Strange Brew Read online

  “I am not a part of it,” she said, her voice a half octave lower than it had been. “I’m not bringing you to his lair so he can dine upon werewolf, too. I am here because some jerk made me feel sorry for him. I am here because I want both him and his brother out of my hair and safely out of the hands of my rat-bastard father so I won’t have their deaths on my conscience, too.”

  Someone else might have been scared of her, she being a witch and all. Tom wanted to apologize—and he couldn’t remember the last time that impulse had touched him. It was even more amazing because he wasn’t at fault: she’d misunderstood him. Maybe she’d picked up on how appalled he was that her own father had maimed her—he hadn’t been implying she was one of them.

  He didn’t apologize, though, or explain himself. People said things when they were mad that they wouldn’t tell you otherwise.

  “What was it you did to me?”

  “Did to you?” Arctic ice might be warmer.

  “When you were looking for the gum. It felt like you hit me with a bolt of lightning.” He was damned if he’d tell her everything he felt.

  Her right eyebrow peeked out above her sunglasses. Interest replaced coldness. “You felt like I was doing something to you?” And then she held out her left hand. “Take my hand.”

  He looked at it.

  After a moment, she smiled. He didn’t know she had a smile like that in her. Bright and cheerful and sudden. Knowing. As if she had gained every thought that passed through his head. Her anger, the misunderstanding between them was gone as if it had never been.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she told him gently. “Let me try re-creating it, and maybe I can tell you.”

  He gave her his hand. Instead of taking it, she put only two fingers on his palm. She stepped closer to him, dropped her head so he could see her scalp gleaming pale underneath her dark hair. The magic that touched him this time was gentler, sparklers instead of fireworks—and she jerked her fingers away as if his hand were a hot potato.

  “What the heck . . .” She rubbed her hands on her arms with nervous speed.

  “What?”

  “You weren’t acting as my focus—I can tell you that much.”

  “So what was going on?”

  She shook her head, clearly uncomfortable. “I think I was using you to see. I shouldn’t be able to do that.”

  He found himself smiling grimly. “So I’m your Seeing Eye wolf?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He recognized her panic, having seen it in his own mirror upon occasion. It was always frightening when something you thought was firmly under control broke free to run where it would. With him, it was the wolf.

  Something resettled in his gut. She hadn’t done it on purpose; she wasn’t using him.

  “Is it harmful to me?”

  She frowned. “Did it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Either time?”

  “Neither time.”

  “Then it didn’t harm you.”

  “All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

  She opened her right hand, the one with the gum in it. “Not us. Me. This is going to show us where Molly is—and Molly will know where your brother is.”

  She closed her fingers, twisted her hand palm down, then turned herself in a slow circle. She hit a break in the pavement, and he grabbed her before she could do more than stumble. His hand touched her wrist, and she turned her hand to grab him as the kick of power flowed through his body once more.

  “They’re in a boat,” she told him, and went limp in his arms.

  SHE AWOKE WITH the familiar headache that usually accompanied the overuse of magic—and absolutely no idea where she was. It smelled wrong to be her apartment, but she was lying on a couch with a blanket covering her.

  Panic rose in her chest—sometimes she hated being blind.

  “Back in the land of the living?”

  “Tom?”

  He must have heard the distress in her voice, because when he spoke again, he was much closer and his voice was softer. “You’re on a couch in my apartment. We were as close to mine as we were to yours, and I knew I could get us into my apartment. Yours is probably sealed with hocus-pocus. Are you all right?”

  She sat up and put her feet on the floor, and her erstwhile bed indeed proved itself to be a couch. “Do you have something with sugar in it? Sweet tea or fruit juice?”

  “Hot cocoa or tea,” he told her.

  “Tea.”

  He must have had water already heated, because he was quickly back with a cup. She drank the sweet stuff down as fast as she could, and the warmth did as much as the sugar to clear her headache.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “For what, exactly?” he said.

  “For using you. I think you don’t have any barriers,” she told him slowly. “We all have safeguards, walls that keep out intruders. It’s what keeps us safe.”

  In his silence, she heard him consider that.

  “So, I’m vulnerable to witches?”

  She didn’t know what to do with her empty cup, so she set it on the couch beside her. Then she used her left hand, her seeking hand, to look at him again.

  “No, I don’t think so. Your barriers seem solid . . . even stronger than usual, as I’d expect from a wolf as far up the command structure as you are. I think you are vulnerable only to me.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means when I touch you, I can see magic through your eyes . . . with practice, I might even be able just to see. It means that you can feed my magic with your skin.” She swallowed. “You’re not going to like this.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You are acting like my familiar.” She couldn’t feel a thing from him. “If I had a familiar.”

  Floorboards creaked under his feet as his weight shifted. His shoulder brushed her as he picked up the empty cup. She heard him walk away from her and set the cup on a hard surface. “Do you need more tea?”

  “No,” she said, needing suddenly to be home, somewhere she wasn’t so dependent upon him. “I’m fine. If you would call me a taxi, I’d appreciate it.” She stood up, too. Then realized she had no idea where the door was or what obstacles might be hiding on the floor. In her own apartment, redolent with her magic, she was never so helpless.

