Chapter 22
Chapter 22
S ully glanced down at her paper. She, along with Mrs. Forsyth and Jacob, had managed to find eight out of the twelve remaining purebloods. Four were still outstanding. Marty needed only three. The paper in her hand darkened, and she looked up. Dark clouds, thick and voluminous, skittered across the sky, as though the Ancestors were angry and frowning down at everyone. She frowned. That cloud action was too fast to be natural. The night would arrive early.
Marty.
Damn him. She started to walk back toward Dave’s booth. She waved to Cheryl, who was manning the Brewhaus Diner coffee stand. She noticed Tyler, in his sheriff uniform, standing beside it. She almost went up to him to ask him when she might be able to get into her home, but he was frowning as he tried to catch Cheryl’s attention, and Cheryl was steadfastly ignoring him as she chatted to a young man who’d received his coffee but didn’t seem in any hurry to move along.
Sully turned away. She’d have to catch Cheryl later for an update, but it looked like something had definitely changed between those two. She took two steps and halted. Was that Noah?
The red-haired boy was being led away from the crowd, toward the head of the walking trail that led down to Crescent Beach. He was being led by a woman wearing a long flowing skirt and a billowy top. A woman who looked a lot like Sully.
Sully blinked. No...
Noah tripped, and the woman turned to tug on his hand. Sully’s heart seized in her chest, then started hammering.
“Noah!” She started to run after the pair, and stumbled a little when the woman looked casually over her shoulder. It was like looking into a mirror, or at a long-lost twin. The face staring back at her was her own.
Except for the eyes. Where Sully’s eyes were blue, this woman’s eyes were jet black. The woman spotted Sully, and her lips lifted in a smile. Then her features started to waver, and the boneless mass morphed into masculine features she knew all too well, and Marty scooped up a surprised Noah and started running.
“Noah,” Sully screamed and bolted after them.
Dave stared around the petting zoo in frustration. Noah wasn’t here, either. He moved his arm away from a donkey whose attention was becoming way too personal. Jacob hurried over to him, with George, Noah’s father, close on his heels, his face pale with worry.
“I take he’s not watching his sister’s concert?” Dave commented.
Jacob shook his head, and George ran his hands through his dark hair. “Where is he?” The man’s tone was panicked, his eyes wide with consternation. The man had lost his wife in a violent crime—Dave couldn’t begin to imagine how he was processing the disappearance of his son.
“Is everything okay?”
Dave turned at the query. Tyler Clinton, in full sheriff’s uniform, was eyeing George with concern. His normal reticence to involve the police, to involve others, disappeared. A little boy was missing.
“Sheriff, we need your help.” Dave quickly informed him of Noah’s disappearance, along with the fact that he may have been taken by a man who can change his appearance, by taking on the facade of anyone he came into physical contact with, and who was responsible for the recent murders in Serenity Cove.
To his credit, the sheriff took it well.
“You son of a bitch,” Tyler hissed, eyes flashing with anger, his fists clenched. “You’ve known all this time—” he bit the words off, his gaze taking in George and Jacob. The sheriff pulled the radio from its holster on his hip and called for all available deputies to attend the festival in search of a missing six-year-old, believed to have been abducted. Then he pointed a finger at Dave. “You’re with me. You withheld vital information to an ongoing murder investigation. That’s obstruction.”
The sheriff turned to George. “Do you have a recent photo of Noah? I’ll need to distribute to the guys when they get here. We’ll also make announcements from the staging area, and see if we can get everyone to help.” He placed his hands on his hips, then looked at Dave. “Can this guy really play swapsies with his face?”
Dave nodded. “Yep.”
Tyler sighed, then turned in the direction of the stage. “Let’s get to it, then.”
It wasn’t long before most of the activities at the Festival were shut down—not because Tyler called for it, but because pretty much all of those attending the street fair wanted to help in the search of the boy. Tyler split the crowd into groups and assigned the groups areas to search.
Tyler beckoned him, and Dave followed him down the length of the street.
“You should have told me.” Tyler’s voice was low, and full of controlled anger.
Dave shot him a look. “Yeah, I can totally see how that conversation would have gone. ‘Hey, Sheriff, your killer is a witch—I don’t know who he is, or what he looks like, or why he’s doing it, but I’ll take it from here.’” Dave shook his head.
Tyler peered through the glass windows of a store. “You still should have told me.”
“You were already suspicious of me,” Dave reminded him.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“How many tourists do you ask when they’re leaving?”
Tyler’s lips curved as he looked back at him, eyeing the bike leathers. “You were never a tourist.”
“But you see where I’m going with this. I have a job to do, too.”
“You could have just told me.”
“We witches don’t air our dirty laundry.” Dave looked inside the window of the next store. Most of them were closed for the festival holiday. “Just like the wolves, the vampires, the bears...”
“So you were really going to kill your witch and leave me with an unsolved murder?”
“I’m a Witch Hunter.”
