Under Witch Curse (Moon Shadow Series)

by Maria Schneider

  My fists clenched. “Only Mat wasn’t an easy target.” I’d like to show him how lethal a witch could be. Lee may have burns from the fireballs, but he deserved worse.

  “I didn’t have a thing to do with it after Tam’s place.”

  It didn’t take a genius to see the lie. “You kidnapped a homeless guy and did a tat on him after Zandy attacked Mat,” I spat out.

  He shook his head. “No way. I told them I’d keep selling them tat designs and rent the place out. Why not? If Zandy happened to bring clients to the salon for body art and left them hosed while he checked his next target, that’s none of my business.”

  “You were with him today!” I shouted.

  He rubbed at the burns on his chest, but with a wince, left them alone. “Different biz. I was only the lookout. Zandy said if I helped him take down the place, I could have all the potions. He didn’t want any of them!” His eyes glimmered with greed. “You know how much cash I could make selling that stuff on the side at the salon? And it wouldn’t even be illegal.”

  Mat’s lips tightened with barely repressed rage.

  “Stealing them in the first place is illegal. On top of that, you don’t know what any of the spells are for,” I pointed out. Mat labeled the potions with broad strokes, leaving many a jar completely unlabeled. Instructions for any spell came only with the purchase.

  “Doesn’t matter. They’d buy the stuff. Those ladies, they have nothing but time and money. I’d tell them all that shit would make their husbands go wild. Or the eighty year old ones that they could get a boyfriend instead of shopping for a cure for loneliness. I could work that.”

  Despite another twenty-five thousand questions, we squeezed little else of use from him. He admitted he knew Zandy was still using the shop, and he admitted he considered getting back in on the deals, but he swore he hadn’t met anyone other than Jedi and Zandy. His physical description of Jedi as “some old white guy” was zero help. He didn’t know where he lived, but assumed he’d been staying with Zandy somewhere.

  Before White Feather and I departed, I pulled Lynx to the side. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Looked like you had it under control.”

  “Did you use the fire packet I tossed to you?”

  “I lost it?”

  “Liar. Do you want to know the word to set it off or are you just planning on copying the spell? I could train you, you know.”

  His eyes gleamed. “Lemme study it first. I can usually twist things to work. I can’t start them from scratch like you do, but I can keep them going.”

  The kid was...no longer a kid. But he was still a marvel. “Do not blow yourself up, okay? You know where I live if you want to ask questions instead of doing things your own way.” I hesitated before moving on, but it had to be done. “Can you get us in the hospital?”

  “Tonight?” Before the word popped out of his mouth he was already shaking his head. “You are not gonna do this one in the daylight!” The end was a feral hiss.

  “Patrick works there at night, Lynx!”

  “That could be a bonus, you know that, right?”

  “Nighttime means he’ll involve himself. That is not something I want to see. And I do not want to owe a vamp anything! Not a favor, not an implied favor, barely a truce.”

  He set his mouth in a mutinous line. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Lynx, we have to get Zandy to talk before Patrick gets to him. Zandy isn’t just a threat to you and me. His blood is a huge problem for Patrick.”

  “Patrick doesn’t want his blood. He isn’t going to drink it.”

  “No, he’s not, but he won’t stand around letting us ask fifty questions while a perfect weapon against vamps recovers in his hospital.”

  “He might let you ask your questions before he takes care of the problem.”

  I crossed my arms and waited.

  “Okay, Patrick gets to him tonight, it’s gonna be a short fight.” Lynx made fangs out of his fingers. “You gonna tell White Feather?”

  “Are you kidding me? You think I’d try to force info out of Zandy on my own?”

  Lynx grinned. “Just checking. Plus if White Feather is with you, maybe he can spin you two up to a window. I open it, let you in and we’re done.”

  “In broad daylight? We can’t go sailing two or three stories into the air!”

  “I tol’ you daytime was a bad idea.”

  I’d walked into that.

