Page 3 of A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums

The lavender was part of thenew meproject. The things to do for myself to help me out of the funk I’d been living under since Jeffery’s passing.

What normally fell soft and full of body now hung limp and stringy around my shoulders. The best I could do was finger-comb it, which brought back a little life. Well, it’d just have to do. Cobweb chic might not have been my best look, but who did I need to impress?

I really despised this particular favor. My stomach pitched as I grasped the handle and I swallowed back the fear as I opened the door. On a large breath, I climbed out.

Lord help me.

Chapter

Two

The suction keeping the door closed because of the temperature differential blew me backward hard enough to land on my butt when I finally yanked it open, with a burst of super-cooled air hitting me as I fell. Clearly, I’d never been a Boy Scout. Wasn’t that their motto: Always be prepared, or something like that? Well, I wasn’t prepared for the gale-force wind about to hit me, and when my hand slipped from the handle, that was all she wrote. Hoping that nobody saw, I pushed up off the hard cement and brushed off my humiliation along with my bottom, thankful that the door caught on the rubber lip lining the threshold instead of shutting completely.

Because I was busy dusting myself off, I didn’t exactly look where I was going—that was until I slammed head, torso, and even legs first into a wall of man. Where Ioomphed, he grumbled, lifting me by my arms to set me away.

“Maybe you should actually look before you walk,” he said, and not nicely.

“I’m sorry,” I replied and looked up to smile at the man, hoping to show my sincerity. That idea blew with the wind when I caught his eyes. Dark eyes narrowed angrily on me and not the kind ofyou just knocked into metype of angry, but a deeper-seeded anger where the roots had already taken hold before he ever laid eyes on me.

“What business do you have here?” he asked, posturing menacingly by folding his arms over his immensely broad chest. He seemed overly pissed off given the situation. It was an accident. I wanted to say, “I hope your day gets better,” but with another scowl from the man, I rethought that real quick. Was Mercury in retrograde? Why did every man I ran into today have to be an asshole? Okay, so I literallyraninto this guy, but come on. I apologized. Let the punishment fit the crime, for crying out loud.

“I’m here to pick up my fiancé’s belongings. It has to be gone today.” Man, I wished I’d stayed in bed. The detective actually seemed to get angrier when I answered the question thatheasked. His body grew super rigid and the vein in his neck not only pulsed, but looked a second and a half away from bursting through the skin on his neck. This must have beenPick on Simone Dayand someone forgot to send me the memo.

“Go to the elevator. Basement level. Check in at the desk—they’ll help you out.”

“Thank you,” I said, moving away from him but deciding that maybe he was just upset about the accident, I wanted to try to smooth things over before we parted ways. “And I’m really sorry about running into you.”

He gritted his teeth but didn’t say another word to me, only watched me until I turned away to get to the elevator. Once the doors slid shut, I pushed the B button and had to grab the wall when the lift jolted. At the bottom when the doors slid open, I had this idea that this floor would be darker with maybe only one or two buzzing, flickering greenish lights illuminating ceilings with water stains and, I didn’t know, puddles on the floor. Maybe I watched too many police dramas because this place might not have had natural light coming in from windows butit held a light and airy feel that surprised me. Clean. No water or cobwebs. A bubbly woman sat behind a desk. Blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and smiling blue eyes that matched the customary blue uniform she wore smartly. Not a scowl in sight. Finally.

“Welcome,” she said. “How can I help you today?”

“You guys released Jeffery Myer’s personal stuff. I’m here to pick it up.”

“Do you have an I.D.?” she asked.

I pulled my wallet from my purse, flipped it open, and slid the license from the plastic sleeve, handing it over. She snapped a picture of it to load into their computer before handing it back.

“Okay, wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Smiling, I nodded, waiting patiently as she jogged through a door behind her. A few minutes later, the woman appeared holding a smallish brown box. The kind that normally held files, with the lid and everything. I signed the paperwork and took possession of Jeffery’s belongings, then got the heck out of there.

On the drive home, I passed the secondhand store again, which made me wonder why that guy was such a jerk. Though I refused to give him too much headspace. I had a cleared-out spot to park in my garage and a box of my dead fiancé’s effects. The first I loved thinking about, the second I wanted to avoid, but at the same time, curiosity got the better of me.

While I sat at the table eating my lunch, I flipped off the lid of the box and pulled the first object, Jeffery’s phone, out. His phone. I pulled out his wallet and other things they’d collected from the scene, but something kept pulling my attention back to his phone. I walked it into my kitchen to plug it in and waited for it to power up.

Jeffery had shared his lock code with me, the same as I’d done with him. Even after two years, when I clicked on his browser, the last thing he’d looked up appeared as a thumbnailin the corner. I clicked on it and—why would Jeffery have been looking up a strange address? He didn’t do house calls. He had an office, a nice office where his clients came to him if they didn’t want to video conference.

I turned to the maps app to help me out, and according to the cross streets, it wasn’t in the best neighborhood. So I clicked off the browser to look at his call history. Mine was the last call he’d made. But there were several calls from a person named Beetle. The last call only five minutes before he’d called me.

Beetle?

Jeffery never talked about a Beetle and we talked, or Ithoughtwe’d talked, about everything. Well, okay, we talked about everything that had to do with him. Me? Not so much. I held a huge secret, something no one else in the world knew about except maybe my parents, but seeing as they died when I was just a baby, they weren’t spilling either.

See, I wasn’t exactly human. I wasn’tnothuman, either. I considered myself human plus. The plus coming from the magic that flowed through me every full moon. No, not like a werewolf or anything like that. This magic sparked from my fingertips like a witch, but I’d met a few witches and all of them said variations on the same thing: “What are you?”

It’d been my experience that others in the magic community could sniff out their own. Even amongst the odd, it appeared I didn’t fit in. At least not until I’d met Jeffery. He went out of his way to make me feel loved. Though, he was also completely human. Kind of like on that old ’60s sitcomBewitched, I’d intended to share my secret with him, just not until we were married. That was why we’d kept separate homes. I made sure to have ‘cramps’ or ‘a really bad headache’ on every full moon, thus avoiding that potentially uncomfortable talk. Stupid, right? All that time wasted. We could’ve spent that time in domesticatedbliss. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time. Like he couldn’t have just divorced me after he found out?

Speaking of magic, that familiar pins-and-needles feeling started to spread through my hands, telling me something I didn’t need a calendar to remind me of, that tonight was a full moon. I flexed the joints in my fingers. This really was the worst part, the pins and needles caused by the magic uploading onto my temporary… what? Cache, maybe?

---