Witch On The Run: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Red Witch Chronicles 4)

by Sami Valentine

  “Excuse me, Madam Flamel, I can help that student. Please don’t trouble yourself!” A voice squeaked behind them, high pitched from nerves, as an androgynous librarian in a bowtie popped up.

  “Thank you, Lee. They can help you with your reading list, Red.”

  Red handed over the list for the librarian’s perusal. She looked up and Perenelle was gone. Frowning, she wished she could have said thank you.

  Lee the cheerful librarian soon had her set up at a round table by a shelf of scrolls with loose leaf paper. Her entire reading waited, stacked in front of her. Red had Trudy’s careful notes on the order in which to read them. Light from the stained-glass windows shined a rainbow over the one that Perenelle had given her. The tussle between curiosity and the desire for scholastic success was short lived.

  She yanked the genealogy closer and flipped it open. The title page listed Richard Crispin as the author. An inserted handwritten note listed the copy as extremely rare. Only fifty copies were printed in its first and only run, with nearly all destroyed. The dry catalog note added that Crispin was forbidden to print more after a lawsuit registered by some of the mentioned witch families who were represented by Smith and Reaper.

  Smith and Reaper! The banking branch of that shadowy multinational corporation held her mysterious inheritance. Obviously, their legal division was the preferred choice for witches too. It looked like Smith and Reaper was more successful in a libel case than shipping a package. She had been waiting on the delivery of the few physical items in her inheritance for months. It probably wouldn’t be a note from her mother along with a scrapbook of her life, but it was a real tie to her past.

  She pushed the wistful hope away to turn the page and scanned the first self-congratulatory verbose lines of the foreword by the author—about his ability to be invited to the best supernatural society soirees—then flipped ahead to the first chapters on the origins of indigenous witch dynasties. Tugging a pen out of her purse, she jotted down quick notes on loose leaf paper as she read. She had bought a new journal, but she couldn’t start a fresh one without more ceremony. There was something about a leather-bound book like that which required some reverence.

  Fixed to the comfy reading chair, she barely noticed the mages and alchemists walking by her with backpacks and oversized scrolls slung over their shoulders. She only moved to make notes. Her script grew thin and wavering as she got to the section on the Proctors’ journey from England to Salem and then finally to Oklahoma. She read it twice to see if there were any clues as to who might want Hannah dead.

  The old pages stuck together as she moved to the next chapter. The name St. James jumped out at her. She thumbed back, wincing but not stopping at a paper cut. The name dominated the chapter page in curling Old English text. The St. James Witches of Old Philadelphia. Her heart thumped loud enough that she expected the librarian to shush her. She turned the page, fighting the urge to put her hand over her eyes and read between her fingers.

  "In Boston they ask how much does he know. In New York, how much is he worth. In Philadelphia, who were his parents." – Mark Twain

  The author started the chapter with the usual quote and tangent about meeting a notable quotable in a fashionable upscale.

  … After meeting with the young Abigail St. James at the Algonquin Hotel, I knew those bow lips couldn’t be unsealed. I was so desperate, I booked passage to a seaside resort in Maine with tomes creatively borrowed from the Brotherhood…

  The entry continued to detail the family legend of its founding by a daughter of the water spirit Melusine before the journey to the New World to hide from the witch trials among the Quakers, then its rise as a powerful and mysterious coven. Red failed to find Juniper’s name on her first scan.

  She read through it deeper to what the St. James family was up to around 1900. It was a well-documented period, thanks to a dotty great aunt who mistook Richard Crispin for a nephew and regaled him with family gossip at a crashed wedding. There weren’t any missing redheaded witches. The author loved juicy stories, so he wouldn’t have skipped out on a tale about a vampire’s courtesan. Quinn had told her the Byrneses had given Juniper her name. It must have been a coincidence about the surname being the same as this notable witch family.

  A shadow fell over her. Lifting her head, she blinked at the realization that the sun had faded outside the window.

