Chapter 3

Chapter

Three

I should've been able to banish a demon like Gnath in my sleep.

The thought rolled around my head as Ida bustled to the ancient coffeemaker on my narrow kitchen counter, her footsteps shuddering through my 19-foot Airstream travel trailer.

"Feeling any better?"

"Yeah. I managed a couple hours of sleep." I perched on the edge of my bed and studied my hands. They'd finally stopped shaking a few minutes ago. Right around the time that my stomach settled down. "Thanks for helping me home."

"Good thing I've been hitting the gym." She gave me a classic Rosie the Riveter pose.

"Good thing." I blinked, widened my eyes, blinked again.

"I managed you into the car on my own, but Fennel used his magic to get you into the trailer. Had to sit in the car with him until he sobered up, though." She poured water in the receptacle at the back of the machine, taking care not to splash it on the minuscule counter. "He sure likes catnip."

"Where is he, by the way? We have a delivery this morning."

"Sleeping it off in the garden room." She gestured to the cabinet by my foot. "Grab the coffee, would you?"

I reached into the cabinet beneath the fridge and produced the grinder. Handed it and a bag of fresh-roasted Guatemalan beans to her. "Gnath doesn't know you're a necromancer, does he?"

As I'd been born a witch with a magical affinity for the earth, Ida had been born a necromancer, a paranormal with the ability to communicate with the dead.

"Nope. I kept my paranormal side under wraps."

"Can you do that?" She'd retired from professional life two decades before, but her ability was innate and, as far as I knew, not something she could turn off.

"Sure. I just don't strike up a conversation with a corpse and no one's the wiser." She poured a measure of beans from the bag into the grinder and held up a finger as the blades went to work. When it was done, she poured the prepped coffee into a natural fiber filter, added water to the machine, and started it up.

The scent of freshly brewed coffee was a balm to my soul. "Thanks again for offering to go into Limbo after Fennel. I know how dangerous it is, especially for you."

"You're welcome." She rocked up on her blue, polka-dot sneakers and dusted coffee grounds off her dandelion yellow blouse and matching capri pants. "You know, it's not that Limbo itself is dangerous to me. It's more that necromancers aren't held in high regard by the denizens of the death realms—creatures like that highway demon last night. They don't appreciate those of us who have the ability to find our way back to the living."

"Probably because they're stuck there."

"Maybe. Though Limbo's not such a bad place. Dante Alighieri called it Purgatorio and made it sound like Hell-lite. He was wrong—about a great many things. He did get the circles concept, though. But, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day." She shrugged. "People have the wrong idea about death and the otherworlds. I could write a book, but it would probably end up in motel-room nightstands a thousand years from now, my words all twisted around."

That earned a smile from me. "What did you think of the glyph Gnath left behind? Think it means anything?"

Ida shook her head, soft white hair fluttering in her eyes. She was experimenting with bangs again. "Let's hope not. Mictlantecuhtli was a real scary guy. Not as bloody as Huītzilōpōchtli, but not someone you'd want to encounter in a dark alley. Or a well-lit alley. Or in broad daylight in the middle of a BTS concert."

Ida was a huge Korean pop music fan.

"The last few generations of my family were from Mexico," I said, "but I don't know much about Aztec gods."

"Me neither, but I know the ones to avoid, and Mictlantecuhtli ranks pretty high on that list." She turned away and peered out the porthole window above my sink. "We necromancers get a little cagey when the subject of death gods comes up."

It was understandable that a necromancer and a death god might not be the best of friends. A necromancer invalidated the finality of death—at least for a short time.

"We need music. Let's see what's playing this morning." I reached into the compartment above my dining table to switch on the only AM radio station in town worth listening to, KLXX. They played the sixties, seventies, and eighties exclusively. AM-KLXX. All the classics, all the time .

"We could play something through the app on my phone. I was listening to aespa last night." She snapped her fingers and sang, " Dra-ma-ma-ma ?—"

"No. The last time I let you play K-pop in my trailer, you nearly danced off my stabilizer jacks. Let's keep it chill in the Airstream."

"Spoilsport."

Two ads later, Boz Scagg's "Lido Shuffle" reached through the built-in speakers and squeezed musical fingers around my heart, wringing out nostalgia like water from a sopping washcloth. Mom had been a teen in the seventies, and my childhood soundtrack had been influenced by her teenage Top 40 charts.

" … whoa oh-oh-oh ," Ida sang.

"Great song, isn't it?"

"It's no "God's Menu," but not everyone is Stray Kids." Ida snapped her fingers and shook her hips. "I was in my forties when this song came out. Dating a stockbroker named Charles Laurent. The relationship didn't last long." She stopped dancing and tapped a finger on her lip. "I think I dated him because I was rebelling against my wilder youth."

"There was a time when you were wilder than you are now?"

"Hard to believe, I know." She went back to her hip shaking. "Go get dressed while the coffee finishes up. And don't forget to bring out the brow pencil so you can draw my eyebrows. I can't get the suckers to go on straight, and the last time I messed them up, people asked me if I was mad at them all day."

I whisked shut the curtain separating my sleeping area from the rest of the trailer and changed into black jeans and a red top. I smoothed a layer of sunscreen over fair ivory skin I'd inherited from a European father I'd never met and dragged a brush through the dark brown-black hair I'd inherited from my Mexican-American mother. Did my eyes and brows, applied some blush and highlighter, and hunted around for my red lipstick.

"Any offers on the Siete Saguaros yet?" Ida asked, her voice trembling a little.

I sighed. Ida knew I planned to leave Smokethorn as soon as I found someone to take over my mom's mobile home park. That had always been the plan.

"None worth entertaining. My mom put me in a bind designing this place the way she did. The person who takes over has to be a magical with an affinity for the soil and has to live on-site."