  Lynx wore a smug smile as he disappeared out the back door to “take care of business.” He was such a cat sometimes.

  Chapter 33

  Much to my surprise, we didn’t need Lynx to sneak into the hospital. After we were done with Lee, Gordon suggested we meet him at the hospital at three to “talk” to Zandy. Maybe his being a cop did have its uses.

  Gordon said, “Zandy should be stabilized by then. We can’t torture him to obtain answers, but it wouldn’t hurt if you brought a load of silver.”

  “Never leave home without it.” Was he crazy? I’d refill at the house, and while there, strap on my sheath for my dagger. It fit under the leg of my jeans and was easier to reach than the backpack. There wasn’t enough silver in the world to make me feel safe around that coyote.

  Mat had a big mess to clean, but instead of mopping up, she pulled out a container of colloidal silver and began filling balloons.

  “How about using thin blown glass as a container?” I suggested. “The broken glass would embed the silver into the skin. You could even sell beads like that to me!”

  “Good idea,” Mat agreed. “The glass would break easily enough and the added damage would be a bonus.”

  “We could add a spell or two into the mix.”

  “A curse.”

  “Excellent. I have a few in mind that won’t stick to the good guys.”

  White Feather asked, “How many silver balls did you lose?”

  “Just the two.” I had already called the remaining balls back and loaded them on my bracelet. “The arrowheads need to be sharper. Or better yet, I should create a throwing star, shaped like the necklace you bought me.”

  “Since the colloidal silver was effective against Zandy, I’ll add a balding spell to a couple of these,” Matilda muttered.

  Gordon squawked before quickly muffling the noise. He patted his own head of hair, and then shifted from one foot to the other as his gaze traveled between me and Mat.

  White Feather laughed softly.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked as White Feather guided me out the back way.

  “Nothing. I don’t think Gordon quite understood what he was getting into when he started dating Mat. He thought he knew all about witches and warlocks because he knew me. But I don’t invent weapons as though I’m in hot competition with Los Alamos, and I never fall into the kind of situations that you find yourself in.”

  “What?!? I’m not the one who was half eaten by a tattoo!”

  “That never happened before I met you.”

  “It never happened to me before I met you either!”

  White Feather chuckled. “True. But I have a feeling that Gordon saw a beautiful witch and set about seducing her without realizing she could blow him into tiny pieces or spell him into knots. He had no idea that the witch he was dating was truly dangerous. Sure, he’s arrested a witch or two, but at least one of those was a fake. He knows two other shifters who play ears in the underground now and then, and I’m pretty sure one of the guys on the force is a shifter, but Gordon has never dealt with them changing, and none of them attacked his girlfriend.”

  “And none of his other girlfriends blew up a fire hydrant twice in one week either, I bet.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, it was an aberration. She doesn’t do that sort of thing all the time.”

  “Uh-huh.” He opened the door to my car. I sat but didn’t swing my legs inside because he crouched down inside the door. “I’ll be right behind you on the way home. Adriel—” He grabbed both my knees. “Could
you maybe stay safe until we get there?”

  I leaned my forehead against his. “I promise. Zandy is in custody. Lee is too.”

  “I love you.”

  “Me too.” He squinted at me so I corrected with a grin, “I love you, too.”

  He didn’t tailgate me, but it was close.

  I showered, changed clothes and loaded my backpack. White Feather strapped on no less than four silver knives. Good. If mine wasn’t enough, I could call his.

  Just before the doorbell rang, White Feather said, “Lynx is getting faster and sneakier. He didn’t drive all the way up.”

  When I answered the door, Lynx said, “Problem. I can’t find Patrick.”

  “Not a problem.” I explained that we had been officially invited to the interrogation.

  Lynx paced inside, his head tilted. “He’s not answering his phone, even the number for an emergency.”

  “Is that unusual?” I had never tried to call Patrick despite him offering the number.

  “His back room is always available. That’s the point. If it’s not, he’s still the contact for a vamp finding a safe house.”

