by K. J. Emrick
Even so, Addie had to agree with Willow. The robes were uncomfortable, and itchy. Even more so with the rope belts.
Willow somehow managed to make it look good. She had that way about her. She was tall and graceful, just like her name implied, with a lithe grace that had landed her a few modeling jobs for women’s magazines. Her hair was a darker red than Addie’s and her perfect skin didn’t have freckles, but they had both inherited the same delicate chin and high cheekbones from their mother.
She had a definite Irish temper, too. Just as stubborn as their father.
“I don’t know why you called me back to the house for this,” she said to Kiera. “Addie already told us her boyfriend is investigating the murder. What do we have to do all of this for?”
“Because, Sister Willow,” Kiera said firmly, “we protect Shadow Lake. We hold its secrets, and we shield the people who live here from the dark things.”
“We protect Shadow Lake,” Addie and Willow both answered, repeating the mantra by pure reflex. This was the code they lived by, and whether the police were investigating or not, it was their responsibility to watch over the people of the town.
“Besides,” Addie told Willow. “Lucian isn’t my boyfriend.”
“Ooh,” she cooed. “Trouble in paradise? You know sis, I’d be happy to give you pointers on how to keep your man. Gary and I are going on almost a whole month together and he’s just as interested in me now as he ever was.”
“I’m so happy for you,” Addie grumbled. “I tell you what, why don’t we start the Circle and when we’re done you can run right back to Gary. How does that sound?”
“I’d rather spend some time with Kiera’s son, tell you the truth.” She smiled playfully. “He’s cute. I snuck in and checked him out while he was sleeping. He’s like, super cute.”
“Thank you,” Kiera said. “I’d like to think he takes after me.”
“Who’s the father?” Willow asked. “I’ve never seen your lover.”
Addie held her breath. She had seen Kiera’s Ex, both in photos and now in real life, and she could definitely see the resemblance between Mephistopheles and Alan. There was something of the divine in Kiera’s son.
Maybe something of the Fallen as well.
Plus, the ability for witchcraft.
That was a powerful and potentially dangerous combination.
Kiera finally cleared her throat and then lifted her arms out to either side. “Let’s begin.”
It was hard not to notice that she hadn’t answered Willow’s question about her ‘lover.’
Where they were standing was the highest room in Stonecrest, at the top of the tower, four stories above the ground outside. There were no windows here. It wouldn’t do for anyone to ever look inside and see what they were doing.
The sloping ceiling rose from each of the four walls to a peak high above. Beeswax candles standing four and five feet high burned in each of the four corners, sending wisps of smoke trailing up the white plaster and leaving behind permanent streaks of gray. Herbs and special plants grew in pots on the shelves, growing and alive and spreading their own sort of Essence throughout the room.
At their feet, inlaid in the polished hardwood floor, was the Family Circle. Three strands of thick copper wire described a perfect circle, twelve feet across. Lines of silver and gold were wrapped around the copper in perfect symmetry, and the braided wire was sealed in place with an acid-cured finish. A fat, square candle only a few inches tall had been placed in the exact center. Power hummed from it even now.
This was a focusing point for the magic of the Kilorian sisters. It allowed them to reach into the Well of Essence below the earth more easily. It was also what allowed them to see all of Shadow Lake, and the world beyond, with just a few words.
“Bee cooidjaghtys fys cooinaghtyn,” Kiera recited in Manx Gaelic, “as graih ain reesht.”
Addie felt the air around her snap, just like always. Blue light illuminated the edges of the circle, rising up from floor to ceiling for just an instant. Then it was gone again.
The magical barrier that surrounded Stonecrest would hide this use of magic. It would have rang out like a gong otherwise, loud and clear, attracting every magic-sensitive being within miles. Every big baddie around would have been rushing in to find the source of this much power if the sisters didn’t take precautions.
They stood at equal points along the Circle. Addie breathed in deeply, and smiled as the shared sensation of thoughts and feelings and emotions flowed between them. Addie could feel Willow fidgeting in her robes. She could hear Kiera thinking about her son, and about Mephistopheles, too.
“Should we begin?” Kiera asked them. “Seth Hunter. What do we know about his death?”
Addie sensed her sisters waiting for her to answer. “He died on the stage at the town manager debate,” she started, “but he was poisoned before that. The coffee he was drinking was poisoned. I’m sure he brought it with him.”
Kiera nodded. “And he poured what was left down the sink?”
“Yes. The wormwood powder I mixed into it showed a positive reaction for poison.”
“Where was the cup?” Willow asked. “If it was a takeout cup we would know where he bought it.”
“The police took it away, I think.” Addie had wondered the same thing but there just wasn’t any cup to be found. “When they collected the garbage for evidence they must have taken the cup with them.”
“Hmm.” Kiera’s mind wavered, going from the mystery of the murder, to her son, to her ex-lover, and back again to the murder. She was having trouble concentrating on one or the other and the Circle was betraying her thoughts. “We should try to roll back the hours. Follow Seth backward. We can find the murderer that way.”
Willow frowned. “That could take forever.”
