The Thirteenth Sacrifice (28 page)

“Witch!” the little boy screamed, continuing to point at the tree.

The man who had been walking in front of him turned around. “Where?” he shouted.

The little boy pointed more emphatically.

With a shout the man ran toward the tree and slammed into it, punching at the wind sock and the tree itself.

Samantha stared in amazement. It was just like watching the woman attack the mannequin the day before. What was it Ed had said about the people who were killing those they thought were witches? They seemed to have just gone crazy.

Next to her, Samantha could feel Karen shudder. “There’s witches everywhere,” she whispered. “Why won’t they leave me alone?”

Alarm bells went off in Samantha’s mind. “Karen, what are you talking about?”

“I hate them, you know. It’s because of them that Wiccans can’t practice in peace.”

“Then why did you become one of them?”

“They promised me…” Karen trailed off, her eyes fixed on something that Samantha couldn’t see. “It doesn’t matter now. It never mattered. I have to kill them all. They’re evil and they must be removed from the earth. They are a scourge upon it.”

“Karen, what’s gotten into you?” Samantha asked, trying to ignore the emotions that raged within her. The kid continued to scream and the man continued to attack the tree and the witch wind sock. “You’re a Wiccan. Wiccans don’t kill people.”

“I’m not a Wiccan. Not anymore, and it’s all their
fault. They’re going to have to pay for that. And everything else they’ve done.”

“What else have they done?” Samantha pushed.

The man’s shouting grew more frenzied and the child’s screaming reached new heights.

Something’s wrong with them
.
They’re hallucinating, paranoid, seeing things that aren’t there. And they’re trying to kill witches. Just like the people who’ve been killing the women they thought were witches.

Just like the mob that attacked Katie.

Too bad they failed.

Samantha blinked. Her own feelings of hatred were beginning to rage out of control. She had a sudden insane urge to help the man vanquish the tree. After all, what if it was a witch who had glamoured herself to look like a tree? It was slender, about five feet tall; it could be a witch. The boy saw it and that was good enough for her. He was smart—he knew the bogeyman existed.

Karen was muttering to herself and Samantha had the unnerving feeling that she was watching the woman disintegrate before her very eyes.
And so am I.

She struggled to focus. “Karen, have people around you been seeing witches?”

“Yes,” the woman replied, ceasing her muttering long enough to utter the word.

“For how long?”

“Dunno. A week… ? More?”

Samantha could feel her shoulders bunching up with tension. “Were you in Boston at the Manor Inn a few nights ago, when that group in the hotel lobby killed those witches?”

Karen nodded. “Naomi said I should go. She wouldn’t tell me why. She just told me to touch a couple of people and then leave.”

“And you never found out why she wanted you to do that?”

Karen shook her head. “I didn’t know Naomi was going to get killed. She was my friend. She promised to help me.”

“What did she promise to do?” Samantha pushed.

Karen’s eyes suddenly widened. “Witches!” she squeaked.

Samantha spun around, but no one was there. She turned back just as Karen collapsed.

Samantha half caught her and lowered her to the ground. Karen was staring past her at something only she could see. Her lips moved.

“It’s her.” Her voice was barely audible.

“Who?”

Suddenly Karen’s body convulsed and Samantha jumped back as a foul-smelling black liquid began to ooze from her eyes, ears, and nose. She coughed and flecks of it appeared on her lips.

Samantha dropped to her knees next to Karen, her hands fluttering nervously in the air. She didn’t know what to do to help her. She hadn’t the faintest clue what the black substance was or how to extract it.

Around her the cacophony grew until she wanted to scream at everyone that she needed quiet to think.

“Somebody call an ambulance!” she shouted.

But no one was listening. Instead two guys were trying to pull the first one off the tree. He just kept screaming and hitting at them. And then the three of them were on the ground, fighting one another.

“Everyone’s gone insane,” she said. “Including me.”

She glanced at Karen.
She’s a witch. I should kill her.

