The Urban Fantasy Anthology

by Peter S. Beagle

  He didn’t know if the witch could hear the rest. He’d been a wolf for twenty years and more so his judgment about what human senses were good for was pretty much gone.

  He could hear the girl’s sweet voice clearly though. “Lucky Jon?” she asked. “Lucky Jon, who are you calling? Let’s hang it up, now.” A pause, then the girl spoke into the phone, “Hello?” Another pause. “It’s an answering machine, I think. No worries.”

  At the same time, a male, probably young, was saying in a rapid, rabid flow of sound, “I feel it…Doncha feel it? I feel it in him. This is the one. He’ll do for Kouros.” Then there was a soft click as the call ended.

  The last fifty times he’d heard the recording he couldn’t make out the last word. But with the information the witch had given him, he understood it just fine this time.

  He looked at Choo’s witch but he couldn’t tell what she thought. Somewhere she’d learned to discipline her emotions so he could only smell the strong ones—like the flash of desire she’d felt as he’d smelled the back of her neck. Even in this situation it had been enough to raise a thread of interest. Maybe after they got his brother back they could do something about that interest. In the…

  “How much of the last did you hear, Wendy?” he asked.

  “Don’t call me Wendy,” she snapped. “It’s Moira. No one called me Wendy except my mom and she’s been dead a long time.”

  “Fine,” he snapped back before he could control himself. He was tired and worried, but he could do better than that. He tightened his control and softened his voice. “Did you hear the guy? The one who said that he felt it in him—meaning my brother, I think. And that he would do for Kouros?”

  “No. Or at least not well enough to catch his words. But I know the woman’s voice. You’re right, it was Samhain.” Though he couldn’t feel anything from her, her knuckles were white on the coffee cup.

  “You need a Finder and I can’t do that anymore. Wait,” she held up a hand before he could say anything. “I’m not saying I won’t help you, just that it could be a lot simpler. Kouros moves all the time. Did you trace the call? It sounded like a payphone to me.”

  “I found the phone booth he called from, but I couldn’t find anything except that he’d been there.” He tapped his nose, then glanced at her dark glasses and said, “I could smell him there and back trail him, but I couldn’t trail him out. They transported him somehow.”

  “They don’t know that he’s a cop, or that his brother is a werewolf.”

  “He doesn’t carry ID with him while he’s undercover. I don’t see how anyone would know I was his brother. Unless he told them, and he wouldn’t.”

  “Good,” she said. “They won’t expect you. That’ll help.”

  “So do you know a Finder I can go to?”

  She shook her head. “Not one who will help you against Samhain. Anyone, anyone who makes a move against them is punished in some rather spectacular ways.” He saw her consider sharing one or two of them with him and discard it. She didn’t want him scared off. Not that he could be, not with Jon’s life at stake. But it was interesting that she hadn’t tried.

  “If you take me to where they stole him, maybe I can find something they left behind, something to use to find them.”

  Tom frowned at her. She didn’t know his brother, he hadn’t mentioned money and he was getting the feeling that she could care less if he called in the authorities. “So if Samhain is so all powerful, how come you, a white witch, is willing to buck them?”

  “You’re a cop, too, aren’t you?” She finished her coffee, but if she was waiting for a reaction, she wasn’t going to get one. He’d seen the “all-knowing” witch act before. Her lips turned up as she set the empty cup on the counter. “It’s not magic. Cops are easy to spot—suspicious is your middle name. Fair enough.”

  She pulled off her glasses and he saw that he’d been wrong. He’d been pretty sure she was blind—the other reason women wore wraparound sunglasses at night. And she was. But that wasn’t why she wore the sunglasses.

  Her left eye was Swamp Thing-green without pupil or white. Her right eye was gone and it looked as though it had been removed by someone who wasn’t too good with a knife. It was horrible—and he’d seen some horrible things.

  “Sacrifice is good for power,” she said again. “But it works best if you can manage to make the sacrifice your own.”

  Jesus. She’d done it to herself.

