“And by the way, you can stop looking out for me too. I can more than look after myself now, if you haven’t noticed—being that I’m the most powerful witch in the world!” I tremble with anger, letting it all out.
“Of course, you are.” Sotherby lowers his head, looking stunned. “My mistake.” He drifts toward the window.
Oh, what have I done? “No, Sotherby, wait.” I start after him. “I’m sorry, it’s not like that. It’s just—”
“I know what it is.” He whirls around, stopping me with a fading hand. “And you’re right. It is none of my concern. I am a ghost, and these men are flesh and blood, like yourself. I have no right to have any comment.”
He turns and disappears through the window, and my heart nearly pulls out of my chest.
Oh Sotherby, I really didn’t mean that.
Chapter 29
“I thought I heard your voice in here.”
I startle and whip around as Jamie walks into Jeremy’s hospital room.
“I found the gloves,” he tells me, marching toward me across the floor.
“What? Where?” I take them from him and stare down at them through the evidence bag.
“In the small hallway we hadn’t found that leads beneath the stage.”
“What?”
“Remember how we couldn’t figure out where the knife-thrower went? Well, now I think I know. There’s another small passageway leading from the back of the main stage, directly down to the basement floor. Just like the one we found earlier, at the front of the stage, where you stumbled on the wig.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I never saw it before, because again it was painted into the backdrop, in the darkest corner.”
“Then how did you?”
“I fell through it, out there looking around again, padding my hands along the walls. The door only opens one way.”
“Then how did you get out?”
“The same way she did. Through the back gates. Then ran around to the front.”
I stare.
“I actually think she’d re-entered the tent from the front, not the stage as we suspected. She was planning to hide herself among the audience. But then you spotted her, and she took off running.”
“You actually think she’d be that brazen?”
“A lot of killers want to see their plans through to fruition,” he says. “I think she’d set up your uncle and wanted to see her trick come full circle by being there to see him arrested for it.”
“Oh, my gods.” I sway back on my heels, almost dropping the gloves.
“There’s more,” Jamie tells me. “I don’t think she was in any way connected to the magical circus group.”
“What do mean?”
“I think she was a total imposter. That’s why the trick didn’t go off as planned. She didn’t know what they were doing.”
I scowl. “You mean, you think, like I thought”—I pause to touch my chest—“that whoever it was who did this was really trying to murder my uncle?”
“I do. Because, I’ve been thinking, why would a random knife-thrower of a traveling magical circus show, or his last-minute replacement for that matter, want your uncle dead? Unless of course, that last-minute replacement—”
“Was intentionally set.” I shiver, looking up at him. “You don’t suppose…”
“I think there’s more to be found out there. You coming?” He looks at me.
“Of course, I am.” I snag my sweater off the chair and follow him from the room…then double back. “I’ll just be a moment,” I call to him, running sideways back into the room. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”
I scramble over to the window and throw my chin. “Sotherby,” I shout to the sky. “If you can hear me, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I’m on my way to the crime scene now. Will you come?”
“The way I figure it, for the trick to have gone as badly as it did, the knife-thrower on stage had to have no understanding of how the trick was really supposed to end up,” Jamie recaps. “And for that to happen, she must have had another plan.”
“Of course, she did. To commit murder and run away.” I look up at him, the two of us combing through the backstage secret passage he found earlier, down the narrow steps to the basement again.
“She must have gone down these steps and into the main room, as the other two were lowering on the platform. Then,” he stalks forward in the only light, the bare bulk hanging down from the middle of the ceiling. “Took off her robe and left it here. Then laid in wait over here to kill, who she thought would be your uncle, and then flee out these back bay doors and out back gates—”
I bite my lip, looking off at nothing over his head, thinking. “The delivery entrance. But once you’re out, you can’t get back in.” I open the door. “See, it only opens one way. There’s no way to open it from the outside. You see, no handles.” It’s a large, heavy, flat steel smooth door that would be impossible to open without any. “So once she was out, that was it. No getting back in.”
I look around, noting skid marks left on the floor, from what looks like a large trunk being dragged toward the doors. “Look,” I say, shining a light from my phone on the marks. “They go all the way from over there to the door.” I shine my phone light on a twisty path leading to the other side of the narrow hallway. I press open the doors to the great beyond and more drag marks appears, leading off into the forest. “You don’t suppose?”
“She killed the knife-thrower,” Jamie finishes my thought. Kneeling down beside what appear to be a second the pair of muddy footprints leading up to the door. Fresh ones.
“Someone’s been back here recently,” I say, looking up.
“Looking for a body to bury perhaps?” Jamie voice shakes.
“Come on,” I say, about to sprint out into the darkness, to check the forest.
“Wait. Let’s look here first.” Jamie points to the skid marks leading back around the corner.
I turn and set off in that direction down the dark basement corridor. Jamie follows me, gagging and pulling his shirt up over his face.
The smell becomes stronger, the closer we get. “This further proves my uncle couldn’t have done the killing, because look.” I shine my phone light on the second small platform. “No blood. He’d be dripping in it if he killed him, wouldn’t he? He would have had blood on his shoes. There’d be prints everywhere”
“But there’s not.” Jamie nods. “In fact, there’s no prints anywhere?” He scowls.
