Last Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 3)

by Stephen Penner

  “Was Eileen Jenkins one of the founders of the church?”

  Miriam squinted at the headstone. “Oh, no. Eileen wouldn’t have been but a babe then. But her mother, her mother came here shortly after the church opened. I didn’t recognize the last name at first, but her mother… Oh, most of us in the congregation know the story of her mother.”

  Benson cocked her head. “Why is that?”

  A fair question, Warwick thought. She had a more practical one. “Is her mother buried here too?”

  “Oh, no,” Miriam answered quickly. “Her mother isn’t buried here. She was excommunicated.”

  Warwick frowned. “Excommunicated? Isn’t that a Catholic practice? I thought this was a Presbyterian church.”

  “Aye, it is,” Miriam agreed. “What I mean is, she and her babe came to this church because she was excommunicated. And it was on account of why she was excommunicated that the church elders decided not to bury her on the grounds here.”

  “Why was she excommunicated?” Benson asked. Warwick had already guessed the answer.

  “For arcane practices,” Miriam said.

  “For being a witch,” Muriel clarified.

  “Aye,” Miriam sighed. “For being a witch.”

  *

  Which, which, which, Maggie considered as she neared the destination of her stroll: the campus. She was trying to decide which coffee shop to spend her afternoon in. She was fully prepared for her visit to Sarah MacKenzie’s flat. Well, almost fully prepared. She would have preferred to have had her Dark Book with her. But that notwithstanding, she was ready. She knew the address; she knew what she wanted to find out; and she knew the most important thing of all: to wait until nightfall.

  There was no way she was breaking and entering in broad daylight.

  Which, she ruminated, meant an afternoon in a coffee shop on campus, followed by dinner at her favorite campus pub, before walking quietly and unnoticed—she hoped—to Sarah’s college district flat.

  Then she spied it. The Green Door Cafe, with its very much white door, thank you. A place she’d first gone to with Sarah MacKenzie. Maggie smiled as she realized she hadn’t selected her route to campus as much as she’d allowed it to select her, not unlike her foggy walk from the train station upon her arrival from Edinburgh. She took it as an omen. Where it began, it might also end. When one door closes, another opens. Or something like that.

  And sometimes, Maggie thought as she grabbed ahold of The Green Door’s white door, you have to open your own doors.

  *

  “Should we open it?” Benson craned her neck to peer into the witch’s grave. Or rather, the witch’s daughter’s grave.

  Warwick glanced down as well. She shook her head. “No. Let’s wait for forensics to process the scene. They can open it up and see what’s missing.”

  “Missing? How do you know something’s missing?” Muriel asked with more than a little disgust in her voice. Miriam just listened to the question, then nodded at the sergeant, wide-eyed, joining her friend’s question.

  “It’s my job to know,” Warwick answered.

  It was an impressive response, and her decision to allow the forensics officers to open the casket, a professional one. But she also hadn’t quite shaken the odor of Jenny Burns’ casket. This grave was older and she had already detected the stench seeping up from the coffin below. Warwick was usually hands-on, but she knew sometimes it was better to let someone else open the box.

  Just ask Pandora.

  15. Evening Constitutional

  Maggie looked at the clock on the café wall. It was time for her to go for her walk. The sun had set and a cool mist was descending onto the twilight streets. She had her backpack and everything she needed. She took the last sip of her last cup of tea and headed out into the darkening night.

  *

  Iain glanced down at his watch. He needed to go for a walk. His companion had left and unbidden thoughts were flooding his mind. He had everything he needed and nothing he wanted. He craved the first drink of the night but instead headed out into the darkening night.

  *

  Philip checked the clock on his desk. He decided to go for a walk. His research was complete and a dull fatigue clouded his thoughts. He had ideas in his head and a plan in mind. He took a parting drink from his water bottle and headed out into the darkening night.

