“Wouldn’t have taken the job if he hadn’t,” said Heath, digging through his backpack for candles and a pale green felt poppet. “But that’s an issue for tomorrow.”

  Heath straightened up and gave his friends a smile that wasn’t his father’s, or his uncle’s, or even his mother’s. It was all his, a little high on the left side, a hint of a wink to his right eye, and a real sense of pleasure from within.

  “Right now, it’s time for me to introduce that karcist bitch to some down home gris-gris.”

  5

  A white marble kitchen island with pink and blue swirls felt like a downright surreal place for Heath to light candles, burn incense, and cast spells. The whole airy kitchen felt wrong for his kind of work, surrounded by white oak cabinets and brushed-steel appliances and hardwood floor. His own work space smelled like old herbs and camphor, and it had herbs hanging from the ceiling to dry, handmade candles everywhere — a proper rootworker’s habitat.

  Casting in Colin’s kitchen felt like he’d been hired by Martha Stewart to hex Oprah on a shoot for Better Homes and Gardens.

  The thought made Heath chuckle, especially after his tense moment with Colin, and he heard Nariko and Colin shift back and forth where they stood behind him with their Teufelsbrau IPAs. Curious, but unwilling to interrupt Heath to ask.

  He’d tell them later. If he remembered. But first, he had two bits of work to do.

  Two piles of red-brown hair in front of the censer. The bigger pile he slid to the side, next to the pale green felt poppet, a fine-point black marker, three strands of Devil’s Shoestring, a packet of red chili powder, and a few other things he’d need later.

  It was the smaller pile that mattered first. No point in reaching out for poppet work when Salt Bitch – so nicknamed because she’d drawn a sigil in salt back at Foxy – had to have defenses in place. Heath even had some idea of what kind.

  All those western ceremonialists – karcists, as some of them called themselves – made a twice-daily-or-more habit of their banishing rituals, which Heath thought was ridiculous. Cleansing and banishing were like bleaching a cutting board. A good idea every once in a while, but do it too often and the meat starts tasting funny.

  And most of them didn’t stop there. Most of them finished those too-frequent banishings with extra protective spells, and maybe shoved more magic into an amulet or two, engraved in some precious metal or other.

  No, Heath couldn’t count on being able to reach out and smack Salt Bitch like she was just some hapless banking executive. But there were ways of slipping in past defenses, for those who had a little subtlety and patience.

  So Heath laid out other herbs and frosted glass vials and three powdery incenses he was considering. Truth was, so much of hoodoo, for Heath, came down to knowing how to work with what he had, rather than following the kinds of recipes found in musty old tomes. Or even musty relatively recent tomes, like the ones Colin used.

  Finally he pulled the cork out of a vinegar-filled blue-glass bottle that he could hide in his hand, and set the bottle and cork right next to the censer where he could grab them quickly. Next to them he placed a narrow strip of red ten bark, and a piece of scarlet string.

  Heath picked up a tiny stem of orange wanderwood and twisted it around the smaller pile of hair, and as he did he mumbled to it. “Some pants fit like a second skin and you don’t know they’re there. Good shirt’ll be like that too. Little wanderwood, you just wrap that hair up tight, and you wrap Salt Bitch up with it like a second skin. You do that for me.”

  Once the wanderwood was coiled tight, Heath held up his first backup vial of holy water. He poured a drop on the hair. “One body.” He poured another drop. “One mind.” A third drop. “One soul.”

  Next he tipped a drop of Church Oil onto his thumb, and anointed the hair as he said, “With water I baptize you, and with oil I anoint you. Salt Bitch is your name.”

  He did that twice more.

  Three dried pine needles went onto the coal next, just enough juice left in them to let out an echo of their scent as they burned. Then a single finger-like leaf of silverweed, adding a tang to the faint smell of pine. Finally he dropped in asafetida, a leaf so rank that Heath could hear Nariko and Colin quick-step to the corners of the kitchen as the odor reached them.

