by Laura Bickle
It was late. The frogs had gone to sleep. I heard a sound. The pigs... The cat closed her eyes. It smelled like blood. I stayed here with the babies.
“Did you hear human voices?”
She opened her eyes to look at me. I heard voices first, then growls. I had not heard growls like that before. Not like the coyote. Larger.
I stroked her ears. “I’m so sorry.”
Her whiskers twitched. I am sorry for the pigs. Louisa was always kind to me. I will try to save this little one.
I looked down at the piglet. She had fallen asleep on the calico’s belly, surrounded by kitten fur.
“Thank you.”
She closed her eyes, and I knew that expression of cat doziness well. The piglet was in good hands. Sometimes, the best hands weren’t human.
I climbed down from the hayloft and exited the barn to find Dalton standing with Sara, staring at the pen.
He looked at me, covered in mud, and lifted an eyebrow. “You know that you might have compromised a crime scene, right?”
I winced. “Sorry. I just...there was a baby piglet.”
“Is it all right?”
“She’s premature, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.” I turned to Sara. “You have a calico barn cat?”
She nodded. “Melody. She’s a good mouser.”
“Well, she’s in the hayloft right now, nursing that piglet with her kittens.”
The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. She burbled, “Oh, my god.”
“I don’t know how this will go,” I admitted. “But Melody is your best chance. I’d let her care for that baby.”
The woman nodded fiercely.
I glanced back at the mud, then at Dalton. “I want to check and make sure there aren’t more.”
Dalton shook his head and sighed. “Well, you already messed it up, so...let’s go for it.”
The three of us slogged into the pen and searched for more piglets, with no success. My heart sank at that. Pigs usually had at least ten piglets.
When we were done, we hosed off as best we could. We sat on the front porch to dry out, drinking iced tea as Dalton took our statements.
“There was no bone. No tissue or other debris?” he asked me for what felt like the fifth time.
“You saw. None,” I said.
He scribbled in his notebook. “And the gate was closed when you came?”
I nodded.
Sara sat with her knees on her elbows, her hands dangling into space. “It was closed when I came out to feed them this morning.” She seemed to have calmed down a good deal, but it looked like shock to me. I knew what it was like to love an animal, and to have ones taken like that...I shuddered.
“That’s another thing that’s weird,” Dalton said. “There was still feed in the pen. It came from the overturned trough, sure, but... If a bear attacked the pigs, it would have gone for that first. Easy pickings.”
“That doesn’t sound like a bear,” I said.
He glanced at the owner. “You mind if we look around your property for tracks?”
“Not at all,” she said, seeming to collect herself. “What do you think got my pigs?”
“I don’t know yet, ma’am,” Dalton said. “But I sure want to know the answer to that.”
Sara took our glasses into the house, and Dalton and I rose to circle the barn once more.
“Dalton,” I said. “There’s else something I found here.” I slid a glance to the empty porch. “It was weird, and I didn’t want to scare her any more than she already is.”
I slogged to the fence post, where I pulled out the dagger.
Dalton took it from me. “I’m betting this was used to kill the pigs. But...why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
I took a breath. “It’s not just a knife. It’s an athame.”
“A what?”
“It’s a knife used in ceremonial magic.”
His eyes narrowed. “The type of thing your aunt is into.”
“She wouldn’t have done something like this,” I protested.
“Yeah, I know. But does she know someone who might?”
I frowned. “I don’t know any other witches in Gibson county.” That was the truth.
He sighed. “This is looking more and more like some kind of animal sacrifice situation.”
I didn’t disagree with him.
Finding nothing notable in our stroll around the house and barn, we walked up to the road. Dalton assumed that a person who would have come for the pigs would have come from there.
“No odd tire tracks,” Dalton said. “In this mud, I would expect deep tracks hauling several hundred pounds of pig. But there’s nothing here.”
We moved back down the gravel drive to the field beyond, stretching toward a forest. I kept my eyes on the freshly sprouted grass and yellow marsh marigolds, smelling earth. Avoiding areas of standing water, I scanned the land. I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Luna,” Dalton called.
