Witch Hunt

by Cate Conte

  Until now. Barely a month after her death, and I’d let her down.

  With shaking hands I bent to pick it up and placed the broken chain and the moon on my dresser. I felt naked without it already. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t felt it against my skin, cooling and comforting at the same time. I’d get it fixed tomorrow, as soon as this insanity was sorted out. But in the meantime, I didn’t like not having it. I thought about slipping it into my pocket, at least, but worried that they’d take it away from me or I’d lose it somehow. So reluctantly I left it on my dresser, running my fingers over it one more time. It was the last blow in a string of them today, and I wished I could go back to this morning for a do-over.

  I finished getting dressed and blew Monty one last kiss. “I’ll be back soon,” I said, and I thought it might be more for my benefit than his. He watched me with concerned eyes. Blinking back tears, I stuck my phone into the back pocket of my jeans and hurried out to my living room.

  Denning handed me my coat from where I’d dropped it on a chair when I’d come in earlier. “Ready?”

  I shrugged it on and grabbed my bag. “Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and unconcerned. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I’d walked by the North Harbor police department a million times—on my way to the train station or the post office or Desi’s, my favorite bakery just outside of the heart of town. I’d been inside once, when I needed a sticker to put on my license with my new address. I’d certainly never been driven there in a police car.

  I wanted to die. I wondered how many people had seen me being escorted out of my building by two cops. And put in the back seat, no less, like a common criminal. Granted, they were both in the front, but still.

  Intellectually I understood this was bad. Carla was dead. Though I wasn’t sure that had actually sunk in yet. Not only dead, but murdered. And I’d had a fight with her, which looked bad for me even though she’d started it. And, my fluffy pink scarf had been at the scene.

  Thinking about that, I suddenly felt a little better. Anyone who knew me would know—aside from the fact that I wouldn’t kill anyone—that I would be way more careful with a favorite accessory, even if theoretically I was doing something bad. There’s no way I’d have abandoned my scarf like that. That bolstered me a bit. It wouldn’t be long until all this was sorted out.

  Officer Denning opened the back door of the cruiser and reached a hand in to help me out. I ignored him and climbed out myself, standing tall. He shrugged and motioned for me to precede him to the door, which Sergeant Haliburton held open. I swept past him with what I hoped was a defiant air.

  “This way,” Haliburton said, motioning toward the right. If he’d even noticed my defiance, he didn’t comment on it. I followed him down a brightly lit hallway to a room with a table and a couple of chairs. He sent me inside and told me to sit, then walked down the hall and disappeared into an office.

  Denning paused.

  “Water?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He walked away, in the opposite direction from his cohort.

  I sat, trying to calm my nerves, wishing I’d had the presence of mind to bring one of my calming stones with me. I usually didn’t leave the house without putting a stone in my pocket, but there hadn’t been time and I’d been too distracted. While I waited, I tried to piece together what could have happened. Who would’ve been that upset with Carla that they’d resort to murder?

  I tried to stay pretty much clear of town politics, but given my position as a shop owner, I had to deal with certain things. Carla’s and my paths had first crossed at a town council meeting not long after I’d opened my shop. I’d been asked by some other shop owners to sign a petition lobbying for more parking and meter forgiveness on weekends in the North Harbor hub. On busy days, some people were deterred from sticking around after lunches or early dinners to check out the shops because they had to worry about their meters running out.

  Carla had been one of the council members opposed to the idea. Like most things in North Harbor, the issue had raised passions among the townspeople and shop owners, and it had caused some bad blood. People around here took any issue affecting our town really seriously. It was a bit overwhelming at times, but I appreciated the overall sentiment.

  In any event, it was my first taste of Carla and her strong opinions. And it seemed to set the stage for the next round of battles as she appointed herself the queen of North Harbor, giving herself say over who got to be successful here. She also seemed to hold a grudge against anyone who publicly opposed her. She took all of it seriously enough that I had to wonder what else she had going on in her life. Maybe a lot of it had to do with her being a Realtor—if she attracted the right clientele to the business district, those people would probably also want to live here. And they likely had the big bucks.

  I figured there were other people in town, maybe others on the council, who thought the same way she did, but they were definitely quieter about it. Carla was a bigmouth, and it was her way or the highway. And that hadn’t earned her many—or maybe any—friends. But murder? That was a whole other ballgame.

  I fidgeted in my seat. I thought this whole stalling and making people wait forever in interrogation rooms was only a tactic they used on television, but I guessed not. In any event, it wasn’t cool. I closed my eyes, trying to focus on my breath and stop the stress from taking over, and found myself fervently wishing I was home. Not just my little apartment with my precious Monty, even though I loved it there. No, I wanted to be home, at Grandma Abby’s house in the neighboring town of Southbury, at the kitchen table waiting for my dad to come home from work while Grandma Abby made one of her special teas and fed me cookies. I missed her.

  I let the feeling of being there wash over me, the memories of feeling safe and loved, and I started to feel better. I could almost feel the mug in my hand, taste the lavender chamomile tea Grandma Abby used to make me when I was especially upset about something. I settled back into my chair, my eyes still closed. Even the chair felt different, once I’d calmed myself down. Softer, more comfortable. I’d always been a big proponent of creative visualization, but it was really working for me today.

