Under Witch Moon (Moon Shadow Series)

by Maria E. Schneider

  "She's working with Arturo."

  He had just confirmed my worst fears. I handed him the cup of tea. "Drink it all."

  He looked like he might bat it away.

  "First thing is to get your strength up," I told him. "The rest we'll take care of later."

  "I have to get it back!"

  "I know." I glanced nervously at White Feather. Now that the emergency was over, he looked like an owl that had been rudely awakened during a daylight nap.

  "He needs a doctor," was his only comment.

  "How is your arm?" I asked Lynx

  Lynx gulped his tea without answering.

  "I'm going to get you some food." I pointed to the Gatorade. "Drink a bunch of that."

  White Feather followed me back to the kitchen. "His arm needs to be set."

  I took out eggs and cheese. "I don't know. I've heard that if he can change back and forth, he can heal it."

  "Rumor. It might not be set perfectly, and if he changes, wouldn't it then be stuck wrong?"

  "Or maybe it would straighten out." I cracked the eggs into a skillet. "I mean, if there are changes, the bone has to change."

  We stared at each other, wondering. When the eggs sizzled, I added slices of cheese. I handed White Feather a plate with some of the eggs. The rest I took into Lynx.

  He was starved, but around mouthfuls he declared, "I've got to go back."

  "Yeah, Sheila still has something of mine too." There was an exclamation from the doorway. I didn't want to face White Feather, so I watched Lynx.

  Lynx said, "Bastard, Arturo. I started to wonder, you know? I wasn't working for him. No way. But I offered my protection services. So did Zandy, but then he'll do anything, always branching out. Offered me in on a deal, supposed to be easy stuff. Deliveries."

  "Deliveries?"

  He paused in his eating. "He brings animals that he gets from Arturo up to the clinic in White Rock. The witch, she picks what she wants. Cats, dogs, anything he captures. Rats. Remember them?"

  I nearly gagged. "Not only rats?"

  Lynx shook his head. "She sews them together. Spells them, whatever. Mixes them up, tries to do something to them." He shook his head with incomprehension. "It's like she thinks she can make a shape shifter by taking parts from one and adding it to another."

  "That doesn't make sense, Lynx. Everyone knows that shape shifters come from whatever bit them. Or infected them. Is she trying to--" My mind boggled. "Is Sheila looking for a cure?"

  Lynx gave me a look of total disgust. "Cure?"

  "Okay, okay." I held up my hands so he wouldn't smack me. The pounding of my heart was obviously getting too much blood into my head. "The fact that she is a scientist confused me for a moment."

  "She ain't trying to create a shifter, because she collects those too." His hands fisted. "Zandy set me up. He hired me. Because I was the next delivery."

  "Oh...no."

  "Only this time, she took Zandy too. He thought he was so smart, but I almost got away. I saw those rats, I knew something was up."

  "You made a run for it."

  He nodded. "But it didn't work out. Zandy's a shifter too."

  It probably wasn't often that Lynx couldn't outrun something. "Why does she want shifters?"

  "Zandy said she needed us because the shifter she had escaped, but that ain't true. Well, maybe one of them escaped, but who you think did this to me?" He looked down at the bruises. They were already healing, but he was covered with purple, green and yellow bumps.

  "A shifter did this to you?"

  "Maybe it wasn't a shifter, maybe she created it, I don't know." He looked up, his eyes haunted. "It was a thing. It wasn't human, and it wasn't any animal I ever seen."

  White Feather drew in a sharp breath. "She is running experiments on shifters."

  Lynx shoveled more food before answering. "I think she's trying to make a shifter that can shift into more than one thing, but I dunno. The thing I saw…whatever it is…it shifts, but it's never human."

  "Are you," I choked. "Are you okay, Lynx?"

  His eyes cut to mine and for the first time, there was humor. "You worried what I might do?"

  I nodded, completely serious.

