Page 2 of Any Witch Wolf (The Smokethorn Paranormals #2)

“ Why would that damned cemetery demon ask you to hold onto the thing?”

I poured Ida a cup of black coffee and myself a cup with a tablespoon of whipping cream and slid into the seat across from her. It was eight a.m., and the weather was spring-crisp. The Airstream’s heater clicked on, taking the chill off. Ida had brought over a basket of warm buttermilk biscuits for breakfast, and we’d already slathered two of them with butter and Trini Navarro’s boozy boysenberry jam.

“No idea. Sexton told me to bury the box but not water it.” I took a bite of my biscuit. Chewed. “He offered me a nice chunk of money to babysit the thing, and after I kept postponing this job—not to mention using up his lamp on that demon last month—I kind of figure I owe him.”

“The Persephone’s Ear? You haven’t found another yet?”

“Not yet. As I said, I owe him, Ida. He saved my life—and probably my soul.”

The eyebrows I’d drawn on Ida arched down.

She’d over-plucked them in her youth, and now they didn’t grow very well, so she came over nearly every morning and had me pencil them on for her. She tended to make herself look either angry or surprised, and depended on me for a more neutral expression.

“I see your face, and I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “And you aren’t wrong for thinking it, but what can I do? Sexton already paid me for the job, the babysitting, and an extra inconvenience fee for having to deal with Dominick. That’s enough to cover the cost of replacing his Persephone’s lamp and the protection spell for this place for the next year.”

“You should’ve let me get out of the car. I’d have taught that joker a lesson he’d never forget.”

“We don’t need a necromancer-ghoul battle on our hands. Besides, he didn’t do anything Sexton hasn’t done. Mostly, he just creeped me out.”

“Still. I don’t like it.”

This time, my brows arched down. “He threatened you directly, Ida. Never, ever go back there.”

She made a pshaw noise and waved her hand. “I can handle a ghoul.”

“I’m not saying you can’t, but it’s not necessary. Also, I love you, too.”

“Nobody messes with my bestie,” she grumbled.

As usual, I had the radio above my dinette table tuned to the local oldies station. “Whenever I Call You Friend” flowed from the speakers. When I’d stumbled bleary-eyed into the kitchen this morning to turn on the radio, “Give Me Just A Little More Time” by The Chairmen of the Board had been playing.

I’d never struggled with delusions of grandeur, but I was starting to get a little suspicious that the DJ was psychically attuned to me. Although, admittedly, that first song probably applied to anyone fresh out of bed in the morning.

Paranoia aside, the song playing now was uplifting and catchy as hell. Ida hummed Kenny Loggins’s parts and I sang Stevie Nicks’s as we polished off another biscuit each.

My Airstream was nineteen feet long and eight wide, and my kitchen was smaller than my closet had been back in Tucson. I didn’t have an oven, either. I had a convection microwave that worked great for some things but didn’t make biscuits crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

Ida finished her coffee and carried her mug to the sink. “You working in Lila’s house today?”

“No. Garden room.” I rose, placed my mug in the sink beside hers. “We’ve got a backlog of charm orders.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“It is, except they’ve been losing their effectiveness too quickly. Cecil and I are going to take a few apart to see what’s going on.”

“What do you think it is?” Ida ran hot water into the mugs and added a little dish soap.

“Could be the lavender or rosemary, but my suspicion is it’s a bad batch of thyme. I’ve had issues growing it the last few weeks.”

“Didn’t you plant some in this thing?” She tapped a small growing pot suction-cupped to the window with a soapy hand.

“Ages ago. I used park soil. It never sprouted.”

“Why do you keep it here, then?”

“Hope?” I wiped soap bubbles from the planter and stuck my fingers inside, gave it a little magic. My fingers tingled, but the soil didn’t respond.

“That’s a great reason. Hope is good.” She finished washing up and wiped her hands on a towel with a saguaro embroidered on it. “Now that the soil is responding to you, do you think you’ll move into your mom’s house?”