  “Aren’t you the diligent little student?” Vic sat down in the chair beside her, putting his backpack on the table. He was dressed in a clean flannel shirt, and a trucker cap rested backwards on his mullet. “Good. You’re already firing on all cylinders. I’ve been thinking about these werewolves since I woke up this afternoon. They were hunting that girl in human form.”

  “It certainly wasn’t a pack getting moonwild while shifted. The local alpha said he didn’t recognize any of them.” Red knew that the word of a wolf didn’t count for Vic, but she hadn’t sensed anything but worry from the pack leader.

  “A group that bold would have made waves before now. The one down an ear is old enough to have been operating for a while. It feels familiar.”

  “In what way?” Red set the genealogy book on the table. She might not remember her biological family, but Vic remembered his slaughtered in a feral werewolf attack. He had only escaped as a boy because the hunter Henry Constantine had found him and took him in to raise beside his own son. Vic never could resist a wolf hunt. Last time, they had nearly died. She didn’t want to egg him on when the academy cops already had their eye on him.

  Vic pulled out his laptop and then four small, curling notebooks with the year marked on the covers in a faded script. “These are Henry’s. I brought them back from Arizona when I saw Lashawn. My brother didn’t want to check them out with me.”

  “Not interested in a trip down memory lane, I guess.”

  Vic shrugged his incredulity away. “I love reading about dad’s greatest hits. My hunter’s journal is a lot of bullet notes and shitty sketches. He wrote lore. We didn’t go up against wolves a lot as a kid, but I remember a few times.”

  “Are you sure? You’ve been hit in the head a lot.”

  Vic’s gazed shifted to scrutinize the other tables. “We’re too close to everyone to talk about it, but your healer buddy cleared up some old concussions.”

  “He’s not exactly my buddy.” Red squirmed in her seat, not knowing what to call the vampire who claimed her. She let Kristoff bite her. He had been injured, the bite was necessary, so he had the blood supply to heal Vic. It was when she was stupid enough to think that friendship was possible with an unsouled vampire. Then he had stopped her from saving Trey, traitor to humankind as he was, from his friend Donal. She had seen where a claimed human-master vampire relationship could end. It wasn’t something she wanted to talk about.

  “What did you find?”

  “Can you take a break to help me skim these journals for the furry parts?” He slid two across the table at her and kept the oldest one for himself.

  Red nodded, swallowing thickly as she read the year embossed on the cover. He must have been nine that year. It was the year his family had been murdered.

  Vic twisted in his chair, turning his face from her as he crossed his legs and slumped deep into the chair. His hands trembled ever so slightly as he thumbed through the pages.

  Leaning over the notebook, she turned it over, used to the late hunter’s style of putting a small timeline in the back of each journal. Before she had come to the academy, Henry’s journals and Bard Net, the glitchy Brotherhood database, were her most reliable sources of information about the dark beings she fought night after night.

  She scanned the timeline index, smiling at his note of Vic’s birthday in May, to find any mention of werewolves and other shifters and wrote down the page numbers. Then she turned to front of the journal. Henry had redrawn the right margin in a thick line to separate his later notes from the blocky script marking out every other centimeter of the pages. She started to read the entry abo
ut the Constantine encounter with a feral wolf in Cajun country. It was quite a year for shifters, so she’d only made her way through a good chunk of the journal by the time Vic got through his first and moved on to the second. A detail or two caught her eye, like a shifter working with a witch in Philadelphia from an unidentified coven, but nothing seemed to point to a group of four werewolves with a penchant for matching track suits and a family resemblance.

  “The whispering werewolf.” Vic lifted his head, excitement jerking his volume up. “Holy shit! You have to be kidding me. The whispering werewolf!”

  “You don’t have to yell.” Red hoped an embarrassed apologetic smile would placate the library goers glaring at the interruption. “Besides being alliterative, what does that mean? It sounds like a pub in England.”

  “True, but in this case, it’s an assassin from Boston.” Vic leaned over to show Red the page with the small mugshot pasted in. It was the leader of the track-suited quartet. Younger and possessing two ears, but the flat-eyed stare was the same. “Frank Lopes. Former military sniper, current pain in our ass.”

