by Leanne Leeds
“It seems an obvious tie, I suppose.” Chris leaned forward, rubbed a thumb and a forefinger down his nose, and looked at me with steady, piercing eyes. His tone didn’t sound like he thought anything was obvious. “Maybe that’s the problem I’m having with the story so far.”
Sorry that our work all day while you were snoozing isn’t up to your usual standards, I thought snarkily. I was tired after running around with Clutterbuck all day and a little frustrated at the long wait for Chris to crawl out of bed. After a brief pause, I asked, “What do you mean?”
“It’s all too obvious. It’s a little too wrapped up in a bow.” Chris, my boyfriend, had turned into Jeeves, Martin’s bodyguard, in the blink of an eye. All work, laser focus. That it happened before Chris, my boyfriend, had hugged me or asked how my day was?
Probably the reason I was feeling so tart.
Setting it aside, I reminded myself this was where the vampire shined. I could practically feel the gears in his mind turning, clicking everything together, and finding the holes we hadn’t had time to plug.
Or, um, spot.
“Which part’s too obvious?”
“A crystal ball that you don’t know the purpose of stolen from the crime scene,” Chris pointed out. “The witch bottle you think you know the purpose of—the very last thing you think you need to break the curse on this town—found in the deceased Mr. Noble’s hand.” He tilted his head. “Why would the murderer leave the bottle?”
“The murderer actually left both,” I pointed out. “The bottle and the ball. They took the bottle into evidence. The ball disappeared from the crime scene later. After they cataloged the crime scene.”
“You two ready?” Pepper asked, sticking her head in. Glancing at Chris, she frowned. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” he responded politely.
“Sundown was, like, 10 minutes ago. How did you manage to come out of a coffin, crawl out of the earth, and still look like an Italian runway model?”
“I’ve gotten better with practice, I suppose.” Chris stood up, and my breath caught—Pepper was right. His black slacks looked freshly pressed, his white shirt was crisp, black leather shoes were shined to a glass-like finish. If I checked the soles of them, I doubted they would show any scuffs. “It also helps that I don’t crawl through the earth or sleep in a coffin. You’ve been watching too many horror movies. I have a secure bedroom downstairs.”
“There’s a downstairs?” I asked, surprised.
“Well, I guess you two aren’t as far along in the relationship as I expected,” Pepper quipped.
I blushed.
But she wasn’t wrong.
Vampire folklore was quite clear about the…appetites of vampires. The Romany believed the vampire was a sexual entity, with male vampires ‘visiting’ their widows as their first undead act. The Roma thought the children born of such relationships—which were possible—had unique magical powers to track and destroy vampires attacking the community.
Because clearly what my future needed was “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” as a daughter.
Sure, okay, I’d been doing quite a bit of internet searching and library reading. It’s not like there was a “Dear Abby” for how to date a vampire. I’d also watched some British show called “A Discovery of Witches” because it featured an alliance between a witch and a vampire. It…well, let’s just say it didn’t work out well in the end.
Anyway.
Chris had operated far more like the vampires in “Twilight.” He’d been nothing but a perfect gentleman, and we never really talked about the future of our relationship. The vampire never pushed for more than a kiss. He just wasn’t the type of guy that let his passions overtaken him. My boyfriend was steady. I loved that about him.
“Our relationship, Pepper, is exactly where it needs to be,” Chris told her with a confidence that made me swoon. He took two steps and put his arm around me. “Please apologize to the others for the delay. We’ll be out in a moment.”
Pepper looked like she wanted to say something, but she gave a quick nod and backed out.
“Before we join the others, I want to caution you against running in the most obvious direction without thinking about it.” Chris gently turned me to him, his fingers grazing my chin to guide my face upwards. “What you have told me? I understand why it makes sense to you and to the others. But I have dealt with your mother since the moment they turned me. Her plans…she plays a long game, Fortuna. Something about this feels too easy.”
