The Thirteenth Sacrifice (38 page)

“Come in,” she said as she swung her legs over the edge of her bed. She reached a shaking hand up and fingered the cross around her neck.

The door opened and a blond head poked inside. Her roommate, Jill, who was even now staring at her with wide eyes as though she was some kind of monster.

But I am. I’m a witch.

She gouged her fingernails into her palm, anger rising
to the surface swiftly.
I’m not—that’s not who I want to be.

“Everything okay?” Jill asked.

“Fine.”

“Sounded like a nightmare. Want to talk about it?” Jill asked, sitting down next to her and putting a hand on her shoulder.

“No!” Samantha said, jerking away.

“You’ve got real trust issues,” Jill said. “Especially when it comes to women.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Samantha snapped, instantly regretting her tone.

“It would make you feel better if you talked about it,” Jill said, looking at her grimly.

Samantha squeezed her eyes shut. “Look, I get that you’re trying to help. And I’m sorry that my nightmares are waking you up. But I really, really don’t want to talk about it.”

Samantha’s phone rang and she jumped. She looked pointedly at Jill, who gave her a perky smile and left the room.

“Hello?”

“We’re up.”

It was her partner, Lance Garris.

She glanced at the clock. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Crime waits for no man. Besides, what did you expect, coming to the big city? Everyone else is already on something else.”

She gritted her teeth. Lance knew she was from Boston, but he kept acting like she was some hick from a small town. It wasn’t the only thing about him that grated on her nerves.

“I’ll pick you up in five.”

“Ten,” she countered.

“Seven and I won’t look if you need to change in the backseat.”

Samantha hung up and clenched her fists, forcing herself to breathe. A moment later she stood swiftly, threw on a pair of black pants and a white shirt. She tucked her gun into the back of her waistband and clipped her detective’s shield to her belt. Then she put on a heavy jacket. It was mid-January, and while that didn’t mean snow in San Francisco, it didn’t mean it wouldn’t be cold.

In the kitchen Jill handed her a cup of coffee and a bagel.

“Thanks,” Samantha said, forcing herself to smile.

She headed downstairs to wait for Lance.

It had been three months since she’d moved from Boston to San Francisco following an undercover investigation where she’d taken down a coven that was murdering young women. She’d hoped that getting some distance would help her forget, but it just seemed like every night more memories from a childhood best forgotten bubbled to the surface.

Samantha had been raised a witch, and only the massacre of her entire coven had allowed her to escape. After being adopted by a kind couple, she had turned her back on her old life and embraced the Christian faith of her adopted parents. She’d studied hard, joined the police force, and made detective. She’d spent a lot of effort building a life for herself only to have it torn apart again.

She took a sip of the coffee and grimaced. Jill always dumped a lot of crap into coffee and this cup was no exception.

Is that cinnamon?
she wondered.

Having a roommate was strange and dangerous. She was constantly on edge and aware of everything she did. Which in its own way was good. Her last case in Boston
had been a nightmare. It had required her to go undercover in a dark coven and use magic. Being undercover and having to use magic made her backslide quite a lot into her old ways. But having someone else in her apartment ensured that she couldn’t use magic often. She never wanted to use magic, Freaky Kitty being the one exception. She’d grown to need the little ball of fur more than she should.

Of course, she hadn’t planned on having a roommate, but it was so much more expensive to rent a place in San Francisco than it had been back home. A roommate had been a necessary evil.

And it’s just a bonus that her presence keeps me from doing actual evil.

She went outside, and a silver car pulled up to the curb. She got in, rubbing her hands briskly. “Morning, Lance.”

He grunted in reply and pulled away from the curb.

Lance was thirty, just two years older than she was, but his dark hair was streaked with gray.

Her phone rang and he swore.

“You need to have that thing on all the time?” he asked.

If only my old partner Ed could hear you say that,
she thought sadly. She never used to carry her phone and it had nearly gotten him killed. Now it was like it was a lifeline.

She checked to see who was calling.

Anthony.

Her heart stuttered. She couldn’t deal with talking to him, not right now. She declined the call and pocketed the phone.

“The guy back home who won’t let you go?” Lance said.

“Something like that,” she replied with a sigh. The relationship with Anthony was far too complicated to deal with, especially at three in the morning.

“Want me to tell him to get a life?”

“No, but thanks for the offer.”

“You know what they say: ‘Protect and serve.’”

She smiled. “So, are we going somewhere or did you just miss me?”

“Someone called in a disturbance at the Natural History Museum. By the time officers got there, there was no disturbance, just a body.”

“Lucky us.”

With little traffic on the streets, they soon arrived at their destination. Officers had already cordoned off the scene and one of them met Lance and Samantha at the car.

“What do we have?” Lance asked.

“Winona Lightfoot, local historian, dead.”

“How?” Samantha asked as she moved toward the building.

