Touched

by A. J. Aalto

  She stopped, her eyes narrowing behind her lenses. Her face transformed from charming grandmother to scolding teacher.

  “Don't do that, dear.”

  Surprised, I could only wait wordlessly, feeling scolded like a kid.

  “Debasing yourself isn't as endearing as you think it is, and your playing dumb frustrates those who know you're more capable than you let on. You're a brilliant young lady with a doctorate to prove it, and friends in high places who respect your opinion and seek out your advice.” She waggled a prune-y finger up at me. “Don't dumb yourself down. You're not fooling anyone.”

  I nodded, embarrassed, as she went to the front door at turtle's speed and flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED, PLEASE COME AGAIN! Two steps up into an alcove, there was a reading station with a library table and six chairs. It took her two pulls but she tugged one out and patted it meaningfully, then toddled off behind a curtain on a far wall.

  I browsed the book wall for a minute under the watchful gaze of the perching cat, who winked at me in friendly contemplation. I had a feeling if she was a floor cat rather than a gargoyle-on-ledge cat, she'd have been rubbing my legs by now, purring. I pulled out a couple books I'd purchase, knowing I should have come here much sooner. As the warm sun beaming into the center of the store fell heavy on my shoulders, I took a deep breath, smelling sandalwood incense and the crisp mix of familiar herbs in the air: angelica and lemon mint and thyme, and the black licorice scent of fennel.

  I let the stress squeeze out of my neck as I clenched and unclenched my shoulders and rolled my head back and forth. For the first time in days I felt safe, optimistic and productive. The mixture of certainties was heady, empowering. I was going to get some solutions, today. No more wondering and head-scratching. No more running. No more crap-shooting random spells that I hoped would help. Ruby Valli would be a powerful ally. Relieved, I went to the alcove and poured myself into a chair.

  Calling out the big guns now, bitches, I thought. Look out, Sherlock.

  The library table was set up with pencils and tiny white squares of paper in oak blocks. The pencils made me think of Batten's soft palate impalement, and made me wonder if he'd ever actually done it. Of course he had, I thought. He's a carnage machine. Then I thought about his inevitable flight out of my life, to blustery Michigan of all places, and the fact that I could do nothing about it. Should do nothing about it. Except maybe one last romp for old time's sake?

  Bad idea! my brain scolded.

  Best idea we've ever, ever had, my private parts retorted, completing a full-body coup and plotting how I might bring Kill-Notch Batten again to miraculous surrender, how hot it would be on a scale of one to oh holy fuck. While I suffered thigh-trembling, pulse-quickening, breath-stealing, bordering-on-rapture memories of Mark's thickness surging inside me, slippery and eager, his hips pumping furiously, skin slapping mine as he groaned and gasped in my ear; I swallowed hard and shook the memory out of my head. Dizzy with lust, I damn near fell out of the chair.

  Jeez. Harry was right, I had to get the damn hunter out of my life. The only thing Batten and I had was sexual chemistry, and titillating as it might be, it was still only chemistry.

  Mrs. Valli came back with a tray and I realized suddenly that I had one hand squeezed tight between my thighs. I stood abruptly to take the tray from her like a good girl. She relinquished it with an appreciative nod.

  “My hands are not what they used to be, I'm afraid.”

  It occurred to me, as I snuck a sideway glance at her pouring out a spicy-smelling dark tea from a Brown Betty teapot, that she looked every day of her supposed 93 years. DaySitters are always a lot older than they appear, aging in appearance about five years for every ten that actually went by. But Ruby's age had never clued-in for me before seeing her thin, transparent skin in the light streaming like an accusing finger from the overhead dome. Depending on how old she was when she first Bonded to Gregori Nazaire, Ruby could conceivably be into her thirteenth or fourteenth decade. Without looking down at my hands, I scrawled this observation in my mini notebook and then slipped it back in my pocket.

  Her knuckles were bent into a crook, but not so much that they seemed swollen with arthritis. Despite her shaking, she insistedon pouring, and on handing me the delicate porcelain cup, which clattered like a terrified hostage against its saucer. Her hair was thinning, coiling in soft white curls around her ears, and I could see her pink scalp through her careful hairdo.

