The Lord save me from smirking teenagers. 

  Jester was barely able to contain his excitement when I told him we were going to see Lady Defuniak. He had no love for the lady who had raised him to adolescence, or most of the other kids she raised there — but there was this one girl. And you know how it is when they’re 18 and full of … drive. 

    Jester was gone before I stepped out of our Jeep, grabbing Rebel by the hand, running off down to the river and ignoring my calls to be careful. 

  Salty, the one-legged British soldier who taught history, science and small arms and explosives at the school, greeted me at their door. He leaned on one of the imposing, white Southern columns that decorated the front porch of the main house. Behind the Lady’s plantation sat two bunk houses. One for boys and another for girls. And nestled along the edges of the property were small cottages that belonged to faculty members or members of the coven.  

  I met Salty with a firm handshake and let him walk me to the parlor, even though I’d been there a hundred times over the years. The cherry smell of the tobacco in his pipe wafted down the hall. Portraits of several centuries worth of Ladies, each wearing something fancier and more uncomfortable than the last, decorated the hallway.

  The Smith and Wesson hand cannon rested comfortably in Salty’s shoulder holster under his jacket. It was always there, and only a keen eye would notice it. I never even looked for it anymore. The smell of it, always freshly oiled and ready, was as much a part of his scent as the pipe or his leather boots or the metal leg he fashioned to replace his real one. 

  “Business or pleasure?” I asked Salty as I hovered near my usual chair and we waited for her to enter. Witches have a myriad of faults, the most annoying one might be their insistence on making an entrance. 

  “Nasty business, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’ll let her tell you though, Waylon, you know how she is.”

  Rigid, stern, severe, set in her ways, unable to accept the fresh new world around her were some of the things that came to mind. However, I only nodded thinking it better to keep my mouth shut rather than insult a witch, in her parlor, to her lover’s face. 

  With a familiar crack, the fireplace rotated into the wall replaced with a mahogony shelf filled with great and terrible books. The Lady Defuniak who stood before me, her thin arms nearly crossed as she gripped her own hands so tightly that they turned a whiter shade of pale. 

  Now she waited on me. 

  “I present myself, The Wolf of the Southern Woods to you, Lady Defuniak. I would welcome your advice and your prayers in both peace and war, in planting and harvest. As long as the law guides us both, we shall be at peace together.”

  Another little bit of annoyance was now completed, because heaven forbid you should ignore the protocol and just get to the meat of the matter. She took her seat before me.

  “Well said,” she said. 

  Salty shuffled out the way we had come in, his metal leg keeping a weird little time all to itself as he marched away from us and down to the kitchen to supervise lunch.

  The Lady pulled an iPad off her table.

  “You’ve seen this,” she said, tapping her long pinky fingernail at a story on the local newspaper website. “Human Woman Loses Ring Finger, Engagement Ring on Wedding Night.”

  “No,” I said. 

  “Not much there, really, but enough. Whatever happened, they slept through it. Waking up only to find that her ring finger and the ring were gone. Then there is a lot of speculation about the possibility of gang initiations, or jewel thieves. Then there is this; ‘When pressed, Sheriff Cruz said there was also the possibility that witchcraft was, in some way, related to the incident.’

  That was not going to go over well. 

  “Who does this sheriff think he is, to blame my kind in the media for this thing?” she demanded.

  The sheriff had clearly gone out of his way not to blame her kind for it, choosing instead to throw out the cockamamie idea that it was done by jewel thieves, who could almost certainly find an easier target and a richer prize than a single ring, and the equally ridiculous idea that it was somehow gang related. 

  In my own unique way I had been in law enforcement for a very long time. And, despite the national fascination, it was always exceedingly rare for a stranger to simply burst into a home. In my experience, most home invasions in human society involved drugs and known drug dealers.

  Although there were a myriad of magical, demonic and mythic tribes in the world. Most of them were content to steal and war amongst themselves. The ones that weren’t were dealt with by me and my kind.   

  “I think we’re missing the forest for the trees here,” I said. “This was a witch, right?”

  “Well of course it was a witch,” she said. “But he should keep his fool mouth shut about it.”

  I assured her I would give him a stern talking to. 

  “It was my kind who handed Excalibur to Arthur and set him on his way,” she said. “Our mysteries guided Charlemagne, Churchill, and Catherine.”

  “Yes, My Lady,” I said, hoping to cut her off from that particular speech. I prodded her to tell me more about what I would be facing.  

  “Cruel magic will reward the user with … delights that are difficult to describe. Power, euphoria and a deep addiction that is not easily broken,” she said. “To the less matured it seems easy and fast. The prayer, study, and meditation needed to achieve your goals can be circumvented by hurting someone else.

  This generation Waylon, they’re not like us. Everything comes so easy to them that they scoff at the time honored principles that guided us.” 

  The Lady had believed that Esmeralda Kelekona was a prize in a pitiful new generation. The girl soaked up her teachings, flew through her books, and burned bright in the mysteries of their ways. 

  For a season. 

  And then, she said, things got harder. 

  “The universe tests us, you see,” The Lady said. “It’s easy to trust in the mysteries when everything is rewarding and new and easy. But will you trust them when the stone in your path is a boulder? When you go from walking on the river to drowning?”

