wisteria witches 06 - wolves of wisteria

by Angela Pepper

  “Oh, just a little something Margaret and I whipped up.”

  “Which was what?”

  “A secret little something, Detective.” She gave him an enigmatic smile. It was always better for others to not know the full depth and breadth of a witch's power. It was always better to be underestimated.

  “Secret witcher-i-doo.” Fung smiled.

  Zinnia wrinkled her nose. Witcher-i-doo was one of Wick's favorite taunts. Not Tansy Wick, but her brother, Vincent. She wondered for a moment if he might be involved in these cougar incidents. She glanced around. He was probably watching her right now, thanks to all his cameras. The thought made her shiver.

  “You're freezing out here,” Fung said. “You should go home.”

  “I will, if you think you can handle—”

  Headlights swept across them, interrupting the conversation. A new vehicle was coming up the road toward them. The driver stopped before reaching the lookout point, and began doing a multi-point turn to leave.

  Zinnia recognized the vehicle immediately. It would have been hard not to recognize the long, shiny, white 1991 Cadillac Brougham.

  “That's Carrot Greyson's car,” she said to Fung.

  He rubbed his chin. “Your coworker with the suspicious wildlife connection? What are the odds?”

  “She might have a logical reason for being here.”

  “Such as?”

  Zinnia had nothing.

  Fung jumped up from the heated bumper. “I've been meaning to talk to Ms. Greyson ever since you left me that phone message, and now here she is. Great how things work out, ain't it?”

  Zinnia checked the time on her phone. “Detective, you promised you'd have Annette's case closed by Friday. It's now Saturday morning. I'd like my money back.”

  Fung hung his head in mock shame and pressed his hands together in a prayer position as he backed away. “Give me another day. You won't be sorry. I'm so close, I can feel it.”

  “You'd better hurry up.” Zinnia waved for him to speed up. “Carrot's going to get that giant boat of a car turned around eventually.”

  Margaret didn't talk much on the drive home. She was too busy cramming granola bars into her mouth.

  Zinnia was also nibbling on one while she reviewed notifications on her phone. Dawna Jones had been drunk-posting up a storm all evening, ever since Gavin had driven her home from Shady Lanes. Dawna had put up a tribute page for Annette Scholem, and she'd added photos from that evening's bowling game in Annette's honor.

  Zinnia got an unsettling, disassociated feeling as she reviewed the pictures that had been taken just a few hours earlier. Everything was so flat in a photograph, like a memory but different. The way a flower pressed in a book is not a flower.

  Zinnia gasped when she spotted a photo of Carrot goofing around with her bowling ball. One side of Carrot's V-neck shirt gaped open, revealing her full tattoo.

  “Cougar,” Zinnia said excitedly. “It's a cougar! Margaret! A cougar!”

  “Yes, Zinnia. I was right there with you when it happened. Wow. You must really be drained.”

  “I mean the tattoo,” Zinnia said. “Carrot's tattoo with the animal paw. It's not a wolf. It's a cougar, just like the one we saw back there.” She leaned over and showed Margaret the picture.

  “I see it, I see it,” Margaret said. “Get your phone out of my face before I crash this van.”

  Zinnia settled back into her seat. “I'd better send this to Fung. No, wait. Turn the van around. We have to go back. He could be in danger.”

  “We're going home.”

  Zinnia didn't like the sound of that.

  “Turn around,” Zinnia said.

  “No.”

  Zinnia felt a sharp pain in her gut. Was it a premonition or a side effect of being drained? She had no idea. Her patchy psychic abilities had not come with a user manual. The pain persisted.

  “Margaret, I think Fung is in danger. We have to go back.” She rubbed her stomach. “Or he will be in danger soon. I don't know. You know how I get these premonitions sometimes. The more distant it is, the less clear it comes through.”

  Margaret didn't even slow down, let alone prepare to turn the van around. “Detective Fung is currently surrounded by half the cops and firefighters and medics in the town. I think he'll be okay without us.”

  “I don't know.” The feeling in her gut was only growing stronger.

