by Willow Mason
“Your powers returned?” Jared cast an assessing look up and down my body. “Can’t you fly, then?”
“No, I can’t fly.” I stood upright and stretched out my back, the muscles in my thighs twinging and popping. “At least, I don’t think I can.”
I closed my eyes, imagining my feet came equipped with feathers and my bones were hollow and as light as air. When I sneaked a peek to see how I was doing, my body was still attached to the ground. “No dice. Let’s go… but slower, okay?”
Jared’s idea of slower wasn’t anywhere near where I wanted it to be, but I forced myself into a jog to keep up, pushing through the pain barrier only to find more pain waiting on the other side.
“How much farther?” I asked, spitting the words out between pants.
“Just over there,” he said, jumping onto yet another fence, this time straddling it and reaching down to pull me over. “Isabella’s scent is covering this place.”
Annalisa put her nose close to the ground, sniffing her way to the front door.
“Locked,” I said in disgust, jiggling the handle. “Can either of you sniff out a key?”
“Try around the back.” Jared had barely said the words before he disappeared around the corner. “There’s a window open here.”
The window was on the second storey and I instantly dismissed it with a shake of my head. Annalisa, meanwhile, leapt straight up as though wings had sprouted from her shoulders, easily grabbing hold of the sill, and slithering through the gap.
“Show off,” I muttered beneath my breath, waiting at the back door for her to work her magic on the other side.
Jared smiled at me, his easy grin coaxing out a return.
Indeed. I strode through the house, doing a double-take at the fridge door, empty of any magnets or notes. Who lived like that? A landline phone sat on the kitchen counter, but there was no matching memo pad or jostling array of pens beside it. The sills were empty of plants or general knickknacks. The shelves in the lounge lacked any DVDs or stack of games.
“This place seems abandoned.” I turned in a circle. Furniture, yes, but no sign that anyone lived here. No pictures in frames. No random objects attracted by the passage of daily life.
“If it’s empty, it hasn’t been for long.” Jared picked up a large remote, the only thing on the long glass coffee table. “But yeah, this place is weird.”
A fat stack of books sat next to a bed in the first door off the hallway. I picked up the top one, flicking through the pages, expecting to see typed words and instead, seeing long rows of braille.
Oh. Duh. No wonder the house was so tidy.
The volumes were obviously well-loved; the covers creased and battered in the way my own treasured childhood stories were, read and re-read until I could quote large passages off by heart.
“Isabella’s blind,” I announced as Jared joined me in the bedroom. “Something everyone I’ve met has failed to tell me.” I put my hands on my hips, trying to remember what her mother had told me. “Perhaps that’s why she sought out a suckling.”
“Does it change anything?”
I was still thinking about an answer when I heard the crunch of car tyres on the gravel outside. My heart rate, still slowing down after my recent exercise, jumped back up the charts and my eyes bulged.
“Get in the wardrobe.” I pulled the sliding door open, shoving Jared inside before joining him and sliding it shut again. A second later, I heard a key slipping into the front door lock, followed by heavy footsteps.
Through slits in the wooden door, I watched Annalisa slink into the room, her gleaming eyes picking me out before she crouched low and slipped under the bed.
“Who—?”
I put a finger to my lips, tilting my head to pick up further sounds. Shuffling noises, someone’s tread on the soft carpet, the small squeak of a door hinge holding out for oil.
The floorboards directly outside the bedroom creaked. My heart now beat so hard, flashes of light danced in my eyes. A high whistle of tinnitus played in my left ear as I strained to hear movement.
Whoever stood outside moved farther down the hallway. I let out a breath, feeling its warmth bounce back off Jared’s chest. The last time we’d stood this close together, he’d been in a rage, clawing at my throat and snapping my necklace in two.
Now, his breathing was soft and even. Calm. His hands sat on my shoulders, the light touch a comfort rather than a weight. The heat of his changing body reassured rather than scaring me. A protector.
He turned me, placing his body solidly between me and the wardrobe door. My cheek brushed against his chest as he twisted, turning to face outwards.
My pulse slowed again, then raced as the boards creaked RIGHT OUTSIDE THE CLOSET!
With a gasp, I held a hand up to shield my eyes the flash of light as someone tore the door open. The warmth of Jared’s body disappeared as he leapt out to tackle the threat.
Chapter Twelve
“I thought we agreed we’d share information,” Patrick said, holding a damp teatowel to his face. His nose dripped with blood, but I felt far more guilty about the long claw mark running across his cheek. The deep scratch oozed at a slower pace than his bloody nose but would require a lot more care to heal without a scar.
“You were the one who went off, chasing up new leads without telling me where you were going,” I said, verbally attacking him in the hope it would chase away my guilt. No such luck. I blushed with a new rush of shame at daring to be angry at the hurt party. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
“Not from someone else’s kitchen, I don’t.” Patrick pulled the cloth away from his nose and frowned at the bright stain. He shifted the towel around to a dry spot, then reapplied it. The corner of his right eye was starting to puff out, a black eye lying in wait.
