Wanda held one hand over the water and murmured below the engine’s roar. “Vapor of foresight, hear my question and help me locate the object of my possession.”

  The oil glistened on the surface for a second and then, as soon as Wanda finished the incantation, the water in the bowl turned to steam and drifted upward. The tilting Jeep didn’t disturb it. Instead, the vapor formed a dense cloud in front of Wanda’s face, and a second later, she took a deep breath, inhaling the cloud with her powerful intake of air. All the steam whooshed into her nostrils.

  She collapsed back into the seat, and the empty bowl toppled to the floor of the Jeep and started rolling back and forth with the vehicle’s motion. I glanced over again and noticed Wanda’s eyes had rotated up into their sockets so all I could see was white. Now she was definitely under the spell’s hold.

  A screech made me whirl around so fast, I almost yanked the Jeep off the road. Hellcat materialized under a streetlight maybe five feet up ahead. He howled in rage for a split second and contorted in a corkscrew before he vanished again. I watched as Lorcan blipped into sight just a second later, right behind Hellcat, before disappearing again.

  My phone rang, and I accepted the call through the Bluetooth of the car.

  “Too late,” Lorcan’s voice came through the speakers. “The little twerp is on your right. No, now he’s gone. Blast.”

  “Slow down, Poppy!” Libby yelled. “You’ll kill us all!”

  “Turn left at the oak tree,” Wanda muttered under her breath in a weary drawl. Her voice was so soft, I had to concentrate hard to hear her over the engine noise. Chancing a quick glance in her direction, I found her eyes still eerily white.

  Looking forward again, I strained to see the landscape beyond the front of the Jeep in the narrow rays of the headlights. A massive oak tree loomed over an intersection not far away, but I couldn’t see anything beyond that. This road led out of town, and now there were no longer any streetlamps to light anything beyond my bouncing headlights.

  In the last gleam of the lights of town from behind us, I spotted Hellcat appearing and disappearing one more time. Lorcan appeared just behind him. I floored it and barreled into the dark. Now I couldn’t see a thing beyond a few feet in front of the Jeep.

  “Turn right at the farmhouse,” Wanda directed.

  “Farmhouse? I don’t see any farmhouse.”

  “There, Poppy!” Bailey shot out a hand and stuck her arm over the driver’s seat. She pointed to the left, beyond a crooked wooden fence.

  I searched for somewhere to turn but was only greeted with darkness beyond the glow of the headlights. Finally, the beams focused on a driveway and as I turned onto it, a tall, deserted farmhouse came into view. The chimney leaned at a crooked angle and the moon revealed several missing tiles on the roof. The porch awning sagged, and the paint was chipped and mostly missing. Clearly, no one had lived in this house for a long time.

  The driveway wound between trees of skeletal branches without any leaves. Hellcat materialized once, right in front of the Jeep. The headlights lit him up and reflected off his brilliant green eyes. He gave a terrified shriek and vanished again, an instant before the vehicle would have flattened him.

  Two matched screams from the backseat joined my own scream. I slammed on the brakes and the Jeep slid five feet forward. I looked in the rear view mirror, halfway afraid I’d see Hellcat’s little body lifeless on the road, but there was nothing. Thank God.

  A cloud of dust surrounded the Jeep. Now I really couldn’t see anything, but my eyes kept darting right and left, waiting for the dust to clear. I wheezed for breath, searching the night for any sign of the cat. “If anything happens to him, I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “What happened wasn’t your fault,” Bailey said.

  My voice cracked with the strain of everything going on. I teetered on the verge of tears and desperation had completely taken hold of me. Glancing over at Wanda, she was still out of it. “It is my fault because I shouldn’t have been working on the potion with so many people present, or this never would have happened. I should have known better, since it wasn’t a potion I was familiar with. I should have been more careful.”

  “Hellcat shouldn’t have been drinking everything in sight,” Libby pointed out. “I fear that cat is quite the alcoholic.”

  “I know all that,” I fired back, “but I still feel responsible for him.”

