“Morning,” Sharon said without turning. She was heating SpaghettiOs on a hotplate. She tasted one, then scraped them into a plastic bowl and handed it to the kid.
Fee watched this nervously. I could feel her clocking the kid, sensing the nourishment he actually needed. I didn’t think it came from a can.
“Morning,” I said, before Fee could say something off topic. “Where’s Marion?”
Sharon sat at the mint-colored table. “Marion’s your girl, I figured she’d be coming with you.”
“Nope.” We’d called her twice that morning and gotten her parents’ answering machine. “Did you figure anything out?”
“Since I last saw you I showered, slept, and woke up screaming. Then I spent the morning dealing with this one.”
The kid flicked a mistrustful gaze our way. His eyes were the same space-age blue as his mother’s.
“Hi,” Fee said softly. “What’s your name?”
He rolled those pretty eyes and went back to his X-Men.
“Don’t bother,” Sharon said dismissively. “He barely even talks to me.”
The room was claustrophobic, even with the open door. I wanted to leave this place and never see Sharon again, never again breathe the hopeless tin-and-tomatoes scent of canned spaghetti. But we were stuck with each other for now.
“Right,” Fee said after a pause. “So I’ve been looking into banishing spells. I’ve got some ideas, places to start.”
“Not sure an off-the-shelf banishing would work.” Sharon folded tattooed hands over her stomach, rocking her chair to its tipping point.
“Okay. So what might?”
“We need Marion here to figure that out. She’s a weak witch, but she’s the only one who knows what we’re unpicking.”
Marion’s voice came from the doorway. “Weak witch, reporting for duty.”
She looked even worse than I did. Baggy dress and scarecrow limbs, and massive sunglasses that looked new. “I know what we have to do,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” Sharon let the legs of her chair drop. “What’s that?”
Marion slopped her bag onto the table. “Redo the spell. This time, we finish it.”
“Not a chance,” I said. “No way.”
“It’s the only way.” She pulled off her sunglasses. The room went so quiet Sharon’s kid looked up.
“Gross,” he said. “What’s wrong with her face?”
All around Marion’s eyes, over her temples and the tops of her cheeks, were little bruises. She was speckled with them like a piece of bad fruit. “Astrid won’t let me sleep until it’s done,” she said dreamily. Not crush-dreamily, but like a person talking in their sleep. “She pinches me awake each time I try.” Her eyes cleared, went suspicious. “Did she let you guys sleep?”
“Like a baby,” Sharon said. “Till I woke up with blood in my ear and my kid’s hamster dead on my pillow.”
“What?” the boy squeaked. “You said she ran away!”
Sharon closed her eyes. “Oh. I’m sorry, baby. Here, take this.” She rummaged in her pocket, then held out a crumpled bill. “Get an ice cream, okay? Take yourself to the movies. Just be gone for a couple hours. We’ll get you a new pet next week.”
He rose slowly, shoulders clenched, leaving his comic book propped beside the untouched SpaghettiOs. He looked too young to go anywhere by himself, but I’d been about that age when my dad stopped keeping tabs.
“Kids,” Sharon muttered, after he’d snatched the money from her fingers and stomped off into the sun.
“Vengeful spirits,” I said. “To get back to the matter at hand. She killed your hamster?”
“Beheaded it.” Sharon made a guillotine of her hands to demonstrate.
Marion dropped heavily into a chair. “I was wrong. About the spell and what it would cost. There’s more to it than I realized.”
“Oh, well spotted,” Sharon said caustically.
“Let her talk,” Fee murmured.
Marion took out the occultist’s book and lay beside it a thicker volume, stamped in gold lettering. Howlett House: A History.
“Last night I reread all the parts about Astrid. Lots of slanderous stuff and old wives’ tales, but information, too. She—” Marion shook her head sharply, started again. “In Baltimore she was accused of killing four men. It was this massive story, probably because of the way she looked. She got all these marriage proposals, she was basically a celebrity. Right up to her escape she denied doing it. But one of the servants at Howlett House claimed she’d overheard Astrid talking about the killings with John Howlett. She said Astrid told him she’d used the men to test a theory she had: that there was a way to beat death.”