by Megan Morgan
She stared at him, anger flaring. Then, realization and horror flooded in.
“Are you—do you have a crush on me?”
He snapped back, as if she’d reached out and slapped him, and color erupted in his cheeks, bright red below his glasses.
“That’s a very elementary school way of putting it.” He laughed, high-pitched. “I admire you, I find you intriguing. And I think we make a good team. Would I like to pursue more? Well…I wouldn’t be against it, that’s all.”
She slammed the book shut. Her desire to be polite battled with her revulsion. He wasn’t an unattractive man, but his absolutely abhorrent personality repulsed her and she had to fight the urge to either laugh, scream, or flee—or all three.
“Holden, just…no. No.” She slid to the edge of the booth and grabbed up her purse and the book. She stood. “No. Absolutely not.”
He sank down in his seat. “Lorena. I didn’t mean—”
“You’re an asshole,” she blurted out. “A complete and utter asshole. I wish you the best in life, I really do. I hope you find someone right for you. But it’s not going to happen until you change the way you treat people. You’re going to have to do some growing up if you want to be happy. I’ll take a cab to the airport. See you in Chicago.”
He gaped at her. She walked away.
“Lorena!” he called after her as she walked out the door.
She didn’t look back.
She had a set of keys to the truck. They were supposed to park it at the airport and the agency would pick it up. She unlocked it and got her suitcase and duffel bag out. Could she change her flight? Or at least request a new seat not near him?
She started down the street. Her phone rang. She checked it, hopes rising, but it was Holden. She turned it on silent and kept walking.
Within a block, she came across a coffee shop and went inside. She had to un-muddle her brain and consider her options before she made her way to the airport.
The place wasn’t as crowded as the diner. She ordered a coffee and sat down heavily at a corner table. She checked her phone. She had two missed calls, a voicemail, and a text message, all from Holden. He had broken the record for obsessive messaging in a ten-minute time span.
She took out the book again. Maybe she would find a section on hexes.
* * * *
The woods were unusually quiet—and stinking. The agency was good at killing Wolvites, but they didn’t care much about the corpses. Deacon should have expected as much. The stench of blinked Wolvites would have been nasty to a normal person, but to a Lycan it was particularly stomach churning.
“Maybe we ought to do some cleaning up.” Jack spoke from behind his hand.
They stood on a ridge, looking down at a reeking, hairy pile below. Flies buzzed so thick they sounded like a swarm of locusts.
“We’d have to burn down the whole damn woods.” Zeke had his nose covered too. “Can’t believe they just left the damn things out here. Ain’t this some kind of health hazard?”
“Least it’ll give the buzzards something to eat.” Deacon squinted at the sky, where plenty of big black birds circled. “They still got the holler closed off. Probably didn’t expect idiots like us to come out here.”
“It won’t take long for them to be picked clean.” Jack peered over the edge. “Between the buzzards and bears and wolves. Nature is as nature does, I reckon.”
“Looks like your house the other night.” Zeke elbowed Jack.
Jack huffed into his hand. “Except this ain’t costing anyone a whole heap of insurance claims!”
They continued on, following the trail they usually took into the Wolvite’s stomping grounds. Their journey so far had been peaceful. Normally, they would have had to shoot a few Wolvites before they got this far. The quiet made Deacon nervous.
They reached the ridge that overlooked the caves, a spot they knew well and often used as a vantage point. Stillness reigned there, as well. Buzzards cawed in the distance. Black Mountain rose proud and stoic above the holler, and cast everything in shadow.
“Least the air’s fresher up here,” Zeke said. “They must have driven them all out of the caves and up through the holler, don’t see any corpses around.”
Below, the caves gaped in the roots of the mountain. They’d never ventured too far into those foreboding tunnels. The cave systems stretched back for miles, allowing the beasts natural secure lairs even a Lycan wouldn’t wander into without being heavily armed.
“Looks like they blew up some of them,” Jack said.
Indeed, a few of the cave mouths were blocked up now by big stones and rubble.
Something caught Deacon’s eye. “What’s that, a fire?” He pointed.
A thin ribbon of smoke rose from the trees on the opposite wall of the holler.
“Let’s go find out,” Jack said.
They shouldered their guns and picked their way down the ridge, using a jagged path they’d navigated for years. Deacon’s balance and senses were things he took for granted, but he got well reminded of them when he had to concentrate them.
Halfway down the ridge they stopped, and looked into the trees on the wall across from them. The spot where the smoke came from was visible. Deacon knew immediately what he saw. They’d burnt enough Wolvites in his Daddy’s pit to know a Wolvite pyre when he glimpsed one.
“Someone’s burning the bodies,” Jack said. “Is the agency out here? Is that why there ain’t no corpses around this spot?”
“We better be careful,” Zeke whispered. “If they catch us out here, they’ll give us hell and slap us with a fine.”
Deacon looked up and down the holler. No movement, no human sounds. He gazed across at the smoldering, blackened heap. “Maybe this was their half-assed attempt to take care of things before they cleared out.”
“We ought to get out of here,” Jack said.
