“That’s because it’s insane!” Blair shook her head. “There has to be another way.”
Ruby sighed, and steepled her hands in front of her. “Look, kid, this is part of being a witch. We’re gifted with knowledge and power beyond those of mundane mortals, but that comes at a price. Seeing the bigger picture sometimes means taking steps which seem drastic on the outset but are actually quite necessary.”
“I don’t know, Ruby. I can’t just kill a man!”
“You don’t have to, resurrecting him is the tricky part. Killing him will be a snap. I can do that all by myself.”
Blair sighed. “But it seems so drastic, though.”
“Look, Blair, if we don’t do something about Cotton Mather, he’s not going to stop. Sure, we’ve been able to fight him off. Maybe I’ll be able to fend him off forever. But what if I can’t? What if he gets loose on the general population? The longer an apparition is kept from true death, the more their madness grows. How long do you think it will be before he decides everyone who crosses his path is a witch?”
Blair sighed. “I—I need to clear this with the Cabal.”
“What? Who cares what those know-it-all creeps think?”
“As their Intercessor, I do.” Blair chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Look, just give me an hour or so to contact them and see what they think of this plan.”
“An hour or two?”
“Two hours, tops,” Blair said, standing up. “Excuse me. The spell I have in mind works better outdoors.”
“Well, I’ll be here, I guess.” Ruby stuffed a cookie into her mouth and called out after Blair, spraying crumbs everywhere. “More cookies for me!”
“And me,” Rumpus said, his face already covered in golden crumbs.
Twenty-Six
Ruby stared at the mostly empty plate, shame burning her soul and indigestion burning her stomach.
“That was a bad idea,” Ruby groaned. “I need someone to exorcise this lump of processed sugar in my gut.”
“We’re too old for cookie dinners,” Rumpus moaned.
“I need to walk some of this off,” Ruby said, rising painfully to her feet. She cupped her hands over her belly and let out a belch. “Pardon me.”
She shuffled over to the stairwell, glancing ruefully over her shoulder at the closed door. Blair had yet to come back in. Hopefully she would get a reply from the Cabal soon.
Ruby walked up the curving stairwell, working her way up the lighthouse. “You coming, Rumpus?”
“Can’t…move…”
“I’ll come, Ruby.”
“Sure thing, sweetie.” Rufus hardly needed to lose weight, but Ruby felt she could use the company.
They padded up to the very top of the lighthouse. Ruby grunted as she unsealed the trap door and pushed it open. Inside, the gigantic, corrugated lens sat dark and silent. Many years ago, when she’d been a child, Uncle Ruckus had still operated the lighthouse for the Coast Guard, but tracking stations and GPS had largely put it out of business.
Fortunately, it was considered an historical location by Fiddler’s Cove, and, therefore, protected. The development of the little town into a bustling tourist spot had left the lighthouse untouched.
Ruby stared out at the Sound, the waves crawling like wizened hills toward the coast. The moon hid behind a shroud of clouds, appearing as a hazy blur in the sky. How many times had she stood in that exact spot and watched the ocean? Strained her eyes, trying to see Long Island in the distance, no matter how impossible it seemed?
Hundreds? Maybe even thousands? One thing was for certain, though…
This is the first time I’ve stood here and looked out over the Sound since my Uncle died.
It wasn’t fair. If there had to be a ghost haunting the lighthouse, why couldn’t it be her Uncle? Instead, she had a stubborn apparition who hated witches and had somehow garnered demonic patronage.
Ruby turned her gaze toward the twinkling lights of Fiddler’s Cove. She’d seen this view many times before as well. For a moment, she could almost imagine the weight of her uncle’s hand resting on her shoulder. She reached up, fingers brushing against the stiff, bristle-like hair on the back of his hand…
“Don’t worry, Ruby Roo. You’ve got this.”
Ruby yelped, looking about in confusion. She ran her hand over her eyes and sighed. Too tired, too worn out, too old to be skipping sleep. Her knees ached from the trip up the lighthouse stairs, and Rufus had already grown bored and slipped back to the lower level.
