“I have a plan,” Laura said. She stuck out her thumb. “Charge me up.”
The three put their thumbs together and squeezed. Aileen spoke the incantation. Laura felt the power grow within her again. She looked through the flames, away from the sadistic grin on Maggie’s face, and into the wan girl’s scared blue eyes.
The girl looked shell-shocked. But Laura would never get through to Dustin, not with him so focused on his mother. And the witches wouldn’t expect this girl to be a threat. Laura just needed to pull a wolf out from under that sheep’s clothing.
She gazed deep into the girl’s eyes and listened with her mind, hoping for some flicker within, some consciousness with which to connect.
She felt the girl. She was terrified of the fire. Surrounded by flames, she was panicked that she would be burned. It triggered some childhood instance. Laura got a sense of a burning kitchen. She didn’t have time to search further.
“Put out the fire,” she sent. “Put out the fire.”
No reaction. She picked the girl’s right eye and focused only on that until she felt like she’d tunneled down to the ocular nerve.
“Put out the fire!”
The girl turned a few degrees towards Laura.
“How?” a high, thin voice asked in Laura’s head.
“Get Maggie’s locket. Now!”
The girl swiveled her head to look at Maggie’s chest. The locket sparkled in the flame’s red light. Her right hand pulled against Dustin’s, but the glue’s bond held tight. The girl’s face sagged. Laura sensed her resolve weaken.
“Now! Before you burn!”
The girl rolled her hand out of Dustin’s with a sound like tearing canvas. Dustin screamed and raised his hand to his face. The girl’s palm and finger skin was still attached, like half of a shriveled white glove.
The girl’s right hand looked like a pack of raw meat. Blood dripped from her fingertips, bright red against her white skin. Her hand shot up and grabbed the locket from Maggie’s neck. With one yank, its chain broke and the girl pulled it away.
The wall of fire fell like a curtain. Shock covered the faces of the three witches. The girl tossed the locket at Aileen’s feet. Tammy and Janice took a few stunned steps back. Laura ran for the girl. Theresa ran for Dustin.
Tammy and Janice stepped forward to defend their captives. Aileen went crimson with rage. She scooped the talisman off the ground, clutched in in both hands and closed her eyes.
Tammy and Janice froze. Their faces went white. They both shuddered and then burst into brilliant-red flames. They flailed their arms and took a few panicked steps back. Then both collapsed to their knees, then onto their faces, dead. The flames retreated to a low glow.
Theresa kissed Dustin’s face a dozen times. She and Laura untied the children.
Aileen opened her eyes like she’d awakened from a dream. She looked back and forth at the two immolated bodies. Her jaw dropped open.
“Oh my,” she whispered. “What did I do?”
She staggered back two steps.
“I brought all this here,” she said to herself. “And now I’m a killer.”
She planted the talisman against her forehead. She closed her eyes and her face scrunched up with effort.
Laura looked up at her. “Aileen?”
Aileen screamed and exploded in a blinding-white phosphorous ball. Whatever she had directed to the witches, she’d directed twice the force inward. The impact blew the vulture skin from atop the uprights. Small, glowing bits of Aileen scattered around the backyard. Laura and Theresa stared at where Aileen had disappeared.
“Mom?” Dustin said.
Theresa turned back and hugged Dustin so tightly he could barely breathe as he sobbed against his mother’s shoulder.
“I was so scared,” Theresa choked out.
Laura looked for Maggie, but she was long gone. She finished untying the girl and knelt in front of her. The girl’s eyes darted around like a cornered animal.
“I’m Laura. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
The girl bolted.
“Wait!”
The girl ran into the shed and closed the door behind her. Laura followed. She pulled open the shed door to an expanse of impenetrable darkness. A hanging flashlight knocked against the inside of the door. She grabbed it and clicked it on.
