by Laura Bickle
I rode to the edge of the property, listening to the birds and following Bristol’s nose. I spied an opossum skulking through the undergrowth. It was too late in the morning for one to be about. Bristol bumbled up to it, but was deterred from sniffing it by a vigorous hiss.
I drew up the reins and spoke to it: “Hey, isn’t it a little late for you to be out?”
The opossum gazed up at me with bleary eyes. She was covered in opossum babies clinging to her back. It is. And I’d rather not be out at all, but something stole my sleeping place.
My heart leapt. “Was it a tall, leggy-looking fox animal?”
Yes, she said, scooping up a slipping baby with her prehensile tail. Over there, by the graveyard, near the fallen stones and rotten log.
“How about I evict that guy for you?” I said. “Then you can go back.”
The mother opossum looked up her long nose at me. I would be indebted to you if you would. I’m tired of looking for a new home.
“You’ll have it back,” I promised.
We rode slowly into the old graveyard.
I smell the not-dog here, Bristol said, his tail wagging. And lots of other interesting stuff.
The graveyard dated back from the 1800s, and contained the graves of dozens of Summerwood witches. When my sisters and I were little girls, we would come here to leave flowers on the graves. Rain had eaten away at much of the stone, blackening the edges and rendering the words almost illegible.
The oldest stones were at the back of the plot, with newer ones at the front. I dismounted, allowing Cyrus to nibble on the tall grasses here. Bristol plowed ahead, nose to the ground and deep in concentration.
I paused before my mother’s grave. It had been a long time since I’d come here to cut the grasses down and leave flowers. She’d been thirty-five when she died in a car accident. It was a very ordinary end to an extraordinary witch. I remember that she had been powerful, showing us images of the world beyond in soap bubbles when she bathed us as kids. She’d grown the apple orchard in only a season, from sticks to trees that swept over our heads, and that orchard had begun to rot when she died. I had always felt safe with her.
And then she was gone.
“We need you now,” I whispered. I plucked a clover blossom and placed it on her headstone.
Beyond the graveyard, beyond the edge of our property, I saw the flash of dark wings. I squinted, seeing the creature I’d seen near the road that resembled a harpy eagle. It perched on a birch branch and peered at me.
I fell still and watched it. It flapped its wings and made to fly over the graveyard, but its wings slapped hard against the air, and it careened away.
My eyes narrowed. It was not lost on me that Celeste had hung a ward on a nearby tree, marking the end of our property. I watched as the bird took wing again, then seem repelled by an invisible barrier.
“Who are you?” I called, reaching for my shotgun.
The bird flapped away, skimming north. I soon lost sight of it in the forest beyond.
Is that another chicken? Bristol asked, his eyes round.
“I suspect that is something much more dangerous than a chicken.” I glanced at the tree. Celeste’s corn dolly was still securely tied to the trunk. I didn’t like that the bird was here, not knowing who or what it was. But the ward seemed to have held, and my heart rose with that knowledge. Celeste hadn’t lost her touch.
I moved on, to the old part of the cemetery, to where a tombstone had fallen against a rotten log. This was the tombstone of Estelle Summerwood, the first witch on this land. A black and white ink portrait of her hung in our hallway, a severe-looking countenance with long white fingers primly folded over her black dress. I remembered that the tombstone had fallen in a storm when I was a child. My sisters and I had come to leave flower garlands, and a huge gust of wind had swept through the forest. We had cowered at our mother’s grave, but the wind had pushed Estelle’s stone over.
We had tried many times in the years since to prop it back up. But it was too heavy, even when we all came together. We even hired a bulldozer once upon a time, but the stone would not move. Celeste said that Estelle was determined to look up at the stars.
I approached the rotten log. Bristol snuffled it vigorously.
Here, the dog said excitedly. It’s here.
A woodpecker paced the log. He cocked his head to the side to stare at me. In his beak dangled the locket I’d left on my windowsill.
Finally. He huffed and fluffed at me. I’ve been knocking and knocking on this log, trying to get that guy to come out so I can get rid of this thing.
“You...you want to give it to him?”
He plopped the locket down on the log. I have places to be. When that guy gets out of the log, will you give this to him yourself?
“I, uh...” I whispered, stunned. But the woodpecker immediately took off, and I heard him hammering away at a tree within moments. I reached down to pick up the locket.
I had asked for help. Maybe Renan would help me. I closed my fingers over it and put it in my pocket.
I knelt beside the opening of the log and peered inside. Dark eyes watched me, distrustful.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” I said. “But I have to talk to you. You’ve been in my dreams. I know what you are. I know who you are, Renan. And I think I can help.”
The amber eyes blinked in the darkness. They blinked, lightened, and became the eyes of a man.
“How do you know?” he demanded.
“I dreamed of you. I dreamed that you were abducted, changed against your will...”
“How is that possible for you to know such things?” His jaw hardened, and I was afraid he might bolt again.
“I’m a witch. Myself and my aunt. My family are enemies of the Casimir. And from what I’ve seen in my dreams, I think you are, too.”
