Under Witch Aura (Moon Shadow Series) (33 page)

White Feather squeezed my
hand. “Gordon
is watching this area tonight. The address is listed as a shop only,
not a residence.”

His reassurance didn't
quiet my nerves.
The kid could easily sleep in the building on a cot. And if he was
the witch clever enough to spell scorpions through my magical wards,
I wasn't too keen on meeting him in his territory. I was far less
enthused about letting White Feather go it alone, however.

We crossed the street and
passed Charms
on the opposite side. The paving was cracked and uneven with large
sections missing completely. The Charms side had part of a sidewalk,
but it was only occasional slabs in front of doorways.

A beer can and some dried
leaves danced
just enough to make me jump.

We doubled back the way we
had come on
the Charms side of street and ducked into the alleyway. The dark tint
on the windows prevented spying in the daytime; at night the glass
was nothing but a black reflective surface.

“There's no way to know if
he's
there,” I whispered.

“So we'll knock.” White
Feather did just that, tossing a few pebbles at the window.

“It's three in the morning.
I
wouldn't answer the door.”

“Me neither.” He held out
his hand. “Let me borrow that heliotrope.”

I felt around in my fanny
pack, curious
about how he might use it. He didn't need it to create wind.

My first hint was the glass
shattering.
The heliotrope crashed through the windowed door rather effectively.
“I guess he'll know we've been here.”

“If he calls it in, Gordon
will
respond.”

“If he doesn't call it in,
that
doesn't mean he isn't there.” Even if he wasn't a witch, a gun
could cause a lot of damage, and he had the law on his side in this
case.

“No, but now we can get
in.” White Feather, like Lynx, had a set of lock picks. “Watch my
back.”

I
crushed a packet
containing the nighttime illusion spell, shadowing White Feather
closely enough to cover us both. The magic had no smell, but it clung
to my presence. We melted into the dark, a hazy bit of blacker night,
nothing more.

At the door, White Feather
reached in,
unlocked the knob through the broken window pane and then spent less
than a minute on the deadbolt.

“Will your spell leave an
aura?”
he asked.

“It disperses with time,
but the
spell residue is attracted to my person.”

“Good. I'd rather he not
get
anything of yours.”

White Feather entered as
though he
belonged. The store was darker than a tomb. In this case, it might
have been safer to enter a tomb.

He flicked on his
flashlight, holding
it low. At some point, he had put on gloves.

There were no shades to
draw. The smell
of faded cinnamon drifted in the air, but there was no incense
burning as there had been on my daytime visit.

I
donned my own gloves, turned my flashlight on and
located
the
heliotrope White Feather had thrown. As soon as I dug it out of the
scattered glass, I was hit with the scent of a forest, a breath of
fresh air. I held it to my nose and savored the smell for an
instant. White Feather must have used his wind to direct his perfect
throw because the stone had absorbed some of his energy.

From the jewelry counter,
White Feather
announced, “He has more than one box of business cards. He can
pick and choose which spells to send out.”

I stashed the stone and got
busy.

The witching fork didn't
twitch, not
even over a box of tourist scorpions trapped in amber-colored
plastic. Of course, the four-inch bugs were cheap Chinese displays
like half the other stuff in the store.

I joined White Feather at
the counter
just as he drifted from the left side of the cabinet to the far side
where Jack had been sitting.

My mouth dropped open.

The mural of
beautiful planets
behind his head changed colors, shifting as though a shadow passed.

“Wait!”

He froze, but the planets
didn't. The
blue planet, Uranus, faded to a lighter shade. Understanding dawned.
“Zodiac signs!”

“What?” His voice was much
quieter than mine, and his whisper carried a warning. As he pivoted
to see where the danger lay, the planets shifted colors again.

“Zodiac signs,” I repeated,
amazed at the audacity and skill that such a spell required. “It's
probably how he guesses whether customers are witches or not.”

