“I apologize if I startled you. I was supposed to meet Aidan Rhodes. Is he here . . . ?” His gaze fell to the man slumped over the desk, and his eyes widened. “Is that him? What happened? Did you . . . ?”

  “That isn’t Aidan. And no, I didn’t. Who are you?”

  “I had an appointment with Mr. Rhodes.”

  “Mr. Rhodes hasn’t been here for some time. With whom did you make the appointment?”

  “With . . . a woman. His secretary, maybe? I didn’t think to ask her name. I made the appointment quite some time ago, as I was led to believe that Mr. Rhodes was a very busy man.” He gave me a charming smile, apparently not particularly disconcerted by the body on the desk. “Look, I know how it is, dealing with dead bodies on your desk. I’ll just leave you to it, come back another time.”

  “Hold it right there, pal. Who are you, and what did you want to talk with Aidan about?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid that’s rather personal.”

  “You can tell me. I’m filling in for him while he’s gone.”

  “Is that so?” He looked doubtful, his gaze sweeping over my vintage dress and Keds and my no-doubt haggard appearance after the long transatlantic flight. He, in contrast, looked fresh as a daisy, as though he had showered and changed before coming. “You were on my flight.”

  “Sure about that?”

  He seemed to relax. “You recognize me as well as I do you,” he said, sounding more confident now.

  His vibrations were guarded, making him very hard to read. A lot of cops, veterans, and practitioners maintained that kind of guard. I didn’t think he was dangerous, but I couldn’t be certain. Was he as hapless as he had at first appeared? Or might he have killed the man at Aidan’s desk, gone to the men’s room to wash his hands, and returned after realizing he had forgotten his pet bat?

  This is the kind of world I live in.

  “You pretended to tip your hat to me,” I said. “At the airport.”

  “You kept staring at me. Thought maybe we had a thing.”

  “Seriously?”

  He shrugged and flashed a crooked grin. “What can I say? I’ve got that boyish charm thing going. Women check me out.”

  “Not this woman. I was on my honeymoon.”

  “Were you, now? Then perhaps you shouldn’t be flirting with strange men.”

  “I was most certainly not flirting, what an egomaniacal—”

  “You most certainly were, madam, I—”

  The bat trilled loudly, interrupting our exchange and highlighting the absurdity of two strangers bickering about nonsense in the presence of a dead man. And a bat.

  “Is that your bat?”

  “My what?”

  “Your. Bat.” I enunciated.

  “Certainly. Not.” He replied in kind.

  I sighed. “Oh, never mind.”

  Clarinda suddenly appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” she said to me. “You can’t just waltz in here without a ticket, you know.”

  I had once helped to save Clarinda’s life. She had thawed toward me for a while after that, but apparently the Ice Age had returned.

  “Where were you earlier?” I demanded. “You weren’t in the ticket booth.”

  She smiled up at Mystery Man. He wasn’t all that good-looking, but I had to admit there was something intriguing about him. Clarinda’s expression soured when she turned her attention back to me.

  “Geez, I was in the freaking bathroom. Excuse me for having a bladder. Security was supposed to keep an eye on things. Like a person can’t go to the bathroom for a few minutes. With the kind of hours I work?” She finally noticed the body on the desk, and stilled. Her mouth gaped open. “What the hell?”

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, I mean . . . I sold him a ticket, I guess. I recognize the weird hair. It was a while ago. What did you do to him?”

  “I didn’t do anything to him,” I said. “I found him like this. Where’s Calypso?”

  “She didn’t come in today,” said Clarinda. “Needed a break, or whatever. I tried to cancel her appointments, but I guess I missed a few. So is he . . . ya know?”

  I nodded. “I was about to call the police.”

  “I’ll just be running along, then,” said the Mystery Man.

  “Ditto,” said Clarinda.

