Circle of Blood (21 page)

She 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 other 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.

She straightened and looked at herself in the mirror. Green eyes that looked far too old to belong to her stared back. Her shoulder-length red hair was damp with sweat and she ducked her head under the faucet, letting the cold water wash away the last clinging tendrils of the nightmare memory.

A few minutes later she toweled her hair dry and walked back into her bedroom, where she looked at the clock. It was almost four in the morning. She knew from experience that she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, and that even if she could, she wouldn’t like what she saw. She stripped her bed, dumped the sheets in the washing machine, and then got ready for work.

Black pants went on first. A gray button-up shirt suited her mood. A small Swiss Army knife she’d carried with her since her first day on the job and her detective’s shield went into a pocket. She hesitated only a moment before clipping her holster onto her belt and sliding her gun inside it.

After leaving her house, Samantha drove downtown, parked, and headed to her favorite coffee shop. The city was just beginning to wake up and she savored the sights and sounds. Every city had its own character and Boston was no exception. The city that had witnessed so many historic events had not forgotten its past even as it pushed boldly forward into the future. It felt old and young all at once.

Just like me.

A jogger passed her, throwing an admiring glance her way. She ignored him. Samantha was twenty-eight but often felt much, much older. With her red hair and green eyes betraying her Irish heritage, a gift from the father she had never known, she caught the eyes of a lot of guys her age. It was admiration she found hard to reciprocate because they all seemed so very young and so very, very naive.

She walked into Jake’s Eats and settled into her usual booth. Claudia, the motherly brunette waitress who never forgot a customer, appeared with a glass of orange juice in her hand.

“Rough night, huh?”

Samantha smiled at her. “You could say that.”

“You’re in luck. We’ve got corned beef hash this morning.”

“Sounds like a winner.”

Claudia smiled, patted her on the shoulder, and headed back toward the kitchen. Samantha wrapped her hand around the glass of orange juice, feeling the cold of it against her fingers, inhaling the smells coming from the kitchen, feeling the squishiness of the red vinyl upholstery, and remembering, as always, her first visit to the restaurant.

She had been twelve and a police officer had brought her. It had seemed like a haven from the horrors of her childhood, and the bloodbath she had just witnessed. It was where she came whenever she needed to remember that the past was the past.
When I need to feel safe,
she thought, briefly closing her eyes.

She heard the chimes on the door and opened her eyes to see a man a few years older than she was, with short black hair, a square jaw, and a brown trench coat, and he was heading her way with a determined stride.

“Morning, Ed,” she said in greeting as he slid across from her into the booth.

“Samantha. I knew I’d find you here.”

“Did you call the house?”

“Yeah, and, surprise, you weren’t there.”

“You could have called my cell,” she said.

He rolled his eyes at her. “I could have, if you ever had it on.”

She resisted the urge to check, but knew he was probably right. Her cell phone spent more time off than it did on. She told people she was forgetful, but deep down she knew that she really just didn’t want to talk to anyone.

“I think you must be the worst partner I’ve ever had,” he grouched.

She smiled. “I’m the best partner you’ve ever had and you know it.”

He gave her a defiant look and then grabbed her orange juice. “Whatever,” he said as he took a swig. She had long before learned not to let his occasional lack of boundaries faze her. He knew she kept secrets from him, but he didn’t push. In exchange, she didn’t gripe when he mooched her food. It was a tenuous truce at best, but for two years it had worked well for both of them.

Ed was her second partner. Making detective so young hadn’t made her popular, and everyone knew that her family was close to the captain. Her first partner had spent more time griping about her age than helping her learn the ropes. It hadn’t mattered to him that she had a degree in criminal science, had worked her tail off, stepping up and taking responsibility wherever she could, and had earned high praise from her supervisors. The whole partnership had been a disaster. After three months Captain Roberts had assigned Ed to be her partner. Fortunately Ed had been willing to overlook her inexperience, and she had learned a lot from him. But she prided herself on also having taught him a thing or two.

“Why are you here, Ed?” she asked as she retrieved her orange juice.

“Why else? We’ve got a body—college coed turned up dead in her apartment off campus.”

“We’re not on duty for another couple of hours.”

“Yeah, but there’s some local color involved.”

Claudia reappeared with the promised corned beef hash. Samantha shoveled several forkfuls into her mouth as Ed grabbed a piece of her sourdough toast and headed for the door. She put money down on the table and followed him outside to his car. They drove for ten minutes in silence before parking outside an apartment complex.

