Undercover Coven (Sister Witchcraft Book 3) Read online

  “Brent, now…” the principal started, but he was drowned out by cheers.

  It was all a little surreal.

  “Don’t you all think this is a little ghoulish? The woman’s husband is sitting right outside,” I said.

  Principal Aberdeen was close and he leaned in to say quietly, “You know what they say. Nine times out of ten, it’s the husband who did it.”

  “You think?” I asked, looking at him in surprise.

  He shrugged. “You gotta go with those odds.”

  I cringed a little, looking toward the door. “I hope he can’t hear us,” I said softly.

  But Brent with the red button-up shirt had no such inhibitions. “If he’s out there, put his drinks on my tab,” he said, slapping his hand down on the table. “And yours, too, because you’re looking at the new head of the English department.”

  “It will take a council meeting to determine that,” the Principal said warningly.

  “A formality.” His beady eyes were glowing. “I’m in like Flynn. Finally, there can be some progress in teaching at this school. We’re not held back anymore by that woman…”

  “Because somebody murdered her,” I said, coldly.

  “Yep!” he replied, a bounce in his voice and his step.

  Too much, I thought. And I wondered if I had to deal with Mrs. Higginbottom in a professional capacity, if I had to be under her thumb and follow her lead into places I didn’t want to go… I might get a bit sick of it. But that was just a conjecture, one I kept to myself as I left the backroom with the celebrating teachers and staff to go to the bar area and see what was going on out there.

  Just as I arrived, the front door opened and a man walked in. He was tall, and thick, like someone born into prodigious muscle. His face wasn’t overly handsome, but it had a certain quality, a roguishness that most women would find alluring. Only it seemed to have something cast over it, a kind of dourness. A shadow.

  He walked up to the bar, setting himself right in between Glen and Max, and said, “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Aren’t we all?” the bartender quipped.

  The man grimaced. “No, someone specific. I’d gotten a call to come and see somebody here, about… something. They didn’t leave me a name, they said they was a reporter.”

  Max turned slightly to look at the man without being particularly obvious about it. Whether he had called the guy in and hadn’t told me I couldn’t tell. Max had his own way of doing things and a kind of weird sense of humor. He might have been pulling strings just to get reactions.

  If that was the case, it worked, because after looking over his own shoulder, Mrs. Higginbottom’s husband, Glen Wright practically leapt from his seat.

  “You!”

  The man turned, scrunched his face up, then seemed to recognize Glen. He threw up his hands in a defensive posture, but Glen was already at him, mid-punch. His fist connected, and the man went down.

  Before I could even believe what I’d seen, Glen was on top of the man, pummeling him with his fists, and shouting. The bartender leaped over his bar, revealing an athleticism (and arm muscles as he grabbed the bar like a gymnast with a pommel-horse) that his hat and beard made seem impossible.

  Max got to his feet, as well, and at first I thought he was going to try to tackle the guy. Instead, his camera was out, and he was taking pictures. The bartender had his arms around Glen, and yanked him up with a single jerking motion, pulling him away. He squirmed in the bartender’s arms, slipped out, and was back on the downed man.

  An instinct took over from me. That funny feeling I’d had from the instant I set foot in this bar, the noise I could almost hear but not quite now came to the fore: a nagging, like the feeling when you have to sneeze and can’t quite manage to do it, tickled at the corner on my mind until I finally gave in fully to it.

  Turns out, though my conscious mind didn’t know this, that Bell, Book and Bourbon wasn’t just a kitschy pretend place. It had some magic in it, hexes that had probably been put in place when it was built. And, from the feeling they gave me, I think they were almost certainly put in place by my grandmother.

  There was a spell here, like that simple hex I had put on my door to make it open or close on command, that was just waiting for somebody who could to come and use it. So I did. I reached up and pulled on an invisible cord that I somehow felt in my hand.

  From nowhere, a bucket tipped over, and suddenly Glen Wright (and only Glen Wright) was soaked, head to toe, with ice-cold water. It made his body spasm so suddenly and so hard that he was rocked right off of the man he was attacking, and he fell back shivering against the bar.

