“How do you know what I always say?”
“Zara, I’ve done my research,” Archer said. “I thought I would make a go of this new life. Seize the day, as they say.”
For the second time, I asked him, “What are you?”
He tilted his head from one side to the other in a casual gesture. “A bit of this, a bit of that. A whole lot of him.” He nodded at Chet, who didn’t react.
I walked over to Chet’s side slowly. He remained frozen, as though he’d been turned to stone by a gorgon, but only beneath the surface of his skin, which was still flesh-colored. I grabbed his arm. He was rigid and unmoving.
The gun in my hand had become very heavy and even hotter. I stepped back from Chet and raised the gun to point at the man I’d just saved from being shot by that same gun. “You’re doing this,” I said. “Stop it.”
“Oh? You want me to unfreeze him, so that he can rip the gun out of your hands and shoot me?” He snorted. “You have a lot to learn about the art of making a deal, Zara Riddle.”
“We can make a deal. What do you want?”
He blinked innocently. “I want the same thing any human wants. A day filled with purpose, a few hot meals, and a cool pillow at night. Companionship when I’m lonely, and solitude when my soul needs to breathe. I want to live. Is that too much to ask?”
I had to answer honestly. “No. That’s completely reasonable.”
“I’m glad we’re in agreement.” He tilted his head to the side. “You really are a powerful witch, aren’t you? Any regular person would have dropped that flaming gun by now.”
“Flaming?” I looked down. No wonder the gun felt hot. It was on fire. I held tight anyway.
“For your own safety, you really should set the gun down,” he said. “Any minute now, the special bullets are going to release their wyvern venom. When the liquid hits your hands, not even your powers will be able to save you. You will become…”
“Pudding,” I finished for him.
“Exactly. And nobody wants that to happen.”
I studied Chet’s frozen face. “Is it true? Are the bullets in here carrying the potion?”
He didn’t move his face muscles at all, probably because he couldn’t. And where was our backup, anyway? As soon as I’d wondered the question, I knew the answer. They were frozen, just like Chet.
I was essentially on my own with this man who could freeze people and set things on fire at will. Fire. Was he a demon?
Calmly, Archer said, “Zara, drop the gun. Obviously I’m not going to hurt you, or I would have done so already.”
I didn’t move. “Unfreeze Chet. Unfreeze everyone.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Even the wyvern watching us from the belfry?”
No, not Ribbons, too! “Especially the wyvern.”
“Not yet,” he said. “Don’t you prefer it this way? Just you and me? Between your witch skills and my powers, we could rule the world.”
I let out a cold laugh. This guy was not the man he’d pretended to be. At last, he’d revealed his true self, his lust for power—whatever he was.
I studied his face. “You think that’s what the world needs?”
He barely reacted. Just a small twitch in the corner of one eye. “Forget the world,” he said. “The world can keep on burning the way it always has.” He paused before asking, “What do you want, Zara?”
I looked at Chet, still frozen except for the trickle of sweat slipping down the side of his face, and then back at his look-alike.
“What do I want?” The flaming gun shook in my hand. It wasn’t heavy, but it was hot. “Security for my family,” I said. “And a sense of purpose, which I get from helping others. And plenty of laughter. That’s all I want, because that’s all I need.”
“Dream bigger.”
“A personal chef?”
“Now we’re talking.” He bounced his eyebrows. “How about an infinity pool? On a yacht?”
“If I want to swim, I go to the ocean.”
“You always were a low maintenance kind of girl. It’s part of what drew me to you.”
“Do we know each other?”
His expression softened as he gazed into my eyes. “You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who kisses a man she doesn’t know, and you’ve kissed me twice now, so you tell me.”
“If you won’t tell me what you are, at least tell me who.”
“Zara, I wa—”
A crashing sound coming from below cut him off. The trap door began to creak open, but slowly.
