Rural witches were the worst.

Whenever Magnus got called out to the farmland surrounding Lazarus City, he knew he was in for a shitshow. The witches peppered in amongst the human hicks were a lot rougher around the edges than the city witches, and never honest about what crime had been committed. They were catty and competitive and things never went according to plan.

"Just one easy day," he muttered to himself in prayer as he got out of his car. He sauntered up the dirt lane towards a hulking farm house that loomed over him, dark and chilling even in the sunlight.

Three women glided out the door, barefoot and dressed in sheer wispy fabric, showing every curve and cleft of their soft bodies.

Magnus raised an eyebrow. So this is how it's going to be, huh? He stopped where he was, not wanting to get too close.

"I don't have time for an orgy today," he called. "What got stolen?"

All three of them pouted, and one of them moved down the steps, light on her toes like a dancer. "Are you sure?" she asked, voice like silk. "We don't get pretty things like you out here often."

"Is that why you called in a robbery?" He crossed his bulging arms.

She sighed, the slump of her body exaggerated like a disappointed toddler. "No, just always a nice perk when they send a sexy wolf out to give us a hand," she huffed, and then licked her lips. "Or two." She peeked past him towards the car. "Don't they always send you boys in pairs? Where's your fairy? Fairies like to play."

Magnus clenched his jaw, his gut twisting. He didn't want to talk about his lack of a partner. The wound was too jagged, too raw, and it wasn't something he liked thinking about let alone sharing with a random witch.

He had supposed to have been assigned to somebody new that morning, but he hadn't waited around to find out who when he got the call for this case.

"What's the problem here?" he asked gruffly.

"Some bitch stole our chocolate!" one of the women on the porch screeched.

Magnus raised an eyebrow. "Your... chocolate."

"It's very special chocolate," the one still simping in front of him continued. "Very, very special."

He shook his head and sighed. "Where's the scene?"

She curled a finger in front of her in a come hither motion, and danced through the grass to a gated garden. The knee-high fence looked like it had seen better days, what had once been twigs tied together with twine now falling apart in most places.

As Magnus tried to step over, his boot collided with what felt like a brick wall. He lowered his foot and cleared his throat loudly.

"Oh, right." The witch flicked a slender wrist, and the air shimmered.

As the magical shield fell, Magnus blinked a few times, realizing that the garden was anything but dilapidated. With the glamour gone, it was a whole new world inside. Lush greenery towered over him, weeping branches creating curtains of viridian and emerald, flecks of ivory flowers peeking through the leaves.

He stepped over the fence freely this time, the canine part of him overwhelmed with scents of lavender and rosemary and mint and something earthy, maybe the very soil itself.

"Over here," the witch called in a singsong voice, and when he turned to her, he noticed the glamour had fallen from her body as well. She was taller, skin taut along sharp cheekbones and a longer, elfin face. Her hair hung in a flaxen purple curtain down to her knees, sparkling in the sun. Ebony irises regarded him as he approached.

"Why did you hide yourself?" Magnus couldn't help but ask. "I know what you are."

She cocked her head, and fluttered her eyelashes at him. "We know how to appear to get what we want," she purred, and then wrinkled her button nose. "Most of the time."

"I like you better this way." He grunted and knelt down next to the disturbed section of soil at her feet. "What was here?"

She pointed to a gaping jagged hole of puckered earth. "Our chocolate tree."

Magnus raised an eyebrow, but didn't inquire further. He let his wolf senses take over, zeroing in on every dip and dive in the dirt. He took a deep breath, taking in the scents, blocking out everything at his back. He caught the honeyed musk of the witch, and blocked that out as well, bringing the crime scene to the forefront.

Wood... wood and the dark bitter tang of chocolate mingled with the earth, where the roots came free having been jerked from the garden.

But by what?

He moved carefully around towards the back fence, focusing his sharp eyes on tiny footprints leading away from the scene. He knelt down, taking a deep whiff, and his brow furrowed.

"Pumpkin," he murmured.

"What?" The witch stiffened, the scent of her arousal suddenly overshadowed by the tang of nervous cold sweat. "Shit."

He raised an eyebrow. "Someone you know?"

"Yep." She popped the p and waved her hand, and Magnus suddenly pitched forward, hitting the ground face-first on the other side of the fence. He'd flown through the air so fast as she restored the shielding that he hadn't even had time to throw his hands out in front of him.

By the time he got to his feet, she was halfway back to the house, and he ran to catch up with her. "What the fuck?"

"There's only one witch I know that would enchant pumpkins like that." She let out a sharp whistle. "Get the obsidian!" she called to the women on the porch, and they disappeared into the front door without hesitation.

"Who is it?" Magnus demanded.

The witch turned, but continued walking backwards towards the porch. "Run on back to the city, puppy. We aren't getting our tree back."

"Regardless of whether you want your tree back, I'm going to do my job." He crossed his arms. "I'll follow the scent back to where that pumpkin came from, but based on your reaction I'd like to know what I'm walking into."