  For an instant, nobody moved, said anything, or even seemed to think. Then a bucket that I know had not been there before appeared in the bartender’s hands. He looked at it for a second, shrugged, and set it down.

  “That was quick thinking, Walt,” Max said, though he was looking at me when he said it, and I’m not sure if he was confused, or just acting confused for everyone else’s benefit.

  “Huh,” the bartender said, then he went over to the downed man, the stranger, who was groaning on the ground.

  “He killed her,” Glen Wright said, through chattering teeth. “He killed my wife!”

  Chapter 11

  The police had already been called by somebody else in the bar and arrived so quickly neither Max nor I was able to get the full story from anybody. It wasn’t until almost 9 o’clock when the two of us finally got some alone time with Sgt. Frisco, behind the sheriff’s station where he’d stepped out, ostensibly for a phone call.

  We were both waiting for him, rubbing our hands for warmth and breathing out plumes of steam from the bitter night cold. It didn’t snow in Lafay, but in the winter the nights can sometimes get down near freezing, and they do it pretty quickly after the sun comes down.

  “So, there’s things I can tell you,” Frisco said, looking from one of us to the other, “And things I can’t. First, I need to get something 100% clear: did you call Mr. Whitten to the bar?” he said, his focus completely on Max.

  Max shook his head, plainly. Frisco held his gaze for a while, then shrugged.

  “He said he got a call from a reporter who told him to meet him there, or else he was going to print something about him and Mrs. Higginbottom.”

  “What?” I said. “Max, do you know anything about this guy… who is this guy?”

  “Zeke Whitten,” Frisco said, going to his cops’ notepad. “Lives just up the road at Halcyon Hills, so he’s not even a Lafay resident. But he’s a handyman who gets most of his work from the four city area, including right here in Lafay. He’d been hired by Higginbottom a couple of times in the last few months to do repairs around the house.”

  “And she totally had an affair with the handyman,” I said, shaking my head.

  “That’s a jump to conclusions,” Max said.

  Frisco looked at us again. “He says it’s nonsense, Mr. Wright says it’s not. But here’s the kicker. Mr. Whitten’s work car is a panel van. And guess what’s on the side of it?” Frisco said, pulling out his phone.

  “A vampire hunting beaver!” I said, practically jumping in my excitement.

  Frisco stared at me like I’d gone a little nuts, and shook his head. “It’s a beaver with a hammer. Like a carpenter.”

  On his phone he pulled up a website, presumably this Whitten’s, and it had a picture of a beaver with a hammer. I had no idea how anyone in their right mind or maybe otherwise could conclude that this hammer was going to be driving stakes into vampires, but then I’m not a crazy old lady.

  “Well, that lends some credibility to the whole thing, doesn’t it? Has anyone been arrested?” I said, starting to get very excited, for very many reasons. Not the least of which was that all of this pointed very far away from Lucy.

  “It’s all very circumstantial, and there’s still a lot of things we need to look at,” Frisco said. “And if Old lady Sandinski is right about seeing the beaver�
�”

  He trailed off, but I didn’t need any more explanation. If she’s right about the van, it stands to reason she would be right about seeing the young girl wandering around the van. And so the finger pointing away from Lucy rolled right back around and poked at her again. Damn it.

  “So what now?” Max said.

  Frisco shrugged. “Police business. I told you what I can, and now you’ve got to do something for me. Stand down, go home. You, Max, just write your stories and quit trying to be in the middle of them, just for tonight. And Mimi… you make sure that sister of yours doesn’t try to leave town.”

  He turned to go. I almost told him about the stray thought I’d had earlier in the night, when I saw that mass of teachers gleefully partying away at the missing Higginbottom… and how it seemed suspicious to me.

  But it was conjecture, with less substance to it than what they had on Lucy, so I let it go. Kept it in my back pocket should I need it. Frisco went into the sheriff’s station, and we went back out onto the street.

