whiskey witches 02 - blood moon magick (19 page)

Dexx hooked his thumb toward the sheriff and mouthed to Paige, “Jennifer.”

She didn’t understand his thing about first names.

The newcomer stepped inside. “Thought I’d bring your stray back.”

Karl raised her chin with a tight smile. “Anything we should be aware of, John?”

He nodded with a tipping of his head. “There’s an implant. I removed it and gave it to Alison to run tests on. But I didn’t notice anything else. He’s well-fed. No bruises. No abrasions. Wherever he was, he was taken care of.”

“I can’t tell if that makes me feel comforted.” Karl quirked a smile at the kid. “Hey, Kevin.” She gestured at Dexx to move. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

Dexx leapt out of the chair. “Here ya go, man.”

Kevin was a gangly young man who moved like a Great Dane puppy, all height and no grace. His dark brown hair was on the long side, giving him the appearance of a skater, maybe. He tugged on his dark t-shirt, glancing at Paige with a frown.

“I’m Detective Paige Whiskey. I’m assisting from Denver.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Okay.”

Karl folded her fingers on top of her desk. “How are you feeling?”

He shrugged with one shoulder, his lips quirked. “Fine, I guess.”

“Do you have any idea where you’ve been for the past few weeks?”

He expelled a breath that sounded like it could have been a “yeah,” but after another shrug and a flop of his hand, he shook his head. “Nah. No.”

Paige glanced at Karl.

She raised an eyebrow, lifting one shoulder minutely.

Time to see if Paige could actually do anything to help. She switched on her witch vision and studied his soul.

Cold blue with sparks of white. Another shape formed at his head. A muzzle. Round ears at the top of a large head.

“You’re a bear.” Though, what kind? She didn’t know. She’d never studied animals before. Big. Tall. Bear.

Kevin’s dark eyes widened in alarm. “Jennifer?”

“She’s here to help.” Karl raised a pink soul-hand, a bright rose color swirling over her heart. Sparks of pink amber shot from her toward Kevin.

Those sparks enveloped his soul, blending with his cool blue and created a blazing lavender. Surprisingly, the lavender stayed.

Interesting. Paige took in a deep breath. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions. All you have to do is answer them the best you can. Okay?”

His bear’s head nodded before his human head did.

Very interesting. “Is there any way for us to speak to your bear?”

The bear’s head tipped, and the eyes flared a bright, pale blue as it studied her.

“No.” Kevin’s voice was clipped. “It doesn’t speak.”

Raising its head, the bear’s bright eyes met Paige’s.

She met its gaze and nodded deeply, maintaining eye contact. “Do you remember anything at all of the time you were away?”

“No.”

The bear straightened, his head rising higher.

Paige frowned. “Was it dark?”

“I just told you. I don’t know.”

The bear shook its head.

“Could you hear anything?”

“Look, Detective, I appreciate you’re just trying to do your job—”

The bear tipped its head and nodded hesitantly.

“—but I’m not going to be able to tell you anything.”

She was talking to the wrong person. Running her tongue along her teeth, she thought about how to approach this interrogation differently. “How do I talk to you?”

“You’re doing it.” Kevin’s voice rose in pitch. “Jennifer?”

“Not you, Kevin,” Paige said, keeping her voice calm as the lavender dispersed to blue again. “I need to speak to your spirit animal.”

“You can’t.”

“I can see him and it appears as though he has information to provide.”

Several spikes of white light flared from Kevin’s soul.

Whoa. “Calm would be better.”

“I don’t know what you want.” His voice rose a half octave.

Paige held out her hands, palm down. “He’s not something to be scared of.”

“I
will
hurt people if he comes out.”

The bear’s eyes grew smaller as he shrank, a feeling of shame and hurt surging toward her.

Paige narrowed her eyes. “Okay. Are you having a hard time bonding to you your spirit animal?”

“It’s too strong,” Kevin moaned. “Please.”

“He doesn’t look as though he wants to hurt you.”

“I don’t know what you see, but he’s trying to take over.”

The bear shrank in what appeared to be even more shame, but the only thing she felt was frustration and disappointment.

