Joy of Witchcraft (25 page)

And I still had two students left to test. I still had a traitor loose in Blanton House.

Even with the clock ticking on Skyler’s silence, David insisted that I eat
something
before my next working. It was faster to give in than to protest. As night fell outside, I stood at the kitchen counter and bolted down a chicken sandwich, accompanying it with a cold glass of milk. Neko sneaked slices of meat from the cutting board.

I had two students left to confront. I actually only had to test one of them. If the witch I chose had betrayed me, then I could take the necessary steps to protect the magicarium. But if the next trial yielded nothing, then the last student was my enemy.

So who should it be? Bree or Cassie?

Bree was the stronger witch. Her sturdy russet power felt like sun-warmed granite in my mind; she was closely attuned to the element of Earth. Earth connoted stony ruins, the Greek sites that were the ancestral home of satyrs, of the orthros and the harpy.

Cassie presented an easier target for my testing. Her pale green magic manifested as fog, diffuse and hard to manage. Even if she hid the strength to summon monsters, it would take her precious seconds to coalesce her power, to wield it against me. Moreover, her warder, Zach, still had his arm immobilized in a cast. It should be easier for David and Caleb to manage a still-healing Zach than the able-bodied Luke.

All logic pointed to Cassie as my next subject.

But Cassie had already been a victim. She’d nearly been raped on our Samhain altar. The orthros had targeted her too. No sane witch would have voluntarily placed herself in such danger, much less cause physical harm to her sworn warder. It felt too much like kicking a puppy to subject Cassie to the full force of my interrogation.

I took a determined breath. Bree, then. I’d test Bree next.

“All right,” I said, planting my glass on the counter. “It’s time.”

Caleb waited for us in the basement. We all made our way to the fourth townhouse, where Bree had taken a room on the top floor. She’d joked about it matching the altitude of her favorite Montana mountains. Luke had obligingly taken up residence across the hall, sharing the space with Perd. I’d heard them call it the bunkhouse.

But we didn’t need to climb all the way to the third floor.

“Looking for me?” Bree called as David passed the ground floor parlor. I steeled myself and stepped forward.

She stood in the center of the room, dressed in her typical uniform of well-worn jeans and a man’s flannel shirt. Luke and Perd ranged behind her, flanking the fireplace. Both men had their hands visible at their sides, an ostentatious display of presumed innocence.

David gestured with his right hand. He put the motion to double duty, waving Neko and me into the room as he swept his sword from its scabbard. I didn’t bother to note Caleb’s defensive position behind me. This late in the game, I trusted him to have my back. Literally.

“Bree,” I said evenly. “I didn’t expect to find you downstairs.”

She crooked her lips in a wry smile. “I figured my bedroom would get a little crowded.”

“How did you know I’d be coming?”

Bree laughed, a throaty sound of unabashed amusement. “You’re mucking out the barn. Tracking down the witch who’s raising those monsters. I reckon you talked to Raven and Emma first thing. They haven’t said a word outside of class since we all got back. You did something with Alex today, before that kid arrived with the summons. And Skyler after that. You’re almost out of time, with the inquest starting tomorrow, and you won’t want to stress Cass for no good reason.” She shrugged. “So here I am.”

I liked her. I liked her directness, her honesty. I prayed to Hecate it
was
honesty and not the shrewd calculation of a spider luring a fly into the center of its web.

Bree shrugged, a motion that emphasized her empty, non-threatening hands. Maybe she was being
too
open, too free. I’d been debating whether to test her with spell or potion or elixir. As my heartbeat thudded in my ears, I decided to go with all three. All three avenues of magic exploration, backed by my familiar, by the two warders around me. I had no room for error.

“How do you want to do this?” Bree asked, before I could summon Neko to present the potion and elixir. “It’s easiest if I just open my powers completely, right?”

With that, she sank to her knees. She moved with a rancher’s ease, smooth enough to calm an edgy half-ton of horseflesh. At the same time that she knelt, her warder and familiar hit the ground. All three looked at me with utter complacency, holding their hands by their sides in absolute, earnest submission.

