Soulbound: A Lone Star Witch Novel (8 page)

I try not to let the coincidence remind me of my own hysterical flight through this forest when I was her age.

When it seems like she’s got the freaking out down to a minimum, I once again ask, “What’s happened, Brenda? Why are you so upset?”

She doesn’t answer at first, but then—in a voice so low I have to strain to hear it over the soft whispers of the wind—she finally murmurs, “Someone’s over there.” She
reaches out a shaking hand and points down a path to the left of where we are.

“Someone?” Micah asks. “Did he or she try to hurt you?”

She shakes her head, whispers, “I think she’s dead.”

Micah and I lock eyes over her head and he looks as alarmed as I feel. “Why do you say that?” I demand.

“I was taking a shortcut through the forest, hoping to make it to the Solstice ceremony before it got too late, and I tripped over her. She’s next to the big, lightning-struck tree and at first, I thought she was just drunk, but”—she shudders—“she isn’t moving and there’s a lot of blood.”

I leap to my feet, head for the path—and the tree—she’s indicated, but Micah gets there first. He blocks me with his body. “You can’t go down there,” he tells me.

“We need to see if whoever she found needs help.” I shove at him a little. We can’t just leave the poor girl out here, bleeding, in the middle of the forest.

He doesn’t budge. “It doesn’t sound like she’s simply hurt, Xandra. You know that as well as I do and the last thing the police need is us tromping around a crime scene. And I’m sorry to say it, but it’s the last thing you need as well.”

I know the words are coming before he says them, even think that I’m prepared for them—at least until they hit me with all the finesse of a two-by-four. He’s right. I know that. I had nightmares for years after I found poor Lucy. Hell, I still have nightmares. What makes me think this will be any different?

And still, “We have to check. What if she’s just unconscious?”

By now a group of half a dozen other witches has stumbled onto the scene. Among them is Detective Moira Montgomery, one of my least favorite people in the world. From the snarl curling her upper lip when she
looks at me, it’s obvious the feeling is more than mutual. I guess now that her father, my beloved Uncle Mike, is dead, she feels like there’s no reason for us to hide our animosity anymore.

“What did you do now, feeb?” she demands in a querulous voice.

“It’s called running. You should lay off the doughnuts and try it some time.” It’s a childish retort, and once it’s out, I’m sorry I said it. But it was a knee-jerk, gut-level response to being called a feeb. As in feeble. It’s a derogatory term for a witch without power and Moira has always thrown it around way too easily. Especially in reference to me.

“And maybe you should stay out of police business.”

“I’m not in police business. This is private property, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten anything. It belongs to the king and queen, of which you are neither, and as such is protected by the Ipswitch Police Department. But if you’d like, I can run you into the station and we can sort this all out down there. Including whatever part you’ve played in disturbing the peace.”

“Whatever part I’ve played? All I’ve done is help calm the kid down.” I speak through clenched teeth, even as I gesture to Amy, who is still huddled against the tree. I can’t believe Moira’s threatening me when all I’ve done is try to help. Not that I’m afraid of her—she may talk a good game, but there’s no way she’d haul a member of our coven’s royal family into the station house without a damn good reason.

But that’s not the point. Finding the girl, the body, Amy tripped over is.

“So, that’s the statement you’re sticking with?” she asks, reaching into her back pocket for goddess only knows what.

“Seriously?” I demand. “You really want to do this
now? A girl is either dead or dying and you want to have a pissing contest with me?”

She barely glances at Amy. “She looks okay to me.”

I roll my eyes, but before I can say anything else—like call her a moron—Micah jumps into the fray, explaining what we know so far.

Moira listens to him as she would never listen to me, then asks Amy to take her to the body. When the girl balks, not wanting to go anywhere near it again, I volunteer to lead the way. Though it’s the last thing I want to do either, I know exactly what tree she’s referring to. As a child, I climbed it a million times and as a teenager, I let Micah carve our initials into its warped and bumpy trunk before I knew better.

I glance at him out of the corner of my eye and from the way he’s watching me, I know he remembers all the things we did at that tree as well as I do. Which is a shame, because some memories are better off forgotten.

