Black Magic Bayou (18 page)

A line of salt was spread in front of the door, and we carefully stepped over it, being sure not to disrupt a single crystal. I’d walked around to the back at one point to confirm a suspicion, and knew for a fact there were salt lines at the door and on the window ledges back there as well, so it wasn’t just a show for the tourists. The owners wanted to keep things out that didn’t belong.

Since we were able to cross the threshold I knew they weren’t concerned about werewolves, which was nice. But it did make me wonder
what
precisely those salt wards were meant to barricade on the street.

I hadn’t yet brought it up to Ez or his wife, Augusta. Maybe someday I’d find out, but on the other hand, maybe I was better off not knowing. Sometimes a mystery was more comforting than the truth.

A bell chimed overhead as we passed through the inner door and into the shop proper. The temperature immediately went up almost ten degrees, and Wilder shed his jacket before we were even three feet inside. He was wearing the sweater I’d loaned him, and it fit so perfectly he might as well have been born wearing it. The outline of his shoulder blades through the fitted knit fabric was enough to drive a girl wild.

Maybe I should ask Ez for a libido-dampening charm.

Doubt it would work. One little smirk from Wilder and I’d be climbing across furniture to get another taste of him. I had it
bad
, and our romp last night had only demonstrated what I’d been denying myself all these months. Now that I knew how good he could be, I didn’t want to stop.

Solve a murder. Exorcise a demon. Then you can have sex for a week.

It was important to have goals.

“
Genie
,” Augusta greeted brightly. She’d emerged from a room at the back of the shop, a beaded curtain jangling in her wake. She was wiping her hands on a small towel, making me wonder what we’d interrupted by popping in. “It’s been a few weeks. We’ve missed you.”

There was a brief, wonderful period at the beginning of my term as Alpha where my life had achieved an almost normal routine. Coming to Ezekiel’s every Wednesday morning had been a part of that. I didn’t
need
things weekly, but I made sure to only get the one or two items I had an immediate call for, so I’d have an excuse to return the next week for something different.

The shop made me feel warm and welcome, and it was like having a direct connection to my years with
Memere
. Working with magic was kind of a natural high, and the places and people who reminded me of that feeling held a special spot in my heart.

Perhaps that was why Santiago knocked me so off balance, because what he represented was something meaningful to me and not anything to do with him in particular.

Yeah right, Genie, keep telling yourself that.

One thing at a time. I was here for a memory spell, and I’d need a fair number of things not available behind the normal counter.

“Hey, Gus. Do you think Ez might be able to take me downstairs?”

She stopped wiping her hands, then peeked back over her shoulder into the room she’d just exited. “Oh, doll, I’m not sure. He’s sort of in the middle of something. You should have called.”

“I know, and I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

Gus pursed her lips thoughtfully, then raised one finger at us and went back through the curtain, the beads clacking in a happy chorus of wooden noise. Low voices sounded in the depths of the building, and I tuned them out so as not to eavesdrop on their conversation. Both voices, her feminine and his low, masculine rumble, were calm and hushed. Neither sounded annoyed by my request.

A minute later Ezekiel came through the curtain without Gus. He was also drying his hands.

Ez was a
big
man. Just under seven feet tall and weighing in at at least three hundred pounds. He was bulky, but in a muscular way, not fat, and with his bushy black beard he reminded me of the bizarre offspring of a bear and a lumberjack.

“Genie, nice to see you.” His voice boomed warmly, making me feel like he was genuinely pleased I was here.

This was precisely why I’d come here once a week for so long. It was humbling to be welcomed by people who didn’t need to be this nice. Sure, they wanted to make sales, but more than that I always felt like they wanted to be of help to me personally.

“Hey, Ez, I’m sorry to ask, but I really need something from the basement.”

He nodded slowly and set his rag on the counter, then came around to our side and bustled us out of the way so he could reach the front door. He flipped the sign to
closed
and turned the lock.

“You know I can’t say no to you.” He gave my back a friendly pat, not bothering to be light about it since he knew my true strength. To Wilder he said, “Gus is making a fresh pot of coffee. Why don’t you head back and get some? Maybe you can give her a hand with what we were doing.”

