by D. Fischer
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jinx Whitethorn
Their feet are silent, so quiet that the walls don’t vibrate the sound back. When a cloud passes over the moon, they’re bathed in a soft glow. White grins are the first thing I see, then the evil intentions that twinkle in their eyes.
“Shifters,” Sara says, cheerfully almost. “See? Not so scary.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I hiss, inching us backward.
“Why are you being so dramatic, Jinx?” She steps out from behind me and raises a hand to wave at the two men coming our way.
“Because they’re not here to walk us home!”
“Hello,” she calls to them. “Are you lost?”
Of course, they’re not lost. They were just inside the bar, you drunken fool. And now they’re out here, prowling in our direction. Does this girl have no self-preservation instincts inside her body? She may be a powerful witch, but she’s drunk and far too trusting, even to a species she’d normally be wary of. Be Deviled may be a safe haven, but that doesn’t mean everyone inside it is safe.
They pay her no mind. Their gazes are locked on mine, their intent clear.
Think, Jinx. Think!
“Sara,” I warn, tugging on the back of her elbow.
“Can we help you?” Sara asks, her tone finally tinged with a bit of worry, perhaps a bit of menace as well. It’s a pathetic endeavor.
“Yes,” one of the men says back to her. He’s missing one of his front teeth, and now that he’s closer, I can fully make out the prominent gap. “You can leave.”
Sara cocks her head to the side. “Leave?”
The other answers. “We have no quarrel with you. We came for her.” He points to me.
They’re close now, so close that I can smell the aftershave on one of them as the breeze passes through the alley. I could make a run for it, but Sara would get left behind. In those heels, and as intoxicated as she is, she won’t make it far before they pounce on her. She might be able to defend herself, but there’s no way a spell would come out clearly enough to be useful. Definitely not fast enough either.
“What do you want with Jinx?”
The men stop, and the toothless one says, “Leave, or die with her.”
My skin crawls, fear pumping through my veins. They’ll kill her to get to me and then kill me too, no matter what they say. Just like the others.
“Over my dead body,” Sara barks. I can feel her magic stirring weakly, basically taste the spell on the tip of her tongue. It’ll slur. There’s no way it won’t, effectively rendering her attack useless.
“So be it,” the other man says, and then they launch themselves.
I throw Sara to the brick wall. She curses, using the bricks to steady herself. Quickly and surprisingly, she growls a simple, short spell. I recognize it immediately and brace my stance. The pavement cracks under the toothless man. He stumbles over it, tripping, and on his fall down, I bring up my knee. My knee slams into his face, and a sickening crunch follows.
The other man reaches for my shoulder. Already, and too soon, I fight to control the shaking overcoming me – this out-of-body experience I’m suffering. I block the attempt with my elbow while gritting my teeth. Enraged, he swings his other arm, and I duck. Black speckles my vision. The feeling, both hot and cold, sweeps from my head to my toes. It crawls along my skin, and my vision blurs further.
Not yet, not yet, not yet! I can’t black out. If I do, Sara will be on her own. If I do, she might die.
He lifts his leg to kick, and I block with both hands again, shoving against his knee and forcing his leg back down. Then, I turn and push both my hands into his gut. The momentum of my turn pushes the air from his lungs, and spittle flies over my head. He staggers back, a frustrated growl rumbling his chest.
I can hear Sara chant and her assailant curse up a storm, but I pay them no mind. I can’t. I can’t focus, and as the black dots in my vision thicken, my heart hammers hard in my ribs. I straighten, shake my head, but darkness pulls me under.
Jacob Trent
I had watched Jinx and her friend disappear into the back room. I had smelled the air tinged with rotting trash as they took the exit. During non-business hours, Trevor and Travis will use that alley to smoke, but otherwise, no one lingers in that alley for long.
Perhaps she and her friend are lovers. Perhaps they’re headed out for a bit of privacy. That can’t be right, though. The witch friend had seemed distraught when I chased away their catch.
My wolf is anxious inside me. I can feel him pacing in the back of my thoughts, urging me continuously to check the entrance to the back room. I wait, not so patiently drumming my fingers, for the two witches to reemerge if only to ease the beast.
