bed. I’m sorry to miss your visit, pumpkin. Give Mara our love.”

  “Will do.” Gus ended the call and blew out a sigh.

  I looked at Mama Lua’s creepy cottage and shook my head. “Gus, I have a bad feeling about this. No one lives like that. What if something bad happened to her before she could leave? For real?”

  Gus paused, then texted Mama Lua. We both waited for what seemed like an eternity, but she didn’t respond.

  “Crap.” Gus hit the speaker button on his phone and called her, but all we got was a message that the call was unable to be completed.

>   GUS THOUGHT ABOUT IT, and dialed another number.

  “Yo, talk to me,” a gruff male voice said.

  “Hey, Nick. It’s Gus. Mara’s here too, so be nice. Say hi, Mara.”

  “Hi, Nick.” I said, surprised that Gus had called his brother. He must really be out of options.

  “Cupcake, how ya doin’?”

  “I’m…doin’.”

  “That good, huh?”

  Nick and I used to date, years ago. The first time we broke up, we were both teenagers and it was because I refused to have sex with him in the front seat of his dad’s car. The second time we broke up, he had just become a cop and he was getting a bit too full of himself. We finally broke up for good though, when I realized I liked Gus more, and Gus, even though he insisted he wasn’t into women, was getting weirdly jealous about sharing me with Nick.

  “Mara, I remember. Who could forget a beauty like Mara? But Gus…Gus…Yeah, that name sounds familiar, but I’m not quite placing it.”

  “Fuck off, dickhead. I know I haven’t called you in, like, ever. Stop being a pain in the ass, or I’ll go back to not calling you.”

  “Hey, my luck’s already changing for the better.”

  “Give me a break. We have an emergency.”

  “So, call the cops.”

  “I am calling the cops. I’m calling you. You’re a cop.”

  “I’m off duty. Try 9-1-1.”

  “I’m not going to call 9-1-1.”

  “We don’t actually know if it’s an emergency or not,” I said. “That’s the problem. We’re at the Crooked Pantry. Actually, at the cottage next door to the Crooked Pantry.”

  “We’re supposed to be staying here, but…we need you to come over here. We need your opinion.”

  “On whether or not to stay there? Stay there. Better than you staying with me.”

  “Would you let me finish? Something weird is going on here.”

  “You should fit right in, then. Your entire life is weird.”

  “Not my kind of weird. Your kind of weird. Criminal weird.”

  Nick sighed. “Fine. What’s going on?”

  “We’re not sure if this place is a crime scene or not,” I said.

  “Seriously?” Nick asked, sounding skeptical.

  “It’s a toss-up,” Gus agreed.

  “We can’t tell if the place was vandalized, if the owner was killed in some kind of ritual murder and her body disposed of, or if just belongs on a very special episode of Hoarders,” I said.

  “You do know how to read crime scenes, right?” Gus asked. “They taught you that in cop school?”

  Nick gave a heavy sigh. “You two couldn’t have stayed in Wisconsin?”

  “What would be the fun in that? Can we focus on the problem? I don’t know if something happened to Mama Lua, or if she just left the place like this,” Gus said.

  “So, call and ask her.”

  “I’ve been trying. We can’t get through.”

  “Why is your fucked-up life my problem? I thought that ended once you moved away.”

  “Because I’m standing here with a really pregnant Mara, and she’s about to puke on me. So, if you can’t get your ass here for me, do it for her.”

  “Mara got knocked up? When were you planning to tell me?” I blushed. “Fine. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Great. See you in a few. Bring a plastic bubble for Princess Vomitron. The world will be safer if she’s contained,” Gus said, ending the call. Then he looked at me, and smiled. “He’s on his way.”

  I punched his arm, hard. Princess Vomitron, indeed.

  WHILE WE WAITED, I thought about the last time I saw Nick. Gus and I were having dinner at his parents’ house, which was chaotic and crazed for the uninitiated, but for me, it was a comforting slice of normal in my otherwise lonely life.

  They lived in a medium-sized bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. A house that would probably cost about $160,000 most other places, but was worth $1.5 million out here.

  As we drove up into the hills, the lights of Los Angeles twinkled away beneath us, like a sea of low-lying stars. When we parked and got out of the car, the smell of roasting lamb wafted out of the screen door to greet us.

  Arturo, Gus’s dad, met us at the door with a beer for Gus and a kiss on both cheeks for me.

  We took our shoes off and Gus got dragged into the family room to watch football with the men, (which he only tolerated because he enjoyed watching all the tight ends in their form-fitting pants).

  “Hey, hey, hey, if it isn’t devil boy and his beard,” Nick said, munching on a handful of peanuts.

  I flipped Nick off.

  “Jackass,” Gus said. “At least I don’t kill people for a living.”

  “Gus, language!” Eleni yelled from the kitchen.

  “What?!” Gus looked around in disbelief. “He started it, Ma.”

