by Leanne Leeds
I stared in shock. I didn’t like where the story was going.
Yet another disaster with my mother’s hand in it.
“So I went to see her in the jail, and she told me that she needed the land next to the church and my brother wouldn’t sell. That if I could get my brother to sell, she would get Reverend Kane to make me the top man in the men’s group. That once I had the ball? I could knock that idiot off his perch and take over, and then all the bonuses would be mine!”
“Your brother wouldn’t sell the family land, though, would he?” I asked from across the room.
“So you shot him in the head,” Clutterbuck followed.
“Well, I didn’t really want to,” Bond told Clutterbuck, though his expression told a different story. “But Prunella wanted to be the top woman at the church. She said it wasn’t right that Beulah Conroe ran over everybody like a big fat—”
“I beg your pardon!” Beulah Conroe shouted angrily.
“Yeah, she said you didn’t like her much. Prunella and I had been having an affair on and off for years so it wasn’t all that hard to get her to agree.” Bond laughed. “She thought my brother was boring. And Prunella did own half of the family land, so I kinda needed her help. But yeah,” he agreed, legs still swinging happily. “I was the one that shot my brother, and just to show Karen how dedicated I was, we donated the land to the church! For nothing! I knew she had to make me top man then!” Bonds looked around proudly. “When Karen finds out everything I did for her?” Bond picked up the gun and thrust it toward the churchgoers for emphasis. “You all are going to be bowing to me!”
“You look terribly tired. That must’ve been exhausting, pulling off all of that.” Dalida reached forward and gently placed her palm on Bond’s cheek. “You should sleep now. Your eyes, your lids…so very heavy. Here, let me take that,” she said as she gently removed the gun from his hand.
As soon as she had a firm grip on the handle, Dalida held it out behind her. Gabe ran forward and took it.
“Yes, Bond, sleep now.”
Bond Noble, the murderer, slumped over on the table and snored.
Twenty-One
“Clutterbuck is taking Prunella de Vil to jail, too,” Pepper said as she rejoined us in the multipurpose room. “He said the prosecutor and judge can sort out who’s who and what’s what.”
Chief Clutterbuck removed Bond Noble from the church without incident, while the shocked churchgoers stared silently. Though it felt like the evening was over, no one else left the premises other than the chief, the unconscious murderer, and an enraged Prunella de—um, Noble. The parishioners stood, staring—as if waiting for something more to happen.
“Dad doesn’t want you to wait for him to come back,” Angie told me.
“That’s good because it’s already almost one o’clock in the morning.” Gabe looked around the room. “It takes a while to process people into lockup, so he probably won’t be back for hours. Whatever you’re going to do, I think it’s time you do it.”
With Clutterbuck gone, I wasn’t super enthusiastic about jumping into the next phase. Out of all of us, he was the closest to Reverend Dexter Kane; I was counting on having him here to lend some calm to the situation. Well, Ollie was close to Kane, too, but one glance at my friend’s face told me he wasn’t super enthusiastic about breaking the truth to the assembled crowd, either.
“Do you know why we’re here?” I asked Ollie’s father.
He swallowed nervously. “We’ve been told that, at some point in the future, the paranormals that were kicked out of this town years ago would come back to take their revenge.” Kane ground his teeth as his eyes moved over us. His gaze stopped on Chris. “We were specifically warned the attack would be led by a vampire. So, that would be my first guess.”
“A vampire you said we could defeat with garlic, and look at us now!” Beulah spat at Kane, her fist descending on the table with a loud bang. “We covered that thing with garlic from head to toe, and he’s still standing there! Shirtless! Defiant! Alive!” The woman next to Beulah, the one previously weeping, let out a low moan as if she was in pain. The old woman shot her an annoyed glance. “Oh, stop that, Gertrude! If that vampire doesn’t like the smell of garlic, he’s certainly not gonna drink you first! You eat so much of it, I can smell you ten feet away!”
