Page 10 of Bewitched By the Pumpkin Queen

I crouch down, and Whiskers leaps into my arms, sniffing the air with deliberate care. “There is no way someone could get in the house with the number of wards that are up.” I say, though I’m not sure which of us I’m trying to convince. “Besides, there were a ton of people here just yesterday. You’re probably just smelling one of them.”

"I know what I smell, Delia. This is different. Fresh.”

I move through the kitchen, each step a fresh round of anxiety. The back door is slightly ajar, just a hair, and a breath of wind creeps through, making the curtains dance. My hand shakes as I pull the door wide, stepping out onto the porch. The hush is even deeper here, like the world took a breath and never let it out. There’s a heaviness I can’t shake, a tension that bends the darkness over the heads of the trees and the fields.

For the first time in years, I’m legitimately afraid of stepping off my own porch. The feeling crawls over me, unfamiliar and slicing, like a paper cut you don’t see until you bleed on the page. Cold air gnaws at my ankles as I step off the bottom step, the grass brittle under my slippered feet.

The grounds are empty. Or at least, they look empty.

I scan the backyard, the pumpkin patch, the fence line. Not even a stray crow hopping from stalk to stalk.

Each step feels like wading through cement, my breath hanging in clouds before me. My fingers tremble against the protection charm dangling at my throat. Whiskers has gone quiet. Now, he’s just a rigid bundle of white fur draped across my arms, his nose twitching at something I can't detect.

Suddenly, he points his paw past the barn and toward the pumpkin patch. “Over there!” he urges.

The flood lights come on as we pass the barn basking the patch in bone-white halogen. We’re halfway through the patch when I see a disturbance in the sea of orange—a trail of trampled vines and splintered stems, leading toward the old scarecrow at the far edge. The figure looms in the fog, arms outstretched as if to block the way.

Whiskers leaps from my shoulder and tears ahead through the pumpkin vines, his white fur a ghostly streak on the dark ground. My heart thrashes as I sprint after Whiskers, bashing my knees on cold pumpkins and nearly losing a slipper to the sucking mud. Whiskers stops dead ten feet from the scarecrow, his tiny spine arched and tail fully Brillo’d, and he emits a sound I’ve never heard from him before like a wet, warbling mewl that cracks and dies in the air.

It doesn’t take me long to see what has Whiskers so upset. Lying at the base of the scarecrow, half-buried in fallen leaves and trampled pumpkin vines, is Jasper.

My world collapses.

I can’t breathe. Can’t move. Can’t…process what I’m seeing.

He’s sprawled on his back, his head at an unnatural angle, one arm flung out as if reaching for something, still glazed over with ice. His eyes are open, staring at nothing, the rich brown now flat and dull like muddy pennies. His skin has a waxy, blue-gray pallor that no living person could wear, and there’s a dark puddle painting the ground beneath him.

And his chest…where his heart should be, there's nothing but a ragged cavity.

I clap a hand over my mouth to stop the scream that's building, but it breaks free anyway, a ragged, animal sound that tears my throat raw. My knees buckle beneath me. The pumpkin patch, the scarecrow, the whole universe contracts to this single point of impossible truth. I grab his shoulders, shaking him as if he's just playing some cruel joke. "Wake up,Jas," I rasp, my voice a stranger's. “Wake up!” I shake him again. “Please. You—you promised me forever, you shit. You promised.”

His face is locked in a terrible stillness, with his mouth half-open as if caught mid-gasp, and his eyes wide and empty as abandoned windows. I cup his cheeks between my palms, my thumb tracing the rough stubble I'd complained about just yesterday morning, willing those vacant brown eyes to focus on me again.

They don’t.

They won't ever again.

I collapse over him; my body wracked with sobs that feel like they're tearing me in two. This can't be real. It can't be. Just last night we were laughing on the porch swing, planning for today's festival crowds. Just last night his hand had been warm in mine, his laugh rumbling in the darkness as we fell asleep.

How can he just be…gone?

I feel Whiskers press against my side, his small body trembling as much as mine. He doesn't speak, just presses his furry head against my arm in silent support.

I don't know how long I kneel there, cradling Jasper's head in my lap, rocking back and forth as if the motion might somehow bring him back, somehow rewind time to before this happened. The world blurs through my tears, and my throat burns raw from the desperate sobs that wrench themselves from my chest.

"Delia." Whiskers's voice is barely audible. "We need to do something…call someone."

He’s right.

We should do something.

My hands move without conscious thought, gently lying Jasper’s head back on the ground before finding their place over the ragged hollow of his chest. I pull on my magic and begin whispering every incantation I can remember—protection, healing, binding, everything. My fingers glow with desperate gold, sparks leaping from my nails and sizzling against the morning dew.

And still, he lies motionless beneath me.

Without his heart, there is no hope.

I rock back on my heels, my trembling hands leaving smears of his blood across my face as I wipe away tears. The wound in Jasper's chest isn't jagged or torn. It's a perfect circle, like someone traced the outline with a compass before carving. Clinical. Deliberate. This wasn't some frenzied attack in the dark. Someone took their time with my husband, harvesting exactly what they came here.

This is the same signature as the others. Thomas. Heather. Dan. And now Jasper.

My Jasper.

Whiskers crawls into my lap and curls up, his nose brushing my wrist, as he whispers, “I’m so sorry, Delia.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say, but I don’t really hear myself.

I rest my forehead against Jasper’s, breathing in what remains of his scent. “I failed you, love,” I murmur. “I should have known.”

Dawn bleeds across the horizon. Soon I'll have to share him with the authorities and then they'll take him away, and after that, I don't know. I can't even picture what comes next.

The only certainty left in my shattered world is this…whoever carved out my husband's heart will answer to me. I will hunt them to the edges of existence. And if I have to reduce this town to ashes and salt the earth beneath it, so mote it be.