by Jayne Hawke
Natasha pouted.
“Have you found someone else?”
Cole continued to glare at her as he said nothing. My stomach twisted, I couldn’t be sure if that meant he didn’t want Natasha to know, or if he didn’t think we were more than a few kisses here and there. Exhaling, I let the tension go and stood up.
“I’m going for a run.”
“Have fun. I’m stealing Cole away for the day,” Natasha said with a little shooing motion of her hand.
She was lucky I didn’t break her wrist as I walked past. My wolf side had set its sights on Cole, and it was not going to share.
30
To my chagrin, Natasha was a regular presence in my home over the coming few days. Cole was relaxing around her too, which did not improve my mood any. They were laughing about something from their shared past when I went into the kitchen and got the the ice cream. I wasn’t in the mood to make something healthy for lunch, and damn if I didn’t need that cookie dough and peanut butter goodness.
Natasha raised an eyebrow and looked down at me when she saw me with the fresh pint of ice cream and a spoon.
“Don’t you think you should be watching your figure?” she said.
I gave her a positively vicious smile.
“I haven’t heard any complaints about my figure from Cole.”
A dark flash went through her eyes and her lips began to curl back. Cole came up behind her and she tried to entwine her fingers with his. Cole pulled away.
“Any progress on your job, Rosalyn?”
I wrinkled my nose.
“Not yet.”
I’d been chasing down every sign of a lead I’d come across on the blood witches and come up with nothing. Amy had been trying to get me into the witches’ online library, but the techno-witches were keeping us both out. Me, for being garou; Amy, for trying to get me in.
The Grim had nothing, and the search engines were only giving me vague notions and some really weird new-age stuff. It was getting beyond frustrating. I was aware of their presence, they were waiting in the shadows somewhere. I needed to get to them before they got to Cole. They had to slip up somehow.
A notification came through on my phone. I frowned seeing it was from the Grim. A gruesome image of a wolf popped up on my screen. Its legs had been broken and its head was lolled at a horrifying angle where the neck was barely more than a few sinews. My ice cream sat forgotten as I looked for details on time and location. The notification was anonymous, which meant a techno-witch was involved somewhere.
The photo had been taken ten minutes ago about twenty minutes’ drive from home. I grabbed my keys and kissed Cole hard as I passed him before I ran out of the door. This was potentially exactly what I’d been waiting for.
The wolf was just outside of my territory. I parked the Mustang next to the road and ran between the trees, trying to ignore the urge to shift. I would be able to move more quickly, but I’d also be more distracted. Sniffing the air, I caught the scent of death and decay. Turning, I moved towards that. There were no trails here, not even game paths. I circled around looking for some sign of the path that the witches must have used to get there. Broken twigs, indents in the dirt, something.
I took my time walking gradually smaller circles looking for anything that might be useful. Footprints, a speck of blood, the hint of a scent. Breathing in deep, I tried to get past the broader scent of death and pick up something I could follow. Nothing. Moving slowly, I continued my visual search. Everything was as you’d expect. There wasn’t a single trace, and I found myself baring my teeth in frustration.
The wolf was even more mangled up close. The rage bubbled up from somewhere deep inside to see a being not that unlike myself having died in such agony. Fear and pain filled the air and my nostrils. It hung like a thick cloud surrounding a neat little circle that I couldn’t quite see.
I needed to push it all away and focus on the task at hand. I was hunting the witches. Crouching down I began with the head of the wolf. There was a small hole in its skull leaving dark blood matted in its pale grey fur. I couldn’t see any signs of magic, sigils, or anything in the dirt nearby or on the head itself. The hole was neat and precise, which made me fear that the wolf had been alive through a slow and agonising process. A rougher hole would have come from a quick blow, something that would have at least knocked it out.
The last sacrifice had symbols carved into the heart, so that was where I looked next. The chest cavity was empty. Lungs sat tossed in a small bloody heap a few inches from the wolf’s tail. It took me a minute or two of searching to find the heart. Even around the body there weren’t any scuffs in the dirt from movement, not even a stray hair from the wolf struggling.
The heart had been nailed to a tree some six or seven feet away from the main body. The innards had been removed entirely, as had the left back foot, I noticed. Upon closer inspection, I saw that there wasn’t a single drop of blood on the floor. I made a quick note of that. They’d taken the blood to use in a future spell - that was worth knowing.
The rest of the wolf’s insides and the missing back paw were all within six feet of the body. The intestines had been dumped in an unceremonious heap on top of a small scrubby bush. The paw was pushed against a slender young tree, the grey almost blending in with the dirt and bark. Picking it up, I noticed the cut was clean. White bone stood stark and bloodless, showing even that had been drained dry.
I inspected the heart while fighting back rising bile and an insatiable desire to get revenge for the fallen wolf. The symbols were different on this heart, far more spikey and aggressive. I took some photos and sent them over to Amy in the hopes maybe she’d recognise them. Something spoke of far more aggression here. I wondered if perhaps their god was growing impatient. The scene looked sloppy, filled with anger and frustration, yet they’d still manage to cover their trails well enough to give me nothing.
