Wisteria Witches Mysteries Box Set 3

by Angela Pepper

  Charlize spoke next. “Say, Adebayo, wasn’t your father who recently passed away a lot larger than you? He’d been taking that serum Dr. Bob was producing. Gosh, with the amount he’d been taking, he must have been twice your size.”

  Everyone looked down at the karambit.

  Steve leaned forward in his chair and started to stand. Agents Knox and Rob jumped up, swerved around the table, and got behind Steve so quickly they were a blur, even to my witch eyes. Each of the duo rested a hand on Steve’s shoulders.

  “Not so fast,” Rob said. “Tell us why you killed Greyson. Was it to protect his sister?”

  “I’m not answering any more questions,” Steve said. “This whole line of inquiry is preposterous.”

  “It was revenge,” Knox said, his deep voice booming.

  “Revenge,” Rob said. “That’s right.” To Steve, he said, “You don’t have to answer with your mouth, smart guy. I can feel the truth in the vibration in your body. You must have found out Greyson was part of the hunting party that killed your father. That’s how your father died, right?”

  “My father died in an accident,” Steve said through gritted teeth. “There was no need for revenge because there was no wrongdoing.”

  Charlize asked, “Then why did you give your girlfriend a sleeping pill last Friday night, then sneak over to Greyson’s house and give him a close shave plus a, you know...”

  Everyone looked at Charlize with puzzled frowns.

  Charlize rapped on the table with her knuckles. “Shave and a head cut, two bits.”

  Knox said, “It’s shave and a haircut, two bits.” Then, a few seconds later, “Oh. Head cut.”

  Steve let out a high, long giggle. “Shave and a head cut,” he said. “Good joke, everyone. Very theatrical. Thanks for the cake and the amateur theatre, but I can’t play along. I didn’t do anything to Ishmael Greyson.”

  “No?” It was my turn to spring the trap. “Then why did you sabotage the projection unit before you dropped it off with the tech department?”

  The trapped chimera shifter blinked. “I did no such thing.”

  I pulled one more item from my purse. It was a battery-operated black light. I flicked it on, and aimed it at Steve’s hands. His palms and fingers glowed bright blue under the special light. He gasped in shock and tried to rub the glow away but it wouldn’t budge. That was sort of the point with invisible ink.

  Bentley got to his feet, came over to look at Steve’s hands, and nodded. “Bank Robbery 101,” he said sagely. “There’s always an invisible ink packet inside the things you’re not supposed to touch. The interior of that little box Zara trusted to your care was rigged with simple invisible ink. Nothing high tech or even magical. It’s the kind of mundane tool we use to catch the dumbest bank robbers.”

  Steve gave me a wide-eyed look. “You set me up. You weren’t lost, Zara. You set me up!”

  “Since we’re letting the cat out of the bag, so to speak,” I paused to chuckle at the irony. Steve was half lion, half cat. “The box doesn’t do surveillance,” I finished.

  “But...” Steve’s head jerked from side to side. “But what about the memo? The alert went out over the company-wide bulletin.”

  “Not really,” Charlize said. “It only looked that way.” She put her hands on her hips and huffed. “And what do you mean amateur theatre? We’re professionals, Adebayo. Admit we got you. Heck, being a known killer around here isn’t the grounds for dismissal you might think it is. When the department discovers special skills in agents, sometimes those agents get reassigned.”

  Bentley’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  Charlize blinked at the detective and smiled enigmatically.

  Steve made a sputtering sound.

  Knox tapped Steve’s shoulder with one big hand. “We have to go somewhere else now. Rob and I will escort you. Please remain calm.”

  But Steve didn’t stay calm. He tore free of Knox and Rob. He dove under the table, changing form as he did. With one massive lion’s paw, he yanked Charlize’s chair out from underneath her. Before she could hit him with her stone powers—before she could even cry out, he’d cracked her head against something hard. An instant later, Charlize lay still on the floor, her head tilted limply to the side, her blonde hair fanned out like a limp halo.

