Witch Interrupted (29 page)

“Is Adele your immediate supervisor?” she asked the trembling man.

“She doesn’t know anything. I get phone calls.”

“Scent him,” she told Marcus. She didn’t have time to put together a mask dissolver, but the guy was bleeding. That beat nearly all masks.

“Scent me? What do you mean?” When Marcus, his dark gaze on Katie promising retribution, did as she asked, the guy scuttled away from the wolf. Marcus took his shoulders, avoiding blood spatters, and sniffed. Sniffed again.

“Oh, fuck. That’s a wolf, isn’t it? A feral.”

“Do I look feral?” Marcus released the witch, who backed against the shelves. More than blood loss drained the guy’s countenance now. “He has Lars’s scent. There’s a definite association.”

“Shit,” Harry commented. “Didn’t see that coming.” June remained silent.

“I swear, I don’t know a Lars,” the guy begged. In Katie’s experience, men this frightened of her lied poorly. It didn’t seem like a lie. “Oh, God. Don’t kill me, okay? I won’t tell anybody.”

“You’re right. You won’t.” She was out of time. Who knew when another customer would need the restroom? Unceremoniously, she flung the spell pod at Frank.

He screamed—until the pod hit him and burst. He passed out in a sprawl on the bloody concrete floor. She dragged the poppy mix out of her pocket and activated that next. She pressed her hand to his forehead. Quick erase. One day.

Her body, her magic, fell quickly into old patterns.

They didn’t have time to clean up the mess. Her mess. Granted, the only thing Adele would know is that two senior citizens and two teenagers purchased an assortment of supplies and then assaulted her employee in the back room, but that was odd enough in coven culture that the news would spread.

Without glancing at her companions, she sprayed the guy’s throat with her travel can of heal-all. “Let’s go.”

No one spoke much on the way home. What little conversation they shared related to the upcoming permabrand experiment, which Marcus wanted to begin ASAP. Katie’s savagery, her apparent willingness to kill and their narrow escape weren’t discussed. They didn’t even debate what Frank had revealed about a network of witches who reported on monkshood purchases.

So no one spoke much. But no one tried to take her monkshood away from her either.

Katie had never felt so alone.

The red bull’s-eye on Marcus’s biceps blazed like a hot poker, drilling into his humerus. He clenched his teeth and didn’t utter a sound as Katie etched the cayenne permabrand into his arm.

Over the months, he’d had a number of tattoos. This was not the same. Adding the cayenne was like adding molten anguish.

“Easy.” Katie wrapped gloved fingers around his arm, but he could barely appreciate her touch. His heart monitor beeped rapidly, recording his stats for risk assessment. “Harry, the belts aren’t enough. Hold him still. June, if you could remove the blood. I can’t see my outline.”

Marcus realized he might not have been complaining, but he had been inching away from Katie and her father’s gunlike tattoo machine she wielded to such painful effect. The makeshift straps that bound his torso to the heavy chair hadn’t prevented his involuntary twitches.

“It’s a one-inch circle. The outline doesn’t matter,” Marcus told her. Pain ebbed and flowed like his pulse, diving beneath his skin and resurfacing. The healing components in the brand would offset blisters and burns but not all the hurt. “Go faster.”

“It matters to me,” she said. The tattoo machine whirred off. Marcus blinked rapidly, surprised to find his vision sheened by tears.

He ducked his head.
Christ.

They hadn’t discussed the incident at the gardening store as a group, but Harry had told Marcus privately that he didn’t like his wife being around a killer. He made June carry extra bay capsules and wanted the monkshood destroyed. Marcus had refused. Yes, he or Harry could sniff the monkshood out, but he didn’t believe Katie would kill them.

Desert them if she thought it would help her family? Absolutely. Kill them? No.

Nevertheless, the aftereffect of the incident was undeniable. Lars’s probable infiltration of the coven network had added a layer of urgency to the experiments. To everything.

Marcus had never intended to dawdle, but now that he knew Lars had secret connections, he wouldn’t wait between tests. No more resting or running. They had to have answers now.

Gently, June dabbed the raw mark on his arm with clean cotton. “Does a permabrand normally get so inflamed?”

“It’s the cayenne,” Katie said.

“Finish it,” he ordered. A permabrand was the answer to his reservoir limitation. He could feel it. Goddess knew he didn’t like the sensation—but he could definitely feel it.

“You want me to finish this, quit wiggling. It’s lopsided.”

“I honestly don’t care what it looks like.” A good thing, considering Katie’s dubious art skills. While she promised she’d do a better job than his dragon, he wasn’t sure he trusted that. She seemed cool and cooperative, but this woman was the definition of still waters running deep.

He needed this to work. Though she hadn’t disappeared yet, Marcus wasn’t sure how many more days that would be the case. If he wanted her to stay, he’d have to produce results—in his work or in a rescue plan.

She was disappointed. In him. She drew further away from him every day, and soon she’d be gone. He couldn’t let that happen.

