by Alyssa Day
“This is Tess Callahan. Be nice,” Jack called out, smiling.
“Hey, it’s Tess from the pawnshop,” a guy in the back said, shoving his way forward.
“Hi, Lucky. When are you going to come down and visit your guitar?”
That prompted another round of laughter, but my smile faded quickly. “Jack. I have a lot to tell you. It’s about Shelley, and her life is in danger. Immediate danger. We need to go get her now.”
Jack studied my face, and whatever he saw there must have convinced him. He looked at the men and made a couple of hand gestures, and they all took off into the swamp. Some on foot, some in small boats, and some just appearing to vanish into thin air.
“Backup?”
Jack nodded. “Backup. Now come inside, and I’ll tell you the plan.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
It wasn’t a very complicated plan.
“We don’t have time for complicated,” Jack explained. “I know people all over the country we could go to for help, but we don’t have time for that. We have to get Shelley out of there now.”
I didn’t disagree with that. Only with the rest of the plan. Or, at least the part that required me to lie to Hank Kowalski and get away with it.
“You don’t understand. He’ll know immediately that I’m lying,” I protested.
Jack ignored me, just like he had the first two times I’d said it. “You’ll be fine. They’ll expect you to be scared, so it will all make sense to them.”
It made sense to me too, but I still didn’t like it.
Jack and his squad of swamp commandos had already scouted the site. Olga was so arrogant, or so powerful, that she wasn’t even trying to hide. She was conducting the ritual in a big open field behind her house. The witches in her coven were already there, chanting. Since the ritual was meant to be conducted at midnight, according to the book, it was going to be a long day for them. Not that I had a lot of sympathy.
“Delia’s there,” Jack said, his voice gentle. “I’m sorry.”
I said nothing. We’d tried to help her, but she’d chosen her path. There was nothing else we could do. All that mattered now was Shelley.
“Let’s go over this one more time,” Jack began.
“We’ve been over it enough. I know my part. I drive up in Lucky’s truck and act like I have no idea that they’re the ones after me. I pretend to be nervous, which won’t actually be pretending at all, and I tell Hank or Walt—whichever one is on guard duty—that I’m going out of town to be with Uncle Mike and Aunt Ruby, and I wanted to give Shelley her two hundred dollars before I left town.”
Jack nodded encouragingly, but he didn’t look happy. “I spent all night trying to come up with a different way to do this. I reached out to people I know, and I talked to the guys here. The problem is Olga’s proximity to Shelley. Anything overt that we try gives her the chance to kill Shelley before we can get to her.”
I paced back and forth in the small room that made up the entirety of the wooden shack, avoiding the small table, couch, and wood burning stove that were its only contents.
“But the ritual says she has to do it at midnight in order to gain all that power,” I said, pointing at the page from the book I had unfolded and put on the table. “Won’t she wait until then?”
“We can’t know that. A witch friend of mine told me that Olga will get some power from the sacrifice if she kills Shelley any time today. Midnight would be better, but if we’re attacking her with an army of soldiers and helicopters, she’s going to improvise.”
I squared my shoulders. “We can’t take that chance. I’ll just have to lie like I’ve never lied before. Let’s go.”
Jack looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes. Then my team will be in place, so they can cover the ordinary witches while I go after the Kowalskis.”
“While we go after the Kowalskis,” I said, texting Susan the bare bones of the plan in a cryptic way that wouldn’t make sense to anybody else who read her phone.
Jack’s voice took on that steely tone of command that he mistakenly thought would work on me as well as it had worked on his rebels. “Don’t even think about it. And you have the most important job of all. You have to find Shelley and get her out of there. If you can’t find a way out while the fight is on, then you dig in somewhere and protect her.”
I grinned, which completely startled him. “You’re cute when you’re all ‘I’m in charge.’”
He flashed that wicked smile of his. “You have no idea, beautiful. Just wait till this is over.”
I closed my eyes and wished very, very hard that we would all live, so I could take him up on that.
*
There is some old saying Uncle Mike likes to repeat, about God laughing when men make plans, and it kept running through my head while I made the five-mile drive to the Kowalski house. Why hadn’t I learned to be a better liar early in life? It was practically a survival skill for teenagers and online daters, after all. Molly had tried to teach me. She was a champion liar. You had to be, when both of your parents were lawyers. But the lessons had never taken with me. My face showed everything I thought about while I was thinking about it. I was absolutely sure that Hank or Walt Kowalski would know immediately that I was lying.
As it turned out, I was worrying about entirely the wrong thing.
When I turned off onto the gravel road that led to Olga Kowalski’s old, faded, mansion, I almost expected to see a small army of hired guns blocking my way. But Jack’s scouting team had been correct. The only person out in front of the house was Hank, sitting on an old, busted-up lawn chair, with a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
Lunch of champions.
It was all I could do to keep from running him down with the truck, knowing that he was almost certainly the one who’d murdered Jeremiah. But Shelley’s life was at stake. I had to stick to the plan.
Hank stood up when he saw the truck, and I slowed to a stop, rolling down the window. Thinking of all the ways I could possibly screw this up.
