A Witch’s Demons (Witch's Path Series: Book 6)

by N. E. Conneely

  Far too soon, I was walking into the same room that had held Tiffany’s body. This time I couldn’t look away from the bones with small bits of tissue laid out on a table. That was all that was left of Patrick. I really wished I’d been called sooner, driven faster, been a better witch. I wished he’d survived.

  When I was a couple of feet away, I started to feel the lingering magic. My eyes darted over to Wells. “Do you feel that?”

  He grimaced. “This place feels wrong, like I should leave.”

  I nodded. “That would be the remains of one of the spells that targeted him.”

  Wells nodded jerkily.

  Reaching out with a probe, I combed through the space above Patrick’s bones. “There’s a lot of residue on him, maybe even an active spell or two. Easy enough to detect. Don’t know why Dr. Wilson didn’t mention it. The basic magic-detection kit should’ve picked this up, and I thought that was a standard part of an autopsy.”

  “Me too.” He turned to me with moist eyes. “Done?”

  “Yup.” The word had barely left my mouth when we started for the exit. I didn’t look back. This wasn’t the way I wanted to remember Patrick.

  We were quiet as we cleaned up. We didn’t have much to say. Not only about Patrick, but about all of it. If Wells didn’t already share my suspicion about Dr. Wilson, the difference between the reports and the realization of what we’d experienced was making him think long and hard.

  Finally, Wells snapped out of his reflections. “Come on. We need to talk to Dr. Wilson.”

  On the way to Dr. Wilson’s office, I pulled the charm out of my pocket, gave it the tiny bit of power it needed to activate. It didn’t immediately color, which I took to mean I hadn’t picked up enough negative energy when examining Patrick to affect the device. I shoved it back in my pocket. One problem down.

  “Just around the corner,” Wells muttered.

  I took a deep breath. This was my chance to see if my suspicions about Dr. Wilson had any merit. I followed Wells around the corner. A blast of magic hit me square in the chest, lifting me off the floor and throwing me back.

  Dr. Wilson grinned as I flew through the air.

  Just once I’d like to be wrong about someone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As I flew through the air, I knew I was about to hit a cinder block wall and had precious little time or magic to prevent the impact. In desperation, I pictured a cushion of air along my back, one that was springy and would absorb impact.

  The air cushion softened the blow, but it was still enough to knock the wind out of my lungs. And in that moment of impact, I realized I’d forgotten about the next hard surface I’d hit. It was too late to do anything about it, and I crumpled onto the tile floor. On the way down, I managed to whack both knees, a hip, an elbow, and a shoulder, but somehow I spared my head.

  Wells landed on the floor beside me but didn’t move. I didn’t know how badly he was hurt, and I didn’t have time to check.

  I wobbled to my feet, pain emanating from every part of my body that had hit the tile floor. Dr. Wilson was running down the hall.

  Summoning my wand, I pointed it at the floor. “Gebo.”

  A thin sheet of water covered five feet of the hall. The expenditure of magic made me a little woozy. I quickly shook my head, hoping it would help me feel better, and started limping after the medical examiner.

  Dr. Wilson was at a full run when his foot landed on the wet surface. His arms windmilled as he stumbled and finally fell. For a moment he was still; then he slowly got to his hands and knees.

  Since I wasn’t going to be able to cast anything else, I dismissed my wand, held both hands loosely fisted in front of me, and summoned my staff. Dr. Wilson was too far away to attack, but I kept it in my hands as I shuffled closer. It wasn’t by much, but I was gaining on him.

  Dr. Wilson tried to stand up. He swayed but made it to his feet. I limped a little faster. I was almost in range. Dr. Wilson hobbled for the door, and I didn’t know what to do to stop him. I was too far away to strike, and I didn’t have any magic. Glancing back, I saw Wells leaning heavily against a wall as he tried to stand. He was too far away and too disoriented to help.

  I lifted my staff and hurled it like a javelin. I knew it wasn’t designed to fly, but it was a credit to its elven maker and stayed mostly steady through the air. It hit Dr. Wilson in the back, sending him to the ground.

