Witches of the West - (An Urban Fantasy Whiskey Witches Novel) Read online

  A woman and a man moved out of their way. The woman frowned at them like they were crazy and hugged her small daughter closer to her.

  Paige knelt beside Leslie and peered into the alley. Whatever it was, it dampened the auras of the people standing near or in the alley. The two police officers standing inside it had no auras in her witch vision. Black uniforms. That was it.

  The couple and their small child standing next to Paige had bare traces of aura.

  Paige looked down at their feet.

  They were standing on the magick bleach.

  Paige pulled the witch vision back just enough to be able to see the physical realm and held up her hand. “Can you back up, please?”

  The woman gave her a disgusted look. “Who are you?”

  “Detective Paige Whiskey.” She stood, slipping on her detective mask like a shield. “Now, please back up and give the officers a little more room.”

  As soon as the man stepped off the magick bleach, his burnt red aura coalesced around him, spooling in swirls like a tide pool current. He glanced at his wife and shook his head like a dog sloughing off water. Wrapping his arm around her, he tugged her backward.

  The woman balked. Something flared inside her sluggish aura, like a light that lit up her skeletal system.

  Paige fought to keep the shock from her face. “Ma’am, if you could just step back. Just here. Yes. There you go. Good. Thank you.”

  The woman struggled against her husband. She kicked and growled.

  The light flared inside her again, lighting up her bone structure.

  Her husband pulled hard, yanking her to him. As soon as her feet stepped onto the black asphalt and off the white bleach magick, her expression changed. Her shoulders relaxed. Her pale eyes widened. Her mouth rounded. “I was going to kill you.”

  So honest. “I won’t hold it against you.” Paige studied the other woman’s aura. Grey and steely blue. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’ve never felt that kind of rage before.”

  “Can you tell me more? Were there any specific thoughts, perhaps? Pictures?” The last time someone had tried to kill her via the mind control of others, he’d used pictures telepathically sent to the brain.

  The woman shook her head. “No. No. I just—I was so mad. I’ve never felt like that before.”

  “You will when you have a teenager,” Leslie said with a smile. “Would you mind if I just take a look at you?” She looked at the little girl. “And you? How are you feeling?”

  The girl’s head tipped slowly to one side and back again.

  Creepy.

  “She doesn’t speak,” the woman said. “She can hear, but she hasn’t said a word in almost two months.”

  Paige frowned and pulled out her phone. She wished she’d thought to bring a notepad and a pen. It was faster than typing notes on her phone. “What happened?”

  “It happened shortly after the death of her teacher, Miss Black. We thought it was grief.” The woman tugged her daughter closer to her. “We’ve tried therapy. It’s not working.”

  “It’s almost as if she’s possessed?” Paige asked, studying the girl.

  No aura. And she wasn’t standing on the bleach magick.

  “What?” The woman stared at Paige like she’d gone crazy.

  Paige gave her a comforting smile. “I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff, ma’am. Did anything weird or unexplained happen? Did she act differently? Like she was a different person?”

  “Not really.” The woman blinked and met Paige’s gaze. “It’s like she’s just not there anymore.”

  Without an aura, it appeared as though the woman might be right. Where was the girl’s soul? “What’s your name?”

  “Jill. Jillean Coover.”

  “Jill. Nice to meet you. Detective Paige Whiskey, again, and this is my partner, Leslie Mooney.”

  Leslie didn’t even bat an eye. She just offered her hand, her eyes carefully set as she studied the woman. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Paige knelt in front of the girl. “Can you tell me anything about when…this happened?”

  “You can see something, can’t you?” Jill asked.

  “Jilly-bean.”

  “John, stop.” Jill stepped out of her husband’s grasp and onto the bleach.

  Paige held up her hands and maneuvered the woman further away from it. “Ma’am, please.”

  Jill’s pale grey eyes flared. “This. I know this.”

  “This what, ma’am.”

  “This smell. Don’t you smell that?”

  Paige shook her head. She couldn’t smell a damned thing over the exhaust fumes and hot pavement.

  “I smelled this that night.” Jill’s eyes lost focus as she took a step toward the mouth of the alley. “And that voice.”

  “What voice?” Leslie asked, her tone low.

  “A woman’s voice. She’s singing to me. Calling me. Somewhere. To my daughter.”

  Paige lightly grabbed Jill’s arm to stop her. “John, can you please take her home?”

  He gathered his wife to him and turned away.

  “But first, I’m going to need your phone number and your address just in case I have some follow-up questions.”

  “Of course.” John gave her the information as quickly as he could and then pulled his wife away, their daughter trailing behind like a ghost on a leash.

  “What’s the likelihood of that just randomly happening?” Leslie asked.

  “Not very.” Paige scanned the crowd, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

  Three other children without auras, not standing in the bleach magick, and four others with pale, grey auras who all appeared to be slightly unfocused, trying to get past the line.

  To the bleach.

  Was this ‘bleach magick’ or whatever they were going to call it, singing to them? Calling to them? Syphoning off their souls?

  Other cops showed up, assisting in directing the people away.

