Chapter One
The Fist of a Child
The prickly sensation crawled over my left fingertips, up my fingers, and snuggled into my palm like the fist of a child. For a moment it was pleasurable, and in my dreams, my heart warmed. I thought of my goddaughter, Angie Baby, and smiled in my sleep.
Then something exploded up my hand and arm and into my torso, a magical bomb going off. An electric sensation, like a burning cactus, the thorns on fire, the blooms as weapons blossoming open through me. Scorching thorns ripped through my flesh. The blooms detonated like heat-seeking missiles.
I gasped a single breath that sent a shock wave of pain through me. Opened my eyes as I woke. But I didn’t move otherwise. Lying in the dark. Terror rising. The heat and power of a magical working—a spell, to the mundane world— rolled through me. Reading me. My heart raced. My breath came too fast.
Familiar . . . I had felt this—or something like this—before. With a tearing sensation, the working ripped out of me and across my bed. And I could breathe. The fear-stink of my own sweat filled my nostrils, tart and acerbic. My heart raced, an uneven thump against my ribs.
For a moment I knew it, remembered it, and then the memory faded, like a dream upon waking, as if the working was designed to be forgotten. But my Beast reached out and swiped it into her claws, keeping it for me.
Beast shoved her night vision into me and I saw the energies of the working on the walls and ceiling and floor as it roiled slowly, a pale green power that licked its way forward, through my room, leaving nothing in its wake but shadows. Nothing happened. So . . . it wasn’t a magical trigger waiting to be set off. It looked as if it was taking a 3-D picture of everything, like a 3-D laser recording of the room. In preparation for . . . what? Nothing. Yet.
The moment it moved off the bed, I picked up the unsheathed vamp-killer and nine-mil on the bedside table, only inches from the hand where the spell had commenced. Rolled to my feet, careful to keep my soles away from the searching magics. I was dressed in leggings and a tee, both in shades of charcoal so that I could move through the house, only slightly darker than a shadow, without being seen from outside. Or inside, for that matter.
My palm, where the magics first touched me, sent a sizzle of pain up my arm when I gripped the vamp-killer. Not lightning, I thought, calming my racing breath. Not lightning. I was still getting over having been hit by lightning, but the panic attacks weren’t totally gone yet. The feel of the vamp-killer hilt in my palm settled me, the crosshatched grip, the fourteen-inch silver-plated blade, the perfect balance for hacking.
Forcing calm into myself with each breath, attempting to quiet my heart rate, I tried to decide if running was smart or playing dead was smarter. Since I wasn’t actually dead yet, and since the magics might have been intended to flush me out where someone could hurt me worse, I decided to stay in the house, silent.
As a skinwalker, one who also carries the soul of a mountain lion in my body, I knew not racing away, not taking the offensive, was the more difficult choice. Especially when attacked in my home. Flight or fight was more natural, but that might get me killed this time. Might get my business partners, sleeping upstairs, killed. They were human. I could heal from most wounds and injuries; humans might not. My heart raced. Breath sped. Muscles tightened.
With my Beast-vision, I followed the magics as they moved slowly through my bath and into my closet. I had left both doors open and so was able to watch as the working rolled through the spaces and the piles on the floor. Sometimes it paid to be a slob. Without a pause, the pale green energies swept over the skull on the top closet shelf. But the working hesitated and hovered over the small wooden carving of a crow. The carving was positioned over my stash of magical trinkets given to me by my best friend, Molly Everhart, long ago, the crow and its working hedge, recharged on her last visit. The box of magical doodads were protected by the crow and its upgraded hedge of thorns ward, which spat and spluttered as the magics feathered their way over them. Hedge of thorns, renovated to hedge of thorns 2.0, had been tested recently. It was, so far, unbreakable, but . . . there was always a first time.
The working brightened and turned reddish, as if trying to read the spells, even encapsulated in the spelled box containing them. The magics grew brighter, a sparking purple, edging toward grape, and then back to scarlet as they tried to penetrate and read. I smelled ozone and a stink like hair burning as the sizzling increased. The meeting of two such workings might trigger something more catastrophic than the sparks and shadows I could see now. I needed to get the guys.