  She seemed fragile until you looked into the clear magnitude of her fierce blue eyes. There was strength there that could not be denied, reassuring wisdom and an enviable catalogue of knowledge. It was more than just her precognitive abilities; the subtle unnatural color of magic was upon her like the sweep of melon-pink blush on a ballerina's high cheekbone. It wasn't something you could put your finger on exactly, but anyone who'd been in the presence of power knew: this woman had it in spades. Whatever influences her elder revenant fed her only added to what she already wielded. Again, I thought, a potent ally.

  “What fanciful gloves, Marlene.” She indicated my frog-embroidered cuffs while gazing at me steadily, like she was waiting for a confession. “A gift from one of your many admirers?”

  It was an odd assumption, but sorta true, and I admitted it with a nod while I sipped my tea.

  “I've got problems,” I started, sipping more tea when she indicated I should. I closed my eyes to savor the strong flavor. It tasted like I'd licked India from the Bay of Bengal clear across to the Arabian Sea. I asked politely: “Chai masala?”

  “I mix my own bedtime blend, lots of cloves, very comforting.” She set her own cup down on its little chintz saucer. “Tell me everything.”

  I finished my tea in one gulp and watched as she refilled. “I should start at the beginning. Danika Sherlock—”

  Ruby interrupted, “Danielle Smith-Watson is her proper name, isn't it, though? Yes. That stage name of hers is just plain silly.”

  “Yes!” I agreed. In a rush of relief, I explained what had happened.

  “Oh dear, oh dear. Dreadful, what jealousy will do to an unstable mind,” she said sadly.

  I hurried on, “She put Kristin Davis' eyeballs in my jar of newt bits!”

  “How grisly,” Ruby agreed, blowing steam carefully across her tea.

  “And now you're going to ask why I had newt bits…”

  “Of course not, honey.” She sat forward. “You white witches, you don't understand how your ‘morals’ limit your choices. But does not everything in nature take from everything else? That is the lesson of the Mother. And yet when a witch takes the force of a natural living object, it is considered black magic.”

  Uh… “Well, I see your point. But the line is drawn, and it's a clear one.”

  “Don't argue with me, missy. I had magic mastered when your mother was still shitting her pants. It's a chalk line, meant to be redrawn as circumstances arise.”

  I blinked at the dark flicker across her face and bit down hard on my tongue. Trying not to imagine my mother shitting her pants, I thought: Don't argue with the Potent Ally, stupid!

  “Well, thanks.” I guess. I sipped my rapidly cooling tea. At the lower temperature, the nutmeg was overpowering and my tongue felt coated. “The spell I used was called the black-watch.”

  “I see,” she said, as though I'd cleared up some mystery. “What else would someone of your mediocre caliber be capable of?”

  Mediocre… So much for “brilliant” Marlene. Biting my tongue was starting to hurt. “I'm not entirely certain how Watson got into my cabin and put the eyes in my jar. Or how she put a head in my mailbox without the cops at my kitchen table noticing. Or how she came in while I was home and stole all my gloves from right under my nose…”

  She interrupted, “If you were more educated in such things, you would know. The gloves should concern you much more than the eyes.”

  I felt my face go carefully blank. Did Ruby Valli just suggest that stolen gloves trumped punctured hu
man eyeballs from a murdered twelve-year-old floating in a jar of newt bits?

  Ruby was nodding. “A personal object worn so often and so close to the skin can be used in so many ways against you. But of course, she did it all with witch-walking.” She pulled one of the books around on the table and licked her fingertip, shifting through the pages until she thudded her forefinger on a spell. Looking at her thick, elderly fingernail drawing across the lines made my skin crawl, though I couldn't have said why.

  I scanned it quickly. The spell cheerfully outlined the creation of a grisly object, its upbeat tone not unlike Julia Child outlining the recipe for a delicious honey spice cake. The result was a fetish, and not the kind involving lubed cleavage or toe-suckling.

