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