Trail of Dead (15 page)

“You saw the future?”

She held up a hand. “No, that’s never been my gift. It’s more like…when I got the call about Samuel early this morning, I just understood that the situation was my responsibility.”

There was that word again, Jesse thought. “You guys take that pretty seriously, don’t you?” Jesse asked. “You feel responsible for the people you lead.”

“Yes, I suppose we do. Magic is very, very old, and there are certain attitudes…well. As long as there have been human leaders there has been a connection between power and responsibility.”

“So it wasn’t just Spiderman, then?”

She smiled, acknowledging the reference. “No.”

They stopped for gas and a drive-through breakfast a few miles past Carlsbad. Jesse had pegged Kirsten as one of those organic vegan kind of people, but she took a lusty drink of her Diet Coke before he’d gotten his own straw unwrapped. Kirsten saw his glance and admitted, “I know it’s terrible for you, but I can’t help it. It’s so good.” He laughed, feeling for the first time like she was a regular person. She looked down at the cup holders, which both held various paraphernalia from Jesse’s work. “Where should I—”

“Oh, let me just clear this crap.” Steering with one hand, he reached over to take her drink just as she reached toward him, and Jesse managed to knock the drink into her stomach. The lid popped off and soda splashed across her corduroy pants and white shirt. Jesse pulled the car over and threw it in park. “Shit! I’m so sorry! Should we stop at a bathroom, or…”

“It’s all right,” Kirsten said calmly. “Just a moment.”

She glanced around, and then whispered something under her breath, touching the stain with her index finger. Jesse’s jaw dropped open as the brown liquid seemed to adhere itself to the tip of her finger. Kirsten raised her hand, drawing a fat stream of soda into the air, and moved the cup under it. She lowered her finger until the brown stream sank back into the cup. As she settled it carefully into the cup holder, Jesse saw her clothes were clean. She brushed a couple of ice cubes onto the floor and smiled at him, a little shyly.

“That was…that was so cool,” Jesse whispered, suddenly feeling outclassed. It was the first actual witchcraft he’d seen, aside from the little dancing saltshaker.

Kirsten gave an elegant shrug. “Saves on the laundry bills, is all,” she said modestly.

“I bet.” Jesse checked his mirrors and pulled into traffic to get back onto the highway. “If you don’t mind me asking, you said you don’t deal in the future, but I’m sort of getting the impression that witches specialize in something. So…what kind of witch are you?”

She was quiet for a long few minutes, and Jesse realized she was deciding whether or not to trust him. “I’m sorry, that’s probably too personal. Please forget that I asked.”

Kirsten was silent for another few seconds, until she said, “It’s all right. That’s a perfectly natural question, it’s just been a long time since I’ve been asked. I’m what’s called a trades witch.”

“Trades…”

She picked the resurrected soda up and took another sip. “It’s an expression; it comes from the phrase ‘jack-of-all-trades.’ It just means that I do a little of everything. I don’t mess with the future, and I don’t read minds. But other than that…” She shrugged.

“I still don’t really get it,” Jesse admitted. “I mean, I know you explained about being a conduit, but I don’t understand how you use magic to fix your clothes or…fly on a broomstick, or whatever.”
She looked a little irritated at the broomstick comment but didn’t say anything. Jesse suddenly realized he’d put her in the position of being his own personal magical advisor, which was rude. “I’m sorry, is this completely annoying? Am I asking too many questions?”

“No. Well, yes”—she smiled a little—”but I understand why you’re asking me. Scarlett doesn’t know all that much about magic. Why would she? But it’s not supposed to be something that one can understand, not completely. Every culture in every society in history has had its own ways of interpreting the existence of magic,” she said. “Greek and Egyptian gods, demonology, Kabbalah, astrology; I could go on and on. It’s all one thing, one vast and incomprehensibly complex…thing. We use the word
magic
because it’s vague and powerful, but maybe it’s the force of creation, God, Mother Nature, mysticism, whatever. Whatever name you give it, however you want to see it, it’s always been here.”

“Wait, that makes no sense,” Jesse objected. “How would these different humans across time and space know the same spells and stuff?”

