White Witch, Black Curse

There were only a few FIB personnel still here doing their FIB thing. One of them flagged Edden over, and he left me with a stern look that said not to touch anything. The faint tickle of fingerprint dust caught in my nose. Ivy was in the corner with a tall woman who, by the twin cameras draped over her, had to be the photographer. They were both looking at her laptop and the shots she had taken earlier.

It was bright and overly warm, and Jenks left Edden to park it on the top of the curtains. Warmer up there, probably. The FIB had been here most of the day before letting us in here, not wanting to chance my messing up their precious virgin site, but it still looked raw to me.

The green-tiled coffee table between the olive-and-orange-striped couch and the brick fireplace—painted to match the floor, incidentally—was on its side and shoved into the raised hearth. The curtains over the wide windows were open to the backyard. God help me but the curtains matched the putrid color combination. Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.

There was no blood except a small splatter against the couch and wall, an ugly brown against the yellowish green paint. From Glenn’s broken nose, perhaps? An armchair had been shoved into an upright piano, and loose-leaf sheets of music were stacked on the bench. Leaning up against the wall by the large window overlooking the snow-covered swing set was a picture. It had fallen turned against the wall, and I wanted to see what it was in the worst way.

A Christmas tree was propped up in the corner, disheveled and clearly having fallen at some point if the dark spot on the rug where the water had drained out wasn’t enough of a clue. There were a lot of decorations for one room, and they were a curious mix of style. Most were the inexpensive, mass-produced variety, but there was what was probably a two-hundred-dollar snow globe and an antique Tiffany-style mistletoe display. Weird.

Three stockings hung from the mantel, and these, too, looked expensive—too classy for most of the decorations. Only the smallest had a name. HOLLY. The baby’s probably. The mantel was empty of pictures, which I thought was odd seeing as there was a new baby in the house. The top of the piano was bare as well.

Jenks had dropped down to talk with the guy at the piano. Ivy had her head next to the photographer’s. Edden wasn’t paying me any attention. Everyone looked busy, so I wandered to the fireplace and ran a finger over the smooth wood for evidence that the mantel had once held pictures. No dust.

“Hey!” the man with Edden exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing?” His face red, he glanced at Edden, clearly ticked off because he wanted to kick me out but couldn’t.

Faces turned, and embarrassed, I backed up. “Sorry.”

Ivy glanced up from the laptop in the sudden quiet. Both she and the photographer wore questioning expressions as they stared at me, looking like yin and yang with Ivy’s short black hair and the photographer’s long blond tresses. I remembered seeing the photographer at Trent’s stables, taking pictures, but Ivy hadn’t been there, and I wondered how she had gotten chummy enough in fifteen minutes to have their heads together discussing the niceties of angles and shadows.

Almost smiling, Edden harrumphed. Head bowed and stubby-fingered hand in the air to say he was taking care of it, he rocked into motion. Ivy gave the photographer one of our cards, then crossed the room to join me. Jenks landed on her shoulder halfway there, and I saw her lips move in a soft comment that made the pixy laugh.

By the time they all reached me, I had cocked my hip and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not going to touch anything else!” I exclaimed, wondering if the harsh expressions on the FIB officers’ faces were for me breaking protocol or a lingering doubt about my involvement in Kisten’s death. I knew Edden had done his best to squelch it, but that meant little to a lifetime of prejudice.

Rolling his eyes at Ivy, Edden took my elbow to lead me into the hallway. Ivy, too, was smiling, but as soon as the privacy of the hall took us, she became serious. “Rachel’s here now, so how about showing us where Glenn was beat up?” she asked, surprising me.

“That’s it,” Edden said, glancing past me and into the living room. “Everything else looks untouched.”

I jerked my elbow from Edden and leaned against the wall. Jenks’s wings clattered as he flew to snuggle in my scarf, and Ivy shook her head. “There isn’t enough emotion in the room for someone having been mauled,” she said. “You say it happened this morning? No way.”

Edden’s face scrunched up, and I looked at Ivy. A vampire could read the pheromones left in a room, giving a qualitative, though not terribly quantitative, impression of the emotions that had been given free rein. By the way Edden looked, I guessed he knew about the ability but didn’t trust it. Neither did the courts, disallowing a vampire’s testimony unless they were trained, registered, and attended quarterly calibration seminars. Ivy didn’t, but if she said there wasn’t a sign of a struggle here, then I’d believe her over a bloodsplattered wall.