  “Can you find my brother?”

  She hadn’t heard him move, not a creak, not a breath, but his voice told her he was no more than a few inches from her. Disoriented and vulnerable, she was afraid of him for the first time.

  He took a big step away from her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Sorry,” she told him. “You startled me. Do we still have the gum?”

  “Yes. You said she was on a boat.”

  She’d forgotten, but as soon as he said it, she could picture the boat in her head. That hadn’t been the way the spell was supposed to work. It was more of a “hot and cold” spell, but she could still see the boat in her mind’s eye.

  Nothing had really changed, except that she’d used someone without asking. There was still a policeman to be saved and her father to kill.

  “If we still have the gum, I can find Molly—the girl on your brother’s phone call.”

  “I have a buddy whose boat we can borrow.”

  “All right,” she told him after a moment. “Do you have some aspirin?”

  SHE HATED BOATING. The rocking motion disrupted her sense of direction, the engine’s roar obscured softer sounds, and the scent of the ocean covered the subtler scents she used to negotiate everyday life. Worse than all of that, though, was the thought of trying to swim without knowing where she was going. The damp air chilled her already cold skin.

  “Which direction?” said Tom over the sound of the engine.

  His presence shouldn’t have made her feel better—werewolves couldn’t swim at all—but it did. She pointed with the hand that held the gum. “Not far now,” she warned him.

  “There’s a pr
ivate dock about a half mile up the coast. Looks like it’s been here awhile,” he told her. “There’s a boat—The Tern, the bird.”

  It felt right. “I think that must be it.”

  There were other boats on the water; she could hear them. “What time is it?”

  “About ten in the morning. We’re passing the boat right now.”

  Molly’s traces, left on the gum, pulled toward their source, tugging Moira’s hand toward the back of the boat. “That’s it.”

  “There’s a park with docks about a mile back,” he said, and the boat tilted to the side. “We’ll go tie up there and come back on foot.”

  But when he’d tied the boat up, he changed his mind. “Why don’t you stay here and let me check this out?”

  Moira rubbed her hands together. It bothered her to have her magic doing something it wasn’t supposed to be doing, and she’d let it throw her off her game: time to collect herself. She gave him a sultry smile. “Poor blind girl,” she said. “Must be kept out of danger, do you think?” She turned a hand palm up and heard the whoosh of flame as it caught fire. “You’ll need me when you find Molly—you may be a werewolf, but she’s a witch who looks like a pretty young thing.” She snuffed the flame and dusted off her hands. “Besides, she’s afraid of me. She’ll tell me where your brother is.”

  She didn’t let him know how grateful she was for the help he gave her exiting the boat. When this night was over, he’d go back to his life and she to hers. If she wanted to keep him—she knew he wouldn’t want to be kept by her. She was a witch, and ugly with scars of the past.

  Besides, if her dreams were right, she wouldn’t survive to see nightfall.

  SHE THREADED THROUGH the dense underbrush as if she could see every hanging branch, one hand on his back and her other held out in front of her. He wondered if she was using magic to see.

  She wasn’t using him. Her hand in the middle of his back was warm and light, but his flannel shirt was between it and skin. Probably she was reading his body language and using her upraised hand as an insurance policy against low-hanging branches.

  They followed a half-overgrown path that had been trod out a hundred feet or so from the coast, which was obscured by ferns and underbrush. He kept his ears tuned so he’d know it if they started heading away from the ocean.

  The Tern had been moored in a small natural harbor on a battered dock next to the remains of a boathouse. A private property rather than the public dock he’d used.

  They’d traveled north and were somewhere not too far from Everett, by his reckoning. He wasn’t terribly surprised when their path ended in a brand-new eight-foot chain-link fence. Someone had a real estate gold mine on their hands, and they were waiting to sell it to some developer when the price was right. Until then, they’d try to keep out the riffraff.

  He helped Moira over the fence, mostly a matter of whispering a few directions until she found the top of it. He waited until she was over and then vaulted over himself.

  The path they’d been following continued on, though not nearly so well traveled as it had been before the fence. A quarter mile of blackberry brambles ended abruptly in thigh-deep damp grasslands that might once have been a lawn. He stopped before they left the cover of the bushes, sinking down to rest on his heels.

  “There’s a burnt-out house here,” he told Moira, who had ducked down when he did. “It must have burned down a couple of years ago, because I don’t smell it.”

  “Hidden,” she commented.

  “Someone’s had tents up here,” he told her. “And I see the remnants of a campfire.”

  “Can you see the boat from here?”

  “No, but there’s a path I think should lead down to the water. I think this is the place.”

  She pulled her hand away from his arm. “Can you go check it out without being seen?”

  “It would be easier if I do it as a wolf,” Tom admitted. “But I don’t dare. We might have to make a quick getaway, and it’ll be a while before I can shift back to human.” He hoped Jon would be healthy enough to pilot in an emergency—but he didn’t like to make plans that depended upon an unknown. Moira wasn’t going to be piloting a boat anywhere.

