Witch's Hunger. Deborah LeBlanc

had a peculiar thought about Hollywood and witches. Had anyone been watching a movie, they would have expected Gilly to immediately cast a spell that would wash the blood from Viv and have any wounds appear in purple neon so they’d be easily detected.

      But there was no spell-casting, and this wasn’t Hollywood. Witches were human, just a different race, and just as each race had their distinct features and culture, witches were no different.

      A witch’s potential for power often depended on the clan from which she was born. Viv and her sisters came from the Circle of Sisters, a relatively small, close and extremely secretive group with maybe fifteen hundred witches worldwide at best. Viv, Evee and Gilly were even a subgroup within the Circle, since they were triplets.

      “Wh-what the hell?” Gilly said, snapping Viv out of her daydream. All three of the sisters had olive complexions, but right now Gilly’s face blanched as she took in all the blood covering Viv.

      “What happened?” Gilly demanded. “Who attacked you? Where are you hurt? Heavens, look at all that blood!”

      Elvis scurried around his mistress’s feet as if trying frantically to weave a web around them. Then in the blink of an eye, he scampered up Gilly’s right leg, across her back and came to rest on her right shoulder.

      “I’m going to call an ambulance,” Gilly said, and Viv grabbed her by the arm before she had a chance to whirl about.

      “Stop, it’s not mine,” Viv said. It took a few seconds for frenzy to leave Gilly’s eyes and settle on Viv’s face.

      “What do you mean, it’s not yours?”

      Socrates rubbed up against Viv’s left ankle then made his way between the sisters and politely sat as if to create a boundary. Elvis leaned over Gilly’s shoulder, watching Socrates’s every move. Socrates hissed at him, gold eyes blazing. “Just that,” Viv said, obviously a little too nonchalant for Gilly’s taste. In that moment, she saw her sister’s black eyes turn auburn, which meant only one thing. Gilly’s specialty was astral projection, and whenever she zoned off somewhere, the telltale sign was the change of her eye color. Right now, Viv would bet dollars to horseshoes that some ghost of Gilly present was at Bon Appétit summoning Evee home.

      “Then you’d better start explaining really quickly,” Gilly demanded. “Whose blood is it? Where did it come from?”

      For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Viv tried to explain what happened at the compound. She kept stumbling over her own words, uncertain how to tell her sister why her own spells hadn’t worked against the Loup Garou. Truth be told, she didn’t know why they hadn’t worked. Back at the compound, she thought her crappy attitude might have played a part in making the spells ineffectual. But after giving it much thought on her way home, the only thing she knew for sure was that the spells should have worked despite her mood. And how was she going to tell her sister why she’d whacked Milan upside the head with a two-by-four, then walked away?

      Viv had circled the conversation back to Milan in the compound and how he and Warden had gone to war when Gilly blew out an exasperated breath.

      “You covered that already,” Gilly said. “Just spit it out. All of it.”

      Suddenly Viv heard a loud squawking followed by the entrance of Hoot, a copper-and-white horned owl. Evee’s familiar. He swooped down, barely missing Socrates’s head, then rocketed back up, nearly knocking Elvis off Gilly’s shoulder.

      “Damn it!” Gilly yelled and swung out an arm to keep Hoot from flying at her.

      That sent Hoot into a high-pitched screech, which pushed Elvis’s squeal button to top volume. Socrates stood with his back arched, teeth bared, and hissed like a bucket of snakes.

      “Y’all shut the hell up,” Viv shouted to no avail. The room continued to vibrate from all the hissing, shrieking, squawking and yelling.

      The sisters looked at each other, perplexed. Time seemed to stand still in a deafening vacuum that neither of them could quiet. It wasn’t unusual for their familiars to snap at one another from time to time, but normally they got along like brothers and sisters. But this was as though each familiar was out to protect their own territory.

      Finally Viv held her arms out at her side, hands out, palms up, and said, “Silence is all I care to hear, I command this noise away from here.”

      Immediately, all three familiars went silent. Gilly blinked rapidly, then said, “Why didn’t I think of doing that?”

      Socrates meowed, then said to Viv, “If I’m not mistaken, this is our domain. Would you please get that intolerable ingrate of a bird and elongated rat out of this room?”

      Viv nudged him with a foot, signaling for him to hush. Fortunately, to Gilly, Socrates had only caterwauled since only the mistress of a familiar understood its voice.

      She didn’t know how much time had passed after the racket died down, but it felt like only seconds before Evee burst into the room, out of breath, dressed in a smartly fitted, powder-blue pantsuit and black pumps.

      “I—I left Margaret in ch-charge of the café and hurried over as fast as I could,” Evee said, panting. “What... Look at you! All the blood! What happened? Where did this happen? Did somebody attack you? We need to call an ambulance. We need to call nine-one-one! No, I’ll get the car. It’ll be faster.”

      “We don’t need an ambulance,” Viv assured Evee.

      “She said it’s not her blood,” Gilly added.

      Evee’s copper-colored eyes grew wide. “Did you kill somebody?”

      “Of course not,” Viv said, feeling guilt twist a bit harder in her gut. That answer might have been different had she hit Milan any harder with the two-by-four.

      Now that all three sisters were in the room, Elvis, Hoot and Socrates settled down next to their mistresses.

      Viv’s reassurance may have calmed Evee’s voice but seemed to do very little for her nerves. Evee reached out to touch Viv with a shaking hand, then quickly drew it back.

      “Really,” Viv said. “I’m okay.”

      Gilly grabbed one of Evee’s hands and pulled her sister to the edge of Viv’s bed, where they sat.

      “Okay, enough bullshit,” Gilly said. “Tell us what happened.”

      Viv sighed, glanced around for a place to sit. Then decided to remain standing so as not to get blood on anything and told them what had happened that morning.

      “Why didn’t you just open the damn ground up where they were fighting and drop the dumbasses into a hole,” Gilly huffed after she’d finished. “If they wanted to kill each other, they could have done it in there. Saved you a lot of grief. And a pair of jeans and shirt.”

      “Oh, please,” Evee said with a shake of her head.

      Now that Gilly had mentioned it, Viv didn’t know why she hadn’t thought about opening the ground while at the compound. The shock of that might have stopped the fight. Once again, she blamed the brain pause.

      “I didn’t want them dead,” she said to Gilly. “They were only fighting for some alpha tail.”

      Gilly narrowed her eyes. “Wait—you mean those two alphas were fighting so close to the gate where you were watching that you got doused in blood?”

      Evee nudged Gilly with a shoulder. “Stop interrogating her like you’re some kind of detective,” she said. “Give her a break. I mean, look at her. Don’t you think she’s been through enough?”

      Gilly nodded slowly and clicked her tongue between her teeth. “Let me guess. You did that partial invisibility thing and went inside the compound to stop them didn’t you?”

      Viv looked down at the highly polished oak floor beneath her boots.

      Evee and Gilly stood up simultaneously.

      “My