Patricia Briggs: Strange Brew

He found blood where Jon had scraped against a tree, crushed plants where his brother had tried to get away and rolled around in the mud with another man. Or maybe he'd just been laying a trail for Tom. Jon knew Tom would come for him—that's what family did.

The path the kidnappers took paralleled the waterfront for a while and then headed inland, but not for the burnt-out house. Someone had found a better hideout. Nearly invisible under a shelter of trees, a small barn nestled snugly amidst broken pieces of corral fencing. Its silvered sides bore only a hint of red paint, but the aluminum roof, though covered with moss, was undamaged.

And his brother was there. He couldn't quite hear what Jon was saying, but he recognized his voice… and the slurring rapid rhythm of his schizophrenic-mimicry. If Jon was acting, he was all right. The relief of that settled in his spine and steadied his nerves.

All he needed to do was get his witch… Movement caught his attention, and he dropped to the ground and froze, hidden by wet grass and weeds.

Moira wasn't surprised when they found her—ten in the morning isn't a good time to hide. It was one of the young ones—she could tell by the surprised squeal and the rapid thud of footsteps as he ran for help.

Of course, if she'd really been trying to hide, she might have managed it. But sometime after Tom left it had occurred to her that if she wanted to find Samhain, the easiest thing might be to let them find her. So she set about attracting their attention.

If they found her, it would unnerve them. They knew she worked alone. Her arrival here would puzzle them, but they wouldn't look for anyone else—leaving Tom as her secret weapon.

Magic called to magic, unless the witch took pains to hide it, so any of them should have been able to feel the flames that danced over her hands. It had taken them longer than she expected. While she waited for the boy to return, she found a sharp-edged rock and put it in her pocket. She folded her legs and let the coolness of the damp earth flow through her.

She didn't hear him come, but she knew by his silence whom the young covenist had run to.

"Hello, Father," she told him, rising to her feet. "We have much to talk about."

She didn't look like a captive, Tom thought, watching Moira walk to the barn as if she'd been there before, though she might have been following the sullen-looking half-grown boy who clomped through the grass ahead of her. A tall man followed them both, his hungry eyes on Moira's back.

His wolf recognized another dominant male with a near-silent growl, while Tom thought that the man was too young to have a grown daughter. But there was no one else this could be but Lin Keller—that predator was not a man who followed anyone or allowed anyone around him who might challenge him. He'd seen an Alpha or two like that.

Tom watched them until they disappeared into the barn.

It hurt to imagine she might have betrayed him—as if there were some bond between them, though he hadn't known her a full day. Part of him would not believe it. He remembered her real indignation when she thought he believed she was part of Samhain, and it comforted him.

It didn't matter, couldn't matter. Not yet. Saving Jon mattered, and the rest would wait. His witch was captured or had betrayed him. Either way, it was time to let the wolf free.

The change hurt, but experience meant he made no sound as his bones rearranged themselves and his muscles stretched and slithered to adjust to his new shape. It took fifteen minutes of agony before he rose on four paws, a snarl fixed on his muzzle—ready to kill someone. Anyone.

Instead he stalked like a ghost to the barn where his witch waited. He rejected the door they'd used, but prowled around the side, where four stall doors awaited. Two of them were broken with missing boards; one of the openings was big enough for him to slide through.

The interior of the barn was dark, and the stall's half walls blocked his view of the main section, where his quarry waited. Jon was still going strong, a wild ranting conversation with no one about the Old Testament, complete with quotes. Tom knew a lot of them himself.

"Killing things again, Father?" said Moira's cool disapproving voice, cutting though Jon's soliloquy.

And suddenly Tom could breathe again. They'd found her somehow, Samhain's Coven had, but she wasn't one of them.

"So judgmental." Tom had expected something… bigger from the man's voice. His own Alpha, for instance, could have made a living as a televangelist with his raw fire-and-brimstone voice. This man sounded like an accountant.

"Kill her. You have to kill her before she destroys us—I have seen it." It was Molly, the girl from Jon's message.

"You couldn't see your way out of a paper bag, Molly," said Moira. "Not that you're wrong, of course."

There were other people in the barn, Tom could smell them, but they stayed quiet.

"You aren't going to kill me," said Kouros. "If you could have done that, you'd have done it before now. Which brings me to my point: Why are you here?"

"To stop you from killing this man," Moira told him. "I've killed men before—and you haven't stopped me. What is so special about this one?"

Moira felt the burden of all those deaths upon her shoulders. He was right. She could have killed him before—before he'd killed anyone else.

"This one has a brother," she said.

She felt Tom's presence in the barn, but her look-past-me spell must still have been working, because no one seemed to notice the werewolf. And any witch with a modicum of sensitivity to auras would have felt him. His brother was a faint trace to her left—something his constant stream of words made far more clear than her magic was able to.

Her father she could follow only from his voice.

There were other people in the structure—she hadn't quite decided what the cavernous building was: probably a barn, given the dirt floor and faint odor of cow—but she couldn't pinpoint them either. She knew where Molly was, though. And Molly was the important one, Kouros's right hand.

"Someone paid you to go up against me?" Her father's voice was faintly incredulous. "Against us?"

Then he did something, made some gesture. She wouldn't have known except for Molly's sigh of relief. So she didn't feel too bad when she tied Molly's essence, through the gum she still held, into her shield.

When the coven's magic hit the shield, it was Molly who took the damage. Who died. Molly, her little sister, whose presence she could no longer feel.

Someone, a young man, screamed Molly's coven name—Wintergreen. And there was a flurry of movement where Moira had last sensed her.

Moira dropped the now-useless bit of gum on the ground.

"Oh, you'll pay for that," breathed her father. "Pay in pain and power until there is nothing left of you."

Someone sent power her way, but it wasn't a concerted spell from the coven, and it slid off her protections without harm. Unlike the fist that struck her in the face, driving her glasses into her nose and knocking her to the ground—her father's fist. She'd recognize the weight of it anywhere.

Unsure of where her enemies were, she stayed where she was, listening. But she didn't hear Tom; he was just suddenly there. And the circle of growing terror that spread around him—of all the emotions possible, it was fear that she could sense most often—told her he was in his lupine form. It must have been impressive.

"Your victim has a brother," she told her father again, knowing he'd hear the smugness in her tone. "And you've made him very angry."

The beast beside her roared. Someone screamed… Even witches are afraid of monsters.

The coven broke. Children most of them, they broke and ran. Molly's death followed by a beast out of their worst nightmares was more than they could face, partially trained, deliberately crippled fodder for her father that they were.