The Spell Read online

  Danny smiled at that thought now, as she once more stared down at the keychain, watching it shift ever so slightly beneath its cloak of magic. It was a great gift. After all, the car was her favorite thing in the world. She’d named him “Thor.”

  It had been two months since she’d lifted him from the police impound lot in Las Vegas, where a permanent mirror spell kept the cops in the dark about its absent nature. Another vehicle was in its place – and they’d been searching for a stolen white Chevelle SS for sixty days, with no luck.

  Danny sighed around her smile as she pretended to unlock the car with the pad on her keychain and then opened the door. A waft of warm, leather-scented air rushed toward her, enveloping her in that new car bliss that she always experienced when getting into Thor. She slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door. “Heaven,” she sighed.

  Then she pushed in the clutch, moved the gear shift to neutral and put the key in the ignition because she liked the way it felt when the metal slid into place. She gave it a turn. The engine roared to life, a deep, angry rumble that sounded like monsters and thunder and an earth quake all wrapped into one.

  “Oh, baby,” she grinned, shaking her head, “you really know how to talk to a woman.”

  She sat back in the seat, buckled her seat belt, and put the car into first. As she pulled out of the lot, she thought of her conversation with Imani. She’d told her friend of the dream that she’d had of Lucas Caige. What she hadn’t told her, however, was the dream that she’d had of the second werewolf.

  There was no force on Earth that could make her share who the second werewolf was. Especially not with Imani, who would probably call out the troops, lock Danny in a key-pad cell, and contact the werewolf Clan Council, just as a precautionary measure. Which would be bad. Very bad. Because those people never took anything lightly – especially precautionary measures.

  Danny was really in trouble with this one. It wasn’t like she could will the dreams away. It wasn’t like she could change what she was. Some how, for some reason, she’d been born a dormant. And fate had thrown her two wolves that were bad for her. One considerably worse than the other, but that was beside the point.

  Danny bit her lip and punched the button to turn on the stereo. There was silence for a second and a half, and then a complicated guitar solo introduced ACDC’s Thunderstruck. Danny nodded and tried to relax. This was just what she needed.

  Imani had already transported back to the house they shared up North. But not Danny.

  She clicked the window control and the tinted glass on both sides slid smoothly into the doors. The wind whipped in and wreaked havoc with her long, black locks and Danny’s smile was back. There was nothing better than the cool, salty night air of Western California.

  Okay, she thought. Four minutes down, five hours and fifty-six minutes to go.

  In Thor, she could make the trip in two and a half hours. If she wanted. After all, it would only take a few cloaking spells to hide her from the police that waited along the coastal drive up to Trinidad, a small town bordering the Redwood forest. But Imani was right. Danny was weary from using magic. It was why she didn’t really feel like transporting her and the big black beast up the coast in the first place. And she didn’t mind the drive. Not a bit of it.

  So she settled into a groove of sorts, let the guitar riffs pour over her, and turned her thoughts toward anything – anything – but the dreams that haunted her.

  And the faces that haunted her dreams.

  Chapter Two, “Now you see it…”

  It was after she’d been on the road an hour when Dannai felt the strangeness come over her. The warning. It was bad timing, but then people who commit murders don’t exactly plan them so that they are convenient for anyone.

  Somewhere, someone innocent was in mortal danger. Right now in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lily Kane, formerly Lily St. Claire, was having a vision of a grisly murder. At the same time, somewhere in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one Claire St. James, also known as Charlie, was noticing the red marks on the insides of her arms begin to glow. And because those things were happening to her dear friends, Dannai felt the warning too. It was like a humming in her blood, unpleasant and sudden and horribly urgent.

  With practiced speed, Danny glanced in the rear-view mirror, down-shifted the Shelby, and pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road. There were no stations anywhere for miles in either direction. She should know; she’d made this drive enough times to have it memorized.

