Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“ M y mom did not practice dark magic. She did not use blood in her spells.”
“It was freely given, if that’s what has you upset,” Sexton said.
Strictly speaking, blood magic—even with blood freely given—might not cross the line between good and evil, but it was definitely doing a high wire walk on it.
“So many things about this upset me I’m not sure which way is up.”
He held out one skeletal finger then pointed down. “Down is earth.” He jabbed toward the ceiling. “Up is air.”
“I’m not speaking elementally—or literally, for that matter. I’m telling you I have no idea what to believe. I feel like I’m floating in a liminal space inside my own brain.”
The song “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd came on the radio. I wished the DJ had chosen something more appropriate to my situation. I wasn’t comfortably anything at the moment.
Sexton downed the rest of his hot coffee in one, long gulp. “Perhaps that is where you need to be.”
“In a state of confusion so deep I don’t know how to feel?”
“Yes.” His head bobbed to the beat of the music, the vertebra in his neck and spine crackling.
The sight should’ve been disturbing, but I was weirdly comforted by the profoundly human trait. Humans rocked out to Pink Floyd. Demons danced in the entrails of their enemies.
“Whose blood is it?” I asked.
Sexton blinked. His lids achieved a level of slow that didn’t exist in any other being I’d ever met. Down, down, down; up, up, up. His brow line lowered, neck creaked, jawbone worked. It reminded me of the way the pirates moved in my favorite Disneyland ride.
“Hers,” he said. “And mine.”
My lips pursed to form the ‘w’ sound, but I couldn’t decide which word to use. Why? When? Where? Whose idea was it?
I finally decided on, “What the hell?”
“Is that a question ?” Frost coated the words, and I reminded myself not to devolve too far into sarcasm. Pissing off a powerful cemetery demon wasn’t on my to-do list for the week—month, year, decade, century…
“No,” I said. “That was me giving into frustration for a second.”
He cocked his head and surveyed me, neck creaking.
“Why?” I asked. “Why did she do this? And why did you agree to it?”
He held up one bony finger again. “I do not know why she made this exact choice.” He held up a second bony finger. “I agreed because I owed her.”
“You don’t know, but you gave her your blood ? You—a demon—gave a human witch your blood?” My head was shaking before the words were out. “No way that’s true. Sexton, you’re too smart to hand over your blood to?—”
“I. Owed. Her.” His words blew across the table like an ice storm. “I still owe her.”
I worked my jaw in an attempt to unfreeze it. “Why?”
“That, I will not tell you. Not now.” He slid from the table and stood, the movement of his joints like a hydraulic mechanism. “You’re close to connecting fully with your soil,” he said. “I can feel it. Keep your magic strong and your eyes open.”
Anger built inside me. I felt like a bottle of champagne someone had shaken too hard. “My eyes are open. For example, I see that you and Mom planted little bags of evil all over the land here. I don’t see why, but?—”
“ They are not evil —at least not in the way you think they are—and she had her reasons.” His brow lowered until I could barely see his eyes. “Slow down, sink in, open your mind, and you will connect with her thought process.”
“Dude, that ship sailed long ago.” I had to be losing it if I was calling Sexton “dude,” but it slipped out. Guess the California in me ran deep. “Mom and I hadn’t seen eye-to-eye for years. Not since I struck out on my own.”
“And yet she felt sure you’d figure it out. So sure, she didn’t explain it all even to me, who provided her with my blood.” He opened the door to the trailer and stepped onto the soil.
“I can’t rebury them. I burned and salted the things.”
“If you found them, you were meant to.” He let the door fall against the side of my Airstream where it snapped into the catch and remained open. “You found my mandrake?”
“Yes. It’s buried under Mom’s cottage.”
“You will bring it to me?”
“Today?” I was still reeling from our conversation, his presence, and the chill in his voice when I’d questioned why he’d give his blood to Mom, yet here I was, talking business as if none of this was of consequence. “I can’t. I have something to do.”
“Your missing wolf investigation,” he said with a nod.
“How did you know I was investigating—nope. You know what? I’m just going to accept that you’ve got a sort of omniscient thing going on and leave it at that.”
His responding laugh sounded like a phlegmy cough. “I am far from omniscient. I listen. I watch.”
“You watch me?”
“Among others.”
I thought of Justice, my singed stalker. “Sexton, did you hire someone to follow me?”
“Hire? No.”
These word games were annoying. “Did you call to or maybe summon someone to watch me?”
“You ask good questions, Betty.”
Of course, he didn’t answer.
