War Witch

by Layla Nash

  No External would have been stupid—or suicidal—enough to challenge the Peacemaker and his people without serious backup. I still wanted to call him a coward. “The coven. What happened to the coven inside the house?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone,” he repeated. “At least two bodies, probably pieces of others. Blood everywhere. It reeked of demons. They were not…pleasant deaths.”

  I bit my lip, hating his disinterest. Those bodies, with their unpleasant deaths, had been my colleagues. My coven. My friends. “Demons.”

  His phone rang again, and again he silenced it. “Yeah. The same demon shit that’s all over your place.”

  All the air disappeared from my lungs. Saints preserve me.

  Something like sympathy made tiny lines around his eyes as he looked up at me, the phone’s light casting strange shadows across his face. “You need my help, don’t you see? I’ll try to redirect the investigation, but you have to disappear. I’ll call you when there’s news.” He headed to the car, phone to his ear, and didn’t look back.

  My phone went off as well as I turned away, but I shut it off when I saw it wasn’t Tracy or Rosa or Joanne or anyone I cared about hearing from. I hustled away, drawing his coat closer around me to cover the bloody clothes, and headed west, to my only guaranteed sanctuary in the city.

  Chapter 18

  Before the Breaking, I lived with my parents in a middle-class neighborhood called Misty Glades in the western suburbs. Two-story Tudor revival houses mixed with sprawling ranches set on manicured lawns. White picket fences kept in golden retrievers and kids throwing Frisbees, while minivans and tricycles cluttered the driveways. It was a protected enclave against the rougher elements of urban life.

  It even stayed that way for a few months after the Breaking, the neighborhood balanced on a pin’s head while the humans tried to deny magic existed. Most of our human neighbors remained confident that the conflicts bubbling up around the globe would never affect their upper-middle-class existence, not realizing Others already lived among them.

  People grew cautious as the seedier side of the magical demimonde emerged, but no one in our neighborhood wanted to know who wasn’t human. The primary concern remained whether people mowed their lawns in accordance with the homeowners’ association guidelines. Even though we weren’t invited to dinner nearly as much once rumors started that my parents were witches, it didn’t occur to me that anything bad would really happen. I still had to go to school and wash the dishes and help Dad in the garden.

  And then street battles between human police and Other freedom fighters, trying to escape the increasingly draconian monitoring imposed by the government, began to eat away at the idyllic daydream that normal life would continue uninterrupted. The war began and ended for Misty Glades in a flash of magic on a bright summer morning, six months after the Breaking. Dad scrambled eggs and asked if I wanted pancakes while Mom read the paper, hmming over the latest attacks against witches in Paris and Jerusalem.

  Even sixteen years after that morning, nothing grew in Misty Glades. Human and Other scientists studied the Remnant, as it became known, and took air and soil and water samples in an effort to reclaim the valuable land after the war ended. They found no answers, magical or conventional. It remained a dead zone despite the best science, technology, magic, and prayer. Eventually the city grew up around the Remnant.

  I crouched near an abandoned hut at the edge of the shantytown on the eastern side of the Remnant, staring into the eerie darkness of the dead zone. After the Truce, but before it became clear the land was ruined, a few intrepid souls attempted to rebuild as land grew too expensive elsewhere and neighborhoods segregated between Others and humans. Structures disappeared or disintegrated without visible cause within hours of being erected in the Remnant. Wood frames simply disappeared. Steel beams melted to puddles in the gray dirt. Concrete foundations turned to dust and blew away. The ghosts ran everyone else out.

  Only six structures remained standing in the wasteland, five the residences of powerful witches with strong defensive wards. The sixth was my house, untouched by time or weather. Exactly as it had been sixteen years ago, when the war landed on our doorstep in jackboots and riot gear. I squinted at the house through a cascade of oily magic rainbows, present even in the dark; the poison magic remained all around and through the once-prosperous neighborhood, tainting even my memories of better days.

