“You still have a little over a year…” Stan said. “There is nothing I can do about this, and I realize that I have no part in controlling it either.”
“So okay…” I breathed out, trying to find a solution. “I guess my job in the next year is to find a boyfriend. Alright.”
“Is this how you do things?”
“What do you mean?”
“You get so cross that you start yelling, and then you think a moment, find a plan and commit to it?”
“Basically. I don’t stay down for long.”
“I think someone out there is going to like that.”
“Both are asses are on the line if they don’t,” I commented, brushing off his compliment. “I guess we’re going to be at Seven’s a lot now. Are you sure you don’t want to rethink drinking?”
“Rather sure, but I have a few changes I need to make too.”
He didn’t leave room for elaboration as he walked up the stairs.
That boy was nothing but an extremely hot mystery in my mind, and I was beginning to realize I liked denying it better than I enjoyed facing a challenge. There was something satisfying about having a secret no one else knew about.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The Mausoleum
Helaine
Weeks had gone by so quickly since our beach trip, and I wondered when the stones would bring along the traveler I so desperately wanted to meet. Any time now would be brilliant. It may have been dumb to pine over someone I hadn’t yet met, but it was incredibly romantic and torturous.
Onyx had to reschedule our lesson that evening, so against my better judgment and consensus of the Coven members, I went out to find some inspiration on my own, to collect my thoughts and find Moon. It wasn’t illegal for me to leave without anyone. The Coven would get especially mad at Stan if Rose was in danger, but it’s not like they had a problem with me being attacked in the girls’ locker room last fall. None of them offered me an intervention or guidance afterward. They knew I’d be fine.
The strength of my water roots and the control I exerted while training and in my personal life shocked everyone—including me, and I didn’t think I’d be the straight-laced one out of me and Rose. In fact, I expected to have broken curfew at least twice by now.
No one recognized me as I traipsed through the green park on a hot summer day.
I was tragically unpopular in London, and I was sure that the only boy who was even interested in me was Esper, and he was gay. That really said something.
Even though my advancing powers made up for my deadened social life, nothing made up for the tinge of guilt concerning the circumstances of Mr. and Mrs. Halloran’s deaths.
But what about Judy Halloran? I wondered for the first time. No one had mentioned her because Stan had only caught Ling’s shady conversations in Moon’s memories. Judy had to be the missing piece of the puzzle.
The Halloran’s ashes could be found in their family mausoleum, so I went there to pay my respects and collect my thoughts. It was down a set of stone stairs, deep underground.
The candlelight at the bottom of the steps gave everything a peaceful glow. There was a tomb in the middle of the floor (an important ancestor, no doubt) and bodies were laid to rest behind fourteen-karat-gold plaques in the walls. A humble water fountain trickled near the entrance. Despite the unsettling, inky corners of the stone tomb, seeing the simplicity of the fountain made me smile.
I looked and Ling and Judy’s portraits and realized I had forgotten to get flowers.
As I stopped in front of their urns someone came in behind me.
I turned my solemn look towards him. He was five years older than me at most and had dark hair and eyes.
“Hi,” I said,
“Hi yourself,” he said back in an Australian accent. He looked familiar, but where from?
“Friend of the family?” I asked him.
“Yes. And you?”
“Moon…er… their daughter is an old friend.”
“It’s a shame, what she had to go through.”
“It-”
My distraction came from the sound of a lighter flicking in his right hand. He touched the open flame to the flowers and gifts piled beneath Mr. Halloran’s portrait.
I immediately extinguished the flame with the wave of my hand. He had been at the pub the night of winter solstice. The lad with the amulet. He was wearing it now.
“Are you mad?”
“Are you Helaine Laurence?”
“Yes. By order of the London Coven, I demand to know why you are setting a fire in a closed room, on sacred ground no less.”
“It always takes me aback when witches are beautiful creatures. They always told me that you wouldn’t be, but in London, I’ve seen different.”
“We’re not all old hags. I’ll ask again: Who are you?”
“The name is Jones.”
I held eye contact with him, perceiving a hollow glint in his eyes. He was here to kill me.
“And what does the Jones family do for fun?”
“We hunt witches.”
“That explains it,” I said, throwing up my arms. Australia was originally a prison continent with no history of witch hunts. What the shit? “Do you think that witches could actually be drowned or burnt?”
“They can be if they’re unconscious.”
“Enough. What is it that you want?”
“When little birds go where they don’t belong, they’re sent into the depths of the cavern all alone. You went where you don’t belong. And you shouldn’t be in the Coven.”
The Coven? But Brittany was never wrong. I knew what was meant to be, and I figured this killer would be batshit when we caught him.
“Winter solstice at the pub,” I said. “You were going to kill me when I was newly initiated?”
“Yes, until you spilled your drink.”
A smile stretched across my face. Go figure that Sophie’s bad luck was good for something.
I knew I had to strike before he did. I felt the power within me grow, and I released its charge with all of my might.
“Where did it go—”
I saw the amulet around his neck glow blue and trap my energy.
