Halfway Bitten (3 page)

Sometimes, when I need to burn off tension, I walk. I don’t run unless I’m being chased, but walking is quite acceptable, especially among the bucolic mountain scenery of my home. It’s tough to keep a bad mood thriving after a few dozen lungsful of Adirondack air. I know, I’ve tried.

After feeding Gus and changing into ratty clothes that were more forest-ready, I wandered up the back path between my house and a row of birch trees that were busy shedding bark like a dog’s hair on a white couch. Their small leaves rattled happily in the light wind, ignoring my bad mood altogether. I cast a look of mild reproof at the irritatingly pretty row and stalked off onto a well-worn path hemmed by low ferns and the odd blackberry. Up a mild incline, I found a deer path that doubled as a cut-through to the other side of town, a sort of impromptu sidewalk that locals used. The meandering track wove in and out of the trees, always at the edge of the meadow that circles the upper crescent of the lake where there aren’t many cabins or homes. One of the reasons Halfway is still tranquil is that we haven’t allowed it to be overrun with cheap vacation homes or hideous McMansions filled with visitors who don’t care about the lake. Or the town. Or us, for that matter. You can always tell that type in the diner; they rarely remove their sunglasses when ordering the waitresses around. I’m glad we’ve dodged that particular tourist bullet. So far.

I reached that point in a walk where the mind begins to travel in a sort of cheerful meander. I missed Wulfric, but knowing he was out there somewhere felt good; I knew he would come back, and we would celebrate by beginning the joys of discovery all over again. He was a sweet and careful lover; not that I’ve taken a ton of men to bed, but I could feel a gentle strength within him that told me at every second we were together, he was aware of me. My needs. My size, which is more important than you might think.

You try sharing a bed with a guy whose feet hang off the end of the mattress.

He would take my face in his gentle hands and kiss me, all the while letting his body ease onto me with the grace of a deer. There was something primal about him that made me relax; Wulfric was above all else a man, not a boy. I reveled in his warmth when the sun was just coming up in that cool hour before the world woke up and life began.

I picked a lovely fiddlehead fern and marveled at the mystery of its knurled green shape. After a few minutes, I was shadowed by some pines that ran along a slope, when I noticed something.

Actually, it was a lack of something. As in silence.

Silence in the woods is rarely good. Birds should be calling, frogs doing whatever you call their noises—but, you know, slimier—and the bustle should
never
fade to stillness while you’re standing in the middle of a fairly remote open space, no matter how close it might be to town. I didn’t even have to reach out with my senses; I knew I was being watched. I lifted the fern head to my lips and nibbled at the crisp little jewel while casually reaching out with my magic to scan the area.

There were two of them. That much I knew.
What
they were was opaque, and I dared not push too hard with my power, knowing that my charms would give away any concerted effort on my part. Blessed metal might store magic like a battery, but it vibrates like a tuning fork when you draw upon it. Any magical being in the area would feel it and know their cover was blown, and that might scare them. Frightened beings make bad decisions, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that kind of mistake.

I let my power ebb and then reached out again, but this time I did so slowly.
Odd
. Now there was one of whoever was watching. I kept my brows from raising and let my pace drop until I was taking steps slowly enough that each footfall was spaced by a quiet second. In those breaks, I listened. What I heard made my skin flush hot with anger. It was a feminine laugh, low and disdainful.

The smell of tobacco smoke tickled my nose, and a series of most uncharitable thoughts bounced through my head just as Anna spoke to me from ahead on the path.

“Hi, Carlie. You really are an outdoor kind of girl, aren’t you?” She was perched on a rock, smoking, and blowing plumes in my direction. I think it was intentional; a sort of announcement that she was around so that I didn’t get startled and roast the little bitch with a spellstrike. Even though I wasn’t surprised, I weighed the possibility of faking it and frying her with a bolt out of sheer principle. Tragically, my better angels won out. I dropped my hand, albeit reluctantly.

This version of Anna was quite different from the playfully sexy girl who’d frequented the diner before she left with Emilia, the daughter she shared with Wulfric. There was a tightness to her eyes, and a hardened expression that robbed her of whatever cute might have lingered. She was still exotic, but more like a venomous fish lying in wait on the bottom of the ocean. There was beauty, but there was palpable danger there, too. I watched her carefully and stood completely still, deciding to let her speak first.

She did.

“You only have him because it isn’t convenient for me to “—she paused, letting her eyes slide over me, and I felt my face flush an even deeper shade of red at her barb—“reclaim him,” she finished, then granted me a frosty smile. “My pack will have these lands, Carlie, with or without his blessing. We need the room, and he doesn’t.”

