“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know, it’s weird. I’ve been stuck in this limbo state for so long, the very idea of being in a flesh and blood body again terrifies me. I mean, maybe I had my time and should just gracefully bow out.”
“Bobby, you were only nineteen when you died. You barely got started.”
“Plenty of people die younger than I was. Why should I get a second chance when they don’t? Some people die young, some people live to a ripe old age. It might not be fair, but it’s the natural way of things.”
“There’s nothing natural about getting run down by a car.”
Bobby opened his mouth but closed it without saying anything.
“Look, I know you’re nervous,” Karen said. “I’m nervous, your mother is nervous. But I believe this is going to work. In just over a week’s time, I’m going to take you out to dinner and we’re going to walk through downtown hand in hand. You want that, don’t you?”
“You know I do. It’s just….”
Bobby trailed off as if he’d lost his train of thought, but his eyes widened as he stared over Karen’s shoulder. Karen felt a chill run down her back like a stream of water. Something told her she didn’t want to turn around and see what had captured Bobby’s attention, but she did so anyway.
She was totally unprepared for who she saw standing at the entrance to the park.
“Jacoby,” she said, jumping to her feet. It was him, right down to his unkempt beard, but he seemed…insubstantial. Faded, like an old photograph. In fact, while she stared at him, he seemed to flicker.
“I don’t think I have long,” he said, his voice sounding tinny and faraway.
“What are you doing here?” Karen said, stepping closer to the thought form, who at this point seemed more thought than form. “I bound the powers of everyone in the coven. How did they conjure you?”
“They didn’t, I conjured myself.”
Karen glanced at Bobby, but he shrugged and said, “I’ve never heard of a thought form conjuring itself.”
“I don’t know how I’m doing it,” Jacoby said, his voice fading in and out like a radio with the speaker going bad. “Maybe because the coven has used me so many times I’ve developed more of a consciousness than is typical for a thought form. I just know that I have been very worried about you. I’ve tried several times over the past couple of weeks to manifest to you but I couldn’t draw enough energy. And I don’t know how long I’m going to last now, I’m burning out quickly, but there is something I need to tell you.”
“Jacoby, I know you mean well, but I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to do the spell.”
“This isn’t about the spell. Not directly. There’s something I think Bobby has a right to know.”
“Me?” Bobby said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “What could you possibly have to tell me?”
“Simply this. The reason you don’t see any other spirits is because spirits don’t typically stick around on this plane. Contrary to what those paranormal TV shows would have you believe, the world is not full of ghosts. There is an order to things, and once this life is over, you move on to the next stage.”
“And what is that?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. No one who hasn’t gone there knows, and no one who goes there comes back. I just know you should have moved on years ago, but you are stuck. Your mother has trapped you here.”
“What?” Karen and Bobby said simultaneously.
“The reason you’re stuck here as a ghost is that your mother performed a spell to keep you from moving on, to keep you bound to her. I don’t know all the specifics of the spell, but I heard the coven say that it involved her keeping a piece of you.”
“His tonsils,” Karen said in a whisper.
“You’re saying my mother has intentionally kept me from moving on,” Bobby said, but he didn’t sound incredulous.
Jacoby faded, becoming transparent, and Karen thought he was going to disappear altogether, but he seemed to regain himself. “She can’t let you go, Bobby. Even though she is preventing you from taking a journey that is rightfully yours. The only way you can be free is to destroy the piece of you she possesses.”
Then Jacoby turned his translucent eyes on Karen. “You know, you made me feel almost human. You made me feel…more deeply than I ever had before. I could almost believe I was a real person when I was with you. I’m going to miss you.”
Jacoby reached out and placed his fingers on Karen’s cheek. They weren’t solid, they weren’t flesh, but she could still feel them, a minute pressure on her skin. Phantom fingers. She reached out to touch his face, but he was gone. Suddenly and completely, not even a Cheshire-cat grin lingering after. She felt his touch on her cheek for a moment more, then it too faded.
“Did that really just happen?” she said to herself, then turned toward Bobby. He was frozen in place, his expression unreadable. “Bobby, are you—”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“Yes, I heard it. Do you believe it?”
“I don’t want to, I want to think it’s just a trick…but it makes too much sense. She couldn’t let me go, so she kept me here. She kept me here so I couldn’t move on, all these years, until she could find a way to shove me into another body. It’s exactly the kind of thing she would do.”
Karen opened her mouth but wasn’t sure what she would say. Truth was that it did seem exactly the kind of thing Penelope would do. “Even if what Jacoby said is true, it’s also understandable. She just didn’t want to lose her son.”
“She did what she always does. Lies, manipulates. She’ll get what she wants, no matter what she has to do to get it, who she has to hurt.”
“Bobby, calm down. Let’s talk about—”
“You don’t know, Karen, you don’t know the things she has done to make this happen. And I kept her secrets, which makes me complicit. Oh God, how did I ever let it get this far?”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Bobby stared at her with such intensity that it frightened her. He made several attempts to speak before finally getting the words out. “Derek…he didn’t attack you.”
