A Debut Unpaid (San Amaro Investigations)

Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

Even with the lights on, I could barely make out anything that far up. It was as though MacCallum had purposely lit his house so that from the ground level you could only see about ten feet up. His massive vaulted ceiling was all shadows.

MacCallum’s house was in the new Hacienda style that was taking over the older mid-century modern common in the hills. It was a ranch-style house, all on one floor, spread out over a massive property. I’d seen his backyard once, and it looked more like a golf course than anything a real person should have. At the time, he’d been swearing at one of his henchmen because gophers were digging holes in his precious turf.

Why he cared, I couldn’t fathom. Maybe he was actually playing golf on it. Maybe none of the country clubs in the area would let a man like McCallum through their doors, so he had to satisfy himself by playing mini golf at home. I imagined him installing a windmill that he had to putt through and stifled a laugh.

The entryway and a couple of massive living rooms closer to the front of the house had vaulted ceilings that made the place feel more like a palace than a home. McCallum’s office was in the back of the house, facing his mini golf range. We had to pass by an indoor swimming pool and a kitchen as big as my apartment to get back to the entryway. It did not sicken me that McCallum had two pools on his massive property, but only because it gave me more places to drown him when he got back.

King pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on, scanning the beam across the ceiling. “You heard it too, right?”

“You mean the fact that your partner’s walkie is somewhere up there? Yeah,” I confirmed.

Frowning, I looked around the house again. We were in the entryway, and I could see the door to the garage a room’s length away. Nowhere did I see anything that looked like a security panel to set a manual alarm. In fact, there wasn’t anything that looked like cameras, lasers, motion sensors. Was McCallum just that confident in his security guards?

No. Even if he had people here 24/7, they would still want something to make sure that all the doors and windows stayed closed.

Nick’s hand on my arm tightened like a blood pressure monitor. His voice, when he spoke, was low, practically a whisper. “Ferro, I need you to do exactly what I say right now. Can you do that?”

I looked up at the ceiling to see what had gotten him so spooked and my whole body felt like I’d decided to take a dip in the Arctic.

There, wrapped in some sort of white material, was a human shaped object. I could see black dress shoes poking out from the bottom. Something had attached the mummified form to the ceiling, pinned there like a butterfly on display.

The form twitched.

“What—”

“Ferro, I want you to walk out the way you came in, and when you get outside, call 9-1-1,” King said. I heard some metallic jangling behind me and felt the cuffs slip off my wrists.

As soon as my hands were free, I shook my arms. But, like I knew he would, King had been careful about the cuffs. There wasn’t even a mark to show that I had been wearing them.

“You want me to leave you inside with whatever monster McCallum left to guard his house?” I asked. “Because I’m not doing that.”

“Ferro —”

I might not like King after he arrested me, but there was very little chance I was going to leave him in Derek McCallum’s house when there was clearly something nasty on the loose.

Nine times out of ten, that was how the movie got its next victim. The person who said, “This doesn’t look good. I’m going home where there isn’t a murderer on the loose,” was always the one who ended up hanging from their neck in the next scene.

I had no desire to be the creature’s next victim. If it was a creature. Maybe McCallum had some magic going on that mummified anybody who tried breaking into his house. If we walked around and looked at all the ceilings, would we see a collection of potential burglars and cops serving arrest warrants?

“Let me just try something,” I murmured.

I bent down, pressing my palms to the wooden floor.

“Witchcraft?” King said. But I saw him pulling out a notebook and a pen, and I raised an eyebrow.

“Says the alchemist,” I said.

“Hey, alchemy is a legitimate form of practicing magic,” King said. “And I’m registered with the police, so they consider any alchemy I do on the job legal.”

“Are you saying that witchcraft isn’t a legitimate form of practicing magic?” I said, amused, curious to see if he was even aware of the bias he’d just shown.

“I never — that’s not what — I understand that there are debates, but I would never —”

I waved him off with some amusement and pointed to his pad of paper. “Trust me when I say that we can have the witchcraft versus alchemy debate when we aren’t trapped in a mobster’s house with whatever did that.”

Jerking my chin towards the ceiling, my eyes went to King’s partner. Was he even still alive? The foot twitched again, but that might just as well have been neurons firing from a dead brain.

“I’m going to protect him while he’s up there,” King murmured. “Can you —”

The end of that sentence was clearly not coming, so I filled in the blank myself. “Keep us safe? Yeah, I can do that. Kitchen witch, remember?”

Even among witches, kitchen witches have a bit of a reputation. They’re known for being able to improvise in spell work, in ways that are both creative and frightening. My sister, the head priestess of her coven, once used a paperback book, a handful of thumbtacks, and some honey to make a rat trap when she had an infestation at her café.

The end result had been… Well, I’d helped to clean it up, and she still owed me for it, because I saw things that no human should see. But she’d killed every single rat.

Fortunately for my stomach and King’s sanity, although my sister and I had been trained by our foster mother in kitchen witchcraft together, I was no kitchen witch. The magic I used was more dangerous, the sort of thing I couldn’t have Detective King knowing about. He might’ve turned a blind eye to it once, when we were both facing down a dangerous poltergeist, but I couldn’t tempt fate by trying it a second time unless our lives were in imminent danger.

I crouched on the floor, taking out a piece of chalk to draw a couple of spells on the ground. The first was nothing more than an alarm spell, like setting up a row of bells that surrounded me and King. At least this way we could hear if something was approaching us, even if it was invisible.