  “No one is going anywhere,” I said, grabbing a handkerchief from my dress pocket to pick up the phone. Mustn’t inadvertently obscure a murderer’s fingerprints. “The police will need to speak to both of you.”

  The Mystery Man started backing away. “I had nothing to do with this.”

  “Me, neither,” echoed Clarinda.

  “They’ll want to speak with y’all, anyway. Hey, don’t—,” I called out as the Mystery Man took off, with Clarinda hot on his heels.

  I raced to the door in time to see the two of them hurrying down the stairs.

  “Clarinda!” I yelled. “Where do you think you’re going? I know where you live!”

  Actually I didn’t, but I knew where she worked—here at the wax museum. And she seemed always to be here, stuck like a veal in that little ticket booth.

  A few curious tourists turned to look, but otherwise my words had no effect.

  “Dammit.”

  I returned to Aidan’s desk and placed a call to my old pal in the SFPD homicide department, Carlos Romero. I knew his cell number by heart.

  “Great party, Lily. Colorful. Makes my family’s get-togethers look positively tame.”

  “Thanks, Carlos, but I’m afraid I’m not calling about the party. I found a body.”

  “Already?”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  There was a pause. “Where are you?”

  “Aidan Rhodes’s office, at the wax museum.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “I think so. There are people around. Sort of.”

  “Go be with people. I’ll send the nearest unit and will be there as soon as I can. Don’t touch anything.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You’re holding the phone right now, aren’t you?”

  “Okay, I haven’t touched much. A paperweight. Oh, and a chair. I used a handkerchief for the phone, but I don’t have fingerprints anyway, remember?”

  “I remember. Just . . . get out of there and go someplace safe. I’ll find you.”

  “Okay.”

  The bat trilled again as I hung up. Its fur was reddish-brown, its broad black ears pointed forward, and its leathery wings were long and narrow. Its shining black eyes were so huge they were almost cartoonish. A very long pink tongue flicked from time to time.

  “Are you a familiar?” I asked. It sang back. I approached slowly and held out my hand. It didn’t flinch. If the bat was the dead man’s familiar, then the victim was likely a practitioner of some sort.

  I glanced down at Aidan’s appointment book. Written in a hand that did not belong to Calypso was an appointment for today, at this late hour, with one Dragomir Ivory.

  Dragomir Ivory?

  Ivory was my last name. My father’s last name.

  The dead man had to be in his fifties. Far too old to be my father’s child.

  The Mystery Man from the airplane, the one who said he had an appointment right now with Aidan Rhodes, was not.

  I gazed at the empty doorway.

  Had I just met my half brother?

  Chapter 5

  “Dragomir? What kind of name is Dragomir?” I asked the next afternoon at Aunt Cora’s Closet.

  I was annoyed, jet-lagged, and decidedly on edge. I had gotten a late start this morning and had spent much of the day catching up on my least favorite thing, aside from murder and laundry: business-related paperwork. Receipts, quarterly taxes, workers’ comp . . . it never seemed to end. In between yawns I had sketched the broad outlines of last night’s events for Conrad, Maya, and Bronwyn.

  “Actually, I sort of like that name,” said Bronwyn. “ ‘Dragomir’ sounds like something out of The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t it?”

  “Apparently it has Slavic roots,” said Conrad, staring at his phone. Conrad was tall and gaunt, with shaggy sandy hair. He was an addict who had recently gotten sober, helped in part by my special brews, but had not been able to find a job and so continued to live on the streets or in nearby Golden Gate Park. According to Bronwyn and Maya, while I was on my honeymoon Conrad had shown up every day to guard the store or to help with whatever needed doing.

  Now that I was spending much of my time running around the Bay Area scouting out clothes for the store and fighting demons and whatnot, it occurred to me that another pair of hands in the shop might be a good idea. I placed a protection spell on the store’s front door every morning, but it wasn’t foolproof, and enough odd things had happened that I didn’t like to leave anyone tending the shop alone.

