Strange Brew Page 2

  White witches, especially those outside of Wicca (where numbers meant safety), were weak and valuable sacrifices for black witches, who didn’t have their scruples. As Wendy the Witch had noted—witches seemed to have a real preference for killing their own.

  He sipped at his coffee and asked, “So how have you managed without ending up as bits and pieces in someone else’s cauldron?”

  The witch snorted a laugh and set her coffee down abruptly. She grabbed a paper towel off its holder and held it to her face as she gasped and choked coffee, looking suddenly a lot less than thirty. When she was finished, she said, “That’s awesome. Bits and pieces. I’ll have to remember that.”

  Still grinning, she picked up the coffee again. He wished he could see her eyes, because he was pretty sure that whatever humor she’d felt was only surface deep.

  “I tell you what,” she said, “why don’t you tell me who you are and what you know? That way I can tell you if I can help you or not.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. The coffee was strong, and he could feel it and the four other cups he’d had since midnight settle in his bones with caffeine’s untrustworthy gift of nervous energy.

  “I’m Tom Franklin and I’m second in the Emerald City Pack.” She wasn’t surprised by that. She’d known what he was as soon as she opened her door. “My brother Jon is a cop and a damn fine one. He’s been on the Seattle PD for nearly twenty years, and for the last six months he’s been undercover as a street person. He was sent as part of a drug task force: there’s been some nasty garbage out on the street lately, and he’s been looking for it.”

  Wendy Moira Keller leaned back against the cabinets with a sigh. “I’d like to say that no witch would mess with drugs. Not from moral principles, mind you. Witches, for the most part, don’t have moral principles. But drugs are too likely to attract unwanted attention. We never have been so deep in secrecy as you wolves like to be, not when witches sometimes crop up in mundane families—we need to be part of society enough that they can find us. Mostly people think we’re a bunch of harmless charlatans—trafficking in drugs would change all that for the worse. But the Samhain bunch is powerful enough that no one wants to face them—and Kouros is arrogant and crazy. He likes money, and there is at least one herbalist among his followers who could manufacture some really odd stuff.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m interested in finding my brother, not in finding out if witches are selling drugs. It sounded to me like the drugs had nothing to do with my brother’s kidnapping. Let me play Jon’s call, and you make the determination.” He pulled out his cell phone and played the message for her.

  It had come from a pay phone. There weren’t many of those left, now that cell phones had made it less profitable for the phone companies to keep repairing the damage of vandals. But there was no mistaking the characteristic static and hiss as his brother talked very quietly into the mouthpiece.

  Tom had called in favors and found the phone Jon used, but the people who took his brother were impossible to pick out from the scents of the hundreds of people who had been there since the last rain—and his brother’s scent stopped right at the pay phone, outside a battered convenience store. Stopped as if they’d teleported him to another planet—or, more prosaically, thrown him in a car.

  Jon’s voice—smoker-dark, though he’d never touched tobacco or any of its relatives—slid through the apartment: “Look, Tom. My gut told me to call you tonight—and I listen to my gut. I’ve been hearing something on the street about a freaky group calling themselves Samhain—” He spelled it, to be sure Tom got it right. “Last few days I’ve had a couple of people following me that might be part of Samhain. No one wants to talk about ’em much. The streets are afraid of these . . .”

  He didn’t know if the witch could hear the rest. He’d been a wolf for twenty years and more, so his judgment about what human senses were good for was pretty much gone.

  He could hear the girl’s sweet voice clearly, though. “Lucky Jon?” she asked. “Lucky Jon, who are you calling? Let’s hang it up, now.” A pause, then the girl spoke into the phone. “Hello?” Another pause. “It’s an answering machine, I think. No worries.”

  At the same time, a male, probably young, was saying in a rapid, rabid flow of sound, “I feel it. . . . Doncha feel it? I feel it in him. This is the one. He’ll do for Kouros.” Then there was a soft click as the call ended.

  The last fifty times he’d heard the recording, he couldn’t make out the last word. But with the information the witch had given him, he understood it just fine this time.

  Tom looked at Choo’s witch, but he couldn’t tell what she thought. Somewhere she’d learned to discipline her emotions, so he could smell only the strong ones—like the flash of desire she’d felt as he sniffed the back of her neck. Even in this situation, it had been enough to raise a thread of interest. Maybe after they got his brother back, they could do something about that interest. In the meantime . . .

  “How much of the last did you hear, Wendy?” he asked.

  “Don’t call me Wendy,” she snapped. “It’s Moira. No one called me Wendy except my mom, and she’s been dead a long time.”

  “Fine,” he snapped back before he could control himself. He was tired and worried, but he could do better than that. He tightened his control and softened his voice. “Did you hear the guy? The one who said that he felt it in him—meaning my brother, I think. And that he would do for Kouros?”

  “No. Or at least not well enough to catch his words. But I know the woman’s voice. You’re right: It was Samhain.” Though he couldn’t feel anything from her, her knuckles were white on the coffee cup.

  “You need a Finder, and I can’t do that anymore. Wait—” She held up a hand before he could say anything. “—I’m not saying I won’t help you, just that it could be a lot simpler. Kouros moves all the time. Did you trace the call? It sounded like a pay phone to me.”

