Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 15

  But he wouldn’t attack; her death wouldn’t come at his hands tonight.

  The kitchen lights were where she remembered them, and she had to take it on faith that she was turning them on and not off. She could never remember which way the switch worked. He didn’t say anything, so she must have been right.

  She always left her coffeepot primed for mornings, so all she had to do was push the button and it began gurgling in promise of coffee soon.

  “Um,” she said, remembering he’d asked her a question. His closeness distracted her—and not for the reasons it should. “Women tend to be more powerful witches, but you can make up for lack of talent with enough death and pain. Someone else’s, of course, if you’re a black practitioner like Kouros.”

  “What are you?” he asked, sniffing at her. His breath tickled the back of her neck—wolves, she’d noticed before, had a somewhat different idea of personal space than she did.

  Her machine began dribbling coffee out into the carafe at last, giving her an excuse to step away. “Didn’t Alan tell you? I’m a witch.”

  He followed; his nose touched her where his breath had sensitized her flesh, and she probably had goose bumps on her toes from the zing he sent through her. “My pack has a witch we pay to clean up messes. You don’t smell like a witch.”

  He probably didn’t mean anything by it; he was just being a wolf. She stepped out of his reach in the pretense of getting a coffee cup, or rather he allowed her to escape.

  Alan was right: she needed to get out more. She hadn’t so much as dated in . . . well, a long time. The last man’s reaction to seeing what she’d done to herself was something she didn’t want to repeat.

  This man smelled good, even with the scent of his sweat teasing her nose. He felt strong and warm, promising to be the strength and safety she’d never had outside of her own two hands. Dominant wolves took care of their pack—doubtless something she’d picked up on. And then there was the possibility of death hovering over her.

  Whatever the ultimate cause, his nearness and the light touch of breath on her skin sparked her interest in a way she knew he’d have picked up on. You can’t hide sexual interest from something that can trail a hummingbird on the wing. Neither of them needed the complication of sex interfering in urgent business, even assuming he’d be willing.

  “Witchcraft gains power from death and pain. From sacrifice and sacrificing,” she told him coolly, pouring coffee in two mugs with steady hands. She was an expert in sacrifice. Not sleeping with a strange werewolf who showed up on her doorstep didn’t even register on her scale.

  She drank coffee black, so that was how she fixed it, holding the second cup out to him. “Evil leaves a psychic stench behind. Maybe a wolf nose can pick up on it. I don’t know, not being a werewolf myself. There’s milk in the fridge and sugar in the cupboard in front of you if you’d like.”

  • • •

  She wasn’t at all what Tom had expected. Their pack’s hired witch was a motherly woman of indeterminate years who wore swami robes in bright hues and smelled strongly of patchouli and old blood that didn’t quite mask something bitter and dark. When he’d played Jon’s message for her, she’d hung up the phone and refused to answer it again.

  By the time he’d driven to her house, it was shut up and locked with no one inside. That was his first clue that this Samhain’s Coven might be even more of a problem than he’d thought, and his worry had risen to fever pitch. He’d gone down to the underpass where his brother had been living and used his nose through the parks and other places his brother drifted through. But wherever they were holding Jon (and he refused to believe Jon was dead), it wasn’t anywhere near where they kidnapped him.

  His Alpha didn’t like pack members concerning themselves with matters outside of the pack (“Your only family is your pack, son”). Tom didn’t even bother contacting him. He’d gone to Choo instead. The Emerald City Pack’s only submissive wolf, Alan worked as an herbalist and knew almost everyone in the supernatural world of Seattle. When he told Alan about the message Jon had left on his phone, Alan had written this woman’s name and address and handed it to him. He’d have thought it was a joke, but Alan had better taste than that. So Tom had gone looking for a witch named Wendy—Wendy Moira Keller.

