And it occurred to her that – with this magic jewel – she could not only listen to this man’s thoughts. She could affect them too. She was not certain how she knew that. It just popped into her head.
Violet’s features brightened with a mischievous delight.
How’d you like it, Mr. Butcher, if the pig fought back?
There was no way that she could return the poor animal to life. But she could make it seem so, to the butcher’s mind.
The man was raising his cleaver again, when he thought he heard a noise. First a low snorting. Then an angry squeal. The carcass’ eyes appeared to spring open, and its mouth stretched wide, its pink tongue sliding out.
The butcher flailed back, howling, and then ran out through the nearest door.
Violet screeched with laughter, doubling over, clutching at her sides. Then, when she calmed down again, it started to occur to her what stealing this jewel really meant.
She was not a helpless little poor girl any longer. All those people who’d thought badly of her, she would show them who was high and mighty now. She’d make them bow to her as if she was the Queen of England. And then –
“Stop that!” yelled a high-pitched voice.
Violet’s eyes snapped open. And she cast her gaze around. But there was still nobody with her in the alleyway.
“You mustn’t do that,” came the voice again.
It didn’t even seem to be emerging from thin air. It was coming from inside her head, despite the fact that it was not her own voice.
“I feel sorry for you,” it said. “Honestly I do. But you can’t go around frightening people like that.”
It was the voice of another little girl, apparently not a great deal older than herself. But where was it coming from?
Strong instincts took hold of Violet once again. She closed her eyes a second time, and let her spirit drift. And before she knew it, she was reaching out, trying to find the person who’d admonished her.
And to her utter amazement, she wasn’t only searching across distances. Her thoughts were stretching out through time. Ten years into the future. Twenty. And then fifty. Then, more than a hundred.
She was entering a strange room in a tidy little house. There were weird pictures of horses on the bed sheets. Shiny gewgaws hanging from the ceiling. And at the center of the room …
There was a little girl, like her. But blond. She was wearing a frock with a checker pattern on it, and white shoes. And was hanging in the air, rotating. And a bright blue light was flowing from her.
When Violet approached, she stopped revolving and looked shocked.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “You … you shouldn’t be here.”
This was a being of tremendous magic power. Violet knew that right away. But with the purple jewel held in her grasp, she also knew she had the upper hand.
She could possess this creature. Take its mind over. And so she did that thing.
But, almost straight away, Violet felt matters going very badly wrong. Her thoughts blurred and became extremely muddled. There were ideas in her head that weren’t her own.
She wasn’t sure what she was doing any more. And couldn’t pull away, however hard she tried.
Some unseen force was trying to trap her in this strange place in the future.
And the last thing that she felt was her own mind going blank.
In the electric blueness of her room, the Little Girl jerked, went slack. Then began to revolve again, the way she always did.
Except the light streaming out around her gradually changed color.
Darkening.
To violet.
CHAPTER TWO
The snow lay deep and even. The air outside was crisp. The night was silent, and the boughs of the trees on my street – and everybody else’s in this town – were bent under their pure white burden.
I stared out at it through my kitchen window for a while, my breath misting on the glass. Then I turned away annoyedly and fetched myself a beer from the fridge. Although it has to be admitted, I only buy the low alcohol type these days, having been warned off the stronger stuff by a certain High Witch that I’d become acquainted with.
But the plain fact of the matter was, this was one of the toughest periods of the year for me. And probably for Cassie too. Christmas is a time for families. And when you don’t have one any more – when you’ve lost your family to magic gone as wrong as it can possibly go—then the only thing the holiday season does is rub additional salt into already gaping wounds.
What did I want this Yuletide? To be honest, everything back the way it had been. My wife Alicia, and my kids Pete and Tammy returned to me. But it didn’t look like that was going to happen, not anytime soon. Christmas in the Devries household was promising to be – for the third year in succession – a pretty bleak affair. And there was nothing I could do about it.
So – for the want of anything better to occupy my mind with – I called Ritchie Vallencourt on his cell phone, knowing he was still on duty.
“Hey, Ritch, is there anything up?” I asked him.
“Should there be?” the young detective sergeant answered. “Something I don’t know about, perhaps?”
He sounded alert, in spite of the hour, and appeared to understand why I was calling.
“Long nights getting to you, huh, Ross?”
“I am pretty bored, I guess,” I admitted, feeling awkward.
And he hemmed sympathetically.
“Wish I could oblige, my friend. But everything’s been so quiet, you could kid yourself this was an ordinary town. I’m afraid you’re going to have to find some other way of keeping yourself busy, because we don’t need your talents.”
What he meant by ‘ordinary town’ is that Raine’s Landing isn’t one. The real witches of Salem fled here, shortly before the trials of 1692. And there’ve been magic and accompanying madness in this whole place ever since.
And what he meant by ‘talents’ is, I seem to have a knack for dealing with the madness part. Ross Devries, ex-cop, ex-husband and father, and the principal troubleshooter in this oddest of communities.
