Barbed Wire Heart

by Alexes Razevich

  After a while, Dee said, “We have to go outside sometime, you know.”

  I did know. We couldn’t stay in his house forever and given that it was almost noon and I was famished, we’d need to go soon. But every time I thought about his front door opening, my stomach lurched. I didn’t feel any danger around us, but I hadn’t felt any advance warning about the monster either—even with Dee’s magical boost. If my abilities were being blocked by whoever was after Aunt Mich . . . I had absolutely no idea how to counter that.

  “I’ll go upstairs and fix us a little something for added protection,” Dee said. “Then we’ll go.”

  “Can I come?” I said. “I like watching you mix potions. It’s like watching a master chef, or maybe a perfumer, at work—equal parts science and art. A skill honed over years of practice.”

  “Flatterer,” he said as he stood up.

  I batted my eyelashes and grinned. “Not my style to flatter unnecessarily, is it?”

  Dee held out his hand to help me to my feet.

  Upstairs, he brought out the powders, oils, and whatevers he needed and lined them up on the long farmhouse table he used as his mixing station. He weighed the plant matters and earths on a brass scale he’d picked up cheap at a police auction and sifted them into a silver bowl. He measured out and added the oils and other liquids, then stirred it all together. It really was pleasant to watch him. Reassuring, somehow.

  “What I can’t figure out,” I said, tiptoeing once again toward all that had happened this week, while Diego strained the protection potion through cheesecloth into two crystal glasses, “is why Sudie? Was it wrong place, wrong time?”

  He handed me a glass and said, “Drink up.”

  The drink had a slightly fruity taste, probably from the dried orange blossoms in the mix and maybe from some of the essential oils. Dee’s potions could taste pretty foul, but this one wasn’t bad at all.

  Diego set down his now-empty glass. “I don’t know why Sudie.” His voice held pain.

  “You two were close,” I said. “Friends with benefits.”

  He tilted his head in acknowledgement. “The friends part was more important than the benefits, but yeah, we were close.”

  Maybe our evil wizard had a beef with her, I thought. Sudie could be prickly. Maybe once he got started with John Broadhurst, the second murder was easier.

  “I know I said I felt the two murders were connected, but maybe I’m wrong,” I said. “Do you think she could have been a random victim picked for no reason other than her shop offered privacy? I can’t think of a time I was in there when more than one or two at the most people stopped by at the same time.”

  “She did most of her business online,” Dee said, but I could see he was considering the possibility that Sudie’s death had nothing to do with Aunt Mich or John Broadhurst.

  “Really?” I said. “She’d sell an enchantment or a curse to some random person online?”

  Could that careless business practice have gotten her killed?

  “No,” Dee said. “She only sold online to people in the wizards and witches registry. No one who wasn’t certified by the council could buy from her that way. She checked out each new buyer before shipping their order. Sudie was meticulous about it.”

  “So, she would have known and trusted anyone who knew where her store was and how to open the door?”

  Diego frowned. I could see he didn’t like the idea that a magical had murdered Sudie, especially someone local. He would have known immediately when he heard where she’d died that it had to be someone in the community and most likely local but hearing me say it out loud seemed to reopen the wound.

  “It’s possible that her killer was from out of town,” he said. “Sudie was scrupulous about her online business, but for the store—the killer could have gotten the spell from someone Sudie trusted, I suppose.”

  Dee had given the spell to me. It made sense that someone could have given it to the killer in all innocence—just trying to be helpful.

  “Could someone steal the door spell without the wizard or witch knowing?”

  He scratched his temple. “Anything’s possible.”

  I could see he didn’t like the idea of someone stealing a spell either, especially a spell locked in someone’s head. That made the whole magical community vulnerable.

  Which made me think of the protection potion we’d just had and were about to trust to keep us safe out on the street. What if someone knew Dee’s go-to spells and could counteract them? It was far-fetched, and I knew it, but that monster had found us at Dee’s house. What else did its sender know about us?

  A written spell could be easily pocketed, of course. If Mr. X, as I was coming to think of the perpetrator, stumbled on the spell written out somewhere and realized what it was, he could have stolen the paper or simply memorized the spell. Sudie’s door wards weren’t that hard to undo.

  I went with the stolen written spell scenario; one that would mean Dee’s protection potion was likely safe from being undone by Mr. X or his minions.

  My empty stomach rumbled loudly.

  “We should go,” Dee said. “It’s half past noon.” He paused. “Back to your original comment. In the six months I’ve known you, you haven’t ultimately been wrong about anything you felt. If you sense the murders and the disappearance are connected, they are.”

  Neither of us felt like breakfast this late, so we went downtown to The Kettle for lunch. Dee ordered fried chicken. I had the watermelon feta salad. The place was packed, the noise level high from people chatting companionably with their friends, the waitstaff bringing drinks and meals, tables being bussed. The tension lingering in me from the attack slowly slid away while we ate. No one was going to strike at us in this room full of people. Dee’s protection potion would do its job. Everything was okay.

  We didn’t talk while we ate. I thought he was probably reveling in our companionable silence as much as I was, drinking in the comfort of not needing to talk, the exhilaration of not being dead.

