Witch in the Wind (Bandit Creek Books)

by Brenda M. Collins

  Busby tilted his head, stared directly into Marcus’s eyes, and barked.

  “I saw her to her car.” Marcus said.

  A growl, low but not threatening.

  “Okay, I’ll do better next time.” What next time? What am I thinking?

  He headed south on Main Street and Busby fell into step with him. Marcus assumed the beast wanted something and would let him know what it was eventually. Avy’s parents must have had something to do with the beast’s presence. Familiars were not well understood, except that they could communicate with their chosen witch companion and perhaps others. If they wanted to, that is. He had no idea where he might stand with this one.

  When they reached the light at the corner, Marcus took a step off the boardwalk intending to drop into the clinic and check on his patients before heading home. The familiar nipped his pant leg and then veered east on Walnut Street, stopped and looked back at Marcus. “Okay, what do you need to show me?” Marcus asked, changing direction to follow the path the familiar had chosen.

  As they reached the Sheriff’s office, Jack was sitting on the front step of the sheriff’s office rocking back and forth, banging a stick on the wood-plank sidewalk. He was chanting something over and over in time to the beat of his makeshift drum. Busby wandered over to the old man and sat.

  Marcus shook his head. There was something about that guy—

  He wandered closer until he heard the old man’s words.

  Take care of the girl, she means the world.

  Take care of the girl, she means the world.

  Take care of the girl, she means the world.

  The old man fell silent and looked at Marcus with rheumy eyes. “You know what to do,” he said. Then his eyelids slipped closed and he resumed his rocking and drumming, without words this time. Marcus knew he wouldn’t get anything more out of the old man. When Busby didn’t seem to have a direction in mind, he decided not to backtrack to the clinic but continued east on Walnut heading for home.

  He was surprised the familiar was still with him. He must want something more or he'd be back with his witch. The drumming and chanting could have been a spell. He didn’t know much about the old ways but he knew not to mess with them. He did know something was closing in on Avy. Something vaguely disturbing that had haunted him since he first set eyes on her. Something evil. He also had to accept that, somewhere along the way, the witch had become his responsibility. He was born and raised a Guardian. His role in the magical community was defined for his ancestors by the Goddess. Crystal clear and undisputed. He never questioned his instincts, not as a Guardian. Avalon Gwynn was an innocent in whatever was going on in Bandit Creek. His job was to guard her.

  He looked down at his travelling companion and remembered he was second in line for that job. “Well, partner, if we’re going to be in this together, you might as well make yourself useful.”

  The dog looked up at Marcus with eyes that betrayed an unnatural intelligence.

  Marcus sucked in a deep breath and mentally compiled all the stray bits and pieces of information he’d gathered about his two murdered witches. And about Avy. Keeping his gaze forward and his voice low, he told the familiar, “From what Avy said, I’m sure her parents kept the Goddess Amulets separate after what happened the day of their escape. I’m betting they hid one of the amulets at the house, probably around the time Avy saw it, and one in the security box at the bank. Whoever is after them has hit both places already. It’s someone from The Otherland and whoever it is likely now has both.”

  Goddess Amulets were the key to the extraordinary powers Guardians developed so they could eventually serve as Master Witches on Council. Or so it was believed. It felt strange to be trying to deconstruct the fundamental beliefs of his race. He was not philosophical by nature. Marcus fingered his own amulet and felt it warm to his touch. “This has to do with those amulets. I’m sure of it.”

  The familiar cocked his head and made a noise that sounded a lot like agreement.

  “That’s just creepy, Busby.”

  As they fell back into step, Marcus thought about the stories he’d been told about the Goddess Amulets. Still hoping the familiar would give him a nudge in the right direction, he said, “Since each family has its own unique magic, we’ve always believed the amulets do too.”

  “What can an Otherlander do with two Goddess Amulets?” He’d heard the story of his family’s Council ancestry countless times but the emphasis had always been on the distinction between each Council family. Any suggestion of a liaison between families or fusing of magic between them would have been treason.

