I closed up the kitchen after the lunch service at the Safe Harbor Café. While I wiped down the tables, a minivan pulled into the parking lot. Ashley, the head witch, got out and went around to the side to get her baby and strapped him to her chest with some carrier. I wasn’t thrilled that she had brought the baby, but it wasn’t my baby. I was glad her lovely little girl wasn’t there.

I walked out to meet her. Lily pulled in as we were saying our hellos. She was going to work the dinner shift by herself so that I could get some sleep. We walked around back, and the café formed the door for us. Ashley went through her ritual of greeting the spirit of the café and bowed to it. Then we went into the basement and lifted out the body bag. The baby made cheerful noises, and Ashley hummed to him.

“Do you want me to take the baby outside while you look at the body?” I asked.

“Nah. He’s too young to know anything. It’ll be fine. Really,” Ashley said. She squatted down to open the body bag. She made a face when the smell hit her nose. The baby started fussing, too.

“Yeah, it’s pretty old. I hope Lily warned you. That’s why we couldn’t identify it,” I said.

“She did. I talked to the hags. They don’t have too much to do with us, but they fall under my authority. They will want the body if I prove it’s one of theirs, which is just as well because I don’t want to drive around with it,” Ashley said and stood up. She closed the lid of the freezer and put her purse on it. She took out a few vials and a stick of incense. The smell from the bag began to fill the room, and I wanted to be sick. “Lily, would you mind going upstairs while I work?” Ashley asked Lily. Lily nodded and left without a word.

Ashley mixed the contents of the vials together in a bowl she had brought and spat in it. Then she lit the incense. I had hoped that the smell of the incense would cover up the smell of the corpse, but it didn’t. Instead, the smell combined with the odor of decay and incense filled the tiny, dank room. I began to be dizzy and unwell. My head was fuzzy. I wanted to vomit. Ashley began to chant. Her hair floated and rifted around her face, blown by wind only she could feel. Then she dumped the contents of the bowl over the skull, and the body in the bag glowed and began to reform. An image of a woman’s face appeared over the skull. The picture kept switching between the face of a young woman and an old one. I didn’t interrupt Ashley.

Ashley watched the body while she was chanting. Finally, she stopped chanting, and the image faded away. “I didn’t recognize her. Did you?” she asked me.

“No, I don’t know her. But as you know, most witches don’t come to us for healing. You all usually have your own ways of doing things,” I told her.

“That’s true; we do. But it’s a hag, alright. I can’t think of anything else that would switch between an old woman and a young woman. Can you?” she asked as she zipped up the body bag.

“No. I can’t.” I tried to think of something. There were a couple of beings that went from old woman to young girl, but they all fell into the hag family, even if they weren’t part of the European mythos. Or at least they did over here.

“Give me a hand?” Ashley asked. “We lift on three.” She looked out of place. She was such a generic-looking young, White mom with her brown hair and yoga pants. A placid baby strapped to her chest. Yet, here she was, lugging bodies into freezers as if it was just the most normal thing in the world. I came around and grabbed the feet. The café helpfully popped open the lid of the freezer. Ashley counted off, “One, Two, Three.” We lifted the bag of bones and tossed it into the freezer. The trash bag was gone.

We left the basement room. Ashley bowed to the café as it closed the doorway we had just exited. Lily wasn’t waiting for us, so I figured she must have gone inside. “Do you want something to eat?” I asked Ashley.

“No, thanks. I have to go pick up my daughter from school. The hags will want to collect the body themselves. I’ll call them from the car. They should send someone to collect the body shortly, which is just as well. I don’t want to wait in the pickup line at school with a dead body in my trunk. You okay dealing with them?” she asked as we walked around the front of the building. I guess no one wants to drive around with a dead body in the car.

“Yeah, it shouldn’t be a problem. Would it be safe to ask them for a spell to find her killer?” I wanted to ask Ashley for a spell. But she had already done the locator charm, so I didn’t want to push my luck. Since we hadn’t been officially asked to intervene, I didn’t want to risk a misunderstanding that would result in my being in debt to her for a spell.

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that. That’s not how magic works. It’s never that straightforward, or we would run the world instead of hiding in the shadows. Ask them if you can join the hunt for her killer. That’s not the traditional phrasing, but it should sound okay and be polite enough to work for them. They’re not sticklers for protocol anyway. If they were Wiccans or something, I’d say go look it up. Hags are more casual.” Ashley unlocked her car and started to buckle in her baby.

“Thanks for all your help. I appreciate it,” I told her.

“It’s no trouble. It’s more interesting than the usual petty squabbling I spend my days dealing with. I think we’ve found all the little people the black witch hurt. I’ve been patching them up as best I can, but there are a few that aren’t responding to treatment. I’d like to have you come and take a look at them,” she said.

I asked, “Oh, no. I can go right over. Do you want me to look in at them now?”

She said, “No. They aren’t in any danger. Can you come tonight? I’ll send you directions.”

“Sure. I don’t have to work tonight, so it’s not a problem,” I told her.

“Thank you. I’ve got to run.” Ashley gave me a quick hug, and we said our goodbyes.