Closing my eyes, I tried my wolf senses. The witches couldn’t have teleported there. There had to be some sign of them somewhere. Breathing deep, I tried to smell beyond the death and fear. My ears pricked when I heard a small bell somewhere nearby. There were no accompanying footsteps.
Keeping my ears pricked, I walked slowly and carefully in the direction of the bell. Bending down, I found a small golden bell, the same size as those on a cat’s collar, caught on a small shrub. A thin red string was attached to it, and I felt triumphant. This was something from the witches, and that meant we had a tie to them.
Digging deeper, I held the bell firmly in the palm of my hand and tried to use those same instincts once more. Nothing. Only cold darkness. Sighing, I resigned myself to having made little progress. Amy would be able to help me use it to get closer to them. I took photos of it on the shrub before I delicately picked it up and tucked it in my pocket.
We were one step closer to removing the vile evil from the world.
31
The high I was riding from having found the bell at the sacrifice site dissipated when I saw Natasha draping herself over Cole in the kitchen. She seemed to be there purely to try and get back into Cole’s boxers, and the fact he hadn’t sent her packing yet was really starting to get to me.
“Rosalyn, tell me, why haven’t you broken Adam and Briar’s curse? Have they upset you somehow?” Natasha asked.
Cole stepped away from her, but the damage had already been done.
“Yes, Rosalyn,” Briar added.
I glared at her. Briar held my eye contact and smirked at Natasha before she returned to looking at me.
My instincts told me to put the insolent little cub down, but that wasn’t how I worked.
“I thought you were a guardian?” Natasha said.
I exhaled slowly. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been trying, I’d been wrapped up in the blood witch problem. Admitting that I had no idea how to break the curse, or be a guardian, wasn’t something I was going to do.
“You know, I think the rumors are false. She’s not really a guardian. Look at her,” Briar pointe
d at me.
I bared my teeth at Briar and snarled. She shot backwards and dropped her eyes immediately.
“Rosalyn is a guardian,” Cole said coolly.
The entire room stilled and turned towards Cole. That was the kind of presence I needed to have.
“Well then why hasn’t she-” Natasha started.
“Rosalyn has been very busy with other far more important matters. Adam and Briar need to learn their place in the world. Their disobedience and lack of respect is entirely unacceptable,” Cole said.
Briar sniffled. The crocodile tears were back.
“That seems like a very cruel punishment,” Natasha said as she put her hand on Cole’s upper arm.
Cole removed her hand and walked to me.
“Rosalyn did not place the curse upon them, and there are times when I wonder if they deserve the curse. Never before have I met such unruly garou.”
“We’re sorry,” Adam said softly.
“Apologise to Rosalyn, not me,” Cole growled.
Briar tensed and curled her hands into fists.
“I have things to get done. I’ll get dinner with Amy,” I said.
Cole’s fingers brushed over the palm of my hand as I turned away. My little pack was falling apart at the seams, and it was all thanks to Natasha. The woman Cole had once loved enough to be engaged to. The same woman he insisted on bringing into our home day after day.
“Am I being completely ridiculous?” I asked Amy as I shovelled another large spoonful of ice cream into my mouth.
“Not at all. Cole’s being a selfish jerk.”
I nodded. That’s what I’d thought but it felt good to have someone else say it. I knew we hadn’t really done much, but he was supposed to be pack, and this felt like a huge betrayal. I couldn’t shake the sensation that Natasha was stealing my pack out from under me, and nothing hurt more than that.
“Did the bell help at all?” I asked.
I couldn’t spend the entire night wallowing in the pitiful excuse that was my love life.
“I believe so. It definitely came from one of the witches, I can feel that much. My goddess is very quiet on the subject, though, which means we need to get into the witch archives to translate those symbols. Do you own an all-black outfit…?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe?”
Amy grinned.
“I think we can get into the physical witches’ library. We’ll have to do it at one AM though, that’s when everyone’s distracted doing their rituals and such. Being the witching hour and all.”
A thrill ran through me. It wasn’t so much at being surrounded by ancient magical tomes, but more for breaking into the witch sanctuary. I wrinkled my nose as I realised I understood the thrill Briar talked about.
“I really need to break that curse,” I said.
Amy put her hand on mine.
“It’s all down to your instincts. You need to awaken your guardian side, or become one with it. Then you’ll be able to do it.”
The weird hippie stuff didn’t sit well with me, but what other choice did I have?
32
I’d told Cole I was crashing at Amy’s for the night. There was no need to get him into trouble with the council if we got caught. Amy bounced on the balls of her feet as I did the laces up on my boots. She was dressed in black yoga pants, a black shirt, hoodie, and a ridiculous little black beanie hat. I’d opted to assume that my hair was dark enough and forgone the hat.
“I haven’t done anything like this since I was a little girl. I snuck into one of the techno-labs and sat up watching them do one of their rituals. I was grounded for a month and had to scrub the house from top to toe after they caught me,” Amy said with a laugh.
