From the Foster Family dictionary of supernatural things, you want to avoid: Fear: A state of being and it’s what all horrifying monsters crave. It goes great on late-night parties, Idiots with no sense of self-preservation, politics, or marketing commercials.


    Once I was sure they were gone, I hurried back to the street and across the parking lot where Mom, Tony, and Dad were waiting. I climbed inside, and it became quite clear that the panic was not isolated to the street, or one section of town. Dad used the back roads to steer away from the bottlenecks and the evitable traffic jam that was expanding by the minute.


    “There’s another mailman doing a number on his load,” Tony observed. “I hope its only junk mail.”


    Several houses had random cars sitting in their yards, along with bikes and there were multiple dogs and cats running across the road, while dragging their leashes behind them.


    “Emma, did you get any pictures?” Mom asked.


    “I tried to do a video,” I said.


    “Let me see the phone,” Mom said. I handed it over, and while she watched the video, I recounted everything I had heard Just in case the microphone hadn''t picked it up.


    The video was about two minutes long, and once Mom had watched it and downloaded it into the car dashboard system. There was plenty footage of the ground, my fingertips and the dumpster but I did catch a bald man in a blue coat. The foot of a second person and the last person to come into view was a woman, with white hair and a thin frame.


    Suzy Sourblood was here in town, and now we had the proof.


    “This isn’t easier,” Dad said.


    “I think a house is on fire on the next block.” Mom added.


    Dad cleared two blocks and as we neared the campus. I saw students and professors running between buildings, and a few cars had collided with each other, but none had made it to the street.


    “Can I be the first to say that this whole thing keeps getting weirder by the day,” Tony said, “We’ve now had a trifecta of unexplainable, and unconnected events,” Tony said. “First, the Main Street attack. Second, for me, is a three-way tie between the vampire, the shapeshifter, and the ghost''s flash mob. And if all of that wasn’t bad, we now we have a scream fest, widespread panic and a hard core traffic jam.”


    “And we know Suzy Sourblood is behind it all,” Dad said. “Based on the comments in the video, she seems a bit more conspiratorial than the intel seemed to indicate.”


    “This is certainly a step up from leaving cookies on a counter and changing a homes temperature.” Tony said.


    “There was also another name,” I added, “All three of them mentioned a person named Mezzaro and they seemed to think that he or she wouldn’t be happy about something.”


    “True,” Dad said, “That is something to think about. Who is this Mezzaro and what role do they play in this plan?


    “Could be the real ringleader,” Mom said, “witches aren’t known to attack the public is such an open and upfront way.”


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    “From the way she was talking,” Dad said, “it sounded to me that Mezzaro is more of a rival, than a companion or associate.”


    “That’s what it sounded like to me,” Tony said.


    “We should have anticipated this,” Dad muttered as we cleared the last signs of houses, and we found ourselves on a county road. “But how do scare so many people at this magnitude? It wasn’t like they had Godzilla stomping down the street roaring at the top of his lungs.”


    “You’re right,” Mom said, “there were a lot of people screaming, but I’m sure I would have heard some kind of monster chasing trouble.”


    “Or someone would have said something,” Tony said, “You know, like there’s a wolf in the woods.”


    “What if we’re dealing with some kind of magic?” I asked, “Maybe it’s got to have something to do with the Halloween decoration thefts, especially those with glowing eyes.”


    “That’s a theory we’ll run past Pop.” Dad said. Then he hit a button on the dashboard and the screen on the dash turned into a microphone. “I would love to backtrack and track down that SUV, but that’s not going to happen. Let’s review what we know while the memories are fresh so we can break it down at home.”


    I rubbed my hands together and felt my fingers popped. “I’m pretty sure that the pianist, the unknown person in the video named Frankie. I’m not sure why but I think he was in the restaurant to cause problems.”


    “It’s odd to cause problems and draw attention to yourself, but that’s a good point,” Tony said, “Ther was too much was going on in that restaurant to have been random. You’d have to have special powers to cause accidents and to nearly make a waitress fall over.”


    “The whole thing did have the hallmarks of a coordinated strike,” Mom said, “The music was particularly distraction, but no one noticed small stuff because we were all so focused on our food and getting over the annoyances.”


    “An elite crew,” Dad said, “Mezzaro is an outlier, and so we’ll worry about that later. What we have now is a dark witch, or the powerhouse. She would be followed by the shapeshifter’s who good for infiltration, intelligence gathering and alibis for high profile crimes.”


    “And that can be topped off with a subject named Frankie who can move really fast along with a few other untapped abilities. He would probably be a frontal assault, and a retriever.”


    Dad pulled to the side of the road and then recounted the events as Tony had done before getting onto the road. “I think we’re onto something. There are small issues like the destruction of the computer intrusions document, but we’ll put that aside for now. I think you’re on to something, Emma. The decorations have to be a key or a focus. Let’s get Pop on the phone. Maybe he’ll have a lightbulb moment.”


    I sat upright, “Lightbulb! I figured it out.”


    “Here we go,” Tony said.


    “Give me a second,” I said as my recollection swirled with the paragraphs I read in Alice Foster''s Journal. “I read something not too long ago that back in 1937, Alice Foster encountered a situation involving a cursed photograph. Some men wouldn''t let it out of their sight. A few fistfights broke out, and the situation escalated into a riot that engulfed two city blocks. She reasoned that it was either cursed or enchanted because these men in question had turned into lovesick puppies.”


    Mom brought down the visor to block the sun from her eyes. “Are you suggesting that the dark witch charmed the stolen Halloween decorations?”


    “Or the events influenced some kind of charm or incantation.” I said, “which would explain why the rounded them up.”


    “That’s good,” Dad said, “Do you remember anything else?”


    “Hold on.” I placed my hands on my head, my temples began to throb. I didn''t know why, but I tried to ignore it as I thought back to additional entries and the notes I had taken.


    “In 1939, Alice encountered a camera that either boosted the confidence of the person who was the subject of the picture or caused serious anxiety and depression. Her contacts thought that it may have been a damaged prototype from Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park facility. The identified photographer was later nearly beheaded by a monster hunter but ended up in a mental institution. Alice heard that the police had discovered random pictures scattered down the hallway of his home.”


    “So, if we use Alice’s logic,” Dad said, “the lightbulb was a focus that casted emotional magic if that is even a thing.”


    “I would say so,” I said, “based on what we’ve seen in the past hour. The crew certainly has done a number of the town, and they’ve created Halloween’s favorite emotion.”


    We all exchanged glances. Mom and Dad went through the review mirror, and Tony and I were beside each other.


    “Fear,” we all said in unison.