The Witch's Key

by Sarra Cannon

  “Holy crap. Look.”

  He pointed out a similar entry about Bates on the day before each of the other girls went missing.

  “All except the first, because that happened before I started work. I can’t believe I didn’t see this before. That can’t be a coincidence, Lenny. He’s involved. He has to be.”

  My stomach flipped, and I felt like I might throw up.

  “What else do you know about this guy? Like, does he work around town? Or is he new to the area?” I asked.

  “I don’t know much else about him,” he said. “Like I said, I noticed his energy was dark some days, but I didn’t have any other thing that drew my attention about him until tonight.”

  I watched as the guy Kai had called Bates stepped into the headlights of Ms. Greer’s car.

  This was my first good look at him, and I wasn’t impressed. He was probably in his mid-thirties or so, tall and lanky with dark, chin-length hair that he kept brushing out of his eyes. He wore a pair of ripped jeans, a Rolling Stones t-shirt, and no shoes.

  I tried to zero in on the guy’s energy, but Kai was right. He’d cloaked himself with something, and I couldn’t quite place a finger on it. He could have been a demon, but he just as easily could have been a were of some kind. Or a vampire. The guy had some definite vampire vibes going on, if you asked me.

  He was obviously very upset to see Ms. Greer, but there was nothing unusual about that. Most people were upset to see her.

  But what was she doing here? Maybe they were working together and this guy had done something wrong? Or maybe she was here to arrest him.

  My mind was running in circles, trying to make sense of it all. I needed more information.

  Ms. Greer tried to step around him and go inside the building, but he blocked her and shook his head, actually daring to put a hand on her shoulder and push her back.

  Yikes. This guy was braver than most.

  Or dumber.

  Anger flashed around Ms. Greer in the form of a bright red pulse emanating from her eyes. Bates took two fumbling steps backward until he hit the door.

  He quickly lifted his hands, throwing up a magical shield to block himself from Ms. Greer’s spells. From here, I could just make out the faint shimmer of the shield in the moonlight.

  It didn’t last long, though, and fear grew on Bates’s face as Ms. Greer calmly stepped toward him.

  He tried to recast the shield, but he didn’t seem to have the focus to do it. He looked like a clown, fumbling around. Magic danced on his fingertips, but he couldn’t seem to get anything going.

  I glanced at Kai. This guy was not some demon mastermind.

  He didn’t even seem all that powerful. Truth be told, he acted high on something. I wished I could get a closer look at his eyes, but as it stood right now, I wasn’t convinced anymore that he was our guy.

  Unless Ms. Greer was the mastermind and this guy was just her lackey. That could be it, too, no matter how much I wanted her to be innocent in this.

  Ms. Greer reached into her suit pocket for something, and a second later, she was holding a fist high over her head.

  Bates shouted. “Don’t you dare. Stop it, now.”

  But she wasn’t listening to him. She tossed whatever was in her hand high up into the air. Golden particles swirled above her like a galaxy of stars. She casually twirled her wrist above her head, making the particles swirl faster and faster.

  Kai moved closer to me, his shoulder pressing against mine. “What’s she doing?” he whispered.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never seen this spell before.”

  Kai put his arm around me and moved to partially shield my body with his. If my heart was racing before, now it was practically exploding out of my chest.

  Despite the fact that I was seventeen, I’d never had a boyfriend before. I’d never even been this close to a guy before. It was extremely uncomfortable and slightly intoxicating.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Protecting you,” he said. “Just in case she’s about to blow that building up.”

  “Well, let’s hope not if the girls are inside,” I said. “Surely she wouldn’t hurt them.”

  Still, I scooted just the tiniest bit closer to him.

  Part of me wanted to run up there and stop her. Confront her and find out what she was doing out here. Another part of me just couldn’t believe she would blow up that building with five innocent human girls inside.

  Meanwhile, the golden galaxy above Ms. Greer’s head had grown massively larger. If she did plan on blowing up that building, she was going to take half the forest with her.

  Bates was trying to get to her to stop the spell, but she held him back with her free hand and some kind of restraining spell.

  “Ostendo,” she shouted as she hurled the spell toward the large building.

  I braced myself for impact, huddling under Kai’s arm. He leaned his head down to shield me from any magic as the floor of the forest trembled.

  I waited for a full-on explosion, but nothing came. Instead, I heard the tinkling laughter of several women.

  Confused, I looked up to see what in the world was going on.

  My jaw dropped, and it took a second for my brain to catch up with my eyes.

  Ms. Greer had somehow managed to make the entire building transparent. Every wall was now invisible, meaning that we could see straight through to every single thing happening inside.

  The building had been partitioned into several rooms. One space appeared to be a party hangout, which is where the loud music was coming from. On a makeshift dance floor, there were about seven moon sprites dancing together and giggling. They hadn’t even noticed that their building had turned invisible, but they certainly didn’t seem to be in any distress.

  Another room was completely empty and dark, but there was nothing much to see there, anyway. An unmade bed on the floor and some clothes strewn everywhere.

