Being looked at was one thing. But being looked at the way the township of Blue Moon Bay could look at me was another matter entirely. There were vampires with hungry-looking blood-red eyes, banshees with their eerie sightless ones, shifters with their lupine pupils, and so on. It was quite unnerving.
“I-I-” I stuttered, not comfortable with being put on the spot. My aunts could have warned me about what they had planned instead of passing their message through water.
I pursed my lips, not sure what to say since I knew about as much as the rest of the attendees.
Aunty Cinth snapped once more. “Up here, ladies and gents. Up here.”
The eyes were slow to turn from me, but eventually they did as Aunt Hyacinth ordered. I felt only slightly mollified when my taciturn aunt actually winked at me.
“It was Malachite that done it,” Aunty Primrose proceeded.
“Then why tell us this now?” a male asked, his voice sounding intelligent and well-spoken. I noted that it was Drucilla’s husband, Bill. He was human, and he’d chosen not to take on the length of her years when he’d mated her. He was longer lived than the average human, already sitting at a hundred but looking only to be about a young fifty.
Drucilla was also a banshee. With her pale ivory skin and lambent, pupil-less eyes, she was as dark and lovely as most of her breed. Her hair was the color of shiny black pearls, and her skin was dewy and youthful. Her husband was aging, as all humans did, and was now a very handsome silver fox. To an outsider, they might even appear as father and daughter, but they’d been mated since the last time the veil had parted, which was more than seventy years ago. They’d had a child much later on in life, and their gorgeous little girl sat between them, looking every inch her mother’s daughter with her snow-white skin, blood-red lips, and inky-black hair. She wore a large smile on her face, just like Edward did.
Clearly, Edward wasn’t the only one highly entertained by the sight of adults squabbling.
“Well,” Aunty Prim began. But she never got the chance to finish because Malachite started writhing and twisting, fighting to jump out of Sage’s arms.
“No. Don’t,” Sage cried, hopping up from her seat as she tried to contain him. But he was fast and slippery, moving through her fingers like a greased pig.
“Oh! Malachite!” Sage snapped at him. Then she hissed, and I soon realized why. He’d bitten her; the devil cat had bitten her. A drop of red was welling up on the tip of her finger. She immediately put her finger into her mouth, barely clinging to Malachite with one arm.
Worry beat at my throat as I stared at him. That wasn’t at all how familiars were supposed to act. Something was definitely wrong with him.
“Bad kitty!” Aunty Cinth turned around and wagged her finger in Malachite’s face, which got the irritable cat to settle down but only a very little. He batted at her hand with his socked foot but didn’t attempt to bite her too.
Aunt Primrose, who looked a little as if she’d been sucking on the world’s most sour lemon, frowned and held up her hands. “Because we feel that—” That was all she managed to get out before Malachite started up again.
He was crying, same as before. This time, the yowls were long and full of what I could only describe as pain.
But I didn’t have a chance to worry about what my aunt had been about to say or even what was the matter with Malachite because everything was suddenly interrupted by haunting screams of agony.
I cried out at the same time Zane and Edward did. They clamped their hands over their ears as they looked to me with fear and worry in their eyes. Zane reached for Edward and dragged him onto the floor, curling his body over the boy’s and becoming a living shield between the chaos and his son.
All the banshees, including little Nala, were up and floating high above us. Their faces were contorted in agony, and their eyes were no longer white but deeply black as they sang.
My ears felt as if they were bleeding, and my skin was on fire as their song poured like hot oil over us all. I was only vaguely aware of the shock and chaos, but I knew that if I didn’t do something soon, Edward and Zane might suffer permanent hearing loss.
Hearing the banshees sing again, after centuries of silence, was befuddling.
Oswald was up, screaming as he tore pell-mell through the crowd, tossing townsfolk and recently vacated chairs aside to escape the torments of their wail.
