25—Witch Blood
Bonhi smiled, wishing she could see the glow. “I’m crying because we heard someone died.”
“Who?” the woman asked. She was tall, dark-skinned, with a straight back and lifted chin, but a heavily-wrinkled face. She wore a white dress and head wrap, and a red sash wrapped around her waist. Her eyes were so light brown they were gold.
“Mama Soline,” Bonhi said.
“You knew Mama Soline?”
Bonhi shook her head. “No.” She pointed at Dallas. “We were coming to meet her and now I’m sad that we never will.”
The woman put her hands on her hips. She looked Bonhi over head to toe, then smiled and motioned to her door. “Magic comin’ off you like firecrackers, cher. Come in here now.”
“Wait,” Dallas asked, his face astonished. “You see her glow?”
The woman came close and took Bonhi by the hand and practically pulled her into the little shop.
Dallas followed. Inside the shop, the walkway narrowed between tables of different sizes and heights.
Each one was crowded with bowls, and each bowl was piled high with miscellaneous bits: crystals and incense, strips of leather, feathers, bits of wood, and bits of bones.
At the back of the room was a small circular table with a white tablecloth that reached to the floor, and near it was a carved wooden statue of a wolf on a pedestal, stained a deep red. The wolf stood on four feet, looking straight at them, its eyes and tail alert. Bonhi wanted to pet it.
The woman patted Bonhi on the shoulder. “Careful, he bite.”
Bonhi took a step away.
The woman threw her head back and laughed. “He say ‘don’t you tell that pretty girl not to touch me.’” She wagged her finger at the wolf. “You leave her alone. She got her a good man.”
Bonhi blushed. Dallas wasn’t hers, even if she wanted him to be.
The woman took Bonhi’s hand and patted it. “Sit down, bébé.”
Bonhi sat at the little table, nervous as hell. The old woman puttered around her shop, her back to Dallas and Bonhi, gathering objects into a bowl with her bony hands, humming.
“It’s you,” Dallas said, sounding certain. “You’re Mama Soline.”
Bonhi gasped, hoping it was true.
The woman bowed her head but didn’t answer either way, continuing what she was doing. After a while, she waved at Dallas. “Mama Soline see no glow, only feel your lady’s magic.”
Mama Soline turned to Dallas, her eerie gold eyes squinted like she was checking him for a glow.
Bonhi watched them both stand there, silent and staring at each other.
After a long minute, Mama Soline clucked her tongue and came to the table with a bowl.
She reached into the bowl again and dropped a hodgepodge of items onto the white cloth.
Bonhi scanned the mess, her eyes bouncing from bit to bit: bones, a shark tooth, pebbles, crystals of all colors, a scrap of fabric with a dark red blotch in the center, eggshells, a tiny bottle of what looked like water, a shiny brass whistle, a snow-white feather, a piece of jagged silvery rock.
“Pick one, cher.”
Bonhi put her hands in the pile, sorting through it. Something shocked her! She pulled her hand away, but Mama Soline motioned she should try again. Bonhi put her hand in the pile and was shocked again, but this time she held on to whatever it was, and the sensation stopped.
The trinket was a rough crystal formation about an inch long that looked like a finger of bony white coral. It wasn’t pretty but Bonhi loved it on sight.
“It’s fulgurite,” Dallas said, his voice awed. “It’s what’s created when lightning strikes sand.”
Bonhi caught his eye and he seemed shaken, like the trinket she held had affected him as much as her.
Dallas watched the exchange between Mama Soline and Bonhi, his mind working over the situation.
Mama Soline glowed a shining white around her entire body, head to toe.
Dallas stared at her until he could let the glow fade into the background, which he’d learned to do with Bonhi’s glow. It helped him focus.
When Bonhi chose an exact tiny replica of the lightning sand that Dallas had trekked across the country with him, and turned into the handle of a knife, he realized Mama Soline was the real thing. She might not be a switch, but she had real magic… somehow.
On a hunch, he pulled the cuff that Warrior Woman had given him out of his pocket.
Mama Soline eyed it. “Where’d you get that?”
“I don’t know. You tell me?” he said.
Mama Soline pressed her mouth into a thin line and glared at the wolf carving, saying, “Why you say that? I don’t need to know that.” She flung a hand in Dallas’ direction. “‘No, this scout here, tell him that.”
Bonhi reached for Dallas and he took her hand, unsure what was going on. No one said anything for a few moments.
Dallas tried to catch Mama Soline’s eye. “You gave a man some-ah-some real magic two months ago. His name was Thorn Severn.”
Mama Soline’s brown skin paled. Her cheeks went slack and her eyes dropped to stare at the table. There was no hiding her reaction. She knew exactly who Dallas was talking about.
Mama Soline took the cuff from Dallas’ hand but didn’t answer his question. She turned the cuff over in her hands, looking at it from every angle, then spoke. “Some magic live inside other t’ings. That man want magic to keep his secrets.”
“Secrets?”