  At his first look, he’d been disappointed. Wendy the Witch was five foot nothing with rich curves in all the right places and feathery black hair that must have been dyed, because only black Labs and cats are that black. The stupid wraparound mirrored glasses kept him from guessing her age exactly, but he’d bet she wasn’t yet thirty. No woman over thirty would be caught dead in those glasses. The cop in him wondered if she was covering up bruises—but he didn’t smell a male in the living-scents in the house.

  She wore a gray T-shirt without a bra, and black pajama pants with white skull-and-crossbones wearing red bows. But despite all that, he saw no piercings or tattoos—like she’d approached mall Goth culture, but only so far. She smelled of fresh flowers and mint. Her apartment was decorated with a minimum of furniture and a mishmash of colors that didn’t quite fit together.

  He didn’t scare her.

  Tom scared everyone—and he had even before their pack had a run-in with a bunch of fae a few years ago. His face had gotten cut up pretty badly with some sort of magical knife and hadn’t healed right afterward. The scars made him look almost as dangerous as he was. People walked warily around him.

  Not only wasn’t she scared, but she didn’t even bother to hide her irritation at being woken up. He stalked her, and all she’d felt was a flash of sexual awareness that came and went so swiftly, he might have missed it if he’d been younger.

  Either she was stupid or she was powerful. Since Alan had sent him here, Tom was betting on powerful. He hoped she was powerful.

  He didn’t want the coffee, but he took it when she handed it to him. It was black and stronger than he usually drank it, but it tasted good. “So why don’t you smell like other witches?”

  “Like Kouros, I’m not Wiccan,” she told him, “but ‘and it harm none’ seems like a good way to live to me.”

  White witch.

  He knew that Wiccans consider themselves witches—and some of them had enough witchblood to make it so. But witches, the real thing, weren’t witches because of what they believed, but because of genetic heritage. A witch was born a witch and studied to become a better one. But for witches, real power came from blood and death—mostly other people’s blood and death.

  White witches, especially those outside of Wicca (where numbers meant safety), were weak and valuable sacrifices for black witches, who didn’t have their scruples. As Wendy the Witch had noted—witches seemed to have a real preference for killing their own.

  He sipped at his coffee and asked, “So how have you managed without ending up as bits and pieces in someone else’s cauldron?”

  The witch snorted a laugh and set her coffee down abruptly. She grabbed a paper towel off its holder and held it to her face as she gasped and choked coffee, looking suddenly a lot less than thirty. When she was finished, she said, “That’s awesome. Bits and pieces. I’ll have to remember that.”

  Still grinning, she picked up the coffee again. He wished he could see her eyes, because he was pretty sure that whatever humor she’d felt was only surface deep.

  “I tell you what,” she said, “why don’t you tell me who you are and what you know? That way I can tell you if I can help you or not.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. The coffee was strong, and he could feel it and the four other cups he’d had since midnight settle in his bones with caffeine’s untrustworthy gift of nervous energy.

  “I’m Tom Franklin and I’m second in the Emerald City Pack.” She wasn’t surprised by that. She’d known what he was as soon as she opened her door. “My brother Jon is a cop and a damn fine one. He’s been on the Seattle PD for nearly twenty y
ears, and for the last six months he’s been undercover as a street person. He was sent as part of a drug task force: there’s been some nasty garbage out on the street lately, and he’s been looking for it.”

  Wendy Moira Keller leaned back against the cabinets with a sigh. “I’d like to say that no witch would mess with drugs. Not from moral principles, mind you. Witches, for the most part, don’t have moral principles. But drugs are too likely to attract unwanted attention. We never have been so deep in secrecy as you wolves like to be, not when witches sometimes crop up in mundane families—we need to be part of society enough that they can find us. Mostly people think we’re a bunch of harmless charlatans—trafficking in drugs would change all that for the worse. But the Samhain bunch is powerful enough that no one wants to face them—and Kouros is arrogant and crazy. He likes money, and there is at least one herbalist among his followers who could manufacture some really odd stuff.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m interested in finding my brother, not in finding out if witches are selling drugs. It sounded to me like the drugs had nothing to do with my brother’s kidnapping. Let me play Jon’s call, and you make the determination.” He pulled out his cell phone and played the message for her.