  I read aloud: “The witch will sever the middle finger of her right hand using the knife of her enemy held in her left hand. The witch will scrape clean the bone, and carve the following sigil into the bone with a shard of broken mirror anointed with the scent of her enemy. Throughout the duration between the current moon phase and the first night of the waning moon, the witch will drink only undiluted blood, and consume only skin peeled from her own…”

  I saw stars, shadowy stars against the yellow sunshine-filled backdrop of the gleaming oak table and the off-white paper before me. The table swam up at my face and I jolted, bracing myself. Ruby's soft, old hand landed on my forearm, where she patted me reassuringly. My vision cleared instantly.

  “Flesh magic. I thought Watson was too crazy for complex magic,” I said hopelessly.

  “She would have left behind the fetish to cloud your mind, allowing witch-walking, and she'd be wearing your gloves, or other intimate items of clothing. It would only work in the parameters of the spell, the current residence of the one it was attuned to, that is to say you. Once the bitch was inside, the spell would temporarily cloak her from being seen in the house.”

  Bitch or witch? Freudian slip? One I agreed with, so I didn't correct her.

  “Even from my revenant companion?”

  “Oh of course,” she chuckled, conceit sneaking into her voice. “There are many ways to toy with the mind of an immortal. They aren't the only ones with power.”

  Ruby used the arms of the chair to slowly inch her way back to her feet in what looked like a painfully stiff progression, then shuffled behind the counter to retrieve a book bound in a strange yellowish leather. I snuck my notebook out again and jotted glamour: witch-walking, middle finger, flesh magic and bitch underlined three times.

  Ruby's book made an impressive, hefty bang when it hit the library table. Its cover was printed with her personal sigils and signs; a grimoire, her own book of shadows.

  “I think the eye in your pocket at the funeral home might have ruined Danielle's plan. Likely, she was prepared to raise the ghoul after the funeral and send it to Shaw's Fist, to your cabin, to retrieve its eyes, to which it would be attuned. You got that eye too close and it prematurely kick-started the whole darn spell.”

  The look she gave me was almost scathing, and my belly crawled; I suddenly felt like a child who knows she's in trouble but not why. “That's what I thought, too. I guess I screwed up.” Why am I apologizing for ruining a spell aimed at killing me in my sleep?

  “Here. No don't touch.” She slapped my fingers away when I reached for the edge of the paper. I withdrew them. “I'll read it to you.” Her voice boomed in the airy space, carried up into the glass dome and echoed around us. “Immunda phasmatis, immunda phasmatis, immunda phasmatis, vindicatum vestri praemium.”

  Okaaaaay. “I don't… erm, speak Latin.”

  “It's goetic conjuring. “Unclean spirit, claim your prize.” The ghoul is then lured with a piece of itself, eats the object, the demon in turn devours the object's soul. The witch releases the demon with thanks and praise.”

  “Am I the object in that whole mess?” I blinked, my stomach chilling even as my breath whisked away.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Ruby said. Under the table, her rubber boots squeaked against each other. “More tea?”

  I nodded, letting my eyelids fall shut; they were suddenly quite heavy. “I knew you'd have answers. What can we do?”

  “First thing is your safety, honey,” she said seriously. “We must put you immediately into psi-stasis so no one can find you, and then you must go, both you and Lord Dreppenstedt, into witness protection.”

  Now that I had official, expert confirmation of my suspicions, slipping out of town in the dead of night sounded right. I had to send Wes home to Mom and Dad in Canada, at least until we could figure out how to battle a homicidal goetic witch. Then Harry and I would go to his flat in London, or his home in the south of France.

  “Psi-stasis,” I said softly. “And escape. That's the first step, you're right. It's going to take more than just a cold saltwater bath for this. She's been in my home. Before I go, I have to get her out. I have to break her witch-walking spell so she isn't standing over my shoulder while I'm booking my flight and making arrangements.”

  “Send it in a circle,” Ruby advised calmly. “You're going to need the eyes-of-light spell.”

  “I'm not familiar with it.”

  “I am, dear, I am.” She made a thoughtful noise. “It requires both wildcrafted goldthread and Mediterranean silphion.”

  My hopes sank. “Goldthread was harvested to extinction in the 1800s,” I groaned. I'd never even heard of the other herb. “Isn't there a more modern version of this spell?”

  Ruby smiled gloriously, shaking her head. “You've forgotten where you are, dear?”

