Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

I hated hospitals.

There was always a smell to them. And that smell only got stronger once the vampire blood within me started kicking in. It wasn't just the chemical smell of alcohol, disease, infection or other body grossness, either. Now there were other, deeper scents ground into the spotless linoleum.

Blood. Pain. Fear. Death.

I didn't hold my nose as Taliyah and I strode through the lobby but spell, was it close. Breathing shallowly through my mouth helped, but not much.

Of course, the other reason I couldn't stand hospitals was that every time I found myself in one, that usually meant someone who mattered had gotten hurt. And as I walked through the halls now, I was reminded of a time when Roscoe had torn into Poppy. I could still see the blood-soaked carpet, and at the time, I'd been sure my best friend was dead. Even rushing her to the hospital, kneeling in the back of Lorcan's car and weaving desperate spells to heal her, to keep her with us, and then sitting beside her bed… it had still felt like she could slip away at any moment.

And that was a sense of helplessness I didn't do well with. And one I never wanted to repeat.

So, no, I didn't like hospitals. Maybe because they reminded me that I was only as useful as my abilities. And really—what good was having amazing, goddess like powers, if I couldn't do anything when it mattered? I'd had to hand Poppy's pale, silent body to mortal doctors, and all I'd been able to do was hope they knew what they were doing—that theycould save her.

Luckily, they had.

Another thing I hated about hospitals—they were too loud andtoo quiet. I wasn't the kind of person for introspection, in general. I was more along the beliefs of ‘done was done, so deal with it and move on'. Sitting around and moping didn't fix anything, and guilt was a useless emotion. Very true sentiments, yet… yet those sorts of thoughts didn't yield themselves to the pain you felt when someone you cared about was on the verge of… moving on forever. And it was that silence that I remembered now—the sort of haunting quiet that stays with you.

Will you stop it, Wanda?I asked myself as I forcefully pushed the macabre thoughts from my head.

It was verging on way-too-late, and visiting hours were long over, but Taliyah flashed her badge, and no one bothered us as we made our way through the barren hallways. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a non-stop drone that felt like fingernails on a chalkboard. They didn't seem to bother Taliyah. Or maybe she was just too focused on her investigation to notice them.

Seriously, how were people supposed to rest and heal when it sounded like a thousand wasp's nests in the hallway?

Jenny Shoe girl's room was at the far end of the hall, past the nurse's station, and for a second, I worried that she was already asleep. Yes, I wanted an excuse to evacuate the coven house, but even I felt a smidge bad for waking up someone who'd been injured earlier that night. But, as luck would or wouldn't have it, the light was still on in the room, and when Taliyah knocked lightly on the open door, a quiet voice told us to enter.

Jenny Carrel didn't look half as nice as she had when she'd walked into my shop. For one thing, hospital gowns looked dreadful on anyone—really, I should have made it my personal mission to create something a little more… attractive, for lack of a better word. It was like the gowns had been specially designed to wash people out and make them look small, sickly and frail. For another thing, it looked like Jenny had lost a fist fight with a brick wall. The entire left side of her face was bruised, the skin around her eye swollen and puffy.

The cast that was encasing her leg almost to her hip didn't help things either. The girl had obviously been put through the ringer and I was surprised to see she'd survived her ordeal. I mean, she was human, after all.

"Police Chief Morgan," she said with some surprise. Her eyes darted towards me, and I could see the confusion as she tried to place who I was. "I've seen you before."

I nodded. "I'm Wanda… from Wanda's Witchery." It seemed the best and easiest explanation.

Her frown furrowed more noticeably. "What are you doing here?"

A good question, considering she thought I was simply the town seamstress and not a witch with power. When I didn't have an answer for her right away, she looked over at Taliyah.

"We just wanted to ask you a few more questions about your accident," Taliyah explained in her professional voice. She'd added a bit of softness to it, like she was talking to a frightened child. Which, fair.

"Is she a psychic or something?" Jenny asked, clearly still trying to figure out what I was doing on a police investigation, even if she kept the question aimed at Taliyah.

"Right, something like that," Taliyah answered as I shot her a look and she gave me a little shrug. "Can you tell me again what happened?" Taliyah continued, facing Jenny once more.

Jenny's face fell, and she gripped her thin blanket over her lap, twisting the material. "I know it sounds crazy, which is probably why you keep wanting me to repeat it, but my story hasn't changed."

"I believe you," I said quickly, which made Jenny look up at me with more surprise. Then I faced Taliyah. "That's what my psychic abilities are telling me anyway."

That statement was followed by a very pronounced frown from Taliyah.

"I swear," Jenny continued, as she turned her gaze back to Taliyah. "I'm telling you the truth. I just… couldn't control my feet. It was like they just took off running without any input from my brain and then… what was even weirder—I randomly started dancing and I couldn't stop. It was like I couldn't control my feet at all." She shook her head as she looked down at her open and splayed fingers, as if they had an answer for her. "I don't understand what happened."