  It had come from a pay phone. There weren’t many of those left, now that cell phones had made it less profitable for the phone companies to keep repairing the damage of vandals. But there was no mistaking the characteristic static and hiss as his brother talked very quietly into the mouthpiece.

  Tom had called in favors and found the phone Jon used, but the people who took his brother were impossible to pick out from the scents of the hundreds of people who had been there since the last rain—and his brother’s scent stopped right at the pay phone, outside a battered convenience store. Stopped as if they’d teleported him to another planet—or, more prosaically, thrown him in a car.

  Jon’s voice—smoker-dark, though he’d never touched tobacco or any of its relatives—slid through the apartment: “Look, Tom. My gut told me to call you tonight—and I listen to my gut. I’ve been hearing something on the street about a freaky group calling themselves Samhain—” He spelled it, to be sure Tom got it right. “Last few days I’ve had a couple of people following me that might be part of Samhain. No one wants to talk about ’em much. The streets are afraid of these . . . ”

  He didn’t know if the witch could hear the rest. He’d been a wolf for twenty years and more, so his judgment about what human senses were good for was pretty much gone.

  He could hear the girl’s sweet voice clearly, though. “Lucky Jon?” she asked. “Lucky Jon, who are you calling? Let’s hang it up, now.” A pause, then the girl spoke into the phone. “Hello?” Another pause. “It’s an answering machine, I think. No worries.”

  At the same time, a male, probably young, was saying in a rapid, rabid flow of sound, “I feel it . . . Doncha feel it? I feel it in him. This is the one. He’ll do for Kouros.” Then there was a soft click as the call ended.

  The last fifty times he’d heard the recording, he couldn’t make out the last word. But with the information the witch had given him, he understood it just fine this time.

  Tom looked at Choo’s witch, but he couldn’t tell what she thought. Somewhere she’d learned to discipline her emotions, so he could smell only the strong ones—like the flash of desire she’d felt as he sniffed the back of her neck. Even in this situation, it had been enough to raise a thread of interest. Maybe after they got his brother back, they could do something about that interest. In the meantime . . .

  “How much of the last did you hear, Wendy?” he asked.

  “Don’t call me Wendy,” she snapped. “It’s Moira. No one called me Wendy except my mom, and she’s been dead a long time.”

  “Fine,” he snapped back before he could control himself. He was tired and worried, but he could do better than that. He tightened his control and softened his voice. “Did you hear the guy? The one who said that he felt it in him—meaning my brother, I think. And that he would do for Kouros?”

  “No. Or at least not well enough to catch his words. But I know the woman’s voice. You’re right: it was Samhain.” Though he couldn’t feel anything from her, her knuckles were white on the coffee cup.

  “You need a Finder, and I can’t do that anymore. Wait—” She held up a hand before he could say anything. “I’m not saying I won’t help you, just that it could be a lot simpler. Kouros moves all the time. Did you trace the call? It sounded like a pay phone to me.”

  “I found the phone booth he called from, but I couldn’t find anything except that he’d been there.” He tapped his nose, then glanced at her dark glasses and said, “I could smell him there and backtrail him, but I couldn’t trail him out. They transported him somehow.”

  “They don’t know that he’s a cop, or that his brother is a werewolf.”

  “He doesn’t carry ID with him while he’s undercover. I don’t see how anyone would know I was his brother. Unless he told them, and he wouldn’t.”

  “Good,” she said. “They won’t expect you. That’ll help.”

  “So do you know a Finder I can go to?”

  She shook her head. “Not one who will help you against Samhain. Anyone, anyone who makes a move against them is punished in some rather spectacular ways.” He saw her consider sharing one or two of them with him and discard it. She didn’t want him scared off. Not that he could be, not with Jon’s life at stake. But it was interesting that she hadn’t tried.