Gertrude flung herself back in her chair and glared.
Chris stood up straight and pulled his shoulders back. “No one here has any ill intent toward any of you. Especially not me. We did not come here to harm any of you. Whatever you may have been told, whatever you’ve been led to believe about us? We are not here to exact any kind of revenge.”
As I listened to my boyfriend, I felt my breath catch in my throat. Gabe’s mother was right; Chris’s chest did look like it was chiseled out of marble. Goodness, my boyfriend was smoking hot. And he was such a nice guy.
You know, for a bloodsucking vampire.
Damn vampire dazzle.
“This church was founded on the idea that the world needs defense from you people. That this town needs a defense.”
“Magic just saved all of you from a gun-toting madman,” Chris pointed out. “Dalida risked herself to protect you.”
“And you could do to us what you did to him!” a woman shouted from the corner. “Would we even know it? Would we even know you were in our minds, controlling us? Making us do evil things? Reverend Kane, you’re the one that told us about this.” She turned to him, a pleading look in her eyes. “Reverend, what do we do?”
Reverend Kane cast a wary eye toward Chris, then turned toward the woman. “Beverly, I…I’ve seen and heard things tonight…” He looked down and then turned toward Ollie. “Is what you said earlier true? Was Karen just using us?”
Before Ollie could answer, Mrs. Conroe started up again.
“Well, it sounds like you were using us, too, Reverend,” Beulah spat. She marched out from behind the table toward the church leader. “What was Bond Conroe going on and on about, about you taking money from the church? Did you really make that man part of the men’s group because he gave you land?” She took a deep breath, but before Kane could answer, the old woman lobbed another question at him. “And what was so important about this land, anyway?”
Reverend Kane took a deep breath, his eyes closed and his face turned upward. With a forceful exhale, he nodded to himself, lowered his head, and faced Beulah Conroe. He was trying to maintain an air of bravado, the stance of a man still in charge, but the attempt was a failure.
“Karen said there was a large selenite deposit beneath the old distillery, and she wanted it. The distillery was built on top of an old quarry, and there’s an untapped and unknown deposit of crystal. At least, that’s what she claimed,” Reverend Kane told Beulah. “She needed to get that land so that she could use it…” He trailed off.
The words Ollie tried to get him to believe ran through his mind like a train, so loud I could hear them without effort. He looked down again. “She directed me to give Bond the position if he got us the land. But I swear to you, Beulah, it never occurred to me he would murder his brother for it. Or that Karen was trying to replace me with that psychotic f—”
“There are ladies present, Reverend!” Beulah snapped before Reverend Kane could finish his thought.
“Oh, Beulah, the man murdered his own brother after sleeping with his sister-in-law,” Beverly told Beulah brusquely. “Whatever that F-word was going to be, it was probably mighty appropriate.”
“This is still a church,” the old woman countered. “I still don’t understand—”
“As much as I think you all have a lot to talk about—and I am sure you do have a lot to talk about—we didn’t come here for a church social,” Pepper interrupted abruptly. She strode across the multipurpose room like a woman who knew exactly where she was going. Reaching a table, the reporter leaned down and snatched up the bowling ball bag left unattended amid Conrad Noble’s arrest. “Now, whether you all believe it o
r not? The crystal in this bag isn’t some magical protection amulet for Mystic’s End.”
“Of course it is; we’ve been guarding it for years,” a man in his mid-fifties told Pepper.
“You see that ghost? And that one? And those two over there?” The ghosts waved as they were pointed to. “They’ve been locked in little tiny bottles. Some for twenty years, some for a hundred years, and some for even more than that.” Pepper unzipped the bowling ball bag and pulled out a stunning white crystal ball.
The church members gasped.
Palming it, Pepper held it up in front of her. “You see this ball? This amulet that you’ve been doing some directed ritual around?”
