Page 11 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
Flushing, he gets unsteadily to his feet but catches his pale, blurry expression in the mirror. Eyes wide, skin sheened in sweat, hair pressed flat on one side and sticking up on the other.Hot, he thinks of Ophelia saying and has to fight the urge to go to her bed, curl up behind her, press his face to the back of her neck and hold on to her until he feels like himself again.
It’s a dangerous thought, teeth sharp in his mouth.
He stares too long, and the shadows come. Tendrils of pure black, seeping from his eyes and mouth, out of his hair, and off of his skin. If he asks anyone but Ophelia, they don’t see them. But they’re getting worse. Everything is getting worse.
And just like Ophelia won’t talk about that night, he won’t tell her it’s escalating.
That if he stares too long in the mirror, he can’t see himself.
That the dreams come every time he sleeps.
That he’s calling themdreams,but he’s pretty sure they’re real.
That he’s going to spend the next hour on the internet searching for the douchey guys from the truck the other day—an impossible search, too soon, not enough details, and there wouldn’t be a body to report anyway.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mateo drags himself out of bed extra early the next morning for Topher’s appointment, which is heinous because he’d slept poorly and it’s his only day off that week.
Throwing open all of the windows and doors as the sun only barely lights the sky, he sprinkles rue and salt over every inch of the floor.
If curse-boy is coming over, he has to re-up the wards on the house. They were composed by his mother to let the demonic energy that is Mateo in and out. Vampire-style, no one can enter without permission. A permission that can be revoked, at which point the person is violently expelled through the nearest exit, even if that’s a second story window. Ask him how he knows.
It’s kept his mom’s associates out, including Dagger Lady, whose bright white power suit he hasn’t caught even a suggestion of since the back-alley stabbing. She could be anywhere or given up entirely and he has no way of knowing.
Broom and vacuum follow, moving from the front to the back door. Smoke next, white copal resin, and then a bundle of herbs—white sage and lavender with a bit of rosemary shoved infor good measure. Nothing wow about any of that, standard witch stuff found in a million blogs with titles likePositive Energy, Positive Mind.
It’s the blood stuff that pushes everything into the dark arts territory.
Pocket-knife in hand, he drags the blade across the pads of his fingers and presses a black smear to the small symbol carved above each door and window, systematically moving from room to room. His mother used to do it with an extremely magical looking dagger. Handle pointing up, she’d have him wrap a fist around the blade, held a small white plate with a golden edge beneath to catch the blood, and then she’d yank the blade up through his grasping fingers.
It had sucked every single time.
On his first go of it by himself, he’d been scared the dagger was a critical element. Torn the house apart looking for it—except in her office where he absolutely wouldn’t search.
Turned out the wards didn’t care how they got the blood, so long as they got it. Lucky him.
The visible symbols are just the point of connection for the ritual. The meat of the protections are painted against the bones of the house and plastered over. He can’t get to most of them without ripping into drywall, except the ones in the roof crawl space. He’s spent a lot of time, flashlight in one hand, phone in the other, studying them. It’s exactly like staring at quantum physics when you only got through multiplication in your self-taught homeschool.
The last set of wards go on Ophelia and himself.
Ophelia sleeps like the dead, which is both normal—she’s always been like that—and unnerving. She’s just as capable of slipping out of her body and getting lost in another plane ofreality in slumber as she is wide awake, but a dread born of vivid memory seizes him whenever he has to wake her, terrified she’ll be cold to the touch.
Assuring himself of the steady rise and fall of her chest first, he drags her legs out from under the comforter and traces symbols onto the soles of her feet with cascarilla chalk. Minimal kicking for his efforts. With much more difficulty he does this to her wrists, arms snaking out to drag him into bed with her. By the time he gets to her chest where the last ward goes, she’s fully awake but refusing to rouse because she knows there’s work to do—she’s on the payroll via a carefully crafted text explaining her skills and fortuitous availability.
He leaves her there faking sleep because warding himself is a whole thing.
Cascarilla is used to protect against things like being possessed by demons, but he’s already possessed. Unfortunate. Still needs the wards, though, so he has to prepare them special.
On him, the purpose is less about protection and more about hiding him from anyone who might sense the demon. It can’t be stressed enough how much other magic people don’t like demons. Which you’d think would mean every other magic person in town would be down for helping him get an exorcism, but please refer to the frowned-upon blood magic his mom used.
A few weeks after his mom bounced, and after a particularly scuzzy-looking ex-client came knocking, Ophelia had decided they should follow the client and see what they could learn. Ophelia had just figured out a new form of projection—her family was still alive and training her at the time—and had wanted to try it out. All she needed was a good look at their aura and a personal item of some importance and she’d be able to track them. She’d forced this plan by having already stolen the wallet of the scuzzy guy.
They’d ended up in front of a nightclub with opaque windows, a large, solid, high-gloss black door, and a sign that readCARD. A quick phone search described the club as having mediocre drinks and sticky floors. The odds were high they’d get turned away, since they weren’t old enough, but the guy at the front had simply said, “Show me,” and fanned out a strangely miniature deck of cards face down, with a humorless stare.
Ophelia plucked out a card with a sun on the face. Whateversunmeant was good. This had been clear because it was directly contrasted by the grim reaction the bouncer had when Mateo pulled a blank card. They were let in with a lot of side-eyes thrown Mateo’s way.
Inside had been a club with mediocre drinks, sticky floors, and magic practitioners tucked into every booth and table lining the walls. No one had been dancing despite the blaring techno and the straight-up laser light show projecting onto the lacquered dance floor.
