“Of course,” I said. “You’re always welcome here.”
“That means a lot, coming from you,” she said, stepping inside. She was in her early twenties, just a little younger than me, with long brown hair, big brown eyes, and a lanky figure. In her skinny jeans and flattering sweater, she was much more fashionable than I was—in part because of her normal, nonmagical upbringing in nearby Santa Rosa. With my messy hair and baggy clothes, I looked like a stereotypical witch next to her. “Can you believe I’m getting my last box?”
Just in the past few weeks she’d sold the winery and bought a storefront and second-floor apartment in Silverpool’s tiny downtown. I’d urged her to test the magical aura of the property before closing the sale, but within only six days, she’d declared the aura perfect and put down her money. It was a done deal.
“It happened so fast,” I said. My privacy was precious to me, but I’d already begun to miss her. And not just because she’d also been covering some of the household expenses.
“Turns out the old owner was on the hook for some permit violations,” she said. “Guess that’s why he was in such a hurry.”
I sat down at the kitchen table and idly stroked my left wrist, still sore from the newest tattoo that had mysteriously appeared after a recent witch house party in Mendocino. The marks were thin, concentric arcs in black ink that radiated outward from the bend in my wrist. One had appeared that summer, and a second ring just over a month ago. I didn’t know why or how they had appeared, but I suspected it had something to do with the first witch I had fought, a witch who died—
Something strange about the pain made me look down, and I stared in shock. A third ring had appeared, stretching out above the other two. The skin around it was bright red and inflamed.
I cupped my hand over it and sent a probing spell into my own skin, searching for answers. Was it a curse? The marks had appeared after I fought other witches.
It had to be something about magical confrontation. Had my fight with the demon left the mark, or had there been another witch, too?
If only I could remember.
Birdie continued to talk about her new store, the building, the code violations. “An electrician I knew from Cypress checked it out. He gave me a quote. It’s not too bad.”
Setting aside the mystery of my tattoos—for now—I gave Birdie a concerned look. “I hope you got a discount on the selling price.” I tended to be overprotective of Birdie, even though we were about the same age, because she was so nice, so deeply kind, walking through the world with her heart open.
“I can afford it,” she said. “Those witches at the Protectorate might be brilliant at magic, but they weren’t very good at negotiating a deal. My lawyer said they way overpaid for the winery.”
Birdie’s inheritance was more complicated than a local lawyer could know. Until that summer, the winery’s owner had been Tristan Price, who had been Birdie’s biological father (and, to my embarrassment, briefly my boyfriend), although she’d never known him. He’d also been the Protector of Silverpool, assigned by the Protectorate to guard the wellspring. He’d loved wine and had cared as much about his vineyards as he had about demons and fae. After his murder, Birdie had inherited the winery, then promptly sold it to the Protectorate. Someday they would install a new Protector in town. For personal reasons, I wasn’t eager for that to happen. I’d risked my life to find his murderer, but I’d also learned to distrust the Protectorate. They were too quick to kill creatures they didn’t understand.
Birdie bent over to greet Random, who had finished eating and was now celebrating her return. He’d miss her when she stopped coming around so often. Our tiny town, magically hidden to avoid danger, was unlikely to have the foot traffic to support a bookstore, but she didn’t actually need the income. She’d learned from me how important it was for a witch to establish a home base where she could centralize and grow her power. Living with me had made it increasingly difficult for her own magic to develop.
“Listen,” I said, rubbing my temples, “did you happen to notice anything at Cypress while you were driving by?”
“At what?”
“Cypress Hardware,” I said. “Was there anything strange in the parking lot, on the street, any Protectorate SUVs, anything unusual?”
“What’s Cypress Hardware?” she asked, sitting across from me.
I stared at her. Demon’s balls. More proof I hadn’t imagined it. Protectorate agents, responding to the demonic emergency, must’ve set up confusion wards around the property. “The massive big-box store in the center of town that sells anything you might ever want,” I said, my voice rising. “Your inspiration for opening your own store since they seem to do a good business even though hardly anybody lives here.”
She blinked, furrowing her brow. “Right,” she said slowly. “How could I forget?”
I pushed to my feet. “I need to go.” Had Samantha survived? Were they here to investigate a murder or a thwarted demonic invasion? “I might need to ask you a favor.”
“Sure. If I can remember it.”
I smiled weakly. “If I don’t come home this afternoon, could you take care of Random until I get back?”
“Why— Oh no. What happened?” Birdie leaned over the table. “Was it something at Cypress? Why did I forget what it was? Is that why you’re so weird-looking, all limp and splotchy? I thought maybe you were hungover, and now that you’ve given up coffee, it’s impossible to recover, but of course it’s not like you go out clubbing or having fun or anything, which you totally should, even though it makes you look sick the next day, it’s actually good for you. I mean, it would be if you did it.”
Because Birdie tended to ramble, I waited for the current of words to come to a complete stop before saying, “I’ll explain later. Will you check on Random?”
“Of course, yes, of course. I’ll put a note on my hand so I can’t forget it.” She took a marker out of her bra and made a wobbly X on her right index finger. “I was using it to label boxes. They can’t erase Sharpie on my skin, can they? Protectorate agents?”
