by Renee George
“Trust me, Tiz. This is the one kind of spell I know how to work.” I picked up the board, and we crawled through the fence. The tracks glowed across the field for as far as I could see. The phone call message had come in more than forty minutes earlier. I worried Lily didn’t have the time it would take me to cover the area on foot. “I’m going to try a transport spell.”
“Dear Goddess kill me now.”
“You were complaining in the car that you wished I’d used one.”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t!” she chirped. “You’re going to turn me wrong side up and inside out.”
“That is a risk,” I agreed without any real conviction. I was pretty sure I could get us from one place to the other unharmed. I just wasn’t sure where we would end up. “You can stay here.”
“And let you have all the fun. No way. Besides, I’m spoiling to skin that rotten beaver for his cheap shot last night. The side of my head still smarts.” She clung to me like her life depended on it. “Do eet!”
I took a deep breath and crossed my fingers. Desperation brought the words. I could only hope I didn’t say something that would land me in a lava pit.
“Goddess show us the path’s end.
Help us find our in-need friend.
Transport us far across this land.
Hold us safely in your hand.
Please don’t put us up a tree.
Transport us now, so mote it be.”
Tizzy snickered in my ear. “You’re really bad a poetr-eeeeeee!” Her squeal ended when we blinked out. When we blinked back in it continued. “Eeeeeeee! What the fading hell?”
We were not on the other side of an open field. Instead, we’d landed in some small dark room.
Tizzy sneezed. “There’s so much dust!”
“Where are we?”
“It’s your stupid spell,” Tiz hissed. “Make a light, Haze.”
“I’d blow this place up.” Probably. I fumbled around until my fingers alighted on a handle. I turned it and opened a door. A small amount of light poured in, and I could see we were in some kind of storage closet.
A thin layer of white powder coated Tiz’s fur, my hair, and my shirt. “What is this?” I touched it. It felt smooth and silky. “Some kind of powder. Maybe concrete silt.”
Tizzy coughed and hacked then examined her paws. “At least I still have all ten of my fingers. Damn, Haze. You chipped my manicure.”
Voices carried like a murmuring brook to our location. “Shhhh. I hear something.”
“I’m not deaf,” Tizzy whispered. “I hear them too.”
Quietly, we eased the door open enough to look outside. There was six feet of concrete floor in front of us with a staircase that went down. I crouched and made my way to the edge. Down below, I saw Adele Adams and Frank Leggert in a wide open space with a thick, gnarled tree growing up through the center of the floor.
Adele was working with Frank? It seemed too odd to be true. I stifled a gasp when I saw Clayton Driver carry Lily into the room like she was a sack of flour. He put her back against the tree and held her there while Frank started tying her to the trunk with a rope.
My hand instantly went to my gun, but it found nothing. Cripes! I’d left it in my purse. The purse that I’d left in Ford’s truck. My phone was in my pocket. I pulled it out to text Ford, but it dawned on me that I had no idea where the hell I was at. Goddessdamn transport spell.
I heard Lily moan, and my stomach clenched.
“Oh, Haze,” Tiz said in my ear, her voice full of trepidation. “Do something.”
Adele was a two-hundred-year-old witch with super witchy powers. I could barely manage a simple relocation spell. How was I supposed to take her down without a weapon? “I’m thinking.”
“I thought I saw smoke,” she quipped. “Quit thinking and start doing.” The windows on this upper level were dirty, some were even broken. Since I couldn’t discern any real utility for the building, I made the assumption it was abandoned. I couldn’t know for sure whether Frank had driven here with Lily, but I knew that Clayton had been at the crime scene when I got there. He most likely drove. But how far? The transportation spell felt like it had lasted only a few seconds, but what if it had taken longer?
I pulled up Ford’s phone number in messaging and texted: In an abandoned building. Unsure where. Unarmed. Adams, Driver, Leggert here. Lily hostage. Weird-ass tree in the middle of an empty warehouse-like first floor. Find me.
Dear Goddess let that be enough information for him to get here in time.
