Witchling Wars

by Shawn Knightley

  Maybe it was just too soon for me to get into a car. But let’s face it. After being in bed for months I could really use the exercise of biking around on the few occasions that I wanted something from the store. That didn’t protect me from the heat. I was a sweaty mess when I walked into the police station. But if Officer Parker wanted my services, he would have to live with my stank.

  A bell rang at the front door as I walked in.

  “How can I help you, ma’am,” said a man up front.

  “I’m here to see Officer Parker if he’s around.

  The man looked at me with a curious lift of his brow. “Are you Harper?”

  Now it was my turn to be curious. “Yes.”

  He gave a small nod. “Parker said you might stop by some time soon. Come on back.”

  Wonderful. He knew he had me. Or he knew that curiosity would get the best of me.

  I walked through the back and down a dimly lit hall. The tile floors were old and made strange noises as I followed him. When we got back to Officer Parker’s office, or what I assumed was his office, he was sitting down with stacks of paper and manila folders in front of him. It gave the term being “buried in work” a whole new meaning for me.

  “This young lady came by for you,” said the man from the front desk.

  “Ah, yes,” said Officer Parker, getting up from his chair as though he had been expecting me this whole time. His smile was too big. Too charming. Too nice in a formal way that made me uncomfortable but melted the hearts of all the girls back in high school. “Miss Ashwood, thanks for dropping by. Please take a seat,” he said after offering his hand out to shake mine.

  His handshake was firm. Confident. He gave two solid shakes to let me know that he was in charge. It’s amazing what one can tell from a solid handshake. It’s even more amazing when you’re a kruxa. The images in front of my eyes changed. The movement in the room started to slow down. I knew that others wouldn’t be able to see it, but it was as if time altogether had come to a torrential halt. One that was allowing me a peek into another dimension. One that others weren’t allowed to view. Couldn’t view. And often times, one I didn’t want to view.

  Officer Parker’s eyes changed. They were empty. Wide open in an unnatural way. There was blood going down his chest from a gaping open wound, showing me his exposed insides. It was enough to make someone squeamish at the sight of blood throw up.

  His shirt was stained in crimson along with his trousers. His skin was ghostly white. The air surrounding us became full of static. If I moved a muscle I wondered if I could receive a spark flying through the air to zap me. But as soon as the vision came, it went. Officer Parker was back to his normal self and standing directly in front of me, pulling his seat back toward his desk with his chest still intact.

  I quickly sat down in the chair opposite him, trying my best to appear as though nothing had happened. And trying my best to wipe away the memory of seeing what very well looked like Officer Parker’s corpse. It was a warning. A very stiff warning that told me Officer Parker really had no idea what he was getting into.

  The other officer left the room and closed the door behind him. Officer Parker didn’t start speaking until he was out of earshot.

  “I take it you’ve either changed your mind, or you want more details. Am I right?” he said, rolling a pen between his fingers.

  “More details would be nice. Especially since you gave my sister a lot more than you gave me. Something about a murder that didn’t make the papers. A young woman in Sealing with a gash to the throat, am I right?”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “I realized when I got off the phone with your sister that it was probably wrong to call her up. I apologize. I’m just at a dead end and I really need the help.”

  “Yeah, it was wrong, but I’ll let it go if you tell me a little more. I’m not agreeing to anything yet. I just want to know more.”

  He smirked. “I can’t really tell you a whole lot unless you want to be involved. These aren’t details that I’m permitted to give freely to just anyone.”

  “Then repeat what you told my sister since those details were already shared. What can you tell me about this girl in Sealing?”

  He took a deep breath and reached for a key in his pocket. He opened a file drawer inside his desk and pulled out one that I could tell had been revisited a time or two. It was crinkled with age and from hands repeatedly combing through it.

  “There was a young woman in Sealing that was murdered a few months ago. Now you and I know that Sealing has a small population of mostly retired folks that don’t want trouble and don’t cause trouble. This young woman was in town visiting her aunt and uncle. She just graduated from high school. Had her whole life ahead of her and got accepted to Duke University on a very generous scholarship. I don’t know if a young woman like this would get involved in anything bad that would follow her to Sealing, if she was on the run, or if this is just a case of some drifter coming through the town and her being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But something tells me there’s more involved.”

  “What might that something be?” I asked with my hand extended. I wasn’t leaving without seeing the files.

  “That’s the problem. I came to a dead end when I looked at certain facts that the coroner told me and not the family. The family is who have asked that this not make the papers and to keep it hushed. So I don’t need to tell you that everything said or seen in this office doesn’t leave it. You understand?”

  “Yes, I understand,” I said as I opened up the file folder.

  I flipped through the crime photographs. A young woman with long chocolate brown hair was in a white sundress. Well, mostly white. The right side was stained with blood. But not enough by the looks of the wound, which was large and gaping open. Her eyes were still peering out into the world as if she could still see, and her mouth was still open as though she were trying to scream but she grew too weak and eventually couldn’t fight off her attacker anymore.

