Hunting Season (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 4) Read online

  Hunting Season

  The Twenty-Sided Sorceress: Book Four

  Annie Bellet

  Copyright 2014, Annie Bellet

  All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected].

  Cover designed by Ravven (www.ravven.com)

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio (www.polgarusstudio.com)

  Electronic edition, 2014

  If you want to be notified when Annie Bellet’s next novel is released and get free stories and occasional other goodies, please sign up for her mailing list by going to: http://tinyurl.com/anniebellet Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  Dedicated to Vandy, for helping me wear out the library’s VHS copy of The Princess Bride, and for showing me The Last Unicorn for the first time.

  The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series in reading order:

  Justice Calling

  Murder of Crows

  Pack of Lies

  Hunting Season

  I carefully glued another piece of rice paper beside the front door of Pwned Comics and Games, mirroring it with the one on the inside. The sigil on it was something I’d learned from an assassin named Haruki, and his memories assured me that this bit of magic would work like, well, a charm for keeping out vermin.

  If only I could figure out how to modify it for keeping out witches entirely. The first plague Peggy Olsen and her coven had sent on me was to set off the sprinkler system in my shop. Fortunately, I’ve got wards up to protect my goods from water and fire damage, so mostly it was just the pain in the ass of cleaning up a thousand gallons of stagnant, brownish water. I’m not great at wards, but protecting something from the elements isn’t too tricky.

  I couldn’t prove it was witches’ work that had caused the inexplicable malfunction in the sprinklers. But when you’ve got a coven of witches trying to run your ass out of town, every issue starts to look like a hex.

  This week it was roaches. I hadn’t even thought to ward against insects. I own the damn building and keep it in shape and inspected. I mean, there’s a bakery next door, whose owner was possibly one of the witches. My roach problem was localized, my shop and apartment only. Thousands of the little filthy critters skittering around. The exterminator said he’d never seen anything like it outside of a big city. Around here he mostly dealt with wasps and ants.

  “Back door is secure,” Alek said as I walked back into Pwned Comics and Games.

  “Everything lined up?” I asked. When he nodded I knelt down on the floor and pressed my hand onto the sigil I’d carefully scratched right into the boards. Gripping my twenty-sided die talisman, I pushed magic into the sigil, imagining lines shooting out and conjoining all around my shop and the apartment upstairs. I’d mixed drops of my own blood into the ink I’d used to create the magic papers, a link between Haruki’s magical knowledge and my own actual sorcery. His ability to use the sigils and this kind of spell had relied on decades of careful study and many special ingredients in the creation of both paper and ink.

  I didn’t need the bells and whistles to make magic work. Only my innate ability and the will to make it happen.

  Power hummed in my head and a spider web of magic spun out between the various bits of paper, igniting them in purple flares. High-pitched squeals and pops resonated around the store as cockroaches of all shapes and sizes poured forth from the dark nooks and crannies of my shop only to burst into purple flame and vanish, leaving no trace but a pungent haze of smoke in the air.

  “Lovely,” Alek muttered.

  Wrinkling my nose at the acrid burned-toast smell, I looked at the front door, still seeing the tracery of magic. Nothing remained of the paper we’d secured around the shop.

  “That was cool,” Harper said as she poked her head up from behind the counter. “No more bugs?”

  “Universe willing, no,” I said, letting go of my magic. “We can reopen for business tomorrow.”

  “The roaches going all vaporizy kind of proves it was the witches, right?” Harper asked.

  “Who knows?” I said. “Can’t do anything about it anyway. The moment I retaliate, I’m an asshole proving everything they think about me is right.”

  Alek slid his warm fingers under my hair and caressed my neck as he gave me a sympathetic look. We’d been arguing about this for weeks now, as the one-month “get out of town or else” deadline the coven had given me approached. I wasn’t leaving, but I didn’t know how to deal with the witches without being a worse bully. I could fry them all where they stood, though I only knew whom a couple of them even were. That was the point and the problem, however.

  Alek wanted to go put the fear of giant Justice tiger into them. I had convinced him it wouldn’t do much good.

  I was the bigger person here, both magically and morally. I had to be. I didn’t want to be Samir when I grew up, after all.

  “Sucks,” Harper said. She looked at the clock and clucked her tongue. “I should be getting home, and it looks like you two need to get a room.”

  I grinned and leaned into Alek’s solid heat. “Levi and Junebug still staying with your mom?”

  “Yeah, she keeps trying to send them home, but not very hard. You know Mom, she loves having people around. She’s going to have to open the B&B again soon though.” Harper shrugged, the motion too casual.

  She’d almost been killed by an assassin, the same one whose knowledge I’d just used to de-bug my shop. Her mother’s bed and breakfast had been damaged as well. None of us were quite sure how to handle the aftermath of the wolf council and Haruki’s assassination attempts. Alek’s mentor Carlos had told him that he couldn’t do their Sunday talks anymore, that things with the Council of Nine, the shifters’ gods, were on shaky ground right now as word spread that a Justice had tried to kill an entire building full of alphas. No one knew much but speculation was pretty wide about how that had even been allowed to happen. Faith could consider itself totally shaken, from what I could see. Even Alek’s, though he hadn’t said much about it since Carlos stopped talking to him.