Whatever the working was, its attention was not on me at the moment. I drew on Beast-speed and her energy flashed through me, an adrenaline flush of my skinwalker magics. Slipping the H&K into my right hand, the blade my in the other, I leaped over the edge of the pale green working where it had paused and thinned on my floor, its attention in the closet. I landed, a tingling of magic passing through me, my braid, slapping my butt. But nothing changed. The scan hadn’t noticed me move. Heart still pounding, I sped out of my room and into the foyer, up the stairs, three at a time, using Beast-stealth to keep my passage from creating any vibrations that the working might pick up.
It might have been smarter to go inside Eli’s room and speak, but I didn’t know what my partner slept in, and I didn’t need to find out tonight. I stopped outside his door and hissed, the sound softer than air, but I knew Eli would hear it, evaluate it, and determine it was likely me, even in his sleep, picking it out as a “not normal” night sound. You can take the Ranger out of the special forces, but you can’t the special forces training out of the Ranger.
I head a faint shushing sound, maybe a sheet rustling. “Jane?” he whispered, from the darkness.
“Magical problems. Silent mode. Weapons,” I said, not much more than a breath, hoping he would understand my intent.
He came out of the room barefoot, his dark skin a shadow in the night, his new weapons’ harness slung around his head and one shoulder. He was wearing dark pants, his dark skin making him a shadow. He put his head near mine and said, “Deets.”
“Something scanning the house. Magic. Unknown source. I can see it, currently in my bedroom, interested in Molly’s toys and hedge. It scanned me and my room on the way in. Now it smells like something overheating and it might go boom on purpose or accidental. Ultimate purpose unknown. Person or persons involved unknown.” Which meant one of two things: it came for the toys it had found, or it was temporarily occupied with the toys it hadn’t expected to find, and would eventually return to whatever it had come to do. If curtain number two was the right one, then the toys sidetracked it. But either way, there could still be an explosion.
Eli gave a single nod and glanced into his brother’s room. “Alex isn’t in his bed,” he murmured.
That meant the Kid, Eli’s teenaged brother, and the brains of our business, was still at his online gaming downstairs or was asleep on the couch, also downstairs. I nodded. “No glow from his screens.”
“Copy.”
We moved down the stairs, silent. Two shadows. Automatically avoiding the steps that might creak or shift or groan under our weight. Old houses have alarm systems built in to the floors.
The energies were still at work in the closet when we reached the foyer. The stink of burning hair and ozone had been joined by a stench vaguely reminiscent of iron and salt and the stink of stagnant water. Eli’s nose wrinkled. Even if I had been human, it would have been horrible; as it was, I pressed against my nose to keep from sneezing at the stench.
He leaned into my room and said, “Nothing visible,” which meant humans couldn’t see the working. Alex was sleeping on the living room couch, arms thrown out, legs spread, with one hanging over the back of the couch. He was shirtless, wearing a loose pair of Captain America pants, the kind that kids wear, hanging on their hips, baggy at their knees. I grinned, glad of the dark, so he wouldn’t see my amusement when Eli woke him. Alex was a boy on the brink of manhood, and laughter had begun to sting.
Eli touched Alex’s shoulder. When that didn’t wake him, Eli set two weapons on the floor, covered his brother’s mouth with one hand, and shook him with the other. Alex came awake fighting and Eli avoided the flying fists with ease. It looked like long practice. Despite the magical energies in my bedroom, my smile grew wider. Eli bent over his brother and whispered into his ear. When he let go, Alex slid his feet to the floor, stood, shook himself like a dog to wake up, and made his way to his tablets.
Eli gave me a hand signal that meant, in essence, “Where’s the big bad wolf?” not that I’d say that to him. Hand signals were a military thing and he took that stuff seriously. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the working was still occupied in my closet. I just hoped that the hedge was enough to keep the magical attack out and that none of Molly’s toys was accidently activated. I’d hate to have to rebuild my closet. I pointed to my bedroom and made a chipping motion to suggest it was still working there. Eli nodded before moving off to survey the windows and doors and, through them, out into the night.
Yellowrock Securities was a well-oiled team, everyone with a job. This was what it meant to be family. Living together. Working together. Fighting together. If we hadn’t been in danger, I might have gotten all teary. But this wasn’t the first time our home had been attacked by magical means in the last months. It almost felt as if someone had painted a target on us. Or on me. Yeah. That.
I went back to the bedroom to study the magical working, standing well outside the paused line of magical energies that marked my floor. The energies were a line of pale light through the bedroom, faintly flickering. The floor and walls beyond, the ones that the magic had already passed through, were unmarked, and the floor and walls on this side were also unmarked, which, with the exception of the pain in my palm, led me to believe that my first impression had been right—a scanning spell. The energies were much brighter in my closet, in my mixed puma/human eyesight, reddish and greenish with sparks of silver flashing through it, the gray of storm clouds.