  “Does he get the combined powers of both family lines?” That thought sent a shiver sliding down his spine. He stopped and glanced at Busby. “Cat got your tongue, Busby? I could use some help figuring this out.” When no response was forthcoming from the beast, he said, “Maybe we’ll be lucky. The magical overload might just shut them both down.” Then, one last thought occurred to him. “What if having both amulets doesn’t do anything? Would the thief go after Avy hoping she can make them work?”

  Busby growled and his hackles stood at attention. They looked at each other for a moment.

  “How the hell and damnation did someone locate the amulets after all this time?” Council had been looking for them since they were taken through the portal. It was assumed they’d been destroyed but whenever a sighting was reported, he or one of the other Guardians had been sent to check into it. They’d never come close to finding them. Marcus resumed his walk but picked up his pace trying to burn off his edginess. Busby padded beside him. Partners. He pulled his thoughts back to the Gwynns as he’d last seen them—charred remains in the morgue. His gut clenched with the sudden thought of what might have happened if Avy had been there. His fists came up looking for a target.

  He pushed her out of his mind again. He had to figure this mess out. To help Avy. To protect the Council. And to protect his own race and the mortals from harm. The tension snapped back into his neck and cascaded down his back in a mighty rush. “The Gwynns weren’t tortured so why kill them at all? Why not sneak in to search the house while they were out? Much less conspicuous. No one would notice the theft. And it’s not like the Gwynns could report the loss even if they did discover it.”

  Marcus stopped again. “Unless—” he said, thinking of Avy’s silver ring. Two wedding rings and the legend of the gryphon, a protector even into the afterlife. “Unless, even after all these years, the Gwynns protected their goddess amulets with their lives. Every instinct he had confirmed it. “Guardians.” He breathed the word in slowly. Savored its taste as it slid over his tongue.

  It changed things for Marcus. Not the job itself. It changed how the job felt. The two murdered witches—runaway lovers, destructive forces of nature, loving parents, keepers of secrets, whatever they were—Devlin Gwynn and Eavan Kemena were ancestral Council Guardians who used magic to protect their own, and others, from harm. Just as he did. Not by choice. Simply by birth.

  His mind flashed back to the day he was presented to the Council Overmaster, Pelles Ferran, for training as a boy. Pelles was flanked by a couple of Guardians. They’d seemed ten feet tall with their confident bearing exaggerated by sweeping cloaks pinned at one shoulder like Roman centurions. He’d been excited to think he’d eventually be one of them. He didn’t remember those two being around later in his training and wondered if the Guardians who’d so impressed the young boy he’d been, were Devlin Gwynn and Eavan Kemena.

  What the hell really happened back in 1911 when the two young lovers escaped to the mortal world? And how much of those events are driving what’s happening now?

  A sharp bark from Busby startled Marcus like a slap on the head. “So you read minds too. If I thought you were saying, ‘finally, you idiot’, I’d zap you all the way to a rock in Kalispell,” he said to the familiar.

  Busby dropped his tail between his legs and whimpered.

  “Anyway, you’re right, I screwed up.”
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  Marcus slowed his pace to drop his hand and rub Busby’s ear as they made the turn up Birch Street. “There’s more to the story of their defiance of Council. I accepted old gossip as fact. I am an idiot.” With this new perspective, he mentally sifted through the other information he had. “Damn, I’m still running on shaky ground here. Lots of assumptions. Suppositions. Not a lot of hard facts.” However…this wasn’t the mortal world with its laws for evidence.

  When they reached the front steps of his cottage, Marcus sat on the stoop while Busby settled on the grass. With a subtle flick of his hand, Marcus conjured a black notebook and pen. He’d learned from mortal cops that keeping notes in a little black book could be useful in lots of ways.