  Before Dr. Wilson could get a hand on the staff, I dismissed and resummoned it, bringing it back to my hands. With my staff back, I breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn’t have to explain to Elron why I’d thrown away my weapon.

  My satisfaction lasted all of a few seconds. Dr. Wilson was slowly getting back to his feet.

  I wasn’t willing to risk throwing the staff again, I didn’t have any magic, and my maximum speed was a shuffle. I stood there, blinking stupidly as Dr. Wilson took one step and then two away from me.

  “Move!” Wells bellowed from behind me.

  I flattened myself against a wall as he thundered past me and hurled himself at the medical examiner. I shuffled after him, determined to help. After a fair bit of tussling, Wells maneuvered Dr. Wilson around and snapped handcuffs on him.

  Feeling a bit pettier than usual, I jabbed Dr. Wilson in the side. He grunted and glared at me with very human brown eyes. I pulled the charm out of my pocket. It had survived the scuffle without breaking and was a medium gray. Dr. Wilson wasn’t the demon, but I bet he knew who was.

  Wells hauled Dr. Wilson to his feet. “How’d you get magic? I saw your file. You’re supposed to be human.”

  Dr. Wilson smiled. “Human, not human, what difference does it make?”

  “Rather a large one when you’re throwing magic around like that,” I chimed in.

  Wells tipped his head in my direction. “Exactly. How’d you get the magic?”

  Dr. Wilson kept smiling.

  “Michelle, can you tell if he’s a witch?” He started walking Dr. Wilson to the front door.

  Most witches had a lot of energy in and around them. I didn’t get that feeling from Dr. Wilson, but I gently probed him anyway. There was something there. It didn’t feel like magic, not the way witches manipulated it. “Not a witch, but he has power.”

  “Hedge-practitioner?” Wells asked.

  “Not with that kind of power.” On a hunch, I probed the handcuffs Wells had used. They were the standard cuffs. We needed to get a pair of magic-dampening cuffs on him as soon as possible. Since Wells’s car was parked near the front door, I figured we were going to get better cuffs and stuff Dr. Wilson in the back of a patrol car so he could be hauled off to jail.

  A flash of light blinded me. I snapped my eyes closed, not that it would do me much good, and jerked my arm up to protect them. A blast of energy flung me to the ground. The energy blast wasn’t as strong this time.

  I got to my hands and knees and patted around until I found my staff. My hands clenched around it, and I waited for my vision to return to normal. To my left I could hear Wells relaying the situation to dispatch. It felt like minutes passed while my eyes were recovering, but it couldn’t have been anywhere near that long. The first thing I saw was Wells holding a broken pair of handcuffs.

  “We should go after him.” I used the staff get to my feet. When I showered later, I was sure I’d find even more bruises. Lucky me.

  Wells shook his head. “I’ll go after him. This isn’t a job for you.”

  “Because I don’t have any magic.” I leaned against the wall and let a wave a dizziness pass. “Hell. Damn. Narzel blast it all. Couldn’t save.” I pointed in the direction of the morgue. “And I can’t do this.” Traitorous tears started dripping down my cheeks. I was Michelle Oaks, consultant and witch extraordinaire, and I couldn’t save my friends or stop one guy with magic.

  “You’re not God, Michelle.” Wells scrubbed a hand over his face. “You have limits.”

  Two officers ran into the building, guns drawn. After sending me
a worried look, Wells went to speak to them. I stayed against the wall, crying about things I couldn’t change rather than being useful.

  This wasn’t me. I’d built a career on being coolheaded, competent, and effective. I wasn’t any of those things now. I was just a person who missed her friends and felt like the weight of the whole world was on her shoulders. All that responsibility and I was crumpling under it.

  Between tears I saw a pair of scuffed boots stop in front of me.

  “Michelle.” Wells gently patted my shoulder. “Go home. Rest. This happens to all of us at some point. You don’t realize how many people you’re going to lose, how many sights will haunt you at night, and how many times you’ll wish you could go back in time and do something different because then… then you might save a life.”