“This room is small enough that I can absorb anything you emit.”
“Anything?” I asked him. “Are you sure?”
Maybe if I expended enough energy, the talisman would break. It could probably only hold so much. I swallowed hard, realizing he had backed me into a small room that didn’t allow my power to expand. I had no wind to fuel it. He had me trapped, but I wasn’t going down without a fight.
“I’m sure, Helaine. You’re a dead woman, or maybe just a dead little girl.” He brandished a stake from his jacket, and still holding his red lighter, he lit it on fire.
“I thought red lighters were bad luck.”
“I thought that red hair was.”
I only had a split second, so I took my kubotan from my inside jacket pocket, blocking his arm as he tried to strike me with the flaming stake, and then plunging the short weapon into his ribs. He cried out in pain, frozen in place from my straight shot to a nerve. I had more powers than he realized, and one was my indomitable spirit. His comment was aimed to make me slip up. I knew better.
I heard a sliding sound behind me and saw two other men descended the stairs into the tomb.
“I don’t want trouble,” I said out loud.
“But you came looking for it,” one of the two new witch hunters said. They were all maybe twenty-five, if that, and they all resembled each other with dark hair and hazel eyes. I didn’t have time to finish off the first one before the other two came at me, and I cursed in my head, knowing that I should have disabled the first one by breaking a limb.
Three-to-one odds of me surviving would be better if I ran instead of fought, but they were blocking the only exit.
I threw one of them over my shoulder as he came at me, and he landed on his head. As I fought the other two, I didn’t see the th
rown witch hunter moving at all. If I was lucky, he had landed on his neck just right. I also saw blood trickling from behind his head.
Just like in our knife form, I plunged the blunt kubaton into the neck of the one, side-stepped with a switch of the weapon, and caught the other bloke in the eye. I remembered my Grandmaster’s words, and how there were no rules in the street fight. In a mausoleum fight, I’d take any opening I could get.
I flew through the air, landing a side-kick into the first man’s solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him. I knew where to hit, but a devastating blow meant using all of my body weight. I tucked my thumb tightly and hit him in the throat with four knuckles. He sat on the floor wheezing, and I saw him start to cough up blood.
There was no time to ask the third if he wanted to retreat because he picked up the flaming stake. I knocked it away, got to his back, wrapped my right arm like a guillotine, twisted my body and dropped him, breaking his neck.
My heart was beating out of my chest as I ran to check all three of their pulses. The first one was dead. The second one was dead. And as I kneeled down to check the third one, his pulse was still. Blood ran from his mouth onto his shirt. I sighed out sharply, standing up, moving to look back toward the door and hoping to get out of here and tell the Coven what had just happened and that I didn’t mean to kill them.
Fuck, they were really dead. Shit fuck. I had killed them.
Rose would know that I didn’t want any of this. She understood my code and would be able to vouch for me, and if I stood trial, she would stand up for me with everything she had. I just wanted to see her now. She’d know what to say to me and I needed to hear her voice.
Before I could turn around, I felt something rip through my back, numbing me with an intense heat. I didn’t know if it was magic or a blade, but there was clearly someone else in the room that I hadn’t seen.
I yelled out in pain and managed to turn myself around to find the source of my agony.
There was a fourth man here and he had been waiting in the shadows. Looking upon his face, I knew I had been mistaken earlier, and that this fourth man was the one who had been at Seven’s. He was younger than the other three. The Joneses worked in a Hive mind as if they were all the same Mr. Jones.
“I wouldn’t have tried to burn you,” he told me, cocking his head to the side with a look of pity that resonated from his hazel eyes. My shock subsided a little bit more now and I moved my arms to feel for whatever was going on in my back. My hands held something long, damp, and wedged into my back.
When I pulled my hands back in front of me, I saw crimson all over them. My blood. The blood rushed from my head. I shouldn’t have looked. My navy blue jacket had to have been slippery with it. I knew I was losing too much by the way my vision started to fail.
Think, Helaine!
I needed a quick plan to deal with the man before me, and I had to talk myself out of losing consciousness so that I could. The sight of my blood was ripping apart my senses.
His skin was covered in black sleeves like the others, some cheap and generic thermal shirt, and there was no way I could get his skin under my nails, not when he was standing so far away. I could barely even stand now, and I almost didn’t believe that I was trying to leave clues instead of fighting him tooth and nail. There was only one other thing I could do to tell my friends who had murdered me.
“Why?” I asked, gripping the stone coffin in the middle of the room. This was it. I was not getting out of this alive. How had I been so careless not to check for others? “Why did you stab me?”
“Because fire is less humane.”
“And stabbing someone in the back is?”
I reached onto the altar and used my remaining strength to throw a chalice to him with nearly perfect aim, and he instinctively caught it, setting up the trap I was laying for him. Gregory would touch the chalice and see who killed me, and at least my parents would know. At least Brittany would know. At least Rose could exact revenge in my place. The spot behind my eyes grew hot, and I choked back tears, thinking about leaving them. I would be fine. They wouldn’t be.
