It was lucky that the threads hadn’t had as much time to sink in, so I managed to burn them all away with magic before Sadie came stumbling out of the dressing room. Miranda already looked better. I’d straightened her out, so she wasn’t sprawled on the carpet, and her color looked more pinky-fair than furious red. She murmured quietly in her magical sleep.

  The bride to be was still on her phone when she walked into the main room of the store, her clothing rumpled and hastily thrown back on. I noticed she’d taken the time to hang the rose dress up properly, and was clutching the hanger forgotten in the hand not holding her phone.

  “The ambulance is on its way,” she told me as she dropped down to her knees beside her friend. “They should be here soon.”

  There were tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, and in an attempt to avoid an emotional meltdown, I said, “She’s going to be just fine.”

  “I hope so.” Sadie dabbed under her eyes and sniffed. “I just don’t understand. She was so happy for me last night; she kept congratulating us. What could have made her go from that, to yelling at me?”

  “Well, it was probably just–wait, did you say last night?”

  She glanced at me, confused. “Yes?”

  “What—what was going on last night?”

  “My impromptu engagement party?” she said in a way that probably meant she’d already told me this, but I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Oh, right—remind me where that was again and with whom?”

  “Oh, just some friends, my fiancé and I… we, uh, all went out to the Half-Moon. It was nice. Fun.” She sniffled again. “And Miranda was just so happy for us. I don’t understand…”

  They were at the bar, before the two guys went MMA on each other. Did that mean something? I could only wonder why each of the victims were being targeted when they didn’t seem to have much of anything in common other than having some pretty extreme emotions. That was a pretty broad pool to fish from, so why those people specifically?

  But the neighbor had been close to the old man, the men and the jealous friend had been at the Half-Moon. The woman from the road could have bumped into any one of them at any time. Was it really just a matter of this entity simply jumping from one victim to the next?

  I gave Miranda a cursory once over, or the best I could with a witness sitting next to me crying softly. I didn’t see any magical tags or tracking spells attached to her. But then, maybe the curse acted as its own tracking spell? There were still too many questions, and it was really starting to tick me off.

  The bride to be sniffled once more, turning wide, tear filled eyes towards me. “Is it terrible that I still want the dress?” she asked me, misery in her voice.

  I almost laughed, but I managed to rein it in. No one knew better than me that when you found the right dress, nothing else would do.

  I patted her on the arm gently. “There isn’t much you can do before the ambulance gets here. So we might as well get you sorted out.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was way too late when I finally closed up my store, after the ambulance left and all the chaos had finally died down.

  I was just dragging myself back to my car when a motorcycle pulled up alongside me; the engine idling. I turned just far enough to make it obvious I was looking and had the sudden ominous feeling that whoever this was—they were bad news. So, I kept one hand down by my side, calling up a blood bolt to sit in my palm, the energy of it warm and begging to be thrown.

  Haven Hollow didn’t have a lot of petty crime in general, but there was the occasional purse snatching, that sort of thing. That didn’t mean I wasn’t prepared to teach some moron exactly why it was a bad idea to try something with a witch.

  But once the person pulled off their helmet, and shook out their ponytail, I was surprised to realize that the rider was a young woman. One whose dark hair had a turquoise streak in it, and whose nose ring glinted under the streetlight. I was more surprised when she turned golden eyes that backlit green in the dark on me, and I realized she was a werewolf.

  The fact that she met my eyes at all meant she had about eighty percent more spine than werewolf females usually had. The once over she gave me gave me hope for them as a species.

  “You Wanda Depraysie?”

  I returned the carefully neutral question with a bland smile and a raised eyebrow. “Who’s asking?”

  She grinned, a sharp flash of teeth in the yellow light. “I’m the courier who’s got a delivery for Wanda Depraysie.”

  I blinked at her, impressed. “You’re fast. I didn’t think you’d get here this quickly.”

  “They pay me to be fast.” She reached into her messenger bag that was slung across her chest. “I take it you’re her, then?”

  “Yes.” My heart was thudding against my ribs. The fact that there might be some answers within reach, finally, was making my fingertips tingle. It was hard not to snatch the padded envelope right out of the courier’s hands.

  There was another flash of teeth as she handed me the disappointingly small envelope. “There you are. Have a nice evening.”

  “You too,” I said, distracted. But she’d already popped her helmet back on, and with a roar of the engine, she was down the street and around the corner, gleaming red lights vanishing from view.

  I was in the dark, beside my car on the road. It wasn’t a good time to rip the envelope open, especially because I might drop or lose the note entirely. Besides, if it was in Japanese, I was going to need some spellwork to even be able to read it, and Roy and Taliyah might actually team up to strangle me if I started doing a light show right here in the middle of the road.

  So, even though it pained me, I carefully laid my prize on the passenger’s seat of my car, and headed for a place where I could actually get some work done.

