Taming The Hunter. Michele Hauf

and fill the circle with love and happiness. And resolve.

      Her silver-green velvet robe splayed around her knees and legs as she twisted within the circle, brandishing the lit match. Closed by three braided-ribbon frog hooks over her breasts, the robe was a favorite piece she wore often when casting a spell. Talismans of silver, crow’s foot and bloodstone hung around her neck, sliding across the crepe-thin pink negligee she wore against her clove-scented skin. Blowing out the match dispelled sulfur into the humid air, and a waft of white smoke curled toward the morning glory vine climbing an iron trellis to the arched windows that formed a cathedral dome overhead.

      Steeped in reverence, her movements were slow and thoughtful. She nestled a heavy, six-sided quartz wand with points at both ends in the sifting of black salt. After whispering a blessing for all that she had, all that she would know and all that changed with her footsteps through this realm, she bowed her head and touched her chest, where a tiny maroon line darkened her pale skin just below her breast. Her heartbeat thudded softly against her fingertips.

      With her other hand she clasped the crystal-bladed athame and drew it across her forefinger, cutting a line through the whorls of her fingerprint. A few blood droplets splattered onto the black salt. Forget-me-nots bowing over the altar whispered delicious fragrance, entwining about the metallic tint from her blood, summoning earth elementals with the sweet perfume.

      Setting aside the knife, she then beckoned forth the earth’s energies with her hands, focusing it toward the quartz. Closing her eyes, she began to hum deeply and from the base of her throat, channeling the vibrations toward her heart and then releasing them throughout her body.

      “I have loved only one so many times,” she whispered. “In all my incarnations it has always been him. This I know.”

      And yet in each of those incarnations she had lost him for reasons she could not divine. Her portentous dreams had never explained that frustrating point. That wasn’t the important question. What was important was that she see him, recognize him should he enter her life once again. For in her dreams, she had never seen his face. She knew no one reincarnated into the same visage.

      There was only one way to recognize the one whom she had loved. And that was with a soul-deep knowing.

      A cool cloud of red smoke diffused from around the quartz wand and billowed up over her hands. She kept her eyes closed, confident the elementals of earth and time participated in this sacred spell.

      “When he returns to me in this life,” she said, “allow my soul to recognize his soul. Bind us with a love of the ages so that only death will part us.”

      She blew out a breath through the red smoke. “So mote it be,” she ended.

      And a force walloped her chest, lifting her from the kneeling position. Arms lashing out for security, she was thrown out of the casting circle. She landed hard on the grass before the green velvet sofa.

      “What the...?”

      Opening her eyes, Eryss saw tendrils of smoke curl and form into intricate arabesques before darkening into soot and dropping onto the quartz. A startling image. What did it mean? And she’d been physically thrown out of the casting circle. That wasn’t supposed to happen. What did such an expulsion portend?

      Had she performed the anacampserote incorrectly?

      “Yes,” she reassured herself on an intake of breath. Crawling forward on the grass, she leaned over the salt line and touched the black salt and soot. Rubbing it between her fingers dispersed a scent much like an ocean surf. Weird. But she would remain positive the spell had achieved her intention. “All will be well with my soul.”

      Bowing to blow out the yellow candle, she then swept her hands to encompass the circle, taking out each flame of the smaller candles as she whisked air over them. An emerald-winged dragonfly swooped down and nestled in her hair as if it were a fancy barrette.

      Now all she had to do was figure out what it would feel like when her soul recognized the one.

       Chapter 1

      Dane Winthur set aside yet another dusty accountant’s box filled with cards that dated back to the early 1900s. While the Agency had been established only a decade ago, they had been operating unofficially for over a century. During that century, detailed cards had been written on each weapon or entity they had encountered and/or confiscated for secure storage. Dane had volunteered to go through the files and verify that each had been entered in the computer database.

      His laptop sat on a stack of flat boxes to his right. So far, about 75 percent of the card files had been entered. But there was no rhyme nor reason why one card had been entered and another had not. It was a grueling, time-consuming task, but he was the newbie on the block in the Agency, having been with them for only two years, so he didn’t mind some grunt work to prove his worth.

      Besides, as a scientist by trade, he found the paperwork and attention to detail came naturally to him.

      Now he fingered another yellowed piece of five-by-eight card stock that seemed newer than the other cards, most of which displayed frayed edges and coffee stains. Another weapon was listed on this one—a dagger that dated back to the thirteenth century. It had been marked as “To Note,” not something the Agency had in hand, but wanted to keep an eye on. He scanned the rest of the notes.

      “Belonged to a witch hunter, eh?”

      He typed the weapon ID number into the database. It didn’t bring up a matching record, so he was about to set the card aside on the “to be entered” stack when a name caught his eye from the description below the record ID information. “Edison Winthur?”

      He read the description carefully and muttered the last line out loud. “Last known owner: Edison Winthur, California.”

      Blowing out a breath, Dane sat back against the stack of boxes behind him in the depths of the storage facility the Agency had leased for the old records. A strange smile curled his lips, and he flicked the card between his fingers.

      “My father?”

      Two weeks later...

      “I’ve tracked down a location for the dagger, Winthur,” Jason said over the phone.

      Phone clasped to his ear, Dane tossed aside his surfboard and wandered across the sand to sit on a smooth boulder edging his property. A thermal wet suit allowed him to surf in the fifty-degree waters. January was always the best month to catch some killer waves. He’d noticed his cell phone glowing when he’d landed on the sand and had returned the call immediately.

      “The witch hunter’s blade?” he asked Jason Meadows, who worked in Research out of his apartment in New York. All Agency positions were “in situ,” since there was no home office or official headquarters. Jason was a cyber guru who could tease out the most hidden of information from a jumble of bits and bytes.

      “Yes, that one. Let me text you the address. It’s currently owned by an antiques store called Stuart’s Stuff. Hang on.”

      Dane smiled at the flock of seabirds swooping over the beach. But his levity was more for the discovery he’d made weeks earlier while going through some of the Agency’s old files.

      Dane was head of Weapons. Well, he was the only one in the department. It was newly created because there had been a need. Their crew was small and distributed across the United States and Europe. Tor Rindle was the head of the Agency and had been visiting the States when he and Dane had met—over the disintegrating fur, flesh and bones of a werewolf.

      Yeah, that had taken a lot of philosophy-changing faith on Dane’s part. He was a geologist who had never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t want to debunk. But the werewolf? Dane had no choice but to believe. And he had been strangely thankful when Tor had told him about the Agency and offered him the job. Such work aligned with a weird memory he’d had from when he was eight. The Agency was secretive, which was cool. James Bond gadgets were not in