Chapter Twenty-Six – Stephanie

 

This was all almost more than I could handle. Magic? Cat people? Ghosts? Hell, I’d just shot someone for the first time! It was enough to make me nearly forget about the fact that I was speaking to a hundred-and-fifty-year-old woman, one who was being hunted by her sister.

“Yeah,” I said after a moment of consideration. “Why are you here? I mean, this is the last place I would you think you’d want to be. Your mother died here, after all!”

Esther smiled a tight little smile. “Your mother more or less died here, didn’t she?”

I frowned, glanced away for a moment.

“No, the story goes back a ways longer than that. My sister, Marguerite, is the start of it. After Mother died, we were taken in by her brother. He raised us as best he could. Even tried to marry us off. But, like our mother, we weren’t exactly disposed in that direction. We learned of magic through her books, through the blood flowing in our veins. We spent long hours locked up in our bedroom, and sleepless nights under the full moon, trying our hand at everything we could. Eventually, as we began to grow our lifespan, something else happened. We began to grow apart. She pursued her own studies, and I became enamored by my own, and our own interests diverged. Extraordinarily so, it seemed.”

“Diverged?” Ryder asked. “How?”

Esther’s face contorted, her brow coming down low, and her nose shriveling up into her face. “Necromancy,” she said, spitting the word.

Even Ryder sat a little more upright.

I, though, just leaned closer. “What’s that?”

“Bad shit,” Ryder said. “Simple as that.”

She nodded in agreement. “Agreed on the first sentiment, but the second one is far from the truth. There’s nothing simple about necromancy, nothing simple at all. It’s the manipulation of the soul, of dead remains. Of death itself, in practiced hands.”

“Oh,” I said. “Wow! So, she was getting into this dark stuff? What did you do?”

“You need to understand, at first I hadn’t realized what Marguerite was involved in. She and I had stopped working together for some time, even though we kept in close touch. After all, we didn’t have many close friends or confidants, and there was no one else I could rely on. But, one night, I arrived at her house unannounced, and found no one home. I let myself in, and curiosity overtook my good sense.” She paused, smiling for just a moment as if she were considering how silly it was for a grown woman to lose control to such a childish urge. But, quickly, she frowned again. “I found her workshop that night. Her true workshop, the one she’d kept hidden from me down in the cellar. The one where she’d been researching her true goals.”

Ryder and I had both leaned forward, and were hanging on her every word like climbers from a rocky outcropping. Silence hung over the bar now as we both exchanged looks. “Is that why you left?” I asked finally. “Because of the necromancy?”

She licked her lips, looking as if she were gathering her strength, before continuing. “No. I left because that night, I discovered what she was truly working towards. She’s been trying to find a way to bring Mother back. But, to do that, she needs a vessel. Someone who was close to her, and of the same blood.”

“Close to her?” I asked myself more than her, my voice just above a whisper. Suddenly, it clicked into place. Magic was, according to the witch across from me, about connection. “Oh no, Esther. She wanted to use you to bring her back, didn’t she?”

Esther bit her lower lip, nodded as solemnly as a priest at a funeral. “I fled that night. For years, I ran all over the world, running down my finances, but she would always find me. Never by magic, either. Just by knowing me too well. That is, of course, until…”

“You came here,” Ryder finished.

Esther sucked in a deep breath. “Yes. I knew this would be the last place she’d look, since it was the spot the spell had to take place. I moved here two decades ago and took over this old building, weaved my magic around the town, and began my hiding in plain sight. Just hoping it would all be over.”

“Weren’t you worried she’d eventually show up on the anniversary?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Honestly, years are just years. They’re not as important as you think. What mattered wasn’t when she found me, but whether or not she found me at all.”

“And that’s your sister in the band, then?” I asked. “On all the posters all over town?”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Marguerite is industrious, if nothing else. She’s been working at this plan for a long time, and knows she needs a lot of warm bodies in town to fuel her spell. What better way to do that than a festival? One the town had been throwing for years already? She just needed to find a way to make herself the thematic centerpiece, a way to build connections to all of them. And what better way to do that than as the lead singer for Maneki Neko?”

