West Coast Witch (24 page)

“Do you think this will work?” Amy asked.

“Why do you think it won’t?” I crossed my arms across my chest. I was already in the
circle, knelt down and ready to start.

“You just are replicating the same methods as the hair spell.”

I nibbled on my lip. “Okay, maybe, yea. But, can’t I just change it, try and try until
I find a way that works?”

“Honestly, probably not.” She said. “My guess is you probably have two or three attempts.
You’ll burn the magic off before you expend the energy in that blood.”

I nodded. “So, I’ve got maybe three tries at most?’ I bit my lip, thinking. I stood
up out of the circle, leaving the compass and bloody handkerchief there.

“That is my guess. And blood…blood is special. You cannot do the same thing for it
like you did with the hair.”

I started to pace around the living room. There wasn’t much room to pace. I found
this new side of me to be interesting. I’d never been like this; energized, tense,
eager. But maybe that was a side effect of the magic too. Or maybe this was what creating
something was like. I wasn’t just reading, learning. No, I was attempting to create.
Was this what being an artist was like? A ball of energy waiting to get out?

“Okay, a thought.” I said. “Vampires can gain memories by drinking blood, right?”

She nodded. “Yes, it is how they can sometimes wipe memories from their victims, the
more powerful ones at least.”

I sat back down on the futon. “Okay. So, theoretically. What if I used magic to somehow…uh,
absorb the blood, or take it into myself, and just shoot the magic there, concentrating
on Sam?”

Amy thought about it for a moment. “I…I suppose it would be worth a shot. But your
focus would have to be great.”

“That, well, I’ll have to work at. But this is my best shot, I think. There is one
thing I’m going to need you to do though.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, okay, if we want the blood to mix with me, we’d need to have it to touch my
blood, right?”

Amy nodded. “They would have to interact, yes. At least, that is how I am given to
understand it. The energy in the blood of their prey, mixed into theirs, gives a vampire
their strength.”

“All right.” I bit my lip. “You’re going to have to cut me.”

“Me?”

I rolled my eyes as I stood up to go back to the kitchen.
 
“I’m not going to cut myself. I’m a wimp in that regard, okay?”

“You are serious?”

“Incredibly. I hate needles.”

Amy produced a knife. “This one is non-silvered, so will not have any lasting damage.”

“Why didn’t you offer that one to Stewart when we cut him?” I asked.

Amy chuckled at that. “Yes, a vampire will believe me when I say that my blade is
not silvered. I did it with his knife so he would be comfortable with it.”

“All right.” I stuck out my hand. “Cut me.” She cut at my thumb, and ruby-red blood
welled up. “Okay, let’s do this.”

I went into the circle, and with my bloody left hand, grabbed the handkerchief. I
had remembered somewhere in my mother’s notes. Magic was to be wielded with the dominant
hand. It made sense to me, at least on some level.

I closed my eyes, and dropped into my senses. This time, in the blackness that surrounded
me, there were two hums of power. The first was that familiar little hum out at the
distance, ready for me to grasp it. The other, however, was in my hand, in the handkerchief.
There was a small bit of power in the handkerchief, in the blood there. I felt that
power, and with my mind’s hand, I grabbed the power, and wrapped it around the thumb,
around where Amy had cut my thumb.

Memories started to flash before me. They were just images, quickly flashing. A courthouse
many years ago. A train coming west. Fire, shouting. Wolves. I focused on the wolves.
I brought that to forefront. There weren’t just wolves, though. A bear, foxes, large
cats. They all surrounded her, like a family welcoming her into their own. I brought
that memory to mind, Sam’s memory.

There, focused on my mind, I reached out and tried to grasp the string of magic, bend
it to my will. The power slammed into me, wrapped it up around me. It was fantastic,
with so much of it encircling me. They were two very different types of energy. The
first, the blood, was life. It was earthy, a power I could understand. The second,
however, was an enigma. I could only understand just what little of it I could touch.
It was mixed in with the blood, older and more refined, somehow tainted. The energy
of the undead.

