My back slammed against a rock, and the man slammed against me, and Sierra snow melt slammed against us both. Icy knives shocked the breath from my lungs. I was drowning in slow motion.
The banging of my pulse in my ears grew sluggish, and then was lost beneath the roar of water. Agony speared my chest. I struggled helplessly against the current that thudded me from boulder to branch.
Something hard struck my temple. Black dots floated before my eyes.
And then the water level dropped, and my head burst from the torrent. I sucked in a thin gulp of air, the weight of the man against me compressing my ribs.
Abruptly, the pressure released. The flood waters swept us away from the boulder we’d been pinned against. I found myself deposited atop a wide, wet boulder, and the water ebbed.
I lay, staring at the blue sky and breathing in great gasps. And then I remembered I wasn't alone. I rolled to my side.
Branches lay scattered on the boulder between us. The back of the man's jacket was torn. He'd probably protected me from much of the detritus in the flash flood.
I crawled to him. A breeze soughed in the pines and slashed through my wet clothes. Shivering, I shook his arm. “Sir?”
How long had he been in that deluge? With effort, I rolled him onto his back.
His eyes were open and staring. A neat, round hole was dead center in his forehead. Blood soaked the front of his checked shirt.
I drew in a quick breath and jerked backward, onto my heels.
He'd been shot. More than once. And he was dead, dead, dead.
My insides quivered. Where was the shooter?
Rubbing my arms, I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone on the hillside above us.
I shook my head, tried to get my bearings. The flash flood couldn’t have carried me far. Up the hill, a narrow cut in the earth marked the trail I’d been on.
I studied the man. He didn't look familiar, so he wasn't a local. But who was he? A silver amulet hung around his neck. I leaned closer for a better look, and froze. My pulse thumped, erratic.
Hands shaking, I pulled my phone from my zipped pocket.
Miraculously, it was dry and working. Frustratingly, there were no bars. I’d need to hike out to get a signal, get help, but that would mean abandoning the man. Even though he was beyond help, it felt… wrong.
I trudged up the bank and tied my wet headband around a tree branch as a marker. I walked the trail, my muscles shaking with cold and fatigue. The sun was tauntingly bright, but it didn't warm.
A flash of blue to my right caught my eye. I scrambled down the hill and found my backpack caught on a low branch. I unhooked it and crawled to the edge of the boulder. I peered down.
The spell book was still there, pages flapping a bitter hello beneath the water.
I fumbled a plastic bag from my pack. Covering my hand with the bag, I reached into the water, grasped the book.
An invisible tentacle, burning cold, wrapped around my wrist. It yanked me toward the stream.
I collapsed forward. My chin barked the stone, and I cursed. I hauled the spell book from the stream and hastily wrapped it in the plastic.
So, running water hadn't worked. I should have expected the failure. I should have expected the book—or the thing in the book—would try to kill me. Again. It had probably caused the flood.
I touched my chin. My fingertips came away bloodied.
But what had brought the dead man?
Fingers stiff, I refilled the box with salt and packed the book in it, and spilled salt across the boulder in the process. I mashed the lid down, jammed it into my backpack and trudged up the slope to the trail.
The man had seemed alive in the flood. But he must have been as inanimate as the book, his arms tossed back and forth by the water. Had he fallen in after he’d been shot? My gaze darted about the rocky hillside. Was his killer ahead of me? Long gone?
A shivering thirty minutes later, I reached my SUV. Unlocking the door, I got inside and turned the heater on full blast. I laid my head on the steering wheel.
Was Nick right? Did the book attract murder? Long ago, a man had been killed to create it—the spells written in the victim’s blood. Murder did seem to be a theme.
I checked my phone again, and there was still no signal. Straightening, muscles aching, I drove to the Doyle Sheriff's Department.
The desk sergeant gaped when I staggered into the high atrium that is the department’s lobby. I dripped on his high desk, my auburn hair clinging to my face, and told him I'd come to report a murder.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“A murder.”
