Hexes and Hemlines (25 page)

Two could play at such matters of the heart.

 

Haight Street was crowded with people in high spirits, bustling to and from dinner and drinks. I walked among them, past Aunt Cora’s Closet, to Bronwyn’s place.

It killed me to see her so upset, so full of self-doubt earlier. I counted on her to be a rock, a port in the storm. I would do as she asked, but . . .

I only hoped Carlos could figure out Malachi Zazi’s death without my help. Because this man who had survived his father, who had loved a beautiful movie star, who had been afraid of the sun but who set up a rooftop garden . . . the late Malachi Zazi was growing on me. I hated to let the injustice of his murder stand, just because of Rebecca’s ridiculous prejudice against witches.

Maybe I could talk to her directly. Maybe all three of us—she, Bronwyn, and I—could hash this out like grown women.

Bronwyn’s second-story lights were still on. I let myself into the building.

Something was wrong
.

I felt it the moment I walked into the foyer—there was a rank odor, as though the yeast in the neighbor’s baked goods had gone bad. But that wasn’t the problem . . . it was something else. As I mounted the stairs, I realized the dread was not merely internal. I was feeling something bleak and wrong outside, as well as within me.

I slowed my pace. Took deep breaths, trying to stay attuned to the vibrations.

On the stairs. Right above me. What was it?

I paused, stroked my medicine bag, whispered a protective chant, and then crept up the rest of the stairs.

Finally, my eyes alit on something on the landing. Right in front of the door, on the woven hemp mat that welcomed all to Bronwyn’s hearth and home.

The door opened. “Lily, what—”

“Stop right there!” I commanded. “Don’t step over the threshold!”

Bronwyn looked startled, but did as I said. “What’s wrong?”

I gestured to an ugly bundle sitting on her doormat. Three nails and three sharp needles, wrapped up in ribbons of black, and deep purple thread. Humming, alive with malice. Charged with wickedness.

The nails were rusty, old. Coffin nails.

“It’s a hex.”

“A hex?” Bronwyn paled.

“A curse.” I nodded, surveying the landing to be sure we weren’t dealing with anything else besides the bundle on the doormat.

I looked above the lintel. I didn’t see anything, but I sensed something. In the old days lintels were often arched or bowed, because the straight horizontal shelf created by standard doorways was an invitation for demons to perch. Bronwyn should hang an amulet there. In the meantime, just in case, I needed to make a sign that evil spirits weren’t welcome here.

“Do you have any paint? Something red I can make a mark with?”

She shook her head. “I can’t think of anything.”

“No paint, lipstick, anything at all?”

“I don’t use lipstick, but . . . the kids and I made red velvet cupcakes earlier. There’s still a little batter in the bottom of the bowl. Would that work?”

I gave her a small smile, despite the tension. “Bring it here, let me see it.”

It might have been rather unorthodox, but I was after color more than substance. I reached across the threshold to take the bowl from her.

“I thought you said not to cross the threshold,” Bronwyn said. “What about you?”

“I
want
them to come after me. Their hexes are no good where I’m concerned.”

Between being a natural witch, which meant I was guarded at all times, and the protective talismans and medicine bag I was carrying, I was like a mirror when it came to something like this. The Wiccans like to point out the rule of three, that any act of goodness comes back to you threefold; similarly, a hex set upon someone like me bounces off of me and reflects many times back onto the curser. I welcomed their hexes.

I scraped my hand along the edges of the sweetsmelling mixing bowl, then jumped up, slapping the wall immediately above the lintel. The mark of the human hand was powerful. The mark of a witch’s hand even more so.

My handprint was clear, in deep red batter against the creamy white paint of the wall. It would do for now.

“Listen to me very carefully, Bronwyn. Don’t let any part of your body cross the threshold, and make sure none of your animals do, either. I have to run to my place for supplies, but I’ll be right back. Are you expecting anyone?”

She shook her head.

