Creedence Clearwater Revival played on the small radio I’d hung by the door. It was sixties classics hour on KLXX.
“Maybe the rat shifters are Alpha Pallás’s spies.” Ida reclined on my chaise in the garden room, hands laced behind her head. Cecil had placed a lavender bud on her forehead to quiet her down, but it hadn’t had much effect.
“You’d have to meet them to know how unlikely that is,” I replied from my workstation.
“That’s what they want you to think,” she said.
I was certain the rats weren’t spies, but I also didn’t trust them enough to summon a demon with them alone. Although, despite the head wound they’d left me with, Kale and Denzel felt more like annoyances than enemies.
There was no use arguing with Ida when she was on a tangent, so I just shook my head at her and took a roll of lead-free foil out of a drawer under my workstation. I set it next to a loop of twenty-gauge solder, a bottle of low-odor flux, and a hot soldering iron.
My workstation was small but well-stocked. Small panes of glass, jump rings, silver chain, and other charm-making supplieswere tucked away in old bottles, small wooden boxes, and hung from little gold cup hooks. At my feet was a stack of pressed herbs, flowers, and vegetable roots that had been bound in wooden books with hemp straps.
Cecil worked with me, though he didn’t use a soldering iron to seal the pendants. He used magic. I sometimes did, too, but I also enjoyed the human way of working. Making pressed flower witch charms was a delicate, highly meditative practice.
“So, you gonna need me to come with you tonight?” She held the lavender bud to her nose and sniffed while humming the final notes of “Bad Moon Rising.”
“You’d do that for me? Even considering how you feel about Sexton?”
“Sure I would. You’re my best gal pal,” Ida balanced the lavender bud on the tip of her nose.
“And you’re mine.”
“I know,” she said.
I thought about the mage Beau had called about. If I sold the park to that person, I wouldn’t get to hang with Ida as much. Who would draw on her eyebrows every morning?
For that matter, who’d done it today? They were a shade too dark and had given her the look of someone five seconds into a surprise party.
“Thanks for the offer, but Cecil, Fennel, and I’ve got it.”
“Maybe you should ask the lady from Wicked to come? Sounds like she really saved your bacon today.”
While I’d worked on tonight’s spell and the charms I’d need, I’d given Ida a rundown of my day, the way I always did. Everything except the stuff Ronan and I’d discussed in his office. It didn’t feel right to share our private conversation.
“Bronwyn’s beholden to the La Paloma coven, so no.”
The opening strains of the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” drifted out of the small radio.
“I don’t blame you for being angry about what Margaux Ramirez pulled the day Lila died, but you can’t hold that against Bronwyn. She wasn’t there.” The lavender on her nose fell into her hair.
“I don’t hold it against her. But I’m not going to riskCoven Mother Margauxinviting herself along, either.”
“Makes sense, I guess.” Ida shook the lavender bud from her hair and rubbed it between her fingers. “Still feel like I should go. Cemetery dead can be an unpredictable bunch, especially the new ones. And you’re doing a summoning right on top of them.”
“Sexton will be around.”
“How reassuring,” she said, drily. “We used to be friends of a sort, he and I. Did you know that?”
“No. What happened?”
“He refused to let me talk to Anita. You remember, she was the lover after Harold, before Lana and Jun Hie. The telepath.”
Vaguely. Ida had led a romantically adventurous life, and it was hard to keep track sometimes. “Was Anita the one who looked like Sophia Loren?”
“No, that was Terese. Anita looked more like a young Diahann Carroll.”
Ida had been a stunner herself back in the day—still was, for her age. She and Anita must’ve made a striking couple.
