Sinclair, holding the empty pickle jar, shot me a miserable look. Cody laid a hand on my shoulder and gave it a surreptitious squeeze. “Hang in there, Pixy Stix.”
“You should take up knitting, dear,” Mrs. Meyers said calmly, needles clicking away. “It calms the nerves.”
“I’m considering it myself,” Sandra Sweddon murmured, fingering a set of crystal worry beads.
“Dahling, I think we should all take up knitting when this is over,” Casimir said, his voice strained.
“I just wish I knew where my goddamn brother was,” Jen said. “Or my goddamn sister, for that matter.”
“You don’t have to stay,” I said to her. “We’ve got enough backup.”
She gritted her teeth. “Oh, I’m staying.”
“Well, I think it’s quite exciting,” Lurine said idly. “But I do wish they’d get the damned thing under way.”
At approximately ten thirty, half an hour late, the parade finally began.
Unlike the children’s parade, there was nothing quaint about the adult parade. There were mad scientists in goggles and blood-splattered lab coats, rotting zombies with latex eyeballs falling down their cheeks. There were ugly witches and sexy witches. There was a guy in a skeleton suit walking expertly on stilts and brandishing a plastic axe who was clearly meant to be Talman Brannigan back from beyond the grave.
That got a big round of applause.
There was a middle-aged heavyset guy in a corset, fishnet stockings, and pumps, with a placard around his neck and a whip-wielding dominatrix beside him, representing some political scandal I’d missed out on. Actually, there were several of those. I really needed to pay more attention to the national news. There was a twelve-foot-tall Pumpkinhead puppet operated by a local theater troupe. Like the Headless Horseman, it was a regular feature. Even though you could see the puppeteers working the poles that supported it, the effect as it bobbed and swayed above the crowd, an evil grin fixed on its ginormous orange head as it turned this way and that, skeletal hands outstretched, was pretty uncanny.
There were nuns and priests and pirates and mummies, and there was a group dressed as the cast of The Wizard of Oz. There was always a Wizard of Oz group. It wasn’t a regularly planned appearance, it just happened that way.
And of course, there was the squadron of Lurine Hollisters from Rainbow’s End. Drag versions of Lurine paraded down the street in a bloodstained lace slip and stiletto heels from her B-movie horror classic Revulsion Asylum and the bloodstained wedding dress and deranged streaks of mascara from the sequel, Return to Revulsion Asylum. There was the famous scarlet suit, pillbox hat, and veil that she’d worn during the trial regarding the challenge to her late husband’s will. There was the figure-hugging, sparkling Dolce & Gabbana gold gown—well, a decent approximation of it, anyway—that Lurine had worn after the verdict was announced in her favor.
Okay, I admit it, I got caught up in the moment enough to cheer.
There was even a Drag Lurine in the dowdy gingham dress she’d worn in one of the few serious movies she’d done, an indie film called Lindy’s Crossing.
The real Lurine smiled beneath the edge of her feathered mask. “Well done, boys. I wasn’t expecting to see that one.”
“You know, that was actually a really good—” I stopped when Cody grabbed my shoulder again. “What is it?”
“He’s here.” Cody’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. His head was up, nostrils twitching, and there was a feral sheen in his eyes. “The Tall Man, or at least his remains. Come on!”
Without waiting for a response, Cody vaulted off the stoop and began pushing his way through the crowd, ignoring complaints. I followed in his wake, stepping awkwardly over the police tape.
“Daisy!” Sinclair shouted after me. “Should we . . . ?”
“I don’t know!” I called over my shoulder as I hurried to catch up with Cody.
My first thought when I saw the apparition shambling toward the rear of the parade was that it was one hell of a costume, or maybe a larger-than-life puppet like the Pumpkinhead. What else would you think if you saw a seven-foot-tall skeleton clad in steel-plate armor, wreathed in crackling blue lightning, holding a wicked-looking axe in one hand? As it drew near, spectators were craning to get a better look at it and already beginning to cheer.
But then Cody stopped dead in the intersection, so quickly I nearly ran into him from behind.
It wasn’t a costume, and there were no clever puppeteers controlling it with poles. Those discolored bones were real, and a foul, acrid scent mingled with the odor of rot and decay hung in the air around the figure. That axe wasn’t plastic; it was a serious and deadly sharp-looking tool for splitting wood. Whatever was causing the lightning, it wasn’t some clever use of LED lights. And the armor . . . I don’t know what the hell the armor was about, but it definitely wasn’t decorative.
The Tall Man’s grinning jaw gaped and blue flames flickered in his hollow eye sockets as he released a booming laugh that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, reverberating against the walls of the buildings.
The pit of my stomach dropped and my blood felt like it was turning to ice water in my veins.
“What the hell?” It was Chief Bryant, sounding angry and bewildered. “What the hell is it?”
“Talman Brannigan, sir,” Cody said flatly.
Sinclair arrived at a run, breathing hard. “And my grandfather’s duppy.”
Chief Bryant stared at all three of us, at the members of the coven, the Scooby Gang, and the ghoul squad converging behind us. The Tall Man stood motionless, axe raised. Several yards away, Stacey Brooks stood frozen in terror, the camera forgotten in her hands.
The noisy crowd had fallen silent and uncertain, and the parade participants were retreating into an uncertain cluster.
Behind the figure of the Tall Man, an elderly man in a leisure suit capered and cackled. There was something familiar about the tenor of that voice. I’d heard it over an intercom, although it hadn’t been cackling at the time. The Tall Man’s jaw gaped again, one bony hand rising to point at Stacey Brooks as he uttered a single word.
“CAVANNAUGH!”
Stacey let out an earsplitting scream.
Oh, shit.
It had been right in front of us the whole time. It wasn’t a descendant of the Cavannaughs that had stolen the Tall Man’s remains. That capering man in the leisure suit was Clancy Brannigan. It was the Tall Man’s sole living descendant that Grandpa Morgan’s duppy had possessed in order to work death magic. Unless I was mistaken, it looked very much as though Clancy Brannigan, former inventor and self-proclaimed man of science, hadn’t been building a spaceship or a new and improved widget in his basement. He’d been welding armor onto the stolen bones of his dead ancestor, now inhabited by the duppy and hell-bent on carrying out the Tall Man’s dying curse.
And not only had we conveniently assembled the parade outside the decrepit old Tudor house, but we’d provided a scion of the Cavannaugh bloodline as a handy target.
“Do something!” the chief shouted at us, then turned toward the crowds and the huddled parade participants, waving his arms. “Clear the street! Get off the street!”
After that, things got chaotic.
The Tall Man lunged toward Stacey Brooks, swinging his axe, and I reacted without thinking, summoning my mental energies the way I’d been drilling for hours. Stefan had made me promise not to attempt using them as a weapon, but I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t even know if I could do it, but as much as I disliked Stacey, I couldn’t just stand there while the resurrected corpse of Pemkowet’s infamous axe murder hacked her to bits. And so instead of kindling a shield as I’d been taught, I visualized a bullwhip of blinding light and cracked it in my mind, wrapping it around the Tall Man’s right arm and yanking on it.