by P. N. Elrod
“The swing set?” Brax said, surprised.
I nodded and moved on, into the edge of the woods. There was no trail. Just woods, deep and thick with rhododendrons, green leaves and sinuous limbs and straighter tree trunks blocking the way, a canopy of oak and maple arching overhead. I looked up, into the trees, still green, untouched as yet by the fresh chill in the air. I bent down and spotted an animal trail, the ground faintly marked with a narrow, bare path about three inches wide. There was a mostly clear area about two feet high, branches to the side. Some were broken off. A bit of cloth hung on one broken branch. “They came through here,” I said. Brax knelt beside me. I pointed. “See that? I think it’s from the shirt the blood-master was wearing.”
“I’ll bring the dogs. Get them started on the trail,” he said, standing. “Thank you, Molly. I know this was hard on you.”
I looked at Jane. She inclined her head slightly, agreeing. The dogs might get through the brush and brambles, but no dog handler was going to be able to make it. Jane, however . . . Jane might be able to do something with this. But she would need a blood scent to follow. I thought about the house. No way could I go back in there, not even to hunt for a smear of vampire blood or other body fluid. But the bit of cloth stuck in the underbrush might have blood on it. If Jane could get to it before Brax did . . . I looked from Jane to the scrap of cloth and back again, a question in my eyes. She smiled that humorless half smile and inclined her head again. Message sent and received.
I stood and faced the house. “I want to walk around the house,” I said to Brax. “And you might want to call the crime scene back. When the vampires played on the swings, they had the family pets. The dog was still alive for part of it.” I registered Brax’s grimace as I walked away. He followed. Jane didn’t. I began to describe the crime scene to him, little things he could use to track the vamps. Things he could use in court, not that the vamps would ever make it to a courtroom. They would have to be staked and beheaded where he found them. But it kept Brax occupied, entering notes into his wireless notebook, so Jane could retrieve the scrap of cloth and, hopefully, the vampires’scent.
Jane was waiting in the drive when I finished describing what I had sensed and “seen” in the house to Brax, her long legs straddling her small used Yamaha. I had never seen her drive a car. She was a motorbike girl, and lusted after a classic Harley, which she had promised to buy for herself when she got the money. She tilted her head to me, and I knew she had the cloth and the scent. Brax, who caught the exchange, looked quizzically between us, but when neither of us explained, he shrugged and opened the car door for me.
THE VAMPIRE ATTACK made the regional news, and I spent the rest of the day hiding from the TV. I played with the kids, fed them supper, made a few batches of dried herbal mixtures to sell in my sisters’herb shop in town, and counted my blessings, trying to get the images of the McCarleys’horror and pain out of my mind. I knew I’d not sleep well tonight. Sometimes not even an earth witch can defeat the power of evil over dreams.
Just after dusk, with a cold front blowing through and the temperature dropping, Jane rode up on her bike and parked it. Carrying my digital video camera, I met her in the front garden, and without speaking, we walked together to the backyard and the boulder-piled herb garden beside my gardening house and the playhouse. Jane dropped ten pounds of raw steak on the ground while I set up my camera and tripod. She handed me the scrap of cloth retrieved from the woods. It was stiff with blood, and I was sure it wasn’t all the vampires’.
Unashamedly, Jane stripped, while I looked away, giving her the privacy I would have wanted had it been me taking off my clothes. Anyone who happened to look this way with a telescope, as I had no neighbors close by, would surely think the witch and friend were going sky-clad for a ceremony, but I wasn’t a Wiccan or a goddess worshipper, and I didn’t dance around naked. Especially in the unseasonable cold.
When she was ready, her travel pack strapped around her neck, along with the gold nugget necklace she never removed, Jane climbed to the top of the rock garden, avoiding my herbs with careful footsteps, and sat. She was holding a fetish necklace in her hands, made from teeth, claws, and bones.
