by Kelly Meding
I swear, I heard him chuckle in my head.
“Tennyson is up to date,” I said.
Jaxon’s hand jerked on the wheel. “He found you this far away?”
“Uh, no. I reached out.”
I could only see his profile, but it showed enough. He was pissed and doing a bad job hiding it. Apparently blood-share meant brain-share, and Jaxon could get over it.
“It’s concerning that your connection to the vampire is strengthening,” Mom said, echoing Jaxon’s thoughts, albeit with a bit more diplomacy. She turned around to look at me, her face twisted with worry. “I fear you’ll lose yourself to his power.”
“I won’t, Mom. I know who I am. The daughter of Elspeth Juno and Gaius Oakenjin. Suspected Para-Marshal Du Jour. Also terrible cook.”
Mom laughed and some of that worry faded. “Stubborn girl. You are your father’s daughter.”
“Hey, you’re just as stubborn as he is.”
“All of y’all are a special kind of stubborn,” Jaxon said.
“True. We are.”
“Hey, wait a sec.” He glanced at Mom, then at me before reverting his eyes to the road. “Your mom’s last name is Juno, and your dad’s is Oakenjin, so how come your last name is Harrison?”
“Protection,” Mom replied. “My father was a powerful warlock, descended from the equally powerful Juno line. He and my mother were murdered by a coven of witches in Chicago when I was a child, because he refused to side with them during a turf war. I kept the Juno name, because it was the name I knew and a way to honor my heritage. But I also knew if that coven discovered I was alive, or that I had a daughter, they could come looking for us. So when I gave birth, I listed Gaius Harrison as the birth father and Shiloh took his name.”
I cut my eyes at Jaxon. “In the six years we’ve supposedly known each other, you never asked before today?”
“No, it honestly never dawned on me. But your mom also never used to be active in our cases, so the name difference caught me off guard.”
“Oh.”
Jaxon met my eyes in the rearview mirror, and I didn’t miss the open hurt over me saying “supposedly.” I was trying, bless it. “So I guess Shiloh didn’t inherit any of her grandfather’s powers?”
“None that she’s displayed so far,” Mom replied. “But I also never taught her how to find and harness them, for fear of discovery. It’s why I lead a quiet life and rarely use my own magic.”
“So wait a sec.” All this was freaking news to me! “I could have hidden abilities I don’t know about?”
“It’s possible, Shi, but not a guarantee. The power of a magical line is secured by marrying those of equal or higher abilities, but instead, my father married my mother. While she was attuned to nature and sensitive to magic, she possessed no real power. So his line was diluted through me, and what you received was further altered by your father’s genes. And I was too scared to explore your abilities, because I didn’t want us to be found.”
I scrunched down in the back seat and pondered the new turn in my life. I totally understood my mom’s desire to protect me from these bad Chicago witches, but I was twenty-eight years old. She could have told me all this sooner, maybe even in private so we could really talk. Not while we were on a road trip with five other Paras on the hunt for missing werewolves.
Sweet Iblis, sometimes my life well and truly sucked.
On the other hand, those bad witches hadn’t found us, and Mom was taking a big risk helping us again. Choosing to live in a tiny town in Delaware made a lot more sense now.
“Hey, what if telepathy is something I can do on my own?” I asked, sitting up straighter, excited by the idea. “I never tried doing it before I met Tennyson. What if his power is helping draw mine out? I reached out to him just now, after all.”
“Try saying something in my head,” Jaxon replied.
“Okay. Um.” I wasn’t sure how to do that. I had a previous link to Tennyson’s mind, but I didn’t have one with Jaxon. Except we apparently had six years of friendship and a few months of great sex between us.
I closed my eyes and pictured his smiling face. Tried to put it into a new context. The beach, maybe, with sun glinting in his blond hair. Laughter. His lightly accented voice calling my name as he splashed in the surf. Warm hands rubbing suntan lotion onto my back. Such a beautiful . . . memory?
