Trifles and Folly 3, page 2
“Even through the lead, something is making my skin crawl,” Rowan said, eyeing the box as if it might attack.
“Do you need to open it, if you can sense it from here?”
Rowan frowned. “Unfortunately, yes. The lead dampens too much for me to get a good read.
I heard a key in the front door lock, heard the chimes as the door opened, and then Teag’s voice rang out. “Cassidy? I’ve got Lucinda with me.”
“We’re back here,” I replied. “And Rowan’s already on it.”
Teag clicked the lock, and a moment later, he and Lucinda came into the break room. Lucinda’s gaze fell to the box immediately, and she fell back a step as if something pushed her. “Uh, uh, uh,” she murmured, shaking her head.
Teag took the warded fabric from Rowan and carefully lifted the lid of the lead box. Even though I was several feet away, I could feel the resonance of the blood-soaked necklace like dirty oil on my skin.
Lucinda clucked her tongue. “Looks like dirty deeds done dirt cheap—and dead wrong.”
I caught a glance between Lucinda and Rowan. “Meaning?”
Lucinda cocked her head as if waiting for Rowan to speak first. “Whoever did the spell has power but no finesse,” Rowan said. Lucinda gave a nod in agreement. “A talented amateur maybe, or a fledgling witch attempting something out of their league.”
“The necklace is cursed—and there’s a whiff of death magic as well,” Lucinda said, frowning like a chef trying to suss out the subtle flavors of a recipe.
“If it’s cursed to kill, isn’t that death magic?” Teag asked.
“Necromancy,” Lucinda clarified. “Remember—I told you last night something about the power wasn’t human.”
Teag and I exchanged a glance. “I thought Donnelly was the only necromancer in Charleston,” I said.
“And that’s as it should be,” Rowan replied. “But there’s nothing to say someone new hasn’t come to town—maybe even since Sorren and Donnelly went to Philadelphia.”
“Necromancy isn’t beginner magic.” Teag eyed the box warily but did not move closer.
“No, it isn’t—and it’s dangerous power, even when it’s used by a seasoned witch,” Rowan agreed.
“But isn’t necromancy about bringing someone back from the dead?” I asked. “How does that factor into a necklace that killed the wearer?”
Lucinda shrugged. “That’s what we need to find out.”
“Is there anything special about the necklace itself?” Rowan moved close enough to peer into the box, as did Lucinda.
“Unless you see modifications that I didn’t, I found the same necklace online—just costume jewelry, nothing special,” Teag said. When Lucinda and Rowan stepped back, Teag used the spelled cloth to carefully latch the lid and replace the box in the office.
“You said you’d felt ripples of power before last night,” I said, looking to Lucinda. “Do you remember when?”
“A week ago. On Thursday.”
Rowan glanced up. “I felt something then too—I just wasn’t sure what. Nothing good.”
“Anything else?”
Lucinda frowned, thinking. “Last Saturday, I felt a surge of something, and then it was gone. It felt…farther away than the other times.” She managed a wan smile. “I remember because I was at the market, and I thought I might be getting a sinus headache from rain coming in.”
Teag had already pulled his laptop from his messenger bag and set it up on the table, carefully dispelling the salt circle. “Thanks. That might narrow things down.”
I glanced toward the front room. “I need to open the shop. Thanks for coming by,” I said, walking with Rowan and Lucinda toward the door. “Can you keep your radar tuned in and let us know if you sense anything else?”
Rowan rolled her eyes at the idea of magic being like radar, but Lucinda chuckled. “Hailing frequencies open,” she deadpanned. “We’ll do some digging of our own.” She frowned. “Don’t you and Teag go busting in on anyone without us, you hear? Necromancy’s nothing to fool with, and even an amateur witch can be dangerous.”
If I doubted her, the memory of a blood-soaked corpse in the alley was enough to prove her point.
For a mid-week morning, the shop was busy with tourists, and then a soon-to-be bride and her mother came in to look at vintage silverware. I glimpsed Teag hunched over his laptop in the break room, but it was almost lunchtime before I had the chance to see what he had found.
