In the morning we were three very sad witches. I was tired and sore from whatever it was I had gotten up to yesterday while under the influence of some unknown drug. Molly and Luce had finally come down from their super-caffeinated high and were essentially zombies sitting at the breakfast counter, their faces pale and eyes red.
“Good morning,” I mumbled when I went into the kitchen.
“Muh,” Molly said.
“I feel like I’m gonna die,” Luce groaned, her head in her hands.
I knew when coming down from a major caffeine boost that cold turkey wasn’t the way to go. I made them coffees, which they drank with a grimace. Apparently my instant coffee wasn’t as good as their super-duper Italian machine. It worked a little, however, and brought them halfway back to life.
I was eating breakfast when my mother and aunts came storming into the room. As usual, Aunt Cass calmly followed them and sat down on the sofa.
“I told you to stay home! I told you to watch television and that was it!”
“We were going for a midnight stroll,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me. You were not.”
“Okay, fine. We were helping find someone who was missing. If we hadn’t found them they might be dead,” I pleaded.
Mom narrowed her eyes at me.
“Was that boy who died in the warehouse missing his blood?”
“Um,” I said.
“I knew it!”
She turned to her sisters. “We need some phosphorus, boron, willow—”
“I’ve already made the balm,” Aunt Cass said calmly and removed a small jar from her cardigan pocket.
“What type is it?”
“I’m not sure. But I am sure it will be over soon.”
“How did you know?”
“The magic told me.”
I saw my aunts roll their eyes. This was a standard Aunt Cass answer when she didn’t want to tell the truth. Some mystic force told her. Uh-huh.
Mom took the jar from Aunt Cass and opened it. The balm inside was a pale yellow, the color of honeycomb. She dipped her finger in and then rubbed a spot of it on the back of my hand. The magic tingled through me as the balm dissolved into my skin. Freya and Ro did the same with their daughters, who largely stood there and took it, given that they were still coffee zombies. Then the mothers dabbed some of the balm on themselves.
“Everyone needs to stay together. We’ll be catering the Grand Finale today and you two are coming to help. Harlow, you’re with us as well.”
“But our store—” Luce said.
Freya pointed at her daughter.
“No arguing. A soul sucker is very dangerous. The three of you gallivanting around in the gardens after dark . . . you could have been killed. You’re coming with us to the carving Grand Finale.”
“Harlow will come with me,” Aunt Cass said. “I’ll make sure she comes to the festival.”
Molly and Luce groaned when they realized they were caught. Now they’d have to man a bakery table rather than recuperate in their shop and dose themselves with coffee again.
I faced another ten minutes or so of comments and complaints that I largely let wash over me. They ranged from “How can I be so reckless?” to “How could I be so foolish?” Eventually Mom, Freya and Ro gave up, gave my cousins very strict instructions to quickly get changed to come to the festival to help set up, and then they marched out the door.
When they were gone, Molly and Luce went off, complaining at the unfairness of it all, but at the same time they decided to eat food, get changed and go. It was easier to give in than to fight. Sun Tzu couldn’t help now: he’d never faced three very angry witch mothers.
Soon only Aunt Cass and I were left in the house.
“Are you still seeing auras?”
“I am, but I think it’s fading. Yesterday I took a photo of Zero Bend’s girlfriend. But it looked very weak.”
“Come with me right now to the main house and bring your camera.”
I grabbed my camera and followed Aunt Cass down to the main part of the house. Adams came jogging along behind us, interested in what we were doing.
We went into the house and down the stairs to the basement, where Grandma stood frozen in time.
“Take a photo,” Aunt Cass commanded.
I switched my camera on and waited a frustrating ten seconds before it came to life and I could take a photo of Grandma. Then we stood there waiting another twenty seconds until the image appeared.
Grandma had a beautiful sky-blue aura surrounding her, but it was very pale, and I knew it wasn’t her aura that was weak, but the power itself. It was fading rapidly. Stretching out from her hands were thin red streaks of light that rose up and went through the ceiling above her.
“Quick, come outside. We need to find out where those red lines go!”