But that wasn’t all. Bree opened her mind to me.

We’d already worked together. I knew the feel of her magic, its rich brown light, as if the most fertile earth in the world glowed from within. But this was more than weaving a spell, more than meshing our arcane forces into a single stream.

Bree let her consciousness expand between us, filling the astral space around her. Her awareness floated like dust in a sunbeam, each particle charged with her unique feel, with the warmth of sun-lit stone rubbed smooth by a lifetime of wind and rain.

If this was a trap, I could not see how she intended to spring it. She was completely vulnerable to me. If I chose, I could sweep her powers away entirely, obliterate her magical consciousness with a single swipe. Her astral awareness could be dispersed so thoroughly that it would take a lifetime, a hundred lifetimes to coalesce into anything resembling a modern witch’s powers.

“Magistrix,” Bree said, and there was a hint of strain in her voice, a whisper beneath the confidence that told me what her vulnerability cost.

I glanced at Luke. The warder’s full attention was daggered to his witch. He was not watching to see what I would do, how David or Caleb would react. He was monitoring Bree’s exposure, measuring the slow drift of her energy. He visibly fought his own impulse to stop her, to rein her in. His fingers curled into fists, only to open reluctantly, as if he remembered strict instructions. He ground his teeth, but he made no other movement.

Perd was equally restrained. The familiar tossed his head once, his only visible sign of distress. I flicked a snake of power toward him, testing his awareness, and I found that his magical energy, his capacity to reflect and expand his witch’s abilities, was flayed open as thoroughly as Bree’s.

Neko whined deep in his throat. He saw what was happening, and the strangeness frightened him.

Tentatively, I flexed my energy back to Bree. I concentrated on shaping my powers, on molding them into a single golden wand. I dipped the very edge of my awareness into the disparate sea of Bree’s consciousness.

I was surrounded by her thoughts.

There—her decision to wait for us in the parlor, to confront us head-on instead of skulking like a villain. There—her realization that I could likely best her with spells and tools, that I could bind her to my will. There—her longing to resolve this matter once and for all, to muck out the barn, as she’d said.

She was tired of reeking suspicion, sick of throat-closing fear. She wanted the malefactor exposed so we could all get back to the reason she’d left her beloved mountain home. She longed to return to the business of witchcraft—free of monsters, free of traitors, free of the politics of the magical world around us.

All of it was there, displayed before me like supplies in a tack room. Thoughts hung on hooks, seemingly haphazard until I grew close enough to study them. Then I could see there was an order for everything, a
reason
. I could follow them logically, stepping deeper into the space of Bree’s mind, traveling without limitation into the storage room of her astral self.

Now that I understood what I saw, I made short work of my investigation. There were her memories of everything she’d done at the magicarium. I slipped past her arrival at Blanton House, her setting up her new quarters to her liking. I saw her in the living room at the farmhouse, staring at the candle, struggling to find the balance with her fellow students, the power to work together to light the column of wax.

She’d been just as surprised by the harpy as I had been. She hadn’t opened any door for the creature, had not worked a spell.

I skipped further back in time. It only took a moment to narrow in on our visit to the beach, to find the emergence of the orthros. Again, Bree had been astonished, taken completely unaware. I checked on our first working, on the satyr, confirming her innocence there as well.

I was deep in her mind, then, close to her magical core. I could reach out to private emotions, to her past with the Butte Coven, to any other aspect of her magical life.

But that would be unfair. That would be an abuse of my power—as a witch, as a magistrix.

I slipped out of Bree’s memories. I stepped away from the diffuse edge of her consciousness, the warm, earthy feel of her powers, still welcoming me, still inviting me to do whatever I needed to do. “Thank you,” I whispered.

Bree waited a moment, as if to see if I had any further demands. Then, she rocked back on her heels. The physical motion acted as a cue to her mental powers, gathering in her astral awareness like cows returning to a milking barn. Even as she swayed, Luke abandoned his humble pose and closed the distance between them, settling a calloused hand on the well-worn flannel between her shoulder blades.

