Witch on Second: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 5 (The Jinx Hamilton Novels)

by Juliette Harper

  “Do you know any wizards who can do that?” Tori asked.

  “Just one,” Lucas said. “Irenaeus Chesterfield.”

  Well, that answered that question. Ionescu and Chesterfield were working together.

  Mom, who had been listening with a kind of frozen expression, returned her focus to the room. “If Chesterfield was there,” she said, speaking slowly and cautiously, “does that mean that I . . . that we . . . didn’t . . . ”

  Gemma caught hold of her hand. “I told you we didn’t send that car off the road, Kelly,” she said, “but from what I’m hearing now, I think Chesterfield wanted us to think we did.”

  “I would tend to agree,” Greer said. “There was no reason for Chesterfield to be there unless he was targeting you, Ionescu, or — and this is much more likely — all of you.”

  We let that sink in. If Irenaeus Chesterfield orchestrated the car accident, he had been pulling strings and affecting our lives for more than 30 years, it meant there was something far larger and more serious going on.

  When I said as much, Greer said, “Perhaps we should work with one crisis at a time, starting with the young women. From your description, they were most certainly killed in the accident. According to Strigoi burial custom, they should have been staked and beheaded prior to burial to prevent their rising as Strigoi mort.”

  “Okay,” Tori said, “I’m confused. Anton and all the other Ionescus are Strogi viu, right?”

  “Correct,” Greer said. “Their ancestor was cursed by a witch.”

  “When Chase told us about all this the other night,” Tori said, “I thought the Strigoi mort were sort of like demons.”

  “They are,” Greer said.

  “So what kind of Strigoi mort are Seraphina and Ioana?”

  “Excellent question,” Greer said. “They are Strigoi mort blasfematoare. The ‘blasphemous undead.’ The witch who originally cursed the Ionescus and others of their kind granted them the mercy of real death if they followed the prescribed rituals. If they did not, the creatures they would become when they arose from a false death were even more demonic than the regular Strigoi mort. Those creatures merely drain the energy of their victims. The Strigoi mort blasfematoare require living blood to survive.”

  “Super-charged Strigoi,” I said.

  “Precisely,” Greer said. “They retain all the powers of their kinsmen as well as a driving hunger that only blood can satisfy. To become Strigoi mort blasfematoare is a fate worse than death. They are exceedingly rare, but where they exist, they are reviled and feared.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Tori said, “after what I saw at the lumberyard, I’m good with the reviling part.”

  Mom spoke up. “But why would Anton do that to the girls when he loved them so much? I just don’t understand why he would stake them, keep them somewhere for years, and then allow them to rise from the dead.”

  I’ll never forget the look that came over Tori’s face. She gets that look when all of the pieces of a puzzle she’s working on suddenly fall into place. Only this time, I could tell the answer was a shocking one.

  “What?” I asked. “Tori? What is it?”

  “Jinksy,” she said breathlessly, “Anton didn’t raise those girls from the dead. You did.”

  25

  “Me?!” I squeaked. “I don’t know anything about raising the . . . ”

  The words died in my throat. My mind flashed back to a night earlier that summer. Armed with a spell downloaded from a voodoo wiki, I managed to not only release the sorceress Brenna Sinclair but also raise a cemetery full of ghosts.

  The only two people in the room who didn’t jump on that memory train with me were Greer and Lucas — or so I thought.

  “Is there something you need to tell us about?” Lucas asked.

  “Grayson,” Greer said. “Is it so impossible for you to read your incident reports? They’re correlating the present set of circumstances with the raising of Brenna Sinclair.”

  “Ah,” he said, “I do remember that. The office pool was running 5 to 1 you wouldn’t be able to put the cemetery ghosts back.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “You people knew what a mess we had on our hands and you thought running an office betting pool was a better idea than helping us out?”

  “It wasn’t time for us to get involved,” Greer said. “And from what I can tell, you handled it quite well.”

