Gray witch, p.9
Gray Witch, page 9
On his head, onyx and deadly, gleamed his horns.
“Oops,” I whispered, our lips brushing. “I might have gotten carried away.”
Fascination heightened his senses, making him hyperaware of when my thoughts took a downward turn. Which, for him, resulted in more of an—ahem—upward turn.
“I can’t see you,” Clay announced, “but I can hear you. Keep that in mind.”
“You can’t see either of us?” I spun toward him. “You’re sure?”
“As far as I can tell, Colby and I are alone.” He hesitated. “Except for the panting and breathy sighs.”
Huh.
The visualization exercise had included things I wanted to do to Asa. That must have secured the spell on me as well. I would have to remember that going forward. It was a handy trick that cut down on magic expenditure.
“Clay—”
“Oh, Ace,” he mimicked me. “You’re so tall, dark, and horny.”
A laugh slipped out of Asa, but I waited for what I knew would come next.
“Do me, Rue.” Clay pitched his voice low. “Ride me like a pony.”
This time, I burst into laughter, because he made it easy to picture using Asa’s braids as reins.
Which I would never tell either of them.
Ever.
“Why are you like this?” I jabbed his cheek. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m sexually frustrated, emotionally stunted, and also hilarious beyond all reason.”
“I’m not the friend who tells you that you need to get laid.” I poked him again. “Your taste in women is terrible.”
“You’re not wrong.” He cocked a half smile. “Maybe Ace can set me up with a nice daemoness.”
“Nice and daemoness don’t often go together.” Asa melted my bones with a look. “I got lucky with Rue.”
Biting the inside of my cheek, I didn’t correct him. I was trying to get better about taking compliments.
Even if they were one thousand percent wildly inaccurate.
“Shorty incoming,” Clay warned as she peeked out of his pocket, breaching the spell that kept her in a bubble of quiet, the better for letting the grownups talk.
Instead of her usual chatter, we got silence as she took in her new surroundings.
“Do you want to play your game?” I cast about for her laptop. “I can set you up before I go.”
Without a word, she ducked back into Clay’s pocket, spooked by my disembodied voice.
“I’m not winning any contests here.” I headed for the door. “Clay, we’re out.”
Twice the coverage meant twice the drain on my magic, so we needed to get going anyway.
“This isn’t your fault,” he protested. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that, I could use Benjamins to wipe.”
Frustrated I couldn’t help Colby by waving a magic wand, I barreled out the door into the parking lot.
The thing about trauma? It lurked in the recesses of your brain, let you hope you had finally, finally won. Then it pounced, digging in its claws and reminding you of each and every scar you did your best to hide.
“Let’s stop by the front desk,” I told Asa in a huff. “I want to see what Myrtle is doing.”
“All right.”
We didn’t go inside, as it would be hard to explain the door opening, but I did peer through the glass.
Elbows on the counter, she filed her nails while she watched the TV mounted in their tiny guest lounge.
“Good deal.” I got my bearings. “The woods are about a twenty-minute walk that way.”
“All right.”
Checking both ways before stepping into nonexistent traffic, I prowled across the pockmarked road.
“Are you stuck?” I flicked him a glance on the other side. “Do you need me to feed you a quarter?”
“You stew. Often. Mostly about your responsibilities to your loved ones. I worried about pulling you out of those dark moods at first, but now I see it’s part of your process.” He noticed he had my attention. “I can’t convince you what others do isn’t your fault. I can’t convince you you’re not to blame when things go wrong. You require time and space to work through it until you convince yourself you did the best you could under the circumstances.”
Unnerved by how well he read me, I cocked an eyebrow. “Who says I don’t stew on guilt 24/7?”
“You’re too busy,” he reasoned. “Busier since we started sharing a bed.”
A half-choked laugh forced through the knot in my chest. Smug looked good on him.
As we set off toward the woods, I gave what he had observed serious thought and decided he was right.