The needle whizzed on. Harry’s grip on his shoulders hardened, and Marcus braced for the pinch. Instead, Katie rubbed him beside the tattoo. Her knees touched his thigh. “Aren’t wolves supposed to have a high pain tolerance?”

“That’s immaterial.” He looked at her, hoping for eye contact, but she was intent on his arm. She was wearing his goggles, bulky on her smaller head. “Completion is necessary in this phase. Please continue.”

Had it been a deliberate callback on her part? It was on his. He stared at her lips and reviewed his and Katie’s original discussion of pain tolerance—and what it had led to. Spanking her. Fucking her. Rousing her alpha. If he drifted away on a cloud of lust and fantasizing, perhaps he could learn to appreciate the pain.

The tattoo machine jabbed like a bullet striking his flesh. Marcus flinched. The belts cut into his arms.

Harry pressed him in the chair with a steely grip. “Come on, man. Is it that bad?”

“Harry, you’re the biggest baby in the world,” June said. “When we dotted the cayenne on your arm with Q-tip, you howled.”

“It blistered.”

“I healed it.”

“Well, I don’t want to be a witch,” Harry said. Marcus’s ears buzzed with the effort to hold…still. His heart rate increased, the beep of the monitor becoming a drone. “If a tattoo turned me into a witch, I think you’d miss a few things about your old wolf.”

Marcus regulated his breathing as the Travises bantered. Katie, hands steady, continued the torture he’d asked for—the torture he’d insisted on. The agony spread from the bull’s-eye to his entire upper arm as the cayenne took hold. Burning. Burrowing. Blistering.

He refused to look. He’d looked in the beginning. The raw hamburger flesh created by the cayenne had offended his stomach.

More heal-all. The agony eased. Then it started again.

“We’re almost done.”

Marcus closed his eyes again and tried to ignore the pain, but it seemed to intensify. He remembered another thing he’d told Katie, about how losing one of her senses would sharpen the others. He’d blindfolded her to heighten her responses. She’d begged him to take her.

Goddess, to relive that night! Either night they’d shared. He didn’t care. It seemed like years ago. He’d wanted her every moment since, but he couldn’t have her. Sleeping with her and calling it science seemed dishonest now. If she realized how he felt about her, if she knew he just wanted to taste her and love her and wake up beside her, what would she do?

Hands slapped his face lightly.

Numbness faded enough for him to sense Katie hovering in front of him. He lolled upright in the chair, courtesy of the belts. He opened his eyes. She’d removed the goggles, the gloves—the impartiality. Worry lines creased her forehead. Her fingers stroked his cheek.

He licked his lips. His voice came out rusty. “That feels good.”

As soon as she realized he was aware of her, the Chang Cai mask slid over her features. She whipped her hands behind her back and straightened.

“He’s alert,” she told the others. “Pulse back to normal.”

At some point, he must have hazed out. Imagining sex with her had succeeded, after a fashion. He didn’t think he’d tell everyone that the secret to enduring a cayenne permabrand had been picturing Katie naked on his bed, begging him to make love to her.

A little shakily, he unbuckled the belts holding him to the chair. They’d been placed to help him stay motionless, not restrain him.

She handed him a bottled water. “Drink.”

He raised the bottle to his lips and gulped. The bull’s-eye was a low, annoying throb. When he was done with the water, he pivoted his arm so he could see it.

She’d not added much ink to the brand, and June had healed it as if it had been there for months. The center dot of the bull’s-eye was blackish green. The heal-all. The rust of the cayenne dominated the ring around it, somewhat indistinct against his medium brown skin. He rubbed it with a finger. Smooth but sore.

His senses weren’t as dull as they usually were in witch state. He could smell the antibacterial soap from the Airstream, where he and Katie had been taking turns sleeping. Never together. She hadn’t asked; he hadn’t insisted. It wasn’t right to insist anymore.

The wind had picked up outside, and rain poured down. A crack of lightning. Glancing at the sky she couldn’t see, she crossed her arms.

“Did June add more magic to the cayenne?” he asked. The necessity of regular deposits into a permabrand’s cayenne was something the region elders could accept if it meant recovering a transformed wolf or stopping cancer. Not the pain, though. After they calculated the square inches required to boost him to true dual state, they’d test anesthetization and pain management options.

“She doubled it.” Katie helped him unhook the heart monitor, hands impersonal. “You aren’t going to like your readings.”

A little stiff, he shrugged into his dress shirt but left it hanging open. If he was too fumbly to manage the buttons, he didn’t want her to see. “That high?”

She nodded. Her short, messy hair pronged everywhere, as if she’d been rubbing her head. Her gaze dropped down his torso and then back to the ceiling when thunder boomed.

“Next time, we’ll create the initial brand with weaker cayenne and layer the magic afterward.” They couldn’t enlarge the current brand. A person could only host one at a time.

“Next time,” she said slowly, “you might have a heart attack.”

