Catspaw

A Deadly Curiosities Adventure

Gail Z. Martin

 

“That’s the last of it,” I called back toward the open back door of the shop. I heaved the cut-down cardboard boxes into the dumpster. Teag Logan waited in the doorway, scanning the dark, empty alley. A cat yowled in the distance.

“Come back inside, Cassidy,” he urged. “I don’t know why, but I don’t like the vibes I’m getting out here tonight.”

Teag’s intuition is fueled by strong magic, so I take his ‘vibes’ seriously. I’m pretty good with both intuition and magic myself, and I felt a shiver go down my back. “There’s something out here,” I murmured, looking down the alley toward the streetlight at the end and seeing a dark shape in the roadway I had not noticed before.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Teag said. “Come back where it’s safe.”

Wardings protected the old antique shop against dark magic. Salt and iron lay beneath the sill of every door and window to repel evil, and as an added protection, sometimes we had a nearly six-hundred year-old vampire staying in the secret room in the shop basement. Teag and I both wore protective amulets, and when it came to defending ourselves, we were no slouches. So when I lingered a moment longer, I took a calculated risk.

“We need to see what that is,” I said, jerking my head toward the lump that lay near the far end of the alley. I let my athame slide down beneath my sleeve into my hand, and jangled the old dog collar on my left wrist, smiling as the ghost of a large dog appeared at my side. Teag muttered something under his breath and joined me a moment later, carrying a wooden martial arts staff and a wicked knife.

Together, we advanced on the shape, which lay still in the dim glow of the distant street light. A mangy cat paced near the body, staying just out of reach as we approached, even though Bo’s ghost growled and stepped toward it. If the cat could see Bo, the ghost dog didn’t intimidate him. I paid attention to what my senses were telling me, shivering at the resonance something evil left in its wake. Yet the closer we got to the thing in the road, the more certain I became that the threat itself had come and gone.

“So much blood.” I hadn’t realized that I spoke aloud until Teag glanced at me, eyes wide with the same horror that thrummed through my gut. A woman’s body lay at our feet, clothing soaked red, wreathed in a pool of crimson. Then Bo growled, and I followed his gaze to the necklace around the dead woman’s throat. For all the mess, the body appeared intact, no claw or bite marks, nothing to explain why she bled out on the cobblestones.

“I don’t think this was a mugging,” Teag murmured, bending down beside the corpse, careful to stay out of the blood. He brushed the back of his fingers against the cuff of the woman’s jacket, one of the few places not saturated with gore. At the same time, I crouched down on the other side of the body, letting my hand hover above the necklace.

Teag’s hand jerked back. “Seriously bad juju. She never knew what hit her,” he muttered, having picked up that much from the brief contact. He’s got Weaver magic, the ability to weave spells into cloth—or recognize magic woven into fabric. I recoiled an instant later, without ever having to touch the piece of jewelry.

“It’s the necklace,” I said, breathless from the dark power I sensed. “I’m certain it’s what killed her—and it’s too dangerous to let it out of our sight.”

“Then we’d better get it off her before the cops come,” Teag replied matter-of-factly. “And there’s no way in hell you’re touching it, so don’t even try.”

I’m Cassidy Kincaide, owner of Trifles and Folly, a 350 year-old antique and curio shop in historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina. Nothing about us is what it appears. For one thing, I’m a psychometric—able to read the history and magic of objects by touching them. Teag is my assistant store manager, best friend, and sometime bodyguard, and he’s got his own powerful magic. My business partner, Sorren—the vampire who keeps a safe room in the store’s basement—founded Trifles and Folly back when Charleston was new, always working with a member of my family throughout the years. Sure, we buy and sell antiques. But our real job is fighting off supernatural threats and getting haunted and cursed objects off the market. When we succeed, no one notices. When we fail, the aftermath gets chalked up as a natural disaster.

Which is why we were crouched over a dead body in a back alley, preparing not just to tamper with evidence, but to remove a key piece from the scene of a crime—because whoever worked the magic that killed this woman was out of the league of the Charleston PD.

