Under Witch Aura (Moon Shadow Series) (34 page)

White Feather groaned. He
sounded worse
than a dying frog.

I tried to sit up. My arms
didn't
function quite right. It took several tries. “Ssssorry,”
I gasped. “I...haven't finished that one.”

Another grunt. He felt for
his head and
missed.

“I'm...okay,” I slurred.

He pushed himself up
partway and sat
still for several seconds. “What--?” He paused for more
air. “In the hell...was that?”

“Needs...fine-tuning.
There's
nothing to prevent it from floating me too far up. Well, unless I
shoot myself sideways, but I have a balancing problem with that
part.”

Maybe he was completely
silent because
he was still gasping for air. Maybe he was questioning whether the
spell was the only thing around here that had a balancing problem.

I managed to climb to my
knees. “I
wonder if those things are tuned to us.” I stood, albeit
unsteadily. Both of us had lost our lights. My gloves had snagged on
the door; so had my sweater. “We need to burn the door. Maybe
we can take it off and incinerate it in the street.”

“Hmm.” White Feather swayed
to his feet.

He dug his phone from a
pocket. It was
turned off, and now it wouldn’t turn on. No surprise
considering how hard we had landed. “I'll signal Gordon from
the car,” he decided.

If
Jack arrived before Gordon's team we would have a rather large
problem on our hands. But why hadn't Jack already appeared? All
witches had wards and traps, and the whole point was to
know
when they were tripped. Jack had to know, but Jack had not appeared.

Maybe he was too busy
calling spirits
he had no business calling, or maybe he hadn't shown up because the
scorpions were lethal enough.

We tripped our way back to
the car,
while I thought out loud. “Water would be good. Soak the place,
wash off our essence. Be even better if we burned the place down.”

At the car my legs were
very happy to
collapse. White Feather flashed a pattern with the headlights and
then we waited.

It didn't take long for the
first
police car to pass us.

White Feather sat tight
until an
unmarked car glided to a stop behind us. “I’ll let him
know the door is a main concern, but he'll get enough people through
there, we don’t need to worry about our auras.”

It didn’t take White
Feather long
to reassure his brother and tell him what happened. After Gordon
pulled away, White Feather came to my side of the car.

“Did you get cut?” he
asked, after I opened the door.

“I don't think so. Couple
of
fibers from my sweater. Maybe some from one side of my pants.”
I was pretty sure at least one leg had scraped, but I couldn't tell
how badly. It didn't hurt and the pants hadn't torn through. “You?”

“I don’t think I left
anything behind except the flashlight. But Gordon will have fire
trucks hose the place down anyway. Did you snag anything from the
shop? Anything we can use to trace Jack?”

I shivered. “No way.
Besides,
there's no telling what in that shop was spelled by him.”

White Feather grunted. “The
scorpions had active spells. Let's collect one or two and see if we
can track Jack. We can store them in the glass containers.”

I grabbed his arm.
Returning to the
shop was not only crazy, it was suicidal. “Those things were
spelled to protect the shop. Even without a spell, they’re
poisonous. I am not trapping one of those God-forsaken creatures.”

A fire truck rounded the
corner with
sirens blaring, effectively stopping any argument.

White Feather opened the
trunk and
reappeared with one of the jars and a small flashlight.

Grumbling under my breath,
I climbed
out of the car.

By the time we reached the
alley, the
first hose was already spraying full blast.

White Feather cursed.
“We're too
late. The scorpions have scattered.”

I kept my eyes on the
ground, watching
for this scattering.

“We've got nothing of his.
No way
to track any kind of magical trail. He could be anywhere.”

White Feather’s flashlight
caught
a black pebble, reminding me of another black chunk of rock. I stared
at it, filtering thoughts of sand paintings and evil creatures. “We
don't need a scorpion to track him down.” That was the good
news.

“We don't?”

“No.” I swallowed hard. “We
have the charcoal. Martin collected the rocks used in the last
ritual.”

White Feather blinked
twice. “I
guess we do have that.”