“A souvenir?” He refused to smile, setting the chalice down on the wall behind him. I remembered that Stan would drink my blood and see this, as long as they left my body alone when I was finished using it. I prayed they would.
“Yes,” I said honestly. I was dizzy; maybe from looking at my blood again or maybe from losing it. “I’m not sorry about killing them. I’d do it again.”
“I’d kill your precious Moon Halloran again too,” he told me, just watching me lie there in a puddle of my own blood.
I could smile now. I looked up at him. My dying breaths had to count for something.
“Moon’s alive, you motherfucker, and I bet she’s coming for you.”
I tried to stay conscious, but fighting to stay alive took every ounce of strength I had. My vision was plagued with black spots, and the blood drenching my shirt was so warm. I didn’t expect it to feel as hot as it did.
I gave it a good go, and this had always been an option. I had no idea if I’d be able to communicate once I died, or how I should go about it, but I did know that this was the end of my life.
I sunk to the floor, and the attacker’s shoes faded in and out of my failing vision.
I felt him pull the knife out.
In that second I knew that my last breath would be a guttural scream.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Intuition
Rose
Helaine being late to dinner was nothing new, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Water witches weren’t the only ones with fantastic intuition. While I didn’t have an emotional empathic connection to Helaine like I did my parents—both of whom would call me when I was terribly upset—I couldn’t discount what happened when we snuck out at Dia, when I could sense danger attached to Helaine.
“I feel like something is wrong,” I said, looking up from the lettuce I was chopping. I talked with the knife in my hand. “Helaine should have been back by now.”
No one corrected me for the use of her first name only, and Gregory, Maddi, and Stan all now had similar looks on their faces from their various locations in the kitchen.
“I think something is wrong. I know it is.”
“I trust your intuition,” Stan said. “Of all days she decides to go off on her own… it’s one that Onyx had to cancel. I don’t like this. Where would she have gone?”
“I’m not sure…” I admitted.
“She probably wanted to stretch her legs and her powers and show everyone she can go out on her own. She probably went to Block Thirteen,” Maddi said.
“No,” Gregory argued. “Helaine’s obsessed with solving the Halloran murder, and The Hallorans were just entombed in the family mausoleum.”
“Why are we waiting then?” Stan asked. “If she should have been back by now and your intuition says she’s in trouble, we’ve already wasted enough time.”
“Everyone ready?” Maddi asked. I wasn’t even armed, but I couldn’t care less.
“You’ll go with me and Maddi,” Gregory told me. “Cross your arms with mine and Maddi’s and don’t let—”
Before I knew it we standing in the cemetery, and it felt like someone had kicked me in the solar plexus. I gasped for air. They went back for Stan as I caught my breath.
“You could have told me to breathe out!”
“That’s the extent of our hazing,” Gregory explained. “Let’s go.”
As we closed in on the mausoleum with daylight just now making way for the moon, I felt a tinge of guilt warm my stomach. I couldn’t sense her anywhere. I knew that whatever happened to Helaine was already done.
I couldn’t tell the others, but Stan exchanged a worried glance with me as we approached the Halloran family mausoleum. The four of us ran through the door into dark stone room.
The candle chandeliers were dark, and there was no electric lighting in the Halloran family mausoleu
m. I waved my hand, spreading fire to all of the wicks, and the room glowed so brightly that it was as if someone had turned on the sun.
Confirming the suspicion in my gut, I saw Helaine lying on her side on the cold stone in an unmistakable red puddle, her hair in a mess around her head. She was wearing the jacket I had gotten her for Christmas.
“No,” I said. “Not Helaine, not now, not here. Fuck,” I choked out under my breath.
I ran over to her, not caring if whoever did this was still here. I checked for a pulse and saw that someone had stabbed her twice, but had removed the knife. We had no way of knowing who stabbed her without Gregory being able to touch murder weapon. It had been important enough to take with. The murderer was probably saving it for later.
There was no pulse to be found on her neck.
“In the back,” I said angrily. “They stabbed her in the back. And the heart…”
My tears spilled from my furious face that contorted against my will, and I tried to keep them away from her body, knowing they could incinerate anything at a moment’s notice. My voice was clear and strong even though I dejectedly slumped over my best friend’s dead corpse.
“Who would do this?”
I looked over to my friends, feeling as if my soul was being ripped from my body, again and again, and if they looked better than I did, they only did so barely.
Maddi wore devastation, eyes welling up, and Gregory was frozen in place. Stan was even concerned and was the first to walk over to me and Helaine.
“Is there anything you can do?” He stood above us now.
“She’s dead. Not even my mentor gift power can help her now.” I didn’t care what Stan’s mentor gift power was anymore, not when we had gotten here too late for him to use it. I remembered his arm in the courtyard and how the burns from my ring of fire healed before I could notice they were even there. I should have put it together then, but even if I had, it wouldn’t have made me feel any less helpless now. “Mentors can’t heal the dead…”
Death's Primordial Kiss (The Silvered Moon Diaries Book 1) Page 35