I tried pouring the magic into the compass. However, with nothing tied to it, it seemed
to just spill over onto the ground, useless. Something was wrong. It wasn’t taking
to it. Even with Sam in my focus, the thought of the blond woman, with her short hair,
now cut, I couldn’t do it.

My right hand, with the magic in it, started to burn. The magic was building in me
too fast. I needed to use it. So, I just focused on Sam, thought of finding her.

I took the word I used last time. Find her. “Trouver. Trouver. Trouver.” I focused
all of my mind onto her, onto her image. “Trouver!”

Images started to flash through my head. The first was a room. I saw boxes everywhere,
crates. Feelings worked their way into me. I was in pain, so much pain. Every bone
in my body yelled at me to make it stop. Fear, shame, desperation. They filled me
and told me to shut down.

I realized, after a moment, that these weren't my feelings. No,
 
these were Sam’s. I had somehow worked a way into her mind. I didn’t know how long
 
I had to do this. There was just something wrong with it. Like I wasn’t supposed
to be doing this. However, I knew that I had to find something, any way to find where
she was. I filed through her senses, one by one. Nothing was there. There were only
boxes.

But that’s not how a fox would have analyzed the situation. A canine would have recognized
more by smell. So I thought about what she smelt. It rushed into me, like I had just
gotten an information dump, an overload of senses. Seawater, the salt of the ocean,
was near me, but also metal. It was a warehouse, I figured. But what kind?

The mix of senses, pain, and emotions was beginning to overwhelm me, though. I forced
myself to pull out, forcibly pulling myself from the vision.

Reality was a slap in the face. The first thing that immediately came to mind was
the bile in my throat. “Bathroom.” I croaked before falling forward onto my hands
and knees.

I vomited on the kitchen floor, emptying my breakfast out onto it. ”Shit.” Amy hissed,
and she carried me into the bathroom.

I spent about 15 minutes worshiping the porcelain god, on and off. Amy held my hair
back. It wasn’t excessively long, but I was shaggy enough to the point that I appreciated
the effort on her part.

“What did you do?” Amy finally asked, as I laid out on the bathroom floor. Amy sat
on the counter, looking down at me.

“I don’t know how, but I touched Sam Coolidge’s mind. She’s in a warehouse somewhere.
She’s still in San Francisco, I think. I could smell the seawater, so I think she’s
near the piers or something. No guards, but that was just in the room she was being
kept in.”

“How was she?” Amy said, her voice quiet.

“She’s in pain. She’s scared. I would be too, if I was in that much pain. I could
feel it all. They’d abused her, I think. Tortured her.”

“You are sure about that?” Amy asked.

I nodded. “Pretty damn sure. Granted, I don’t get tortured a lot, but that pain, that
fear…Damn.”

“Do you have any bit of a more…specific idea of where she might be? There are a lot
of warehouses on the piers.”

I shook my head. “Not that I could tell. There’s a lot of hazy stuff. But I think
even she doesn’t know.”

“That does not give us a lot.” Amy shook her head. “Not a lot at all.”

“We’ll figure out. We’ve got to.”

“Or else she may get moved soon.”

“Yea, that’s my fear. I think Lucien won’t wait forever. He’ll leave with her, back
to wherever his hidey-hole is, leaving us with nothing, or he'll just kill her.”

“So, what do we do?” Amy asked.

“I dunno.” I sighed, and stared up at my stucco ceiling. “You’re the guardian here.
Could we potentially go to the police with this?”

“Not likely. At best, they would dismiss you as a psychic and just sort your ‘visions’
along with a bunch of other nonsense they always get. At worst, they would start asking
questions about how you think you knew all this.”

“Oh,” I bit my lip. “That would probably not be good.”

