Wizard in a Witchy World Page 21

  "If you know all this, why'd you drag me down here?"

  "Because there's something brewing out there and it's about to boil over - all over my city," she said.

  "I hope you're wrong, Lieutenant. Shaggy was bad news and I'd hate to think there's more where that came from," I said.

  "You're free to go, Mr. Slade," she said.

  "You don't need Joe to clear me?"

  "He already did."

  I stood up. "I don't suppose I could get a ride back to my truck?"

  "You're at the center of this thing, Slade. Put me on speed dial and I'll see you get a ride," Dukats said.

  ***

  I pulled a slice of pizza from the box on the broken coffee table in my living room. Joe and Daphne had ordered in and were on their third pie.

  "You guys always eat this much?"

  "Shifting takes a lot of energy," Joe said.

  "Sue, you mind telling me what you were doing with Clarita at the mansion?"

  She looked at Joe. "Go ahead," he said. "He's not going to make trouble. Right Felix?"

  "I don't know, Joe. She helped kidnap a six-year-old girl and wanted to kill her," I said.

  "I did not help kidnap her," she said. "I didn't even know I was a werewolf when that happened."

  "But, you don't deny you wanted to kill her. I was there, remember?"

  She looked at me with sadness in her eyes. "Your world is so simple, everything so black and white."

  "When it comes to six-year-old girls, it sure is," I said.

  "How about we try to stay on track," Joe said. "Sue, what were you doing with the girl?"

  "We were supposed to get her to open the door to the basement."

  "Did she try?"

  Daphne … no Susan … nodded and dropped her head. "She did. Brand did. We all did. That door was stuck with more than rust. Mostly she just cried, though."

  "Go figure. She'd just seen her mother murdered and was being held by werewolves," I said.

  "Look pal. We all have baggage. If you hadn't noticed, our lives just got ripped apart too."

  I sighed. She wasn't wrong. At some level, she had been victimized here, just as Jennifer and Joe had been. "How'd you meet Shaggy… er Brand?" I asked, trying to soften my voice.

  "I waitress at a diner on I-35. He came in one night. I guess I have a thing for bad-boys. One thing led to another and we were sleeping off our party when he must have shifted and bit me. I woke up and after that, I had a hard time saying no to him," she said. "Look, I knew it was fucked up, but what could I do? I think he grabbed me so I could look after the girl. I guess he thought all women have a soft spot for kids."

  "Guess he was wrong." I still wasn't ready to forgive her for threatening to kill Clarita. It felt like she was telling the truth, although, she and Joe were both hard to read.

  "I've lived a crappy life and never wanted kids, so tough shit," she said.

  "Tell me what you talked to Jennifer about?" Joe asked, changing subjects.

  "I told her you're lycan and she should talk to her grandmother," I said.

  "You told her? She's got to be freaking out. I can't believe you did that without talking to me." He rose from his chair, tossing a piece of pizza back into the box. Sue stood with him.

  "Calm down, Joe. How'd you think it was going to go? You trash the house, then disappear and when you finally show back up, it's with another woman. You need to understand. This isn't a disease you take a pill for. Lycan don't get better. They ruin the lives of people around them."

  Joe took my standing up as a provocative move and placed his hands on my chest.

  My heart raced as I looked into eyes which had changed from brown to yellow. A low growl emanated from his chest. "It wasn't your decision." He pushed me backward and I stumbled, almost falling back into the chair.

  "No? You called me, Joe. If you want to screw up your life without me, go ahead. It’s already a train-wreck. I just happen to hold out hope that you might be able to beat the odds. But you're not doing that without the help of your wife and even your grandmother. If you want to have it out, let's get after it. Better with me than Jennifer."

  I stood completely still as he picked up a lamp and tossed it into the wall, roaring as he did. I could see the war within him. He wanted to respond physically, but was holding back, at least for now.

  "You're pushing me," he said, his eyes returning to brown.

