They were the only really witchy items in the store. Some of the daggers were plain, in black wooden sheaths. Others bore intricate ornamentation. A bronze dragon formed the hilt of the fanciest. It grasped the blade to its belly, its tail twisting around to form the finger guards.
It was priced out of my reach.
'Dell.'
I turned to see Ann swing her arm lightly in my direction. I walked over to the pair.
'Kasmira will take us to see Bridget,' she said.
'Who's that?'
'The owner. Kasmira is her granddaughter.'
I followed Ann and Kasmira through a bland, ordinary door in the back of the store. That's when things stopped being ordinary forever.
7
Witches
She might have been dead the way she stood so still. Dead and propped up against the door at the end of the narrow hallway.
Kasmira stepped up to the old woman and stopped. Ann and I waited a respectable distance away.
Thin, bony arms rested against her chest, folded. She wore a pale blue kaftan robe, roped at the waist with a white cotton cord. She stared at us with the same clear jet eyes as her granddaughter. Her hair was long for an old woman's. It hung in gentle grey waves down to the small of her mildly curved back.
'Well?' she croaked. She wasn't unpleasant to look at. She carried her years with pride and dignity. She simply looked
Ann stepped forward. 'I'm Ann Perrine. We met once, a few years ago. I work for Bautista Corporation.'
'And
' she asked with a disdainful glance. The emphasis she put on my gender was as sharp as her athames.
'Dell Ammo,' I said. 'Ann tells me you can explain what's been going on outside. Did you get a look at it?'
Bridget smiled faintly. 'I felt some static. Something screwed up a spell of mine, so I asked Kasmira to check things out. She went sensitive and saw what the others were seeing.'
'Blood,' Kasmira said softly.
'Yes,' said Ann. 'She told me that much. Can you track down the source for us?'
The old woman unfolded her arms and stood away from the doorframe. Picking up a cane from behind a wall hanging, she leaned forward to say, 'That's hard work. Why should I do it?'
Ann stepped very close to the woman and whispered in her left ear. Bridget shook her head, pointing to her right. Ann changed sides and whispered again. Bridget frowned for a moment.
Her eyes widened. 'Others have tried,' she said. 'And failed miserably.'
Ann smiled at me. 'None of them were professionals.' She seemed to be enjoying all this.
The crone narrowed her gaze and peered at me as if I were a bad joke. 'That has little bearing on why you wish me to unravel a psychic incident.'
I continued to search for my cigarettes. 'We're apparently the center of the occurrences. Perhaps the focus of a'-I had to clear my throat before saying it-'a psychic attack.' I gave her the rundown on our mile-and-a-half excursion. She grilled me all through it with the incisiveness of a district attorney.
'The image on the building. It looked like a moosehead?'
'Yeah,' I said, 'sort of. Like a lousy drawing. The antlers drooped and the eyes were under them, off the sides of the head.'
'The break in the clouds-was it round, square, oval?'