  Somewhat mollified, I said, “Thank you. And is there any chance I could get a copy of this mystery time table that seems to be running my life?”

  Greer laughed. “Doubtful,” she said. “The Grid works with us on a need-to-know basis. I can’t tell you how many times the Mother Trees have uprooted my plans. No pun intended.”

  “Try working with the Registry,” Festus groused. “Some werewolf lifts his leg on a rose bush in sight of the humans and it takes six werecats and a crew of raccoons to contain the fallout.”

  Lucas snickered. “Before we head down the endless rabbit trail of interdepartmental politics,” he said smoothly, “would you mind just running through your foray into raising the dead for me?”

  As briefly as possible I laid out the details. While I was talking, Greer got up from her chair and crossed to the liquor cabinet. She took out a bottle of Oban single malt and poured herself a dram. From the brief amount of time I had spent with Greer MacVicar, I already knew the woman only drank the expensive stuff.

  Rather than take her seat again, she leaned back on the edge of Beau’s desk, watching me with obvious interest in her liquid, emerald eyes. In fact, she was watching everyone in the room.

  Let me give you some advice from the vantage point of retrospection. Don’t bother trying to lie to Greer or getting anything past her. I have no idea how old she is or how powerful, but her presence fills a room. When that woman is on your side? You’re loaded for bear.

  When I finished my account of the graveyard incident, Lucas flashed me another grin and said teasingly, “Come on. You have to tell us. What did you Google to come up with the spell?”

  Blushing to the roots of my hair, I said, “Necromancy, how to.”

  At that, Lucas laughed outright, and I smiled in spite of myself. “I was new to the business,” I said in self-defense.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chase cross and uncross his legs. My easy banter with Lucas seemed to be annoying the hell out of him, which both irritated and pleased me. Chase was the one who called it quits on our relationship, not me. If watching me talk to a good-looking, roguish man gave Mr. McGregor a hairball, he could just figure out how to swallow it.

  As I turned my full attention back to Lucas, my gaze crossed Greer’s. She had taken in both Chase’s behavior and my reaction to it. When our eyes met, she smiled, and raised her glass an imperceptible fraction as if to say, “That a girl.”

  Tiny though it might have been, that accolade sent a thrill of power through me.

  “So what do you think?” I asked. “Did I have some effect on Seraphina and Ioana?”

  “Regardless of the source of the incantation you used,” Greer said, “you gathered a tremendous amount of magic that night. I think it is possible that your spell could have awakened Seraphina and Ioana.”

  Chase cleared his throat. “What would you say the radius of a spell like that would be?”

  Greer considered the question. “That’s difficult to measure,” she said. “Why? Do you know where Ionescu might have been keeping them staked in their coffins?”

  “No,” he said, reaching for the TV remote and lowering the big screen, “but I think I know where he may have been keeping them since they woke up.”

  Chase tapped a few buttons and streamed the image from his tablet to the television. We all moved to get a better view of the screen, which showed a recorded sequence from a GNATS camera.

  Festus hopped up on the back of Chase’s chair. “Talk to us, boy,” he said. “What are we watching?”

  “This is a video that Ironweed’s pilots shot yesterday
,” Chase said. “They’ve been observing activity in the Ionescu compound for several days now, and frankly, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. From what I can see, these people are just trying to go about their business in peace. Now, the building that is coming up is where Anton lives.”

  The drone’s view took us down an ordinary residential street before turning up a sloping drive to approach a large two-story home set back from the compound’s main street. The front of the house was open, but a high wall protected the backyard.

  We listened to the radio chatter as the GNATS pilot received directions to fly the drone over the wall. The camera showed a good-sized pool, an outdoor kitchen, and what at first glance looked like a guest house.

  “Do you see it?” Chase said.

  “Other than a grill that set Anton back several thousand dollars?” Tori asked.

  “No,” Chase said. “Look at the guest house as the drone circles the yard.”

  As he spoke, the camera panned, so we saw the small structure as a whole for the first time. There were bars on the windows.

