I never saw him coming.
A relaxing walk on Hasell Street suddenly turned into a contact sport when the skinny guy in a hoodie slammed into me. I stumbled toward the street and caught myself on a parked car. He staggered into the low bushes next to a parking lot but never slowed down, turning the corner onto crowded Meeting Street before I could catch my breath.
“Are you all right?” The woman had a Midwestern accent, very noticeable here in Charleston, South Carolina. She might have been my mom’s age, and she and her husband planted themselves on the sidewalk, so everyone had to go around us, giving me a chance to catch my breath.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks,” I said, pushing a strand of strawberry-blonde hair out of my eyes, more shaken than hurt. I’d gripped my small purse on reflex but slung cross-body, nobody was going to get it without a fight. Funny, but the man who shoved me hadn’t even tried to take it.
“Do you want us to call the police?” the man asked.
I shook my head. “No. Thank you. I didn’t see his face, and he didn’t take anything.”
“You could have been hurt,” the woman huffed.
She was right, but aside from perhaps a bruise where my hip hit the passenger door handle of the car I smacked into, neither the car nor I was actually damaged. “Lucky for me, it’s a soft car,” I joked. I thanked the couple again for their help and watched as they walked away toward the touristy parts of town. I stayed where I was, trying to get my bearings.
I felt the pull of magic, something old and strong that hadn’t been present moments before. It took a moment before I collected my jangled nerves enough to focus. A few steps brought me to where the man had stumbled into the shrubbery when he bounced off me. The glint of gold caught my eye, lying beneath a short, slightly mangled boxwood.
When I bent down, I saw a small statue of the Virgin Mary, no larger than my hand. The gold leaf paint looked real, as did the small gems that glinted on her Queen-of-Heaven crown. I grabbed my scarf and used it to pick up the statue without making skin contact, then I slipped it into my purse.
What was a guy who looked rough around the edges doing with an old statue that gave off strong magic vibes? “Stealing it” was the obvious answer, but why? Maybe I’d end up calling the police after all, but before then, I needed to check into the magic piece of the puzzle and figure out what was going on.
I’m Cassidy Kincaide, owner of Trifles and Folly, an antiques and curio store in historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina. Most people think of the store as a great place to find estate jewelry or the perfect vintage accent piece, but the store—and I—have some pretty big secrets. I’m a psychometric, which means I can read the history and magic of objects by touching them—hence the careful handling of the statue. And the store, which has been around since the city was founded 350 years ago, is part of a secret coalition of mortals and immortals who keep Charleston—and the world—safe from supernatural threats. So when I decided to have a closer look at the stolen statue, I wasn’t just whistling Dixie.
Even wrapped in my scarf and tucked into my purse, I could feel the buzz of the statue’s magic as I power-walked back to the store on King Street. Maggie, our part-time helper, was busy with a customer. Today, Maggie had a sari-silk broomstick skirt-of-many-colors with a matching strip of bright pink tied like a headband around her short, gray hair. Teag Logan, my best friend, assistant store manager, and sometimes bodyguard looked up when I walked in. With his chin-length, asymmetrically cut dark hair and whipcord build, Teag looks more like a skater boy than the Ph.D. drop-out he really is. Let’s just say he found a higher calling in kicking supernatural ass than finishing his dissertation.
“Everything okay? It took you longer to get back than you expected.” Teag automatically looked me over from head to toe, checking for injuries. I shook my head and walked to the break room. “You’re limping,” he pointed out.
“Someone ran into me pretty hard on the sidewalk,” I said. “My hip slammed into a parked car. Could have been worse.” I glanced over at the customer who was busy looking at beautiful old signet rings with Maggie, and Teag nodded, realizing there was more to the story.
“I’ll be fine,” I promised. “Let me put my purse in the office and grab some coffee, and I can come help up front.” Mostly, I wanted to get away from the buzz of energy the statue put off, although I could use some java too.
The store got busy then, and I didn’t have a chance to talk to Teag for a couple of hours as we matched shoppers to their ideal antiques. As I wrapped up a large, heavy silver tea set, I wondered how the purchaser—who told me excitedly about the bus tour she was on—intended to get it home. I mentioned shipping, but she said there was plenty of room under the bus. Hopefully, none of her fellow travelers decided to buy equally large souvenirs, or someone would be walking back to Toronto.