  “Plus, it's just Carrot. I mean, come on. Last week, I had to help her open a milk carton.” Margaret ripped open another granola bar using her teeth and spat out the wrapper. “Driving and eating without magic is hard,” she complained. “There should be a drink we can use, like a Gatorade for witches.”

  Zinnia sighed. Margaret would not be turning the van around. Whatever it was Fung was about to discover from questioning Carrot, he'd have to deal with it himself.

  She looked down at her phone. Coincidentally, the battery was as dead as her magic. One percent power remaining. Zinnia sent a message to Fung, including the photo of Carrot's tattoo. Her phone blinked off. And that was that. She had tried. She wasn't a police officer or a detective. Forwarding the photo was all she could reasonably be expected to do.

  “Exactly,” Margaret said, conversing with Zinnia's unspoken thoughts without realizing it. “Let the police handle it from here. It's no witch's duty to put herself in danger.

  “You're right,” Zinnia said, making an effort to be agreeable despite being irked by Margaret's attitude. Zinnia had to let it go. Margaret didn't want to put herself in further danger. And Zinnia might feel the same way if she had four kids who counted on her coming home at night.

  Zinnia had been the one to lead the charge toward the screaming and the cougar. Margaret had helped tonight, with the location spell and the trip to the swamp, but she had her limits. And who could blame her for setting reasonable boundaries?

  Zinnia had to accept one key fact: she was only willing to take risks because she had absolutely nothing to lose.

  Chapter 21

  Saturday, 8:00 am

  Zinnia stood under her shower nozzle and experimentally turned the temperature down. The water turned chilly, yet it didn't bother her. She turned the lever all the way to cold. Icy! Under normal circumstances, she would have been jumping out of the tub, teeth chattering. But this morning there was no shivering. No discomfort, even. Cold was simply a temperature, just another option.

  Last night at Towhee Swamp, she'd helped Margaret cast a spell to warm the car bumper for both of them, but now that she thought about it, she hadn't really needed an external heat source. They'd simply used the spell because they were witches, and they could.

  The chilly shower water continued to pour down.

  Riddle women are tougher than they look. The old family saying was true.

  She rotated in the shower and let the icy water run down her other side. No effect. If anything, the cold water was stoking her internal fire.

  She rinsed her hair and turned off the water. The air in the bathroom felt warm by comparison. She called for her towel magically, and it floated over obediently. Her magic had recovered from the previous night's tandem lightning spell.

  She changed her mind about the towel, snapped her fingers to send it away, and then cast a drying spell on herself instead. Hair and body dried instantly. She lifted one foot to the edge of the tub and checked between her toes. Dry! The spell didn't usually work that well, but this morning it was perfect. The interior of the tub and shower curtain were similarly dry.

  Her magic hadn't just recovered; it had increased. She was like a character in a video game who had... what was the term? Leveled up.

  The new and improved, leveled-up Zinnia Riddle got dressed. She pulled on a cute pair of green corduroy stretch jeans and a flowered silk blouse. Zinnia liked to dress casually on the weekend, so she didn't fasten the top two buttons of her blouse. She closed the doors on her closet, which contained dozens of variations of the same basic outfit.

  Her m
entor had always stressed the importance of minimizing frivolous decisions, leaving the mind free for more important matters. Choosing a wardrobe and sticking to it was one way of simplifying. So was waking up and going to sleep at the same time each day, or drinking the same tea.

  More important than routine, though, was adversity. Too much comfort makes a witch weak. A tree that takes no wind gets fragile and topples in the first storm. Etcetera.

  Zinnia had been well served by her mentor, even if it hadn't felt that way at the time. Only now, at forty-eight, she was finally able to fully appreciate the wisdom that had been passed on. Her training had truly saved her bacon the night before. If she hadn't developed good muscle memory thanks to countless drills with fundamental spells, she might have accidentally incinerated all of Towhee Swamp. Or herself. Or poor Margaret.

  If Zinnia Riddle were ever in the mentor position herself, she would teach the way her mentor did. With the stupid egg drills and everything.