“How do
you
know where the body is?” Moira asks as I skirt Micah. Her eyes are narrowed suspiciously.

“These are my woods.” It’s a simple answer but it’s also the truth.

I weave around a clump of trees in the center of the path and start booking it. That poor girl shouldn’t be out here any longer than absolutely necessary. But I’ve made it only a few yards down the path when I slam straight into the obscene. The whole area stinks of violence and black magic.

From the way both Moira and Micah stop, I know they feel it too. Every instinct I have screams at me to run in the other direction, but I can’t do that. Not when some poor girl went through hell out here. Might still be going through hell.

I push forward, down a small hill and around a curve, aware as I do so that the tree in question is only a few
feet in front of me. As soon as I clear the curve, I start sweeping the ground with my flashlight. It isn’t long before I find her.

I see her feet first, encased in a pair of decorative brown cowboy boots. So she’s a witch then, one of our coven—or at the very least a cowgirl who wandered across the path of the wrong dark warlock. She’s facedown in the mud, wearing tattered blue jeans and a ripped University of Texas hoodie in burnt orange. The hood has been pulled up until it completely obscures her head.

Micah rushes past me, starts to roll her over, but Moira stops him. “No fingerprints,” she barks, slipping a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket.

“She might not be dead,” I object, though deep inside, I know better.

Moira focuses her own large flashlight—the reason it took her so long to catch up to Micah and me—on the body, and the huge pool of blood it’s lying in. “She’s dead.”

But she tosses Micah a pair of gloves anyway.

Micah nods in confirmation, even as he slips on the gloves. He feels around her throat for a pulse, pulls back a hand covered in blood. “I think her throat is slit,” he says weakly.

Moira nods, then pulls out the walkie-talkie she wears at her waist, orders a perimeter to be set up and a comprehensive sweep done of the forest. The look on her face says she knows she isn’t going to find anything, but I know that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The warlock may be gone, but he might have left something behind.

The next hour passes in a blur. My mom and dad arrive with Donovan, and all three of them try to talk me into going home, but some invisible force keeps me pinned right here, watching as this new nightmare unfolds.
I don’t know why it matters so much, but I need to know who this girl is. Need to know what happened to her. Maybe because, standing here looking at her, I can’t help but remember the last body I’d found.

That girl, Lucy Douglas, had been a college student at UT. She’d come to Ipswitch for what she thought was a romantic weekend with her new boyfriend and had ended up mutilated and strangled. It’s been over eight years and I haven’t forgotten anything about that night. Something deep inside warns me that forgetting tonight won’t be any easier.

Donovan and my parents choose to stay with me and just like last time, no one—not even the new chief of police—can get them to move. Sometimes being royalty has its perks. I just wish we could use them for something other than viewing death.

Witchcraft Investigations shows up along with the more traditional CSI team and together they work the murder, taking pictures and measuring the magical signature that still hangs in the air all around us. It is dark and oppressive and stinks of blood magic at its most vile. It’s not familiar to them, doesn’t fit any of the signatures they currently have on record. Not that I would expect it to—warlocks of this caliber know how to disguise themselves.

After CSI finishes taking pictures in situ, Moira crouches down and rolls the girl over. As she does, the girl’s hoodie falls off and there’s a collective gasp from the small crowd gathered here, along with a muttered curse from both Donovan and my father. I don’t make a sound. I can’t. The first glimpse I get of her black hair throws me right back to my hallucination-that-was-really-a-memory-and-now-might-actually-be-called-a-prophecy from this morning. It immobilizes me, has my blood freezing in my veins. The girl in my dreams, the one who had lain battered and broken and bleeding in my parents’ forest, had had the same exact hair.

Had I seen this coming? This morning, if I hadn’t been so busy trying to bury the images, could I have somehow prevented this? Or is it all just a horrible coincidence?

“Do you recognize her?” I ask the group as a whole.

No one answers, and I finally move a few halting steps forward. Moira is so arrested by what she sees that she doesn’t even bother to reprimand me. But she doesn’t know about the hair, doesn’t know about what I saw, and I can’t help wondering what holds her and the others spellbound.

