The Death of Destiny Graves

by Jessica Lancaster

  He shook his head. “They won’t. They can’t do that. We have an agreement.”

  “Signed in blood?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “In Latin?”

  He gave another nod.

  “They’re never letting you leave.”

  Cassandra jolted back into the living room, panting. “She’s gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Destiny left, she didn’t take Hope.”

  “Let me out,” Phil said. “I can help you track her.”

  “If you could do that, you would’ve done it already.” A smile formed on my lips at a thought.

  “If you were any good at tracking, you’d have found your brother already,” Cassandra said, taking the words straight from my thoughts. I hadn’t wanted to say it, it wasn’t quite in my spirit to beat him down when he was already on the floor—but Cassandra wasn’t pulling any punches. “We can do this ourselves,” she said.

  I took Cassandra by the arm and took her out into the hallway, closing the living room door behind.

  “What else did she say?” I asked.

  Cassandra looked at the time on her phone. It was 11:02 P.M. She slipped it into her pocket. “Her sister told her she needed to get something.”

  “So, she’s going back tonight?” I asked. “I’m ready.” I’d napped. I’d prepared myself for a long evening of watching the forest and getting into the action.

  “Whenever she calls her again.”

  “She can’t get in,” I said. “Not with the crystals.”

  “Possibly why she left.”

  I held out a hand, pressing a finger against my forefinger. “We know she’s not a spirit,” I said. “We know this has happened to four people now.” I listed on a second finger. “They’re being turned. Werewolf, vampires, whatever—someone is turning them.”

  “Is it because of the energy?”

  “Possibly.” Someone was out there, they were creating a pack—or a family of fiendish friends to keep themselves company.

  A crackle came from the living room, followed by a loud female voice. “Three girls in three days, possibly four in four.”

  As we entered, we found Philip on the floor, his foot hitting the TV remote to turn the TV volume up.

  “What?” he asked, looking up at us. “This is the fourth girl, this is your third chance at finding out.”

  He was right. This was our third opportunity at finding out what the killer was leaving on the bodies, and why they had all been disappearing.

  We sat and paid attention to the news.

  “—found with scars alongside her back, and at the scene, there were crystals laid out. Police investigators believe this to have been some cult ritual being performed. We will know more soon.”

  I slapped my forehead. “Great, and now all eyes are on the crystals,” I said. “Not good for witches.”

  “They can’t possibly know this is witchcraft—” Cassandra said, looking around in hope. “Can they?”

  “They can jump to all kinds of conclusions,” I said.

  Phil scoffed. “And your job is to keep this from hitting the news.”

  I snapped my fingers, making the wire tighter around his body. “Do you want to keep going?” I asked. “What other creatures do you know of around here?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Liar.” I snapped my fingers once again. “Again?”

  “They stopped me from connecting with that part of my body,” he said. “If I could feel them—I could go with them.”

  “Or, if they were clever, you could help.”

  He smirked.

  Yeah, they were being clever by stopping them from knowing where more of their kind were. “Guess I give you more credit than you deserve.” I liked to think the best of the people around me, until they proved otherwise. Cassandra was the opposite, everyone was a villain until they proved to be an ally.

  “We need to see that girl’s body,” Cass said. “We can’t find something when we don’t know what it is we’re looking for.”

  Phil sighed. “I can get into the mortuary, and out without anyone seeing me.”

  A fact I hated. Sylphs were basically invisible to the human eye. “Then that’s exactly what you’ll do, tomorrow. They won’t even move her until they’ve surveyed her surroundings.”

  “Back again, we can show you the whereabouts of the body,” the news reporter said.

  We all stopped and stared at the images on the screen. A bright light scanned across the area.

  “This is where she was found,” the reporter said. “She’s currently inside that tent.”

  The camera panned to a large yellow tent, before panning around the woodland once again. A white glint caught my eye. It was on the ground. A card. The logo looked familiar.

  “Do you recognise that?” I asked them. “Where do I know it from?” I reached for the remote and paused the TV screen.

  “Is it a shop logo?” Cassandra asked.

  I shook my head, squinting my eyes and focusing, exerting myself with concentration. “Henry,” I mumbled. “He gave me a card just like that.”

  Had I left his card there? It was right in the centre of where we’d been.

  “I think I might have dropped some poor man’s contact card.” My face contorted in the fear that I might be responsible for a man being arrested. I sat and pressed a hand to my chest. I didn’t like the feeling at all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I could barely sleep. It wasn’t only because I’d slept yesterday evening, but it was also because I’d grown stressed and my stomach constantly growled at me in anger. It was bumbling with the same type of tantrum you’d expect from a toddler. I didn’t want to get out of bed, but I wanted to get out of my thoughts.

  Finally, at 8:42 A.M. the smell of bacon pulled me from the comfort my duvet offered.

  Cassandra was in the kitchen, objects and foods flying overhead as she fried bacon and whipped scrambled eggs into a frenzy. She had the kettle brewing hot water and danced around to a music playing through her earphones.