Mama Soline straightened her back and lifted her chin. “He say he need a place to hide t’ings, even he can’t get them back.”
“His clothing spell lets him hide things from himself?”
Mama Soline nodded.
“Did he do something to you?”
Mama Soline shook her head, a haunted look in her golden eyes. “Not him.”
“Who, then? What happened? Why were we told you were dead?”
Mama Soline’s voice was a sad, weary murmur. “He got too many shadows, that man.”
Dallas crouched by the table, ignoring the pain in his bad leg. He had to get Mama Soline to open up.
“Shadows?” he asked gently.
A pained look entered Mama Soline’s eyes.
“So many shadows. One shadow stole my magic and snatched it for himself. That shadow, it live with him all the time.” Mama Soline clutched her bony hands together, twisting them in her lap.
“The other shadows…” She shook her head.
“You gotta help him. If they get power over him… ain’t no hope for none of us. ”
“They?” Bonhi breathed. “Who?”
Mama Soline flinched. “Them other shadows, they come later.” She tapped one finger to her forehead, then clutched her hands again. “They tried to steal my mind.”
“Steal…?”
“Steal it all.” Mama Soline rocked back and forth in her chair, like a child trying to soothe herself. Tears welled in her eyes. She gestured at the carved wolf beside her. “Only the red wolf save me.”
Dallas looked at the statue. “The carving?”
Mama Soline lifted her chin. “He say they wouldn’t stop until my mind belong to them. He say, ‘but you got witch blood, Mama Soline, so you trick them. Play dead and they leave you alone.’ So that’s what I did.” She nodded once, like that settled it.
Bonhi’s eyes were big. She looked from Mama Soline to Dallas.
“Were they va—?” Dallas began but Mama Soline held up a hand.
“Don’t say that word in here! They’re evil! Dangerous! Don’t call them back!”
Dallas looked at Bonhi. She was staring back at him, her eyes wide and scared, her hands covering her mouth. Dallas realized Mama Soline had been visited by vampires because she’d done magic for Thorn—and then he realized he and Bonhi were putting her in danger again.
Mama Soline nodded at Bonhi. “Don’t be scared, bébé. I got witch blood, but you the real thing. I got tricks, but you got real magic.”
Bonhi relaxed slightly. “I don’t know how,” she said.
Mama Soline grasped Bonhi’s curled hand in hers and turned it over. Bonhi opened her fingers to reveal the trinket. “You keep that to help you learn.”
“Thank you.” Bonhi brought it close to her face, peering at it.
Blue light filled the cramped room, blinding Dallas, and… compelling him in some way to touch the red wolf carving. A breeze blew through the closed-up room.
Mama Soline raised a hand. “Don’t you touch—”
But his fingers were already grazing the wood. Mama Soline’s back bowed and she cried out. Bonhi grabbed her around the waist and tried to hold her up.
Blue fairy lights swirled through the air, creating a vortex that opened up on a forest somewhere.
The circle filled with a pink glow and focused on a woman—Warrior Woman, with her wild hair and primitive clothing, her hand raised in front of her and the cuff in it, like a memory of the morning Dallas had first seen her.
She looked directly into the circle, into Dallas’ eyes like she could see him too.
She spoke like she had that day, and instead of running water, he heard words.
“You are the Scout.”
Warrior Woman dissolved into pink sparks and a series of flickering images filled the vortex, like projections on a screen.
The Ingrav first—it was a jagged circle with four slashes across it, and what the shifters used to call for help.
Then he saw a snakeskin, a baby, red eyes, a funny looking bottle hanging from a strap, the Ingrav again, a red wolf, the knife he’d made, a cabin in the woods, a black bear cub, a raptor on fire, Bonhi bathed in stormy blue, Dakota in turquoise, red eyes, the Ingrav again…
The images flickered, faster and faster and Dallas’ eyes couldn’t keep up.
He couldn’t process the images visually, but he felt them somehow, and a terrible truth hit home.
Urgency rose in Dallas’ chest. There was something they had to get before the vampires did…
some item… or key… and if they didn’t get it, the vampires could control someone important, and ‘The Cause’ would be destroyed from the inside out…
the members scattered and… killed? Dallas leaned toward the sparking vortex, trying to see what the key was.
Mama Soline cried out and struck the wolf carving. It flew into the wall. The vortex snapped shut. The carving clattered to the floor, its wooden eyes glowing red before winking out.
Mama Soline recovered first. She yelled at Dallas, “I say don’t pet that wolf! What he tell you?”
Dallas looked back and forth between Bonhi, the wolf statue, and Mama Soline. “There’s a key… something we have to find or… or…. everyone dies.”
Mama Soline raised her chin. “He tell you true.” She picked up the leather lacing Dallas had shown her, the one Warrior Woman had given him, and pressed it into Bonhi’s hand. “Take this, bébé. Put your magic in this. You’ll know when.”
The lights dimmed. Mama Soline looked up. She walked to the far corner of the shop, picked up a coat, and motioned they should follow her.
“Closing time,” she said, her voice suddenly all business.