“Which is?” Wilder was already making his way towards the curtain, but I could tell he wanted to brace himself in case it was something especially unpleasant.

“Harvesting mouse gall bladders.”

Wilder froze, narrowing his eyes at Ez like he was trying to determine whether this was a test or maybe a joke. Ez smiled, in an apologetic way, telling us he was entirely serious about the task at hand.

“You can’t exactly dry them
inside
the mouse,” he added, shrugging.

“All right.” Without asking more questions, Wilder rolled up the sleeves on his sweater and went into the back room.

Once he was gone, Ez gave me a serious look, pausing in front of a heavy black door with seven different locks keeping it securely shut. “You haven’t needed anything from the basement in over a year, girl. Are you okay? If there’s trouble, maybe it’s something Gus and I can help with.”

I shook my head and placed a hand on his arm, rubbing it briefly the way someone might if they were trying to help someone get warm.

“Someone died, Ez.”

His lips formed a thin, tight line, turning almost white. “You’re not planning on bringing them back, are you? You know that never works out the way people want it to. I know death is hard, but there are other things we can—”

“I’m not doing a resurrection spell. I’ve seen how well that goes, and no thank you. No, I’m doing a memory-projection spell so I can prove my wolves didn’t kill the guy.”

Ez didn’t have an immediate response to this. Instead he tilted his head slightly and regarded me through heavily lidded eyes. “That’s still deep magic. If you don’t do it right, you can wipe someone’s memory entirely. You can erase everything that makes them who they are with just one wrong word.”

If he was trying to spook me, it was working.

“I know the risks.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” I thought I did anyway.

“Have you ever done it?”

I couldn’t lie to him. Nothing he was doing
compelled
me to answer truthfully, but I also knew any direct question Ezekiel ever asked me I’d want to be honest with him.

“No.”

He sighed, then unclipped a heavy key ring from his belt. Two of the locks had keys: one was a round bike-lock key, the other an old skeleton key. The third lock was a combination dial, which he opened so quickly he must know the code by muscle memory at this point. The fourth was a puzzle, requiring him to line six interconnected circles up in such a way they clicked open. Locks five and six were good, old-fashioned deadbolts, more designed to keep something
in
the basement than to keep people out of it.

The seventh was a small circle dead center in the door that looked like a Celtic rune, but one I didn’t know the name of or meaning behind. I took a couple steps back and covered my ears, knowing the drill. Ez leaned close and whispered something to the rune, making it glow bright blue for a half second.

The door opened with a soft
click
, swinging out towards us, exposing a pitch-black opening and a set of steps. Beyond the first stair, everything else was just anticipated, because even my eyes couldn’t make out shapes in the darkness.

“Are you sure about this?” Ez asked, holding the door open and standing out of my way. “I think we could come up with something else.”

“I’ve considered all my options. This is the best solution.” And by that I meant it was the easiest solution for me.

“Okay. After you.”

This was the worst part. Things that came after might be scarier, and the cost wouldn’t be easy to swallow when I did finally get what I needed, but this first step was always the hardest.

I sucked in a breath, holding it, and closed my eyes.

It’s worth it.

It had to be, right?

I stepped down onto the first step, counted to three in my head, then took the second one.

The world gave way, fracturing around me, and the darkness became a solid object, cloaking me like a suffocating velvet blanket. Things were silent, and then the oblivion began to scream.

My ears popped, but the wailing continued, filling my head with words in a million languages and all the terrible, terrible things the speakers of those words had experienced. My mouth felt full of cotton, and when I tried to catch my breath, it was like inhaling wood shavings, hurting my lungs and making me cough. Only I couldn’t cough because there was no way to get enough air.

The sensation of flying through space and time made me so dizzy I had trouble staying on my feet, and when we finally got to the basement, I staggered like a drunk who had gotten up from a barstool too fast.

