by Alyssa Day
Lou was happy to see me, in more than her usual “feed me now, human” way. I don’t know if she had some sort of cat sense and was telepathically picking up my stress and worry, or if she was just tired of being alone while I went running around with Jack, but she launched herself into my arms and started purring. The feel of my warm, snuggly cat was the nudge that took my emotions from frozen into overdrive, and I sat on the couch and held her and tried not to let terror drown me.
It wasn’t easy.
Fear kept trying to rise up through my throat and choke me to death. An already powerful witch, leader of a coven, had turned to black magic and wanted me dead. She had custody of the little girl I was determined to rescue.
My family was out of town, and so was my best friend. My partner—and, let’s be honest, the guy who was way better equipped to handle all of this than me—was missing.
In the wind.
Probably had an APB out on him. Or a BOLO.
I really needed to quit watching so much TV.
I gave Lou one final cuddle and then put her down and got to work. I filled her bowl with food, gave her fresh water, and taped a note to my front door, just in case I never came home, that said:
CAT IN HOUSE, PLEASE RESCUE, HER NAME IS LOU.
Then I went upstairs to my tiny spare room and searched around until I found the sleeping bag I’d only used once, when Uncle Mike had taken me on a fishing trip. Once had been way more than enough for me, when it came to fishing, but I still had the sleeping bag, and it might be useful tonight. I wasn’t staying here, or going back to Jeremiah’s. I didn’t need to give them an easy target. And I wasn’t going to spend the night at Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike’s, even though I could, because I didn’t want to make them or even their house and poor Bonnie Jo targets.
So I was headed back to Dead End Pawn to rest and regroup for the night. We had a few magical oddities there—more than a few—and maybe the magical resonance, as Olga the evil witch had called it, would interfere with any long distance exploding-head spell she tried to cast on me.
Hopefully, though, she’d be too busy getting ready to take over the world the next night to worry anymore about me. Basically, I was hoping that I was insignificant in the grand scheme of her plotting. Added bonus—that way, maybe she’d never see me coming.
I didn’t say goodbye to my cat. It felt too final, too much like I thought I’d never see her again. And even if that might be true, and even if my eyes were burning just thinking about it, I refused to say the words.
“I love you, Lou. I promise to be back soon, with tuna fish.” I settled for saying, instead. And then I grabbed my uncle’s prized shotgun, and the bag filled with boxes of shells that he’d left for me, and headed out.
*
The pawnshop was eerie in the middle of the night. Strangely shaped shadows lurked in every corner, and curiosities that seemed innocuous in the light of day took on a looming, ominous presence. My voice, when I called out hello for no real reason, echoed back at me, seeming to reverberate off dozens of surfaces, taking on a life of its own. Even the musty scent of familiarity—smelling of aged things and furniture polish—had sharpened into something different. Darker. The shop had been my second home for years, but now I felt like an intruder, invading the secrets it kept during the night.
Only Fluffy, smiling optimistically for all eternity, seemed glad to see me. Even the light from my phone’s flashlight reflecting off the duct tape on her tail was cheerful and welcoming.
Or maybe I was finally, completely, and utterly losing it.
I didn’t turn on any of the lights, because I didn’t want to alert anybody watching the shop that I was in there. I’d even parked across the road, in my familiar spot from high school, and then dashed across the parking lot, feeling horribly exposed the whole time.
But nobody had shot me, and my head was still unexploded, so I was counting it as a win.
I locked myself in the vault, curled up in my sleeping bag on the floor with the shotgun in easy reach, and settled in to wait till morning. Daylight might weaken Olga’s power enough that I had a chance against her. Or maybe it wouldn’t. She would still be a witch in the bright light of day, and I’d still be just a person with a vision quirk.
And a shotgun, I reminded myself.
And maybe a tiger.
Feeling marginally better, I closed my eyes to try to get a little sleep, but just then my phone buzzed. I grabbed it, because it might be Jack.
