“You were so close,” Zach snapped at himself, head bowed. “I should have known.”
Red took his hand. “I thought it was the diner that made me feel safe, but it was you two.”
Tears streaking her cheeks, Stace put her hand on theirs.
Red pulled the other woman into a side hug before drawing back, wiping her own face. “I know you both have questions, and I bailed on them all.”
Zach said. “We called old Chuck in LA last night, so we got a few answers. You can eat your eggs first.”
Stace smiled. “Then you can tell us how you found us again. I think we got up to Vic taking you in. That reminds me, I want to send him a gift for taking care of my bestie. Would he like an edible fruit arrangement or pie?”
“He’d prefer a good whiskey.” Red chuckled. “So, this is where I’ve been…”
She laid out the broad strokes of her journey, starting with the scattered hunting jobs. It felt awkward in the beginning, summarizing her life, but the friendly questions and easy repartee loosened her tongue. Except for Juniper St. James. She simply said that she’d learned about a past life. Being the reincarnation of a dark witch wasn’t exactly something she was proud of. Red stuck to the highlights of taking out master vampires and meeting the Immortal Alchemist.
She also glossed over some of the drama in Los Angeles, like the vampire politics she’d been forbidden by the Blood Alliance to reveal. Not sure how to explain Kristoff, since his secret maneuvers as ambassador of Portland were classified and his healing blood was something she’d never confess, she mentioned she had been claimed but not by who. She left out that she had dated Lucas, only that she worked with him, still heartsore from how it ended.
Parched, Red stalled trying to piece together the most coherent version of events. It was like catching up with old college friends except they had a lifetime to cover. “You two must have meet Lucas and Quinn when they stopped Alaric’s apocalypse here.”
Eyebrows lifting, Zach exchanged a glance with Stace and snorted. “That’s a stretch.”
“They helped, but it was us who vanquished that creepy priest. I got the last hit and, you closed the door on him,” Stace said. “Alaric opened the Blood Realm, and monsters were streaming out like manananggal. It was chaos. The seer said it would be you first but then she retracted saying it was me, it was super confusing. Either way we got there at the same time but—"
“Wait a second.” Red waved her hands. This didn’t make any sense. Stunned, she had to process this new and surprising fact.
The specter of the Alaric Order had haunted her life in LA. Michel de Grammont’s coup in LA had been a byproduct of wanting revenge on it. Led by one of the most gruesome and powerful vampires ever, its members including the Bloody Byrnes—Quinn, Delilah, Selene, and Lucas. She had learned so much about the Order, but she hadn’t really retained much about its founder beyond his death ten years before, writing him off as a piece of trivia. She never had a reason to connect a direct line between them.
If Emma Peters had helped fulfilled a prophecy, even a misinterpreted one, and took out Alaric, why had she not found an entry on this in the Bard Net?
She had wondered how she’d redeem herself for a past life as Juniper St. James. Now she realized that Emma already had. Alaric’s downfall dwarfed anything that Red had accomplished on hit jobs and bounties for the Brotherhood.
Pride mingled with confusion as she calculated the timeline. “Why didn’t Lucas recognize me in LA, if he had met me before?”
“You wore a glamour. Your mother’s orders. I remember because you complained so much about the acne she gave you,” Zach said.
Red thought back to the very limited information she had gotten from Kristoff’s Blood Alliance contacts on Emma. “Did she make me look like another race?”
“The glamour wasn’t targeted to humans, so I saw you as normal, but she made you look as different as possible. Your mother was clever like that.” Stace shrugged. “Once she heard the prediction, she tried to get you out of town. You two compromised. Brooke didn’t even want my Aunt Gina to relay to the Brotherhood that you made the killing blow. I guess she worried about retaliation.”
“I still think she was right to be paranoid.” Zach stared in the distance, thick eyelashes framing the jaded edge to his melancholy gaze. “Even the Bards have leaks.”