  “That,” Festus said, “is one high-rent jail.”

  “That’s not all,” Chase said. “Look at the door.”

  When no one spoke. He froze the video and zoomed in on the entrance. The wood around the door handle was splintered and broken, with one end of an industrial strength hasp dangling at a drunken angle.

  “He had someone or something locked in there,” Greer said.

  “Something he was feeding,” Chase said, shifting the image to magnify a sliding iron panel at the bottom of the door.

  Cats can’t snap their paws, but Festus would have done just that if he could have pulled if off. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “That explains the livestock.”

  “What livestock?” Tori asked.

  “I met with Merle, Earl, and Furl at the Dirty Claw yesterday to see if they had heard anything that might help with the Strigoi Sisters,” Festus said. “They didn’t have much to say, so we wound up having nip nachos and shooting the . . . er . . . . talking over Litterbox Lagers. Earl was bitching about trying to get to the bottom of a bunch of mysterious livestock deaths in the area around Briar Hollow over the past couple of months. He was thinking there might be a werewolf passing through, except the carcasses were drained of blood and dumped miles from where the animals disappeared.”

  “So,” Greer said, “the girls are awakened without warning and wander back to their people. That’s typical behavior for a newly risen Strigoi mort. Anton sticks them in the guest house behind bars and feeds them animal blood until he can figure out what to do with them. But the girls get out, which could explain why the Inonescus uncharacteristically made an appearance in town on Saturday night to retrieve them.”

  “Which didn’t work,” Gemma said, “because Sunday morning they were going after my husband at the lumberyard.”

  The whole scenario made sense, with a few glaring exceptions. “That’s all well and good,” I said, “but why did Anton hire Malcolm Ferguson? And if Anton is working with Chesterfield, what’s in it for him? From everything I’ve learned about Chesterfield, he always plays the long game.”

  From the couch, Mom said softly, “Maybe Chesterfield is offering him a way to help the girls.”

  Given the depth of the grief Tori and I witnessed Anton display in our shared vision at the junkyard, I had no difficulty believing Ionescu would do anything to help Seraphina and Ioana, especially if he was partially responsible for turning them into Strigoi mort blasfematoare.

  “We have suspected for some time that Irenaeus Chesterfield is not merely an antique dealer and rare book collector,” Greer said. “His involvement with Brenna Sinclair made that rather obvious.”

  “But what does he want?” Beau asked. “We have presumed that his goal was to gain access to The Valley and Moira, as she is, to my understanding, the last person capable of performing the necessary magic to create a Creavit witch or wizard.”

  “Veneficus trajectio,” I said. “The magical transference. Moira would never do that.”

  “Moira would never do it willingly,” Greer corrected me. “Chesterfield is quite skilled at the art of leverage.”

  Leverage. The Mother Oak told me it wasn’t time for Connor to come to Briar Hollow yet. Was she afraid he would fall into Chesterfield and Ionescu’s hands?

  When I put that idea on the table, Mom turned deathly pale. “We can’t put Connor’s life in danger,” she said.

  I moved over and sat down beside her. “We won’t let that happen, Mom,” I assured her. “We just have to figure out which one of the bad guys is the biggest threat.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not quite true,” Greer said, still leaning against the desk. “The greatest threat could be what they plan to do together.”

  “Separate or together,” Mom said in a steely voice, “makes no difference to me. I gave my son up once. I’m not losing him again.”

  For as much as I hated to leave the store with so many things coming together at once, I couldn’t send Beau out to conduct the battlefield tour alone. Everyone else thought he was just dressed in uniform as an enthusiastic Civil War buff. I knew he was a commander honoring the men who died with him.

  On one of our long walks through the hills, Beau had already taken me to the place where he lost his life. It’s a narrow cut between two low hills where a dirt road used to run before the highway came in. What’s left is just a two-rut country track connecting adjacent farms.

