“Oh, that’s a nice image. A bloody falcon.”
“Not a bloody falcon. A blood falcon. Like it…lives on blood.”
“A vampire bird,” I said, nodding. “Okay.”
“Is it important?”
“I can’t tell. I’ve noticed the phrase coming up a lot, so it must have had some importance to Eamon, anyway.”
“I hope we don’t have to tangle with it to get what we’re looking for.”
“Don’t say things like that,” I told him. “You don’t want to jinx us.”
“I don’t believe in luck. Magic, yes, but not luck.”
He had a point. I had thought I was lucky to meet him the first time. That hadn’t turned out to be right at all.
That was typical of the way things went when we worked together: frustratingly slow progress on the work we were doing, punctuated by awkward, uncomfortable moments when I almost forgot to be mad at him but then reminded myself again of everything he had done.
It wasn’t like this was all I had to worry about, either. My father was gone, and even though the family knew where he was, to everybody else it was like he had dropped off the face of the earth. He was in the communications business – radio stations, Internet providers, cell phone companies, etc. – and the head of such a complex operation can’t just disappear without it causing problems. My brother Mark, who was a vice-president of the company, had stepped in to keep things going and make excuses for my father’s absence. He blamed my dad being gone on illness, but in the long run, that wasn’t going to work.
I had always considered Mark to be a very powerful warlock. After all, he was my big brother, and I had grown up thinking that I couldn’t do magic at all. With everything I knew now, I realized that his powers were mid-level, at best. I had a feeling he was over his head trying to run the business, too, but I had to give him credit for trying. He was doing the best he could.
My mother wasn’t much help. She was a retired schoolteacher and had never really had that much to do with my dad’s business, and more importantly, she was devastated by his loss. Witches and warlocks are considerably longer-lived than normal humans, but if it actually took a hundred years to breach the barrier sealing off the council’s realm, in all likelihood that was a death sentence for my father.
I spent some of the time with my mother, knowing it would help just for her not to be alone. I hadn’t given up my own job working for the Cathcart Entertainment Agency, either. In the past my dad had tried to get me to go to work for his company, and I knew that now Mark wouldn’t mind if I pitched in to help him. But I wasn’t cut out for business and I knew it. I figured I’d probably just wind up making things worse.
That was how things stood when I took the job from Sherry of going to the Twin Palms Club one evening and delivering a singing telegram to a guy who was getting married the next day. It should have been simple…
But I guess things had forgotten how to be simple where I was concerned, because now I found myself standing there in a club full of motionless people, frozen in time.
o0o
You don’t realize how loudly your heart beats until you’re surrounded by absolute silence. There’s no noise without motion, and there’s no motion without the passage of time. So if time stops for everybody but you, you’re left with a pounding in your ears that gets louder and louder and louder every time your heart beats and a terrible disorientation that makes you physically sick and an overpowering sense of disbelief that whispers, This can’t be happening. It can’t, it can’t, it can’t…
I forced myself to calm down and take a deep breath, then another and another. That slowed my pulse, and as the hammerblows in my head slowed accordingly, I heard something in the gaps between them. A faint murmuring, barely loud enough to reach the level of conscious awareness. After a moment I realized it was coming from outside.
I forced my brain to work, to order my thoughts in something resembling a coherent pattern. The noise from outside meant that I hadn’t actually stopped time. I had just suspended it, and in a limited area, at that. Outside the club, life continued normally…I hoped.
I looked around. Punches were frozen in mid-air. Mouths were stuck open in the middle of shouts or curses. One guy had been about to fall on his butt after a hard shove. His rear end hung about a foot above the floor, and it stayed there. A chair in the process of toppling over stood on one leg, balanced at a crazy, impossible angle. A mug of beer knocked off a table seemed to float in space with a wave of amber liquid sloshing out of it but going nowhere. It was all bizarre, almost too much so for my mind to comprehend.
All right, I told myself, this was a pretty simple spell. I had cast it, so I could undo it.
First, though, I tied the broken shoulder strap of my dress together. I didn’t want it falling down and giving these guys a free show, even if they weren’t exactly awake to see it. Who knows what you might remember when you wake up from being frozen in time?
Nothing, I hoped. Probably when that happened you weren’t even aware of it. Why, for all we knew, I thought, time could stop and start and we wouldn’t even have a clue it had happened unless something was different when we woke up.
That thought put ideas in my head. Sure, it was a petty thing to do, but I went over to Grady, removed his billfold and took enough cash to have the dress repaired before putting it back, then unbuckled his belt, and unfastened his trousers. A second later they were down around his ankles, exposing his boxer shorts.
I put the money in my tiny purse that matched the dress. It was just big enough for my driver’s license, cell phone, and lipstick. I unbuttoned Grady’s shirt and spread it open, baring his chest. Then I took the lipstick and used it to write BRANDI RULES on his chest.
He was going to be one confused son of a gun when he woke up.