Uneven concrete steps led down past an open trapdoor in the shed’s floor. She played the beam around the shed and saw a collection of gardening tools. She probed the steps. About a story down was a dirt floor. A bone-chilling evil pervaded the darkness below. But it was the only place the girl could be. Laura descended one slow step at a time.
Theresa remembered that Maggie was still out there. She looked up from Dustin’s shoulder, but they were alone. She saw Laura step down through the open shed door. Theresa scooped Dustin up off the ground, though he was years too heavy to carry.
“Where are we, Mom?” he said. He clung to her like she was all that kept him from being swept off the earth.
“Somewhere bad on our way to somewhere good,” Theresa said.
They needed help. The woods were full of witches and panicked children. The strange, pale girl needed medical attention. With the sabbat broken and the power of the children no longer sending out its charge, maybe…
She pulled out her phone and dialed. She’d averted the vision of Dustin’s fiery death. She prayed that somehow she’d averted the other that starred Sam. Her heart leapt when Sam answered loud and clear on the first ring.
“Are you all right?” he blurted out.
“Sam, we’re fine. Are you?”
“Now that I snapped my pilot back awake.”
“We need your help at the Petty house.”
There was a pause and a lot of loud background noise.
“Help’s coming,” Sam said. “Hold tight and stay safe.” The call ended.
“Is he coming?” Dustin whispered in her ear.
“Like Arrowman,” Theresa said.
In the front yard, a car roared to life, then another. The coven must have collectively decided to get the hell out of here, kids or no kids. Theresa couldn’t let them escape, not now.
She ran to the driveway. Pairs of headlights already stabbed the front yard’s darkness as cars tried to maneuver out to the gravel ruts. Two cars hit the driveway and raced away. If they made it to the road, they’d be home free.
Rotor blades thundered overhead, accompanied by the wail of a jet turbine. The yellow belly of the Lifeflight helicopter scraped treetops as it blasted by in a cloud of dusty prop wash. The bird flared at the edge of the driveway and settled on the main road. Brake lights flashed the night red and the second speeding car rear-ended the first in a crunch of metal. The third car swung hard right and crashed into a tree.
Sam leapt from the helicopter, crouched down, weapon drawn and pointing at the lead car. He whipped on his wide-brimmed sheriff’s hat, and held it in place with his free hand. He shouted something Theresa could not hear. Two hands stuck out of the lead car’s window. Blue lights flashed near the edge of the property as sheriffs’ cruisers arrived as backup.
Theresa swept Dustin back up into her arms and jogged down the driveway. The helicopter cut its engine. She approached the second car, where an unconscious woman lay with her head against a deflated air bag. A few feet ahead, Sam had a woman in a black robe facedown on the ground and handcuffed.
Theresa ran into his arms.
“Are you two all right?” Sam said.
“We’re fine,” Theresa answered. “The longarex, the creature?”
“It’s dead.”
Two deputies jogged up the driveway, side arms drawn.
“The coven scattered into the woods,” Theresa said. “For every witch, there’s a child they brought to sacrifice.”
“We’ll round them up.”
The two deputies stopped at Sam’s side.
“Sheriff?” one said. There was no tone of derision this time, just a respectful reque
st for orders.
“Women and children are out in the woods. Treat the women as hostile, the children as victims. Set a perimeter around Pear Tree Hill. No car leaves this property. Start running the plates. I need to know who we’re looking for.”
“Yes, sir.” One deputy moved forward into the backyard. The other turned and began barking orders into his radio hand mic.
“You came,” Theresa said. “You didn’t ask for an explanation, you just came.”
Sam ran a finger against a stray strand of her red hair. “What can I say? I’m helpless against its power.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
“Sweetheart?” Laura called into the dark recess beneath the shed. “I’m not here to hurt you. All that’s over now.”
The air was thick with the smell of toasted herbs, the scent of the disarming concoction the witches had favored. The aroma wasn’t just in the air. It permeated everything, the wall she passed, the rafters over her head. Constant exposure had sent the smell deep into this place’s every fiber. Farther down, she caught the smells of human waste and stale sweat.
