Black Magic Woman

by Christine Warren

  The woman had that right. Daphanie couldn’t remember the last time her head had ached so badly. Of course, she also couldn’t recall what had happened before she’d begun to regain consciousness a moment ago, so maybe that didn’t mean much.

  “You weren’t there,” another man said, sounding at once defensive and apologetic. “I tried being gentle, and it didn’t work. She wasn’t herself. No human woman I’ve ever met has been that strong, blacksmith or no.”

  The woman sighed. “I know, Asher, I’m sorry. I’m just worried. What you described was definitely not like Daphanie. We need to find out what’s going on.”

  Missy. The woman speaking was Missy.

  The realization brought a flood of relief. She hadn’t lost her memory. It was all coming back. Thank God.

  “I’ll make some calls.” It was the first voice she’d heard again. Graham. He sounded thoughtful, and maybe a little bit concerned. “Maybe Rafe can pull some strings. The witches may not like us much, but they can’t completely ignore us, either.”

  “Thanks.” She heard cloth shifting and felt Asher’s presence move above her. “Shouldn’t she be waking up by now?”

  “She may be—”

  “I’m awake.”

  The words emerged with a distinct croaking sound, but at least they made sense. At the moment, that seemed like an accomplishment.

  “Here, drink some water,” Missy urged, and Daphanie felt the cool, smooth rim of a glass press against her lips.

  She raised her head a few inches and sipped gratefully. Her mouth had been so dry.

  “How are you feeling?” Asher asked, and she could hear the guilt and concern underlining his normally impassive tone.

  “Like I just got whacked upside the head by a baboon who outweighs me by a hundred pounds or so.” She opened her eyes the barest slit and looked up at him. “How are you?”

  Missy snorted. Asher just laid his hand over hers for an instant and squeezed gently.

  “Let Missy take care of you,” he urged. “Graham and I will be back as soon as we can.”

  Daphanie watched him leave with a frown on her face. “He couldn’t at least have given me a clue what’s going on?” she demanded peevishly of no one in particular.

  Missy answered anyway. “Go easy on him.”

  Daphanie turned to scowl at her, the expression turning into a grimace as her head protested, joined swiftly by her stomach. “Easy? The man hit me. He knocked me unconscious.”

  The words held a lot less heat than they might have, and Missy must have noticed.

  “And he feels terrible about it,” she said. “Although, from what he said when he brought you inside, it doesn’t sound like you gave him much choice.”

  Daphanie forced her eyes fully open and looked around the small, tastefully decorated bedroom. “Where’s here?”

  “Our house. Graham and I were sound asleep when someone started pounding on the front door. At four-fifteen in the morning,” she added wryly. “I think he would have knocked the darn thing down in another minute. Luckily Graham didn’t even stop to put on clothes before he went to answer it.”

  Daphanie frowned. She was pretty sure he’d been dressed when he and Asher left the room together.

  Missy grinned. “Don’t worry. I always make him dress for company. He’s perfectly decent now.”

  From what she’d seen of her friend’s husband, she suspected he was more than decent even stark naked. Maybe especially stark naked. She might have suffered a head wound, but she wasn’t dead. She also wasn’t injured badly enough to make the mistake of offering that opinion out loud. The alpha and luna Silverbacks had a reputation for mutually jealous natures.

  Instead, she asked, “Asher brought me all the way over here?”

  “ Carried you all the way over here, looking ready to tear the building apart with his teeth if we didn’t get you help.”

  The revelation sent a wave of pleasure coursing through Daphanie, and she had to work to beat it back. She disguised her reaction with a huff. “Maybe if he hadn’t knocked me out, he wouldn’t have had to bother you trying to get me medical attention.”

  Missy looked at her oddly. “He didn’t bring you here for medical attention, Daphanie. Do you remember seeing a red cross anywhere on our front door? If you’d needed a doctor, he would have taken you to a hospital.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Unease crawled through Daphanie’s stomach, but whenever she tried to turn her thoughts back to the hours earlier, it was like trying to sift through quicksand.

