The Poison of Ivy Read online

“Ivy Hart!” Ivy said.

  “Oh, hi, Ivy! Can you—excuse me,” she heard Cassiopeia say. “One second, Ivy.” There was a slamming door and then quiet. “I’m sorry, we’re a bit slammed at the house. So many people have been interested since Aline—”

  Ivy could understand Cassiopeia’s hesitation to consider Aline’s near-death experience to be a positive recruiting technique for The Protection of the Female Goddess or the L.A. coven in general, but it was certainly true. The video of Aline had gone viral in seconds, apparently, after airing live on television. Some theories still credited Aline’s witchcraft with saving her life, even after the actress herself had gone public with the bullet-resistant dress she’d had created for the occasion, shooting her designer, Julio, from mid-tier status to fashion superstar.

  “Cassiopeia, the reason I’m calling is because of some videos online of the Prophetess of the Female Goddess?” she asked. “Is this one of yours?”

  Cassiopeia sighed. “No, it most definitely isn’t. I’ve tried to tell the coven not to purchase any of her stuff, especially the pre-cast charms. Who knows what spells or vexes were placed on each of them! This is dangerous for witches,” she said. “But, you know, a ton of the people who have shown interest in the past few days have only found us because of her, so …” Cassiopeia paused. “She’s definitely not one of ours or any of the nearby covens. I’ve called them already. No one knows who this woman is.”

  Vince raised his eyebrows, and Ivy shook her head. “Okay, thank you, I’ll probably be calling—”

  “Oh, um, Ivy?” She imagined Cassiopeia pacing back and forth across the backyard of the small suburban cottage she’d been using as a base for the L.A. coven meetings and her business of running the Protection of the Female Goddess. “I was wondering … We’ve been getting threats tenfold. I know the Kingsmen have kind of exploded the same way the coven has since the Oscars, but … Should I be worried?” she asked.

  Ivy didn’t know how to answer. “To be fair, I wouldn’t say they’re totally baseless. There might be a crazy one who tries something. But those are mostly going to be empty threats; people are going to be much more likely to send hate notes than actually try to harm you.” She paused, remembering that Cassiopeia had once told her that the coven regularly had to physically relocate in response to Kingsmen finding out their location. “Are they being sent to the house?”

  “No,” Cassiopeia said, relief in her voice. “At least, not yet, but the new witches are literally pouring out of the doors and windows.” She laughed a bit. “The new threats have been brought to me. A lot of these women are, unfortunately, here out of fear.”

  “I see,” Ivy said. “Call if anything arrives addressed to your residence.”

  “Thank you,” Cassiopeia said. Someone yelling for Cassiopeia sounded far too close for the phone, and Ivy was suddenly thankful she was only dealing with a camera crew.

  Ivy hung up the phone and skimmed through her personal email, going to clear out the junk mail, a regular habit that made her head feel much less cluttered. At the top was an email from the Prophetess: ARE YOU A WITCH KIT | HALF OFF TODAY ONLY!

  “How did they get my email?” Ivy asked, groaning. She clicked on the email, and a bright-green flyer flooded her screen.

  Vince moved to her desk. “You trying to figure out if you have superpowers?” he asked. He whipped his arm out, a perfect recreation of Spider-Man’s classic web-slinging pose.

  Ivy blinked slowly at him, unsmiling, but Vince’s grin was unhindered. “I would prefer to be bitten by a radioactive spider than buy a kit that tests my blood for magic.”

  “It actually tests your blood?” he asked, scrolling through the email himself. He laughed. “If you believe your results are incorrect, please send a picture of your results, and you will receive a second kit for half the price.”

  “Wow,” Ivy said. “Whoever this Prophetess is, she knows how to sell a product.”

  “We should get one,” he said. “Just to see what she’s selling.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, she supposed. The Prophetess wasn’t doing anything wrong at all, really, just riding a wave of publicity and interest, but Ivy still felt that things were fishy with this woman. She nodded.

  “Send it to me,” Vince said, “since you’re still, you know.”