She probed the darkness with the flashlight’s beam. The basement had no windows, and with the heavy trapdoor in place, she guessed it would be pitch-black even at high noon. The walls were made of plank boards. On the wall hung two white gowns, like the girl wore, like Laura had seen that night in the backyard with Tammy. The flashlight beam paused on the crude painting beside it, a wall-sized mural of the scene she’d just witnessed. A boy and a girl were bound to uprights, hand in hand. Above them hovered a bat-winged, hairless creature.
Something moved to the right and Laura swung the beam that way. She lit up a small bed with dirty covers. The terrified girl was backed into a corner, a tattered, flattened pillow crushed within her arms, her wide eyes windows to a mind on the verge of collapse.
Laura edged over to the bed and sat on the corner. She laid the flashlight so it best lit them both. The girl’s eyes never left her.
“You were the voice, inside my head,” the girl said. The pillow muffled her words. “You told me to pull the locket from her neck.”
“And now you’re safe,” Laura said. “What’s your name?”
The girl inched her mouth above the pillow’s seam. “The Gift.”
“The Gift?”
“That’s what my mothers called me.”
“Your mothers?”
The girl cast a look up at the roof. “The two who caught fire.”
This girl wasn’t on the record as being here, not on the school rolls, not with Child Services.
“How long have you been with your mothers?”
“Always.”
“I didn’t see you in the house.”
“I live here. The Gift cannot see daylight before she is given.” She spoke the last sentence like she was quoting a Bible verse.
Laura’s heart fell. This girl, trapped in perpetual darkness, here or somewhere like here, for as long as she could remember, her only company a crude representation of the fate that awaited her as an offering to release evil. Laura dared not think about how the women had gotten ahold of the poor girl to begin with.
The girl winced and loosed her bleeding hand from the pillow.
“That must hurt,” Laura said. She reached over and pulled one of the gowns from the wall. She held out her hand. “Let me help.”
Slow as a blooming flower, the girl extended her shaking hand. At Laura’s touch, her arm relaxed. Laura swathed the girl’s mangled hand loosely in the gown.
“Better?”
The girl nodded and let the pillow fall away.
“How about we get you out of here for good?”
The girl gave three quick nods.
Laura wrapped her arm around the girl’s shoulders. They mounted the steps and exited the shed. Down the driveway, blue lights pierced the darkness, along with the flash of the Lifeflight’s red anticollision light. Sam hugged Theresa and Dustin in the glare of a wrecked car’s headlights.
The pale girl tugged at Laura’s arm. “What’s that?”
Laura followed the girl’s gaze east. A yellow streak lay across the horizon.
“That’s dawn.”
Theresa carried Dustin back to behind the house, as far as she could get from the roundup at the property’s edge. She passed Laura, who held hands with the pale girl saved from sacrifice. The two friends exchanged knowing smiles. Theresa stopped near the base of the uprights.
The shed vulture’s skin of the longarex lay by her feet. She swore it moved in the flickering torchlight. Then it flinched again.
Theresa swung Dustin feetfirst to the ground and behind her. She yanked one of the torches from the ground and thrust it inches from the skin.
In the middle squirmed a gray-white grub, several inches long. Along its back lay two vestigial, folded wings. It inched its way towards a protective fold in the skin, away from the light, as if in search of a womb to reenter and renew.
“Hell no,” Theresa said.
She plunged the torch into the glistening protolongarex. It squealed, sizzled and popped. Theresa tucked the head of the torch into the skin, lifted it up and spun it around the burning tip. The feathered carcass burst into flames. Theresa dropped the torch as the skin withered into black ash.
“We are not doing this again,” she said.
Chapter Sixty-Three
Over the next few days, a story came together. The town council knew the truth would either make the town a destitute outcast or a pilgrimage site for every wacko cult on the planet. So, plausible fiction became the order of the day.
