A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums (Lilith and Co. #1)

Chapter 2

Chapter

Two

T he suction keeping the door closed because of the temperature differential blew me backward hard enough to land on my butt when I finally yanked it open, with a burst of super-cooled air hitting me as I fell. Clearly, I’d never been a Boy Scout. Wasn’t that their motto: Always be prepared, or something like that? Well, I wasn’t prepared for the gale-force wind about to hit me, and when my hand slipped from the handle, that was all she wrote. Hoping that nobody saw, I pushed up off the hard cement and brushed off my humiliation along with my bottom, thankful that the door caught on the rubber lip lining the threshold instead of shutting completely.

Because I was busy dusting myself off, I didn’t exactly look where I was going—that was until I slammed head, torso, and even legs first into a wall of man. Where I oomphed , he grumbled, lifting me by my arms to set me away.

“Maybe you should actually look before you walk,” he said, and not nicely.

“I’m sorry,” I replied and looked up to smile at the man, hoping to show my sincerity. That idea blew with the wind when I caught his eyes. Dark eyes narrowed angrily on me and not the kind of you just knocked into me type of angry, but a deeper- seeded anger where the roots had already taken hold before he ever laid eyes on me.

“What business do you have here?” he asked, posturing menacingly by folding his arms over his immensely broad chest. He seemed overly pissed off given the situation. It was an accident. I wanted to say, “I hope your day gets better,” but with another scowl from the man, I rethought that real quick. Was Mercury in retrograde? Why did every man I ran into today have to be an asshole? Okay, so I literally ran into this guy, but come on. I apologized. Let the punishment fit the crime, for crying out loud.

“I’m here to pick up my fiancé’s belongings. It has to be gone today.” Man, I wished I’d stayed in bed. The detective actually seemed to get angrier when I answered the question that he asked. His body grew super rigid and the vein in his neck not only pulsed, but looked a second and a half away from bursting through the skin on his neck. This must have been Pick on Simone Day and someone forgot to send me the memo.

“Go to the elevator. Basement level. Check in at the desk—they’ll help you out.”

“Thank you,” I said, moving away from him but deciding that maybe he was just upset about the accident, I wanted to try to smooth things over before we parted ways. “And I’m really sorry about running into you.”

He gritted his teeth but didn’t say another word to me, only watched me until I turned away to get to the elevator. Once the doors slid shut, I pushed the B button and had to grab the wall when the lift jolted. At the bottom when the doors slid open, I had this idea that this floor would be darker with maybe only one or two buzzing, flickering greenish lights illuminating ceilings with water stains and, I didn’t know, puddles on the floor. Maybe I watched too many police dramas because this place might not have had natural light coming in from windows but it held a light and airy feel that surprised me. Clean. No water or cobwebs. A bubbly woman sat behind a desk. Blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and smiling blue eyes that matched the customary blue uniform she wore smartly. Not a scowl in sight. Finally.

“Welcome,” she said. “How can I help you today?”

“You guys released Jeffery Myer’s personal stuff. I’m here to pick it up.”

“Do you have an I.D.?” she asked.

I pulled my wallet from my purse, flipped it open, and slid the license from the plastic sleeve, handing it over. She snapped a picture of it to load into their computer before handing it back.

“Okay, wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Smiling, I nodded, waiting patiently as she jogged through a door behind her. A few minutes later, the woman appeared holding a smallish brown box. The kind that normally held files, with the lid and everything. I signed the paperwork and took possession of Jeffery’s belongings, then got the heck out of there.

On the drive home, I passed the secondhand store again, which made me wonder why that guy was such a jerk. Though I refused to give him too much headspace. I had a cleared-out spot to park in my garage and a box of my dead fiancé’s effects. The first I loved thinking about, the second I wanted to avoid, but at the same time, curiosity got the better of me.

While I sat at the table eating my lunch, I flipped off the lid of the box and pulled the first object, Jeffery’s phone, out. His phone. I pulled out his wallet and other things they’d collected from the scene, but something kept pulling my attention back to his phone. I walked it into my kitchen to plug it in and waited for it to power up.

Jeffery had shared his lock code with me, the same as I’d done with him. Even after two years, when I clicked on his browser, the last thing he’d looked up appeared as a thumbnail in the corner. I clicked on it and—why would Jeffery have been looking up a strange address? He didn’t do house calls. He had an office, a nice office where his clients came to him if they didn’t want to video conference.

I turned to the maps app to help me out, and according to the cross streets, it wasn’t in the best neighborhood. So I clicked off the browser to look at his call history. Mine was the last call he’d made. But there were several calls from a person named Beetle. The last call only five minutes before he’d called me.

Beetle?