  Lying low. That’s what she was supposed to be doing. After her name had shown up as a “Work in Progress” on the Kingsmen website, a supposed marked for death by the extremist cult, she’d found herself looking over her shoulder constantly. She knew how to take care of herself—she was more skilled in hand-to-hand combat than most officers, and she was a sure shot. But that didn’t mean she didn’t take the threat seriously after seeing so many bodies turn up at the hands of the Kingsmen, who clearly believed they were cleansing the world of darkness by killing ever-reincarnating witches. Sending a kit related to witchcraft to her own apartment was likely just asking for trouble.

  Ivy filled out the shipping information. “Actually, buy two,” Vince said, and Ivy looked up at him. “I want to see if I’m a witch too.” Vince swiveled in his chair, pointing his pen like a magic wand, “zapping” different officers around the room, complete with sound effects he enthusiastically supplied.

  “What do you mean by too?” Ivy asked. “I’m not a witch.”

  “I know, I know,” Vince said, though he moved his eyes playfully as if he didn’t believe his own words. Ivy flung out a hand to hit his stomach. “Ouch.”

  “That did not hurt,” Ivy said, not looking away from her computer. She clicked through the confirmation of her purchase, and a popup bounced on her computer’s monitor.

  The image featured a picture of the Prophetess lying on her side, one arm beneath her gracefully reaching out to an elaborate mirror, one finger touching the glass, and reflecting her body back to her. Wispy smoke surrounded her, curling seductively around her wrists, ankles, and waist. Across the top, in all caps, was the word: WHIMSY. Beneath, the reader was invited to join the woman in the image: “Witches and Wanderers alike, come find out how the Wiccan world can heal, teach, and pleasure you in this first official Prophetess gathering.”

  Beneath, the address of the Greek theatre and the date and time were written in lime green, and the rest of the image and words were in an attractive grayscale.

  “I mean, I’m curious about it,” Vince said. “Do you want to go? We can at least see what type of things happen.”

  “It’s tomorrow night.”

  Vince took this statement as confirmation. “What do we wear?”

  Ivy remembered her shock when she’d walked into Cassiopeia’s home for a gathering of the L.A. coven, and how many of the women were in casual clothes or workout gear. From the picture of the Prophetess in front of them, who was only wearing a sheer sheet of gauze and was dripping with glittering jewels of different sizes and shapes, she figured that whatever group had joined the following of the Prophetess, who now had nearly forty million followers on social media, were going to be displaying a much different dress code. This meeting was going to be a place where people could show off.

  “I would guess something … trendy?” Ivy said. “This feels more like a brand than a belief system, honestly. So, something fashionable.”

  “Giraffe onesie it is.” Vince kicked his feet up on his desk, and Ivy pointed to a gum wrapper plastered onto the bottom of his shoe. He cringed and ignored it.

  “Please tell me you don’t have one of those,” Ivy said. “You are a police detective. You do not own—let alone wear—a giraffe onesie.”

  “I most certainly do,” Vince said, pulling out his phone and showing her a picture of himself in said giraffe onesie. He was comically tall in the attire, especially standing next to his little nephew, who was dressed in identical gear.

  Ivy swiped to the next picture, which showed Vince alone, trying to swing a bat at a piñata.

  “Why do you even have this picture on hand?” Ivy asked.

  Vince
beamed. “Just in case I run into a moment like this one.”

  “At least you’re prepared,” Ivy said begrudgingly. She could never criticize someone who was ready for anything.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Saturday, March 4, 2017, 8:48 p.m.

  Ivy’s expectation of the Prophetess gathering to require trendy clothes was a gross underestimation.

  Vince laughed. “This is a rave,” he said.

  Ivy scrunched her eyebrows. A pair of girls walked past, each of them in crop tops with the word “Witch” on the back in big, white block letters, sparkling green skirts, and knee-high boots that mimicked the Prophetess’s online video from Venice Beach. All around them were ripped clothing, fishnet tights, high heeled-boots, black lace, and green glitter.

  “Appealing to the college and high school culture was a good idea,” Ivy admitted. Though, even as she skimmed the crowd of mostly young people, she found no lack of adults up through their seventies, draped in heavy black and green velvet.

