Under Witch Moon (Moon Shadow Series)

by Maria E. Schneider

  "I would never have sold her the shirt had I realized she sought to control you with it. You have my apologies."

  He was miserably human, shivering uncontrollably in the corner.

  "You need to leave," I urged again. "Quickly." I moved away from the window without touching anything.

  He bolted, buck naked, for freedom. I wasn't going to stop him. More stress might cause him to revert back to full wolf form, and that stupid I was not. Instead, I looked for the shirt.

  It wasn't on Dolores, since she was completely naked. The problem with fabric protection was that it could be taken off and she had, after all, invited the werewolf into her bedroom. Had she somehow thought she could have sex with a werewolf partially clothed?

  The scene in front of me was unpleasant, but for a panicked wolf, surprisingly lacking in blood. He had killed her, but crushed her throat rather than ripped it to shreds. There were more than a few deep scratches, as if the coyote had been trying to scramble away rather than do serious damage. From what was left of the shirt, it looked as though Dolores might have tried to wrap him in it.

  The wolf had not been amused by the protection spell. I had seen at least two burns, one on his arm and another across his chest.

  When it had finally rid itself of the touch of the garment, the coyote had soiled it with urine, destroying any of the spell that hadn't burned itself up when it came in contact with his skin. The silver that was left would have to be purified. Depending on the wolf's abilities…well, it was probably best buried.

  I scanned the room one last time. There were two fancy shopping bags on a chair in front of the dressing table. The plastic one was the easy choice.

  I held my nose as I bagged the shirt. I would have sighed, but didn't want to breathe deeply. Being a witch was a messy job. Being a witch wasn't easy. I had a bad feeling that retrieving the spelled shirt wasn't going to be enough to keep myself out of further trouble.

  Chapter 2

  It would have been kinder had I been able to find a way to make sure Dolores's parents weren't the ones who found her body. Trouble was, by the time I got out of there with the evidence of my involvement, my cohort in Santa Fe had long since ceased delay tactics.

  Dolores made covering my tracks easier because of her insistence on secrecy, but I still had to zip out to the desert location where I had met her to erase all traces of my aura. If another witch were hired to trace me, I was determined that the witch would come up empty.

  When I got home, I was ready to collapse, but my luck hadn't changed. Waiting for me at my humble abode was a message, another problem. I left the shirt in the trunk of my car and got out.

  Lynx didn't care that I had had only three hours of sleep in the last twenty-four. His job was to deliver a message to me, and I'm sure whoever hired him didn't stipulate that I had to be anything other than present.

  "Job for you," he said by way of greeting.

  My friend of the underground was probably a shape shifter, but it wasn't the sort of question you inserted in casual conversation, especially if that person was Lynx. The kid regularly hired out as a spy, thief and general no-good odd-jobber. I tried not to use his more unsavory services because he was young, probably no more than thirteen, although he looked ten.

  "Can't it wait?" I whined. If Lynx could shapeshift, he was probably a were-rat rather than a lynx as his name implied. There was an outside possibility that he was a half-starved alley cat with patchy fur, quite likely diseased, definitely filthy. I knew the last part was true because not once had he ever evinced signs of having taken a bath. His black hair was so matted I'd never been sure if he was part Indian, black with an afro glued together by sweat, Mexican, or a white kid with a lot of dirt coloring his skin and hair.

  "Lady is in hurry to get this job done." He followed me inside when I unlocked the front door. "It's about a love potion."

  "I don't do love potions. No matter what it pays, it isn't worth the trouble." Most witches who did love potions only provided spells that caused wild physical attraction, not love. Those spells were the shortest-lived, but the easiest because there was a lot of unwise human nature to count on. Imagine what happened though, when the thing rotted and decayed as all spells eventually do.

  Lynx grinned, a sly twist of lips, no teeth. "I know. It's about getting rid of a love potion. My client swears her husband has been given a potion by some scientist that works at the lab."

  "Los Alamos?"

  The smile again, giving me the answer. The lab always had rumors swirling around it. It was a place of mystery, its shrouded occupants working on everything from blowing up the world to re-inventing it. "I take it the wife was not the first person he saw after drinking the love potion?"

  "Even worse." He licked his lips as though he had just finished a juicy steak. "She claims the potion was brewed as a matched set--the woman who did the brewing works at the lab, and she is the recipient."

  My eyes narrowed. Matched potions were very difficult, but they worked with the same basic properties of a tuning fork--some important ingredient, usually a plant if the witch was any good, was grown a certain way and then ingested by both people. An amulet with the ingredient was then used to keep the person bespelled; otherwise, the potion would wear off. The problem with the whole mess was that the amulet was much like hypnotism. Passion became rather…mechanical.

  "Sounds to me like the husband is having an affair with some lady at work, and the wife is looking for excuses for his despicable behavior," I said.

  Lynx's tail twitched, only he didn't have a tail. The motion was actually his hand as he nabbed a box of unopened girl scout cookies off my counter. He munched them as he explained. "My client doesn't think so. The witch at the lab is old and gross--in no way an attraction for her husband."

  "Did you expect your client to describe the woman as young and lovely?"

