Free Spellcasting in Silk: A Witchcraft Mystery by Juliet Blackwell

Oscar once told me:
“Emotional baggage doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment. You have to pay extra to check it
.” Goblin wisdom.
    “Anyway, it doesn’t appear that poor old Fred has gained much by Betty’s death.”
    “It’s early yet,” Sailor pointed out. “Probating a will takes time. No one would have received anything from her estate at this point.”
    “You think I’m jumping to conclusions?”
    He shrugged. “I’m just saying there’s still a lot of investigating to be done. And I’m not all that comfortable climbing onto the blame-the-scamming-fortune-teller band-
wagon. It hits a little close to home.”
    Sailor was Rom, and though he kept his distance from the more colorful members of his family, I imagined this was the sort of thing he had dealt with a lot in the course of his life. I changed the subject.
    “Did you
feel
anything when we were with Fred?” I asked. “Pick up any vibrations about him, good or bad?”
    “Nothing in particular, but then I didn’t try. I’m not supposed to be dissipating my powers with casual readings. It’s part of my training with Patience.”
    “So, that’s going well, you said?” I asked.
    He nodded.
    “You’re seeing progress?”
    “It hasn’t been that long,” he said.
    When I first met Sailor he’d had some sort of unholy pact with Aidan Rhodes. I wasn’t privy to the details of their arrangement, but knew it had resulted in enhancing Sailor’s innate psychic skills to startling proportions. But once he managed to break free, Sailor’s powers had been compromised. Though he had once railed against his psychic abilities, losing them had left Sailor adrift.
    So I was happy that he’d found someone to help him hone his psychic skills. Still . . . last night I’d tried to wheedle a few details out of him and his monosyllabic answers—or, more aptly, nonanswers—drove me nuts. But I supposed it was like asking someone how their psychotherapy was progressing: hard to answer and bound to be a bit loaded.
    “Fred brought up one good point, though,” I said. “How come your name’s Sailor?”
    “How come
your
name’s Lily?”
    I shrugged. “My mom likes flowers. It’s probably as simple as that. I’m just lucky she didn’t name me Hyacinth or Chrysanthemum.”
    “You’d be a cute Hyacinth. I would call you Hya.”
    “Not unless you wanted me to turn you into a frog, you wouldn’t.”
    Sailor laughed. “You little fraud, that’s a Hollywood witch move. I’ll bet you couldn’t even pull it off.”
    “I could
try
.”
    “Anyway,” Sailor continued. “I always assumed Lily was short for Lilith.”
    “Why would you think that?”
    “Lilith was Adam’s companion, before Eve. But she refused to be subjugated to the whims of her man and became a queen of demons instead, wreaking havoc on mere humans. Especially men.”
    “And this reminds you of
me
?”
    I braked at a stoplight and looked over to see him grinning.
    “Very funny.” I gave him a dirty look. “But seriously, why ‘Sailor’?”
    Now he shrugged and remained mute.
    It doesn’t matter
, I thought. Still, it frustrated me how closemouthed Sailor was, even about the smallest things. I knew almost nothing about his family, for instance. He knew more than he probably wanted to know about
mine
—he had had the misfortune to meet my father not long ago, and had heard a few too many stories about my mother’s inability to deal with her magically precocious child, how she had sent me to live with my grandmother Graciela, and then, as a teenager, how my mother had arranged for a horrific snake-filled exorcism in an attempt to scare the witchiness clear out of me. And afterward, how I was basically run out of my hometown on a rail.
    But other than meeting his aunt Renna, who disliked me, I knew nothing about Sailor’s people. I knew very little about Sailor’s personal history, either, other than one fateful car accident, and Sailor’s bargain with Aidan to save