We raced up the stairs and outside, where I took a photo of the general landscape and waited again. The image appeared, showing the red lines coming through the front wall and up into the air like ribbons, stretching to some distant source.
“I knew it,” Aunt Cass whispered.
As we looked at the photo, the lines glimmered away and vanished.
I took another photo. This time it was only the scenery: no red lines, just blue sky and green fields, the distant blue ocean and Truer Island.
“What was that?”
Aunt Cass sighed.
“April bit off more than she could chew—very much more. If we could find where the end of those ribbons went, we might be able to wake her.”
“It looks like it’s heading toward Truer Island to me.”
“Could be the caves by the beach, underwater, across on Truer Island, or any of the houses between here and there.”
“How did you know there would be an aura?”
“I didn’t. I only thought of it today. Must be getting old.”
Okay, so there was a murderous soul sucker roaming Harlot Bay, and that didn’t scare me as much as Aunt Cass admitting she was getting old. What was happening?
“Keep this to yourself. We need to go to the Butter Festival now.”
As we started to walk back, Aunt Cass asked me what I’d seen last night.
“It was ball of light.”
“A small one, like a marble?”
“Uh, yeah. How did you know that?”
“There are a few entities in the same family who follow that pattern. This one is called a morchint. They make a deal with a human—usually promising wealth and power—and latch on as a parasite. The human host has to kill to feed the parasite. Only a few at first, but then it becomes hungrier. This can go on for decades. It feeds until it releases a tiny ball of energy that will often explode.”
“What was it?”
“An egg. Or a test egg, really. The first one isn’t anything. It’ll explode, maybe cause some harm, but nothing else. It’s the big one you need to watch out for. Within a day of the test egg it’ll feed again, consume the host and transform into a big egg. When it explodes, it gives birth to its next form.”
“Can an entity actually give you wealth and power?”
Aunt Cass snorted.
“Nope. It’s a trick—the dumb host makes the deal, believes it will work, and then it does work.”
“Like a placebo?”
I couldn’t resist.
She pointed her finger at me.
“That cracking sound is the ice you’re standing on. It’s very thin this time of year.”
“I support the small businesswoman, you know that.”
“Hmmf.”
I told her about finding the ball of light in the park.
“You didn’t try to contain it, did you?” She waggled her finger at me.
“No . . . it exploded.”
I don’t know why I lied about it. Maybe because I wasn’t in the mood for another lecture.
Aunt Cass visibly relaxed.
“Good. Don’t try to do that. We need to discover who it has latched itself to. Morchints are devious. They love causing conflict. Betrayal and deceit are their tools. They can’t help themselves but to stir things up. You can always tell a morchint because all around it is strife while it sits innocently in the midst.”
That sounds like someone I know. I wisely kept that thought to myself.
“Will a finding spell work?”
Aunt Cass shook her head.
“They’re hidden in their host. This one could be twenty, thirty years old and will be experienced in staying hidden. Look for anyone rich and powerful and then say Calypso to them.”
“Um . . . Calypso?”
“Yes, you just need to say Calypso to it. If it is the morchint, it cannot help but repeat you.”
“Really? That’s weird.”
Aunt Cass threw up her hands.
“I don’t make the rules. It’s a lot better than some of the other variations. One of them you can only detect by touching it with something more than two hundred years old. Do you know how hard it is to get something that is actually two hundred years old? You’re running around trying to snap parts off old buildings or breaking into museums.”
“A lot of the competitors are famous and rich. The sleazy agent, Fusion Swan, is rich. So is Preston Jacobs. What am I supposed to do if I find the morchint?”
“You tell your mother, aunts and me immediately. We can handle it together. Okay?”
“Sure, not a problem.”
“Well, we better get moving. If you saw the light ball yesterday, then today it’s going to hatch. My bet is it’s going to be at the Butter Festival Grand Finale.”
Aunt Cass sat on the sofa while I got changed for the day. Molly and Luce were already gone, dragging their sorry selves to the festival to help their mothers set up. I took a quick second look through some of the photos on my camera. All the auras were gone. They’d only been in the images as long as I had the power.
I drove Aunt Cass to the Butter Festival. We parked a number of streets away—they were packed with cars, and we had to walk into the festival.