She’d hallucinated her Uncle’s touch, his voice, to make herself feel better. For a witch, daydreams could be particularly vivid. Sometimes, a witch’s dreams could even be contagious…Ruby admonished herself for being careless. Being a witch meant never being able to completely relax your guard, even when you were alone.
Magic is a burden. It’s worn on me all this time bearing it alone.
Ruby spotted Blair moving back up the ramp. Judging by the bounce in her step, Blair had successfully contacted her superiors in the Cabal.
She reached the kitchen level about the same time as Blair and Felix. Felix glared at the empty plate and then turned his incensed gaze on Rumpus.
“You just had to do it, didn’t you? You couldn’t leave us one cookie to share?”
“You snooze, you lose,” Rumpus said, laying on his back with four legs thrust in the air.
“You’re not going to be in any shape for the Reincarnation spell.”
Blair glanced at Ruby, confusion furrowing her brow. “The what?”
“Reincarnation. I don’t know a spell to raise the dead back to the realm of the living, but I know one that can force a rebirth into a new form.”
“A new form?”
Ruby grinned and moved quickly to the corner of the room. She lifted a blanket away and revealed a palm sized colorful sea snail inside a goldfish bowl.
“We transfer him into an Atlantic Moon snail, a creature so puny it has to beat up on other snails. Then, we introduce him to my other recent pet purchase.”
Ruby unveiled another fishbowl, this one with a starfish.
“The Yellow Sun Star, the natural enemy of the Atlantic Moon Snail. You see, Blair, you don’t have to let your conscience bother you. We’re not going to lift a finger to harm Cotton Mather. Mr. Starfish will be doing that for us.”
“Who’d have ever figured Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants would be a mollusk assassin?” Rumpus asked.
“You haven’t even asked me what the Cabal had to say,” Blair said icily, tapping her fingers on the kitchen table. “And you could have left me a cookie.”
“Rumpus, I told you the last cookie was for our guests! And maybe I didn’t ask what the Cabal said because I don’t give a flying f—”
“They agree with you.” Blair ceased her tapping and clenched her hand into a fist. “Cotton Mather is an apparition which has caused a great deal of strife to witches over the centuries of his existence. They’ve ordered me to oversee his execution, being as I’m the Intercessor and all.”
“Listen to her brag.”
“Shut up, Rumpus. Can’t you tell from her tone of voice she’s being bitter?”
“It’s alright, Felix,” Blair said.
“Why don’t you tell the Cabal to get stuffed?” Ruby shrugged. “Nobody voted them into power, you know. And, for all their supposed power, they need to lean on you to take care of their problems for them. Why don’t you just quit?”
“That’s what I’m always saying.” Felix bobbed his head. “They don’t even pay us!”
“That’s just criminal,” Rumpus gasped.
“The cabal…I get the impression they need me. If I quit, there’s nobody to stop the bad things that are coming.”
“Sounds like you have a martyr complex, my dear, but to each their own. If you don’t want to be around for the actual execution, you don’t have to be. I could use your help on the reincarnation spell, though.”
“I’ll see it through to the end,” B
lair sighed. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
The two witches moved the table out of the way and drew a pentagram on the floor. This time they had no less than six layers of runic borders laid out around their silver star. Each layer had its own purpose and had to be inscribed with the utmost precision.
With three cats frolicking around, it was difficult to concentrate. Ruby eventually set them up watching Netflix in her bedroom so they could have some peace.
“Alright,” Blair said, straightening up with an ease that made Ruby jealous. “I think we’re ready to cast the spell.”
“Yeah,” Ruby grunted as she stood up, rubbing her aching knee. “Just give me a second.”
They stood on opposite sides of the star, soon joined by their familiars. Rufus didn’t have a place in the ritual, so he sat in a specially inscribed circle which would allow him to act as a kind of anchor. If Cotton Mather somehow managed to squirm his way out of their trap, he would still have to get past an cytoplasmically-enhanced Rufus.