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to think about the worst case scenario—that Hellcat might disappear for good or that he might die. Wanda would never forgive me if that happened. I would never forgive me if that happened. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure what that would mean for Wanda if her familiar didn’t make it. Was it even possible for a familiar to die?

  For right now, Wanda didn’t recognize what was going on. Her blank eyes stared at nothing. “Turn left here.”

  I cranked the wheel, and we pulled into the farmhouse driveway. Not a single light twinkled anywhere. It was just as dark as dark could be, minus the glow from my headlights, which seemed to make the unoccupied farmhouse all the more intimidating.

  “That place looks haunted,” Libby said.

  “As a former zombie, you shouldn’t be concerned about ghosts,” Bailey answered.

  “And, yet, I am.”

  Turning left brought me around the house into the backyard.

  “Left,” Wanda muttered.

  She kept saying, “left,” until I drove all the way around the house and ended up right back where I’d started. I put the Jeep into park and faced Wanda. “Where is he? What are we doing here?”

  “He’s there,” Lorcan announced through the phone, and it was only then that I realized the call was still active.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The little furry rodent keeps appearing and disappearing all around the house, but your lights are not able to reach him,” Lorcan answered.

  “Why haven’t you caught him yet? Aren’t you supposed to have vampire speed?” I asked, not meaning to sound so frustrated, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “While I do possess vampire speed, my dear, the little devil also possesses his own brand of impossible speed. Thus, I can’t seem to catch him. I’m always a second or so behind him.”

  I squinted into the dark beyond the fence. Empty farmland stretched in all directions. I didn’t see Hellcat anywhere, but that meant nothing. If Lorcan was right, Hellcat was appearing and reappearing dozens of times in the dark all around us.

  Wanda directed me all the way back down the driveway and onto the road by raising her arm and pointing the way with her index finger. “Go there,” she said, eyes still as white as moons in her face.

  “You’re right behind him,” Lorcan concurred over the phone.

  “We have to do more than follow him,” I returned. “We have to catch him.”

  A few miles away, we returned to a stretch of road where streetlights shone on the pavement.

  “There he is!” Libby pointed upward. A flash of moonlight caught the cat’s fur high in a pine tree. His enraged howls echoed through the night.

  Chapter Six

  “Where to now?” I asked.

  “South,” Wanda answered.

  We entered a neighborhood south of Haven Hollow. I hadn’t been to this part of town before, but at least it had enough streetlights to reveal more of the surroundings. Hellcat popped into view a few more times and always in the oddest places. Lorcan tried to direct us, too, but since he could only see Hellcat after the cat appeared, his commands always came a split second too late, just as he did.

  “Right. No, left. Left again. No, sorry, go right.”

  Hellcat winked into view between the telephone wires, but he vanished before he could fall or get tangled in them. A mile later, I caught a glimpse of him on top of a jungle gym in someone’s yard. And then I caught a glimpse of Lorcan just behind him. Once, Hellcat appeared on a fencepost, right next to the sidewalk. I hit the brakes, and the Jeep screeched to a halt. “There he is!”

  I flung open the door with Bailey right on my heels, but we got halfway across the sidewalk when Hellcat disappeared again. I stopped in my tracks and all the wind went out of my sails. It took all my effort to walk back to the Jeep, just as Lorcan appeared beside me, also looking the worse for wear.

  “This is hopeless,” I moaned when we reached the Jeep. “We’ll never catch him at this pace.”

  “He’s slowing down,” Libby remarked. “Each time, it takes longer for him to come back.”

  “That might be so, but he’s still too quick for me to catch him,” Lorcan said.

  “Is my dear witch okay?” Lorcan asked as he walked up to Wanda and inspected her. I glanced toward her and noticed she was still zoned out and lay with her head back against the seat and her eyes still rolled back in her head. Lorcan looked at me with concern in his gaze as he ran his fingers down her cheek.

  “She still feels warm,” he said.

  I waved away his concern. “She’s fine. She’s just under the influence of one of her tracking spells.”