I caught a whiff of smoke. The scan was setting something on fire. I raced back to the kitchen and grabbed the fire extinguisher, pulling the pin and stopping again at the closet. A gray cloud, totally physical and fiery in nature, came off the hedge. The pale green energies of the attacking scan spluttered and sizzled and I felt the heat signature from where I stood. The sound stopped. The scan withdrew slightly. The stench began to lessen as it filtered into the air and diminished. The smoke dispersed, a long, indistinct tracery across the ceiling. Nothing happened for what felt like two or three minutes. Then the attacking magics tapped on the hedge and stopped when it sparked and spat.
I had a better way to see the unfamiliar working, but I wasn’t in the mood to make myself deathly ill unless it was life or death for my partners. The working in the closet flashed again and the line of pale light guttered like a candle going out, before strengthening into a pale green hue, brighter than a Disney night-light. It slipped from the closet and started moving again, taking in the ceiling and sliding toward my doorway.
I backed away, through the foyer into living room, watching the magic as it slithered across the floorboards and up the front wall, tracing the floor in light before passing on. It wasn’t something I could hear with my ears, but I felt a sensation of popping and hissing as magical energies worked their way around and through the front door, pausing to limn it in a fairy-tale illumination that few humans could see.
I stepped away and it paused, as if it had heard or sensed me. I froze, wondering if it would follow me when I moved. If I should run. But it touched the stairs and angled up, climbing slowly.
I slid through the darkness and shadows to Eli, and when he glanced at me, I mimed it rising up the stairs, and pointed to the Kid’s bedroom overhead. Eli nodded and jutted his chin out the kitchen window. He held up two fingers, meaning that we had two people out there who shouldn’t be out there, doing things that tourists in New Orleans didn’t do.
I leaned to the glass and studied the street, at first seeing nothing but a fine mist that hung like a slowly falling fog, a leisurely, Louisiana rain. But when my eyes felt the need to drift away from two different places, I understood. There were two human-shaped forms out there, both hidden beneath obfuscation spells, one standing at either end of the block, in shadows. Not vamps. Not were-creatures. Witches. To a human they would be no more than two blurs, a haze on the night, obscured by the mist, an illusion of shadows in the darkness between the streetlamps. The power of their magic kept me from seeing them well, but now that I knew they were there, the magic itself was something Beast could make out, at least partially.
The working came from both of the hidden forms, two, separate, pale lines of power that ran across the street to meet and merge just in front of the house into a stronger line of energies. One line was a smooth, weak pale red, the magics controlled and even and concise. The other witch’s magic was a pale green, the energies jumping and spitting, slithering like snakes, full of power that seemed to want to sprint away and perform all on their own. The term wild magics came to me, power that was feral and uncontrolled and seeking destruction. The red magics were meticulous and skillful, if not so dominant; the green magics were more potent and by far the greater danger. A yard or so after the two lines of witchy power combined, they entered the house through my bedroom wall.
I looked back at my partner and pointed to my eyes and then to the backyard, asking him if anyone was back there. He gave me a down-turned thumb. No other witches were part of the attack. Just two witches, one extraordinarily powerful. And if they hadn’t known before, they now knew about the magical trinkets in my closet.
Eli went to his brother and looked over the Kid’s shoulder. Alex was a former hacker, a former felon, and currently studying for a double doctorate at Tulane, while spying on me for some supersecret information gathering part of the Department of Defense or Homeland Security or the CIA. Or all three. The government wanted to know what I was. Alex was feeding them incorrect info, and as long as I didn’t shift in public, and stayed under the radar, things would be okay. I hoped.
The Kid was too smart for his own good sometimes, but he was exactly what we needed as intel backup. He had the outside cameras up and running, taking digital and tape recordings. We had discovered that digital media worked when photographing vamps but was interrupted by many other kinds of magic. Old-school stuff was sometimes better at capturing images that would otherwise be hidden beneath the pixelated energies.
Tapping his tablets and putting camera views up on the big screen, Alex whispered, “You want me to call the police?”
“And tell them what?” I murmured in reply. “Two women are standing out front and shooting invisible X-ray vision at the house? That would go over well. Not.” I frowned hard. “They aren’t actually doing anything illegal according to human law. Witch law, maybe, but not if the NOLA coven sent them.”