  I gathered my courage as I gathered more magic to attempt the walk through the Remnant. It generally wasn’t a good idea to imitate ghosts, as they tended to resent the living pretending to be dead, but there weren’t many other options for sneaking into the Remnant. The Alliance occasionally kept witches on the watchtowers around the dead zone, since magical flare-ups occasionally erupted from the remaining houses, and the Alliance stopped anyone, human or Other, who tried to enter the Remnant at night. There were no good reasons for someone to try the wasteland after dark.

  So I cast a simple glamour until I looked incorporeal and ghost-like, and edged into the open around the shack. Luckily one of the ghosts who still haunted the Remnant had a nasty habit of stealing from the shantytown, so a ghost carrying a bag like mine wasn’t that unusual. I wanted to race to the two-story brick house where I’d grown up, but I forced myself to pace with as much dignity as possible even as my knees knocked together and my hands shook with fatigue on the long hike along uneven, cracked sidewalks.

  Ghosts never rushed—the dead had no reason to.

  After an eternity of fear-sweat trickling down my back, I eased through the back door into the house. Mother’s wards, strong enough after almost two decades to deter the ravages of time and stymie intruders, zinged around me and boosted my spirits. Strength, certainty, power. Underneath it all, love blazed higher.

  I dropped the glamour along with my bag in the kitchen on the way to the living room. I shed Eric’s coat and tossed it over the books, and washed the blood off my hands as quickly as possible. Scrying for a missing witch while a bloody mess was a bit too macabre for me, and the blood and bad magic could have affected the spell itself. I crouched under the piano in the living room and rummaged through a steamer trunk until I came up with a perfectly round copper basin. Scrying worked better in mirrors, most times, but for me, mirrors would always be where demons dwelt. I couldn’t look for my friends there.

  Setting a protective circle took only a moment after I filled the basin with fresh water, collected from rainwater in a cistern off the kitchen, then I wrapped my magic around the basin until it vibrated through every molecule. The reassuring numbness of magic buoyed me until there was no doubt I would find her. I was the War Witch. When I sought someone, I found them. I concentrated on Tracy, locked her face in my mind, and sent the spell into the water.

  It clouded, grew dark and viscous, but revealed no clues as to her whereabouts. I concentrated harder. “Tracy.”

  The water shivered as the magic reacted to her name, but the ripples showed me nothing. Maybe, wherever she was, Tracy heard me. Maybe it would comfort her, give her strength, to know I searched for her.

  My vision blurred and I had to wipe my cheeks to prevent any tears from contaminating the water with salt. I rested my hands on my knees as I concentrated on breathing. She was alive. She had to be alive and well and I would find her.

  I would find her.

  I murmured, “Theresa,” and the water swirled white and cloudy. But no guidance formed in the dense vapor.

  Maybe that was what the Rowanwood coven saw when they searched for the witches I’d shoved into a demon realm.

  I closed my eyes. Breathe. Breathe. I wrapped the powerful, numbing magic even closer around myself as panic bubbled up in my chest. I stared into the basin as if it contained the waters of Mimisbrunnr itself and whispered her third name. “Teodora.”

  The copper rang at her thrice-given names, but the water remained opaque with no hint of her face. Tracy had to have heard the
echoes when I used all three of her names. I sent an arrow of power with her name into the world on that ringing, hoping she would hear. She would know. She would give me a sign. Maybe not immediately, but soon.

  Chapter 19

  I woke up with a magical hangover. My head ached and my sinuses clogged with emotion and regret and some of the dust that sifted through the old house. It was a thousand times worse than drinking too much. Even my bones ached as I tried to roll out of bed. The tax for using that much magic lessened over time, but made it much harder to stop. By the fifth year of war, I never released my magic. It was always around me, always dulling the pain, always numbing the terror and grief and deep-seated anger. On the few instances when I was forced to drop the magic for a short period of time, it nearly crippled me.

