The Thirteenth Sacrifice (13 page)

“Where did you see this symbol?”

“That was from our first victim. Her body turned up three months ago without any type of pentagram, so nobody made the connection right away. The other girls have slightly different versions of the same thing carved somewhere on their bodies. It’s all part of the process.”

He turned pale. “Do you expect me to go to the governor with this? He’d laugh me out of his office. And if the press gets wind of it, our little troubles are going to escalate far beyond our means to control them.”

“I don’t want you to tell anyone. It takes someone with experience, someone like me, to understand the
significance of that symbol.” She took a deep breath. “If the other side discovers that we know what it means, they’ll realize we have someone on the inside.”

“Inside?” he asked, arching a brow.

She bit her lip and nodded. “I’m going undercover, like you asked me to.”

Relief and fear mixed in his gaze and after a moment he looked away from her. “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered hoarsely.

She stood up and tapped the symbol. “This says otherwise. Unless there are more bodies we haven’t found, several more women are going to be killed. Each one is a point of the star. And odds are good that whoever they’re trying to resurrect is not a candidate for humanitarian of the year.”

“What about Kyle?”

“He’s part of this whole mess, but not one of the eight. He wasn’t a sacrifice. If I move fast, hopefully there won’t be any more sacrifices.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay. How do you want to play this? I can let Salem PD know you’re coming.”

“No. The fewer people who know, the safer I’ll be. If you need to reach me, send Ed to Red’s Sandwich Shop. I’ll check in there most mornings.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll need a day to get some things in order and then I’ll be going in.”

“Will that give you enough time to stop them?” he asked.

“I hope so, for all our sakes.”

“I’ll get some paperwork taken care of for you.”

“Good.”

She turned and started out the door, then stopped. “Do you know anyone who can recommend a discreet tattoo artist?”

“Why?” he asked, startled.

“If I’m going to be a witch again, then there’s something I must do,” she told him.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Like you said, someone has to go in and it should be me,” she said.

Even if it kills me.

Samantha sat down in the chair at the back of the tiny shop and did her best not to betray the powerful emotions within her. The proprietor, a gentleman covered in a hodgepodge of ink ranging from tattoos of tribes he could not possibly be descended from to depictions of animals of prey and the obligatory girl’s name on his bicep, sat down next to her.

“Little lady, what can I do for you today? Nice little butterfly, heart maybe?” he asked patronizingly.

Samantha smiled at him. “Actually I had something a little more exotic in mind.”

He lifted an eyebrow in surprise. “Really?”

“Really,” she said, handing him a slip of paper that showed a series of lines and curves surrounded by a circle.

He took it, looked at it for a moment, and blanched. “I don’t think so,” he said, standing abruptly and dropping the paper in her lap.

“
I
think so.” She contradicted him, allowing her voice to become softer. It had the desired effect. He began to pace and sweat beaded on his brow. Slowly she pulled off her shirt, so that she was wearing only her sports bra. “Right here,” she said, indicating a patch of skin near her heart.

He glanced at her and then took a closer look. “You had a tattoo there at some point, had it removed?”

“Very good.”

“Lady, look, you don’t want this tattoo. Trust me. This is some serious shit, bad juju. I can give you a nice pentagram or something if you want to do the whole Wiccan thing.”

“I’m not a Wiccan,” she said. “The pentagram is a symbol stolen from the Christians—why would I want to put something like that on my body?”

“Why did you get your tattoo removed?” he asked, clearly trying to work up the courage to deal with what she was asking.

“It was a little hard to hide who I was while wearing it,” she said evenly, staring him straight in the eye.

If anything, he grew more agitated. “And who are you?” he asked.

Samantha picked up the piece of paper and turned it around so the symbol was facing him. “This is who I am.”

He groaned deep in his throat. “Please don’t kill me.”

Samantha continued to stare at him. “Do as I say and I won’t.”

He nodded and then set to work. She watched him closely. The symbol had belonged to one group only, and most of its members were dead; not even the police files held pictures of the symbol. Somewhere, somehow, he had seen one on a living person. Where, though, and on whom? It was possible he had seen one years before, but she didn’t think that was the case. The lines inside the circle were an ancient script and when the letters were combined in the pattern Samantha had given him, it meant
I am as god
. It was the epitome of blasphemy, and it pained her that she was having it put back.

He paused and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
His hands were shaking and his breathing was shallow. She frowned, not wanting his hand to slip while he was working.

“Relax,” she said, deepening her voice and pushing the words out.

He looked up at her, fear in his eyes. “That’s easy for you to say, lady,” he muttered.

She reached out her hand and put it on the top of his head. He jerked in alarm, but she didn’t move. She pushed energy through her hand until the skin on his forehead was warm, which she knew would produce a calming effect.

“You are doing well,” she said, dropping her voice even lower.

He nodded slightly, his pupils dilating, and then returned to work.

When he was finished she nodded her approval even though her blood ran cold to see the familiar symbol once again on her flesh. Everything that was in her rebelled and she wanted to claw it off. She forced herself to smile at him, though. He gave her a tentative smile in return.

She needed to find out what he knew about the symbol. She took a deep breath, and thought about her mother and what she would have done to get the information she wanted.

Samantha grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into the wall. “Tell me where you’ve seen one of these tattoos,” she hissed.

“I can’t! She’ll kill me!”

“And what do you think I’ll do to you if you don’t?” she asked, squeezing her fingers tighter around his throat.

It would be so easy to kill him.

She gasped as the thought entered her mind. She
dropped him and he slid to the floor, clutching his throat. She took a step back, shaking herself. This was bad, dangerous. She had no business going undercover, not when after only a couple of hours she was slipping into old habits, deadly habits.