My answer was no; I still wasn’t entirely sure carving out a home base in Smokethorn was the right move. I’d been raised by a nomadic witch, but I hadn’t traveled more than fifty miles away from the Siete Saguaros in two months. It wasn’t for lack of job offers, either.

Was this place the reason Mom had eventually stopped traveling? Had the Siete Saguaros somehow kept her tethered to it like a dog on a leash?

I sidestepped Ida’s question. “The soil isn’t responding to me with any kind of regularity. Case in point, this planter.”

She frowned. “But you said the ground twinkled like a field of diamonds last month. And I saw it drag you into an ankle-deep hole when you were talking to the mage about him taking over the park. That seems pretty responsive.”

“There are days when it’s responsive, and days when it’s not. And the latter is more frequent lately.”

As an earth elemental witch, I’d been taught that the soil was a living thing, and that, like all living things, it had needs. Needs that extended beyond the basics of sunlight, water, and fertilizer.

“Maybe it’s afraid,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of being abandoned? I don’t know.”

Ida dropped the subject. She went home a few minutes later, and I threw on a pair of comfortably worn jeans and an old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers T-shirt and headed to the garden room.

I supposed most people would call it a greenhouse, though it had always been the garden room to Mom and me. We’d built it under two kurrajong trees that had somehow survived Mom’s death when little else in the soil had, including the seven elderly saguaros that had protected the park.

The walls were thrifted windows, and the floor was unglazed clay tile. The roof was tinted corrugated polycarbonate that allowed the desert sunshine to bathe the room in light without boiling us. The footage varied, according to our needs. Space folded and curved and did all sorts of impossible things inside this room.

It was my favorite place in the world.

I walked inside and took a deep breath. The herb-perfumed air wrapped me in comfort, insulating me from the disappointment and sadness the rest of the world sometimes brought to my door.

Cecil gave me an over-the-shoulder look—a trick for a one-foot-tall creature who was predominately beard, nose, and floppy purple hat—and tapped his tablet screen. Five Finger Death Punch’s “Bad Company” blasted through the wireless speaker on the wall.

I hoped it wasn’t a portent. The gnome was moody on his best days, downright diabolical on his worst. Telling him to turn the music down was asking for a rude chitter or obscene gesture from his pink-tipped bulbous nose—the guy was phenomenal at expressing himself with twitches and head tilts—or worse, a formal letter of complaint comprised of cut-out letters from the newspaper.

So, instead, I extended a piece of string-of-pearls succulent in the palm of my hand.

Cecil’s nose twitched. He tapped the volume, lowering it.

“I took it from the cemetery in East Pluto.” I didn’t tell him the Curio rowleyanus had freely given me a cutting. Pilfered plants were one of the garden gnome’s favorite things. “It’s toxic to humans when ingested, so I thought you might like it.”

His nose twitched again, but otherwise, he remained motionless.

“The plant was gorgeous. Super healthy. It cascaded over the sides of the planter in the most luscious way.”

He reached out a tiny hand and picked up the plant. Normally, he moved in a blur of action so fast I couldn’t see his individual fingers, but this time he’d moved slowly, cradling the cutting in his arms like a baby. He sniffed the tiny green pearls and tilted his head up to look at me.

“Nice, huh?”

Cecil turned off his music and began to hum a song that had the rhythm of a lullaby. He dusted pollen from his hat onto the cutting and tucked it into his beard. Without a glance at me, he abandoned the charm he was working on, climbed down the leg of his worktable, and skittered out of sight.

I peered down at Fennel, who blinked sleepily from his bed beneath the planter containing his namesake herb, among others. “Guess he liked it.”

“ Meow .” Fennel let out a long purr and closed his eyes.

