“She’s been docile as a…I don’t want to say puppy,” Hudson told her. “You want this, just in case?”
Elaine took the canister of pepper spray from him, blinked at it, then handed it back. “I have a grown son and a teenager, Deputy.”
“Right. I’ll be just outside the cell with my back turned, like a proper gentleman.”
They walked along the corridor between cells in an odd silence. Cronus County’s criminals weren’t generally the dangerous kind, but they were notoriously mouthy.
It was a prolonged whine, the sound of a woman imitating a forlorn canine, that not only made Hudson and Elaine halt, but brought out a low complaint from the cells. “Cain’t you put her somewheres else, Shurf?”
“Yeah,” enjoined frequent customer Bern Addison. “She’s giving us the heebie-jeebies.”
“I’ll book you a suite at the Regis,” deadpanned Hudson. “You want room service?”
The grievances ended there, except for Aura’s. When they arrived at her cell, Hudson and Elaine found the biker chick cowering in the corner with her head held low like an abandoned German shepherd, the blanket they had draped over her bundled around her feet.
Hudson turned his head from her nakedness as he unlocked the cell. “You sure you want to do this?” Hudson handed her the bucket of bathwater he carried. “I can have one of the neighboring counties send a female.”
“She seems harmless enough.” Elaine entered, setting down the bucket of warm water at the door and extending a dish of mashed potatoes and chicken strips, atop a folded, county-issue orange jumpsuit. “Hi, there!” Instinctually mothering, Elaine might have been talking to little Wanda Lott.
Hudson closed the cell door, keeping his eyes averted but listening close, as Elaine went to work earning Aura’s trust.
* * * *
Violina thanked the boys, paid everyone’s tab, tipped ostentatiously, and effortlessly coerced Maisie into taking a walk with her along Main Street.
Beyond the looming smog of its troubles, Ember Hollow still offered beauty and tranquility. Watching poplar leaves breeze by, the witches smiled at the mystery. There was no poplar tree in sight. The recently liberated leaves might have traveled aloft for many miles.
“I’m amazed at how your gift has grown,” flattered Violina. “Ysabella is teaching you so well. Frankly, I’m envious.”
“How can you tell? We haven’t…”
“I can feel it.” Violina stopped and looked intently at the younger girl. “Your energy radiates like a sun.”
“I still have so much to—”
“I do too, dear,” interrupted Violina. “I see how you’ve grown, and it makes me realize…I’ve stunted myself.”
“No! You have so much to offer, Violina. The battle took its toll, but we’ve gained something from it. I hope we’ll all have a chance to grow closer here…”
Violina took Maisie’s arm the way she had seen Ysabella do. “You’re the apprentice Ysabella deserves, and I wish I had under me.”
“Oh, please,” said Maisie. “I’m privileged to learn anything you’re willing to teach me.”
Violina smiled wistfully as she started walking again.
“Did I say something wrong?” asked Maisie.
“Not at all. I just don’t want to interfere with Ysabella’s teachings.”
“She’s the one who told me every witch has something to teach.”
Violina took on a hopeful expression. “Well, then, that would include me, wouldn’t it?”
“Of course!”
“I would like to help you with your Akashic ritual,” said the elder witch, beaming with enthusiasm. “I could be your apprentice!”
Maisie seemed stunned.
“Will you at least think about it?”
“No need. I’d be honored!”
Violina deftly switched the topic to Pedro, and they were soon giggling and bumping against each other like high school freshmen.
* * * *
At lunch, with most officers and personnel busy or out, Yoshida took the opportunity to put to the test a few of his concerns and suspicions.
Aura was scheduled for pickup by state mental-health personnel the next morning. He needed to face her before then.
She sat slumped on her bunk with her back against the graffiti-scratched cell wall, blinking away sleep. When she looked up at Yoshida, it was as if for the first time.
All traces of her lycanthropy had vanished, along with her power over him, real or imagined.