“Now what?” Tizzy whispered.
“How stupid are you, Frank?” Clayton Driver yelled. He poked a finger in Frank’s narrow chest. “I swear to the Goddess that beavers are the stupidest creatures.”
“Shut your mouth, Clayton,” Adele said. “Don’t be evoking the you know who in here.” When he gave her a blank stare, she said, “Starts with a G. Ends with an S.”
“Oh…right.”
Adele shook her head, her blonde hair flouncing around her shoulders. Clayton looked at her like a kid starved for candy. It appeared, she was using something other than her magical powers to keep him on a leash. “Bringing the Mason girl here was stupid. As long as she’s missing, that bitch Hazel Kinsey won’t stop digging around.”
“Then we’ll take care of her too.”
Adele slapped him. He growled, but she held her hand up, a fireball forming in her palm. “Try me, Cat.”
He backed down.
“We can’t touch the Kinsey girl. She is under Baba Yaga’s protection. Damnit! The girl showed no promise as a child. Even her mother thought she’d amount to nothing better than a slight step up from human. But I believe now that she carries more raw magic than I’ve seen in a long time.”
Ouch. That hurt. Adele had known my mother? Wait. She thought I had a lot of raw magic?
“Priscilla was key in these rituals.” She paced in front of the two Shifters. “Maybe you aren’t so dumb.” She touched Lily’s hair, and I focused my thoughts on burning her face off.
Nothing happened. Not that I expected anything would.
“We can use Hazel’s friend to get her to help finish the spell. And this time, Kent won’t be able to interfere.”
What? I was seriously struggling to process Adele’s revelations. My mother was a powerful evil witch, and my dad had stopped her somehow? If that were true, he wouldn’t have gotten thrown into witch jail. He cast a bond severing spell that was above his pay grade and caused my mom to disappear from the world entirely. That’s the story I’d been told.
I gestured to Tizzy to get down from my shoulder. She jumped to the floor and waited. “Stay here,” I mouthed. She nodded once.
The stairs were concrete, easy to descend without making a lot of noise. I had to stop this somehow. I could use Adele’s misconception that I might have some of my mother’s gifts to an advantage.
Frank Leggert snickered when Lily groaned again. What had they done to knock her out? The opiates. Both Boyd and Danny had recreational amounts of opiates in their system, but what if they hadn’t taken it willingly? It might take an elephant’s dose to put a Shifter out, and by the time the bad stuff started the drug would be wearing off.
Why hadn’t I seen it before?
“I know how we can get Hazel Kinsey here and helping,” Clayton said.
Adele gave him an appraising look. “How?”
Clayton reached back, grabbed Lily’s arm and with one quick jerk, he snapped it. The crack echoed against the walls. Lily screamed, suddenly alert.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Please don’t hurt her.”
Clayton smiled. “Just like that.”
He’d known I was there. How?
“I’m a werecougar, Agent Kinsey. I have a nose, I have ears, and I have eyes.”
Crap. Fifteen years of working with humans, I’d forgotten how attuned Shifters were to their senses.
“So glad you could join us, Hazel,” Adele said. I didn’t like her pleas
ed tone.
Clayton poked Lily’s arm. She cried out. “Don’t keep us waiting.”
I swore to the Goddess I was going fry his furry ass. As I walked the last ten steps to the floor, I asked, “How has the Baba Yaga not caught wind of your foul magic? Have you figured out a way to shield your powers against her?”
Adele laughed. It was lyrical and lovely, and it made me want to barf. “Carol can sit on Stonehenge and spin.” She laughed again.
“Stonehenge? As in the place in southern England where the…” Oh, Goddess. Was Adele really dabbling in… “You’re practicing druid magic.”
Her eyes widened. “You are definitely smarter than you look. Your mother would be proud.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing all this, Adele. You’re a powerful witch already.”
“But not the most powerful.” She shook her head. “And once that Zelda creature was born, I knew at that moment, I never would be. Especially now that Carol is dating the child’s father.” Adele shook her head. “Nepotism at its worst.”
