Chapter Eleven
Eleven
Honey’s shop was open, the front door held ajar with a big chunk of white quartz and the inviting scent of sandalwood and sage wafting out from inside. The siren call of her new-age Spotify playlist that went from chanting monks to thunderstorms to singing metal bowls was currently playing the last, and it was an instant balm to my nerves as I passed over the threshold.
Inside, the shop was cluttered in an inviting way, with herbs and crystal charms hanging from the ceiling and rainbows adorning ever surface as the sunlight passed through dozens of dangling prisms.
Here the smell of various herbs and incenses was even stronger and it became more difficult to tell patchouli from Oudh, but the mix-match was wonderful rather than headache inducing.
Bins of colorful crystals ranging in size from a penny to hulking, faceted boulders invited bystanders. There was a sign next to some of the smaller crystals that read Shoplifters will be Cursed .
My friend popped up from behind the glass counter that hugged the back of the store in a big U shape. She was wearing a brightly printed scarf over her hair, and in place of her usual gold hoop earrings she was sporting dangly ones with peacock feathers on them.
“Howdy, stranger. How was your big hike?” She waved a hand toward the sporty ensemble I was wearing.
I handed her a Bee’s Knees latte, since the barista had felt so bad she’d made me a new drink as well. Honey sniffed it and smiled. “Now, did you assume I’d like it because it’s sweet like me, or what?”
“I just know you’ve got good taste; otherwise we wouldn’t be friends.”
She sipped the drink and smiled. “You didn’t answer my question about the hike.”
I grimaced. “You noticed that, did you?”
“Sweetie, you’ll find there’s very little that goes on in this town that I don’t notice. So what happened?”
“Well, it didn’t happen, that’s a start. We had to cancel it.”
She waited, so I knew she knew there was more, I just wasn’t sure how much. “Someone killed Sebastian Marlow last night.”
Honey let her breath out in a long exhale. So she’d known there was something up but hadn’t known about the murder. There must be a branch missing in the town phone tree today.
“Murdered? Are you sure?” She didn’t wait for me to answer before she started rummaging around behind the counter, littering the glass with bits of crystal and partially burned sticks of palo santo.
“Yeah, I was at the B and B this morning, talked to Detective Martin.”
Honey’s head shot up over the counter, and she gave me an appraising, almost motherly look. “You’re not in trouble again, are you?”
I clutched some imaginary pearls at my throat. “Whyever would you imagine such a thing?” She began to rummage again, and I said, a little more quietly, “Well, at least I’m not in trouble about that .”
Honey found what she was looking for and placed a large, light-blue velvet bag on the counter. Whatever was in it was heavy, because it made a thunk sound when she put it down. She untied a silver rope that was wrapped around the bag, and the cloth unfolded to show that it was one large square of material, not a real bag at all.
In the middle were a set of jade stones, all bearing gold inscriptions on them. I wasn’t an expert by any means, but they looked like runes to me.
She picked them up in her hands and gave them a shake, then strategically let several fall onto the velvet before setting the rest of them aside in a big crystal bowl.
She pointed to one, its sharp design a complete mystery to me.
“Your magic is still misbehaving?”
“Yeah, how did y—”
She clucked her tongue and kept looking at the runes she had dropped. She pulled one into the center of the cloth and seemed to contemplate it for a long time. Honey wrinkled her nose like she was confused, though I also couldn’t make heads or tails of what the runes were telling her.
Lining the five stones she had dropped in a row, she arranged them, then rearranged them, before pushing them all aside with an aggrieved sigh. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“Murder rarely does.”
That made her laugh unexpectedly. “Oh, Phoebs. Murder tends to be one of the most sensical things in the world, just as long as you know where to look. What doesn’t make sense is this.” She nudged one of the stones.
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s not something I can translate directly, but in general, this one stone indicates confusion. It means that possibly a mistake was made, or I’ll often see it doing love readings when a person is with the wrong partner. I’m not totally sure what it means in this context, but something along the lines of their being confusion with the murder? The wrong person, maybe?”
I stared at her and then at the runes, trying to make sense of what she was saying. Sebastian had been killed, but were the runes trying to suggest he wasn’t the intended target?
It occurred to me then that I was looking at a set of shiny rocks to give me insight into a murder, and while I did believe in magic, I wasn’t sure I could take what the stones said at face value, especially if even Honey wasn’t clear about the translation.
“Honey, what are you talking about?”
She gently laid her palms down on the runes. “I know I’ve told you before that one of my gifts is dream magic, right?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure where she was going with this. All natural-born witches could do any number of things with magic, but we each had something, a gift or two more powerful than the others. Honey was skilled at helping people find things and at interpreting and channeling information through dreams.
“Well, it might be unrelated, but the stones right now are giving me the same vibe I’ve been getting from my dreams. For weeks now I’ve been having the same one, over and over again. There are all these birds sitting on a power line. Just hundreds and hundreds of them. And there’s this house under the power lines. Every night in my dream the house burns down and the birds sit and watch. Last night, though, the dream changed. The house stayed standing, and all the birds, every single one of them, they all flew away.”
I wanted that to be enough of an explanation, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t read dreams, and when I had one that was trying to tell me something, it usually involved a giant spider wearing the face of the person I least wanted to see, and I didn’t want to have that dream again anytime soon. Honey could keep her dream magic.
“The birds were never supposed to fly away. They were protection.”
“But you said the house burned down.”
“Sometimes a house is meant to burn down.” She picked up one of the runes, carefully running her thumb over the smooth green surface. “I’m worried what’s going to happen now that they’ve flown away.”
This didn’t really tell me much about the murder, though the birds aspect was interesting, given Sebastian’s career. Could the dream birds have been protecting him? Was he the birds in the dream? None of it made a lick of sense to me, and I was more than a little frustrated by this mystery.
When Honey glanced up, her eyes widened. “Oh. Yeah. Your other problem.”
I couldn’t fathom why she was changing topic in the middle of a serious monologue, until I glanced over my shoulder.
Every candle in the shop was now floating upright in the room, hovering near the ceiling. Inexplicably, at least three of them were also lit, giving off a soft, flickering yellow light from where they hung in midair.
“Yeah. That’s sort of what I came to talk to you about.”