By mid-afternoon, the influx had slowed to a trickle. Maggie waved us off, promising to yell if she got swamped. Maggie knows what we really do at the store, and she’s a godsend. Teag and I headed to the break room, and I sat down with a sigh.
“Spill,” Teag ordered, giving me a worried glare.
“I was coming back from lunch, and a guy in a hoodie ran past and slammed me out of his way. When I got my bearings, I felt magic tug me from the parking lot—where he’d stumbled. And I found this.” I pulled the scarf out of my purse and set it onto the table, where the small statue rolled free.
Teag leaned over for a closer look but kept his hands behind his back. We’ve learned the hard way not to touch without sizing up the danger first. “Looks old and authentic. Meaning I don’t think it’s a souvenir piece. Wanna bet it’s stolen?”
“That’s what I figured, but it seems like a weird thing for someone to steal,” I said, shifting on my chair to ease the tender spot on my hip. “Easy to identify, hard to fence.”
As an antique store owner, I have to be very conscious of where the items we buy for resale come from and make sure the owner actually owns them. That’s aside from determining whether or not the pieces are cursed or haunted—which is true more often than people might think.
“Here.” Teag went to the fridge and pulled out an ice pack, which he handed to me. Given the nature of what we really do—fighting off things that go bump in the night—the break room has an unusually robust first-aid kit. I pressed the cold compress against my sore hip and sighed in relief.
“How about you sit with that ice while I see what I can pull up online?” Teag grabbed his laptop and went to work. He’s got Weaver magic, which means he can weave spells into cloth and hidden data into information, making him a hell of a hacker. Moments later, he looked up in triumph.
“Looks like there’s been a rash of break-ins at churches all over the Lowcountry,” Teag said. “All of them Catholic, which isn’t as common down here as it is up North, so that’s interesting right there.”
Plenty of churches had valuable items if a thief just wanted a quick buck. Silver crosses, antiques, artwork, even loose change in the donation box could be fair game for a grab-and-run. But the thief—or thieves—had concentrated on Catholic churches, which had to mean something.
“Can you tell what was stolen?” I asked, trying to figure out the connection.
“Give me a sec,” Teag’s fingers flew across the keyboard. After a short while, he sat back, stared at the screen, and chewed his lower lip, a tell that he was trying to make sense of what he found.
“Anything?”
“Yeah. In every case, all that was taken were statues—mostly of the Virgin Mary, but also of some saints. Not just the regular image of Mary, but some of the special ones like the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Lourdes, Virgin of Montserrat. Most were old, some were said to contain relics, and—get this—several had reputations for miraculous healing or warding off evil.”
Well, that explained the “magic” I’d sensed. Power—regardless of its source—calls to power. Miracle or magic, puh-tay-toe, puh-tah-toe.
“Which brings us to the million-dollar question—why?” I mused, taking a sip of my coffee.
“Could be a collector with specialized tastes,” Teag speculated, still glaring at his laptop like it could be intimidated into giving up the missing information.
I shook my head. “I didn’t get a look at the guy’s face, but when he bumped me, I got a glimpse of his emotions. He was terrified—and I don’t think it was of the cops.”
“So maybe it’s like the kid in that movie who could see dead people? You know, where he made a blanket fort and stole all the crucifixes to keep the ghosts away?”
“Yeah,” I said as I weighed the statement and felt my intuition respond. “I don’t know what he was scared of, but that would make sense.”
“It must be pretty big if he’s the one knocking over all those churches,” Teag replied. “Because there’ve been at least twenty break-ins according to the report I hacked into.”
I pulled out my phone and hit a number on speed dial.
“This is Father Anne,” came the greeting. “Hi, Cassidy!” Father Anne Burgett is an unorthodox Episcopalian priest who moonlights as a demon hunter. She’s one of our allies when shit gets real, and she’s also wicked with Cards Against Humanity.
“Hey there,” I said, shifting again to keep the ice on my sore spot. “What do you know about the thefts of statues of the Virgin Mary and random saints?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Not much, other than the scuttlebutt I’ve picked up through the inter-faith meetings. Newsflash—clergy gossip. And when someone starts breaking into churches and stealing sacred objects, word travels fast.”
