Reaper Rituals in Witchwood

by Jessica Lancaster

  “Really—really—really bad,” I stumbled over my words, my tongue clicking.

  “Who?”

  “Another witch.”

  Not something my mind immediately wanted to jump to, but it was all I could think now that the crystals had been moved—no, disarmed. This wasn’t any ordinary attack coming, and the man in the bowler hat could have been right; we needed to leave before we got hurt.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nowhere was safe, especially if there was a witch on their side—not even home was safe, except I had to believe it was or let all my guards down. As we reached the house, I rushed inside panicked by the events. I quickly ran to my room and threw myself on the bed, pounding my head into my pillow.

  Everything that had happened caused me to feel so erratic. The man in the bowler hat, Harry and the card in the forest, Philip and his quest to find his brother, Greg and his—well, Greg was okay, although I’m sure the energy levels would soon get to him as well and then he’d be in as much of a panic as the rest of the world.

  “Nora,” Cassandra said at the doorway. “Phil’s in the living room.”

  “What does he want?” I asked behind the muffle of the pillow.

  This was the exact reason why they didn’t allow witches to investigate in their own back garden, because they may just end up going crazy with everything happening—there was no way I could continue to live here if all the so-called creatures coming came to take over. It wasn’t unreasonable for me to ask for help—I’d only asked once before.

  “He’s got something.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I straightened myself and stood sharply, sucking in my stomach and forcing my back into a line. Posture was key to confidence and success.

  “What do you have?” I snapped, my cold voice whipped through the living room as I entered.

  Phil stepped back. “Erm—well—I—”

  Cassandra placed a hand to her face. “Come on,” she said.

  “I saw the girl’s body,” he said. “In the mortuary. There were claw marks in her skin.”

  Cassandra snapped her fingers. “Werewolves.”

  “Guess you don’t need me then.”

  “Oh, hush,” I said. “We’d been thinking werewolves, we’d be idiots not to—people dying, only to come back—sounds awfully like a supernatural rebirth to me.”

  He nodded. “I was only in there for a minute,” he said, clenching his teeth in some sort of pain. “It was bad. Really bad.”

  “Do you think someone will take her?” I asked. It would follow the order.

  “That’s another thing,” he said, inhaling deeply. “Whoever is doing it, they know you’re watching.”

  My face pinched into a scowl. I’d only been thinking it earlier—he couldn’t possibly know what I’d been discussing with Cassandra. My doubts came flooding once again. “How do you know that?”

  “Because five minutes later, the body was gone.”

  “Three for three,” Cassandra said, holding three fingers up. “I didn’t want to mention it while we were out, but Hope said her sister would be over tonight—around seven.”

  I glanced at my watch. “We have nine hours then.” I sighed heavier. “And there’s no funeral today. The family don’t even remember when the funeral is. Someone did a real number on them.”

  “Once we get Destiny, we can sort them out,” Cass said.

  Phil coughed. “Now at least we know it’s not my brother.”

  “Unless your brother is a werewolf.” And from what he’d said earlier, it was completely possible that his brother had changed forms.

  “Well, he’s not.”

  There wasn’t a single way he could have known what his brother was—or wasn’t. He didn’t have any active powers unless they involved him teleporting or being invisible. His other abilities were quite useless with his ankle monitor strapped to his leg.

  I snapped my fingers and my book of shadows appeared in my arms. I took a seat and set the book on the coffee table. I clicked my fingers once again and the pages fluttered open, landing on the specific page about werewolves.

  “What we need is to find the alpha of the pack,” I said. Scrolling a finger down the list. “These types of people usually take high power jobs. The type to have many people below them.”

  “So, what are we looking for?” Cassandra asked.

  “We’re looking for someone who has influence,” I said. “We’re looking for someone with connections.”

  Cass gasped. “You think it could be the man?”

  “What man?”

  “The man that’s been following us around,” I said, glancing up from above my glasses to see Phil’s concerned face staring back.

  He stuttered slightly, pacing back and forth. “He’s probably here to feed from the energy,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll be coming in their droves soon.” He stomped a foot. “I can’t be here when they come. They can’t see me like this.”

  “A prisoner?” I asked.

  “Exactly.” He shuddered and disappeared.

  Cassandra took a seat beside me and Jinx jumped up to her lap from practically nowhere. She pressed her head, nuzzling into her thigh. “So, what’s the plan?” she asked. “How do you kill a werewolf?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “You need to find them in their human form and do it.”

  She nodded. “Should I be taking notes?”

  “Possibly,” I chuckled. “I think we need to get to the family home tonight a little early. If Destiny is there, she’ll present as human. That’s when we capture her—and only then can we find out who’s behind all of this.”

  I had supplies for when it came to capturing creatures of the night, and they were skills that never left. I knew just what to use to capture such a beast.

  As Cassandra scrawled down notes, I gathered supplies, planting them on the living room floor as the news channel played on the television. I’d gathered a number of crystals, a small container of ash, an even smaller container with rare spider spun silk, and a bloodstone.

