How To Be A Badass Witch: Book Two Read online

  Christian’s sense of being aimless reminded her of how she felt when she thought of office jobs.

  She wanted to make a difference, and she had just been handed the means to do so on a silver platter. She had to take it.

  Chapter Three

  “You’re going to what?” Sven asked blankly.

  “It’s basically the same strategy we’ve been using.” Johnny settled back in his chair. “So the bitch should like it.”

  Sven tried to calm his disquiet. He perched on the edge of the desk and considered.

  Johnny was right that his plan was in line with what they’d been doing so far. Little Tokyo and Chinatown had three main gangs operating in them right now, grabbing fluctuating amounts of territory: Vox, Dread, and the Union. Vox and Dread had been easiest to lure out of hiding and manipulate into the gang violence over the past couple of weeks.

  The violence had been Pauline’s strategy, a way to show the police they couldn’t control what was happening in the territory and that she could. In the meantime, the gangs would exhaust each other, possibly take some of each other’s members out, and be vulnerable either to merger attempts or outright takeovers.

  So far, it was working, though the Union had been surprisingly recalcitrant.

  Johnny wanted to change that. Specifically, he wanted to enlist their help against the LA Witches. He’d use the Union to lure the new group out into the open, where Johnny, Sven, Pauline, and Lia could assess their strength.

  “I didn’t think you’d have a problem with it,” Johnny said, frowning. “It’s her fucking plan. You kept riding me for not following it before, so what’s the problem?”

  Sven didn’t have a good answer for that. He thought about it as he took a chair.

  The truth was, this morning had worried him. Like Johnny, he’d gone into that meeting expecting Pauline to be furious. She was leading a gang, after all, and gang leaders had a reputation to uphold. Specifically, they had to make it clear that if you failed them, you paid for it.

  Instead, Pauline had pivoted. She had as good as told Johnny to take out an entire gang on his own, not by threatening his life, but by intimating that she would bring his rival on board if he didn’t. She was playing him against his pride.

  Something like that, her reaching into a person’s mind and fucking with it, worried Sven. He didn’t like the idea of working for someone like that.

  Even weirder was that Johnny seemed to appreciate it. Today was the first day Sven hadn’t seen him acting like he wanted to kill Pauline and take over.

  This felt like one of those twisted books with everyone screwing each other over and no one saying what they meant, which was not what Sven had signed up for. One of the reasons he, like Johnny, had chosen not to go into the traditional business world was that gangs had less bullshit. You didn’t have to use corporate buzzwords, and you didn’t have to say one thing and mean another. There were clear rules.

  Sven had thought Johnny liked that, too.

  “All this sneaking around,” he said finally. “I don’t like it. You hurt the people that fuck with you, end of story. She should’ve just told you to kill those fuckers and string their guts up somewhere.”

  Johnny smiled, “Oh, I plan to. I definitely plan to.”

  “Okay, so…” James guided the Phantom smoothly around a semi-truck and pondered, tapping his fingers on the wheel. They had only made a few stops today, during which they had both read feverishly about what was going on in Los Angeles.

  Getting to Los Angeles was clearly a higher priority than figuring out what was going on there, but both were important.

  “So?” LeBlanc queried.

  “So we have an increase in gang violence, which sounds bad, and could fit with someone coming into their powers.” He shook his head and banged on the steering wheel. “Dammit, why didn’t we—”

  “James, it’s always been a risk.” Her voice was calm, and it steadied him. “Most of those who come into magic never make it all the way. They stop using their powers, they burn out, their power cracks…”

  Her voice held something like fear, though James could hardly imagine the self-possessed Mother LeBlanc feeling such an emotion. Still, if anything would do it…

  A crack in someone’s power, in the channel that allowed them to siphon it from the world and turn it into spells, could widen and burst like an aneurysm, burning them from the inside out. One or two of those incidents had given rise to an unsettling rumor of spontaneous combustion, though luckily, most people now thought that was only an urban legend.

  “And some do not have a character that is suited to wielding magic,” LeBlanc finished. “You remember the history of our order. There were covens who did unspeakable things.”

  James nodded gravely. Still, it troubled him. There were few magic wielders, and they were cautious enough in general that magic had never introduced itself into the mainstream of gang warfare. The two would be a potent combination.

  “What genuinely surprises me is that we haven’t heard of a single defining event from that flare,” LeBlanc mused. She was looking out the window at the countryside in the fading daylight. “That much power, we should have heard about.”

  She was frowning, and James allowed himself to zone out and think about it. The freeway was clearer out toward Abilene than it had been in the Dallas-Fort Worth urban area. The landscape was mostly flat, the road mostly straight. It was greener than he had expected, but it didn’t hold a candle to the lush greenery of New England.

  He always needed to zone out to find the answer. It was one of his most infuriating traits. He couldn’t leave a project alone; he would sink into the details and turn a problem over and over in his head, unable to walk away. The answer usually came to him in the middle of the night, when he’d directed his conscious mind elsewhere and focused on something else.

