by Maher Tegan
“Yeah, but you deserved it.”
“Okay,” Jake said, raising his voice to drown us out. “I think I’ve made my point here.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I still think there’s more there than just friendship.”
I was saved from further conversation by the flash of green and orange neon lights ahead in the shape of a giant pizza wedge. My stomach would have made Pavlov proud with the depth of its rumble, and my mouth watered right on cue.
“I’ll run in,” Eli said, pushing the door open as soon as I’d rolled to a stop.
While he was inside, Jake nudged me again. “I know it wasn’t easy to call James. Are you okay?”
I pulled in a deep breath and let it out. I wasn’t sure how I felt. “I guess. It was weird, but it’s not like I haven’t seen him around since the break-up. And he’s dating that Amy girl from the donut shop.”
“Actually,” he said, “he’s not. They broke up. I was just in there the other day and overheard her telling her coworker about it. She was pretty mad. Apparently, he’s hung up on someone else.”
“Then there you go,” I replied. “He’s already found somebody to replace her.”
“No, you dingbat. I think he’s still hung up on you.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, he’s been carrying a five-year flame for a woman he thinks is a freakshow. Maybe that’s lust rather than disgust that curls his nose every time he sees me. He wouldn’t give me the time of day if I turned him into a clock.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t think for a minute you should get back with him, but I do think if you’re gong to be working with him, you need to know where his mind’s at. He may not like you. He’s probably a little scared of you. But I don’t think he’s over you, either. Just be careful.”
Fabulous. Because I didn’t have enough complications in my life. Why couldn’t we just go back to the day before, skip the dive like we should have the minute Eli got a bad feeling, and get on with our almost-normal lives?
Because nothing was ever that easy, that’s why.
Chapter 15
“D o I smell pizza?” Willow was the first to pop her head into the kitchen. I hadn’t even had time to text Mom or Connell before she’d grabbed a slice out of the box and plopped down beside me.
“No offense, but if you’re still sick, keep your cooties away from me,” I said. “After I tell you about our day, you’ll understand why I don’t need a cold on top of everything else.”
“Phht, you never get sick,” she said.
“She doesn’t, but I do,” Eli said, brow raised. “So please, keep her space cootie-free.”
Mom and Connell must have heard us—or smelled the pizza—because they showed up right then.
My mom was angelic; there was no other way to describe her, and Willow looked just like her right down to the smattering of freckles across her nose. Both were small with golden hair and bright blue eyes. Whereas I’d inherited Dad’s height and angular features, they were delicate and feminine. Sometimes I was a little jealous of how pretty and feminine they both were, but for the most part, I was happy to be tall and sturdy.
Though they were both small, they were mighty. Both of them had wicked magic and the power of the goddess in her soul, and they both had wicked tempers that were in direct opposition to their angelic looks. The rest of us may have towered over them, but they never gave an inch.
As if to prove my words, my mom elbowed around Connell and snatched the last piece of sausage and pepperoni from the box almost right out of his hands. Smirking, she slid it onto a plate and grabbed a Coke from the fridge. “You snooze, you lose. Anyone else?”
She passed around sodas, then after everybody had a full plate, she took a seat around the oval oak table.
Connell turned to me.
“Did you get the problem with the trunk resolved?”
“What problem with what trunk?” Mom asked before sinking her teeth into her slice.
Before we could answer, Axel, who had a nose that would put any bloodhound to shame, scurried in and jumped up on the table to grab a slice of pizza.
“Where’s the ground beef?” he asked, his whiskers twitching with displeasure.
“Ground beef goes on a bun, not a pizza,” I said. “Besides, that’s not the important question. Where were you all day?”
He took a slice of pizza from the box and stuffed a quarter of it into his mouth. “I was busy,” he said with a full mouth.
“Busy doing what?” Eli asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied, reaching for my soda. “When I went to the shop and you weren’t there, I left. I stopped in here and Willow said you’d gone to Sybil Blackburn’s. I’m not going within a mile of that place. What did you learn?”
I swatted at his paw. He was terrible about stealing drinks because he knew that once he’d slobbered in it, nobody else would drink after him. “We were just getting to that.”
Eli, Jake, and I took turns telling the story from the point of discovering the trunk to leaving Sybil’s.
“I always liked Sybil,” Mom said, wiping her fingers on her napkin. “She keeps to herself, but when she does decide to come out, she’s quite the personality. You’re lucky she decided to help you. Honestly, I’m surprised, though maybe not as much as I would be if she hadn’t had some small hand in it to begin with. She’s always had a defined sense of right and wrong. It doesn’t always line up with the traditional concepts, but her moral compass is in fine working order and she’s one of the most powerful witches I’ve ever known.”
“So you know her, huh?” Eli asked, his expression shrewd.
“Yeah, I’ve known her for what seems like forever,” Mom replied, dipping her last bite of crust in garlic butter. “Why?”
“What’s the deal with Luther?” he asked. Leave it to him to jump to the gossip before we hashed out what to do about the Colonial psycho on the loose.
A small smile curved her lips. “Ahh, Luther. He’s still around, is he?”
