Olga made a face, and Franz crept a little closer. The raccoon gave the silk a sniff, sneezed, and ran and hid behind Olga.

  Betanya frowned, pensive.

  Imani glanced around the circle before turning back to me, her face serious. “Well, then. Shall we get started?”

  Something inside me that I’d been holding tense relaxed at her words. I looked around the circle, meeting everyone’s eyes, and nodded.

  Chapter Eleven

  Magic breathed through the circle, flowing through us, linking us.

  A sourceless wind drifted around the fire, tugging at Betanya’s graying red curls. Imani’s long fingered hands made graceful patterns in the air as she prayed quietly under her breath in what sounded like French. Maverick had his eyes closed with Isis perched on his shoulder. Her wings were mantled, spread partially over Maverick’s head, like he was a chick she was sheltering.

  Hellcat had joined us under protest, and he’d made sure that each and every one of us knew just how much of an imposition the whole thing was on him. Even once we’d begun, he stayed a solid six feet away from me and did his best to pretend he was ignoring the ritual circle, choosing to focus on a stubborn patch of fur high up on his shoulder that was in desperate need of grooming.

  Maybe a skunk or a creepy raccoon wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

  Betanya made a plucking motion and frowned, her brows beetling together. “There is more than one layer of enchantment here.”

  She was right. I could feel it when I dove into the silk, letting the rest of the world drift away from me. It wasn’t just the protection magic that I’d felt at first glance, and honestly, after sifting through all the various magics woven into the cloth, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it was protection magic at all.

  Protection spells should have kept the cloth intact. I’d assumed preservation had been the reason for the enchantment in the first place. If that were the case, then the original person to commission the piece should have demanded their money back.

  Though, they’d probably been gone for a few centuries, so maybe they’d just let it go.

  In fact, the more the strands of silk pulled apart, the more the cloth degraded. Something told me that the tackiness of the threads was less about bad processing, and more of a magical side effect. Like whatever the person who’d woven it originally had been trying to do had resulted in a bit of gumminess. I just didn’t understand why.

  I peeled the layers of enchantment apart, examining every piece, but the silk had degraded so badly that the magic was failing at about the same rate, and I ended up with crumpled bits of spell in my hand, just like I’d ended up with silk dust when I’d moved the fabric too quickly.

  Maverick reached out with his power, trying to steady my own. Energy, as warm as blood, slipped between the strands of my magic, trying to stabilize it so I could look at the cloth properly. For the first time in a long time, I could have hugged him. I managed to beat back the sentiment though (and thank the Goddess for that), and focused on the job at hand.

  Olga shook her head, looking distressed. “I do not like zis.”

  “Why?” I asked her.

  She continued shaking her head. “It feels bad. Like ze magic has corroded, zomehow.”

  That was an interesting way of putting it. The magic did feel rotten, like something gone off in the back of the fridge, but I wasn’t sure if it was the magic itself, or a result of what the silk had been used for, maybe both?

  It was Imani’s gentle touch that brushed past me, as light as air. Just a gentle breath of magic, and she jerked away like she’d been stung.

  The whole circle turned her way.

  “Are you okay?” Betanya asked.

  “Vat just happened?” Olga echoed.

  Had the layers of enchantment reacted to Imani in someway?

  My gut went cold, my pulse speeding. If I was right, then the silk might be magically contagious in some way, cursed. And that was really bad because I’d basically just asked my whole coven to roll around in it, for all intents and purposes. What had I been thinking? If something happened, if that horrible draining magic latched on to someone in my coven, I didn’t even know what I’d do. But it would definitely involve some serious revenge on that auction house. I’d show them a real curse, by the Goddess.

  Imani shook her hand out, staring wide eyed. She hesitated.

  “Imani?” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, worry spurring me on.

  She shook her head. “Sorry, sorry, it just felt… well, not familiar exactly. That’s not the word for it.”

  Betanya’s eyebrows flew up. “You’ve experienced something like this before?”

