Chapter 3
We were dragged down to the station, but not the local one; the central depot in the middle of the city that shared the building with the Federal Police.
Because Mister Agent Fairweather wasn't just an ordinary boy in blue; he was a Federal Agent. My grandmother had, after all, tried to import a ridiculously large amount of cocaine into the country. And drug crimes of that stature always skipped the local authorities and got the attention of the big boys.
I was sitting on a chair, by a desk, huddled into my coat, nursing a cup of lukewarm tea.
I didn't care that it tasted like crap, and that the milk was too old and had formed curdled clumps across the top, I still drank it with relish.
It was about my only comfort right now.
They had taken her away to have a chat, as they had put it, in one of the interrogation rooms.
Thankfully they hadn’t handcuffed her, and neither had they bothered to handcuff me, but I got the distinct impression that at any point should either of us get out of hand, they would have no trouble in tying us up.
I stared down glumly at the scant steam rising off from my Styrofoam cup. Then I indulged in closing my eyes for a moment.
At that exact point the door opened and I heard someone clear their throat.
Though I had only just met the man, I knew instinctively it was Fairweather. It were as if a giant or a troll had taught him how to speak. The exact rumble, the baritone, how it resonated through his powerful chest – it felt like listening to lightning.
I winked one eye open to stare at him.
He didn't have a kind expression. But neither was it completely accusatory like it had been that morning. One of his eyebrows was more depressed than the other, his lips were crinkled, and he looked overall confused. Clearing his throat again, patting down his tie, he walked around me and sat at his desk.
“She is crazy,” I started off, spreading my fingers wide in a stopping motion. “It's not been diagnosed, but it's pretty darned close to dementia. Look up her file, this isn't the first time she has... ordered weird things off the Internet.”
Weird things? Cocaine wasn't a weird thing; it was just a very illegal thing.
I couldn't help it though, I was stressed, and whenever I got stressed, I started to babble and speak nonsense.
He leaned back in his chair, the damn thing creaking in an effectively ominous way. “She ordered a kilogram of cocaine,” he pointed out plainly.
Yes, I knew that fact. Glancing up at his expression, not liking it, and staring straight at the floor, I shrugged my shoulders. “What's going to happen to her?”
He leaned onto his desk slowly, planting his elbows over the neat paperwork, and then drumming his fingers close to his phone. “Charges,” his baritone bottomed out to a level that sounded lower than anything I had ever heard.
I winced. “Right.”
“As for you,” he began.
I flicked up my hand, a little too quickly, splashing some of my tea onto my blouse. I was in no mood to care though. “I have no idea what she does on the Internet, none.”
“Well then you should. Your grandmother appears to have had an illustrious career of ordering restricted goods into the country. If you knew she was...” he shrugged his shoulders, “experiencing dementia-like symptoms, you should have kept an eye on her.”
It was a fair point. But there was a mitigating factor here, a really strong one. She was a witch. And while I told everyone she had dementia, it wasn't exactly true. She was experiencing what all witches did as they aged. A loosening of boundaries, a natural desire to break the rules that had once kept them in place. Cognitively she was actually still the same. She had a memory, she knew your name, she could function in her day-to-day tasks. Behaviorally, she was just a lot freer than she had once been. Yes, that meant she would dance around in mud pies in the yard, but it unfortunately also meant that she couldn’t see the problem in ordering large quantities of very illegal drugs into the country. To her, the rules of law simply didn't mean much anymore. That didn't mean she would run out and murder the first person that angered her; she still had morals and a sense of ethics. She just wanted those drugs for a spell, not to sell to kids on the street or pregnant women. No one would get high off them; she’d probably just incorporate them into her next dream spell, or her next love potion, or her next weather enchantment.
I really couldn't explain that to the man with the laser-like gaze. Instead I flopped my hands onto my lap and looked glumly at my tea.
“You have the right to call a lawyer,” he pointed out again.
Yes I did. But I really didn't want to. And it was because I couldn't afford one. There was a lawyer in my family, and his rates were free.
I just didn't want to call Uncle Fred. Because if Mary was going batty, it was nothing compared to the depths of crazy Fred could plunge into.