In addition to the crash, there was a low, grinding noise. Or was it groaning? The sound seemed to be coming from Chet. He was still frozen, but not entirely. He was moving, albeit very slowly. His face was red from the effort. His nose pushed forward, but just his nose, not the rest of his face. It elongated and turned black. And furry. He was shifting into his wolf form. I watched with horrified fascination as dark fur sprouted from his skin.
“That’s a new one,” Archer said. “And it’s also my cue to leave.”
“Your powers aren’t unlimited.”
“Not yet.”
“What are you? Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who should be going now, before the reinforcements come barging through that trap door with all manner of weapons blazing.” He gave me a bored look before turning to stare at Chet’s elongating face. “It really is hard to tear your eyes away from a good transformation, don’t you think?” He sighed. “But I should go. Other business to attend to, as it turns out.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “The only way out is through that trap door, and I’m sure they’re ready for you down there.” They hadn’t been ready for getting frozen, but it wasn’t really bluffing if I didn’t know for sure. The DWM crew could have other tricks.
He only smiled and backed toward the window. The window. There were four other ways out of the bell tower, if you didn’t mind the eight-story drop to the ground. The guy could set fires and freeze people, so maybe he could fly, too.
He wasn’t flying out of there without a fight. I lifted my arm and pointed the flaming gun at him.
With my best steely Detective Bentley tone, I said, “Don’t make me shoot you.”
He didn’t look frightened. In fact, he couldn’t look more amused if he’d tried. “Oh, Zara. What are you going to shoot me with? Your finger?”
I followed his gaze down to my hand. There was no gun in my palm, only a gun-shaped mass of fire. The gun was on the floor, in a puddle of something. Acid? The puddle, whatever it was, was now eating through the wooden floorboards. I watched in horror as the old, wooden floor split and splintered before my eyes. A four-foot by two-foot section broke free and dropped away, falling to the level below with a crash. Then another jagged section followed, taking one of the tower’s eight bells with it. This time, the bell made a sound. The gong reverberated through the tower.
I tore my gaze off the disintegrating floor and looked up at Archer. His lips parted, and he seemed about to say something to me, but then he stopped himself. He waved goodbye, leaned back, and dropped out of the window.
The tower rumbled as another section of flooring gave way. The sound froze me, but only for a few seconds. I was free to move, so I did. I grabbed Chet, who was still a barely moving chunk of stone, and pulled him back from the expanding hole in the floor. He toppled like a statue. What if he struck a hard surface like this? He might be brittle enough to shatter into smaller parts, still alive. I caught him before he fell—barely. Then I carefully rocked him toward the wall the way one might move a statue, walking him, leaning him from one frozen foot to the other.
His face was now twenty percent wolf, and one hundred percent gruesome. I averted my eyes as I carefully tilted him into a lying position on the floor. He resembled a toppled turtle, with his arms and legs sticking up.
“This is for your own protection,” I said. “Now, are you going to be safe here until you thaw out, or is that acid going to bring down t
his whole tower?”
He didn’t answer, because he couldn’t.
I watched the hole in the floor, noting the size of the damage from the acidic potion. Good tactic with the poison bullets, I noted. How else do you take down a supernatural entity? Especially one who’d be too wary to drink your poison and too powerful to be taken down by regular bullets? It was an excellent tactic, and it might have worked, if I had allowed Chet to hit his target.
A thought that was not my own reverberated in mind: You did the right thing.
I glanced up just as a shadowy form dropped from the ceiling. Ribbons landed between two of the remaining cast brass bells, his claws making a horrific scraping sound. He wasn’t as frozen as Chet, but he didn’t have full range of motion, either.
I rushed over to him. “Are you hurt?” I touched his wing and helped him get his balance. I was rewarded with a dirty look and a hissing sound. The wyvern didn’t want to be touched. I yanked my hands away and held them behind my back.
Go after him, Ribbons spoke in my mind. He could barely move, and his telepathic voice sounded strained.
