Once we neared the main door, I heard Baxter, my little Maltese, yipping up a storm. He’s a six-pound bundle of attitude. Heart of a warrior, body of a guinea pig. I knew Maggie had come over to keep him company, and as Teag and I came in covered in zombie-spatter, she scooped Baxter up and retreated to the far end of the foyer.
“Merciful heavens, what the hell did you get into tonight?” Maggie’s eyes watered, and Baxter gave one last yip and buried his nose against her arm.
“Greasy grimy gopher guts,” I replied, toeing off my boots and leaving them on the porch. I debated stripping down right there to avoid tracking awful slimy stuff through the house. Maggie must have read my mind because she came back with Bax in one hand and two old bedsheets in the other.
“Pretend you’re in middle school gym class,” she ordered. “Wrap up and strip down without showing anything. I’ll put on some water for tea. When I leave, I can bundle those clothes into a big garbage bag and take them to my cousin’s place out in the country—he’s got a burn barrel.”
I didn’t intend to argue because I know from experience that some things just don’t wash clean. I hoped a good shot with the garden hose would save my boots.
Teag and I complied, then shimmied inside wrapped in my mom’s old sheets from the 1970s. The big floral prints looked ridiculous, but they let us retain a shred of dignity, and I directed Teag to the downstairs guest bath while I scooted upstairs for a shower. Maggie’s been on hand enough times for the aftermath of bloody battles to know where Teag’s spare clothing is kept.
I scrubbed with soap until my skin turned pink, and promised myself I’d bleach the bathtub for good measure tomorrow. Even after I knew I’d gotten all the gunk off of me, the smell was still in my nose, and several squirts of my strongest body spray wasn’t quite enough to overpower the stink.
Still, I felt a lot better when I came downstairs to find Maggie and Teag already at my kitchen table, with Bax dancing around their feet, shamelessly begging for treats. I scooped him into my arms, and he recoiled, making me wonder whether it was the perfume or the formaldehyde that offended his nose.
“Is it okay if I stay here tonight?” Teag asked. “Anthony was going to be late working on a case, and if he’s gotten to sleep, I don’t want to wake him. Besides, I’m too jazzed right now to rest.”
“Anytime,” I said, and meant it. Teag is my best friend and brother-from-another-mother, and Anthony is a close second. Maggie’s the smart-mouthed aunt I never had. It’s crazy, but it works.
“Thanks,” Teag said and texted Anthony that he’d be staying over. Now that we’d settled that, Maggie got down the good bourbon and three shot glasses. After the night we’d had, I figured we’d earned it.
“What I don’t get is, why were the zombies only in Magnolia Cemetery, when all of Huguenin Avenue is one long necropolis?” Teag asked.
Maggie raised her eyebrows at “zombies,” but didn’t ask.
I sipped my bourbon and considered the question. The street where Magnolia Cemetery is located is home to about a dozen other smaller cemeteries. Bethany Cemetery, down a side street, is still pretty big and has the graves of many of the area’s early German settlers. There’s a Jewish graveyard and several small AME Zion lots, some of which are very old. Yet as we made our escape, we didn’t see any shamblers in those sections.
“That’s a good question. I wonder if there were problems elsewhere.”
I didn’t wonder for long because my phone buzzed. “Father Anne,” I mouthed to Teag and Maggie. “Hi there,” I greeted my caller and glanced at the time. Midnight. That meant this wasn’t a social call, even in our circles. “What’s up? And can I put you on speaker? Teag and Maggie are here. We’ve had an interesting night.”
I put the phone down on the table so everyone could hear. “Hey Cassidy, I wanted to give you a heads up,” Father Anne said. “Lucinda and Rowan and I have been riding more back roads than a bootlegger, putting down zombies at little rural cemeteries.”
We all looked at each other. “Say again?” I replied.
“Zombies,” Father Anne repeated. She’s a highly unorthodox Episcopalian priest who’s also a member of a secret society of ass-kicking warriors against the Darkness. And a great poker player. “Popping up like zits all over the place, in these little bitty old churchyards in the middle of nowhere.”