Though often not spoken of, male witches exist. A male witch is not a wizard, and neither are they a warlock. As the times have changed, so have our understandings of magic. Being a witch is not a feminine thing, it is just a specific method of practicing magic. And men are more than welcome to practice that way without feeling emasculated. So it was very PC these days to call your uncle and father a crone and to invite them into your coven.
But Uncle Fred... I would have to call him, I did know that, I just didn't relish what would happen next.
Likely he would get us off with no charges, but it would be an entirely unpleasant experience to watch. If Mary could be embarrassing, Fred would earn you a reputation that would haunt you for life.
I swallowed hard, stared down at my tea, and nodded my head. “I guess I had better.”
“As for your yard,” his chair creaked as he leaned back further.
“There is nobody buried there,” I said excitedly, realizing a little too late that I'd definitely chosen the wrong words. “Look, I mean, she is crazy. I get home from work, and she digs holes in the yard to make mud pies. Not to... you know.”
He still looked stony. “We are having Agents search your house and garden.”
I closed my eyes again, trying not to give a defeated, pathetic laugh lest the Agent think I was a crazy, drug-loving murderer.
This was just so fantastic. Agents searching the yard? Well good luck to them, because they would have to get through all the weeds first. Neither would they would find anything... much. No dead bodies, of course, they would however discover a lot of weird, truly bizarre junk. Glass jars full of decrepit buttons, heads pulled off dolls – that kind of crap. The stuff any functioning witch would always have on hand, but the kind of things that would lead any good policeman to become truly suspicious.
And that was just the yard; the house was a whole other beast. Hopefully they wouldn't go through it too carefully, because I really didn't relish the idea of what they would find.
I didn't need stress like this. I had enough going on in my life without adding all of this into the mix.
“If there's anything you would like to tell me,” he nodded towards me.
Oh there were a lot of things I would like to tell him. Like the fact that his jacket didn't fit right, that his blue tie was a little too dull, and that if he chose another color it would match his eyes. I also wouldn't mind telling him that my grandmother was completely innocent, that we were just a bunch of city witches, and that this whole thing was a misunderstanding.
I wasn't going to do that course.
“I think I need to call my lawyer,” I conceded.
He nodded his head.
I also needed to start taking charge.
Yes, I was currently a woman under a great deal of stress, but I was also a witch. And sitting there huddled into my jacket on that chair, staring into my crap tea was not utilizing the full range of my abilities.
My grandmother had always told me that the greatest magic of all can be produced when we are at our most anxious, fearful, and desperate. When the energies in a life come t
ogether with such tension is when we can pull them back to reveal the secrets within.
Taking in a deep breath, pushing it into my cheeks and puffing it out slowly, I realized I had to do something. Other than call my uncle, that was.
“How long exactly have you been living with your grandmother?”
I almost didn't hear his question; I was too busy wrapping myself up in my self-loathing, frustration, and general anger.
He repeated his question, and I looked up quickly. “Five years or so. I moved in after it became clear... she couldn't look after herself,” I quickly added. Because that was not why I had moved in. I had moved in after it had become clear that I could no longer live on my own. That didn't mean I was having trouble paying the bills or I needed some company around to stop me from getting lonely.
Unfortunately it meant something a little bit more nefarious.
Magic is a very complicated thing. There are good sides and there are bad sides; two heads to the same coin.
The practice of magic is not without its risk. Even when it is done right, and for the best intensions, it can still attract things. Dark things, terrible things, the kind of things that go bump in the night, but don't leave it there. The kind of things that crawl up from underneath your bed, wrap their tentacles around you, and drag you down to hell before they roast you and eat you alive.
The kind of magic I practiced was not the glitzy, powerful, sparkly kind. I never produced lightning from my fingers, and I hadn’t once parted the sea or used my wand to make objects fly towards me.
That being said, my magic happened to be one of the most powerful kinds out there. It was what you used if you needed to shift big things. Fireballs were great for small fights or if you wanted to impress somebody. They took a lot of energy over a short period, and what you got in the end was a fantastically bright ball of flame that could dent a car or burn through a pile of leaves. What you couldn't do with a fireball, however, was change governments. Shift hearts and minds, take a broken life and mend it.