“Tess, what the hell are you doing out here?”
Oh boy. He was already drunk and belligerent, even this early in the day. What would he be like when his mother was the queen of the dark side? A total nightmare, that was what.
I pasted a bright smile on my face and beamed at him like he was my new best friend.
He scowled at me. “Do you have a toothache or something?”
When this was all over, if I survived it, I really needed to work on my fake smiles.
“Nope. No toothache,” I said, cheerfully and way too loud.
Crap. I was supposed to be terrified, not manic. I let a little of my actual fear seep through into my expression. “Actually, I’m pretty stressed out. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s some guy threatening me. Last night, he took a shot at me, but he got away from the sheriff. I’m headed out of town to go join my family until this guy is caught,” I babbled.
“Do I look like I give a shit about your problems?” He turned his head to the side and spat on the ground. “What are you doing here, then?”
“I have Shelley’s money. I wanted to drop by and give it to her on my way out of town,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t believe me.
He believed me.
“You can just give the money to me,” he said. He drained his beer and tossed the can in the general direction of the porch. Then he held out his grubby hand and waggled his fingers. “I’ll be sure she gets it.”
From the nasty smile on his ugly face, I knew perfectly well that he was in on his mother’s plan. He was actually standing there expecting me to give him the money that belonged to the little girl his mother was preparing to murder. I wanted my shotgun right then and there almost more than I’d ever wanted anything.
But it was in the backseat, covered with an old blanket, and I had to save Shelley.
“Oh sure. Let me just park the truck, so I can get the money out of my wallet,” I said brightly. Before he could pro
test, I yanked the steering wheel to the side, pulled the truck over, and parked it at a crazy diagonal in what was probably the worst parking job of my soon-to-be-drastically-shortened life. Then I hopped out, holding my purse and walking toward the house.
“You don’t mind if I use your bathroom, do you? I have a long drive in front of me.”
“Oh hell,” he said. “I didn’t want to do this, even though my mother has a wild hair up her ass about you. I already had to shoot your boss. Now, I guess I’ll have to shoot you too.”
I froze and threw my hands up in the air like a captured bank robber on TV. As Uncle Mike’s stupid saying had predicted, our plan was going wrong already, but I comforted myself that at least I’d managed to pull off the lie.
Yeah. Because that was the important thing.
Score: Tess=1, Evil murderers=3,000.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I dragged my feet and tried to stall, thinking furiously, but Hank made me walk around the side of the house to the back by the simple method of pointing his gun at my head.
“What is it with you people and heads?” I shouted. I was way past the “nothing left to lose” mark on the terror-meter now.
“That’s my mother. She thinks it’s more dramatic.” He belched, and I heard him stumble, but when I glanced back at him, the shotgun was still pointing straight at me.
“Why did you have to kill Jeremiah? Because he figured out that your mother wanted Shelley?”
Strategy: get the villain talking while I try to figure out a new plan.
Olga Kowalski was standing right in my path when I rounded the corner of the house, and the new plan went straight out of my mind, replaced by sheer, unadulterated terror. The air itself turned icy and heavy, pressing against me like a rotting corpse in a desecrated grave. Evil—so powerful it was visible—clung to the woman, caressing her with shadowy, skeletal fingers that I could actually see, even in the bright light of mid-day.
My knees turned to jelly at the thought of what she’d be like at midnight. And after she sacrificed Shelley? We were all doomed. If there had been anything in my stomach, I’d be throwing up all over her.
Olga could see how scared I was, and a crazed smile spread slowly across her face. “Hank didn’t have to kill Jeremiah. I’d already placed a memory spell on him to make him forget his suspicions. But my son takes after his father. He’s a moron,” she said pleasantly, smiling.
Olga herself didn’t come across as particularly scary. In fact, she looked so completely ordinary that she could have been a mom on her way to a PTA meeting, if it hadn’t been for the midnight-blue velvet robe she was wearing. Or the leather belt cinched around her waist with what looked like human finger bones tied to the ends.
She had graying blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and she was shorter than me. Nothing about her face screamed “insane murderer,” until you took a deeper look into her eyes and pure, malignant evil looked back at you.
“But you weren’t like this before,” I said helplessly. “When you came to the shop after Jeremiah’s death, you were kind. Did you know then that Hank had killed him?”
“Of course I knew,” she said dismissively, and then she turned her back on me, like I didn’t matter at all, because I couldn’t affect her plan in any way.
It was nothing but the truth.
Now I had to depend on Jack and his team to create a diversion, so I could try to find Shelley, who wasn’t anywhere in sight. The yard sloped back gently to a large, level field. A group of women—I counted twelve, so Olga was the thirteenth—was there, chanting. They sat, evenly spaced, in a circle around a wooden post. The robes must be the fancy coven leader outfit, because the women were all wearing jeans and jackets.
Shelley must still be in the house, or perhaps in the small shed that was set off to one side of the field, its door propped open. The thought of that poor child enduring this after losing her mother and grandparents stiffened my spine, and I found my courage again. Now might be a good time to try to make Olga angry. I could distract her with my clever banter, so she wouldn’t notice Jack sneaking up on the place.
