Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Read online

  “Now,” said Colbert in an interested voice, “how did you manage that?”

  Elyna had thought it was someone on his side. She shrugged.

  The pretty man turned in a slow circle. “Master,” he said, biting out the word as if he found it distasteful. “Master, there is a ghost in this room, can you feel it?”

  “Elyna.” Colbert looked at her. “You are just full of surprises. But the ability to control ghosts is not uncommon; why do you think they hide from us? And, as it happens, I am very good at it.” He looked around the room. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Familiar big hands landed on Elyna’s shoulders.

  “Jack,” she said, horrified. “Jack, you have to get out of here.”

  “Too late,” said Colbert, smiling. “Jack, is it? Break her neck.”

  No.

  The pretty black man looked from Elyna to the ghost behind her and started to smile.

  “Jack, come here.” The Master of Chicago’s voice cracked with power. His pretty pet woman took a step forward and so did Elyna.

  Jack patted her shoulder and then moved around her. His hands had been so solid, she thought that the rest of him would look that way, too. Instead, he looked more like a mist of light, a shimmering presence mostly human-sized but not human-shaped.

  She’d done this to Jack, brought him to be enslaved by this vampire. She had to do something about it. Everyone in the room was paying attention to Jack and to Colbert. No one was looking at her.

  You aren’t interested in me, she thought, calling on all the power she had to fade out of notice in this fully lit room full of vampires.

  Colbert extended his hand until it touched the cloud of light that was Jack. “Mine,” he said in a voice of power.

  But vampires can move fast, and Elyna had already crossed the room and found a weapon.

  “You”—Elyna hit the Master vampire across the back with a piece of the broken sawhorse and knocked him away from her husband—“leave him alone.”

  Colbert turned on her—and there was nothing human left of him. “You dare—” He would have said more, but another piece of the wooden sawhorse emerged from his chest. He looked down, opened his mouth, then collapsed.

  It took Elyna a moment to realize that Jack had used the other leg.

  Beside Elyna, the black man threw back his head and laughed in utter delight. When he stopped laughing, it cut off abruptly, leaving echoing silence behind. His face free of emotion, he turned his attention to Elyna. He gave her such an empty look that she took two steps away from him until she hit the solid-feeling bulk that had been Jack O’Malley.

  “He forgot,” said the man who had been Colbert’s. “Evil has no power over love.” He smiled, his fangs big and white against his ebony skin. “And we are evil, aren’t we, Elyna Gray?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What now?” he asked her. “Do you want this seethe, Elyna? Do you want to be Mistress of Chicago?”

  “No.” Her response was so fast and heartfelt that it caused him to laugh again. His laugh was horrible, so much joy and beauty coming out of a man with such empty eyes.

  “Then what?”

  Elyna looked at the woman, Colbert’s other minion, who had fallen to the ground in that utter obeisance sometimes demanded of them by their Mistress or Master.

  “Who is the strongest vampire in your seethe?” she asked.

  “Steven Harper,” he told her. “That would be me.”

  Jack’s reassuring presence behind her, she smiled carefully. “Steven Harper, I would seek your permission to live in your city, keeping the laws and rules of the old ones and bearing neither you nor yours any ill will. Separate and apart with harm to none. Yours to you and mine to me—and this human”—she tilted her head to indicate Peter, who was lying very still just where he had been dropped—“is mine.”

  The new Master of the Chicago seethe looked at Peter, then over Elyna’s shoulder at Jack, and finally to the floor, where a splintered piece of wood stuck out of Colbert’s limp body. “You have done me a great favor,” he said. “I swore never to call anyone Master again, and now I no longer have to. Come and be welcome in my city—with harm to none.”

  Elyna bowed, keeping her eyes on him. “Thank you, sir.” She took a step back, paused, and said, “The really old ones turn to dust when they are dead and gone.”

  He looked down at Colbert’s body. “I guess he lied about how old he was.”