There were people everywhere. It was more like a rock concert than what you’d think a butter-carving festival would attract. The Ice Queens were out in force, wearing their ridiculously skimpy outfits, cheering and screaming. The town hall was slowly filling up as people made their way inside through the narrow doors.
When we got inside, Aunt Cass told me she was going take a look around and to keep my eyes open.
In the center of the hall there are two glass cases. Each was piled high with butter. One would contain Zero Bend, the obvious favorite, and the other would contain The Slice, a short, cheerful-looking brunette in her midthirties who looked like she’d fit right in working at the bakery. Multiple food stands were set up around the perimeter of the hall. Hot dogs, ice cream, Dutch pancakes, Chinese food, Indian food, sausages and bread, and then the Big Pie Bakery. My mother and aunts were over there working furiously. Molly and Luce stood at the end collecting money and passing baked goods over the counter. Both of them were still pale.
Eventually the crowd filled the hall and the attention turned to the front. The mayor and Preston Jacobs appeared. Applause rippled across the room.
“Butter Festival!” the mayor yelled into a microphone. The crowd went nuts, cheering and jumping as though he’d just said everyone was about to get a million bucks.
“Welcome to the Grand Finale of the International Butter Carving Championships. Today, Zero Bend will take on The Slice for the chance to win this spectacular trophy and five hundred thousand dollars in prize money, supplied by Preston Jacobs and Jacobs’s Sandcastles.”
The crowd cheered again as Preston Jacobs took the microphone. He smiled at everyone, dazzling them with his brilliant white teeth. Could this be the man infected with the morchint? How could good health be a sign of something evil?
“Thank you, Mayor. It is my very great honor to welcome these top two athletes to the Harlot Bay Butter Festival Grand Finale. I give you Zero Bend and The Slice.”
The crowd went crazy as spotlights appeared. Zero Bend and The Slice made their way through the crowd and then stepped into their respective refrigerated glass boxes. Attendants closed each box and then removed the ropes that kept the crowd at bay. People started cheering and chanting the competitors’ names. I looked up in the crowd and realized The Slice had a bunch of groupies as well. These ones were all men, and they were screaming just as loud as the Ice Queens. A loud horn went off at the front of the hall. The competition had begun. I turned back to the front of the hall, but the mayor and Preston Jacobs were gone.
Damn, if Preston Jacobs was the morchint, I’d have to get close to him.
I started moving around the hall, keeping my eyes open for Preston Jacobs or Fusion Swan. I need to get close enough to them to say the word Calypso and see if they would repeat it back to me.
I shook my head. Magic is so crazy sometimes.
Molly and Luce spotted me and both gave sad little waves in between handing over donuts and pastries to the waiting crowd. I kept moving around as time ticked by. About half an hour into the carve, I still hadn’t spotted either Preston or Fusion. Aunt Cass was nowhere to be seen either.
Just as I was wondering whether I should go up into the stands to get a better view, someone tapped me on the shoulder.
I turned around and found myself face-to-face with Fusion Swan.
“So, it’s the writer who is going to be sued into poverty. You’re claiming that I am deliberately profiting off the deaths of my clients? Do you understand how much trouble you’re in?”
“Um . . . I didn’t actually claim that you were profiting. I merely noted a pattern.”
“We’ll see what my lawyer has to say about it. I take my reputation very seriously, Ms. Torrent. I’m not going to allow myself to be smeared by some two-bit, seaside town, country reporter. I know you don’t own much, but I’m going to take it all.”
I glanced at his hand and noticed the nail was a vivid green today. Fusion Swan turned his back on me to walk away.
“Calypso!”
He turned around to face me and frowned.
“Calypso?”
“Calypso!” I said again.
“What is wrong with you?” he said and turned away.
“Calypso!” I called out to him again as he walked away.
Okay, so he’s not the morchint and I’m going to be sued down to the ground. This is just the most awesome week of my life.
A sudden memory loomed out of nowhere. When I’d first met Fusion Swan at the police station, I’d shaken his hand and had no crazy overheating immune response. That meant . . .