He didn’t seem to notice her sudden uncertainty. He raised a hand, begging her. “Please, please. I’ll tell you.”

She dropped into a crouch so she could look him in the eye. The terror that was there fueled something dark inside that she had tried for so long to suppress. She could feel the adrenaline racing through her body, making her feel strong, powerful, aggressive.

“Where?”

“It was a woman. Long blond hair. She had me give her that tattoo about a year ago. She was bad news. She got inside my head, knew things she shouldn’t. She told me she’d kill me if I ever revealed it to anyone else, or even thought of giving someone else the mark.”

Samantha studied him. It sounded like he was describing Bridget. If that was true, then the woman was even more formidable than Katie had let on.
Bridget must have done a spell on him to make him so terrified of her.

“Did she have a name?”

“No. She paid cash. I’ve never seen her before or since.”

“This symbol,” Samantha told him, “is who I was raised. The woman you saw does not have the right to wear it. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

“Now, you’re not going to tell anyone about meeting me. But you are going to call this number if you see anyone else wearing this tattoo,” she said, pressing a card into his hand. “Do you understand?”

He nodded again.

She stood. “And just so you know that
I’m
the one
you need to fear crossing…” She waved her hand, and fire appeared on his hands and arms.

He screamed and batted at himself.

The fire wasn’t real. It was only in his mind. She had touched him and put the suggestion of his greatest fear into his mind and he had done the rest, imagining what wasn’t there.

She leaned down and blew, snuffing out the imagined flames. He collapsed onto the floor, sobbing.

She stood up and walked outside. Once in her car, she leaned her head for a moment on the steering wheel as she struggled to regain control of herself.

After a moment, she left the tattoo shop and headed home. There she packed some clothes and a few other things she would need. She next gathered anything related to her life as a cop and put it all into a box.

Later that evening she drove over to her parents’ home, with the box on her car’s front seat.

When she walked in the door, her mother took one look at her face and hugged her even as her father grabbed the box to take to his office. Once he had stowed it away he returned and joined them in the living room.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“I have to. What they’re doing, what they’re about to do—”

“We know,” her mom said.

She stayed long past the time she’d planned to go home. Fear gnawed at her that she would never see them again, or worse, that when she did she’d be someone they wouldn’t want to know.

In the morning she woke, grateful that there’d been no nightmares, at least none that she could remember. Ed
showed up at her door looking like he hadn’t slept at all and handed her a cup of coffee.

“We’ve got things arranged for you,” he said, handing her a driver’s license. The picture was hers. The name was Samantha Castor.

“So that’s your original last name?”

“Yes.”

“You sure you want to use it?” he asked.

“Names have power. That one is associated with a lot of dark things and if someone does enough digging, they’ll figure that out.”

“Then why still go by Samantha?”

She followed him out to the car, locking the door on her life, and chose her words carefully. “Same reason. Names have power. I can’t risk losing myself completely.”

It was only partially true. If someone knew your name, they could cast a variety of spells on you. Knowing her birth name would allow them to do that. And knowing the name she went by now would also allow them to do that. But mixing the two, new first name and old last name, created a false name that wouldn’t allow someone to curse her by using it.

She tossed her bags in his trunk and took one last look at her house.

“Okay,” he said as they climbed into his car. He handed her an envelope with papers in it. “So, you have an account at the bank in that name and a reservation at the Hawthorne Hotel for a week, although we’re all hoping you won’t need to be there that long.”

“Most undercover operations don’t play out overnight,” she reminded him grimly. “Not unless they go completely south.”

“Yeah, well, this one needs to be finished quickly.”

“Any more bodies discovered?”

“Not yet,” he said, his voice tense. “But I figure it’s early yet. Sure you don’t want me to drive you to Salem?”

She nodded. “I don’t want you anywhere near unless there’s an emergency.”

“Then Red’s Sandwich Shop. I got the message. One last thing.” He handed her a cell phone. “Samantha Castor’s phone. Charger’s in the envelope. Do me a favor and don’t be Samantha Ryan. Keep the damn thing on.”

She nodded, her throat suddenly tight as she slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. Ed had no idea how hard it was going to be not to lose Samantha Ryan.

He drove her to the airport. Once there, she retrieved her bags from the trunk of his car and made her way to the taxi stand outside baggage claim. Taking a taxi in from the airport ensured that anyone who saw her arrive would think she’d flown in from California, where she was going to say she’d been living with a distant relative.

If anyone even asks
, she thought. It was a house of cards she was setting up. It would hold and look nice as long as no one decided to blow too hard on it.

The taxi driver talked the entire way to the hotel and she let him. It kept her from thinking too much about what was about to happen even as her stomach tightened into painful knots. When they crossed into Salem itself she felt herself stiffen. Everywhere she looked there were memories.

When he pulled up outside the Hawthorne Hotel, it took all of her strength to get out. Bags in hand, she forced herself to march inside. Reprieve was over. She had to be in character now. And Samantha Castor would believe that she owned the place.

She checked in at the tiny front desk to the right of the door. The lobby was as she remembered it, with ornate yet comfortable furnishings.

She went up to her room. It was large and comfortable, with a sitting area and a Victorian look to the furniture.

When she had put her things away she headed back downstairs. She needed to do one last thing before attempting to locate and infiltrate the coven responsible for the human sacrifices.

Downstairs she had the front desk call a taxi for her and she waited in the lobby until it arrived. Once in the car she gave the driver the address for her mother’s house in Danvers, which she hadn’t set foot in since the day of the massacre so many years before.

The city of Danvers had been called Salem Village before it changed its name in the eighteenth century and became separate from Salem. Many of the events of the witch trials had taken place in Danvers, and many of the sites were still viewable, including the house of Rebecca Nurse, who had been falsely accused of witchcraft and put to death despite an outpouring of public support for her.