  “Or he is not, quite, gone.” Elyna had made a point of finding out things like that. Corona had been ash before she touched the floor.

  “Ah,” Steven said, pushing the corpse with his toe. “My thanks.”

  A pair of Steven Harper’s vampires drove her to her apartment building and helped her negotiate the way into her apartment while she carried Peter, unwilling to trust him to anyone else. She could no longer see Jack, but she knew he was with her by the occasional light touches of his hands.

  Harper’s vampires didn’t try to come in, nor did they speak to her. She set Peter down on her bed, since she didn’t have anywhere else to put him. Then she went back out and locked the door. When she returned to the bedroom Peter was sitting up. She’d been pretty sure that he was more awake than it had appeared, because a smart man knows when to lie low.

  Without a word, she cut the ropes and helped peel off the duct tape that covered his mouth. Then she got a wet hand towel and brought it to him.

  “There’s blood on your face and neck,” she told him.

  He took it from her, stared at it a moment, and then wiped himself clean. The wounds had closed, she noticed, as vampire bites do. They hadn’t actually hurt him very badly—not physically, anyway.

  They stared at each other awhile.

  “Vampire,” he said.

  She nodded. “If you tell anyone, they’ll think you’re crazy.”

  “Could you stop me? Make me not remember? Isn’t that what vampires are supposed to be able to do?”

  She shrugged, but chose, for his sake, not to give him the whole truth. He’d sleep better at night without it. “Hollywood vampires can do lots of things we can’t,” she told him instead. “You don’t have to worry about Harper coming after you, though. He agreed that you are one of mine, and he won’t hurt you. We vampires take vows like that very seriously.”

  “You don’t look like a vampire,” he said.

  “I know,” she agreed. A stray breeze brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. “We’re like serial killers; we look just like everyone else.”

  Peter grunted, looked down at his hands, and then made another sound—something she couldn’t interpret.

  Then he said, “That man who killed his girlfriend’s baby, the one where the evidence got bungled and the charges were dismissed a few weeks ago. The one who turned up dead in a place full of people who never were sure who killed him. That was you?”

  Elyna nodded. He eyed her thoughtfully, then nodded.

  He cleared his throat. “There were others after that, just a couple. The ones we talked about while we worked. Like the well-connected lawyer who liked to pick up hookers and beat them to death. Fell down his stairs and died a month or so back. That was you, too?”

  She ducked her head. “Vampires don’t have to kill people,” she told him. “Especially once we are older, more in control of ourselves. I try not to. But . . . it doesn’t bother me very much, not when they are”—she looked him in the eye and gave him an ironic smile—“evil.”

  “In my business,” Peter said slowly, “you come into the job seeing the world in black-and-white. Most of us who survive, the good cops, learn to work in shades of gray.” He smiled slowly at her. “So, Ms. Gray. What have you decided about the lighting fixtures in the kitchen?”

  The brass lights are nice, but I think the bronze will look better, J
ack whispered, his lips brushing the edge of her ear.

  “I think I like the bronze,” she told Peter.

  SEEING EYE

  I was invited to submit a story for P. N. Elrod’s Strange Brew. I had intended to write a story about the witches at some point in time, and this invitation seemed tailor-made for it. In Mercy’s world, good witches are few and far between—and mostly on the run from the dark witches. I thought about how a white witch could gain enough power to stand up to the evil ones, and Moira was born. A moment later, Tom knocked at my (figurative) door, full-fledged and ready to go. I am going to write more about Tom and Moira eventually. But for those who want more now, they also have a guest appearance in Hunting Ground.

  Tom and Moira had been together for some time when they appeared in Hunting Ground, so the events in “Seeing Eye” take place about a year before those in Moon Called.

  The doorbell rang.

  That was the problem with her business. Too many people thought they could approach her at any time. Even oh-dark thirty, even though her hours were posted clearly on her door and on her Web site.

