Page 6 of Any Witch Wolf (The Smokethorn Paranormals #2)

Ronan asked me again about my bad day, but I said I was too tired to think about it. It wasn’t a lie. I had no idea how to handle the mandrake, I had no idea how to handle the soil in the park, and I had no idea how to handle my waning magic.

So, I decided to focus on the missing wolf, something I did know how to handle.

More or less.

I left Ronan’s wearing a Cecil-crafted sober charm. Since gnomes had very little interest in sobriety, I’d had to teach him the spell. He’d tried to take a moralistic stand against the charms, but I explained to him how terrible non-gnomes were at handling their liquor. He’d responded to the implied gnome-superiority with schadenfreude glee and whipped up a few for me.

I fished my keys out of my bag and went down the stairs, feeling refreshed and mostly back to normal. My mouth was a bit numb from the peppers, but that would be gone by morning.

Halfway to my car, I noticed the beige sedan parked at the curb again. A chill skipped down my spine. Seeing the car once was nothing. But twice?

I got into my Mini and locked the doors before starting the engine and pulling away from the curb. When I was a block away, I voice-dialed Ronan as I stared into the rearview mirror.

“Forget something?” he asked. The hum of people talking told me he was in the bar.

“No. Already back at work?”

The noise softened, though it didn’t disappear completely. “Had to grab my laptop from my office. Bookkeeping. It never ends.”

“I hear you.” I glanced in my mirror again. The sedan didn’t appear to be behind me, but I’d moved into traffic, and it was as noticeable as sugar in a saltshaker, so it was hard to tell.

“There’s a car parked outside your bar. Kind of a sandy cream color. It was there this afternoon, too. Could be nothing, but I thought I’d let you—shit.” A glance in my side mirror told me the sedan was four cars back.

“What is it?” The background noise rose then died. He’d probably gone outside.

“The sedan. I thought it was watching you. Seems I was wrong about that.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s following me.”

“Drive back here.”

“Nah. I’m going to let this play out. I want to see what he’s up to.”

“You could be in danger.”

I kept half my attention on the traffic in front of me and half on the sedan. “Maybe, maybe not. He could’ve easily accosted me outside the bar today and didn’t.”

“The driver’s male?”

“I think so, but I could be wrong.” I switched lanes and made a quick turn down a side street. The sedan didn’t follow, but I was almost positive it had slowed down. “Okay, it’s not following me now. Sorry to worry you. Honestly, I was calling to let you know you might have a stalker. Didn’t realize the stalker was mine.”

“I don’t like this, Betty.”

“Me neither. But it’s okay. He’s not behind me anymore.”

“Call when you get home.”

I smiled at the phone. Why did it mean so much that he sounded worried? “I’m fine, Ronan.”

“Betty, if you don’t call, I’m going to drive over to your place and check on you, and you know that’ll annoy you.”

Did I know that? “It’ll only annoy me if you bring your enchiladas with you.”

“Again with the enchilada insults. I’m dangerously close to having my feelings hurt.”

“That seems fair since I was dangerously close to having my tastebuds singed off.” The banter relaxed me, which, in turn, annoyed me, since that meant the sedan following me had made me tense.

“You’ll call?” he asked.

“Yes. I’ll call.”

We hung up, and I made it the rest of the way home without incident, and without a visual on the sedan—until I was inside the park.

I was shuffling through mail I’d picked up on the way to my trailer when an uneasy feeling gripped me. Someone was close, and their focus was on me.

I spun around, my gaze immediately drawn to a figure dressed in the palest shade of brown I’d ever seen, from hoodie to sneakers. The part of his face I could see told me he was white and male. He’d parked the car on the street and was leaning against the passenger side door, arms crossed, as if he had all the time in the world to watch me.

“Who are you?” I asked, careful to stay within the boundaries of the protection spell. I didn’t sense magic from him, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know any. It only meant he didn’t have elemental magic, like me. He might be a learned witch, like Bronwyn, and they could be every bit as dangerous as born witches.

Or he could be something else entirely.

“ Lilibet Lennox .” His voice sounded like rocks in a grinder. It didn’t evoke fear or send ice through me the way Sexton’s voice did, but it wasn’t pleasant.

“Wrong answer. Let’s try this again. What’s your name?”

The man began to laugh. He doubled over, his entire body shivering, nearly flopping over with laughter. If his speaking voice had sounded like grinding rocks, his laughter was like ice cubes in a blender. It popped and pulverized, quiet enough that I could barely hear him, yet loud enough to block out every other sound on the street.

He might not be a magical, but he was definitely not human, and he was powerful in his own right. I planted my feet in the earth. I was wearing shoes, but if the soil was cooperative, that wouldn’t— shouldn’t —matter.