  The Lady explained all this to Esmeralda, of course, but the young often only hear what they want to hear. 

  Esmeralda cut herself first. Mixing a drink made of her own blood with other ingredients for a boost. After a while the power from that faded and she convinced a boy to cut himself for her. 

  That, too, faded in time. 

  “You didn’t see what was happening?” I asked. 

  Her nose crinkled. 

  “Since you adopted him, has Jester ever broken your rules?” she replied. 

  “Aye,” I said. He had, in fact, taken a shine to the three sisters on the Econfina, for fortunes and, sometimes, just for company. I had warned him it was reckless behavior on a number of occasions. 

  “He broke your rules and yet he was still well enough to come here today and chase my girl around a maypole,” the Lady said. “As you know, sometimes you correct them and sometimes you just have to watch and hope for the best.” 

  There was some gravel in my voice, unrequested but still there when I responded. 

  “And how did your strategy of doing nothing work out?” I asked. Daddy always said my biggest problem was voice tone. I don’t mean to sound like God’s own thunder, but sometimes it’s there whether you want it or not. 

  The Lady looked as if I had slapped her. 

  “It didn’t go well,” she said. “She killed a cat. And that would have been bad enough but it was Rebel’s familiar. Rebel told her, her pretty face should reflect her dark deeds and she cut her deep, from here,” she said as she touched the top left of her forehead, “to here,” bringing her pinky finger down in a slashing motion across her eye and mouth.

  Esmeralda survived and lit out, like a fox with it’s tail on fire, for parts unknown, the Lady added. 

  “I hoped she would stay gone,” she said. “Seeing this, this morning, I knew my hopes were dashed.”

  “It’s minor crimes right now,” I said. “You want me to bring her back to you?”

  “If she repents, if she will come, if her crimes do not yet warrant death, then I can send her to another coven. Do not bring her back here, Rebel will kill her on sight and be well within her rights.”

  “Over a cat?” 

  “A familiar is not a pet, Waylon, as you well know,” she said waving off the comment. “This is, I am afraid, too hopeful a conversation. A witch on this addictive path will kill someone sooner rather than later, and I doubt given the opportunity that she will come with you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about all that, I can be mighty persuasive,” I said. 

  She chuckled. She rose, regal as always. She had aged well, I thought, but she had aged. 

  The dim lights in her study accented her features, something I bet she had meticulously overseen herself. And I asked myself, not for the first time, how much of all this was real power and how much of it was smoke and mirrors. Some days I figured, it was as little as fifty-fifty. 

  “Why didn’t Rebel just kill her, when she had the chance?” 

  “Mercy,” she replied. 

  Our audience concluded, I found Salty in the hallway ready to escort me back. I wondered if he had oiled that leg, as I had not heard his return. More than likely, I had simply tuned it out. The witch commanded your attention. 

  I whistled as I stepped out into the afternoon sun, and Jester came bounding up from the back side of the property. Rebel held his hand and struggled to keep up. 

  She was curvy, with thick glasses and mounds of wavy chestnut hair that she kept up on top of her head with an array of scrunchies and number 2 pencils. Three girls Rebel’s age were now part of the gaggle. Jewel, Millicent and Wynona, two witches and a Fireeater. 

   No matter the tribe, girls of a certain age only seem to exist in pairs or small groups. 

  “You guys got a case,” Rebel said. 

  “She has a new recipe for tea,” I said. “Wanted me to try it.”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be able to speak,” Rebel said. “Her latest concoction is supposed to turn a man into a mute.”

  “All men turn into mutes when they get around pretty girls,” I said. 

  She blushed, Jester kissed her as we both got into the car. It was not as chaste a kiss as I would have liked but, as The Lady said, sometimes you got to let children go their own way. 

  I called Sheriff Cruz as we drove away, waving Jester quiet when asked what The Lady had said.

  “I think that girl who lost her finger had a run in with my side of the fence,” I began. 

  “Yeah,” Cruz said. “Pretty much confirmed when I took the pictures of her injury to the medical examiner.”

  “Oh?”

  “You know when we got there the big mystery was how does someone cut off your finger while you sleep?” he said. “We solved that one pretty quick when we checked out the bedroom and it smelled like chloroform.

  “So, our unsub gets in the honeymoon suite, uses the chloroform on our newlyweds and then cuts off the girl’s ring finger.”

  “That sounds like a bad way to wake up,” I said. 

  “The boys on scene tell me there was a lot of screaming and crying,” he said. 

  “I’ll bet.”

  “But nobody’s seen anything and nobody knows anything and there are cameras all around this condo but they don’t pick up anything that looks like something to us,” the sheriff said. “So I take the pics to the doc, he takes a look, and then he looks back at me and says, ‘Was she attacked by an animal?’ 

  “Waylon, someone gnawed the girl’s finger off with their teeth,” the sheriff said. 

  And then, his voice almost a whisper, he asked, “Who does that?”  

************************ 

With her next victim, Esmeralda Kelekona decided she had been too generous with the chloroform. 