  I actually felt good, despite where I was. So I just had to hold on to this feeling, even when Denning and Haliburton returned with their attitudes and their accusations. Let them see how little I was bothered by them.

  I opened my eyes again, a self-satisfied smile on my face, to see if they’d returned yet.

  And froze, wondering if I’d had a stroke. Or maybe passed out and hit my head and somehow was in a strange dream. Either way, I wasn’t in the police station anymore. I was in . . . a living room. Sitting on a chair. And not just any chair. Grandma Abby’s favorite chair. In our old living room.

  CHAPTER 13

  I was in her house.

  Sitting in her favorite spot, where I’d go when she wasn’t home and I needed to feel comforted. Which, after my dad died five years ago, was often. It had been just the two of us after that, and I’d craved her company. I looked around now, half expecting her to appear with a mug of tea, but the house was quiet. It had that empty feel to it, the feeling a space got when its inhabitants left it for an extended period of time. Trying to hold on to their memory in case they came back, but it still started to fade. I hadn’t cleaned any of her things out yet—I couldn’t face it—but it still felt wrong. Empty. She had left it to me to do what I wanted with, but right now all I wanted to do was keep it the same as she had.

  But I couldn’t be in her house, because I was in the police station waiting to give a statement. I had to be asleep. Or hallucinating. This day had been stressful, for sure. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, hoping whatever this . . . vision was would clear up when I opened my eyes again. Not that I wanted to be back at the police station, but . . . of course I couldn’t be here.

  Could I?

  I opened my eyes slowly, bracing myself. I was still i
n the living room. Still in Grandma Abby’s chair, where the scent of her lingered on her favorite soft white throw blanket hung over the back of the chair. The scent hit me so hard tears filled my eyes.

  I got up slowly, checking to see if my arms and legs worked. Sometimes in dreams my limbs froze and I couldn’t move, so I waited to see if that was the case here. Nope, everything was doing what it was supposed to do.

  I walked into the kitchen, with the brilliant yellow walls just as my grandma had painted them years ago. Our cheery light wood table with green legs and matching green chairs, the old-style clock on the wall. And the built-in wooden shelving on the wall next to the pantry, where she used to put her favorite spices. Out the window over the sink, I could see the backyard—my old backyard, where I’d spent hours playing on the tire swing my dad had hung for me off the giant oak tree. Where I’d collected leaves for every fall school project. Where I’d dug up rocks and began studying them in earnest, fascinated by all the different shapes and textures and colors.

  This was my old house.

  How in the name of the goddess had I gotten here? I had no recollection of walking through a door, or driving here. I’d have had to drive. But I had no memory of doing so, or of leaving the police station in the first place. I wondered if I’d had a blackout or something. Unless they’d let me go—or I’d run out and didn’t remember.

  The air around me turned colder as I considered that option. If that had happened, did that mean I’d . . . possibly done what the cops said? Killed Carla and forgot?

  I fled out the back door and around the side of the house to the driveway, searching wildly for my car. It wasn’t there, nor was it parked on the street. A blast of cold air hit me, and I realized I wasn’t wearing my coat, only the sweatshirt and leggings I’d pulled on hastily before I left my apartment with the police. Why had I left without my coat?

  I felt around in my sweatshirt pockets for my phone, figuring I’d call Josie, but it wasn’t there. It must be in my bag, which was . . . still at the police station.

  I closed my eyes and sagged against the big old oak tree that still stood in the front yard, offering up a silent prayer that I would regain my mental faculties and figure out what was going on. It seemed insane, but I thought longingly of the sparse interrogation room where Haliburton and Denning had stashed me. At least I’d known how I’d gotten there, and that my stuff was there. If I could just remember what happened in that room, I’d be able to figure out what had happened next.

  I felt a weird sensation in my stomach, almost like I was on a roller coaster and it had just taken the big dive. I pressed my hand into my solar plexus and took a deep breath. Then I opened my eyes.

  And nearly fell off a chair I hadn’t been sitting on a second ago. I grabbed the edge of the dirty plastic table to steady myself. “What the . . .” I muttered, looking around the empty interrogation room. It was just as I’d left it before I ended up in my old house. Which clearly had all been in my imagination. The stress of the day had gotten to me. Maybe I’d fallen asleep for a minute and dreamed of it because it had been a safe haven for me. That had to be it. My head still felt a little spacey, but overall I felt better.

  I heard footsteps in the hallway and raised voices. I glanced up to find Denning and Haliburton arguing with each other as they appeared in the doorway. Then they stopped and did a double take when they saw me sitting there. Denning closed his eyes and shook his head as if to clear it.

  Haliburton narrowed his eyes. “Where were you?”

  I frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, where were you?”

  “Right here where you put me,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as uncertain as I felt.

  “Yeah, but . . . you went to the bathroom or something?” Denning asked.

  “I didn’t,” I protested. “I’ve been right here.” At least I desperately hoped so. There was no way I could’ve really ended up in my old house. It was a crazy dream or a hallucination.