We walked to the mailboxes together. I admit, I left a wide space between us. Not that it would help if he wanted to reach over and cosh me over the head with a hex bag. I didn’t know why he’d bother doing something so ridiculous, but who said fear instincts were always logical?
“Will you please tell me why?” I cleared my throat when my voice got stuck there. “I realize you don’t have exact answers, but anything you can tell me … I just don’t know why Mom would do something like this. I’m so—” Lost, hurt, devastated… “—confused.”
“The only thing I can tell you is your mother loved you deeply. If she chose to do this, there was a very good reason. It was not in her nature to hurt you—not intentionally.” He stepped past the protection spell’s barrier. I stayed behind it. “I will inform you when I am ready for the mandrake.”
“Okay,” I murmured.
He gave me a final look over his shoulder. “Be cautious, Betty Lennox. Take care with yourself.” Then he crossed the street and phased out of sight.
“Take care with myself. Not of myself. Strange way to say it.”
I revoked his permission to enter the property and set out for the garden room.
A short while later, Cecil and I crawled—well, I crawled, Cecil walked upright—under Mom’s house. I had a clean trowel tucked into the back of my jeans and a soil-softened swatch of burlap in my hand. Fennel elected to watch from the access door.
“He was as cryptic as ever.” I coughed, wiped a trail of sweat and my penciled-in brows off my face. “I learned precisely nothing—except that Mom buried the bags. Ostensibly for my own good or some such bullshit.”
Fennel’s responding meow echoed off the walls of the compact crawl space.
“Yeah, I believed him.” A house spider walked across my hand and scuttled away. I watched it with an impassive air. “No reason he’d lie to me about Mom. Except that he’s a demon and that’s literally what they do.”
Cecil walked directly in front of me, kicking dirt into my face.
“Quit it.” I spat it out.
He chattered back at me.
“Yeah, I know I’m an earth witch. I still dislike having dirt kicked in my face.” I spat again. “I hate this place. Spiderwebs and dead bug guts aren’t my idea of chic accessories.”
He kicked more dirt at me and chittered over his shoulder.
“Stuff it in your purple hat, gnome. I can bitch and moan all I want. You can walk upright in here. I can’t even get on my hands and knees without scraping my back on a nail. Whoever built this place was a godsdamn sadist. Leave me to my bellyaching.”
I wasn’t claustrophobic, but army-crawling under a house wasn’t my idea of a good time, either. The deeper I went, the darker it was. If I could’ve sent my consciousness into the mandrake’s hidey-hole and lured her out that way, I’d have done it. Unfortunately, when I’d tried, she’d ignored me.
We made it to the spot, and I laid my hands over the dirt where the mandrake was buried. There was a leaf sticking up that told me she was in shallow soil, so I wouldn’t need the spade. I gently slid my fingers next to it and sent magic into her tiny root body. I sang, cooed, and coaxed her awake. When I sensed her digging herself out, I laid down the burlap.
She poked her head out of the soil. As I’d mentioned to Sexton, the mandrake’s body was roughly the size of a peach pit. She had a single stem atop her hazelnut-brown head, a little pot belly and two black BB eyes. Her downturned mouth was a fingernail’s width wide, and her hands were rooted to her sides. She didn’t have the twisty body of human-grown mandrakes. She looked more like an angry Medjool date.
She opened her teeny mouth and let out a scream like a sonic boom.
My ears popped. Cecil leapt back an entire foot.
I held out my hand, and she scowled at it and screamed again.
Fennel meowed, Cecil tried to bury his head in the dirt, and my hearing went beeeeeep . I flopped over on my back, pinched my nose, and blew to unclog my ears. It worked horribly. I hadn’t worn the heal charm this morning because my ribs were back to normal, and I was really regretting that now.
“Get over here, you little monster,” I mouthed. Or yelled. Even I couldn’t tell. “Fennel, don’t let her get past you.”
If he responded, I didn’t hear him.
The mandrake shuffled away from me, her grumpy little mouth moving as if she were muttering. She walked in lurches, dragging her scraggly roots behind her.
Cecil ran around to block her from making a dash for the door. His beard fluttered, so he was either sighing profusely, or speaking forcefully.
The mandrake squatted, her entire body shaking. Though her hands were attached to her body, she made it seem as if they were planted on her hips. Her leaf flattened like Fennel’s ears when someone he didn’t know attempted to pet him.
The gnome and root plant squared off.
Her leaf flattened more. His hat deflated and wrapped around his head and face like a purple balaclava. Probably to block the sound.
