Witch at Odds: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 2 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries)

by Juliette Harper

  “I knew Knasgowa would come to Jinx,” Fiona said. “She and Alexander sacrificed everything to bind Brenna to limbo.” She looked at Myrtle questioningly. “Did Knasgowa tell Jinx anything else?”

  Myrtle nodded. “She told Jinx none of this is her fault.”

  “And it’s not,” Chase said, with sudden vehemence. “It’s our fault. We should have found a way to give Jinx more guidance while she was learning how to use her powers.”

  Fiona made a soft, clucking sound in her throat. “Now, now, Chase,” she said. “We really didn’t think she’d just start Googling spells and trying them out.”

  “She was trying to help,” Chase said protectively.

  The three women exchanged a knowing look.

  “See,” Myrtle said, “I told you. He’s in love with her.”

  “Well, now what’s wrong with that?” Fiona said brightly. “I think it would be wonderful for one of our clan to be with a McGregor.”

  “You won’t feel that way when the kittens are born,” Festus mumbled from the hearth.

  “Dad!” Chase said, outraged.

  “No werecat has ever produced an offspring with a witch,” Festus said, unfazed by his son’s reaction. “For all you know, you’ll get a human-looking kid with a tail, big ears, and whiskers.”

  “Stop!” Chase ordered, now blushing outright. “No one is talking about having kit . . . er . . . babies. All of you, just stop.”

  Everyone laughed at that, Festus chiming in with a wheezing sound that could have been merriment or an impending hairball. Finally Amity had the good grace to apologize for them all.

  “We’re sorry, Chase,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It’s just that we’ve been trying to fix you up with a girl for years now, and you and Jinx are just so darned cute together.”

  “We won’t be so cute when she finds out what I am,” he said. “Seriously, I think the whole shapeshifter thing is just going to be too much for her.”

  “Right now it probably would be,” Amity said, “which is why I agree with you. That bit of information can wait until everything else is settled down.” She looked over at Myrtle. “Do we have a plan?” she asked. “Those ghosts out there on the square are starting to get rowdy, and that rabble rouser Howard McAlpin isn’t helping matters.”

  Fiona blew out a disgusted blast of air. “That man!” she said scornfully. “I thought surely this town was rid of him when someone ran him through with that swordfish trophy.”

  “He was murdered, you know,” Myrtle said, as if the news was just a casual aside. “He is right about that.”

  Amity regarded her with horror. “Now you decide to tell us that?” she said. “The whole town buzzed for weeks when he was found with that trophy sticking out of his chest.”

  “Well, yes,” Myrtle replied reasonably, “but not because anyone was actually sorry that he was dead.”

  “Huh,” Amity said, digesting the statement. “I guess that is true.”

  “Who killed him?” Fiona asked eagerly. “Was it a political hit for hire?”

  Myrtle laughed. “Hardly anything that exciting,” she said. “He cheated in the swordfishing tournament. The rightful winner drove up here from Wilmington to confront him; they argued and the man pushed Howard into the trophy.”

  “Ah,” Fiona said, “that makes perfect sense. Howard couldn’t even fish honestly. Don’t forget to tell Jinx about the murder at some point. I don’t think that insufferable idiot will go quietly back into the grave until he knows the truth about his death.”

  “I’ll put it on the list,” Myrtle said, “but there are a few items of greater importance ahead of Howard McAlpin’s ego.”

  “To say the least,” Amity agreed. “So, what do you need from all of us tomorrow night when you help Jinx summon Alexander Skea’s spirit?”

  “At this point, nothing,” Myrtle said, “but that may change once we are in possession of the journal.”

  Chase cleared his throat. “I hate to be the voice of gloom and doom,” he said, “but have any of you given any thought to what we’re going to do if we don’t find the journal?”

  Myrtle regarded him gravely.

  “That,” she said, “would be a seriously negative turn of events.”

