by Norah Wilson
Maryanne adjusted to tighten her grip even as Alex loosened hers.
“They’ll never stop hunting us if you kill him,” Brooke said. “If you drop him into the flames.”
“They’ll never stop anyway.”
“But then we’ll be the legit bad guys,” Brooke said. “More will fight us. The legend will only grow! This isn’t C.W Stanley, Alex. This isn’t—”
“And this isn’t you, Alex,” Maryanne said. “What am I saying? This isn’t us!”
And in that instant, Alex knew it had slipped too far over there—the inhibition, the fear, everything that they put aside when they cast out.
Oh God, she was losing it! She liked losing it.
Alexandra, that is enough.
She startled as her original’s thought broke into her caster consciousness. No, it wasn’t her original’s thought. It was her original’s dream. Working the other way, somehow. It wasn’t Alex’s other consciousness talking to her. It was someone in the dream. Oh God…
It was them. The two women from the railway tracks, one robed in black, one robed in royal blue. This time as she stood on those lonesome tracks, the one dressed in blue lowered her cloak.
And Alex saw her depthless eyes. White and cloudy with age within her weathered face.
She smiled, then misted into the background of Alex’s now dreamless sleep.
“Alex?” Brooke said.
Her answer was to move, and Maryanne and Brooke moved with her. They swooped down and deposited the old man unceremoniously onto the ground. His knees wouldn’t hold him, and he fell in a motionless heap.
“Let’s get out of here!” Brooke’s warning came on the heels of a shotgun blast. The three shot into the air.
“Ah! That nicked me!” Maryanne cried. She clasped her right hand to her left shoulder. “And it was iron this time!”
The old man had effectively acted as a human shield. Now that they’d set him down, the hunters could shoot again. Alex glanced down to see that it was Melissa who held the gun.
Alex and Brooke flanked Maryanne as they flew away. “I’m all right” she said. “Hurts like heck but it’s just a graze. Nothing left behind—”
Bang!
“Let’s get out of here,” Alex cried. By now, they were already out of shotgun reach, but nobody slacked off.
“That was Melissa who shot at us. Who shot Maryanne.” Brooke said.
Alex nodded. “I know.”
Melissa Kosnick had somehow kept her wits while the others had panicked. She’d shown very little fear. Why? Had she lost it in her madness?
Had Alex lost her own?
Alexandra, that is enough.
The woman cloaked in royal blue had come back to her, through the portal of her dreams. This time she’d turned her face toward her.
Chapter 24
No Place To Run
Brooke
They didn’t head straight back to the cave. The last thing the three of them needed was to be seen soaring toward Hants High Mountain. So as they’d gathered together again in the sky, they flew in the opposite direction, hard and fast, out of gunshot range.
Brooke had taken the lead; the others had followed.
What had gotten into Alex? Maryanne, even?
Casting.
It was changing all of them. But while Brooke had been half giddy to see that hunter so terrified, she was aware there was a line not to be crossed.
Eustace. That was the name of the man they’d dangled over the flames. He was the old fart from the hardware store where she and Maryanne had bought gardening gloves last November. He’d been all charm and smiles back then. Tonight, he’d been a venomous hunter.
Once they were sure that no one was following them, they headed toward the mountain and up to the highest cave.
They’d flown in silence. Each, Brooke guessed, lost in their own thoughts. As she was lost in hers.
She couldn’t escape the inescapable—that damned third verse from Vesta Walker’s grimoire. Those words hurt her; those words had saved her.
Two hold the power! Ring-of-rosy goes around!
Ashes to ashes, do you dare fall down?
The very first portal—the child and the mother
It’s a portal blessed like no other.
Without discussion or any preamble, they’d fallen into chanting that second line. Chanting it! Even while they were in such danger.
And they’d ‘fallen down’ all right. Dared fall down. Down through the floor to find the vault, down through the graveyard. Coincidence? Was there a prophetic quality to the stained glass portrait after all?
Two hold the power…
Damned verse? It wasn’t the verse that was damned. It was Brooke herself!
