A moan from the hospital bed heralded the rousing of Bailey. She opened her eyes, which quickly widened as she took in her surroundings.

  “Wha... what happened?” she asked.

  “You had a seizure,” I replied, my voice still gravelly from uneasy sleep. “The doctor says you’re all right, but they want to keep you overnight for observation.”

  She nodded before trying to swallow. “Thirsty...”

  I spotted a plastic pitcher and a plastic cup with a straw on the nightstand and I rose from my chair. The effort, however, took much more than my sore body could handle, and I fell back on the seat with a groan.

  “Looks like you had a rough night too,” she said, using the bed controls to raise her top half up.

  My pain and exhaustion from the previous night flared up like a persistent rash. “Sleeping in a chair is far from comfortable,” I explained even though my words failed to persuade either one of us.

  Bailey hummed and nodded as she got out of the bed and grabbed the pitcher, putting it on the freestanding table next to the bed. Ever so carefully, she poured some water into the cup and downed it. Then she did the same again and asked me, “Want a drink?”

  I smiled, trying to muster the strength to get out of the chair. My legs were still stiff as I stumbled towards Bailey’s bed. At least, they carried me all the way. Her smile was mischievous as she handed me the plastic cup. Our interaction seemed ritualistic and intimate and I wondered if she noticed it too.

  Looking deep into Bailey’s eyes, I remembered what Osiris had said about Melody and how my clinging to her wasn’t allowing her to move on, just as it wasn’t allowing me to move on. I hated to think that I was punishing Melody as much as I was punishing myself. My thoughts started spinning when I wondered just how I could fix the situation—how could I let Melody go? I remembered seeing some specialized potions and ointments in Poppy’s shop and I wondered if they might do the trick. As soon as I found a spare moment, I would drop in and ask which concoction worked best to help release someone.

  As I finished taking a sip of the water, I tried to walk but my legs turned to rubber again. Bailey said, “Oh, pull the chair up, Syd! The last thing I want is to have you fall down and wind up being my neighbor down the hall.”

  I laughed and barely dragged the chair over. While I quietly admitted to myself what a relief it was to be sitting again, Bailey looked at me thoughtfully. “I guess last night was hard on both of us.”

  “You more than me,” I countered. “Dr. Gruff says you have to take it easy for a day or two.”

  Bailey looked at me with disappointment in her eyes. “Dammit! I can’t take off a day or two! We haven’t finished the office yet,” she moaned. “Not to mention the fact that I’m definitely going to get fired from Spook Society.”

  “I’m sure your boss won’t fire you when he finds out you’re in the hospital.”

  She nodded and looked anxious. “I’ll need to call him and tell him.” Then she swallowed hard. “And I need to let all my friends know.” She breathed in deeply then. “We have a Black Cat Cocktail Club meeting tonight.”

  “A what?”

  She laughed. “All my girlfriends and I get together in this club so we can drink and gossip.”

  I chuckled at that. “Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen tonight, I’m sorry to say.”

  She nodded.

  “All of this stuff can wait until you recover,” I replied, putting my hand on hers gently. “The only priority right now is for you to get better.”

  Bailey gazed at me with an expression of gratitude as she squeezed my hand. “I feel fine now... really.”

  “You’ve just woken up from a terrible ordeal. Let’s see how you feel a few hours from now and then it might be a whole different story.”

  She smirked at me. “Okay, whatever you say, Dad.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her and then we both laughed. The moment felt good and light and even though I didn’t want to ruin it, in order to keep fighting the monster I’d just rescued her from, I needed to ask her some questions. “What do you remember about last night?”

  She squinted and thought for a second or two. “Let’s see... I remember going to The Half-Moon and watching Lizzie show off some priceless gold amulet or whatever it was...” Her brow furrowed as she thought harder. “Then you yelled at me not to touch it.” She grimaced as she turned her wide eyes to me. “Your warning came too late because I did touch it. After that...” She got the shivers and became suddenly quiet.

  “It’s all right,” I assured her, giving her hand a warm squeeze. “Whatever it was, is already over.”

  She shook her head. “I would have thought… well, I would have thought that I would have picked something up from it. Usually with my abilities, I can detect the evil in things.” She looked up at me then. “And yet… I couldn’t detect anything from the thing.”

  I nodded. “Maybe some things are hidden… intentionally.” I couldn’t get into the hows or whys of it without potentially breaking my promise to the Council, so I changed the subject. “Then you don’t remember anything after that?”

  “Shadows,” Bailey answered before shuddering again. “Something that slithered and hissed was hiding in the shadows... I’m guessing it was a big snake. By big, I mean Godzilla-size, you know?” When I nodded, she added, “Wait! I saw...” She stopped herself before finishing the sentence.

  “Lorene?” I supplied for her. When her eyes went wide, I explained, “You woke up for just a second, and the name you said was ‘Lorene’. Is she your sister?”

  Her jaw tightened. “What makes you ask that?”

  “My intuition,” I replied.

  Bailey moistened her lips with her tongue and took a deep breath. “I almost had a sister once, during my senior year in college. She came late in Mom’s life but Mom couldn’t wait to share the news with me.” She looked away. “Like I said, it was a premenopausal pregnancy for Mom, and maybe a little too late in life. My sister went full term, but she was stillborn.”