“I don’t know where he went. Do you want me to just jump out the window blindly and chase after him with no backup?”
Is that not something you would do, Zara Riddle?
“You make a good point, wyvern. That is something I would do. Got any hints about where to look first?”
You’re the witch.
He knew, but he wanted me to beg. I unclasped my hands and started to reach for him. He didn’t like being touched, so he would hate being tickled. As I reached for his unprotected scaly belly, something on the back of my hand caught my eye. It was just a smudge of ash from the burning gun, but it reminded me of something. It reminded me of the disappearing tattoo.
And then, everything fully clicked into place in my head.
Yes. The wyvern sounded smug yet pleased.
“No thanks to you,” I muttered.
Now go, he urged.
I squinted and looked around us. The light had thinned even more, and there were no lights on inside the bell tower. I found the light switch and flicked it with my magic. There was a click but no light.
Ribbons hissed with impatience. He inhaled sharply and then exhaled a thin ribbon of orange light. The ribbon swirled above us, providing a helpful amount of light. A telepathic wyvern was a very handy sidekick, I noted.
I’m nobody’s sidekick, he replied, his telepathic voice snippy and offended.
We didn’t have time to argue about who was whose sidekick. Aided by his ribbons of light, I peered down through the hole in the floor to check if Rob and Knox needed assistance. The two agents were frozen, just as I’d expected, but at least they were clustered at the edge of the clock room, well clear of falling bells.
As I straightened up, another bell came loose and crashed down below. When it struck the other, both made noises that were almost melodic.
Ribbons brightened his plume of fire, pointing toward the window.
“I was thinking I’d take the stairs,” I said. “Unlike you, I don’t have wings.”
You should not use the stairs, he said. The agents have set up traps.
“Good for them,” I said. “It’s a relief to know they didn’t completely bungle this operation.” Like they bungled the one in the Pressman attic.
The wyvern raised a wrinkle of scaly flesh over one eye in a look that said as much as words in my mind.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m the one who bungled up this particular one,” I admitted.
I turned and carefully stepped around the collapsing floor. I jumped over Chet’s body, which was half wolf now and too grotesque for words.
I leaned down and spoke into the area that might have been an ear. “Thanks for testing my loyalty the way you did. If you hadn’t done that, I might not have seen what I did and connected all the dots.”
He growled in response.
“If you ever get free of this, meet me downstairs in the hair salon.”
He continued his slow transformation.
I jogged toward the window, casting the body-buoyancy spell on myself as I hiked up my billowing skirts and threw one leg over the stone windowsill.
Now, here’s where things take a turn toward the bungling yet again.
What I didn’t notice, in the heat of the moment, was that my hands weren’t working the way I expected them to. Getting my palms pierced by the gnome’s device earlier that day must have damaged my hands deeply. The handful of burning flames probably hadn’t helped, either.
Behind me, another bell crashed down to join the others, the notes combining to make an unsettling, unresolved chord.
Perhaps it was the sound of the bells that caused me to miss the fact that my body wasn’t any lighter.
I was in free fall, eight—no, seven—stories above the ground, when I realized my body-buoyancy spell wasn’t working.
Chapter 38
You’re probably wondering about the smudge of ashes on my hand, and how that led me to figuring out who was the mastermind behind multiple evil plots.
No? You’re more worried about me plummeting to my death from the tower? That’s sweet of you. We’ll get to that in a sec.
A couple of ghosts back, I’d been host to Perry Pressman, Jo’s father. He made himself extremely useful, too. A later ghost, the gardener, spent a bunch of my money on landscaping my back yard, but the money had only been in my savings account thanks to Perry and his penny-pinching ways. Not only had he straightened out a bunch of bills and saved me money on my house, but he’d also been thoughtful enough to get me a half-price haircut. But had that been his full intention? Sure, I did save some bucks by bringing my daughter with me for the two-for-one special at the cute beachside salon, but the haircuts weren’t that expensive in the first place. What if Perry had sent me there for more than a cheap haircut? What if it had been a clue? What if he’d been pointing me toward her?
