by Renée Jaggér
“Agreed,” said Roland.
Brown uncrossed his arms. “Thank me later by not pulling crap like this again after you get back. And hold on a minute. There’s one more thing. ”
Bailey wondered what that could be. Knowing the man as she did, it would probably be an admonition not to get into trouble in the big city and to call her family when she arrived.
He surprised her by warning her about something else entirely.
“Be careful,” he began, his voice only a touch above a whisper. “Unless you’re bullshitting me, and I don’t think you are, there’s witchcraft afoot.” He flicked his eyes to the wizard, then back to the werewolf. “Magic is still taken seriously here. People remember the old tales and the rules and punishments from the days when witches, and especially WereWitches, got burned at the stake. Some things don’t change much.”
Bailey kept her face impassive but nodded solemnly. “Yes, sir,” was all she said, despite the sudden eerie coldness she felt. “We’ll be careful.”
“Aye,” Roland agreed. “Thanks again, Sheriff.”
Sheriff Browne turned and gave them a lazy wave over his broad shoulder. “Oh, and I suggest a change of clothes and some makeup. And call your family after you get into town.” He trudged to his cruiser and disappeared into it.
Bailey motioned for Roland to return to the passenger seat. “Looks like we’re free to go,” she quipped. “Finally.”
Chapter Nine
All the way to the outskirts of Portland, the couple in the black Tundra talked almost as comfortably as if they really were boyfriend and girlfriend.
Bailey laughed, trying to keep her eyes on the road. “What I can’t figure out,” she mused, “is how the hell we weren’t able to smell them before the car shot out into the road. Goddamn, is there magic that can hide the scent of two gallons of perfume?”
Roland pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head, chuckling gently. “I’ll have to look into that. There are ways to manipulate such things, but, well, even magic can only do so much.”
“Hah!” Bailey laughed. “So that’s why they want your seed—to acquire your great and amazing power.”
“You might be on to something there,” he admitted.
They settled into a slightly more serious mood then.
“Anyhow,” said Bailey, “I hope the sheriff was able to stall them, and that they’re on the way to Bend by now. If we’re lucky, they’ll get lost somewhere in Nevada and be abducted by aliens.”
“We can hope,” Roland commented. “Although they would give a pretty bad impression of our species.”
Bailey grimaced. “If I might ask, what are their names? I don’t want to run into them again; I just feel like I should know who the hell they are.”
“I can tell you that much,” the wizard replied. “Just don’t ask me for all the details of their backstories. I do not feel like going into it.”
“Deal,” said the girl.
Roland cleared his throat and closed his eyes for a second, waving his hand around the periphery of the truck. For a split second, Bailey felt something, then it was gone.
Her companion began to speak. “Just wanted to cloak us a bit. Sometimes people can hear their names when someone else says them aloud. Without further ado, the leader, the skinny one with the dyed burgundy hair, is named Shannon DiGrezza. She’s the same age as I am—that would be twenty-eight, by the way—and has known me for the longest, but please don’t ask me about that.”
Bailey nodded. “Okay.”
“The tall brunette with the little purse is Aida Nassirian. She’s from a Persian-Armenian family from California, but they seem to have slid right in with the witch community in Seattle. I think she’s a year or two younger.”
“I see,” Bailey commented.
“And,” he finished, “the short blonde is Caldoria—or Callie—McCluskey, whom the other two collected recently, since she’s only, uh, twenty-two or twenty-three, I think. I believe she’s from Olympia and came to Seattle for the big city lights and so on. Nice to know she’s not getting many of those in Greenhearth.”
Bailey snickered again. “Small and boring towns have their advantages. Well, anyway, these witches—Shannon, Aida, and Callie—won’t get the jump on us again. And if somehow they do, I’ll just beat the crap out of them straight away before they can start talking out their asses and turn us into frogs or whatever.”
