Chapter Four

As promised, Palmer delivered Mel back to Gleason’s at 6:07 a.m., one minute after sunrise. An inch-by-inch survey of the Gogmar-scented alley turned up nothing more gem-like than a few pieces of broken glass and left her eighteen minutes to clean up the mess in the kitchen and concoct a believable explanation of why Arnie would need to bake a brand-new moose for the Lodge Initiation Dinner.

Palmer gave her a sympathetic look when her shoulders drooped. “I’ll help you. Give me a dustpan, and I’ll work on the cake crumbs. For what it’s worth, it looked delicious.”

Without preamble, she handed him the dustpan. While he collected Marty’s remains, Mel mopped up the water from the double boiler and chipped hardened sugar off the countertops and the floor.

Despite Palmer’s wild story about DeWitt’s curse, or maybe because of it, she found herself feeling a little bit sorry for the guy. He hadn’t seemed all that evil, and she imagined being turned to stone, for even part of the day, had to put a major dent in one’s social life. Could she really blame him for wanting to foist that burden off on someone else?

She shook her head as she dumped sugar in the trash. Right now she needed to concentrate on keeping Arnie from freaking out. She needed to stop worrying about there being a cursed witch hunter on her trail, at least until night fell again. By then, hopefully, someone would use a little pixie dust on her and make her forget all this ever happened.

Palmer finished his cleanup, left her a card with his number on it and made himself scarce barely seconds before Arnie arrived. To Mel’s shock, Calypso strolled in on his heels, looking fresh as a daisy in her thigh-high boots and leather skirt. Over those she wore a man’s button-down shirt cinched at the waist with a yellow-and-black-striped silk tie. The shirt’s crisp white collar was turned up to hide the runes tattooed on the sides of her neck.

Cal had a sixth sense about her, and though she hung back while Arnie and Mel exchanged pleasantries and discussed his morning’s coffee-buying adventure, the moment he wandered into the back to get started on his next culinary masterpiece, she pounced.

Her kohl-rimmed eyes bore into Mel’s. “You’ve been fooling around, haven’t you?”

Torn between wanting to confess to the only person who might have half a chance of believing her and wishing the whole sordid evening would go away, Mel gaped. She decided a good offense was the best defense and turned the tables rather than spout her wild story just yet. “Me? That’s Angelo’s shirt you’re wearing, isn’t it? I recognize the smell of his aftershave. And, what are you doing up at this hour anyway?”

Cal blushed beneath her Goth makeup and brushed at her straight black bangs. “Honey, I’m too jazzed to sleep. I figured I’d come in and do a little work on the Augustine wedding cake before I crashed. Now enough about me. Spill. You’ve had a man in here. I can smell testosterone.”

“That’s creepy.” Mel pulled Cal aside, out of earshot of Arnie, who was whistling his way through the kitchen. In a moment, he’d open the fridge and find Marty gone. “I’ve got a problem.”

Calypso snickered. “How many times have I told you, I can hook you up with a guy just like that. All you have to do is—”

“The moose is toast.”

Cal’s fake eyelashes fluttered. “There’s a sentence you don’t hear every day. What do you mean? What moose?”

“Marty. The moose, you know, for the Lodge Dinner, tonight.”

“Oh. Oh! Shit. What happened?”

Mel deflated a little. “It’s a long, strange story. Will you help me make a new one?”

“Sure, but Arnie’s going to find out.”

“Will you help me keep it from Arnie? I don’t want him to freak. The Mooses…Moose gave him so much trouble about the design, the deadline, the flavors. If he finds out we have to start from scratch because I wrecked the cake—well, I didn’t wreck it, but it got wrecked—he’ll have a coronary.”

Calypso glanced over Mel’s shoulder at Arnie. “I owe you one anyway. I’ll do whatever you need me to do on one condition. You have to tell me absolutely everything you did last night and who you did it with.”

“You’ll never believe me, Cal.”

“Good. The more outrageous, the better. Let me make a few phone calls and see if I can arrange to get Arnie out of here early; then we can get to work.”

Mel sighed. Complete relief would come only when the Lodge took possession of a fully functioning moose cake, but with Calypso on the job, she at least had a chance of keeping hers. The day might not be a total disaster after all.

By the time the scent of coconut sponge cake wafted from the oven, Mel had begun to feel almost normal.

She stood at the stove, stirring a pot of melted sugar. The details of the previous evening spun around in her head like the gnats that had danced in the beams of Palmer’s headlights.

Demons. Witch hunters. Pixie dust.

