War Witch

by Layla Nash

“Well,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Leif brought you back here and wouldn’t let anyone touch you. Kyle checked you over and said the only remedy was rest.”

  I wanted to throw back the sheets and stride forth in triumph, to show the mender how a real witch recovered from powerful magic. But I doubted I could have even lifted my head as I’d spent all my energy in answering the phone, and I counted my heartbeats as I tried to keep my eyes open.

  Moriah leaned forward, a curious intensity in her wolf-like gaze. “Leif wouldn’t leave. He sat here for three hours, watching you breathe. Soren finally sent him on an errand so I could get in here. You tell me what happened while you were at Tracy’s, babe, and I can help translate.”

  I studied the pale blue stitching on the sheet folded across my middle, debating how long I could occupy the Peacemaker’s guest room before I incurred a debt—particularly if there were demons popping up around the city. “We talked in the car on the way to her house. He was angry about what Brandr said, and how Soren stepped in during the magic exchange.”

  She frowned, slouching a little before propping her boots up on the mattress near my feet. “I figured that might be part of it.”

  “Fill me in, Mo.”

  Moriah’s head tilted as she watched me, a hint of the wolf still in her eyes. “After that night at the Pug, and the restaurant, and everything else, it’s obvious Leif likes you. By our rules, even with the investigation and trying to be professional, he’s made it clear that he’s interested in the chase. Even though we were all betting on what happened, no one was really sure how things would go, with you being... nonaligned and a witch and everything. With him being the Chief Investigator and all... It’s a little unprecedented.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “We talked about it. Briefly.”

  “Right. So if you and Leif were officially together, or he’d made his interest in you known—which he did—then some of the things Brandr said would have required a fight to the death. Especially the part about him turning you. And you hexing him could be interpreted as you marking him back—staking your claim. With all of that, he’s a little off-balance and kind of a dick lately. What did you talk about, exactly? He called you kjaereste at least twice.”

  “What does that mean?” I couldn’t face the conversation Leif and I had before and during the chaos at Tracy’s. It still felt like a red, raw wound.

  “Technically, it means ‘sweetheart’ in one of the old languages.”

  “Tell me what it really means,” I said. I couldn’t meet her gaze. Saints preserve me. Sweetheart.

  A laugh bubbled up in her words, and a mischievous twinkle made her blue eyes brighter. “It implies a long-term relationship, a deep commitment. Soul-mate kind of love. So spill, girl—don’t keep me in suspense.”

  Soul-mate kind of love. Heat crept up my cheeks and I sank lower in the bed, wanting to pull the sheets up to cover my face. It felt good, at least, to think about something other than demons and dark magic, even if talking about Leif made me want to squirm. “We agreed on something I could do when—if I change my mind about dating him.”

  The smile spread until her white teeth flashed. “If it’s serious, or getting that way, give me a heads-up. The pool is huge and we could make a killing if I get the date right.”

  I just shook my head, wanting to curl up on my side and sleep for another twelve years. Maybe Leif would come back and lie next to me...

  Moriah’s smile faded as she watched me, and the deep breath signaled something I probably didn’t want to hear. “Leif told me a little of what happened at Tracy’s. What you had to watch. I’m sorry, Lil. Really, really sorry. That blows.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Rosie and Joanne and Andre, uneasy ghosts waiting for someone to avenge their deaths. I sent an arrow of magic into the universe once more, to reassure them I hadn’t forgotten and I would do whatever it took to bring the guilty to justice.

  But I picked at a loose thread on the sheet to distract myself. “It’s difficult to watch people fight for their lives and lose.”

  Her lips compressed in a thin line and her gaze went far away, a hint of red in her eyes. We’d all done our fair share of witnessing violent deaths. Before she could go on, the door swung open and we both jumped.

  Soren filled the doorway and stole all the air from the room, his expression dark. Pack magic and red tension propelled Moriah to her feet and out the door, though she called, “I’ll check on you later,” before Soren shut the door behind her.

