Episode 5 of The Witch’s Key: Found You
The story is really heating up! I know I left you hanging yesterday, and I can’t wait to get started on Episode 5 today!
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Episode 5: Found You
This couldn’t be happening.
“We just saw her yesterday afternoon,” I said. “She dropped me off at my house last night. That was just a few hours ago. It’s not possible that she’s gone. She’s probably just late for school.”
My entire body was shaking.
Peyton was the first real friend I’d ever made, and even though I’d only known her a few days, I was already growing close to her. She couldn’t be gone.
This whole thing had to be some kind of misunderstanding.
“It’s true,” Brandy said. “Her mom called me early this morning asking if Peyton had decided to sleep over at our place. She’s done that a few times when her parents were out of town, but I haven’t seen Peyton since I left her house yesterday afternoon.”
“Me, either,” Olive said. “She texted mom about the cupcake at like nine or so last night. That was apparently the last time anyone heard from her.”
“Lenny, you were probably the last person to see her before she disappeared,” Brandy said. “Did she say anything about where she was going after she dropped you off?”
It felt like someone had just dropped a massive weight on my chest.
“No. She just said she was going home,” I said. “Maybe she just went to visit someone else? Does she have a boyfriend?”
I realized we’d never talked about any of them having a boyfriend. I hadn’t seen any guys hanging around any of them, though. At least not so far.
“Not anymore,” Brandy said. “She’d been dating Maddox Penn for two years, but they broke up over the summer.”
“Maybe she went to his house,” I said. There had to be a logical explanation.
“There’s more to it than that,” Brandy said, wiping her face with a tissue. “Believe me, I want this not to be real more than you do. I’ve known Peyton my whole life, Lenny. She’s my best friend. But they know she’s been taken. She’s not just visiting a friend or something. I can’t say anything else, because the police told me not to talk about it, but they’re going to want to question you, too, Lenny. They might already be talking to your uncle.”
My mouth went dry, and I had to sit down on the picnic table’s bench for a second.
They police knew for sure Peyton had been taken?
My mind had already put it all together, but I just didn’t want to believe it. The four other missing girls, and now this. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Whoever took those other girls had Peyton, too.
But why?
After the confrontation with Kai, I had seriously considered taking a step back from figuring out what happened to those girls. Besides, I knew my uncle Martin wouldn’t want me messing in this stuff. This was potentially Council business, and if not, it was human business.
I shouldn’t get involved.
But now, the only friend I’d ever made was gone.
I had to find her.
I closed my eyes and let my head fall into my hands.
Find her? How the heck was I going to do that? I knew nothing about this town or most of the people in it. I didn’t know anything about the other girls who had gone missing or why the police knew for sure Peyton was gone, too.
I didn’t have the first clue about where to start.
A chill went through me, and I looked up slowly.
Except, I did have one clue.
I had an encounter with a supernatural mystery dude just yesterday who very forcefully told me to mind my own business. He practically threatened me if I didn’t stay out of it.
Which means he knew a lot more than I did.
I stood up and scanned the crowd of students gathered outside the main entrance to the school. He had to be here somewhere. Besides, he was super tall, so it should have been easy to find him.
“I don’t know how I’m going to focus at school today,” Brandy said. “I think I’m just going to call my mom to come get me. Do you both want to come over to my place and wait for news?”
“I’ll call my mom, too,” Olive said. “She’s just as upset about this as I am. Peyton’s parents must be a wreck, too. They worshipped her. They’re never going to forgive themselves for being out of town.”
“Geez, you’re talking about her like she’s never coming back,” I said. “She’s been gone a few hours. We’re going to find her.”
Brandy’s lower lip quivered, and tears started falling down her cheeks again in a steady stream.
“You’re right. We can’t give up hope,” she said. “But you don’t know what it’s been like this year. Every time a girl has gone missing, we’ve put up posters all over town, started a Facebook page, searched the woods, held candlelight vigils. We’ve kept the hope alive. But then, six months goes by without a single clue or sign of them, and it’s hard to believe they’re ever coming back. We’ve done this four times now, and none of those girls have ever come home.”
“Listen, it’s going to be different this time,” I said, touching Brandy’s arm. “This time it’s Peyton. We can’t let this happen. We’ll find her.”
Brandy nodded, but I could tell she didn’t have much hope.
And she was right. I hadn’t been here when those other girls disappeared. I hadn’t been a part of those vigils and the search for them.
It couldn’t have been easy to go through that over and over again with no results. Eventually, it had to feel hopeless.
Which is why we all needed to do everything we could to help bring Peyton home.
Brandy and Olive both stepped aside to make phone calls. I still hadn’t gotten my phone in the mail, so I couldn’t call Martin, but I really hoped the cops weren’t headed to his house to ask if they could talk to me. Martin hated the human police. He wasn’t likely to be super cooperative.
At the same time, though, maybe hearing about my friend’s disappearance would make him want to get involved.