“It will take as long as it takes,” Kiera scolded her younger sister. At the same time, her own thoughts resonated with concern, going to Alan again, asleep in the guest room, but only until Addie’s spell wore off.
“Hey,” Addie said gently. “It’s all right. He won’t wake up for a while yet. We have time.”
Kiera nodded, her gratitude at Addie’s understanding flowing through the Circle and touching her sisters. “Then we should not waste any of that time. Let us begin.”
She raised her hands, thumbs circled with her pointer fingers. Addie and Willow did the same. Inside the circle, at the exact point of the center, the air began to shimmer. Into that disturbance in space and time each sister threaded a little bit of their Life Essence. Their auras bloomed, manifesting as a colored mist rising from each of them, a colored haze unique to their individual selves. Kiera’s was a deep purple, like an aged wine. Willow’s was that sensuous pink streaked through with a shy yellow, very feminine and alluring.
Addie’s was a complicated shade. A pearlescent teal, a mix of blues and greens. Today there was more blue there than green. She knew it was a result of her lingering emotions over how Lucian had treated her. Her sisters knew it too, thanks to their bond in the circle.
Their combined Essence swirled, spinning out flat from edge to edge all around the Circle, waist high to the sisters.
Then a snap of blue electricity shot across the surface and an image appeared.
The Vision had been cast.
What they saw was the stage at the town hall, just the way it had looked earlier this evening. The candidates, Seth Hunter and Eleanor Griggs, were standing there at the podiums. It looked real enough to touch. It was like they were looking at it through a window. And, just as if they were looking through a window from the outside, there was no sound. There never was sound in a scrying image of a moment in time that had already passed. The power needed to create this rift in time and space was taxing enough on their strength. Maybe if they were a coven of twenty or so witches, they could coax a little sound to go with the picture. Maybe.
For now they didn’t need sound. They just needed to watch Seth die.
�
�He looks terrible,” Willow commented.
Callous, but true. He was swaying from side to side, just like Addie remembered, sweating and tugging at the neckline of his shirt. In another few moments, he would be dead. “We should try to go back from here,” she suggested to Kiera and Willow. “What I saw was the end of Seth Hunter. We need to see what happened before that.”
They focused their energies, each of them turning their left hands, at the same time, to the same degree. The image began to rewind.
Seth Hunter walked backward, behind the stage, through the heavy curtains. He stood there with Eleanor Griggs, and the two of them were chatting about something. They seemed fine with each other. Not upset. Not mad. They actually laughed a couple of times.
They saw Seth check the clock on his cellphone four times.
“The debate started late,” Addie explained. “Something held everyone up.”
“What was it?” Kiera asked.
“Well at first I thought maybe Seth had shown up late, but obviously he’s already here. Addie could only shake her head. “Now I don’t know.”
Willow leaned in closer to the image. “I don’t see a coffee cup in his hand, either.”
“Then we need to continue,” Kiera decided.
They went further back, watching Seth and Eleanor walk with odd, backward motions into the waiting room behind the stage area. Seth paced back and forth the whole time they were in there. Or rather, he paced forth and back, considering he was doing it backward. Eleanor, on the other hand, looked completely calm, sitting in one of the chairs in there, her hands folded and hooked around one knee. She didn’t have a care in the world.
She seemed very confident that she was going to win the debate, and maybe the election, too.
“Almost,” Willow observed, “like she knew her opponent would be out of her way soon.”
“Yes,” Kiera agreed, “just like she knew Seth would be dead very shortly.”
Willow stretched with a loudly exaggerated yawn. “Well, there you go. Now that we’ve found our prime suspect we don’t need to do this anymore. Let’s call it a night and all get back to who we were doing. Um. I mean, back to what we were doing.”
Considering the color of Willow’s thoughts at that moment, Addie had a suspicion that she had meant it exactly how she had said it the first time.
The image froze, under Addie’s direction, showing Seth and Eleanor in that room. Addie squinted at it, and rotated her hand to move the angle back and forth. “No, look. There’s still no coffee cup here. He must have already dumped it. He’s sweating. Tugging at his collar. The poisoning happened somewhere else. It might not have been Eleanor after all. We need to go back further.”
The disappointment radiating from Willow was palpable. “Of course we do.”
Concentrating, the three of them set time moving backward again.
Seth waved hello to Eleanor as he left the room. He marched backward down the hall, obviously in a hurry, and then he was moving into the bathroom, the door swinging open behind him as he backed his way in.
The image blurred. Static streaked across the scrying Circle.
“Too many walls between us and the past,” Kiera said, pointing out the obvious. “If we can tune in what’s going on in that room…”
The picture of Seth cleared under their efforts and then went hazy again. In the bathroom, a plastic travel cup jumped from the sink top to his hand, and then a dark brown liquid was pouring up from the drain and into the cup.
“There!” Addie said excitedly. “That’s where he dumped out the coffee.”
“So where did he get it from?” Willow asked. “That’s not a Styrofoam cup, it’s a travel mug. It’s not from a restaurant. He must have brought it from home… oh, come on. Do we really have to go all the way back to when he woke up this morning?”
“Hopefully not,” Kiera agreed. “However, we will go back as far as we need to.”