The thought came unbidden and filled her with a quiet kind of horror. Karen wasn’t the kind of person
who deserved to be killed. She was just in love with someone who didn’t love her back and had gotten in over her head in a desperate attempt to remedy her situation.

Rip her head off.

“No!” Samantha screamed to the impulses that pushed her to do something to Karen.

This all started when she touched me.

She stared down at Karen and then lifted her eyes to the man and the boy.
And they touched her. And the woman who attacked the mannequins. And the people in the hotel.

Everyone who’s touched her has turned violent against witches.

But she’d seen Autumn and Jace touch her and neither of them had been infected.
It must only work on people who already are predisposed to mistrust or dislike witches. Like me.

She looked down. Karen was thrashing harder, more of the toxic black sludge oozing out of her body. She was right. The witches had done this to her. She was Typhoid Mary, infected with a mind disease that turned ordinary people into witch haters, witch killers. And now the disease she had unwittingly been spreading had caught up with her.

Karen’s entire body jerked once more, hard. Then it went totally slack. Looking into her eyes, Samantha realized that Karen was dead.

But not before she had infected her.

Samantha’s first instinct was to call 911 and then get out of there before anyone showed up. She took a deep breath and forced herself to try to think rationally despite the heightened emotions that were rushing through her.

Karen’s body was still carrying the infection, and if Samantha just left, the chance was great that others would touch her and the madness would continue to spread. She had to try to purge it before the authorities arrived. She squatted beside the body, grateful that everyone’s attention was still on the others up the path who were screaming about witches.

She placed her hand on Karen’s chest, much as she had with Katie, and began to push, willing the destructive energy out of her. The energy was stubborn, though, and didn’t want to leave. It had worked its way into her organs at a fundamental level. Had Karen been alive there would have been no way Samantha could have driven it out. But she was dead and Samantha didn’t have to worry about the damage she was causing to the body as she forced the energy to the surface. It came out as more black ooze leaking from the eyes, ears, and nose. It was thick and foul smelling, and it made Samantha sick.

Finally she had pushed it all out. She set the black goo on fire, regretting that it would damage Karen’s body. But it was better this way, safer. And a coroner would never have figured out the actual cause of death anyway. Finished, she turned to look at the men and the boy affected by the toxin. She could feel it poisoning her brain, changing the chemicals being released. She didn’t know how to fight it in herself or how to drive it out of them without killing them.

The best she could do was to incapacitate and isolate them. She stepped away from Karen’s body and moved swiftly to the others. She touched the child on the shoulder first and he crumpled to the ground, asleep. Next she surveyed the tangled mess of limbs of the men, who had begun fighting one another. She swiftly reached out and touched each of them and they too fell asleep.

Then she moved to a gawking woman a little farther away. “Listen to me,” Samantha said, deepening her voice and forcing the hypnotic sound to flow over the other woman. “These people have some kind of virus. Do not touch them. Call nine-one-one and tell them that these people need to be restrained and that no one should touch them without protective gear. Do you understand?”

The woman nodded wordlessly and reached for her phone.

As soon as the call connected, Samantha turned and ran as swiftly as she could back to her hotel. She needed to be alone, where she couldn’t infect anyone else, while she figured out how to purge the toxin from her system.

In her room she sat down on the floor, forcing herself to breathe slowly and evenly. She took stock of what was happening inside her body, trying to figure out how the toxin worked so she could learn to purge it safely or at
least render it inert. There were spells that could be undone only by the person who cast them, but the great majority of magic could be undone by anyone with the skill, knowledge, and power to do so.

It wasn’t just energy that had been sent into her system. It had been shaped into something.
It really is like a virus,
she realized. Hallucinations, paranoia, and violent outbursts would be three of the symptoms. After a half hour of trying to analyze it, she gave up. She knew a lot about physics, and some biology, but this was way beyond her.

And she realized in a flash that whoever had engineered the spell had to be not only a witch but also a doctor.

