Page 12 of Silk Skullduggery (Haven Hollow #40)

The Half-Moon Bar and Grill was something of the social hub of Haven Hollow.

Not just for the magical community, either. It was located right on Main Street, barely a block from Wanda’s Witchery in the middle of what passed for downtown. There were other restaurants in Haven Hollow, but none of the others hit that perfect balance of plenty of space, comfy booths, excellent food (that wasn’t too fancy or too pricey), and the fact that it was partially owned and operated by a literal Sasquatch didn’t hurt.

Roy was on the Council, and very well known in the supernatural community, so people usually minded their manners when eating in his place. And the humans normally took one look at the seven-foot-tall man with the width to back it up, (he looked like he could juggle pianos if the mood struck him), and decided to take their alcohol induced scrappiness elsewhere without too much of a fuss.

But occasionally there was someone who was just so bone-headed, who’d pawned all sense of self-preservation, who decided it was a good idea to kick up a fuss at the Half-Moon, and then Roy was forced to take out the trash.

The fact that Taliyah had been called in was surprising. The fact that she’d asked for further back-up, and further magical back-up at that, was downright jaw dropping.

Maverick and I parked up the street and headed for the bar. We had to push our way through the crowd of people who were all milling around outside, peering through the windows. It looked like Roy had evacuated the restaurant and gotten the other patrons clear, which was not a good sign. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

Maverick shoved his way through, and I followed in the wake he left behind him before people had a chance to fill in the gap.

I had no idea what to expect when I stepped through the door, but I was still surprised enough that I had to stop and stare and try to make sense of what I was seeing.

It shouldn’t have been all that shocking. The Half-Moon was a bar. People drank there. Alcohol made people make dumb decisions, and some of those choices might have been starting fights. Roy certainly didn’t start fights, but usually him just being there was enough to get folks to sit down and reconsider their actions.

Of all the things that I thought I’d have walked into that required not only Roy and Taliyah, but further help than that, two completely human, middle-aged men doing their best to beat the snot out of each other wouldn’t have even cracked my top fifty list.

It wasn’t a normal bar fight, either. Both men weren’t just fighting, they were absolutely enraged. Their skin was flushed a brilliant red, and their eyes were stained the same color from blood vessels bursting. Not to mention that their eyes were also bulging out of their faces with obvious rage. The tendons in their necks stood out like industrial cable as they did their best to beat the life out of each other.

It was like the legends of the Viking berserkers. There was no reasoning, no sense behind those blood glazed eyes, there was only fury. There were no words, just flying fists, sweat and blood spraying across the floor, and nothing Taliyah said would get them to separate. Even Roy, looming like a frustrated mountain, couldn’t get a grip on either one in order to pull them apart physically. They ignored him, wrenching themselves away from his hold, trying to push each other to the ground to get a better, more painful hold or a strangle grip, that for a second I actually doubted Roy was here. Maybe he was a hallucination after all.

Tables had been overturned, chairs smashed, and glass and food were spread all over the floor. I’d never seen the place such a mess since I’d moved here. Roy must have been furious. Part of me was surprised he hadn’t already banged their heads together until they made a sound like a hollowed-out coconut.

Again, it was a bar, fights happened. I might have been willing to chalk it up to too many drinks and some kind of toxic masculinity at play. Except as I watched them, caught between horror and fascination, I could see them.

Little strands of magic clinging to both men, forming a sticky web over them. Each thread of magic was swollen, pulsing with magic. They reminded me of well-fed leeches, glutted on stolen blood. What was more, the angrier the men got, nostrils flared, their chests heaving like enraged bulls, the more the curse pulsed and glowed, and the easier it was for me to see it.

We had to do something. People weren’t meant to hold that much fury in their bodies, and they weren’t meant to fight that long. Both men were drenched in sweat, and the risk of their hearts giving out was getting higher by the second.

“Maverick,” I warned.

“I see the magic.” He strode forward to join in the fray, and with any luck, the extra person helping would be enough to get the men to stop.

