Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(48)

Alphas and dominant wolves tended to be protective. It was both endearing and annoying, depending upon whether it was turned toward helpless, kindly women who looked like they baked bread for the homeless on a regular basis or directed at me.

“Sorry,” she said, her voice tightening until it was nearly a whisper.

It wasn’t that she was a naturally anxious person, I didn’t think. BDSM wouldn’t attract the faint of heart. But a person could be taught fear—and white witches had plenty of reason to be afraid.

I ran through reasons she might be worried about us—and not George—and tried one.

“Geena,” I said, “our job is to protect the people in the TriCities. We can’t do that unless we know what’s going on. We appreciate very much that you’ve brought this to our attention. Whatever you tell us will help us keep your coven”—if she used the word, so could I—“safer.”

She lifted her chin then and stared at me. She raised one hand toward me, palm first, and I felt a fine tickle of magic slide over me. Then she closed her eyes and nodded.

“Truth,” she said. “Truly meant. Sorry, sorry.” She sounded, this time, as if it were an apology rather than a fear response.

She straightened her back, let George’s hand go, and said, in a much firmer voice, “Sandy is one of my coven. She shares a house with a woman called Katie, who is also a witch. Last Friday night, Katie went into her meditation room and locked herself in, as was her habit. Sandy went to bed, got up in the morning, and went to work. She’s a nurse and has a regular Saturday shift. When Sandy got home, she noticed that the room was still locked. No one responded to her knocks or calls.”

She frowned at us. “Meditation is a way to increase power, but you can get caught up in it, and that is dangerous.” She waited until Adam nodded, and I wondered if she was a teacher of some kind. She seemed made for the role of elementary teacher—I really wouldn’t have picked her for one of George’s club members in a thousand years. Some people were hard to pigeonhole. Maybe Geena was a banker or an insurance salesperson.

“Sandy had to take the hinges off the door to get it open,” she said. “When she did, Katie was gone. The room was empty.”

George nudged her.

“It is a converted closet,” she explained hastily. “There are no windows or other doors. The lock is a bar dropped into brackets on the inside of the door. That’s why Sandy had to take off the hinges.”

“Is that something a witch could do?” Adam asked. “Vanish from a locked room?”

“A black witch maybe?” Geena hazarded. It was obvious that she didn’t really know. “Sandy says Katie was a gray witch, but not a powerful one, not even measured by white witch standards. And Sandy said that the room felt wrong. She’s sensitive to things like that.”

Stefan could have taken a witch from a locked room. Or Marsilia. I didn’t like that thought one little bit. “When was this again?”

“Saturday,” she said. “Or at least sometime between Friday night and Saturday late afternoon.”

Friday night something odd had gone on at the seethe. On Saturday, Wulfe had brought me the girdle.

“You said that there were other witches missing?” Adam asked.

She nodded. “We think that the first was Ruben Gresham. He disappeared a few weeks ago. He was a white witch with a little more power than most men, from an old family that has a reputation for producing a few male witches every generation. I didn’t know him—he vanished before I moved here. He wasn’t a member of the coven, exactly, more of a loner. But he had a few contacts there. Maybe he got scared and just left.” Her voice grew darker. “We white witches know how to run.”

“Yes,” I said.

That seemed to be what she needed. When she continued, her voice was steadier. “But if Ruben ran, he left everything behind, told no one, and knocked over his dining room table in the process. That was about four weeks ago. We called his family—one of my group is a cousin of sorts. They came and cleaned out his apartment, but none of them had heard from him. Not that they admitted to, anyway. Probably if it weren’t for the other two, no one would have thought much about his disappearance.”

“White witches don’t file missing persons reports,” George said. “If one of their people has reason to run, they don’t want to have the police—or anyone else—searching for them.”

“He’s right,” Geena said. “There might be more. These are the ones that no one thought would run. The third witch was Millie Sawyer.”

Adam stiffened. “I know her. About eighty years old? Lives in West Richland near the pizza place? Elizaveta brought her in for some work once.” He glanced at me. “Back when I was still married to Christy.”

“Nearer to ninety according to what I was told,” Geena said. “She didn’t get out much, but some of my coven would go play bridge with her on Sundays. Two weeks ago, they found her door broken and no sign of Millie. Like Ruben, she didn’t seem to have packed up and gone anywhere. Her car was still in the garage.”

Adam looked at George. “Those are the three witches who disappeared. You sounded like something else is happening, too.”

“Yes.” It was Geena who answered. “I don’t have a real name for this one. Sarina, she called herself. S-A-R-I-N-A but pronounced like the title. She pretended to be the reincarnation of a Russian Czarina—”