  ***

  I headed for the coven house, since most of our books were located there, and there might be someone around to help with the translation (just to make sure the translation included with the package was correct). But for once, the place was deserted, or those who were there had retreated to their rooms and didn’t want to be disturbed. Just because I was on an enforced nocturnal schedule didn’t mean everyone else had to do the same.

  I took the envelope right into the study and laid it on the desk as I pulled my coat off and tossed it onto the little chaise lounge under the window. The coat dropped onto a startled Hellcat who was apparently sleeping there, and he shot up into the air, his fur going in every direction like he’d been electrocuted.

  “Oh, sorry,” I told him sweetly. “I didn’t see you there.”

  It wasn’t even a lie. A black cat in the dark wasn’t something even my enhanced eyes could spot necessarily.

  The malevolent golden glare leveled my way said he didn’t believe me.

  I waited for it, even as I fished a letter opener out of the desk. Waited for the usual screed of complaints, demands, whatever verbal deluge Hellcat decided to level at me. His tail lashed back and forth, lips curled back to show just the barest tips of his little fangs.

  But he didn’t say a word. Only hopped down to the ground and stalked out of the study, his tail puffed up three times its normal size and lashing furiously.

  Well. That was weird.

  I shook my head. I didn’t have time for whatever Hellcat’s newest bout of dramatics was about. Not when I finally had a chance at figuring out whatever the spell was going on in Haven Hollow.

  The letter opener made short work of the sealed edges, and even though Ethan had warned me there were only two notes that had been included with the silk, I was still disappointed at the one piece of extremely ragged and stained paper that slid out of the envelope, followed by a post-it note with a translation written on it.

  There were only a couple of lines on the ancient page, written top to bottom instead of the left to right I was used to. It was also a very careful calligraphy, but it may as well have just been ink blots on the page, because I couldn’t read any of them.

  But luckily for me, I was a witch. And a really excellent one at that.

  I grabbed a cup of water from the kitchen and hurried back to the study, where I set it at the edge of the desk. Moonlight spilled into the room when I yanked the curtains open, as wide as I could, so that the full silvery illumination fell across the cup, turning the water into something that glittered with borrowed light.

  Next came the feather, a single dove feather that I had tucked into the drawer of the desk. With a prayer whispered half under my breath, I waved the feather over the glass of water, picking up some of that reflected radiance, and brushed it over the yellowed paper.

  The elegant calligraphy wavered, black lines blurring, and the ink started to move on the paper, reshaping the letters into more familiar ones. My heart leapt in my chest as the Kanji turned to English letters, and then my heart immediately dropped again when I read what was written there.

  It was the briefest note I’d ever read. I’d gotten text messages with nothing but a thumbs up emoji in them that dictated more information than what that note held.

  It just listed the name of the town, and province where the original weaver made the silk, as well as the year it was made, making the cloth slightly more than three hundred years old. That was it. It was like the ancient version of a department store receipt. I had to grip the edge of the desk to fight the urge to ball up the old, fragile paper and throw it across the room. Or maybe out the window. And, yes, the English translation they’d included was much the same, only they’d turned the Kanji notes into full sentences.

  There had to be something, anything. The town and province would help narrow down what we might have been dealing with a little, I supposed, but it was still a needle in a haystack. Yes, a needle in one haystack was better than a needle in a dozen haystacks, but still.

  I snatched the note up, squinting at it, turning it over, in case I missed even a hint of a hint. There was a smudge of ink off in the corner of the yellowed page, away from all the other writing, and I would have ignored it, except when I tilted the paper towards the window, the smudge vanished.

  I went still. Interesting.

  A little frisson of excitement pricked at my spine, and I held my breath, hardly daring to exhale. The chance that there might be more writing, hidden somehow, made my fingertips tingle.

  I ghosted my fingers over the paper, looking for any hint of magic, some spell hiding the words from me. It probably wasn’t anything like lemon juice or so-called invisible ink, because from what I remembered, those discolored or ate through paper eventually, and the note had held up pretty well, all things considered.

  Deep down, in the pulp of the paper, I felt a tiny, familiar shiver of protection magic. The same as I had from the silk. And it had taken blood magic on my shears to get through that, cutting out the pieces of my pattern. Fingers crossed, my blood magic would work again.

  I summoned power into my hand, scarlet energy lapping at my palm and twining around my fingers. Gently, carefully, I tapped the corner of the note, and let my power slowly crawl across the page like delicate flames burning across alcohol. It swept up the page, and as it passed, more letters appeared.

  I had no idea how long the spell would hold, so I fumbled around and yanked a desk drawer open, grabbing some paper and a pen so I could scribble down what was turning up on the note. When I was done, with my heart pounding in my ears and my arms feeling shaky from the withdrawal of adrenaline, I sat and stared.

  It wasn’t the whole story. But it was a good chunk of the story, and I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure about how screwed Haven Hollow was, but I wasn’t exactly hopeful.