She’s not Allie, I remind him and myself. Surely she’ll come back in. She lives here for god's sake.
Wait. If she wanted privacy with her friend, no matter what for, why didn’t she just go upstairs into her apartment?
I stand swiftly in the booth, moving the table two inches away as my thighs push against it.
“Jacob!” Rex exclaims, snatching his beer before it tips over. He had been lulled in a daze, content to watch the pack by the bar joking and laughing with one another over a tray of nachos.
“Something’s wrong,” I respond, feeling magic. It’s faint, but it’s there.
“What do you mean?” he asks stiffly.
Moving around the table, I push through the crowd, ignore Cinder’s offered beer as I pass the bar, and head into the back room. Rex is on my heels, booth entirely abandoned. Opening the back door, I stop before I even step foot into the stench of the alley. Rex bumps into me, cursing under his breath.
“The hell?” Rex asks as he straightens himself. “Jacob?”
He moves to my side and follows my gaze to two people, motionless, on the dirty alley’s cement.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jacob Trent
Blood puddles around the two men, reflecting the moon back to the sky. The blood’s scent – a thick aroma of sweat and iron that overpowers the stench of rotting food – stirs my wolf from his shock at the scene. My eyes glow to the threat he feels, and I quickly survey the alley for the culprit to these murders.
“What the hell?” Rex barks. He pushes past me and strides outside. There’s a spray of blood that he carefully avoids, and he squats next to the first male.
I follow him. No one else is around. No Jinx. No witchy friend. Not even a rat.
“No pulse,” Rex says. “They’re dead.”
I circle the two men and survey their injuries, bending this way and that to get a better look. Their throats are a mess of gaping flesh, the source of the blood. It’s just like the dead guy on the news.
“Rogue?” I ask, stuffing my hands in my pockets. “A vampire couldn’t cause this much damage. There are teeth marks, so a human is firmly out of the question too.
“Clearly,” Rex mutters. I commend him for not turning a shade of green. The site of these two men would roll a weaker man’s stomach. “A rogue war, maybe?”
I tap my thigh inside my pocket, considering this from all angles. “I don’t think so,” I say. “Look at the marks on their necks.” They’re still visible, a branding or welt of diamonds. The dot in the middle of them would appear as a spot of blood if I hadn’t known the earlier dead shifter didn’t had the same mark. The witch at the morgue had confirmed it as a branding, but not the traditional kind.
I search the alley once more, wiping a hand over my mouth.
“Same as the other guy,” he murmurs unnecessarily. Rex stands and wipes the alley’s dirt on his jeans. “What are we dealing with? What are you thinking?”
“Jinx came out here,” I say, my thoughts categorizing with newly formed theories. “She was out here with her witch friend. And now they’re gone.”
Bright red eyebrows raise on his forehead. Scratching at them with his thumb, he says, “They had to be long gone before this happened. I dou
bt they saw a thing.”
“Do you really think that, Rex? You really think two witches came out here, only for a murder to happen seconds after they left?”
“Well,” he shrugs and crosses his arms. “I guess not. Maybe they saw the bodies on their way out?”
“I think not.”
“Wait. You suspect Jinx and her witch did this?”
“Maybe,” I murmur.
He laughs again. “Have you seen how tiny those two women are? Jinx’s friend was drunker than shit. They couldn’t have done this much damage even if they did manage to… what? Defend themselves? They’d break their bright pink nails.”
“Only one of them had pink nails,” I blurt then scold myself for the smirk he gives me. Jinx didn’t have any paint on her fingers. She doesn’t seem the type for pretty things. She’s the type who doesn’t mind getting dirty. I don’t share this with Rex though. He’s already dangling my acute observation in front of me.
“Look,” I point ten feet away to where the concrete is cracked and raised. A few drops of blood sit near it.
Rex strides over and bends to the unnaturally straight crack. He touches the blood and brings it to his nose. His wolf’s green eyes flash. “It’s the shifters’.”
“The magic is still here too,” I mutter. “I can taste and smell it.”