  “If you take me to where they stole him, maybe I can find something they left behind, something to use to find them.”

  Tom frowned at her. She didn’t know his brother, he hadn’t mentioned money, and he was getting the feeling that she couldn’t care less if he called in the authorities. “So if Samhain is so all-powerful, how come you, a white witch, are willing to buck them?”

  “You’re a cop, too, aren’t you?” She finished her coffee, but if she was waiting for a reaction, she wasn’t going to get one. He’d seen the “all-knowing” witch act before. Her lips turned up as she set the empty cup on the counter. “It’s not magic. Cops are easy to spot—suspicious is your middle name. Fair enough.”

  She pulled off her glasses, and he saw that he’d been wrong. He’d been pretty sure she was blind—the other reason women wore wraparound sunglasses at night. And she was. But that wasn’t why she wore the sunglasses.

  Her left eye was Swamp Thing–green without pupil or white. Her right eye was gone, and it looked as though it had been removed by someone who wasn’t too good with a knife. It was horrible—and he’d seen some horrible things.

  “Sacrifice is good for power,” she said again. “But it works best if you can manage to make the sacrifice your own.”

  Jesus. She’d done it to herself.

  She might not be able to see him, but she read his reaction just fine. She smiled tightly. “There were some extenuating circumstances,” she continued. “You aren’t going to see witches cutting off their fingers to power their spells—it doesn’t work that way. But this worked for me.” She tapped the scar tissue around her right eye. “Kouros did the other one first. That’s why I’m willing to take them on. I’ve done it before and survived—and I still owe them a few.” She replaced her sunglasses, and he watched her relax as they settled into place.

  • • •

  Tom Franklin hadn’t brought a car, and for obvious reasons, she didn’t drive. He said the phone was only a couple of miles from her apartment, and neither wanted to wait around for a cab. So they walked. She felt his start of surprise when she tucked her arm in his, but he didn’t object. At least he didn’t jump away from her and say “ick,” like the last person who’d seen what she’d done to herself.

  “You’ll have to tell me when we come to curbs or if there’s something in the way,” she told him. “Or you can amuse yourself when I fal
l on my face. I can find my way around my apartment, but out here I’m at your mercy.”

  He said, with sober humor, “I imagine watching you trip over a few curbs would be a good way to get you to help Jon. Why don’t you get a guide dog?”

  “Small apartments aren’t a good place for big dogs,” she told him. “It’s not fair to the dog.”

  They walked a few blocks in silence, the rain drizzling unhappily down the back of her neck and soaking the bottoms of the jeans she’d put on before they started out. Seattle was living up to its reputation. He guided her as if he’d done it before, unobtrusively but clearly, as if they were waltzing instead of walking down the street. She relaxed and walked faster.

  “Wendy.” He broke the companionable silence with the voice of One Who Suddenly Comprehends. “It’s worse than I thought. I was stuck on Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Good Little Witch. But Wendy Moira . . . I bet it’s Wendy Moira Angela, isn’t it?”

  She gave him a mock scowl. “I don’t have a kiss for you, and I can’t fly—not even with fairy dust. And I hate Peter Pan, the play, and all the movies.”

  His arm moved, and she could tell he was laughing to himself. “I bet.”

  “It could be worse, Toto,” she told him. “I could belong to the Emerald City Pack.”

  He laughed out loud at that, a softer sound than she’d expected, given the rough grumble of his voice. “You know, I’ve never thought of it that way. It seemed logical, Seattle being the Emerald City.”

  She might have said something, but he suddenly picked up his pace like a hunting dog spotting his prey. She kept her hand tight on his arm and did her best to keep up. He stopped at last. “Here.”

  She felt his tension, the desire for action of some sort. Hopefully she’d be able to provide him the opportunity. She released his arm and stepped to the side.