by Leanne Leeds
“Now?” Clutterbuck asked, startled.
“Now,” I told him.
And I began walking.
As we slipped into the darkness, I lit an orb of light to guide the way. The further we got from the elevator, the darker and dirtier and dingier the hallway became. Initially, everything was empty and quiet. As we crossed into areas utterly unoccupied by storage units, I could feel the eyes of tiny animals glaring at us as we passed.
“I thought you said there was a door blocking the path?” Chris asked the chief.
“I was told there was.”
“You never checked?”
Clutterbuck made a sound. “Would you come down here if you didn’t have to? Maybe it’s further down.”
“It’s not,” Chris assured him. “I’m sure. There’s no brick wall.”
“Sparkles can see in the dark,” I told Clutterbuck as we walked confidently forward. “The whole place isn’t lit up for him, but he can see three or four times as far as we can.”
“Well, maybe we should just send him down there to check everything out, then.”
“You know, you have a gun.”
“I can’t shoot what I can’t see. Your little magic light ball is pretty, but it’s not exactly bright.”
“I don’t think you need to shoot anything,” Chris told him. “There’s nothing here.” He stopped walking. “I know you said that I should check everything out in jest, but it might not be a bad idea. If this walkway really is several miles long, do we really have the time to do this?”
“There’s no clock ticking on figuring this out,” I shrugged.
“Unless you count my bedtime.” I rolled my eyes at the reminder that my boyfriend had an allergy to the sun. “Or that we know of. Just in case there is, though—I can move far faster than the three of us can together. Or,” Chris said, raising an eyebrow, “I could bring you both with me.”
“There’s no water down here. I don’t want to vomit.”
“Why would you vomit?” Clutterbuck asked me.
“Sparkles here can move really fast. I’ve mapped it out twice, and it’s well over two hundred miles per hour. We are really not designed to fly through the air bouncing around like that. It makes me a little nauseous.”
“Cars go faster than that,” Clutterbuck scoffed.
“Not with me in them,” I answered dryly.
“What do you think?” Chris glanced at both of us. “Should I go on my own and report back?”
“I’m just concerned there’s going to be something only I can see. What if there’s something like Anna’s hole, and you blow right by it because you can’t see it?”
“That’s possible, but even if there are things I can’t see? I’ll be able to tell us where this goes, if anywhere. That’s more information than we have right now, and I can get it in much less time.”
“How much less time?” Clutterbuck asked him.
“If it’s two miles, I can be back here within ten minutes.” Chris met my eyes, a hopeful look on his face. “Faster if I take a few risks and push my speed.”
I frowned. “You will take absolutely no risks, and you’ll be back here in fifteen minutes. Because you will be extra careful.”
The vampire looked disappointed, but he nodded and promised me he would. “You’ll take care of her?” Chris asked the chief of police politely.
“While we are standing here doing nothing?” Clutterbuck responded with a chuckle. “Sure. No problem.”
Chris took a slow step forward. It brought him face to face with Clutterbuck, their noses almost touching. “You’ll take care of her?” the vampire asked again—three times as slowly. His eyes narrowed, and his fangs extended. Somehow looking even paler than usual in the glowing supernatural light, his entire body seemed to vibrate with tension.
It was the first time I’d ever seen him look genuinely frightening, and my breath caught in my chest.
If I was struck by Chris’s sudden change, though?
The chief looked like he was about to pee in his pants.
“Absolutely,” the nervously earnest Clutterbuck responded. “As if she were my own daughter. You have my word.”
Chris stood there for another five seconds, his silence absorbing the oath. With a nod, he stepped back, retracted his fangs, and relaxed the tension in his muscles.
“You didn’t have to scare him,” I chided the vampire.
“And as for you, Fortuna, stay here,” he said, turning. “Even if you suddenly get a bright idea. Even if you just want to check that thing out that you heard or saw or thought of. Unless something comes to the spot and attacks you and you have to run,” Chris lectured, his fingers dancing lightly on my chin. “Please, please, just stay here.”
“I’m not Pepper,” I grumbled and then kissed him. “Be careful.”
With a whoosh, he disappeared.
After a few moments, I heard the chief’s quiet voice. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Doesn’t what hurt?” I asked, leaning against the wall to wait.
“The fangs. When you kiss him. Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Kind of none of your business. But no. Kissing Chris is like kissing anyone else.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I didn’t know that for a fact. I didn’t know what it was like to kiss anyone else. I’d had minimal experience with dating and almost none with relationships. Intimate partnerships with people when you’re a telepath? They’re not a straightforward thing. I found no one I cared enough about to try.
Until Chris.
“You doing okay?” Clutterbuck asked.
“Surprisingly, yeah.” And I meant it. I had an exceptional dog. I had two sisters. I had a great circle of friends. And my boyfriend could bite anyone that made me mad. Actually, my dog could, too.
I was super close to freeing the last witch stuck in a bottle—and Martin’s mom. I mean, I wasn’t Charles Lutz or Harriet Tubman or anything, but it felt good. Being close to accomplishing something that once seemed so impossible.
Suddenly, I frowned.
