Witch for Hire (24 page)

"Everyone agree?" I asked. All the shifters nodded. "What was different about the smell?"
 

They considered for several moments before Johnson broke the silence, "It was floral, and dead. Have you read about those corpse flowers; the ones that smell like a decomposing animal? It smelled how I think that would smell. It's hard to detect because trolls tend to smell a bit like dead things anyway."

"
Titan arum
." I answered, a feeling of dread balling in my gut. Only sorcerers who acquired their power from an evil source smelled like floral rotting mammals. I continued before they could catch my fear. "Thanks guys. If you think of anything else let me know, okay?"

They agreed. I thanked them again as they left me alone with Jones and my fear.
 

"Spill. You have that look, like you know something you don't want to share, but I'll annoy you until you tell me." He grinned, knowing my aggravated look was coming.
 

He had to know. The case was in his county, where he would be on the front line. "If I tell you, do you have to tell Carls?" I might be able to fix this, keeping my job. If Jones told Carls, I'd be gone.
 

"It depends. Is it something I would be required to tell him?"

"If I said yes?"

"Then I think we should take a walk behind the station." He picked up two cups of coffee, guiding me to the back door.
 

I'd never been on the path behind the office. It wound through the edge of the park, giving people a convenient way to get away from work during breaks.
 

"Off the record."
 

"Off the record," I agreed. "I think there's a sorcerer, or sorceresses, hiding the trolls. I can't give you court worthy proof. I might be able to tell how powerful he is, but I doubt he's scary powerful or he'd have magicked the trolls right out of the preserve."

His normally jovial face fell. "How bad is it?"

"I don't know. I can try a few things to figure out how powerful the scent was on the dead troll, if it's still there, but it isn't a direct correlation between scent and power level. Not to mention I can't use that as proof of a sorcerer."

"What if they come to fight you?"

"Then I'm screwed. After last night I'm not prepared for a fight. If the sorcerer is powerful enough to confront me, thinking he'll get away with it, I don't have a chance. To save energy, I'm going to use rituals to cast spells." The thought of dueling with a sorcerer made goose bumps cover my arms and legs while a shiver ran down my spine. I had a long life ahead of me. I wasn't planning on losing it to some power hungry psycho.
 

"What can you do?" He'd stopped walking.
 

"I might be able to get the trolls, but I won't promise until I've looked at a few things." Really, promising anything would be a mistake. I didn't want to be held to anything I couldn't deliver.
 

"What if you can't?"

"Then I'll go tell the assistant sheriff he can fire me. If I fail, he needs to hire a clan. I'm risking enough as it is."

His brows wrinkled, "How risky is your plan?"
 

"We'll know when it bites me in the ass."

Michelle

Capturing a sorcerer wasn't a situation that had crossed my mind when I was planning. It had been at the very bottom of my worst case list, and had only been on that list because I liked being prepared. Sorcerers showed up every ten or fifteen years. Not often enough for me to think I'd be finding one. Jones and I pulled several more boxes of now necessary supplies out of my car. Spell components needed to be made, books needed to be consulted, and time was running out.

 
There were several spells witches didn't perform often, but still learned. My education had included those. Lucky for me, I'd packed A Practical Guide to Combating Evil, which contained those spells. I hadn't wanted to bring the book because it was big, heavy, and rarely useful. Now, I was grateful to have it. After finding the correct page, I pulled a special oak box out of the cardboard boxes.
 

It wasn't an ordinary box, even for a wooden box. The oak was etched with signs for purity, safety, and containment. Blessing the box had been an extra precaution I'd taken.
 

The contents of the box were more extraordinary than their simple designs would indicate. Every bit of the supplies had been blessed, purified, and cleansed. The long, thin wooden sticks, different sized squares of cloth, corks, gloves, glass vials of various sizes, jars of herbs, and oils weren't everyday supplies. They were prepared and carefully stored for emergencies.
 