“You think?” Eli muttered, concern lacing his voice.
“No. But I also don’t think the local witches would be interested in helping me against two of their own.” Witches were notoriously insular. I had made some witch friends back in Asheville, and while I had met some of the locals, I wouldn’t call them gal-pals.
Still softly, Eli asked, “Where is it?” meaning the scanning energies.
I walked silently through the house to the foyer and looked up the wide stairway. The pale green glow was entering the bedroom where Angie Baby stayed when she was here, and that didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t like anyone or anything that might affect my godchild, and I had no idea what the spell was really doing. It might be simply a scan, as I thought, or it might be putting down the witch equivalent of napalm, or a trigger for some future spell to incinerate us all. Or worse, it might be setting up a way to get to us when the Everhart-Trueblood witch family arrived in just a few days for the Witch Conclave. These witches might be working against the assembly; there were always people who wanted the status quo instead of peace, and the Witch Conclave was gearing up to be the event when the witches and the vamps of the Southeastern U.S. signed a peace treaty of sorts (though they called it something else) for the first time ever. I didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision about the purpose of the scan. As usual, I was flying by the seat of my pants, which didn’t bother me when I was the only one who would pay the consequences, but it did bother me when my lack of knowledge meant the boys or the Everhart-Trueblood clan would pay as well.
The stink of iron, salt, and burned hair had grown stronger again. What did burned hair mean? I had to assume it meant danger for the Youngers and me in the present. Or danger for my godchildren and their parents, later. Inside me, Beast growled and thought, Kits in danger. Kill witches.
Beast had a much simpler view of things than I did. Kill and ask questions later. No can do, I thought back at her. Deep inside, she extended her claws and milked my brain. It hurt. A lot. But it meant she was close if I needed to draw on her, so I wasn’t going to gripe.
Walking back into the shadows of the kitchen, I muttered, “The scan—if that’s what it is—is nearly done upstairs. That leaves this half of the downstairs. Oh.” Apprehension sped through me. “And the weapons storage and the utility area.” A part of the house I seldom went into and rarely even thought about.
Eli waited, watching me. He wanted a plan of action, but I didn’t have one to give him. As a rogue-vamp hunter, I had a legal leg to stand on when killing vamps—and their human blood-servants—who presented a clear and present danger to the human populace. The blood-servant ruling was a new one, recently issued by the Louisiana Supreme Court, over a kill made back in the nineties by another vamp hunter, who was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned when he killed three of a vamp’s walking blood-meals while saving a family of four humans. The vamp hunter was free now, though no one could give him back his lost years. The state supreme court decision gave me certain powers, within state law, against rogue vamps and their willing dinner partners. Against sane vamps, law-abiding humans, law-abiding were-creatures, or witches, I had no more power than anyone else.
I didn’t know what to do. My Beast-inspired headache was growing. One thing I knew for certain. The house was old, constructed of wood and old brick, with an antiquated electrical system. If the magics wanted to cause me trouble, burning down the house would be easy. I sniffed again, but the stink of magic-induced smoke was gone. For now.
Alex waved us over and said softly, “I took digital photos of them, but the photos don’t work worth jack through the obfuscation spells.” We stood behind his chair and his boy-man-garlic stink wafted up. Eli swatted him on the back of the head.
“What’s that for?” Alex complained, sotto voce, rubbing his head and straining back to grimace at us.
“For being Stinky,” I said. “So the digitals didn’t work. Why I am I here smelling you?”
He scowled at us through his straggly curls and bent back over his screen. “Because the tape is working fine. Both witches are female, natch, and though the light sucks, they might be African-American or mixed race.”
We all studied the camera footage. One witch appeared to be about five-five, two hundred fifty pounds, give or take. She held herself stiffly and something about her stance suggested that she was middle-aged, dressed in a long, full skirt and turban. The other one moved like someone younger, maybe even late teens. She was dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a skinny girl with lots of hair. Alex initiated some kind of electronic conversion, taking the tape to digital where he did something with the brightness and contrast and created stills from the footage.
I pointed at the younger one and asked, “Lots of long curly hair. A wig?”
“Could be,” Alex said. “Or extensions. That is all the still shots can make out.”
“Decisions,” Eli demanded. “Stay here or leave? Call the cops? Call someone else?”
