Page 18 of Witch Slap

"I'm asking," he said patiently, "if you're going to be all right."

The honest answer was that I did not know. The honest answer was that some part of me eleven years old and bleeding into a towel on a bathroom floor was screaming to let that gate stay shut and see what the dark did with her. I had no doubt that I would have enjoyed it, and would have told itself a story about it afterward that I'd have half believed about making sure others were safe. Yada, yada, yada.

But Amber was up in that house with two of her children and the third one asleep under a table.

And Davon had told me to be somewhere safe with a wall around it.

Whatever was coming up that road did not care in the slightest which of us had cut whose face open sixteen years ago. Sasha’s fear was so palpable it was choking me from afar.

"Open it, Alex." I said.

Alex lifted two fingers and the motor started up. The gate rolled back on itself with a noise like a train coming into a station. Sasha stumbled forward and made it three steps through when her legs quit entirely. Ace caught her under the arms before she hit the gravel with an ease that suggested he'd been expecting exactly that.

She looked up at me from two feet down, blood on her teeth.

"You've got gold coming out of your skin, Byrne," she said conversationally.

"You've got blood crusted on your teeth, Airborne."

"Fair." Her eyes rolled back and she passed out.

The gate closed. The motor whined and squealed but finally stopped. The floodlight buzzed over the barn while shifters stood in a gravel yard in the cold. All of them were facing the same direction. Behind us the house sat with every window lit like a ship in an open sea.

The sound down the road had stopped.

That was the part I didn't like. It did not fade. Just stopped, all at once.

River stepped up beside me, his arm brushing off of mine. He was looking down the road too. The cold coming off him had gotten worse but I didn’t move away. I actually leaned closer sharing my warmth with him. He stiffened for a second but when he spoke it was underneath his breath and meant for my ears only.

"Firefly," he murmured. "Whatever we heard out there stopped when the gate closed."

"I noticed."

"Which means it wasn't hunting her."

I looked at the red-headed wreck of my childhood being carried up the road toward a house full of wolves, and my sigils turned off under my skin one by one. The cold got into the soles of my bare feet at last settling along the dread festering there.

"No, it wasn’t," I said, threading my arm through his. "It came inside with her."

Chapter Six

Nobody argued with me or told me I was paranoid. That's how I knew I was right.

Alex looked down that road for a long three seconds. Whatever he did with his nose and his ears, he didn't share it. Then he lifted his chin at the two nearest wolves and they peeled off toward the tree line without a sound.

"Get her inside," he rumbled at River. "Kitchen. Not upstairs."

"This one weighs nothing." Ace called out. He had Sasha over one shoulder like a coat. "Is that a witch thing? Do you people eat?"

"We eat." I fell in beside him before River had a chance to drag me inside as Alex requested. "We just don't eat our feelings."

"Princess, you had three of Amber's Danishes yesterday for a snack."

"Those were fuel for magic." My glare dared him to contradict me.

We went up the road in a loose knot. Fifteen of us and one unconscious problem. Past the guard house with its knocked-over chair. Past the doubled fencing. Past the stumps standing up pale and raw in two rows all the way to the yard, like teeth in the mouth of a dead beast somebody left open.

For about four seconds the house looked like the safest place in the world.