West Coast Witch

by Justen Hunter

  I scooped it up, and opened up the cover. The needle inside was spinning, like the entire magnetics of the earth were thrown off, or something. It took several seconds for it to settle. When it did, however, I had a simple observation to make.

  “That isn’t north.”

  “No, it is pointing towards whatever we are looking for. In this case, this is where Samantha Coolidge is located.”

  “Okay, but it’s just pointing. And this is San Francisco. I mean, it’s pointing east, but there’s an entire continent in that direction.” I stood up, and got a broom and dustpan for the salt so Amy could walk around freely. “So, uh, where do we go from here?”

  “The hunt begins, Eric.”

  Chapter 12

  There was a certain high to the magic, or what I could only assume was a minor high. It was a wonderful little buzz of energy as I just sat around, grinning as Amy drove. When it wore off, however, I realized that there was a downside to magic.

  The follow up work was boring. We had driven in as easterly a route as possible, until the compass needle had started to curve south. Then, we drove south, until the needle started to point west.

  Reading may be my hobby, but I was never very patient. After about forty-five minutes, we were still driving around, trying to get a fix.

  “We should have brought a map or something.” I murmured as we turned onto another one-way street. “San Francisco’s already hell to drive in. If we’re going to go be looking for a spot that we don’t know, it would have been nice to get a map so we could triangulate it.”

  “We will have to buy them in advance, next time. That was a good casting of the spell. I think we have got about another hour left to work with.”

  “It has a time limit?” That wasn’t something she had mentioned.

  “Yes, all magic naturally does.” She said. “It is never that easy, Eric. If we cannot-“

  “Whoa!” I interrupted her. “Pull over, now!”

  “What is going on?” She asked.

  “The compass needle. It’s pointing up. It’s touching the glass now. Pull over. I, uh, I think she’s in one of these buildings.” Amy spent a few minutes parallel parking.

  We walked around the block, and eventually narrowed the building down to an apartment building that had seen much better days. We ended up going through the front door.

  “So, what do we do now?” Amy asked.

  “Go up each floor and check with the compass. Once we narrow down what floor she’s on, we look for her.” I grinned a little. “Seriously, I came up with that before you did? Witch one, Angel Eyes zero.”

  “Angel Eyes?” She rolled her baby blues at that.

  “Yea, you know. Lee Van Cleef’s character in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? That, and I really don’t know anything about you, besides your guardian role.”

  “Do not call me an angel. That is the first thing you need to know.” She remarked as we went into the stairwell.

  “Then what else? You mentioned you’re not totally corporeal. Do you eat, sleep, have desires?” We reached the second floor, and the compass still pointed upwards. The next floor, then.

  “I eat, but not much, and I do have to rest to regain my strength.” She explained. “As to desires, hardly. I am not human. I am not tainted with their desires.”

  I looked behind myself to her. “Seriously, tainted? Who says that having desires is a curse?”

  “Desire is inherently selfish in nature.”

  “Okay, that’s just preachy.” I rolled my eyes. “What about my desire to help people? That is definitely not selfish.”

  “Would you not say that it is motivated by a desire to seek gratification for yourself?”

  “We are totally not doing a philosophical discussion in the stairwell of this building while we look for a missing woman.”

  “You do not enjoy it?” Amy chuckled.

  “Not really. I had to take a few philosophy classes for my degree. Worst money I ever spent on a class, and I include my terrible calculus classes I took.”

  “I take it you do not enjoy philosophy?”

  “I hate debating it. After all, how do you seriously expect to change someone’s view points?” I sighed. “Besides, why do you do this whole guardian thing anyways, if you don’t have desires?”

  “A promise that was made long ago.” Amy said. “But that is a story for some other time. Come on, we should get back to the matter at hand.”

  We went to the third floor, then the fourth. It was finally, on the fifth, where the compass needle settled out. I held up a hand. “Okay, this floor. Let’s take a look around.”