  *

  Warwick peered up at the clock on her wall. She wanted to go for a walk. The grave-robbing case was delegated to Willis and her concentration was focused on her newest case. She took another drink of coffee from her Styrofoam cup and headed out into the darkening night.

  *

  Sinclair neither knew nor cared what time it was. And he had no plans to go anywhere. He was confident that, in time, others would come to him.

  16. Apartment Hunting

  Autumn had definitely arrived. Summer was a short season at the 58th parallel, especially on the top half of an island sticking into the North Sea. The day had been warm enough, but the sun had set a few minutes earlier than the previous day and a thin fog rolled in from the harbor to coat the streets. It surrounded Maggie’s ankles as she glided beneath the streetlights on her way to Sarah MacKenzie’s flat.

  The flat was located one block off the main street of one of the more eclectic neighborhoods straddling the border between the college and the rest of Aberdeen proper. It was a three-story building with small balconies facing the street. The front door was secured, with a tiny lobby visible through the glass and an intercom system on the outside wall. The intercom was a silver-colored metal plate with a dozen push buttons and a circle-shaped series of slats for staticky and unintelligible conversation. Maggie examined the buttons, or rather, the names on the labels stuck next to them. She didn’t know whether Sarah’s name would still be there. If not, she could guess the one blank button was hers. She supposed it might be difficult to rent an apartment where someone had killed herself.

  The labels proved less than helpful, however. Trendy neighborhood or not, the landlord was not keeping up appearances—at least not in terms of keeping the intercom updated. Three of the buttons had no labels, and the labels that were there seemed old and likely out-of-date.

  Maggie frowned. She was sticking with her empty-apartment-because-somebody-died-inside theory. It was part logic, part wishful thinking. If it had been rented out already, the new tenants would probably resist her efforts to snoop around their home. Either way, the directory was unhelpful, so she had to go to Plan B.

  She just wished she knew what Plan B was.

  Actually, she knew what Plan B was; she just wished it were something better. She shrugged and stepped off the porch to look up at the flats. There were six facing the street, which, combined with the twelve intercom buttons, suggested six more facing the back. She scanned the area and spied a gate, guarding a narrow walkway along the side of the building.

  She stiffened a bit as a car drove past, on its way to the main street, which was uncomfortably near and busy. She watched as it turned off the side street, then looked up again at the apartment building. Four of the flats had lights on just then. That left two in the front which might be empty—and therefore might have been Sarah’s. She made a mental note of that, then headed for the gate.

  She hoped to find at least one other lightless flat in the back. If she was going to have to do what she was starting to think she might have to do, she was going to want some privacy—or at least more privacy than afforded out front with its lights and traffic.

  The gate wasn’t locked. It was wrought iron bars, about as tall as her, and easily swung open after she reached through and undid the latch. The pathway was paved with large flagstones. She looked down to watch every step, since there was no lighting just there and she’d had bad luck walking across uneven stones in the dark. A few moments later, she was standing in a tiny courtyard behind the building, paved with smaller red bricks. She stood as far back as she could and looked up at the balconies. Five of t
he six had lights on. So she had selected her target. That was the good news. The bad news was that the unlit flat was on the top floor.

  Of course, she sighed. She’d have to hope the remaining five tenants wouldn’t be looking out their balcony windows just then. Maybe there was a football match on. Celtic versus Rangers would be the best, if she recalled Iain’s explanation of Scottish soccer loyalties correctly.

  Iain.

  She sighed again.

  Stupid Iain. He should have been waiting out front for her, ignorant and worried, but supportive nonetheless. What she wouldn’t have given for an ignorant and supportive boyfriend just then. And cute. Ignorant, supportive, and cute.

  A third sigh. There was nothing wrong with a wistful pause, but she had work to do, by herself if necessary. She looked up at the one dark balcony. There was no scaffolding or ladder to climb up. She’d expected as much.