“Most likely not.” She said. “Humans, for the most part, are not ready for a witch
without thinking of pitchforks, ‘suffer not a witch to live’, and Salem.”

“Were there any witches, really, in Salem?”

“No,” Amy shook her head. “Most witches, at least those of European descent, were
still in Europe, and this was in their declining years, anyways.”

“Oh.” I thought then of The Crucible, and of how Joseph McCarthy would have handled
an actual witch hunt. “So, we just canvas all the piers and try to find her?”

“If only. Canvassing would imply that we had actual people to do that with. We are
only two.”

“We’re two, and running quickly out of ideas.” I remarked.

“Do not remind me.” She sighed. “I will put out a call or two to some people I know.”

I tried sitting up to look her in the eye, but my body told me that was a bad idea.
“You’re not going to try calling Finnegan, are you?”

“He is my last resort in that matter.” She said. “But I have a favor or two from my
past I can call in.”

“No magical werefox finders?” I teased her.

“Not exactly, but someone might have seen something.”

“Good luck with that. If I need your help with another round of vomiting, I probably
won't give you a lot of warning.”

“I will clean up the kitchen,” she said. “By the way, next time we’re bringing a bucket
when you try that spell. I have never seen anyone actually entering another’s mind,
but apparently it is not too healthy for you.”

“Would make sense, wouldn’t it?” I asked her. “After all, I’m shoving my brain into
someone else’s just so I can access their files. It’s like trying to access a system
that doesn’t recognize what OS you’re running under. Or some computer term that would
make sense if an actual tech guy was speaking it, not some sick bartender. But, yea,
minds are freaking complex.”

She nodded. “It may just be you were unprepared. That was…rather serious, at least
by my guess. You made a spell on your own, a good first step in any witch’s book.”

“What, I’ll be a respectable witch someday?” I gave a queasy laugh. “Yea, right. I’ll
yell-or vomit-if I need you. Bring the notebooks. I want to write this all down.”

I spent another hour in the bathroom, overhearing some of Amy’s conversations on the
phone. It seemed, for the most part, that no one had seen-or maybe no one had wanted
to see-a kidnapping committed by a master vampire. While I was fighting my stomach,
I wrote down my methodology for the spell. I tried to be as descriptive as possible,
filling out one of the empty sheets in the back of the notebook with my own writing.

After about ninety minutes of lying on the bathroom floor and writing, I dragged myself
up into the kitchen, and then to the living room.
 
I started to listen more closely to the conversations Amy was having. She liked to
pace back and forth on longer calls, I noticed. A little quirk, and it was an interesting
break to her usually ordered state.

“Yes, she was a blond. About five-eight. A werefox, one of the local pack.” She paused
a moment, listening to the other end. “Yes, her name was Sam. Samantha Coolidge. She
was brought in by a group, I think, and one of them was wearing an eye patch.”

She was silent again, this time in shock. “You saw her? You did? Where?” A smile broke
on her features. “Yes, the piers. Okay, okay...All right.” She listed off my address.
“When can you get here? Fantastic. Thank you.”

When she ended the call, I asked. “I take it we got something?”

“Indeed we did. His name is Jenkins, a dock worker here. He said he saw someone who
matched our description, about a week ago.”

“So why couldn’t he just give us the address?”

“Because it is not listed. I did not follow, but he will take us there.”

“All right.” I nodded. “How long until he gets here?”

“About ten minutes.” She said. “Get something to drink, and eat some toast. It will
settle your stomach.”

Ten minutes and two pieces of toast later, I was sitting on the couch. Someone knocked
on my door. “Is that Jenkins?”

Amy nodded. “Should be.” She walked to the door, and opened it.

All hell broke loose, though it happened so fast I’d barely had any time to react.

The moment Amy opened the door, someone kicked it in. The force of it sent Amy reeling
back as two men entered. They were the weres from Francis’s office. Both of them held
knives, looking wicked sharp. One of them went straight for Amy.