Just in case, I bent down and scooped up a handful of dirt. Sifted a little through my fingers as I pushed magic into it.

“O-kay, then. You prefer privacy. Sucks that you didn’t afford me the same luxury, but whatever. How about you tell me what you are?” I asked, feigning boredom. I was anything but bored. The man had my full attention.

“You can call me Justice.”

The soil in my hand felt as dead as rock salt. Why wasn’t it responding?

“Justice, huh? Is that the name on your birth certificate or is it some dumb nickname you picked up from a seventies cop movie?”

He did the laugh thing again, and though I was unnerved by the whole-body laugh, I tucked my mail under my arm and examined the black fingernail polish on the hand not holding soil until he’d finished. Behind me, I tuned into the sound of tiny feet headed my way.

Cecil, not Fennel. Fennel moved silently.

“You’re funny, witch.”

“Yeah, I headline at the Laugh Shed next Friday. Get your seats now,” I drawled. “Why are you following me, Mr. Justice?”

I pushed harder, forcing magic into the soil.

Nothing.

“Why not?” He surprised me. I didn’t expect him to answer, since he’d barely given me any information.

“I’m a boring person,” I said, forcing myself to sound unconcerned instead of shoe-shaking terrified.

Work, damn you , I silently screamed. Please .

“Now see, I don’t think that’s true.” His words sounded warm, but the undertone was pure ice.

“Trust me. You won’t find anything interesting here.”

“Trust you?” He did the laugh thing again.

I looked at my hand. The dirt wasn’t glowing, sparkling, or anything else. It sat there in my palm like a kid’s mud pie. My heart started pounding and sweat beaded on my brow line and above my lip.

I had no idea what this man could do to me, and I had no way to fight him.

“Most people are afraid of me,” he said, once he’d stopped with the creepy laughing. “You aren’t.”

“Most people have less curiosity and a stronger sense of self-preservation than I do.” I risked a glance at Cecil, finally catching a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye.

He was on the roof of my Airstream, his peaked purple hat stuck straight up in the air. And what was that burlap bundle he was carrying?

Was that a lighter in his hand?

“You should develop a stronger sense of self-preservation. You’re going to need it, Lilibet Lennox.” The man jerked away from the car, shoulders bowed, face sinking further back into the hood of his jacket—not that I’d been able to see anything but his nose and a glint of teeth before.

“It’s just Betty, and I’m open to a dialogue.” I breathed through my panic and tried one more time to get the soil in my hand, under my feet—any of it—to respond. “I’ll meet you in a public place,” I said. “We can have a little chat.”

“The time for talking is long past.” Head down, he started across the street toward me.

“You’d better back up or you’ll regret it.” I chanted under my breath. I couldn’t get the soil to help me, but I knew a spell or two. I could protect myself.

Sparks flew from the disposable lighter as Cecil tried to get it to work. He chittered something that sounded like cursing and chucked the plastic thing over his shoulder then made a low keening noise I recognized as one of his forms of chanting.

A purple flame appeared in his palm.

I stopped chanting and muttered to Cecil out of the side of my mouth. “I can handle this. Don’t make it worse.”

Too late. With a laugh that vied with the stalker’s as the creepiest thing I’d ever heard, he slapped his tiny hand onto the burlap bundle.

“You have no idea who it is you’re dealing with, witch. I’m going to— what is that ?” Justice’s head swiveled to the right and up. He’d caught sight of the flame.

Cecil heaved the bundle shot-put style at the man. I backed up a few feet. I’d seen the gnome’s work a time or two. He was unpredictable when it came to explosives.

The missile burst into crackling flames as it sailed through the air. Justice ducked, and the explosive landed on the roof of the bland car, where it scorched a blackened flame pattern into the paint.

“What is that?” Justice’s voice lost its depth, rising to cat-screech levels. He slapped at the flames, batting the bundle into the street where it sputtered out.

“A small incendiary device.” I stood, scanned the area for Cecil. He was gone. “You’re lucky. It was a warning. Normally, my associate is an explode-first, ask-questions-later type of dude.”

“You’re going to regret this.” He jerked open the driver’s side door and stood there, yelling at me across the smoldering hood. “Before it was?—”

“Don’t tell me. Before it was business, now it’s personal.” I dropped the soil I was holding and dusted off my hands. They were trembling. “Awful. Just awful. Did you get your schtick from old episodes of Starsky & Hutch ?”

“ Be silent ,” he said.

The urge to speak completely left my body. It wasn’t that I couldn’t speak, it was that I simply had no desire to.

Curse talker.

All humor fled from my body. Even though it hadn’t done me any good up to now, I wished desperately that I hadn’t dropped that soil.

