A fireball spell is so much destruction tucked into one little package that it's a good thing only a few witches know how do it. Too bad I'm not one of them.
When she saw me standing there, not even trying to conjure up a fireball of my own, she smiled. For a second I knew how Poland must've felt when the Wehrmacht swept over the border. My last thoughts, just before she pulled back her arm, took aim, and let fly, were: Thank the Powers there's nothing like this in mortal hands, and I hope there never will be or we can kiss our broomsticks good-bye.
Then the flames hit me.
* * *
I put back the glue brush and smoothed down the edges on the latest newspaper clipping in my scrapbook. The accident was still fresh enough for the dailies to use type so big I could read it without my glasses. The gas company kept yapping about how gas was safe, blaming the whole thing on customer negligence, saying that Mr. LeGras or one of his servants must've done something wrong with the pipeline to call up the biggest explosion in the history of the greater L.A. area. They were partly right. LeGras did do something wrong, sure enough, but the only pipeline with his name on it was the one that went straight to hell.
Bogey jumped up on my desk and sat on the open scrapbook, forcing me to pay attention to him. He was born a demon, but he's all cat at heart. I'd be peeling gluey newsprint off his tail for hours.
"Want your toy?" I asked. I took the silver chain off my neck and let him swat at the little jade-and-pearl pinky ring dangling from it. While Bogey played ping-pong solitaire, I marvelled how something so small had contained power enough to save my skin. Bogey's too. He'd ducked under my skirts just as the fireball hit.
Hit and bounced straight back onto the one who'd launched it. Thanks to the shielding spell on that little ring—a spell she'd set in place herself—the rogue witch got everything she'd been aiming at me, only tripled. Her own shielding spells couldn't stand up to that. There wasn't enough of her left to grease the wheels of a kiddie car.
"That was a close one," I told the cat. "Too close. When I couldn't take her down with my magic, I knew I'd have to turn her own against her. Too bad I had to blow up the bird, but I had to make her mad enough to want me dead. Lucky I managed to slip this baby on my finger in time or she'd've got her wish."
Bogey caught the ring with a left hook, yanking the chain out of my hand. I let him chew on it awhile. "I'm getting too old for this job," I sighed. "Even a cat can play me for a sucker. Gretel did it too, easy; too easy. I knew better than to trust her, but still I let her reel me in like a prize marlin. Suckers make lousy detectives. Pretty good corpses, but lousy detectives. Maybe it's time I retired, found a cozy cottage up the coast, got back into the bakery business, a little baby-sitting, six of one—"
My office door flew open with a bang. She was five-foot-six of danger, half of it legs, the other half fireworks. "I need your help," she said. She had one of those breathy voices that leave you gasping for air like you've just been kissed, long, hard, and professionally.
"It's my stepmother. I—I think she wants me dead."
I nodded her into a chair. When she crossed those gams, my little dream house on the coast went up in a fireball bigger than anything LeGras's pet witch ever threw at me. Oh sure, I knew the odds were stacked against her giving me a tumble, but I do my best work when I've got more stars in my eyes than Graumann's Chinese Theater's got in their cement.
That was when I knew that this was how my life was going to stay, until the day they chucked my broom into the janitor's closet at the L.A. morgue: one case after another, rubbing elbows with the dolls and the deadbeats, the chumps and the chiselers, the gophers, gorillas and goons, with maybe a princess or two thrown in to keep the game interesting. A whole lot of fairy tales and