Rock Paper Sorcery

by L. J. Hayward

“Hawkins? Y’all right?”

  Not quite ready to risk too much movement, I waved a hand vaguely. It did something to assure him, I guess. He shut up at least.

  Maybe a minute or two later, the rolling concussion of agony dropped down to a trickle. I felt relatively safe enough to open my eyes. The dim cave behind my knees was bearable, but my eyes watered when I lifted my head to the outside world.

  “What happened?” Dev crouched not far away, elbows resting on his knees, hands dangling. Hands, normal hands. Not glowing-green hands.

  “Dunno,” I muttered truthfully. “Felt like a migraine, all the pain hitting at once.” It was settling back down into a regular headache again, a dull pressure against my temples. “Seems okay now, though.”

  Dev didn’t look convinced. “Anythin’ like that happen to you before?”

  “Not without a corresponding physical blow.” My head had been knocked around a good deal in the last couple of years. God. Maybe the accumulated injuries were catching up to me. Maybe I was going to end up like the Colonel, retired from the game after suffering a few too many high tackles.

  Before Dev could say anything about seeking out medical advice, I clambered to my feet. The thought of having anything in common with that thug was enough to scare me into action.

  As I went looking for my balance against the wall of the building, the next thought I had wasn’t any more pleasant. Less so, even.

  Did Sean feel that sort of pain when the stone monkey crashed into his head?

  I was in the bushes losing my breakfast so fast the intervening seconds may as well have not existed.

  Dev didn’t exactly hold my hair back, but he hovered close while I retched. Then handed over a folded handkerchief when I managed a mostly upright position again.

  “Thanks.” I swiped at my sour tasting mouth.

  “You need to see a doctor,” he advised, proving my earlier thoughts correct.

  “Nah. I’m fine now. Just an unfortunate flash back.”

  “PTSD now?”

  His warily concerned exasperation finished off the recovery process. I chuckled and it didn’t hurt.

  “No, I’m kidding,” I assured him. “Honestly, I’m okay now. No headache, no nausea, no worries.” Only two of which were lies. “Shall we get on with your business?”

  Leaving him no time to protest, I went back to the door and considered our options. Buzzing a second floor apartment, I waited. Dev came over, arms crossed, gingerly, and frowned at me.

  “Yes?” came a tinny female voice from the speaker.

  “Hi, ma’am. My name’s Matt Hawkins and I’m with a private investigation firm, Sol Investigations. I was wondering if perhaps you had the time to talk to me about a case I’m working on.”

  I’ve learned that, generally, people are intrigued by the whole ‘private investigator’ deal (I mean, who wouldn’t be, right?) and were willing to chat if you gave them the chance to be part of the gumshoeing. It helped that I could, somewhat semi-legitimately, throw around the name of Erin’s company. If folks wanted to get all hoity-toity about legality and stuff, they could give the office a call and Erin or Ivan would honestly answer that yes, Matt Hawkins contracted with them. Whether or not I was actually working for them at that time was another matter altogether.

  There was a speculative pause from the speaker, then, “What sort of case?” There was a distinct tone of wariness in the voice.

  Then again, some people just didn’t like being involved.

  “Nothing personal, ma’am. It’s about the deaths of—”

  “Oh, them. Yeah, sure, come on up.”

  The lock whirred and clicked open.

  Dev looked from the door to me. “Easier than ensorcelling the lock to break.”

  “Much,” I agreed. “We mere regular humans must find regular ways of doing things.”

  And hey, I get the irony of my words. No, that’s not irony, it’s just hypocrisy. I hadn’t been regular—in a social, lifestyle and metaphysical way, at least—since… well, ever, but more so since the advent of Mercy Belique, fanged femme fatale.

  Leaving it at that, I led the way into the building. In the cool interior, out of the heat and bright sunlight, the last of the ache in my head shrivelled up and disappeared, though it seemed to give a ‘next time, Hawkins, next time’ farewell. I needed to find a pharmacy with a distinct lack of aggravation in residence.

