A Cold Case in Spell Read online

  From here the opening in the trees where I drove in looked much farther away. And wasting precious minutes inside while leaving the truck running hadn’t helped my situation any.

  “Here we go,” I mumbled, shifting into drive. The truck lurched forward and slid a little, slow to pull the weight of the camper behind it.

  I was close to holding my breath as I got nearer to the entrance of Charming Springs. If I could just make it out to the main road then maybe a cop would pull over… it was hard to miss the truck and camper after all.

  And then there was the fact that I couldn’t wrap my head around the winter in summer thing. Winter could be fun… at least for the first snowfall. But after that it just got monotonous and cold. I’m not the type of person who likes to stay in one place for very long, so all those cozy days that are supposed to be used for curling up under a blanket with hot chocolate and bingeing three weeks’ worth of Netflix just weren’t my thing.

  The truck made it back on the main road, helping my panicking a bit. That is, until we went where the trees began to hang over the roar, marking where everything was starting to go back to summer.

  Big Ben start to cross underneath the trees but much to my horror, the old truck decided this was the perfect time to stall on me. It shuddered, taking one last gasping breath before it plain broke down. The heat was barely blowing out now. I was screwed.

  "No way. This cannot be happening!”

  A huge bird swooped past the windshield, scaring the heck out of me as it screeched. I shrieked in return, wishing for more good luck and less irritable giant birds.

  There was no way I was going to be able to stay warm for much longer with the truck's heat off.

  "How...? Why?" I smashed my fist down on the dash again. "Come on, my friend. You can't just leave a girl hanging like this. I'm going to freeze to death and it's totally going to be your fault! I don't think Nan would appreciate that very much."

  Another twist of the key in the ignition, but still nothing. It was like the truck just didn’t want to go back down the road. Or I was completely out of gas.

  The cab was not going to be a very hospitable environment for much longer. I was going to need to find a place to not just hunker down, but to call for some roadside assistance. Why it didn't occur to me sooner I had no idea.

  Better get a head start on that. I searched for my crumpled-up car insurance card, flipping it over as I grabbed my phone to dial in the number. But when I went to call the number all I got was a shrill ringing noise in my ear. Which usually meant one thing... yep. No bars.

  "You have got to be kidding me." I shook my head, unable to accept that there was no way to get ahold of anyone on my phone. I tried again. And again. And again, but to no avail. I was stuck like Chuck, as Nan likes to say.

  I bit my lip. This was not only incredibly inconvenient, but it meant I really did have to hoof it outside and find somewhere to take shelter, which in the twenty-first century sounded absolutely primitive.

  What was around me...? I turned around to look out of the cab's back windows. The nearest thing was the not-at-all-helpful gas station. There were a couple of buildings that looked normal enough, sitting up level with the hill that seemed to drop off into more road ahead. Maybe there were people inside. One of the buildings had a large sign that spanned the roof but the top half of it was covered in ice and snow so I couldn’t quite make it out.

  I steeled myself for the bite of cold air against my bare skin and pushed open the door, making a beeline to the camper and yanking it open. My clothes were still packed in two different suitcases, and with the trip I planned through the cooler air of the mountains I was beyond thankful to past Indie for thinking ahead and packing a heavy jacket. I wasn’t prepped for snow whatsoever, but something was better than nothing. I changed into the warmest clothes I could manage. A tank top underneath a t-shirt and another long-sleeve t-shirt, plus the jacket. Two pairs of fleece leggings and I doubled up by adding my ‘bloat-proof’ jeans that were purposefully a size too big. With two pairs of my favorite fluffy socks, I was about as warm as I could get, all things considered.

  I peeked between the blinds beside the kitchenette and the foldable bench and table. Still no sign of life. Except for the huge bird which perched on the nearest tree limb, watching me.

  No, it’s not watching you. It’s just scoping out the only moving target around. Or did owls not care enough to attack humans? Was that some other kind of predatory bird? I knew of a couple of predatory geese that liked to chase me around the lake my grandparents and I liked to go fishing in, so I wasn’t counting it out.

