Samantha’s first instinct was to call 911 and then get out of there before anyone showed up. She took a deep breath and forced herself to try to think rationally despite the heightened emotions that were rushing through her.
Karen’s body was still carrying the infection, and if Samantha just left, the chance was great that others would touch her and the madness would continue to spread. She had to try to purge it before the authorities arrived. She squatted beside the body, grateful that everyone’s attention was still on the others up the path who were screaming about witches.
She placed her hand on Karen’s chest, much as she had with Katie, and began to push, willing the destructive energy out of her. The energy was stubborn, though, and didn’t want to leave. It had worked its way into her organs at a fundamental level. Had Karen been alive there would have been no way Samantha could have driven it out. But she was dead and Samantha didn’t have to worry about the damage she was causing to the body as she forced the energy to the surface. It came out as more black ooze leaking from the eyes, ears, and nose. It was thick and foul smelling, and it made Samantha sick.
Finally she had pushed it all out. She set the black goo on fire, regretting that it would damage Karen’s body. But it was better this way, safer. And a coroner would never have figured out the actual cause of death anyway. Finished, she turned to look at the men and the boy affected by the toxin. She could feel it poisoning her brain, changing the chemicals being released. She didn’t know how to fight it in herself or how to drive it out of them without killing them.
The best she could do was to incapacitate and isolate them. She stepped away from Karen’s body and moved swiftly to the others. She touched the child on the shoulder first and he crumpled to the ground, asleep. Next she surveyed the tangled mess of limbs of the men, who had begun fighting one another. She swiftly reached out and touched each of them and they too fell asleep.
Then she moved to a gawking woman a little farther away. “Listen to me,” Samantha said, deepening her voice and forcing the hypnotic sound to flow over the other woman. “These people have some kind of virus. Do not touch them. Call nine-one-one and tell them that these people need to be restrained and that no one should touch them without protective gear. Do you understand?”
The woman nodded wordlessly and reached for her phone.
As soon as the call connected, Samantha turned and ran as swiftly as she could back to her hotel. She needed to be alone, where she couldn’t infect anyone else, while she figured out how to purge the toxin from her system.
In her room she sat down on the floor, forcing herself to breathe slowly and evenly. She took stock of what was happening inside her body, trying to figure out how the toxin worked so she could learn to purge it safely or at least render it inert. There were spells that could be undone only by the person who cast them, but the great majority of magic could be undone by anyone with the skill, knowledge, and power to do so.
It wasn’t just energy that had been sent into her system. It had been shaped into something. It really is like a virus, she realized. Hallucinations, paranoia, and violent outbursts would be three of the symptoms. After a half hour of trying to analyze it, she gave up. She knew a lot about physics, and some biology, but this was way beyond her.
And she realized in a flash that whoever had engineered the spell had to be not only a witch but also a doctor.
She put in a call to the only doctor she knew and could trust: the coroner.
“Hello?” he answered.
“George, it’s Samantha,” she said tersely.
“Samantha! Excellent timing! I think I just found your other victim.”
“From last night?”
“What? No. They haven’t brought that poor girl in yet. I’m talking about the missing one.”
“They did find the girl from last night, though?” she asked, racing to process what he’d said.
“Yeah. Didn’t Ed fill you in this morning?”
“No,” she said, her hand tightening around the phone.
“Oh, well, you might want to give him a call. But first let me tell you what I found. I went back through my files and found nothing. So I made some calls. Six weeks ago a girl was pulled out of the Charles River. Coroner who looked at her labeled it a suicide. She was listed as a Jane Doe; clothes she was wearing indicated she was possibly homeless. Case closed and that was that. Well, it turns out she did have a mark, on the sole of her foot. I had him fax me a copy of the picture, and I’m sure it was an octogram. I’m having him send me the whole file now.”
“Thanks.” She was right. That left one more victim before the resurrection.
“Now, why are you calling me?”
“I need to pick your brain about toxins and how they work.”
“Sure… hold on a second.”
She could hear him put the phone down and voices in the background. A minute later he picked it back up. “They just brought in the latest girl. I need to go. I’ll call you back in a little while.”
“Oh,” she said, hearing panic edge into her voice.
“Is it an emergency?” he asked, seeming to notice.
“It can wait a little while,” she said. She heard Ed’s voice in the background. “But do me a favor and put Ed on,” she said.
“You got it.”
Seconds later her partner answered the phone. “Why didn’t you call me when you found the latest victim?” she asked.
There was a long pause and then he said, “I don’t know you.”
