by John Conroe
“He’s not keen on bullies,” I noted, listening as the cop cars pulled onto the street, then into the parking lot.
After that, there were several dramatic retellings by the staff, a statement by Stacia, who explained away her self-defense prowess by mentioning a cop uncle and, from myself, a license plate number and detailed description of the van and attackers. The officers took our statements, then spent a great deal of time making sure Stacia was okay. Probably more time than your average victim would get. They checked 'Sos’s dog tags, which I had produced upon their arrival, took copies of the hotel’s exterior camera footage, and left with many assurances of doing their best to apprehend Stacia’s attackers. Me, they mostly left alone, which was fine because it let me look over the Volvo. The only thing in the car was the sealed fire safe with the witch book in it.
After the cops left, we took the safe into our room, covering it with a blanket so it didn’t look weird for me to be carrying the eighty pound lump like it was a shoe box.
“What did the guy say to you?” I asked.
“He asked where the book was, then his partner noticed the safe in the back of the car. I was just swinging by the Volvo to see if I left a pair of boots in the back.”
I sliced the safe open with a mono-edged finger and we looked in at the silk-wrapped lump. Books are normally good things. Sources of knowledge or a comforting chance to escape reality. They’re, generally speaking, not black holes of despair and misery. This one was. It gave off an oily feeling of pressure that simultaneously made me fear it and want it. It also made me painfully aware of the supernaturally sexy girl who was practically leaning against me as we both looked in at it.
Less than a week away from Tanya and I couldn’t keep my eyes or thoughts off Stacia. Now granted, she’s a phenomenally beautiful girl, but I’m just not like that. Tanya was for me and I was for her… period. But the feeling in the room now was hot. Not temperature hot but sex hot.
I took a deep breath, which was clouded with Stacia’s scent (so not helpful), and flicked the silk open enough to see the book’s cover. Cursive writing in what looked like German graced the cover. The cover was made of a pale, soft leathery material that made my skin crawl. I snapped a picture with my throwaway smart phone, rewrapped the book, and slammed the safe door shut. After re-welding it with bursts of well-placed aura, I placed a call.
“Copper Top Cabins. Erika speaking.”
“Hi Erika. it’s Chris Gordon. Is your mom there?”
“Ooh, hi Chris! How are you?” she cooed into the phone. A strong mental image of a blonde bombshell popped into my head. A Swedish bombshell, at that. Across the room, Stacia raised her eyebrows at the girl’s tone, werewolf hearing following both sides of the conversation.
“Wouldn’t you rather talk to me, Chris?” Erika Boklund asked, sugar sweet. Stacia’s eyebrows went ever further north.
“I need your mom’s expertise Erika. Is she there?”
“Yes, I’ll get her,” the girl said with a sigh. Then her bad-girl impression came back full force. “But I think you’d get more from my area of expertise,” she said archly.
Despite my focus on the problem at hand, another image of the curvy blonde sprang unbidden into my mind. I shook my head to clear it.
“I really need to talk to your mom, Erika,” I said, eyes clenched shut, trying to blank my internal video display. What was with me and blondes lately?
“I’ll have to take the phone outside. It’s really hot here today and we were all swimming in the pond. Lucky I heard the phone at all. I was getting ice for drinks. Now I’m standing here in my wet bikini, dripping all over the floor.”
The image in my head changed, losing most of its clothes, left in a skimpy black bikini and beaded with water.
“Ahh, okay,” I mumbled, looking away from a frowning Stacia.
“Here she is. Oh, and Chris?”
“Yes?”
“My bikini is white, not black,” she said. Next I heard fumbling sounds as the phone was handed off.
“Hello? Mr. Gordon?”
“Ah, hi Mrs. Boklund. I was hoping you could help me with a problem I have,” I said, still trying to get her daughter’s steamy image out of my head.
I outlined the situation to her, keeping the details short.
“Generally, every Summons creates a small, one-time portal to the realm of whatever it is that’s been summoned. An open portal such as you’ve described would be theoretically possible but would take enormous power to create. I don’t see how three pre-teen girls with no training or help could do it.”
“I don’t know for certain that the book is at faultm but the whole thing happened not long after the book was found walled away in the basement.”
“The book was found in a wall? Who owned the house?”
“A man named Scott Lloyd. The house is bad, twisted. I believe Mr. Lloyd was into the spiritualist scene and that some pretty dark stuff happened at that place.”
“Scott Lloyd? I’ve heard of him. Power for spells can be stored, as you do with your stone figures. The house could have enough retained energy for something like that. Send me the photo you took and I’ll see if any of my group know of the book.”
She gave me her email address and I sent the photo as soon as we said goodbye.
Stacia was still frowning at me.
“What?”
“A whole family of witches?” she asked.
“Well, the mom and twin daughters.”
“What do they look like?” she asked.
“I tell you about three Swedish witches in Northern Michigan and you want to know about their appearance?”
“I’m guessing they’re very pretty and that they’re blonde. Also, the one you spoke to, Erika, has a major thing for you, right?” she asked, arms folded over her chest.