  “What was the case?” Red huddled closer.

  “Dad was protecting some poor sucker in Indianapolis who had a bullseye on his back. I remember having to hang out in the guy’s laundromat for hours. He was laundering more than clothes for supernatural types. I had just turned sixteen and had been hunting for years. Not on this case. Dad packed us off to Colorado when Frank dropped an ear off at the hotel we were staying in. It was from the client’s wife. She had no idea what her husband was into.” Vic shook his head. “Henry didn’t lose many innocents.”

  “Frank earned his fee then.” Red tried to sound cool, but it wasn’t exactly comforting to know that fabled Henry Constantine, who had been toasted in hunter’s bars from Arizona to Maine, had failed to stop the wolf.

  “Dad took an ear from him. The rest got away. He tried to keep tabs on Lopes, but the trail dried up. Called him the whispering werewolf until he found his real name. The case must have stuck with Dad.” Vic snapped the journal closed and set it on the table. He drummed his fingers on it. “This isn’t just a big bad wolf. This is a stone-cold killer who’s found himself a gang. Or bred one.”

  “He’s not working for free. Hiring a werewolf death squad can’t be cheap.”

  “This guy takes underworld contracts brokered through god knows where. I doubt he even knows who wired the money into his offshore bank account.” Vic stroked his chin. “But it couldn’t hurt to track him down and ask.”

  “It could hurt a lot. You’re a little eager about this case. I’m not the only one who’s noticed.” Red sketched out the meeting with Ian and the Synod meeting with the supernatural leaders. “This isn’t Los Angeles. We’re not the first call when something weird happens. It’s your vacation. Relax, play a poker game, process things, you know?”

  “Nope. Don’t start with the therapy stuff.”

  “But Quinn… He just di—"

  “And he wouldn’t want me sitting on my ass now that I can walk again. I think a werewolf hunt is the best way to get my mojo back.” Vic fixed a determined glare on her. “You want me to process. This is my process.”

  Red put her hands in the air. “Don’t get me kicked out of here. And you’re going to get an ulcer, by the way.”

  “Probably just give you one.” Vic snorted. He opened his laptop and entered a long password before bringing up his browser. “Let’s see if the Brotherhood has anything on Frank Lopes and the gang.” He typed the obscure sequence of letters and numbers that made up a masked URL, bringing up a black page with a white login form in the center, and put in his password.

  Red drew closer, expecting to see the Bard Net interface that looked built in 1997 and never updated. Instead, the page refreshed and sent them off to a random car dealership website. It automatically forwarded any failed logins as a security measure.

  “Did I forget the exclamation point?” Vic went back to the page to log in. The page rejected him again and again.

  Leaning back in her chair, tired of watching him type, Red checked her phone to see if Lucas had finally texted her back. She sighed at the empty inbox. “This is what you get for making paranoid hacker passwords.”

  “It’s been crapping out a while now. Sweet Jebus, they need a new IT guy. I say this, and he’s a buddy.” Vic breathed in deep, ready for a new rant. “If Chuck hadn’t changed his password, I could have used it again. Damn it, we’re going to have to ask that woman—"

  A soft cough interrupted.

  Head bowed, Trudy walked from the stacks to their table. She clutched her satchel strap while the other hand lay hidden in her tweed jacket pocket. She took off her glasses, letting them hang on a chain, losing a shade of severity and the appearance of ten years. “Mr. Constantine, Red, good evening. I’m glad I found you. I must apologize to you both.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Red said. If it were up to her, they could have an unspoken do-over on the whole day.

  “No, carry on.” Vic beckoned further apologies with a crooked finger, leaning back in his chair.

  The contrite expression curdled on Trudy’s face. She licked her lips, nostrils flaring. Her tone held the evenness of a woman resisting the urge to kick a man. “We didn’t start our working relationship as I would prefer. I should have thanked you both for bringing back my charge. Guarding Hannah is my number one priority. I’ll accept help where I can take it.” She held out her hand.

  Red crossed her fingers under the table. School was going to be tough enough without her new teacher fighting her old mentor.

