The Thirteenth Sacrifice (14 page)

When Samantha was seven her mother took her there before her official initiation into the coven. Her hand tingled as she remembered the feel of the place, the history. She’d sliced open her palm with her dagger and offered her blood to the ghosts of the past so that they might help protect her.

It took years after she was adopted and consecrated herself to God before she stopped feeling like she was being watched and condemned by the very spirits whose help she had once implored.

When the driver finally turned down a tree-lined
street, Samantha felt sick inside and began to shake. She had played on this street as a child, though the games she had created were much darker than those of other children. The driver pulled up outside the house where she’d grown up.

It was a colonial with once stately columns that were now sadly in need of repair. Dusty, vacant eyes seemed to stare at her and vines littered the ground and crawled up any structure they could find.

“Are you sure this is the right address?” the driver asked, staring out his window with a dubious expression.

“Very sure,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“It looks deserted,” he noted.

She couldn’t argue with him there. It was, after all. Only the dead walked its floors, and she prayed fervently that she wouldn’t encounter any of them when she went inside.

“Call when you need a ride back,” the driver instructed, handing her his card after she paid him.

She nodded and stepped away from the taxi. The car lurched forward, tires screaming as if the driver couldn’t wait to leave the place behind. She didn’t blame him. She’d been trying to do the same for years.

She mounted the steps slowly, key in hand. Standing in front of the door, she stared at the tarnished brass door knocker. It was a demonic figure with a gaping mouth. It had always scared her as a child because she had once sworn that she saw it smile at her.

It was unbelievable to her that she was standing in front of the house that she had grown up in. In many ways it was more haunted for her than the house that had belonged to her high priestess, the one where the massacre had occurred. Now within two days she would have revisited them both.

She stood there, emotions colliding within her. Would the house remember her? Would it fail to recognize her because of the ways in which she had changed? Or, perhaps worse, would it recognize her instantly because she hadn’t changed enough?

She inserted the key in the lock and then had to turn it hard to get the ancient mechanism to move after years of being frozen in place.

Kind of like me.

The door finally opened and she stepped inside. The stench of dust and decay wafted over her, forcing her to cover her mouth and nose with her hand.

She remembered how surprised her adopted father had been later when she told him that she didn’t want anything from her house. She abandoned her clothes, her magic tools, everything. Once the estate had been settled and the house had become hers, people had urged her to sell it. She hadn’t done so; she couldn’t bring herself to deal with it even though it meant she’d be able to get rid of it. Instead she had let it sit vacant, slowly decaying. She had at one time considered burning it to the ground and salting the earth afterward. Now that she needed some of the things inside, she was glad she hadn’t.

She stepped forward through the dust and the memories. Here in her mother’s house there were no protections, no alarms, no booby traps. Their house had never been used for a coven meeting. Here they had been able to masquerade as normal people whenever they needed to.

Her mother had always been good at that. She’d been a member of the PTA long after Samantha had been forced to leave school because she kept saying and doing inappropriate things. Most little girls cried when a
bully knocked them down. Samantha hadn’t cried; she’d blinded him. Things had only become worse when her mother severely punished her for using her powers publicly, though Samantha could tell she was actually thrilled and proud of what her daughter had done.

When witches go to school, little boys cry. When
witches go to school, bad girls die.

She’d often thought of that little boy, Marcus, and wondered what had happened to him. She’d overheard her mother talking to another member of the coven about “fixing” the problem. When she’d gotten older she’d prayed that fixing it meant they’d given him back his sight.

She climbed the stairs slowly, still wishing she was miles away. Because her mother wanted to live the appearance of an ordinary life, they had not kept any of the tools of their practice where others might see them. Everything that had to do with that part of their life was stored in the attic.

She reached the second floor landing and moved to a door on the far side. It was locked and the only key she had for the house would not open it. As a child she had taught herself how to pick it magically. As an adult, she knew how to do it manually. She pulled a small case from her purse, and moments later was swinging the door open to reveal a narrow flight of stairs leading up into darkness.

On the wall hung an ancient lantern, and after she had lit it she ascended the stairs, struggling to ignore the leaping shadows that danced in the fire’s light. One in particular seemed to take the form of a woman and she struggled not to look at it or think of it as welcoming her home.

Except for the dust, the attic was as she remembered
it. The single dingy window filtered the light as it came through so that even though it was still morning it felt like dusk. Boxes of junk, old furniture, and odds and ends were scattered around the space. She ignored them and moved to the far corner, where she found what she was looking for.

She had come to the house in Danvers specifically for the things inside an old steamer trunk with brass fittings that had been hers. She stared hard at the trunk. On the lid her initials, DC, had been carved, the last in a long line, a line she had sworn to herself would be broken.

Samantha’s hands shook as she slowly lifted the trunk’s lid and came face-to-face with her past. She felt a chill wash over her as she stared at the black cloak that lay on top. It was just a thing, black cloth cut into a certain pattern in order to hang a particular way. Across the country hundreds of theatergoers, Renaissance fair attendees, and prop houses had cloaks just like it. It was just a thing—there was nothing evil about black cloth, nothing sinister about a cloak. Like so many things in life, it wasn’t what an object was that was important, but instead what it was used for.

And the cloak had been used for evil. By her grandfather, by her mother, and by her. She closed her eyes, trying desperately to shut out the flood of memories that threatened to overwhelm her. The smell of blood filled her nostrils, a memory, nothing real. But the cloak was real and as her hand closed on it she could feel that evil washing over her, threatening to smother her.

Tears streaked down her cheeks as she stood slowly, pulling the cloak free of the trunk. She shook it out, dusty folds unfurling, and then with a remembered grace swiveled her wrists so that the cloak swirled about her for a moment before settling onto her frame.

