by Nash, Layla
When I said nothing, Lincoln frowned just slightly. “And so it seems there is magic here, and that you are a witch.” His hand stilled where he continued to wipe away the blood on my throat, and for a long time, he just looked at me.
Hazel leaned forward to offer a swab and small test-tube. “Test her blood now. It’s been long enough that we’ll probably see the antibodies if she was exposed.”
“She was exposed,” Nelson said from across the tarp. “We all saw the bites. And we can’t burn the bodies until this damn rain lets up.”
“Shut up,” Hazel said under her breath, and she offered a smile to me. “We can hope your spell got in the way before the venom reached your bloodstream.”
Hope. I squeezed my eyes shut as Lincoln ran the swab into the wound on my shoulder, and stabbing pain followed. I probably needed stitches, and she was talking about hope. I knew better than to hope for anything.
Lincoln squeezed my wrist, just above where the restraints held me. “It’ll turn purple if you’ve been exposed. Two minutes to process.”
I didn’t want to look at the tube where they’d put the swab. It didn’t really matter. I needed to stop listening to them and plan how I was going to escape the restraints and their little team. Figuring out where they came from and what they wanted—and what they intended to do about there being magic in the Crossroads – would come second. It didn’t sound like they liked witches or wanted them hanging around, and they didn’t seem like people who set out to solve problems like rogue werewolves with talking and hand-holding. If I hadn’t killed the werewolves, apparently Lincoln and his team would have. Hopefully witches fared a little better.
Breathing evenly took a great deal more effort as Hazel sighed. “Purple.”
The test tube had turned a brilliant lilac. Lincoln’s expression tightened, the lines around his eyes deepening. “Just because you were exposed doesn’t mean you’ll turn. It could take a while for that to manifest. We can give you the pain meds now, at least.”
And Hazel again leaned over me, popping another syringe into my thigh. I opened my mouth to tell them all to fuck off again, but the warm flood of morphine flushed through me and I almost cried in relief as the pain faded away. I exhaled a gust, and my hands, tightened into fists since before they tied me down, finally relaxed. I’d never really prayed in my life, but all I could think was “hallelujah.”
My eyes drooped and something in Lincoln relaxed as well. He remained next to me, occasionally patting the cloth along my forehead and cheeks, as Mason and Nelson kept an eye on Eddie and set up the tents. I wondered what they expected me to do, staked to the ground like that—just sleep in the grass? Already the cold seeped into my bones, even with the warmth of morphine and pain relief.
And without the pain shredding my thoughts to splinters, I could finally think, though my thoughts took great giant loops to get around to the point.
Hazel started a fire, though I didn’t see whether she used flint or matches or magic, nor where she got the dry wood. More magic, it seemed like. And Mason tried to talk to Eddie, explaining why they’d done what they’d done. But the park ranger was unmoved and unmoving, his focus on me. I had to get us out of that little predicament, since Eddie’s approach with the rifle was more likely to just get him killed. It was my fault the ranger was caught up in all that.
My fingers stroked through the grass under my hands, and as my nails worked into the dirt, I felt the familiar glimmer of power. Of course. The ley lines. We were still in the Crossroads, and the ley lines still ran more strongly through here, closer to the surface and broader and deeper and carrying unbelievable power. I exhaled, ready to reach out for the magic and heal myself right up so I could walk out into the rain and call down lightning on them, but paused as Lincoln leaned down.
“Are you the only witch in your family? Or are all the women witches?”
“Not your business,” I said. The ley lines hovered just under my hands, and I realized they’d managed to stake me to a crossroad of smallish ley lines. Foolish. Just plain foolish. So either they couldn’t sense the ley lines, didn’t know they existed, or didn’t bother to check where they were.
“We’re not your enemy, Anastasia,” he said, gently enough I almost believed him. Even if he used my first name like I’d asked him not to. “We’re not. It may seem that way right now, but I promise you, we’re not the enemy.”
