Sweep - Stakes

by Sara Bourgeois

  “Is someone here with you?” I asked and nodded my head in the direction of the car.

  “Nope. That’s my new car. I bought it a couple of weeks ago.”

  I looked at Annika and she shrugged. Brody kept his car in the garage after it was finished, so no one noticed he’d switched vehicles. I would have thought Annika would have noticed, but she either got rides with Remy or drove the car Amelda had given her as a gift. She and Brody must have been more distant than I’d picked up on, but then again, he’d become far more distant from all of us over the last six months. I felt a pang of guilt for not noticing.

  “You’re just like mother said.” He’d stopped moving toward us. “I can see the wheels turning in your head. You’re trying to figure out exactly when things went bad, and you’re pretending to feel bad for not noticing.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m not pretending, Brody. If things were going bad for you, why didn’t you come to me?”

  “Or me,” Annika added.

  “We could have helped you,” I said. “I would have wanted to help you.”

  “I’d thought about it before that night,” he said and his shoulders slumped a little. “But the way I felt when I saw him killing her, I knew I was never going to be what you wanted me to be.”

  Chapter Nine

  I’ll skip over the part where we had to use magic to subdue my baby brother until Gunner could get there to arrest him. It’s too difficult for me to talk about. I will tell you, to the best of my recollection, what happened to Councilwoman Landers. Buckle up, because it’s not a pretty story.

  Brody had been in the archives looking for something that evening. He was done and was getting ready to leave for the night, but when he stepped off the elevator, he heard something. The sound traveled down the elevator shaft to him. He’d described it as a scream that had been cut off.

  He took the elevator back up and found Theodore standing over Councilwoman Landers. The funeral director was strangling her. She wasn’t dead yet, and Brody could have saved her. Instead, he got the vaguest idea of a revenge plot. Theodore wanted no part of Brody’s plans, but Brody threatened to rat him out to the sheriff unless they worked together.

  Theodore and Brody took Landers back to the funeral home and held her captive for a short while as they worked out the plan. Brody wanted to frame Kyle for the murder. He figured Theodore could make that happen.

  The twist is that Theodore said they could probably get Kyle to kill Landers himself. They didn’t need to pretend. He’d come running for a human victim if he thought he couldn’t get caught.

  Brody was skeptical, but he made the call. It turned out that Theodore was right. What he knew that no one else knew, even Brody, was that the funeral home had been disposing of bodies for the vampires for a long time. No one in Coventry knew. The vampire council didn’t know. None of the victims, until Vivian Landers, had come from Coventry. They were just disposed of here.

  So Kyle came and he happily killed Vivian. All of the stories he’d told us in jail where complete garbage. The key was to the funeral home. He had it so he could leave bodies there for Theodore to cremate after hours.

  When Lundgren had seen him, Kyle wasn’t trying to save Vivian. He thought he could use his vampire speed to leave the body there and no one would see him. Except something tripped him up long enough for Deputy Lundgren to see him. It was probably Brody’s magic.

  Lundgren was lucky that Kyle didn’t get the chance to kill him. I had no doubts he would have murdered him too.

  Kyle never turned Theodore in and vice versa. Both of them thought they had enough dirt on each other to keep the other quiet. What they didn’t count on was that Brody had lost the plot completely. He’d become a full-on dark witch.

  The vampire he’d let into Hangman’s House to attack me confessed to everything he knew in order to be spared. He wasn’t. Kyle only survived because he was in human custody. Amelda made sure to cast a spell that would hold him captive. We figured out he’d only been staying in jail to avoid casting suspicion on himself. Amelda took care of that. Not that he’d ever want to leave jail. The vampire council had vowed to hunt him down and take his head.

  Theodore never got to the point of being arrested. Before Brody parked his new car in my driveway and tried unsuccessfully to break into Hangman’s House, he’d paid Theodore a visit. That was one loose end he’d been able to tie up before his bloodlust took over and he came for me and Annika.

  It all came down to greed and jealousy. Theodore wanted Councilwoman Landers dead because she was on to him. Not the vampire thing, but she knew something was wrong. Vivian was just doing her job, and she paid with her life. As far as why her body was at the funeral home, well, the county morgue was full.

  Theodore happily volunteered to hold her until they had room, but he wasn’t doing a good deed. My guess, and it’s just a theory, was that he intended to “accidently” cremate her to eliminate evidence. It’s just my intuition, though, I had nothing concrete to back it up.

  Okay, back to my brother. Brody was jealous of Kyle. By that point, he viewed Annika as his possession. Seeing her have even the slightest inkling of feelings for someone else had flipped a switch in him.

