“How long do you think it’s going to take us to end this?”
“No idea, but we’ll do it. Together. You, me, the others.” His arm tightened around me. “Roland isn’t going to know what hit him.”
I was glad Owen was confident. I was nervous. Two untutored witches, a ghost, and a wolf against an ancient evil witch hunter and countless serial-killing cronies. Even with the FBI, a voodoo priestess, and whatever Edward was— “The odds suck.”
“Not once we find your third sister.”
“How are we going to do that?”
A knock came at the door.
“Better put on some clothes,” Owen said. “I called a meeting. First order of business, a plan to find that sister. Second order of business—figuring out what those mean.”
He pointed at the athame with the wolf head carved into the handle, which lay on the kitchen table next to the necklace we’d found around Mistress June’s neck. A pentacle similar to the one Raye wore, which according to Raye had been taken from one of the witches June had killed in New Bergin. We had no idea why.
However, when we’d put the athame, the pentacle, and Raye’s wand on the same table, the legs had begun to vibrate so hard we’d been afraid the thing might self-combust. Raye had snatched up her wand; the table had stilled, and she had taken the wand with her when she went back to her own room.
The knock came again. I leaped out of bed and grabbed the nearest pair of pants. Owen did the same.
“And here I was afraid you’d miss the Marines, that you’d need more than … this.”
I tugged a T-shirt over my head, and when my face popped out, Owen stood right in front of me. He drew me close and set his forehead against mine.
“All I need is you,” he whispered, and when he kissed me I knew that he was right.
Read on for an excerpt from the next book in Lori Handeland’s Sisters of the Craft series Smoke on the Water
Available August 2015 from St. Martin’s Paperbacks
Chapter 1
“Do I know you?”
I glanced up from the book I wasn’t reading to find one of the inmates—I mean patients—of the Northern Wisconsin Mental Health Facility hovering at the edge of my personal space. In a place like this, people learn quickly not to get too close to anyone without warning them first. Bad things happen, and they happen quickly.
“I’m Willow,” I said. “Willow Black. But I don’t think we’ve met.”
I’d seen the woman around. The others called her “Crazy Mary,” which was very pot/kettle in my opinion, but no one had asked me. She was heroin addict skinny. I gathered she’d done a lot of “self-medicating” on the outside. A lot of nutty people did. When you saw things, heard things that no one else did, you’d think you’d be more inclined not to take drugs that might make you see and hear more. The opposite was true. Trust me.
“Mary McAllister.” She shuffled her feet, glanced at the empty chair next to me, and I nodded. She scurried over, sat, smiled.
She still had all of her teeth, which was an accomplishment around here. I had mine, sure, but I was only twenty-seven. Mary had to be … it was hard to say. I’d take a stab and guess between thirty and sixty. Give or take a few years.
Mary looked good today. Or as good as she got. Her long, wavy graying hair had been brushed free of tangles. She’d had a shower recently, but she still wore the tan jumpsuit issued to problem patients. The more you behaved like a human being, the more you were allowed to dress like one. I, myself, was wearing hot pink scrub pants and a white T-shirt that read NWMHF, which placed me somewhere between Mary’s solitary confinement jumpsuit and the jeans and Green Bay Packer designer-wear of the majority of the visitors. Not that I ever had any visitors, but I’d observed others.
Mary had been incarcerated a while. The powers that be didn’t like to call us “incarcerated,” but a spade was a spade in my opinion, and if you couldn’t waltz out the front door whenever you wanted to, I considered that “incarcerated.” Mary spent a lot of time either doped into zombie-ville or locked away from everyone else. She was schizophrenic, but around here that was more the norm than not. Sadly, Mary was on the violent side of the spectrum—hence the doping and the locking away.
“Willow.” She rubbed her head. “I don’t think that’s right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“Your name isn’t Willow.”
“It is.”
“No!” The word was too loud. She hunched her shoulders, glanced around to make sure none of the orderlies were headed our way. None were.
Yet.
“It hasn’t always been. It was something else. Before.”
Very few people knew about my past, or lack of it. Mary McAllister certainly shouldn’t. Unless she was part of it.