  At 24, Mitch Mitchell had begun to grow a promising business out of his high school hobby. He’d built himself a studio and started recording bands. None of them took off but word got out about Mitchell’s attention to detail and the party atmosphere that surrounded his Panama City Beach studio. 

  A rapper had come through, on a tour, and recorded a few tracks. A country star hitting the beach for Spring Break had done so as well. An Instagram of the encounters increased Mitchell’s profile to the point he was solidly booked for months. 

  Mitchell recorded a screaming, speed metal band the night she visited him. The evening broke up with a fistfight between the drummer and the lead singer over the lyrics to a song about their joint ex-girlfriend. Mitchell kicked them all out but promised to have the tracks ready in a few days. 

  Coming up from a snort and heading to the bathroom, he spotted them on the wall. 

  At first he thought he was looking at a poster. Something sinister the boys had hung up to get themselves in the proper mood. 

  It was a girl, five foot nothing, short brown hair, tan skin, eyes like rough seas. A mean scar across her face blinding one eye. She wore a silver necklace with a golden dragon on it, claws and snout reaching forward like they were about to strike. 

  Behind her was a man, more than six feet tall, a white man covered in white powder and black marks that circled his eyes and lips. He held a machete in his left hand, and had an Alice Cooper top hat on his head.

  The people in the poster moved, and Mitchell realized he’d been looking in a mirror. 

  Too much coke, Mitchell thought, time to slow it down. 

  He saw them again in the bathroom mirror as he washed his face. The man pointed the machete at him. 

  Mitchell decided he should swear off mirrors and cocaine for a while, and hustled out of the bathroom. 

  They met him in his studio. The man just stood there, silently, staring him down. The girl had a Gibson Flying V in her hands, pretending to thrash on it. Air guitar with a real guitar. 

  “What the ffff—,”

  The man punched him, with the hand holding the machete and Mitchell went down in a heap. 

  “On your knees before the mistress,” the man said. 

  Things started to go hazy then, and the last thing Mitchell remembered was the girl scolding the man in a nasal whine. 

  “I told you I wanted him awake for it,” she said. 

  He awoke, he didn’t know how long he’d been gone, to find her straddling his chest. 

  “There you are pretty boy,” she said. 

  “What do you want?” he said. “I got money.”

  “And drugs too,” she replied. “We’ll be taking all of that. Here, hold him down, for this next part.”

  The man did as he was told. Kneeling, he grabbed Mitchell under his chin and on top of his head, turning him so that the left side of his face was level with the carpet. Mitchell resisted, but couldn’t move his head. The man’s hands nearly enveloped him. 

  “Mitchy, baby, your going places, you got the best ears in the business,” she said. 

  Then she bit his earlobe, and in one smooth motion she ripped off his ear. 

  Mitchell screamed and he kept on screaming as the man turned his head so the witch could rip off his other ear.

  When she was done she got off him, snatched up the ears, and fastened them to her necklace. Mitchell was certain they were going to kill him and began punching the man. The white powder on his face showered them both but the punches didn’t seem to faze him. His top hat didn’t even move.

  “Careful,” she said. “He won’t feel it, but I wouldn’t want you to damage my familiar.”

  The man slapped Mitchell hard, and then dragged him by the scruff of his jacket through the studio, depositing him in a heap in the corner. 

  Then, she went to his soundboard and started playing the tracks he had been recording earlier. She headbanged around and smashed up the instruments. Her familiar held his machete and watched.  

*******************

It took hours to convince the Sheriff to get his CSI folks out of the studio. And longer still to get the full story, relayed second hand from the officers who had talked to Mitchell as he was being carted away in the ambulance. 

  “I thought witches didn’t take humans as familiars,” Jester said as we walked through the studio and tried to pinpoint the exact location where Esmeralda Kelekona had ripped off the ears. It was harder than it might seem, given the mystical elements involved. 

  And there was blood everywhere. 

  “It’s an offense that carries severe punishment,” I said. “Any coven in good standing with the Council has banned the practice. Though, there are exceptions. Like vampires, if the victim is willing and does not die in their care, then it is allowed. However, given what we’ve heard he didn’t sound like a willing participant. And the white powder with black rings marks him as her zombie.”

  Not a zombie in the popular sense. Those are like an infection. 

  A witch’s zombie is more akin to a slave. The spell makes them unable to feel anything but the most extreme pain, and generally makes them stronger than most humans. After she enslaved him she could have placed a piece of herself inside him, making it both easier to control him and easier to use him as a lookout. Thus, making him her familiar. 

  A witch has to take special care to keep the zombie alive. An unwilling familiar won’t sleep while under her thrall and it will barely eat. Some of them wither away until they are useless. You have seen what’s left of them outside your local rescue mission, or in a parking lot somewhere, unsure of how they got so far from home and in desperate need of bus fare. 

  “Here,” Jester said. “I think it was here. Although there are no markings. But I can feel it.”

  I could feel it too, sense it. It was so foul that even long gone the wolf inside of me wanted to be let loose to confront it.

  “Maybe she erased the markings,” Jester said. 

  “No,” I said. “That’s like erasing the spell.” 

