The Binding Witch and the Bounty Hunter Read online

  Praise for The Binding Witch and the Bounty Hunter

  "Kate Roark is a strong and complex female lead who is sure to be every teenage girl’s idol."

  Shannon Winton - Novel Nurse Developmental Editor

  “Kate is a delight to read – strong and brave, but with a lot to learn about life, love, and magic. Joining in her victories and misadventures is pure fun.”

  Annette Moncheri, author of Madame’s Murder Mysteries

  “Magic, snark, and demons. What more do you need?”

  Wayne Basta, author of the Aristeia trilogy

  The Binding Witch and the Bounty Hunter

  The Kate Roark Magic Series #2

  Laura Rich

  Copyright © 2018 by Laura Rich

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover by Marianne Nowicki

  Editing by Hilary Ritz

  Author photo by Eleisha Ensign

  Created with Vellum

  For my family

  Contents

  Also by Laura Rich

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Dive Deeper into the Kate Roark World…

  Did you enjoy this book?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Laura Rich

  The Binding Witch and the Fortune Taker -

  The Kate Roark Magic Series Book #1

  1

  Doing martial arts wasn’t my idea of how to spend the day before the opening of a Renaissance festival. I glared up at my attacker from where I was currently sprawled on the ground.

  “Try again, except without falling down this time,” said my friend, Indira Valaithan. “Your opponents will not wait until you stand up again to . . . barrage you with attacks.”

  I grumbled as I stood up and brushed the dry clay dust of southeast Texas off my jeans. I only partially regretted getting her a word-of-the-day calendar to beef up her English skills. The results were often both amusing and endearing.

  Indira had invited both my mom and me to this little torture session, but Mom got off easy, saying she had some midwife clients to check up on, then preparations to make in our vendor tent. I hadn’t come up with an excuse quick enough, so here I was. So sue me if I didn’t have all my attention on the perfect balance needed to execute the difficult Kalaripayattu forms Indira tried to teach me.

  My name was Kate Roark, and I was a fifteen-year-old hedge witch—not a real witch like my mother—and I had some weird skills, like my ability to empathize deeply with those around me. Recently, I’d had a run-in with another hedge witch named Madame Miri, who, armed with a talisman, attacked a bunch of people, including me, and took all of our innate gifts, like my empathy, for herself. Fat lot of good it did her—when they all left her, she barely survived enough to flee the police. I came out of it okay, but Indira thought I should learn some self-defense moves.

  Spring in Texas lasts about five days in February, and then it gets stupid hot and stays that way until October. We were just about at the end of spring now, and I was glancing around for some way to get out of exercising during the growing heat of the day when I spotted my mom’s cat familiar, Gringo. As usual he was stalking a poor, unsuspecting bird. This time it was a lonely pigeon who pecked in the grass at the edge of the woods behind the campgrounds.

  It was a small thing, and all white, which was unusual, so it caught my eye as well as Gringo’s. I hadn’t seen too many white pigeons before, so I was kind of rooting for this one. Also my empathy migraines sometimes extended to animals in pain, and it had been doing weird things lately, like engaging when I was near a blue jay eating a worm, so I wasn’t too keen on letting my Mom’s jerk cat catch the bird.

  We weren’t exactly friends, Gringo and I. Most familiars only like their witch, but Gringo seemed to have a special hate just for me. From a young age, I learned to give him a wide berth, but now that I was older, I would step in if needed. Like now.

  My eyes darted between Gringo, the white pigeon, and Indira.

  Indira saw my hesitation, interpreted it as the reluctance it was, and lowered herself into the form in one graceful motion with an impatient ‘come on’ hand gesture. “Follow me. Again.”

  Of course, that was when Gringo decided to make his move.

  He pounced on the poor pigeon, and a plume of white feathers puffed into the air, followed by a short squawk from the bird.

  A sharp pain stabbed my left toe, which told me the bird had an injury there. Bracing myself for the next wave of pain, I raced to cover the short distance between us and caught Gringo by the scruff of his neck.

  This surprised him, since we had a strict no-touching policy between us, and he dropped the bird and let out a jowly war-cry. He raked his hind claws across the soft flesh under my forearm, drawing streaks of blood.

  I cursed and gripped him by the scruff at arm’s length, blood dripping down my arm. “Leave this bird alone, Gringo, or we are going to have problems.” My forehead was already ablaze with sharp spikes of pain, which told me the bird wasn’t dead yet, but suffering. I gave him a shake and let him feel the full force of my anger. “Do we have a deal?”

  Gringo hissed, but he didn’t scratch me again.

  I took that as a yes. I dropped him, and he streaked away into the woods.