Okay, I needed to find Preston Jacobs and hope it was him. If it was, then I would call Aunt Cass and the mothers and hopefully they’d be able to contain the morchint before anything bad happened.
I was looking around when I felt a push of magic from beneath my feet. It was like the tide suddenly rising up past my ankles and knees, splashing at my thighs. It was cold, freezing, almost, and gone in an instant.
I looked over at my aunts and cousins. They had all stopped in place, heedless to the people still trying to pay them to buy their baked goods. They’d felt it too. There was something beneath the town hall.
I started pushing my way through the packed crowd, heading for the stairs at the back. Like many of the buildings in Harlot Bay, the town hall had been built on top of an earlier building, so there were at least one or two levels underground. In most cases, they’d modernized them and made them into air-conditioning rooms or maintenance, or sometimes even underground parking.
I finally reached the back stairs and turned to see where my family was. They were stuck in the crowd over near their table, forcing their way through to me. There came another flood of cold magic, and I knew I couldn’t wait. I rushed down the stairs and into the basement. The push of cold magic came again. It was still beneath me.
At the bottom of the stairs was an old metal door that was seriously rusted. It was bolted shut and had a warning sign on it. I quickly whispered an opening spell and the lock opened under my hand.
I opened the door and found a set of very rickety old steps facing me. They were covered in dirt, but there were clear footsteps. Someone had come down here recently.
I rushed down as quickly as I could, hoping I wouldn’t fall to my death, and reached the second subfloor. There was old lighting down here—perhaps installed in the 1960s—and it lit the room in stark whites. I followed the footsteps on the ground, keeping my ears open and looking for anything around me that was out of place. I turned a corner and there she was—Kachina, Zero Bend’s girlfriend, tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth. Beside her was a small wooden table, and sitting on top of it was an ice-carving hammer. From where I stood I could see it was one of Zero Bend’s. It had his name carved in the handle.
“Quite a story?” Preston Jacobs said as he stepped out of the shadows.
Last time I’d been close to him, he’d looked young in that I’ve-had-a-lot-of-plastic-surgery kinda way. Skin tight like a drum. Fake tan. Glowing white teeth. He wasn’t looking so good now. His lips were pale, cracked and dried, and there was a network of deep lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes.
“Excuse me, I’m feeling a little dehydrated,” he said. He placed his hand on the back of Kachina’s neck and breathed in. His pale lips flushed red. When he removed his hand, there was a smear of blood on her neck.
Supernatural evil monster stuff. Great. Why can’t they ever be nice? Help old ladies and mow their lawns? It’s always drinking blood and doing evil.
“You framed Zero Bend for murder.”
Jacobs shrugged, an oddly graceful movement.
“Well, I sort of did. It’s part of the deal.”
“Calypso,”
“Calypso,” he replied.
“Calypso, Calypso, Calypso.”
“Calypso, Calypso, Calypso—stop that!”
“You didn’t have to make that deal, Preston. You could have become rich on your own. The morchint is lying to you.”
“It has a name? Wow. I just call it my helpful little friend.”
We had only been talking a short time, but already the youth and vitality he’d sucked out of Kachina was fading. His lips were turning pale again and his skin was drying out before my very eyes. He put his hand on the back of Kachina’s neck and took in another deep breath, his skin flushing pink as he sucked the blood out of her. She was already pale and white and barely breathing.
I glanced behind me, hoping I would see six very angry witches coming down to help me, but I was alone. They must still be stuck up in the crowd.
Delay, delay, delay . . .
“Morchint, can you hear me?”
Preston blinked slowly and shook his head.
“What do you want?” he slurred in a much deeper voice.
Oh crap. I hadn’t planned for this. I was doing anything I could to delay whatever it was he was going to do until my family got there.
“Why do you try to frame people for murder?” I asked, desperately searching for anything that could possibly keep it talking.
But this wasn’t a movie, and it was no bad guy who was going to start giving me a monologue about all the evil he had done. Preston Jacobs sniffed in my direction.
“You’re one of those filth witches. I remember your stink.”
With that he lunged forward, moving with unnatural speed, and grabbed my wrist. The pain was sharp and immediate, like a cold burn. Just as quickly he let go, pulling back and doubling over. He started coughing, making a deep choking noise like he was about to vomit.