Maybe I should have asked him about the missing girls, already. Technically, Uncle Martin was a retired Keeper, but if the Council was planning to get involved in searching for the demon or vampire or whoever took those girls, they would have told Martin.
The Council wasn’t going to send a Slayer into his town without him knowing about it.
But it was totally possible Martin would keep me out of the loop.
Still, I found it hard to believe the Council would have sent me to this town and insisted I go to this school full time if they knew about these girls and had plans to get involved somehow. Maybe this particular situation just hadn’t made it onto their radar yet.
With the Council, it was all about balance. As long as members of the magical community didn’t go too far and tip the scales too noticeably in a negative direction, the Council mostly left them alone.
But something like this? Where did they draw the line?
That was part of the business my parents never really let me get involved in. I would go with them on some of their jobs when things were simple, but they didn’t let me in on any of their behind-the-scenes information like conversations with their Keeper or the research they did on their targets.
For example, I might know that a demon had crossed the line, and I would be allowed to go with them when they captured him or banished him, but I didn’t always know exactly what he had done to get their attention.
I had an idea, of course, but sometimes the details were kept private.
Still, whoever was taking girls in Newcastle had to be crossing a line here. Four missing girls was bad enough, but five in little more than six months?
That was serial killer mania. If the national news media got wind of this, it would be a PR nightmare for the entire community. Part of the entire reason the Council existed was to keep a balance between the supernatural community and the human community.
Too much activity, and humans would know we all exist.
There were certain divisions inside the Council that dealt with different aspects of trying to keep the magical community secret from humans. Slayers were the most severe. If a Keeper decided a Slayer needed to be called in, it was bad news for whoever had done something wrong.
At that point, it usually meant banishment, eternal imprisonment, or death. Period.
I would say five missing girls called for the attention of a Slayer.
Talking to Martin about it was the smart thing to do, but I wasn’t sure I could handle it if he told me to leave it alone. There was no way I’d be able to sit back and wait for the police to find her. Obviously, they were getting nowhere with the other girls.
I had to do something, and right now, the only thing I could think of was finding Kai. He knew more than I did about this whole situation.
Yesterday, he’d said he wasn’t my enemy. He’d even acted like he wanted to protect me from getting hurt. I didn’t want to believe he had anything to do with those girls going missing, but I was still convinced he knew a lot more about this situation than he was letting on.
And it couldn’t have just been a coincidence that he showed up in Newcastle right before the first girl went missing.
I needed to find him, and I needed to confront him.
Even if he didn’t do this, I was willing to bet money he knew something about the person, or creature, who did.
Before, I’d looked at this as a potential project or a diversion, but now, it was personal. I was going to find Peyton, and I was going to bring her home. I dared anyone—even Kai—to try and stop me.
**
I had to sit through homeroom, because they weren’t dismissing anyone without parental permission today. It made sense. The last thing they needed was more missing teenagers in this town.
I listened to what everyone was saying, trying to take in as many conversations around me as I could.
Mostly, though, it was just a regurgitation of the newspaper articles I’d read, but every once in a while, I caught a snippet of something I hadn’t heard before.
For example, all of the missing girls were home alone when they went missing. Some people were also saying that every girl had been a regular at Sir Bean during the weekdays after school. Several people thought the owner, Melvin, might have something to do with it.
“I heard he has some kind of police record from before he moved to town,” the guy behind me said. “I was going to ask Kai about it, since he works there, but he’s not here today.”
My ears perked up at that little tidbit.
Kai was absent today? I wanted to know why.
When they called Olive’s name over the loudspeaker to go home, I slipped into the hallway with her.
“Did you get ahold of your uncle?” she asked.
“No, but I really can’t stay here,” I said. “Do you think your mom could vouch for me?”
Olive looked nervous. “I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. They’re being really strict about who goes home with who, and if mom checks you out and you disappear, too—”
“I’m not going to disappear, Olive. I just need to get home, and Martin wasn’t answering the phone. He’s old. He’s probably taking a nap or maybe he has his phone turned off,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I promise I won’t go anywhere else. I’ll walk straight home.”
She sighed and bit her fingernail. “I’ll ask, but I can’t promise she’ll say yes.”
We walked together to the office, and Olive’s mom pulled her daughter into a big hug. “I’m so glad you’re safe,” she said. She’d obviously been crying. “This is such a tragedy. I don’t know what we’re going to do. If anything happens to our sweet Peyton, I just…”
Her voice trailed off, and she held her daughter tighter.
“Are you ready to go, sweetheart?”
Ms. Julie held her daughter’s hands in her face, then hugged her again.
This was getting awkward with me just standing here watching. I cleared my throat.
Olive seemed to take the hint.
“Mom, you remember Lenny from yesterday, right?”
“Of course,” she said.
She pulled me into a hug, too, and I stiffened. I wasn’t used to this kind of affection. Not even from my own mom. I pulled away as quickly as I could.