I pulled out several of the match-like wooden sticks and squares of cloth. Using a small grease pen, I wrote runes for the spell. This wasn't something I wanted to use personal power for directly. Having power in direct contact with something contaminated by evil could give the evil a way to access my power and influence my judgment. Smart witches cast spells through runes or objects when confronted with evil. Once evil accessed a witch's power, there weren't many ways of purifying the contamination. Most of the ways I'd heard of witches being purified didn't end well for the witch.

Slowly, over the next few hours, I constructed three Sorc-O-Meters, and containers to place them in once they'd been used. The scrapers and jars were harder. Scrapers were textured, making defined runes difficult. I spent more time inscribing two scrapers than everything else. Corks, jars, and vials were much easier. Grease pens worked very well on them, and they were already designed to contain. Working within something's design was the best way to guarantee performance.
 

The cloth had been tricky to produce. I prepared a batch of cloth once a year by washing, blessing, and soaking it in specific solutions. Few witches went through the trouble every year. If properly stored, it would be perfect for many functions for nearly ten years. With a bit of refreshing, it would be nearly as powerful as when it was first crafted. This particular cloth had only been purified a few weeks ago. I didn't believe in using old goods when the poop hit the fan. I could always use the rest of my stash for less critical spells; I wanted the best when it counted.

I finished my preparations, and tidied the work space. My rumbling tummy would have to wait. The medical examiner's office was expecting me, and I didn't want to work on a body with a full stomach.

At the medical examiner's office, I gently settled the nose clip over my nostrils, an odor-neutralizing mask over my nose and mouth, and pulled on gloves and lab coat. Out in the open, fresh bodies weren't that bad. Well-aged, and indoors, was a different story. I needed to get up-close and personal to acquire samples, which was gross enough on its own, but I knew I'd throw up if I had to smell the trolls. I'd nearly hurled dissecting a fetal pig in college; an icky troll wouldn't have any trouble making me throw up.
 

Jones nonchalantly strolled in laden with a tray of supplies, not at all concerned to be in a room filled with bodies. The smell of dead things didn't bother him. I wasn't sure if some people weren't bothered, or if it was an acquired skill. If it was the latter, I didn't want to spend enough time around them to acquire immunity.
 

The room looked like something out of a horror show with shiny metal tables, sliced open bodies, and a wall refrigerator. How people worked in this, day in and day out, was beyond me. I needed light, nature, and the outdoors to steady myself.
 

Jones turned to a body on a gurney, out of the way of the rest of the room. He set the tray on a small workbench next to the corpse before pulling the sheet off of him. My innocent eyes told me trolls may have been ugly clothed, but naked wasn't an improvement.
 

"The wood?" He plopped bit of wood that looked like a long match into my hand. The Sorc-O-Meter's white tip would change color if there was an essence of sorcerer near it.
 

I gently moved the tip down the length of its torso, not touching the body, just the air about the body. The tip slowly changed from white to purple. Jones dropped a bottle into my open hand. I stuck the stick in, colored side first, before capping it with a cork. I handed it back to him.

"Well, there is some essence of the sorcerer in the remains of the troll's aura. Let's try the skin," I said. Jones nodded his agreement.
 

With the next Sorc-O-Meter I tested the troll's skin, dragging it down the slowly decaying flesh. This one turned purple almost immediately. I hurried to shove it in a bottle.

"Finally, some luck. I'm going to take skin scrapings and suck the sorcerer's essence out of them. I need the scraper and a vial."

"Great. What will you do with the essence?"

"Not sure, it depends on how much essence we get. I'll know after I do the extraction."
 

With the scraper, I raked skin cells off of the troll, depositing them in the vial. I did this over and over, slowly working across the troll's chest. I needed the top layer of skin; anything deeper than that wouldn't be as useful. When it looked like I'd gathered nearly a teaspoon of skin cells I dumped the scraper into the vial, capped it and carried it over to the tray. Jones was scraping other parts of the troll.
 

"Done," he placed the capped vial on the tray. "Do we need anything else?"

"If there are any more blood samples from this guy I'd like to test them." If the spells had contaminated the troll's blood, it might explain why the map hadn't been working as intended. It would also change how I dealt with the trolls and sorcerer. Sentient beings changed when evil was introduced.
 

