Chapter 14

Chapter

Fourteen

I tossed my seeds into the back of the Mini and turned on the radio, singing the chorus of "Rock On" by David Essex.

Fennel meowed at me to get a move on, so I entered the address Alpha Floyd had given me into a GPS app and clipped the phone to my air conditioner vent. La Paloma wasn't a huge town, but it was big enough for me not to know the name of every street—unlike Smokethorn—hence the GPS.

On the alpha leader's advice, I'd grabbed a weapon or two—besides Fennel and my magic—and they were currently tucked into my bag, vibrating with menace.

"Should I bring in the Mara blade?" I asked Fennel. "Alpha Dickhead said to bring a demon-killing weapon, but this feels like overkill."

" Meow ."

I took that as a yes and arranged the unsheathed dagger in a side pocket of my bag. "Cecil made us a couple of hex bags. I asked him not to make them lethal, but you know how close to that line his chubby little feet like to walk."

Fennel's tail snapped to one side. Annoyed agreement.

"So, only use them if we're desperate."

Another tail snap.

I moved a couple of the hex bags to the front pockets of my jeans and fastened one to Fennel's breakaway collar. He had several collars and liked to change them up often. Today's was tie-dyed purple, green, and gold. Mardi Gras colors.

That done, I slung my bag over my shoulder like a normal purse, which was essentially what it was—a black nylon Kate Spade classic with extra pockets sewn in and the shorter handles replaced with a shoulder strap. I'd found the 90's bag beaten and abused in a thrift store and taken it to a human tailor shop that probably had no idea why I needed so many small pockets sewn in but didn't ask questions.

My boots clicked on the gritty cement walkway leading up to the house. It was small, unkempt, and unassuming—one story, flat roof, aged white stucco, dead-grass-and-dirt patched front lawn—in an unkempt, unassuming section of La Paloma. I knew a few paranormals in the area, but none on this empty street, and the houses next to this one appeared abandoned.

Fennel shot around the side of the house to explore on his own. I went to the door and looked for a doorbell. Found a knocker instead. It was in the shape of the disk of Mictlantecuhtli.

"What are the odds?" I muttered and used the knocker.

No one answered.

Fennel was still exploring, so I smacked the knocker against the resting plate again, a little harder this time. The crack echoed down the deserted street.

I waited another five minutes then made the universal pspsps cat noise to summon Fennel. When he didn't return, I set off in the direction he'd gone, listening for any sounds of life.

There weren't any. It was as if a dome of silence covered the entire street. But that didn't make sense. If there was a dome, I wouldn't have been able to enter the street at all.

Unless it wasn't a dome, but an entrapment spell—or a distraction.

Light danced before my eyes even before the pain hit me. I dropped to my knees and reached for my bag. Whoever it was struck the back of my head again, and I was out.

" I've disabled your spell and cast one of my own. Get away from her or you will regret it in a way that you rarely, if ever, have regretted anything in your pathetic existence. "

Consciousness returned with the vengeance of a wronged cop in a seventies vigilante movie, and my eyes flew open. Sunlight pierced my brain like a knife. I pinched them shut.

"Damn, lady," a male voice said. "That's cold as hell. She was trespassing. We have every right to defend our home."

"Back away from her or get the claws. I won't tell you again." The woman sounded familiar, but I couldn't seem to make my brain work hard enough to place her.

"Claws, right," a second male voice said. "You're kind of small to be threatening us."

"I'm not the one threatening you."

" Rrrr. " Fennel's growl was followed by high male shrieks and whispered pleading.

"Betty? Betty, are you all right?"

A shadow moved over my face, and I opened my eyes. Bronwyn bent down beside me, one of my charms in her hands. "Is this for healing? I was afraid to power it up without knowing for sure."

"For pain," I whispered.

She squeezed it in her hand. A flash of pink peeked through the spaces between her fingers, the color matching the glow of her eyes. It winked out, and her eyes went back to their lovely brown again.

Of course her magic was pink.

"My god, is everything about you like a princess?" I rasped.

"Aww, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me." She giggled and put the charm around my neck. The pain in my head and eyes disappeared and my nausea drained away.

I thanked her and dug into my bag for the heal charm I kept in a hard-to-reach pocket near the bottom, which thinking about it now, seemed a huge oversight on my part.

" Please, someone do something about this cat ," one of the men yelled. There appeared to be two of them, and Fennel seemed to have both under control.

I sent power into the charm and put it on. The back of my head itched like crazy, and I smelled blood.

"Your pupils are the same size again, thank goddess." Bronwyn helped me to my feet. "I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing here."

"I assume you reported what I told you to the coven, and they made you follow me."

She sighed. "My intention wasn't to betray you. I was worried, and I called the coven mother to ask for advice."

"It was an accident. We wouldn't have hit her so hard if we'd known she wasn't a shifter. We didn't intend to — Noo, not my face ," the second man yelled.