Roland gave a spread-handed shrug. “That might work, simply because I doubt they’d expect it. But they might have shock-and-awe tactics of their own. Hard to say, and with three of them, even as, ahem, powerful as I am, I might not be able to counter them. They’re pretty strong themselves. But I’m tired of talking about them or thinking about them.”
“Fair enough,” Bailey agreed. “Let’s talk about Portland. We’ll be there in, what, half an hour or so, won’t we?”
“I think so.” Roland sighed. “And we can talk about Portland in a few minutes. But first, you asked about the witches, so it’s only fair for me to be able to ask about something involving you and your world.”
Bailey's gut clenched at that, but she put on a cocky smirk. “Uh-oh,” she said in an exaggerated tone. “Dunno if I like the sound of that.”
The wizard put his feet up on the dashboard before he continued, “That weird, ominous stuff the sheriff said just before he let us go. What was the term he used? ‘WereWitches,’ I think? I haven’t heard of those before. And something about ‘old tales’ and burnings at the stake. What can you tell me about that?”
Frowning, Bailey wracked her brain for the best and easiest way to explain it to an outsider. Of course, he’d ask about one of the things she was least eager to discuss.
“It’s a nasty old custom,” she began darkly, her voice low and monotone. “If a Were is found to have magical aptitude—you know, like yours—they’re killed immediately. No werewolves anywhere will tolerate it; it’s something all the packs agree on. WereWitches are abominations and must die.”
Roland seemed legitimately surprised by this. “Well, that sucks. Have you seen it happen?”
“No,” Bailey replied. “It’s pretty rare, at least these days. Probably because my people have worked so hard to eliminate magic from the gene pool through that very tradition. I mean, it’s not like it’s a common thing everyone talks about, but the stories have kinda lurked in the background ever since I was a kid.”
The wizard stared out the window. It was early evening now, the sunlight turning the hills and forests a darker green, while the sky took on an amber-orange tint.
“Old, ignorant customs,” he remarked in a distant, almost philosophical way. “Every culture has its superstitions going back into prehistory that have persisted throughout the centuries. Did anyone ever mention why WereWitches are hated so much?”
“Not really,” Bailey answered, “although reading between the lines, my best guess is that it would upset the social order too much. A werewolf with magic would be too powerful, and the pack Alphas couldn’t boss them around. So, they’re eliminating the potential future competition. Can’t have Weres with extra gifts running around and taking over packs or starting their own. That would destroy the normal order of things.”
Roland returned his feet to the floor of the truck, brushing away the mud he’d left on the dash with his hand and putting it into one of her ashtrays.
“Yeah, sounds about right,” he agreed. “Most ancient traditions are either about keeping people from overthrowing the existing hierarchy or about stopping people from killing themselves. Like the dietary proscriptions in the Old Testament. They’re mostly just ways for people to live in an environment where it’s a hundred degrees every day in times before refrigeration and not die from eating spoiled food.”
Bailey laughed. “Interesting. We don’t, uh, read the Bible, actually. We have our own gods. Werewolves do, I mean. But I’ll tell you about them some other time.”
He perked up. “Please do. I enjo
y learning about that kind of stuff. That reminds me of the third type of taboo—the ones on breeding. Those are all over the place too, aren’t they? Like how in America, until fairly recently, it was frowned upon for people of different races to marry. Or how in India and Japan, people of different castes weren’t supposed to get too friendly with one another, and so forth.”
“Right,” she confirmed. “People can’t just, I dunno, let nature take its course.”
He put his hand in his pocket, probably checking his phone, but he didn’t take it out.
“Oh,” he said suddenly. “By the way, you don’t think you might have any magical aptitude, do you? I’ve noticed that you seem sensitive to things that are too subtle for most people to notice. Then again, I have no experience around Weres, so it could just be your heightened senses.”
Bailey shook her head. “Nope. If anything, I’m pretty sure I’m less magical than most. I…well,” she paused, sighed, and felt blood rushing to her face to grow cherries on her cheeks, “I didn’t want to talk about this because it’s really embarrassing, but…”
Roland looked at her, and his expression was warm and gentle. “It’s okay. No judgment.”
