During the entire drive across town to Margery’s university district apartment, I felt like I was going to puke. She was the last person I wanted to see.

When our father had died five years ago, it had been a major blow for everyone. The entire family had blamed me to some degree for refusing my talents until it was too late. But Margery had blamed me most of all.

She’d been quite vocal about it the night he died, and had said things that just couldn’t be unheard. Her words had been a knife in my heart.

After that particularly harsh conversation, I left home and never came back. Coming to her for help now after all these years was setting off all kinds of alarms in my head. 

I pulled into the parking lot of her complex and cut the engine. Every fiber of my being was screaming to run, but I forced myself to get out of the car and close the door behind me.

Raven parked beside me and met me on the sidewalk beside her building. “I let her know we were on the way through the witch network,” he said.

“She knows I’m coming?” I asked, almost losing my lunch on the pavement. For someone who killed people for a living, my reaction to seeing my own sister was making me question my identity. I couldn’t be this much of a pussy.

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“Yes,” I blurted. “I mean no. It’s no big deal. I mean, she just blames me for our dad’s death and made that very clear the last time we spoke.”

“Have you even talked to her since you left?” he asked skeptically.

“No, but…”

“You mean the night your father died? I’m sure she doesn’t still feel that way, Olivia. It was an accident. Everyone knows that.”

“It wasn’t really a mistake, Raven, it was my failure. But thanks for saying it.”

“Olivia, you were eighteen. Is this why you left? Because you’ve been blaming yourself all this time?”

“Everyone blames me!”

“No one blames you.”

“Margery does,” I said. I felt like a kid again. It was the most disturbing feeling I’d had in a years. Vincent was going to pay for this.

“If she still blames you, then she’s wrong.”

“It’s nice to have you around to break it all down for me, Raven,” I said sarcastically.

He gave me a dark look and then smirked. “Same old Olivia. Can we just get this over with? I need to get back to the station.”

“Fine.”

We walked around the side of her old-world brick building and went through the wide double doors at the entrance.

Raven pressed the button for the elevator and put his hands on his hips, giving me an appraising look.

“I like the outfit,” he said.

“This, is another Nelly Fanning special. It’s really my Executioner gear under her spell.”

“Still, it’s a nice look on you.”

“Always with the compliments. I’d watch out Raven, or I’m going to think you’re still interested.”

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. Raven just stood there, narrow-eyed and glaring at me.

“What? I’m just kidding. Come on. The harpy of Portland is waiting to claw out my eyes.”

He followed me into the elevator and I pressed the button for the third floor. My sister had been living in the same building since she started university and never left.

Unlike most of the witches in my family, Margery was more of a mage. She was an academic magician. Although no one at her university knew anything about it. To them, she was just an associate professor of ancient studies.

To everyone in the paranormal community, she was a high magus of ceremonial magic. I didn’t even want to imagine what she was capable of.

The women in my family were basically nature witches. They practiced magic with strict laws of karma. First do no harm and the law of three were their underlying tenets as nature witches. A mage, on the other hand, had no problem manipulating nature to her will.

As an Executioner, I was neither a mage nor a nature witch. I was a death dealer, contracted by the Council of Elders to kill paranormal criminals without a trial. Not that a trial was needed. They knew if someone was guilty or not by telepathy and second sight.

But they needed someone like me to deal the final blow. Most paranormals had some kind of protection from curses or spells, but being stabbed in the heart with an enchanted blade or shot by spelled bullets by a death-dealing witch was pretty hard to survive. Unless it was a psychotic vampire with an ancient protective totem around his neck.

I came to Margery’s door and could already feel the magic vibrating from within. The fact that humans just ignored this kind of energetic vibration always make me kind of laugh. Humans. Raven just walked right up and knocked before I was ready and the door swung open almost immediately.

“Well, if it isn’t Olivia Fanning. Did you come to finish the rest of us off?”

I looked over at Raven and lifted an eyebrow. He just shrugged and sighed.

“Margery, we need help solving a murder case. The same creature was on Aster’s farm, near your nephew. Can we put the past in the past for a while?” he asked.

“Fine. For you, Raven, and for Aster. But I don’t understand why I have to talk to her.”

“It’s great to see you too, Margery. How are things?”

My sister’s massive strawberry-blonde afro puff shimmered around her face. She pushed her thick glasses up her nose and swirled around on her heel, into her apartment.

She wore a long black robe, like what I’d worn at my high school graduation, but more formal. I rolled my eyes. She never lost the opportunity to let everyone know she was a professor. It was like she was saying, “Oh, look at me, I have a PhD. I wear a black professor’s robe around the house.”

