“You come because I can keep your secrets.”
I gave her a surprised look and she cackled again. “Oh yes, I know Theo told you to come to me because I can keep secrets.”
She was right. When I had refused to see a proper psychiatrist, even one accustomed to working with the eldritch as Theo had called it, he had reluctantly told me about Roopa. He knew her through his magic shop. She sourced customers through him for her special amulets — her taweez as she called them. Theo got a percentage for any referrals he made, and the sums were hefty given how much people were willing to pay for them.
Theo said she was a powerful witch. I would never have guessed it to look at her. The thing that made me give in was that Theo had said she would keep my secrets even from him if I desired it. And that he trusted her not to try to use anything I told her for her own use. Aside from her large family, Roopa was pretty much a recluse. She was untrained too. She only knew how to use her magic one way, and that was to make her taweez. Even she couldn’t say how they really worked, only that they did. Theo was her only contact in the world of magic and otherkind, and that was only by accident.
In the moments that it took me to have these thoughts, Roopa’s mood had flipped. “Tell me a secret or I won’t sign your paper,” she said abruptly.
“But you have to sign my paper,” I wheedled. “The deal was that I come here to talk to you, and I haven’t been doing anything but talking these past thirty minutes. Don’t be mean, Roopy-Roo.”
“Not real talking. Just nonsense talking. Three weeks you’ve been coming to me and you tell me this nonsense and that nonsense. But Theo said to me you are a dreamer — a firr. But you have not told me once about any of these dreams! Tell me a dream. I want to hear it today.”
“Ugh. You’re killing me here.” I pretended to glower at her.
Trust her to pick today when Storm was mad at me to make a fuss. I needed my paper signed. These past three weeks I had been working every Monday to Wednesday at Agency Headquarters. I even had my own office, sort of. But only so long as I completed this course of therapy and proved that I was not a danger to myself or to anyone else. All because I had accidentally got a murderer’s head blown off that one time.
And I very much wanted to keep this job. I needed it. Storm’s team were the Agency’s top hunters in this part of the world. They were the ones that the Devil Claw Killer case had been assigned to. DCK was the notorious serial killer who had murdered my biological mother Magda. Working for the Agency was the only way I would get put on the case next time DCK murdered again. And I was determined to catch the evil elusive murdering bastard.
“What’s a firr?” I asked.
“No distractions.”
“Tell me what a firr is and I will tell you about a vision of mine.”
“You know! A firr!” She shouted it as if volume would clarify matters, and waved a hand at me impatiently as if only an idiot lacked this knowledge. “A person who sees things. In my country our people go to see them to find lost things or seek paths to lost dreams. They practice in the occult. But their knowledge comes from the djinn you know, and the djinn aren’t to be trusted. Half of what they tell you is the truth but the other half are lies. But you are an interesting one. A different type of firr. I should send my family to you next time.”
“Do your family think you are a firr?”
“My family think I am mad. They think I should be locked up. They call my gift a curse. They don’t believe it works, even when my taweez cured them of the bad spirits that were plaguing them. All my life I thought I was mad and then your friend Theo comes along and tells me I am a witch. Ha! He says witches and magic and werewolves and vampires are all real. Ha! He says this Otherworld is real!”
“Otherworld is real. It’s common knowledge! Has been for decades.” I was astonished she would think otherwise.
“It’s only real in the fake news. They make these things up to scare you.”
“You can’t really think that!”
“Have you been there?” she demanded.
“No,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You’re a witch. You’ve met Theo and you must know he is a wizard. He wouldn’t have sent me to you if he didn’t think you’d understand. I know you don’t think Otherworld is a myth or hoax.”
“I did think that. So do all of my family, my community. But now I don’t know what to think anymore. If I said it out loud they would think I had gone even more mad. Your friend Theo is a funny one, huh? He changed my life, but his news is not easy news for the mind to understand.”
“I thought Theo was your friend too!”
“Pah! I don't have friends. What are friends? Nobody. They will stab you in the back as easily as smile at you.”
“That’s a harsh way to look at the world.”
“You tell me about your friends, huh? You have no friends. If you had friends you’d be talking to them, not to me!” She said this triumphantly.
“I do have friends actually.” I glowered at her.
She was right. There were only two girls I could possibly call friends And I only ever saw them at Luca’s, a restaurant where I still worked occasional shifts. They were fellow waitresses and last time I had seen them was three weeks ago when I had worked my last shift there.
Roopa saw that my mood had soured and she looked a tad contrite. But only the tiniest bit. It didn’t matter. My annoyance had already passed as quickly as it had come.
“Theo is a good man,” she conceded. “He told me he would pay me money for my magic and he did. Astaghfirullah! Magic, he called it. I told him it was God’s gift. He said other people needed the gift God had given me. People who could pay a lot. And what choice did I have? If I didn’t have this house my family would have found a way to get rid of me. And at least now I have something to leave to my children. And I give more zakat than I ever gave before and I can only pray God will forgive me.”