After one final shriek that shook the foundations of the house and sent Fennel running, the mandrake did a very slow 180-degree turn and waddled back to me. I only knew she’d screamed because of the dirt that had sifted onto my head. My hearing was dead. Even the beeping was gone. That couldn’t be good.
Slowly, gently, I scooped her up and set her atop the burlap. “I’m going to wrap you up so your roots stay damp, okay?”
She scowled at me.
“I’m going to take that as a yes. Now that you’re awake, we’ll get you into a cozy pot with some nice juicy worms—as soon as Cecil makes me a charm for my ears, and possibly—” I dabbed at my nose with my fist. “—yes, it’s bleeding, so my nose, too.”
She allowed me to wrap her up. When she was folded into the burlap like a tiny package, I tucked her into my bra and army-crawled out, breathing a sigh of relief when we were in sunlight again. The soil under the house wasn’t the problem. It was more that I didn’t care for the feeling that the house might fall on me. I didn’t want to end up as Smokethorn’s version of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Fennel bounded over and we went into the garden room together. I washed the blood off my face, and Cecil packed my ears with cotton soaked in a mixture of stinky herbs—I recognized clove and garlic—then tossed me a charm. He fastened another to Fennel’s collar. Once my ears had gotten past the most painful part of healing, I unwrapped the mandrake and set her in one of my culinary herb planters. There were plenty of worms for her to munch on there, and Cecil had indicated she had a preference for rosemary over lavender.
Fennel wound his lithe form around my legs, seeking comfort. The mandrake openly disliked him—she’d spat mud on his clean black fur when he’d tried to come close. And although Cecil had kept her company the last two nights, the mean little mandrake didn’t appear to care one way or another about him. She had obeyed him, though, so I supposed that was something.
“Why are you so angry?” I asked her.
She mumbled something I probably couldn’t have understood even if I’d heard it and stared up at me with a crabby frown as she settled into the soil. Apparently, the ornery little plant didn’t give two leaves about me, either.
Fennel hunkered down in his bed, and I sat on the chaise and rested my head in my hands. It took thirty minutes for my hearing to fully return, which meant I’d been very badly hurt. Cecil’s charms were powerful. The only reason we didn’t sell them was because they took a long time to make. Each spell had to be specially keyed to the person using it.
Cecil had long ago figured out how to key them to Fennel and me. Ida, too, after last December when she’d fallen off a ladder putting Christmas lights on her mobile home.
“Did she tell you her name?” I asked Cecil.
He shook his head.
“Then what should we call her?”
He shrugged.
“Good talk. I’m going to close my eyes now.”
I took a short nap on the chaise, and when I woke, my ear canals were less raw and my ears had stopped ringing.
“ Hello ? You in here? Stopped by the trailer, but you weren’t there. Made biscuits for breakfast, you hungry?” Ida strolled through the garden room door holding a napkin-lined basket of deliciousness.
“Starving. Hang on a sec and let me wash the dirt off my … everything,” I said.
“What dirt?” Ida asked.
Sure enough, every inch of visible skin was completely clear. There wasn’t as much as a dusty smudge on my arm or even a grain of dirt under my nails. And the tingly sensation was back. Like hot magic pulsing just beneath the surface of my skin.
“Hi, Fennel. Hi, Cecil.” Ida’s gaze immediately went to the tiny grump huddled beneath a rosemary stem. “Well, now. Who’s this sweet little angel?”
Angel was not the word I’d have used to describe her.
“This is what was in Sexton’s package. She’s a Mictlan mandrake. Be careful, she …”
The mean BB eyes softened at the sight of Ida, and the rude little mouth curved into a smile.
“Aren’t you the prettiest thing?” Ida cooed.
The mandrake gurgled. Her leaf perked up atop her head. Waves of what could only be described as affection, or even love, wafted from her.
“What’s that?” Ida asked, then as if she’d received a response none of the rest of us could hear, she said, “That’s a lovely name. It suits you.”
Fennel, Cecil, and I all looked at each other.
“Ida?”
My friend tore her gaze away from the tiny brown plant and gripped the handle of her biscuit basket until her knuckles whitened.
“I’m so sorry about this, Betty. I was hoping I was wrong. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Oh, Ida,” I said.
A shower, a change of clothes, and some brow pencil scribbles later, I sat at my breakfast table and bit into a flaky, buttery biscuit. Since I’d already had coffee, I’d poured myself a glass of water. Ida drew condensation circles on her glass of iced mint tea.
“It was an accident. I was walking past, and the little one called out to me. I couldn’t resist touching her power with mine.” Ida gave me a sad look. “I should’ve told you right away, and I’m sorry about that. I’d hoped that my going to the beach for a couple of days would help, but obviously it didn’t.”