  I watched for a moment with a smile on my face. I envied the happiness she had there.

  “Enough for me?” I finally asked.

  “Uh.” She panicked, looking around. “Nora.”

  “Having fun?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said with a huge smile. “I’m just trying to motivate myself.”

  I took a seat at the table and yawned. “We have the funeral today.” I rubbed at my sore eyes. “You sleep?”

  “Surprisingly, I did.”

  That was assuring, at least one of us would be ready. “Have you checked on Phil?”

  “Let him leave,” she said. “Something about him going to the mortuary.”

  “I hope he’ll prove his use,” I grumbled. “Today we need to go see Destiny’s family. We also need to find out if the police suspect Harry. I can’t believe I was so careless.”

  A mug floated and planted itself on the table, nestled between my hands.

  “He was the one who came over, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He could have easily dropped it himself.”

  “Doubt it.”

  At the table, food piled itself on our plates. I didn’t realise I’d needed it, but my body craved the taste of something fatty and fried.

  “I don’t think it can be werewolves,” Cassandra blurted. “They’ve not been this far south in years.”

  “But it wouldn’t be unusual, given the circumstances.”

  “So, you think more will come here?”

  “Think?” I chuckled. “I can almost guarantee it.” A thought crossed my mind—the last time this had happened, I was nowhere as this close to the growth of it. I’d only appeared at the tail end and disbanded the groups.

  “I’m not sure Jinx likes it,” she said. “She wasn’t meant for life as an investigator’s familiar.”

  “They never are ready,” I added, wiping my mouth on a napkin. “I wasn’t ready
. You weren’t ready. Nobody is born wanting to do this, we do this because we want to help protect the people around us, and we do this because we want justice.”

  “Or,” she added with a smile. “Or, some people want to start over, and this feels like the best fit.”

  Or that. Cassandra’s secret hadn’t quite set in, and there was still more to it. There was still more to Cassandra and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep unravelling, it was all completely possible that it would ruin the connection we shared as mentor and student. “All that matters is that you’re a good fit.”

  “I think I am.”

  “Then that’s all that matters.”

  She smiled. “When are we going?” She looked at her watch.

  “Thirty minutes,” I said. “The earlier, the better.”

  I needed to get dressed, and I needed to think of a plan. We needed to talk to the family. Their daughter was going to be buried today, but they were going to be burying an empty casket, and neither of them knew. We needed to check in and make sure they were feeling better. Chances were, the crystals around their home were working the wonder that I knew them to be.

  In my closet, I routed around for clothes to wear. I needed something that screamed spiritualist—like I had when I first met them. I couldn’t go in as someone else. The clothes were often my characters and in them, I was very much that character—out of them, I was just Nora, a little bit blunt, very much an interrogator.

  I grabbed the jacket I’d worn when I met Harry—I certainly hadn’t worn that to go into the woods.

  Frisking the pockets, my hand touching something. The card.

  “It wasn’t me at all,” I told myself, stepping back and sitting on the bottom of the bed. “I hadn’t dropped his card.” It meant he’d dropped it. He’d been there, so it wasn’t completely out of the norm, but my suspicions were now alert. “Harry Bateson,” I read his name aloud from the card.

  “You okay?” Cass asked. “Speaking to someone?”

  “Just myself.”

  “My mum did that all the time,” she chuckled from outside my room. “She was definitely going crazy.”

  It was certainly nice to be compared to her then, if she was going crazy—of which, I currently wasn’t. I laughed off her remark and went back to choosing an outfit.

  I was ready ten minutes later, pushing the business card Harry had given me into the front of my pocket. Cassandra was waiting by the front door with a huge umbrella in hand.

  “It’s raining,” she said in the obviousness of it all. “Last night really knocked Jinx out. She’s still in there sleeping.”

  I smiled. “She’ll get used to it.”

  “I hope.”

  “The plan, before we leave,” I said, opening the front door. “You’ll speak with Hope, I’ll speak with her parents. I’ll try and get a sense of what happened, perhaps I can find some answers as to who Destiny had become in her death.” I inhaled deeply. “Whatever it is, I can’t imagine her parents saw her life coming to this, and then whatever they need help for with the funeral.”

  Cassandra nodded. “We know she’s definitely alive—or, well—a creature now. We can try and find her with something that was hers.”

  “I can ask the parents,” I said. “They’re nice, I don’t really want to steal from them.”

  “Okay.”

  I was never ready for this part of being an investigator, especially when it was children involved. Nobody could prepare you for a funeral, nobody had any magical words that could bypass all feelings a funeral brought to the surface.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A figure appeared to flitter by the garden fence of the Graves’ family home. It was just outside their home. As we walked closer, it appeared to be a man. A man with a familiar face, a man dressed in a grey striped suit with a black bowler hat. The man from the funeral home, the man I’d seen stalk the air for me.

  “That’s him,” Cassandra whispered, clinging to the umbrella above our heads.

  “Yes,” he replied aloud.

