A Witch's Rite Read online

  Rodriguez snatched it out of my hands. "Bless you. Someone must've told you I burned half my breakfast."

  "It's your lucky day." I set my stuff down and looked around. There were eight boxes stacked in the corner and one open on the other side of the cooler. "Is all this for me?"

  "Some," he mumbled around a bite of muffin.

  "The cooler?"

  He nodded.

  "Do you mind if I take a look?"

  "Go." The rest of what he said was lost in the mouthful of muffin, but he motioned in that direction. I took it as permission.

  As I approached the cooler, I let my power explore. When it came to unknown magical items, I had a distinct advantage over Rodriguez. He was a hedge-practitioner, or hedge-wizard since he was a guy, but he was primarily human. Rodriguez could manipulate small amounts of magic, but that was the limit of his abilities.

  On the other hand, I was a witch, designed to see and feel magic and to manipulate large amounts of energy to boot. We both looked like humans, just like shifters looked human until they turned furry, feathery, or whatever. However, appearances were where the similarities ended. A lot of races, including witches, shifters, elves, and vampires, weren't overly fond of humans. America was one of the few places they were considered equal, and that was because President Ederin had taken pity on them a long time ago. Humans got respect when a dragon had their back.

  All that aside, few witches wanted to work with the police. To fill their magical gap, the police had started hiring hedge-practitioners, but sometimes they weren't enough. That was where I came in. I was a consultant who worked with several police departments, helping them when they needed more than what their hedge-practitioner had to offer. This was exactly one of those times. Rodriguez was a perfectly competent hedge-wizard, but he often needed my help. There were simply too many spells that were out of his league.

  My power examined the cooler at the same time as my eyes. While I could tell it was magical, I hadn't gotten enough information from that first touch to determine what spells were in use. Holding my hand over the cooler, I probed it more deeply.

  Multiple spells were tangled around one another, each trying to perform their task, but they hadn't been set up properly and kept trying to interfere with one another. One spell had been created to keep food cold, another to keep things frozen, and a third was intended to melt ice. Since they were crawling all over each other, none of the functions were working correctly.

  I pulled back the tendril of magic I had used to probe the cooler and started looking at the outside. On the side was a hole and marks that could have been made by a knob. The control mechanism had broken, leaving the spells a mess.

  "Do you want me to strip the spells?"

  "Please. I've gotten as much from it as I can."

  Nodding, I turned my attention back to the cooler. There were a couple of ways to remove the spells, some more power efficient and others more time efficient. I wasn't in the mood to gently unwind the magic, so I yanked it off the cooler and let the excess power return to the earth. Now it was just a cooler with an interesting history and a small hole in the side.

  Turning around, I leaned against the counter and gave Rodriguez a long look. He was licking the last muffin crumbs off his fingers. Under the muffin-induced bliss, his usual caramel complexion was pale and I could see dark circles under his eyes. A few tufts of his black hair were sticking up, and there were worry lines between his eyebrows.

  "Does your mom know how little rest you've been getting?" I asked.

  "I missed mass. She lit into me over that one. I told her I had to work. You know what she said? 'I raised you to be a good Catholic boy, not a heathen who ignores his family. Don't be late for dinner.' She took one look at me and forked out a double portion. Apparently I look undernourished." He had such an exasperated look that I couldn't help but laugh.

  "Oh, sure. You find it funny. So did the rest of my family. The teasing." He rolled his eyes. "Anyway, yes, and she has given me strict orders to get more rest."

  "Good." My smile faded. "About that cooler."

  "I know." He sighed. "Not good news, especially not with this lot to go with it." He jerked his head in the direction of the boxes.

  "That wasn't accidental or a misuse of charms. Someone with skill cast those spells."

  Rodriguez motioned for me to move, then put a tag on the cooler and moved it across the room. It sat next to a toaster, lamp, and two TVs. He returned to the workbench and pulled a salad-serving set, a fire poker, and a water bottle out of a box.

  He stepped to the side. "After you."

  My eyes couldn't tell me anything useful, so I closed them and let my power trail over the items. The fire poker had the most complicated spell, so I moved it in front of me and focused my efforts. Like the cooler, it had several spells on it, but in this case they were working together. One spell prevented the energy from spreading to the rest of the room, the second pulled heat into the poker, the third turned the heat into electricity, and the last one used that energy to electrocute the person holding the poker.

  I stopped examining the poker and whirled around. "Have you looked at this?"

  He grimaced. "It was designed to kill."

  "Where did you get it? Has it hurt anyone?"

  "I found it on a routine sweep of a secondhand shop. It and a couple of other boxes were left overnight. I've requested any security camera footage they have from that night." Rodriguez shrugged. "Hopefully I'll find something."

  "Any deaths that could be connected to this thing?"

  "Not that I've found, but I'm not entirely sure what to search for."

  I rechecked the spells. "Any victims with burns on the hands, electrical shock, or high heat exposure. The spells weren't linked correctly, so I don't think it will work the way the designer intended."

  "I'll check again with those parameters." He looked at it for a moment. "Can you pull the spells off?"

