Secondhand Spirits (5 page)

“What do you think happened with Jessica?”

“It could be anything,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe it was her father, or some other relative. It usually is.”

Her serious, dark eyes fixed on me. “Is that what you really think?”

I pulled up to a red light and hesitated. Maya hadn't heard
La Llorona
's scream, thank goodness, and as far as I knew she had no idea I was a witch—had no knowledge of magic at all. So what was she asking, exactly?

“I don't know what to think, Maya,” I said finally.

“Let's just hope the police find something out, and soon.”

Chapter 4

By the time we neared home, neither of us had an appetite, so we skipped dinner. I paid Maya her commission and dropped her at her apartment, just a few blocks off Haight Street. Bronwyn had long since closed up shop, and I was glad for the solitude. I brought Frances's wedding dresses with me to hang them up, but decided to leave the rest of the bags in the van until the morning, when I could sort through them with fresh eyes and decide which ones needed repair or embellishment, and which a simple cleaning.

As I let myself into the old two-story Victorian building that housed Aunt Cora's Closet I breathed deeply, sighing with contentment. The shop welcomed me with the scent of clean laundry, lavender, and sage. A bundle of rosemary tied with a black ribbon hung over the front door, inviting luck to enter, while charms in the form of dried flowers, wreaths, and herbal sachets hung over every doorway and mirror.

Several precious antique gowns too delicate to be out on the sales floor adorned the walls like gossamer tapestries—their heirloom lace and exquisite hand-sewn ruffles were more suited to decoration than to twenty-first-century lives. The rest of the stock was hung on racks and divided by historic era: I carried clothing from the 1890s all the way up to the 1980s, from white cotton Victorian underthings to fringed leather vests. Though I preferred the older garments, there was a market among the youth for items just twenty or thirty years old, including the ugly polyester outfits I remembered from my adolescence. No matter, they all hummed with the energy and vitality of their former owners.

Aside from the overflowing racks of everyday skirts, dresses, and tops, I maintained an impressive selection of frothy lingerie, feather boas, hats, wigs, and even a few period stewardess, nurse, and cheerleader outfits. And though I carried only women's clothes, I liked to interpret that liberally: In the costume corner were several tuxedos and a number of Boy Scout uniforms, sailors' hats, and cowboy accoutrements. I couldn't wait for Halloween.

I love my shop and its contents. No matter how alienated I have felt my whole life, when I'm in the company of old things I sense the human connections through the ages. They have always helped ease the loneliness of my solitary existence.

A narrow staircase led off the rear storage room to a cozy one-bedroom apartment on the second floor. As in the store below, I had filled my personal space with much-loved used furniture, appliances, and artwork. The lace curtains in my bedroom window had been tatted by a British war bride who made her new home in the Outer Sunset; the soft white sheets on my canopy bed were purchased at a Parisian flea market; even my stove was an old Wedgwood that had nourished three generations of a family in nearby Hayes Valley.

Unfortunately, like so much in the magical world, my sensitivity to vibrations was a two-way street. I hated the soulless feel of newly minted products that were factory-produced by poorly paid workers, and felt their despair every time I touched them. Even finding toothpaste whose vibrations didn't rattle my fillings could be a trial.

I crossed through the bedroom to the bath and took a quick cleansing shower with lemon verbena soap. Afterward, brushing my long chestnut brown hair twenty strokes, I was sure to capture any loose strands before tying it into a ponytail with a black ribbon. I then cleaned the brush carefully and brought the loose hair into the kitchen to burn.

My grandmother Graciela had hammered this habit into me:
Let not a single strand of your own hair fall into a brew,
m'hija
, for you will change the spell in ways you did not intend. Intention must always reign supreme while brewing. And never forget that hair and nails must always be burned lest they be captured for use in a spell against you.

