Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
“ D o you think it’s safe to touch them?” Ethan asked.
“We didn’t go through all of that not to,” Stella said. The drawer was stuffed full of file folders, some of them thin, others bulging with papers stacked askew, their edges torn where they’d gotten stuck in the drawer.
Ethan smiled, and Stella realized he’d been kidding. He reached into the drawer, removed the first dozen-or-so files, and handed them backward to Jun. “See if there’s anything interesting in there.”
Jun took them over to the window and raised the shade an inch to let in some moonlight.
“Are the files at least alphabetical?” Stella asked, rising up on her toes to get a better view of what was left in the drawer. She snapped her fingers and held a flame closer to the files to give Ethan some light.
Ethan walked his fingers through a dozen more files. “Mostly. A few might be out of order.”
“Look for the name Corey,” Stella said. “Robert Giles Corey.”
“I’ve got A-D,” Jun said, “but I’m not seeing any Coreys.”
“Really?” Antoinette asked. “If that was the name the Collector gave Hurley, why wouldn’t it be filed under Corey? I bet there’s a file still buried somewhere on his desk. Do you think we should turn the light back on?”
“Too risky,” Stella said, then turned toward Jun. “What about Aldren?”
“Ummm… nope,” Jun said.
Stella sighed in frustration.
“What about a file labeled Robert Griffin?” Ethan asked, and he pulled out a thick manila folder.
“What?” Stella asked. Her father’s real name was Robert-Griffin Aldren. Would he be so obvious to use his real name?
Ethan turned from the cabinet and laid his discovery on the cluttered desk. “Light.”
Stella moved to stand beside him and held her flame over the file as he flipped through the pages. There seemed to be a number of financial documents, bank accounts, investments, and then Ethan got to a document that made Stella’s blood run cold.
It was several pages, stapled together, with row after row of names, many of them—hundreds even—crossed out.
“Is this what I think it is?” Ethan asked.
“If you think it’s a list of witches to collect,” Stella said, “then yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re looking at.”
Abby drew closer with Stryker at her back.
Antoinette put her hands on the desk and leaned in.
Ethan dragged his finger down the list, stopping at the crossed-out names they recognized, like that of his own father, John Mather , Hawk’s former captor, Marissa Black , and Brady , the murdered shifter.
“Frannie isn’t crossed out,” Stella said, putting her hand over her heart. That was a welcome relief, not only because Frannie was a friend, but because that meant her father hadn’t collected Frannie’s magic and made himself fire resistant.
The names Alastair McTavish and Mary Hutchinson were also intact, as was Ha-Jun Kim, as they already knew.
Ethan got to the last page of the document, and Stella grabbed it from him with her fire-free fingers. She held it up to her eyes and squinted.
“What is it?” Abby asked.
“This page isn’t a list of witches,” Stella said. She read to the bottom of the list just to make sure.
“What is it?” Stryker asked. “Shifters?”
“No,” she said. “It’s a different kind of hit list.”
“Don’t keep us guessing,” Antoinette snapped.
“Matthew Hopkins,” Stella said, lowering the paper just enough to make eye contact with Antoinette.
“Who?” Abby asked.
“Oh, lord,” Antoinette said grimly. “When it comes to witch hunts, you might call Matthew Hopkins the ‘founding father.’”
“He kicked things off in England in the 1640s,” Stella said. “Also Hopkins’ associate, John Stearne.” Her eyes went back to the paper. “Then there’s the usual suspects: Cotton Mather. William Stoughton…”
“We all know Cotton Mather,” Abby said. “Who’s Stoughton?”
“Chief Judge during the Salem witch trials,” Stella said. “But that’s not all.”
She read off the rest of her father’s list: “Jonathan Corwin, Thomas Danforth, Bartholomew Gedney, John Hathorne, John Richards, Nathaniel Saltonstall, Peter Sargent, Samuel Sewell, Stephen Sewall, Wait Winthrop, Thomas Newton, Anthony Checkley.”
And it wasn’t just men associated with Salem either. The list went on to include names from seventeenth-century witch hunts in Connecticut— Roger Ludlow and the Reverend John Davenport —as well as names from other states, and more modern names too.
None of them were crossed out yet.
“He’s gearing up,” Stella concluded. “He means to go back in time and wipe them all out.”
“Is that such a terrible thing?” Abby asked. “Wouldn’t more lives be saved than taken?”
Stella understood the logic, but it wasn’t that simple. “When you pull the threads of history, you don’t know what you’ll unravel.”