  We stepped out onto the floor. It was a hallway, with apartment doors to either side. We walked down the hallway, working our way down slowly so we didn’t pass over anything.

  The compass spun to my right once we passed the last door in the hall. “I think this is the one.” I murmured. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, and used it to grab the doorknob.

  The door proved to be unlocked, and Amy stacked up against the wall, knife in hand. I opened the door, slowly, trying to keep it as quiet as possible. The old hinges creaked like the devil. I cursed to myself, and swung the door open.

  At first look, the apartment was empty, and at the second look too. It was clear of all furniture, and even the floors were stripped bare, showing only a cheap tile. The sun was heavy in the apartment. It had windows closed, leaving it to bake in the morning heat.

  Amy and I walked into it. “I thought that this was supposed to be where it was…” I said.

  It all became clear when we got to the center of the apartment. A small pile of gold hair was on the floor, with a set of clippers next to it. There was a sticky note on the clippers.

  “Give up.” I hissed the note’s message. “How the hell did they know that we were going to do this?”

  “They knew we had the brush. They must have shaved her head.”

  “It works like that?”

  Amy nodded. “They shaved it, removing it from her body. The spell just tracked her hair, not her.” She made a grunting sound. “That is not good. Whoever these people are, they are smart.”

  “And they know about magic.”

  “Indeed. That separates them from run of the mill criminals.”

  I closed the compass lid, and then shoved it into my pocket. “So, where does this leave us?” I asked.

  “Those men we saw yesterday at Francis’s office. Do you recall their tattoos?”

  “Yea, they looked like the ones that Sam’s roommate Diana had.”

  She nodded. “They are were tattoos.”

  “Were tattoos?” I echoed, the term unfamiliar.

  “Most shapeshifter clans have them. Our next stop is to visit the alpha of the San Francisco packs.”

  “The alpha?” Great, let’s meet all the supernatural leaders. “As in, like, the guy who rules all the packs?”

  “Well, since you thought you were capable enough to meet with the Count against my specific instructions, you seem to think you are a big boy.”

  “Well, I walked into that one. Where do we go?”

  “When do you have to be at the bar?”

  “Uh, four. Why?”

  “We are heading to the piers. We have to make sure we can get in with the Alpha’s schedule.”

  “Great. And just who is the Alpha?”

  “The head of the Irish mob.”

  Okay, a vampire? Yea, I’m good with that. I can chat with a vampire. The head of the Irish mafia? How the hell did Amy even know this guy?

  We drove down to the piers. The piers were what remained of San Francisco’s legacy as the Pacific’s largest port. Back in World War 2, it had been the major embarkation point for troops heading into the Pacific. Changes in the times, however, had seen Los Angeles and Oakland take most of intercontinental shipping away from the City by the Bay.

  That left a lot of unused piers lying around San Francisco. They’d been bought up by private partie
s in recent years. Some of the piers, like the famous Pier 39, served mostly commercial interests, while others were used for warehouses or private docks.

  Amy drove us to one of the industrial ones. She parked the jeep, and we made a quick stop to grab lunch at a hot dog stand. I devoured a polish, and quickly bought another. Even after the second sausage, I still felt ravenous.

  “Okay, I’m not usually this hungry.” I looked to Amy, who smiled knowingly. “Something you forgot to mention?”

  “You have to obey the laws of nature. Magic is working with a lot of energy. You are burning through your body’s energy to work magic. As such, your metabolism is sky-rocketing, and you’ll need to eat a lot more than usual. Your mother was a little shocked by it when she went through it.” Amy actually grinned. “She thought she was pregnant. She said she would swear over a stack of bibles that she wasn’t that serious with her boyfriend at the time.”

  I found myself smiling just a little. “So, did my father know what she was?” I asked as I ordered a third polish.

  “He did, but he did not want to talk about it a lot. He wanted her to stop, for your sake.”