  “It’s broad daylight. Vamps won’t be hunting for a safe house right now.”

  His head tilted the other way. “Mostly true. Any vamp outside right now would be too fried for treatment. But the thing is, he treats more than vamps. And the rooms in the basement have always been available if you know the code. But he didn’t answer. Or call back.”

  “How do people usually gain access to the treatment rooms if he’s not there? And what good does it do them if he’s not there?”

  Lynx gave me a blank stare.

  “Okay, okay, too many questions.” Lynx guarded client information better than Fort Knox guarded gold. I had been treated in Patrick’s special room during daylight hours. During that emergency, it was possible that Lynx had reached Patrick before Patrick left his night shift at the hospital. But Patrick had also given Mat a key so there was more than one way to deal with Patrick.

  “Do you have a key?” I asked.

  “Not the way it works. There’s a system, but he doesn’t hand out keys.”

  “Hmm.” Lynx didn’t need to know Mat had one. He wasn’t the only one who could keep a secret.

  “You don’t need me for the Zandy thing, then?” he asked.

  “No, that’s set.” I knew what he was thinking. “Lynx, be careful.”

  He was halfway to the door. “Always am.”

  “Lynx.” He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “After we’re done with Zandy, we’ll help you find Patrick. If he’s lost. You know where he lives, right?”

  Cat eyes. “I’ll do some checking. He’s always answered before. After you’re done with Zandy, maybe you can see if he showed for his shift last night.”

  Before I could agree, Lynx was out the door and moving. Great. Just what we needed. Another problem to solve. I didn’t necessarily like Patrick, and my life would be easier without him in it. Still, I didn’t wish him any ill will either. Quite the contrary. Most of the time, I wished he were one of us—alive and someone I could trust.

  I headed to the lab to finish packing necessities. White Feather followed me.

  “Could Zandy possibly be creating constructs on his own?” he wondered.

  “He’s so lazy, I can’t see him figuring out black magic. And spell casters, especially the black magic ones, aren’t likely to explain as they mix their tricks.”

  “There were two people at the shop drilling tats on the homeless guy, Nick,” White Feather mused. “But Lee said he wasn’t one of them.”

  “Lee could be lying a blue streak in the hopes of a reduced sentence.”

  “True, but he has to be telling the truth about that night. Lynx would have recognized his smell if he had been there.”

  “Whoever they are, they kept the same MO that he described. Take a victim, do a tat, check the joint is empty and rob it.”

  “Only we interrupted the process with Nick.”

  “For what good it did.” I rolled a ball of silver between my thumb and forefinger. “The best curses are spelled to a specific person. But I could load a couple of these with a curse. Or a fireball spell. Be good to have some silver shrapnel flying around, right?”

  White Feather kissed the top of my head and left me to my spells. In the end, I made a fireball with silver, holy water, stinging nettle, and some explosive firepower. “Hmm. A little of Granny Ruth’s spider poison in here would force a neurotoxin into the blood along with silver. A shifter could have a real problem staying upright.”

  Borrowing from the design used in the arrowhead necklace, I melted silver to the back of a steel tip and packed the spell. I used the kitchen burners to complete some of the work. It wasn’t entirely safe, but until my lab was finished, it was the best I could do.

  White Feather appeared from the bedroom. “Ready?”

  I jangled my silver bracelets. “Showtime.”

  The entire way to the hospital, I pondered what to use as leverage to convince Zandy to spill his guts. Difficult that. He was on the hook for murder. Lee stood the better chance of negotiating a plea deal with prosecutors, and he’d be more than happy to place Zandy at the scene of the crimes. Deals weren’t my cup of potions anyway. Gordon would be the one to offer or fake it.

  As expected, Zandy had been admitted to the building across from the main Santa Fe Indian Hospital where Patrick worked nights as a nurse. Come nightfall, if Zandy was still a patient, there was no way he’d live through the night. He was too treacherous for the vamp community to allow him to continue breathing.