Her glee was contagious, and I soon found myself grinning like a fool with her as we drove to the library with cheesy 00’s pop music blaring. We sang along to the music I’d heard when I was little, and got half of the words wrong which only made us laugh more. We should have been stoic and serious, we were doing something that could get us into a lot of trouble. Yet the exhilaration of what we were about to do was making me far too happy to worry about something like that. It felt fantastic to get away from the stress and tension that had been building at home. Briar kept pushing in little ways, and Natasha was, well, herself.
The library was a simple, plain cream building with small windows and a presence that made it blend into the suburban surroundings it had been planted in. That was intentional, of course. Humans didn’t go poking around boring buildings that looked like the bland offices and such all around them. They were interested in the spooky dilapidated houses and the expensive-looking mansions.
Amy took a deep breath, and the giddy happiness washed away leaving a serious witch ready to do something potentially very dangerous. I ran my fingers over my knives as I followed her around the back of the building. The small round shrubs were evenly spaced down to what looked like the quarter inch. Everything about them was identical, and something about it freaked me out. Sniffing the air, I realised there must have been some magic running over the building that was setting me on edge.
“It’s a defence mechanism to keep non-witches away,” Amy reassured me.
I couldn’t help but notice the fact that the building looked too perfect to be real. It had that bizarre uncanny valley thing going on, and I couldn’t quite pick out the details that told me why I thought that. Looking up at the sky, there was an oddness there, too. It felt as though I’d stepped into a huge bubble or glamour and nothing was quite right. My eyes wouldn’t pick out the details, but it was a broader sense of wrongness that I couldn’t shake.
We stopped outside the small black door with the heavy lock, and I looked around for another way to get in. The walls were perfectly smooth, and the windows looked to have heavy locks on them. It was all on Amy and her lock-picking skills. I moved away and stood guard while she did her magic. I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do against guard witches, but I had my knives and a can-do attitude.
There was lots of whispering that sounded like a negotiation. I wondered if Maat wasn’t quite as game for this plan as Amy had led me to believe. The consequences for going against a deity had to be pretty severe. I wondered just how much the blood witches were suffering and had a fleeting feeling of pity for them. It faded into anger for all of the pain they’d caused. No one forced them to become Aztec blood witches, at least I didn’t think so.
I was in the middle of a moral dilemma in my head over whether the witches were as evil as I’d assumed when Amy ushered me inside.
Some part of me expected booby traps and layers of magic within the building, but I didn’t see or feel anything. On one hand, it was only a library. On the other, a library was full of knowledge that the witches had worked very hard to keep hidden. The air was a little cooler than outside, but that could have been to protect the books. We walked quickly down the plain hallway with large pale grey tiled floor and soft gold walls. I kept waiting for something to jump out at us. Amy led me up the broad staircase that would have been at home in a high school and through the well-worn wooden double-doors into the library itself.
The shift in aesthetic was huge. Behind me was what I could only describe as high school chic. The library itself was something that Belle would have married the Beast on the spot for. Three stories of bookshelves sprawled out before me. The walls were packed full of dark wooden shelves with beautiful scrollwork making its way up along the edges. Upon closer inspection, I saw the elegant spellwork carved into the wood and was compelled to run my fingertips along the smooth wood. I then realised there was a chance that someone had felt that. The spellwork could have been tied into a thousand things, and my non-witch status might have screwed something up.
There were books with every binding in every size and shape you could imagine upon those shelves. The aisles formed by further shelves were wide and had tables and very comfortable leather-covered chairs at even intervals. I breathed in deep,
taking in the familiar scent of old books, leather, and canvas. A calm came over me as though I’d returned home at long last. It was an unnatural calm that I shook off as much as I could. Allowing this place to lull me into a sedate state seemed like a very bad idea. Beneath the calm was the sensation of stepping in the maw of a great beast, and it was ready to snap its jaws closed around me.
Amy took my arm and tugged me along to the section on Aztec magic. She clearly knew her way around the place despite having suffered a ban a while ago. When I asked about it, Amy changed the subject; the ban was clearly a sensitive topic.
“We have maybe ten minutes before we get caught,” she whispered.
Well, that made things a bit more difficult. I was glad to not be spending long in that place though. The deeper we walked into the depths of it, the more aware I was of that sensation I was about to be devoured.
“Don’t take any books. Just take photos of useful sections.”
I had no idea what the titles meant so I pulled the biggest books off the shelves and flipped through until I saw something that looked like a sacrifice or a ritual. I took as many photos as I could. There wasn’t really time to read details and try to really research. The clock was ticking and the need to run was crawling up my spine and making my feet itch.
A small alarm went off and Amy took my arm and we ran out of there. Relief flooded me as we stepped back out into the bland stairway. I glanced through the slowly closing doors and saw a soft blue light start in the middle of the library and slowly spread outwards. That didn’t look good. It made me think a bit too much of one of those disintegration rays from the cheesy old horror movies.
“That’s the ward checking for intruders,” Amy hissed as she pulled me along.
“It looks like it does a lot more than check for them,” I said.
Amy gripped my hand tighter and we jumped down the last few stairs before we shot down the hallway towards the door. I could feel the disintegration ray close on our heels. There was a prickly coldness chasing us through the doorway.