Taming the Hunter

by Michele Hauf

  “Ah.”

  There was so much in that simple utterance. Disbelief. Condemnation. And a professional debunker wondering if he should laugh out loud at her.

  “A witchy sort of thing?” His smirk told her she should steer clear of further discussion that might lead to more disdainful comments about her species. “You know, it’s been said that a woman is better off unarmed, because in most cases the attacker will be stronger and more powerful, capable of wrenching the weapon from her hands and, thus, arming himself.”

  “Oh yeah? You want to try me, surfer guy?” She held the knife at the ready, very much capable of defending herself with the blade. Valor had given her a few pointers.

  “I would never harm you, Eryss. And I suspect that you are skilled with that thing.”

  “Damn right.” She made a fake stab toward him, stopping the blade a good ten inches from his chest, when out of nowhere a vision flashed in her mind.

  * * *

  The man beneath her screamed and clasped at the blade stuck in his chest. Blood pooled out in a rich crimson flood over his thick wolf’s fur coat. His face was spattered with blood and he growled, cursing her as a witch. “My soul will not rest until yours has burned,” he hissed out, along with some spittle.

  She clutched her chest, which burned with pain. Blood coated her fingers and the edge of the blade cut her skin. But not from the crystal blade. She, too, wore a blade in her heart. And she, too, cursed the hunter in turn. “My soul will live forever with your love.”

  * * *

  “Eryss? Watch it with that thing. Eryss!”

  “Huh?” Startled out of the vision, she dropped her hand, then realized she was still holding the blade, and at the last second managed to snatch it away before the tip slid across Dane’s chest.

  “Whoa. Woman, what is up?” He shuffled to lean on his elbows, his gaze fiercely tracking the crystal blade.

  “I’m sorry, I had a moment of...distraction. I’ll put this away.” She leaned over him, opened the nightstand drawer and tucked it in. “There. All gone.”

  “All gone? You almost stabbed me with that thing.”

  “No. I was just going to show you that I have the skills.”

  “By sinking the blade into my chest?”

  “Never! Would you stop freaking out?”

  “Sure, but for a moment there you had such a look in your eyes. Is everything all right?” He stroked the tips of her hair, hanging near her elbows. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Wrong?” She forced herself to snuggle up beside him, putting the horrible vision away for a moment when she could be alone and think it through. “Are you crazy? You just rocked my world.”

  “Right. Uh...” He glanced to the nightstand where she’d tucked away the crystal blade.

  “Can we drop this, Dane?”

  “I...yes. I’m just...”

  “Not tired?”

  “After what we just did? Not at all.” He kissed her forehead and slid a hand down her arm. She sensed he was still thinking about the blade, because his body tensed against hers.

  She had seen herself and a man, a fearsome man, stab one another. He’d said he wouldn’t stop until she burned. Only a witch hunter would say such a thing.

  “Since I’m now well and thoroughly awake, want to do it again?” Dane asked. The night was lightening, but snow still battered the glass in sleety ticks. “The weather deems to keep me here, snug with you.”

  He kissed her stomach and Eryss forgot all about being stabbed in the heart by a witch hunter.

  * * *

  Eryss breezed into the brewery and tossed her purse behind the bar. A leather jacket with The Decadent Dames logo stitched on the back in red and white threads was lying across the bar. Valor must be in the basement, filling the kegs with the stout Mireio had brewed a month earlier. Eryss decided to review the brew schedule for the month, so she parked a stool at the end of the bar and opened her laptop.

  She’d had no problem leaving Dane back at her house. They hadn’t gotten the promised six inches of snow, probably just two or three, but even so, Dane had offered to plow the drive. She’d left him to it. And it was a good idea because the weatherman had promised the real storm would hit tonight.

  But now she caught her forehead in her palms and squeezed her temples. That vision she’d had of holding the bloody knife returned to her. She had grasped for a blade stuck in her chest. In that moment she had felt the painful cut of the steel through her heart. It had struck right where she pressed her fingers now—through the birthmark below her breast.