I swing my light around and follow where the stench is coming from, the far end of the basement, Jamie galloping behind me. I round the corner, beneath the secret passageway stairs, and stop dead. There, tuck in, well behind them, I spot the edge of a trunk. I shine my phone light on the floor around it and see a trickled pool of dried blood. I bend, crawl under and throw open the trunk, and the stench is unbearable.
“Jamie,” I say, covering my nose with my shirt. “I think we may just have found the real knife-thrower.”
Chapter 30
“So, she killed the knife-thrower before the show, threw him in the trunk, then returned topside to perform the trick,” Jamie says, pacing the floor in the basement. “Then she returned to the basement and laid in wait to kill the assistant.”
“My uncle, you mean,” I say, turning around.
Jamie stops and stares back at me.
“She would have thought he was the one strapped to the Spinning Wheel of Death at the time, remember? Without knowledge of the whole trick, as you presumed, she wouldn’t have known about the knife-thrower switch, clearly. She just lunged out and murdered the person on the wheel, thinking it was my uncle, who had already gone back up to stage level. He said himself it all happened so fast. By the time the killer got through the passageway, down the stairs, Harold would be gone, and the assistant would be killed.”
“And it would look to the crowd like my uncle did it, because, of course, he’d be wearing the cape, back up on stage,
in the real knife-thrower’s position.”
I can’t tell Jamie this, but I know something more. The knife-thrower had to be after my uncle, because the killer used wooden stakes instead of knives. Wooden stakes are the only way I know to kill a vampire and certainly not necessary to kill an assistant.
“The poor girl didn’t stand a chance, being strapped to the wheel.” I bite my lip, looking longingly over there.
“Just like the poor knife-thrower.” Jamie glances back at his body stuffed in the trunk. “I’m sorry you had to see all this.” He glides toward me and takes my hand.
“Oh, no. It’s all part of it, isn’t it? Investigation work.” My voice fades out. He squeezes my hand in the dimly lit of the basement, and my heart beat slows at last.
“I’m sorry, anyway.” He smiles down at me, releasing my hand. “I’ll go topside and call the coroner now. Reception’s better up there. Why don’t you go outside get some air?” He glances at the bay doors and the backyard beyond. “And then I’ll meet you there.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” I say, feeling a little shaky now, all of a sudden. Adrenaline has worn off I guess. And then I remember. “Jamie? Before you go.” I turn, catching him just as he’s about to scale the secret passageway stairs, back up to the stage. “Do you mind? Could I see those hairs you found again?” I have a thought, that I don’t particularly want to share with him just yet.
“Sure. They’re in my briefcase out in the car. I’ll go get them if it’s important.”
“Would you mind?”
He races from there to his car and back in second. “Here,” he says, passing them to me inside the evidence sample bag. I wait for him to leave to make his call before I pluck them out.
I crack open the evidence baggie and pull the hairs out.
Just as I suspected.
Independent of any wind or movement of air at all in the basement, the strands of hair stand straight up between my fingers, gently dancing.
Quickly, I stuff them back in.
Chapter 31
Jamie was right. Air is exactly what I needed. I pocket the bagged hair sample, push out the doors into the wooded area behind the tent, and breathe deeply.
Suddenly, my senses become supercharged, like I’ve just stepped on a lightning bolt, though I haven’t moved an inch. I look around me, sniff the air, and panic. An unmistakable scent singes the inside of my nostrils. I haven’t smelled that toxic smell since….
Oh gods…
The ex-Supreme Leader.
“Where are you, you little soil stain, you!” I clench my fists and scream at the sky, then conjure up my strongest magic. It roils throughout my body, charging me up, arcs of electric-like current flying from my fingertips. I zoom around, striking everything. Every branch, every tree, every boulder, every stump, setting half the forest ablaze. Hitting every place I can think he might be hiding, charring everything in my wake. “Come out or I swear…”
“No, please don’t!”
The smoke settles, and there he is, hands raised. Naked.
“Ex-Supreme Leader?” I say, shocked, and he covers up.
“Oh, yes, that. I can explain. But first, please, please, just take me with you. Don’t leave me here. I beg, you please.”
“What?”
“He’s not dead. He is not dead,” he whispers slowly through clenched teeth, his eyes bugging like he’s seen well…the undead.
“Who’s not dead?” I glare at him, then look away, because of course, he’s naked.
“Him.” He points at a Druen.
“Wow, I didn’t realize they have fangs,” I shudder, staring at the massive creature that’s just appeared before us, invisible one second, visible the next. Just like my coven council warned. He must be seven feet tall with shoulders as broad as a transport truck.
“Yes,” the ex-Supreme Leader grovels, shaking. “And venom. And claws.” The ex-Supreme Leader shakes.
“You set me up!” I shout at the ex-Supreme Leader.
“No, no, no, no, no.” He shakes his head. “You don’t understand. This is as much of a surprise to me as it is you. You see, they kidnapped me from the catacombs.”
