She didn’t know. Did she care? She was about to find out.
A large wolf broke through a window and landed on his four paws. He glowed with a red aura, bits of the black ooze clinging to him. He shook and parts of it flowed off, but most of it clung to him.
The ooze could be a problem. The dampener? Maybe it wasn’t a binding spell. Maybe it was something she couldn’t fight. What could she do against it?
Several other auras lit on the floor a floor below her.
Lots of people walked, guns in their arms. The shifters were bound to the floor in crouched positions.
A thought occurred to her. Shifter vision. Would it override whatever protection was in place? Would it fight the ooze?
The only way to find out was to try.
She switched into shifter vision. The black ooze morphed with the walls, providing structure. She turned her gaze to the shifters crouched on the floor in the middle of the room. Their animal spirits’ heads rose to look at her.
A purple bear.
A red otter.
A green cat.
A silver gorilla.
Chuck, in wolf form, crouched on the ground, writhing in pain. When she shifted her vision to him, however, his red wolf head rose to meet her gaze. His physical wolf head rose to follow it. He got to his feet and shook his coat, the black ooze flinging from him like water droplets.
The purple bear rose to its feet, her human rising with her. The ropes that had bound them both snapped.
The red otter scrambled to all fours as he gnawed on his bindings.
The green cat growled, the ropes falling away as she morphed from human to animal.
The silver gorilla issued a guttural roar, breaking the ropes that bound him.
The other shifters did the same. One by one, as her gaze touched them. They shifted shape, broke their ropes, and gathered to their feet, paws, or wings.
Well, that was one thing fixed. The shifters could take care of themselves. Well, as long as she kept her vision and shifter vision. Where were the Blackman witches? What did they intend to do? And how was she supposed to stave them off?
She really didn’t have time to wonder.
One of the guards turned his attention on her, realizing that she had no intention on killing the shifters—obviously. He pointed his gun at her.
Her fingers pulled her pistol out of her holster before she had much time to think. She cocked it and shot.
Not before he’d released a spray.
Completely missing her.
She spun to see if he’d managed to tag anyone else.
He had.
Chuck. He panted, still in wolf form. As soon as her shifter vision set on him, he lifted his head and began to move again.
One of the shifter women shouted in pain.
Paige turned her gaze back to them.
When her attention had been shifted away, they’d been frozen. Or, at least, that’s what she figured because they all appeared to just now be picking themselves off the floor. Again.
Damn it!
Another of the guards turned toward her.
Shit.
Keeping her gaze directed at the shifters, she raised her gun in her off-hand and pointed it in the general direction of the guard. Not a great idea. But there were only more guards standing behind him, so if she missed him, chances were good a bullet would find another of his compatriots.
She hoped.
Paige ducked behind a column, keeping her eyes pointed toward the shifters. With the assistance of her gaze, the shifters had gained full animal form and were taking care of the guards on their own.
Good for them, but this wasn’t entirely helpful for her. She was stuck…staring.
Where was Lucius? Had he not been able to find a way in? That seemed odd for a demon. But maybe he was on the outside still, looking for a way to break the ward.
Or, what if the Blackmans knew that she was the one coming and had found a way to ward off demons?
Shit.
Someone kicked a chair behind her. Spinning, she hit the man’s gun with her right hand—quite by accident, but she felt like a fuckin’ ninja—and followed it through with a pistol butt to the face. That last part was on purpose. The fact that she hit mostly just his nose was not. He stumbled backward, clutching his face.
Chuck staggered to his feet, his red wolf head rising to meet her gaze.
A gun went off.
Someone screamed in pain behind her.
Another whimpered.
A man groaned.
Something hard connected with flesh and someone cried out.
“I can’t keep this up forever,” she shouted to Chuck over the sound of fighting.
“Get in there so I can see you all at the same time.”
Chuck nodded his massive wolf head and walked painfully into the melee, picking up speed as he went.
The man she’d temporarily disabled roared.
Damn it.
She grabbed her gun with her right hand and shot two rounds into him.
He grunted in pain and fell to the floor.
Still not dead. She kicked his gun away from him and turned her attention back to the middle of the warehouse.
The shifters hadn’t fared so well when her attention had been away. Two of them lay on the ground in full human form, unmoving. Three more lay half-human on the ground, but at least they moved. One inched her arm toward a gun. Another crawled toward a column, using it as support to help him to his feet.
As soon as her shifter vision gaze landed on them, their spirit animals rose as if getting a charge-up, their humans following.
Paige plugged the guard closest to her with another two bullets, opened her revolver and calmly removed the empty shells. She stepped behind the column closest to her for the barest of cover and reloaded through feel alone. She couldn’t risk taking her gaze off the shifters. Not again.
Chuck regained more power as his red wolf spirit surged in raging fuel. He tore at the throat of one of the guards, cutting off the mans’ screams.