I frowned and walked to the bottom of the stairs again, to see the light of the working moving to the front of the house and the two, narrow doors/windows that opened to the small second-floor gallery at the front. We never used the front gallery. I didn’t even know if the doors would open anymore, what with the damp and heat, and the swelling and shrinking of old wood in older frames.
I needed to get close to the witches.
“No,” Eli said.
I chuckled under my breath. My partner had a way of reading my mind. “I can access the Gray Between and , without much pain, if I don’t try to actually do anything but watch while I’m there.” And maybe Eli wouldn’t realize that this situation might to call for more than that. The witches might have the ability to set the house on fire, so I needed to be able to disable them. And to do that, I would have to move in the Gray Between of bubbled time. The ability to move outside time was part of my skinwalker energies, though whether it was something that all skinwalkers had been able to do, or if I was the only one—because an angel had given me the ability—I didn’t know. I had met only one other skinwalker. And I had killed him. And the angel wasn’t talking.
Bubbling time made me deathly sick, and it wasn’t something that my skinwalker energies healed well. Moving in bubbled time had nearly killed me, leaving me afraid to use the gift. Fear was a new emotion for me and I hated it. But I had to be honest and admit that the fear was one reason I hadn’t made a decision yet. Fear paralyzed.
The pale green swath of light was coming down the stairs. “Well, crap,” I muttered. I was out of time. Ha-ha. I blew out a breath. “Call the cops,” I ordered Alex, “but not nine-one-one. Try the woo-woo room. If someone we know is on, tell them what’s happening. Then do what they say. If no one is in the department, then call nine-one-one.”
Giving up on being discreet, I stepped into the middle of the living room and pointed again, drawing an imaginary line from one part of the house to the other. “The scanning beam is here.” It was about eight feet from Alex, who reacted by grabbing up his precious electronic equipment while dialing the woo-woo department of NOPD, direct. He got through on one of his backup systems to someone in the woo-woo room, the department that handled paranormal cases.
“Talk fast,” I advised him. “I suggest we withdraw to the backyard.” Which might actually work, if the witches didn’t think about scanning the grounds too. For now, they halted again, scanning the weapons room under the stairs. That gave us a few precious seconds.
Alex explained our situation succinctly to someone at cop central while rushing onto the back porch with an armful of his toys. He made three trips, the last one with an umbrella he found in the butler’s pantry/coffee bar/tea nook. Eli and I backed slowly away and out onto the side porch and the night mist.
Even with the noise of voices and the vibration of feet, the scan didn’t change in any way. There was no speeding up or slowing down, no brightening or dimming or color change, no more smell of hair burning, just iron and salt on the air, which were unusual enough as witchy scents went. All that stealth had been unnecessary.
And it told me something about the witches. Either they didn’t care that I knew they were scanning my house or they didn’t know that I could tell they were. I was betting on the latter. Which would then mean that they didn’t know I was a skinwalker. Which meant they had been surprised at the magical feel of my body, hence the pain they might not have expected me to feel, and the magical ward in my closet. Which was way too much guesswork. But the weapons room didn’t hold their interest for long. The line of light started progressing after a little over a minute.
I was still barefoot, but in the retreat, Eli found a pair of my flops. They were purple with pink plastic flowers on them and were studded with sparkles and glitter. The thongs were a gift from Deon, Katie’s three-star chef and up-and-coming IT guy, as a way of thanking me for suggesting him for the job. One did not throw away a gift. Even something as ugly as the thongs with bling. I have tiny feet for a six-foot-tall woman, and the flops were way too small for Eli, his heels sticking out behind. The flowers hanging over this toes bounced with each step. I couldn’t help it. A soft titter started in the back of my throat.
“Don’t,” Eli warned.
My laughter spluttered out in a single syllable that was half snort, half interrogative laugh. I caught it before it was more and turned both lips in, biting them to stop the giggles. I took a breath to maintain some form of dignity and managed, “Very stylish. They go so well with the vamp-killer and the nine-mil. You’re so . . . pretty,” I sang out. And then I dissolved in giggles, the song from Westside Story banging around in my head, though I knew well enough not to sing more. “Sorry,” I squeaked. Catching my breath, I said, “I’ll go around back and take the witch over there.” I pointed downtown. “You get the one that way.” I pointed uptown.
“This is not over.”