Those with the big things. And for the big things you needed an entirely different type of magic. Zipping around on brooms, making candles burst into flame of their own accord, using your mind to make an apple appear before you could not heal a traumatized soul. It could not take someone who had been broken down by the hardships of life and give them hope.
For that you required influence. Context. Change context, change everything.
It was the most complex form of magic, but that answer alone could not satisfy Agent Fairweather's question.
The reason I had moved in with my grandmother, was that I was no longer safe on my own. Neither was she. Because we both practiced influence magic, the most powerful kind of magic out there, we were targets. Not just for the things that go bump in the night, but for our competitors.
Nasty competitors.
Because changing hearts and minds, shifting the values of a country, altering the course of history was a profoundly personal thing. Not everybody wanted the broken man down the street to get better. Not everybody wanted the woman with low self-esteem to finally find her true self and to blossom. Not everybody wanted a country to start accepting its minorities, a world to stop going to war.
Different people, different desires. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
I was under no illusion that I was a particularly powerful witch. While I talked of influence magic being able to alter the course of a country, I was nowhere near that level of power. I was the kind of girl you went to if you’d just fallen out of a bad relationship and needed to build yourself a new identity. People called me if they couldn't understand what was going wrong with their life, and needed to find a new source of meaning. I was a little bit more like a personal coach, a little bit less like a powerful sorceress shepherding the course of humanity.
That didn't mean that I hadn't made my enemies though. For every good witch out there that wanted to help you grow, there was somebody that wanted to use your weakness to feed their own power.
I'd made enemies. In my short career as a witch on my own, I had turned certain heads.
I'd received threats in the mail, spells in the postbox, I would come home at night to see my house ransacked, but not by your ordinary robber, by the kind that would leave enchantments painted across your walls in freshly dried chicken blood.
Not pleasant.
By moving in with my grandmother that had all stopped. There is safety in numbers, especially where witches are concerned. The magic number, that everyone knows, is three. You get three witches together, and you have safety, you have a coven, you have a place of purpose and meaning and growth.
There was only myself and my grandmother, but it had proved to be enough. In our enormous old, decrepit mansion, the threats had stopped, the bullying had ceased, and my life had settled down.
I pushed my teeth into my bottom lip, darted my gaze up to the man, and suddenly realized that I had just dwindled into the world’s longest and most awkward pause.
What should have been a fairly innocent comment, was quickly turning into something ridiculously suspicious. “I... guess I needed to look after her,” I added.
“What do you do?”
“I am... a secretary,” I said, my voice going up like a kazoo at the end as if it were a question.
Technically that was correct. I was a lot more however. I was a secretary during the day, but a witch at night.
I started to massage my neck and noticed how sweaty it was.
“I think I need to call my lawyer now,” I realized as the panic started to build.
He grabbed his phone, turned it around, and handed it to me. It was a heavy and pointed move.
Agent Fairweather was suspicious. For very good reasons, including a kilo of cocaine and a quip about digging a six-foot hole in the yard.
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms as he watched me intently dial the number.
I was starting to get bleary eyes and I could hardly breathe. Dragging my hand over my forehead, I let it shift down until I was hiding my eyes with it.
Come on, Uncle Fred, I told myself in my head, answer, answer the bloody phone.
“Hello there, Esmerelda,” he finally picked up.
How he knew it was me, considering I was calling not from my mobile but from Agent Fairweather's phone, I didn't ask. It would be magic, after all. “I sense you have a spot of legal trouble, my legal bones are shaking about, and I'm very good at reading them.”
“You could say that,” I said carefully.
Then I looked up sharply. Fairweather was still watching me, his eyebrows fully crumpled over his eyes. To him that would be a particularly weird way of answering the phone. No hello, no introduction, just a random statement.
I settled my fingers into the collar of my blouse, and I tried not to blink too much. I asked my uncle kindly to come down, told him a little bit of the story, and then hung up, feeling thankfully more secure than I had before. Fred would be a nightmare, but at least there would be a dawn after the dark, dark night. If anyone could solve this, he could.
“I guess I will wait for him to arrive,” I conceded in a quiet voice as I shot one more look Fairweather's way.
His arms were still crossed, his jaw was still locked, and he was still as hard as ever. He no longer reminded me of a scalpel, but of a sodding great broadsword. One that was directed straight at my throat.