I started the engine. “Not you.”
“You better not get yourself killed. Seriously Abby, what on earth are you trying to prove here?”
“Nothing. I’m trying to prove nothing. I’m trying to figure out why someone keeps calling me to old crime scenes. Now is the time for me to figure that out.”
“I thought Oliver was working on that?”
I nodded. “He was supposed to be, but I don’t know if he ever made progress. The calls stopped, but now they’ve started emailing.”
“Yep, we’re going to end up dead.” Simon shook his head and pulled out his phone.
“Tattling?”
“In your world, it’s called calling for backup. I’m letting your uncle know.”
Two seconds after Simon finished the text, Oliver called my phone. I answered it on the hands-free system. “You’re on speakerphone.”
“What the hell are you doing, Abigail? Get home and rest. Paperwork, be damned. Mysterious emails, be damned.” He snarled. “Simon, you turn that car around bring her back home.”
“I’m not driving,” Simon said, almost as if he was defeated.
“You want to meet me at the haunted house?” I offered. “Because that’s where I’m heading.”
Oliver made a frustrated noise and then hung up the phone. I snickered at him and then went to the drive-through for coffee.
“I’m going to assume he’ll met us there.” Simon shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him give a demand like that.
I ordered both of us coffees and then waited to answer him until after I got the coffee from the window. I handed him his. “He’s worried. He was first on the scene when Adrianna stabbed me.”
“It scares me when Oliver is worried,” Simon muttered and drank his coffee.
Me too, but I didn’t admit it out loud.
We pulled up the dirt driveway of the old farmhouse. I parked next to a mangled thing of metal, and Simon gave me a dull look. “Your car?”
“Looks like it.” I threw the Hummer into park and looked at the house.
The wrap around porch looked in even worse shape than the last time I was here. There was still caution tape around the hole that led into the hidden basement where we had found the bodies. I watched the window to wait and see if I saw the woman. She’d been Ira’s lover, and he fed her to his experiments without a second thought. Her spirit had never been put to rest.
Nothing moved in the windows. Simon got out and sniffed the air. “I smell something.”
I readied my gun and stepped out of the Hummer.
“Abby,” Simon growled.
“Not approaching the house,” I promised. I waited for my uncle to appear, but he didn’t. Footsteps behind me had me aiming my gun.
Merick stood there with his hands held up. “Just me.”
I let out a breath. “Okay.”
Simon sniffed the air again. “Scent is gone.”
That was a good sign. It meant that we could move around.
‘Abigail…” Samuel’s voice entered my head, and I tried to ignore it. “Abigail…the cabin.’ He cooed, and his voice seemed to promise me the world. If this was what it was like to have a vampire maker, I was going to need someone to swear to stake me if I became a vampire.
But… the voice did have a point.
I started walking to the cabin I knew was hidden on the property. Ira had used the cabin to hide his blood-starved. It was like my feet had a mind of their own as I walked to the cabin. Neither of the men near me said anything as I walked away from the house.
They should have. They should have followed or stopped me, but all I knew was that there was something at the cabin. Something that I wanted to find.
The cabin came into view, and I paused. This was stupid.
“Abigail…”
This time it was a woman’s voice. During the case, I hadn’t seen the ghost out this far. I tightened my hand on the gun. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost.
The woman from the street came into my mind. Maybe this was a setup. But Samuel wanted me alive. Not dead.
‘Run, you stupid witch.’ He hissed in my head, and that got my feet moving. I ran and jumped into the cabin’s entrance, the door long gone. I hoped my memory served me right on where the broken boards had been.
As my feet landed on solid ground, and I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t fallen through. Samuel wanted me alive, which meant that he was trying to protect me. Was he around?
Samuel was a daywalker, I knew that much, so it was a possibility that he was here watching me.
I heard footsteps outside the cabin, a snap of a twig here, a kick of a rock there. I took a deep breath and swung around the doorframe, aiming.
Nick had his gun leveled with mine, and we both took a moment to stare at each other.