The carnival’s wild animals escaped at Donkey Day and caused the mayhem there.
A flying batlike creature, you say? It was so dark that night, and you had been drinking. We can understand what your imagination conjured up. Surely you don’t believe in such things?
The animals were spooked by the small grassfire an errant cigarette had caused.
A ring of fire? Around the fence? Did you see the whole fence line? No, just your section, huh? We can see how it might have seemed like a ring of fire to you.
While the children at the Petty place were all rescued from the woods, of all the coven members, only a few were caught at the scene. The rest disappeared, not just from Shaw County, but from everywhere. No one claimed the impounded cars, or the abandoned children, none of whom remembered ever leaving their homes for a trip to Tennessee. The coven had assembled from around the country, so the tale of a mass abandonment of children dissipated like morning fog into individual stories of deserted adoptees, stories too small to garner notice.
The Gift had no history. She’d known only the darkness and skull-masked women all her short life. She gained a proper name, Dawn, and a proper home in Laura Locke’s spare bedroom.
The irresistible draw to return one more time to Galaxy Farm consumed her. Two days later, Laura wheeled her car up the driveway and stopped outside the barn.
Sarah had saved her here a second time. The first time, she’d held short of crossing over to the other side, unable to leave her children’s souls to the mercy of an evil entity. She saved Laura because she needed Laura to reunite her with her children. After that, the three had gone together to whatever world it was that paralleled ours.
But this second saving had no self-interest involved. Sarah had summoned the strength to cross the near-unpassable barrier and intervene to save Laura’s life. That deserved a personal thank-you. Laura wasn’t going back into the barn, ever. But she’d felt Sarah’s spirit down by the pond before. Perhaps, she could make a connection there again.
Light rain had smoothed the dirt at the end of the gravel driveway. Laura left footprints through it as she walked to the edge of the pond. A breeze rippled the surface and the morning sun flickered off the tiny crests like daytime fireflies. The breeze rolled in the rich, earthy scent of fall from the surrounding woods. She took a deep, cleansing breath and closed her eyes. She let her thoughts reach out like spreading v
ines.
Thank you, she thought. Thank you for saving me, for being there when I needed you. I will remember that, always.
She pulled out the locket from her purse, rescued from the mess at 214 Pear Tree Lane. Misused so many times, now it needed to rest forever. She wound up and cast it out at the pond. It sailed out and hit the thick water with a plunk.
Her spine tingled from top to bottom. An emotional wave rolled through her, a feeling of delight, relief, joy. When it passed, it passed with a sense of finality, not like a wave that lapped an ocean shore, but like a wave that passed out across the sea, moving to another, distant, deserved destination. Her heart danced with happiness.
She turned and walked back to her car. She stopped short of the driveway and stared at the ground. Shaky letters scribed in the dirt read: Forgive me.
And underneath was a little outline drawing of a shovel.
Laura fell to her knees, stunned. The sense of shared consciousness, the help in the barn against Rhonda, none of it was the spirit of Sarah Hutchington. It was Doug, her Doug, not the spirit that possessed him and twisted him into a killer. Souls could resist crossing over if they had compelling unfinished business. Mabron’s remained for evil reasons. Doug’s remained for repentance. And for love.
Since that awful night here, so many months ago, she had cried for the pain Sarah Hutchington felt. She’d cried for the loss of sending Constance and Elizabeth away forever. Now, on her knees, where she’d hoped to renew her relationship with her husband, for the first time, she cried for Doug.
Theresa stood in her kitchen as she spoke to Sam on the phone.
“Mayor Maggie McCormack tendered her resignation,” Sam said, “or at least the town council produced one. A family illness in North Dakota apparently called her away, and she said it would not be fair to the town to leave her post unfilled.”
“Looks like we need an election,” Theresa said.
“The council offered it to me on an interim basis,” Sam said. “I think they saw the temporary pay bump as a payment for my silence.”
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