“How do you know what he needs?” I snapped. I felt my mouth go dry at the question, as part of me hoped she didn’t have an answer.

She nearly purred with laughter. “He needs what I tell him he needs. He’s really quite the man-child, that one. One minute, he’s making love to me and telling me that we’ll never be apart, and the next he’s worked himself into a frenzy over some meaningless prey animal with a broken leg. He’s so perfectly unformed despite his age. That’s where I come in, Carlie. Do you see?” She flicked her cigarette away and looked mournfully into the empty pack, then tossed it as well. Add littering to reasons for hating her—not that I needed any more.

“I think I do,” I said.

“You do?” Anna’s eyes narrowed. I’d given her the one answer she wasn’t expecting.

I walked a step closer toward her and had the satisfaction of seeing the hint of a flinch. So, she wasn’t immune to threats. Good to know. “You lay underneath him like a two dollar whore so that you could have a child—who you don’t deserve, by the way—in hopes that you could lure him away from lands that your pack of half-breeds wants to control.” She bristled and I threw my next dart. “The problem is that your pack is too weak to keep any real powers out of your turf, so you’re relegated to second-class lands in the middle of an empty wilderness. You don’t even have the guts to stand and fight for it.” I drifted my eyes up and down her petite form, then let them rest on her face. “Or maybe you do all of your best work on your back. I don’t know, and I don’t care. He’s mine, and the lands are his. If you were serious about taking them, your alpha wouldn’t have fled when I approached and left you to do the dirty work.”

Anna was getting angry now. I saw amber flashes in her eyes and knew she was struggling to contain the cat within. Good. I had more where that came from.

I sniffed to let her know what I thought of her unseen master. “That’s
beta
behavior, Anna. Are you sure you’ve hitched yourself to the brightest star?”

She bared her teeth in the outline of a smile, sliding from her rock in a liquid grace as her feet hit the grass without a sound. Cocking her head, she regarded me with a cool gaze. I felt the animal inside her, and didn’t care for it at all. When she spoke, her voice bubbled with arrogance.

“My pack is perfectly capable of taking what we wish, especially from a half-coven of witches who would rather heal a bird’s wing than practice actual magic. You’ve got bigger problems, Carlie. You just don’t see it yet, or maybe you do, but the whole heart of gold thing has you blinded.” She shrugged. “Either way, you’ll be gone soon.” Her tone was frigid with certainty. In a shimmer, she dropped to all fours, and a midnight black panther stood staring at me with implacable golden eyes. It was gone in three bounding leaps, and I heard the birds start chirping again, although I wasn’t sure I agreed with their sunny dispositions.

I gritted my teeth and walked on, determined not to let Anna ruin my day. I saw signs of a fae in the area, but it seemed relatively innocent. The little forest dweller had carved glyphs onto a long, thick limb of an ash tree, and at a glance, it turned out to be nothing more than a bawdy joke directed at a rival family of Flutterbys. They’re a medium fae with four wings, mouths like sailors, and a passion for keeping paths clear for travelers. I’d even classify them as helpful, if you get past their use of language. They’ve sung songs to me that would make a diesel mechanic drop everything and go to church. Naturally, I love them.

I walked off my irksome experience with Anna the Wandering Skank, and concluded by sticking my feet in the lake at the end of a low dock just across from the library. I knew Brendan was probably at work, but I wasn’t quite ready for his kind of intense curiosity, so I did what I always do when I have a problem.

I sat. Completely still, not thinking, really, and just letting the air and world move around me until words popped into my head without any invitation at all.

He will, or he won’t.

That was the heart of it. I knew Anna was taunting me from a position of weakness. Wulfric and I were too far gone to be casual, and she knew it. Simply by showing her face, she’d tipped her hand. She feared me.

That, I decided, was good.

I let the sun warm my cheeks until the day began to fade, then got up to go feed Gus and spend some time writing a spell in my grimoire. I take refuge in the planning and execution of something as simple as writing, and the comforting bulk and accompanying rumbly purr of Gus would center me until the moon could rise, when all would be well once again.

I was shoving somewhere near a pound of funnel cake into my mouth and trying not to choke on the fine powdered sugar that tumbled from each glistening loop of dough like an avalanche. “Mmm-hmmph.” That was the best I could do for an answer, and Gran paused to look me over, one hand waving delicately at my general state of disarray.

“Child, are you aware that other people can see you eat? You haven’t gone daft and forgotten you aren’t invisible?” Gran looked at me with a mixture of horror and amusement.

