Hex at a House Party

by Gretchen Galway

  “But I won’t act with force. I can’t.”

  “You can and you will when necessary.”

  I stood up. “You almost had me, Raynor. The girl was a master stroke. But now I’d like to hit the road.”

  Raynor lifted his coffee to his lips. “I understand your living arrangements have changed since I saw you last.”

  An uneasy tickle ran down my spine. Why would the Protectorate be interested in Birdie? “A friend is renting my spare room for a few months.”

  “Tristan Price’s biological offspring, isn’t she?”

  Until Tristan’s death, Birdie’s paternity had been a secret. He’d left her his property in his will, and his paternity was revealed. Father and daughter hadn’t had a chance to get to know each other. “Why do you care?”

  “People are curious about her. I’m glad you’ve taken her under your wing. She might need training.” He pulled out his tablet and looked at the screen. “She doesn’t look much like him, does she? Took after her mother, I guess.”

  “She’s harmless. She’d never met a witch until recently.”

  “Wasn’t doing magic on her own?” he asked.

  “No. Whatever power she has is buried deep. Her mother was nonmag.”

  He swiped his finger over the screen, suddenly appearing bored with the conversation. “I’m sure you’ll help her develop as much as she can. It won’t hurt to have another witch near the wellspring if there’s any more trouble like there was over the summer.”

  Intentionally triggered by Tristan’s murderer, the fairies in Silverpool and across the North Bay had attempted a revolt, setting fires, blocking roads, hiding Mount Tamalpais. “When are you going to install a new Protector? Isn’t that what they’re for?”

  He looked sharply at me. “I’m surprised you’d want that position to be filled anytime soon.”

  My stomach tensed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He turned the tablet around to reveal an unflattering photo of Seth Dumont. “He’s purchased the house next door to yours,” he said. “Arrived yesterday.”

  I said nothing, but my heart thudded in my chest.

  “Maybe you think he’s unlikely to cause any trouble now that the source of his power, the human-born fairy Launt, is dead.” He turned the tablet back around and studied it. “It’s surprising he’s still walking around, actually. I thought he’d be dead by now. That will be my excuse if I have to explain why I haven’t finished the job.”

  Dropping my gaze to my lap, I pretended to brush lint off my jeans. I couldn’t let him think Seth’s life meant anything to me. My failure to kill him had made me look weak; I wouldn’t make it worse by looking like I actually cared about his everyday well-being.

  “And I tend to agree with you. Not all demons are the same.” He set the tablet down on the desk and shrugged. “But I don’t make the rules. Witches have survived as a species because centuries ago we agreed to organize ourselves within a society of those rules. Without them… we would burn in chaos.”

  “He’s not a demon,” I said.

  “Close enough.”

  “He’s a changeling. Born lake fae, raised as a human being.”

  “He’s a possessing spirit,” he said. “His body is not his own. There was a human boy not unlike that little girl in there, but that boy never got his body back.”

  I wondered how he knew so much about Seth, what he knew that I didn’t. “Seth tried to give it back,” I said. “He’s not some… some monster who wants to eat fairies and kill people.”

  Raynor shrugged. “We have no idea what he wants. But we do know he can’t do much harm outside Silverpool, given the circumstances.” He met my gaze and held it. “Don’t we?”

  I found more lint on my jeans. “Do you have any evidence of him ever harming anyone, anywhere?”

  “I have a responsibility to have him eliminated. No possessing spirit should be allowed to get so close to a wellspring. Other demons—”

  “He’s not a demon,” I said.

  Raynor rolled his eyes. “Other possessing spirits might think we’ve grown lax and attack the fae at the wellspring. Humans could be injured.”

  My control snapped. “Fine, you’re right. I don’t want you to kill him. I don’t. I think it would be cruel and unnecessary. It would be wrong, just like it’s wrong to kill any creature who hasn’t committed a crime.”

  “All I would have to do is to drive him out of Silverpool. Mother nature would take care of the rest.”