“Yes, yes, and I guess yes,” I answered, frowning at her.
“When you were speaking to Erika, you had a pretty detailed mental picture of her, didn’t you? Including a bikini.”
“Ah, what are you talking about, Stacia?” I asked, shocked that she knew that—and more than a bit embarrassed.
“How, Chris, could she know you were thinking of a black bikini? From your thunderstruck expression when she said it, I knew she was dead on. But how does a teenage witch know what you’re thinking, Chris?”
I hadn’t really caught that when Erika had said it, my mind had been busy changing the black suit to white and I had been… caught up in the details.
“She’s a witch. Maybe she reads minds?” I threw out.
“I don’t think witches can read minds from hundreds of miles away, or even ten feet away unless they have a spell tied to the person they’re reading.”
My expression must have been thunderstruck again because she softened her glare and unfolded her arms.
“Think about it. You have a teenage witch with the hots for you. Is it possible she could try a long-distance love spell or something? You mentioned that you and Tanya stayed in a cabin; did you leave hair or nails or blood behind?”
“We cleaned up the cabin really well,” I said, but then another memory of Erika popped into my mind. She had brushed something off my arm when I was getting ice from the machine outside the office. “Yeah, I guess it might have been possible.”
I opened my Sight, looking at the world around me through a veil of my aura. Stacia glowed almost equal parts green and blue. Awasos was a blend of purple and green. Then I looked down at myself. At first, there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. Just my purple aura. But then I spotted it – a tiny tendril of black, just a wisp really. Thin. Thin, like a strand of spider web, it extended from my core, shooting off into the wall of our room. Our room faced west and the strand went out the corner of the room on that side. Northwest. Like toward Michigan.
“Damn it! Son of bitch!” I tore at the strand with a whip of aura. “It won’t cut!” I said, a little panicky.
“Hold up, stud. No p
anicking. It’s a love spell, or at least a lust spell,” Stacia said. “It’s not like she’s trying to kill you—she just wants to bed you. If she has a piece of you, then her connection is pretty tight. Not something that is easily broken.”
“How do you know all this—about magic?” I asked, waving a hand around.
“The Pack has several witches on retainer. It’s not normal for weres and witches to work together, but the Malleks are really forward-thinking people. They’ve forged some unusual alliances. Part of my job as Afina’s assistant is to liaise with the local Circle of witches. I’ve made friends with the daughter of the head witch. So I pick stuff up from her.”
I shuddered, still panicking that a witch had a piece of me. Picking up my phone, I started to redial the Boklunds’ number. Stacia grabbed the phone out of my hand.
“Whoa, let’s not do anything stupid, okay?” she asked. “If we’re right, and I suspect we are, than the spell is a harmless love spell by a teenage witch. But if you start raving over the phone, then the momma witch might be frightened that the most dangerous person she has ever met might be coming for revenge. What might she do with your hair?”
That stopped me in my tracks. Tanya and I had swept and vacuumed the cabin, even burning the vacuum bag and bed sheets, all because we knew Quinby Boklund was afraid of us. Something about seeing us kill three un-killable Cheenos. Stacia had a mega point.
She was watching my expression as I processed that concept. “Right. So let’s not trigger anything here. Erika wants all your pieces in the right places, so she’s not going to do anything to harm you. I doubt the spell has been in place long.”
“Why? Why do you think that?” I asked.
“Because you’ve only been gone from Tanya for less than a week and you’ve been staring at me much more than you should for about three days now,” she said.
“What?” I asked, face burning.
“You are, above all else, loyal to a fault. I thought it odd that you were paying as much attention to me as you have been. I mean, I like it, don’t get me wrong. Truth be told, I’ve been trying to capture your attention since I met you,” she said with a slight blush of her own. I didn’t know what to say, just stared at her with my mouth open.
“Oh come on! You have to know that I like you?” she asked, exasperated.
I nodded slowly. “I guess I do… I mean, yeah, you flirt with me a lot. So yeah, but I, ah...”
“Yeah, I know. You’re pretty much an idiot about women, aren’t you?”
“Ah, very much,” I agreed.
“Well, Christian Anthony Gordon, I know a lot about you. For you, forgetting about Tanya isn’t happening, not in a week’s time. Not in a month’s time. In fact, I was a little disappointed in you,” she said. I must have frowned something fierce because she laughed. She was still very much in control of this conversation and loving it.
“I will go ahead and lay it out for you. I want you. But I want you to want me, too. You shared what you think about me last night, so my turn,” she said, pushing me to sit in the closest chair while she sat on the bed. “Settle in, hero, and no interruptions.”
Chapter 9
Just like the night before, Awasos jumped up on the bed and curled around behind Stacia. She didn’t really notice, just laid back and rested one hand on his ten-gallon head while she composed her thoughts.