  Other than the stupid shit the witches were pulling, the last month had been almost too quiet, a calm that seemed more like a held breath than actual peace. Even Samir’s stupid postcards had stopped coming.

  I didn’t know if it was the calm before the storm, or if this was the eye of the storm.

  Only thing we were all sure of was that a storm was coming. Nobody felt comfortable. Nobody felt safe. All I could do was keep training, learn the things Haruki’s memories had to teach me, keep gaining power and strength and pray it would be enough to protect my friends.

  I gave Harper a hug and a promise to come out for dinner another night, then locked up the store. Wylde, Idaho dies out on a weeknight after about seven in the evening. The October air carried the first hints of winter in it as Alek and I climbed the back steps up to my apartment. We’d get snow soon.

  My apartment was roach free as well; the same lingering scent of charred toast greeted me as I opened the door. The wards had been for the whole building and I was already sure if they’d worked down in the shop, they would have gone off upstairs, too, but it was still comforting to smell the evidence and see the faint trace of power hanging in a protective web around my little place. I was tired of b
ugs.

  Alek started pulling steaks from the freezer as I grabbed a couple of candles, put them on the kitchen table, and lit them with half a thought and a touch of power.

  “Show-off,” he said, nuzzling my hair as he wrapped his arms around me.

  “Practice,” I said. “You know, you don’t have to cook. We could go celebrate, grab burgers at the bar or something.”

  “I promised. You rid place of roaches, I cook dinner. Go shower, and dinner will be ready soon.”

  “You saying I smell?” I turned in his arms and poked him in the stomach.

  “Like burned roach,” he said.

  “That’s not me, that’s the apartment!”

  “Perhaps, but that shampoo you use will drown it out.”

  I poked him in the stomach again, harder. I knew he liked my shampoo and was just giving me shit. It was nice he felt like joking, at least. “If I have to shower, so do you.”

  “Then steaks won’t be cooked,” he said. He smiled at me with half-lidded ice-blue eyes, and a low, purring growl started in his chest as I slid my hand down lower and poked another part of his anatomy.

  “They will later,” I said, then shrieked as he picked me up and tossed me over his shoulder.

  “I accept,” he said as he carried me into the bathroom. The doorway was narrow enough that the two of us wouldn’t fit and he had to set me down. I had his shirt off and he had mine half over my head when he froze, letting go of me.

  “What?” I asked as he turned his head toward the door. Then I heard it, too. Footsteps coming up the back stairs.

  I yanked my shirt back on as a knock came a moment later. “If that’s Peggy the bitch librarian,” I muttered, “I’m turning her into a toad.”

  Gathering my magic just in case, though I had a shield more in mind than a transformation spell, I threw open my door, shivering as the chill autumn air blasted over me.

  Not a witch or a librarian. Just Vivian, the local veterinarian and a wolf shifter. Her thick down jacket was streaked with drying blood and her eyes were dark, tired hollows.

  “Please,” she said. “I don’t know who else to go to. We need your help, Jade Crow.”

  Vivian explained very little, ushering us out the door as we grabbed coats. She told us only that she needed my magic to help her with a hurt animal and that it was better if I just saw things for myself.

  “I can’t heal for shit,” I said.

  She shook her head, halfway down my stairs already as I zipped on my hoodie and followed.

  “It isn’t like that, not exactly,” she said over her shoulder.

  “You said ‘we’—who is we?” Alek asked as he followed me out as he settled his gun into a hastily buckled-on holster. He didn’t bother with a coat, having told me more than once that our Idaho autumn weather was like a Siberian heat wave to him.

  “Yosemite,” Vivian said. “He’ll meet us at the Henhouse.”

  “Mountain man?” I asked, but Vivian was already getting into her car, which she’d left running in the middle of the small lot behind my building. Only it wasn’t her car, because she drove a truck. I recognized one of Levi’s loaners and wondered. More questions for later.

  I climbed into Alek’s truck and we followed the frantic vet out of the parking lot, heading toward Rosie’s bed and breakfast.

  “Mountain man?” Alek asked me as we pulled onto the main road.

  “Yeah, he’s sort of a local legend,” I said. “Brie is his sister or something, I think. He comes into town sometimes to get supplies, but mostly he lives out in the River of No Return Wilderness. Huge guy, bushy red beard. That’s why everyone calls him Yosemite, after Yosemite Sam.”

  Alek’s eyes flicked to me and then back to the road. He clearly had no clue what I was talking about. I opened my mouth to try to explain and then closed it. I could always show him cartoons later.

  Vivian broke all the speed limits and since we were following her, we broke them too. On a night like this, it was unlikely that Sheriff Lee or one of her deputies would be out trolling for speeders. They were likely all at the diner or catching up on paperwork. The whole town was subdued by the apparently accidental deaths of the family who had owned the main supermarket, and the events that had followed among the wolf shifters.