  Heath held the hair and wanderwood in the gray smoke, turning them left and right so every little bit got bathed in the fumes.

  “Seep and bank,” cooed Heath to the hair. “Seep and bank, Salt Bitch. Ease in like a mist they do. Nothing to see as they come. Nothing to hear. Nothing to smell. Nothing to feel. Nothing to taste. They follow the wanderwood, and the wanderwood is part of you now. Twined in and mixed up and all the same. Seeping right into you they come, and what they carry you can’t resist.”

  Heath smiled. “But don’t you fret none, Salt Bitch. These little herbs can’t hurt you. Too small. Too minor. Not so much as a buzz or a chirp. Won’t even touch you. They’ll stick along the wanderwood, yes they will. They’ll stick along the wanderwood and coat you thick and tight. Cozy they are, like sweet warm spring air after a cold tax assessor’s office.”

  Heath licked a pennyroyal leaf, savored the acrid-mint taste, and wrapped that leaf around the hair and wanderwood. “And here are your shields.” Another. “Your armor.” Another. “Your defenses.” Another, and now the hair and twisted stick were entirely surrounded by pennyroyal. “All the little magics you put between you and the world around you to keep you safe.”

  Heath took his thumbnail and scratched a pentacle onto one leaf. He put a drop of Abramelin Oil on his thumb and rubbed it into the pentacle.

  “Sealed by Solomon himself, just like all those old books tell you to do.”

  Heath pinched the tiny, barely visible tip of the wanderwood and held the bundle over the smoke again. He tapped the pennyroyal leaves free so they fell onto the coal. The leaves were green still, and started smoldering before they would ever catch fire, though the oil helped.

  But Heath wasn’t watching. He was already tying the hair and wanderwood to the red ten bark with the piece of scarlet string. His fingers whirled as they wound it tight and finished with a quick knot. He shoved the bundle down into the little vinegar bottle and slapped its cork back into place.

  “Right,” he said aloud to himself. “Defenses burning away and the moment they’re gone” – Heath pointed to the blue-glass bottle – “she’ll be just befuddled enough that she won’t get them back in place before I finish Phase Two.”

  “It’s like watching an evil Iron Chef,” said Colin.

  “Hush!” said Nariko. “It’s puppet time!”

  Heath gave her a cockeyed grin and wiggled his eyebrows.

  Heath was glad of the taste of the Teufelsbrau India Pale Ale on his tongue, and even of the slight buzz the two strong beers had given him. Made the roadside dung odor of the asafetida – only slightly moderated by the acrid mint of the burning pennyroyal – more tolerable.

  He hoped Colin wouldn’t have trouble getting the stink out of his beautiful kitchen. Though Heath had to admit that a tiny part of him felt good at giving the photo-quality décor a lived-in touch, even if in smell and not in appearance. Heath suspected that Nariko – hiding from that smell over in one corner of the kitchen – knew this about him. That perverse tendency was probably part of the reason she liked to have him over to her parents’ house.

  Heath took a step to his left, where the pale green felt poppet lay awaiting its fate on a swirl of pink and blue in the white marble of the kitchen island. Heath sewed all his own poppets by hand, and this one was the length of that hand, a little over seven inches. With no distinguishing characteristics, the poppet could serve equally well for a male or female target, depending on his needs at the time.

  Next to the poppet he had already laid out some of what he expected to need. A fine-point black marker, three strands of Devil’s shoestring, a packet of red chili powder, and a pile of herb packets he could dig through as needed.

  The marker was first. He wrote “Salt Bitch” on the front, and underneath that he added, “Property of Heath Cyr.” He flipped the doll over and pulled down a short, black zipper sewn into the back.

  Heath picked up the three pieces of Devil’s shoestring. He smacked them five times on his own left wrist, then held them up before his face and fanned them out. “Little of my own pain to wake you up, Devil’s shoestring. You and me, we’ve got work to do and a score to settle, and I think we can do both at the same time.” He smacked the three strands five times on his other wrist. Then he smacked the poppet on the head and belly, five times each, in an alternating pattern.