So, dancing was involved. Hmm, interesting. Dancing curses were definitely the actions of the Fae.

"Do you… have any idea what happened to me?" The thread of fear in Jenny's voice caused even my shriveled heart to twinge, and that was really saying something. If there was one thing I didn't love about my move to Haven Hollow, it was that I'd most definitely gone soft.

While Taliyah asked a few more gentle questions, I drifted around the side of Jenny's bed, trying to be unobtrusive while I looked her over. The part of me that was magic, that brushed up against the Goddess and nature, well that part of me had been changed by being blooded by a vampire. That meant things weren't the same anymore and didn't work the same anymore. I'd had to come to terms with that. My magic had swung hard in the direction of death, and sometimes that irritated the spell out of me. But sometimes, it was useful. Especially when detecting the darker sides of magic—like curses, hexes, or things that withered and caused harm.

So, I was stumped when I looked Jenny Carrel over and didn't see so much as a shadow of dark magic on her. No hexes. No curses. No signature of magic, even. Nothing. She was mundane, through and through. Not a whiff of power, hers or anyone else's, to stain her.

Hmm.

The dancing curse was so obvious, though. It was a textbook Fae prank. No one else used it, if they even could. No one did nasty enchantment like the Fae, after all.

But no—there was nothing on her. No taint. No spells. Nothing. Had I just failed to pick up on it? I leaned forward, pretending to brush the front of my blouse like there was dust on it so I could get a little closer to her.

At last, there was something there. Something so minute, it was more like the hint of a shadow. Something small, light and pail clinging to the small toes sticking up from the hot pink fiberglass of the cast. But the feeling was so slight, I didn't imagine that small amount of magic could make her trip, much less run and dance against her will.

"Wanda…" Jenny said my name as she looked up at me. "From the dress store, right?"

Apparently, she hadn't remembered the name of my store. Well, no doubt she was still plenty confused by my being here. I smiled, trying to look like someone who came along on police investigations all the time. "That's me."

"And you're psychic?"

"Right."

For a second, I thought about making a joke that the stitching surgeon was out to lunch so I was here to oversee the stitching up of any wounds, but I didn't think Taliyah would appreciate that sort of humor, so I kept my mouth shut.

"Then you know what happened to me?" she continued, looking beyond hopeful.

"Well, not exactly," I started.

Jenny just blinked at me for a few seconds, glancing between Taliyah and me. "Then why are you—"

"My visions don't work like that," I interrupted. "They're more like puzzle pieces that might hint at the bigger picture of the whole puzzle when it's finished."

"Oh," Jenny said and seemed appeased with that explanation. Taliyah appeared pleasantly surprised, so I figured I'd come up with a decent explanation for why I was here.

"Once you're healed, we'll have to get you fixed up with another outfit," I continued, figuring I might as well try to get some extra business out of the deal. "Maybe for date number two?"

Jenny laughed, the sound quiet and forced. "I don't think there's going to be another date. Not after this."

This was starting to get into the territory of failed romances and that was a place I wanted nothing to do with—especially after all the romance talk I'd had to suffer through at the coven house. "Well, plenty of fish in the sea, right?" She nodded. "Tell me, the shoes you brought into my store. What happened to them?"

Jenny blinked at me, then shot a confused look at Taliyah, like she was seeking reassurance that she wasn't hallucinating and that I was really asking about her shoes. Taliyah gave me a frown that said she wasn't impressed, but she hadn't seen the shoes, so she didn't know what she was missing.

"Um. I think they're with the dress, if the paramedics grabbed them?" Jenny answered as she looked at Taliyah, who just shrugged like she wasn't sure what happened to them. Then Jenny looked back at me. "Why are you asking about them?" Then she cocked her head to the side as something apparently occurred to her. "Strangely, the shoes never fell off my feet even though I was sprinting in them."

"That is strange," I answered, nodding. "Running with heels is never an easy thing."

"Right," she answered and nodded as tears glistened at the corners of her eyes, and she twisted the blanket until her knuckles went white. If she started sobbing, I was bolting from the room. I wanted to help Taliyah, sure, but there were limits.

"I really couldn't stop," she continued, her voice thin and shaking.

Taliyah nodded, somehow looking sympathetic without changing her blank cop face very much. "That must have been very frightening for you."

"You believe me?" Jenny asked, as she looked up and searched Taliyah's face, looking for some hint that she was being lied to.

But Taliyah nodded. "I do."

"Oh." Jenny let out a shaky sigh that sounded like relief. "What… what do you think did it? Did I somehow take like… a drug? Oh, my God, did Bradley drug me?"

But Taliyah was already shaking her head. "No, it wasn't a drug."

I stopped paying attention to their conversation, moving instead to the little cubby that worked as the room's only closet. Since Jenny didn't have a roommate at the moment, the cubby was pretty bare. Just a plastic bag knotted up and a stained, torn dress draped over the bar and inside the bag?

The pair of shoes.