“You didn’t escape?”
“No. They blew up the sheriff’s office, then stole me, and they would have blown you up too, only…”
“Only what?” I shriek.
“That warlock you run with saved you.”
“What do you mean?”
“He put a diversion spell over you, before passing out in your arms, which completely confused them…for like, a long time,” the ex-Supreme Leader shivers. “That’s when they raided the catacombs and stole me, thinking I would know how to get to you,” his voice cracks. “Or get this,” he sniffs, “that you would pay them ransom to get me back, and thus, be lured to them.”
I try not to laugh, in spite of the terrifying situation.
“But alas, when they found that you and I had had a falling out, and that my magic was, well, you know…non-existent, that’s when the real beetle dung hit the fan, and they forced me to track you. I tell you it took every inch of my energy—”
“Don’t you dare whine to me.” I stop him short.
“Regardless, that’s how I wound up at the fair. Dressed as the man in black—”
“I knew that was you.” Well, I had a pretty good hunch.
“I was planning to run them off your scent, truly.”
“Oh, for sure.”
“But before I could do so, this psycho blonde woman grabbed me and stuffed me in a trunk.”
“What?”
“But first she stole my clothes, then stuffed me in the trunk, and left me out in the forest for dead.”
So that was the skid marks.
“If you hadn’t come along, blasting everything with your magic, I never would have gotten out. And now…” He gulps and looks between myself and the Druen, who’s been salivating and patiently waiting for the kill. I read somewhere Druens like to do that, prolong the torture by playing with their victims, like a cat would a mouse, ‘cause they know they have the upper hand.
“Are you done?” the Druen asks, tapping his fingers on his massive arm.
“I guess I am now, aren’t I?” The ex-Supreme Leader shivers.
Slowly, I reach into the pocket of my sweater for the gift Donny and Wayne brought to me earlier this morning—a potion perfected, I can only hope—then brace myself as the Druen makes his move. He throws up a hand, and I hit him with a fireball, which he easily deflects. I go for the gut and the eyes, and he demolishes those strikes too, batting them away and reducing them to nothing.
“Not so powerful in the presence of one of us, are you—the most powerful witch in the world?” He laughs, his fangs dripping venom as he throws back his head—a dark sardonic cackle.
He lunges. My life flashes before my eyes.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” I gasp in a breath, mustering up all my courage and pop the cap off the gift in my pocket, about to wield it when—
“Okay so the coroner will be here any minute,” Jamie says, appearing from around the back corner of the tent. “Oooooh, what’s this?” He stops in his tracks and stares. “Is that guy like, flashing you?” He turns to me.
The Druen raises a hand and wields a ball of fire in his direction, which I quickly intercept, accidently igniting a nearby tree.
“What the—?” Jamie’s eyes grow wide.
“Get out of here! Go! Run! As fast as you can!” I shout at him.
“No,” he says. “I’m not going without you.” He goes for the holster on his hip, and the Druen melts the gun right out of the bottom of the leather.
“Holy crepes!” Jamie scrambles to unfasten his gun belt and drops it to the ground. “What the heck is…”
“Don’t ask,” the ex-Supreme Leader blurts as the Druen snarls, blowing back Jamie’s hair.
“Do as I say, please, or he’ll kill you, I swear. You don’t understand what you’re dealing with.” I turn to hi
m and beg. “I’ll explain later, I promise. But for now, please, please just go! Save yourself.”
“Not a chance,” Jamie says, then lunges at the Druen like a line-backer, football-player style.
“Oh, you dolt, you!” Sotherby appears, dropping down from the trees, blocking the Druen’s path to Jamie. He takes the Druen’s hit full-on, saving Jamie, and is rocketed backward into a tree.
“Sotherby!” I charge after him.
“No!” my ghostly friend shouts.
I whirl around to see the Druen’s fangs spewing venom, about to bear down on me.
“Not in this lifetime,” I hear someone say, then a crunch, but the fangs don’t reach me. Something is blocking their way.
“Quick, the potion!” Sotherby calls out from the ground.
“Oh, right!” I reach into my pocket and pull out the vial. I’ve lost some in the kerfuffle, but there’s a quarter of the vial left. I turn and sling it in the Druen monster’s direction—and something very strange happens.
A warlock is illuminated in front of me—one who’s been invisible to this point—standing between me and the Druen, holding off his fangs.
“Again!” the warlock shouts to me.
“Oh,” I gasp and fumble for the vial. There are just a few drops left.
“In the mouth, in the mouth, in the mouth!” he hollers.
I turn and fling what’s left, vial and all, down the Druen’s throat.
The action is almost instantaneous. The creature’s tongue turns black and shrivels to nothing. Then it squelches, shrivels, and with a screaming pop, the rest of it vanishes into nothingness.
I look around, shocked. “Is it gone?”
“Oh, it’s gone all right.” The warlock drops his arms and dusts off his hands
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“As sure as I am Elvis Presley has left the building,” he says.
“So, not really then.”
Abracastabra (Hex Falls Paranormal Cozy Mystery # 4) (Hex Falls Paranormal Cozy Mystery Series) Page 17