  I clenched double handfuls of the sheets. If Moriah’s questions were unpleasant, at least I knew she wouldn’t push me. Soren, on the other hand, would get his answers, come hell or high water, and there wouldn’t be any way to distract him.

  Chapter 38

  Soren took her seat and watched me with half-closed eyes as I dragged another blanket up to better conceal me.

  His deep voice rumbled through the still air. “Are we connected, witch?”

  “What?”

  “I felt them die in your heart.”

  I opened my mouth to ask for more detail, but Soren didn’t pause long enough for me to do more than take a breath. “Yes, I felt them leave the pack bonds that night—one downside of being alpha. The witches were connected to me. They all blinked out at once that night.” His gaze cut straight to my soul. “So I ask again—are we now connected?”

  “Maybe.” I tugged on that loose thread. “Normally the exchange of magic once, in a one-sided fashion, would not create a lasting connection, but... Your magic is different. I’ve never seen it with pack magic, so I don’t know how it works.”

  “Your Varg-damned witch magic...” he grumbled, scowl deepening.

  “Nice try,” I said. I wouldn’t let him get away with sloppy thinking. That kind of behavior around magic meant bad news and unpredictable results. “You reap the consequences of jumping in to be a hero, ace.”

  “Do not,” he said. “Call me ace.”

  Mocking him took too much energy, as appealing as it was. I closed my eyes. “Soren, magic doesn’t have a lot of rules, and the ones it does have are only internally consistent. The rules for how witch magic works bend when you throw pack magic into the mix. I don’t know why you felt a connection.”

  “You didn’t know I was there?”

  “No.” My cheeks heated to think he might have overheard that awkward hopeful conversation with Leif in the car. The idea of the Peacemaker riding around in my head was too disturbing to even consider. “Although Leif touched my hand as I used magic and said it felt like I belonged to you.”

  “Not a good sign.”

  “No shit,” I muttered, managing to open my right eye.

  He grimaced but didn’t respond. Silence filled the room, and I focused on breathing. In and out. The Peacemaker folded his hands over his flat stomach and watched my feet move under the sheets. His gruff voice might have been comforting were it not for the subject he chose. “From what I saw and felt, and what Leif told me—you tried to help the coven.”

  “Too little, too late.”

  “But it says a great deal that you tried.” Soren continued his study of my feet, and I stopped moving them so maybe he’d look somewhere else. “And how much you valued them.”

  Again I begged their forgiveness. “No more than any witch.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. His gray-green eyes locked on mine, and I couldn’t look away or even blink. “What I felt from you was personal. You want to save Rosa, not just another witch. Memories—good memories—of Rosa and Joanne and Tracy and Andre came up. Shared battles, shared losses. Good times and bad. And real grief, real outrage at their deaths, locked up in your heart. It was suffocating, Lilith.”

  My eyes burned and I made a fist under the sheet. “Why does it matter? What difference could it possibly make?”

  “The time for secrets is passed, if we’re connected like this.”

  “The connection will fade,” I said, hoping it w
as true. Maybe intent would be enough to carry the day once more. “And we all carry secrets, Peacemaker—I certainly don’t want to know where your skeletons are buried.”

  His voice gained an edge as his eyes narrowed. “I do not like when people—my people—lie to me.”

  I remembered well what happened to people who willfully deceived the Warbringer. Not many witnessed their fates, but I had been executioner once or twice. “What your people tell you is not my concern. You should address that with your Morrigan.”

  “Explain this,” he said, lifting the cheerful Recycle bag, with its grim contents, into view.

  “I don’t know why Tracy had those things.” I didn’t take my eyes off the bag. “Maybe research, maybe she didn’t like what Anne Marie was up to. I thought all copies of that book were destroyed, but there’s no telling where it all came from.”

  It wasn’t entirely true. I could examine the grimoires and get a sense of the witch who’d copied them, but that was a slippery slope. It would be easy to get sucked into the Alliance once again.