  She was quiet for another moment, clearly weighing her words. Then she let out a slow breath. “Back home, sometimes during a ceremony, a priest or priestess might invite a spirit, one of the Loa, into their bodies.”

  Olga blinked rapidly, looking concerned. “Possession?”

  “Not exactly.” Imani looked frustrated, like she was having trouble explaining. “It’s considered a huge honor, to be chosen.”

  “Why?” Maverick asked.

  “The Loa grant their blessings, their gifts to the person in question. They help us in return for offerings of tobacco or rum, that sort of thing.”

  Maverick watched her carefully, rubbing the pads of his thumb and forefinger together, like he felt something clinging to them. “And the spell reminds you of that?”

  Imani shook her head, her coils sliding around her shoulders. “No, not exactly. That’s the thing. This doesn’t remind me of that magic. It feels like that magic sort of, but inverted, somehow. It feels… wrong.”

  “Ya,” Olga said and breathed in deeply.

  “A demand instead of an invitation,” Imani continued.

  Isis hooted softly, encouragingly, while Imani struggled to continue finding the words.

  “The Loa are the messengers between people and the gods,” she said, speaking slowly. “We can invite them, but you don’t command them, not ever. It’s not done.” Her whole body shuddered in revulsion. “Whatever this is,” she gestured to the silk. “It’s foul. Wrong. A kind of perversion.”

  I chewed on my lower lip some more, trying to put what Imani was saying together with what I was sensing. The points she was making, they felt true to what my own magic was telling me. The enchantment on the silk was strong, that was for sure. Meant to grip and hold fast against the ages. Meant to preserve itself, but then why would it all fall apart the second some scissors touched it? It didn’t make any sense. And hadn’t someone, through the ages, tried to cut the damned thing before I did?

  It came to me in a rush, chilling me like a sudden tide of icy water.

  “Are you telling me that instead of an invitation, this was meant as what, a prison?”

  Imani stared at me wide-eyed. One hand flew up to her mouth in shock.

  Maverick swore viciously and creatively. “It was meant to trap something. Something that is evidently no longer trapped.” He waved a hand at the pile of mouldering fibers.

  It was a pretty flimsy prison if all it took where a pair of scissors to break it. That seemed like shoddy planning, certainly.

  A memory reared up in my head, and all the warmth drained out of my face.

  Betanya noticed my sudden chalkiness, and she gripped my hand. “Wanda? What is it?”

  My lips felt numb, my tongue was clumsy in my mouth. “I had trouble cutting it when I laid out my pattern. I had to use magic with the shears, but not just magic…”

  “Blood magic,” Betanya finished for me, her eyebrows arching.

  I nodded. “I had to use blood magic to cut it.”

  Maverick scrubbed his hands over his face.

  Betanya looked grim. “Most enchantments have a flaw, a weakness to them. Blood magic isn’t exactly common, and I imagine it wasn’t much more common back whenever this spell was created. Whoever was responsible for placing the spell on the silk might have forgotten to ward against blood magic, or maybe they weren’t able to.”

  I could taste bile at the back of my tongue at the thought of the fact that I’d probably managed to unleash some ancient horror on Haven Hollow. I’d just wanted to make a dress, where else in the world was cursed fabric even something that needed to be worried about?

  “Zo… eef something vas trapped in zere… zat is now free…” Olga looked around the circle, her hands nervously plucking at the skirt of her dress. “Vhat vas in zhere?”

  And wasn’t that just the question.

  Imani swallowed hard enough that I could hear it over the muted crackle of the fire.

  “I got a hint of whatever it was when I touched it, and I have no earthly idea what that entity was. It’s like nothing I’ve ever sensed before. But I do know this...” Her eyes were wide, showing white all the way around the brown of her irises. “Whatever it is, it’s been in there a long, long time. And it feeds on some kind of energy or life force or something. And when it came out of the silk, it was starving.”