  But the route up 101 was a scenic one, and the tourism business had called for the state to carve “look-out” points along the road so that people could pull over, break out their cameras, and snap a few keepers of the shoreline or the redwoods.

  It was one such viewing spot that Danny now pulled the Shelby into and then shut it down. The small lot was empty, save for her own jet-black car. This late at night, this far from any cities or towns, there were no lights to illuminate the scenery. The early September night was black, and the sea was blacker. There was nothing to witness – no view to be viewed.

  Danny turned off the lights and wasted a little energy placing a shielding spell over the vehicle. The magic she applied simply blended the car into the scenery behind it, and she prayed she wouldn’t be gone long. For so many reasons.

  Danny got out of the car and closed the door, stepping away from it to summon some more of her power. As she raised her arms at her sides to transport herself to her friends’ psychic signals, she noticed the heaviness in her limbs.

  Imani was right. Danny was tired. She had healed so many people lately. She’d had to keep her shield up so strong because she’d been working around alpha male werewolves. And those damned dreams haunted her night times, stealing her sleep and negating any rest she would otherwise have had.

  She was growing weak.

  Just let me get through tonight’s ordeal, she thought, and then I’ll get some sleep.

  Her magic answered her call, surrounding her in a vortex of shifting power that melted the world around her – and then solidified it once more. Danny lowered her arms and looked around.

  She was in a vast space. It was dark. There was damp; she could hear the echoing drip of something remnantly wet somewhere nearby. There was a cloying scent of rotting garbage.

  There was also a sound like whimpering; soft, unsure, and muffled. Something shifted, scraping against the concrete. Danny slowly turned in place, her gemstone eyes searching through the darkness. A light spell would have cut through it. But she didn’t dare, because it appeared that she had arrived first this time. It happened every once in a while. Every now and then, Lily’s visions were so clear and so emotionally distracting that Lily left a bit of herself behind within them. When that happened, Dannai’s transportation magic would go awry, locating itself to Lily’s mental impression – instead of to Lily herself.

  Danny wondered what Lily had seen in that vision. What was so bad this time that it left the seer so emotionally distraught? Whatever it was, Danny was fairly certain she was about to find out.

  “I can hear you breathing.”

  Danny stilled, silencing her breath. The voice had been a man’s. It was thin and grated and too high pitched.

  “I saw you arrive. If you’ve been sent by him, have you come to help? Or to stop me?”

  Another shift and scrape against the concrete. Danny readied a spell on the tip of her tongue, feeling the power she called go coursing through her arms and down to her fingertips. Ready and waiting.

  And then the world was awash in red, as if a stop light had exploded. In the few seconds that it bathed the interior of the large open space, Danny was able to make out two tiny, bound forms laying atop a dirty mattress. She saw a man seated in a chair beside them. He was undressed. There was a knife in his hand. A lighter in the other.

  He was looking at Danny with a strange kind of expectation; his expression was slanted and off. He was too thin. Hungry. His teeth were yellow.

 
; There was a sucking sound, a separation of air as something forced its way into a space where nothing had been a moment before. Then it sealed back up again like thunder, leaving behind two tall, lean forms with glowing eyes.

  Surrounding the newcomers was a dim aura of light, as if they’d wrapped themselves in it and brought it with them, just in case.

  Charlie! Lily! Danny called out to them mentally, letting them know she was there. She rarely used this form of communication, as it felt claustrophobic and invasive and was on the more draining side. But it seemed natural now.

  The girls turned to face her and even through the dim light, she could see that they both looked relieved. Danny’s gaze flicked from them to the children on the mattress. They were laying with their backs to one another, their wrists bound together. They couldn’t have been more than six years old. One boy, one girl, both stripped of everything but the ropes that bit into their tender flesh and the gags that muffled their sobs.

  There was no blood yet, but even so, Dannai tamped down the vomit that immediately swelled from her stomach to her esophagus and winced as it burned on its way back down. She wouldn’t be able to keep it there. Not for long.