He had left his weapon and gear behind when he stepped away from his desk to make this trek. He wasn’t about to tell anyone he was afraid she held some kind of psychic control over him, and certainly not that he had sleepwalked naked into the forest. Not till he had a chance to do this—to stand near her and make eye contact with her in human form, to see if he was affected in the same way as when she was caged in the murdered witch’s barn.
Before settling down in Ember Hollow, Yoshida had spent four years with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, during which he had been in a couple of high-speed chases. On one such pursuit, he had made a curve too fast and skidded off the highway, down a thirty-foot bank. Fortunately, it was both shallow and scrubby enough to prevent a catastrophic nosedive. But he had not forgotten the terror of plummeting through a noisy tunnel of blur, unable to right his vehicle no matter how hard he clutched the wheel or mashed the brakes.
That was what he had felt back in the barn, watching the panicked wolf fight her forced transformation.
Now—nothing.
The tendrils of her wild mind burrowing into his, the tingling of the tiny bite wound she had given him, the ownership in her eyes—gone.
Hudson had expressed doubt that she was truly amnesiac. But Yoshida was now satisfied she was. A true clean slate, with only basic human function.
“Do you know me?”
She blinked. His words were just sounds, bereft of the kindness inflected in Elaine Barcroft’s or the baritone authority of Hudson’s. Yet nonthreatening. Neutral.
Yoshida looked at the place where she’d bitten him—or where he imagined she had?—and rubbed vigorously to see if the tingle would return. Like the wound itself, it did not.
Yoshida walked away from Aura’s cell.
“What did you guys do to her?” asked inmate Buddy Sandstorm, as Yoshida walked past. “She stopped making them weird noises.”
Yoshida didn’t respond. He was too busy in the moment, the wave of relief washing over him.
Relief over what, though?
Rather than try to answer his own question, Yoshida considered his own strange behaviors and dismissed them as stress-induced.
Chapter 13
Storm In My Head
Violina was pleased to see the clouds gathering and condensing, as she had willed. Thunder, so subtle only she could hear it, grumbled inside the high, condensing mass. The storm was as devious as she was.
Thumbs hooked in his creaky belt, Officer Kebbler greeted her at the open door. “Yes indeed, ma’am! Hudson called over and said you’d be by!”
With his sun-spotted pate and deep crow’s feet, Kebbler looked to be well past the age of retirement. Yet his brisk movements and snappy speech pattern gave the impression he would be better in the field, rather than overseeing this dusty former machine shop at the end of Ecard Street, which served as an annex to the Cronus County Sheriff’s Department’s evidence lockup.
“Right this way.” He whistled a tune that seemed disjointed, as if he only needed to hear its reassuring echo in the plain-block building. They walked a while, passing locked cage rooms that housed everything from damaged Pumpkin Parade floats to one serious collection of armaments taken from a white-supremacist, militia-type group.
“This stuff’s kinda funny, ain’t it?” Kebbler asked as he unloc
ked the flimsy door to the small room, formerly the shop’s office. A clipboard hung by the door held a list that was labeled saxon farm/devil’s night.
“Funny?” asked Violina.
“Silly!” he elaborated, nodding his head in quick little jerks like a hyperactive teenager.
He swung the door open and flashed his coffee-browned teeth at her. “Hey, how about I keep you company?” Kebbler was shameless in his lack of subtlety given his age—and wedding ring.
“Aren’t you kind?” Violina made plain her sarcasm. “But I wouldn’t want your wife to get the wrong idea.”
“Oh, she’s passed.” Kebbler folded his fingers to hide his ring and his lie, face flushing.
She patted him on the chest as she entered the room. “Heart attack?”
“Yes…ma’am”
“Condolences.” Violina flipped the light switch and surveyed a simple table with folding chairs and a trio of steel shelving units not unlike those in Matilda’s barn. Plain boxes marked with sequential numbers lined them neatly.
“Are y’all ladies with one of the colleges?” asked Kebbler.
