“Sure — if fine means that your sleeve is rotting from your wrist.”
Vee looked calmly at the disintegrated cuff of her hoodie. When she wanted, the girl could be as rational as a Vulcan. “We should have brought an extra set of clothes.”
“I hope you’re speaking in the royal we — as in, ‘We should’ve brought extra clothes for Kenna,’ because that’s the only ‘we’ here. This is as far as you go, Queenie.”
“But — ”
In no mood to argue, I grabbed her newly exposed wrist. Before I could reach toward the limbus again, Vee began to gag. Her free hand covered her mouth as she pulled away from me.
When I let go, her panic disappeared. She blinked at the forest, trying to make sense of her own perceptions.
“What just happened?” she asked in a low voice.
“I tested my own theory. You saw what I see, didn’t you?” Sharing my sight had been totally accidental — I’d meant to pull her back out of harm’s way. But if it changed her mind about coming with, I planned to use the fluke to my advantage.
She faced me. “I didn’t realize . . . I mean, I knew it was bad, but I couldn’t see, or smell . . . Oh boy.”
“Now you understand what we’re dealing with.”
“But Duncan couldn’t see the true nature of the limbus when you touched him?” I shook my head back and forth, and she said, “What made you think that I could?”
I held out my hand with my uncle Cam’s glowing emerald ring. “Fiona said the rings weren’t done with us, remember?”
Her eyes narrowed. “But you had no idea that was going to happen when you grabbed me.”
I should’ve known she’d call my bluff. “None whatsoever.”
Vee pulled her scented scarf up to her nose and then lifted her ringed hand to mine. “Let’s see what happens if we actually reach in together.”
She clutched my fingers.
As we reached toward the limbus, the green glow of Uncle Cameron’s ring merged with the red light of Gracie’s to become dazzling white. The black flowers sprouting along the border shriveled, just as they had when Duncan hung over the crevasse. Wherever the light shone, the zombie fungus skittered away, leaving a bare and slime-free path. We swept our hands in a half-circle while watching the phenomenon. But as soon as the light moved on, darkness and decay crept back in with the promise of death.
Like a perverse game of hokeypokey, we pulled our hands
out and let go of one another with a little shake. I hadn’t noticed at the start, but the power of the combined rings gave off a charge of energy, like an electric current.
The border of the limbus, which had been bare a second ago, was now overflowing with petunias once more. Vee’s eyes sparkled with discovery as her gaze leapt from the flowers to Aunt Gracie’s ring. “That was interesting.”
“Little bit.” Prolonged exposure to the limbus made my throat feel scratchy, like I was on the verge of a cold. I coughed to clear it.
Vee rotated her wrist back and forth. “No clothing damage that time. And did you notice the smell?”
“No, I didn’t notice the smell. I was a bit preoccupied watching the limbus skitter away from the light like cockroaches . . . Wait, I
didn’t
noticed the smell.”
Grinning, she said, “Exactly. When the light of the rings turned white, the smell was barely noticeable.”
“Great, but so what?”
“Don’t you see, we’re both supposed to do this.” She grabbed my hand. “The rings of unity. Together, the rings provide a small bubble of protection.”
She did have a point. I wasn’t terribly keen on going into the limbus — with the horrible stench and the decomposing clothes — by myself. But I needed to look out for her the same way she protected me. “Are you sure you’re ready to commit treason?”
“I never wanted you to face this alone. But this clinches things. We’re not even talking about the greater good here. This” — she shook our hands — “is a sign. The rings will help us defeat the limbus, but only if we work as a team. Besides, I’ve seen you search for things . . . Do you really want the fate of the kingdom resting on your Nancy Drew skills?”
I didn’t need the ninety-minute sales pitch to know she was right. “If
we
are about to break Doonian law, then let’s be quick about it.”
Using our intertwined hands as an anti-evil Mag light, we stepped into the limbus. Off in the distance, just to the left of the oozing path, I caught a glimpse of a crumbling stone structure. The dilapidated remains of the Blackmore cottage. If Fiona was right, the key to stopping the limbus was in a book somewhere in that ruin.
The white light kept the limbus at bay just enough to keep the clothes from rotting off our bodies. After a short, blessedly uneventful walk, we arrived at another heavy patch of petunias surrounding the neglected fence of the cottage. Pointing to the flowers, Vee announced, “If the limbus is attacking the border of Doon, then this should be where it ends. Do you see any sign of it around the cottage?”