“The rest of the house is undisturbed,” he said, and Ivy frowned. “Do you want me to tell you what we do know while we tour the house for signs of…emotion?” he finished, and I smirked. Wait until they heard what I found out. But Ivy shot me a look to shut up, and my breath slipped from me. Okay…I’ll wait.

“I’m listening,” she said to Edden as she went down the short hall. Her stride was long and confident, and the man toting the FIB evidence vacuum pressed into the wall to let her pass. She went first into a tidy, opulent bedroom with pillows, rich drapes, rugs, and beautiful things arranged on what looked like an antique carved bedroom set. Drawers were open and the closet clearly had hangers missing. The rich femininity didn’t match the rest of the house. Not at all. Well, except for the snow globe, stockings, and mistletoe display.

“The mortgage is in Mr. and Mrs. Tilson’s names,” Edden said, his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels, clearly not interested in the incongruity of decorating styles. “They’re human,” he added, and I almost blurted, No they aren’t, biting my tongue instead.

“He and his wife bought the house about a year and a half ago,” Edden continued, and Jenks snorted, silent to all but me. “She’s a stay-at-home mom caring for their daughter, but we’ve found that Holly is registered at three day cares. Mr. Tilson works as a janitor, retired from being a science teacher in Kentucky. Took early retirement, I guess, and wanted something to do and to supplement his pension.”

Like clean crap from the walls of the boys’ bathroom? Yeah, that sounded right.

“We have a tap on the phone and we’re watching the credit cards,” Edden was saying as Ivy skulked around the room. “There’s no extended family that we know of yet on either side, but everyone is out for the holidays and it’s taking a long time to get anything.”

His words broke off suddenly, and he stared at me. “Why are you smiling?”

Immediately I forced my expression to go innocent. “No reason. What else have you got?”

“Very little.” He eyed me. “We’ll find them.”

Ivy eased around the carved furniture like a shadow, using a pen to shift the curtains and nodding at the securitysystem sticker on the window. Her sleek leather made her look like a well-paid assassin against the elegant surroundings hidden inside the depths of the house. Someone had excellent tastes and I didn’t think it was Mr. Tilson the janitor. Mr. Tilson the hit man, maybe.

“Here’s a recent picture,” Edden said, handing me a piece of paper with a copy of Tilson’s school ID. Jenks startled me when he vaulted from the folds of soft yarn to hover over the nine-by-eleven paper. The face not smiling back at me was blurry, but according to the tag he was blond and blue eyed. There were some wrinkles, but not a lot, and he had a receding hairline.

“Pretty harmless looking for someone who can beat up an FIB detective,” Jenks said.

“It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for,” I murmured, silently asking Jenks if he was done before handing the paper back to Edden. Ivy hadn’t come over to look, so she’d probably seen it already.

“We don’t have anything yet on Mrs. Tilson,” Edden said, starting when Ivy jerked into a fast pace and left the room. “But we’re working on it.”

His last words were rather distant, and I could guess why. Ivy was edging into the eerie vamp quickness she took pains to hide from me. Her unnerving speed aside, I enjoyed seeing her like this, wrapped up in thinking. Work was the only time she let herself forget the misery of her wants and needs and found a feeling of self-worth.

Edden followed me into the hallway. It wasn’t hard to figure out where Ivy had gone. Jenks had already flown past the open door to the bathroom, and there was a frightened, older FIB officer leaning against a wall at the end of the hall.

“She in there?” Edden asked the man, who clearly had not been expecting an intense vampire in leather to burst in on him. Edden gave the sweating man a pat on the shoulder. “Will you find out if the fingerprints have been sent off yet?”

The officer walked away gratefully, and Edden and I entered what was clearly the baby’s room.

If Ivy looked out of place in the bedroom, she looked like she was from Mars next to the crib, frilly lace curtains, and brightly colored expensive toys. The child had been lavished with attention, from the looks of it. And where Ivy stuck out, Jenks fit right in, hovering with his hands on his hips and staring in disgust at a framed shot of Tinker Bell.

“We’re gathering information for a trial more than searching for a way to find them,” Edden said to keep the conversation going and cover the pain in the back of his eyes. “I’m not letting a lawyer uphold the Constitution so far that we have to let them go.”