“If that stuff doesn’t lead
right to him, nothing will.”

“But aren't those rocks
actually
tied to whatever it is he called?”

“Isn't that the thing we
really
have to stop?”

White Feather's head
swiveled to the
shop. Water cascaded through the door. “I was hoping we'd catch
up with him before he had another chance at a sand painting.”

“Yeah.” We had many things
to wish for, but I didn't think the tooth fairy was listening right
now.

We returned to the car.
Dawn was not
far off.

Just before we settled
inside, my skin
prickled. I slammed the door. “Let’s go.” If the
wind had finally picked up White Feather’s scent, our troubles
were about to get a lot worse. I seized his hand, coating him with
silver and Mother Earth.

If White Feather detected
anything
amiss, he didn’t acknowledge it. He peeled away from the curb
and drove us to an all-night drive-through.

Since I wasn't driving,
both of my
breakfast burritos were gone before we got back to my place.

Unfortunately, even with
daylight upon
us, the nightmare wasn't over.

As we pulled up to the
porch, Tara was
clearly visible.

That was the best news.

A larger concern was my
mother sitting
in one of the chairs on the porch.

My mother met me on the
bottom step.
“When you didn't answer your phone early this morning, I called
your friend Lynx, but Tara answered.”

Tara interrupted, “He’s
been tracking Claire! Lynx gave me his phone last night because he
never takes it on jobs.” She sounded nearly hysterical.

From the way Mom kept her
back ramrod
straight, she was obviously not pleased to have reached Tara while
tracking down Lynx.

“What happened?” I
demanded.

Mom said, “They ambushed
Gomez
again. This time they escaped with four of his horses. Your father is
out helping him look.”

Tara interrupted again.
“Lynx has
been watching Claire, but he didn’t tell me where. As soon as
he came back this morning, we came here looking for you, but then,
when your mom showed up, he took the cat and left me here!”

“The little house cat?” I
asked. “It went with him?”

“Something is wrong with
that
cat,” my mother said.

“Lynx talked to it. The cat
finally came over to him. He took the cat, and he wouldn’t take
me!” Tara didn’t bother to disguise her bitterness. Lynx
was going to have a problem when he returned to his love life.

“I doubt he cares if the
cat gets
hurt,” White Feather said.

All he got for his pearl of
wisdom was
brimming tears and an angry glare.

Lynx was no dummy; he could
hold his
own running in the desert, but he couldn't do it with a liability
attached. He had left Tara in one of the safest spots he knew, which
didn't bode well for what he was up to. “What else did Lynx
say?”

“Take me with you, or I
won’t
tell.” Tara’s lips compressed into a stubborn line.

My mother folded her arms.
Whatever
small influence she might have gained with Tara was far too slim for
us to force any information out of her.

I ducked my head quickly to
hide the
snarl on my face. “I better reload my spells.” My flying
spell was used up, but I had other copies. I also wanted every other
spell in the house. And maybe I had better complete the sand painting
I had started. As long as it was dispersed by sundown, I’d be
within the rules.

Halfway
up the porch, I noticed the cactus pot had been positioned to
indicate a message.
Lynx.
Perhaps he had known better
than to leave information with Tara. I
wouldn’t want her as my only hope of backup.

My mother surprised me when
she said,
“Take her with you.”

My head shot up from my
inspection of
the cactus. “What?”

My mother nodded, her
eyebrows frowning
fiercely. “You can ruin yourself many ways. Some people don’t
have enough ambition. Some have too much. Some would rather die
trying than live.” Mom glared at Tara and then as if she was
cooking with flour, brushed her hands free of it. “We can only
do so much. You live with your own consequences.”

Tara lifted her chin in
defiance, but
she wasn’t brave enough to take on my mother verbally.

White Feather met my eyes, but I had
no answer for
him. His face was a pasty color.

“And?” There had to be more
to Mom’s request.

Her lips were tight,
holding back
whatever she really wanted to say. She touched one finger to the
corner of her eye.