“Are you guys still out there?”
“Just heading back.”
“I’ve got a couple of frozen pizzas and plenty of bourbon. If you want to do a slumber party, why not come over here and get cleaned up, then we can compare notes? We barely got back from Magnolia Cemetery, and it’s gonna be all over tomorrow’s headlines.”
I heard some mumbled comments as they conferred. “Sure thing. But we’re all kinda nasty right now, on account of the brain bits,” Father Anne warned me. “I think I can rustle up clean sweats for all of us from the bag in my trunk.”
“If you can’t, I can,” I promised and decided to swing by a dollar store tomorrow to pick up more disposable t-shirts and drawstring pants for exactly this kind of occasion. “See you when you get here.”
Maggie begged off on the practical consideration that someone needed to be awake to open the store tomorrow. She headed for the spare bedroom after Teag and I showered her with our everlasting gratitude.
I heated up the oven, got the pizzas ready, and grabbed a two-liter of soda from the fridge. Teag knows his way around my kitchen, so he dug out some chips and a jar of salsa. Then I dragged the big whiteboard out of my office and into the living room, along with one of the gazillion paper maps of Charleston I keep for things like this. If none of us were going to get to sleep for a while, we might as well get something done.
Once everyone had devoured the pizza, we all gathered in the living room. It felt like being back in middle school, except this crowd knew better than to look in the mirror and summon Bloody Mary.
Father Anne’s colorful St. Expeditus tattoo showed in all its glory with her tank top. He’s a patron saint of monster hunters and the founder of a secret society of hunter-priests. With her pompadour haircut, Doc Marten boots, and penchant for black leather jackets, Father Anne isn’t your average parish priest.
Lucinda, our local mambo, looked as unruffled by the night’s events as usual. She’s tall and statuesque with dark hair and dark eyes, and tonight she had her hair done in braids and wound into a tight coil around her head, which accentuated her chiseled profile. When she’s not hunting evil, she’s a professor at the University specializing in folklore and mythology. I wondered if she’d taken the next day off from class.
Rowan had her long blond hair in a messy top knot. She rocks a Hitchcock blond elegance no matter what she’s wearing, even in jeans and a t-shirt. Although Rowan might look like a fashionista, she’s a hella-powerful witch that we’re lucky to have her on our side.
“You’re telling us that Archibald Donnelly couldn’t lay the dead to rest?” Rowan marveled. “Now there’s a first.”
Lucinda shrugged. “Maybe not such a surprise. The Loas wouldn’t answer when I made offerings. It’s not like the Baron to ignore a plea to help souls in trouble.” I knew she meant Baron Samedi, the Ghede Loa who helped the dead pass over, and probably Papa Legba too, the keeper of the crossroads.
Father Anne looked troubled. “We figured out pretty fast that the bodies weren’t possessed when exorcism didn’t work. I actually felt sorry for them. They all acted like they’d been woken out of a sound sleep and had no idea why they were wandering around.”
“The ones in Magnolia Cemetery were the same—until something Donnelly did seemed to piss them off, and then they came after us,” Teag added, nibbling on the last piece of pizza.
“Maybe they weren’t supposed to rise,” Lucinda mused. “Maybe that was an accident, a side effect of someone else doing something somewhere they weren’t supposed to be doing.”
“Helluva side effect,” Rowan said with an incredulous snort. �
��It would take a lot of power for someone like Donnelly to raise a zombie—not that he would. But I don’t think even he could raise half a cemetery—and not just in one, but in cemeteries all over.”
I frowned. “But it’s not every cemetery, is it? Teag and I didn’t see any other zombies in the cemeteries on Huguenin Avenue, only Magnolia.”
Father Anne nodded. After the shower, her usually spiked hair lay smooth and flat, giving her a less edgy look. “You’re right. We passed other rural graveyards with no zombies at all. And in the places we found some, it wasn’t all the graves.”
“So why some and not others?” Teag asked.
“Did you note the names of the people who were brought back?” I asked, taping up the map to one side of the whiteboard.