  "Just waiting for the order." I ruthlessly stripped them away from the metal, turning the poker back into a normal hunk of iron. When I was finished, I reexamined the other items. The salad forks would ensure an even mix of toppings, and the water bottle added a lemon flavor. Since those spells were simpler, I unwound them, leaving behind perfectly ordinary utensils.

  "All done. The other two were nothing to worry about."

  "Good," Rodriguez said without looking up from the notes he was writing. As a consultant, I had the easy part. I got to show up, work with magic, and go home. He was stuck with trying to identify the source of all these items, but especially something like the fire poker. I still had to write reports, but mine were about the magic and typically just went back to him.

  While he was working, I went through a couple of boxes in the back. Most of the items were along the lines of the water bottle. Not legal but not harmful either. I did find an extension cord that was designed to catch feet. Hopefully no one had been seriously injured. It was all too easy to see someone getting caught in the extension cord and falling onto a running table saw. That wasn't the only malicious bit of spell-work. I pulled out an ice scraper that shattered windows, a bag clip that would bite, and a tissue box that would give people poison ivy.

  The current problem wasn't the existence of these items—after all, battling illegal magical goods was a mainstay of modern policing—but the volume. I did a lot of disenchanting for the police, but lately my work had tripled. I had known it was bad, but no one had said it was this bad. Considering the pile I'd dug through, I was only getting a fraction of what was ending up at the department. If all my clients had stacks like this, some of the theories I'd heard about a large organization setting up in the area, whole production facilities, and possible attacks on the police were starting to make more sense.

  "What did you find?" Rodriguez pushed back from the table and came over.

  "A couple of things that should jump to the front of the pack, but before we get to that…" I took a deep breath. "How much has y
our intake of illegal magical items increased?"

  "I don't know. Until the past month or so, it was a gradual thing, but I'm seeing ten, maybe fifteen times the stuff I did this time last year."

  "Yesterday, when I was up in Pickens County, the hedge-witch Paige Queen said the same thing. She thinks there's a new black-market dealer in the area. I heard from Union County the other day, and they're having similar problems."

  "I've looked for connections, but I can't figure out where these things are coming from. Whoever's doing this is covering their tracks."

  "Can't help you with that, but I think I know why you're starting to see more and more of these things." I gathered my thoughts. "You know that frying pan you had last week? The one that wouldn't let whatever it was cooking burn as long as you cooked on high?"

  "What's your point?"

  "Remember how if you used a lower temperature, things could burn?" This time he nodded. "A lot of the items have been like that. I think people buy these things because they're cheap, realize they don't work as advertised, and pass them along. That's when you get them."

  "Could be." He looked at the boxes filling his workroom. "If that's the cause, then the dealer has been here for a while and we're seeing the tip of the iceberg."

  "That's what I'm starting to think."

  Rodriguez groaned. "Remember the good old days?"

  "The ones with the occasional magical emergency?"

  "I miss them."

  "Me too." My voice was soft. It was too easy to get lost in the memories after all the deaths. By comparison, this was irritating but hardly life threatening. "Let me help you with these. When we're done I'll reach out, see if I can get some information on our black-market problem."

  After pulling the spells off the problem items, I collected my stuff while Rodriguez scooted boxes around.

  "Hey, did you look at this?" he asked.

  "Look at what?" Glancing around, I tried to figure out what he was talking about.

  "I don't know what to make of it." He picked up an evidence bag containing a man's sneaker encrusted in the red clay we called dirt here in Georgia, though there were some odd white flecks in the mud. While it sounded normal enough, I'd never seen a shoe that was longer than my forearm unless it was on a clown's foot.

  "Where'd you get it?" Taking the bag from him, I carefully extended a thread of magic to explore it. There was magic there all right, but it was oddly diffused and didn't seem to be acting as a cohesive spell.

  "A guy was out at a friend's place. He said when he was on his way home, the shoe started to grow. He got so spooked he came straight here. I took it, logged it as a magical phenomenon."

  I frowned, puzzled by the odd way the magic was dispersed through everything inside the evidence bag. "Had he been anywhere with reports of unusual magic?"

  "Didn't sound like it. But it was hard to go back through everywhere he'd been. He couldn't remember where he'd picked up the mud." Rodriguez shrugged. Georgia clay was everywhere around here and stuck to anything it touched. "Jurisdiction is a little sketchy too. The shoe did most of its growing here in Cherokee County, but he said his friend was in Gilmer and they'd been all over the place that day. I talked to the hedge-practitioner up there, Westmoreland. There weren't any reports of similar problems, and the friend's house was clean. The friend told Westmoreland the same thing. They had been all over town and out in the woods."

  "Not helpful," I muttered. "Can I take it home for a closer look?"

  "Please. I don't need any more problems on my hands." He motioned around the office.

  "If there's anything else you want me to take, I will." As I was saying it, I knew he wouldn't take me up on the offer.

  Rodriguez shook his head. "Not yet. No offense, Michelle, but you're expensive. It's early in the year, and the boss wants to make sure we have enough money for future problems."

  "I get it. It happens every year." The sharp ring of the phone interrupted me.

  "Sorry, I have to get this." Rodriguez picked up and, after a quick exchange, covered the mouthpiece. "You should go."