He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me.
Once I got my breath back, I pulled back and nodded. “Look, I know what you mean, but we’re literally getting the entire gang together—”
“I don’t like that I can’t protect you during daylight,” Chris said, cutting me off. His eyes were troubled. With a sigh, he brushed my cheek with his lips. “I won’t lose you.”
“Hey, I’ve made it this far.”
Chris drew himself up slowly, and I felt him push away his concern. “That you have. Shall we?”
It took about forty-five minutes to go through the entire thing again. This time, Clutterbuck shared pictures projected onto Martin’s clean white wall, passed around notes that his officers had written, and shared the audio of the meeting we’d tried to have with Prunella Noble.
My eyes widened. “You taped that?” Gideon, who I’d picked up earlier that afternoon, launched himself to his feet and growled at the chief. “Way to build trust, there, sir.”
Clutterbuck stepped back. “Call off your hound, Delphi. The recording wasn’t for evidence. I wasn’t planning on sharing it with anybody at the station. It was for me.”
“That violates about six regulations, sir,” Gabe observed.
“How many does this meeting violate?” Clutterbuck snapped with a wrinkled brow.
“Daddy, how could you not tell her?” Angie said. She sounded disappointed. Angie’s greyhound rubbed its head against her leg and whined while Gideon’s growl took on an even more menacing timbre.
“Gideon, we’ve got this,” I told the dog. Gideon bared his teeth in an angry grimace a final time and curled up at my feet once more. “See?” I told Chris in a low voice. “The dog’s got me covered during the day. No problem.” The greyhound lifted his head, stared at my vampire boyfriend, and sneezed on his perfectly creased pant leg.
Clutterbuck looked over the group reclining casually on various sections of a large sectional sofa. “I feel like none of you are taking this seriously,” he said, his voice frustrated. “You’re upset I recorded a conversation? About regulations? They shot a man in the head over this magical claptrap. A woman in my jail is being spotted at a church with one of my detectives. The three of you were strangers six months ago, and now suddenly you’re all sisters—”
“Chief, take a deep breath and calm—” Gabe started, but his words stopped when Clutterbuck pointed a finger at him.
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, young man,” Clutterbuck said to Gabe as Martin rose from his place on the couch. The older man’s voice was heavy and hard. “You have no idea how it feels to be responsible for the safety and security of a town that you don’t understand! You are well aware they don’t prepare you at the police academy for vampires and witches and magical holes in the ground—”
That got my attention.
“What did you say?”
Clutterbuck looked surprised at the sharpness in my tone. “What do you mean?”
“What magical hole in the ground?” I jumped off the couch and stepped up to Clutterbuck. Chris and Gideon moved into position on either side of me.
He blinked as if he wasn’t sure what he’d just said. “What do you mean? You told me—”
“But I didn’t,” I cut him off emphatically. “I told you a lot, yes. I told you about almost everything. Almost.” I turned to Martin. “I didn’t tell him anything about your mother or any hole in the ground. I told him about the witch bottles, and the ghosts, and a bi
t about my mother.” My face twisted like I was sucking on a sour lemon at the word. “But I never once mentioned anything about the hole in the ground. I promise I didn’t. I’d never bring that up to someone I didn’t fully trust.”
“Someone must have,” the chief said, looking pained. “How else would I know?” he murmured to himself. “There’s no other way I could know that, is there? Angie?” Clutterbuck frowned as he searched around and met his daughter’s eyes. “Angie, did you tell me?”
“No, Daddy.” Angie set the papers she had been clutching on a side table and leaned forward. “Daddy, I’ve been trying to avoid talking to you about a lot of this magical stuff. It seemed hard for you to take, so I was just letting you get used to the fact that I was a witch.” She smiled sadly at him. “I didn’t tell you.”
A fresh voice called out from the back of the room. “Do you think Karen is still controlling him?”