  He grinned, showing a lot of cookie. "For your sake, I left out the best parts of the description my client gave me. And it's true, my client could be dealing with a spell or a slut."

  "I'm too tired to think about this right now."

  "Do you take the case or not?" He rubbed two fingers together. "I get paid either way. I told her I'd go to the best."

  Unspoken was the word, "First." After he checked with me, he would move on to others. If the search went on long enough, the client would end up with nothing more than a loser in an apothecary shop who had bought something from one of the previously questioned witches. The potion might or might not contain any helpful ingredients, but there were some who believed a dead husband was a cured husband.

  I never would have taken the case without more facts had I not been so tired, but any answer would get him out the door. "Fine. I'll look into it. But I get paid whether a spell was used or not."

  He nodded happily. "Of course."

  I pointed to the fridge. "There's sandwich makings in there. Stop with the cookies--take the box for later. Make yourself a sandwich."

  He had the refrigerator opened before I finished speaking. "You want one?" he asked as he pulled out slices of chicken and bread.

  "Lettuce and tomato," I instructed tiredly, taking a seat at the table.

  "On yours?"

  I sat at the table and ignored his hint that he had no intention of eating any vegetable matter. I wanted sleep, but there was no way I could leave him anywhere in my house without supervision. He was a professional sneak. He wouldn't waste the opportunity.

  I ate my sandwich almost as fast as Lynx ate his. He watched his surroundings warily, stopping his progress on the sandwich every few seconds to listen or twist his head to the windows. I wasn't worried because it was normal behavior for him.

  "You come back tomorrow with details," I said. "I'll check things out before I name my fee."

  "You don't want the info now?"

  This was a departure from normal, but I was too exhausted to retain any information. "Tomorrow." I thought of something. "In the meantime, if you don'
t have them, I'll want names and dates of when this happened or started happening."

  "Already have it."

  "Okay." I held up my hand to stave off the recitation. "Tomorrow. Nine o'clock."

  His eyes widened briefly before checking the clock. "You don't mean this morning."

  It was already morning; dawn was only two hours away. I had to get some sleep, daytime on the way or not. "No, day after."

  "She won't like that. She wants action right away."

  "Tell her to shoot her husband if she's that mad. If he's already sleeping around, one more night won't make that much difference. If he's under a spell, it's going to take me several days to break it correctly anyway."

  Lynx tilted his head and watched me. I didn't look good; my hair had crawled out of its ponytail into snarls, and my black jeans and dark blue shirt were decorated with stucco pieces and desert dust. When I was tired, my eyes went bloodshot, and the funny green hazel streaks that were only in my left eye stood out against the whiskey brown.

  No doubt Lynx was curious about my appearance and the mood that had me putting off a desperate client, but instead of talking, I dragged my right foot across my knee and unlaced my boot.

  "You need me to do more distracting on tonight's clients?" He inspected the table for crumbs.

  It was his way of asking if he had somehow screwed the job up. In his world, those who asked direct questions ended up with no business.

  "You did fine. No more need for distraction." He'd find out soon enough about the dead girl. I wondered briefly if he would think I did it, but part of his survival was to know the people he worked for. Even though he hadn't been my contact for Dolores originally, he would know something about her werewolf infatuation or could find out.

  "Okay. Tomorrow then." He slid out of the chair. With only a whisper of sound, he was out the door, letting it close silently behind him. I hit the lights and went to the window, but it was impossible to see him. Had it been daylight I might have been able to follow him around the side of the house for fifty yards before he disappeared.

  When I was certain he was gone, I retrieved the smelly evidence from the trunk of my car. I rinsed it well with the garden hose, because water was the best cleanser in the world--of spells and of other things. I then stashed the fabric in a warded metal can filled with sand and hid it under an innocuous looking rock cairn in my backyard.

  I'd deal with real disposal or purification of the silver later.

  I went inside, set the locks and went to bed.

  Chapter 3

  Law officials generally pretended that I didn't exist. They also ignored werewolf sightings, vampires and a whole host of other ills. There were a few officials who didn't. My favorite was "White Feather." Despite the name, he didn't leave smoke signals. I didn't even know if he was Native American, but it was possible. When he wanted to talk to me, he snapped an extra padlock on the monument gate at the center of the Santa Fe plaza. A barely noticeable colored line around the middle of the lock indicated the church where we would meet.

  We never met out in the open pews. Our conversations almost always took place in a confessional. I dressed as a pious Catholic, which I was. Catholic anyway. Mostly I was a good Catholic too, but I was a practicing witch, so no one in their right mind would refer to me as pious.

  When I met with White Feather, I went as an old lady in long skirts with one of those doilies on my head. Okay, the doily was more properly referred to as a veil. I walked hunched over as if I was the last of a dying breed, and let me tell you there really were only a few old ladies left who wore hats or those, ah, doilies during Mass.

  I also wore lace gloves, even in the summer, because at twenty-six, it was impossible to hide my youth with my hands visible. My Indian policeman, and he was an officer of the law I was certain, dressed as a priest. He wore robes and a cowl. Sometimes when I was sitting in church during Mass, I tried to spot White Feather. For all I knew, he was fifty years old and bald. Hard to say, and that was the point.