Neither of us were expecting the other.
“What the hell are you doing here,” I hissed as my brain went into overdrive.
I saw his hand twitch before it moved, and he fired. I expected pain, but nothing came except the ringing in my ears from being next to a gun that discharged. I looked over my shoulder when the ground vibrated with a thud.
The woman from the street the day of the shooting laid face first in a pool of her blood. I glanced at Nick then back to the body. “Holy shit.”
“Still don’t trust me at your back. You would have been dead.”
“Why can’t you get past my circle at the house?”
Nick shook his head. “It’s not yours keeping me from it.”
“Merick. You can’t get past his magic,” I muttered. I looked back at the body again and then looked up when I heard more footsteps. This time both Nick and I aimed at the same place.
Simon and Merick came out of the woods, but with their hands in the air. I sighed and lowered my gun. “I have had enough scares for one day. Let’s get home.”
Everyone muttered in agreement, and we walked back to the house. I noticed that Merick and Nick stayed away from each other, and I wondered what I was missing there.
We got back to the Hummer, and I paused at my mangled car and looked at Nick. “Why?”
He smirked. “The first one I did as a warning. This one…I thought it was an ugly car, and you needed something that wasn’t a death trap. I had someone steal it and compact it.” He went and sat on the porch of the house. “Stay safe, Abby. I’ll see you back at the office later. I need to have a chat with a ghost.”
I wasn’t even going to ask. I knew he had the sixth sense, and I left it at that.
I climbed into the Hummer and started the car as Merick and Simon got in. I leaned back in my seat. “Told you I wasn’t going to get killed.”
“Only because Nick was there.” Simon dialed his phone and put it up to his ear. “Yeah, tell Levi the chick from the video is dead.” He paused for a moment. “Yeah, I’ll send you the location.” He hung up and sent a text message.
I didn’t bother asking who it was. Levi would get the message, and I would either need to explain, or he’d leave it be, just like he’d been doing with the Adrianna situation.
At the thought of that, my side ached. A text came through, and Simon grabbed it. “Mason wants you and Merick at the station. Hope wants to talk to you.”
“Okay, I’ll drop you off first, and then we’ll head in.”
“Okay.” Simon put my phone down and then put a hand on my knee as I drove. He’d been increasingly cuddly since I’d woken up at Oliver’s. I didn’t mind, though. It comforted me somewhere in my tired soul.
We walked into the station, and Merick stayed close to my side. At first, I didn’t understand why, and then I felt the little pull of magic. I sighed and looked at him. “I thought the magic was gone. She’s in the containment center.”
“That’s not Adrianna’s. It’s Hope’s,” Merick said. “The situation with her mother woke her magic early.”
I cringed at that. “That poor girl.”
We stopped at the office and knoc
ked on the door. Detective Mason opened it, and we both walked in. “Agent Collins, Merick.”
Hope looked up at us and smiled. “Abby,” she said softly. “It’s good to see you alive.”
“Thank you.” I sat down at the table in front of her, and Mason stepped up behind me.
Hope continued to color the picture she had been working on. “My name is Hope now. They told me that Mommy won’t be coming back, and I’ll have a new family.”
Her speech seemed so much better than when I first met her, which made me reassess how old she was. Five, possibly six.
She looked up at me. “They told me that you couldn’t be my family.”
“No, I’m sorry, Hope. I’m not ready to raise a child yet.”
“I know.” She slid a picture over to me, and I looked down at it. “Mommy says it’s not over, Abigail.”
The words made me shiver, but the picture stabbed me in the gut. It was a very child-like drawing of me against the wall covered in red. The symbols from the scenes were drawn on the wall.
“It’s not over,” she whispered again. “Her army is still out there.”
I put a hand on hers. “It is over, Hope.” I stood and took the picture with me. “There are people who will help you, Hope. They’ll help you walk that path of light, not dark, magic.”
“Am I capable of light magic?” She asked, raising scared eyes to meet my gaze.
