Under Witch Aura (Moon Shadow Series) (4 page)

The cat tired of the game
and sauntered
off the left side of the porch. A delicate pattern of ribs warred
with the stripes of brown and rust. “Do you want food?”
The cat, most certainly a small female now that her tail end was
clearly visible, did not deem me important enough to answer. She
seemed uninterested, but I knew better.

Whoever had abandoned her
hadn’t
given her much of a chance. If the coyotes didn’t make a meal
of her, an owl or hawk would. If she managed to escape those fates,
the desert would claim her by refusing to provide enough water.

Once inside, I filled a
bowl with water
and emptied a can of tuna in another. I left both bowls on the
porch. The cat had saved me, whether it meant to or not.

White Feather drove up just
as I
finished my self-appointed task. Unless he wanted to wait, we'd have
to hunt for Sarah without a witching fork. Setting the willow to
Sarah's essence would be more complicated than usual because I needed
a way to extract bits of her remaining spell without using it up
entirely.

Ah well. How hard could it
be to find
a dead body if one really looked?

White Feather brought
lunch. It was
almost a date since we ate the takeout burritos in the car on the
way up the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Neither of us said
much because our mouths were full.

I was not a slow eater
during the best
of times, and since I wasn't driving, my fingers were licked clean
before we reached Hyde Park, not even halfway to the Upper Tesuque
Trail. I rolled the window down and inhaled pine-scented fall air.

Mountains had so much
magic, how could
anyone, mundane or witch, not feel the sheer weight of their power?
As we climbed Artist Road toward Hyde Park, Mother Earth drummed a
steady beat all around us. The wind carried her scent, brushing magic
along my skin. The auras were so intermingled, it was impossible to
separate one bit of magic from the other.

“I should have brought my
herb
basket as long as we were coming up here.”

White Feather's green eyes
lingered on
me for a few seconds. The winding curves of the road couldn't be
ignored for longer than that. “Let’s hope it stays
peaceful.”

It was an opening, at least
of sorts.
“Something in the wind still bothering you?”

He flexed his shoulders and
then his
fingers. “Doesn’t get worse, doesn’t get better.”

We reached the turnoff.
White Feather
parked in the small space afforded for hikers. “The cabin isn’t
that far.”

It was probably no more
than a fifteen
minute hike, but I retrieved my backpack from the back seat. It
housed my water bottle, and more importantly, it contained a few
basic spells.

White Feather grabbed his
own backpack
and locked the car. The start of the trail was a clearly marked
forest road.

“According to Gordon, Sarah
used
to park at this turnout. Since her vehicle wasn’t here after
the fire, he hoped she wasn’t home when it happened.”

“Her car was a real
clunker. I'm
not sure how it made the climb up the mountain.”

“Gordon has a bulletin out
for
it—rusted, brown Chevy with a blue door.”

“Did you tell Gordon about
her
ghost?” I waited nervously for his answer.

“Of course.”

He trusted my judgment,
enough to tell
the story to his brother. I was immensely relieved.

The trail we were on was
part of the
upper Tesuque. After less than a mile, a string of yellow tape marked
where we needed to head down.

Sarah’s place was tucked
along a
ridge, far enough from the trail that most hikers wouldn’t come
across it. She must not have come in and out the same way all the
time because there was no defined trail. The few broken branches and
slide marks were probably from Gordon’s team.

“Did you come out here with
your
brother?” I worked to keep my balance on the loose incline.

“No. The report stated the
incident as a fire accident, likely cooking over an indoor fireplace.
Gordon only sent me the electronic file after I told him about the
ghost.”

I had been to Sarah’s shack
once,
uninvited. A couple of summers back while harvesting wild herbs, the
odd scent of magic had drawn me there. I had expected the remnant of
an old ranch site where someone had practiced magic. Instead, Sarah
was toiling away in a small garden patch next to a rustic cabin.

We drank cold tea while we
pretended to
catch up, but we had little to talk about.