  Vic shook Trudy’s hand, grinning. “Well, I was a hungover horse’s ass, so no worries. You’re not wrong about my teaching style. I’m not much for details until I need them.”

  “I remember the pace of field work. It doesn’t leave much time for memorizing magical correspondences.” Trudy smiled, laugh lines crinkling by her hazel eyes.

  Red relaxed in her chair. Seeing the two Bards make up eased the knot of tension she had been carrying all day.

  “You would know.” Vic wagged his finger at the other Bard. “I’ve heard about you back in the day.” He tapped Red on the shoulder. “They say Trudy and her Hero held off a horde of ghouls until sunrise. And she was rolling with just an empath.”

  Red whistled. “They aren’t the ones you want in a ghoul melee.”

  “It was a small horde.” Trudy clarified, hiding a shy smile behind her hand as she put her glasses on.

  “You can brag around us.” Vic chuckled. “Because I certainly will. I got a lead on the pack that attacked Hannah.” He laid out their evidence on Frank Lopes.

  Trudy pulled a tablet out of her satchel, thumbs moving quickly on the bright screen. “The Bards have a file on him. Its skimpy on details… Hmmm. He travels with his children—Paul, Gloria, and Nuno. I’ll give this to the Gendarme.”

  “You’re on the Bard Net. It’s working then.” Vic quieted, gaze fluctuating between Trudy and Red. He clenched his jaw, launching himself out of his chair to toss the laptop into his backpack. The journals were carefully set on top. “Well, now, you know the score. I’m going to bounce. Give me holler if you need a wolf hunter.”

  “Thank you!” Trudy said after his fleeing back. She turned, hand on her hip to survey Red. “I heard from the librarian that you’ve been here all day.”

  Red picked up the only textbook she had flipped through beyond the genealogy book. An elementary guide to witchcraft, it was so crammed full of theory that reading it was like staring into a solar eclipse. “Don’t expect much. I’m going to have to work hard to catch up to Hannah.”

  “I’ll see that you will.” Trudy nodded, stance wide and hands on her hips. “I should inform Ian and the rest of the investigators now. Carry on.”

  Red’s phone buzzed on the table, and she turned it over to see the screen. It was a notification from Sheila Jones, her agent at Smith and Reaper. She tapped it, bracing herself for more disappointment.
Had the mystery box from her inheritance been lost? She had been waiting for it since before Halloween. Was the uber competent representative who had arranged apartments, rented cars, and secured access to mage hospitals finally admitting defeat to the whims of the mail?

  A message popped up. The English was as incomprehensible as Greek. It wasn’t the writing, that was clear and business professional, it was the meaning.

  Red had to read it again to believe it. The package had exited foreign customs. Sheila estimated the arrival time to the minute. It was the same time that Red would be in her first class later this week. She knew she would wake up that day at dawn like the kid that she didn’t remembering being on the Christmases she couldn’t recall.

  Red opened her new hunter’s journal and touched the first creamy white page. Her hands shook, and she realized it was finally time. She didn’t know what was ahead, or if she was ready, but she had waited for this. She wrote the date and the location in the corner, then began the entry as she always started her journals.

  They call me Red. I don’t know who I am.

  She frowned, scratching out the last sentence. She hated blemishing the first page, but that line didn’t fit her anymore.

  I know who I am now, and I’m going to find out who I was. I’ll find my way home.

  Chapter Five

  "I didn't think we'd have gym class at witch school," Red joked, jogging beside Hannah on the sidewalk between a construction site for a new hotel tower and a parking garage of the Circe Casino. The dry breeze chilled the sweat on her tank top. A small bag of crystals bumped against her back. Trudy insisted they train with witch gear on. Tonight, she wanted to test them out in the elements instead of in the climate-controlled gym.

  "Witchcraft requires physical stamina," Hannah said in a winded impersonation of Trudy. "Don't worry, you’ll get to handle the real stuff soon."

  With perfect form, Trudy outpaced them both, satchel bouncing on her hip. She disappeared in a blur of a wild curly ponytail and runner’s shorts around the building’s corner.