Asil’s Third Date Asil and the Not-Date #4
She hadn’t taken her hand away from the amulet she wore; he supposed that it held some sort of protective magic. With rare exceptions, white witches were not very powerful, and they were prey to their darker sisters. They needed all the protection they could get.
Asil knew a lot about witches. He and his beloved had taken a witchborn child into their home. Mariposa. That child had grown up and killed his mate. She had killed a lot of other people, too.
“Take the next left,” Tami said, then continued as if he had asked her a question—maybe he had.
“We found Joshua wandering around homeless two years ago, scooped him up, and as there was nothing wrong with him other than his mother is a hoarder, we dusted him off and found a foster home for him. Straight for about two miles.”
He had to admire her emergency persona. Her voice was calm, and if she kept a hand braced on the dashboard, he didn’t hold it against her. He was driving thirty miles an hour over the speed limit in traffic and she was only human.
“But he visits his sisters?”
“A good thing,” she told him. “His mother was better when he was a child. He tells me that before she inherited her parents’ house, they lived in a small apartment and she kept that clean. But her parents were hoarders and she just…let the house absorb her, too. Next right.”
His wolf didn’t like taking orders—even necessary directions—from her, from someone less dominant than he. Few people were more dominant.
His wolf’s temper was not helped by her being a witch. His wolf did not like witches.
Neither did Asil, but he also believed in being fair. She had not asked to be a witch; witches were born, not made. Her only choice was what kind of witch she would be.
White witches might draw upon only themselves for power—unlike gray witches, who drew upon the willingly offered pain and suffering of others. Or black witches, who did not bother with consent when they tortured and killed their victims. Black witches like Mariposa, who had killed his mate.
Tami had made the more difficult choice. She had chosen to stay a white witch, to remain vulnerable to the witches who were not so nice. Asil had a lot of respect for that.
His wolf, however, felt no need to be fair: a witch was a witch.
The Subaru broke loose on the ice and Asil had to concentrate to bring it back in line. Even with his reflexes and his car—he’d brought the Subaru, which handled better on winter roads than his Porsche—driving on the ice and slush was tricky.
They turned onto a street of Craftsman houses—not mansions, but substantial buildings. Most of them were well tended, a few showed signs of being recently renovated, and one of them was boarded up with scaffolding lining the outer walls.
The house Tami directed him to park in front of had good bones.
But its paint was faded, peeling around the windows.
The once-white picket fence leaned this way and that and was missing pieces, giving it the look of a jack-o’-lantern’s grin.
None of the walkways had been cleared of snow; instead, a narrow track formed by foot traffic disappeared around the side of the house.
As soon as he got out of the car, Asil could smell rotting food, moldering fabrics, and something foul that had him reaching over the back of the seat for the case he kept there for old times’ sake. He slung the strap over his shoulder and followed Tami to the gate.
“No smoke,” she said, her voice quiet. “Let’s head to the back door. It’s closer to the girls’ room. That way we might avoid Joshua’s mom. She doesn’t like strangers—especially strangers who are male and—” She looked for a word, then said, apologetically, “Not white.”
“I am a Moor,” he told her.
He did not expect his words to bring her to a full stop. “ ‘Moor’ is racist,” she told him. “Not to mention antiquated and imprecise.”
He closed his eyes, because the snap to her voice made his wolf—already agitated—want to show her why people didn’t just contradict a dominant wolf. Especially when one was a witch.
She was a defender of the downtrodden. He would not hurt her, would not allow his wolf to hurt her.
“Tami,” he said softly, and when he opened his eyes, she hissed and took a step back.
“I am very old and my wolf is generally angry. Arguing makes it—” Violent.
Murderous. He picked a less alarming but still accurate word.
“Obstreperous. I am descended from African Berbers and people from the Arabian Peninsula. I am thus a Spanish Moor, however antiquated the term. Perhaps we should go rescue the children?”
She watched him, like a rabbit who suddenly sees a hawk. He sometimes enjoyed making people look at him like that. But he didn’t enjoy it from her. His wolf did.