  Through his enormous reptilian mouth, Steve growled, “Nobody move or I cut the gorgon’s head off.” Sure enough, he had one of those fierce claws fully extended. The curve would fit a human neck perfectly.

  Bentley, who had his gun drawn and aimed already, fired off a shot. He managed to crack off two shots before the chimera with the body of a lion and the head of a reptile soared over the table and took down the detective. The shots sounded like they embedded in the beast’s body, but didn’t slow him. Bentley’s third shot went wild. There was a crack, and a tinkle, and glass rained down from one of the false windows. An instant later, there was an electrical crackle, and all of the artificial windows went dark.

  In the darkness, there was the awful sound of growling, snarling, flapping, and bones breaking.

  When the backup lights flickered on, I almost wished they hadn’t. There was blood everywhere.

  Charlize was still unconscious, possibly dead. Two enormous birds lay on the ground near her outstretched hand. They barely resembled birds. They were a heap of dark feathers.

  And Bentley. Poor Bentley. The human lay on his back, gasping for breath, his face twisted in agony. Both of his legs and one arm were—I could barely look at him long enough to make the assessment—broken in multiple places. Bones protruded from the fabric of his gray wool suit.

  The only thing moving was Steve, walking toward me on four lion’s paws. Now I saw every single one of the claws. Gleaming and metallic.

  Closer he walked. Tick, tick went the claws on the floor.

  I’d already tried blasting him with my blue plasma, as soon as he’d started changing. It hadn’t worked then, and it still didn’t work now. My magic was locked down. Why had we been so foolish to believe three agents and two humans with no powers could take down a mythical beast? We should have had more backup. So much more backup. Now we were all as good as dead.

  But not yet. I still had my human strength. Aunt Zinnia had prepared me for this. A witch couldn’t count on magic in every situation; she had to use her wits.

  There was a weapon within my reach. I grabbed the curved karambit from the table and pointed the business end at the approaching beast.

  I was fast, but he was faster. Before I could open my mouth to let off a verbal warning, he was on me. He pounced like a kitten, except he was no kitten. I fell backward helplessly. I managed to save my head somewhat, but it still struck the floor. My vision swam with stars. I couldn’t move. I’d been pinned. Tough as I was, my arms were no match for the powerful forepaws of a lion.

  “Stop this,” I said. “You don’t have to kill anyone else.”

  The reptilian face loomed over mine. Inhuman eyes stared down impassively.

  “Their blood is on your hands,” he growled. “Your hands, witch. You were the one who made the mistakes.”

  I spat in his scaly face. “At least I’m not a cold-blooded murderer.”

  He licked the side of my face with his long tongue. “Tasty,” he said. “I do love eating delicious red candy.”

  I tried to kick him in whatever he had for a groin, but my legs wouldn’t move. He had me completely pinned.

  “Codex!” I yelled. “Hey, robot girl! A little help down here in the cafeteria?”

  The eerie mechanical voice replied, “There is a security incident occurring in the cafeteria.”

  “I know! We need some help!”

  She said, “The cafeteria is currently under lockdown.”

  And then I heard the banging on the other side of the door. Help should have been on the way, but it wasn’t. It was just me versus one extremely angry iguammit. And I didn’t even have the karambit in my hand. If only I had...

  B
entley’s gun!

  I rolled my head, scanning the ground near Bentley. The gun was in sight. It was two feet from his bleeding hand, and about five feet away from mine. But it might as well have been a mile, because there was no way I could reach it. Not without any magic.

  What a shame the dampener field doesn’t shut down shifters, I thought bitterly. It wasn’t so much a dampener field as an anti-witch field.

  I closed my eyes and focused on a name. Ishmael Greyson. Ishmael, if you’re going to help avenge your death, if you can do anything at all in the physical plane, come and do it now!

  When I opened my eyes, there was only my injured friends and the reptilian face hovering above mine. No Ishmael.