Beulah gaped at Pepper with a mix of mystification and fear, perplexed that the reporter had not been struck down by lightning or felled dead by an instant heart attack.
A quick focus on the mental murmuring clarified where the expectation came from. Apparently, they believed women could not touch the crystal ball. With a thundering bolt of clarity, the pieces fell into place.
The descendants of witches were all women.
This misogynistic church separated women and men to keep women away from the orbuculum prison.
“This crystal ball houses every ghost of every townsperson that’s passed away,” Pepper called out. “They are all locked in there together, and you people have been getting together to do some kind of magic ritual to tighten the front door lock.”
“That’s impossible! We weren’t doing magic!” Beulah told her, looking horrified.
“You were participating in a magical imprisonment,” Pepper argued back, her eyebrows arched fiercely. “Karen mentioned you guys were keeping the ghosts alive or powered up or…something. I don’t know. But I don’t know any religion that has a ritual around an object that is imbued with some kind of symbolic properties—”
“Catholic mass and communion,” Beulah told her, her hands on her hips.
“The Latter-Day Saints and that Celestial Room,” Beverly added. Beulah turned and raised her eyebrow at the other woman. “What? I saw it on HBO. It was stunning. All white. It was just lovely.”
“That Jewish swimming pool thing—” a man said, but Pepper cut him off.
“Okay, okay! Just trust me. You were participating in magic!” Pepper said with exasperation. “For goodness sake, I don’t know how you people wound up at this church with as much as you seem to know about religion. None of you questioned for a second whether these beliefs were ridiculous? Seriously?”
“Okay, there’s no need to be insulting,” Reverend Kane told his likely future daughter-in-law.
“I’m not insulting. You people really have basically been certifiably crazy.”
“Wait a minute. Didn’t you come in here with a vampire? And don’t you write that pagan-heathen-occult blog?” Beverly asked Pepper.
“That meticulously researched, unbelievably well-written pagan-heathen-occult blog?” Pepper responded proudly. “You bet. That’s me. And boy, are you people going to make a great entry. And my blog never imprisoned hundreds of people’s souls.”
“Fortuna, I’m not trying to be rude, but we are running out of moonlight,” Chris said loud enough for most to overhear.
“So that sun thing can kill you, then, huh?” a formerly silent man asked quietly. Chris favored him with a look so cold the man seemed to stop breathing as he shrank under the vampire’s withering gaze. Then he coughed. Then stepped back. “Ah, I was just curious. Since we’re all chatting, you know. Nothing intended by that observation.” Chris continued staring. “Um, sir.”
At that, Chris smiled warmly, his fangs faintly visible. “Of course. No intention inferred.”
The man shuddered.
“Are we going to do this, or what?” Pepper asked, holding the crystal ball out toward me.
“Do what?” Reverend Kane asked.
“Free the town.” I stepped forward and gently took the crystal ball from Pepper. “We freed the living.” I turned and looked at Angie. “Now it’s time to free the dead.”
For something that had been so profoundly woven into such a complicated conspiracy, freeing hundreds of ghosts was far more straightforward than I would’ve believed. Angie, Dalida, and I spent half an hour walking around the crystal ball, discussing different attack plans with Miss Bessie and Mary. Once we determined our magical action course, we placed the ball on a small table and stood at three points around it.
We grabbed hands, and—
There was no explosion, no flash of light, no screaming.
All the plans we had, all the spells and chants we would try?
None were needed.
Just a fraction of a second passed between our hands clasping and the first tiny speck of light floating up and out of the ball. Then there was another, then another, then another. Eventually, it looked like a spray from a Fourth of July sparkler. We stared as the dead of Mystic’s End left their prison.
“I’m not even concentrating on anything in particular,” Angie whispered. She looked at me with a worried expression. “Am I supposed to be thinking something? Doing something?”
“I don’t think so.” I looked across at Dalida. “I’m not really concentrating on anything, either. Are you?”
