My Favorite Witch

by Lisa Plumley

  Which reminded her…

  “Hey, I’ve got a few things I’ve been wanting to try out.” Eagerly, Dayna nodded to the mezzanine level overhead. “Are you game to join me? And maybe make a good memory flicker of my magical exploits to post on EnchantNet, for once?”

  Francesca looked intrigued. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I think my vixen magic needs a test drive.” Brimming with enthusiasm, Dayna set down her glass. “Right here, right now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Patayan healer had been gone for almost an hour by the time T.J. heard the first clatter at the apartment’s front door. Poised beside Deuce’s bed, staring watchfully at his friend, T.J. listened. A noisy bang burst the stillness…then giggles.

  A feminine voice uttered a swearword.

  Like a shot, T.J. swept himself to the front door. Just as he reached it, the door shuddered beneath the force of a kick.

  Frowning, he yanked it open. Dayna stood illuminated in the glow of the moonlight, her jacket missing and her scarf askew. Her dark hair stuck out from her head. Her eyes looked bleary.

  She’d never seemed more beautiful to him.

  With a sense of undeniable relief, T.J. pulled her to him.

  “You’re here.” Feeling overcome, he buried his face in her messy hair. He inhaled her scent. But instead of her usual sweetness, he detected the tang of liquor, the spiciness of cloves…and an aura of guardedness. With a deepening frown, T.J. looked down. “What happened to you? Where have you been?”

  “Celebrating. Woo!” Unsteadily, Dayna threw her arms in the air. The motion made her wobble. She stepped on his foot. She giggled, then swayed again. She sagged in his arms. “Yay!”

  “Celebrating.” He didn’t care why. That could wait until later. He peered at her with concern. “Then you’re all right?”

  “Never better!” Dayna swerved into the apartment, crunching broken glass and papers underfoot. Unfazed by the destruction T.J.’s dark current had wrought, she stepped over a tipped-over chair. She dropped her backpack, then struggled with her hoodie. The complications of her zipper stymied her. “I feel great!”

  Confused, T.J. watched as his bonded witch battled to undo the fastener. She yanked, frowned, then swore. She held up her arms like a child. “Help, please. I can’t get this off.”

  “Leave it on. There’s something I have to tell you. Deuce—”

  “Deuce!” Dayna’s face brightened, cheerful beneath her smudged eye makeup. “He’ll help me if you won’t. Hey, Deuce!”

  She wandered toward the kitchen, peered inside, then gave the debris on the floor a cursory glance. Making another stab at removing her hoodie, Dayna yanked at it. Her kitten familiar meowed, trapped in a fold of the hood by her earlier efforts.

  T.J. reached up to grab the creature. It purred.

  “Hey.” Dayna grinned unsteadily at him. “That’s the first time you’ve ever touched my familiar. I think she likes you!”

  “I’m sure she does.” Setting down the creature, T.J. watched with abstract interest as the kitten padded through the open doorway. He didn’t have time to waste on its whereabouts. If Dayna had been strong enough to conjure it, she would be able to retrieve it later. He shoved the door shut with a burst of magic, then followed Dayna. “Something happened to Deuce. He—”

  “My familiar likes you, just the way my fellow vixens like me!” Dayna announced. “I’m in the cool-witches’ club now, T.J. I had the special cocktails to prove it, and everything!”

  He couldn’t believe she was babbling about cocktails. Not now, while Deuce lay unmoving in the next room. Before T.J. could say anything though, Dayna swerved her way toward him.

  Woozily, she flung her arms around his neck. Her boozy breath blasted him. “I would have had even more drinks, but that stupid dozer had to go and fall off the mezzanine at Janus tonight.” Her luscious mouth turned down at the corners. “Just when I was about to do some totally amazing magic, too! Francesca was even going to flicker it for me. I don’t know what’s up with the gardeners in this town, but they sure are accident prone.”

  T.J. stilled. “Another human died tonight?”

  Dayna gave a drunken nod. “That’s why I cleared out. The human police swarmed the place. The IAB, too. The fall shouldn’t have been fatal, they said, but the aneurysm definitely was.”

  An aneurysm. That’s what had killed Henry Obijuwa. And the other gardener—the one whose death had put the IAB on alert—too.

