The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge (9 page)

“Witch’s Haven. Can I help you?”

I had no idea if the person on the other end understood me. I mostly got pops and snaps and ominous crackles, but just enough syllables crept in to confuse me. “I’m sorry, we have a bad connection,” I said. There were more noises and garbled words but eventually I heard “herb,” which was good enough to convince me that my caller was Rodric, Ennis’s herb supplier. “Fine, can you give me the address?” I held the phone as far away from my ear as possible, and actually heard the address clearly. I scribbled it down on a pad, and said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I’d been planning to shut down early anyway, so after I cleaned up the spilled potion and broken bottle, I made a quick sweep to make sure everything was locked, put up the closed sign Ennis had made—in calligraphy, of course—and headed for my car. Thankfully, my non-Affinity had no effect on cars, but of course any kind of GPS system was right out. Instead I had an actual paper map of Salem, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out how to get to Rodric’s house.

When I got there, I was sure I’d heard the address wrong after all. I was expecting enough land for a garden and a greenhouse or two, but I was in a suburban neighborhood and the address was a double-decker house in the midst of a forest of double-deckers, all of them so close together that I could nearly have stood between any two and stretched my arms far enough to touch both.

Well, it couldn’t hurt to check. The door opened as soon as I rang the bell, which was a good sign, and a man looked at me expectantly. He was a couple of years older than I was, and not bad looking, though nothing special: medium height, with medium-brown hair, and a medium build. It would have been funny if he’d also been a medium, but I didn’t sense even a little bit of magic from him.

“Hi, I’m Maura Allaway from Witch’s Haven. I’m looking for—”

“Come on in,” the man said. “There isn’t much time. My mother will be home soon.”

I didn’t know what his mother had to do with it, but stepped inside. Like most double-deckers, the building was split into two apartments. The first door in the foyer apparently led to the downstairs home, while the one the guy opened led to a flight of stairs. He started up in a hurry, and I followed as fast as I could. Even when we got into the apartment proper, he kept leading the way down a short hall, through the kitchen, and toward the back of the place.

I was accustomed to odd manners from the practitioner community, so I wasn’t too surprised until the moment he opened a door and practically pushed me into a bedroom.

I backed out into the hall. “Slow down, tiger! Aren’t you going to at least buy me dinner first?”

“But this is where it happened,” he said, his brow furrowed in confusion.

“I’m sure it is, but it’s not going to be happening there today. Look, Rodric, Ennis said there’d be special instructions for the stuff she ordered, but this is going a bit beyond the pale.”

“Who’s Ennis? And why are you calling me Rodric?”

Shit! Was I in the wrong house? “Didn’t you call Witch’s Haven?”

“Yeah.”

“And you gave me this address?”

“Yes.”

“So I could pick up a batch of herbs?”

“I don’t know anything about herbs.”

“But you said—”

“I said my name is Herberto, Herberto Rocha, and that I need your help. That connection was really bad.”

“Yeah, we’ve been having problems. Let’s start over, Herberto.”

“Everybody calls me Rocha.”

“Okay, Rocha. What kind of help do you need?” I still wasn’t thrilled by the proximity of the bedroom.

“I’ve been asking around town, and the word is that you people—you people at the store, I mean—are, you know . . . real.”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t after my body. “As opposed to imaginary?”

“Real witches. You can do real magic.”

“Says who?”

“The Goodwins. They said you were able to help them when nobody else could.”

I sniffed the air delicately, but there was no falsehood in his words. The Goodwins were trustworthy, and would never purposely send anyone to the Kith who wasn’t in true need, but anybody can be fooled. So I phrased my questions carefully. “Do you mean me harm? Do you mean harm to any of the Allaway Kith?”

“What? No! Of course not.”

He was still telling the truth, which was a relief. Over the years, we’d encountered some nutcase fundamentalists out to burn witches—or even to follow Salem tradition and hang them—and I didn’t like the idea of facing somebody like that on my own. “Good. So what kind of help do you want?”

He took a deep breath. “Two weeks ago—two weeks yesterday—my niece was found dead in her bedroom.”

“And that’s her bedroom?”

He nodded.