  “Ah,” Lorcan said with a clipped nod. “I do hope her eyeballs return as I do enjoy it when she uses both of them to glare at me.”

  “Her eyeballs will return,” I said, sounding exasperated. A moment later, another scream split the quiet and Bailey pointed out the window.

  “Hellcat just blipped through again.”

  “Where?”

  “At the mouth of Cemetery Bridge, leading into Haven Park.”

  “Let’s get back to it then,” I said as Lorcan nodded and leaning down, he kissed Wanda’s cheek before disappearing into the night air and I piled back into the Jeep.

  “Ah, wasn’t that sweet,” Libby said.

  “I don’t think ‘sweet’ describes Lorcan very well,” Bailey answered.

  “Actually, Lorcan can be very sweet when he wants to be,” I argued as Hellcat blinked into view right before the wooden covered bridge, just as Bailey had mentioned. And then he plummeted straight down. If he actually landed this time, he’d find himself swept away by the Haven Hollow River. I stopped the Jeep, kicked the door open and nearly brained myself as I scrambled to get out in time.

  Hellcat stayed visible much longer this time. He somersaulted end over end, shrieking and yowling like a banshee. Libby and Bailey sprang out of the Jeep right behind me. We raced to catch the cat, or at least break his fall. If he hit the pavement of the mouth of the bridge from that high up, he wouldn’t survive. And if he landed in the river… ergh.

  Lorcan blipped into sight before blipping right out again and I could see him flying through the air. It sounded like the billowing of wind.

  Libby and I watched as Hellcat suddenly appeared in the center of the covered bridge, a few feet below the wooden beams of the top of the covered bridge.

  “He’s right there!” Bailey yelled as the three of us ran as fast as we could and were able to get right underneath him. He was still too high for any of us to actually reach him, though.

  His furry, little body wrenched this way and that, but nothing could stop him from sailing right through the bridge and emerging on the other side.

  “He’s headed into Cemetery Park!” Libby yelled.

  “So what?” Bailey said.

  “So there are ghosts there!”

  “It’s not a cemetery anymore, Libby,” she answered, shaking her head. “It’s Haven Park now.”

  “I don’t care what they call it! Everyone knows the graves are still there! And I don’t want to come across any ghosts! Or, banshees! I’ve heard rumors of awful screams at night and ghosts don’t scream—banshees do!”

  Nothing could stop Hellcat or even slow him down—he started sailing up high into the night sky above Haven Park and then immediately stopped, just floating there for at least a few seconds. He was maybe twenty feet up. Then, with a mewling scream, he started plummeting. He spread his limbs in all directions with the air whipping at his shiny black fur, but that did nothing to slow him down.

  I raised my arms to grab him and positioning myself right underneath him; I braced myself for his claws, which weren’t going to be pretty. His shrill screams pierced the otherwise silent night, and I felt the slightest brush of his thick, velvety coat against my fingertips but then he was gone—popped out of existence again, just like that.

  I stood there, staring up at the stars, still waiting for him to land in my arms, but there was no sign of him—anywhere. My throat started to swell up, and I fought back tears when a sound woke me from my despair.

  “Wanda’s saying something!” Bailey cried from where she was already halfway across the bridge, on her way to the Jeep. “Look!”

  Libby grabbed my hand and yanked me across the bridge to the Jeep. She practically shoved me behind the wheel as Wanda still lolled in the passenger seat, completely oblivious to the fact that her cat almost pancaked in Cemetery Park.

  I put the Jeep in drive and floored it across Cemetery Bridge as Wanda said, “Turn right.”

  I turned to face her, but her eyes were still rolled up into their sockets, revealing nothing but gleaming white.

  “There he is!” Bailey pointed down the road that led back toward Haven Hollow. “He’s heading back to town.”

  I took a deep breath and gunned the engine as we barreled away toward town. “Hold on. I think I have an idea.”

