by Faith Hunter
I almost stopped. I did not want to do this. But Beast reached into me and forced me on, her scream rising into my throat.
The mobile home rocked in the wind on its foundation. Lightning struck, a severe blue flash, throwing me down, sizzling through me. I somersaulted through the air. My heart shuddered with pain as if I’d taken a blade to the chest. I hit the dry ground. What breath I still had in my lungs huffed out. I groaned and rolled to my side, nauseated. Small blue flames licked at the grass. A half-frozen blast of rain hit beside me and put out the fire. Molly screamed again. Big Evan’s voice shouted. They were in trouble. Big trouble. I rolled to my knees and then to my feet and raced to the house.
Blue sparkles and a gray mist flowed down from the cloud. I recognized magic, both icy and scorching, undirected, dangerous. Malevolent. Searching. Almost sentient. Growing more powerful as I raced.
I was almost to the mobile home when the swirling tornado spiraled down, speeding, threatening. And touched down on the mobile home.
The wind ripped at the roof. Tearing. Questing. And it peeled back a corner of the roof. Directly over Angie Baby’s room. Purplish lightning flickered down and struck the damaged home. The boom was deafening. Its flash was blinding. My hair rose, pulling itself from my braid. Sleet slashed at the earth like claws. The wind tried to lift me away, and I hunched low to the ground. The air was so full of magic that I couldn’t take a breath.
Beast screamed. Flooded my body with strength. I leaped to the small porch and tore the door from its hinges. The wind gathered it up and yanked it away into the storm. Overhead the roof rolled back like an old-fashioned tin can. The ceiling went with it. I was inside. But so was the storm.
The wind roared in, brutal and sadistic. Rapacious. Sucking out blankets, clothing, a doll with its arms flailing. Please, God, let it only be a doll. Not Angie Baby. A dark blue-black mist swirled in, filling the front room with power. Uncontrolled.
Over the sound of the wind, I heard Molly and Big Evan chanting what sounded like a prayer. Angie screamed.
Kit! Beast screamed in return. I dove into the mist.
Magic poured over me. Fangs of power bit into me like angry snakes. Magical energy shot into my bloodstream like venom. And my body began to shift.
I fought the pull of the change, holding on to my own shape. Screaming with frustration, “No! Not now!” My own magic thrummed through me, feeding on the witch magic. Black motes of darkness. Gray mist against the blue.
Pain, pain, pain. Knives of power sliced into me, separating muscle from bone. Flaying skin away. Setting fire to nerves. Choosing the only shape I could take without planning, tools, and trappings to guide me.
My Beast screamed.
I screamed.
Pelt erupted through skin. Joints slid and twisted. Claws pierced my fingertips. Killing teeth filled my mouth.
I was Beast. I screamed anger against the storm. Clawed off Jane clothes. Leaped across room. Wind plucked at me. Tore at me. I raced down hall. Into girl kit’s room. Witch man was sitting with eyes closed, back to wall, singing to wind. Air witch chant. Witch woman was standing against other wall. Smell of fear and desperation leaked from pores. Panic. Storm was awake. Angry. Not theirs to control.
Wind snaked into room. Grew in strength, like fist with claws. Bashed out windows. Picked up human things and carried them away. Fear smell grew. Woman’s, man’s, kit’s.
Kit was on bed. Afraid. Screaming. Fear like human knives cut inside her. Power was coming from her fear—feeding storm. I—Beast—understood fear.
I leaped to bed, standing over kit. Screamed to wind. Kit safe. Safe with me. I am Beast!
Woman opened eyes. Her fear smell swirled thick into room. Fear of Beast. Woman’s mouth moved in soundless cry. Woman was working magic with her hands. Rain poured in, heavy and hard.
I sat on bed. Curled around kit. Holding her with paw so wind with claws would not steal her. I licked her face. Human tears salty. Human skin milky. Smooth. Soft. She made funny sound. Hiccup. Swallowed hard. Crying stopped. Witch kit reached up and took my ears in her hands. Pulled Beast face to her. Stared for long moment, eye to eye. And closed eyes. Not afraid. Not anymore.