  Opening my eyes took more effort than I wanted to admit, and for a brief flash, I was back in an alley five years earlier, trying to survive a magical detox when I finally realized how much trouble I was in. Going cold turkey after sixteen years of magic left me afraid and alone, terrified and unable to tell the difference between the past and the present and things that never happened at all.

  I shook off the memories as I found my cell phone, the battery nearly dead after a night in the dead zone. The Remnant drained any electronics that passed the border, and even getting close to the perimeter could play tricks with the circuitry in every sort of device. At least my phone still worked, though it showed several missed calls from Leif. But his wasn’t the number I punched into the keypad. He had too many questions for me, but I had quite a few for someone else.

  Eric answered on the first ring, voice uncharacteristically deep. “This is Zeibart.”

  “It’s Lily.” I hesitated, unsure of what to say next since I didn’t even really know what I wanted from him.

  “Hold on.” It sounded like he moved, some of the background noise growing quiet until all I heard was his breathing. “Did something else happen?”

  “No. But I have questions for you. About what happened, and why you keep showing up where I am.”

  “This isn’t something to be discussed over the phone,” he said. “Meet me at the diner at Wilson and Lake. Can you be there in an hour?”

  I checked my watch and bit back a groan. The devil’s hour had barely passed, and he wanted to meet at seven. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good. It might be best if you disguise yourself, given everything else that’s going on.”

  “I know.” Tension gathered in my chest as I dreaded the relief and eventual misery of using more magic. “I’ll be there.”

  Getting out of the Skein in the early dawn was trickier still than making my way over the broken ground in the middle of the night, since far more people were up and about in the outskirts of the shantytown. The ghost glamour wouldn’t work in the first hints of dawn, so I settled for a glamour based on a witch who’d died in the war and a don’t-see-me spell to direct attention away from me.

  It was still a long damn walk until I could blend into the foot traffic in the shantytown, and longer still until I reached a bus stop.

  By the time I arrived at the diner, I half-expected Eric to have left already. When I scanned the booths and breakfast bar, I didn’t see him right away. I looked again, though, and something drew my eye to the back corner and a booth with a single male occupant. The face was different, an adjustment of the glamour he’d used earlier, and the gut he’d created bumped against the table. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew it was Eric. He was as eye-catching as a bowl of oatmeal, even with a hint of oily magic around him.

  He didn’t look up as I eased into the booth, the plastic-coated menu screening his expression. “I don’t have much time.”

  Thank all the saints. A few hours of sleep remained a possibility, if I could find a safe place to rest. I squinted at his glamour, though, and tried to figure out why a second glamour, of a young woman with a ski-jump nose, hovered underneath. “How are you doing this?”

  He didn’t answer as the waitress approached, and he ordered only a cup of coffee. After all the energy expended in the last few days, pancakes and sausage sounded divine. My long, manicured fingernails distracted me as I handed the waitress the menu. No one local would recognize the witch whose face I borrowed, except the coven—and the coven had bigger problems than seeing a ghost. It was disconcerting to know I wore a dead woman’s face, but it was safer than my own.

  Once the waitress sashayed out of earshot, a conspiratorial grin bloomed on Eric’s face. “There was a development in the investigation.”

  I unfolded and refolded my napkin, reining in curiosity borne of desperation. “They found the coven?”

  “Oh no. No trace of the witches. We have a few leads, but we identified the bodies.” He pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket and licked his fingers to flip through the pages. “Rosa Marquez and Joanne Park.”

  The room spun in echoing silence, broken only by the slow thud of my heartbeat. I leaned my elbows on the table to keep from sliding to the floor. I took deep, measured breaths as I focused on a water-spotted spoon on the table. Two good witches. Good friends. They’d fallen in with Anne Marie at the end, but I couldn’t blame them.

  They deserved more than a bloody end. More than being murdered and used to fuel some demon spell. More than betrayal from the coven.

  But under the bitter grief lingered a hint of relief that Eric didn’t say Tracy. Which was immediately followed by a backwash of guilt and disgust for being grateful that someone else died instead.

