Page 27 of Brimstone and Broomsticks
I looked down at my shoes. And at my navy pantsuit that I hadn’t changed out of when I’d gotten home. “I’m not exactly dressed for scrambling over a deadfall,” I told Bronwyn. “I’ve got my work clothing on.”
“So have I.”
I bit back a smile. “Your work clothing is Carhartt overalls or pants and Red Wing steel-toe shoes. Mine is a silk-poly blend pantsuit.”
My sister threw up her hands. “Fine. But if my overalls get dirty, I’m sending you the dry cleaning bill.”
Bronwyn grumbled under her breath and climbed her way up and over the deadfall, her work boots slipping and sliding on the wet bark.
“Got it!”
I heard her mutter an incantation, felt the electric prickle of magic, then heard the crack and snap of branches as she made her way back up and over. By the time she appeared on my side of the deadfall, Bronwyn had a healthy coating of mud on her pants and shirt as well as a few leafy twigs snagged in her hair. She also had something clutched in one hand covered by what appeared to be an old-fashioned handkerchief.
“Seriously?” I gestured at the handkerchief. “Your initials embroidered on that thing? Lace around the edges?”
“You try fumbling for a Kleenex when you’re sweating next to a forge.” She opened the handkerchief and showed me what she’d found on the other side of the deadfall.
It was a coin. It looked a lot like a beat-up, old Chuck E. Cheese token.
I swore. “I left him at the hotel. How the hell did he get out here, and how the hell did he get on the other side of the ward with an anklet on?”
Bronwyn bristled. “Are you saying my enchantment failed? Because them’s fighting words, Cass.”
My sister took her magic seriously. I put up my hands in a placating gesture. “No, I’m just wondering if there’s some magic that might have trumped yours, something powerful enough to negate what you put on the anklet as well as punch a hole in the wards.”
She wrinkled her nose in thought. “It’s a specialized kind of magic tailored so it’s not affected by any supernatural being’s gifts. I had to tweak it five years ago because Aaron found out the fae were able to remove it. There’s only one loophole I couldn’t close off. But if that had happened, there wouldn’t have been any damage to the wards at all.”
I shot my sister a narrowed glance. “What loophole?”
“The wards are like a fence, not a dome. In the seventeenth century, having them extend six feet was plenty high enough. The goal wasn’t to keep supernaturals in or out, it was to keep us a secret from humans. They wouldn’t know about the wards, and were hardly likely to climb a nearby tree and zip-line their way to the other side over the top of them.”
I understood what she was saying. “Why don’t we dome the town then? Eventually some human is going to zip-line out, or hang-glide, or fly over the town in a hot air balloon and see a bunch of pixies getting drunk at Magoo’s aviary.”
She laughed. “If they can see pixies from a hot air balloon, they’ve got some serious binoculars. Trust me, I’ve thought about it. Doming all of Accident and the surrounding area would take a whole lot more power than the seven of us combined would have. We just have to hope the odds of that happening are slim to none.”
“I doubt Lucien can fly.” I eyed the coin. “Unless maybe there were two here? Lucien flies over the ward, so his anklet doesn’t keep him in, and someone else breaks through?”
“Like they were chasing him?” Bronwyn arched an eyebrow.
“Like Clinton Dickskin chasing him?” I added. “Maybe Marcus caught up with the werewolf in some happy hour bar and told him he was dropping the charges. Clinton decides to take the law into his own hands and punish Lucien. Lucien sprouts wings to get away and Clinton chases him out of town and through the wards.”
“First, Clinton can run back and forth across the wards all day and they’re not gonna break. Second, we’ve gone from ‘this guy’s not the son of Satan, he’s a newb’ to ‘he’s got wings’.” My sister shook her head. “If he’s a demon, he’s not going to be running, or flying, away from a vengeful werewolf. Heck, even if he’s not, a newb with enough mojo to beat the crap out of Clinton Dickskin is hardly going to flee from a fight with him.”
She was right. Lucien would stay and beat the crap out of the werewolf. If Clinton had come after him, I would have gotten a text from county lockup telling me to come back and pick up my client once again.
“Let’s look at this as two separate incidents and see if they meet in the middle,” I told Bronwyn. “One, what could possibly cause this sort of break in the wards? Either intentional or as an unanticipated side effect?”
My sister looked over toward the deadfall. “Intentionally? Magic. Another witch, although we’re the only witches in town and I don’t see any of us having a reason to break the wards. Besides the seven of us could temporarily bring them down, then put them back up again if needed. There would be no reason to blow a big freaking hole through them.”
“How about the guys?” Witch magic was passed down through the female line. Only daughters had magic. But in spite of that, some of our male cousins did have some special skills that bordered on a very light sort of magical ability.
“None of them have anywhere near the power to do this,” Bronwyn asserted. “And we’re the only witches in town.”
“What if another non-Perkins witch from outside the town broke the ward?” Temperance wasn’t the only witch to escape burning in the seventeenth century, and I did know a few that had come over from Europe in recent times.
“It’s possible, but why?”
I held up my hand. “Let’s explore that later. Right now we have the possibility that one of us did this or a witch from the outside did.”
