“That’s great,” I said, in a tone that indicated I really didn’t care.
“It’s a grand payday, Daiya.” Day-ah.
“I’m sure.”
“Daiya, didn’t you want to do something else with your life than run a coffee shop?” Crissy leaned on the hand-off table, her cleavage spilling over the deep V-neck of her red sweater.
I gritted my teeth and lifted her cup, swirling it three times widdershins — counter clockwise. I set the hex to make her hair fall out with more intention than I usually did.
“No, Crissy. I love this shop.” I shoved her Brewlatte over the counter, spilling a little in the process.
She jumped back, wrinkling her nose. “You’re not very good at it.”
I wanted to tell her she wasn’t very good at being a human being, but she wouldn’t have understood what I meant.
“Daiya! What do you think?”
Jasmine’s voice — and the blessed correct pronunciation of Die-ya — tore through my thoughts.
“Huh?” I asked, finishing Geena’s latte with a dollop of homemade whip cream.
“Are all killers sociopaths?” Jasmine repeated, as if I were slow.
“No. I don’t think so. Just like I don’t think all sociopaths are killers. Some are just assholes.” I smiled and slid Geena’s latte across the hand-off plain, not spilling a drop.
Chapter Four
“Crissy Nolte had a crescent roll and a cinnamon Brewlatte the night before she died,” I greeted my sister.
Devin sat on her front porch as the sun set over the lake, wrapped in a giant floral comforter and comfy pink socks. She sipped from a steaming mug that said “Live by the Sun, Love by the Moon.” I’d given it to her for her 28th birthday last year.
“So?”
“So if she drank the latte and ate the roll, my magic would still be inside her.”
“That sounds naughty.” Devin wiggled her eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes. “You’re worse than Aunt Delphine. Would you listen to what I’m saying? Crissy should still hold my magic. I can do a Last Moments spell on her.”
Devin nodded slowly. “I’m listening.”
“Did she die when Lars Kendrick died?”
“As far as I know. I’m off today, so I haven’t gotten any of the usual workplace updates.”
“If she died with Lars Kendrick, I have to get to her yesterday or the spell will bomb.”
“As her decaying body slowly eats your magic?” Devin took another sip, looking serene against a backdrop of log cabin, her messy dark hair piled atop her head.
“That’s a lovely image. Thank you.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I need the keys to Grandmama’s car.”
Devin burst out laughing, sloshing tea on her blankets. “You’re kidding, right? You don’t even have a driver’s license.”
“I have to get to the morgue. What else am I going to do? I can’t ride my bike to the edge of the county.”
She sat up and put her socked feet to the porch floorboards. “You’re going to get in the car, and we’ll go together. With me as a legal, licensed driver.”
“When did no license stop you in Daddy’s truck in middle school?”
Devin pointed at me. “Don’t make me zap you.”
She’d do it, too. Devin’s power lay in pulling electricity from her surroundings. And that stuff hurt.
*
The morgue was housed in the basement of the county hospital, half an hour down the interstate from Tates Creek. Devin picked a parking spot, and we walked into the emergency room waiting area. Several people in various states of disarray sat against the wall including a teenager with a bloody towel around one hand and a middle-aged woman clutching a swollen, most-likely-broken arm.
Devin picked up a magazine and plopped into a chair by the door.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Waiting. The idea of dead bodies freaks me out.”
“You’re a police dispatcher,” I reminded her.
“Exactly. There’s always airwaves between me and the dead bodies.” She winked and opened the magazine.
I sighed. Obviously, I was on my own for this one.
I walked for the desk, inwardly weaving a cloaking spell so that I disappeared little by little. The effect was physical as much as psychological. By the time the nurse at the station looked up from her paperwork — having seen me coming for her in her peripheral vision — I’d vanished. She looked around, confused, but shrugged and went back to her chart.
Nobody else in the waiting room had noticed a thing. The mind was incredibly easy to trick, even when you didn’t have magic on your side.