Their chanting came low and rhythmic, repetitive. Entreaties were made to forces older than Gods, older than even the concept of Gods. Many-eyed things left over from before the formalization of all creation peered with envious contempt at their ceremony as they slowly manipulated the forces of life and death to their whim.
Ruby’s throat grew raw from the chanting. This was old magic, primal magic. Not simple like her levitation or protective spells or manipulating water. Ruby normally eschewed such rituals because they involved garnering the attention of forces beyond even a clever, experienced witch’s purview.
Something heard their reply, a force/concept/deity which decided to grant their request. Cotton Mather’s ghostly mouth howled in raging denial even as an unseen vortex sucked him down toward the humble snail in the center of the pentagram.
“It’s working,” Rufus said in awe.
Ruby kept up the chanting, her eldritch power draining away. Ley lines and the moon were not enough for magic so powerful. It required a witch to expend her own energy and could take so much more. If they couldn’t complete the ritual before she ran out of power, the magic would take years off her life as its price…
Cotton Mather’s scream faded into a wet squish as his spirit splashed into the snail’s form. It glowed brightly for a moment, then took on, to Ruby’s mind, a kind of dejected posture. For a snail. Its eyestalks seemed droopier, at any rate.
“Did it work?” Blair asked, wiping a sheen of sweat away from her forehead.
“I think it did,” Ruby sighed. “Thank goodness, something went off without a hitch for once.”
The door slammed open as Busta Kapp/Trevor Whitley stumbled into the room, a large caliber pistol in his hand. “Yo yo, who dat? Who dat? Busta Kapp, Mother—”
Then he opened fire, drowning out his own voice in a hail of bullets.
Twenty-Seven
Busta Kapp’s mouth fell slack as his bullets froze in midair, trapped by the sparking field of miniature lightning emanating from Blair’s spread fingers. Busta stared at his pistol, then at the suspended bullets, and turned tail to flee.
“I gotta stop mixing my weed with Angel Dust.”
Ruby let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and nearly collapsed. “Thank goodness you had some power left.”
Blair sagged to her knees. The suspended bullets spilled to the floor and pinged about. “That’s it. That’s all I had left.”
“You’re both out of commission, then,” Felix said, brandishing his claws. “Looks like it’s up to me to take this creep down.”
“You think I’m going to let you hog all the fun?” Rumpus laughed menacingly as he reared up on his hind legs. “This man attacked my witch in her own home. I’m not going to snap his neck! He doesn’t get a quick, easy death! I’m going to smother him, choke the life out of him slowly so I can watch the impending doom unfold in his eyes.”
“I don’t know what I can do to help, but count me in,” Rufus said firmly. “I can be a good distraction if nothing else.”
“So, it’s settled then,” Felix said, his feline face split with a grin. “We three familiars combine our powers to form Cat-tron.”
“Felix, will you stop?” Blair sighed. “No one’s forming Cat-tron. There’s an armed, if not necessarily bright, lunatic on the loose. We need you to stay right here.”
“Um, yes,” Ruby said, “to protect us in case he comes back.”
Felix sighed. “Darn it. I could have taken him, you know.”
“You mean we could have taken him,” Rumpus added.
“I stand by what I said. Though, I guess, maybe it’s only fitting he has to fight two sub bosses before he reaches the final boss.”
“What makes you think you’d be the final boss, shrimp? I leave piles in the litter box bigger than you.”
“Float like a butterfly, stink like yo momma,” Felix hissed, getting up on his hind legs and batting the air in front of Rumpus.
“Bring it on, you filthy alley-rumpus casual!” He, too, raised up on his hind legs and batted the air with his paws. “I’ve been eating pieces of crap like you for breakfast since before you were born.”
“You eat pieces of crap for breakfast?” Felix taunted.
“Oh, that is it, have at thee!”
“Enough.” Ruby and Blair each picked up their respective familiars and backed away.
“Did you know that man who attacked us?” Blair asked.
“Only too well. He calls himself Busta Kapp, but his real name is Trevor Whitley.” Ruby’s face wrinkled in disgust. “He thinks he’s a hardcore gangster rapper and he’s apparently involved in some sort of criminal enterprise with my dead ex-fiancé.”