  He flipped open the pad and clicked the end of his pen. Marcus carefully recorded what he knew about the murder, the Gwynns and Avy. With each flip to a new page, he could feel his heart pick up its pace. “I’m sure Avy’s list will confirm one of the amulets was in the bank vault. No doubt the thief got that one.” His fingers tightened on the pen, gouging through the paper. Marcus pulled it back and gave his hand a shake to loosen his grip. “But we don’t know that he got the first one. The one at the Old Gwynn Place. That’s the key question now. Did the thief get it from Devlin and Eavan before he killed them? Or after?” He’d like to think their bravery paid off, and they were able to protect the hiding place. On the other hand, they were dead and the thief wasn’t. He needed to check out the house to be sure but—

  After reviewing his notes, one thing was clear to Marcus. It was time to report to the Witches Council. He didn’t want to think too hard about why he’d delayed this long. Guilt nicked his conscience. Was it my fault the thief had time to hit the bank? What about Avy? What do I tell Council about her? Is she even part of this case? She was in Seattle when her parents were killed—doesn’t even know what the amulets are.

  Marcus flipped his notebook closed with one hand and used the other to rub the ache that throbbed just under his rib. The Witches Council had guided his race peacefully for millennia. Until 1911 when Devlin Gwynn and Eavan Kemena dared to change the rules.

  “Time to go, Bus—” Marcus shook his head. The air around him was still. The yard and street were empty. To disappear unnoticed around a mortal was one thing but to pull it off with a warlock—

  He almost wished he could take the familiar with him to talk to the Witches Council. No way to anticipate how they’d take the news of a Gwynn offspring. Avy. It was the first time he’d ever felt the need for backup on home ground.

  He stood and shrugged off the stiffness from hunching over his notes.

  It was time—past time—to present the facts.

  He walked into the shadow of the mature walnut tree looming near his side fence.

  He pictured Lost Lake, focused his energy and stepped into a current of air.

  Chapter Eight

  Avy pulled up to the front of her house and put her car in park. Busby immediately leapt off the porch and ran towards her. After getting out of the car, she let herself enjoy his enthusiastic welcome. “I was only gone for a few hours, sweetie.”

  She rubbed his ears and buried her face in his neck. He smelled of the woods surrounding the house. He must have spent the day chasing rabbits. She pulled a twig from his coat.

  After a quick supper for herself and Busby, she wandered back into the living room. The late afternoon light cast shadows in the corners that seemed to twitch and sway with life. The room was a dim memory of the warm family gathering place of her childhood. Would she ever again see her world through sunlight, rather than the smoky gloom she was slogging through now?

  With her parents gone, she had to fight hard to believe that time would ever come. She shook off the melancholy that continued to hang over her like morning fog on a mountain top. She looked at the stack of loose papers she’d piled on her father’s desk.

  “It’s time to do more than tidy in here.”

  She strode over to the desk and sat down. Busby followed and sat beside her chair, facing the foyer as if on guard duty.

  It didn’t take her long to find the piece of paper she’d seen the night before. She’d been right. There was only the one mention of jewelry. Nothing else that would fit, or need to be in, a security box. The records showed her parents had kept the security box at the bank for decades. She’d have to look at the signature files there to know how often, if at all, her parents had accessed the box.

  She folded the list and tucked it in her front jeans pocket, then picked up the next handful of papers. Scanning through, she stopped at two papers that were clipped together. One was a security box receipt for the Ellis Bank in town. The second paper was also for the Ellis Bank but looked quite different from the first. Upon closer inspection, she confirmed it was also for a security box at the Ellis Bank. But the date on this one was 1911 and the box was for a branch in Seattle.

  “They didn’t mention it when they visited. But the sheriff isn’t interested in century old bank records.” She put the older receipt in the file marked Misc. Family Docs and tucked the more recent paper in her jeans pocket with the list.

  Something tugged at her mind. The swivel chair squeaked as Avy leaned back and dropped her hand to stroke Busby’s back. “It couldn’t be their box, 1911 is too far back. It had to belong to one of their parents.”

  Her grandparents had died before she was born and her parents rarely mentioned them. She’d realized very young that the subject was off limits so she’d stopped asking questions. “Crap. I needed to know about them.” Some of her overwhelming grief slipped over into anger. “Even just for medical reasons, they should have told me something about them, right?” She looked down at the dog as if he’d answer.

