Free Hunting Witches by Jeffery X Martin Page A

universe. Their silent hopes that everything would be okay were hollow, a bad mantra, like frightened pioneers, praying to their gods that the fire won’t die out, that the wolves don’t show up in the middle of the night. Not this time. Not tonight.
    But the wolves are there, always, even when they can’t be seen. They exist just outside the light of the campfire, waiting for darkness to descend, so they can feed.

Part Two
    History Lessons

 
    It was almost three in the morning, and Sheriff Graham Strahan was scratching the palm of his left hand. It shouldn’t have still been itchy. After all, it had been almost a year since former Sheriff Will Brackins had held him at gunpoint and carved strange, arcane symbols into Graham’s flesh with a hunting knife before shooting himself. It was also the night Will Brackins murdered his wife by shooting her while she sat in her favorite chair in the living room.
    Time heals all wounds, but it doesn’t do shit for the scars.
    It had been a strange and difficult night, and to say it had left Strahan unaffected would be a lie. Take this moment, for example. It was almost three in the morning and Sheriff Graham Strahan was digging at his ravaged hand while sitting in his cruiser outside the former home of the deceased Brackins family. Even though it was no longer officially a crime scene, it was never put on the market. It sat in the middle of the street like an abscess, a brightly dark place, doomed to be known as haunted by generations of Elders Keep children to come.
    “You did just fine, Deputy,” Strahan said. “You did what I told you to do at their house, right?”
    Moon nodded. “Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “I hung that mirror up in front of whatever it was Sheriff Brackins drew on the wall. Even if the news wants to take pictures through the front window, they’ll never see it. I never saw anything like that before, Sheriff. What do you think it means?”
    “Well, Deputy,” Strahan said, “I don’t know. I reckon I’ll have to do some police work and figure it out.”
    Strahan had never done that work. There were dozens of crime scene photo Deputy Moon had taken. He had never looked at them. Strahan had also never worked up the balls to break through the faded crime scene tape, break through the front door and go back into that copper and carbide smelling living room and look behind that mirror.
    Strahan hated to sleep. In his dreams, he relived that scene with Brackins, trapped in a meeting room at the Highlander Lodge, handcuffed and powerless. There were no answers then. There were few answers now. Even the Book of Shadows Brackins had left, sort of an instruction manual for being the sheriff of a town like Elders Keep, wasn’t much help.
    And that was the problem with the Keep; it wasn’t like other places. Good and evil had set up their own little mosh pit in his little town. Surrounded by the mountains and the forest, the Keep was the perfect stage for age-old powers to duke it out. Brackins had grasped this, but it had driven him mad. Graham had only a dim understanding of how the Keep worked, what it was. Strange things happened in the Keep all the time, isolated incidents of brutality and high weirdness. It made it difficult to enforce the law with any absoluteness. Graham found himself the keeper of secrets, frequently having to cover things up in order to preserve the public peace.
    The greater good.
    Sheriff Graham Strahan fidgeted with his hand and stared out of the car window at the old Brackins place, fogging the windows with hot breath and indecision.
    “Well, son,” he said to himself, “do it or don’t.”
    Strahan stared at the front door for a few more seconds before shaking his head, starting the car and driving away.
     
    ***
     
    “All I’m saying, Sheriff, is I think I’m ready.”
    Graham rubbed his forehead with his right hand. “I don’t know, Deputy Moon. You’ve only been in this department, what, three weeks longer than I