I scanned for the black blossoms that heralded the zombie fungus. “No.”
Wrenching open the dilapidated, iron gate with my free hand, Vee and I stepped across the threshold. As soon as our feet touched the other side, the bright white light faded so that the rings were once again glowing green and red.
Vee let go of my hand and let out a slow yoga breath before she nodded toward the cottage. “Okay. Let’s go find that spell book.”
Up close, the cottage reminded me of those ancient tourist attractions. After five centuries of neglect, it just barely resembled a building. The walls were crumbling and in a few places had collapsed entirely. Parts of the roof had caved, the long wooden crossbeams resting across the rotting floor and dirty furniture like skeletal remains. The only thing that seemed unaffected by time was the heavy wooden door at the front.
Cautiously, Vee and I circled around to our left until we found a space wide enough to enter the remains of the witches’ evil lair.
“Watch the floorboards,” Vee warned as she stepped inside. “We can’t afford for you to have one of your clumsy moments right now.”
As much as I wanted to take offense, she spoke truth. I slipped carefully in after her, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the task ahead. Vee was right; I didn’t want the fate of Doon resting on my inner sleuth. Now, if we needed someone to sing a magical aria that would reveal the hiding place of the book, I would be all over that. But creating order out of abandoned chaos was beyond me.
Doing a slow three-sixty, I surveyed our surroundings. In the not-so-far distance, a garbled animal groan pierced the silence. I’d witnessed what the limbus had done to the crow, so I could only imagine what it would do to a raccoon or opossum. Zombie opossums of unusual size stampeded across my imagination, causing the hairs on my arms to stand on end.
Vee must’ve been imagining her own zombie Jumanji, because when her gaze met mine with a reassuring smile, I noted fear around the edges. “There are only two rooms,” she said. “Why don’t we split up? You take the back one while I search in here.”
“’Kay.” It was fine with me. The sooner we found the spell book, the sooner we could get the heck out of Zombie Dodge.
Picking my way across the large main room, I approached the second room like a guest-starring detective on a New York procedural drama. Flush with the wall, my index fingers pressed together like a fake weapon, I pivoted and peeked into the back room. Resisting the urge to shout “Clear!” I stepped through the doorway.
The back room was smaller than the main part of the cottage, but equally as devastated. With a section of the roof missing, the elements had taken their toll on the few pieces of furniture: a giant bed with a moldy mattress, a decaying nightstand off to one side, and a huge water-stained chest at the foot. Wishing I had a set of rubber gloves like a proper crime inspector, I walked over to the chest. Using the edge of my scarf as a protective barrier, I lifted the top.
A plump brown spider scurried out, and I jumped back, barely managing to swallow the scream erupting from my throat. I forced a breath deep into my lungs and exhaled slowly. No need to alarm Vee over a creepy crawly. Prying up a broken floorboard, I used it to probe the contents of the chest — clothes, mostly. I stirred the fabrics around until I was satisfied that there was no book inside.
Crossing to the nightstand, I nudged the door open with my foot to reveal a whole lot of nothing inside. Next, I shoved the nasty mattress off the bedframe to look underneath. Through the discolored rope supports crisscrossing the wooden frame, I could see the empty floor below. So far my inner Nancy Drew was O for three.
Out of places to check, I tried to think like a desperate, wicked witch. She’d want the book close to her while she slept. And she wouldn’t use any place as obvious as the chest. Which left hiding it in plain sight by means of a spell or concealing it in a secret space. If it was in plain sight but cloaked, we were out of luck. So I decided to focus on potential secret spots in the room.
I’d checked the chest and nightstand, and I didn’t believe either one contained a false back or bottom. The stone walls were too solid to conceal nooks or crannies. The mattress was too thin, plus the possibility of mold would make it a lousy hiding
spot for something consisting of leather and paper. In fact, any places where the elements could get at it were out. If this were a TV show, the book would be in a waterproof box under the floorboards. But real life was never as convenient as fiction . . . or was it?
Getting on my hands and knees, I crawled over to the spot where I’d pried up the plank of wood. The three-inch gap between the rotting wooden floor and the bare dirt underneath was dark. Wrenching up the surrounding boards, I peered into the gloomy space. Underneath the floor, below the chest, I caught a glimpse of something solid.
