By Sun

by T Thorn Coyle

  BY SUN

  The Witches of Portland, Book 6

  T. Thorn Coyle

  By Sun

  Focus, Lucy.

  She imagined breathing through her hands, connecting her spirit to her flesh, and connecting flesh to earth. Breath was the great unifier. She inhaled the oxygen given off by the trees overhead. They buried their roots in the soil beneath her hands.

  Lucy reinforced the shields around her aura, and allowed herself to deepen further still.

  The acrid tang of teargas and the burn of pepper-ball projectiles coated the back of her throat, making her want to spit again. She swallowed. She felt fear. Anger. Sorrow.

  Tell me… she thought.

  But the earth revealed nothing more.

  Copyright © 2018

  T. Thorn Coyle

  PF Publishing

  Cover Art and Design © 2018

  Lou Harper

  Editing:

  Dayle Dermatis

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946476-11-1

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locales is coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  1

  Lucy

  From her place at the top of the ladder, Lucy set the broad, soft-bristled brush down on the edge of the paint tray and rubbed her right hand against her painter’s pants. The hand itched, and not in the good “your palm itches because money is coming to you” way. She’d been poisoned by nicotine-tainted flying ointment at Summer Solstice. Now the year barreled toward Lammas and the weird sensation hadn’t gone away. Plus, it was messing with her magic in ways she still didn’t understand.

  Regardless, Lucy had work to do. Work she loved.

  The scent of interior house paint was as familiar to Lucy as the scent of her sandalwood shampoo. Paint smelled of industry, creativity, and happiness. There was a deep satisfaction in helping make something beautiful again. Brightening things up. Enriching spaces. Changing people’s lives.

  Oh, that last thing seemed a little grandiose, and Lucy admitted it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Part of her magic was helping to shift ordinary spaces into havens, places of refuge and delight. Painting houses was part of Lucy’s true work, and she began every project with a magical intention.

  But sometimes paint was also the scent of stress, like right now. Her crew was way behind on this job, stretched thin because summer meant everyone wanted the outside of their houses painted. But indoor jobs were Lucy’s specialty, and this one was for a friend. Jack. That last fact didn’t lessen the pressure. As a matter of fact, for Lucy, it made things worse. She never wanted to let down people she knew.

  Even if they had let her down before.

  At least the air inside the house was cool. The owner before Jack had installed a central HVAC system, and the air-conditioning worked just fine, keeping the late July heat outside at bay. It also kept out the smoke.

  It had been a hot summer, smoky with the fires burning up in British Columbia turning the blazing sun a bloody red-orange in dark gray skies. Luckily, it seemed as if the smoke was clearing. Whether that was just a wind pattern shift or because some of the fires were under control, Lucy didn’t know.

  The only issue Lucy had with AC was that with windows closed, the paint fumes didn’t disperse as quickly. Thank all the Gods and Goddesses for low VOC paints.

  Speaking of…

  “Suco, more flat white for the dining room ceiling, por favor!”

  “You got it, boss,” came the reply from the living room.

  Lucy heard the thump of Suco’s boots onto the broad wooden porch, where paint cans and extra drop cloths lived during the day. She exhaled, blowing an errant strand of dark hair from her face, and looked around the formal dining room. Jack’s home was gorgeous. The nine-foot-high ceilings were tall enough to feel spacious but still cozy. The home still had its original wood built-ins and trim around the doors and windows, plus a gorgeous picture rail, all taped up, which Lucy currently worked above, using it as a natural demarcation between the walls below and the ceiling above.

  While Lucy worked on all sorts of houses, old Craftsman and Victorian homes were her favorites. They were built with care. Meant to last. Some of the modern homes these days also had an attention to detail, unlike the cracker boxes of the late nineties, but give Lucy a one-hundred-year-old home to work on, any day.

  Even covered with plastic sheeting, the warm wood of the china cabinet gleamed. The built-in sideboard was the original dark walnut, mirroring the walnut picture rail that ringed the room. The walls were currently navy, which did the room no favors, especially during the cloudy Portland winters. Once the ceiling was done, Lucy planned a pale, leaf green for the walls. She and Jack had debated over that. She lobbied for a rich burgundy, but after the navy, he didn’t want the rooms to feel dark. They wouldn’t have, but the customer was always right.

  Even when the customer had been an on-again, off-again lover, and was now a who-knew-what-to-call-them, so they both just used the word friend, even though they didn’t exactly hang out these days. Jack had kind of ghosted Lucy a couple of years ago, right when she thought they’d actually been headed a good direction. She had to admit, it still stung.

  Lucy didn’t let herself get close to just anybody, and she was way attracted to Jack—which, right now? She wished was not the case.

  But they were still friendly enough for Jack to hire her and of course, they bumped into one another pretty regularly.

  Jack was part of the ad hoc community that clustered around Arrow and Crescent, Lucy’s coven. There were several people like that, who moved in and out of the sphere of the coven. In Jack’s case, he just happened to be Raquel’s neighbor. Raquel and Brenda had founded Arrow and Crescent, and trained most of the members.

