Midnight Blood

by Adam J. Wright

  Felicity knew that what they’d found so far—an open door and some dirt—was hardly the grounds to suspect a crime but she knew why Amy was being so cautious. There was a kind of electricity in the air around the Libby house, something that made the hairs on Felicity’s neck and arms rise to attention. She realized her breathing had quickened.

  “Perhaps they just went out to the store and left the door open,” she said softly, trying to assert some logic to the situation, something that would ease the anxious feeling that bloomed within her.

  “The car’s over there,” Amy said, pointing the flashlight at a brown station wagon parked in the yard.

  “Oh,” Felicity said. That was that theory out of the window.

  Amy pushed the screen door aside. As she did so, the remaining hinge snapped and the metal door crashed onto the porch.

  If anyone’s in there, Felicity thought, they know we’re here now. She wished she had some sort of weapon to protect herself.

  Amy pushed open the wooden front door with the toe of her boot. She shouted, “This is the Sheriff’s Department. Is anyone home?”

  The house remained silent.

  With her gun and the flashlight gripped in both hands in front of her, Amy entered the building. Felicity followed close behind but made sure she gave the deputy enough room to maneuver should she need it.

  They stood in a kitchen. The walls were grimy and there were dishes in the sink but there were no signs of a struggle or a break-in or anything of that nature. The kitchen chairs were neatly arranged around the table and the cabinets were closed.

  “More dirt,” Felicity whispered to Amy. A dark trail of dirt lay on the linoleum. It led all the way to a small corridor that separated the kitchen from the living room and terminated in a set of stairs that went up to the next floor. The dirt trail didn’t lead to either the stairs or the living room, though; it led to an open wooden door in the corridor.

  Amy shone her light through the doorway. A set of wooden steps led down to a cellar.

  “You smell that?” Amy asked.

  For the first time since entering the house, Felicity noticed a smell that reminded her of rotting vegetables. She nodded to Amy. At least this wasn’t the sickly-sweet smell of death but in a way, this smelled even worse.

  “Stay close,” Amy said as she moved through the doorway and down the steps. Felicity did as ordered. She didn’t want to be left alone up here.

  They descended to the cellar slowly, the wooden steps creaking under their weight. Amy moved her gun and flashlight in an arc and the light traveled over the cellar’s brick walls. It came to rest on a workbench that had been set up in one corner.

  “There’s something on it,” Amy said, moving forward. She stopped suddenly and held out a hand to stop Felicity. “Be careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” Aiming the flashlight down, she revealed a crude oblong hole in the dirt floor. Felicity guessed the hole’s dimensions to be approximately three feet wide and eight feet long. It looked to be around six feet deep. The standard size of a grave.

  A pile of dirt and a shovel lay next to the hole. The grave had either been dug recently and was awaiting an occupant or something had recently been unearthed from it.

  Stepping carefully around the hole, Felicity joined Amy at the workbench. Amy had something in her hand. She gave it to Felicity. “Can you read this?”

  Felicity took the slim leather-bound book from Amy and read the title stamped on the cover. Et Conjuratio de Nocte Sanguine. She leafed through a few of the pages. Like the title, the text was in Latin with diagrams of magical symbols.

  “What does it say?” Amy asked.

  “It’s a Latin translation of an older work, a resurrection spell. She showed Amy the title on the cover. “The Conjuration of the Midnight Blood.”

  Amy looked from the book to the open grave. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “That the spell was used to bring Mason Libby back from the dead? Yes.”

  They left the cellar. Felicity took the book with her because she wanted to study it in detail later when she got home. When they got to the first floor, Amy used her light to track the trail of dirt across the kitchen floor and out of the door. “Where did they go?”

  “Maybe they went to the Hawthorne residence to commit their final act of revenge?”

  “Then why is the car still here? The Hawthorne house is miles away.”

  They went outside and Amy shone the light around the general area. As well as the house, there was a barn and a toolshed. Both seemed deserted.