I dragged my eyes away to focus on the wall of windows behind me, where every single person who lived in Haven Hollow seemed to be pressed up against the glass, watching like we were endangered species at the zoo.

Half of keeping a supernatural conspiracy intact was not having to modify everyone in town’s memory in the first place. My hands behind my back, I channeled scarlet energy into my palms. A simple twist and a deft flick, and I turned the glass in the windows dark and opaque. With any luck, the witnesses would just think someone had turned all the lights off. Then I threw the doors shut and locked them to make sure no one would see anything more than they already had. This might require some further magic—potentially magicking the water supply to make sure the human inhabitants of Haven Hollow forgot this evening. We’d have to see…

With the threat of witnesses now neutralized, nobody was obligated to play human anymore. Roy waded right into the fight and separated the combatants by grabbing one man’s shirt collar and bodily lifting him off the ground. That didn’t stop his buddy, though, and Maverick had to wrap him up tight in bands of deep purple energy. Outside, thunder rumbled overhead.

Against all reasoning, common sense, or even just basic biology, the two guys were still trying to get at each other. Flailing, kicking, even trying to bite their captors.

Taliyah stepped forward, and her glamour dropped.

Instead of a tired, late middle-aged woman, there was suddenly a tired, immortal faerie woman standing there. And she was pissed off. Her hair blanched to silver and white, her skin smoothing out into something that looked more like alabaster than flesh, and her ears suddenly swept back into graceful points. The Princess and Heir to the Winter Court of Faerie was in the house, and she looked about as done with everything as I felt.

A blast of frost in the face of both combatants didn’t snap them out of their berserker fury, but it did shock them long enough that it maybe gave their adrenal system a chance to calm down a little before they burst something in their brains. They hung there in their bonds, blinking as the frost melted and dripped onto the floor to join the rest of the general mess. They didn’t stay docile for long, unfortunately. The threads of foreign magic pulsed brighter, deeper, and the men started to struggle again. There weren’t any words. It was like they’d been driven somewhere beyond language, where the only way to communicate was with fists and blood.

Maverick grunted and tightened the spell holding one man. He tossed a look over his shoulder at me, and I hurried forward.

“I’m on it.”

Taliyah leveled me with an arctic glare. A lock of white hair slipped free from the bun she had it tied back in and hung almost to her waist. “What is going on here?”

“I wouldn’t mind knowing that myself,” Roy growled, the rumble in his chest rivaling the thunder outside.

“Yes, yes, give me a moment,” I snapped. “I need to work this crap off before they manage to drop dead.”

That at least bought me some time from the interrogation. Too bad I hadn’t been exaggerating. The man still dangling from Roy’s hand had his heart pounding so fast and so hard that I could see the jump of his pulse in his throat from over a dozen steps away. I was no cardiologist, but that struck me as something that wasn’t maybe the best for his continuing health.

Between Maverick and me, we got to work trying to wrench the curse strands free from their victims. The lines were stronger, full of energy, and I could tell it was going somewhere, but where exactly I didn’t know.

The energy felt foul, like I was picking flies off a bloated carcass. I had to force myself to keep going. While I worked to unravel the curse and its grip, I was mulling over exactly what I could sense from the spell, even though I really didn’t want to. Whatever creature was behind the curse, it was obviously feeding on something. I just didn’t know what—energy? Life force? Vitality? Maybe all three? Furthermore, why had it picked these two men as its victims over anyone else in the bar? And in this town, for that matter?

“How did this all,” I gestured with my fingers between the two men and then circled my hand to take in the broken furniture and plates and general mess. “Get started, exactly?”

Roy exhaled a furious rush of near scorching air. “It was so stupid. I thought it would just be some posturing, and then it would blow over and be done. One guy stepped back from the bar and bumped the other guy.”

I blinked at him, distracted from my work. “That’s it?”