Adele was jealous with a capital J. “So you’ve been learning druid spells to become more powerful than Baba Yaga? To what purpose?”
The two-hundred-year-old blonde witch shrugged. “Carol has her kingdom. Now I want mine.”
“And my mother was helping you?”
“Oh, darling girl,” Adele said, syrup thick in her words. “All of this was your mother’s idea.”
This little nugget of information took the wind right out of my sales. “Liar.”
“Not in this case.”
Frank and Clayton laughed. I threw my rage at them, lightning bolts shooting from my hands. I struck Frank in the leg. He went down like a screaming beaver with a large charred hole in his thigh. The second bolt bounced off a force field. I turned on Adele. She held her hand out, casting a protective bubble around Clayton.
“You can have, Frank, but Clayton is my pet.” Her eyes glowed with green as a red light bathed her skin. A fireball skimmed my shoulder as I took a diving roll toward the tree. I put myself between Lily and the scary-ass witch-druid.
“If you hurt Lily, I’ll never help you.”
A tall man with black hair walked into the room, and my stomach soured.
“Ease up, Adele. We need Hazel more than we need her friend’s pain.” Robert Townsend ran his hand through his neatly styled hair. “Hello, Agent Kinsey. So nice to see you again.”
Well, screw me blue, the raton was a stinking rat. “Why? Why would you help her?”
He held out his hand to Adele, and she took it. Robert smiled. “You misunderstand what’s going on here, Hazel. I’m not helping Adele. She’s helping me.”
“Pentagram on a popsicle stick,” I said. “I did not see this coming.”
“We are the Arete,” he said. “We strive for perfect magic.” He cupped Adele’s cheek, and she crooned.
Yuck. “You are completely nuts.”
He lifted his arms and began to wave his hands around in front of him. I thought he might be having a seizure for a moment until the symbols began appearing in the air. I recognized the H.
“Hagalaz.”
“Very good. It took me a long time without your mother to master using the rune without bringing down the wrath of nature.” He held up a piece of cut glass. “It was a matter of infusing some baubles with a druid spell for temperance and pairing the two. The last three sacrifices have proven we’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“Our own Utopia, of course.”
“You’ve been sniffing the glue too long.” Paradise Fails, once again. “You won’t get away with this.”
“There is nothing you can do, Hazel,” Adele said. “I’m not breaking any witch rules.”
“You are breaking every rule of common decency, you smug lunatic.”
“Sticks and stones will break Lily’s bones, but names will make me hurt you.” She flung another ball of fire at me. I screamed as the burning pitch hit my forearm.
“We need her,” Robert said.
“She’ll never help, my love. Can’t you see? She is stalling.”
Lily was in and out of it. The pain burning through the opiates in her system.
I said quickly:
“Bound be unbound, Goddess hear me.
Release my friend, so mote it be.”
The ropes wrapped around Lily dropped to the ground, and she crumpled to the floor. The witch and the three craphead Shifters started at me with abject surprise. They couldn’t have been more amazed than I was. I couldn’t believe the spell worked!
“Silence her!” Townsend ordered. “Don’t let her attract the Lady G.”
“Goddess,” I shouted. “Goddess hear me.”
Another fireball flew at me. I countered with a lightning bolt that Adele easily deflected.
A high-pitched screech made everyone look up. Tizzy, arms spread, wings flapping, glided down on us like a red, hairy angel of death. She hit Adele in the face then jumped on top of Robert before leaping into another gravity defying glide to where I stood.
“I’m with you, Haze.”
The pride I when I looked down at my fierce familiar, made my chest swell until it forced tears from my eyes. I stared down Adele.
“Goddess help me scratch this itch.
Give me strength to beat this bitch.”
Emerald green flames poured over me as my aura filled with an energy so powerful I thought it would explode me. I released the magic in one giant lightning bolt that headed straight for Adele. She tried to block it, but her druid magic was no match. A split second before it could zap her, Robert Townsend threw a giant mountain lion in the lightning’s path. The cougar blew up like a microwaved turkey wrapped in foil.
