A Witch in a Well

by K. J. Emrick

  Purity sniffed and tried to look offended. “So what if we did? People know each other, sometimes. That doesn’t mean we killed her.”

  “You sure about that?” Godfrey pressed. He knew he was onto something. “She couldn’t stand the two of you. The feeling was mutual, considering your reaction when we noticed she was left behind, lady. You were glad to see she was gone!”

  “We were just as surprised as anyone to find out she was dead!” Chase shouted back.

  Those words echoed around them and brought down sheets of dust and tiny pebbles from the ceiling. The water dropping from the ceiling became a sudden rain shower before it settled down again.

  It was a reminder that they weren’t on a sightseeing tour anymore.

  After, there was another sound. A rustling from above them. Something whispery, and alive.

  Maria’s eyes got wider by degrees. “What was that?”

  Addie knew exactly what it was. She had really hoped they would get through here without disturbing what was up there.

  “Please,” Kiera said, threading a little Essence into her voice to bring their attention on her, and her alone. “Let’s all get moving, now. Oh, and please… don’t look up.”

  Immediately, with Kiera’s magic forcing power into those words, Purity and Chase and Godfrey looked down at the Stairs, as they started moving again.

  Maria, on the other hand, looked up. Whatever part of her that had been immune to the concealing spells on the door before proved to be immune to Kiera’s suggestive magic now. She looked up and turned Godfrey’s flashlight in that direction as well. It was one of those heavy-duty ones, the big kind that had to be carried by a handle on top. It was more than powerful enough to pierce the darkness.

  Addie lunged forward down the steps and smacked the flashlight down again.

  She was too late to keep the reporter from seeing what was up there.

  Bats. Hundreds upon hundreds of bats, all climbing over each other, woken up by the explosion that had rocked their world, and then by Chase shouting. They were awake. They were irritated.

  They were scared.

  This species of bat tended to act out when they got scared.

  Now the bats knew they were here.

  Maria should have been affected by Kiera’s magic the same as everyone else had been. Very few people could refuse a witch’s direct suggestion, unless it was something that went against their moral center. You couldn’t just suggest that someone commit murder, for instance, unless they were already the murderous type. You couldn’t make someone fall in love with you, unless the spark was there to begin with.

  But a simple suggestion not to look up? That wasn’t against anyone’s ethical code.

  Even so, Maria had looked up.

  “Oh, curse my Irish eyes,” Addie whispered.

  Now that she’d seen the bats, Maria cried out in alarm. Godfrey looked up. Chase and Purity looked up.

  The bats began to chatter.

  Humanss iss here.

  Humanss ssee uss.

  Addie willed them all to move faster. Faster would be better.

  “Did those bats just… talk?” Purity asked, clinging closely to her husband. They were already several steps down, but now they stopped to stare at the shadows shifting and crawling along the ceiling.

  “It’s an illusion,” Willow said quickly. “A trick created by the way sound echoes in here. If we leave the bats alone, they’ll leave us alone. Trust us. Those bats don’t have any interest in anything other than eating the insects that live in these tunnels.”

  She followed that with a little laugh that sounded just as fake as it was.

  Before they could get everyone going, the bats were talking again.

  Inssectss the human ssayss.

  Yess, they don’t know…

  We eatss what we pleasse. Ssilly humanss.

  Hungry now.

  Humanss tasste good.

  We iss hungry now…

  Maria was using her cellphone to record what they were hearing, even though Willow had tried to blame it on an audio hallucination. Thankfully Addie knew the bats spoke at a frequency that electronic devices wouldn’t pick up, so that was one less worry. Because they had bigger things to worry about.

  The Blood Bats hadn’t swarmed to eat human flesh in years. Not since Addie was a little girl. Ever since that day, they had been satisfied with eating just insects.

  Now, things had changed. The bats were scared. Fear could make even the sanest of creatures do insane things, and no one had ever accused Blood Bats of being sane.

  She wondered… had the person who set off that bomb known about the dangers they would have to travel through to get out of Shadow Lake Caverns by this route? The bats, for instance? Were they being herded like sheep through a slaughter pen?

  No. It couldn’t be. These parts of the caverns weren’t known to many. They couldn’t know about the dangers, or the Well of Essence either. More than likely they had assumed the falling rocks would take care of them all. That had to be it.

  Still…

  “Let’s go,” Kiera insisted. “Carefully, now. One step at a time. The bats won’t bother us if we move quickly.”

  The group began to follow, reluctantly, down the Stairs. Each one was wide enough that it took two steps. Their progress was decidedly slow.

  Each step they took echoed around the chamber.

  The noise stirred the bats more, until they were squeaking and flapping their wings, crawling across the rock of the ceiling, and over each other, constantly moving. They began to swoop in little arcs and then land again.

  Their beady eyes glinted in the dark.

  The humanss move.

  They movess and makess noisse.

  They try to leavess uss here. They wantss uss to die.

  Kill them.

  Yess.

  Killss them…

  Kill them firsst.

  Feasst on their boness.

  Yess.