  T.J. grabbed her. “Someone attacked Deuce tonight. The healer is gone now, but Deuce still hasn’t awakened. He—”

  “What?” In the midst of unwinding her scarf, Dayna gawked at him. She stumbled, then righted herself. Comprehension rolled across her face in an awful wave. “Deuce is hurt?”

  Without waiting for his answer, Dayna wheeled her way toward the bedroom. She thumped into the hallway wall, then righted herself and kept going. T.J. followed her. He found her standing beside his partner’s bed, staring perplexedly at Deuce.

  “Oh my God.” Her face, ghostly and aghast, turned to T.J. Feebly, she waved her arm. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s hexed. Or spelled. Or something.” Tight-mouthed, T.J. looked at him. “He’s been this way since I got here—hours ago.”

  “Hours ago? Oh, Deuce.” Mournfully, Dayna sank to her knees beside the bed. She took Deuce’s hand and stroked it. Anxiously, she fluffed the blankets, then tucked them more securely around Deuce’s motionless body. Frowning, she glanced up. “Where is Lily? Does she know? I think she’d want to be here.”

  “Deuce ended things with Lily.”

  “Oh.” Appearing concerned, Dayna squeezed Deuce’s hand. Her gaze met T.J.’s. “I’m sorry. I guess that means—”

  “I’m not sorry,” Deuce croaked.

  T.J. stiffened. With a surge of hopefulness, he dropped to his partner’s side. Deuce flailed in the bed, then blinked. He opened his eyes. He smacked his lips together as though tasting something bad. He looked at Dayna’s hand, then up at her, a shadow of his usual happy-go-lucky smile on his pale face.

  “Because that witch was pissed when I broke it off,” Deuce said. “That’s it. No more witchy romances for me. I’m done.”

  “Deuce!” Dayna leaned nearer, smiling. “You’re awake.”

  The tracer swore. “Looks that way. But I’d rather not be.”

  Frowning, T.J. looked at his bonded witch—at her hand, linked with Deuce’s. Had she managed to awaken him somehow?

  Before he could decide, he felt Deuce’s gaze on him.

  “I have a mother of a headache,” his partner said. “And you’re freaking me out there, pal. What’s up with the funereal expression? Did somebody steal your Patayan mojo or what? You’re actually wearing clothes. I know that doesn’t make you happy.”

  “If it would make you feel better, I’ll strip right now.”

  “No thanks.” With a hoarse chuckle, Deuce held up his hands. He shook his head as though trying to clear it, then pushed himself up in bed with Dayna’s help. “I’ve had all the surprise views of your Patayan…assets that I ever want. For the rest of my life. Just keep it zipped, okay?”

  Swallowing against the lump in his throat, T.J. nodded.

  “How do you feel?” Dayna hovered near Deuce, magically plumping his pillows. With concern, she lay her hand on his forehead. “You were out a long time. Do you know what happened?”

  Deuce made a face. “Lily happened. She came over here to ‘talk,’ wearing sexy lingerie and toting a couple of beers—”

  That explained the beer bottles on coasters, T.J. thought.

  “—and telling me how I was being ‘hasty,’ not giving us a real shot at a relationship. Well, she has this way about her, you know? When she’s trying, Lily can be kind of irresistible.”

  “Yeah.” T.J. nodded. “All witches are like that.”

  With a rueful grin, Deuce kept going. He stretched his arms as he talked, then rotated his
shoulders, obviously feeling better by the minute. “Anyway, in the end, I told Lily it wasn’t going to work between us. We’re from two different worlds, I said. With her being a witch and me being human, we were pretty well doomed, I told her. But she had a solution for that.”

  Deuce’s expression turned forbidding. A wave of bitterness and regret swept from him to T.J., revealing everything.

  “I’m pretty sure Lily dosed me with a conversion potion.” Deuce pushed off the bedclothes, then swiveled to sit on the edge of the bed, his usual vitality returning. “She kept talking about how this Old Ways elixir she’d heard about was the best thing for ‘awakening’ nonmagical humans—dozers, like me.”