  “I remember I had another dream,” she admitted with reluctance. “A pretty bad one. At least, I remember feeling freaked out when I woke up. I went outside to get some air. I think Asher was there, lurking, like usual.” Her brows drew together and she shook her head slowly. And carefully. “But no, I don’t remember. Did he tell you what happened? Did I get hysterical or something? I know the dream’s had me on edge the last few nights…”

  “Daphanie. You nearly raped him.”

  Her heart and stomach clenched in unison and she gazed at Missy with wide, bruised eyes. “What?” she whispered.

  The luna’s face filled with sympathy and her words were soft, but they still slashed at Daphanie like razor blades.

  “Asher said he tried to talk to you after you went out on the terrace,” Missy explained quietly. “He could tell that something had upset you, but you didn’t want to talk about it. You tried to shake him off and go back inside, but he stopped you. He literally had to restrain you to keep you from running. Then he said you just … went a little crazy.”

  Daphanie buried her face in her hands as the barriers erected by her subconscious came crashing down, allowing her to see what she would have preferred to forget. “Oh, God.”

  A gentle hand settled on her knee. “You kissed him. He tried to stop it, because he knew you weren’t thinking straight, but—”

  “I crawled all over him,” Daphanie breathed, bile creeping up into the back of her throat. “I frickin’ climbed him like a jungle gym. Oh, my God, Missy, what the hell was I thinking?”

  “It doesn’t sound as if you were thinking.”

  Daphanie’s head shot up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. The last thing she wanted at the moment was for someone else to hear all about her humiliating behavior. In truth, she wanted nothing so much as a shower hot enough to scald her skin, a loofah the texture of sandpaper, and about a gallon of the kind of soap that surgeons used to scrub in before an operation. Nothing less would ever make her feel clean again.

  “Who is she?” she hissed at Missy. Had they called for a shrink? Would that be such a bad thing?

  The woman didn’t even blink at Daphanie’s rudeness. She stood in the door to the guest room looking dignified, gentle, and maddeningly serene. It made Daphanie feel even dirtier. And crazier.

  “Daphanie, this is Erica Frederics.” Graham ushered the woman into the room with his hand at her elbow, but he watched Daphanie carefully. “Asher and I asked her to come over for a few minutes to talk to you.”

  “Do you really think this is the best time?” Daphanie almost choked on a laugh that had very little to do with humor and an awful lot with incipient hysteria. She really needed that shower, before she snapped and startled babbling fit for Bellevue. “Maybe we can do this later. Like tomorrow. Or next year.”

  Asher stepped in behind them and fixed his gaze on Daphanie’s face. “You need to talk to her,” he said calmly.

  “I don’t—I don’t think this is the right time. I should put some clothes on and go home.” Daphanie scrambled from the bed and tugged at the hem of her short robe—or rather, her sister’s short robe. She gave a brief prayer for the floor to swallow her up, to no avail. “I’m totally disrupting Missy’s day. And taking over her and Graham’s house. That’s so rude. I’ll just leave.”

  “Going home isn’t going to make you feel any better,” Erica said. She sou
nded just like she looked, like an aging hippy, but her voice contained a backbone of steel that Daphanie hadn’t expected. “The thing you’re running away from is attached to you. Wherever you go, it will only follow.”

  Daphanie froze, caught in the act of yanking open a drawer in hopes of finding one of the changes of clothes she had heard Missy was famous for keeping on hand, in case of emergencies. This felt like an emergency to her.

  The woman reached out a hand and Daphanie flinched, but the hand never touched her. It hovered four or five inches from her skin while Erica examined her through narrowed eyes.

  “It’s incomplete,” the woman continued. “Something is keeping it in check, but it feels stronger than it should be, given the tenuous attachment. You won’t be able to shake it easily.”

  Daphanie’s gaze flew to Asher. “What is she talking about?”

  “Erica is a witch.” It was Graham who answered her question, his voice surprisingly gentle for the impatient, forceful man she knew him to be. “Asher suggested that he thought you might be under some kind of magical influence, and I seconded the opinion. It looks like Erica agrees with us.”

