Bone Coven

by D. N. Hoxa

  When he jumped to his feet, I fell back, startled. Like a man with a purpose, he strode to the beginning of the room and fell down on his knees in front of a stack of newspapers and books.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, but Bender didn’t answer. Instead, he began to throw books behind him without even looking. My heart began to race. He was onto something, that much was obvious.

  “Just tell me what you’re looking for,” I said. Impatience made a little girl out of me, every damn time.

  “Holy spell,” Bender whispered, then stood up with a piece of paper in his hand.

  I practically touched it with the tip of my nose, but it was too dark. I couldn’t read it.

  “Light,” I said and pointed at the lamp on the other side of the room, but Bender didn’t move. He kept looking at the paper as if he could see something.

  “January eighth, 2006,” Bender said. “Jessica Davis went missing on January eighth, 2006.”

  Holy cow. The eighth of January was exactly two weeks and two days ago. The same date Cara Hughes disappeared from her apartment.

  Bender returned to his recliner but only to take his cigarette between his fingers, and with the paper still in hand, he began to pace around the room.

  “Everybody thought she’d run away from home, including her parents. They said she was always a rebel, so they didn’t make a big deal out of it until Amanda Reigns disappeared a week later.”

  “I knew it,” I whispered to myself. It was just too much to be a coincidence.

  “Then Arthur, and Melanie…” Bender’s voice trailed off for a second. “I remember it like it was yesterday. The fear. The panic. The suspicion. Nothing like that had ever happened in our coven before. Everybody was pointing fingers at everybody.”

  “Because the protective spells over the coven community were never broken.”

  Just like in Delaware. The main coven communities were always built right where the leaders lived, and those places were very heavily guarded. I’d smelled it myself the night before while entering the coven. I’d hopped into a truck of Green witches to get through. It hadn’t been hard. And if I could do it, why couldn’t someone else, even if they did look like monsters?

  “We were very careful who we let in.”

  “There are a thousand ways outsiders could get in without being detected. I did it myself just last night.”

  Bender shook his head. “You’re talking about the Greens. Bone magic is stronger. Our spells can’t be manipulated by anyone other than a Bone himself.”

  “There are always ways, and the attackers found the perfect one. Nobody noticed a thing.” The case spoke for itself.

  “The whole coven was interrogated. Every single person—including your mother,” Bender said.

  Shivers washed down my back at the mention of her but I shook them away. Now was not the time to get sentimental.

  “When did you start to find the bodies?” I asked reluctantly. If those beasts kidnapped on the same dates, they would probably kill on the same dates, too.

  Bender went back to the stack of papers and started to search for something else. This time, I didn’t bother to follow. I just waited for him to come back to the lamp, a fine layer of sweat on his forehead now, though it was pretty cold in there.

  “February second,” he whispered. “The first body was found in the backyard of the next-door neighbor.”

  Instinct took over, and my phone was in my hands before I realized it. I wanted to call Peterson, tell him…what? That the dead bodies of those people were going to start appearing in nine days? Who would believe me? I couldn’t prove anything. Not yet. So I put my phone back in my pocket.

  “My aunt said that they’d died by blasts of magic.” Ralph Martinez’s face came to my mind as I spoke. I’d killed him the same way, no matter that Amelia wanted to believe I’d conjured a spell and didn’t remember doing it.

  “Your aunt was right,” Bender said. “Hold this.” He left the piece of paper in my hand and started to search another stack of books. Then, he stopped and looked up at me. “You do know this is all confidential information, right?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Who would take me seriously if I even tried to tell anyone? You didn’t, and you still wouldn’t have, had you not known my family.” It was just another way of saying: I’m a fairy.

  With his lips pressed together, Bender nodded and looked away from me. He felt sorry for me and that pissed me off. I definitely didn’t need anyone’s pity, but I held my tongue when he returned to his books and papers, until he stood up again, holding a folder with transparent plastic covers in his hands. He took it to the lamp and put it on the small stand right next to it, above an ashtray full of ash and cigarette butts.

  When he opened the folder, my stomach turned. The face of a dead girl with brown eyes looking at nothing was like a fist to my face. I’d seen worse, but she was so young. No more than fifteen. My eyes quickly filled with tears, but I didn’t let them fall. I didn’t allow myself to look away, either.

  “Jessica Davis,” Bender said, then turned the page. The man on the picture was lying on his stomach so I couldn’t see his face on that shot. On the next picture, though, his face was clear in detail. His blue eyes looked the same as Jessica’s—frozen at the second they’d seen all the horror of the world. The coffee I drank in Amelia’s house made it all the way up my throat, but I swallowed it back.

  “Arthur White,” Bender whispered. “He was the eldest of the kidnapped kids. Probably about your age.”

  “I assume you did the autopsy,” I managed to say without my voice breaking.

  Bender nodded. “And the reports are right here. Their hearts just stopped beating. Their brains shut down. No trace of anything else.”

  My ears began to whistle. The need to know what that beast was nearly overwhelmed me. Could it be that it had bluffed the night before? Because I was the only person I knew who could use a blast of magic to kill. If they were not part fairy, what were they?