I’d been to the morgue once before in my life: the night Daddy died.
My daddy was a good man. But like all good men, he had his vices, and his big one was drinking. Mama fought with him for near on thirty-two years, scooting him in and out of sobriety. He’d been one year sober the day he lost his job and ended up at a bar the next county over. When he didn’t come home, and didn’t call, Mama sent the police after him. They found his car embedded in a cliff wall on the highway.
Me and Grandmama drove Mama to the hospital and stayed right by her side to identify Daddy. They’d cleaned him up, and you couldn’t even tell his neck was broken. He simply looked … asleep.
I followed the same path we took that day two years ago, dodging nurses and orderlies doing their nightly duties. Visiting hours had ended, so a sleepy hush fell over everything. Workers spoke in low voices, and the usual canned laughter of televisions had been quieted for the night.
The elevator deposited me in the dim main foyer of the morgue. Nobody sat behind the desk; the hospital’s logo bounced gently across the computer screen. I shook the mouse to wake it up, but it was password protected.
Which meant I’d be doing it the hard way. The hospital catered to the whole county, so I’d just have to hunt for Crissy’s body.
I began a systematic search of the examining rooms. The first room was empty, the tables clean and the lights off. My heart beat in my ears as I opened each of the four fridge drawers, but they were unoccupied.
A second sterile, empty room housed two refrigerated occupants. The first body gave me a shock as I tugged open the metal drawer, even though I expected bodies. Neither drawer held Crissy.
The third room was dim, though a small desk lamp illuminated an empty table in the corner. I turned to look for the light switch but froze at the unfamiliar, but very recognizable click of a gun.
I threw my hands in the air and squeaked.
“Daiya?” Light flooded the room, and Cole stared at me in astonishment, one hand on the light switch as he lowered his gun to his side. “What are you doing here?”
“Uh.” I had no good response. I hadn’t expected anyone to be here this late, much less for Cole to be hiding in the shadows, looking entirely too rumpled and scrumptious for my heart. Lacking an answer, I turned it around on him. “What are you doing here?”
“Sitting watch with my wife. So I have a little more authority to be here than you.”
I flushed, caught red-handed. Mama always said honesty was the best policy. Time to test her theory. “Do you trust me?”
Cole raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never given me reason not to.”
“Can I see her?”
His eyebrows tucked into his hairline. For a moment, I thought he’d kick me out. His instinct must have decided in my favor, because he holstered his gun and crossed the room to a drawer marked 2. “It’s not pretty. They did a number on her.”
“Are you okay?”
He shrugged and turned the handle. “I don’t know.”
I managed to hold back my gasp when he gently pulled the sheet from her face. Crissy’d been battered, her face swollen black and blue and almost unrecognizable. “Oh, no. Who would do this to her?”
A muscle clenched in his jaw. “A monster.”
“Sitting w
atch, huh? Very Irish.” I smoothed an errant blonde hair from Crissy’s forehead, suddenly sorry I’d spent so much of her life hating her. But death could do that, I think: make you regret all the choices you did or didn’t make when the person was alive.
Cole smiled sadly. “I didn’t want her to be alone.”
“You’re a good husband.”
“Too bad she didn’t think the same thing.”
I reached over Crissy to squeeze his shoulder. “I think she did, Cole. She just got a little lost in the end.” When his eyes began to sparkle with unshed tears, I let go and turned my gaze back to Crissy. I spread my hands above her chest. “I need you to trust me, okay? And … don’t freak out.”
Cole stared at me but gave me a single nod.
I reached for my magic stored deep inside Crissy. It was still there — which was good news. The power danced happily at my touch, like a puppy pleased to see its owner after a long day. “Show me the end.”
Energy rose from Crissy’s body, maintaining her facial features — pre-beating. A perfect duplicate of her in repose floated only an inch above her skin. After a silent moment, the energy opened its eyes.
“What the — ” Cole stumbled away, hitting the open door of the freezer drawer.
