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woman’s cell phone mysteriously exploded in her ear. I asked
Lilith at the time if she had anything to do with that, but she
just smiled and said, “With what?”
    I squeezed her hand tighter and shook off the
hold that her stare had me under. “Lilith, you have to focus. Look
at you. You’re scaring me. Now how `bout you take a deep breath and
tell me everything from the beginning. Does this have anything to
do with that phone call you got earlier tonight?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who was it?”
    “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me his
name.”
    “What did he want?”
    “He wanted to fucking kill me! That’s what he
wanted.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. That’s just it.” She pulled free
of my hands, stood up and began pacing the floor, wringing her
fingers one at a time in nervous secession, and counting her steps
quietly up and down and back again. I could see her gathering her
thoughts, shuffling and reorganizing in her head the events of the
last few hours. “He told me he had the gate key,” she said,
stopping and pointing at me just long enough to establish that fact
before renewing her stride.
    “What’s a gate key?”
    She pulled a medallion from her back pocket,
the pocket that wasn’t just a flap covering her bare ass. “This is
a gate key.” She tossed it to me. “That one was given to me by my
mother. It’s been passed down through the women in my family for
generations.”
    I examined the relic, bouncing it in my hand to
guesstimate its weight and worth. “Nice. What’s it
open?”
    She reached down and snatched it from me.
“Nothing. It’s not that kind of key.”
    “Then what does it do?”
    “The markings on it are used in various ways to
decipher the riddles of the grimoire. Without it, the book is
essentially useless, except for a couple of chants and a few basic
spells that every witch already knows anyway.”
    “I get it. So it’s called a gate key because it
sort of opens the gates of witchcraft to whoever has the key to use
it.”
    “Bingo. Give that man a cigar.”
    “All right, so, if you had this gate key, what
key was he talking about?”
    “He was talking about my aunt’s
key.”
    “The Bishop woman.”
    “Yes. You see Ursula Bishop had no children of
her own. Therefore, I’m certain that she would have had her key on
her person when they hanged and subsequently buried her. But when I
went down to pick up her bones today, they told me they had found
no key.”
    “Maybe they didn’t. A key like that would have
been worth a lot of money to someone back then. It’s possible
someone took it from her, either before or after they hanged
her.”
    “No. You don’t understand. That key is sacred
to a witch. There is no way Ursula would have gone to her grave
without it.”
    “So you believe it was on her person when they
buried her.”
    “No. It’s more likely it was in her person when
they buried her.” Lilith looked down at the front of her jeans and
passed her hand discreetly over her private area.
    “Oohh, I see.”
    “People back then didn’t know the first thing
about witches. Everything they thought they knew came from the
church and from the wild imaginations of the accusers who sent them
to the gallows. No. Ursula had her gate key when they buried her.
I’m certain of that. If this man says he has it, he has
it.”
    I got up from the couch and found myself
unconsciously checking the window and the door lock. “Okay, what
then? What happened after this man phoned you and you left
here?”
    “We were to meet at the parking garage
downtown. I got there first and waited for him in the shadows
behind a fence.”
    “And?”
    “Just about the time I spotted him, the
elevator door opened up and a woman stepped out. Everything
happened so fast after that. The man walked up to the woman. He
called her Lilith.”
    “Thought she was you.”
    “Yes.”
    “What then?”
    “Then he killed her. Stabbed her with a fucking
sword.”
    “A sword?”
    “All