Now I was even less inclined to go in. “What happened to her?”

“We don’t know. Nothing showed on the autopsy—no injury, no illness, no nothing. She just . . . died. She was only fifteen years old, Miss Allaway—”

“Maura.”

“Maura. Her name was Carmen, and she was only fifteen years old, and now she’s dead.” He looked down, and it didn’t take my special senses to know that he was fighting back tears. “She was my goddaughter. I don’t know if you have anything like godparents in your, um, religion, but—”

“We have godmothers,” I said. Mine was Aunt Hester, a flake even by Allaway standards, but I knew she’d do anything for me.

“Then maybe you understand how important Carmen was to me. I need to know how she died.”

“The cops must have some idea. What did they put on the death certificate?”

“ ‘Heart failure due to an undetected defect,’ but I don’t believe it. She was as healthy as a horse. Besides . . .” He hesitated. “Something else was going on. The last few weeks Carmen hadn’t been herself.”

“How so?”

“Distracted, not paying attention in school, forgetting her chores, not interested in spending time with her friends.”

“Sounds like drugs.”

I could tell he didn’t like me saying that, but he kept his temper. “The cops thought that, too, but there were no drugs in her system—not so much as a Tylenol. No sign of booze, either.”

“So what do you think happened?”

He rubbed his hand over his face, and I noticed he hadn’t shaved that day. From the look of the bags under his eyes, he wasn’t sleeping well, either. “I don’t know. Maybe the cops are hiding something. Maybe the medical examiner botched something in the lab, missed some kind of poison.”

“Or maybe it was an evil spell?”

“Yeah, no offense. I mean, that makes as much sense as anything else. All I know is that Carmen is gone, and I need to know why. The cops think I’m some kind of nut, and the medical examiner threatened to take out a restraining order if I didn’t stop calling him. I don’t know who else to ask for help.”

Since most people who come to the Kith do so as a last resort, I had a canned answer ready. “Look, I can’t guarantee anything. My family will try to find whatever answers we can, but you’ve got to realize that nothing we learn would ever stand up in court. It might enable you to get better evidence; then again, it might not.”

He nodded.

“That doesn’t mean that you can use what we tell you to try for payback. We’re big into the Law of Return. Do you know what that is?”

“It’s like karma, right?”

“More or less. Whatever we send out, positive or negative, comes back to us. So before the Kith even thinks about investigating, you’ve got to promise not to do anything stupid.”

“I promise.”

My sister Ennis would have insisted that Rocha swear on a Bible or whatever book he held holy, but I could tell he meant it. “Okay, then I’ll get somebody from the Kith to talk to you as soon as possible.”

“Why not you?”

“We all have our specialties,” I hedged, not wanting to tell him that my specialty was random destruction. “Somebody else will be able to help you more.”

“Is there somebody you can call right away? My mother is due home in an hour, and I don’t want her to know what we’re doing.”

“Here’s the thing. I’m the only one of the Kith who’s currently available. The rest are at a retreat, and they won’t be back until the end of next week.”

“I can’t wait that long. My mother—you see my sister took off after Carmen was born, so Ma is raising her. Was raising . . .” He stopped to take a breath. “Ma is going to clear out Carmen’s room this weekend—she says it’s morbid to leave it this way. Don’t you need the room intact to do whatever it is you do?”

“It usually helps.”

“Then I need somebody now. Is there somebody else I can call?”

“There are other practitioners,” I said, “but honestly, there’s nobody else I would recommend. Maybe a regular PI?”

“I talked to a couple. They talked to the cops, and now they think I’m nuts, too.”

“I’m sorry but—”

“Come on, you’re here. Can’t you at least look around Carmen’s room? Maybe you’ll be able to, um, See or Sense something.”

I could tell the poor guy was capitalizing words, trying to describe something he’d probably never even considered believing in before this. It made me feel awful, and I was about to make more excuses and get the hell out of there. Then I remembered the call from Ennis. Aunt Hester had predicted that somebody would ask me for help, and she thought I should help him. Of course, Ennis would disapprove. So did I want to follow Aunt Hester’s advice or Ennis’s? When I looked at it that way, it was a no-brainer.