In his hasty flight, his ring must have slipped off his finger, because his true form was suddenly revealed to all—that of a beast fifteen feet tall with limbs as thick as tree trunks and feet as long and wide as a small giant’s. Covered in a thick coat of shaggy fur, Oswald gave off a stench of fear that was a palpable odor in my nostrils.
“Hells bells,” Aunty Violet muttered. I heard her even above the tumultuous din as Oswald continued to run, not looking or caring about the destruction he was leaving in his wake.
Glenda was on her feet, flapping her tiny wings as she raced after her temporarily insane husband. People were crying out. There was mass bedlam and confusion.
I had to get Zane and Edward to safety. I reached into my purse and pulled out my wand. With a flick of my wrist, I whispered, “domum.”
They were gone, back at my home. Safe. But now my aunties and I had to bring order to this mess or risk the exposure of a Big Foot running as if the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels down the streets currently full of unwary humans.
As though we all shared the same thought, vampires, shifters, and I turned on Oswald and shackled him to the ground just one step before he reached the door.
He screamed an unholy sound that only a Foot could make, but Glenda was kneeling beside him a second later, rubbing his forehead as she sang the song of dreaming. The only problem was the banshees had still not let up, and the brain pick currently driving through my head was giving me a massive, pounding headache.
But then three bolts of sizzling neon-green power encased the banshees, and blessed, blessed silence returned.
It took me well over a minute to stop hearing the ghostly echo of their skin-tingling song. And as I slowly came to, I noticed just how much Oswald had destroyed. There were holes in the floor where his mammoth feet had stomped down and even holes in the walls. Chairs were crumpled into twisted shapes.
The rest of the town was slowly working their way to their feet, looking stunned and disheveled. Some of them even had small open wounds on their cheeks and foreheads.
My daze was quickly erased when I noticed my friend Eerie Thistlebottom, the town’s only zombie, lying in a heap with all her limbs pointing in gruesome and odd directions.
“Eers,” I cried, finding my sanity again. I raced to her and reached her side in seconds. She wasn’t just stunned; she’d gone into a zombie coma. Her clear, colorless eyes were open and staring dead up at the ceiling.
Sometimes when she got too much of a fright, she would go temporarily catatonic. Feeling terrible for my friend, I touched her forehead with the tip of my wand and whispered, “Animas.”
A small bolt of lightning shocked her, and Eerie cried out. She trembled as she fought to move, only her limbs would not obey her.
“Shh. Shh,” I whispered as I took hold of her left hand and pulled the joint into its socket. Then I turned my attention to the other hand and did the same.
She grunted, but she was used to tumbling over like a falling stack of dominoes. From what she’d told me, falling for her didn’t actually hurt so much as it made others uncomfortable to witness.
“What? What happened?” she murmured, groaning as she was finally able to sit up.
“Oswald went on a rampage,” I whispered mournfully. “Oh, Eers, I’m so sorry.”
She swallowed hard when I yanked on her left hip and eased her bone back into its socket. She winced and then sighed.
“It’s okay, Zinny. It’s okay,” she whispered, her voice broken and full of sawdust.
I wasn’t sure if she was telling me that she would be okay or that wha
t I’d done to her was okay. I hated myself for turning her into a zombie and always wished I could take it back, except for the fact that if I did, she would die. And neither of us wanted that.
When her final limb fell into place, she grabbed my hand and squeezed gently. “Zinny, it’s really okay. I promise. I promise.”
My smile was sad, but I nodded.
“We must find out who’s died,” Aunty Hyacinth said gravely, cutting through my forlorn thoughts and making my blood run like rivers of ice through my veins.
In all the confusion, I hadn’t stopped to consider that a banshee only sang when something truly terrible had happened.
I looked at the others, spotting almost everyone who lived in Blue Moon Bay in the crowd. And they were all doing the same. Eerie was audibly swallowing, looking as if she’d swallowed shards of glass.
Someone had died.
Above us, encased in the aunties’ green smokescreen, the banshees still sang.
“I’ll be releasin’ one,” Aunty Cinth said slowly, “so she can take us to the corpse. Five of you go out and make certain the humans dinna linger long on the streets. We must take care that none o’ them hears the death cry.”