Teag ran back to the shop and returned a moment later with a pair of pliers, a lead box and a long strip of cloth. I recognized the fabric as a piece Teag created, with protective magic woven into the warp and woof. I kept a lookout while he wrapped the fabric around his hand so that no skin touched the pliers, then snipped through the chain that held the necklace in place, and gingerly placed the jewelry inside the lead box. The mangy cat watched every move from a distance.

“We need to get out of here,” I muttered as he snapped a picture of the necklace with his phone, then flipped the lid shut. Bo’s ghost wagged once, satisfied that I was in no immediate danger, and winked out. The odd alley cat rose from where it sat and padded off into the shadows. Teag and I jogged back to the store, closed and locked the back door, and exchanged a look.

“The sooner we’re gone from here tonight, the better,” Teag warned, placing the lead box on a shelf in my office for safekeeping, and locking the door, just in case. “The bar up the street has pay phones in the back; I’ll call in a scuffle in the alley, and let the cops take it from there. Nice and untraceable.”

I nodded, still feeling shaky from the sight of all that blood. “I’ll call Sorren and let him know, and then I’ll see if Rowan or Lucinda have heard anything or picked up any bad mojo.” Rowan is a witch who’s worked on a few situations with us, while Lucinda is a good friend who also happens to be a powerful Voudon mambo. If someone was working powerful dark magic in Charleston, odds were good that one or both of them sensed it.

“Okay,” Teag agreed. “I’ll walk you to your car. And when I get home, I’ll see if I can find out anything about that necklace—and monitor the police chatter and hack their system to see what they learn about the vic. I’ll call you later, let you know what they said.”

“Deal.”

As it turned out, Lucinda was waiting for me on the piazza of my Charleston single house, what most people call a porch. I didn’t have to ask how she got past the wardings, since she’s the one who put them in place. Lucinda’s suit suggested she had come straight from her work at the university, and its sand and ochre colors offset the dark chocolate tone of her skin. “Child, there’s trouble brewing,” she greeted me.

I locked the door leading off the side of the piazza to the street, and let us into the house. Baxter, my Maltese dog, yipped and bounced in greeting until I scooped him up in my arms as we entered. “Tell me what you know,” I said to Lucinda as I led us into the kitchen.

I poured glasses of sweet tea for both of us, then fed Baxter his dinner, and motioned for Lucinda to have a seat at the table. She savored the ice cold tea for a moment, and let out a long sigh.

“Someone is messing around with very bad magic,” Lucinda said, giving me a sharp glance that told me she suspected I already had an inkling about that. I nodded, confirming her hunch. “Whoever’s doing the magic is sloppy—which makes things even worse.”

“You think he—or she—doesn’t know what they’re messing with?”

Lucinda shrugged. “Or maybe doesn’t have the training to handle what they’re attempting. Don’t know. There’s no mistaking that it’s dark magic, so I don’t think it’s something someone blundered into by accident.”

“Can you locate who’s doing it?” I toyed with my glass of tea, reaching down to lift Baxter onto my lap, where he settled down, content to be in his rightful place.

Lucinda concentrated, then shook her head. “No. At least, nothing I’ve tried so far has worked. I’ve sensed the… ripples… of power, but it’s too quick to get a lock on it. And there’s something very odd about the way it feels. Not quite… human.”

“What kind of ‘not human’?” I asked.

Lucinda was quiet for a moment, sorting through her thoughts. “I’m sorry. That’s all I can say right now. I wanted to warn you—but I get the feeling you already knew.”

I told Lucinda about the woman in the alley. “I’ll come by tomorrow and have a look at that necklace,” she replied. “Don’t you touch it. I’ll look into it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But we’ve got to hurry. Whoever’s behind it—they’ve already killed once.” I paused. “Maybe that’s all there’ll be. Maybe it was something personal. Still bad, still murder—but it might not be a crime spree.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The ripples—I’ve felt them before, not long ago. I think there’s been at least one more. We just don’t know who it was.” Lucinda finished her tea and stood.