  I’d just like to say that it wasn’t because he was a witch. That dark seed had been planted in him at a young age. It was my mother’s doing. She was a twisted individual. The human definition is narcissist. Mother had tried to poison Brody and I against each other, but all she’d done was poison her golden child. He’d never be okay.

  After that day, we didn’t see evil Meri anymore either. As best as we could figure, it was a demonic version of Meri manifesting to serve as Brody’s familiar. The evil in the world apparently had big plans for him, but his personality disorder made it impossible for him to become some sort of nemesis. Brody’s malice had burned too hot and he’d taken himself out.

  I got the feeling it wasn’t the last attempt, though. The evil in the world needed to balance the equation. Amelda said it could get worse. Remy and I getting married was one step closer to some sort of prophesy of peace. When it was fulfilled, Tuttlesmith and Skeenbauer witches would come together and do great things. The darkness wanted that stopped at any cost.

  “I have faith in you,” Amelda said. “I’m sorry we weren’t kinder to you when you came to us. I was blind, but luckily, my grandchildren knew better.”

  Epilogue

  It was a nice evening, so we decided to sit out on the front porch and drink some lemonade. Meri was sprawled out in the grass soaking up what was left of the setting sun.

  I felt a twinge of annoyance when the sheriff’s cruiser pulled up in front of my house. Not only was I keenly aware that Gunner Black didn’t like me very much, but the sight of that car pulling up at my house still brought back a twinge of unsettling memories. It had faded with time, and I was very much in love with Remy, but the sight was still unnerving. It was as if I still expected Thorn to come rolling back into town and make a selfish attempt to ruin everything.

  But, that didn’t matter just then. It wasn’t Thorn, it was Gunner, and he was probably at my house to lecture us about something. Like, he knew we were up to no good, and he was going to figure it out.

  He got out of the car and strode confidently up the driveway. “I need to talk to you,” he said once he reached the bottom of the porch steps.

  “What about?” I asked.

  “Not you,” he said. “Her.” Gunner nodded toward Annika.

  “You want to talk to me?” she asked, but she stood up and set her lemonade down.

  “Would you like a glass of lemonade?” I offered.

  “Thank you, but I won’t be staying long,” he said with a stiff smile, but he was trying.

  Annika joined him at the bottom of the steps. “What’s up, officer?”

  “Can we go somewhere…. Maybe a little more private?” he said and looked at me.

  Annika scrunched up her nose and narrowed her eyes at
him. She was as confused as I was about what was going on.

  “We can talk here. I’m going to tell them everything you say anyway.”

  “I figured as much,” Gunner said and rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “Okay. Here’s the thing. You pick terrible men.”

  I had half a mind to protest since one of them was my brother, but Gunner was right. I had to stifle a giggle at the look of abject indignation on Annika’s face, though.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t mean to offend you, Annika, but you seem to gravitate toward horrible men.”

  “So, what does that have to do with you anyway?” Her nostrils flared when she said that part.

  “I bet it’s been a long while since you had a real man treat you like a real woman should be treated.”

  “So?” Some of the fight had gone out of her already.

  “So let me.” Gunner softened considerably too.

  “Let you?”

  “Come out with me tonight, Annika. Dinner, a movie, or whatever you want. I know it’s probably too soon but screw it. I know you’re hurting right now, and I think I can make it better.”

  “Right now?” she asked.

  “Right now,” he said with a smile.

  She turned back toward me and Remy. We both offered her a nod.

  “All right. Sure.”

  When they were gone, I turned to Remy. “We’re never getting rid of him now.”

  “Probably not,” Remy answered. “We’re probably going to have to invite him to the wedding too.”

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “He’s good for her. If anyone needs someone like him, it’s Annika.”

  “She’ll give him a run for his money for sure,” I said.

  “Yeah, but in the end, she’ll twist that man around her little finger. Did you see him? He was already halfway done in.”

  “Not as done in as you are for me,” I said.

  “Not even close.”

  “Oh, gawd, you guys are gross,” Meri called from his patch of grass in the front yard.

  “Mind your business, cat,” Remy responded.

  “Whatever.”

  The whole scene made me smile on the inside and out. Maybe we could finally get some peace. I was going to get married to the love of my life. We had a beautiful sunset bathing us in beautiful shades of orange and pink. The air was crisp and cool. It wasn’t there yet, but there could be a new season around the corner. Literally and metaphorically. So, of course, a strange car I didn’t recognize pulled up in front of the house as I was getting up to get more lemonade.

  “Now who could that be?”

  Grab the next book in the Wicked Witches of Coventry series here: Broom and Board

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  © Sara Bourgeois 2019

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons alive or dead is a coincidence.