Not my memory.
His memory.
“Are you thinking about us at the beach?” I asked.
Jaxon’s head snapped in my direction, his eyebrows furrowed, then just as quickly returned to the road. “How did you know that?”
“I saw it.” An odd kind of joy bubbled up inside me. “I saw you thinking about us at the beach. Why are you thinking about us at the beach?”
“Figured if you really could read my mind, you’d like to hear something positive. We had a great time that weekend. Only one we ever got to spend as a mini-vacation when we dated.”
“Where were we?”
“Bethany Beach.”
“Oh. It’s so odd, because I couldn’t hear any specific thing in your head, but I saw the memories playing out. I did hear you call my name, but it matched the memory of you doing it on the beach.”
“That’s an impressive gift,” Mom said. She didn’t sound happy about it, though. “Perhaps we should leave your exercising it to later, though? We’re getting close enough that I need to concentrate on the cubes. I can sense their magic more intensely now, and it’s definitely pulling me in this direction.”
“Yeah, of course, Mom. Job first, self-discovery later.”
I refocused my energy into the task at hand, but we would definitely be revisiting the topic of my visual telepathy at another time. “What are you sensing?”
“It’s still so vague. I think the wood is blocking it too much.”
Oh fun. Mom passed the branch to me, and I held back a pained scream as I vibrated my hand and pulled one cube out. “Ugh. Here.”
She took the sock-wrapped cube with a grimace, then held it in both palms. The dark magic crawled over my skin, so I put the branch in the empty seat and tried to scrunch away from my mom.
My mom, who started shaking in the front seat, before flinging the cube onto the dash in front of Jaxon.
I jackknifed up and reached for her shoulder. “Mom?”
“Elspeth, what’s wrong?” Jaxon asked.
“I can feel it now that it’s free of the wood.” Mom’s voice was an odd tangle of terrified and furious. “All magic has a signature unique to the source, especially among witches and trained users.”
“You know this signature?” I said.
She twisted to face me, her skin pale, but her eyes blazed with fury. “It’s the same magical signature as the witches who killed your grandfather.”
Chapter 10
I gaped at my mom. “It’s the same signature? Are you shitting me?”
“I’m perfectly serious,” Mom replied. “I was a child when my parents died, but I’ve never forgotten the sound of their screams, or the scorched earth smell of the witch who cursed them. They didn’t know I existed or that I was hiding under their bed, because my mother had kept my birth a secret. From my first memory, they instilled in me how I must hide myself from the magical world for all our sakes, just as I kept you hidden until adulthood.”
Shock and horror rolled through my system, and I reached for one of her hands to squeeze. “The witch who killed my grandparents created those cubes?”
“Yes. Copper is a strong absorber of magic. Those cubes would have been effective for months, if not years, even without a boost from the witch.” Mom let out a sound not unlike a growl. “To curse young people barren is an insult to Mother Earth herself. It is dark magic no respectable witch would dabble in, but these Chicago witches have no morals. They answer only to themselves. We must be cautious going forward, Shiloh.”
“I understand. I need you safe, Mom.”
A few minutes passed before Jaxon said,
“I know this is painful for you guys, but Elspeth, can you sense the direction we need to go?”
“Northwest. We’re too far south.”
“Okay, thank you.” On the next route advertising north, he turned. The SUV behind us followed. I called Chandra and filled her in on what Mom learned about the witch and that this was the area. In the background, I heard Kathleen say, “I told you so.”
“It sounds like this case just got personal to you,” Chandra said.
“It did. I don’t know why this witch is working with Damian, or what they want with all those werewolves, but I am going to find out. That woman killed my grandparents.”
“Keep a clear head, Shiloh. This isn’t the time for personal revenge.”
I didn’t entirely agree, but I understood needing to keep my head in the game. In the present and not the past. I also desperately wanted to tell the others what I’d learned about my own powers, but it could keep. Maybe it would be surprisingly useful down the road.