I picked up my pace to join him across the field. He was crouched beside a rill of land, pointing into the muck.
“Look there.”
Footprints were pressed into the mud. I squinted at them. “Are those fresh?”
“I would say so. And they’re a man’s prints, too large for the homeowner.” He looked around. “And more than one man.” He pointed out a set of tracks with a different tread pattern on the soles, heading toward the barn. He began taking pictures with his cell phone.
I paused before a set of animal tracks weaving in and out of the human ones. “These are canine,” I said. And big canine tracks, at that—each print was the size of my fist.
“What is this?” Dalton asked. He pointed down at another set of tracks that flattened some of the grasses and pressed the swamp marigold into the earth. They were clawed, with a long trail scraped into the mud, as if a snake had slithered through. The tracks were partially obscured in places by deep scrapes in the ground.
I crouched to look at them and frowned. I pulled some long auburn hair out of my mouth. Despite my efforts to rinse it, it was stiff with dirt and tasted like it, too.
“Hnh,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Well, I don’t want to say. Not until I’m sure.” I pulled out my phone and did a quick search. When I had convinced myself, I turned the phone around to show Dalton an image.
“You have to be shitting me.” He looked from the phone to my face, as if he were searching for a trace of a prank.
“I’m not.” I pointed down to the track. “That belongs to a crocodile. At first, I thought it could be a monitor lizard, but...it’s a crocodile. See? Those are the feet, the drag is the belly, and that wavy line is the tail scrape...”
“Shit.” Dalton rubbed the back of his neck.
Things got even weirder. We traced the tracks back to the forest, where we lost them in the spring undergrowth. The trail started out there, with human tracks in the forest. In the field, animal tracks appeared out of nowhere, mingling with the human footprints. When we followed them back to the gravel drive, only animal prints remailed.
“I don’t get it,” Dalton muttered. “There have to be tracks we’re missing. Did some guys show up with their big dog and their crocodile and...let them eat pigs?”
“And how were they able to do that without waking up the owner?” I said. “Pigs are smart. And they can be loud. I can’t imagine that they would have gone anywhere quietly.”
Dalton stared at the green horizon. “And they went somewhere, dead or alive, with some guys who have a crocodile.”
I pulled my hair out of my face and knotted it at the nape of my neck. “About exotic animals...that coyote you brought me last night wasn’t a coyote. It was a maned wolf.”
“A wolf?”
“Not really a wolf, but a canine that’s sort of its own creature. They’re native to Brazil.”
“Damn.” His jaw hardened. “So it seems like we’ve got some exotic animals on the loose.”
“It sure looks like it.”
“Maybe they took those pigs to feed them?”
“Maybe.”
But my thoughts tracked back to that knife, that knife that glittered with power. There was a lot more to this killing than met the eye.
Somehow, there was magic involved.
CHAPTER 4
“What do you make of this?”
Dalton’s voice was carefully neutral, but his grey eyes were piercing.
I sat at the kitchen table with Celeste, who stared down at a plastic bag containing the athame we’d retrieved from the pig farm.
Celeste hovered her hand over it and snatched it back. She wrinkled her nose. “Where did that come from?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
Celeste stared at it with as much contempt as she might a rat on her kitchen table. “That’s been used for dark magic. Blood magic.”
“What’s blood magic?” I could tell it was killing Dalton to play along with this.
She frowned. “Magic for binding and cursing. No good ever comes of that.”
“Do you know anyone who’s into that sort of thing?”
She fixed him with an offended look. “No. I do not know anyone who practices dark magic. There’s a law in witchcraft—the threefold law. What you do to or for others comes back to the practitioner threefold. No ethical witch would tempt that kind of fate.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me about this thing?” Dalton said, frustration chewing through his voice.
