Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard #1)(45)
She spent a lot of evenings trying to teach me about clothes—my mother hadn’t been a bad dresser, exactly, but LA and Esperanza standards are very different—and taking me shopping for the kind of clothes she wore: casual tailored dresses with high heels and earrings that matched the necklace. She dressed me up in the brands she liked best: Armani, Burberry, Christian Louboutin. Soon I was her perfect little clone—no, not like a clone. A daughter.
Olivia had inherited money from her husband, a banking consultant who’d died a decade earlier, though she never talked about him. I asked her once why she worked for the Old World if she didn’t need the money, and she just shrugged and said she enjoyed the challenge. That never seemed quite enough to me, but I wasn’t going to push. I never pushed Olivia, actually. If we got too close to certain subjects—her dead husband, her childhood, her education—she would get this hardness to her, a flashing steeliness that had me backing off quickly. It didn’t take very long for me to learn to keep my mouth shut.
That night, I had been planning to read for a while in my room, but Olivia took a call right after supper. She listened to Kirsten for a few seconds, nodded, and hung up, telling me to change and get in the van immediately. I ran to my room and pulled on the coveralls Olivia had given me—just like hers—and was delighted to find that I’d beaten her into the van by a few seconds. She gave me a weird little frown at that but got behind the wheel, driving us to a suburban area in Culver City where a bunch of sensible sedans and SUVs were parked in front of a little split-level house. It just looked like any other party. We backed the van into the driveway and strode through the door near the garage, Olivia in the lead like she owned the place.
There were five witches, plus Kirsten, waiting for us in a small kitchen. I had expected the women inside to look the part of the suburban mommies, but most of them were fairly young, mid-twenties, with a professional look. Like big-business interns who had the night off. There were six of them crowded around the modest kitchen table, which was piled with wads of used tissues. They had all been crying, except for Kirsten, who was leaning against the counter looking furious. Kirsten isn’t really pretty, exactly, but with her clear Swedish skin and tranquil blue eyes, you’d never really notice. She has what my high school drama teacher used to call presence. In the Old World, though, we just call it power.
“Death magics,” Kirsten said tersely, her calm eyes flashing now. She had on jeans and a black leather jacket over what appeared to be a pajama top. “They were playing with death magics.” She pushed herself off the counter and jerked her head so Olivia and I would follow. Kirsten stalked down the hall to a back bedroom, which looked like the morning after a Wicca-themed slumber party—lights on, used candles and spell books and chalk scattered around next to empty wine cooler bottles and an honest-to-goodness Ouija board. It could have all been fairly innocent, except for the corpse in the middle of the room—a man, stark naked, with no visible injuries, unless you counted the look of terror on his face. He wasn’t rotting, didn’t even smell yet, but no one would mistake him for alive. I looked away. I wasn’t a virgin, but I’d never actually seen a penis in full light before, much less a dead penis. My eyes fell on Olivia, as I waited for her to tell me what to do. She was already opening her black old-fashioned doctor’s bag, pulling out some surgical gloves and an extra-strength Hefty bag.
“Put these on,” she said, tossing me a pair of gloves. I fumbled the catch and had to pick them up, my hands shaking. The worst thing I’d seen up until then was a severed werewolf ear, but the wolf had grown it back quickly, and the detached ear looked more like a movie prop than anything else. But I wanted so desperately to impress Olivia with my cool.
She unfolded the garbage bag, clearing a space on the floor to spread it next to the body. “You should always know what happened,” she told me as she worked. “It might make a difference to the cleanup. Usually the witch who did it—or Kirsten, if it’s a bad one like this—will fill you in, but I’ve seen this before, so she didn’t bother.” She motioned me to go crouch by the guy’s feet. “Death magic usually involves trying to contact the dead. This guy probably knew one of the witches and asked for help to talk to someone.” She leaned back for a second, showing me the importance of what she was saying. “A lot of things happen in the Old World, Scarlett, and some witches have a lot of power to manipulate the magic. But magic doesn’t like it when someone tries to cross the line between the living and the dead. It takes a very, very powerful coven to control death magic spells. Those witches couldn’t do it, and the magic went right back through them and zapped him. Like a lightning strike, but with no marks, which is why we have to take care of the body. No coroner is going to be able to determine cause of death.”
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Kirsten said, leaning in the doorframe. “Your magic—or lack thereof—costs you nothing.” Her eyes were sad. “For the witches, there’s always a cost. Some of us can’t afford to pay it.”
Listening to the two of them talk as if we weren’t gathered around a corpse was starting to calm me down. But then Olivia smiled at me, reached down, and wrapped her gloved hands crudely around the guy’s head, nodding for me to take his feet and help lift him onto the bag. I had no choice but to look. The guy’s feet were on the smallish side, and he’d had a pedicure recently (thank you, LA). I put my hands gingerly around his ankles, sticking my elbows out so his toes wouldn’t brush my forearms, and Olivia counted to three. When we lifted him, he felt awful—just dead, a dead sack of meat. His sad little penis lolled around with the movement, and the second he hit the bag, I was moving, darting out of the room. Kirsten had already backed into the hallway, pointing at one of the doors with a look of sympathy. I ran by and got the toilet lid up just in time to puke up all of that night’s dinner. I lost control of my body, which kept heaving and heaving, ignoring my attempts to calm it down, until at last it allowed me to collapse back against the tub. I stretched out one leg and kicked the handle on the toilet.