“Have you ever found squatters or animals? I mean, something other than a ghost?” I asked, holding the thermal underwear up to me. It looked like it would fit. “These are clean, right?”
He snorted. “Of course they’re clean. We wash everything when we come back from a run. Though you might want to get your own. Spending a night in the cold isn’t out of the ordinary for what we do. We keep spares on hand, but most of us have full camping gear, a top-notch sleeping bag—everything we need to bivouac in any situation, whether it’s midsummer or midwinter.”
I paused to make a note on my phone to buy camping gear and long johns.
“As to whether we’ve ever found a natural cause for what someone thought was a haunting, or other UL—”
“UL?” I asked.
“Urban legend. Anyway, the answer is yes. Last year we were sent out to investigate a potential Jersey devil–like case, but it was just a wolf shifter who…well, this was worse than a UL in this case. The wolf shifter had been hexed and when he transformed, he couldn’t finish the shift. He couldn’t return to his human form, either. He died after a few days, and the witch who cast the spell was brought up on charges by the tribunal of Court Magika. He was stripped of his powers and sent to prison out on Gull Island.”
“Why would he want to hex the shifter?”
“Love triangle…the wolf shifter was the husband of the witch’s mistress.”
Court Magika was a tribunal who pronounced sentence on cases that just couldn’t fit in the normal court systems. Made up of a council of witches who were also lawyers and judges, Court Magika had the power of life and death at their fingers.
“That’s horrible,” I said, thinking of the poor shifter. Caught in mid-transformation, he would have been in incredible pain, unable to fully shift either way. The strain on his body had to have eventually killed him.
“Trust me, the witch who cast that hex paid for it. Life on Gull Island, especially when you’ve had your powers stripped, is no walk in the park.” Caitlin gave me a smile from where she was polishing a couple of the camera lenses.
“She’s right,” Hank said. “Anyway, so the ‘devil’ we were looking for was the shifter who lived for five days in the woods before he died. They only caught the witch because the shifter’s wife finally turned herself in. The guilt on her conscience was more than she could bear.
“We’ve had other cases like that, where it turned out to be something totally normal. I’d say the ratio is about 70 percent actual hauntings or whatever, and 30 percent false alarms. But even the false alarms can be daunting, like with the wolf shifter,” Hank said. “We’re good to go. Let’s get the van loaded.”
“I stopped and bought sandwiches, chips, candy bars, and water. We’ll stop on the way for coffee,” Caitlin said. “I think we’re ready to go.”
“I need to put these on,” I said, holding up the long underwear. I hurried to the bathroom, did my business, and slid on the long-sleeved undershirt and the leggings. While I wasn’t looking forward to returning to the asylum, I decided to look at it as an adventure. Might as well go full immersion on the job, and at least I wouldn’t be alone. As I returned to the main room, Hank and Caitlin were carrying bags of equipment out the door.
“We’re ready. Let’s head out to the van,” Tad said.
“Whose van?” I asked.
“Conjure Ink owns a van—we can transport all our equipment as well as up to seven people.” He locked the office door behind us as we trudged out into the overcast morning. It wasn’t snowing at the moment, but the temperatures were still hovering around the upper twenties, and everything had a frozen sheen to it. It was beautiful, in an Elsa sort of way.
I crunched over the snow, following the others. We were headed toward a large van, and when we got there, Tad opened the door to reveal what looked like a bank of high-tech surveillance equipment mounted on a fold-down table on the opposite wall of the van. There were two seats up front, three near the computer equipment, and two more in the back, where I saw the stack of sleeping bags.
Caitlin, Hank, and I sorted the equipment as Tad slid into the driver’s seat. Then, Caitlin and Hank took their places near the table. I stood there, unsure of where to sit.
“January, ride shotgun,” Tad said.
“I wasn’t sure where you wanted me,” I said as I belted myself into the front passenger seat. “What’s all that back there?”
“Computers. We can download our results and know what we’re dealing with, without having to return to the office during sessions.” He glanced back to make sure that Caitlin and Hank were fully situated and buckled in, then eased the van out of the parking space and we were on the road.
“How long have you been interested in work like this?” I asked.
Tad shrugged. “All my life, I guess. I started studying about UFOs when I was eight. Of course, as a kid I devoured the tabloids. I didn’t care about who was dating who, I wanted to read the stories about the dogman or whatnot. I knew most of it was garbage, but I thought if I could just find one thing that was real…”
“Did you know about the Otherkin community at the time?” It seemed unbelievable to me, but there were a handful of humans who still denied the existence of magic, of shifters, of the various preternatural entities who walked the face of the planet. How they still insisted that their beliefs had any veracity confounded me—evidence was everywhere, including in a lot of their next-door neighbors’ houses.
“Oh, I always knew. Our neighbor was a shifter. He was an eccentric old coot who, every full moon, would go out and shift into his alt-form and run around the neighborhood, looking for treats.” He grinned. “That old dude was tough as nails. He was an ex-marine who had some form of PTSD. You know, one of those Get-off-my-lawn-you-kids types. But when he shifted into his collie form, he was the sweetest dog ever. Everybody loved him when he was in his alt-form, and everybody watched out for him. Poor guy was hit one night by a car. The driver couldn’t see him because it was hailing like crazy. He was in his alt-form, trying to get home, when he darted across the street at the wrong time. The driver skidded, but he clipped him a good one. It was hard on the whole neighborhood when he died.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I opted for, “Then you’ve been aware of shifters all your life.”
“I wanted to be a witch. But my mother told me we didn’t have the blood for it. I begged her to send me to one of the magic academies, but I couldn’t even get admitted. We just have no magical blood in our veins.”
“How did you come to start Conjure Ink?”
“I came across the Urban Legends organization about five years ago. I decided since they didn’t have a member site here in Western Washington, I’d create one. That’s when I began to pull together Conjure Ink.” He pulled into a drive-thru Starbucks and we all placed orders for far too much caffeine and sugar.
While waiting for our orders to be filled, I thought about Tad.
So many people envied those who were born to magical families, but there were other ways to work with magic, even if you didn’t have the aptitude. For instance, there were garden witches who worked on the practical level—they grew the herbs and harvested them under the right signs of the moon, and while they couldn’t cast the spells, they could commune with the plants and produce ethically sourced ingredients for those who could work the magic. But I knew that sort of side business wouldn’t have suited Tad at all. He had a thirst for knowledge, and running Conjure Ink seemed perfect for him.