Compelled (2 page)

That was when I noticed the obvious. My eyes beat my nose in this regard. Not a single early morning shopper included a spellcaster. No witches, wizards, or even warlocks. One of our consistent customers, an elderly wind witch named Mrs. Weiss, hadn’t made an appearance either. She usually hovered near the wand display, in a fog of vanilla perfume, browsing the goods for the longest of time.

“Hey, my mom’s looking for a 1940s highlighter trunk she saw on the Internet. Is it still available?” The leather from his biker pants rubbed against the glass.

 
“Yes, we still have it. Do you want to buy it and pick it up at the loading dock?”

He nodded. “If the air stays clear for a while, that sounds good.”

My right eyebrow rose. “How long has the air been clear?”

He grinned, revealing a set of perfectly straight teeth—a perk for shape-shifters. “A few days, now that the war has begun.”

I about choked on the sharp inhale that coursed down my throat. “Excuse me?”

“You folks out here in Jersey are always the last to hear about the stuff going on in the big cities.” He shrugged. “The shifters always smell trouble coming first. Especially since those rat bastards come looking for us when they need power.”

People like the chap in front of me were prized possessions to spellcasters. I’d learned from a close wizard friend about how the power generated by shape-shifters and werewolves like myself could be harnessed by spellcasters, whether we wanted to be used or not.

My nerves rose to alarming levels, forcing me to grip the counter. “Where are they fighting? Who’s involved?”

I waited for an answer, but he chose that moment to clam up. “Just be careful out there,” was all he said.

Since he wouldn’t give me any more information, I decided to wrap up the sale. “I’ll have someone bring your trunk to the dock as soon as we make arrangements for payment.”

After the customer paid for the trunk, I glanced around the room again, perhaps hoping my observation earlier had been a mistake. We always had at least one spellcaster roaming around.

“Something wrong, Nat?” Bill peeked at the register. He wasn’t referring to my well-being.

“Nothing important. A customer bought a trunk.”

“Just what I wanted to hear. More junk has got a home.” He sighed and adjusted his round wire-frame glasses. Bill used a glamour to hide his true appearance, but right now, he had an uncanny resemblance to the cartoon character Dilbert. “Did you ever find that goblin who you
stole
the knife from?”

I rolled my eyes. A few months ago, when I was in Atlantic City, trying to help my father, I met a strange goblin who tried to attack me with a mysterious blade that changed based on the kind of enemy I faced. I ended up the new owner when I couldn’t find the guy to return it.

I’d even showed the goblin blade to Bill, hoping he’d say it belonged to his long lost brother or something. No dice.

“I didn’t steal it. When the guy moves back into his repair shop, I’ll send it express mail so he can have it back in his happy little hands.” I gave him a curt smile and then returned to the back office to get some work done. The man I needed to see was emptying trashcans. The Bends’s janitor also hauled goods as needed around the store. His scent, a haze of myrrh and frankincense, hit my nose first before anything else. The guy was covered in it, since he stuffed his zombies like burritos with the stuff.

“Hey, Nat.” He glanced up, the dark circles under his eyes quite prominent under the skylights in the business office. Slowly, he added the trash into a container on wheels.

“Morning.” I quickly went to the computer and logged in. Just smelling him brought back memories of a date night I’ve wanted to suppress for the rest of my life, a dinner where one of his zombie minions made an appearance to show me a thing or two about his master’s proper treatment.

Also, a piece of a zombie, dunno what, fell in my food.

Yep, it went down as creepy as you’d imagine.

I printed the paperwork for the trunk and turned to hand it to the necromancer. I gasped to find him right behind me.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I mumbled.

With him so close, my nose twitched. His floral scent was pretty overpowering.

“I’ve been doing great,” he said. He had some cute blue eyes, but the dead thing just didn’t work for me.

“There’s a customer who—”

“Matter of fact, I’ve been seeing someone.”

Oh, really.
Now that came out of nowhere.

He continued. “I met her a week ago, picking flowers in the graveyard.”

“How nice.”
What kind of nice girl hung out in a graveyard?

A small smile broke out on his face. “She was picking the dead weeds along the head stones. I thought she was so angelic, gathering all her flowers into a broken wicker basket.”