She put in a call to the only doctor she knew and could trust: the coroner.

“Hello?” he answered.

“George, it’s Samantha,” she said tersely.

“Samantha! Excellent timing! I think I just found your other victim.”

“From last night?”

“What? No. They haven’t brought that poor girl in yet. I’m talking about the missing one.”

“They did find the girl from last night, though?” she asked, racing to process what he’d said.

“Yeah. Didn’t Ed fill you in this morning?”

“No,” she said, her hand tightening around the phone.

“Oh, well, you might want to give him a call. But first let me tell you what I found. I went back through my files and found nothing. So I made some calls. Six weeks ago a girl was pulled out of the Charles River. Coroner who looked at her labeled it a suicide. She was listed as a Jane Doe; clothes she was wearing indicated she was possibly homeless. Case closed and that was that. Well, it
turns out she did have a mark, on the sole of her foot. I had him fax me a copy of the picture, and I’m sure it was an octogram. I’m having him send me the whole file now.”

“Thanks.” She was right. That left one more victim before the resurrection.

“Now, why are you calling me?”

“I need to pick your brain about toxins and how they work.”

“Sure… hold on a second.”

She could hear him put the phone down and voices in the background. A minute later he picked it back up. “They just brought in the latest girl. I need to go. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

“Oh,” she said, hearing panic edge into her voice.

“Is it an emergency?” he asked, seeming to notice.

“It can wait a little while,” she said. She heard Ed’s voice in the background. “But do me a favor and put Ed on,” she said.

“You got it.”

Seconds later her partner answered the phone. “Why didn’t you call me when you found the latest victim?” she asked.

There was a long pause and then he said, “I don’t know you.”

“What are you talking about, Ed? It’s Samantha.”

“I know who you are, but I’m not sure I can trust you,” he said heatedly.

“Ed, what’s going on?” she asked, bewildered and starting to panic even more.

“You’re a witch!” he exploded.

“Please, Ed, not you too!”

“I think you need to stay the hell away from me and my case.”

“Listen, Ed—listen closely. The paranoia that’s going around? The violence against suspected witches? It’s being triggered by some kind of magic toxin that messes with your brain. You must have been infected yesterday when you were in town. I was infected today by the person who was spreading it. I’m working on a cure, but you have to trust me.”

“Trust you! How can I trust you? All this time we’ve been partners you never told me you were a witch.”

“Because I wasn’t. I’m still not. I’m just a cop doing my job,” she said raggedly.

“So you say. I think you’ve been one of them all along.”

“I’m not. Please, just try to be calm. I’m going to fix this.”

He hung up on her and she stared at the phone in horror. If her own partner turned against her, she was as good as dead. She needed answers and she was running out of time.

Without letting herself stop to think about it, she grabbed a white candle, a yellow candle, and the purple candle, lit them, and then placed them on top of the dresser again. “I am unmoving; I am fixed. I compel you to come to me, Autumn,” she said before waving her hand and sending the purple candle on its march toward the white one.

So all she could do now was wait. Wait for George to call her back. Wait for Autumn to show up.
Wait for the toxin to make me as crazy as the others.

She closed her eyes and prayed for strength. All her fear and confusion bubbled to the surface and she struggled to keep herself under control.

A sudden sound caused her to turn and she saw the purple candle speeding faster than it should toward the
white candle until a moment later they were standing together.

A shock wave went through the room and Samantha realized that Autumn had arrived. She couldn’t have been very far away to have gotten there so quickly.

There was a tentative knock on her door and with a wave of her hand she swung it open. Autumn stepped inside and Samantha closed the door behind her the same way. It was a waste of energy to use it on such a mundane task, but she had learned from years of watching that the witch who had the energy to waste on such frivolities often impressed upon those witnessing it that she must have greater power than they did.

Autumn looked sufficiently impressed by the display and stopped a couple of feet from Samantha, her head bowed respectfully.