The scrying circle filled with gray and black streaks of static. The image was lost entirely to them until the moment Seth was first entering the building, and he was outside again, rushing up the sidewalk butt first, strolling backward through time. The further away he went, the more clarity the image lost.
Kiera frowned. “Or at least, we will go back as far as the scrying allows.”
He was there again, heading to the parking lot.
Gone again, covered up by white noise and static.
In his car, staring ahead through the windshield as his car rolled backward through the streets of Shadow Lake.
Gone again.
Starting his car in his driveway, and taking the key out of the ignition, and getting out to walk to his house, backward.
The travel mug was still in his hand.
Gone again.
The static remained for several minutes this time, despite the sisters pouring in more of their Essence to try and maintain this link with the past. Addie felt perspiration on her forehead and at the nape of her neck from the exertion. The candles in the room flickered. She could feel the frustration Willow was experiencing. She felt Kiera’s distracted thoughts.
She pushed her own stray thoughts about Lucian Knight aside, stuffing them into a little black box in her mind before either of her sisters could see them.
Then she concentrated on the scrying.
Seth popped back into crisp clarity, seen through the window of the past, sipping at the coffee from his travel mug. Weird to see the liquid going back into the mug. Addie tried not to think about it, focusing on the image she was seeing instead. Seth was in his kitchen, and he was reading a news site on his tablet in one hand, and now without looking he reached over with his other hand, and set his travel mug down.
No, this would be him picking it up, since everything was moving in reverse.
A digital clock on Seth’s counter read 5:18… 5:17… nearly an hour before the debates were supposed to start and everyone had been at the town hall.
“There!” Addie exclaimed. “Right there. This was where he first drinks from his coffee. This is where he was poisoned!”
Willow did not share in her enthusiasm. “Great. That’s wonderful. Except, if you’ll notice, he’s by himself. There’s no one else in the room with him. So who poisoned his drink?”
That was the right question, Addie had to agree, and with it a little of her own enthusiasm waned. Did it maybe happen earlier in the day? Had he been sipping poisoned Maxwell House all day long?
No. Here. Right here in front of them was the moment that started Seth Hunter’s death. It would be just under an hour later when he actually died from the poison, but this was where it started.
“Stop the image.” Addie held her palm out flat toward the Circle. “I want to see something.”
Her sisters made the same hand motion, stopping the image where it was. Static streaked across it once more, moving left to right at different points and obscuring little aspects of the scene.
Addie panned her hand to the right, turning the image of the room in that direction. A door came into view, and a cupboard, and more static, and the refrigerator, and more static…
And the image of someone standing there, dark and indistinct, at the corner of Seth Hunter’s vision.
When Addie tried to turn the image further, the static took the whole thing until there was nothing left. This was as far back as they were going to be able to go.
She panned back left, and things became a little clearer. The clock read 5:17. Seth was reaching for his mug of poisoned coffee.
“There is someone else there,” Addie said, “but you can just barely see them.”
Kiera nodded. “True. This is someone at the very edges of Seth Hunter’s vision, and apparently the very edges of his awareness. He is concentrating on the debate that was supposed to happen tonight. He isn’t thinking about whoever this is.”
“Which means,” Willow said with superb disinterest, “that we aren’t going to be able to get a clear picture of whoever this
is. Maybe if we could stretch time back even further, but we can’t.”
“But he’s not alone,” Addie insisted. “There was someone else there with him.”
Willow shrugged. “Is he married? Does he have a girlfriend?”
Addie shook her head, still trying to work the image around to get a look at the shadowy figure in the background. “Seth? No. He’s a confirmed bachelor.”
“Hmm. Then is this our murderer?”
The image refused to come clearer. She turned it this way, and then that way, and no matter how she spun it, nothing changed. Shadows and hazy images, and then always the scene scattered into static. She ran the image forward, and caught just a glimpse of the figure leaving Seth’s house, a good ten minutes before he did. It could have been anyone. Eleanor Griggs. Mac McDougal. Cavallo Raithmore. Anyone.
Frustrated, Addie made one intense push with her Essence, forcing it into the scrying Circle.
With a puff of actual smoke, the image fell apart.
The magic recoiled like a broken rubber band, lashing at the three sisters. It was a moment before everyone’s aura settled.
“Ow,” Willow complained. “For the love of Padraig, can you not do that again, please? There. Show’s over. Is that it, can we go now? Gary’s waiting for me.”
Kiera dropped her arms. “Yes. I think, actually, that we are done. The rest of what we need to learn must be learned in person. We will speak with the people involved tomorrow… oh.”
She stopped abruptly, but her thoughts still echoed through the Circle. Addie knew she was thinking about her son, and that tomorrow she wouldn’t have any time—or patience—for anything except talking to Alan.
“It’s all right,” Addie told her. “Willow and I can handle interviewing people tomorrow.”
Willow grimaced. “Do I have to? I seriously had plans with Gary for tomorrow.”
Addie shot her a look, and their emotions tangled.
“All right, all right,” Willow relented. “I’ll be there. We protect Shadow Lake, right?”
“Yes,” Kiera agreed. “We all do.”