“Moonlight madness,” I
muttered. Now I had to take along a huge disadvantage. I turned back
to the cactus. Lynx had stuffed a very small pouch under the needles,
which meant I’d need tweezers to extract it. If it got
punctured, the spell could escape and there would be no way to trace
him.

Mom said, “I'm going to
help your
father and Gomez track the horses.”

“None of this is good.” I
gave her a brief rundown of our visit to Charms and what we had
gleaned so far. “Jack didn’t show up even after his
alarms went off. I think he’s out there in the desert with
Claire drawing a sand painting. My guess is they want Gomez or his
horses, maybe as an offering.”

“A gift to the spirits in
the
west? Dios mio.”

I
said, “We need more help. A
lot
more help--like maybe every witch you know.”

Her eyes glinted, a kind of
half smile.
“Witches don’t cooperate anymore. Suspicious lot.”
She hugged me tightly. “You will be careful. We will come to
you. We will help.”

“Mom, will you tell Granny
Ruth
what is going on? She knows some of it. I don’t know what she
can do, but it can’t hurt.”

“Of course. She’s the best
place for information. Everyone behaves around her because we’re
all afraid she’ll send a tarantula up our legs if we don’t.”

“Tell Mat too,” I added on
impulse.

She took a deep breath
while she
thought about it. “The older witches don’t much care for
the younger witches.”

“Mat knows her stuff,” I
said.

“Yes, but no witch in ten
counties wants to admit they know her. They don’t trust her
because she mingles her trade with non-believers.”

While I was more discreet
than Mat, I
mingled with the normals and sold to them too. So did most witches
if they admitted the truth. Mom knew it, but we were still a
generation apart.

Before I could say more,
she planted
herself in front of White Feather. “Watch over her. You bring
her to me if anything goes wrong. Tara isn’t trained yet. She
doesn’t know how to give.”

She was down the steps
then, focused on
her own mission. The echo of her fear beat in my own heart, but I
pushed it aside and went in the house to find my tweezers.

My longest pair hadn't been
cleaned
yet, so I settled for a shorter set.

As I extracted the packet
from the
thorns, I wondered who had spelled the packet for Lynx and on such
short notice. He wasn’t a witch. Of course he had been watching
me a long time.

Hmm. Lately I’d had a lot
of
evidence that he was watching me closer than I thought.

After retrieving the packet
from the
cactus,
I left Tara and
White
Feather fighting over why she had been with Lynx when she was
supposed to be home.

Obviously, I needed every
spell I owned
and probably a nuclear device or two. But the most important spell
was the one I hadn't taken with me earlier. My sand painting was a
pathetic collection of ochre, a couple of gifts from friends and
heliotrope. Not much to fight off the spirits of this world let alone
any other.

It was barely seven in the
morning. It
took time to draw a sand painting, but all the evidence suggested
that Claire and Jack had been choosing sites and learning the
necessary pieces. If they wanted to call the wind spirit again, it
didn't matter whether it was a night painting or day. But what did
they want with a horse whisperer?

They certainly weren't
interested in
inviting him for dinner. No, they wanted to use him as a draw for
power; an enticement for some beast lurking in the west.

I set out a piece of
deerskin and chose
the smaller piece of heliotrope to serve as a gift. Of course, if
Claire was actively summoning a wind spirit, that spirit wasn't
likely to be sidetracked by a little piece of heliotrope, not with
White Feather in the vicinity. The red blotches in the stone mocked
me. That wind was out for blood.

My efforts would be a
toothpick prick
in the side of a rhino.

“How long before you’re
ready?” White Feather asked from the doorway.

I curled my fingers tight
around the
rock. The burrito that had been such a boon earlier was sour in my
stomach. “Not long.”

I wasn’t very practiced at
trickling the sand through my hand, but it would have to do. The
first painting I had drawn went into a smaller bundle to be part of
the offering of my new painting. Like before, I set all the lines,
welcoming the spirits from the east, but left off the final lines of
power. Those would be for later.