White Feather grasped the
concept
immediately. “Without knowing a person's birth date and time
he’d be missing key data, but yeah. How far out does this thing
read?”

I edged closer to him. The
planets
reacted, some of them darkening in color, some fading. “With
two of us, it confuses things.”

“I don't think I've ever
seen
anything like this done in a--” White Feather's head whipped my
way and then we both said, “painting!”

“And whoever is messing
with the
Indian sand painting isn't following the usual rules! Maybe he's
attempting a combination, employing what he knows, but using a
different medium,” I guessed.

“Good way to die young.”

“Or kill someone else, like
Sarah.”

“If I knew my signs better,
it
would make more sense,” he said. You definitely got a
darkening from Venus and Mercury, but those are also air signs. Me
standing here influences it.”

“The other air sign is
Uranus,
and that's the one that changed to a lighter blue as you were messing
around on the other side of the cabinet.” I slid behind the
counter. The Venus, a pearl iridescent, rippled. “No telling
what he has these things set to tell him.” My stomach clenched.
“I wonder if the changes will stay in the painting after we
leave.”

“I don't care to leave a
calling
card,” White Feather said grimly.

The
only option was
to destroy the painting, which would be a signature in and of itself.
Then again, there was a lot of magic in this store. “If we
lined up various magical items from his display, maybe their magic
will erase or change the signals.” I picked up the box of
desert rocks and dumped a few out along the bottom of the wall.
“Anything?”

“With you still standing
there, I
can't tell.” White Feather located the light for the counter
display and switched it on. He grabbed the extra boxes of business
cards and scattered them. The glass display was locked, but he went
to work on them with his lock picks.

I searched the bottom of
the cabinet
for anything else that might be useful. Behind where the cards had
been, there was a large box of copper bracelets. I had considered
making something similar myself, dipped in spider venom and spelled
against scorpions. Spotting them here made me wonder about Jack's
reason for having them.

My hand hovered over the
selection.
Most of the bracelets were thin, the kind sold for various aches,
such as arthritis. The larger ones were heavily etched with symbols.

Without touching them
directly, I
couldn't feel magic radiating, but there was a general taint of
magical aura in the entire shop. Knowing what I knew about copper...I
pulled my hand back.

The light from the glass
case kept us
from seeing much of the rest of the store, but it didn't stop noises.
The sound of paper crinkling teased my wary ears. The last time I'd
heard crumpling paper I was in with the grimoires, and it hadn't been
paper rustling.

“Do you hear anything?” I
whispered.

White Feather froze. “No.”

“It...sounded like
parchment.”
Had I stepped on one of the business cards? My skin crawled.

“A breeze from the broken
window?” Without moving, he searched places I couldn't see.

Using his wind was a bad
idea,
especially here. I panned my flashlight. The place was crammed with
junk across all the counters, shelves, and narrow aisles. The
ceiling, much to my regret, had more zodiac signs painted around the
edges. Entering a witch's domain was hopeless. Unless we burned the
place down, we couldn't disguise our presence completely.

White Feather noticed the
ceiling.
“Tossing this stuff around is a waste of time.”

The shuffling, scraping
paper noise
broke the silence again. This time, he heard it too. “Let's
go.”

My light glinted off the
large copper
gauntlets. Such bracelets would be very handy as a defense for
someone who handled poisonous creatures. I shone the light down
again, along the floor.

They were there. Scorpions
the size of
my fist wedged their way through the closed door panel on the far end
of the display case. One by one, they dropped to the floor.

“Eee-aaack!” I bolted.

White Feather's back
stopped me. I was
not in the mood to be slowed down. I'd had quite enough of these evil
bugs.

“They're melting,” White
Feather said.

“What?” My back against
his, I pushed, but he wasn't budging. “Go!” I shouted.
“They're coming!”

“They don't blow away.”

Still pressed against him,
I squealed
and kicked out when the first scorpion scuttled around the side of
the counter. White Feather finally moved.