  It only took a few moments for the entire outdoor stadium to smell of alcohol and turn misty with different types of smoke. Music blared from the speakers, and a slideshow of the Prophetess flipped through to the beat of the music. Ivy guessed the Prophetess was about five years older than she was, though she couldn’t find a blemish on the woman’s skin in the pictures. She was covered in pearls and black lace, lying in piles of still-green leaves. Buzzwords that made no real sense together flashed between the images, exciting the crowd: Natural, Magic, Live, Enchant, Journey, Powerful, Delilah, Glow.

  “Are they advertising skincare or recruiting witches?” Ivy asked.

  Vince shook his head. They claimed two seats at the end of a row, though they didn’t sit—no one was sitting, and Ivy presumed it was because most of the crowd wanted to show off their outfits. Fists flew up all around them, clad in bangles and fingerless gloves and spike-studded leather.

  The speakers beeped, and a few people screamed right as the phones all around the theatre started flashing in different shades of green. Ivy looked down at her own screen. Both her and Vince’s phones did not light; whatever police protections had been placed in their phones were unbroken by the signal the Prophetess was sending to the crowd. Excited murmurs flowed through the crowd as the stage in front of them when entirely dark and silent.

  In the blinks of brightness from the onstage lights, Ivy saw flashes of smiles, glow-in-the-dark face paint, and even a pair of dimly lit wings—some sort of costume taken to the extreme.

  Ethereal music cast a spell over the crowd, which quieted. At the first drop of the bass, the lights on the stage strobed green and white, making Delilah’s walk look both stunted and eerie. She was difficult to see, her face veiled and her entire body behind a thin screen. She moved her arms in long, sweeping motions, and lights reflected on the screen in front of her, making it look as though she were controlling the projection in front of her, a flowing, green lava that had the crowd screaming with joy. Her movements matched up to the music, and the lights continued flashing as smoke machines spewed white mist, clouding around the Prophetess’s ankles. The screen in front of her dropped to the ground in a waterfall of shimmering silk, and she pulled the veil over the top of her head, green silk falling over her hair, revealing her smile, which was rimmed with black lipstick. Ivy was vaguely reminded of a cartoon image of Cleopatra.

  “It is a beautiful moon, witches!” she yelled, and the crowd roared.

  Ivy looked up. A perfect white half-circle sat, suspended in the black velvet of the night and surrounded by stars that were almost entirely hidden by air pollution and the blinking red lights of airplanes headed to and from LAX. The young man in front of her—decked out in an entirely lime-green outfit—howled like a wolf, and Ivy wondered how clearly the crowd really understood witch lore. She didn’t know much herself, but she was fairly certain that werewolves fell into a different realm of fairytales.

  Vince howled next to her, and Ivy looked up at him, confused. She couldn’t hear his voice, but she could clearly see he was saying, “It looked fun.”

  Fire shot up from each end of the stage, and a wave of heat flew across the crowd. Delilah raised both hands as the base of the music dropped, and the crowd began to dance, raising their hands and drinks.

  Ivy sarcastically wondered if a Kiss cover band was going to be introduced next, and she and Vince both pulled out their phones, recording the madness around them. A drone passed overhead, and the crowd pretended to reach up for it. Ivy looked around for the person controlling the drone, for any sort of staff, and couldn’t find any. There’d been a few people around in green shirts and khakis when she’d come in, watching over the crowd as they pushed toward the different entrances of the theatre, and there had been a few cops from the LAPD, who Ivy and Vince had called in when they realized the magnitude of the event. Even though the Prophetess and her crew hadn’t asked the LAPD for crowd control help, that didn’t mean they didn’t need it. Ivy had seen an officer breaking up two girls fighting over the correct way to perform some sort of beauty spell.

  “Welcome to our first bewitched meeting, my loves!” she said. “If you signed up for my blast emails, you knew to bring your natural garnet rough stone!” She held up a deep-red rock, and a camera zoomed in on her hand, projecting a closeup of the image onto the projection screen behind her. “A stone that will give you the gifts of self-esteem, victory, and eternal love.” She closed her fingers tightly around her stone.

