by SM Reine
Seth was fast, but not fast enough. He lost Abel among a dense copse of trees.
“Dammit,” he swore, scrambling on top of a nearby ridge.
He could feel werewolves nearby, but he couldn’t see them. The starlight and full moon couldn’t penetrate the canopy. Lightning bugs drifted among the grass, their pinpoint lights smothered by the density of shadow.
Seth heard a rustling noise. He dropped to the ground, aiming his gun at the stirring bushes. His finger was tense on the trigger.
“Katja?” he asked in a low voice.
He heard a faint growl—and then footsteps, from the other direction.
Summer appeared behind him, panic turning her cheeks gray. She was human, with twigs caught in her hair. “I couldn’t hold them! They wouldn’t follow me. I tried everything Rylie said, but you were right, I’m not Alpha. They’re scattered and I can’t—”
“Get down!” Seth roared.
She obeyed instantly, flinging herself to the ground.
It was still a moment too late.
Katja erupted from the bushes and slammed into Summer. Seth managed to pop off a single shot while she was still hurtling through the air, but he had no idea if it hit. And then the wolf’s limbs were tangled with Summer, and she was screaming, and there was blood—
The Walkie-Talkie at Seth’s belt shrieked for a half-second before the battery died.
It was the only warning that Nash was coming.
The angel plummeted from the sky, hitting the ground hard enough that the earth shook beneath Seth’s feet. Nash’s wings were at their full brilliance. They glowed with the force of a sun.
He grabbed Katja by the fur, ripped her away from Summer, and flung the wolf into a tree. She hit the trunk hard. It shattered in half with an explosion of bark.
The pain didn’t take Katja down. She rolled onto her paws again, twitching and shuddering.
It was the first clear look that Seth had gotten of Katja as a wolf. Her eyes rolled. Blood trickled from the corners. And her face—it was covered in some kind of black fog. It sparked with internal lightning, like a storm roiling through her fur. Seth caught occasional glimpses of symbols in the fog. They weren’t from any alphabet he knew. They were full of spikes and jags, loops and swirls.
He had seen markings like that on a human before: Deputy Lincoln Marshall, who had been attacking the pack under demonic influence.
Katja’s head swiveled toward Summer, who was limp on a bed of fallen leaves. But Nash moved so that he was between them.
“Look at me!” he commanded.
It was invitation enough. Katja flashed into motion, bowling into Nash.
Seth scrambled around the growling, snapping wolf trapped in Nash’s arms, dropping to Summer’s side. Her neck and chest were mangled. There was blood everywhere. But she managed a weak smile when she saw Seth.
“I’m good,” Summer said. “We’re all good.”
No, she definitely wasn’t good. He ripped his shirt off over his head and packed the worst of the wounds.
Nashriel was on the ground, a mess of wings and fur and claws. His silver blood splattered onto the dirt. He shouted a warrior’s cry—not done yet, but hurt badly.
The only sign that Abel had jumped into the fray was a flash of black fur, and then the growling redoubled.
If Abel and Nash couldn’t take down Katja together, Seth was probably going to be dead. There was no point in watching them fight. He focused on Summer instead. “How many fingers do I have, kid?” he asked, holding up a peace sign.
“Ten, you stupid old man,” she said. “You count fingers.”
He rolled his eyes. Summer sounded like her father when she talked like that. It also meant that she was probably going to be fine.
With a single yelp, the fighting cut off.
Seth turned to face the victors. Abel had Katja pinned to the ground with his jaws in her throat, and Nash sat on her side. There was so much spilled blood between the three of them that even Seth could smell it with his human nose. It drenched Nash’s chest and right wing.
“Is she dead?” Seth asked.
“Not yet,” Nash said grimly. “Hold her.”
Seth took the angel’s position at Katja’s hind legs, letting Nash go to Summer. The one shot that he had fired seemed to have hit after all—he felt a wound on Katja’s rear leg where the bullet had entered. He must have struck an artery. That single wound was the source of most of the blood on the ground.