  So now, as much as possible, he turned his thoughts to the weather, the road, the hotels coming up, and the sorts of snacks he might buy at a rest stop.

  He’d always been curious about chicken-flavored crackers.

  The answer came to him in a rush, and he straightened with a whoop and a little dance in his seat.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” LeBlanc said drily. When he looked at her, a smile was tugging at her mouth.

  “An explosion, a car crash, a shootout…we’d have heard about that, right?” James could hardly contain his excitement. “Anything used against someone? That flare couldn’t be missed.”

  “Not necessarily,” she hedged. “On the other hand, that much power not hitting the news would indicate a very skilled magic worker.”

  “Exactly. And this is someone where we don’t think there should be anyone. There aren’t any covens in Los Angeles that I know of.” Magical groups tended to be secretive by nature, but the council had contacts in every state and major metropolitan area.

  “Okay.” LeBlanc nodded. “I accept your premise.”

  “Excellent. Knew I could count on you.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “So…”

  She pinned him with a glare. “James, I have been sitting in this car all day. I am in no mood to be slow-walked to an epiphany.”

  “Right,” James said hastily. “Well, the thing is, there’s a kind of magic that wouldn’t be easily noticed and which requires much more effort for the payoff.”

  “Healing,” Mother LeBlanc whispered. “Oh, James. We might have a healer.”

  James couldn’t keep from smiling. He wanted to punch his fist at the sky and yell excitedly, but a car was a confined space, and he didn’t want to make anyone’s ears ring.

  Healing was an intensive skill and one that some could not wield. No one knew why, but it seemed to require an unusual innate quality as well as dedication and power. Thaumaturgists were rare, and good healers even rarer.

  James had suggested that people with a hint of talent often trained in medical professions, not understanding the power they wielded. Burnout, after all, was co
mmon in those fields. It would be difficult for someone to notice a difference between them and their colleagues, particularly if they were not able to channel enough power to hurt themselves seriously.

  There were currently no healers on the council, and the discipline as a whole could benefit greatly from a new practitioner to push the boundaries of their understanding and take new recruits under their wing.

  “This could be the one we were looking for.” James glanced at her. To his surprise, he felt something more than triumph—something deep.

  “It could,” she agreed. The same deep emotion shone in her eyes for a moment before she took a deep breath and looked away.

  She was not one to enjoy displays of emotion, especially her own.

  They rode in companionable silence as James basked in the victory. After the dizzying number of results from his experiment and the first failures—candidates motivated by spite, unwilling to consider other viewpoints, or incautious—he had worried that what he had done was overthrowing the natural order in some way.

  Perhaps magic should only come to those who learned to channel it on their own, absent a grimoire.

  Now, he allowed himself to think once more that this could be a good idea. If this book had awakened a talented healer, even Mary Mitchell, the council’s resident killjoy, would have to agree that he’d been right.

  The thought was appealing, he had to admit.

  It was so appealing, and he spent so much time dwelling on it, that when his phone rang and showed a council member’s number, he wondered if someone had sensed his thoughts. That was, of course, superstition. Telepathy could only be achieved in very specific conditions, but there was a strong urge in the human brain to find patterns.

  Since he was driving and the Phantom was not equipped with any of the newer hands-free technology, he nodded when Mother LeBlanc held up the phone questioningly.

  “Good afternoon,” she said in her calm voice. “James’s phone, LeBlanc speaking.”

  There was some chatter on the other end.

  “Texas,” she answered.

  He stole a glance at her face. Her tone was pleasant, but there was no missing the fact that she was stonewalling.

  More chatter.

  “Of course,” she said smoothly. “It’s already late where you are, and we’re still on the road. Find a time that works for all of you tomorrow and let us know.”

  There was a pause, then a few words.

  “Absolutely,” LeBlanc said. Her voice was warm. “Good night. I will talk to you soon.” She held the phone away from her face and hesitated for only a moment while finding the End button. She carefully replaced the phone on the center console and looked at him. “The council wants an update.”

  James swore under his breath.

  “You’re presuming they’ll be unhappy,” she told him. “If anything, you know the sheer number of new practitioners shows that they were wrong.”

  “And you know that some of them will find fault with all of it. The part where there are more practitioners than we can chase down quickly? They’ll have a field day with that.” He shook his head.

  “James. This country is very large, and we have a lot of driving ahead of us. I do not intend to spend all that time with someone bemoaning things that haven’t happened yet.” Her voice was tart. “When we get to the hotel, we will prepare an update, and that will be that.”

  James did his best impression of a sulky teenager, rolling his eyes. “If you’re going to be logical about this, I can’t argue with you.”

  “That was the idea.” She was smiling.

  The rest of the drive was smooth, the highway sparsely traveled as night fell. Since there were no B&Bs around that met James’s stringent qualifications, the two managed to locate adjoining suites at a chain hotel.

  Without discussion, they arranged for room service and immediately set about drawing up a report. The council members had many things on their plates, and it would be a waste of everyone’s time not to make a concise report.

