by C. T. Phipps
“Stay out of this, Jane,” Jeremy said. “This is only going to get you hurt.”
I wanted to smack him so hard right then. “People are dead, Jeremy! Not just Victoria but someone named Courtney Waters and another guy named Jonathan Hart. This is some serious…stuff.”
Yeah, I don’t swear in front of my parents.
Sue me.
“Courtney’s dead?” Jeremy said, looking paler than usual. “Jesus.”
“Now will you talk?” John said, looking down at him.
He didn’t answer.
“Mom, could I have a word with you?” I asked, realizing I wasn’t going to get anything about my stupid brother.
“Of course,” Judy said, taking me to a corner of the hall. “What is it, dear?”
I gave her a really compressed version of the past hour then looked at her. “Why did you tell Agent Timmons I could help him? This entire thing is crazy, with Emma just asking me to look into this and now a member of the FBI wants me to help!”
“It was your destiny,” Judy said, a beatific smile on her face.
I stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “Seriously? You’re using the same line Darth Vader used on Luke?”
“Destiny is a bit older a concept than Star Wars,” Judy said, sighing. It was her disappointed-mom tone. “Which you’d know if you’d agree to be my apprentice. However, it’s like having a map to the many pathways through the Great Woods. You can see where they go and try to choose the best one, though only the greatest seers can tell exactly how the paths lead. All of them end up in the same place, of course.”
The Great Woods were one of the many spirit realms my mother believed in and probably Agent Timmons too, if his earlier claims about astral projection were real. I didn’t have any reason to doubt they existed but I’d never seen any hard evidence either. The astral plane was like outer space in that regard—something I trusted was real but was unlikely to ever visit. Supposedly, my ancestors included shamans who could visit the Great Woods physically around here but that knowledge was lost. Now they were just a metaphor about traveling through life.
“Of course?” I said, confused as hell as to what my mother was talking about. “Destiny ending up at the same place being—”
“Death,” Judy said a little too cheerfully. “But hopefully not for many years to come.”
Now I wasn’t sure who was irritating me more, my mom or my brother. “But why this path?”
“It’s the only path where your brother doesn’t die in the next few days. Probably.”
My mouth hung open. “When…what…when were you going to tell us this?”
“Dinner,” Judy said. “I find some hot soup and veggies help bad news go down well.”
After that, I decided not to ask any more questions. It was clear everyone in this town was insane except me.
My mom smiled. “Oh, no, my dear, we’re all mad here. You too.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What have I said about reading my mind?”
My mom gave me a hug. “I know this is going to be hard on you, honey. I wish I could say I’ve seen it work out, but there are powerful forces at work. Things that are clouding my vision and I can’t see objectively when it comes to my babies. Something dark inhabits this town and I think we have to remove it.”
“We?” I asked, hugging her back.
“You and me. You and Agent Timmons. You and Emma. I can’t say much more.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t as in don’t know,” Judy said. “I wish I was as omniscient as my grandmother. However, she died utterly insane and babbling about the vampires revealing themselves. That was in 1977, so I shouldn’t complain too much.”
I pulled away. “I understand. None of this makes any sense, but I’ll do my best to see Jeremy freed.”
“So will I.”
“I’ve got a lead—” I started to say.
“Follow it,” Judy said, cutting me off. “Put your trust in the spirits and they will see you through.”
“The spirits help those who help themselves,” I said. “Probably because I haven’t seen much help from them lately.”
“Haven’t you?” Judy said, chuckling.
I started to walk toward my dad and hoped he wasn’t about to get into more trouble by being around his son with no guards.
My mom had one more thing to say. “Jane, it’s about Victoria’s body. You mentioned you didn’t get anything from it?”
“Yeah?”
“Blood sacrifices, the oldest and darkest magic, drain every bit of life and magic out of bodies. They have nothing left inside of them. Not even souls. A person who sacrifices a shifter, let alone three, will have almost unimaginable magical power.”