Weird.
When had I become a person capable of forgiving myself? Not shucking blame. Not immune to the consequences of my actions. But truly able to look at a situation, evaluate all factors, all participants, and determine I wasn’t at fault?
Okay, so I wasn’t that progressive.
Safer to say I was cutting myself slack when I never had before, not when it mattered, not when I cared.
In taking on Colby, I had duked it out with Atlas for the right to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. I wanted to believe that meant I had made headway in becoming the person I wanted to be, but I wasn’t sure if letting myself off the hook was progress or regression.
Aiming my gaze higher than my navel, I filled in Asa on my conversation with Myrtle.
“We have the Boo Brothers,” he mulled it over, “who are an undefined variety of dead. We have an inn run by a white witch family. The parents are missing, and the kids are performing dark rites under the cover of LARPing. Their restaurant burned down. A familiar with it. And a teenage boy was kidnapped and killed behind their house.”
“This feels like a side quest.”
“How do you know about side quests?”
Fair question, given anything Mystic Realms leaked out of my ears. “Osmosis?”
Full dark had fallen by the time we reached the area, which made searching for clues harder but safer.
“They’re onto us.” Markus stomped into view dressed in the same jeans and tee as before. No wizard robes this time. “We have to be ready when they come back.”
“You’re paranoid.” Trinity followed him wearing Clay’s brunette wig, fiddling with it every few steps. “They’re FBI. You saw the badge. Do you really think they let witches join the Bureau?”
Depending on the Bureau, they downright encouraged it. But that was beside the point.
“I found the witch in Mom and Dad’s room, which means she magicked open the lock, because I sealed that door shut myself,” Markus argued. “What do you think she was doing?”
“She probably got lost, like she said.” Trinity removed the wig and flexed it on her hand. “How do you know she’s a witch?” She jogged to catch up when she fell behind him. “They seemed normal to me.”
They marched past our hiding place, and we hung back to give them a head start.
“They’re not normal.” Markus worked his jaw. “Come on.” He set a brutal pace. “I’ll prove it.”
“We’re not going there again, are we?” Trinity gave up on styling the wig. “Twice in one day?”
“They’ve been fed.” He led us straight to the stump Myrtle mentioned. “They won’t be any trouble.”
A spasm twitched through Trinity’s shoulders, but I couldn’t tell if it was fear or anticipation.
Markus, on the other hand, was salivating for what came next.
The top of the stump, as near as I could tell, had been sanded to create a smooth surface. Moonlight hit the edge, and it shone, leading me to believe it had been coated in resin or polyurethane to preserve it.
From his pocket, Markus produced a switchblade and sliced across his palm. He flicked the blood onto the stump, which absorbed every drop, then he let Trinity layer on neon Band-Aids to cover the wound.
“Rise,” he commanded, and the earth trembled beneath us. “Obey your master.”
A blueish-gray haze seeped across the ground, a fog so thick and cold, I took a step back.
A standing apparition formed atop the stump, and another coalesced beside it.
The Boo Brothers.
Definitely dead then.
“What do you want?” Malcom, the older brother demanded. “Ain’t you ever heard of rest in peace?”
“There is no peace here,” Emmett said, his eyes black and bottomless. “Can we kill them yet?”
“Not yet.” Malcom stepped down beside his brother. “One slip though, Marky, and you’re lunch.”
“You and your sister.” Emmett stared a hole through Trinity. “I bet you scream real pretty.”
Most things brought back after death came back wrong, and it sounded like the quasi-religious Boos had a different fixation now than in life. Or maybe death had cut away the excess to reveal their true selves.
“Enough with the theatrics.” Markus stepped between them and his sister. “Can you sense witches?”
Hatred burned hot and fast in the Boos’ eyes. “We smell you.”
Confirmation the Amhersts had witch blood wasn’t exactly a shock. Neither was the Boos’ disgust.
