West Coast Witch (12 page)

“Do not push it, do not direct it. Instead, imagine that you are pouring it, like
you are watering a plant.”

I thought about that, and how I would visualize it in my head. It made sense, on some
level. Some vague memories of physics classes came back to me, told me that it made
sense.

After a few minutes, my burned finger was wrapped up, and Amy said it was time to
try again. I knelt down in the circle, and closed my eyes. This time, I was able to
find the strand much more quickly.

I grasped it, bound it to me, and felt the power once again fill me. This time, however,
I cupped my hands, and imagined the power filing my hands like water. I moved my hands
over the compass. I poured the energy down.

A new sensation flew through me. My fingers grew colder, the heat leaving them, pouring
out onto the compass. The energy leaving me took on a yellow color, like pouring molten
gold into the compass. It covered it, and slowly, golden strands started to wrap around
my fingers, connecting me to the compass.

“The energy’s there, Amy.” I whispered. “What now?”

“You need a word, a word to focus on. To focus your energy on that compass, to tell
it you want to find her. It is best if it is not English. You have to focus on the
word.”

I searched through my memory of what I knew of French back from high school. I selected
a word, and whispered as I focused on the compass.

“Trouver.” The magic lit even brighter, shining through the compass. The very air
crackled around me with power. It flowed from my fingers until the power flowed straight
from my hands into the compass.

“And stop.” Amy whispered.

I stopped pouring the magic, and I removed the strand of magic from my fingers. This
time, however, it didn’t singe me. It was cool to the touch. I brought myself from
the magic, and brought myself back to the real world.

It was exhilarating. I had done magic. I’d casted a spell. I grinned, manically. “I’m
a freaking witch.” I found myself giggling.

“Indeed.” Amy was standing at the edge of the circle, smiling down at me. “Pick up
the compass.”

I scooped it up, and opened up the cover. The needle inside was spinning, like the
entire magnetics of the earth were thrown off, or something. It took several seconds
for it to settle. When it did, however, I had a simple observation to make.

“That isn’t north.”

“No, it is pointing towards whatever we are looking for. In this case, this is where
Samantha Coolidge is located.”

“Okay, but it’s just pointing. And this is San Francisco. I mean, it’s pointing east,
but there’s an entire continent in that direction.” I stood up, and got a broom and
dustpan for the salt so Amy could walk around freely. “So, uh, where do we go from
here?”

“The hunt begins, Eric.”

There was a certain high to the magic, or what I could only assume was a minor high.
It was a wonderful little buzz of energy as I just sat around, grinning as Amy drove.
When it wore off, however, I realized that there was a downside to magic.

The follow up work was boring. We had driven in as easterly a route as possible, until
the compass needle had started to curve south. Then, we drove south, until the needle
started to point west.

Reading may be my hobby, but I was never very patient. After about forty-five minutes,
we were still driving around, trying to get a fix.

“We should have brought a map or something.” I murmured as we turned onto another
one-way street. “San Francisco’s already hell to drive in. If we’re going to go be
looking for a spot that we don’t know, it would have been nice to get a map so we
could triangulate it.”

“We will have to buy them in advance, next time. That was a good casting of the spell.
I think we have got about another hour left to work with.”

“It has a time limit?” That wasn’t something she had mentioned.

“Yes, all magic naturally does.” She said. “It is never that easy, Eric. If we cannot-“

“Whoa!” I interrupted her. “Pull over, now!”

“What is going on?” She asked.

“The compass needle. It’s pointing up. It’s touching the glass now. Pull over. I,
uh, I think she’s in one of these buildings.” Amy spent a few minutes parallel parking.

We walked around the block, and eventually narrowed the building down to an apartment
building that had seen much better days. We ended up going through the front door.

“So, what do we do now?” Amy asked.

“Go up each floor and check with the compass. Once we narrow down what floor she’s
on, we look for her.” I grinned a little. “Seriously, I came up with that before you
did? Witch one, Angel Eyes zero.”

“Angel Eyes?” She rolled her baby blues at that.

“Yea, you know. Lee Van Cleef’s character in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? That,
and I really don’t know anything about you, besides your guardian role.”

“Do not call me an angel. That is the first thing you need to know.” She remarked
as we went into the stairwell.

“Then what else? You mentioned you’re not totally corporeal. Do you eat, sleep, have
desires?” We reached the second floor, and the compass still pointed upwards. The
next floor, then.

“I eat, but not much, and I do have to rest to regain my strength.” She explained.
“As to desires, hardly. I am not human. I am not tainted with their desires.”

I looked behind myself to her. “Seriously, tainted? Who says that having desires is
a curse?”

“Desire is inherently selfish in nature.”

“Okay, that’s just preachy.” I rolled my eyes. “What about my desire to help people?
That is definitely not selfish.”

“Would you not say that it is motivated by a desire to seek gratification for yourself?”

“We are totally not doing a philosophical discussion in the stairwell of this building
while we look for a missing woman.”

“You do not enjoy it?” Amy chuckled.

“Not really. I had to take a few philosophy classes for my degree. Worst money I ever
spent on a class, and I include my terrible calculus classes I took.”

“I take it you do not enjoy philosophy?”

“I hate debating it. After all, how do you seriously expect to change someone’s view
points?” I sighed. “Besides, why do you do this whole guardian thing anyways, if you
don’t have desires?”

“A promise that was made long ago.” Amy said. “But that is a story for some other
time. Come on, we should get back to the matter at hand.”

