“He must have really loved you,” Baxter commented. “To go through all of that trouble to have you by his side.”
Susannah’s face straightened. “That’s one word for it, though I would never believe that someone loved me after they killed my mother.”
“He slew your mother?” Jennie repeated, shocked.
Susannah’s eyes narrowed, the memory still painful. “She went out to try to stop him. The army was marching through the forest on their way to the village. She thought she could waylay them, sneak up and take them by surprise. Magic was as prohibited then as it is now, rumors of witches were growing in Massachusetts and women of a certain disposition were not being treated kindly. She created the first fire to be seen from the village and tried to smoke them out, destroy them before they could destroy us, but Haybourne was too fast. He shot into the dark with a musket and caught her. Whether by chance or with great skill, I’ll never know, but he carried her body to my door.”
Susannah rose to her feet and gave the cauldron a stir. “By that time, I knew the worst was coming. A few days later and no sign of my mother, I readied myself for him. The village burned, but I knew what my role was. I had to stop him. I had to end it.”
“How?” Baxter asked. “What could possibly have brought him to his knees?”
“A curse,” Jennie stated.
Susannah nodded. “A powerful curse, one that stilled his beating heart and disbanded his army.” Her eyes grew glassy. “I’ve never felt so much anger and power running through my veins as I did that day. Haybourne entered my house, and I led him to my basement. When he was there, I hit him with all I had. He fought hard, but I managed to stop him. His men waited outside obediently, unknowing that their master was already entombed in the grave that I had built for him. A tomb that would lock him away for some time.”
“And the men outside?” Baxter asked. “What happened to them?”
Susannah’s face finally broke into a smile. There wasn’t a great deal of pleasure in there, just a tickle of a familiar memory. “I became what they thought I was. A witch. I tangled my hair and cackled and donned a dark robe. I created the illusion of the thing they feared, and when I emerged from the house without their precious leader, they fled. I threw bottles of chemicals designed not to hurt but to create the illusion of power—what you would think of as smoke bombs—and scared them into the ether. After that, his reign was over.”
Susannah fell silent. The only sound was the low chatter of the agents and the bubbling broth in the cauldron.
After a while, Jennie asked, “What happened to the tomb? What did you do next?”
Susannah met her eyes. “The tomb was too heavy to do anything with. It lay in the depths of my family’s cottage, at least thirty feet below ground. I locked it away, gathered my things, and fled. What else was there to do? Those I scared had seen a witch that day, and I knew I was no longer safe. Even if I’d saved the town, no one would want to live anywhere near me. I gathered my things, found my aunts and cousins, and we fled to Massachusetts to find more of our kind.”
Baxter scratched his head. “That doesn’t make sense. If you fled and left the tomb, then who engraved the sides of it?”
“I don’t know,” Susannah admitted. “All I know is that, if you’re telling me he’s back, he’s going to be pissed. He’s a danger to everyone, and you need to stop him.”
Jennie cocked an eyebrow. “Do you have any ideas as to where he might be? Somewhere that he could be hiding? Is there any place Haybourne would be desperate to get to in order to reconnect with the world he once knew?”
Susannah thought about this. “The world has changed dramatically. Little of what once was still remains.”
Baxter nodded, unsurprised by her answer.
“I suppose,” she continued. “There might be one place. I don’t know if it still exists, but it could be worth a shot.”
Jennie rose to her feet and patted down the dirt from her backside. “Come with us,” she requested in earnest. “Show us around the city you once knew. We need you, now more than ever.”
Susannah considered this, her face growing dark. “It’s been so long since I’ve been back. I don’t know how much help I’ll be. All that I know is that ancient curses twist and bend over time. I may have stopped his heart, but I didn’t still his destructive nature. There’s no record of what happens to a specter under the conditions I used to bind him. You need to be prepared.”
“Agreed,” Jennie acknowledged. “So, are you in?”
Susannah snapped her fingers and the flames from beneath the cauldron hissed out of existence. She snapped them again, and the torches around the walls lit. “I’m in,” she said, resigned. “One question. What’s the SIA’s attitude toward witches? I can’t risk hanging again.”
Chapter Sixty
Richmond, Virginia, USA
Ula lay on the rooftop, her head dangerously close to the edge. A few more inches and she’d be looking at a twenty-story drop onto the street below.
She scanned the streets through her binoculars. A multitude of agents took the other four corners of the building as they searched for any strange activity below. Already pedestrians were making their way to work, cars drove lazily through the streets, and the sounds of the city coming alive met their ears.
Ula’s earpiece buzzed with chatter. It felt like a real operation now that there were representatives from each of the major spectral groups keeping each other updated over the radio. They were stationed in twelve primary locations, and all things said, they had found nothing yet of note.
Julia sat a few feet away, scrolling through her cell phone and searching the city’s news outlets. She hunted through tabloids, pouring past sensationalist media, looking for anything that mentioned anomalies in the city. Attacks on buildings or people roaming the streets with far-off looks in their eyes.
An article caught her eye. She clicked the link and found a piece titled Sleepwalking incidents on the rise.