Tyler grimaced. “No wonder people don’t trust witches,” he muttered.
“Hey, people trust witches,” Dave protested. Tyler arched his eyebrow. “Mostly,” Dave added, trying to be as truthful as he could.
Dave held up both hands. “Witch Hunter.” He didn’t like playing that card, would prefer to just drift in and out of a mission without pissing off the local law enforcement, but the reality is that he had a duty that, while focused on witches, had the recognition and enforcement from Reform authorities.
“The path of least resistance,” Dave told him as they crossed the street. There was a break in the buildings, with what looked like a trail down toward the beach.
“So keeping this from me was to avoid an uncomfortable conversation,” Tyler said, his tone dry.
Dave nodded. “Like this one? Hell, yeah.” He squinted as he scanned the beach briefly. The wind was picking up, the temperature had dropped several degrees and the waves were crashing against the shore as though being hurled at the beach. He was about to move on when a figure running in the distance. Black pants, gray shirt.
Sully.
And she was bolting after something.
“Sully!” he cried out, taking the trail. His words were snatched away by the wind.
“What is it?” Tyler asked as he reached the top of the trail.
“Sully. Something’s wrong.”
Sully wasn’t jogging leisurely along the beach. She was running at full pelt and was almost at the end of the beach where the headland started to rear out of the water. Dave took off after.
Sully clambered over the rocks. She heard Noah cry out, heard the fear in the little boy’s voice. She hurried, her feet scrabbling over the wet stones slick with seaweed. The waves rolled in, smashing against the rocks, and she ducked under the spray.
She had to wait for a wave to recede before she climbed around a larger rock formation and stumbled when she landed on wet sand. A hole loomed in front of her, the entrance to a cave. The sand was drier up near the mouth of the cave, and she ran, plowing through the sand until she reached the cave and entered.
“Mar—”
An invisible force pushed at her, sending her flying against the rock wall of the cave. She landed heavily on the sandy floor, coughing as she tried to catch her breath.
Wicked laughter echoed through the cave, and she raised her head. The cave was huge, with various rock formations that created bridges and ramps within the space, so it was almost like a multilevel labyrinth, resident monster included.
She eyed Marty who was presently carrying a struggling Noah up a ramp. Had he—had Marty just magically blindsided her while carrying a null? His powers were getting stronger. Her shaking hands clenched fistfuls of sand. This was Marty. The guy who’d almost drained her dry, who had scared her so much, had hurt her so much, that she’d run from him. Not walked out. Not left. Run . All those years of training on the West Coast, all those hours of practicing with the weapons she created, all of that fled her in the face of the man she’d once trusted, and who had abused her so much. Memories, of him screaming in her face, of him pushing her, of her falling over furniture, against walls and doors, of glass breaking, cutting...they all surfaced, along with her sense of powerlessness, of the very real danger she faced with this witch.
“Let him go, Marty,” she called out to him, and rose to her feet. She quickly bolstered her shields as she ran over to the base of the rocky ramp. The closer she got to Noah, though, the harder it was to maintain the protection.
Marty turned to face her. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sully.” He looked different. His skin was almost radiant, his eyes flashing. As though power itself was coursing through his veins, bringing with it a confidence and brashness she could never feed him. “I need him. He’s the last.”
Did that mean he’d killed already? She didn’t think so. Each time she’d delivered a null to Dave at the stand, he’d seemed in good health and not reeling from the wound on his chest. Did that mean he’d captured the nulls? Is that why nobody could find the remaining purebloods?
“No, you don’t.” She started to jog up the ramp, and Marty whirled, his hand out.
“Stop right there,” he told her. He reached behind him and pulled something out from the waistband of his jeans. Sully swallowed when she recognized the ceremonial knife she’d seen used in the vision to kill Amanda Sinclair. “Admittedly, I don’t like using kids, but I’m working with a short time frame, here.”
“You have to see this is crazy,” Sully said, panting as she slowly advanced, arms up, palms out in a nonthreatening pose. Even she could see how much her hands were shaking.
Marty’s eyebrows rose. “Crazy, huh? Crazy like a fox, maybe.”
Noah squirmed, and Marty shook the boy. Sully took a couple of extra steps forward.
“I know what you have planned,” she told him. “And it’s clever, I have to admit—but it’s so wrong, Marty.”
Marty smiled grimly. “Only those in a weaker position would say that. To me, this feels very right—and long overdue.”
Sully stepped closer again, and she had to lock her knees to stop from collapsing. Everything felt so unstable, so...shaken. “Why, Marty? Why are you doing this?”
Marty’s smile turned into an unattractive twist. “Do you remember what you called me, Sully? Remember that day you ran out like a rat scurrying in a sewer...?”
Sully glanced at Noah. The boy was looking between them, his face pale, but his eyes—so like his mother’s—showed a spurt of rebellion. She held out her palm in his direction, trying to make her warning to the boy to hold still look casual in the eyes of his captor. She’d learned that if you didn’t move, didn’t make eye contact, just burrowed down and let him vent, the storm would eventually pass.