Great.
That was all I needed.
Chapter Seven
I was too freaked out to drive after my talk with my mother. Instead, Emma took the wheel of the Millennium Falcon and I sat in the passenger’s seat I left my head against the side of the window while the rest of the town passed by. My mind was abuzz with the possibilities her parting words had left me with.
Human sacrifice? In this day and age? I mean, I knew shifters had done it in the olden times, but I thought those were things abandoned centuries ago. Then again, supernaturals tended to lag a few hundred years behind the times. Vampires still existed under a feudal structure with its own court system and brutal punishments to anyone who stepped out of line. It wasn’t until my dad’s time that arranged marriages weren’t mandatory and the clan lord as well as wolf king hadn’t the authority to kill anyone who looked at them cross-eyed.
No, I couldn’t think of this as some sort of fucked-up shifter tradition gone wrong. This was, if Emma would pardon the racism, some sort of lone-wolf crazy-person stuff. More Ed Gein than anything to do with us. The Reveal had brought out all the crazies who lived on the edge of vampire, shifter, mage, and fae society. Hell, it was probably a human who wanted to become supernatural.
Yeah, that was the ticket. Some psycho pathetic wannabe who thought killing shifters would make him a god. Some human who was jealous of the ability to do magic and wanted to gain it through whatever means possible.
“Okay, that’s just racist on my part,” I muttered. “God, I really am an awful person.”
“Any insights?” Emma asked, staring at the road.
“I dunno,” I said, looking over at her. “Is Lucien a shifter?”
“I think so,” Emma said, clearly unsure. “I mean, there’s a lot of cat imagery around him.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t mean anything. There’s not an O’Henry breed of wolf. Only Cervid make horrible puns of their name.”
That wasn’t strictly true, but my sister had a dream of opening a music store called the “Doe Rae Me” so there had to be something genetic about us and puns. Something I was very glad hadn’t been passed down on me.
“Maybe,” Emma said, frowning. “But if I was going to think of someone who would be willing to murder something, I’d look to the town’s biggest criminal. Also, if someone were going to kill someone for magical power then I’d think it was the guy who has the sacrificial dagger.”
“Is that our working theory?” I asked, surprised Emma was taking the lead on this. “Local drug dealer murders weres for magic?”
“Your brother and my sister worked for him,” Emma said. “Maybe he’s killing his employees who’ve crossed him and thinks he can get more out of it by doing it in a ritualized way.”
I thought about that then frowned. “Emma, how did you know my brother was dealing? Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t give me any of the ‘I thought you knew’ garbage either. You know me better than that.”
Emma frowned. “I was buying Spark from him.”
I opened my mouth. “Emma!”
Spark was a strictly shifter-only drug. It was a mixture of various herbs and chemicals that did nothing to humans but worked like Ecstasy on shifters in large doses while making you
incredibly perceptive in smaller ones. At least, so I’d heard. Some hunters actually used verbena gathered in the light of the full moon or the more dangerous wolfsbane to cut it as a kind of poison for shifters. A typical “scare you straight” story ended with a young werewolf or weredeer dying after taking it.
“I use it to study!” Emma said, frowning. “I don’t want to stay in this town forever and my grandfather controls all the money in the family.”
“Isn’t your dad a lawyer?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Emma said. “With one client. Dad doesn’t speak to me much, either. Victoria was the apple of his eye.”
Ah.
“Was this before or after she tried to drown you?” I asked.
“Both,” Emma said, taking a deep breath. “I should probably mention Christopher O’Henry isn’t my biological dad.”
I blinked. “What?”
Emma sighed. “That’s the reason Grandpa Marcus hates witches and wizards so much.”
“I thought that was because he got his ass handed to him by a guy one-third his size in war form,” I said, still chuckling at the image.
“No,” Emma said, her voice somber. “This is serious.”
“You have my attention.”