  Steve was talking. Blathering on about how he’d only gone to the apartment to talk to Ishmael, but something had taken control over him. It must have been the ghost of his father. Blah blah blah. I couldn’t even hear him over the pounding of my pulse in my ears. The guy wanted me to believe he wasn’t really a monster? I’d just seen him maim and possibly kill four of my friends. I was tempted to use my remaining strength to spit on him again, or headbutt him. But I needed to stay calm and keep thinking.

  Where was that darn ghost?

  Something moved over near Bentley’s crumpled, broken body. Ishmael? No. It was Bentley, slowly moving one hand. He wasn’t reaching for the gun, though. He was unbuttoning his collar. He was reaching in under his shirt. And then he was pulling out the talisman he wore on the chain around his neck.

  The bullet.

  Only it wasn’t a bullet.

  I blinked, the world swirled then settled around me, and the true form came into view.

  His talisman was a vial of red liquid.

  All at once, I realized what he was about to do.

  “Bentley,” I said. “Don’t!”

  The iguammit who had me pinned stopped whining. Dark eyes bore into me. With his face looming over mine, Steve breathed hot, cinnamon breath into my nose and mouth. “Nice try, witch. You want me to turn my head to see what the human detective is doing, and then what? You hit me with something?”

  “You got me,” I lied. “Bentley isn’t doing anything you need to be concerned about. Nope. Nothing at all.”

  But Bentley was doing something. And if my suspicions were right, it would be of utmost concern to the killer who had me pinned.

  Chapter 33

  The bullet that was not a bullet went into Bentley’s mouth, where he cracked it open with his teeth.

  It wasn’t a bullet because it was made of glass. It was a vial. A clear, glass vial. And that vial held something red.

  What is red?

  Cherry cheesecake sauce is red.

  So are a variety of candies and juices.

  And blood.

  Don’t forget blood.

  And especially don’t forget the kind of blood that comes from the dark veins of a creature of the grave.

  That’s the kind of blood that transforms a human being into something else.

  Bentley was a lump of broken angles and pain, biting through a glass vial of dark blood.

  Then the iguammit shifted, and its tawny lion’s shoulder blocked my view of the detective.

  I felt wind across my face. Wind inside a sealed cafeteria several stories underground. Magical wind.

  When the beast above me shifted again to lick my face, I saw that the space where Bentley had been was now empty except for a pool of blood. And then, in a blink of the eye, the pool of blood was gone. The magic of his transformation must have done something. I’d seen so many strange things, yet it took me several seconds to process what was happening. The blood must have magically wicked back into the detective’s body.

  The world was turning black. I couldn’t breathe—hadn’t been able to for some time already, thanks to the weight of the beast on top of me, but it was only now taking effect.

  Steve was still whining, still pleading innocent. “If I hadn’t taken out Ishmael, he would have been a liability to the department. A guy like that can’t be counted on. He was insecure, a braggart.”

  “Shut up,” I managed to say. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it already. I can’t... listen... to...”

  He stared down at me with incredulity in his large, black eyes. The blackness around his head was seeping toward the center of my vision. The weight grew even heavier on my chest, and the blackness closed in. I couldn’t see anything.

  But for a brief moment, I could still hear. I heard everything.

  The janitor was whimpering behind something in the kitchen, talking to someone on a phone, or maybe praying to whatever gods he still believed in.

  Charlize was groaning, breathing heavily as she pushed herself up.

  And something went click. It went click, and then it went bang. My face was hit with something hot. Even as I lost consciousness, I knew it was blood. The iguammit’s blood. And I knew Bentley had pulled the trigger.

  As I pulled away from the pain and the confusion, down into the ocean of calm, I knew something else.

  That night in the cafeteria, Bentley—the Bentley I knew and had even come to like—died.

  He died to save me.

  * * *

  I regained consciousness shortly after Charlize and Bentley shoved the corpse of the beast off me.

  He was dead, they reassured me. “You can’t be too careful,” I growled, and kicked him a few times to be sure.

  Next, I turned my attention to the two great birds who lay tangled in each other’s broken wings. My hands should have been tingling with healing powers but I felt nothing. It wasn’t from the physical attack. My powers were still grounded.

