Call Of The Witch (15 page)

I shook my head. “I’m not tired.”

Her smile returned, only now it was thin and
seductive. “Neither am I.”

“
I thought you were
cutting me off from sex.”

“
You know how to turn it
back on.”

“
The ritual?”

“
Is it such a chore for
you?”

“
Lilith, we don’t have to
do it just yet. There’s still plenty of time for that.”

She reached out, took my hand and coaxed me
to my feet. “I don’t understand your hesitation, Tony.” She wrapped
her hands around my waist and pulled me in. Our bodies touched. I
felt her breasts, firm against my chest. I slipped my hands behind
her, lifted her shirttail and cupped her cheeks.

“
Can’t we take it slowly?”
I said.

She rocked up on tiptoes and kissed me. I
flexed my arms, lifting her off the floor. She could feel me now.
She had my attention. I let her down but she kept her weight
pressed against me.

“
Slow is good,” she said,
grinding softly. “I like it like that.”

“
That’s not what I
meant.”

“
I know what you
meant.”

She slipped her hands into my back pockets. I
surged forward, fearful I might stop thinking with my brain.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about that. I felt her hands
rip from my pockets almost as soon as they went in. She palmed my
chest and pushed me away. “What the…?”

“
What?”

She held up a pair of panties. “Whose are
these?”

“
Oh those,” I said, and I
laughed callously. “I can explain.”

She unfurled them and held them up to my
face. “You can explain women’s panties in your pocket?”

“
They’re not women’s
panties. Look at them. They’re girls’ underwear.”

“
Excuse me?” She wadded
them up and threw them at me. “Now I see what your problem
is.”

“
My problem?” She turned
and started down the hall toward the bedroom. I started after her,
following on her heels. “Lilith, wait. That’s not my
problem.”

She stopped and did an about face, and though
I almost ran her over, she did not budge. “Then what is your
problem?”

“
I don’t have a problem.”
I held up the underwear. “These belong to the girl that was
kidnapped this afternoon. Carlos and I found them on a suspect we
questioned.”

“
Of course, and did you
take them off her forcefully, or did you schmooze them off
her?”

“
Schmoozed? Nobody
schmoozed anybody. Our suspect was a man, and he wasn’t wearing
them. He was carrying them on his person.”

“
Oh.” Her expression
softened. “So why do you have`em?”

“
I thought you might do
something with them.”

“
What, you want me to try
them on? Is that your angle? You want to play innocent schoolgirl
meets big bad police man?”

“
Huh?”

“
You got a kinky streak I
don’t know about?”

“
Kinky? Good God woman.
What’s wrong with you?”

“
What’s wrong with me?
What’s wrong with you? That’s perverted even by my
standards!”

“
Nothing’s wrong with me.
I’m talking about you doing something witchy on them.”

“
Like what?”

“
I don’t know. Maybe you
could do a reading. You know like you did back at the research
center in Doctor Lieberman’s workshop.”

“
You want me to do a
psychometric reading?”

“
Yes.”

“
No, Tony, I’m sorry.
Psychometry isn’t in my repertoire. That was Valerie’s
thing.”

“
But you know how it’s
done, don’t you?”

“
I’m telling you. It won’t
work.”

“
There must be something
you can do.”

“
What?”

“
Anything.”

I could see her hedging, which was better
than a direct no. I held the underwear up again to help her gauge
the age of the child we were discussing. “Please. She’s just a
kid.”

She took a breath and let it out with a sigh.
“I don’t know. Maybe….”

“
Yes?”

“
Maybe I can try
scrying.”

“
I tried that
already.”

“
You tried
scrying?”

“
Yes. It didn’t
work.”

She seemed impressed. “Did you use sand?”

“
No. I used
salt.”

She shook her head. “Sand’s better. But it’s
gotta be New Castle sand.”

“
Why?”

“
It gives the girl a home
advantage.”

“
That makes
sense.”

She snatched the panties from my hands.
“What’s her name?”

“
The girl?”

“
No, the panties. Yes, the
girl!”

“
Brewbaker,” I said.
“Kelly Brewbaker. She’s nine. We believe she was abducted twelve,
maybe thirteen hours ago.”

“
Thirteen…?” I could tell
from her expression that that timeline did not sit well with her.
“Come. We’ll have to hurry.” She led me into the kitchen where a
quick search through her spice collection yielded a small bottle of
sugary white sand. She brought it to the table. I pulled a chair
out for her. She sat. I pulled a second chair out and took the seat
perpendicular to hers.

“
You keep sand in with
your spices?” I asked, pointing at the bottle with a suspect
smirk.

“
Of course, where else
would I keep it?”

“
Lilith, I’ve used that
before as salt.”

“
Well, it is beach sand. I
suppose it’s salty.”

“
No. I mean I used it
thinking it was salt.”

“
Yeah? Did it make your
food salty?”

“
No. It made my food
sandy.”

“
Well, duh, what did you
expect? It’s sand.”

I let it go, not seeing the point in arguing
with her. Instead, I brought up my attempt at scrying back at the
station. “It wasn’t a total failure,” I told her. “I did see a
great map of new Castle. I just couldn’t see where Kelly was.”

She dismissed me cold. “Then it was a
failure.”

I gave her that one. “So what makes you think
it’ll work now?”

“
Three reasons,” she said.
“First, because this time we’ll be using sand, the proper medium
for a search and rescue endeavor. Secondly, it’s because I’ll be
doing the scrying and not you. No offence.”

“
None taken.”

“
And thirdly, it’s because
we’re going to intensify our attempt with a cross-application
approach.”

“
How’s that?”