Violina hadn’t considered that Hudson and his circle were wisely keeping it quiet that witches were now involved in their town’s ongoing struggle against the unknown. “Of course. Duke University.” She said, naming the school not for its paranormal studies program but because it was the state’s most prestigious.
“I love college girls!” Kebbler laughed and laughed.
As Violina tugged one of the boxes down and onto the table, Kebbler made to help.
“No, I’ve got it,” she said. “Watch your heart!”
Kebbler seemed confused for a second. “No, that was my wife. Mine’s fine.”
“Surely it’s still broken.”
Kebbler was tongue-tied.
The box contained several sealed plastic bags. The top one, labeled footpath to barn, contained shards of glazed pottery. The footpath was where Jill had battled for her life against Everett Geelens. The shards had to be from the container the punker girl had smashed over the Trick-or-Treat Terror, the one that made him “vanish.”
“I hope you don’t think all of us around here believe in that hokey, horror-movie nonsense,” said Kebbler, regaining momentum. “I think the Halloween parade got into a few empty heads around here.”
The next bag contained a clay jar, about the size of a cold-cream container, engraved roughly with the letters lup. This would be skinwalker salve, for either changing or restoring. Unimportant to Violina.
“Some kind of lube?” Kebbler giggled like a frat boy. Violina didn’t look at him, but she could feel his gaze like a heat lamp on her legs and ass.
She took down another box and opened it, facing toward Kebbler this time. Inside was something of a knife collection: Aura’s bone-handled balisong, Rhino’s boot knife and Matilda’s athame, still speckled with blood.
Beneath these smaller blades were Everett’s toys: hedge clippers and the kidney-shaped bone saw he used to make real, live skull masks.
“Don’t get yourself hurt with those, now,” said Kebbler. “Be a shame if ya got blood on that nice blouse.” His breathing had gotten heavier. “…And had to take it off.”
Among a stack of Polaroids, she found several of sigils splashed onto a stone wall, possibly in blood. A notation at the bottom told her these were taken in the chamber under the church.
“I’ll need to take some of this with me,” Violina said.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Can’t do that without the sheriff’s say.” Kebbler leaned out to look toward the front and make sure no one was there. “You can just take your time and…examine ’em here.”
A third box yielded a find more mundane in appearance, yet infinitely intriguing to Violina. giant pumpkin from field next door said its label. The contents were at least two handfuls of massive pumpkin seeds, about twice the normal size. Tiny brown dots on a few of them could only be blood.
“Are you all right, Deputy Kebbler?”
“Oh, I’m righter than rain right now, hun.”
“Are you”—she cocked her head and stared at his chest—“certain?”
Kebbler cleared his throat. He raised his hand to his sternum. “Maybe a little heartburn.”
“Some water might help,” said Violina.
Kebbler wheezed, louder with each breath, as he stepped away from the little room and started toward his desk.
Violina rearranged the contents of the boxes, putting all she wanted to take in one. She carried it cradled in her arm like an infant as she left the room and made her way toward the exit.
Kebbler was at his desk, trying to move the dirty, clear-plastic rotary on the ancient telephone cradle with a quivering finger.
“Can I call someone for you, Officer?”
Neutered by distress, he could only look at her with suspicion. “I think I’ll be all right. Just need to sit for a minute or two.”
She patted his suddenly pale hand on her way to the door. “Thanks for all your help.”
Before the door had clicked closed behind her, Kebbler’s breathing had gotten so heavy and strident it echoed throughout the building, like his off-tune whistle.
* * * *
The Wolf fought to stay. Spurred by the shock of sharp pain, the Man eventually claimed the greater measure of control.
Yoshida snarled and snapped, but the violently wriggling cat was out of his paws—hands—and bolting through the clattering pet door before Yoshida could drop to all fours to pursue it.