"Bronwyn," I said, "I'm not a fool. I knew you'd call for guidance. Covens always come first." I touched the back of my head. The wound was healed, but my hand came away covered with blood. "Got to admit, though, didn't foresee you following me. Tracking spell on the package?"

"You told me after I'd already handed you the seeds." She gave me a pained smile. "So, I put it on Fennel's collar."

The first man shrieked, " Please, lady, get your damn … cat ."

Neither of us paid him any attention.

"You cast a spell on his collar, and Fennel didn't pick up on it?" I'd never let him live this down. "I didn't see your eyes glow."

"A quick look down was all I needed. The spell won't last long. Maybe a couple weeks."

Damn. Bronwyn was more powerful than I'd given her credit for. She was a learned witch, not an elemental, and people tended to underestimate the learned. I wasn't one of those people, but even I hadn't expected her to be this good.

"Well, thank you for betraying me to the coven, since it worked out well this time."

She sighed. "Really wish you wouldn't put it like that."

"One thing you should know about me, Bronwyn, I calls it like I sees it." My head felt a bit floaty while the charm did its work. "Okay, you can let these dumbasses go, Fennel."

The men, one shirtless and in jeans and the other dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt and shorts—unfortunate choices for a run-in with a pissed-off cat—were sprawled on the ground, their blood making mud with the dirt beneath them. If I were a dark magic earth elemental, I'd have scooped that mud up into my bag and taken it home.

Since I wasn't, I'd have to burn the blood out of the soil after the fools got up.

The men groaned, rolled onto their bellies, and pushed to their feet. Shirtless Man scraped mud off his sliced-up chest. "Damn, that cat's mean as hell. Do you have any of his kittens for sale?"

Fennel hissed, and the man's eyes widened. "It was a compliment, dude."

"No, and if I did, you two are the last people I'd allow to adopt them." Actually, if Fennel did father kittens, I'd keep every single freaking one. But I was pretty sure he was fixed—or at least able to control his baser urges.

"Aww, c'mon, don't be mean," he said.

"Tell me who you are," I said. " Now ."

"I'm Kale," the shirtless one replied.

Kale was tall and good-looking in a burn-out sort of way. He appeared to be Mexican-American, though his name certainly wasn't.

"I'm Denzel. No relation," Denzel said, with a bloody smile. He was whip-thin, and had the pallid white skin of a man who required sunscreen in a well-lit room.

"If you're referring to Denzel Washington, god of masculine beauty and divine acting, no shit Sherlock," I drawled.

Bronwyn snickered.

"Tell me about the front door knocker," I said.

No-relation Denzel smirked at Kale. "What's to tell? Doorbell's broken."

"Go, Fennel," I said.

The cat jumped onto Denzel's head and dug his claws into the man's scalp. Blood streaked down his face in long, skinny rivers. "Ouch, shit. Okay, it's our club insignia."

I nodded, and Fennel hissed and leapt away.

"Club?"

"I mean," Kale looked at Denzel, who was mopping blood off his face with the hem of his dirty T-shirt, "I guess it's more like a church than a club."

"It's definitely a cult," Bronwyn said.

"We're not creepy or anything," Kale said. "Not like typical deist cults. We don't do sex stuff, and we think women deserve all the rights, and we love LGBTQ+ folks, so we're not like a freaky religious sect, but yeah, I guess we're still a cult."

"How very self-aware of you," I muttered. "Why Mictlantecuhtli?"

" Shh ." Both men bowed their heads. "Be careful. He might hear you."

"You think the Aztec god of death is going to hear me ? Like he's just hanging out in the scummy backyard of your condemned house waiting for someone to speak his name?"

"Hey, that's not cool," Kale said. "We cleaned up last week."

"Try water. It helps grass not to die," I said.

"The water got turned off. We haven't showered in three days."

Eww. I couldn't imagine how bad it smelled in that house. I got a little dizzier just thinking about it.

Bronwyn looked at me. "Guess cults don't pay as well as I thought they did."

"Look, we're not hurting anyone. Except you, but we apologized for that." Kale dusted off the seat of his pants, his gaze on Fennel. His wounds, and Denzel's, were already mostly healed. As I suspected, they were shifters, which begged another question.

"Why didn't you just shift when Fennel attacked you?" Shifters were strongest in their animal forms—even a hybrid form would likely have allowed them to fight the cat off. For a few seconds, anyway.

"Do you think turning into a rat would have helped the situation?" Kale asked.

Now that was a surprise. I'd assumed they were wolf shifters Alpha Floyd was too lazy to deal with.

"Why'd you ask about Fennel's kittens, then?" Bronwyn scowled at the men. "Do you have a death wish?"

"She makes a good point," Denzel said to Kale.

Kale rubbed his arm absently, as if recalling an old injury. "Yeah, guess I didn't think it through, dude. I've been attacked by a feral cat before. It didn't go well, but it wasn't as bad as what your familiar just did to me."

