Chapter Forty
One way or another, I would’ve got myself into the Stovells’ Savannah home but it was all the easier when Ashley produced a key, bequeathed to Catherine ‘in case of emergencies’ years ago.
‘What exactly are we looking for?’ my aunt asked as the key turned in the lock without protest and we let ourselves inside.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ I said, speaking in hushed tones. ‘I should probably warn you, there’s a chance it won’t be anything fun.’
‘You mean she’s going to want to give me another lecture on the evils of showing your belly button in public?’
I couldn’t even raise a laugh. The house was dark, literally and figuratively, all the curtains closed in the middle of the day and a strange gloom hovering that made the hair on my arms stand up.
It was also eerily quiet, only the hum of an air conditioning system that wasn’t quite up to the task of a Georgia summer breaking the silence.
‘Nice place,’ Ashley commented, peering around the front hallway. ‘Tasteful.’
It was. Nice and tasteful. It was also boiling over with magic.
‘How long have the Stovell family been in Savannah?’ I asked, pausing by a low upholstered bench and a rack full of shoes, momentarily wondering if I should take off my sandals. A stupid thought, given how badly I wanted to turn around and run away already.
‘A long time, I think. Not as long as us or the Powells. They weren’t witches, if that’s what you’re wondering; Catherine would’ve mentioned it.’
That much was obvious from the way my grandmother treated Ileen when they were younger.
I couldn’t believe she’d ever treat another witch or former witch so cruelly.
Well, not without what she considered good reason.
We were at the door to the parlour when I stopped so suddenly, Ashley almost fell over me.
‘What the hell?’ she hissed as I turned around and went back to the shoe rack.
There, right on top, was the exact same pair of sneakers I’d seen at the Stovells’ beach house in Hilton Head.
Sweat began to bead on my forehead and my hand closed around the silver and moonstone pin I’d brought in my pocket.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I said to Ashley. ‘You need to go back to Bell House.’
She picked up a shoe horn, long and elaborately carved out of solid oak with a duck’s head cast in brass for a handle.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, wielding the thing like a baseball bat. ‘We’re doing this together.’
The parlour door was open, every bit as elegant as you’d expect from a historic southern home, but it was in complete disarray.
Glasses, plates, bowls all used and dirty, covered the coffee table and credenza, with half-empty coffee cups lining up and down the mantel over the fireplace.
There were clothes too, jackets and sweaters mostly, discarded on the armchairs or the floor, and the sofa was covered in blankets with a pillow at one end.
‘This place has to have at least five bedrooms.’ Ashley poked at an abandoned black rainslicker with the end of her shoehorn. ‘Why would someone bother to camp out in the living room?’
‘Best view of the hotel,’ I replied, looking out the window and right at the back entrance of the DeSoto.
Ashley continued sorting through the items scattered around the room, the occasional displeased sound squeaking out of her throat.
‘Most of these clothes don’t look like they’d fit the woman you described,’ she said. ‘Unless she’s going for a super oversized fit.’
‘You mean our lone wolf might not be so lone after all?’
It was a harrowing thought and one that posed more questions than it answered.
Ashley picked up a large black hoodie, a long white tank top, a pair of tube socks.
‘If she went to the pack, told them about you …’
‘Then they have Wyn,’ I murmured. ‘Which means he’s safe.’
‘But you aren’t,’ she said sharply. ‘Em, get it together, this is not good. A lone wolf is bad, a lone wolf working with a vengeful pack hellbent on ripping out your heart is even worse. I need you to focus—’
Ashley cut herself off by clapping a hand over her mouth.
‘What is it?’ I asked, rushing over to where she stood, but she quickly moved around the sofa and pushed me away as a bleak call sounded out all around the house.
‘You don’t need to see it,’ she assured me, hurrying me out of the parlour. ‘But unless the junior league took up animal sacrifice this season, I think we can officially confirm this is where your wolf has been hiding.’
Back in the hallway, even though I didn’t want to let them in, I closed my eyes and listened to the voices clawing at the edges of my mind.
There were so many and they were all in pain.
Awful, ugly things had happened here and we were nowhere near the worst of them.
Every room was hurting from what had happened here and the whorls of magic were so intense, I could almost see them.
I hadn’t experienced anything so chaotic since I saw the craft room blackened by Catherine’s influence.
It was as though Astrid had taken that same energy and turned the whole house against nature.
‘We need to check the kitchen,’ I said, almost sure I saw something move at the end of the hall, turning a corner into the back of the house. ‘Or at least I do.’
‘You’re not leaving me alone out here,’ Ashley argued as she trailed after me. ‘Whatever is waiting in the kitchen can’t be any worse than what I just saw in the parlour.’
She had no idea how wrong she was.
Neither of us screamed. The scene was too sickening for that; any kind of noise would’ve felt performative, for our benefit only, and poor Ileen Stovell deserved better.
In the centre of the kitchen, right by the butcher block table, Ileen’s body lay on the floor, all of her limbs protruding at the wrong angles.
Ashley physically turned me away, pulling my head to her chest until she heaved and ran out the room, leaving me alone to look again.
Not all her limbs. Ileen’s hands were missing.
Her empty eye sockets stared into eternity and her mouth was open, the tongue cut out, frozen in an endless scream only I could hear.
No hands, no eyes, no tongue, no way she could identify a Were. A task rendered all the more difficult by the wound that ran across her throat, a gaping scarlet slit cut from ear to ear.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered to the unnatural scene, words I was getting too used to hearing and saying. ‘I am so sorry.’
Backing out of the room, never once looking away, I found Ashley, crouched in a ball on the bottom step of the stairs, tears pouring down her face.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘There’s nothing we can say,’ I replied, my turn to soothe her for a change. ‘All we can do is try to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.’
I was angry, beyond angry. To take Wyn was bad but he was another Were, he was a player in this game and he knew the risks.
What Astrid had done to Ileen Stovell was one of the most brutal things I had ever seen, not only the act itself but the meaningless death.
Ms Stovell had done nothing to deserve this ugly end other than have the misfortune to be born close in age and location to my grandmother.
A whole life spent trying to be someone’s friend until she found herself face to face with me at the DeSoto when Astrid happened to be watching.
It was senseless and disgusting and I would never allow anything like it to happen again.
For weeks, people had been asking me who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t have an answer.
Now I did.
I wanted an end to all this death and violence, whatever the cost. I wanted Wyn, Ashley and my friends to be happy. I wanted to know that on the day I took my last breath, it wasn’t the end of a life I had wasted.
Ashley and I stood shakily, leaning on each other as we prepared to leave, before the authorities inevitably arrived. They would never solve what happened here and I knew years from now it would be another ghost story for the tourists of Savannah. Ileen Stovell would always be remembered.
‘Do the Stovells have children?’ I asked Ashley, pausing by the door as she replaced the shoe horn in the umbrella rack where she’d found it.
‘Two daughters. Both moved away, one is in New York, the other somewhere in the Midwest, I think. Poor things.’
‘No sons?’
‘She had a son,’ Ashley said with a questioning look. ‘He died when he was just a toddler, some kind of terrible allergic reaction, Catherine said, no one could do anything to save him. Said the family was never the same after that.’
At the end of the hallway, Ileen Stovell crouched down beside a little boy, the same blonde hair as her, the same sparkling blue eyes.
She whispered something in his ear and he giggled, waving at me, before he pulled away into one of the other downstairs rooms. I raised a hand in return then followed Ashley outside, closing the door on Ms Stovell until the next time we met.