Crissy’s face twisted into concern. “Babe, is that Lonnie’s — What are you — Jesus. Is that a baseball bat?” Her eyes blinked rapidly, and her lips moved, the energy superimposed over her dead body in a macabre reenactment.
Energy Crissy jerked and screamed, her gaze watching something happening beside her. A moment later, she threw her hands up in front of her face and squeezed her eyes shut. Then the energy disappeared.
In the wake of her absence, the room seemed darker. I removed my hands and knelt, touching the floor beneath my feet to ground from the rush of power.
“Daiya!” Cole barked, appearing around the open drawer. He gripped my bicep and yanked me to my feet. “What the actual fuck?”
“Calm down.” I gently pried his hand from my arm. “What I’m about to say has to stay between us. You can’t tell anybody.”
Cole’s breath heaved in his chest. My display had creeped him out. I guess that was to be expected when a ghostly image of one’s dead wife played out her last living moments.
I took a deep breath and spoke a secret no one outside the Pettigrew family had ever been told — though some might have guessed. “I’m a witch.”
Cole’s eye twitched. “A witch.”
“Yes, a real witch. Potions and spells and magical powers.” I fluttered my fingers ineffectually, as if that would help to explain rather than make me look even more like a crazy person. “What you just saw was a ‘Last Moments’ spell. Crissy drank a latte and ate a crescent roll from The Witch’s Brew the night she disappeared. My residual magic in her system let me conjure what she said and did in her last moments alive.”
Cole backed up and sank heavily onto a folding chair. “How long have you … ”
“My whole life. My mama’s a witch, too. And my sister. And Aunt Delphine and Grandmama, and both of Delphine’s girls. The women in my family are pretty powerful. Bless the men who put up with us.” I smiled, trying to relieve some of the tension.
“There’s magic in your lattes.”
“Just a little bit.” I held up my forefinger and thumb, barely apart, and grinned.
Cole laughed. “I guess that explains why everyone in town is addicted to your coffee.”
Chapter Five
Devin stood and dropped the magazine she’d been reading as Cole and I walked up. “Lieutenant! What are you doing here?”
“That question seems to be going around,” Cole said wryly.
“He was with Crissy,” I explained. “He saw the spell.”
Devin’s jaw dropped, and she looked at Cole. “Loot … I — ”
“It’s okay. So my best dispatcher is a witch. Whatever.” He threw up his hands and closed his eyes. I saw an inkling of the high school drama captain in that motion. “As long as no one tells me the world is ending tomorrow, everything will be all right. Look, I’m going to drive your sister home so we can chat. Go ahead and take off.”
“Ten-four, Loot. See you tomorrow.” Devin waggled her brows at me — Gods, I hated when she did that — and left.
Cole’s cruiser was parked in a police spot by the door, an Official Business sign sitting on the dashboard.
“They didn’t take your car away?” I asked as I buckled my seatbelt.
He turned over the ignition and hit the button to kill the radio, which had burst to life wailing country music. “It’s my only vehicle.”
“Guess it’s nice having your dad as your boss.”
He made a face. “Sometimes. Not often. You’ve met my dad, right?”
I laughed, glad he’d seemed to get past his shock over my spell. “Devin could have taken me home. You didn’t have to leave Crissy.”
“I had a couple hours alone with her,” Cole told me quietly as he circled the lot and signaled to exit. “I said my goodbyes.”
“I’m so sorry, Cole.”
He glanced at me. He was only two years older than me, barely past his thirties, but he looked aged. Wearied. “I know.”
“The good news is we have a name.”
Cole glanced at me blankly.
“Lonnie?” I prompted.
“Oh. Right.” Cole shook his head — shaking away cobwebs, maybe. “And we know ‘Lonnie’ had a bat.”
“That doesn’t really help us though. The Slugger factory is less than two hours away. The county high school sends their sophomores there every year. People all over Tates Creek have Louisville Sluggers.”
