Page 19 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
“Check addresses. See who’s local. Maybe someone’s listed asDagger Ladyand it’ll be easy,” he says, shifting closer so he can see despite his burnt misery. Her hands are more functional, so she gets to turn the pages.
Six are local. He doesn’t recognize any names except Braulio Blanco, who is distinctly not a lady but a smarmy con-man whohad a falling out with his mom years ago. Not that he expects to recognize the name of the lady who tried to stab him, as he’d never seen her before.
After a difficult balancing and agility exercise of button mashing with barely functioning fingers, they translate all of the locals’ notes. None screamwill knife you in a back alley. As far as they can tell, they’re clients, middling witches his mom wasn’t impressed with, and one has a Metsy shop that sells incense. All have photos readily available on the internet. None of them have the rage-precise eyebrows of Dagger Lady.
Total dead end. And all he got for it was both of them burnt all to fuck.
He closes the book and holds it in his lap, then catches sight of his hand. Mostly whole, though covered in shedding, burnt-up skin. His nails are totally trashed, now shriveled bits of plastic he starts ripping off even though it hurts.
“Fuck,” he says quietly. And then again, much louder. Teeth press unevenly against each other, sharp and useless as his blood buzzes in his veins. Fixing him. Feeling hotter than usual. Like maybe getting knifed then getting badly burned tallied up two points against him in his unknowable scoreboard of demon possession.
What good is a book filled with magic people when they’re probably all assholes like every other magic person he’s ever met? It’s not like he can call each of them and ask if they attacked him. And now Ophelia’s hurt. That’s completely his fault. The opposite of what he’s trying to do here. Throwing the address book would feel good, but that’s one of those things people do in movies that’s nonsense in actuality. Throw the book, kick the desk, knock the probably cursed finger bone off the shelf for a moment of impotent power.
Looking to the wall of books, he wonders if there’s something helpful there. And how many times he’ll set himself on fire trying to check.
Finally, he turns to the spell book on the ground like it ever left his awareness. It’s a second heartbeat, cocooning around his own and buzzing with his blood. He tries to feel past the thrall. His mom hadn’t taken it with her. Had hidden it. Warded it. From him. But how did she know the book would call to him? He’d only ever seen flashes of the spell book. She’d kept it close, kept it closed, tucked it away if she saw him nearby.
She’d so clearly never wanted him to have it.
So, it seems extremely bad that it’s here while she’s missing. Like it means her missing wasn’t on purpose. Which is a slew of complicated feelings he doesn’t want to deal with.
His thumb finds the steady pulse beneath his jaw. It should be galloping because his teeth are sharp. There’s an asymmetry to his thoughts and his body’s reaction, a cold and distant terror at what it would cost him if he tried to use that spell book, being smothered by the sureness thathe should. Thathe’s supposed to. He tries to examine the thought, but it’s like the murderous ones that rattle though his brain. Slippery. Impossible to grasp onto and examine. Some part of him, or the thing in him, really thinks he should use his mother’s scary-ass magic book.
“Your aura’s freaking out,” Ophelia says softly, and Mateo rips his eyes from the spell book. Her complexion is waxy, like she’s not slept or eaten, and the image of her corpse flashes in his mind. Like it was yesterday. Like it could be today.
He can’t use that book. If the demon wants him to, it’s bad. And if he lets himself get taken over, he can’t save Ophelia.
Getting to his feet isn’t easy but he still offers her a hand and hoists her up as his re-forming nerves scream. “Let’s keepbrainstorming the Dagger-Lady–tarot-pull problem. I don’t work till tomorrow night, so we’ve got time.”
Time is the one thing he doesn’t have—none of them do with the ill-omened death card in the air—but she doesn’t point that out. As they settle in the living room for a night of research, he pretends the spell book, still on the floor of his mother’s office, isn’t pulsing gently at the edges of his awareness, keeping time with the beat of his heart.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mateo is low-key freaking out as he takes his spacious window seat and buckles in, watching the stream of boarding passengers. Seems like too many people, but no one else looks concerned. He starts counting them but has no idea what a reasonable number is, so he stops.
It’s 5AM,which should be illegal. Especially because Ophelia and he had been too restless from yesterday’s misadventures to focus on research. Persisting just long enough for Mateo to not look like he’d made out with a campfire, they’d gone bar hopping until last call and haven’t slept yet. While walking home from the bar, they’d had a brilliant idea.
They should talk to Topher’s dad.
Just, like, interview him. See what’s up.
Because they’d both been drunk, they’d texted this idea directly to Topher and even though it was 2AM, he’d agreed. With the obscene powers of a huge bank account and the info from Mateo’s fake ID—Topher hadn’t commented when he’d listed his name as Matthew E. Borrero—Topher got them a flight. Sobriety had come to Mateo an hour later—another demon-vesselperk. Ophelia has only really come back to the world of reaping what you sow in the past thirty minutes. She sits across the aisle, the seat beside her empty, huge sunglasses hiding bloodshot eyes as she checks every compartment around her for free things.
“We switched seats,” Topher whispers beside Mateo, failing at buckling in an impressive number of times before getting it. “I was going to have an empty seat beside me. Because people too close might be bad with my thing. But I thought maybe she’d like to sleep. Not that she can’t sleep next to you. I mean, not to imply that you guys are okay sleeping next to each other. Or not okay sleeping next to each other. On a plane. Only talking about planes. Where you sleep other times is—” Topher has the sense to cut himself off, eyes wide and desperate.
Jesus, this guy. “It’s okay, I get what you mean. We were up late researching.” Which bars had better tapas. If Topher wants to keep up this awkward chat for the whole flight—curse, demon, and death card be damned—Mateo’s not going to survive.
Speaking of not surviving, thereisthe matter of Topher’s curse, and how utterly brain-dead it is to get into a plane with him after the tarot pull yesterday. But he can’t explain to Topher that they’d drunk-texted him, so here they are. In an attempt to mitigate this bad idea, Mateo hyper-warded Ophelia and himself and, upon pickup, made Topher get out of his ride so he could aggressively rub a damp and perfumed egg all over him in a last-ditch effort to remove more bad energies.
He needs to distract himself but there’s nothing here but Topher and a small pinprick hole in the window he now can’t stop staring at. Isn’t that how the Alien got killed once? Sucked out of a hole? Is that a space thing or an air thing?
“Sorry it’s so early.” Topher’s quiet voice blessedly draws his attention from what is probably a perfectly normal hole in awindow that’s going to be in the sky, apology all over his face. “You texted and I bought the next available flight without thinking. Set the pick-up and drop-off. Reserved a hotel. I almost booked dinner at three different places because I don’t know what you like to eat. What either of you like to eat, I mean,” he continues, gaze intent but curling a paper menu up into a thin tube between restless fingers.
Now Mateo feels a little bad he’d been getting wasted while this guy stressed. As someone who’d just recently lit himself on fire while looking for an address book that was only ever going to be so helpful in the first place, he perfectly understands the desire todo. “I get it. Sometimes it’s nice to do anything that feels a little bit like progress.”
The wideness of Topher’s eyes diminishes as he nods.
Mateo’s pretty sure that means some concerns have been soothed. So, in general solidarity with Ophelia on free food matters, he adds: “For the record, neither of us are picky eaters.” The overhead announcement muffles that they’re waiting for a maintenance approval—which is deeply distressing to Mateo. Not wanting to give power to the cool phobia he didn’t know he had because he’s never been on a plane before, he keeps talking, “How’d things go once you left my place?”