It wasn’t.
Uncle Mike. And I saw I’d missed texts from Aunt Ruby and Molly too. I answered all three that things were fine, lying my butt off, and had just closed my eyes again when the phone buzzed a second time.
This time, it was Jack.
Don’t worry so much. I’ll be back. I never kiss and run.
A tidal wave of relief, and maybe something else that I wasn’t going to admit, spread through me, and I texted back a single word.
Jerk.
And then the adrenaline from my insane day finally drained out of me in a rushing wave, and I rolled over and went to sleep.
When I woke up a few hours later, it was daytime, and my tiger was still missing.
But I’d had an epiphany while I was dreaming. Or at least a not-too-terrible idea—I needed to search the pawnshop. Maybe this Molder book was here, not at Jeremiah’s house.
I ate a protein bar, drank some water, and brushed my teeth. Then I made coffee and started searching, leaving the CLOSED sign on the door and texting Eleanor that she didn’t need to come in that day.
An hour later, I was still searching, and I still hadn’t found anything. Not in the shop, not in the office, not in the vault. The only thing left for me to search was a file cabinet filled with old, dusty manila envelopes that Jeremiah had called the Cabinet of Last Resort. It contained items that the owners had never redeemed, but which, for whatever reason, we considered to be unsellable.
I was too practical to buy much that I didn’t think I could sell, with the obvious exception of Fluffy. But Jeremiah had had a soft spot, especially for women in trouble. He’d sometimes accepted trinkets that clearly had no value at all, except a sentimental one to the owner, and paid out whatever amounts of money he thought might help the person get through his or her time of need.
Most of these things wound up in the Cabinet of Last Resort, because Jeremiah had always said that if someone wanted to come back for her silver-plated locket or her dime-store watch, he wanted to have it on hand.
I was halfway through the second drawer when I found it. Jeremiah’s neat handwriting on the envelope told me that Melody Adler had pawned it, and a chill tingled down my spine. All those intersecting connections, over and over again.
I opened the envelope and removed the old book. A large Post-it note on the cover, also in Jeremiah’s handwriting, said:
I think she took this from Olga Kowalski. If so, I need to confront Olga about it. Hopefully, she’ll listen to reason.
But she hadn’t, had she? Olga hadn’t listened to reason. She’d shot Jeremiah instead, or told one of her horrible sons to do it, and they’d dumped him back here to make it look like a robbery gone bad. She’d even pretended to perform that magical resonance testing to throw everyone off. Or maybe just to throw me off, because I was the stupid, trusting idiot. The sheriff had probably been her partner in crime, even back then. Why else would he have been so completely incompetent at investigating Jeremiah’s murderer?
My hands were shaking. All of me was shaking. I felt sick and furious, and acid was sloshing around in my stomach. Somehow, I knew what I would see, even before I removed the Post-it note and read the cover. The book was covered in worn green leather, and the title, embossed in faded gold letters, was Blood Magic Rituals. The author was F.S. Molder. I opened the book to page 85, and then I was sure that I was going to throw up.
The chapter was titled “Black Magic and the Blood Moon: The Ritual Sacrifice of a Virgin Childe of the Blood Moon to the
Forces of Darkness.”
A child. All of this was about Shelley. It had always been about Shelley.
Olga planned to sacrifice Shelley, and I had to stop her, even if I had to do it alone.
Just then, somebody pounded on the shop door, and I jumped about a foot in the air, almost dropping the book. The pounding continued. At first, I was tempted to ignore it. The CLOSED sign was up, and nothing could really be that urgent. This was a pawnshop, not an ER.
But whoever it was really, really wanted my attention, because the pounding continued and even got louder. Suddenly, I realized that it could be Jack. Maybe he was injured. I grabbed the Remington and ran out of the vault, only to skid to a halt. I needed that book, but I didn’t have a way to hide it. I ran back in and tore out the page about the ritual, and folded it and hid it in my shoe. Then I went back out to the shop, so I could see who was at the door.