  “He’s not going to hurt anybody! He’s human and fae, just like the population of Silverpool.” I jumped to my feet and strode over to the blacked-out window beside his desk. The witch Helen Mendoza lived in the house next door and two months ago had shown me how she eavesdropped through that very window.

  Raynor got up and stood behind me. “Perhaps you’re right. As you said, he’s not a real demon.”

  I closed my eyes and flinched, feeling the spring of the trap he’d set for me.

  “Nobody needs to know he’s there,” he added softly.

  I fisted my hands. So that was how he was going to pressure me. “Why do you think I’d sacrifice my life to help some obnoxious fairy stuck in a man’s body?”

  “You’ve done it before,” he said. “Twice now.”

  “Nothing I did was for him in particular.”

  Raynor put a hand on my shoulder. It seemed as heavy as a cast-iron frying pan.

  “I appreciate your moral compass,” he said, his low voice rumbling in my ear. “I happen to share it. That’s why I’m sure, when you hear what I have to say, you’ll be happy to help us out by driving a few hours north to the beautiful Mendocino coast. There’s going to be a house party.”

  I stepped out from under his hand and turned to him in surprise. I’d assumed the business was in the Bay Area. “A party?”

  “Think of it as an all-expense paid, weeklong vacation.”

  “What kind of party lasts a week?”

  “The witch who has invited you frequently brings interesting people together,” Raynor said. “She and her wealthy husband bought a big place on the coast that used to be a bed-and-breakfast. Tourists love places like that—old farmhouse, converted barn, cottages, ocean view.”

  The only reason I knew about places like that was because years ago my father had stolen a magic carpet from a hotel near Carmel, using nine-year-old me as his lookout.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and tilted my head back to look him in the eye. “Why would she invite me?”

  “Don’t you think you’re interesting?”

  “Not to people like her,” I said.

  “You’re a former Protectorate agent and the only child of a famous thief.”

  “Exactly. That hasn’t been great for my social life up to now.” I walked around him and grabbed a handful of peppermints from a glass bowl on his desk. “Most witches look down on me. Especially rich ones.”

  When he didn’t answer, I knew I’d hit the target.

  “Is she doing you a favor to have me there?” I asked, popping one of the candies into my mouth.

  “Hardly. I don’t want her to know that you and I have ever met each other. That’s the reason I want you to go,” he said. “She’ll think Darius is my only agent at the party.”

  The cold peppermint became a rock in my mouth. “Darius Ironford?”

  “He told me you worked together once. That won’t be a problem. He’s got a good poker face.”

  “He hates me,” I said. “With good reason.”

  “He’s a pro. That was a long time ago.”

  “Not that long. And because of me, Seth Dumont threw Darius into the bay and nearly killed him.”

  “Darius has been through worse since then. And if he carries any grudges, it’s against your changeling friend, not against you.” Taking a peppermint for himself, Raynor sat behind his desk and reclined his chair. “Good thing he doesn’t know Dumont is living in Silverpool then, isn’t it?”

  “Are
you threatening to tell him if I don’t do this?”

  “We’re negotiating, Alma.” He popped the peppermint in his mouth. “I help you, you help me.”

  “Oh, come on. Seth’s not— He’s not my friend. You don’t think—? Why would I risk my life and my peace of mind to save that guy again?”

  “Because you’re a Bright witch who believes it’s the right thing to do and you can’t help yourself,” he said. “And because you’re bored hiding in a shack in a forest making folk-magic trinkets for a few bucks.”

  I bit down on the peppermint, enjoying how the crack sounded like crunching bone. “More than a few bucks,” I mumbled. “And it’s not a shack. It’s a bungalow.”

  Raynor got to his feet with his hands braced on the desk and leaned over to face me. “But mostly you’re going to do this because you’re curious, like the true witch you are, and you just have to know.”

  “Have to know what?”

  He smiled slowly. “Whatever there is to know. For instance, why do I want to send two agents to a remote stretch of the Mendocino coast?”

  “I’m not an agent anymore.”