  23

  Myrtle surprised me with the announcement that we weren’t going to immediately use Knasgowa’s silver cup to summon Alexander. Was I the only one who wanted this whole mess to just go away?

  “It will be dawn soon,” Myrtle said placidly. “That’s not the correct time to be conjuring a spirit. Go upstairs and get some sleep. We’ll take this matter up after nightfall.”

  Sleep was the last thing I wanted to do. I felt absolutely energized. I’d just talked to my own great-great-something-grandmother and had an incredible encounter with a mountain lion.

  Maybe you’d have to be a cat lover to really understand just how cool that really was. I’m not just crazy about my over-indulged pack of spoiled house cats, I love all cats, and this one had just been . . . amazing.

  I know, I know. “Amazing” is an incredibly over-used word these days, but I really don’t know any other way to describe what it was like staring into those intelligent, amber eyes. It was almost like there was a person in there.

  Since Tori can fall asleep standing up, she happily dragged off to bed. I curled up on the couch and watched the sun come up, which should have been a cue for the ghosts milling around the courthouse square to disappear.

  Except not all of them did.

  And somehow, that just made me feel sadder and more determined to undo what I had done. Watching those pale forms wandering aimlessly around the square as the night lightened to day brought the weight of their loneliness home to me.

  Unlike Beau and the graveyard regulars who had come to accept their earthbound plight, the spirits I had awakened were confused. They wanted their lives back. The more I watched them, the more convinced I became that I had unwittingly taken them away from something better. Accident or not, I had no right to do that.

  That weighed on me, and so did the sensation of basically being a deer caught in the crosshairs of a high-powered scope. Brenna Sinclair was out there somewhere. Since that night when she smiled at me through the darkened store window, I’d looked for some sign of the red-haired sorceress in every shadow.

  She hadn’t appeared again, but neither had she disappeared — at least not from my worried thoughts.

  Knasgowa said we might not be able to banish Brenna. Not what I wanted to hear, by the way. If we simply took away her mortality, what would Brenna do? What the heck was she doing? Where was she?

  I hated the feeling that we were being watched, which is why I wanted to get on with talking to Alexander Skea. Now.

  Instead I was made to wait.

  I waited while the sun came up.

  I waited as I went through the motions of fixing breakfast and feeding the cats.

  I waited while I spent the morning restlessly dusting the store Darby had already cleaned to immaculate perfection.

  I waited fourteen freaking hours until the sun went down and Myrtle was willing for us to get down to business.

  Were my nerves a little on the frayed side?

  Uh, yeah.

  Which is why I plopped down in one of the chairs by the fireplace in the basement, and without bothering about any pleasantries, looked straight at Myrtle and said, “Okay, let’s do this thing.”

  “Impatient, much?” Tori asked, sitting down in the chair next to me.

  “I think I need to prepare you for . . . ” Myrtle started.

  And, of course, I had to go and do something impulsive because I was in such a hurry.

  Without waiting for instructions, I picked up the silver cup, cleared my mind, and went for the ride of my life.

  Let’s just recap my spectral resume up to that moment.

  Aunt Fiona was the first ghost I ever saw. She appeared in my kitchen upstairs and talked to me as if it were the most normal
thing in the world, all the while using an old piece of string to play with my cats. I didn’t realize she seemed so solid because of her proximity to Myrtle.

  Then Tori and I went to the graveyard and I met Beau and the others, who weren’t solid at all, but were equally benign.

  You know about the angry ghost of the murdered girl, but she gets a total pass for her mood.

  The one thing that all those ghosts had in common, however, is that they came to me.

  The instant I picked up the bowl and let my psychometry kick in, the tables turned.

  I went to Alexander.

  Or more exactly, I was sucked down a long, dark tube filled with howling cold winds that shot me out into a foggy, steel-blue landscape so surreal it felt like the backdrop for a cubist painting. All the angles were wrong. There were no buildings or even trees, just a barren desert filled with enormous jagged rocks.