What did Officer Corbin mean? The history of the entire town in their “sacred orb”? That had to be symbolic, right? But if it was just symbolic, why would someone steal it?
What did that ridiculous church have to do with all this?
And why was it so important Conrad Noble had to die?
With another whoosh, Chris reappeared. “You were right. This path goes all the way to Martin’s complex. Or, more specifically, Angie’s restaurant.”
“The underground hallway to get to the club?” I asked.
He nodded. “The door to the right, about midway through the tunnel?” Chris asked me. I nodded. “There’s a set of stairs that goes down six flights. There are three doors at the bottom, and one leads to this hallway.”
“So the construction of this precinct and Martin’s complex both accommodated this path. But why?”
“Probably for easy access to the cauldron,” Chris said. “Big one, about halfway to the complex. It’s in an open antechamber. Very obvious, you can’t miss it.”
“Why would you need a tunnel for access to a big pot?” Clutterbuck asked, confused.
“It’s not just a big pot,” I explained. “Witch cauldrons are ensorcelled communication and teleportation devices. Most people just have small ones to use to call other witches—”
“Why not just use the telephone?” The chief still looked confused.
“Because of the teleportation aspects,” Chris explained. “You can talk to someone who is very far away, but as long as they have a cauldron, you can reach through the mist and pass items. If it’s a large enough cauldron on both ends, people can also simply step through.”
I nodded. “I take it this one’s big enough?”
“If we wanted to throw a hot tub party and invite ten of our closest friends? I think we’d be good.”
The three of us started back toward the police precinct. We were silent, each contempla
ting what on earth Karen White had been planning for Mystic’s End that involved this level of preparation. Giant cauldrons, underground quick access tunnels to the police station and the track, controlled armies of paranormals, unlimited funds, bribed and blackmailed town leaders...
Three daughters, placed with rich or influential families.
What did my mother, ultimately, want?
A new fear gnawed at me.
A fear there was too much of her well-planned blueprint left in play for this to be over.
Fourteen
When the elevator door opened, Clutterbuck stepped inside with one long stride. Chris and I followed, turned, and waited. The chief reached out and hit the button marked B4.
The women’s jailhouse floor.
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not ready to talk to her.”
“Ready or not, she’s like the center of a hurricane you’re circling around. You can only measure the wind speed of a storm in the eye, Fortuna,” Clutterbuck responded. He then hit the button to close the doors—which, let’s be honest, does nothing. I mean, I’m sure they do nothing. I don’t know why anyone bothers to hit the things. The doors seem to close when the doors decide to close. “We all know that whatever’s going on here? It leads back to her.”
“We just think that. We don’t know that for sure.” Granted, if someone else was at the center of all this, darned if I knew who was. “We really should get with the others first and find out what they might know. Maybe someone got a critical piece of information we need. Maybe it will point to something we haven’t even thought about yet.” Clutterbuck raised his eyebrow. “What? It’s just not necessarily her.”
Clutterbuck glanced over at Chris. “I thought she was a psychic?”
When Chris met the lawman’s gaze, there was just a hint of menacing. “Respectfully, for a man that just recently had no awareness of things he’d done or the control Karen subjected him to, you’re rather insensitive about this. I’d suggest you cut Fortuna some slack as she works her way through this situation.”
Clutterbuck harrumphed, mumbled under his breath about being plenty sensitive, and redirected his gaze at the door.
“Don’t you think I should go get my sisters?” I whispered to Chris, hoping I could delay the inevitable. “If I’m going to talk to her, maybe they should be there.”
He responded with a look that contained sympathy—and the knowledge I was grasping for excuses to delay the inevitable. “I’ll go in with you. It’s probably a better idea that I accompany you, in any case. I’ve had a much longer relationship with Karen than you have, and I’m much better acquainted with her than either of your sisters.” His eyes tightened with concern. “Besides, according to your visit from Beulah Conroe, your mother is demanding to see you. Not your sisters.”
“I’d almost forgotten about that.” Add another weird brick to the pile.
The elevator doors opened, and we came face to face with Detective Beau Conroe, Beulah Conroe’s son. “Where are you three going?” I noted that Conroe showed no surprise at seeing the three of us there.
Our suspicions about Detective Conroe came rushing back. The words I’d heard in his mind about the same thing happening to Clutterbuck was another weird brick on a pile that was towering. Chris sensed my sudden tension and moved closer, his alert eyes scanning the blond Conroe for any visible threats.
Which there was because Conroe was carrying a gun.
“I’m taking Fortuna to visit her mother,” Clutterbuck said, walking forward in such a way as to present Detective Conroe with the choice of slamming into the big man or giving way so his superior could pass. For a moment, I wasn’t sure which he would choose. Just when I thought the two men would physically collide, Conroe stepped back.
“It’s not visiting hours.” I could sense the detective’s glee I was here—even as he worked to hide it.
“Well, it’s a good thing I run the whole place, then, isn’t it?” Clutterbuck said, motioning for us to follow him down the hall. Before we could follow, Clutterbuck halted, turning on his heel to face the detective once again. “By the way, Detective Conroe, I went down to the evidence room to look at Fortuna’s bottle. I wasn’t able to find it. Since Noble’s murder case is technically assigned to you, I figure you must know where it is.” The chief cocked his head. “Where is it?”