Abel’s glassy gold eyes lifted to meet Seth’s. His face was matted with her blood.
Ripping Katja’s throat open wouldn’t be enough to kill her, but a werewolf’s jaws were powerful—he could sever her spinal cord, rip the head from her neck. Werewolves healed fast, but not that fast.
Abel was silently asking Seth if he should kill Katja.
He hesitated a moment too long. Rylie stumbled through the trees, clumsy on her two human legs. She took in the sight of the destruction and gasped. “Oh my God, Summer, are you—”
“She’s fine,” Nash said. He had scooped Summer up in his arms. She still had Seth’s shirt packed against her neck wounds, but the dreamy smile said that she was enjoying being held way too much to be injured that badly.
Rylie turned to Seth. “And Katja?”
“Alive,” Seth said reluctantly.
Katja’s spine twisted. She tried to bite weakly at Abel, though she didn’t have a good enough range of motion to succeed. There was no sign of her pupils now—the eyes had rolled into the back of her skull, and all he could see was bloody sclera.
“I think I know why Katja’s sick.” Rylie swallowed hard. “She’s been possessed by a demon.”
Five
Victoria, British Columbia
Brianna Dimaria’s first response to people saying stupid things was to smile. Not a sarcastic smile—a genuine, molar-flashing, eye-crinkling, cheek-dimpling grin, which could charm any moron into thinking that Brianna wasn’t annoyed by their rampant idiocy. It usually wasn’t hard to fake it. Stupid people had a habit of being pretty funny.
At her meeting with the high priestess of the Sandstone Coven, Brianna found herself smiling a lot, but she definitely wasn’t laughing.
“The Goddess called you to us,” said Cobweb, the high priestess. “I saw it in my tea leaves. They formed the shape of a bridge over treacherous waters, so I knew that the blessed Hecate was bringing you to our door.”
“A bridge, huh?” Brianna asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t. Cobweb was serious. “More like London Bridge or Golden Gate Bridge?”
Cobweb gave this question serious thought. “A quaint rural bridge,” she decided.
Just keep smiling.
“Wow,” Brianna said. “That, uh, that must have been some tea. Earl Grey?”
Cobweb’s forehead wrinkled. “No, Moroccan mint. Why do you ask?”
“To me, Earl Grey always seemed a little more…prescient.” She managed to keep a straight face while saying it. In truth, Brianna wasn’t a tea drinker. She also wasn’t a tea leaf reader, but that was probably because she didn’t like wasting her time on nonsense.
“I’ll have to try it sometime,” Cobweb said.
I bet you will.
Brianna’d had her doubts about the Sandstone Coven the minute she walked into Cobweb’s house for the interview. Her home was typical of a high priestess: a huge herb garden in the front, plants drying in the windows, pentagrams over every door, sage incense burning on the mantle. That was normal.
But the shrine to her dead cats—that was a little less normal. Especially the part where she had apparently stuffed her last “familiar” so that he could watch over the house.
The first thing that Cobweb had done when Brianna entered was introduce her to Theodore—the cat—and bestow his blessing upon her. He was posed so that he sat back on his haunches, mouth peeled open in an eternal meow, with one paw lifted. Cobweb had held that paw as she chanted the blessing. “He likes you
,” Cobweb had said, beaming.
Definitely not normal.
And Brianna knew what was normal for witches at this point. She had interviewed with almost a dozen covens throughout the United States since her last mentor ditched her. She thought she had seen everything: techno-shamans, radically feminist covens that considered men cattle, covens that believed magic was dead, and a “coven” that existed mostly as an excuse to get drunk every full moon.
All of them had rejected her.
Now Brianna sat in front of Cobweb smiling until her cheeks felt like they might pop off her face, even though the dead cat was still staring in her direction with glassy yellow eyes.
Just. Keep. Smiling.
“What do your tea leaves tell you?” Cobweb asked, and Brianna realized that the high priestess had been trying to talk to her for several seconds.
Brianna hadn’t touched the apple tea yet. Her mug sat, completely full, on the coffee table between them. “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. I’m still savoring it. Won’t find out until I finish.”