“Don’t even get me started.” Roy scrubbed a hand over his face before making a furious gesture at the state of the bar. “I don’t even think they know each other, so it’s not long-term beef that got out of hand. Look at this mess. All this chaos because someone couldn’t deal with getting his shoulder bumped? Unbelievable.”

It was unbelievable. Oh, not that humans weren’t capable of some absolutely boneheaded behavior. And they weren’t alone in it, either. Seeing so-called alpha werewolves on the full moon filled me with crippling levels of second-hand embarrassment. But in this particular instant, it did seem unlikely.

I could have believed it more easily if there was just one out of control meathead with the other guy trying to disengage. But they both went at it with an equal insanity, and considering they were also both completely covered in those sticky curse strands, I wasn’t about to assume that this was a coincidence.

I burned away the last bits of the magic that were clinging to my hands, my mouth twisted up in disgust. “This is very different from the last victim. I never thought finding someone lying in the middle of the road in the dark was ever going to be the better option.”

Roy stared at me like I’d spontaneously grown a second head. “Wait, what?”

Taliyah locked in on me with an alarming intensity. “This is linked to the other victims?”

I pinched the last strand of ugly, glutted curse off one of the men, who had helpfully passed out once we’d started removing the curse. I pinched the wriggling, writhing bit of ugly magic between my thumb and forefinger, holding it up so Taliyah could get a look at it before I burned it away. “Same curse, different end result.”

“Why was this one different, then?” And just like that, Taliyah had her notebook and pen in her hand.

“That’s a good question.” It wasn’t their ages, since the other man who was middle-aged had dropped dead. To be fair, everyone seemed to be moving in that direction. It was just intervention that had saved the woman the night before and the two guys lying on the floor now, snoring the sleep of the wildly inebriated.

Not gender, either, because there had been at least one female victim, assuming there hadn’t been others who hadn’t been clocked as anything unnatural, like the elderly man almost had.

I needed a better look, but the floor was downright gross with the knocked over plates and shattered glassware. I kicked the worst of it to the side and grabbed a towel from the bar in order to spread it out so I could kneel on it.

It took some work, and a whole lot of effort to drown out the chatter going on over my head, but I managed to examine the edges left behind even after the curse was removed. It had been a lot more difficult to deal with than it had been for the young woman in the street, like the difference between tugging a shriveled up dry weed out of a dead lawn, and trying to rip out a well-established raspberry bush, but I had a theory as to why that was.

Ruby colored light wove between my fingers as I passed my hands over the body of one of the unconscious men, and I frowned at what I felt there.

Maverick hovered over me, his expression tense. “Anything?”

“Unfortunately.” I held out my hand, but it was actually Roy who grabbed it and half lifted me back to my feet.

I was very happy with Lorcan, his recent disappearing act notwithstanding, but part of me would always thrill a little at the sheer mass of Roy’s muscles. He’d just hauled me up and onto my feet with one hand and about as much effort as I’d use to pick up my pillow. Fifi was one lucky woman.

Lorcan could do the same, of course. Insane strength just hit differently when it was backed up by seven feet of solid muscle.

“Okay, so the good news is, I’m pretty sure that the reason the curse was so much harder to remove this time is because it was still at its peak feeding time,” I started. “The woman from the other night—well, she was almost bled dry. There was nothing more for the curse to feed on from her, so it was in the process of drying up and dropping off, like it did from the victims who died. This fight between these two though… well, it’s still juicy, so the curse probably hadn’t had a chance to do any real lasting harm.”

Taliyah’s pen paused, and she glanced up at me. “That’s the good news?”

My smile had more teeth in it than was probably strictly friendly. “Oh, yes.”

Taliyah was professional enough that she didn’t sigh, or swear, but she let out a slow breath and went back to taking notes. “What’s the bad news, then? Does it have to do with why this time was different?”

“I think so, actually.” It probably would have been more informative if I’d taken a look at the men while the curse was active and feeding, but that would have meant leaving them to duke it out, which would have made observation awkward. But it was okay. There was still a whole lot to learn.

