Skin Trade

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Olaf seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, “I didn’t want to, and no one was paying me to do it.”

There, perfectly Olaf, not that he didn’t kill a priest because it would be wrong, but because it didn’t amuse him at the moment, and no one had paid him. Even Edward at his most disturbing wouldn’t have had the same logic.

“We’re talking in front of you too casually,” Edward said. “Why?”

“Perhaps you simply feel at ease.”

He shook his head. “You’ve got a permanent spell of some kind on the room, or house.”

“All I have cast is that people may speak freely if they desire to. Apparently, your friends feel the need, and you do not.”

“I don’t believe confession is good for the soul.”

“Nor do I,” she said, “but it can free up parts of you that are blocked, or help soothe your mind.”

He shook his head, then turned to me. “If you’re going to have her do something with the medallion, do it. We need to go.”

I fished the second chain from underneath the vest and all. I’d tried carrying the cross and the medallion on the same chain, but there were too many times when I needed the cross visible, and I got tired of people asking what the second symbol meant. The image on the metal was of a many-headed big cat; if you looked just right on the soft metal, you could discern stripes and symbols around the edge of it. I’d tried to pass it off as a saint’s medallion, but it just didn’t look like anything that tame.

I held it out to Phoebe. She took it gingerly by the chain with only two fingers. “This is very old.”

I nodded. “The metal is soft enough that it bends with pressure, and some with just the heat of the body.”

She started walking toward the door that her daughter had come through with the tea. I expected us to go all the way to her altar room, but she stopped us in a small, bright kitchen. Her daughter, Kate, was nowhere to be seen.

Phoebe answered as if I’d asked out loud, “Kate had a date tonight. I told her she could go after the tea was served.”

“So she missed the metaphysical show.”

“Yes, though many gifted in the area might have felt something. You do not call down such evil and such good without alerting those who can sense such things.”

“I don’t usually pick up stray stuff,” I said.

“But you are not trained for it. Tonight’s show would have attracted either the untrained, who ca

I shook my head. “Are we here for me to get lectured or to cleanse the charm?”

“So impatient.”

“Yeah, I know, I need to work on it.”

She smiled, then turned to the sink. “Then I will not waste more of your time.” She turned the water on and waited a few moments for it to run, while her eyes were closed and she looked upward at nothing that I could see or feel.

She passed the charm and chain under the ru

I gave her a look.

She laughed. “What, you were expecting me to put it on the altar and take you out to dance naked in the moonlight?”

“I’ve seen my teacher cleanse jewelry, and she does the four elements: earth, air, water, fire.”

“I thought I would see if I could cleanse it doing something that you might actually do yourself.”

“You mean just wash the bad stuff off?”

“I let the water run for a few minutes, as I thought, ‘All water is sacred.’ Surely you know that ru

“I’ve actually never found that a vamp couldn’t cross water to get to me. I’ve had ghouls run through a stream.”

“Perhaps the stream, like your cross, needs you to believe.”

“Why isn’t the water like the stones, and works on its own?”

“Why should water be like stone?” she asked.

It was one of those irritating questions that Maria

She smiled. “I see why you worked so quickly and seamlessly with Michael. You both have a certain exasperating quality to you.”

“So I’ve been told.”

She dried the medallion carefully on a clean kitchen towel, then handed it to me. “This is not like your cross, Marshal. It is not an item that automatically keeps the bad things at bay. It is a neutral object; do you understand what that means?”

I let the medallion and chain pool into the palm of my hand. “It means that it isn’t evil or good; it’s more like a gun. How it’s used depends on who’s pulling the trigger.”

“The analogy will do, but I have never seen anything like this. You do not know me, but I don’t say that very often.”

I looked at the dull gleam of the metal in my hand. “I was told it would keep Marmee Noir out of me.”

“Did they tell you anything else about it?”

I thought, then had to shake my head.

“They may not have known, but I think as it keeps the Dark Mother out of you, it may also call things to you.”

“What kind of things?” I asked.

“There’s something very animalistic, almost shamanic, to the energy of the piece, but that’s not quite it, either.”

I wanted to ask, did it call the tigers to me? Was it the medallion itself that was causing me to be drawn to them? Would asking be giving her too much information?

“Why did you ask how good a witch Randy was?”

I felt the compulsion to simply tell her. She was right, I wanted to tell her, felt we should enlist some help from the local talent, but it wasn’t my call. Edward was senior on this, and I bowed to his expertise. What could I say?

“The bad guys, or things, didn’t go in for a killing blow. Their first strikes were to keep him from talking. He was a fully armed, fully trained, special teams guy. That’s dangerous enough to just kill, but whoever struck the blows saw his ability to speak as more dangerous than the weapons.”

“You asked me about a spell, but I can’t think of anything that would force Randy to speak out loud. You saw Michael and what he did. His invocation was soundless.”

“Yeah, but it takes concentration to do that kind of summoning, doesn’t it? Could Randy call up that kind of energy in the middle of a firefight?”

She seemed to think about it. “I don’t know. I have never tried to do a working in the middle of combat. We have other brothers and sisters who are soldiers. I can email them and ask.”

“Just ask if they’ve tried doing magic in the middle of a firefight. No details.”

“I give you my word.”

Had I said too much? It didn’t feel like I had. “Let’s say for argument’s sake that your people tell you they can’t do magic, silent and normal, during combat. What would come up against an armed unit, a SWAT unit, that Randy Sherman would have thought words, a spell, would be more effective against than silver-coated bullets?”

“Are you certain it was silver bullets?”

“It’s standard ops that tac units like SWAT have silver-coated ammo to be carried at all times, in case one of the bad guys turns out to be a vampire or shapeshifter. They were backing up a vampire hunter; they’d have silver ammo.”

“But you didn’t check,” she said.

I nodded. “I will, but I’ve seen these guys work, and they wouldn’t make that big a mistake.”

She nodded. “Randy would certainly not have made such an error.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Phoebe.”

“I was thinking,” she said. She frowned, rolling her lip under just a little. It looked like an old nervous habit that she’d almost lost. I wondered if it was her tell. Did it mean she was lying, or more nervous than she should be? Could she have some tie to what was happening? Well, yeah, duh, but it didn’t feel right. But then, how much was her magic and the house itself with all its wards affecting my reaction to her? Shit, I wished I hadn’t thought of that, or that I’d thought of it sooner. That I hadn’t thought sooner meant I was being messed with again. Shit.