“Now, tell us all about this boy,” her mom said after a minute.
“And all about New Orleans. Ed’s narrative was exciting but lacked some perspective,” her dad said.
“And don’t forget to tell us why it’s okay that our grandkitten was stuffed inside a duffel bag.”
Samantha laughed. “Okay, but we’re going to be here all night.”
“That’s okay. We’ll order dessert,” her dad said.
“Twice,” her mom chimed in with a grin.
Samantha started laughing and she wasn’t sure she was ever going to stop and it felt so good. Slowly over dinner and what ended up being triple desserts all around, she explained everything that had happened, and even about Freaky.
Finally the restaurant closed and they had to leave, but they continued talking in the car all the way home and late into the night before they all had to retire to bed.
Samantha went to her old room. They had decided that she would stay with them for a couple of weeks while she looked for a new apartment. And to be honest, they were all looking forward to some quality time together. Plus, despite what Ed had told her, Samantha still had her doubts that she was going to be welcomed back at her old precinct. In the back of her mind she kept thinking that there was a very real possibility she was going to have to leave Boston again if she wanted to find work as a cop.
She just knew there was no way she was going back to San Francisco or New Orleans. She’d had her fill of the particular crazy both those places had to offer. Maybe she’d opt for somewhere nice and laid-back. Hawaii sounded good.
Her old bedroom held so many memories for her and she relived several of them as she got ready for bed, particularly the pivotal one when she had foresworn magic altogether and dripped her blood into the cross.
At last she lay down and forced herself to close her eyes. Her mind was still racing, though, and she had a hard time falling asleep, even with Freaky curled against her side purring and snoring all at the same time. It still amazed her that he’d managed to take on such a life of his own that she could no longer disperse his energy. It would make it harder to hide him when she wanted, but she was still actually quite glad.
“You’re a real boy now,” she whispered to him. Fortunately, though, he still didn’t come with the higher-maintenance functions of a real boy such as injuries. She could only imagine trying to explain that one to a veterinarian.
It was far into the night before she was finally able to fall asleep.
When she rose in the morning, she dressed for her day, feeling butterflies in her stomach. She left Freaky in her bedroom and then headed downtown. When she parked she said a silent prayer before getting out of her car.
Samantha walked back into her old precinct, fear prickling at the back of her mind. The last time she had been there, it was far from a happy experience. Ed had reassured her, though, that things would be different, that everyone was willing to welcome her back with open arms. She hadn’t asked him just how many of those arms he’d had to twist to guarantee that that would be the case.
She’d spoken briefly over the phone with Captain Roberts the night before and he had reassured her that, yes, they wanted her back and her badge and gun were waiting to be collected the next morning in his office. Still, she couldn’t help wondering if it was all some sort of mistake, if she’d get there and people would have changed their minds about having her around.
She should have made Ed come in with her, but he’d said he had a doctor’s appointment that couldn’t wait. Personally she wondered if he just didn’t want to be there in case there were unexpected fireworks.
She walked into the hallway and was surprised that she didn’t see anyone around. Normally there were officers busy heading in all directions. Something seemed off about the whole thing. It was unnaturally quiet as well. Had they heard she was coming and made themselves scarce? She really wasn’t sure how long she wanted to be working in a department where most of the other cops avoided her like the plague. When she finally entered the squad room, she was tense, braced for anything.
Anything but what she saw.
Every officer was standing there beneath a huge banner that proclaimed .
She blinked in shock and then her eyes found Ed’s. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“Surprise!” he said.
Everyone began to applaud and then to cheer. Captain Roberts approached her with her old badge and gun in hand. She felt a lump in her throat as she accepted them from him.
“The way we figure it, every department needs a secret weapon. We’re just glad we found ours,” he said with a grin.
“I don’t understand. I thought no one here wanted anything to do with me.”
He shrugged. “I told you to give it some time. When Ed came around, it was like opening the floodgate.” He chuckled. “Course it doesn’t hurt that since you’ve been gone there’ve been a couple of cases that we definitely could have used your expertise on.”
She nodded. “Well, whatever the reason, I’m grateful,” she said.
“I’m sorry this was so long coming.”
He stepped back and the other officers swarmed around her, patting her back, shaking her hand. A few of them even hugged her.
“Drinks tonight at O’Doul’s in honor of Samantha!” someone shouted.
Ed rolled his eyes. “Well, there go my and Vanessa’s plans to take you out to dinner tonight.”
Samantha smiled. “There’ll be plenty of time for that. When was the last time any of these guys even asked me to go out celebrating?”
He shrugged. “That’s what you get for being so darn unlikable.”
She smiled at him.
“Hey, don’t forget the cake!” someone shouted.
The crowd parted and someone wheeled a cart up with a large cake on it that said . There were some unlit candles on it.
She grinned.
“Okay, who forgot the matches?” the guy with the cake shouted.
