“Agreed,” I said.
She put her fist out and I bumped it, apparently forgiven for potentially meeting her new fantasy crush, which I hadn’t.
“As I said, we clearly can’t stay. It’s too dangerous,” Eric continued.
“There’s no clearly about it,” I said. “I mean yes, for our safety we should leave. But something’s going on in this town, and it’s just the kind of thing we’re trained to handle. How can we just leave, knowing some ghost is out there killing people? If it hadn’t been me tonight, and I hadn’t been a vampire, someone else would have died already.”
I met everyone’s eyes, willing them to see things my way. I’d died in terror—in a car crash rather than a murder, but still—and I didn’t want anyone else going through that if it was in my power to prevent it. Sure, I’d risen from the dead, but most people wouldn’t get that lucky.
“If any town is equipped to handle a supernatural threat, it would be Salem, don’t you think?” Eric asked. “I saw four or five witchcraft stores just on our way through town. Besides, I swore after what happened to Nelson that I’d keep him safe. I can’t do that here.”
Marcy looked Nelson up and up and up, then back down to Eric. “You seriously think some supernatural stranger is going to choose him to mess with? Unless the ghost or whatever is, like, seven feet tall, he’ll never even be able to reach around that bull neck. Plus, hello, vamp. I’d say he’s the safest of us all.”
“And what if that TV guy tries to get any of you on film?” Eric asked, desperate. “You’ll be found out when none of you show up, and Brent and I will be discovered when we do. We are wanted by the Feds, remember.”
“As if we could forget,” I answered. “We just have to be careful, and what we can’t prevent, we fix.” He opened his mouth to continue the protest, but I headed him off. “All in favor of staying and putting the ghost to rest?”
Marcy’s hand went up right away, and she nudged Brent’s along as well. Bobby’s was slower to rise. If I knew him, he was playing out every possible scenario in his mind, all the way to its conclusion. I could imagine that took time.
Nelson looked apologetically at his uncle before raising his hand as well.
Five to one.
The motion carried.
“Fine,” Eric said, with really bad grace. “Just fine. Throw yourselves into danger again. What do I care?”
Nelson shot his uncle a look that was both fond and exasperated. “So where do we start?” he asked the rest of us.
“The Morbid Gift Shop,” Brent said, surprising us all. “I felt something there last night. I don’t know if it’s related to everything else going on, but I think we should check it out.”
“And after that,” Bobby added, “the spot where Gina got attacked near the Old Jail.”
“The nights are getting longer, but they’re still not that long,” Eric grumbled.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be back before sun-up,” Bobby promised.
Brent went to gather his coat and hat. “You’ll need me to read the place. I’ll need Bobby to tumble the locks and get us in.”
“And me to … mist inside or something if the locks stick,” I insisted, not about to be left behind. After seventeen human years of making sure that I was the center of attention, I’d found that my super-vamp power was being able to go invisible and unnoticed if I chose. Yup, fate had a way of laughing in your face.
“And you’ll need me to”—Marcy floundered—“play look-out.”
Even though she’d been vamped by the same vixen vampiress as Bobby and me, Marcy didn’t seem to have any kind of special power beyond the super-speed, strength, and senses that came with the territory. Yet. Of course, she’d never needed one to get her way before.
“I’ll drive,” Eric said.
“No!” Marcy and I chorused.
“Uh, if something goes wrong, we’ll need you and Nelson to bail or break us out,” I improvised. “Best you stay behind.”
“Sure, and we’ll ride to the rescue in what?” Eric asked. “You’ll have the van.”
“You’d find a way,” Bobby said. “We have faith.”
“Great. That and a crucifix could get you killed.”
“Four less for you to worry about, then.”
Strangely, Eric didn’t look comforted.