  "No more than when you argue with your wife. You really think you're ready to be in the same room with her?"

  He sat heavily in the chair and rested his head in his hands. "No. You're right. I was ready to rip your head off just then. What am I going to do?"

  "You're not alone, Joe. The first thing we need to do is get Jennifer on board, but you can't push her. If she'll let you back in, then she sets the pace. For now, we need to wait for her to talk to Nanna and hope she reaches out," I said.

  "And, if she doesn't?"

  "We'll deal with it." I pulled a book from my shelf that had a few references to lycan and handed it to him.

  "What's this?" He opened the book and started paging through it. "I can't read anything. It's in a foreign language."

  "Welcome to my world. It's time to learn how to read Latin. The good news is, most of it isn't about werewolves, so you won't have too much to transcribe."

  "How am I supposed to do that?"

  "Oh, come on. Can you read Spanish?"

  "Sure."

  "Latin isn't that far off. Use the internet. Google will do the translation for you, but you'd be better off learning how to read it. All the material I have is Latin."

  "We don't need moldy old books to tell us what it's like to be werewolves," Sue snapped. "We're living it."

  "And doing a bang-up job." I turned on her. "Your first act as a werewolf was to participate in a kidnapping and your second was to beg to kill a child so you could get on with your life." It was a low blow, but I was tired of her woe-is-me attitude.

  She jumped back up and swung, landing a blow on my cheek. I saw stars and stumbled in the cluttered space, but didn't go down. "Shit."

  "Sit down, Sue," Joe growled. "Knock it off, Felix. You can't keep poking her like that."

  Her response seemed disproportionate, but he had a point. I wasn't holding back my anger in a volatile environment and I'd received a quick lesson in etiquette.

  "You're welcome to my apartment for a couple of nights. After that, you need to figure out something else," I said, nursing my jaw.

  "Where are you going?" Joe asked as I started stuffing books into my satchel.

  "I'll be around," I said. There was no way I was going to feel safe sleeping in an apartment with two werewolves. "Just lock up when you leave."

  Once I was in the truck, I dialed Amak.

  "Booty call?"

  "You gotta stop that! It's not easy for me to say no to you," I said, meaning every word.

  "What! The sex is good," she said.

  "And, I never know if you're being compelled to do it or not," I said.

  "I've had worse jobs."

  "That's not helping," I said. "I'm headed over to Happy Hollow, want to do a sleepover?"

  "I thought you said that was off the table," she said.

  "Sex is off the table, but you're still my friend."

  "I'll bring the booze; you get food. I'm thinking gyros," she said.

  Thirty minutes later I pulled into the circular drive in front of the Tenebris Manerium with a bag full of gyros. I looked up at the canopy of trees as I stepped from the truck. The weak light of the late October sky a dull glow behind the leaves. Mentally, I added exterior lighting to a quickly growing list of repairs I had to fit within the thirty-thousand-dollar maintenance budget.

  The sound of a beefy engine and blaring radio broke me from my contemplation. I turned to see the lights of Amak’s Jeep bouncing along the entry lane as she avoided the many obstacles on her way in. I added clearing the lane to the top of my work list. It occurred to me t
hat I might not own Tenebris Manerium as much as it now owned me.

  "So is this place yours now?" Amak asked, swinging out of the Jeep onto the ground next to me. I appreciated that she was wearing loose sweats instead of the tight, revealing clothing she seemed to prefer.

  "Who's asking?"

  "Just me, but I can't guarantee Camille or Liise won't ask about it," she said.

  "Everything you see here is mine," I said. "Such as it is."

  "I love what you've done with the place," she laughed, wrapping a long arm around my shoulders as we walked toward the breezeway entrance. "It's so... so…"

  "Gothic?" I asked, noticing the stone gargoyles staring down at us.

  "If that means ‘about to fall down,’ then yeah, Gothic," she agreed. "I hope you brought a lot of gyros. I'm starving."

  "I might not have thought very hard about how cold it was in October," I said as I pushed through the door into the mudroom.

