On the car ride over, I called Lily and asked her to pass it on to all interested parties that I was about to start the hunt for the killer. When I got to the Safe Harbor Café, the hags were already waiting. A hideous old woman and a gorgeous young woman stood by a nondescript car. I thought it was the same pair that picked up the body. All White European hags looked alike in their young and old aspects, so I couldn’t be sure.

“Hi, I’m Harper,” I said. I waited for them to introduce themselves. Instead, they nodded and didn’t say anything. Then they got in the car. Which was weird. Not knowing what else to do, I got in after them. A Venus of Willen Dorf statue hung from the rearview mirror. I couldn’t decide if it was supposed to be some sort of a joke or not.

The old woman was driving. With her hunched back, her nose was even with the top of the steering wheel. The young woman was in the passenger seat. In her lap, she held a black disk, a bone, and a bowl. There was a stick of incense stuck on the dashboard. The spicy, musky smoke filled the car and made my eyes water. Could none of these people do magic by burning something smelly? I wondered.

The young woman, who I guess wasn’t really young, started chanting. The black disk in her hand turned silver, and the bone glowed. It must have been glowing pretty brightly for me to be able to see it in the bright morning light. Slowly, the smoke from incense began to clump together. It turned into a ball of gray smoke, which grew more and more solid. The chanting from the passenger seat stayed at the same steady pace. The black ball began to stretch and elongate until it wasn’t a ball anymore but rather an arrow. It began to spin like a compass seeking true north. Then it stopped and pointed left. The old woman started the car and pulled out of the café’s parking lot to the left. The chanting from the front seat continued.

The smell in the car was overpowering. I was pretty sure that under the smell of the incense, I could smell the bone. It dawned on me that it was probably a bone from the dead hag. Which was gross and also a little sad. I wanted to roll down the window. Between the smell and the sensation of riding in the back, I was beginning to feel car sick. My head spun, and my stomach lurched in uncertainty. I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.

“Too much for ya?” the old woman asked with a cackle.

“We can talk?” I asked without opening my eyes. I had questions but didn’t want to disturb the chanting woman.

“I can,” said the old woman. “I don’t know if you can. You look magicsick to me.”

“If not magicsick, then carsick,” I said. “Is this spell going to lead us directly to the killer, or does it take us to the place she was killed?”

“It’ll take us where it wants us to be,” she said.

I wondered if perhaps asking questions was not the best use of my time. But I tried again anyway. “Do you know who she was?”

The old woman sounded sad. “Yes, we do.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” It was the automatic polite thing to say, but that didn’t make it any less true.

“I know you are. Thank you for bringing her back to us. There are others that would have left her there or given her to the cleaners. Nasty things that they are,” she said.

Interesting. The hags didn’t like the cleaners. Jo would probably be flattered. The hags were considered pretty dark themselves. Being two-faced, I suppose they could be considered both the dark and the light at the same time. But since the only reason they turned into beautiful women was to trick people into helping them, it seemed more dark to me. Of course, sometimes they turned into old women to guilt people into helping them. Who knew? Not me. That was for sure. The arrow on the dashboard spun again. I watched it go and wondered where it would lead us. When it stopped, it was pointing toward the left again.

We were on a two-lane road through the woods. There wasn’t anywhere to turn. I wondered why they couldn’t scry and use a map like the witches did. Maybe it wouldn’t work since the witches had been looking for a person they had something from, and the hags were looking for—well, I wasn’t totally sure what they were looking for. Maybe the place where their friend had died? Or her killer? I wasn’t sure which one. I hoped that we weren’t going to go back to the place where we had found her body. That would be a colossal waste of time.

I leaned forward in the back seat. “Hey, can I ask a question?”

“I think you just did,” said the old woman.

“Oh, come on," I said, "you know what I mean.”

She waved at me to go on, “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

“Did the dead woman spend any time at Fidnemed State Park?” I asked.

There was no response from the front seat for a while. Maybe the connection was something else, but so far, it was all I had. I realized that I hadn’t asked Lily what she had found out about Samantha’s connection to the park. Maybe Chris had told her something. While I was waiting for the hags to respond, I texted Lily to ask. The hag finally found a road she could turn onto, and we were now headed in the same direction as the arrow again.

“Why do you ask?” the old woman said finally.

“Because two of the women who died both spent time there, and that’s where they were found. The dryad lived very near the park, and the werewolf recently went camping there.” I checked my phone and saw that Lily had already gotten back to me.

Lily’s text read: Samantha liked to hike. She may have gone there. Am trying to get more details.

Aloud, I said, “Oh, and the vampire liked to hike. So, she may have gone there at some point.”

“A vampire that likes to hike? How strange,” said the hag who was driving without answering my question.

“She was fairly recently turned. Which is why he was able to catch her, I guess.” I explained. I leaned forward a bit to talk. The smell was pretty strong, and the glow from the bone was more than a little creepy. Sitting in the back seat made me feel a bit like a kid.

“So, you really think it was a human that did this?” the hag asked. Her partner in the passenger seat kept chanting.

“I’m positive," I explained, "I don’t know if he had some magical aid or what. But I was told that a human did it in front of a luduan, and you can’t lie in front of them.”

“You can’t. What told you? Would it know if there was something magical about the human?” the driver asked.

“A vodnik told me. I don’t really know what their powers are,” I told her honestly.

She looked at me in the rearview mirror. “They drown humans and keep their souls in teacups.”

“Oh. That explains the cup then,” I said. “You don’t think it could be a human?”