  He ignored me. “Why would I bother myself personally with a pair of isolated witches almost two hundred miles away? Why would I risk offending a member of the oldest, most prestigious witch family in the country by sending not only a demon killer but also a spy, as you put it?”

  I could feel the sharp hooks of the question slicing into my brain and latching on, just as he’d intended. “All right. Why?”

  “It’s even more interesting if you knew it’s me she’s expecting at the party,” he went on. “When one of my agents shows up, she’s going to realize she overplayed her hand.” He sat down behind the desk and opened a folder. “No witch is above the law. Not even the wife of Warren Hawk.”

  I licked my peppermint-flavored lips. The Hawk family was even older than mine, known for its roots in colonial New England. The magic research library in that very building—the Hawk Room, just down the hall from where we sat—was named after one of their ancestors.

  “I didn’t know any of them were still alive,” I said.

  “Warren is the last,” Raynor said, “but he’s become reclusive in his old age. It’s his wife, Crystal, who throws the parties.”

  “And you think Crystal has committed a crime?”

  “I don’t have the evidence I need to arrest her. Being Warren’s wife, it’s touchy.” He patted the folder on his desk. “I was invited for social reasons. The director of the Protectorate lends prestige to parties, I suppose. When an active agent shows up, she might panic and do something stupid. I want a witness. I want evidence. You have no reason to lie for the Protectorate, so your account will carry weight.”

  “What kind of stupid thing might she do? What do you think she’s already done?”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s confidential. I have no evidence. If word gets out, she’ll have me fired for slander.”

  “You’re kidding me. You think I’m going to go up there when I don’t—”

  “There are also advantages if you don’t know,” he said. “This way will be easier for you to convince her you don’t know anything.”

  I got to my feet and dropped the envelope on the desk. “I won’t go if I don’t know anything.”

  He sighed. “I expected you to say that. I would feel the same way.” He looked up. “Let’s just say… it’s a financial crime. Involving powerful people.”

  “She’s a thief?”

  He paused. “Yes. I believe so.”

  “That’s really why you want me there, isn’t it? Because I’m an expert on stealing?”

  “I want you there because you have the fairy sight, like me,” he said quietly.

  Unlike any other witches I’d ever known, Raynor and I could hear and see fairies, even when they didn’t want to be seen. Other witches could only see them when the fae allowed them to. “I thought it was a financial crime,” I said. “How are fairies involved?”

  “They probably aren’t,” he said. “But fairy sight has been more useful for me in my career than I can say. I never know when it’ll come in handy. I’ll feel better about sending Darius up there knowing somebody else can watch the fae, just in case.”

  “How common is it? The gift?”

  He looked down and rolled his fingers along the gold chain on his wrist. “Nobody I know has ever admitted to it. Telling anyone would probably get you fired.” He smiled. “With anyone but me.”

  “I still don’t work for you,” I said.

  He took an envelope out of the folder and handed it to me. “Thanks to Helen Mendoza, who’s an old schoolmate of Crystal’s, you and Tristan’s daughter have been formally invited to attend the Hawks’ party with their other guests.”

  “Birdie? But—”

  “You were right. Crystal isn’t interested in you. But she would like to meet your Birdie, and she knows you’re her friend.”

  I looked at the envelope he’d handed me. It was dark green, in the kind of thick, heavy paper used for wedding invitations, and bore my name in silver script. Inside was a small card with an address and a date range beginning on Friday. It was already Wednesday.

  “Birdie isn’t ready to meet other witches yet,” I said, alarmed by the short notice. “Especially if they’re dangerous.”

  “Oh, she’ll be safe, don’t worry about that. It’s not that kind of crime.” He handed me a second envelope, this one with Birdie’s name on it.

  “I haven’t said I’ll do it.” But I took it, as curious as he’d known I would be.

  “Talk to Dr. Mendoza. She might help you make up your mind.” He leaned back in his chair. “I told her to expect you.”

  Chapter Six

  I stepped out of Raynor’s office with the envelopes tucked into my jacket and was immediately greeted again by Darius’s little sister, Rochelle.

