This Strange Witchery. Michele Hauf
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not going anywhere. Did you decide just now you’re not doing the protection thing anymore?”
“No, I—”
“Or is it me? I get that my dad and his brother are a couple of big scary witches. Woo-woo dark witch stuff is imposing. But I’m not asking you to work with them.”
“I’ve been considering this decision for weeks. Months,” Tor protested. “And it’s final—”
“Oh, come on. One more job? I need your help, Tor. I’m just one tiny witch who has an ominous magical artifact stuffed in her purse that seems to attract strange things to it. In proof, on the way to finding you, I gave a zombie the slip.”
“Zombies do not exist,” Tor said sharply. “Revenants do. But the walking dead are a false assumption. It’s impossible to have a dead person walking around, decaying, and actually surviving more than a few minutes.”
“Is that so? That’s good to know. Still not sure I believe you. But revenants...” She cast her gaze out the passenger window.
And Tor couldn’t help but wonder what it was about revenants that gave her pause. Damn it! He didn’t care. He could not care. If he were going to make the transition to normal, he had to get rid of this annoyingly cute witch.
Yet the glow from the heart, seeping between her fingers, did intrigue him. Something like that should be under lock and key, kept far and safely away from humans. And should it fall into the hands of the Archives, whom her uncle Certainly Jones headed? The Archives wasn’t as beneficent as they were touted to be. The things they stored weren’t always left to sit and get dusty. Tor didn’t even want to think about all the nasty happenings that occurred because something the Archives had obtained had been used.
Yeah, so maybe he had stepped into that circle of danger with one of the Jones brothers. Whew! He knew far too much about the ominous power of dark magic. And yet he had lived to breathe another day.
“You want me to protect you and that thing?” he asked. “You know the Agency would take that heart in hand and put it under lock and key? In fact, if you want to hand it over, I guess I could take it right now—”
“No.” She lifted the heart possessively to her chest. Tor squinted at the maddening glow. “Can’t do that. I need it for a spell that I can’t invoke until the night of the full moon.”
Which was less than a week from now. Tor always kept the moon cycles in his head. It wasn’t wise to walk into any situation without knowing what phase the moon was in. Had tonight been a full moon? That werewolf would not have gone down so easily for the slayer. And burning it would have roused every bloody wolf in the city to howls.
Tor rubbed two fingers over his temple, sensing he wasn’t going to be rid of her as easily as he wished. “Why me? What or who directed you toward me and suggested I might want to help you?”
“If I tell you, you’ll think I’m weird.”
“I already think you’re weird. I don’t think a person can get much weirder than stealing a dead witch’s beating heart and then breaking into a stranger’s van to beg for his help.”
“What makes you think I stole this?”
“I—I don’t know. Is it a family heirloom you dug out of a chest in the attic? Something dear old Granny bequeathed to you on her deathbed?”
“No.” She hugged it tightly to her chest. Guilty of theft, as he could only suspect. And he had locked the van doors. He never forgot.
“People only find me because someone has given them my name,” he said. “And I always know when someone is coming for me, because that’s how it works. I want to know how you learned about me.”
“Fine. This evening, after I’d gotten home with the heart and sat out on the patio to have a cup of tea—I like peppermint, by the way.”
“I’m an Earl Grey man, myself.” The woman did go off on tangents. And he had just followed her along on one! “You were saying what it was that led you to me?”
“Right. As I was sipping my tea, a cicada landed on my plate. It was blue.”
Now intensely interested, Tor lifted his gaze to hers.
“Cicadas always look like they’re wearing armor. Don’t you think? Anyway, I didn’t hear it speak to me,” she said. “Not out loud. More like in my head. I sensed what it had come to tell me. And that was to give me your name. Torsten Rindle. I’d heard the name before. My dad and uncle have mentioned you in conversation. Cautiously, of course. I know you stand in opposition to them. And they know it, too. But they also have a certain respect for you. Anyway, I knew you could help me.”
A cicada had told a witch to seek him out for help?
Tor’s sleeves were still rolled to the elbows. Had the light been brighter, it would reveal the tattoo of a cicada on his inner forearm. The insect meant something to him. Something personal and so private he’d never spoken about it to anyone.
“How did you know—”
A thump on the driver’s side window made Tor spin around on the seat. A bloody hand smeared the glass.
“That’s the zombie,” Melissande stated calmly. “The one you told me didn’t exist.”
Melissande observed as Tor swung out of the driver’s seat and darted into the back of the van. Heavy metal objects clinked. The man swore. His British accent was more pronounced than her barely-there one. He again emerged in the cab with a wicked-looking weapon. Actually, she recognized that hand-sized titanium column as one of those fancy stakes the knights in The Order of the Stake used to slay vampires. Was that supposed to work with zombies, as well?
“Stay here,” he ordered. Tor exited through the driver’s door, slamming it behind him.
Crossing her arms and settling onto the seat, Melissande decided she was perfectly fine with staying inside the nice safe van while the hero fought the creepy thing outside. Zombies didn’t exist? The man obviously knew nothing about the dark arts.
A hand slapped the driver’s window, followed by the smeared, slimy face of something that could only be zombie. One eyeball was missing. From behind, Tor grabbed it by the collar and swung it away from the vehicle.
Melissande let out her breath in a gasp, then tucked the heart she still held into her bag on the floor. Growing up in a household with a dark witch for a dad and a cat-shifting familiar for a mom, she should be prepared for unusual situations like this, but it never got easier to witness. Dark magic was challenging. And sometimes downright gross. She was surprised she’d accomplished her task today, securing Hecate’s heart. But she hadn’t expected it to attract the unsavory sort like the one battling Tor right now. Earlier, that same creature had growled at her and swiped, but she’d been too fast, and had slipped down the street away from the thing in her quest to locate the one man she knew could help her.
Anticipating the dangers of possessing the heart, she had known she might need protection. She couldn’t ask her dad, or her uncle. And should she ask her cousins—the twins Laith and Vlas—they would have laughed at her, saying how she’d gotten herself into another wacky fix.
She did have a knack for the weird and wacky. It seemed to follow her around like a stray cat with a bent tail. She didn’t hate cats, but she’d never keep one as a pet or familiar. When one’s mother was a cat-shifter, a girl learned to respect felines and to never take them for granted.
The not-zombie’s shoulders slammed against the vehicle’s dented hood. Melissande leaned forward in time to watch Tor slam the stake against its chest. The zombie didn’t so much release ash as dechunk, falling apart in clumps, accompanied by a glugging