“And the ghosts?” Ryder asked. “What about those? About my seeing Winifred on the outskirts of town?”

“A side effect of my sister’s ritual. It’s stirring up the memories of the people attached to Camelot, calling their echoes back from wherever. And not just Mother’s. Anyone who’s passed away in town is liable to come back, at least for a little while.”

“Like fishing in a pond,” Ryder said. “Stir up the water and throw in some bait, plenty of fish will come by to at least see what’s going on.”

“Precisely,” Esther said, her lips pressed into a thin line.

Ryder leaned back into his bar stool, sighing. “But, now that she’s accomplished so much already, how do we stop her? She’s practically got an army with her.”

“Therein,” Esther said, her glass halfway to her lips, “lies the rub. True, we can stop parts of her plan, but I fear we can’t stop it all.”

I frowned as I leaned back into my seat, staring down into the nearly untouched scotch in its old-fashioned glass, the ice slowly melting and dripping condensation on the bar. None of this looked good. None of it at all. I lifted the glass of scotch to my mouth, took a long drink.

Warmth flooded through my stomach and extremities, contrasting with the wet, chilly glass still in hand. “Have a coaster, Esther?”

She smiled as she reached down behind the bar to grab one for me, saying, “Sorry. Even after two decades of doing this, I’m still not a very good bartender.”

As she spoke, though, my eyes settled on the ring my glass had left behind. On the oddly, but still distinctly, shaped circle of water left on the bar top. “That’s it,” I whispered to myself.

“What?” Ryder asked.

“A ring,” I said as Esther dropped a coaster in front of me. “Can’t we just put up a ring around the event? You said that stops magic, right?”

They both gave me a look like I was crazy. “A ring?” Ryder asked, blinking those heavy lashes of his at me. The words seemed to drawl from his lips, as if he barely believed he was speaking them. “Around an entire field?”

“Hear me out,” I said, setting my glass down on the coaster. “What if we could make one around where they’re holding the event? What if we could enclose the farm in one? Would that help?”

Esther screwed up her face a little, like she was considering her options, weighing whether or not this might even come close to working. She nodded after a moment, the movement as rhythmic as if she were nodding along with an unheard song. “It might. It just might. It would probably stop whatever spell she’s put on the townspeople, that’s for certain. The only question is how we could do something like that?”

That, I actually had an answer to. “Salt trucks. Jeff drives one for the county during the winter, and I think he even has keys to it.”

“Would he be willing to help?” Esther asked.

I nodded. “Jeff would do anything to save the town. Same as me.”

Ryder shifted in his seat a little. “That’s all fine and good. But what about the rest, though? We still have all the people at the event to contend with. How do we break this curse that’s turning them all into cats? If this spell is as big as you say, and we’ve got no reason to doubt that, then we’re going to be hard-pressed to counter it. And I’m not about to wrestle that many of those things to the ground, just so I can pay for their tickets.”

“For most ritual spells,” Esther began, “it takes a central caster. Someone who’s directing it. It’s almost like an orchestra, where the conductor is responsible for all the musicians and instruments harmonizing and creating a symphony.”

Another uneasy moment of silence settled over the bar as her words set in. Marguerite was that conductor. She was the director of this piece, and without her, everything would quickly fall apart into nothing more than discordant noise.

Esther swallowed hard, her too-young throat visibly moving up and down just before she looked away. We all knew what had to be done, but none of us seemed to want to admit it, if only because she was Esther’s flesh and blood. Her twin, no less.

“I’m sorry, Esther,” Ryder said, his quiet words loud enough to sound like the banging of a church bell in the near-silent hotel bar, “but Marguerite needs to be stopped. You know it’s true.”

Esther closed her eyes, swallowing hard again as she nodded. “I do. I do, I do, I do.” She paused, sucked in a breath. “But, I don’t have to like it. She’s my sister, after all. How should I be handling this?”

I swallowed hard, closed my eyes. There it was. We were in agreement.

Marguerite O’Bannon would have to die.