“A what?”
Wasn’t I speaking clearly? Possibly not. My teeth wouldn't stop chattering. I clenched my jaw and took a breath. “I said—”
“Karin?”
My sister Lenore's boyfriend, Deputy Connor Hernandez, stopped beside the desk. “What happened to you?” His brown eyes widened with concern.
“Flash flood,” I stammered. A tremor wracked my body. “There was a dead man in it. He'd been shot.”
“I'll take care of this,” he said to the desk sergeant. “Come with me.”
He led me into what looked like a private waiting area, with blue-cushioned chairs and a carpet that didn't scream you're-under-arrest. “I'll be right back.”
He was gone only a few moments and returned with a thick blanket and a cup of what I knew would be bad coffee.
Grateful, I let him arrange the blanket over my shoulders.
I sipped the coffee and made a face, intuition confirmed.
He perched on the arm of a chair across from me. “Okay. Where were you exactly, and what happened?”
I explained as best I could, and he nodded.
“And you say he was shot?” he asked.
“I don't know what else could have put a hole like that in his forehead.”
“All right. I’ll tell the sheriff,” he said apologetically.
I nodded.
He left me there, and things began to happen. Another deputy entered the room with a trail map. He had me show him where I'd been swept away and where I'd left the body.
Sheriff McCourt came, asked questions, left. Someone swapped my coffee for tea. A female deputy brought me a clean sweat suit.
I changed in the bathroom into the gray sweats with DSD printed across the front. And I waited.
Two hours later, I was in Sheriff McCourt's office with a fresh cup of bad coffee before me.
The sheriff eyed me across her metal desk. Her Shirley-Temple curls seemed limp. “Are you pregnant again?”
My hands flew to my stomach. “No! Come on. You never ask a woman if she’s pregnant. Not even if she’s giving birth in front of you.”
“That’s a rule for men. Not for me. And not after you dragged yourself in here looking like you took a beating.” She tilted her head. “But sorry. You look good,” she said insincerely.
I scowled. “No, I don’t.”
“Whatever. Are you sure you didn't recognize the man you found?”
“No. Was he a tourist?”
“A local.”
A chill spread through my core. “Oh no.” A Doyle family had lost a loved one. But how was it possible I hadn’t recognized the man?
She flipped through a manilla file. “His family declared him dead ten years ago.”
“Ten... What? But... he looked like—”
“Oh, he didn't die ten years ago. He disappeared twenty years ago and was eventually declared dead. But he was shot recently—I'd say within the last few days. The coroner will give us a better idea.”
She tapped the folder with her slim fingers. “So... You see what he was wearing around his neck?”
I raised the cup to my lips and set it down. My breathing accelerated. Why was she telling me all this? “A pentacle,” I said slowly. “An inverted pentacle.”
“An occult symbol.”
“Yes.” I hesitated. The sheriff knew humans weren't the only cause of bad things happening in Doyle. And she knew my sisters and I were more than we seemed. But we'd always danced around the whole truth.
Like the truth about the book burning a hole in my backpack. She thought it had been destroyed. We’d let her believe that. “It’s a symbol of black magic,” I said.
Her blue eyes narrowed. “And you're sure you don't know him?”
“I've never seen him before in my life.” My mouth pinched. And why would she associate me with dark magic? That was just offensive.
The sheriff stared at the folder on the desk. “I'm not sure what to do with you. With this.” She motioned toward the folder.
She shifted in her executive chair. “We found where the body had been stashed, before it was swept away by this so-called flash flood. If it hadn’t been for the water, he would have been there for years with no-one the wiser.”
“So called flash flood? It nearly killed me.”
Her gaze bored into mine.
“There are broken branches,” I said. “And trees and brush ripped from their roots—it's obvious there was a flash flood.”