My beta sniffs the air, frowns, and then pivots to me questioningly. “Why would they kill two shifters?”
I look to the moon, pocketing my hands in my jeans. “Why wouldn’t they. Just because we all fought together in the Realms War doesn’t mean we’ll all come home and be chummy.” For years, witches and shifters have kept their distance. The only thing we agree on is the abominations that are vampires. Why anyone would expect witches and shifters to suddenly get along is beyond me.
“You think this is witches hating shifters?”
“Maybe.”
“It can’t be,” Rex says, standing. “Both those girls are good friends with Cinder. I’m pretty sure he’s slept with at least one of them. Why would two witches who supposedly hate shifters be friends with one?”
“That’s what I want to find out.” I tear my gaze from the moon. “In the meantime, I don’t want Cinder anywhere near them.”
“Okay.” He shifts uncomfortably. “What do you want to do?”
“He needs to kick this Jinx woman to the curb and find out if she was involved in this.” I wave a hand over the dead bodies.
“Cinder won’t like that,” he says softly. “He seems quite attached to her.”
“Cinder will do what I say,” I growl. Rex averts his gaze as my alpha waves ripple out with my command. There’s nowhere to look but at the dead men.
“What do you think the brands mean? Who do you think they belong to?” he asks.
I sigh, forcing out the tension that has a grip on my chest. “I don’t know.” I study the mark too and then add, “Call Evo. Tell him what we’ve found and our suspicions. I don’t want the humans or witches to get a whiff of this. Hopefully, we’ll figure out the rest once the bodies are taken care of.”
Jinx Whitethorn
My eyelids feel like they’re glued together. I blink with difficulty, waiting for the film over my eyes to clear enough to make out the texture on a white ceiling. I know where I am. I’ve stared at the chipped and stained paint my entire adolescence.
The smell of the coven’s home is instilled inside every pocket of my brain. The aroma swirls around the room like ancient ancestral ghosts. It’s tinged with burning wood, sage, and the soft, delicate scent of homemade laundry soap mixed with homegrown, dried lavender leaves. I used to help make that laundry soap. Since I couldn’t produce one spell to help the coven in other ways, I was subjected to many chores.
Chores were my bane, and the familiar smell stirs cherished but mundane childhood memories.
My head pounds, and I groan. I pull my arms from under the heavy quilted blankets and press the heels of my palms to my temples.
“Jinx?” Sara calls. My headache pulses, and the lumpy bed dips as she moves closer. I hadn’t even noticed she was here.
“What happened?”
I snatch the offered cup of cold water from her and drink it greedily. When I hand it back, she sets it on the floor, subjecting it to the territory of the ever-breeding dust bunnies. I watch as the bunnies skitter across the cracked wood floor like tumbleweeds.
I don’t know what I’m more distressed about; being here, or watching the orbs of dust stick to the precipitation.
“You don’t remember?” she asks, grabbing my knee.
“No, Sherlock. Did I get too drunk? Oh God,” I grumble. “Did I throw up?” I can’t stand puking, especially in public. The mere thought churns my own stomach.
“Jinx,” she says, drawing out my name and banking my panic.
“What?”
She squeezes my knee gently. “Do you remember the alley?”
I scratch the space between my eyebrows. My head thumps against the pillow as I try to piece my scattered memories together. “The two men.”
“Thank God,” she sighs out. I look back to her, confused at her hardened expression. Gone is the nursemaid. “Mind telling me what the hell you are? What kind of magic that was?”
I match her scowl. “What are you talking about? How did you get me here?” I look at my bedroom door, trail the scratches on the trim from my many adolescent heights, and purse my lips at my boots tossed below them. There’s not a blemish on them. Not even a speck of dirt. “How did we escape?”
“Because you killed them,” she says, throwing her arms in the air. They come back down and slap against her thighs. The entire action jostles the bed, and I fight the urge to kick her off the mattress. “You killed them, Jinx. You turned into a wolf and ate their throats.”
I blink at her. “Come again?” When I burst out laughing, she stands abruptly and grasps my shoulders. “Have you lost your mind?”
