I caught a whiff of smoke. The scan was setting something on fire. I raced back to the kitchen and grabbed the fire extinguisher, pulling the pin, and stopping again at the closet. A gray cloud, totally physical and fiery in nature, came off thehedge. The pale green energies of the attacking scan spluttered and sizzled and I felt the heat signature from where I stood. The sound stopped. The scan withdrew slightly. The stench began to lessen as it filtered into the air and diminished. The smoke dispersed, a long, indistinct tracery across the ceiling. Nothing happened for what felt like two or three minutes. Then the attacking magics tapped on thehedgeand stopped when it sparked and spat.
I had a better way to see the unfamiliar working, but I wasn’t in the mood to make myself deathly ill unless it was life or death for my partners. The working in the closet flashed again and the line of pale light guttered like a candle going out before strengthening into a pale green hue,brighter than a Disney night-light. It slipped from the closet and started moving again, taking in the ceiling and sliding toward my doorway.
I backed away, through the foyer into living room, watching the magic as it slithered across the floorboards and up the front wall, tracing the floor in light before passing on. It wasn’t something I could hear with my ears, but I felt a sensation of popping and hissing as magical energies worked their way around and through the front door, pausing to limn it in a fairy-tale illumination that few humans could see.
I stepped away and it paused, as if it had heard or sensed me. I froze, wondering if it would follow me when I moved. If I should run. But it touched the stairs and angled up, climbing slowly.
I slid through the darkness and shadows to Eli, and when he glanced at me, I mimed it rising up the stairs, and pointed to the Kid’s bedroom overhead. Eli nodded and jutted his chin out the kitchen window. He held up two fingers, meaning that we had two people out there who shouldn’t be out there, doing things that tourists in New Orleans didn’t do.
I leaned to the glass and studied the street, at first seeing nothing but a fine mist that hung like a slowly falling fog, a leisurely, Louisiana rain. But when my eyes felt the need to drift away from two different places, I understood. There were two human-shaped forms out there, both hidden beneath obfuscation spells, one standing at either end of the block, in shadows. Not vamps. Not were-creatures. Witches. To a human they would be no more than two blurs, a haze on the night, obscured by the mist, an illusion of shadows in the darkness between the streetlamps. The power of their magic kept me from seeing them well, but now that I knew they were there, the magic itself was something Beast could make out, at least partially.
The working came from both of the hidden forms, two separate pale lines of power that ran across the street to meet and merge just in front of the house into a stronger line of energies. One line was a smooth, weak, pale red, themagics controlled and even and concise. The other witch’s magic was a pale green, the energies jumping and spitting, slithering like snakes, full of power that seemed to want to sprint away and perform all on their own. The termwild magicscame to me, power that was feral and uncontrolled and seeking destruction. The red magics were meticulous and skillful, if not so dominant; the green magics were more potent and by far the greater danger. A yard or so after the two lines of witchy power combined, they entered the house through my bedroom wall.
I looked back at my partner and pointed to my eyes and then to the backyard, asking him if anyone was back there. He gave me a down-turned thumb. No other witches were part of the attack. Just two witches, one extraordinarily powerful. And if they hadn’t known before, they now knew about the magical trinkets in my closet.
Eli went to his brother and looked over the Kid’s shoulder. Alex was a former hacker, a former felon, and currently studying for a double doctorate at Tulane, while spying on me for some supersecret information gathering part of the Department of Defense or Homeland Security or the CIA. Or all three. The government wanted to know what I was. Alex was feeding them incorrect info, and as long as I didn’t shift in public and stayed under the radar, things would be okay. I hoped.
The Kid was too smart for his own good sometimes, but he was exactly what we needed as intel backup. He had the outside cameras up and running, taking digital and tape recordings. We had discovered that digital media worked when photographing vamps but was interrupted by many other kinds of magic. Old-school stuff was sometimes better at capturing images that would otherwise be hidden beneath the pixelated energies.
Tapping his tablets and putting camera views up on the big screen, Alex whispered, “You want me to call the police?”
“And tell them what?” I murmured in reply. “Two people are standing out front and shooting invisible X-ray vision at the house? That would go over well. Not.” I frowned hard. “They aren’t actually doing anything illegal according tohuman law. Witch law, maybe, but not if the NOLA covensentthem.”
“You think?” Eli muttered, concern lacing his voice.