We kept going on a long, twisty road through farmland that, I hoped, would lead us to our missing werewolves—and if we were lucky, this Damian person, too. He was not going to cause a Para Apocalypse on my watch. No fucking way.
After ten miles, Mom pointed to another road, marked by a sign that said “Gabriel, KS, Pop. 890.”
“Gabriel,” Jaxon said. “If that’s our destination, there’s some irony to it. The name means God’s messenger.”
“Which Damian seems to think he is if he wants to destroy Paras?” I asked.
“Bingo.”
“I believe it’s our destination,” Mom said. “The power is concentrating, and I don’t sense it extending beyond the next town.”
“Terrific.”
I passed the information to the other car, and then pushed the information at Tennyson. He responded with a simple, “I will see you soon.”
I also kept a close eye on my mom, but so far, we hadn’t encountered any magical snares. The people behind this place weren’t doing much to protect it from people sensitive to magic.
Then again, how many magically sensitive people randomly traveled through Bumfuck, Kansas? The Midwest was a great place to hide illicit paranormal activity.
The small town of Gabriel rose on the horizon suddenly, from flat earth to distant buildings. A scattering of homes lined the main street, along with a handful of businesses and a mom-and-pop grocery store. A municipal building and an antique store. A gas station/repair shop. Nothing unusual until we’d gotten to the other side of town, where a professional-looking building appeared. Brick, two stories, with a sign that advertised a dentist, a family doctor, and the oddly named DM Clinic.
“Here,” Mom said. “It’s centered here.”
“This building here?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The parking lot had about a dozen cars in it, so we didn’t stand out too much pulling into two rear spaces, side by side. We rolled windows down on the sides of our vehicles that faced each other. Chandra was in the back seat facing me, so I asked, “Do you sense any of the werewolves?”
“Not yet,” she replied. “The cube may be interfering somehow, or the place has protective shields. I’m uncertain which.”
“I don’t scent them, either,” Gideon said from the driver’s seat. “Something may be interfering, or they simply haven’t been outside the clinic in a long enough period of time that their scents faded.” From somewhere inside the SUV, Kathleen concurred.
Well, I could take care of the cube problem. Jaxon fetched it from the dash and I vibrated it back into the branch. My hand tingled with annoyance long after. I moved through objects so rarely that doing it this many times in two days was taking its toll.
“Better?” I asked.
“I feel better,” Mom replied.
Chandra closed her eyes. “Yes, I can sense Alice now. Her mind is fuzzy but no longer hidden from me. There is still something interfering, though.”
“Can you get into her head?” I asked. “Do that misty thing you do?”
“I’ll try. Would you like to join me?”
“Definitely.”
The car disappeared, leaving Chandra and me again standing in the swirling gray mists of human consciousness. For as bizarre and trippy it had been the first time, this was old hat now, and I kind of liked it. For all I wasn’t entirely sure of the extent of Chandra’s powers, this had been crazy useful so far.
Her eyes remained closed as she sought out Alice Anderson’s mind. A faint bluish charge ripped across the mists a few times, and I bet that was the interference. Probably a protective ward of some kind, not only to hide their activities from other Paras, but likely from the residents of Gabriel itself.
The shape of a woman appeared. Curvy and tall, standing half-bent as if looking down at something. Her silhouette angled toward us, as if sensing our presence, but she remained grayed out.
“Alice? It’s Chandra Goodfellow. Can you hear me?”
Alice nodded, and more details appeared. She wore a simple linen dress. Had dark brown hair, like many of the other werewolves we’d encountered. But she never fully materialized like Lacey and Will had. That blue electricity jolted all around us, probably unhappy that Chandra had broken through.
“Chandra?” Alice’s voice was tinny, as if coming from a great distance when her shape was only a few feet away. “What are you doing here? Who’s she?”
“This is a Para-Marshal associate of mine, Shiloh Harrison. We’ve been working with your Alpha to find you and the other missing werewolves.”
