Halfway Dead (Halfway Witchy Book 1) Read online

  “Okay.”

  He relaxed into a broad smile.

  “I’ll do it, but I need to do some research first. Do you have any information about this supposed secret grove? I’ll need it before this goes any further.”

  He nodded once, an affable grin still on his face. “Thanks—just, well. This makes things easier.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. I said I would, but it doesn’t mean I will. If you have some idea where we’re going, I’ll need to confirm it first. Then, if it seems like I’m not being dragged to a pit filled with vampire badgers or something like that— ”

  “Good gravy. Vampire badgers? Is that a thing? Even a local legend?” He looked around in mock alarm, but there was a hint of actual wariness when his eyes swept over the expanse of the forest.

  “Well, no. Not that I’m aware of, and if there was a local legend like that, I’d never leave my house, thank you very much.” I shuddered. Some things should never be contemplated. The marriage of an undead and a badger being one such thing. Eww.

  “Sorry, you were saying? You’re going to research whether I’m a stealthy, heinous murderer who wants to eat your toes or something, and then what?” he asked in the voice of a judge. At least he had a sense of humor.

  I sniffed. “Exactly. I’ll need to see your photo ID, and then I’ll need until tomorrow afternoon to get ready.”

  “One day? That’s fast. Okay, so let’s say I pass muster with your—who will be doing this deep research on my darkest secrets?”

  “That would be the crack staff at our local public library. Nothing escapes the penetrating gaze of that institution. Think of them as a sort of council on everything that happens from Raquette Lake to Utica. Plus, they’ve known me since I was a bump in my mom’s belly. They won’t steer me wrong. Now, you were going to spill whatever proprietary information your company has about this potential grove of chestnuts?” I leaned back to give him my most serious gaze. I was going to go on this little jaunt as long as he wasn’t currently wanted for mass murder, and even then it was possible. I can handle myself. Some guy with new hiking boots and a great smile wasn’t going to scare me one bit.

  He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know if it’s much help, but we got reference to a place that was a complete dead end. Just a name, maybe, but it sounds to me more like a place.”

  “Which is?” I invited.

  “Thendara.” And I felt my stomach drop as I pasted a smile on my face, keeping everything I knew under that stupid grin.

  Chapter Four: Ghost of a Chance

  I’d practically tripped myself escaping Major’s presence in order to get to my Gran’s house.

  We needed to talk.

  When I first came aboard the family business, I spent an entire summer walking beside my Gran, listening to her weave stories of our long family history. It wasn’t as dramatic as one might think, given that we’d been witches as far back as the time of Brian Boru. He was a high king who unified Ireland nearly 1000 years ago, and apparently an all-around badass considering he was killed in combat at the age of eighty-five. In fact, we seemed to be the quietest practitioners of witchcraft in all of history. We behaved. We paid our taxes. I don’t recall one single instance of my family being at the head or tail end of some uprising, unless you count a minor affair in France over the outrageous cost of pastries. To be fair, exorbitant cake prices would probably raise my hackles, too, but given that this was a one-time event in the late 1800s, I think it’s safe to say we avoid drama.

  Except for one incident.

  Thendara no longer exists. It was never truly anything more than a name, and at that, it was the source of a grim mystery in my family that went back to the year 1839. I was breathless when Gran let me in. One look and she led me to her kitchen table while pouring boiling water into two mugs. Tea first, troubles second. It was her way of letting me gather my thoughts. It worked. When she wordlessly handed me my cup, she raised one white brow in question. That was enough for me.

  “Thendara.” That was all I said, and her mobile face didn’t even twitch.

  She leaned forward, elbows on the table. Her hands were aged, but still strong, with long fingers that she wrapped around the mug. The aromatic steam hinted at something that was intended to create calm.

  “Hey! You had the water on when I got here . . .” I pointed at Gran accusatorily. “How did you know?”

  “You’re my own flesh and blood. And I’m a witch. A damned good witch, child, and I know everything that happens to you.” She sipped her tea, then grinned. “Three different people called me to say you were sitting with a man, gazing at the lake. The conversation seems to have ended with you looking rather stricken.”

  “That’s exactly right.” I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The whorled plaster was broken by square beams, and I thought I could see some kind of story there. It was tantalizing, and I fought not to get lost in the myriad of cracks.

  “Who is this man?” Gran asked firmly.

  “He wants me to find something. To help him find something, actually. His name is Major Pickford, and his family owns some giant company that makes all kinds of things,” I said.

  “What kinds of things?” Gran was curious. It was the mark of a great witch. She was never content with the information at hand.

  “Well, food stuff. Furniture. A variety of products, but none of that seems to matter. Major’s grandmother owns the company, and she runs it, too. She grew up crazy poor and wants to do some good in the world, which led to him being sent here on this . . . whatever it is. I guess you’d call it a hunt.” I told her the entire story in exacting detail, pausing as she asked for clarifications leading up to the moment when he said Thendara.