  “No way,” she whispered. But it was believable. Birthmarks were often remnants of past life traumas.

  And the vision hadn’t been a dream or nightmare. She had been wide-awake while holding the crystal dagger over Dane. The vision had come to her at that particular moment for a purpose. Could that mean she had used the dagger in a past life to defend herself against...

  You never make it to your thirtieth birthday.

  Was Dane the witch hunter?

  “No,” she whispered. “He doesn’t believe in witches.”

  If he was going to hunt witches, she suspected belief was a strong requirement for getting the job. On the other hand, the man did debunk the paranormal. Which, again, didn’t leave room for belief. Right?

  Of course, Eryss knew if people didn’t want to see the truth, they could convince themselves otherwise using science, superstition or any illogical thought process. Humans possessed a herd mentality and tended to go along with the majority. To follow those who demonstrated authority.

  But the vision had been clear. Perhaps since her thirtieth birthday was so near, she was tapping into the universal energies that held her past secrets? The more she thought about it, the more clearly she realized that the crystal blade must be what she had used when she’d defended herself against the witch hunter in the past. Could it be? It had been given to her by Mrs. McAlister, who had been a Light witch. They had known one another in previous lives, usually in a teaching manner, they suspected. She could have gotten the blade from an earlier incarnation of Eryss.

  Eryss had never been compelled to check her family tree. And she suspected if she went searching, she wouldn’t find one written down. But reincarnation did not imply she was born into the same family every lifetime. That didn’t make any sense. She was a different person each time. And yet, remarkably, she had always been female, and a witch. It happened like that sometimes. A person could be a teacher, a musician or even a socialite through the ages. Others ranged vastly from lifetime to lifetime in their occupations and personalities, either through choice or because they’d made the decision to experience a great variety of lifestyles.

  What had the faceless man said to her in the vision? Something about a curse. And him not stopping until she burned.

  The witch hunter had been cursed to kill her? That was an interesting detail. It was hard to believe—yet Midge had suggested the same.

  Eryss shuddered to consider she may have been tracked through the centuries by a vengeance-seeking killer. Who had been cursed? And why stab her, then? Burning was the only way to kill a witch and to make her stay dead. (And yet, there was a rumor that dead witches burned at the stake in centuries past had been summoned in a Paris cemetery only a few years ago.) But usually fire and witches did not mix. Sure, you could kill one with a blade, and she would die. But that didn’t ensure final death.

  Was that why Eryss kept reincarnating? Because her soul had never received true and final death from fire? Midge had seen her stabbed many times over the centuries. But she hadn’t mentioned anything about fire.

  The thought of it made Eryss woozy. She grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge behind the bar and sat before the laptop again. Running the vision over in her thoughts, she recalled what she had said to her killer.

  Something like “Our souls will live forever with our love.”

  What could that mean? How could she possibly have been in
love with a witch hunter? Was the man she’d stabbed in her vision really the witch hunter? Had she killed someone else? In defense or otherwise? Had she killed her lost love?

  “Dane,” she whispered. “This is so freaky!”

  “What’s freaky?”

  Eryss spun around at Valor’s voice. She hadn’t heard her walk in. The brown-haired woman hoisted a bag of grains on each shoulder and strode over to the brew tanks, where she set them down against the wall, then brushed the dust off her hands with brisk slaps. Two five-gallon plastic buckets, the mill and an electric drill sat nearby, for her to hand mill the grains that Mireio would brew this afternoon.

  Valor Hearst was a seventy-year-old witch who had performed an immortality spell on her twenty-fifth birthday so she’d stay young for a good century. She had never met a beer she couldn’t reverse-engineer. She liked cars, motorcycles, biker boys and tattoos. Not necessarily in that order. The ultimate tomboy, she could also rock the glamour when she felt like it. But ordinarily she wore her purple-tinted hair straight and uncombed. Fashion was as easy as Sunday morning when she donned an old army jacket over a biker T-shirt and skintight jeans. The moonstone amulet on the leather cord around her neck never left her person.