  “We should check around back,” Amy said.

  Felicity followed her around the side of the house. She still felt a charge of nervous energy running through her veins, even more so now that she suspected black magic had been performed here recently. Although checking the crystal shard was almost redundant at this point, she took it out of her pocket and held it on her palm. It shone brighter than Amy’s flashlight.

  A chill wind had begun to blow through the trees, rustling the leaves so that they sounded as if they were whispering. Felicity put the crystal back into her pocket and shivered.

  They reached the backyard and Amy suddenly shouted, “There!” She increased her pace, almost running toward a bulky object on the ground. Felicity ran after her and when Amy finally stopped, could see what had alarmed the deputy.

  A wheelchair lay on the ground on its side. A young man Felicity assumed to be Owen Libby was sprawled on the grass. It was obvious that he was dead. The grass around his body was stained with blood that looked black in the weak moonlight and a huge gash had been torn from Owen’s neck to his navel. He wore wire-rimmed glasses but one lens was shattered and the eye behind it was nothing more than a bloody mess.

  Felicity felt sick. She turned away from the grisly scene and swallowed back acidic bile that rose in her throat. This young man had clearly been murdered and it looked like his chest cavity had been ripped open and parts of his body had been removed.

  “Come on,” Amy said, putting a gentle hand on Felicity’s shoulder. “I’m going to call this in.”

  Felicity followed her back to the car, her mind racing. She knew that black magic spells usually demanded a sacrifice and resurrection was one of the blackest forms of all magic. Had the Conjuration of the Midnight Blood demanded a terrible sacrifice?

  Before they left the yard, she looked back at the bulky shape lying beneath the pale moonlight. She hardly dared contemplate what she knew had probably happened here.

  Had a mother sacrificed one of her sons so that another might be brought back from the dead?

  12

  I brought the two mugs of coffee into the living room and gave one to Mallory. She was sitting in the easy chair with her legs curled up.

  While I was waiting for the coffee maker to do its thing, she’d gotten dressed and now wore a pair of jeans and a cream-colored sweater.

  I sat on the sofa and waited for her to tell the story in her own time.

  Mallory took a sip of the coffee and grimaced. “I haven’t tasted this in a while.”

  “Would you like something else? I have tea.”

  “No, I might as well get used to things again.” She swallowed some more of the coffee before continuing. “The moment I plunged the dagger into the heart of the sorceress, something entered my body. I felt…different. At first, I thought it was the curse, that I could somehow sense it inside of me but after a while, I began to see a woman in my peripheral vision. Like, I’d see her in the corner of the room but when I turned to look, she wasn’t there. I began to believe I was going crazy.”

  “You could have told me. Maybe I could have helped.”

  She shook her head. “I needed to be alone, think things through. The curse made me realize it was probably now or never where hunting Mister Scary was concerned and seeing the imaginary woman reinforced that belief. If I was losing my mind, I had to act quickly before the madness overtook me completely.”

  I nodded
and tried to imagine the mental torment Mallory must have been going through.

  “I spent some time traveling down the east coast, staying in one cheap hotel after another, waiting for some clue to appear and give me a direction,” she said. “Every night, I had vivid dreams of an ancient city and I saw scenes of life in the palace there. I saw the Pharaoh, Amenhotep, and the high priest Rekhmire. I saw all of this through the eyes of Tia, the sorceress who cast spells and enchantments for the pharaoh. I also saw the moment Rekhmire murdered her and cut out her heart.”

  She’d been gazing at the table while telling this part of her story. Now, she looked at me with tears in her eyes. “I felt everything she’d felt, Alec. These weren’t just dreams; they were her memories and I was sharing in them. I knew then that I wasn’t crazy; the sorceress was inside my head. When I stabbed her heart, Rekhmire’s death curse wasn’t the only thing that became attached to me. So did Tia. Now, I sometimes see her when I look into a mirror. Instead of my reflection staring back at me, it’s her.”