Calypso had been staring at her for twenty minutes now, since the moment she’d gotten Arnie out of the bakery on a hunt for the perfect silver-coated nonpareils she required for the Augustine wedding cake. “Come on now. A deal’s a deal.” Cal wiped her hands on her apron and planted her fists on her hips. “How did the moose bite the dust?”

Might as well jump right in. “He was attacked by a witch hunter.”

A strange shadow crossed Calypso’s indigo eyes, and her dark red lips quirked. “Did he at least put up a good fight?”

“I’m serious, Cal. I knew you wouldn’t believe me. It was a circus here last night. I heard noises in the alley, and when I went outside, there was this…guy out there with a sword.” Best to leave the Gogmar out of it for the moment. “Then this other guy showed up on a motorcycle, and he chased me around the kitchen.”

“On a motorcycle?”

“No. He left that outside. You’re not buying any of this, are you?”

Cal turned her attention to the sheet of chocolate fondant she’d just rolled out on the coldstone at her workstation. “Hey, I’ve asked you to believe some wild things. Who am I to judge? What did this witch hunter look like, anyway?”

Mel returned to her stirring to hide the self-conscious flush that crept up her cheeks. How could she describe Blake DeWitt? A man who was both drop-dead gorgeous and utterly terrifying defied description. “He was handsome, in a rugged way. Dark hair, light brown eyes—you know, whiskey colored? And he had a bit of an accent. Maybe Scottish. He wore leather.”

Cal raised a sculptured brow. “Leather, you say? I thought your men wore flannel or they wore nothing at all.” She giggled, but there was a nervous undertone to the laugh that made Mel even more self-conscious. Did Calypso think she was lying?

“So Larry worked in construction. He might have been a jerk, but he looked damn good in a tool belt.” Mel’s marriage had taught her all too well that looks weren’t everything. DeWitt’s piercing stare and craggy voice might have caused her a tingle or two, but the fact remained he’d been ready to do to her what he’d done to Marty.

“So he hunts witches. Does that come with health bennies and a 401K these days?”

“Apparently it comes with a curse.”

Cal dropped her rolling pin. The thick wooden cylinder clattered to the floor and rolled away.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” Cal chased the pin across the floor, scooped it up and dumped it in the sink. She swept the kitchen with a suspicious look. “Mel, let’s not talk about this here. We can have the moose ready to go in two hours. Then we’ll jet, and you can tell me more about this witch hunter, okay?”

Something about her tone didn’t bode well. Mel scanned the kitchen too and then spared a quick glance at Calypso. She seemed rattled, and nothing, except Angelo, rattled Calypso.

Either way, Mel was certain now that Blake DeWitt was every bit as evil as Palmer had said, and Cal obviously knew a lot more about him than she was willing to let on.

By 1:00 p.m., Marty the Second reclined in the industrial fridge, his antlers tall and proud and his sugary teeth pristine and straight. Mel was dead on her feet.

After working the night shift at Gleason’s for more than a year, she’d gotten used to sleeping from dawn to early afternoon, so by the time she and Calypso managed to slip out and dash down Garden Street to Starbucks, she felt like a zombie.

Calypso pushed a double-tall, full-caf chocolate latte into her hands and herded her to a secluded booth at the back of the coffee shop where the comingled scents of cinnamon, peppermint and rich Colombian roast swirled around them like a grandmother’s hug.

Mel sighed into the first hot sip of her latte. If she closed her eyes now, she’d be out before the double shot of caffeine made its way into her bloodstream. The only thing keeping her awake was Calypso’s deadly serious expression.

“Tell me everything you know about the witch hunter,” she began. Her own half-caf mochaccino sat untouched between them on the freshly polished table.

“I don’t know anything, really. Palmer said his name was Blake DeWitt.”

“Palmer…Van Houten?”

“Yes, he was the guy in the alley. He had a sword, calls himself a demon hunter. Do you know him?”

“I know of him.”

Mel rummaged in her purse and pulled out Palmer’s card. Cal grabbed the little white rectangle and studied it as though it might hold the secrets of the universe. “What was a demon hunter doing in the alley behind Gleason’s?”

Somehow, staring into Cal’s dark blue eyes, the details of the early morning hours didn’t seem as farfetched. That realization only served to make Mel even more nervous. “Hunting demons?”

“What kind of demons?”

“Um…” Mel lowered her voice. “Gogmar?”

“Oh crap.” Cal finally sipped her coffee, and under the table, her three-inch boot heels made a nervous rat-tat-tat on the tile floor. “How many were there?”

