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

  “All right,” she told him, falling into the comfortable patter she adopted with most of her clients—erasing the odd intimacy that had sprung up between them. “I know the girl on your brother’s phone call—her name used to be Molly, but I think she goes by something like Spearmint or Peppermint, Somethingmint. I’m going to call for things that belong to her—a hair, a cigarette—anything will do. You’ll have to do the looking. Whatever it is will glow, but it might be very small, easy to overlook.”

  “What if I don’t see anything?”

  “Then they didn’t leave anything behind, and I’ll figure out something else to try.”

  She set aside her worries, shedding them like a duck would shed the cool Seattle rain. Closing her senses to the outside world, she reached into her well of power and drew out a bucketful and threw it out in a circle around her as she called to the essence that was Molly. She hadn’t done this spell since she could see out of both eyes—but there was no reason she couldn’t do it now. Once learned, spells came to her hand like trained spaniels, and this one was no exception.

  “What do you see?” she asked. The vibration of power warmed her against the cold autumn drizzle that began to fall. There was something here; she could feel it.

  “Nothing.” His voice told her he’d put a lot of hope into this working.

  “There’s something,” she said, sensations crawling up her arms and over her shoulders. She held out her right hand, her left being otherwise occupied with the workings of her spell. “Touching me might help you see.”

  Warmth flooded her as his hand touched hers . . . and she could see the faint traces Molly had left behind. She froze.

  “Moira?”

  She couldn’t see anything else. Just bright bits of pink light sparkling from the ground, giving her a little bit of an idea what the landscape looked like. She let go of his hand and the light disappeared, leaving her in darkness again.

  “Did you see anything?” she asked, her voice hoarse. The oddity of seeing anything . . . She craved it too much, and it made her wary because she didn’t know how it worked.

  “No.”

  He wanted his brother and she wanted to see. Just for a moment. She held her hand out. “Touch me again.”

  . . . and the sparkles returned like glitter scattered in front of her. Small bits of skin and hair, too small for what she needed. But there was something . . .

  She followed the glittering trail, and as if it had been hidden, a small wad of something blazed like a bonfire.

  “Is there a wall just to our right?” she asked.

  “A building and an alley.” His voice was tight, but she ignored it. She had other business first.

  They’d waited for Tom’s brother in the alley. Maybe Jon came to the pay phone here often.

  She led Tom to the blaze and bent to pick it up: soft and sticky, gum. Better, she thought, better than she could have hoped. Saliva would make a stronger guide than hair or fingernails could. She released his hand reluctantly.

  “What did you find?”

  “Molly’s gum.” She allowed her magic to loosen the last spell and slide back to her, hissing as the power warmed her skin almost to the point of burning. The next spell would be easier, even if it might eventually need more power. Sympathetic magic—which used the connections between like things—was one of those affinities that ran through her father’s bloodlines into her.

  But before she tried any more magic, she needed to figure out what Tom had done to her spell. How touching him allowed her to see.

  • • •

  She looked unearthly. A violent wind he had not felt, not even when she’d fastened on to his hand with fierce strength, had blown her hair away from her face. The skin on her hands was reddened, as if she held them too close to a fire. He wanted to soothe them—but he firmly intended never to touch her again.

  He had no idea what she’d done to him while she held on to him and made his body burn and tremble. He didn’t like surprises, and she’d told him that he would have to look, not that she’d use him to see. He especially didn’t like it that as long as she was touching him, he hadn’t wanted her to let him go.

  Witches gather more power from hurting those with magic, she’d said . . . more or less. People just like him—but it hadn’t hurt, not that he’d noticed.

  He wasn’t afraid of her, not really. Witch or not, she was no match for him. Even in human form, he could break her human-fragile body in mere moments. But if she was using him . . .

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked as he had earlier, but the question seemed more important now. He’d known what she was, but witch meant something different to him now. He knew enough about witches not to ask the obvious question, though—like what it was she’d done to him. Witches, in his experience, were secretive about their spells—like junkyard dogs are secretive about their bones.

  She’d taken something from him by using him that way . . . broken the trust he’d felt building between them. He needed to reestablish what he could expect out of her. Needed to know exactly what she was getting him into, beyond rescuing his brother. Witches were not altruistic. “What do you want out of this? Revenge for your blindness?”

  She watched him . . . appeared to watch him, anyway, as she considered his question. There hadn’t been many people who could lie to Tom before he Changed—cops learn all about lying the first year on the job. Afterward . . . he could smell a lie a mile away an hour before it was spoken.