A group of Padfoot shifters nodded and trotted out the doors, melting into the embrace of shadows and night.
Aunty Cinth’s lavender eyes narrowed. “Now brace yerselves, creatures.”
Eerie bit her bottom lip hard, and I clamped my hands over my ears.
But it didn’t matter because the second Druscilla was released, the spine-tingling cries of her song filled my eyes with tears and my soul with agonized bitterness.
Chapter 3
Zinnia
WE ALL RAN DOWN THE eerily empty streets of downtown Blue Moon, moving at speeds only the preternatural could. Our silence was in obvious contrast to Druscilla’s terrible lamentations.
There was a loud cacophony of party-type sounds streaming out of Margo’s Salon and Cantina—lots of boots stomping, cheers, whistling, and the tinny tapping of ivory keys. Standing as a guard outside the door was one of the Padfoot clan. She stood with her arms crossed, scanning the eerily deserted streets. At a distance, I thought the she might be Coco due to the Nordic white locks glistening like freshly fallen snow.
I didn’t know how the shifters had managed to pen all the humans who’d been out and about so quickly into one place, but the Padfoot nodded at me as if to say, “All good here.”
I stopped worrying about humans seeing what they shouldn’t after that and ran harder. But as Druscilla continued to sail down Main Street without stopping, all the fine hairs on my arms and the back of my neck began to rise. My heart started beating like the hooves of hundreds of racing horses in my chest, and it had nothing at all to do with the exertion.
Dread filled my belly. We were drawing awfully close to my diner. I just hoped to the gods that whatever had happened hadn’t happened there. But the greasy pit of fear in my stomach was growing ever wider.
Finally Druscilla stopped, hovering like an undulating wave in the breeze, a black stain of breathing shadow in the night, still singing out her song. Sweat popped out on my brow even as my blood felt as if it had just turned to rivers of ice in my veins.
We all stopped in front of The Golden Goose, my diner.
The door was propped open. Why was it propped open? I distinctly recalled shutting it. And a cold, brutal chill was winding like a serpent’s tail out of it.
Maybe the woman had taken her cupcake and left, leaving the door ajar in her haste? I wanted so badly to believe that. But deep in my heart of hearts, I knew it wasn’t so.
I could hear Gwendolyn honking madly inside, and I could tell even from a distance that most of the chairs and even a few of the tables had been knocked over. My fowl was nervous, and when she was nervous, her wind funnels became stronger, capable of knocking over just about anything that crossed her path. But Gwenny didn’t take to nerves easily. She lived in a diner full of strangers for cripe’s sake. So what had caused her to react as she had?
I started to feel the eyes of the others turn toward me.
I swallowed, feeling sick and twisted up inside.
Druscilla’s long arm drew outward as her singing grew stronger still and pointed to the door. Death awaited us inside.
I began to shake, small tremors at first, but then more and more powerful, until my teeth started to clack. Others were starting to murmur between themselves, wondering what they should do, but all of them looked toward me. This was my place of business. I should be the one to make the first move. Only problem was, I felt frozen by fear and barely able to even take a breath.
Dru gave an ear-splitting cry, as though she were tired of waiting on me to decide, and moved like only a banshee on the hunt could. She slipped into the diner so fast that she was gone from one blink to the next.
I should go inside too, but my feet felt trapped in concrete.
Suddenly, a pair of warm arms wrapped around me. When I looked up, I saw that it was Aunty Hyacinth. Her pinched features were softened now, more gentle than her usual glower, and she was rubbing small circles on my upper arms with her thumbs, pulling me back from the cold shock that had crept over me.
“Come, Zinny. The banshee canna stop her wails until we’ve seen the body,” she said patiently. My aunty’s lavender eyes glowed with compassion, which was so unexpected from her that I was finally freed of the stupor.
I nodded. “O-okay.”