Red knew that from hard experience. The rogue Brotherhood burn notice had come seemingly from the outside. She assumed that it was about Juniper St. James. What if it wasn’t? She whispered to them how she’d foiled her own assassination in the local cemetery weeks ago and let the Bards believe she had perished. Neither recognized the name Mr. Gabriel.
Stace reassured her that they hadn’t heard of any bodies found in the pond either. “Speaking of ghouls, we were going to patrol, see if we can pick off any early risers from the colony. Want to come?”
Red nodded, smiling. As the small lunch rush filled a lull in the conversation, she was full of more than food. The grief for her parents still panged her, but she could handle the truth now. She might not have found family, but she’d found friends and a past to be proud of.
---
Hatchet hooked onto her belt, Red smiled beside Stace and Zach. The trio had left their vehicles at Lili’s and walked to the nearby graveyard after breakfast.
Light broke through the lazy clouds, dappling the rolling hills. A white church steeple rose on a ridge to the north. The weak spring sun dialed down the creep factor of the expansive boneyard. If she didn’t think about the ghouls that lived there, it seemed peaceful.
She listened eagerly to the half-fae’s life story. Stace had been the Brotherhood version of a military brat for years, following her Aunt Gina’s career from London to Tokyo, until they were stationed in Charm. That was when Emma and Zach entered the tale.
With a katana on her hip, Stace pointed out spots like an old family mausoleum—"Aunt Gina was married to a McGregor, my Uncle Robin. We lost him in high school.” Then a tree—"I’m pretty sure you had your first kiss there.” Every couple of yards, she found a memory. It sounded like they had spent more time in the expansive, multi-denominational cemetery than in class.
Bow and quiver on his back, Zach remained watchful, volunteering only a few comments.
“So, I got the run down on how he ended up with Lili’s, but what about you, Stace? What happened after school?”
“Do I start with my semester abroad, returning to Tokyo, or the fact that I moved back here because my hamster café failed in Portland?”
Red expected to hear the unexpected but—hamsters? “Japan sounds lovely but, tell me about this café.”
“Hamsterdam.” Zach said curtly, a smile cracking his serious demeanor.
“I thought it was a winning concept—have delicious pastries and play with foster hamsters looking for good homes, but if it couldn’t work in Portland of all places...”
“You’re a Hero. I’m impressed you had time to even start a café.” Red lifted an eyebrow. “Do you still have the hamsters?”
“No,” he said gruffly, arms crossed. “They were all adopted out, so we didn’t have a hording situation. Except Cocoa Puff.”
“I tried to walk away from Charm. I fulfilled my destiny in high school anyway.” Stace launched into the story of vanquishing a demonic duke months before Emma disappeared. “Retirement lasted about a year and a half. I wish we still had all our videos. Zach practically slept with a camera in hand. We could have shown you so many high school adventures. Like the first time we fought a manananggal.”
“We haven’t seen one of those for ten years,” he said quietly.
“Where did it come from?” Red asked. Vampires had driven manananggal to extinction in the 1960s. Containing lesser bloodsuckers and undead were one of their traditional responsibilities in maintaining the Dark Veil.
“Blood realm, probably. But honestly, there are more hells than you’d think.” Stace bounced on her heels, sounding unc
oncerned that this little village was a transit station to Hades if you had a ticket.
Red had heard the theories on different supernatural realms split off from their own like the fae world. There were other towns like this. Human scientists speculated on different dimensions, and cryptozoologists had long noted that UFOs and bigfoot sightings happened in the same places as if passing through worlds. Even after all she’d seen, it still seemed fantastical.
“The barriers between dimensions are like swiss cheese around here,” Zach said.
“I think the bottomless pit on the Ghost Beach goes somewhere gnarly too,” Stace chipped in. She rolled her eyes, tapping her head at Red’s confused look. “Oh, duh, you wouldn’t know yet. That’s the one next to the cemetery. I keep forgetting you’re new in town. You were the one who showed me around when I moved here.”
“You might need to grow up here to understand it. I spent the last few weeks researching, but it didn’t prepare me at all.” Red didn’t know if anything could have. She rolled her shoulders, trying to shake off how surreal it was to do a walking tour of a life she didn’t remember. “That sacrifice last night. It was something dark. The sheriff made it sound like the first one was just as grisly. Who are the dark mages in town?”