  “I can’t imagine what that must be like,” I said.

  “It isn’t too bad. At first, I fought the sorceress and the visions—tried to get them out of my head—but now I accept them. Tia is a lot like me; I want revenge on Mister Scary and she wants revenge on Rekhmire.”

  This kind of reminded me of Merlin possessing Sheriff Cantrell but at least in this instance, Mallory was still in control of her own body, and her mind wasn’t locked away in some magical prison.

  “When I was in Shadow Land,” she said, “I became thankful that Tia was with me. Her being there meant I wasn’t completely alone. She helped me get through some dark times.”

  My phone rang and Leon’s name appeared on the screen. “Sorry,” I said to Mallory. “I have to get this.”

  She nodded. “Yes, of course.”

  “Leon,” I said, answering the call. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, man, we have a problem. Brad Hawthorne texted me a little while ago. He wanted to meet me at his sister’s house in Rockport, said it was urgent. When I got here, the door was open so I came inside. There’s something you need to see. I’m sending you a photo.”

  The phone buzzed and I navigated to the text Leon had sent. He’d taken a picture of Lucy’s living room, where I’d sat and talked to Lucy earlier that day. But now everything in the room was out of order. The coffee table with the carved tentacle legs lay on its side, surrounded by hundreds of paperback books, which had been pulled from the shelves. Lucy’s computer had been overturned. Papers and notebooks lay on the floor.

  “There’s no sign of Lucy or her brother?” I asked Leon.

  “I checked everywhere. There’s no one here.”

  “Okay, listen, I’ll finish talking with Mallory while you drive back from Rockport and I’ll meet you at the office in an hour.”

  “Mallory’s back?”

  “Yeah, she is. Bring something of Lucy’s from the house. Something personal. Maybe one of her notebooks or a pen or something. We can get the Blackwell sisters to cast a locator spell and find out where she and Brad are.”

  “You got it. On my way.” He ended the call.

  “Trouble?” Mallory asked.

  “Yeah, someone connected to a case we’re working has gone missing. I’m going to have to go to the office and—” I cut off my own words when I heard something small crash through the window. It landed on the floor between us.

  “What the hell’s that?” Mallory was out of her chair, standing by the coffee table and looking down at the object on the carpet.

  It was ball—no larger than a baseball—made of a dull metal and inscribed with runes. I had no idea what it was but since someone had thrown it into the house, I knew it wasn’t good.

  “We need to get out of here!” I said to Mallory.

  But as soon as I got the words out, a blinding flash of light exploded from the ball.

  Then everything went black.

  13

  As they left the Libby farm behind, Felicity ran over the scene they’d just witnessed in her head. It didn’t make sense that Abigail Libby would sacrifice one of her sons to bring back the other. What mother would do that?

  It began to rain and Amy turned on the wipers. Felicity listened to the repetitive whirr as they arced across the windshield every few seconds.

  Amy hit the brakes suddenly and the cruiser skidded to a halt.

  “What are you doing?” Felicity asked.

  “That woman we just passed back there,” Amy said, killing the siren. “That was Abigail Libby.”

  Felicity turned in her seat to look out of the car’s rear window. She could barely make out the silhouette of someone walking along the edge of the highway.

  Amy got out of the car and sprinted back along the highway toward the silhouette. Felicity took off her seatbelt and got out as well, squinting against the headlights of the oncoming traffic. As she followed Amy, she saw the silhouetted woman—the person Amy had said was Abigail Libby—stumble and fall.

  Amy tried to get the woman to her feet and Felicity rushed over to help.

  “Help me get her into the car,” Amy said.

  They each took an arm and guided Abigail into the backseat of the cruiser.

  Amy turned on the interior light. In its dim glow, Felicity could see that Abigail was in her fifties with gray hair scraped back into a ponytail. She was a thin woman with sunken eyes and a sallow complexion. Felicity could smell alcohol on her breath. Her head lolled to one side and she mumbled something incoherent.