She started to read the article, making it as far as the first few paragraphs when the door to the rooftop opened and two men arrived. Julia’s attention was pulled away from her phone when she caught Roman’s eyes and saw the trace of a smile on his lips.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she declared, rising from the floor and running over to meet him. She jumped into his arms, and they wrapped around her instinctively. She buried her face in his neck, and he was left looking confused and a little out of his comfort zone. After a few seconds of her babbling into his neck, she pulled away and he put her gently down.
She glanced at his leg. There was no bandaging, no sign of a limp or a struggle to stand. “How…”
Roman shrugged. He lifted his leg off the floor and flexed his knee and foot. He looked past Julia to Ula. “My guess is that Hendrick threw something together?”
Ula crossed to them and stood beside Julia, who flushed bright red. “It seems so. Is there anything that man can’t make?” She turned to Rhone. “And you?”
Rhone stretched his back out, flexing his hips forward before thumping his fist against his ribs. “Good as new. You may want to tell Hendrick to batch-produce that stuff. He could make millions selling a miracle cure to heal broken bones and damaged muscle.”
Ula laughed. “I don’t think he’d want the attention.”
Rhone waved a hand. “I’ll pitch it to him. We’ll make it work.”
Julia’s eyes never left Roman’s. “How are you feeling? I was worried about you.”
Roman struggled for words. Ula and Rhone chuckled and left them to it. They walked over to Triton and took place beside him at the roof’s edge, filling Rhone in on their progress and the kind of things they were looking for.
Julia’s eyes fell to the floor. She laced her fingers behind her back. Roman tried to find the words he wanted to say but couldn’t. Romance wasn’t in his bank of knowledge. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had shown interest in him.
Julia waited for a response.
The longer she waited, the more crestfallen she appeared. She looked into his eyes again and wasn’t sure what was going on in the man’s head. After a few seconds, she sighed. “It’s good to have you back.”
She turned and went to leave, suddenly finding that Roman had grabbed her wrist. He tugged gently and turned her back around before leaning down toward her and cupping a finger to her chin. He led her lips to his, and they kissed.
He was surprisingly tender for such a large man. Julia rose to the tips of her toes and took his cheeks in her hands. They lost themselves in the moment, their hearts racing as passion took over and they let their actions do the talking.
Ula and Triton exchanged a glance, eyebrows raised.
Ula’s smile split her face from ear to ear. “When I’m right, I’m right.” She chuckled. “Sexual tension from the moment they met.”
Rhone, who had been staring into the street through the binoculars, turned and saw what they were seeing. He did a double-take, then grinned. “I was not expecting that.”
“We were,” Triton replied. “We were.”
* * *
When Julia and Roman finally stepped apart from each other, they held each other’s gaze, uncertain what to say next. They smiled and rested their foreheads against each other’s.
“That was…” Roman started.
“Yeah,” Julia added.
Roman pulled back, and he caught the others staring at them. He flushed and cleared his throat, rising once again to his full height. He whispered to Julia, “Maybe we can talk about this later?”
Julia nodded, unable to hide the pleasure from her face. “Sure.” Her mind suddenly went back to the article she had been reading. “Oh!” She pulled her phone out and found the page again. She studied the text and approached the others. “This looks like something.”
They each read through the article, a small interest-piece which told the story of a number of sleepwalkers who had been seen through the window of an apartment on the west side of town. An old man, aged and possibly senile, had witnessed so-called “zombies” wandering through the city in the middle of the night.
For once, the journalist had added a layer of reason to the article and stated that perhaps it was all a dream. The source was unreliable, but it made for something that could make readers of that particular digest smile. Julia sensed there was more to it than that, though.
Ula tapped a finger to her ear and called out to the group nearest to the west end of town. Sturgeon picked up the call and proceeded to let them know that she’d not seen anything but would try to follow up the lead. She asked if there was a street mentioned, or any kind of address. They informed her where it was, and she promised to take her team to check it out.
Ula then tried to patch into Jennie but found no answer. She wondered if she was perhaps out of reach of signal, as she so often was, and left her a message.
They sat on the rooftop and waited. Each group had its mark and its position. Only once a target was confirmed would they all rush to take their places.
While Rhone, Julia, and Roman caught up with Triton and the others, they bided their time and waited for the signal from Sturgeon.
* * *
Sturgeon left her perch atop a high-rise block of apartments and made her way into the streets below. With her was a handful of SIS agents, a small group of specters donated by Jimmy Dean, Agent Erik, and a man who she already knew she hated and wished she’d never met who went by the name of Grimald.
She could understand the reasoning, but she wished they were never involved. Flailing for help and backup, the originators of this witch hunt had wanted to bulk their numbers and recruited a group of local gun enthusiasts. It might have seemed like a smart idea at the time, but they hadn’t known that only a day or two later shit would truly hit the fan and the forces would be called in.
You know, the federal forces. The agency the GOA rebelled against.
Grimald had been a headache since the moment they had split into their groups and watched over the city. She wished he didn’t have to follow her now, but there was safety in numbers.