“If you believe God gave you your magic then how could it be bad to use the gift that God gave you to help other people?”
She smiled sadly. “Maybe you are not such an embryo after all. Now out with a secret! We agreed on a vision, and you have five minutes left before I decide not to sign this paper.”
I rolled my eyes heaven-wards. I had thought she might have forgotten her little ultimatum in the middle of her tirade.
“Fine,” I muttered, wracking my mind to find something appropriate.
I really didn’t want to have to go into any of my past visions about murder because that would open up various cans of worms. I didn’t want to talk to her about my biological mother Magda’s death, the real reason that Storm had wanted me to see a therapist in the first place. Why dwell on the past when I could look forward to a future of happily delivering vengeance on the evil bastard that killed her in the first place? I didn’t want to tell her about the dream that I’d had just this morning of the handsome yet cruel-faced man shackled to his prison of a chair. Half naked as he had been, Roopa in her current mood would no doubt have many choice words to say about that.
I sighed, staring at a rose on Roopa’s coffee table. It was a single yellow rose. I wondered where it had come from because I had never seen flowers here before, and Roopa was definitely not the sort to buy them for herself. Was the rose why she was in a mood today? Was that why I was seeing the rose change? It went from yellow to orange a deep dark scarlet that was so full of a density of red that it was almost black. And then it was black. A deep dark, the color of ink. I shuddered. A whispering hissing music was coming from it. The sound was a taunt, as jarring as the sound of unkind laughter. Its cruelty made me grind my teeth.
Suddenly I was filled with anger. I want to tear the goddamn thing to shreds. I was going to crush it to smithereens. I was going to vent my desire for the dark and the deadly on it. My navelstone was vibrating, sending quivers deep into my stomach. Its movement was violent. That had not happened in a long time. It wanted something. It wan
ted me to do something. It wanted me to tear the rose apart. It wanted me to find the source of that laughter and cut it to pieces.
I had to force myself to breathe deeply and steadily. I had to force myself to believe that the rose was just a rose. But the laughing taunting whispering music of the rose grew louder. It had no words and yet I could almost decipher a meaning, as if I was hearing a foreign language that I did not quite understand. The goddamn rose was taunting me. What the fuck? I reached out with great control and I forced myself to pick it up, to feel it and know that it was only a rose. But the moment that my fingers met the stem, the rose crumbled into ash.
There was a sharp pain in my thumb. I blinked, and then the rose was there again and yellow again, its green thorny stem between my finger and thumb. It had pricked me.
The vibration in my navelstone had stopped, but I was shaking.
“Well?” Roopa said impatiently.
“I saw a rose,” I told her. My voice came out croaky. My throat had gone painfully dry. I swallowed hard to ease the soreness but it didn’t work. For the first time in three weeks that sunshiny buoyant feeling inside me had fully dried up. I resorted to taking a sip of water from the glass that Roopa always brought me.
“A rose?” she said looking skeptical.
“A rose,” I repeated. My hand, which was still holding Roopa’s rose, was trembling.
She took her rose as if irritated that I had touched it. She placed it carefully back in its slim vase. “My son got it for me,” she said, a hint of pride in her voice that she could not hide.
“A rose isn’t enough to make me sign the paper,” she said.
“It was taunting me,” I said. “It was laughing at me.”
“In your dream? What does it mean?” she asked.
My fists were clenched so tightly that my nails were cutting into my palms. I opened them up and stared at the little crescent shapes left by my nails. “I don’t know. Someone was laughing at me.”
I was certain of it. Someone was out there laughing at me. I knew it in the way that I have that made the small things seem like the most important things in the world. As if they were signs that something bad was coming. No wonder Roopa thought I was mad. She had never had to experience one of my visions and how real they felt. It was like how dreams seemed to make total sense when you were in them but when you awoke and tried to tell it to someone you realized all of the gaps in the logic. That was what my visions and psychic dreams were like. That was what this new music was like. They were so real, but as soon as I reached out to touch them they disintegrated and made no sense.
I had been still staring at the rose. I looked up to Roopa and found her studying my face with a frown. She took pity on me. She reached over to take the piece of paper that I had put onto the coffee table and signed it. “Next time you will tell me more about this dream,” she insisted.
By the time I was ready to leave the incident with the rose felt foolish. It was just a stupid rose after all. How bad could it be? As I put on my jacket, Roopa disappeared in through the door that I was not allowed to go through, and came back out with two plastic carrier bags. Inside each I could make out the outline of a stack of tupperware boxes which I knew from experience would all be filled with various home-cooked curries. The sight made my mouth water. Roopa’s home cooking had left me stunned the first time I had eaten it. It tasted like love poured into a dish.