Conroe’s mind was blank as he stared back at his boss. “I’m sure I don’t know. I haven’t been down there. Probably just got filed in the wrong place. Why would anyone steal some old bottle?”
“I didn’t say anyone stole it, Detective. I asked if you knew where it was.”
Detective Conroe shot a look at me—as if getting caught tipping his hand was my fault.
“My mistake. You all have a delightful visit now.” Conroe jabbed the button for the elevator far more aggressively than he needed to, and the doors popped open. Stepping in, he glanced back. “I’m sure Ms. White will be happy to see you.” Before any of us could answer, the doors closed.
“What a turd that guy is,” Clutterbuck mumbled.
“He’s going down.” I pointed to the arrow on top of the elevator. “He’s not going back up to the main station; he’s going down.” I turned to look at Clutterbuck. “Why would he go down? There are only two floors below this one. The high-security floor, and the dungeon.”
“It’s not a dungeon.”
“It looks like a dungeon,” Chris disagreed. “Could you have missed the bottle? How hard did you look?”
The chief gazed up at the ceiling and whispered to himself, running through all the places he checked. We waited for Clutterbuck to get through his thorough step-by-step mental inventory. Finally, he shook his head. “No, I looked everywhere that thing could be. I mean, I didn’t pull down all the boxes and rummage through them, so I guess I can’t swear that the bottle wasn’t anywhere in the room. But I don’t see how it would get in a box in the first place.”
“What do we do?” Chris asked me.
“We need to follow him,” I said as I hit the button as aggressively as Detective Conroe had. “Do you think he’s in the evidence room, or is he walking toward the cauldron? Should we just gloves-off this thing?”
Clutterbuck looked at me. “Gloves off? What does that mean?”
The elevator doors opened and I stepped in. “We need to stop all this sneaking around. We are not getting anywhere, we have none of the things we’re looking for, and no one else is exactly tiptoeing around us. Beulah Conroe came to see me and demanded I see my mother. I’ve tried to walk into places today that blew me with a gale-force wind in the opposite direction.” I held up my hands. “We’re the only ones being subtle. Sneaking around, looking, poking. We’re getting nowhere.”
“Are you saying you want to stop being subtle?” Chris said, stepping into the elevator. Clutterbuck stood in the hall, looking concerned. “Because I can stop being subtle.”
“Hey, I work here, and not everyone in this place is corrupt, you know,” the chief told me nervously as he walked into the elevator and hit the button to head back down to the dungeon. “Let’s not start drinking people’s blood and throwing sparkly lightning bolts at people in the middle of the station. I will not be able to explain that.”
“You can throw sparkly lightning bolts?” Chris whispered as Clutterbuck glared.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe we should find out.”
The corridor was quiet. If I didn’t have a vampire with me, we might not have known which direction Detective Conroe had gone. But I had a vampire with me, and Chris immediately scented him.
“He’s gone toward the cauldron room.”
Clutterbuck raised his eyebrow. “That way? Are you sure? He’s not in the evidence room?”
Faster than the human eye could see, Chris shot down to the evidence door and then boomeranged back within seconds. “No. His scent isn’t strong on the door at all. I can tell that he’s been there before, but not recently.”
; “What’s recent to you?” the chief asked.
“Maybe in the last six hours. If I had to guess, the last time he was in that room was around three this afternoon.”
“Your nose is that precise?”
Chris nodded once.
“That’s just creepy,” Clutterbuck muttered.
“But useful,” I chimed in. “Can you tell with that super sniffer of yours whether he had the bottle with him?”
Chris shook his head. “I don’t know what the bottle smells like. If it had been in your possession, there’s a good chance I could tell. But since you’ve never laid hands on it?” He scratched his neck, his head tilting. “I can’t isolate the hints of it. It may be there, but I wouldn’t know it.”
“So do we follow him?” Clutterbuck asked.
“I don’t see why we all need to follow him. I am a vampire.” Clutterbuck held up his hands in mock surrender and then rolled his eyes. “It was simply an offer, Chief. I am more than capable of going to get him. I can deposit him back here within seconds.”
“But he’s got a gun, hun.” I knew they involved Detective Conroe in this. Still, I didn’t know if he was interested enough to kill on behalf of whatever conspiracy he was helping to further. I didn’t want to take any chances. “You could get hurt.”
Chris’s posture stiffened. Looking down at me, he gave me a half-smile. “I would be incredibly offended at what you just said if you weren’t so adorable. Incredibly offended.” The half-smile turned into a broader, playful grin. “I promise you, my love, the gun the detective is carrying will be of absolutely no consequence. None. In fact, he’ll be quite surprised how little it—”
“Okay, no, that’s the creepy thing. Yep. That right there.” Clutterbuck crossed his arms and took what seemed to be an unconscious step back. “I think I liked it better when you both pretended you were human.”
“Okay, go,” I told him. “But don’t hurt him. Just—”
Before I could finish the sentence, a breeze wafted across my face and a whoosh hit my ears.