“Nice outfit,” I said, unable to keep myself from poking at her obvious pretentiousness.

She gave me a death glare and walked over to a big thick book sitting on a table covered in a rune-encrusted cloth.

“This is the Fanning family grimoire,” she announced.

“Why do you have the grimoire?” I asked, still poking at her. It was childish, but hey, she started it.

“Because, Olivia, I’m the scholar of the family. It has the most value in my hands. It isn’t like Aster needs it on the farm,” she said it with a tone of superiority that made me want to ring her neck.

“Just show us what you’ve found,” I groaned, rolling my eyes. Of all the people in my family, Margery reduced me to a puddle of teenage snark.

She flipped through the pages, giving me another glare for added effect. The pages landed on an illustration of a drooling beast with elk antlers, a dog’s snout, and a human’s body and eyes.

“What is that?” I asked, my eyes growing wide. I’d never seen anything like it before.

“This is a wendigo. They haven’t been common on this plane for hundreds of years. Every once in a while someone is infected with the curse, but it’s so rare, I hesitated to even show you.”

“A wendigo curse? What are you talking about?”

“I’m getting to that,” she snipped.

Raven looked from Margery back to me and took a step back.

“Wendigoes are humans who have been infected with curse. As the curse progresses they begin to transform into these beasts and crave human flesh.”

“So the man I saw at Aster’s farm is going to turn into that?” I said pointing at the page.

“If it’s a wendigo it will. Still, the occurrence of these creatures is quite rare. The magic only exists on the other side of the portal.”

“The curse can only come through a portal from the other world?” I asked, trying to clarify.

“Yes. If someone is infected. It means there is at least a partially open portal somewhere nearby.”

“An open portal? As far as I know, Twyla is the only portal catalyst of this generation. Do you have any other ideas?” I said, putting my hand on my hip. I was getting tired of being here. At least some lead was better than nothing.

“No,” she finally admitted. “A cannibal with super strength who disappears out of thin air? This is the only creature in the grimoire that fits the bill. There are other ways to open a portal than by using a catalyst. There are special objects, totems that will help do it. Someone with a powerful enough totem could open a portal even in Twyla’s general proximity.”

“Just great,” I muttered. An open portal really complicated things. “First thing’s first, I have to take out the beast man.”

“The wendigo gets progressively harder to kill. In fact, it can only be killed with a specific kind of blade.”

“What kind of blade?” I asked, my interest peaked.

“A spelled blade made of titanium.”

“Like Benedictus,” I said.

“Precisely.”

“Well, could you give me the key to the long-term storage locker so that I can get the damn thing?”

“I don’t have the key,” she said defensively. “Mom has it.”

“Mom has it? She said Aster had it. Aster said you had it.” Anger boiled in my brain and I rubbed my temples.

“I don’t have it.” Margery threw her hands up. She was so snotty that I doubted she was lying. Unlike my mother’s cunning or Aster’s sweet manipulation, with Margery Fanning what you saw was what you got. She might be a pompous windbag, but she wasn’t capable of very sophisticated guile.

“Goddamn it,” I ground out.

“Why would they lie?” Raven asked. Margery and I shot him the same look at the same time. He threw his hands in the air. “Oh, right. Fanning women.” He shook his head.

“When you do find the sword, you need to know that you can only kill a wendigo by cutting its head off.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“You have to penetrate at the back of the neck, at the base of the brain stem. The throat is coated in an iron-like hide that even Benedictus can’t cut through.”

“Great.”

“You can also stab it right in the armpit. Those are your only two options.”

“Anything else?”

“The wendigo will find an underground pit near its original home. Because this thing can disappear it will help you to find its original human identity. If you approach it in its pit, it can’t blip out for more than a second because that is where it disappears to.”

“Okay. Any leads on this guy’s identity?” I asked Raven, turning to him.

“No missing persons match Olivia’s description. We are searching for matching dental records from the bite wounds on the victim. Three college girls have gone missing in the last few days though. We don’t know what the connection is, if any. We’ll have a better place to start with the killer once the dental records come back.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said to Raven.

“I’ve got to get going. Girls, it’s been… well. Bye.”

“Wait!” I said, following him to the door. I didn’t want to be with Margery a second longer than I had to. Even if that meant being with Raven.

Outside on the sidewalk, we went over what we’d just learned.

“So you haven’t seen any missing persons that look like a middle-age accountant?”

“No. But people that age, with no family, are rarely reported right away. After he misses work for a week or so, someone might go looking for him.”

“Well, keep me updated. I want to get this taken care of as soon as possible.”

“So you can leave with the sword, right?”

“I have important work to do,” I said opening my car door.

“Well, maybe next time it won’t take you five years to come home again.”