  We took the stairs to the second storey. I’d buzzed number twenty-two and as we came out of the stairwell, the door to said apartment opened and a woman stepped out. She was a little plump in a nicely rounded way, piles of white-blonde hair on top of her head, dark eye makeup and bright ruby lips. The moment I made sense of her outfit, I understood the wariness.

  “You the PI?” she asked, looking between us, her gaze drinking in Dev’s long, lanky form before hitching on his bloody t-shirt.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, barely stopping myself from saying ‘madam’. I wasn’t sure about the protocols of greeting a dominatrix in full getup so decided to err on the side of not-wanting-to-be-spanked.

  “Both of you?”

  Frankly, I was surprised she remembered I was there. Apparently Texan sorcerers were just what punched her ticket.

  Dev smiled. “Just him. I’m the client.”

  Ms Red Leather all but panted at the accent. “Oh, yeah. Of course.”

  “Darlene?” The disgruntled, partly muffled voice came from inside the apartment.

  Darlene the Dom leaned back inside. “In a minute!” Then she shut the door and leaned against it. “Sorry about that. He’s not quite trained yet.”

  “No problem,” I muttered. “Why did you say ‘of course’ about my client?”

  One finely pencilled-in eyebrow arched at me. “You’re investigating Luke and Cathy, aren’t you?”

  “The couple that died?”

  She nodded. “He cut her throat, then hung himself. Terrible business.”

  “Terrible,” I echoed. “But we’re not looking into that directly. We’re trying to track down some stolen property.” Season the lies with truth until palatable. “Why did you link them to my client?”

  “Well, it’s obvious. They were American, too.”

  Oh so obvious. I checked silently with Dev, to see if it had been obvious to him. Yeah, I’d have to wait till I could check in not so silently. His expression had gone politely neutral.

  “Right. American, of course. Were you here when they died?”

  “No. I was in Sydney picking up a new outfit.” She indicated her ensemble, a complicated affair of red leather, chains, buckles and studs. “You just can’t get good leather work in Brisbane.”

  I shook my head in complete agreement. “Did you know them at all?”

  “Not really. They kinda kept to themselves. Didn’t really talk to anyone.”

  “So you can’t say if he was the type to perpetrate the murder-suicide?”

  Darlene shrugged. “Well, I suppose I couldn’t say, really. I wasn’t surprised, though. Them being what they were.”

  “Which was?” Dev asked.

  “Witches.”

  Chapter 17

  Darlene the Dominatrix left us with that dread announcement and went back to her job. We continued on to apartment twenty-six, the abode of the witches.

  “Were they really witches?” I asked quietly.

  Dev shrugged. “Could have been, I suppose. If they were who I think they might have been, then it’s entirely likely. Though it would take more than, how did Darlene describe them? Satanic tattoos and chantin’.” He shook his head wearily. “It would take more than that to confirm it.”

  Stopping outside the door, we considered it for a moment. There was a notice on the door saying the apartment was only to be entered by authorised persons.

  “Got a regular way of getting in here?” Dev asked me wryly.

  I crouched and studied the lock on the doorknob. “Sure.” Gripping it, I reached out with my telekinesis.

>   Since I’d begun seriously working with my psychic abilities, I’d had to, basically, get serious about them. Caroline, the clairvoyant, had given me some help, not so much in how to use and control them, but more in naming them. She said I had varying levels of aura reading, remote viewing, astral projection and perhaps a touch of something she called mediumship. But by far the strongest of my abilities was telekinesis. Caroline called it psychokinesis. I preferred ‘telekinesis’ because there was already enough psycho in my life without intentionally adding more.

  The telekinesis was based in that mass of potential energy in my solar plexus, that great whump of power I could unleash to break through things in my path. Concentrating, I teased out a thin strand of that power and directed it into the lock on the door.

  Surprisingly, or not so, Roberts had some experience with picking locks. He’d grudgingly taught me a thing or two over recent times, just in case I needed to pick a lock to get out of some unfortunate situation my, as he called it, ‘poor judgement’ got me into. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t appreciate me actually using those skills to break into somewhere. Mostly because he said so. Still…

  It took a little fiddling to find the right position and pressure, but the lock clicked over and I turned the knob. The door swung open and a waft of stale air puffed out.

