A Cast-Off Coven (2 page)

“Does it matter which one I get?” Andromeda asked. “Or are they all the same, protection-wise?”

“They’re—” I began.

Andromeda dropped the medallion and screamed, flattening herself against a stand of frothy wedding gowns. The rack teetered under the pressure.

“
What
the
eff
is
that
?”

Oscar, my miniature potbellied pig—and wannabe witch’s familiar—snorted at her feet.

“That’s Oscar, the store mascot.” Maya smiled. “He sort of grows on you.”

“He won’t hurt you, Andromeda,” I said to the pink-haired young woman still cowering against the pure white wall of silks and satins. Clearly she wasn’t a pet person, or maybe she just wasn’t a pet pig person. “Oscar, go on back to your bed.”

Oscar snorted again, looked up at me, rolled his pink piggy eyes, and finally trotted back to his purple silk pillow.

Andromeda wiped a thin hand across her brow. “I’m a nervous wreck. Ghosts, now pigs . . . I just wish everything would get back to normal.”

“This should help,” I said, holding up a pendant carved with the ancient symbol of a deer—a powerful sign of support and protection—and an inscription in Aramaic. It hung on a cord made of braided and knotted silk threads in the powerful colors of red, orange, turquoise, magenta, and black. It suited her.

When Andromeda bowed her head to allow me to slip the talisman on, my gaze landed on the vulnerable curve of her pale, slender neck. Her vibrations were as clear as a bell: bright and frightened, almost tangible, and though I was only ten years her senior, I felt a surge of maternal protectiveness. Like her mythical name-sake, who had been offered—bound and naked—as a sacrifice to the sea monster, this young Andromeda had a whole lot on her mind.

As we used to say back in Texas, she was scareder than a sinner in a cyclone.

But not only of a ghost, or even a pig.

Andromeda was scared of something altogether human.

 

“Don’t you need any, ya know, ghost- hunting stuff?” Maya asked later that night after I managed to squeeze my vintage Mustang convertible into an impossibly small spot in front of Bimbo’s on Columbus Avenue. Proud of my parking prowess, I led the way up Chestnut toward the San Francisco School of Fine Arts. The cool night air was fragrant with a whiff of salt off the bay, the aroma of garlic from nearby North Beach restaurants, and a heady floral perfume—early flowering brugmansia and jasmine were my guess. San Franciscans did like their flowers.

Slung over the shoulder of my vintage dress was my trusty Filipino woven backpack, filled with a few talismans and charms; on the knotted cord at my waist was my powerful medicine bag; and on my feet were easy-to-flee-in Keds.

But no legitimate ghost-hunting stuff.

“Oops,” I said. “Guess I left my catch-a-spirit kit in Hong Kong.”

“Very funny. Seriously . . . you don’t have any special equipment or anything?”

“Like what? Stakes and crosses?”

“Those are for vampires,” Maya pointed out.

“Right. I get that mixed up. Stakes would be immaterial. Get it? Immaterial? Like ghosts?”

Maya gave me a pity smile. “The guys on that TV show haul a lot of equipment around with them. Mostly electronic stuff.”

“No doubt they bought most of it at RadioShack’s annual clearance sale. Just how do they expect to capture energy on videotape?”

“I’m just saying”—Maya shrugged—“you should get cable. It’s very educational.”

“But if I watched TV,” I said with a smile, “when would I find time to traipse around town looking for phantoms?”

Besides
, I thought to myself,
I don’t need to watch a videotape to know that ghosts are real.

We arrived at the campus. Our footsteps echoed off the ochre stucco walls of the covered walkway as we trod upon earth red Saltillo tiles worn down by the feet of scores of nuns, and now art students, for more than a century. The San Francisco School of Fine Arts was housed in a gorgeous example of Spanish-revival architecture, complete with red-tiled roofs, intricate plasterwork, graceful arches, and a bell tower. So far the vibrations of this convent-turned-art school felt largely positive . . . with just enough negative thrown in to prove its claim of being a historic building. After all, bad stuff happens. Shadows are necessary in human life, if only to emphasize the light.

“Didja see anything yet?” asked an eager young woman leaning against the wall outside the heavy carved wood door of the school café.