  The grass under her was green. Not red.

  “Are there photos of her underside or the grass underneath?” I asked.

  “Why would you ask that?” he questioned.

  I then took out the coroner’s notes just under the few photographs of the scene, trying to remain as casual as possible given that I had just looked at photographs of a dead body. I had seen death for most of my life. Certain visions were worse than others. But the ones with lots of blood still never failed to stun me. Normally they were the sign of an accident, not murders. Dilton and Sealing were small sleepy towns. This kind of thing didn’t happen here. Which made the case even more curious. At least in Officer Parker’s eyes.

  The coroner’s writings took note of the large wound and the lack of blood in her body.

  “Because there’s not enough blood for a wound like that,” I said calmly. “Surely the grass underneath was stained from her having bled out. Maybe this wasn’t the original crime scene. She could have been killed somewhere else and dumped wherever she was found.”

  “That’s what we thought too. But there was a trail in the woods nearby. Just not much of one. It’s possible she could have been carried there and dumped, but there’s something about this that doesn’t make the least bit of sense.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Officer Parker reached back into the drawer and revealed a handheld recorder. “This is the voicemail she left for her mother earlier that day.”

  He turned it on.

  “Mom, mom, are you there? If you are please pick up. I need help. I don’t know where to hide. They’re after me. The Catach-Brayin are after me. I messed up. I should never have gotten involved with them. I was being so careful. I thought he cared about me. Please pick up! I don’t know where to go. Call me back as soon as you get this.”

  I didn’t move. Or at least I tried making it look like I had no interest in moving. Or looking uncomfortable. The name Catach-Brayin might not have meant much to him, but it certainly did
to me. This was purely a mission to find out how much Officer Parker knew. And if this one bit of information didn’t make sense to him, I certainly wasn’t going to fill in the holes. It would only make him more curious. Not all my visions happened the way I saw them. Some of them were vague because people can always and often do change course. But this was something Officer Parker didn’t need to look into. Particularly if it ended with his chest being torn open like I had seen only minutes ago.

  “Now this didn’t make much sense to me at first,” he said. “But I did a bit of research and found a few things that were, um, interesting to say the least.”

  I remained silent, not wanting to give him any hint that I knew the exact meaning of the words Catach-Brayin. And I wasn’t about to let him in on such details.

  “When you Google the name Catach-Brayin, you don’t find much. It’s close to a few Gaelic surnames, but that’s about it. Then when I looked on the national criminal database, there were three other cases of young women on the East Coast who reported the same group was after them. All three of them spoke the words Catach-Brayin before dying. These details weren’t widely reported. I had to call a station in North Carolina and another in Massachusetts to get a few more details about the name. But they each said that the few girls also used another word. One that won’t leave this office and will never be spoken outside of you and me? Got it?”

  I nodded already knowing the one he was about to say.

  He turned his head down for a moment, wondering if he should even utter the word. Wondering if he would come across looking like a fool. Wondering if I would throw the file back in his face for even suggesting such a thing were possible. None of which was about to happen.

  “They said the girls also spoke of vampires,” he said in a hushed voice.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Excuse me, vampires?” I whispered. “Was this just on the East Coast or were there more cases like this?”

  His forehead creased. That wasn’t the question or reaction he was expecting from me.

  “So far it was just these two other cases that I could find. It took digging just to find other references to the word. I have a buddy in Boston who does detective work. When I told him that a victim here had said the same thing, he suggested that I keep the case as quiet as possible. And to bribe the victim’s family not to talk or ask further questions if I have to.”

  “Meaning he didn’t want word getting out.”

  Officer Parker was studying me. Watching to see if my reaction would change. Trying to see if I knew more than I was leading on. I wondered if he had done an interrogation or two over the years. Or if he had training in doing so. He wanted to know what I knew. He would never get the words out of me. No matter what.

  I closed the file and set it back in front of him. “I’ll give you one thing, Officer. It is really interesting. But if your buddy up in Boston said not to share it around, you shouldn’t be sharing it around. If I were you, I’d get him on the phone again and tell him to share more details of the case he’s currently working on regarding the other murder. Maybe you can draw more correlations between the two that can help.”

  He scoffed. “Meaning you won’t help me out, right? I should continue to look elsewhere?” He was mildly irritated. And he didn’t mind showing it.

  He really didn’t realize the position he was putting me in. And how could he? He was only speculating about these things. He didn’t know for a fact that any of it was real. He was an outsider looking in. And most if not all outsiders who dared to look into vampires with any real conviction end up dead. If I helped him, I would be putting my family at risk. If I didn’t, he would likely end up exactly as my vision predicted. Dead with a huge hole in his chest. If I were to guess. Someone ripped his heart out. Someone strong. Someone not human.

  “Can I take a little more time to consider it?” I asked. “I’m not saying no. Really, I’m not. I’m just in a hard place right now and I’m not sure I’ll always be up to the task.”