  “We investigated everyone in the coven. We followed every living person around for months. Tapped into their phones, bugged their cars.”

  “But you found nothing.”

  “We found nothing,” Bender confirmed, his voice that of a defeated man.

  “It’s a beast,” I said with a sigh.

  He looked up at me, brows narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “The attackers,” I clarified. “They are some sort of wolf beasts. My opinion is that they’re witches with enough power to transform to perfection into an animal, but it’s just a guess.”

  Bender stood up and lit another cigarette. I hadn’t even seen him put the last one out.

  “Start from the beginning,” he said and began to pace around the room.

  Reluctantly, I closed the folder next to the lamp because I didn’t want to see Arthur White’s lifeless eyes any longer. They threatened to suffocate me.

  “I’m an investigator, and two days ago, one of the Green coven leaders came to me with a job. Told me how the children of the leaders were disappearing, and one of his kids was next. He hired me to help find who was responsible. He also hired an agency and lots of ECU soldiers for protection.”

  Bender gave no indication that he was even listening to me. With his head down and the cigarette between his lips, he just walked to the end of the room and back.

  “I was in Delaware last night to see the house where one of the witches was kidnapped. I didn’t find anything—not a single trace—but on my way back, the beasts attacked the house of the last leader and tried to take one of his children.” Elisabeth’s face came to my mind, and I wondered where she was. If she was safe. I sure as hell hoped so.

  “The twenty-third,” Bender said, then asked for the piece of paper he’d handed to me. “The fourth kidnapping occurred on the twenty-third.”

  “Except last night, they didn’t count on that many guards being there. They tried to escape after they killed a lot of werewolves and Greens, b
ut I managed to capture one of them alive. We interrogated it, and that’s when I knew for sure that this case was connected to the Bone coven.”

  “It confessed?” Bender’s voice broke. I could almost hear the thoughts going through his head. He’d devoted his entire life to finding out who’d killed those four witches, and now, he was finally getting some answers.

  “Not really, but it said that they’d done it before and that nobody had stopped them—that my world hadn’t stopped them. It knew I was a Bone witch. My aunt didn’t believe me, but she’d change her mind if she saw these dates. There’s no way in hell this is a coincidence.”

  “Where is it now? I want to see it,” Bender said and for a second, an entirely different person was in front of me. A determined, confident man who knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Not going to happen. The ECU came in and kicked me out. Now, they’ve taken over, and I can’t get anywhere near the Greens. It’s why I’m here.”

  Bender gave me half a smile. “Why did you bother?”

  The question caught me a bit off guard. “Because people are going to die. Because people of my coven have died before and nobody was held responsible for it. Nobody paid the price but Bones.”

  “Your mother wasn’t part of our coven. You weren’t, either.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not a Bone witch, no matter how I look.” If you wanted to piss me off in half a second, this was the way to do it. Bender figured that out, too. Maybe that’s why he changed the subject.

  “So what exactly are you planning to do?”

  I pointed at the piece of paper in his hands. “I plan to read everything you have and listen to the story of how everything happened in detail, until I know everything by memory. I’m pretty sure the answer to where the rest of those beasts are is hidden somewhere in your head. Now that you know what we’re looking for, you’ll find it. It’s only a matter of time.” Or maybe I was just an optimist.

  “Then what?”

  I grinned. That was my favorite part. “Then, I’m going to hunt them down.”

  Twelve

  Bender’s kitchen wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. He offered me coffee. I agreed only if he let me wash the cups and the kettle myself. He also let me take one of the chairs from his kitchen table. They were old, but I wiped one with a kitchen towel until I was sure I wasn’t going to die of an infection by sitting on it.

  “No offense, but your house is a mess. I am not sitting on that sofa,” I said to Bender when he asked me what I needed the chair for. To his credit, he said nothing. He just smiled and went back to the living room while I prepared the coffee.

  Half an hour later, I was sitting on the chair next to the recliner. Bender had “cleaned” the three-legged table by literally throwing everything on it to the floor. He’d put the small lamp on top of it, then he began to fill it with stacks of paper and folders—even some books. I just watched him until he was finished, eager to dive into it all.

  “How did you end up with this case?” I asked him when he finally sat down on the recliner with a folder in hand.

  Bender smiled sadly. “I used to work as a detective for the ECU,” he said.

  It sucked how surprised I was. Obviously, this man was very good at something, no matter how he looked now. The ECU picked nothing but the best, even a decade ago.

  “I quit when our coven was attacked. I dedicated everything I had to finding out what happened.” Meaning he felt he’d wasted his life away for nothing.

  “You asked me before why I bothered. Why did you?”

  Bender opened the folder on his lap. The smell of tobacco when he moved his hand hit my nostrils hard. He turned three pages until the first picture appeared. It was the girl I’d seen before, only in this picture, she was alive. She was vibrant, her smile as bright as the sun. Bender’s fingers touched her cheek.

  “Jessica was my niece,” he whispered.

  Ah, shit. I wished I hadn’t asked. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. I swore I’d find out who was responsible for this, but I never did.”

  It almost sounded like he was apologizing, not to me, but to his niece. To her picture.