  “I had another portent this morning,” Eryss offered. She could tell Valor anything. The witch knew how to keep secrets.

  “Yeah, Mireio told me you’d been having nightmares.”

  And that witch couldn’t keep a secret to save her life. Not that Eryss had told Mireio to keep it hush-hush. She trusted her sisters in the craft with the details of her life, as they all did. Geneva was the only one who had a tendency for secrecy.

  “Did she tell you about my scientist?”

  “Sexy, dark hair and eyes you could drown in?”

  “That would be the one. He stayed the night again, and this morning...well, he saw the crystal dagger I got from my mentor. I’d had it out to perform a house blessing and Dane picked it up from the floor. He debunks paranormal-related weapons and started to explain why crystal wasn’t a good weapon and how crystals don’t have energy.”

  Valor made a pfft sound.

  “Right, but when I took it in hand I got a vision of me stabbing a man.”

  “Did he look like your scientist?”

  “I didn’t actually see faces in my visions, but I wouldn’t expect a past incarnation to look like me or the other person.”

  “True. Though ghosts do like to hang on to their previous incarnations. I sometimes think it’s a courtesy to us living ones.”

  Valor had an uncanny ability to see ghosts. And there were a lot of them lingering in the city of Anoka. Poor girl.

  “Though, now I think of it,” Eryss continued, “we were dressed in different clothes. Maybe medieval? The fabrics were rich and I’m pretty sure I was in a long dress. And the man had stabbed me. I could feel the blade in my chest. He said he wouldn’t stop until I burned.”

  “Yikes. That is not cool.” Valor slid onto a bar stool and propped an elbow on the counter. “I hope you killed him in your dream, after he said that.”

  “I think I did. It wasn’t a dream, though. Dane and I were both awake. It was a vision. And I said something about love keeping us alive forever.”

  “Mercy, someone put a wacky curse on the two of you.”

  “He did say something about a curse in the vision. But seriously? Not me and Dane.”

  “Why would you think otherwise?”

  “Well, he’s not a witch hunter. It’s a witch hunter who kills me, Valor. Midge read that in the soul gaze.”

  “He is a scientist. Don’t they pooh-pooh witches and everything woo-woo? You did say he debunks stuff.”

  “Yes, but—no. He’s not. Seriously? The guy would know if he’s a witch hunter. I’m sure it was me holding the crystal dagger that sparked the vision. He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “What did he think of your vision?”

  “I didn’t tell him. How could I? I did tell him I’m a witch and he laughed about it.”

  “Yeah, doesn’t sound like a hunter to me.”

  “His career is all about proving people like us don’t exist.”

  “Better those kinds than the ones who are obsessed with proving we are real and get creepy real fast.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I got the blueberry cream ale on tap for this weekend. You coming in to work, or will you be nestled all snug as a you-know-what with your man?”

  “I hoped to be snug as a bug. But Harold is due back on Friday, so who knows.”

  “Mr. Stuart, the antiques dealer across the street? What does he have to do with your amorous liaisons? Am I missing an important detail in a strange new love triangle?” Valor waggled her brows.

  “No, silly. Dane is in town to pick up a dagger from Harold. Oh my goddess.”

  “He’s here to pick up a dagger?” Valor eyed Eryss with the most obvious “I told you so” glare ever.

  Eryss shook her head. “It’s for his job. Not a witch hunter thing.”

  Yet even she had difficulty not acknowledging there was too much coincidence going on here. And nothing in the universe was coincidence. Everything happened for a reason.

  “You had better be very careful around that man,” Valor warned. “And get that dagger from Harold before the so-called—” she made air quotes “—debunker gets his hands on it. For your own safety, Eryss. Be smart.”

  “I am. I just don’t think Dane is anything but a kind man who knows how to kiss me silly.”

  Valor rolled her eyes. “I hear he’s sex on a stick. I always think that would be so painful when someone says that.” She shuddered. “Give me sex on a bike or in the backseat of a ’65 Impala any day over a stick.”