I often wondered how much of what I did was witchcraft, and how much superstition. To this day I couldn't shake the childish image of evildoers lurking behind every corner at hairdressers' and manicure salons, brooms in hand, just waiting to sweep up all that personal mojo lying around on the floor and manipulate it for their own evil ends. Last week my neighbor Sandra suggested we go for mani-pedis and I nearly hyper-ventilated.

No wonder I had a hard time making friends.

My favorite part of the apartment was its huge kitchen, which was at least as big as my small living room. The floor was tiled with 1950s-style black-and-white-checked linoleum, the cupboards were simple wood hutches painted a chalky blue-green, and unpainted wooden beams ran across the ceiling. From the beams dangled bunches of dried herbs, flowers, and braids of garlic; open shelves were crammed with jars filled with ingredients in a rainbow of colors; and a pot of fresh basil sat on the butcher-block counter to keep negative spirits at bay. The all-important lunar calendar hung by the sink.

Ready to begin spell casting, I filled my old cast-iron cauldron one-quarter full with fresh springwater and hoisted the heavy pot onto the gas stove to boil. A village “cunning woman” in the Scottish highlands told me that using an iron pot is an insult to the Fae, or the fairy folk, but I've never known any Fae well enough to ask.

“Whatcha doin'?”

I jumped and whirled around at the croaky voice of my wannabe familiar, perched on top of the refrigerator. My own personal outsize gargoyle.

“You makin' a spell?” he asked.

“You scared me . . .” I said, slapping my hand over my pounding heart. “What's your real name, anyway?”

“Oscar.”

“No, it isn't. I just called you that on the spur of the moment.”

“Then that's my name, mistress.”

I realized I was arguing with a gargoyle, and tried to ignore him.

“I like it the way that lady says it.
Oscaroo
,” he crooned.

“ ‘ Oscaroo' sounds like some strange Australian creature that evolution left behind.”

He snickered. It was a disturbing sound.

I pulled a huge red leather-bound volume off a high shelf in the pantry. Every practicing witch has her own unique Book of Shadows, full of spells, recipes, and remembrances. Mine creaked when I opened it and smelled slightly of must, reminding me, not unpleasantly, of a used bookstore. Graciela had given me the book, already half-full of her own family recipes, when I was eight, and I had gone on to crowd it with notes and newspaper clippings for as long as I could remember. Besides spells, it contained mementos and quotations that I read to myself in moments of doubt and despair, as well as a few newspaper articles about events I would rather not remember, but that I must. The tome quite literally hummed with memories, knowledge, and awareness.

Though I knew almost all of my spells by heart, I always opened my Book of Shadows and double-checked before conjuring. It was part of my ritual.

Covering the counter with a clean white cloth, I started setting out the things I needed. Of primary importance was my
athame
, or spirit blade, which is a black-handled, supersharp, double-edged knife. Beside it I placed a length of blessed rope; a special kind of vinca known as Sorcerer's Violet; and dried stalks of Verbascum dipped in tallow.

“I like that lady that held me,” Oscar said, a dreamy note in his voice.

“I'll just bet you do.” I had never met a demon, male or female, who didn't possess a healthy libido. “Listen, I want to ask you about something. What do you know about
La Llorona
?”

He gave a little shudder. “She
scares
me. I hear she has empty sockets where there should be eyes, and her mouth is an open, voracious void, and—”

“
Enough
, thanks. I don't need a description.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“I thought I heard her tonight. She's supposed to hang around riverbeds,” I pointed out as I hung a basket on my arm and grabbed my white-handled
boline
, a special sickle-shaped knife used to cut magical herbs. “But there aren't any rivers in San Francisco, are there?”

“Nope.” Oscar trailed me through a pair of French doors onto my terrace.

This was my essential rooftop herb garden: crowded with pots holding coriander, vervain, and even poisonous wolfsbane; and planters full of gingerroot, hore- hound, and damiana. Since it was only six weeks old my garden was still immature, but I had worked a fertility spell to speed the growing season up a little bit. I snipped off small sprigs of henbane and badger's foot and placed them in my basket.

