Bitter Spirits

THREE

AIDA HAD NEVER HEARD OF SUCH A THING. “GOO?”

“Gu. Black magic,” Bo elaborated. “Old Chinese myths say sorcerers can make a magical poison to manipulate a man. Different kinds of Gu for different things.”

Velma waved a small circle of paper filled with green symbols. “This particular magic is drawing ghosts to you, Winter. If we don’t get rid of it, you’ll be the Pied Piper with a herd of ghosts following you around.” She turned to Bo. “You sure you don’t know anyone around town who could do this kind of magic, Bo?”

The bootlegger’s assistant scrunched up his nose in irritation. “Only magic worker I know is you, conjurer. And it seems to me that you’re the one with the reputation for curses that kill. Maybe you want to hex Winter.”

“Why in God’s name would I want to hex my own supplier?”

Winter grunted from the floor. “If you ever want to kill me, Velma, do it to my face—no riddles or hexes. And give me fair warning.”

“Believe me, Winter, if I’m gonna kill you, you’ll be the first to know.”

Merriment danced behind Winter’s dazed eyes as Bo laughed.

Velma frowned. “I don’t specialize in Chinese curses, but if you can think of anyone who might, Bo, you need to tell us now.”

“You think I know every Chinaman in the city?”

She put a hand on her hip. “I think you know a little about everyone. Why else would Winter pay a scrawny, orphaned thief a better salary than my own manager makes?”

“I can’t help it if you’re miserly,” Bo deadpanned. When Velma shot him a murderous look, Bo winked at her. “Look, I really don’t know anyone other than the person who interpreted the Gu symbols. I can ask around. I’ve heard rumors about restaurant owners cursing one another—maybe they learned tricks from someone. But it might take me a few hours to get a name. Maybe longer.”

“My source will be quicker.” She stared down at Winter. “You came to me for advice, so I’m going to give it to you. Best I can piece together, that old woman you claimed accosted you in the street? She was a witch sent to lay a spell on you that opened your eyes to ghosts, and the Gu poison was administered tonight to draw them to you. Sounds to me like someone is trying to frighten you.”

“Who?”

“You’d know better than me. Let’s just hope my source can help me with a cure. In the meantime, I can do something to help ease the jinx. Why don’t we get you upstairs to my apartment. Aida, you might as well stick around and help, just in case he attracts more ghosts.”

Aida briefly wondered if she was going to receive extra pay for all this.

Two bouncers peeled Winter off the floor. Velma led them all down a short passage to a locked stairwell. Up a short flight of stairs, they entered Velma’s private living quarters through a warm yellow hallway. She pointed her men into a room halfway down the hall, swinging the door open wide to reveal a spacious bathroom, where a black-and-white checkerboard pattern covered the floor and an enormous claw-foot tub sat in the back.

“Boys, you manage Winter.” She turned to Bo. “And you, run a bath. Cold water only.”

“A bath?” Bo shot her a bewildered look.

“Not for cleaning. For unhexing. Don’t put him in until I come back. I need to mix something up first.” She crooked a finger at Aida. “Come with me.”

Aida followed her boss’s rapid path through the apartment to a bright sitting area filled with dark wood and buttery chintz silk. Next to a fireplace, Velma unlocked a nondescript narrow door and beckoned her inside.

The scents of spice and wax filled Aida’s nostrils. A single bulb hung from the rafters of a tiny square room with no furniture other than a long table butted up against one wall. The walls were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, crammed with books and candles and bottles of every size, shape, and color—a few of them old liquor bottles with the labels torn off. Bundles of dried herbs dangled from long nails that had been hammered into the sides of the shelves.

“This is my workroom,” Velma announced casually. She scoured the shelves for several minutes and began pulling down jars. A couple were filled with tinted powders: one with a mixture of dried herbs, and another, unidentifiable. She set them all on the worktable with a dinged metal bowl, measuring cup, and spoon. While Aida inspected them, she retrieved a worn book with a broken spine, which was littered with scraps of paper serving as bookmarks, and opened to a page that said: UNCROSSING BATH TO REMOVE CURSES. A list of ingredients followed. Scribbled pencil notes filled the margins.