  He put the bag down and watched me in silence. He wasn’t usually one to think before he spoke, and the consideration on his face made me very, very nervous.

  “I want your professional opinion, witch. Who was responsible for this?”

  “I do not know.” Admitting it hurt. I stared at the ceiling and prayed someone would interrupt us. “Something went wrong during their first cast at the Skein, and introduced dark magic into what they were doing. When they did the regression at Tracy’s house, it was there again. The whole cast turned into a demon summoning, and everything unbalanced. Maybe one of the young witches lost focus, or maybe someone inside the coven was out to get them.”

  “About the Skein,” he said. He pressed his hands together in front of his face, hiding most of his expression from me. “Enlighten me as to what happened.”

  My eyes drifted shut as fatigue welled up. “I’m tired, Soren, maybe—”

  Pack magic surged and I sat up with the force of it. Soren’s expression turned grim behind his fingers. “You are trying my patience.”

  The wild magic sang in my veins, and my fingers trembled as I tucked hair behind my ears. I rested my hands on my thighs, marshaling my thoughts. “They held a full circle at the Skein on Tuesday. The circle had eight witches when Tracy asked me to join them.”

  He waited, silent.

  I rubbed my temples. “I assume, from what we learned at Tracy’s, that Anne Marie intended to summon an Ancient.”

  A long pause answered me, then Soren asked in a low voice, “Which one?”

  “They didn’t say.” Which was true enough—they hadn’t. Anne Marie’s notes filled in the gaps, but he didn’t ask me that. “I don’t think it matters.”

  The Peacemaker sat forward, tension coiled in every muscle. “It matters to me.”

  “He hasn’t shown up yet, has he?” His lip curled and reminded me I skated on thin ice. “I went to clean things up after them, and there was no evidence they’d succeeded in Calling him. They left a hell of a mess, but it wasn’t a proper Calling.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Something darker.” The wild pack magic fizzled in my blood, my muscles still twitching with the extra energy even though my head ached. “It felt like demon magic, but not by the whole circle.”

  “You’re suggesting one of my witches dabbled in demon magic.”

  “You already know some of them are,” I said. “Cara and Danielle, and more from their coven. But yes, I’m suggesting your Morrigan was also getting her hands dirty.”

  He shook his head in immediate denial. “Not her. I refuse—”

  “She controlled the circle both times something dark happened,” I said. “She had a demon focus in her workroom. And Anne Marie was always ambitious. What she had was never enough. She always wanted more power, and…demon magic is powerful. Seductive and addictive and not something you can walk away from easily.”

  “She would never—”

  “She told the coven you didn’t know about the Ancient or any of the spells the coven cast this week. So did she lie to you, or to them?”

  His upper lip curled as he gritted the words out. “To me, apparently.”

  “Then can you really say, Peacemaker, what she would never do?”

  Soren stared at the wall, fist clenching and relaxing. “The rest?”

  “The Calling didn’t go as planned, and they stopped in the middle of it—tied it off and left it to come back to. The Externals could have followed it straight to your coven, and then to you. There was enough dark magic in that spell to have gotten you all arrested. So I hid it. I meant to go back and deal with it, but the Externals have been all over the Skein.”

  Tonight, though. Eric wanted to meet there, and I would be able to clean everything up and wipe away any evidence. And maybe learn something useful, like who I needed to kill to avenge my friends.

  “How is it bound?”

  Explaining myself to the shifters over and over grew so damn tedious. I missed the days when I could have said, “I’m the fucking Morrigan, I don’t have to tell you anything.” If I’d wanted to teach magic theory, working at one of their ridiculous academies would have been a better use of my time. “I covered it up so no one could see it.”

