At his first look, he’d been disappointed. Wendy the Witch was five foot nothing with rich curves in all the right places and feathery black hair that must have been dyed, because only black Labs and cats are that black. The stupid wraparound mirrored glasses kept him from guessing her age exactly, but he’d bet she wasn’t yet thirty. No woman over thirty would be caught dead in those glasses. The cop in him wondered if she was covering up bruises—but he didn’t smell a male in the living-scents in the house.
She wore a gray T-shirt without a bra, and black pajama pants with white skull-and-crossbones wearing red bows. But despite all that, he saw no piercings or tattoos—like she’d approached mall Goth culture, but only so far. She smelled of fresh flowers and mint. Her apartment was decorated with a minimum of furniture and a mishmash of colors that didn’t quite fit together.
He didn’t scare her.
Tom scared everyone—and he had even before their pack had a run-in with a bunch of fae a few years ago. His face had gotten cut up pretty badly with some sort of magical knife and hadn’t healed right afterward. The scars made him look almost as dangerous as he was. People walked warily around him.
Not only wasn’t she scared, but she didn’t even bother to hide her irritation at being woken up. He stalked her, and all she’d felt was a flash of sexual awareness that came and went so swiftly, he might have missed it if he’d been younger.
Either she was stupid or she was powerful. Since Alan had sent him here, Tom was betting on powerful. He hoped she was powerful.
He didn’t want the coffee, but he took it when she handed it to him. It was black and stronger than he usually drank it, but it tasted good. “So why don’t you smell like other witches?”
“Like Kouros, I’m not Wiccan,” she told him, “but ‘and it harm none’ seems like a good way to live to me.”
White witch.
He knew that Wiccans consider themselves witches—and some of them had enough witchblood to make it so. But witches, the real thing, weren’t witches because of what they believed, but because of genetic heritage. A witch was born a witch and studied to become a better one. But for witches, real power came from blood and death—mostly other people’s blood and death.
White witches, especially those outside of Wicca (where numbers meant safety), were weak and valuable sacrifices for black witches, who didn’t have their scruples. As Wendy the Witch had noted—witches seemed to have a real preference for killing their own.
He sipped at his coffee and asked, “So how have you managed without ending up as bits and pieces in someone else’s cauldron?”
The witch snorted a laugh and set her coffee down abruptly. She grabbed a paper towel off its holder and held it to her face as she gasped and choked coffee, looking suddenly a lot less than thirty. When she was finished, she said, “That’s awesome. Bits and pieces. I’ll have to remember that.”
Still grinning, she picked up the coffee again. He wished he could see her eyes, because he was pretty sure that whatever humor she’d felt was only surface deep.
“I tell you what,” she said, “why don’t you tell me who you are and what you know? That way I can tell you if I can help you or not.”
“Fair enough,” he said. The coffee was strong, and he could feel it and the four other cups he’d had since midnight settle in his bones with caffeine’s untrustworthy gift of nervous energy.
“I’m Tom Franklin and I’m second in the Emerald City Pack.” She wasn’t surprised by that. She’d known what he was as soon as she opened her door. “My brother Jon is a cop and a damn fine one. He’s been on the Seattle PD for nearly twenty years, and for the last six months he’s been undercover as a street person. He was sent as part of a drug task force: there’s been some nasty garbage out on the street lately, and he’s been looking for it.”
Wendy Moira Keller leaned back against the cabinets with a sigh. “I’d like to say that no witch would mess with drugs. Not from moral principles, mind you. Witches, for the most part, don’t have moral principles. But drugs are too likely to attract unwanted attention. We never have been so deep in secrecy as you wolves like to be, not when witches sometimes crop up in mundane families—we need to be part of society enough that they can find us. Mostly people think we’re a bunch of harmless charlatans—trafficking in drugs would change all that for the worse. But the Samhain bunch is powerful enough that no one wants to face them—and Kouros is arrogant and crazy. He likes money, and there is at least one herbalist among his followers who could manufacture some really odd stuff.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m interested in finding my brother, not in finding out if witches are selling drugs. It sounded to me like the drugs had nothing to do with my brother’s kidnapping. Let me play Jon’s call, and you make the determination.” He pulled out his cell phone and played the message for her.
It had come from a pay phone. There weren’t many of those left, now that cell phones had made it less profitable for the phone companies to keep repairing the damage of vandals. But there was no mistaking the characteristic static and hiss as his brother talked very quietly into the mouthpiece.
Tom had called in favors and found the phone Jon used, but the people who took his brother were impossible to pick out from the scents of the hundreds of people who had been there since the last rain—and his brother’s scent stopped right at the pay phone, outside a battered convenience store. Stopped as if they’d teleported him to another planet—or, more prosaically, thrown him in a car.
Jon’s voice—smoker-dark, though he’d never touched tobacco or any of its relatives—slid through the apartment: “Look, Tom. My gut told me to call you tonight—and I listen to my gut. I’ve been hearing something on the street about a freaky group calling themselves Samhain—” He spelled it, to be sure Tom got it right. “Last few days I’ve had a couple of people following me that might be part of Samhain. No one wants to talk about ’em much. The streets are afraid of these . . . ”
He didn’t know if the witch could hear the rest. He’d been a wolf for twenty years and more, so his judgment about what human senses were good for was pretty much gone.
He could hear the girl’s sweet voice clearly, though. “Lucky Jon?” she asked. “Lucky Jon, who are you calling? Let’s hang it up, now.” A pause, then the girl spoke into the phone. “Hello?” Another pause. “It’s an answering machine, I think. No worries.”