I jumped and blinked. “Sorry. Just trying to sort through the images.”
“Anything useful.”
“She’s moving fast but not as fast as she did last night. She’s attempting to give us time to get there.”
“Because of the half-baked agreement she made with us?”
“Because she doesn’t want to murder an unborn child.”
He swore. Several times. “We really have to stop this bitch.”
The bitch he was talking about this time was the witch, not the hone-onna. “Yes. But the reservation is a big place, and she’s had more than enough time to set up her defenses.”
“You can’t set the wild magic on an investigative hunt? That’d surely be the easiest way to at least find her altar, and it’s something she wouldn’t be expecting or guarded against.”
I hesitated. I hadn’t actually thought of doing that, and it might be worthwhile trying. And yet, at the same time, it was also dangerous. “The last thing we need is this witch thinking the wild magic is, in any way, controllable.”
Especially when we had a second wellspring that no one as yet knew about.
“Even a witch powerful enough to control a dark spirit over the length of time this one apparently has isn’t getting through the protections that now ring the wellspring.”
It wasn’t the main wellspring that I was worried about. While Katie and the soul of her witch husband did protect the second wellspring, neither had been tested yet. Not in any way. I really wanted to keep it that way.
“One thread,” Monty said. “That’s not dangerous, and it’s unlikely to catch the witch’s attention.”
“I can try.” Albeit reluctantly.
But he was right—it would be the quickest and easiest way to find the witch. Even if Tala came through with a small list of mineral springs, it would still take more hours than we could afford to check all of them.
The truck skidded right onto the highway that would lead us down to Woodbury. I wrapped my hand around the grab handle so tightly that my knuckles were white but, in truth, Monty was an excellent driver, even if he wasn’t overly familiar with the truck.
I regularly checked the bone, especially once we drew close to the woman’s address. The hone-onna was now following the winding path of a tree-shrouded river, giving us time but drawing inexorably closer.
We were cutting it fine. Real fine.
The victim’s house lay in a street close to the football field, which itself was too damn close to the river the hone-onna followed.
Monty swung left, the tires screaming and the big truck wobbling unsettlingly before he got it back under control and then sped on. There was a T-intersection up ahead, but he didn’t slow. He just did another of those unsettling turns onto a rough old dirt road. Dust and dirt plumed behind us as we sped on.
The bone’s pulsing increased. “She’s close, Monty.”
“How close?”
“Like, if I looked out the window, I might see the whites of her eyes close.”
He didn’t look up at the rearview mirror, and I certainly didn’t want to.
“Then get a protection spell ready now, because I may not have time to construct one before she hits. Just make sure you weave in an exception for my magic this time, otherwise I won’t be able to respond.”
I nodded and started weaving a heavy-duty protection spell. By necessity that meant weaving in threads of personal wild magic, but I resisted the impulse to reach for the real stuff. If the witch connected to her creature in order to watch the kill—and I rather suspected she would, given her anger focused more on the women involved in the extramarital activities than the men—she’d see the threads of my inner wild magic. I just had to hope they were different enough from the reservation’s that she wouldn’t connect the two.
Monty hauled the truck right onto a stone driveway then accelerated toward the white weatherboard house perched on stumps tall enough to allow a car to park underneath.
He stopped in front of the stairs, threw the truck into park, and then scrambled out without bothering to turn it off. I grabbed my pack and followed, bounding up the steps two at a time after him. He didn’t knock on the front door or announce his presence in a calm manner; he just blasted it open with magic and yelled, “Mrs. Rankin, are you in the house? I’m Monty Ashworth, the reservation’s witch. I believe your life is in danger, and we need you to leave with us immediately.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” came the startled comment from the far end of the house. “Get out of my house before I call the rangers.”
“The rangers are already on the way, Mrs. Rankin.”
As he ran down the hall, the bone in my left hand pulsed, and images rose. We were out of time. The hone-onna was on the dirt road and only seconds away.
“Monty, get her in here now! I can’t protect the whole house.”
There was a squawk, a stream of curses, then the sharp rap of dual footsteps coming back down the hallway. As Monty appeared, dragging the heavily pregnant woman behind him, I unleashed my spell. It rolled swiftly through the room, covering not only all the doors and windows but also the floor and the ceiling in a net of pulsing power. I immediately activated it, then swung the pack around and pulled out the salt and holy water. I tossed the former to Monty, then slammed and locked the front door and popped the cork on the first bottle of holy water. Once I’d poured half of it in an unbroken line across the threshold, I raced over to the nearby window to repeat the process.
The hone-onna hit before I could get there. The sheer force of her attack sent me staggering sideways, but I somehow remained upright and pushed more energy into the netting. Another magical blow. A gasp escaped, and I dropped to my knees even as Monty’s energy surged.
The threads of his spell flew over my head and pierced my protective netting. The hone-onna screamed, and her magic surged anew, the spell one I didn’t immediately recognize. It hit Monty’s caging spell, and the two exploded. As the broken threads of magic drifted past the window, he swore and quickly weaved a repelling spell—one so powerful it lit up the room.
The hone-onna continued to hit my protection net. Each blow hit like an invisible fist, making my body quiver and jerk. My net pulsed rapidly in response, but it held, even if the ache in my brain was getting steadily worse.
I ignored it all the best I could and, through slightly narrowed eyes, watched and repeated the spell Monty was creating. My version, however, was reinforced by my inner wild magic. It was a beast of a thing, and if it actually hit, it would fling her right across the reservation.
But that’s exactly what we needed if we were to have any chance of getting Mrs. Rankin to safety.
Monty cast his spell. As it pierced my netting and speared toward the hone-onna, I cast my duplicate, keeping it close to the tail of Monty’s in the vague hope she wouldn’t immediately notice it.
The hone-onna screamed and flung another counterspell. Once again, the two spells hit and then exploded, the blowback strong enough that the little ornaments on the nearby shelving unit shook. But the debris of those two spells hid mine, and it sped on through and hit the hone-onna square in the chest. For a second, nothing happened, but just as I started wondering if I’d done something wrong in the construction of it, there was small whoomph, and the hone-onna started screaming. It was a sound that became ever more distant. Despite those screams, despite the fury so evident in them, there was an odd wash of … not really relief, but perhaps satisfaction … coming from the bone fragment. A response from the hone-onna rather than the witch who controlled her, I suspected.