  She looked back up at Charlie and Lily. Charlie’s real name was Claire St. James. The turned werewolf stood a touch taller than Lily, her long and lithe musculature the result of being a female born werewolf, enhanced by the fact that she was also a dormant and had been turned by her fiancé, Malcolm Cole, two months ago. The fact that she’d been training in martial arts for more than a decade didn’t hurt.

  Her long, thick, strawberry blonde hair was pulled back into a pony tail at the moment and she wore no make up. She didn’t need any. On her wrists were leather bands, much like the ones that her mate, Malcolm Cole used to wear. For Charlie, they served two purposes. They absorbed any sweat she created while playing the drums. And they hid the ancient gypsy curse that marked the insides of her arms.

  Beside her, Lily Kane, formerly Lily st. Claire, spun toward the children on the mattress a few yards away, her long, gold hair fanning out in a halo of honey-shimmer behind her. Lily’s stark amber eyes flashed with both pain and anger as she took in the tiny forms that she had most likely witnessed in her vision, bound and helpless and naked on the filth of the mattress beneath them.

  Lily had become a werewolf two years ago, when she’d mated with one Daniel Kane, police chief of Baton Rouge, and alpha male to the extreme. They made a striking pair, even if both were so head strong that their marriage often times found itself on rocky ground.

  One clean swipe of Lily’s sharp extended claw had the children’s wrists unbound. But the two tiny forms remained where they were, trembling violently and otherwise unmoving, too traumatized to do anything else.

  The man in the chair stood. “You haven’t come to help, then.” His reedy voice shook with insanely calm rage, and the knife in his hand glimmered, flashing against the magical aura surrounding the women.

  “You sick, sorry son of a bitch,” came Charlie’s voice. Her ice blue eyes were glowing in warning. Her teeth were bared, her fangs elongated.

  Dannai took all of this in within seconds. Sheer, precious seconds that gave her a feel for the situation so that she could summon any magic they might need to get them all through this without inviting tragedy.

  The man lunged toward Charlie.

  But Charlie was a martially trained werewolf and mate to Malcolm Cole, perhaps the most powerful werewolf aside from the Overseer. She carried his magic in her veins. And his curse on her wrists. Both were a boon to her now, in a time like this, when right needed a lot of help and wrong needed to be vanquished.

  Charlie lunged forward as well. However, where as the naked man stumbled across the concrete, his knife hand flashing in warning, Charlie seemed to move without any warning at all. Her beautiful form blurred into motion. It stood in one place one second – and was on top of the would-be rapist and killer in the next.

  Dannai closed her eyes when Charlie ripped out the man’s throat. She always closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand to see it; couldn’t stand to watch it. She could still hear it, and that was bad enough.

  She knew that Charlie didn’t want to do what she did, that she didn’t want to be the assassin in their trio of supernatural saviors. But Danny, the witch, was not allowed to kill. If she ever used her magic to do such mortal harm…. Well, it was a road she could not go down, for so many reasons. Their choice was to either allow Charlie to destroy every criminal they engaged, or restrain those criminals and chance the authorities.

  In the end, all three women felt that they could not afford to allow an imperfect judiciary system to help criminals as sick as these back onto the streets where they could do more irreparable harm.

  It was a pact they’d made two months ago, when they’d begun this routine. If they were going to be called by the Fates to fight this kind of fight – then they were going to fight it their way.

  So, Charlie killed. She did it so that Lily wouldn’t have to. She did it because she was the fighter in the group, and that was the power she had to offer. It tore Malcolm Cole apart. It tore Lily and Dannai apart. But Charlie bore the burden with incredible strength and determined purpose. If it were not for her, so many innocent women and children would be dead – raped, mutilated, tortured, missing.

  While Charlie finished off the children’s abductor, Danny turned away and ran to join Lily by the bed. Lily was now holding both children, taking off her own sweater to wrap them both up in it. This is what Lily did.

