by Melody Raven
Before the car even came to a stop, one of the hounds jumped out of an open window. No, not open. Broken. A broken window.
“What the hell happened to my mom’s car?” she asked as it came to a stop and the second hound, Zeus, leapt out the window. He was followed by Bastian and Derek, who exited out of the door like normal. Both of the men took a second to stretch while the hounds ignored all the other members of the search party and bounded into the woods.
“Should we be worried about them?” asked Sam.
Derek let out a breath as he looked in the direction they ran off in. “Uhhh, no?”
“Well, as long as you’re sure.”
“Holy crap,” said Claire as she approached. “Those really were hellhounds! How did you get two pet hellhounds?”
“I think the question is how did they get a pet Derek.” Bastian winked.
“I think when I came back from the dead, I brought something they like. As far as I can tell, they’re harmless as long as I don’t want anyone hurt.”
“And if you’re not being a douchebag,” said Bastian.
“Were you a douchebag?” asked Dante.
“Not me.”
Sam’s heart flipped over. “Wait. Who did they go after?”
“No one good,” assured Derek. “It was that guy looking for Claire. One of the families.”
“Phillip.” She winced. “Of course they’d want Claire still.”
“Well then, all the more reason to find this diary and see what we have to do to take out the darkness once and for all.” Derek looked around where the cars were parked. “Does this seem like the right place?”
The road had been in progressively worse and worse shape for the past five miles. They had stopped where they were because a wide tree had fallen at some point, blocking the road from any cars. From the looks of it, the tree had fallen years ago. A good sign that they were in the right place. “I’m thinking so.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Bastian. “Move the tree.”
Sam snorted before she realized he was serious. “Wait, you actually want me to do that?”
He looked confused. “You’re the most powerful witch there is. Therefore, yes, I think you can move one small tree.”
She tilted her head to get a better look at the tree that had to be about two feet across. “Small. Yeah, sure.”
“Just think about what you did to me earlier when you tried to break my back. Look at the tree and make it disappear.”
“I wasn’t trying to make you disappear. I just wanted you to be safe.” Which she now realized was probably a lie considering she was taking him back to the place he had died.
“You can do it, Sam.” Claire set a hand on her shoulder to give an assuring squeeze.
“We can try walking,” she pointed out.
Derek shook his head. “We have no idea how far. Since I don’t know what is going to be in that town, I’m guessing there’s more than one safeguard to keep people out. So we might have to get out fast, which would mean having cars there, not running a few miles on foot. I think Bastian knows your limits more than any of us. If he thinks you can do it, you probably can.”
It was a scary day when Derek was agreeing with Bastian. But she knew that if Claudia had been here, that tree would be gone already, and theoretically, anything Claudia could do, she could do.
“Okay.” She took a steadying breath. Then, with a quick nod and working up all her strength, she shot everything she had at the tree.
Nothing.
Everyone kind of exhaled at the same time and looked at her utter lack of progress.
“That was underwhelming,” said Sam with a dejected sigh.
“It was your first try,” said Angela helpfully.
Yeah, but she expected something to happen on the first try. At least a little wiggle or something. So she went back to an old standby. She balled her hands into fists and called the fire to her. In seconds it ignited, surrounding her with its familiar warmth. That’s the stuff.... At least she could still do something. “Stand back,” she warned. Then, holding her hands in front of her, she shot the fire out and toward the tree.
Nothing.
She dropped her hands. The flames extinguished immediately. Okay, so now she knew this wasn’t just her. “I think something’s—”
All of a sudden, a hellhound, followed closely by the second, jumped out at them. But they had come from out of nowhere, as if they’d teleported from a space directly in front of them. The dogs ran right for Derek and started to prance around his legs while the other members of the search party all inched away, even Bastian, who had spent a few hours in the car with the hounds.
“So...” she said.
“There is no tree,” finished Derek.
“You’re kidding.” Angela walked for the stump. But as she started walking, she just kept going and the stump seemed to... move. As though it got farther with every step she took. “This is trippy.” She turned back to meet up with them.
“So I guess we’re just going to go for it,” said Sam. “Drive through until we get to wherever were going?”
“The dogs could do it,” said Angela.
“Hounds,” said Sam and Derek at the same time.
“There’s going to be a lot of magic in there,” warned Bastian. “Spells designed to keep people the hell out.”
“So probably not a pile of bunnies for us to cuddle?” asked Dante.
“That depends. Are you terrified of bunnies?”
“Oh, this is a greatest fear kind of thing? Well, everyone get ready. My ex, Jasmine, is going to be in there and she’s going to be pissed....”
Claire snorted and rolled her eyes. “Let’s get this show on the road. Should we call the dogs, er, hounds back?”
“Yeah, they don’t like to do things like come when I call.” Derek looked around the overgrown woods, looking for any sign of the animals. “They’ll show up eventually.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Let’s get going.” Derek went back to his car and slammed the door a tad too hard. Sam frowned as she tossed the keys to Claire. “Take my car. I’m going to go with him.” She ran over to the passenger door and jumped in. Bastian notably didn’t come into the SUV and stayed back with everyone else getting into the second car.