“No time,” Father Anne replied. “But I can go back under the guise of ‘saying a blessing’ over the next couple of days and make a list. It’ll be easy to tell from the freshly filled in graves.”
“I got some of the headstones on my phone, but not all. Maybe Sorren can do some recon and find the rest. He’s the least likely to get arrested,” I said.
“Let’s start with the locations.” Teag finished his pizza and took a drink of his bourbon and cola. “Then we’ll start listing the names.” For the next half hour, I marked the cemeteries on the map that Father Anne and the others had visited, then Teag read off the names and dates from the photos on my phone, while I made a list on the whiteboard.
When it was done, I sat back on my heels and looked at the work. “Does anything stand out to you?”
“It’s got to be significant that only Magnolia had zombies, out of all the other cemeteries right next to each other,” Lucinda said. “What’s Magnolia got that the others don’t?”
We brainstormed for several minutes. War dead, famous ghosts, celebrities, notable historical figures, politicians, and shady figures—nothing seemed to fit.
“Landowners,” Teag said. We all went still. “What you said, Cassidy, about it being related to the other weirdness? What if the people who heard this magical ‘call’ were all landowners—people who liked to hunt?”
Chapter Four
We fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning and didn’t get up until almost noon. After a quick breakfast from the odds and ends in my kitchen, I sent everyone home, except for Teag. Maggie was long gone, making sure the store opened on time.
“I’d better get home and change, then I’ll meet you at the store,” Teag said. “I need to call Anthony. He’s probably worried. Even if he doesn’t want all the details, he knows enough to figure that me being out all night means trouble.”
“Yeah, and I should give Kell a heads up about the zombies, in case his crew runs into them elsewhere,” I said. “I’ll see you at the store in a bit. Gonna need some extra coffee to recover before I can face the world!”
When I got to the store, Maggie had her hands full with a room filled with shoppers. Teag showed up about fifteen minutes later. We both slid behind the counter and got right to work. We didn’t have a chance to talk, but I got a strange vibe from Maggie, and I noticed she was tense. That’s not the norm for her; in fact, it’s pretty hard to rile Maggie. Rainy days and crabby people don’t get her down. Now, she looked ready to chew nails.
“Are you the owner?” A woman with frizzy bottle-blond hair muscled up to the counter. Besides her hair and the scowl on her face, the hand-woven shawl around her shoulders caught my attention because the bright shade of pink heightened the flush in her cheeks. “I want to talk to the owner!”
“I’m the owner,” I replied, with my best customer service smile.
“Why aren’t there any opals?” she demanded.
I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Opals. Why don’t you have any?” She sounded like we’d run out of cake at a party.
We don’t stock opals because they’re dicey when it comes to supernatural mojo. Some people believe they’re bad luck, and others think just the opposite. I’ve run into more than my share of the pearlescent gemstones that carried the emotional resonance of their last owner whose belief in bad luck brought about the very thing they feared. But I couldn’t really tell her that.
“Our stock changes almost daily,” I said in my most soothing voice. “And since everything we carry is one of a kind, there’s no way to predict what we’ll have from one day to the next.”
“Everyone told me you carried the best estate jewelry in Charleston,” the woman argued. “But I can see they were wrong if you don’t even have any opals!”
My smile strained around the edges. “We have some lovely rubies and garnets, and a very nice sapphire set—”
She leaned in and fixed me with a nasty glare. “Did I say I wanted any of those? I came here looking for opals, and you don’t have any!”
I took a deep breath. “I’m very sorry that you’re disappointed, but all of our stock is in the cases. We do get new pieces in frequently, but I’m not expecting any opals.”
“I’m going to make sure everyone knows what a terrible selection you offer.” The irate customer looked like she might bite. “I’m never coming back here!” With that, she stomped out, slamming the door hard enough that I feared the glass would break.