  He slipped the Devil’s shoestring inside the poppet.

  Heath picked up the packet of chili powder next and addressed its spirit as he had the Devil’s shoestring’s.

  “You and me, we know each other already, chili powder. And you know the kind of work I ask you to do. And this Salt Bitch, I guaran-damn-tee you she’s got it coming. Tried to kill me and my friends, and messed up a good restaurant in the process.”

  Heath put five pinches of chili powder inside the poppet.

  A single shaving of cedar wood went in next, with Heath telling it how Salt Bitch threw fire without worrying what she burned. Then three bits of licorice root, activated by some of Heath’s own saliva. And finally three pinches of rich, whiskey-soaked tobacco, prayed over in the name of Papa Legba.

  Heath zipped up the doll, then baptized it with holy water and anointed it with church oil, naming it Salt Bitch, and this he did nine times.

  Heath had some good, fine pins waiting in his backpack, not to mention a knife. And he had a burning coal not much more than a foot and a half from him. He had all kinds of ways he could hurt Salt Bitch for what she did.

  But that was what his uncle would have done, and his uncle was still a fresh thought in Heath’s mind. Uncle Andre would have used that poppet for something truly nasty. Maybe even nastier than Heath could imagine, and he could imagine quite a bit.

  Heath could have done a bunch of those things too. If he didn’t mind the risk of turning into his uncle.

  Instead Heath held that poppet up in both hands and addressed all the saints and gods and anyone else who might be listening in.

  “Papa Legba, hear me. Papa Legba, hear this words of this little fool. Papa Legba, carry my words to all the Lwa, and if you judge my words worthy, carry them all the way to the Highest High.”

  Heath bowed his head and drew a slow breath.

  “By the love that Jesus Christ bears for all us little sinners, I swear that this woman I call Salt Bitch tried to kill me and my friends today. She asked me to not do something I promised to do – something that she gave me no reason to believe would hurt her or hers – and when I refused her she gave killing me her best shot.”

  Heath drew the sign of the cross three times.

  “By the words of the man who taught me, I have the right to kill her. By the deeds I have seen my peers perform, I have the right to kill her. By the need to preserve my own life, I have the right to kill her. But I do not want to kill her. So I see only one way out.”

  Heath dug into his backpack for purple string and pulled out a spool the size of his fist of royal purple eighth-inch cord. He set down the poppet and held up the spool. He drew the sign of the cross over it, then a pentacle, then another cross.

  “In nomine patri, et fili, et esiritu sancti.”

  Heath began to coil purple cord around the poppet.

  “In the name of Jesus Christ, I bind your power. Magic will not answer your call. In the name of Jesus Christ I bind your power. Angels will not answer your call. In the name of Jesus Christ I bind your power. Spirits of this earth will not answer your call. In the name of Jesus Christ I bind your power. Demons will not answer your call. In the name of Jesus Christ I bind your power. Familiars will not answer your call.”

  Over and over Heath repeated those words as he wrapped the poppet in purple cord. Until at last it was entirely enveloped. Only then did he finally cut that cord, and knot it, saying, “One way out. Make amends for what you did today. Make amends to me, to my friends, to your vessel, to your vessel’s lover, and to the restaurant. Only then, if God and the Lwa see fit, may your magic return.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Nariko from her corner of the kitchen, the dark glass bottle of her current beer gripped tightly in her fist. “All that work for a little binding?”

  “Didn’t sound so little to me,” said Colin, from the opposite corner. He was dangling his beer by the neck. “Lotta conditions for getting her magic back.”

  Heath said nothing as he grabbed his third Teufelsbrau IPA from the fridge. This would be his last of the night, despite the half-case still chilling in Colin’s well-stocked fridge. He popped the top and took a long pull, forcing himself to focus on the taste of the beer, the wet chill of the bottle in his hand.

  Anything but the spells he just cast. Even a momentary mental distance helped seal them off.

  Besides, Heath had always found beer good for grounding himself in the mundane after working magic.