  I landed hard, and immediately scrambled to my feet in panic when I realized a dull mumbling surrounded me. Twisting in frantic circles, I searched for the source of the voices that were surely about to trample over me in a chaotic stampede.

  Instead, one voice broke through the rumble.

  “You are hearing the mortal coil,” the man said. “There is no need to fear it.”

  Whirling around again, I found myself staring at Alexander Skea, but not the version of him I’d seen in the Lodge photo. This man was young and broad chested with powerful arms. He moved toward me with an air of vigor and purpose.

  I couldn’t help myself. I took a step back.

  “The mortal what?” I managed to croak.

  “Coil,” he repeated with a smile. “It is a poetic term for the troubles of daily life.”

  He took my hand and bent low to kiss it.

  “I’ve listened to the voices for so long,” he said, looking up at me, “I think I would be quite lost without them. I take it my wife sent you?”

  Suddenly I remembered why I had come in search of him.

  “Yes,” I said, “she did, but where are we?”

  “We are between your world and the next,” he said, “in a nether region that belongs everywhere and nowhere.”

  Trust me. By this point, I’d completely given up on getting a straight answer from anyone.

  Then it hit me. A nether region? Wasn’t that like another word for limbo?

  Choking a little on the words, I asked, “But isn’t this where you and Knasgowa sent Brenna?”

  His face grew more serious. “No,” he said. “We sent her to a much darker realm, a place where the angels hold back the powers of the night. But she is no longer there, is she?”

  The important point for me at the moment was that she wasn’t anywhere near where we were standing.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. That’s my fault, but it was an accident. I didn’t mean to set her free and I’m really trying to put her back.”

  Alexander seemed to look at me closely for the first time. “You are afraid,” he said simply.

  Again with the understatements?

  “Yes,” I admitted, “very afraid.”

  He offered me his arm. “Walk with me,” he said. “Tell me what has happened.”

  The courtly gesture reminded me of Beau and I suddenly wished very much that the old soldier were here with me.

  Alexander wasn’t the source of the creeping unease that nearly immobilized me. The metallic, monochrome landscape pulsated with the constant, low rumbling of an unhappy world. It made my skin crawl.

  That sound alone was the stuff of nightmares.

  Seeing my indecision, Alexander spoke again, “Walking will help,” he said. “Motion gives a body purpose.”

  Purpose.

  Okay. Purpose would be good.

  I took Alexander’s arm and, haltingly at first, then all in a torrent, I told him the whole story as the formless landscape moved past us. When I ended with an account of my conversation with Knasgowa, I said, “She wanted me to tell you that she loves you.”

  Alexander bowed his head and I saw him swallow hard before he spoke. “And I love her,” he said. “If you are her granddaughter by blood, then you are mine as well by the affection I hold in my heart for her. This is what you must do.”

  Let’s just say that’s when the bovine by-product hit the rotary device.

  When Alexander was done speaking, I gaped at him. “You can’t be serious,” I finally managed to say.

  “I am quite serious,” he said. “You must go to my final resting place, open my tomb, and retrieve my journal. Draw Brenna to the site of my wife’s grave with the blood of my blood. Hold her fast there within a circle of magic. Speak the words in the journal and consign her once again to the blackness of limbo.”

  Yeah, that part I got. Or at least most of it.

  The bigger problem wasn’t something I could explain to Alexander.

  He thought he was buried under an ancient oak tree at the edge of a country meadow, which is undoubtedly what the scene looked like in 1864. It was now, as best as I could figure, the parking lot of the local Baptist church.

  Ever since this witch thing came up I had been worried about going to hell.

  Now it was starting to look like a sure thing.

  Alexander got me headed in the right direction to return to my own reality, but it was Tori’s insistent voice that led me back up through the tunnel and into the light. When I opened my eyes, I was still holding the cup in my shaking hands. The basement felt ice cold.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Tori demanded, draping a blanket that had appeared out of nowhere around my shoulders. “I thought we agreed after the whole talking-to-hickory-trees episode that you were going to be careful about what you picked up?”

