Panic Broom Read online

  “Well, we have to do something. I’d never forgive myself if she is really a zombie and kills someone.”

  “Fine. This will hold her for a while,” Meri said and wiggled his nose.

  I looked at the zombie woman, and she began to walk around the yard in a small circle. When she didn’t break her pattern after ten times, I decided it would be okay to leave.

  The whole time we were driving to the square, I kept expecting to see more zombies. We didn’t see any more. The closest thing we did see was a man shuffling down to his newspaper box in a bathrobe and bunny slippers. He gave us a wave, and it confirmed he was not a member of the undead.

  Remy was happy to see us until he saw the look on my face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “It wasn’t a ghost,” I said and set Meri down on the counter.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know that woman we saw last night?”

  “Wait, you already saw this woman?” Meri asked. “And what, you just came home and went to bed? No wait, you had champagne and a little party first. No mention of seeing something horrific.”

  “We saw something last night on the way back from the restaurant,” Remy said. “But we weren’t sure what it was. What she was. When we got out to look for her, she was gone.”

  “I think I know what she was,” I said. “She’s in my front yard right now. I think she’s a zombie.”

  “She’s in your front yard?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Meri put a spell on her to make her walk in circles, but this morning she was kind of scratching at my front window and running into my house.”

  “Let’s go,” Remy said. “We’ll head back to your house and take care of this. Hopefully before anyone else sees her.”

  “You think she’s the only one,” I said as we headed for the elevator.

  “We can only hope.”

  “We’re taking his car,” Meri said when we got outside.

  “Oh, now you like him better.”

  “No, I like his car better. I don’t have to worry about it stalling out and us being swarmed by the undead.”

  “We’re not going to be swarmed,” Remy said. “But we can take my car.”

  Meri was right. Remy’s car was a lot nicer. I noticed when we got in, Meri sat in my lap instead of stretching out in the back. He must have been scared, but I decided not to tease him about it. The truth was that, even with our powers, I was a little scared too.

  When Remy pulled his car into my driveway, the zombie woman was still walking in her little circles around my front yard. None of my neighbors were close, so none of them had spotted her yet. We had the advantage that sometimes, I could go a whole day without anyone other than Annika, Brody, or Remy driving down my street.

  She turned to look at us, and sort of swiped at the air. The undead woman moaned again, but she couldn’t walk toward us. The spell held her in that pattern.

  “What are we going to do?” I said as we studied her from the driveway.

  “We can’t kill her,” Remy said. “There may be some way to fix this.”

  “We should turn her into a goat,” Meri offered. “A zombie goat is far less scary.”

  “No,” Remy countered. “Transmogrification isn’t a good solution. It will take too much of our power. It would leave us vulnerable if there are actually more.”

  “Well, figure something out,” Meri said. “The salmon I wolfed down on the way to see you wasn’t enough. I need more breakfast.”

  “Meri, we’re not getting bacon either way. You’re going to have to wait on that,” I said.

  “The garage,” Remy said. “It’s not like you’re using it for anything else right now, and Link did a good job finishing it. We could lure her into the garage and then use Meri’s spell to keep her walking in those little circles. No one would be able to see her.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Meri, can you do that spell again?”

  “I can do better than that,” he said and ran over to her.

  “Meri, be careful.”

  But he stayed out of her reach. Meri broke the first spell, and the zombie woman began to follow him. Remy and I hurried over to the garage and opened the side door. I was worried the woman would come after me or Remy, but she was laser focused on Meri.

  Once he had her inside, he did the nose wiggle and got the undead woman going in her circles again. He darted back outside, and Remy closed the door.

  “I’ll grab the key,” I said and started for the back door. “I keep it in the kitchen.”

  “Maybe some more salmon too?” Meri called after me. “I mean, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  I got him some more salmon and the garage keys. We made sure it was locked up tight, and then all got back in Remy’s car again.

  “Where are we going?” Meri asked as Remy started the engine. “I’ve heard the desert or somewhere really cold is the best place to ride out a zombie apocalypse. We’ll need to stop for a lot of supplies. We probably should have gotten more things from the house. The rest of the smoked salmon and your toothbrush.”

  “We’re not leaving town,” Remy said as he put the car in reverse. “We’re going to the woods were Brighton and I saw that woman last night. I’m hoping we’ll be able to find more in the daylight.”

  “More zombies?” Meri asked.

  “No, more… I don’t know. Clues? Information?”

  “Oh, great. More witches playing Sherlock Holmes,” Meri snarked.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Should we get Annika and Brody too?”

  “Not yet,” Remy said. “We’ll alert them right away if things start to go sideways, but you know my cousin. The whole town will know about this fifteen minutes after we tell her.”

  “What about Brody?” I asked.

  “You can tell him now if you want,” he said and patted my leg. “I know you probably want to warn him.”

  “Let’s just go take a look around those woods. No reason to panic anyone yet. We need to figure out what is going on before we start telling people.”