Jeffery never talked about a Beetle and we talked, or I thought we’d talked, about everything. Well, okay, we talked about everything that had to do with him. Me? Not so much. I held a huge secret, something no one else in the world knew about except maybe my parents, but seeing as they died when I was just a baby, they weren’t spilling either.

See, I wasn’t exactly human. I wasn’t not human, either. I considered myself human plus. The plus coming from the magic that flowed through me every full moon. No, not like a werewolf or anything like that. This magic sparked from my fingertips like a witch, but I’d met a few witches and all of them said variations on the same thing: “What are you?”

It’d been my experience that others in the magic community could sniff out their own. Even amongst the odd, it appeared I didn’t fit in. At least not until I’d met Jeffery. He went out of his way to make me feel loved. Though, he was also completely human. Kind of like on that old ’60s sitcom Bewitched , I’d intended to share my secret with him, just not until we were married. That was why we’d kept separate homes. I made sure to have ‘cramps’ or ‘a really bad headache’ on every full moon, thus avoiding that potentially uncomfortable talk. Stupid, right? All that time wasted. We could’ve spent that time in domesticated bliss. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time. Like he couldn’t have just divorced me after he found out?

Speaking of magic, that familiar pins-and-needles feeling started to spread through my hands, telling me something I didn’t need a calendar to remind me of, that tonight was a full moon. I flexed the joints in my fingers. This really was the worst part, the pins and needles caused by the magic uploading onto my temporary… what? Cache, maybe?

The last voicemail recorded on Jeffrey’s phone happened the day before he died. Again, from Beetle. “Make the move now,” the low, eerily smooth voice ordered. “Or else.”

Or else?

Or else what ?

Or else he loses a client ?

Or else he gets written up ?

Or else he gets a bullet to his brain ?

When I said eerily smooth , I meant like when you heard the Godfather talking in that really popular movie. You just knew he was evil, but he never sounded upset. That was Beetle. Could this man be behind Jeffery’s murder? And why hadn’t the police ever mentioned this to us before? Since no arrests were made, I could only assume that they didn’t feel the need to feed us this information. The sandwich sat like a lead brick in my stomach. Wishing that I’d avoided food altogether, I sipped on the iced tea from the sub shop in hopes that my poor tummy would stop hating me as much as it felt like it did.

But… what if the police missed something? My gut told me there was more to this Beetle and the address Jeffery looked up. Crap. Okay. My feet knew what I planned to do before my brain knew probably because my brain started to focus on something else, something more… diabolical.

The word CORRUPTION began flashing in my head over and over in a bright purple neon. Corruption? Was their lack of communication concerning this person purposeful? I’d love to say that my intuition or gut instinct led me to this conclusion too, but I couldn’t because as I continued to see the flashing purple neon word behind my eyes, I felt the pulse of magic encircling it. Magic? Surrounding a word? This never happened before. I wasn’t sure I liked it now. No. My entire life I knew what to expect from my magic. Taser fingers that sparked with every full moon. Now suddenly the universe decided to change the rules of the game? Why? How? And most importantly, what did it have to do with Jeffery?

While this corruption angle took up major headspace, my feet seized control of the rest of my body. I left the other items on the table, crumpling up the wrappers from my food to throw away then grabbed Jeffery’s phone, my purse, and keys and ran out to my garage. Even in the daylight, the power in my veins started to get stronger because of the moon’s position. I flexed the fingers on each hand multiple times and shook them out. Then using my maps app, I followed the route from the address provided by Jeffery’s phone back to that less-than-stellar neighborhood.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I hoped to see a sign that read: Beetle’s place. Did I expect to see it? Of course not. But it would’ve made this job a whole lot easier. What didn’t make it easier was the address belonged to an abandoned building with the bottom windows and doorways boarded up and the second- and third-story windows broken out as if people had thrown rocks through them. It took a great deal of psyching myself up to finally decide to do a walk around. Without full use of my magic, if someone decided to pop a shot off at me, depending on how good a shot they were, it could mean R.I.P. Simone.

If they tried to attack me, maybe take me out with a tackle, enough magic flowed through me to fend them off. A touch from my hand was like being touched by the prongs of a stun gun. But I had to be touching them for that to work.

This is for Jeffery . After my mental pep talk, I sighed, shook off my fear, and pushed open the door to my jeep, making sure to bleep the locks after I jumped out.

The entire perimeter was littered with broken beer bottles and fast food wrappers, and around the back, I even found bent spoons and discarded needles, evidence of drug use—totally gross. One of the boards on the window had been loosened and I was able to move it out of the way enough to climb through. The temperature immediately dropped by a good twenty degrees inside and when the board swung shut again, the room plunged into blackness.

It stank of urine with faint hints of excrement. I wrinkled my nose, seriously contemplating turning myself around and getting the hell out of there, but instead, I fished my phone from my purse and clicked on the flashlight, shining it around the open space. Evidence suggested that several of the city’s homeless used this building as a camp.

