by Willow Mason
“Sure.” I pulled into the street and shifted in my seat as my back began to cramp. The morning’s unexpected sprinting had pulled muscles everywhere. Legs. Back. Arms. Probably gave my sphincter a good workout as well.
“That was easy. Where’s the ten minutes of sarcasm I usually get when I make a request?”
“I love being employed by a dog. There’s nothing like working all hours of the day and night, just to be tossed a bone. Literally.”
“That’s more like it,” Beezley said, resting his paws on the dashboard to see through the window.
“For a policeman, you sure don’t have a safety-first attitude.”
“Oh, stop.”
I slammed both my feet on the brakes.
A car crunched into our rear and I jolted forward. An airbag punched into my face. My seatbelt bit into my shoulder and I tried to shriek, but the bag covered my mouth.
My head became the meat in a bag/seat sandwich. I was smothering, choking for breath.
The bag deflated enough to pull the thin material away from my face.
I turned to stare at the passenger seat. Empty. No sign of Beezley.
I jumped out of the car, time slowing to a crawl. He’d been resting on the dashboard. How could he have gone anywhere? The window glass was still intact. A star pattern radiated out from a point of impact, but the shards clung together.
“Beezley, where are you?” I choked out as a cloud of noxious gas embraced my face and forced itself down my throat.
Reversing direction, I got back into the driver’s seat to turn the engine off. I bent into the footwell of the passenger seat, shoving my hands into all the corners in case they hid a small dog.
“Beezley?”
A faint yap sounded from the back. I gasped in relief, then a renewed sense of terror overcame me as I lunged through the gap between seats, wriggling through.
He was sitting behind the passenger seat. The small dog’s eyes glanced at me, dazed, then drifted away.
“Are you okay?” I snapped my fingers in front of him. “Answer me.”
“I’m fine. Get out of my face.”
I jerked my hand back to my side, continuing to stare at him with concern. “You’re sure there’s nothing broken?”
“No, I’m not sure. Give me a minute, will you? Go sit somewhere, far away from me.”
With a quick jerk, I tried the rear handle, but the shape of the door no longer fit the frame. I retraced my journey, squeezing between the seats into the front, then out onto the road again. A quick breath, then I jogged away from the cars. It ignited pain in places I couldn’t remember feeling before, but I waited until I was halfway down the street before I stopped and collapsed onto a bench.
“Hey. Stop right there.” I looked up and flinched away from a man who ran straight at me. “You’re the driver, aren’t you?”
“I’m already stopped, you don’t need to shout.”
“You stopped for no reason. Right in front of me! What were you doing? You just slammed on the brakes for nothing.”
The man’s white shirt had crimson splatters down the front. His nose had a giant smear in the same colour underneath. I fished in my pocket and pulled out a purse pack of tissues. “Here.”
Although he eyed me warily, the man accepted the gift and put it to good use. He twisted the tissue ends and shoved one up each nostril, giving a gigantic sniff to seat them in place.
“Was there a dog or a cat or something?”
“A dog,” I said, holding a shaking hand up to my temple. The weak headache from earlier was still there. It felt strange. Almost like something foreign was moving around in there. Why did you stop?
Beezley. Hadn’t he called out something about stopping? I put my face into my hands and shuffled over on the bench so the tailgater could sit down.
“I called the police. Even if you don’t want to explain things to me, you’ll have to explain it to them.”
“Good. Thanks for doing that.” When I pulled my hands away, I stared back at the wrecked cars. His bonnet was crumpled up like a metal concertina. My vehicle appeared in better shape, but if the stuck door and clouds of exhaust were anything to go by, it hadn’t escaped unscathed.
“Did the dog come through okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. He told me to come and wait down here, far away.”
The man’s face grew slack, and he dropped eye contact. After a second of silence, he clambered to his feet and inched away. “Better get back to the car. I can hear the cop car now.”
He skittered to the side as Beezley ran straight past him. “What are you doing all the way down here? We need to get back to the car. You must talk to the police.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m just getting there.”
The other driver’s eyes bugged out of his head. “A-are you okay? Should I call a doctor?”
“I’m fine.” I glanced down at Beezley. “What? Don’t you talk to your pets? Rude.”
He’d run too far away to hear most of my reply.
“Are you okay, Miss?” a female officer asked me as I moved back to rest against my car. “We’ve got an ambulance on standby.”
“I’m fine. It might be a different story tomorrow between the airbag and the seatbelt, but I’m okay.” I pointed to the man with the bloody nose. “Have you checked on him? I think he got the worst of it.”
“I got the worst of it,” Beezley said, indignant. “When you stopped for absolutely no reason my face made close acquaintance with the windshield, then my spine hit the seat when I pinged back like a bouncy ball.”
“Do you think I should get a vet to check my dog out?” I asked the officer. “He went flying when we stopped.”
“It’s probably a good idea.”
My temple stepped up the painful pulsing and my eye watered on the right-hand side. Rubbing it didn’t help.
The officer took out a notepad. “Could you take me through what happened?”