“Just the one. That I…saw.” Mel whispered the word “saw”. She glanced around at the other patrons of Starbucks. No one seemed particularly interested in their conversation, though Calypso drew a few sidelong glances from several of the men. Her jet black hair, ruby lips and nosebleed heels never failed to garner a few double takes wherever she went.

She leaned in closer to Melodie. “So you saw a Gogmar.”

“Wish I hadn’t.”

“What happened to it? Where did it go?”

“Remember that essence of decay around the back door this morning?”

“It’s dead?”

“I assume. Unless it can recover from being impaled and then melting into green sludge.” The memory of it dulled her enthusiasm for the latte. It occurred to her that Calypso didn’t seem quite as freaked out as she should have been. It wasn’t every day someone confessed to a run-in with a demon.

“Van Houten killed a Gogmar in front of you, and you remember it?”

Mel set her cup down. “Are you humoring me because you think I’m nuts, or does this conversation not seem that strange to you? We’re talking about demons here. And I’m gathering you know about the pixie dust too. Maybe you have met Palmer before and you just don’t remember.”

“I don’t think you’re nuts. And pixie dust won’t work on me.” Cal dove into her mochaccino and resurfaced, innocently licking foam from her lips.

“Why? Because you’re a witch?”

Cal’s nervous laugh died quickly. “Why would you… All right. Yes.”

Ah, well, that explained a lot about Calypso. “I always suspected, you know. I figured you didn’t think I could handle it.”

For the first time in Mel’s memory, Calypso looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry I never told you I’m a witch. I’m sort of in the closet.”

“Oh. Why?”

Cal dropped Palmer’s card on the table and slid it toward Mel. “Because of witch hunters like Blake DeWitt. If he’s around, and there are Gogmars roaming the streets, that means trouble.”

“I don’t understand. It’s the twenty-first century. How can he still be hunting witches? Isn’t that illegal?”

Cal nodded. “He isn’t trying to kill anyone. Only a witch can break his curse. It’s been in his bloodline since 1729.”

“Palmer told me about the Cabochon and the transfer from one demon queen to another. If Blake gets a hold of this jewel, he can give the curse to someone outside of his immediate family, right?”

“Yes. So far that’s happened only once. When a man named Wendell Blake managed to transfer the curse to his nephew, Calvin DeWitt, rather than passing it on to his own son. I think that was in the 1860s.”

The caffeine had begun to transform Mel’s fatigue into nervous energy, and she fidgeted. Ignoring Calypso’s wide-eyed stare, she grabbed a sugar packet from the carafe on the table, tore a corner off the blue paper pouch and dumped the sweetener into her cup just to keep her fingers busy. “I don’t understand. This curse was originally placed on a witch hunter in 1729 and it’s been passed down through his male descendants for all these years, even if they don’t kill witches anymore? Isn’t that sort of excessive?”

“Key word curse. If you look in the dictionary, you won’t find it anywhere near ‘justice’.” Cal sipped the last of her coffee. “The original witch hunter was Percival Blake, an English nobleman. He murdered at least thirty-five women, and not all of them were practicing witches. Some were just herbalists or midwives, women of vision or exceptional skills who made their contemporaries jealous enough to suggest they might have come by their talents from a questionable source.

“When Birgid Cooper cursed him, she put vengeance for thirty-five deaths into her spell—thirty-six if you count Percival’s last victim was rumored to have been pregnant. It takes a long time for that kind of anger to play out. Plus, at the time, it was assumed that fear of witches and witchcraft wasn’t ever going to go away. And it hasn’t. Murder might be illegal now, but prejudice against practitioners of magick isn’t.”

“But Blake DeWitt isn’t really a witch hunter, is he?”

“Birgid Cooper believed Percival would train his progeny to do what he did and carry on his legacy. She wanted to make sure they all suffered for it, I suppose, whether they were guilty or not, just like Percival’s victims died whether they were witches or not.”

Mel gaped. She’d never heard such conviction in Cal’s voice before or seen such pain in her eyes. “Wow. I had no idea. Palmer said Blake DeWitt was evil. Do you think he’s capable of hurting a witch to force her to break the spell?”

“A desperate man will do anything. The important thing is that the Cabochon gets into the hands of the next demon queen. Then DeWitt will lose his chance to transfer the curse to anyone else. We just need to figure out where the Cabochon is.”

Mel’s heart fluttered a bit. “Well…DeWitt thinks I have it.”

Cal arched a brow and scoffed. “Why would he think that?”

“Because the Gogmar gave it to me.”