Perd offered his own support, throwing off his own bridle. Rising to his feet, he came to stand beside Bree, letting her lean against his knees.

She took a single deep breath before she looked back at me. “Well,” she said. “I suspect that was faster than whatever you had in mind.”

I nodded, grateful for her common sense practicality.

But I was heartsick, too. Because now knew the truth: Cassie was the traitor.

And if Bree had been clever enough to realize I was testing my students, Cassie would be just as aware. I needed to get her
now.

“David,” I said, turning to enlist his help. As I moved, I relaxed the tight grip I’d held on my powers, dissipating my golden wand. A few stray drops of power drifted away, merging with the faint residue of Bree’s own display. The energy caught in an odd eddy, dragging
away
from us witches, toward the corner of the parlor.

In my mind’s eye, it looked like water swirling down a drain, a miniature whirlwind spinning to the right. But that wasn’t
water
draining out of the room. It was power.
My
power.

Someone had tapped into Blanton House and was stealing the remnants of my magic.

I leaped forward, zeroing in on the disturbance before it could disappear. Even as I moved, the whirling power sank into nothingness. The drain had done its job.

At first glance, there was nothing to see in the corner. There certainly wasn’t any physical sign of a vortex—no gaping hole, no break in the hardwood floor or the careful molding.

As I collected my senses, ready to reach out on the astral plane, David held up a commanding hand. He extended his warder’s powers to cordon off the area, setting it behind the magical equivalent of yellow “crime scene” tape.

Luke joined him, muttering a curse under his breath. I glanced at Caleb, expecting him to step up as well, but Emma’s warder pointedly hung back. He was guarding against anyone attacking us from behind. He was keeping an eye out for Cassie, for whatever havoc she might wreak while we investigated the anomaly in the corner.

“What the hell is it?” Bree asked, craning her neck to look around Luke’s broad shoulders.

I eased a tentative mental probe past the warders’ blockade. “I can sense Teresa Alison Sidney. But it’s not really her…”

I trailed off, because I couldn’t put my sensations into words. I
could
sense Teresa. But her signature was mixed with something else, blended into something completely different.

That combined energy had a kernel at its heart, a hard nugget of power. But there were streamers too, trailing strands of magic that siphoned toward the center, funneling into the core. The vortex was like…a sea anemone, waving fronds until an unwary fish ventured into its clutch.

That image chimed deep inside my mind, echoing another thought, a memory. The magical drain was like…

Clara’s NWTA. Her Nucleus With Tentacles Attached.

The power-stealing vortex was a physical manifestation of the model Clara had been harping on from the moment she’d arrived at my school. “David,” I said. “We need Clara. Now.”

I don’t know if he understood the course of my thoughts, if he actually knew why I wanted my mother. But he didn’t hesitate to act. Taking a step back from his fellow warders, he slid his sword home with precision. After a single nod to Caleb and a slightly delayed glance at Luke, David crossed his arms over his chest. He lowered his chin, and he disappeared.

David’s warder magic left behind a wispy steel-grey fog, a faint spray of masculine energy that sparkled in the air. As I watched, those tiny filings began a slow dance, wrapping into a loose spiral. They flowed toward the corner, toward the vortex, spinning faster and faster until they drained out of sight.

“It’s like that urban legend,” Bree said.

“Which one?”

“The guys who stole a million dollars from a bank. They wrote a program to skim off the partial cents from rounding transactions. They made a million bucks without taking a whole penny from anyone.”

My magicarium would generate massive amounts of remnant energy when we functioned at full speed. We’d work hundreds of spells every day, as individuals, as groups. Each attempt would shed droplets of power, arcane fuel to be vacuumed up by the maw in the corner. Whoever had planted the device could be the magical equivalent of a millionaire in no time.

As I stared in horror, the air in front of me flickered and David’s outline solidified into his body. Not just
his
body—his hands were planted firmly on Clara’s shoulders.

“Jeanette!” she exclaimed. “What’s going on? David said you need me.”