Aunt Addie stood in the archway between the living room and the kitchen. Her apron still on, a dishrag in her hand, she’d listened to the whole meeting without saying a word. Uncle Vito stood behind her.
They’d both silently listened.
Until now.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I honestly don’t know what my mother did to him that night.” Thinking back to the night my mother came here to confront us, I tried to remember her exact words. “She said ‘the chief is now mine again,’” I said with a grimace, giving voice to the image in my mind. “She said she wiped his memory of everything we told him about her, about magic belonging to anyone but her.” I opened my eyes.
“But then you snipped the cords,” Chris said. “So none of that would be true. Right?”
“Right, I snipped the cords,” I agreed, but even I could hear the hesitancy in my own voice. “I snipped the cords from Karen to everything she controlled. Cords of connection, I guess you could call them. I snipped all the cords of connection.” I was pacing back and forth, my arms crossed. I looked up. “That’s not the only type of magic there is. I did nothing else. She cast a spell so he would forget,” I said, waving my hand toward Chief Clutterbuck. “I cut all the cords, so if that spell needed a cord, he’d remember. And since he’s remembered some things but not others, it’s a spell that’s still at work. It has to be. It’s not like she cut those memories from his mind. They’re still in there, buried by the magic that’s slowly degrading thanks to the cord being cut.”
“But that means…” Martin trailed off.
“Her magic is still in play,” Pepper breathed as she grabbed Ollie’s hand.
“The chief is still hers,” Gabe said bluntly. “And they’re in the same building all day. Who knows what magic she might cast?”
“No!” Angie told him fiercely.
“Do you have another explanation?” he asked her. “How would he know? Give me another explanation, Angie.”
She didn’t have one.
The room fell silent save for the whirring of the fan on the projector. Angie squirmed slightly on the sofa as she glanced at the others. Ollie looked shocked, Martin glum. Gabe put an arm around Dalida. Chris folded me into his arms. “It’ll be okay.”
“It’s not okay. How did I miss this?” I murmured.
“It’s not your fault,” Chris told me as we stood on the terrace overlooking the town. “It’s not your fault; you spotted it at the moment it was clear, and we’re going to deal with it.”
I shook my head. “The very fact he didn’t remember her, that he arrested her at all. I should’ve seen it.”
“You thought it was a consequence of you removing the cords.”
I rolled my eyes. “You mean I got cocky and thought I was, like, super witch, and when I removed the cords, I would magically free him from her clutches. That’s what you meant to say, wasn’t it,” I said sarcastically.
“If that’s what I had meant to say, that’s what I would have said,” Chris responded evenly.
“Stop being nice to me. I don’t deserve it.”
The glass door slid open. “How’s she doing?” Angie asked Chris.
“Am I such a screwup you can’t even ask me directly?” I asked her without turning around.
“Oh, boy,” Angie muttered.
“Leave me alone for a few minutes, Angie, huh? I just—”
“Oh, please,” she shot back. “Fine, sis—you screwed up. You missed a magical thing that put my dad in jeopardy, and you screwed up. You should have known. You shouldn’t have let this happen. We relied on you, and you screwed the pooch.”
Angie’s harsh words brought everyone out onto the porch. I whirled on her and glared.
“Gee, Angie, tell us how you really feel,” Pepper laughed bluntly. “Don’t you think you’re a little harsh?”
“No, I don’t.” Angie turned to Pepper. “Fortuna’s right. She messed up. Telling her she didn’t will not change anything. We all got complacent. And she knew it, too.” Angie glanced at me and raised her eyebrow. “You said it right here on that outdoor couch a few days ago. That we were all acting like everything was over. Like everything was wonderful.”
“Even though there was one bottle left, and even though Anna was still buried and held prisoner,” I whispered.
“Exactly.” Angie nodded. “You knew. We convinced you otherwise. And then you convinced yourself everything was fine. The last stretch. Time enough to deal with things later. And it’s possible that our delay in finding the bottle just caused a man’s death.” Angie held up her hands. “Screwup any way you look at it.”