I enacted the events as best I could, without a working car to demonstrate. When I got to the crash, I stuffed my face into the deflated airbag and waved my hands about my head.
The officer didn’t appear impressed with my acting skills.
“Why did you stop?”
“He told me to,” I said, pointing an accusing finger at Beezley.
“I did no such thing.”
“Yes, you did. You said ‘Oh, stop,’ so I stopped.”
“Miss?” The officer took a step back, frowning. “Are you talking to your dog?”
“Only when he talks to me.”
“I didn’t mean for you to stop driving. It was just something to get you to stop talking.”
“Well, success! I did that, too.”
“Miss?”
The pulse in my temple grew louder, beating like a drummer who’s been banished to the garage. “What?”
“Are you feeling okay?”
“No, I’m very shaken. I’ve just been involved in a car accident.”
“Could you say your name into this device?” She held out a breath testing machine.
“I’m not drunk. I’m not even the one who caused the accident. You should talk to the guy travelling so close up my tail that he rear-ended me because he couldn’t stop in time.”
“That works, too,” the woman said in a calm voice, reading the device as it beeped. “Well, you’re under the limit.”
“When I told you to go away, you did,” Beezley said in a musing tone. “And you started giving me lip when I asked you why you weren’t being sarcastic.”
“So? You’re my boss. I’m meant to do what you say.”
“Walk into traffic.”
“Don’t be silly,” I called over my shoulder as I walked into the middle of the road. “I’m not going to run into the street just because you tell me.”
The officer grabbed my arm and dragged me to safety as a RAV4 drove by, honking its horn.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” she said, pulling out her mic again. “I think yo
u might’ve bumped your head harder than you thought.”
Beezley ran over and jumped up, putting his front paws on my thighs. “It’s the stamp on your hand, it must be! You’ll do anything I suggest. Make sure the doctor looks at it.”
“That dog should be on a leash,” the officer commented a second before she clipped one around his neck. “And he should have a collar. I hope he’s micro-chipped.”
I stared at her, dazed. “Sure, I think he is.”
“It’s best to be certain about these things. You wouldn’t want him wandering off and winding up in the pound.”
“Okay. I’ll check it out.”
I stretched out to take the leash, but the officer held it out of reach. “He can’t come with you to the hospital. I’ll drop him into our animal care facility on the way back to the station and you can pick him up when they discharge you.”
“Couldn’t I get a neighbour or something to pick him up?” I suggested, before remembering the only person who might help me out was locked in a jail cell. “Never mind. He’ll be safe there, won’t he?”
“Of course, he will,” she said as the ambulance arrived, and a paramedic jumped out to give me the once over.
“She needs a scan or something,” the policewoman called out. “She’s not tracking things. Thinks her dog is talking to her, walked into the road, that kind of thing.”
I tried to protest but my head was thumping, and my stomach rolled in queasy circles. When the paramedic loaded me into the back of the ambulance, I didn’t notice until too late that the door was shut, and we were moving away.
“There’s something wrong with my hand,” I said, sticking it out as I remembered what Beezley had last said to me. “I think there’s poison in the ink.”
After that, I ceased to know anything as the world slipped into blackness.
Chapter Eleven
“You’re free to go,” the doctor said the following afternoon, after reciting a long list of everything wrong with me. Apparently, stamping myself with foreign substances was a moral failing rather than a medical one. Since his many years of university training had given him no tools on that front, the doctor was happy to discharge me.
“Did the tests show what was in the stamp?” I remembered to ask as I gathered together my things. “Was it a drug or something?”
“Or something. It’s not come up against any of the standard markers we test for so it’s either something new or just uncommon. Either way, you seem to have recovered.”
“What if the effects come back?” The thought of being susceptible to any random stranger I met was enough for me to clutch my hands to my chest. “I don’t want to leave here if it makes me vulnerable.”
The doctor sighed, sticking his hands deep into the pockets of his white coat and flapping them back and forth. “We can’t hold everybody in hospital just in case something might happen. It’s not how it works.”
“I’m really tired,” I said, emphasising it with a large yawn. “Can’t you keep me in overnight to make sure I get a good night’s sleep?”
“You’ve already survived one night with nothing bad happening. I can prescribe something to get you through the next few days, what with the trauma from the accident. Nothing more.”
The prescription for sleeping pills would have to do. A few months ago, the most I got up to was working in the library during the day and maybe attending a coven meeting in the evening. In the past few days, I’d been chased through tunnels, infiltrated a police system, and befriended a small, uptight dog.
I felt life owed me at least a week of non-stop sleep to make up for it.
“There’s someone waiting for you down in reception,” a nurse arrived to tell me. “Says he’s your ride home.”
“It’s not a dog, is it?” I could imagine Beezley striding in, as though he were still human. Not that anyone at the desk would understand him.
“No.” The nurse frowned at me and checked the chart at the base of the bed, arching one eyebrow in flagrant disbelief. “It’s a person. A human man. Homo erectus.”
I wrinkled my nose but hurried down to the reception area, unsure who’d be waiting there for me. When I recognised Wilson’s large glasses and geeky hunchback, I gave a cry of delight. “You’re free!”
