The Spell (3 page)

The girls turned to face her and even through the dim light, she could see that they both looked relieved. Danny’s gaze flicked from them to the children on the mattress. They were laying with their backs to one another, their wrists bound together. They couldn’t have been more than six years old. One boy, one girl, both stripped of everything but the ropes that bit into their tender flesh and the gags that muffled their sobs.

There was no blood yet, but even so, Dannai tamped down the vomit that immediately swelled from her stomach to her esophagus and winced as it burned on its way back down. She wouldn’t be able to keep it there. Not for long.

She looked back up at Charlie and Lily. Charlie’s real name was Claire St. James. The turned werewolf stood a touch taller than Lily, her long and lithe musculature the result of being a female born werewolf, enhanced by the fact that she was also a dormant and had been turned by her fiancé, Malcolm Cole, two months ago. The fact that she’d been training in martial arts for more than a decade didn’t hurt.

Her long, thick, strawberry blonde hair was pulled back into a pony tail at the moment and she wore no make up. She didn’t need any. On her wrists were leather bands, much like the ones that her mate, Malcolm Cole used to wear. For Charlie, they served two purposes. They absorbed any sweat she created while playing the drums. And they hid the ancient gypsy curse that marked the insides of her arms.

Beside her, Lily Kane, formerly Lily st. Claire, spun toward the children on the mattress a few yards away, her long, gold hair fanning out in a halo of honey-shimmer behind her. Lily’s stark amber eyes flashed with both pain and anger as she took in the tiny forms that she had most likely witnessed in her vision, bound and helpless and naked on the filth of the mattress beneath them.

Lily had become a werewolf two years ago, when she’d mated with one Daniel Kane, police chief of Baton Rouge, and alpha male to the extreme. They made a striking pair, even if both were so head strong that their marriage often times found itself on rocky ground.

One clean swipe of Lily’s sharp extended claw had the children’s wrists unbound. But the two tiny forms remained where they were, trembling violently and otherwise unmoving, too traumatized to do anything else.

The man in the chair stood. “You haven’t come to help, then.” His reedy voice shook with insanely calm rage, and the knife in his hand glimmered, flashing against the magical aura surrounding the women.

“You sick, sorry son of a bitch,” came Charlie’s voice. Her ice blue eyes were glowing in warning. Her teeth were bared, her fangs elongated.

Dannai took all of this in within seconds. Sheer, precious seconds that gave her a feel for the situation so that she could summon any magic they might need to get them all through this without inviting tragedy.

The man lunged toward Charlie.

But Charlie was a martially trained werewolf and mate to Malcolm Cole, perhaps the most powerful werewolf aside from the Overseer. She carried his magic in her veins. And his curse on her wrists. Both were a boon to her now, in a time like this, when right needed a lot of help and wrong needed to be vanquished.

Charlie lunged forward as well. However, where as the naked man stumbled across the concrete, his knife hand flashing in warning, Charlie seemed to move without any warning at all. Her beautiful form blurred into motion. It stood in one place one second – and was on top of the would-be rapist and killer in the next.

Dannai closed her eyes when Charlie ripped out the man’s throat. She always closed her eyes. She couldn’t stand to see it; couldn’t stand to watch it. She could still hear it, and that was bad enough.

She knew that Charlie didn’t want to do what she did, that she didn’t want to be the assassin in their trio of supernatural saviors. But Danny, the witch, was not allowed to kill. If she ever used her magic to do such mortal harm…. Well, it was a road she could not go down, for so many reasons. Their choice was to either allow Charlie to destroy every criminal they engaged, or restrain those criminals and chance the authorities.

In the end, all three women felt that they could not afford to allow an imperfect judiciary system to help criminals as sick as these back onto the streets where they could do more irreparable harm.

It was a pact they’d made two months ago, when they’d begun this routine. If they were going to be called by the Fates to fight this kind of fight – then they were going to fight it
their
way.