“Lucinda and Rowan’s ‘ripples’ helped a lot,” Teag said, turning his laptop so I could see what he found. “The lady in the alley wasn’t the only vic. Two other dead men, on the days Lucinda and Rowan felt something in the magic, both covered in blood without any visible wounds.”
“Show me.”
Teag’s Weaver magic gave him the ability to weave disparate strands of data into information, making him one hell of a hacker. Normal firewalls didn’t even slow him down. “Charleston police found a guy in a locked, parked car near the airport last Thursday. Soaked in blood, not a mark on his body.” He brought up the police file on the screen, and I glanced at the details.
“What’s that?” I pointed at a gray blur on the dead man’s pant leg. Teag enlarged the image.
“Looks like he got against something—maybe pet fur?” Teag replied, leaning closer to make out the image. “Police file said they had to send Animal Control after a cat that wouldn’t leave the crime scene.”
“And then Saturday, another death, same thing. This time, a guy dies in a locked bathroom at a coffee shop. Security cameras show no one went in or out except the vic. No windows in the room, no other exit—nada.” We watched the security footage from multiple cameras, saw the victim go into the bathroom as no one else showed up on any of the other feeds, nothing except an alley cat pacing in front of the bathroom door.
I sighed. “That looks like the mangy cat we saw out back. Can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to mean something. What next?”
Teag sat back in his chair and tilted his head to loosen his shoulders, then stretched his arms, laced his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles. “Now I really start hacking, looking for anything the vics had in common—besides dying bloody and that damned cat. There’s got to be a connection—but it’s going to take some digging.” He raised an eyebrow. “On the other hand, with three victims, I’ve got a better chance of narrowing down matches than I would with just two.”
“I’ll run the store; you dig. I’m sure you’ll find the connections.”
By five o’clock when I closed the store, Teag was still at his spot at the breakroom table. I ordered pizza, figuring we had a few more hours ahead of us. “I think I know the why and the where, but not who or how,” Teag announced as I walked into the room.
I sat down next to him. “Do tell.”
Teag turned the laptop to show me his screen. “None of them owned a cat. But all of them died wearing or holding a piece of jewelry. And all of them went to the same jewelry repair kiosk the day before they died.”
I frowned. “I get the ‘where’ but what’s the ‘why?’”
Teag met my gaze. “They all testified against a teenager named Ben Calvert six years ago when he went to trial for manslaughter.”
“So that means Calvert’s either the witch or the person who hired the witch—right?”
Teag shook his head. “Not that easy. Calvert was underage. I only got his name by hacking into the private files of a reporter who covered the trial. The media didn’t release the name, and the records were sealed.”
“So he changed his name and disappeared,” I mused. “He could be anywhere.”
“He could be—but let’s start looking at that jewelry repair kiosk.”
“So he goes by Brian Cade now,” Rowan murmured from her seat in the back of the car, staring out the window at the night. “Same initials.”
“Yeah,” Teag replied. “The man at the kiosk said he started four months ago—a month before the murders began.”
“He must have been targeting the victims all along,” I mused. “And it’s too much to think coincidence sent all three of them to the same kiosk right after he started working there.”
Teag shook his head. “I’m betting he sent them all a special discount or coupon to lure them in. I don’t think he left any of it to chance.”
Teag, Lucinda, Rowan, and I parked on a dark suburban side street, watching the house at the edge of town where we’d tracked Calvert. “Can you tell anything more about his magic—or about the necromancy?” I asked. We were each fairly powerful with magic in our own ways, but none of us was a necromancer, and going up against that kind of power gave me good reason to be nervous.
“You know the plan,” Teag said quietly. “Let’s go.”
Lucinda and I headed toward the front door while Teag and Rowan went around back. The small house had just one floor and what might be a loft or small attic above. Not much crawlspace and no basement. If Calvert was home, it wouldn’t be hard to find him.