  Remy drove out to the edge of town and parked the car off the side of the road. It had been dark, so we weren’t exactly sure where we’d seen her, but I knew we were close.

  That same feeling of something being very wrong hit me as soon as I opened the car door. I’d been in denial until that moment. I had convinced myself that maybe there was only one zombie, and we’d just deal with it and move on with our lives.

  It quickly became glaringly apparent that she was just the canary in the coal mine. “This is bad,” Remy said as he shut his car door. “Do you feel that?”

  “Is that demonic?” I asked Meri.

  “It is and it isn’t,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean that it’s complicated. There is definitely something demonic going on, but there’s more. Black magic perhaps. There’s something human woven in with the demonic energy.”

  “We need to find where it’s coming from and deal with it,” I said.

  “You guys should go get Amelda and some of the other Skeenbauer elders,” Meri said. “This is too much even for the two of you.”

  “You think it’s that bad?” Remy asked.

  “If I’m saying we should get Amelda, then yeah, it’s bad.”

  “Let’s just have a look,” I said. “If for no other reason than we need to know what to tell Amelda. We can’t just tell her we had a bad feeling in the woods.”

  “No, but Annika could. She can get Amelda to call together the Circle. We’ll show them the zombie woman and bring them here,” Remy said.

  “I just want to have a look,” I said as I began walking into the trees.

  Something was pulling me in as if I were attached to it by a thin spiritual thread. I wouldn’t realize how stupid I was being until later.

  “Brighton, come on. Let’s not go in there,” Remy said.

  “It’s fine,” I said and walked deep
er in.

  “It’s okay,” Meri said calmly. “We can protect her. Let’s just let her have a look.”’

  There was a tone to his voice. If I hadn’t been so enthralled by what was farther in the woods, I would have picked up on it. He was trying not to startle something. If I had been thinking straight, I would have had the good sense to be terrified.

  But I wasn’t thinking straight, so I kept walking deeper in. We found a clearing a few hundred feet into the woods. The smell of sulfur made my eyes water. At least, I thought it was the rank odor. It could have been the overwhelming feeling of total hopelessness. I might have been crying. It was hard to tell what was going on.

  The sadness and evil mixed together in that place were like a dark, oppressive soup in the air. It was like humidity made of black magic.

  “We need to go,” Remy said. “We’ll come back with help.”

  I was about to finally agree with him when I saw it. She was lying there on the ground face down. The woman, dressed in a long black ceremonial robe, had fallen face first to the ground. She’d knocked over a bunch of candles and a cauldron.

  A dead witch. A dead witch who had been up to some very bad things when she died.

  “Are those skeleton bones?” Remy asked.

  He was right, the dead woman had cast her circle, and put a pentagram in the middle, using what looked like human bones. Thankfully, they looked old and weren’t fresh. I mean, if you could consider that a bonus.

  “Maybe they’re just cattle bones or something.” I knew as soon as I said it that I was just grasping at straws.

  “I’m going to see who she was,” Remy said.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get closer. You were right before. We should go get your family,” I said.

  “Let me just look,” he said. “How about it, cat? Think you’re up for protecting me while I have a peek?”

  “I’ll go,” Meri relented. “But it doesn’t mean I’m your familiar.”

  “Of course not. You’re the Tuttlesmith familiar.”

  “As long as we have that understanding,” Meri said.

  They walked over to where the dead woman lay, but I stayed back. It was almost as if there was an imaginary line around where she’d been working. It felt like you’d be diving into an abyss if you crossed it, and yet, Remy and Meri walked right through it. There was a depth to their power that I didn’t quite understand yet.

  Remy walked right up to her and rolled the body over. His eyes narrowed, but I got the distinct impression that he recognized her.

  “You know her?”

  “I do,” Remy said. “I just can’t believe it’s her, and that she’s out here doing this.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s my Aunt Margery,” Remy said. “I still can’t believe she was involved in this. But…”

  “But what?”

  “Her husband died a few years ago, and there were whispers that she never really got over it. I can’t believe she’d go this far.”

  “What are we looking at?” I asked. “How far did she go?”

  “I think she was dabbling in necromancy,” Remy answered.

  “This is way more than dabbling,” Meri said. “These are human bones.”

  “You don’t think she killed someone?” I asked.

  “No, there is graveyard dirt here too,” Remy said. “She dug up the bones. From where, I don’t know. There haven’t been any grave robberies in either of the Coventry cemeteries. We would have known about something like that.”

  “You think that she was trying to bring your dead uncle back?”

  “I mean, I don’t know what else she would have been doing. The Skeenbauers don’t normally practice necromancy. It’s not like a regular thing with us. I mean, not like this.”

  “Not like this?”

  “Well, there are different levels of necromancy. Sometimes it’s just used to communicate with the other side. This is not that. She was trying to raise the dead. That’s the only explanation for all this.”