  She’d managed not to use the magic since the nightmare on the train. Although she didn’t recall it, she knew the dream meant she’d used the magic shortly before—during The Lost Weeks. She’d avoided it since, afraid of what she might have done during those weeks to have resulted in both inexplicable amnesia and tortuous nightmares.

  But she wasn’t scared of another nightmare. Not any more. Now she was scared she wouldn’t have any more nightmares. She was scared the magic was gone. The Dark Book was gone. Iain was gone. Maybe the magic was gone too. And despite her usual rationality—or perhaps because of it—she had decided not to test it. She knew it was better to fear the magic was gone forever, than to fail at it and confirm its loss.

  But her respite was over. Time for the test.

  The first spell she’d ever tried was also the first one that had ever worked. It hadn’t worked the first time. Not the second time either. But eventually, after enough tries, and after learning enough to make her think the magic might actually be real, it had worked. A simple spell. Basic, really.

  Levitation.

  There was a certain poetry to that being the first spell she had mastered. It wasn’t just the simplicity of it, but its perfection as a symbol of how the magic worked. For the magic in the Dark Book was dark magic, and levitation, as benign as it might seem, actually illustrated exactly how the dark magic worked. The dark magic attacked and destroyed the natural order of things.

  Things don’t levitate. They fall. Rocks fall. Leaves fall. Apples fall. They fall on the heads of brilliant physicists who realize that apples always fall. Always. And that was a law that couldn’t be broken.

  Except by the dark magic.

  Maggie looked down and spied a small rock laying loosely atop the uneven bricks of the courtyard.

  Even the words of the spell confirmed its counter-natural power: ‘Tear asunder the bonds which chain this object to the Earth.’

  She whispered the well-learned spell in its original tongue, “Mhaidhid inh chuimriachan anh-í chonrig riátsha cho inh Thalum,” and waited. Nothing happened at first and Maggie felt a bolt of panic strike her heart. But rather than repeat the spell, she simply concentrated on the pebble, the words she had just whispered echoing in her mind.

  After a moment, or maybe two, the pebble stirred, almost imperceptibly. Maggie allowed herself a deep exhale of relief. She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath. She narrowed her eyes and repeated the spell.

  “Mhaidhid inh chuimriachan anh-í chonrig riátsha cho inh Thalum.”

  This time, the pebble floated straight up, accelerating as it went. Maggie had expected it to stop at her eye level, but it glided up and shot out of sight into the darkness above her.

  Good to know, she thought. Pay attention to the distance.

  If she was going to levitate herself up to the balcony—and she was—she didn’t want to accidentally end up in the stratosphere. She glanced around. No one appeared to be watching her. No one had come out onto their balcony. Go Celtic. Or Rangers. Or whoever. She closed her eyes and imagined herself being raised weightless to the top of the balcony. She didn’t just imagine. She remembered. And it felt good.

  “Mhaidhid inh chuimriachan anh-í chonrig riátsha cho inh Thalum.”

  A feeling of utter weightless came over her and she opened her eyes. She didn’t feel like she was rising. That would have involved noticing herself traveling against the force of gravity. Instead, she felt separated from it as the building scrolled past her like the pan of a camera.

  The feeling of the magic—not the effect on her body as on object of it, but the power of wielding it—was instantly intoxicating. It had been too long and the force of it almost distracted her from her goal: the balcony. And the danger: the stratosphere. At the last moment, she extended a dreamlike hand and grabbed the balcony railing. The reconnection to the real world—the world bound by gravity, the world that only worked because of gravity, whose foundations and pillars and beams and bricks and mortar and nails relied on the constant, relentless, inescapable downward pull of gravity to keep the building together—this connection ripped Maggie from her state of weightlessness and she could feel the spell slough off of her like melting snow from a tree branch. She quickly pulled herself toward the building and landed safely on the floor of the balcony as the last of the levitation spell vanished from her.