  My head pounded and tears formed in my eyes from the empathy pain, but I knelt down, scooped up the bird, and cradled it, wetting its white feathers with my blood. There was nothing to be done about that right now—I could wash it off later.

  Indira appeared at my side, having watched the entire episode from our training area a few yards away. “You should put that bird out of its misery.”

  A wave of migraine nausea washed over me, and I took a deep breath. Acutely aware of the misery she spoke of, I still shook my head. “It’s just a broken toe.” This would not be the first time I’d ministered to one of Gringo’s victims. It was just one of the many reasons I hated that cat. He’d killed far more animals than I’d been able to save—everything from mice to kittens to a set of screech owlets last week. Every time I stumbled upon a new little animal, it ended up dead or missing at Gringo’s sharp claws and teeth.

  She eyed it with distaste. “Fine. I will be at my tent. Find me when you want to practice again.” She sniffed and walked away while she called over her shoulder. “You were acceptable . . . for a beginner.”

  “Sure,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t find her for practice again. My tastes ran to playing video games, eating tacos, and taking naps.

  I carefully carried my patient to our traile
r and placed my palm on the door to disarm the ward. I might not have been able to do my own magic, but my mother had attuned protection wards to my touch so I could operate them. Same with her potions, tinctures, and charms, which I headed towards as soon as I closed the door behind me.

  The white pigeon stirred in my arms and cooed softly.

  “It’s okay, sweetie, I’ll help you.” I slipped a scarf from the hook by the door, coiled it into a nest-like pile on the table, and settled the bird into it.

  It tried to stand, wobbled, and dropped back into the scarf.

  A quick exam confirmed a broken toe on its left foot. Luckily, we had some sports tape in the first-aid kit, so I applied some alcohol and carefully wrapped the scaly toe. The bird watched my every move with intent, black eyes. I decided she was female, since I got a distinct, though completely unmagical, female vibe. Or maybe I just wanted her to be a her.

  “You might be able to stand on that now.” I set aside the scissors and tape. I thought to look for some chamomile tea to help with the stress of the attack, but she seemed to be coping. My empathy headache had dulled, which told me the referred pain in my left foot would soon dissipate, so I stayed put. “Go ahead, try standing up.” I smiled at the idea that she would even understand what I was saying.

  The bird struggled, pushed to her feet, ruffled her blood-caked feathers, and cooed.

  I smiled, though she still looked gruesome. I wondered if she would let me clean her off. She stood perfectly still, and we stared at each other. The whites of her eyes were actually gray flecked with gold, and she had black pupils of surprising depth.

  As I continued to hold her gaze, waves of information flowed towards me. Flashes of Gringo’s attack, the quest for food, the feeling of a mashed-up worm in my mouth, and flight. Glorious flight. The only experience I could compare it to was sticking my head out of the window of a moving car, but this was so much more wild and uncontrolled. Dipping, gliding, climbing, soaring, banking, communicating to other birds using the way my—her—body moved. It was exhilarating—and terrifying.

  It was then that I realized why my mother used feathers in change magic. This was exactly what change felt like.

  Once that idea hatched, I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget it. I wanted to lock it away in a vessel to be visited later. Immediately a shape formed in my mind to contain it: an orb of moonlit reeds that contrasted light and darkness. The idea of change slid eagerly into the orb and filled its roundness. The weave rearranged itself to seal off the ends, and a brilliant light lit up the whole room. I yelped and collapsed on the table, unconscious.

  “Are you all right?” The voice was young, female, loud, and close.

  I jerked up with a gasp, drenched in sweat. “Who’s there?”

  The white pigeon on the table brushed my cheek with her outstretched wing tip and tilted her head. The voice repeated directly in my mind, “I said, are you all right?”

  2

  I stared at the pigeon who had just spoken to me telepathically.

  “I say again, are you okay?” Her tiny nails clicked the table as she crowded closer to me.

  “How,” I said, trying to wrap my head around this, “can I hear you?” By this, I meant hear the animal’s thoughts. Only real witches could do that with their familiars, and I was only a hedge witch with a bad case of empathy, as my mother liked to remind me. My mind reeled.

  The bird did a close approximation of a shrug by raising and lowering her wing . . . elbows?

  My phone rang just then, scaring the crap out of both me and the pigeon. She flew to the top of the refrigerator. I took a few deep breaths, looked at the caller ID, and answered.

  “Hi, Mom.” My heart hammered.

  “KATE!” Mom always yelled into the phone like an elderly person, rather than the forty-something she appeared to be. She wasn’t hard of hearing, she just wasn’t used to technology—yet. I’d argue that as a two-thousand-year-old witch, she’d had plenty of time to acclimate to the science of telephone communication. “KATE, I NEED YOU TO BRING THE TWO BLUE FOLDING CHAIRS TO THE TENT.”

