Page 6 of Sinful

“Hey, watch it,” I said, smirking. “If he didn’t own it, you might be out of a job right now.”

Jesse chuckled. “I know. I’m just messing with you. But seriously, you’re really doing this? You’re going up to that witch village?”

I scoffed. “They aren’t witches. No such fucking thing.”

“You know what I mean. Are you really going there?”

“Yup.”

“To be honest, I thought you gave up on this plan three… wait, no,fouryears ago.”

“I’ve been biding my time,” I said, glancing at a bleached set of antlers hanging from a branch on my left. I knew the locals put them up as decorations for the adventure-seeking tourists, but I always wondered who was stupid enough to see them as anything but a clear warning to stay the fuck out of this place unless they were truly prepared.

Then again, half the tourists were true crime fanatics who made their pilgrimage to my mother’s murder site every year, pretending they wanted to lay flowers and honor her memory, when in reality they were making content for their stupid fucking podcasts and websites. They didn’t care about the real and ever-present danger that lurked in these woods. They just wanted clicks and views.

Jesse laughed again. “Hey, with mysterious talk like that, you’ll fit in perfectly with those fucking creeps.” His voice suddenly turned somber. “But seriously, good luck. You deserve answers. Your mom was a really cool lady.”

My lips tightened. “Yeah. She was.”

“I still remember those balls she used to make us after preschool. What were they? Chocolate, peanut butter, coconut…”

“And honey.” A ghost of a smile lifted the corners of my mouth. “That was her favorite thing.”

“They were bomb. I want—” Jesse’s voice faded out for a moment, so I couldn’t catch a word he said. When the reception returned, he was bidding me goodbye. “Catch you later, man.”

Five minutes later, I turned into the steep driveway that led to my family’s vacation home. I always felt a pang in myguts when the house came into view. So many good times had occurred here, but they were all wrapped up in the worst time of all—the night my mother was taken.

As I drew closer, I saw my father’s car parked by the front of the house. He was standing on the wraparound porch, one hand lifted in a greeting.

“For fuck’s sake.” I gritted my teeth as I braked. What the hell was he doing here?

I didn’t have a bad relationship with my father. Not at all. But he wasn’t supposed to be here. This must’ve been the first time he’d even stepped foot on this land in over a decade.

After what happened to my mother, he stopped visiting. He didn’t want to give up the house, though, because he knew it still contained a lot of happy memories from before that dark time, and so he’d passed it down to me as part of my trust fund provisions, which came into effect around six years ago.

I exhaled deeply and headed up the steep wooden stairs that led to the porch. Dad gave me a tight smile and leaned in to give me a brief hug and pat on the back. “I was in the area and thought I’d drop by, because I knew you were coming up here today,” he said when he drew back. “Totally forgot I gave all the keys to you.”

I snorted. “You were just in the area, huh?” I said fumbling in my pocket for the front door key. “In a remote town in the High Peaks Wilderness?”

“I know it sounds like a lie, but I need to go to Montreal, and it’s only an hour away from here,” he said, lifting a brow. “It seemed reasonable to come by for a visit.”

“Why are you going to Montreal?” I asked, frowning as I turned the key in the lock.

“The Thorne Foundation is funding a drug trial that’s showing promising results for Alzheimer’s patients,” Dad replied. “Unfortunately, the lead scientist is a born-and-bredMontrealer, and she refuses to move her team down to the States, even temporarily. So I have to head up there for a couple of weeks to oversee a few things. One of your uncles will be joining me too.”

“I see.” I pushed the front door open and stepped aside, gesturing for him to go in. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a familiar accent table on the far side of the open plan living room. The sight instantly made me stiffen.

While I was crouched under that very table during an impromptu game of hide and seek twenty years ago, my mother was abducted by two men from the Covenant. Men she’d seemingly been friendly with up until that night.

After they snatched her, a large-scale search of the wilderness ensued, including several police raids on Alderwood, the isolated village belonging to the Covenant cultists. That search lasted six days before Mom’s body was found by hikers in a remote spot around forty minutes north of our vacation home property.

She was dressed in a ceremonial white gown and tied to a blood-soaked stone altar. Her throat had been slit, and esoteric symbols were carved into the flesh of her arms, legs, and abdomen. A strange effigy overlooked the sacrificial altar, hanging from a tree branch—straw and leaf body cloaked in hessian with an animal skull for a head and antlers bound to the top with twine.

I had nightmares about that night for years when I was a kid. Someone accidentally left the crime scene photos out on a desk one day when the cops called us in for an update on the case, and the images burned themselves into my mind’s eye, intensifying the awful dreams until I was convinced that I’d actually been there to witness her murder.

Night after night, I closed my eyes in bed and found myself helplessly watching a ceremony in the deep woods. Chantingmen and women held flaming torches as others tied my screaming mother down. A man in a dark cloak and hulking antler headdress muttered an incantation as his gleaming knife hovered over her, before—

Fuck. Stop it.

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