My wrist was bloody where he’d grabbed me. Shimmering on the wet blood was a golden honeycomb color—the magical balm.
He stood up and spat black gunk on the floor. Then, before my very eyes, Preston Jacobs aged and dried out. Deep crevices appeared in the skin, and suddenly he looked like he was eighty. A moment later, he was one hundred, a desiccated wraith, tight skin over bones.
He started coughing and then hunched over as though he had some great pain in his stomach. He fell to the floor, huddled into a ball and then . . .
Then he split open.
His clothes ripped first, and then he broke open. There was no blood and guts, just a glimmering white marble of energy that floated up. It sucked in the last remnants of the physical form of Preston Jacobs, leaving nothing behind.
The egg.
I heard clattering behind me, the slam of the door, my mother yelling, and my aunts shouting spells. I felt the push of magic, Aunt Cass’s voice sounding deeper than I’d ever heard it. The magic welled up around me, spells racing over, but it was all too late. This egg would explode and kill everyone above us. I knew instantly it would seed hundreds of new morchint eggs for miles around. It would only take in one great breath before it detonated.
The world narrowed, and my mother’s frantic shouting faded away as I leapt forward with my hands out and grabbed the egg. It breathed in, taking in a gulp of the magic around us, and I felt its power. The tiny egg that I’d stopped in the park yesterday had been nothing compared to this. This was an entity that had been growing for decades, killing and sucking in life force. Now it was feeding on the magic in Harlot Bay itself.
But it was no match for a Slip witch.
I called on the magic within me and the magic around me, and it answered with a roar of power.
The egg tried to explode, but it couldn’t. It was an intense heat, a fireball, a storm of pain, but it was at a distance. It couldn’t burn me, couldn’t hurt me. I had to keep concentrating on it. All I had to do was hold it in place and gently allow the energy to radiate away. I directed a tiny bit of it back toward Kachina, ensuring she would live. The rest I let radiate away into the air.
The power spiked higher, but I was stronger than it. I grinned to myself as the ball of pure burning fire between my hands started to falter and dwindle.
Just a moment more, just a moment more.
The egg began to collapse in on itself as I slowly released its energy so it couldn’t explode. I pushed in on it, crushing it between my hands and grinning with joy at the sheer power flowing through me. Almost there.
The egg was down to a marble, the living entity inside it furiously scrabbling, trying to get away, but there was no escape.
It was snuffed out of existence and I turned around to face my family.
“I did it!”
Oh crap.
I was in the basement standing next to Grandma and . . . I was wearing an old wedding dress over the top of my clothes. I also had a party hat on top of my head.
“Did what, exactly?”
Aunt Cass emerged from the dark.
“I . . . held the energy ball. Stopped it from exploding. I saved all those people.”
“We had it contained. You’ve been frozen like April for six weeks after you siphoned all that energy off.”
Six weeks?
“Is that what happened to her? She was fighting a morchint?”
Cass whacked me in the shin with a cane.
“No! Next time listen to what I tell you. Now go upstairs and tell everyone you’re back.”
“Ow!”
I rubbed my shin. I’d really been down there six weeks? I looked over at the wall and saw that it was covered in photos. Me wearing a wedding dress, me wearing a hula hoop, me wearing a variety of fancy masks and different types of makeup. Obviously my cousins had had a lot of fun while I’d been frozen.
I went up the stairs with Aunt Cass climbing up behind me. When I emerged in the kitchen, my mom and two aunts were there focused on their cooking. They must have thought I was Aunt Cass, because they didn’t even look around.
“Hi, everyone,” I said.
Mom was cutting tomatoes. She dropped the knife, which bounced off the chopping board and fell onto the floor, narrowly missing Adams, who was waiting for any fortunate scraps to fall his way.
“Harlow!” she cried and pulled me into a hug. She crushed me against her, heedless of the tomato juice on her hands, staining what was probably her wedding dress.
“Hi, Mom,” I managed to whisper from within her tight grasp.
From the dining room I heard my cousins call out my name and then their footsteps running toward the kitchen.