by Nova Nelson
“Don’t look at me!” Grim moaned, trying to claw the bow out with his paw.
Ruby smacked his arm. “No. Bad boy! We had a deal.”
“A deal?” I asked, trying to imagine what Ruby could have possibly offered him to convince him to let her do this to his face.
“Yes.” She got slowly to her feet and dusted off her robes. “If he let me fix him up nicely for the faire, he could have a treat.”
“A treat? Ah. You mean bacon.”
“Of course not, dear. As I understand it, he’s not allowed to have that. Going through some sort of detox for his addiction, if I remember correctly.”
I meant to confirm her assumption, but I was still laughing too hard to breathe.
“Venison sausage,” he moaned. “How could I say no? It’s been days since Anton’s fed me scraps in the kitchen.”
“You’re a mess.”
“Ah, Aria and Dean. So nice to see you again,” Ruby said, staring behind me. Then she turned her eyes on me. “Any particular reason you’ve brought two ghosts into the home I’ve spent days securing to keep spirits out?” Her question seemed simple enough, but I could tell she was seriously annoyed and just trying not to show it in front of the guests.
I composed myself quickly. “I need to have a word with them away from Tanner.”
“I feel like we’re in trouble,” mumbled Dean.
“Yeah,” I said, turning toward him. “You kinda are. There’s a lot you haven’t told me.”
Ruby gave the couple one last look, then said, “I have a bit more prep to do tonight before Ezra arrives to escort me over to the festivities. I hope you’ll excuse me.”
“Of course, Ruby,” said Aria. “Great seeing you again.”
Ruby nodded at them and smiled, and this time it looked genuine. “You too. If there were going to be two spirits crashing my fortress, the Culpeppers would be at the top of my list. Have a good chat, and don’t mind Nora’s bluntness. She can’t help it. Hasn’t managed to tap into the empathic gifts yet.” She only got one foot on the stair before she paused, pointed a finger at Grim and said, “If that bow isn’t still on you when I come down, the deal’s off.”
Grim grunted and flopped his head down onto his paws, sulking.
I pulled out two chairs at the parlor table, one for each of them, and then I took a seat myself. While spirits didn’t need to sit, most did prefer the habit of it, and the Culpeppers were among that bunch. Aria crossed her legs, and Dean leaned back casually, keeping a keen eye on me. “Did you find the book?” he asked.
“I did, assuming you mean the one in a room of books from my old world. And assuming you mean the Enochian one about Fifth Winds.”
“That’s the one,” he replied.
“There’s a whole lot you’re not telling me,” I said, feeling the press of time on us. “What were you doing with an Enochian book on Fifth Winds, and why did you have a bunch of junk from my world on your dining room table, and why in the hellhound were you in the Deadwoods the day you died?”
“Well done,” Aria said, sounding unconcerned about my rising impatience.
“We weren’t sure we could trust you right away,” Dean said. “We couldn’t tell you everything. Sure, you’re a Fifth Wind, but that doesn’t say anything about whose side you’re on.”
“Whose side I’m on in what? What are the sides?”
Dean paused then said, “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me. I might understand more than you think.”
Aria nodded. “And what is it that you think you understand so far?”
I hadn’t yet put it into one string of thought yet, but I decided to give it a go. “You told me nature’s balance is off and that it could be really bad. Then you sent me after a book about Fifth Winds, one only an angel could read, or so I thought. But others can read it too. Like Ted.
“And I know that I’m not from nature. Fifth Winds don’t exactly play on the same team as the other winds. Our element is the spirit. We’re nature’s counterbalance. We’re the complication. And since I’ve come to Eastwind, so have the Winds of Change. Not right away, but as I settled into my powers they started to blow. And that’s only the start of it.
“It’s no coincidence that I entered through the Deadwoods and that’s where the Winds of Change originated, is it?”
Dean looked more focused than I’d seen him, and he shook his head. “I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.”
“Of course you don’t. You know something about it, don’t you? That’s why you were in the Deadwoods, checking it out. You had a book on how to create a portal to my world. You went there, didn’t you?”
“We both did,” Aria said, and now she just seemed sad. “You’re quite good at this, Nora.”
The compliment practically bounced off me. I didn’t want flattery right now, I wanted some answers. “Why? Why were you in my world right before you died?”
Aria took the lead. “We were sent on a mission. We… we thought we were doing the right thing.”
“Sent on a mission? Who sent you?”
“The Coven.”
“The—”
“More specifically,” Dean added, “High Priest Clearbrook. It wasn’t public knowledge what we were assigned to do.”
“And what were you assigned to do?”
Aria met her husband’s eyes briefly before explaining. “The High Priest claimed to have foreseen a great imbalance coming to Eastwind. He said he could feel the disturbance and that it was one that threatened to devastate everything this town had built, throw it back into a war like the last one, with casualties on all sides. But he said there was a way to keep that from happening, and he needed our help.”
“Well, actually,” Dean said, “it wasn’t the High Priest Clearbrook who told us all this.”