“No, she just went into hiding under Mom’s house.” I rolled my shoulders. The tingling feeling under my skin hadn’t gone completely away, but it was fading.
She sighed. “How much do you suppose a Mictlan mandrake costs?”
I’d replanted the mandrake in a six-inch clay pot along with a rosemary cutting I’d been planning to move to one of my larger containers. The screaming plant had seemed fond of the herb—though not as fond as she was of Ida. The little weirdo kept making soft eyes at my bestie from her terracotta perch at the end of the table.
“A lot. But we’ll figure it out. My demonic belladonna plant is doing very well. Sexton’s expressed an interest in purchasing some, so we could probably work out a deal.”
“Homesickness tea,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, surprised. When I’d mentioned it last month, Sexton had made me think it was unusual for anyone to know that demons used belladonna to combat homesickness. “How did you know that?”
“Remember, Sexton and I were once friends—as much as his kind and mine can be,” she said without looking up from her glass.
Sexton hadn’t allowed Ida to escort her lover Anita to the other side, claiming that by the time Ida arrived, Anita was already too far gone. That to pull her back would be cruel. Gravedigger demons protected the souls of the dead and most wouldn’t allow a necromancer within a mile of their land. That Sexton had allowed Ida limited access for a time had been a revelation to me.
She was still angry, and Sexton was still unhappy with her, but they’d called an uneasy truce because of me. I hated to also be the reason that truce might be broken.
“I’ll talk to him. The last time he was here he had to use his Persephone’s Ear to save my life. The way things are going lately, he should probably start a tab for me.”
Ida smiled.
I smiled.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks, Betty.” She tapped fluorescent green-and-pink fingernails on the table. The mandrake watched her hand, seeming transfixed by the bright polish.
“You don’t mind taking care of her, do you?”
Gods, I hoped not. When Ida had attempted to leave her behind, the mandrake had let out a squall that threatened to break all the windows in the garden room. Hence the travel pot.
“No. She’ll be nice company. What does she eat?”
“Bugs, worms, and different types of organic matter, I believe. You can take her into the garden room every day and put her in the herb planter. Take a book and hang out on the chaise. We keep it stocked with good stuff, so a few minutes a day should do the trick. I’ll have Cecil put together a small garden in the soil on your back porch so she can hang out there, too.”
“Kind of like having a dog,” Ida said.
“I’d say more like a cat with a garden gnome attitude and the vocal range of Mariah Carey on helium.”
“Oh wow.”
“Yeah. I was told not to put her box in bright light or get it wet. But then, I wasn’t supposed to open it, and it obviously opened. So, I’m thinking all that’s off now, because she’s had water since you woke her up and she’s fine. Probably best to keep her well-fed—and be sure she’s with someone at midnight or it’s burst eardrums for anyone nearby.” I popped the last bite of biscuit into my mouth and looked out the window behind me. “Kind of surprised no one complained.”
“I don’t think anyone but you three heard it. At least, I didn’t. Neither Trini nor the Brittons mentioned it when I took them some biscuits before I stopped by here. And you know if Maria Cervantes had heard anything, she’d have been on you like green on grass.”
That was the honest truth. The woman was highly critical of everything I did.
“A targeted attack?” I looked at the mandrake. Her tiny mouth dipped down when her gaze met mine. “Is that how your power works?”
Ida asked her the same question. “Meredith, is that how your power works?”
Meredith ?
The plant’s little mouth turned back up. The leaf rocked back and forth in a sort of nod.
“That kind of power makes people afraid of you, doesn’t it?” Ida said gently.
Meredith leaf-nodded again.
“I understand how you feel. So does Betty, and so do Fennel and Cecil. We’re all dangerous in our own ways.” She listed our abilities as the mandrake regarded her with rapt attention. “You don’t need to fear any of us, though. We would never treat you with fear, and we’d never hurt you.”
Meredith blinked. Then she cooed back at Ida. Her voice was high and melodious and bladed with magic. One or two octaves up, and my eardrums would be toast.
Again.
“Please be kind to my friends.” Ida leaned down until she was eye level with the root plant. “Especially Betty. She’s very important to me.”
“As you are to me,” I said.
“I know. I was just making sure Meredith knew, too.” Ida booped the mandrake on the leaf, and the plant giggled. “No more spitting mud at Fennel.”
The leaf nodded.
“Well, I’d better get home. A new BTS video dropped while I was away, and I need to learn the dance moves before they go on tour again.” She finished her tea and scooped up her basket and Meredith’s pot. “Little one, I sure hope you like K-pop.”