5
Brent insisted on driving, since he was the only one who’d actually show up to any traffic cameras we might pass. I’d never even thought about that in the past, but then, cover-up had been the Feds’ problem. Now that we were on our own, it was all on us. Not that we had to worry about anyone reviewing those traffic tapes, at least not where the van was concerned. Brent obeyed the speed limit precisely—stopping on red, going on green, and even slowing down for yellow rather than speeding up to make it through an intersection.
“Boy Scout,” I accused.
“All the way to Eagle,” Brent answered, sounding proud of it.
It was so late the parking garage was closed, but with the commercial part of town shut down for the night, we were easily able to find parking not far from the mall.
We walked the streets in silence. A brisk wind had blown up and Brent huddled in his coat, pulling his watch cap a little lower to cover his ears, but the rest of us carried the chill of the grave with us, I guess, thus the chill outside wasn’t any big thing. I could hear Brent’s teeth chattering as we reached the outer mall doors.
“Could you stop that?” Bobby asked mildly, as he closed his eyes to concentrate his mental mojo on the locks and alarm system.
Brent clenched his teeth together to keep them from chattering and wrapped his arms around himself. Marcy added hers and huddled against him for warmth, but since she didn’t generate any of her own, I doubted she was good for more than a windbreak.
The door popped open in Bobby’s hand.
“Quickly,” he said, holding it aside for us. “I gave the alarm system a burst, which should blank it temporarily. If we’re lucky, it’ll look like a natural power surge.”
We hurried through, and Bobby yanked the door shut behind us, making sure it was firmly locked again so that we’d be the only people who didn’t belong skulking around the place.
“Okay, guys, just in case the security company sends someone to check things out, we want to get in and get out. No dawdling,” Brent commanded, like he was still one of our handlers back at spook central.
“Sir, yes, sir,” I said, giving him a mock salute.
Marcy, maybe to prove she was her own person, paused in front of a window display that held an incredible cobalt-blue kimono-style dress with golden dragonflies taking flight across it and a matching gold sash. She came with us when I tugged her away, but reluctantly, like she was already planning how to spend her tips—and not on gas and food. Not that I blamed her.
Bobby tumbled the locks of the Morbid Gift Shop with his mental mojo, and we all ducked inside. There was plenty to gawk at here too, of course, especially if you were in touch with your inner goth, but I think we all felt Brent’s sudden tension in some way. It infected us with an unnatural seriousness.
Gravely, Brent removed his gloves and tucked them into his jacket pocket. He removed his cap, too, as if it might stop him from getting some kind of signal. Or maybe it was just about not overheating, now that we were out of the wind and into a store that still retained its heat even if it had been shut off for the night.
“Quiet,” Brent warned us, though no one had spoken.
I looked at Marcy, who made a funny face behind Brent’s back. I tried not to laugh, which would definitely break
the quiet. Instead, I watched, curious. I’d never really seen Brent work before. Not up close and personal. Spying from a
distance, before I was sure we were on the same side, hadn’t given me a really good feel for what he could do.
Brent approached the coffin on the cart that made up the front window display. The look on his face was something between determined and … scared? Nervou
s, anyway. I wondered what he thought he’d find.
Marcy, Bobby, and I hung back, Marcy apparently taking seriously her offer to play look-out, because she kept glancing back and forth between the window and Brent, keeping an eye on both.
I watched as Brent closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths as if psyching himself up for what he was about to do, and reached out to touch the coffin. Even with his eyes shut, I could see them roll up into the back of his head. His whole body tensed and began to shake. Then his mouth fell open with a low moan. It was eerie. Goose bumps started on my arms and flowed right on up to the back of my neck, standing my hairs on end. Brent’s shakes started to give way to more violent twitching, almost convulsions.
Marcy let out a gasp and moved toward him, but Bobby got there first. He reached for the hand connecting Brent to the coffin, and as soon as he made contact with it, images burst into my head—like Bobby’s mind-reading was being overloaded and broadcasting on all frequencies.