  She might not be able to see him, but she read his reaction just fine. She smiled tightly. “There were some extenuating circumstances,” she continued. “You aren’t going to see witches cutting off their fingers to power their spells—it doesn’t work that way. But this worked for me,” she tapped the scar tissue around her right eye. “Kouros did the other one first. That’s why I’m willing to take them on. I’ve done it before and survived—and I still owe them a few.” She replaced her sunglasses and he watched her relax as they settled into place.

  Tom Franklin hadn’t brought a car and, for obvious reasons, she didn’t drive. He said the phone was only a couple of miles from her apartment and neither wanted to wait around for a cab. So they walked. She felt his start of surprise when she tucked her arm in his but he didn’t object. At least he didn’t jump away from her and say, “ick,” like the last person who’d seen what she’d done to herself.

  “You’ll have to tell me when we come to curbs or if there’s something in the way,” she told him. “Or you can amuse yourself when I fall on my face. I can find my way around my apartment, but out here I’m at your mercy.”

  He said, with sober humor, “I imagine watching you trip over a few curbs would be a good way to get you to help Jon. Why don’t you get a guide dog?”

  “Small apartments aren’t a good place for big dogs,” she told him. “It’s not fair to the dog.”

  They walked a few blocks in silence, the rain drizzling unhappily down the back of her neck and soaking the bottoms of the jeans she’d put on before they started out. It didn’t always rain in Seattle, despite its reputation. He guided her as if he’d done it before, unobtrusively but clearly, as if they were waltzing instead of walking down the street. She relaxed and walked faster.

  “Wendy.” He broke the companionable silence with the voice of One Who Suddenly Comprehends. “It’s worse than I thought. I was stuck on Casper the Friendly Ghost and Wendy the Good Little Witch. But Wendy Moira…I bet it’s Wendy Moira Angela, isn’t it.”

  She gave him a mock scowl. “I don’t have a kiss for you and I can’t fly, not even with fairy dust. And I hate Peter Pan, the play, and all the movies.”

  His arm moved and she could tell he was laughing to himself. “I bet.”

  “It could be worse, Toto,” she told him. “I could belong to the Emerald City Pack.”

  He laughed out loud at that, a softer sound that she’d thought he’d have from the rough grumble of his voice. “You know, I’ve never thought of it that way. It seemed logical, Seattle being the Emerald City.”

  She might have said something, but he suddenly picked up his pace like a hunting dog spotting his prey. She kept her hand tight on his arm and did her best to keep up. He stopped at last. “Here.”

  She felt his tension, the desire for action of some sort. Hopefully she’d be able to provide him the opportunity. She released his arm and stepped to the side.

  “All right,” she told him, falling into the comfortable patter she adopted with most of her clients—erasing the odd intimacy that had sprung up between them. “I know the girl on your brother’s phone—her name used to be Molly, but I think she goes by something like Spearmint or Peppermint, something -mint. I’m going to call for things that belong to her—a hair, a cigarette—anything will do. You’ll have to do the looking. Whatever it is will glow, but it might be very small, easy to overlook.”

  “What if I don’t see anything?”

  “Then they didn’t leave anything behind and I’ll figure out something else to
try.”

  She set aside her worries, shedding them like a duck would shed the cool Seattle rain. Closing her senses to the outside world, she reached into her well of power and drew out a bucketful and threw it out in a circle around her as she called to the essence that was Molly. She hadn’t done this spell since she could see out of both eyes—but there was no reason she couldn’t do it now. Once learned, spells came to her hand like trained spaniels and this one was no exception.

  “What do you see?” she asked. The vibration of power warmed her against the cold fall drizzle that began to fall. There was something here, she could feel it.

  “Nothing.” His voice told her that he’d put a lot of hope into this working.

  “There’s something,” she said, sensations crawling up her arms and over her shoulders. She held out her right hand, her left being otherwise occupied with the workings of her spell. “Touching me might help you see.”

  Warm flooded her as his hand touched hers…and she could see the faint traces Molly had left behind. She froze.

  “Moira?”

  She couldn’t see anything else. Just bright bits of pink light sparkling from the ground, giving her a little bit of idea what the landscape looked like. She let go of his hand and the light disappeared, leaving her in darkness again.