  Busby gave her a shoulder glance but returned to his guard duties.

  She’d assumed, without giving it much thought, her grandparents had died. The idea of her parents having siblings simply hadn’t occurred to her. But, now that she thought about it, that didn’t make sense. What were the odds of both sets of grandparents dying early and neither of her parents having any siblings, cousins, other relatives? Her parents must have cut themselves, and her, off from their families. She needed to find out why. Avy sat up in the chair and went back to sorting papers. This time with a sharper eye to names, places, any detail that might relate to her family.

  It took an hour to get all the papers neatly filed back into the desk drawers, at which point Avy stood up, nudged Busby out from underfoot and stretched. The dog watched as Avy twisted her back and rolled her shoulders. When she moved towards the sofa, he fell in at her side, waited for her to sit and then jumped up to snuggle beside her. Avy chuckled. “I guess there’s no point telling you to stay off the sofa, when you’ve already slept in my bed.” He looked at her with the ends of his mouth tipped up in an almost human smile.

  Avy leaned back against the cushion with a sigh. So much had happened through the day that she was surprised to realize the evening sun was still in the sky. She touched her lips and remembered the kiss from Marcus. She remembered the feel of his hand warm on her neck as he’d pulled her towards him. Was there any chance it was more than first aid for him? Her lips still tingled—it felt like more than that for her.

  A weight thumped onto her leg. Without lifting his chin from her thigh, Busby looked up at her. “Okay, Busby, I know. More food.”

  A half hour later, with both their stomachs full, Busby was settled on the carpet at her feet as she sat on the sofa. Avy settled against the soft back cushion and rolled her head from side to side, trying to ease the tension headache throbbing at her hairline. She wrinkled her nose at the faint, yet familiar, smell hanging in the air.

  The door to the root cellar caught her eye. Some of her mother’s lavender would freshen the air in the house in no time. She stood up and looked at the cellar entrance again. Except she’d have to go down and get it. As a child she’d been afraid to go down to the dark crawl space where her mother kept all he
r herbs and other ritual paraphernalia. She straightened her shoulders. She stopped being afraid of the dark when she was ten.

  “Come on, Busby.”

  The dog looked up, growled at the door and dropped his head back down on his paws.

  Avy gave him a gentle push with her toe and he slid to a standing position on the floor. He did not move forward.

  “I’m not going down there alone.”

  Busby raised his head again and whined.

  “Some guard dog you are, ya big baby.” She hadn’t gone into the cellar in years but her memory of a single, weak overhead light bulb made her sidetrack to the kitchen to pick up a flashlight from a shelf above the sink. Then she strode over to the cellar and looked back at the dog.

  Left with no choice, Busby slowly made his way to her side.

  She turned back to the cellar door. It was a perfectly ordinary door. Made out of some sort of wood. Six panels. Standard brass doorknob. The latch was hanging open. Avy vaguely remembered a heavy black padlock having been there before.

  “I must have had an awesome imagination as a kid, Busby,” she said. She lightly brushed her hand across a panel. “I would have sworn that the door was red when I was a kid.” She hadn’t really noticed in more recent years. Reality showed it was a deep indigo.

  She stifled a giggle. “And, for sure, I saw a fire breathing dragon come up the stairs at least once.” The memory was so clear in her mind. “I guess it was a pretty small dragon, though. Probably just a baby.” She stroked Busby’s head to reassure him before she reached for the doorknob. “Yup, one hell of an imagination.”

  She pulled open the door and stepped into the darkness. Immediately her nose wrinkled against the acrid smell hanging in the stale air.

  Busby whimpered but stepped in front of her.

  She couldn’t imagine why a dog would be afraid of the dark. There was a light switch on the wall beside the stairs so she flicked it on. It wasn’t bright but it cast enough light for Avy to see the stairs. She waited a moment to give her eyes time to adjust.