  Wait. Aren’t owls supposed to be nocturnal?

  It wasn’t ideal but I knew it was a good idea to be as prepared as I could get, so I grabbed the crowbar I brought with me on the trip and pulled the jacket’s hood over my head, heading back out into the snow. Creepy owl or not, I was going to find a way to get gas and back out on the main road.

  It took all of thirty seconds for my shoes and doubled up socks to get wet and mushy in the foot of snow. And another couple of minutes before my teeth started to chatter. If it weren’t for the stupid snow I might have a chance at running up the street to safety…

  “This b-bites,” I said to absolutely no one.

  Ahead, I could make out the sign for the larger building. Charming Springs Gazette. It wasn’t a grocery store or working gas station, but the place was bound to have a phone somewhere… maybe even someone inside.

  The sun had finally come peeking from behind the heavy clouds, throwing shadows all along the road. Trees, the buildings, myself, and something moving around me… I jerked my head up just in time to see the big white owl swoop in with its long black talons curved and ready to rip my face off.

  I dropped to the snow with a yell, and the owl glided past me, circling back around. My heart raced as I stood back up with the crowbar above my head, ready to defend myself. But instead of round two, the owl settled on what looked like a blue post office box. The top had been cleared off recently.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry! I must have frightened you! Ack, I am the worst messenger, ever.”

  I blinked. The owl’s beak had moved in time with the words. Was this some sick joke? Some kind of animatronic toy to freak me out even more?

  But the owl snapped its beak and shook off its wings, shaking its head back and forth. Its big golden eyes were definitely looking at me. And not in a normal animal way.

  The bird sighed. “Okay. This probably seems really weird, but I promise I can explain everything. I’m Goldie, by the way.” The bird, who I presumed was a female with her voice and name, flew back over to a closer tree limb and hooted at me. “But first… who are you and how in the world did you cross the barrier?”

  2

  Eleven Years Froze

  “Nope.” Crowbar in hand, I turned right around and trekked through my previous footsteps, glad to see that yes, there was some sort of pavement underneath the heavy blanket of snow. Slippery but solid at least.

  “Wait. Where are you going?”

  I ignored the bird and kept moving. This was just a really bizarre dream and since you can pretty much do whatever you want in dreams then the snow, the owl, the creepy ghost town and broken-down truck—all of it was just a minor inconvenience until I woke up.

  But the owl swooped ahead of me. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

  I shook my head. “You’re not real. So a hypothetical conversation is not necessary.” Logic was going to be the way out of here.

  “Are you trying to leave? I hate to break it to you but there’s no way out. Your truck isn’t going anywhere.”

  With a sigh I kept moving forward. This would be over in just a minute…

  “I can help you!” she shrieked from overhead. “You’re going to want to maybe sit down for this though.”

  “Of course I want to sit down! Do you think I want to be out here?” I shouted back.

  The owl, or Goldie as my brain h
ad made up on its own probably due to her pretty golden eyes, was circling around me again. “I thought I wasn’t real?” That was definitely sarcasm.

  “What’s the point? I’m just going to wake myself up as soon as I lie back down in bed. I might as well see what you have to say.” I shrugged.

  “Okay then. Well, to start off with again, I’m Goldie. The resident messenger in town. And you’re…?”

  “Indie Warren,” I muttered. “Not a resident. Not a messenger.”

  “Well, duh. Messengers are animals. I mean, technically so are humans but… you get what I mean. Anyway, so welcome to Charming Springs. Usually we have a bigger welcoming committee, but things have been a little different lately.”

  I glanced up at her. “If you’re an owl then why do you sound so normal? I thought owls were supposed to have some kind of weird significance in your dreams? You said you have a message for me, right? So what is it? Is that the only way I’m going to wake up?” Ugh, of course it is. My brain would make this whole dream sequence into a puzzle. I swear, if it has anything to do with Gavin… “Let’s have it, then.”

