by Tess Lake
Eventually the crowd filled the hall and the attention turned to the front. The mayor and Preston Jacobs appeared. Applause rippled across the room.
“Butter Festival!” the mayor yelled into a microphone. The crowd went nuts, cheering and jumping as though he’d just said everyone was about to get a million bucks.
“Welcome to the Grand Finale of the International Butter Carving Championships. Today, Zero Bend will take on The Slice for the chance to win this spectacular trophy and five hundred thousand dollars in prize money, supplied by Preston Jacobs and Jacobs’s Sandcastles.”
The crowd cheered again as Preston Jacobs took the microphone. He smiled at everyone, dazzling them with his brilliant white teeth. Could this be the man infected with the morchint? How could good health be a sign of something evil?
“Thank you, Mayor. It is my very great honor to welcome these top two athletes to the Harlot Bay Butter Festival Grand Finale. I give you Zero Bend and The Slice.”
The crowd went crazy as spotlights appeared. Zero Bend and The Slice made their way through the crowd and then stepped into their respective refrigerated glass boxes. Attendants closed each box and then removed the ropes that kept the crowd at bay. People started cheering and chanting the competitors’ names. I looked up in the crowd and realized The Slice had a bunch of groupies as well. These ones were all men, and they were screaming just as loud as the Ice Queens. A loud horn went off at the front of the hall. The competition had begun. I turned back to the front of the hall, but the mayor and Preston Jacobs were gone.
Damn, if Preston Jacobs was the morchint, I’d have to get close to him.
I started moving around the hall, keeping my eyes open for Preston Jacobs or Fusion Swan. I need to get close enough to them to say the word Calypso and see if they would repeat it back to me.
I shook my head. Magic is so crazy sometimes.
Molly and Luce spotted me and both gave sad little waves in between handing over donuts and pastries to the waiting crowd. I kept moving around as time ticked by. About half an hour into the carve, I still hadn’t spotted either Preston or Fusion. Aunt Cass was nowhere to be seen either.
Just as I was wondering whether I should go up into the stands to get a better view, someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned around and found myself face-to-face with Fusion Swan.
“So, it’s the writer who is going to be sued into poverty. You’re claiming that I am deliberately profiting off the deaths of my clients? Do you understand how much trouble you’re in?”
“Um . . . I didn’t actually claim that you were profiting. I merely noted a pattern.”
“We’ll see what my lawyer has to say about it. I take my reputation very seriously, Ms. Torrent. I’m not going to allow myself to be smeared by some two-bit, seaside town, country reporter. I know you don’t own much, but I’m going to take it all.”
I glanced at his hand and noticed the nail was a vivid green today. Fusion Swan turned his back on me to walk away.
“Calypso!”
He turned around to face me and frowned.
“Calypso?”
“Calypso!” I said again.
“What is wrong with you?” he said and turned away.
“Calypso!” I called out to him again as he walked away.
Okay, so he’s not the morchint and I’m going to be sued down to the ground. This is just the most awesome week of my life.
A sudden memory loomed out of nowhere. When I’d first met Fusion Swan at the police station, I’d shaken his hand and had no crazy overheating immune response. That meant . . .
Okay, I needed to find Preston Jacobs and hope it was him. If it was, then I would call Aunt Cass and the mothers and hopefully they’d be able to contain the morchint before anything bad happened.
I was looking around when I felt a push of magic from beneath my feet. It was like the tide suddenly rising up past my ankles and knees, splashing at my thighs. It was cold, freezing, almost, and gone in an instant.
I looked over at my aunts and cousins. They had all stopped in place, heedless to the people still trying to pay them to buy their baked goods. They’d felt it too. There was something beneath the town hall.
I started pushing my way through the packed crowd, heading for the stairs at the back. Like many of the buildings in Harlot Bay, the town hall had been built on top of an earlier building, so there were at least one or two levels underground. In most cases, they’d modernized them and made them into air-conditioning rooms or maintenance, or sometimes even underground parking.
I finally reached the back stairs and turned to see where my family was. They were stuck in the crowd over near their table, forcing their way through to me. There came another flood of cold magic, and I knew I couldn’t wait. I rushed down the stairs and into the basement. The push of cold magic came again. It was still beneath me.
At the bottom of the stairs was an old metal door that was seriously rusted. It was bolted shut and had a warning sign on it. I quickly whispered an opening spell and the lock opened under my hand.
I opened the door and found a set of very rickety old steps facing me. They were covered in dirt, but there were clear footsteps. Someone had come down here recently.
I rushed down as quickly as I could, hoping I wouldn’t fall to my death, and reached the second subfloor. There was old lighting down here—perhaps installed in the 1960s—and it lit the room in stark whites. I followed the footsteps on the ground, keeping my ears open and looking for anything around me that was out of place. I turned a corner and there she was—Kachina, Zero Bend’s girlfriend, tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth. Beside her was a small wooden table, and sitting on top of it was an ice-carving hammer. From where I stood I could see it was one of Zero Bend’s. It had his name carved in the handle.
“Quite a story?” Preston Jacobs said as he stepped out of the shadows.