Two hold the power? In that strange, stained-glass portrait, Alex and Maryanne had thorns breaking beneath their feet as they raced. Neither Alex nor Maryanne seemed to have noticed that the middle caster—Brooke herself—had no bending or broken thorns underfoot.
Brooke was first to re-enter the cave. “Home again, home again, jiggity—”
Right behind her, Maryanne shushed her loudly.
Yes, they were all glad to be back. The night was almost over, the heaviness was settling in. It had been one heck of a night! But none of them wanted to think of this place as home. Not in a permanent way.
Brooke grabbed a small piece of mesh, barely glancing at the pile of their assorted copper tools, pots, pennies, and others articles Bryce had assembled for them. And of course, Connie’s copper knife.
One by one, she moved the candles a safer distance from their bodies. On the floor, Maryanne seemed to sigh with relief. At least it had worked: there wasn’t a spider in sight. Nor any other critters or creepy-crawlies.
Brooke, Alex, and Maryanne gathered by the still-burning candles. They didn’t move in a clockwise circle now, but they huddled close together by the flames. Soon they’d spread out the copper for resting and take their turns. Brooke would let Alex and Maryanne go first.
Neither would object.
Alex hadn’t said a word since they’d left the burning church on Robinson Road. Maryanne had said very little.
Alex broke the silence. “I screwed up.” She said it with a nod and a very ‘there, that’s done’ way.
“We both did,” Maryanne said.
Alex wasn’t about to give over blame. “I started it, and I would have dropped him—”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Brooke said.
“I would have. That’s the thing Brooke, I was losing it. Oh hell, I damn well lost it! He called us whores. That’s what set me off. He was with the hunters. For all I know, he was the one who’d fired the shots through the windows, lit the first torch. But when he called us those names, I could have killed him. This wasn’t a matter of lowered inhibition. This was more. I really could have killed him. Maybe I did? He looked—”
“He’ll be all right,” Maryanne said. “It’ll give him a story to tell the rest of the geezers at the old folks’ home.”
Maryanne’s voice was steady, but Brooke detected the quake in it just below the surface.
“What if I scared him to death?” Alex said. “Don’t you remember what Connie wrote about Sugar? Ira’s old hunting dog? Connie scared that dog to death. She didn’t mean to scare it at all, but just being touched by a caster was enough to kill it. This wasn’t just swooping animals when we get carried away or smacking Mr. MacKenzie upside the head for bad behavior with a student. I could feel his terror! I could feel it going right through him! And I didn’t just frighten the old fart. I shook him. He was—”
“He was there to kill us,” Brooke said. “Remember that. Him and everyone else! It was self-defense! Pure and simple. They threw down the gauntlet. It was a lesson. A lesson to them all. A reminder to Mansbridge. If they’re going to try to hurt us, then let them live in fear. Let their fear be justified if they’re looking for it to be.”
Brooke could see the slight softening of Alex’s rigid
shoulders.
When Alex spoke again, her words were steady, “Payback’s a bitch, huh?”
“So I’ve heard,” Brooke allowed with a straight face. “But just don’t call her a whore, okay?”
That had the desired effect of setting the girls off. They laughed until they would have cried, if a cast could cry. Brooke joined in with them, grateful for the release of tension. But afterward, Brooke’s mind slipped right back to the events on Robinson Road.
Melissa Kosnick. Neither Alex nor Maryanne had raised the subject of Melissa’s involvement, and Brooke wasn’t about to. But the truth of it was that they—or rather Brooke herself—weren’t so innocent where Melissa was concerned. Brooke had started it with her. She’d found her in Seth’s arms, and in her jealousy, she’d messed with them both. Then her remarks to Melissa at the food court after that Halloween… Brooke had tormented the poor girl further. And for what? Because Seth Walker had rejected her in favor of Melissa, that’s why. Brooke had lashed out at the other girl, wanting to hurt her.
“We’ve got to rest,” Alex said.
Brooke glanced at her peacefully-sleeping original.
“I’m dreaming I’m rollerblading with Anika. Hey, I should bring—” Alex stopped suddenly and stilled for several seconds. “I did it. I just brought a couple of beers into the dream. Oh crap! I spilled them!”