“He is,” I said, curious despite myself. “And he was an ancient butler when we first met him.”
Mom lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know if I’d call him ancient, but it’s fair to say that if he were to appear as a human his actual age, he’d resemble the Crypt Keeper.”
I had a hard time picturing him like that even though I’d seen a close version.
“So which version of him is real?” Jake asked. “Old man or young soap star?”
Mom gave that weird smile again. “Both, I suppose. Neither. His story is his own. If you want to know it, you’ll have to ask him; it’s not mine to tell.”
I scowled at her. “That’s not fair.”
“Yeah,” Eli said, his expression no doubt mirroring my own. “Dish.”
“Nope,” Mom replied, tossing her napkin onto her plate then rising and collecting ours, too. “That’s his business. And Sybil’s, I suppose.”
That made me even more curious, but Mom was as stubborn as the rest of us—that’s where we got it from. When she sealed her lips, nothing was going to pry them open.
She tossed our plates and the empty pizza boxes in the trash and rejoined us. “Now, let’s see that book.”
Eli handed it to her and gave her a few minutes to look it over. Like all of us, she had a couple areas of expertise, one of which was ancient texts. She was an avid reader and a history buff, so her interest had drawn her to ancient texts. Axel settled in her lap and examined it, too. “That’s some serious voodoo, there,” he said.
“You can read it?” Jake asked before I could.
Axel gave him a duh look. “Of course. Or at least enough to understand you’ve got your work cut out for you. You’re gonna need someone experienced to deal with some of them.”
Setting aside the curious fact that a skunk could read a scrambled version of the Honorian alphabet, I asked the obvious question. “How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad,” Mom said as Connell pulled the book closer to him.
He shook his head after flipping through a few pages. “It’s beyond me. The pictures create some interesting possibilities, though. How could an old bed warmer possibly do any harm? I mean, I get the jewelry because people still wear it, but that’s not gonna do much more than hang on a wall. It’s low-priority.”
“Or not,” Eli said. “There are a lot of reenactments around here, especially during the Pirate Festival. You never know.”
Connell rolled his eyes. “I’m pretty sure they’re not going to go so far as to actually use a bed warmer, especially now. It’s the middle of summer in Florida. You’d roast.”
Mom had flipped back to that page. “That’s exactly what they’d do.”
“Come again?” Jake said, brows raised.
“The curse on it is that the minute it’s filled with coals, it’s almost like hellfire. It gets so hot that it would pretty much incinerate anything it touches.”
“Lovely,” I said. “And now somebody in this town has it.”
“Yeah,” she said, a troubled frown creasing her brow. “And the snuffbox is poisoned. I can’t imagine anybody actually using it for its original purpose, but that doesn’t really matter. Anything that goes in it becomes toxic.”
A whole litany of potential tragedies crossed my mind.
Mom and Axel were quiet for a few minutes as they read, and I could tell everybody else at the table was as impatient as I was. “What else?”
“Well, it seems that whoever cursed the items put a failsafe, so to speak, on many of them. Not all of them, but enough to maybe give us some wiggle room before the curses are activated. Also, they’re not all lethal. This one, for instance,” she said, pointing to the pocket watch, “is cursed to punish anybody who puts work time above the really important things in life.”
“So if it goes to somebody who rolls with the punches and appreciates what they have, the curse won’t activate?” Eli asked.
“Exactly,” Axel said with a nod. “But the odds of that happening are fifty-fifty at best. Nobody knows how to look up from their phones anymore.”
“Still,” Jake replied, “Glass half full. We may have time on that one.”
“So we have a bedwarmer that incinerates people, a necklace that held the vengeful spirit of an elitist Colonial serial killer, and a watch that punishes the wearer for taking the good things in life for granted. We need to find a way to prioritize them.”
Connell nodded his head. “Agreed. And we need to make an initial push to find as many as we can. Flyers, posts on our website and in the Marauder.”
The Marauder was our local paper. Unlike most papers, it still had a decent following even with hard copies.
“That’s not a horrible idea,” Eli said. “All we have are drawings, but we can add descriptions and say that the items were sold accidentally and offer a reward on top of a refund for their return.”
“It could work for some of them,” Mom replied. “Some people will go with greed over goodwill and believe the item is more valuable if we want it back, but I think most people in town are decent. Even if we only get one back, that’s one less that we have to hunt down.”
“And one less that we have to worry about,” I said. The pizza had turned to a hard lump in my stomach. I had a feeling we were going to see a lot of bad things happen before it was all said and done.
Chapter 16
W e spent the next few hours going through the book and prioritizing the items as best we could. There were forty-three items in total, and about twenty of them were high-priority. All of them were bad, but it was obvious that some of the Romani had been angrier than others, or at least more vindictive. To be fair, though, most of the bad ones had fail-safes that made the triggers user-specific, so that was something, anyway.
I tossed and turned most of the night, so when I got up the next morning, it was safe to say a bear would have been more pleasant.
“Morning, sunshine,” Connell said when I shuffled into the dining room.
I glared at him as I poured a cup of coffee. Jules knew just how to make it—strong—and I wasn’t sociable before I had at least a half a cup even on a good day. I added a dollop of cream and sugar, then plucked a bagel and some grapes from the sideboard.