“I told you last night a little about growing up in Vermont. I need to tell you a little more. Despite my looks, I wasn’t really popular. I was middle-of-the-pack popular. In middle school, it was better, but then things changed. My dad died in Iraq. I was angry and bitter; I missed him so much. The military fucked up our benefits, something about an I not dotted or a t not crossed. Mom had to get a second job, so I barely saw her. I got a little… wild. Drinking at parties that I didn’t belong at. A guy I liked took to me to one. He was a sophomore and I was in eighth grade. I got tipsy, and we made out in a bedroom. A little heavy petting, but that was about it. But he went and bragged that he had nailed me. It spread all over school. My closest friends dropped me. The boys all harassed me. I was labeled the school slut. I survived. But high school wasn’t fun. I made some new friends, went out with a few boys, but my reputation never recovered. You already know we didn’t have any money for college, so my future looked bleak. Graduation was just around the corner and, in a fit of despair, I hooked up with an old boyfriend. We went camping.”
I started to say something, but she held up one hand. “I know you know this part, but you don’t know it from my point of view,” she said.
“Where was I? Oh yeah, so we’re camping, messing around. I hear a howl. Something far off that doesn’t sound like any coyote or dog I ever heard. Then five minutes later, something heavy is rushing through the campground. Our tent is ripped apart and that idiot, Dan, runs headfirst into the only tree around. A monster that would make Wes Craven cry for his mommy is a split second from tearing me to literal pieces and you show up. That thing was the size of a grizzly—okay, a small grizzly,” she said, turning to 'Sos, who had lifted his head and tilted it at her.
“And you just threw it like a bag of garbage. This impossibly good-looking man just shows up and yanks it away—and then dives into the darkness after it. I heard your fight… it was insane. Even now, knowing everything I know, able to do what I can do, and I still panic at the memory. A couple minutes of all hell exploding around me, and it stops. You walk back into the campsite like you’re there for a beer. Your clothes are shredded and bloody, but you’re cool as a cucumber. You check Dan, you check me. You actually look me in the eyes—do you know how many men actually look me in the eyes and not at my tits? And I was just about buck naked. Then you see the wound on my leg and you’re, like, totally concerned about it. Covered in your own blood and you’re more worried about me. And somehow, you heal it! With your bare hands. Then you tell me about my future – the one where I’m gonna be a werewolf. But before I can even freak out you’re reassuring me that it will be alright. You put me on the phone with Afina, who invites me to New York City along with my mom for a new life.”
She stopped and shook her head, blonde hair whipping.
“How cliché can you get? Poor girl rescued from a fairytale monster by a superman who promises her a life of opportunity! Part of me didn’t really believe it, but then again, there was a dead werewolf lying thirty feet away and the man who killed it with his bare hands is standing in front of me, so maybe, just maybe the rest is real, too? Then the feds show up along with the police, including my uncle, and everything goes down just as you said it would. And you’re standing there with your shirt off and Gina is cleaning you up. I wanted to fucking kill her. She’s touching a body that makes every celebrity I’ve ever seen look anemic, and she’s all doctorly about it. She even slapped you, which actually made me a little happy, because I was jealous as hell up to that point. You disappear, but everything you promised happens, even better than you said. Do you understand, Chris? My life was empty dreams and broken promises and you twirl it all around a hundred and eighty degrees. I go to freaking Columbia University now! I have a job a thousand people would kill for. I won’t ever get sick, I’ll look twenty for a hundred years, and I’ll never be afraid of men again! I wasn’t even afraid of the Loki Spawn at my induction because I knew, just knew you were going to stop them. I was scared to shit when you fought them, but that was a joke. It was like they hit a living Cuisinart!”
She stopped to take a breath, petting the heavy wolf head nestled by her side.
“So I want you. I’ve wanted you since you saved me. I know it’s like a white knight fairytale thing, but that doesn’t matter. But you’re bound to her. Even as you’re bound to me.”
“Er, what? What do you mean I’m bound to you?” I interrupted.
She smiled. “The Pack has its own doctor—Dr. Arcos. He’s a very old werewolf, from Europe. Afina took me to him my first day in the City. Dr. Arcos is absolutely fascinated by you and more th
an a bit by me. He did blood tests and things. Told Afina and I that the LV virus had spread through me faster than any bitten were he’d ever seen. Also, the virus is a bit different in my case, a different strain. He thinks your blood mingled with mine—just before you healed me. He thinks you and I have a bit of a bond, which is why I can almost always find you in the City. Not like the chosen bond you have with her—more like an offshoot of a Pack bond, but more… personal.”
She was looking at 'Sos as she rubbed his head. Now, she raised her liquid emerald eyes and started straight into mine.
“So to be perfectly honest with you, Chris, my goal is to win you away from her. I’ve thought about the words for a long time. Things like how toxic a cold, blooded parasitic relationship that only uses you for your powers and blood can be. Like how you deserve to be with someone that doesn’t feed off you, but feeds with you. But you’re not a word person, you’re an action person, so I will do it with my actions, just as she will drive you away with hers. That’s it. My hidden agenda—out in the open.”