I nodded. “Everyone is capable of light magic.” I walked out and looked at the picture again. Merick came out and motioned to the paper. “Make sure you leave that for Mason so he can get it to Hope’s therapist.”
“Yeah. I have no intention of keeping it.” But I couldn’t get her words out of my head. The witch was locked away. She couldn’t get me. I broke the spell that allowed her to call people to her.
The only person I had to worry about was Samuel in my head, and in a couple of weeks, that would be taken care of.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Two Weeks Later
Mario’s voice came over my phone. “She was O’Donald’s daughter.”
I walked into my house, cradling the phone on my shoulder. “And he didn’t know?”
“She was estranged.” That explained why the missing person file said ‘friend’ and not ‘father.’ “We’re still looking into it. Don’t worry. The council is going to talk about it tonight.”
“Good, keep Levi distracted.”
“The other thing is, Abby, I don’t think this is the end of it.”
“Neither do I, Mario. Look I have to go, thanks for updating me.” I hung up and walked into the living room.
I hadn’t been allowed alone for the two weeks once I fessed up that I heard Samuel in my head at the haunted house. Tonight was no different. Except tonight, Levi didn’t know we were doing the spell because we didn’t want him to try and stop it on Samuel’s command.
Levi at a council meeting would keep him from showing up here tonight. I was back to work full time, and I was ready to get this stupid vampire out of my head.
Merick, Liz, and Oliver all stood out in my backyard, and I sighed as I went to lay in the circle they’d drawn.
I closed my eyes as Oliver closed the circle. His magic snapped over me and called to my own. I took a deep breath because I knew what was going to happen next. Oliver closed his hand over the bite mark on my neck and started chanting.
I cried out as it burned through my body. Digging my fingers into the dirt, I tried to find my grounding. I tried to focus through the pain, but my mind was spinning.
‘Don’t let them do this, Abigail…’ Samuel’s voice came stronger than it ever had been. ‘You’ll never get the answers you seek. You’ll never understand what happened that night…’
“You’re lying,” I cried out, and another pair of hands held me down while Oliver continued to chant. I bucked against the ground as the pain became unbearable. Oliver’s magic burned through me, and my own magic tried to rise and meet it. I didn’t remember it doing that with the cleansing from Ira.
“Now, Liz.”
Liz’s magic flooded into me, blocking my own magic.
‘Abigail…your mother…” Samuel’s voice faded as the spell started to wind down.
“Fuck off,” I growled. “You ordered her death.”
‘Are you so sure about that?’ His voice faded completely, and I felt his influence leave me.
Liz’s magic floated back, and Oliver’s hands left my neck. I sat up and looked at him.
“Don’t believe anything he says, Abigail. He can’t be trusted.” Oliver pressed his head to mine. “You’re safe now, niece.”
Dear Reader,
I hope you enjoyed this book and if you did, please consider leaving a review. Thank you for sticking with me on this journey and coming back for more. Many of you have been with me since the first book hit the shelf back in 2015 and it’s been a wild ride. Abby’s not done yet, she still has a few books left in her and a lot more in her life to figure out, so I hope you keep sticking around. As for me, I’m hard at work on book eleven.
Elizabeth Bathory was a real person, if you get a chance listen to the Lore Podcast episode on her. It’s crazy and yet super interesting. That episode inspired this book and the idea of what a witch would do with the amount of power in that much blood.
Again, thank you for reading!
A.L. Kessler
Connect with me Online
Website: Https://www.herewitchywitchy.com
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About the Author
A.L. Kessler is the author of the best-selling series Here Witchy Witchy. She resides in Colorado with her family and pets. Her addiction to coffee and chocolate fuels her creativity to bring her readers wonderful stories.
Other Series by A.L. Kessler
Parlor Tricks
Children of the Apocalypse
The Case Files of Abigail Collins
The King’s Game
Normalcy
The Syndicate (with Mia Bishop)
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A Little Blood Magic (Here Witchy Witchy Book 10) Page 19