She sat down behind the desk, closed her eyes, and rubbed her hands over her face. Then she sighed heavily, seeming to contract in the room, and put down her hands again. She looked tired and miserable. Unfortunate those feelings hadn’t pushed her to find us before.
“He came to me because he had a problem.”
“He who?” I asked.
“Zane. He was alone, and he was frustrated. He came in near midnight one night, roamed around the store, seemed nervous or agitated. I watched him, because I thought he was going to steal something. He had that kind of jitteriness. But then he came up to the counter. Handed me a piece of paper and said he needed that.”
“And what was on the paper?” Theo asked.
Paloma swallowed. “A spell. Ingredients for a potion, instructions for use, an incantation.”
“And what was the spell for?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and jerked when Theo leaned forward. “I don’t know,” she said again, but didn’t meet his gaze. “I know how to follow directions, but I don’t, like, have a degree in spell theory. Based on the ingredients, I thought it was supposed to make them stronger.”
We let silence fall in the wake of that statement.
“Do you believe that?” Theo asked, glancing at me.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, and glared at Paloma.
She put her hands flat on the desk, leaned forward as if to work harder to convince us. “I swear to god, that’s all I knew.”
“And what did you tell him?” Theo asked.
“I played it off at first, said I didn’t do any real magic, and then that I wasn’t licensed. He didn’t believe any of it. Said he could feel my magic. I said fine, even if I did magic, I didn’t do dark magic. I wouldn’t make a compulsion spell. Couldn’t do it, as I didn’t even stock those kinds of ingredients. So I asked him what the issue was, if there was any other way around it.”
“Because you wanted to sell him some real magic,” I said, my irritation rising.
“Because I want to pay my rent,” Paloma countered. “He said someone was hurting his family, and he wanted to stop it. So I made the potion, told him to follow the instructions and say the incantation.”
“So you gave him the potion that night?” Theo asked.
“No, he had to come back for it. I had the ingredients on hand, but you still have to be careful in the making. There are steps you have to take, stages you have to follow. You can’t just dump everything in and expect to get a good result.”
“How long until it was done?” Theo asked.
“Maybe a week?” A faint flush rose on her cheeks. “It was done faster than that, but he hadn’t been able to get all the money together, so I held it.”
“Do you know where he got the money he used to pay for it?”
“No. Why? Should I?”
Not if you were willfully oblivious, I thought. “So you gave him a weapon.”
“I gave him the magic he paid for. I didn’t have control over what he did with it afterward.”
But her eyes skittered away from mine, focused on a stack of papers on the corner of her desk. She wasn’t telling the truth, or at least not all of it. But we’d get to that. . . .
“How did he pick it up?” Theo asked.
“He came back to the store with three of his friends. Beyo and”—she squeezed her eyes closed, as if trying to remember—“I’m not actually sure of the others’ names.”
“John and Marcus?” I offered.
“Maybe.”
“What do you know about the Sons of Aeneas?” I asked.
Her eyes widened. “The cult? I had a treatise on them—a little paperback. I keep some materials on the occult—kind of a ‘true crime but paranormal’ version. We get a lot of demand for that around Halloween. Mostly kids looking to be entertained.”
She sounded so absolutely certain of it that I both pitied and disdained her. She’d armed Zane, and who knew who else, with weapons as sharp as any blade, as powerful as any gun.
“Can we see it?” Theo asked.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’ll go get it.” Then she squeezed around the desk and our chairs and into the hallway.
“Odds it’s gone?” Theo asked. “Pilfered by Zane and the others?”
“High,” I said. “Nice little bit of background for his growing obsession.”
“Yeah,” he said, then looked up when she entered again.
“It’s gone,” she said as she stepped back into the room. She was wringing her hands, working her fingers over and over as if that would solve her problems.
“Oh, my god, shock,” Theo murmured.
“Zane or the others probably took it,” I said. “What do you know about it?”
“Not much, other than what’s on the cover.” She wedged behind her desk again. “It’s a small book, paperback sized but much thinner. Blue-and-yellow border on the cover. It’s from a press in North Carolina. They did an entire series on cults and paranormal groups in the late seventies, and they’ve been reprinting them since. I think the Sons of Aeneas must have been around that time period, because there was one of those ‘ripped from the headlines’ type stickers on the book. Like, ‘Hey, check this out. It’s going on right now. You just heard about it on the news’ or whatever.”
“But you don’t know what they did?”
“No. I didn’t read it.”
Another irony—that the woman who operated the magic store seemed to have very little understanding of how it actually worked.
“Did Zane talk to you about the SOA? Or anyone else?”
“Not to me, and not that I’m aware of to anyone else.”
“Do you know Loren?” I asked.
She swallowed, began to shuffle a stack of papers into a precisely aligned block. “The clan leader who died? Why do you ask?”
I glanced at Theo, got his small nod. He’d also seen she wasn’t telling the truth. I watched her until the silence stretched taut and tense as a wire. I was tempted to push a little magic into the air, use my own glamour just to nudge her along. But it proved unnecessary.
“I knew him,” she said.
“You don’t say,” Theo said, tone flat as the documents she’d just organized.
This time, her eyes went hard. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me or who I am.”