  LeBlanc made a longhand list of their encounters so far, including the green witch who would be watched for a few years and their “failures.” In that category was the young boy who had been determined to use magic for spite, as well as several magic users with cracks in their power, and an older woman in Fort Worth who had exhausted her supply of magic and did not believe she’d had any to start with.

  While LeBlanc put down her notes, James scanned local and national news, hoping to show that the veritable explosion of recruits had not caused any undue attention on the book.

  Eventually he sat back, frowning. LeBlanc, who knew his expressions fairly well, correctly determined that he was still thinking and did not interrupt him.

  “Do you think we should take the book down?” he said finally. “Bury it?”

  She gave him a surprised look.

  “I pulled out all the stops on the advertising,” James told her. “I worked those ads into oblivion; I made sure we were getting eyes on the book. I thought we’d get maybe one or two people, though. If we keep getting potential recruits at this rate, we’ll never have time to track them all down.”

  “That makes sense,” she acknowledged. “I am not certain how such things work. You say, ‘take it down.’ What does that mean?”

  “It means no one could buy it,” James explained.

  “But the people who already have it?”

  “They’d still have it.” He grimaced.

  She sighed. “Still, it would likely help.”

  “Yes. I’ll work on it.” He went back to his computer, finding his way through the screens that showed his sales reports, advertising spending, and product details.

  LeBlanc finished her report and ate while he continued working. She did not interrupt his mutters, which he appreciated. He had always been someone who dove deeply into his work, and that meant frowns, mumbling to himself, scribbling notes, and going down research rabbit holes.

  Finally, he was able to say, “Well, I did what I could, but there are some problems.”

  “Oh?”

  “I took the ebook down, and it won’t be sold anymore. Well, as soon as the site updates, so in a couple of hours. The only problem is because there was a paperback book, I can’t just remove the whole thing from the store. They’re determined to keep a record of it.” He looked aggravated but resigned to his fate. “But there’s no way to buy a copy anymore, and only a couple of people ordered paper copies, so we should be good.”

  “Hmm.” LeBlanc sat in one of the armchairs and smoothed her dress. “I have to say, I’m glad. At the rate we were finding potential recruits, if we had allowed this to continue indefinitely, there would be the near-certainty someone killing themselves or another with the power we’d bestowed.”

  James closed the computer, shaking his head. “Honestly, I hadn’t thought about the uninitiated being able to perform any of the harder spells. I figured they would hit their limit and seek out further training. That was part of the puzzle: that we weren’t easy to find, but someone with magic could find us eventually.”

  She nodded. The two of them had set up minor clues that would lead someone, after a certain amount of dedicated research, in the direction of the council.

  No one had reached out yet, but it hadn’t been very long, and it appeared that people were much more capable of teaching themselves magic than anyone had anticipated.

  “Granted, any of the fire spells are perfectly capable of burning down a house if you’re not careful with them,” James admitted.

  LeBlanc nodded slowly. “Mmm. I had figured it would be difficult for someone to gain even marginal competence on their own. But it seems we were wrong, and now we have quite the mess to clean up, don’t we?”

  “Which is not how we’re going to present it to the council,” James stressed.

  “Agreed. I drew up notes. It’s difficult to know how accurate our numbers are, but it seems that, as in the past, most potential recruits are unsu
itable. If anything, this helps us find people sooner who have flaws in their power, meaning we can turn it off before they get themselves or anyone else killed.”

  James nodded.

  The two of them streamlined their presentation, and by the time they were done, it was late enough that they should go to bed. James finished the night with one more search, noting with approval that the book was already gone from most retailers.

  Then he swore. “What the hell is this shit?”

  LeBlanc frowned. “Problem with the book?”

  “No…and yes.” He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “The book is down. That part went smoothly. The issue is that,” he took a deep breath, “someone ripped it off by copying it and released their own unauthorized copy, which is all over the goddamn Internet.”

  “What?” LeBlanc snapped. “How could they do that?”

  James put his glasses back on and scrolled. “There are ways. Honestly, looking at these sites, they probably stripped a copy as soon as it was published. Oh, what a nightmare.” He groaned and tipped back in his chair.

  LeBlanc sighed. “Can we use magic to rein it in? Interfere with their technology, or hide the search results from users’ eyes unless they’re specifically looking for it?”

  James considered that. “Not really. We would need to delete it at its source, and there’s no way to do that of which I’m personally aware.” After another minute’s hesitation, he offered, “We could perhaps neutralize it by republishing the book, only with fake spells.”

  LeBlanc squinted at him. “You mean, purposely put out a book with incorrect information? Magic that doesn’t work? But the correct one is out there—”

  “Yes,” James said, still thinking. He had never tried to use his advertising training to bomb his own product before, but he saw now that he had all the tools at his disposal. “Re-release it and do another advertising blitz. People will download it, it won’t work, and the reviews will go straight to hell. People will see those reviews, and the whole thing should…bury itself.”