  “Did you see anything?” she asked, her voice hoarse. The oddity of seeing anything…she craved it too much and it made her wary because she didn’t know how it worked.

  “No.”

  He wanted his brother and she wanted to see. Just for a moment. She held her hand out. “Touch me, again.”

  …and the sparkles returned like glitter scattered in front of her. Small bits of skin and hair, too small for what she needed. But there was something…

  She followed the glittering trail and, as if it had been hidden, a small wad of something blazed like a bonfire.

  “Is there a wall just to our right?” she asked.

  “A building and an alley.” His voice was tight, but she ignored it. She had other business first.

  They’d waited for Tom’s brother in the alley. Maybe Jon came to the payphone here often.

  She led Tom to the blaze and bent to pick up it up: soft and sticky, gum. Better, she thought, better than she could have hoped. Saliva would make a stronger guide than hair or fingernails. She released his hand reluctantly.

  “What did you find?”

  “Molly’s gum.” She allowed her magic to loosen the last spell and slide back to her, hissing as the power warmed her skin almost to the point of burning. The next spell would be easier, even if it might eventually need more power. Sympathetic magic—which used the connections between like things—was one of those affinities that ran through her father’s bloodlines into her.

  But before she tried any more magic, she needed to figure out what he’d done to her spell. How touching him allowed her to see.

  She looked unearthly. A violent wind he had not felt, not even when she’d fastened on to his hand with fierce strength, had blown her hair away from her face. The skin on her hands was reddened, as if she held them too close to a fire. He wanted to soothe them—but he firmly intended never to touch her again.

  He had no idea what she’d done to him while she held on to him and made his body burn and tremble. He didn’t like surprises and she’d told him that he would have to look, not that she’d use him to see. He especially didn’t like it that as long as she was touching him, he hadn’t wanted her to let him go.

  Witches gather more power from hurting those with magic, she’d said… more or less. People just like him—but it hadn’t hurt, not that he’d noticed.

  He wasn’t afraid of her, not really. Witch or not she was no match for him. Even in human form it would be only a matter of moments before he broke her human-fragile body. But if she was using him…

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked as he had earlier, but the question seemed more important now. He’d known what she was, but witch meant something different to him now. He knew enough about witches not to ask the obvious question though, like what it was she’d done to him. Witches, in his experience, were secretive about their spells—like junkyard dogs are secretive about their bones.

  She’d taken something from him by using him that way…broken the trust he’d felt building between them. He needed to reestablish what he could expect out of her. Needed to know exactly what she was getting him into, beyond rescuing his brother. Witches are not altruistic. “What do you want out of this? Revenge for your blindness?”

  She watched him…appeared to watch him anyway as she considered his question. There hadn’t been many people who could lie to Tom before he Changed—cops learn all about lying the first year on the job. Afterwards…he could smell a lie a mile away an hour before it was spoken.

  “Andy Choo sent you,” she said finally. “That’s one. Your brother’s a policeman, and an investigation into his death might be awkward. That’s two. He takes risks to help people he doesn’t know, it’s only right someone return the favor. That’s three.”

  They weren’t lies, but they weren’t everything either. Her face was very still, as if the magic she’d worked had changed her view of him, too.

  Then she tilted her head sideways and said in a totally different voice, hesitant and raw. “Sins of the fathers.”

  Here was absolute truth. Obscure as hell, but truth. “Sins of the fathers?”

  “Kouros’s real name is Lin Keller, though he hasn’t used it in twenty years or more.”

  “He’s your father.” And then he added two and two. “Your father is running Samhain’s Coven?” Her father had ruined her eye and—Tom could read between the lines—caused her to ruin the other? Her own father?

  She drew in a deep breath—and for a moment he was afraid she was going to cry or something. But a stray gust of air brought the scent of her to him and he realized she was angry. It tasted like a werewolf’s rage, wild and biting.

  “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 he 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 peaked 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 hec
k…” 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, turned her hand palm down, then turned 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 of 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?”