  The markings aren’t necessary if the room is built right. Or if trees or boulders were attuned properly. The Lady’s coven cleared out several lanes of trees near her home and cut it just so that the center was their perfect place of power.

“I think we should perform the tracking spell,” Jester said. 

“Not till we’ve sussed it all out,” I said. He started to reply but I held my hand up. I cut into the carpet but found nothing. We walked the outside of the grounds looking for an alignment of totems but came up empty again. 

“Maybe she didn’t mark it,” Jester said. We went back inside, still trying to find it. 

“She marked it,” I said. “It’s the difference between a beer and a keg. She wouldn’t have let this go to waste.”

  Jester sighed, exasperated. He looked up. And, for the first time in my life, the snarky teenager in him worked out to my advantage. 

  “Waylon,” he said. “Look here.”

  She’d written it on the ceiling in black lipstick.

  “That’s too clever,” I said. “This is a dangerous witch.”

  “Well, she did rip a guy’s ears off with her teeth,” Jester replied. 

  “Look at what she’s done,” I said. “We’ve wasted the night trying to find her pentagram and she’s written it here, on the ceiling, in Hebrew. And, unless you are a better study than I think you are, we will have to bring in a translator before we can begin the tracking spell. By the time all that happens, the spell will most likely be worthless.”

  I called the coven and they sent Rebel to us. The words that formed the pentagram were mostly just curse words. Although, Esmeralda did take the time to threaten the coven, The Lady and Rebel by name.  She had written exactly which body parts she planned to cut off of her rival, and in what order she planned to do it. 

  The incantation ended with this: “And the dragon is loosed upon the world, to bring fire and blood.”

  When she was done I asked Rebel to step aside while Jester and I performed the tracking spell. 

  “I can help,” she said. 

  “Thanks for that,” I said. “But only the hunters are allowed to perform this one.”

  “I think I should be hunting her with you,” she said. 

  Jester started to speak but I locked eyes with him and shut it down. 

  “Our council does not allow such a thing,” I said. “Witches can advise but are not allowed to join with a hunt. We each have special gifts, and those must be nurtured in their own ways.”

  The argument was far from over but the children accepted my orders for now. The spell didn’t work and I was convinced it would not have worked even if we had performed it hours earlier. The witch hid herself well. 

  I ordered Jester to ride back to the coven with Rebel while I followed. With Rebel back in the mystical safety of her coven and another not so chaste kiss out of the way, I picked out Blues at Sunrise, the live version Albert King recorded with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, to play as we drove home. 

  “I don’t think it’s fair,” Jester said over the stinging guitar licks. 

  “Seven hundred years of tradition, scripture, and well reasoned arguments about the proper roles of wolves and witches versus what an 18-year-old thinks is fair,” I said. “Okay, shoot.”

  “Well tell me how this isn’t like Catholic priests not being allowed to marry. A tradition that’s not really found in scripture and has caused more harm than good,” he said. 

  “Nothing stopping a witch from hunting,” I said, although a witch would never call it a hunt. “They just can’t hunt with us.”

  “They’re powerful,” he said. 

  “Immensely powerful, and easily corrupted, and at times mentally unstable,” I said. “Next.”

  “Rebel’s not like that,” he said. 

  “Son, she’s always gonna be a witch and you are always gonna be a wolf. And that puts you on very different paths.”

  “I think that’s just bigotry,” he said, stinging tears welling up in his eyes.

  “Jester, it ain’t bigotry to recognize that y’all are living very different lives,” I said. “The simple truth about life is you don’t figure it out till you live it, and by the time you see the mistakes you made it’s usually too late to correct them. You love her and she loves you, and that will carry you a long way. But it’s not a good match and the price you’ll have to pay to stay together is a high one. And I’ve seen how this story usually ends.” 

  Jester was done, turning away from me, and looking out the window. 

  “One more thing,” I said, too caught up in the moment to let it pass. “I’ve been to places in this world that were left behind when two powerful witches fought each other to the death. Nothing lives there, and nothing grows there.” 

  The boy had a good soul and the skills needed to do our work. What I didn’t know, was if he had the heart for it.  

**********************

  Generally speaking, the tracking is the easiest part of the job. Even in our human forms werewolves have senses far beyond those of humans. We can see, and smell, and hear things that most folks don’t even know exist. 

  But Esmeralda Kelekona was using magic, and, I think, just some common sense to hide her tracks. No cameras had captured her, or her zombie, or a vehicle at any of the scenes. She was changing her form at each encounter with the human world. 

  It was two weeks before we caught any kind of break and that only happened because of the persistence of a clerk. The sheriff had spotted a handprint in blood at the record producer’s house. It was too big for the witch or the victim, but just right for our zombie. 

  “You know what we big time detectives call that?” the sheriff asked. “A clue.”

  But big time and small time doesn’t affect much when dealing with government bureaucracy. It took two weeks to get anything back on the bloody fingerprints. In that time our prey cut the feet off a marathon runner and took the left eye from an opthamologist. 

  “Why not both eyes?” Jester asked me, as we found ourselves part of another fruitless tracking spell. 

  “You are looking for logic when dealing with crazy people,” I said. “But I suspect the particular spell she needed only required one eye.”