“If anyone can figure that part out, it’s Teag,” I replied. “Let me see what I can find out from my sources, and I’ll see you tomorrow at the shop.”

I walked Lucinda to the door. “Cassidy—you and Teag need to watch your backs,” she warned. “What’s Sorren have to say about all this?”

I sighed. “He and Archibald Donnelly went to Philadelphia yesterday. I’ve left a voice mail, but he can’t always reply when he’s handling a problem.” Donnelly was another ally, a powerful necromancer. He and Sorren went north to help my Philadelphia counterparts deal with something nasty and undead. “No idea when they’re planning to get back.”

“Then you and Teag take extra care,” Lucinda said in a no-nonsense voice, the one I’m sure she used in her day job as a professor to chastise errant college students. “Someone finds out you two are looking into this, you might draw the wrong kind of attention.”

“Will do,” I promised as I saw her out. I locked the door and leaned against it. Baxter trotted out of the kitchen and sat down in front of me, blinking his black button eyes. “Not sure what to do, Bax,” I said, running a hand back through my hair. “We’ve got a dead body, a cursed necklace, and a rogue witch—who might not be human. Even for us, that’s a lousy way to start the week.”

 

§

 

The next morning, I found a witch waiting for me as I opened the door to the shop.

“We need to talk.” Rowan said. Anyone watching might have thought she was a tourist jumping the gun on a day of shopping, but I heard the serious note in her voice. I unlocked the door and gestured for her to enter first. The blast from the air conditioner made me tilt my face back in bliss, since outside was already broiling and heavy with humidity.

“Teag called you?” I locked the door behind us and headed toward the office, knowing what Rowan came to see.

“Was he supposed to?” She looked honestly surprised. I slid her a sidelong look. Tall and slender, blonde hair up in a twist and wearing a loose green summer dress, Rowan didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a witch—unless you knew enough to recognize the protective runes on her bracelets and the sigils carefully stitched along the hem of her dress. “I felt a pulse of dark magic last night, and came to warn you—except that the closer I got to the store, the stronger it felt.”

“I might know why.” I led the way into the office, and pointed at the lead box on the shelf.

Rowan’s eyes narrowed, and I could have sworn she let out a soft hiss. “Oh, that is not good.” She glanced at me. “What’s in there?”

“A necklace we took off the body of a lady who bled to death in the alley with no visible wounds.” I fixed her with a look. “And no, I’m not touching that box.”

Rowan smirked. She knew about my magic. She said a warding against evil under her breath and pulled a cloth down from a peg on the wall, a piece of fabric the size of a bath towel that Teag wove with protective magic running through its fibers. Then she took a deep breath, centered her power, and wrapped the cloth around the lead box, lifting it down carefully. I moved ahead of her into the break room and drew a thick circle of salt on the table. Rowan placed the box in the middle of the circle and withdrew the fabric.

“Even through the lead, something is making my skin crawl,” Rowan said, eyeing the box as if it might attack.

“Do you need to open it, if you can sense it from here?”

Rowan frowned. “Unfortunately, yes. The lead dampens too much for me to get a good read.

I heard a key in the front door lock, heard the chimes as the door opened, and then Teag’s vice rang out. “Cassidy? I’ve got Lucinda with me.”

“We’re back here,” I replied. “And Rowan’s already on it.”

Teag clicked the lock and a moment later, he and Lucinda came into the break room. Lucinda’s gaze fell to the box immediately, and she fell back a step, as if something pushed her. “Uh, uh, uh,” she murmured, shaking her head.

Teag took the warded fabric from Rowan and carefully lifted the lid of the lead box. Even though I was several feet away, I could feel the resonance of the blood-soaked necklace like dirty oil on my skin.

Lucinda clucked her tongue. “Looks like dirty deeds done dirt cheap—and dead wrong.”

I caught a glance between Lucinda and Rowan. “Meaning?”

Lucinda cocked her head as if waiting for Rowan to speak first. “Whoever did the spell has power but no finesse,” Rowan said. Lucinda gave a nod in agreement. “A talented amateur maybe, or a fledgling witch attempting something out of their league.”