Emma sighed. “I don’t know the exact details, but my mom explained the rough outline once I was old enough to understand. There was some kind of land deal, back when the town was prosperous, and a married couple of magic users was called on to arbitrate. The vampires were on one side and the O’Henrys were on the other.”
“What happened?” I asked, wondering what this had to do with her father not being her mother’s sperm donor.
“The magician sided with the vampires and Grandpa made his displeasure known by killing one,” Emma said.
I blinked. “Okay. Not often I’m told about a murder, but today seems to be a day for that.”
“That’s how things were done before the Reveal,” Emma said. “The witch used her husband’s blood to curse the O’Henrys. The male line was rendered infertile and the town was cursed to lose its businesses.”
I looked around to the many boarded up store fronts around us. “I’m pretty sure that’s more due to the collapse of the American export industry, but what do I know about magic? Also, why just the male line?”
“Old-time magic is sexist. She was wrong, anyway. Grandpa is from the Reagan era, not the Stone Age,” Emma said, grumbling.
“Greed is good,” I said, chuckling as I imagined Marcus O’Henry as a Gordon Gecko-esque Wall Street executive. Honestly, it was a pretty good fit since he didn’t look like that far from Michael Douglas did now.
“Not funny,” Emma said. “Mom was a werewolf, though, and wanted to carry on the lineage. With Dad’s permission, she went to an old boyfriend and—”
“I get it,” I said, grimacing. “I take it that didn’t go over very well with Grandpa Marcus.”
“Not at all, but not for the reasons you’d expect,” Emma said softly. “Mom was his late brother’s granddaughter. Which, ick, but that’s the way our family rolls.”
“Like in Appalachia.”
“Ha-ha,” Emma said. “Like royalty.”
“Go on,” I said, trying to ignore the fact her parents were second cousins. Well, not in the having-children sense but yes in the married sense. Ugh. Too much information.
Emma continued. “Grandpa Marcus was only angry that our bio-dad was a human. He said that would make us less likely to become werewolves. That’s why Victoria tried to drown me. She thought she was Christopher O’Henry’s only ‘real’ daughter.”
“Was she?” I asked.
“No,” Emma said. “We’re both children of Bart Matthews. Brad has a werewolf father from out of state. Victoria cried for a week when I turned at fourteen; she didn’t turn until last year.”
I actually knew Bart Matthews. He was the guy who ran the gas station and oil-change service nearby my house. He was also biracial, which probably hadn’t contributed to Marcus O’Henry’s high opinion of his grandchildren. I mean, biracial people were awesome and beautiful. Halle Berry and Rosario Dawson were two of the women who looked just as good as supernaturals and…okay, wow, I really was racist. I needed to see a therapist about these issues.
“Wow,” I said, taking a deep breath. “That’s cool. So you’re part b—”
“Not the point, Jane.”
“Sorry,” I said, grimacing. “Liberal weredeer guilt.”
Emma rolled her eyes. “Well, you see where I’m going with this.”
“No, actually, I don’t. I mean, this is a fascinating and kind of horrifying story you’ve told me about your grandfather being a murderer and all—”
“He’s killed a lot more people than that weredeer woman. There used to be thirteen clans in the town.”
I’d heard about that, but even my parents hadn’t been willing to talk about it. There were kitsune, selkies, werebear, wereboar, werecats, werecoyotes (who were just a kind of werewolf in my opinion), werecrocs, weredeer, wererats, wereravens, werespiders (eesh!), and werewolves.
There were other kinds of shapeshifters ranging from wereowls to weresquirrels (seriously). As long as vampires kept having children with humans then it was likely there would always be new species of human-animal hybrids. The twelve clans were the only groups large enough to be called actual societies—at least in North America.
“So what is it?” I asked, trying to figure out her point.