  Bloodstones were used for creatures of the night—they disarmed them in a stun move. I’d used mine on vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters—if it goes bump in the night, I’ve used the bloodstone against it, and there was a 95% success rate too, only 5% of the time would it fail on me or the creature was too strong, and here, I didn’t have anything stronger to back the crystal up with.

  We had no way of knowing if Destiny was at the house; we relied on Hope’s call—it’s why we needed to be there early, just in case something happened, but the paranoia that someone was watching us put a stop to the way I was feeling. I didn’t want to be out there with my back to someone a step ahead.

  “Are you ready?” Cassandra asked, checking the watch on her wrist. “It’s almost six.”

  I’d prepared everything I could to be ready—retirement was making me soft in the centre, not how I imagined I’d become. I rinsed my hands under warm water, rubbing them together quickly, the friction was warming.

  “What else have you got to do?” Cassandra asked from the end of the kitchen.

  I closed my eyes briefly. “Once we’ve got the girl, we call Phil,” I said. “Our first case is closed. After that, we’ll need to call more witches. It’s impossible for us to be everywhere at once.”

  “How many more?”

  “Five?” I shrugged. “It’s going to keep growing, and it sucks we can’t feel it.”

  Squeezing her forehead in a wrinkled concentration. “We need Destiny to tell us who turned her. We get to the top of the food chain. We disband them. We disband whatever energy beacon is active here.”

  Easier said than done.

  And that was only possible if the energy beacon had been created instead of forming naturally.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  We were on time. I carried my tote bag of belongings on a shoulder. We walked on the opposite side of the street, and as we approached the house, a girl stood looking in
through the window. She seemed to be looking inside, watching her family in the light from the living room.

  I’d seen the pictures, I knew it was her. It was Destiny, she was in her human form. She was there for the taking.

  “Caution,” I whispered to Cassandra. “Approach with caution.”

  She nodded.

  We crossed the road and approached from the garden path.

  Destiny remained still as we approached, even though I knew she must have heard us. I prepared the bloodstone in one hand, ready to throw at a moment’s notice. As we grew closer, a peculiar noise came from her, it wasn’t a growl, it wasn’t a hiss, it wasn’t anything I’d heard from a supernatural being before.

  “I did it,” she sobbed softly into her reflection of the window. “Arrest me.” She turned, dropping to her knees in front of us.

  That threw a spanner in the mix. We hadn’t prepared for this turn of events. We weren’t ready for her to throw herself at us like that—especially when we weren’t dressed as police officers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, gasping. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to do it.” Flying into a fit of tears, she begged for forgiveness.

  I nodded for Cassandra to use her witch thread ring to tie the girl up.

  As she tied the girl up, I knocked on the front door. There was no answer, not a single response. I pulled the handle and it swung open. A smell hit me in a heat, thick and heavy, decaying. I shook my head, rushing into the living. The light illuminated everything.

  On the floor, there was a lumpy white sheet. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. This couldn’t have been what I was looking at. There had to be another explanation.

  My eyes followed all the way down until they reached my own feet. Beneath my shoe was an image. I picked it up and flipped it over. It was a picture, covered in scribbled out faces. A man in a red cape stood centrally while several other people stood around them. There was nothing to define them as all their faces had been scratched away from the surface, all that remained was the upper half of their torsos. Five people, I counted them. There were five people on the image, including the large person in the centre. I tried looking at the picture for longer than I needed, I didn’t want to look back at the sheet.

  I turned the living room light off and stepped outside, folding the picture into my pocket.

  “She killed them,” Cassandra said.

  “They’re inside,” I told her. “They’re in there, and we could have stopped this from happening.”

  Destiny continued to cry. “It was the plan, all this time, it was the plan.”

  I walked back inside. “Phil,” I called out. “I have something for you.”

  A cool hand touched my shoulder. “What is it?”

  “She killed her family.” I turned to see Phil’s face stare back at me. “You need to take them all before they turn.”

  “I wanted to ask you about something,” he began, taking a deep sigh. “Please, can you leave me out of the reports. As much as I want to be in the Council’s good graces, I don’t need to look like a snitch to the people around me.”

  “You don’t have people around you,” I told him. “But it’s not my decision, this is Cassandra’s case.”

  He tssked his teeth. “Can you ask her for me?” he grabbed my hand and squeezed it lightly. “Please.”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “I’ll take the bodies.” He looked into the living room. “What about the girl?”

  “She’s outside,” I said. “Bring her in,” I called out. “Phil’s in here.”

  Destiny’s clothes were pitted in dirt. Her mouth covered in blood, her clothes covered in a mixture of everything that had been going on for the past couple of days. There was something foul in the smell, it came from every part of her, and more-so the mouth she sobbed through. The smell was unbearable.

  “Take them all,” Cassandra commanded, handing the reigns of Destiny’s string to Phil. “I need to talk with Nora.”

  “I’m sorry,” Destiny continued to sob. “I was—I was—I was only doing what I was told.”

