The Thirteenth Sacrifice (24 page)

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Years of research. It’s based on a much older design that was used for the same purpose a few centuries earlier in Europe. I’ve often wondered if it was used in my mother’s sacrifice.”

“No!” she burst out, louder than she meant to.

He looked at her, startled.

“No,” she said more quietly. “You—you can’t think like that. You don’t know for sure that’s the type of ritual it was used for. And even if it was, you can’t tie it directly to your mother’s death and you shouldn’t, for your own sanity.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s just the not knowing that
eats me up inside. They took more than my mother from me that night. They took my innocence, my peace of mind, my future.”

“You needn’t let them continue to take those things,” she said, grabbing his hand.

He sighed. “I just can’t fight this feeling, this belief that the two are connected somehow. What’s happening now with what happened then.”

“You’re very likely right to make the connections.” She let her eyes rove over the other items in the case. “Tell me about this coven, the older one.”

He sighed. “From all accounts, there were thirty members. Twenty-nine perished in a single hour. The official reports never say how, but references are made to rivers of blood and torn limbs. A few years ago I tracked down an Officer Roberts, who was one of the police at the scene. He refused to talk about what he’d seen. And when I pressed, he just shook like a leaf and stopped even looking at me. I can’t imagine what would be so horrific he wouldn’t be able to talk about it after all these years.”

She could.

Anthony pointed to a group of pictures in the right corner of the case that she hadn’t even noticed before. “Those were the members I could confirm.”

She recognized each face even though she struggled with remembering some of the names. For one of them, though, she didn’t need to read the nameplate. It was her mother. She looked young in the picture, younger than Samantha’s memories of her. She was wearing a white shirt with billowy sleeves and a low, scoop neckline. Samantha froze, realizing that through the gauzy material she could just barely make out the lines of her mother’s tattoo.
My tattoo.

“As near as I can figure, the coven had been operating
here for about twenty years,” Anthony continued. “They slowly amassed more and more power, strength. Until slowly wasn’t good enough for them anymore. I’m not sure what they were trying to accomplish with the human sacrifices, but my mom was at least the third. She was pregnant with what would have been my baby brother.”

The news shook Samantha to her core and wrenched an anguished groan from her lips. He turned and looked at her, eyes moist. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to lay all this on you.”

“So much pain,” she whispered. She just wanted to make it stop. His and hers. She reached up and touched his cheek. He put his hand over hers and the tears began to flow freely down his face. And then they were kissing, trying to lose themselves in each other, trying to hide from the pain and the terror.

She could feel him wrap his arms around her, pulling her close. But it wasn’t enough. She needed to shut out the voices in her head, the ones that whispered that she was to blame, that if only he knew, he would never touch her like this. But she was crying too. A lifetime of fear and sorrow needed to be swept away and tears alone were not enough.

“Samantha, I need you,” he whispered against her ear.

“I need you more,” she reassured him.

Something was happening between them. She could sense the changes. The kisses were becoming more frantic. Her hands roamed over his body and she thrilled to his touch as his did the same to her.

She felt like she was falling from a great height and all the things she’d never said to anyone, never done with anyone, swirled in her mind. And she wanted to say
them to him, to do them with him. And by the way he was touching her, the way he kept repeating her name, she knew he wanted that too.

He picked her up in his arms and she wrapped herself around him. Her entire body felt like it was on fire and she sobbed as she tried to hold him closer. “There’s something I have to tell you—”

An earsplitting scream came from the front of the museum, followed by an explosion of breaking glass. And then someone shouted, “Witch!”

Anthony dropped her and Samantha landed on her bottom. The envelope with the crime scene pictures fell onto the floor and she hastily scooped it up and shoved it back into her waistband as she scrambled up.

Together they ran to the front of the museum. One of the windows had been smashed in and a woman was on the floor, flailing about with one of the mannequins dressed in old-fashioned clothes. The woman screamed again and Samantha realized she was trying to strangle the mannequin.

Anthony bent down to grab her and she kicked at him, hitting him in the stomach. The people who had been in the museum had scattered backward.

“What happened?” Samantha shouted to one of them.

“She came flying through the window,” he said, his eyes wide. “She landed on the witch mannequin and started screaming that it was a witch. I think she’s trying to kill it!”

“She’s crazy!” the woman with him shouted.

Anthony reached for the woman again, but she snapped her teeth at him, as if to bite him, and he retreated to a safe distance. He whipped a phone out of his pocket and called 911.

Samantha focused all her attention on the woman,
approaching her slowly, cautiously. “The witch is dead,” she said, lowering her voice and willing the sound to wash over the woman, to penetrate the fog that she seemed to be in.

For a moment the woman stopped struggling, cocked her head, and listened.

“You’ve killed her. You’ve saved us all,” Samantha said.

The woman blinked at her, then turned and looked at the mannequin, as if to check that it was really dead. Samantha took a good look at her and realized she’d seen her less than an hour before when she had walked out of Red’s. She had seemed completely normal then, nothing like this.

It’s just like the people in the hotel lobby,
she thought with a shudder.

“I killed her?” the woman asked.

“Yes. Thank you,” Samantha said.

The woman looked up at her. “Really?”

“Yes, really.” Samantha could hear a siren in the distance. That had to be the police. She just needed to keep the woman distracted for a few more minutes without revealing to her or the other bystanders that she was a witch.

Samantha pointed toward a nearby chair. “Why don’t you sit here and rest a while? You were really heroic and you must be exhausted.”

The woman was bleeding from several cuts from the glass window she had leaped through. She seemed to be considering Samantha’s offer. She stood up slowly and Samantha nodded encouragement.