“I apologize for scaring you,” he said. “You are not in danger from me—” A promise must be kept, he advised his wolf sternly but was not hopeful of being heeded. “But you will help me greatly if you make suggestions rather than give orders.”
When she didn’t move, he started walking toward the back of the house, following the trail to what was presumably the way in, judging by the recent tracks.
A woman who worked with the homeless, where predators and prey mimicked each other, would not stay frightened of him for long, he trusted.
And indeed, after he had walked a few steps, she fell in behind him.
“My mother told me that some of the werewolves get really old,” she said. “Centuries.”
“Your mother was right,” he told her.
“The Spanish Moors…”
“I am very old,” he agreed.
“Okay,” she said in a small voice as they came to the back of the house. “Very old. I am sorry, my reaction is a hazard of the job. A lot of my people are minorities of one sort or another.”
We like her, he told his wolf. She’s a good person.
There was a set of wooden steps that rose about three feet to the door at the back of the house. No one had attempted to clear them.
“Don’t walk in the unmarked snow,” he advised, noting that this close to the house, the miasmatic stench was unpleasantly strong. “Joshua said on the phone that his mother barred the window—would it be easier to go through this window he spoke of?”
She shook her head. “I assume you mean you could deal with the bars, but the window in the girls’ room is less than a foot square. We might be able to get the girls out through it, but Joshua is six feet tall and broad-shouldered.”
He could go through the wall. But since he judged that the children were in no immediate danger, there was no reason to destroy the structure.
“Very well,” he said. “Since I am more likely to be unhurt if the floorboards go out beneath our feet, why don’t I lead the way, and you tell me—politely, please—where to go?”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
He turned the handle on the door and it opened into what had once been a kitchen. He could tell because there was still about two feet of refrigerator visible over the top of masses of garbage bags and boxes and totes. Asil coughed at the cacophony of mephitises and took an involuntary step back.
“The kitchen is the worst of it for smells,” said Tami in a grim tone. “At least they don’t have pets. I’ve been in places full of kittens and half-starved dogs that look like this and smell worse.”
“There are rats,” observed Asil, because the scent of rat urine was a part of what he smelled. “But I suppose that you might not consider them pets.”
He could smell other things, too. Rotten food of various types.
Old sweat and feces, rat and otherwise. Oddly, given the general filth, he caught the pungent odor of bleach, as if someone had recently dumped a gallon somewhere on the other side of the building.
That one made him stiffen, but there was no corresponding ammonia.
No one was trying to kill anyone via chemistry.
“No pet rats for me,” she said, looking as eager as he felt about stepping into the cave of aggregated stuff.
He didn’t pick up the odor that had caused him to bring his case with him. Perhaps he’d been mistaken, or maybe it was hiding beneath the filth. Or the bleach. He shifted the strap so that the case was less likely to catch on detritus.
“Rats are clever beasts. As smart as dogs, if not so long-lived.” Asil stepped on a strong-looking box and climbed into the room.
“I don’t want to talk about rats while we are crawling among them. Please?” she said. “And the way to the kids’ room is down the hallway to the right of the fridge.”
He noticed that there seemed to be a trail of compacted rubbish that led in the direction she had indicated.
They crunched and climbed past two doors nearly covered to the top of the doorframe and then slid downhill to a small area that had been cleared of stuff all the way down to a hardwood floor.
An area that looked as though it had been bigger until very recently.
The boy had told Tami there had been an avalanche, and that’s what it looked like, too.
A full-sized metal desk of the sort ubiquitously found in government offices after World War II was the main bulk of it, but there were bags and boxes—cardboard and clear plastic—scattered around.
The fall had left a divot in the mass just beyond the cleaned space.
Asil’s eyes narrowed grimly. He might not be able to pick out the scent of the creature, but there was an intent to the way in which the desk had fallen that made him certain he’d been right about the existence of forces at work that were darker than gravity and neglect.
The boy had said that he thought he smelled smoke, but by the time he called Tami—in a panic—the smell was gone. Magic, dark magic, could have an acrid scent if you were one of the humans sensitive to it, a scent easily mistaken for smoke.
There was an enemy here, and Asil’s first task was to remove the innocents from danger. That was not going to be as easy as he’d assumed it would be.