by Kate Krake
I plucked a ten-dollar bill from the register. The magic had drained me and that third cup of coffee couldn’t wait any longer, even if Kenny Langdel was the last person I wanted to see.
“Do you want anything from BrewHaHa?” I asked Lila.
“Half-caf soy turmeric latte with whipped cream and caramel drizzle, one and a half sugars,” Lila said. “Please.”
“Oh, I’m sure Kenny will love making that. I doubt he’d even put such a concoction on the menu.”
“Ask him anyway,” Lila said with a sly grin. “Just to mess with him. Not like he doesn’t deserve it. Ask him to dust some cinnamon on top too.”
It wasn’t only me. As far as I knew, in Kenny’s five years of business, he’d managed to annoy a large percentage of Blackthorn Springs’s twelve hundred residents.
I’d once heard Abbi complain about the time he’d banned her from the cafe for a week because she said the coffee was too hot and the milk burned. I had listened to Elsie Norton, who ran the craft store up the road, tell of his rage when she’d asked him to mix half and half decaf and regular into the same cup. Lila, who I thought had never said more than five harsh words about anyone in her life, complained about how he had screamed at her for leaning her bicycle up against the side of his shop.
“Next to a sign that said bike parking,” Lila had added in furious disbelief.
Kenny Langdel was not a likeable person at all, but since his coffee and food was something close to manna from heaven, he’d earned a steady business from most of the town.
I opened my door and had only taken one step before a scream tore through Main Street.
Abbi stood at the top of the cobbled thoroughfare running between my place and BrewHaHa. She screamed again.
I raced out of the store, my long skirt flapping around my ankles. When I reached Abbi, I saw what was so upsetting.
Kenny Langdel lay on the ground, twisted and still.
“He’s dead!” Abbi wailed.
I knelt down and placed two fingers on Kenny’s neck.
He certainly was dead.
2
It didn’t take long for a small crowd of shocked onlookers to gather around Kenny’s body. Lila and I were among them, Lila sniffing soft, quiet tears. A few in the group gasped, covering their mouths with their hands. Others cried, though I wondered, given that Kenny was a man the whole town loved to hate, if that was more the effect of a dead body in the street than whose body it actually was. Most people just stood there staring. Like I did.
Kenny was faceup, his back bent into a wooden arch. His arms were twisted, his hands curled into hooks, his legs sprawled. His eyes were open, frozen and terror-filled, with a stream of red flowing from each as though he were crying blood. His mouth was agape, locked as tight as the rest of him. His skin was mottled with dark purple splotches.
My throat constricted and I wrung my hands, unable to look away from the ghoulish vision. Those marks, the bloody eyes, the stiff bends in his body—I recognized what this was. I knew how Kenny had died, and I knew he had been murdered.
A dark shadow of the life I’d thought I had left behind enveloped me like a death shroud, and I stroked my snake pendant.
“What a terrible business.”
I cleared my throat, blinking quickly to bat away the sting of tears I hadn’t expected. I turned to see Henry Walton beside me. Even with half of his face covered in his thick grey beard, my friend looked pale.
“Hi, Henry.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Did anyone else in the crowd realize what they were witnessing? Everyone looked shocked, but was it the shock of seeing a corpse or seeing a murder victim?
A coldness gripped my soul. What if I was the only person who could see this heinous scene for the crime it actually was? The only person besides the killer, that was.
As if sensing the turmoil twisting around my insides, Henry put his arm around me. I tensed. I appreciated the gesture, but the closeness made me uncomfortable. I wanted to step away, but I also didn’t want to be rude to him when he was only trying to help.
“Kenny wasn’t sick or anything, was he?” Henry said.
“I have no idea,” I said. It wouldn’t matter if Kenny had been sick. This was a Mortis curse, and there was only one end once the victim had been targeted.
The officials arrived. Sheriff Dalton Bonney—a small man who always reminded me of a boy playing dress-up in a sheriff’s uniform—shifted his hat back off his brow, surveying the scene with the same grim look everyone else wore. Deputy Margie Garon, was making notes in a flip-top pad and ordering people to move away.
In the short time I had lived in Blackthorn Springs, the only crimes I had heard about were the occasional traffic violations, a bit of teenage graffiti, and an ownership argument about a ram who liked to wander between houses on the other side of town.
Had either Bonney or Garon ever come up against an actual first-degree crime? Would they even know what they were seeing? I doubted it, but at least that morning, they looked like they were trying to play the part of serious law enforcement.
Blackthorn Springs’ only ambulance, an old box-like truck leftover from the 1970s, pulled up to the curb, its lights flashing but its sirens silent.
Abbi Flannagan stood toward the front of the crowd, still shaking, talking to Garon. She was wrapped in a blanket given to her by one of the two EMTs. Tom Jenkins approached Abbi and placed a tentative arm over her shoulders in an attempt at comfort her.
Tom Jenkins had opened the new Blackthorn Springs diner not long before I had moved in. I had only been there a couple of times, preferring BrewHaHa even with its questionable service, but it was good to have another place in town to eat besides Kenny’s and the local bar, Bar Armadillo. I had seen Tom’s wife, Helen, and Abbi together often. Tom stared with a look equaling the horror on the face of the woman who had found the body.