Supposedly.
“I’ve got licenses, ain’t I?” Grimald declared loudly, caught in a rant that Sturgeon had stopped paying attention to. “I’ve done my training. I’ve proven I’m responsible. I should be allowed out wherever the hell I want to hunt and play with these bad boys. The hoops you have to jump through, it’s ridiculous.”
“Will you keep your voice down?” Sturgeon asked, an edge to her voice. “How are we ever going to sneak up on the target if they can hear you coming from a mile off?”
Grimald threw his hands in the air. “Well, excuse me. I thought as an American, I had the right to free speech? If some federal force is trying to silence me—”
Sturgeon whirled on Grimald and he froze, taken aback by the sudden turn. “Here’s the deal. You shut the fuck up for a few moments while we hunt for an enemy who is trying to sneak around the city, okay? If you can do that for more than a few moments, I’ll give you a cookie later. Tax-free, no strings attached. I promise.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
Sturgeon advanced on him, staring him down. “Let’s put this in terms you can understand. When you’re hunting for game, do you shout and stomp and disturb nature around you to flush out the scared and vulnerable, or do you sneak and be quiet to try to catch the best prey? You ever tried to hunt deer by hollering and whooping like that?”
Grimald composed himself and shook his head. “No, ma’am.”
“Then shut the fuck up,” Sturgeon instructed. “I’m not sure if your issue is that I’m a federal agent, or because I’m a woman, but somewhere along this journey you’re going to enter the twenty-first century and see what a real woman can do, okay?”
Grimald was quiet for a moment. Eventually, a smile appeared on his face. “I love your accent.”
Sturgeon shook her head in disbelief. She addressed the others. “Follow me, and let’s find this street. If he opens his mouth again, you have my permission to find a way to close it, got that?”
Grimald smirked and turned toward the empty space over his shoulder. As a mortal, the spectral addition to their group was lost from sight. “Who are you talking to?”
Sturgeon rolled her eyes and took the lead. Finally, she had been at a point where she believed she was ready to take charge and show the queen what she was capable of, and she got stuck with this guy.
They found the street mentioned in the article and looked out for any sign of the sleepwalkers. As she expected, there was nothing there at all. They made their way toward the apartment building where the old man lived and paused beneath its long shadow.
She scrolled to the forwarded article on her cell and studied the image. There was a shot of the old man in the window of his apartment, and it appeared as though he was level with the roof of the building opposite. She counted in her mind and took a stab at it, hoping she could find him and ask him a few additional questions.
The hallway of the tenth floor hosted half a dozen doors with nothing else on them but numbers. There were three on the side of the building where the old man had been, and she took a stab at each one. Inside the first apartment was a bitter old lady who instantly grew agitated at the sight of so many agents at her door. Clearly used to fighting off authority, she shouted out her rights then slammed the door when Sturgeon couldn’t produce a warrant.
She breathed an internal sigh of relief when the old man appeared at the door of the second apartment. They had knocked three times and were almost certain no one was in when he finally answered.
“Yes?” His eyes drank them all in.
Sturgeon explained that she had a few additional questions for him. The old man nodded and allowed her inside but demanded that the others wait in the hall. He hadn’t prepared for guests and was concerned about the state of his place.
Had he been this picky before the cops and papers had spoken to h
im?
After a long fifteen minutes of questioning him, she finally extracted the information that she needed. She managed to get him off his ass so that he could point which way down the street. Sitting in his chair and pointing at the general direction of the window was not helpful at all.
“That way,” the old man declared, pointing out of the window. “They were walking that way.”
She followed his finger, and from this high up, she could see that he was pointing toward the outer reaches of the west side of the city. In the distance, rolling hills and fields beaconed the start of Richmond’s farming district. A little way beyond that was the quarry.
“Thanks,” Sturgeon added before disappearing out of the apartment. She wasted no courtesy, wanting to get on with her quest. Even though the man called after her and offered her one of his butterscotch candies, she paid no heed.
When she arrived back in the street, she immediately headed in the direction he had told her. They walked straight for a few blocks and were on the verge of giving up when they came across a woman belly-crawling along the sidewalk.
Sturgeon swallowed her initial reaction to seeing the woman’s struggle. She was clearly paralyzed. Her legs were thin and the muscle wasted. Still, she determinedly clawed her fingers and pushed them into the cracks of each flagstone and pulled herself onward.
“Excuse me, ma’am?" Grimald stood above the lady and looked down with eyebrows raised. “Are you okay?”
The woman stared ahead of her, unaware that anyone was nearby. She grunted as she pulled herself along, oblivious to anything around her.
Grimald exchanged a glance with Sturgeon.
Sturgeon moved closer and lowered to her knees. She waited in front of the woman and ducked her head, noticing the blank voids of her eyes.
Despite the horror of the woman’s situation, a smile crept onto her face. They had the key to freeing all of the possessed. “Bingo.”
Agents, Agreements and Aggravations: In Her Paranormal Majesty’s Secret Service™ Book Three Page 46