Darkness stirred, and Renan crawled out on his hands and knees. He was filthy and rumpled, looking as if he hadn’t slept in a week. Maybe it had been because the woodpecker had been hammering away at the fallen log. Bristol bounded up to him and sniffed him. He didn’t shove Bristol away, just stared at him.
“Your dog is wearing a dress.”
“It’s not a dress. It’s a tank top. And he just had surgery. He can’t get his incision dirty.”
Renan stared at the shotgun slung over my shoulder. “Do you mean to shoot me?”
“No.” I glanced down at it. “I just mean to give a mother opossum her den back.”
He looked at me, a trace of hope flickering across his face. He seemed to be weighing what little information he knew of me. “You have helped me so far, when I had four legs. We can talk on two. But I want something in return.”
“What’s that?”
His stomach growled. “Breakfast. Something that’s not dog food.” A grin split his face. He had a very nice smile, gentle and sly.
“That can certainly be arranged.”
Will there be chicken? Bristol asked.
CHAPTER 11
“There will be chicken.”
I swore it up and down to the Goddess.
Bristol grinned. It was good to see him grin. I’d give him a whole turkey if it made him smile again.
I offered Renan a hand up, and he followed me to the horse. To my surprise, he knew how to ride. He sat behind me, hands resting lightly on my waist. The nape of my neck prickled from his breath, and I felt the warmth of his chest when it brushed my back. The guy was battered and filthy, but...there was something about him that just made me want to be close to him, to figure out what made him tick. In more than one way, and that unnerved me.
“So you’re a witch?” he asked. “I remember you said that when I was in the kennel.”
I nodded.
“What does that mean...do you turn men into toads?”
I laughed, thinking it was an attempt at a joke. That was before I realized that, from his perspective, that wasn’t such an outrageous suggestion.
“No. I can’t do that.
But I can talk to toads.”
“You talk to toads,” he repeated.
“All animals, actually. Except for you. Which make senses now—you’re not really a maned wolf. You’re human.”
He sighed, and I felt his chest rise and fall against my back. “Well, it seems like I’ve been spending more time on four feet rather than two in the last several months.”
“When you change from maned wolf to man...you can control that?”
“Sort of? I think I’m getting better at it. When the moon’s full, I’m in maned wolf form, no matter what I do. But the rest of the time, I can change if I concentrate. But it takes a lot of energy.”
“Is that why it took you so long to change in the kennel?”
“Yeah. I thought I was dead, to be honest.”
I twisted around to look at him, glancing down at his leg. “You’re getting around awfully well on that.”
“Well, one of the benefits to shifting shape is that I seem to heal really well. Faster when I shift.”
“In my dreams, I saw you...bitten by another maned wolf. Is that how it happened, like in the movies? You got bitten by a wolf and became a werewolf?” It seemed so much easier to have a conversation like this, both with the forced intimacy of riding together and the knowing that we didn’t have to face each other. Something about not looking him in the eye made this weird conversation easier.
“Yeah,” he said. “That was Silva. The movies get that much of it right.”
“But how did you get mixed up with the Casimir in the first place?”
“I’m an insurance investigator,” he said, with a trace of a smile in his voice. “I specialize in art theft. Most of the time, I’m tracking down stolen paintings and knickknacks. Art heists aren’t as common as they once were, but when they’re executed well, the losses are substantial.
“The National Museum of Brazil experienced an odd theft about six months ago. I was thinking it was an inside job. The cameras and security system had been disabled. The high-value art had been untouched. It took us a couple of weeks to figure out exactly what had been stolen, and what had been taken seemed a relatively low-value ornament—an engraved tooth that archaeologists at the University of Sao Paolo had been studying. Archaeologists thought it dated from the time of the Marajoara culture. The archaeologists had even managed to extract a bit of ancient DNA from it. They’d concluded it came from a jaguar, but there were some mutations in it they couldn’t fully account for. Now I suspect I know why.
“I was curious about this heist. This was an awful lot of effort, an elaborate plan to rip off something that wasn’t anywhere near the most valuable item in the collection. I pulled camera footage from traffic cameras and other businesses in the area. I got a partial shot of license plates of a suspicious-looking vehicle. I tracked the registry to a rental company, and sifted through a series of fake names that led me to dead ends.
“I checked with others in my network, and found that a similar heist had taken place five years ago in Brussels. Again, something odd was stolen—a shirt made from human skin in medieval times. It wasn’t on display, but someone figured out that it was there and took it, leaving behind other items that would have been easier to sell. It never emerged on the black market. I made connections with that heist to some museum pieces that had been taken in Baghdad several more than a decade back—jewelry dating back to Nebuchadnezzar’s time. I had pretty much figured out that I was dealing with a ring of thieves. But I couldn’t figure out what they wanted. They never sold these items. So...what was their motivation? I assumed that it was to keep them in a private collection, but that would have to be a very strange collection.”
“Magic,” I said. “They’re collectors of magic.”
“I had no idea. Fortunately...or maybe unfortunately, for me, there was enough evidence left behind after those other thefts that I was able to connect with the same fake names from the car rental company in Brazil...and that led me to Silva. I was doing some recon on an abandoned warehouse I thought might be his hideout. I wanted to get pictures of the people going in and out before contacting the local authorities to conduct a raid.