  While the two women were her mentors, Lucy had had her own training earlier. Her Catholic abuela had a little bit of the witch about her, though she would never call it that. She had tried to teach Lucy the use of herbs but that had never quite stuck. Reading objects was Lucy’s natural skill. She’d practiced the art of psychometry—the art of reading physical objects—since puberty, and was now the go-to person for the whole coven.

  She scratched at her right hand again. The sensation was actually more of a tingle than an itch, and less physical than psychic. Despite all of the clearing and cleansing the coven had done after the poisoning, the sensation hadn’t gone away.

  Lucy hadn’t mentioned it to Brenda and Raquel. They would just worry, and frankly, Lucy didn’t see there was anything to be done for it. So she kept mum and just did her job.

  “Here you go, boss,” Suco set the gallon can down on a drop cloth and got to work popping the lid off.

  “Gracias,” Lucy said, rattling down her ladder. Once down, she reached for the plastic-lined paint tray and carefully lifted it from the metal perch.

  “Disponha,” he replied, as she set the tray down next to the gallon can.

  The two of them tended to trade off between Spanish and Portuguese. He was one of her best workers, and had moved to Portland from Sao Paolo when he was a child. His family had immigrated during a slightly easier time.

  Lucy been raised in Portland, on the outskirts further east, toward the city of Gresham. As a matter of fact, there was an old bruja in Gresham that Lucy had known since her teens, when she stumbled into the woman’s shop. She still sought counsel from Izel off and on, though it had been a while.

  Lucy could trace her family back to the days when California had still been part of Mexico. They’d moved to the Pac
ific Northwest during her great-grandparents’ time, when vaqueros migrated north, hired by white cattle ranchers.

  Suco went back to the living room, where he was busy covering the wood built-in bookcases and the fireplace surround, leaving Lucy to her solitary work. After refilling the tray, she stood to stretch her back. Her heart pounded –– Toomtoomtoom–– an arrhythmic beat. Too fast. Damn it. She never had issues like that before, but yeah, ever since summer Solstice, when that self-centered jerk who called himself the Alchemist had poisoned her, things weren’t quite right, physically or psychically.

  Nicotine poisoning tainted with bad magic was enough to give someone a heart attack, and it had killed one person and put another into the hospital.

  And as for Lucy’s psychometry, where she used to need to consciously tune into objects in order to get a reading, half the time now readings leapt out at her, unbidden. Having worked her ass off to hone her psychic art, it annoyed the shit out of Lucy to be picking up psychic information like some untrained newbie.

  So Lucy had taken to being careful. She didn’t touch the walls or doorways of strange houses with her hands, particularly not her right hand. She just wasn’t sure what stories the buildings would have to tell, and couldn’t afford further distraction when she was already behind. And that pissed her off, too.

  Damn the rogue magician for messing with her magic with that Goddess-damned tainted flying ointment. She shouldn’t have to relearn something she’d been training in for years.

  Lucy shrugged, an irritated gesture, and moved the ladder to the opposite wall. She had one more section to cut in before rolling out the ceiling. If she was honest, she’d actually gotten through the poisoning relatively unscathed, with just a few weird symptoms and erratic magic that she needed to get under control. The coven had to go onto the astral plane and save one victim from a coma that was sapping all of her energy. Another person had ended up dead.

  At least the Alchemist was in prison now. Even though Lucy wasn’t a fan of the carceral state, she had to admit that if anyone should be locked up, it was that madman.

  Meanwhile though, she still had a business to run, jobs to catch up on, and her own health to consider.

  She sighed.

  Okay. Back to work.

  Lucy placed the paint tray back on the fold-out perch and climbed the ladder. The edges around the trim weren’t going to get cut in by themselves, and the ceiling needed to be rolled out by lunch time.

  She just wished the tingling in her palm would go away.

  2

  Jack

  The lines of code swam before Jack’s eyes. He paused, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and stretched. He was working standing up, hoping the extra blood flow would somehow make it to his brain.

  Jack wanted to blame his lack of focus on Lucy being downstairs, but that wasn’t fair. If he was being honest, he had to admit this was all on him. And he knew exactly why.

  He gazed out the double sash wood-framed windows and out past the blooming white dogwood toward the pines that towered two houses away. The trees were what made Portland so special. Oh, people talked about the weird people, but Jack had never found anyone he met to be all that odd. But the trees that choked every neighborhood and even lined the freeways? They were really something.

  A man could get lost in those trees, and hikers did every other year, sometimes wandering for days before being found. Jack wouldn’t mind getting lost that way. It would at least be something different than getting lost in screen after screen, beer after beer. Or line of code after line of fracking code.

  He was behind deadline on this latest game but had no interest in working on it.

  Deadlines were part of the business, and usually Jack had no trouble with them. But lately? He had trouble caring. Was starting to wonder if the work was even worth it.

