by Joyce
Brian shoved the sofa out of the way, and we all gathered behind it. Makaleigh was lying on the pink marble, which was rapidly turning red with her blood. A large, elaborately made knife was sticking out of her back. It glistened with heavy jewels in the gold hilt.
“She’s still alive.” Dorothy checked her pulse. “We have to get her to the hospital.”
Makaleigh’s eyes fluttered open in her gray face. “No. There’s nothing you can do. The knife was poisoned.”
We joined hands and each placed one hand on Makaleigh before we called on several strong healing spells. I could feel our strength together as we fought for her life. It felt as though she was slipping away. With all her magic, and all ours too, there was no way to bring her back. She was lost to us.
“Who did this to you?” I took her hand, squeezed hard and stared into her fading eyes. “If we can’t save you, we can at least avenge you.” With her died our hope of ever making the Grand Council of Witches consider changing the stranglehold of fear they held on us. No doubt there were plenty of suspects. I wished Joe was here to take charge.
“Come closer.” She pulled my head down to her. “They must stop, Molly. The council must stop persecuting the witches. Promise me.”
“I promise to do what I can,” I said tearfully.
“Remember this.” Makaleigh muttered a few words that I couldn’t clearly understand. They sounded like gibberish. Maybe the passing of a soul from one world to the next. There was no time to ask her to repeat them. I cried as her hand released mine.
“So much for not having a funeral while we’re here,” Elsie sobbed.
CHAPTER 8
It all seemed to have happened so quickly. One minute Makaleigh was with us, and the next she was gone. I felt confused and angry. Why had this happened? Why now of all times when the most important revolution in the last few hundred years of witch history was about to take place?
And maybe the answer to that question was what had doomed Makaleigh and her new ideas.
We didn’t touch anything and left Makaleigh as she lay. Being the wife of a homicide detective, I knew the rules. Even if the police wouldn’t handle this murder, things needed to be done right so that the killer could be found.
Brian went to tell his grandfather what had happened. Dorothy, Elsie and I huddled in a far corner of the room away from the dead council member. Even though this tragedy had occurred, we still had to put our magic together to get Olivia back into the bracelet. I hated to think what the other members of the council would think if they found us here—with a ghost and a dead body. We wouldn’t be able to cover her presence in the castle with dozens of witches looking at us for answers as to what had happened to Makaleigh.
“Concentrate, ladies,” Olivia encouraged. “I know I shouldn’t have done this, but it’s too late to go back now. They can’t find me this way, for all our sakes.”
“Brian should’ve stayed and helped us with this before he went off to tell everyone,” Elsie grumbled.
“People had to be notified. Knowing the time of death is very important to a police investigation,” I reminded her.
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Dorothy said. “The council won’t let anyone else help with it.”
“That’s for sure,” Elsie grunted. “They’d have to wipe the memories of the whole police department!”
“Let’s try this again,” I encouraged. “Olivia, you got yourself into this bracelet. We can help, but you need to make it happen again.”
“And quickly,” Dorothy urged. “It won’t be long before the whole council is here.”
“Not to mention all those other people who are going to want to know what’s going on,” Elsie said.
We joined our magic one more time, and Olivia closed her eyes. She slowly began to merge with the bracelet again. Everything but her eyes became part of the enchanted metal. It was creepy watching her eyes move back and forth across the bracelet as she tried to see what was going on, but someone would have to look closely to notice. Elsie and I finished off with a hiding spell with no more than an instant to spare.
“Where is she?” Abdon demanded as he marched like an angry general into the sitting room. “You three. I should have known you were involved.”
We had to hope that Olivia had been well enough hidden in the bracelet by the time he barged in that he didn’t notice. Dorothy put her hand over her wrist, holding it against her side.
I winced to think of her putting her hand on top of Olivia’s eyes.
“Move your hand, honey,” Olivia whispered. “I can’t see a thing.”
We all shushed her at the same time, gathering closer to Dorothy. Not that it would help hide Olivia completely, but it felt as though there was solidarity when we were close.
“Are you daring to tell me to be quiet?” Abdon roared.
Brian appeared a moment later. “Don’t give them a hard time. I was with them when we found Makaleigh. She was already near death. I came to get you right away. But we didn’t kill her or have anything to do with it.”
“Nearly dead? Did she say anything?” he demanded.
I immediately thought that his words seemed suspicious, since she had muttered those few words, which may have implicated her killer—if I could have understood her. I went back to that moment and went over what she’d said to me. It didn’t make any sense, and I wasn’t planning to randomly share until I knew the person who heard me wasn’t her killer.
After all, Abdon may have been one of those people who didn’t like the change Makaleigh was urging me to fight for. I knew that no matter what the rest of us did, with Makaleigh gone, it was unlikely that her ideas would have any impact on the council.
Not to mention that not just anyone could have killed her—though a witch of Abdon’s strength would be at the top of the list. So I kept my own council on Makaleigh’s last words.