“Old Magda, but she’s been in New Orleans with her voodoo priest boyfriend since New Year’s,” Stace said, pixyish features drawing together in a scowl. “The murders started around the time Olivia and her sorority witches started coming to town for the reunion.”
Zach added somberly, “It wouldn’t be the first time someone died in one of their rituals.”
Waggling her eyebrows, Stace grinned sneakily as if vanquishing this Olivia in her mind. “We’ll get the hot gossip at the dinner rush.”
Red chuckled at the enthusiasm, imagining her friend wielding idle chatter like a katana as she bustled between tables. They’d said Emma had picked up a few shifts at the diner, but she couldn’t have been as good at it as the friendly half-fae. “I’ll text you all the photos. Maybe you might recognize the handiwork. I think…” She suddenly realized where they were going next.
The conversation hushed as they approached the grave of Emma Peters.
“It’s not empty,” Stace said. “There’s a few bones in there, but I guess the old coroner was wrong.”
“He was a drunk coward,” Zach spat out bitterly.
Arms crossed, Red kept her distance from the headstone. She was tough, but the sight still unsettled her. If Trudy had succeeded, she’d have ended up buried here. “You cremated my mom. Why did you put up a stone for me?”
“Aunt Gina made the arrangements based on Brooke’s will, but there was nothing about you dying, naturally. I guess my aunt wanted us to have somewhere to go to grieve.”
“You don’t know where my dad was buried?”
Zach shook his head. “Your mom was private.”
“Why would someone do that to me, to my mom? How many enemies could I make between school and drama club? I was a kid. She was an archaeologist. Why did she die?” Red’s voice broke at the last word.
Stace wrapped an arm around her, guiding them from the grave. “We don’t know, but why don’t we tell you about your mother’s life instead? She was brilliant, always digging something up in France or England. She’d come back with crazy souvenirs from her trips like Roman amulets.”
Red smiled, the image of her mother as Indiana Jones a sudden delight breaking through her grief. “Really?”
“Your mom was cool, told us to call her Brooke. In some ways she could be a total hippie. One time…”
Even with the sunlight and Stace’s animated stories, Red struggled to shake the chill from her skin. It returned in force when they investigated the large memorial pond for ghoul tracks. Trudy Fox and Frank Lopes had been dragged beneath its depths by the creatures weeks ago. Nothing stirred when the half-fae shot sparkles at the surface.
“We can check the older tombs,” Zach said. “Supes are always breaking into them.”
Stace chattered on the way to the historical section. “Once we found a Skilosh demon squatting in the Alpert crypt, and he had faster Wi-Fi than I have!”
The clouds gathered as they walked back to the McGregor family mausoleum on a hill. He tested the intact door chains as Stace and Red scanned the cemetery sprawled below them for the telltale clue of a disturbed grave where a dead thing could hide from the weakening rays of the sun. Decay wafted on the shifting breeze.
“I smell incoming.” Red pointed to the ghoul as it lumbered around the tomb. She grabbed the axe hanging on her belted hunter’s kit.
Stace grinned, unsheathing the katana on her back. “Soften him up for me, Zach.”
He unstrapped his bow from his back harness and drew an arrow from the attached quiver. Notching the arrow, he released, sending it deep into the undead heart and fired again.
The ghoul staggered back against the mausoleum. Impaled in the forehead, arrow embedded to the feathers, the ghoul gnashed its jaws and hobbled forward.
Stace sprinted forward, blade glinting in the weak sun, arms too quick to see. She paused, posed with her katana raised. Gray goop dripped from the edge.
Head tumbling, the ghoul kicked and slumped over, the demonic energy fueling its movements cutting out like a blown fuse. The headless torso caved in on itself, oozing from the neck.
“They’re getting bolder, guarding territory.” Zach pivoted, scanning the hill, fresh arrow ready.
