Faith Hunter - Have Stakes Will Travel

It was nap time, and it wasn’t often that I could get both children to sleep a full hour, the same full hour, that is. I stepped back and ran my hands over the healing and protection spells that enveloped my babies, Angelina and Evan Jr. The complex incantations were getting a bit frayed around the edges, and I drew on Mother Earth and the forest on the mountainside out back to restore them. Not much power, not enough to endanger the ecosystem that was still being restored there. Just a bit. Just enough.

Few witches or sorcerers survive into puberty, and so I spend a lot of time making sure my babies are okay. I come from a long line of witches. Not the kind in pointy black hats with a cauldron in the front yard, and not the kind like the Bewitched television show that once tried to capitalize on our reclusive species. Witches aren’t human, though we can breed true with humans, making little witches about fifty percent of the time. Unfortunately, witch babies have a poor survival rate, especially the males, most dying before they reach the age of twenty from various cancers. The ones who live through puberty, however, tend to live into their early hundreds.

The day each of my babies were conceived, I prayed and worked the same incantations Mama had used on her children, power-weavings, to make sure my babies were protected. Mama had better-than-average survival rate on her witches. For me, so far, so good. I said a little prayer over them and left the room.

Back in the kitchen, Paul Braxton—Brax to his friends, Detective or Sir to the bad guys he chased—Jane Yellowrock, and Evan were still sitting at the table, the photographs scattered all around. Crime scene photos of the McCarley house. And the McCarleys. It wasn’t pretty. The photos didn’t belong in my warm, safe home. They didn’t belong anywhere.

Evan and I were having trouble with them, with the blood and the butchery. Of course, nothing fazed Jane. And, after years of dealing with crime in New York City, little fazed Brax.

I met Evan’s gray eyes, seeing the steely anger there. My husband was easygoing, slow to anger and full of peace, but the photos of the five McCarleys had triggered something in him, a slow-burning, pitiless rage. He was feeling impotent, useless, and he wanted to smash things. The boxing bag in the garage would get a pummeling tonight, after the kids went to bed for the last time. I offered him a wan smile and went to the Aga stove; I poured fresh coffee for the men and tea for Jane and me. She had brought a new variety, a first flush Darjeeling, and it was wonderful with my homemade bread and peach-butter.

“Kids okay?” Brax asked, amusement in his tone.

I retook my seat and used the tip of a finger to push the photos away. I was pretty transparent, I guess, having to check on the babies after seeing the dead McCarleys. “They’re fine. Still sleeping. Still… safe.” Which made me feel all kinds of guilty to have my babies safe, while the entire McCarley family had been butchered. Drank dry. Partly eaten.

“You finished thinking about it?” he asked. “Because I need an answer. If I’m going after them, I need to know, for sure, what they are. And if they’re vamps, then I need to know how many there are and where they’re sleeping in the daytime. And I’ll need protection. I can pay.”

I sighed and sipped my tea, added a spoonful of raw sugar, stirred, and sipped again. He was trying to yank my chain, make my natural guilt and our friendship work to his favor, and making him wait was my only reverse power play. Having to use it ticked me off. I put the cup down with a soft china clink. “You know I won’t charge you for the protection spells, Brax.”

“I don’t want Molly going into that house,” Evan said. He brushed crumbs from his reddish, graying beard and leaned across the table, holding my eyes. “You know it’ll hurt you.”

I’m an earth witch, from a long family of witches, and our gifts are herbs and growing things, healing bodies, restoring balance to nature. I’m a little unusual for earth witches, in that I can sense dead things, which is why Brax was urging me to go to the McCarley house. To tell him for sure if dead things, like vamps, had killed the family. How they died. He could wait for forensics, but that might take weeks. I was faster. And I could give him numbers to go on too, how many vamps were in the blood-family, if they were healthy, or as healthy as dead things ever got. And, maybe, which direction they had gone at dawn, so he could guess where the vamps slept by day.

But once there, I would sense the horror, the fear that the violent deaths had left imprinted on the walls, floor, ceilings, furniture of the house. I took a breath to say no. “I’ll go,” I said instead. Evan pressed his lips together tight, holding in whatever he would say to me later, privately. “If I don’t go, and another family is killed, I’ll be a lot worse,” I said to him. “And that would be partly my fault. Besides, some of that reward money would buy us a new car.”

“You don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Moll,” he said, his voice a deep, rumbling bass. “And we can get the money in other ways.” Not many people knew that Evan is a sorcerer, not even Brax. We wanted it that way, as protection for our family. If it was known that Evan carried the rare gene on his X chromosome, the gene that made witches, and that we had produced children who both carried the gene, we’d likely disappear into some government-controlled testing program. “Moll. Think about this,” he begged. But I could see in his gentle brown eyes that he knew my mind was already made up.

“I’ll go.” I looked at Jane. “Will you go with me?” She nodded once, the beads in her black braids clicking with the motion. To Brax, I said, “When do you want us there?”

The McCarley house was on Dogwood, up the hill overlooking the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, not that far, as the crow flies, from my house, which is outside the city limits, on the other side of the hill. The McCarley home was older, with a nineteen-fifties feel to it, and from the outside it would have been hard to tell that anything bad had happened. The tiny brick house itself with its elvish, high-peaked roof, green trim, and well-kept lawn looked fine. But the crime scene tape was a dead giveaway.

I was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, trying to center myself for what I was about to do. It took time to become settled, to pull the energies of my gift around me, to create a skein of power that would heighten my senses.

Brax, dressed in a white plastic coat and shoe covers, was standing on the front porch, his hands in the coat pockets, his body at an angle, head down, not looking at anything. The set of his shoulders said he didn’t want to go back inside, but he would, over and over again, until he found the killers.

Jane was standing by the car, patient, bike helmet in her hands, riding leathers unzipped, copper-skinned face turned to the sun for its meager warmth on this early fall day. Jane Yellowrock was full Cherokee, and was much more than she seemed. Like most witches, like Evan who was still in the witch-closet, Jane had secrets that she guarded closely. I was pretty sure that I was the only one who knew any of them, and I didn’t flatter myself that I knew them all. Yet, even though she kept things hidden, I needed her special abilities and gifts to augment my own on this death-search.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, huffing in and out, my lips in an O. My body and my gift came alive, tingling in hands and feet as my oxygen level rose. I pulled the gift of power around me like a cloak, protection and sensing at my fingertips.