  “That’s it!” I whispered, even though we were alone in the elevator headed to the second floor. “I bet Zandy knows Patrick works here, because all the shifters and vamps know Patrick has a safe place in the basement. Zandy knows Patrick is on the lookout for him after that vamp went rogue. We can tell Zandy that if he cooperates, we’ll transport him to a nice safe jail cell before sundown.”

  “Good idea.”

  White Feather’s phone rang the second we stepped out of the elevator. “It’s Gordon.” He read the text. “He’s running late.”

  “Good. Then he won’t hear our conversation about Patrick.”

  We knew the room number, but even if we hadn’t, the guard was obvious.

  White Feather showed his ID, and it was enough to gain us entrance. That was the good news. The bad news was that we were too late.

  Zandy wouldn’t be sharing any secrets ever again.

  Chapter 34

  White Feather dialed, even as we stared at the lifeless body that had once been Zandy. The hospital curtain had been secured more than halfway around, blocking anyone entering from immediately seeing the damage. An IV hooked up to his arm dripped slowly, but the blood could in no way replace the amount that had been taken out.

  “Bled dry,” White Feather said into his cell.

  That was a good assessment. The ripped carotid artery at his neck wasn’t leaking more than a drop or two anymore. Whoever had done it had been fast and clean. Or really hungry. My eyes flew to the window. It was still daylight. “Aztec sacrifices!” It had to be the work of a vamp. But it wasn’t dark outside.

  Gordon being late must have meant “Gordon is waiting in the parking lot until we ask our questions” because his voice boomed in the hallway as White Feather provided a terse description of the situation.

  Gordon burst through the door, breathing hard. “Shit. Damn vamps. What shift does your vamp buddy work? Did he have to be this obvious? Some kind of freak warning, maybe?”

  Fear began to build in the pit of my stomach. “Patrick didn’t drink his blood. Not on his worst day.”

  “Now ain’t the best time to stick up for him.” Gordon gestured at Zandy’s form in disgust.

  I shook my head. “His shift is at night. He’s a vampire.” I looked at White Feather for backup. “Insanity, remember? Patrick said Zandy’s blood drove the other vamp insane. Patrick didn’
t like Zandy, but he isn’t stupid. There is no way he’d bleed him, not even a mouthful.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed my declaration.

  “Then who—or what—did it?” Gordon asked.

  “It can’t be a vamp. It’s still three o’clock. No sane vamp would attack in the daytime. Only a completely dumb vamp with no survival skills whatsoever...wait a minute!” My thoughts raced ahead of my mouth. “Fat old guy who tried to use his own tattoos...Lee said Jedi was sick. Joe is sick; he’s somewhere past death’s door. Patrick said he had to stay here at the hospital otherwise Joe became confused and went out in the daytime!”

  “What?”

  Neither man was following my confused ramble. I grabbed White Feather’s arm. “Patrick! He disappeared. Basement! Mat has a key!” Over Gordon’s protests, I confiscated the cell phone still in White Feather’s hand and dialed Mat.

  “We need the key to the hospital basement,” I told her. “As in yesterday. Although it’s really too late.”

  The thing about girlfriends is that they aren’t like men. They understand an emergency and don’t demand logic on the spot. Sure, you’ll have to provide the gory details eventually, but best friends trust you’ll share when the time is right. Meanwhile, they hop in the car and drive faster than the legal speed limit allows.

  I hung up. “I think the key she has opens the inner door. It had better.” We’d only used it on the outside door.

  White Feather said, “Patrick’s new vamp? The sick vamp you just visited drained Zandy?”

  “Joe. It has to be him. Lee told us that Jedi decided to use his own tats to form constructs to control. What he didn’t say was that Jedi had to first create new tats on himself. I didn’t think of it at the time, but new tats are the only possible way Jedi could have animated them. Old tats wouldn’t contain the black magic or Zandy’s blood, both of which were used in the construct formula.”