“But I never got the chance. I don’t know how, but they knew I was there. They caught me, and I thought that was the end of things. I figured I’d wind up dead in a ditch, but that’s not what happened. They started doing cult stuff...weird rituals. I nearly escaped once, but not for long. They changed me...cursed me.” He fell silent for a moment.
“And they brought you here?”
“I don’t understand why,” he admitted. “It’s not like you have any museums out here to raid.”
We were nearing the house, passing into the field where the Casimir had died centuries before. “They’re here for this place, the ancestral home of the Summerwood witches. There’s power here, in the land, and in us. They came here before, centuries ago, and were killed.” I didn’t tell him about the bodies we were riding over. Not yet.
He seemed to relax, tension in his arms dissipating. “Then you can do it again.”
I shook my head. “There are only two of us now. I don’t know...” I trailed off. I didn’t want to promise him something I couldn’t deliver.
We rode Cyrus up to the barn. We dismounted, and Bristol took the opportunity to snoot after the peacock once more. With Renan’s help, I took Cyrus’s saddle and bridle off, gave him a quick rub-down, and released him into the paddock with the goats.
I beckoned for Renan and Bristol to follow me into the house for breakfast. We were out of view of the main road, and I hoped that his presence wouldn’t bring the sheriff’s deputies parked there down on us with a bunch of questions. I had my own that needed to be answered, first.
I unlocked the back door and headed into the kitchen. We were greeted with a thunderous barrage of pots and pans flying through the air on a gale-force wind. I ducked and crouched under the kitchen table with Bristol. A cast-iron skillet struck Renan square in the chest. He slammed back against the plaster wall, wheezing with the wind knocked out of him. The plaster cracked behind his back and exhaled pale dust from a wallpaper seam.
Celeste stomped toward us, a volley of kitchen knives lining up behind her in the air for a second attack. “Leave her alone, you filthy piece of Casimir shit...”
“Celeste, no!” I yelped over the hurricane-force wind she’d summoned. I spat the hair out of my mouth. “He’s with me.”
A knife sliced through the air and stopped an inch before Renan’s nose. Celeste stalked toward him to stare at him. Her fists were clenched, and the sleeves of her blouse churned in the air.
“This is Renan,” I said. “He’s the maned wolf. He was their prisoner.” My words tumbled all over themselves. “He’s not one of them.”
She squinted at him and sniffed. “Well, he smells a bit like wet dog. But how do I know that he’s telling the truth?”
“I saw it,” I said firmly. “In my dreams. I believe him.”
Celeste stared at him menacingly for a moment. But then the wind dropped, the knives clattered to the floor, and Renan took a deep breath.
The front door crashed open, and sheriff’s deputies thundered down the hall into the kitchen, guns drawn and shouting.
“Hands up!” Sandy bellowed.
I groaned inwardly and put my hands up, peeping above the kitchen table. Renan and Celeste complied. Sandy and her fellow deputy advanced on Renan and shoved him up against the wall to cuff him. Bristol began barking furiously.
“Guys, he’s not a threat,” I said, trying to pull Bristol back by the neck of his tank top.
Sandy was busy handcuffing Renan. “That’s not what I see from here.” Her gaze sketched out the pots, pans, and knives scattered around the kitchen floor.
“This is my house,” I shouted. “So get the hell off him!”
All eyes turned toward me, including Renan’s, from where his face was smashed up against a painting of a rooster. Even Bristol shut up.
I pinched
the bridge of my nose. “He’s an insurance investigator. He’s been looking for the guys who attacked Dalton, too. He wants them for art theft.”
Sandy gave Renan a shove. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can give you my ID number. You can run it all through my employer.”
The deputy pushed him down into a kitchen chair and started taking down his information.
Sandy crossed her arms and looked at me. Her mouth turned down in disapproval. “And you two decided to go out for a morning ride?”
She’d seen us. I winced. “Yes?”
Sandy glanced pointedly back at the floor, where Celeste was picking up pots and pans. “So what the hell happened here?”
Celeste chirped, “I was going to make breakfast, but there was a rat in the kitchen. I almost killed it when you two showed up.”
Sandy’s gaze narrowed. “Rats don’t throw pots.”
“But I do.”
I helped Celeste pick up the pots, listening closely. Renan gave the cops an edited version of his story. He said that he had been tracking them in Brazil, but they’d kidnapped him and tried to kill him. He’d escaped, and he’d tailed them here.
“Then how did you meet Luna?” Sandy queried with a heavy dollop of skepticism.
“I ran into him at the feed store,” I said. “Literally. With guinea pig feed.”
The deputy interrupted. “I got confirmation. This guy’s license checks out. He’s an insurance agent with Slate and Fields Holdings in New York.”
Even in his roughed-up state, Renan projected an elegantly withering stare. “Could you please uncuff me now?”
Sandy grudgingly unlocked his cuffs. “You have some information on these guys you’re willing to share with the local yokels?”
He nodded. “I’ll have my notes sent over from my office on the items that we suspect that they’ve stolen. We think they’ve been operating a long time.”
“But why the hell are they here, in Gibson County?” Sandy growled.