  “I only shoot people who really deserve it. So, you should definitely watch out, Gus.” Nick grinned.

  I grabbed a handful of peanuts and wandered into the kitchen to see if “the women” (mostly Eleni) needed any help.

  Eleni had the lamb arranged on a platter and was pulling roast potatoes out of the oven. “There you are, my beautiful girl.” She kissed me on both cheeks as she handed me the platter. “Be an angel and take this to the table.”

  Once the table was ready, Nick grabbed the chair next to me, edging Gus out of the way, and heaped lamb, roast potatoes and green beans cooked in tomato sauce on his plate.

  “You keep hanging around this loser,” he said to me, nodding in Gus’s direction, “you’ll never find a husband.”

  “Who says I want one?”

  “Everyone wants a husband,” that was from Gus’s Gran. She walked down the stairs from her bedroom, decked out in her finest gold jewelry and one of her church dresses.

  “Gran, you should have warned us to wear sunglasses.” Nick said, shielding his eyes. “I can’t see you, there’s so much glare coming off that bling.”

  “Ma,” Arturo sighed, “What are you doing? It’s not Sunday.”

  As she passed the table, Gran reached over and snagged a roast potato on her fork.

  “I have a date with studmuffin398,” she said, through a mouthful of potato. “I’ve got to look hot.”

  I tried hard not to laugh. Said in English, the studmuffin comment would have been funny enough. But in her soft half-British, half-Greek accent, it was too anachronistic for words.

  Across the table, I could feel Gus trying not to look at me, which made it even harder for me not to laugh. The rest of the table, however, was silent.

  Gran was born in England. She spent her life fascinated by the occult. On a trip to Madeira, her mother introduced her to Gerald Gardner, the father of Wicca. The day she turned 18, Gardner initiated her into his coven.

  Unfortunately, her first husband was a non-witch, and he didn’t understand anything she was doing. He started acting out in bizarre ways, trying to bring her under his boot, as she puts it.

  After her divorce, she moved to Greece, where she met a ravishingly handsome Greek man in a Thessaloniki cafe. They scandalized their families by eloping on their third date and moving to America. While their kids were raised Greek Orthodox, Gran continued her occult studies, and soon formed a small coven with her new husband.

  Fast forward three decades, when Gus got kicked out of kindergarten for using a plastic knife to cast circles, holding pagan religious ceremonies during recess, teaching his classmates the basics of spellcrafting during snack breaks, and (successfully) cursing his teacher after being punished. Gran was so pleased, she took him under her wing and taught him everything she knew.

  After her husband died of a heart attack (in the middle of a sex magick ritual, is what Gus told me), Gran went through a long, dark period. Now that she was feeling on the brink of the abyss herself, she was making up for lost time by trying to sample all that life had to offer, while she was still here to enjoy it.

  “I hope
you’re all happy.” Arturo frowned at us from his plate. “I told you buying her that computer was a mistake. Now look at her. Instead of wearing black and mourning her life, she’s picking up strangers on the internet, like an American teenager.”

  “Wanna borrow my gun?” Nick asked her. “You can shoot him in the balls if he gets fresh.”

  Gran beamed. “I have pepper spray, but a gun would be better. Can I shoot him if he doesn’t get fresh?”

  Eleni reached over and twisted Nick’s ear. “You do not arm your grandmother, you hear me?”

  “Ow! Okay, let go. I was kidding.”

  Just then, the doorbell rang. “That must be StudMuffin!” Gran cackled.

  “You gave a stranger our home address? Great. Now, we have to move. Arturo, talk to your mother!”

  Arturo looked pained. “Mom, you can’t give our address out to strangers.”

  “She shouldn’t be dating strangers she meets on the computer anyway. What if he’s Jack the Ripper?” Eleni was so flustered, she gulped down her wine like it was water.

  Gran waived down her objections. “I’m tired of being old. I want my life back. And that means…a man. And sex. Sex is what keeps you young.”

  “Heaven forbid,” Arturo said, making the sign of the cross.

  “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” Gran said.

  Eleni poured herself a second glass of wine and gulped it down. The doorbell rang again.

  Gran stood up. “Let’s not keep the man waiting. We’re going out for dessert. You know what they say about chocolate,” she said, winking at me.

  “You haven’t even had your dinner,” Eleni protested.

  “Life’s short, eat dessert first. Save me some dinner and I’ll have it later.”

  I coughed into my napkin and tried to hide my smile. My dad used to say the same thing. Eleni looked even more horrified.

  Nick got up, arranged his jacket so that his shoulder holster was showing and motioned Gran to sit down. I popped a blue-cheese stuffed olive in my mouth and sat back to watch the floor show.

  Nick opened the door. An older man stood there, wearing a biker jacket, his thinning gray hair pulled back into a pony tail. I would bet, underneath that jacket, his arms were covered with faded tattoos.