She sat back and crossed her arms. “It’s old. Very old. Moonstones are sacred to the Goddess and correspond to the phases of the moon. The other symbol is a cosmic lemniscate, a symbol of infinite power. This tool has been used, and used for many years. Whoever lost this will be missing it. It is not something that can be easily replaced.” She glanced up at Dalton. “Or are you wanting me to do a reading on this?”
“A reading?” he echoed.
I put my hand on Dalton’s sleeve, trying to put it in terms that he might understand. “Like a psychic reading.”
Dalton sucked in his breath and blew it out. “Sure,” he said in resignation. Maybe he was attempting to be polite. “Hit me with your psychic reading.”
Celeste’s hands crept over the table and rested on the plastic bag. She stared down at the athame. I rarely got psychometric impressions from things. I could get a sense of good and bad energy with people and places, but little more than that. Celeste had decades more practice than I did, and her talents were a different subset. She called herself an air witch. She could summon up a breeze to dry laundry and feel into the air around objects. When I was a teenager, she could tell from holding my jacket that I’d snuck out at night and where I went, based on how it smelled and what the wind told her when it ratted me out.
My aunt’s index finger tapped a moonstone. “This belongs to a man. A man who is in a group of other men. He’s tall...”
“Tall, dark, and handsome?” Dalton blurted. I kicked him under the table, and he shut it.
Celeste stared at the knife. “He’s tall. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Not from around here. He’s involved in some kind of criminal enterprise with these other men. There’s money, a lot of money changing hands.” She winced. “And suffering. He’s the source of a great deal of pain and violence.”
“What kind of criminal enterprise?” Dalton prodded.
“It’s not drugs. I want to say...human trafficking. But that’s not exactly it.” Her lip turned down.
“What’s he doing here?” Dalton demanded.
“He’s here on business. There’s something he wants here, and he’s come to get what he wants.” Celeste pulled her hands back. She rubbed them together, as if she’d been holding ice cubes that bothered her arthritis. “I don’t see anything more than that. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Dalton said. He sighed and picked up the bag containing the knife. “That’s, um, helpful.”
I led Dalton to the front door. Once on the porch, he glanced back at the kitchen window. Celeste could be seen inside beneath a small forest of spider plants, washing her hands in the sink and muttering to herself. Not that I blamed her. When I got home, I took a shower immediately to scrape the aura of death off me. My hair still dripped down the back of my T-shirt, and it stuck to my back.
“I don’t know what to make of this,” Dalton said. “But I’m going to treat this as a serious investigation. Those pigs are living creatures, and they didn’t deserve that.”
I nodded. For all his disbelief in magic, Dalton was a decent man, and I trusted him to do the right thing. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
He lifted a brow. “Well, hopefully, I don’t have to identify any more exotic animal tracks. But I’ll call.”
I nodded and waved at him as he climbed in his cruiser, turned around in our gravel driveway, and headed up to the main road. I lingered a bit outside, watching him.
My attention was snagged by movement in the trees across the road. The bird trees had begun to bud out, and redbuds still clung to branches, winding around pale green maple leaves. Squirrels leaped from branch to branch, but something large moved among them, wings fluttering.
I squinted. It was a bird of some sort. I took two steps toward the long driveway, wanting to get a better look. The local newspaper had said that someone had seen a golden eagle this winter, and I was curious to see if it was one of those.
It was no golden eagle. It flapped its wings, far broader and more massive than any eagle I knew. It turned its face toward mine, dark eyes in a curiously flat face with dark grey plumage. The bird’s visage was stark, terrifying, and froze me in place. It took to the sky, winging off in the direction Dalton’s patrol car had left.
I fumbled with my phone, tried to get a picture. But all I got was a grey blur. I frowned at the blur. Whatever kind of bird it was, I hoped to get closer. Perhaps it would be inclined to talk to me, and I could ask it what it was. It sort of reminded me of pictures I’d seen on the internet of a harpy eagle.
I frowned, wondering what other exotic animals might be lurking in Gibson county. I took a deep breath. Before jumping to conclusions, I’d have to watch and see if I could get a better picture. If it came back, that was.