Morganna Faire.
From the instant I met the tiny, ancient hairdresser, I’d sensed there was something supernatural about her. Yet, whatever she was, she’d stayed off everyone’s radar. My aunt couldn’t connect her to any local witches or supernatural creatures or magic ingredient suppliers. The DWM didn’t have any files on her. But there she was, hiding in plain sight, with her wall full of historical photos that implied she was well over a hundred years old. The department should have had a file on her, if only to study her for anti-aging practices. The absence of information was, in itself, information.
The first time I saw her for a haircut, she’d mentioned to me in a confused fashion that one of her tattoos had disappeared. She’d chalked it up to fading, or a memory issue. I’d chalked it up to the strange side effects of the Erasure Machine, which had been pulling ink off all sorts of things.
But what if there’d never been a tattoo on her hand? I hadn’t seen one there in any of her photographs. That meant she’d lied to me, to make me pity the sweet, harmless, little old lady who couldn’t keep track of her body art. To make me ignore her as a suspect.
And she might have gotten away with it, too, except she slipped up the last time I saw her. When Chet Moore was in the hair salon, posing as Archer Caine, she’d asked him what he was up to, and she’d asked him in the manner of someone who was well acquainted with him. Except it hadn’t been Archer in the chair, despite the booking being under his name. She’d recovered quickly—so quickly, I hadn’t clued in at the time. But the subconscious is a powerful thing that keeps working on puzzles for hours, if not days. The subconscious is like a good research librarian who won’t give up.
Morganna Faire was involved with Project Erasure, which had led to Perry Pressman’s death, and now she was connected to the entity with Chet Moore’s face, and Jo Pressman’s death. The DWM had closed that case, but they shouldn’t have. I knew there was at least one other party involved. Chet denied it. He’d been adamant… almost as though he had been pulled into the conspiracy. Influenced.
Infiltrated.
No. Infected.
As I plummeted from the tower toward the rocks below, and I imagined the mess I would make, two images in my mind lined up. The first was Chet’s current grotesque state, halfway between wolf and human. The second was Chet’s body half-submerged in the fleshy, crawling monstrosity inside the Pressman attic. Both times, he’d been a mess, barely human.
What if something from Project Erasure had infected him that night? It seemed like kind of a far-fetched idea, but what if the entity calling itself Archer Caine was, in fact, the Erasure Machine, but in human form?
Think about that for a minute.
Spoiler alert: I would soon find out that my theory was only partly right.
But which part?
Chapter 39
So. The whole falling-from-a-bell-tower thing.
Remember the fancy, old-fashioned dress I was wearing, with the waist-cinching corset, the flattering gold brocade, and most importantly, the billowing layers of skirts? It turns out that, with a little magic to hold the hem down, such a thing can work as a parachute. As soon as I launched from the window, the skirts filled with air, inflating to a tulip shape. Kids, don’t try this at home unless you’re a witch! The captured air only stayed in place thanks to my telekinetic magic—which had thankfully been working when I’d grabbed Chet’s gun, and continued to work now, despite my spell-casting failure.
Down I floated.
I didn’t exactly hang in the air like a dandelion seed, but there was a gracefulness to my descent. Thank goodness the Mary Poppins trick worked, because my fallback plan had been less glamorous. Remember the wagon full of horse manure I’d been smelling earlier, when I’d talked to Griebel Gorman? You got it. My other option had been to wheel over the wagon full of horse manure by a couple of feet and break my fall with that.
My twilight parachute ride was over far too soon. I thudded to the ground right next to the wagon, sticking the landing like a gymnast—or at least in less of a disaster than my landing the night before, when I’d dropped from my mother’s room into the rose bushes with all the panache of a redheaded Sasquatch.
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