  Gran steepled her fingers, and the gesture lent her even more of an air of power. She was really three women; my grandmother, of course, but also a sage and a mother in her own right. The three faces were closely connected, and all of these people flickered in her eyes while she considered my report. After a long contemplation, she asked, “Do you have the picture? The one that led Major’s people to this spot?”

  I held out my phone, the image hovering on the screen. Gran looked at it with a scrutiny that was unsettling if you were the subject; she let her eyes investigate every aspect of the image. She did not hurry.

  “Those stones behind the trees, do you see them?” she asked. When I nodded, Gran placed her hands on the table, fingers drumming lightly. “That is not a random pile of rock. In fact, it isn’t really rock at all.”

  That was new to me. I thought I could recognize ordinary rocks. I was wrong.

  “What Major Pickford has stumbled onto is a ruin,” Gran said. Her voice was soft and distant. She was in the grip of a memory.

  “What is it, Gran?” I took her hand as the first tingle of concern began to crawl up my neck. There was something sad here; I could feel it coming.

  She shook her head lightly, chasing ghosts. “Do you know why Thendara is no longer a place?”

  “I thought a distant relative was killed there. I haven’t heard the story since I was little; you always just used it as a sort of cautionary tale about the forest. I sort of thought it was so long ago, that it had passed into the realm of legend.” I raised my shoulders slightly. I was reaching all the way back into my oldest memories to recall the nuance of how Thendara came to be a dirty word.

  Gran pressed her lips together in a grim line. “A boy. There was a boy who was a blood relation to our family, and his father took him to scout the route for a canal that was being built. It was supposed to transform the mountain communities; each little town would be linked to Lake George in the east, and the Great Lakes in the west.”

  “You mean they thought they could connect to the Erie Canal? Here?” I waved around. The mountains weren’t exactly soaring, but they were almost certainly too high to consider building a manmade waterway through.

  “That very thing.” Gran sighed, wistful and with a degree of condemnation at the
folly of man. “This relative of ours, a man named Bentley . . . well, he was an engineer who would build the locks for the canal. His word was considered law regarding the course of the canal, because he was the only person who could accurately plot a route that wouldn’t run straight into bedrock. That sort of hitch would kill the project in its infancy. Bentley was a genius with stone, and he had his oldest boy with him in hopes of teaching him the family trade, as it was.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Erasmus. He was twelve, more than a boy. A young man at that point,” Gran said heavily.

  She fiddled with her cup for a moment, then continued. She wasn’t nervous; there was nothing on the planet that could discommode my Gran, but she was processing something. I could see shadows flicker in her eyes, and then she sighed again, but less gusty, and pointed at my phone. “That picture is not some random assembly of broken rock. It’s the site where Bentley began to survey and place holder stones for the building of the lock system. I’m sure he wanted to assure himself that the small ravine was stable enough to hold such a structure.”

  There were well-preserved locks throughout New York; some of them could still open and close to raise the water level and let boats float merrily on their way, higher in elevation and none the worse for wear. Locks were a brilliant feat of engineering that made hills something to go over rather than through; they let barges laden with goods traverse more than 3300 miles of canals during the nineteenth century. You could still see them here and there, their doors long gone, but the sturdy stone walls upright and resisting the inexorable tug of root and weather. It said a lot about my ancestors that they would even attempt to build a waterway through the enormity of the Adirondacks, but something stopped them.

  Gran took my hand. “Bentley came out of those woods a shell of a man. He’d been missing for a month; the half-dead creature that emerged on the shore of the lake was no longer the engineer who people looked to for guidance in a modernizing world. He was a pale echo, and his son was gone. He told everyone who would listen not to go looking for the boy, but families around here were thick as thieves. They plunged into the woods with axes and knives at their belts, and three more men vanished before the search was called off completely.” She looked at me with the weight of her years, and I could feel all of the stored wisdom directing me to listen. “We McEwans do not scare easily, if at all, but there is something at Thendara that is unnatural, and it has killed. It will kill again, and if you seek this place of trees, then you’re being led directly to a secret that I hoped would never appear again. At least not while I am still alive.”

  That last bit shocked me; I couldn’t fathom a time in which Gran was not a fixed point in my world. “You’re not leaving this planet. I forbid it.” I tried to be playful, but it ended up sounding petulant.

  “Not this year. Not for many years,” she assured me. “Do you know the secret to our longevity as a family, Carlie?” Her eyes measured me. This was a semi-serious test.

  “Skill?” I guessed. I knew it had to be partially true. Sloppy witches were dead witches. We were far from sloppy.

  She nodded appreciatively. “You’re somewhat correct. Yes, we must be skilled, but above all else, we must be free of pride.”

  “Pride? I thought that being a white witch meant I served, not conquered. Don’t the two go hand in hand?”

  “They do, but pride is stealthy. I speak of the type of pride that makes a young woman venture into the deepest wood with an unknown man. They seek a grove of ancient trees that are, by some miracle, the only living examples out of several billion chestnuts. To add another layer of intrigue, the location is near a crime scene that houses something bilious enough that we’ve avoided it for nearly two centuries. Am I painting a picture that’s easily visible?” She smiled again, and this time, it was cool and professional.