  In the very back, though, there was some kind of mechanism set up. It almost looked like a chemistry lab attached to a conveyer belt.

  “What in the heck is going on in the back there?” I asked.

  Kai looked as though he was in more shock than I was. He shook his head and seemed to notice the lab for the first time.

  “I can’t quite tell,” he said. “This guy is obviously making some kind of home brew back there. See the bubbling cauldron in the very back near the wall?”

  He pointed toward it, and I had to squint to see it in the very back, but he was right. There was a cauldron full of some type of glowing liquid in the very back.

  “There’s a glass tube siphoning liquid out of it and pulling it up to the glass beakers on the table,” he said, following the progression of the liquid with his fingertip. “See those vials on the right there? The multi-colored ones?”

  I nodded. There were vials in six different bright colors. Purple, pink, green, blue, yellow, and orange. We watched for a moment before Kai spoke.

  “From the looks of it the golden liquid in the cauldron gets pulled up to those beakers, boiled or processed there in some way. Then, the new liquid travels up through that second set of tubes, dropping small amounts into each of the vials, where it takes on a new property. The vials then drop into small bottles before uprighting themselves to collect more liquid.”

  I watched the process closely. He was right. This was a factory of some kind.

  “Watch the bottles,” I said. “They travel down that conveyor belt, go into that small oven-looking machine, and when they come out—”

  “Dust,” he said, cutting me off.

  “Moondust in different flavors?” I asked.

  Kai closed his eyes. “This guy isn’t some demon mastermind kidnapping girls,” he said. “He’s a glorified drug dealer.”

  He rolled over onto his back and ran a hand through his hair.

  “I feel like an idiot,” he said. “I should have seen this coming. He was probably coming into Sir Bean to distri
bute the drugs to someone there. I just never caught the exchange. That would explain his sometimes-dark intentions. He’s doing bad things, but this is peanuts compared to kidnapping and murder. It’s not like Moondust ever killed anyone.”

  I let my head fall into my hands.

  That likely explained Ms. Greer’s involvement, too. She wasn’t in cahoots with some evil demon. She was following up some lead about a low-level dust dealer.

  Truth be told, it seemed too small-time for someone at Ms. Greer’s level, but still, it did explain why she was probably here. It had nothing to do with the missing girls or the demon.

  Ms. Greer exchanged a few more nasty words with Bates, probably telling him to clean up his act or get out of town, and then climbed into her car. As she drove away, the walls of the building slowly came back into view.

  Bates shook his head and sat down on the back end of his brown sedan. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket with trembling hands, snapped his fingers to light it from a magical spark, and started to cry.

  Pathetic.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Kai said.

  He stood and offered his hand to me, helping me stand.

  “Well, that was a massive waste of time,” he said. “I’m sorry I got your hopes up.”

  “It was a good lead,” I said. “I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bates had dark intentions the day before each of the girls disappeared. There’s something to that, if you ask me. Plus, the fact that he moved here and started this operation right before the first kidnapping. There might be a connection there that we can’t see yet.”

  “I’ve never tried Moondust. Have you?” he asked as we walked back to the car.

  “Once,” I said. “I ate a piece of candy at a vampire’s house once that had some Moondust in it. It was one of the most delicious things I’d ever tasted, but it gave me terrible dreams afterward. I never wanted to touch it again after that.”

  “Candy,” Kai said.

  He stopped walking and tapped a finger to his lips.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Moondust is rarely just eaten straight,” he said. “I mean, you have your hardcore users who might do that, but most people put it in food, right? Candy, milkshakes—”

  “Cupcakes,” I said, my eyes widening.

  “Exactly. I think our next mission is a trip to Olive’s house to talk to her mother,” Kai said. “Maybe there’s still time to swing by there tonight and just take a look around. Then, we can go back to your place and come up with a plan to test those cupcakes tomorrow. It might be unrelated, but I’m not sure.”

  “I honestly think we can—”

  My words were cut off by a blast of fire that knocked me backwards fifteen feet into a tree. My head hit, and the entire world blurred and nearly faded away, but I forced myself to stay awake and aware.

  What was that?

  I tried to stand, but the second I put weight on my arm to prop myself up, I screamed at the pain that ripped through me. The entire right side of my body had been burned. I couldn’t tell how badly yet, but everything hurt.

  I struggled to make sense of it all, but my thinking was fuzzy.

  I was pretty sure my right shoulder had been dislocated, too. I prayed it wasn’t broken.

  The forest around me was on fire, and I couldn’t see Kai anywhere. I shouted his name, but there was no response. The flames had separated us right down the middle, so he had to be somewhere on the other side of the blaze.

  Had we been attacked?

  Were we still in danger?

  Adrenaline surged as my brain snapped back into working order. Of course we were in danger. It wasn’t like fireballs just randomly fell out of the sky.

  I used my left hand to push myself up, and I moved away from the fast-spreading flames.

  I thought through all of my options. I could run back to Bates’s place and ask for help, but I wasn’t sure that guy would help us. Or that he was any good at casting, anyway.

  Ms. Greer might have been able to help, but she would be long gone by now anyway.

