Under Witch Aura (Moon Shadow Series)

Maria
E. Schneider

Bear
Mountain Books

ISBN-13:
978-0615533926 (Bear Mountain
Books)
ISBN-10: 0615533922

Copyright
November 2011 © Maria E. Schneider
5.8.2012

Under
Witch Aura

Ghosts don’t usually cause
much
trouble; they knock things over or rattle the eaves enough to be
annoying. I didn’t know Sarah all that well in life, and I had
no desire to know her better after death. It took a pretty angry
ghost to appear in full form and do damage on the plane of the
living.

Sarah wouldn’t have been
able to
reach me at all had I been inside my house. I’m no dummy; after
my first home burned down due to an evil spirit trapped in Aztec
gold, I built the new one with the best protection a witch could
spell. No witch, not even a dead one, could get through.

Of course, the problem was
that I
wasn't safe inside my little house. I was unloading groceries from my
rattletrap Civic, trying to grab all three bags because I was too
lazy to make an extra trip.

The howl split through the
air, an
angry, fighting growl that rose to a feral scream. In one motion, I
dropped my groceries and spun around. Instinctively, I snapped my
silver-decorated wrists in front of me. I didn’t carry a silver
dagger to the store, although these days, just to get a parking spot,
I probably needed a gun.

Sarah was within inches of
touching me,
but she stopped as though she hit a wall when I raised silver. She
didn’t look much different than the last time we’d met,
except for the fact that I could see right through her to the front
porch.

There should have been
nothing in my
yard between the car and my porch besides moonlight, but not only was
there a ghost, there was a cat. The feline had let loose the feral
scream, not Sarah.

I didn’t own a cat. I
hadn’t
the faintest idea where it came from, but it had saved me. Its
warning screech had turned me around in time to keep Sarah from
touching me. If she was trying for possession or for violence from
the grave, thanks to the cat, she had missed.

Unfortunately, my raised
silver did not
cause her to disappear. Her groping arms faded into barely visible
stubby fingers even as they reached for me.

I retreated carefully,
keeping my
silver exposed.

In life Sarah hadn’t been
my
rival, but neither had she been a close friend. Sure, she was a
witch, but her witchery involved the spiritual; inner healing and the
like. I didn’t mess with that stuff, and we rarely crossed
paths—or clients.

Like me, her appearance
didn’t
shout “witch” unless you considered her gray frizzy hair.
She was my age, twenty-seven, but her hair had been gray since high
school. Mine was still black and thankfully pulled into a ponytail,
out of the way.

Sarah wore jeans, tighter
than mine,
with a flowery, ruffled shirt. There was a huge dark stain below her
left collarbone. Rather than sad like I'd expect from a ghost, her
eyes were as wild as her hair.

“Sar..ah?” Collecting my
breath, I realized then that her shirt wasn’t ruffled, it was
in tatters, flapping away from her body as though floating from some
unseen force. When had I seen her last? A month ago?

How long had she been dead?

“Sarah?” I repeated
pointlessly. With another few sideways and backwards steps, I'd have
a clear path to the porch. There wasn't a lot of protection there,
but she’d be less real in the porch light, and the small amount
of silver lining the deck might keep her at bay.

Sarah wailed, an eerie,
sub-audible
sound, leaving me witless and cold with fear.

I edged away, but she
followed, her
mouth moving mournfully. Stealing a glance towards the steps, I
noticed the cat again. It hunched on the railing, illuminated by a
pool of porch light. Mottled browns rippled across its body.

It was far too small to be
my
shape-shifter friend and sometime-employee, Lynx. Not that I had ever
heard such a hair-raising feral scream from Lynx, either in his human
or cat form.

The cat leaped from the
railing, darted
off into the shadows, and howled again. I swung around to find Sarah
close enough to breathe on me had she still had breath.

“Stop.” I pushed out with
one hand as though I could strong-arm her. Backing up, I flashed
silver behind me with my other arm. Watching every direction was impossible.

She flinched, wailing. Her
angst was
strong enough that the noise vibrated through me, grating painfully
through my bones. The sound was far more ominous than the cat's live
screech.

How long would the silver
protect me?
So far as I knew, ghosts didn't have a lot of limitations or power. But
then again, I had never met one this audible or visible.

Sarah's mouth moved again,
petulantly
this time, and she rubbed at her chest. I couldn’t read lips,
and her hollow groaning wasn’t discernible as words. With the
porch light behind me now, her arms showed almost as much damage as
her chest. The wounds were either disease from the grave or she'd
been peppered with shrapnel.

