“Oh, please,” said Maisie. “I’m privileged to learn anything you’re willing to teach me.”
Violina smiled wistfully as she started walking again.
“Did I say something wrong?” asked Maisie.
“Not at all. I just don’t want to interfere with Ysabella’s teachings.”
“She’s the one who told me every witch has something to teach.”
Violina took on a hopeful expression. “Well, then, that would include me, wouldn’t it?”
“Of course!”
“I would like to help you with your Akashic ritual,” said the elder witch, beaming with enthusiasm. “I could be your apprentice!”
Maisie seemed stunned.
“Will you at least think about it?”
“No need. I’d be honored!”
Violina deftly switched the topic to Pedro, and they were soon giggling and bumping against each other like high school freshmen.
* * * *
At lunch, with most officers and personnel busy or out, Yoshida took the opportunity to put to the test a few of his concerns and suspicions.
Aura was scheduled for pickup by state mental-health personnel the next morning. He needed to face her before then.
She sat slumped on her bunk with her back against the graffiti-scratched cell wall, blinking away sleep. When she looked up at Yoshida, it was as if for the first time.
All traces of her lycanthropy had vanished, along with her power over him, real or imagined.
He had left his weapon and gear behind when he stepped away from his desk to make this trek. He wasn’t about to tell anyone he was afraid she held some kind of psychic control over him, and certainly not that he had sleepwalked naked into the forest. Not till he had a chance to do this—to stand near her and make eye contact with her in human form, to see if he was affected in the same way as when she was caged in the murdered witch’s barn.
Before settling down in Ember Hollow, Yoshida had spent four years with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, during which he had been in a couple of high-speed chases. On one such pursuit, he had made a curve too fast and skidded off the highway, down a thirty-foot bank. Fortunately, it was both shallow and scrubby enough to prevent a catastrophic nosedive. But he had not forgotten the terror of plummeting through a noisy tunnel of blur, unable to right his vehicle no matter how hard he clutched the wheel or mashed the brakes.
That was what he had felt back in the barn, watching the panicked wolf fight her forced transformation.
Now—nothing.
The tendrils of her wild mind burrowing into his, the tingling of the tiny bite wound she had given him, the ownership in her eyes—gone.
Hudson had expressed doubt that she was truly amnesiac. But Yoshida was now satisfied she was. A true clean slate, with only basic human function.
“Do you know me?”
She blinked. His words were just sounds, bereft of the kindness inflected in Elaine Barcroft’s or the baritone authority of Hudson’s. Yet nonthreatening. Neutral.
Yoshida looked at the place where she’d bitten him—or where he imagined she had?—and rubbed vigorously to see if the tingle would return. Like the wound itself, it did not.
Yoshida walked away from Aura’s cell.
“What did you guys do to her?” asked inmate Buddy Sandstorm, as Yoshida walked past. “She stopped making them weird noises.”
Yoshida didn’t respond. He was too busy in the moment, the wave of relief washing over him.
Relief over what, though?
Rather than try to answer his own question, Yoshida considered his own strange behaviors and dismissed them as stress-induced.
Chapter 13
Storm In My Head
Violina was pleased to see the clouds gathering and condensing, as she had willed. Thunder, so subtle only she could hear it, grumbled inside the high, condensing mass. The storm was as devious as she was.
Thumbs hooked in his creaky belt, Officer Kebbler greeted her at the open door. “Yes indeed, ma’am! Hudson called over and said you’d be by!”
With his sun-spotted pate and deep crow’s feet, Kebbler looked to be well past the age of retirement. Yet his brisk movements and snappy speech pattern gave the impression he would be better in the field, rather than overseeing this dusty former machine shop at the end of Ecard Street, which served as an annex to the Cronus County Sheriff’s Department’s evidence lockup.
“Right this way.” He whistled a tune that seemed disjointed, as if he only needed to hear its reassuring echo in the plain-block building. They walked a while, passing locked cage rooms that housed everything from damaged Pumpkin Parade floats to one serious collection of armaments taken from a white-supremacist, militia-type group.
“This stuff’s kinda funny, ain’t it?” Kebbler asked as he unlocked the flimsy door to the small room, formerly the shop’s office. A clipboard hung by the door held a list that was labeled saxon farm/devil’s night.
“Funny?” asked Violina.
“Silly!” he elaborated, nodding his head in quick little jerks like a hyperactive teenager.
He swung the door open and flashed his coffee-browned teeth at her. “Hey, how about I keep you company?” Kebbler was shameless in his lack of subtlety given his age—and wedding ring.
“Aren’t you kind?” Violina made plain her sarcasm. “But I wouldn’t want your wife to get the wrong idea.”
“Oh, she’s passed.” Kebbler folded his fingers to hide his ring and his lie, face flushing.
She patted him on the chest as she entered the room. “Heart attack?”
“Yes…ma’am”
“Condolences.” Violina flipped the light switch and surveyed a simple table with folding chairs and a trio of steel shelving units not unlike those in Matilda’s barn. Plain boxes marked with sequential numbers lined them neatly.
“Are y’all ladies with one of the colleges?” asked Kebbler.
Violina hadn’t considered that Hudson and his circle were wisely keeping it quiet that witches were now involved in their town’s ongoing struggle against the unknown. “Of course. Duke University.” She said, naming the school not for its paranormal studies program but because it was the state’s most prestigious.
“I love college girls!” Kebbler laughed and laughed.
As Violina tugged one of the