  A week of running checks in statewide databases, another week with the FBI and a day or two after that, until a clerk in the sheriff’s office convinced someone at the Department of Defense to run the handprint for her on the off chance that our zombie had been in the military. 

  As it turned out, he was still in the military. 

  David Levine, U.S. Marines, missing for two months. Had a fight with his wife one night, went out for a drink, and hadn’t been seen since.    

  After speaking with his co-workers we learned the last place anyone had seen him was Whiskeytown, a cowboy and sawdust joint favored by members of the military who liked to arm wrestle with trolls, and pick up witches — or just girls who preferred black lipstick and ankhs who called themselves witches. 

  It was dusk when Jester and I got there. We were greeted by blond elf with a button nose who I would have called gorgeous, if not for her apparent affinity for body piercing. She offered Jester and me our choice of ale, beer or Gremlin Whiskey. 

  “Ale please,” Jester said. 

  “He’s underage ma’am. Neither of us are here for a drink,” I said. I showed her a photo of the missing marine. “We’re trying to find out if anyone has seen this man or a woman he might have been with, maybe a month ago.”

  “Most people come here to forget things,” the elf replied. “I remember him though. He hit on me something fierce.”

  “I bet they all do that darlin,” I said. “Anything else?” 

  Her brow furrowed. 

  “After I shot him down he played darts with Acastus,” she said. “That was the last I saw of him.”

  Acastus was the best pilot in our little backwater, and had a reputation for being able to smuggle anything anywhere. He claimed to be the Acastus, who voyaged with Jason and the other Argonauts, now cursed with immortality as a living skeleton. 

  He hid his condition as best he could with a trenchcoat and a fedora. And I never saw him when he wasn’t smoking a cigar. 

  All the time I’d known him I never asked him where exactly the food and drink went after he consumed it. 

  As was our custom, Jester stood sentry while I sat down across from Acastus at his table. 

  “Waylon, here to buy your old friend Acastus a drink I hope,” he said. 

  Acastus still owed me money for bailing him out of jail when the police caught him with a hooker and $50 worth of marijuana. 

  What he was planning to do with the hooker I truly did not want to know. 

  I put the picture on the table. 

  “This man is in grave danger,” I said. “I’m hoping you can tell me anything that might lead me to him.”

  Acastus looked down at the picture and then back at me. 

  “You try to tell kids that they’re playing with fire but they never listen do they?” he said. 

  I nodded. 

  “Bout a month back we were playing darts when he spotted a witch or, I should say, she spotted him,” he said. “I warned him about what she was. I mean, all you gotta do is take a gander at me and know you don’t want to fool with no witches. But they just don’t listen when all that blood rushes away from their brains.”

  This time, he said, Esmeralda had honey blond hair and pale white skin. She wore a cross decorated with a muscular gold Jesus. And the scar on her face given to her by magic and unchangeable by magic was there.

  “Anything else you can tell me?” 

  Acastus shook his head. 

  “Anything?” Jester asked, as sat back into the jeep. 

  “Not much,” I replied. “She seduced him here about a month ago.”

  He was fiddling with his iPod when I spotted a security camera concealed in the eye of a painted cowboy on the wall. 

  “Wait,” I said. “There we go.”

  As it turned out, the troll who owned Whiskeytown had an extensive security camera set up, and he never deleted anything. He was happy to show us the video. 

  We watched the two of them dance and kiss and then she snuck him into the ladies bathroom. When he came out the light was gone from his eyes. 

  The footage outside showed her leading him to a black Volkswagon bug. And then driving him away. 

  The camera equipment was so good we were able to read her license plate.

  The registration on the license plate gave the sheriff an address.

  “I’m sending in SWAT,” the sheriff said as he gave it to me over the phone. 

  “Give me first crack at it,” I replied. “Y’all aren’t prepared for what she can do.”

  “You can go in first,” he said. “But we will be there.”

  *******************

  The address was on Beach Drive, a collection of expensive houses that overlooked St, Andrews Bay in the wealthy section of Panama City. The premiere business owners, politicians and scions of old money lived on the street itself with a fantastic view of the water. Their great front lawns were always neatly cut and in at least one instance, the front door was guarded by marble lions.

  We got there first, just as the sun set behind us, but just barely. The SWAT guys marched out of their black van and dutifully surrounded the house. Following the playbook, they pulled the neighbors out of each adjoining home, and sent them back behind a perimeter that was more than a block in any direction. 

  If I thought they would have listened I would have told them not to bother. 

  “Can’t we just tell them she’s not here?” Jester asked. “We can both sense it.”

  The mansion smelled like death. But old death. 

  I led the SWAT team through it. They kept their night vision goggles on. A teen girl was dead in her room, her pink comforter covered in her blood. 

  Her parents were dead upstairs, hung upside down and drained of blood. I suspected Esmeralda had carried it off in a cauldron or, maybe, a set of mason jars. 

  A raccoon was living in the father’s sternum. It poked its head out and looked at me as I stepped into the bedroom. 

  The SWAT team leader saw him too and opened fire, shredding the raccoon and the corpse to bits. His head and torso pulled free from his spine and collapsed onto the floor in a heap. 