“We should go first. Make sure nothing horrible happens.” Without waiting for her to respond, he threw the gear in drive and started right for the log.
Sam held her breath as they seemed to get close, but they never hit it. Like with Angela, the tree seemed to get farther and farther away and then, just like magic, they were through. There was no log. Just a long stretch of overgrown road in front of them.
Derek pulled the car to a stop and looked over to Sam. “We should call and tell them to come on in. I don’t want us to get separated.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that as soon as you tell me what’s wrong.”
Derek shrugged. “Nothing’s wrong. I have a headache and I want to get this over with. Can you call someone please?”
She raised a brow at his tone and stared him down as she took out her phone, calling Claire to let her know to come on in. As she hung up, she never stopped staring him down.
“Sorry,” he said finally. “I really do have a headache, but I’ll try to be nicer.”
She smiled sweetly at him. “Thank you. Because I have a feeling that headache is about to get a hell of a lot worse.”
They looked ahead of them at the road, where overcast skies cast everything in gray shadows, making the midday scene look later in the day.
“There they are,” said Derek as the other car approached.
Sam looked over her shoulder and verified that it was Claire. In the woods, a flash of moving shadow caught her attention and she saw a hellhound bounding through the woods. “The hounds seem happy. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
“I think that if a hellhound was running in fear, we should all be afraid.�
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She watched the dark forms disappear into the woods. “Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Maybe. Is it working?”
“Maybe.” The corner of her mouth hooked up and she studied their surroundings. After about a mile, they finally started to pass by a few staggered houses. The brick had become obscured by some vines and moss, working to camouflage the little homes.
“Do you want to start looking here?”
Derek shook his head and kept driving. “I want to start at the end and work our way back. It’s like carrying out a very big warrant. Methodical. Room by room, foot by foot, making sure nothing gets overlooked. It might take a while, but we’ll know for sure if we’re missing anything or not.”
That sounded horribly boring, but she’d prefer a boring search over the terrors she thought were coming. “Does this all seem....”
“Don’t say it,” he warned.
“Uneventful,” she continued.
“Well, the day is still young. Just keep on your toes. Let me know if you see anything that makes you unsettled.”
“Will do.” She noticed one of the hounds in the woods again and turned her head for a better look. As her eyes scanned over the trees, for one flash of a moment, she could’ve sworn Claudia stood right there at the side of the road.
She blinked and the image was gone. Was she imagining it?
“Did you see something?” asked Derek, obviously picking up on her body language.
“Yeah,” she said, still studying the woods. “I saw a ghost.”
“Please, not more dead people.” Claire ran a hand through her hair. “I’m really sick of dead people coming back.”
“Thanks,” said Derek from where he leaned against the borrowed SUV with a hand against his head.
“Well, not you obviously. Or me, for that matter. But everyone else. No more coming back.”
“They’re not real ghosts,” said Bastian. “Ghosts draw people who want to see passed loved ones. If anything, these are guards. They might take the shape of people you know or say things no one should ever know about, but it’s all a lie designed to make you get out of here as quick as possible.”
“But they can’t actually hurt you?” asked Claire.
Bastian was quiet and that was answer enough.
“Either way, we’re here. Let’s make the best of it and get out before any ghost or apparitions can fuck up our day. First things first. Is there any magical way to find the diary sooner?”
“There are a bunch of ways. Do you have a picture of the item? Personal belonging of the person who wrote the diary? Blood of the author? Blood of the person who stole it? Blood of a recent sacrifice? Blood of a—”
“We get it,” bit out Derek. “We’ll do a cold search then. I don’t want to sound like a horror movie cliché, but if we want to get this done, we’re going to need to split up. But I don’t want any group more than a hundred feet from someone else. If not within sight, within shouting distance. A quiet shouting too. We’ll do one building at a time and go through each room in pairs. Do it methodically. Make sure nothing gets missed. We’re not going to spend five hours here and then find out we were unorganized, got it?”
Claire waited to see whether anyone was going to object to his taking control, but even Bastian and Dante seemed in agreement with the orders. She hated the idea of splitting up, but she was comforted that they were staying close to everyone else. So it wasn’t really splitting up. At least that’s what she kept telling herself.
“What are the pairs?” asked Parker.
“I’ll stick with Sam. Claire and Dante. You and Bastian. I’m assuming no one has any complaints.”
Claire glanced at Dante out of the corner of her eye and then looked away. She really didn’t want to spend a few hours alone with him, but that wasn’t something she could say out loud. Especially after he’d come all this way to help her. “Sounds good to me. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Claire looked around them on the street. They were in the middle of Main Street, and she could tell it used to be a very nice, serene place to live. But not anymore.
