Page 61 of Stalked By Shadows
Micah narrowed his eyes. Nothing I said was fooling him at all.
I sighed. “No way I can talk you out of this, right?”
“Correct,” Micah agreed.
“Fuck,” I swore, then reached out to grab his hand. “Lead the way. Let’s get this madness over with already.”
He gave me a brilliant smile which both made me hard and terrified all at once. That smile felt like an omen of heaven and coming doom. Fuck.
He guided us through an alleyway and across a street. Her place was much different than his. Instead of the bright bohemian feel with added snark of Simply Crafty, Mary’s place was dark and cluttered. Every bit of shelf space was covered in tiny statues, incense holders, and knickknacks. Nothing cute or precious like you’d find at a Hallmark. Instead it was endless skeletons, monsters, and zombies. There were no fun T-shirts or hand-crafted shawls, just cases of Tarot cards, bongs, elaborate ‘ceremonial’ candles, and daggers.
The entire vibe of the place was dark and creepy. A handful of old dolls sat on shelves around the top of the room, staring down with blank broken faces. Statues of demons and skeletons danced little jigs in every corner. And there were half a dozen mini altars set up with tiny notes taped near them explaining which spirit guide or deity they were for. All of them requesting offerings, and had bowls filled with coins, rings, and other trinkets.
“No wonder people come to Simply Crafty,” I told Micah. “This place puts the capital S in somber.”
“She calls herself a Voodoo Queen. Says all of this is part of her practice,” he told me while we navigated the shop. There was no one at the register, no one that I could see in the shop at all. Maybe the back room somewhere? “At least she doesn’t have live snakes in here anymore. Something about zoning laws. She had to get rid of them. I think it was mostly because the neighbors didn’t like them.”
“You don’t believe she’s a voodoo queen?”
“Lots of people practice rituals. Catholic priests practice rituals all the time. Do you think they really talk to ‘God’? I think the same goes with the voodoo people. They practice rituals and proclaim they hear voices from the other side. Mary tells people she can talk to the dead. Uses it to get more money out of them. I think using people’s grief to extort money is wrong and I haven’t made my feelings on it a secret. Did you know when I went missing, she called Tim and tried to talk him into paying her to communicate with me?”
I gaped at him. “Are you shitting me?”
Micah shook his head. “Nope. Tim didn’t take the bait, but he said it made him feel horrible and he cried for days thinking that I was dead because some hack psychic claimed she could hear my voice ‘on the other side.’”
Maybe he had been on the other side, I thought briefly. Who knew where he’d been taken. Did that mean some random woman who thought she could talk to the dead had actually heard him? I wasn’t sure I believed in all that, which was funny because I might have actually been seeing dead people a lot lately.
He stopped and frowned at the shop. “Where is she?”
“A storeroom maybe?”
Micah wove his way through the maze of tightly packed shelves to a little curtain area which led to a bathroom and a small room with a microwave and table. No one was there.
“You said she lives upstairs. Maybe she ran up for something.”
“Even I wouldn’t leave the shop empty for more than it took to use the restroom,” Micah said. “Plenty of opportunistic thieves in New Orleans.”
“Maybe she has her stuff cursed so if anyone steals it they bring it back?” I half joked.
Micah looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Wonder if I could figure out a spell like that.”
“You’d have to believe in it first, right?”
“Minor technicalities,” he said and headed back out the door and around the side to another door. That outside door opened and led up a flight of stairs to another door above. The door at the top of the stairs was ajar. “She never leaves her place unlocked.”
“Let me call Lukas so he can send the police out for a wellness check,” I said stepping into the little entry beside Micah. The door closed behind us and the feeling of heat and humidity seemed to close in. I pulled out my phone and wiped sweat off my forehead. It shouldn’t be this hot in such a tiny little dark space.
Micah shivered as though he were cold and glanced up the stairs. “Do you smell something sweet?”
I sniffed the tiny area, but only smelled sweat. “No. Are you cold?”
“Freezing.”
While I was burning up. It made me think of standing in front of the voodoo museum with my hand on the window and it began to burn. “We should go.” That little feeling of doom began growing in my gut. There was some kind of energy here, that much I could tell. If Micah had been experiencing this for weeks, I could understand why he hadn’t been sleeping.
“I don’t feel anything on my skin,” Micah said. “Just cold. Do you see something?”
I peered up at the partially open door and really hoped I didn’t see something. “No. And I’d like not to. This whole ‘tuned into the supernatural’ is new to me.”