I laid down a salt line around the front of the house while Lucinda chalked veves to invoke the protection of Papa Legba and Baron Samedi, two of the most powerful Voudon Loas who held authority over life and death. Teag completed the salt line so that it went around the rest of the house, trapping the energies we released inside. We weren’t taking any chances.
My phone vibrated silently in my pocket, the signal I’d been waiting for. I let the athame slip down into my hand and sent a cold blast of power toward the entrance, splintering the wood as it ripped from its hinges. I could hear Teag kicking in the back door, as Lucinda began to chant. With a shake of my left wrist, Bo’s ghost materialized at my side, and before I could say a word, he let out a low growl and lunged inside, chasing after that same mangy cat from the crime scenes.
Lucinda and I charged in the front while Teag and Rowan barged into the back. The living room looked like the set to a horror movie, with candles burning on every flat surface and sigils drawn in blood on every wall. The carpet lay in a heap to one side, and more markings covered the floorboards, along with an obsidian knife and a bowl of blood. Calvert stood in the middle of the room, looking more like a junkie than a killer. Eyes sunken, cheeks hollow, and unshaven, brown hair lank and dirty, he stared at us like he was coming off a bad trip.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a wrecked voice. “I’ll kill you like I killed them. Aren’t you scared? I’m a witch.”
Rowan snorted. She raised one hand and clenched her fist. Calvert dropped to his knees as if he’d been sucker-punched. “I’m the witch. You’re a poser with a good spell.”
I kept my athame pointed at Calvert, backing Rowan up. I’d put bigger bad guys through walls with the blast of power my athame harnessed, and after seeing what Calvert did to his victims, I wouldn’t lose sleep about roughing him up a little.
Teag and Lucinda each made a slow walk around the room’s perimeter. “What I don’t get is why he needed necromancy to kill those people with cursed objects,” I said.
“He didn’t.” We all turned to look at Lucinda. “He needed a familiar to work the curse. Didn’t you?” she added, fixing Calvert with a glare that made him tremble. Rowan held him with her power, forcing him to stay kneeling, hands at his side as if bound.
“You’re so smart, you figure it out,” he snarled.
“That’s why that damned cat’s been everywhere,” I said. “He’s the familiar.” That’s when I realized that Bo and the cat were sitting side by side like besties.
For the first time, I got a good look at the cat itself. Mangy didn’t begin to cover it. I couldn’t tell what color the cat’s matted, dirty fur might have been originally. Chunks of fur were missing, the tail seemed abnormally short, and one ear had rotted away. The cat fixed me with a stare, desperate but too proud to beg. “He brought the cat—the familiar—back from the dead,” I murmured. “Against its will.”
“Where did you find the curse, boy?” Lucinda’s voice held an undercurrent of power, and from the look on Calvert’s face, that magic compelled him to speak the truth.
“I found an old book in a second-hand store,” Calvert spat. “It wasn’t hard to get everything I needed, but I’ve only got a little bit of magic, and that was a problem.” The look on his face made it clear that we would all be next on his list if he had a choice in the matter. “Then I read that the familiar of a powerful witch can share its power with a novice. There was a guy a few towns over that everyone said was a witch with a freaky cat. I thought maybe I could buy the cat—or steal it. But when I got there, they were both dead.”
Calvert licked his lips nervously. “But the old book—it had a bunch of spells on all kinds of things. And there was this ritual to bring something back from the dead. I didn’t need the old guy, just the cat.”
“So you used necromancy to bring the cat back to life and used the cat to work the curses,” Rowan supplied, contempt clear in her voice.
The unhinged look in Calvert’s eyes said more than any confession. “They testified against me. Sent me to jail. They had it coming.”
We ignored him. “So what now?” I asked. “Release the spell on the cat, and he loses his mojo?”
Rowan frowned. “A bit more than that, I’m afraid. Problem with dabbling in magic that’s out of your league,” she added with a withering look at Calvert. “Necromancy comes at a cost—blood, life force…souls. A trained necromancer figures out what he’s going to owe before he does the spell. Our boy here didn’t read the fine print, and now he has a balance due.”