Last time I’d been close to him, he’d looked young in that I’ve-had-a-lot-of-plastic-surgery kinda way. Skin tight like a drum. Fake tan. Glowing white teeth. He wasn’t looking so good now. His lips were pale, cracked and dried, and there was a network of deep lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes.
“Excuse me, I’m feeling a little dehydrated,” he said. He placed his hand on the back of Kachina’s neck and breathed in. His pale lips flushed red. When he removed his hand, there was a smear of blood on her neck.
Supernatural evil monster stuff. Great. Why can’t they ever be nice? Help old ladies and mow their lawns? It’s always drinking blood and doing evil.
“You framed Zero Bend for murder.”
Jacobs shrugged, an oddly graceful movement.
“Well, I sort of did. It’s part of the deal.”
“Calypso,”
“Calypso,” he replied.
“Calypso, Calypso, Calypso.”
“Calypso, Calypso, Calypso—stop that!”
“You didn’t have to make that deal, Preston. You could have become rich on your own. The morchint is lying to you.”
“It has a name? Wow. I just call it my helpful little friend.”
We had only been talking a short time, but already the youth and vitality he’d sucked out of Kachina was fading. His lips were turning pale again and his skin was drying out before my very eyes. He put his hand on the back of Kachina’s neck and took in another deep breath, his skin flushing pink as he sucked the blood out of her. She was already pale and white and barely breathing.
I glanced behind me, hoping I would see six very angry witches coming down to help me, but I was alone. They must still be stuck up in the crowd.
Delay, delay, delay . . .
“Morchint, can you hear me?”
Preston blinked slowly and shook his head.
“What do you want?” he slurred in a much deeper voice.
Oh crap. I hadn’t planned for this. I was doing anything I could to delay whatever it was he was going to do until my family got there.
“Wh
y do you try to frame people for murder?” I asked, desperately searching for anything that could possibly keep it talking.
But this wasn’t a movie, and it was no bad guy who was going to start giving me a monologue about all the evil he had done. Preston Jacobs sniffed in my direction.
“You’re one of those filth witches. I remember your stink.”
With that he lunged forward, moving with unnatural speed, and grabbed my wrist. The pain was sharp and immediate, like a cold burn. Just as quickly he let go, pulling back and doubling over. He started coughing, making a deep choking noise like he was about to vomit.
My wrist was bloody where he’d grabbed me. Shimmering on the wet blood was a golden honeycomb color—the magical balm.
He stood up and spat black gunk on the floor. Then, before my very eyes, Preston Jacobs aged and dried out. Deep crevices appeared in the skin, and suddenly he looked like he was eighty. A moment later, he was one hundred, a desiccated wraith, tight skin over bones.
He started coughing and then hunched over as though he had some great pain in his stomach. He fell to the floor, huddled into a ball and then . . .
Then he split open.
His clothes ripped first, and then he broke open. There was no blood and guts, just a glimmering white marble of energy that floated up. It sucked in the last remnants of the physical form of Preston Jacobs, leaving nothing behind.
The egg.
I heard clattering behind me, the slam of the door, my mother yelling, and my aunts shouting spells. I felt the push of magic, Aunt Cass’s voice sounding deeper than I’d ever heard it. The magic welled up around me, spells racing over, but it was all too late. This egg would explode and kill everyone above us. I knew instantly it would seed hundreds of new morchint eggs for miles around. It would only take in one great breath before it detonated.
The world narrowed, and my mother’s frantic shouting faded away as I leapt forward with my hands out and grabbed the egg. It breathed in, taking in a gulp of the magic around us, and I felt its power. The tiny egg that I’d stopped in the park yesterday had been nothing compared to this. This was an entity that had been growing for decades, killing and sucking in life force. Now it was feeding on the magic in Harlot Bay itself.
But it was no match for a Slip witch.
I called on the magic within me and the magic around me, and it answered with a roar of power.
The egg tried to explode, but it couldn’t. It was an intense heat, a fireball, a storm of pain, but it was at a distance. It couldn’t burn me, couldn’t hurt me. I had to keep concentrating on it. All I had to do was hold it in place and gently allow the energy to radiate away. I directed a tiny bit of it back toward Kachina, ensuring she would live. The rest I let radiate away into the air.
The power spiked higher, but I was stronger than it. I grinned to myself as the ball of pure burning fire between my hands started to falter and dwindle.
Just a moment more, just a moment more.
The egg began to collapse in on itself as I slowly released its energy so it couldn’t explode. I pushed in on it, crushing it between my hands and grinning with joy at the sheer power flowing through me. Almost there.
The egg was down to a marble, the living entity inside it furiously scrabbling, trying to get away, but there was no escape.
It was snuffed out of existence and I turned around to face my family.
“I did it!”
Oh crap.
I was in the basement standing next to Grandma and . . . I was wearing an old wedding dress over the top of my clothes. I also had a party hat on top of my head.
“Did what, exactly?”
Aunt Cass emerged from the dark.
“I . . . held the energy ball. Stopped it from exploding. I saved all those people.”
“We had it contained. You’ve been frozen like April for six weeks after you siphoned all that energy off.”
Six weeks?
“Is that what happened to her? She was fighting a morchint?”