  Half an hour later, Zinnia found that the dreaded egg drill wasn't so stupid after all. One might almost call it fun. Fun and useful. A witch would be hard pressed to find a better way to practice accuracy than by peeling the shell off a levitating egg. The egg was raw, so the real trick wasn't in removing the shell, but keeping the wobbly liquid egg in its egg form.

  The doorbell rang.

  Doorbell!

  She smiled as the word doorbell reverberated in her mind. Zinnia and her older sister, Zirconia, used to yell doorbell and fight each other to reach the front door first. They did the same for the ringing telephone, back in the days before voicemail—before answering machines, even.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Zinnia's egg wobbled. Long drips formed, straining to break free of the magical tether and succumb to gravity. Zinnia managed to hold the half-peeled egg together long enough to get it over the sink. It plopped with a wet crunch.

  She ran to the door, excited to see Jesse. They didn't have plans until dinner, but sometimes he surprised her on Saturday mornings by dropping in with fresh croissants. Whenever he did pop in, it was about this time.

  Zinnia was surprised to see a woman standing on her porch. The woman was in her late twenties, and she wore a shiny silver jumpsuit that made her look like the flight crew for a spaceship in a cheap sci-fi movie. Golden blonde ringlets framed a round face that was as perfectly symmetrical as it was pretty. She looked up at Zinnia with eyes that shifted between blue and something else—the gray of cast concrete statues. Her natural beauty was enhanced by a light dusting of shimmering makeup, frosty pink. The blonde was neither tall nor short. Some might describe her as petite, which was probably what she wanted. Better to be underestimated. She stood solidly, with her feet apart. A power pose. And, oh boy, did she have powers.

  Zinnia took an automatic step back and crossed her wrists, palms forward.

  The blonde smirked as she looked down at Zinnia's hands. Her light eyebrows rose in amusement.

  “Easy now, Ms. Riddle,” she said. “There's no need for either of us girls to mess up our hair and makeup.”

  Us girls? It was just like a twenty-nine-year-old to refer to a pair of women as girls. The label offended Zinnia, and yet, on some level, she also enjoyed being lumped into a category with the young woman on her porch. Such internal conflict. Being called a girl at forty-eight was nearly as flattering as it was patronizing.

  Zinnia took a second step back and relaxed her arms into a welcoming swing. “Won't you come in, Ms. Wakeful?”

  Charlize Wakeful's smirk blossomed into a grin. Zinnia felt the tautness in her muscles relax. It was hard to hate someone so beautiful and happy. But not hard to fear them. Some of the tautness remained.

  “Please, take a seat anywhere,” Zinnia said as she led Charlize to the living room.

  Charlize looked past her. “Isn't that the kitchen over there?” She didn't wait for a response.

  Zinnia followed her guest into the kitchen. The young woman's silver jumpsuit looked even more incongruous in that room than it had on the porch. Where exactly would one wear a silver jumpsuit? Besides the set of a music video.

  “Kitschy wallpaper,” Charlize said. “I like what you've done with the place.”

  Zinnia walked around the blonde, keeping a safe distance, and grabbed the kettle. “Tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee. Unless there's tequila. Do you have tequila?”

  It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning. “I'll make coffee.”

  Charlize ran her hands over the wallpaper and continued to snoop around the kitchen while Zinnia put the kettle back and pulled out the coffee maker.

  “Hah!” Charlize exclaimed.

  “Hmm?” Zinnia turned to find the blonde leaning forward, her nose practically touching the stone object Zinnia had left resting on a dusty stack of recipes.

  Charlize asked, “What's this supposed to be?”

  What did it look like? “A paperweight,” Zinnia answered flatly.

  “Family heirloom?”

  “How'd you guess?”

  Charlize chuckled. “Ms. Riddle, that is not a paperweight.”

  Zinnia replied crisply, “I believe the papers it is currently weighting down would beg to differ. I've had it since—”

  Charlize touched the lump with her fingertip. The lights overhead flickered. Zinnia felt all the air in her lungs forcibly leave. A charge of electricity pulsed through the room. Zinnia inhaled, gasping, just as the lumpy paperweight did the same. It had transformed into a mouse. A very confused-looking mouse, who skittered to the edge of the counter and jumped to the floor. It looked left and right, soiled the floor, and ran away.