“We just got here,” said Maya. “Ginny, this is my new boss, Lily Ivory. Lily, meet Virginia Mueller.”

“Hey. Call me Ginny,” she said, thrusting out a hand to shake. She wore a once-white work apron over faded Levi’s that clung to slender, boyish hips; her honey brown hair was cropped as short and shaggy as her paint-stained T-shirt. With her big eyes and piquant expression, Ginny had a sexy, pixyish style often found among free-spirited young artists; such were the kind of looks I had aspired to—but failed to achieve—when I was seventeen. Now, at the ripe old age of thirtysomething, I doubted the wood- sprite appearance would have aged well. Maybe that was why real elves are immortal.

Ginny’s blue eyes swept over my vintage outfit, focusing on my empty hands. “Didn’t you bring any, like, ghost-hunting stuff?”

“She left it in Honolulu,” Maya said.

“Huh?”

“She doesn’t use anything like that.”

“Oh.” Ginny looked disappointed. I couldn’t help but notice more excitement than fear shining in her big eyes.

“I’m happy to take a look around, see what I can see,” I said. “But if there
are
ghosts in the building, and you really want to communicate with them, you should probably bring in a skilled psychic.”

“I thought
you
were a psychic.”

“I’m no psychic; I’m . . . sensitive to things sometimes; that’s all.” I’m careful not to bandy about the title “witch.” A lot of people were open to the idea of em-paths, or people sensitive to the otherworldly. However, mucking around with special powers in order to alter reality on purpose—as in witchcraft—was another thing entirely.

“You don’t have to be sensitive to hear this ghost,” Maya commented.

“Most spirits aren’t malevolent,” I pointed out. “Has anyone been hurt?”

Ginny shook her head.

“Any property damage?”

“Only if you count when Sean Hitchins fell back on his butt into the vat of leftover clay.”

“I missed that one,” said Maya.

“It was classic.” Ginny grinned. “We still have the imprint of his backside in the sculpture studio. You should totally check it out.”

“You know,” I interrupted, “my mama always used to say,
Don’t trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.
All old buildings harbor a ghost or two. Couldn’t y’all just ignore the noises?”

Maya and Ginny both gawked at me as if I had suggested they vote a straight Republican ticket. In San Francisco, Maya had informed me last week in no uncertain terms, artists did
not
vote for the conservative party.

“Have
you
ever tried finding the essence trapped in a hunk of stone with a
ghost
breathing down your neck at three in the morning?” Ginny demanded.

“Can’t say that I have,” I conceded.

“Anyway, I think I know who the ghost is . . . or was,” Ginny said, pulling a tiny sketchbook from her back pocket. She handed me the pad, opened to a bold pencil sketch of a handsome young man with a heavy brow and dark, searching eyes. His hair was cut short, and he wore an honest-to-goddess high school letterman’s jacket circa 1959—I had just acquired one very similar to it for the store.

A chill ran over me. If Ginny was seeing actual full-body apparitions, there could be more to this haunting than I thought.

“You’ve
seen
him?”

“What? Oh, nah, I was just looking into the history of the place. You know, like what tragedies occurred that might explain the noises. And I read about this guy’s suicide in the old school newspaper—they had his photo and everything, and it seemed to fall into place.”

Maya took the sketchbook from me and studied the picture. “What was his name?”

“John Daniels,” Ginny said. “Supposedly he was, like, totally in love with this student painter. They were gonna get married and everything. But it was the early sixties, bohemia and all that. She walked away, or fell in love with someone else, or something, and he wound up throwing himself down the steps of the bell tower.”

Maya and I glanced at each other before turning back to the sketch. His eyes seemed mournful.

“Can you imagine loving that strongly?” Ginny sighed. “It’s
so
romantic.”

“It’s so melodramatic, you mean,” muttered Maya. At my amused look she added, “What? He couldn’t just find another girlfriend? Committing suicide is more stupid than romantic, if you ask me.”

Ginny’s gaze shifted to look over my shoulder.

“Uh-oh.”

I swung around, half expecting to see John Daniels’s lovelorn ghost.

Ginny snorted. “Here comes the Big Cheese.”