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt for me to try,” I said, and stepped inside. I should have realized before that it wasn’t Rocha’s bedroom. The Taylor Swift poster and pink-and-purple striped curtains were dead giveaways. “Where was she found?”

“On the bed,” Rocha said. “Ma got home from work and went to tell Carmen she was back. She knocked, but Carmen didn’t answer, so Ma went in and found her lying there. She could tell Carmen was . . . gone, but she called 911 and they tried to revive her. It was too late.”

I stood still and opened myself up. Though I’d been short-changed in the Affinity department, I did have the usual senses of the Kith: I could smell deception, I could sense vibrations from places and sometimes people, and I could detect magic. It took a moment, but when the sensations from the room hit me, I shuddered.

“Did Carmen have a boyfriend?” I asked. “Or a girlfriend? Anybody she would have been sexually active with?”

Rocha’s face turned pink, and I was still open enough to tell it was from a combination of anger and embarrassment. “Not that I know of.”

“Did anybody else use this room?”

“Just Carmen. I mean, Ma came in, but she wouldn’t . . . Why are you asking?”

“I’m sensing erotic emotion in this room.”

“What does that mean?”

So much for subtlety. “Sex. Somebody had a lot of sex in here.”

“Carmen? No way. Ma kept a tight leash on her—maybe too tight—but she didn’t want her ending up like my sister. Besides, I live in the apartment downstairs, so it would have been hard for Carmen to sneak somebody in.”

“Hard, not impossible.”

“No, but—I just don’t see it. And even if she had, what did that have to do with her dying?”

“I don’t know. The impression is so strong it’s masking everything else. I would expect to get more from the actual death, but all I’m getting is sex.” I shrugged. “I told you I’m not the best choice.”

“Not the best choice for what?” a voice demanded.

An older woman with the same coloring as Rocha was standing at the door, her hands on her hips. We’d been so distracted—me by what I was sensing and Rocha by what I was saying—that we hadn’t heard her coming in.

She said, “Herberto, what are you doing now? Did you find another detective to waste your money on? How many people do you need to tell you that Carmen is dead?”

“Ma—”

“What gives you the right to bring a stranger into my house, into my granddaughter’s room? Why do you do this to me?”

“It’s not about you!” Rocha said. “It’s about Carmen.”

“No, it’s about you. You think my heart isn’t bleeding for Carmen? It will always bleed, but I have let her go. Now you must let her go!” She crossed over to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Please, Herberto. I cannot lose my son, too.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to relent and abandon whatever it was he wanted me to find out, but he stepped away. “I can’t, Ma. Not yet. I have to know.” He turned, and I heard him going down the steps.

Leaving me alone with his mother. She was angry, and I was way out of my depth.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should go.”

“What are you? A detective?”

“Not exactly.”

“Don’t tell me. A psychic?” She rolled her eyes.

“Something like that,” I said. For some reason, people are more willing to accept practitioners if we veil ourselves in pseudoscience. “Your son wanted me to see if I sensed anything about your granddaughter’s death.”

“What is there to sense? I get home from work, and come to check on her. She’s on the bed, a schoolbook across her chest. I think she’s fallen asleep while studying, but when I go to touch her, I know. I know she’s—”

The scent of falsehood filled the room. “You’re lying,” I blurted.

“What are you saying?”

“What you just said was a lie.”

“How can you—I would never—”

I waited until she sputtered to a stop, then asked, “Did you lie to your son, too?”

She looked toward the doorway, as if afraid Rocha had returned, but said nothing.

“No wonder he’s making himself crazy. Don’t you think he can tell that you’re hiding something?”

“I did not want him to know,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “Carmen would not want him to know.”

Again, I waited her out.

“When I found Carmen, her clothes were open. Her hand was— I could tell what she’d been doing. I called 911—don’t think I wasted any time. But while I waited for them, I covered her so nobody would know she had sinned.”

“Sinned? Then she was having sex?”

If looks could kill, I’d have died that instant. “I said she sinned, not that she was a whore!”

That’s when I realized what Mrs. Rocha was talking about. “She was touching herself?” That could explain what I’d picked up from the room. A girl’s early experiences with masturbation could be even more intense than actual sex.