“No. But I also don’t think the local witches would be interested in helping me against two of their own.” Witches were notoriously insular. I had made some witch friends back in Asheville, and while I had met some of the locals, I wouldn’t call them gal-pals.
Still softly, Eli asked, “Where is it?” meaning the scanning energies.
I walked silently through the house to the foyer and looked up the wide stairway. The pale green glow was entering the bedroom where Angie Baby stayed when she was here, and that didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t like anyone or anything that might affect my godchild, and I had no idea what the spell was really doing. It might be simply a scan, as I thought, or it might be putting down the witch equivalent of napalm, or a trigger for some future spell to incinerate us all. Or worse, it might be setting up a way to get to us when the Everhart-Trueblood witch family arrived in just a few days for the Witch Conclave. These witches might be working against the assembly; there were always people who wanted the status quo instead of peace, and the Witch Conclave was gearing up to be the event when the witches and the vamps of the Southeastern U.S. signed a peace treaty of sorts (though they called it something else) for the first time ever. I didn’t have enough information to make an informed decision about the purpose of the scan. As usual, I was flying by the seat of my pants, which didn’t bother me when I was the only one who would pay the consequences, but it did bother me when my lack of knowledge meant the boys or the Everhart-Trueblood clan would pay as well.
The stink of iron, salt, and burned hair had grown stronger again. What did burned hair mean? I had to assume it meant danger for the Youngers and me in the present. Or danger for my godchildren and their parents, later. Inside me, Beast growled and thought,Kits in danger.Killwitches.
Beast had a much simpler view of things than I did.Kill and ask questions later.No can do,I thought back at her. Deep inside, she extended her claws and milked my brain. It hurt. A lot. But it meant she was close if I needed to draw on her, so I wasn’t going to gripe.
Walking back into the shadows of the kitchen, I muttered, “The scan—if that’s what it is—is nearly done upstairs. That leaves this half of the downstairs. Oh.” Apprehension sped through me. “And the weapons storage and the utility area.” Parts of the house I seldom went into and rarely even thought about.
Eli waited, watching me. He wanted a plan of action, but I didn’t have one to give him. As a rogue-vamp hunter, I had a legal leg to stand on when killing vamps—and their human blood-servants—who presented a clear and present danger to the human populace. The blood-servant ruling was a new one, recently issued by the Louisiana Supreme Court, over a kill made back in the nineties by another vamp hunter, who was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned when he killed three of a vamp’s walking blood-meals while saving a family of four humans. The vamp hunter was free now, though no one could give him back his lost years. The state supreme court decision gave me certain powers, within state law, against rogue vamps and their willing dinner partners. Against sane vamps, law-abiding humans, law-abiding were-creatures, or witches, I had no more power than anyone else.
I didn’t know what to do. My Beast-inspired headache was growing. One thing I knew for certain. The house was old, constructed of wood and old brick, with an antiquated electrical system. If the magics wanted to cause me trouble, burning down the house would be easy. I sniffed again, but the stink of magic-induced smoke was gone. For now.
Alex waved us over and said softly, “I took digital photos of them, but the photos don’t work worth jack through the obfuscation spells.” We stood behind his chair and his boy-man-garlic stink wafted up. Eli swatted him on the back of the head.
“What’s that for?” Alex complained, sotto voce, rubbing his head and straining back to grimace at us.
“For being Stinky,” I said. “So the digitals didn’t work. Why am I here smelling you?”
He scowled at us through his straggly curls and bent back over his screen. “Because the tape is working fine. Both witches are female, natch, and though the light sucks, they might be African-American or mixed race.”
We all studied the camera footage. One witch appeared to be about five-five, two hundred fifty pounds, give or take. She held herself stiffly and something about her stance suggested that she was middle-aged, dressed in a long, full skirt and turban. The other one moved like someone younger, maybe even late teens. She was dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a skinny girl with lots of hair. Alex initiated some kind of electronic conversion, taking the tape to digital where he did something with the brightness and contrast and created stills from the footage.
I pointed at the younger one and asked, “Lots of long curly hair. A wig?”
“Could be,” Alex said. “Or extensions. That is all the still shots can make out.”
“Decisions,” Eli demanded. “Stay here or leave? Call the cops? Call someone else?”
I frowned and walked to the bottom of the stairs again, to see the light of the working moving to the front of the house and the two narrow doors/windows that opened to the small second-floor gallery at the front. We never used the front gallery. I didn’t even know if the doors would open anymore, what with the damp and heat, and the swelling and shrinking of old wood in older frames.