  My heart dropped down to somewhere around my shoes.

  I wanted her to be wrong. Oh, Goddess, I wanted her to be wrong. But the pieces were clicking into place, and the puzzle was, unfortunately, really starting to look like the picture on the box. The silk had been woven in order to trap some kind of entity, holding it for however many years, right up until someone cut through the wards with blood magic, and unleashed a hungry monster on the town.

  And I still had no idea what the creature could be, or how it picked its victims, or even what kind of people it targeted.

  “Okay.” I took a breath and let it out. “Okay, we–”

  Disney music suddenly blared over the crackle of the fire and the wind in the trees, and Maverick fumbled his phone out with a half defensive, half apologetic look.

  “Sorry, it’s Taliyah.”

  At my raised eyebrow look of amusement, he rolled his eyes at me. “Nice ring tone.” Everyone else was also laughing.

  “Sybil picked it.”

  Yeah, that tracked. Maverick wouldn’t have picked something that whimsical or blatant, but that was right up Sybil’s alley, and Maverick was a giant softy for his adopted daughter. I wasn’t sure that he’d ever told her ‘no’ over something and actually stuck with it.

  Maverick’s voice was terse when he answered, and his expression just got grimmer the longer he listened.

  “I’m on my way.” He hung up and rose to his feet all in one smooth motion. “I have to go. There’s a fight at the Half-Moon, and Taliyah needs more than human deputies as back up.”

  I scrambled to my feet and hurried after him, half-running to keep up with Maverick’s ridiculously long-legged stride. “I’m coming with you.”

  He didn’t argue, but he also didn’t slow down.

  I threw a look back over my shoulder to where the remains of the ritual, and the silk sat by the fire.

  Betanya waved me on. “We can clean up. Go.”

  I shot her a grateful smile. I wasn’t usually one for a fight, but I had a lot of negative emotions roiling around inside of me at the moment, and the chance to let some of it out on someone who deserved it sounded pretty darn seductive, I couldn’t lie. And I had a feeling that someone was probably involved in Taliyah’s call. It would have been really nice to work out some of my frustrations with a solid hex. Though, realistically, I’d probably just end up needing to alter the memories of some human who’d seen something they shouldn’t have.

  Either one was fine, I thought as I followed Maverick to his car. So long as there was something to distract me from having to think about just what kind of nightmare I might have set loose on Haven Hollow.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Half-Moon Bar and Grill was something of the social hub of Haven Hollow.

  Not just for the magical community, either. It was located right on Main Street, barely a block from Wanda’s Witchery in the middle of what passed for downtown. There were other restaurants in Haven Hollow, but none of the others hit that perfect balance of plenty of space, comfy booths, excellent food (that wasn’t too fancy or too pricey), and the fact that it was owned and operated by a literal Sasquatch didn’t hurt.

  Roy was on the Council, and very well known in the supernatural community, so people usually minded their manners when eating in his place. And the humans normally took one look at the seven-foot-tall man with the width to back it up, (he looked like he could juggle pianos if the mood struck him), and decided to take their alcohol induced scrappiness elsewhere without too much of a fuss.

  But occasionally there was someone who was just so bone-headed, who’d pawned all sense of self-preservation, who decided it was a good idea to kick up a fuss at the Half-Moon, and then Roy was forced to take out the trash.

  The fact that Taliyah had been called in was surprising. The fact that she’d asked for further back-up, and further magical back-up at that, was downright jaw dropping.

  Maverick and I parked up the street and headed for the bar. We had to push our way through the crowd of people who were all milling around outside, peering through the windows. It looked like Roy had evacuated the restaurant and gotten the other patrons clear, which was not a good sign. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

  Maverick shoved his way through, and I followed in the wake he left behind him before people had a chance to fill in the gap.

  I had no idea what to expect when I stepped through the door, but I was still surprised enough that I had to stop and stare and try to make sense of what I was seeing.