  “I didn’t say I had a message for you, I just said that I’m—okay, you know what? Forget about the messenger part.” She settled down on another branch closer to the camper. “You’re wondering why that beat-up old thing couldn’t get past the sign. I can tell you why, but you might not believe me.”

  I threw my frozen hands up. “So what? Just tell me. The suspense is killing me.”

  She raised one feathery brow. “It is?”

  “No.”

  “All roads in and out of town are blocked by the barrier spell Mother Nature put up. No one can leave, though it’s awfully odd that you were able to get in. Usually people drive right past to Great Hill without even seeing the sign for Charming Springs. Anywho. Magic keeps us in town.”

  I rolled my eyes and pulled my arms tighter around myself with the crowbar still firmly in my grasp. “Uh-huh. It looks like Mother Nature definitely has it out for you.”

  “Exactly! She and her ex-husband, Father Time, don’t see eye-to-eye so they take revenge on each other here and there. Her lovely eternal winter spell hasn’t been broken for the past eleven years. And since we can’t go anywhere, we’re stuck freezing our cloacas off.”

  “Our cloacas?”

  “Ahem. Never mind that. We can’t leave, in other words.”

  The camper door felt like ultimate salvation at this point, and I yanked on the handle. “Mmkay. Well, it’s a nice story but I think I’d like to wake up now.”

  And with that, I slammed the door and retreated to the safety of the camper’s flimsy mattress. Hey, it was better than the alternative.

  I pulled my favorite knit blanket from Nan over my head and willed myself to wake up.

  I tossed. And turned. And I watched the minutes on my watch tick by. I fluffed the pillow at least three times, contemplated how long it would take me to flag down a cop if I just walked down the steep side of the mountain to the main road. I groaned when I checked and realized a whole hour had passed.

  Something wasn’t right.

  “I need… what do I need? Oh!”

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize I was either slowly slipping into some kind of coma—maybe from a car wreck I didn’t realize I’d had—or I was in an alternate universe where there were apparently talking animals. I’d watched enough on String Theory to know that nothing was impossible.

  That didn’t mean I liked it.

  I changed out my shoes, wrapping them in the only thing I could think of that would keep them from getting wet: plastic grocery bags I had stored under the tiny kitchenette sink. Throwing on another layer of clothing just because, I set back out.

  Of course Goldie was perched nearby. I could hear her tsking me like a disapproving mother.

  “I tried to tell you this was real.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Whatever this is, I obviously need to find a way out.” I held up the crowbar. “Time to test that so-called barrier.”

  “I really, really wouldn’t do that.”

  The sign that Goldie had mentioned before was just barely visible under a blanket of snow. This one said, ‘Sorry to see you go - come back to visit!’ I shook my head. No way.

  But approaching the tunnel of trees felt like I was walking through quicksand, really cold quicksand. This wasn’t how snow was supposed to be.

  I struggled to pick my feet up and my calves ached as I got closer to the sign. By the time I made it to the stupid thing, a buzz not unlike a bug zapper in the summertime had me stop dead in my tracks.

  Tentatively, I reached to clear off the snow from the top of the sign. The buzzing grew louder, almost like it was daring me to see what would happen if I just—

  “Don’t! Unless you’d like to lose your eyebrows and get thrown backward a few dozen feet, don’t do it. I mean it—that barrier is no joke. Mother Nature can be vicious when she wants to be.” Goldie swooped down, squawking.

  I pulled my hand away. “Then I need to find a chink in the armor.”

  The day grew longer and so did my shadow as I walked back toward the truck. Cautious relief flooded through me as I turned the key in the ignition and Big Ben sprang to life again. Throwing him into gear, I smashed my plastic-wrapped foot down on the accelerator and pulled the wheel to the right in hopes that I wouldn’t tempt the fate of the barrier.