  “I’ll escort you out,” she said, looking as if she’d rather lock me in a closet with Mission before the exorcism.

  Over her shoulder I saw a trio of other agents lingering by the watercooler, pretending not to stare. They were all Flint level, in their twenties. I recognized a bearded man in white jeans as the witch who’d enlisted just as I was leaving, in spite of my recommendation to reject his application. The smirk he gave me suggested he’d heard about my opinion of him. I didn’t remember his name. The other two were too young for me to know.

  At the front door downstairs, I caught Rochelle’s eye. “Good luck with the agent thing,” I said.

  Shaking her head, she slammed the door between us, leaving me standing alone on the porch.

  Looks like I was as popular as ever. I turned away to take a deep breath. The morning haze had burned off early, and sunshine lit up Diamond Street in a warm, yellow glow.

  I walked down the steps of the Protectorate’s freshly painted porch, hiked up the steep sidewalk to the ramshackle Victorian next door, climbed those creaky steps, and lifted my fist to bang on the door.

  It opened before my skin met wood.

  “How lovely to see you, darling Alma,” Helen Mendoza said, opening her arms as if welcoming me in a hug. Her short white hair, usually askew, was brushed smooth. Her thin lips bore a pink color that might have been an effort at cosmetics. Instead of men’s workwear, she wore a dress. No, a nightgown, but under a wool cardigan with floral embroidery.

  Helen was generally an irritable, aggressively unfriendly witch who only interacted with other people when forced to do so, or for money. I’d never seen her put on so much effort for company.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Her pink lips tightened. She grabbed my arm and dragged me over the threshold, then slammed the door.

  “People say I don’t have any manners,” she said. “Take off your shoes. They hexed them.”

  I looked down at my favorite black boots. “How? I never took them off.” But I untied the laces and sent out a spell to feel for unwanted magic as I took
them off. Helen was right—something clung to the rubber soles. I flipped one over and peeled off a silver thread stuck to the bottom. “Kind of expensive for them, throwing away real silver.”

  A silver thread close enough to the target’s skin could be used to eavesdrop for brief periods if the target was careless or inexperienced.

  “New guy, big budget,” Helen said. “That’s how they got him to take the job.”

  “I’d think a lot of witches would want to be a director,” I said. “Run their own office after taking orders all the time.”

  “It’s lonely at the top.” She took the silver from me, wound it into a ball in her palm, and then spit on it, singing an off-key song under her breath. Then she tucked it into a chest pocket, no doubt to use for some spell of her own later.

  “Raynor doesn’t seem the type to get lonely.”

  Helen shot me a look. “Then why does he keep bothering you? How many letters did he send last week?”

  The first two weeks after the crisis in Silverpool, Raynor had sent me text messages. Then he’d tried email for a couple of weeks before moving on to handwritten letters on real paper mailed through the US Postal Service.

  Raynor had told me he’d put an end to Helen’s spying. “I thought the Protectorate had blocked your ability to eavesdrop on them,” I said.

  Helen pulled at her hair, messing up the careful style. “He’s smarter than the last director, but not smarter than me.”

  I grinned, thrilled somebody had bested Raynor. “He wants me to work for him.” I took the party invitations out of my jacket. “He said that you do too, so you got me and my neighbor invited to this party. Is that true?”

  Helen opened the front door and pointed at the doormat outside. “Set your boots out there. Who knows what else they tried to stick on you?”

  Reluctantly I did as she said, hoping a local street person wouldn’t steal them, then followed her to the end of the long, dim hallway through the center of the house. On either side were cluttered parlors and sitting rooms that seemed to be lost in time, their Victorian style unchanged for over a century.

  Like me, Helen Mendoza made a living from her magic, selling useful items she made at home. Off the back deck of her house was a greenhouse where she grew herbs, flowers, small trees, raised insects, some small amphibians, and I shuddered to imagine what else. In her kitchen, she mixed up herbal remedies, snuff, spells, potions, teas, amulets, and charms. Unlike me, her business was well-established and highly profitable, allowing her to afford the astronomical cost of living in San Francisco.