I didn’t have a wicked slap shot that would let me score from way up ice. I had to come in closer to the net. My wrist shot is pretty good though. I turned my left side toward the net and shot. The puck flew over the goalie’s right shoulder, hit the net behind him and fell to the ice. I glanced across the ice to the other team warming up, as we were. Bring it, I thought in their direction.
We didn’t win, but an overtime loss was yards better than a mercy in the first period or something. I’d had a goal, an assist, and had chased down one of the faster guys on the other team and stolen the puck off him. I was pretty pleased with my game for the night. Like many women who play, I really loved besting a guy.
“We’re going to The Corn,” one of my teammates said. He wiped the ice off the blade of his skate with a small orange towel before stowing it in his bag.
The Corn was the Coronet Bar, a couple of blocks from the rink. We went there for beers after a game pretty often. The owner didn’t mind stinky hockey players in his bar and it was always a good time. I was “one of the guys” to my teammates and no one hit on me, ever. And truly, there was nothing like a cold beer after a game.
I shook my head, “Not tonight, thanks.”
I was glad for the game and the chance to skate off some of the nervous energy roiling around inside me, but I wanted time with Dee a lot more than I wanted a beer with the guys. He’d texted that he’d meet me at my house after my game. It’s important to have your priorities in order and let nothing get in their way.
My teammate shrugged and glanced around the locker room to see who else might want to go. I picked up my bag and stick and headed for the parking lot.
I made my way from the rink down to Pacific Coast Highway toward home. Pacific Coast Highway could be a crowded bear to drive. This time of night the traffic was fairly light, and I pulled into my one-car garage twenty minutes later. As always, my mood lightened the moment I pulled up to my house.
I loved my old house, a two-story wood-sided beach cottage built by my great-great-great-grandfather in the early nineteen-hundreds. Over the years, it had become a sort of tradition that when the child—for some reason, there had only been only-children in my family for generations—turned eighteen, her parents moved to the big house in Beverly Hills and the newly minted adult got the beach house to herself. I’d turned down offers of literally millions of dollars just for the dirt from people who wanted to tear down my cottage on its insanely valuable double lot and put up yet another giant house on the ocean-front site. I’d never sell. As long as I could come up with the yearly property taxes, this house, still known around town as the Goodlight House for its builder, would be mine forever.
My wards were still up and the house dark, which meant Dee hadn’t arrived yet. It was a measure of the trust we had in each other that I could take down the wards around his house just as he could take down the wards around mine. I dropped my bag in the garage, unzipped it, took out my wet hockey gear, and spread it out to dry.
I went in the back door to the mudroom and into the kitchen. My paper and colored pencils were still on the table where I’d left them, along with the drawing of the buff building.
I looked at the drawing and shook my head. “If you’re downtown, I couldn’t find you.” I tended to talk out loud to myself. Dee, who didn’t, found my habit hilarious for some reason.
I sat down on one of the old bentwood café chairs that had come down to me with the house. I pulled out a clean sheet of paper, closed my eyes, and focused on locating Aunt Mich.
Except my mind wandered to the murder room I’d been in this morning. I pushed that out of my thoughts and tried again to channel some information, any information, about Aunt Mich. Eyes closed, I let my fingers crawl among the pencils until one seemed right. I picked it up and began drawing. When I felt done, I opened my eyes.
Damn.
I’d drawn the murder room with a faceless Aunt Mich as the victim. A man had died in that condo. I knew that. So, unless Aunt Mich was a cross-dresser who’d managed to fool his/her family all of his/her life, the condo and Aunt Mich had nothing to do with each other.
I heaved a big sigh, closed my eyes, and went through the pick-a-pencil, make-a-picture process again. This time I drew a big red heart with a jagged crack down the middle—the classic broken heart motif, which didn’t seem to fit in with anything.
My phone chimed with an incoming text. I frowned at the screen. Dee was held up with work and wouldn’t make it over tonight. I tried to remember the last night we hadn’t spent together and couldn’t.
“Can’t have everything, Oona,” I told myself, got up, took a nice hot shower, and crawled into bed. I was asleep in minutes.
The thing that looked like a man but wasn’t, the thing from the murder room downtown, was chasing me. I couldn’t see him, but I knew. My tennis shoe-shod feet made little plopping sounds as I ran down a dark street. An alley opened up on my right. I bolted down it, past giant metal trashcans overflowing with still beating hearts. A hand grabbed me by the back of the neck. Another hand covered my mouth. Somewhere a woman was keening.
I awoke, my heart pounding, covered in flop sweat.
5
Monday morning, I sat at my kitchen table again, the drawings I’d made spread out over the oak surface, thinking. I wasn’t any closer to figuring out anything about Aunt Mich. If I hadn’t been knocked over by the knowledge and if the drawings hadn’t come so easily, I’d seriously wonder if there even was a missing aunt.
The doorbell rang, and I got up to answer it. I didn’t get a lot of visitors and I was pretty sure it would be Dee, though he was usually in the office or out in the field at this hour and didn’t usually ring my doorbell. It could be my parents. They were known to drop in unexpectedly.
