Doyle Times Police Blotter, Saturday, May 25th
Reckless Driver: A Doyle resident reported a silver Mercedes running stop signs on Main Street on Friday, May 24th, at 5:30 PM.
“No!” I fell to my knees beside Lenore and grasped her hand. It was ice. Her eyes were half-lidded, their gaze unseeing. “No,” I sobbed. Anguish tightened my muscles, twisted my stomach. I was too late. Why had they come here without me? How had Karin and Lenore gotten here so quickly?
How had I gotten here?
A vision. A spell.
This wasn’t real.
But her hand was so cold… Gently, I laid it atop her midsection and stood.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. I stretched out my hands and felt my way forward. Nothing blocked my passage. But I’d been standing by my window—
I froze.
The open window. I opened my arms in a T. And felt only air.
But I wasn’t dead. If I’d stepped through the window, I’d either be feeling some serious pain or all this would be over. Still, walking around didn’t seem like the best idea.
Okay, stop seeing what’s not there. Use your other senses.
I closed my eyes and inhaled.
Smoke.
I ran my hands over the front of my t-shirt and felt its softness, dampened by sweat. Bending my head to listen, I heard the faint wail of a siren.
The siren’s wail exploded beneath me, and my eyes flew open.
Sidewalk.
I jerked backward and stumbled from my apartment’s open window.
Gasping from the effort, I swayed, overcompensating. My brain felt woolly, my limbs heavy. A foglike image of my sisters wavered in my kitchen. My mind seemed to split, and I gagged.
Spelled. I’d been spelled.
Sirens wailed, but they seemed a long way off, as if the sound came through water.
Picatrix backed away from me, her ebony fur on end.
Head spinning, I dragged myself to the guest room and wrenched open the media center. Quartz crystals and other stones glimmered on the shelves. I grabbed a smooth obsidian and clutched it between my palms.
The remains of the illusion evaporated, and the dizziness fell away. Breathing deeply, I let my head loll forward.
The ringmaster. It had taken more than not using my vision to break his magic. The obsidian had helped, but I could still feel his spell, prickling my skin and ebbing away.
Obsidian in one hand, I dropped a box of salt and other crystals into my slouchy bag. I slung it over my shoulder. Tucking the Necronomicon, still wrapped in plastic, beneath one arm, I let myself out.
I turned, juggling bag, book, and stone, and I locked the door.
A hand grasped my neck. It shoved me hard against the door.
My forehead bounced off the hard wood. I shouted, incoherent.
Keys, obsidian, book fell. My cloth bag dropped beside my feet, crystals clashing against each other. The Necronomicon slapped to the pavement one story below.
A spotlight blinded me, and my knees buckled. The hand spun me before my knees could hit the landing. I lurched drunkenly. My hips pitched against the stairway railing.
Professor Fager grasped my shoulder.
“Please. You don’t have to do this.” My words were slow to my ears. Slurred. Faint. A bloodstain spread across Karin’s chest. I sobbed. No. You don’t have to die.
His face contorted with rage. “Do you have any idea how sick you made me?”
This wasn’t real. None of it was real. I shut my eyes and focused on the feel of his fingers on my throat. That was real, and it didn’t feel good.
“You killed John and Gertrude Marsh,” I forced out.
“He took my dog to the pound.”
I opened my eyes. “But you got her back.” The obsidian lay beside Karin’s outstretched hand. But the blood… It pooled beneath her, darkening the sand. No! Not real!
I shut my eyes, heard the pant of his harsh breath, the scent of stale coffee. I was here, on the landing. I’d fought past this spell before and it wasn’t real.
“That isn’t the point,” he said. “Marsh attacked me.”
“He assaulted you?” I sagged lower against the railing, feeling the warm heat of the wood tug my shirt upward, scrape my skin. The nausea faded, my head clearing.
“Attacked me through my dog.”
Had Fager been crazy all along? Or had the Wyrd Systerrs’ spell sent him over the edge? I pushed my aura outward and touched a metal band so cold it burned. Their spell had him in its grasp.
“You watched them,” I said, my voice loud. “You knew where he was going.”
Sirens were everywhere, which meant deputies and fire fighters and people. If I could stall, maybe someone would see us…
No. It was no good. The town was being drawn toward the fire, not to the empty alley almost no one used. I was on my own.
Carefully, I opened my eyes. A fog drifted before them, and I willed it away.
“I knew about Marsh and his wife’s sister,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. Policemen are surprisingly vulnerable. They’re so used to being predators, they don’t consider they might become prey. He never varied his route or watched for a tail.” He stepped sideways, his toe knocking the obsidian towards the edge of the stairs.
Another freezing wave crashed, driving me lower. The Wyrrd Systerrs’ spell. The ringmaster’s illusions. How could I fight them both and Fager?
