Free The Thirteenth Sacrifice by Debbie Viguié

wrist she caused the door to slam shut in its face and then she collapsed to the sidewalk, sobbing.
    Half an hour later she and Ed sat on the curb as a dozen officers from the Salem and Boston police departments swarmed all over the house. She had stopped crying but was still shaking. She noticed that Ed also looked the worse for wear, with an ashen face, vacant eyes, and blood-covered shoes. Fortunately Oliver had listened to her, and he and Grant had whisked Katie away from the scene quickly and had taken her to a different precinct to wait for them while reporters continued to arrive at their own precinct.
    After a while an officer from the Salem department approached them. He had sandy blond hair and his name tag read WESLEY . “Sir, ma’am, we’ve set up some portable lights down in the basement at the crime scene. Would you care to come down? We’d like your opinion on whether this might be linked to the murders in Boston.”
    Before the others had arrived she had used a few well-chosen words to banish the beast that had growled and clawed at the front door, the barrier it could not cross. Shame still filled her, but she had been able tothink of no other way to dispel the creature and the danger it represented. After that, many of the barriers and protective spells guarding the house had fallen like dust. The barriers were magic; that’s all they were, mostly designed to protect the house and its former inhabitants from intruders. Some, like the floorboards that creaked beneath Ed’s weight but not hers, were like an alert system. Others, like the sounds they had each heard in the basement, were designed to scare those who did not belong there. The creature had been created to kill those who made it too far into the house and proved resistant to the other spells.
    Ed stood up shakily, but Samantha stayed put. It was safe to go inside now. Even if a few barriers remained, they would be of the kind designed to work on the psyches of two or three people, not a dozen. Safety in numbers was an old concept, as old as magic itself. Still, she wasn’t going to set foot back in that basement, even if they had managed to drive away all the shadows they thought resided there with all the portable lights in Salem. Some shadows would never leave.
    Ed looked down at her, but she shook her head slightly. He didn’t argue; he simply trudged into the house after the officer. She knew he didn’t want to go, but he was also still not sure what all had happened. If he knew how close they had really come to dying, he would have stayed on the curb with her and looked at photos later.
    She sighed as she let her head drop into her hands. The truth was, even if he realized it, he would probably still go. He needed to see for himself that the girl was long dead and that there really had been no way for him to save her. His need to save others was the greatest thing that drove him, was what gave him the strength togo back into that basement.
And I’m still just trying to save myself,
she realized.
    So she waited outside while her partner explored the depths of the house and examined the crime scene. She didn’t need to see it. Enough of it had been burned into her brain that she would not soon forget. After a while she realized that it had been a long time since Ed had gone back inside. Fear touched her and she turned to look at the house behind her.
    It was a gray house, older than those around it by at least a half century. It was large, though. The windows in the attic stared down at her like unblinking eyes and the maw of the beast gaped open. She blinked, forcing herself to see the door as it actually was and not as what it meant to her.
    Could she have missed something? Had there been other spells, traps that even now could be killing the officers inside the house? She shook her head forcefully. If that were the case there would be screaming, some whisper of sound. She concentrated, focusing on shutting out all the other sounds