  I looked to her, and I felt like I had to ask the question. “Amy, was my mother’s death natural?”

  She nodded. “It was. Your mother had a few enemies, but she had confronted them before she made the choice to live with your father. Victoria did not want anyone to hurt her husband or her child.”

  “Well, that means something, I guess.” I whispered. But what did it mean? And what were those enemies that she’d fought? Questions for a later date, I told myself.

  After she had finished her bag of corn chips, and I had demolished the last hot dog, she led us to the pier.

  “Will the weres be able to tell what I am?” I asked as we walked. The pier itself wasn't a big one, but set at its entrance was a large building, a warehouse that had to have seen better days.

  “Most likely not. Weres live long, but in no way long enough to remember what witches are. You will smell interesting, as will I, but they will just catalog it as something new and different.”

  I shrugged at that. “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  The front of the warehouse had a set of double glass doors. A small bell rang as I opened the door for Amy, and we were greeted by a cheerful secretary, a brunette with a big smile.

  “Hi, welcome to Finnegan Shipping. Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, we do not.” Amy answered, and then said in a casual voice. “I am here for a shipment of hides.”

  The secretary’s demeanor changed. The cheerful smile went away, and she looked down to her desk. “Of course. I’ll see to it that our sales representative is contacted.” She stood out from behind the desk. She was tall, and lanky, all arms and legs. She wore slacks and a creme blouse. “If you’ll follow me.” We did, and we followed the girl into a conference room with a small table and several chairs. “Take a seat, please. I’ll make sure that the representative is here in a moment.”

  When she left, I turned to Amy. “Okay, what’s up with that?”

  “I know some of the passwords to the pack. What happens now is that we will get a minor pack functionary. After that, they will judge whether our request is worth of the Alpha’s time. If not, we deal with the other pack member. If we do, we meet Finnegan.”

  We were there for a few minutes before the door opened. The man they sent to deal with us was a tank of a man. He was six and a half feet easily, and freaking built. His entire frame was stacked with muscles. I resisted an urge to ask if the guy was human. Obviously, he wasn’t. Though, I did wonder what his animal was. I shuddered at the thought of a wolf that big.

  “I’m Jackson Miller.” He said, and extended his hand to Amy. “Your reputation precedes you, Amy.”

  Amy shook his hand, and gave him a pleasant smile. “Why, thank you, Jackson. This is Eric Carpenter, my associate.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Mister Carpenter.” We shook hands once they were done. I saw Jackson's nose twitch. I knew he was taking in my scent. “So, what business do you have with the pack today?”

  I decided to take the lead. “We are looking into Samantha Coolidge’s disappearance, Jackson. We were hoping we could as for a bit of help in the matter.”

  He nodded as he sat down. “Sam wasn’t a very active member of our pack, but she was pack. That’s more than family. We’ll do anything we can to help.”

  “Well, let us begin with her friends.” Amy said. “Mister Miller, we went to the office of Raymond Francis, the private investigator who had been hired to look into her disappearance, and there were two weres there. One of those same weres tossed my associate’s apartment.”

  He smiled, just a little. “Cut to the chase, don’t you two?”

  “We could waste each other’s time, dance around the subject, and get nowhere. Would you prefer that?”

  Jackson smiled. “Well, I can appreciate that. Can you describe the two men?”

  I nodded. “Both were about six feet tall, dark hair. They were stocky, not like workout freaks, but worker-types. Only one of them spoke, but he was the gruff, few words type.”

  “That describes more than a few people here. What makes you think they were ours?”

  “The tattoos, in particular.” I remarked. “They had were tattoos on them, and so I’m inclined to believe they were weres.”

  “So you want us to root through our own on the thought that you think that they’re one of ours?”

  Amy nodded. “That is what we want, yes. We want to know why they are trying to stop us from trying to find her.”

  “Stop you?” Jackson furrowed his brow. “What did they do, Miss Amy?”