“The necklace is cursed—and there’s a whiff of death magic as well,” Lucinda said, frowning like a chef trying to suss out the subtle flavors of a recipe.

“If it’s cursed to kill, isn’t that death magic?” Teag asked.

“Necromancy,” Lucinda clarified. “Remember—I told you last night something about the power wasn’t human.”

Teag and I exchanged a glance. “I thought Donnelly was the only necromancer in Charleston,” I said.

“And that’s as it should be,” Rowan replied. “But there’s nothing to say someone new hasn’t come to town—maybe even since Sorren and Donnelly went to Philadelphia.”

“Necromancy isn’t beginner magic.” Teag eyed the box warily, but did not move closer.

“No, it isn’t—and it’s dangerous power, even when it’s used by a seasoned witch,” Rowan agreed.

“But isn’t necromancy about bringing someone back from the dead?” I asked. “How does that factor into a necklace that killed the wearer?”

Lucinda shrugged. “That’s what we need to find out.”

“Is there anything special about the necklace itself?” Rowan moved close enough to peer into the box, as did Lucinda.

“Unless you see modifications that I didn’t, I found the same necklace online—just costume jewelry, nothing special,” Teag said. When Lucinda and Rowan stepped back, Teag used the spelled cloth to carefully latch the lid and replace the box in the office.

“You said you’d felt ripples of power before last night,” I said, looking to Lucinda. “Do you remember when?”

“A week ago. On Thursday.”

Rowan glanced up. “I felt something then too—I just wasn’t sure what. Nothing good.”

“Anything else?”

Lucinda frowned, thinking. “Last Saturday, I felt a surge of something, and then it was gone. It felt… farther away than the other times.” She managed a wan smile. “I remember because I was at the market and I thought I might be getting a sinus headache from rain coming in.”

Teag had already pulled his laptop from his messenger bag and set it up on the table, carefully dispelling the salt circle. “Thanks. That might narrow things down.”

I glanced toward the front room. “I need to open the shop. Thanks for coming by,” I said, walking with Rowan and Lucinda toward the door. “Can you keep your radar tuned in and let us know if you sense anything else?”

Rowan rolled her eyes at the idea of magic being like radar, but Lucinda chuckled. “Hailing frequencies open,” she deadpanned. “We’ll do some digging of our own.” She frowned. “Don’t you and Teag go busting in on anyone without us, you hear? Necromancy’s nothing to fool with, and even an amateur witch can be dangerous.”

If I doubted her, the memory of a blood soaked corpse in the alley was enough to prove her point.

For a mid-week morning, the shop was busy with tourists, and then a soon-to-be bride and her mother came in to look at vintage silverware. I glimpsed Teag hunched over his laptop in the break room, but it was almost lunchtime before I had the chance to see what he had found.

“Lucinda and Rowan’s ‘ripples’ helped a lot,” Teag said, turning his laptop so I could see what he found. “The lady in the alley wasn’t the only vic. Two other dead men, on the days Lucinda and Rowan felt something in the magic, both covered in blood without any visible wounds.”

“Show me.”

Teag’s Weaver magic gave him the ability to weave disparate strands of data into information, making him one hell of a hacker. Normal firewalls didn’t even slow him down. “Charleston police found a guy in a locked parked car near the airport last Thursday. Soaked in blood, not a mark on his body.” He brought up the police file on the screen and I glanced at the details.

“What’s that?” I pointed at a gray blur on the dead man’s pant leg. Teag enlarged the image.

“Looks like he got against something—maybe pet fur?” Teag replied, leaning closer to make out the image. “Police file said they had to send Animal Control after a cat that wouldn’t leave the crime scene.”

“And then Saturday, another death, same thing. This time, a guy dies in a locked bathroom at a coffee shop. Security cameras show no one went in or out except the vic. No windows in the room, no other exit—nada.” We watched the security footage from multiple cameras, saw the victim go into the bathroom as no one else showed up on any of the other feeds, nothing except an alley cat pacing in front of the bathroom door.