"It's worse than you think. Fennel isn't my familiar. He's a magical cat who's as vicious as a wolf with an injured paw on his good mood days."

"Yeesh." Kale shivered.

"Funny you should mention wolves," Denzel said. "At first, I thought you might be a wolf shifter."

"Why would you think that?" I asked.

"Because Alpha Pallás wants us gone. Kind of figured you were an assassin or something. The other members of our, uh, club?—"

"Cult," Bronwyn murmured.

"—have all left town due to the threats."

"Or they're dead," Kale said.

"Why would the pack want you dead?" I asked.

"Because we know how to summon Him ," the men said in unison.

Kale pointed downward.

To Hell.

A fully-grown man thought Hell was literally under his feet. Probably thought Paradise was up in the clouds, too. Good goddess, these two had three brain cells between them, and one of the three was blinking out.

"Okay, one at a time here. You think you can summon the Mictlantecuhtli?"

"Yes," Denzel said, wincing. " Shh ."

I looked at Bronwyn. She looked at me.

We both burst out laughing.

"It's true," Kale yelled. "We can summon Him . We'll show you."

"All right. Let's do it." I walked onto the back steps of the house and opened the screen door with a flourish. "After the two of you. Not getting coshed in the head again."

The men looked nervous.

"The ceremony must be performed at midnight in a cemetery," Kale said.

"Or at a crossroads," Denzel said.

Kale jumped in again. "Or on unconsecrated holy ground. A former mosque, temple, church—anything like that."

"Isn't a cemetery considered consecrated ground?" Bronwyn asked.

"Not if it's secular." I gave the rat shifters my best stink-eye. "You can't do it. This is all a bunch of bull."

"We can. We'll show you. Meet us tonight at?—"

"Shut up." I turned to Bronwyn. "We done here?"

She sighed. "I have to report this, Betty. I was given an order."

"You can only report what you know. If you leave now, you won't know the specifics."

For a moment, she looked as if she might be stubborn about it, but after a long look at me, Fennel, and the two dorks, she released an annoyed breath. "Fine, I'll go. Things would be so much easier if you'd just join the coven."

"Not a chance in…" I exaggeratedly pointed down.

She didn't smile. "The coven mother will want to talk to you."

"Not going to happen. But I'll let you know if there's anything the coven should be involved with. That's the best I can do."

"Fine." She shook her long braids over her shoulders and stomped out of the yard. "Destroy that bloody soil."

" Thanks for the back up ," I yelled after her.

She gave me a hand gesture that told me she'd heard me, she was pissed off, and she was reporting everything to the coven mother the second she got back to her shop.

I took care of the blood-drenched soil and arranged things with the rats then hit a drive-thru Mexican restaurant and picked up a bean burrito for me and a container of shredded beef for Fennel. I parked in the lot of an abandoned video rental store, and we chowed down. We were both drained of magic and hungry enough to eat double what I'd bought.

"What did you think of Bronwyn?"

Fennel purred and lazily flung his tail from side to side.

"You like her? She totally bugged you, and you didn't know it. How could you be okay with that?"

He rolled to his feet and stuck his head inside the paper bag to look for more meat.

"You ass," I said. "You knew she bugged you."

" Meow ." He pulled his head out of the bag and sat up on the passenger seat.

"You were worried about me." I couldn't be too angry about it. Turned out, he was right to worry. "You know, those punk rats would never have gotten the drop on me if my magic was at full power."

Fennel purred rapidly. Swished his tail.

"I like her, too. We can't trust her, though. She's part of the coven."

" Meow ."

I finished my burrito in silence.

"We should stop by Ronan's and see if he's got any more of those polvorones."

Fennel flicked his feline gaze to the panaderia across the street and meowed.

"Yeah, I know they have them, too, but the cookies Ronan buys are that delicious mixture of soft and crisp that I love."

" Meowww ."

"Stop looking at me like that. There's nothing between Ronan Pallás and me but a little harmless flirtation. Alpha Floyd would fall over dead if we ever dated—which, I admit, is a plus—but it wouldn't work out."

" Meow ."

"Because I'm not staying in town, Fennel. And I don't think Ronan's the kind of guy you just have a fling with and walk—you know what? Never mind. I can live without his polvorones."

I ran my fingers over Fennel's furry— bare —neck.

"Good job repurposing Bronwyn's tracker and planting it on Kale. If either of those punks stand us up tonight, we'll hunt them down Fennel-style."

He reclined on his back, burped, and slapped me with his tail.

"No chance Bronwyn can use it anymore?"

" Me. Ow ."

"No offense meant. I know how strong your magic is." I stroked the soft black fur on his hind feet. "Now that we've finished eating, there's only one stop left."

He slapped me with his tail again. Harder, this time.

"Don't worry. I won't let my guard down. Not around him."