  The tears picked up their pace. “Patrick, Tiffany, those other officers…”

  Wells’s voice was gentle. “They weren’t your fault. I know it feels that way, but the demon was already planning that attack. You want to focus on the people you couldn’t save, but that’s not the whole picture. You saved lives. You changed the outcome of that day.”

  “I just…” I rubbed the tears off my face. “I don’t know what to do.”

  He looked at me right in the eye. “You find the demon. You find it so it can be killed and we can get what little justice there is for all the blood on its hands.”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t know how to find the demon. The last one had hunted me, and I’d simply caught it in the act. This one was different. It came at me from the sides. One deadly situation at a time. It was trying to pick me off, but it was never nearby.

  Gremory had been brash. It had attacked, so sure that its secrets had been lost to time, and it had gotten careless. This demon, it was different. It wanted to pick people off one by one, in little accidents, in big attacks, but well away from wherever it was hiding. There was no great gathering of evil like there had been before. No, this demon was a far more dangerous type of evil. It was trying to slither its way into law enforcement, slowly remove people who knew of it, and one day we’d look around and realize we were in a trap.

  “Go home, rest, and tomorrow you’ll be able to fight this.”

  I held up my hand. “I’ll go home, I’ll rest, and I’ll prepare, but you’re wrong.”

  His eyebrows pulled together.

  “I don’t need to hunt the demon. I need the demon to hunt me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After hours of reports and going through every detail of what had happened over and over, Wells told me to go home. I made a noncommittal nod and left. I would go home, but there was something I had to do first. It was exactly seven when I knocked on Amber’s door.

  She let me in. “I was worried you’d have an emergency.”

  “I did, but this is more important.” She’d set up her dining room table with a few pictures of Tiffany and candles. I couldn’t help but walk over and stare at the photos. Tiffany was whole, healthy, smiling, and her hair was a cheerful burgundy. I let the picture of her as she’d been on the day the photograph was taken build in my mind. And I held on to it, because that’s how I wanted to remember her. Not the broken thing on a cold metal table, but vibrant, happy, and alive.

  Amber’s voice broke the moment. “It hasn’t sunk in yet. I find myself reaching for my phone because I want to share a joke, and then I remember.”

  Opening my eyes, I reached out and touched the picture. “I can’t get the memory from the morgue out of my head. This is the first time I’ve been able to remember her the way she was, not… not that.”

  “They showed me pictures. They wanted to know if I had any theory on who had done that to her. I saw enough.” She swallowed. “Enough to understand.”

  “I missed her.” My fingers brushed the glass shielding the picture. “I tried to reach out, but she would never respond.”

  Amber knelt next to me. “She missed you too, and I think if she’d had more time, you could’ve mended fences.”

  “But she didn’t, and a demon killed her to get to me.” I snorted. “She was right all along. Being my friend was too dangerous.”

  “She was wrong.” Amber’s voice cracked through the air.

  “What?”

  “She was wrong.” There was an earnest note in her voice. “She was already a target, especially when you consider her job and the situations that put her in. You don’t ask us to go into dangerous situations. You do your very best to protect us, to protect everyone, even people you don’t know. When she shut you out, she lost that protection and made it impossible for you to actively work to help her. Tiffany made herself an attractive target by removing herself from your sphere.”

  “But—”

  “No. Even if you don’t agree with that reasoning, there’s more.” Amber took a deep breath. “When Adder captured me, I could see the effects of the demon. That type of evil, it doesn’t know kindness, empathy, love, or friendship. The only way it can feel is by hurting people. And when it wants something, the first thing it does is start causing pain. The demon enjoys it, and the rest of us work to avoid it, making pain the perfect weapon in its mind.”

  “I agree,” I said tentatively.

  Before I could say anything else, Amber continued. “Tiffany never understood that type of evil.”

  “That doesn’t change my guilt. Or my memory.” I rubbed tears from my eyes, wishing I could go back in time and save Tiffany the way I’d saved Amber.

  “You didn’t kill her, you didn’t ask the demon to kill her, and you can’t control another entity’s behavior.”