We went to the third floor, then the fourth. It was finally, on the fifth, where the
compass needle settled out. I held up a hand. “Okay, this floor. Let’s take a look
around.”

We stepped out onto the floor. It was a hallway, with apartment doors to either side.
We walked down the hallway, working our way down slowly so we didn’t pass over anything.

The compass spun to my right once we passed the last door in the hall. “I think this
is the one.” I murmured. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, and used it to grab
the doorknob.

The door proved to be unlocked, and Amy stacked up against the wall, knife in hand.
I opened the door, slowly, trying to keep it as quiet as possible. The old hinges
creaked like the devil. I cursed to myself, and swung the door open.

At first look, the apartment was empty, and at the second look too. It was clear of
all furniture, and even the floors were stripped bare, showing only a cheap tile.
The sun was heavy
 
in the apartment. It had windows closed, leaving it to bake in the morning heat.

Amy and I walked into it. “I thought that this was supposed to be where it was…” I
said.

It all became clear when we got to the center of the apartment. A small pile of gold
hair was on the floor, with a set of clippers next to it. There was a sticky note
on the clippers.

“Give up.” I hissed the note’s message. “How the hell did they know that we were going
to do this?”

“They knew we had the brush. They must have shaved her head.”

“It works like that?”

Amy nodded. “They shaved it, removing it from her body. The spell just tracked her
hair, not her.” She made a grunting sound. “That is not good. Whoever these people
are, they are smart.”

“And they know about magic.”

“Indeed. That separates them from run of the mill criminals.”

I closed the compass lid, and then shoved it into my pocket. “So, where does this
leave us?” I asked.

“Those men we saw yesterday at Francis’s office. Do you recall their tattoos?”

“Yea, they looked like the ones that Sam’s roommate Diana had.”

She nodded. “They are were tattoos.”

“Were tattoos?” I echoed, the term unfamiliar.

“Most shapeshifter clans have them. Our next stop is to visit the alpha of the San
Francisco packs.”

“The alpha?” Great, let’s meet all the supernatural leaders. “As in, like, the guy
who rules all the packs?”

“Well, since you thought you were capable enough to meet with the Count against my
specific instructions, you seem to think you are a big boy.”

“Well, I walked into that one. Where do we go?”

“When do you have to be at the bar?”

“Uh, four. Why?”

“We are heading to the piers. We have to make sure we can get in with the Alpha’s
schedule.”

“Great. And just who is the Alpha?”

“The head of the Irish mob.”

Okay, a vampire? Yea, I’m good with that. I can chat with a vampire. The head of the
Irish mafia? How the hell did Amy even know this guy?

We drove down to the piers. The piers were what remained of San Francisco’s legacy
as the Pacific’s largest port. Back in World War 2, it had been the major embarkation
point for troops heading into the Pacific. Changes in the times, however, had seen
Los Angeles and Oakland take most of intercontinental shipping away from the City
by the Bay.

That left a lot of unused piers lying around San Francisco. They’d been bought up
by private parties in recent years. Some of the piers, like the famous Pier 39, served
mostly commercial interests, while others were used for warehouses or private docks.

Amy drove us to one of the industrial ones. She parked the jeep, and we made a quick
stop to grab lunch at a hot dog stand. I devoured a polish, and quickly bought another.
Even after the second sausage, I still felt ravenous.

“Okay, I’m not usually this hungry.” I looked to Amy, who smiled knowingly. “Something
you forgot to mention?”

“You have to obey the laws of nature. Magic is working with a lot of energy. You are
burning through your body’s energy to work magic. As such, your metabolism is sky-rocketing,
and you’ll need to eat a lot more than usual. Your mother was a little shocked by
it when she went through it.” Amy actually grinned. “She thought she was pregnant.
She said she would swear over a stack of bibles that she wasn’t that serious with
her boyfriend at the time.”

I found myself smiling just a little. “So, did my father know what she was?” I asked
as I ordered a third polish.

“He did, but he did not want to talk about it a lot. He wanted her to stop, for your
sake.”

I looked to her, and I felt like I had to ask the question. “Amy, was my mother’s
death natural?”

She nodded. “It was. Your mother had a few enemies, but she had confronted them before
she made the choice to live with your father. Victoria did not want anyone to hurt
her husband or her child.”

“Well, that means something, I guess.” I whispered. But what did it mean? And what
were those enemies that she’d fought? Questions for a later date, I told myself.

After she had finished her bag of corn chips, and I had demolished the last hot dog,
she led us to the pier.

“Will the weres be able to tell what I am?” I asked as we walked. The pier itself
wasn't a big one, but set at its entrance was a large building, a warehouse that had
to have seen better days.

“Most likely not. Weres live long, but in no way long enough to remember what witches
are. You will smell interesting, as will I, but they will just catalog it as something
new and different.”

I shrugged at that. “All right, then. Let’s go.”

The front of the warehouse had a set of double glass doors. A small bell rang as I
opened the door for Amy, and we were greeted by a cheerful secretary, a brunette with
a big smile.

“Hi, welcome to Finnegan Shipping. Do you have an appointment?”

“No, we do not.” Amy answered, and then said in a casual voice. “I am here for a shipment
of hides.”

The secretary’s demeanor changed. The cheerful smile went away, and she looked down
to her desk. “Of course. I’ll see to it that our sales representative is contacted.”
She stood out from behind the desk. She was tall, and lanky, all arms and legs. She
wore slacks and a creme blouse. “If you’ll follow me.” We did, and we followed the
girl into a conference room with a small table and several chairs. “Take a seat, please.
I’ll make sure that the representative is here in a moment.”