by Stella Blaze
Min missed the lock with the key a couple times, scratching the old key hole. She gritted her teeth and finally forced it into the lock, turned it and let herself into the shop. Already halfway through the store, she finally realized she hadn’t switched on the overhead lights. With a stamp of her foot and a sibilant phrase the candles usually just for decoration flashed and blazed to life and illuminated the store with a haunted quality. She stayed her course to the back of the store proper and whisked the beaded curtain impatiently out of her way.
Enchanted, the beaded curtain was fashioned from blue green globs of glass she and Andy had collected at the shores of the Dead Sea when they were children. As with the curtain, humans that were not magically inclined never saw the thousands of shimmering crystals scattered along the Dead Sea’s shores.
The candles in this room were already lit and she grabbed things she would need up in her arms as she moved through the displays and shelves. Holy water, a cross—just in case Elaina showed herself—wolves’ bane, a thick piece of yellow chalk, some silver powder and some thistle. The thistle and silver powder would help with any glamour she would need to do; the thistle to trick the wild thing inside the werewolves, and the silver powder to specifically work on the wolves.
She looked around the shop but couldn’t see anything else that would be of use to her. These were all defensive charms and ingredients for protection spells. She needed something offensive, something she could use as a weapon.
Then Min thought of some of the more dangerous objects they’d kept away from the general public—and their more supernatural clientele. She scrambled to the back of the store, moving quickly back the length of the long, skinny hall, taking the sudden right into the office she shared with her sister and mother.
She went right for the desk she and her sister shared, pulling a long, though subtle, sword from the wall behind the desk. It had been made with enough silver content to be deadly to a werewolf, yet was still hard enough to be deadly to almost anything else. Min swung its scabbard over her head and shoulders until it rested competently around her waist. She scrounged through her desk, not finding much that wasn’t a stapler, pens, a ridiculous amount of paper clips, and a plethora of tidy sales slips—the last week of sales slips, to be exact. They had turned over half the store inventory during the solstice sale and the Sci-Fi convention.
Then, reluctantly, she looked across the room at her mother’s desk. Unlike Min’s simple oak business desk, Katarina’s desk shined with high polished cherry wood and elegant carvings. She could be in the room for hours without really ever looking over to the desk. Not that she wished it gone. No, her sister and she had left it exactly as it was. Min had tried to dust it once, to put the small stack of letters that were on the desktop in a drawer, to straighten the three pens Katarina always had at hand. But she couldn’t. So after that she just left the desk alone. But now she walked over to it, and very cautiously sat down in her mother’s sleek yet comfortable swivel chair.
There was a thin layer of dust on everything on top of the desk. Apparently Andy had found the thought of dusting the desk unthinkable too. In fact, Min couldn’t remember Andy setting foot in the office at all since their mother’s disaster, opting instead to do her paperwork, or the ordering, from the stool behind the counter up front. She even employed a laptop computer—so very civilized, if not verging on technologically savvy.
Min placed her fingers on the intricate bronze handles of the center drawer. She felt no magick there, so her mother must not have felt anything contained within the drawer was dangerous or of importance enough to rate anyone stealing it. Inside the drawer Min found nothing but the usual clutter a desk might acquire over a few decades of use. There was a hairbrush and a lipstick—her mother’s favorite color—and a neatly folded monogrammed handkerchief. It was pearl white with a delicate fringe of lace. Min took it in her hand and brought it up to her face, inhaling deeply. It smelled of her mother’s perfume, and of sage (her mother’s favorite incense to burn. It cleansed the very air of dark energies.)
She put the handkerchief back and closed the drawer up tight. She went for a side drawer, and feeling yet again no wards, she opened it. Nothing of use, just some takeout menus, an old rolodex and a half-full box of tissues.
The bottom drawer on that side, though, did have a ward on it, one Min recognized. It was one they used often—easily put up, and easily dropped. With a mumbled phrase and a push of her will, the ward melted away in her fingers. In this drawer she found some interesting things: a talisman—one that made the bearer unnoticed (not invisible, just unnoticed)—a potion that caused light confusion when exposed to air, and a stink-slash-smoke bomb. If nothing else, if she got Luca away from the pack it might cover their tracks for a time.
But all of this, she had to admit, was pretty flimsy. Maybe if she were in her own house she could keep a pack of werewolves at bay. But she was going to have to face them out in the open city. There she had greatly reduced power, not to mention the long in place wards and counter measures of her home.
They would take her down in a few minutes. She’d be lucky to get herself away, not to mention their captive. She needed something with a lot more kick.
She remembered her mother showing her a few of the dangerous things she’d collected over the years. Some of it was inter-dimensional stuff. But Min remembered her mother showing her what she thought was just a Chinese finger-trap, but was in actuality a small vial of Dragon’s Breath. It would have only two or three good doses in it, but when aimed and ignited by a force of will, it could burn through anything.
Min went through the top side drawer on the other side of the desk, finding no ward and nothing inside of use. But in the bottom drawer on that side she did find some things that made her pause. This drawer was nearly bare compared with the middle drawer of the desk. This one held only three objects. A framed photograph of Min, Katarina and Andy looking happily into the lens of the camera, lay in the bottom of the drawer. It had been taken on Andy’s last birthday, her twenty-second, and they had celebrated at a small bistro in Oakland.