  I lifted my face to the ceiling, where I assumed the cameras were located. “Codex, lift the dampener field on the cafeteria,” I said. “I need to—” My voice choked in my throat. Was there any use? Was there enough life still in Rob and Knox for me to try? They couldn’t shift back to human form while injured.

  The voice replied, as I knew it would. “The cafeteria is under lockdown.”

  I felt a cool hand on my shoulder. Charlize’s hand. “I can turn them to stone,” she said. “It’s like putting them in suspended animation.” She looked at them, grimaced, and quickly looked away. “It’ll be hard on their systems, but... it’s protocol whenever there’s a grave injury in the field and I’m on the team. It’s my job.”

  I took a step back. Hoarsely, I said, “Do your job.”

  * * *

  The rest of the night was a blur. Backup eventually burst through the door, nearly shooting me in their confusion.

  Charlize went with the granite birds to the medical bay, leaving me to explain why there was a dead chimera with the body of a lion and the head of an iguana lying on top of a smashed cherry cheesecake.

  I turned to Bentley for corroboration of my story, but there was no Bentley. He was gone. Vanished into thin air. I looked up at the broken artificial windows. One was still shattered, but the other three were semi-functional, showing the most beautiful sunset.

  * * *

  When I got home that night, around midnight, Ishmael Greyson was standing on my porch. He had a packed suitcase at his side, and a rifle slung over his back.

  “What are you up to?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re going on some hunting expedition in the afterlife.”

  He grinned.

  “I guess you can’t tell me anything, can you?”

  He shrugged, picked up the suitcase, and vanished in a flash of light.

  “Send me a postcard,” I said to the empty porch. Then I thought of something my aunt and I had talked about before her vacation. About how people always ask for postcards but nobody really likes getting them. “Or not,” I said to the stillness.

  Chapter 34

  I slept through most of Saturday.

  By Sunday afternoon, life happily returned to what passed for normal in the Riddle household. Except it wasn’t truly a regular Sunday.

  It was the one day
a year that, to me in particular, was not like the others.

  Thirty-three years had passed since my birth.

  Friday had been my fake birthday, but now the real one was upon us. July 24th. Smack-dab in the middle of summer. The perfect time for backyard parties. I had so many fond memories of water balloon wars staged between an army of preteen girls led by me versus a smaller band of teen boys led by my friend Nash. Such innocent days those had been, when none of the girls cared how many calories were in cupcake icing and the worst thing that happened was a lost contact lens.

  In honor of the special day, my mother and Zinnia called me together with a video chat. They were overseas, so it was as close to in-person as they were going to get. I took the call in bed, since I hadn’t gotten up yet. They worked out the time difference and gave me a hard time for sleeping in. Then my mother gave one of her almost-apologies.

  “Such a shame we couldn’t be there,” Zirconia Riddle said, making a tsk-tsk sound.

  “You’ve missed six of my birthdays in a row,” I said.

  The former redhead who now had ebony hair rolled her pretty eyes. “It’s not polite to keep score.”

  Zinnia elbowed my mother and pushed in so her own face filled my screen. “What my sister is trying to say is we are sorry to miss your birthday.” She winced and bit her lip in a girlish gesture I hadn’t seen my aunt do much. “Promise you’ll do something special to celebrate yourself, Zara. Birthdays are important. We ought not let them pass by without notice.”

  “This one won’t pass by without notice.” I smiled at the screen. “Zoey has arranged for a very special cake.”

  Zinnia blinked repeatedly. “But that’s not terribly special. The two of you eat cake nearly every day.”

  My mother widened her eyes in horror, making the hollows below her cheekbones even darker. “Oh, Zara. Tell me it’s not true. Cake every day?”

  I pressed my lips together and said nothing. Protesting that we didn’t have cake every day, since sometimes we ate pie, was not going to help my situation. I kept my mouth shut and received the lecture from my mother, calmly and gratefully. I’d missed her nagging during the years she was allegedly dead.