  “Hey,” Jester said over the radio. “Tell that fool to quit it before he hits one of us.” 

  “It’s over,” I said. Then, turning to the leader, “You did the right thing lieutenant that creature wasn’t natural and needed to be put down.”

  He did not seem comforted in that knowledge.

  “Late again,” I said to Jester. “This must have been her first stop after she was kicked out of the coven. Using magick to convince these people to give her a place to stay and then cutting them down when she was done with them.”

  As we prepared to leave the scene, Jester popped everything down into the jeep with a bang. Every clang of a knife or a gun, made me wince. 

  “Careful,” I said. “Don’t let it get to you.”

  “I’m just, I’m just starting to think we’ll never catch her,” he said. 

  “It’s been a month,” I said. 

  “Yeah, a month,” he replied. “And she’s killed and maimed and done whatever she wanted in our town, to the people we’re supposed to protect.”

  Jester was almost shaking. You can forget, if you’re not careful, how much it hurts when you’re young. 

  “It’s not a race,” I said. “Justice will find her, and I believe we will be the ones to see it done.”

  Jester settled in. I drove. We left the windows and the top up. No music either. So it was just quiet. It was just us. 

*******  

  “Not long after I was named The Wolf of The Southern Woods I offended a vampire,” I said. “He was a minor royal of their kind, and he had fallen for a recently turned woman. It was a scandal but he didn’t care. Unfortunately, his love didn’t abide by the rules and killed three humans while in my jurisdiction. I hunted her, passed judgement, and killed her. 

  When he learned of this he demanded I apologize. I refused.  

  The apology would have cost me little. The council would have overlooked it, understanding that there were times you have to play politics to keep the peace. 

  But, I had met him, you see, and I thought he was foppish and lacking in substance. Humble myself to a vampire? My pride wouldn’t allow it. 

  And then, in one night, a year after I judged his love, he killed every human friend of mine. It was 12 people. A group of cops I played cards with, a family that had fed me and shown me kindness, and two ex-girlfriends. Some he found on the street. One of the girls he seduced and killed. The family, who had loved and served The Lord all of their days, he burned out of their home and killed on their front lawn. 

  He killed a new mother, and the baby in her arms. 

  And then, he got on a private plane and left the country.”

  Jester knew some of this, I’m sure, even though I had never talked about Parris before. 

  Jester watched me close while I drove and told him the rest. It took 50 years to track Parris down. The other wolves helped of course, but we all, each of us, had our own duties and responsibilities. Someone would hear a whisper and I would chase it down. Or, another wolf would investigate if I was simply too busy. 

  Sometimes it would wake me up in the middle of the night and gnaw at my soul. 

  “Are you saying this could take decades?” Jester asked. 

  “No,” I said. “I tracked him, finally, to a church in his home country. He had ensnared a priest and forced him to do his bidding. At day the church seemed normal. But at night the crosses were hung upside down and Parris was free to find food amongst the willing and to kill as he saw fit.

  “The Wolf of the Hills had been there three times in three succeeding decades herself to investigate and turned up nothing. It was brilliant, in its own evil way. No one ever looks for a vampire in a church. 

  “Eventually, one of his concubines repented. She had been his favorite, she knew his secrets. I was called and I knew he was there when I stepped foot on the property. The poor Wolf of the Hills didn’t know, couldn’t know, what fifty years of frustration could do.”

  I took a long deep breath. 

  “I killed the priest the second he opened the door,” I said. “Cut him down with my claws before he could say hello. Didn’t even think twice about it. And I’m here so you know how the story ended with Parris. Let’s just say when I was done there was nothing left of him, or his church.” 

  Jester’s face hadn’t turned away from mine. At a red light I gazed back at him. 

  “And so, after fifty years, justice was done and all was right in the world,” Jester said. “That’s sort of comforting.”

  I sighed. 

  “The priest, Jester, the priest,” I said. “He was just a victim of the vampire. Like so many others. And in my rage I killed him. The council cleared me of it, of course. Said he had been a willing collaborator. But the Wolf of the Hills had known him his whole life, and she knew what I had done. And I’ve never forgotten their faces. Ever. I still see them sometimes, when I try to sleep.”

  We were almost home. 

  “And I know, you still want to look at this in black and white terms. But the God we serve has never shown his people an easy path. It’s the narrow way and the hard choices that bring us back to him. So, whatever he’s being forced to do now we must remember that David Levine is a victim, a slave. If I get close enough to him, I can perform the rites that can bring him back as long as we also kill her. 

  “But, if that path does not present itself, if our only options are saving ourselves or saving him?” I said. “I want you to come home no matter the cost.”

******

A few days later when Jester announced he was going dancing with Rebel and some of the other kids. I decided to let it be. Well, mostly. 

“I’m going to be in the area,” I said. 

“You’re going to stalk us?” he replied. “You think she’ll attack us? Rebel almost killed her last time.”

“I can’t say one way or the other,” I said. “The Lady doesn’t know either. Maybe she’s just satisfied doing this. Maybe she wants to start her own coven, which I gotta tell you, makes me shudder at the thought of six more just like her. Maybe the notes she’s leaving in her pentagrams are real threats and not just false boasting. Either way, I plan to be nearby.”

