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“I think there’s something here,” I told my husband. “Do you have a screwdriver with you?”
Basically a rhetorical question, since I knew the Swiss Army knife he carried on his belt had what felt like a gazillion different attachments. However, since I didn’t have them memorized, it wasn’t as if I could know for sure.
He pulled the knife out of his pocket and deployed the screwdriver gizmo. A minute or so later, he pried the license plate off the back of the car.
Underneath it, someone had scratched a symbol into the paint, something that looked vaguely like a dagger pointing downward with several loops and crosses near the top. Because I’d never studied dark magic, I had no idea exactly what it was, only that it hadn’t been put there to ensure happiness and long life.
“Is that…?” Calvin began, and I nodded.
“It’s a sigil of some sort. Clever of them to hide it under the license plate — that’s not the kind of place people would generally look unless they’re switching out their plates for some reason.” I paused there, eyes narrowed as I stared at the evil little symbol. “And I suppose I didn’t sense it when I got into the car because I didn’t detect anything now until I got pretty close. I just got right in the driver’s seat after my doctor’s appointment.”
My husband’s eyes had narrowed, a sure sign he was thinking of all the things he’d like to do to the person who placed that symbol there, if and when we eventually caught up with them. However, his voice sounded even enough as he said, “Who would do something like that to you?”
I shrugged. Not the most eloquent of responses, but I was just as flummoxed as he was. One might have said that I’d racked up my share of enemies over the years, thanks to the way I’d put nearly a dozen murderers behind bars, and yet I couldn’t say for sure whether that was what we were dealing with here. The few people who might have wanted revenge on me — for whatever reason — weren’t witches. They wouldn’t have even known anyone who could have created a sigil like this, let alone scratch it into my car themselves.
“Honestly?” I said. “I have no idea. There isn’t anyone in Globe who practices this kind of magic.”
Even as I spoke, however, I wondered whether I should be quite so confident on that point. True, there were others here who dabbled in Tarot or other kinds of minor magic, but they weren’t true practitioners, simply people who were interested in the occult and wanted to play with it a bit.
Whereas whoever had hidden that sigil under my Jeep’s license plate definitely knew what they were doing.
Calvin’s grim expression didn’t flicker. “From somewhere else, then.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But the only people I ever really knew who dealt in this kind of thing were members of GLANG, and it’s been disbanded for years.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Sure” might have been an overstatement. On the other hand, I’d kept in touch with Maisie Hoskins, an old friend of mine who was the proprietor of a witchy store in West L.A., and from what she’d told me, it sounded as if the Greater Los Angeles Necromancers’ Guild had completely fallen apart after Lucien Dumond’s death. Some of its members had tried to start their own little groups, but they didn’t seem to have lasted for very long.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it’s remotely possible that a former member of GLANG might be gunning for me, but why now? They’ve had years to get their revenge, and yet everything has been completely quiet on that front.”
Calvin’s lips pressed together. He looked away from me to the mark on the tailgate, then asked, “Is there a way to remove that thing?”
Well, at least I had a ready answer to that question. “Oh, sure,” I said. “We just need to scratch it out, and then I can cleanse the spot with moon water and place a spell of protection on the car. It’ll be good as new.”
Assuming the insurance company didn’t total it after all. We’d paid a decent chunk for it, but even I knew vehicles depreciated like crazy almost the second you drove them off the lot.
My answer seemed to have relieved Calvin at least a little bit, because something in the tense set of his jaw eased. “Good to know,” he said. “All the same, I’m just glad this thing is going to be in the shop for a while.”
“Same,” I responded, doing my best to keep my tone light. “For now, though, let’s go home.”
Chapter 12
THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES
Although absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened on our drive home from the body shop, I was still on edge enough that I made Calvin remove the Durango’s license plate once we were parked in front of the garage, just to make sure the same evildoer hadn’t placed a sigil there as well.
But we didn’t find anything, despite my walking around the big SUV, fingers trailing across the smooth white paint, looking for something that wasn’t there.
“You might as well park it in the garage,” I told Calvin. “It’s not as if the Jeep is going to be in here for a while. And I’d just feel safer that way.”
My husband’s eyes narrowed slightly at that request, but he didn’t say anything, only got back into the Durango and pulled it into the garage. Luckily, we’d reclaimed the remote for the opener when we were at the body shop, so managing that task was easy enough.
Once the garage door was shut and we’d gone into the house, some of the tension that had been knotting my jaw and neck seemed to ease just a little. Maybe it had been silly to imagine the unknown worker of dark magic creeping onto our property and casting a hex on Calvin’s police-issue SUV, but at the same time, I thought it better to take whatever precautions we could. The house and the land it sat on were protected by the same sorts of spells I placed on my shop, and yet I knew all too well that they weren’t foolproof.
As far as I knew, nothing was.
But it did feel good to sit down and put my feet up while Calvin went into the kitchen to get us both some water.