My legs wobbled. “And you knew how to cut his brake line.” The engine I’d heard in the cave – it had been from Fager’s vintage car.
“I know all sorts of things about cars.”
Sirens echoed down the alley.
“Because of that antique you’re always working on.” I rubbed my head.
He smiled. “Everyone needs a hobby.”
“And you got the carbon monoxide from the chemistry department. You filled a yoga ball, thinking to blame Gertrude.”
“No, to blame her sister. Why do you think I cut the brakes?”
“Then why the yoga ball?” I mumbled through anaesthetized lips.
“Because I plan ahead. The police think she tried to frame her sister then kill her.”
“But why kill Gertrude at all?” I choked out.
“She helped him. Do you think she was innocent?”
“Gertrude knew what you’d done, didn’t she?” Gertrude, looking out the window at Professor Fager’s house and realizing... Jerk. When she’d looked out her kitchen window that morning, she’d been looking at Fager’s house. She’d been cursing the professor, not the sheriff.
I shook my head. “I saw you. You weren’t home when Gertrude was murdered. I saw you come home afterward.”
“You made me sick.”
“What?”
“The stink bomb.” Spittle flecked his mouth.
“I’m sorry!”
“Oh, you’re sorry. Everyone’s so sorry. But no one wants to pay the price. You’re going to pay.”
“So you set fire to the garbage cans beneath my stairway?” I asked.
“But it didn’t hurt you, didn’t make you sick. If you’d only shown you were sorry, I wouldn’t have to do this. I tried to warn you off when I saw you sniffing around. I only slashed your tires then. I’m not unreasonable. But when I learned what you did in my classroom – you never paid for it. You have to pay.”
“And Ben Daley? Did you kill him because he gave you a ticket?”
“How do you know about that? I suppose they laugh about it at the police station, all the tickets they give. Do you know they have quotas? It isn’t right.”
My head spun sickeningly. “Oh my God. You did kill him over a speeding ticket.”
“No, because I don’t speed. My brake lights were out. Can you believe he gave me a ticket for something so trivial? I tell you, it’s all quotas.”
“He was a human. He had a life! How could you kill someone over a ticket?”
His skin mottled. “I won’t be pushed around anymore,” he shrieked.
I released the railing and lunged for the obsidian. The stone leapt into my palm. I rolled onto my back. One of my legs tangled between the professor’s.
A siren blipped.
He lurched, grasped for the railing. His foot flew out, kicking my hand.
Pain screamed up my wrist and arm. The obsidian flew free. It clattered on the pavement far below, and the foggy overlay of my sisters, the spotlight, the stands, rushed back with a stomach-turning lurch.
The professor tumbled between my sisters. He thunked heavily down the stairs and to the landing below, and my sisters turned transparent. Fager rolled beneath the railing, thudded to the pavement.
The finality of that sound shocked me into reality.
My sisters vanished.
The professor lay still.
With my good hand, I grasped the railing and shakily pulled myself to sitting.
Thunder rolled off the mountains.
Professor Fager’s neck bent at a wrong angle. He stared, his gaze flat and lifeless, at the gray sky.
A sheriff’s SUV slowed to a halt beside the body. Owen Denton scrambled from the SUV. He knelt beside the professor. The blond deputy looked up. “Jayce, are you okay?”
No. “I don’t feel...” Nausea spun through me.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I saw enough. This wasn’t your fault.”
But a man was dead. I’d killed him. I’d broken the ringmaster’s spell for a moment, and I’d killed a man.
Owen bent and picked up the Necronomicon. “This is in an evidence bag. What’s it doing here? Did he take it?”
My tongue stuck in my mouth. “Mine,” I panted. I reached toward Owen, but he’d turned and tossed it onto the seat of his SUV.
“Shit, Jayce. This is the book the sheriff’s been keeping in her office. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could be in?” He shook his head. “I’ll put it back.”
No. He couldn’t take the book! But I couldn’t speak. Could barely move. The spell… If I opened my mouth, I’d vomit. “Owen—”
“Look,” he said, unspooling yellow police tape around the scene. “The whole department’s out on calls between the fire and the rioting—”
“Rioting?” The word dissolved into an inebriated slur.
“I want you to go back upstairs and stay put. Not to be cold, but there’s nothing anyone can do for this guy now. I’m going to take some pictures—”
The radio on his collar squawked.
“Hold on.” He turned away from me and muttered into the radio. Owen jerked. “Shit!” He leapt into his SUV. “Wait here. Just wait here!”
“What’s…?”
“Something happened at the department. I’m being recalled. Connor’s been injured.”
He slammed the door and tore off.
Connor. The name pierced my fog. I had to get to Lenore. Another spiral of nausea knocked me to my knees.