“What?”
“I mean, he did…but he didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Bobby, you’re not making sense.”
“It was my mother. She did some kitchen magick on him.”
“Kitchen magick?”
“Yes, it’s when you make up a potion and mix it in with food, that you then feed to someone. In this case she baked up a batch of cookies and left them for him. Once he ate the cookies, she had him. He was hers—he’d do anything she asked.”
“That night…at the graveyard….”
“Yes, I led you there, and my mother sent Derek to attack you.”
Karen’s legs suddenly felt weak, and she stumbled to the bench and dropped down. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. “Why would she do that?”
“She wanted to put you in a situation where you would be upset and afraid so that you would tap into your power, realize a potential that you didn’t even realize you possessed. She thought it was the fastest way to get you to where she needed you to be so she could use your power.”
Karen felt lightheaded, and she wondered idly if she were about to pass out. Her emotions swirled like a cyclone. The day seemed to grow dim, as if a cloud had passed over the sun though the sky was clear and blue. She finally looked at Bobby. “You were in on this. I trusted you, and you helped set me up.”
“She promised you wouldn’t get hurt, but you’re right. I lied to you. I let my mother talk me into a truly horrible thing. I wouldn’t blame you if you never forgave me. You shouldn’t. But this has to end. My mother has to be stopped.”
Before Karen could say anything else, Bobby was gone. At first Karen didn’t move, too stunned to process what she’d just learned. Her attack had been orchestrated by Penelope herself, with Bobby as her accomplice. The past several months of h
er life were nothing but a series of deceptions and masquerades.
As the shock wore off, anger took its place, filling Karen. She assumed Bobby had gone to confront his mother, and Karen was going to do the same. Leaving the park, she started down the trail toward campus at a brisk walk that soon turned into a sprint.
* * *
It took Karen almost forty-five minutes to drive to Penelope’s house. If her life were a movie, she would have sped at breakneck speeds, weaving in and out of traffic, tearing through red lights, going the wrong way down one-way streets, angling onto sidewalks to avoid stalled traffic, and sending pedestrians leaping out of the way. But life wasn’t like a movie, and Karen had to sit through red lights, wait patiently through stalled traffic. She tried calling Penelope a couple of times but got no answer.
The librarian’s car was in the driveway when Karen pulled up in front of the house. Now that she was here, she was having second thoughts. She was still angry, that was for damn sure, but she dreaded a confrontation. Her feelings were...complicated. She knew that Penelope was not her friend, and she did not want to help her in any way....
But that meant not helping Bobby, not being able to finally kiss him and feel his arms around her.
Then again, with what Bobby had learned from Jacoby, he probably was no longer concerned with being made flesh again. More than likely, he would want Karen to keep her promise and help his spirit move on. And now she knew how to do it.
But did she want to? He had betrayed her, had led her into a trap, had kept things from her...yet when she thought of how much pain he’d suffered at the park, she felt pain of her own.
Her feelings were complicated.
But first things first: she had to talk with Penelope. Getting out of the car, she hurried down the walk and began pushing the doorbell. She heard a chime inside but no footsteps approaching. Karen pounded on the door for good measure, but still no one answered. Penelope could have been around back in the circle, but in that case she would have heard Karen’s car pulling up.
Grasping the doorknob, she turned it…and the door swung open. Karen hesitated, feeling that she might be walking into another trap. But if she was, she’d be ready. She was not powerless, not by a long shot, and no one knew that better than Penelope.
The living room was lit only by a fire burning low in the fireplace. Stepping inside, Karen called the librarian’s name. When there was still no answer, she started toward the hall.
Bobby suddenly materialized in front of her. She was so startled that at first his words made no sense to her. By the time he said—“Behind you!”—sank in, it was too late.
She started to turn toward the door, which was now swinging shut, but something heavy collided with the side of her head and the world went black.
Chapter 19
When Karen came to, she wasn’t sure where she was or why she couldn’t move her arms or legs. There was something with a vaguely sour taste stuffed in her mouth, and when she tried to spit it out she found she couldn’t. Her head pounded as violently as if atomic warheads were going off inside her skull. She blinked rapidly to clear her blurry vision and saw that she was in a dimly lit bedroom. Looking down her body, she could see that she was lying atop a bed, legs spread, and each foot tied with rope to the footboard. Craning her neck, she found her wrists likewise secured to the headboard.
She scanned the room to see what she could make out, but her vision blurred and the pounding in her head increased.
Now she remembered. She’d come to confront Penelope, and the witch had been lying in wait behind the front door and had hit Karen over the head with….
With what? She wasn’t sure. She’d only really seen an indistinct movement. Perhaps one of the shovels they’d used to dig up Rebecca Yomans. It didn’t really matter; what mattered was that Karen was imprisoned here with no idea what Penelope had planned.
A creak made Karen turn her head to the right, wincing as fresh pain detonated in her head. Light flooded in from the hallway, silhouetting Penelope in the doorway.