Alice blinked at us several times. “Well, you’ve wasted your efforts. We all left the Pack of our own free will. We want to be here.”
My hand jerked, and I met Chandra’s equally shocked expression. “You’re all here on purpose?” I asked. “You weren’t coerced into leaving?”
“Of course not. We all want children, and when Alpha Kennedy refused to allow us to seek human help with our infertility, a solution was presented to us by Dr. Marcus Ferguson. He told us about this clinic, said the treatments were free because they were all still experimental. We’re his test subjects so other werewolves don’t face this same problem in the future.”
“Alice, the only reason you guys were infertile in the first place is because someone here placed a magical cube in your home that caused it. They made the problem so they could trick you into coming here to fix it.”
“You’re lying.” Alice crossed her arms, the very picture of obstinacy. Freaking werewolves. “They really are helping us. Two of the volunteer couples have already conceived.”
“Yeah, because you guys aren’t exposed to the magic whammy anymore. And how do you think we found you in the middle of nowhere? We used those cubes to trace its magic signature back to here. We’re in cars right outside in the parking lot.”
“Dr. Ferguson is going to give us children. And then he’ll help us apply to the government to form our own Pack. One where human medicine is allowed.”
“About that.” I glanced at Chandra, who seemed more than willing to let me speak. She had her hands full keeping the communications channel open. “We spoke to your goddess Danu. She’s okay with Packs using human medicine, and we’ve told Alpha Kennedy, who has agreed. And before you say we’re lying again, Rosalind was with us. She heard the words with her own ears.”
Alice frowned. “How did you find our goddess? What are you?”
I hated that question more than almost any other. “I’m a Para-Marshal doing her job. Twenty-eight werewolves from two Packs are considered missing, and it’s our job to find you and bring you home.”
“No. You can’t tell anyone you found us. They’ll take us away, and we’ll never conceive. Please. My heart is already torn open from the three children I lost. Don’t take this from me, too.”
Bless it all. “They. Made. You. Infertile.”
“I don’t believe you. Alpha Kennedy would make you say anything to see us retrieved so we can be punished for our
deceit.”
She didn’t want to believe me, so the least I could do was gather a little more information. “Were you the first person approached by Dr. Ferguson about these experimental treatments?”
“Yes. He understood my grief, and when he told me what he could do, I agreed to be his voice.”
“You got all the other couples on board?”
“Yes. And now because of me, two of those couples will have a child of their own. Thanks to Dr. Ferguson.”
“Did it never occur to you that Dr. Ferguson tricked you into being his mouthpiece? How do you know he isn’t the one who had your children killed?”
She snarled at me, and I took a step back, even though I was pretty sure she couldn’t physically touch me. This was all in our heads, after all. Right?
“Please, Chandra, leave me alone,” Alice said with rage in her voice. “Let us live our lives as we see fit.”
A blaze of blue zapped between us and Alice, and then I was back in the car blinking at the headrest. Chandra was rubbing her temples and muttering.
“That didn’t go well,” I said. I relayed the conversation.
“It’s her grief that is stoking her stubbornness,” Chandra said. “She lost the three children I helped her bear, and now all of her hopes and dreams for offspring are riding on this place. She won’t accept that, while it’s possible she and Raymond are naturally infertile, the other couples were intentionally magicked. They were targeted.”
“Do you think this Dr. Ferguson knew about the Andersons?” Jaxon asked. “About their previous inability to conceive, using Chandra to finally have kids, and then losing them? Their loss and grief, and maybe he targeted them first?”
“Alice pretty much confirmed he did, so yes, I do. Without knowing this Dr. Ferguson, I’m speculating on his motives, but grief is a powerful emotion. And they were the first couple reported missing.”
“I think this guy’s motives are pretty clear,” I said. “He wants willing werewolf patients to experiment on, and he’s got them. Now we have to find and expose the lie in what he’s selling them.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to kidnap them and take them back to their Packs?” Novak asked.