“What are you talking about, Ed? It’s Samantha.”
“I know who you are, but I’m not sure I can trust you,” he said heatedly.
“Ed, what’s going on?” she asked, bewildered and starting to panic even more.
“You’re a witch!” he exploded.
“Please, Ed, not you too!”
“I think you need to stay the hell away from me and my case.”
“Listen, Ed—listen closely. The paranoia that’s going around? The violence against suspected witches? It’s being triggered by some kind of magic toxin that messes with your brain. You must have been infected yesterday when you were in town. I was infected today by the person who was spreading it. I’m working on a cure, but you have to trust me.”
“Trust you! How can I trust you? All this time we’ve been partners you never told me you were a witch.”
“Because I wasn’t. I’m still not. I’m just a cop doing my job,” she said raggedly.
“So you say. I think you’ve been one of them all along.”
“I’m not. Please, just try to be calm. I’m going to fix this.”
He hung up on her and she stared at the phone in horror. If her own partner turned against her, she was as good as dead. She needed answers and she was running out of time.
Without letting herself stop to think about it, she grabbed a white candle, a yellow candle, and the purple candle, lit them, and then placed them on top of the dresser again. “I am unmoving; I am fixed. I compel you to come to me, Autumn,” she said before waving her hand and sending the purple candle on its march toward the white one.
So all she could do now was wait. Wait for George to call her back. Wait for Autumn to show up. Wait for the toxin to make me as crazy as the others.
She closed her eyes and prayed for strength. All her fear and confusion bubbled to the surface and she struggled to keep herself under control.
A sudden sound caused her to turn and she saw the purple candle speeding faster than it should toward the white candle until a moment later they were standing together.
A shock wave went through the room and Samantha realized that Autumn had arrived. She couldn’t have been very far away to have gotten there so quickly.
There was a tentative knock on her door and with a wave of her hand she swung it open. Autumn stepped inside and Samantha closed the door behind her the same way. It was a waste of energy to use it on such a mundane task, but she had learned from years of watching that the witch who had the energy to waste on such frivolities often impressed upon those witnessing it that she must have greater power than they did.
Autumn looked sufficiently impressed by the display and stopped a couple of feet from Samantha, her head bowed respectfully.
“What do you want?” Samantha asked, hazarding a guess that the other witch must have already been on her way to see her since she had appeared so quickly when summoned.
“I just wanted to tell you that I don’t think it’s right that you haven’t immediately been embraced by the high priestess,” Autumn said, licking her lips in distress.
“You speak boldly against your leaders,” Samantha said, drawing her words out a little more than usual.
“I speak the truth,” Autumn insisted.
Samantha smiled and cocked her head slightly to the side. After a minute Autumn aped the behavior.
“So, what do you think should be done?”
Autumn swallowed. “I think we should break with the coven. I would gladly follow you. I believe there are others who would too.”
“And who would they be?”
Autumn hesitated. “I’d rather not say until I know your thoughts on the matter.”
“I think it’s time you tell me everything you know about what they’re doing.”
“I don’t know!” Autumn burst out. “They won’t let me in.”
“You seemed pretty cozy with Bridget the other day.”
Autumn shook her head glumly and sat down at the desk. “I’m not sure she even knew my name until I told her about you.”
“That’s okay, Autumn,” Samantha said, making her voice soothing. “You’re a smart woman. You’ve been watching, listening. I’m sure you’ve gathered a lot of useful information. You might not even know how valuable some of it is. So, take your time and tell me everything you can think of.”
“I was recruited about six months ago.”
“By Bridget?”
She shook her head. “Jace and I are friends, and she introduced me to Calvin. By the way, whatever you did to him was totally amazing. It really got Bridget’s attention. Maybe you could teach me?”
“Just tell me more,” Samantha said, forcing herself to stay calm.
“It started off with small stuff, pretty boring, really. Then a couple of months ago we did the first one of those blood rituals like you saw the other night. I have no idea how you managed to stomach drinking the blood. Just the smell makes me sick.”
Samantha was starting to regret her decision to try to make Autumn relax. The girl was too chatty for her taste.
“What are those rituals for?” Samantha asked.
Autumn shook her head. “I don’t know. A lot of us don’t. I know for sure that Karen and Jace don’t.”
“What do you think they’re for?”
“I think we’re trying to invoke something,” Autumn said. “Spooky, huh?”
“What about the people who are getting hurt?”
Autumn looked at her for a moment, uncomprehending. “I don’t understand.”