  “Why?” When I just stared at him, trying to parse what the hell he meant, Soren started ticking reasons off, one finger at a time. “You don’t like Anne Marie. You don’t like that coven, or aligned witches, or the Alliance. They did something illegal, or at least ill-advised, and they didn’t bother to tell me about it. And they left a mess, enough to draw attention and punishment—something I assume you wouldn’t shed any tears over. I’m having a difficult time understanding why you covered for Anne Marie.”

  “I didn’t do it for her. I did it for Tracy, Rosa, Joanne, and Andre. They sure as hell weren’t mixing with demon magic, and if the Externals found out, they all would have been executed.”

  “So you let them get away with it instead? How magnanimous for a war witch.”

  “No,” I said, sensing a trap. “I went to Anne Marie’s store for an explanation, and to offer my help. She tried to hex me and kicked me out of her store, right after she called me a murderer. So I figured she deserved what she had coming.”

  “Did you.”

  My jaw clenched until bright sparks of pain flared in my temples. “I would find the symmetry pleasing—that the demon she summoned killed her—if the damn thing had killed her instead of three good witches. So yes, she deserves whatever hell she’s going to.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  “If she isn’t,” I said, eyes narrowing, “she’ll wish she were by the time I’m done.”

  Soren leaned forward. “I don’t understand why your apartment was ransacked and covered in blood. Why were you a target, and why didn’t they catch you?”

  “Anne Marie knew I had useful books, and she’s never had a problem with stealing. Or maybe she wanted to kill me, steal my magic, and use my blood for rituals.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  I studied the ceiling, waiting for him to come to his senses.

  Soren growled in irritation. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?” I actually wanted to know, curious about his ability to deny the obvious.

  “Because I have been in her head, too, Lily, and it is not nearly as scary as yours.”

  That made me smile.

  Before I could do more than sit forward to tease him a little more, a low boom rolled through the house, rattling the frames on the walls and making the lights flicker.

  We both froze. An eerie silence followed the noise, and my heart raced. It sounded too much like artillery landing too close. It could have been thunder. I really hoped it was thunder.

  But two-tone alarms sounded throughout the house, and running feet raced up and down the halls. Soren launched out of the chair and wrenched open the door, bellowing for a s
tatus report.

  Questioning shouts competed with the clangor. I started searching for pants. Nothing magical caused the acrid smoke that rolled across the expansive lawn and into the house, so there was nothing for me to do. I couldn’t defend the Peacemaker’s house.

  Luckily Moriah left a duffel bag of clothes in the bathroom, so I was at least dressed as I went to the window and peered out. A dozen armored vans, the chariots of the Externals, arrayed in the long drive up to the Peacemaker’s mansion, and the wrought-iron gates crumpled inward as men in black clambered into the open, guns ready.

  Growling rose as shifters converged from every direction, and Styrma teams moved into position as wolves snarled and snapped to keep the Externals at bay. I held my forehead as I stared at the chaos. The Bureau had lost its fucking mind, raiding the Peacemaker...

  My blood ran cold. No wonder Eric sounded so damn gleeful when she mentioned raids—she had to have known the Bureau was on its way to break down Soren’s gates. I just hoped she hadn’t arranged the raids to give us time to search the Skein. I couldn’t afford to replace those wrought-iron gates, damn it.

  The Externals shouted warnings at the approaching shifters, weapons clicking and popping, and flares and smoke grenades made it impossible to see who was where. Tensions skyrocketed as they traded accusations and more people shouted. The Alliance prepared for battle inside the house, and when I dared to peek into the hallway, I took a sharp breath.

  Everyone carried weapons and radios, moving efficiently and calmly through the house, and I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do. I couldn’t just stay in the room, not with that damn bag full of dark magic implements and a creepy grimoire—if the Externals got inside and caught me, I’d be executed for sure.

  And if the Externals found it in Soren’s house, they’d hold him responsible for it. He could be executed or the Alliance dismantled. It was just enough evidence of wrongdoing to place all the recent attacks, demons, and strange activity on the Alliance. The humans would finally have their justification to depose Soren, to prosecute the witches they hadn’t killed yet.