I told Ritchie I got that, trying to sound relaxed about the whole business. We chatted generally for another while. And then he said he had to go, and I hung up.
The corrosive silence settled in around me once again.
But what he’d said, the way he’d said it, kept on echoing through my head. And I could see that he had been bang on the money. I’d actually rather there was peril coming down on us, that I was having to fight like fury just to keep myself intact …
I’d actually prefer that to dealing with my own empty home at Christmastime. And that bothered me more than a little, I have to admit.
I took a soft kick at the empty air.
Then stopped myself and sighed. And wondered how Cass was doing.
Quinn Maycott appeared in her living room, popping out of thin air, the same way he did every night. And Cass Mallory greeted him with a huge, delighted grin.
She held up a bulging shopping bag and announced, “Hey, I’ve figured out how we can have sex!”
Which – since he was a ghost – took Quinn aback.
He was a few years younger than her, muscular and blond, his appearance unchanged since the day he’d died. And he’d once been a very powerful adept. That was how he had been able to come back to her. His powers were so intense, they’d kept his consciousness and soul together, even when his body was destroyed.
But their relationship wasn’t what it had been, and they both knew that. When they’d first met, they’d barely been able to keep their hands off each other. Whereas these days, Cass could only feel a faint sensation when she tried to touch him. A mild tingling, like static on the air. Anything more physical had been out of the question for a while.
But she obviously had plans to change that. Except the plain fact was that he could not see how. Merely a pale outline in the dimness of the room, Quinn blinked and tipped his face at her
.
“You’ve … what on earth are you talking about?”
Cassie reached inside the bag and pulled out a large spray can, which she shook so that the bearing rattled. By the look of it, she’d gotten hold of a good number of them.
“Found ‘em in a novelty store off O’Connell. Read about ‘em in one of my biker magazines one time. It’s spray-on, flesh-toned latex.”
Quinn could only shake his head, his pale eyes becoming faintly glazed.
“I can never figure out whether I love you because you’re crazy, or in spite of it,” he murmured. “Spray-on what? What are you going to do with that?”
“Hold out a hand,” Cass told him. “Seriously.”
Quinn still thought this was nuts, but did as he was asked. Cass’s thumb depressed the plunger, and a jet of pinkish, paint-like goop came hissing out. It passed right through his outline, settling to the carpet.
Cassie frowned, but she looked undeterred. She was three months pregnant with his child but – even though she had a lean, tall frame – the bump still scarcely showed.
“Honey,” she chided him, “we’ve talked about this, haven’t we? You’re a real powerful adept.”
“Was one.”
“And an adept such as you,” she carried on, ignoring him, “ought to be able to hold himself together just a little better. Get a little surface tension going on his incorporeal form.”
Quinn looked slightly pained. “I’ve thought about that plenty, and I’m still not sure how to achieve it.”
“Don’t think, feel it,” Cass insisted. “Don’t you want to touch me again? Be able to fool around again, the way we used to do?”
So he turned it over, threw her an uncertain look, then concentrated hard. The contours of his ghostly shape became a little firmer.
“That’s it,” Cassie coaxed him. “That’s the stuff.”
He set his jaw, focusing intensely. His body wavered for a second, and then densened even more.
“Keep going, honey,” Cass confirmed. “I think we might be getting somewhere.”
And when she used the spray a second time, it held.
Quinn stared at the pinkish patch on the back of his hand. The fluid had already dried. And he had to admit, it did look fairly realistic.
“Okay?” he asked her. “Now what do I do?”
“Take your clothes off,” she informed him, her gaze brightening. “Shut your eyes, and stand completely still.”
And once that had sunk in, it was Quinn’s turn to smile.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he laughed.
He reached down to pull off his T-shirt. Then paused momentarily, his pale head lifting. Something had distracted him. And it had to take an awful lot to manage that.
But he thought he had detected – for the briefest instant – something out of whack. A strange vibration on the darkened air beyond this house. The most peculiar sense of things out there going awry.
It faded in another second. He had only been imagining it, surely?
Cass was staring at him with open hunger, and he started doing what she’d asked.
CHAPTER THREE
A missing person’s call had recently come in. In other parts of Massachusetts – or so Ritchie Vallencourt had been led to believe – no attention was paid them for at least twenty-four hours. But this was not exactly what you’d call a normal place. Almost everyone here practiced a little magic. And, like most things in life, it occasionally went wrong. So a person vanishing was taken very seriously, and dealt with right away.
It was coming up to two in the morning. Ritchie peered out through his windshield as he entered the Marshall Drive district of town. It was perfectly still, not a single light on in a window. No more snow had fallen since yesterday morning, and the ploughs had been here recently, so driving was not a problem.
But getting over to the front door of 12 Bethany was. Most households had their driveways clear, but this particular one was still covered with ice. He was wearing ordinary shoes. And he slithered after only three steps, having to grab hold of a privet bush to stop himself from falling.
