witchesintheweeds_GEN

by Lila Dubois

  He was guessing that was not the case for Kim. These cannabis plants must be the source of income for her coven. It could be hard for practitioners to hold down a job in the normal world. Because they could see and feel magic, they often seemed disconnected or distracted. In his family almost everyone worked for Barclay Farms—the agricultural company—or Barclay Green International, the larger parent company. Even those who didn’t work directly for the company the way he did were supported by it financially.

  He looked at the slim woman walking in front of him and wondered how many people she felt responsible for, how many people she was trying to feed and shelter with the sale of these plants. Her desperation made sense. Even her seeming lack of care of what happened to her. If he’d been asked to sacrifice himself to protect his coven he would have. That was what she was doing.

  He reached out and brushed his fingers over the leaves of another plant, more out of habit that anything else, and then recoiled. “Goddess protect us!” He brushed his hand against his pants.

  Kim turned to face him. “The blight has reached this far up. It gets worse the farther down we go.”

  He glanced at her face, then back at the plant.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t look at it with your sight. Not yet. It’s hard to look at.”

  “I’ll have to, if I’m going to help.”

  She sagged a little with relief and a smiled pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Harris.”

  “You’re welcome, Kim.”

  She jumped a little, as if startled that he’d said her name.

  As lovely as she was to look at, his attention was pulled back to the plants. When he’d touched it, it had been as if the leaf was coated in a fuzzy yellow mold. But mold was a natural living thing, and what he’d touched had been neither. He peered at the plant, seeing nothing on the leaf. That meant what he’d touched had been magical. Something he would be able to see if he opened himself up to it.

  He looked down the slope of the hill. Now that he was paying attention, he could feel both the pull of strong magic, and a repulsing push.

  He slipped past Kim, picking up the pace. She followed behind him, silent. A large tree marked a sharp bend in the path. He rounded it, and found himself on a small outcropping of rock jutting out of the steep hillside. This elevated him above the top of the tall cannabis plants. There was a natural break in the trees that gave a straight line of sight from the outcropping down to the bottom of the small valley, which was closer to a ravine than a proper valley.

  Kim stood beside him, and he could feel the sadness and anxiety rolling off her in waves.

  “There’s strong magic down there,” he said.

  “Yes.” Her reply was terse.

  He glanced at her, but only briefly. He closed his eyes and willed himself to see the world as it really was. When he lifted his lids, the world glowed.

  The cannabis plants glowed green, as if they were bioluminescent. The outer stalks and leaves were a healthy shade of bright green, but the larger stems and main stalk of each plant were being strangled by something putrid. It glowed a sickly yellow-gray, and seemed to pulse. Harris had to swallow hard to stop himself from gagging.

  The putrescence was strongest at the base of each plant, where it disappeared into the earth. He focused on the ground and sucked in another breath.

  The earth under them fairly glowed with power. If he hadn’t been standing on a rock, it would have knocked him off his feet. It wasn’t the top layer of soil, where the roots were strongest, but deeper, where magic lay in a layer of gold, umber, and brown. He’d never been able to see into the earth like this, and it was disorienting for a moment. He’d never been able to do it because he’d never been someplace where a strong Salachar witch was working.

  Whatever else Kim was, she was strong. Very strong.

  No, that couldn’t be it. If she was this strong, she wouldn’t be depending on cultivating a few pot plants to feed her family. Her coven must have done it collectively.

  Even looking at it as the work of a collective, it was still awe-inspiring.

  “Harris?”

  He turned to look at her, but he hadn’t yet shut his sight. He couldn’t see her—all he saw was white-hot light in a vaguely human shape. He closed his eyes, the negative image of her glowing outline dancing against his lids.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Give me a minute.” He took a few deep breaths before cracking open one eye and looking at her. She no longer glowed.

  “Harris?” she asked again.

  He stared at her. She’d glowed. He’d seen that before, but only a few times, when he was young and too inexperienced to know how to use his sight selectively.

  “I saw you,” he said.

  “You saw me?” She frowned for a moment, then blinked. “Oh, you saw me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can…you can control what it is you see, you know.”

  “Yes, I know that, thank you. I thought I had.” Once a practitioner used to learn their sight, the next thing they learned was how to open it only to the natural world. Looking on people was difficult and intimidating.

  “Oh.” She was looking at him like maybe he was a bit too stupid to control one of the first and easiest powers practitioners had.

  “I also saw into the earth. Into it,” he repeated with emphasis.

  “Uh, yes?”

  “I’ve never done that before.”

  She frowned. “Can’t you see roots and stuff?”

  “No, I can sense them, but not see them. You have a shit-ton of magic under here.” He gestured at the forest.

  Her mouth thinned into a line. “Yes, we do.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at him like he was an idiot. “Because we’re witches?”

  “Nuh-uh, I don’t buy it. Why are you stockpiling magic?”