  "It'll be fifty tonight. If we snuggle, we'll stay warm." The brat waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

  "If we keep it to snuggling," I said.

  "Did you ever make it to the basement?" she asked. "That's the thing Liise was all worked up about, although I think she doesn't care quite so much now."

  "What do you mean, she doesn't care?"

  "I transferred a call from the bank to her today that I might have listened in on."

  "From David Phibbly?"

  "How'd you know?" she asked. "Anyway he told her that you'd been confirmed as the heir to this old dump. She pretty much lost her shit on him."

  "What's her tie to Phibbly?"

  "He's a witch. Part of Illuminaire," she said.

  "You don't see a lot of male witches," I observed.

  "Illuminaire has three of them. There are only two other male witches in the whole city," she said. "You know, I should have brought a chainsaw. We could have made a fire."

  We'd made it into the kitchen and Amak was looking at the brick fireplace next to the oven, its hearth at waist level.

  "You want to see what all the fuss is about?" I asked.

  "Like you have to ask," she said, pulling a beer from the 12-pack she had under her arm. "Want one?" She handed me the beer she'd just pulled out.

  I led her back through the solarium, its walls empty of glass and open to the back woods. I mentally added ‘sealing breaches in the outside walls’ to my fix-it list. We walked through the casual family room where we'd first hidden, listening to the plans of the kidnappers. Finally, we made our way over to the back staircase. I pushed through the lock on the first door and we went down the circular stone staircase to the main entry of the lab. I had to put the beer down to manage the more complex lock, but I finally got it open.

  "I was thinking we could spend the night here," I said, setting the bag of gyros on the desk. I took one for myself and slid the bag in Amak's direction.

  "How are your wounds?" I asked. "Aren't you worried about lycan infection?"

  "Nah, they have no effect on me, aside from hurting that is," she said.

  "Dukats seems to think capturing Shaggy was just the beginning. She’s certain there's more to come." I leaned back in the leather chair that I was sure belonged to my mother. I dug into the gyro.

  "Dukats?"

  "Lieutenant with Leotown's finest," I said.

  "I don't know. It seems to me that Shaggy was the bad news."

  "Holy Shit!" I said, looking at the silver spell circle in front of the fireplace. The skeletal remains I'd taken the jar from were gone, the sword was replaced on the wall and the silver kettle I'd knocked from the lab table was once again sitting upright and in its original location. In fact, everything I’d upended during my fight with the shades was back in its original place.

  "What?" Amak sat straighter and looked around, readying herself for action.

  "I'm not sure. Someone's been here and cleaned up. There was a corpse on the ground when I left."

  "You had to kill someone?"

  "No. It was a skeleton, but it's gone now."

  "Doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd complain about," Amak said, grabbing a lab stool and rolling it over to the desk. "What do you want to do tomorrow? I'm off."

  "I was thinking about getting someone out to look at electricity and heat. If I'm real ambitious, I might move my own lab equipment over," I said.

  "Do you remember being here? According to Liise Straightrod, you lived here when you were really young," she said.

  "Why would she tell you that?"

  "She might not have known I was listening."

  "You're a scamp." I tossed a french fry at her.

  "You can't imagine how boring it gets out there in the country. Different groups of witches have meetings and my job is to make sure nobody breaks in or roughs anyone up. Which, of course, no one ever does because witches just don't get all that rowdy."

  It felt good to just hang out and chat with someone. Later on, we found old blankets in a closet and stretched out in front of the fireplace. It wasn't as comfortable as a bed, but it was manageable. We finally drifted off to sleep sometime after midnight.

  The next morning, I awoke refreshed but sore. Something about sleeping on the hard floor hadn't done me any good. Unfortunately, we didn't have running water, so I had to run outside to take care of business. I added yet another item to the ever-growing list of house maintenance tasks.

  It was after eight in the morning, so I dialed Andy. "Good morning, Felix. Everything okay with those doors?"