“Other witches,” Markus clarified through his gritted teeth. “Can you verify one was at the inn?”
“Maybe.” Malcom clamped a hand on his brother’s shoulder to still him. “What do we get in exchange?”
“To kill her when you find her.” Markus offered me up without a blink. “Deal?”
“Deal,” Emmett growled, his teeth bared. “Brother?”
“All right.” He was slow to agree, sated from their earlier kill and not interested in glutting. “Let’s go.”
The four of them headed toward the inn while Asa and I watched their grim procession.
Just before they were out of sight, Malcom glanced over his shoulder…and winked at me.
“We need to go.” Asa gripped my upper arm. “Now.”
“You saw that, right?” I craned my neck after Malcom. “He knew we were there, but he let the Amhersts drag them to the inn to begin a search.” I rushed after Asa. “What do you think’s going on?”
“They’re playing a game. With the Amhersts, and with us.” He shepherded me away. “What are they?”
“The Amhersts or the Boos?”
“Either.” He amended, “Both.”
“The Amherst kids have white witch parents. If they went dark, none of us smelled black magic on them. If they haven’t, they’ve done something equally stupid. I’ve never seen that level of sentience in a spirit. The Boos can bargain rather than accept orders. That’s not revenant or poltergeist behavior.”
Wary the Boos might change their minds and come hunting me, Asa and I jogged the whole way back to the hotel. Inside the room, I dropped our glamour to avoid spooking Colby again then got to work placing wards to keep out spirits.
Only once those protections were in place did we settle in to give Clay an update. “Any idea what we’re dealing with?”
“Reminds me of lemures. Wandering and vengeful ghosts. Those aren’t solid, though.” He thought on it some more. “The consumption of entire meals, entire people, is a vrykolakas trait. They mainly eat livers and flesh. They’re less corporeal but still able to interact with the world around them.”
“How about we call them koalas and leave it at that?” I ignored the guys’ synchronized eyerolls. “What’s anchoring them here? What hold do the Amhersts have on them? And what are the Amhersts? Those are the big questions. We need to remove the Amhersts from the equation, and then take down the Boos. We can figure out the rest once the situation has been neutralized.”
Clay lifted a finger for silence and brought his vibrating phone out of his pocket.
“Kerr.” He listened for a minute. “I’m putting you on speaker.”
“We have a report of Francis Franklin gutting a couple in Natchez.” Parish bit out the order almost as well as the director. “I want your team on it.”
“We have a situation in Raymond.” Asa sat on the desktop beside me. “We can’t afford to leave yet.”
“Francis is the greater threat.” Parish brooked no argument. “I’ll deploy a secondary team to Raymond.”
The call ended with a click, and Clay stared at us in expectation, his whole body trembling.
“I can tell you’re about to pop.” I urged him on with a roll of my wrist. “Who is Francis Franklin?”
“Femme Fatale Frankie was a B-movie staple in slasher flicks. She was gorgeous, and a bean sidhe.” He vibrated with excitement. “When her movies wrapped, her costars died. Every. Single. Time. Her fans loved it. Her costars, not so much. Eventually, no studio could afford to touch her.”
“Did she do it?” I frowned. “Bean sidhes predict deaths. They’re not the cause of them.”
Among the fae, they were despised as a reminder that even the long-lived die eventually. They weren’t popular among other factions either. People blamed them for being harbingers, but it wasn’t like they were fulfilling the prophecy. They merely gave the warning they were genetically wired to impart.
“Police tried to make the charges stick, so did Black Hat, but there wasn’t enough evidence.”
“You met her,” I realized. “Did you work the case?”
“Yes and yes.” His gaze grew distant. “I might have asked her to marry me if she hadn’t been killed by the wife of one of her former costars between police interviews. The wife was a literal goddess. She was convinced Frankie was having an affair with her husband. She believed Frankie killed her man when he refused to leave her. Frankie denied the allegations, but the guy was already dead. He couldn’t say either way. Bean sidhe are tough, but a minor goddess is a major player.”