I curled legs and body around her. Protected her from rain and wind. Looked at woman. Not human. Powerful witch, like man. Like kit. I purred. Licked kit face.
Witch woman walked to witch man. Took hands. Chanting steadied like calm heartbeat. Power in storm shifted and eased. Rain softened. Warmed. I purred. Panted.
Man and woman worked magic like net, binding power in girl kit. Felt it curl under belly and paws, around small kit body. Time passed. Kit fell asleep.
Storm fell apart. Thunderhead darkening the sky thinned and wisped. Clear sky showed through. Magic disappeared like mist. Floating away.
Man fell over. Dead? No, breathing. Asleep. Empty of magic.
I purred and rested head on kit head. Keeping kit safe.
Storm was gone. Sunlight fell through where roof had been. Woman witch studied me. Fear tainted air, but confused fear. Not run-from-predator fear. I purred. Licked kit face. Moved kit off my leg with paw. Licked face again. Slowly stood. Slowly, slowly, not to frighten woman.
I looked at woman. She looked at me. At necklace on my neck. Jane’s necklace.
“Jane?” she whispered. “Oh my God. Jane.”
I hacked. Not God. Not Jane. Beast.
I leaped from bed to land on wet, squishy cloth floor. Padded from room, rain puddles splashing. And out door. Kit safe.
I woke beside my bike, naked and cold, my bones aching. A half-moon and several million stars dusted light to the earth, enough for me to see with my night vision intact. I knew better than to change form in daylight, but I’d had no choice when I shifted into Beast. Now I hurt. I hurt badly.
In an emergency, like today, I could shift into Beast in daylight, but I couldn’t change back to human in daylight. Or at least I’d never figured out the mechanism. And it wasn’t as if I had anyone to teach me. I was the only skinwalker I had ever heard of. Hence the hours that had passed and the moonlight above me. And me naked and cold and starving.
Shivers gripped me and shook me hard. Teeth chattering, I opened the bike’s saddlebags and pulled out my one change of clothes. Dressed but barefoot, I started the bike and rode up the hill into Molly’s yard. The trailer was dark but for a candle guttering in a window. I killed the engine. Bare feet on cool earth, I waited. If Molly heard me, if she wanted to talk, she’d come out. If not, then I could ride on. But it would be a lot easier with my boots. Jacket. Helmet. Did she know what I had done? What I was? Crap. I didn’t want her to find out this way. I didn’t want her to find out at all.
The front door opened. Molly stood on the front porch, her white nightgown fluttering in the hilltop breeze. I couldn’t have said why, but a trembling ran through me, part fear, part . . . something I couldn’t name. I kicked the stand down and walked across the lawn, watching Molly’s face in the light of the candle. She was smiling. And tears trickled slowly down her face.
I stopped at the bottom of the three steps leading to the tiny porch. And couldn’t think of a solitary thing to say. My boots and jeans and torn clothes were folded in a neat stack by her feet. Yeah. She knew. Crap. She knew. I hunched my shoulders and tucked each hand under the opposite armpit. And waited for her judgment.
“You—” She stopped and caught a breath. I gathered that she had been crying for a while. “Thank you. You saved my baby.” When I didn’t reply, she went on, voice rough through her tears. “We were losing her. She was out of control. Too powerful. Neither of us was ready to deal with that much power. And not so early.” I still didn’t speak, and Molly said, “Her power wasn’t due until her first menses. Not for years and years. We weren’t ready.” She heaved a breath, and it shuddered through her. “We almost lost her.”
I nodded.
And still couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Suddenly Molly giggled. “What? Cat got your tongue?”
I jerked. An answering laugh tittered in my throat. I stuck my hands in my jeans pockets, shoulders still hunched. “Cute. You’re okay with it? With me? Me being Beast?”
“I have no idea what you are, except a big-cat. But you saved my baby, and for that you have my undying thanks, my undying friendship, and any help you may need for as long I can give it.”