“Don’t worry, boys. I’ve got this,” Samantha said.
She snapped her fingers and the candles lit.
There were gasps all around. She stepped forward, stared at the cake for a long moment, and then bent low and blew out the candles.
There was more cheering and anyone who hadn’t already patted her back surged forward to do so.
Great, you know they’re going to want you to do that at all the parties from now on, Ed said, thinking the thoughts at her.
As long as they keep inviting me to the parties, I’m good with it, she thought back. Then with a happy start, she realized that she truly was.
The rest of the day was crazy. Captain Roberts needed her to fill out some paperwork. Ed made a great show of reintroducing her to her desk, then took almost fiendish glee in piling it high with open-case files.
“So this is why you really missed me,” she finally quipped.
Everyone who hadn’t been able to make it to her welcome party dropped by at some point during the day to say hello. Then, when it was quitting time, she was swept up by a crowd of people heading for the bar down the street.
Samantha limited herself to soda, but no one cared what she was drinking as long as her glass stayed full. She realized that there was so much she had missed out on in life because she had always kept herself so closed off, and the simple joy of blowing off some steam with her coworkers was a new experience, one she vowed she’d repeat.
Ed left early to get home to Vanessa after making Samantha promise that she’d let them take her out to dinner later in the week. She knew that sooner or later all the attention would die down, but she decided to enjoy it while it lasted.
If the guys had had their way, the party would have lasted all night at O’Doul’s. As it was she managed to bow out at midnight. She made it back to her parents’ home and tumbled into bed in her old room, where Freaky already was asleep. He glared at her for waking him and she grabbed him and hugged him close as she fell asleep.
S
he slept through the night without a single nightmare and in the morning she woke with a smile. She and Anthony had made plans to do a late breakfast together at Red’s in Salem. It was the first time they were going to have seen each other since parting ways in New Orleans, and she could hardly wait.
Driving into Salem felt different this time. There were no witches to fight, no good-byes to say, and the past could no longer haunt her as it once had done. A burden seemed to lift off her shoulders and she felt truly free. It was such a relief, such a blessed feeling, that she wanted to sing out loud. She actually flipped on the radio. The Eagles’ song “Witchy Woman” came on a moment later. She laughed and then began to sing along for joy. The world was a new place. A song she would have shunned before for all the pain and guilt it would have reminded her of was now instead something to celebrate.
She parked on one of the streets ringing Salem Common, got out of her car, and drank in the sights and sounds. She walked slowly up Essex Street, smiling at all the shop windows filled with their touristy witch paraphernalia. For the first time she was able to see it as others saw it and not as a mocking reminder of her own grisly past.
At last she turned the corner that led to Red’s. It was appropriate that she and Anthony were meeting at the same restaurant where they had first met. She glanced at her watch; she was actually a couple of minutes late. She’d taken her time strolling down the street when she hadn’t expected to. When she got there she was shocked to see a sign on the door that said the restaurant was closed that morning for a private event.
She stood for a second, feeling deeply disappointed and a bit unsettled. Why had Anthony not called to tell her and to suggest an alternative meeting place? He was usually quite punctual and she had a hard time believing she had beaten him there. He couldn’t be having second thoughts about them, could he?
Maybe with the danger finally now past he’d had time to think and realized he just couldn’t be with her. She had started to turn away when the door opened and a waitress stepped out. “Come on in, miss,” the lady said.
Samantha pointed to the sign. “You’re having a private event.”
“Yes, and I believe it’s in your honor,” the woman said with a smile.
Startled, Samantha followed her inside. Anthony stood up from the table, their table, and gave her a smile that melted her heart. She moved quickly over to him and he kissed her heartily before waving her to a seat.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Well, I realized that it can be so hard to get a table here in the mornings and so noisy with all the crowd, so I rented the place for the morning. It seemed the thing to do somehow. After everything, I thought we could use a little peace and quiet and time for just us.”
“You are a genius.”
“And don’t you forget it,” he said with a grin.
The waitress came and put food on the table. There were eggs and bacon and sausage and heaping plates of their famous pancakes.
“It would take an army to eat all this,” Samantha observed.
“Well, then, we’d better get started,” he said with a grin.
The food was even better than she remembered and she was surprised at how hungry she actually was. For the first time maybe in her entire life she actually felt at peace. It was a unique feeling and she savored it even as she savored every bite.
“So, I hear that you met my parents,” she said.
He nearly choked on his bite of pancake. “I thought I was going to kill Ed. That had to be one of the most awkward few hours of my life.”
“Well, they liked you, so you don’t have to worry too much. My dad psychoanalyzed you, of course, but the results were mostly favorable.”
“Mostly? Great,” he said.
“I wouldn’t worry. Mom thought you were nice.”
“Oh, nice. That’s even better, because that’s what every guy likes to hear,” he said sarcastically.