What if
she’d
been the animal spirit and
she’d
chosen Kevin? What if
she’d
deemed him worthy of being a bear? How would she react if Kevin treated her this way?

About the same as when Alma had treated her similarly. Alma had been afraid of Paige’s gift, so she’d sealed away. Safe. Or so Alma had thought.

It hurt, though, being put away, not being trusted.

The bear’s head rose above Kevin’s and a feeling of trust-filled understanding trickled toward her.

“That’s not what he’s trying to do.” She couldn’t allow her own frustration to interfere with the line of questioning, though. Kevin, for whatever reason, was emotionally fragile. That happened. Fact of life. She needed to maintain her cool. “Kevin, when was the last time you tried talking to him?”

“He hurt someone.”

Paige glanced around the room, but only saw soul fires of those sitting around her. Nothing flared. “I don’t think he’s going to hurt anyone here.”

“You don’t understand.” Kevin bent at the waist, grabbing his head. “You removed the chip. You removed the chip!”

Sheriff Karl rose and walked over to Kevin, her pink and rose colored soul shooting sparks of comfort. The head of a fox peeked out, focused on the bear.

Kevin deflected them this time, his soul rejecting her pink and sending it into the office.

With no wards to contain the flares, she wasn’t sure how the people outside the office would react. “Okay, okay, okay!” Paige pushed out of her chair and onto the floor at Kevin’s feet, holding her hand out to Sheriff Karl to stop.

Karl’s fox tipped her head to the side as if curious.

“Let me try something, okay? Kevin, just be calm.”

Kevin continued to rock and moan.

The bear, however, raised his head.

Paige knew that bears were generally thought to be associated with the earth, but this bear looked and felt more like water. Cold water.

Unfortunately, that was the one element she was the weakest in. Not to say that she couldn’t call to it, but each element had nuances. She reached inside of herself and whispered to the element, calling for the cleansing attributes, the numbing aspects of it.

The pull of the full moon thrummed, singing to her like a lost lover. Close. So close. It gave her more energy than she’d anticipated. Her hands shook as she tried to contain it.

Water rose from a cup on Karl’s desk.

The plant on the beige metal filing drawers shivered.

Karl’s gaze bloomed a blazing fuchsia, but her fox seemed unconcerned.

Paige shivered. Gently. Gently. “Bear?” She swallowed hard and focused on the element of the spirit animal. “We could really use your help.”

Kevin’s ice blue soul color melted away to something a bit more teal and deep blue, like deep water Paige had only in seen pictures. Kevin’s voice deepened as he straightened, his shoulders back, his head held high. The bear’s head merged fully with Kevin’s.

Only in witch vision? She couldn’t tell. It would be really neat if she could somehow use half-witch vision and half-real vision.

“Hello, witch,” the bear said. “You seek assistance.”

“I do. Do you wish anyone in this room harm?”

“Of course not,” the bear said, his voice thick. “But then you knew that, witch.”

“I did. Thank you.” She scooped herself back into her seat. “Are you and your human having a hard time bonding?”

“We are,” the bear said simply.

Her witch vision wasn’t telling her much, so she switched to regular. But something happened in between. For one brief moment, she was able to see both the teenaged boy and the bear’s face. She narrowed her eyes and concentrated, trying to figure out what she’d done.

“Ah, witch. There. I see you now.”

Paige blinked. The bear’s face appeared as if it were a physical projection over Kevin’s face. “Hello.”

The bear nodded. “Hello.”

Karl’s brown eyes were wide as she glanced at Paige, but the pink soul eyes of her fox remained calm.

Cool. Shifter vision. That’s what she was going to call this. “Okay. You said you and your human were having a hard time bonding. How and why?”

The bear sighed. “Sometimes when we choose a human to bond to, they are not as prepared as we had thought.”

“How
do
you choose your human?”

The bear shook his head. “That is not something we will discuss.”

Paige ducked her head with a smile. “I had to try. My theory is that whoever took you two chose you because you are not bonding well.”

“I would agree with that.” The bear pressed the palms of Kevin’s hands together.

