Eileen Wilks: Humon Error

“Oh?” Robin focused on her daughter. “And what would you suggest? Possibly inviting a Native Power onto our land?”

Dead silence.

“Seri?” Robin prompted. “Sammy?”

It was Sammy who answered, his voice far too bland. “I haven’t been in contact with any Powers, Native or otherwise, since the equinox.”

“No? And have you been in touch with any energies that I would consider a Native Power, even if you don’t?”

Sammy gave himself away with a quick glance at his twin.

Robin looked around. “Did anyone tell these two what happened while they were gathering holly?”

Sammy sent Benedict a dark look. “Benedict claims he was forced to turn into a wolf and that Coyote showed up and scared Muffin.”

“And you don’t believe him. Why?”

Another glance between the twins. Seri sighed and answered. “Because it wasn’t Coyote we invited. Not that it was really an invitation—you’d call it that, but we altered the ritual so we’d be drawing on the underlying reality of the kind of protective energy we wanted, not a named persona representing that energy.”

“Who,” Robin said, “or what did you invite?”

“It wasn’t an invitation. It was—”

“Seri.”

“Raven.”

Benedict sighed and rubbed his forehead.

“Benedict,” Robin said, “you have something to say, I think.”

“Yeah. You two got the wrong trickster. Protective energy? Raven?” He shook his head. “Raven’s a lot of things, sometimes helpful, sometimes not, but at heart, he’s a trickster, not a guardian.”

Sammy managed to look both wary and vaguely superior at the same time. “Raven is a symbol, not an entity.”

“He’s both. And symbol or entity, he’s not a protective figure. And you didn’t get him. You got Coyote. I see three questions here. First, what were you really trying to do? Second, why involve a Native Power instead of the ones you call on in Wicca? Third, why did Coyote decide to show up?”

Arjenie spoke suddenly. “I bet I can answer the first one. Look at what happened. Something forced you to Change. I bet the twins cast some sort of ‘reveal’ spell—a variation on a truth spell that was supposed to force you to reveal what you really are. Only because they involved Coyote—”

“Raven,” Seri insisted hotly.

“You may have been thinking Raven, but when you tinkered with the invitation, trying to make it not an invitation but something that fit your skewed notion of reality—”

“Skewed? Skewed? Let me tell you, we have been practicing this sort of thing with smaller spells for some time, and results clearly demonstrate—”

“You have, have you?” Robin said softly. “And where have you done this practicing?”

The glance the twins exchanged was easily read by nontwins this time—something along the lines of Oh, shit.

Robin waited. When neither of them spoke, she said, “This is now a coven matter. The family meeting is adjourned.”

“But Mom—”

“Clay?” Robin stood.

He shook his head, but it wasn’t a disagreeing shake. More like resigned and unhappy. Benedict wondered what coven rules the twins had broken and what the penalty might be. “She’s right and you know that. We’ll have to talk with you two privately.”

Robin’s face had gone still, as if she were listening to something. “But not right away,” she said slowly. “We have a visitor, or will very shortly. I believe it’s the sheriff.”

Sheriff Porter was a tall, ropy man somewhere between fifty and sixty with a luxuriant mustache and a prominent brow ridge overhanging deep-set eyes. Cop eyes , Benedict thought. Like Lily’s. Porter turned down an offer of coffee and asked to speak with Clay and Robin privately.

The house was crowded enough to make privacy difficult to find, so they’d gone out onto the front porch. Everyone else had migrated from the kitchen to the living room; Benedict sat beside Arjenie on the loveseat. He’d considered finding an excuse to linger near the front wall where he’d be able to hear what the sheriff said but decided that might be seen as intrusive.

Arjenie was quiet. He wondered what that family meeting had meant to her. Earlier she’d been angry, but he didn’t think she was angry now. Hurt, maybe, but Arjenie was even worse at brooding than she was at holding a grudge. This seemed to be one of her thinking silences.

“I bet he’s got a case,” Ambrose said. “Don’t you think?”

“Of course.” That was Nate. “We’ve helped out sometimes,” he added directly to Benedict. “The coven, that is. Or now and then one of us is able to lend a hand on our own. Depends on what kind of help the sheriff needs.”

Benedict nodded. The Delacroix family had been here for generations, so they’d had time to build trust both in the community and with the sheriff. Some law enforcement officers refused any sort of magical assistance, but others were more open-minded. And the only magically derived evidence the courts accepted came from certain Wiccan spells. “Arjenie tells me that Robin is a Finder. I imagine she gets called on often.”

“Often enough,” Gary said. “Plus there were those creatures blown in by the power winds at the Turning. A lot of us were involved then, rounding them up, but of course we couldn’t send them back where they belonged.”

“What did you do with them?” Benedict asked.

“The pixies left on their own. No one knows how, but they skedaddled. The gremlins . . . well, not much you can do about gremlins except kill them, but fortunately we just had to find and hold them. The disposal was handled by the FBI’s Magical Crimes Division. The most dangerous one was that snake.”

“Oh man, yeah.” Nate shook his head. “Biggest damn snake I’ve ever seen. At least twice the size of an anaconda, and it could hypnotize its prey, just like they say dragons do. It ate someone, though we didn’t know that until they cut it open.”

“Your coven found and killed it?”

“Trapped it. We avoid killing if possible, especially if there’s some uncertainty about the sentience of the predator. The snake died anyway, though, about three days later. Robin thinks it came from a high-magic realm and there just wasn’t enough here to sustain it.”

Seri grinned. “Or else it ate something that didn’t agree with it.”

“Seri,” Hershey said reproachfully.

She shrugged. “Come on, Uncle Hershey, you know what John Randall was like. Beat that poor wife of his, even if she never would press charges. Too scared, most likely.”

“No one deserves a death like that. Swallowed alive.”

“So it was ugly. So was he.”

Stephen shook his head, his mouth twisting wryly. “You and Sammy didn’t see the body. It’s easier to joke about that sort of thing if you don’t see the object of your humor half digested.”

“You didn’t see it, either,” Seri protested. “You weren’t here during the Turning.”

“True. I saw other things, however.”

That sparked Benedict’s curiosity. Stephen was a wanderer, according to Arjenie. The rest of the Delacroix brothers had settled near their homestead. Hershey and his partner were practically neighbors; Nate and Ambrose were about fifty miles away. Arjenie had moved farther than most, but D.C. was still only two hours from here. Stephen, however, kept a post office box in his old home town but had no permanent address. He traveled all over the country. Why?

“Benedict,” Arjenie said quietly.

He turned to look at her. She had beautiful eyes. Ocean eyes, not blue or green or gray but partaking of all those and varying according to the lighting. Or maybe they reflected her surroundings and her self the way water reflects the mood of the sky . . .