She couldn’t keep the shifter vision going forever. She needed a new solution. Searching along the walls, she renewed her efforts to find anything different.
There. Just under the black ooze glimmered the faint outlines of symbols. She didn’t recognize any of them, but she knew this has to be what had formed the boundary. All she had to do was mar one of the symbols and the spell would be broken.
Right?
Well, in theory anyway.
Keeping her eyes on the shifters and her attention on the wall, she backed up. There were fewer guards, and they were all focused on the center of the room.
Well, or fleeing. Thank goodness.
Step by careful step she backed up to the wall, around the odd pieces of furniture in piles of debris..
She flung herself to the ground as debris and random pieces of paper shot by her head followed by the whizzing of bullets. They needed to get the rifles out of the hands of guards, but she had no way of getting that information to the shifters.
Cawli stirred within her. He seemed to latch on to the information she just provided, then disappeared.
Great. Awesome.
Except that somehow he had managed to get that command out to the rest of the shifters. Instead of going for arms, legs, necks, abdomens, the shifters went for the guns.
Well, wasn’t that a neat trick?
With the threat of bullets no longer eminent, she flicked her gaze to the wall, searching for the nearest symbol. She found it and inched toward it, returning her gaze to the shifters. She traced her fingertips along the wall, the electric buzz of the symbol trailing up her arm. The buzz became painful. She found the symbol.
Reaching for her pocket, she pulled out her pocketknife and opened it with her thumb. She took her gaze away from the shifters just long enough to give her hand direction, and then scraped the wall, raking the line of the symbol.
A wave of bright, blue and inky black power swept acros
s the floor, then skidded backwards.
It hit her. Hard, slamming her against the wall.
Her ears rang.
The air was still.
She rose onto her elbow, turning slightly to see the shifters. Everyone lay on the floor, like her.
The walls no longer oozed black. The symbols were now barren and dull, no longer glowing with life.
One of the guards stood up. He looked around him as though confused.
The other guards stood up as well, looking around themselves, uncertain.
Victory.
Awesome.
The inky boundary was down. Shifters lay in various states of shift from the explosion of the boundary, but they all appeared to be alive.
Except for two.
All in all, not bad.
She could go to her family now. Finally!
She wanted to know how Dexx and Gomez were doing, but calling could be bad. It worked miraculously in Hollywood, but there was no way it worked in real life. In real life, a phone call at the wrong time could get a person killed.
No. She re-holstered her pistol and felt for her keys. Still in her pocket. Excellent.
She went to Chuck’s side and knelt. He was still in wolf form, but lay on his side, panting. She knelt at his back, mindful that kneeling anywhere near his paws was a bad idea. Claws. Granted, dog claws, but claws nonetheless. She pressed her hand on his ribs. “Chuck, are you okay?”
He whuffed a sigh, lifted his large wolf head and set it gently back on the ground again. His fur retreated. His ribs grew larger. Soon, her hand lay on human flesh as his front legs became arms, his paws hands. He blinked and his now human eyes turned and looked up at her. “We are fine.”
Which was good, but this wasn’t over. Something here wasn’t right. She’d just fought back and won. Even with Ethel overriding what the Galsborys saw, at least one of the guards had to have called them. Right?
No call. That was good news. Wasn’t it?
She could hope.
“Go,” Chuck said, slowly picking himself up off the floor. “Save your family. It is doubtful the grove made it past the boundaries. Not if the boundaries are the same as they were here.”
Paige had to assume that they were. If she was attacking another witch family, she’d ward against any type of magick she could think of.
She nodded and stood. “Lucius,” she called softly.
He walked through a door on the far end, a thick frown marring his face.
She met him half-way. “Where did you go?”
“I couldn’t get through,” he muttered.
“And when I took the boundary down?”
He narrowed his eyes. “I was tracking the witches.”
Something she was keen to do. “Do you know where they are?”
He nodded. “Do you have any idea why the Blackmans would do this?”
She had one guess. Merry Eastwood. “Not really. I barely just found out they even exist. So…”
“Now we go to your family?”
Paige nodded. “Let’s go. It’s a twenty minute drive from here.”
“No. Reach into my soul, but instead of shoving me through the Gate, tap into my abilities. Travel through the spaces between dimensions and you use the power of the location you received from your spell to guide you to your family.”
Much faster. “You said you know where my family is.”
“Yes. I do, but so do you and this is something you are going to need to learn if what I suspect is true.”
“And what’s that?”
He clamped his lips shut and didn’t provide any additional information.
Asshole.
She took in a deep breath, touched on her gift, and released her inky and silver witch hands. She shoved them deep within his glowing white soul and searched for the ability to move.
The warehouse slid away as if it was nothing more than a watercolor landscape in a rainstorm.
A dark storm raged around them. Sounds she couldn’t quite make out and visions that were almost there, but only when she wasn’t looking directly at them.