“But water spirits are practical folk,” Oscar continued. “They can't find a creek or a river, they use the bay, a backed-up storm drain, a swimming pool. Easy enough for drowning people, either way.”

“Great. I finally find a place to settle down, and now
La Llorona
's haunting the bay?”

He shrugged. “Everyone wants to live in the Bay Area. It's an active area, spirit-wise. New Orleans is getting crowded, and the climate's better here.”

“Hey, what's the deal with your master, Aidan Rhodes? Does he want you to spy on me?”

“You're my master now, mistress,” he repeated his earlier incantation.

“I don't need a familiar, Oscar. I'm not . . . not a normal witch.”

“Well, you sure as heck aren't a normal human.”

I glared at him.

“What'd I say?”

“Why don't you go be Bronwyn's familiar? She could use the help.”

“Who's Bronwyn?”

“The woman you're so enamored with.”

“Ooh, the
lady
,” he repeated dreamily. Then he shrugged. “Can't. I'm yours. And she's not a witch like you. She one of those, whaddayacall? Wiccans.”

“At least she belongs to a coven. I don't belong . . . anywhere.”

In the old days—the burning times—there was a distinction made between sorcerers and witches. It was said that a sorcerer learned magic through training, while a witch was born with innate talents and connections to the spirit world. The latter was true in my case, to an extreme degree. I hadn't chosen this path; it had chosen me. One of the many curses my status bestowed was a near-perfect memory, and I could recall every alienating episode, every isolating incident, of my thirty-one years.

Oscar was following so closely on my heels that when I stopped to pick some cinquefoil grass he plowed right into the backs of my legs. He watched me for another minute while I gathered nine berries of deadly nightshade ; then we both headed back into the kitchen where the cauldron was boiling.

“Whatcha cookin'?”

“A woman I met earlier may have heard
La Llorona
's cry. I'm brewing a spell to protect her.” I started crushing sempervivum leaves in the ancient stone mortar Graciela had given me when I left home.

“Ooh! How much is she paying you?” Oscar hopped around the kitchen in his excitement. “Firstborn? Life of duty? Web site?”

That last option threw me. “Web site?”

“Master Rhodes had a supplicant make him an interactive Web site. You should see it. It's awesome.”

Times do change.

“She's not paying me anything,” I answered as I dropped the black shiny berries, one by one, into the boiling cauldron. “She doesn't even know I'm doing it.”

He narrowed his eyes, fixed me with an odd look. “Don't tell me you have a fetish for normal humans. They would have burned you not so long ago.”

“Good thing we live in modern times, then, right?”

“I don't really like cowans,” he mused, using the archaic derogatory word for a nonwitchy human. “They're fun to play with, but they're narrow-minded, quick to blame, can't see past their own—”

“Don't call them cowans. Besides, I'm just as human as the next person.”

“Normal humans don't cast spells . . . at least, not well.”

I threw my stone pestle down on the butcher block with a loud thud.

“For your information, familiars don't argue with their masters. And if you don't like humans, then you shouldn't hang around me. I
like
being around normal people. I'm a normal-people person. They just haven't especially liked me up till now. But all that's about to change.”

“How will it change, mistress?”

“Because I'm not moving around anymore. I'm staying put, and I'm going to make friends, and sell great old clothes, and I'm going to use my powers to help people. But no one is ever going to know that I'm—”

“A superpowerful witch?”

“—a freak. I don't want to be seen as a scary freak anymore.”

And with that I dropped a freeze-dried bat into the bubbling brew.

 

The matching of a witch with a familiar is supposed to be an intimate affair. A witch bonds to a special animal with which she feels an overwhelming sense of kinship and trust. Familiars are popular with witches because animals are often more in touch with the undercurrents of the spirit world than are humans, allowing them to be not only companions but magical intermediaries and helpers. But I had more than enough power all by myself, which was one reason I had never joined other witches in a coven. If I added my power to theirs, there was no telling what forces might be unleashed.