09 - Return Of The Witch Read Online Free Page A

difficult task of getting on with their lives. Though I’m sure they couldn’t see it, in the smallest barely perceptible sense, so had I.
    “Lilith!” Carlos came around the desk and gave me a big hug. “You look nice today.” He turned to Dominic and gestured a presentational wave of his hand. “Doesn’t she look nice, Dom?”
    “Absolutely .” He nudged Carlos out of the way and hugged me as he might a frail old aunt. “You know we missed you at the memorial service yesterday. How come you didn’t…?” I saw him steal a glance at Carlos who was gesturing no-go like a catcher waving off a fastball pitch. “Come?” he finished.
    “I had plans,” I told him. “Now, tell me why you called me down here.”
    He pulled a chair out and offered it to me. I sat. The two of them did the same.
    “Well, I know that Carlos told you about th ose two missing women yesterday.” He looked at Carlos, who acknowledged him with a nod. “And I know you told him you didn’t believe there was any creditability to the stories.”
    “That they’re witches, you mean?”
    “Yes, but there’s more to it than you know.”
    “So, enlighten me.”
    He reached across the desk, picked up a newspaper and handed it to me. “That’s the Newburyport Daily News. Look at the front page.”
    I looked down at the first column and then back up at him. “How nice. Shopping plaza courts more tenants.”
    “Not that . Below it.”
    “Amesbury man indicted o n money laundering charges?”
    “Lilith .”
    “Okay, fine. ‘Woman’s disappearance similar to others in the county’. How sad. Another runaway.”
    He snatched the paper from my hands. “She’s not a runaway. She’s a missing person. What’s more, as the article indicates, her disappearance is strikingly similar to two others in the county. In all three instances, the only clues left behind were the clothes the women were wearing and the strange chalky substance inside them. What’s more, all three were witches.”
    “Okay. Stop right there . First of all, like I told Carlos, witches don’t generally advertise themselves as witches. Secondly, if a witch wants to disappear, as I myself have done on numerous occasions, especially after a rite of passage, then she does so without fanfare, cryptic or otherwise. So, if there’s nothing more.”
    I stood and pushed my chair up against the desk. Dominic palmed his laptop and spun the screen around for me to see.
    “ Wait. There’s this.”
    I leaned in to look. “Ah, yes, Paige Turner. Carlos told me about her. Is that her web site?”
    “Yes . See here she mentions you.”
    “ Me?”
    He hunched over the top of the screen and gave it a tap. “Right there. She says that a witch from New Castle recently traveled to the dark dimension and back. You know she’s talking about the Eighth Sphere.”
    “ Come on. How would she know that?”
    “I don’t know, but she does, and now everyone knows you live here in New Castle.”
    Carlos said, “We think she works for Ingersoll’s Witness. This web site is her way of getting the word out to all its members.”
    “Nooo,” I said, dismissing it as nonsense. “We talked about th at, Carlos. Pastor Hilton is dead. James T. Putnam is dead. Ingersoll’s Witness, as an organization of witch-hunters, is most certainly dead.”
    “It could be someone else, then,” said Dominic.
    “Who?”
    “There’s a group out there calling themselves, Satan’s Apostles. They’ve been known to hang suspected witches.”
    “Yeah, but those women weren’t hanged.”
    “Not that we know of,” said Carlos. “But they could have been. Just because nobody’s found them….”
    “Still.” I shook my head. “I’m not worried.”
    I turned and started away, when Dominic said, “ Tell me about the quintessential.”
    I froze in mid-step, turned and found them both looking at me as if they had accidentally mentioned the unmentionable.
    “What did you say?”
    I saw Dominic’s Adam’s