“Tell me again what you’re going to do if I supposedly turn into a werewolf?” My words slurred together with the morphine, but the ley lines tickled my fingers and helped clear away some of the fog. I drew on them just a touch, feeding the power into whatever kind of spell Hazel managed to work on my wounds, and hoped I could at least avoid stitches. And turning into a werewolf.
His lips thinned. “If you turn, you’re a danger to the town and everyone you love. The were virus is just as bad as Ebola; it kills innocent people, and turns them into carriers of the disease that they unleash on their friends and family and whole communities. We have to eradicate it.” He rubbed his jaw, the beard rasping under his palm. “I’m sorry. We don’t have a cure yet. But it wouldn’t be a good life if you carried on with the virus. It’s not a good way to live.”
“But it’s my life, not yours.” My eyes drooped more until I only saw him through a haze of eyelashes, and my fingers dug more into the earth as I coaxed the ley lines into feeding me more power. With enough of it, I could stop the rain and burn the wolf bodies and get Eddie and myself to safety.
“And your sisters? How would the town treat them if you turned into a werewolf instead of a witch? How can you protect them when you’re a threat yourself?”
He had no idea what he was talking about. He thought he understood, but it was like he was translating one language into another language into another, then back to the first. There were pieces and parts and nuances missing, holes and things that didn’t agree. It might have the gist of the first message, but it wasn’t the same.
I didn’t dignify the questions with a response. That would have just encouraged him, and distracted me from my mission. I wondered whether those seer stones would trigger against ley magic, or if it was just the natural kind of magic that came from witches.
A frown pulled at the numb muscles in my face. Maybe Hazel was a witch. She didn’t feel like the same kind of witch as my sisters and aunts and the other Lucketts. Maybe there were different kinds of witches. Huh. The thought hadn’t really occurred to me before, as outlandish as that was. I’d been so focused on my own trials and tribulations that I’d never stopped to think whether any other witch families might be stuck in small towns across the country. That was one of those morphine thought-bubbles that drifted up and away before I could hold on to it.
“Luckett,” Lincoln said, and my attention drifted back to him. “Are your sisters witches?”
“No,” I said, and the lie came easier than any truth I’d ever told. “Just me.”
“Do they know you’re a witch?”
“Of course they do.” The very idea was absurd, that I could have perhaps hidden such a thing from my sisters for the last twenty-odd years. “Everyone in town knows.”
Lincoln leaned closer still, until I could almost feel his breath on my cheek. “People in this town have seen you work magic before, and you’re refusing to tell me about a damn healing spell?”
My lips twitched in what might have been a smile, though I’d certainly never think to taunt a federal agent. Particularly when I was staked to the ground like some kind of sacrifice for a hungry dragon. Or the poor goat from that dinosaur movie, left to nibble his hay and wait for the terrible lizard to gobble him up. I snorted, entertained by the drift of my thoughts, and sighed. “They’ve never seen it. But they know because they know. It’s a small town with a long history and in the center of all the trouble—and all the saving—of Rattler’s Run are the Lucketts. That’s the long and the short of it.”
“If you ask anyone in that town about her, they
’ll lie to you,” Eddie said. His fury still boiled around him, his lips pulled back from his teeth in an almost feral snarl. I started to wonder if maybe he’d been the one bitten, not me. “They’ll protect her the second they know you want to take the Lucketts away from this town. It might be mostly superstition for them, but they won’t allow it.”
“They’ll never know,” Hazel said, too casual for it to be a normal boast. “We can make her disappear, hon, and you along with her, and no one will know the difference. So why don’t you calm down and help us figure out how to get all of this sorted out?”
“Don’t worry about it, Eddie,” I said, but clamped my lips together before I just went ahead and told him about my plan to escape. The morphine definitely affected my self-censorship.
Lincoln smiled just a touch, like he knew what I was thinking, and I started to wonder what manner of witch or beastie he was. Maybe one that could read minds. That would be just my luck, too. And since I had the convenient excuse of the morphine addling my brain, I gave him a narrow-eyed look. “So what the hell are you?”