She nodded. “I can’t change.”
He blinked. “Oh. You mean…”
“I can’t, you know, shift into a wolf-thing. I have the blood since both my parents are Weres, and I have the hearing and vision and strength and all that. I guess things go wrong sometimes, and I’m the proof of that. Even if I can’t shift, I can produce Were children. That’s been proven. There aren’t so many females anymore that they can ignore me, even though as far as my people are concerned, I’m handicapped. ”
She tried not to hang her head, but it shifted lower in relation to her shoulders, as though something was weighing it down.
“I see,” Roland said. “Well, I hope I didn’t embarrass you back at the house when I sort of asked for a demonstration, although I’m assuming your brothers could have handled it. Anyway, having seen you fight, you didn’t seem particularly handicapped to me.”
Her stomach fluttered again. She suddenly wanted to bat her eyelashes at him.
“Thanks. All things are relative, though. I guess you could say I had to learn to fight well in human form since I don’t have Plan B to fall back on like most Weres do. A lot hardly ever change unless they’re hunting deep in the woods, since, y’know, can’t have normal humans seeing that. But to not be able to do it at all is strange.”
For a moment, Roland wanted to put a hand on her arm, but she was driving, so he refrained. “Try not to worry about it. You got us out of town successfully, and being able to turn into a wolf wouldn’t be very useful in Portland anyway.”
By now, they were coming into the city’s outskirts. Bailey hadn’t seen anything too surprising so far, although traffic had gotten heavier. It did strike her as odd that the clusters of buildings didn’t vanish after a few minutes and give way to wilderness. They just kept going on.
Still, out here, it was mostly just houses and gas stations and warehouses. No skyscrapers, not yet.
“In fact,” Roland went on, “one of the strange things about cities, now that I think about it and have a little more experience with small towns, is that you kind of have to be on your guard all the time, but also very careful and restrained.”
Bailey shot him a squinty glance. That didn’t sound much different from what she was used to, but she was curious about what he meant.
“Like,” he extrapolated, “there’s always a really stupid, aggressive driver who’s going to try to cut you off or tailgate you while you’re on a crowded street during rush hour and all you want to do is get into the right turn lane. And there’s always an aggressive panhandler who may or may not be a junkie, testing you to see how much money he can get off you. And there’s always cops who wonder if you’re a career criminal because unlike in places like Greenhearth, they have no idea who you are. They can’t keep track of everyone personally here.”
He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes.
“You always have to be at least slightly on edge because of stuff like that, and you can never just cut loose and beat the hell out of these people because those same cops will arrest you and throw the book at you. You’ll end up locked in a cell with people much worse than you are, or someone will just shoot you on the spot. There are so many different people everywhere that you’re never quite sure who you’re dealing with.”
All of a sudden, Bailey felt her enthusiasm for their little venture waning. “That’s…something,” she stated.
She glanced at her fuel gauge. “Crap. I need to get gas, especially if the traffic in this damn place is going to be as bad as you say.”
“Go for it,” he said.
It was only another two minutes before a gas station hove into sight. Bailey pulled into the place on the right and wheeled the truck around to the proper side of an open pump. Once they came to a stop, she fished around in her pockets and found a twenty-dollar bill.
Roland glanced at her. “Do you need money for gas? You’re chauffeuring me around, after all.”
She shook her head. “I’ll be fine for now. Maybe later, though, since I usually don’t do this much driving. Thanks for the offer.”
Opening the window, she waited for the attendant. Once he came, a pimply boy of about sixteen, she told him to put in $20 worth of regular.
As the fuel pumped into her tank, she noticed two guys with baseball caps and earrings hanging around near the air pump off to the side, looking at her and talking between themselves.
“Just stay right where you are,” she growled under her breath.