  Maybe I should offer Conrad a job. If my math was correct, Aunt Cora’s Closet was doing well enough that I could afford it.

  Conrad continued, “According to this, ‘Dragomir’ means ‘to whom peace is precious.’ ”

  “Huh. Well, I certainly hope old Dragomir lives up to his name,” I muttered. “Otherwise, he might just . . .”

  What was I thinking? That the Mystery Man had killed the dead guy on the desk, mistaking him for Aidan Rhodes? And would that mean that I, or Calypso, or one of my friends, was next? Could he have been looking for something?

  I didn’t trust him, even before I learned that he might very well be my brother.

  Half brother. The son of our entirely untrustworthy father, who had attached himself briefly to my mother in the dusty West Texas town of Jarod, and then moved on. Given the way things usually went with me, not to mention the prophecy involving me or my brother, I doubted our sibling relationship would be a smooth one.

  Last night at the wax museum, while waiting for the police to arrive, I had called Calypso and was relieved to hear that she was alive and well, at her home in Bolinas.

  “Gracious, Lily,” Calypso said, “I assumed you’d come by tomorrow, not the very moment you got back!”

  “I thought it was urgent. Anyway, I found a dead man in Aidan’s office.”

  “You found a . . . what? Oh, no, you poor thing! Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. This ain’t my first rodeo, you know. Unfortunately.” I had stumbled across a body or two in my day. “I’m calling because a stranger was here a few minutes ago. European guy, who spoke excellent English. He said he had an appointment with Aidan, which was written down in the agenda. Did you make it for him?”

  “No, but Clarinda was taking appointments.”

  “What about a bat?”

  “A what?”

  “There’s a bat in the office.”

  “It’s not mine.” There was a beat. “Is it a familiar?”

  “I’m not sure. Could be; it seems pretty comfortable with people. Anyway, I should warn you that you’ll probably be hearing from the SFPD soon. I’ll have to tell Carlos Romero that you’ve been working in Aidan’s office.”

  There was a long pause. For many of us who color outside the lines, interactions with the authorities were anxiety producing, if not panic inducing. Over the course of several murder investigations I had become friends with Carlos Romero, but even so, in his official capacity as a homicide inspector he still occasionally incited hyperventilation.

  “Yes, of course you must,” Calypso said finally. “A man has died.”

  “I’m sorry about this, Calypso—”

  “It’s fine, Lily. The police would have found out about me eventually, anyway. Thank you for letting me know. It’s not a problem.”

  I put down the phone, worried. One reason I didn’t like phones was because I couldn’t feel the other person’s vibrations through the device. A landline was better than a cell phone, but not by much.

  Then I called Sailor.

  “I knew I should have driven you,” he grumbled.

  “You couldn’t possibly have foreseen something like this.”

  “I’m a psychic, remember?”

  “Not that kind of psychic.”

  “Anyway, I’d rather be by your side,” he said in that low growl that made my stomach flutter.

  “I know, and I appreciate it,” I said. “But your presence would just complicate matters. Besides, I don’t like you spending time around the SFPD.”

  “You and me both.”

  Sailor and Carlos had a fraught history, and though they had come to tolerate and respect each other, and Carlos had stood up with us at our handfasting, they were not exactly pals.

  Then the police arrived, and I spent a very, very long time talking to Carlos Romero. I gave him a minute-by-minute account of what I had seen and done, then hesitated for a moment, unsure whether or not to tell him about Dragomir Ivory, who might or might not be my brother. Finally, I did.

  “How is it you don’t know if he’s your brother?”

  “Complicated family history.”

  “So tell me, does this alleged brother take after your dad or your mom?”

  Carlos had dealt with my father before and didn’t have much good to say about him.

  “Same father, different mothers. And I’ve had exactly one interaction with my alleged half brother, so I honestly don’t know if he has any kind of relationship to my—our—father, magical or otherwise. Assuming, that is, we are in fact related.”