  She waited a few moments, crouched on hand and knee, to see whether any of the neighbors had torn their eyes from the undoubtedly riveting nil-nil tie to catch a glimpse of the flying American girl. A few more moments without so much as a, ‘Did you see that, love?’ and Maggie felt comfortable that her unorthodox ascent had gone undetected.

  She stood up and appraised the balcony’s sliding glass door. She guessed she wasn’t done with the magic. She grabbed the handle and tugged. Sure enough, it was locked.

  Damn.

  This particular obstacle brought into crystalline focus just how dire the loss of the Dark Book truly was. She had memorized the levitation spell, but there were scores of spells between the intricate leather covers of her Dark Book. She hadn’t memorized all of them. She’d barely translated some of them. Undoubtedly, there was something in there about getting through locked doors. The need to get through a locked door was as old as the first door lock. But without the Book, Maggie had no real idea where to begin. Levitation was unlikely to do it. The other spells she could do without referring to the Book seemed equally unlikely to help: igniting things; divining information. The only one that seemed even potentially helpful was the transmutation spell. If she could turn the glass into paper… But that spell was hard. And complicated. Even with the Book cracked open in front of her, she’d had little success with it.

  No, she couldn’t get in with magic alone. Not the dark magic anyway. She couldn’t fight the laws of nature to get the result she wanted. But maybe, she realized, she could embrace those laws.

  The door was glass. Glass breaks.

  She pulled off her shoe and slammed it against the glass nearest the door handle. It bounced right off again, barely leaving a mark. She looked at the soft sole of her thin shoe, unjustifiably surprised that something so small and flimsy had failed to shatter tempered glass. A scan of the balcony revealed no objects strong enough to break the door. No metal deck chairs or anything. In fact, there was nothing at all, just an empty, slightly dusty balcony. Looking on the bright side, the lack of furnishings suggested she likely had the correct flat. She looked over the edge of the balcony at the brick patio below.

  That’ll do, she thought.

  This would be different. The same spell, but used, not to send something away, but rather to bring something to her. She selected a brick directly below her that seemed to have a wider gap on one side, and repeated the levitation spell.

  The brick shuddered against its neighbors, but Maggie kept her concentration on the object and willed it upward. There was no need for her to say the spell again. The brick was coming; it just needed a moment to scrape past its surrounding bricks. The force necessary to do that was sizeable so when it finally did br
eak free, the brick shot upward at a surprising rate, and Maggie had to react quickly to snatch it out of the air as it flew by.

  The impact stung her hand, but she shook it off as she turned to face the balcony door, reminded yet again that there was no healing spell.

  Simply tossing the brick through the pane was one option, but she wasn’t convinced it might not just bounce off and smash her in the face. Also, she couldn’t imagine anything making more noise than that—certainly enough to pull at least one neighbor away from the tele. She needed to be quieter than that; she didn’t want to hurry once she was inside, worried that the neighbors had called the cops. She’d read stories where the heroes break into some top secret facility, tripping all the alarms and security measures, but not caring because they knew it would take the guards four minutes to arrive but they only needed three to grab the goods and get out. That wasn’t Maggie. She’d left her ninja outfit at home. This wasn’t smash and grab; it was enter and explore. She needed time, which meant she needed quiet. She wasn’t sure how long it might take Aberdeen’s finest to arrive after a neighbor called the police to report the sound of breaking glass on the balcony above, but she didn’t want to find out either.

  Holding the brick like a hammer, she struck the glass right by the door handle. And as she did so, the glass shattering from the force, she cast the levitation spell on the exploding shards. She captured all but one of them, holding them weightless, and silent, in the air as one lone shard crashed and tinkled on the balcony floor. She would have preferred no noise, but it was quiet enough. She decided it was unlikely to evoke the suspicions of the other apartment dwellers.

  She carefully lowered the remainder of the broken glass to the cement, the pieces clinking only slightly as they settled. Then she reached through the broken pane and unlocked the door.

  She was in.

  With a new appreciation for the accuracy of the term ‘breaking and entering.’