The attendant let off the pump when the price display hit $19.87. She’d had about a quarter tank, and while this wouldn’t fill the whole thing, it ought to be enough to last for a while. He replaced the nozzle and she paid him, then went inside to go to the bathroom.
When she emerged from the building, the two hat-bearers started walking toward her.
“Hey, there,” one of them called, “looks like you’re missing a piece of your shirt on the shoulder there.”
She cursed silently, having forgotten about that, and wished again she’d thought to bring a change of clothes.
The guy went on, “So, like, if you want, I can take that off your hands and let you trade up for a complete one. Used to belong to my ex. Might be a little bit tighter on you than it was on her, though.”
“What,” Bailey blurted, pivoting to face them, “you gonna offer to pull out a tape and measure my bust while you’re at it? Christ, neither of you numbnuts are drunk enough to be hitting on me. Go home and have another couple brews. Since you seem sober, you oughta have recognized that I’m the type who will shove your balls up your ass if you try anything with me.”
The one who hadn’t spoken yet laughed and said something like “Whoa-ho-ho! Feisty!” His buddy simultaneously whined, “Oh, man!”
The important thing, though, was that they stopped dead in their tracks and did not attempt to bother her further. She climbed back into the truck, started the engine, and got back on the road.
“Well,” quipped Roland, “that was fascinating. You really are a magnet for trouble, aren’t you?”
Bailey groaned and tried not to roll her eyes. “Not you, too. Everyone says that, and it isn’t even me. I mean, did you see me go up to them and start talking shit? No. They started it, and I just provided them with the response they’d earned.”
“True,” Roland admitted, no longer attempting to hide his amusement.
Just after the gas station, they entered the southeastern suburbs of Portland. Traffic picked up almost immediately, and Bailey squirmed as she struggled to keep track of everything going on around her.
“Shit,” she hissed under her breath as her boot stamped on the brake. A pickup truck had just pulled out in front of her, forcing her to slow down rather than risk having to wait another thirty seconds before he could turn onto the r
oad.
Roland was nonchalant. “Don’t worry, you saw him in time,” he pointed out. “Also, stay in this lane. I think the road grows a right turn lane somewhere up ahead, but then it disappears again after a mile.”
“Okay,” Bailey replied. The day’s light was fading to where half the motorists had their headlights on, and she wasn’t used to seeing so much illumination at one time. “Damn, where do all these cars come from?”
“Oh, you know,” Roland drawled, circling his hand around the cab. “Places.”
She snorted. “That’s helpful, thanks. Do you know of any places to eat around here? That steak sandwich back at the Elk was the only thing I’ve had today. And I’m already tired of driving, to be honest.”
Roland shrugged. “There’s always places. I’ll keep an eye out. Just keep going for now, and we can head into the city after we find somewhere to eat out here in the suburbs.”
Fortunately, he spotted a restaurant a minute or two later. “Turn here,” he instructed.
It took Bailey a second to realize that she had to go down a side street and then enter a huge parking lot forming a kind of plaza filled with at least a dozen businesses. She spotted the restaurant, though, and headed toward it, parking a few hundred feet from the entrance.
“Well,” she said, “looks like a family-owned place, at least. I figured it would be all chain restaurants here, or maybe weird vegan cafés or some shit.”
Roland hitched up his jacket as he unbuckled his seat belt. “There are plenty of those, too. Something for everyone. This place looks nice and simple, not to mention popular.”
It was around dinnertime and the place looked at least two-thirds full, so Bailey hoped they were staffed properly.
Once inside, they found the place to be agreeable—not as homey as the Elk, but nothing too strange by her standards, either. Just an all-purpose American diner. The waitress brought them water, took their order for coffee, and left them to peruse the menu, which was a good five pages long.
Eventually, Roland ordered a grilled chicken Caesar wrap with onion rings, and Bailey a pepper jack burger, medium rare, with fries. Then they both leaned back in their padded booth, sipping their coffee, feeling warm and good.