“How are you holding up, Lenny?” she asked. “You couldn’t have known Peyton very long, but she gets into your heart fast, doesn’t she? Plus, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to start a brand new school, make a new friend, and then have her disappear like this. I promise you, Newcastle wasn’t always like this. It’s always been a very safe place to live, until recently.”
She shook her head, and I thought she was about to cry again, but she managed to get it under control.
“I’m not handling it well at all,” I said, laying it on thick. “I don’t see how I can stay here all day and listen to everyone talk about this. Do you think you could sign me out, too? I don’t live far from here, and I just want to go home and lay down for a while.”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” she said. “Have you talked to your parents?”
I swallowed. I hadn’t realized how often people assumed you had parents to talk to.
“No, I live with my uncle,” I said, leaving it at that for now. “I couldn’t reach him, but I know he won’t mind if I come home. He’s there now, actually. I just couldn’t get him to answer the phone. I promise, I’ll just walk straight home from here.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I couldn’t have you walking home by yourself, even if it’s close. I’ll check you out and drive you there myself.”
My shoulders relaxed in relief. “Thank you.”
I needed to learn to forge some documents from my uncle to get me out of situations like this in the future, but for now, this would do. Thank goodness for new friends and their overly nice mothers.
A few minutes later, we all loaded into Ms. Julie’s Ford Explorer. It smelled like cupcakes.
“Where do you live, Lenny?” she asked.
I directed her toward the house, and she frowned. “100 Moonlight Drive? But that’s…”
She didn’t complete her thought, but I already knew what she was going to say.
That’s the abandoned house. Or that’s the house with the creepy dude.
“Yeah, I know it looks dark, but my uncle’s just elderly,” I said.
Martin would probably kill me if he heard me say that.
The truth was, he was well over a hundred years old, so elderly was in fact an understatement. Slayers and Keepers, once initiated, had expanded life expectancy. We weren’t exactly immortal, but we lived a lot longer than your average human.
I hadn’t been initiated yet, though. I couldn’t make that move and get my next key until I’d taken the Council’s initiation test at eighteen. I still had eight months to decide if I was going to take it or not.
“I didn’t realize anyone still lived there,” she said, clearing her throat and glancing at Olive in the passenger seat. They shared a look that sent a wave of warm embarrassment up the back of my neck.
We didn’t talk the rest of the way to the house, but in a car, it only took about three minutes to get there. Ms. Julie parked on the street in front of the house, right where Peyton had stopped the night before.
“I can’t believe she was just dropping me off right here a few hours ago,” I said. “Whoever took her must have done it late last night. What time did she text you?”
“What?” Ms. Julie asked. She obviously hadn’t been listening to me.
“Peyton. What time did she text you about the cupcake last night? What did she think of the new flavor?”
Ms. Julie nodded, tears in her eyes again.
“It was about nine-thirty when she finally texted me,” she said. “She said it was my best recipe yet. I just can’t believe she’s gone.”
“Me, either,” I said, glad to at least have an idea of the timeline we were dealing with here. “Thanks again for dropping me off.”
Olive handed me a slip of paper with a number on it. “Text me if you want to come over later,” she said. “I think we might hang out at Brandy’s for a while this afternoon and wait for news.”
“Thank you. I’ll message you later if I get a chance.”
I got out of the car and headed inside as quietly as I could. To be honest, I was relieved there hadn’t been a police car outside the house when we pulled up.
It was probably only a matter of time before the police found out I was possibly the last person to see Peyton before she disappeared. That meant it was also only a matter of time before I had to talk to Uncle Martin about what was going on.
But there was something I wanted to do first.
I silenced the soles of my boots again as I entered the house and ran up to my bedroom. At this time of day, Martin really was likely to be napping or working in his study on the other side of the house.
I shut the door of my room and took a second to catch my breath before walking over to the small cauldron I’d left on my desk the other night. I lifted up the piece of straw I’d used in my spell and shook my head.
There wasn’t a lot left of the top quarter, and it hadn’t even worked right in the first place, but this was my best shot at getting information today.
I quickly gathered all the herbs and components I needed for the location tracking spell, including my father’s magical compass, cleaned out the cauldron, and tried, for the second time, to cast a spell using Kai’s stolen straw.
I mixed everything together and took a deep breath before dropping the tip of the straw into the spell mixture.
“Invenio,” I said as I held the compass in my other hand and waited.
I needed this to work. I needed something to prove that I could do this without my parents here to help. That I could still make a difference in the world.
I needed this to work so that I could help find Peyton before it was too late.
“Please,” I whispered, tapping my toes inside my boot.
I stared at the needle on the compass, silently begging it to move.
Come on.
It jerked a couple of times, went still, and then started spinning around in circles so fast, I couldn’t follow it with my eyes.
My stomach knotted as I watched. Was it supposed to do this? I couldn’t remember.
I held my breath, waiting and praying.
Then, finally, the needle stopped with an abrupt click. It was clearly pointing east, and a smile slowly crossed my face.
“Found you,” I whispered before grabbing my bag and heading back out to begin my official investigation into the disappearance of my first real friend.