  A waitress laid our check on the table. Dee paid with a credit card but even after he’d signed the slip and restored the card to its home in his wallet we lingered, as if neither of us could bear to leave this little land of safety.

  Then we stood at the same instant, both of us wordlessly deciding it was time to go. I smiled at him and half nodded my thanks for lunch. He put his hand in the small of my back and steered me out onto the street. I liked the feel of his hand there, the familiarity of it.

  We walked out into bright sunshine on Highland Avenue and headed toward his car. A fair amount of people rambled along on the street, but not so many as to feel New York City or even Downtown LA crushed. Again, having people around made me feel safer.

  “Do you want to head down to the pier?” Dee said.

  I always liked walking out on the pier in any beach city—the view from above the sand and sea, from beyond the breakers.

  Sure, I was about to say when the street fell away, the view changed, my head was pounding, and Dee was gone.

  I was back in Little Tokyo, in John Broadhurst’s condo. John sat on a brown La-Z-Boy sofa, blood running from his wounds but—lucky for whoever was going to have to clean up afterwards—not staining the sofa or carpet. He wore a plaid Pendleton shirt and baggy blue jeans. His feet were bare.

  I sat down next to him. “Hey, how are you?” I said, my voice soft and, I hoped, comforting.

  He turned to look at me. His face was slack and his eyes wet with tears. He reached to take my hand.

  I’m not a big fan of holding hands with the dead, but John Broadhurst looked so sad, I let him. His flesh was exactly as cold and clammy as I’d expected. It was hard not to draw my hand away. But I felt for the man—brutally murdered, his spirit evidently unable to move on. He didn’t speak. One slow tear leaked from the corner of his eye and slid slowly down his face.

  “Do you want to tell me who killed you?” I said.

  He nodded forcefully and wo
rked his mouth, his jaws and tongue moving. The only sound that came out was a strangled “Argggg. Arggg. Arggg.”

  “Can you send a picture to my mind?” I said, but he shook his head. His hands were in his lap now—he’d moved his hand away from mine—his left hand twisting the fingers of his right.

  “I don’t know how to help you then,” I said.

  Tears streamed down his face. Tears of sorrow, of frustration, of rage. I felt his emotions as though they were my own and yet not mine.

  His relentless finger twisting stopped, and he stood up. He turned and looked at me and I knew he wanted me to follow. We slid through the wall into the long hall with doors on either side. He stopped in front of a door and I thought we were going to go in, but he seemed to think better of it. We continued on down the hallway. At the end of the hall was a metal door painted blue. When he reached the door, he turned around and faced me, his back pressed against the blue metal. He raised his arms out to the sides, as graceful as a ballet dance. His arms continued to rise, bent at the elbows, until the backs of his two hands touched the top of his head.

  “Behold the miracle,” he said, as clear as a church bell when he couldn’t manage even the smallest word before.

  “Behold,” he said again as his body began changing color, going from pale flesh to bright red as the space between his arms filled in and then his whole shape changed, morphing slowly until he was no longer a man but a giant red heart cracked down the middle.

  18

  Cold water swirled around my legs, shocking me out of my psychic dream. A wave smack against my knees and I started to stumble.

  “Are you back?” Dee asked, holding me up so I wouldn’t fall. “Are you okay?”

  He was standing behind me and I couldn’t see his face, only his arms and hands that encircled me. I glanced to the right. The Manhattan Beach pier rose above the surf and sand, its white-sided roundhouse aquarium sitting like a giant stone at the pier’s end. Another wave broke, soaking me to my waist. I shifted around to face Diego.

  “I’m fine, I think.” My brain felt muzzy. I didn’t know how we had gotten to the beach and into the water.

  “You went into one of your trances,” he said. “I know you draw your power from the ocean. It seemed like the best idea to get you down to the water.”

  I blinked, still trying to orient myself to the real world. I leaned against him, needing the feel of his solid, strong body. “Thanks.”

  We stood in the water, both of us in street clothes. He’d probably kicked off his flip-flops before wading in, but I still wore my red high tops.

  “My shoes are probably ruined,” I muttered.

  He tightened his hold on me as a wave buffeted us. “We’ll get you another pair.”

  Funny how the most mundane words were the things that brought me completely back to the here and now. I loosened the death grip hold I had around Dee’s waist. “I’m okay. We can go.”

  “Do you want to tell me what you saw?” he said as he took my hand and led me out of the water and onto the sand.

  The sand was hot beneath my feet. I wasn’t wearing my high tops after all. When had I lost my shoes? Had Dee taken them off, or had I? John Broadhurst had been barefoot. Did that mean anything?

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do want to tell you, but not here. Can we go to my house?”

  “More comfortable within your own walls,” he said and gave my hand a friendly squeeze. “Sure.”

  We trudged across the sand to the Strand and then crossed the street to the parking lot where he’d left his car. Neither of us said anything as we drove through the slow beach traffic and found a place to park on Hermosa Avenue, close enough to my house. I spent the time spinning the vision through my memory, looking for clues. Nothing emerged.

  I immediately felt better once I was back inside my cottage. Dee reset the wards and declared them whole and strong.

