by Joyce
I wished I could say the same. I wasn’t a former high school beauty like Elsie was with her red hair and green eyes. I wasn’t sexy and provocative like Olivia with her natural blond hair and flirty gray eyes.
I was a little on the plain side, like Dorothy. My brown hair and blue eyes were nothing special. I’d sacrificed my figure to have a child, and never completely got it back. I was a fifty-eight-year-old homemaker, mother and wife. I felt as though I looked the part.
“She’s still got some mojo!” Elsie nodded as Olivia slipped her arm around the young man’s back to show him some powdered eyebright that could be used to improve his vision.
“He seems to be enjoying it.” I watched as the curious young man smiled and slid his hand across Olivia’s butt. She squealed and giggled.
“She’s playing games while we’re trying to keep everything together.” Elsie’s eyes roamed the store that we all loved. “I’m older than you two. I don’t know how much longer I can go on. I can feel the fire dying inside me. It used to burn so hot and bright. I don’t want to give up my magic. I want to bring in some new members and make it strong again.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. “It’s going to be fine. I know the idea of having no magic is scary, but magic that flickers on and off, that we can’t control, is even worse.”
Elsie wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. “A witch’s tear. Powerful medicine. Too bad we already have so many stored up. I hate to waste it.”
“I’m going to leave now with Brian.” Olivia looked up at the young man, adoringly. “I’ll see you girls later. Keep an eye on Dorothy. Tomorrow could be a great day for us.”
Brian waved and smiled before the old door to the shop closed behind him and Olivia. He was a witch, of course. I don’t think Olivia had ever dated anyone without magic.
I couldn’t explain it, and didn’t mention it to Elsie—she might take it the wrong way—but I had a sense of melancholy and foreboding.
Perhaps it was only the slow loss of everything I’d held dear in life, not only the loss of my magic. For the first time in my life, I was worried about what the future would bring.
Whatever it was, I left Smuggler’s Arcane with a heavy heart that evening. The weather seemed to mirror my emotions, as frequently happened. Water witches are known as harbingers of changing weather. A large storm was rolling in from the Atlantic. I was afraid what it might bring with it.
CHAPTER 2
Power of the witches rise.
Come unseen across the skies.
Come to us, we call you near.
Come to us and settle here.
Blood to blood, I summon thee.
Blood to blood, return to me.
I woke up at two A.M. There was a loud crash of thunder—lightning struck close by, illuminating the night.
I looked around my quiet bedroom with my heart pounding. Nothing seemed wrong.
Then I saw a small glowing ball float across the room. I threw back the blanket and slid my feet into slippers.
“What’s up?” my husband, Joe, muttered sleepily.
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”
He patted the empty spot beside him. “It’s only the storm, Molly. Come back to bed.”
“I can’t right now. Go back to sleep.”
I could tell by his breathing that he’d already fallen asleep again. I kept my gaze locked on the ghost ball that flitted from room to room. I followed it silently, watching as it went through the house. What is it searching for?
The orb spent a few minutes in my son’s bedroom. Mike had already gone back to school for the fall semester. He was in his sophomore year at East Carolina University, majoring in engineering. The school was far enough for him to feel independent and close enough for me not to worry so much. He probably wouldn’t be home until Christmas.
My cat, Isabelle, pushed her head under my hand. I could hear her thoughts as clearly as I heard my own. I stroked her soft gray fur and tried to calm my rapidly beating heart. We both knew something was wrong.
Isabelle was convinced nothing good could come of following a ghost ball in the middle of the night, but she tended to be a little negative at times. It wasn’t surprising since her spirit was that of a fourteenth-century witch condemned to die at the stake.
I watched the ghost ball until I heard Joe’s cell phone ring in the bedroom. He was a homicide detective. A phone call at this hour rarely brought good news.
Isabelle twitched her tail, reminding me that she’d told me so.
When I looked back, the ghost ball was gone. It had disappeared as quickly as it had come.
My heart was still pounding when I met Joe as he was coming out of the bedroom. He was trying to push his long legs into worn jeans and pull on a black T-shirt at the same time.
“What is it?” Dread filled every fiber of my body.
Olivia.
It was a shadow that floated across my brain as the ghost ball had flitted through the house.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this, Molly.” He put a hand on each of my arms. His black hair was threaded with silver now but was as thick as it had been when we were married thirty years ago. “Your friend Olivia has been found dead in an alley off Water Street.”
“Are you sure it’s her?” My mind grappled with what he’d said, but I already knew the answer.
“Yes. There’s ID. It doesn’t look like a robbery. That’s all I know right now.”
“You’re going down there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going with you.”
“Molly, you can’t do anything for her now. And I can’t take you into an active crime scene. You wouldn’t want to see her this way. Why don’t you call Elsie, and the two of you get together.”
“I’m going with you.” I repeated the words in a way that let him know I was serious. “I can be ready as fast as you.”
He nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
It had never been easy being married to a homicide detective. Our lives had been made up of late-night phone calls that led to dead bodies—and Joe leaving parties to answer leads that helped find killers.
This was the first time his job had involved someone I knew.
Olivia. How was it possible?
I took a moment after my shoes, jeans and sweatshirt were on to take a deep breath, close my eyes and say a few words of peace for my friend. It was difficult to find that time, between silence and fear, when I could concentrate on her.
Who killed her? Where were her protection spells?
I wanted to call all the magic that I knew was available to a skilled practitioner—magic I had never called upon before. I could feel the roar of the ocean surging through me, wanting me to reach out and pull in that strength. My heart ached with the need to find and destroy whoever had killed my lifelong friend.
“I have to go, Molly,” Joe called.
“I’m ready.”
He seemed surprised to see me there beside him. “Are you sure about this? I think it’s a bad idea.”
I didn’t have to answer. I knew he could see the determination in my eyes.
“All right.”
We walked out of the house together. The storm had receded from Wilmington, but lightning still flashed over the dark swells of the ocean.
Elsie was standing by Joe’s SUV in the drive.
He was startled when he saw her. “Oh, it’s you! Did Molly call you?”
She took my hand. “She didn’t have to.”
Joe complained about taking both of us to the crime scene. “You’re not going to like what you see.” His voice was raspy in the damp night air. He’d given up smoking twenty years before, but still had that husky smoker’s voice. “This isn’t your friend out there in the alley. Olivia is gone. You have to understand that.”
Elsie and I sat together in the backseat. We held hands and stared into each other’s eyes. We knew exactly what we’d find.
He drove us to Water Street, next to the river in the old part of town, not too far from the Cotton Exchange, where Smuggler’s Arcane was located.
Here it was said Blackbeard the pirate once roamed the coast of North Carolina. Some of the older houses still had escape tunnels under them. The good folk of Wilmington had gone to hide there until the late-night raids and terror were over—always with their valuables in their pockets.
There were several police cars with blue lights flashing. A crime scene van was already there. As Joe got out of the SUV, several officers came to speak to him. His partner, Lisbet Hernandez, walked up slowly, blue gloves protecting her hands.
“Hello, Molly.” Lisbet nodded to me. “Joe told me this woman was your friend. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She was a good partner for Joe. Lisbet was younger and liked to joke around. I worried about him getting too serious from the things he witnessed every day. They’d been partners for ten years. She was good for him.
“This is Elsie Langston. The victim is a friend of hers too,” Joe explained to her.
Lisbet repeated her words of condolence to Elsie. “They aren’t going over there, right? It’s terrible.”
“I couldn’t talk them out of it.”
She shrugged, her thin shoulders covered by a brown leather jacket that matched her knee-high boots. “It’s okay with me. As long as you explain to the boss—and you write up the report.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Talk to me.” Joe put on his protective gloves too.
Elsie and I were still holding hands. Lisbet explained the basic details of what they thought had happened that night. Joe nodded as we walked toward the crime scene. Uniformed officers acknowledged them and moved out of the way.
“She hasn’t been dead long,” Lisbet said as we reached the spot where Olivia had fallen. “Her throat was cut. Nothing was taken. Like I told you, I don’t think it was a robbery.”
Joe approached the scene with a grim face. “You might want to look away,” he warned us before he pulled back the green sheet that covered Olivia’s body.
I wanted to look away. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted all three of us to be home in our beds.
But here we were, together at the end. I wished we could’ve been together when Olivia had died.
Her still-pretty, proud face was smudged with dirt from the street. Her expensive clothes were dirty and torn. Both of her new shoes were gone. The bottoms of her feet were dirty, as though she’d walked without them for a while.
“Any sign of sexual assault?” Joe asked Lisbet.
“The medical examiner said he didn’t see any indications of it, but he won’t know for sure until after the autopsy.”
Joe glanced around at the old buildings that surrounded the spot. There were several restaurants and a tavern, along with some tightly closed boutiques. “Let’s see if we can get any camera footage. Have the nearby restaurants and the tavern get theirs for you too. We might get lucky. Maybe she went in and out of one of the local places with her killer.”
“You got it.” Lisbet wrote down what he said.
“Witnesses?” Joe asked.
“Only an old man who was sitting by the river. He said he didn’t see anything, but he heard a woman scream.”
Joe and Lisbet glanced at me and Elsie.
“Are you two okay?” he asked.
“I think we’ve seen enough. Thanks for bringing us. We’ll get a taxi home.” My mouth felt like it was carved from wood.
“You don’t need to do that, Molly,” Joe said. “I left the keys in the SUV. Take it home. Lisbet can give me a ride. Maybe Elsie could stay with you. I don’t think either of you should be alone right now.”
