Fair Game

sorcerer, wizard, mage. Anything. You can store it. For use later. To power a spell or some magic.”
    “What could you store it in?” Anna asked.
    “Something dense. Metal or crystal. Most of us use something that can be worn or carried easily.” She hesitated, looked at Brother Wolf’s big teeth, and said, “But that’s not what happened with this spell, specifically. This is designed to feed the magic of a fae.”
    “So this boy was marked by a witch,” Heuter said.
    Caitlin snorted despite her terror of Brother Wolf and answered Heuter as if he’d asked a question instead of making a statement. “She only
wishes
she were a witch.”
    “What do you mean?” Leslie’s voice was cool, as if she questioned witches who were flat on their backs being threatened by werewolves every day.
    “Some of the symbols are done wrong, and a couple of them are complete nonsense.” The witch’s voice was laced with contempt. “Sally’s been gone since the late eighties. Maybe someone copied them wrong. A real witch would have been able to feel that they were off, and could have fine-tuned them on the spot. So someone’s playing make-believe witch.” Caitlin spoke as if the boy’s life were less than nothing, that the worst thing the person carving on Jacob Mott had done was to get the symbols wrong.
    “Tell us about Sally Reilly,” Anna suggested. “If she’s dead, what does she have to do with this?”
    The witch set her jaw. “We don’t talk to outsiders about her.”
    Brother Wolf gave her a little more fang to look at.
    She swallowed.
    “If it makes you feel better,” Anna murmured, “we do know some witches who will tell us what we want to know.”
    “Fine,” said Caitlin. “Sally Reilly figured out a way to let mundane people use our spells. If someone paid her enough, she’d teach them how to write the symbols. She’d give them a charm that, if they wore it while they worked the magic—usually only one specific spell—behaved for them as if they were a real witch. Like playing a tape recorder instead of a violin, she liked to say. It’s been a long time since she was killed, and mostly people have lost either the symbols or the charms that allowed them to use the spell. This one was done wrong. It might have been drawn that way on purpose, though Sally had the reputation for delivering what she said she would. Probably they thought they had it memorized.”
    Caitlin smiled maliciously. “Spells don’t like the wrong people using them; they tend to fight back when they can. Maybe in a couple of decades it will be wrong enough that they’ll be cutting into someone and it will kill them all.” Then she looked at Charles and stiffened. “I’m telling the truth,” she said, sounding a little hysterical. “I’m telling the truth.”
    Muscles flexed in Brother Wolf’s back and Anna thought it might be a good idea to get him off the witch before Caitlin really ticked him off—though part of her was happy to see that he was involved in the hunt again.
    “She’s cooperating, Charles,” Anna told him. “Let’s let her up before you scare her to death.”
    The werewolf snarled at Anna.
    “Really,” she told him, tapping him on the nose. “It’s enough already. You aren’t a cat. No playing with something you aren’t going to eat.” It wasn’tthe words she hoped to persuade him with; it was the calming touch.
    Brother Wolf stepped almost delicately off the witch and watched with yellow eyes as the woman scrambled untidily to her feet.
    “Better?” Anna asked, and then, without waiting for her to respond, continued with another question. “How do you know it’s a she? The one who is trying to be a witch?”
    Caitlin straightened her hair with shaky hands. “Witches strong enough to do this are women.”
    “You just said that whoever put these symbols on the boy wasn’t a witch.”
    “Did I?”
    Brother Wolf growled.
    “I really wouldn’t push him much more,” Anna advised. “He’s not very happy with you right now.” Brother Wolf gave Anna an amused look and then went back to being scary.
    The witch snorted archly. She reached out to touch Jacob’s body again and stopped when Brother Wolf took a step closer, his eyes on her hand. She pulled it back and answered Anna’s question. “Anyone could have drawn this and made it work. There’s no reason but habit to assume it was a woman. I suppose that the rape means it was probably a man, doesn’t it?”
    “And it