“Local color” was what the other detectives called it when there was anything weird about a call. As soon as they walked inside the apartment, Samantha saw why the phrase had been applied.

A girl was standing, talking to a uniformed officer. Her hair was dyed an unnatural black, and she was dressed like a Goth, in a black velvet dress, black boots, and fishnet tights. Nearby, the crime scene photographer was taking pictures of the body of a young woman dressed in white who had a bloody pentagram drawn on her forehead.

When Samantha and Ed approached, the uniformed officer explained that the live girl was Katie Horn, that she lived there and had discovered the body. The dead girl was Camille. He then moved away.

Samantha turned to Katie and studied her, taking in everything from the pentagram necklace to the crystal ring on her finger.
Wiccan?

“What’s with the getup?” Ed asked.

“I’m a witch,” the girl said defiantly.

Wannabe.

Samantha suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. “When is your coven meeting?”

“I don’t have one. I’m a solitary practitioner.”

“What you are is full of crap,” Ed said. “You see, my partner here, she has witch-dar. If you were a witch, I would have known it ten minutes ago.”

Samantha sighed and contemplated kicking him, but he continued. “Friend of yours?” he asked, indicating the body.

“My roommate.”

“You don’t seem too shook up,” he noted.

The girl shrugged. “Didn’t know her until three weeks ago. I put an ad in the campus paper, and she was the only one who answered who wasn’t a freak.”

“Good one,” Ed said, as if she had just made a joke.

“Was she observant?” Samantha questioned.

“Huh?” Katie asked, a confused look on her face.

“Did she practice? Was she Wiccan? Pagan?” Samantha clarified.

“No, nothing like that. She was like Mormon or something.”

“And she didn’t have a problem with you being a . . . witch?” Ed asked, choking on the word.

“No, some people have, like, religious tolerance, you know,” Katie said, glaring at Ed.

“Right.” He snorted.

“Did she have a boyfriend?” Samantha interrupted.

“Yeah, Brad, a real frat brat,” Katie said, wrinkling her nose. “They just started going out.”

“Did she have any enemies?” Ed asked.

Katie shook her head. “She wasn’t interesting enough to have enemies.”

Samantha’s eyes swept the room. They weren’t going to get anything useful out of Katie. The way she stood, all defiant and rebellious posturing, was mostly a front, but if she knew something more, she had no plans to spill it.

Ed continued to question Katie while Samantha inspected the environment for anything of interest. Aside from the bloody pentagram on Camille’s forehead, there didn’t seem to be any blood on the body or anywhere else in the room.

She walked into Katie’s room, which had vampire- themed posters on the walls. Stacks of vampire and witch books cluttered her desk and nightstand. A handful of mythology and comparative lit textbooks teetered precariously on the edge of her desk.

A pentagram had been marked on the floor underneath and around her bed. Samantha raised an eyebrow and wondered if the guys Katie brought home found it as dark and sexy as Katie clearly did.

From there she moved to Camille’s room. By contrast, this room was all delicate pastels. A stuffed bear sat lonely in the middle of the neatly made bed. Posters of horses and kittens decorated the walls. If Camille really was Mormon, then Samantha was surprised that she would have tolerated a roommate like Katie. Her parents would no doubt have been even less thrilled.

“Why were you here, Camille?” she whispered to the room. She closed her eyes and could almost feel the younger woman’s spirit, her essence.

She opened her eyes and shook herself hard. She moved over to Camille’s desk and went through the drawers, finding only school supplies. The textbooks on the desk were neatly stacked and revealed that Camille had been taking biology, chemistry, and French literature.

After gathering all the names and information they could, an hour later they left the scene. Once in Ed’s car, Samantha’s irritation with him returned. “I don’t like it when you do that.”

“Get sarcastic with the suspects? You know I can’t help myself.”

“Not that.”

“What, say you have witch-dar?”

“Yes.”

“But you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Okay, was she a witch?”

“No!”

“Was she a Wiccan?”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“I don’t know. I think she might have been—after all, there were all those candles around,” he said.

She couldn’t tell whether he was serious or he was baiting her. “You saw that apartment. There was no place she could cast a proper circle, not easily.”

“Maybe she worships outside.”

“In the dirt and the mud? Hardly.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

“Let’s just say her boots weren’t made for walking.”

“Okay, but the candles . . .”

“All black. She’s a Goth. You know, darkness, death, tragedy. Wiccans celebrate the whole cycle—birth, life, death. Not just one aspect. Besides, you can’t do candle magic with all black candles.”