“Seems unlikely. We aren’t hunted like the vamps or even the wolves. And nothing hunts dryads. Everyone loves those stupid hippies.” She sounded annoyed.

“But what if it was like the government or something?” I asked.

“Government wouldn’t leave the bodies like that. Just out and exposed. They’d cut them up and study every part,” she said.

“Do you think it was the hunters? Maybe your”—I wasn’t totally sure of the right word here—“friend and the dryad got caught up or something.”

“Doubtful. The hunters don’t make mistakes. That’s not how they do things. But they wouldn’t leave the bodies out in the sun either. Anyone could have found them,” she said. “The hunters are murderers to a world that doesn’t know about magic.”

“That’s what made me wonder if he had someone working with him from our side. I don’t understand how the bodies were not found. They weren’t easy to find, but if you were in the area, they would have been impossible to miss.”

“Bodies aren’t found all the time. Maybe the odd thing was that these were found at all,” she said.

“Maybe.” But I didn’t believe that. The weird smoke arrow changed direction. The old woman made her way over in traffic so she could turn. We were on a busier bit of highway now. Strip malls and box-stores lined the sides. She made the turn. The arrow swung again so that she had to look for a side street where she could backtrack. We were in a residential neighborhood. The houses were small, brick, one-story buildings with not enough windows. They had the look of being plopped down one after another by some sort of giant machine. As if the whole street had been a giant conveyor belt. One brick house after another, bloop, bloop, bloop. They were only distinguishable by slight variations in the uninspired landscaping. A pot of dead flowers here or an abandoned plastic trike bleached white by the sun there. The arrow swung back around as we passed by one of the houses. When she tried to make the turn to make the block, the arrow swung back around, and I realized it was pointing at a house. The driver must have realized that, too, because she slowed down and drove by the house once and then again twice. The arrow moved slowly and stayed steadily pointed at the same nondescript, little, red brick house with two small windows sealed against the sunlight.

“Is that it?” I asked. “Is he there? Can you tell? Do you think he’s holding anyone else?” I really hoped not.

“I have no idea what it is. But it’s where we are supposed to be.” She reached out and touched the other woman’s shoulder. At the touch, she stopped chanting. All at once, the smoke puffed out from the arrow and filled the car. I pulled the neck of my shirt over my nose and mouth and the women in the front rolled down their windows. Even with the air coming in from outside, we all sat there, coughing for a moment.

“How do we get in? Or do we want to call the wolves to get him out?” I asked.

“Let’s see if there’s anyone to get out first,” the woman who was driving said. As some signal I hadn’t seen or understood, she and her partner had switched roles, and now the driver was a young woman, and the woman in the passenger seat who had been chanting was old. It was a bit disconcerting. I still couldn’t figure out why they insisted on doing that. She drove the car around the block and parked.

“Give me your hand,” said the now old woman in the passenger seat. I held out my hand. She touched it and started chanting again. A slow feeling of warmth spread up my body. As it spread, a weird film began to appear on my skin. I panicked that it was a trap and tried to pull my hand back, but her grip was too tight.

“Relax,” said the driver. “It’s just a look-away charm.”

I tried to calm down and slow my breathing. When the film began to cover my face, it got hard. I felt it coat the inside of my nostrils, and when I gulped for air, it spread over my tongue and teeth, went down my throat, and I couldn’t breathe at all. Then it settled tight to my skin, and I felt totally normal. “How about a little warning next time?” I asked.

“What? You’ve never had one before?” asked the no old woman in the passenger seat.

“No, never,” I told her.

“Well, now you know. Next time, you’ll keep your mouth shut,” she said. Then she started chanting again, and I watched a glow spread over both of them. As the glow grew stronger, it became harder and harder to look at them. On one level, I knew that it was just the spell working on me, but I couldn’t control the response. I just wanted to look away and ignore them. Focusing on them was giving me a pounding headache, and it just wasn’t worth it. I looked out the window. When the chanting stopped, I tried again to look at them. But it was still uncomfortable. I went back to looking out the window and trying to pretend I was alone in the car.

“You’ll get used to it,” one of them said, but I wasn’t sure which one since I still couldn’t stand looking at them. Even hearing their voices was painful.

“Go easy on the guardian,” said the other one. Her voice made me shift around in my seat in pain. It took probably three full minutes, but eventually, I was able to turn my head and look at them.

“Oh, good. It’s getting easier,” said the woman in the driver’s seat. Her voice wasn’t pleasant, but it was no longer physically painful to hear. “Here’s the plan. We’re going to walk over there and try to keep as low of a profile as we can. This spell works the best if you don’t attract attention to yourself. Once we get over there, we can look in the windows and check the place out. See if there are signs that he’s working with someone magical. We can also look and see if he’s keeping anyone here. If he is, we can contact the wolves and have them help us with the extraction. Otherwise, we don’t involve any others until the tribunal. Can you agree?”

“Yes. That seems reasonable to me. Do you think that this is his home base? Is that why we’re here?” I asked.

“That’s the most probable explanation. There’s a small chance that her murder wasn’t the most upsetting thing in her life when she died, and we were going to go in this house and find her estranged mother,” she said.

“Oh. Does that kind of thing happen often with this spell?” I asked.

“Nothing can be said to happen often with this spell. We don’t use it that much. I mean how often are we called upon to investigate a murder?” the driver said and opened the door. We got out into the bright cold morning air. “I mean, it’s not like we’re Nancy Drew,” she added. I guess every woman had read old Nancy, although it was hard to imagine these two ever having been 8-year-old girls reading the books with their yellow spines.