The Trouble with Beasts (Howl for the Damned: Book One)

by D. Fischer

  Cinder snorts, and all heads swivel toward him. “Do you really think she’ll go anywhere near shifters after last night? If what you’re saying is true – which it isn’t because Jinx wouldn’t hurt a fly unless that fly bit her – then I doubt she’ll return to the bar. Where, exactly, do you plan to find her?”

  Quiet until now, Bia raises her hand. “A witch in trouble will return to her coven, but she’ll probably go back to the bar apartment to collect her things eventually.” Nervously, she swipes at her mousy brown hair that always seems to be charged with electricity. It’s frizzy and wiry and oddly matches her voice.

  “Then you clearly don’t know Jinx,” Cinder mumbles.

  “Oh?” I say, crossing my arms. “Why wouldn’t she want her things?”

  “Because she has no things. Jinx can fit everything she owns into a carry-on bag.”

  My heart pangs to this new information. Most women I know, including Cibel, a shifter who left the pack after she and I had a messy break up five years ago, had boxes and boxes of trinkets and makeup and frilly girl things. Is this a personality trait of Jinx, or is her lack of funds so great that she can’t afford much more than the clothes on her own back?

  “It’s our only shot,” Rex says. He turns back around and assesses the symbol he had drawn there; The double diamond-shaped tribal branding.

  We still haven’t gleaned any information about it, nor who the dead shifters belong to. I have a feeling that once Jinx is in our possession, we’ll find the answers to put a stop to the murders. Hopefully, before they gain human attention more than they already have.

  “I say we take it,” Rex adds. “If anything, to find out what the hell is going on.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jinx Whitethorn

  I breathe in the familiar dusty and herbal scents of the house as I walk through the hallways in search of my mother. I know where she is – Sara had told me, but I probably could have figured it out myself.

  Deciding to endure the long route and delay the inevitable conversation, I peer into the bedrooms to see who’s home. I have half a mind to see Marian, the High Priestess of the coven, while I’m here, but Sara also informed me she’d be gone for the day. I don’t plan to stay that long.

  My mother loves to garden – loves to pluck and harvest what we grow for both food and spells in the churned earth square that’s larger than this manor. In our coven, my mother’s knowledge over the herbs is superb, and therefore, this is where I’ll seek her out. She’s always calmest around her plants. It’s as good of a place to push for answers as any. I just hope I don’t kill the greenery simply by being near it. The thought makes me quietly snort.

  I turn a corner and nearly bump into Jamie. “Oof,” we both say, and I quickly snatch the empty vial that tumbled from her hand. It was nearly inches from the floor before my fingers circled around the warm glass. My heart skips a beat at the close call. It would have made a mess that would have continued to delay the conversation I don’t necessarily want to have with my mother.

  “Quick hands,” Jamie praises. Her voice has always been a bit too high for my liking, and I suppress the cringe. “Quick hands are good for a young witch.”

  “A witch who can’t do magic,” I say, handing her back the vial. She dusts the vial off on her apron wrapped around her muffin top belly and then regards me and my attitude.

  “When did you arrive, Jinx?”

  I scratch my chin to guard my half-lie. “Last night. I came home with Sara.”

  Jamie smiles. “Ah, yes. You two have always been inseparable. Since birth, I believe, just like your mother and me.”

  I nod, having been told this story a hundred times with just as many versions. Jamie and my mother, Tabatha, are best friends just like Sara and I. The connection isn’t lost on me that Jamie is Sara’s mother even though they look nothing alike, but in a coven, it’s not uncommon for such connections to happen.

  Where Sara is slim and fit, mostly because I force her to go to the gym with me, Jamie is short and plump. Hair that was probably once luxurious and long is now knotted and frilly, a dull shade of blonde. Her skin is just as aged as my mother’s, mostly damage from the sun rather than the actual ticking of years. She wears the wrinkles well, but I inspect her hair for greys anyway. I expect Sara will be pleased if Jamie passed this gene down to her daughter. Not all women are so lucky to have youth on their hair’s side.

