The Burning Bush (38 page)

“Dante bombed Yemaya district. We’ve lost Cassie. Angel is in jail, and you want a date?” I opened Jacobi’s closet. All his clothes hung in a crisp line of blacks and whites. No other colors stood out. Large bottles labeled as antibacterial sanitizer sat on the top shelf.
What disease does Jacobi think he’s going to get?

“I know a lot is happening,” MeShack said. “And you’ll have to help Zulu grieve when he takes back control of his body. I’ll give you time for that—a few weeks or so.”

“Well, thanks.” I studied the clothes and touched them with my hands. “You’re a very giving person.”

“I just want one night with you.” His voice softened. “I miss the little things we had, like hanging out.”

I got on my knees, checked out Jacobi’s shoes, and searched for a hidden compartment under the carpet. “So the bet is that you find the ingredients in less than five minutes, and I hang out with you. We’re only talking movies and a meal with no sex?”

“We don’t have to say no sex,” he said. “Why not leave that open?”

“No sex.”

“Fine. Movies and a meal with no sex.”

“I’ll agree to that.”

“Hmm. Let’s add a goodnight kiss.”

“No.” Standing back up, I separated Jacobi’s dull-colored clothes with my fingers and spotted only an empty wall behind them. After messing around in the closet some more, I paced around the almost empty room. MeShack leaned against the wall, with one of his feet balanced on it. He whistled his band’s song “Heart of Fire.”

“Are you going to help?” I asked.

“One kiss.”

Rubbing my eyes, I got on my knees and ran my fingers through the carpet near the gray dresser. I crawled around for a few seconds. MeShack purred.

“Those jeans are kind of tight. Perhaps you should take them off,” he suggested.

“You’re a pervert.”

“Take the deal, La La. I can smell the ingredients. If you wait too long I’ll just add more things to our date. Things that will involve moaning, sweating, and screaming my name to the gods.”

Oh my goodness.

“I’ll agree to a movie, meal, and a peck on your cheek.”

“What is this, high school? I want a movie and a meal.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “Plus a kiss for however long I want and wherever I want to put it.”

I sat up. “I might agree, but only if you tell me where you want to kiss me and for how long.”

“Between your thighs and until my tongue gets tired.”

A rush of heat washed over me. “Your tongue never gets tired.” My teeth caught my bottom lip.

“No, it doesn’t, especially not with you.” The gold in his eyes flashed bright.

I turned my back to him to hide my arousal. We’d already been in this room for five minutes. It was time to get this over with. “MeShack, that’s not a kiss. So let’s go back to the earlier deal: movie, meal, and a kiss on the mouth for no more than a minute.”

“Deal.”

I’m sure I’m missing something since he agreed too quickly.
I’ll figure a way to get out of the kiss later—when I have time to freaking think.

A scraping sound came from behind me. I twisted to see MeShack moving Jacobi’s bed and exposing a trapdoor under it. His hands clasped onto a plastic handle as he lifted the trapdoor with one hand and climbed inside.

“I smell blood and cardamom coming from here,” MeShack said and disappeared beneath the floor.

“Damn it.” I rushed toward the opening and went in after him, climbing down a wooden ladder that squeaked with each step. Darkness surrounded me. I squinted to see, but it didn’t help.

“La La, what are you waiting for? You can make fire. I don’t smell any gasoline or any other flammable liquid down here.” MeShack appeared in front of me with bright gold eyes.

“Thanks.” I created a fireball with my hand and pushed it out two feet in front. The blaze barely lit the area, but at least I could see. We were under the house. Dirt and rocks covered the ground. A few plastic pipes jutted out of the rocky soil. Other pipes stuck out above my head. The air held a thick and humid feel to it like there wasn’t any true ventilation down here. A moldy scent clung to the space.

“I smell cedar, rosemary, and eucalyptus leaves about six feet ahead of us.” MeShack seized my hand, enclosing his soft skin around it, and rubbed my palm with his thumb. “I smell a lot of blood too. Stay close to me, please.”

“Okay.”

Something skittered by my ankle. I held in a shriek and snatched MeShack’s huge arm for safety with my free hand.

“You can see well in the dark.” I gripped him tighter. “What went by my leg?”

“Oh, that was a big-ass rat,” MeShack informed me. “There’s a whole family of big ones down here—”

“Okay stop.” I cringed and tiptoed as if that would help me not get bitten.

“Don’t worry! The rats sense me, so at least they’re running away from us.”

I created several fireballs, guiding them around the room to get a better look of the area and to avoid as many rats as possible. The illuminated space displayed a huge area that stretched the entire length of the house. There were several doors above us, probably trapdoors from other rooms.

MeShack let go of me and crept forward, holding his nose in the air. “All I can smell is blood right now.”

I inhaled. “All I can smell is mold. I’m glad you’re with me. As far as I’m concerned, you get your date night, and I’ll pay. I don’t think I would have found the trapdoor or smelled the blood without you.”

“We’re good together.” MeShack glanced over his huge shoulder. “Remember that.”

Footsteps sounded above us.

“Don’t worry. I locked Jacobi’s bedroom door,” MeShack said. “They all saw you ogling me in the kitchen. They’ll just assume I’m having sex with you if they find the door is locked.”

“Awesome. There will be gossip about it all over the habitat.” I stepped toward a wooden pole on my right. A dirty teddy bear lay next to it, sitting on top of a stack of crayon drawings. I kneeled down to check out the pictures.