  Her visions led her and her two friends to the sites of the crimes they were fated to stop. Her skills as a social worker and her love for the human race in general helped ease the trauma of the dark events for the victims they saved.

  And now it was Danny’s turn. As the most powerful witch in the most powerful coven in the world, it was Danny’s unique healing touch and her ability to make particularly traumatized women and children forget what they have gone through, that was required.

  Danny’s powers helped them heal, both physically and mentally, so that they could get on with their lives and leave the past behind.

  Danny knelt beside Lily and looked into her friend’s golden eyes; Lily nodded. Danny’s gaze skirted to the two children. They were tow-headed, both blue-eyed and pale-skinned. They had a few bruises here and there, but other than the scratches left by the ropes at their wrists, they were physically unharmed. It required only a very quick psychic evaluation of their minds to determine that neither child had yet been sexually violated.

  Danny and her friends had made it in time again. Danny closed her eyes, held her hands palm-down over each child’s head, and whispered the quiet words of an incantation. To the children, it sounded like a lullaby, soft and sweet and pure.

  And it was this tender thought that carried them off into their healing sleep as Danny released another, separate tendril of power that wove its way gently through the children’s bodies, repairing broken blood vessels, stretched or torn tendons or muscles, and easing away any visible signs of bruising.

  Charlie joined them once more, her forearms covered in blood that was not hers.

  From where she was knelt beside Lily and the children, Danny waved a quick hand over her friend’s upper body and the blood was gone.

  Charlie looked down at her now clean hands and exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Danny nodded and smiled.

  Charlie was a little shaken up, Danny could tell. She always was after a kill. The blood awakened a hunger in her; and the prey awakened disgust. The dichotomy of the cruel and inevitable situation was one that often haunted Charlie, though she would never admit it. But there was no way out of this duty of theirs. And even if there was… would they take it?

  “You look tired, Danny,” Lily spoke softly from where she cradled the two sleeping children in her lap. The thin gold chain she wore around her neck held a single enchanted pearl,
which nestled in the hollow of her throat. It was a gift from Danny and it allowed her to transport to the scenes of her visions. It would also take her back to her gorgeous and swarthy, if a bit difficult, alpha werewolf husband when this was all finished, but not before Charlie’s curse took her back. They never had much time.

  “I’m fine,” Danny said, brushing off the question as she knew a friend should never do. Lily gave her a rueful look, but left it alone. For now.

  “I’ll take them to Council headquarters,” Lily said, looking down at the children asleep in her lap. “They’ll reunite them with their families.”

  Danny nodded.

  “Gotta go, guys. We still on for next Saturday?” Charlie asked.

  Danny and Lily glanced toward her. She was gazing down at her arms. A warm red glow emanated from beneath the leather bands she wore around her wrists. It was time for her to go.

  “Ten o’clock, girl,” Danny told her. “And it’s girls’ night only,” she reminded her. “Which means you’ll have to shake that green-eyed fiancé of yours.” This was neither the time nor the place to talk about dance club hopping. The very idea of it, to anyone witnessing the scene, would have been surreal.

  But these days, these slight moments they possessed together after their jobs were done were almost all the trio had. They had been far too busy lately. The world was going to shit.

  “Got it. See you then.” Charlie smiled a beautiful, weary smile. And then there was a red flash – and she was gone.

  Lily stood next, cradling the children. A human woman would have had trouble with their combined weight. But Lily wasn’t human. She glanced down, readjusted their weight so that it was more even, and then her gold gaze once more cut to Danny. “Something’s going on with you, Danny. You’ve got shadows under those stained glass eyes.”

  Danny didn’t say anything to that. Where would she start? The dreams? Or the two very dangerous alphas in the dreams? She should have seen this coming; she was a dormant, just like Lily and Charlie. She was tall and thin, like they were. Her eyes were stark and different, just like theirs. She was involved with the werewolves in some way – just as they had been. When she really thought about it, she was surprised the dreams hadn’t come sooner. There was so much she wanted to tell Lily.