  That earned a smirk, but then he shrugged. "She wanted me to change. Made Zandy change. Zandy said he'd help her. He gave her blood, took some kind of shot." Lynx wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It was shaking. "I gotta take a shower. Water helps, right?"

  "Some." Now wasn't the time for false hope. "There's herbs by the tub. It's a start."

  I helped him up. "Did she give you any shots?" I asked fearfully.

  He shook his head. "No way. I wouldn't even eat. I made my own grave, and she was gonna have to dig me out if she wanted my body."

  We made sure he got to the bathroom without collapsing.

  Back in the kitchen, I fixed more eggs and cheese.

  "What does she have of yours?" White Feather finally asked.

  "I don't know." Haltingly, I gave him highlights of the break-in and why.

  "We can't leave the situation like it is," White Feather said when I was finished.

  "I know." I finished picking at breakfast and rinsed the plates in the sink. "I didn't know she had shot Zandy full of something either. You were right, we should have kept him here."

  "We'll get him." White Feather sounded a lot more sure of it than I felt.

  "Before or after he does damage?" My voice was raw. Everything felt raw.

  "I guess that all depends on what she gave him." He looked at his watch. "I think it's time I gave Gordon another call. He can start looking in certain places."

  I nodded. While White Feather made phone calls maybe I could figure out a way to protect myself against Sheila. Then again, probably not. I was way outside my league. The things she dabbled in wouldn't even cross my mind.

  Still, a witch had to try.

  Chapter 36

  It made the most sense to go in broad daylight when Sheila was at work, break in and get what we were after. I was certain I could get Vi, via Harold, to call me when Sheila arrived for work at Los Alamos.

  Between my spell making and Gordon's latest information, that plan ran way late.

  The spell to protect myself was pretty simple; double silver crosses that worked a lot like a circuit breaker. They were connected with silver wire and spelled with my hair, skin and blood because I didn't know what Sheila had of me. In theory, if Sheila hit me with anything, the first cross would absorb the spell and then break the circuit between the crosses. The bad spell should remain trapped in the silver. Hopefully, this design would work better than the glass. Under pressure all the beads had shattered, probably from a single spell. With the circuit breaker design, I should, theoretically, be able to stop more than one spell.

  Once my protection was finished, I struggled to make a spell to protect Lynx. He was a shifter. He couldn't wear silver. I knocked at the guest room door and tossed him the protection packet I had made for him days ago. It wasn't going to be anywhere near enough.

  "You don't have any problems with silk, right?"

  He peered blearily at me. "No." The one eye he had bothered to open, closed. I chewed my lip anxiously. Silk was a good block for dormant or inactive spells, but it wasn't much use against active ones.

  "Will silk protect you from silver?"

  Both eyes flew opened. "What?"

  "I'm concocting a spell to protect you from Sheila."

  "She has my blood. Ain't nothing that works against that." His eyes flicked to the packet that had landed on the bed. Disdainfully, he ignored it and looked toward the window.

  "Not entirely. But it wouldn't hurt to have something stronger to deflect spells she might throw at you."

  It went downhill from there. I tried the silk, but it wasn't enough protection against the silver. He screamed outright.

  "I'm sorry, sorry!" I was near tears myself.

  White Feather came running. I explained what I was trying to do.
"Leather," he suggested.

  "Hmm." I went back to my workroom. White Feather followed.

  He had other things on his mind besides concoctions. "I talked to Gordon. The DNA finally came back. Looks like you were right about Zandy. The DNA traces on the wolf that killed Dolores didn't match the other kills."

  "I could have told you that." I had thread in my mouth so it probably wasn't very clear. Would a leather pouch be better or a flat piece glued to silver?

  "You did tell me that. The good news is that now Gordon knows for sure to look for more than one killer."

  I pointed to the willow stick that contained Zandy's hair. "I meant I could have used Zandy's tuning fork to prove to Gordon that Zandy was only connected to Dolores. Zandy's aura wouldn't have been anywhere near those other bodies assuming he was innocent. It would only show up on Dolores."