I didn’t want to scare her by telling her how much of her they could erase, so I just nodded and went to the door, where my footwear was lined up under a coatrack. How had I taken off my shoes when I was unconscious? Or my jacket?
“I’ll take him for a walk right now, if that’s OK with you,” she said. “I miss our jaunts around the neighborhood.”
“That would be really great,” I said. “Thanks, Birdie. Thanks so much.”
“But you have to tell me everything when you get back. You’re going to be sneaky and try to hide things from me, so promise me you won’t.”
I stared at her, biting my lip. There were things it was probably better she not know, at least not until she’d learned more. She’d only discovered she was a witch a few months ago.
But maybe I was being too protective. “I promise to tell you what I can,” I said, pretending not to see the face she made.
My Jeep, which I’d driven to Cypress that morning, was in the driveway.
Not good. How had it gotten there without my knowing?
Leaving it there, I set out on foot to return to the store, down the narrow lane where our three houses perched amid the trees on the hill overlooking the Vago River. The rest of Silverpool’s business district fit within the next three blocks along Main Street, which also followed the river. And a couple of miles past that, on the way to the Pacific coast, was the magnet for all the demons, witches, and fae that come to town: the Silverpool Wellspring.
Once a year, a flood would coincide with the winter solstice, bringing water with magical properties to the surface. The fae found it irresistible and traveled great distances to enjoy it; the demons found the fae irresistible and so came to consume them; human witches, under the organizational umbrella of the Protectorate, stayed to prevent supernatural chaos. Weeks away from the solstice, the wellspring was still dry. Why had a demon risked coming so close?
&nbs
p; And I didn’t want to think about how my vehicle had returned to my house. Just the thought of having been carried and driven, without my awareness, sent a shiver through me. Why couldn’t I remember? There should’ve been some magic residue on my body that gave me a clue what had happened, but I felt nothing.
I would have to find answers at Cypress Hardware.
As I’d expected, the parking lot in front of the wide, squat building was behind a blur of boring, misty air. But then I was overcome with a yawn and stood in place a moment, feeling my head swim. Maybe I was getting sick. I had a sudden, vivid, delicious craving for an almond-milk latte and pumpkin-spice scone from the café down the street. The taste of cloves and butter and cinnamon tingled on my tongue, luring me past the scene of the crime—and the trio of black Protectorate SUVs parked out front—to the warm, cozy café across from Birdie’s planned bookstore.
The second I touched the crosswalk button to go to the café, I returned to my senses and snatched my hand away. Annoyed with myself, I pinched my arm to keep myself in line, then returned to the enchanted parking lot and strode through the spell.
I made it through, but I had to fight off a wave of nausea.
I was definitely not at my peak form.
When my stomach settled, I was able to get a good look at the faces of the Protectorate agents. With mixed feelings I saw Darius Ironford, my former partner. He was a serious-looking man in his late twenties, tall and lean, with his dark hair in twisted curls—a little fuller on top than when I’d last seen him. He wore his usual diamond earring and a generous amount of gold on his wrists and hands.
The five others, young men and women, all wearing silver-studded black leather jackets, were unfamiliar to me. Darius watched me approach as if he’d been waiting for me, which he probably had.
“You were seen here this morning,” he said without greeting. That was typical for him and didn’t necessarily mean he was angry, suspicious, or annoyed with me, though he usually was. I hadn’t been the best partner, but recently I’d been able to make up for some of my limitations.
“I set up a jewelry display,” I said. “For the holidays.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow and looked away. “Save it for Raynor when you give him your report.”
Raynor was the director of the San Francisco office of the Protectorate. Until his promotion to management a few months ago, he’d been the most infamous demon hunter in the country. I’d never worked for him officially, but I’d been forced to do odd jobs for him off the record. My trip to a recent house party of murderous witches in Mendocino had been for him. Now he wanted me to take on more assignments, work as some kind of spy or off-the-record investigator, and I kept refusing. The house party had been a terrifying ordeal. Why would I want to repeat that kind of experience?
“I won’t be giving him any reports,” I said. “I don’t work for—”
He held up a hand. “Not now. I’ve got to watch the new Flints.” He nodded at the crew of agents. Flint was the entry-level position at the Protectorate. “A nonmagical human is attacked near a wellspring, and all they give me is a handful of Flints.” He scowled.
I opened my mouth to say she was more than attacked—total demonic possession would trigger a high-level investigation involving New York and Emerald-level witches—but froze. How would I know about the demon if I’d only been setting up my jewelry display? Avoiding Protectorate entanglement in the demon’s attack on Samantha was going to be complicated.
If I told Raynor about what I’d seen, there was a chance he would keep it a secret from the rest of the Protectorate. He’d already had me work off the record with Darius before in Mendocino—fairly successfully, although we hadn’t prevented as much death as I would’ve liked—and he might want me to do it again. From the way Darius was acting, my old partner probably assumed I was still one of Raynor’s secret agents.
But I didn’t want to be. I wanted my privacy, my independence, my safe, peaceful life.