Maryanne laughed, but this time Brooke could hear the exhaustion in it. She was already at their pile of copper, digging out more pieces to ‘make the bed’, when she gasped. She shot back.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
She and Broke both flew to Maryanne’s side.
Maryanne held up a glove. Not just any glove, but one with pennies lining the fingers. “I left this back at the church!” Maryanne cried. “Someone’s been here! Someone who knows!”
There was a loud and purposeful stirring by the cave’s entrance, and Brooke raced to it. “Someone’s still here!” But she didn’t move to attack the uninvited guest. She backed up slowly and let him enter. He was obviously terrified, shaking, stumbling, yet coming forward to them.
And before he said a single word, Brooke knew who he was.
He was one who watches over and one who watches out.
Chapter 25
Take Care
Alex
As Alex looked at the terrified man before them, her shock broke into her original’s dreaming consciousness.
But even if she hadn’t, hearing the words that had stammered out of their uninvited guest would have startled her sleeping self awake.
“Please don’t hurt me!”
With frightened eyes, John Smith looked over at their unmoving bodies laid out side-by-side in the sleeping bags at the back of the cave. Then he looked to the casters—the Hellers—as he would have always known them to be.
“What if he thinks we did that to them? I mean to us.” Alex gestured back toward their bodies. “That the Mansbridge Hellers did that to the Harvell House girls.”
“Crap!” Brooke shouted.
“We have to stop him from telling,” Maryanne said. “We have to make him understand.”
“And if we can’t?” Alex shouted.
Maryanne had no answer.
Oh God, this was getting out of hand.
John Smith stood shaking in front of the three casters as they advanced toward him. “I…I’m not here to hurt you! I’m here to help! I brought the glove. I was the one who left it in the oak tree to begin with.” His voice weakened as he begged. “Please, girls, don’t hurt me. Maryanne…Alex…Brooke.” He nodded correctly to each caster in turn, not to the originals on the floor. “I know it’s you. Have mercy!”
Alex halted immediately. So did Maryanne and Brooke, much to the obvious relief of Smith.
“He knows,” Alex said. “He knows that our casts and our originals are both still us.”
“What else does he know?” Maryanne whispered.
Making little flappy talking hands, then jabbing her finger toward Smith, Alex gestured for him to speak.
He wet his lips, swallowed hard. “I’ve known it was you for a while. I figured it out. Three Hellers were seen around town this year. You three were close, acted strangely…I knew it had to be you. But then another one joined you.” He swallowed hard. “And then it was down to three again after you found the body in the basement.” Suddenly John Smith was watching them very, very closely.
Connie! He knew about Connie Harvell!
But how much?
John Smith startled as Alex sped across the cave and back again at an angry speed. But he seemed to breathe a little easier when he saw her turn the copper knife in her hand in front of him. Not the reaction Alex would have expected, but one she’d hoped for.
She’d been testing him.
“Yes,” he said. “I have seen that knife before. Years ago. Decades ago. Right here in this cave. I left it here for the Heller—for Connie.” Smith pointed down to the carvings on the wall. Not at the rows of lines counting off the days, so closely together they resembled railroad tracks, but at the words written low to the floor of the cave.
“I used to bring a lady here. A kind, strong woman. I’d drive as far as I could, help her walk the rest of the way here. We…we were friends.”
John Smith looked away.
“Friends with benefits?” Brooke asked her casting sisters.
“Did they even have benefits back then?” Maryanne said.
If the situation weren’t so dire, Alex would have guffawed a laugh.
“She wouldn’t let me carve the words. She said they had to be from her hand. I’d sit guard outside the cave as she worked away.”
Alex’s head shot back. Sat guard?
Smith took her startled gesture for what it was—a question. Who was he guarding her from?
“Her husband was the nastiest son of a bitch you’d ever want to meet. He would have been furious had he known about…that his wife was trying to help the Mansbridge Heller. Vesta Walker was her name—Ira Walker’s wife. She was a blessed soul. A brilliant, blessed soul.”
