I heard only the sound of breathing. “I’m going to call her right now.”
“I’ll call her,” I said. “We’re already in the car and driving.” I gestured to Ethan to start the car, pull out into traffic. He didn’t waste any time. “And we’re on our way to the store.”
“Maybe this is nothing,” he said. “Maybe it’s nothing at all.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, but it didn’t feel right in my gut. And just in case: “Talk to my grandfather. Get the CPD to Curt’s house, too, just in case he’s off today. Maybe this is all a coincidence.”
“Find her, Merit.”
As soon as the call was disconnected, I dialed her number. The phone rang three times, then four, and my chest tightened with fear. Until, on the fifth ring, she answered.
“Hey, Merit—”
“Mallory, thank God.”
“Hey, I’m actually right in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?”
Shit. “Mallory, are you in the Magic Shoppe?”
“Well, yeah, actually. How did you know?”
Blood roared in my ears, but I forced myself to stay calm, to think. “I need you to turn around and walk out of there, Mallory. Pretend that nothing’s wrong, just turn around and walk out. And don’t ask questions. Don’t ask me why; just turn around and walk out. Right to the door, and then back to the town house. Pretend I called, and I need something. It’s an emergency. Okay?”
I had to give her credit. She didn’t argue or ask questions. I must have sounded like a crazy person, but she didn’t panic.
“Oh, hey, Curt,” I heard her say. “Sorry, but Merit’s got something she needs to talk about right away. Some kind of boy nonsense. Could you hold that wolfsbane for me for a few minutes? I’m going to step outside and try to calm her down.”
“She’s good,” Ethan quietly said, eyes on the road as he took a sharp turn, then squeezed between cars to get a better spot in a different lane.
“You’re doing great, Mal,” I quietly told her. “You’re doing great.”
But her tone changed. “Get your hand off me, Curt. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
I could actually feel the charge of magic through the phone, as if the cell tower had sent an echo of it along with her words.
“Just walk out, Mallory. Just turn and run.”
I don’t know whether she heard me or not. The phone crackled and sizzled with magic and the sound of breaking glass.
“Get your hands off me, you psychopath!” And then the magic deflated, like it had been sucked back through the phone with a vacuum.
“Oh. Shit,” she woozily said. “It’s Curt . . . isn’t it?”
The call went dead.
I called my grandfather back, hand shaking around the phone, and told him what we’d heard. Ethan drove like the proverbial bat out of hell, my grandfather, Catcher, and the rest of the CPD zooming along behind us.
Ethan squealed to a halt outside the Magic Shoppe, and I had my katana unsheathed before I reached the door. The lights were on, and the door was unlocked. There was a trail of magical destruction behind the counter—a line of broken jars and a lightning strike of broken glass across the mirror.
I gestured Ethan to the right, and I took the left, creeping down the row, checking the cross aisles for signs of life. When we met in the back of the store, he shook his head. I gestured to the door, counted quietly down. “Three . . . two . . . one.”
We went in, katanas in hand, blades pointed and ready for action but ultimately unnecessary. Skylar-Katherine lay on the floor in front of us.
“Shit,” I said, falling to my knees in front of her. I checked her breathing, which was slow but regular. A bruise was rising on her temple. He’d knocked her out.
I patted her cheeks. “Skylar-Katherine. Skylar-Katherine, wake up.
“There’s probably a bathroom,” I said, gesturing Ethan to the back of the store. “Damp towels?”
“On it,” he said, and rose to a quick jog.
After several seconds, her eyes fluttered, opened. She looked around, then focused on me. “What’s going on?”
“Somebody knocked you out?”
“Somebody . . . Curt. It was Curt. I think Curt knocked me out.”
“I think so, too. Can you sit up?”
She nodded, but I put a hand behind her shoulders, helped her move into a sitting position. “My head,” she said, touching her temple gingerly with the heel of her hand.
“I know the feeling,” I said. “Do you know where Curt is?”
“No. There was—someone came to the door. It was your blue-haired friend. He said he had business, and he needed to attend to it. And then he hit me.” Tears rushed to her eyes. “Why would he hit me? We’re friends.”
There wasn’t going to be an easy way to say this, so I didn’t bother sugarcoating it. “You heard about the tarot murders?”
All the color drained from her face. “Sure. Why?”
“We think Curt is the killer.”
It was obvious she wanted to argue; I could see it in her face. The assault had made her enough of a believer. “Is that why he hit me?”
“We think so.” Ethan came back with wet towels, and I pressed them against the bump on her head. She hissed with pain.
“I don’t know him,” she said, leveling him with a suspicious glance. She was clearly coming around.
“He’s Ethan. My boyfriend. Skylar-Katherine,” I said, snapping my fingers until she looked at me again. “Why would Curt hurt Mitzy? Or Brett?”
“Mitzy? Oh, because he loved her. And she didn’t love him back.”
I frowned, very confused. That didn’t match what the CPD had learned. “Wait. I thought Mitzy was dating Brett.”
“She went on a date with Brett. She’d been dating Curt, but they broke up. It was nasty, too. He really had a thing for her. She quit the store a couple of weeks after that.”
“Do you know where Curt was going?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. This is so confusing.”
“Stay with her,” I told Ethan. “And call Catcher, let him know.”
I rose and ran to the back corner of the store, looked at the tarot card case. I’d expected the spot for the Fletcher deck to still be empty, but there was a new deck where the old one had been.
I pulled up the glass lid, but it didn’t budge. There wasn’t time for keys, so I grabbed the closest thing I could find—a candleholder made of antler—and stabbed it into the top of the case. Glass shattered and dropped into the case.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I glanced back, saw Skylar-Katherine behind me, limping forward with Ethan’s support.