“Won’t it affect your evil plans if your witches’ asses are frozen to the ground by midnight?” Okay, more rudeness than clever banter, but I wasn’t exactly working from a script.
She whipped her head around and glared at me, but I was way past being worried about nasty looks. Behind her, the witches kept chanting. A few of them, including Delia, were hunched in on themselves, clearly terrified, but several were smiling as they watched us.
I marked in my mind which ones were smiling. I’d be sure to catch up with them later.
“What’s the matter, Olga? Was your magic so weak that your memory spell didn’t work on Jeremiah? Is that why your useless son had to shoot him?”
“My spell worked just fine,” she said, sneering. “Why do you think Jeremiah gave the sheriff his prized Wyatt Earp gun?”
“Doc Holliday,” I said automatically, as another piece fitted itself into the puzzle.
“Like I give a damn,” she said, bored with the details.
That’s what Jeremiah’s life had been to this woman too. A detail.
I started toward her, but Hank poked me in the back with the barrel of his shotgun.
“Stop now, Callahan,” he growled.
I was beyond being afraid of him too, though, so I almost kept going, but Shelley’s pale, thin face flashed into my mind. I froze. Olga laughed in my face and then reached out to grab me, but she hesitated at the last moment, and then very carefully did not touch me.
When I realized why, I started laughing. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you? Afraid that I’ll tell you exactly how you’ll die, you miserable excuse for a human being. I hope it’s horrible. Agonizing. Fire, and blood, and lots of screaming.”
Fury battled the madness in her eyes, and I thought I’d finally pushed her beyond the point of no return. But, no. Not even close. She visibly pulled her rage under control, took a deep breath, and looked past me to Hank.
“I don’t have time for this. Kill her.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Whoops. That hadn’t been the plan.
Hank raised the shotgun and pointed it at my head again, and I closed my eyes.
“Tess, run,” Delia shouted.
I opened my eyes in time to see Olga turn toward Delia.
“I don’t think so, little girl,” Olga said, pointing at Delia, just like in my vision, and Delia slumped sideways to the ground, unconscious or dead.
“No,” I moaned.
“What a lovely piece of poetic justice,” Olga said, turning back to me. “The Death Seer gets to see her own death coming.”
“I don’t think so, unless you want to watch me rip your son’s throat out,” Jack said, walking around the corner. “And Death Seer is a terrible superhero name.”
Jack held Walt by the neck. Walt was bloody and bruised, and a rag was stuffed in his mouth, but he was still fighting back.
“You wouldn’t dare harm my son,” Olga shrieked. She muttered something I didn’t catch and made a flicking motion with her hands, like she was flinging water at Jack.
He grunted, and his shoulder jerked back as if she’d shot him. There was no blood, but I could see from his clenched jaw that whatever spell she’d cast, it had hurt. A lot.
“Bad move, witch,” Jack snarled. “Now you lose the son who killed Chantal Nelson and Harper Rawls.”
He grabbed Walt’s shoulder and, with a sickening sound like cardboard shredding, ripped his arm clear off his body. Time seemed to freeze—captured in that moment—as Walt’s blood sprayed through the air in a vivid red arc.
The witches never stopped chanting. Instead, the blood seemed almost to fuel their strength, and the sound grew deeper and more resonant. The sharp smell of sulfur sizzled through the air, and the blackness of the shadows coalescing around Olga deepened.
Hank, whom I’d almost forgotten, made a low, strangled moan, deep in his
throat, and then he slammed the tip of the shotgun barrel into my side, almost knocking me down.
“You animal! You killed my brother,” he shouted at Jack. “I’m going to kill your woman, and then I’m going to shoot you in the gut and watch you bleed to death, slowly.”
I reacted with pure instinct and, instead of running away, I stepped closer to Hank. I grabbed his hand with mine and stared straight in his eyes.
Then I screamed.
Oh, how I screamed. Long and loud and ululating. It was the most piercing scream that anybody in Dead End had ever screamed, and they could probably hear me all the way from town.
I stumbled, retching, but managed to keep my feet. Hank, his shotgun forgotten, stared at me, his eyes filled with horror, and then he yanked his hand away from me and started to back away.
“Don’t you want to know how you die, Hank? It’s coming for you. Your death,” I told him, smiling viciously. “It will be bloody and painful, and you’ll die alone. So, so alone.”
“No! Stay away from me, you freak!” he shouted, making the gesture to ward off the evil eye. He looked at the shotgun in his hand as if he didn’t understand what it was or why he had it, and then threw it on the ground and ran away as fast as his drunken lack of coordination would let him.
When I turned back around, filled with triumph, Hank’s mother was standing over Jack’s body, and half of the witches in the circle were down—unconscious or dead. Delia was still down too.
The rest of them were still chanting.
“It doesn’t have to be a child of the Blood Moon, you know,” Olga said, a crazed, dreamy smile on her evil face. The shadows circling her body had intensified. “Any death can help me raise the Dark Power I crave. Even my witches, or a shifter, or my own son.”
“You killed your own coven? And Jack?” I didn’t believe it. Not Jack.