  "They're perfect, Andy," I said. "Any chance you have some time this morning to take a look at a few things?"

  "You have more problems at your apartment?"

  "No. I just came into a house and don't know how to get the power, water and all that turned on," I said. I was still outside, looking around at the property in the morning light. My eyes fell on a ramshackle greenhouse where most of the glass had fallen in. It was twenty feet from the back side of the house. Item number fifty-two on the repair list, I thought sarcastically.

  "Sure, I can help. I'll have to bring my kid along. I've got babysitting duty while Kelli's at work," he said.

  "No problem. I'll text you the address," I said.

  I went inside and found Amak looking around the kitchen.

  "No food in here, not even a can of beans," she complained. "And those darn werewolves made a heck of a mess in the front of the house."

  "Let's go get some breakfast and a chainsaw," I said.

  "In that order?"

  We walked out and jumped into my truck. I noticed Maggie’s silhouette and found her sitting atop one of the many gargoyles on the front of the house. I whistled at her and she nodded in acknowledgement, but didn't join us.

  An hour later we returned with a new chainsaw, gas and oil. We set right to work clearing the entryway at the street. We cut back vegetation and freed the once proud stone pillars that bracketed the brick-paved driveway. At some point in time, a reckless driver must have veered off Happy Hollow and knocked one of them over. I pulled out a notepad and added the pillar to the list of items to be fixed.

  About the time we'd finished clearing the entry, Andy pulled up in his work truck. A red haired, ten-year-old boy sat next to him, fidgeting.

  "House is just down the road," I said. "You'll have to go around the back and in through the broken solarium attached to the dining room. The doors are all locked for some reason."

  "I'll see what it’s going to take to get your water on, but you'll want heat before we open the valves. Hard freeze is around the corner," he said.

  "Could you make a list and see what needs to be done to, at least, get us limping along?"

  "Sure can," he said and drove off down the lane.

  Amak and I settled into a comfortable rhythm of work. We'd decided to concentrate on clearing the brick lane of the fallen trees. As we worked, we uncovered a bridge that spanned a dry creek bed and discovered that several of the six-inch thick planks were rotted. I began to
wonder if we’d ever discover any good news related to the house. Two hours into it, Andy finally returned, rolling to a stop next to us.

  "Looks like you're making good progress. What are you going to do with all that firewood?" He was looking at the back of my pickup that was now filled.

  "No shortage of fireplaces," Amak said.

  "True," Andy agreed. "I'd get someone out to inspect 'em before you burn, though. Critters like to build nests in abandoned fireplaces."

  I pulled out my notepad and added it to the list.

  "What's it going to take to get the water and electricity on?" I asked.

  "Good news or bad?"

  "Good," I said.

  "You're on a well and the electrical looks relatively modern. Once you call the city for electricity, you'll probably get water too," he said. "Although, it'd be worth getting someone…"

  "To inspect the well," I finished his sentence as I wrote down yet one more thing to do. "If that's the good news, then what's the bad?"

  "Boiler looks shot. You could be looking at ten or twelve thousand to get it running," he said. "I also looked at your roof. There's another twenty thousand in that, although I could probably patch a few places enough to get you through the winter," he said.

  "You’re full of good news. What would it cost to have you patch it?"

  "Six or seven hundred," he said.

  "Let's do that," I said. "Any recommendation on a furnace company?"

  "You want me to call 'em out?"

  "Sure. Why not?"

  FAMILY TIES

  My phone rang as we stacked the third load of firewood onto racks in a wood shed next to the long garage. It was late in the afternoon and I was physically exhausted. I felt good about having cleared the lane all the way to the house, especially since Leotown Public Power had then been able to make it down the drive and work on our power issues. We now had lights and water. Even better, Andy's furnace company was coming out in the morning.

  The caller id showed Gabriella.

  "Heya," I answered. "What's shaking?"

  "I was talking with Mari and she said you might be working for Willow. That true?"