“What are they saying?”
“Aside from telling everyone to lock their doors? Some people think it’s an attack specifically on the Catholic faith because it’s only been their churches targeted,” Father Anne replied. “Others have pointed out that Catholic churches are more likely than others to have really old, really valuable objects. Protestants don’t usually go for as much bling.”
“Anyone talking about a supernatural cause?”
“Not out loud,” she replied. “But I’ve heard some whispering inside the Society that the pattern could suggest the thief is either trying to summon something or ward it off—and neither of those options is good.” “The Society” was the St. Expeditus Society, a secret organization of priests dedicated to eliminating supernatural threats.
“Thanks,” I said. “Keep an ear to the ground for us, okay? We’ll let you know what we find out because I’ve got a feeling that whatever’s up ties in to your area of expertise.”
I ended the call and turned back to Teag, who was hunched over his laptop. “You look like a hound dog on a trail,” I said with a chuckle. “Next thing, you’ll be sniffing the computer.”
Teag barely looked up. “None of the churches that were robbed had security cameras. But the corner where he ran into you did. I’m piecing together splices from the cameras along his route to see where he went.”
“You’re awesome. A little scary, but amazing,” I replied. I went back up front to make sure Maggie didn’t need help, but the afternoon tourist bump had already started to trickle off. By the time I came back to the break room, Teag greeted me with a Cheshire cat grin.
“I think I’ve got him,” Teag said. I stood behind him and looked at the grainy footage of Hoodie Guy getting into an old, beat-up Toyota. The license plate was clearly visible, even though I still hadn’t gotten a good look at his face.
“Let me hack the DMV, and we’ll have an address,” Teag said, making it sound like business as usual. Which it kinda was, for us.
A few more minutes at the keyboard turned up a name—Jason Durant—and an address. “Now all we have to do is figure out why he wants all the statues and what to do about it,” Teag said, sitting back and stretching.
“Once we close up, I thought I’d take a look at the figurine and see what I can read from it. Maybe it’ll shed some light on why Jason was so afraid.”
Maggie rang up our last sale of the day, checked in to see if we needed anything, then headed out, locking up the front as she went. Teag poured me a glass of sweet tea from the pitcher we always kept in the refrigerator and sat beside me at the table.
He held out one end of a thin strip of cloth, and I knew it was one he had woven himself, incorporating his magic into the fabric with every pass of the shuttlecock. We’d found through trial and error that if I held one end of the fabric and he kept hold of the other, he could see my vision when I tranced.
“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath and letting it out. “Let’s see what’s got him running scared.”
I closed my hand around the statue and found that it was painted wood, not carved stone as I had thought. I could sense its age—at least a century or two. The figure had a warm glow in my inner sight, a mix of serenity and worship and forgiveness that stilled my churning thoughts with an otherworldly peace.
But I could feel Jason’s anxiety overlaying all of that like a stain. His terror felt like a punch in the gut, and my heart sped up as my breathing grew shallow. Nightmares. Terror. Voices in the dark. And beneath it all, the whiff of something evil, maybe even infernal.
“Cassidy!” Teag’s voice urged me to break contact with the statue, and immediately the vision vanished. I slumped in my chair as I tried to get myself under control. Teag pressed the glass of very sugary sweet tea into my hand. “Drink.”
We’ve done this so often, Teag and I have the routine pretty well rehearsed. Sweet tea grounds me, and the sugar rush re-sets my inner gyroscope. After a minute or two, I was back to normal.
“You felt it?” Sometimes I get images, other times, just feelings. Tonight was less visual and more visceral.
“Jason’s afraid something awful is waiting for him,” Teag recapped, which was pretty much what I had gotten from the impressions. “But I didn’t get the feeling it was a person, did you?”
“No. A ghost, maybe? Or a supernatural creature?” I took another long drink from the tea and set the glass aside. “Why don’t we take a drive past his house and see what kind of vibes we pick up? Then we can figure out how to confront him.”