She laughed at him and continued eating. At last they both began to slow down and the waitress came back and cleared away all the dishes and refilled their coffee mugs.
Samantha sat back with a contented sigh. “That was really good.”
“Yes, it was. You remember the last time we were here together?”
She nodded. She had seen him before she left for San Francisco. It had been a much more somber occasion.
“Do you remember what I told you?” he asked, smiling wistfully.
“How could I forget? You said we had a good story. You know. Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy tries to kill girl.”
“Yes, but it needs a better ending,” he said.
“Boy rescues girl. That’s pretty good.”
“I’ve got a better one. Boy proposes to girl.”
Samantha’s heart began to race. Anthony was no longer smiling. He was dead serious.
“Girl says yes,” she whispered.
A moment later they were in each other’s arms, laughing, crying all at once. He kissed her, and the world swept away. This was what was real. This was what mattered. It made all the pain and sacrifice worth it.
At last Anthony pulled away. He reached into his pocket and took out a ring box. “I, um, had this made for you a while ago.”
He opened the box and inside was a thick gold band with a diamond on it.
“You had it made for me?” Samantha breathed as he took it out of the box.
“Yeah, and believe me, it took some doing to find a jeweler who would do it to spec.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Well, the band has a hollow core that runs all the way around. Before it was sealed shut underneath the diamond, I filled the core with a few drops of my blood. So this way, you’d have a circle of my blood always surrounding you, always protecting you.”
He slid the ring on her finger and the metal felt warm to the touch. “I can feel it,” she whispered in awe.
He kissed the ring on her finger. “That’s my love, my life, everything that I am.”
“It’s perfect.”
She kissed him with tears of joy streaming down her cheeks. In all her life, Samantha had never dreamed that a circle of blood could be so beautiful or make her feel so protected and so very, very loved.
Don’t miss the first novel in the
Witch Hunt series by Debbie Viguié,
The Thirteenth Sacrifice
Available from Signet.
Everywhere she looked there were shadows. Somewhere far away a man was chanting in a deep voice, and with each word a new cut appeared on her arms, until she was bleeding from a dozen wounds. The blood rolled down her arms and dripped off the tips of her fingers to land in pools on the floor. She began to shake.
“Turn!” It was one of the grown-ups, the one with the pale blue eyes.
She spun slowly, the blood continuing to drip onto the floor, forming a circle around her.
She stopped when she had gone all the way around. She began to feel faint and the smell of her own blood made her sick.
“It must be unbroken.”
She looked down at the floor, at the blood spatters that formed the circle. Except it wasn’t perfect; there were three spots where the line was broken.
The man stopped chanting and a moment later several women started a different chant.
“Close it—now.”
She stared down in terror at the breaks in the circle. The circle kept her safe. The circle protected her from what was outside, but only if it was unbroken. A sulfurous smell filled her nostrils and she could hear screams nearby. She began to spin in a circle again, trying to drip blood on the gaps, but no matter how hard she tried, the blood went everywhere but where she wanted it to go.
She started to get dizzy and she thought she was going to fall down, but she had to stay inside the circle and she had to finish it. The screams grew closer and she didn’t know what made them.
“You will die!”
She began to scream herself, trying to block out the othe
r screams. She dug her fingernails into her arms, tearing at her skin until the blood flowed faster and fell all around her. Two gaps left.
She heard the sound of claws scratching the ground, running toward her.
One gap left.
Growling and snarling, they were upon her, on every side. She shook her hands, watching her own blood fly through the air, covering her, the ground, the things beyond the circle with red eyes, and then the last gap was closed.
And something hit the circle and sent shock waves through the air and the screaming got louder.
• • •
Samantha Ryan shrieked and sat up in bed. Sweat covered her and she could still smell the blood from her dreams. She switched on the lamp on her end table and saw that she had scratched several deep grooves into her arms, and her sheets were bloody.
She wrapped her bleeding arms around herself and began to rock back and forth. “Just a nightmare, just a nightmare,” she told herself over and over again.
Only she knew it wasn’t a nightmare. They never were. It was another repressed memory from her childhood, bubbling to the surface to haunt her and shatter the peace she had tried so hard to achieve and hold on to.
Finally she got up and made her way to the bathroom and did her best to stanch the flow of blood. The scratches were across the insides of her lower arms. Cat scratches—that’s what she’d tell anyone who asked. Scratches from a phantom cat who didn’t exist, who got blamed for a lot she didn’t want to have to explain.
Once she got the bleeding stopped, she applied Neosporin to the cuts. As her fingers stroked the scratches, she fought the urge to mutter a healing incantation over them. The pain was great but not unbearable. Far better to feel the pain.
She reached up to touch the cross she wore around her neck. It wasn’t good to wear it to bed. She risked injuring herself while she was unconscious. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to remove it. Her arms began to throb and she said a silent prayer as she swallowed some Tylenol.