  He nodded, clearly thinking that my lack of enthusiasm was me telling him my answer was no. “Sure. But just so you’re aware, we can start off small. If you ever feel like it’s too much, you can stop.”

  I stood up and reached over to shake his hand again. “Have a good rest of your day, Officer,” I said.

  “Yes, you too.” His handshake was a firm as the first one when I walked in. Only this time, I didn’t get the same feeling that I did before. A sense of dread didn’t wash over me. His hand was merely cold. As most people’s hands were when they worked in an overly air-conditioned building at war with the Georgia heat.

  I walked out of the office and back outside, almost grateful that I was out of the chill from the station. It only took a few minutes of being back out under the blazing sun for me to realize that scorching hot rays on my back weren’t exactly a good alternative.

  The route back to my house was easier when I took a shortcut through the woods. There was a creek with a wooden bridge built over it. I liked taking this route. It allowed me to avoid riding near the highway where cars were zooming by. Once I even saw a water moccasin catching a frog by the leg. The frog screeched bloody terror as the snake refused to let go. Not that I could blame him. I made a vow that I would never stop on the bridge through the swamp after seeing that. But it was still preferable to the cars on the nearby highway.

  Only today was different. Today, I broke my vow. I hit the brakes on my bike and stopped right in the middle of the long ended wooden bridge.

  Having kruxa senses can be nice when you want to know something. They can also send horrific tremors down your spine when they tell you something is wrong. Very very wrong.

  Someone was watching me. I didn’t know if it was from the trees or on land nearby. I leaned over on one foot and searched around to see if I could spot anyone. There was no one to find. But he was definitely there. The light of the sun disappeared behind a dark cloud. It was clear and sunny only a moment ago, but now the air smelled as though it would start raining. Little droplets fell around me as the humidity turned to static.

  No. This wasn’t really happening. I was seeing something. A vision. Time stood still once more as I waited to see if it was yet another sight that would terrify me. That would make me wonder if I should stay cooped up in my house.

  “Sweetheart?” said a familiar voice from behind me.

  I turned around. It was my grandmother. She was wearing a lovely blue cotton dress and walking barefoot toward me. Her feet gently slapped the wooden bridge as she got closer, stepping through puddles on the wood as though a fresh rain had just swept through. Only she didn’t look the way I last recalled her when she was slowly dying of Alzheimer’s and struggling to remember who I was. She looked a bit younger. Still gran, but refreshed.

  I parked my bike and took a few steps closer to her, not sure if I was seeing things clearly. I rarely saw visions of anyone really close to me. There was the one time with grandpa, but that was it. He stood by my bed and watched me with kind eyes when I was a child. The next morning we got a phone call that he had died in his sleep. I knew before I even walked down the staircase for breakfast. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t my grandmother. It was a version of her, but it wasn’t really her. Or if it was, she couldn’t stay long.

  “Gran?” I said in a voice that barely reached a whisper. “How are you… you can’t… you shouldn’t be here.”

  She gave me a smile and reached to cup my cheek in her hand, just as she would when she was alive. Then she peered up at the sky. “In times like these you really give me no choice, sweetheart,” she said with a southern drawl I missed each and every day.

  I loved gran dearly, but my thoughts instantly went to Caleb. I wanted to see him. I wished he would appear in a vision right after he died that day. Like my grandfather did. But he never came.

  “Times like these? What do you mean?” I asked her, still confused by the gray clouds engulfing the sky and making everything hazy. It wasn�
�t like my other visions. It wasn’t a sign of things to come for a client or a warning. It was a message meant directly for me.

  “A tempest is brewing over Dilton,” she said. “A wild tempest. One I never prepared you for and your mother always feared.”

  I shook my head. “No, gran. The sky was shining only seconds ago.”

  She gave me a knowing smile, telling me that she found my ignorance a bit amusing.

  “Do you feel that?” she asked. “Look for him.”

  I closed my eyes. The man watching me lurked closer and closer. I could feel the magic inside my blood begin to stir. My grandmother always said that was the kruxa blood within me. The magic in my veins begging for release. As a child, I thought it was fun. A curiosity. As I got older it felt like yet another thing that made me weird. Different. But my grandmother always said it made me special. Our magic was as much of a gift as it was a curse. It protected us and gave warnings. It told us when danger was close, whether it was an opportune moment or not. It was telling me so right then and there. And yet, our lack of control over it also put as at extreme risk. If someone saw my magic stirring in my hands, I would have no choice but to run. My whole family would.

  I searched the woods across the water with my senses, allowing my magic to pierce through to my fingertips and help me discover what was there, and who was watching me.

  My eyes shot open. “A vampire?” I mouthed, being careful not to say it aloud. “Is he after me?”

  My grandmother didn’t say anything. She simply took a step back and moved away as a stiff breeze shifted the air around us. A few droplets of rainwater struck my hair. I peered up at the sky. The storm clouds were breaking, revealing the sun hidden behind an array of gray.