He must have heard the distress in her voice because when he spoke again, he was much closer and his voice was softer. “You’re on a couch in my apartment. We were as close to mine as we were to yours, and I knew I could get us into my apartment. Yours is probably sealed with hocus-pocus. Are you all right?”
She sat up and put her feet on the floor and her erstwhile bed proved itself to be a couch. “Do you have something with sugar in it? Sweet tea or fruit juice?”
“Hot cocoa or tea,” he told her.
“Tea.”
He must have had water already hot because he was quickly back with a hot cup. She drank the sweet stuff down as fast as she could and the heat did as much as the sugar to clear her headache.
“Sorry,” she said.
“For what, exactly,” he said.
“For using you. I think you don’t have any barriers,” she told him slowly. “We all have safeguards, walls that keep out intruders. It’s what keeps us safe.”
In his silence she heard him consider that.
“So, I’m vulnerable to witches?”
She didn’t know what to do with her empty cup, so she set it on the couch beside her. Then she used her left hand, her seeking hand, to look at him again.
“No, I don’t think so. Your barriers seem solid…even stronger than usual as I’d expect from a wolf as far up the command structure as you are. I think you are only vulnerable to me.”
“Which means?”
“Which means when I touch you I can see magic through your eyes…with practice I might even be able just to see. It means that you can feed my magic with your skin.” She swallowed. “You’re not going to like this.”
“Tell me.”
“You are acting like my familiar.” She couldn’t feel a thing from him. “If I had a familiar.”
Floor boards creaked under his feet as his weight shifted. His shoulder brushed her as he picked up the empty cup. She heard him walk away from her and set the cup on a hard surface. “Do you need more tea?”
“No,” she said, needing, suddenly to be in a familiar place. Somewhere she wasn’t so dependent upon him. “I’m fine. If you would call me a taxi, I’d appreciate it.” She stood up, too. Then realized she had no idea where the door was or what obstacles might be hiding on the floor. In her own apartment, redolent with her magic, she was never so vulnerable.
“Can you find my brother?”
She hadn’t heard him move, not a creak, not a breath, but his voice told her he was no more than a few inches from her. Disoriented and vulnerable, she was afraid of him for the first time.
He took a big step away from her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Sorry,” she told him. “You startled me. Do we still have the gum?”
“Yes. You said she was on a boat.”
She’d forgotten, but as soon as he said it, she could picture it in her head. That hadn’t been the way the spell was supposed to work. It was more of a “hot and cold” spell, but she could still see the boat in her mind’s eye.
Nothing had really changed, except that she’d used someone without asking. There was still a policeman to be saved and her father to kill.
“If we still have the gum, I can find Molly—the girl on your brother’s phone call.”
“I have a buddy whose boat we can borrow.”
“All right,” she told him after a moment. “Do you have some aspirin?”
She hated boating. The rocking motion disrupted her sense of direction, the engine’s roar obscured softer sounds, and the scent of the ocean covered the subtler scents she used to negotiate everyday life. Worse than all of that, though, was the thought of trying to swim without knowing where she was going. The damp air chilled her already cold skin.
“Which direction?” said Tom over the sound of the engine.
His presence shouldn’t have made her feel better—werewolves couldn’t swim at all—but it did. She pointed with the hand that held the gum. “Not far now,” she warned him.
“There’s a private dock about ahalf mile up the coast. Looks like it’s been here awhile,” he told me. “There’s a boat—The Tern, the bird.”
It felt right. “I think that must be it.”
There were other boats on the water, she could hear them. “What time is it?”
“About ten in the morning. We’re passing the boat right now.”
Molly’s traces, left on the gum, pulled toward its source, tugging Moira’s hand toward the back of the boat. “That’s it.”
“There’s a park with docks about a mile back,” he said and the boat tilted to the side. “We’ll go tie up there and come back on foot.”
But when he’d tied the boat up, he changed his mind. “Why don’t you stay here and let me check this out?”
Moira rubbed her hands together. It bothered her to have her magic doing something it wasn’t supposed to be and she’d let it throw her off her game: time to collect herself. She gave him a sultry smile. “Poor blind girl,” she said. “Must be kept out of danger, do you think?” She turned a hand palm up and heard the whoosh of flame as it caught fire. “You’ll need me when you find Molly—you may be a werewolf, but she’s a witch who looks like a pretty young thing.” She snuffed the flame and dusted off her hands. “Besides, she’s afraid of me. She’ll tell me where your brother is.”
She didn’t let him know how grateful she was for the help he gave her exiting the boat. When this night was over he’d go back to his life and she to hers. If she wanted to keep him—she knew that he wouldn’t want to be kept by her. She was a witch and ugly with scars of the past.
Besides, if her dreams were right, she wouldn’t survive to see nightfall.
She threaded through the dense underbrush as if she could see every hanging branch, one hand on his back and her other held out in front of her. He wondered if she was using magic to see.
She wasn’t using him. Her hand in the middle of his back was warm and light, but his flannel shirt was between it and skin. Probably she was reading his body language and using her upraised hand as an insurance policy against low-hanging branches.
