Kicking It(2)

I didn’t know what he was talking about at first; when you’re facing a five-foot blackened cross still giving off wisps of smoke, it does tend to command center stage. But then he pointed at the ground in front of it.

Punched into the lawn by a knife was a picture. I turned on the light on my cell phone and crouched, not touching it or the knife, to study it, and I felt my stomach withdraw into a tight little clench as I realized what it was.

It was a photo of a dead woman, staring up at the camera. Her throat had been slashed, and her mouth was open and bloody; it looked as if she’d been beaten before the final cut. Her eyes were open and empty.

And I knew her. So did Andy.

“That’s Portia,” he said. “God damn them. Want to tell me I shouldn’t have shot them on their porches now?”

No. No, I didn’t. But I took in a deep breath, dialed 911 again, and reported the photo.

I asked for Detective Rosen, to save time; he’d show up, where some of the others might not. They’d have all kinds of excuses—out on a call, unable to respond, batteries dead. But the truth was that after the particularly painful murder of one of their own, Detective Prieto, a significant portion of the Austin Police Department didn’t want to protect and serve people like us.

People like witches, I mean.

Andy nodded toward the cross. “We should get that thing down.”

“No,” I said. “Leave it up. Let them see it as it is.”

“Want me to set it back on fire, too?” His voice was too tight, and so were his shoulders. He prowled restlessly, back and forth, and I could feel the fury snapping off him like invisible lightning. Andy was a dangerous man in this mood. “Not taking this flat on my back, Holly. Not taking this any damn way. They want to come at us, they better come ready for hell.”

Moments like this, I wished that witchcraft worked the way it did in the movies . . . that I could just murmur some fake Latin and blow away bad things. But the tradition of it had come down through the ages, and it was not only hard, but each of us was limited in what we could do with it. Andy and I, we were potions witches; give us time and ingredients, and we could do everything from heal the sick to raise the dead and keep them walking. But potions took time, energy, and concentration, and they didn’t keep well.

Potions couldn’t help us with something like this. Might as well take a slug of whiskey to calm the nerves, and then break out the shotgun.

There were a few witches in the world capable of actually cursing someone, fast and with effective spells. I’d never met one, and they damn sure didn’t live in Austin, Texas. The picture of Portia proved she wasn’t one of them, either.

We sat down on the steps of the house, and Andy put his arm around me. We didn’t speak. I watched lights go on and off in the other houses and thought that this would, yet again, be brought up at the association meeting as a disruption. We were those people now. And while we lived in a time a bit too PC for pitchforks and torches, I could feel the tide of sentiment turning against us.

Witches had come out to the public in an odd sort of way, about ten years back. Two specialists had teamed up because they wanted to solve a murder. One was a potions witch, and the other was a witch who specialized in making shells—creating a perfect copy of a human, but without the spark of life. A potions witch—commonly called a resurrection witch, when they did what I do—could brew a potion that put the spark of life back in, and that was exactly what they’d done. Together, they’d brought back a murder victim from beyond, to tell the incredulous detective all about his murder. And who did it.

Other witches teamed up for the same purpose. Before long, unsolved cases were being closed right and left . . . but there was a hitch. Even the strongest resurrection witches—and I was among them—couldn’t keep a dead soul in a resurrected living body for long. We expended our own energy to seal the bond, and the dead . . . Well, death had its own gravity. Eventually, it pulled the soul away. The longer that soul had to stay, the more it, and the witch, suffered. So the logical recourse for the cops was to record the testimony of the resurrected, and play it in court.

Turned out that was ruled unconstitutional at the highest levels, and now testimony of the dead no longer counted. It still solved cases, but it was inadmissible. The business for resurrection witches had fallen off significantly, and although people still wanted their loved ones revived for a brief period, it wasn’t exactly a cash-heavy business.

I often felt that we’d revealed ourselves for nothing, really. As my dad used to say, no good deed goes unpunished.