“It might not just be confronting him,” Teag pointed out. “We don’t know if what he’s afraid of is in his house or if he thinks it’s going to come after him.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And we need to figure out why he stole the statues, so we don’t accidentally let something bad loose.”
“Plus, if we can do it without starting the apocalypse, we need to get him to release the Virgins so they can go back to the churches where they belong,” Teag added.
Even with the seriousness of the vision, I couldn’t help but chuckle at Teag’s comment.
We locked up the shop and headed out to Teag’s car. I sent a message to Father Anne about where we were going—safety precaution—since my boss, Sorren, was out of the country on business. Usually, he’s our backup, since he’s a nearly six-hundred-year-old vampire. Handy, that. But his work with the Alliance takes him all over the world, and tonight he was somewhere in Europe.
I wasn’t familiar with the part of town where Jason lived. The houses were modest, and most looked in fairly good repair, although a few were boarded up or abandoned. As soon as we crossed into Jason’s block, I felt a chill to the marrow despite a warm Charleston evening. Psychic ooze leaked like an oil spill from an unremarkable yellow one-story house.
“There,” I said, pointing.
“Yeah, I feel it too,” Teag agreed. Our gifts might take different forms, but dark, evil energy bled out from that little bungalow.
We kept on going, unwilling to let Jason or whatever entity he was hiding notice our interest or our abilities. “I think we need to bring Rowan in on this,” I said, naming our favorite white magic witch. “Just in case it’s more than Father Anne can handle alone.”
“Agreed,” Teag said as we drove back so I could pick up my car at the store. “You and I can be back-up, but whatever that was, it’s not something we can fight outright.”
Teag’s martial arts training makes him pretty tough to beat, and I’m no slouch with my own set of magical weapons. We’ve both fought off enough ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties to be able to throw down with the worst of them. But there’s a difference between whacking the head off a zombie with a blessed machete and facing down something incorporeal—or possibly even infernal.
“Then let’s call in the cavalry and figure out our next moves,” I replied. “Because I got the sense Jason’s protections are at their breaking point, and I don’t want to see whatever that is get loose.”
The next night, we closed in like a supernatural SWAT team. Rowan rocked a Buffy look-alike vibe, with her blonde hair up in a ponytail and wearing all black. Father Anne was her usual badass self, dark hair in a fade, clerical collar over a sleeveless black T-shirt that showed the colorful St. Expeditus tats on her shoulders and upper arms, jeans, and steel-toed Doc Martens.
Teag and I have both amassed a wardrobe of dark-colored clothing because it helps us blend in when we’re somewhere in the line of duty we’re not technically supposed to be, or because it hides the blood and monster guts. Always handy when you’re running from a pile of creature corpses you’ve just torched.
Rowan set down a perimeter warding to keep the evil from getting out if something went wrong. It also carried a distraction spell, so unless we blew the place up—wouldn’t be the first time—the spell would encourage the neighbors and the cops to look the other way.
Father Anne spoke a benediction, cleansing the area in her own way, making it naturally repellent to dark energies. Blessings and curses carry real power, more than most people give them credit for. I knew she also came prepared to do an exorcism, depending on what we found inside. While they did their thing, Teag and I set down a circle of salt and iron filings around the small yard, another layer of insurance.
We all wore protective charms—silver, onyx, agate—as well as religious medallions. Teag and I also carried gris-gris bags and jack balls from a friend who’s a powerful Hoodoo root worker and some blessed Voudon veves on silver bracelets from another friend who’s a kickass mambo. I’d found that protective energies tended to be more ecumenical than some of their ardent believers, and I knew the importance of taking good juju wherever I could find it.
As far as weapons—we were all carrying. I had my athame—my grandmother’s old wooden spoon—that helped me channel my touch magic and concentrate it into a protective force. I’d brought an antique walking stick whose resonance enabled me to shoot fire. Teag and I both had silver and iron knives—good against ghosts and other supernatural creatures—as well as a sawed-off shotgun with salt rounds and a Glock with silver bullets. Rowan had her magic, and while Father Anne’s faith was strong, her aim with a knife was downright wicked.