“That’s one for the coroner.”

“Any witnesses?” Lance asked.

“Nah. Call about a disturbance was anonymous and there was no one outside when I got here.”

“No one? Not even the homeless?” Lance asked sharply.

“Not a living soul.”

“So where’s the body?” Samantha asked.

“Inside.”

“Was the alarm tripped?” Lance asked.

“No, and when we got here a side door was unlocked.”

Samantha paused and turned to look at the officer. His name badge proclaimed him to be Zack. “Zack, what made you go inside?”

Zack looked sheepish for a moment. “My boy and his scout troop are having one of those overnights at the African hall exhibit. When I realized the one door was unlocked . . .”

“You didn’t feel you could not investigate, just in case.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Zack admitted.

“Sounds like it’s a good thing you did,” Lance noted.

“None of the scouts heard anything?”

“No. Not a sound.”

They entered the structure and headed straight back toward the area known as the Swamp, which housed alligators.

“Someone didn’t feed her to a gator, did they?” Lance asked as they got closer.

Zack shook his head.

Samantha had been through the museum complex, the California Academy of Sciences, once since she’d moved there. She’d gotten sick of having everyone she worked with suggest she see it, so she’d gone one Saturday.

Now, with the sound of their footsteps echoing eerily and darkness reigning over much of the area, it was a completely different experience.

The body came into view and Samantha caught her breath. The woman was well dressed, wearing a business suit. Her eyes were frozen wide in terror. And her arms were lifted straight up, hands clenched into fists that looked like they were clawing at something Samantha couldn’t see.

“What the hell?” Lance said, stopping abruptly.

“We found her like that,” the officer said. “Took us a minute to realize she was actually dead. I’ve never seen a body do that before. It’s like she was frozen.”

“I’ve never seen rigor mortis like this,” Lance said.

Samantha grabbed a pair of gloves and slid them on. She knelt down on the ground and touched the body. The skin was warm to the touch.

“She’s still warm. She can’t have been dead more than a few minutes, so this isn’t rigor mortis and she isn’t frozen.”

She pushed gently on the arms and then on the woman’s stomach and finally on her cheeks. Then she sat back, head reeling.

“What is it?” Lance asked, kneeling down next to her.

“She’s been petrified.”

“Come again?”

“Like a tree. She’s warm to the touch but everything is hard as wood. There’s no give in her skin at all,” she said.

Lance put on gloves and touched the woman’s cheek. “She feels like stone,” he said, marveling.

Samantha stood slowly and backed a few feet away from the body. Something wasn’t right. She walked away, leaving Lance with the officers who had discovered the body.

She swept the ground with her eyes, looking for something, anything, that could tell her what had happened to the woman.

You won’t find anything,
a voice inside her head mocked her.
Nothing natural, nothing rational.

She hissed to herself, trying to silence the voice. She walked away from the African hall. If the kids and their leaders hadn’t seen anything, then there probably wasn’t anything to find over there, and it was best to leave them alone anyway.

She stepped lightly, straining her senses to hear and see whatever she could.

Whoever had killed Winona must have left just as Zack and his partner arrived.

Unless they’re still here.

She came to a standstill and struggled with herself. It would be so easy to reach out with her senses, see if she could feel anyone nearby.

But that wasn’t going to help her fight the desire to use magic. And if she found something, she’d have to find a way that didn’t sound supernatural to explain it to her new partner.

Her last partner hadn’t been able to handle the truth.

She forced herself to keep watching and she reached the rain forest biosphere. She let herself in and then stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust. It would be the perfect place to hide and it would be easy to slip out in the morning after the academy had opened.

She took a step into the darkness and felt a growing apprehension. Another step and the birds that lived in the rain forest exhibit fell silent.

And suddenly she wanted nothing more than to be out of there and to be
anywhere
else.

She backed out slowly.

It felt as though the trees were actually whispering her name.

The trees.

She had seen a petrified tree once when she was younger. People thought it had been hit by lightning but she’d been able to tell that lightning hadn’t killed it; magic had.

What killed Winona?

She began to sweat and her heart sped up.

She didn’t want to know the answer.

She made her way back to the Swamp, feeling like there were eyes watching her the whole way.

Lance was talking to a man who looked like he was shy several hours of sleep and a gallon of coffee. He had the look of shock people exhibited when they were awoken in the middle of the night with bad news. He was wearing a name badge on his shirt.

He must be one of the people in charge of the academy, she realized.

“Nah, she worked in the city, but she commuted in. She lived in Santa Cruz,” the man was telling Lance.

Samantha gasped and reached for her cross.

“Is that a problem?” he asked, turning empty eyes in her direction.

It was a huge problem. Because what had happened to Winona was unnatural. There was nothing Samantha knew short of magic that could have caused the petrification. And before she left Salem, Anthony had warned her that Santa Cruz was home to witches.