“We can’t leave.” Deacon gripped his arm. “We gotta keep looking. There’s gotta be something out here, a clue at least. We have to find her.”
Jack looked at Zeke. “I got a feeling we need to look in those caves. And even now, that’s a dangerous prospect. Any of them survived, that’s where they’ll be hiding.”
“We’ll leave that for last,” Deacon said. “Just keep looking out here for now.”
“We should split up,” Zeke suggested. “Easier to hide by ourselves, if we come across agency people. We’ll cover more ground that way, too.”
Deacon patted the radio on his hip. “We’ll turn on the walkie-talkies so we can keep in touch.” He pulled his cell phone out and checked the time. “One hour, then we’ll meet down by the cave mouths.”
They walked back up on the ridge, turned on their radios, and tuned in to the same channel. After checking their weapons and ammo, they parted ways.
Deacon kept to the top of the ridge for a piece, then made his way down into the trees. He kept his eyes peeled and his ears open, but he still had no idea what he was looking for.
He pulled the necklace out of his pocket and wound it around his wrist. Maybe if he had it on, it would lure Dafydd out. Deacon could get some information out of him, at the end of his gun barrel if need be. He still owed him one from last night.
He hiked into the trees.
* * * *
Lorena sipped her coffee and kept one eye on the time. She’d looked up a cab company, but she’d become engrossed in the book and wasn’t focused on leaving now.
She’d found a spell for making wards, and the process was easier than she imagined. It also brought back memories.
When she was a little girl, rabbits and gophers were constantly getting into her grandmother’s vegetable garden. After a few futile rounds of trying the usual means to keep them out—fencing, salt, ditches—her grandmother decided to put up a ward.
Lorena would walk through the cabbage rows with her, the scent of turned earth and fresh spring growth making her feel alert and alive. She didn’t realize then that nature activated her power
s, she just felt better outside, when she was playing in the yard, walking in the woods, or wandering the farm.
“A ward only lasts, at most, two days,” her grandmother told her. “So it won’t keep them out long. But it will give me some time to figure out something more permanent.”
Her grandmother explained wards kept out what they were specifically constructed against: weather, animals, or people. The two of them pulled on garden gloves and Lorena helped her draw a line of salt and lye, mixed with herbs, around the edge of the garden.
“You don’t always need this,” her grandmother said. “You can put up a ward for a few minutes with just a spell, but this gives it an anchor and makes it last longer.”
At that point in Lorena’s life, she wanted to grow up to be a smart witch like her grandmother, and so she listened to her every word.
With the line down, her grandmother cast the spell. Four words. Paries parietis cedo bestia—bestia being Latin for “animal.” And just like that, the gophers and rabbits stayed away. During the two day reprieve, her grandmother concocted a mulch mixture to keep them out permanently.
Lorena gazed at that familiar incantation written in the book. Bestia could be replaced with tempestas for weather, or homo hominis, for people. How might her life have been different if she’d never left that farm, if she’d stuck with her desire to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps. Would she be a powerful witch today? Would she even be working for the agency?
She returned to the entry for the Potion of Enrapture, a combination of herbs brewed during a certain moon phase. Footnotes at the bottom led her to other pages that entailed spells and rituals to strengthen the enrapture.
Her skin crawled. She recalled Hazel bragging about love spells.
The potion could be made into a tea or added to other liquids and fed unsuspecting to the target. The accompanying spells were long and strange. The more she read, the more she detested it. The whole thing was worse than just shady or desperate—it was pure violation.
“Disgusting,” she muttered. “Maybe I don’t want to be a witch after all.”
Other spells she found were questionable too. Spells to coax the truth, to uncover secrets, coercion tactics, spells of silencing and suppressing. Though a good portion of the book covered healing and strengthening, these questionable things woven into the mix made her uneasy.
She considered mailing the book back to Hazel with a strongly-worded letter of condemnation.
Finally, she closed the book, finished her coffee, and started gathering her things. The time had come to call a cab and head to the airport, and deal with Holden for the next few hours.
As she stood, a foreboding sensation filled her, so powerful and sudden it made her fall back in her chair. Panic and urgency, something she had experienced once already. She nearly screamed.
Deacon, in danger.
Chapter 20
Deacon grumbled at his cell phone. No service out in the sticks, that’s why they used walkie-talkies to communicate. Still, he took a picture of the delicate white flowers he’d come across to send to Lorena later. They reminded him of the morning next to the pool. If they were going to be apart for three weeks, he would send a few dirty thoughts her way.
He’d been tromping around for nearly half an hour and hadn’t come across anything, Wolvite, human, or otherwise. He’d checked in with his cousins and they were empty-handed as well. He started to doubt himself.
Nonetheless, he continued on his path. The trail cut through the holler under cave mouths that were situated a good twenty feet up the mountain wall. They were silent, gaping maws, gateways to the unknown, and probably his only hope at finding anything.
Maybe she’d been killed in the raid. God was surely a trickster if Deacon finally came upon her, only to find her a few days dead.
Memories of her didn’t come clear to him. He was only eight when she vanished. At that age, he was into sports, fishing, hunting with his Daddy, and getting rough and tumble with his cousins. Girls were gross and the two of them had their stupid sibling squabbles. Her room was pink and she liked horses, and one time she screamed and punched him because he put a caterpillar in one of her Barbie sneakers.
