Southern Belle Read Free Page A

down to Winston-Salem."
    "Patience. I'll get there."
    "Forgive my husband," Sandra said, still patting Leed's knee. "He can get a bit enthusiastic."
    "Good. We'll need that kind of passion. But I'm an old man, so I don't move as fast — even in my storytelling. Seems backwards, doesn't it? Seems that with so little time left to live, I should be doing everything faster. Try to get as much crammed in as I can. But that's the way of it."
    "Mr. Leed? The coven?"
    "Right, right. Now, Dr. Ernest and I spent months tracking the coven. We picked off a few more members during our search but eventually we discovered the majority had slipped into North Carolina. See, we had developed a contact in the warehouse at the Sears & Roebuck Company. He carried a list of supplies that Dr. Ernest devised. It contained the kinds of practical things a coven required but wouldn't want to order in bulk locally in case it aroused suspicions — candles, salt, that kind of thing. If that list was ever ordered together and in large quantities, our man would call and give us the address. I don't think he ever knew why that list was important. And that call eventually happened, leading us to Winston-Salem."
    "How did you end up meeting Drummond?" Max asked.
    Sandra backhanded his chest. "Let the man speak."
    "You have to understand," Leed continued, "Back at that time there weren't many witch hunters around. In fact, most people thought we were nuts. So word spread fast about new people who fought against these evil beasts — at least it spread fast amongst us. It didn't take long to learn of Drummond.
    "That day we walked into his office, I knew we had found a man who could really help. So many times, we met crazies who thought cultists were raising Satan in their backyards or scientists who wanted to capture witches for study or overly prepared but intellectually under-qualified warriors. Drummond, on the other hand, stood out as a capable man of action. The kind of man who thought through an immediate problem without causing the mess to fall back on his men. One who understood the necessity of destroying these abominations without falling prey to sympathies because of the enemy's human appearance."
    Sandra frowned. "You don't think witches are human?"
    "What kind of human would do the things they did to my mother and father? No, I think they gave up that right when they started meddling in magic."
    Max saw the strained tendons in Sandra's neck. She teetered on the edge of letting Leed know how wrong he was, but Max's simple touch on her shoulder brought her back. She glanced at Max with an embarrassed grin and settled into the couch, nestling closer to him as they listened to the rest.
    "Drummond didn't want anything to do with us. He thought we were the very kind of crackpots we had avoided from the start. But we gave him two names and what information we had, and we left. Before dinner that same day, he contacted us. As we knew he would, he checked out our story and now he believed there was something worth looking into. And boy did he ever.
    "I don't know how he pulled it off, but in less than a week, he identified where the witches were staying, what false names they were using, what jobs they held, everything. From there we learned the names of the other coveners, and we were set to curse them, to destroy the whole coven in one night."
    "Curse them?" Sandra said. "Is that part of your vengeance? I mean, wouldn't it be easier to simply kill them?"
    "True witch covens are extremely powerful. They bind and accentuate the energies of all the witches within the coven. Killing one only turns it into a ghost which can continue to feed the coven with its energy. But we knew of a curse that if done properly would break the power of the coven and lock the witches in their dead bodies, preventing them from roaming around as ghosts. It was a difficult spell to cast and required all six key witches in the coven to be killed on the same night.
    "In order to