  “Okey dokey,” Carlos said, jotting something in his well-worn notebook. “Gotta say, Lily, you do live an interesting life. So let me get this straight: You don’t know if your brother’s your brother, and your husband isn’t really your husband.”

  “Sailor is my husband, in every way that counts. We just haven’t filed all the paperwork yet.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a cop. Take it from me: Paperwork matters. All those pesky laws and statutes, and whatnot,” he said with a grunt.

  Thinking about it now, I wondered: Had Carlos found out anything about “Dragomir Ivory” since last night? Or about the victim, such as who he was and why he was in Aidan’s office? Most importantly, had he been murdered, or might there be another explanation for his death?

  “Hello? Earth to Lily,” said Conrad, bringing me back to the present. “He might just . . . what?”

  “Hmm?” I asked.

  “You, like, stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.”

  I was standing at the counter in Aunt Cora’s Closet, my friends looking at me as if I had taken leave of my senses.

  “Oh, sorry, jet lag again,” I said with a jaw-cracking yawn. Not to mention I had been up half the night with a dead body and the fine fellows from the SFPD.

  “Poor dear, you’re dead on your feet,” Bronwyn said.

  Just then the bat, which I had kept in a box behind the counter, woke up and flew around the store, swooping and screeching and trilling. Luckily there were no customers in the shop at the moment, but Bronwyn, Maya, and the Con shrieked and ducked in surprise.

  The critter alit on an antique Edwardian ball gown I had draped high on the wall as a decoration and hung upside down from the fragile taffeta. I cringed, enough of a vintage clothes connoisseur to worry that the little creature’s claws might shatter the silk.

  “Forgot to mention that I found a bat at the scene of the crime last night,” I said.

  “Awesome!” said Conrad. “Dude. I love bats. They eat, like, tons of mosquitoes, and the Con does not like mosquitoes.”

  Carlos had given me a pained expression when he spied the creature in Aidan’s office, but when I told him it might be magical he suggested I should take care of it unless I wanted him to call animal control. Carlos didn’t really believe in magic . . . and yet, he did.

  When I brought it back to the apartment, Sailor teased me about being a stereotypical witch, walking around with a bat in the dead of night.

  “What are you going to do with it?” asked Maya, looking concerned.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t just leave it there.”

  “He’s a cute little guy,” said Conrad. “Like a little cartoon character come to life.”

  If the bat were indeed the dead man’s familiar, then I hoped it might be able to tell me what had happened. Unless it was simply the victim’s exotic pet. Or the killer’s . . . ? Or, what did I know; maybe the bat was a part of something Aidan had been doing before he was injured, and the poor little guy had been hanging out in the wax museum, forgotten and neglected.

  The bat’s pink tongue stuck out and its huge eyes gleamed, as if interested in our discussion. It took flight again, and landed on Conrad’s head. The Con grabbed it and flipped it into his arms to cradle it.

  “I like him,” said Conrad. “Can we keep him?”

  Bronwyn, mixing teas behind her stand, chuckled. “Maya’s parents took Loretta-the-dog when Lily brought her home, and I took Beowulf-the-cat before that. I guess this one’s for you, Conrad.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I said. “After all, we don’t even know how to care for a bat. What do they eat? How do they drink?”

  “The Con is on it,” Conrad said, using his free hand to scroll through his phone. “This site is full of information. Looks like he needs an enclosure of some kind. Dude.”

  Those phones are veritable fonts of information, I thought. Maybe I really should consider giving in to modern life. One of these days.

  For the moment, I needed to concentrate on the tasks at hand. But my mind kept returning to the dead man, slumped across Aidan’s desk. What had caused his death? I hadn’t seen any blood or obvious wounds or marks. Could he have died from natural causes, a heart attack or a stroke? Or something more insidious, like poison? And who was the poor man? Did his potentially untimely demise have anything to do with the sudden appearance of Dragomir Ivory, my purported half brother?