  This was definitely her kind of case, but…how was she going to work it without a badge?

  First thing first. Act like she did have a badge and gather the names and contact information of the grey-auras.

  Dexx caught up to her and Leslie after she was done sending the last of the grey-auras home. “This is definitely our kind of case,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Paige closed the case on her phone and stashed it in her back pocket. The one thing they all had in common was the death of a teacher, Miss Black. How did that tie everything together? It didn’t make sense. “No shit.”

  “What did you find?” Leslie asked, stashing a hair sample she’d taken from the last mother and daughter into her purse.

  “Symbols.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  Paige didn’t like a lot of what she was seeing. “Why?”

  “Because this isn’t paranormal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dexx clucked his tongue. “This isn’t shifters, or vampires, or any other kind of paranormal person I know.”

  “Until three months ago, you didn’t know shifters and vampires existed,” Leslie said with a snort.

  “Right.” Dexx sent her a glare. “But I do know witchcraft, and this is definitely it.”

  Paige hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself, but that was the conclusion she’d come to as well. “What do we know about the victim?”

  “Sarah Evans,” Captain Banes said behind Paige.

  Paige spun, her eyes wide.

  “Twenty-eight.” Banes pushed aside one flap of his suit jack and shoved his hand inside his pants pocket. “Local driver’s license. Local address. One outstanding parking ticket.”

  Dexx glanced at Paige, an open question on his face.

  She was a little curious, too, but if he was willing to share information… “Cause of death?”

  “Unknown.”

  If this had been magick…what kind of magick killed people without a knife or a gun?

&
nbsp; All sorts. Hex bags? Voodoo, though, she really needed to learn more about that. She couldn’t just spout ‘voodoo could kill’ if she really didn’t know. Hell, her own elemental magick could kill. She had the ability to suck all the air out of a space.

  Well, she didn’t know that. She’d only bragged that she could. That wasn’t the same thing.

  “What have you gathered?” Banes asked, drawing her back into the present.

  Well, if he was being honest—though she was confused. How was she supposed to help on the case if she didn’t even have a job as a detective and had no rights to investigate it? “Somehow, this is tied to the death of a school teacher. A Miss Black.”

  Banes narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “There were several kids without auras and their parents, when they stepped near the scene—it was like watching their auras being syphoned off. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “And the kids?”

  “All started acting…strangely after the death of Miss Black.”

  Banes paused while he studied her. “That was Shelia Blackman, Ms. Whiskey.”

  “What?” How was it that she’d just stepped foot in Portland and was already handed a case involving the other witch families?

  Unless someone had planted this body—Sarah Evans’ body—so that Paige would get the case.

  “What else can you tell me?” Banes asked.

  “There’s a kind of magickal bleach over everything.” Paige swallowed and turned back to the scene. Maybe Banes was right. If someone had dumped Sarah Evans’ body for her to find, if someone was trying to get her to really solve Shelia Blackman’s murder… “Was Shelia Blackman’s murderer ever found?”

  Banes pursed his lips, then shook his head. “What about this bleach? Is it significant?”

  She nodded, not quite as focused on her words as she should be. “When people step on it, their auras disappear.”

  Banes frowned. “Are my people in danger?”

  She appreciated that he understood just enough about magick to realize his men could be endangered. “When they step back out, their auras are in place, though…less, somehow, as if part of their aura has been absorbed.”

  “Will they be all right?”

  “Probably with rest, yes.”

  “So we need to hurry.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me where it ends?”

  “Yes,” Leslie said. “I could take a police officer and point it out right now, if you like.”

  Banes pulled his head back and looked at her in question.

  “Leslie Mooney-Whiskey.” She offered her hand. “Medium.”

  He glanced around, then looked at her quizzically. “Are there dead people here?”

  “There are dead people everywhere, Chief.”

  “Captain,” Banes and Paige said at the same time.

  “Captain,” Leslie modified. “But no. No one’s here to offer anything extra on the case.”

  Banes paused, nodded, then flagged down one of his officers. “Shirley, Mrs. Mooney is going to show you where to put up another police barrier. Until we can get the crime scene cleaned up, I want our people in what she’ll designate as a safe zone.”

  “Roger that, Captain.” Officer Shirley didn’t even blink or flinch, his expression remaining cool.

  “How much of this stuff do you get, Captain?” Paige asked after Leslie disappeared in the crowd with Officer Shirley in tow.

  “More than I like.”

  She needed to find a way onto this case. How was his team going to track down the killers? And there were probably two killers. One killed Shelia Blackman almost two months ago, syphoning souls somehow through her death. Had Sarah Evans’ death been anything more than a signal flare? “I can help.”

  Banes turned back to her. “And I want your help, but not on my team.”

  “Consultant, then?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want my team to have any ties to you.”

  That was going to make things rather difficult.

  “What else can you tell me?”

  Paige narrowed her eyes at him, still confused on how she was supposed to make this work. “Do you know about the kids whose souls were taken? Have you opened a case on them? Did you even know that had happened?”