  “Okay, well, let’s get to the tea shop,” Max said, heading to where our cars were parked.

  “Excuse me?” I said. “Frisco told us to go home. I need to check on Lucy. And I need to grab something to eat. I didn’t have dinner and I never called Sibyl. She’s going to kill me.”

  “No problem. I grab the food, you get to the shop and wait for me there. I’m not going to miss out.”

  “Miss out on what?” I said, trying to be very coy and doing, probably, a terrible job of it.

  He practically rolled his eyes at me.

  “Miss out on what the cat has to show us. He’s been out all this time digging stuff up, hasn’t he? About things like…the high school coven that I know about but have very judiciously left out of my reporting heretofore?”

  I swallowed.

  “Burgers, or tacos?” he said.

  On the way to the shop, I tried to figure out exactly what in the world I was going to do to keep Kashmir away from Max, or Max away from Kashmir. Even if I personally trusted Max not to spill the beans about the cat, I knew he had an innate curiosity that would make him poke around. Maybe dig up more about the past, figure out just what Kashmir was, and that would lead to disaster.

  What kind of disaster, I had no idea. And the only reason I really thought it would be bad is because that’s what Kashmir would tell me. Maybe some of his familiar powers relied on him being secret. Maybe the more people who knew all about him, the more vulnerable he would be to the Jiggs.

  Or maybe it was another one of those times when he was just pulling my leg because he was a cat, and that’s what they did for fun.

  I was thinking abstractly about these things when I passed by the central bus-stop in town. It was on the main thoroughfare, and one person was sitting at it, waiting for the last late night bus that served the four city area to come rumbling through. She was dressed in a dark gray coat, a broad-brimmed hat, like something out of a 40s movie.

  What would I do if it was Lucy, sitting there? I thought. I’d stop right at the bus stop, she’d run away from me, I’d have to chase her down. Then tackle her and… what? Drag her into the car, put her under lock and key, cast some spell that made it impossible to leave, no matter how much Sibyl objected?

  It was something we needed to get completely straight, because this sort of thing could not go on. Fighting Lucy was something that was completely exhausting, and it was also weirdly out of character for her to be so… moody and fighty. A part of me wished she would go to Los Angeles. Not to get rid of her, just for her to be happy again.

  All of these conflicting feelings disappeared in the instant I was beyond the bus-stop, and saw the girl waiting there again in the rear-view mirror. A sudden gust of wind whipped the hat off her head, and an enormous mane of bouncy, curly hair flipped out of it. Lucy leapt up to grab the hat, then froze when she heard the screech of my tires on the pavement as I slammed down the brakes.

  The street was empty of traffic, so I wasn’t in danger of crashing or running over anyone when I flipped my car into reverse and sped back to the bus-stop. Lucy, for whatever reason, did not run. She just stood there like a mannequin.

  “I would like to react to this in a calm manner,” I said through my now open window. She didn’t come to the curb, stuck in her awkward position, the hat held several feet above her head. “So I will ask you nicely to get into the car, so I can take you home.”

  Lucy came back to life, pulling the hat down on her head, then crossing her arms. The coat she was wearing must have been Sibyls, and Sibyl was a head again taller than Lucy and much broader across the shoulders (she’d trained in her formative years for monster fighting, after all.) Lucy looked entirely like a girl playing dress-up, including a hat that threatened to devour her entire head.

  It was too pathetic a display to be mad at. Not helped at all by the pouty lips on her pale, sad face.

  “I thought if I went away…”

  “That it wouldn’t look like you’re guilty, and that people wouldn’t come looking for you?” I said, still being completely calm despite my blood simmering toward a boil.

  “But I am guilty ‘cause I did something, it’s not just a coincidence. I can’t… Mimi, I’m a big old bother. Let me go where I’m not going to be in anyone’s way.”

  She was pleading with me, and that softened my heart completely. I pushed open the door.

  “I’ve got ice cream and cup cakes at the shop. We can go there, and figure out what we’re going to do, because there’s no way I’m letting anything bad happen to you. Get in.”