  Her eyes flashed with fear, and he knew he was right. “We’re…I’m…preparing for a major working. But the magic is four feet down. Only the deepest roots touch it. The blight has nothing to do with it.”

  As soon as she mentioned the blight, he had a vivid memory of that sickly yellow-gray light. “You’re telling me you think the blight has nothing to do with the shit-ton of magic you’ve got stored down there?”

  Kim swallowed. “The blight hasn’t touched the magic. I checked.”

  He stared at her, sure there was something she wasn’t telling him.

  She sighed. “But the blight started only after I started really pouring magic in.”

  “Whatever the blight is, it’s magic.”

  “Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. Maybe I should try and find a practitioner who knows something about plants to help me. Oh. Wait. I did.”

  He snorted in amusement. “Find someone?”

  “Are you still whining about being kidnapped?”

  Harris jumped off the rock and started down the path toward the ravine’s floor, where the worse of the blight had pulsed like a mound of rotting flesh. As he walked, he started to see signs of the blight in the physical plants. They were dying. Not dead, but dying—the center stalks withered and gray, the leaves shriveled and spotted with yellow.

  A small stream, only two feet across, marked the bottom of the ravine. He stopped near a circle that had been dug into the forest floor. The circle was six feet across, and one foot deep. The inner walls of the circle had been shored up with flat rocks, keeping the sides from crumbling in. He could see the tops of several crystals protruding from the dirt.

  “Your working circle?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

  “If you want me to help, tell me the truth.”

  “Sorry, you’re right. Those are the tops of crystal spikes, each four feet long.”

  He thought about what he’d seen. “You’re using the crystals to funnel the magic into the earth.”

  “Yes, and the plants help keep it in place
. If I tried this somewhere else the magic would have been pulled to the surface by now.”

  “So you planted your crops close between the trees, creating a living barrier on the surface of the earth.”

  “Yes. I’ve tried to pool power before, but it always leeches away, or goes dormant if I try and store it in stone.”

  Harris didn’t totally understand what she meant, since he’d never tried to pool power on this scale and knew nothing about the magical properties of stone. One thing he did notice was that she kept saying I.

  Maybe this was all her work, but if that was the case, she was scary powerful.

  The question of Kim and her magic would have to wait. He had a more pressing issue: the plants. Whatever this blight was, it was working from the stem out to the leaves, instead of the other way around. It was unnatural.

  “I’m going to need to use my power,” he warned her. “You’re going to have to leave.”

  “I have another dampener.” She crouched and pulled up her pant leg. She wore a loose fabric ankle bracelet. Her calf was studded with small puncture marks that were scabbed over. One large hole that must have been from a rose thorn started bleeding when she hissed and pulled the fabric away from the wound.

  He’d done that to her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I deserve that and more.” She unfastened the anklet, which had five or six matte studs on the outside. When she flipped it over, turning the studs in, he realized they must have been made of the same meteorite as on her necklace. “The good news is that I don’t have to make a new hole in myself.”

  He realized what she was going to do a moment too late to stop her. She jammed one of the studs into the fresh puncture, and her face went white with pain. Her fingers shook as she pulled it tight around her calf and fastened it in place.

  “Don’t.” Harris fell to his knees beside her, reaching for her leg. His fingers brushed her bare skin and…

  …nothing happened.

  She smiled, though it was strained. “It worked. Tell me what I can do to help.”

  “Get away from here and take that thing off.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m going to help. I can gather materials or fetch you water.”

  His hands were still on the bare skin of her leg. He traced his thumb over the small punctures left by the wheat.

  She shivered, and he knew it wasn’t from cold.

  He looked up to find that she was staring at him. She exhaled from between parted lips that looked far too kissable.

  “I want to kiss you,” he whispered.

  “I want you to kiss me.”

  “I think I have Stockholm Syndrome.”

  Kim blinked and then laughed softly. “That explains what’s wrong with you. What’s wrong with me?”

  “The allure of the forbidden?” he guessed.

  “Maybe.” They stared at one another for a moment longer. Kim leaned forward, he held his breath. She brushed her lips against his cheek. “Thank you for helping. For being kind.”

  “Kind. Right.” Harris gently pulled down her pant leg. “I’m going to call quarters and make a circle.”

  “I’ll stay out of your way.” As if to prove it, Kim stood and limped over to a large rock on the edge of the stream. She perched on the rock, the leg with the dampener stretched out in front of her.

  Harris chose a spot safely away from the circle she’d cut into the earth. He closed his eyes to shut out distractions, and called to the small plants that were huddled in the very upper layer of soil. Stems of bearberry sprouted, leaves unfurling in the jerky way plants had of moving, especially at high speed. Firefly and white orchid rock rose also grew, as did gentle shoots of creeping rosemary. In response to his will, the plants sprouted and grew, their branches and leaves stretching to the sides, tangling and braiding the plants beside it, until he stood in the center of small circle about four feet across, the six-inch-high walls made entirely out of newly grown plants, many of which were mature enough that a botanist would have said they were several months old.