There had been so many layers to the curse, just like the layers of enchantment on the silk that we’d teased apart. It looked like one thing on the surface, but it was only once you started poking at the tendrils, prying them apart, that something else started taking shape.

I gestured to the sleeping men like I was a game show host. “On one hand, I was right. The curse is feeding on its chosen victims.”

Roy scratched at his jaw, rasping at the stubble there. He had a darker five o’clock shadow than any other man I’d ever met. It was sexy. Almost as sexy as his muscles. Jeez, clearly I needed to see Lorcan soon…

“What is it feeding on?” Roy asked. “It just pissed them off and made them wreck the bar. How does that make food for some creepy crawler?”

“Well, now, that’s the other part,” I answered. “I have a theory. Maverick can double-check and see if he agrees, but I’m almost certain that whatever this thing is, it’s feeding off emotion. Specifically, the nasty kind.”

Taliyah tapped her pen to her notebook, her eyes sharp. “It was feeding off their anger.”

She said it like a statement, but I nodded anyway. “Anger, despair, with the old man it might have been loneliness. I don’t know with the victim who fell in the street, but I can and do assume she wasn’t feeling anything good. But it’s more than that.” I stepped closer and gestured to both men. “There are lots of draining curses out there. And there are lots of entities that can feed off different kinds of energy. But this wasn’t just anger, this was rage. I think the curse is two-fold.”

Maverick straightened up from his own investigation, and purple fire flared across his hands, like the tacky gross feeling of the curse was clinging to him, too. “You think the curse amplifies the emotions, and only then turns to siphoning them.”

“Yes, exactly.” I wasn’t happy about any of it, but I had to admit, there was something thrilling about teasing apart such a complex spell and trying to figure out what made it tick. I’d never seen anything like it before, and if it weren’t so horrible and actively killing people, I might have been impressed.

“I’m still not sure how whatever or whoever is doing this is picking their victims, but I think they incite whatever unpleasant emotion the victims is already feeling, and then they gorge on the result until the human body simply can’t sustain itself anymore, and the person in question dies.”

Taliyah made another couple of harsh notes in her book before raking a hand back into her hair. “And we have no idea what is causing this, or where it came from?”

Maverick gave me an extremely pointed look.

I didn’t wince. I did not. “Yeah. About that.”

Sometimes Taliyah was so aggressively human that it was easy to forget that she was in fact a High Sidhe, and heir to one of the thrones of Faerie. When she turned the full force of her gaze and her disapproval on me… well, it wasn’t one of those times.

“Explain.”

In as few words as possible, I told Taliyah about the silk, about how cutting it up destroyed what I was rapidly starting to believe was a spell keeping some kind of entity contained, and that lovely entity might very well be stalking the streets of Haven Hollow right about now.

Taliyah looked less and less impressed by the second. Roy crossed his massive arms over his chest, looking pained.

Taliyah flipped her notebook closed and tucked it away again, before taking stock of the disaster that the Half-Moon Bar and Grill had become. “So, you’re telling me there’s a potentially ancient and unknown entity stalking Haven Hollow, feeding on the people who live here, and we don’t have any idea of what it could be?”

“Right,” I answered.

She was talking to me, but she was looking at Maverick, like she was asking for verification.

Hands on his hips, Maverick shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I have no idea what kind of creature feeds like this. It could be some kind of powerful ghost, or spirit.”

A frown took root on Taliyah’s face, but it was more puzzled than irate. “Aren’t those the same things?”

“No, actually. A ghost is a dead human,” he answered. “Spirits are more concepts and ideals. They were never human at all.” He shrugged his shoulders, looking frustrated. “Point is, I don’t know what else could have been bound like that. Most creatures have a physical form to deal with.”

I hadn’t even considered that. “A non-physical entity is going to be an absolute treat to try and catch, too.”

“Hang on a second.” A muscle jumped in Roy’s jaw as he glowered. “Are you saying that all this is happening because you wanted a dress?”