  Finally, the staff members in green and khaki emerged again, holding credit card readers and bulging black bags.

  “Don’t worry if you haven’t gotten yours yet!” she said, gesturing out to the crowd. “Representatives will be coming through the aisles, and you can grab one for yourself! Skeptics,” she said, sweeping her hand across the crowd, her pointer finger searching for said non-believers, “this is the perfect stone for you to try. Feel empowered by this bit of magic, yes?”

  The crowd cheered for her, and Ivy watched as several in the crowd started waving the staff members down, hoping to grab a garnet stone before they ran out—which they clearly would.

  Delilah smiled out at the crowd. “While we’re getting that all settled, I’m going to teach you the words to the garnet blessing,” she said. “Now, as most of you know, spells are quite often in Latin.” Words flashed up behind Delilah: Da mihi amorem aeternam. “Give me eternal love,” the Prophetess said, translating. “Repeat after me! Da mihi amoren aeternam.”

  The crowd repeated, the noise more of a rumble of confused vowels, each person testing out the new language on their tongues. However, an older woman close by seemed to know the spell by heart already, the way she spoke the words, and had to cut herself off before she continued onto a part of the spell the rest of the crowd had not yet learned.

  “Provide me with victory.” She held up her hand in a fist, punching the air. The motion made her bright-white hair reflect the light, creating an effect that left her with a sort of halo reflection around her head. “Succedunt sibi et victoriam!” The crowd repeated, now recognizing the words succeed and victory in the old language.

  The Prophetess raised both of her arms, her head nodding as she said, “And may I believe in my power!”

  The crowd cheered.

  “Yes!” she yelled, her arms now pretending to embrace the crowd. “Yes! Et ego in te virtutem meam!”

  The crowd repeated one last time, and then a loud, persisting note exploded from the speakers. Most of the crowd had received their garnet, Ivy and Vince politely refusing a man who tried to sell them each a rough-cut stone.

  From the stage, Delilah said the first piece of the blessing and pointed to the crowd, who held the garnet in front of themselves as she did and read from the monitor. She pressed the stone to her heart, and the crowd followed. The note resounding from the speaker moved an octave lower, and Ivy felt the reverberation of it in her stomach. The Prophetess yelled the second part of the blessing, and the crowd scre
amed it back at her. She drew the stone from her shoulder down to the crook of her elbow. Then came the last piece of the spell, which she said breathily into the microphone, her eyes closed, and her lips curled into a smile. The crowd repeated it back to her, and she smiled up to the sky, pressing the stone against her wrist, right where someone would take their pulse.

  She then pressed her wrist to her heart, and the crowd followed, many upset to find they’d used the wrong arm for the wrist part, and now found themselves in a different position than the Prophetess. Ivy zoomed in with her phone to the stage, who was clapping for the people in the crowd, her social media information popping up on the screen behind her, along with pictures of a necklace meant to provide confidence in job performance.

  The screen flickered, and for a moment, she felt like a child changing the channel, waiting for that quick moment of static to pass before a new image was projected on the screen, being projected on the phones all around them, including Ivy’s.

  The Kingsmen logo.

  Several people in the crowd—those who knew what it meant—screamed. Ivy barely caught sight of Delilah sprinting into the wings of the stage, her garnet stone rolling across the stage and into the orchestra level of seating.

  Vince’s hand was already on his hip, and they pressed their backs together, scanning the crowd. The sound of a gunshot pulled Ivy’s attention to a severe-looking woman, who was preparing to pull the trigger when Ivy’s bullet took her down. She felt the slight recoil of Vince’s back against her own, twice. Three times. There were several shooters, then. She scanned her side of the theatre, finding one other shooter aiming at her. She fired before he could get off a shot.

  The audience was in a panic. Some people were screaming, most were running, and Ivy and Vince sprinted toward the loudest part of the crowd. Ivy had already hung up, an ambulance on its way, when she reached the first young woman shot. Her eyes were rolled back into her head, and she was draped over one of the plastic chairs, which remained mostly folded, her slight weight not enough to make the chair fall open. Next to her, a thickly muscled man was breathing heavily against the blood squeezing between his fingers from his ribcage.