I pulled my coat around me tighter against the cold bite of the morning that had just been made all the more chilling.
Henry removed his arm from my shoulders. “I can’t watch this,” he said. “I’m sorry, Belinda, I have to go.”
“Are you alright?” I said. If Henry ever smiled or frowned, it was hidden in the depths of his beard, but his silver eyes, lined with crow’s-feet, expressed in the most honest way. His eyes that morning betrayed a deep worry.
“Come see me at the shop later?” he said, trying and failing to put a chipper tone on his voice. “I haven’t forgotten about the Scrabble rematch we said we’d have later this week, either.”
“Sure,” I said. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to get out of there. I turned back to the scene.
A man, tall and broad with serious eyes, chestnut hair, and a short shaggy beard of the same color, moved through the crowd near me. He carried the same BrewHaHa travel coffee mug that I owned. He glanced at the body as if it were nothing more than an idle curiosity, stood for a few seconds and then moved away quickly. I watched him get into an old white truck and rattle off down the road.
“Who was that? He was certainly in a hurry to leave,” I whispered to Lila. She’d been too caught up in the commotion to have noticed who I was talking about.
“Maybe he just didn’t want to gawk,” she said.
It was a reasonable assumption.
“Looks like a heart attack,” Elsie Norton said from behind me.
“Or a stroke,” Elsie’s husband, Neville, replied. I knew it was neither.
The ambulance officers loaded the body, now covered in a white sheet, into the back of the ambulance.
Margie Garon looked my way and nodded, jotting something down in her notebook before walking over to me. My heart leaped into a tumble. Was I about to be questioned? Did they see this for what this was? Did they know I was a witch?
“Morning, Ms. Drake,” the deputy said. She was all business.
“What an awful thing, Margie… I mean, Deputy Garon.”
“It’s okay, Belinda. Let’s ski
p the formalities. It’s easy to slip into that mode when faced with something like this, right?”
“Can I help you with something?” I prompted, not wanting to waste any more time on idle chitchat if I was about to be called out as a witch, responsible for the most heinous spell known to witchkind.
“I just wanted to ask you if you’d noticed anything off about Kenny this morning, or in the last few days. You lived next door to him, probably saw him more than most since he didn’t have any family in town.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I mean, I bought a coffee from him this morning, like always, but we hardly said anything. We’re not really on speaking terms.” I thought it best to leave out the fact he’d abused me only hours before his death.
“You didn’t like each other?” Margie said, her interest piqued. I swallowed hard. I had made myself look like an enemy of a murder victim without even trying.
“No, no. I mean, I didn’t know him. We didn’t know each other, it was just a normal business transaction. I like to keep to myself and haven’t made friends with many people yet,” I said. Was I talking too fast? Did she think I was a weird loner?
“Fair enough,” Margie said. She smiled, and I relaxed.
“We’re likely calling this natural causes for now. We just want to know if he seemed unwell or anything. Do you know if he was on anything? Any health conditions?”
I shook my head and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I don’t know much about anyone.”
Margie smiled. “Well, that’ll change. Live in this place for long enough, you get to know just about everything about just about everyone. And they do the same to you.”
Great. Precisely what I needed.
What remained of the lingering crowd disappeared as the sheriff packed away and drove off. Abbi stayed, Tom still beside her. Abbi had stopped shaking and sobbing, but her face was still ashen.
“Would you like to come back to the shop?” Lila offered. “A cup of tea and something sweet, maybe? Sweets are good for shock.”
Abbi shook her head, and I was secretly relieved. “No, no, I’m fine. Did I hear them say it was a heart attack? I never knew a heart attack could do that to a person.”
“Hearts attacks can do all sorts of things to a body,” Jenkins offered quickly. “Or so I’ve read.”
I turned to leave the scene but stopped. Neville Norton was hurrying over toward me. Damn, I was too late to slip away. If only I hadn’t hesitated.
“Belinda, don’t forget there’s a committee meeting tomorrow,” he said.
Was he seriously bringing up the hedge maze committee to me when someone had just died in the street?
“I haven’t forgotten, Neville,” I said.
Like anyone, I’d made a few mistakes in my life. Agreeing to join the Blackthorn Springs Tourist Board Hedge Maze Committee on a whim was one of the most recent. That’s what I got for being such a sucker for anything even resembling a puzzle. Mazes were one of my favorites.
“You’ve missed every meeting, and we’re getting close to—”
“I’ll be there, Neville,” I said sharply.
Neville looked at me over the top of his old man spectacles, pressing his lips into a thin, hard line. “Very well, then. No excuses this time.”
* * *
“What a tragedy,” Lila said as we came back inside the shop. She had stopped crying but still looked like she had lost her closest friend. Death has a way of leveling people’s niggles in life.
I opened the box of chocolates that I wasn’t supposed to be eating any more of. Not even gooey nut caramel could sweeten this moment, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.
