Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(10)

“Yeah.” I filled her in on my own evening, starting when Jesse picked me up at the airport. “But he doesn’t know that Erin was a witch,” I finished.

“There’s something else he doesn’t know,” Kirsten said suddenly. She reached up, making a weak attempt to smooth down her hair. “Erin wasn’t the first witch to be murdered this week. She was the second.”





Chapter 4


“Two dead witches?” I asked, startled. “Eli didn’t mention another body.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. This one was out of our hands. The woman was thrown off the Santa Monica Pier.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, and my mind was clearing now. “Can you start at the beginning please?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.” Kirsten straightened her back, obviously trying to rally. With her makeup wiped off and her hair a lopsided cloud around her face, I was struck by how young she looked. How old was Kirsten? Thirty? Thirty-five? It seemed awfully young to have so much power and so many people counting on you. Granted, I was only twenty-three, but I had the opposite of power, and nobody counted on me.

“Last Friday, I got a call from one of my witches,” she began. “Her name is—was—Denise Godfry, although she worked under a different name. Anyway, she asked to meet with me, in person, to discuss a problem. I agreed, of course, but I had meetings that night. We were supposed to have brunch in Santa Monica the next morning, but Denise never showed. I called and called, and finally went down there. There was a policeman at her apartment.” Kirsten began victimizing a new coaster, and I noticed that her manicure was chipped to shit. A very bad sign.

“She was dead,” I prompted.

“Yes. The police said she had killed herself,” Kirsten said, with a bitter little emphasis on the word police. “Her body was found in Santa Monica, right up on the damned beach. It even made the Times, though you probably didn’t see it in New York.”

I tried to remember if I had ever heard her swear. “No.”

“Anyway, I was very worried. I tried explaining to the policemen that it couldn’t have been a suicide, but none of them would listen to me. Then last night it was the same thing all over again, with Erin.”

“I don’t mean to be insensitive, but how do you know Denise didn’t just fall? Or, um…jump?”

She was shaking her head. “Denise was hydrophobic. Deeply afraid of the ocean. She told me once that she’d seen that movie Jaws when she was a little girl, and she still couldn’t stand to be over water, much less in it. She would never have been on the pier. And if she were going to kill herself, it wouldn’t be like that.” The coaster in her hands was viciously ripped in half. “I told the policeman that too, for all the good it did me.”

I raised my eyebrows, surprised. “You told the police?” It wasn’t like her to involve the police in Old World affairs.

But Kirsten said, “At the time I was thinking Denise’s death didn’t have anything to do with her being a witch. I thought maybe it was an ordinary murder. If there is such a thing.”

I understood. This was Los Angeles, after all, and young women who are out alone in the middle of the night do disappear for “ordinary” human reasons. “But then Erin died too, and you figured it was an Old World connection,” I surmised. She nodded at her coaster pieces. “Aside from being witches, was there anything that Erin and Denise had in common?”

“Well…neither of them had much ability, I’m afraid. What you would call power.”

I nodded. When I paid attention to my radius, I experienced both Kirsten’s and Eli’s power as two distinctive hits on my null radar: Eli as sort of a low throbbing and Kirsten as a steady buzz that flickered if she flexed her magic. A witch with less power would register as a much lesser buzz. “So you think someone may be killing…what, minor-league witches?”

She hesitated. “Maybe. It might not be that simple, though. In terms of magical ability, Erin and Denise had something else in common. They both dealt with the future.”

“Fortune-tellers?” I said, unable to keep the skepticism out of my voice.

She held one hand out flat and teetered it from side to side in a “kind of” gesture. “Both women were active in our society”—the witches’ word for their union—”but like many witches, both of them were really only talented with one thing: in this case, predictions. Denise read tarot cards on the Third Street Promenade, a block from the pier. She was very successful at it, but that was all she could do. Erin had even less natural magic. She got…feelings, about the future. But they were very vague.”

“What do you mean, vague?”

Her eyes searched the ceiling above my head, as if she might read off an example. “She worked as a loan officer at a bank, and she would sometimes get a feeling about the people who applied. That they were going to be successful, or that they would fail miserably.”

“Was she right?”

“Always, as far as she knew. But she never knew why or how something was going to happen, just sort of a general sense. I remember another witch, Stella, telling me that Erin had called and told her to keep her kids home from day care that day. Erin had no idea if that meant that the building would explode, or one of the kids would fall off the swing set, or what. She just told Stella not to let the kids go.”