  He turned north, instinct telling him where that was, and raised his arms. “I call to the north, to the pull of the earth.”

  He twisted a quarter turn to his right and caught sight of Kim out of the corner of his eyes. She was looking down at the water, and for a moment he saw not a slightly battered young woman, but once more a white, glowing outline, a gleaming icon of power. He quickly called quarters for the east and turned to the south, so he couldn’t see her.

  There was something about her that called to him, and he had a bad feeling it wasn’t just Stockholm Syndrome.

  * * * *

  The kidnapper was a woman. Tray stared at the black-and-white image from a security camera. The picture had been taken outside at night, but there was no doubt the person with Harris was a woman. They must have drugged him, because in the security footage Harris was unsteady on his feet, and his kidnapper had to half-support, half-drag him to the steps to the plane. A flight attendant helped the kidnapper get him up the steps.

  The kidnapper had taken Harris Barclay to a private airstrip and then flown him on a chartered jet to California. She’d done a good job bribing everyone involved. Tray had gotten nothing from the pilot, flight attendant, or airstrip staff. They’d all said they remembered a couple flying home to California, and that the man had been drunk.

  It was a plausible story, but the fact that they’d each said the exact same thing assured him that it had been rehearsed.

  What the kidnapper hadn’t done was bribe the daytime employees. They’d handed over the surveillance videos with no protest, happy to take money he transferred to them electronically.

  Tray sat back in his chair and stretched. Iris’s assistant had actually been the one to ask if there was preliminary work they could do before he left for Montana. Tray was more of a “wade in and start shaking trees and knocking heads” type of investigator. He could be deadly silent and sneaky when he needed to be, but when the job was finding someone or something he preferred the incite-panic approach. Usually the bad guys made a mistake once he started making enough noise.

  But this time, keeping his butt in his desk chair in Chicago had paid off. He’d called in favors to get traffic camera images, then on a hunch started calling airports and private airfields.

  It was after seven in Chicago, and the wind was cold. He couldn’t feel the bite of the wind in the temperature-controlled offices, but he knew. The wind was his, and he was the wind’s and he knew it, in the way of knowing that even the most studious had trouble defining.

  Once he’d had the tail number of the plane, it had been a simple enough matter to find the flight plans. Those were nearly impossible to fake, and if a plane deviated from its flight path, there would be record.

  All that meant he was ninety percent sure that Harris had been taken to Humboldt County, California.

  He picked up the phone and called Fitz Barclay’s personal cell phone.

  “This is Fitz.”

  “Fitz. Trajan.”

  “Have you found him?”

  “I think I know where he is.”

  “Then go get him. Are you here? Are you in Montana?”

  “No, sir. I’m still in Chicago. I won’t be coming to Montana.”

  A hard silence greeted that statement.

  “Harris isn’t in Montana any longer. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “What? Where is he? Who took him?”

  “If I’m right, he’s in Humboldt, California. In Salachar cabal territory.”

  “Salachar?” The word was neutral, unnervingly so, as if that meant nothing.

  “If you want me to help Harris, I need to know if there’s anything going on between the Saol and Salachar cabals.”

  “Of course not. The cabals do not feud. We are not enemies.”

  Right. “Let me rephrase. Is there any bad blood between the Barclay coven and any of the Salachar covens?” The cabals themselves would never feud, though the
y jockeyed for power and land, but covens were a different story.

  “Not at the moment.”

  “But in the past?”

  “There were times when we ran into conflict. Salachar covens hold good agricultural land. They squander it.”

  “So you’ve had conflicts with earth magic covens.”

  “Not conflicts. Differences of opinion.”

  “Was Harris a part of any of these differences of opinion?”

  “No.”

  Tray considered that, absently waggling his fingers in the air as he thought. Mist formed in his office, blanketing the floor and obscuring the carpet from view. Fitz Barclay had children of his own. If this had been an attempt at retribution, it would make more sense to take one of them instead of Fitz’s nephew. But maybe Harris was easier to grab.

  “You said Harris is powerful?”

  “Very.”

  “Is that a well-known fact?”

  “We are not hiding his abilities.”

  If you were planning to kidnap someone to get back at the Baron of a coven, it would be safer and smarter to kidnap the weakest member of the family, not someone with strong magic.

  “Are you sure someone from Salachar took him?” Fitz asked.

  Tray had almost forgotten he was on the phone with Fitz. “Uh, no. No, I’m not. There haven’t been any reports of disasters or unexplained events in Humboldt County, and if he was taken by a practitioner, I’m assuming he would have fought back.

  “Of course he would fight back.”

  “Then it’s possible this has nothing to do with Salachar.” Unlikely, but possible.

  “I don’t care what it is or isn’t. Find my nephew.”

  Harris looked at the clock. If he headed for the airport now, he could probably grab the last flight to San Francisco. “I’m leaving for the airport now.”