As I walked the room, I heard a clanging like a can falling and spun around with my light, finding the offending can and a giant rat scurrying along the perimeter of the floor closest to the wall. What in the world would have made Jeffery come here?

The hairs on my arms started standing on end, which meant the time had come to move my ass. I ran back over to the window, moving the board and slipping back out into the sun, warming my bones, though not getting rid of that shaky feeling.

The feeling grew steadily stronger as I rounded the building. I prepared to see someone scoping out my jeep or checking out the building. But I could never have prepared to see him. He was there. The guy from the secondhand store stood across the street not scoping out my jeep, not checking out the building, but staring straight at me .

Arms crossed over his chest, a really attractive chest, even if not quite as broad as the detective’s at the police station. It still out-broaded most chests in the chest universe. What was wrong with me, thinking about broad-chested men at a time like this? He glared at me. Those hard eyes struck me harder than any hand ever could. They struck me down to my soul. He had that menacing thing down because I, for one, was intimidated.

Instead of asking him what in tarnation he was doing there, I ran to my truck, bleeping the locks to get in before I reached it. The problem with that strategy one might ask? I’d be happy to tell if I wasn’t so scared out of my mind, but one might guess my answer when I reached the door, swung it open, and climbed in, only to be met with him sitting in the passenger seat. How? He was across the street like two seconds ago.

“Drive,” he ordered me and the only thing that went through my head at that moment was an episode of a police forensics show where the officer said flat out: “Never let them get you to a second location.” I didn’t want to die.

“No!” I yelled, hoping to take him off guard, and I touched all five fingers on my right hand to his neck. That touch should’ve knocked him out for like ten minutes at least, but instead of passing out, he grabbed my hand, forcing it back onto the steering wheel again.

“If you don’t want to die, I suggest you not try that again and drive.”

Well, my next escape strategy involved running us off the road into a busy gas station or grocery store. My baby, beautiful flowery lilac finish, pristine in her condition, would just have to forgive me when I took her into the body shop for repairs because that would mean I was alive to take her there.

As I didn’t want to die and for some odd reason, my personal finger tasers neglected to work on my kidnapper, I started the engine and pulled out onto the road.

“Turn left,” he ordered. Since turning left took us out of that particular neighborhood, up and over the bridge to an area I was more familiar with, I turned left.

“Why are you doing this? How did you know I’d be there?”

“My boss sent me,” he answered.

Uh, his boss? “And why does the owner of a secondhand store care where I spend my free time?”

“Different job. Different boss.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“Can’t tell you that.”

“Can you tell me anything?” I asked. “What’s your name?”

“Not that it matters, but it’s Connor. Feel better?”

“That I know the name of my kidnapper? Yes.” I turned a hard right into a gas station, stepping on the gas. I stopped just short of plowing through the wall.

“Stop!” he shouted, trying to yank the wheel. When I stomped on the brake, I threw her in park, wrenched the keys out of the ignition, grabbed my purse, jumped out, and ran for my life, yelling at the top of my lungs.

“ He’s trying to kidnap me! Help! Someone, help! ”

Several men of the big, strong, pissed-that-someone-was-trying-to-hurt-a-woman variety fell in, blocking Connor to allow me to get inside the store. From the door, I watched as those same men surrounded him, closing ranks.

“My girlfriend gets a little dramatic,” he said in his lame attempt to cover his own behind. Which I had to admit was weird because it sounded like a radio transmission in my head. With only a glass door to separate us, his words should’ve sounded muffled, but they came at me clear as a bright sunny day. And I didn’t like them one bit. Dramatic? Did he really have the nerve to call me dramatic?

Oh, I could show him dramatic. With a great lack of common sense, considering the man kidnapped me and thus I should’ve kept as many barriers between us as possible, I pushed open the door to yell, “He’s not my boyfriend. I met him once today at a secondhand store. I think he might be stalking me.”

There might have been some knuckle- and neck-cracking among the men keeping me safe from Connor. The cashier, an older woman who looked at me like this wasn’t the first time she’d seen something like this, handed me a phone. “911,” she said.

I explained the situation the best I could.

“Are you safe?” the dispatcher asked.

“For now. I’m inside. Men are keeping him from entering.”

“Good. Stay inside. Police are on the way.”

She kept me on the line, giving her a play-by-play of the standoff outside.

With my stomach all tied up in knots, the cashier kindly handed me a cup of coffee. I’d swear on a stack of tarot cards that I only turned my head away for a second—a measly, split second—and bam ! The yelling and painful screams caught my attention. The cup of hot brew slipped from my fingers, spilling a puddle of brown liquid over the floor as both the cashier and I pressed our faces to the door, peering outside, where those big, strong, angry-on-my-behalf men slumped in a heap on the hot cement.