Ethan busied himself, taking pictures of every page in the document. The flashes that went off each time were blinding.
Stryker pulled the rest of the file closer to himself and flipped through the remaining documents. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just take the file with us?”
“We’re leaving it behind,” Stella said. “We’re putting everything back where we found it. With any luck, he won’t know that we were here.”
“Uh…” Antoinette said. “His defensive spell on the cabinet went off. He’s gonna know.”
Stella blinked once. Damn . She was right about that. There was no point covering their tracks.
“Look here,” Stryker said. “There’s a key taped inside the back of the folder.”
“A key? ” Ethan asked, and his head jerked toward Stella.
“You don’t think…” Stella said, but she was definitely thinking it. Was this the key Catherine had been talking about the last couple of days?
Ethan cheeks puffed out, and he blew out a long breath.
“By any chance is it a round key?” Stella asked.
“Yeah.” Stryker glanced at the file cabinet. “And I think it’s made of iron. It’s too old to be for the locks on the file cabinet, or even the door.”
“Check the book shelves,” Stella said. “Maybe the books are covering an old safe? If this is the key Catherine was talking about, it’s got to be important.”
Immediately, Stryker, Abby, Jun, and Antoinette started pawing at the shelves. Books slid onto the floor.
“Maybe the desk?” Ethan asked. He untaped the key from the back of the folder and tried it in the small keyhole in the desk drawer.
Stella got down on her hands and knees beneath the desk and looked up at its underside, wondering if there might be a secret compartment. Ethan’s own desk, the one where she’d found the stolen athame, had a secret compartment.
She flattened her palm against the smooth wood and searched for something irregular.
“Anything?” Ethan asked.
Stella curled the fingers of her other hand into the Oriental rug’s short wool pile and groaned in frustration. “No. Nothing.”
“Nothing on the book shelves either,” Antoinette said.
Stella could only see Antoinette from the knees on down. She watched as Antoinette turned toward the desk and tripped over the edge of the rug.
Stella had a thought. She scratched at the wool fibers, then put her nose to them. The rug was neither authentic nor old. It still had a bit of its factory, chemical smell. “Move the desk.”
“What?” Ethan asked.
“Move the desk,” Stella said, crawling out from underneath. “Roll back the rug.”
“You think there’s something underneath it?” Ethan asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure Hurley bought this rug recently.”
“If he hasn’t had the office long, it makes sense that he’d decorate it,” Abby said.
“I know,” Stella said. “There might not be anything there, but we have to look.”
Stryker and Ethan moved the desk. Jun, Antoinette, and Abby rolled back the rug.
“Do you see anything?” Abby asked.
“No,” Stryker said, and given that he had better night vision than any of them, that was saying something.
“Get the lights,” Ethan said. “Just for a second. Just long enough to check out the floor.”
Abby got up and flipped on the lights.
Stella scanned the floor, then spotted Antoinette’s hand in her periphery. It shot out, index finger extended.
“There,” Antoinette said.
“Lights off,” Ethan ordered, and Abby flipped them off.
They all descended on the part of the floor where Antoinette had indicated.
Stella walked her fingers along the joint between the boards. A piece of the floor was cut into an eighteen-inch square. One of its edges had two flat hinges. The opposite edge had a small, metal, oval plate with what felt like a keyhole.
“Try the key here,” she said.
Ethan fumbled a bit, then got the key into the hole. “It fits.”
He turned the key, and it clicked. When he opened the door, it revealed a hidden compartment under the floorboards.
“What’s that?” Stryker asked.
Stella held her flames a little closer.
Ethan reached into the compartment and pulled out a square wooden board with silver numbers—zero through nine—painted around its edge.
“Ohhh,” Stella said, feeling awestruck. “I think it’s some kind of witch board.”
She sold mass-produced ones at her store, but she’d never seen a homemade witch board, especially one so primitive.
“Witch board?” Stryker asked. “You mean like a ouija board?”
“That’s the most common type,” Antoinette confirmed, “but this one looks different. No letters. Just numbers.”
“Does this mean something to you, Red?” Ethan asked.
“Not yet,” Stella said. “But it has to be important.”
She sent up a silent thank you to Catherine for all her pestering about keys.
Prophetic magic may not have been Stella’s favorite, but it did come through from time to time.
“Uh…Stella,” Stryker said.
“What?” She looked up.
Stryker pointed toward the window.
The shade was still raised a couple of inches to let in the moonlight. And a gray, swampy face was peering at them through the glass.