  “Alan Choo sent you,” she said finally. “That’s one. Your brother’s a policeman, and an investigation into his death might be awkward. That’s two. He takes risks to help people he doesn’t know—it’s only right someone return the favor. That’s three.”

  They weren’t lies, but they weren’t everything, either. Her face was very still, as if the magic she worked had changed her view of him, too.

  Then she tilted her head sideways and said in a totally different voice, hesitant and raw. “Sins of the fathers.”

  Here was absolute truth. Obscure as hell, but truth. “Sins of the fathers?”

  “Kouros’s real name is Lin Keller, though he hasn’t used it in twenty years or more.”

  “He’s your father.” And then he added two and two. “Your father is running Samhain’s Coven?” Her father had ruined her eye and—Tom could read between the lines—caused her to ruin the other? Her own father?

  She drew in a deep breath—and for a moment he was afraid she was going to cry or something. But a stray gust of air brought the scent of her to him, and he realized she was angry. It tasted like a werewolf’s rage, wild and biting.

  “I am not a part of it,” she said, her voice a half octave lower than it had been. “I’m not bringing you to his lair so he can dine upon werewolf, too. I am here because some jerk made me feel sorry for him. I am here because I want both him and his brother out of my hair and safely out of the hands of my rat-bastard father so I won’t have their deaths on my conscience, too.”

  Someone else might have been scared of her, she being a witch and all. Tom wanted to apologize—and he couldn’t remember the last time that impulse had touched him. It was even more amazing because he wasn’t at fault: she’d misunderstood him. Maybe she’d picked up on how appalled he was that her own father had maimed her—he hadn’t been implying she was one of them.

  He didn’t apologize, though, or explain himself. People said things when they were mad that they wouldn’t tell you otherwise.

  “What was it you did to me?”

  “Did to you?” Arctic ice might be warmer.

  “When you were looking for the gum. It felt like you hit me with a bolt of lightning.” He was damned if he’d tell her everything he felt.

  Her right eyebrow peeked out above her sunglasses. Interest replaced coldness. “You felt like I was doing something to you?” And then sh
e held out her left hand. “Take my hand.”

  He looked at it.

  After a moment, she smiled. He didn’t know she had a smile like that in her. Bright and cheerful and sudden. Knowing. As if she had gained every thought that passed through his head. Her anger, the misunderstanding between them was gone as if it had never been.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she told him gently. “Let me try re-creating it, and maybe I can tell you.”

  He gave her his hand. Instead of taking it, she put only two fingers on his palm. She stepped closer to him, dropped her head so he could see her scalp gleaming pale underneath her dark hair. The magic that touched him this time was gentler, sparklers instead of fireworks—and she jerked her fingers away as if his hand were a hot potato.

  “What the heck . . . ” She rubbed her hands on her arms with nervous speed.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t acting as my focus—I can tell you that much.”

  “So what was going on?”

  She shook her head, clearly uncomfortable. “I think I was using you to see. I shouldn’t be able to do that.”

  He found himself smiling grimly. “So I’m your Seeing Eye wolf?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He recognized her panic, having seen it in his own mirror upon occasion. It was always frightening when something you thought was firmly under control broke free to run where it would. With him, it was the wolf.

  Something resettled in his gut. She hadn’t done it on purpose; she wasn’t using him.

  “Is it harmful to me?”

  She frowned. “Did it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Either time?”

  “Neither time.”

  “Then it didn’t harm you.”

  “All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

  She opened her right hand, the one with the gum in it. “Not us. Me. This is going to show us where Molly is—and Molly will know where your brother is.”

  She closed her fingers, twisted her hand palm down, then turned herself in a slow circle. She hit a break in the pavement, and he grabbed her before she could do more than stumble. His hand touched her wrist, and she turned her hand to grab him as the kick of power flowed through his body once more.

  “They’re in a boat,” she told him, and went limp in his arms.

  • • •

  She awoke with the familiar headache that usually accompanied the overuse of magic—and absolutely no idea where she was. It smelled wrong to be her apartment, but she was lying on a soft surface with a blanket covering her.

  Panic rose in her chest—sometimes she hated being blind.

  “Back in the land of the living?”

  “Tom?”

  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 indeed 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 heated, because he was quickly back with a cup. She drank the sweet stuff down as fast as she could, and the warmth 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 vulnerable only 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.”

  Floorboards 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 home, 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 helpless.

  “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 the boat 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 a half mile up the coast. Looks like it’s been here awhile,” he told her. “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 their 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 doing, 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 kep
t 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 day was over, he’d go back to his life and she to hers. If she wanted to keep him—she knew 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 he’d know it if they started heading away from the ocean.

  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 real estate gold mine 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 they’d been following continued on, though not nearly so 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.