“We don’t know how they know what they do. I’ve always been seen as strange, but to leap from weird kid to witch is a stretch. Someone did, because they came to New Bergin first.”
I glanced at Pru, but she’d fallen asleep. “Is that why she was there?”
“Yes. I’ve seen her and Henry all my life. For a long time I thought she was a ghost too.”
So had I. “No one else ever saw her but me. Until Owen.”
Raye’s eyebrows rose. “Boyfriend?”
I lifted one shoulder.
“Interesting. No one saw her in New Bergin until Bobby.”
“Boyfriend?”
She lifted her shoulder. “Fiancé. He was a New Orleans homicide detective.”
“How’d you meet a New Orleans cop?”
“He came to New Bergin following what he thought was a serial killer.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Technically it was. Mistress June killed at least a dozen witches.”
My eyes widened. “A dozen?”
The world was a great big mess. But when hadn’t it been?
“Who is this woman?”
“All we have is her first name. No one seems to ever have heard her last. Her fingerprints weren’t in the system, neither was her DNA.”
“How could she kill all those people and yet no one knows anything about her?”
“She’s very good at being bad. She didn’t kill in the same way or in the same place. Made it look random, which is really hard to connect. But now that they know what to look for…”
“What?”
“Brands. Burning. Witches.”
“Who’s looking?”
“FBI.”
“The FBI is looking for witch killers,” I repeated.
“Yes. Well, no. The FBI, per se, is looking for a serial killer. But the agent on this case, Nic Franklin, is also a J?ger-Sucher.”
“You just said the J?ger-Suchers hunt werewolves.”
“And assorted evil creepy-crawlies,” she repeated. “The Venatores Mali are very creepy-crawly. And evil. They have been from the get-go, which was about four hundred years ago.”
“Four hundred years?” My gaze went to Pru again. Still asleep.
“She told you?”
“That she was four hundred years old? Yeah.” I found it a lot less crazy now than I had when she’d brought it up.
“What else did she say?”
“That she was a witch, and so is Henry. Are they related?”
“Married.”
“Wolves can get married?”
“Henry isn’t a wolf. Neither was Pru at the time.”
My head spun again. “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”
“Maybe I should.”
She went to the counter, snatched up a brown paper bag that she must have brought but I hadn’t noticed, then returned to the exam table and started pulling things out.
Two white candles. A clear crystal. A hand mirror. A gorgeous wand with a cherrywood handle. One of those books you can write in yourself. Her journal?
“I’m going to take us back to the beginning.”
She picked up a candle and, using the pointed tip of the quartz, carved Scotland into it, then she carved 1612 into the other.
“You think we’re going to Scotland in 1612?”
“Not going, no.” Raye opened the book, paged through, found what she wanted, and set the book in front of her.
“What is that?”
“Book of Shadows.” She lit a match, held it to the candles. “Every witch has his or her own.”
I didn’t.
“You will,” she said.
Had I said that out loud? I didn’t think so.
“Witches born to the craft are elemental and each has their particular item of power. I’m an air witch so this…” She lifted the wand and waved it. I could swear sparks flew through the air in the wake of the tip. “Is my item. We can use other items. For instance, this pentacle”—she reached inside her shirt and withdrew a necklace with a star surrounded by a circle—“helps me to focus and call spirits, though traditionally it’s the item of an earth witch.”
She dropped the necklace and lifted the book, turning it so I could see inside. Handwriting filled the page. At the top I read: Spell to See into the Past.
She positioned the book so she could see the spell, tapped it once with the wand. Did it glow? Then she lifted the mirror, reflective side facing away, took my hand, and pulled me close.
“Together we look into it, okay?”
“Am I gonna fall through the looking glass?”
“Let’s find out,” she said, and flipped it over.
Chapter 19
“They come,” Raye whispered.
We stood in the shadowy corner of a one-room cottage—thatch roof, stone walls, rough-hewn furniture, fireplace that doubled as a stove. If this wasn’t 1612, it was doing a damn good imitation. In the distance, wolves howled.
“They’ll never get here in time,” Raye continued.
“In time for what?”
She pointed to the room’s inhabitants. A man, all in black—clothes, hair, even his eyes—stared into the darkness beyond the slightly cloudy pane of a single window.
“Darling,” he murmured.