The other shoppers had frozen, studiously looking away but hanging on every word. When the woman left, they slowly went back to browsing. I looked at Maggie, who seemed torn between punching someone and having a good cry.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
All the fight went out of Maggie, and she sagged to a seat on the tall chair behind the counter. “I will be. Thanks for drawing her off. She was quite a handful.”
I stared at the door, trying to figure out what had just happened. Something niggled in the back of my mind, a detail I hadn’t quite caught, or that my mind didn’t process. “Well, she’s gone,” I said. “Good riddance. I hope she calms down before she busts a gasket.”
Maggie had already begun to recover. She slipped off the chair and headed for the break room. “I need some sweet tea. You could use some, too.” I didn’t argue. Between the sugar and the caffeine, a good glass of sweet tea was the next best thing to a stiff drink.
My phone buzzed, and I looked at the caller ID. Alistair McKinnon, from the Museum of the Lowcountry. “Alistair?” I answered. I barely had time to get the word out before he started in.
“Cassidy, I need you and Teag to come over as soon as you can, please. I know the museum is haunted. But most of the time, the ghosts don’t do much. Now, it’s like they’re supercharged. And there’s been a theft of something you’d be interested in. When can you come over?”
Teag stared at me across the shop like he knew something was up, and I gave a nod in acknowledgment. “I can come over right after we close up if that’s all right,” I said. “But I know Teag has plans—”
“Get me home by seven, and I’ll be fine,” Teag said, making it clear he intended to come along.
“Wonderful. Thank you.” Alistair didn’t usually freak out, so I figured something big must have been going on.
Despite our late arrival, Maggie shooed us out the door and promised to lock up. I decided she was definitely getting a bonus—or maybe combat pay. Getting an early start seemed like a good idea since I didn’t want to ruin Teag’s night with Anthony. Teag and I drove separately so he could head out from the museum. That meant I could meet Kell for dinner as well, so I couldn’t complain.
Alistair met us in the lobby. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” he said. Alistair looks born to the role of Museum Director, down to the tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches. He’s held his age well, with a trim build and a full head of gray hair, so he could be anywhere from mid-sixties to a decade older. He and Mrs. Morrissey teamed up on plenty of fundraisers, charity events, and soirees to attract well-heeled donors and patrons—and Trifles and Folly is often involved.
“Come this way.” Alistair ushered us upstairs toward the main exhibit fl
oors. Huge banners in red, black, and gold proclaimed “Rural Gentry,” the name of the new installation about Charleston’s foremost hunting families. Smaller banners read “Common Threads” and tried to lure visitors into a room full of needlework, lacemaking, and similar crafts. I knew Teag would want to swing by that on our way out.
“You’ve been to the Archive’s exhibit?” Alistair asked as he walked. I figured he and Mrs. Morrissey had probably already spoken; they once admitted to talking shop nearly every day.
“It’s very nice,” I replied. “But they’ve had a couple of problems,” I added, dropping my voice so it wouldn’t carry.
“I heard,” he replied. “And for some reason, everyone is out of sorts these days. That makes everything twice as difficult,” he fretted. “It seems there’s no pleasing people. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to get out of bed in the morning.”
Teag and I exchanged a glance. Usually, Alistair was practically the definition of “unflappable.”
“Did something happen?” Teag asked.
Alistair sighed. “No one particular thing. Just that people seem to have a shorter fuse than usual. Maybe it’s got something to do with the phase of the moon or the alignment of the stars, but they’re extra crabby lately.”
I felt certain that he’d had a more potent adjective in mind, but Alistair is quite the gentleman. “There seems to be a lot of that going around,” I said carefully, remembering the woman in the shop, and the edgy pedestrians. In fact, now that I thought about it, for a city that has a reputation as welcoming and hospitable to a fault, Charlestonians lately were downright pissy. Odd—and perhaps not entirely a matter of chance. I’d have to give Rowan a call when I left the museum, though I had no idea what kind of spell could make an entire city grouchy, or how to break it.
“Tell us about the new exhibits,” I said to lighten the mood. Alistair brightened immediately. He’s passionate about the museum, and he’s in his full glory showing off a new installation.
Tangled Web Page 5