I nodded, not able to find words. Elsie and I walked away from the scene of Olivia’s death.
“What can we do?” Elsie whispered. “There must be something. Maybe a locator spell to find the killer.”
We got in the SUV and sat there for a few minutes, trying to take it all in.
“It won’t be easy to do anything,” I reminded her. “Even with Olivia’s magic and ours working together, we’ve been having a difficult time getting mundane things done. How are we going to find a killer?”
“We have to do something.” Elsie’s voice trembled, as did her cold hand in mine. “Someone murdered her out here in the street, Molly. She shouldn’t have died that way. We have to find out who did it.”
“I know.”
“You know it was her turn to have the spell book,” she reminded me. “You don’t think it had anything to do with her death, do you?”
“She wouldn’t have had it with her. It’s too big and bulky. I’m sure it’s still at her house. But we should go and check.”
“I couldn’t sense a thing magical about her death, could you?” Elsie wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
“I’m not sure that I could have sensed anything.” I was tearless, but my head was reeling with the knowledge that Olivia was dead. It was a tight compression in my chest that wouldn’t allow me to take a deep breath. “She reached out to me as she was dying. There was a ghost ball at my house right before Joe got the call to come down here. I knew it was her.”
“Harper!” Elsie put on her seatbelt. “That poor dear thing! We have to go and check on him and the spell book. I don’t like to think what he’s going through right now.”
I started the SUV, and we drove to Third Street. Olivia had lived in the same house that had been passed down to her through her mother’s family for several generations. It didn’t have the safeguard of an underground tunnel to hide from pirate raids, but its magic protection was ingrained in every foot of lumber and every iron nail.
The porch light was on. Olivia’s silver Mercedes was still parked in the driveway.
“Was she still out after leaving the shop this afternoon?” I asked. “I wonder if she was still with that young man.”
“What did she say his name was?”
“Brian. She didn’t say his last name. She’s seen him before, I think. He didn’t buy anything, or we’d have a receipt we could use to track him down.”
“No.” Elsie nodded. “But he did touch a few things. That might be enough of his essence left to find him, at least for us. It won’t do the police much good.”
“Let’s go inside first and talk to Harper.”
“And find the spell book.”
Years before, Olivia had spelled the front door to allow us entrance, but it took both of us to use the incantation.
“It may have been easier using the key under the rock,” Elsie muttered.
“That wouldn’t have helped with the alarm system.” I opened the door and turned on a light. “We’re in now. That’s all that matters.”
“Oh my goodness!”
Everything had been ripped apart in the handsomely decorated foyer. Antiques that Olivia had collected through her life had been needlessly destroyed. A carpet was shredded near the stairs, and an original Gainsborough painting was torn from its frame, though not stolen.
We carefully proceeded through the rest of the house. Everything was ransacked—from flour bins in the kitchen to Olivia’s lingerie drawers. The clothes were thrown out of her closet, and the walls inside it were ripped open. Every piece of furniture in the entire house was sliced open and broken. It seemed as though there wasn’t a single spot left untouched.
“How could this happen?” Elsie demanded in pain and sorrow. “The doors and windows are spelled. How could anyone get in?”
I showed her the kitchen door, which had been pushed in almost to the point of ripping off its hinges. The wires to the alarm system were cut too. “Someone physically broke in, probably after she died. Olivia�
��s death weakened the spells on the house, or it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Then why did we have such a hard time getting in?”
“We didn’t use a crowbar.” I stared at the devastation around us. “It still took a witch to get inside, but why cut the alarm and break the door? Magic should have gotten them inside without all of this damage.”
“We should look for the spell book.”
Harper called to us from the cellar. Even though he didn’t belong to either of us, we could still hear his frightened thoughts. We flew down the old stairs as quickly as we could. His loud cries continued, even after we’d located him behind the washing machine.
“Poor thing.” Elsie gathered the large cat to her and hugged him close. “What happened here? When did someone break into the house?”
Harper was clear in his response that it had happened after Olivia’s death. He’d been devastated, knowing instantly when she’d died. Their bond had been strong.
“Whoever did this knew her spells were weak and waited until it was possible to cut the alarm and break down the door.”
Elsie snorted, startling Harper into jumping down. “They must be a good sight better than us. We could barely open the front door, and it was spelled so we could get in.”
“Did you recognize the person who broke in?” I asked Harper as I looked into his blue eyes.
He was regretful that he hadn’t recognized the man who was there. He wished he had, and that he could’ve killed him. It was going to be a sorrowful life for him without Olivia.
“And the spell book is gone.” I glanced into the safe behind the washer again.
“Why would someone want to steal our spell book?” Elsie asked. “There must be dozens of them more powerful than ours.”
“Maybe. Still, we’re talking about more than a hundred years of spells and incantations, counting back from our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. That’s nothing to fool around with. We may not be the most powerful witches in the world, but we have been well documented.”