With my partner asleep and the wildcard that was Cecil off doing goddess knew what, I took a clipboard and pencil around the garden room, inspecting every herb and making notes on its needs. It wasn’t necessary—Cecil usually took care of that chore—but it was the distraction I needed. I’d done something earlier that wasn’t sitting right with me.

I’d lied to Ida.

I hadn’t wanted to delve into why my charms were failing, so I’d blamed it on the thyme. But that wasn’t the truth. The herbs I’d put into my charms had been perfectly fine—when they went in. Once they left the garden room, the charms’ power immediately began to fade. Not the ones Cecil had crafted, only mine.

The problem wasn’t the herbs, it was me.

None of the experiments I’d done—bringing in soil and compost ingredients from off-property, meditating with magic, even changing the language/wording/order of my spells—had worked. When I’d tried bringing in the soil I’d been working with in front of Mom’s cottage, it was even worse. Everything I’d planted died within hours. Their deaths had nauseated me so badly I’d spent the rest of the day in bed with a cold compress over my eyes.

I hung the clipboard on a nail by Cecil’s workstation and checked on the artifact I’d buried in a terracotta pot beneath mine. Although I’d done as Sexton asked and left it wrapped in the box, curiosity ate at me. I didn’t like having an unknown artifact in my safe haven. Especially one that had come from a deal between a ghoul and a cemetery demon.

Still, it wasn’t doing anything magically nefarious that Fennel or I could detect, and Cecil hadn’t complained, so I assumed it was okay. Or, if not okay, at least not actively evil.

Yet.

I turned on a small radio on my worktable, and “You Make Me Feel Brand New” by The Stylistics played quietly in the cool, fragrant room. My mood lightened as more ‘70s tunes played, and I spent the rest of the morning watering, fertilizing, and infusing magic into my plants, including the baby Atropa belladonna grown from a seed Fennel had snatched from a demon’s garden in Limbo.

Already, it was flowering, tiny bell-shaped buds decorating its branches. Because it had been demon-grown, this belladonna wouldn’t behave the way the plant did in this realm, which meant I was learning as I went.

I was thrilled to see how well it was doing. Soon, I’d have enough of the berries to sell to Sexton for his homesickness remedy tea. If it was of high enough quality, the cemetery demon would pay top dollar for the stuff, and I’d be able to afford to pave the parking lot—or at least replace the gravel. It was starting to look bald in places.

As the soft music flowed into me, my gaze drifted outside the garden room. Thankfully, Mom’s original cloaking spell was still holding up. It made the windowed walls appear darker than limousine tint and would never fade or peel away in the brutal desert summer yet allowed me a clear 360 degree view of the park.

“Seven spaces, seven saguaros, seven spells. Seven is a good number, mija. Remember it.” Mom had often said as we walked the park. She’d been so happy when she named the place Siete Saguaros and even now, three years after the cactuses had gone, I couldn’t bear to change it.

The seven spaces of the park were arranged like rays around the sun, the sun being Mom’s cottage. Residing within each mobile home was a paranormal senior, or two, on a fixed income. No matter how much I needed money, hiking up the rent to cover the cost was out of the question. Mom had never raised the rent on her tenants, and I had no intention of doing so, either.

Besides, water and septic were individually managed by each tenant, and power was solar—via roof panels on the mobile homes and mom’s cottage—so, overall, the Siete Saguaros was a cheap place to run.

It was only the magical upkeep that could get expensive—specifically, the protection spell, since the saguaros weren’t capable of powering it anymore.

Currently, only space five was empty. Filling it would help cut down costs. Space one was where I parked my travel Airstream, so I supposed that could also count as an empty space, since I wasn’t earning any revenue from it.

Gladys Jimenez tapped on the garden room door. “Hey, Betty?”

The beta wolf shifter was in her late seventies, partial to black eye makeup and tight clothing. Today, she’d clomped up in cowboy boots and knee socks, a Johnny Cash concert T-shirt, and denim shorts.