  “Take them now,” Cassandra said.

  Phil approached the bodies on the ground, he dipped and pressed a hand against the white cloth. “Remember, there’s still more people you need to find. Those two other girls. The person responsible for this.”

  I squinted. “The case was to get the girl, come back when you have the resources for the rest of the town.”

  He vanished within in the instant.

  Cass sighed heavily. “She was talking about someone.”

  “Who?” I asked, glancing at the small patch of blood left in the centre of the room. “They’ll need to send cleaners to fix this town.” I snapped my fingers and the stain was gone. “And someone will need to fix the neighbours.”

  “Do you think they saw?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, you were saying something.”

  “She said she spoke to a man, a lot, he wasn’t the one who turned her,” she said. “But he worked for him.”

  “Crap.” I clenched my teeth together. “This goes above what we can do. This is at least a five-witch team.” I pulled the picture from my pocket. “But I think this might be a start. We could find them. Even if we don’t know their faces.”

  Cassandra nodded. “I’ll go do a walk around outside to see if there’s anyone who might have seen Destiny, their dead daughter, wandering the streets at all.”

  I nodded. “I’ll make sure I haven’t left anything in here.”

  As Cassandra left, I walked into the centre of the room, the place where the three bodies had been. It stung my throat to think I could have helped them if we’d been earlier, even if I thought we were going to be early, we could have been so much earlier than we were.

  “She couldn’t help it,” a deep voice spoke from the corner of the room.

  It was the same man who’d been here this morning, dressed in his suit and hat. He blended in well with the darkness of the corner of the room and the sun setting.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to make sense of all his cryptic clues.

  “You can lead a horse to water, but they’ll still kick you in the face if you stand close enough.”

  “Who are you?” I asked, stepping closer. “Just answer that one question.”

  He shook his head. “I’m only here to watch.”

  I approached closer, my eyes fixed on him, watching everything about him. “So, all you do is watch?”

  “I am a witness,” he said. “I watch events in history—and any witch knows, if you see someone like me. It means a doomed fate awaits you.” A smile prickled the side of his cheeks. “But any witch worth their weight in magic potions and spells knows that it’s a mere warning and not set in stone.” He chuckled, stepping back, fading into the wall like a second layer of wallpaper.

  Cassandra approached from the front door. “Did a sweep, all clear.”

  “Clear in here too,” I answered plainly, but I had no idea. I was confused, and I was a little dumbfounded. This man had come and gone, left me with more questions than answers. It stung in my throat to think about what had happened, these people were soon to be the prisoner of the High Witch, they were soon to be enslaved into a life they didn’t choose.

  “Let’s go back,” Cassandra said. “I have to write my report.”

  I nodded. I was glad this came down to her. I’d never had a case that blew up so monumentally—and it wasn’t even over. It was so far from being over.

  The TV flashed on as we were about to leave.

  “Missing dead girl, found,” the reporter announced. “Police investigation is over.”

  I shook my head and snapped my fingers, cutting the TV off. “Let’s get out of here.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  My nerves were shot. My entire body was ready to hibernate. The case started out so small, we had to find a girl—simple enough, but then more girls died. We didn’t have a chance. I laid on the sofa, my eyes wide
as I stared out into nothing.

  “I’ll write the report,” Cass said. “Try and get something to eat.”

  I didn’t respond.

  A wing settled across my arm.

  “What happened?” Ivory asked.

  “We found the girl,” I said. “But the work has just started.”

  “Ohh, goodie.”

  Of course, Ivory was happy. I was happy, but it wasn’t a closed case, and I knew we’d need to close the case soon or have the rain of hundreds of creature batter down on the town. The Witches Council couldn’t let that happen, no matter how understaffed they were. I stroked her wing. “I have ideas—I have leads now.”

  “Need anything going in the report?” Cassandra shouted.

  “You need to tell them it’s not over,” I said. “We need more witches.”

  She hurried to the door. “We’ve got this,” she said. “All we need is to get the leader and we’re done. We’re so close to it. It’s like I can almost taste it.”

  I hummed at her thoughts. We weren’t at all near finished. From experience, I knew this was the start. I knew there were going to be more people coming out from the woodwork, and all because they wanted a piece of the energy they could feel. “What we really need is to find the source of the energy—then kill it.”

  I’d been close to energy before, pure and raw, but this time, I was slap bang in the centre of it. It was going to get messy, and someone or something had to be part of it.

  “Do you think because they killed the girls, it was some kind of—”

  “Awakening?” I attempted to finish her sentence.

  She shrugged. “Like, a spell.”

  Black magic could call for all number of things, including sacrifices. If they were sacrifices, it meant their deaths and rebirths were more crucial to the investigation. “Well, Destiny is with the Council. The other has been found, and I’m sure the Council will have claimed her. It leaves the last one, and Phil claimed she’d left as well.”

  “Left, or—”

  “Taken.”

  Ivory pulled her wing away. “So, what’s next?” she asked. “I can do a round of the town later.”