Page 39

Story: Enraged By Magic

Salem was under siege by a demon. It didn’t get any more real than this. A few hours into our bracelet craft time and together we’d already made a few hundred bracelets. A few of us had left the shop to go out around town and start handing them out to people. They chalked it up to free shop promo, but we all knew it was something far more important than that. I’d just finished one and stood up to stretch when I got a tug in my stomach. My hands immediately lowered to my stomach when the next cramp started. I doubled over the table. Owen saw me first. “Are you—?”

Liam butted in. He put his hand on the back of my neck to sooth me. I knew he had to have been feeling similarly, but he looked at everyone instead. “Don’t be alarmed. It’s how we get the call when something bad is happening.”

Did I mention I really fucking hated cramps?

I looked up and locked gazes with Travis. He nodded, and we all moved toward the door. “Feel free to stay and keep working. We’ll be back.”

Anticipation grew in my stomach, twisting my insides to knots. The sick feeling grew as we jumped into the Jeep. It was close. The Akasha wasn’t taking us to a place too far away. Up front, I saw Travis get on the phone from the passenger seat as Randy asked for the keys. Immediately, he said, “Why are we getting the pull?”

Of course, I thought. We weren’t Akasha members anymore. Why the hell were we getting the pull?

Travis nodded as he heard Walter out on the other side of the line. “A little heads up would’ve been nice,” he snapped.

A moment later, he hung up the phone and shook his head. Gabe peeked around the seat. “What did he say?”

“He said they decided to reinstate us as the Order in Salem.”

“A heads up would’ve been nice,” I said, grimacing through the latest cramp. I had a feeling that because I was a girl whose body was already predisposed to cramps, I felt them more than they did. It was a theory, and I was going with it no matter if it was the case or not.

I knew instinctively when Randy was going to take a left down the street and then another left just past the Salem Witch Museum. We were kiddy corner from the park where we were earlier, but that was where the pull took us.

“Are they going to meet us here?” Liam asked.

Travis shrugged. “I don’t know. I hung up on him.”

I didn’t know why, but it made me laugh. All this other shit was happening, and it still felt good to get back at someone who’d been a dick.

Liam didn’t find it all that amusing. “We could probably use their help.”

“I doubt it,” Travis said. “You know yourself that wasn’t a really big pull. I doubt it has anything to do with the demon. Or if it does, it’s not Jax himself.”

I checked on Travis. His face was clear, yet concentrated. I wondered if he thought he’d find his sister in here. He at least had to have a small fragment that that could happen. If it was her, I hoped she wasn’t hurt.

We emptied into the small foyer. There were people gathered there, waiting for the next showing. Gabe went up to the counter, all smiles. He came back with stickers for each of us that allowed admission. Luckily enough, the girl running the register was a witch and had been at the equinox celebration earlier. She’d give us five minutes to check the place out by ourselves.

After a minute had gone by, she stuck her head in the door and then waved us through. We each inched past her and she shut us in from behind. I heard her voice coming from under the door where she said there would be just a slight delay in the next showing.

There was one single faint light shining down in the middle of the floor. The rest of the room was in shadows. I didn’t know where to look first, but the guys started checking out the side walls and when I looked a little closer, I saw that there were scenes depicted in different areas around the room. It took me looking at two different scenes before I realized why we’d gotten the call.

Where there was supposed to be wax people to represent the different characters in Salem’s witch history, there were real people.

Gabe got out his phone and shone the flashlight on it into the corner of the room. I recognized the scene from one of the stones I read when Gabe was taking me around to the cemetery and the Witch Trials monument. Giles Corey had been pressed to death. Instead of seeing a model there, there was an actual guy laying between the piles of stone. His face was pale, and blood poured out of his mouth.

The faint smell of rotten meat trickled into the air around us. These guys had been killed somewhere else. The stench was still on them. But they’d been moved here as a statement.

Randy cleared his throat. “I think I know where Walter’s new Salem Order ended up.”

My mouth dropped. Of course. Who else could it be?

Reluctantly, Travis took out his phone and called Walter. His coven would be the only ones to identify them. How the hell had this happened? If this was them, were they not prepared for what they were getting into? Had Jax ambushed them. There were so many questions and not enough answers to go around.

When Travis got off the phone with Walter, he took a closer look. I noticed the shine of his flashlight strayed the longest on the female models. Luckily, those were still wax.

Jennie was still alive then, as far as we knew. She’d better stay that way too because I wasn’t sure how Travis would handle that at all.

It didn’t take Walter and his coven very long at all to make it to the museum. They’d mastered the art of just showing up places. I guessed that was what age and wisdom got you.

Gabe had arranged it with the girl at the counter to let in the superiors. Soon, they’d learn that not another person was going to be let in here anytime soon. I assumed the Order would want to take the bodies away instead of involving the local police, but all that still took time.