When White Feather stopped,
I had to
step to the side or slide right into his back. The view through the
aspen stand brought me to my own dead halt. “Moon...light
madness.”

Sarah’s cabin was charred
down to
almost nothing. The old tin roof was halfway down the hill, pieces of
it propped up by trees. Of the shack, only one section of a side wall
was left standing.

“
Cooking
accident
?
Are you kidding me?” Where her fireplace had been, there was
now a giant hole.

He acknowledged my
disbelief. “If
we find her body, they’ll be interested in the real cause of
the fire, collecting DNA, the works. Until then, it’s just an
accident.”

In the world of cops, DNA
was the rough
equivalent of auras. Gordon believed in witchcraft; his brother was a
full warlock so it would be hard for him to ignore. Nevertheless, the
police didn’t look for auras. Most of them didn’t believe
in witchcraft, werewolves or any other magicals. That was White
Feather’s unofficial role. He filtered information from the
underground to Gordon so that justice could be meted out even when
the subculture of magicals was involved.

We paced forward at the
same time,
drawn to the ashes that marked where the front door had been.

The place still smoked in
spots, a
stray puff here and there when the wind shifted the ashes. “Will
our auras mess up the investigation?”

“The property isn’t insured
and belongs to no one officially. It’s been left unsecured for
several days now.”

I shook my head and stepped
carefully
inside what would have been a wall. No one had combed through the
mess. There were piles of melted plastic, a pipe sticking straight up
out of the ground, and some shattered bricks from the fireplace. “One
heckava a pot of soup gone wrong.”

White Feather stayed at my
side as we
took the three steps necessary to reach the hole near the fireplace.
A small line of bricks was the only indication that the fireplace had
been there.

I knelt down and fingered a
piece of
blackened, gritty clay tile. It was all that was left of an Indian
sand painting, a depiction of one of the sacred ceremonies to call
the spirits to ask for intercession. Too bad it hadn't protected
Sarah.

Dropping the piece, I
stood. On the
south side of the house where the garden had been there were no
plants, just a rippled line of sand as if the explosion had happened
in a wave, depositing a sandy border all the way across that side of
the property. The front door had been on the north end. Black ashes
there formed another, almost straight line.

White Feather muttered, “If
we
manage to find her somewhere in this mess, we stand almost zero
chance of proving how she died. This fire was too intense.”

“If her body burned, her
ghost
wouldn't be able to come back, would it?” I hadn't had time to
do much research, but incinerated vampires couldn't come back. Surely
the same held true for any burned body.

“With proper preparations
done
before she died, it’s possible. A lot depends on how strong a
witch she was.”

Goosebumps danced across my
arms. “This
is crazy. The only way this could have been a cooking accident is if
she had been baking dynamite over the fireplace.”

“The investigation report
said
something about finding parts to a grill in the area. There was
speculation she had been using propane inside the fireplace and that
it sparked the explosion.”

At least White Feather said
“the
report” which implied he wasn’t a big believer in the
theory. “There was certainly an explosion in the fireplace,”
I agreed, peering down into the hole. The bits under my foot crumbled
and landed some six feet down.

White Feather stepped back
and pulled
me with him. “Careful.”

“Good idea. Thanks.”

There was no real
delineation of rooms
because the place had been too small. A very short stub of adobe
jutted into the center and might have enclosed a kitchen or maybe a
small bedroom. A lone metal pipe in the rubble was twisted and
broken. Pipes made no sense because there wasn't any running water.

White Feather pointed to
the garden.
Another pipe lay there, less twisted, but also unattached to
anything. “She must have had collection barrels up higher and
let water run down through pipes.”

“Should we take a look? Or
maybe
we should wait until I spell a witching fork to see if we can track
her.”

“You can do a tracking
spell in
this mess?”

“I doubt it. Matilda had a
spell
in her shop that belonged to Sarah, and it turns out I have one in my
lab. The problem is that if Sarah was blown up in this mess, the
spells won't be effective. She’d be everywhere.” I kicked
the ashes at my feet. To my surprise, the ashes didn’t settle;
they kept moving.