  Greta, a spitfire hag whose room I nearly darted past down the hall, has been greying since she was a teenager. Sara says she’s been using potions to suppress the signs of early aging, and at the time, we had snorted about it. If you ask me, Greta’s early grey hairs are because she holds onto stress like a scrawny squirrel with a nut just before an ice storm.

  An awkward silence blossoms between Jamie and me. The grandfather clock downstairs chimes the hour, and two witches giggle down the hall. I fidget, straining for something else to say. The truth is since I moved out, every relationship within the coven I once had, has evaporated. Or pulled taut. Except for Sara’s. She’s the only one, besides my mother and Marian, who doesn’t disapprove of my living away from the manor.

  Strangely, I think my independence made Sara and me move closer together. Just as I had felt, I think the coven’s lifestyle – a quiet and peaceful house full of secrets – is smothering to Sara. She’s more often with me than other ‘real’ witches these days, and together, we still manage to wander our way into trouble. Or someone else’s bed. But never together, obviously. I don’t share.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Jamie asks. “You look . . . stressed.”

  “I’m fine,” I quickly reassure her, tucking my hair behind my ears. “Do you know where my mother is?” Of course, I already know this, but a change of subject is needed. I don’t need help from Sara’s mother even if it is good-natured concern. Jamie always has advice I never want to swallow.

  “The garden,” she murmurs while roaming my face as if to pry my secrets from any evidence that I may have splayed across it. “Harvesting the elderberries.” She fingers the necklace around her neck, directing my attention to the stringed, dried, and probably spelled elderberries inside. They’d look like raisins to the ordinary human.

  I frown at it. Elderberries have a few different uses but mostly to guard the wearer. It makes me wonder what she’s hoping to guard herself against.

  My frown disappears. I could use some elderberries myself. But then I’d have to get someone to spell them, and I don’t have it in me to explain to everyone else why I need a bit of hocus pocus draped around my neck.

  “Great,” I say, moving past her.

  “Jinx,” she calls. I come to a reluctant halt. “Whatever you’re stressed about, whatever has you so worried, please don’t drag my daughter into it.”

  My eyelid twitches in time with my clicking jaw, and I briskly walk down the steps to the first floor and straight out of the greenhouses’ back door.

  As soon as I step outside, I breathe in the crisp air. My mind comes up with a whole host of retorts I could have slung back at Jamie’s last words, but in the scheme of things, it wouldn’t have done any good. Trouble follows me everywhere, and she has a right to ask me to protect her daughter by not getting Sara involved. She could have worded it better though.

  My eyelids flutter closed, and I tip my head to the sky, allowing the sun to warm my skin, to seep inside and chase away my fear. It works, but it’s short-lived. When I’m ready, I start toward the large garden.

  A wall of buttery sunflowers lines each side of the arched entrance gate, reaching taller than myself with their buttery pedals. From the outside, the inside of the garden appears to be in need of some serious help. I finger a pedal as I shuffle through the spelled woven arched entrance made of thorny vines both dead and alive, stepping along the stoned path that’s been here for ages. The garden transforms into something of a fairy tale as the magic snaps aside for me to enter what’s truly here. Every witch in this coven has given
the thorns a bead of our blood. It’s how we enter the true garden instead of the illusion it’ll show to intruders.

  As a child, this was my favorite spot to avoid. This garden, full of life and regrowth, where everything has a purpose, made me feel like I never had one. I was different from the others. I still am, and I knew even then that I didn’t fit in here. I could never mold or reshape or regrow myself to fit what the witches desired. As a teen, I quit trying to entirely.

  I brush my hands along the herbs as I pass by, seeing my mother kneeling before the elderberry bushes with a basket at her side. Apple trees shade her from the high sun, and around the ground of their trunks, rotten apples decay.