Then the woman turned her head and fixed her gaze on a different mannequin. “Another witch!” she shrieked and tackled it to the ground.

Samantha backed up, stunned by her ferocity, while Anthony worked at moving everyone else farther away.

Soon the police arrived and it took three of them to restrain the woman. Samantha had retreated to the back with all the other witnesses. When they finally had the woman who was seeing witches handcuffed and in a police car, another officer came forward to take witness testimony.

With a tiny wave of her hand, Samantha walked right by him without his noticing her at all. She could feel Anthony’s eyes on her, but she didn’t have time to stick around for the marathon questioning session that was coming. Even if she’d had the time, she had no desire to face Anthony after everything that had just happened.

As she walked toward the hotel she marveled at the feelings that collided inside her. She’d never given much thought to relationships, yet for some reason Anthony now occupied too many of her waking thoughts. A real relationship with him seemed out of the question. But why did he keep sparking something inside her that she had never known was there? Was it guilt? Shared pain? A shared past he wasn’t even aware of?

Whatever it was, it couldn’t be healthy. And there were too many secrets between them for them to have a shot at anything real. No, the best she could do was try to put him out of her mind. And by the time she reached her hotel room she was prepared to do just that.

She locked herself in before taking the crime scene photos from their envelope and spreading them across her bed. She stared intently at the shot of the waitress with the ketchup pentagram on her head. Then she flipped to the next picture and caught her breath. The octogram on the back of the victim’s neck was clearly
visible, more so than on the past couple of bodies. Going counterclockwise, the sixth point was filled in on this one.

She quickly flipped through the other photos until she found the one of the octogram on the other girl’s neck. It was much more swollen but she could swear the fifth point was filled in.

The drawing the coroner had had of the first victim had shown the first point filled in. Assuming that Katie’s roommate and the nun each had a distinct point and that there was an order to the killings, that would make them either two and three or three and four. Either way, there was one victim they hadn’t accounted for yet.

And only two more points to go before the resurrection could occur.

Her heart began to hammer painfully in her chest as she reached for her phone. Ed picked up just before her call would have gone to voice mail.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I think we missed a victim. Either before Katie’s roommate or after the nun.”

He swore. “What makes you think that?”

She explained about the star points and he swore again.

“I’ll check with the coroner, see if he got a better look at their octograms. Then I’ll put out the word that we’re looking for another victim.”

“Thanks, Ed. And if we find out which number the missing victim is, it should help us with location too. They’ve been getting steadily closer to Salem with each death.”

“I noticed that too,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. Did you get things straightened out with Anthony?”

“None of your business,” she snapped before she could stop herself.

“Ouch. I’m not sure if that means you did or you didn’t,” he said. “Either way, watch yourself.”

“I will. You too.”

After she hung up, she went back to studying the photographs. The other victim had been a painter, found in her studio by one of her students, with red paint on her forehead.

Two more victims. And if she was right, at least the last one, but probably both of them, would be murdered in Salem. Right under her nose if she wasn’t careful.

When she had finally gleaned everything she could from the photographs, she shredded them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

She grabbed a late lunch downstairs at the Tavern and lingered over her food, not ready to face what was coming. Finally, when she could put it off no longer, she returned to her room. She changed into black clothes and tucked her athame into the back of her jeans. She debated what other equipment to take with her and finally decided on just her cloak. With it rolled tightly and tucked under her arm she headed downstairs to the lobby.

Bridget hadn’t told her what time, but the sun was setting when she hailed a cab. She had it drop her off five blocks from her destination, as she was determined to walk the rest of the way. Autumn leaves crunched under her boots and the air had a bite to it that brought the blood to her cheeks. She breathed deeply and evenly, making sure her muscles got plenty of oxygen in preparation for the work ahead. She resisted the urge to do some small magic as a warm-up, wanting instead to have her full energy available when she was with the others.

When she turned onto the block, she could feel the house. It was waiting for them, for her, calling out. She shuddered and then settled her cloak around her shoulders and put her hood up. The other residents of the block had been trained years before not to notice the passage of cloaked figures.

The house came into view and she stumbled. Furious with herself, she pushed forward.
Don’t let it get in your head. It’s just a place, nothing more. You could set a match to it and destroy the whole thing within minutes.

Then finally she was on the sidewalk in front of the house. Memories of being there with Ed just a few days earlier were fresh in her mind. But other memories were coming too, many of them from when she was too young to be an official coven member. But she had watched when the adults practiced magic and she had come here on more than one occasion to celebrate some social event. Her five-year-old self had strong memories of one solstice celebration that had lasted long into the night.

Tonight she was the first to arrive. She could feel it, and although she did not like being here, she was glad that no one else was witness to her first few moments of fear and revulsion. Better to come to terms with it away from prying eyes.

She strode onto the porch and decided to go no farther alone. Better to enter with current practitioners that the house might be more used to. Yellow police tape that had been put up a couple of days before had been taken down by somebody, and only a small strip remained, caught on a nail protruding from the doorframe. Samantha stared at it while wondering how long it would be before the others arrived.

After only a few minutes other cloaked figures appeared on the street. Some walked, while others had
driven. Karen was the first up on the porch and she nodded absently at Samantha but seemed to have no desire to go inside either.

“You okay?” Samantha asked, noting that Karen looked worse than she had that morning. Her eyes were slightly sunken and she seemed distracted.

“Fine,” Karen said, in the kind of voice people used when they were lying but were in no mood to discuss it further.

Samantha didn’t push. Karen didn’t belong there any more than she did and she hoped to get the other woman to see that soon. Others joined them on the porch. Some lingered on the steps and a few remained on the sidewalk. Samantha could sense agitation coming off most of the witches present.