Chapter Thirty #2
Blair hung up the phone, then told Travis to close the stall and find cover because it looked like a storm was coming. She told him that she needed to help the festival committee with some issues. Travis nodded, telling Blair he would take care of the stall, and she needed to go save the festival.
Blair rushed to the big tent at the entrance, where she found Agatha, Raj and Earl, along with both Belinda and Bianca.
‘What’s going on?’ Blair asked.
‘Chaos,’ Agatha replied. ‘The rash is back.’ She pulled up the arms of her sweater to show large red hives on both forearms. ‘Plus huge crows have started pecking at all the props in the photo booths, scaring the children. And look at the apples from the bobbing for apples game!’ Agatha pointed to a bucket on the table.
When Blair looked inside, all the apples were rotten, smelling sharply of advanced decay.
There were even flies swarming the fruit.
‘These were fine yesterday. They were delivered fresh from the orchard.’
‘That’s not the worst of it,’ Belinda said, face pale. ‘Look, Blair.’ She pointed to the standing sign welcoming visitors to the festival. As they were in the tent behind it, all Blair could see was the normally blank back of the sign. But it wasn’t blank anymore. Blair stepped closer.
With each letter in a different font and colour, a message was written on the sign. I am taking back what was once ours. I will return at sundown on All Hallows Eve. Abandon the festival, or its fate will be tenfold what I did to the bakery.
‘The missing letters from all the signs,’ Blair whispered. Blair could easily see the n that was stolen from the Harvest Moon Café sign in the word once.
‘Sundown is six-twenty-ish tonight,’ Bianca added. It was just over an hour from now.
‘I know you and Luke Caldwell were trying to determine who was behind all these pranks,’ Agatha said loudly over the gusting wind.
‘How do we stop them? The festival is full – record numbers. We can try to evacuate, but there are so many people. The cars leaving the parking lot alone would need more than an hour to clear out. We don’t know what to do! ’
‘You said the opening ceremony happened, right? With the mayor?’ Bianca asked.
Agatha nodded. ‘Yes. Mayor Hazel and Dr. Fairwood were here. Dr. Fairwood said the mayor’s lines since Hazel’s memories are still jumbled. But she was right next to her wife. Her family hoped her being there would jog her memory. But I’m afraid it has not. Please tell me you know who’s doing this.’
Oh no. If Mayor Hazel didn’t recite the opening spell, then it had been meaningless.
Blair did know exactly who was behind this, but she didn’t know how to stop Hecate.
Belinda looked at Blair with a pleading expression.
And Blair understood her sister completely.
They needed to figure this out. Now. Yes, they didn’t start this mess, but the people at the festival were just as innocent.
Blair and her sisters (and now Luke) were the only ones who knew that magic was behind all this, so they were the only ones equipped to deal with it.
They were the only ones who had any fighting chance of getting Hecate to leave Moonbeam Hollow and the festival alone.
But they weren’t really equipped to do it.
They’d tried and failed. There weren’t enough of them to summon Hecate in a circle and letting Hecate possess someone was too dangerous to try again.
Blair didn’t know what else to do. If her parents were here, they could try a summoning circle of five instead of three.
It could work. But the Briarwood sisters were the only witches in Moonbeam Hollow, and there simply wasn’t time to find any more before sundown.
That’s when Blair noticed something next to the bucket of rotten apples. It was the rectangular wood sign that said Shirley’s Sugar Mountain. ‘Why is this here? I thought the bakery wasn’t able to have a stall after their storm damage.’
Raj shook his head. ‘Another mystery. I found it hidden with other trash. Look, letters are missing.’ Sure enough, a t and an o were missing from the sign. No doubt they were on Hecate’s message.
‘I called Calista,’ Agatha said, ‘I thought she might know how her sign got here, but she wasn’t much help.
She said she’s cleaning the storm damage with her son, and someone must have stolen it without them noticing.
’ Agatha paused. ‘She seemed unconcerned. Calista Caldwell actually had the nerve to say that the festival shouldn’t be celebrated, anyway. ’
Blair frowned. Luke had told her his mother used to say something similar to him. Blair had assumed she meant fall shouldn’t be celebrated, because Calista was allergic to fall trees.
But now Blair knew that the Moonbeam Hollow Fall Harvest Festival wasn’t started to celebrate the harvest; it was started to celebrate killing witches.
Was it possible that Calista knew the witch history of Moonbeam Hollow?
The look on Calista’s face when Blair last saw her .
. . the last thing she’d said was ‘Be gone, Witch.’ Blair had assumed Hecate was still inside Calista then, but maybe she wasn’t?
It was possible that Calista herself had been addressing Blair when she said Be gone, Witch.
Maybe she knew what Blair was. Maybe she’d always known.
But that didn’t make sense, either, because this morning when Luke showed up at the house, he said his mother wanted him to work things out with Blair. She told her son to trust Blair, even when he himself didn’t. That didn’t sound like a mother who knew her son loved a witch and didn’t approve.
What if Calista hadn’t been addressing Blair, what if she’d been talking to Hecate? Telling Hecate to leave, just as the Briarwoods had, because that’s how a witch makes a spirit stop possessing someone.
Blair nearly fell to the ground when another realization came to her. Her hand went straight to her mouth as she gasped.
Bianca held on to Blair’s arm. ‘Are you okay, Blair?’
‘I know what to do,’ she whispered. Standing straight, she looked at Agatha. ‘My sisters and I can stop this. We need to speak to someone first, but we’ll be back before sundown. Please have people take cover but assure them that everything will be fine. I promise, we’ll be back soon.’
Agatha nodded, so Blair motioned for her sisters to head to Belinda’s car. They needed to get to Shirley’s Sugar Mountain, and fast.
A part of Blair didn’t believe this at all, but a bigger part of her felt that she’d always known this somewhere in her mind. Somewhere in her heart. Luke and his mother were both witches. They always had been.
Blair Briarwood had fallen madly in love with a witch.