“What am I? Like I said, a federal agent.”
“No,” I said, my head rolling back and forth in the grass as I shook it. “Hazel’s some kind of witch, those other two are oompa-loompas or something, and you’ve got to be something. Vampire, maybe. Chupacabra. The Growly Fart you were talking about earlier. Bigfoot.”
I drifted off a little, naming random creatures, until Lincoln smiled a real smile and used the damp rag to stem the flow of words from my drug-addled mind. “I can’t tell you what I am, Luckett.”
“Come on,” I said. “You’re probably going to try to kill me anyway, so you might as well. Abominable Snowman?”
“Giving someone a name to call you by is a powerful thing,” he said. “And I don’t think you’re ready to hear it, anyway.”
“Loch Ness monster?”
Even Hazel cracked a smile, shaking her head as she scraped something out of the pan over the fire. “Good to see that you’ve got most of your mental faculties about you. That’s a good sign.”
“You have no idea,” I said. My eyes drifted closed again as the ley lines sang, stirring from their sluggish slumber beneath the earth. I exhaled and drew the magic up and up and up through me, wondering what it might have been like to cast with a coven, back when there was more than one branch of the Luckett family tree. A stray thought escaped before I could bite it back or even worry what it might mean. “You have no idea what you’ve done.”
They would, though. They would learn what it meant to threaten the Lucketts.
“What have we done?” Mason asked, crouching nearby to hand Lincoln a bowl and his water bottle.
“Woken the beast,” I said, mostly a sigh. Maybe I meant me, maybe I meant another beast. Who could tell?
Nelson sat up not far from us, his eyes on the seer stone. “Uh, Lincoln...”
I knew my time was up. I called the ley lines through me until the power burned up my skin and dried all my clothes and even healed most of the bites on my shoulder before it burst out and I directed it somewhere useful. Hazel cursed and jumped up, her hands held out as she tried to do something to contain the magic, but it flowed around her. That was the thing with ley magic—it moved like water. It always found a way, and it could wear down the hardest stone or the most perfect fence. It was just a matter of time.
Lincoln called something to Nelson, though it was Mason who brought the seer stone and held it over me, and it felt as though a vacuum tried to suck up all the magic as it left me.
It wouldn’t work, of course, because it wasn’t my magic. It was natural and raged like a river under the earth. I was just the vessel through which it flowed. The seer stone shattered in his hands and sent chunks and dust all over me. I curled the magic up and out, into the rain clouds to send them again to the east, where the farmers needed rain. A few more tendrils of magic drifted down to where the bodies of the werewolves waited, and the carcasses disappeared in puffs of smoke and ash. The magic didn’t like them any more than I did, as they lay on the earth like malevolent plague-carrying blights.
And then my work was done. The storm passed, the werewolves were gone, and that damn seer stone was destroyed. There was just the matter of... I opened my eyes and found Lincoln and Hazel and Mason standing around me, trying to set up odd gadgets in a circle. The magic flowed into the metal that kept me restrained, and melted through it so the shackles fell away. I directed the magic back into the earth, and waited until it was safely away before I sat up and brushed off the chains.
I felt a little better, though the magic hadn’t taken care of the morphine haze, so it took a while to order my thoughts as I watched the federal agents stare at me, open-mouthed.
Eddie leaned back, his own expression a bit shocked, and his face paled as he watched me sit up and drop the pieces of metal on the ground. It must have seemed impressive, I supposed, to watch the rain stop abruptly and the wolves fade to ash.
I yawned and slowly got to my feet, enjoying that the federal agents stepped back, though I wasn’t sure what those gadgets were supposed to be. “Is dinner ready?”
Hazel’s eyes looked more silver than normal, and her hands trembled just a bit as she held the odd metal contraption in my direction. “That’s not…not possible. The storm? How did you do that?”