For the first time, Calvert’s eyes glinted in fear. “What do you mean?”
“Gotta pay the power bill,” Lucinda replied, an unpleasant smile touching her lips. “And it’s time to pull the plug.”
“Found it.” We all looked to Teag as he held up a small wooden box. “Cat bones. Vertebra—bits of its tail. Am I right?”
“Go to hell,” Calvert snapped.
Teag set the box on the floor and poured a stream of salt on it from a container in his pocket, then used one of the candles to kindle the old wood into flame. Rowan began to chant in a language I didn’t understand, but I felt chills down my back just the same. Lucinda sang strange words in a quiet voice while I kept my athame trained on Calvert.
I smelled pipe smoke and heard a dog bark from the front porch. I glimpsed a tall, thin man in a tuxedo and a top hat, dark glasses hiding the empty eye sockets of his skull, standing in the doorway. The mangy cat stood up with an air of threadbare dignity and walked straight toward the apparition, pausing only to fix Calvert with a baleful glare before it sauntered to the door.
Outside, two powerful Voudon Loa, Papa Legba and Baron Samedi, guardians of the underworld, waited to claim what belonged to them. The necromancer’s cat went willingly.
Calvert did not.
Payback’s a bitch.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MELTED SAINT
First appeared in the anthology:
Baker Street Irregulars
THE ADVENTURE OF THE MELTED SAINT
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Alistair, but if you’re here, it means trouble.”
Alistair McKinnon, Curator of the Lowcountry Museum of Charleston, jokingly preened. “Why, Cassidy! At my age, that’s one of the nicest things anyone has said to me in a while. Do I look suitably dangerous?”
Alistair stooped, though the doorway was still an inch above his thinning brown hair. Today he wore a blue seersucker suit with a red bowtie, the natural apparel of the sartorially-inclined, old-school Charlestonian blue-blood. He held a cardboard box, and despite our banter, his brow furrowed with worry.
“You don’t usually bring me your mail for show and tell. What’s up?”
“For starters,” Alistair replied, “I think this package arrived with its own ghost.”
I figured that something supernatural lay behind his visit. That’s normal for me. I’m Cassidy Kincaide, owner of Trifles and Folly, an antique and curios store in historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina, and I’ve got a couple of big secrets. First, I’m a psychometric, which means I can read the history—or magic—of objects by touching them. That comes in handy with my second secret, which is that Teag, my assistant store manager, has his own magical ability to weave spells into fabric or weave data and hack computers with supernatural ease.
And those two secrets roll up to our biggest one—Trifles and Folly really exists to get dangerous magical items off the market and out of the wrong hands. We’re part of a covert Alliance of mortals and immortals dedicated to shutting down dangerous supernatural threats with extreme prejudice and have been since our founding over three hundred years ago. When we do our job right, no one notices. When we screw up, the death and destruction usually gets chalked up to a natural disaster.
“Maggie can cover the front of the store for a while,” I said. Maggie gave me a nod. She knows a little bit about what we do, though not quite everything, for her own safety. Alistair knows about my magic, but not about Teag’s abilities and the Alliance. It’s complicated.
Teag and I showed Alistair into the small break room kitchen, and Alistair put the box onto the table. He declined Teag’s offer of tea or coffee. Teag went ahead and poured a big glass of sweet tea for me, figuring I’d need it to recover after I read whatever objects were causing Alistair fits.
“We received this box in the mail last week from the Adirondack Museum in New York State,” Alistair said. “Apparently, it had been in their basement for nearly a hundred years. They sent it here because they felt the people connected to these objects had a stronger history with Charleston than they did with upstate New York.” He shrugged. “I’d agree with them on that part, but they didn’t mention that a ghost came along for the ride.”
I eyed the box without touching it. If an object had really strong magic, I could often get an impression before I made physical contact. That was helpful because then I could brace myself for what was coming. “I’m not getting any really bad vibes,” I said, letting my hand hover a few inches above the box. “What kind of problems has it been causing you?”