Out of breath, his hands stinging from cat scratches, Yoshida rolled onto his back on the rough bark mulch around Mr. Campbell’s Japanese maple and squinted in pain at the sky. Fast-growing clouds had covered the moon, but he knew, somehow, that it was at about three-quarters, and this seemed disappointing for some reason.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Purrf?” asked Mr. Campbell, smelling strongly of store-brand shampoo and a toasted bacon-and-cheese sandwich he’d eaten roughly twenty minutes ago.
Yoshida looked toward his neighbor’s door, realizing he had never heard more than an indecipherable muffle from within before tonight. He rose from the mulch and shook to throw off the clinging chips.
Shook?
He reached back and slapped the mulch away, as he hunkered down to hide between some shrubs. A second later, the bathrobed Mr. Campbell flipped on his outside light and, opened the door, searching the yard with tired eyes. “Did you fight another kitty?”
Mr. Campbell went back inside and switched off the light. But Yoshida found that he could see just the same without it. He could trace the oozing trails of his cat scratches just as well as he could feel them, even in the deeper dark of the hedges.
How the hell did I piss off Mr. Purrfect? Yoshida asked himself.
Campbell’s tuxedo cat had been friendly to him since the day Yoshida moved to Ember Hollow. Yoshida even allowed him into his home and petted him sometimes.
The cat must have gotten scared.
Yoshida realized he was naked again. And that his teeth ached from gnashing.
“Crap on a Chrysler!” Yoshida whispered. “Did I just try to eat Mr. Purrfect?”
Yoshida’s heart sank. Taking the wolf out of Aura had not taken it out of him.
It didn’t take a Harry D’Amour to figure out that he was drawing closer to full-on werewolf status as the moon grew fatter.
* * * *
Hudson set the phone on its cradle gently, as if out of respect for his fallen fellow officer, Kebbler. The relieving officer had found him face down on his desk, dead of a heart attack.
This should be a day of mourning. Unfortunately, as with the past two Octobers, that would have to wait.
* * * *
Deputy Yoshida signed out, changed into civvies and drove his personal car to Ember Hollow R
ecreational Grounds Park, sure he looked like an undercover rookie about to make his first drug buy.
He tried on a smile, checked his reflection and decided against it. It seemed predatory somehow, exactly the last thing he wanted, as he was going to meet the kids.
The sky was a Hitchcock film, heavy with suspense. Clouds were gathering like an angry flock of bloodthirsty birds.
The kids were out on the soccer field, passing a jack-o’-lantern-painted Frisbee between the three of them and the exuberant Bravo. Yoshida raised a hand to wave, but they were having too much fun to notice. He envied them and remembered how much they deserved it after the extremes of raw terror they had lived through.
He was within thirty feet before Bravo charged for a vigorous greeting rub—then stopped hard. Some troubling scent had him on edge.
“You don’t seem so square in your regular clothes,” quipped DeShaun.
Bravo issued a low growl.
“Bravo disagrees.”
Yoshida slowed, extending his hand for the dog to sniff. “Hey, it’s me, boy!”
Bravo remained leery.
“Jeez, what’s wrong, Bravs?” asked Stuart.
Candace tossed the Frisbee to Yoshida and went to hug the dog. “You’re trembling, fella!”
“Maybe he thinks you’re a cat,” said DeShaun.
Yoshida smiled, but it was not genuine. He was reminded of his skirmish with Mr. Purrfect.
“Sorry, kids. Not feeling very jocular.”
“Yeah, well, my dad is gonna give you a major frowning-upon if he sees you sporting that scruffy samurai look, Lone Wolf.”
Rubbing his chin, Yoshida had a disconcerting moment of paranoia that DeShaun knew his secret and was mocking it—then realized the boy was making reference to a Japanese manga and film character with that appellation. His point was well made; there was already gritty stubble where he had shaved just hours ago.
As DeShaun hoisted his backpack and started toward the nearest picnic shelter, Candace attached Bravo’s leash. “Maybe I should hold onto him.”
“Stay close, okay?” said Stuart.
Watching how the kids kept careful watch on one another drove home for Yoshida just how much they had been through together. He winced at the sound of distant thunder, which the kids did not seem to hear.
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