I sighed. “That looks like the mangy cat we saw out back. Can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to mean something. What next?”

Teag sat back in his chair and tilted his head to loosen his shoulders, then stretched his arms, laced his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles. “Now I really start hacking, looking for anything the vics had in common—besides dying bloody and that damned cat. There’s got to be a connection—but it’s going to take some digging.” He raised an eyebrow. “On the other hand, with three victims, I’ve got a better chance of narrowing down matches than I would with just two.”

“I’ll run the store; you dig. I’m sure you’ll find the connections.”

By five o’clock when I closed the store, Teag was still at his spot at the breakroom table. I ordered pizza, figuring we had a few more hours ahead of us. “I think I know the why and the where, but not who or how,” Teag announced as I walked into the room.

I sat down next to him. “Do tell.”

Teag turned the laptop to show me his screen. “None of them owned a cat. But all of them died wearing or holding a piece of jewelry. And all of them went to the same jewelry repair kiosk the day before they died.”

I frowned. “I get the where but what’s the why?”

Teag met my gaze. “They all testified against a teenager named Ben Calvert six years ago when he went to trial for manslaughter.”

“So that means Calvert’s either the witch or the person who hired the witch—right?”

Teag shook his head. “Not that easy. Calvert was underage. I only got his name by hacking into the private files of a reporter who covered the trial. The media didn’t release the name, and the records were sealed.”

“So he changed his name and disappeared,” I mused. “He could be anywhere.”

“He could be—but let’s start looking at that jewelry repair kiosk.”

 

§

 

“So he goes by Brian Cade now,” Rowan murmured from her seat in the back of the car, staring out the window at the night. “Same initials.”

“Yeah,” Teag replied. “The man at the kiosk said he started four months ago—a month before the murders began.”

“He must have been targeting the victims all along,” I mused. “And it’s too much to think coincidence sent all three of them to the same kiosk right after he started working there.”

Teag shook his head. “I’m betting he sent them all a special discount or coupon to lure them in. I don’t think he left any of it to chance.”

Teag, Lucinda, Rowan, and I parked on a dark suburban side street, watching the house at the edge of town where we’d tracked Calvert. “Can you tell anything more about his magic—or about the necromancy?” I asked. We were each fairly powerful with magic in our own ways, but none of us was a necromancer, and going up against that kind of power gave me good reason to be nervous.

“You know the plan,” Teag said quietly. “Let’s go.”

Lucinda and I headed toward the front door, while Teag and Rowan went around back. The small house had just one floor, and what might be a loft or small attic above. Not much crawlspace and no basement. If Calvert was home, it wouldn’t be hard to find him.

I laid down a salt line around the front of the house while Lucinda chalked veves to invoke the protection of Papa Legba and Baron Samedi, two of the most powerful Voudon Loas who held authority over life and death. Teag completed the salt line so that it went around the rest of the house, trapping the energies we released inside. We weren’t taking any chances.

My phone vibrated silently in my pocket, the signal I’d been waiting for. I let the athame slip down into my hand and sent a cold blast of power toward the door, splintering the wood as it ripped from its hinges. I could hear Teag kicking in the back door, as Lucinda began to chant. With a shake of my left wrist, Bo’s ghost materialized at my side, and before I could say a word, he let out a low growl and leaped through the doorway, chasing after that same mangy cat from the crime scenes.

Lucinda and I charged in the front, while Teag and Rowan barged into the back. The living room looked like the set to a horror movie, with candles burning on every flat surface and sigils drawn in blood on every wall. The carpet lay in a heap to one side and more markings covered the floor boards, along with an obsidian knife and a bowl of blood. Calvert stood in the middle of the room, looking more like a junkie than a killer. Eyes sunken, cheeks hollow, and unshaven, brown hair lank and dirty, he stared at us like he was coming off a bad trip.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a wrecked voice. “I’ll kill you like I killed them. Aren’t you scared? I’m a witch.”