  “Hi, Mom,” I repeated. “Sure, I can do that. And remember, you don’t need to yell.”

  Wait.

  I had news. Big news. “Mom! I can hear a bird! I mean, in my mind!” I waited for her to realize the implications, because in my excitement, I couldn’t remember how to form the right words.

  Silence.

  “Mom?”

  She sighed and spoke in a softer voice. “Tell me about it.”

  I figured she was being conservative in her response in case I was wrong—it had happened before when I thought I had conjured a new ward. It turned out that one of Mom’s old wards had acted up and I hadn’t done anything at all.

  I filled her in on rescuing the bird, splinting its toe, then doing an eye gaze—something she’d always warned me against with humans, but I hadn’t thought about that with an animal. I told her how I realized why the feather was used in change magic and how I saw change and captured it, then about the big flash of white light and how I kind of passed out and then woke up to a talking pigeon.

  “That’s a very good explanation,” the pigeon said. Though her little bird body was still on top of the fridge, her voice rang in my head.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “What?” Mom said.

  “Sorry, the bird was talking to me again,” I said.

  Mom was silent again for a few beats. “Was your blood involved?”

  My eyes snapped to the dried blood on the pigeon’s wings. I gulped. “Yes.”

  “Well, Kate, I believe you’ve made yourself a familiar.”

  I laughed. “How is that possible? Only witches can make familiars.” Also, the thought of making a pigeon my familiar was ridiculous. Who does that?

  “I think it has finally happened.” She paused and cleared her throat. “You have magic.”

  My heart raced. I had magic! I looked around for someone with whom to share my news, knowing very well there wasn’t anyone in the vicinity I could tell, since humans didn’t know about paranormal beings and telling them was kind of a big no-no. They tended to go a little crazy with information like this, so I settled for bounding out the door of our trailer and shouting “Huzzah!” at the top of my lungs.

  Blind Maggie, the palm reader, was shuffling by with her walking stick and returned my cheer with a hearty “Huzzah!” She had a table near the entrance, where her father, one of the organizers, could keep an eye on her safety, though she was pretty fearless with that walking stick. Anyone who annoyed her usually got a rap on the head with said stick—don’t ask me how I knew that.

  “Thanks, Maggie!” I said. An excited warmth bloomed in my heart, and I lifted the phone back to my ear to hear Mom laughing softly.

  “We’ll celebrate tonight,” she said, her tone muted.

  I keyed in on her lack of enthusiasm. “Aren’t you happy for me?”

  “Of course, Kate!” Mom’s voice lifted, though just. “You can’t know how much I’ve watched for the signs of your magical powers finally manifesting. I know how much you’ve wanted this. Congratulations, honey.”

  “Congratulations, witch!” said the pigeon.

  I smiled at the validation from my . . . familiar? At least that was more like it. “So now what, Mom?”

  I turned to admire the bird on the fridge with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. At least we didn’t associate with other practicing witches—I was sure having a pigeon for a familiar would be a point of ridicule. It was just my luck that my first order of magical business was to make the most ridiculous familiar possible. What was she going to do, coo someone to death? At least Gringo was useful as a defender and had some magical skills, like the ability to recognize other witches and warn Mom of demons.

  “Well, I need to show you a few things about how to manage your familiar,” Mom said. “It can be kind of tricky—hey, we’re not open yet—what are you doing here?”

  I m
ade a face. “What is who doing there?”

  I heard a crash and a grunt and a muffled boom, then the phone cut off.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Mom?” said the pigeon.

  “No, not your mom, my mom!” I said. “Someone showed up at the tent and something bad happened. I’ve got to go. Now!”

  The pigeon flapped down to the table and landed gently on her good leg. “Okay, witch. Should I come, too?”

  I ran my hand through my hair and looked at her splinted toe. “I’ve got this. I think you should stay here at least until you’re fully healed.” I had no idea how to use a pigeon as a familiar, anyway, and I wasn’t used to working with someone—or something—else. I looked around for a safe place to stow her in case Gringo came back—the cat-door lock was broken, so I couldn’t keep him out. “Bathroom?” I pointed to the small room off the kitchen.

  The bird flew into the bathroom. She landed in front of the mirror and proceeded to parade back and forth in front of it. “I am a very dirty bird.”

  Between the humor of her statement and stress over what was happening to Mom, I barked a laugh while I filled the sink with water. “Try not to splash too hard, but wash up. You’re kind of a mess.”

  “Dirty bird!” she squawked.

  I shook my head and shut her in the bathroom, then raced to our fortune-telling tent in the heart of the Renaissance festival.