“The women who’ve been killed?” Samantha prompted.
“What women?”
“Do you ever watch the news?”
“I can’t afford television and I need to get a new computer. I keep frying them.”
Samantha took a deep breath. Autumn, and likely several others, were even more in the dark than she’d guessed. She’d been right to want to get Karen away from the group. She considered trying to steer Autumn in that direction as well.
“Have you ever heard anyone mention the name of the high priestess?” Samantha asked.
“High—” Autumn started to say, then shuddered and collapsed on the floor, her eyes rolling back in her head.
Samantha stared for a moment, startled, and then knelt next to her.
“Autumn!”
The girl was comatose. Samantha touched her and received a mild electrical shock. What on earth? she wondered.
She sat there, unsure what to do. The act of saying the words “high priestess” had caused Autumn’s mind to shut down. That implied that someone had rigged it that way. There was no reason to do so in a coven, since it would be normal to make reference to the high priestess, either the position or the person.
It had to be something more. Like maybe Autumn actually knew the name of the high priestess.
But why would that be a secret? Her entire coven had known the name and identity of Abigail Temple. She thought back to the ritual she had attended. No one had mentioned the high priestess’s name. Most of the coven had never even revealed their faces to one another. She hadn’t thought it strange, since performing some rituals fully cloaked was not uncommon.
But what if it was more than that? What if identities were being protected? If the coven was really committed to doing what they were doing, that seemed absurd. What Bridget had said came back to her, though. They needed the extra bodies.
Except for Bridget, the leaders must be unknown to the extra coven members, the ones who could be removed once their purpose was fulfilled. Autumn would seem to fall into that category, but for some reason she had learned a name she was never supposed to know.
And they hadn’t killed her because they needed the bodies. So they put a block in her mind to keep her from revealing the name.
Excitement rushed through Samantha. All she had to do was figure out a way to get around the block. She checked Autumn’s vital signs and they seemed stable. If they didn’t kill her outright but bothered to put in the blocks, it stood to reason that the effects would be temporary.
She got up and paced around the room, running through everything she knew about mental blocks and curses. Figuring out how to remove them would require far more medical and psychological knowledge than she had. She couldn’t even remember parts of her past that she had blocked herself, let alone figure out how to remove blocks from someone else’s brain that a third party had put there.
Until she could figure out a way to get at the knowledge inside Autumn’s brain, she couldn’t encourage the woman to leave the coven.
A few minutes later Autumn stirred. She opened her eyes and pressed her hand to her head. “What happened?” she asked.
Samantha briefly debated telling her the truth, but was concerned that even thinking too hard about it might cause her to pass out again. “You fainted,” she said.
“Wow, that’s never happened before,” she said.
“Better take it easy. You know, maybe you should see a doctor just to get checked out. Does anyone in the coven have any medical experience?” she asked. “Nurse, doctor, anyone?” She held her breath, hoping she might also find out the creator of the toxin.
Autumn shrugged. “We don’t talk about our jobs, so I don’t know.”
Frustrated, Samantha tried another tack. “Who is in charge of healings?”
Autumn shook her head. “We’ve never done any healings. At least not since I’ve been there.”
Samantha wanted to scream. Autumn was completely useless. The only bit of important information she had was locked inside her brain and even she couldn’t get at it.
“You might want to ask around anyway,” Samantha suggested. “It’s better to have one of our kind work on us whenever possible.”
“Thanks, I will,” Autumn said. “What were we talking about?”
“You had asked me about splitting from the coven.”
Autumn colored and then dropped her eyes. “Sorry. I get a bit full of myself sometimes. Forget I said anything.” She stood up slowly. “I’ve really got to get going.”
“It’s okay,” Samantha said, willing to let her go since she wasn’t likely to get anything else useful out of her.
“And please, don’t tell anyone I was talking like that,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“Thank you.”
Autumn left in a rush and Samantha closed the door after her with a frustrated sigh. Moments later she felt the girl exit the building and she allowed herself to relax slightly. It was important for the coven leadership to keep their identities hidden.
That was why she had to make uncovering them a top priority.
Suddenly there was a pounding on her door. It couldn’t be Autumn. Perplexed, she went to the door and opened it. Anthony stormed in, his face like a thundercloud. She closed the door and turned to look at him.
“Anthony, why aren’t you at the motel? What’s wrong?” she asked.
He lifted a gun and aimed it at her heart.
“I just found out who you are. You’re a Castor witch… the one I’ve sworn to kill for what you did to my mother.”