  “And you took it?” Dayna blurted. “Deuce, how could you?”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing.” He rubbed his head. “Lily brought out a couple of cocktails from the kitchen and made a toast. ‘Here’s to moving on,’ she said. She seemed resigned to splitting up. I thought I’d finally convinced her to see things my way. So I wasn’t going to quibble at that point.”

  T.J. remembered the cocktail glasses. The spill. The sweet and sour flavor of the liquid he’d tasted. A conversion potion?

  “She didn’t tell me what it was until too late,” Deuce said. “By then, everything was getting kind of foggy. I remember feeling weird. Powerful. Something stank, like burnt matches—”

  “That’s what magic smells like,” T.J. said. Appalled that any witch would go to the lengths Lily had, he glanced at Dayna.

  She refused to meet his eyes. Instead, she fussed over Deuce, her expression closed. He didn’t have time to wonder why.

  “The healer said you’re lucky to have survived,” T.J. told Deuce. “Apparently being thick-headed saved your ass this time.”

  “Oh yeah?” Deuce seemed pleased—and revitalized. “That’s cool. Maybe someday being a pain in the ass will save yours.”

  “Real funny, you two.” Obviously more sober now, Dayna put her hand on Deuce’s shoulder. She peered into his eyes with evident concern. “But I’ve already seen one person die tonight, and I don’t ever want to see another. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  Deuce blinked. “Someone died tonight?”

  “A human. At Janus.” Dayna nodded, explaining in a shaky tone about the gardener who’d fallen from the mezzanine. “Apparently, it wasn’t the fall that killed him, though—the poor man. The paramedics thought it was probably a brain aneurysm.”

  “It wasn’t an aneurysm.” T.J. stared at them, suddenly struck by the pattern of events they’d seen. “It was a failed conversion. Exactly like the one Deuce just survived. The difference is, those gardeners got dosed with the elixir and tried to use their new magic—like Henry Obijuwa did.” For a moment, T.J. fell silent, remembering his friend. Then he gazed at Deuce. “Even dosed, you were too pigheaded to succumb.”

  “Hey, the last thing I want is magic.” Deuce shuddered.

  “Well, your aversion to the magical world probably saved your life.” Gratified by that, T.J. gave him a somber nod. “Because it’s looking like someone in Covenhaven is trying to convert humans into witches—and the results are deadly.”

  “You can’t convert humans into witches,” Dayna argued. “Surely that would have been covered in cusping-witch class.”

  T.J. shook his head. “Cusping-witch classes teach an IAB-approved curriculum. Those lessons barely scratch the surface of witchstory and culture and magical lore. Why do you think the bureau stole cusping-witch training from the covens?”

  “I don’t know…Because Leo Garmin is a control freak?”

  “Because it serves the IAB to keep witchfolk ignorant.”

  With evident skepticism, Dayna frowned at him. But before T.J. could say more to defend his position, Deuce spoke up.

  “The Followers believe conversion is possible and desirable. I read about it in the Book of The Old Ways.”

  Dayna frowned. “You read the Book of The Old Ways?”

  Resistance flowed from Deuce in waves. Then, grudgingly, “I was looking for a way to get unturned.”

  For a moment, T.J. and Dayna fell silent. His bonded witch gave Deuce a sympathetic look. “So…there wasn’t one?”

  His partner shook his head. “No. But I did find out a lot of unsavory myrmidon facts in that book. And I know this much for sure: The Followers want witches to dominate. They’re sick of being marginalized, and they blame people like me for it.”

  “Myrmidon want to live freely,” T.J. said, “without fear of persecution and without hiding. They believe it’s their right as witchfolk—as ‘superior’ witchfolk. But if this is an example of their methods…” He broke off, shaking his head. “I guess if there aren’t any humans, there aren’t any problems for them. If they increase their ranks by force, witchfolk will dominate.”

  “But the conversion elixir is deadly!” Dayna protested. “How would it help them to make new witches who instantly die?”

  “Potions are mutable. They’re probably still working on improving it. And judging by what we know already”—T.J. thought about what Jesse had told him about Henry’s use of legacy magic—“the myrmidon are very close to a working conversion elixir.”

  “Besides, to a Follower, a dead converted witch is better than a living ignorant ‘dozer,’” Deuce said grimly. “As a human, that position didn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.”