“Come again?” Felix said, his anger forgotten.
“That’s a lot to digest, Ruby.” Blair cocked an eyebrow. “Wait, you said your ex had been killed the other day…does that mean this, um, Justin Crapp person—”
“Busta Kapp,” Ruby said
“Right. Does that mean he killed your ex-fiancé, too?”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. It certainly seems possible.” Ruby sat down suddenly, sinking into her uncle’s chair and covering her face with her hands. “My Goddess. I knew coming back home was going to be complicated. I just had no idea it would be in so many different ways.”
Blair shifted nervously from foot to foot. “Are you alright?”
“No, I’m not alright.” Ruby laughed. “Don’t freak out, I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown or anything. It’s just—I wanted closure with my ex, but not so, um, final. I wanted to avoid seeing people I knew when I used to live here. Instead, I walked right into a nest of them at book club.”
Ruby stared at the bullets scattered across the floor and shook her head. “A criminal wants to kill me, but I’m a lot more afraid of the guy who’s supposed to protect me from said criminal.”
“How so?” Blair sat down on the stool, folded hands resting on her drawn-up knees. If nothing else, the young witch was a good listener. Then Ruby realized Blair’s secret. She liked people. She just plain liked them.
Could I ever be like that? Or did I used to be like that but, at some point, the world ground it out of me?
“Well, after Roger left me at the altar—quit being dramatic, Rumpus, I know I talk about it a lot. It seems like an important distinction when he left me, is all I'm saying. Are you done? Good.—where was I?”
“When Roger left you at the altar…”
“Right. I decided I’d been a sucker, and I was never going to let anyone fool me again. Ever.” Ruby heaved a sigh, fidgeting with a crocheted afghan draped over the back of her Uncle’s chair. “So, I never let anyone get close. I’ve got tons of friends but no best friends. I’ve dated lots of men—handsome ones, rich ones, even a married one once, and I do not recommend that—but never let any of them get close.”
“Because that way they wouldn’t be able to hurt you.” Blair smiled gently. “So
, now that you’re reconnecting with this Johnny Mumbles person, you’re finding you want to let him get close?”
Ruby nodded. “I don’t know if I’m still even able to do that. I’ve practiced the opposite for so long it’s become an ingrained instinct.”
“Um, this jibber jabber is touching and all, but has anyone else remembered there’s an armed, murderous scum bag on the loose?” Rumpus asked. “We haven’t even shut the door yet.”
“Don’t be a jerk, your witch was working something out,” Felix hissed.
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, snowball. I’ll chew you up and spit you out.”
“Oh yeah? I’d like to see you try.”
“Ain’t nothing between us but six feet and opportunity.”
“Will you two stop?” Ruby rolled her eyes and threw her hands up in the air. “Exactly what genius decided to bond witches with cat familiars in the first place?”
Blair shook her head, eyes wide with import. “I’ve asked myself that question so very, very many times…”
Ruby stood up and stretched. All of these busy days and late nights were taking a toll. There were things to be done, however, so she told all her tired muscles and sore joints to keep it down to a dull roar.
Her aunt used to have a placard on the door to the kitchen. It read Proof Jesus was a woman: Even when she was dead, she had to get up because there was work to do.
It went well with the placard hanging over the fireplace: When God created man…she was only kidding.
“I hate to say it but Rumpus does raise a good point. We need to call John so he can put out the alert for Busta Kapp.”
Blair looked at the bullets on the floor, then back at the wide open door. A patch of moon showed at the top left corner. “What are you going to tell him?”
“The truth. John knows I’m a witch.”
“That’s convenient,” Felix said.
Ruby smiled at Blair. “Listen thanks for all your help tonight. Stopping bullets, trapping reincarnated witch hunters in sea snails, just listening…I really appreciate it.”
“It’s nothing,” Blair said with embarrassed humility. “You saved my life back in New York.”
You've Got To Be Kitten: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Cozy Mystery Page 15