Alex moved down close to the floor. With the tip of the copper knife, she began to write in the dirt.
“Did she know the Heller was Connie Harvell?”
“Not for certain.” John Smith shook his head. “But that was always her fear. Our fear. I…I didn’t know how Miss Harvell was connected to the Heller, but I knew there was a connection to Harvell House. That window. Then, after you dug up the body, and that fourth Heller—the very first Heller—was gone, I knew I had to accept the truth. That Heller was Connie Harvell. That’s when I knew just how powerful a gateway that stained glass window is—was. Not even Vesta knew how powerful. If she had known, she’d have gone through it herself. She’d do that, she’d go that far. Anything to help the Mansbridge Heller. Like you girls did. Many nights I watched you fly out.”
“He does know!” Brooke said.
Maryanne’s original moaned a muffled, “Oh wow.” All four of them glanced over.
Alex turned back to Smith. She made the motion with her hands again: speak. Then swept her arms out wide in an all-encompassing way.
“We need to know everything he knows,” Alex said. “Everything.”
“Damn right,” Brooke said.
“Ah, you want me to back up a bit?” Smith said. “Tell you everything from the beginning?”
Alex gave an exaggerated nod of her head in confirmation.
“Well, let’s see. I’m not from Mansbridge, to start with,” John Smith began. “I never saw this town until I was six years old. Truth be told, I never saw much of anything till I was six. My mother had me out of wedlock. She was only fifteen, and didn’t stick around long after I came into the world. She got out of that hellhole she brought me into. Glory—that was her name, I think. No one talked about her much. I never heard from her again. My grandparents raised me until they couldn’t. By couldn’t, I mean the government got complaints from the neighbors and finally ste
pped in and took this little bastard away from them for good. Best day of my life.” Smith swallowed twice. He cleared his throat before he continued.
“They put me in a home here in Mansbridge. Jeremy and Joan Dufty took me in. They ran a foster home for half a dozen kids. Except for me, they came and went. Mostly boys. I was with the Duftys for twelve years. I know there are horror stories about those kind of places, but really, this wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t so bad. But I had what they called a ‘nervous disposition’. Scared spitless would be a better way to describe it. I barely talked. Could hardly eat. I couldn’t sleep at nights, especially when I first got there. Couldn’t stay in bed. Mama Joan—God rest her soul—gave me my own room. She worried, I guess. So there I was, all by myself in the smallest room at the top of the stairs, overlooking the river. I’d watch the skies at night.”
“The river,” Brooke gasped.
“Oh God,” Alex said. “He must have seen—”
“When I was about fifteen,” Smith said. “I saw her—that black ghost. Yes, I was scared…almost as scared as I am now.”
Maryanne shook her head in a way that clearly intended to say, “Don’t be.”
Alex made her own gesture, setting the knife she still held on the ground. Then she unknotted the fists she hadn’t even realized she’d been clenching.
He nodded his understanding.
“I didn’t tell anyone about her. And yes, I could tell by the shape of the thing, it was a her. A round-bellied her.” John glanced away in embarrassment for being so indelicate. “And soon I heard the tales, about how the Heller was evil and how Ira Walker was trying to hunt it down. I saw for myself how his hair turned white overnight. One day it was as dark as shoe polish, the next white as powder.
“I never said a word about seeing that Heller. Not to anyone. I didn’t want them to hurt her. She always seemed so lonely to me. I knew lonely.
“As scared as I was, I kept watching for her, night after night. Some nights, I’d lay in bed with the windows open and listen for her. Listen for the quiet. That’s how I would know she was around. I saw how she’d hover close by the windows. I borrowed the kitchen radio and started playing it softly at nights to lure her closer to mine. I’d leave that window wide open. Even in the winter I did this, cold as it was. Once—I was never sure—but once, I thought the Heller slipped through the wall and came right into the house. One minute she was there, outside, the next, nothing. I didn’t dare roam the halls to go look for her. But one night soon after that, when I was as brave as I was ever going to get, I snuck outside of the Dufty house while she hid by it, and when she left I followed her.”