Everyone was staring at me, waiting for me to say something. Thanks, Brian! “I’m sorry. She just thanked us for our help.” It was a lie, but it might be an important one. If not, I could always tell the truth. Probably not to Abdon, but to someone.
“Of all the half-witted, incompetent witches to find someone important dead, you three are the worst!” He went down on one knee to be near her, taking her hand in his and murmuring, “Oh my dear. This should never have ended this way for you.”
He was right, of course. Most witches had an idea of when they were going to die. Our magic helped us avoid accidental death, even murder. Makaleigh shouldn’t have died this way. She should have been able to avoid it, just as Olivia should have. I couldn’t imagine how hard this was for her, even if she couldn’t see what was happening as well as we could.
Though witches were born with the information regarding their deaths, it was forbidden to share it with anyone else. No one would know when Makaleigh’s death was supposed to happen. It took powerful magic for it to circumvent what should have been the natural order of her life.
As it had taken powerful, evil magic to kill Olivia.
As Abdon mourned her, more witches joined us in the small room. Brian’s parents saw what had happened and came to stand with their son. Members of the council filed in, most averting their eyes from their friend’s death. Because it was unnatural, many witches would try to keep themselves apart from it. It was a means of protecting themselves from further happenings away from the natural order.
The room was filled to capacity with whispering, suspicion and fear. If this could happen to Makaleigh, it could happen to anyone. No one was safe. What could be done to protect other witches from the threat?
Abdon finally got to his feet in jerky movements and wiped a hand across his tears. “We must find the witch who did this. No matter what it takes. Makaleigh’s killer must be found and made to pay for his or her crime.”
Everyone agreed and shouted encourage
ment for the idea. I felt sure most of them wouldn’t want to be actively involved in that procedure, but like other mob activities, they wanted someone else to take care of it.
“Summon the witchfinder!” Sarif Patel, one of the other council members, called to Abdon. “Bring him forward until the killer is identified.”
“Witchfinder?” Elsie whispered to me. “Is that what I think it is? Is that really a thing? I mean, I’ve heard old stories from my grandmother, but I didn’t believe it was true.”
Abdon held out his hands for quiet as the shouting demands for calling the witchfinder increased.
Dorothy looked curiously at me. Like Elsie and probably every other older witch in the room, I’d heard the old tales and put them down to mythology. Many of the younger witches would have no idea what they were talking about. From the stories I’d heard as a child, it had been hundreds of years since the witchfinder was called.
The witchfinder was one of the oldest legends—at least I’d always thought of it as such—a witch’s bogeyman. If you’re not good, the witchfinder will come for you. He was supposed to be one of the original members of the Spanish Inquisition who went above and beyond his calling to bring witches to trial and finally to flame in the early 1500s. They said he was responsible for the deaths of a thousand witches. He had a knack, almost magical, for finding his prey, and he took great pleasure in getting them to confess and killing them in ghoulish ways.
When it was over, it was said that a powerful spell was cast upon him to make him the slave of the witches he’d wronged for all time. The witches could call upon him to serve them in anything they might need. His body was said to be hidden somewhere and reanimated—when they called.
It occurred to me that Makaleigh, and maybe Abdon, had helped make the decision to punish the witchfinder by this means. What spell had they used that was powerful enough to trap the man forever?
“What exactly is that?” Dorothy had never heard the old stories that Elsie, Olivia and I had grown up with.
Brian took her hand and explained in muted tones, bringing all our nightmares into real life. “I’ve never seen the witchfinder. He hasn’t been called in hundreds of years,” he whispered. “But a council member hasn’t been murdered in that long either. Anything is possible now.”
Even the molecules in the air around us seemed different. The passing of an ancient, powerful witch like Makaleigh was no trifling matter. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible for someone to have killed her. I thought she’d be above that kind of thing. I thought all the members of the council would be better protected.
I fingered my amulet, feeling the power of the sea trapped inside it. While there was still a great deal of magic in it, it wasn’t as strong here as it was in Wilmington. It had to be that we weren’t near a large body of water. With the river and the sea in proximity, water witches like myself were strongest. Makaleigh was a water witch too.
“Where are we, Brian?” I asked him softly as the other witches in the room were still expressing their outrage over Makaleigh’s death.
“We’re still in our world, but slightly set apart in reality,” he explained. “It’s a powerful spell set by the Fuller family a thousand years ago. I’ve never had anything to do with it, but that’s why no one can just get here and they had to send the cars. Leave it to the Fullers to go overboard in paranoia.”
“That explains the loss of water energy that I feel around us.”
“I feel the same about the earth energy,” Dorothy said. “I noticed it right away. How can we not be on the earth?”
“Did I also mention the dampening spell that protects the castle from magic assaults against it?” Brian grimaced. “That’s right, ladies. My ancestors tried to think of everything. All the witches here are operating on half power.”
“Which made Makaleigh’s death possible.” Elsie sneezed and looked around at us. “What? It’s what happened. I hate she’s gone too, but someone carefully set this up.”
