Malediction: An Old World Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

she could have said goodbye … I don’t know. She doesn’t even have a grave we can visit.” He hung his head, a man beaten down by exhaustion and grief.
    Before I left, I asked him if he’d ever heard from Lizzy Thompkins. He told me she’d left town as soon as the police had finished interviewing her.
    “Where did she go?”
    “Beats me. Someplace where she can start fresh, I’m guessing.” For a moment he looked wistful. “Can you blame her?”

5. Lex

    When I went to bed in my crappy hotel room, I half-expected to see Sam again. I was here, following her instructions, wasn’t I? Surely she’d want to check in on my progress? But I just had regular dreams filled with tangled snatches of images: sunshine and graves and a green dress with fringe.
    By eight a.m. I was driving south toward Chino. Traffic was light this early on a Sunday morning, but I still had to pay close attention to freeway signs. I could drive the route from the airport to Sam’s neighborhood in Long Beach from memory, but I didn’t know East LA very well. It appeared to be an industrial area, filled with plenty of factories, concrete, and patches of scrubby bare land, but very few private homes. Compared to the rest of the city, this part of town seemed barren.
    The California Institute for Women was surprisingly enormous, bigger than many college campuses. I’d arrived plenty early, but it still took ages to park, go through security, and wait my turn for visitation. The other people in line were mostly families: fathers and grandparents toting small children, many of whom were dressed up, either to see their mothers or maybe for church afterwards. We were divided into groups while our inmates were summoned, and then at last it was my turn to go into the visiting room and meet Petra Corbett.
    The prison’s exterior may not have been what I was expecting, but the visiting room was: a giant, shabby space with big picnic-style tables bolted into the floor. It looked exactly like a middle-school cafeteria, with a prisoner sitting at each table. I scanned them until I found Petra Corbett, which was easier than I’d thought because most of the prisoners were Latina or black. I’d seen pictures of Petra in the paper and knew she looked like a Hitchcock blonde—slender and cold. In person, in a prison, Petra looked even more dangerous, like she was smugly hiding a weapon, secrets, or both. Probably both.
    When I arrived at the table, I reached out to shake her hand, which was allowed. I introduced myself and said, “Thanks for agreeing to see me.”
    She blinked for a second, as though she needed to run my words through a mental translation filter. Then she nodded. “I do not get many visitors,” she said slowly, in a French accent thick enough to put Pepé Le Pew to shame. “I have no family here and zee man in charge has made sure his people stay away from me.”
    “The man in charge?”
    She gave me a critical look. “You are not from here either, I take it.”
    “No.”
    “What are you?”
    The question was so direct, so matter-of-fact, that I had to sort of admire it. Here I’d been struggling through verbal gymnastics to get Old World creatures to reveal themselves, and she came out with a simple “what are you?” Had I been a normal human, I would probably find the phrasing a little odd, but I would have just answered with the name of my profession.
    Revealing yourself to humans is usually anathema, but I was a witch, and Simon had told me that we get a little more leeway on the whole revealing-ourselves thing. Humans just assume we’re Wiccan or delusional. “Witch,” I said quietly.
    Her eyes brightened. “As am I.” A witch. Interesting, but I wasn’t sure how it connected to anything else. “But I still do not understand why you wanted to see me,” she added.
    “I’m looking for information about my sister, Samantha Wheaton.”
    Her brow furrowed as if she were trying to place the name, then her face cleared.