I knelt down to take a
closer look.

“Be careful,” White Feather
warned.

He must have had a
premonition or maybe
there were better ways to explore blackened dust. The ashes rose and
moved at me, a black missile with legs and a raised, stinging tail.

“Eeep!” I fell backwards,
landing across the charred doorway. Without standing, I scrambled
away as fast as my awkward feet and arms allowed.

White Feather's wind
brushed around me,
targeting the scorpion. In his hurry, fine particles of ash circled
around the main force of his strike. Half of the soot landed on my
face and went directly into my lungs when I breathed in.

“Ack!” Gasping, I stumbled
away. My eyes watered, and I coughed until at least one lung rattled
loose.

“Sorry.” White Feather
wisely had his arm over his mouth while he searched the ground with
his feet.

The beast scuttled across
the top of an
adobe brick. “There!” I wheezed out.

White Feather quickly
stomped on the
chunk of adobe.

“The tail!”

The stinger jabbed wildly
from
underneath one side of his boot even as he ground the scorpion into
the dust.

The hair on my neck
prickled, a shock
that was almost electrical. I spun around, but there was nothing
visible at my feet or in the trees. “White Feather,” I
whispered.

He lifted his foot and then
smashed it
down again. “The fire must have disturbed it.”

“White Feather,” I said
more urgently and louder. “There’s…someone here.”
It was impossible to take in the landscape all at once. Could Sarah
appear in broad daylight?

White Feather finally
noticed the
change in the air, but instead of searching with his eyes, he put his
hand out to probe the wind.

“Be careful!” The skin
around my face tightened as though drying in a breeze after a swim.
It quickly escalated to a feeling of tiny ants biting hard. I
hightailed it to ground not covered in ashes.

Silver came from Mother
Earth and was
my tie to her. Clutching my bracelet with one hand, I anchored
myself.

White Feather remained
inside the
house, standing against an enemy neither of us could see.

“White Feather!”

His head came up fast.
“Stay
back! It’s coming from the fireplace. I tried to block it.”

He must have failed,
although now that
I was touching Mother Earth, the prickling sensation wasn't nearly as
painful. “What is it?”

“It’s wind. But I couldn’t
block it.” His voice choked as though something had hit him
hard in the gut.

I swung my backpack around
on my way to
him, hunting for backup pieces of silver, an explosive spell and…just
as I reached him, the biting sensation on my skin stopped. I wasn’t
sure if it ceased because White Feather was blocking it or if it
stopped of its own accord.

“White Feather?” My hand on
his shoulder brought him in contact with silver.

He shook himself and
blinked.
“Something controlled the wind. It wasn’t that strong,
but the wind went right past me as if I wasn’t even here. I
pushed it away from you, but then it hit me...”

He didn't finish the
thought. Worried,
I prompted, “And what?”

“It stared me down.” He
lifted his hand, testing the air.

I trailed my fingers down
his other
arm, capturing his hand in mine. It wasn't romance, it was
protection. My silver ring linked across the back of my hand to my
bracelet, which contained more silver. The silver had kept Sarah at
bay.

Even when nothing came at
us, we
remained on guard. My silver was quiescent; not cold or hot.

White Feather flexed his
fingers, but
he didn't lower his hand. “If Sarah had anything to do with
that wind, she wasn't your normal wind witch. Whatever that was, it
didn’t respond like wind should. It reminds me of Tara’s
spells when I'm training her. Her experiments have a tendency to
explode in all directions and ricochet. Her spells have the same lack
of focus as that wind, a scattered magic that hasn’t
coalesced.”

“You're training your
sister?”
Tara was at that tenuous teenager time; hellbent on experimenting
with sex, magic and everything else that would upset White Feather
and her family. She had needed training for quite a while.

White Feather grunted. “Her
spells are sloppy, usually contaminated and she mixes too many things
at once. Sometimes there’s--it’s like a big fart in the
room. Half the time it smells, the rest of the time, the magic
explodes.”