“Seems only one of us can be locked up at a time,” Wilson replied with a grin that changed to startlement as I wrapped him in a large hug. “When they let me go, I found out you were being held here. Once I got word you were being discharged, I discovered Beezley is being held at some weird police pound.”
“We’d better fetch him,” I said with a giggle. “Can you imagine his face if we left him there for another night?”
It turned out Beezley’s face wasn’t much better for being rescued in the afternoon. As we piled into Wilson’s car—mine being stuck at the garage for the foreseeable, since I didn’t have money for repairs—he gave a few barks of total indignation.
“Do you know what they made me do?” he asked in a horrified whisper, though Wilson couldn’t understand him, loud or not. “The owners forced me to go to the toilet in the middle of the yard, in front of everyone there!”
“Couldn’t you just have told them you didn’t need to?”
“I couldn’t tell them anything. When I barked too long, they stuck a muzzle over my mouth.” Beezley shuddered. “It’s the clearest case of police brutality I’ve ever come across.”
“Well, let's get you home and settled with a nice bag of treats to make up for it.”
“Do you want me to stop at the supermarket on the way home?” Wilson asked. “I can stay in the car with the dog while you shop, or vice versa.”
So, a day late, I ended up trailing around the supermarket with my list in hand. For the box of paracetamol and doggie treats I struck off my list, I could add four months salary worth of car repairs and about ten years spend restoring my reputation. Among humans, that was. I’d already lost all credibility with the witches in my life.
As I stood in line for the self-checkout machines, I could almost hear my mother’s voice speaking in my ear. “I’ve never met someone so fond of burning bridges. If you carry on this way, mark my words, you’ll find yourself unable to move in any direction.”
And here I was. Stuck.
A tap on my shoulder made me jump. Wilson leaned forward to speak into my ear. “I couldn’t stay in the car. Beezley was driving me mental. Yap. Yap. Yap.”
“Great, you can pay.” A terminal came free, and I bustled over, trying not to show my flinch as Wilson crowded too close again. The boy needed to learn boundaries. My fault, I guess. I should never have given him that welcome hug.
“Try this card,” he said, handing over a well-worn piece of plastic with enough trepidation I felt nervous introducing it to the machine. Luckily, it was accepted, and I handed Wilson a bag and his card back.
“I wanted to ask you something else, while I’ve got you alone.”
I stared around the bustling pool of shoppers and wondered how Wilson saw the world. Didn’t all these people count?
“Sure, what is it?” There was a short bench near the checkouts, and I took advantage, giving the car a quick glance as I sat down and feeling reassured to see Beezley nosing around the driver’s seat.
“When I was in the cells, I overheard some police talking,” Wilson said as he crowded onto the bench next to me. “They mentioned an occult box or something they’ve stolen from a group of witches. One of them laughed and said it was how they turned a certain problem into a dog.”
I turned, my face draining of colour. “And you only thought to mention this now?” My voice streaked into the upper registers. “Who was it talking? Was it someone Beezley knew?”
“It was another Detective Inspector. John or Johnson, something like that. He said he’d try to steal another one this evening, from the library.”
My mouth dropped open. Bad enough the police were turning on their own but how dare they try to steal a singing spell. The
y were mine!
“We have to do something. They can’t get away with this.” I sat and frowned as my mind worked through the problem. “We’ll need to stake out the library and catch them in the act,” I decided. “It’s no use trying to talk sense into Glynda at the moment. I’d never convince her, and any time spent trying is time they can use to get the spell away.”
“Are you sure?” Wilson’s voice conveyed he wasn’t. “I feel like we should involve someone higher up. An official.”
“In the police? Don’t be daft. They’d just commit us to the psych ward if we started babbling about witches and occult spells. No. We have to do this ourselves.”
“But doesn’t your coven have someone higher up it can alert? If you tell them—”
“It’s no use. I can’t tell them anything right now and it’s not like I know how to reach Glynda’s superior to let them know directly.” I smacked my fist into the opposite palm, experiencing a flash of the smug satisfaction I’d feel if I could catch them in the act and drag the officers into the middle of a coven meeting.
They’d reinstate me in a heartbeat. Glynda would apologise for the coven’s ridiculous behaviour. She’d teach me whatever knowledge it was Silla had talked about.
Silla. She must be in on it. Working together with the police.
Everything began to fall into place. No wonder she had a spell in her back room. She must be in league with this DI Wilson had overheard. Between the two of them, they’d been sending people to their death, somehow guiding them through the suggestive power of the stamp.
Black magic.
They must truly be evil to put occult spells to work for their own empowerment. No sin among the coven was worse. A witch could practice white magic all day and all night with no repercussions but even a smidgeon of black magic and they directly opposed everything the coven believed.
I mean, look at what they’d done to me just for dabbling in a stupid prank.
But this stuff… This stuff was the real deal. People were dying. Power was being exchanged. It stretched into the highest echelons of the police department. Maybe higher. Maybe it reached even farther afield, into politics or corporations with the fate of thousands of people, more, in their hands.