They followed a half-overgrown path that had been trod out a hundred feet or so from the coast, which was obscured by ferns and underbrush. He kept his ears tuned so if they started heading away from the ocean he’d know it.
The Tern had been moored in a small natural harbor on a battered dock next to the remains of a boathouse. A private property rather than the public dock he’d used.
They’d traveled north and were somewhere not too far from Everett by his reckoning. He wasn’t terribly surprised when their path ended in a brand-new eight-foot chain-link fence. Someone had a goldmine on their hands and they were waiting to sell it to some developer when the price was right. Until then they’d try to keep out the riffraff.
He helped Moira over the fence, mostly a matter of whispering a few directions until she found the top of it. He waited until she was over and then vaulted over himself.
The path that they’d been following continued on, though not nearly as well-traveled as it had been before the fence. A quarter-mile of blackberry brambles ended abruptly in thigh-deep, damp grasslands that might once have been a lawn. He stopped before they left the cover of the bushes, sinking down to rest on his heels.
“There’s a burnt-out house here,” he told Moira who had ducked down when he did. “It must have burned down a couple of years ago because I don’t smell it.”
“Hidden,” she commented.
“Someone’s had tents up here,” he told her. “And I see the remnants of a camp fire.”
“Can you see the boat from here?”
“No, but there’s a path I think should lead down to the water. I think this is the place.”
She pulled her hand away from his arm. “Can you go check it out without being seen?”
“It would be easier if I do it as a wolf,” Tom admitted. “But I don’t dare. We might have to make a quick getaway a
nd it’ll be a while before I can shift back to human.” He hoped Jon would be healthy enough to pilot in an emergency—but he didn’t like to make plans that depended upon an unknown. Moira wasn’t going to be piloting a boat anywhere.
“Wait,” she told him. She murmured a few words and then put her cold fingers against his throat. A sudden shock, like a static charge on steroids, hit him and when it was over her fingers were hot on his pulse. “You aren’t invisible, but it’ll make people want to overlook you.”
He pulled out his HK and checked the magazine before sliding it back in. The big gun fit his hand like a glove. He believed in using weapons, guns or fangs, whatever got the job done.
“It won’t take me long.”
“If you don’t go you’ll never get back,” she told him and gave him a gentle push. “I can take care of myself.”
It didn’t sit right with him, leaving her alone in the territory of his enemies, but common sense said he’d have a better chance of roaming unseen. And no one tackled a witch lightly—not even other witches.
Spell or no, he slid through the wet overgrown trees like a shadow, crouching to minimize his silhouette and avoiding anything likely to crunch. One thing living in Seattle did was minimize the number of things that could crunch under your foot—all the leaves were wet and moldy without a noise to be had.
The boat was there, bobbing gently in the water. Empty. He closed his eyes and let the morning air tell him all it could.
His brother had been in the boat. There had been others, too—Tom memorized their scent. If anything happened to Jon he’d track them down and kill them, one by one. Once he had them, he let his nose lead him to Jon.
He found blood where Jon had scraped against a tree, crushed plants where his brother had tried to get away and rolled around in the mud with another man. Or maybe he’d just been laying a trail for Tom. Jon knew Tom would come for him—that’s what family did.
The path the kidnappers took paralleled the waterfront for a while and then headed inland, but not for the burnt-out house. Someone had found a better hide-out. Nearly hidden under a shelter of trees, a small barn nestled snugly amidst broken pieces of corral fencing. Its silvered sides bore only a hint of red paint, but the aluminum roof, though covered with moss, was undamaged.
And his brother was there. He couldn’t quite hear what Jon was saying, but he recognized his voice…and the slurring rapid rhythm of his schizophrenicmimicry. If Jon was acting, he was all right. The relief of that settled in his spine and steadied his nerves.
All he needed to do was get his witch…movement caught his attention and he dropped to the ground and froze, hidden by wet grass and weeds.
Moira wasn’t surprised when they found her—ten in the morning isn’t a good time to hide. It was one of the young ones—she could tell by the surprised squeal and the rapid thud of footsteps as he ran for help.
Of course if she’d really been trying to hide, she might have managed it. But it had occurred to her, sometime after Tom left, that if she wanted to find Samhain—the easiest thing might be to let them find her. So she set about attracting their attention.
If they found her, it would unnerve them. They knew she worked alone. Her arrival here would puzzle them, but they wouldn’t look for anyone else—leaving Tom as her secret weapon.
Magic calls to magic, unless the witch takes pains to hide it, so any of them should have been able to feel the flames that danced over her hands. It had taken them longer than she expected. While she waited for the boy to return, she found a sharp-edged rock and put it in her pocket. She folded her legs and let the coolness of the damp earth flow through her.
She didn’t hear him come, but she knew by his silence who the young covenist had run to.
“Hello, Father,” she told him, rising to her feet. “We have much to talk about.”
She didn’t look like a captive, Tom thought, watching Moira walk to the barn as if she’d been there before, though she might have been following the sullen-looking, half-grown boy who stalked through the grass ahead of her. A tall man followed them both, his hungry eyes on Moira’s back.