  “As Amy said, one of them broke into my apartment last night. They were trying to find a brush that belonged to Sam.”

  Amy winced. “You should not have said that, Eric.” She whispered.

  “What, why?” I looked over to her. Shit, well there went our cool, professional demeanor.

  Jackson leaned forward. His eyes, big dark pools, focused on me. “Why did you have her brush?” He said. “Her hair wouldn’t help a were. No, you’re not a were, Mister Carpenter.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a party who’s interested in helping.”

  “But what good would that brush do, I wonder?” He smiled a little. “Unless, you are what I think you are.”

  “And what is that?”

  “What Diana told me you said you were.” He shook his head. “After all these years, the race returns. Finnegan says that the witches were extinct.”

  Well, that came back to bite me real fast. “Just endangered.” I shot back. “Surely you can appreciate that?”

  “Law of the jungle. As the stories go, the witches couldn’t adapt to the times. The human animals tore them apart.”

  “Not this one.” I said. “But let’s get off the subject. I want to know who these weres are, Jackson.”

  He stood. “I’ll let Finnegan know you're here.”

  “Thank you, Jackson.” Amy said, and she inclined her head to him.

  “Don’t do that, yet. He’s an interesting case. I have no idea what Finnegan will do with a witch. This is…well, interesting.”

  “Great.” I rolled my eyes as Jackson left the room. Once the door was shut, I said. “Well, he was…friendly-ish.”

  “It’s the nature of his animal. The bears are much nicer than some of the other weres.”

  “He’s a were-bear?” I laughed. “That is...well, slightly awesome.”

  “There are a number of animals out there that weres shift to. Wolves are just common. Bears, all the big cats, birds, some are even known to take the form of fishes.”

  “So, there’s like, a were-tuna out there somewhere?”

  “I don’t know everything. I have met a were-shark in my journeys, but that was long ago.” She gave a cursory shrug. “Let us focus on the matter at hand.”

  “What can you tell me about Finnegan?” I asked.


  “His full name is Connor Finnegan. He was born in the eighteenth century, to the alpha of a powerful werewolf in Ireland. He emigrated to America in the eighteen-fifties, and in the latter half of the century became a minor industrialist.”

  “So what’s he doing running the Irish mob?”

  “The Great Depression. He lost everything, disappeared for fifty years, and reappeared in the eighties. He worked his way into the packs here and worked his way up to Alpha. He is old enough to think this is still the Old World, but don’t underestimate him.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. I’m planning my continued survival on the fact that I shouldn’t be underestimating anyone.”

  “Clever enough.” She murmured. “I will let you handle the negotiations. Finnegan will not like me butting in on this.” Her eyes rolled in derision. “Our history is not exactly joyful.” We waited a few minutes until the door opened again.

  Finnegan was very different, compared to Jackson. Where Jackson was burly and wide, Finnegan was lanky and skinny. Where Jackson had rough features and a little smile, Finnegan had toothy grins and a thin face. Finnegan also looked older, though he only appeared to be in his forties. His long blond hair was pulled back. I noticed a few gray streaks, but they were just beginning to take root.

  “A witch, eh?” Finnegan’s voice still had a bit of an accent from the old country, though there was also some New England in it. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  He shoved his hand out, and I stood and shook it. “Mr. Finnegan, I take it. I’m Eric Carpenter.”

  “Carpenter…hmm, the name doesn’t ring any bells, but I had guessed that you got the gift from your father.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.” I remarked. “But I’m not here to talk about my family history.”

  “No, you’re here to talk about Sam Coolidge.” He nodded. “Well, take a seat.” He sat down at the head of the table, while I sat back down. “Oh, you brought Amy with you? How are you, my lovely?”

  I looked to Amy, and I had to force myself to not mouth the words ‘My lovely?’ to her.

  She cleared her throat. “I am doing well, Connor, thank you for asking.”