“I remember begging you to stop,” she told him quietly. “I remember you throwing me against that mirror.”
Marty huffed. “Well, that was an accident,” he told her. “You got me so mad.”
She pursed her lips. So him throwing her up against a wall mirror was her fault? She shook her head. “You hurt me.”
“When my father found out the Alder Keeper of the Books had cast me aside, he banished me from my coven,” he rasped, and Noah cried out as the grip on the back of his neck tightened. “You called me pathetic.”
Sully took a deep, quivering breath. “I realize that must have sounded harsh,” she allowed. She couldn’t agree with him, but she didn’t want to outright challenge him, not knowing how he’d react.
His comment, though, brought a lot of things into sharp relief. He’d been cast out. For a witch whose powers were limited, he needed the safety of a coven to ward off threats. He would have been vulnerable. Alone. Although she thought that was a fitting outcome for this guy, she wouldn’t have actually wished it on anyone. After living so long without her own coven, she knew how lonely, and how scary, it could be on your own.
Marty sneered. “You called me a pathetic vessel of puerile misery.”
“I’d have to agree,” a deep voice called out from behind her.
Relief flooded her when she recognized Dave’s voice. She didn’t turn, though, didn’t take her eyes off Marty and little Noah.
Marty’s eyes widened, and his hand moved. A fireball burst from his palm, and Sully ducked. She heard a grunt, a hiss and then a thud. She glanced over her shoulder. Dave was on the sandy floor of the cave below, and steam was rising from his jacket. Dave shot Marty an exasperated glare.
“Hey, watch it. This is my favorite jacket.”
“Stand back,” Marty shouted, and Sully turned in time to see him angle the knife toward Noah’s throat.
She met Noah’s eyes and saw a familiar terror, one she recognized from her own experience with this man. That day he’d pushed her down the hallway, and she’d fallen in front of the mirror... She’d seen her expression, seen the fear, the desperation...the depths she’d allowed herself to sink to. She saw that same fear, that same desperation in her friend’s son. Something snapped inside her. Rage—but not fiery and unpredictable. No, this anger filled her like a cold, calm curtain of control.
She stepped closer. “You can’t hurt him,” she told Marty, her eyes on his.
“Oh, and who’s going to stop me? You?”
She shook her head. “No.” She lifted her chin in Noah’s direction. “He is.”
“He’s a little badass,” Dave called as he grasped the lip of the ramp and pulled himself up and over. He rose to his feet and winked at Noah. “Aren’t you, buddy?”
Noah looked at Dave, then nodded faintly.
Marty smirked, then brought the knife down.
The blade halted about half a foot away from his body. Marty frowned and tried again. Again, he faltered, as though the knife encountered an invisible barrier.
Marty looked up at her and Dave, his eyes wide. “What have you done?” he rasped.
“You’re not the only one who can draw symbols,” Dave responded as he came up to Sully’s side. “Only I’m better at it.”
“He’s protected,” Sully told Marty. “It’s over. You can’t make your quota.”
Marty shook his head. “No,” he bellowed, his face blooming with the heat of his rage. He shoved Noah, who screamed as he stumbled and fell over the edge of the ramp. Dave launched himself over the edge, diving for the boy. He caught Noah midfall and twisted so that his body bore the full brunt of the landing on the cave floor about twelve feet below.
Sully screamed, racing to the edge of the ramp to look down. Dave wheezed, but he gave her a thumbs-up signal. She turned around to see Marty running farther up the ramp. The witch leaped across a divide to a rock ledge. He scurried along to a tunnel opening and disappeared.
She hesitated, then Dave groaned.
“No,” he gasped, his hand to his chest. He lifted his gaze to Sully. “I’m warming up. He’s got someone back there.”
She turned and ran, heart in her throat as she jumped over the gap between ramp and rock ledge. She hissed as her hands slammed into the rock wall, and she almost bounced back. She clasped a rock bulge to prevent herself from plummeting backward into the cave. Taking a deep breath, she scurried along the ledge, hugging the wall until she reached the tunnel, and then started to run.
It was so dark. Sully braced her hands outward, using her contact with the wall of the tunnel as a guide. A strangled scream echoed down the tunnel, and she sped up, stumbling along until the tunnel opened up into another smaller cavern. She skidded to a halt. A shaft of light came through an opening in the roof of the cavern, almost like a natural skylight. The light was weak, though, and growing dimmer.
A man lay cowering on the floor, Marty straddled his body. His hands and feet were tied, and his yells were muffled by his gag as he shook his head rapidly at Marty. A woman lay on the ground nearby, her wrists and ankles bound, tears streaking her face. Marty raised his hand and the blade gleamed in the weak light.
Sully reacted. She ran toward him, her hand pulling out one of her belt blades as she did. She raised her hand behind her ear and flung the blade.