Page 11 of Witch

Kana nodded, then remembered Ary couldn’t see him and called, “Agreed. I’m tapped out right now anyway.”

“That’s what I thought. First fighting Diana and then fighting that imp, I’m surprised you’re awake right now, to be honest. You’re welcome to come over with Ember tomorrow if you’re up to it, but no magic.”

“I’ll be there,” Kana replied. He had already been quite literally up for other activity; there was no reason why he wouldn’t be able to go over to the hunter’s compound for a meeting as long as he didn’t have to do any magic.

“Good. I have to get back to figuring out sleeping arrangements. Have a good rest of your night, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“See you,” Ember replied before hitting the button to end the call. The room went dark again, but Kana could still see Ember putting the phone back on his side table. The covers shifted as Ember lifted them, and Kana welcomed his warmth as he slid back into the tangle that was Kana, Mika, and Sora.

The afterglow might be gone, but the comfort of having Ember there was more than enough for Kana. He yawned, settled his head against Ember’s arm, and happily fell back asleep.

Chapter Six

THE HUNTERS HAD turned their house’s massive formal dining room into a meeting room. A conference table filled the center of the room, and Diana immediately took one of the few empty chairs around it when she walked in. More chairs were placed along the wall, but those were already filled, so Kana stood, holding up a patch of wall instead. Ember could have taken a chair at the table but had chosen to stay back with Kana.

All three were getting a lot of side-eye. Diana appeared to be blithely ignoring them, but the hair on the back of Kana’s neck was standing up. He could call on his magic to defend himself if it came to that, but it would hurt. Even a full night’s sleep on top of the two days he had already gotten hasn’t been enough to heal. Just talking to Mika, who was draped in his small cat form across Kana’s shoulders, and Sora, who had wandered off somewhere once they had entered the building, was still unpleasant. His magic channels felt bruised, but they would heal as long as Kana didn’t use any magic for at least the rest of the week.

Ary and his boss, Stan, finally walked into the room, a pair of hunters Kana didn’t recognize trailing behind. Johanna walked in just behind them, but while the hunters went to find seats at the table, she joined Kana along the wall.

“You should be so glad you didn’t have to come to the first meeting,” she muttered under her breath to Kana. “I had no idea we had so many hunters with sticks up their butts until they started arguing.”

“Let me guess,” Ember replied, his own voice soft. “They hunt wolves; they don’t work with them.”

Johanna snorted. “And witches. Can’t forget all those evil witches we’ve hunted down, and now you’re saying you’ve hired one to work in our research and development sector? Ary left out the rest of your history, of course,” she added.

Kana let out a relieved breath, glad the hunters who didn’t know him well weren’t about to attack him because of his admittedly worrying parentage.

“Which brings us to this meeting. We’ve told them we’re working with you, they bitched about it, we held firm, and now we’re going to lay out a plan that includes your participation.” Johanna sighed. “I’m expecting more fireworks.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Ember replied.

Stan knocked his fist on the table, then waited for the noise to die down. “Thank you for coming today,” he said with a glance at Diana and then Ember. “I said this earlier, but I want to reiterate it for our partners: warlocks are not good news. To obtain power, they have to summon creatures whom they then enslave. Even the nicest person eventually becomes twisted. I’ve had a couple of historians combing our archives for the last few days to gather all the information we have about warlocks. There are plenty of documented instances where hunters have worked together with the local magical population, werewolves and witches included,” he added pointedly, “but not one report of a good warlock. In fact, our historians only identified three types of warlocks: those who don’t use their power to summon anything and live a magic-free life, those who have summoned creatures and are using their magic for evil purposes, and those who are dead.

“We know the imp was using black arts to influence and control people around it based on what happened at the news agency and on what happened here.”

“You said someone here was able to contain it until you arrived with the holy water,” a woman standing along the wall on the other side of the room called. “Were they able to find out why an imp dared come into a hunter’s compound in the first place?”

Ary turned in his chair to face Kana. “Kana?” he asked.

Kana let out a breath to try to still his nerves. He had never spoken in front of a crowd like this before, and jittery butterflies filled his stomach, but Ember standing next to him and Mika on his shoulders gave Kana enough confidence.

“The imp wasn’t capable of speech,” he said loud enough for the entire room to hear him. “Instead, it was putting hooks of power into people to force them to do its bidding. The woman who came here with the imp was completely under its control, and she was doing everything she could to convince me to allow the news station to come here to conduct an interview. The impression I got was she wasn’t willing to take no for an answer.”

“Why the heck would an imp want a news station to come here?” someone asked.

“Wrong question,” one of the visiting hunters, sitting next to Ary at the table, said. “It sounds to me like the imp needed an excuse to come here, and I’d bet they wanted to use the chaos from having the news crew here to go poke around unsupervised.”

“To do what?” the other visiting hunter at the table asked.

Ary shrugged. “Good question. Put poison in the food in the kitchen, steal a weapon from the armory, or put those controlling hooks Kana mentioned into every single hunter in the area? The options are limitless, and we have no real way of knowing.”

“The imp didn’t say anything else?” Stan asked Kana.

Kana shook his head. “I think it realized I wasn’t going to give in and let the news station come, so it sent a hook my way. I had to defend myself, and once I locked the imp in a circle, I broke its connection to everyone. It couldn’t speak any longer.”

“Out of curiosity,” the first hunter said, “why were you the one conducting that interview?”

“He used to work for that news station,” Johanna cut in. “Since he’s familiar with how they operate, I asked him to be the one to rebuff them. Turned out to be a good decision for a different reason. I’m not sure I would have noticed the imp sending a hook my way.”

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