She looked at me, standing shivering in the falling light. “Can your camera record this dark?” When I nodded, my teeth chattering, she said, “Okay. I’ll do my thing. You try to get it on film, and then you can drive me over. You got a blanket in the backseat in case we get stopped?” I nodded again and she grinned, not the half smile I usually got from her, but a real grin, full of happiness. We had talked about me filming her, so she could see what happened from the outside, but this was the first time we had actually tried. I was intensely curious about the procedure.
“It’ll take about ten minutes,” she said, “for me to get mentally ready. When I finish, don’t be standing between me and the steaks, okay?” When I nodded again, she laughed, a low, smooth sound that made me think of whiskey and woodsmoke. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”
I laughed with her then, for several reasons, only one of which was that Jane’s rare laugh was contagious. I said, “Good luck.” She inclined her head, blew out a breath, and went silent. Nearly ten minutes later, even in the night that had fallen around us, I could tell that something odd was happening. I hit the record button on the camera and watched as gray light gathered around my friend.
If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whorled. It coalesced, thickened, and eddied around her. Beautiful. And then Jane . . . shifted. Changed. Her body seemed to bend and flow like water, or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light. The bones beneath her flesh popped and cracked. She grunted, as if with pain. Her breathing changed. The light grew brighter, the dark motes darker.
Both began to dissipate.
On the top of the boulders where Jane had been sat a mountain lion, its eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor, the big cat of the western hemisphere sat in my garden, looking me over, Jane’s travel pack around her neck making a strange lump on her back. The cat was darker than I remembered, tawny on back, shoulders, and hips, pelt darkening down her legs, around her face and ears. The tail, long and stubby, was dark at the tip. She huffed a breath. I saw teeth.
My shivers worsened, even though I knew this was Jane. Or had been Jane. She had assured me, not long ago, that she still had vestiges of her own personality even in cat form and wouldn’t eat me. Easy to say when the big cat isn’t around. Then she yawned, snorted, and stood to her four feet. Incredibly graceful, long sinews and muscles pulling, she leaped to the ground and approached the raw steaks she had dumped earlier. She sniffed, and made a sound that was distinctly disgusted.
I tittered, and the cat looked at me. I mean, she looked at me. I froze. A moment later, she lay down on the ground and started to eat the cold, dead meat. Even in the dark, I could see her teeth biting, tearing.
I had missed some footage and rotated the camera to the eating cat. I also grabbed her fetish necklace and her clothes, stuffing them in a tote for later.
Thirty minutes later, after she had cleaned the blood off her paws and jaws with her tongue, I dismantled the tripod and drove to the McCarley home. Jane — or her cat — lay under a blanket on the backseat. Once there, I opened the doors and shut them behind us.
There was more crime scene tape up at the murder scene, but the place was once again deserted. Silent, my flashlight lighting the way for me, Jane in front, in the dark, we walked around the house to the woods’edge.
I cut off the flash to save her night vision, and held out the scrap of bloody cloth to the cat. She sniffed. Opened her mouth and sucked air in with a coughing, gagging, scree of sound. I jumped back, and I could have sworn Jane laughed, an amused hack. I broke out into a fear-sweat that instantly chilled in the cold breeze. “Not funny,” I said. “What the heck was that?”
Jane padded over and sat in front of me, her front paws crossed like a Southern belle, ears pricked high, mouth closed, nostrils fluttering in the dark, waiting. Patient as ever. When I figured out that she wasn’t going to eat me, and feeling distinctly dense, I held out the bit of cloth. Again, she opened her mouth and sucked air, and I realized she was scenting through her mouth. Learning it. When she was done, which felt like forever, she looked up at me and hacked again. Her laugh, for certain. She turned and padded into the woods. I switched on my flash and hurried back to my car. It was the kids’bedtime. I needed to be home.
IT WAS 4 A.M. when the phone rang. Evan grunted, a bear-snort. I swear, the man could sleep through a train wreck or a tornado. I rolled and picked up the phone. Before I could say hello, Jane said, “I got it. Come get me. I’m freezing and starving. Don’t forget the food.”
“Where are you?” I asked. She told me, and I said, “Okay. Half an hour.”
