They’d traveled north and were somewhere not too far from Everett by his reckoning. He wasn’t terribly surprised when their path ended in a brand-new eight-foot chain-link fence. Someone had a goldmine on their hands and they were waiting to sell it to some developer when the price was right. Until then they’d try to keep out the riffraff.
He helped Moira over the fence, mostly a matter of whispering a few directions until she found the top of it. He waited until she was over and then vaulted over himself.
The path that they’d been following continued on, though not nearly as well-traveled as it had been before the fence. A quarter-mile of blackberry brambles ended abruptly in thigh-deep, damp grasslands that might once have been a lawn. He stopped before they left the cover of the bushes, sinking down to rest on his heels.
“There’s a burnt-out house here,” he told Moira who had ducked down when he did. “It must have burned down a couple of years ago because I don’t smell it.”
“Hidden,” she commented.
“Someone’s had tents up here,” he told her. “And I see the remnants of a camp fire.”
“Can you see the boat from here?”
“No, but there’s a path I think should lead down to the water. I think this is the place.”
She pulled her hand away from his arm. “Can you go check it out without being seen?”
“It would be easier if I do it as a wolf,” Tom admitted. “But I don’t dare. We might have to make a quick getaway a
nd it’ll be a while before I can shift back to human.” He hoped Jon would be healthy enough to pilot in an emergency—but he didn’t like to make plans that depended upon an unknown. Moira wasn’t going to be piloting a boat anywhere.
“Wait,” she told him. She murmured a few words and then put her cold fingers against his throat. A sudden shock, like a static charge on steroids, hit him and when it was over her fingers were hot on his pulse. “You aren’t invisible, but it’ll make people want to overlook you.”
He pulled out his HK and checked the magazine before sliding it back in. The big gun fit his hand like a glove. He believed in using weapons, guns or fangs, whatever got the job done.
“It won’t take me long.”
“If you don’t go you’ll never get back,” she told him and gave him a gentle push. “I can take care of myself.”
It didn’t sit right with him, leaving her alone in the territory of his enemies, but common sense said he’d have a better chance of roaming unseen. And no one tackled a witch lightly—not even other witches.
Spell or no, he slid through the wet overgrown trees like a shadow, crouching to minimize his silhouette and avoiding anything likely to crunch. One thing living in Seattle did was minimize the number of things that could crunch under your foot—all the leaves were wet and moldy without a noise to be had.
The boat was there, bobbing gently in the water. Empty. He closed his eyes and let the morning air tell him all it could.
His brother had been in the boat. There had been others, too—Tom memorized their scent. If anything happened to Jon he’d track them down and kill them, one by one. Once he had them, he let his nose lead him to Jon.
He found blood where Jon had scraped against a tree, crushed plants where his brother had tried to get away and rolled around in the mud with another man. Or maybe he’d just been laying a trail for Tom. Jon knew Tom would come for him—that’s what family did.
The path the kidnappers took paralleled the waterfront for a while and then headed inland, but not for the burnt-out house. Someone had found a better hide-out. Nearly hidden under a shelter of trees, a small barn nestled snugly amidst broken pieces of corral fencing. Its silvered sides bore only a hint of red paint, but the aluminum roof, though covered with moss, was undamaged.
And his brother was there. He couldn’t quite hear what Jon was saying, but he recognized his voice…and the slurring rapid rhythm of his schizophrenicmimicry. If Jon was acting, he was all right. The relief of that settled in his spine and steadied his nerves.
All he needed to do was get his witch…movement caught his attention and he dropped to the ground and froze, hidden by wet grass and weeds.
Moira wasn’t surprised when they found her—ten in the morning isn’t a good time to hide. It was one of the young ones—she could tell by the surprised squeal and the rapid thud of footsteps as he ran for help.
Of course if she’d really been trying to hide, she might have managed it. But it had occurred to her, sometime after Tom left, that if she wanted to find Samhain—the easiest thing might be to let them find her. So she set about attracting their attention.
If they found her, it would unnerve them. They knew she worked alone. Her arrival here would puzzle them, but they wouldn’t look for anyone else—leaving Tom as her secret weapon.
Magic calls to magic, unless the witch takes pains to hide it, so any of them should have been able to feel the flames that danced over her hands. It had taken them longer than she expected. While she waited for the boy to return, she found a sharp-edged rock and put it in her pocket. She folded her legs and let the coolness of the damp earth flow through her.
She didn’t hear him come, but she knew by his silence who the young covenist had run to.
“Hello, Father,” she told him, rising to her feet. “We have much to talk about.”
She didn’t look like a captive, Tom thought, watching Moira walk to the barn as if she’d been there before, though she might have been following the sullen-looking, half-grown boy who stalked through the grass ahead of her. A tall man followed them both, his hungry eyes on Moira’s back.