  It shouldn’t have been all that shocking. The Half-Moon was a bar. People drank there. Alcohol made people make dumb decisions, and some of those choices might have been starting fights. Roy certainly didn’t start fights, but usually him just being there was enough to get folks to sit down and reconsider their actions.

  Of all the things that I thought I’d have walked into that required not only Roy and Taliyah, but further help than that, two completely human, middle-aged men doing their best to beat the snot out of each other wouldn’t have even cracked my top fifty list.

  It wasn’t a normal bar fight, either. Both men weren’t just fighting, they were absolutely enraged. Their skin was flushed a brilliant red, and their eyes were stained the same color from blood vessels bursting. Not to mention that their eyes were also bulging out of their faces with obvious rage. The tendons in their necks stood out like industrial cable as they did their best to beat the life out of each other.

  It was like the legends of the Viking berserkers. There was no reasoning, no sense behind those blood glazed eyes, there was only fury. There were no words, just flying fists, sweat and blood spraying across the floor, and nothing Taliyah said would get them to separate. Even Roy, looming like a frustrated mountain, couldn’t get a grip on either one in order to pull them apart physically. They ignored him, wrenching themselves away from his hold, trying to push each other to the ground to get a better, more painful hold or a strangle grip, that for a second I actually doubted Roy was here. Maybe he was a hallucination after all.

  Tables had been overturned, chairs smashed, and glass and food were spread all over the floor. I’d never seen the place such a mess since I’d moved here. Roy must have been furious. Part of me was surprised he hadn’t already banged their heads together until they made a sound like a hollowed-out coconut.

  Again, it was a bar, fights happened. I might have been willing to chalk it up to too many drinks and some kind of toxic masculinity at play. Except as I watched them, caught between horror and fascination, I could see them.

  Little strands of magic clinging to both men, forming a sticky web over them. Each thread of magic was swollen, pulsing with magic. They reminded me of well-fed leeches, glutted on stolen blood. What was more, the angrier the men got, nostrils flared, their chests heaving like enraged bulls, the more the curse pulsed and glowed, and the easier it was for me to see it.

  We had to do something. People weren’t meant to hold that much fury in their bodies, and they weren’t meant to fight that long. Both men were drenched in sweat, and the risk of their hearts giving out was getting higher by the second.

  “Maverick,” I warned.

  “I see the magic.” He strode forward to join in the fray, and with any luck, the extra person helping would be enough to get the men to stop.

  I dragged my eyes away to focus on the wall of windows behind me, where every single person who lived in Haven Hollow seemed to be pressed up against the glass, watching like we were endangered species at the zoo.

  Half of keeping a supernatural conspiracy intact was not having to modify everyone in town’s memory in the first place. My hands behind my back, I channeled scarlet energy into my palms. A simple twist and a deft flick, and I turned the glass in the windows dark and opaque. With any luck, the witnesses would just think someone had turned all the lights off. Then I threw the doors shut and locked them to make sure no one would see anything more than they already had. This might require some further magic—potentially magicking the water supply to make sure the human inhabitants of Haven Hollow forgot this evening. We’d have to see…

  With the threat of witnesses now neutralized, nobody was obligated to play human anymore. Roy waded right into the fight and separated the combatants by grabbing one man’s shirt collar and bodily lifting him off the ground. That didn’t stop his buddy, though, and Maverick had to wrap him up tight in bands of deep purple energy. Outside, thunder rumbled overhead.

  Against all reasoning, common sense, or even just basic biology, the two guys were still trying to get at each other. Flailing, kicking, even trying to bite their captors.

  Taliyah stepped forward, and her glamour dropped.

  Instead of a tired, late middle-aged woman, there was suddenly a tired, immortal faerie woman standing there. And she was pissed off. Her hair blanched to silver and white, her skin smoothing out into something that looked more like alabaster than flesh, and her ears suddenly swept back into graceful points. The Princess and Heir to the Winter Court of Faerie was in the house, and she looked about as done with everything as I felt.