He gave a nervous laugh. “Duly noted.”
I spent time with Sinclair, too. In honor of his new commitment to a magical vocation, I rented one of my favorite guilty-pleasure movies from the library and spent an evening introducing Sinclair to The Craft.
To be honest, the video was just an excuse. It was good to spend time with him. There was a little lingering awkwardness, like figuring out how close together we should sit on the couch, but we found ourselves establishing new patterns of platonic friendship without a great deal of difficulty.
Ongoing home improvement projects aside, Sinclair had always kept a tidy house, but now it was immaculate. Apparently the ritual that Kim McKinney had overseen included not only a full-immersion bath performed in the Fabulous Casimir’s backyard under moonlight—Sinclair glossed over the details on that part—but a thorough cleansing of the entire rental property. It had been scrubbed top to bottom with a wash that included essential oils of rosemary, juniper, and lavender, after which every nook and cranny was smudged with purifying sage smoke, all of which left his place smelling sweet and herbaceous. There was an altar set up on a sideboard in the living room. The thresholds of the front and back doors had been blessed with salt water, and there were crosses of rowan branches tied with red thread.
Theoretically, it meant that not only could no malevolent spirit cross the threshold but no mortal could enter Sinclair’s home with ill intent.
“Do you think it will work?” I asked him.
Frowning, he turned down the volume on the TV. “On a duppy? Yeah, I do. Magic here feels strong, Daisy, stronger than it does on the island. The roots go deeper. Everything’s more powerful. Casimir says it’s because of Hel and the underworld. All I know is that I can feel it working.”
“But . . . ?”
“I don’t know if it would work on Emmy,” he admitted. “I can’t ban her from my heart, which means the binding may not hold against her. And if she truly believes in her heart that she’s doing the right thing, it wouldn’t work anyway.” He shrugged. “But safeguarding the house is only the first step. I need to learn to protect myself.”
“You don’t think Kim’s magic bath did the trick?” I teased him. “How about the nice scarf Mrs. Meyers knitted for you?”
Sinclair gave me a look. “Hey, now! Are you making fun of my prayer shawl?”
“Not at all.” What Mrs. Meyers had produced was a lightweight scarf striped in the pan-African colors of red, green, gold, and black. It actually looked rather dashing looped around Sinclair’s neck. “I just didn’t know knitting was a kind of magic.”
“Neither did I.” He stroked the scarf absentmindedly. “But it makes sense. Knots are a form of binding. It’s the intention that it’s done with that makes it effective, and I can feel hers in this.”
“A blessing in every stitch?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Believe me, that kind of focused intention is hard to maintain. I’ve been working on visualization techniques. It’s tough.”
“Like a shield?” I asked, hoping maybe we could compare pointers. Or maybe, truth be told, that I could show off a little. I’d held my own in the House of Shadows and I’d kept up my daily practice, including several more sparring sessions with Cooper out behind the Wheelhouse. I was proud of my progress.
But Sinclair shook his head. “Not exactly. More like an orb of white light. And chakras,” he added. “I don’t even know if I believe in them, but did you know Mrs. Sweddon can actually manipulate her entire aura? It’s pretty amazing.”
“Huh.”
He stretched out his hands, regarding them. “So far, my favorite part is working in the nursery with Warren. I’d forgotten how much I liked working with plants.”
“So no tattoo?”
Although I asked half as a joke, Sinclair took the question seriously. “I stopped by the shop and took a look at their portfolio. It’s all beautiful work, but nothing felt quite right, you know? I think for that kind of commitment, it has to be right. Mark and Sheila told me it would be better to wait for my personal sigil to reveal itself than to choose something just for the sake of getting some protective ink.”
I glanced involuntarily toward the altar. At this point it was pretty sparse, containing a pair of white candles, several seashells, including a conch with blue beads glued to it, and a small dried starfish. The conch shell was missing a few beads and one of the starfish’s brittle arms was broken. I had a feeling those items had been in his possession for a long, long time.
Sinclair followed my gaze. “Yemaya’s symbols. Could be an element of a sigil, but not a whole. Not anymore.”
I’d done a little research since he’d mentioned being dedicated to her at the coven meet and greet, enough to know that Yemaya was one of the orishas, Yoruban deities whose worship was imported into the Caribbean via the slave trade. It appeared she was a benevolent goddess associated with the sea, a sort of oceanic mother-of-all. There was a wealth of information available about her role in what Mr. Leary called the syncretized religions like Santería. Obeah, not so much.
Some of the more fabulous depictions I’d found online reminded me of Lurine in her true form. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out she’d served as the inspiration somewhere back at the dawn of time.
Anyway, I kept that thought to myself. “You’ll figure it out,” I said. “Don’t worry. You don’t need a tattoo to face down your sister, Sinclair. Not with the whole eldritch community of Pemkowet behind you.”
He took my hand and squeezed it. “Thanks, Daisy.”
I squeezed his hand back. “I mean it.”
Both of us glanced down at our clasped hands, then let go and scootched a few more inches apart on the couch by mutual accord.
Sinclair turned the volume back up on the TV and reached for the popcorn, settling in to watch a coven of teenaged witches turn on one of their own. “You do know this movie is ridiculous, right?”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “I know. But sometimes ridiculous is exactly what you need to make it through the day.”
He laughed. “True dat.”
Twenty-eight
At the beginning of the following week, Lee finally unveiled his database to me. Not only that, but he actually suppressed his paranoia and made the bold move of divulging his address and inviting me to his house. I’d half expected to find that he was living in his mother’s basement after all, but in fact he’d purchased a place of his own, a newish construction nestled in the woods across from the river on the west side of town.
There were a few items of geek-chic memorabilia on display, like a detailed replica of the Enterprise from Star Trek and a life-size copy of a British police box, which I knew just enough to identify as the TARDIS from Doctor Who, but not as many as I would have guessed, and he had a surprising number of pieces of Native American art from the Pacific Northwest, which fit well in the woodsy environs. I guess he’d become a bit of a collector in Seattle. Six years was a fair amount of time; Lee had probably developed facets I had yet to discover.
As for the database? It was awesome.
It didn’t look like a database. It looked like the interface for a video game, with extensive, colorful graphics and a Norse rune–inspired font that managed to be at once decorative and easy to read.
At the top of the page, there was an ornate scroll bearing the words The Pemkowet Ledger. Beneath it were avatars for every category of eldritch being, with fields to enter proper names, dates, location, description, strengths, weaknesses, transgressions, favors. There was an interactive map with links to the pinpointed entries. There was a calendar that automatically logged documented incidents in the past by date, as well as providing the ability to enter projected incidents in the future—like, say, the next satyr rutting cycle—complete with alerts to be sent via pop-up, e-mail, and text.