Earth-walking goddesses, minor or not, were famous for their tempers. “How was she killed?”
“Arietta gutted her. Neck to navel.” He turned solemn. “Waste of a beautiful woman.”
“When you implied you two were in a relationship,” Asa pried, “do you mean in your head or in reality?”
To hide my smile, I turned my head, but Clay knew me too well.
“This is your influence.” Clay pointed a damning finger at me. “He used to be such a nice dae.”
Swallowing my amusement, I prodded, “Answer the question.”
“I never said we were in a relationship.” He sniffed. “I said I might have asked her to marry me.”
“So, the starlet was killed by a goddess, and now she’s reenacting her death in Natchez.”
“Does that mean the Boos are doing the same?” Asa frowned. “Acting out their deaths?”
“No one knows how they died,” I admitted. “We’d have to solve that crime to know for sure.”
The serpentine nature of their kills reminded me of a naga or another creature with snakelike qualities. They swallowed prey whole, then, after a period of time, bones were the end product. How was the flesh digested if the Boos weren’t revenant-like? And if they weren’t undead, did it mean that ghosts poop?
“I’ll cross-reference what we know about their recent crimes against similar events occurring around the time of their disappearances.” The tiny voice barely registered as Colby, but it grew stronger. “See if we can narrow the scope on a potential cause of death for them.”
Are you sure? Are you okay? Are you ready for this?
Those were the things I longed to ask, but I didn’t want to undermine her attempt to regain her footing.
“Clay?”
“You don’t even have to ask.” He sank onto the bed beside Colby. “Me and my best girl will wait here.”
“Thank you.” I jerked my chin at Asa then double-checked my kit. “We’ll be back the second we can.”
“Be safe,” Colby whispered. “Promise me.”
For so long, I had been her anchor. I hated to admit how good it felt when she said or did things that proved she might not have chosen me that dark night when she died, but she would choose me now.
“I promise.” I leaned over the bed and kissed her soft forehead. “Don’t let Clay get in trouble.”
“Don’t assign her impossible tasks,” Clay chided. “Ace, take care of my second-best girl.”
“I will.” Asa followed in my footsteps and pressed his lips to Colby’s cheek. “Be brave.”
“I’ve got this,” she told him. “I can do this.”
“I know you can.” He withdrew and took my hand. “We’ll text as soon as we arrive.”
Leaving Clay and Colby, Asa and I climbed into the SUV and set out for Natchez.
7
Ten minutes into our drive, Colby called me with a breathless note in her voice that left my palms slick.
“I was checking online for a match,” she rushed out, “and I found another one.”
“A match?” I recalled our last conversation. “You mean a killer with the Boos’ MO?”
“A VacayNStay rental in Natchez with the same logo as the Amherst Inn hidden in the bottom left corner of their listing.”
The vacation rental boom had turned many a home into a hotel in recent years. The more popular destinations got sliced and diced into B&B-style lodgings. You were on your own for meals, but you shared a house with a few other guests.
After Charleston, I was starting to view them as the bane of my existence. Apps made it too simple for paras to set traps to lure in prey. Mostly, they ensnared humans. But this was next level strange.
“Whatever the Amhersts are into,” Clay added, “I bet the host is in it up to their necks too.”
“Book us a suite for the next week,” I said, covering our bases. “Do we know if the owners live on site?”
“Let me check.” Colby grew more confident. “There’s a note mentioning they stay on the premises.”
“You are one brilliant moth, smarty fuzz butt.” I grinned. “Do we know what the logo means yet?”
Silence on the end of the line warned me I had tread too close to a memory, and Colby shut down.
“The seal is part of the LARPer’s logo on their website, but it’s pinging in other searches too.” Clay jumped in with her notes. “I’ll let you know once we narrow it down.”