“What?” I asked as a minor avalanche of powdered sugar broke apart on my shirt. I
really
like funnel cakes.

She rolled her eyes and brushed me into a more respectable state, subjecting me to one of those moments where I felt like I was five years old again. I can’t say the feeling wasn’t welcome. “I asked you if you’d seen any of those clowns again. You know, the ones you insist on mentioning each time we speak, despite your most vigorous assurances that they don’t frighten you?”

I coughed lightly to clear a particularly dusty remnant of funnel cake and shook my head. “Not yet. And I’m not scared of them. It’s just unusual to see clowns in full makeup eating salad nicoise with such delicacy.”

“They didn’t order waffles?” Gran raised a brow.

“No. How scary can they be if they’re making dietary mistakes like that?” I asked, and we ambled toward the frozen lemonade. I was parched after my manhole-cover-sized dollop of fried dough. I looked around at the general hubbub—the carnival or circus or whatever was hopping. There were hundreds of teens, some of them couples holding onto each other with the desperation of an impending curfew. There were sunburned tourists, bad boys in cut off shirts, and married couples walking around with that bemused patience that only two decades of marriage can bring. I saw a few friends from high school, about half the staff of the diner, and most of the city government, all involved in eating one form of meat on a stick or in a tube, or something sweet. It was a good atmosphere.

Gran leaned in and brushed more sugar from my cheek, a beatific smile on her face. “Do you feel it?” she asked, her lips not moving.

I reached out after adopting the same bland smile. At the periphery of my senses, there was someone watching. No, I changed that conclusion when the presence skittered to one side in my mind. It was some
thing
. “It’s moving. It’s not fully alive, or human.”

Gran nodded once, still smiling. The corners of her mouth twitched with pride; as usual, every moment was a chance to assume the role of a teacher. “I can’t decide if it’s just masking, or truly dead. There’s something almost playful about it.” Her last phrase was tinged with admiration, if one could admire a creature who was most likely interested in eating you. Or drinking you. Or maybe both.

We moseyed along the main area where the barkers were hawking their games, letting the crowd push us along like so many fish in a school. Gran’s arm was looped through mine, and, when the presence would pulse in my senses, she would feel it as well and respond with a small twitch. She was always the slightest bit quicker to recognize the threat, a benefit of her decades of magical mastery. I knew we were being followed. I also knew that to assault us would be virtual suicide. I’m no pushover, but Gran was clearly on high alert, and doubtless had a spell of unsurpassed power resting lightly on her tongue.

After a few moments of cautious advance, we came to the tent housing the actual entertainment portion of the sprawling mélange of carnival and circus. There was no sawdust or sand scattered about; instead, we walked onto a temporary floor of stained plywood scuffed to a sheen by untold feet. There were bleachers nearly filled with patrons, all chattering away to produce a deafening wave of sound kept under the tent by simple geometry.

A listless employee was stamping the hands of patrons who entered the tent, but Gran waved the woman off with an apologetic smile. “We won’t need to re-enter, thank you anyway.” Her tone invited no discussion, and the woman—a bedraggled twentysomething with short blue hair—sensed that we weren’t going to budge. With a sullen glare, she turned and began stamping more obedient customers in a rapid fashion. I caught a glimpse of the logo on a man’s hand as he pulled it back after receiving a thumping blow from the angry Stamper-in-Chief. It appeared to be the number eight—hardly exotic enough to warrant inflicting harm, but then again, this
was
a circus, and I suspected they had slightly different rules of engagement.

“Shall we?” I asked, and Gran smiled pleasantly at a family of six who slid obediently down their row to allow us space on the end of one bleacher. There were lights strung from each tent support, and all were turned down low to give the entire space a modest gloom that was shattered by occasional camera flashes from phones. We settled into our seats as the instinctive silence fell over the crowd, just before a loud pop was followed by a single blaze of white light that shot downward into the middle of the ring.

“Showtime,” said many of the people around us. And it was.

The ringmaster was tall, thin, and dressed in the manner of a Victorian gentleman. His neatly-waxed moustache shone brilliantly under the punishing spotlight, and his hair parted crisply to one side. He wore a red velvet jacket, cut high to reveal a snow white vest, a watch and fob, and his trousers—they were too baggy to be pants—tapered to a narrow point just over shoes that gleamed midnight black. Gold suspenders peeped from either side as he turned to regard the crowd with an imperious smirk. He raised a long hand into the air and dropped it with practiced drama as he threw his head back and shouted, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we welcome you to the very source of all things that are thrilling.”