She was two inches taller than she had been when last she’d worn it. It no longer touched the ground, but instead brushed against the tops of her feet. It had been too big on her when she was a child, but it fit perfectly now. Spiritually she had left it behind, but her body had continued to grow into it and it settled around her with a familiarity that chilled her.

She bent over the chest and drew forth a wicked-looking dagger, her athame, which she had forged herself when she was ten. She pulled it free of its sheath and the blade glistened. “Did you miss me?” she whispered, and almost without thinking she sliced open her palm, feeding the blade with her blood. She felt the pain in the wound and the resulting power that surged through the arm that held the blade.

“Careful, Samantha,” she breathed. She sheathed the blade and hung it on her belt. She removed a box from the trunk. Inside it were candles of different colors, a dozen different gemstones, and a male and female poppet, which the average person might mistake for voodoo dolls. In the hands of a Wiccan these items were powerful tools for healing, sympathetic magic, and the bringing of light. In the hands of a witch they were lethal. She set the box aside and continued searching in the trunk, pulling out the things that she would need.

Everything that she could remember as being hers was there. After a moment she sat back, lost in thought. She stroked the cloak absently as memories of that last day in the house trickled through her mind. She hadn’t taken her cloak or her athame to the coven ritual; that was why they were here, safely stored in the trunk. Why? She racked her brain, trying to remember.

After a few minutes she got up and moved a few feet, to the trunk that her mother had started using for her
things on the day she had given Samantha her old one. She opened the lid and her breath caught in her throat.

There, on top of everything, was a picture of her mother wearing her cloak but with the hood folded down, a stern look on her face. Her long black hair was pulled back and her dark eyes seemed to pierce right through Samantha. With a trembling hand she put aside the picture and dug into the trunk. A few minutes later she was able to confirm that her mother’s cloak and athame were missing.

She must have taken them with her that night. But why were mine left behind?
Samantha wondered.

She didn’t know. It was possible that even if she could remember leaving the house that night she still wouldn’t know why. If her mother had told her to leave them, she would have and wouldn’t have asked questions about it. Her mother had never liked explaining her actions to anyone, let alone to her twelve-year-old daughter.

Her mother had always been stern, demanding. Many in the coven had been that way. And Samantha had been raised to believe that she should take what she wanted and be strong as well. That was who she was going to have to be now, until she could put a stop to the plans of Bridget and the others.

Her mother would have wanted her to be a strong, courageous, fearless witch. And that was the role she had to play. She continued looking through her mother’s trunk, but in the end decided to take nothing from it. She didn’t want to risk interacting with any residual energy the items might contain. She’d already had enough nightmares about her mother and the coven to last a lifetime without accidentally conjuring a spirit or two.

Finished with gathering what she wanted, she made her way back down the stairs and snuffed out the light.
On the second-floor landing she turned to continue down to the first floor but felt an irresistible pull toward one of the rooms.

A moment later she was standing inside her bedroom.

The room was spartan in its austerity. A simple green comforter adorned the bed. On a shelf were a few weathered books. That was all. There were no toys, no posters, nothing to identify it as a child’s room.

As if drawn to the bed, she sat down slowly on it, grimacing at the dust. A memory stirred of hiding something under the mattress. She slipped a hand underneath it and after a few moments of feeling around she pulled out a small journal. She flipped it open and noted that many pages had been torn out, leaving only jagged little bits of paper to attest to their existence. On the first intact page she recognized her handwriting.

I know that I’m going to die.

The words chilled her. She couldn’t remember writing them. She skimmed through the rest, but there was nothing else. She hesitated for a moment and then put the journal back where she’d found it. She stood abruptly and left the room, shutting the door behind her.

She forced herself to go into her mother’s room next. She didn’t want to, but she needed to see whether there was anything in it she could use.

In a shoebox on the top shelf of the closet, she found several old papers, her mother’s passport, and three photographs. She recognized one with her grandfather right off. Another was of her, and the third was of a man with red hair whom she’d never seen before. She stared closely at it. He looked muscular and he had a strong jaw and deep blue eyes. She touched her own red hair and couldn’t help but wonder if the man in the photograph
was her father. A sudden surge of loneliness overwhelmed her and she clutched the picture tightly for a moment before replacing it in the box with the rest.

As she stood to leave the room, her gaze fell on her mother’s jewelry box. She walked over to the dresser, lifted the lid of the box, and stared inside. A necklace with a moon caught her eye and she slipped it into her pocket, then closed the box.

A few minutes later she had put everything she was taking with her in a bag and moved downstairs to wait for the taxi she had called to take her back to the Hawthorne. She knew she was ready. The transformation was complete.

She was no longer Samantha Ryan, detective and Christian.

She was Samantha Castor, last of a long line of ruthless witches, and she was pissed.

Fire. Screaming. There was blood everywhere, even on her. She clutched her athame in her hand. She had killed… who had she killed? Somebody. A woman ran past her, her throat half torn out, and made it a few more steps before collapsing on the floor. Long claws had shredded the back of her cloak and dug into the flesh beneath.

People were running for the stairs, but they never made it. She stood, terrified, watching the chaos. They who had always frightened her were now themselves enmeshed in unspeakable terror.

And there was something she had to do. If only she could remember.

Samantha awoke bathed in sweat but no blood this time. She shook as the horror of the memory took hold. It was just a glimmer, but she knew she’d been remembering the day of the massacre. The images faded, leaving behind only the memory of the screams and the terror she had felt.

She had spent the night before refamiliarizing herself with the tools of the witch. Now, in the pale light of dawn, she steeled herself for what she had to do next.