  “Beer?” I said as lightly as I could, wanting him to know I truly was back from my psychic jaunt and was fine. At least I thought I was fine. I hadn’t quite shaken the head-full-of-cotton feeling yet

  He nodded, and I brought two Vacates with glasses and lime slices into the parlor where he’d settled himself. I poured the beer into the glasses and we each had a swallow before the impatience in his eyes started me talking. I told him what I’d seen from start to finish. Dee listened, leaning toward me, his hands between his knees, not interrupting once.

  “Wait here,” I said when I’d told it all. “I have something to show you.”

  My drawing pad and pencils were still on the kitchen table. I brought the pad back into the parlor and flipped it open to the page with the cracked heart.

  “I drew this several days ago, when I was trying to figure out where Aunt Mich might be.”

  Dee regarded the drawing thoughtfully. “What does it mean to you?”

  “The drawing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing really,” I said. “It’s the classic broken heart. Beyond that, it doesn’t mean anything to me personally.”

  He picked up his glass but set it down again without taking a drink. “What do you think it means to John Broadhurst? Or Aunt Mich? Did one break the other’s heart?”

  “I wondered about that, but it doesn’t feel right,” I said. “In my vision today, Broadhurst turned into a cracked heart. It has to mean something, but I don’t know what.”

  “So?” Dee said.

  I thought about it. Or rather I didn’t think about it or anything, letting my mind go blank, a hole waiting to be filled.

  But no flash of insight fell in the hole and filled it up. No vision came. No voice whispered in my head. No knowledge walloped me.

  I shrugged and said, “I got nothin’.”

  Dee was in the parlor reading a book of mine on the history of Japanese papermaking. Sounds dull, but it’s quite fascinating.

  The timer rang, indicating that the pasta I’d put on the stovetop to cook was done. I gave the marinara sauce a final stir and turned off the heat under it, then poured the pasta into a colander to drain. I’d already set the table, so once the pasta and sauce were together in a celadon green bowl—the color worked well with the red sauce, in my opinion—not Christmassy at all—and put out the salad I’d made, I called him to come eat.

  While the sauce had been cooking, I’d googled Michelle Dinsmore. I should have done that earlier, I supposed, but I don’t usually feel the need to know all about a person in order to follow a psychic link. Or hadn’t in the past.

  Michelle Dinsmore, it turned out, was neither a common nor a unique name. But none of the possible Aunt Mich’s that popped up in Google seemed to be the Aunt Mich. They were the wrong age, or dead a hundred years, or living in the U.K. So much for that.

  We sat at the table, dished out what we wanted onto our plates, and once again ate in companionable silence.

  My stomach suddenly knotted. My ears buzzed, and I felt faint.

  “Diego,” I said.

  He looked up quickly from his plate, probably because I hardly ever called him by his full first name.

  “I don’t like talking to the dead.” I grabbed the edge of the table in a mad attempt to stop the vertigo coming on.

  Dee shoved his chair back and bolted around the table toward me, but it was too late. I was already in John Broadhurst’s condo.

  He’d tried to clean up, I thought, to wipe away the blood smeared on his skin, but it was a permanent stain now, a slipshod, all-over tattoo in faded red. It would never come off and he knew it. His clothes were clean though. He’d changed into a navy-blue suit, white shirt, mustard-colored tie—the kind of clothes one might wear to a job interview. Or a funeral.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” Broadhurst said.

  We were again sitting on the brown couch in his condo living room.

  “Did you call for me?” I said. “Do you want to tell me something?”

  He nodded forcefully and opened his mouth, but all that ca
me out was the same strangled “Arggggg” as before.

  I sniffed. The smell of rosemary was back. It confused me. I’d smelled rosemary when I’d come in real life to this room but had felt sure the scent was associated with the killer, not the victim. Jeez. I couldn’t get anything right.

  Broadhurst stared shaking as though he were freezing. I wanted to manifest a blanket for him or turn up the heat in a room I wasn’t really in. His shoulder’s trembled. His teeth chattered. He wrapped his arms around his chest as if trying to hold the pieces of himself together.

  I put my hand on his leg.

  “John,” I said softly. “If you can’t speak, can you show me like you did before. Do you remember that?”

  His jaw and throat were working madly, trying to speak. He wanted desperately to tell me something.

  “She makes me,” he yelled suddenly.

  “Who makes you? Mich? Michelle?”

  “W-w-w-w-w-iz-ard,” he managed to get out before his words went back to nothing but “Arrrgggg” again.

  His desperate emotions slammed into me like a fist. The wizard who’d been unable to control him in life but had brought the thing that killed him—that wizard did, finally, control him after death. Broadhurst wanted to move on to the next phase but was being held back.

  Oh, shit, I thought. The wizard is a necromancer. And a woman, if my vision of the murder was accurate.

  Not that I knew much about necromancy, only what I’d picked up here and there from others. Very bad juju and very bad people was the consensus.

  The tidal wave of magic swirling through the room knocked against John and me. My heart should have been jumping in my chest, but I was as calm as dust on a windless day.

  “I want to help you,” I said. “If you can’t speak, send me a picture.”