Atop the photo sat two pieces of origami. Min recognized them immediately, though she hadn’t seen them since she was a child, when she and Andy had folded them and presented them to their mother as birthday presents. Min had been nine and Andy would have been six. One was a blue paper dragon—Min’s creation—and she could still feel the sharp fire she had imbued the thing with on that day, for she had enchanted it to move, and to snap, and to puff smoke.
Andy’s had been a yellow bird—a hummingbird—and she had cajoled the thing to flit and streak across the room, fluttering and nattering close to their mother’s joyously beautiful face.
Katarina had loved the presents, because they had made them for her—especially since Min and Andy had done such a good job enchanting the things to life.
Min remembered, though Andy’s bird had been sweet and obedient, her blue paper dragon had been moody and bit.
Min let her hand hover over the two pieces of origami, feeling with her senses that neither piece had any magick left in them. No snapping dragon remained in the blue paper, and the hummingbird was just folded yellow paper. But Andy’s bird gave her an idea as to how to track down Luca and the pack, so she folded the thing up and slipped it into her pocket.
After looking through the remaining drawers of her mother’s desk, Min stood and glanced through some of the books her mother had collected on the shelves behind her desk. Tax journals sat beside murder mysteries, and magical histories covering the last four centuries. There was even a copy of a Chelsea Handler book, a slender volume of vulgarity her mother had read with unveiled disgust, though she could not wipe the smile the obscene woman’s words elicited from her face.
She remembered her mother having been working on a memory erasing conjuring, the book she’d used for referencing the spell sat askew on the shelf. The thought of making the werewolves simply forget that they had even seen Luca was mo
st enticing. But she knew from her conversations with her mother, that using memory spells was tricky business, and unless you had the antidote on hand—and someone to administer it to you—you might want to sew your name into your clothes before you flirted with that most certain of disasters.
But then, of course, why had her mother been working on the spell in the first place?
Again, something flickered in the periphery of Min’s memory, and once again she couldn't grasp hold of it before it darted off into the shadows of her mind. So freaking irritating! But she didn’t have time to ruminate over it. She needed to find more firepower. And she needed to find it fast. The werewolves weren’t just going to wait around patiently for her to show up.
Min sighed and rolled her eyes at the preposterousness of the wolf pack sitting on their thumbs. She was still way low on firepower. She spun around the room, looking about her trying to find what she was so obviously missing.
And then something caught her eye, gleaming from above her mother’s desk where it had hung for as long as she could remember, something she’d passed by so often, something that was just part of the background of the office. Until that moment, only a decoration, an artifact from the family’s rather sordid past. Something she’d forgotten. It glinted silvery in the dim light of the office, and Min reached up and took it from where it hung.
Would it still work? Holding its weight in her hands, she could feel its power just waiting to be unleashed, anxious to be put to work. Hungry.
Min raised an eyebrow and smiled. It was crazy, and stupid—old magick like it would have easily degraded, and using it could turn suicidal—but it could just work.
Chapter 19
The alley wasn’t hard to find. The moment Min had woken she’d known exactly where Luca had fallen. It was part of a long crisscross of alleys running between four near identical seven-story buildings. They housed everything from restaurants and coffee shops, to lawyers, accountants, a nail salon and a florist.
Andy had taken dance classes at a studio there when she was young.
The alley in question was directly behind the nail salon. Min found the alley deserted, and no sign of a struggle…unless you counted the small pool of blood that shimmered inhumanly in the light of the full moon, right beside a particularly putrid smelling dumpster. She knelt and dabbed her finger into the cold, black, shimmering substance, then drew it to her nose. She may not be a werewolf, but she knew the smell of vampire blood. She especially knew the sweet, near intoxicating scent of Luca.
In a few hours the sun would rise in the sky. Had the werewolves killed him, or would they use him as leverage, thinking that Elaina would come for him?
Min knew from Luca’s memories that that was a mistake. Elaina would not risk herself, not for him, especially if he’d picked Min over her. Min shook the knowledge that he loved her out of her mind. It was making her heart race and her breathing catch in her throat—not productive things and she had to concentrate. She knew already that Günter knew Luca was her lover. She just had to hope he wouldn’t try and kill her when she came to collect Luca from him. After all, he should just take her word that Luca, the vampire, wasn’t evil anymore.
Yeah, that would happen…
She had to get him back. But first she needed to know where they had taken him.
Well, she thought, I’ve got some blood—nothing’s more personal than that—so now’s the time to show some magical capability. Min pulled the chalk out of her pocket, and the origami hummingbird. She put the bird by the drops of blood, and then drew a small circle around them both. Extending her will out to it, the circle sealed with a silent pop of magick. She told the bird to wake, in the old language of her people, and when it stirred, stretching its wings and turning its head with rapid motions, she told it to, “Find the owner of this blood.”
The little bird chirped and hopped delicately over to and pecked at the pool of blood, drinking it. Min then reached down and broke the circle with her finger and a bit of will.