It was Deputy Gonzalez, in uniform, and she didn’t look happy.
Well. That was too damn bad, because I didn’t have time to get arrested.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think she was going to give up. I debated aiming the shotgun at her, but ultimately decided that it was ridiculous to put myself in a Wild West shootout with an armed officer of the law. Instead, I sighed, put the gun down on the jewelry counter, held up a hand for her to have patience, and went to the door.
“Tess, I need you to take a ride with me,” she said abruptly, the minute the door was open. Her face was drawn and anxious, and I hadn’t seen her like that since she’d first come back from wherever she’d gone after high school.
“I don’t have time to be arrested,” I said defiantly, wondering whether she’d shoot me, which lawyer I could call since Mr. Chen was still on vacation, and how horrible I’d look in an orange jumpsuit.
Still, orange jumpsuits were better than dead.
“I’m not arresting you, but I can’t be seen here with you, either. There’s too much stuff going on. Scary stuff. Wrong stuff. I didn’t sign up for any of this. I just wanted to serve and protect and help people.”
“And to be able to officially carry a gun, so you’ll never be hurt again?” Even as I asked the question, I realized the thought had been in my mind since she’d come back to town.
Susan looked shocked, but then she smiled ruefully. “Yeah, I guess gossip goes both ways. My past with that vampire son of a bitch, and yours with the woman and her husband and his shovel.”
I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin, trying to look tough. If she hadn’t come to arrest me, but she wanted to go for a ride, then that probably meant she was going to take me out somewhere by the swamp and shoot me in the back of the head.
“I don’t want to die today, Susan. I’ve got things to do. I need to get Shelley Adler away from the Kowalskis, to begin with. You don’t know what they’re planning—”
“That’s just it. I do know, and I want to talk to you about it. Please, just come with me, just for a little while. I promise I won’t arrest you or hurt you or harm you in any way.”
I thought about it, and then I nodded. If she knew something that could help us, I needed to listen. And if not, maybe she would listen to me and find us some help. Law enforcement from another town maybe, or the feds. Alejandro Vasquez still hadn’t returned my call, and he was the only federal agent I’d ever met, so I wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice.
“All right. I’ll come. Can I bring the shotgun?”
I saw it as a sign of just how bad things really were in Dead End when she didn’t even try to argue about it. I locked the door behind us, and we headed for her car. I couldn’t help but feel that this might be the stupidest thing I’d ever done, because she might be taking me directly to the sheriff, but I was desperate, and desperate people do crazy things. Anyway, this was only the first of many crazy things I had planned for that day, so I climbed into the car and looked at Susan.
“Okay, this is probably stupid, but what the hell,” I said, resigned to my fate. I wasn’t backing out now—from any of it.
Susan tore off down the road so fast that I started to hope that “what the hell” wasn’t what they wound up writing on my tombstone as my last words, and my heart sank into my stomach when I realized that there was only one reason that she could have for driving like this.
“You’re taking me to the sheriff, aren’t you?” I said, as steadily as I could manage.
She shot a look at me. “No. I’m not turning anybody over to that horrible man ever again. I’m taking you to Jack.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I filled Susan in on what I’d found in the book, on the way to wherever we were going.
The worst part was, she didn’t even look very surprised. “I wish I could tell you that the plan to sacrifice a little girl was outside the realm of possibility, but from what I’ve learned about Olga Kowalski in the past day or two, it is not.”
“She was the one who made Gator’s head explode at the jail, wasn’t she?”
Susan took a turn practically on two wheels, and nodded. “She’s behind all sorts of things. She’s been putting loss-of-memory spells on people for the sheriff, for whatever horrible reasons he had. In return, he let her sons get away with anything they wanted to do.”