It was terrible enough that someone had died right there in the street, but this whole thing would be concluded by the end of the week, ruled a medical tragedy, natural causes. Unfortunate, but not uncommon.
It was absolutely not natural causes.
Kenny had been killed by a Mortis curse.
There had to be another witch in Blackthorn, and whoever that other witch was, they were about to get away with murder.
My hand went again to my pendant, stroking the smooth silver back of the twisted serpent. My twin brother, Quentin, had given it to me on our sixteenth birthday. He had a matching one, and when the two were pressed together, they made a serpentine figure eight. In times like this, when I was reminded of him, I sometimes wondered if he still had his necklace. I wondered if he was still alive.
3
Here’s the thing. Magic is real. Witches are real. Spirits, demons, fae, vampires, shapeshifters—a lot of stuff people dismiss as fairy-tale nonsense is real. That doesn’t mean we talk about it a lot, though. Well, some of us don’t. It’s easier that way. Besides, since I wasn’t much of a witch, I never really thought there was any point in being open about it.
Loreton is a big city, and just about every kind of life happens there, including the supernatural kind. I hadn’t known any other witches growing up, except Quentin, and we’d kept our magic a secret from all of our foster families. Whenever any of them suspected, it meant a new foster home was always just around the corner.
As we got older, and Quentin started reaching out to other witches, I was honestly surprised how many supernaturals there were living in the open, and that was only in our corner of the city.
By the time we were old enough to live on our own, Quentin was out and proud, supernaturally speaking, but his skills were always a lot better than mine.
“You keep doing those fun little tricks of yours, Bella. No point in looking for a real coven to practice with when you don’t have any real magic,” Quentin had said to me more than once.
When Quentin left, I locked my magic down deep. But in the first few weeks of being in Blackthorn Springs, the magic had started coming through me more strongly.
At first, I hadn’t thought much of it. Maybe it was the clean mountain air. Who cared, really? Whatever was happening, no one needed to know about that side of me. And given what had happened with Quentin, it was something I myself wanted to ignore. But as the weeks passed, it was harder to tune out. It was like my powers wanted to be used. There was no harm in the little tricks I would try now and then, but as for the rest of the supernatural world and everything I’d experienced in Loreton, I refused to think about it. Seeing a death curse in high-res gory detail right outside my home was something I couldn’t ignore, though.
It was almost lunchtime, and there hadn’t been a single walk-in customer since Abbi. Business online was okay, though I couldn’t focus on orders and shipping with the thought that there was a supernatural killer in town whirling through my mind. My days of pretending that world didn’t exist were apparently over.
“I think we should take the rest of the day off,” I said. It would be a totally acceptable cover to close the store for the day, given my next-door neighbor had just died.
Lila sat on the stool, stroking Hemlock’s back and staring at an empty space in front of her. She shrugged.
“I don’t mind staying if you want to leave early. I can lock up at closing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll just mope at home. At least I can feel useful if I’m here. If anyone comes for you, I’ll explain. They’ll understand.”
“Thanks, though I can’t imagine anyone would come looking for me. But if you do need me, I won’t be far away.”
“Right upstairs.”
I nodded. I would be upstairs later that afternoon, but there was something I needed to take care of first.
* * *
The Blackthorn Springs sheriff’s office was a log building two blocks behind Main Street. With the rows of potted daisies along the front of the building, it looked more like a child’s playhouse than the center of law enforcement for the town.
Once upon a time, the young me would have never voluntarily gone near a police station of any kind. Growing up as Quentin and I had done, with no money, no one to watch and no one to care, I admit, the occasional petty crime had come my
way. Light-fingered shoplifting, mostly. A few times I’d broken into neighborhood houses just to see if I could. It was never anything serious—I just liked to snoop around, look in drawers, closets, and attics, explore the hidden corners of people’s lives where they thought no one could see. I never stole anything of real value, and no one ever got hurt. And then there was the time I was caught trying to break into a former foster house to retrieve the snake pendant Quentin thought he might have accidentally left there. Our former foster parents had pressed charges, and no one had listened to my side of the story.
Even though I’d closed the book on that life a long time ago, willingly entering a sheriff’s office still put me on edge.
Standing tall and trying my best to look like an upstanding citizen, I tapped the bell on the deserted front desk and waited.
Margie came through the swinging door, eating a granola bar.
“Belinda, nice to see you again,” she said, her mouth still half-full. “What can I do for you?”
I cleared my throat. “Is there somewhere private we can talk, Margie? It’s about Kenny Langdel.”
Margie swallowed her mouthful. She placed the granola bar down on the desk, straightened her tie and motioned for me to follow her through the back door.
We went into a small room empty of anything but a table, two chairs, and a security camera mounted on the wall. It was the kind of place I imagined would be used for suspect interrogation, if such a thing had ever happened in the sleepy little town.
“Would you like some tea? Coffee? Dalt had some soda yesterday. I can see if there’s still a can in the fridge.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” I said, sitting.
Margie sat down at the table opposite and pulled out her notepad and a freshly sharpened pencil. “We’re on the record,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Actually, I’m not sure what I’m about to say should be on the record.”