When I got back inside, Celeste pinned me to the wall with her eyes.
“Why did you bring that thing in here?” she hissed at me.
“Um,” I stammered. I had rarely seen Celeste this pissed about anything. I explained the scene at the pig farm, the strange tracks, and how the athame had emerged from the mud like a kind of filthy Excalibur.
She pressed her lips together and paced the hallway floor.
“What are you not telling me?” I demanded.
“That knife bears the mark of an ancient order of magic peddlers. The Casimir,” she said. “They buy, sell, and trade magical tools, caged spirits, genii in bottles.”
“That sounds pretty unethical.” Celeste had raised me with very strict moral standards where witchcraft was concerned. I wasn’t even permitted to dabble in love potions. She told me horrendous stories of love charms gone wrong for years—spells that had resulted in hideous hauntings for the casters, stalking, and even death. In witchcraft, there were two paths—the right hand path and the left hand path. Celeste made sure that I always drove on the right side of the road and never drifted across the median to the sinister left.
“They are. They deal in money and power and nothing else.”
“Are you saying the law of three didn’t flatten them?” My brain whirred.
Celeste groans. “The law of three always applies. But people can do a whole lot of damage before it kicks in.”
“You talk about them like you know them.”
“Come,” she snapped. She grabbed my sleeve and hauled me toward the basement door.
She unlocked the door, and her fingers brushed the ward she’d placed on it. To the naked eye, the ward looked like a benign cork husk
dolly perched in a wreath of dried flowers. As a witch, I could see beneath that, at sigils drawn with faint shimmering lines in the doll’s skirts, like spiderweb silk in afternoon sunshine. In the doll’s crude folded hands were bits of black obsidian, and she had been soaked in rum from the kitchen and rosemary oil from the herb garden. Her head was stuffed with graveyard dust, and her hidden spine was a coffin nail. Anyone who was not a Summerwood witch would feel a strong desire to avoid that door. If a stranger dared to set a hand on the door latch, he would be compelled to snatch his hand back and leave, unable to cross an invisible barrier strong as barbed wire.
I touched the ward, as well, and we descended the wooden steps into softly glowing darkness.
This basement had been dug when the first Summerwoods had claimed this land centuries ago. The house above it had changed shape over the years and had burned down once. But the basement remained, untouched. Celeste always said that the basement housed the unconscious soul of a home. It was where houses rooted into the earth, where it drew its power. Our house was no different.
Well, maybe it was a little different.
Soft, humid warmth enveloped me, and I ducked to keep from bumping my head on an overhead beam. The walls were brick, dusted with coldly glowing efflorescence, and the dirt floor had been pounded smooth over centuries of use. Shelves lined the walls, containing all manner of witchy artifacts in jars: glittering stones, half-melted candles, crushed leaves, brick dust, silver coins, and dried mushrooms.
Diaries and spellbooks of the house’s prior residents perched on a high shelf, away from any danger of water leaks. I had read them all at least once. Each Summerwood witch kept her own Book of Shadows, I was told. Unfortunately, many of the books were missing, lost to time or destroyed in fire. The ones that remained were little more than recipe books and diaries. I had lost interest in them as a teenager. I’d honestly felt bad when I read them; my ancestors had glamorous power, like the ability to fly or change lead into gold. I could talk with the cat. It was a good power, but my teenage self wasn’t quite able to cope with magic powers, hormones, and comparisons, too.
My book was there on the shelf, too, a simple lined leather journal. I hadn’t written much in it since I was a teenager carrying on conversations with spiders. My sisters’ books were shelved next to mine. Starr’s was an iridescent journal with an image of a mermaid that she’d painted on it when she was thirteen. Halley’s was embossed with the image of a map. Neither one had taken their books with them when they’d left home. I wonder if they ever used magic at all, anymore, if they would ever write another word in those books. It wasn’t as if they’d been dealt unglamorous powers, either. It had been clear to me from the time we were small that my younger sisters were the powerhouses of this generation. Not that they particularly let me forget it, either...