He didn’t agree but he didn’t want to fight about it. 

“I think you’re gonna spend a lot of time bored in a parking lot,” he said.

That turned out to be mostly prophetic. I spent the night under a neon sign watching groups of kids stagger in and out the Double Eagle. I was comforted, mostly, by the heavy presence of off duty law enforcement officers, and that none of the loaded ones got behind the wheel. 

It was three in the morning when the alarms went off and the screaming started. 

It started when one of Rebel’s friends, Millicent, went to the bathroom. She came running out engulfed in flames. That sent patrons running in every direction. Jester was able to knock her down, and put out the fire with his coat. 

And then, In their minds, Rebel and Jester received the witch’s invitation: 

“Come play.” 

Rebel began an incantation, but Jester pulled her out of it. 

“Stop,” he yelled. “You have to get these people out of here.”

“I’m going to kill her and end this,” she said. 

“No,” he said. “You can’t. This is her plan. The two of you let loose in here and all these people will die. You’ll kill them too Rebel. It’s … It’s too big for you.”

“I’m not letting you go in there,” she replied. 

When I asked her about it, Rebel said she wasn’t sure why she let him go. 

“It was the calm in his voice I think,” she said. 

“Don’t worry. I can handle this,” he had said.

Jester almost lost his head the second he burst through the bathroom door. The zombie swung at him with the machete. He caught it in his left hand and felt it cut through to the bone. He grabbed it and pulled it away while defending himself from Esmeralda with a spell. 

Esmeralda chose pink tails with emerald happy birthday ribbons in her hair for this encounter. She blew fire out of her mouth so hot that the doors and mirrors had begun to melt. 

Jester was now inside, but flanked by the witch and her familiar. 

“You first,” he said to the zombie. “Then her.”

It was a nice misdirection as Jester actually flung himself at the witch who caught him with her power and tossed him through a window and out of the club altogether. 

By the time I fought my way through the fleeing crowd and into the club Esmeralda and the zombie were gone. A burned hole in the back wall suggested their escape route. 

Jester was just getting to his feet and picking shards of glass out of his hair.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

Jester grinned, pulled an ornate, gold compass out of his pocket and handed it to me. 

It was pointing south. 

“Which Scarab did you use, Persian or Egyptian?” I asked.

“Persian, in her left hand. Now probably at her spine.”

Technically, the scarabs were forbidden for use by the council and the various treaties and agreements signed by the tribes over the years. However, they’d never really fallen out of fashion amongst my kind and we were, all of us, prepared to reap the stern talking to we would receive if any group learned that we used them. 

Both scarabs — the Egyptian was black, the Persian blue — burrow themselves into the skin of its victim. They were half the size of a dime, making them easy to slip onto the unsuspecting. 

Then, with the combination of a properly prepared magical compass, the victim can be located anywhere in the world. 

The Egyptian was the more aggressive of the two and easier to attach. But it left the victim with a dull ache of nostalgia that wouldn’t leave them until it was removed. A witch could do it magically, anyone else would need a surgeon. 

The Egyptian was traditionally used, not for tracking but for torture. Which is why it was banned. 

The Persian on the other hand was skittish, making it much more difficult to attach. However, it gave its victims periodic rushes of euphoria. Most wouldn’t notice they had been magically attacked, thinking instead they were just having a good day. 

I sent Rebel to the hospital with those girls and for once she did not protest. 

“No time for games and no recriminations,” I began as Jester and I drove away. “Did you have any alcohol tonight?”

“I had a beer and never even got buzzed,” he said. “I’m ready.”

No way to tell, really, if he was telling the truth. He reeked of alcohol, but that could just as easily have been the scent of the place covering his clothes, as it could be a night of heavy drinking. 

I would have to put my faith in the boy. 

*******

Esmeralda Kelekona and her concubine had been living in a $300 a month trailer park in a suburb of Winter’s End, Alabama called Sleepy Hills. There were no hills for a hundred miles, and the last word I would use to describe these people was sleepy. 

It made sense to me, finally, why no one had ever called 911 and reported Esmeralda to the authorities. Meth and pills flowed through this neighborhood like water in Niagra. These people had seen worse things than her every day of their lives, many of them when they looked in a mirror. 

It wasn’t an ideal place to fight. These trailers were mostly cardboard, pulpwood, and asbestos and they would shatter or collapse or burn easy. But an evacuation was out of the question as Esmeralda would notice the activity. 

She didn’t have any magical defenses that I could see. Perhaps she thought the distance — she was 50 miles north of the coven — kept her safe. Or perhaps she just didn’t care, assuming she was now powerful enough to deal with whatever crossed her path. 

To tell you the truth, she was probably right. 

“The usual,” I said as we parked off the highway. “You’ll have the sniper and I’ll take point. She doesn’t know we’re coming but I’m not counting on being able to surprise her.”

“You think a bullet will see it done?” Jester asked. 

“No,” I said. “But hell, I once killed an Immortal who had sold his soul for an eternity on earth with one shot from a derringer under his chin.”

Jester looked puzzled. 

“What I’m trying to say is that shooting her can only help our cause.”    