“Catcher will be here in a couple of minutes,” he said. “CPD’s nearly at Curt’s house.”
“I asked what you were doing to our case!”
“I’m finding out where your crazy coworker took my best friend.” I brushed glass aside with the edge of my sleeve and plucked out the box of Fletcher tarot cards.
I ripped away cellophane and paper, destroying the box to get to the cards, flipping through them until I found the card I was looking for.
“Four of Wands,” I said, pulling it out and holding it up so they could see the Lady Godiva-esque feature, her horse, her castle.
I turned the card so they could look at it, too. “He’s been literal so far with the symbolism. If he keeps that here, he needs a castle.”
“The Water Tower?” Ethan suggested. “It looks medieval.”
It was the type of place he’d like—a public space with lots of attention. But he had an eye for detail. The Water Tower was much too small to look like the enormous battlement on the card.
“Too small,” I said. “What about that castle in River North?”
“It’s a club now,” Skylar-Katherine said. “Good scene.”
“But surrounded by concrete,” Ethan said, tapping the card. “And he won’t want that much attention, not at first. He’s too particular, and he’ll want time to arrange things. He can’t do that privately downtown.”
“Oh, I know something!” Skylar-Katherine walked to the back of the store, grabbing shelves for balance as she moved. The shuffling of paper and moving drawers echoed through the store.
“This,” Skylar-Katherine said, emerging from the back room only seconds later, one hand on the doorjamb as she made the turn into the store again, feet practically skidding on the carpet as she moved. A newspaper, folded open, was in her hand.
“This,” she said again, thrusting it at us. “The Bellwether Castle—it used to be a private school, but they rent it out now for weddings or whatever. They’re having a spring open house.”
Ethan took the paper, and we looked at the black-and-white photograph of a building that, yeah, looked very much like a castle. Large, square, and tall, with a turret on each corner. The stones were roughly hewed, and the giant front door consisted of large planks of wood butted together with golden bolts. The building was set back on the lot, with plenty of green space behind it.
Ethan held the picture beside the card, whistled. “That’s pretty damn close.”
“We don’t have time for ‘pretty damn close,’” I said.
“There’s a stable behind the building,” Skylar-Katherine said. “I don’t know if they still have horses, but there’s a stable.”
“That’s pretty damn close,” I said, and took a picture of the newspaper to send to Jeff just as tires squealed outside the front of the building.
“Where the fuck is she?” demanded the voice that rushed inside over the clang of the bells on the door.
Catcher had arrived. His magic—sharp and dangerous—was telling enough. He emerged around the row in a T-shirt that read, fittingly enough, YOU’RE MY PROBLEM.
He and Mallory might have had their problems, and their relationship might have been endangered during her Nebraska period, but there was no doubting the ferocity in his eyes or the cloud of magic behind him. His woman had been threatened, and he’d damn well take care of it.
Jeff and my grandfather rounded the corner behind him. Not just Catcher taking care of it, but Mallory’s entire magical family.
“We think she’s here,” Ethan said, extending the paper to Catcher. He grabbed it, took a look, lifted his gaze again before handing it off to Jeff.
“Why?” my grandfather asked.
“There’s a castle on the Four of Wands.” Ethan handed him the card.
Catcher reviewed, nodded. “Jeff?”
“On it,” he said, handing the paper down the line to my grandfather as he pulled out a thin tablet that looked like little more than a thin sheet of glass. He swiped fingers across it.
“Bellwether Castle,” he read. “Formerly Bellwether Beaux Arts Academy, built 1891.” He looked up. “It’s in Logan Square. Near the park.”
“That’s only a couple of miles from here,” I said.
Catcher turned and started for the door, but my grandfather adjusted to block him.
“Chuck,” Catcher warned, his eyes wild with fear and fury. “He’s probably drugged her, and he’ll kill her if we don’t get there.”
But my grandfather stayed calm. “If we don’t go in there with a plan, we risk her getting hurt in the process. And we don’t want that. We’ll get to her first,” my grandfather said, keeping his gaze on Catcher.
“Curt is careful,” my grandfather continued. “The arrangement, the positioning. Think of the trouble he goes to. We do this right, and she’ll be fine. But we have to do this right.”
Catcher nodded, stepped aside.
“There are a couple of other places,” I said. “Water Tower, the castle. Low chance he’s there, because they don’t quite match, but . . .”
My grandfather pulled out his phone. “I’ll tell Arthur. Have him send squads to both places just in case. They’ll need to go in quietly. No sirens. We don’t want to startle or scare him.”
He looked at me. “You said you talked to Curt?”
I nodded. “Day before yesterday, when we came to ask about the purchase of the tarot deck. I was with Mallory when she ordered the stuff.”
“So he’ll recognize you. I’ll talk to Jacobs, but you might be the best candidate to go in. How do you feel about that?”
I expected Ethan to protest, but he was silent. I glanced at him, saw concern on his face. But by his silence, he offered me trust, faith. He squeezed my hand supportively.
“Fine,” I said. “I’m fine with it. I’ll go in. I can talk to him about what he did, why he did it. Try to build a bond?”
My grandfather nodded. “The card. What weapon would he use?”
I offered it to him, but it wasn’t clear from the simple artwork. Castle. Horse. Wands. Pennants.
“The wands?” Ethan asked. “That’s a possibility.”
“Or the braid,” I suggested. “Strangulation?”
“Each murder has been different,” Catcher grimly said. “He won’t repeat something he’s done before. He’s strangled, stabbed, slit wrists. This would be something else.”
“That will have to wait until we get there.” My grandfather held up his phone, stepped away. “Two minutes,” he said to Catcher, “to work the details. And then we’ll get your girl. Because she’s our girl, too.”