Leah.
She had the location the water had given her which was more than just an address. She recalled all the information the water had given her. The feel of the place’s location in relation to space and dirt and water and time. She felt the pull of her daughter’s life on her soul in all the places that refused to allow her to forget someone so important.
The black storm dissipated as if opening the door from a dark room into another was a battle.
First, all the objects that were red appeared.
A car parked on the side of the street.
The letters of the sign of the Chinese restaurant across the street.
Yellow was next.
The fire hydrant on the corner.
The letters on what might have been a trash dumpster in an alley.
A yellow bumper sticker.
The world opened to her in that manner until she saw a street. Downtown residential. Apartments on the second story floors. Store fronts on the street level. Cars parked on the sides of the streets.
She took a step forward and stopped, removing her hand from the middle of Lucius’ chest.
He stumbled, his hand raised, and coughed. “I will not be offering that again soon.”
“I’m okay with that.” She turned, trying to figure out where they were. This wasn’t a street she was familiar with, though that really didn’t mean anything. She might be a native to the area, but that didn’t mean she knew every street. She knew where they were on the map. But what direction was she supposed to be going in?
An almost magnetic pull turned her toward the left.
A building stood before her. Massive. A laundromat dominated the ground floor. A small door hid beside it. It glowed softly as if a light radiated behind it.
She stepped over several branches that littered the street, then stopped, surveying the area.
Limbs. Trees.
The grove had attacked and, judging by the litter of tree limbs, they’d lost.
The street was covered in leaves and branches. It looked like the area had been hit by a hurricane.
Her heart pounding, Paige ran to the door, switching on witch vision. A towering wall of inky black. Blackman wards.
Even though the street was oddly—weirdly—abandoned at the moment, she had no doubt that there were people within the apartments in the surrounding buildings. Several had lights on. A few had moving shadows. More than a few had flickering lights of televisions.
No. She couldn’t afford to dismantle the wards as she had at the warehouse. The explosion of magick in a place like this could cause a lot of damage. Too many casualties.
The door glowed with a burning red light at the handle.
Frowning, she tried to assess what kind of spell was cast on it.
Lucius grabbed the handle, his flesh sizzling and pulled. “Ladies first.”
“Do you have any idea what was on that?”
“Yes. A heat spell. Really, Paige, you think this is the first time I’ve dealt with a witch before?”
They’d met when she’d been kidnapped by a mad man, drugged, had the spell cast into her bones, and then had him possess her. He’d been a demon trapped to a single location by an archangel and a witch. So, yeah. He might know a thing or two about witches.
It made her feel more than a little stupid that she couldn’t just look at a spell and know what it was. “How did you know?”
“The rune work in the aura.”
Paige twisted around to stare at the doorknob, but she saw nothing. She shook it off. For another time, another place. This wasn’t it.
He nodded and led them up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
“Lucius,” she called, as his feet drew dangerously close to a gold line that was drawn across the second to top step.
He stopped, tipped his head to the side, and stepped over it. “That one would have been tricky.”
Lucius stopped in front of a door on the second floor and gestured toward it. “They’re here.”
How was it that he had this odd intuition on what was beyond the door?
“You’ll understand more as you develop your gift. We can smell them.”
Smell. More smelling. Great. “Who?”
“Mandy, who is bleeding, though not badly. Leah, who remains unhurt, but is scared and mad. Reminds me of her mother. And Leslie who is bleeding internally. Dexx is somewhere on the premises, though I cannot immediately locate him.”
“Gomez?”
“Is a tree.”
Great. When a dryad lost a branch, how did that affect the human she transitioned into? Did she loose arms? Fingers? Hair? Toes?
Another day. Another time. Another place.
“Anyone else?” Paige asked.
“Well, yes. Of course. Derrick Blackman.”
Paige shook her head.
“Eldora Blackman. Well, rather quite a few of them.”
Where were the damned Galsborys?
“How much further do you want me to go?”
Paige raised her chin. “Stay out here. I’ll go in alone, but if it sounds like I’m losing, get in there. We will need to break the boundaries here as well.”
“They’re here?”
“You can’t see them?” Inky walls blanketed the doors and the apartment they stood in front of.
“No. I could not at the warehouse, either.”
“Hmm.” She switched to shifter vision and searched for the symbol. There. Beside the door in the hallway. “After I’m in and have a moment to assess the situation, you break the symbol here. If I break it, it’ll knock everyone out. Magick will go everywhere. I don’t know how it’ll effect everything. See what you can do. But if it does release an explosion of energy, I want to be inside that room.”
Lucius stared at the wall where she pointed. “Where? What am I looking at?”
Apparently, nothing. “Just trust me. There’s a symbol right here. You take your knife and you gouge the wall. The boundaries will fall.” Hopefully.
Lucius nodded. “How long do you want me to give you?”
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