  Zinnia kept her shock to herself. Poker face, Zinnia. Poker face. Don't let your guard down around a gorgon. She reached for a paper towel and cleaning spray, and tidied up after the frightened mouse.

  Charlize asked, “How long was that,” she made air quotes with her fingers, “paperweight in your family?”

  “A couple of generations, at least.”

  “Someone in the Riddle family tree must have been acquainted with a Wakeful or two.”

  “It would seem that way.” Zinnia finished tidying the floor and washed her hands thoroughly. She fought the urge to spit on her hands for extra sanitization. Who knew what sort of germs a decades-old mouse carried? It could have fleas with bubonic plague.

  Lightly, Zinnia asked, “How have you been?”

  “Keepin' busy.”

  “Has there been any improvement with your sister?”

  Charlize didn't answer. Zinnia looked up at her—not directly into the gorgon's eyes, but slightly to the side of her face. Safety first.

  Charlize was frowning. “Uh, can you keep a secret?”

  “Only the dead keep secrets, and even they aren't perfect.”

  “Then never mind. You'll find out soon enough.” The sunny smile returned. The young gorgon yawned and stretched, snakelike in her movements, before changing the subject. “I'm here about something else, anyway. I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count.”

  “You must be working with Detective Fung, investigating the Scholem homicide.”

  “Ding ding. We've got a winner!”

  Zinnia pursed her lips. Annette Scholem had been her friend.

  Charlize Wakeful continued, unperturbed. “Have you heard from her lately? By which I mean, have you heard from her ghost?”

  “No.”

  “Aww, come on. I thought you witches were tapped in with the ghost world, what with all your archaic, demonic ways.”

  Zinnia pursed her lips even flatter. The gorgon was actually calling her archaic and demonic. The nerve.

  “I'll take that as a no,” Charlize said. “How about you do something for me right now? Call her up on the witch phone. I've got a few questions for the lady.”

  “It doesn't work that way.”

  “No?” Charlize blinked her powerful blue-gray eyes. “Fung says you saw the dead lady on Tuesday morning, right
here in your kitchen.” She looked around the room with a theatrical whipping of her blonde hair. As the ringlets swung out, Zinnia caught a glimpse of the hidden magic, a glimpse of the copper snakes that sprung from the gorgon's head. The snakes were both there and not there. Seen and not seen. Like a glamour.

  “Well, I don't see any ghostly people,” Charlize reported. “Can you tell if she's here right now?”

  “No.”

  The snakes in her hair twitched. “But you saw her. Don't lie to me, witch.” The copper snakes flashed their fangs.

  Zinnia made her voice soft and non-confrontational. It was the same tone she took with her boss, Karl Kormac, when he was having a mood swing. “Ms. Wakeful, I assure you that I only saw Annette Scholem briefly, thanks to a reveal spell. That particular spell only works if the ghost is fresh, and only for a glimpse. I cannot contact her directly.”

  “You mean you won't. I'm sure you can.”

  Zinnia said nothing. There were indeed ways to make contact with ghosts, but the spells were dangerous and required multiple spellcasters.

  A tense silence hung in the air.

  When Zinnia spoke, she chose her words carefully. “If it were truly that easy, I would have done so already.”

  “I bet.” Charlize, who'd been staring at the candid photos on the vintage fridge, finished her inspection of the kitchen and grabbed a seat, turning a chair around and straddling it. “Hey, Annette,” she said in a falsetto tone, imitating Zinnia in a scenario where she called the ghost on a ghost phone. “Tell me something, girlfriend. Who or what killed you, and how? Oh, really? Okay, okay! Slow down, I can't write that fast.”

  Zinnia was not amused. “Only a few of the most cursed witches interact with the dead.” She licked her lips and added, “Poor things.” Her older sister had been one of those cursed witches, and she'd taken extreme measures to free herself. But that was none of this gorgon's business.

  “Only a few? I thought all of you witches were cursed.”

  “Charmed or cursed, it all depends on your perspective.”