  ***

  I knocked on the door and listened for any movement inside—seeing as how it was still the dead of night, I figured it would take Marty a while to wake up. Three hours had passed since Hellcat had first disappeared, and it was now four in the morning.

  “Marty sleeps like the dead,” Bailey said, from where she stood just beside me. Libby stood on my other side.

  “Maybe you should knock harder,” she offered.

  “Or ring the doorbell,” Bailey added.

  I did both. Just then, my phone chirped again. I answered it, and Lorcan’s voice came through the speaker phone.

  “Hellcat has just appeared and disappeared in proximity to the graveyard behind your house, Poppy, and then again near Stanley Stomper’s shop.”

  “Hmm, it sounds like he’s not traveling as far now, or maybe he’s slowing down?”

  “He could be slowing down, but so am I. I’m not certain how much longer I can track him.”

  “He’s still all over the place,” Bailey pointed out. “He came toward town, and now he’s over by Poppy’s graveyard. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”

  “At least he hasn’t left Haven Hollow,” Libby added. “He seems centered on this town.”

  “He’s on the roof of your shop now, Poppy,” Lorcan began. “Oops. No, he isn’t. He’s gone again.”

  “Keep an eye on him, will you, please?” I replied. “We’re going to try something… different.”

  A voice drifted through the air from the passenger seat of the Jeep, which was parked just behind us, maybe five feet away. When I looked over, Wanda’s arm was still draped from the open window. She was also still lost to her trance and kept giving instructions for the tracking spell, even though none of us were in the SUV anymore.

  “Maybe no one’s home,” Libby suggested as she faced me again.

  At that moment, the door opened, and Marty Zach squinted out at us. I didn’t think I’d woken him because he was fully dressed. And he had the look of someone who wasn’t planning on going to sleep anytime soon, never mind that it was now four in the morning.

  Marty was a good friend and always had been—he was the first person I’d met in Haven Hollow, and I was beyond grateful for him.

  “What…” he started as he recognized me. “What are you doing here, Pops? Is everything okay?”

  “I need your help,” I blurted out. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

  “It’s not necessarily a matter of life and death,” Bailey corrected.

  “I should know—I’ve been through both,” added Libby.

  “What’s… what’s going on?” Marty asked, his eyes returning to me.

  “It’s Hellcat,” I stammered, frowning at Libby. “He swallowed a potion and got himself transported to another dimension and we can’t find him.”

  “We’ve been driving all over town and he keeps blipping in and out of sight,” Bailey said.

  I nodded. “Right now, Lorcan is keeping an eye on him and we were wondering if you could use some of your ghost hunting equipment to lay out his trajectory… or something like that.”

  I bit off the last words and waited for the axe to fall. This was a long shot to beat all long shots. I had no idea whether Marty and his famous ghost-tracking equipment could help locate Hellcat, but with so many failures to my credit, what did I have to lose? And Hellcat certainly didn’t have anything to lose with the way he was going.

  Marty clamped his eyes shut, shook his head fast, and pressed two fingertips to his temples. “Uh… what?”

  “Marty, we don’t have time to repeat everything we just said!” I started.

  Bailey leaned into him and whispered, “She’s kind of gone Poppy Stalin, if you know what I mean.”

  Marty didn’t seem to understand what she was talking about and faced me squarely. “You want me to use delicate and expensive scientific equipment to track… a cat?”

  “Hellcat,” I told him as I nodded my head with vigor. “He’s…..”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not yet!” I exclaimed, my stomach dropping down to my toes at just the thought. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid!”

  “Okay, well, as you know… my equipment is designed to track and identify ghosts, Poppy. If the cat isn’t dead, I don’t think I’ll be able to help you.”

  “Oh.” I collapsed, defeated once again. “Crap.” I was out of ideas.

  Just then, Henner Tayir and RJ (both of whom worked for Marty in his ghost-hunting business) emerged from the darkness inside Marty’s house.

  “What’s going on?” Henner asked, as he gave me a big smile. “Hi, Poppy!” He looked at Libby and Bailey. “Ladies.”