“Like murder,” I said grimly. “I’m pretty sure one of them killed Jeremiah when he started asking questions about Shelley Adler.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sure you’re right. I can’t confirm that, but I listened in on the sheriff’s phone call with Olga last night, even though I was scared to death that she would somehow find out and kill me. They all but came right out and said that Walt killed Chantal Nelson, because Hank got too drunk that night and was bragging to her about Olga and the Blood Moon. How he was going to be rich, and everybody in this pissant town needed to watch out. Walt killed her to keep her from talking.”
“Olga wanted Shelley all along. That’s why she killed Melody and her parents. Then Shelley would have nowhere else to go, and Olga could force Lawless to let her take custody,” I said.
She took a sharp turn and rocketed down a dirt road until we reached an old wooden shack at the edge of the swamp. In spite of our conversation, I hadn’t quite believed that she wasn’t going to shoot me until I saw Jack walk out the door.
“I need to leave now,” Susan said, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “I got a call, but, well, I’m not going to say anything else about it, because I’m not sure it’s going to work out.”
In that case, I wondered why she’d even bothered to bring it up, but I was so relieved that she wasn’t planning to shoot me, I let it go. But I still didn’t understand why she was leaving.
“You’re not going to help us? Shelley is in serious danger. You know I’m right about that.”
She clenched her hands around the steering wheel so tightly that her arms were shaking. “I know. I know. And it goes against everything I believe in to let you handle this without me. But the sheriff gave Olga some of my hair. I’m sure of it. My hairbrush was missing from my locker a while back, and shortly after that I started to have memory lapses. Little missing pieces of my day, sometimes.”
She laughed, and it was a sound filled with despair. “He did the same thing to Kelly, somehow. We compared notes, and Kelly had the same memory lapses that I did. I know enough about black magic to know that if I go in there with you, Olga can use my hair to kill me with a spell before I even take two steps. Not only wouldn’t I be of help to you, I might mess up the whole plan. I’ve got to try to help from a distance.”
I took a deep breath, preparing to argue with her, but there was no point. She was right. I didn’t want her death on my conscience, either. “Look. There’s this P-Ops agent. He seems like he might be a good guy. I’ve been trying to reach him, but my calls keep going to voicemail. Let me give you his number—”
“I have his number,” she told me. “He’s the one who made the weird call I didn’t want to talk about. Let me see what I
can figure out. Text me and let me know what the plan is and what time you’re going in, and I’ll do my very best to find a way to back you up. Somehow. Or at least I can keep the sheriff away from there. He could—and probably would—shoot you and Jack both and get away with it, and I’m not going to let that happen.”
Impulsively, I leaned over and gave her a quick hug. “You’re a good person, Susan. No matter what happens, I’m glad I know you.”
She swallowed, hard. “Okay, that’s enough of this girly stuff. Get out of the car before that tiger comes over here to get you, and go save the day. When this is all over, we’ll go out to Beau’s and let Lorraine bully us into eating way too much pie. Normal stuff.”
I tried to smile. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
Then I climbed out of the car with my shotgun and my bag of ammunition, and watched her speed away.
“She’s on our side,” Jack said, from right behind me.
“I know,” I told him. “I hope it doesn’t get her killed.”
Jack took the gun and bag out of my hands, put them carefully down on the old picnic table next to us, and then lifted me up off the ground in a fierce hug.
“I was about five minutes away from coming to get you when Susan called me,” he said roughly. “If something had happened to you because I had to get away from that damn sheriff, I would have ripped his entrails out.”
“It was the right thing to do. We didn’t have time to be arrested; especially not by him,” I said, hugging him back, happier than I could ever express that he was alive and well.
A wolf whistle sounded from the shack behind me, and my face turned red.
“Hey, Commander, we’re starting to see why you were so anxious to get away from us last night.”
A round of laughter followed the words, but it sounded friendly, so I tried not to mind too much. When I turned around, seven guys, all with serious muscles and the hard, wary eyes of men who had seen combat, were staring at us.