The woman had some serious style, if I did say so myself.

She’d moved into the late Ms. Berry’s trailer in space six last week, which had added some revenue into the pot and livened things up a little. Gladys was a wolf shifter with a take-no-shit attitude, which meant she fit in well around here. The wine and charcuterie board parties had already started.

“Come on in.”

She pushed through the door and instantly smiled. That was what the garden room did to people. You didn’t have to be a cat or gnome or earth elemental witch to enjoy it.

“Hey there, Fennel,” she said.

“ Mrreow ,” he murmured without opening his eyes. Fennel didn’t seem to mind that Gladys was a canine. He was a non-judgmental sort of cat.

“By the moon, it smells good in here.”

I drew in a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, then let it go. “I know.”

“You’d think it would be a mess of scents, considering all the herbs, vegetables, and other plants in here, but it’s nice.” She gestured to the English lavender spilling out of its planter. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. And neither does the lavender,” I said.

She bent over, lifted a handful to her face, and breathed in the scent. “Thank you. I needed that.”

Cecil poked his purple hat around the Spanish lavender pot. The succulent was no longer in his beard, so I figured he’d planted it somewhere. He chittered at Gladys.

“Hello, Mr. Cecil,” she said. “That was some fancy dancing you did last night. You coming next week, too?”

He chitter-chatted, which was my way of describing his polite “talk.” Most people didn’t understand him, especially when he gesticulated like a hummingbird on speed. Gladys appeared to do fine.

“Sounds good. You bring some of those peppers for the charcuterie board, and I’ll make sure I have your favorite boysenberry wine.”

Cecil nodded and disappeared again.

I stared after him. “I’m not sure I want to know what happened at the party, but I feel like I should . I had no idea Cecil was socializing with you all.”

Gladys made a swishing motion with one hand. “Don’t worry, we didn’t get up to any trouble. Had some good wine, excellent snacks, and jammed to some good music. Cecil doesn’t drink a lot, Trini doesn’t drink at all, and Ida and I had a couple of glasses each.” She smiled. “You’re invited, you know. Always.”

“Thanks. Next time.”

“Good.” Her black-rimmed eyes brightened. “Now, I have a favor to ask. If you can’t do it, you tell me, okay?”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning and can’t go into work. I was thinking you might fill in for me. Ronan says he can do it himself, but the man gets next to no sleep as it is. I told him I’d find someone to?—”

“ You’re still working at Ronan’s Pub ?” I wasn’t angry, just shocked. The main reason we’d moved her in here was to ensure she could enjoy her retirement.

“This is my last week of working regular mornings. I wanted a little cushion.” She smiled. “After this, I’ll go in from time to time, whenever I feel like it. Ronan said I’m always welcome but my health comes first.” Her smile dropped and so did the volume of her voice. “He’s different from most alphas, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said. “Unlike his father, Ronan actually cares about the pack seniors.”

She flinched, and I could’ve kicked myself. Gladys might not like her alpha leader, but she’d sworn an oath to respect and obey him. I needed to remember that, because one word from Alpha Floyd Pallás, and she’d be on the street. I’d fight for her, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d do what he said because she had to.

Getting the La Paloma alpha to allow Gladys to move in had been no easy task. He hated me. With good reason, but I had zero regrets for my actions. If he hadn’t committed a bunch of easily observable (and recordable) crimes, he’d have ended up becoming mayor of La Paloma and an even bigger thorn in my side.

“Ronan’s a good one, you know,” she said. “I’ve been with enough of the bad ones, I recognize his kind.”

“He’s…” I left the thought unfinished.

“That he is,” she said with a knowing smile I ignored.

“All right. I’ll fill in for you tomorrow,” I said. “But you owe me a photo of Cecil dancing on your porch.”

“Deal.” She winked. “Cecil won’t mind. He’s a fun guy.”

“You’ve obviously never gotten into a rock fight with him over a tablet computer.”