Page 10 of Strike It Witch

Three

Ishould’ve been able to banish a demon like Gnath in my sleep.

The thought rolled around my head as Ida bustled to the ancient coffeemaker on my narrow kitchen counter, her footsteps shuddering through my 19-foot Airstream travel trailer.

“Feeling any better?”

“Yeah. I managed a couple hours of sleep.” I perched on the edge of my bed and studied my hands. They’d finally stopped shaking a few minutes ago. Right around the time that my stomach settled down. “Thanks for helping me home.”

“Good thing I’ve been hitting the gym.” She gave me a classic Rosie the Riveter pose.

“Good thing.” I blinked, widened my eyes, blinked again.

“I managed you into the car on my own, but Fennel used his magic to get you into the trailer. Had to sit in the car with him until he sobered up, though.” She poured water in the receptacle at the back of the machine, taking care not to splash it on the minuscule counter. “He sure likes catnip.”

“Where is he, by the way? We have a delivery this morning.”

“Sleeping it off in the garden room.” She gestured to the cabinet by my foot. “Grab the coffee, would you?”

I reached into the cabinet beneath the fridge and produced the grinder. Handed it and a bag of fresh-roasted Guatemalan beans to her. “Gnath doesn’t know you’re a necromancer, does he?”

As I’d been born a witch with a magical affinity for the earth, Ida had been born a necromancer, a paranormal with the ability to communicate with the dead.

“Nope. I kept my paranormal side under wraps.”

“Can you do that?” She’d retired from professional life two decades before, but her ability was innate and, as far as I knew, not something she could turn off.

“Sure. I just don’t strike up a conversation with a corpse and no one’s the wiser.” She poured a measure of beans from the bag into the grinder and held up a finger as the blades went to work. When it was done, she poured the prepped coffee into a natural fiber filter, added water to the machine, and started it up.

The scent of freshly brewed coffee was a balm to my soul. “Thanks again for offering to go into Limbo after Fennel. I know how dangerous it is, especially for you.”

“You’re welcome.” She rocked up on her blue, polka-dot sneakers and dusted coffee grounds off her dandelion yellow blouse and matching capri pants. “You know, it’s not that Limbo itself is dangerous to me. It’s more that necromancers aren’t held in high regard by the denizens of the death realms—creatures like that highway demon last night. They don’t appreciate those of us who have the ability to find our way back to the living.”

“Probably because they’re stuck there.”

“Maybe. Though Limbo’s not such a bad place. Dante Alighieri called it Purgatorio and made it sound like Hell-lite. He was wrong—about a great many things. He did get the circlesconcept, though. But, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.” She shrugged. “People have the wrong idea about death and the otherworlds. I could write a book, but it would probably end up in motel-room nightstands a thousand years from now, my words all twisted around.”

That earned a smile from me. “What did you think of the glyph Gnath left behind? Think it means anything?”

Ida shook her head, soft white hair fluttering in her eyes. She was experimenting with bangs again. “Let’s hope not. Mictlantecuhtli was a real scary guy. Not as bloody as Huitzilopochtli, but not someone you’d want to encounter in a dark alley. Or a well-lit alley. Or in broad daylight in the middle of a BTS concert.”

Ida was a huge Korean pop music fan.

“The last few generations of my family were from Mexico,” I said, “but I don’t know much about Aztec gods.”

“Me neither, but I know the ones to avoid, and Mictlantecuhtli ranks pretty high on that list.” She turned away and peered out the porthole window above my sink. “We necromancers get a little cagey when the subject of death gods comes up.”

It was understandable that a necromancer and a death god might not be the best of friends. A necromancer invalidated the finality of death—at least for a short time.

“We need music. Let’s see what’s playing this morning.” I reached into the compartment above my dining table to switch on the only AM radio station in town worth listening to, KLXX. They played the sixties, seventies, and eighties exclusively.AM-KLXX. All the classics, all the time.

“We could play something through the app on my phone. I was listening to aespa last night.” She snapped her fingers and sang, “Dra-ma-ma-ma?—”

“No. The last time I let you play K-pop in my trailer, you nearly danced off my stabilizer jacks. Let’s keep it chill in the Airstream.”

“Spoilsport.”

Two ads later, Boz Scagg’s “Lido Shuffle” reached through the built-in speakers and squeezed musical fingers around my heart, wringing out nostalgia like water from a sopping washcloth. Mom had been a teen in the seventies, and my childhood soundtrack had been influenced by her teenage Top 40 charts.

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