  Of course, answering the door would be something to do other than sit in her study shivering in the dark. Not that her world was ever anything but dark. It was one of the reasons she hated bad dreams—she had no way of turning on the light. Bad dreams that held warnings of things to come were the worst.

  The doorbell rang again.

  She slept—or tried to sleep—the same hours as most people. Kept steady business hours, too. Something she had no trouble making clear to those morons who woke her up in the middle of the night. They came to see Glinda the Good Witch, but after midnight, they found the Wicked Witch of the West and left quaking in fear of flying monkeys.

  Whoever waited at the door would have no reason to suspect how grateful she was for the interruption of her thoughts.

  The doorbell began a steady throbbing beat, ring-long, ring-short, ring-short, ring-long, and she grew a lot less grateful. To heck with flying monkeys, she was going to turn whoever it was into a frog. She shoved her concealing glasses on her face and stomped out the hall to her front door. No matter that most of the good transmutation spells had been lost with the Coranda family in the seventeenth century—rude people needed to be turned into frogs. Or pigs.

  She jerked open the door and slapped the offending hand on her doorbell. She even got out a “Stop that!” before the force of his spirit hit her like a physical blow. Her nose told her, belatedly, that he was sweaty as if he’d been jogging. Her other senses told her that he was something other.

  Not that she’d expected him to be human. Unlike other witches, she didn’t advertise, and thus seldom had mundane customers unless their needs disturbed her sleep and she set out one of her “find me” spells to speak to them—she knew when they were coming.

  “Ms. Keller,” he growled. “I need to speak to you.” At least he’d quit ringing the bell.

  She let her left eyebrow slide up her forehead until it would be visible above her glasses. “Polite people come between the hours of eight in the morning and seven at night,” she informed him. Werewolf, she decided. If he really lost his temper, she might have trouble, but she thought he was desperate, not angry—though with a wolf, the two states could be interchanged with remarkable speed. “Rude people get sent on their way.”

  “Tomorrow morning might be too late,” he said—and then added the bit that kept her from slamming the door in his face: “Alan Choo gave me your address, said you were the only one he knew with enough moxie to defy them.”

  She should shut the door in his face—not even a werewolf could get through her portal if she didn’t want him to. But . . . them. Her dream tonight and for the past weeks had been about them, about him again. Portents, her instincts had told her, not just nightmares. The time had come at last. No. She wasn’t grateful to him at all.

  “Did Alan tell you to say it in those words?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” His temper was still there, but restrained and under control. It hadn’t been aimed at her anyway, she thought, only fury born of frustration and fear. She knew how that felt.

  She centered herself and asked the questions he’d expect. “Who am I supposed to be defying?”

  And he gave her the answer she expected in return. “Something called Samhain’s Coven.”

  Moira took a tighter hold on the door. “I see.”

  It wasn’t really a coven. No matter what the popular literature said, it had been a long time since a real coven had been possible. Covens had thirteen members, no member related to any other to the sixth generation. Each family amassed its own specialty spells, and a coven of thirteen benefited from all those differing magics. But after most of the witchblood families had been wiped out by fighting among themselves, covens became a thing of the past. What few families remained (and there weren’t thirteen, not if you didn’t count the Russians or the Chinese, who kept to their own ways) had a bone-deep antipathy for the other survivors.

  Kouros changed the rules to suit the new times. His coven had between ten and thirteen members . . . He had a distressing tendency to burn out his followers. The current bunch descended from only three families that she knew of, and most of them weren’t properly trained—children following their leader.

  Samhain wasn’t up to the tricks of the old covens, but they were scary enough even the local vampires walked softly around them, and Seattle, with its overcast skies, had a relatively large seethe of vampires. Samhain’s master had approached Moira about joining them when she was thirteen. She’d refused and made her refusal stick at some cost to all the parties involved.

  “What does Samhain have to do with a werewolf?” she asked.