The odds that it was the spell book were astronomical. But that didn’t squelch the excited feeling in my chest as I pried up the floor. With a little luck, the mysterious something beneath the floor would disprove Oscar Wilde. Sometimes, when it mattered most, art did indeed imitate life.
A
fter the off-the-charts spine-chiller we’d just walked through, the witch’s cottage was a bit of a disappointment. Nothing like the creepy-chic abode from
Hocus Pocus,
or the frightful towers of
Sleeping Beauty
’s Maleficent. There was nothing at all terrible or awe-inspiring about this crumpled old ruin. Beyond the aesthetics, though, I’d hoped to get a sense of Addie, some clues to what made her tick. But whatever pieces of her life she left behind had disintegrated along with the furniture. I only hoped that didn’t include her book of spells.
Rolling up the one ragged sleeve and one intact sleeve of my hoodie, I began to search the perimeter of the main room, looking for any chinks in the stone large enough to hide a book. But everything seemed to be in plain sight. What I didn’t see was a kitchen. I knew from many of the houses in the village that the kitchen was often in a separate area to lessen the risk of losing the entire house to fire. As I ran my hands over the walls, and around the mantel, I encountered an indentation — a door I hadn’t noticed before.
“Ken, I found another room!”
Without waiting for a response, I turned the knob and pushed the door open with a whoosh.
It was a small space, and much better preserved than the rest of the cottage, indicating it had been built more recently. The majority of the roof was still intact, and the walls were only crumbling in one corner. I swiped at cobwebs and descended five steps into the room. A round table with three chairs, storage cupboards, and a huge cast-iron pot hanging in the fireplace indicated I’d found the kitchen.
I stepped toward the cooking hearth, and a chill raised goose bumps on my arms. Was this a bubble, bubble, toil and trouble type caldron, or did they merely use it for soup? Rubbing the trepidation from my skin, I dispelled images of Addie and her sisters hunched over the blackened pot, brewing foul potions.
On the other side of the room, I ran my finger through a thick layer of dust coating a potbelly stove, and then stopped in front of an odd-looking, three-legged cabinet. Using my sleeve, I wiped the grime from its face. The drawers were covered in coarse carvings — multiple pentagrams, a three-headed dog, a gryphon, and a flock of ravens. From my research of Celtic symbols, I knew the animals represented multiple themes, but they all had one meaning in common — protection.
Bracing myself to find jars of eyeballs or lines of severed rat tails, I took a steadying breath and pulled open the first drawer. Loose sticks and balls of twine rattled around the almost empty space.
Strange.
A bit braver now, I opened the second drawer to find scraps of material in various patterns, and needles stuck in an apple-shaped pin cushion. Everything was strangely well preserved. I rummaged around and found a few spools of thread and some cotton batting, confirming my theory that I’d
found the witch’s sewing cabinet. But why bother with all the symbols of protection for something so mundane?
I yanked open the next drawer and stumbled back. A neat row of dolls made of sticks and twine, and wearing tiny clothes, stared back at me with drawn-on expressions of horror. One with brown yarn for hair and a lavender dress had a clump of needles piercing her abdomen. The one beside it was smaller, with short hair and trousers, a pin stabbed into both of its eyes. A child?
“Ken, I think we should go,” I called in a surprisingly steady tone.
“One more minute,” came the muffled reply. “I think I found something.”
I stared at the cabinet for several seconds before slamming the drawer closed with two fingers. As I was ready to turn away, an irregular shadow beneath the cabinet caught my eye. I squatted down and reached underneath it. Trying to ignore the sticky cobwebs and bug carcasses, I patted the floor until I felt a solid shape.
Cautiously, I pulled out a small box. The exterior was plain oak and an iron key rested in a lock on the front. I swiped a hand across the top. There were no symbols carved into the wood, just the letters
L.E.C.M.
I turned the key and felt the mechanism pop. Sweat trickled down my neck as I lifted the lid, half afraid I’d find more voodoo dolls, or worse. But nestled in a lining of purple velvet sat a silver pendant in the shape of a luckenbooth. The heart, topped by a crown and inset with tiny multi-colored jewels, was identical to the one Queen Lynnette wore in her portrait. The initials carved into the lid had to be hers — Lynnette Elizabeth Campbell MacCrae.