Jester silently crawled on top of the trailer that faced hers. He was actually closer than we would have liked, given that he would only be separated from the battle by a single lane road. But the angles of the park and the lack of trees made it the only option. 

In war, you choose the ground when you can but you prepare to fight anywhere when you can’t.

Rummaging in the back of the Jeep, I chose the shield of Aaron Larsen for my left hand and kept my right free for spell casting. 

As I crossed the street, the front door of the witch’s trailer swung open and the zombie charged out. He hopped over a little wooden gate that lined the front stoop and raced toward me. I decided the machete in his hand didn’t bother me nearly as much as that top hat. 

I put him to sleep with a simple cast. That was easy, at this point his body cried out for sleep. He landed hard on his knees and then fell over on his side. 

I knelt down and whispered the spell prayer of King David over him. 

“The Lord Bless and keep your soul, The Lord Guide you out of the shadows, The Lord Lift you up, The Lord Turn your weeping into dancing.”

The fire began in the back of the trailer, but it followed her, like a nest of vipers might follow their mother to the front door. 

“Perhaps, I’ll set him loose wolf, and have you for my familiar instead,” she said. 

Jester fired four or five shots at her, but, as I suspected, they were no use. They never touched her at all. 

The human parts of her were still there, but in the fire that danced all around her you could see her true self, the creature she had maimed and killed innocents to become. 

In the fire there was the dragon. 

I started towards her and she breathed fire back at me. The shield absorbed most of it. Thankfully, she hadn’t recognized it. It may have looked like a simple wooden shield but it was in fact, The Shield of Aaron Larsen, the greatest witch killer of his age. 

It was a stalemate. I would push forward and then be forced back by the fire. If I could get close enough I could end her, but she was never going to let that happen. 

Behind me David Levine’s body jolted, like he had been hit with paddles on an operating table. Once again, she was just too clever. Stall me long enough to bring him back from his sleep, and she’d have an ally at my back. 

She jolted him again. I moved forward. Fire. 

Then she screamed. A high pitched wail that sent me to my knees behind the shield. My nose began to bleed.

If it hadn’t hurt so much I would have thought it strange that she changed her tactics in a battle she was winning. 

But I looked up and saw her dilemma. Rebel had disobeyed me, tracked Jester through his phone and followed us here. 

  The two witches were now locked into one another. Esmeralda was sending fire, Rebel countering it with mystical energies of her own. 

  When David Levine stood up I shouted at Rebel to watch out but she couldn’t hear me. I could see the fear in her face, and it was clear she was doing everything she could just to keep Esmeralda at bay. 

  Calmly, deliberately, David picked up the machete and began walking towards Rebel. I started to get up but my legs were jelly. 

  He was still five feet away from Rebel when Jester put two shots into his chest. As he fell Esmeralda jolted backwards. The piece of herself inside the man was struck and dying too. 

  I pounced but would have fallen short if Rebel hadn’t grabbed me with a spell and pushed me towards my prey.

  I cut Esmeralda’s throat with my claws. And then was knocked back by a wave of fire and mystical power.  

  It burned her away in seconds. When she was gone, like that, the fire that surrounded my world, along with the fire that had been consuming the trailer, was extinguished. 

  I started to whoop with celebration until I heard his voice — panicky and scared. 

  “Somebody help me,” David Levine shouted. “Oh God, I’ve been shot.”

******

  Jester and Rebel wrapped him up in bandages from the first aid kit we kept in the Jeep and applied pressure to the wound. Jester talked to him, listened to his prayers for his wife and child, and promised he would fulfill the dying man’s final wishes. Levine was a long time dying, and it was an even longer time before an ambulance arrived. 

  We were in the wrong part of the world and help doesn’t come out here until an army of law enforcement officers confirm it’s safe. 

  Wouldn’t have mattered, really, when they arrived. David Levine was dead the second he threatened Rebel. Jester chose center mass instead of a headshot for fear of a miss, but center mass was still a death sentence. 

  Three days went by until I followed Jester’s wishes and drove him to David Levine’s house. 

  It was in a neighborhood of brick houses built for GI’s in the boom years after World War II. Some of them were run down, but this one had a new metal roof, with new blue highlights on the trim, and a flower garden in the front lawn. 

  An American flag hung near the entrance. 

  “I can go with you,” I said as I parked the car. 

  “It’s my job,” he said. 

  Jester rang the bell and a young woman answered the door. Her face was puffy and red. Shoulder length blond hair covered the straps of a black dress. 

  “I’m sorry ma’am, for your loss,” Jester began. “I was the last person to talk to your husband. I guess, I guess you know what happened.”

  “I, they’ve only told me so much,” she said. 

  “I’d like to tell you everything. He asked me to tell you everything that happened and everything he had to say,” he said. “But … and there’s no easy way to tell you this … I’m the man who shot your husband.”

  She collapsed in sobs.

  Jester started to back away but she grabbed him and held his hand. 

  “Wait,” she said. “Just wait.”

  After a few moments she composed herself. 

  “Come inside,” she said. “I want to hear it, all of it.” 

  When it was over she walked Jester back to the front door and hugged him and sent him back to me. 

  A man now, full grown.