The overcast skies sent a shadow over everything and all the buildings seemed to have a gray tint. Some of the windows were broken and others boarded up, a sign of the less peaceful days that had occurred before the town had been cordoned off for good. “What exactly happened here?” She looked over to Bastian. He had been here. He had died here. He was one of the few people who really knew the secrets held inside this desolate place.
“Same thing that’s happening in New York. The darkness starts with one person and then gets stronger and stronger until it was touching every corner. Here it happened a lot faster than the city. Less people. Less witches to protect it. By the time Claudia even knew something was wrong, there wasn’t anyone left who wasn’t affected. We came in to do the cleanup and containment.”
“What happened to all the people?” asked Dante.
Bastian squinted as he looked out over the town. “Like I said. They were cleaned up and contained. We couldn’t let any of the darkness out.”
“And at what part of this did you die?” asked Angela.
He shook his head. “Let’s get this over with. This place is going to kick us out sooner rather than later.”
Dante pointed to the closest building to them that also marked the end of Main Street. “Looks like this is the best place to start. Who’s in the mood for Ma’s home cooking?”
The small restaurant had a red awning that was now hanging in tatters and blowing in the soft breeze.
“I think my appetite is gone.”
“Too bad, hun. Because dinner’s on me.”
“If I have to listen to this all day, the ghosts can kill me now,” said Bastian from behind them.
Dante ignored him and reached out and took her hand in his. “We have the kitchen.” He led Claire through the empty tables.
The most disconcerting thing was how pristine everything was. Except for a coating of dust, all the tables and chairs and centerpieces were exactly where they had been. As though it could be open for business in just a few hours.
She tried to imagine how quickly everything had gone downhill. Abandoned at the drop of a hat. She ran her hand over one of the plastic tablecloths, leaving a trail in the thick dust. “So, you want to start in the room with all the knives in the haunted town?” she asked, only half joking.
“Like you’ve never wanted to rummage through everything in the kitchen of a restaurant,” he pointed out. He found the swinging doors that led to the cramped kitchen. This wasn’t exactly a five-star establishment, so she could imagine that during a busy dinner service, the cramped quarters would lead to hot tempers between the wait and cook staff. During her time on the streets, she’d worked a few dishwashing jobs. They were good for getting paid under the table and not having to give out a Social Security number.
It wasn’t just because she didn’t want her parents to find her. She hadn’t even known her Social when she’d run away from home. It wasn’t the kind of thing a normal teen would know, and she wasn’t smart enough at the time to collect important stuff like that before she left.
Now that Dante had her new identity set up, she’d already memorized her Social Security number, driver’s license number and credit card number. Because some things she didn’t want to be without again.
“So...” said Dante. “We’re looking for a diary.”
“A diary that should tell us how to use me or Derek against the darkness. There was something in it that was so good that Jackson felt the need to use it as leverage against the darkness. Now we’re going to get that leverage.”
“Assuming he wasn’t lying to us.” Dante started to open and close doors, getting the search underway.
“I don’t think he was.”
He paused and glanced over at her. “You really think he can be trusted? Not a great track record there.”
“I don’t know.” She
started going through cabinets to avoid looking at him. “It’s just a feeling I got.”
“I know it was hard for you to see him again.”
She swallowed but didn’t say anything. Jackson was the last thing she wanted to talk about, but he was kind of an unavoidable subject considering he was the reason they had all come here. “It wasn’t the best day all around.”
“What happened between the two of you?”
Claire froze. Dante wasn’t supposed to know anything happened. Had he sensed something? Had Jackson contacted him somehow? Now that he was alive and running loose, who knew what kind of havoc he would wreak on her life. She was the one who killed him, after all. She had a feeling forgiveness wasn’t in his nature.
“You know,” she lied. “I found out he was like me and he tried to help. I killed him.”
“If anything else went on, you can tell me.”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut. Not now. She couldn’t have this conversation now, when she was going to be spending the next few hours alone with Dante. She slammed the cabinet she was looking through shut harder than she intended and opened the one closer to her. “We have a lot of work to do.”
“I didn’t realize you couldn’t talk and look at the same time.”
“What do you want from me?” she snapped. “What do you want me to say? I killed the guy, Dante. So yeah, he bothers me. He bothers me in ways I don’t think I can tell you. Just leave it.”
“Like I’m supposed to leave the fact that you were about to kill yourself?”
She slammed the other cabinet shut and there, behind the door, was Jackson staring at her. She blinked in surprise and the vision was gone. Was that one of the ghosts Sam had mentioned? Or were her visions of the frustrating witch back? She thought now that he was alive, her conscience would stop manifesting itself but.... Now she wasn’t so sure. “I can’t do this right now,” she breathed. She strode out of the kitchen and pushed the swinging doors open, only to see Angela and Bastian in the main dining room, looking under tables and chairs. “Angela, can you switch partners with me?” She knew it would look awkward if she wasn’t working with Dante, but she didn’t care right now. She couldn’t let herself be distracted by her own drama when there were so much more important things to worry about.