Sara has always had an excellent imagination. Growing up, she was the one who came up with imaginary friends and the dreamlike fake places we would use for our games of pretend. As teens, she would come up with the schemes that got us grounded for weeks. But this . . . This accusation is out there.
“What kind of magic are you working with, Jinx? Tell me right now.”
I sit up in the bed and readjust my pajama bottoms riding between my cheeks. “I don’t have any magic. You know that. I can’t even light a candle.”
Her voice becomes gentle as though she’s talking to a child. “Then how the hell did you turn into a wolf?”
I search her face, trace the worry lines around her mouth, and I swallow thickly when I only find concern and truth. “I killed them?”
“I had to change our clothes.” She closes her eyes as if the memory of the attack had surfaced at the mention of the evidence. “They were covered in blood. Your boots were miraculously spared, but that’s about it.”
I killed them. Two people. Murder. Murderer.
She snaps her fingers in front of me. “How?”
“I – I don’t know.” I run a hand through my hair and search the pattern of my quilt. “I – I don’t remember any of it. Not past the beginning. I don’t know.”
Placing her hands on her hips, she snaps her head to the side to crack her neck, and then she paces, murmuring to herself. “That’s okay. This is all right. One time. It happened once, and we’ll figure it out.”
I clear my throat, and she whirls to face me. “More than once.”
Her jaw ticks, and her nostrils flare while she waits for footsteps in the hall to disappear. It’s an adorable expression of anger when it’s on her face, but I pale at the sight of it anyway. Sara never gets mad at me. Not like this. I can’t tell if she’s upset that I never told her or if she’s upset that I may have murdered more than the two men in the alley.
“Tell me everything,” she practically growls.
I nod and then launch into a story, tentatively at first. I reco
unt all the times I’ve blacked out only to wake to the news of that person dead. I make it clear that I had no idea I could do any sort of magic – turn into a wolf or whatever she said. I hadn’t known how I survived. I stuttered over the hard parts, particularly my last encounter where I truly thought I wouldn’t make it – that no one would ever find my body buried under the metal junk by the rusted factory. All my hard work in learning various ways of self-defense, and I was still utterly terrified. She softens at this, crossing her arms loosely instead of her hands firmly grip on her wide hips.
“I hadn’t seen the news after the guy at the factories. I have no idea if he’s dead or not.”
“Oh, he’s dead,” she snorts. She parts the sea of encroaching dust bunnies, snatching something from my dresser and tossing it to the bed. “I found this in the bathroom.”
I quickly read the headlines of the front page’s article. A homeless man had stumbled across a body whose neck was savaged to strips of flesh. My mouth becomes as dry as parchment, and my fingers tremble, quaking the paper. What am I? I ask myself over and over again, the thought echoing as I read each paragraph more slowly than the last.
“I really turned into a wolf?” I ask when I’m done. The newspaper falls limp to my lap. Sara has said nothing, only staring at the walls of my room barren of any decoration. I like it that way. I’ve never seen the point in decor, nor posters and fluffy pink stuffed animals as some of the other girls in the coven’s large home have.
“Yes,” she says, eyebrows pulling together. She scratches at the paint on her fingernails. “It was bright white. Each strand glowed like the surface of the moon.” Goosebumps pepper her skin.
I push my hair from my face, still messy and unbound. “Am I –” I clear my throat and try again. “Am I a shifter?”
She looks to me now. “I don’t think so, Jinx. Shifters . . .” she absentmindedly scratches her cheek. I hadn’t realized until now that she’s still wearing the skimpy pink dress she had on at Be Deviled. She threw a hoodie over top, but the skirt peeks out of the bottom. Her makeup is smeared, black mascara smudged under her eyes, and her hair is a mess. “Shifter’s bones reshape. Every part of them morphs into the beast that rests inside them. Yours was different. A light pulsed, and then you were something else entirely. One minute, you were a woman. The next, a white wolf. And when it was over, the wolf had looked at me. I was terrified. I was terrified you’d eat me, and I don’t think I could have defended myself. Not against you. You’re my best friend.”
