Chapter 2
Cat stared at the broken pieces of the crystal ball on the dining room table. The thing had cost over two hundred dollars and lasted through one scrying session.
She’d been working on this puzzle for the past three weeks. Ever since the Thanksgiving break, there had been a series of thefts around town, and Gary, the owner of the local hardware store, had finally come to the witches.
He didn’t know they were genuine witches with real power, but the Griffin family ran the Cauldron and Broom, a new age supply/bookshop/tea shop with a ton of Wiccan resources, and the twins who settled in Silver Spring decades ago and ran the shop cultivated a reputation as the local experts in all things magic.
The old grandfather clock in the hallway chimed, and Cat nearly jumped out of her skin, landing back in the present with a thump that hurt her head.
“Is that a good sign or a bad sign?” Siobhan, one of the twins, asked from the front window. She looked to be hovering perpetually around seventy, though her hair was still black with a shock of white at her widow’s peak.
They were not related at all, but Cat liked to pretend they were, because she looked a little like Siobhan. They shared black hair and blue eyes, though Cat was paler with far sharper features. Cat was also a normal height instead of a giant.
“Cat?”
“Sorry, what?”
“What does it mean?” Siobhan asked, staring at the broken crystal.
“I don’t know,” Cat said, thinking back on the vision.
It had started with a flash of white light.
She’d been getting that flash for a few weeks.
Then it had transformed into a chant: two, three, six, twelve, with swirling images of jewels and flowers.
She’d heard that before, too. She normally didn’t get repeating visions, and it was freaking her out, but no sense of imminent threat had come with it.
Maybe it was just how her visions started now?
After that, she’d Seen a local pack of kids from the high school. Unfortunately, she had guessed before scrying that the thieves were local teenagers, given what was stolen and how they did it, so she didn’t know any more now and was down a crystal ball.
They’d started with gold panning equipment that was normally used for the bizarre sport of running beside donkeys in a nod to Colorado’s mining past. They’d also stolen fertilizer, a magnet, and granola bars from Gary’s store, and some chemistry supplies from the high school.
It was Cat who connected these random thefts.
What worried her was the theft from the tax preparation business at the end of Main Street.
It also served as a front for doomsday preppers to pick up supplies.
They were rumored to be stashing weapons, and everyone gave them a wide berth while pretending that a town of 600 people needed year-round tax services.
They’d reported the theft of four ultra-heavy sleeping bags and denied anything else.
She looked at the pieces of crystal. The thieves were planning a project she couldn’t understand yet, but her vision made one thing clear: the pending blizzard was the perfect cover. That had come with a sense of danger. Bizarrely, not from the blizzard but from a stalking animal?
There was a tinkling crash, and Cat jumped, her eyes flying to Siobhan, who was covered with crystal icicles.
“What are you doing?” Cat asked.
Siobhan turned, icicles tinkling. “We blasted through every defensive spell we had when that shifter attacked us.”
Cat opened her mouth to protest and then closed it. The wolf in question had been minding his own business on his own land when they tried to drive him away. He’d had no intention of hurting any of them and had fled the state. Not that the twins would ever be convinced otherwise.
Witches and shifters had been enemies for centuries, but after active war and destruction for most of those centuries, they’d put together a treaty to carve up the world into separate territories and never cross the lines again. It made traveling a headache, but it had kept the peace.
The twins did not believe the peace would last. They ran their business in town and raised their kids, but their hobby was werewolves, specifically, destroying werewolves.
They spent most of their time preparing for the days the wolves broke the treaty and came after them personally here in the mountains where no one knew about them and the only strangers who came were tourists who did not understand how big the West was and thought that the cheap accommodations with Misty’s illegal Airbnb on the other side of town would be a great place to stay instead of $500 a night in Aspen over two hours away.
Cat’s entire life here was an extension of that goal in a way.
The Griffin Coven had lost the ability to field a Circle of thirteen witches a generation back when there weren’t enough girls born with magic.