  “I’ll take it anywhere Dane wants to give it to me. Even in a snowbank, if that’s on the table.”

  “You always have loved winter. You have any lavender growing over at your place? I want to imbue it in the last batch of October honey. I think it would taste fabulous.”

  Valor kept bees on the roof of her apartment building.

  “Sounds delicious. Yes, I do have lavender. I’ll bring some in this weekend.”

  Valor fist-bumped her. “Cheers.”

  * * *

  After a morning of blowing snow from the driveway, Dane brewed a cup of hot chocolate (because coffee was blatantly absent from Eryss’s kitchen). The snow removal had been surprisingly satisfying, and he’d blown a wide path all the way out to the main road and around the mailbox so the mailman could drive up close with his car. He was wishing for more snow tonight so he could go out again tomorrow morning.

  Weird, the things that appealed to a man’s sense of duty and personal satisfaction.

  Now he settled into the couch in the conservatory with laptop in hand, and set the hot chocolate on the grass. So strange that the floor was fresh, springy blades of it. He couldn’t begin to explain that, only that there must be a heating element threaded beneath this room. Otherwise the ground should be frozen solid, even with the conservatory on top of it. By rights, he should get on his knees and tear up a piece of the sod to discover what lay beneath. He could debunk her magical landscape. But Dane was confident what he believed was true. And maybe a part of him wanted to relax and take this vacation as it should be. No scientific queries regarding green grass in Minnesota in January.

  He took a few moments to enjoy the surrounding greenery and the humid warmth. He could hear birds squawking and insects chittering...

  “If only,” he muttered, at the surprising leap of his imagination. But the room did evoke visions of a Victorian hothouse replete with colorful birds and perhaps even a monkey-climbing apparatus. Ha! There it was, his childhood imagination leaping out unawares. Best to tuck that away before anyone noticed.

  On to more serious endeavors. He had the Haywood project that required proofing before he sent the final report on to the Agency. With that report, the Agency would reassure the small Nevada town that the
Golgotha Cross, which had been excavated from the salt flats, couldn’t possibly have been the reason behind the mysterious deaths over the past six months. It was most likely lead in the water. Water tests had shown dangerously high lead levels.

  The Agency did suggest advanced testing and further research to their clients, which was what he liked most about the people he worked for. They didn’t simply say “this is stupid; it couldn’t possibly be real.” They gave their clients avenues to explore what could really be behind something they believed was caused by the paranormal. And no, Dane didn’t do it to tear apart people’s dreams, as he’d once been accused by the housewife who was quite sure she was being visited nightly by a sexy hunk of a vampire. For the record, she’d been ODing on oxycodone and reading too many romance novels. For the unofficial record? It had been a vampire with a sweet tooth for the maple-sugared bacon the woman often snacked on.

  Dane was about to open the file when he remembered the symbol in the kitchen. He’d noticed another this morning while showering. It had hung in the corner of the bathroom and was made from twigs and dried grass. An amethyst crystal had been woven into it.

  A feeling of dread tickled his neck. Had Eryss been born into believing that she was a cauldron-stirring witch? What kind of parents would do that to their child? It was just wrong. And what magic, exactly, did she believe she possessed?

  True-born witches were raised as witches, and he wasn’t sure if they were taught magic or simply possessed it innately. Were there witchcraft schools? He’d never dealt with witches, so he didn’t have the research required to call her real or not.

  The knife thing had been creepy. For those few seconds that she’d held the crystal blade suspended above his chest, Dane had thought something had shut down in Eryss. Or maybe too much had been going on in her brain. Had she had a vision of sorts? Similar to those she claimed to dream about? Something about a lost love. Hmm...would she have stabbed him if he hadn’t said something to her?

  He rubbed his chest now. The crystal blade had been sharp, and while he would expect it to crack and break upon impact, a good firm thrust could send it through skin, muscle and organs before breaking.