“Don’t you dare,” Jessie warned.
Everyone looked at her because they’d never heard her sound so commanding before. She giggled and took a deep breath.
“I only mean that I’m not sure if we made enough. How about we head over to the diner and grab some dinner. I’ll pay if you promise to leave the appetizers for the other guests.”
Everyone nodded in approval, and they got back in their cars and drove to the restaurant. Technically they were supposed to be at the party, but everyone was starving. Jessie’s hors d’oeuvres looked delicious, but a meal would be more filling.
Whether it was pure gluttony or a side effect of the protection spell on Belladonna, their decision to go out for dinner before the party would be the thing that saved them all.
The first scream came rolling down the hill into the town square as Jessie was paying the tab at the diner’s old cash register. The others ran outside while Jessie finished paying the bill.
They ran up the street and looked up at the meeting hall. Jessie joined them a few moments later as they stood there trying to figure out what had happened. As far as they could tell, it was just one woman standing outside of the building screaming for help.
Then, she went quiet.
The woman’s shoulders slumped, and she started to twitch. Her jaw went slack, and if Belladonna had been closer, she would have heard a low moan come from the woman’s mouth.
“What’s going on?” Ben asked.
Before anyone could offer a theory, a few more people stumbled out of the meeting house. They looked frantic. A few of them yelled for help, and the others screamed at Belladonna and her entourage to run away.
“We should go back and get the cars,” Luke suggested.
“We’re already halfway there. Let’s just walk up the hill.” Carly insisted.
They’d been walking forward towards the meeting house and hadn’t even noticed. Once they’d walked halfway up the hill, the sound of the moans finally reached them.
Only by then it was more than just a few town’s folk. There had to be at least a hundred “people” making the noise almost in unison.
Just then, Old Man Jenkins came shuffling out of the meeting hall. He spotted Belladonna and moved towards her as quickly as his legs would carry him.
“Where is your Granny?” He was more alarmed than Belladonna expected.
“She and Aunt Sumac haven’t come back yet. They won’t give me a straight answer.” Belladonna said.
“You’re going to need them. Heck, we all need them. Naiema and little Almoy didn’t come tonight. I’m going to go watch over them. This could get bad. I’m gonna call your Granny when I get home.” Jenkins said and started to leave.
“Wait, Jenkins. What’s going on?” She asked.
“It’s zombies, Bella. They’re turning into zombies. But, not like me. Like shambling, flesh craving, moaning masses of resurrected dead.” He seemed more frightened than Belladonna was comfortable with. “I gotta go. Hopefully, your Granny and Aunt are already on their way here.”
They watched him hurry off and then turned to look at Luke as he started to howl. The change tried to take him, but it was clear that he was fighting it.
“I need one of those cake pops.” He panted.
“What? You want cake now? What’s going on?” Muri asked as she rushed to her husband’s side.
“Whatever evil is causing all of this, it can make me shift too. I felt it last night, but whatever is in Jessie’s cake pops helped keep it suppressed.”
“I have them back at the bakery,” Jessie said. “Oh wait, I left a box of them in the van.”
Jessie had left the van parked in the meeting hall’s parking lot and ridden with Carly and Nick to dinner. The group trudged the rest of the way up the hill and snuck as quietly as they could towards the van.
The sound of Jessie unlocking the back of the van must have caught the zombies attention because the moaning started moving towards them.
“Oh, crud,” Murielle whispered. “We don’t have any weapons and they’re heading this way.”
“Murielle, we can’t use weapons anyway. Those are our neighbors.” Belladonna whispered back.
“Right now, they’re zombies,” Murielle answered.
“We can fix this. I know we can, but we can’t hurt anyone. We’ll just have to run.”
“We can’t just run away either. This will eventually spread beyond Winterfield. We need a solution, and we need a plan.” Ben said.
Jessie handed Luke one of the cake pops from the box in the back of the van. He took one bite and then shrieked.
Everyone whirled around and saw that one of the zombies, Betty Kent decked out in a fantastic 1980’s style jumpsuit with huge shoulder pads, had grabbed hold of Luke’s arm. He pulled away, but she kept coming for them.
Luke’s next move probably saved humanity. He threw the half-eaten cake pop at Betty. It hit her on the forehead and bounced on the ground. This distracted her long enough for the group to get away.
When they turned around, zombie Betty had bent over, picked up the cake pop, and taken a bite. Within seconds, she became human again.
Fourteen
“We need more cake pops,” Muri said.
“Oh gosh, the other zombies are going for Betty. Somebody go get her before they turn her again.” Belladonna exclaimed.
Luke ran up the hill again and got Betty. He brought her back down with him and explained to her what had just happened.
“I have more cake pops at the bakery, but I only have half of what we’d need. Belladonna said I couldn’t serve them at the party, so I stopped baking them halfway through.” Jessie said almost in tears.
Everyone looked at Bella.
“Sorry guys. I didn’t want anyone to think we were drugging the party goers. If I’d known it was the antidote to the zombie whatever and for that matter, that someone was going to try to turn the town into zombies, I’d have let her serve the cake pops at the party.” Now Belladonna was almost in tears.
“You couldn’t have known,” Betty said and put a reassuring hand on Belladonna’s shoulder.
“She’s right, you couldn’t have,” Ben said. “But right now, we need more cake pops. Jessie, do you have what you need to make more?”
It was all hands, including Betty, on deck after that. The group raced down to the bakery as fast as they could and got to baking more pops.
They could hear the zombies getting closer by the minute, and eventually Luke and Ben felt like they had to barricade the door.