Most failed covens got swallowed up by a stronger coven, but the twins set out to build a coven with their foster daughters and share power amongst them.
Thus far, they had failed in that task. Well, they succeeded wildly in creating a coven of unrelated witches by adopting girls like Cat, but no one had yet shared power with anyone they weren’t related to.
So instead of wards at the edge of town like a normal coven, they put up spikes, projectiles, and potions all over the lawn to defend this house. The icicles were new.
“What are they going to do?” Cat asked.
“Well, once he got in the house, he had free rein. We had a bunch of warnings, but we never imagined he would get that far.”
“So now you’re booby-trapping inside where we live?
” Cat tried to keep the dismay out of her voice.
It was already a minefield to get from the front door to the street.
Technically, the spikes in the ground weren’t supposed to release if you weren’t a werewolf, but she never wanted to test that.
She didn’t want to worry in the living room, either.
“The crystal knows who we are. They’re here to protect us.”
Cat eyed the shattered shards of her ball. “Right. Because crystal is so biddable.”
“Ooh, can I use that?” Siobhan asked, pointing to the shards.
Cat really wasn’t sure how a crystal shattered by divination magic would behave when subjected to other magic, but she supposed that was Siobhan’s problem.
Cat was one of the few witches in the coven with receptive magic. Most of the foster kids who ended up in Silver Spring had an active talent that was hard to control and, therefore, hard to hide. They had three witches with telekinesis.
Cat couldn’t do anything with her magic except peer into the future.
She couldn’t move objects with her mind.
She couldn’t calm down lightning. She couldn’t heal anyone.
The only magic more useless than hers was empathy.
They had no empaths. She was sure there were witches in foster care with that talent, but they probably had a pretty miserable time with no one the wiser.
If it hadn’t been for the religious fanatics running the orphanage, she probably wouldn’t have been found either.
Her talent only saw a couple of weeks into the future and was mostly good for finding lost keys or getting a glimpse of who might walk in the door next.
In a normal orphanage, they’d chalk it up to someone with luck or coincidence.
Even humans believed they could peer into the future, probably because most days were more like the day before than any other day, so her talents could hide.
She’d just been a little too accurate with people who had been a little too vigilant about demons.
The twins had gone all the way to Romania on the rumor of a child possessed.
For the plane ride home, she’d been convinced they were going to kill her, but instead they tucked her into a room upstairs in this Gothic purple monstrosity of a house and told her she was a witch, mangling the Romanian they’d tried to learn for all of a month.
She licked her lips and looked out at the snow, trying to match the light out the window to the light in her vision. She’d gotten glimpses of the woods and views she’d recognized from long experience tracking real locations from flashes.
She still had no glimpse of the faces of those who were pulling this off, nor why they needed sleeping bags, chemicals, and equipment.
Nor did she know where they were going in the vast wilderness that surrounded Silver Spring with endless mountains of ponderosa pine forests until the Continental Divide.
But she’d seen enough to know that the storm was going to be a doozy, and the kids did not know that.
Beyond the weather, there was that menacing threat. It was almost like a…
It’s not a wolf. She could not borrow the twins’ paranoia.
Niamh, the other twin, was a foot shorter than her sister with strawberry blonde hair that was fading to gray, a compact body, and a face dotted with freckles.
She walked in with a flask in her hand. Her talent was potions.
Frankly, no one was really sure if they were sisters at all, but it had never mattered to Cat.
“I’m going to do a route.”
Both twins looked at her with identical expressions of dismay.
“I’ll be quick, don’t worry.”
“The sky is almost dark,” Niamh said.
“I know.”
“It’s noon, and the sky is dark,” Siobhan said.
She hoped the kids saw it too. They had lived through enough winters to know that when you lost the light like this, it meant there was a lot of water between the sun and the ground, and it was well below freezing.
“That’s why I’m going to be quick,” she said and dashed up to her room. She layered up and grabbed the pack she kept ready for fun excursions into the backcountry.
She picked up her skis from the front porch and headed around the back of the house.