“Thanks. We are still investigating and will let you know if we find anything,” Dre promised.
I hung up the phone and thanked Marie for her information. She promised to keep researching the Guardians of the Veil. "I hope they don’t show up dead at other cemeteries,” Phi suggested as we loaded into my vehicle.
“You and me both,” I agreed as I took off down the road.
We were maybe five minutes from Marie's house when shit went sideways. A creature shambled out of the tree line, looking like someone had taken a corpse, added too much preservative, and forgotten to maintain the refrigeration. It moved with jerky, unnatural motions, and its skin was mottled and gray. Its eyes also burned with an intelligence that was not normal.
"Oh, come on," Kota muttered as I slammed on the brakes of my SUV. "We can't even drive five miles without getting jumped by supernatural ugliness?"
The creature—because calling it a person felt wrong on every level—lurched toward my vehicle with surprising speed. "Everyone out of the SUV!" I yelled, grabbing magical supplies from my bag. "We can't let it attack any innocents!"
The thing that had once been human opened its mouth and released a sound that was part scream, part death rattle, and entirely horrifying. When Dre hit it with a blast of her magical energy, it dissolved. Literally dissolved into a pile of grave dirt and goo that left a stain on the asphalt worse than an oil leak.
"Well, that was easy. And gross," Dea said, poking at the remains with a stick she'd found. "Look what it left behind."
Nestled in the gooey debris was a medallion. It’d been tarnished with age but clearly bore the same symbols we'd beenfinding carved into cemetery stones. I picked it up with a tissue, not trusting anything that had been inside a walking corpse.
"These are the same symbols from the corrupted ritual sites," I confirmed. "Which means this thing was connected to whoever's been sabotaging the guardian rituals."
"They sent it after us specifically," Dani added. "We're definitely on someone's radar now. How did they find us, though? We’ve been all over the place."
“It was tracking us," Dre replied as she looked closer at the talisman. “Maybe it can follow our magic kind of like Lucas and Noah track scents."
Kota shuddered and took a step back, saying, “I was thinking the same thing. We have unique magical signatures and haven't bothered trying to hide them.”
I stared down at the medallion in my hand. We were dealing with ancient entities, secret societies, and disappearing people. It made sense that we would be targeted. The stakes kept rising, and I was starting to wonder if we were in over our heads this time.
I looked at my sisters. We'd faced worse odds before. Maybe not this complicated, but we'd always found a way through. "Come on," I said, shoving the medallion in my bag. "Let's get back in the SUV and head home. We need to figure out our next move. If they're sending supernatural hit squads after us, it means we're getting close to something they don't want us to find."
"Define close," Dani said as we climbed back into my SUV.
I looked back at the stain on the road where the creature had dissolved. "Close enough that they're scared," I replied. "And that means we're finally asking the right questions."
CHAPTER 5
DANIELLE
The medallion from our supernatural roadkill was still giving me the creeps three hours later. Lia had wrapped it in blessed silk and stuffed it in a box, but I swear the damn thing was humming with malevolent energy like a demonic tuning fork. "I'm adding 'target practice for undead hit squads' to our ever-growing list of occupational hazards," I announced as I sprawled across the couch in the ladies’ parlor. I had a laptop balanced on my knees.
The plantation's Wi-Fi was cooperating for once, which felt like a minor miracle given how our day had gone. I'd been diving deep into every database I could access, legal and otherwise, as I tried to trace the history of Les Gardiens du Voile. What I'd found was making my stomach churn worse than the time I'd eaten a gas station hot dog.
"Tell me you've got something useful," Lia said, settling into the chair across from me with an energy drink and a biscuit.
"Oh, I've got something alright. Just not sure it qualifies as useful so much as terrifying." I angled my laptop screen toward her. "Les Gardiens du Voile didn't fade away into obscurity like Marie thought. They performed their last known ritual on April twenty-eighth."
Dea looked up from the ancient tome she'd been studying. "That date sounds familiar."
"It should. April twenty-eighth was the night before Baron Samedi's hurricane hit the city." I pulled up the news archives I'd been cross-referencing. "Every single member of the society—forty-three people—vanished without a trace that night. Their cars were found abandoned at cemeteries across the city. Their personal belongings were left behind, but not one body was ever recovered." The silence that followed was the kind that meant everyone was processing just how screwed we potentially were.
"They either died performing a protective ritual using the energy of the storm," Kota said slowly, "or something killed them all to prevent it."
“Or they were sent somewhere by Samedi because they were trying to steal his power,” Dea suggested.
"Given what we know about our current supernatural shitstorm, it could have been the asshole connected to the entity," I replied grimly. "They wanted those guardians out of the way so the hurricane could damage the barriers trapping their friend."
Phi looked up from her research materials. "Which means whoever's behind the current situation has been monitoring the Guardians. They used Samedi's storm as cover to weaken the binding."
"I bet they're picking off anyone with Guardian bloodlines before they can interfere." Dre’s suggestion painted an increasingly ugly picture.