Inside the coffin, someone thrashed … or once had. I knew that terror. I’d awakened in a coffin myself and had to claw my way out, but this guy—and I knew it was a guy from the dark, wiry hair on the back of the hands beating at the sides of his prison—didn’t have super-vamp strength. He was purely human and running out of air, his lungs working hard to inflate in the absence of oxygen. He was dying, using the last of the stale air in a desperate attempt to batter his way out of the grave. His hand slipped and slid off the sides of his cheap coffin as the rough wood tore them to shreds and coated the walls with his blood. I felt the grave close in, his vision flicker and fade, panic give way to hopelessness, defeat. The movement slowed nearly to nothing. Brent started to sag.
Bobby broke Brent’s hand away from the coffin, and we all stood gasping in the middle of the Morbid Gift Shop as if we needed the air, as if breathing for the man who’d been buried alive.
“That is no prop coffin,” Bobby said, proving his mastery of the obvious.
“No,” Brent agreed.
“But where’s the body?”
Because it wasn’t still in there. The wood had retained the marks, the terror, the blood, sweat, and tears, but not the body.
Brent looked around. His gaze caught on the skeleton in the cage with one hand outstretched, the one I’d noted last night.
It was too horrible to contemplate, a whole different and terrible kind of immortality than the one we vamps lived through. Key word: lived.
“No,” Marcy gasped, echoing my thoughts.
Brent stepped toward the cage, arm outstretched, and Bobby slapped it away. “Dude, you can’t. If just the coffin had that effect on you, the body could drag you right into the grave. Have you ever touched a dead guy before?”
Brent turned haunted eyes on Bobby. “I need to know,” he said.
“Is it worth your life?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Brent answered, but his words were slurring with exhaustion. Clearly, the coffin had taken a lot out of him.
“Don’t do it,” Marcy said. It was more like an order than a request. We all knew it. She wrapped her arms around Brent to be sure he kept himself to himself … or maybe to her. But I saw her pause first, a millisecond hesitation, as if touching him might offer up some residual terror. The pause was probably too brief for a human to notice, but I saw and understood.
Brent was rigid in her arms, as if touch was something he could barely tolerate at that moment. But then, maybe he had seen Marcy’s reaction and knew the hug was costing her as well. I wondered … could he read her? She was a living thing … mostly … depending on your definition. Did that bring them closer, or …
Not my business.
The look Brent gave Marcy was so full of pain and love, it was like they were the same emotion.
“I have to,” he said, holding the intimate eye contact as if willing her to understand.
She stepped back, but not far, ready to pull him away herself this time, with no Bobby in the way to channel the horror.
Brent reached out just two fingers and touched the skeleton’s hand. His body instantly seized up and he dropped like a stone, falling away from the contact. His head hit the floor hard enough to rattle brains.
Another rattle sounded right at that moment. I was so focused on Brent—we all were—that it took me a second to realize that it was coming from outside the store. Marcy dashed to the window, looked out, and dropped down into a squat so she was below window level, behind the coffin cart and hidden from a casual glance.
“Get down,” she hissed at Bobby and me.
We each grabbed one of Brent’s arms and dragged him out of the line of sight, behind a bookshelf that held old herbals and hex books, just as a piercing light flashed through the window. Only our vamp reflexes had gotten us out of the way in time to avoid being seen.
Brent started to moan, and Bobby put a hand over his mouth as the bright flashlight panned back and forth over the interior of the store. The beam cut to the side, and we all heard the door rattle as the security guard or police officer or whoever it was behind that blinding light tried the door to make sure it was still locked up tight. Nobody moved. Nobody except Brent breathed. Finally, the guard moved on, rattling other doors and flashing his big light stick.
Bobby removed his hand and muttered. “Sorry.”
“No problem,” Brent answered softly, sounding all but done in.
Marcy duck-walked over to us, carrying Brent’s jacket and hat. “You okay?” she whispered. “What did you see?”
