The Urban Fantasy Anthology (Peter S. Beagle) (Kitty Norville 1.50)

She drank coffee black so that was how she fixed it, holding the second cup out to him. “Evil leaves a psychic stench behind. Maybe a wolf nose can pick up on it. I don’t know, not being a werewolf, myself. There’s milk in the fridge and sugar in the cupboard in front of you if you’d like.”

She wasn’t at all what Tom had expected. Their pack’s hired witch was a motherly woman of indeterminate years who wore swami robes in bright hues and smelled strongly of patchouli and old blood that didn’t quite mask something bitter and dark. When he’d played her Jon’s message, she’d hung up the phone and refused to answer it again.

By the time he’d driven to her house, it was shut up and locked with no one inside. That was his first clue that this Samhain Coven might be even more of a problem than he’d thought and his worry had risen to fever pitch. He’d gone down to the underpass where his brother had been living and used his nose through the parks and other places his brother had drifted through. But wherever they were holding Jon (and he refused to believe that he was dead) it wasn’t anywhere near where they kidnaped him.

His alpha didn’t like pack members concerning themselves with matters outside of the pack (“Your only family is your pack, son”). Tom didn’t even bother contacting him. He’d gone to Choo instead. The Emerald City Pack’s only submissive wolf, Alan worked as an herbalist and knew almost everyone in the supernatural world of Seattle. When he told Alan about the message Jon had left on his phone, Alan had written this woman’s name and address and handed it to him. He’d have thought it was a joke but Alan had better taste than that. So Tom had gone looking for a witch named Wendy—Wendy Moira Keller.

He’d been disappointed at his first look. 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 minimal 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 had come and gone so swiftly that if he’d been younger he might have missed it.

Either she was stupid or she was powerful. Since Alan had sent him here, he was betting on powerful. He hoped she was powerful.

He didn’t want the coffee, but he took it when she handed to him. It was black and stronger that 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 ‘an 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?”

She snorted a laugh and set her coffee down abruptly. Grabbing a paper towel off its holder she 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 shit 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 principals, m

ind you, witches, for the most part, don’t have moral principles. But drugs are too likely to attract unwanted attention. We never have been as deep in secrecy as you wolves used 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 in 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 kidnaping. 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 payphone. There weren’t many of them left, as cell phones had made it less profitable 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 had 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 payphone, outside of 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.”

At the same time, a male, probably young, was saying in a rapid, rabid flow of sound, “I feel it…Doncha feel it? I feel it in him. This is the one. He’ll do for Kouros.” Then there was a soft click as the call ended.