“Good job not putting ‘good’ in front of that,” I grumbled.
He grinned and I hated him a little because he was already dressed and ready for the day. His dark hair was still damp, and he was freshly shaven.
“Do you just wake up looking like that?” I asked, slathering some honey-almond cream cheese on my bagel before taking a seat beside him.
“No, but I daresay I don’t wake up with half my hair plastered to my head and the other half standing straight up. Nice slippers, by the way,” he said with a pointed glance at the stuffed Pikachus sitting atop my feet.
“Thanks,” I replied. “Now I know what to get you for Christmas.”
“Pass,” he said. “Though it would be an improvement over the foul cologne you got me last year.”
“That was supposed to have pheromones in it,” I said, scratching my head as I sat down. “And I thought it smelled nice. Maybe you just don’t know what the girls like.”
“I don’t think I’d want to attract a girl who thought that smelled good,” he replied, nose scrunched. He pushed a drawing pad toward me. “I did my best to copy some of the high-priority pictures from the books. They’re not as good as Marshall could have done, but if you type up quick descriptions for each and add a chunky reward to them, I bet you get at least a few of them back.”
“Thanks!” I said, pulling the notebook toward me. Marshall was the artist in the family, which was why art was his area of expertise. Still, these were good. “I’ll take them down to the paper this morning. If I hand them straight to Ms, Marilyn, she’s more likely to put them in.”
Ms. Marilyn was the lady who oversaw the Marauder. She’d run a tight ship for five decades, which was probably why the paper still did so well. Not a word was published without her say-so, and an order from her was like a command from the Almighty. What she said went.
“Put what in where?” Eli asked, cruising into the dining room looking fresh as a daisy in his khaki shorts and a black tank top that had a smiling pirate skull set in a circle of text that said Captain Sarcasm.
I hated him a little too, but at least some of the caffeine in my system took the edge off. He’d been a morning person all his life—it was one of the few areas where we differed. It was a wonder one of us hadn’t killed the other because my reticence to get an early start irritated him as much as his chipper, smiling morning face did me.
“You’re wearing that to the meeting?” I asked.
“Of course, I am,” he said, plucking a strawberry from the fruit platter and popping it into his mouth. “It’s a meeting about a pirate festival. I think it’s perfect.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic, not that my brain was operating at a high enough capacity to do so even if I’d wanted to.
He filled a coffee cup and buttered a croissant, then joined us. I pushed the drawings toward him. “If we get descriptions and a reward added, we can run them down to the paper.”
“I’ll do that while you get dressed,” he said with a pointed look. “We can do it on the way to the meeting.”
I glanced at my phone; we had a little over an hour before it started, and I wanted to be there early. I was holding out hope that one of the women would be so obvious that it would just be a matter of nabbing her after the meeting, but I doubted that would be the case. My luck just didn’t run that way.
“How are we going to kidnap a woman in broad daylight?” I asked, then couldn’t believe what my life had come to that such a sentence had crossed my lips.
“You’ll distract the others and lure her away, and I’ll knock her out,” Eli said. “Easy, peasy.”
“You can’t just knock her over the head,” I said, popping a grape into my mouth. “We have to keep some kind of high ground here.”
/> Eli rolled his eyes. “Magically knock her out, dingbat. I’m not just going to clonk her in the gourd.”
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Connell said, pouring more syrup on his Belgian waffle, “but now might be a good time for you to climb inside her noggin. If you’re steering, you can just make her get in the car.”
Eli had the power of persuasion, and he hated it. He wouldn’t even use it on the twins, and that was saying something. We’d first learned about it in the eighth grade when he’d made a football player who was bullying him punch himself in the face. It had been both funny and terrifying, and he’d gone straight home to demand answers from his mother. He’d never known anything about his father other than that he’d left when he’d learned his mom was pregnant, but Sophia had admitted that Eli had gotten the gift—if you could call it that—from him.
“No,” he said, steel in his voice. “That’s not an option.”
“Besides that,” I said, “she’s not the only one in there, remember. She’s sharing headspace with a dead chick. We don’t even know if it would work or if, gods forbid, Prudence could use the mental link to jump into Eli. We’re not risking it even if he’s willing to do it.”
“Which I’m not,” he added in a tone that said the discussion was over.
“I concur,” Jake said as he ambled into the room. Like me, he was still in his pajamas, though it did look like he’d taken the time to at least splash water on his face. “If Sage distracts the others, there’s no reason why we can’t draw whichever one of them is possessed away from the crowd and nab her.”
“It’s settled, then. Eli, my laptop is in the parlor. You do the descriptions while Jake and I get ready.” I popped the last bite of my bagel in my mouth, then rose from the table and filled my coffee cup so I’d have an extra dose of caffeine to sip on while I made myself fit for public consumption.
Twenty minutes later, I felt a little more human, or at least ready to take on a spiteful spirit. We were just leaving when a vintage red Mustang convertible pulled up behind my car—its younger, sleeker little sister. I had a hard time deciding which I liked better, but loyalty to mine along with the fact that it had air conditioning won the day.