Justice threw himself into the car, driving off without another word.

The urge to speak returned to me with a rubber-band snap .

Given that it took under a minute, and he was flying down the street like his ass was on fire, I’d say his range was less than a mile. That meant he either wasn’t very strong or was easily distracted by anger.

Those were good things to know.

“ Cecil ,” I yelled. “Come on out. I’m not pissed—in fact, I’m going to treat you to a drink. You might’ve just saved my life.”

I dropped off my mail at my trailer, grabbed a sour apple Four Loko, and read Ronan’s last text: Are you all right?

My hands were shaking, my breath was coming too fast, and my head ached. I was being stalked by a curse talker, and I had a Mictlan mandrake buried in my garden room. To top it off, my soil had failed me again.

All that was too much to say in a text, and I didn’t feel like talking about it, anyway, so I went with: I’m fine.

Then I headed to the garden room.

On the way there, I bent to sink one hand into the soil in front of Mom’s cottage. Minerals illuminated like glittering grains, and I felt a surge of magic.

“Now you decide to react? Not when my life was being threatened, but now ?”

The glowing faded, and instead of magic flowing into me, the soil dragged on my energy until I felt like a deflated balloon.

Damn. This push and pull, hope and rejection was killing my magic. And it was wrecking any peace of mind I’d achieved when the soil had responded to me to save my life from the demon two months ago.

I stood, switched the Four Loko can to my dirty hand, and dug the non-working charms out of my pocket. I looped the silver chains over my index finger and dangled the dead things, studying them like a hypnotist’s subject as they swung back and forth.

The dried herbs—lavender, thyme, and few seeds and strands from other herbs—had been set in a heart-shaped pattern between oval panes of glass. I’d cast my calming spell as I soldered them using lead-free foil and solder, attached a jump ring, and hung them from a chain.

“Pretty, but useless,” I whispered.

“ Meow ?” Fennel asked from the doorway of the garden room.

“Yeah. They’re the ones I did.”

I didn’t speak cat, and Fennel didn’t communicate in human, but we managed to get our point across, nevertheless. Besides, he was incredibly attuned to me and had likely picked up on my distress and extrapolated from there.

Fennel wasn’t an ordinary cat. I didn’t exactly know what he was, or where he’d come from originally, I was just glad he was here now.

“These didn’t even make it to the shelf.” I stepped over him and dumped the charms onto Cecil’s workstation. “Bronwyn sensed they were dead.”

“ Meow .”

“You’re right. It does suck. Peace charms are about as easy as it gets for an earth witch.” I poured Cecil’s drink then flopped onto the chaise lounge by the lavender and inhaled the strong, soothing scent. “If I can’t craft even those, something’s wrong.”

Cecil wandered out from behind a small clay pot of lemon basil a few feet away. The gnome had been uncharacteristically silent since I walked in.

“Thanks for tonight,” I said. “I know I’m supposed to tell you that it’s never okay to solve problems with explosives, but I’d be a hypocrite if I benefited from your spell then blamed you for using it.” Fennel jumped onto the chaise and made a place for himself beside my hip. I ran my fingers over his tail. “But let’s be judicious with fire, okay?”

He shrugged, his purple hat canting to the side, dusting his chubby toes with pollen.

Not a promise, but good enough.

“Can you redo those, please?” I pointed at the dead charms, doing my damndest not to let the tears gathering in my eyes slide down my cheeks. “Also, do you know where I put the truth charms? I need to carry one. I’ve got people to talk to who might lie to me.”

He nodded, purple hat leaving a trail of pollen on the floor, and went to his worktable without complaint. He downed half the shot glass of Four Loko then began gathering herbs from preassembled piles near him.

Okay, what was going on?

Cecil had perfected the art of curmudgeonliness. He was a first-class grouch and had no qualms about showing it. So why was he being so nice?

My conversation with Kiv echoed in my brain.

“…best-case scenario, you gave him a gift of sibling love.”

“And worst case?”

“You asked him to marry you.”

“Cecil,” I began, then stopped. What could I say? Hey, did I accidentally ask you to marry me yesterday?

He faced me and twitched his nose. Waiting.

I sidled up to the lavender plant and dug around the roots. “Uh, how’s the Curio rowleyanus cutting doing?”

The pointed tip of his purple hat flopped to the right. I rocked to my feet and headed in that direction, toward the back of the garden room. At least, it was the back of the room today . Tomorrow, it might be another ten feet away. The garden room did its own thing with time and space.