“I see you’re up,” Penelope said, stepping into the room. Her voice was flat and emotionless, nothing remaining of the woman Karen had once considered a friend. “You’ve been out for several hours. I was starting to think I’d whacked you too hard.”
Karen struggled against the rope, but her movements were slow, sluggish. Looking back up at her wrists, she tried to will the knots to loosen, but her vision kept going fuzzy and her mind felt fuzzy as well, unable to concentrate. She thought she detected a minute movement in the ropes, but that was it.
“Having trouble?” Penelope said, standing over her. “Might be the potion I forced down your throat while you were unconscious. Clouds the mind and weakens the body, rendering you almost powerless…at least until it wears off. Don’t want you untangling yourself until we’re done here. Of course, your powers would be useless against me anyway. For the past several months I’ve been spiking the tea you’ve been drinking with me with a little protection spell. Just for insurance, you understand.”
Karen’s eyes darted around the room, searching for any sign of—
“I’m afraid my son won’t be appearing,” Penelope said. “I removed your bracelet and put it away with the other talismans. He’s still around—I can feel him—but I don’t need to hear him whining and pleading. He’s my son; I know what’s best for him, and one day he’ll see that. One day he’ll thank me. It’ll take him a while to adjust to a female body, but he will adapt.”
This froze Karen. She ceased moving, for a few seconds ceased even breathing. Her already stunted thought processes slowed even further. Penelope couldn’t possibly mean what it sounded like she meant…but as the librarian was proving, she was capable of anything.
Penelope continued to speak as she went about the room, lighting candles around the bed. “I know it’s not quite the equinox, but it should be close enough. And of course, I wanted to use Pete’s body—that situation was just too perfect—but I can’t very well drag you down to the hospital like this, can I? So I’ll improvise.”
Once she finished with the candles, she reached down beside the bed, out of Karen’s line of sight, and picked up a mason jar full of a dark amber liquid. Screwing off the lid, she dipped her fingers into the liquid and began smearing it on Karen’s forehead and eyelids. Karen shook her head back and forth, but her range of motion was limited.
“The potion I fed you earlier alters your concentration so you can’t focus enough to use your power, but the power is still there. Oh yes, you’re just brimming with power. And the more upset you become, the more potent that power becomes. Even though you will not be reciting the incantation with me, I think just your presence will ensure that the spell succeeds. And if not…well, I’ll just move on and find another witch to help me. I’m nothing if not persistent when I have a goal.”
Karen tried to scream, but the sound was muffled by the gag stuffed in her mouth. Another attempt to spit it out proved futile, and now she could feel the duct tape that had been wound around her head to keep the gag in place. Still she tried to scream, straining until the tendons protruded from her neck and tears leaked from her eyes.
When Penelope finished anointing Karen, she reached down and retrieved a smaller jar, this one half-filled with a pale yellow liquid with something floating in it. Karen squinted at the jar and realized that these must be Bobby’s tonsils. The items Penelope was using to keep her son’s spirit on this plane of existence and that she would use to evict Karen from her own body to make room for Bobby.
“In order for the spell to work, these have to be inside you. Normally ingestion would be the route I’d take, but I don’t think I can trust you to keep quiet if I remove that gag, plus I don’t really fancy having you spitting my own son’s tonsils at me. So I’ll have to get them inside you another way.”
Karen began to buck on the bed, straining against her bonds again. The ropes didn’t seem to be tight, but she felt so weak.
Penelope stared down at her, and her expression softened, emotion coming back into her eyes. “I really am sorry it turned out this way. You have to believe that this isn’t how I wanted things to happen. Ideally, you would have helped me install Bobby’s spirit in Pete’s body, and I would have had my son back, and you and Bobby could have been a real couple. But I guess you two will still be together, just not in the way any of us envisioned. I mean, just think about it, what better way to show him how much you love him than by giving up your body so that he can have another shot at love? It’s rather poetic when you get right down to it. Almost Biblical.”
Unable to speak, Karen used her eyes to plead for mercy, hoping there was some sane part of Penelope left that she could reach. But the emotion bled from Penelope’s face again, leaving it cold as an ice carving, and she reached out with one hand and started undoing the buttons on Karen’s pants. Karen closed her eyes and tried to focus her mental energy and make something happen, anything…but she felt nothing.
“Mother, STOP!”
At the sound of the deep, gruff voice, Karen’s eyes sprang open. She looked toward the doorway to find Bobby standing there, his expression fierce in the flickering candlelight. Penelope was looking his way too, her jaw slack and her eyes wide.
“What…how…,” she stammered. “I locked away the talismans.”
A slight smile curved Bobby’s lips. “Guess I learned a little something from Jacoby. If a thought form, a creature that had never truly been a person, can conjure itself up, then surely I can manifest myself through the strength of my will.”
Penelope recovered from her shock quickly. “Listen, angel, you just need to let Mommy finish her work. I’m going to make you all better again. Whole, strong.”
“By killing the woman I love?”
“Please, the only reason you even started talking to her is because I told you to. Trust Mommy…this is for the best. Keep your mouth shut and let me do my work.”
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