“I already said I was sorry, mate,” Jared said with a soft growl. “How was I meant to know you were friendly when you burst into the house of a murder victim?”
“Because somebody”—Patrick glared at me—“should have told you.”
Well, okay. Somebody should have. I stared at my fingers, picking at the hangnail on my forefinger until I pulled it off. “Jared, this is Patrick. He’s a paranormal investigator.” Better late than never. “And Patrick, this is Jared. He’s a… friend from Auckland.”
“What were you doing here, anyway?” Patrick asked, ignoring my introduction in favour of glaring at me. “Shouldn’t you be working the witch community for leads?”
“We’re searching for the body,” Jared said before I could get a word in. “Don’t know about you, but it seemed an important step in the process.”
I couldn’t read Patrick’s face with the towel pressed against it, but his voice told me he was struggling with his temper. “Do you think I haven’t been searching?”
“I don’t know what you’ve been doing, mate.”
“Why?” Jared and I asked in unison. “What’s downstairs?”
Annalisa led the way, Patrick stumbling along behind us.
Jared sniffed the air then lifted a rug placed in the centre of the spare bedroom floor. Beneath it, there was a metre square gap in the carpet, revealing a trapdoor. “Back up, I’m going in first.”
“No, let me. I’m already banged up.”
“Don’t be silly,” I spluttered in protest, shoving past Patrick. “You won’t be able to see Isabella, even if she’s there.”
My hand clung to the handrail as I stepped down into the basement, my eyesight unable to keep up with the darkness. Something brushed against my face and I yelped, then realised it was a cord hanging
from the ceiling. One tug and a weak bulb illuminated the small space.
Isabella’s body lay flat on the floor. My foot stood an inch away from her leg. I jumped back, giving another yelp, then was pushed aside as Jared and Patrick arrived at the base of the steps.
“What’s happened to her?” Jared knelt, his face twisted in horror as he gingerly pressed a finger to the woman’s face. “She looks like someone dried her out in an oven.”
“Sucked her dry, more like,” I said, my annoyance at being shoved out of the way obvious in my voice. “That’s what a suckling does.”
Patrick switched on his device, letting loose a furious explosion of beeps. He craned his neck to see while his feet stayed glued to the spot, then shook his head. “Should we move her upstairs?”
“Leave her where she is,” Jared said. “There’ll be far less chance of her coming to harm down here than out on display, upstairs.”
I nodded. “We should put a guard here, just in case someone tries to move her again.”
One pointed glance at Jared, and he shook his head. “Not me. I’m not leaving your side until whoever or whatever’s responsible for this is caught and dealt with.”
Surprisingly, Annalisa took his side.
“Where exactly are we going?” Patrick asked as I moved past him, grateful to emerge back into a room of sunlight. “We still don’t have a decent lead anywhere.”
“Did you know Isabella was blind?” I asked, evading his question.
“What? No, she wasn’t.” Patrick rubbed the side of his nose, wincing as a new trickle of blood started. “They don’t hand out driver’s licences to people who can’t see.”
A good point. Perhaps I’d misread the signals. “She has a stack of braille books in her room.”
“Maybe she volunteers or something.” He glanced into Isabella’s bedroom on the way past, pushing the wardrobe door back into position. “But I’m sure her mother would have mentioned it if she were sight-impaired. That’s a pretty big thing not to know about a missing person.”
Jared had run outside but now returned and inserted himself between me and Patrick. “I’ve got a scent for whoever brought the body here, but it runs out in the driveway.”
“Makes sense. I can’t imagine anyone wants to be seen carrying a mummy around town.” I cringed, thinking back to my own experience. It made me lightheaded enough that I took a seat in the dining room. “Patrick, you’re the one with investigative experience. Any ideas how we find out who placed Isabella back here?”
“Ask the neighbours,” he said immediately, then tilted his head to the side. “If no one knows or is talking, then we should try to get hold of some CCTV footage next.”
Jared shook his head and joined me at the table. “The police won’t just hand that over.”
“There are cameras mounted at the intersections that stream over the internet for the traffic channel.” Patrick pulled out his phone and quickly brought up the feed. “Since the images are publicly available, anyone can request footage from the archive.”
“And how does that help?” Jared smirked and tipped his chair back, a habit that used to annoy the heck out of me.
Scratch used to. It still did. I subdued the urge to kick at the chair legs to send him sprawling.
Patrick explained, “It gives an excellent view of the cars going by. Given the population of Briarton, it should be simple to track down the owners.”
“Great.” Jared shrugged and looked mulish. “And where does that get you? Excuse me, sir, I noticed you drove down a street today and wanted to ask you a whole lot of questions about that.”
Patrick ignored him completely, a trick I wished I could adopt. “At the corner, there’s a dairy with a camera pointing down this way. They’re picking up the foot traffic heading up the street, but the scope of the feed will probably show any cars stopping outside.”
“Are they likely to give us permission to view it?” I asked.
“We won’t know until we ask them.”
