Kicking It

out here in the backwater.

“This is where the witch lives,” he said in his lazy accent as we both merely sat there, staring at the cabin.

“How do you know?” I wished he’d had the time to explain more about her to me before we had fled the shop.

“Rumors. And a vibe.”

I realized that he might be more than a psychic. “Are you also a voodoo practitioner?”

He laughed. “No. I only rent space in the shop for readings. But I’m well acquainted with everything in it. I haven’t been there long—only a few weeks—but I’m learning more every night.”

“What did you do before this?”

“Curious, aren’t we?”

“You don’t have to answer.” We needed to be getting on with this, anyway.

But it seemed Philippe liked my keen interest. “I was a carpenter. Still am, although business is slow. I’ve always had the seeing gift, just as my maman did, and I make use of it on the side for her sake.”

From the manner in which he said this, I wondered if his mother was sick or destitute. My heart beat an extra time.

He must have seen I was sympathetic because he brushed off what he had said. “My senses have been sharp lately, and that’s probably why, a week ago, I had the vision of you.”

“It’s fortunate you were prepared. I can’t say the same for myself.”

I finally stepped off the bike, and he put down the kickstand, then dismounted as well.

“So let’s find a way to get these boots off,” he said.

I prepared every apology I could think of, in case I had stolen the items. This was the best course of action, I kept telling myself. If Amari had sent an employee out to reclaim the enchanted boots, I was better off facing the music here and taking my chances.

“I hope we don’t need an appointment,” I said.

Philippe merely gave me a look, and I shrugged. Maybe I was a polite sort in real life.

Our footsteps echoed on the stairs, then the porch, and my boots tightened round my legs. Clinging, as if they wished to hold on to me and me alone.

I opened the broken screen, then knocked on the door. When no one answered, I knocked again.

“Nobody is home,” he said assuredly.

“How can you be . . . ?” I didn’t finish the question. “All right. So what do we do now?”

Philippe reached round me and opened the door, which was so warped that it took a shove from him. He sent me a smug glance.

I tried not to dwell on how he smelled of cedar or perhaps pine as he brushed past me. Either way, yum.

I walked inside after he did, glancing round. Dark, with only the slim lights coming through the slats of the shutters.

Reaching back toward the wall, I groped for a switch. When I flipped it on, it didn’t work. Chills fingered up my spine as I backed up to the wall, wanting to feel it behind me in the near darkness. I continued scanning the room, my eyesight adjusting. Meanwhile, I held up Philippe’s revolver, evidently knowing just how to use it, comfortable with it in my grip.

Boot steps thudded as Philippe moved toward the window. There was a sharp sound as he pulled the shutter cords, and the room lit slightly more with wan moonlight.

It allowed me to lock onto a form across the room that was draped by a sheet. I nearly squeezed the revolver’s trigger until I concluded that, based on the shape and the exposed gilding on one side, what I was seeing was a covered standing mirror. Another look round showed a second shrouded frame above a fireplace. When Philippe got to it and peered beneath the linen, he spoke.

“Someone doesn’t like looking glasses.”

And that wasn’t the only disturbing element in this small cabin. As I surveyed the area—the simple kitchen in the corner, neat as a pin; the cot on the other side of the room—I saw a table near me.

A table with bones spread over it.

My boots reacted sharply, like the ends of vines digging into me. I gasped, flinching as a sudden memory grabbed me: a woman’s voice saying, “There is a cost for these.” Then the feel of the boots sliding up my legs as someone put them on me . . .

I jerked out of the memory, and my skin . . . It felt as if it were puckered. Yet when I ran my free hand over my arm, my flesh was as smooth as always.

I wasn’t certain what I had just experienced, but I knew for a fact now that there had been some sort of cost for the boots, and if I had remembered this little nugget of information because I was inside this cabin, the price was no doubt still to be paid to Amari.

Had their powers lent me the speed and strength to run from the witch before I’d paid for them? Why couldn’t I remember?

Sliding down the wall to the floor, I pulled at the boots again, wanting them off. Now.

“What’re you doin’?” Philippe asked, coming to me.

“Trying again,” I said. “If she’s not here, then at least I hope the boots will be when she returns. I think that’s why I was led to you, by fate, by a spell Amari cast, or . . . I don’t know. The boots belong here. When I caught sight of those bones on the table, the boots responded, and I had a flash of memory. Someone told me there was a price for these, and I don’t think I paid it.”

Philippe blew out a breath, then ambled over to the table and reached for a bone. When he made contact with one of them, he froze.

“Philippe?” My voice seemed to echo in the cabin until his took over.

“Liberatio,” he said.

My boots shifted on my legs, as if restless.

“Say it again,” I whispered, my breath quickening. He’d felt a psychic vibe from the bone.

Louder now. “Liberatio!”

My legs jerked. Or, rather, the boots did. At a sensation of release, a loosening, I pressed my advantage, sticking my hand between my calf and the vines, pulling them away from my skin. When the boot gave, I dropped the revolver, using both hands.

“It’s working!”

He came to a knee next to me, pulling at my other boot. And when he uttered the word again, we managed to yank both of them off.

Freedom!

We leaned back against the wall, laughing. I had the urge to hug him or kiss him or . . . Whatever it was, I didn’t do it.

I said, “Those bones . . .”

“From animals. Amari must’ve used them for the spell that she put on the boots.”

I kept laughing. Now the witch could have her property, and I would get that red-eyed creature off my trail. That would leave me free to discover the rest of my puzzling life.

Dropping a boot on the floor, I said, “Who needs to run that fast or be Jackie Chan, anyway?”

Philippe’s laughter faded. “Yes. Who needs that?”

The way he looked at me now wasn’t with amusement, or with a pirate’s gleam in his moonlit eyes. He was serious about something I didn’t quite understand.

“I think,” he said, “it’s time we left, cher.”

Why did it sound as if he had been waiting to say that ever since I had run into his shop?

I didn’t have the opportunity to answer, because my skin . . . It had begun to do something strange.

Shriveling. Puckering.

I lifted my hand. In the moonlight, I could see my flesh changing before my eyes, as if it were . . . scarred from burns?