Time to roll. I felt a frisson of energy as I crossed the barriers, able to do so by the permission of their casters. Jason and the dark power would not be able to do the same. The closer I got to the house, the more I felt the taint of the entity or magic inside. Awful as it was, the power still felt muted, and I shuddered to think of what would happen if Jason hadn’t stolen the blessed statues and called on their protection.
Rowan and I went for the front door; Teag and Father Anne circled around to the back. Rowan lifted a hand and blew it off the hinges, and I heard a crack from the other side of the house and figured our partners had kicked in the rear door.
“What the hell is that?” I recoiled at the sight of what lay before me. Where the living room should have been was a circle of saint’s candles, most of them blackened and burned far down, as if they were lit 24/7. A row of unused candles sat to one side, and the soot-streaked empties supported my guess. In between the lit candles were the stolen statues of the Virgin Mary, facing inward, silent sentries to contain the evil Jason had loosed.
All around us, on every wall, someone had marked sigils and symbols of protection from every religion I could think of, and some I couldn’t identify. They were spray painted, drawn with Sharpie, dug into the wallboard—and some looked to be written in blood. Little homemade shrines sat in each corner of the room, to Christ, Shiva, Buddha, and Papa Legba. The shrines held religious statues, candles, and offerings of food, coins, and liquor.
A thick haze of smoke drifted in the stale air—I couldn’t tell immediately whether it was sage or weed—but it didn’t completely cover the underlying stink of rot and sulfur. Because in the center of the candle circle, surrounded by a pentagram—good side up—and other protective symbols, was a small black hole that looked like it descended to the Abyss.
“It’s a hell-mouth,” Father Anne and Rowan said, nearly in unison.
Teag snorted. “Looks more like a hell-nostril to me.” I knew he fell back on humor when he was scared, and his wide eyes told me he felt as terrified as the rest of us.
“Don’t cross the circle!” Hoodie Guy—aka Jason Durant—lurched out from the hallway where he’d been hiding. “You don’t understand—if that gets loose, we’re all gonna die!”
“How did you open a hell-mouth?” Rowan turned her full attention on Jason, which made him wilt like the guilty teenager he was.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whined. “My grandmother was supposed to be some kind of witch, but my mama wouldn’t let me study with her because Mama got religion and said magic was bad. Then Grandma died. Only I found out I could do things that weren’t normal—magic things—and I didn’t dare let Mama know. So I got some old books at a used bookstore and studied on my own. Except I screwed up, and that—” he pointed to the dark portal in the floor—“opened, and I don’t know how to shut it. So I figured I’d put a fence around it and find out how to make it go away.”
Jason didn’t look like he’d been sleeping or eating, and he seemed contrite enough I believed his story about accidental magic. We run into that a lot in our business, along with cursed heirlooms and haunted antiques. People mess around with powers they underestimate and open up a highway to Hell.
“You’re not going to turn me over to the police, are you?” Jason looked like he’d reached his breaking point. “I stole the statues, but I maybe saved the world a little. That counts, doesn’t it?”
“If we all get out of this alive, we’ll return the statues to the churches you took them from,” Father Anne said sternly.
“And then you’re going to apprentice with me, so this doesn’t happen again,” Rowan added with a glare that could curdle milk.
Jason nodded miserably. “Anything. I swear, I’ll do anything. Just…make it go away. I hear it screaming in my dreams.”
That was our cue. Father Anne moved to the right; Rowan walked to the left. Teag and I fell back, unable to help dispel the darkness Jason had conjured but ready to protect the two who could.
Father Anne began the exorcism rite, her voice strong and confident, rebuking the powers of evil. Rowan thrust out her right hand, palm forward, and blasted the hell-mouth with a torrent of white light that glared too bright to watch.
The portal shifted and writhed on its own like a living thing, trying to twist away from the all-consuming energy. But it didn’t vanish.
A blob of black ooze bubbled up from the small hole and expanded into a horror of teeth and claws. Later, I’d find out we all saw it differently, that it played to our individual fears, but in that moment, I saw a creature somewhere between werewolf and demon. The stench of sulfur and rotting meat almost made me gag.