“My sister didn’t become a shifter until her junior year,” Emma said, scrunching her nose. “We know she was a witch then, but what if she, somehow, used magic to become one? Courtney was a late bloomer, too, and—”
“What?” I said, stunned. “You think my sister and brother were part of a make-themselves-shifters-with-magic cult?”
Emma shrugged. “It would explain why they’re into magic.”
“That is dumb, incredibly dumb,” I said, staring at her. “Also, it would mean my brother was actually involved in this nonsense.”
Emma was silent as we pulled onto the highway.
“Don’t you dare!” I snapped. “Not even for a second. Also, I can prove they weren’t into that.”
“How?” Emma asked.
“My brother isn’t a shifter, duh,” I said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Oh, right,” Emma said. “Never mind then.”
I crossed my arms, too furious to respond for the next five or six minutes. I ended up turning on the radio to Kansas’s “Carry on my Wayward Son.” It was the theme for Supernatural and while they’d had to seriously retool that show, I still loved it. Especially after Jared Padalecki had come out as a werebear.
Eventually, Emma said, “I’m sorry.’
“Right,” I said, unable to let go of the accusation but not for the reasons I wanted to. I wanted to think it was ridiculous. “Who, exactly, was in my brother’s, our siblings’, drug posse? There’s Victoria, this Courtney person, Jeremy, and who else?”
I knew my brother’s friends. Some of them, at least, but clearly I hadn’t been paying much attention to them.
“Rudy and Maria Gonzales,” Emma said, sighing, “Those are the only remaining members. Do you remember those two?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, no. Are they shifters?”
Emma took a deep breath as if she wasn’t quite ready to let go of this theory. “Maria is, yeah. She turned just last month and she’s twenty. Wereraven.”
Okay, that was frigging insane. Was there silver nitrate in the town’s water or something? That shouldn’t happen.
“Rudy?” I asked.
“No,” Emma said. “He’s just this perverted stoner who wanted to be a raven like his father and not like his human mother.”
“Ah,” I said.
Try as I might, I couldn’t disregard that there was something really peculiar about the timing of all this. Three shifters in a group of people who weren’t expected to transform all suddenly developing t
he power to change. Now two of them were dead.
“It’s weird,” I said.
“Yeah,” Emma said, her voice low. “It is.”
“But if people actually knew how to make a normal person into a shifter, then it’d be on the national news.”
Emma’s next words haunted me. “Not if it required something bad.”
I texted those names to Agent Timmons.
“Oh, so we can tell him about those?” Emma asked.
“Do you want him showing up at the Lyon’s Den and tipping them off?” I asked before tapping my head. “Vision, remember?”
“Right,” Emma said, clearly not believing a word of it. “I’m sorry, it’s just a theory.”
“Why I’m not angry,” I said, sighing. “Much.”
The two of us didn’t say anything more as we continued driving for another fifteen minutes down the highway past Bright Falls Park. It was the part of the city I loved most as the place just went on for miles and miles, full of campgrounds and scenic spots that seemed at odds with the rest of the dying town.
There was actually a massive waterfall inside the location, the one that gave the town its name but it was no longer part of the park, since the O’Henrys had somehow managed to buy the land and build their hotel over it. I always found that a crying shame since I’d often gone swimming there as a little girl, but it was fenced off from anyone but paying customers now.
Bright Falls Park was actually one of five state parks and three nature preserves we had in the area with Darkwater Preserve being the smallest. That part of the forest was sealed off from the rest of the town due to the fact it was supposedly cursed. I used to wander around it with my cousins all the time as a kid but had stopped when, well, the accident with Jenny had occurred.
“Do you know what the thirteenth clan was?” I asked, more for lack of anything better to do than a desire to talk about minutiae. I was still troubled by how much sense Emma’s theory about it being some sort of weird shifter-wannabe cult made. Mostly because it was along the lines I’d been thinking.
Just without my brother.
“I have no clue,” Emma said. “I wasn’t exactly allowed into the secret family meetings where my grandpa determined were future. That was all before the Reveal.”