  “I found the phone booth he called from, but I couldn’t find anything except that he’d been there.” He tapped his nose, then glanced at her dark glasses and said, “I could smell him there and backtrail him, but I couldn’t trail him out. They transported him somehow.”

  “They don’t know that he’s a cop, or that his brother is a werewolf.”

  “He doesn’t carry ID with him while he’s undercover. I don’t see how anyone would know I was his brother. Unless he told them, and he wouldn’t.”

  “Good,” she said. “They won’t expect you. That’ll help.”

  “So do you know a Finder I can go to?”

  She shook her head. “Not one who will help you against Samhain. Anyone, anyone who makes a move against them is punished in some rather spectacular ways.” He saw her consider sharing one or two of them with him and discard it. She didn’t want him scared off. Not that he could be, not with Jon’s life at stake. But it was interesting that she hadn’t tried.

  “If you take me to where they stole him, maybe I can find something they left behind, something to use to find them.”

  Tom frowned at her. She didn’t know his brother, he hadn’t mentioned money, and he was getting the feeling that she couldn’t care less if he called in the authorities. “So if Samhain is so all-powerful, how come you, a white witch, are willing to buck them?”

  “You’re a cop, too, aren’t you?” She finished her coffee, but if she was waiting for a reaction, she wasn’t going to get one. He’d seen the “all-knowing” witch act before. Her lips turned up as she set the empty cup on the counter. “It’s not magic. Cops are easy to spot—suspicious is your middle name. Fair enough.”

  She pulled off her glasses, and he saw that he’d been wrong. He’d been pretty sure she was blind—the other reason women wore wraparound sunglasses at night. And she was. But that wasn’t why she wore the sunglasses.

  Her left eye was Swamp Thing– green without pupil or white. Her right eye was gone, and it looked as though it had been removed by someone who wasn’t too
good with a knife. It was horrible—and he’d seen some horrible things.

  “Sacrifice is good for power,” she said again. “But it works best if you can manage to make the sacrifice your own.”

  Jesus. She’d done it to herself.

  She might not be able to see him, but she read his reaction just fine. She smiled tightly. “There were some extenuating circumstances,” she continued. “You aren’t going to see witches cutting off their fingers to power their spells—it doesn’t work that way. But this worked for me.” She tapped the scar tissue around her right eye. “Kouros did the other one first. That’s why I’m willing to take them on. I’ve done it before and survived—and I still owe them a few.” She replaced her sunglasses, and he watched her relax as they settled into place.

  TOM FRANKLIN HADN’T brought a car, and for obvious reasons, she didn’t drive. He said the phone was only a couple of miles from her apartment, and neither wanted to wait around for a cab. So they walked. She felt his start of surprise when she tucked her arm in his, but he didn’t object. At least he didn’t jump away from her and say “ick,” like the last person who’d seen what she’d done to herself.

  “You’ll have to tell me when we come to curbs or if there’s something in the way,” she told him. “Or you can amuse yourself when I fall on my face. I can find my way around my apartment, but out here I’m at your mercy.”

  He said, with sober humor, “I imagine watching you trip over a few curbs would be a good way to get you to help Jon. Why don’t you get a guide dog?”

  “Small apartments aren’t a good place for big dogs,” she told him. “It’s not fair to the dog.”

  They walked a few blocks in silence, the rain drizzling unhappily down the back of her neck and soaking the bottoms of the jeans she’d put on before they started out. Seattle was living up to its reputation. He guided her as if he’d done it before, unobtrusively but clearly, as if they were waltzing instead of walking down the street. She relaxed and walked faster.

  “Wendy.” He broke the companionable silence with the voice of One Who Suddenly Comprehends. “It’s worse than I thought. I was stuck on Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Good Little Witch. But Wendy Moira . . . I bet it’s Wendy Moira Angela, isn’t it?”

  She gave him a mock scowl. “I don’t have a kiss for you, and I can’t fly—not even with fairy dust. And I hate Peter Pan, the play, and all the movies.”

  His arm moved, and she could tell he was laughing to himself. “I bet.”

  “It could be worse, Toto,” she told him. “I could belong to the Emerald City Pack.”

  He laughed out loud at that, a softer sound than she’d expected, given the rough grumble of his voice. “You know, I’ve never thought of it that way. It seemed logical, Seattle being the Emerald City.”

  She might have said something, but he suddenly picked up his pace like a hunting dog spotting his prey. She kept her hand tight on his arm and did her best to keep up. He stopped at last. “Here.”

  She felt his tension, the desire for action of some sort. Hopefully she’d be able to provide him the opportunity. She released his arm and stepped to the side.

  “All right,” she told him, falling into the comfortable patter she adopted with most of her clients—erasing the odd intimacy that had sprung up between them. “I know the girl on your brother’s phone—her name used to be Molly, but I think she goes by something like Spearmint or Peppermint, somethingmint. I’m going to call for things that belong to her—a hair, a cigarette—anything will do. You’ll have to do the looking. Whatever it is will glow, but it might be very small, easy to overlook.”