A stocky UPS driver, dressed all in brown except for black leather trainers, stood outside, a package the size of a shoebox in his hand. I signed for it, thanked him, and glanced down at the return address. Danyon and Peet. Hmmm.
A thank you for my help yesterday, I guessed. Juliana was big on thank you gifts. She liked shopping and business-related thank you gifts were a good excuse. She also had excellent taste and didn’t stint on expenses she could write off. Tyron insisted on signing-off in advance for business purchases of this sort, but he was fairly indulgent about it. I was curious to see what was inside.
I used a pair of scissors to cut the tape and then lifted off the top. There were a lot of Styrofoam peanuts inside. I rumbled around until my hand found the end of a plastic bag. I hauled it out and then dropped the bag as if it were made of molten lava.
Inside was the big sister of Petra’s silver box.
My cell phone was on the table. Hands shaking, I picked it up and hit a number.
“Danyon and Peet,” Terry, the ever-placid receptionist, said.
“Terry, it’s Oona.” I kept my voice even, which was quite a feat, considering how angry I was. “I need to speak with Tyron or Juliana right now.”
“Hey, Oona,” she said. “Juliana’s out, but Tyron is here. Let me get him for you.”
My heart pounded double-time as I waited for him to come to the phone. My hands were still shaking.
“Oona,” he boomed into the phone, full of bonhomie. “Have you decided to work more on the death case after all?”
“What the hell, Tyron?” I all but shouted, the lid blown clean off my self-control at the sound of his voice.
“What the hell, Oona?” he said back crossly. “Did you call just to swear at me?”
“The silver box,” I said. “With the rowan tree on it. How did you know about that? How dare you send one to me.”
Tyron’s voice held a long-suffering but patient tone. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t,” I said, throwing a big old sneer into my voice.
“Oona,” he said, his voice still full of patience. “I do not know anything about sending a box. What box?”
Cold shivers r
an through me. I knew Tyron. He wouldn’t lie to me. For someone in a business where lying was sometimes—often— required, he was impossible at it.
Which probably meant that whoever had sent the box to Petra had sent this one to me.
Someone who didn’t know me had seen me with her and stalked me to my home. Someone who knew where I worked as well as where I lived.
Someone with bad intent if they were involved with Aunt Mich’s disappearance, which I had to think they were.
Either that or coincidence was developing a sense of the macabre.
“Okay. Sorry,” I said, anxious now to get off this call.
“Listen,” Tyron said. “About that death job. We really could use your help.”
I shook my head firmly, but of course Tyron couldn’t see that. I’d had all the death I could stomach. It struck me then that a good portion of the reason I wanted to help Petra find Aunt Mich was to stave off another death. I wasn’t sure why I felt death around Mich—no, around Petra—but I did. Anything I could do to find the missing woman quickly seemed like a good thing.
“I have something I’m working on right now,” I said. “Call when you have a case that doesn’t involve dead people. I’d be happy to help.”
There was a bit of silence, before Tyron spoke again. “Well, if you change your mind—”
We made polite end-of-conversation noises and I hung up.
That someone had stalked me to my house and sent me the rowan tree box seriously freaked me out. That they knew me well enough to put D&P as the return address was frightening. At the same time, it pissed me off that I felt invaded in my own home. I knew my wards would stop anyone from actually coming into my home, but I thought I could use some personal protection, too.
The first spell Dee had taught me was for personal protection. I intoned it now and felt better knowing it was there. I could ask Dee for even stronger protection, but I hated asking him for magic. I wanted to be able to do whatever I needed myself. I grabbed my purse from where it hung on a peg in the foyer and headed out.
Pier Avenue, one of the two main streets in Hermosa Beach, the other being Pacific Coast Highway, is lined with small shops, restaurants, and bars. I hiked up the road to what had been Either/Or bookstore when I was a kid and was now knickknack stores and a Subway sandwich shop. I didn’t go in any of the buildings facing the street. I went up the messy alley around back. No one who didn’t know a magical store was there would ever spot it. The only way to enter was by using the right spell.
I intoned the words and the wall seemed to simply disintegrate, revealing the shop within. Sudie, the owner, looked up from behind the counter. She swiped a hank of long black hair away from her face and grinned.
Sudie was half-Japanese, half-white, and had that amazing exotically indefinable beauty so many mixed chicks are blessed with, as though genes that were fine on their own somehow exploded into perfection when combined.
I stepped inside the shop filled with books in a floor-to-ceiling, weathered-looking bookcase, walls decorated with dream catchers and mandalas, shelves filled with boxes and bottles filled with anything and everything a magical might need for a spell or potion. A couple of the many crystal, brass, and silver wind chimes that hung from the ceiling tinkled musically. The wall reformed behind me.
“Oona!” Sudie said, her surprise at seeing me clear on her face and in her voice.
I’d never come into her shop alone before, only with Dee. She was probably surprised I knew the entry spell, though it was pretty common knowledge in the community, from what I could tell.
She gave me a gracious smile. “How have you been?”
“Fine,” I said. “And you?”
“Busy. Busy,” she said. “But in a good way.”
Something was missing in the shop.