She grunted. “Thank you for your help. You can go now.” She shut the folder and pulled a calendar from her desk.
Feeling wrong footed, I rose and left the station. I sat in my car and turned on the heater. I glanced at the modern station, then looked away.
A dead occultist in Doyle. We were famous for UFOs, not witchcraft—unless you were really in the know. Unless you were part of the Black Lodge that had been hunting the book in my backpack for decades.
Had the book caused the flood? I hunched lower in the seat. And more disturbing, could it possibly be connected to the murdered man?
∞
The next day, muscles screaming, I left the book at home and took Emmie and Mitch to my sister's coffeeshop in Doyle. On the sidewalk outside Ground, I paused outside a newly boarded up window. I readjusted my pink scarf, frowning. Someone had broken one of Jayce’s windows? No. It must have been an accident.
Shaking my head, I pushed open the red-paned door and walked inside Ground. Twinkle lights swagged the rafters. Every table sported a glass jar filled with pinecones, pine boughs, and more lights. The effect was magical.
In his carriage, Mitch stared, mesmerized, at the lights above him.
“My favorite niece and nephew are here.” Jayce squealed and scooped up Emmie. “Can she have a candy cane?”
I imagined the sticky mess. “Why not?” I glanced longingly toward the pastries in the glass case beneath the counter. I was certain I smelled gingerbread.
Emmie tugged a lock of Jayce's mahogany hair free from her loose bun. Jayce reached up to pull it free from my daughter’s fist. Somehow, Emmie managed to snarl the hair in Jayce’s new wedding ring.
Laughing, Jayce disentangled herself. My sister pulled a candy cane from the pocket of her green apron and handed it to Emmie. “Because big girls get candy canes.”
Gingerly, I shrugged out of my red coat. I hung it over the back of a chair and sat. “I'm not sure that's–”
She sat in the empty chair across from me. “OMG. Did you hear about the m-u-r-d-e-r?”
I shifted guiltily and set off another round of aches. When I'd gotten home last night, it had seemed more important to thrash out what had happened with Nick than to call my sisters.
Jayce grabbed a discarded newspaper off a nearby table. She slapped it in front of me with one hand. “Can you imagine the poor person who found him? Being swept away in a flash flood along with a dead body?”
“Um. I found the body,” I admitted, unwinding my scarf.
There was a muffled choking sound from a nearby table. I glanced over my shoulder. A plump, middle-aged woman frowned into her coffee mug and rubbed her throat.
Jayce’s gaped. “You what?”
“It was late when I got home, and I was exhausted, so I didn't call last night. But yeah. That was me. I was trying to use running water to get rid of the you-know-what. It didn't work.”
“No,” she mused, bouncing Emmy on her knee. “That would be too easy. So, the book was there, and he was there... You don't think the man is connected to the book?” she asked, lowering her voice to a whisper.
“He was wearing a pentacle. It was upside-down.”
Her ivy-colored eyes widened briefly. She swallowed, nodded. “Any idea how long he'd been in the water?”
I rocked the carriage back and forth. “He looked pale. And dead. But he didn't look very battered by the flood. He looked... in good condition.”
“For someone who'd been shot in the head.”
“Yeah. Aside from that.”
She bit her bottom lip. “It's just that someone broke into my safe last night, the one here, in Ground.”
My hand tightened on the carriage handle.
“They got in through there.” She nodded toward the boarded-up window.
My hunger fled. A window facing Main Street? That was bold. The break-in must have happened late at night—after Antoine’s Bar had closed at one—for no one to have noticed. “I thought your safe was warded?” I whispered.
“It was, but I moved the wards to the new house.” She grimaced. “It wasn’t easy.”
“Did they get the journals?” I asked. Jayce had found a collection of journals from Barnabas Grue, the man who'd created the book. What we'd learned had been disturbing, but it hadn't helped us much.
“I'd moved those to the house as well.”