  The new note just had a few lines, but they were pretty darn informative and they appeared in English, which was… convenient. It seemed that a few centuries back there had been a creature that the note referred to as a ‘spider demon’ which didn’t sound great. It had attacked a village, and the local equivalent of a coven had managed to trap it, and bind it into a silk prison, turning the spider-demon’s powers of web weaving back on itself.

  Whoever was responsible for binding the thing had woven protections into the silk to keep any harm from coming to the fabric, which in turn, might damage the bindings that were keeping the demon trapped.

  Right up until a Blood Witch had come along and carved right through all of them. I dropped my head into my hands and rubbed my forehead.

  That must have been what the auction house had seen, the protection magics. They’d assumed the magic had been directed out, intending to shield the wearer. Instead, it was directed in, to keep the creature’s prison intact, but the auction house hadn’t realized as much and clearly hadn’t gone any further.

  In their defense, I’d thought the same thing. Of course, I hadn’t had days with the silk like they had, and I wasn’t about to sell it into the general population, either. I’d seen the surface enchantment and accepted it too. But I wasn’t feeling particularly charitable, so I made a mental note to call the auction house back when this was all said and done, and rip a verbal strip off of whoever was in charge there, because their quality assurance was an absolute dumpster fire.

  But back to the current situation, I was definitely getting a headache.

  There were a few more words that showed up in the note—stuff about it being the family’s duty to guard the silk, and pass down the prison through the generations to make sure the creature never got free, and blah blah… right, we’d seen how well that all turned out. It looked like there had been some miscommunication down the family line, or the silk had drifted away from the magical branch—either way, it had ended up at auction.

  I almost dropped the note back into the envelope, but there was one more word down in the very bottom corner that I’d almost missed. The handwriting translated was still small, fine, written in a crabbed hand like an afterthought.

  Tsuchigumo.

  Well. It was a place to start.

  Chapter Sixteen

  One of the best parts of being in a coven was the sharing of power and information.

  At least, on paper, that was what a coven was supposed to be. We had some witches from all over the world in Circle Scapegrace, and they brought with them a wealth of knowledge from all over the globe.

  There was less information about Japan than I would have liked in the coven library, but unlike my sisters throughout history, I also had access to the internet. Speaking of, there was a lot to dig through that was obviously pop culture, or western interpretations of things, or just straight up stories made by mundanes without any magical knowledge or background. But I did manage to find a few invaluable tidbits.

  I studied, and I napped, and I bolted down some food and coffee when I needed it. My work saw me almost all the way around the clock, and it was nearing sunset again by the time I actually had anything resembling useful information. Most of what I needed to know was already summed up in the note. The Tsuchigumo was a spider demon, though there were actually more than one in Japan, but this one seemed to do more actual hunting and less seducing prey, so at least that saved me some nightmare fuel.

  The things I looked up had me nervous. This was not a small or weak demon. The only saving grace was that it had been locked up for a long, long time, and it seemed to be taking a while to get its full strength back. I didn’t want to see what would happen to Haven Hollow if that was ever allowed to happen.

  From what I could figure out, the Tsuchigumo was mostly being lazy in its hunting. It seemed to have gone for an easy target at first: an old, lonely man who wasn’t in great health, and since that point, it had been hunting mainly to contagion. If someone made contact with a victim while they were under the Tsuchigumo’s draining curse, they picked up a bit of the curse, and bam, next meal acquired. Like all major predators, it was letting the prey do most of the work as far as coming to it. Convenient for the demon, extremely frustrating for me, because I had no idea how to hunt down something that seemed to only have a tangential link to this plane of freaking existence.

  Further issue, I didn’t know what to do with it once I did manage to round it up. The information that I’d managed to scrounge up didn’t paint a good picture about dealing with it. There had been a reason that the original weaver had gone to such extreme lengths to trap it in the first place.

  Weaving silk threads into cloth, especially pre-industrial revolution, wasn’t exactly a simple or quick thing to do. And every thread, every twist and pattern, was set with the single purpose of keeping this creature away from the world. No one would go to that amount of effort for something that a can of Raid would deal with.

  And of course, the obvious and most simple solution of binding it right back where I got it from, wasn’t going to work, because the silk was barely shreds now. Whatever enchantment had been protecting it from time and damage was well and truly broken. I just had a sad pile of threads and a whole heap of buyer’s remorse to show for it.

  At least it explained why all the curse threads looked like spider webs. Well spotted.

  I dropped my head into my hands. I was going to have to tell Taliyah about this and once I did, that was going to go over so very well. At least I was pretty sure she couldn’t turn me into a witchsicle over the phone.

  I dug my phone out of my purse and was just about to dial when it lit up with an incoming call. The number wasn’t one I recognized, and my instinct was to send the caller to voicemail, or just plain hang up, because I didn’t have time for a scam or someone trying to sell me something I almost certainly didn’t need. My thumb hovered over the button, but something convinced me to answer it, if only to get whoever it was off the line faster.

  “What.” I answered. No one said I had to be nice about it, and I had a lot of things on my plate.