Molly had given me three things, and I knew that witches did important things in threes. The cold that had settled in my bones, the ache of the shift that the magic had forced through me, warmed a bit, began to ease. “Well, I’ll settle for my socks and boots. My feet are cold.”
“I found them on the lawn,” she said, laughter still in the tone, “and I’ve let them air-dry, though they’re still pretty wet. Would you like some tea? Power is out, but I have a kettle on the camp stove.”
I didn’t have time for tea. I had to be on the road, had to get to the job. But that wasn’t what came out of my mouth. “I’d love a cup. And, Molly? I’m a skinwalker. And I never told anyone that before tonight. Not anyone.”
“So we can share secrets, is that what you’re saying? You’re a skinwalker, whatever that is, and my baby is an early-blooming, powerful witch? Come on in. Let’s talk. And I’ll get you that charm.”
I pulled on my socks and carried my boots into what was left of Molly’s house. We had tea. We shared secrets. Weirdly, Molly held my hand while we talked, as if protecting something fragile or sealing something precious. Even more weirdly, I let her. I think that, for the first time in my life, I had a real friend.
Haint(s)
Author’s note: This story takes place after the short story “Kits” and before the short story “Signatures of the Dead.” Molly Everhart Trueblood is the narrator.
“Nothing unusual here, Molly,” she said.
I watched Jane Yellowrock as she crawled across the floor of the old house on all fours. Most adults looked foolish or ungainly when crawling, but Jane was graceful, her arms lifting and moving forward with feline balance, her legs raising and lowering, toes pointed like a dancer, even in her Western boots. My friend moved silently in the hot, sweaty room, easily avoiding the bird and mouse droppings, the holes in the old linoleum, and the signs of recent reconstruction—the broken plaster walls, large holes in the floor, and the shattered remains of the toilet, tub, and kitchen sink in the corner. Her shoulder blades, visible beneath her thin T-shirt, lifted up high with each crawling step, her head lowered on the thin stem of her neck, moving catlike. I envied her the grace and the slenderness, but little else. Jane was more alone than anyone I had ever known.
Now she breathed in with a strange sucking hiss. Flehmen behavior, she called it, using her hypersensitive senses to smell things the way a cat would, the way a mountain lion would, sucking air in over her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her lips pulled back and mouth open. Mostly, she did it only when she was alone, because it sounded weird and looked weirder—not a human action at all. But because I had asked her for help, and because no one but me would see her, she did it now, scenting for the smell of . . . of whatever.
As I watched, Jane crawled out of the half-renovated kitchen and into the dining room beyond. We were both dressed in old jeans and T-shirts, clothes that could get filthy and be tossed into the washer, and already Jane looked like something the cat dragged in, which was funny in all sorts of ways. Jane Yellowrock was a Cherokee skinwalker, and her favorite animal form was a mountain lion. She called it her inner beast, which I still didn’t understand, but I figured she’d tell me someday.
I’d met Jane in the Ingles grocery store, when a group of witch haters caught me in the frozen foods section and harassed me. None of us Everharts were officially out of the closet then, but most townspeople were okay with my family maybe carrying the witch gene. It was the out-of-towners who had the problem—a group that wasn’t from the religious right, but was just as rabid. I still don’t know what Jane did—she stepped in front of me so all I saw was her back—but the haters departed. Fast. I gave her my thanks and a card to my family café and we parted ways.
The next morning Jane came into the Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café, and nearly cleaned us out of bacon, sausage, and pancakes. The appetite of that morning was because she had just changed back from an animal form and needed calories to make up for the shift, but I didn’t know that then. I just thought it was a crying shame that a woman who was so skinny could eat like that. If I tried to shovel in that much food, even half that much food, I’d weigh four hundred pounds. I think I gained three pounds just watching her eat, that first day.
And then the group of witch haters from the day before started picketing out front. I guess they were in town and figured they should make the most of it. They were carrying signs about not suffering a witch to live—the usual crapola—and chanting, “Save our children! Save our children!” Two cars pulled by and slowed, as if to turn in, and then pulled on away. Such attention was going to be damaging to business.