Another spotlight snapped on to reveal a snarling tiger, causing a wave of
ahhhs
in the crowd. The ringmaster smiled indulgently, as if only he knew the secret of what wonders were truly coming. “Please, please, good people, we are only beginning. There are so many mysteries to be revealed this evening.” His oily grin deepened as he shared a companionable moment with every member of the crowd. I had to admit, the guy was good. “Tonight you will see that which cannot be explained”—again, the practiced pause, and another light flared into life—“by reason or science.” In the new column of light stood a woman perched on a sword, her heel balanced to perfection as she swayed delicately while smiling through bone-white makeup slashed with red lips. Her body was encased in a singlet of glittering rhinestones, and she never moved, save to wave lazily at a group of children close enough to see her toes curl slightly just before she leapt into the air and landed in a deep bow. With one finger, she caught the sword before it fell to the floor, then blew a kiss to the audience as the light went out, and the crowd erupted into wild cheers.

“Okay, that was pretty good,” I allowed, and Gran nodded along with me as we both joined in the raucous applause.

The ringmaster raised a hand, quelling the crowd. He had them now. “Surely, there are things more challenging to the mind?” Although rhetorical, he allowed a generous pause for the vocal members of the crowd to feel included as their shouts rang out across the swelter of the bleachers. It was hot and getting hotter, and I felt my clothes sticking to my back in an unwelcome caress.

The ringmaster began to speak, thought better of it, and closed his mouth with a theatrical click of his gleaming teeth. “I—no, I cannot.” He waved vaguely, intimately. The motion included the expanse of the crowd, and he shrugged helplessly as people began to clamor for him to continue.

After due time, he looked over one shoulder and then spoke. “Perhaps something from the netherworld?” His voice rang out in triumph as a blue light blazed forth to illuminate a man clad in black, his head bowed to the floor. Both hands protruded from the folds of his robe like two pale fish. His fingers were long and white. With a snap, his head came up and he bared his fangs at the audience, hissing with the rasp of a malevolent serpent.

The crowd went nuts. At the expected outburst, the ghoulish apparition spread his arms wide and spoke in a high, tittering whisper that carried through the entirety of the tent. It was an eerie voice, full of stagecraft and projected by unseen speakers planted in the crowd and under the bleachers.

“I bring you news of magic. I bring you news of laughter, even . . . and joy, but never forget, good friends, that one cannot simply trust that which is
seeeeennnn
.” His pitch rose to a squeal as more light spilled down from the darkened recesses of the tent.

“Ahh, they’re here,” I said. The clowns who loved olives made their appearance at last, six in total. Each was dressed in wild regalia, cobbled together with medieval elements and the odd hint of golden age Hollywood. Their shoes were high, the heels flashing with chemical lights, and each clown carried a large metal hoop, which they twirled expertly in dizzying circular patterns.

“No wonder they visit the diner. They certainly are active lads, aren’t they?” Gran remarked as the clowns began to weave about the sinister robed figure in a complex, enthusiastic series of gymnastic dance moves. They were fluid, odd, and beautiful, like watching squid flume through the water, free of limitations due to mundane things like gravity. I couldn’t take my eyes from them, almost forgetting the man in the center who remained standing—no, he was
lurking
—in the center column of blue light.

The ringmaster faded from sight, but his voice would occasionally break into the whoops of the crowd as he commented on the continuing display of athletic calamity. All the while, the robed man rarely moved, save to catch an errant ring or point dramatically at a passing clown. It was a surreal scene of grace and menace, and for some time, I don’t think I drew a deep breath as my curiosity about the unknown star of the show began to grow.

Finally, the clowns began their crescendo in a flashing pinwheel of motion that led them to stand in a line, arms extended, with the metal hoops dangling from a single finger.

The unseen ringmaster said simply, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for our guest to return to his dark home.”

The man in black leapt forward in a blur of trailing robes, hurled himself into the line of rings, and vanished in a flare of white light as the clowns dropped to one knee, leaving the rings hovering in space for an incomprehensible second.

The roar of the crowd vibrated in my chest like thunder, and as the lights snapped on in a jarring burst of invasive glare, I looked at Gran with my mouth hanging open. “What did we just see, Gran?” I’m a witch and I wasn’t sure I could pull off something as inexplicable as what we watched under the sticky air of that rippling tent. “Gran? What was that?” I repeated.

She tapped her chin thoughtfully and turned to me with her eyes flushed by worry. “A distraction.”