  “Wait,” she told him. She murmured a few words and then put her cold fingers against his throat. A sudden shock, like a static charge on steroids, hit him—and when it was over, her fingers were hot on his pulse. “You aren’t invisible, but it’ll make people want to overlook you.”

  He pulled out his HK and checked the magazine before sliding it back in. The big gun fit his hand like a glove. He believed in using weapons: guns or fangs, whatever got the job done.

  “It won’t take me long.”

  “If you don’t go, you’ll never get back,” she told him, and gave him a gentle push. “I can take care of myself.”

  It didn’t sit right with him, leaving her alone in the territory of his enemies, but common sense said he’d have a better chance of roaming unseen. And no one tackled a witch lightly—not even other witches.

  Spell or no, he slid through the wet overgrown trees like a shadow, crouching to minimize his silhouette and avoiding anything likely to crunch. One thing living in Seattle did was minimize the stuff that would crunch under your foot—all the leaves were wet and moldy without a noise to be had.

  The boat was there, bobbing gently in the water. Empty. He closed his eyes and let the morning air tell him all it could.

  His brother had been in the boat. There had been others, too—Tom memorized their scents. If anything happened to Jon, he’d track them down and kill them, one by one. Once he had them, he’d let his nose lead him to Jon.

  He found blood where Jon had scraped against a tree, crushed plants where his brother had tried to get away and rolled around in the mud with another man. Or maybe he’d just been laying a trail for Tom. Jon knew Tom would come for him—that’s what family did.

  The path the kidnappers took paralleled the waterfront for a while and then headed inland, but not for the burnt-out house. Someone had found a better hideout. Nearly invisible under a shelter of trees, a small barn nestled snugly amidst broken pieces of corral fencing. Its silvered sides bore only a hint of red paint, but the aluminum roof, though covered with moss, was undamaged.

  And his brother was there. He couldn’t quite hear what Jon was saying, but he recognized his voice . . . and the slurring rapid rhythm of his schizophrenic-mimicry. If Jon was acting, he was all right. The relief of that settled in his spine and steadied his nerves.

  All he needed to do was get his witch. . . . Movement caught his attention, and he dropped to the ground and froze, hidden by wet grass and weeds.

  MOIRA WASN’T SURPRISED when they found her—ten in the morning isn’t a good time to hide. It was one of the young ones—she could tell by the surprised squeal and the rapid thud of footsteps as he ran for help.

  Of course, if she’d really been trying to hide, she might have managed it. But sometime after Tom left it had occurred to her that if she wanted to find Samhain, the easiest thing might be to let them find her. So she set about attracting their attention.

  If they found her, it would unnerve them. They knew she worked alone. Her arrival here would puzzle them, but they wouldn’t look for anyone else—leaving Tom as her secret weapon.

  Magic called to magic, unless the witch took pains to hide it, so any of them should have been able to feel the flames that danced over her hands. It had taken them longer than she expected. While she waited for the boy to return, she found a sharp-edged rock and put it in her pocket. She folded her legs and let the coolness of the damp earth flow through her.

  She didn’t hear him come, but she knew by his silence whom the young covenist had run to.

  “Hello, Father,” she told him, rising to her feet. “We have much to talk about.”

  SHE DIDN’T LOOK like a captive, Tom thought, watching Moira walk to the barn as if she’d been there before, though she might have been following the sullen-look
ing half-grown boy who clomped through the grass ahead of her. A tall man followed them both, his hungry eyes on Moira’s back.

  His wolf recognized another dominant male with a near-silent growl, while Tom thought that the man was too young to have a grown daughter. But there was no one else this could be but Lin Keller—that predator was not a man who followed anyone or allowed anyone around him who might challenge him. He’d seen an Alpha or two like that.

  Tom watched them until they disappeared into the barn.

  It hurt to imagine she might have betrayed him—as if there were some bond between them, though he hadn’t known her a full day. Part of him would not believe it. He remembered her real indignation when she thought he believed she was part of Samhain, and it comforted him.

  It didn’t matter, couldn’t matter. Not yet. Saving Jon mattered, and the rest would wait. His witch was captured or had betrayed him. Either way, it was time to let the wolf free.

  The change hurt, but experience meant he made no sound as his bones rearranged themselves and his muscles stretched and slithered to adjust to his new shape. It took fifteen minutes of agony before he rose on four paws, a snarl fixed on his muzzle—ready to kill someone. Anyone.

  Instead he stalked like a ghost to the barn where his witch waited. He rejected the door they’d used, but prowled around the side, where four stall doors awaited. Two of them were broken with missing boards; one of the openings was big enough for him to slide through.

  The interior of the barn was dark, and the stall’s half walls blocked his view of the main section, where his quarry waited. Jon was still going strong, a wild ranting conversation with no one about the Old Testament, complete with quotes. Tom knew a lot of them himself.

  “Killing things again, Father?” said Moira’s cool disapproving voice, cutting though Jon’s soliloquy.

  And suddenly Tom could breathe again. They’d found her somehow, Samhain’s Coven had, but she wasn’t one of them.

  “So judgmental.” Tom had expected something . . . bigger from the man’s voice. His own Alpha, for instance, could have made a living as a televangelist with his raw fire-and-brimstone voice. This man sounded like an accountant.