  “I’m very sorry, Bailey.”

  The sorrow and regret was visible on Bailey’s face when she looked at me again. “I really wish I’d had the chance to watch her grow up.” Then she nodded and breathed in deeply as a strange little smile crossed over her face. “Do you know… you’re the only person I’ve ever told about Lorene? Not even my best friend, Marty, knows.”

  I gave her a copy of her own sweet smile. “Well, I will cherish the story and I will never tell another person.”

  The vulnerability in her expression banished my sense of exhaustion and I rose from my chair to give her a compassionate hug. How often I forgot that others had overwhelming burdens too. Maybe our mutual sense of mourning was what had bound Bailey and me together in the first place. Because, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was as if Bailey and I had been brought together. From the first moment she’d walked into my store, I’d felt a special closeness to her—a kinship.

  When our embrace ended, Bailey looked at me self-consciously. “Sorry, I... I know this is a lot to take in.”

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “We all need a shoulder eventually, and I’m just glad I could lend you mine this morning.”

  Yes, I could have told her about Lorene’s visits and how I’d gotten to know her little sister but I wanted to save that conversation for another day—when we both were healthy enough to have it.

  She gave me a sweet smile when the door opened. I was expecting Doctor Gruff, so I was more than a little surprised to find Maverick entering the room.

  He nodded at me. “It seems you’ve been up to a whole lot, Syd.”

  “Maverick,” I replied. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Marla was more than happy to alert me to your whereabouts after all the excitement yesterday.” He looked at Bailey. “Feeling any better?”

  “Slightly,” Bailey replied.

  Maverick’s attention then drifted back to me. “The doctor is right behind me.” He pointed a finger at me and said, “In the meantime, you and I need to talk... privately.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I turned around in the hospital corridor and waited for Maverick to catch up to me.

  “Eyes to the front, Sandman,” he said, pushing my head around with his hand. “Your shopgirl’s safe and we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Bigger fish?” I repeated.

  He nodded. “Put your cards on the table, Blackstone. I know about the cartouche you took from Lizzie.”

  I felt a surge of energy in my pocket as if the item, itself, were responding to his words. “And here I thought I was so discreet.”

  “You can’t keep secrets from a genuine mind-reader,” Maverick answered with a scowl.

  “You?” I started.

  His scowl deepened. “Not me. Marla.”

  “Ah.”

  He nodded. “Marla was in the back kitchen while all the excitement occurred. To hear her version, you couldn’t stop thinking about the damned thing the entire time you waited for the paramedics to arrive. At least, that’s what she told Roy.”

  “Naturally, Roy then passed that info on to you,” I concluded.

  Maverick nodded and held out his hand. “Let’s see it.”

  I reluctantly pulled the cartouche from my pocket. The napkins I’d wrapped it in had a few gaping holes in them. Carefully handing it over to Maverick, I cautioned him, “I wouldn’t advise holding it against your bare skin.”

  Maverick dramatically cleared his throat while raising his covered hands. “Do you think Marla failed to parse that information from your thoughts too?” Pulling back the flimsy paper, he gave the golden emblem a scrutinizing examination. He seemed every bit as uneasy handling it as I was.

  When he finally looked up, he asked, “You’ve kept this in your pocket the entire night?”

  “Which, I admit now, may have been a mistake,” I replied as I briefly recounted the ferocious attack on Bailey in her dreams by Jormungandr.

  Maverick looked down at the cartouche again with a visible grimace. “You know, up until yesterday, everyone on the Council was absolutely sure this was destroyed well over a hundred years ago.”

  “If Lizzie Bloch is correct, it’s actually been buried at the Cairo Museum until fairly recently.”

  Maverick stuffed the cartouche into his own pocket and growled. “Dammit all! I really wish that snoop of a shaman were bluffing.”

  “Quincy Derleth, you mean?”

  “Who else?” Maverick replied. “After you texted me about him and then the two of you did the Shadow Snake Tango in the alley night before last, I got in touch with him and forced him to report himself to the Council.” His eyes grew furious.

  “So, you didn’t know what he was until then?”

  “No. And don’t think I was the only one who got pissed that he wasn’t more forthcoming with exactly what he was and what he was doing in Haven Hollow. That ‘research’ he claims he was here to do could have saved us all a lot of headaches.”

  “In his defense, he did mention that his kind carried a heavy social stigma,” I explained on a shrug. “He may have feared not being believed or even worse, accused of being the cause of all of this.”

  “Yeah, well, seoimanns are hardly anyone’s favorite in any supernatural community, so the concern is valid.” Holding up the cartouche, he added, “But this little relic should never have left Haven Cemetery, where it was meant to be buried and stay buried.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “The graveyard being the subject of Quincy’s research?”

  “Just one incident there in specific,” he corrected me. “A ritual conducted by a bunch of Aleister Crowley wannabes last century.”

  Even with my pitiful knowledge of unstable magicians, I was surprised. “Were they trying to concoct an entity that would swallow the world whole?”