No Connor to be found.

That was when the police showed, sirens blazing. And just my luck, the angry police detective had to be the one to answer my call for help. Great. What could be odder than a failed kidnapping attempt, a dogpile of large protector-type men out cold, and a detective angry I breathed air? Well, that could only be the giant black hound the size of a grizzly running top speed away from the scene. I’d hate to be the animal control officer sent out to trap him.

“What are you staring at?” the detective asked after snapping his fingers in my face to get my attention.

I pointed in the direction of the dog. “Uh… the gigantic dog .”

He turned his head the way I pointed, squinting his eyes and covering his hand like a visor to shield his eyes from the sun. “What dog?”

“What do you mean what dog? It’s right there ?” I pointed again. “He’s running between the trees and that building.”

The man frowned even harder at me, a feat I didn’t think possible until I saw it with my own eyes, as he folded his arms over his massive chest taking a “don’t test me” stance that I probably should have found more intimidating—but hello , gigantic dog on the loose! “Did you hit your head?” he asked and I thought he might’ve been part dog himself the way he growled that sentence at me.

Hit it? No, but I shook it.

“Listen, just take my statement so I can go home and take a nice bubble bath.” Something felt off about the detective. Definitely something that I could no longer ascribe to him having a bad day. I wish I could put my finger on the what of his issues, but my head started to throb and I just needed to go home now. Thus, I gave my statement without any further pretense. When he asked me how I’d ended up at that abandoned building, I was honest. “Jeffery’s phone was in with his belongings. I charged it and turned it on. I saw his call log and texts. The location puzzled me, so I went to check it out. That’s how I ended up at the building.”

Then, I kid not, he poked me several times with a beefy finger right in the center of my chest. He did it hard enough that I figured I’d find a bruise in that spot. “I’m telling you now, don’t go back there. That’s an order.” —Uh, an order ? Last I checked, we didn’t live in a fascist state and he had no say in where I chose to go at any given time of day— “You’ve got no business being in that part of town.”

Then he suddenly and completely dismissed me by turning his back on me to take the statements of the big, burly protector-type men who’d kept me safe from my kidnapper and now stood around in a huddle rubbing the backs of their necks and wherever else appeared to pain them. I couldn’t read their minds, but I’d say trying to figure out what the hell just happened to them.

Connor. He said his name was Connor. Why would he tell me his name unless he’d planned for me not to make it out of our encounter alive?

And on top of everything, I’d found nothing useful in the abandoned building. Zip. Zilch. I sighed. It was time to call this a day and head home. Vegging until I fell asleep sounded pretty perfect, actually. The magic simmered just below my skin now. It wanted out. It wanted me to let it loose onto an unexpecting world.

“Simmer down,” I whispered to my fingers. The magic didn’t listen. It never listened.

The problem with the whole vegging-out plan was that once I reached my house, ordered takeout from my favorite Chinese place, and plopped down into my favorite chair with a tall glass of icy-pink lemonade, the condensation dripping down the glass—the best way to drink it—my curiosity got the better of me again and I opened Jeffery’s phone again. I open the Dropbox app. All boring finance-related files. I couldn’t pretend to understand all the jargon, but I understood enough to see that there didn’t appear to be any funny business.

File after file, I read for hours. Only stopping to answer the door and pay the delivery driver. Then I hit a file related to a client named “B. el-Zebu.” That was an interesting name. I’d seen al-Whatever names before, but never el-Whatever. I clicked on the file. Every word was written in a language that I didn’t understand. Not one that I recognized. Yet another dead end, or so I thought. I thought about it until I reached the bottom of the file, only to find a second file. This filename caught my attention because Jeffery had named it “Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.”

This seemed like a weird spot to put a cookie recipe. I clicked on it. My magic went haywire, burning under my skin, boiling my blood until I feared I’d pass out. “What the—” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut and shaking out my hands, trying anything I could think of to get rid of the burning.

The words in the file began to rearrange themselves and I blinked several times to rid myself of the hallucination. They rearranged into an address. Similar, eerily similar to the address I’d gone to today, but it was located in a town like four towns over. Could this be why I’d found nothing at the abandoned building? Because it was the wrong location?

Quickly, I shoved the remnants of my dinner into the refrigerator, slipped on my ballet flats, grabbed up my purse, and headed out to my jeep. In so much of a hurry, I even neglected to turn off the TV and lights. Before I backed out onto the road, I plugged this new address, with the new ZIP Code, into my map app.

The closer I drove to this new address, the more my magic tried to rip itself from my body. It hurt so badly I was forced to pull over two different times to get a grip on the pain. It had never behaved like this before. Once I reached the town of Raven, the town where I needed to be, I took each turn going slowly. Not a star shone in the sky, but the moon burned full and bright.

And then I heard the robotic voice of my map app: Destination on the right.