  She was right, but it didn’t help. “Maybe when the demon is dead I’ll see it that way, but right now I just see the death, and I feel like those people would be alive if they didn’t have a connection to me.”

  “Or the demon would simply be somewhere else, doing terrible things, but no one would know demons exist, so no one would look for it.” She sighed. “Normally you and Tiffany would have the debates and I’d try to defuse them. I’ll miss that.”

  “Me too.” My gaze rested on Tiffany’s pictures. We wouldn’t have pizza and girls night. We wouldn’t compare crazy cases. We would never talk again. She was gone.

  A buzzer sounded in the kitchen.

  Jerking, I came back to the here and now. Then I sniffed. “Is that pizza?”

  Amber glanced at the oven. “Yes… We always met up for pizza.”

  “Our last girls’ night for the three of us. It’s perfect.”

  She smiled. “I thought so.”

  While Amber pulled the pizza out of the oven and sliced it, I poured three glasses of wine. I carried a picture of Tiffany and the wine over to Amber’s coffee table. We picked two slices of pizza for Tiffany and set the plate next to her wine.

  When I looked at the pizza, I didn’t feel very hungry, but between the first story and the fifth, I finished my food. A glass of wine later and things were winding down. On my way back to the kitchen with my dishes, I glanced outside—the stars were bright and the moon was almost full.

  I picked up Tiffany’s glass of wine. “There’s one more thing we need to do.”

  Amber collected the candles and followed me outside. We found a nice patch of grass. Kneeling, Amber set the two candles front of us, framing the moon. I placed the glass of wine off to the side and then rested my hand against the earth. Slowly it warmed. A shiver went through the ground. Between the two candles, the earth churned. Stone broke through the grass, bits of dirt clinging to it. As it emerged, it took the shape of a cross. It was simple gray stone, but it was still a marker for her that we could both visit.

  Taking a deep breath, I said, “May the earth embrace you.”

  “May the earth bring you peace,” Amber echoed.

  “May you live forever in our memories.”

  “May you live forever in our hearts.”

  I lifted up the glass of wine, turned it over, and let it splash onto the grass. Amber
blew out the candles.

  We sat there, soaking in the moment, saying our goodbyes. In that time I must’ve apologized to Tiffany a hundred times. I told her I’d miss her twice as many times, and I kept saying how much I had loved having her as a friend. I was trying to fit a lifetime of friendship and love into a few moments.

  Finally I closed my eyes and said what I hadn’t had the chance to say to her in life. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry my life and my choices caused your death. I’m sorry that separating your life from mine didn’t save you. I miss you. I’ll miss you every time I have pizza or think about girls’ night. And I’ll keep missing you.”

  I stood there, looking down at the cross the earth had provided, feeling like there was more to say but not having the words.

  Eventually Amber touched my hand. I nodded and we gathered up the candles and wineglass. Back inside, I helped her clean up. We didn’t say much because we’d said everything earlier.

  When it was time for me to leave, I looked Amber in the eye. “You’re right. I know that here”—I touched my temple—“but I don’t believe here.” I rested my fingers over my heart.

  “Time.” Amber bit her lip, her eyes watery with unshed tears. “I know, know, you will kill this demon or die trying, but it isn’t enough. There are other demons and other victims out there.”

  I just stood there. Helpless was a great word for how I was feeling, though hopeless and guilty had their places too. “If I could bring her back to life, I would. If I could go back in time and save her, I would. I don’t know how to fix this. Killing the demon is the best I can do.”

  “This isn’t about guilt but justice, and maybe a little revenge,” she whispered. “Can you kill all the demons?”

  Snorting, I shook my head. “How? Once there were hundreds of Hunters, warriors, witches, elves, all of them devoted to exterminating demons. They couldn’t manage the task. How would I?”

  “If anyone can do it, it’s you.” There was no doubt, no allowance for failure in her voice.

  “How?” I demanded angrily. “Tell me how and I’ll do it. But I’ve looked. I can’t find a spell that would do what I need this one to do. I don’t even think it’s possible to target an entire group like that. I don’t know how to kill them. I don’t even know how I’m going to survive this demon, never mind the next, or the one after that.”