  They stared at each other, the room growing colder.

  “The Hallowe’en Festival kicks off tomorrow, right after graduation.” T.J. crossed his arms. “Soon there’ll be thousands more humans at risk in Covenhaven. If that elixir gets out—”

  “It could happen way too easily,” Deuce said. “Concession stands, sales at the farmers’ market, roving vendors…”

  The Followers’ plan unfolded in T.J.’s mind, easy to see now that the pieces were coming together. The annual festival, always so popular with residents and tourists alike, would act as a lure and a mechanism for conversion at once. After the Followers succeeded here in Covenhaven, they would spread their conversion attempts everywhere. It mattered little to them whether the humans they dosed with the elixir converted or died.

  He was a Patayan guardian. He couldn’t allow this to happen. Just as his magus’s tocsin had foreseen, dark forces were here in Covenhaven. They had to be stopped. Whether they were led by Lily Abbot—which seemed likely, given her use of the elixir on Deuce—or another witch, they had to be defeated. The question now was, would Sumner Jacobs really join with him and the Patayan…even against a member of her own vixen pact?

  Before T.J. could pose the question, Deuce stepped up beside him, clearly ready to take on whatever lay ahead.

  Beside him, Dayna rubbed her arms, shivering. She glanced from T.J. to Deuce, then back again.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” she announced. “How do we stop them?”

  Obviously taken aback by her pugnacious tone, Deuce stared. At his partner’s incredulous expression, T.J. stifled a laugh.

  “What’s with you two?” Dayna asked. “Come on! We can’t let the Followers run amok with that potion. I have a lot of human friends. I’d rather not see them forcibly ‘converted.’ So let’s go!”

  Filled with love for her—and admiration for her courage, however misguided it was—T.J. turned to his bonded witch. He made sure to soften his voice. “You don’t realize what we’re up against, Dayna. I can see that you’re ready to fight, but—”

  “Are you kidding me? I was born for this moment, T.J. I have awesome magic skills. You have no idea.” Excitedly, Dayna faced him. Liquor still lingered on her breath. “I had no idea, until tonight, actually, but now I do. I’m pretty sure I can take on a bunch of The Old Ways zealots. How tough can they be?”

  “They’ve already killed three people,” Deuce pointed out.

  “And you aren’t ready for this,” T.J. said gently. “You’re not equipped for a battle. Your magic is not purposeful enough.” He looked at Deuce. His partner gave
him a nod. “We’re going to fight the Followers. You’re staying here, where it’s safe.”

  Appearing crestfallen, Dayna stared at him, her eyes filled with tears. Then she sniffled. She jabbed her chin upward.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, T.J. I’m going with you.”

  No. This was a terrible time for her rebellious, stubborn streak to kick in. What T.J. needed now was a powerful vixen witch like Sumner on his side—not an eager, cute-but-clumsy runaway witch who still couldn’t conjure a decent cloaking spell. He didn’t want to hurt her. But too much was at stake to let his feelings for his bonded witch dictate his actions.

  “You need me,” Dayna insisted. “I found out something—”

  “No. You weaken my magic.” T.J. frowned at her. He fisted his hands, then turned his back. “I need you to stay away.”

  With patent disbelief, Dayna followed him to the doorway. She pointed her finger at him. “You’re the one who trained me! You know how much my magic is improving. I can see your aura!”

  “Not for much longer, you can’t. I’m leaving. Stay here, where you’ll be safe. Wait here for me.” Stoically, T.J. looked at Deuce. “Are you sure you’re ready for this? A half hour ago, you were practically comatose. And before that, you were still—”

  “A turned human. I know.” Deuce’s eyes glimmered with humor, but his face looked taut with determination. “And that’s why I’m going. Being turned gives me twice as much reason to send those motherfuckers a message. As long as I’m around to stop them, nobody else is getting turned against their will.”

  “Or killed,” T.J. reminded him. “That potion is lethal.”

  “No. You’re both crazy!” With her hands on her hips, Dayna confronted them. She eyed Deuce first. “You should go to the hospital, get some treatment, and sleep it off. In that order. And you,” she told T.J. “You should believe in me for once. I’m telling you, I found out something important tonight.”