Pretty Witches All in a Row (22 page)

“I don’t know, it’s probably my imagination,” Anna shrugged.  “So… it’s in the bedroom, right?” 

“Yeah, this way…”  Nick took a couple of loping steps ahead of her to lead the way, pausing at the doorway.  “If you’re freaking out, you don’t have to do this, you know.”  He offered her that last out.  As much as he wanted her to take a look, he didn’t want to upset her more than she already had been by the loss of her friend. 

“No, it’s fine, I can do it.”  Her chin came up a fraction in determination.

“God you’re adorable,” he sighed, opening the door to the bedroom and stepping inside, snapping on single overhead light.  The room had been catalogued; little numbered markers by every spatter of blood to be found, highlighting them to prevent a casual observer from missing any of them.  The effect made them seem a little more scientific and a little less ghastly, at least to his way of thinking. 

Annaliese took a shaky breath and stepped inside, her face ashen.  “Wildflowers, just like you said,” she murmured.

He’d forgotten all about that, he’d been so preoccupied with the blood that he’d forgotten about her dream.  “Yeah… over here is where I think her altar table was…”  Nick steered her towards the corner of the room, not liking the chalky pallor to her skin.  What the hell would he do if she fainted?

Swallowing, Anna nodded, letting him move her to the corner.  “Yes, it looks like it.  Someone really had it in for her stuff, this place is thrashed.  They smashed her crystals too… that’s a shame.”

“Do you see any of the same things you saw at Skye’s place?”  Nick tried to keep her talking, gratified to see her snapping out of it a little. 

“It’s hard to tell, things are so… mangled.  She had some of the same tools, the cauldron, the candle holders, runes, incense… to tell you the truth, I’m not sure how much good I’m going to do you here with this mess.” 

Her expression turned grim and he tamped down his own disappointment as well, not wanting her to feel worse than she already did about it.  “So there’s nothing that leaps out at you as to what she’d been working on?”

“No, it’s all jumbled together.  Maybe if we find her Book of Shadows, then we’ll find something similar to Skye’s, but that was sort of a dead end too really.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Nick disagreed.  “You found that there wasn’t anything to indicate that she was involved in the layout of the last ritual in her house, I’d say that’s a pretty major discovery.”  He laid a comforting hand on her back. 

“Which means that a witch is involved in these deaths,” she sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder.  “I just wish that…”  Annaliese stopped, an unreadable expression on her face.

“What?  What is it?” 

“Wait… maybe we can… can you find me a blank piece of paper?  It doesn’t matter if it has lines on it or not.”  She asked, ducking under the altar table and pawing through the rubble there. 

“Ah… okay.”  Nick scanned the furniture in the room briefly but nothing turned up a blank piece of paper.  He left her there rooting under the table and went in search of a piece of paper, buoyed by the sense of urgency in her voice.  Whatever it was, she’d had an epiphany, and he couldn’t wait to see what she came up with.

He came back a few minutes later to find her with a small pair of silver scissors in her hand, snipping carefully at strands of the carpet.  “Oh hey… um… you’re not supposed to be doing that… crime scene and everything.”  The expression on her face was triumphant, but he winced as she sat back, a small notch cut out of the carpet and several strands of dark crusty fibers in her hand.  Technically everything was already photographed and catalogued, but they were definitely in the realm of contaminating a crime scene at this point. 

“I’m sorry; I needed some of her blood.” 

“Of course you do.”  He deadpanned as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world for her to say.  “Should I be worried about this?  What exactly are you doing?”  It was beyond him what Annaliese was up to; she was currently trying to cram the pieces of carpet fiber into a small wooden capsule. 

“I had this thought… if only we could ask Meiliyn what she’d been up to, and then it came to me… divination!”

He stared at her blankly.  “You say that as if I know what that means.”

“There are different schools of thought on how divination works.  Some say it’s channeling the earth’s energy, some say it’s your energy, some say it’s divine energy but what it amounts to is fishing for information.  The same way you would with scrying but with a more concrete response, less room for interpretation,” she replied, screwing the little cap back onto the wooden piece.  “Do you think we can move the altar table here over the center of the rug?” 

Nick rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably before caving in.  “Sure, why the hell not.  We’re already disturbing things, right?  What’s one more infraction.”