Teag didn’t hesitate. He launched three silver throwing knives in quick succession seconds before I raised my athame and sent a streak of cold, blue-white energy to strike the monster in the chest. It roared, a noise I’d hear forever in my nightmares, but it did not break the circle of candles. Dark blood seeped from where Teag’s knives embedded, hilt-deep, in its ribs, and charred skin hung in ribbons where my strike had ripped into the body. Yet the were-demon still stood, teeth bared and claws unsheathed, promising bloody death to all of us if it ever got free.
Rowan and Father Anne’s chants rose and fell, reinforcing each other. The creature stalked within the circle, glaring at us with a malevolence that made me shiver, and then it threw itself at the warding. A bright yellow light flared, rising from the saints’ candles, and the monster fell back, howling.
“Look,” I whispered to Teag. The symbols on the walls around us glowed with inner fire, shining as brightly as the boundary of light that rose above the sacred candles. Father Anne and Rowan spoke with authority, their voices growing louder, commanding the creature to be gone. Inside its prison, the were-demon shrieked, its body arcing in agony. I watched, holding my breath, as its immense form was drawn back to the small black hole from where it came, vanishing inch by impossible inch as the chants and liturgy continued.
I felt the struggle as the monster fought with all its power and the borrowed energy of hell itself, and I knew that Father Anne and Rowan had to be tiring. Teag and I didn’t have the right magic to send the creature packing, and I hated feeling helpless. Then I spotted the woven and knotted cords on Teag’s belt that he uses to store magic.
“Your cords,” I hissed. “We’ll be their extra batteries.”
Teag loosed a cord, and we each held an end. I put my hand on Father Anne’s shoulder while Teag gripped Rowan tightly. I felt my gift flow through me and out to them, reinforcing and healing, renewing and energizing. Alone, the creature was too much for us to handle. Together, we were enough.
“Benedictus Deus, Gloria Patri, Benedictus Dea, Matri Gloria!” Father Anne shouted defiantly.
“So mote it be!” Rowan cried, sending another flare of white light at the luminous boundary that made it flash so brightly I had to look away.
When my vision cleared, all that remained was a blackened streak in the middle of the pentagram on the floor. No monster. No hell gate. Just Jason, on his knees, sobbing, and the four of us, gobsmacked to still be alive.
I shook myself to clear my mind and loosened my hold on Father Anne’s shoulder, fearing I’d gripped tightly enough to leave bruises. Teag let his hand fall as well. When we broke contact, both the priest and the witch staggered as if the infusion of our energy was all that was keeping them standing.
Father Anne rallied first and said an additional blessing to clear the space before she began to extinguish the candles and gather up the stolen Virgins. Rowan collected her wits a moment later and strode over to Jason.
She squatted down and pulled him into her arms until he quieted. “Get your things,” she ordered. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Tomorrow, you start your training program.”
“The police—” he began in a ragged voice.
“The police are the least of your worries,” Rowan said in a stern voice. “You’re now in the custody of my Coven, within the jurisdiction of the Society. And you will not be rid of us until you’re properly trained and no longer pose a threat.” The chill in her tone suggested that Jason didn’t want to find out the alternative.
Her expression softened, just a little. “You’ll get the training you need and the answers you deserve—and a group to have your back.” She followed him as he went to pack a bag. It was obvious Jason was badly shaken by his mistakes, but I was confident Rowan and her coven’s tough love would get him back on track.
“What about all this?” I asked, waving a hand to indicate the now-darkened sigils painted on the walls and the pentagram on the floor. “It’s not going to help resale value.”
Father Anne looked grim. “I’ll make a few calls. Between the Alliance and the Society, we’ve got people for that. I think we’re covered.”
I suddenly felt all of the night’s work in every muscle and sinew, down to the marrow of my bones. I was drained and empty, starved and thirsty, and utterly exhausted.
“What about the statues?” Teag asked.
Father Anne shrugged. “The less said, the better. If they come back via a few well-placed ‘friends’ in the diocese, no one will ask awkward questions.”
Rowan and Jason came back into the room. Father Anne tucked the holy figures into the small duffel she’d left by the door.
“Go home,” Father Anne said, giving me a weary smile. “And…thanks.”
Teag and I walked back out to my RAV4 as the others got into Father Anne’s truck. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had all the excitement I can handle for today,” I told him. Once again, we’d saved the world, and no one would ever know except us. “Time to call it a night.”