“We need to speed this up. Luke and I put up road blocks to keep people out of town, but even zombies will figure out how to get around them in no time.” Ben said.
Without thinking, Belladonna waved a wand and said: “Make it faster, double it up, time is no master, let’s speed things up.”
Suddenly the oven dinged, and when they went to pull the cake pops out, there were what seemed like endless amounts of trays coming out of the oven. When all was said and done, they had enough for the entire town in one batch.
“Belladonna you did it. Your magic worked.” Murielle whispered.
“Thank goodness for that, too. We thought you’d never figure it out.”
Everyone turned around, and Aunt Sumac and Granny Pepper were standing in the kitchen with them. They waved their wands, and all of the cake pops were frosted and ready to go.
“What?” Everyone said in unison.
“The only thing stopping Belladonna’s magic was Belladonna.” Aunt Sumac said as she ate one of the cake pops. “These are delicious.”
“Yep. You made a mistake when you were distracted, and you let it get inside your head. The only way to fix it was to step back and let you get out of your own way. For a moment, just now, you forgot that your magic didn’t work, and voila, it started working again. Now that it’s all fixed, your Aunt and I can help you get yourselves out of this mess.” Granny Pepper said.
The rest is history. But, not a
ny history that’s recorded in any books because there was no way Brynhilder was going to let news of the great zombie incident make it to the papers outside of Winterfield.
The Nightshade witches and friends took the cake pops and left the bakery. They started throwing them at the zombies, who picked them up, took a bite and then turned human again.
As each person turned back, they grabbed some cake pops and started throwing them at the other zombies. Pretty soon, everyone was back to normal. Well, they were back to their old paranormal selves.
“This has to stop,” Belladonna said resolutely.
“What do we do? We still don’t know where Lexi is or who did this. For that matter, we don’t know who killed Leonard and tried to kill Nick.” Luke said.
“It was Alex Frost,” Nick said. “He looked strange. Pale. Deranged even.” He continued when everyone looked at him.
“The vampire in the dungeon.” Belladonna gasped. “That was what was so horrifying about him. My mind recognized him, but poor Alex. He was just so twisted.”
“Wow. Chief Frost is the evil vampire?” Ben was astonished. “We have to go get him.” He thought for a moment. “But, he hadn’t disappeared yet when Nick was attacked. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There is some sort of spell over him too. That could explain it. Vampirism doesn’t twist people the way Belladonna describes unless there is evil involved. If Alex wasn’t bad in the first place, then someone is using dark magic on him.” Carly offered.
“What do we do with him?” Luke asked. “We can’t arrest him the way he is. I don’t like the idea of killing him either.”
Carly remembered the vial containing Linestra’s blood. “I have something that might help. It’s the Queen’s blood mixed with dragon’s blood oil. It helped me bring Nick back. Alex will still be a vampire, but we can use it to rid him of the evil. That’s assuming it’s a spell.”
They couldn’t all go down into the dungeon, so Ben took the Nightshade coven with him. Luke, Jessie, Carly, and Nick stayed in town to help clean up. There was a huge mess as well as a lot of confused people who needed assistance getting home as the zombie poison wore off.
What they found in the dungeon didn’t exactly shock Belladonna. The coffin was empty. There was no sign of Alex or Lexi.
They did find something a little surprising in one of the cells, though. In the back of the dungeon behind the last door was Mattie. She was dressed in a straitjacket and rocked back and forth while murmuring something about being a good little girl.
“Why didn’t they change me. The promised they’d change me.” She said when Ben opened the cell door.
Aside from that, she was useless for information. As Ben drove her to the state hospital, Mattie kept asking him why Lexi and Alex didn’t change her into a vampire. She was a nasty young woman, but it still made Ben feel bad to see her this way.
If she didn’t stop rambling about being turned into a vampire, Mattie was never going to get out of the mental hospital. Thankfully, Belladonna was confident that her ravings would be viewed as the imagination of a broken mind and not be taken too seriously.
The bigger problem was that Lexi was still on the loose and now she either had a minion or a partner in Alex Frost.
Epilogue
As far as the world was concerned, Brynhildr’s campaign party was a rousing success. Anna Keller wrote a brilliant piece that was sure to be a great kick start for Brynhildr’s campaign for governor.
The DJ who played the event was the only person from out of town who witnessed the zombie incident, but since he and Jessie were now an item, he wouldn’t be saying a word to anyone. DJ ColdPepper was too smitten with Jessie to ever betray any of her secrets.
Muri picked Gone with the Wind for movie night since she’d never seen it. Everyone gathered around her and Luke’s new big screen television to eat marshmallows and watch the film about a week after the zombie incident.
About fifteen minutes after the movie started, there was a knock at her door. When Muri answered it, there was no one there, but there was an envelope labeled “Dead Witches” on the front porch.
Belladonna pulled the letter out of the envelope. She read it and then passed it around.
My Dearest Dead Witches,
I’m almost happy enough to let you all live. Almost. You see, I’ve been waiting a long time to have my Alex back. Now that I’ve lost my grip on Brynhildr and Alex’s annoying wife is gone, we have no reason not to be together. He will, of course, spend the rest of his life atoning to me for marrying that awful wench, but I’m sure I can find it in my heart to forgive him eventually. For now, I have a dedicated servant and partner to help me bring the dark magic I crave into this world and ensure your deaths. Oh, and the deaths of everyone you love.
Watch your backs.
Love and kisses,
Lexi
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You can get the next installment of the Witches of Winterfield series here:
Love Hexed
Party Hexed: Cozy Witch Mystery (Witches of Winterfield Book 4) Page 8