  More than fifty people showed up for the ghost tour, so Beau broke them into two groups and delivered his presentation twice. He spoke in precise and moving detail about the ambush and then helpfully positioned knots of ghost hunters around the battlefield.

  When they were all settled with their infrared cameras, recorders, and other paraphernalia, Beau and I walked off into the woods to talk in private. “How are you doing with all this?” I asked him.

  “The sadness I carry for my men has long been with me,” he said, resting one gloved hand on the hilt of his saber. “There has not been a moment of my afterlife that I have not grieved for them.”

  He was standing with his back to the woods, so he didn’t see them at first, the spirits dressed in Confederate gray who cautiously picked their way through the trees, quietly forming into two straight lines behind him.

  “Beau,” I said softly, “they’ve been thinking about you, too. Look.”

  When Beau turned, a young officer with a thick drawl called the men to attention. “The troops await your inspection, Colonel Longworth, suh.”

  At first, I didn’t think Beau could move, but then he drew himself up to his full height. “Lieutenant Broward, I would hope death has not given us over to any laggards.”

  “Not our boys, Colonel,” the Lieutenant grinned. “Point us at those Billy Yanks and we’ll give’em hell.”

  “Our war is long since over, son,” Beau said. “I had thought you all to be at rest. Why have you come here tonight?”

  “This was the day, suh,” Broward said, “the day we all died. We’ve come back every year since looking for you.”

  I saw the muscles in Beau’s jaw work back and forth. “I did not know,” he said. “It was only recently I have been able to wander far from my own grave.”

  The Lieutenant eyed him curiously. “Have you come back from the dead, suh?”

  “No,” Beau said, “but I have been granted the incalculable privilege of walking among the living.”

  “If you have a few minutes, Colonel, would you walk with us tonight?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Beau looked at me with tears in his eyes. “Will you keep the others away from this part of the woods?”

  “Of course I will, Beau,” I said. “Be with your men.”

  The Lieutenant tipped his hat, “Much obliged Miss . . .”

  “Hamilton,” Beau said. “Boys, I have the deep honor of presenting to you Miss Norma Jean Hamilton, my benefactress and a great lady.”
>
  As I watched, work-roughened hands reached for caps as one after another the men bowed.

  I have no idea what came over me, but I think I actually curtsied. I do recall saying, “My pleasure, gentlemen.”

  Beau took my hand and kissed it. “I shall not be long.”

  “Take as much time as you like,” I said, my own eyes now filled with tears. “You’ve earned this.”

  26

  Beau and I returned to the store well after midnight. True to their word, the festival committee managed to pull together an abbreviated version of the carnival to run each evening through the week. All the stores on the square, including ours, were staying open until 9 or 10 o’clock.

  Locals who had at first been skeptical about the festival were now enthusiastically supportive, decorating their homes and yards as well as coming downtown in the evening to picnic on the courthouse lawn. Tori reported brisk business — so brisk, in fact, that she looked exhausted, as did the moms and my dad.

  “So nothing on the Strigoi front? I asked.

  “Nope,” Tori said, “everybody is off working their own leads.”

  Since she finished the sentence with a massive yawn, I decided it was time to call it a day.

  “Everybody go to bed and get some rest,” I said. “Things are quiet for now.”

  Nobody argued.

  “Aren’t you coming up, honey?” Mom asked as she started to climb the stairs. “You’re just as tired as we are.”

  She wasn’t wrong, but I was also wired. With the episode at the junkyard that morning, a full afternoon of work in the shop, and then witnessing Beau’s emotional reunion with his soldiers, my mind wouldn’t stop churning.

  When we got downstairs to the apparently deserted lair, Beau excused himself to “reflect on the remarkable events of the evening.”

  I planned to unwind with some magical drills on the target range until a voice from the vicinity of the fireplace stopped me.

  “Won’t you join me?”

  Greer was sitting in one of the wingbacks by the fire with the chair turned toward the hearth. Since the lights were off in that area and she wore black from head to foot, I hadn’t seen her sitting there.