  Between me and my mother, there’s a small clearing separating the paths of vegetation. A pentagram is outlined in brick with a circle around it to honor the new rulers of the realms. In each triangle of the pentagram’s star is a different shade of flowers. White for the Earth Realm, red for the Demon Realm, purple for the Dream Realm, yellow for the Guardian Realm, and blue for the Death Realm. The smell that lingers around these flowers is so inviting, and I bend to sniff them.

  The center of each triangle is spared for honoring the Divine, the four creators of all realms and those who rule them. That triangle is covered in a sprawling moss that crawls across the embedded bricks to reach the other representations of the realms.

  When I was here last, I watched my mother tend to it, murmuring prayers to each triangle as she weeded. I wonder if I prayed to Mother Nature, once a former witch who fought for the realms in the Realms War and was then rewarded by the Divine, it would go unheard.

  “I can taste your anxiety from here, Jinx,” she says, a hint of humor to her tone. She half turns, smiling up at me.

  I try to return the warm gesture as I pass the pentagram of flowers, but even the push on my own cheeks feels false. Instead, I bend and press a quick peck to her brow. She smells of the earth and the sweet juices of the elderberries.

  “It’s nice to see you too,” I mumble sarcastically.

  “Perhaps if you came home more often, your anxiety wouldn’t be to the point of a mental breakdown.” She moves back to the bush, plucking blackberries.

  “Mhmm,” I murmur.

  The birds chirp overhead as they soar above the garden, waiting for it to be unattended so they can steal their snacks. But they’ll never get inside the garden. It’s warded from anything without witches’ blood. Some of the herbs here are highly poisonous, and even though we’re surrounded by miles of fields, we don’t want any humans or animals to wander into a garden full of witchy things. Besides, at night, when the moon is just right, dancing specks of light travel from plant to plant, a sign of all the magic inside the garden. It’s pretty to watch, but that would sure get a rise out of unsuspecting thieves, be it they’re on four legs, two wings, or two feet.

  To the humans, this garden looks nothing but ordinary from the outside, a complete lack of interest.

  “Do you remember what elderberries are for?” she asks, holding up a stained palm filled with them.

  I raise my eyebrows and breathe deep, exhaling through my mouth. “Protection against evil and a ward to hexes, mostly.”

  “Very good,” she says, beaming. “And what else?”

  I frown, searching my mind. I almost shrug, and then, somewhere deep in the pocket of my mind, from a memory of when I was seven, comes the answer. “If worn, it protects the wearer from corruptive negative energy.”

  She laughs. “And, if worn, it warns off the intention of mental harm from others.”

  “Yeah, that too.” I bend to my knees and place them in the dirt next to hers. Dampness seeps into my pants.

  Witches often wear dresses, plain and ordinary dresses, but I have and always will prefer jeans. And right now, I can see the benefits of my mother’s dress. Her skirt is pushed above her knees, bare in the soil. The wet spots may leave a stain on the knee of my jeans while her skin is easily washable.

  “What are you using them for this year?”

  My mother shrugs. “This year, we may just be dehydrating to store them. Jamie has already gone through last year’s stores, throwing bad reserves to make room for these. It’s been quiet since the Realms War, and not many requests have come in for elderberry protection.”

  The Realms War was a war that happened only a few months ago. Our coven didn’t ‘attend’, as Jamie likes to put it, as though it was a party we declined an invitation to. There weren’t many within the coven who wanted to help, and my mother flat out refused to allow me to go. I have no magic, therefore, I would have been a hindrance.

  If you ask me, that’s a whole lot of bad karma the coven has raked up. Almost all of the other witches went to help in the war. I wait for the day when the karma will snap its whip on the women here, and probably me too. Maybe it already has.

  A lot of witches died, I was told. Covens with few to no members still alive had joined together and started new covens after it was over. The shifters took a great loss as well. This news is according to Cinder who had stayed behind that day to protect his territory while his friends fought in some place called The Tween. He never talks to me about it, and when I press, he walks away, so I’ve learned to avoid the topic at all times. It clearly hurts him.

  I still can’t believe other realms exist, though I shouldn’t be surprised. We heard the stories about Mother Nature and her daughter, the firstborn witch, as children. Stories that have been passed down through generations. Why wouldn’t other, more nefarious realms exist?