“I’ll run the math,” he promised, but he had no intention of letting high readings intimidate him. A difficult permabrand would be preferable to human cancer treatments.

Once he broke through the wolf-witch barrier and possessed both magics, they could go straight to the region elders with their demands. In exchange for the cure for cancer, the elders would ferret out all of Lars’s spies, protect them from the keepers and rescue Katie’s family. The keepers might be combat veterans, but coven members outnumbered them.

The keepers would no longer be allowed to torture and murder innocents like Elisa and her unborn child. For all Marcus knew there was already a contingency plan for keepers gone rogue. Too bad Zhang Li and Vern weren’t here to ask.

Too bad they had no idea if the elders would consider the keepers’ attempt to capture him or nullify Chang Cai—convex witch, assassin and security threat—as going rogue. Could they prove the keepers had been torturing and violating the covenants? Could they prove the keepers had overstepped in Alabama, if nobody remembered it? Could they prove Frank was part of an unapproved monitoring network, or was that something the elders had allowed Lars to create?

Would it matter, if he was handing the elders the cure for untreatable cancers on a silver platter?

“June?” he said. “Let’s record my lattice.”

He preferred Katie, of course, but she was drained after a brand. June, already armed with the shaker of kava mix, sprinkled some on his hand and activated the true eye through a dittany link. Harry ambled over with the full-length mirror.

Marcus squinted at the glass. His aura coalesced around him, less gray than usual with his exit from wolf state—and more purple. June, a novice aura reader, wouldn’t know what purple meant. He glanced quickly at Katie, but she was weighing her ink caps on the digital scale and recording it on the chart.

June, as instructed, focused the chi spell, passing through his aura to the core. The dimness of the lab sharpened the witch lattice that shimmered into view. Was it stronger? He’d been a wolf when the tattoo had begun; now he was most definitely a witch.

“I see the witch thread you used to create the healing gel. Looks unbroken.” She patted his hand, as if he were a young witch being taught spells for the first time.

“Hmm.” He’d expected a stronger lattice response. “I need to upload my stats and test how many spells I can cast.”

Harry sniffed him. “Juvenile.”

He wasn’t calling Marcus immature; he was confirming Marcus’s scent was how an unmasked witch would register to a wolf.

“As I suspected,” Marcus agreed.

June’s burner phone trilled. He paused. Everyone paused. Even the storm seemed to pause.

Few people had that phone number. Vern, the four of them, Rachel from Cardholder Services and select individuals June had contacted while looking for information about the keepers.

For that phone to ring…

She flicked it on. “Hello? Annette? Slow down.”

A tense hush descended over the room. As she spoke to her friend from the Millington coven, Marcus wished he had his wolf hearing so he could tell what was being said on the other end of the phone.

June, who was fair-skinned to start with, paled and sank onto the cot. “Witches in military gear are looking for you? I assume, since you’re talking to me, they didn’t find you. Is Pete all right? He’s a policeman in the human world. He can’t just vanish.”

Katie and Marcus exchanged a glance. Whatever this was, it sounded big.

June didn’t pause long before continuing. “No, we haven’t seen anybody like that.Why?” She leaned against Harry. “They’re looking for us too?”

Even Marcus with his witch-dead ears could hear Harry growl.

“The white-haired man specifically asked for someone genetically related to me?” June laid a trembling hand over her eyes. “I have to call my mother.”

Marcus didn’t like the information adding up, even though he was only hearing half. Witches in military gear questioning coven members, searching for biological family members, abandoning subtlety—and a white-haired male witch in charge.

Hiram Lars.

But keepers didn’t, weren’t supposed to, interfere with covens and witches. Their job was to perform the tasks requested by the elders. With Lars declaring the covenants no longer applied to him, nobody would be safe from the keepers if they weren’t stopped.

Harry ejected himself off the cot. Without saying a word, he sped through the lab’s only door. He made as much noise as a cat. When Marcus glanced at Katie again, she’d retrieved her gun. Her expression had gone cold.

Had Harry heard something outside? Had Katie? Marcus, right now, had limited magic—the contents of the untested brand. Because Katie had just inked it, she was drained. She’d require human weaponry or primed spell pods for defense. June’s reservoir of magic hadn’t been flush since they’d begun the lattice tests.

If Annette’s news precipitated some sort of keeper-led takeover of the coven network, they were in a poor position to counter it. It might be time to direct-dial region elders. How could Lars imagine he and his team could blatantly hunt down witches like June or Annette without alerting his erstwhile superiors?

Of course, no one seemed to have found out about Alabama. Decimating an entire Birmingham border patrol had to have been a larger cover-up than wiping a few observers. Then again, perhaps Lars had employees like Frank in all sorts of places. Perhaps he had more support than they realized.

After another comforting murmur to her friend, June hung the phone up with a snap.

“The keepers and Hiram Lars are in Millington.” She pressed a hand to her lower stomach, as if holding back nausea or protecting herself from harm. “Why would they want to find me and Harry? How would they realize we helped you?”