  Not waiting, Dev stepped past me and went right in.

  “You’re welcome,” I muttered and stood. My reconstructed knee cracked and a small wave of achiness rolled up my thigh. Yay, more pain.

  Hobbling in after Dev, I closed the door so no randoms would get suspicious.

  The apartment opened up in a fairly spacious living room. There was a kitchen to one side and a short hallway to the other, leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. Witches or not, Luke and Cathy had decorated with a modern Spartan theme. Grey modular sofa, decent sized flat screen on the wall, bookshelf with a few books, a few DVDs, a few knickknacks and a few layers of dust. There was a bowl of decaying fruit on the kitchen counter and a couple of utilitarian fridge magnets holding up local takeaway menus. The main bedroom had an unmade bed with matching side tables and dresser. Two toothbrushes, two towels, two sets of shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom. All in all, it had a very temporary feel about it, as if this were a hotel suite not a home.

  As I walked through the place, that feeling I’d experienced downstairs—the sense of Dev’s sorcery, not the head splitting, stomach churning pain—brushed over me. My skin tingled as I headed toward the last room.

  Dev stood in the open doorway, thumbs hooked into his belt, shoulders tense, head bowed.

  “Trouble?” I asked coming up behind him.

  Yeah, he didn’t need to answer. The room said it all, really.

  There was no furniture, no carpet. Just bare floor and walls. In the middle of the room, painted on the floor, was a Ring of Solomon, the tips of the six-pointed star inside the circle crusted with old blood. Splattered across the design was a larger stain. Even though a clean-up team had done what they could, nothing short of sand-blasting was going to make that stain look like anything other than what it was. Directly over the circle, the ceiling fan hung skewwhiff, as if a full grown adult had taken a swing off it.

  Which he had.

  The lingering presence of sorcery was all but overwhelming, crawling over my skin like a hundred acid-dipped needles, but I could feel the darkness of the deaths that had occurred here under it. The horror and fear had been strong enough to seep into the floor and walls, strong enough to reach out to me, in the hallway, and show me what had happened here.

  I’d experienced this once before, when investigating the death of a physicist. She’d been strangled in her lab, by a demon, and all I’d had to do was walk into the same space she’d been when killed in order to be drawn into her death, a week after the fact. When I’d told Caroline about it, she’d said it could have been psychometry—the ability to sense things about an object through touch—but since I wasn’t really touching anything, she preferred to slot it into the ‘remote viewing’ category, which was usually done, well, remotely. I figured being removed in time was as good as being removed by distance.

  Only wished I was more remote than right in the middle of the vision though.

  I stood in the middle of the room, right in the centre of the Ring of Solomon, knife in my hand. My chest heaved, whole body straining with the effort to resist. Sweat blurred my vision but I saw her clearly, this woman I’d spent most of my life with, whom I loved more than the power the demons sold me. She knelt on the floor at my feet, struggling as much as me. Her body was locked down, immobilised, into this submissive position she’d never, ever, voluntarily take. But her eyes. Goddamn, her eyes, they were wide and filled with terror and anger and a desperate pleading.

  My guts twisted, almost physically, with my need to not do this. Heart slamming wildly, I tried to force my hand down, away from her throat. It didn’t budge. The keen edge of the knife, our athame, sat against the soft skin of her neck. It wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t meant to cut, had never been used to draw blood. Right then, I didn’t care about that. I would plunge it into my own heart before I used it against Candy like this.

  I could almost hear her whispering to me, the way she would say ‘baby’ and laugh when I screwed up my face at the endearment.

  But it wasn’t her whispering, it was the other one.

  He was behind me, not touching but in control. Those cold hands both across the room and on me, in me, at the same time, moving, directing, making a traitor of this flesh I’d known all my life. My arm moved at it wasn’t me doing it.

  “Tell me,” his chill, low voice hissed. “Tell me where it is, or you’ll do it.”