I whirled on him, sparks of scarlet magic twining up my arms. It was almost a relief to have a proper target to direct the mingled fear and fury towards. “That is the oversimplification of the century. I bought fabric, for Goddesses sake. I didn’t say, ‘ooh, bring me the most haunted frock in all the land’. No, it was cloth—just cloth. It also had protection magic on it, which is something I’m very familiar with. I didn’t realize anything was different about the fabric until I’d already cut into it.”

Roy didn’t flinch, but he did lean his head back away from me like I was a bonfire that might erupt into a shower of sparks at any second. He opened his mouth to respond, but Maverick beat him to it.

“I didn’t notice anything off about it when you brought it into the store, either,” he said, clearly annoyed about the fact. “It was a good weave, and the protection enchantment looked normal on the surface.”

“Thank you,” I muttered under my breath as I crossed my arms and glared at Roy. I felt guilty enough for something that was ultimately not my fault. I wasn’t about to get berated about magic by a man who’d never cast a spell in his entire life. And I took back all my previous thoughts about how sexy he was.

“So, what does that mean?” Taliyah’s voice was tight. She was getting impatient. That was never good, and I really wasn’t looking for a blizzard in the middle of Roy’s restaurant.

Maverick and I exchanged a look. He gestured for me to go ahead. Part of me didn’t want to, just because I didn’t like doing what I was told. But the situation was dire enough that I wouldn’t be petty. I’d remember this though and be petty about it later.

“It means that whoever made the silk and the enchantment, did so in a way to deliberately camouflage what they were doing,” I said, slowly, feeling my way with the words as they came out. “They not only wanted to trap this creature, whatever it is, but they wanted to hide the fact that they’d done so.”

Roy shifted his weight, and glass crunched under his foot. He grimaced at the sound. “Why would they do that?”

I fought the urge to throw up my hands. I was a witch, and a damn good one, but I wasn’t a magic eight ball or a repository of motivations of witches from yesteryear. Focus, Wanda. Breathe.

“As far as I can tell, one of two reasons. And these are just guesses, mind you,” I started.

Roy nodded. “Understood. Keep explaining.”

“Either the person trapped something they shouldn’t have and didn’t want to risk getting in trouble.”

“Okay… and option two?” Roy asked.

I swallowed hard. “Or, option two, the person didn’t want to risk someone finding the entity and letting the thing out deliberately. The protections on the silk meant that it couldn’t be cut, or dyed, or damaged in a way that would ruin the binding.”

“Right up until a Blood Witch decided to make herself a dress.”

I glared at Maverick, not appreciating his commentary. “Could you say it a little louder? I don’t think every vampire in Portland heard you.”

Maverick scowled, but didn’t comment further.

“We need more information,” Taliyah cut into our bickering. “We can’t deal with an entity that we can’t see, can’t find, and don’t know anything about.”

A headache started up behind my right eye, and I wanted to dig my thumb into the socket to try and ease it. “The auction house is being difficult about coughing up any details. I might need to make them an offer they can’t refuse. It might at least give us a clue as to where to start looking for more information.”

I saw the conflict in Taliyah’s eyes. It was very obvious that she wanted to be the one asking questions—it was a bit of an occupational hazard. But she also very clearly knew that the auction house wouldn’t say boo to her without a warrant, where I’d dropped a ton of money there, and could lean on them in the supernatural world. Most people didn’t want to cross a coven. We were spiteful that way.

She didn’t look terribly happy about the decision, though. Her nod was short and sharp. “Keep me informed.”

“Of course!” I turned on my heel, speaking over my shoulder as I headed for the door. “I’ll go handle that right now while you all take care of… this.”

I gestured with one finger, indicating the mess and the two still unconscious brawlers.

I glanced back at Taliyah, who looked resigned. Roy had already grabbed a broom, and Maverick gave me a dirty look.

I blew him a kiss, and then the door was ahead of me, and I was stepping out into the cool night air.