My shoulders sagged. “Lucky.” I tugged at my too-tight jacket, realized I was fidgeting, and forced my arms to relax. “You think whoever broke in was part of a Black Lodge?”
“Don't you? Someone tried to put the whammy on Lenore's house last summer. Darla caught someone lurking in the kitchen last October, and now a break-in and a dead occultist? What are the odds?”
“We're jumping to a lot of conclusions,” I said weakly.
“It's what I do. And you know my feelings are never wrong.”
“Oh, so this is a feeling?” I arched a brow.
She didn't smile. “It is. A bad one. I’ve read the section over and over where Barnabas created the book and killed—" She blinked rapidly, swallowed, and looked toward the front windows.
“I'm sorry,” I said. Barnabas had tied his victim’s spirit to the book to feed the demon inside it. We'd released the spirit, but if that had weakened the demon, we hadn’t been able to tell.
I had a copy of that section of the journals. We all did. Worst. Bedtime reading. Ever.
“I keep coming back to the part where he...” her voice lowered, “...just added demon. I know we're dealing with a thought form he created. I know the demon is something imaginary, out of a Lovecraft story. But I experienced that thing.” She shuddered. “It’s real enough.”
“I believe you. But why are you bringing this up now?”
“It's just... we're not really ceremonial magicians, are we? This isn’t exactly our jam.”
“Nothing else has worked.” And though I wasn’t a qualified ceremonial magician either—how did one get qualified?—the formal rituals, the words, made sense to me. They’d been used by others before, and they’d worked. And that made sense to me too.
She kissed the top of Emmie's curly blond head. “I know. You're right. We have to try the ritual you found, and I've been reading up on it to prepare, really I have. But this magic just doesn't seem like me.”
I grimaced. Jayce was an earth witch. Lenore a shamanic witch. None of us had dealt with anything like this before. And I hoped Lenore wasn’t having second thoughts too.
“Then why not make it yours?” I asked. “Magic is an art, and art happens when you make a skill your own. Why not bring your earth magic to the ritual?”
She blinked. “I can do that?”
“I don't see why not.”
“Is the um, stuff, ready yet to take care of the thing?”
“I'm just waiting on the disk from Hermia.”
Her face spasmed. Jayce and Hermia had been friends once, but their relationship had grown strained.
“Hermia was happy to help,” I said. “I think you should reach out to her.”
“I will.” She tickled Emmie's cheek, and my daughter squirmed, laughing. “Life is too short to waste a friendship. Did she tell you when the disk will be finished?”
“Next week.”
“I hope we can hold out that long.” She stood, still holding Emmie, and walked behind the long, wooden counter.
The other baristas swooped, giggling and cooing at my toddler. At last, Emmie was getting the attention she deserved.
I smiled at my son. “Not that you don't deserve attention too.”
He blinked at the ceiling and kicked his feet.
I opened the paper and read.
Police discovered a Doyle man, missing 20 years, dead Wednesday night. They will investigate his death as a homicide.
According to a news release from the Doyle Sheriff's Department, 34-year-old Trevor Lancet had disappeared from Big Bear Avenue “under unknown circumstances” twenty years ago. Police issued a missing persons notice, and ten years later, with no body found and no sign of Lancet, his family declared him dead.
Lancet's body was found Wednesday afternoon, washed up after a flash flood off the Red Paintbrush trailhead by a hiker, who'd also been caught up in the rising waters.
Officers did not specify the manner of his death.
Lancet leaves behind a wife and son—Puck and Daniel Mathias.
Daniel. I knew Daniel. We'd played together as children, before he’d moved to a rundown apartment complex on the other side of town.
Angry heat flushed up my neck, prickled my scalp. Daniel had been a child when his father had left. How could Trevor have abandoned his family like that? Had it been because of a Black Lodge? Had he been seduced away?