“Where’s Major?”
Sudie unconsciously glanced at the spot by the window that was invisible from the outside but let sunlight flow inside. Major the mynah bird’s cage had hung there. Her eyes grew misty. “We get old, we die.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said. “When?”
Sudie sighed deeply and her eyes watered a little. “Two days ago. He’d been complaining lately that he felt tired and his wings felt stiff.”
Major was a special bird and could speak far beyond mere mimicry. He’d told Sudie where to find a book that contained the spell Dee and I had used to close the breach in the membrane between our plane and the Brume, the world of murk and fog.
“We were here alone when it happened,” Sudie said. “Major called to me and said it was his time to go. I opened the cage door and he sat in my lap until the end.”
I felt her grief like a fist blow to my chest. I swallowed hard, tried not to cry myself, and waited until she was ready to go on.
Sudie dabbed at her eyes, pulled herself together, and said, “So how can I help you today?”
I told her about the two silver rowan tree boxes, that being stalked creeped me out, and that I needed some extra strong protection for myself.
She gave me a quizzical look and I didn’t have to read more than her face to know what was in her mind.
“I know,” I said rolling my eyes slightly. “Diego could whip up a strong spell. I want to do it myself.”
She grinned approvingly. “You’re going to make a good wizard.”
My cheeks warmed. “Thank you.”
“Except— Just a warning. Don’t be surprised if you find some in the community less than welcoming to a psychic learning the magical arts. There are people who feel the two shouldn’t go together. The jealous types, worried that two skills could make you stronger than they are.” She laughed without humor. “And then there’s some of the old guard who think women shouldn’t be wizards at all. That only males should wield that sort of magic.”
I nodded. “Believe me, I know all about people who don’t like to be bested by someone they think should be less skilled simply because she’s female. They’re my favorites to beat.”
“You wouldn’t think in this day and age—” Sudie said.
“But you’d be wrong.”
Sudie grinned again. “So wrong.”
She leaned forward, her elbows on the polished marble counter, folded her hands together and set her chin on the stage they made. “Back to the spell. Protection or repulsion?”
“Protection will do it, I think.”
Repulsion would keep away anyone with the slightest bit of magic in them, which meant that Dee—and my mother, for that matter—couldn’t get close to me. That would never do. Protection, on the other hand, would stop anyone who came near me with evil intentions.
Sudie nodded. “I’ve got just the spell for you.”
She came out from behind the counter, walked across the room to a long, high bookshelf crammed full of books, pulled one out, and went back behind the counter. She opened the book to the page she wanted by memory and named a reasonable price. Too reasonable. It was a good thing Sudie didn’t really need the money from the shop to live. She’d have starved long before now.
“How much for the book?” I asked.
She named a higher but still reasonable price.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
She leaned forward, elbows on the counter again. “Do you want to cast it now?”
A nervous hitch ran through me, but I nodded. I didn’t feel that whoever had sent the box was physically on my tail at the moment but slathering myself in protection certainly couldn’t hurt.
“Come on,” she said and led me behind the counter to a door marked ‘private.’ She opened the door with a word. Inside was a room that was much too large given the size of the building and how much of it Sudie’s merchandise took up. Sometimes I had to just shake my head in sheer appreciation of what magic could do. The room held a desk, filing cabinets, a small refrigerator, and two comfortable looking couches.
“Do you want some help?” Sudie said.
I shook my head. “Nope. But thanks.”<
br />
“I’ll leave you to it then.”
When the door closed behind her, I sat on one of the couches and read over the spell. I was used to Dee being with me when I cast any spell, ready to undo anything I might mess up, which, I confess, had happened. The less said about the first time I tried to light a fire with a spell the better. At least my house didn’t burn down.
I took a breath, gathered my will, and intoned the words.
My skin prickled. I rolled my shoulders trying to relieve the sharp tension rolling through my body as the spell settled over and through me. Some spells had no physical sensations at all, I had learned. Some did. Evidently this was one of the latter.
The prickling stopped, and a feeling of peace settled over me. I didn’t know if it was a direct result of the spell itself or if it was relief at feeling I’d cast it properly—I hoped I’d cast it properly, I was new at this—and was protected. Without Dee around to tell me if the magic had worked, I had to take it on faith.
I guessed I could have asked Sudie, she’d probably be able to tell, but I’d turned down her help offer for casting and it seemed rude now to ask her to check my work. Besides, I needed to learn to trust my abilities.
Back in the main shop. Sudie gave me a thumbs up and I handed her the book of spells. She dropped the book into a plain, brown plastic bag, the kind you get at Ralph’s if you forget your reusables. I pulled some money from my purse. She made change. I had the feeling she’d like me to stay and chat a while, but I had other errands to run. I said goodbye.
Sudie muttered the spell that opened the wall again, and I walked out into the typical Southern California Spring beach day—lovely, pleasant sunshine now that the marine layer had burned off. I still had two stops to make.
6
Whoever had sent the rowan tree boxes to Petra and I had chosen silver as a metal. They could have chosen brass, copper, gold, pewter, paper, glass, any number of substances, but they’d gone for silver.
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