The floor under my feet was rough stone, strewn with bits of hay and other debris I couldn’t put a name to. The air was hot and had the distinctive smell of humidity—a ripe dampness that soaked into everything. I wiped my brow, suddenly sweating. This had nothing on the October warmth we’d left behind in the shop above. Contrary to popular opinion, warm air does not always rise.

There’s a reason people think Hell is full of fire and brimstone. It’s because the closer you get to the center of the earth, the hotter it becomes.

I stripped off my jacket and draped it over one arm, my skin immediately becoming so wet at the crook of my elbow the sweat dripped down onto the floor. It was over a hundred degrees down here. My ponytail stuck to my nape, and rivulets of perspiration started to trace their way between my shoulders and down to the small of my back.

“We’ll be quick,” I promised Ez.

He shrugged. “You know it doesn’t matter.”

Ez pushed past me and grabbed a lit torch mounted to one wall, then ducked into a low passage, taking the light with him.

All but for a pair of glowing green eyes in a corner to my right.

I hurried after him, following the flickering orange flame that moved at a steady pace through the round, smooth, rock tunnels. Every so often I’d hear an unfamiliar chittering noise or feel something brush against my ankles. Going back wasn’t an option. Standing still wasn’t an option. I had to stay where the light was.

I caught up to Ez in a large open area, about fifty feet across and two hundred feet up. Cool blue light filtered down from some unseen source high above us, and spores of some type of fungus flitted in the dim columns. Stalagmites and stalactites grew from floor to ceiling, some uniting in thick, calcified pillars.

A steady
drip, drip, drip
sound announced something leaking from somewhere, but in the hot, dank space it could very well have been my own sweat pooling on the floor.

“What do you need?” He moved quickly and quietly for such a big man, but with the rock formations and low tunnel entrances, he often had to duck under things in order to fit. At five-seven I was a pretty average height, but even I needed to stoop to get into some areas.

Small parts of the spell would be easy enough to collect upstairs, things like white and yellow candles, rosemary, skullcap, and belladonna—deadly nightshade—and a few other odds and ends any witch might need.

For this spell to work, however, I needed some things that shouldn’t be bought or sold over the counter. Things a Wiccan with a few starter books and crystals from a New Age shop wouldn’t know how to use or could do serious damage with.

“I need the bean pods of a sophora toromiro and amber with the soul of a dreamer in it.” I thought about what
Memere
had used when she performed the spell. Ez probably knew all the components as well, but he was right not to tell me. If I didn’t know for myself, I shouldn’t be doing it. “The brain of an elephant and the eyes of an owl.” I cringed at those two, but that was one of the things about working dark magic—it had costs. The spell would take something from me as well. It wasn’t like I was making demands and not willing to pay my own price.

Yet another reason I didn’t want Detective Perry getting any ideas of this being an ongoing offer of assistance. I couldn’t just pop up at every crime scene and perform this spell. I’d be dead within a month.

Ez nodded, making his way towards another tunnel. This one I knew was where the flora was kept—my pods. The sophora toromiro was a tree specific to Easter Island and had actually gone extinct in its natural form, meaning the pods were going to be harder and harder to find. I’d never used the greenhouse-cultivated kind in spellwork before, but doubted they would be as effective.

Easter Island had its own unique kind of magic, and the plants that grew in its presence carried some of that same special gift with them.

There was something else, a final ingredient I needed from down here, and I was wracking my brain as we walked to the first aisle of the basement apothecary.

“
Oh
.” I snapped my fingers. “And beeswax pollinated from a Queen of the Andes flower.”

A small smile crossed his lips, and he nodded. I knew I hadn’t missed anything.

We collected the pods, seven three-inch long yellow tubes that rattled when I shook them, then we moved to the next tunnel, this one smelling sweet but slightly rotten. A tall librarian’s card catalogue was against one wall, and each drawer was labeled with the name of a different flower. These blossoms all had one thing in common: they bloomed only once a decade. Or, in the case of the Queen of the Andes, only once every hundred years. Beeswax represented a sealed moment in time, and the pollen from the Queen of the Andes specifically represented connecting to a memory from long ago.