I went over to the groom and said, “You seem to be a decent guy, Jason, but you need b-better taste in friends.” Maybe something of that sentiment would linger in his brain, so that in the future he wouldn’t associate as much with jerks like Grady. To reinforce it I bent down and kissed him on the cheek.
I looked around the room to see if there was anything else I needed to do before I put things back the way they were. I didn’t know any of the people here, but I thought that if any of them were on the verge of getting seriously injured, this was my chance to prevent that.
Luckily, nobody seemed to be in any dire danger, at least not that I could tell by looking at them. Some of them would be bruised from the brawling, and one or two were about to get beer dumped on them, but I didn’t think that was anything I needed to interfere with.
Satisfied that I could leave with a relatively clear conscience, I made my way across the big, dimly lit room, weaving around all the frozen figures on my way to the entrance. When I got there I turned around to face the club. I’d been thinking about what I needed to say, or rather to sing, so I was ready to reverse the spell.
“Now time once again like a river will flow,” I sang. “This is my wish, please make it so!”
In less than the blink of an eye, the scene came to life. The throbbing dance music from the sound system pounded against my eardrums, mixed with the angry shouts of the brawlers. Fists thudded against flesh. Chairs crashed as they overturned. Falling glasses shattered on the floor.
I lingered just for a second, just long enough to see Grady standing there in the middle of the chaos, his pants around his ankles, BRANDI RULES written in bright red lipstick on his bare chest. He yelled, tried to take a step, tripped on his trousers, and fell on his face.
“Tough luck, Grady,” I muttered as I ducked out of the club. With all the commotion going on, I don’t think anyone even saw me leave.
Wherever she was and without her even knowing it, Brandi had gotten a little revenge on her ex-husband, I thought as I walked quickly to my car. Of course, I didn’t know the story. Maybe she really was as bad as Grady made her out to be. But since I didn’t know her, I was going to believe th
at she was more of the injured party in that relationship and that Grady had it coming.
I had gotten into the car but hadn’t started the engine yet when I heard my phone buzzing in my purse. I took it out and saw that I had five missed calls. In that noisy club, I hadn’t heard or felt a thing from the phone. Somebody was anxious to get hold of me. I checked the calls and saw that they all came from Donovan.
I had told him I had a job tonight. As put out with him as I already was – and he knew it – I couldn’t imagine that he would call me so many times unless it was something really important.
There were five voicemails, one for each call. The first one said, “Call me as soon as you get this, Aren. I think I’ve found something important we need to talk about.” The other four messages were variations on that theme. I thought I detected an undercurrent of excitement in his voice, but I couldn’t tell if it was hopeful excitement or worried excitement.
One way to find out, I told myself. I pushed a button on the phone and waited for the call to go through.
Chapter 4
He picked up right away. “Aren,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you – “
“I know,” I said. “Wh-what is it?”
If my curt tone bothered him, he didn’t show any sign of it as he went on, “I’ve found something interesting here at my mother’s house.”
“That’s wh-where you are?”
“Yeah, I’ve been going through all her papers whenever I get the chance. With her not available, there are decisions I need to make regarding her finances, so I have to know how things stand with her portfolio.”
Sharon Cole lived in a big, luxurious house on Ocean Drive with a spectacular view of the seawall and the Gulf right across the street. I had no idea how rich she really was, or whether she had made her fortune or inherited it. Donovan’s dad wasn’t in the picture, but I didn’t know if he was dead or simply not around anymore. I didn’t know much of anything about the Cole family history, in fact, except that Sharon was a witch and a member of the council, and Donovan was a warlock. Finding out more about a guy’s family would be a natural thing to do when you’re in a relationship, but whatever had been developing between us had unraveled before it ever reached that point.
I also knew that Donovan was a financial manager in his day job – assuming that being a warlock could be considered a sideline – and so obviously he would be the one to take care of his mother’s business while she was gone. I didn’t know what he’d been telling people about her absence, and I didn’t really care.
I didn’t see how anything in Sharon’s mundane business dealings could have anything to do with what we were working on, but since Donovan seemed excited about it, I said, “All right, what did you find?”
“There are bills here from several different private investigation firms. I never knew she hired any detectives.”
That did seem a little odd in a way. Why would a witch, especially one with Sharon’s powers, need to hire a private eye? Couldn’t she spy on anyone she wanted to, any time she wanted to?
Humans, sure she could, I realized. But witches could cast privacy spells to keep other witches from nosing around in their personal business, so in that case Sharon might be forced to resort to old-fashioned snooping. I couldn’t imagine her doing any skulking around herself. Of course she would hire it done.
“Do the b-bills say what she paid them to d-do?” I asked.
“No, it’s all case numbers and file numbers and account numbers. But my mother wrote a little notation on every one of the bills. It’s just one word.”
“We don’t need any dramatic p-pauses,” I told him. “What’s the word?”
I heard him start to say something, but just then I saw flashing lights coming along the street toward the club. Someone had called the cops about the fight, as I knew they would. And because I’d allowed myself to get distracted by Donovan, I was still sitting in the parking lot talking to him.