Not that I’d ever had a safe, peaceful life, but I could fight for one.
“Do you know the name of who was attacked?” I asked. It was a deceptive question, because I knew it already, but not technically a lie.
“Samantha Ashe,” he said. “Eighteen. Female. Nonmagical.”
“Is she…?” I began.
“What?”
I swallowed, bracing myself for tragedy, and spoke in a whisper. “Alive?”
He shot a hard look at me. “Yes,” he said carefully. “She was found sitting on the floor in one of the aisles, saying she’d fainted.”
“That’s it?” I asked, feeling uneasy. Maybe the demon was still active inside her. “You talked to her?”
“We suspect she’d been attacked an hour earlier. The demon sign was all over her.” He eyed me. “You must’ve felt it yourself, since you were here. It triggered one of our automatic wards, alerting us in San Francisco around seven o’clock this morning.”
“I—”
He flung up a hand. “Please. Don’t tell me anything. Raynor wants to keep you off the record, and anything you tell me will have to go in my report. An Emerald witch will be scanning me for memory and truth errors when I make it.” He took out his notebook and began sketching the layout of the parking lot, the cart return corral, the sliding front doors. “I’m telling you what I know just because I figure you’ll poke around to find out what you want to know anyway, and getting it from me keeps you from causing more trouble.”
“You make it sound like I want trouble in my life,” I said, “when that’s the last thing I ever want.”
He continued sketching.
“But since you’re answering my questions,” I continued, clearing my throat, “what does she remember happening this morning? Other than the fainting?”
“She felt light-headed while she was collecting the shopping carts from the parking lot, and the next thing she remembers was waking up inside on the floor next to the garden tools.”
“And…” How could I ask if she’d said anything about me without admitting I’d been in the same aisle? “She was alone?”
He flipped back through his notebook. “An assistant manager, Carolyn Kemper, found her and called for help. She can barely walk, but declined an ambulance. Doesn’t have insurance. Two of our people pretended to be off-duty EMTs and checked her out, confirmed the demon sign. Her mother just took her home.”
“Who called the Protectorate?”
“We were already on the way after the ward was triggered,” he said. “We have to conduct a complete sweep of the town, starting with this store and the wellspring. When a human being is affected by any Shadow presence, however briefly, we still have to make sure the threat is driven away or destroyed.”
From the way he was talking, I feared they didn’t realize just how serious the threat actually was. The demon hadn’t brushed up against Samantha accidentally and then passed on; he’d completely possessed her. For him to be driven out—by me, apparently—was too unusual for Darius or the other agents to consider.
But if I told them what I’d seen, a horde of powerful, aggressive, intrusive Protectorate witches would descend on Silverpool and not only interfere in my own privacy, but uncover the existence of one of my neighbors—an individual who’d become important to me: the changeling Seth Dumont. Since in modern witch politics, Seth was technically a possessing spirit, that made him no different than a demon—a threat that needed to be destroyed.
Seth, however, was stuck in Silverpool. Years ago his mother, a lake fae, had put him in the body of a human baby, and Seth had grown up in Minnesota with loving, nonmagical human parents. This past summer, feeling guilty, Seth had tracked down the human spirit who now inhabited his fae body and offered a corrective exchange. But the former human, living as the fairy Launt, was an angry, violent creature, and had died in the ensuing conflict. Now Seth found he could only survive if he stayed near the grave of his dead twin, and so he’d bought the house nearest to it—next d
oor to me. He’d discovered that any travel outside of town made him mortally weak.
He frequently annoyed me, but I didn’t want the hardliners at the Protectorate to discover him. I’d helped him stay alive this long and had gotten rather attached to the idea of him continuing to live.
But if I didn’t tell the Protectorate about the demon, other residents of Silverpool, also my friends and neighbors—could lose their bodily and spiritual autonomy if they were possessed and consumed by the evil spirit I battled that morning.
“I have to talk to R—” I began.
Darius strode away before I could finish my sentence.
Right. He didn’t want to know. Always ambitious, Darius still played by the rules and hoped to climb the ranks to Emerald before he was forty. Associating with me wasn’t good politically. Worse than having an infamous criminal as a father, I’d been canned from the Protectorate and now made a living with hearth magic, growing herbs and selling wooden beads out of a cottage in the woods for rent money. Very old-fashioned, and very uncool.
I watched him talk to the Flint agents near the row of SUVs, who were talking to a very tall woman with dark hair I’d seen around the store before. The Cypress employees were milling about, adjusting the early Christmas trees, collecting shopping carts in the lot, acting as if nothing had happened. None of them glanced at the agents. The ignore spell was strong, and fighting it had started to give me a headache.
There was nothing else for me to see here. Why had I even come? There was a load of laundry in my washing machine I needed to move over to the dryer. I turned around and left, stepping through the boundary spell with relief and hiking up the hill to my house. By the time I was walking past Seth’s house next door to mine, I’d forgotten why I’d left home in the first place. I didn’t even have Random with me—why was I walking around without my dog? He needed as much exercise as I could give him, and here I was leaving him at home.
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