“Right,” Aria said. “He wanted to keep his distance from it, so he sent his most trusted pawn, Serenity. She was the intermediary. Hardly anyone even saw him at that point. He wasn’t in good health, and, looking back on it, I think he’d begun to lose his mind.”
“So, you were in charge of preventing whatever… catastrophic thing from coming to pass?”
“Yes,” said Aria. “Springsong gave us the Enochian manual and explained what needed to happen. We weren’t excited about it, but we felt sure it needed to be done, and I think we were both a little flattered we’d been chosen.”
“Also, we had Tanner to think about,” Dean added.
Aria nodded. “We couldn’t stand the idea of him getting caught up in a war, even if it was predicted to come years later.”
“How did you know what was in the manual? Do either of you read Enochian?”
“No,” Aria said, “but like you mentioned, others do.”
“It wasn’t Bloom or Ted who helped you. They would have told me. Who was it then?”
“Who else would be so bored as to learn to read Enochian?” Dean asked. “Count Malavic.”
“And he was willing to help you?” Imagining Malavic doing anything out of the kindness of his heart was nearly impossible. Did vampires even have hearts?
“I imagine he thought it might lead to entertaining trouble,” Aria said, addressing my implied question.
“Which it did,” Dean added. “Well, maybe not entertaining, at least not for us, but for someone like the count? Yes, very entertaining.”
I would need to have a word with Malavic about this down the line, but it was low on my current priority list. “What then? Count Malavic translated the text and… then what?”
Dean exchanged a hesitant look with his wife then said, “We created a portal in the Deadwoods. We needed to enter the world of the Fifth Winds and stop one of them from coming through. That was our mission. If we didn’t stop it, her appearance could spell the end for harmony in Eastwind and spark the next great war.”
“It was a murder mission,” I said, trying not to cast too much judgment, but also… what the heck? Suddenly my boyfriend’s parents we
re a couple of hitmen?
“It was,” Dean said, his voice softening with enough shame to pacify me for the time being. “But we failed. We couldn’t go through with it.”
Okay, point in their favor. “Why not?”
Aria took over. “Because when we managed to track down the Fifth Wind using the spells laid out for us, we discovered it was a young girl only a few years older than our own son.” She swallowed and stared at me as the pieces clicked into place.
The hair stood up on my arms, and not from the two spirits across from me, but from suddenly knowing how close I’d come to never making it this far, to never even making it into my twenties.
I tried to speak but my throat was dry. I cleared it and gave it another go. “Wouldn’t killing me have just sent me here anyway?”
Aria’s intense gaze stayed glued to me. “Not the way we were going to do it. There was a ritual and… it doesn’t matter. We couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. Not based solely on a vision by the High Priest. Even with the best Seers, visions only show the most probable outcome—the higher the likelihood of it coming to pass, the stronger the vision. But there’s always a chance that something could change and the vision could never come to pass. We couldn’t justify murdering an innocent girl on the chance that it might stop later conflicts. There were too many variables. And you were someone’s child, just like Tanner was ours.”
I decided not to mention that at that point I was likely no one’s child, since my parents were already dead and gone. Didn’t seem relevant, and I wasn’t exactly trying to make them regret not murdering me.
But I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I allowed a bit of silence. That only left me thinking about how awkward it was going to be to tell Tanner about later: Uh, so, your parents were hired as assassins to create an illegal portal to my realm and murder me… But don’t worry! They didn’t go through with it, so it’s all good.
Right. That would go smoothly.
“What happened when you came back through?” I asked finally. The motive for their murder was beginning to resemble a distinct shape, but I thought they could use the opportunity to talk it through while they were here.
Dean took up the thread. “We knew the High Priest wasn’t going to be happy about it. We asked Serenity Springsong to meet us at Sheehan’s Pub later that night to discuss what had happened and help us come up with a plan for explaining it to him. Needless to say, she was concerned and agitated when we told her. But in the end, she said she would speak with Clearbrook and make sure he understood why we couldn’t do it. We figured he would just send someone else to do it instead, but there wasn’t much we could do about that. We’d done what we thought was right, and that was all we could control.”
“Not all,” Aria added. “We could also hide the book with the instructions for crossing over. Without the book, whoever the High Priest assigned to the task next would be out of luck unless they happened to ask Malavic what he knew. But who would think to ask him? And there was always the possibility that he either wouldn’t remember or would prove entirely unhelpful to the next witch that came along, if for no other reason than to watch them squirm.”
“Sounds like the count we all know and love to hate,” I said. “I take it you went home and hid the book after your meeting with Springsong at the pub?”
“No,” said Dean. “We did that before. Because afterward we had plans with the Stringfellows that we didn’t want to miss.”
Aria rolled her eyes. “Right. Who wouldn’t want to spend the night listening to stories from someone’s expensive vacation?”
Dean set a hand on her arm. “It was a nice distraction.”
She shrugged noncommittally.
“And afterward you went home and…” I paused, hoping one would fill in the blank.
Aria did. “Went to bed. Tanner was with Dean’s mother for the night, so we went upstairs and went to sleep.”
“And never woke up,” finished Dean.
That didn’t add up. Were they still holding something back? Nothing about their demeanor seemed to say so. Finally, it felt like they had been completely honest with me. “But what about the dispute?”