“Good. But if you hear anyone come in, warn them to stay downstairs.” Keeping my eyes on the bundle, I started to back down the stairs. “Or better yet, have them wait outside. In the meanwhile, make yourself some tea.”

“What kind?” she asked, eyes huge.

I smiled. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s just to calm yourself. Chamomile would be excellent. And light a white candle and say a protection charm, then pet your cats. I’ll be right back.”

I ran.

The three blocks might as well have been as many miles. My lungs burned from the exercise and the fear, each searing breath feeding my rage. Bronwyn was an innocent in all of this. Someone had gone after my friend. My
friend
.

I burst into Aunt Cora’s Closet.

I heard a thump overhead, and then the sound of the door opening. “Mistress?”

Oscar sounded unsure. I never called for him like that, always coming up for him when I was ready.

“Grab my box of stones and bring it to me. Then crush some rosemary with the mortar and pestle, set it on the tray in the kitchen, and bring it down as well.”

“Yes, Mistress,” said Oscar, for once doing as he was told.

I crossed over to Bronwyn’s herb stand, pulling a glass jar of crushed eggshells off the top shelf. Eggshells are potent. In the old days, it was said that if you threw your eggshell away haphazardly while cooking, a witch could come upon it at night, make a boat of it, and sail away wherever she pleased. That didn’t sound like such a bad idea at the moment.

I also gathered cobwebs, three dead flies, and a coarse black cloth.

Oscar brought me what I had asked for. I told him to stay upstairs with the cat and not to open to anyone, no matter whom, except for me.

“Can’t I help?” he growled.

“No. Stay here.” The look on his face gave me pause, even in my haste. “I don’t mean to be harsh, Oscar, but right now I want you to stay here, safe and sound, with the cat, so I don’t have to worry about you two. Understand?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

Then I ran back to Bronwyn’s with my supplies. Upon hearing me come in the main front door to the foyer, Bronwyn opened her door.

“Stay there,” I said.

I crept back up, slowly, to the top of the stairs. I coated the fingertips of my left hand in the pure white powdered eggshell and picked up the bundle with my protected hand, holding it away from me.

Still holding the charm in my left hand, I drew a pentacle in salt around the rosemary on the tray, set stones of malachite and jasper and marble at each point. I chanted a protective spell, muttering the words as a verbal talisman while I created the pentacle.

Finally I set the evil bundle at the center of the charged pentagram, adding the cobwebs, the flies, and covering it all with the black cloth. The lines of salt would bind the wickedness temporarily, keep it from attaching to me or anyone else.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

In Bronwyn’s kitchen I washed my hands thoroughly with lavender soap and then checked her whole apartment for Goofer Balls or any other hexes. It was clean. Still, I performed another brief protective spell, and then Bronwyn and I swept the whole place from the back to the front, including the landing and the stairs, and I took the broom out to the front porch.

Afterward, I sat with Bronwyn at her kitchen table, drinking tea from handmade, brightly painted ceramic mugs. A big yellow platter held a dozen or so very sloppy red velvet cupcakes topped with white buttercream frosting. Coloring books and crayons were still scattered about the main room, but the children had gone back home with their mother.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

“I’ll take the hex with me when I go. Try not to worry about it, Bronwyn. I promise you, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

“I don’t want you to.”

I met her eyes for a long moment. She shook her head. There were tears in her soft brown eyes.

“Please, Lily. I meant what I said when I asked you to stay out of it. I thought you were going to.”

“I was, but not after this. Not anymore. I can’t.”

“You can. Rebecca says if we keep pursuing it, she won’t let me see my grandbabies anymore. She said she’ll cut me out, shun me, won’t speak to me.” Tears ran down her face.

I was speechless. I knew they weren’t all that close, but . . . Bronwyn’s daughter didn’t want to even acknowledge her mother? How could she? I thought of my own mother, who sent me away at the age of eight—albeit to a loving home with Graciela, but still—and who then put me at risk in a desperate attempt to normalize me. The mother I still sent money to, but who preferred I didn’t call. The mother who was still friends with the hometown neighbors who had vilified me. What would I have given for a mother like Bronwyn: openhearted, generous of spirit, confident in the good of humanity?