“One for Theo, one for you,” she said as she ushered me impatiently towards the door.
“Thank you Roopa.” I gave her a big hug, squeezing her until she protested.
“You know you love it,” I said.
She needed my hugs even if she didn’t know it. I bet that prickly son of hers never bothered to hug her when he came over. Sometimes I got the feeling that in between each of my visits nobody had visited her at all.
She returned my hug for a mere few seconds before pushing me firmly away. “Remember to bring back my tupperware next time,” she chided as I left.
Chapter 4
DIANA
I arrived to Grimshaw’s magic shop later that morning to find a small queue had formed outside. This only happened to us on the week before full moon, and after I had served all the customers with their waiting orders of wolfsbane potion, the shop became quiet again. Nobody was here but me. I wanted to check to make sure that Theo was not having a lie-in, so I called his name loudly up the back stairs that led to his living quarters. He did not respond.
This did not surprise me. Theo had already told me that he would be out for most of today, and may not see me at all. I had very little idea of what he got up to when he was outside of the shop. When he was here he kept me company on the shop floor or pottered around his workshop in the back, tinkering with his latest magical inventions, many of which he ended up refining into merchandise to sell. But he was out as often as he was in, a fact which suited me very well. I quite liked having the place to myself so I could go through the files that I had stolen from Agency Headquarters. I hadn’t admitted this to Theo yet. He wouldn’t approve of me jeopardizing my job, which he had observed was important in giving me stability in my life.
Having confirmed that Theo was out, I decided now was a good as time as any to check his ledger. I had been working for Theo for nearly a month now, and in that time had noticed his particular habits about certain things. For example, he kept a ledger of certain purchases that certain customers had made. He tracked which of his werewolf customers were up to date with their purchases of wolfsbane potion, but had never overtly told me that he kept an eye on them in case any stopped observing the rules of society. I don’t think anyone had asked Theo to do this, but maybe he just liked to be a good citizen. His werewolf customers would no doubt be offended if they knew about it.
It made me wonder about all the ways that Theo might be keeping an eye on me. Which might not be a bad thing, so it didn’t bother me much. I pulled the heavy ledger out of its spot where it was stored beneath the counter in the magical section of the store and I leafed to the werewolf section. I updated the list with the ones who came in today. Several others would soon be running out of potion, but as they still had five days to come in before the full moon I was not worried.
Next, I ran my finger down the list of names of customers who had all purchased items of a dubious nature. Theo did not sell anything that was outright dangerous in the store itself, but that didn’t mean that certain ingredients weren’t well known for being used in dangerous spells and the like. And it didn’t hurt for me to keep my psychic tabs on people. I don’t think Theo would have liked me to be looking at his list in order to hunt down anyone who was misbehaving. I had already made up my mind that if anyone was doing anything particularly naughty, I should investigate to see if they needed punishing.
I needed to find a bad person and soon.
At times like this I missed the little voice inside my head. I would have been able to have a conversation with her, and discuss why we were on the hunt for bad people. And then she would have told me that she wanted to stop them from doing bad things in all the brutal ways that appealed to her nature, and I could have told her that she was wrong. The problem was that she was now me. And I needed what she needed.
I ran my fingers down several pages of names, hoping that something might tickle my psychic senses, but nothing did. Feeling annoyed, I put the ledger back in its place. I went to get my Agency files from the drawer that Theo had given me in the store room to put my things in, and returned to the counter to peruse them. Something was nagging at me. It took me a few minutes to realize what it was. Normally Mozz would have come to find me by now.
I called for her. “Mozz? Mozzarella? Where are you?”
She did not make an appearance.
Frowning, I went to look for her. I headed up to Theo’s kitchen, where she was sometimes to be found guzzling a ball of fresh mozzarella cheese, the only thing she ate. Mozz looked like a toddler and had the habits and temperament of one
too. Theo had told her she was not to eat the cheese anywhere else in the shop due to her tendency to leave behind a mess. She had not been happy about this, but it was pretty much the one rule that she obeyed now that I’d filled the kitchen with fresh flowers and made it a pleasant environment for her to loiter in. Since she took such a long time eating, pulling off strings of the cheese and nibbling them delicately, she ended up spending hours at a time there.
But she was not there.
I headed to one of her other favorite spots; Theo’s workshop. Neither of us was allowed in there without supervision, but that was probably what appealed to Mozz most. I knocked on the workshop door and called her name, but she did not answer. This did not mean she was not there. I tried the handle, and when it turned I knew she must be inside, because it never turned for me when the workshop was empty. It was probably some sort of spell that Theo had put on it to keep me out. Either Mozz knew how to break the spell or Theo didn’t mind me going in there to get her out.
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