  Approaching the Henhouse, we saw all the lights were on out at the barn and saw Vivian’s truck and trailer parked there. She pulled up her loaner car beside it and waved us over.

  Harper, Max, Levi, and Ezee were all there, crowded around the biggest stall.

  “Move,” Vivian said, her voice half growl.

  Everyone moved. Their faces when they turned toward me were grim and horror-struck. The air fairly crackled with shifter anger. I noticed as I passed that the other stalls were empty, and I wondered where the horses had gone.

  Vivian pulled open the stall door, and I looked over the short woman’s head as I came up behind her. The barn usually smelled of horse and hay and sawdust, but tonight all I could smell was blood and something rotten, like a compost heap in high summer.

  Yosemite, who had a few inches and at least eighty pounds on Alek, knelt inside the stall, a white horse prone beside him with bloody gashes oozing blackish fluid all along its pale sides and flanks. He leaned back as he turned his head to me, revealing the head of the horse, which he cradled in his lap. A long, pearlescent horn stretched out over a foot from the forehead of the animal.

  “Unicorn,” I said, frozen in the door of the stall.

  “He’s dying,” Yosemite said. “Fix him.”

  I crept into the stall. The unicorn’s eye rolled toward me, his gaze dark and pained. There was intelligence there, more than I’d ever seen in all my years of working with horses. I’d been a working student at a barn once, during my twenty years of living on the run, and helped Max with their horses from time to time out of nostalgia. I’d ridden show jumpers worth six figures and trail ponies saved from auction. All beautiful. None as beautiful as I imagined the unicorn would have been.

  His abdomen was torn open, guts glistening where they weren’t caked with blood and woodchips. His breathing was labored, rasping. I didn’t know how he was still alive. Unicorn magic, I guess. I understood my friend’s anger now, why everyone in the barn looked ready to go to war and tear something apart. Whatever had done this to such a magnificent creature was evil, pure fucking evil.

  “I don’t know how to heal,” I said. I tried to fix Alek once, to drive poison from his body, and almost gotten us both killed instead.

  “He could heal, but there’s something wrong. I feel magic at work, but it is nothing I’ve ever seen, something foul and tainted.” Yosemite’s eyes were multicolored, one green, one blue, like a white cat Sophie had once rescued when I was still in high school.

  I knelt down, pushing my sleeves back and summoning my magic. I laid my hand gently on the unicorn’s shoulder. His coat was soft and thick; it felt like I was touching rabbit fur instead of horsehair. Closing my eyes, partially for focus and partially because I couldn’t stand to see any more exposed guts, I pushed my magic into the unicorn and tried to see the taint.

  Yosemite was right. Clinging dark magic twisted and writhed within the unicorn, covering the bright pure light of his own innate power. The taint reminded me of those pictures they show you after oil spills, where the animals are coated in inky black sludge, barely visible as a creature beneath the filth.

  The magic was alien to me, however. I didn’t know how to fight it, or how to kill it. I pictured my own power as dish soap and attempted to scrub away the filth. The filth reacted by spreading and writhing, not retreating. Nausea ate a hole in my stomach as I swallowed bile and struggled to retain focus, to keep the magical bond with the unicorn. He was trying to fight, but his light was so dim, his own power nearly extinguished by the filth.

  Fireball? No problem. Shields? Lightning? Destruction? Finding lost socks? I was good at these things. When it came to this kind of thing, I was lost. Helpless. I hat
ed it.

  A long gasp rattled from the unicorn’s throat and he stilled beneath my hand.

  “No you fucking don’t,” I muttered. I was not letting the unicorn go gentle into that evil damn night.

  Turning my magic into a lance, I speared through the filth, reaching for the dimming sparkle of his power. “Rage, rage,” I whispered, barely aware of the sound of my own voice.

  The iridescent power touched mine and joy filled me, pure and wild. The joy of a flower blooming through the last frost of winter, sunlight breaking warm and golden through a clouded sky. The burble of a brook, clear water cold and sweet on the tongue. The joy of storm winds whipping down a valley and the quiet of a forest buried in fresh snow.

  I clung to that joy, though it hurt, like staring into the sun. I fed it strength, trying to remember every time in my life I’d ever felt like this, giving over everything good and happy that I had for this creature until one memory stood clear.

  It’s dark and everyone was saying there would be below-freezing temperatures tonight. I had nowhere to go, so when the little Asian guy offered me a warm meal and somewhere to sleep tonight, I figured even if he wanted a fuck or something, I could talk him down to a handjob. He’s pretty short and thin. I’m in a weird old house and he’s arguing with two women in the other room. I try not to listen. I guess they don’t like the idea of this guy bringing home a street kid, but now I’m not so certain why he did. Seems weird to pick up a kid when you already have two women, right? Maybe they are only into each other.

  I’m debating what the wooden clock on the wall might be worth if I can get out of here and pawn it when the women come in to the kitchen. One starts making me another sandwich. The other sits down across from me at the little table.