“Oh. God. I hope not. I want pictures,” I said. I turned on one bare foot and raced around the house. In the distance, I heard two sirens; NOPD’s finest were heading toward us from the general direction of the Eighth District Precinct House.
Knowing that my hilarity had something to do with an unsupported sense of relief that nothing had exploded or caught on fire—yet—I raced to the brick wall on the far side of the yard and leaped. Beast’s power flooded my limbs and she pushed off with me, adding two feet to my jump. I was glad I was no longer hiding my skinwalker abilities, because this would have been hard for a human, even one as fit and pretty as Eli, in his purple flops. The wall had small outthrust brick ends in irregular spots, making it easier to climb than a sheer face, but the brick was wet from the mist. The rain seemed to be growing stronger. In midair, I crashed into the wall and caught a brick with my fingertips, one toe on a tiny toehold. I slipped, the brick rough on my skin. Using the waning momentum, I shoved off again, catching the top of the fence. I levered myself over and dropped down to the other side.
It was what passed for fall in New Orleans, but the air was still warm and muggy, the ground was damp and squishy. Only my nose kept me from stepping into dog poo. Fortunately the neighbor’s ugly, hairy yapper dog wasn’t out this time of night. It didn’t like the way I smelled, and kicking a lapdog was bad form and downright mean, no matter how much Beast wanted to play bowling ball with it.
I hadn’t been through the neighbor’s yard in ages, and I slunk around under the dripping banana tree leaves until I was at the front of their house and could see the witches. The rain increased to misty drizzle and ran down my neck and under my T-shirt, and it further obscured the witches. The larger woman with her red magics was only the width of the street away, standing in a tiny patch of grass and dead flowers, less than twenty feet from me. I peeked around the wall and saw the pale green lights of the magical working flicker in the front windows of my house. The squad cars turned onto my street and moved in, blue lights flashing, sirens wailing.
Both witches looked up. I had to move.
The green and red energies of their working snapped and brightened in a blast of force. The flash of witch energies left my eyes burned and blinking as the working snapped to a close. The woman nearest bent as if to pick up something at her feet and the smaller girl slammed into her, moving fast. The rain pelted down; the girl slid. They both almost went down, stumbling from the patch of grass into the road. The rain bent around the obfuscation spells they were hiding under, making them visible as human-shaped shadows for a moment, but the splattering rain kept me from getting a clear look.
The girl screamed, “Go, go, go, go, go, go!”
The larger woman caught her balance and followed the girl, both of them running. The drivers of the NOPD units could see the shadows of them inside the rain-drenched spells, and seemed to assume that a running person was a guilty person. The cars sped after them, toward an alley between two houses, down the street from me, sirens wailing. Lights were coming on in the houses up and down the street. I could see heads peeking through windows.
Inside me, a voice repeated, FUBAR, FUBAR, FUBAR, and it wasn’t Beast. It was me, starting to panic. Humans in danger, everywhere, all around me, if the witches intended to release some form of magical working. And to stop the witches, I might have to kill them.
As the cars raced down the street, a speaker blared, “Stop! Police. Stop, and put your hands in the air.”
But the witches turned as one and the girl reached into her shirt pocket. Time slowed for me, that battle-time change that made it seem as if I could see everything and everyone, almost—but not quite—standing outside of time. Me, moving through it, faster than normal. As if I had all the time in the world, but that was a lie. I raised my gun but forced my muscles to wait. To fire at a witch was a cop call, not mine.
The NOPD units both rocked to a halt, tires screeching. One cop opened his car door, weapon leading through the crack of the unit’s A pillar and the door itself. “Stop!” he shouted. “Put down your weapons. Show me your hands!” He was young, and his voice went high and breathless. Over the noise, I heard the other officer calling for backup. I was right. We were about to get FUBARed.
Still in a stutter-slow motion, the girl pulled something out of her shirt. She screamed a wyrd. Or part of it. The older woman grabbed her and shook her, the girl’s head snapping back and forth, the wyrd only half spoken—the powerful spell, contained in a single word, ended before it began. The turbaned older woman snapped her fingers and red sparks of power flashed out, visible to the human eye. The cops ducked.
The girl screamed, “No!”
The older woman wrapped her arms around the skinny one in a mighty hug. Threw out the fingers of one hand.
A blast of white smoke burst from her fingers and . . . the witches disappeared.
Just like that. In a vanishing act worthy of Las Vegas.
I shook my head.
Nothing made sense. And I hadn’t gotten a good look at them. Dang it.