“I don’t think this is a spell. I think the three of us, being here, was the key.”
“That must be why you kept running into magic working to keep you away from these things,” Angie said as her eyes followed a pink spark. “Why would Karen have such an obvious hole in her spell?”
“I don’t think she put it there,” Miss Bessie said, her hands clutched in front of her chest as if in prayer, her expression jubilant. “You girls are, for good or ill, her daughters. Her blood runs through your very veins. But she shoved you away, all three of you.” Miss Bessie, standing outside the circle, unclasped her hands to put her arm around Mary. “Karen never understood the bond between mother and child. So how could she account for it? I doubt it ever occurred to that narcissistic woman the three of you would be anything other than what she thought you should be.”
Dalida, Angie, and I looked at one another. I felt both of my sisters squeeze my hands. I squeezed back.
The multipurpose room grew crowded, the air cool as ghosts and specters expanded and took form. Those we rescued from the witch bottles were hard at work greeting those newly freed, explaining where the town had been and what had happened to them. The churchgoers, still able to see the dead in their midst, stared in shock.
“Mama!” a woman screamed, and then a sob. “Mama, is it really you?”
It was Gertrude. She was the first to recognize a family member, but she wasn’t the last. Soon the air was filled with laughter, tears, excitement. Shouted greetings, hollers of joy. Reverend Kane stood off to the side, a conflicted look on his face. Relief flowed from him that the damage had been reversed, but he was mortified he had played a role in what led to this.
“Dexter?” a small, shy woman in a yellow sundress whispered. “Dexter, it’s me.”
The woman swept toward him, excitement on her face.
Reverend Dexter Kane stared as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His eyes filled with tears.
Finally, the ball stopped its spray of glittering soul stars.
“I think that’s it,” I told my sisters. We swept the ball with all of our combined psychic senses, and one ghost even volunteered to go back in and ensure everyone made it out. “We got everybody.”
“Not everybody,” Martin Salvi said, staring at me with a pointed look. “Anything else here can be taken care of another time. You have one more person to rescue.”
“Fortuna, do you need us to come?” Dalida asked me.
I nodded. “I don’t think it can hurt.”
I knew there would be many discussions about Holy Grove Church, its parishioners, and their role in the curse. At least some townspeople now knew that real witches and vampires walked among them. I didn’t know how much influence th
is night would have on their future attitude toward me, toward Chris. Toward paranormals in general.
But that could all wait until tomorrow.
I owed Martin one last rescue.
“I can see the hole,” Dalida said, shivering in the darkness. “There’s really someone down there?”
“Encased in selenite, yes.” I frowned. “What the heck was it with Karen and selenite?” Karen-dog barked happily and wagged her tail. Gideon barked in response. “Maybe Gideon will be able to teach her how to send images, and we’ll know eventually. Selenite is such a pretty, happy stone. Hard to believe it’s been used for such misery.”
“Anything can be used for good or evil, you know,” Angie told me as she leaned down and stared into the darkness. Straightening, she shrugged. “So, are we all going down? You want us to wait?”
“I can see the hole, as well,” Martin said, his voice vibrating with nervous energy. “When Chris took me out here the last time, he pointed to where it was, but I couldn’t see a thing. That’s good, right?”
“The curse is broken now,” Chris said. Then he frowned, looking worried. “Anna was being kept alive by the magic that powered the curse. If that’s the case…” He trailed off, glancing at Martin for one second. Saying nothing else, the vampire dove down into the hole and disappeared.
Chris shouldn’t be worried, I thought. She’s fine. She was safe in…
A sudden fear washed over me.
“Let’s go!” I shouted and scurried down the ladder into the darkness.
The candles and fire that showed the way previously were no longer illuminated. My heart thumped in my chest, a faint whisper in the back of my mind droning repeatedly that we would be too late, that the woman at the heart of the rescue that freed an entire town would be my mother’s last victim.