Jane paid her bill, went outside, and revved up her bike. And revved up her bike. And revved up her bike again. At which point I realized she was doing it on purpose. Then she did something to the engine, and revved it up again. And black smoke came out. So Jane rode in circles around the parking lot, shouting to the witch haters, “So sorry about the noise! I have engine problems!” After about ten minutes of noise, the witch haters left. It was so cool. I thought the twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, were going to have twin cows.
That’s Jane. A loner with a cause. Any cause, as long as it’s protecting someone.
She sneezed, bringing me back from my daydreams to my friend crawling around on the floor of a deserted, possibly haunted house.
The dining room had little floor left, and I could see the ground and the foundation beneath the house, between the struts. Still on her hands and knees, Jane moved into the foyer, circled its perimeter once, ignored the stairs leading to the second story, and crawled into the parlor beyond. I followed, watching from the foyer, which had been exposed when the construction crew pulled off the old boards covering the entrance. Oddly enough, though every other room in the house showed the results of men with mallets and hammers and crowbars, the parlor had still not been touched. The finish of the original handmade woodwork below the chair railing and the moldings at the ceiling was dark and filthy, the plaster between was cracked and split with water damage, and the last bits of old, red wallpaper curled, hanging loose, covered with spiderwebs and the dust of decades.
I stood in the six-foot-wide opening, watching my best friend track through the dust. The flooring beneath the accumulated filth was wood parquet, probably cut from the land the house stood on, milled by the lumber baron who’d built the house in the previous century. He had died a gruesome death, killed by a bear beside his train car, or so the old story went. His son had married a witch, and their daughter had inherited, and so had her daughter. However, the old house hadn’t been occupied in decades, not since Monique Ravencroft, the most powerful witch in the Appalachians, had disappeared without a trace.
The family had died out except for a son who no longer wanted the property, and the old house had been sold to a local lawyer for his business offices. Construction had begun quickly thereafter. The workers, however, had abandoned the project two days ago, after a flying mallet attacked a plumber standing in an empty room. The construction company owner had asked the local coven in the little township of Hainbridge to investigate, but the women had had no luck identifying the spiritual miscreant. They had called me in to discover if the troublemaker was a ghost, demon, or haint—haint being a term applied, in this part of the woods, to a form of poltergeist, or supernatural energy that usually manifests around a person instead of around a place. Whatever had attacked the plumber, it needed to be iden
tified so the coven could coerce or force it to vacate the premises. Unfortunately, all I’d found was a sense of something dead in the house, and I’d had no luck calling to or talking to any noncorporeal would-be-killer. I hoped Jane, with her hyper senses, might discover something I had missed.
Jane sniffed around the fireplace on the far side of the room, the interior walls black with wood or coal smoke, the old grate rusted through and coated with spiderwebs. She seemed to find the opening uninteresting, and moved on to the corner. She paused there, repeating the openmouthed sniffing, and looked up, puzzled. “Molly, are you sure there’s something dead here?”
I nodded. I’m from a long family of witches, all of us pretty much in the witch closet, and while I’m an earth witch, with the gift of growing plants, healing bodies, and restoring balance to nature, I’m a little unusual for an earth witch, in that I can sense dead things. And there was definitely something dead in this house somewhere.
“I smell witch and vamp,” Jane said.
The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. “Vampire? There shouldn’t be a vampire here.”
“It’s been years, but I think . . .” She put her nose back to the dust-covered floor, sniffed delicately, and started sneezing. She rolled to her feet and crossed the room, sneezing all the way, her nose buried in the crook of her elbow to keep her filthy hands away from her face. I counted twelve sneezes before she stopped and her face was red from the sneeze effort. “I think I smell vamp and witch together,” she said, the back of a wrist to her nose, pressing against more sneezes, “and both of them were bleeding.” She stood beside me and turned to face the room. The evidence of her crawling progression was a clear trail through the layers of dust.