Stace wiped her sword on the grass before fishing a handkerchief from her pocket and gently cleaning it. “That one seemed normal.”
“The ones last night definitely weren’t,” Red said. “They made the ghouls in Louisiana seem tame.”
Stace frowned. “Must have been stirred up by the riftquake.”
“If we burn this one, the ghouls will scatter at dusk from the smell.” Crouching, he retrieved a coiled length of thin plastic rope from a pocket in his cargo pants. “We’ll lug it out of sight.”
Red walked around the crypt, finding a hole in front of a crooked old headstone. Ghouls were too stupid to hide their burrows from humans. “It went to ground over here.”
Stace followed, sheathing her sword. “Whatever caused the infestation, we need to deal with it ourselves.”
“Don’t want hunters coming to town?”
“That’s not the worst that could come.” Zach shook his head, dragging the dead ghoul at the end of the rope.
Stace sighed. “And we have the new cop butting into everything.”
“Aisha comes through in a pinch, I promise. Give her some humans to run background checks on, at least,” Red said. “I’m more used to calling her Detective Callaway, but I have no doubt she’ll be a good sheriff.”
Zach kicked the headless ghoul into the hole. “Good sheriffs don’t last long here.”
7
Scouring the old section of the cemetery, they found another ghoul. Both bodies were reburied in the graves they had crawled out of. Hungry and sweaty by noon, the three trekked back toward Lili’s, where Zach promised takeout waited.
Feeling a watcher, Red looked over her shoulder at the cemetery for any strange energy. She thought she saw a flash of blue aura by the old McGregor mausoleum, but it was gone when she squinted. The clouds had cleared, but the cold didn’t leave her until back in Stace’s kitchen.
After eating chicken wings and fries, Zach took her into a cozy living room with overstuffed green furniture. An elaborate habit trail of cages and plastic tubing stretched along the wall between the couch and the TV. He reached inside. The adorable little fuzzball scampered to his hand. Zach dressed like a movie assassin, but he turned into a cinnamon bun as he showed Red the white spot on the brown hamster’s belly. “It’s shaped like a hammer.”
Red petted the docile creature, wondering if it was just well socialized or if Zach used his abilities to suppress its prey fear instincts. “Fess up, you loved Hamsterdam, didn’t you?”
“No. If I
had time for a pet, it would be a rottweiler,” Zach said gruffly as he snuggled the hamster against his chest, letting it climb to perch on his shoulder. He fed it a green pellet. “This is Stace’s rodent.”
“You’re calming Cocoa Puff, aren’t you?”
“He trusts me now. Don’t really need to.”
“Can you do your empath thing on supernatural creatures like vampires?”
Thoughtfully stroking the hamster, the archer in black considered the question. “Yes and no. I only can push so many buttons on the unsouled—anger and fear, mostly. Its more useful to sense their emotions to bargain with them or when I need to take aim.”
So, Kristoff did have real feelings…
Both man and hamster analyzed her face, dark eyes widening. “Did you win a bet? You’re suddenly chipper.”
How could she explain? She wasn’t even sure why she’d asked the question or why it felt so important in the moment.
Saving her from answering, Stace appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. “Hey, Red, I want to show you something.”
She stood, patting the hamster one last time, and walked with Stace through the kitchen and into the dining room-turned-study.
The half-fae gestured to a thick black binder on the desk. “It’s Aunt Gina’s report on the housefire. You should read it for yourself.”
“Thank you.” Red touched the cover, tapping as if it would disappear. The book delivered from her inheritance was supposed to have all the answers. It hadn’t, but this one would have plenty. “This is everything I’ve wanted to know for so long. I don’t know how to tell you what your kindness has meant to me.”
“You don’t have to.” Stace hugged her, rubbing her back as she pulled away. “After Aunt Gina passed in January, I know how much it hurts to lose a mom. Nothing makes it better, really. Last night, I didn’t know the best way to tell you everything that happened. I still don’t, but my auntie might. I can leave you alone with it.”
Small Town Witch: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Red Witch Chronicles 5) Page 7