  “She has information we may need,” said Nariko. “It would have been nice if you at least compelled her to help us.”

  “He did better than compel,” said Colin. “Any help she gives us has to be willing.”

  “Anytime you two are finished backseat casting, let me know.”

  Heath stepped back up to the marble island and dropped the lid back on the bedpan, sealing off the smoke and giving them all a rest from the rank odor of burning asafetida in the censer. He set down his beer and started cleaning up by shoveling herb packets back into his backpack.

  “You’re not your uncle,” said Nariko, in the same firm tone she’d said the same words at least a dozen times before. But what followed was different, at least. “Compulsion for defense is hardly the same thing he’d do.”

  “That’s not why.” He paused with his sigil-covered incense box in his hand. “She was stupid and clumsy. Hired help, at best, trying to make a name for herself with a big show.”

  Heath leaned back against the counter and folded his arms, incense box still in one hand.

  “The vessel she used, that guy’s going to need years of therapy. His lover too. Their relationship might not survive it. Salt Bitch probably hurt even more people physically, with smoke inhalation if not fire. And Foxy is losing money every hour it’s closed, on top of whatever damage she did. Who knows if they can even afford to re-open.”

  Heath smacked his incense box against one palm.

  “That’s a whole lot of lives and livelihoods messed up because she was stupid and clumsy. She’s got no business using magic. Maybe if she figures out how to make reparations to those she harmed, maybe then she’ll develop some sense of responsibility.”

  “Noble,” said Nariko, “but in the meantime anything she does know is lost to us.”

  Heath tucked his incense box down into his backpack.

  “Maybe not,” said Colin. “I might be able to use my pendulum to figure out which hospital the ambulance took her to.”

  “A map would work just as fast for that,” said Heath, organizing his herbs. “We were either closer to OHSU or Legacy, and the ambulance will go to the closer one. She might be out by now anyway.”

  “Fine,” said Colin. “Use logic. Then I shall summon the mighty powers of my laptop to see what mysteries they can reveal to us.”

  Colin turned and left the kitchen, and the moment Heath heard Colin’s shoes reach the carpet, Nariko stepped in close.

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she said, barely loud enough for Heath to hear over the sounds of Colin setting up his computer in the dining room. “But you could have used her as a link to find the people who hired her. Even if she knew nothing, you could have used her to learn things we need to know.”

  Heath bit the inside of his cheek to hold back the words, “That’s what your mother would have done.” Which just went to show that he had learned something since they broke up.

  “There are enough people after this book that it may not matter,” he said. “And besides, by morning we’ll figure out who she is, and from there it’s a short step to who she’s working for. And don’t forget, she does owe us now, if she ever wants to cast another spell.”

  Heath smiled, and somewhere inside those jade eyes of hers, Nariko looked like she wanted to smile back. But that smile had no real chance of reaching her lips. Not when she had a point to make.

  “This time,” she said, louder now to match Heath, but both of them still quiet. “This route may have worked for us this time, but before this business is all said and done, it’s going to get ugly. And I think you know that. Tell me you’re ready to do what needs doing, or I’m out.”

  Nariko quirked her lips in an echo of Heath’s own smile, but her eyes were serious.

  “I still say you’re too pretty to be a corpse. But I won’t watch you kill yourself trying to be noble.”

  “I’ll do what needs doing,” said Heath, an icy sensation building in his gut as he said the words. “But if – all right, when – this gets ugly, it won’t be because I dragged it into the gutter.”

  “Good enough,” she said, and they clinked beer bottles and drained the contents.

  Colin came back into the room and Heath said, “What’s the good news?”

  “The good news,” said Colin in a flat tone, “is that she won’t be troubling anyone else with her magic. Her name was Brenda Killingworth, and according to the latest news report, she just died en route back to the hospital.” Colin made air quotes as he added, “Heart failure.”

  Heath found himself thinking that a fourth beer might not be such a bad idea after all.

  6

  “Three of my helpers were eaten last night.”