Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(47)

“Did I have a dream, or was it a message from Stefan?” I wiped down the sink and shook my head. “I don’t know. It had the same feel as the one in Stefan’s house—and neither of them felt quite like my normal dreams. But Stefan didn’t say anything materially that I didn’t know, and what was new was something I could have made up.” I paused. “But I am going to have Zee look at my foot. It looks and feels okay—but it should be more painful, I think. It hurt when I stepped on those spiky things, and then I forgot about it.” Feet, I thought. I needed to have Zee look at both of my feet.

“I’ll go with you. Afterward we should gather some of the wolves and go pay—” He stopped talking as the sound of a car outside caught his attention. He glanced at me.

“George,” I said with certainty. George drove a ten-year-old Mazda sedan. There was another Mazda in the pack, but it had a smaller engine. I knew cars.

A second car followed the Mazda. Brand-new cars could be trickier—less individual than older cars.

“And,” I said, “someone driving a newer Chevy Malibu.”



* * *



—

Geena Reed’s hand shook as she brought the cocoa up to her mouth. Sleeplessness ringed her eyes and tightened a mouth that looked as though it usually wore a smile. She was short, plump, and maybe fifty.

We made her very uncomfortable. Interestingly, it was just Adam and me who bothered her. She appeared to be quite at ease with George.

We had gathered in the living room because the kitchen seemed a little close quarters for someone who was as scared as she was. The living room had more choices of seating where she could get some distance without looking like she was trying to hide from us.

“Geena has been in the TriCities for about two weeks,” George said. “We met at my club.”

George’s club was where he joined other people who practiced BDSM. Geena didn’t look like my idea of someone who belonged to a BDSM group. But I didn’t look like most people’s idea of a mechanic, either.

“I’m a witch,” she told us—unnecessarily because witches carry a distinctive scent. Or rather there are three kinds of scents that belong to three kinds of witches.

White witches use only their own power to create magic. Being a white witch usually meant being a good person. Anyone witchborn who wasn’t a good person—and who had a lick of self-preservation—became a gray witch. Gray witches pulled their power from the strong emotions of other people. I understood that negative feelings—pain, anger, grief—worked better. To stay a gray witch, the sources that they harvested from had to be willing—or at least unwitting. That gave them a lot more power than a white witch had.

Black witches didn’t bother with finding volunteers. White witches, weaker and full of potential, were black witches’ favorite victims, but they weren’t fussy.

“I’m a white witch,” Geena said, as if she were used to explaining herself. “Word has gone out that you don’t tolerate black witches, and that’s why I came here. I belong to a group of about thirty white witches. Most of us haven’t been here long. A year ago, I am told, there were only six of us.”

She looked at the cocoa in her hand and said, “We all thought . . . hoped, really, that this would be a safe place.”

George helped her set her cocoa down on the side table. He looked a bit rough around the edges, like a man who could handle himself in a dark alley. He also appeared young enough to have been her son, though he’d been born sometime in the late nineteenth century.

There was an air of protectiveness in George’s body language that was interesting—and none of my business. That last didn’t lessen my interest. He took Geena’s hand and kissed it. He didn’t say out loud that he wouldn’t let her be hurt—because Adam might take offense at that. But his kiss made it very clear that he considered her to be under his protection.

“I was asked by my coven to talk to George because we’re friends,” she said. George had not released her hand, and now her fingers closed tightly around his.

“And I brought her here because I thought you needed to hear what she knows,” George said, when she didn’t say anything more. “Witches have been disappearing and worse.”

“Three witches have disappeared, we think,” Geena said, sounding a little tentative. “No one from our coven. But Sandy is one of us.”

Good for Sandy, whoever that was, I thought, when she quit talking. And did that mean that Sandy had disappeared, and we had four missing witches? Or had something else happened to her? Or was she the one who knew about the missing witches?

Geena’s group wasn’t really a coven, not a proper one. I’d been told that specific criteria were required to have a coven. For one thing, they had to have an exact number of members—I couldn’t remember if it was nine or thirteen. But I knew it wasn’t thirty. A coven had to have representatives from multiple families of witches—most of whom have died out. I was also pretty sure, because the implication was that all the witches had to be people of power, that a real coven wasn’t formed by white witches. Still, Geena was welcome to call her group a coven if she wanted to. I didn’t care.

“Sandy knows someone who disappeared?” inquired Adam before the silence grew any more desperate on her part. His voice was gentle. George wasn’t the only one feeling protective.