“We can put it back when we’re done; it’ll be fine Nick, I promise.  If this works… we can get some real answers,” she grinned back, her eyes alight with excitement and he couldn’t resist her enthusiasm.

“I’m still a little fuzzy on what it is that you’re going to do exactly,” he admitted, helping her move the small table from its side to the center of the room. 

“You see this?”  Anna held up the wooden pendant, suspended from a silken cord, shaped like an inverted teardrop with a point at the bottom.  “This is a pendulum.  The idea is, you can decide that yes is clockwise and no is counterclockwise, but I prefer to go with horizontal is no and vertical is yes.  You concentrate, let the pendulum swing naturally and then ask a question.  You’ll get your answer and then you move on to the next question.  Do you get it now?”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to get a ouiji board and ask her questions outright if that’s our goal?”  Not that he bought into any of it exactly.  Even after seeing her little light the candle trick, he wasn’t prepared to become a believer of everything she pitched at him. 

“We could try a Ouija board, or I prefer a witch’s board, there are better protections built into them, but channeling spirits directly can be tricky.  Something like that would be better done with the rest of the coven here… well, what’s left of us.  Also, I don’t have a Ouija board, you didn’t happen to see one lying around did you?”

“Well, no,” he admitted, still skeptical. 

“It couldn’t hurt to try, right?”  She pointed out, dragging the folding desk chair over to one side of the table.  “Go see if you can find another chair, I have a few more things to put together.”

“Alright.”  Nick went in search of a chair, still not quite sure how he felt about this.  His teeth chewed lightly on the inside of his cheek as he thought things through.  He was actually going to sit with her while she pulled a fortune telling spell to ask about what had happened in the room.  Was he crazy for allowing it?  The final decision hadn’t come to him by the time he returned to the bedroom, a metal folding chair the best he could find.  In his absence, she had set up a miniature cauldron like he’d seen for sale in her shop on the table to the right of the paper, a foil packet and a small plastic bag next to it.

“What’s going in the cauldron, are we making a potion?” Nick asked, setting up his chair opposite hers. 

“No, not a potion,” she smiled faintly.  “I’m using it to burn some incense.  It should help clear out the negativity in the room and help sharpen our focus.” 

He watched with interest as she opened the foil packet and withdrew a little black lump of charcoal, setting it into the bottom of the cauldron.  “And what’s in the little plastic baggie, the incense?”

“Yes, I found some elecampane, it’s good for sharpening psychic powers, especially when scrying but it should do in a pinch.  We really should use mugwort but she didn’t have much to choose from and I didn’t think to bring anything from home.”  Cupping her hand over the top of the cauldron, she concentrated for a moment and the little disk of charcoal began to smolder and catch light.   “There now, we’ll let that get going for a moment… oh, and slip this into your pocket.”  She handed him a little fabric envelope about two inches across made of pink gingham fabric. 

Mugwort.  It sounded made up, like something from a Grimm Brothers fairytale, or a kid’s cartoon, but she looked deadly serious.  Biting back the witty rejoinder poised on the tip of his tongue, he accepted the little packet. “What is this?”  He sniffed it skeptically.  It smelled nice, like an exotic flower, and he brought it to his nose for a longer smell. 

“It’s a little sachet filled with tuberose.  It’ll keep us calm and peaceful, plus it’s also good for increasing psychic powers,” she replied, tucking an identical little sachet into the bodice of her dress.  Annaliese closed her eyes, taking a deep calming breath. 

“Are we supposed to hold hands or chant or something?”  Nick couldn’t help but ask, a tiny bit of sarcasm leaking into his tone.

Her eyes snapped open again.  “You just sit there and try to keep quiet, I need to focus.”  Without waiting for a response, her eyes drifted shut again.

Lacking something active to do, Nick looked around the room and then down at the components on the table.  She’d drawn a set of perpendicular lines on the piece of paper, the horizontal one marked no and the vertical one marked yes, as she’d mentioned before.  It seemed a childishly simple undertaking, but he had promised to keep an open mind, so he simply sat there and waited for her to begin. 