"Let me check." He talked to the guy in the lab coat on the other side of the room. Lab coat guy ambled over to a refrigerator where he pulled out a labeled cup. Jones carried it over, carefully setting it on the table. It couldn't have contained more than a quarter cup of blood.
 

"Is this it?"

"No, but it was all he wanted to give me. Just test it. If we don't need more I'd rather not argue with him." Irritation laced Jones' voice.
 

"Alright." I picked up the last Sorc-O-Meter, unscrewed the cap and just barely touched it to the blood. We both studied it. Ten seconds, then twenty, ticked away. "If it hasn't show up now it isn't going to."

Breathing a sigh of relief, I capped the blood, letting Jones return it. It was a safe bet that the sorcerer wasn't powerful enough to do more than contain surface things, like hair, skin, spit, fingerprints. Spelling external parts, rather than the entire body, clearly defined the sorcerer's power. If he'd been able to push power through the trolls internally and externally, we wouldn't have found the dead and injured trolls.
 

He'd still had to place this spell on eight trolls. It wasn't practical for the spell to have been set on the trolls at the preserve. It was far more likely the truck, and people nabbing the trolls, had been spelled and the trolls hadn't been spelled until they were delivered to—to wherever.

"Anything else we need to do?" Jones was even cheerful around bodies.
 

"Yup, get out of here before I hurl." I grabbed the tray, rushing into the room where we'd suited up. Taking just enough time to set the tray on table, I yanked everything off, shoving it in the appropriate bins. The nose clip was the only thing removed gently.
 

Jones undressed a bit more slowly while I carefully packed everything into a big wooden box filled with Styrofoam peanuts. This box was different from the other one, being designed to contain anything once locked. The peanuts should keep anything from breaking, but if something happened the box wouldn't let the nasty out.
 

"Where do you want to eat?"

"Somewhere with a good salad." Just thinking of meat made bile rise up in my throat.
 

"I know a place." Jones said.

"Let's go."

We stored the boxes in the backseat of his car. It was only a couple of blocks to this small coffee shop with a deli attached. I got a Greek salad and sat in the coffee section; the meat smell near the deli reminded me of the troll. Jones plopped a giant meatball sub on the table, proving his cast iron stomach and unshakeable demeanor.
 

I pushed the thoughts of what I'd just seen out of my head. I was hungry and needed to eat. Magic required energy, something I was lacking lately.
 

"Oaks?"
 

Apparently, I'd missed something while I'd been trying not to think about, well, you know. "What?"

"You have a plan. Don't deny it."
 

"Not gonna."
 

"But you're not going to tell me either."
 

"It's a stupid plan, or set of plans."
 

"It can't be all that bad."

I didn't answer. I had several plans, but they were bad. All of my plans had flaws I couldn't fix, and the possibility of very bad things happening to me or someone else.
 

"Well?" he prodded.
 

"This isn't the place." I pinned him with my gaze, just long enough for him to see my serious face. "Did you find anyone buying a lot of meat?" I'd asked him to look for people buying excessive quantities of meat. The trolls had to be eating something and it wasn't people.

"I'd forgotten about that. More meat's being purchased since the explosion, but they're spreading it out. No one person has been buying all of it at one place. We've got it narrowed down to two or three people. They're under surveillance, but we don't have enough to bring them in for questioning. Just buying meat isn't suspicious, they could be stocking up for the apocalypse."

"Still useful." He raised an eyebrow. "Well, not at the moment, but you never know what else we'll find."
 

He nodded as I dug back into my salad, pathetically grateful it didn't remind me of anything nasty I'd done. I looked at my food so he wouldn't see how concerned I was. It wasn't just the sorcerer bothering me. Something had given him power, something evil. Evil things don't just let you kill their minions, they send other things after you, get new and better minions, or move on to a different aspect of their plan. I might be able to take care of this sorcerer, or sorceress, but most truly evil entities had plans upon plans. They had a long time to plan in between attempts; not many people wanted to make a deal with evil.