“At least you asked the important question first,” he answered with a weak grin.
She shrugged. “Well, I’m not quite finished with you yet.”
“I’m touched.”
“Maybe later,” she agreed.
Brent’s smile gained a little strength at that and as they looked at each other, it was like the rest of us, the coffin, the body, and the security guard all ceased to exist.
Bobby cleared his throat.
“Right,” Brent said. It took him time to refocus, though. This second vision had pretty much done him in. “That’s definitely the body. And he didn’t die easily.”
“So how did he end up buried alive? And how did he get here? I mean, he’s got to be historical, right? If he’d been embalmed, he’d have been in no condition to scratch up that coffin,” Bobby said.
“More likely, too poor for embalming,” I said. “Did you check out the pine box he was buried in?”
Everybody stared at me. “What? I know quality. That’s not it.” I flung a hand toward the coffin.
Bobby grinned. “That’s my girl. What about it, Brent?”
“I don’t know. Definitely old, but how old? There’ve got to be some records around here somewhere about where this came from. You know, provenance—though I can’t imagine they know what they have here.”
Bobby had been studying the coffin and cart and said suddenly, “Uh, guys, I think they do know, at least part of it. Check out the plaque beneath the coffin.”
It was facing the mall window, which was how we’d all missed it originally. Bobby read it aloud for us. “Coffin, circa late 1800s, with evidence that the inhabitant was buried alive. It was a fear so prevalent at the time that the safety coffin was invented, complete with a bell and pulley system to let graveyard attendants know if the recently ‘deceased’ required rescue. Such rescues are the origin of the expression ‘saved by the bell.’ ”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Look at that price tag,” Marcy added.
“Ten thousand dollars—you’ve got to be kidding! Who’d want this gross old thing?” I asked.
“A collector,” Brent answered. “Especially if it’s authentic.”
“Which we know it is,” Bobby said. “But how did they get it? Is it even legal to buy and sell stuff like this?”
“All good questions. And here’s another one,” Brent said. “Is there any connection with the Salem Strangler? If this guy was bu
ried alive, he’d have suffocated to death. If there was a woman involved—”
“There’s always a woman involved,” Bobby interrupted. I swatted him.
“—it could explain why he’s throttling them, cutting off their air,” Brent continued. “But then, the same goes for Sheriff Corwin and his punishments—hanging, pressing—or any number of ghosts who were killed that way and are hanging around righteously upset about it.”
“We’ve got to get at those purchase records,” Bobby said.
A light strobed through the window, and we all dropped to the ground again.
Bobby crawled over behind the counter and started tumbling locks and opening drawers, as quietly as possible. He quickly reclosed the bottom cabinets.
“Inventory,” he announced, then sorted through various receipts. But they were old and unorganized. No convenient data storage or computer in sight, though there was a hand-held scanner locked away in one of the drawers.
“Looks like they’re changing over to a paperless office,” Bobby said with a sigh. “Good for the environment, bad for us. Probably Chip or whoever keeps everything on a laptop and takes it with him when he leaves.”
“I bet they use off-site backup for their records, then. I would,” Brent offered.
“But those things are like Fort Knox. We’ll never get in.”
“Then we have to get that laptop. Tomorrow, when everyone’s in the theater watching the Gothic Magic Show. Eric’s a genius hacker; he ought to be able to find a back door into the system. Gina, you think you can get Ulric to help with distraction so that no one notices when Eric goes for the computer?”
Everybody looked at me. Again.
“Piece of cake.”
By the time we were certain the security guard had gone, dawn was too close for comfort. The Old Jail would have to wait until tomorrow night. We raced the sun back to Danvers, and made it with just moments to spare.
6
The Gothic Magic Show didn’t start until midnight, after the Haunts in History tours ended, so the first order of business the next night was keeping our cover. I was in the midst of getting costumed for my first tour when Ulric pulled aside the dressing room curtain and poked his head in.
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