  “Sorry,” I said weakly, huddling into the blanket. “I was tired of waiting.”

  The heavenly aroma of coffee suddenly wafted up around me. I looked down into Darby’s worried eyes. “Mistress seems to be cold,” he said with concern, holding up a steaming mug of coffee.

  I put Alexander’s cup down and gratefully accepted the coffee, managing not to splash any of the hot liquid on myself with my shaking hands. “Thank you, Darby,” I said. “Your timing is perfect.”

  The brownie hesitated and then he asked, “Did you see my Master?”

  The hopeful note in his voice broke my heart.

  “Yes,” I said. “Alexander told me everything I need to know.”

  Still looking uncertain, Darby asked, even more softly, “Is he in an awful place?”

  God. What could I say to that?

  “It’s not the greatest,” I admitted, “but he’s a strong man. I think the worst part for him is not being with Knasgowa.”

  Darby nodded his head solemnly. “Theirs is a great love,” he said.

  Myrtle cleared her throat and I glanced over at her. She didn’t look quite as disapproving as I expected her to, but almost.

  “That was exceedingly imprudent of you,” she said through pursed lips. “Please don’t do something rash like that again.”

  Even though I really couldn’t make any promises about that, my good Southern girl gene kicked in and I mumbled a contrite, “Yes, ma'am.”

  I’m really not sure Myrtle believed me, but she apparently decided to let it go. “What did Alexander tell you?” she asked, listening intently as I ran it all down for her.

  When I got to the end of the story, I said firmly, “We are going to the church tonight. I cannot stand one more day of this.”

  To my considerable shock, Myrtle agreed with me, as did Beau Longworth who materialized at the foot of the staircase.

  “You must go tonight,” he said. “Mayor McAlpin is being rather successful in his organizational efforts. He is now rallying the spirits to stage something called a ‘haunt in’ of City Hall — during the daylight hours tomorrow. When I left they were singing an old Negro spiritual, ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

  I frowned. “Singing is bad?” I asked.

&nbs
p; “Passersby on the street can hear, but not locate the voices,” he said. “A crowd is gathering and they are using their communication devices to take photographs. I do not believe anyone has been successful in capturing an image as of yet, but Mayor McAlpin has vaguely materialized at least twice. Those present are hoping to secure a photograph to do something I believe they referred to as ‘going viral?’”

  Uh-oh. Not good.

  Or was it?

  “How big is the crowd?” I asked.

  “Enough to fill the courthouse lawn,” he said, “and more are arriving. I am afraid there are also two paranormal investigation groups in attendance; a woman claiming she can ‘channel’ the spirits of the dead, and a minister preaching about the end of days. I believe there are also correspondents present.”

  Tori frowned. “There are people in the crowd writing letters?”

  “He means reporters,” I said. “How about the local police?”

  “There are two law enforcement vehicles parked in front of the courthouse,” Beau said. “They seem to be primarily involved in securing the smooth flow of motor vehicles around the square.”

  Perfect. That meant the entire Briar Hollow Police and Sheriff’s Department were on the case — and paying absolutely no attention to anything else that was going on in town.

  “Beau,” I said, “do you think you can help us locate the exact site of Alexander’s grave the same way you found the cup?”

  “I can try,” he said. “In theory the principle is the same.”

  Tori made a little “ahem” sound. “Uh, excuse me? Voice of reason here.” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “How, exactly, are we supposed to dig up part of the Baptist Church parking lot without getting caught?” she said. “Never mind lugging a moldy old skeleton across town?”

  “The whole town is paying attention to the square,” I said. “If we hurry, we can get in and get out without anyone seeing us. It’s perfect.”

  “God,” she groaned, “don’t say that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because now something is guaranteed to go wrong.”

  24