  The sound of Eric’s voice came from far away; I shook myself, and tried to muster the energy to care about what else he had to say. Saints keep them.

  Eric poured half the pitcher of cream into his coffee. “You knew them well.”

  I stared into the liquid abyss of my own mug. “Yes.”

  “Mm.” He stirred, watching the eddy and flow around his spoon as the coffee turned caramel. “They cast some kind of spell on the premises, using some of the blood, but the Bureau can’t identify what it was. No connection to the witch who worked at the Skein, as they’d been hoping.”

  “Of course not.” I dragged my gaze from my mug and stared out the window at the people walking with purpose in the chill air. They didn’t know and wouldn’t care that Rosa and Joanne were dead. It meant little, in the grand scheme of things, that two more witches perished. I cleared my throat again; something stuck in my throat, I couldn’t manage to swallow. “Do they know who cast at Tracy’s house?”

  “No.” Eric folded blunt, square hands on the table. “The coven did—there was enough left over to identify that. But we don’t have signatures for individual coven members, so we don’t know who did what. The Alliance could clear it up, of course, but the Alpha is not being particularly cooperative.” His face crumpled in something close to a pout. “The paperwork is taking forever.”

  Not surprising, really. Soren would want to handle it, but he would play by the rules and delay the humans with their own bureaucracy. It was witch business, after all, and witch business would be handled by witches. That was fine—if Soren had any witches left.

  Eric drummed his fingers on the table, eyebrow arched. “How did you know the witch from the Skein didn’t cast at the house? What does the Alliance know?”

  I weighed my options as I studied him and the shifting glamours. Stefan wanted to arrest me for dark magic and being nonaligned with the wrong ring. They would have, if not for the lapis lazuli ring hanging heavy around my neck. I didn’t understand why it saved me, but it couldn’t have been a coincidence that Stefan saw the ring and let me go. Eric could make his career by handing me over. And yet he hadn’t.

  Of course, I could take him down with me, but obviously he was willing to risk that.

  So I took a deep breath. “Because I was the witch who cast at the Skein.”

  He sat back, hands braced on the table. His face—and the glamours—turned inscrutable, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of a
serious investigator, instead of the caricature he played. He waited for me to continue, unblinking.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. I concentrated on shredding my napkin into tiny snowflakes. “Tracy asked me for help and I thought I saw what they were trying, so I interrupted it a little. I left some magic behind, I guess.”

  “You contaminated a crime scene.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I ran out of napkin and cupped my hands around the coffee mug, trying to leech warmth from it. Cold permeated every part of me. “I didn’t realize they considered the Skein a crime scene.”

  “Unauthorized magic conducted the night before demons are loosed on the city? Yeah, it’s a crime scene.” He frowned at me, then pasted a smile on his face as the waitress arrived with my pancakes and a disapproving glare at the fluffy pile of my napkin. Eric waited until we were alone and the din from the rest of the customers nearly drowned his words out. “It was a summoning. A demon summoning.”

  The pancakes didn’t clear the bitter taste of adrenaline and grief from my mouth. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “If you have a better theory, by all means let me know. I could use a promotion.”

  Dark magic had permeated the spell in the Skein, but the goal of the Calling hadn’t been the demon itself. They used too much power over three nights to try to seal something to them, and that wasn’t necessary even for the most dangerous demons. That kind of magic had to be focused against the Ancient Anne Marie highlighted in her book, the same one still waiting in the Remnant where I’d forgotten it on the kitchen table. I wanted to smack my forehead, but instead only considered the possibilities in the patterns of syrup on the cracked plastic plate.

  The Ancient, the Barbary lion they’d tried to Call, was not my secret to tell, especially to the Externals. I didn’t like the grim look on Eric’s face, nor the certainty in his tone. If Eric believed they summoned a demon at the Skein, Stefan probably thought them guilty of far worse crimes, and there was no way I, or the Alliance, could protect them. But once Stefan learned I worked magic at the Skein, doubtless he’d pin the demon summoning on me as well.