Uh, that kind of girl.

“She sounds nice,” I said. “I bet you two make quite the pair. So if you could—”

“Her name is Marlene and she’s quite handy with a sewing needle. Whenever somebody has a body part that falls off, Marlene is right there to—”

“Whoa. Okay, there.” I waved my hands in front of his face. “How about we work on stuff for The Bends.” With a dry laugh, I shoved the paperwork into his full hands. “There’s this trunk a customer needs—”

He drew the piece of paper I handed him to his nose. “Are you wearing a different perfume?”

My mouth dropped open, but I quickly closed it again. “Uh, no. Why?”

“From where I’m standing your aura is the same, yet your scent is weird. The things you touch leave a mark I can smell. The computer, this piece of paper. There is something different about you.”

“When did you notice this?”

“I guess around New Year’s. I’ve been too busy to really approach you about it.”

Had something bad happened to me? Was it an alpha female’s scent maybe? Or perhaps I had some kind of magic clinging to me I didn’t know about. Worry tried to seep into my mind like black ink, but I pushed it away. “Do I smell bad or something?”

“It’s very faint. I’ve never smelled this on a werewolf before, either. I can check into it if you like?”

“No need.” The last thing I needed was more up-close-and-personal time with a dude who touched rotting dead folks.

I left him with the paperwork and headed back to the main floor to keep myself busy. With the strange lack of witches and wizards in the area as well as my alpha female issues, I had too many things to worry about.

Just one more might bring down everything I’ve built up.

Chapter 2

A few days later, on my day off, I eagerly headed to my aunt Olga’s apartment. It was sunny, promising to be a great day of visiting with family.

The minute I approached the door, I caught a whiff of baby lotion and heard the gurgles of an infant. I had a bag in hand, containing yet another recent purchase, a gift. An older blonde woman opened the door and quickly got out of the way as I bounded inside.

“Heh. Good to see you too, Nat,” my aunt Olga said in Russian. I’d have time to give her a proper greeting later. She wouldn’t go anywhere.

An elderly woman, my grandma Lasovskaya, gently patted my three-month-old niece’s tummy in a small portable crib.

“Sveta,” I whispered with a grin to the baby.

The tiny girl with a bit of blonde peach-like fuzz hair on the top of her head squirmed at the sound of my voice.

“Hey,
princessa
. It’s your
tyotia
,” I said.

Seeing Sveta made all the worries pressing against my shoulders disappear. Even though she was still young, she was my family’s hope for the future.

“Are you hungry, Natalya?” Grandma asked.

“I can make extra food for you and Mama,” Aunt Olga offered. My aunt acted as caretaker for my grandma during the day.

I leaned down and kissed both of Grandma’s cheeks. Her wrinkled skin was warm and soft. “Not right now, but thanks.”

Grandma chuckled and handed me the baby. “You’re not here to see me, huh?”

A sigh escaped my lips as I cuddled the baby close to my chest. Sveta’s wayward fist found her mouth, and she suckled on it. Such a simple act filled me with happiness. I didn’t get quality time like this due to work. Once in a while, Karey, Sveta’s mom, needed a sitter when her normal one backed out, which came as a surprise to me, since Sveta had so many aunts on Karey’s side, even if they were all bat-shit crazy. Last year, my brother married Karey, a wood nymph he’d knocked up. Like a gang of mobsters, the wood nymph’s numbers ran deep and they fiercely protected their own.

Crazy aunts or not, I had the baby all to myself and she eventually fell asleep in my arms.

Grandma looked on with a grin. “So how long until I get to hold one of yours?”

If I had been drinking, I would’ve done a spit take. “Not any time soon, Grandma. We just got married. Thorn and I need to adjust to my new status.”

Grandma chaffed. “That’s a poor excuse. Your grandpa Pyotr didn’t wait long to get me in the family way.”

“Oh, Mama,” Olga said with a laugh.

Grandma never held back when it came to having new babies in the family. Once Alex married Karey, she switched targets. I hadn’t married a good Russian boy like my parents expected, but the local pack leader was just as good. Just thinking about Thorn made me smile. Now they hoped for me to produce a litter or two. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. Like how many full moons Thorn had left.