“That may be true,” Cole agreed, “but we know Lars died first. He was the intended victim.”
“So Crissy was an innocent bystander pulled into his drama.” I shook my head. “I feel so bad for her.”
“Me, too. But she made her bed.”
The bite to his tone left me no room for interpretation. He loved her, he grieved her, but he blamed her entirely. I suppose that wasn’t a bad thing; the guilt over a loved one’s death could often be the hardest part of grieving to overcome.
“Find out more about the boyfriend’s dirty laundry, we’ll find out why.” Cole slammed a hand to the steering wheel, and I jumped. “God dammit. I can’t even do anything because of my suspension.”
“I don’t know. Seems to me you could do a lot more because of it.”
“Huh?”
“As a cop, you’re held to certain standards. Laws,” I said, though he already knew that. “You’re not a cop right now. You will be again, I guarantee it, but right now … you kinda have free reign to investigate this, don’t you?”
Cole rolled to a stop at the end of the off-ramp to Tates Creek and chuckled, looking over at me. “Daiya Pettigrew, there’s a lot more to you than I realized. You toe the line.”
“The line is only in your imagination,” I said sagely. “You know about the dogfighting ring?”
He shook his head. “I’m in the dark. Dad isn’t telling me anything.”
I recapped what I’d read about Lars’s dogfighting ring based out of his empty listings in Atlanta. I finished up with the recent results of his court case, and losing his real estate license. “Do you think Lonnie could be someone in dogfighting?”
Cole nodded slowly. “It’s a possibility. I have a contact at Atlanta PD. I’ll call him up. Make a trip down.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I’m going with you,” I said firmly. “You’re the prime suspect, Cole. How are you going to leave town without all of your coworkers knowing? Without your dad, the Chief of Police, knowing?”
He looked stricken at the thought. “I can’t leave town.”
“You can if I glamour the car.”
“Like, put make-up on it?” Cole asked, wary.
I laughed. “No, silly. A glamour is magic that camouflages the
car. Nobody would see us leave. We could even take Grandmama’s car and leave yours at home, so if anybody passed your house, they’d think you were home grieving.”
“I probably should be home grieving.” He sighed.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He went quiet so long, I figured he didn’t want to talk about it. We pulled into the driveway at Mama’s, and Cole went right on past the main house, taking the dirt drive to my cottage.
“How’d you know I lived in the cottage?” I asked.
Cole shrugged. “I know things.” He took a breath. “I’m still angrier than anything else. Crissy played me for a year. We’ve been fighting longer than that. I should have ended it ages ago. Maybe I wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Even if you had, you wouldn’t necessarily be free from the situation. Ex-husbands are obvious suspects, too.”
He punched me in the arm like he did when we were teenagers. “Not helping.”
“If things were bad for that long, you were headed for a blow out,” I said simply. “Whether it was a public fight — ”
“Check.”
“ — or Crissy’s murder, things were going bad, anyway. We don’t have control over everything in our lives.”
“I do. I want to,” Cole said, his gaze on the front window where Skadi sat illuminated by his headlights, eerie green eyes staring and fluffy white tail flicking.
“Well, you can’t.” I took his hand and squeezed. “You’ll be all right. Meet me at The Witch’s Brew before we open?”
He nodded. “Atlanta, here we come: A witch and an ex-cop.”
“Still a cop,” I corrected, “with a witch on his side.”
Chapter Six
The sun hid over the horizon, still making its decision to rise, when Cole knocked on the door at The Witch’s Brew.
Lucy wolf-whistled and laid a freshly baked tray of blueberry-honey muffins on the counter. “I’d take a ride with Cole Nolte any day.”
I untied my apron and threw it at her. “His wife just died. Hush.”
She laughed, tugging my floury apron off her head. “I could say the same of you, Miss ‘We’re just taking a drive.’ ”
“It’s strictly as friends. Don’t be putting words in my mouth.” I zigzagged through the tables, smiling at Cole through the all-glass door as I unlocked it and let him in.