Patricia Briggs: Strange Brew

"Tell me."

"You are acting like my familiar." She couldn't feel a thing from him. "If I had a familiar."

Floorboards creaked under his feet as his weight shifted. His shoulder brushed her as he picked up the empty cup. She heard him walk away from her and set the cup on a hard surface. "Do you need more tea?"

"No," she said, needing suddenly to be home, somewhere she wasn't so dependent upon him. "I'm fine. If you would call me a taxi, I'd appreciate it." She stood up, too. Then realized she had no idea where the door was or what obstacles might be hiding on the floor. In her own apartment, redolent with her magic, she was never so helpless.

"Can you find my brother?"

She hadn't heard him move, not a creak, not a breath, but his voice told her he was no more than a few inches from her. Disoriented and vulnerable, she was afraid of him for the first time.

He took a big step away from her. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Sorry," she told him. "You startled me. Do we still have the gum?"

"Yes. You said she was on a boat."

She'd forgotten, but as soon as he said it, she could picture the boat in her head. That hadn't been the way the spell was supposed to work. It was more of a "hot and cold" spell, but she could still see the boat in her mind's eye.

Nothing had really changed, except that she'd used someone without asking. There was still a policeman to be saved and her father to kill.

"If we still have the gum, I can find Molly—the girl on your brother's phone call."

"I have a buddy whose boat we can borrow."

"All right," she told him after a moment. "Do you have some aspirin?"

She hated boating. The rocking motion disrupted her sense of direction, the engine's roar obscured softer sounds, and the scent of the ocean covered the subtler scents she used to negotiate everyday life. Worse than all of that, though, was the thought of trying to swim without knowing where she was going. The damp air chilled her already cold skin.

"Which direction?" said Tom over the sound of the engine.

His presence shouldn't have made her feel better—werewolves couldn't swim at all—but it did. She pointed with the hand that held the gum. "Not far now," she warned him.

"There's a private dock about a half mile up the coast. Looks like it's been here awhile," he told her. "There's a boat— The Tern , the bird."

It felt right. "I think that must be it."

There were other boats on the water; she could hear them. "What time is it?"

"About ten in the morning. We're passing the boat right now."

Molly's traces, left on the gum, pulled toward their source, tugging Moira's hand toward the back of the boat. "That's it."

"There's a park with docks about a mile back," he said, and the boat tilted to the side. "We'll go tie up there and come back on foot."

But when he'd tied the boat up, he changed his mind. "Why don't you stay here and let me check this out?"

Moira rubbed her hands together. It bothered her to have her magic doing something it wasn't supposed to be doing, and she'd let it throw her off her game: time to collect herself. She gave him a sultry smile. "Poor blind girl," she said. "Must be kept out of danger, do you think?" She turned a hand palm up and heard the whoosh of flame as it caught fire. "You'll need me when you find Molly—you may be a werewolf, but she's a witch who looks like a pretty young thing." She snuffed the flame and dusted off her hands. "Besides, she's afraid of me. She'll tell me where your brother is."

She didn't let him know how grateful she was for the help he gave her exiting the boat. When this night was over, he'd go back to his life and she to hers. If she wanted to keep him—she knew he wouldn't want to be kept by her. She was a witch, and ugly with scars of the past.

Besides, if her dreams were right, she wouldn't survive to see nightfall.

She threaded through the dense underbrush as if she could see every hanging branch, one hand on his back and her other held out in front of her. He wondered if she was using magic to see.

She wasn't using him. Her hand in the middle of his back was warm and light, but his flannel shirt was between it and skin. Probably she was reading his body language and using her upraised hand as an insurance policy against low-hanging branches.

They followed a half-overgrown path that had been trod out a hundred feet or so from the coast, which was obscured by ferns and underbrush. He kept his ears tuned so he'd know it if they started heading away from the ocean.

The Tern had been moored in a small natural harbor on a battered dock next to the remains of a boathouse. A private property rather than the public dock he'd used.

They'd traveled north and were somewhere not too far from Everett, by his reckoning. He wasn't terribly surprised when their path ended in a brand-new eight-foot chain-link fence. Someone had a real estate gold mine on their hands, and they were waiting to sell it to some developer when the price was right. Until then, they'd try to keep out the riffraff.

He helped Moira over the fence, mostly a matter of whispering a few directions until she found the top of it. He waited until she was over and then vaulted over himself.

The path they'd been following continued on, though not nearly so well traveled as it had been before the fence. A quarter mile of blackberry brambles ended abruptly in thigh-deep damp grasslands that might once have been a lawn. He stopped before they left the cover of the bushes, sinking down to rest on his heels.

"There's a burnt-out house here," he told Moira, who had ducked down when he did. "It must have burned down a couple of years ago, because I don't smell it."

"Hidden," she commented.

"Someone's had tents up here," he told her. "And I see the remnants of a campfire."

"Can you see the boat from here?"

"No, but there's a path I think should lead down to the water. I think this is the place."

She pulled her hand away from his arm. "Can you go check it out without being seen?"

"It would be easier if I do it as a wolf," Tom admitted. "But I don't dare. We might have to make a quick getaway, and it'll be a while before I can shift back to human." He hoped Jon would be healthy enough to pilot in an emergency—but he didn't like to make plans that depended upon an unknown. Moira wasn't going to be piloting a boat anywhere.

"Wait," she told him. She murmured a few words and then put her cold fingers against his throat. A sudden shock, like a static charge on steroids, hit him—and when it was over, her fingers were hot on his pulse. "You aren't invisible, but it'll make people want to overlook you."

He pulled out his HK and checked the magazine before sliding it back in. The big gun fit his hand like a glove. He believed in using weapons: guns or fangs, whatever got the job done.

"It won't take me long."

"If you don't go, you'll never get back," she told him, and gave him a gentle push. "I can take care of myself."

It didn't sit right with him, leaving her alone in the territory of his enemies, but common sense said he'd have a better chance of roaming unseen. And no one tackled a witch lightly—not even other witches.

Spell or no, he slid through the wet overgrown trees like a shadow, crouching to minimize his silhouette and avoiding anything likely to crunch. One thing living in Seattle did was minimize the stuff that would crunch under your foot—all the leaves were wet and moldy without a noise to be had.

The boat was there, bobbing gently in the water. Empty. He closed his eyes and let the morning air tell him all it could.

His brother had been in the boat. There had been others, too—Tom memorized their scents. If anything happened to Jon, he'd track them down and kill them, one by one. Once he had them, he'd let his nose lead him to Jon.