I jumped when one of the toys burst into music. Jenks just about hit the ceiling in a cloud of dust, clearly the guilty party.

“You can’t pack up a baby and go that fast without leaving a trail,” I said, adrenaline flooding me. “I heard the woman dotes on her kid.” I gazed at the mounds of toys. “All you’ll have to do is post a man at the toy store. You’ll have them in a week.”

“I want them now,” Edden said grimly. The music cut off, and seeing Jenks hovering miserably in the middle of the room, Edden added, “Don’t worry, Jenks. We were done here.”

Oh, sure, I get yelled at, and the pixy gets told it doesn’t matter. But as Ivy poked around, I drifted to the books in the overstuffed rocking chair, smiling at a familiar title. I reached for them, not wanting to leave this spot of innocence and good taste. A feeling of melancholy had overtaken me. I knew it was from my dilemma about having kids. If it had just been my blood disease, I might have taken my chances, but I couldn’t face my children being demons.

I had let the hide-and-seek book slip from my fingers when Ivy gingerly came to a halt among the stuffed animals and pastel colors, standing as if the soft domesticity might be catching. “Is this the last room?” she asked, and when Edden nodded with a tired motion, she added, “Are you sure Glenn wasn’t attacked somewhere else and dropped here?”

“Pretty sure. His prints on the walk come right to the door.”

Her calm face showed a glimmer of anger. “There’s nothing in this room either,” she said softly. “Nothing. Not even a whisper from a cranky baby.”

Seeing her ready to go, I stacked the books on a small table. The thump of a small cardboard doll hitting the floor drew my attention, and I picked it up. The lavish hide-and-seek book was extravagant for a small house in a depressed neighborhood, but after seeing the bedroom, I wasn’t surprised. It was obvious they spared no expense when it came to their kid. Nothing fit. Nothing made sense.

Jenks flitted to Ivy’s shoulder, clearly trying to cheer her up. She was having none of it and waved him away. Edden waited for me by the door as I leafed through the book to put the doll back. But there was already a hard bump in the pocket where it belonged.

“Just a minute,” I said, using two fingers to dig it out. I didn’t know why, but the doll needed to go back in her bed and I was the only one who could do it. That’s what the oversize print said. And I was feeling melancholy. Edden could wait.

But when my fingertips connected with the smooth bump in the pocket, I jerked my hand out, jamming my fingers into my mouth before I knew what I was doing. “Ow!” I yelped from around my fingers, then stared at the book, now fallen onto the chair.

Edden’s face became wary, and Jenks flew to me. Ivy stopped dead on the threshold, staring with eyes black from the surge of adrenaline I’d given off. Embarrassed, I took my fingers out of my mouth and pointed. “Something’s in there,” I said, feeling quivery inside. “It moved. Something is in that book! And it’s furry.” And warm, and it shocked the hell out of me.

Ivy came back in, but it was Edden who took his pen and stuck it in the pocket. The three of us crouched over the book while Jenks stood nearby and bent to look in.

“It’s a stone,” he said as he straightened, looking at me quizzically. “A black stone.”

“It was furry!” I backed up a step. “I felt it move!”

Edden wedged the pen in, and a black crystal came sliding out to glint dully in the electric light. “There’s your mouse,” he said dryly, and I felt the blood fall to my feet as I recognized it.

It was a banshee tear. It was a freaking banshee tear.

“That’s a banshee tear,” both Ivy and I said together, and Jenks gave a little yelp, taking flight to flit madly between me and Ivy until he finally landed on my shoulder.

I stepped back, wringing my hand as if I could erase having touched it. Damn, I’d touched a banshee tear. Double damn, it was probably evidence.

“It felt furry?” the pixy said, and I nodded, eyeing my fingers. They looked okay, but it had been a banshee tear, and it gave me the creeps.

Edden’s expression of confusion slowly cleared. “I’ve heard of these,” he said, tapping it with his pen tip. Then he straightened to his entire height and looked me directly in the eye. “This is why there’s no emotion here, isn’t it.”