  Luckily for me, Big Ben got the message and we chugged slowly through the road tracks we left behind to the gas station. This time though, I kept going until we passed the Charming Press Gazette building and slowly descended down the hill.

  The town was spread out much more than I expected it to be, though it was still just as empty. Everything looked relatively modern, which in itself made it that much more eerie. It wasn’t some abandoned old mine town Nan had told me about. It was as if everyone had just disappeared while shopping at the Harris Teeter.

  Big Ben let out another beep, signaling his imminent death. I was hoping to get through to the other side of town to see what was there, but I was just going to have to walk again. I parked outside of a beautiful white church with wide stained glass that rose to where the tall gothic-designed spire began.

  Goldie had soared through the air right behind me and landed on the cleared off steps leading up to the church. “I suppose this is as good as any spot to hole up.”

  “I’m not holing up. I’m going to find a way past this barrier and get the heck out of here.”

  Was it my imagination or did she just snort at me?

  “You should really take my advice. It’s too cold out here for someone like you. Maybe if you had fire magic… I don’t suppose you do?”

  “Nope. The last I checked, I was fresh out of fireballs. Though I could see how that would be helpful.” I paused for a moment, letting the sound of the wind whip at my face. “I do have a question though. Why is no one here? Did something happen to them?” I shuddered at the thought. What could drive away a whole town of people?

  Her expression grew as somber as an owl could look. “They’re here, but… well, they’re all asleep.”

  I stumbled over to the steps, nearly going headfirst into one of the huge stone pillars topped with angels. “Sorry, what?”

  “No one really knows what happened, but after we had our first turn of the spring trapped here in the snow, people got angry. Witches and wizards, all of the other supernatural people, everyone was looking for a way out of here. We couldn’t expect to be stuck in here with no way to feed ourselves down the road. Well, at least they wouldn’t be able to. There are plenty of lemmings, rodents and…” she snapped her beak into an unnerving smile, “Rabbits.”

  “Gross. And also… supernatural people?” I shook my head. One thing at a time. “Okay, so the folks in town got mad because they couldn’t leave. Why are they all sleeping?”

  “Another spell, I think. Late one night I saw it. The shimmer in the air that was just like the first eternal
winter spell. Then the next morning, no one came out of their homes. I got worried, so I went to check on a few of my friends… they were all asleep. Still alive and breathing, but asleep. I waited for them to wake up, but they never did.”

  I frowned. “How long have they been sleeping, exactly?”

  She sighed. “This happened eleven years ago.”

  My jaw dropped as I looked around the empty town. “So everyone’s dead? They can’t be sleeping for eleven years. That’s impossible. Even coma patients need—”

  But Goldie shook her fluffy white head. “No. It’s not a sleeping spell. It’s a time-freezing spell that was cast while they were sleeping. So as far as we know, they’re frozen in time, perfectly preserved as if their night never ended. Which honestly is a good thing. I don’t know how the spell was cast or who casted it, but it was a smart move. Things were getting ugly.”

  I swallowed hard. I could only imagine what a whole town’s worth of angry, hungry people would look like. “So why didn’t anyone call for help when they were awake? You said it happened eleven years ago. There was still Wi-Fi even. No one thought to send out an SOS email?”

  “After the barrier was put up there was no way in or out. That includes internet, phone calls, electricity even. Luckily we had our brightest minds come up with a town electrical grid during the first month they realized what happened. That’s located over in the norther-most section of town. So no emails.”

  “No Netflix to binge during an eternal winter? Yikes,” I mumbled. It wasn’t really my thing, but if I was stuck inside with nothing to do, I could see the benefit.

  I looked down at my feet and then out at the shoveled snow at the bottom of the icy steps. “Hold on. The town is frozen or the people?”

  “People. It’s snowed, melted, then snowed again since.”

  “Then why are the steps clear? You didn’t magically pick up a snow shovel, did you?”

  She opened her beak but squawked and took flight, just in time for someone to step out from behind one of the stone pillars.