  You still have bills to pay, my man, he thought. And coding games paid really well. The fact that he could work from his home office was a bonus.

  Jack sighed and took another sip of coffee from his favorite Tardis mug. The home office had started out as a small bedroom and still had gleaming dark wood wainscoting and a three-panel closet door. The room also held low bookcases, a sickly ficus plant in the corner by the window that he really needed to ditch, and a massive wooden standing desk with two huge monitors, a tall rolling stool, and the padded mat he was currently standing on.

  His fingers twitched over the small white mouse, ready to click over to the project he was really interested in. The little hacking job his friend Olivia had roped him into.

  Hacking was taking over his life. It was almost all he thought about. But those projects didn’t pay his bills.

  He was getting sick of games. Barely even played for fun anymore.

  Quit stalling.

  This code wasn’t going to write itself.

  The latest game design was complex and chewy, just the way Jack used to liked it, and if he didn’t get enough done today, his schedule was totally borked. But nothing in it grabbed him. Used to be, he could sink right into the rhythm of coding. Put some ambient music on, and his fingers seemed to know just what to do, with barely any input from his brain.

  Jack had been doing this long enough that all coding practically felt hardwired, as if his subconscious was jacked directly into his keyboard.

  Except today it wasn’t happening. Video games had paid for this house, free and clear, paid off his debts, and given him what was a pretty sweet, stable life. But that wasn’t what he wanted anymore.

  He’d had couple of years where it had felt as if he was coasting through life while everyone around him moved forward. Doing things. Falling in love or saving the world. Then his friend Olivia had taken him for a walk in the park one day and shoved Jack’s life from autopilot back into gear.

  He had found a way back to passion and hated giving anything else time. He’d been reborn and didn’t want to go back into stasis.

  There was a creak of a ladder from downstairs, and he heard Lucy talking with the only other worker on site today. Suco, he thought the man’s name was. He sometimes heard them speaking a smattering of Spanish and what must be Portuguese together.

  Maybe he should learn a new language. That would be something else to do, right? Something to quell this new obsession. Make him more well-rounded.

  More interesting to a person like Lucy. Maybe.

  He knew at least five programming languages already, and still retained some of his high school French. How hard could Spanish be?

  Jack drank more coffee and shook his head again. If it weren’t for Lucy, he would have zero interest in learning Spanish. He exhaled noisily and stretched, coffee mug still in hand.

  Yeah. Along with the secret project, Lucy was a definite distraction. Maybe it had been a mistake to hire her. To have her in his home like this every day. It had felt like a natural thing to ask her to redo the interior of his house. He had the money and she was both one of the best housepainters in the city and a friend.

  None of that took away the fact that he’d totally blown it with her a few years ago during his plodding-through-life phase. They’d made a few attempts at dating and sex but he had been way too cavalier. Too scared. Not ready for commitment. In the end, he pretended that all he wanted was casual sex with a friend. The occasional pizza or a movie on the couch.

  He retreated back into his computers, spending hour after hour either gaming or coding games.

  Boring. His whole life had become boring. And what really sucked? He wasn’t even sure why.

  But now that he was starting to wake up, and Lucy was in his house every day…he had to admit he was probably in love with her. Which also sucked.

  Truth be told, Jack had loved Lucy since the moment he first saw her, damp wisps of dark chocolate hair sticking to light brown skin as she wiped her boots off on the mat in Raquel’s café one rainy January four years before. It was a Tuesday afternoon, just past lunch…and why the hell did he even remember that fac
toid?

  He set the Tardis mug down on the desk too hard, and coffee sloshed over the sides.

  “Shit,” Jack said, and grabbed for the box of tissues to his right as the pool of milky liquid inched its way toward the ergonomic keyboard. He mopped it up just in time.

  Maybe he needed a break. Go downstairs, get a fresh cup. Talk to Lucy.

  She’s still too good for you, man. And that was God’s own truth. She was sexy, smart, ran her own successful business, involved herself in social justice causes, and to top it all off, she was a witch.

  Couldn’t get much more interesting than that.

  Jack? On the surface he was still just another white nerd who could code. He had ordinary, sandy brown hair that needed a cut and dressed in geeky T-shirts and old jeans. There was pretty much nothing interesting about him.

  The only interesting thing in his life right now was something he could never share.

  He pushed back from the desk and threw the damp, coffee-impregnated wad of tissues into the small black garbage can stationed next to the desk. He needed a break anyway. Dork or not, he might as well talk to Lucy.

  Mind drifting to the secret project, he padded downstairs in gray wool slippers, walked through the bright white kitchen, and poked his head into the dining room. The built-ins were draped and taped. The room had lines of white where old cracks in the walls had been patched, but at least they looked smooth now, ready for paint.

  And there she was, perched on a metal ladder, cutting in strips of white ceiling paint above the blue-taped picture rail. No makeup on her serious face, paint spatters all over her work clothes, she was beautiful as always.

  “Want some coffee?” he asked.

  The brush jerked, spitting white paint on her brown skin.