  Since it was summer, I dispensed with the long wool skirt and wore a shorter dress with hefty support hose. Clever lumps were strategically placed inside the hose to make my legs bulbous and full of veins. I added old lady sock-things that were supposed to keep aged feet from swelling. All they did for me was cut off circulation.

  I took my cane instead of the usual walker. As always, I stopped to catch my breath--and to make sure no one else was using the church for an assignation. Hopefully if anyone saw me, well, let's hope no one really thought any local priest was so desperate as to be meeting with the disguised me for anything other than prayer.

  It was just after midnight. Well-rested after my day of mostly sleeping, I took my place in the confessional, breathing hard and raspy. "Forgive me father for I have sinned…" I mumbled, clacking rosary beads together.

  "As long as it wasn't you who had anything to do with murdering a young woman and trying to make it look like an animal had done so."

  I sucked in a breath so fast that had I really been old, I'd have swallowed my dentures. I knew I'd be asked about Dolores eventually, but it hadn't even been twenty-four hours.

  Before I could begin my denial, White Feather started with dry details. "No sign of sexual trauma, but like the others, she was naked, her neck ripped apart, and an arm torn completely away."

  My cough got worse, but luckily it only made my character more believable. "Others?" I squeaked. "What others?"

  "We're desperate here, Merlin."

  Merlin wasn't a terribly original name, nor was it really mine. I only used it with White Feather because I didn't need the law knowing who I was in real life. Adriel Pacheco was the name my great-grandfather used, and the one I went by professionally. I never, ever used my birth name because it could be used to bind my soul or destroy me. Granted, there weren't many witches powerful enough to bind another witch, and none who I actually knew. But even someone with minimal talent could use my real name to mimic my aura, send minor chaotic pranks my way or call images into my dreams.

  "I'd be happy to help," I told White Feather agreeably. "But I can't. I wasn't aware of the…bodies." I wondered briefly if someone had torn Dolores apart after I left, but that made no sense. What bodies was he talking about if not hers? Had the werewolf gone crazy afterwards?

  "Merlin, you can't tell me you don't know about it! It's been in the papers. Three bodies over the last two weeks. The first one we could pass off as a violent offense. Then the second one happened right before the full moon and that got the rumors going. Thank God the last one wasn't torn apart."

  I hated to name the last one. "Dolores Garcia?" I asked weakly.

  He snorted. "Well? What else can you tell me? I knew her name!"

  White Feather was usually more patient, but then, he had never asked me about serial killings before. He generally came to me about the odd witch's vengeance or crimes that occurred in the hodgepodge community of paranormal types. "I can't tell you much else. There was a werewolf involved, but…it wasn't really his fault."

  "Name?" he snapped.

  "I don't know. Young werewolf, inexperienced. The kid didn't realize she was trying to control him, possibly capture him. He got hurt during the attempt, and she ended up dead."

  "You aren't trying to tell me it was self-defense? A werewolf against a young woman?"

  It had been though, in a lot of ways. If the kid had kept his head, he probably could have escaped without killing her, but he hadn't the experience to realize what he was dealing with--not the woman or the protection spell. I tried to explain this to White Feather. "Look, she was trying to trap him. She had the means to injure him. It's a…it burns. She may have thought it was harmless fun, like light ropes holding him, but it's not. It would have been very painful, and the kid panicked."

  "So I'm looking for a young man with burns? Where? Face, arms? How old do you mean when you say young?"

  I wasn't sure the guy deserved to be captured, but I also knew the chance
s of White Feather finding him were slim. Of course, if the kid had been killing other women that was a whole different story. "I'd guess he was fifteen to eighteen." I tried to remember the burns, but the light hadn't been good. "The burns were probably...around the shoulders…maybe one across his chest, but I'm guessing based on the object used."

  White Feather gave another snort of disbelief. "His name?"

  At least I didn't have to lie. "No idea."

  "I want this kid."

  "I can't help you. I don't know who he is, I only know the likely results of the spell that was used."

  "You know he was young." The anger gave way to curiosity, a larger danger for me.

  Before he could ask how I knew the age of the werewolf, I said, "He had to be young. No experienced werewolf would have been in the room with the protection there. No sane werewolf would have been messing with someone like Dolores."

  "No one said the werewolf was sane," he muttered.

  "Well, yes. There is that possibility." I crossed myself and pushed to my feet, creaking noisily. My bones really did crack without any false effort on my part. "I'll let you know if I find out more."

  "How?"

  "Same signal at the plaza, just as you do." The plaza was full of tourists much of the time, making it easy to check for signals without standing out. I had missed the padlock a couple of times when things were busy, but he knew if I didn't appear by quarter after midnight, I wasn't going to show. He had the keys to the various churches, so if the door wasn't open, I knew something had come up, and he was a no-show.

  "I'd appreciate help on this one." I started to answer, but he whispered, "It means a lot."

  I hesitated when I heard the plea, but I had nothing else to give him. I left first, wondering why this particular case meant so much to him. He was always diligent, but rarely angry.

  Maybe if I had paid more attention to current events, I would have known the answer. Luckily that was something easily rectified.