Page 2 of Coven

Kana let the kittens drop to the floor as he went over to his closet. His suitcase was right where he left it, and a backpack from his school days sat nearby. If he took out the top layer of the backpack and stuffed those few things into the outer pocket of his suitcase, the kittens should fit.

First, though, he had to wait to be certain he wasn’t being watched.

Kana walked across the room and into his kitchen, where he started putting dishes away. He was going to leave the house spotless, as if he had never actually lived here, and cleaning was also a good way to kill time. The kitchen had a view out the front windows, which allowed him to surreptitiously watch the comings and goings of his neighbors.

At first, all Kana could see was his own reflection in the glass. His features were a fairly even mix of both his parents, although he was basing that judgement on his memories as he didn’t have any photographs of them. Still, his hair was the same light-brown shade that brightened under the summer sun to a honey gold as his mother. His eyes were hazel like his father’s, and they changed color based on what he was wearing or even on how blue the sky might be on a given day. His button nose was his mother’s, fuller bottom lip his father’s, and he was middling tall at five foot eight like his father.

Would they be proud of him? Kana wondered. What would they think of their son, who had fought to learn magic against all the odds stacked against him and had somehow managed to earn two wonderful cat familiars? Kana hoped the answer was yes, but in the five years since their death he had hoped many things about them. He no longer knew what might be true when it came to his parents, but he liked to think they would still support him in what he was about to do.

Reminded of his task, Kana shifted so he stopped seeing his reflection and could instead look outside. The flowers of early spring were turning brown and falling to the ground as the first buds of green leaves slowly began to overtake them. The sight was beautiful even in the fading light of the afternoon sun, but Kana wasn’t looking at the beauty. He was watching his neighbors, waiting for the moment he knew he wouldn’t be seen to make his escape.

He didn’t have to watch long before Jane bustled out of her house, wrapped in a thick jacket and scarf despite the fact spring had already thrown off the claws of winter. She was no doubt off to tell whoever she reported his activities to about his plan to request a second attempt at the circle.

Kana waited, putting the last of the dishes into their cabinets, until he was certain she was gone. He turned off all the lights, dug the key out of his pocket and placed it on the kitchen counter, and then went over to his suitcase.

“If you climb in here,” he said to his kittens while holding open the top of his backpack, “I can carry you without needing to conceal you with magic.”

The kittens hopped inside and curled up around each other. Kana zipped the bag almost closed, leaving just enough space for an air hole, and carefully slid it onto his back. He picked up the suitcase and went to his back door.

Magic came at his call, thankfully less sluggish after a bit of time to recover, and he cast it out behind the house. The magic swept into the woods surrounding the village but didn’t impact a concealment or alarm spell. Nothing in the woods was currently watching him, though that might not be true in a few hours. It was now or never.

Kana opened the door, walked outside, closed the door firmly behind him, used a touch of magic to turn the lock, and then strode off directly into the woods toward what he hoped would be a better, new life.

Chapter One

“WE NEED TO do an exclusive, and we need to do it before anyone else jumps on it.”

With that one sentence, Kana knew he should have cast some sort of forgetting spell on the speaker. He wasn’t at all surprised the assignment had fallen in his lap. The newest hire always got the crappy jobs, and his undergraduate degree in journalism was still warm from the printer.

After years of fighting to get hired for this job, Kana wasn’t exactly in a position to say no. He had stayed on the run from his old coven for two years, covering his tracks and making fake trajectories all over the country. He had felt safe enough after that to try settling down, but four years had flown by while he tried to get his feet back under him. Over those years, he had worked hard to go from homeless, to living in a crappy apartment, where he was just thankful to have a roof over his head, to slowly saving every penny so he could go to college. Four more years in college, studying full time while working two jobs to pay for everything, and finally, finally, Kana could say he had made it.

Except, a vampire coven had just moved in, and the cities of Albany and Schenectady were collectively losing their minds.

Humans couldn’t look at Kana and immediately pinpoint him as a witch. To his coworkers, he was a human with emotional support cats. Which meant his supervisors had chosen to send a young, untried, and unprotected human into the den of monsters, all in the hopes he could somehow convince said monsters to agree to an interview.

Kana couldn’t turn down the assignment, not as new as he was. At least he was only visiting the vampires once to conduct the initial reconnaissance. He would gauge the vampires’ willingness to be interviewed, ask some basic questions to get all the baseline facts solidified, and hand over his notes to the big guns. The guys who wrote the story for the website and the newspaper, and who put together the interview plan for the TV reporters would do the rest, but only after Kana had already paved the road for them.

And with vampires, his coworkers were very, very happy someone else got to be the guinea pig first.

The bus slowed to a stop and the doors popped open. Kana hurried outside and looked around to get oriented. He was on Route 7, a four-lane thoroughfare connecting Albany and Schenectady, the two neighboring cities that made up the Capital Region of New York State. On either side of this section of Route 7—which was closer to Schenectady—were residential neighborhoods, each one fancier than the last. The largest and most majestic house in those neighborhoods had remained empty for the last seven years. According to Kana’s research, the previous owner’s deteriorating health had forced him to move to assisted living, but he had refused to sell the house he had lived in for fifty years. Only after his death had his children been able to put the house on the market, and the vampires had bought it.

After moving in, the vampires had solidified the house’s fortifications, building a ten-foot stone wall around the perimeter of the six-acre property, a huge gatehouse, and who knew how many other improvements inside. Kana knew the defenses were necessary for their protection; humans weren’t exactly welcoming to creatures above them on the food chain, and humans were often the least of a vampire’s worries. Yet, vampires had to live in urban areas if they wanted to eat. They didn’t have a choice about where to live, in the same way as Kana didn’t have a choice about this assignment.

Kana glanced at the setting sun, glad to see he had enough daylight left to get to the house, but he wouldn’t arrive so early as to be insulting. He settled the straps of his small backpack into place on his shoulders—just big enough to hold a notebook, some pens, and one cat—and headed into the neighborhood in the direction where the vampires were waiting.

The sidewalks petered out after fifteen minutes of walking, and Kana had to, instead, walk on the road next to carefully mown lawns. Old growth trees blocked any view of the house as Kana approached the driveway with a massive ironwork gate. As he approached, a door opened in the wall next to the gate, and a man stepped outside.

“Can we help you?” he asked, and while he sounded cordial enough, something in his voice had Kana hesitating to take those last few steps forward to be within comfortable talking distance.

Wolf, Mika said.

Werewolves? There were only supposed to be vampires here, not werewolves too. Kana let some magic drift from his fingers to surround his bag and felt the spell circle he had meticulously stitched into the side of the bag take hold. Mika’s scent was now masked, so he would be protected, at least. Kana, on the other hand, still had a job to do.

“I called ahead,” Kana replied. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his work ID to show the wolf. “I’m here to interview the household.”

The wolf studied the ID, then glared at Kana’s face as if memorizing the placement of every pore.

“This way,” he finally said. He didn’t quite turn his back to Kana as he led the way to the door and inside the guard building. They walked through a dozen twisting hallways, and Kana suspected he was being taken in circles. There weren’t any decorations on the walls. Everything was painted beige, the floor was tiled white, and it all looked pristine, so he didn’t even have a smudge of dirt to let him know he had passed this way before. Eventually, they walked through a doorway to a staircase that led downward. The werewolf jumped down the stairs, skipping every other step, and Kana continued to follow. The hallway below was the same beige and white, but there weren’t any more turns or side halls. Kana guessed they were finally heading to the house.

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