  He narrowed his dark eyes at her. “No.”

  “Well, there were five kids here, all missing their souls. Their mothers’ auras look like they’re being syphoned off. They’re grey and thin. And when the mothers touched what I’m calling the magick bleach, they became enraged. And when I pulled one of them away, a light flared inside her soul, lighting her up.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me, either. I’ve never seen anything like this before. But somehow, when Shelia Blackman was killed, whoever murdered her was able to tap into the kids she taught.”

  “That could be dozens of children.”

  Paige gave him a wide-eyed, tight-lipped look. “This murder, Sarah Evans, was a cry for help. Someone wants more attention on Shelia Blackman’s murder.”

  “Do you think the killer today was a Blackman?”

  Paige shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s too much I don’t know yet.”

  “Okay.” His face folded in confusion. “But why were they all here? Five kids? Why?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Why?”

  Paige rubbed her head. “It was as if they were drawn here, like the bleach magick called them. One of the mothers even mentioned that she heard a voice calling to her, a woman’s voice.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know. Because whoever did this still needs the souls? I can’t ignore the fact that this bleach, or whatever it is, is stripping away their auras. It’s weird.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Witches,” Dexx said bluntly. “Dexx Colt, private investigator.”

  Banes nodded at him, giving him a brief once-over. “You’re sure about this?”

  “Pretty sure,” Paige said.

  “This isn’t just some staging event so you can get one of the other reigning witch families out of the running, is it?” Bane crossed his arms over his chest. “You trying to muscle in after you discovered you don’t have a job?”

  Paige buttoned down her anger and narrowed her eyes at him. “No. I don’t know who it is. I don’t know if it’s Eastwood, or Blackman, or maybe none of them.”

  “You’re sure it’s not a Whiskey.”

  “We just got here and none of us know how to do anything like this.”

  “You’re sure.”

  Yeah. “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “No distant relatives that aren’t under your coven control?”

  What kind of witches did he even know? “No.” Wait. “Yes. But we don’t have ‘coven control.’ There is, however, Rachel. But even she wouldn’t be able to do something like this.” And Paige prayed to the All Mother that Rachel hadn’t known where the Whiskeys were moving to. She didn’t need to be dealing with the Eastwoods and with Rachel at the same time. She had sent a letter through the State, telling Rachel where they were relocating to, but she needed time to settle in before she dealt with that again.

  “Well,” Banes said, taking a step back. “Thank you for your help. Don’t get in the way of the investigation.”

  “Get in the way?” What? “I thought you needed our help.”

  “That was before you said this was a witch matter.” Bane ducked under the tape. “I can’t trust you’ll remain unbiased.”

  “But how are you—”

  “Good day, Miss Whiskey.” He turned away.

  Paige released a deep breath. “Shit.”

  “Fuck.” Dexx scrubbed his fingertips along his forehead. “Now, what?”

  “Detective Whiskey,” a woman said.

  Paige turned, scanning the crowd for the person who’d called her name.

  A tall woman with short blonde hair and a well-fitting busi
ness suit—with common sense footwear, by the way—stepped out of the crowd. “Director Lovejoy, FBI. Let’s talk.”

  “What?” Paige asked, her heart rate speeding up. The FBI? Yeah. That probably wasn’t good. Though, why? What had she done? Why was she even worried?

  Because when government agencies got involved with things they didn’t know, things typically went badly.

  Director Lovejoy’s smile softened. “I’d like to have a word with you in my office.”

  The smile had seemed genuine, but in her office? That didn’t bode well. “You came all the way down here to tell me that?”

  Lovejoy tipped her head to the side and glanced at the alleyway. “No.” She took in a deep breath and captured Paige’s gaze. “Look at me.”

  The shifters had discovered that when Paige ‘looked’ at them, she could speak directly to their animal spirits. She’d been asked on a handful of occasions to do so. To have some stranger come up to her and ask her to look at them seemed strange.

  Were there shifters in the FBI?

  Lovejoy leaned forward. “It’s okay. Just look at me.”

  Clearing her throat, Paige gestured to Dexx to move back.

  He released a frustrated breath and stepped behind her.

  When Paige switched into what she called shifter vision and saw his spirit animal, the saber-toothed cat tended to come out and take over. That hadn’t gotten any better in the last three months.

  With a steadying breath, Paige turned on her witch vision, then slipped it backward a notch or two, seeing the real world and the witch world in equal parts.

  Lovejoy’s aura was shaped like a fiery hawk. She wasn’t a shifter, but… “What are you?”

  “A firebird.” Lovejoy’s fire-gaze slid to Dexx. “I’m a paranormal, but not a shifter. I think you classify me as an elemental.”

  Paige blinked and viewed Lovejoy in the real world. Paige didn’t have a classification system. “I don’t understand.”

  “I can see fire.” Lovejoy held up her hand. “Not the way you do. I can see fire’s life energy. I can read ashes, can tell what started fires.”

  “That would make you a great arson investigator,” Leslie said, rejoining them.

  “Yes.” Lovejoy extended her hand. “You must be the medium.”