“This is your idea of helping?” Pepper asked.
“We’ve all been a part of this for a while,” Gabe said from behind her. “This wasn’t just Fortuna. We all wanted it to be over. And we wanted the over part to be easy. The ghosts are all off hanging out—and sure, they’re looking for the bottle, but not exclusively. We are all doing our own thing.” He looked down. “Six months ago, none of us would have just gone out to eat or made vacation plans while two people were still imprisoned.”
“Hawaii,” Dalida whispered to Pepper’s silent eyebrow raise.
“When this started, we were diligent. We’ve gotten less so, assuming the two people we had to rescue were at least safe.”
“That was a legitimate assumption, though, Gabe,” Ollie said.
“No, it wasn’t.” I shook my head. “I knew your father had something sketchy going on over at that church from way back. So did you. As soon as we knew that their beliefs had something to do with paranormals, we should have been digging into it. We didn’t.”
Ollie didn’t want to agree, but finally, he nodded.
Dalida smiled. “So, no more dinners out, no more vacations. Not until we get this solved?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Martin said with a half-smile. “Even in the middle of a crisis, we have to eat.”
“And if you have to eat, it may as well be Beef Wellington?” Dalida teased me.
The group laughed.
I fought the urge to magically zap every one of them.
“So, how much longer are you going to sulk?” Angie cocked her head. “Because the problem you’re out here complaining you missed?” She pointed toward the glass door. “It’s sitting on a couch. I know my dad’s done some bad things,” my younger sister said, her voice growing serious. “But if he’s just ensorcelled and we can fix it? We need to go do that. And yeah, maybe you made a mistake. Maybe we all should’ve caught it. But we caught it now.” She paused for a few seconds, her eyes burning into mine. “And we need you to help fix it.”
I wanted to sit and sulk more.
I was angry at myself for not paying more attention, for pushing my mother out of my mind so far that I missed she was still making moves and counter moves. That as much as I thought binding her not to harm anyone would end her reign of manipulation, I never made sure.
But my plucky younger sister was right.
It was time to end this once and for all.
Ten
“Before we get started with anything,” I told Chief Clutterbuck as we all walked back into Martin’s house like a mob on a mission, “where’s the witch bottle you brought from the police station? We probably should have dealt with that before any of this.”
“What witch bottle?” Angie’s father stared at me with wide eyes. He looked almost drugged. “What’s a witch bottle?” His head wobbled on his neck toward his daughter. “Honey, what is that woman talking about? Is she a friend of yours from school?”
My jaw dropped half a notch.
“The chief has been, um, decompensating since you all retired to the veranda to discuss the situation.” Aunt Addie sat next to him on the sofa, her hand on his back. I wasn’t sure if she was comforting him or keeping him from running away. Uncle Vito stood behind both as if he expected Chief Clutterbuck to jump up and become violent at any moment.
Though considering Uncle Vito was nearly eighty and Chief Clutterbuck was armed, I’m not sure what the old man expected to do about it if it happened. Regardless, he looked ready.
“What do you mean, decompensating?” I approached Clutterbuck, but his eyes widened like I was a tiger stalking my prey, and I stopped in my tracks. “Why didn’t you get us?”
“He’s fine, just…a little woozy, that’s all. It seemed better to let him talk. He told me he has to leave, must return to the police station. That it’s imperative. Then he tried to leave, but the two dogs”—Aunt Addie gestured toward Gideon and Ella—“convinced him it would be better if he waited until you all returned.”
Gideon sent an image to me of a cuckoo clock clanging loudly.
Chris turned toward me. “Do you think she knows? Would it be possible at this distance?”
“That or we’ve tripped some sort of failsafe in the spell.”
“My head hurts,” Pepper said. She closed her eyes. “Dalida’s right. Hawaii sounds good right now.”