I shook my head. I was as bad as Jayce, leaping to conclusions. All we knew for sure was Trevor had worn a symbol of dark magic—not that he was in a lodge. And definitely not that he was in the lodge that was after the book, hidden in a secret safe in my shed.
The bell above Ground's front door jangled.
But what were the odds he wasn't?
“Karin?” Puck Mathias stood, beside Mitch's carriage, her face pale as marble.
Hurriedly, I stood. “Puck. I'm so sorry. I heard about Trevor.”
The older woman nodded, stately as the goddess Hera. Her straight, shoulder-length gray hair swayed at the motion. “Can I sit down?” Her face was free of makeup, but that had always been Puck. She'd had a natural beauty and had aged proudly.
“Yes, of course.” I motioned to the empty chair across from mine.
She scraped it back and sat. “I heard you found my husband's body.”
I glanced at the paper. It hadn't mentioned my name.
She motioned behind me. “Sandra overheard you and your sister talking.”
I twisted in my chair.
At the nearby table, the plump woman flushed and bobbed her head.
The café was suddenly too hot. What else had she heard? If I hadn’t brought the children, Jayce and I could have talked in her tiny kitchen.
“She only wanted to help,” Puck said.
“It's fine,” I said. “I should have called you, but I wasn't sure what was appropriate, or if it would help.”
“I'm just... confused. Why was Trevor in Doyle?”
“You mean, you didn't know he was here?”
“No,” she said. “This is completely out of the blue. I hadn't seen or heard from him since the night he disappeared twenty years ago.” Her jaw hardened. “But he didn’t disappear. He walked out on us.”
Elbows on the table, she knit her fingers together and pressed her lips to them. “None of it makes sense. Did you see him go into the water?”
She seemed calm. As if she were discussing a stranger. But her husband had been gone twenty years, declared dead. After all this time, maybe he had become as good as a stranger? Whatever the case, Puck deserved the truth.
“No,” I said quietly. “The water rose, and I saw someone in it, and then I was swept away too. I think he saved me, in a way. His body protected mine from the debris in the water. But it was sheer luck. He was dead before I found him.”
“Shot.”
I nodded.
“But who would shoot him?” she asked. “Did you hear a shot?”
“No. I didn't hear anything.”
Mitch gave a soft, plaintive cry, and I resumed rocking the carriage.
“Can I ask you an odd question?” I said.
“Odd? Odder than my presumed-dead husband reappearing in a flash flood?”
“I guess not.” I grimaced. “Was Trevor into the occult?”
Her head reared back. “It— Yes. He was. I mean, nothing weird. Nothing weird for California, at least. He was fascinated by books on the occult. You think that's why Trevor left?”
“I have no idea. I just noticed he was wearing a pentacle around his neck. Does that sound familiar?”
“No. No it doesn't.”
“Did he have any friends he talked to about his occult interests?”
“Oh, yes. There was some old internet thing—an email list. Remember those? He spent a lot of time at that computer, chatting online about magic. I deleted all that too after he was gone.” She rubbed her cheek. “But there was one–”
“Puck?” A fit man wove through the tables toward us—Puck's husband, Greg Mathias. Beneath the green work apron from his fancy grocery store, his clothing was simple. I liked him for it. He had money, but he never flaunted it.
“I've been looking all over for you.” Greg’s high brow creased beneath his buzz cut. “You know my van’s still a paperweight. I need a ride.”
“A paperweight?” I asked.
“It’s parked in our driveway until someone gets around to getting it towed,” Puck said lightly.
“With everything that’s happened, I guess I let some things slip.” He studied her. “Are you all right?”
“I'm fine.” She stood. “Thanks for the talk, Karin. I look forward to reading your next book.”
She and Greg ambled from the café.
I glanced at Ground’s slowly closing door. What had Puck been about to tell me? And an occult internet list?
I’d known Trevor as Daniel’s father. But who was Trevor Lancet? I drew my mouth into a line. Perhaps the better question was, what had he become?