The bird fluttered into the air, faltered, and finally took off, zipping down the alley. Min took off at a dead run, her heart pounding in her chest, her eye never leaving the rocketing bird.
~*~
Luca woke to the sweet scent of maple trees and nearly fresh air—he could still hear cars passing along in the distance, so he knew before he opened his eyes he was still somewhere in the city. He also woke to the searing pain of silver chains biting, burning, into his flesh. He jerked against the chains, and though they were thin, they kept him in place well enough. If anything, the thinner chains cut more easily into the flesh, something a werewolf would know all too well. The silver in the chains would keep Luca from using his powers. No strength, no ability to glamour; he was screwed and in pain. And from the rough unyielding hulk of what he was chained to, he guessed it was a tree. A really big one, though with silver chains, a sapling would have held him just as well.
Another scent, rank and unmistakable, told him that he was surrounded by the pack of werewolves. He glanced around: those few in human form were armed with swords and other hunting finery. More than a dozen were already shifted into their beasts, and they were pissed, growling, their slathering jaws gaping to show off long, sharp teeth.
A woman cackled, and Luca looked to her. Her copper hair was long and curly, and framed her lean, angular face. Her mouth was full and sensuous, but those eyes, though lovely, held true insanity. Either that or she was a ravening bitch by nature. Either way, Luca cringed as she stalked closer to him.
“My, my, my…the pretty vampire has finally woke up.” She stopped only a foot from him, her eyes meeting his without a trace of fear, which either meant she really was crazy, or she knew that the silver chains would dampen his power to mentally push and glamour her. She pursed her lips. “About damn time.”
Luca tried again to pull at the silver chains, only causing himself even more pain as the chains cut deeper into him. He groaned and felt his stomach turn as he smelled his own flesh burning.
“Don’t worry, leech, with you alive and bleeding still, your whores will come for you soon enough. And when they do, the witch and the vampire die with you.”
Luca looked up into the woman’s eyes, his voice shattered, no more than a breathy groan. “I’ll kill you if you touch her!”
“Which one?” asked a man that the other werewolves parted to clear a path for. He was of average height, but everything else about him said power. Broad shoulders, a well-built body, coupled with the handsome, angular features of Eastern Europe. His head was shaved, and his dark eyes were sharp. “You’ll kill us if we touch her…but which her are you speaking of: the witch or the vampire?”
The woman moved around the man, her body language obvious—she wanted him, yearned for him. It might be part of the reason she was so crazed, for the man didn’t seem to register her even being there. A woman in love, a woman scorned, was always dangerous—preternatural strength or no.
“Which is it, vampire…Min or Elaina?”
Luca stayed perfectly still, not letting a bit of his inner reaction to Min’s name show through.
The werewolf smiled knowingly. “Ah, so you wish to protect the witch. Surprising.”
“Touch her and I will end you,” Luca said low and cold.
The werewolf looked amused. “Really?” He looked Luca up and down. “You’re bound in silver. Forgive me if I don’t see how you’re going to make good on any threat you make right now.”
Hate bubbled up inside Luca. Anger and panic, and his chest rumbled with it as he bared his fangs.
“Don’t worry, vampire. Though she has soiled her soul by taking a creature as of you into her bed, the pack has no quarrel with Min.”
“Günter…you can’t be serious!” the copper haired woman roared in an animalistic version of her own voice. She seemed on the verge of losing control, her human traits melting away before she even transformed. “She knew damn well her leech lover was in league with the vampire
that killed Marina. She deserves the same fate as the vampires.”
Günter didn’t take his eyes from Luca’s. “Min will not be touched, Giselle. I have—”
“His whore is as guilty as he is. Her hands are as stained with Marina’s blood as—”
With lightning speed Günter turned and struck Giselle hard enough to flatten her to the ground. His eyes had turned wolf gold, and his teeth were bared as he glowered down upon her. “You’ll do well not to say her name again.”
Fear showed shivering in Giselle’s eyes.
“And as for Min, she has been a friend and ally to the pack for many years. Besides being a powerful witch and a well trained fighter, she—”
“She was your whore too!”
Something in Luca’s chest tore with grizzly pain as he realized Min had been with the werewolf. He’d believed her when she’d said…but she’d kept this back from him. It hurt, and he knew that it shouldn’t.
Günter’s eyes turned to molten amber, and his voice became chilled like smooth, glassy ice. “You are the only woman I’ve been with that was ever a whore, Giselle.”
She gasped and bowed her head as Günter turned back to Luca. She sobbed and then picked herself up off the ground. Those around her didn’t bother to look at her, they just stood and listened to their leader.
“But your Elaina will die with you. All we have to do is wait for her to turn up. And with such alluring bait as you, how can she resist?”
All too readily, Luca thought. The werewolf doesn’t know Elaina at all. She had been toying with them, stringing them along with murder and the need for vengeance, as she led them straight to him. Whatever they thought, she knew damn well the danger he was in, and she didn’t care. If anything, she’d orchestrated it.
“And once she does,” Günter continued, “we’ll capture her, and what’s left of her will meet the loving touch of dawn alongside you.”