  "Auras?" He stared at the stick. "You could tell me if the werewolf was the same in all the other cases?"

  "I could tell you if the auras were the same around all the bodies. But doesn't the DNA already tell you that?"

  He nodded. "It does, but could we get more out of the aura?"

  I thought about it. "I don't know. It isn't as though I could tell you who it is unless I already had something from the wolf. Then it's a lot like DNA; I could match it to the auras left on the victims."

  "But maybe you could find something we missed. On the man who was killed, there was no DNA other than his own, nothing to send to the labs. Everything they sent matched up with himself."

  "That's odd."

  "The body was torn apart, like the others, but there was no evidence of a sexual crime and no other DNA anywhere."

  I hunted through my cabinets for leather lacing. "I could tell you pretty quickly if there was another aura around the guy, but auras are a lot like DNA. They can be cleaned up also."

  White Feather wasn't one to give up easily. "Understood, but it's worth a try. Whoever cleaned up the DNA might not have known to clean up the auras. I'll get some samples." He disappeared out the door, leaving me to my spells.

  I shrugged and turned back to my Lynx problem. "Kid, there has got to be a way."

  Probably an hour before White Feather returned, I hit on the answer. I prepared a spell much like my own. The only trouble was that Lynx didn't want to donate any blood.

  "You walk in there trying to take what is yours unprotected, she will end up owning you," I told him.

  "I'll die first," he snarled.

  "It won't be your choice. You know that."

  "There's plenty of other werewolves she can have! Why she gonna bother again with me? Shit, Zandy, he took that shot, she told him she was going to let him go, live his normal life. All he had to do was come back for appointments."

  "Pretty easy to make him do it too," I said.

  There was a lot of silence on my part and hard breathing on his. He wouldn't look at me, he just clenched his fists over and over. When I got up to leave, I saw claws.

  "How much?" he asked.

  "A drop on the silver."

  His eyes got wide. "Silver?"

  "Here's the idea." I explained how the blood spell would hit the silver and then break the circuits. I explained how he was going to wear it wrapped in leather. Then came the hard part. I looked away from his wide, desperate eyes. "You're going to take the silver out of the pouch and hold it in your hand." He started to shake his head, but I kept talking. "The silver and the pain should be enough to help you resist for long enough that the spell gets trapped in the silver. You drop it back in the leather."

  "This sounds like a one-time deal."

  "She probably won't have too many spells sitting around. She's going to try to call you back, and you have to be ready. Once you break the first one, she's only going to set a stronger spell, but the idea is that we get the blood back before she has time to work the next spell."

  "She might run out of blood."

  "She probably won't," I said.

  A long, pointed fingernail slid from his forefinger. He pricked his own hand. Off-guard, I almost didn't get the silver beads underneath the blood in time.

  "I'll be back." I went to the lab and finished the spell. Lynx had beads instead of a cross and several more in a row than I had made for myself. Sheila would have more than one spell ready. Hopefully, the first bead would stop some. Anything that got through would get stopped at another bead and so on.

  I took the spell back to Lynx. We used leather to secure it around his upper arm, one of his least injured spots, although he was healing fast. At some point he must have changed, because his broken arm didn't look broken anymore.

  "When?" he whispered.

  "I thought we'd go today, but I had to do the spells. Tomorrow, I guess, while she's at work."

  He glared. "Night is better."

  "She'll be there at night, Lynx. We don't want her there."

  "I'm going to kill her."

  "One thing at a time," I said.

  It was like making spells. We had time for anger, but not for mistakes.

  Chapter 37

  I was back in the lab cursing myself for not thinking of gold sooner when White Feather came back. The reason I hadn't thought of gold for Lynx was pretty simple. Usually if my clients wanted it, they had to pay for it. Lynx wasn't the sort of client who had gold, and I wasn't the sort of witch who had much of it either.

  After knocking politely on the open door to the lab, White Feather said, "I've got some tissue sample slides, and a couple of clothing items."