Dean cocked his head slightly to the side. “What dispute?”
“Deputy Manchester said he came over because a neighbor reported some sort of argument. A man and a woman yelling. Nothing like that happened?”
Aria frowned. “Not with us. Could have happened after we’d died, I guess.”
True. Awkward to talk about, but true.
“So, you really don’t know who killed you?”
“No,” Aria said, “but it didn’t come as much of a shock.”
Dean nodded. “I think we both knew what it meant to turn our backs on the mission. It was the kind of task that would be hard to explain to the public if it got around. That meant it was the kind of secret that one took to the grave.”
“If we hadn’t had a change of heart,” Aria added, “I think we would’ve been safe. Our guilt would have ensured our silence. But when we showed that we couldn’t go through with it, what was keeping us from telling everyone what we’d been asked to do?”
That was probably why they’d been able to move on after death. It was often the spirits who didn’t know who had killed them that stuck around and needed my help, but the Culpeppers had seemed to accept their fate, regardless of who had carried it out.
Of course, now they were back, but that seemed to be at no fault of their own.
“It was Springsong, wasn’t it?” I asked.
Dean waved that off. “No way. Serenity wouldn’t do that.”
“But she was the only one who knew you’d backed out. You said she wasn’t happy about it. How do you know she didn’t decide to clean up the mess you’d made?”
Dean shrugged. “I guess I don’t.”
Then I remembered that she had an alibi for that night. Shoot. But it had to be her. I just needed to figure out how it all fit together, how she could have been seen in the Elk’s Lodge and been able to murder the Culpeppers in their bed.
Wait. Could it have been another case of a doppelgänger?
Fangs and claws, those things could really make a person paranoid.
While I couldn’t rule that out, it seemed almost too easy. I’d hold onto it for now.
“If I needed to,” I said, “could I reopen the portal to my world?”
“Yes,” Aria said, “but I suspect you don’t need to. I think it’s been open for quite a while now, burst open at the seams.”
That’s what I’d been thinking, too, and the notion that I could just waltz back into my old world left a panicked knocking in my chest, especially when I considered why it was open and what it might take to close it.
A creak on the bottom stair pulled my attention toward it, and Ruby gazed at us with bemusement. “You’re still here?” she said to the Culpeppers. “Come now. Nora needs to get ready for the faire. Don’t you want to go see your son anyway? You don’t have forever on this plane.” She pulled together her robes, which were the usual color black but with small flecks of gold thread running throughout, and scurried over to the table where she grabbed the anchoring bowl and tossed the contents into the fire. The Culpeppers dissipated immediately.
“How much did you hear?” I asked.
“Most of it,” she said, grabbing a pair of black gloves from a drawer by the front door. “And the rest I already knew.”
“You already knew some of that?”
She spared me a glance over her shoulder. “Of course, dear. Who do you think was the Fifth Wind on duty when they were murdered?”
“What do you think about it then? Did Springsong murder them?”
She tucked the gloves into her pocket and carried her boots over to the empty chair previously occupied by Dean. “She couldn’t have. She was at the Elk’s Lodge, wasn’t she?”
“You even knew about that?”
“Of course. Springsong’s romance with Grand Bull Edgar Shallow
s was very hush-hush, so, naturally, everyone in town knew all about it.”
“Could it have been a doppelgänger at the lodge that night? Maybe the real Springsong was murdering the Culpeppers.”
Ruby paused in her preparation to sigh dramatically. “Nora. It could always be a doppelgänger. Yet it’s almost never a doppelgänger. Sure, a couple breezed through town recently and caused a little trouble, but for the most part, they’ve been wiped out of existence because you can’t trust them and that’s what people do with things they can’t trust—they wipe it out. Not the best solution in my opinion, but there it is. Also, I don’t believe Serenity had any malice toward the Culpeppers. For all her many faults, the woman appeared genuinely torn up when she heard of their death. Not even her quick ascension to High Priestess cheered her up for a while.”
Huh. Ruby’s dislike for the witch generally outmatched my own, so if she was convinced…
“What about the portal? Did you already know about that?”
“No, I don’t find portals terribly interesting. More trouble than they’re worth. I don’t need to cross into other worlds just to keep myself entertained. Besides, I’ve never heard of anything good coming from messing with them, have you?”
I hadn’t, so I just shook my head.
“If you really want to know about how they work, you should ask— Oh, for fang’s sake, Clifford!”
I followed her gaze and saw her giant red canine familiar peeking out from the stairs.
“I’m done trying to clean you up, you big mangy mutt. Just come down here.”
Clearly set on avoiding the same girly fate as Grim, Clifford appeared cautious at first, scanning the room as if a bow might jump out at him and attach itself permanently to his noggin.
“I don’t even have time to clean you up if I wanted to,” Ruby added, lacing up her last boot. “You’ll just have to show up at the festival looking like a mess. Just the way you like it.”
When there was a knock at the door, she stood, fully dressed in her finest robes, looking cheerier then I’d ever seen her. And was that a bit of blush on her cheeks?
Sheesh, she really did love Halloween.