Our trio trudged down the sidewalk with Harry floating silently behind us. The crossroads were defined by a café with overflowing flowery window boxes. Peachy Corner had a slate sign outside which boasted the best peach cobbler in the country. Across from that was a red brick building with a set of stone steps and arches which declared it as the library. On the northern side was a smaller building with a big heavy wooden door. Dr. Lauren Forde was etched into a shiny gold rectangular metal plate on the wall. One doctor for the whole of the town? She must be a superwoman. Or perhaps not, if what Caleb said was true and everyone is indeed dead.
A breeze rustled the leafy peach trees. Dave lifted his head and his nostrils flared. His eyes narrowed down the western street. “Do you smell that?” he asked.
Honeysuckle, sweet and heavy, drifted like a spell on the wind. It was heady and intoxicating and so very wrong. A long ago memory surfaced of wandering the greenhouses kept by The Order’s herbal and potion masters. “I think I know what it is.” I prayed I was wrong, but as the universe kept proving, worse case scenarios were my life.
Sebastian lifted his head and stared down the street in the direction of the heavy scent. “There’s something wrong with the smell. It’s laced with—”
“Death,” I finished for him, my feet already scurrying along the sidewalk like a predator scenting her next meal. Indigo raised her head, her senses locking onto the foul unnatural stench. She snarled her disgust. Great, the soul hungry daughter of death was turning her nose up at whatever awaited us. This should be fun. Dave and Sebastian flanked my sides as we stalked down the shadowy, quiet street while Harry floated behind us. We passed empty shops, dark homes, and closed doors. I dug into my coat pocket and pulled out a set of medical gloves before snapping them on.
Sebastian raised a brow. “Are you expecting a body?”
“Well, the dead guy didn’t poof out of nowhere.”
We crossed a road, and the scent deepened, along with the ominous sensation that skittered over my flesh. I pulled my coat tighter around me as the chill increased with the departure of the sun.
Our footsteps stalled on the edge of a neatly manicured lawn. A sign hammered into the lawn glowed with the words‘I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven’. There were small piles of fresh soil around the wooden posts. It was newly erected and the words seemed familiar. I knew it was a bible reference, but something stirred in a memory about this specific quote.
“No way,” Sebastian muttered. “If this is some Kool-Aid kind of situation, we need to let the authorities deal with it.”
“Don’t be a baby,” I muttered as I took the first step toward the white building. A wooden cross was nailed above the closed door bearing a plaque which read, ‘The church of the Peach Tree welcomes all.’
“How inclusive,” Dave muttered. The pressure of the expelled magic was suffocating and we weren’t even in the building. Dave stepped in front of me and pushed open the door. “Stay behind me,” he instructed. Harry floated in ahead of Dave, uncaring that the pack’s head of security had issued a mandate.
My head tipped back and I groaned. This would not do. I couldn’t have a shifter getting in my way every time they suspected danger. I couldn’t function like this. Hudson and I needed to set some ground rules.
The air was so still as we stepped into the church, the specks of dust were highlighted by the hundreds of candles that littered the floor, making them glitter as if they were suspended in time. The patrons were statues facing the pulpit. All we could see was the back of their heads, like they were waiting for the pastor to make his entrance. I froze and Sebastian swore a blue streak that his mother would have clipped him around his head for while promising to wash his dirty mouth out with soap. However, given the spectacle we were facing, she may have forgiven him. The pastor was kneeling on the floor, his hands together and raised in a sign of prayer. Perhaps his maker had taken pity on him before he lost his life.
I tried to make sense of the unsettling scene before us. Dave took a step down the center aisle and I followed, glancing at the townsfolk propped up in the pews.
“This is some next level shit,” Sebastian said from behind me. I paused and leaned toward a middle-aged bald man sporting pale blue corduroy pants and a crisp white shirt. There was nothing amiss except his eyes and his heartbeat. He had neither.
Two burned-out sockets stood in place of the eyes he had once seen the world through. I gazed down the row, noting that identical black, ashen holes were sunk into each person’s face. I spun. Every single person here had lost their eyes. No, not lost, they’d been burned from their skulls.
“This is disturbing,” Harry agreed as he glided around the room looking at the people.
“I guess the cause of death is pretty obvious,” Sebastian stated.
My gloved fingers carefully probed the cold man’s face. He was as stiff as a board. “Is it?” I asked.
“They are missing their eyes.”
“True, but there’s no blood,” I mumbled. “The eye removal was done post mortem and they’ve been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in, but not long enough for it to subside—so less than two days.” What I was super curious about was how they were all still upright, as if someone had held them that way until rigor mortis had frozen them in this position.
I stepped back and spun in a circle. The people here were all adults, at a guess, nobody below the age of twenty years. This was certainly not the entire town, which begged the question—where the hell was everyone else?
Dave paused in front of the pastor, his big body hiding the kneeling leader. “Cora, what do you make of this?” he asked. I stalked toward the raised area and side stepped Dave to view the pastor. “That’s weird, right?”
I tilted my head. “Someone arranged him like this, waited for his body to lock into a position of prayer, which would take hours. Weird seems to be our motto.”
“I thought our motto was fangs before claws?” Sebastian muttered.
Dave raised a brow at him. If Sebastian thought he was going to get a rise out of the pack’s head of security, he hadn’t been paying attention.
“I wasn’t referring to the pastor. Look at the book open at his knees.”
“The Bible is hardly a weird thing for a pastor,” Sebastian scoffed.
I stepped onto the raised area and looked over the shoulder of the pastor so I could view the open book in front of him. My gaze scanned the text, it was Latin. I was no expert, but I was one hundred percent sure this was no Bible. The odd word or two stood out to me—‘diaboli’, meaning devil. Not unusual in itself, there were plenty of references to the Devil in the Bible. But teamed with the words ‘rex’ and ‘salvator’, meaning King and Savior, this was most likely some kind of grimoire which worshiped the darker side of the afterlife. What had the little town of Peach Tree gotten itself into?