  It had to be.

  They both looked at each other, then looked away. “Forget it,” Haliburton muttered, stalking into the room and slamming the door. He shoved a notepad and pen at me. “Write down everything that happened today. Every place you’ve been. Times. All of it.”

  I took the pad and pen. I wasn’t going to add in the trip down memory lane to my grandmother’s house. “Aren’t you going to ask me more questions?”

  “No,” he said, his voice sharp. “Just write it down.”

  I obliged. I wrote slowly and carefully, trying to think of everything just as I’d told it to him earlier. Denning stood in the doorway, watching me the whole time as if I were some weird specimen he had to study. Haliburton barely watched me at all, and checked his watch repeatedly. When he wasn’t checking his watch, he was checking his phone. He made me nervous.

  I stopped writing when I got to my nap. Of course, after that the police knew everything because they’d shown up at my door and caused all this chaos in the first place. I pushed the notebook back across the table at him.

  “What now?” I asked.

  CHAPTER 14

  Far away from the North Harbor police department and the fountain where Carla Fernandez’s body had been found, in a parallel realm to everything Violet Mooney was experiencing at that moment, a Magickal Council meeting was about to get underway. It was a meeting Fiona Ravenstar loathed attending, but she had to because, well, someone needed to be in charge. And that someone needed to be her because, let’s face it, if she didn’t, the whole witch community that had taken eons to build and morph into what it was today would probably just fall apart. That’s how incompetent some of the so-called leaders of this generation were.

  And it was no mystery why. Fiona watched them now, most of them on their smartphones—and really, if you had to call a phone smart, what did that say about people? —and she wondered what on earth a witch was doing with a smartphone. How did most of them even come by a smartphone? When witches—especially the ones around this table, who had more power in their pinky fingers than they knew what to do with—became dependent on an object like that, it was alarming.

  It represented all that was wrong with their world today. This generation of witches—and this included those her age or older—were too enmeshed in the mortal world. It was one thing to share space with mortals, but it was quite another to become so fixated upon their way of life that it got in the way of the important business going on here. Business that had to do with saving their heritage.

  Especially with such important matters on the docket. Most urgent was the pending election to fill the seat left by Abigail Moonstone’s shocking death a few weeks ago. Much talk about Abigail’s successor had ensued, but no one at this table, including Fiona, was in a position to alert that unknowing successor. And if that didn’t happen before the election, they were in big trouble, because a definite undesirable was in the lead, according to the latest Broom Poll.

  But something else weighed almost more heavily on Fiona’s mind. According to the Moonstone tradition and heritage, Abigail had no time limit on her life, unlike some witches. Not a lot of people knew that, but Fiona did. And the fact that she’d died now, leaving an empty chair, was disturbing.

  They had one week.

  She felt the strong urge to do something childish but terribly funny to get her colleagues’ attention. As she pondered what that would be, with one eye on the clock to track the minute hand to when they could start despite the fact that two members of the council hadn’t bothered to show up yet, she felt a strange sensation flooding her body. Her arms, legs, even her fingers started to become numb, and she felt a rush of something rising through her, all the way up to her head, sending her off-kilter.

  Fiona hadn’t felt like that since she was a toddler, trying out her powers for the very first time without realizing what she was actually doing, or how powerful she would one day become—head of the Ravenstar Witches—a family who had fought for, and won, power and p
rivilege for witches everywhere. The Moonstones were the only other family in the stratosphere even remotely close to being as powerful, although in Fiona’s mind they weren’t even close. It didn’t stop her from staying one step ahead, though. She was a confident witch, but not a stupid, egotistical one. She hadn’t gotten to where she was by being cocky.

  “Are we starting, Fiona?” An impatient voice sounded to her left. She vaguely registered Hattie Blandon, who thought she was infinitely more important than she actually was.

  Fiona ignored the voice and tried to focus on the feeling in her body and where it was coming from. She closed her eyes, and the vision hit her like a ton of bricks. A beautiful red-headed woman, silently calling for help. Fiona could feel the despair, fear, and loneliness in her plea as she’d never felt anything before. And it shook her to the core.

  Fiona wasn’t prone to emotional outbursts. At least not the touchy-feely kind. When she got angry, it was another story. Until then, she ruled logically and consistently, doing what she felt was best for the greater good. She tried to stay out of emotional quagmires and people’s personal dramas.

  She hardly even engaged in her own any longer.

  But today, she felt something she hadn’t felt in nearly thirty years. She squeezed her eyes closed even more tightly and forced herself to concentrate harder.

  The redhead came more into focus, and Fiona could see her face clearly. It was a face she hadn’t seen in that same nearly thirty years, but she’d know it anywhere: Violet. Her daughter. And she was in trouble.

  A collage of images passed through her brain, like a slideshow on fast-forward, moving so quickly she could barely grasp them. Cobblestones. A lifeless body. Something pink. A hand ripping a shirt off and a necklace with a crescent moon falling to the ground. An orange cat. An ugly, gray-toned room. Violet leaning against a tree, full of despair.