  “You will,” I said, and as much as I wanted to pat his shoulder, I held myself. “We both will.”

  Bender took in a deep breath and sighed. “I never thought I’d see this day.”

  “Working on the case again?”

  “Sitting down with a fairy—no offense.”

  I was definitely offended, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “But let me tell you the story first…”

  When the four leaders of the Bone coven decided to take a member of every Bone family for questioning, they thought they were making sure that whoever took Gwyneth Wayne’s place was worthy of leadership. Rumor had it that that’s where they screwed up and began to anger most of the families. Everybody knew everybody in the community. Why would people need to be made to feel like criminals?

  Apparently, when the leaders went out of their way to find a relative of my grandmother from her mother’s side only to find that he was dead, there was an actual riot in the community. People protested and demanded they be seen as equals in the race for the empty seat. Still, the leaders refused and did so publicly with an open statement. Bender had the letter folded in the pages of the folders, and as I read it, I couldn’t really blame everyone for being pissed off. The text there basically said that the leaders had the right to choose their equal, and that everybody who wanted to be part of the leadership was pretty much worthless so far.

  The next day, Jessica Davis disappeared.

  “I knew something was wrong from day one. No matter what everybody said, Jessica would never run away from home. I tried to talk to my sister, but ever since she married Joseph, she never had an opinion of her own. Whatever he thought, she did, too,” Bender explained. “By the time Amanda Reigns disappeared, I’d already quit my job, and I started the interrogations.”

  The Bone families didn’t like it. At first, they voiced their dissatisfaction, and some even refused to be questioned. But when Arthur White disappeared next, everything changed.

  “It was like a spell was cast upon every Bone witch in the coven,” Bender said. People stopped talking to one another. They stopped going out of their homes after dark. By the time that Melanie Rivera disappeared, everybody suspected everybody. Every person in the coven was a suspect.

  “Back then, there weren’t people we could hire. The ECU refused to help in internal matters of the coven, as our own rules dictated.”

  Finn’s Agency wasn’t even open at that time. He only started his operation seven years ago. Maybe, if Bender had had more help, he would’ve gotten to the bottom of it by now.

  He showed me pictures of what every person who was kidnapped looked like while they were still alive. Against my will, all of their faces were forever imprinted in my memory. Then, Bender gave me a new folder, much thicker than the last. It was the first out of thirteen parts where the interrogation of every Bone witch was recorded in details. Just looking at all those lines was tiring. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to go through it all, especially for Bender, who had been thirty-five at the time. Every page had the names of the people being interrogated together with their place and date of birth at the top.

  “This one here,” he said and turned the pages until he got what he was looking for. “Ashley Johnson, Jessica’s best friend. She found her bag in the school yard.”

  I read the line on the yellow paper quickly. Ashley had found Jessica’s bag in the backyard of the school. The bag hadn’t been opened. Everything inside had belonged to Jessica, and everything was intact, save for the straps. They were cut with perfect precision at the top.

  “A knife was the logical guess,” said Bender.

  Of course they’d think that. They’d never seen the claws of those beasts before.

  “Claws,” I mumbled.

  Bender thought about it for a
second. “Claws would have left marks. All the testing we did on the cuts came out clean. No sign of any material.”

  “It’s only a guess, but it could be because those things appear as beasts only through magic?”

  “It’s possible,” said Bender, scratching his chin. Then, he lit another cigarette and all the smoke blew in my face. Ew. I moved away, but he didn’t even notice. “But magic would have left a trace, too.”

  “Blasts of it don’t.” I shrugged.

  “Move on to page thirty-two,” Bender said, and I did so. It wasn’t surprising that he knew this stuff by memory. Ten years of obsessing over something was a very long time.

  The interrogation of Andrew Reigns, brother of Amanda Reigns. I found the lines Bender wanted me to read easily. They were highlighted with a bright orange highlighter.

  The frame of her bed was bent. Bent, not broken, he’d said. As if something huge had sat on it. The frame of the window had four lines engraved on it, right by the left corner. I think it’s a message.

  “We thought the kidnappers had left us a message with that sign,” Bender filled me in. “Turn the page.”

  When I did, the picture of a piece of wood with four straight lines on it was in front of me.

  Again, “claws.” It was so obvious. How could they not have seen it?

  “Could be, but like I said, claws leave marks. Our reports—”

  “Whatever tests you did, it’s obvious that these things cannot be detected by them. But these are claws. Look at them! How can you even doubt it?”

  “I tested these lines with everything. Werewolves’ claws, even dog claws. Nothing matched.”

  Bender suddenly looked pissed off. I bit my tongue because I wasn’t being fair. If I hadn’t seen those beasts, all of these things—the cut bag straps, the bent bed frame, the claws on the window—they would have looked meaningless to me, too.

  “But you didn’t test them with those beasts. You’d definitely have a match.”

  “Page fourteen.” Bender offered me another one of those thick folders. “Bethany was Arthur White’s girlfriend. She swore in the interrogation that she saw chain marks around Arthur’s throat when she found him in the alley behind their favorite restaurant where they used to meet.”