A muffled brring-brring rang through the walls. Velma quickly tapped her fingers on the tops of the jars she’d collected. “Rue, hyssop, dried okra, and the two compound mixtures needed. Stir all of these together. Follow the recipe. Don’t touch anything else,” she added, and then left the room in a flurry.

Aida stood still for several moments, looking around at the assortment of oddities crowding the shelves. As if she’d want to touch some of these things. Velma wasn’t the first person Aida had known to possess a talent for spellwork or to dabble in mysteries. Aida had stumbled upon witches, psychics, cartomancers, and other assorted characters with unexplainable skills, as they all seemed to be drawn to one another as iron is to a magnet. Like speaks to like. Aida’s own abilities often seemed tame by comparison.

It didn’t take much time to mix up the ingredients for the spiritual bath. As she finished, Velma raced back into the room, mumbling to herself, and dragged a wooden stool to a bay of shelves. She stood on tiptoes to retrieve a jam jar filled with what appeared to be evenly cut sticks with thorns—only, when Velma dumped out several of them inside a large mortar and pestle, Aida realized that she was wrong.

“Dried centipedes,” Velma said blithely when Aida stared. “My associate claims that Gu poison is venom magic. The sorcerer will put all kinds of creepy-crawlies inside a spelled jar—snakes, scorpions, frogs.” Velma pounded the dried centipedes with alarming gusto; the shells made a horrible crunching noise beneath her pestle. “Then it’s a fight to the death. The venomous insects and reptiles battle it out, eating one another. A spell is cast upon the last one standing. That’s what they use to brew the poison.”

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Velma stopped to retrieve two more jars. From the first, she used tongs to retrieve two frail, perfectly preserved scorpions, their curled tails stretched out and feet shriveled against their abdomens. She dumped them in the mortar with a sprinkling of some dark red powder and began grinding them up with the centipedes.

“The remedy for the hex is to fight like with like—the centipedes and scorpions will eat the Gu inside him. Let’s go ahead and do the unhexing bath. It should help weaken the spell and give the remedy a better chance to take hold. Here, give me your bowl.” Velma bowed her head as if praying and spoke a few mumbled words over the bath mixture. When finished, she let out a deep breath and handed it back to Aida. “Take this to the bathroom. Dump it in the bath water and mix it up.”

“Me?”

“It won’t harm you. I called downstairs and asked someone to bring ice from the bar. We want the water as cold as possible to shake the curse loose. Once you get the powder mixed up in the water, get them to put Winter inside. I’ll be in shortly with the antidote.”

Hugging the bowl against her middle, Aida hurried to the bathroom and nearly stumbled into a girl exiting with two empty ice buckets. Then she nearly stumbled again when she stepped into the bathroom and set her eyes on Winter. He was naked. Very naked.

“I swear to Buddha, Osiris, and your Christian God—”

“Who clearly hates me,” Winter said, interrupting Bo.

Velma’s man held one of Winter’s shoulders, Bo the other, and Aida stood, gawking at the bootlegger’s bare body. He was pale and more finely shaped than she’d imagined when she’d been eyeing him earlier: broad chested, upper arms thick with muscle, his stomach a brick wall. Dark hair peppered the center of his torso, from his breastbone to his solid, blocky legs. But it was the thicket below his rippled stomach that drew her attention. And the substantial length that hung under it.

Dear God.

She wasn’t exactly an expert on men’s naked bodies, but she’d seen a couple, and neither possessed anything between their legs quite like that, and definitely not in a state of rest. She could only guess what it looked like when it woke up.

She forced herself to look elsewhere. Twice.

Her gaze zigzagged everywhere, up and down, back and forth. No, Aida had definitely never seen a body like this, like a statue in a museum—not the athletic, trim David, but a meatier Zeus or Poseidon. As if one extra sandwich a day might take him across the line from stocky to stout. He was big and mighty and intimidating.

