Darla raised the mop in an awkward salute. “I’ll lock up if you’re not back before I leave.”
I wasn’t worried.
Most of the shops were closed Mondays, their old-timey windows dark. Main Street was deserted, the scent of someone’s fire hanging in the chill air.
A battered green pickup rolled slowly past, and I edged closer to the railing of the stone bridge to give it more space. In the deepening twilight, the truck’s headlights barely illuminated the empty street and closed doors. A metal shutter creaked and banged shut, and I managed not to jump.
Lengthening my strides, I clutched the box of pastries more tightly. My tasseled, grape-colored purse bounced against my hip.
I strained my senses, scanning for threats. The animal that had attacked Alex was a scavenger. But I remembered that sense of being watched, and I shivered.
An animal hadn’t been watching us outside Angela’s house. There had been too much awareness in that gaze. It must have been the killer… Assuming the killer had been human. But it had to be, didn't it?
So why was I thinking of the killer as an it rather than a he or she?
Light streamed from Angela’s square windows, and a blue Honda sat in the driveway. I glanced up and down the road, still and quiet now that David and his music were gone. Insides quivering, I trotted up the porch steps and rapped on the front door.
Within the house, a chair scraped back. Footsteps moved toward me.
I glanced over my shoulder and shifted the box in my hands.
Angela opened the door. “Jayce?” She opened it wider and jammed her hands in the pockets of her sleek, purple hoodie. Her knuckles pressed against the stretchy fabric. “Is everything all right?” She blinked through red-rimmed eyes. Her short, dark hair was mussed, and she was wearing black yoga pants. I guessed I’d woken her from a nap rather than exercise though.
“Hi.” Guilt twinged through me, and I bit my bottom lip. “I probably should have called, but I didn't have your number.” I thrust the box toward her. “I was closing up Ground and thought I'd bring over some pastries.”
She took the box and stared at the pink cardboard for a long moment. “A condolence call. Thank you.”
“If this is a bad time—”
“No. No, it’s not. I just… I just don’t know what to do with myself or say to anyone. It’s all so…” She raked her free hand through her hair. It stood up in spikes that gleamed red beneath the overhead light.
“I’m deeply sorry for your loss.” Sorrow tightened my throat, and I swallowed. “I didn’t know David well, but he seemed like a decent guy. How can I help?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s possible.” She shook herself. “Sorry. You must be freezing. Come in.”
I followed Angela into the faded rose living room.
She laid the pastry box on the coffee table and gestured to the couch.
I sat.
She dropped into the overstuffed lounge chair opposite.
“Pastries are perfect,” she said. “I can't go into the kitchen to heat anything. Not with…” She bit her bottom lip and looked away. “People have been bringing by casseroles, and I haven't even been able to put them in the freezer. They're piled on the back porch. It’s cold enough outside that they’ll keep, but I worry an animal will… find them.” A quake rippled her pixie-like form. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God.”
Unspeaking, I reached across the table and grasped her hand.
The sobs wracking her body subsided, and she released her grip. She wiped her eyes. Her hands dropped to the arms of the dusty-pink chair. “It's strange,” she said. “After he came back, he never felt like my brother. I'm shocked by what happened – he was my brother. But a part of me feels I didn't lose him yesterday. I lost him when he disappeared, all those years ago.”
“I'm so sorry you’re going through this.”
“The police found notes.” She sagged against the chair cushions.
My ears pricked. “Notes?”
“Poisoned pen letters. Can you believe they still call them that? Or at least, that's what the sheriff called them. I'd call them blackmail.”
“Someone was blackmailing David?” Candace had mentioned poisoned pen letters as well. Was this the connection between the deaths of her husband and David Senator?
“No.” She stared at her hands. “No. David had written the notes. He blamed those boys for his disappearance. I guess we all did.”
“What boys?”
“They’re men now. Wharton. Eclectus. Alex.” She leaned forward and opened the box between us. Angela studied the pastries and extracted a bear claw. “We always wondered the real reason he'd been in the woods at night.”
I frowned. “I don't understand.”
“David was on the wrestling team. The team roughed him up, took him to the woods, tied him to a tree and left him there. Or that's what David told me, when he returned last year. Because of them, he was alone in the woods. Because of them, he was taken.”
Taken. A more menacing word than disappeared. And more accurate. “But why?”
She picked a slivered almond off the top of the pastry and stuck it on her tongue. “Hazing.”
“They hazed David then, so David was blackmailing Alex now? Alex was one of the team members?” And Eclectus had been on the team as well. “The evil magician,” I muttered.
Her head jerked up. “What?”
I shook myself. “Something David told me.”
“He told you—” She swallowed. “Eclectus. My brother called him that because of his name.”
“And the letters?”
She sniffed. “I didn't read them. The police wouldn't let me. I just saw the paper cutouts before they took them away.”
“Wait… You mean cutout letters from a newspaper?” That sealed it. The letter Candace had mentioned must have come from David. But that didn't explain the murders. I could see Alex killing his blackmailer, but why would both the blackmailer and his victim die?