CHAPTER 9
My brain began going over Makaleigh’s death as probably few witches here would. How many cases had I sat through, half asleep in many instances, listening as Joe droned on about what he’d done and why they couldn’t find the killer they were looking for? I almost had the mind of a homicide detective after so many years.
I looked at Abdon. He was certainly powerful enough to kill Makaleigh, but then so were the other members of the council. Yet with all of them at half magic, which was placed on everyone in the castle including the Fullers, even Elsie and I could probably have killed her. That made it possible that anyone here could be guilty.
“Except the killer would be at half strength too,” Dorothy echoed my thoughts as I used her as my sounding board.
“That’s true,” I had to agree. It wasn’t going to be as easy to solve Makaleigh’s murder as I thought.
“Since we are pretty sure we know why she was killed,” Elsie added, “all we have to do is figure out which of the witches had the most to lose by her instituting the new plan to take away the penalties for non-witches finding out about magic.”
Dorothy laughed. “You wouldn’t want to say that five times fast!”
Brian commended her. “You are on the ball, Red. Are you taking new vitamins or something?”
“It’s love.” Elsie sniffed and put her handkerchief to her nose. “Something in here is making me allergic.” She sneezed a few times.
“Girls, we should get out of here.” Olivia’s voice was like a tiny chirping sound when she spoke. What she said made sense, but it was harsh on my ears. “I’m kind of nervous being surrounded by a bunch of angry witches, not to mention all this talk about the witchfinder and all.”
Dorothy pointed out that we would be even more noticeable if we tried to leave. “We’re squished in here like sardines. We can’t even move without hitting someone. This is mob mentality. We have to be careful.”
Elsie, Brian and I quietly agreed.
“Just be patient,” I whispered, staring into the two dots that were her pretty gray eyes in the bracelet. “We’ll get out of here soon.”
The two dots blinked—a little weird—and she started to say something else. Dorothy quickly put her hand across the metal, silencing her mother.
Abdon was holding out his hands for silence again. “My good friends, this is a terrible tragedy, but calling the witchfinder is no easy task, nor is it something we do lightly. We should explore all possibilities before that dread solution. Thanks to an immediate response by council member Erinna Coptus, no one has left or entered the castle since Makaleigh’s death.”
That made everyone start talking again. The room buzzed with it, and the sound carried from the outer areas. Not all the hundreds of witches present could fit in the pink sitting room.
“Are you saying that we’re prisoners here, Abdon?” a stout witch with a pointed white beard asked in a tone of pompous disbelief.
“Calm yourself, Sir Hardsley,” Erinna said. “The spell only lasts for twenty-four hours. I’m sure that will be enough time to find Makaleigh’s killer.”
“I suggest we all adjourn to the main hall again,” Abdon said. “We will quickly start conducting interviews of each and every witch present. The killer is still here in the castle. It won’t take long to choose the guilty witch.”
His emphasis on the word “choose” made me nervous. Killers weren’t chosen in my experience. They were carefully discovered by unraveling their actions and the facts of the case.
“Who’s going to be responsible for that?” Owen Graybeard, another member of the council, asked. “You, Abdon?”
“I’m not sure,” Abdon admitted. “Perhaps the members of the Grand Council should sit together in judgment on this. That might be a better response than calling the witchfinder.”
With Makaleigh dead, there were only eleven members of the council. Most of
the witches present were unhappy with that idea.
“What if one of the council killed Makaleigh?” an older witch demanded. Her very fine white hair was piled a foot high on her head.
“Do you have a better suggestion, Madam Ernst?” Larissa Lonescue haughtily demanded. She was another member of the council.
“Yes.” Madam Ernst was just as haughty. “It should be a combination of council members and non–council members. Just using council members isn’t fair.”
“I agree,” Sarif Patel said. “Bring forward the witchfinder. He is impartial and won’t stop until he finds the killer.”
“Oh my gosh!” Dorothy put a hand to her mouth. “I forgot all about your present, Brian. She can’t just stay wrapped up that way.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t think about her being alive.” Brian quickly followed her as Dorothy pushed her way out of the room. Loud grunting and a few curses followed them, but it was Brian, so no one dared say much about his departure.
Abdon stared at me and Elsie. He appeared to be trying to put something together, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it. With the bracelet containing Olivia gone, I wasn’t so worried about standing out in the crowd, even with him. I stared right back until I grabbed Elsie’s arm and the two of us followed Brian and Dorothy through the crowd.
“What in the world was wrong with him?” Elsie asked. “I feel as though I’ve had the third degree, and he didn’t even speak.”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “But we just needed to get out of that room. I’d rather not find out what he’s thinking. I’m sure it has something to do with him ‘choosing’ a murder suspect.”
We emerged through the throng of angry, depressed witches back into the nearly deserted ballroom. Dorothy was pulling Brian behind her as they approached the ceiling-high pile of gifts.
“She’s right here. You don’t have to worry. I mean, it’s not like she’s in a closed coffin or something. She’ll be fine.”