Goddess, I’d just whacked Clayton Driver. “Noooo!” My fury wasn’t sated. I threw another bolt, and this time, the beaver got it. The room reeked of singed fur.
The green flames were fading. I was losing energy. Townsend started rune casting on the air again, and Adele was bathed in green, red, blue, and yellow flames.
“Crap, we're screwed,” Tizzy yipped then said with a little too much excitement, “Now that Frank’s dead, do you think Colleen is free?”
“Not the time, Tiz.” She really did have beaver-fever.
“Right!” She scampered back behind me.
The flames were burning out fast. I could take one last shot at Adele or try and save my friend. I chose my friend. I focused my energy on creating a protective bubble for Tizzy and Lily. As Adele’s magical blaze burned brighter and thicker than any I’d ever seen, it sounded like a freight train gaining steam.
“Save yourself, Haze,” Lily yelled over the noise. She was awake now and cradling her broken arm. “Don’t die for me.”
“Forget it, Lily” I shouted as the protective bubble firmed into place. “I’m not going to desert you. Not again.”
A side door to the building blew in. I nearly faltered in my protection spell when I saw Ford run into the room, his face full of rage-y determination. Adele turned on him.
“No!” I shouted as a tremendous fireball sailed at him. My father, Kent Kinsey, knocked Ford sideways, and Chief Nichols, who’d run in after my father, threw up a protection spell. It wasn’t enough. Adele’s power had grown too strong for the warlock. When the bubble burst, so did Nichols.
Dear Goddess. Warlock goo flew everywhere. I gagged. Adele gagged. I guess the art of torturing people had done nothing to harden that reflex.
Ford and my dad ran to my side. A worthless witch, a brooding bear, a worthless warlock, a horny squirrel, and a broken cougar. The Fab Five we weren’t, but knowing I wasn’t fighting alone gave me a warm fuzzy.
The strong scent of snickerdoodles eased the fear building inside me. “I fight by your side, Haze.” Ford squeezed my hand. “You are brave. I’m proud to be your mate.” I was amazed how clearly I heard him over the hullabaloo of chaos magic. He let go of my hand and turned into a giant grizzly be
ar. He roared at the raccoon Shifter and his psycho witch girlfriend, the sound vibrating the air.
“We have to cut the binds that tie Adele to the tree,” my dad yelled, as the freight train of the witch’s magic grew louder.
“How? It’s not like we can see them?”
“Can’t we?” he asked.
As a famous real estate tycoon once said, it was all about location, location, location. I focused my power at Adele.
“Ties that bind this tree to thee.
Reveal yourself so all can see.
The ties that bind, so mote it be.”
A long glowing tether wrapped slithering around the tree’s roots flowed out across the room and speared straight through Robert Townsend’s chest, out his back, and into the flames consuming Adele. She gathered another large ball of nuclear flames in her arms. A vision of all of us ending up like Nichols made me shudder.
“Whatever you have planned, Dad, you better do it quick!”
Dad wiggled his fingers:
“Tree of Blood, Witch of Lies.
Slice away your mortal ties.
Earth. Water. Fire. Air.
Sever bonds to this earthly lair.”
The flames around Adele spiked. Robert Townsend tried to run, but Ford the Bear leaped the distance smashing him down with his massive paws. Next, he tore off Townsend’s head, and the raton was no more. Unfortunately, that still left Adele, and her power seemed to be going atomic bomb dangerous.
“Ford! Run!” The bear took one look at the witch as her flames went supernova and barreled his way toward me. I turned to my dad. “Uh, I think you maybe made it worse!”
“It should have worked.”
Ford, a massive man again, only naked now, took me in his arms and kissed me. A last act of love before dying. Hubba.
A sonic BOOM shook the entire building, and I looked up in time to get hit in the shoulder with a piece of charred meat. “Ew!”
The silence following the boom was deafening. My dad picked up Lily and carried her over the battlefield of body parts. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been proud to be his daughter. My eyes misted.