Cass whacked me in the shin with a cane.
“No! Next time listen to what I tell you. Now go upstairs and tell everyone you’re back.”
“Ow!”
I rubbed my shin. I’d really been down there six weeks? I looked over at the wall and saw that it was covered in photos. Me wearing a wedding dress, me wearing a hula hoop, me wearing a variety of fancy masks and different types of makeup. Obviously my cousins had had a lot of fun while I’d been frozen.
I went up the stairs with Aunt Cass climbing up behind me. When I emerged in the kitchen, my mom and two aunts were there focused on their cooking. They must have thought I was Aunt Cass, because they didn’t even look around.
“Hi, everyone,” I said.
Mom was cutting tomatoes. She dropped the knife, which bounced off the chopping board and fell onto the floor, narrowly missing Adams, who was waiting for any fortunate scraps to fall his way.
“Harlow!” she cried and pulled me into a hug. She crushed me against her, heedless of the tomato juice on her hands, staining what was probably her wedding dress.
“Hi, Mom,” I managed to whisper from within her tight grasp.
From the dining room I heard my cousins call out my name and then their footsteps running toward the kitchen.
Chapter 25
Epilogue
“So the best you could come up with was that I was in France for six weeks?”
“What were we supposed to do? You didn’t tell us that you had arranged a date with him. The poor boy just showed up at the house expecting you’d be here, and what could we say? Yes, she’s here but she’s frozen downstairs for some unknown length of time? I had to think on my feet,” Molly said, shrugging.
“Just to get this straight: immediately after the Butter Festival, I hop on a plane and go to France for six weeks and now I’m back.”
“Hey, I could have sent you to Botswana. What do you know about Botswana?”
“Botswana probably would be better than France. The could be people here in town that I’m going to lie to who have actually been to France or know a lot about it. You know anyone who has been to Botswana?”
“Michael Erikson. His girlfriend,” Luce said, staying to count them off.
“That was when we were in high school and they were exchange students. It doesn’t count. Besides, they don’t even live in Harlot Bay anymore.”
We were back at our end of the mansion after a very emotional dinner that was alternately loving and then contained a lot of instructions on things that I was never to do again. Such as: never to try to contain a ball of energy ever again. I was never allowed to run off into some spooky underground death trap ever again.
It was Aunt Cass who finally told my mother and aunts to give me a break. The morchint had been destroyed, and that was the end of it.
They filled me in on what had happened while I was frozen. My mother and aunts had to cast a concealment spell on me and then shoved me over to one side of the underground basement. They called the police and ambulance to save Kachina. The EMTs had taken her out through the hall. Zero Bend had already finished carving (he won). He’d come rushing out of his glass container to his girlfriend’s side.
My mother told Sheriff Hardy it was Preston Jacobs who had held Kachina underground, and when she finally woke up she confirmed it. He’d grabbed her very late the previous night and somehow drugged her so she couldn’t wake up properly. Zero had been spending the night elsewhere meditating, so he didn’t know she was gone. At the kidnapping news, a statewide manhunt was launched for Preston Jacobs, but of course he would never be found. The morchint had consumed him entirely.
Preston Jacobs was now the number one suspect in the death of Holt Everand. Cases in the past where people died in connection to any carving competition that Preston had sponsored were now being reviewed. There are at least two people in prison who had been framed, and hopefully they would find the evidence to clear them.
In the hospital wi
th Kachina, Zero Bend had started to freak out, but this time they sedated him and took a blood sample. Someone eventually tested the food that he had been carrying in his bag. It had been laced with a powerful hallucinogen, and shortly after that, Fusion Swan was arrested. In the burned wreckage of Zero Bend’s vacation rental, they’d found that the milk in the refrigerator had been laced with the same hallucinogen. The red-haired man was in fact a drug dealer, and Fusion Swan had been buying from him while he was in town. This news made me suddenly sad, because that meant that Jack had been buying from a drug dealer.
Molly cheered me up a little, though.
“Oh, you should hear this crazy news. Jack is actually a private investigator! You know he told us he used to work for the police? He sort of still does. He’d been tracking Preston Jacobs all across the country and around the world. A mother of a competitor who died in a carving competition hired Jack because she suspected Preston Jacobs. Isn’t that crazy?”
More pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together. So Jack wasn’t buying drugs from red-haired weasel man. He was using him as a source, tracking down what was happening with Fusion Swan and Preston Jacobs. Then he’d turned up at my house for our date, and I’d stood him up because I was frozen in the basement.
Molly told me sadly that as far as they knew, Jack had left town.
That news hurt more than it should have.
Harmonious Twang had recovered well from her ordeal and left town a number of weeks ago. Zero Bend had fired Fusion Swan and then he and his girlfriend had gone into rehab.
That was everything I’d heard before I was hit with an incredible tiredness. When you’re frozen, you don’t exactly sleep and it catches up with you.
Two days later, I was sitting at the dining table building myself up to going to work and looking through the dress-up photos my cousins had taken. Me as a bride, me wearing a snorkel. In all the photos was Adams, resting on my shoulder, rubbing his face against me, sleeping at my feet. He hadn’t left my side the entire time.