She jerked her head impatiently, like she’d been waiting for that question, and now that he’d asked he had disappointed her. “It’s not about spells. It’s not about
how
you manipulate magic, but the manipulation itself. Look at it this way: magic is too big and too wild to be a part of us. Witches need a system, a context, in order to understand it, though it doesn’t really matter what the specific system is. How is that different from religion?”

“But…” he sputtered. “If I’m getting this, you’re suggesting that a witch in California can say abracadabra and a flame shoots out of her finger, but a witch in Japan can, I don’t know, click her heels together and the same thing will happen?”

She held up her hand again, in a
wait, stop
gesture. “You’re looking at this wrong. Magic isn’t a single trick. It isn’t finite at all.” She tilted her head and took another sip of the soda, thinking. “Okay, look. If I go to the beach with a gallon bucket and fill the
bucket with ocean water, I can do lots of things with that water. I can use it to splash someone who’s hot, to build a sand castle, to soak my feet. Now, will that bucket of water that I took make a difference to the ocean, in the grand scheme of things?”

“No, not really.”

“What if I brought a hundred of my friends, and we each took a gallon of water?”

“No. The ocean is still too big.”

“Right. Now, I have a bucket, but maybe one of my friends has a pitcher, and one has a big plastic baggie, and one has a giant seashell, and so on. It doesn’t really matter what we use to transport the water, and it doesn’t matter if we wade in and scoop it up, get in a boat and skim the surface, or wait for the tide to come to us. We all have our own methods, passed down from ancestors or completely made up. What matters is what we do with the gallon of water.”

He thought about that, and glanced over at Kirsten. She was perfectly composed, sitting with her hands folded and her legs crossed at the ankle. They might have been discussing the Napoleonic Wars or the price of gasoline. “I can see why you’re their leader,” he said, impressed.

She laughed, a low, musical sound. “Well, thank you.”

“Whenever I talk to Scarlett about this stuff, and we get too deep into theory—or get to something she doesn’t know, probably—she just says ‘It’s magic. The smartest people in the Old World don’t understand the half of it.’” He realized he was smiling to himself.

“Well,” Kirsten said, taking another sip of her soda, “I don’t disagree with that, either.”

Abusing his police light helped them make record time, and within an hour and a half of leaving Dashiell’s Jesse found himself facing exits for San Diego. Kirsten called ahead for directions, and when she hung up she said, “The storage facility is half a block west of the temple.”

“They don’t keep things on-site?”

Kirsten shook her head. “They used to, but the collection became too large, and safety became a concern. Beth Israel is still a temple, and there are people in and out at all hours. Rabbi Samuel was the one to propose moving things to the storage facility nearby.”

“Sort of a hiding in plain sight kind of thing.”

“Yes,” she said, and added wryly, “For all the good it did.” She frowned again. “Of course, we’ll have to move everything now. Too many people—especially Olivia—will know about it before this is over.”

Jesse squirmed a little in his seat. She was also talking about people like him and Scarlett. Kirsten saw them as a liability, and he couldn’t entirely blame her. From her perspective, telling a null and a human cop the location of a warehouse of secret witch artifacts must seem like giving terrorists the key to the president’s secret bunker. “Who found him?” Jesse asked, to change the subject.

“His assistant, Alice. The rabbi stayed late last night, which was pretty typical of him, but he was supposed to be in early this morning. When Alice got to the office she couldn’t find the rabbi but saw his car was here. She had the sense to see if the storage keys were missing. They were, so she went over there.” Jesse glanced over at Kirsten, whose face was suddenly troubled.

“What?” he asked.

“I don’t…I mean, I know you know what Scarlett does with crime scenes, that sometimes allowances have to be made to keep our way of life a secret.”

Jesse looked at her again, but Kirsten’s face was set now, and she stared straight ahead. He understood. “What did Alice do? Did she move the body?”

“No, no.” Kirsten was shaking her head. “But she took the key. To the storage facility.”

“So the police…”

“Don’t know why Samuel was there, no.”