“Not my secret to tell,” I said. “When you all feel like sharin’, maybe I’ll be inspired to do the same. Just make sure you don’t try to tie me up like that again.”
It wouldn’t work the same outside of the Crossroads, not when the ley lines were so much weaker in town, but they didn’t need to know that. I gestured at the blackened grass where the werewolves had been. “At least I cleaned up for you. It should have gotten all the blood and other stuff at the same time, but you might want to double check if you’re concerned about contamination.”
Lincoln didn’t look happy. But he gestured for me to turn. “Let me look at those wounds. Are they healed?”
“Mostly,” I said. I didn’t feel a hundred percent, but it was better than wallowing in agony and hoping they remembered to give me more morphine. I tried to stay out of his reach, though I moved the shredded tatters of my shirt so he could see the shiny pale scars. “It should have gotten rid of the virus as well.”
“We won’t know that for a while,” Mason said. He and Nelson both remained out of reach, as if they feared getting too close to me. “So you’re not out of the woods just yet.”
They wouldn’t stop me, not if we stayed in the Crossroads. Nothing they had on them, none of those gadgets and fancy stones, could match the power of the ley lines. And since it seemed pretty clear they didn’t know anything about ley magic, it would remain my only advantage as we tried to figure out whether I would turn into a werewolf.
Lincoln exhaled a gust, as if he’d been holding his breath for a while, then tilted his head at the fire. “Fine. Eat up, but for your own safety and ours, we need to chain you before you sleep. If you turn in the middle of the night and aren’t restrained, you could bite us all and we’d change as well. It’s a safety precaution.”
“I’ll consider it.” I hunkered down next to Eddie and held out my right hand. “Thanks for sticking up for me, friend.”
But something had changed in his face. He looked at my hand for a long time before he shook it, and he didn’t quite meet my eyes—like he didn’t recognize me. Like he truly believed for the first time that I was a witch and could work magic, that it wasn’t just superstitions and rumors. I tried not to let it get to me, tried not to show the hurt, but it was there, buried deeply. Another friend lost. I wondered if he’d tell anyone when we got back to town.
I took the bowl of oatmeal and berries that Hazel handed over, though I didn’t feel like eating.
Chapter 17
No one spoke for some time, listening only to the crackling of the fire and the hush of the grass outside the tarp. Mason and Nelson investigated the grass where
the werewolves had been, searching for any leftover goop with their lanterns, while Lincoln and Hazel stayed close to keep an eye on me. I pretended not to notice, and only focused on eating the oatmeal. It tasted like ash.
I pointed my spoon at where the bodies had been. “Do you know how many of those there were? Did I kill them all, or are some of them going to surprise us while we sleep?”
Lincoln shook his head. “We were tracking two, but it looks like they managed to bite more people before we got here. Has anyone been reported missing lately?”
“No,” Eddie said. “But around here that doesn’t mean much. They might have been hired hands out at the ranches, or seasonal workers, or undocumented workers. There’s a lot of people who are just passing through this part of the country, and no one keeps tabs on when they leave and if they make it to the next town.”
“That’s too bad.” Hazel squinted down at the device she held, still pointing it at me periodically. “If we could find their den, we might be able to find what remained of their clothing, to help with identifying who they were.”
I went back to studying my oatmeal, counting the dried berries that still remained. “Where do they usually den?”
“Caves, normally, or down by rivers. Anywhere they can find shelter.”
Eddie frowned in thought. “There’s nothing like that in the Crossroads. Just the river where we were a few days ago, but no caves. The old buffalo wallows wouldn’t provide any real shelter.”
It wasn’t precisely true. There was a cave network that we’d kept hidden for some time, not just because the Lucketts used it for our own purposes, but because we didn’t want it to become more of a tourist attraction than the national park already was. Getting tons of random tourists running through the Crossroads just begged for more trouble. I’d have bet dollars to donuts that the werewolves had found those caves and hunkered down to wait before their hunt. They practically oozed magic, which the wolves would likely find irresistible.