"So, an earth magic elemental witch—like you."

No. Nothing like me. The magical who took over the park would have to be powerful. They'd have to connect with the soil on a deep level, be able to form a symbiotic relationship with the earth here. Something I couldn't seem to do.

"There are mages who could do the job," I said.

"A trailer park in a low desert small town isn't exactly a ripe business opportunity," Ida said. "I happen to know this place isn't even making a profit. If it was, you wouldn't have to take jobs like the one last night."

I padded barefoot into the kitchen with the brow pencil I kept in my makeup case for Ida. "I would've eventually had to shut down the hitchhiker demon even if a member of the city council hadn't approached you about it. Gnath was a nuisance. Besides, I wrangled a demon favor out of him. I came out ahead."

"And drained your magic so badly you collapsed."

"I'm fine. Now, hold still." I tugged her into the beam of sunlight streaming through my kitchen window and penciled in her brows.

"You'd never have sent Fennel after the demon-grown belladonna if you weren't worried about money."

She wasn't wrong. If it hadn't been a big payday, I'd never have allowed him to take that risk, no matter how much he'd assured me he could handle it.

"Why don't you tear down the protections and sell this place to a non-magical? Your mom's cottage is in great shape. It has a good roof, the paint isn't sun-bleached, and it's got that cute little porch swing. It'd fetch a good price in this market even if you didn't do a thing to improve it." This time she'd spoke without the tremor in her voice, but there was sadness behind the words.

"What brought this on?" I asked.

"Last night brought this on . You're taking risks you shouldn't be taking just to keep this place running."

"Is this about the demon banishment? Or sending Fennel into Limbo?"

"It's about you intending to go in after him. Fennel can hold his own over there, just like I can. You'd have been dead two seconds after the portal snapped shut, but you were still going through it, weren't you? Got to do it all on your own."

"I didn't do it on my own. You and Fennel were there."

"Only because we begged you to let us come," she snapped. "If you'd had your way, you'd have driven the demon to the trees and jumped through the portal on your own to get that blasted belladonna."

I didn't know what to say. She'd seen straight through me. If Ida and Fennel hadn't insisted on being there, I'd have gone alone. And probably died screaming.

"Lilibet Lennox, you pushed yourself to the breaking point last night, and it wasn't necessary. I'm starting to think you have a death wish."

My throat itched, tears welling up until I was choked with them. "That's a hell of a thing to say to me after what happened to Mom."

"If Lila was here, she'd agree with me."

I swallowed, strong-armed my tears back into that place deep inside where I kept my pain. "I can't just abandon the Siete Saguaros to its fate."

"Betty, you live in a cramped travel trailer while your mother's three-bedroom cottage sits empty. You've had one foot out the door since you took over, and everyone knows it. Abandoning this place isn't some kind of plan-B contingency—it's your goal. So why wait? Go now."

She didn't offer an apology for her bluntness, and I didn't ask for one. That wasn't how our friendship worked.

"I've never lied about my intentions, Ida."

"And I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to go now, before you get yourself killed."

"Do you want me to leave?" I asked, a little hurt.

"Of course not." She let out a long, tired sigh. "I'm your best friend, and you're mine. Why would I want that? What I'm saying is I want you to be happy, and you aren't happy here."

I slammed the Airstream door shut and inhaled a breath of cool, fresh February air. Winter in the desert southwest was sublime. It almost, but not quite, made up for the triple-digit summers.

Ida had left soon after the Siete Saguaro conversation, but not before broaching another touchy subject.

"Demon-grown belladonna is strong stuff. Aren't you worried the person buying it will use it to poison someone?"

"It's not only poison. When used in tinctures and charms, it can be a powerful healing agent."

"You sure that's how it's going to be used by your client?"

No, I wasn't, but I'd soon find out.

I took a sip from my third cup of coffee and headed to my garden room where my mom had once grown luscious herbs and crafted powerful charms.

Now, it was where I did those things.

Mom and I'd built the original greenhouse structure under the shade of two Kurrajong bottle trees shortly after we moved in. The walls were constructed from old windows, the floor a motley arrangement of unglazed clay tile from an artisan in Mexico. The roof was the newest addition—a tinted corrugated polycarbonate that let just enough light in.

From the outside, the room ran half the length of her cottage and was roughly six feet wide. The interior square footage varied according to its caretaker's needs. Mom and I had layered spells to ensure the greenhouse would never run out of room.

Back then, the magic in us and in our soil had been strong enough to bend reality.

Back then, the soil beneath the park had loved my mother.

Now, Mom was gone, and the soil had turned against me. It hated me as much as it had loved her back then.

If I had one wish, it would be to have the soil here respond to me the way it had to my mom. I could power the park's protection ward on my own, bring back the seven saguaros, bring my magic back to full-strength.

The problem with could s was that they sometimes turned into should s, and when you thought you were owed something, you ran the risk of becoming desperate to get it. There was always someone in the shadows of the paranormal world willing to make a dark deal for a desperate witch.

And I was beginning to feel desperate.

I stopped in front of Mom's cottage for a moment, doing my best to ignore the sharp stab of sorrow that sank into my chest.

The small house sat in the center of the property like a sun, seven trailer spaces surrounding it, beaming outward like rays. It was a protection glyph. One crafted purposely by Mom when she took over.

"Our home is both a blessing and a responsibility, mija. The soil here must be cared for and fed. Treat it well, and it will reward you with trust and magic."

"What if I'm not strong enough to feed and protect it?" eight-year-old me had asked.

"You'll be strong enough. All you have to do is listen."

But she was wrong. I hadn't been strong enough to save the saguaros or power the soil.

And I hadn't been able to save her.