With effort, I yank my attention from her blood-matted hair and instantly wish I hadn’t. One look at her vacant eyes and the gaping tear in her throat makes my stomach churn. No one should ever have to die like this.

“Does anybody know who she is?” I ask again.

Ipswitch is a relatively small town, made up mostly of witches and a few other creatures that go bump in the night. I haven’t lived here in years, so it’s not unusual that she doesn’t look familiar to me. But Moira should recognize her. Part of the role of the small police department in this very low-crime town is to know the citizenry, simply because you can never tell when some kind of weird magic or otherworldly thing is going to happen. And if she doesn’t, Mom, Dad and Donovan should certainly have some idea of the girl’s identity.

When once again no one answers, I creep a little closer until I’m standing on the front line with my parents, Donovan and Micah, none of whom have said anything since the body was rolled over. And now that I’m this close, now that I’m staring at her from this angle, I finally realize what they’re all looking at. Not the wound in her throat or the bruises all over her body. And certainly not her bloodstained hair. No, they are all staring at the large, black mark that covers her entire left cheek, a mark I’ve never seen on anyone else in my entire life.

At my first sight of it, I stumble backward, trip on a tree root and hit the ground, hard. I barely feel the fall. I’m too busy trying to wrap my mind around what I’m seeing. That girl, that poor girl who I’m becoming more and more convinced I really did see in a vision this morning, has been branded with a circlet of
Isis
.

She’s been branded with
my
mark.

“You know, the whole purpose of sitting on that thing is to sway back and forth.”

I’m curled up under a blanket on my mom’s antique patio swing when Donovan finds me hours later. It isn’t moving because I’m too shell-shocked to push, too shell-shocked to do much of anything but sit here and stare out into the garden I usually take such comfort from.

This morning, that’s nearly impossible, especially with the ritual ring cast by my family still sitting front and center. Normally, it vanishes at the end of a ceremony as mystically as it appears, but the Solstice rites weren’t completed last night and so it remains, a dark and lonely reminder of everything I would rather forget.

“You doing okay?” Donovan asks as he settles down next to me.

“Just peachy.”

He snorts. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” He doesn’t say anything else for a while, just sits with me, swinging us back and forth in a slow, easy rhythm that makes me want to cry even as it relaxes me.

I ignore the prickles behind my eyes—crying won’t do me any good—and instead let the warmth of everything Donovan isn’t saying simply soak into me. I don’t tell him, but I’m glad he came out here. Sometimes being alone isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

“They think I did it,” I finally say, nearly choking on the words.

“
Moira
wants to believe you did it but she’s not exactly
objective. She’s so blinded by hatred she’d arrest you for every crime that crosses her desk if she could.”

“What’s with that, anyway?” I demand. “I’ve never done anything to her.”

He shrugs. “I think she’s just always wanted to be you.”

“Yeah, because being me is so great. I’m sure she’ll change her mind once I go to prison for a murder I didn’t commit.”

“You’re a princess, Xan. The one thing I can assure you with absolute conviction is that you are not going to prison.”

“They think I did it,” I repeat.

“No.” He scoots over, hugs me to his side. I put my head on his shoulder despite my resolve to stay strong. “They don’t know
who
did it so they’re casting around, trying to figure out who in the community is strong enough to hide from them after doing something so terrible.”

“Which should be reason enough for them not to bother looking at me at all. Yet here we are.”

“Here we are.” He starts to say something else, then stops himself and I’m left wondering what he’s not telling me. From the look on his face, whatever it is is pretty serious stuff.

“Do you know?” I sit up straight, my hands clutching at his shirt. “Have you seen what happened to that poor girl?”

“You know clairvoyance is my weakest gift.”

“I also know you didn’t answer the question,” I say with a glare.

He grins. “There’s my Xandra. I knew my hard-ass sister was in there somewhere.” He holds up a hand, his smile fading away. “And before you ask again, no. I have no idea who killed that girl. I just know that neither the chief of police nor any of the investigators—besides Moira—believe you had anything to do with it.”