Rowan snorted. She raised one hand and clenched her fist. Calvert dropped to his knees as if he’d been sucker punched. “I’m the witch. You’re a poser with a good spell.”

I kept my athame pointed at Calvert, backing Rowan up. I’d put bigger bad guys through walls with the blast of power my athame harnessed, and after seeing what Calvert did to his victims, I wouldn’t lose sleep about roughing him up a little.

Teag and Lucinda each made a slow walk around the room’s perimeter. “What I don’t get is why he needed necromancy to kill those people with cursed objects,” I said.

“He didn’t.” We all turned to look at Lucinda. “He needed a familiar to work the curse. Didn’t you?” she added, fixing Calvert with a glare that made him tremble. Rowan held him with her power, forcing him to stay kneeling, hands at his side as if bound.

“You’re so smart, you figure it out,” he snarled.

“That’s why that damned cat’s been everywhere,” I said. “He’s the familiar.” That’s when I realized that Bo and the cat were sitting side by side like besties.

For the first time, I got a good look at the cat itself. Mangy didn’t begin to cover it. I couldn’t tell what color the cat’s matted, dirty fur might have been originally. Chunks of fur were missing, the tail seemed abnormally short, and one ear had rotted away. The cat fixed me with a stare, desperate but too proud to beg. “He brought the cat—the familiar—back from the dead,” I murmured. “Against its will.”

“Where did you find the curse, boy?” Lucinda’s voice held an undercurrent of power, and from the look on Calvert’s face, that magic compelled him to speak the truth.

“I found an old book in a second-hand store,” Calvert spat. “It wasn’t hard to get everything I needed, but I’ve only got a little bit of magic, and that was a problem.” The look on his face made it clear that we would all be next on his list if he had a choice in the matter. “Then I read that the familiar of a powerful witch can share its power with a novice. There was a guy a few towns over that everyone said was a witch with a freaky cat. I thought maybe I could buy the cat—or steal it. But when I got there, they were both dead.”

Calvert licked his lips nervously. “But the old book—it had a bunch of spells on all kinds of things. And there was this ritual to bring something back from the dead. I didn’t need the old guy, just the cat.”

“So you used necromancy to bring the cat back to life, and used the cat to work the curses,” Rowan supplied, contempt clear in her voice.

The unhinged look in Calvert’s eyes said more than any confession. “They testified against me. Sent me to jail. They had it coming.”

We ignored him. “So what now?” I asked. “Release the spell on the cat, and he loses his mojo?”

Rowan frowned. “A bit more than that, I’m afraid. Problem with dabbling in magic that’s out of your league,” she added with a withering look at Calvert. “Necromancy comes at a cost—blood, life force… souls. A trained necromancer figures out what he’s going to owe before he does the spell. Our boy here didn’t read the fine print, and now he has a balance due.”

For the first time, Calvert’s eyes glinted in fear. “What do you mean?”

“Gotta pay the power bill,” Lucinda replied, an unpleasant smile touching her lips. “And it’s time to pull the plug.”

“Found it.” We all looked to Teag as he held up a small wooden box. “Cat bones. Vertebra—bits of its tail. Am I right?”

“Go to hell,” Calvert snapped.

Teag set the box on the floor and poured a stream of salt on it from a container in his pocket, then used one of the candles to kindle the old wood into flame. Rowan began to chant in a language I didn’t understand, but I felt chills down my back just the same. Lucinda sang strange words in a quiet voice, while I kept my athame trained on Calvert.

I smelled pipe smoke and heard a dog bark from the front porch. I glimpsed a tall, thin man in a tuxedo and a top hat, dark glasses hiding the empty eye sockets of his skull, standing in the doorway. The mangy cat stood up with an air of threadbare dignity and walked straight toward the apparition, pausing only to fix Calvert with a baleful glare before it sauntered to the door.

Outside, two powerful Voudon Loa, Papa Legba and Baron Samedi, guardians of the underworld, waited to claim what belonged to them. The necromancer’s cat went willingly.

Calvert did not.

Payback’s a bitch.