  “Abigail,” Amy said. “What are you doing wandering along the highway?”

  Dressed in nothing more than jeans and a black T-shirt, Abigail was hardly dressed for the weather.

  “I’m just going for a walk,” Abigail said.

  “Along the highway at night?”

  Abigail looked around at her surroundings with bleary eyes. “Is that where I am?”

  “Did you walk here from your house?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t go to the house. Owen says I’m not allowed. So I stay away.”

  “What do you mean? Why aren’t you allowed to go to your own house?”

  Abigail shrugged exaggeratedly. “I don’t know. Owen said it would spoil the surprise. He’s a good boy. Both of my boys are good boys. Look, I have a photo of them.” She patted the pockets of her jeans as if looking for something but couldn’t find it. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Abigail, what are—”

  “Do you know it’s a year and a day ago that my Mason was taken from me? That’s a long time to be without my son.”

  “I know,” Amy said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Abigail squinted at Amy. “Are you the police? Am I in trouble?”

  “I am the police and I’m not sure if you’re in trouble or not. What can you tell me about your son Owen?”

  “He’s a good boy. He’s going to surprise me, he said. A big surprise. That’s nice, don’t you think?”

  Amy nodded. “Uh huh. Do you know that the surprise was?”

  Abigail let out a short laugh. “No, because then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Owen?” Amy asked.

  She frowned, obviously trying to remember. “A couple days ago I think. He told me I had to stay at a motel and I couldn’t go home until he said it was okay.”

  Amy looked at Felicity with sadness in her eyes. Felicity was sure the same expression was showing on her own face. Abigail didn’t seem to know that Owen was dead.

  “That’s the last time I saw Owen,” Abigail said. “Was when he said I had to stay at a motel and that there’d be a surprise waiting for me when I got home. The last time I saw my other son, Mason, was more than a year ago. Isn’t that sad? I have a picture somewhere.” She patted her pockets again. “It’s in one of my pockets but I don’t know which one.”

  “So what are you doing out here in the rain?” Amy asked.

  “I
got bored in the motel room,” she said. “Or maybe I was sad. I’m not sure. So I came outside and went for a walk.”

  “Were you heading anywhere in particular?”

  Abigail frowned as if deep in thought and then said, “Yes. Yes, I was.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “To the cemetery. To Mason’s grave.”

  “Why were you going there?”

  “Because the last time I went there with Owen, he said to me, “Mom, this is the last time you’ll ever have to come here.” Well that isn’t right, is it? Why wouldn’t I visit my son’s grave ever again? So I’m going to walk there tonight to prove Owen wrong.” She laughed. “That’ll show him.”

  “I have a better idea,” Amy said. “Why don’t we take you somewhere safe and warm and dry?”

  “Is there a minibar?”

  “No, there isn’t a minibar but there is coffee.”

  “Okay, sounds good.”

  Felicity and Amy got into the front seats. Leaving the lights flashing, Amy joined the traffic on the highway. “I’m going to have to take her to the station.”

  “We should warn Charles Hawthorne first,” Felicity said. “His house is quite secure but he needs to know that Mason Libby might be on his way there.”

  “The question is,” Amy said, lowering her voice. “If Abigail wasn’t involved in raising Mason from the dead—and it appears she wasn’t—then who was?”

  “Owen definitely had a hand in it,” Felicity said. “Those things he said to his mother about not having to visit the grave anymore and telling her he had a big surprise for her suggest he was planning to resurrect Mason.”

  Amy nodded. “Yeah, but he didn’t kill himself. Someone sacrificed him. So somebody was working with him and then betrayed him.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Felicity said.

  They reached the driveway that led to the mansion. The security guard came out of his booth as soon as he saw them approach.

  Amy rolled down her window and shouted at him, “Let us in. Police business.”