  “But why is there such a bad feeling here?” I asked. “Trying to raise her dead husband is weird and kinda creepy, but it doesn’t seem evil.”

  “Without a coven or her family on her side, she would have needed other help to do something like bring a dead man back to life. It would take a far more powerful witch than Margery to do that alone,” Remy said.

  “Other help. Like a demon?”

  “Or several,” Meri added. “That’s why the bad energy here is demonic and human.”

  “So your Aunt Margie was in league with demons to resurrect her dead husband, and no one in your family knew about it. The demons killed her, and now there’s a zombie in my garage,” I said. “But how did a zombie get made? She wasn’t trying to resurrect just anyone.”

  “I don’t know that the demons killed her,” Remy said.

  “Why not?”

  He rolled Margery back over, and I saw it. There was an athame, or ceremonial knife, sticking out of her back. She was stabbed in the back while performing the ritual to bring her husband back from the dead.

  “So she might have been murdered? Do you think that something she did while she was dying, or just the spell being interrupted is what unleashed the zombie?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” Remy said. “We have to figure out what we’re going to do here. Once Margery is dealt with, we will worry about the zombie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, while he was still here, the Skeenbauer Coven might have trusted Thorn with this since he seemed to accept witches, but they’re not going to want this getting out to the human deputies that are in charge right now.”

  “If there are more zombies, we’re not going to be able to hide this from them,” I said.

  “Then we’ll let them think it’s an everyday, run of the mill zombie apocalypse, and we’ll keep the secret Skeenbauer necromancy out of it.”

  “He’s got a point,” Meri said. “That could work for the time being. We’ve already messed up the crime scene. Even if we hadn’t, if we call in the coroner, a case like this will get national attention.”

  “The spell will keep most people from believing actual necromancy was going on here,” I said.

  “That doesn’t matter, Brighton,” Remy said. “Margery’s death would still be a sensational case. It would be a disaster for Coventry.”

  “Well, I mean, there might be a zombie apocalypse starting anyway.”

  “Let’s get some pictures of the crime scene,” Remy said. “And then let’s go to the library and get Amelda.”

  Chapter Three

  “Oh, Margery,” Amelda said before exhaling a puff of hair through her nose. “I don’t understand how perfectly good witches let themselves get sucked into these dumb situations.”

  “I’ve heard she never recovered from her husband dying,” Remy offered.

  “While that’s probably true, Margery knew better than to go around trying to bring him back from the dead. That violates the most sacred of the Coven’s laws, and this is why,” Amelda said. “Does anyone else know about this?”

  “We came straight to you,” Remy said. “We haven’t spoken with anyone else, and the undead woman is concealed in the garage at Hangman’s House.”

  “We thank you for that,” Amelda said to me. “And thank you to you too,” Amelda said to Meri. “I can only imagine that they couldn’t have done this without you.”

  Meri looked a little shocked. “You’re welcome.”

  “Our family doesn’t have a familiar, but we do hope that when one finds us, they’ll be like you.”

  Meri shook his head in disbelief. I imagined it was the kindest words he’d heard from Amelda in a long time. In fact, they both looked a little sad. I wondered if Amelda had any regrets about her family banishing Meri.

  “What should we do?” Remy asked his grandmother.

  “I think I can get my assistant to cover the library while I gather some of th
e other elders to go out and handle the death scene,” Amelda said.

  “We can do it,” I said.

  “What?” both Amelda and Remy asked at the same time.

  “We can do it,” I said again. “Remy and I can handle it. We could get Annika too. I don’t think Brody is ready, but we’ve got Meri.”

  Amelda didn’t immediately say no. She thought it over for a few minutes. “It would be better to involve as few people as possible. Wait here.”

  She hurried off and left Remy, Meri, and me standing in the Obscure Occult Practices section of the library. No other witches were in the paranormal part of the library that day. We assumed we were alone, but none of us talked about what was going on after Amelda left. It was probably best to just take a moment and breathe.

  When Amelda returned a couple of minutes later, she had a ruby amulet in her hand. She reached out to me. “Wear this while you’re there,” she said. “It will bring you under the protection of the family.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re not going to need an amulet to do that for long. At least, that’s what I assume the ring means,” Amelda said. Her eyes zeroed in on the engagement ring.

  “Grandma, you know that’s what it means,” Remy said with a smile. “I told you that last night.”

  “We’ll get together for dinner soon. When we’re sure this is over,” Amelda said. “Until then, the amulet will provide you with all the protection the Skeenbauer Coven can provide. It will also bestow some… inspiration upon you if there are spells we use that you don’t know.”

  After we left Amelda, Remy, Meri, and I went to Annika’s shop to see if she wanted to come with us, but she had several customers milling around and waiting in line. Not wanting to interrupt her good sales day, we left without saying anything.

  “We can handle this,” I said as Remy drove us back to where Margery’s body lay in wait for us. Waiting for anyone at all. “We’re a good team.”

  “We were supposed to be getting your family to help us,” Meri said.