  Yess…

  A few of them began to fly lower, becoming flashes of dark, leathery wings against the floodlights. Addie picked up Doyle and started down with everyone else. There were twenty-three Stairs, and they were moving as fast as they could, but Addie could tell that they wouldn’t make it to the bottom before the bats came for them.

  Not unless someone did something.

  She dipped into her Essence and pulled some out to weave into her voice. When she did, she realized just how low her internal reservoir of magic was. She was starting to feel the drain on her body, and they still had a good distance to walk before they came to the next closest exit. Then they would have to walk back to the vehicles in the middle of a blizzard.

  She ignored all that, how tired she was, and how far they had to go, all of it. Instead she concentrated on working her magic.

  Lifting her face, she spoke directly to the bats in their own language.

  The words sounded strange spoken with her faint Irish accent.

  “The cavernss are damaged. You need to leave before anything happenss to you.”

  They laughed, all of them chittering again, and it sent a chill through Addie’s blood.

  The woman thinkss we are sstupid.

  Wantss uss to leave. We livess here. Have alwayss lived here.

  Alwayss will live here.

  Hungry now.

  Thinkss we’re sstupid.

  Eatss what we wantss.

  Hungry.

  Now.

  Doyle squirmed in her arms. He could hear the bats, too, and he didn’t like what they were saying. Not one bit.

  Addie put more of her magic into her words this time. “My ssissterss and I have alwayss protected you. We would not abandon you now. Pleasse, believe me. We’re trying to esscape, and you need to leave. It issn’t ssafe here. Leave now, and come find uss at Sstonecresst after. We will keep you ssafe.”

  The whispering became louder, and louder, until it was almost deafening.

  Then it stopped altogeth
er.

  With a flurry of movement, the bats flew down from the ceiling in a spiraling loop that doubled back on itself and flashed across the lights. All of them watched in wary silence as the bats flew through the chamber, and over their heads, and then up and up and out through some secret escape route creatures like that used when they were fleeing from danger.

  Before the last one exited through the darkness above, Addie heard it whispering.

  Hold you to your promisse, Ssissterss Kilorian. If you forgetss uss, we will find you.

  And we will feedss.

  Then they were gone.

  Addie breathed a huge sigh of relief. That would be a problem for them to deal with on another day, but for now it was over.

  When she looked down the Stairs, she saw the others looking up at her, a mixture of confusion and amazement on their faces.

  “Uh,” Addie stuttered, “I just figured if I hissed at them, they’d go away. Worked, didn’t it?”

  If any of their guests wanted to say anything about how her ‘hissing’ sounded an awful lot like strange words in a foreign language, they kept it to themselves. No doubt they were hoping to wake up tomorrow and forget all about talking bats. Or maybe they were just hoping to wake up tomorrow, warm in their hotel rooms, having escaped both a cave in, and a murderer.

  “Good job,” Willow whispered to her as they started down again.

  “Thanks,” Addie said, surprised by the rare compliment from her younger sister. “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of those little fellows though. I have a feeling they’re going to make trouble for us as Stonecrest.”

  “One crisis at a time,” was Willow’s advice. “Kind of wish I’d be there to see Alan’s expression when a bunch of bats come flocking into the attic.”

  Addie grimaced. She’d sent a group of Blood Bats to Stonecrest, forgetting that Alan was still there, waiting for them to return. He’d been so understanding of it all this morning, coming down to breakfast and agreeing to stay behind without even a single complaint.

  A flash of memory came and went, of Alan in the kitchen, sitting at the island counter, in his pajamas…

  No. Oh no, no, no.

  It couldn’t be.

  Chapter 5

  She gasped and nearly dropped Doyle as that thought hit her like a slap to the face. He complained with a yelp and dug his claws into her shirt to keep from falling until Addie held him tight in her arms again.

  “Watch it,” he hissed. Then, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one had heard him, he added a “meow” for good measure.

  Addie didn’t even scold him. Red shirt, was what she was thinking. Now she knew why it had stuck in her mind when she saw their attacker wearing red. It was the same color shirt that Alan had been wearing this morning.

  The shirt that Kiera had just bought him. The one he liked so much.

  So what, she argued with herself. People wear shirts. Two different people could be wearing red shirts. Red was a popular color.

  Besides, for someone to sneak their way into these caverns they almost certainly had to have magical ability themselves, or have help from someone with magic. Alan wasn’t a magic user.

  Except, there were all those hints that maybe he was. A true son of a witch, wasn’t that how she’d put it? Things like red sparks of energy when he shook hands with other magical beings. Like how he’d found his way back to Kiera without any help, almost like he was using extra senses to find his long-lost mother.

  Not to mention how suspicious it was that Alan had reinserted himself into Kiera’s life just as Belladonna Nightshade had begun her attacks on the Kilorian family, trying to get her hands on the Well of Essence.

  Which wasn’t very far from where they were standing.

  That image of them as sheep being herded came to her all over again.

  Alan being a spy for that evil witch had been the first thing Addie suspected when he showed up on their doorstep. It was just too coincidental otherwise. Sadly, it made perfect sense.

  Plus it would explain how someone could have gotten into the tunnels in the first place. Alan had been left alone in Stonecrest, where there was a door that led right to the caverns. They would be using it as an exit, if it wasn’t further away, and if it wasn’t right next to the Well.