She grabbed my hand and tugged me forward. All I could focus on was taking one step at a time. I smelled the sweetness of vanilla and blackberry-spiced cupcakes still lingering in the space, the dust of the outdoors, and the curl of sweat from something far too sickly sweet within. A tear gathered in the corner of my eye.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Aunty,” I breathed shakily, looking down at my feet. I was too afraid to look up and come face to face with the death awaiting us inside.
“Fiddlesticks, Zin. I raised you.” She said it as if the fact should have been obvious to me.
She lifted her chin, pride gleaming in her eyes, and I understood. Of all the sisters, Hyacinth’s mettle was strongest. She might have been the youngest of the three, but everyone in town knew who wielded the mightiest power.
“Now, take a deep breath with me,” she whispered and pulled in a large lungful of air.
I followed suit, mimicking her movements. And with each drag, I felt the claws of fear lessen their grip just a little bit more.
She nodded. “Good. Another.”
I nodded back and continued to draw from my aunty’s bottomless well of bravery. I ignored the panic beating at my mind like hundreds of frantic wings in the chaos of flight.
“Ready?” she asked a second later.
I nodded. “Ready.”
She turned, and I followed close on her heels, still clinging tight to her fingers.
The closer I drew to the diner door, the stronger the dread became, turning my stomach and making it sink to my knees.
I felt the curious eyes of those around us and looked at them, faces I’d known my whole life. Evangelina’s vampire eyes glowed a deep, bloody red. A worse-for-wear but more lucid-looking Oswald stood with Glenda still firmly by his side. Jacqueline Frost, daughter of Jack and legendary in her own right, looked at me with eyes burning with disbelief, and when she sparked with power, fat flakes of snow swirled and danced around her. Then there was will-o-the-wisp, who we all just affectionately called Doc since he wore a turn of the nineteenth century bowler and always walked around with his 1911 gold grips sticking out of his holster for all to see. He spoke with a thick Texas drawl and fashioned himself a cowboy of old, but it was a known fact the wisp couldn’t shoot the broadside of a barn. This was due in part to the fact that faes were deathly allergic to most metals, but especially iron. Doc’s holster had been spelled by a witch two centuries ago so that he could keep his prized possessions on his person, but I’d never actually seen him with them in han
d.
And there were more faces, so many more. But not a one of them looked at me with judgment, and that went a long way toward settling my terrible nerves.
The hinges of the door creaked when Aunty pushed it wide, and the moment we stepped foot inside the diner, Druscilla’s wailing ceased. The blessed silence was a shock. My ears still rang with the ghostly din of her cries.
Druscilla was now openly sobbing and sprawled over my countertop, her normally pale skin looking completely bleached of color. From the corner of my eye, I caught sight of strands of hair sprawled out like a disturbed spider’s web on the floor. The hair was golden blond.
I swallowed hard.
“Ye must look,” Aunty Cinth said with a small squeeze of my fingers.
I looked at her.
Meow. The silky fur of Lapis’s black tail wound between my legs, tickling the inside of my left ankle. Her bright-blue eyes stared up at me with something akin to mournfulness.
I bent over to talk with her. “Did you see what happened here, Lapis? Did you see?”
Meow, she said again. Her pink tongue licked at her nose before she sneezed and shook her head. Her socked right paw scratched at her cheek.
Behind me, Gwenny was still honking, but the sound was softer now, more pitiful. What in the devil had happened to my familiars?
I still couldn’t quite make myself look at the figure lying on the ground. I had to work up my nerve just a bit more. Aunt Hyacinth seemed to understand and simply stood with me, holding tight to my hand.
We hadn’t had a dead body in Blue Moon Bay since old man Tinker’s boy had up and vanished. And though we’d never found the child, we all knew he must have drowned. Any deaths since then had been of natural human means, and maybe this one was too.
Lapis sneezed again, three times in a row, and kept meowing as though she were still distressed by something. Gwenny was just as agitated, creating miniature wind funnels and knocking over the glass saltshakers on the tables as she gently flapped her wings.
This wasn’t natural. None of this felt natural.