Annalisa rubbed her shoulder against my leg.
“Great.” I slapped the table and stood up. “Let’s get a move on, then.”
“I recognise the face from somewhere,” Philip said, pulling at his ear and staring at his partner. “I just can’t place exactly where. You?”
Wallace shrugged and pulled out a tray full of EFTPOS receipts. “Yeah. He was in here the other day, I’m sure.” His doubtful expression contradicted the words as he flicked through the slips. “A packet of mints and a bottle of milk.” He turned the receipt for Philip to see. “Isn’t that him?”
“We don’t need to know what he bought, fellas,” Aunt Florentine said with a serene smile. “We’re after an ID not a summary of his shopping habits.”
“It can’t be the same guy,” Philip said with a firm shake of his head. “That’s Blair Candlewood.”
“But he has a blue van.”
“Yeah, with a wheelchair ramp. This van looks the same but the guy’s walking.”
“Someone borrowed it, maybe?”
I watched the conversation bouncing back and forth, not wanting to interrupt in case it stopped their train of thought.
Jared wasn’t so patient, however. “Either you know him, or you don’t. Which is it?”
Philip arched an eyebrow while I stabbed Jared in the ribs with my forefinger. “Don’t listen to him,” I said. “Believe me, I spent enough time living with him to know and almost nothing he says is worth paying attention to.”
“If this is the same guy, he lives on the other side of town, near Church and Main.”
“Quite a distance to go for a quick shop.”
Wallace nodded. “His local dairy is too far for him to reach comfortably in the chair, so he has to use the van, but he doesn’t want to get into the van unless he’s going a reasonable distance.”
Jared rolled his eyes. “Could we just get an address so we can move on with our lives?”
“Rude much?” I would have elbowed him in the side except Philip was handing over a scrap of paper. “This is the place. Bright yellow trimmings and a ramp outside the front door.”
“Thanks for this.” I jerked my head at Jared. “Despite appearances, we really appreciate it.”
“No worries. It’ll be good to have a favour up our sleeves come the solstice.” Philip nodded to Aunt Florentine with a pointed expression. “Genevieve does seem fixated on having us decorate half the forest each year.” He grinned. “It’ll do the coven good for someone else to take a turn.”
“I’ll see what we can do,” she promised, waving goodbye as we edged out of the store.
We walked back to Isabella’s flat in silence, waving to Patrick who was busy interrogating a neighbour. The woman must have just returned from a trip to pick her young son up from daycare and balanced the child on one hip while holding a shopping bag with the other. When she saw me coming, her face took on a pleading expression.
“Seriously, I can’t remember seeing anyone who stood out,” she said as we drew near. It didn’t sound like the first time she’d spoken the words.
“What about this man?” I handed across a still image that Philip had printed out from the camera. “Do you remember him?”
“I…” The woman nodded, then frowned and shook her head slowly. “No… I don’t think so.”
“He looked familiar though?”
“Hey, I’m tired, my son needs to lay down for his afternoon nap, and I’ve got ice cream in here.” She lifted the reusable shopping bag. “Yeah, I might’ve seen him around but…” She broke off again. “Maybe yesterday? A van pulled up and a guy took a roll of carpet inside.”
I thanked her and pulled Patrick away, grouping on Isabella’s front porch.
“We’ve got an address, but we’ll need a car.”
Aunt Florentine volunteered and, a ten-minute drive later, we parked outside another empty house. A peek into the side windows showed the rooms in such a tidy state I felt like a mess monster.
“Does everyone in this town have a cleaner or something?” I mumbled, turning from the window as an inquisitive dog tried to sniff out something exciting from the power pole outside. “And can I get their number?”
“Magic helps with that,” my aunt said, rubbing her forehead. “We should get you started on lessons next week.”
I thought about the pile of dishes waiting beside the sink at home. “What’s wrong with today?”
“Ah, beginners.” Aunt Florentine primped her hair. “Always so keen to get going and so unwilling to put in the groundwork.”
My brain was halfway to creating a suitable retort when I spotted a weird shape lying to the side of the driveway. I walked over and picked up the container, shaking it even though I could tell it was empty from the weight.
A gas can.
“Isabella was here.” I turned and lifted the container as though it would explain everything. “She must’ve been taking this to the petrol station when this man picked her up.”
“It’s the right place,” Jared said, waving an envelope he’d picked out of the mailbox. “See, Blair Candlewood.”
Aunt Florentine was busy waving to someone over the street. She hurried across to exchange a few words with the woman standing in her driveway, then walked back more slowly. “Apparently, he’s been gone a few days. Doris—” she jerked her chin at the woman who was still standing outside “—has picked up his paper for the last two mornings.”
A sliver of dread wormed its way up my back, setting off tingles in my neck and shoulders. “He kidnapped Isabella, discarded her body in the woods, then took off.”
My aunt pursed her lips while her gaze became unfocused. “Sounds unlikely. If you’re in the middle of a kidnapping, you don’t usually arrange for someone to collect your paper.”
