No. Even if he had people here 24/7, they would still want something to make sure that all the doors and windows stayed closed.
Nick’s hand on my arm tightened like a blood pressure monitor. His voice, when he spoke, was low, practically a whisper. “Ferro, I need you to do exactly what I say right now. Can you do that?”
I looked up at the ceiling to see what had gotten him so spooked and my whole body felt like I’d decided to take a dip in the Arctic.
There, wrapped in some sort of white material, was a human shaped object. I could see black dress shoes poking out from the bottom. Something had attached the mummified form to the ceiling, pinned there like a butterfly on display.
The form twitched.
“What—”
“Ferro, I want you to walk out the way you came in, and when you get outside, call 9-1-1,” King said. I heard some metallic jangling behind me and felt the cuffs slip off my wrists.
As soon as my hands were free, I shook my arms. But, like I knew he would, King had been careful about the cuffs. There wasn’t even a mark to show that I had been wearing them.
“You want me to leave you inside with whatever monster McCallum left to guard his house?” I asked. “Because I’m not doing that.”
“Ferro —”
I might not like King after he arrested me, but there was very little chance I was going to leave him inDerek McCallum’s housewhen there was clearly something nasty on the loose.
Nine times out of ten, that was how the movie got its next victim. The person who said, “This doesn’t look good. I’m going home where there isn’t a murderer on the loose,” was always the one who ended up hanging from their neck in the next scene.
I had no desire to be the creature’s next victim. If it was a creature. Maybe McCallum had some magic going on that mummified anybody who tried breaking into his house. If we walked around and looked at all the ceilings, would we see a collection of potential burglars and cops serving arrest warrants?
“Let me just try something,” I murmured.
I bent down, pressing my palms to the wooden floor.
“Witchcraft?” King said. But I saw him pulling out a notebook and a pen, and I raised an eyebrow.
“Says the alchemist,” I said.
“Hey, alchemy is a legitimate form of practicing magic,” King said. “And I’m registered with the police, so they consider any alchemy I do on the job legal.”
“Are you saying that witchcraftisn’ta legitimate form of practicing magic?” I said, amused, curious to see if he was even aware of the bias he’d just shown.
“I never — that’s not what — I understand that there are debates, butIwould never —”
I waved him off with some amusement and pointed to his pad of paper. “Trust me when I say that we can have the witchcraft versus alchemy debate when we aren’t trapped in a mobster’s house with whatever did that.”
Jerking my chin towards the ceiling, my eyes went to King’s partner. Was he even still alive? The foot twitched again, but that might just as well have been neurons firing from a dead brain.
“I’m going to protect him while he’s up there,” King murmured. “Can you —”
The end of that sentence was clearly not coming, so I filled in the blank myself. “Keep us safe? Yeah, I can do that. Kitchen witch, remember?”
Even among witches, kitchen witches have a bit of a reputation. They’re known for being able to improvise in spell work, in ways that are both creative and frightening. My sister, the head priestess of her coven, once used a paperback book, a handful of thumbtacks, and some honey to make a rat trap when she had an infestation at her café.
The end result had been… Well, I’d helped to clean it up, and she still owed me for it, because I saw things that no human should see. But she’d killed every single rat.
Fortunately for my stomach and King’s sanity, although my sister and I had been trained by our foster mother in kitchen witchcraft together, I was no kitchen witch. The magic I used was more dangerous, the sort of thing I couldn’t have Detective King knowing about. He might’ve turned a blind eye to it once, when we were both facing down a dangerous poltergeist, but I couldn’t tempt fate by trying it a second time unless our lives were in imminent danger.
I crouched on the floor, taking out a piece of chalk to draw a couple of spells on the ground. The first was nothing more than an alarm spell, like setting up a row of bells that surroundedme and King. At least this way we could hear if something was approaching us, even if it was invisible.
The next spell I drew had a similar intent to whatever King was doing. It was a protection spell, acting like a bubble that would resist anything trying to get close to us.
I wasn’t particularly good at spellcraft. It always left me feeling off kilter, as though I’d been woken from a nap suddenly. That woozy, uncertain feeling you get when you aren’t sure if you’re awake or asleep. Only with me, the anxiety was whether the spell would work.