  I exhaled hard, relieved. “You have some? How could I possibly…?”

  “Marlene, don't be silly,” she said, reminding me once again of Grandma Vi's warm, unruffled manner. “You're a rising star, a lovely talented slip of a girl. I couldn't let anything bad happen to you if I could help in any way.” Her softly-curled claw of a hand touched my glove, patted it reassuringly. “I have some, but it's in a special humidor in the cellar, and I don't go down the stairs anymore. My Gregori won't be available to help me until dusk, of course. We should start as soon as possible, though.”

  My brain jotted. Is his casket down there in the same room as the humidor? Other than Wesley, who didn't count, I'd actually never met another sane and sociable revenant. My only other revenant sighting was vile Jeremiah Prost. I wondered if Gregori was anything like my Harry.

  “I'll fetch it,” I offered. “If you trust me near Mr. Nazaire's casket, which you totally can.” I couldn't imagine what other treasures she might have stashed away down there, guarded by her ancient companion. Extinct herbs! Maybe she had false unicorn root. My fingers itched inside my gloves; as one form of magic sensed a sympathetic power source, the Blue Sense trembled to life, aching to be released like a cock in a strip joint. I hopped to my feet and went to the door behind the cash desk where she pointed.

  “Of course I trust you, dear. I know you're not going to touch him,” she assured me. “You get the herbs, I'll look up the spell we need. The humidor is set high in the wall, but there's a step stool there, or there was, last I checked. It's been more than a year since I could manage the stairs.” She laughed softly, and behind her thick lenses the laughter in her eyes was jolly and full of something else… “Getting old is hell.”

  “Just tell me where the light switch is.” My hand slipped along the wall while I tried to see past the third step down. The blackness was a solid barrier.

  Ruby's chai tea breath was suddenly blowing around my shoulder. She leaned one frail hand against the doorjamb. “Let's get you safely out of the way.”

  Wait, wha--

  Two deceptively strong hands thrust into my lower back. Jerked off balance I plummeted forward, flung headlong down the stairs into the dark.

  FORTY-TWO

  I tucked around my head as I plunged down the stairs, bracing for impact. The force of elbows hitting the treads jarred my teeth. My knee hit an edge and there was a sickening crunch. I cried out, one yelp, and whapp
ed into the cement floor, my wind knocked out in a silencing huff.

  I whirled to a stop as my side hit the corner where the wall took a sudden turn. The not-quite-healed wounds in my belly wailed to attention, their tenderness soaring. Gasping to draw air into lungs that no longer seemed to work, I forced my eyes open to seek out the source of danger. A click, then dull light from dusty bulbs.

  Ruby jogged agilely down the stairs. Jogged, dear God. Her glasses (a prop, I saw now) bounced on their cord against her bosom. She snatched my elbow without consideration to injury, claw-like clutch dug into my flesh, finding the joint. Dragging me with no trouble across the coarse floor, her hand an inescapable clamp, hard enough to pull ragged sound from my throat. Old chipped paint grabbed the fabric of my jeans. My exposed arm raked along cement. My knee throbbed, already swelling. I wriggled to free myself from her pincer-grip. No arthritis there, no sir.

  Weakness hit me with a sinking swell, dragging me down even as I fought it.

  “Finally,” Ruby commented, dropping my arm and planting both hands on her hips, frowning. She consulted her watch. “Eighteen minutes. You drink too much caffeine; your body is accustomed to it.”

  “Eighteen…?” I widened my eyes as wide as they could go, but still my vision was slippery and my eyes didn't obey my directions.

  I was vaguely aware we were not alone; two blobs of indeterminate construct stood sentinel-like against the wall, faceless golems, vague muddy shapes with their arms above them in silent appeal to the sky. In the center of the room, the candles she lit spent unnaturally-violet light that bounced off an obsidian mirror. In the circle a woman sat tied to a chair, her long-haired head slumped over chin to chest, a spill of strawberry blonde covering some of her nudity but not enough.

  “Dan…” I slurred with realization. Danika Sherlock. I could think it but my mouth wouldn't make the words, my tongue skimmed the words. I tried to bring my eyes up to Ruby's but they only made it as far as the toes of her Wellies. “You… why… I don't think so good.”