  "Good luck," I told him as I tucked the oversized shoe in my workbag and headed out. It was a good time for me to be on my way. I had another meeting, and she wasn't the patient type.

  Chapter Two

  Elron

  My head throbbed. I had read the paper three times, but my mind was unwilling to remember the information. Looking into the greenhouse, I let the calm nature of the plants wash over me.

  This morning had largely been wasted as I kept replaying the past twenty-four hours. Perhaps camping had been a poor decision. I knew it would be a useful skill for Michelle, but the night had been a failure.

  In retrospect, I knew I had been harsh, demanding, and uncompromising. Those hurtful moments would need to be mended. Perhaps Landa would have some suggestions for repairing the damage.

  "Professor Elron, there's a new sample here for you." Luke was standing in the door to my office holding a box.

  "Who sent it in?" Standing up, I took it from him. My other students would have come in and set it down, but with the bench I had added to keep my personal projects separate from the rest of the greenhouse, a centaur like Luke would have a difficult time maneuvering in my office.

  "This letter was delivered with it." He handed me an envelope and swished his tail.

  "Would you like to see what is in the box?"

  Luke nodded excitedly. "Yes, Professor."

  "Elron will do nicely. As I have said before, professor makes me feel my age." All 1,545 years of it, which was part of the problem when dealing with a witch in her midtwenties. Taking a deep breath, I focused on work.

  "Sorry, Pro— Elron."

  I cut open the envelope, hoping it had useful information. All too often it was a useless note asking if I could take a look at a specimen and remarking upon how so-and-so had never seen such a plant before. The last box had contained a white, double-petaled daffodil. Whilst that was an unusual variety, it was not magic or extraordinary, which were the requirements for my work here at the university.

  The current box was only a foot and a half square. Whatever they had sent was not particularly large. In the past, I had received extra samples. One poor jade plant had made the trip from northern Kentucky because it had a mutation that caused its leaves to grow in a trumpetlike shape.

  I skimmed the letter. It contained more information than most. The enclosed rhododendron had been discovered only a couple of hours from here. The sender suspected magic but was unsure. They hoped I would be able to have a more definitive answer on the topic, but the concerned citizen had neglected to sign the letter or include a return address.

  Setting the letter to the side, I cut open the box and pulled out a small potted rhododendron and several cuttings. Luke took the pot from me, and I tossed the box on the ground. There was nothing extraordinary about the cuttings. I could feel light traces of magic; other than that, they were very normal sections off a much larger plant.

  I set them to the side and turned to Luke. "What is your evaluation?"

  "Well, if it's magical, it's not what I would recognize as such. Looks like this was a small shoot off a larger plant and they took all of it, roots and soil, for potting. It has a good chance of thriving, especially under your care. Without digging around, I can't tell if they properly treated the severed roots. Even with the travel, it seems to be healthy."

  "From a quick glance, I agree. Though there may be more than meets the eye." I took the plant from him.

  Luke's face fell. "What did I miss?"

  "I can feel a hint of magic; however, nothing about it is readily identifiable." Turning to set the plant on my desk gave me a moment to collect my thoughts. This was a sensitive topic with Luke as centaurs could not sense magic. "You are one of my best students. You are better with the plants than an elf taking classes, and you scored a ninety-eight on the magic-identification test."

  Luke nodded, but his expression did not
change.

  "Give me some time with these, and depending on what I discover, we can discuss what would help you make a better evaluation in the future." I held up a hand to hold off Luke's thanks. "I am not guaranteeing that I will find a way for you to have found these magic traces, but I will try."

  "Anything you find will help," he gushed. "I can come early one day."

  I shook my head. "That will not be necessary. Any time we spend on this sample can replace an equal number of your hours in Greenhouse Two."

  "Thank you, Elron." Luke grinned.

  "You are welcome." I bowed my head. "Now, I really must finish this paperwork."

  "Of course. I need to spend some time on my project anyway." Luke backed out of the door and moved through the greenhouse with a spring in his step. I kept hoping he would gain some confidence, but thus far it had not happened. I sighed. That was a problem for a different day.

  Picking up the rhododendron, I examined it. There was magic, but it was not something I had encountered previously. A light ambience of magic encompassed the plant but did not seem to be emanating from it. I moved some of the soil. It looked rather ordinary, though there were small white spots. I patted the soil back into place and turned my attention to the plant. When I had learned all I could, which was not much as I did not have active magic with which to probe the oddity, I changed my approach.

  After introducing myself to the rhododendron, I gently asked it if it was magical. The plant was slow to respond, but it did not think it had any unique abilities. It was new, and as far as it was concerned, it was just like every other plant where it grew up.

  I informed it that I could feel magic. It was surprised and somewhat confused. I quickly assured the rhododendron that the magic was not a problem, simply a curiosity. When the plant relaxed, I set it down. It wanted to know what I would do about the magic. I told it the truth that I would investigate and inform it of what I learned. Until then, the plant was welcome to stay.

  With that I went back to my work. This time my focus did not waver. I would get home early enough to speak to Landa and formulate an appropriate apology.