But Cobweb (and Theodore) stared expectantly at her, and Brianna realized that it was meant to be a test.
She hurriedly drained the mug and tried not to choke on stray leaf chunks.
“Okay,” Brianna said, turning the cup in her hands. “The tea leaves say…” The tea leaves say that you need to switch to bags. This is nasty.
The shape of the leaves didn’t look like anything, no matter how hard Brianna stretched her imagination. It looked like a dirty cup.
Time to make shit up.
“I see a long road,” Brianna said, dropping her voice into a breathy, mystical tone. “The end of a journey.” She glanced up at Cobweb. The high priestess’s expression had grown fixed. Keep smiling. “I see…I see a home at the end of that road…on top of a hill…” Now Cobweb wasn’t smiling at all. Brianna gave it one more push. “A hill with…stars?”
Cobweb took the cup.
“Oh dear,” she muttered, tugging on one of the crystal drops dangling from her right earlobe. “Oh, no…”
“It’s a nice hill,” Brianna added.
“This isn’t a hill at all.” Cobweb shot a worried look over the rim of the cup. “Are you sure that’s what you saw? A road, a house?”
Double or nothing. “Yup,” Brianna said. “Definitely a road.”
“Tell me about the White Ash Coven,” Cobweb said.
The smile slipped off of Brianna’s lips. “What about them?” she asked. “They’re in Colorado, right? I’m not from Colorado.”
“Look in your cup, and really look this time.” Cobweb tilted the mug toward Brianna. It still looked like a bunch of soggy leaves. “When you wrote me a letter, you mentioned that you were coming from another coven. I see a tree here. I believe that Theodore is warning me that you have a relationship with the White Ash Coven.”
Brianna shot a glare at Theodore, then plastered the smile on her face again. The dead cat was a freakin’ tattletale. “‘Relationship’ is a strong word. The former high priest offered me a position with them, but I never initiated or anything.”
Cobweb’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t see a road in the tea leaves, did you?”
Brianna could see her opportunity to join another coven fading rapidly away. Damn you and your stuffed face, Theodore.
“Look, Cobweb—I’ll be honest. I’m not the kind of witch that reads tarot cards, channels the spirits of dead cats, or sees quaint bridges in my tea leaves. But I’m strong enough that the oldest coven in America wanted me to initiate straight into the role of high priestess. There’s a reason for that.”
Cobweb tugged harder on her crystal bob. It looked like she was going to rip her earlobe off. “Strong in what way?”
Brianna straightened her back, imagining that she looked regal. “I have the unique ability to identify any preternatural creature at a glance.”
She tried to say it like she was announcing a cool power, like setting things on fire with her mind, rather than the stupidest, most useless talent any witch could be born with. Unfortunately, Cobweb didn’t look fooled. The priestess set the mug on the coffee table a little too hard.
“Miss Dimaria—” Cobweb began.
“Sometimes, I don’t even need to be able to see them,” Brianna added. “I once identified the species of a werewolf’s twin pregnancy through her stomach.”
Cobweb’s eyes flashed. “When were you around a pregnant werewolf?”
Okay, so that was not the right thing to say.
“The White Ash Coven is important,” Brianna said. “James Faulkner himself gave me his endorsement.” “Endorsement” was a stretch, but she was getting desperate.
“The White Ash Coven does not have proper witches in it!” Cobweb’s shrill voice throbbed through Brianna’s skull. “They don’t acknowledge the threefold law, they don’t follow the paths of the Horned God and Mother Goddess, and they—”
“Are probably a lot more powerful than anyone in your coven.” It slipped out before Brianna could think to shut herself up. She could only smile through so much idiocy before cracking.
Cobweb stood. Her features were pinched. “Our meeting is over.”
“I’m sorry,” Brianna said. “I didn’t mean—”
The high priestess marched her through the parlor, past Theodore, and out the front door. “The White Ash Coven,” Cobweb muttered. “I never would have… If I had known…” She flung her hands into the air. “I’ll have to cleanse the whole house!”
