A circle of drenched women blocked the main crossing. Twelve women. The scent of magic was strong in the air, tickling along my skin and making me want to sneeze, despite the insulating rubber tires and the pouring rain, not that insulation worked against magic as well as it worked against electricity. Or at all, actually.
Eli pulled to a stop some twenty feet away from the witch circle, the soaking-wet women illuminated by his headlights. Witch circles can be composed of different numbers of practitioners, and I had seen circles with two, five, twelve, three, four, and nine witches, depending on the geometry and mathematics being used to rout the magical energies. Twelve witches made up the most potent kind of circle, and working with that kind of energy and potential could do scary things, including take over the witches and use their combined life force to power the working, leaving dead witches behind and their magic operational but out of control. These witches were bedraggled and dripping and so involved that they didn’t seem to notice or care about the weather. Or us. And oddly, they were standing outside the circle they were working. Which meant that something inside had their full attention.
I tried to make out what it was, even pulling on Beast’s vision, but all I saw were dull kaleidoscopic colors, all in the green and blue part of the color spectrum, with a hint of yellow. It looked locked down, well contained, whatever it was.
“Twelve, eh?” Eli sounded casual, but he had fought beside me when a full circle had changed the local vamps in Natchez into bizarro insectoid creepazoids. Wiping out the vamps had been the worst fight of my life, and I’d had some bad fights to compare it to. “Last time we ran into one of those,” he murmured, “I met Syl. That was a good time in my life.”
Alex made a gagging sound. “Ignore the lovestruck idiot in the driver’s seat,” he said. “Can you see what they’re doing?”
“The circle looks like a form of Molly’s hedge of thorns spell,” I said, “but they’re outside the hedge. I think I see some kind of circle outside the hedge, but it’s weak as well water. There’s something in the middle of the street and in the center of the circle.” I squinted to see it better. Tried to look at it from the edges of my vision, focusing on a tree in the distance to make the blue-green fog of dullness. “Is it a . . . a hat?”
Beast rose from her nap and studied the scene through my eyes. Witches are studying prey. Which was as good an explanation as any I had.
“I can’t imagine why you sound so shocked,” Edmund murmured. “Not so many years ago, most women loved hats.”
“Jane’s not most women, dude,” Alex said for me. “And it isn’t a hat—it’s one of those laurel wreath things that the Greeks and the Romans used to wear.”
At the comment, Edmund sat up straight and leaned across the opening between the front seats to get a better look. As he studied the wreath, he slowly vamped-out, his pupils going wide, the sclera going scarlet, and his fangs slowly dropping with a soft schnick of sound on the hinges in the roof of his mouth. “Well, well, well,” he said. “I do wonder what that can be.”
I couldn’t have said why, but I had a feeling that Edmund knew exactly what it was, and for whatever reason, he wasn’t saying. I thought about calling him on it, but decided to hold my tongue, saying instead, “Down boy. That’s a dangerous circle, so no matter what it is, we aren’t getting near it.”
I gave directions to the bed-and-breakfast where I stayed last time I was in town and Eli put the SUV in reverse and backed a few feet but didn’t pull away. The headlights gave us a clear view of the town and the women, despite the rain, and I could see him taking in everything, the way Uncle Sam had trained him in the Rangers. If he had to, Eli could now draw an exact replica map of the town for house-to-house warfare. Hopefully we wouldn’t need that map or that much bloodshed, but it was a handy skill set.
On the south corner of the intersection, there was a huge, brick Catholic church, the bell tower hiding a tarnished, patinated bell in its shadows. The large churchyard was enclosed by a brick wall, with ornate bronze crosses set into niches in the brick every two feet. On top of the wall were iron spikes, also shaped like sharp, pointed crosses. The sight made Edmund growl and sit back. I just smiled. The church in Bayou Oiseau had been fighting vamps for decades. It never hurt to remind a vampire that he had enemies and that there were ways to fight his power.
To the east of the church, across the road, was a bank, beige brick and concrete, with the date 1824 on the lintel and green verdigris bars shaped like crosses on the windows and door. To my right was a strip mall that had seen better days, brick and glass, with every single window and door in the strip adorned with a cross, either painted or decaled on. The mall featured a nail salon, hair salon, tanning salon, consignment shop, secondhand bookstore, bakery, a Chinese fast-food joint, a Mexican fast-food joint, and a Cajun butcher advertising andouille sausage, boudin, pork, chicken, locally caught fish, and a lunch special for $4.99.
“Is that Lucky Landry’s place?” Alex asked.