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“I’ll join you in that research,” Verla offered. “Uncovering clues could certainly give us an advantage over the priestesses.”
I nodded in agreement. “Talia, Chloe, any clues about the Wands?”
Talia shook her head. “We’re working on it. We’ve gotten into the archives room a few times, but there are a lot of records to look through. So far, we haven’t found anything.”
“Mandy? Grant? Anything on the demon?” Lucas asked.
Grant frowned. “I’ve been searching records for traumatic deaths, but it’s a lot, man. Any one of them could’ve been connected to a demon. We’ve been trying to narrow it down, but no mention of demons in the coven’s records yet.”
Mandy bit her lip and straightened a pile of papers in front of her. “I may have found something last night, but I can’t be sure that it’s legit. It’s just a rumor.”
“There may be some truth to the rumor,” I said. “What’s the story?”
“This is a photocopy of an old article in The Epitaph,” Mandy said, handing out copies. “About fifteen years ago, a student did a series on coven legends. One of the stories he wrote about was the Mystic Wands Suicide.”
Chloe wore a calculating expression. “Mystic Wands… that’s the shop downtown where the owner hanged himself in the back, isn’t it? That place is supposed to be spooky haunted.”
Grant scoffed. “You’re telling me. That ghost is holding one hell of a grudge.”
Onyx tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“He means we saw it,” Talia said ominously.
Miles snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Look, I know you never believed us, but we saw what we saw,” Grant snapped.
Miles’s features paled. “It was Halloween when I dared you to go into that shop. I thought you were trying to scare us. I didn’t think you’d actually seen anything!”
“What’s the legend?” I asked, eyeing the article Mandy handed me.
“Decades ago, a man by the name of Adrik Harvey was found dead in the back of his wand shop, hanging in the back room,” Mandy explained. “At the time, it seemed like a pretty straight-forward suicide case. His body was buried, the noose was removed, case closed… or so the coven thought. When they went to clean out the shop, Adrik’s ghost got violent. Anyone who went inside the shop got hurt, so the shop was left abandoned. Many rumors have sprung up throughout the years, suggesting he didn’t kill himself at all, but that he was murdered. Some say his wife did it. Others claim it was his competitor. No one quite knows what happened in the back room that day, but one thing about his haunting remains consistent.”
My blood turned ice cold as I scanned the article. “Leave, demon scum… or die,” I read out loud.
Mandy nodded. “That’s what he says to anyone who enters the shop, right before he attacks.”
Talia’s face had turned paper white. “Th—that’s what he said to me…”
All eyes turned to her, but Lucas was the first to speak. “What happened in that shop?”
Talia cleared her throat. “Last Halloween, Miles dared Grant to go inside Mystic Wands. Legend says that the noose is still hanging in the back, and Grant was going to get a picture of it. But I heard him scream, so I ran inside… and the ghost was there. He called me demon scum, and I thought he must just be confused, right? We’re descended from a demonic god, so we have demon blood. I thought that’s all he meant. But what if he was talking about the demon?”
“Of course,” I said in realization. “The demon feeds off traumatic deaths. If he cast a spell on Adrik that made him hang himself, it would certainly look like a suicide, and it’s a recipe for a vengeful spirit.”
Grant tapped his chin. “He must think anyone who enters the shop is the demon returning.”
“Then we have to go back to Mystic Wands and help him move on,” Lucas insisted. “He might not even know he’s dead. If we can talk to him, maybe he’ll remember some things. He might know how to get rid of the demon.”
Grant bit his lip. “It’s not that simple. He’s not there anymore.”
Lucas furrowed his brow. “He’s been there for decades. Where could he possibly be now?”
“Um… we kind of trapped him,” Talia admitted.
“Trapped him? How?” Lucas asked.
Talia stood and walked over to one of the shelves she’d decorated. She picked up the pretty music box she’d brought with her other antiques. “We’re not totally sure how it happened. Grant threw my music box at him, and it… sucked him in. It’s like it was protecting us.”