  “Your thoughts are like bees. I can hear them buzzing.” She turns toward me and snags my hand, running her thumb across the lines of my palm. “What troubles you so much?”

  “I –” my voice breaks, and I clear my throat. “I want to know about my father.”

  She blinks at me. Once. Twice. Then, she shakes her head and stands, rubbing her damp hands on her heavily stained skirt. “We’ve been over this, Jinx.”

  I stand, too. The cool autumn breeze licks at the wet spots on my jeans. “And yet, I still have a million questions. Each question goes unanswered. What was his name? Where was he from? I already know what he looks like since I look nothing like you.” I throw my hands in the air, and they slap back to my thighs.

  Sighing, she turns her attention to the wall. “Why is it so important to you?”

  “Because,” I hiss through clenched teeth. “I deserve to know. Why won’t you tell me?”

  Her cheeks begin to redden, and slowly, she looks back to me. The expression on her face tells me everything I didn’t think of. “You love him.” Witches aren’t supposed to fall in love with anyone. It complicates everything and compromises the coven’s secrets.

  She flexes her jaw, my only answer. I run a hand through my hair. “Holy shit. You really do. You love him.”

  “Yes,” she hisses, bending to roughly grab her basket of plucked elderberries. She props it on her hip. “I loved Adriel.”

  Loved. Past tense. I swallow at this subtle knowledge. It’s odd how two little letters can change the meaning of a word so greatly. “What happened?” I ask breathlessly.

  “He died.”

  “Obviously,” I whisper. My eyebrows scrunch, and my attention falls to the rotten apples at our feet. Silence fills my head. I’ll never get any answers now, and I don’t know what is more heartbreaking – that or the fact that I’ll never get the chance to know him.

  My mother sighs, and her posture deflates. “Your father was Native American, honey. A shaman of his tribe.”

  “They still practice that?”

  My mother laughs. “Did you think that their magic would deplete over time?” She taps the underside of my chin with her dirt-covered index finger. “He was powerful, Jinx. An equal to me, in fact, but two different sides of the magical world. He couldn’t leave his tribe and his duties, and I wouldn’t leave the coven. We couldn’t. We had to choose between our desires and our loyalties.”

  To a witch, l
oyalty to the coven is life. Without it, without the other witches, we would be lost.

  They. They would be lost.

  “When I found out I was pregnant, well . . .”

  “You were scared, weren’t you?” After all, how can someone keep a secret as big as love with a baby in the womb?

  She smiles sadly. “You’ll always be the best thing that ever happened to me, Jinx, but at the time, I could consider little else than the predicament I found myself in. Eventually, I went to tell him. He was so happy, so delighted.” Tears line her eyes. “Shortly after, he died. A car accident.”

  I watch as she dries the tears with the back of her hand, a certain resolve steeling her features. “That’s all there is to say.” She begins to walk away.

  “Wait!” I shout a bit too loudly, hand outstretched as my gut settles in my toes to the abrupt close of information.

  She stops and half-turns, readjusting the basket of elderberries against her ample hips. My mouth works as if trying to spit out several sentences at once, but not knowing which one to choose. I can practically feel her pain at this conversation, and now, I understand why she avoided it all my life. I’m the only thing left of the man she loved, and though I know she loves me deeply, speaking about him has to feel like she’s reliving it all over again. It makes me hesitant to ask anything else.

  “Jinx?” she presses, concern pulling her eyebrows together.

  “The – there’s something wrong with me,” I stumble.

  “There’s something wrong with all of us, honey. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “No.” I close the small distance between us. “I’m not a witch.”

  “Of course you are,” she says, reaching to touch my cheek. I pull back.

  “You’re not listening to me, Mom!”

  “I am, but you’re not making any sense, Jinx.”

  “I – they –” I take a steadying breath. “People are after me, mom. People who are trying to kill me, and when they try, when the situation becomes a choice between my life and theirs, I turn into – into – into something else.”