  Unless it’s her attacking us.

  The thought ran through my mind, but I quickly pushed it out of my mind. I didn’t have time to speculate. I needed to find help.

  Kai’s car was close, but the flames had come from that direction.

  Then I remembered the phone in my pocket. I had to reach across my body to get it out of my right pocket with my left hand, but I somehow managed to get it done and call Martin’s number as I ran away from the flames.

  He was going to be so angry, and the thought of him finding out I’d gone out behind his back for the second time in one day brought tears to my eyes, but I had no choice. We needed him.

  “I’m already on my way,” he said when he picked up the phone. “Find a safe spot and use whatever resources you have around you to hide. Go, Lenny.”

  Relief flooded my body. Martin was already on his way.

  Like everyone else in my life, he must have been spying on me, too.

  I needed to find a safe place and stay put. I wanted to go back and look for Kai, but I was going to have to trust he was doing the same thing on the other side. Hiding.

  With my arm like this, I wasn’t going to be much help, anyway.

  I lifted my shirt to cover my mouth, so that I could breathe through the heavy smoke that filled the air. Martin had said to use whatever resources I had around me to hide, so what resources were here?

  I dropped to my knees and rummaged through scattered pine straw, twigs, and dirt.

  Think, Lenny, think.

  I used to consider myself a very cool-headed person. I used to pride myself at how calm I managed to stay during hunts with my parents. I was a fast-thinker who usually produced the right spell at the right time.

  But now, I felt like a fledgling witch who’d never seen a day of danger in her life.

  And maybe I hadn’t. With my parents leading the charge, I’d never been in any real danger. They both would have protected me with their lives.

  They also never took me on the really dangerous jobs, I realized now. I used to think I was better than other witches my age. Powerful.

  But look at me now.

  I was burned, broken, and crying in the dirt, clueless about how to protect myself.

  How had I gotten to this point? How had I become so weak?

  If my parents could see me now, they’d have been so disappointed.

  I took a slow breath and closed my eyes.

  I needed to calm down. I needed to get centered. Someone was out here right now, hunting me down, and I wasn’t ready to die.

  I opened my eyes and started looking more carefully at the ground and trees around me. What could I really use here?

  Blackberry vines with fresh, plump fruit grew just ten feet away. It was the perfect time of year for wild blackberries, which meant the vines out here were much more potent than the shriveled one I’d used earlier from my spell cabinet.

  Blackberry vines had protection capabilities.

  I crawled over and plucked two large blackberries and a six-inch stretch of vine, careful not to prick myself on the thorns.

  What else?

  I carefully brushed the pine needles off the forest floor and looked around. There would be something here I could use. My mom always said that the right ingredients came to a witch when she needed them most, as long as she knew how to look for them.

  So I pushed back the panic growing inside me and trusted that what I needed was here somewhere.

  I sucked in a breath as a dead beetle rolled out from under a twig as I pushed it aside.

  I leaned back against a tree, cradling my right hand in my lap as I gathered the fresh ingredients in my awkward off-hand.

  My eyes stung and my throat burned from all the smoke, but I reminded myself that Martin would be here soon. I just needed to protect myself until he got here. I could do this.

  Once I had this spell in place, I could go look for Ka
i. It was going to be okay.

  But tears of doubt streamed down my face.

  I was too scared. Too unprepared. My hands were shaking.

  I set the three ingredients down in a small clearing between my legs and took as deep a breath as I could manage. I quickly squished the blackberry between my fingertips and let the juice fall on the beetle’s hard carapace. Next, I wrapped the blackberry vine around the beetle’s body.

  It was tough to do one-handed, but I managed well enough.

  Now for the incantation. “Prot—”

  Before I could get the word out of my mouth, an invisible hand seemed to lift me up like a ragdoll.

  I screamed and kicked against the energy, but I couldn’t get a grip on it.

  I frantically searched through the woods, looking for any sign of my attacker, but the only person I saw was Kai, unconscious and wrapped in some kind of net that emanated dark, bluish-purple energy.

  Seeing him squeezed what little hope I had out of my heart. There was no way Martin would get here fast enough now.

  It was up to me. If I didn’t save us, we were both going to die.

  A Single Key

  I hung in the air, my body dangling about four feet off the ground. Something invisible slithered around my neck and tightened its grip.

  I struggled against it, kicking and trying to pull away, but nothing made any difference.

  I scanned the woods again. I needed to see who was actually doing this to me.

  Whoever they were, they were casting from a distance, and they were completely hidden by the smoke. Their magic was definitely strong, though.

  Had the demon come for us?

  How did he find us here? It didn’t make any sense.

  Not unless Blythe Greer really was involved and knew I’d followed her out here. In that case, then, Kai’s cloaking spell hadn’t worked.

  There was no doubt the person—or creature—attacking us was powerful, though. Way beyond what my magic could handle, anyway.

  What could I do? I had no idea if they were trying to kidnap me or kill me, but as the invisible rope tightened around my neck, I was leaning toward death. And I just couldn’t let that happen. I was not going to go down like this to some unknown creep.