So, Charlie killed. She did it so that Lily wouldn’t have to. She did it because she was the fighter in the group, and that was the power she had to offer. It tore Malcolm Cole apart. It tore Lily and Dannai apart. But Charlie bore the burden with incredible strength and determined purpose. If it were not for her, so many innocent women and children would be dead – raped, mutilated, tortured, missing.

While Charlie finished off the children’s abductor, Danny turned away and ran to join Lily by the bed. Lily was now holding both children, taking off her own sweater to wrap them both up in it. This is what Lily did.

Her visions led her and her two friends to the sites of the crimes they were fated to stop. Her skills as a social worker and her love for the human race in general helped ease the trauma of the dark events for the victims they saved.

And now it was Danny’s turn. As the most powerful witch in the most powerful coven in the world, it was Danny’s unique healing touch and her ability to make particularly traumatized women and children
forget
what they have gone through, that was required.

Danny’s powers helped them heal, both physically and mentally, so that they could get on with their lives and leave the past behind.

Danny knelt beside Lily and looked into her friend’s golden eyes; Lily nodded. Danny’s gaze skirted to the two children. They were tow-headed, both blue-eyed and pale-skinned. They had a few bruises here and there, but other than the scratches left by the ropes at their wrists, they were physically unharmed. It required only a very quick psychic evaluation of their minds to determine that neither child had yet been sexually violated.

Danny and her friends had made it in time again. Danny closed her eyes, held her hands palm-down over each child’s head, and whispered the quiet words of an incantation. To the children, it sounded like a lullaby, soft and sweet and pure.

And it was this tender thought that carried them off into their healing sleep as Danny released another, separate tendril of power that wove its way gently through the children’s bodies, repairing broken blood vessels, stretched or torn tendons or muscles, and easing away any visible signs of bruising.

Charlie joined them once more, her forearms covered in blood that was not hers.

From where she was knelt beside Lily and the children, Danny waved a quick hand over her friend’s upper body and the blood was gone.

Charlie looked down at her now clean hands and exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Danny nodded and smiled.

Charlie was a little shaken up, Danny could tell. She always was after a kill. The blood awakened a hunger in her; and the prey awakened disgust. The dichotomy of the cruel and inevitable situation was one that often haunted Charlie, though she would never admit it. But there was no way out of this duty of theirs. And even if there was… would they take it?

“You look tired, Danny,” Lily spoke softly from where she cradled the two sleeping children in her lap. The thin gold chain she wore around her neck held a single enchanted pearl, which nestled in the hollow of her throat. It was a gift from Danny and it allowed her to transport to the scenes of her visions. It would also take her back to her gorgeous and swarthy, if a bit
difficult
, alpha werewolf husband when this was all finished, but not before Charlie’s curse took
her
back. They never had much time.

“I’m fine,” Danny said, brushing off the question as she knew a friend should never do. Lily gave her a rueful look, but left it alone. For now.

“I’ll take them to Council headquarters,” Lily said, looking down at the children asleep in her lap. “They’ll reunite them with their families.”

Danny nodded.

“Gotta go, guys. We still on for next Saturday?” Charlie asked.

Danny and Lily glanced toward her. She was gazing down at her arms. A warm red glow emanated from beneath the leather bands she wore around her wrists. It was time for her to go.

“Ten o’clock, girl,” Danny told her. “And it’s girls’ night only,” she reminded her. “Which means you’ll have to shake that green-eyed fiancé of yours.” This was neither the time nor the place to talk about dance club hopping. The very idea of it, to anyone witnessing the scene, would have been surreal.

But these days, these slight moments they possessed together after their jobs were done were almost all the trio had. They had been far too busy lately. The world was going to shit.

“Got it. See you then.” Charlie smiled a beautiful, weary smile. And then there was a red flash – and she was gone.