I waved to her as she drove out of the parking lot, then went into the Safe Harbor Café to tell Lily what was going on. After I explained that it was a hag, she asked me how we were going to find the killer. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out. Can you call Jen and Chris and see if the victims had any common hobbies or anything? They couldn’t have been picked completely at random. There must be something that ties this all together. There must be something we’re missing,” I said.

“I guess I can. I wish it hadn’t happened to someone we know. Not that I wanted it to happen to anyone but asking Jen these kinds of questions about her sister is really hard,” she replied, looking down at her perfect manicure.

“Start with Chris. He didn’t know Samantha that well since she was a new vampire. It won’t be as awkward. We just have to find the thing that connects them and then work backward,” I told her.

“What if there isn’t anything?” she asked.

“There has to be. You call Chris, and I’ll call Amara with the café’s help. I doubt dryads have great cell phone reception. Then maybe we’ll have an idea of where to look and what to ask when we talk to Jen. I can call her if you want. But for some reason, I thought it would sound better coming from you.” I felt a pang of guilt over the fact I was scared to be the one to call.

“I can’t call Chris right now. I’m not with him, so he’s asleep for the day,” Lily told me. I refrained from pointing out that he wasn’t asleep; he was dead.

“Oh, that’s true. I’ll call Amara then. And wait for the hags. They should be here soon. Ashley said that we could ask them if we could join them on the hunt for the killer. They won’t give us a spell to find the murderer, but they should let us in when they pursue him,” I told her.

“Alright. I’m going to get the dinner stuff set up for myself while you call Amara. If the hags get here while you’re on the phone, I’ll go out and greet them. Did Ashley say if they would deal with me or not?” Lily asked.

“She didn’t say. But she did say that she has fairies and pixies who need healing. She wants me to go out and look at them tonight,” I said.

“What time?” Lily asked.

“I don’t know. I told Ashley I didn’t have to work the dinner shift, so I guess sometime around then.”

“You’re going to go without me?” Lily asked.

“Yeah. We’ve been away from the Safe enough lately. Don’t worry so much,” I told her. To end the discussion, I addressed the spirit of the café. “I’d like a phone to call Amara, please.” The café materialized the wooden phone next to me. Lily frowned at me and at the café but went back into the kitchen without further comment.

The phone made a sound of blowing the wind, and Amara came on the line. She didn’t have a lot to tell me. Vasiliki, the missing dryad, mostly stayed close to the forest. She would sometimes travel into town to use the library computers. Apparently, she had a bit of a shopping habit and liked to order things online and have them delivered to the library. It was a testament to librarians, the weird wonderfulness of libraries that would let a woman with leaves in her hair have MAC lipstick shipped to herself there. To get to the library, she would take the bus from the parking lot of Fidnemed.

After I finished with Amara, I couldn’t think of what else to do, so I called Jen. As anxious as I was about talking to her, sitting there doing nothing was worse. I asked her if her sister had ever gone to Fidnemed, the dryad’s forest, or the library.

“I don’t think she went to the library. But we’re wolves. We’ve all been to that forest. We’ve all been to every forest for like two hundred miles around here,” she said.

“Do you think she would have been to Fidnemed in her human form or had gone there more regularly?” I asked.

“She could have. She had a student group that she took hiking. They just went on a big hiking trip. It’s possible that she went out there to scout the location, then went on the trip. Let me look at the map she gave me. Maybe she was camping at Fidnemed.” Jen went silent for a while, but I could hear her moving around and looking through papers. “Here it is. Wow, yeah. She was at Fidnemed for her big camping trip about a week or so before she went missing. You said that is near the part of the forest the dryad was from?”

I felt a slight touch of chills. Perhaps we would be able to catch this guy. “Yes. When she left her grove, she would go through there. We don’t know yet if the other two had any connection to it. We’ll have to wait until the vamps wake up to ask them. The hags are coming over in a bit to collect their dead,” I told Jen. There wasn’t much else to say. I asked her when the funeral was. She told me, and I promised to be there. I hated funerals, although I suppose no one enjoys them.

When I finished, I went back into the kitchen to talk to Lily. She had tied an apron over her yellow scoop-neck sweater and tan, wide-leg pants. She paired the entire outfit with saddle shoes, which I guess were more appropriate for the kitchen mats than her normal heels. I told her everything I had learned. Lily looked over and asked, “Why did he go after them? Just because they went through there? Was he protecting that part of the forest?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to be warned off. Maybe he didn’t want to be caught? We’re operating on the assumption that this guy had a motive for killing that we would understand. But maybe he doesn’t, maybe he’s one of those crazy human serial killers?” This was one of my less likely theories.

“It could be. I don’t know too much about humans, except from TV. And if their TV is to be believed, they’re always killing each other for no reason. And serial killers. They have tons of shows about serial killers. So that must happen a lot,” Lily said.

“It doesn’t. Serial killers are pretty rare. They just make good TV. I wouldn’t base my expectations of human behavior on TV any more than I would expect us to behave the way we do on human TV,” I told her.

Lily didn’t say anything and kept setting out the stuff for the dinner service. I didn’t help. She liked the kitchen a different way than I did, and she wouldn’t thank me for getting in her way. I stood and watched until the café made a doorbell sound. When I went into the dining area, I saw two women standing there, one old and one young. “Lily,” I called over my shoulder, “the hags are here.”

“You go show them downstairs. I’m going to finish prep work. The café will let me know if you need me,” she yelled back.