A mythological-sized beast.

She couldn’t stop staring. Her face warmed, not with embarrassment over seeing him naked, exactly—well, maybe a little—but mainly because of the raw lust he stirred up.

Oblivious to her entry, Bo flung Winter’s trousers onto the floor with malice and continued ranting. “This is the worst thing you’ve ever asked me to do. And I’m including the spy job in the hull of that steamer with all that rotting fish.”

Winter laughed and nearly toppled over, face-first.

“Whoa, now.” One of Velma’s men pressed a firm hand in the middle of Winter’s chest to hold him up against the tiled wall. He couldn’t stand on his own, but he was conscious.

Mostly.

“It’s not funny,” Bo said. “Did you hear what Velma said? You’re hexed. You’re probably going to die, and I’ll be out of work.”

“Where is she?” Winter complained, almost sounding drunk. The poison appeared to be pushing his mental state into boozy territory.

Aida’s elbow bumped against the doorframe. Everyone looked up. She was sure her face was reddening, and it would be best if she’d just avert her gaze and head to the bathtub. She didn’t understand why her feet weren’t moving—or why she was still gawking. Move, feet, move!

Winter’s mismatched eyes met hers. His lower face melted into a lazy smile—he actually could smile, imagine that—which sent an intense fluttering through her stomach. Good grief. She was acting like a daydreaming schoolgirl.

“Hello, cheetah,” he said to her.

She lifted her chin and tamped down the chaos burning through her mind and body. “Mr. Magnusson—”

“No need for formalities when someone in the room is naked.”

“Mr. Bootlegger, then.”

He chuckled, low and deep. “You can call me Winter.”

“Oh, may I? Now that you’ve nearly crushed me to death and exposed me to sights I don’t care to see.”

“Keep staring like that and I might think you’re lying.”

Aida’s already-warm cheeks combusted with mortification. She quickly shifted her gaze to the bathtub and made her way across the room.

“Where’s Velma?” Bo asked Aida.

“Brewing his remedy.”

“Isn’t the bath the remedy?”

“I think the bath is an insurance policy.” The bathtub was half filled with water; chipped ice floated on the surface. She dumped the contents of the bowl and watched them sink, wishing she’d thought to bring a spoon or a long stick. Then again, Velma said the mixture wouldn’t hurt.

Sighing, she pushed up a sleeve and plunged her arm in the icy mixture. It was shockingly cold. She winced as she used her arm to swirl the frozen water.

Winter’s voice rumbled from across the room. “You bathing with me?”

Now that was a picture. But never in a million years would she give him the satisfaction of knowing his comments about her staring were on the mark. Bootleggers were notorious womanizers, or so the gossip rags would have one believe. A man who looked like that probably bedded every flapper in the city. “I’d rather be horsewhipped.”

Both Bo and Velma’s men laughed.

When the bath turned pink and the herbs and okra seeds floated to the top, she hastily withdrew her arm and shivered, flinging drops of water away. “Okay, get him inside.”

The men grunted in unison as they half dragged, half shoved Winter toward the tub. Aida snatched a towel off an étagère to dry her arm, sneaking a look at Winter’s backside as they passed. A majestic sight. When he tried to take a step on his own, his buttocks rippled with muscle, deepening the clefts on either side and indenting two succulent dimples on his lower back.

He twisted in their grip and caught her staring again. “Go on. Look,” he encouraged with a grin. “I’m not ashamed.”

“Can you not get him in there faster?” she asked the men in exasperation.

They hauled one long leg over the side of the bathtub.

“Cold!” Winter shouted, suddenly energized. He attempted to bolt.

“Oh no you don’t!” Bo said, giving him a shove.

The giant cried out as he crashed in the tub. A tidal wave of pink water surged over the rim. His great body shivered as water and ice clinked against the sides of the tub.