When I was fifteen, years before I had even heard of a null, I got a summer job house-sitting for one of the richest families in Esperanza, the Mycrofts. Every day I would ride my bike the five miles to their house, water the plants, collect the mail, and check that the pool guy had been there and the appliances were all working, stuff like that. It was an easy gig, but I still remember tiptoeing into that huge empty house, feeling its stillness, and terrifying myself with the possibilities of what I might find or what I might do. I could search through all of their things if I wanted to, and no one would ever know. I could throw a pool party, try on all of Mrs. Mycroft’s expensive clothes,
steal
something, even. I never did a thing, of course, just did my job perfectly and got a big bonus at the end of the summer, but the thing I remember most about the house is that I always felt guilty when I was in it. Guilt because of what I
could
do.

That was exactly how it felt to be at Dashiell’s house in the daytime.

After Kirsten left, Hayne and I eyed each other warily for a moment, and then he turned left into the living room, gesturing for me to follow him. We went into the hall beyond and down a long hallway I hadn’t seen before. Dashiell’s mansion isn’t small, and I was nervous, so after a few minutes of silent walking I lost patience. “So how many daytime guys are there? I’ve only seen a couple.”

He grinned at me. “Enough.”

“Have you worked for Dashiell long?”

I’d meant this to be a polite small-talk kind of question, but Hayne gave me a sudden, measured stare as if I’d asked for nuclear codes. Finally he shrugged and smiled, and I let out a breath. “My family has. The Haynes have been working for Dashiell since before he was turned.”

It took a lot, but I managed not to giggle over the “Haynes working for Dashiell” thing. This guy would probably not appreciate an underwear reference. “This whole time?” I asked. “Like, generation after generation?”

He nodded calmly. “In each generation one kid has been chosen to serve Dashiell during the daytime. Sometimes more than one of us has wanted the job.” I wanted to laugh at the “in each generation” phrasing, but he was just so
serious
. And so very large. Besides, I was too flabbergasted. I knew from personal experience that Dashiell wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest boss. I would almost certainly never have kids, but if I did I couldn’t see myself sending them to Dashiell for work.

“Just…for money?” I asked.

“Not just that. Dashiell pays for training, for college, for health insurance. When my great-aunt got cancer back in the thirties, he turned her into a vampire to save her.” Hayne lifted his chin proudly. “Our family’s history has been intertwined with Dashiell’s for two centuries.”

It made sense, when I thought about it. Dashiell had piles of money, but when it came to safety, that wasn’t enough: someone who wanted him dead could always just offer more cash. What he really needed in a daytime guard was loyalty, and he’d found a way to earn that. It was actually very clever. “Do the other daytime guys have the same arrangement?”

“Nope,” Hayne rumbled, and then grinned at me again. For such a dangerous-looking guy, he was certainly quick to smile. For
some reason, it made him scarier. “They’re just very well paid, and very loyal to
me
.”

Or
, I thought,
maybe just very afraid of you
.

We finally reached a door at the end of yet another long hallway, and Hayne took hold of the doorknob. “You can hang out in here,” Hayne said to me in his deep voice. I braced myself for a dungeon or empty white cell, but when the door swung open I caught sight of an enormous, sunlit room filled floor to ceiling with books. Of all things.

I craned my head around, stumbling in after Hayne, trying to see all of them. The ceiling was twelve or fifteen feet high, with an astonishingly large skylight to let the sunshine in, and oak shelves covered each wall. The books looked like they were arranged more or less chronologically: the shelves on the west wall held ancient, browning covers with titles I could barely make out, while the south wall books looked all shiny and new. I was so busy looking that I bumped into a thickly stuffed blue armchair in the center of the room. There was another armchair and a matching couch with a coffee table that matched the shade of the bookshelves.

I was in love.

“The library,” Hayne boomed behind me. I turned to face him, finally remembering he was there. He was giving me a bemused grin. “You seem to like it okay.”

“It’s nice,” I said noncommittally, but I was thrilled and we both knew it. Hayne and I exchanged a smile. I considered making a comment about feeling like Belle in
Beauty and the Beast
, but wasn’t sure how he’d take the implication.

“There’s a bell over there,” Hayne said, pointing to a little brass bell on the shelf nearest the door we’d come through. “If you need something, ring it and one of the house staff will come. The bathroom is the very next door down the hall, on the right.” His face grew stern. “If you need to go anywhere else, ring the bell, and one of the house staff will get me or my men. You do not want to
run around this house unescorted.” He said the last part with a lot of warning in his voice, and I found myself nodding emphatically. It would just suck if I got accidentally shot.