Two men were walking down the hallway in our direction, heads bent as they talked in hushed tones. One wore a plush leather jacket and had a full head of snow-white hair. He looked to be in his early sixties, tanned and good-looking in a tennis-playing, gold-chain-wearing, no-comb-over-for-me kind of way. The other man was tall, lanky, and as pale as a proverbial ghost. He wore an ill-fitting brown corduroy sports jacket over outdated jeans and a baggy T-shirt.

They strode by our trio without a sideways glance and entered the café.

“Let me just take his order before we go. Be right back.” Ginny slipped through the café doors after the men.

Maya and I followed, taking seats at an empty table near the entrance. It was almost midnight, but the cavernous café was abuzz with black-clad, body-pierced, and paint-spattered students. Some hunched over slim laptops and thick sketchbooks, while others downed yet one more caffeine boost before closing time while arguing over relevance and technique. A thin young man with a sparse goatee strummed on a guitar in the corner, crooning a vaguely Dylanesque tune. Plates and silverware clanged and clattered as the café staff finished washing up and putting away the last of the night’s dishes.

I was happy to wait, savoring the collegiate ambience. I hadn’t had the chance to go to college; in fact, I never officially graduated from high school. While other kids were memorizing French vocabulary and sweating over trigonometry, I’d been training to brew love potions and cast binding spells and interpret auras. I learned the uses and abuses of mugwort and wolfsbane and dragon’s blood resin. I discovered that all sorts of “mythical” creatures were, in fact, as real as we humans. Most important, I came to understand how to call upon my spirit helper and my ancestors to focus my intentions in order to alter reality. My powers of concentration were great indeed.

I had learned all of this at the feet of a master: my adoptive grandmother, Graciela. I was lucky to have her. The small west Texas town I grew up in didn’t much cotton to witches. Like many “gifted” people, I found my talents were more a burden than a boon. They had gotten me tossed out of my home, my high school, and then my hometown . . . all before I was old enough to vote.

What would it be like to hang out at midnight with like-minded folk who wanted to argue over the classics—or, in the case of the admittedly scruffy group of three at the next table, the relative merits of painters Jasper Johns and Gustav Klimt? I wondered if these kids had any inkling how fortunate they were.

I roused myself from my thoughts and followed Maya’s gaze to the men standing at the counter, ordering lattes from Ginny.

“So, who’s the Big Cheese?” I queried.

“Jerry Becker, one of the school’s major benefactors. He’s donating a cool million or so to help renovate the studio building. As daughter of the provost, Ginny’s under strict instructions to be nice to him, which also means fending him off. Becker fancies himself a real ladies’ man. He’s been hitting on anyone and everyone even remotely young and female.”

“I can’t imagine he gets far with this crowd.”

“You’d be surprised—he’s very charming when he wants to be.” Maya would have made a first- rate gossip in a small town, or a top-notch spy during the war. She had a knack for information gathering and on-the-spot, spot-on character assessments. “He arrived last week on his own private jet, flown by his own private pilot. But don’t take my word for it. He’ll work it into any conversation sooner or later. That and the fact that he’s on a first-name basis with the staff at the Fairmont.”

The Fairmont was a gorgeous, historic hotel perched atop fancy Nob Hill. It offered the kind of luxury accommodations that might cost upward of a thousand dollars a night, and it did so with a straight face.

“Must be nice,” I said. “Where’d the money come from?”

“He founded a string of beauty schools throughout the South.”

“Wait—this wouldn’t be Jerry Becker as in Jerry’s College de Beauté?” I pronounced it as I had heard it growing up in Texas:
Collage duh Bootay
.

“That would be he.”

“Wow. We had one of those in my hometown. A lot of the girls in my high school went there. We ended up having more hairdressers than heads of hair to dress. How’s he connected to the School of Fine Arts, of all places?”

“He’s from San Francisco originally, I believe. Plus, his daughter’s a student here. You met her this afternoon. Andromeda.”

“With the pink hair?”

“The very one.”

“Who’s the other guy?” I asked, indicating the tall, gaunt fellow with him.

“That’s Walker Landau. He’s on the painting faculty.”

“Any good?”

“Talented, but . . .” Maya trailed off with a shrug.