I dragged my feet and tried to stall, thinking furiously, but Hank made me walk around the side of the house to the back by the simple method of pointing his gun at my head.
“What is it with you people and heads?” I shouted. I was way past the “nothing left to lose” mark on the terror-meter now.
“That’s my mother. She thinks it’s more dramatic.” He belched, and I heard him stumble, but when I glanced back at him, the shotgun was still pointing straight at me.
“Why did you have to kill Jeremiah? Because he figured out that your mother wanted Shelley?”
Strategy: get the villain talking while I try to figure out a new plan.
Olga Kowalski was standing right in my path when I rounded the corner of the house, and the new plan went straight out of my mind, replaced by sheer, unadulterated terror. The air itself turned icy and heavy, pressing against me like a rotting corpse in a desecrated grave. Evil—so powerful it was visible—clung to the woman, caressing her with shadowy, skeletal fingers that I could actually see, even in the bright light of mid-day.
My knees turned to jelly at the thought of what she’d be like at midnight. And after she sacrificed Shelley? We were all doomed. If there had been anything in my stomach, I’d be throwing up all over her.
Olga could see how scared I was, and a crazed smile spread slowly across her face. “Hank didn’t have to kill Jeremiah. I’d already placed a memory spell on him to make him forget his suspicions. But my son takes after his father. He’s a moron,” she said pleasantly, smiling.
Olga herself didn’t come across as particularly scary. In fact, she looked so completely ordinary that she could have been a mom on her way to a PTA meeting, if it hadn’t been for the midnight-blue velvet robe she was wearing. Or the leather belt cinched around her waist with what looked like human finger bones tied to the ends.
She had graying blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and she was shorter than me. Nothing about her face screamed “insane murderer,” until you took a deeper look into her eyes and pure, malignant evil looked back at you.
“But you weren’t like this before,” I said helplessly. “When you came to the shop after Jeremiah’s death, you were kind. Did you know then that Hank had killed him?”
“Of course I knew,” she said dismissively, and then she turned her back on me, like I didn’t matter at all, because I couldn’t affect her plan in any way.
It was nothing but the truth.
Now I had to depend on Jack and his team to create a diversion, so I could try to find Shelley, who wasn’t anywhere in sight. The yard sloped back gently to a large, level field. A group of women—I counted twelve, so Olga was the thirteenth—was there, chanting. They sat, evenly spaced, in a circle around a wooden post. The robes must be the fancy coven leader outfit, because the women were all wearing jeans and jackets.
Shelley must still be in the house, or perhaps in the small shed that was set off to one side of the field, its door propped open. The thought of that poor child enduring this after losing her mother and grandparents stiffened my spine, and I found my courage again. Now might be a good time to try to make Olga angry. I could distract her with my clever banter, so she wouldn’t notice Jack sneaking up on the place.
“Won’t it affect your evil plans if your witches’ asses are frozen to the ground by midnight?” Okay, more rudeness than clever banter, but I wasn’t exactly working from a script.
She whipped her head around and glared at me, but I was way past being worried about nasty looks. Behind her, the witches kept chanting. A few of them, including Delia, were hunched in on themselves, clearly terrified, but several were smiling as they watched us.
I marked in my mind which ones were smiling. I’d be sure to catch up with them later.
“What’s the matter, Olga? Was your magic so weak that your memory spell didn’t work on Jeremiah? Is that why your useless son had to shoot him?”
“My spell worked just fine,” she said, sneering. “Why do you think Jeremiah gave the sheriff his prized Wyatt Earp gun?”
“Doc Holliday,” I said automatically, as another piece fitted itself into the puzzle.
“Like I give a damn,” she said, bored with the details.
That’s what Jeremiah’s life had been to this woman too. A detail.
I started toward her, but Hank poked me in the back with the barrel of his shotgun.
“Stop now, Callahan,” he growled.
I was beyond being afraid of him too, though, so I almost kept going, but Shelley’s pale, thin face flashed into my mind. I froze. Olga laughed in my face and then reached out to grab me, but she hesitated at the last moment, and then very carefully did not touch me.
When I realized why, I started laughing. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you? Afraid that I’ll tell you exactly how you’ll die, you miserable excuse for a human being. I hope it’s horrible. Agonizing. Fire, and blood, and lots of screaming.”
Fury battled the madness in her eyes, and I thought I’d finally pushed her beyond the point of no return. But, no. Not even close. She visibly pulled her rage under control, took a deep breath, and looked past me to Hank.
“I don’t have time for this. Kill her.”