Patricia Briggs: Strange Brew

"Like Kouros, I'm not Wiccan," she told him, "but 'and it harm none' seems like a good way to live to me."

White witch.

He knew that Wiccans consider themselves witches—and some of them had enough witchblood to make it so. But witches, the real thing, weren't witches because of what they believed, but because of genetic heritage. A witch was born a witch and studied to become a better one. But for witches, real power came from blood and death—mostly other people's blood and death.

White witches, especially those outside of Wicca (where numbers meant safety), were weak and valuable sacrifices for black witches, who didn't have their scruples. As Wendy the Witch had noted—witches seemed to have a real preference for killing their own.

He sipped at his coffee and asked, "So how have you managed without ending up as bits and pieces in someone else's cauldron?"

The witch snorted a laugh and set her coffee down abruptly. She grabbed a paper towel off its holder and held it to her face as she gasped and choked coffee, looking suddenly a lot less than thirty. When she was finished, she said, "That's awesome. Bits and pieces. I'll have to remember that."

Still grinning, she picked up the coffee again. He wished he could see her eyes, because he was pretty sure that whatever humor she'd felt was only surface deep.

"I tell you what," she said, "why don't you tell me who you are and what you know? That way I can tell you if I can help you or not."

"Fair enough," he said. The coffee was strong, and he could feel it and the four other cups he'd had since midnight settle in his bones with caffeine's untrustworthy gift of nervous energy.

"I'm Tom Franklin and I'm second in the Emerald City Pack." She wasn't surprised by that. She'd known what he was as soon as she opened her door. "My brother Jon is a cop and a damn fine one. He's been on the Seattle PD for nearly twenty years, and for the last six months he's been undercover as a street person. He was sent as part of a drug task force: there's been some nasty garbage out on the street lately, and he's been looking for it."

Wendy Moira Keller leaned back against the cabinets with a sigh. "I'd like to say that no witch would mess with drugs. Not from moral principles, mind you. Witches, for the most part, don't have moral principles. But drugs are too likely to attract unwanted attention. We never have been so deep in secrecy as you wolves like to be, not when witches sometimes crop up in mundane families—we need to be part of society enough that they can find us. Mostly people think we're a bunch of harmless charlatans—trafficking in drugs would change all that for the worse. But the Samhain bunch is powerful enough that no one wants to face them—and Kouros is arrogant and crazy. He likes money, and there is at least one herbalist among his followers who could manufacture some really odd stuff."

He shrugged. "I don't know. I'm interested in finding my brother, not in finding out if witches are selling drugs. It sounded to me like the drugs had nothing to do with my brother's kidnapping. Let me play Jon's call, and you make the determination." He pulled out his cell phone and played the message for her.

It had come from a pay phone. There weren't many of those left, now that cell phones had made it less profitable for the phone companies to keep repairing the damage of vandals. But there was no mistaking the characteristic static and hiss as his brother talked very quietly into the mouthpiece.

Tom had called in favors and found the phone Jon used, but the people who took his brother were impossible to pick out from the scents of the hundreds of people who had been there since the last rain—and his brother's scent stopped right at the pay phone, outside a battered convenience store. Stopped as if they'd teleported him to another planet—or, more prosaically, thrown him in a car.

Jon's voice—smoker-dark, though he'd never touched tobacco or any of its relatives—slid through the apartment: "Look, Tom. My gut told me to call you tonight—and I listen to my gut. I've been hearing something on the street about a freaky group calling themselves Samhain—" He spelled it, to be sure Tom got it right. "Last few days I've had a couple of people following me that might be part of Samhain. No one wants to talk about 'em much. The streets are afraid of these…"

He didn't know if the witch could hear the rest. He'd been a wolf for twenty years and more, so his judgment about what human senses were good for was pretty much gone.

He could hear the girl's sweet voice clearly, though. "Lucky Jon?" she asked. "Lucky Jon, who are you calling? Let's hang it up, now." A pause, then the girl spoke into the phone. "Hello?" Another pause. "It's an answering machine, I think. No worries."

At the same time, a male, probably young, was saying in a rapid, rabid flow of sound, "I feel it… Doncha feel it? I feel it in him. This is the one. He'll do for Kouros." Then there was a soft click as the call ended.

The last fifty times he'd heard the recording, he couldn't make out the last word. But with the information the witch had given him, he understood it just fine this time.

Tom looked at Choo's witch, but he couldn't tell what she thought. Somewhere she'd learned to discipline her emotions, so he could smell only the strong ones—like the flash of desire she'd felt as he sniffed the back of her neck. Even in this situation, it had been enough to raise a thread of interest. Maybe after they got his brother back, they could do something about that interest. In the meantime…

"How much of the last did you hear, Wendy?" he asked.

"Don't call me Wendy," she snapped. "It's Moira. No one called me Wendy except my mom, and she's been dead a long time."

"Fine," he snapped back before he could control himself. He was tired and worried, but he could do better than that. He tightened his control and softened his voice. "Did you hear the guy? The one who said that he felt it in him—meaning my brother, I think. And that he would do for Kouros?"

"No. Or at least not well enough to catch his words. But I know the woman's voice. You're right: It was Samhain." Though he couldn't feel anything from her, her knuckles were white on the coffee cup.

"You need a Finder, and I can't do that anymore. Wait—" She held up a hand before he could say anything. " — I'm not saying I won't help you, just that it could be a lot simpler. Kouros moves all the time. Did you trace the call? It sounded like a pay phone to me."

"I found the phone booth he called from, but I couldn't find anything except that he'd been there." He tapped his nose, then glanced at her dark glasses and said, "I could smell him there and backtrail him, but I couldn't trail him out. They transported him somehow."

"They don't know that he's a cop, or that his brother is a werewolf."

"He doesn't carry ID with him while he's undercover. I don't see how anyone would know I was his brother. Unless he told them, and he wouldn't."

"Good," she said. "They won't expect you. That'll help."

"So do you know a Finder I can go to?"

She shook her head. "Not one who will help you against Samhain. Anyone, anyone who makes a move against them is punished in some rather spectacular ways." He saw her consider sharing one or two of them with him and discard it. She didn't want him scared off. Not that he could be, not with Jon's life at stake. But it was interesting that she hadn't tried.

"If you take me to where they stole him, maybe I can find something they left behind, something to use to find them."

Tom frowned at her. She didn't know his brother, he hadn't mentioned money, and he was getting the feeling that she couldn't care less if he called in the authorities. "So if Samhain is so all-powerful, how come you, a white witch, are willing to buck them?"