  My jaw unlocked and I could move it. A totally involuntary gasp was the first thing out, then, “Fuck you.”

  “Tell me, Lyle.”

  My hand pressed forward and the edge of the athame bit into Candy’s neck. Tears spilled from her dark eyes, like the blood spilled from her skin. She had no choice but to feel the steel sliding into her skin. There was no pulling away from it.

  “It’s not yours,” I sobbed, unable to look away from my hand slowly killing my lover.

  “I could stop it now,” our torturer said. “It’s not so bad yet she couldn’t survive, if you tell me where it is and I stop you and you get her to a doctor.”

  The cut was growing deeper, longer. Candy’s eyes were glazing over, the front of her neck and shirt washed in red.

  “All right,” I moaned. “Stop it. I’ll tell you.”

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  I gave the name of the storage facility where we kept our stash, the PIN for the door, gave the combination of the lock to the safe. I was crying, eyes on Candy as she knelt before me, the knife still in her neck, still bleeding out.

  “Come on,” I ground out when I’d spilled everything. “Let us go.”

  A terrifying chuckle came out of the corner behind me. “I don’t think so.”

  My heart tripped and Candy’s eyes got even wider.

  “You said you’d let us go if I told you!”

  “No. I said I could stop it, but I’m not going to.”

  My hand moved, twisting, slicing and Candy’s throat was cut, side to side, blood spraying.

  Lyle’s mind broke in that instant and I was tossed clear. Even as I staggered back, I felt the echoes of what happened after, though. Of how Lyle’s body was lifted up, how he reached for the noose himself, insane in those last moments so he didn’t know if it was him or the other making him slide the rope over his head.

  In the wake of the vision, the headache flared and I pushed the heels of my palms into my eyes, hunching over. I struggled to calm my racing heart, to pull in enough air to settle my body from full on panic to something less aneurism inducing.

  “Hawkins?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” A couple more deep breaths, and that became truer than it started out as. “I, ah, got a mindful of how they died is
all.”

  There was a speculative silence from Dev, then he huffed. “In future, when introducin’ yourself to folks, don’t flounder and settle on warrior. Go with psychic. Seems to be your strongest ability.”

  “Hey! You haven’t seen me really fight yet.”

  “If you can read a room from the hallway, Hawkins, it wouldn’t matter if you were the Hulk. You’re more psychic than anythin’ else. Trust me.” He gave my hunched shoulder a pat. “What did you get?”

  I straightened up, scowling. “I got a front row seat to something that’s going to give me nightmares for a potentially very long time, that’s what I got.”

  He just looked at me steadily, waiting.

  “Fine. Their name’s weren’t Luke and Cathy. They were Lyle and Candy. A couple, don’t know if they were married but they were pretty tight because when Lyle was forced to cut Candy’s throat, he lost his shit so thoroughly it was like he’d never had it in the first place.”

  Dev nodded. “Lyle and Candy Belasco.”

  “You knew them?”

  “Not personally. I knew of them. Wizard and witch couple, but what made them most useful to someone like Friedrich was that they were facilitators.”

  “Facilitators?”

  Wandering into the murder room, Dev nodded. “They helped people who wanted somethin’ find the people who wanted to sell that somethin’.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Like eBay for the supernatural world.”

  Dev glanced at me, a small smile on his face. “Yes, exactly like that. And highly indiscriminate. As long as their percentage of the fee is right, most facilitators aren’t too picky about who they connect. The Belascos themselves weren’t too bad, just a little greedy.”

  Looking back toward the bland living room, I cocked a doubtful eyebrow at that comment.

  “Not for physical possessions,” Dev explained. He crouched by the edge of the Ring of Solomon. “But power. It’s why they courted demons, for the power they could get from them. Some of the things they bought would go to the demons in exchange for magical ability. When I confronted Friedrich, he said he’d sold the spell on to someone in Brisbane. He obviously went through the Belascos. I didn’t know they’d moved here, just that they’d lit out a couple years back after a deal with the Red Primal went wrong.”