Any kid that plays down here for fun has to be crazy.
A child had scribbled crayon art on newspaper clippings. Even crazier, the drawings were all pretty much the same—stick figures standing in an orange circle. Each brown stick figure had long, yellow hair and an open mouth. I scanned the clippings’ titles and froze. They were all different district newspapers but about the same event, the death of Jacobi’s mother. All of them stated:
“Fiona Brass is survived by her husband of ten years, the Honorable Judge Brass, and her ten-year-old son, Jacobi Brass.”

The stick figure with the long hair must have been his mother.
But why is she trapped in an orange circle? Maybe the circle is fire.
After all, he was just a kid drawing this, not an adult artist. Plus, she was a Fire Witch. Something had happened on the day Jacobi’s mother died, and maybe Jacobi had witnessed it. Or maybe he didn’t see anything and was just drawing on his mother’s obituaries.

“La La, come here,” MeShack called from around a dark corner. I grabbed one of the drawings and headed his way, towing all of my fireballs with me.

“Here’s what you wanted.” He pointed to several buckets of blood in the corner.

A blue haze hovered over each bucket and shimmered as I came near it. I’d seen a similar looking haze in Vee’s kitchen. It was some sort of spell to keep an item from spoiling. A large marble stone sat on top of a metal desk. Dried blood and dust covered the marble. Next to those items were jars full of herbs, rocks, gems, and some unidentifiable bugs. A bright orange and red picture of Shango adorned the wall. The words on the picture read, “God of Fire.” Bottles of sanitizer lined the back edge of the desk.
This must be Jacobi’s altar.

“You have a bottle or something to grab the blood?” MeShack asked.

“Fuck me.” I hit my forehead.

He groaned. “How do you come here to grab stuff and not have anything to hold it in?”

“Would you cut me some slack? I haven’t gotten any sleep, and I was high when I first jumped on the tram.” I searched the area.

“What about your ‘stealing’ pants?”

“I didn’t wear them.”

“So we’re just going to carry a bucket of blood up to the kitchen?” MeShack placed his hands on his hips, like I usually did, and frowned.

I spotted an empty jar nearby that was half the size of my hand, took it, and filled it to the rim with blood. “Let’s just use this.”

“I guess I can put the jar in my pocket,” MeShack said. “Your jeans are too tight.”

“Good idea.” I handed it to him.

“Now what?”

“We give it to Rivera, have Vee go down to the police station to test it, and if the blood matches the spell, we’ve got our guy.”

“And then we focus on killing Dante,” MeShack said.

We’d done our best to put everything in Jacobi’s under-the-house room back to normal. I’d folded up the crayon drawing and stuffed it in my back pocket. MeShack put the jar of blood in his jeans pocket. Once all that was done, MeShack and I headed back through the trapdoor and to the kitchen.

“Oh good, I was just going to grab you two. Sharlene made coffee,” Ely said.

Sharlene? I bet this is the girl MeShack said was named Sharon.

A few trickles of coffee magically seeped out of an hourglass-shaped pot on the stove and floated in the air. The drops flew away from the stove and toward the two cups beside Sharlene. She poured sugar into the small cups right before the drops of coffee landed into them. The sugar moistened. She vigorously mixed the sugar and coffee until it transformed into a tan paste.

“Café Cubano?” I licked my lips.

“Of course.” Sharlene winked at me. “I don’t get out of Yemaya district much, but do people in Santeria drink anything but Cuban coffee?”

“Well, some do,” I said as MeShack clutched my arm and tugged me away from her. I’d probably been hovering embarrassingly close to Sharlene, which I couldn’t help once that yummy coffee scent hit my nostrils. “I drink a lot of coffee, but I don’t just drink anybody’s café Cubano. Making Cuban coffee is an art.”

“Yes, it is. It’s really all in the dedication.” Sharlene picked up the metal pot and slowly poured the rest of the coffee into the tan paste she’d made. The whole time her other hand stirred, folding the brown liquid into the sugar paste until a thick foam rose to the top. “Seriously, if you don’t get a cup with at least an inch of foamy sugar froth, then it’s just a regular coffee, not Cubano.”

Sharlene handed the cup to me and began working on the other one. I took a heated sip. The foam stuck to my lips. Sugar penetrated my mouth and absorbed into my taste buds. I moaned, closing my eyes.

“Really? Is it that serious?” MeShack asked.

“Sharlene, you’re a goddess of coffee.” I opened my eyes and sipped some more, trying my best not to gulp it all down. “I’m taking you back with me. I’ve never in my life had it this good. Not even at the Fire Bean Café.”

“Did you two find anything?” Ely asked.

Nodding, I twisted around to look at him. “Well, it was mainly a walk-through of the house to make sure you all aren’t working in dangerous conditions.”

MeShack snatched up his shirt from the end of a chair and put it on.

“Would you two like to add something about your work experience here?” I asked. “And I had another question too. Is there a Mrs. Judge Brass? I didn’t see any pictures.”

The kitchen went quiet for a minute. Ely averted his eyes and stared out the window as if he’d never been talking to me.

“She died in a fire a long time ago.” Sharlene sighed. “It’s an uncomfortable topic for all of us.”

“Our mothers died in the fire too.” Ely’s stayed centered on the window.

“Wait a minute.” I carried my coffee to a chair and sat down. “You all grew up here with your mothers?”

They nodded.

“And Tammie too. That’s my sister.” Sharlene brought over a Cuban coffee for MeShack. “Once our mothers died, Grandmother Brass let us stay here and took care of us. She just passed away last month.”

“Was that Grandmother Brass’s bedroom furniture I moved into the attic?” MeShack asked.