  “I think they have my brother.”

  “Another werewolf?” It wasn’t unheard of for brothers to be werewolves, especially since the Marrok, He-Who-Ruled-the-Wolves, began Changing people with more care than had been the usual custom. But it wasn’t at all common, either. Surviving the Change—even with the safeguards the Marrok could manage—was still, she understood, nowhere near a certainty.

  “No.” He took a deep breath. “Not a werewolf. Human. He has the sight. Choo says he thinks that’s why they took him.”

  “Your brother is a witch?”

  The fabric of his shirt rustled with his shrug, telling her that he wasn’t as tall as he felt to her. Only a little above average instead of a seven-foot giant. Good to know.

  “I don’t know enough about witches to know,” he said. “Jon gets hunches. Takes a walk just at the right time to find five dollars someone dropped, picks the right lottery number to win ten bucks. That kind of thing. Nothing big, nothing anyone would have noticed if my grandma hadn’t had it stronger.”

  The sight was one of those general terms that told Moira precisely nothing. It could mean anything from a little fae blood in the family tree or full-blown witchblood. His brother’s lack of power wouldn’t mean he wasn’t a witch—the magic sang weaker in the men. But fae or witchblood, Alan Choo had been right about it being something that would attract Samhain’s attention. She rubbed her cheekbone even though she knew the ache was a phantom pain touch wouldn’t alter.

  Samhain. Did she have a choice? In her dreams, she died.

  She could feel the intensity of the wolf’s regard, strengthening as her silence continued. Then he told her the final straw that broke her resistance. “Jon’s a cop—undercover—so I doubt your coven knows it. If his body turns up, though, there will be an investigation. I’ll see to it that the witchcraft angle gets explored thoroughly. They might listen to a werewolf who tells them that witches might be a little more than turbaned fortune-tellers.”

  Blackmail galled him, she could tell—but he wasn’t bluffing. He must love his brother.

  She had only a touch of empathy, and it came and went. It seemed to be pretty focused on th
is werewolf tonight, though.

  If she didn’t help him, his brother would die at Samhain’s hands, and his blood would be on her as well. If it cost her death, as her dreams warned her, perhaps that was justice served.

  “Come in,” Moira said, hearing the grudge in her voice. He’d think it was her reaction to the threat—and the police poking about the coven would end badly for all concerned.

  But it wasn’t his threat that moved her. She took care of the people in her neighborhood; that was her job. The police she saw as brothers-in-arms. If she could help one, it was her duty to do so. Even if it meant her life for his.

  “You’ll have to wait until I get my coffee,” she told him, and her mother’s ghost forced the next bit of politeness out of her. “Would you like a cup?”

  “No. There’s no time.”

  He said that as if he had some idea about it—maybe the sight hadn’t passed him by, either.

  “We have until tomorrow night if Samhain has him.” She turned on her heel and left him to follow her or not, saying over her shoulder, “Unless they took him because he saw something. In which case, he probably is already dead. Either way, there’s time for coffee.”

  He closed the door with deliberate softness and followed her. “Tomorrow’s Halloween. Samhain.”

  “Kouros isn’t Wiccan, any more than he is Greek, but he apes both for his followers,” she told him as she continued deeper into her apartment. She remembered to turn on the hall light—not that he’d need it, being a wolf. It just seemed courteous: allies should show each other courtesy. “Like a magician playing sleight of hand, he pulls upon myth, religion, and anything else he can to keep them in thrall. Samhain—the time, not the coven—has power for the fae, for Wicca, for witches. Kouros uses it to cement his own, and killing someone with a bit of power generates more strength than killing a stray dog—and bothers him about as much.”

  “Kouros?” He said it as if it solved some puzzle, but it must not have been important, because he continued with no more than a breath of pause. “I thought witches were all women.” He followed her into the kitchen and stood too close behind her. If he were to attack, she wouldn’t have time to ready a spell.