The next spell I drew had a similar intent to whatever King was doing. It was a protection spell, acting like a bubble that would resist anything trying to get close to us.

I wasn’t particularly good at spellcraft. It always left me feeling off kilter, as though I’d been woken from a nap suddenly. That woozy, uncertain feeling you get when you aren’t sure if you’re awake or asleep. Only with me, the anxiety was whether the spell would work.

To my sister, Laurel, my spellwork never looked right. Even if I copied her exactly, doing all the lines identically, down to the millimeter, she’d still make minor corrections and when I began putting magic into the spell her face scrunched up and I could see her jaw held so tight I was surprised she still had molars.

Nine times out of ten—well eight times out of ten if I was being honest—everything worked fine. It was just to her master eye, something looked off. But it was like handing a really pretty gemstone to a jeweler. If the jeweler saw a flaw that was invisible to the naked eye, did it really matter?

When I finished the spellwork, I glanced at King. He was busy on his third sheet of paper, drawing complicated alchemy circles, and I left him to it. Instead, I listened for whatever had attacked his partner.

Placing my hands on the floor, I checked to make sure it was wood.

Actual wood was something that I could work with; vinyl, laminate, tile, or anything else that had more than one element in it was too much for me. Normally, I would be up for any challenge, but I still had that feeling inside of me like I wanted to tear down MacCallum’s house brick by brick until all that was left was a tattered foundation.

I wasn’t the big bad wolf coming to blow down the house. I was a tornado.

My magic boiled red again, and it felt like lava cooking my intestines. I took a slow breath, but it stuttered in the middle, so I took another one. Then, when my breath was smooth and long and the ocean had cooled the lava, I reached out.

My magic doesn’t rely on symbols and iconography, or even a special language, like witchcraft and alchemy do. Instead, I rely on what’s around me. The spirits that inhabit almost everything we touch.

In my impaired state, I only trusted myself to talk to staid spirits who were unlikely to react to the emotions I could feel burning under my skin. I’d have to settle for wood. Trees are one of the spirits I’m most familiar with. Some of my favorite friends are trees.

But, since I wasn’t in a forest, I would have to make do with the wood that once been a tree.

It woke slowly under my fingers. I didn’t need it alert enough to grow back into the tree it had been, but I did need it conscious enough to answer some questions.

“Who else is here with us?”

King glanced at me as he sent to circles floating into the air, spinning around each other until they built a shell of protection around his partner. I waved him off and mouthed the words ‘witchcraft stuff .’

There was a ripple along the floor, as though each board was blinking, but then the flooring responded in slow, measured tones. There was no one in the house with us. We were the only heavy footfalls it could feel.

“What about light footfalls?”

The image the floor responded with sent me to my feet and then right next to King.

“Ferro?” He looked me up and down, as though doing a quick field triage. “What happened?”

“I sent out a tracking spell.”

King scanned the two spells I had drawn and squinted, as though trying to read them. He must know about as much about witchcraft as I knew about alchemy, because he looked right back at me, eyes unclouded by suspicion.

“We need to leave now,” I said.

“You’re welcome to go,” King said. “I can’t leave my partner stuck like that.”

“There is something in this house with us that—” I hesitated. I couldn’t describe what the wood had shown me. The image was of something that walked on delicate feet, something massive and dangerous. All I knew for certain was that whatever the creature was, it had friends.

The floor did not like its friends. They crawled into cracks between boards, anywhere that they could fit. I hadn’t even met them, and I didn’t like the idea of something crawling into every crack and opening in my body.

“There’s something big and dangerous in this house with us. And neither of us are going to like the creepy crawlies that come with it,” I said.

“Listen, Ferro,” King said. “I can take care of myself; just get outside. We radioed that we were coming in after you, so there should already be backup on the way. You just need to call again and let them know they need to send more people.”

Frustrated, I exhaled a sharp breath. I took two steps away, half thinking that if I ran fast enough, I could beat whatever had attacked Smith. Clearly King didn’t know what he was fighting, but I did.

The smart move would be to look after my own interests. My interests were definitely not to get mummified and stuck to the ceiling so that Derek McCallum would have convenient target practice when he got back. My interests were my own health and safety, and leaving the stupid cop behind so that whatever got his partner would be distracted by him and ignore me.

Still, I hesitated. Although he was being a bit too brave for his own good, he was still someone I wasn’t sure I wanted to see mummified. He had given me a chance to clean up my mess before Paranormal Crimes caught me out last time, and he’d taken off the cuffs this time.

It wasn’t like I’d made any smart decisions since the moment that Derek McCallum had offered me a year’s salary to track down his artifact. At least this dumb decision came with a cop hot enough to raise the room’s temperature a few degrees.

Something touched my ankle. I shifted, jerking my leg and shaking it. Nothing came out from under the cuff of my jeans and I slapped at them, feeling something wet squish against my calf.

King was busy levitating another alchemist circle, and shot me an irritated look. I glared at him and pointed to my pants.

“There’s something in there,” I said.

The look he sent me was so irritated that I threw up my hands in annoyance.

“Not like that,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

King rolled his eyes, and the spell hit the ceiling. It weighed down the mummified body of his partner, tugging the other cop loose. Slowly the mummy descended.

Okay. As soon as we got the body, we were out. I felt something on my other leg and begin doing a dance that looked like I had to use the restroom.

“Ferro, can you?—”

Whatever King was about to say was cut off as something the size of a watermelon hit him from behind.