I scooted away and jumped
over two
steps straight onto the porch landing. “What do you want from
me?”

“Adriel. Heeeelp. Meeee.”
The three words were forced across planes of existence that weren’t
meant to be traveled in reverse. The sound was as clear as daylight,
something in short supply at ten in the evening.

I stood directly under the
light now,
but made the mistake of blinking.

That fast, she vanished.

I spun around, ducking, but
there was
nothing behind me. There was no one on either side of me. I clung to
the side of my house like a new layer of paint. My eyes searched the
shifting shadows. The Civic was a giant monster at the edge of the
darkness. Shadows…

“Eeep!” My heart missed a
beat, but the movement across the yard was just a tree, rustling in
the breeze. Although it was early September in Santa Fe, my shivers
arose from fear rather than the cool evening breeze.

Ghosts could easily brush
through a
person. Sometimes they wanted back on the side of the living badly
enough to attempt possession. Sarah had to have some amount of power
just to appear at all. From the damage and pain she exhibited,
letting Sarah touch me wouldn't be a pleasant experience.

My fingers gripped the
rough adobe. The darkness shifted, but it was only the juniper tree
continuing its
swish back and forth. The potted cactus on my porch didn't bend, nor
was it large enough to hide anything in its shadow.

I edged carefully to the
front door.
“Sarah?”

I thought I heard a “meow,”
but it could have been the breeze flapping the plastic grocery bag
that lay in the dirt next to the Civic. The night whispered; crickets
chirping, the ticking of the car engine, sand shifting. A faint hint
of gasoline fumes from the Civic wafted through the air.

I unlocked the front door
and dodged
inside. As fast as my feet would move, I ran to my workroom and
grabbed my silver dagger even though I hadn't the slightest intention
of going back out there tonight. Maybe not even tomorrow.

No, I was calling for
backup. From the
looks of the sizable hole over her heart, Sarah had met a brutal end,
and I didn’t want to run into her again tonight, or
worse—encounter whatever she might have led to my front door.

Witchery is far more
mundane than you
might expect. Mostly I mix and measure chemicals from Mother Earth
and add important “firing” mechanisms. Occasionally,
casting a spell involves mysterious words, but it's far easier and
safer to set off a spell by crushing a membrane containing a chemical
catalyst.

While I generally had a
spell or two on
my person, they were usually protections that had been concocted in
advance. None of my spells worked against ghosts, at least not that I
was aware of. I hadn’t even known silver would ward off a
ghost because silver was certainly no threat to a living witch.

There would be time for
research and
spells later. Sarah had obviously not died a peaceful, easy death,
and right now I wanted the comfort and protection of the living more
than anything else.

I snatched up the phone to
call White
Feather. Although he still called me at least once a day, I had
barely seen him the last two weeks. Our relationship had been on the
cusp of “getting warm and wonderful” when he retreated,
got busy or got cold feet.

I wasn’t sure why we hadn’t
been spending more time together. When we first met, he had posed as
an undercover cop investigating problems in the paranormal community.
He thought I was an old decrepit witch; one of his best informants.

It turned out his brother
was the cop.
White Feather was really a wind energy consultant by trade and a wind
warlock covertly helping his brother investigate supernatural crimes
now and then.

Whatever he was working on
could wait. Sarah was dead, and the stain on her front hadn’t been from
a
few sips of spilled coffee. White Feather could involve his cop
brother Gordon when…The thought of finding Sarah’s
actual remains spooked me more than the thought of her ghostly form.
At least the wraith had been animated. A dead body had a different
and very definite finality.

“Hello?” White Feather's
warm, mellow voice dispersed the worry, replacing it with a shock of
longing. It had been too long since I’d seen him.

“White Feather, it’s me.”

“I know.” He sounded
exactly as he had the last few times we'd spoken, his deep baritone
happy to hear from me.

I was breathless, something
he could do
to me without any help from a ghost. Usually, I covered the worst of
my reaction so that it wasn't too obvious that he could have me
wrapped around his finger, or his body--just about any time he asked.

My voice stuttered when I
said, “I’ve
got an issue. A possible issue really. It’s small, I think, but
I’m pretty sure it’s going to be an issue.”

“Are you in danger?” Keys
jangled and what sounded like a door closing came from the
background.

“No, no, I’m fine.”
Sarah couldn’t cross into my home without an invitation, and
she wasn’t likely to hover out in the yard waiting for me to
come out. Or was she?

She had faded completely
after a scant
minute of trying to communicate. But what had summoned her in the
first place? She had no reason to seek me out before death, much less
after.