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“Pipe the hell down.” Quill nudged me in the shoulder. “Go on. Get out of here. And don’t you ever forget that your good friend Quilliam J. Abernathy volunteered to be your getaway driver at no cost to you whatsoever.”
I grumbled as I clambered out of his car. I pushed the door shut, but not before I caught Quill grumbling on his own. “See if you can find a rideshare willing to do that for you. I could be at home, reading.”
Jerk.
With my teeth clenched and the garden shears gripped in one hand, I made a beeline for the Rodriguez house. It wasn’t a tough place to break into at all. The garden walls were just trellised fences, the kind with slats in them that made it convenient for both vines and people to climb up and over.
Easy peasy. I slipped into the garden without incident, my only real concern bringing one of the fences down with me. They were delicate, hardly sturdy enough to offer the house any real privacy and protection. And truthfully, that got me a little more concerned. It suggested that whoever lived in this house – a death witch, of course – was confident enough in her power that she didn’t need mundane forms of security.
Finding further proof that I was probably right only made me more nervous. Looking around the compound, I couldn’t really see any signs of a security system. There was no whir and click of cameras, no glint of their lenses up under the eaves. No dogs, either. I stayed close to the ground, scanning the gardens for something – a chained up guard zombie, a chattering skull that relayed security footage directly to Monica’s brain, anything – but the coast was clear. Monica was either really relaxed about this sort of stuff, or she had other protections in place.
I was leaning heavily towards relaxed, however, mainly because the Obsidian Rose was just sitting out in the open. Quilliam had briefed me about it, passing on Leonora’s instructions. The Rodriguez house was full of greenery, a garden that the family had always been very proud of. The Rose, he said, would be found opposite some glass doors leading into the back of the house. That was the biggest risk, of course, that someone hanging out near the patio would spot me.
But I was there already, lurking in the bushes, my nostrils filling with the perfume of night flowers, the damp air of the evening settling like wet film on my skin. The Obsidian Rose was sitting in full view, its petals like shards of perfect black glass, its stem like that of a champagne flute, studded with wicked black thorns, wreathed in leaves cut out of midnight.
It looked so brittle and so delicate that I had to second guess using the shears Quill gave me, but that was clearly the best option. The Obsidian Rose, so he said, was transferred from garden to garden depending on which woman in the Rodriguez clan was designated its new grand witch, often the youngest as she reached a certain age. Brought to that heiress’s garden, the Rose would set down roots and integrate itself with the surrounding vegetation. That meant that its stalk would, at the very least, be as tough and as thorny as something from a regular rose bush. Seeing that everything was clear, I crept up to the Rose, set the jaws of the shears around its crystalline base, and snapped it off its stem.
That was what I’d expected to happen. The shears jammed right in my hands, as if the Rose’s stem was made out of an even harder metal. My chest thumped with fresh panic as I tried again and again to cut the rose out of its bush, the shears failing each time.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, finally giving up and reaching out to the Vestments for a different tool that would help me. Did they have gigantic golden scissors stocked up in heaven’s armories? What would they even use them for, I wondered? I was about to find out.
But before the Vestments could respond, something slipped around my ankles and tightened, holding me in place. My blood froze. I shifted, fighting to break free, but whatever had looped around my feet had me locked there tight. I couldn’t risk falling over, either – I was pretty sure that was going to end in a pair of broken ankles.
A woman with black hair in beautiful, tumbling curls and lips as red as blood came strutting out of the darkness, her arms folded, her eyes flashing with displeasure. She wore a maroon sweater over some dark jeans, dressed not at all like how I imagined a bruja might look. Then again, Leonora had looked nothing like a death witch, either.
“Well, well,” said the woman who I presumed to be Monica Rodriguez, death witch and professional abuela torturer. “Now, who could be out here rustling in my favorite rose bush?”
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“Lady, I’m not hassling your bush,” I said, giving myself the best drunken slur I could muster, which is kind of a challenge when you’ve never been drunk. I just had to pray that I was a really talented actor. “Just passin’ through. I dunno how I ended up in your yard, but if you could get this garden hose off my legs, I’ll be more than happy to get out of your hair and – ”
“What’s that in your hand, then?”
Damn it. I should have shoved the stupid shears in my pockets. Monica grabbed them from me, tutting as she snapped them open and shut some menacing inches away from my body.
“Liar,” she snarled. “I should use these to twist your cojones right off your body.”
“Whoa,” I said, instantly dropping the drunk act. “I’m really attached to those, lady. No need to get violent.”
“Then tell me why you’re in my garden.”
“Look,” I said. “I’ll talk if you loosen these restraints. It’s a really clever trap you’ve got going, but these rope things are really starting to hurt.”
Monica cocked one perfect eyebrow at me, then clapped her hands. Floodlights instantly came on from under the eaves and just above the sliding door. I looked down at my feet, and my jaw dropped in horror.
They weren’t enchanted ropes or wires. I was trapped in place by a pair of skeletal hands. Dry, bony fingers locked in a threatening death grip around my ankles. My socks had made it hard for me to tell from the texture, but now that I knew, my skin was absolutely crawling.
“We can stay here and stare each other down all night, gringo,” Monica purred. “Or I can make this quick. I can make those hands squeeze tighter and tighter, and see which breaks first: your spirit, or your legs.”
“Now, now,” I said, my hands shaking as I raised them. “There’s no need for violence. We can talk this out.”
“Then start talking. And while you’re at it, tell me why you brought an accomplice who doesn’t actually help, and whose only purpose is to gawk at you from across the garden wall.”
I struggled and stretched to look over my shoulder, my eyes flitting across the gardens. I grimaced when I found Quilliam peering through the slats in the trellised fences, the fingers of his leather gloves poking through. You couldn’t tell his expression through his pointless sunglasses, but he looked very much like a peeping Tom who’d been caught in the act. Had he been watching the whole time?
Monica shook her head and sighed. She snapped her fingers, and the bones clamped around my ankles released me. The soil parted, allowing the skeletal hands to sink back into the earth. Then the grass clumped together over the same spot, leaving the lawn perfect and unmarked, as if nothing had passed through.
“You two are probably the most inept trespassers I’ve seen on these grounds yet,” Monica barked. “Bring your stupid friend. Come on in and let’s talk. I’ll fix you some hot chocolate.”