“The letters looked like something out of an old movie.” She met my gaze. “The old David would never have done something so hateful.” She returned the uneaten bear claw to the box and rubbed her palms on the thighs of her yoga pants.
Angela swallowed, her movements jerky. “The teenager who came out of the woods wasn't the same as the one who’d walked into them. None of them are.” Her voice rose. “None of them are right.”
The mantel clock ticked in the silence.
I shifted, clasping my hands between my knees, and looked away. Karin had only been gone a week. My sister wasn’t like the others. It wasn’t the same.
It had only been a week.
One week.
The clock chimed the quarter hour, and I shivered.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Because I can't fight crime every day, I spent Tuesday and Wednesday doing what I get paid for: barista-ing. It was a relief to step away from the murders. Plus, I love Ground. I love chatting with customers. I love talking up my coffee ground (plus magic!) scrub. I love the swish of the espresso machine and the scent of the beans and the funky hangings on the rough brick walls.
Ground hummed with conversation and laughter. And if I'd juiced the atmosphere with a little good-mood magic, what was the harm?
I stuffed my hands into my apron pockets. Besides, my good-mood spell didn’t influence tipping. That would be unethical. The spell took time to have any effect – a lot longer than it took to order coffee and drop a tip into the jar. I do think about ethics, in spite of what certain sisters may think.
The day chugged on, sunlight shifting across the laminate floor. Customers trickled from the café, and finally Darla and I closed up. Turning the chairs upside down, we set them on tables, and Darla swept the floor. I wiped the counters and loaded mugs and dishes into the kitchen's industrial dishwasher.
Darla swept through the
blue-and-white curtains into the kitchen. “Okay, I’m off.” Laying her purse on the end table, she reached for her parka, hanging on a peg beside the closet.
My breathing turned shallow. Suddenly, I didn’t want her to leave, didn’t want to be alone. It wasn’t fear – not exactly. I wasn’t afraid. But what if whatever monster had dined on Alex and David was out there and hungry?
“Hold on,” I said and ran upstairs to my apartment. I grabbed the twinkle lights and hurried down the steps, where Darla waited in the narrow kitchen. “Too early?” I bit my bottom lip.
Her broad face broke into a grin, and she replaced her coat on the hook. “Definitely not. We were starting to look like the block’s Scrooge without them.”
I made us hot cocoa, garnished with a lashing of whipped cream and dusted with cinnamon. Laughing, we strung the lights around the front windows and hung them from the rafters. And we managed not to bang our thumbs with the hammer once.
I wrapped the lights around a support beam and used the motion to weave a protection spell around Darla. When a golden grid of magical protection surrounded her aura, I relaxed. Maybe I was being paranoid, but a man was dead, and something was out there.
Gulping the final dregs of my cocoa, I turned off the overhead lights and looped an arm over Darla’s shoulders. The twinkle lights glittered like fireflies, making the polished wooden tables gleam.
She sighed. “I’m so glad you reopened Ground after the fire. I needed this.”
“Me too.” The coffeeshop kept me… grounded.
Following Darla to the red-paned front door, I watched her amble down the darkened sidewalk. I sniffed, scenting snow in the air. The old gold mining town was a gingerbread fantasy world, lights gleaming invitingly in the windows. But Main Street had always been a fantasy. It was fun for the tourists, and beautiful for everyone. But the real town – where residents went to laundromats and got haircuts and bought groceries – was on the streets behind Main’s false fronts.
Darla turned a corner, and I stepped further onto the sidewalk, staring after her vanished form.
Brayden was working another double shift – he'd been working a lot of them lately, and I wasn’t happy about that. But he’d always been depressingly responsible. I wouldn’t change him for the world.
I turned to study the twinkle lights bordering Ground's windows. Because of its red windowpanes, Ground was almost holiday enough with just the lights.
I'd wait until after Thanksgiving to add greenery, I decided, stamping my feet on the cold pavement. A wreath for the door and boughs for the bar, and Brayden helping…
Shivering in the cold, I smoothed the front of my sweater. His schedule would calm down once Terry left.
I glanced down the quiet street, and my fingertips pressed into my palms. The idea of returning upstairs to my apartment didn’t appeal.
I hurried inside the café and grabbed my thick, silver parka off the hook in the kitchen. The fabric rustled as I shrugged it on. I returned outside and strolled down the sidewalk, stopping to admire shop windows. Angela's boutique was especially enticing, twinkle lights wound around mannequins in trendy winter shades.
A siren bleeped and broke into a wail fifteen feet from my ear.
I jumped, muscles contracting.
A sheriff's SUV raced down Main Street and turned left. Other, distant sirens joined the chorus.
I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
Another sheriff's car flashed past. A third.
Something bad was happening, and dread curled my shoulders inward.
I stopped on the stone bridge and realized with a start I'd been walking in the same direction as the black-and-whites.
Unthinking, I continued forward as if tugged by quicksand.
I turned down a street lined with skeletal elms, gloomy pines, crooked houses.
Another sheriff's SUV screeched past and turned the corner. I rounded the bend, stumbled to a halt.