But when he thought on it, he also remembered them walking home from the bus stop after school, and her chasing an older neighbor boy with a stick for picking on him. He remembered her sneaking him a piece of cake when he got sent to his room without dessert for being a jerk at the dinner table. She took care of his fish when he went to summer camp. She taught him to swim.
What sort of woman would she have grown up to be, if she’d never been snatched out of Blue Ditch? Would she have gone to college? Would Deacon be giving her boyfriends a hard time? Would she be married and have children?
He jerked out of his melancholy as static cut across his walkie-talkie. He pulled it off his hip.
“Guys!” It was Jack. “Guys!”
“What’s up, Jack?” Deacon spoke into the radio.
Silence. Deacon frowned.
The radio popped back on, mostly static, but Jack kept yelling, muffled and indistinct.
“What was that?” Deacon asked.
No reply. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
The radio popped back on. This time, Zeke came through. “You hear that, Deacon?”
“I did. Sounded like he was yelling something. You catch it?”
“Negative.”
Deacon waited, breath held, for Jack to come back on. His worry turned to fear. Something had happened.
“You know where he’s at?” he asked Zeke.
“I don’t.”
Deacon turned back down the trail. “Meet me at the caves. We gotta find him, something’s wrong.”
“All right.”
Deacon hurried back the way he’d come, praying the radio would cut on again and Jack would just be cursing because he tripped or slid down a hill. Maybe splitting up was a bad idea, even if they did cover more ground. So far, it had been pointless.
A sound, definitely not the radio, made Deacon stop in his tracks. A familiar growl.
He whirled around and stared up at the cave mouth directly above him, where the sound seemed to come from. He tightened his grip on his gun. A ridge jutted out from the cave, wide enough something might be able to lurk up there out of sight and watch him.
Nothing stirred. He scanned the trees around him, and sniffed the air. He didn’t see, hear, or smell a Wolvite.
Wary, he took off again. Damn skulking Wolvites would have to wait. They had to find Jack.
A moment later, another growl sounded, louder and closer. He spun around and aimed his gun into the trees.
Nothing there. His blood boiled.
“You stalking me?” he called out. “Ain’t enough of you been killed already?”
He would have taken a shot to scare it, but Zeke might hear and get even more worried. He’d only shoot if he absolutely had to.
The forest was still, as if mocking him. He didn’t need this nonsense right now.
“You best scamper off! You keep following me, I’m gonna kill you.” Given what he’d seen last night, the thing might understand him. “Go on, get out of here.”
He turned and started down the path again. He kept his gun at the ready, just in case.
He got about ten feet when a woman’s voice startled him. “Deacon!”
His heart leapt into his throat to choke him.
In turning around, he caught a glimpse of something on the ridge above—someone peeking over the edge, but they pulled back as quick as he looked.
“Chelsea?” he yelled up, his voice filled with hope and alarm.
All was silent. No one appeared on the ridge.
His heart pounded in his ears. He had to get up there, but he also had to help Zeke find Jack.
He pulled out his radio.
“Zeke, I’ll be there quick as I can. Try to locate Jack. I just found something.”
Zeke’s voice cut on. �
�I’m keeping an eye out for him. You all right?”
“Yeah.”
Deacon hiked his shotgun strap over his shoulder and found a spot where he could climb the wall. The rocks formed a treacherous makeshift set of stairs, but his balance kept him safe.
He ascended the wall, anxious and frantic. He couldn’t be mistaken—he’d heard a woman’s voice, and he’d seen a person. No woman had reason to be out here, certainly not one who knew his name.
The Wolvites might be messing with him, too. If they could project human forms, maybe they could project false voices, too.
When he reached the top of the ridge, he prepared himself for anything. Adrenaline pumped through his veins. He found—
Nothing.
He stood on the narrow strip of rock, right in front of the cave. The mountain rose above him. The trees stretched up from the holler floor and created an orange wall on his right.
Maybe she went inside the cave.
“Chelsea? You here?”
Cool air flowed over him from inside, and it smelled like water and moss and things dank and dark.
He had to find Zeke and Jack and bring them back here. Chelsea or not, stumbling into a dark cave deep in Wolvite territory by himself would be a damn fool move. All his Lycan senses and reflexes wouldn’t help him in the pitch black, in a place he didn’t know, where they had the advantage.
And yet, his sister might be close by. He’d found her. She was alive. It had to be her…
A delicate shower of rocks tumbled down in front of the cave mouth. On guard, gripping his gun, he looked up.
And gasped.
Someone sat on a narrow rock outcropping a few feet above the cave, their back to him. Judging by the delicate frame and long brown hair, it was a woman. A woman wearing a red hoodie.
“Chelsea?” He narrowed his eyes. He knew that hoodie, and that hair.
He took a step back to see her better. She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Mel,” he snarled. “What the hell are you—”
Suddenly, a vile scent overwhelmed him and choked off his words. The stench of Wolvite. Something heavy and hot pressed against his back.