  “What if I don’t see anything?”

  “Then they didn’t leave anything behind, and I’ll figure out something else to try.”

  She set aside her worries, shedding them like a duck would shed the cool Seattle rain. Closing her senses to the outside world, she reached into her well of power and drew out a bucketful and threw it out in a circle around her as she called to the essence that was Molly. She hadn’t done this spell since she could see out of both eyes—but there was no reason she couldn’t do it now. Once learned, spells came to her hand like trained spaniels, and this one was no exception.

  “What do you see?” she asked. The vibration of power warmed her against the cold fall drizzle that began to fall. There was something here; she could feel it.

  “Nothing,” his voice told her he’d put a lot of hope into this working.

  “There’s something,” she said, sensations crawling up her arms and over her shoulders. She held out her right hand, her left being otherwise occupied with the workings of her spell. “Touching me might help you see.”

  Warmth flooded her as his hand touched hers . . . and she could see the faint traces Molly had left behind. She froze.

  “Moira?”

  She couldn’t see anything else. Just bright bits of pink light sparkling from the ground, giving her a little bit of an idea what the landscape looked like. She let go of his hand and the light disappeared, leaving her in darkness again.

  “Did you see anything?” she asked, her voice hoarse. The oddity of seeing anything . . . She craved it too much, and it made her wary because she didn’t know how it worked.

  “No.”

  He wanted his brother and she wanted to see. Just for a moment. She held her hand out. “Touch me again.”

  . . . and the sparkles returned like glitter scattered in front of her. Small bits of skin and hair, too small for what she needed. But there was something. . . .

  She followed the glittering trail, and as if it had been hidden, a small wad of something blazed like a bonfire.

  “Is there a wall just to our right?” she asked.

  “A building and an alley.” His voice was tight, but she ignored it. She had other business first.

  They’d waited for Tom’s brother in the alley. Maybe Jon came to the pay phone here often.

  She led Tom to the blaze and bent to pick it up: soft and sticky, gum. Better, she thought, better than she could have hoped. Saliva would make a stronger guide than hair or fingernails could. She released his hand reluctantly.

  “What did you find?”

  “Molly’s gum.” She allowed her magic to loosen the last spell and slide back to her, hissing as the power warmed her skin almost to the point of burning. The next spell would be easier, even if it might eventually need more power. Sympathetic magic—which used the connections between like things—was one of those affinities that ran through her father’s bloodlines into her.

  But before she tried any more magic, she needed to figure out what Tom had done to her spell. How touching him allowed her to see.

  SHE LOOKED UNEARTHLY. A violent wind he had not felt, not even when she’d fastened on to his hand with fierce strength, had blown her hair away from her face. The skin on her hands was reddened, as if she held them too close to a fire. He wanted to soothe them—but he firmly intended never to touch her again.

  He had no idea what she’d done to him while she held on to him and made his body burn and tremble. He didn’t like surprises, and she’d told him that he would have to look, not that she’d use him to see. He especially didn’t like it that as long as she was touching him, he hadn’t wanted her to let him go.

  Witches gather more power from hurting those with magic, she’d said . . . more or less. People just like him—but it hadn’t hurt, not that he’d noticed.

  He wasn’t afraid of her, not really. Witch or not, she was no match for him. Even in human form, he could break her human-fragile body in mere moments. But if she was using him . . .

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked as he had earlier, but the question seemed more important now. He’d known what she was, but witch meant something different to him now. He knew enough about witches not to ask the obvious question, though—like what it was she’d done to him. Witches, in his experience, were secretive about their spells—like junkyard dogs are secretive about thei
r bones.

  She’d taken something from him by using him that way . . . broken the trust he’d felt building between them. He needed to reestablish what he could expect out of her. Needed to know exactly what she was getting him into, beyond rescuing his brother. Witches were not altruistic. “What do you want out of this? Revenge for your blindness?”

  She watched him . . . appeared to watch him, anyway, as she considered his question. There hadn’t been many people who could lie to Tom before he Changed—cops learn all about lying the first year on the job. Afterwards . . . he could smell a lie a mile away an hour before it was spoken.

  “Andy Choo sent you,” she said finally. “That’s one. Your brother’s a policeman, and an investigation into his death might be awkward. That’s two. He takes risks to help people he doesn’t know—it’s only right someone return the favor. That’s three.”

  They weren’t lies, but they weren’t everything either. Her face was very still, as if the magic she worked had changed her view of him, too.

  Then she tilted her head sideways and said in a totally different voice, hesitant and raw. “Sins of the fathers.”

  Here was absolute truth. Obscure as hell, but truth. “Sins of the fathers?”

  “Kouros’s real name is Lin Keller, though he hasn’t used it in twenty years or more.”

  “He’s your father.” And then he added two and two. “Your father is running Samhain’s Coven?” Her father had ruined her eye and—Tom could read between the lines—caused her to ruin the other? Her own father?

  She drew in a deep breath—and for a moment he was afraid she was going to cry or something. But a stray gust of air brought the scent of her to him, and he realized she was angry. It tasted like a werewolf’s rage, wild and biting.