  "Okay, come on in." I was almost finished melting the only gold chain I owned. It contained enough gold to make two small balls. I hooked a silver filament between them. "Sheila's blood spells will probably blow through this like a screen door," I mumbled.

  White Feather shuffled his feet. It distracted me, but I wanted to finish so I ignored him. I needed more blood from Lynx. "Hang on a second."

  Thankfully, Lynx cooperated a lot quicker this time.

  Coming back to the lab, I checked the filament and pronounced it done. Turning to White Feather I asked, "What have you got?"

  "Can I set these here?"

  I moved a few things from my worktable. He set down a large load of plastic bags, lining them up neatly. They were all labeled.

  "Wouldn't this go badly if a jury knew these came here?" I asked.

  "They're all extra samples. You'll notice I only brought fragments of the clothing, not the entire garment. In two of the cases, there were no clothes."

  I went to my store of willow. "Let's see what I can do."

  There was no point in using much of the wood. With everything right in front of me, I didn't need full forks. Size and flexibility were important, but if the spell worked we could get fancier later if necessary.

  "Why didn't you try this with your own abilities?" I asked while I whittled.

  "I never thought of it. Sensing magic is pretty easy for me, but I've never tried to separate auras." He shrugged. "There are auras around these items, but I'd have to study the problem for a while before I could do what your spell does."

  "What about when you used that spell to help me track Lynx?"

  "All I did yesterday was tack the wind onto your spell. The focus was already there. So was the magic from the willow."

  "Oh." I showed him the strands of Zandy's hair that were tied to the fork. "Following an actual signal takes some natural ability. I know witches who can make the forks, but couldn't find their own socks with it. I've also sold a fork or two to normals who can use them without any training. This is a spell you can teach your sister. It's very basic and almost anyone with even the slightest talent should be able to make it work. Same for witching for water or other elements."

  When everything was set, I loaded the first fork by touching the tissue sample. I set it aside and loaded the next one.

  On the second fork, as soon as I linked it to tissue, it tugged. I let it spin freely. It aimed between two of the clothing bags. "These belo
ng together."

  He nodded. "Two of the girls went on their date together. There was a lot of shared body fluids and everything else at that scene. What else does it tell you?"

  I shrugged and continued working. "Not much."

  The third fork pinged strongly back to the originating tissue. I set it aside.

  The forth one spun all over the place, falling off my open palm. It landed pointing at the table, but all the objects were on the table. "Hmm."

  "Contaminated?" He frowned over the bags, studying the codes.

  I moved the objects further apart, and then picked up the fork. It oscillated frantically between two of the loaded forks and the other objects on the table. "This isn't Zandy's sample, is it?"

  He checked. "No."

  I went and retrieved Zandy's fork. It found Dolores' tissue sample and a DNA sample, but ignored everything else. "Let's separate these more."

  We got better organized. The fourth fork went most strongly for the tissue it came from, but it also pinged every other fork and item except that of Dolores and the DNA I assumed must belong to Zandy. "Who is this?" I demanded.

  "It's the guy--the one who had no other DNA on him." He grabbed the fork. "Let me try that."

  The fork swung around and with White Feather's adrenalin behind it, it landed on the floor. The thing looked like it might hop its way over to the original tissue. He picked it up again. "How do I control this thing?"

  "Hold onto it. Don't put your magic anywhere; it doesn't need it."

  He got pretty much the same results only the fork kept falling off his hand. "What does it mean?"

  "The guy was somehow linked to the samples of the other five women," I said. "Did the DNA show that?"

  "There was no foreign DNA on him. They found nothing at all."

  "Yeah, I know, but did they find his DNA," I pointed at the slide, "on any of them?"

  White Feather stared at me. "I don't think anyone looked. Each of these was handled weeks apart. Samples were sent in. The investigators were looking for foreign DNA. There was no sexual crime against the guy and no foreign matter."

  "So no one took his DNA and compared it to the foreign DNA on the other victims?"