  “Who are you?” I asked, stepping out of the umbrella to approach him. “And what do you want?”

  He shrugged. “To pay my respects to a family who lost their child.” He tipped his hat. “I have another two house calls this morning. Unfortunately, that takes me out of Cottonwood.”

  “Who are you?” I asked again, rain drenching my hair and skin.

  Cassandra forced the umbrella over my head. She faced me the entire time, her eyes fixed away from the man.

  I glared directly into his eyes. They were bright, unearthly—which made all the sense because he wasn’t from here.

  He stepped closer. “Can you feel it?” He pressed his mouth to my ear. “It’s getting stronger. You witches will have to leave soon—or end up part of the destruction this is going to cause.”

  “What—are—you?” I asked once again.

  He tipped his hat.

  “Cassandra!” Hope called from the front door.

  We turned our heads, but I quickly turned back to him—and he was gone.

  I wanted more from him—like a name, and instead, I got a warning. I didn’t like warnings that seemed to be veiled thinly as threats. I didn’t like that at all. I had a new plan, I needed to find out what he was doing at the house.

  “She didn’t like that I called you,” Hope said, biting at her lips. “But she was pale and dirty. I had to tell someone.”

  “That’s fine,” she replied. “Let’s talk about it.”

  Hope moved to the side to look at me. “My parents are inside.”

  Even though Cassandra was much older than Hope, I felt like I was taking her on a children’s playdate.

  Cal and Poppy were both seated on the sofa, their hands in each other’s hand, their faces fixed in the direction of their television screen. As were most people’s faces, I was sure. The news was a recap of what had happened that night, and how the body of a girl had been found. My heart sank to read the headlines once again.

  “Morning,” I greet them with.

  Poppy patted the seat beside her. “It’s just awful, all of this.”

  “I’m in shock,” I said. “Did you know the girl?”

  “They haven’t released her information yet,” Cal replied.

  They hadn’t? I questioned myself. The man said he was going to make two more calls, I presumed to the families of the two girls who’d been murdered. He knew who she was.

  “I just saw a man leave your house,” I said.

  “Oh, he was sweet,” she said.

  “Family friend?”

  “No, no,” Cal said. “People are coming from all over to pay respects to the family. It’s sweet actually.”

  “And how are things for the burial today?”

  Poppy glanced at her watch. “It’s today?”

  From all the information I’d gathered, that was the date. But there was so much going on around it, there was no telling what was actually happening, and what the family had believed through lies someone had been feeding them—the man in the bowler hat and striped suit. He must have been behind this whole thing.

  “Oh, no.” I wafted a hand in front of my face. “I have no idea.”

  They both smiled at me. This wasn’t something I was going to bring up. If they didn’t know when their daughter’s funeral was, the man must have done a number on them both. I wondered if Hope was in the same boat, but she knew her sister wasn’t quite as dead as everyone else believed.

  “Dead body still missing from mortuary,” the newsreader spoke. “There’s a national cry as the police continue to flounder around about the missing body. The girl’s family plan on suing the national police force for mishandling.”

  “That’s just awful,” I grumbled.

  They didn’t respond. They didn’t do anything, not a single facial tick or movement. They stayed completely still.

  I stayed in the lulled state for a moment, watching the television while Cassandra attempted to complete her task
. I’d so far found nothing. They were unresponsive to questioning unless it was something that was already public knowledge about the whole investigation.

  A panic struck my chest. I jumped from the chair.

  The man. He went in and out of the house. It was impossible, he can’t have. I had wards up. I had the house covered. Unless he really was human, unless he—I ran to the front door and opened it wide, checking the spaces near the grass where I’d placed the stones.

  Gone.

  All of them—gone.

  “Cassandra,” I called. “We need to leave.”

  It wasn’t safe. Someone knew. Perhaps the same person we’d encountered last night. Someone was watching.

  “Is it important?” she asked.

  Safety was important. I gestured to the doorway. “We’re missing something.”

  “Nora. No.” She gasped, galloping down the steps with a heavy thudding. “Don’t tell me—don’t—”

  “Someone’s removed them,” I said in a whisper as she came closer.

  “I got everything I could from her,” she said.

  “Are you leaving?” Hope called from the top step of the second floor. “I’ll see you later, yeah?”

  She nodded.

  “Will we?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you everything when we’re home.” She grabbed her umbrella from the doorway, it sprung out, opening up.

  I closed the door behind us. “They’re basically vegetables in there,” I said. “Someone’s been in. Someone is watching us. Someone knows what we’re doing.”

  “Phil?” she asked.

  “Someone who can interfere with a witch’s magic,” I grumbled. “And there’s only a few people who can do that.”

  “Like who?” she asked, panting in anticipation as we walked quickly, the umbrella over our heads, keeping the beating rains from our bodies.

  I shook my head. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “Nora, tell me.”

  It wasn’t safe here, but it might not have been safe back home either. I paused in the street and took her hand in my shaky hands. I could sense the nerves ran straight through from me to her.