“Hang on,” I told him. The last thing I wanted was to be questioned by the police about my part in the brawl. I could easily imagine somebody telling them that some bimbo delivering a singing telegram had started the trouble, but I doubted that the authorities would care enough to follow up on that. They would just arrest everybody for disturbing the peace and haul them in. Anything else would require too much paperwork.
So I figured I’d better get while the getting was good. I started my car, pulled out of the parking lot, and turned the opposite direction, away from the flashing lights that were still several blocks away. Even if the cops in the first car noticed me leaving, I didn’t think they would bother to come after me.
I was right about that. I watched in the rearview mirror as the lights turned in at the club parking lot. Donovan must have heard the sigh of relief that came from my lips.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on there, Aren? Are you still out on that job you mentioned?”
“Just leaving from it,” I said, which was an honest answer. It would be better not to mention the whole stopping time business, I decided. “Go on. You were t-talking about the word your mother wrote on those bills from the p-private detective agencies.”
“Yeah. It’s ‘falcon’.”
I frowned as I turned a corner. “As in…blood falcon?”
“That’s right.”
“What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I keep trying to remember something…Ever since we figured out that Eamon might have been saying something about a falcon in his book, I’ve had this nagging feeling in the back of my head like I ought to know something about that. But I’ve tried and tried to remember what it is, and so far I haven’t been able to.”
“You’ve got to think, Donovan,” I told him. “This could be important.”
“I know. First thing Monday morning I’m going to get in touch with these private detective agencies and see if they’ll tell me anything about what they were working on for my mother. I don’t know if they will or not. I’m sure they have some policy about confidentiality.”
“You can m-make them talk,” I said.
“Aren…”
I winced, even though he couldn’t see me through the phone, and said, “I know, I know.”
You might not believe it, but by and large witches and warlocks are some of the most law-abiding people in the world. There’s a very good reason for that. We live in a human world, and our numbers are small. It’s easier all around if as few humans as possible know about our powers. So like a drunk trying to drive under the speed limit and stop at every stop sign so the cops won’t have any reason to notice him, we obey the laws and keep a low profile to keep from drawing attention to ourselves. If Donovan used his powers to coerce information out of those detectives, it would go against what we’d all been taught to do.
“I’ll do what I can,” he promised. “Meanwhile I’ll keep poking around in Mother’s papers and her computer and see if I can find anything else. Do you have any jobs to do for your friend Sherry this weekend?”
“Not that I know of right now. Are we g-going to work some more on translating Eamon’s book?”
Donovan didn’t answer for a second, and I wondered about his hesitation. Usually he was pretty decisive. When he spoke, he said, “I was thinking maybe we could use a break from each other for a couple of days. I know I’ve been getting on your nerves, and I don’t want to do that.”
“Fine,” I said, keeping my voice light. “You can call me if you find out anything else, or if you need me for anything.”
I wished I hadn’t phrased that last part exactly like that, but Donovan didn’t seem to think anything about it. He just said, “Okay. We’ll be in touch. Have a good night.”
“You, too,” I said. I don’t know which of us broke the connection first. I think it was mutual.
I set the phone on the seat beside me and drew in a deep breath. I wasn’t sure how I felt about him saying we could use a break from each other
. That was what I wanted, to keep everything between us strictly business and devoted to our effort to rescue the three people trapped in the realm of the witches’ council. But at the same time his comment bothered me. When he said that he’d been getting on my nerves, did he really mean that I was getting on his nerves? I thought I’d been fairly civil, considering the circumstances.
“Don’t overthink it, Aren,” I told myself out loud. “Let him go do what he wants. There’s no reason it should m-matter to you.”
The trick now would be to make myself believe that.
o0o
Taylor and Beth were both out when I got home. It was Friday night, so I was sure they had dates. Matilda greeted me by rubbing against my ankles. I picked her up, scratched her ears, and carried her into my bedroom. Taylor hadn’t wanted me to keep a cat here in the apartment at first because she had always been extremely allergic to them. A simple spell had cured that. I had given Taylor some story about Matilda being de-allergied by the vet, because at that point she didn’t know I had any magical powers, and since then I hadn’t bothered explaining the truth. It was enough that Taylor didn’t sneeze and wheeze and sniffle because Matilda was around.
Matilda settled down in the middle of my bed while I kicked off the stilettos and took off the slinky cocktail dress. A quick shower got the smell of the club off me. Thankfully, a toothbrush and some strong mouth wash helped get the taste of Grady out of my mouth. After I put on my pajamas, I examined the damage he had done to the dress. I felt a little bad about taking the money, but Sherry shouldn’t have to pay to have the dress fixed, and I didn’t have the ability to fix it myself and I didn’t have a lot extra cash on hand to get it fixed. If there was any money left over I’d send it back to Grady. I wouldn’t even take out the cost of a new lipstick, since that was my own doing.
A snack sounded good, so I headed for the kitchen with Matilda trailing after me. I carried a plate of cheese and crackers to the sofa and sat down to look at the book lying in its usual place on the coffee table.
Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 16