  I inclined my head. She was right. Put in those terms, my little walk in the woods sounded outright stupid.

  “But you are young, and you are strong,” she began, “so before you imagine that I forbid such a thing, you must find out if there is any information you can leverage to your cause. Then if you are still inclined to go off the map to where the dragons are, you will have my blessing. And my help.”

  I sat quietly as the clock over the kitchen table clicked with infuriating regularity. “I’ll start in the records room at the library.”

  “Good. And do call if you find anything, won’t you?” Her tone held a note of warning.

  “Promise.” I kissed her cheek and left, wondering what awaited me in the cool deep of the forest. Whatever it was, I decided that Erasmus would be avenged or found . . . preferably both. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked out over the mountains and knew that somewhere, there were lonely bones waiting to come home.

  My campaign to bring Erasmus back to the light would begin immediately. Even though the connection stretched into history, when it came right down to it, we were family.

  Chapter Five: A Stranger in Town

  The next morning, I knew something was wrong because I was being watched by a man in a uniform that wasn’t really a uniform. He leaned against the door of his car and examined me with the calculating gaze of a professional. I kept my pace exactly the same, listening to Halfway waking up all around me as the day began in earnest. I’d juggled my schedule to allow an impromptu trip to the library, which would, in turn, determine whether or not I was taking a second unplanned trip into the woods. The man watching me was tall, rangy, and in his late middle years. He had a long, severe face, with liquid-brown eyes that captured every detail around him. I got an impression of nervous energy from him. He had an active mind, and a quick glance told me the hint of a smile played at his face. He didn’t appear unfriendly, just . . . interested.

  I waited for traffic to thin, then stepped across the walk. The bustle of cars was already reaching a morning crescendo as tourists began their compulsive migration from one lake to the next. Why they didn’t simply settle at one place for a week and let the mountains capture their imagination was beyond me; their harried darting stole so much of the peace that the park could give. The brick walkway was already warming in the sun, and I knew it would be a bright day with little wind. I am trained to keep a weather eye alert at all times; there are forces at play that find storms irresistible. Unfortunately for me, many of these unseen forces find witches to be simply delicious, a fact that’s been drummed into my head since I cast my first spell. Even though my magic is pure, I’m still a target of opportunity for a great many beasties who consider all witches to be a threat of the highest order. I lifted my face to the growing sun and reconsidered; not just warm today, but perhaps even hot. That was good with me, I’d be ensconced in the library’s records room, pawing through the detritus of our local history. Air conditioning was a wonder. I don’t care what any crazed camping enthusiast says.

  I’d made it three steps onto the other sidewalk when I saw the man’s head jerk sharply toward his car. The crackle of a radio drifted from the open window, an electric summons he could not ignore. He gave me one last look, shook his head slightly, and folded into the black, unadorned sedan without a second’s hesitation. If I had wavered at all on his occupation before, the car clinched it. He was a detective of some sort, which meant that was the second investigator in as many days to contact me. That’s exactly two more investigators than I’d met in my entire life up to this point, and I considered that fact to be a terrible harbinger for some unknown event that was lurking over the horizon. Don’t get me wrong, I’m naturally optimistic, but a practitioner of witchcraft knows that there is no such thing as an accident. Not around a witch.

  The library is one of those buildings that might have been a house at one time, but has been pressed into government service out of sheer practicality. It’s a two-story white building, with gleaming black shutters and a real copper cupola. On top, a rooster eternally points his iron beak into the wind. The only sign is small, neatly lettered
in black and gold, and the walkway is an absolute riot of flowers during the entire growing season. I was convinced that there were magical beings tending the walkway until I watched the assistant librarian, Mrs. Van Ryswick, spend an entire afternoon weeding, tending, and generally cosseting every plant on the grounds. Never mind the wee folk, Mrs. Van Ryswick is on the case, I thought, looking at the spill of color that threatened to cover the steps leading up to the doors.

  Brendan Kilmeade saw me enter and waved. He’s around forty, whipcord thin, and relentlessly upbeat. In short, if you’re having a bad day, he can make it worse. His cheer is exhausting, but, as a librarian, he might be the finest example of smiling efficiency in this lifetime or any other. His deep-set green eyes twinkled at me as I made my way to the reference desk. There are only three stations in the humble library and his is constantly covered with odds and ends. He’s a collector of some renown, his specialty being All Things Adirondack. Even sitting, he towered over me, but not in threatening way, unless you consider good customer service to be a menace to your person. I did not, so I smiled.

  “I have a research question,” I began without prelude, knowing that if I didn’t launch directly into my query we would be caught in the ten minutes of awkwardness that has existed since he first met me. He is the least direct male I’ve ever met, and his concept of flirtation consisted of a detailed account of salamander migrations in the local mountain area. So, yeah. I pushed onward in hopes that we could get to the good part, despite his being rather sweet and earnest.