  “If only,” Maverick scoffed. “More likely they were after the usual occult wish list: wealth, health, sexual virility. You know, the stupid shit people who don’t know the first thing about magic always chase.”

  “I take it things didn’t go well?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Maverick said, nodding. “Given how sloppy their ritual was, I’m amazed Haven Hollow survived the event.”

  “Were the guilty parties punished afterwards?”

  “Most of them by their own stupidity. The dipshits left a lot of artifacts and paraphernalia behind them. No surprise the Council insisted on having those destroyed.”

  I pointed at the cartouche. “And yet this little gem managed to survive the purge, only to cause more mischief.”

  “Do you think it’s just a matter of melting it down?”

  I shook my head vigorously. “No, not with the intense oneiric energies coming off it. It would have to be disposed of in a very precise and careful manner.”

  He frowned at me. “Well, obviously that didn’t happen, seeing how it was entombed inside the Cairo Museum. Looks like we’ve got a new mess to clean up.” He rolled his eyes in disgust. “Joy of joys.”

  I stroked my chin. “That’s not the only valuable relic Lizzie Bloch stole from her parents. She already sold several others to the pawn shop in Shady Hills.”

  “Joe’s place!” Maverick exclaimed with a nod.

  “You know of Joe?”

  He nodded. “The Council gets regular reports from Joe on anything people sell to him. If it’s supernatural, he sees a red flag.”

  “Maybe some of the gems Lizzie sold him yesterday came from that ritual?”

  Maverick thought about that but then shook his head. “Joe would have been able to spot them as supernatural right away.”

  “I didn’t identify Quincy as a seoimann straight away. Joe could have made the same mistake with the jewels.”

  He nodded. “Fair point. Let’s find out.”

  ***

  The moment I looked through the windows of the pawn shop, I bristled with alarm. The darkness inside the shop wasn’t normal. When Maverick’s eyebrows shot up, I knew he noticed the same thing I just had. Going in the front door seemed very ill-advised.

  “Does the shop have a back door?” I asked.

  He pointed towards the alley and we rushed through it, all the while, I had a nagging sense of familiarity. It wasn’t until we approached the back wall—and the back door in the left wall—that it hit me. This was the same alley in which Quincy and I had dispatched Jormungandr two nights ago.

  A quick jiggle of the handle confirmed the closed door was locked. But Maverick wasted no time in holding up his hands and staring hard at the window. As I watched, a light glow began to build between his fingers and then he unleashed the glow at the window just beside the door. As intended, the glass pane broke into six or so large pieces.

  “Impressive,” I managed.

  He looked at me and frowned and then we both immediately began removing the panes of glass before he plunged his hand through the opening and unlocked the door from within.

  The shadows from inside the shop started to creep outside, coming toward us in inky tendrils. As we took several steps back, I pulled out some of my sand and blew it at them. The twinkling grains had no effect and were swallowed whole by the dark tendrils. My sand didn’t slow them down one inch. Maverick thrust his gloved hand into the nearest dark appendage. At the sound of snapping fingers, the sand grains reappeared in the dark before bursting into flames. The resulting conflagration consumed the shadow tendrils from the inside out, without leaving a trace of ash behind.

  I looked at him in astonishment.

  He rammed his elbow into my arm. “Less gaping, more sand-throwing!”

  I couldn’t argue with that logic, so I threw another handful of sand into the darkness. After another snap of Maverick’s fingers, a space appeared for us to safely enter. We repeated the process eight or nine more times and walked further into the store. With each snap of his fingers, the darkness was pushed back far enough for us to walk several feet. A strange afterglow remained, which allowed us to see our way.

  Gradually, I started to hear something that unsettled me: sobbing. I’d handled far too many dreamers not to know when someone was terrified beyond reason. Only a panicked individual could make a noise like that. Tossing sand in the proper direction, I said, “Over there.”

  To his credit, Maverick nodded before igniting the sand again. I had to admire his skill in snapping his fingers with gloves on. It was a lot harder than it looked. Three handfuls of sand were used before we uncovered a pair of prone figures huddled together under the counter. One of them uncurled himself and revealed the bushy face of Joe.

  “This sure ain’t written in the lease,” he said as I helped him up.

  The other male figure was the source of the sobbing I’d heard earlier. He clutched something tightly in his hands, but before I could inquire what it was, Joe spoke.

  “I should have recognized the feeling I got off that boy and known it was a warning sign. But did I?”

  “I’m guessing the answer to that question is ‘no’?” I asked as I crouched down.

  Through Joe’s fingers, I could see the jewels that Lizzie sold him yesterday. But the real surprise came when the man beside Joe lifted his head back so I could finally see his face. His eyes were black in the area where they should have been white and his cheeks were ashen and sunken in.

  But there was no mistaking Sam Clarke.

  ***

  I heard voices coming from inside Bailey’s hospital room.

  They sounded familiar, but I couldn’t identify them until I opened the door.

  When I did, Lizzie and Ethel looked up. I stepped into the room.

  “Land’s sake, look who it is,” Ethel said with her trademark warmth.

  “Ethel,” I nodded as I shut the door behind me.

  Bailey regarded me with obvious worry. “What happened?”