“
Look. I did this a few
times in Doctor Lieberman’s class. It’s not exactly psychometry,
and it’s not strictly scrying. It’s a combination of
both.”

“
I thought you couldn’t do
Psychometry.”

“
Technically, I can’t. But
I can improvise. As you probably know, psychometry is a method of
reading latent images recorded in ordinary objects left by ones
psychic aura in the things they touch or come in contact with. The
theory behind that belief derives from the understanding that the
mind is a multi-dimensional abstraction of constituent energy. That
energy is ever flowing. Ever flowing that is, when generated
proportionally to the rate of exhaustion, with residual dissipation
of varying degrees. That varied amount feeds the spirit within. As
a sensitive, I’m able to tap into the essence of that entity,
harnessing the non-somatic forces driving it, and hopefully
eliciting a metaphysical response.”

“
English, Lilith.” I
reached out, grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “Tell me what the
hell that means in English.”

“
It means I can’t read the
past from material objects, but I may be able to connect with Kelly
through her Met Tet.”

“
What’s that?”

“
Met Tet? It’s a voodoo
term. Think of it as the spirit in your head, like a guardian
angel. We all have one. Sometimes we listen to it. Sometimes we
don’t.”

“
Oh, so you’re into voodoo
now?”

“
Tony.” She grazed me with
a stabbing glare. “All religions are based on intangible forces of
inexplicable definition. Some attribute it to Divine providence;
some to the macrocosmic order of nature. Though no two religions
agree entirely, most prescribe to the belief that self-awareness is
the spiritual acceptance of a non-physical certainty. I used the
voodoo example for your benefit, to put a name to the
phenomena.”

“
Of course,” I said.
“Sorry.”

She returned a look of acceptance. My eyes
moved to the panties still in her hands. She laid them on the
table, spreading them flat and raking the wrinkles clear from the
center outward.

“
Think of a bloodhound,”
she said. “He can pick up the scent from an object and track it
down to its source miles away. This is kind of the same thing.
Scrying with objects of intimate association improves the chances
of a successful connection tenfold.”

“
That’s good,” I said,
“because you can’t get any more intimate than a pair of
panties.”

She rolled her eyes up at me for all of two
seconds. I directed mine back to the table. She pointed to the
spice jar. “Hand me that.”

I handed it to her. She removed the cap,
spilled a large pile of sand into the palm of her hand and set the
bottle aside. I thought I knew what to expect next, having seen her
scry before, and having done so myself with some success, despite
her assertion to the contrary. But her unusual method of
prognosticating this time differed from anything I had witnessed in
the past. She held her hand over the table, made a fist and turned
it down so that the back of her hand faced up. A few grains of sand
fell out, but most stayed within her grasp.

She cited an incantation.

“
By speed of sound and
weight of light, guide thee now thy spirit’s flight. Let time and
space forever part and show these granules where thou
art.”

She opened her fist and allowed the sand to
drop. Surprisingly, though, it did not freefall. It scattered in a
cloud-like pattern horizontal to the table, floating midway between
the garment and her hand. I marveled as the graduals danced in
nervous migration, suspended with no apparent means of levitation,
defying gravity as if subject to the vacuum of space.

“
What’s happening?” I
asked, my voice buried in a whisper.

She shushed me. “Watch.”

And I did. I watched the sand rearrange
itself in ever-shifting patterns, forming map-like images with
topographic highs and lows, the likes of which my attempt at
scrying could never produce. I recognized the city of New Castle
first, the riverfront along Edgewater, and the Madison Avenue
neighborhood where the Brewbakers lived. Soon that yielded to
precisely defined interpretations of other cities like Danvers,
Reading, Salem, Swampscott, Ipswich, Peabody and Wakefield. I could
see outlines of rivers and lakes, valleys and hilltops. Even
highways and intersections morphed accurately through the changing
topography, as if an aerial flyover made it all possible. Then, as
if confused by lack of direction, the entire sand cloud collected
in a spiral, rose in a column three feet high and dropped onto the
undergarment in a dusty splash.

I studied the new pattern closely, trying
hard to determine what city or town it was trying to depict. When I
could no longer guess, I said to Lilith, “I give up. It looks like
just a pile of sand to me. What is it?”

She pushed her chair away from the table,
stood, and clapped her hands clean. “It’s a pile of sand.” She
pulled at her shirttail to cover her butt.

“
So where is
she?”

“
I don’t know.” She lifted
her shoulders and dropped them. “It can’t tell us.”

I stood and grabbed her hand. “It was trying
to tell us. I saw the maps.”

“
Yes. I saw it, too. But
it can’t decide.”

“
Why not?”

She shook my hand loose. “I don’t know, Tony.
It’s not an exact science.”

“
What am I suppose to do
now?”

She smiled, moved in closer and folded her
arms around my waist. “We still have the consummation ritual.”

No, Lilith. Come on. I’m serious. We have to
try something else. What about the mothers?”

“
The mothers?”

“
Yes, the mothers. The
sisters. The other witches. We can pool the resources of the Coven
and try a super scry.”

“
Tony, there’s no such
thing as a super scry.”

“
How do you know? Have you
ever tried it?”

“
Well, no I’ve
never––”

“
Then what do we have to
lose?”

“
I don’t know, but calling
forth the Coven is a big deal.”

I cupped her shoulders and held her at arm’s
length, assuring firm eye contact. “Lilith, this is a big deal. I’m
sure the other witches will understand. Besides, aren’t you the one
who’s always telling me that I should practice witchcraft more
often?”

“
Yes.”

“
Well, I’m calling you out
on this. Let’s summon the Coven and ask them for their
help.”