  The woman nodded. “It’s undeniable.”

  Daphanie felt a surge of something, but whether it was fear or hope, she couldn’t decide. She didn’t like the idea of being under some kind of spell, but if someone could figure out what it was, maybe they would be able to get rid of it.

  She gave the witch a longer look.

  Erica Frederics appeared to be in her late forties or early fifties, in that sort of late-afternoon period after adulthood has had time to settle in but before age has bothered to make an appearance. She had long, thick hair the sandy apricot color that some redheads turned on their way to gray. In fact, she already had plenty of gray mixed in, and she didn’t bother to try to hide it, letting her waves hang freely almost down to her waist. Her skin was lined, but subtly, and a certain heaviness had begun to creep in around her jawline and at her middle. She wore a long tunic over a long, loose skirt, but Daphanie got the impression the clothing had more to do with comfort and habit than with a desire to conceal her thickening figure.

  In all, the woman looked exactly like what she was, a middle-aged earth mother with a talent for reading faces and a gift for nurturing.

  She scared Daphanie almost shitless. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s a shadow on you,” Erica answered, bluntly but not unkindly. “Something black is trying to attach itself to your soul. It has a foothold, but it’s tenuous. Whoever placed it there will be unsatisfied. They’ll try for something firmer.”

  “Who will? Attached how?”

  The witch smiled, serene and sympathetic. Daphanie couldn’t decide if she found that comforting or maddening. “I’m not certain yet. May I?”

  She reached out once more, stopping again a few inches from touching Daphanie’s face, but this time she clearly wanted to continue.

  Daphanie found herself nodding.

  Erica’s hand settled on her face as lightly as a butterfly. The tips of three fingers glided to rest against her cheekbone and the woman stared deep into her eyes.

  The witch’s eyes, Daphanie noted, were hazel, a deep, mossy green ringed in smoke and turning a bright golden copper just around the pupils. They looked like little bits of the forest floor, and something told her they held just as many secrets.

  A frown flickered over Erica’s face. Her lips parted and she blew out a deep breath, exhaling steadily while the tips of her fingers began to quiver. When she flinched, Daphanie felt a little electrical shock, as if she’d just crossed a winter carpet in thick wool socks.

  “Black as death,” the woman murmured. “There’s something very dark at work here, Daphanie Carter. You need to take care.”

  Daphanie had been prepared to scoff at the witch’s evaluation. After all, what had she said that any so-called psychic with a crystal ball and a booth at Coney Island couldn’t have repeated? But somehow, she found she couldn’t be dismissive, not so much because of what Erica said, but because of the secrets flickering wildly behind her eyes.

  “You shouldn’t be alone,” Erica concluded, dropping her hand and stepping back from Daphanie. “This will work faster on you, gain more power, if it finds you alone.”

  “She won’t be alone. I’m staying with her, and believe me, from now on, she’s not getting out of my sight. This is not going to happen again.”

  The witch half turned to smile ruefully at the Guardian. “Nothing is going to happen again, Mr. Grayson. What’s going to happen already has. At this point, it’s just a matter of degrees.”

  “What do you mean?” Daphanie demanded.

  Erica sighed. “You’ve been cursed,” she said bluntly. “Someone has used magic to try to influence your behavior.”

  “Yeah, well, it sounds like last night, it actually worked.”

  “Not completely. You did no one any harm, from what I hear. Not even yourself. No, I don’t think that last night was the end goal.” She shook her head. “There is something larger at work here, but whatever happens next won’t be about gaining something new; it will be about strengthening the charm that’s already been laid.”

  Daphanie felt her mouth tighten. “I don’t think ‘charm’ is an appropriate description for whatever this is. ‘Charm’ makes me think of leprechauns and fairy godmothers, not voodoo priests who want me dead.”

  “Voodoo?” Erica sounded startled.

  “What? Didn’t Asher mention that was what started all of this? I pissed off some witch doctor, who apparently seems to be having trouble getting over himself.”

