Page 102 of Real Fake Hauntings

Why hadn’t they done that first at the shop?

Maybe they had expected the spell to work much better, so now they were going with plan B.

I began walking along with the throng of people, Fluffy shifting in my arms to take a better look at all the lights.

If the dark witch had successfully transferred Bagley from the finger to an object, they might be far from here already.

The thought chilled my blood. If that had happened, then I was truly screwed.

On the other hand, what if the spell in the closet hadn’t been successful because Bagley operated inside Crane’s body the same way she had operated in my shop? Take her out, and her soul disappeared into the ether until it snapped back to the shop, or in this case, Crane’s body.

If the spell had failed because Bagley was no longer in the finger, and the witch had realized this, they must’ve gone back to the body to try to move it to another location or try the spell in-situ without any extra dark-magic atmosphere.

But again, where could they have stashed the corpse? It wasn’t in the old coven house. Another abandoned house? People might notice.

Unless…

Unless they hadn’t taken it out of the cemetery at all.

Why move a huge body around when you only need a finger or two? If the witch had used a glamour potion on Crane’s body after taking it out, none of the shifters would’ve noticed the smell of decomposition even if it was nearby.

Pulse pounding in my ears, I made a one-eighty and hurried back toward Ian’s cemetery, putting Fluffy down as soon as it was safe for us to run together.

I was out of breath by the time we got there. A few people milled around the entrance, with Natalia in charge of the tickets table.

“Water?” I asked, panting.

Natalia arched her brows but handed me a water bottle from a cooler. I gulped half of it down, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I need to leave Fluffy with you.”

Fluffy had had enough bad people encounters for the day.

“Uh…” Natalia eyed the dog. “Sure?”

“Fluffy,” I told her, crouching down and scratching her behind the ears. “You’ve been a good girl, but now you wait for me here, okay?”

Fluffy darted upward and licked my cheek.

“Good girl.”

I passed her leash to Natalia and ran inside the cemetery. Between the creepy background music and the excited yelps and shouts coming from the tour currently doing the rounds, it was easy to move around without anyone hearing. Rufus might’ve noticed something amiss, but how could he differentiate between the tour people and one witch using a glamour potion?

The large pools of darkness between the spotlights for the tour made me basically invisible in my black witch costume and Ian’s black jacket.

As I zigzagged among the gravestones toward Crane’s original burial spot, I called Ian.

“Ian,” I whispered. “I think I know what happened.”

“Are you at the Cabinet?” he asked in a low voice. “Did you find the witch?”

“No, I’m back at the cemetery. I think the spell at the haunted house failed because Bagley’s soul snapped back to the majority of the body instead of staying in the finger, like what happened whenever I took her out of the main shop room.”

“Where’s Shane and Alex?” he immediately asked.

“I don’t know.”

I arrived at the patch of trees around Crane’s old burial. Nothing appeared amiss. Considering my options, I decided to start my search fanning away from the direction of the house. There were several statues ahead, graves, and a few more trees. In the distance, I spotted the white walls of a small mausoleum.

I studied the tiny building. Hiding in plain sight?

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