Cecil had planted the string-of-pearls plant in a pot I’d never seen before. It was a mosaic of mother-of-pearl pieces and freshwater pearls, and the feet were tiny seashells edged in a brilliant gold that had to be real. The pot itself was an abstract shape, one side sloped higher than the other to keep the cutting comfortable while it found its roots.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Fennel padded up beside me and meowed softly. He agreed.

Everything earth witch in me wanted to send magic into the delicate roots, but after my disastrous experience tonight, I thought better of it. Whatever message I’d inadvertently sent Cecil by giving him the string-of-pearls succulent, he obviously loved it. I didn’t want to accidentally do anything to hurt the plant—or him.

I stared through the windows at the soil.

Damn you for failing me. That curse talker could’ve killed me, and you would’ve done nothing to help.

I started to dust off the hand I’d stuck in the soil. But when I examined my hand, all the dirt was gone. Had I dusted it off without thinking?

That had to be the case. Except … I didn’t recall doing it and there wasn’t any on my clothes.

Strange.

I said goodbye to Cecil and Fennel and went home.

My dreams were violent and terrifying and painful—an abomination of a portal hung in midair, a bleeding slash between this world and Hell, where roiling, writhing demons dug hot claws into my face and chest, piercing my skin, cracking my ribs, and drilling a hole into my heart while the soil beneath my feet ignored me.

I awoke way too early, but I didn’t dare go back to sleep.

At eight a.m., I took the Mini to the apartment Calvin shared with Sylvester. It was in the pack’s senior complex where Gladys had lived prior to moving into the Siete Saguaros.

Desert Oasis Senior Apartments was a two-story rectangle looking onto a courtyard with a pool, a community garden, and a rec room. It wasn’t on the best side of La Paloma, nor was it on the worst. At first glance, the complex appeared cared for, and the residents shuffling around the common areas looked healthy and happy.

Gladys had told me she’d liked the place well-enough but couldn’t afford the soaring rent. Cue the deal I’d made last month to procure a cursed book for Alpha Floyd in exchange for letting Gladys move in. I’d summoned a demon to take on the curse, and it had all gone sideways—as things to do with demons often did—but had worked out in the end thanks to Ida.

She’d set aside her hatred of Sexton and given the gravedigger demon access to the Siete Saguaros because she’d been worried about me. A justified worry, it turned out.

I strolled past the garden on my way to a set of concrete stairs, the scent of growing things imbuing me with calm. Sprawling melon and cucumber vines cascaded over the sides of raised wooden beds, juicy bell peppers with thick stems grew beside bushy carrot tops, ripe red beefsteak tomatoes hung heavily from staked plants, and grape, cherry, and plum tomatoes spilled out of tall pots. I craned my neck and spotted celery, eggplant, three varieties of lettuce, and spinach.

It was a beautiful, bountiful, tranquil garden.

“Opal, if you touch my carrots again, I’ll tan your hide and use it as a bathmat.”

“I was only giving them a little plant food, Abe. Quit being so precious about your damn carrots,” a woman, presumably Opal, replied. “Jenny, now, you don’t mind me fertilizing?—”

“Don’t you bring Jenny’s peppers into this. She’s got her own bed over there. We’re talking about my carrots.”

I paused on a landing to peer down into the garden. A skinny black man with a shiny bald head and a pillowy white woman with tightly rolled gray curls argued over a raised bed of carrots. Two beds down, a seventyish blond woman with the haircut of the kid on the Dutch Boy paint can rolled her eyes and ducked behind a jalapeno plant. I was guessing she didn’t want to be drawn into the fight.

“You took out the oleanders in front last fall with one of your plant food concoctions. How’d you even do that? Most folks would need a flamethrower to kill an oleander. They grow like weeds here.”

“That was three years ago, Abe. I’ve improved on the formula since then. Here, let me show?—”

“Get your mitts off my vegetables. Use that junk on your own bed.”

“Fine. We’ll see whose vegetables grow the best. You’ll be begging me for my potion then, Abraham Jackson.”

“Those two argue all day long.” A man’s voice came from somewhere above me. “They’ve been married sixty years. You’d think they’d have found a way to get along at some point,” the voice said. “It’ll give you a headache if you stay out here too long. Jenny is too sweet to put up with those old sourpusses. Don’t know how she does it.”

I glanced up to the top of the stairs where a white man so skinny he’d have to run around in the shower to get wet leaned on a polished wood cane.

“Calvin Holland?”

“The one and only.” He grinned, jabbed down at the arguing pair with his cane. “Best not to engage with those two.”

“Some of us have strong feelings about fertilizer,” I said with a smile.

“That’s for sure. Thanks for coming, Ms. Lennox. Come on up. I just brewed a fresh pot of coffee.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all morning.” I started up the stairs. “Oh, and it’s Betty.”