The witch stopped walking and sighed. "There was a necromancer in these parts some fifty-odd years back. He did so much nasty shit that the old families ran him out of here. If he's back it don't mean anything good for nobody."

"Why would he steal your tree?" Magnus asked.

She threw up her hands. "Because he's an asshole? I don't know."

"How do you know for sure it's him?"

"He's got a weird thing with pumpkins." She turned and leapt up the steps, landing in front of her front door. "Later, puppy."

She disappeared inside, and Magnus tongued the inside of his cheek, sliding his cell phone from his pocket. He dialed the station as he turned and walked back towards the garden.

"Liana here," the bright secretary greeted on the second ring.

"It's Magnus," he said gruffly as he knelt down next to the spot of fence he'd flown over. "Are there any records of a necromancer causing trouble in these parts back in the sixties?"

"Let me have a sift through my files here." The staccato clatter of keys clickclicked through the phone. "Good morning, by the way. You booked it outta here pretty fast this morning."

Magnus simply grunted as he leaned over, studying the ground for more of the tiny footprints. He caught another faint whiff of pumpkin.

"Oh, this might be what you're looking for," Liana said, and the typing stopped. "Called himself Dr. Zorn. Looks like he was conning humans with fake remedies and healing... ugh, and selling hallucinogens to local drug dealers that was just enchanted water. Looks like quite a few humans ended up hospitalized because the spells wouldn't wear off. Lots of damage control with this guy."

Magnus followed the scent, spotting another little footprint in a patch of soft-packed dirt. "What happened to him?"

"There's no record of arrest... which is weird because we have so many files of stuff we had to clean up. You'd think since all these things are attributed to him that someone would have moved in on him." She clucked her tongue, and there was a burst of more typing. "The last thing that's here is that they sent a bunch of hounds to check out his estate but it was deserted, and there's no trouble after that so he must have moved on."

"Fucking sixties..." he murmured. "They didn't do anything with his estate? It's just been sitting there?"

"There aren't any more records," Liana replied with a sigh. "Either people weren't filing the proper paperwork, or Dr. Zorn had his hands in the right pockets."

"Do you have an address for the estate?" Magnus skirted a thick oak trunk, blocking out the woodsy scent to focus on the tangy pumpkin. It had almost a sickly sweet edge to it, as if it were overripe.

"Hmm... there's coordinates for a portal, let me have a look and see what's there nowadays." There was another clattering of keys. "Oh, there's a pick-your-own pumpkin patch there now. Registered to a private owner... I hope they're not humans. That could be trouble having a portal smack-dab in the middle of their traffic."

Magnus shook his head, straightening up. "Update my log, I'm going to go have a look. Text me the coordinates."

"I can send Mosely's team out as backup," Liana offered. "Also did your new partner catch up with you? You left without her this morning, I think she was five minutes behind you, she should have been there by—"

"I'm fine," he cut in gruffly. "Send me the coordinates. I'm on a trail, I'll do some recon and report back."

"Magnus." She sighed. "If this necromancer is—"

"I'm just doing recon."

"You're good at what you do, mister, but I—"

"Thanks, Liana," he snapped, and then ended the call, shoving his phone back into his pocket.

He had no doubt that she'd be sending Mosely out after him, and if he were being honest with himself, he wouldn't mind the centaur's backup against a necromancer. But he didn't want to wait around with this thumb up his ass for everyone else to catch up. Magnus hated being idle... being idle meant thinking too much, feeling too much.

As he followed the fruity tang through trees and across fields, he fell into a tracking trance. For a long time he had only been able to do it in wolf form, but in his years on the force he'd trained himself to do it as a human. Sometimes it wasn't worth it to shift and leave his gear behind, but the tracking trance allowed him to see the path ahead.

His other senses shut down to his conscious mind, his eyes and ears still monitoring his surroundings, like a background app on his phone. His nose was the forefront, the scent tickling every capillary and winding ahead in a curling path to his destination.

Time was irrelevant in his tracking trance, stretching for eons and a moment all at once. The pumpkin smell intensified, multiplying by the thousands, and when he blinked his way back to the forefront of reality, he stood at the edge of a vast field of orange and green.

Magnus knelt down to examine the closest fruit, reaching out to run a hand over the hard ridges and dips of the outer shell. The stem was still attached to the vine.

He stood and blocked out the overwhelming tang of the fruit, trying to hone in on the ashy musk of the portal. Inter-dimensional rifts had a specific scent, a vibrating burnt essence as if someone had used a cauterizing iron to cut through spacetime itself.

As he concentrated, there was a deep rumbling in his gut. No, not his gut. It was coming from the ground, quivering his boots enough that it reverberated into his core.

"You aren't the smartest dude, are ya?" a tiny voice asked, and he had just enough time to glance towards the noise before the pumpkins exploded from the ground.

Round 1 Words Completed: 2042