I nodded, deciding this was why it looked like a home, but didn’t feel like it. The banshee tear explained everything. The love had been sucked right out. “They leave them where there’s likely to be a lot of emotion,” I said, wondering why Ivy had gone pale. Well, paler than usual. “Sometimes they will tip the scales and make things worse—sort of push everyone to a higher pitch. The tear soaks everything up, and then the banshee comes back to collect it.” And I had touched it. Euwie.

“A banshee did this?” Edden said, his anger slipping through a crack in his veneer of calm. “Made that man hurt my son?”

“Probably not,” I said, thinking about what Matt had told me and glancing at Ivy. “If Mrs. Tilson was cheating on her husband, that’s reason enough for a banshee to leave a tear. I bet she got it in here by posing as a babysitter or something.”

I looked at the tear, heavy and dark with the stored emotion of Glenn’s mauling—and I shivered, remembering how warm it had felt. “The I.S. has a record on every banshee in Cincinnati,” I said. “You can analyze the tear, find out who made it. The banshee might know where they went. They usually choose their victims carefully and will follow them from place to place if the pickings are good. Though they prefer to feed passively, they can suck a person dry in seconds.”

“I thought that was illegal.” Edden slid the crystal into an evidence bag and sealed it.

“It is.” Ivy’s voice was mild, but I thought she looked ill.

Jenks was picking up on her mood, too. “You okay?” he said, and she blinked her softly almond-shaped eyes once.

“No,” she said, her gaze falling to the tear. “Even if Mrs. Tilson was cheating on her husband, the suspect knew exactly where to hit Glenn to hurt but not maim. The house is clean to the point of obsession, but there’s too much money being spent on the little girl and the wife for him to be a wife beater. The man doesn’t even have a remote for the TV, for God’s sake,” she said, pointing to the unseen living room, “yet they have silk sheets and a baby computer.”

“You think the woman beat him up?” I interrupted, and Ivy frowned.

Edden, though, was interested. “If she was an Inderlander, maybe a living vampire, she could do it. She’d know how to induce pain without damage, too.”

Ivy make a noise of negation. “I’d be able to smell it if a vampire had visited, much less lived here,” she said, but I had my doubts. Last year, I would have said it was impossible to make a charm to cover an Inderlander’s scent from another Inderlander, but my mom had spelled my dad into smelling like a witch for their entire marriage.

I stood there and tried to figure it out, both Jenks and me jumping when Edden clapped his hands once. “Out,” he said suddenly, and I protested when he manhandled me into the hall. “Ivy, you and Jenks can stay, but, Rachel, I want you out.”

“Wait a minute!” I complained, but he kept me moving, yelling for someone to bring the vacuum. Ivy just shrugged, giving me an apologetic smile.

“Sorry, Rachel,” Edden said when we reached the activity of the living room, his brown eyes glinting with amusement. “You can poke around in the garage if you want.”

“Excuse me?” I exclaimed. He knew I hated the cold. It was an offer that really wasn’t one. “How come Ivy gets to stay and help?”

“Because Ivy knows how to handle herself.”

That was just rude. “You suckwad! I’m the one who found the tear!” I said as I stood in the archway to the living room and watched everyone buzz about the new development. Several heads turned, but I didn’t care. I was being gotten rid of.

Edden’s face darkened with emotion, but his next words were postponed when Alex, the officer he had sent to watch my car, came in, cold on his breath and snow on his boots. “Ah, they won’t be able to have a dog out to look at your car for a couple of hours,” he said nervously, seeing Edden’s anger directed at me. “There’s a big Brimstone bust out at the Hollows airport.”

I jumped as, suddenly, Ivy was next to me. “What’s wrong with your car?” she asked, and I let my air out in a huff.

“Tom Bansen was standing next to it,” I said. “I’m being paranoid.”

Ivy smiled. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “You’re under Rynn Cormel’s protection. He wouldn’t dare.”

Unless the vampires want me dead, I thought, then turned back to Edden. “Edden…,” I complained, but the squat man put a hand on my shoulder and moved me to the kitchen.

“Alex, take Ms. Morgan home,” he said. “Rachel, I’ll call you if we need you. If you don’t want to leave, you can wait in the kitchen, but it’s going to be hours. Probably not until tomorrow. You might as well go home.”

He wasn’t telling Ivy to go home. I took a breath to whine some more, but someone had called his name, and he was gone, leaving only the faint scent of coffee.