  Erica shot Asher and Graham a disgusted look. “No, they left that little detail out. Huh, men.”

  “Does it change things?”

  “It most certainly does. Voodoo is a highly sympathetic form of magic. It relies heavily on the use of objects and tokens to effect change in the material world. Hence the famous voodoo doll. A curse laid by an ordinary magic user can be broken by any other practitioner, provided an equal or greater amount of will is used to effect the change. A voodoo curse is significantly more complicated.” She eyed Daphanie. “Do you know if this witch doctor has anything belonging to you?”

  Daphanie snorted. “Hardly. The man isn’t exactly on my Christmas list.”

  “Well, make sure it stays that way,” Erica advised. “That’s probably why the link is as weak as it is.” She saw Daphanie’s puzzlement and explained. “Like I said, voodoo uses objects to magical purposes. The dolls in particular are linked to the person they’re meant to represent through the uses of that person’s possessions, usually stolen. A practitioner of voodoo might steal a woman’s scarf, for instance, or a man’s handkerchief and use the fabric to make the doll’s clothing. Some of the person’s energy is tied up in his or her possessions and that helps to forge the link so that the actions performed on the doll are experienced by the intended victim.

  “That’s what makes the voodoo curse so hard to lift. Because there is a physical object linked to the victim by magical energy, that object must also be destroyed in order for the spell to be broken. Devious people, voodoo priests. The houngan, or white magicians, are difficult enough, but the bokor, the ones who practice on the darker path, are even worse.”

  “You mean someone out there might have a doll that looks like me and be sticking pins in it to make me act like an idiot?”

  Erica smiled. “It’s possible, but it would be unlikely unless the bokor had something of yours to bind the doll to you. Something you’ve had for a long time and used or worn frequently is usually preferred, because the closer it is to you, the more of your energy it will have stored.”

  “Like I said, I haven’t exactly presented any witch doctors with tokens of my favor—”

  Daphanie broke off, her skin going cold.

  While it was true she hadn’t given any scarves or hankies away lately, or suffered any unexpected thefts, she had nearly forgotten that s
omething had been taken from her. Last Saturday night.

  “What?” Asher demanded, reading her expression and stiffening. “What are you thinking, Daphanie?”

  “Last week at the club,” she said weakly, her hands nervously tightening the sash on her belt. “It was such a little thing, I didn’t even really think about it.”

  “What happened?” he snarled.

  “One of D’Abo’s little flunkies, the one he tried to sic on me. I forget his name. But before you were able to reach us, the guy tried to grab me. He missed, so I just forgot about it. Only he didn’t really miss. He tried to grab my wrist and he grabbed the hem of my top instead. All he got was a tiny little strip of fabric. I was so relieved he didn’t hurt me and so angry about the whole incident that I completely forgot about it.”

  Asher swore, long and low, and Erica looked uncomfortable.

  “This is … unfortunate,” the witch murmured.

  “It wasn’t like it was a favorite top that I’d had forever,” Daphanie struggled to reassure them. “It was fairly new. I just bought it a couple of months ago. I think that was only the second or third time I ever wore it. That means it wouldn’t have a lot of juice, right?”

  Erica nodded. “Theoretically, that’s correct, but it would still be something, especially since you were wearing it when it was taken.”

  A growl rumbled through the air. Daphanie glanced at Graham, but he only looked grim. No, it was Asher doing the growling. He looked ready to grind someone’s bones to make his bread.

  “It’s good that it wasn’t something you were more connected to,” the witch hastened to reassure them. She’d realized who the noise was coming from, as well. “In fact, that’s probably the reason why I detected so much weakness in the attachment. The curse can’t take hold with so little of you to feed its power.”

  “Then I’m safe.”

  Erica’s lips compressed in a grim line. She shook her head. Daphanie already hated when she did that.

  “You’re not at immediate and dire risk, but I wouldn’t call you safe,” she corrected. “The weakness of the curse prevents your enemy from certain, more immediately dangerous acts, but what Asher described to me as having happened earlier tonight is a fairly good illustration of the fact that you’re not out of danger.”