Aunt Olga finished preparing Grandma’s lunch and left her food on a tray. She offered me a serving of chicken soup, but I refused. Nobody could get me to move with this baby in my arms.

In the middle of a bite, Grandma turned to me. “I heard from an old friend a few days ago.”

“From Russia?” I asked.

“Yes. It was Tamara.”

The name brought a flash of memories from this winter. I’d made a journey north to help my father with a werewolf obligation called a moon debt. Somehow, thanks to the help from close friends, I succeeded, but one of the obstacles in my way had been Tamara. A sinister older woman with a cunning smile came to mind.

“Why would she contact you?” I asked. “I thought she worked for a pack leader in Maine.”

“She reached out to me about old magic. She didn’t go into details as to why she’d returned to our homeland. Only that during her time in Russia, she’d gotten close to uncovering a spell to remove curses from objects.”

My stomach felt like it dropped onto the floor and rolled away. A few months ago, I didn’t know werewolves could cast spells. Our people called it old magic and these days the laws governing werewolves, the Code, prohibited any werewolf from using it.
 

“And what else did she say?” I asked.

Think of big girl panties with obnoxious pink flowers.
I took a deep breath. Was this the news I craved hearing, news that would save my husband?

Grandma patted my knee. “It’s not what you think, Natalya. I believe it isn’t.”
 

My chest tightened. I glanced at Sveta, my heart breaking as I wondered if she’d ever know her uncle. Would he die before she even took her first steps?

“Tamara wants me to go check her work, and I’m too old to consider such a request. The last five centuries have been hard on me.” Grandma had seen so much since emigrating from nineteenth-century Russia.

I nodded, staring at the minuscule lines on Aunt Olga’s coffee table. “So what do you think, Grandma?”

“It’s probably a rumor of some kind. She said the wizards have been working to remove curses from their weapons. The spellcasters are fighting among themselves, and, somehow, the warlocks have found a way to tilt the balance. They’ve found a way to curse wizard weapons and render them useless.”

So that was why there wasn’t as much stock at work for the past couple of days. Did that mean none of our spellcaster customers would ever come back?

Grandma continued with a sigh. “I’ve got too many years on me to play with old magic.”

“What about Thorn?” I blurted.

“I know you love him, but the thing about old magic is that there’s more than one spell to do the same thing. Don’t talk to Tamara if she tries to contact you. You’re just a beginner, but she might try.” There was a bite behind the old woman’s words. Grandma rarely pushed when she spoke, but this time she did.

My lips sealed shut, and I bit the inside of my mouth. There were so many things I ached to say. So many questions. Maybe my grandmother sensed the rising anxiety I struggled to suppress. She tried to take my hand, but I slid out of the way and placed the sleeping baby back in the crib. Keeping my feelings inside wasn’t going too well.

“Don’t be disappointed,” she said. “Tamara has chased too many problems. She is
beda
. The kind of trouble you don’t need right now.”

“What can you do, Grandma? What can I do?”

“Pray to God. I’ve contacted friends I trust. They are doing what they can.”

“I appreciate that.” I kissed her cheek and then Aunt Olga’s. It was time to go. I had some thinking to do.

We said our goodbyes, and I headed home. On the way back to the small house I shared with Thorn, I noticed a dark-haired man waiting by the door. He had to be here for Thorn, since I rarely had visitors. When he turned around, my hackles rose and my fists clenched.

It was Rex, a man I wouldn’t even call an acquaintance.

This day was getting better and better.

As he strolled in my direction, my memory replayed every single moment with him from the past that I tried so hard to suppress: disappointment, shame, and—even worse—betrayal.

“You seen Thorn around?” he asked, looking me directly in the eyes. As the pack’s second-in-command, he should have looked at the ground in my presence. This wasn’t the first time he’d challenged me.

“Not since this morning.” I stared right back at his smug face.

“That’s a shame.” Rex used his right foot to kick around a small stone on the sidewalk. “He hasn’t been easy to find the last couple of weeks.”

“Your point?”

Rex gave me the very same expression he used on the day my parents tried to match me up with him after Thorn disappeared five years ago. It was the look a predator gave his prey. “An alpha should be accessible to his pack. He’d only hide if he was
weak
.”