Jane swore and hung up. She had warned me about her mouth when she was hungry. I poked my hubby, and when he swore, too, I said, “I’m heading out to the old Partman Place to pick up Jane. I’ll be back by dawn.” He grunted again and I slid from the bed, dressed, and grabbed the huge bowl of oatmeal, sugar, and milk from the fridge. Jane had assured me she needed food after she shifted back, and didn’t care what it was or what temp it was. I hoped she remembered that when I gave it to her. Cold oatmeal was nasty.
Half an hour later, I reached the old Partman Place, an early-nineteenth-century homestead and later a mine, the homestead sold and deserted when the gemstones were discovered and the mine closed down in the 1950s, when the gems ran out. It was grown over by fifty-year-old trees, and the drive was gravel, with Jane standing hunched in the middle. Human, wearing the lightweight clothes she carried in the travel pouch along with the cell phone and a few vamp-killing supplies.
I popped the doors and she climbed in, her long black hair like a veil around her, her thin clothes covering a shivering body, pimpled with cold. “Food,” she said, her voice hoarse. I passed the bowl of oatmeal and a serving spoon to her. She tossed the top of the bowl into the floorboards and dug in. I watched her eat from the corner of my eye as I drove. She didn’t bother to chew, just shoveled the cold oatmeal in like she was starving. She looked thinner than usual, though Jane was never much more than skin, bone, and muscle — like her big cat form, I thought. Criminy. Witches I can handle. But what Jane was? Maybe not so much. I hadn’t even known shape changers or skinwalkers even existed. No one did.
Bowl empty, she pulled her leather coat from the tote I had brought, snuggled under it, and lay back in her seat, cradling the empty bowl. She closed her eyes, looking exhausted. “That was not fun,” she said, the words so soft, I had to strain to hear. “Those vamps are fast. Faster than Beast.”
“Beast?”
“My cat,” she said. She laughed, the sound forlorn, lost, almost sad. “My big hunting cat. Who had to chase the scent back to their lair. Up and down mountains and through creeks and across the river. I had to soak in the river to throw off the heat. Beast isn’t built for long-distance running.” She sighed and adjusted the heating vents to blow onto her. “The vamps covered five miles from the McCarleys’place in less than an hour yesterday morning. It took me more than four hours to follow them back through the underbrush and another two to isolate the opening. I should have shifted into a faster cat, though Beast would have been ticked off.
“You found their lair?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. “On the Partman Place?”
“Yeah. Sort of.” She rolled her head to face me in the dark, her golden eyes glowing and forbidding. “They’re living in the mine. They’ve been there for a long time. They were gone by the time I found it. They were famished when they left the lair. I could smell their hunger. I think they’ll kill again tonight. Probably have killed again tonight.”
I tightened my hands on the steering wheel and had to force myself to relax.
“Molly? The lair is only a mile from your house as the vamp runs. And witches smell different from humans.”
A spike of fear raced through me. Followed by a mental image of a vampire leaning over Angelina’s bed. I squeezed the wheel so tight, it made a soft sound of protest.
“You need to mount a defensive perimeter around your house,” Jane said. “You and Evan. You hear? Something magical that’ll scare off anything that moves, or freeze the blood of anything dead. Something like that. You make sure the kids are safe.” She turned her head aside, to look out at the night. Jane loved my kids. She had never said so, but I could see it in her eyes when she watched them. I drove on, chilled to the bone by fear and the early winter.
______
JANE WAS TOO tired to make it back to her apartment, and so she spent the day sleeping on the cot in the back room of the shop. Seven Sassy Sisters’Herb Shop and Café, owned and run by my family, had a booming business, both locally and on the Internet, selling herbal mixtures and teas by bulk and by the ounce, the shop itself serving teas, specialty coffees, brunch and lunch daily, and dinner on weekends. It was mostly vegetarian fare, whipped up by my older sister, water witch, professor, and three-star chef, Evangelina Everhart. My sister Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, an air witch, newly married and pregnant, ran the register and took care of ordering supplies. Two other witch sisters, twins Boadacia and Elizabeth, ran the herb store, while our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were waitstaff. I’m really Molly Meagan Everhart Trueblood. Names with moxie run in my family. Without a single question about why this seemingly human needed a place to crash, my sisters let Jane sleep off the night run.
