Page 1 of What Is Dark Within Me

PARTI

1

A SPELL FOR FINDING LOST THINGS

Beneath the overcast sky,a yellow parking ticket fluttered brightly on Alejandra Ruiz’s windshield, and she wished her family had prolonged their bargain with the devil. Without bothering to look at the amount she’d been fined, Aleja tossed the ticket into her bag. It wasn’t as if she could afford it either way.

She wiped a few scattered crumbs off the driver’s seat before settling into the car and checking her phone. Her cousin had sent the address of the home she was assigned to as a caretaker today, but as usual, the message was preceded by a round of family gossip. She scrolled past tidbits about people she hadn’t spoken to in years before finally finding the information she needed.

It’s the old Victorian house on Blackbird Ave. Sarita is a regular there. She’ll show you the ropes. The client is Agnes Flanders. She’s probably a witch, so don’t tell her your last name.

Aleja was about to put her phone away when another text came through.

Hey, it’s Sarita. Pretty sure I’ve got the flu, but Agnes is easy. Just be sure to make her coffee right. Two sugars, and a shot of whisky strong enough to numb the pain in her joints. Don’t worry, she’ll remind you.

Aleja should have been irritated, but this morning, she was planning to steal a wildly expensive relic from the old woman’s house. It would be much easier if there wasn’t another caretaker looking over her shoulder.

It was a ten-minute drive to the home, giving Aleja enough time to finish the podcast she’d started while pulling on her puppy-patterned scrubs this morning. As always, it was a true crime story centering on a young woman named Violet Timmons, who’d been missing for six months.

And as always, it made Aleja remember the last words Violet had left on her voicemail.Hi, Al. I’m going on a quick solo hike near the falls. If I’m not back in a few hours, assume Bigfoot is trying to make me his forest bride and swoop in for a rescue!

Violet hadn’t made it back that evening. And no matter how many times Aleja retraced Violet’s last steps, no matter how many nights she spent scouring the blogs of others obsessed with the influencer who’d disappeared in the Oregon wilderness, not a shred of evidence pointed to where Violet hadactuallygone that day.

But while Aleja’s family may have lost the power granted to them by the devil, she was still a witch. A witch who knew how to use a scrying mirror, even if she couldn’t actually afford one.

After parking her car, she approached the wrought iron fence surrounding the Flanders’s property. The gray sky made the home’s yellow facade appear more intense, and the curtains—a pastel pink that reminded her of a dollhouse—were pulled shut behind dark windows. A tabby cat meowed as Aleja made her way through the trimmed front lawn but darted into the bushes when she kneeled to pet it.

There was no answer when she knocked and announced herself as the new caretaker from the Gentle Hearts Agency, but that wasn’t unusual. Many of their clients were hard of hearing or needed time to make it to the entrance. She waited a few moments before peering through the nearest window, her view partially blocked by lacey curtains.

Two dark green Champagne bottles sat atop the coffee table; one had tipped over and long since emptied itself onto the rug. Aside from the sofa, where a velour bathrobe was bundled up like a tired ghost, nothing much of the living room was visible.

“Agnes likes to party,” Aleja muttered, before knocking again and trying the door.

The first thing she spotted as the door swung open was a note next to a bowl of keys atop a small table in the foyer. Neat handwriting spelled out:Sarita, come on in and make yourself a pot of coffee. I had a late night. Might be asleep for a while.

Guilt darkened her relief. It wasn’t as if shewantedto be a thief, but scrying mirrors were the purview of those wealthy and connected enough to find, let alone afford one. She had cousins who fit the bill, but Aleja belonged to the ‘broke college dropout’ end of the family, which consisted solely of her.

“Hello?” she called into the house. “Miss Flanders, I’m Alejandra Ruiz with Gentle Hearts. Sarita isn’t feeling well, so I’m here to lend a hand today.”

Again, nothing.

She made her way to the kitchen. The smell of burned grease hit her first, and she realized someone had left a kettle on the hot stove. Aleja darted forward, nearly burning her forearm as she snatched up a kitchen towel and moved it off the heat. Any water inside had long since evaporated.

“Miss Flanders, are you okay?” she called again, listening to the house as it answered. Somewhere, a furnace rattled.

As Aleja pulled her phone from her pocket to text Paola, her attention turned to a staircase leading to the second floor.Dammit. Sure, she could take someone’s blood pressure or change a bandage, but waking a witch with a hangover was not worth her hourly minimum wage.

Before she could swipe past her lock screen, she saw Violet. It was a photo taken a few months before her disappearance, when she’d dragged Aleja to some remote waterfall on a day she would rather have been working on her thesis.

A streak of mud had smeared across the camera lens, giving the picture a misty atmosphere. Violet’s pale hair was pulled back into a sweaty ponytail. She’d posted it to her hiking blog with the caption:Get a best friend who always picks up the phone, even when you’re calling at four a.m. to see if they want to catch the sunrise.

They were a study in contrasts, despite both being twenty-two. Violet was blond, aside from fading lavender ends from a dye job gone awry. Aleja’s shoulder-length bob framed her round face and was a red deep enough to be mistaken for black in certain lights; a natural color, despite the constant questions she got about what salon she went to.

“You’re going to owe me big time someday, Vi,” she muttered as she climbed. Most of the second-floor doors were open. Through one of them, she glimpsed an outdated bathroom, with walls as pink as the curtains—a color she could best describe assticky. Another opened to what might have been an office. Her mouth clamped shut before she could call out to Agnes again.

To her left was a line of shelves packed so tightly with books that she imagined the house collapsing if a single one was removed. On a strip of bare wall was a framed print Aleja was intimately familiar with. Her great-great-grandfather and his brothers stared at her with dark eyes. One held a rapier, one a chess piece, and the youngest, a guitar. There were four types of people with posters of the Ruiz brothers: budding fencers, chess players, musicians, and lastly, dark magicians impressed by the brothers’ allegiance to the Knowing One.

A statue perched beside a dusty typewriter caught her attention. It was of an angel with great leathery wings, but instead of extending his hands in the usual gesture of kindness, he tumbled from some unseen place.

---