Once Annaliese finished praying or meditating or whatever it was she’d been doing to prepare herself, her eyes opened and she picked up the wooden pendulum, clutching it in her right hand.  “I wish we had some sage to purify it, but we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got,” she said softly, letting out a long breath.  “Okay… here we go.” 

Picking up the plastic baggie, she shook out a small quantity of the herb right onto the smoldering coal in the cauldron, releasing a cloud of smoke with a bitter tang to it, but not unbearable.   Next, she picked up the pendulum by the cord and held it over the cauldron, bathing the wooden pendant in the smoke for several seconds.   Nick watched with interest, wondering what it was that she was waiting for, but eventually she removed the pendulum from the smoke, holding it over the table so that it hung about an inch away from the paper. 

Annaliese provided a little running commentary for his benefit and he was grateful not to be left completely in the dark.  “Now we have to calibrate it, make sure it’s working properly.  Ask it some questions we already know the answers to.  Like… am I female?” she asked in a clear, steady voice.  The pendulum started to swing vertically almost instantly and Annaliese gave a small nod of satisfaction.  “Do I live in California?”  Came the next question, and the pendulum changed directions, swinging horizontally now.

“Cool…” Nick breathed.  “What else can we ask it?”

“Anything we want to.  Like… does Veronica have red hair?”  The pendulum stayed on the horizontal sway and she looked up in surprise.

“Technically it’s brown, she dyes it red,” Nick supplied with a half shrug.

“See… that’s where things can get tricky.  The answers aren’t always as they seem, even with this simple yes/no type format; they can still be left open to some interpretation.”

“Ask it who the killer is.”

“I can’t, it has to be yes/no question,” she explained patiently.  “But I can ask it… Do you know who killed Meiliyn, Skye and Zoe?”  While they waited with bated breath, the pendulum swung directions again, changing to a ‘yes’ response.  “Did the same person kill all three of them?”  There was no change in the motion of the pendulum. 

“Ask if it’s that asshole Reverend,” Nick interjected, leaning forward a little in his chair in spite of himself, unable to keep from getting involved now.

“Is the killer Reverend Cahill?” Annaliese asked, gasping as the direction changed to a ‘no’ response.  “Is it one of his followers?”  There was no change in the motion of the pendulum. 

Disappointment lanced through Nick, even though they’d already discovered there was more to this case than they’d thought, part of him was still hoping to pin it on the so-called holy man. 

“Is the killer someone in the Pagan community?”  She asked next, her face crumpling with pain when the pendulum swung to ‘yes’.  “Is the killer someone I know?”  There was no change in the motion of the pendulum.

Nick resisted the urge to reach out and touch her; unsure if doing so would somehow break the spell or whatever it was she was doing.  “Ask if it’s someone in the coven,” he said gently, his eyes full of regret for having to ask it of her.

Annaliese nodded, taking a calming breath before she asked.  “Is the killer someone in my coven?”  They both held their breath as they waited to see if the pendulum would switch direction, but it maintained it’s steady direction, indicating a ‘yes’ response.  “I don’t know if I can do this…”  Her hand started to shake and the direction of the pendulum wavered. 

“You can do it, Annie, I know you can.  Just a little more, we need to know who it is.”  Nick spoke in a calm, soothing tone, his voice reaching out to comfort her where his body couldn’t follow.

Another nod was given, and she took another few deep cleansing breaths, “Shhhh…be still now.”  She instructed the pendulum, which stopped its erratic swinging and came to a halt, making little circles over the center of the page.  “Is the killer Seraphine?” Anna asked, holding her breath again as she waited for the pendulum to respond.  Slowly it started to swing horizontally, clearing her of the accusation.  Her eyes closed in relief, and she took a steadying breath before she continued.  “Is the killer Rose?”  The pendulum continued in its horizontal swing and she darted a look up at Nick.  “Is the killer Ellie?” 

Nick stared as the pendulum kept swinging in the same side to side motion.  How could it be a member of the coven but not be Seraphine, Rose or Ellie?  Annaliese’s face showed just as much confusion, and she gave a little helpless shrug.

“Am I the killer?” she asked in a quavering voice.  They both stared as the pendulum continued to swing with a ‘no’ response.

“I don’t get it, the killer is in the coven, but it’s not any of the coven members?”  Nick couldn’t help but ask aloud, rapidly losing faith in this particular form of questioning.