Hexed

street in my human form, rolling and skidding and scraping my hide up with a beautiful case of road rash. The witch’s hair floated free from the grasp of my human feet—which cannot be said to have much of a grasp at all. She spat that curse at me again, and I lost what little breath I had remaining as the amulet punched me once more. Well, that was enough of that.
    I was still rolling from the fall and kept at it, diving naked for the lawn of the nearest house. I sank my fingers into the grass and got only the tiniest trickle of power into my bear charm before I was torn away and hauled up by my own hair into the street.
    Instead of resisting and trying to tear free by lunging forward, I pushed into a backward somersault. The unexpected maneuver forced her to let go, because her single right arm could not hold my entire weight propelled by my legs. I tumbled ass over teakettle and rose to my feet, squaring my shoulders and crouching defensively, to find myself facing not one but two witches in the street. Where had the second one come from?
    My back was to the widow’s house, and the witches guarded my approach to the lawn in front of me. They looked different now—the hellish juju was muted and I could see some of their features in the green haze of the faerie specs, so I presumed they were now visible to humans and flipped off my spell to check them out in the normal spectrum.
    They looked like they wanted to be Pat Benatar. Or maybe Joan Jett. They wore form-fitting black leather pants with boots rising to mid-calf, spaghetti-strap black camisoles barely restraining the sort of epic chests one finds in comic books, and snarling, toothy expressions glowering at me underneath feathery, heavily sprayed hairdos from the eighties. The one I’d pursued was a blonde. The new one was a brunette. I was surely looking at a cosmetic façade. Like Malina and her coven, these German witches were hiding their true ages with spellcraft. Unlike Malina and her coven, I had absolutely no doubts about their malignant intentions; there was cruelty in the faint lines around their eyes, and their thin lips smiled only at other people’s pain. Die Töchter des dritten Hauses had tried to kill me during World War II, and now they were after not only me but Granuaile too.
    I heard police sirens wailing somewhere nearby and wondered if Granuaile had called them. As we scrutinized one another, looking for an opening, a weakness opened up behind me. » Atticus? Is that yer naked bum what I’m lookin’ at? « the widow called from her porch.
    With a word they could have killed her, that same brief curse in German that they had used against me three times now. There was nothing I could do to prevent them. They would process it in another second and see how they could hurt me. So I had to distract them.
    A clump of the blond witch’s hair was lying on the asphalt where it had fallen from my feet, just to my right. I dove for it, snatched it up, and strung the strands across my mouth lengthwise, as if they were a gag. Then I used the last of my magic to transform myself to a hound and bounded south down Roosevelt, back toward my house.
    The witches shouted in dismay and gave chase immediately, the widow forgotten—if she’d even registered on their consciousness at all. If I reached my house, my wards would protect me utterly, and they could not allow that to happen.
    I tumbled messily in the street as my amulet punched me twice in quick succession, but I scrambled to my feet and veered across to the houses on the west side, where I could weave in and out of the landscaping and draw more power as I ran. I was careful not to swallow or do anything else to dislodge the hairs resting between my jaws.
    Though I was quickly outpacing the witches, I wasn’t going anything near full speed. I wanted them to chase me rather than pay attention to the widow. And I was beginning to wonder if they had anything else in their repertoire besides the single curse they’d been spitting at me. Some witches are bloody terrors if they have the time for ritual but are limited in what they can do in face-to-face combat; other witches are amazing in combat but lack the discipline or magical chops to do anything complicated when you sit them down in a circle and tell them to go to’t. Lots of European witches are of the former type: Give them time and the proper ingredients, and they could open some ungodly cans of whup-ass. Rarely were they prepared for