“Can you give us any details that might help us with our investigation? There were others taken. Were any of them with you?”

“There were many with us. Some, Kevin knew, others he did not.”

“Other packs?”

The bear gestured to his chest. A symbol swam to the top of his chest, right over his heart. It looked like a fuller crescent moon, with shoots of fire coming off of it.

Dumbass. Those weren’t shoots of fire. Those were bear claws. “Is that the symbol of
your
pack?”

The bear nodded.

“There was a symbol on Elizabeth Harwood’s chest. It appeared—” She didn’t know how to say it politely.

“After the soul would have exited the body,” the bear finished for her.

“Wouldn’t the soul have left the body much sooner? It didn’t appear—” The only words she could think of were, “until she’d been in the morgue for several hours,” but that was considered rude to the civilian population. “—for several hours.”

“Sometimes,” the bear said slowly, his voice low, “the animal spirit stays in the body, trying to heal it.”

Interesting.

“Kevin,” Karl said, “should you be telling her this?”

“See for yourself, Fox. Witch, turn your vision to her.”

Paige didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she did as he instructed and looked at the sheriff.

Her fox head sank down to morph more fully with Karl’s face. While Karl’s mouth rounded, the fox’s muzzle gaped. An explosion of awe tumbled toward Paige.

Not sure what that meant, she looked back to the bear. “Can you describe the people who took you?”

“That description will not assist you as a dark traveler possessed the human who took us.”

Paige winced. Demon. Great. “What about any of the people who guarded you?”

He shook his massive head, wispy bits of teal and blue light trailing off with his movements. “They switched bodies as well.”

What would demons want with a bunch of shifters? “Did they say anything? Repeat anything? Leave a mark, a sign?”

The bear tipped his head. “Yes.” He held out a hand to the desk. A wisp of water brought him a notepad and a pencil from the sheriff’s desk. He drew a symbol and handed it back. “One of them left that mark. He burned it onto many things.”

The four-tiered candelabra. Why would he leave his mark so carelessly? “This helps. You indicated you smelled something.”

“Rotting trash. We were very close to the trash dump.”

That didn’t narrow the location a whole lot. There were a lot of trash dumps in the metro area. Could be Denver, Golden, Boulder, Littleton—could be anywhere. Denver was a one great big sprawl of city. “What were they doing to you?”

“They experimented on us.”

“Anything we should be concerned with?” She didn’t get a sense of urgency from him.

“Only the implant. It repressed me. I could not speak to Kevin as I should have been able to.”

“So, they are trying to keep you away from your human?”

“They claim they are working to bring us closer together, but that is not what happened. They were attempting to cage the spirit animal and give our humans our power without our guidance.”

Paige jerked and narrowed her eyes, repeating that statement in her head. Power without the animal spirit’s interference. Now, that could be something Sven would be interested in.

“That is not all. They are trying to remove the spirit animal from our chosen host to give to another.”

A chill wracked Paige’s spine. What were the consequences of that? What was the end game? “Did anyone say anything? Repeat anything that could help?”

“Only that they had discovered the cure. It is the reason we were released. More of us will be released soon. At least, that is what they said.”

She exchanged a look with Sheriff Karl. “And is there any reason to believe anyone’s lives are in jeopardy?”

The bear shook his head. “We were treated well.”

“What about the—were they successful in removing the animal spirit?”

“Only once.”

She didn’t like the clipped sound of that. Still, she had to ask. “The host?”

“Did not survive.”

“And the animal spirit?”

“Was not returned to the circle.”

The circle of life. Shit. “So it’s still out there somewhere. Was it successfully applied to another host?”

“I do not know. When that spirit was ripped from her chosen host, it cut off her connection to the spirit kingdom.”

That could not be good, but what could she do?

“Witch.”

She focused on his face.

“If they continue to suppress us, we will break free.” The bear turned his attention to Sheriff Karl. “It will be quite explosive. People will be hurt.”

“Then, I guess, we need to find everyone else and get this implant out before people start exploding.”

And before more animal spirits were ripped from their hosts.