  Like she said. It was all just a little too coincidental for her tastes.

  Now someone in a red shirt had blown apart an entire section of Shadow Lake Caverns, making them have to take a detour to get out. A detour that would take them within spitting distance of the Well.

  The image of Alan in his red shirt came to her mind again.

  She looked at the front of the group, where Kiera walked through pools of lights and shadows, leading them down the last of the Stairs. The closed and locked door they were looking for next wasn’t that far away. Should she pull her sister aside and tell her what she had guessed?

  No. Not yet. Because it was only a guess, she had to admit, and she was going to need some pretty solid evidence before she went and accused Kiera’s son of trying to kill them.

  If only they still had Evelyn’s body. If they could just use a little magic with her corpse, they would be able to determine exactly how she had died, and exactly who had killed her. It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law—answers derived from magic rarely did—but for the Kilorian sisters, it would prove Alan’s guilt or innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  The rocks groaned and trembled again, and somewhere far above them was the sound of a deep thud. Something had settled to the bottom of the lakebed over their heads. Something large, and heavy. If that ceiling cracked, and the water started to come in…

  They had to get out of here. All the magic Addie and her sisters could call upon together wouldn’t save them if Shadow Lake Caverns suddenly fell apart around them.

  Chase growled in frustration, breaking into Addie’s darkening thoughts. “Can’t we just go out the way the bats did?” he asked.

  Willow cocked an eyebrow at him. “Can you fly?”

  “Er, no. Of course not.”

  “Are you the size of a mouse?”

  Purity laughed at that. “Hardly.”

  “Then, no,” Willow told them both. “No, we can’t go out the tiny hole the bats flew through. We’ll just have to settle for getting out of here on foot.”

  Chase grumbled under his breath, but he knew Willow was right.

  “Here we are,” Kiera said after several more minutes spent in silence.

  They were off the bottom of the Stairs now, and further down this next tunnel, past a row of connected stalactites and stalagmites, was an opening that had been gated off with a metal door set into a frame of poured cement reinforced with rebar. There were three chains secured with padlocks holding it closed. The locks had no keys. They were opened with magic, the same as the overlapping protective spells could only be undone with magic.

  Addie hadn’t been this way in years.

  “We will take this gate to a side tunnel,” Kiera explained. “It leads to an alternate exit. Eventually. There’s still quite a bit of walking involved. Let’s be going.”

  Maria nodded, holding tight to Godfrey’s arm, eying the door suspiciously.

  The other three guests looked past the door without seeing it.

  “This isn’t funny,” Purity snapped. “We’re trying to save our lives and you’re showing us a blank wall.”

  “I agree,” Chase said, crossing his arms. “First Evie dies, and now we’re all in danger, too. This is no time for games.”

  His wife glared up at him. Purity had a surprisingly menacing stare for someone as petite as she was.

  Chase cleared his throat. “Er. I mean, Evelyn. Evelyn was murdered, obviously.”

  Addie realized what had Purity mad at him now. Chase had slipped and called Evelyn by a nickname: Evie. The previous relationship of those three was starting to look more like a love triangle. Perhaps Chase and Evelyn had dated in the past. That might explain his extrem
e reaction when he found out about her death.

  It certainly explained Purity’s anger at his slip of the tongue, using an old nickname for an old flame.

  None of that mattered now, of course. It was just Addie’s mind being its usual analytical self. Behind them, somewhere, was a murderer. The explosion happening where it did was no accident, and Addie couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being pushed in a direction of their attacker’s choosing. He’d already killed one woman by caving in her skull. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill the rest of them.

  Not that it mattered. They had to go through this door to get to where they needed to go.

  But first, everyone needed to be able to see it.

  Putting just the tips of her fingers against it, Kiera brought down the magical protections, one by one, until it was just another door.

  Albeit a highly protected door in the middle of a secret cave system, underneath a huge lake, barricading the path to one of the largest deposits of pure magic in the world.

  With three graceful flicks of her wrist, Kiera undid each of the padlocks with magic while making it look like she had pressed just the right spot to make them open.

  “Oh,” Godfrey said. “That door. Can’t believe I missed that before.”

  Maria looked at him strangely. “Yeah. Neither can I.”

  “I’ve explored more cave systems than I can remember,” he said to all of them. “I know more about how caves are formed than anyone you’re likely to meet. I hold several world records for spelunking, and yet I’ve never seen anything like this place.”

  Maria nodded in agreement. Her eyes were wide as she stared at the door that she had seen when no one else had. Addie noticed that she’d given up trying to record what was happening. Her cellphone was still out, but she’d forgotten all about it. For all Addie knew it was still recording everything around them from the lopsided angle of her hand, in true Blair Witch style.

  Kiera pushed the door open and they went inside.

  Reaching over without having to look, Kiera pushed the light switch. This section of the tunnels was only just barely lit. There were lamps along the walls, with electrical cable in metal sheaths in between, just like there had been all along. There was just fewer of them here. These sections of Shadow Lake Caverns weren’t open to the public. No need to make them bright and pretty.