The front door of the house came swinging open. There was a low-wattage bulb switched on in the hallway beyond, and the occupant was silhouetted by it. He had seen what had happened, and his body had an anxious curve.
“Sorry about that,” the fellow said. “I’ve been working double shifts, and haven’t had the time to clear the driveway yet.”
His wife and son were missing, and he was apologizing for being tardy in his house maintenance duties? Ritchie thought the people in this town were too polite sometimes. He murmured something along the lines of “don’t worry about it,” then struggled inside, the owner stepping back.
Jay Reece was an inoffensive looking man in his mid-thirties. He was medium height and build, with short, sandy hair that was thinning at the front. His face was very pale and rather shapeless. And his tired eyes kept on squinting, like they couldn’t focus straight.
“Sorry to have to meet you under such difficult circumstances, sir,” Vallencourt said, getting straight to the point. “Both your wife and child are missing, so I understand?”
The man nodded unhappily.
“Okay, we’ll get this sorted out. But I need to have the entire facts, sir. You got home about …?”
“An hour ago. Not much more than that,” Reece sighed. “Carol and Kenny should have been here. I mean, where else would they be, at this hour?”
Ritchie took a quick glance up and down the hallway, and could make out no signs of a struggle. He could see from here to the back door in the kitchen, and there was no indication of forced entry either.
“I have to ask this, Mr. Reece. Excuse the question, but did you and your wife fight recently?”
Reece looked shocked. “Absolutely not. I mean, nothing even remotely like it. We were looking forward to the holidays.”
All right. People sometimes lied to him about matters like that, out of embarrassment as much as anything. But for the moment, he had no choice but to take Reece at his word. So Vallencourt kept his expression blank and moved on to the next question.
“Could she be with family? Or friends perhaps? Someone that she’s close to, and would turn to if she needed someone?”
“I’ve phoned everyone that I can think of, both our sets of folks included. Nobody knows where she is. And now I’ve done that, Kenny’s grandfolks are beside themselves with worry. They keep phoning back here every five minutes.”
As though to demonstrate the point, a ring tone started sounding from the living room. Jay didn’t move to answer it. He simply put a hand across his mouth and looked like he was going to cry.
“If I’d of only been here,” he groaned. “I thought that I was doing something smart – we’re always short of cash. And now …”
He choked up so badly he could not finish the sentence. Ritchie reached across and clasped his shoulder, murmuring some reassuring words to try and calm him down.
But – any way you looked at it – this was not a very reassuring situation. Would a mother with a young son just go wandering off, in the middle of the night and in the depths of winter? Two cars were parked on the drive. There’d been no trail of footprints that Ritchie had noticed. And it wasn’t like the woman could have left Raine’s Landing, even if she’d wanted to.
Three hundred years ago, an angry witch called Regan Farrow had put her curse upon this entire place. Nobody who was born here could ever leave Raine’s Landing.
Which left him with what?
“Can I see Kenny’s room?” he asked.
Then he noticed the startled way that Reece’s head came up. Vallencourt’s thick eyebrows knitted.
“Sir, is there a problem?”
“There … I think something peculiar is happening in there.”
Ritchie hadn’t been warned of, and was not expecting, anything like that. And it wasn’t the kind of news he was exactly pleased to hear. He felt his own mouth tighte
ning.
“Peculiar how, exactly?” he inquired.
“Come with me. I’ll show you.”
Reece went up, the sergeant following closely behind him. It turned out that the door to the room in question had been firmly closed, which didn’t fit in with the wider general picture. Why do that when you had recently been searching for your son?
Jay Reece pushed the handle down. The door swung open onto perfect darkness.
Then he murmured, “Watch.”
He reached in gingerly and flipped a switch.
And the light … it didn’t come on in any natural way. The element flickered several times, then brightened not to yellow, but to purple. Weird mauve light cast its sickly pall throughout the room.
It hung there for several seconds. Then the usual pale glow returned.
Ritchie guessed this wasn’t any kind of novelty bulb. Which meant that he was more than likely looking at the residue of magic. So his mind worked quickly.
“You’ve been casting spells?” he asked. “Got any artifacts about the house?”
Most folks in the Landing had one or two.
“I’ve got a health amulet,” Jay told him, pulling it out from underneath his shirt. “And Carol wears an old ring of her grandma’s that’s supposed to give the wearer courage in hard times. But we’ve got nothing that could cause this. And there’s no spells that I know of.”
Ritchie stepped inside and flicked the light off, then brightened it again. This time, the bulb shone violet and remained that way. Everything looked unreal in its glow, the shadows dense, the room’s perspectives skewed.
A normal little boy’s room, otherwise. Slightly messy, with toys scattered across the carpet. The detective turned around in a slow circle, trying to hide his unease. It felt colder in here than it ought to. Colder than the landing. And he thought he could detect a very faint, peculiar odor, like some weird mixture of ozone and formaldehyde.
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