His wolf recognized another dominant male with a snarl, while Tom thought that the man was too young to have a grown daughter. But there was no one else this could be than Lin Keller—that predator was not a man who followed anyone or allowed anyone around him who might challenge him. He’d seen an Alpha or two like that.
Tom watched them until they disappeared into the barn.
It hurt to imagine she might have betrayed him—as if there were some bond between them, though he hadn’t known her a full day. Part of him would not believe it. He remembered her indignation when she thought he believed she was part of Samhain and it comforted him.
It didn’t matter, couldn’t matter. Not yet. Saving Jon mattered and the rest would wait. His witch was captured or had betrayed him. Either way it was time to let the wolf free.
The Change hurt, but experience meant he made no sound as his bones rearranged themselves and his muscles stretched and slithered to adjust to his new shape. It took fifteen minutes of agony before he rose on four paws, a snarl fixed on his muzzle—ready to kill someone. Anyone.
Instead he stalked like a ghost to the barn where his witch waited. He rejected the door they’d used, but prowled around the side where four stall doors awaited. Two of them were broken with missing boards, one of the openings was big enough for him to slide through.
The interior of the barn was dark and the stall’s half-walls blocked his view of the main section where his quarry waited. Jon was still going strong, a wild ranting conversation with no one about the Old Testament, complete with quotes. Tom knew a lot of them himself.
“Killing things again, Father?” said Moira’s cool disapproving voice, cutting through Jon’s soliloquy.
And suddenly Tom could breathe again. They’d found her somehow, Samhain’s Coven had, but she wasn’t one of them.
“So judgmental.” Tom had expected something…bigger from the man’s voice. His own Alpha, for instance, could have made a living as a televangelist with his raw fire-and-brimstone voice. This man sounded like an accountant.
“Kill her. You have to kill her before she destroys us—I have seen it.” It was the girl from Jon’s message, Molly.
“You couldn’t see your way out of a paper bag, Molly,” said Moira. “Not that you’re wrong, of course.”
There were other people in the barn, Tom could smell them, but they stayed quiet.
“You aren’t going to kill me,” said Kouros. “If you could have done that you’d have done it before now. Which brings me to my point, why are you here?”
“To stop you from killing this man,” Moira told him.
“I’ve killed men before—and you haven’t stopped me. What is so special about this one?”
Moira felt the burden of all those deaths upon her shoulders. He was right. She could have killed him before—before he’d killed anyone else.
“This one has a brother,” she said.
She felt Tom’s presence in the barn, but her look-past-me spell must have still been working because no one seemed to notice. And any witch with a modicum of sensitivity to auras would have felt him. His brother was a faint trace to her left—which his constant stream of words made far more clear than her magic was able to.
Her father she could only follow from his voice.
There were other people in the structure—she hadn’t quite decided what the cavernous building was: probably a barn, given the dirt floor and faint odor of cow—but she couldn’t pinpoint them either. She knew where Molly was, though. And Molly was the important one, Kouros’s right hand.
“Someone paid you to go up against me?” Her father’s voice was faintly incredulous. “Against us?”
Then he did something, made some gesture. She wouldn’t have known except for Molly’s sigh of relief. So she didn’t feel too badly when she tied Molly’s essence, through the gum she still he
ld, into her shield.
When the coven’s magic hit the shield, it was Molly who took the damage. Who died. Molly, her little sister whose presence she could no longer feel.
Someone, a young man, screamed Molly’s coven name—Mentha. And there was a flurry of movement where Moira had last sensed her.
Moira dropped the now-useless bit of gum on the ground.
“Oh you’ll pay for that,” breathed her father. “Pay in pain and power until there is nothing left of you.”
Someone sent power her way, but it wasn’t a concerted spell from the coven and it slid off her protections without harm. Unlike the fist that struck her in the face, driving her glasses into her nose and knocking her to the ground—her father’s fist. She’d recognize the weight of it anywhere.
Unsure of where her enemies were, she stayed where she was, listening. But she didn’t hear Tom, he was just suddenly there. And the circle of growing terror that spread around him—of all the emotions possible, it was fear that she could sense most often—told her he was in his lupine form. It must have been impressive.
“Your victim has a brother,” she told her father again, knowing he’d hear the smugness in her tones. “And you’ve made him very angry.”
The beast beside her roared. Someone screamed…even witches are afraid of monsters.
The coven broke. Children most of them, they broke and ran. Molly’s death, followed by a beast out of their worst nightmares, was more than they could face, partially trained, deliberately crippled fodder for her father that they were.
Tom growled, the sound finding a silent echo in her own chest as if he were a bass drum. He moved, a swift silent predator, and someone who hadn’t run died. Tom’s brother, she noticed, had fallen entirely silent.
“A werewolf,” breathed Kouros. “Oh, now there is a worthy kill.” But she felt his terror and knew he’d attack Tom before he took care of her.
She reached out with her left hand, intending to spread her own defenses to the wolf—though that would leave them too thin to be very effective—but she hadn’t counted on the odd effect he had on her magic. On her.
Her father’s spell—a vile thing that would have induced terrible pain and permanently damaged Tom had it hit—connected just after she touched the wolf. And for a moment, maybe a whole breath, nothing happened.