Lily stood next, cradling the children. A human woman would have had trouble with their combined weight. But Lily wasn’t human. She glanced down, readjusted their weight so that it was more even, and then her gold gaze once more cut to Danny. “Something’s going on with you, Danny. You’ve got shadows under those stained glass eyes.”

Danny didn’t say anything to that. Where would she start? The dreams? Or the two very dangerous alphas
in
the dreams? She should have seen this coming; she was a dormant, just like Lily and Charlie. She was tall and thin, like they were. Her eyes were stark and different, just like theirs. She was involved with the werewolves in some way – just as they had been. When she really thought about it, she was surprised the dreams hadn’t come sooner. There was so much she wanted to tell Lily.

But there was no time. So, she just shrugged.

“I’ve got a feeling about you, sweetie,” Lily told her, her shimmering eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “And when I get enough alcohol down your throat on Saturday, you’re damn well gonna tell me what it is, my friend.”

At that, Danny smiled. Lily was probably right on that count. She was the seer, after all.

“Gotta go.” Lily’s pearl began to shed a warm, white light. She hugged the sleeping children tighter to her, smiled one last time at Dannai, and then she too was gone.

Danny stood alone in the clammy, damp warehouse that was beginning to smell of blood. It was a rusty kind of scent that joined the other stenches already prevalent in the would-be crime scene. In the stretching silence, the sound of something dripping somewhere once more reached Danny’s ears. Car horns honked at each other in the distance. The mattress at her feet reeked of urine.

Suddenly Danny felt very tired indeed.

But it was her job, as always, to get rid of the evidence. It was left to her to clean the slate so that the victims could go on with their lives without questions from the authorities.

With what strength she could marshal, Dannai walked toward the fallen body of the man who had planned unspeakable things – and she closed her eyes once more. Again, the bile threatened. Again, she tamped it down and focused.

Pure
, she thought.
New. Be clean….

She raised her arms at her sides and light began to gather in her palms. It was a green light, reminiscent of a freshly mowed lawn or the flash one sees on the horizon before the sun goes down. It was this glowing jade newness that spread from her out-stretched hands and into the moldy darkness of the warehouse beyond. It touched upon the mattress, and as it passed over, the bed lightened to a bright white, its dank stench lifting until it smelled of nothing but cotton and coils and preservant.

The green light continued, racing along the ground like an emerald flash flood, cleansing everything in its path. The blood disappeared, the evidence vanished. And when the bleaching light reached the body that Charlie had left behind, it leapt over the fallen form, enveloping it tightly.

Danny fell to her knees on the ground beneath her. Her body was trembling. Sweat had gathered on her upper lip. Her breathing was quick and ragged. Dizziness waited for her, barely kept at bay.

She needed to get home. Soon. And when she did, she needed to sleep for a week.

Danny tried to stand, stumbling a little as that dizziness finally washed over her, a triumphant, insidious tide. She braced herself beside a concrete pillar, closing her eyes against the tilting darkness. “Come on, Danny. I know it’s been a long night, girl. But you just need to use a little more….” A little more magic. Enough to get her back to Thor. That was all.

Danny opened her eyes and knew what she had to do. It was a last resort and one she wouldn’t even contemplate under any but the most necessary conditions.

She let her shield fall, allowing the scent of her dormancy to re-establish itself around her. It felt strange to suddenly be without the cover she had worn for so long. It was a little like going without underwear or forgetting to buckle her seat belt.

But it freed up a bit of her power. It would be enough to make it back to her car.

Quickly, Danny used the newly acquired strength and transported herself back to that spot on the side of the road on the West coast. The sound of the surf and the salty breeze that wafted through her hair were an instant reward for her efforts. Thor was still there, as liquid black and darkly beautiful as he had always been.

Danny had never been so glad to see him. She strode to the driver’s side door, opened it, and slid behind the wheel, shutting the door behind her. The scent of leather enveloped her in a warm, welcome embrace. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.