“Don’t drown the man,” Velma said from the doorway. Her dress fluttered around her calves as she strode past Aida with a steaming cup of tea on a saucer. The scent wafting from the liquid was nothing short of repulsive. “You gotta drink this, Winter,” she said, hooking her foot around a three-legged stool to shift it next to the tub. “You gonna go quietly, or am I gonna have to have Manny and Clyde hold you down?”

“Holy shit,” Bo murmured, jerking his head away from the potion.

“I won’t lie—it’ll taste terrible,” Velma said to Winter in a calm voice as she sat on the stool. “But it will remove your hex.”

“Want . . . doctor,” he answered between shivers.

“No regular doctor can save you now, you understand?” Velma said firmly, snatching his chin between her fingers and turning his face toward hers. “I am your doctor—you are my patient. I will heal you. Drink.”

Winter hesitated, his face pinching from the ghastly scent of the tea, teeth clicking together from the cold. “Iffit kills me—”

“Then I’ll get Miss Palmer to bring you back from the beyond to chat as often as you like. Now, open up and drink.”

He obeyed. His face was rigid as she held the cup for him, chanting a prayer. Brown rivulets leaked from the corners of his lips. Aida thought of the crunch from the mortar and pestle and couldn’t bear to watch him drink. She clamped a hand over her mouth.

He gasped in pain—he was trying to keep it down, gagging. Bo turned around, hands on his knees, breathing heavily.

“There you go,” Velma praised.

Winter stilled. His eyes rolled back into his head, but instead of white, they were swarming with black lines, moving and vibrating like a spiderweb being shaken by a fly. He looked possessed. Aida had never witnessed anything like this—and she’d seen a lot of strange things in her line of work.

Bo gaped at Winter with horror-stricken eyes. “He’s not breathing. What have you done, witch?”

“He’s really not breathing,” Aida seconded.

“Wait!” Velma shouted.

They all stood stock-still. Watched. Waited. Winter wasn’t moving, but the water was. It bubbled up, the pink hue turning darker . . . blackening. Something moved within it, shifting and stirring.

Suddenly the surface rose like boiling water inside a pot. It churned and roiled, and up from the depths, tiny black shadows wriggled and danced, thousands and thousands of them.

Everyone jumped back. Disjointed shrieks of terror reverberated through the bathroom.

Winter’s body sagged into the mass of black shadows as if he were melting. His limp arms hung over the sides. Velma called his name, but he was unresponsive.

As his head sank below the surface, the shadows rose until they spilled over the sides of the tub. But when they hit the black-and-white checkerboard of Velma’s floor, they just . . . disappeared. As if the entire gruesome spectacle was a mirage. Might’ve been; magic often was.

Winter remained underwater, unmoving.

Aida’s heart drummed a crazed rhythm. A silent scream welled up inside her.

The foamy bathwater calmed and lightened to pink. Then, like a submarine surfacing, Winter’s head shot out above the water. Eyes wide and clear, he gulped air and began coughing.

“You see?” Velma said triumphantly as Bo and her men rushed to pull him out of the water. “I told you I was a doctor.”

Aida exhaled a long-held breath as the men hauled Winter onto his feet and covered his shaking body in towels. He looked exhausted and defeated, but he could stand. He gave Velma a pitiful, grateful look, as if that was all he could manage.

“My pleasure,” Velma said as she turned to exit the room. “Get him dressed and leave the bathwater alone. I’ll need to throw it away at a crossroads and cleanse this room later.”

Aida stepped in the hallway with Velma and shut the bathroom door with a shaking hand. “Is he really going to be okay?”

Velma nodded. “He’ll feel better after a good rest. Hopefully he won’t be drawing any more ghosts . . . though I can’t do anything about him seeing them if he stumbles on any around the city. His eyes are open now—no fixing that.”

Tough break, but Aida had little sympathy. She’d been able to see ghosts since she was a small child. If she could live with it, surely a big, tough man like him could do the same.

The conjurer stared at the empty cup in her hands. Traces of antidote ringed the bottom. She turned it upside down on the saucer. “Once he’s back to normal, he’ll need to track down the person responsible. Looks to me like he’s got some enemies in your neighborhood.”