While my sisters worked around the cot and ran the business without me, I went driving. To the Partman Place. With Brax.
“You found this how?” he asked, sitting in the passenger seat. I was driving so I could pretend that I was in control, not that Brax cared who was in charge so long as the rogue vampires were brought down. “The dogs got squirrelly twenty feet into the underbrush and refused to go on. It doesn’t make any sense, Molly. I never saw dogs go so nuts. They freaked out. So I gotta ask how you know where they sleep.” Detective Paul Braxton was antsy. Worried. Scared. There had been no new reported deaths in the area, yet I had just told him the vamps had gone hunting last night.
There were some benefits to being a witch-out-of-the-closet. I let my lips curl up knowingly. “I had a feeling at the McCarleys’yesterday, but I didn’t think it would work. I devised a spell to track the rogue vampires. At dusk, I went to the McCarleys’and set it free. And it worked. I was able to pinpoint their lair.”
“How? I never heard of such a thing. No one has. I asked on NCIC this morning after you called.” At my raised brows he said, “NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI, a computerized index and database of criminal justice information.”
“A database?” Crap. I hit the brakes, hard. Throwing us both against the seat belts. The wheels squealed, popped, and groaned as the antilock braking system went into play. Brax cussed as we came to a rocking halt. I spun in the seat to face him. “If you made me part of that system, then you’ve used me for the last time, you no-good piece of—”
“Molly!” He held both hands palms out, still rocking in the seat. “No! I did not enter you into the system. We have an agreement. I wouldn’t breach it.”
“Then tell me what you did,” I said, my voice low and threatening. “Because if you took away the privacy of my family and babies, I’ll curse you to hell and back, and damn the consequences.” I gathered my power to me, pulling from the earth and the forest and even the fish living in the nearby river, ecosystems be hanged. This man was endangering my babies.
Brax swallowed in the sudden silence of the old Volvo, as if he could feel the power I was drawing in. I could smell his fear, hear it in his fast breath, over the sounds of nearby traffic. “NCIC is just a database,” he said. “I just input a series of questions. About witches
. And how they work. And—”
“Witches are in the FBI’s data bank?” I hit the steering wheel with both fists as the thought sank in. “Why?”
“Because there are witch criminals in the U.S. Sorcerers who do blood magic. Witches who do dark magic. Witches are part of the database, now and forever.”
“Son of witch on a switch,” I swore, cursing long and viciously, helpless anger in the tones, the syllables flowing and rich. Switching to the old language for impact, not that it had helped. Curses had a way of falling back on the curser rather than hurting the cursed.
I beat the steering wheel in impotent fury. I was a witch, for pity’s sake. And I couldn’t protect my own kind. Rage banging around me like a wrecking ball, I hit the steering wheel one last time and threw my old Volvo into drive. Fuming, silent, I drove to the Partman Place.
The entrance, once meant for mining machinery and trucks, was still drivable, though the asphalt was crazed and broken, grass growing in the cracks. The drive wound around a hillock and was lost from view. Beyond it, signs of mining that were hidden from the road became more obvious. Trees were young and scraggly, the ground was scraped to bedrock, and rusted iron junk littered the site. An old car sat on busted tires, windows, hood, and doors long gone. The office of the mining site was an old WWII Quonset hut, the door hanging free to reveal the dark interior.
Though strip mining had been the primary means of getting to the gems, tunnels had gone into the side of the mountain. The entry to the mine was boarded over with two-by-tens, but some were missing, and it was clear that the opening had been well used.
Brax rubbed his mouth, looking over the place, not meeting my eyes. Finally, he said, “I would never cause you or yours trouble, Molly Trueblood. I do my best to protect you from problems, harassment, or unwanted attention from law enforcement, federal NCIC or otherwise.”