He reached around, half
picked me up
and made a run for it. As he dragged me forward, I saw the display of
fake amber scorpions. “Moonlight madness!” The plastic
graves were rapidly melting, freeing the massive bugs.

White Feather blasted mugs,
pencils and
plastic souvenirs into the street, but his wind had no effect on the
bugs. He raised his foot to smash the nearest one. There were too
many of them, and they wasted no time converging on us.

I stomped first, as hard as
possible,
breaking the helium flying spell in my shoe. I muttered the words,
hiding them, not from White Feather, but from ears that might be in
some other tourist trap item. Supporting White Feather's weight on my
own would have failed miserably except for the fact that he was
already holding onto me in an attempt to protect me.

My flying spell, the only
lousy one I
had, shot us up to the ceiling fast enough to crack our heads. I led
with my shoulder.

White Feather wasn't so
lucky, plus he
was taller. I blunted the blow as much as possible and then rolled to
trap him above me against the ceiling.

The second part of the
spell would blow
wind at our backs, but I had gone through a window once because of
that spell and wasn't too keen to set it off again.

“What the--” White Feather
kept his arm around my waist but barely. “Adriel!”

“Crawl against the ceiling!
We've
got to get to the door!” I couldn't use my hands because I was
holding onto him. “Aztec curses!” I was going to be
forced to use the other spell, but we were angled wrong.

White Feather sputtered.
Before I made
any progress, his wind pushed us forward. We still hit the window,
but in a much more controlled manner than had I spoken the words. My
flashlight rolled crazily below us, throwing scorpion shadows the
size of lobsters.

“We've got to get the door
opened
before they climb up here!” I yelled.

“Can you hold us here?” he
asked.

“This spell isn’t going
anywhere but up for a while.”

White Feather hit the
broken window
with a gust of air strong enough to blow out the remaining glass. I
stretched to grab the edge to pull us through, but the force of my
spell was too strong. I couldn’t lower myself and still hold
onto White Feather.

I hugged him with my knees,
keeping my
feet, and more importantly the magnets, pointed at the floor.

“Can you let us down?”
White Feather's groping fingers barely caught the top edge of the
window

“No!”

“How long will this spell
last?”
He grunted and yanked against the door. We nearly capsized. Tilting
the wrong way was suicide.

“Are they climbing the
walls?”

He growled a non-answer. It
might have
been yes, but it wasn't a definite no. He clasped me tight around the
waist with one arm and whispered, “Hold on.”

Wind shoved us again. We
sailed partway
through the window. White Feather’s back scraped the top edge.
My heavy knit sweater snagged on the side and threads yanked free. If
we left blood, we were going to be trackable, spellable, and in a
world of hurt.

Another blast and White
Feather kicked
his feet free of the door. Like a shot, we headed for the stars.

There were probably
scorpions on the
ground below, escaping mindlessly into the street. White Feather's
wind carried us sideways along the street, but I didn't have that
kind of control over my spell. We floated higher at an alarming rate.

In a complete panic, I
canceled the
spell.

Too late I remembered that
only hard
pavement waited below. We might as well have jumped off the top of
the building.

I hoped the scorpions
didn't eat our
bodies.

Of course, it would have
made sense to
tell White Feather that I was going to cancel the spell. He actually
controlled the wind, while I used a magical concoction of helium and
magnetic fields to gain altitude.

The last time I fell, at
least my crash
had been broken by a tree rather than concrete. I hadn't had to
worry about a full-grown man crashing down on top of me either.

White Feather shifted,
trying to
maneuver underneath me. He managed to blunt our landing with a bare
breath of wind, but we both still hit hard.

“Uhng...”

He collapsed next to me
more than on
top. I expected the worst and got slightly better than that.

Neither of us stirred. I
wanted to ask
if he was okay, but my brain was about three feet above us, floating.
That and I had zero air in my lungs. If I wanted to continue using
the flying spell I had better perfect it or practice my landing.