Blue and red lights cascaded in a sickening fury across the front of Candace Mansfield's Victorian.
The psychic scent of death, acrid and empty, flowed from the house.
“Not again,” I whispered and pressed a hand to the front of my cold parka.
A-frame traffic barricades surrounded left-behind construction equipment in the center of the road. Their flashing amber lights combined with those of the sheriff's cars in a sickening, disco array.
My scalp prickled, a heat of awareness growing between my shoulder blades.
I was being watched.
My fists clenched. I worked to center myself, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps. This time, I’d find the thing—
“Jayce,” Karin said in a low voice.
Briefly, I closed my eyes. Of course, she'd be here, though how my sister had intuited… “Did you know this would happen?” I whispered.
She jammed her hands in the pockets of her knee-length, navy parka. “If I'd had any idea, I would have tried to stop it.” Karin buried her chin in her thick blue scarf. Her auburn hair was hidden beneath a matching cap. “Do you think Candace…?”
Guns drawn, bulky silhouettes fanned from the house. They were searching for something.
I swallowed. Candace had wanted to tell me more about her husband, Alex. If I’d pushed her harder, would she still be alive? I shook my head. Maybe. But there was something else happening too. Dark magic was in the air.
“They're looking for an animal,” Karin said.
“It’s not an animal,” I croaked. An animal wouldn’t have raised the hairs on the back of my neck, wouldn’t have watched me with such malignant intensity.
“No,” she said. “There’s magic nearby.”
I wished Brayden were here, and sudden anger flooded my veins. He wasn't here, and that thing, whatever it was, was watching. My neck tightened. “We need to find it before the cops do.”
“I agree. But I'm not sure we're ready to take it on, whatever it is. Unless you already know what it is we’re hunting?” she asked pointedly.
“No,” I said wearily. Did she have to be so damned suspicious? “And we won't know unless we get a look at it.”
“And what if it attacks us? We don't even know what it is, much less if we can stop it.”
“It's going after things that are already dead,” I said roughly, “and the way those cops are acting, it's just eaten. Now's the perfect time to hunt it. And it's close, can you feel it?”
“How do you know it’s—?” She turned her head, scanning the street. “I don't feel things like you do.”
“But you do see it?” I asked. “You said you sensed magic.”
She squinted. “I see… something.”
We turned in unison toward the east. The shadows of the clouds moved swiftly over the mountains, so that they appeared to be undulating, great beasts, shifting in their sleep.
“There,” we said, pointing, and smiled bleakly at each other. We might not work magic the same way, but we got the same results when it counted.
“You said you can feel it watching,” she said. “Do you still feel it?”
I shook my head. “I think whatever it is has moved on.”
“It is an it, isn’t it? Not a person, not another witch, like us?”
I wanted to shriek. How should I know? But I closed my eyes and prodded gently with my other senses. I felt… hunger. Awareness. Animalistic, but there was intelligence too. “I’m not sure.”
Gun drawn, a sheriff's deputy crept toward us.
“Let's go,” I said.
We hurried down the road and away from the cordon of deputies.
On Main Street, I pointed toward the stone bridge. We crossed it and ducked down the narrow trail to the creek, heading east. The creek trickled sluggishly through a low cleft. Above us chain link fences lined the top of the hill, glowing with backyard lights.
“Have you considered what we're going to do if we find this thing?�
�� my sister asked.
“Send it home.”
“How?”
Uh… An uncomfortable warmth spread through me. “A go-home spell.”
“I don't know that one.”
“We'll make it up.”
“That's what I thought.” She rummaged in her purse and drew out a massive flashlight, handed it to me.
I took it but didn't turn it on. It felt solid in my hands, and I swung it experimentally, striking the tops of a low bush. “Sorry,” I muttered to the plant. But the flashlight made a good club.
“It will take the three of us to send it home. You do realize that? We’ll need Lenore. Any serious magic always has taken the three of us.” Karin reached into her ginormous bag again and pulled out a gun.
“Are you kidding me?” I whispered, stomach jumping. But it was just like Karin to come prepared.
“You didn't think I'd come here unarmed.” She smacked a magazine into the gun’s grip and pulled back the slide, chambering a round.
My jaw set. “I still don't know how you knew to come here at all.”
She shrugged.
“Have you got a license for that?” I asked, eyeing the weapon.
“Of course. But not to concealed carry. So, let's not get caught.”
“And people say I’m the reckless one,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
We hiked upward, working together to track the creature. The elevation increased. The snow along the side of the trail grew thicker. The houses on the bank above us grew taller — two and three-story Victorians with turrets.
I followed the bloody thread of the creature’s appetite. When my sense of the thing we hunted wavered, Karin saw its psychic trail. And when her vision clouded, the miasma of its violent hunger tugged me forward.
We weren't a bad team, especially since she could sometimes read my thoughts.
I felt her glancing smile and averted my gaze. Being an open book to Karin wasn’t always a good thing. I'd have to be more careful.
We moved as silently as we could. I started at every cracking branch beneath our feet, at every rock kicked by a clumsy boot down the trail.
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