“Bronwyn, I’m so sorry.”

“How can she ask me to renounce what I believe in? It doesn’t hurt anyone. That’s our creed above all: ‘An ye shall harm none. . . .’ ”

“I know.”

She shrugged and tried to smile through her tears. “I was so young when I had her. I truly thought . . . I believed that with enough love, she would eventually love me back.”

“Oh, Bronwyn.” I wanted to tell her that Rebecca did love her, in her own way, but it sounded like a platitude. Instead, I reached out to envelop her in a hug.

I’m not really a hugger. Other than children or animals, I could count on both hands the number of times in my life when I’ve willingly hugged someone. But Bronwyn sank into me, and sobbed with a broken heart. I held her for a very long time.

As much as I wanted to please her, I couldn’t promise Bronwyn not to pursue the case. Not now.

If the powers that be wanted me to drop this case, they had just succeeded in convincing me to do the very opposite. I would hunt them down, and I would do what I had to do in order to destroy them, or at the very least to drain them of power. No one went after someone I loved.
No one.

I could no more keep from exacting revenge than I could stop being a witch. I wasn’t sure how that would play out among the Zen-inspired Bay Area types, but it was my witchy nature, plain and simple.

I only hoped Bronwyn would understand. Someday.

 

After another restless night, I headed down to the café for coffee and breakfast.

I was pretty clear on how to deal with the hex left on Bronwyn’s doorstep, but I wanted to double-check with someone more familiar with this sort of curse than I: Hervé LeMansec. Hervé was a voodoo priest and—at least last time I checked—one of my few remaining friends. His shop didn’t open until eleven, though, and I was just as glad. I could use a little downtime in the shop this morning, soaking up the vibrations of the clothes and their history.

A charming, rather scruffy holdover from the Summer of Love, the Coffee to the People café was now peopled by pierced, tattooed, vaguely antisocial types rather than the original peace-and-love hippies. But its rebellious nature was intact; whatever the majority of the middle class wanted, these folks did not. Along with the head shops and secondhand clothes stores—for Aunt Cora’s Closet was not the only vintage shop in the neighborhood—it was both a Haight Street holdover and a landmark.

While standing in line, I listened in on the conversation in front of me.

“It just seems like you’re giving in to conformity, though, if you actually have the gender reassignment surgery and then start acting all masculine. I mean, would you even still be a lesbian if you’re, like, officially, a man?”

It was the kind of conversation it was hard to imagine hearing in most parts of the world. I smiled to myself and tried to remember it to share with Bronwyn later. But as the thought occurred to me, I remembered how we left things last night.
Bronwyn
. It about broke my heart to hear her crying yesterday.

I reached the front of the line. Wendy was an ample, curvy young woman with a penchant for wearing in public what would have been considered bedroom attire back home in Texas—for that matter, it would have been considered lingerie in most parts of the Bay Area. Today she was dressed in a black fishnet jacket over a corset—both of which she had found at Aunt Cora’s Closet last week—along with black leggings. But with her Bettie Page smooth black hair cut in dramatic bangs across her forehead, and the “don’t mess with me” look in her brown eyes, she was more than an empowered woman; Wendy was a phenomenon.

“I hear you need to stop messing around with Bronwyn’s deal,” she said as she started to concoct a Flower Power drink for Conrad and a Chocolate to the People for me. When life was difficult, I opted for chocolate. This was much of the time lately. If I wasn’t careful, I wouldn’t be able to fit in my own vintage clothes much longer.

“Bronwyn’s ‘deal’?” I asked.

“She didn’t want to go into details, but she asked the coven to help support you in not butting in. I mean, she said it nicer than that, but that was the basic idea. So”—Wendy caught two bagels as they popped out of the toaster—“are you going to drop whatever it is you’re doing?”