“I’m a witch,” she told us—unnecessarily because witches carry a distinctive scent. Or rather there are three kinds of scents that belong to three kinds of witches.
White witches use only their own power to create magic. Being a white witch usually meant being a good person. Anyone witchborn who wasn’t a good person—and who had a lick of self-preservation—became a gray witch. Gray witches pulled their power from the strong emotions of other people. I understood that negative feelings—pain, anger, grief—worked better. To stay a gray witch, the sources that they harvested from had to be willing—or at least unwitting. That gave them a lot more power than a white witch had.
Black witches didn’t bother with finding volunteers. White witches, weaker and full of potential, were black witches’ favorite victims, but they weren’t fussy.
“I’m a white witch,” Geena said, as if she were used to explaining herself. “Word has gone out that you don’t tolerate black witches, and that’s why I came here. I belong to a group of about thirty white witches. Most of us haven’t been here long. A year ago, I am told, there were only six of us.”
She looked at the cocoa in her hand and said, “We all thought... hoped, really, that this would be a safe place.”
George helped her set her cocoa down on the side table. He looked a bit rough around the edges, like a man who could handle himself in a dark alley. He also appeared young enough to have been her son, though he’d been born sometime in the late nineteenth century.
There was an air of protectiveness in George’s body language that was interesting—and none of my business. That last didn’t lessen my interest. He took Geena’s hand and kissed it. He didn’t say out loud that he wouldn’t let her be hurt—because Adam might take offense at that. But his kiss made it very clear that he considered her to be under his protection.
“I was asked by my coven to talk to George because we’re friends,” she said. George had not released her hand, and now her fingers closed tightly around his.
“And I brought her here because I thought you needed to hear what she knows,” George said, when she didn’t say anything more. “Witches have been disappearing and worse.”
“Three witches have disappeared, we think,” Geena said, sounding a little tentative. “No one from our coven. But Sandy is one of us.”
Good for Sandy, whoever that was, I thought, when she quit talking. And did that mean that Sandy had disappeared, and we had four missing witches? Or had something else happened to her? Or was she the one who knew about the missing witches?
Geena’s group wasn’t really a coven, not a proper one. I’d been told that specific criteria were required to have a coven. For one thing, they had to have an exact number of members—I couldn’t remember if it was nine or thirteen. But I knew it wasn’t thirty. A coven had to have representatives from multiple families of witches—most of whom have died out. I was also pretty sure, because the implication was that all the witches had to be people of power, that a real coven wasn’t formed by white witches. Still, Geena was welcome to call her group a coven if she wanted to. I didn’t care.
“Sandy knows someone who disappeared?” inquired Adam before the silence grew any more desperate on her part. His voice was gentle. George wasn’t the only one feeling protective.
Alphas and dominant wolves tended to be protective. It was both endearing and annoying, depending upon whether it was turned toward helpless, kindly women who looked like they baked bread for the homeless on a regular basis or directed at me.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice tightening until it was nearly a whisper.
It wasn’t that she was a naturally anxious person, I didn’t think. BDSM wouldn’t attract the faint of heart. But a person could be taught fear—and white witches had plenty of reason to be afraid.
I ran through reasons she might be worried about us—and not George—and tried one.
“Geena,” I said, “our job is to protect the people in the Tri-Cities. We can’t do that unless we know what’s going on. We appreciate very much that you’ve brought this to our attention. Whatever you tell us will help us keep your coven”—if she used the word, so could I—“safer.”
She lifted her chin then and stared at me. She raised one hand toward me, palm first, and I felt a fine tickle of magic slide over me. Then she closed her eyes and nodded.
“Truth,” she said. “Truly meant. Sorry, sorry.” She sounded, this time, as if it were an apology rather than a fear response.
She straightened her back, let George’s hand go, and said, in a much firmer voice, “Sandy is one of my coven. She shares a house with a woman called Katie, who is also a witch. Last Friday night, Katie went into her meditation room and locked herself in, as was her habit. Sandy went to bed, got up in the morning, and went to work. She’s a nurse and has a regular Saturday shift. When Sandy got home, she noticed that the room was still locked. No one responded to her knocks or calls.”
She frowned at us. “Meditation is a way to increase power, but you can get caught up in it, and that is dangerous.” She waited until Adam nodded, and I wondered if she was a teacher of some kind. She seemed made for the role of elementary teacher—I really wouldn’t have picked her for one of George’s club members in a thousand years. Some people were hard to pigeonhole. Maybe Geena was a banker or an insurance salesperson.
“Sandy had to take the hinges off the door to get it open,” she said. “When she did, Katie was gone. The room was empty.”
George nudged her.
“It is a converted closet,” she explained hastily. “There are no windows or other doors. The lock is a bar dropped into brackets on the inside of the door. That’s why Sandy had to take off the hinges.”
“Is that something a witch could do?” Adam asked. “Vanish from a locked room?”
“A black witch maybe?” Geena hazarded. It was obvious that she didn’t really know. “Sandy says Katie was a gray witch, but not a powerful one, not even measured by white witch standards. And Sandy said that the room felt wrong. She’s sensitive to things like that.”
Stefan could have taken a witch from a locked room. Or Marsilia. I didn’t like that thought one little bit. “When was this again?”
“Saturday,” she said. “Or at least sometime between Friday night and Saturday late afternoon.”
Friday night something odd had gone on at the seethe. On Saturday, Wulfe had brought me the girdle.