  She looked both ways, as if trying to magic the bus into existence. And then with a sigh, she walked to the side of the car, ducked in, and we were off.

  Chapter 12

  In a replay of what happened earlier this evening, the instant I opened the backdoor to the shop, Kashmir came from nowhere and whipped inside, nearly bowling me over. I grabbed the door jamb to keep from completely toppling, and felt Lucy’s hands on my back, steadying me.

  “Ugh, cat,” I said.

  “You should call somebody to pick it up,” Lucy said. “It’s probably got all kinds of diseases and stuff.”

  I smiled to think of how indignant Kashmir must feel to hear that… and then I dropped my smile completely when I saw the dirty little track marks on my clean kitchen floor, followed by a few little spots of blood.

  “Oh my God, Kashmir!” I shouted, racing after the trail to the other end of the kitchen. I reached the far end just as a door under the sink flapped closed.

  I opened it to see Kashmir curled up tight there, licking at one of his sides. He glared at me, and I closed the door to give him a few moments.

  “Oh, it got into a fight. Should we call a vet? It might be infected. Maybe it’s got rabies,” Lucy said.

  “He. He’s a he, and he doesn’t have rabies,” I said, rubbing my hand over my eyes. I needed to contrive some reason for Lucy to get out of here so I could have a few words with my familiar, but I also couldn’t let her out of my sight.

  Something had to shift in this scenario, something had to be changed… My first thought was to call Sibyl. It’d be a fight with Lucy, and Sibyl hadn’t done much of a job keeping Lucy at home. But at least then I could get back to the job of saving my sister. Even if she would hate me for sending in the Warden just after she made her prison break.

  I stood up, took a deep breath, and turned to see Lucy with a wet mop in her hand, slapping it down against the paw prints and the blood. Without having to be asked, she went about on a task helping me. Just because she saw I was upset.

  Wow, Lucy might be growing up a little bit. Who’d have thought that?

  “I really need to know why you keep that overgrown… what’s this?” she said, ducking down to the end of the mop to find something there on the ground, just under the lip of the counter where it was hard to see. It looked like a little leather pouch, tied with a drawstring. I could see the subtle impression of teeth m
arks and a bit of dampness around the end.

  Lucy got to the conclusion as quickly as I did. “That cat was carrying this in his mouth,” she said, eyebrows going upwards. She grabbed the drawstring. “Let’s see what’s in it.”

  “No!” Kashmir and I shouted at the same time. His feline head poked out from under the sink, looking at Lucy very severely.

  Thankfully, being scolded by a mouthy cat was not something in Lucy’s experience, so she looked up and around and everywhere but at the sink. There was no reason for her to think a kitty was talking to her.

  “What the heck… was that like a weird echo?” she said, then looked at me. “Did you hear that?”

  I shrugged, then looked down at Kashmir, and gave him a little wink. He pushed himself completely out from the sink, and looked at me with incredulity.

  “What are you winking at me for?” he said, out in front of everybody. “The girl still has the pouch in her hand, it’s dangerous! Go get it from her.”

  That… was much more difficult for Lucy to miss. So she didn’t. She stared, open-mouthed, at the black cat with his twitching whiskers and weirdly human expression on his face.

  “Well?” he said.

  “OMG,” Lucy said her hands going to her mouth. She dropped the pouch in the process, leading to a stunning run and leap from Kashmir, who caught it again in his mouth. He spun around on the newly mopped floor, leaving a little trail of dirt from his paws.

  “Kashmir!” I said, as new little drops of blood splattered from his quick movements.

  He muttered something from his clenched mouth, and motioned toward me with his head, making the pouch dangle back and forth.

  “I don’t—” Then his head movements got more violent, and I stepped forward and grabbed the pouch from his mouth.

  “About time! It burns the tongue,” he said, then he twisted around and got back to licking the side where the blood had come.

  “Kashmir, you’re hurt,” I said, very seriously and solicitously.

  “A scratch,” he said, irritatedly, “and don’t touch it. I found the Jiggs new security system. It’s a terrier.”