As Evan parked his car, an old second-hand Volkswagen Polo, down the road from Kingfisher Meadow, he could hear the construction work from within the gated street. Hearing the multiple drills, hammers, and god only knew what else, Evan understood why the Council had received so many complaints about the noise. however, noise complaints were the smallest of the issues on the list of reasons for today’s visit.

The apartment building that stood at the front of the street, walling it off from the connected street, now housed on its front state-of-the-art security cameras, the kind that could identify a face even in the dark. All of the windows were covered by blinds so Evan had no hope of seeing inside. How the residents of those apartments could stand the constant noise was beyond him, and he knew that they were putting up with it because not a single complaint had come from inside Kingfisher Meadow itself.

The metal gate that proudly wore the name of the street, stood at the entrance of the tunnel that cut through the apartment block and led to the protected community. For the first time, he caught a glimpse of the mansion beyond the gates.

Evan had looked at the plans first submitted to Maidstone Council all those years ago when the developers had proposed turning the entire street into a gated community and building a range of apartments within. There was no mansion on those plans. About two years ago, one of Evan’s friends had rented one of the cheaper apartments near the gates. Back then there had been no mansion.

If Evan remembered correctly the farther down the street you went the more expensive the apartments got. At the very end of the street by the river had been two fancy duplex apartments and a few other elegant buildings had been nearby. They were all gone now. At the end of the street, elevated on a hill above the rest of the community was a mansion that looked like it had been lifted right out of a horror movie.

Ben was having a hard time looking away from the corpses that littered the ground of the clearing. Their faces were still red, their eyes still bulged, and pain still riddled their permanently frozen expressions. Their deaths had been so horrific. It had not been a mere execution, it was a punishment.

“Where are the Pieces of Seven?” Christine said, her voice could have cut through a diamond. Ben looked up, suddenly realising that they too might be about to receive a punishment from the Penenden Coven Sorceress.

Christine was not looking at Ben, she was staring directly at Rik.

Rik shook his head, partly in response and partly trying to shake away the shock of what they’d all just witnessed. “I don’t know,” he lied. No fancy vocabulary, no elaborate sentences, just brief and straight to the point. The danger that he had cautioned them of was a surprise even to him. None of them had expected to witness a mass poisoning.

Christine raised one eyebrow. “Liam confessed to you that he was searching my home for the Piece of Seven, he admitted to already having two pieces in his possession, and yet you did not think to take them from him?”

Rik licked his lips and cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice had shaken off the quiet fear that had been present in it a moment before. “I have no interest in Coven fairytales and old trinkets or heirlooms. The Coffin Stone is nothing more than a legend. It’s just as real as Excalibur or the Loch Ness Monster.”

“There’s loads of evidence proving the Loch Ness Monster is real,” said Kieron. In all the murderous dramatics Ben had forgotten about the reason he had even come to the woods in the first place. Kieron’s voice served to remind him. He looked up but not at Kieron, at Grace. He wasn’t at all startled to see her eyes were already on him. Her lips were down-turned and her pasty face wrought with worry. She didn’t know how this was going to play out any more than Ben did. Ben wanted to believe that he was looking at true concern for him, but a part of his mind told him he was only seeing what he wanted to see.

David jumped in before anybody could respond to Kieron’s claim, not that it seemed that anybody was going to. “If you know the Pieces of Seven exist then doesn’t that prove the Coffin Stone is real?” said David.

Rik sat at the table, hunched over the open journal, drumming his fingers on the wooden surface. He’d been staring at the same page for about twenty minutes. His dark hair hung down hiding his face from view but Ben could hear the warlock’s frustration every time his fingers hit the table.

“It’s a load of old codswallop!” he decried and pushed the book away from him so hard that slid right over to Ben who was sitting at the other side of the table.

Liam, who was sitting at the head of the table equidistantly between Ben and Rik, smirked at Rik’s annoyance.

“Do you know what any of this means?” he asked as he lifted the book from the table.

Liam’s smirk melted away as Ben’s mesmerisation forced the truth out of him. “No.”

“Stop smirking then.”

Ben leafed through the pages and his eyes passed over the lists of cryptic expressions that were listed within. Had it not been for the brief mention of the Parchment of Seven at the start of the book, Ben would have dismissed the entire thing as a poor attempt at poetry. He stared down at the peculiar lines of handwritten text on the page.

The father watches us all.

It carries the weight of our burdens.

A window that shows what others see.

Beauty can be deadly.

Each page of the book had a similar paragraph on it, some were longer, some were shorter, and all of them made no sense.

“It’s like an idiot’s attempt at writing riddles,” said Ben. He dropped the book back on the table. “Maybe it would be easier to just search the house from top to bottom. what if this book is just a decoy? We found it without even looking, that’s surely not a good sign, right?”

“I was searching for that for two hours. It was hidden inside another book,” Liam said, shooting down Ben’s suggestion.

“If we can just decode this moronic riddle then we’ll know where the bloody bit of parchment is,” Rik said in frustration. He dragged the book back to his side of the table and flicked the pages back to the beginning. “It is the duty of the Sorcerer or Sorceress to move the Piece of Seven to a new location at the start of their reign,” he recited. He looked up at Ben as though that one line of text proved something.

“But why would Christine or any of her predecessors bother to write it down? If the parchment is supposed to stay hidden then why leave any clues at all?”