She shoved Brianna onto the doorstep and slammed the door behind her. The walls shook.
Through the stained glass window, Brianna could see Theodore continuing to glare.
“I’ll take that as a no,” she told the shut door.
After the twelve other covens had similarly rejected her, the Sandstone Coven was lucky number thirteen to throw Brianna on her ass.
The first two or three times it happened, Brianna hadn’t believed that the covens would have the nerve to reject her. After her experience working with the White Ash Coven—which, yes, was kind of on the evil side of the spectrum, but extremely prestigious—she had expected every other coven to fall down begging her to join them.
Once the fourth rejected her, reality sunk in. She stopped mentioning the White Ash Coven, stopped asking for leadership roles, and started asking for an opportunity to initiate. That was it. She asked to be a common witch and nothing more.
But none of them would take her. Even the crappy drunken covens had turned her out.
Brianna shrugged off the lingering feelings of Cobweb’s hands on her shoulders and walked down the front path, shuffling through autumn leaves that desperately needed to be raked. Her car was parked on the curb outside Cobweb’s house with the windows rolled down. It was a nice neighborhood, so Brianna hadn’t thought she needed to lock down. Plus, after living in her car for the last few months, it desperately needed to be aired out.
But a man was standing next to the car. He had broad shoulders and shaggy blond hair, kind of like how she imagined a Viking might look, were Vikings the type to wear red polo shirts with pocket protectors. He was studying her license plate.
This man didn’t look like a thief, but Brianna wasn’t in the mood to put up with snoops, either.
“Hello,” Nerd Viking said.
“Sorry, je ne parle pas anglais,” Brianna said, reaching in to unlock her car door.
“You’re Brianna Dimaria, aren’t you?”
Brianna’s eyes dropped to Nerd Viking’s shirt. Aside from the two pens in his pocket protector, he also had a pentacle pin on his lapel. He didn’t feel like witch, which meant that if his affiliation was of the pagan persuasion, he had no magic.
Another wannabe witch. Great, just great. How many dead cats did this guy have blessing his house?
“Did Cobweb send you to check my car for demons?” Brianna asked.
“Cobweb’s a hack,” he said, shoving his hand out. “My name is Brogan.”
Brianna suddenly liked this guy a lot more. “What can I do for you, Brogan?” They shook hands, and a wave of understanding swept over her. This wasn’t a witch—this was a kopis, a demon hunter. She knew the instant their skin touched.
“I hoped you could help me,” he said.
“Sorry, but I can barely help myself. Right now, I want to curl up with my knitting, nurse my wounded ego, and marathon Mark Darcy on the BBC,” Brianna said. She got into the driver’s seat, but Brogan grabbed the door before she could close it.
“Even if help means being the high priestess of a coven again?” he asked.
Brianna had been about to slam her door, but at that, she froze.
Thirteen covens had rejected her. Thirteen.
Yet now, for some reason, one had sent a kopis to talk to her.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”
Brianna mentally revised Brogan’s status from “Nerd Viking” to “probable murderer-slash-psychopath” when they reached his so-called house. She hated to make assumptions—her grandpa had always said that assuming was for assholes—but something about living in a warehouse screamed, “I kill people for fun!”
This warehouse was especially intimidating. Most of the windows had been boarded over, and it looked like a nasty windstorm had thrown a tree through one wall. If it lasted another winter, Brianna would have been stunned. Of course, a warehouse that collapsed on the evidence of horrible, gruesome murders performed inside was kind of a brilliant idea.
Unless I’m the one getting murdered, she thought with a wince.
Brianna stopped her Honda in front of the fence and wondered how quickly she could reach the Leatherman in her glove box. “Looks cozy,” she said brightly.
“This isn’t really my house,” Brogan admitted.
No shit. “Then why did you tell me that we were going back to your place?”
“I thought that would sound less intimidating.”
“And you knew I wouldn’t agree to come here if you’d been honest,” Brianna said. Visions of ax murder flashed through her eyes. “That’s a great start to our relationship. Look, I’m going to drop you off here, but—”