A familiar wing clatter drew my attention to Jenks, sitting on top of a picture frame, and he dropped to me. “Sorry, Rache,” he said, and I slumped back into the wall, disgusted.

“I’m staying,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, and Alex exhaled in relief, going to stand over a heating vent. “How come Ivy gets to help?” I asked Jenks, already knowing the answer and envious of how she, a vampire who had once beaten up an entire floor of FIB guys, was fitting in better than me, a witch who had helped them bring in the city’s master vampire in their own back room. It wasn’t my fault Skimmer killed him.

Hell, I thought. Maybe I should take some classes on crime scene protocol. Anything would be better than standing on the sidelines and watching everyone else play. I was not a bench warmer. Not by a long shot.

Jenks landed on my shoulder in a show of support. I knew he wanted to help, and I appreciated his loyalty. At his movement, Edden looked up from his cell phone. “Is your finger okay?” he asked suddenly, and I glanced at it. It looked fine.

Not answering him, I pushed from the wall and stomped out. Jenks rose to follow me at head height into the empty kitchen. “Rache…,” he started, and I grimaced.

“Stay with Ivy if you want,” I said bitterly, zipping up my coat and wrapping my scarf around my neck. I wasn’t going home. Not yet. “I’ll be in the garage.”

His tiny features became relieved. “Thanks, Rache. I’ll let you know what we find out,” he said, slipping a trail of gold dust as he zipped back to the nursery.

It’s so unfair, I thought as I took my blue booties off. So my protocol sucked dishwater. I was getting results faster than a houseful of FIB agents. Leaving, I slammed the screen door and stomped down the cement steps. Home. Yeah. Maybe I’d make cookies. Gingerbread men with little FIB badges. Then I’d bite their freaking heads off. But when my feet hit the cement floor, I slowed. Oh, I was still mad, but Edden had said I could look through the garage. I thought he’d offered only because he knew it was too cold, but why not?

Hands on my hips, I used a boot tip to unwedge the informal closure on the nearest box. It popped open to show a mishmash of stuff that looked like classic post-yard-sale clutter: books, knickknacks, photo albums, and several cameras. Expensive ones.

“Photo albums?” I questioned, looking at the silent walls. Who keeps their photo albums in the garage? Maybe it was temporary, for Christmas, to make room for all the baby toys.

I moved to the next box, slipping on my gloves for warmth as I opened it to find more books and clothes from the seventies—explaining their living room, perhaps. Under it was another box that contained last year’s styles. I held up the first—a dress that I might find in my mother’s closet—thinking that Mrs. Tilson must have been heavy once. The dress was way bigger than me, but not a maternity cut. It didn’t match Matt’s description. It didn’t match what I’d seen in the open closet, either.

Frowning, I put the dress back, digging to the bottom to find a stack of yearbooks. “Bingo,” I whispered, kneeling to feel the cold cement go right through my jeans. I didn’t have to wait until Edden’s office dug up a photo of them. I could see for myself.

My knees were cramping, so I pulled the kiddie sled over and sat on it, knees almost to my ears as I leafed through a yearbook with Clair Smith penciled on the front flap. Clair had graduated from a high school a few hundred miles upstate, and was apparently popular if the overwhelming number of signatures meant anything. Lots of promises to write. Apparently she toured Europe before going to college.

There was another yearbook from a local college where she’d gotten her four-year journalism degree, majoring in photography, and had met Joshua, according to the hearts and flowers around his signature. My gaze slid to the box of albums. So maybe it was school stuff. It might explain the cameras, too.

She was a member of the photography club in high school, and had graduated in ‘82. I stared at the picture of the young woman standing on the bleachers surrounded by awkward teenagers, my finger resting on her name. Unless there was a misprint, Clair was a rather round young woman with a cheerful smile, not the slight, mild woman Matt had described. She wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t my size either. And if she’d graduated in ‘82, that would make her…over forty now?

I felt my face lose its expression, and I turned to look at the wall of the house as if I could pull Ivy out here with my thoughts. Over forty with one kid and wanting five more? Spacing them five years apart?

She had to be an Inderlander. Witches lived a hundred and sixty years and could have kids the entire span, apart from twenty years on either side. Maybe that was the source of strife? Mr. Tilson found out his wife was a witch? But it didn’t smell like a witch lived here. Or a vampire. Or a Were.