by Willow Mason
“…was destroyed in what appears to be a gas explosion. Fears are held for the whereabouts of a homeless man whom neighbours reported camping out in the building.”
A camera panned over the bedding and rubbish we’d been standing near only a half-hour before.
“At least they’re come up with an explanation for it,” Glynda said, snapping the picture off. “The last thing we need is the supernatural council digging around in our business.”
“What happens when they work out it wasn’t the gas?” Beezley asked. Although sitting down, I saw his limbs were trembling and gave him another hug.
“They won’t. Now the idea’s planted, it’ll be easy work to keep it topmost of everyone’s mind.” Glynda turned to me, pulling her mouth down. “This homeless bloke—was he the one who attacked you?”
“Most probably. There wasn’t anyone else around that I know of.” I turned to Beezley. “What about you? Did you see anything more?”
“No. I was sniffing the floor until he kicked me. We could make hunting him down a top priority—”
Glynda flapped her hand to stop him. “I don’t care as long as it doesn’t result in another incident. You.” She pointed a long fingernail in my face. “No magic until you’ve had training, I don’t care how much you’re provoked. And you”—Beezley’s turn in the spotlight—“when I ask for something to be investigated I expect it to be done with utmost haste. If you must follow up another case, do it on your own time.”
Five seconds later, we were outside with the door slamming shut behind us.
“So, who was this zombie?” Beezley asked as we got into the car. “I guess we’re paying his family a visit.”
Chapter Eight
Philip and Marsha Sloan lived in a brick three-bedroom home just a five-minute drive away from what used to be the premier ski lodge in Riverhead. From their front window, I could see the flashing lights of police and other emergency vehicles still attending the site of the collapse.
“I remember you,” Philip said by way of greeting when we bowled up to his door, unannounced. “You were involved with the soul sucker. A nasty business that.”
“She was involved in bringing him to justice,” his wife said with an elbow to his ribs. “The way you put it sounds like she enabled him instead of turning the wretch into a pile of ash.”
“Rest assured, I’m not here in connection with anything like that,” I said, accepting Marsha’s invitation to come inside. “Is it okay if I bring my dog in?”
“They’re witches,” Beezley said with an annoyed grunt. “You don’t have to pretend I’m something I’m not.” He waddled inside before I could say another word.
“I had a sister got turned into a goat,” Marsha said as she bustled around the room, plumping cushions and wiping away imaginary dust. “Never miss a fee if you take out a payday loan from a goblin, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Did she get changed back?” Beezley fixed her with a hopeful stare.
“Oh, yes. Once he’d emptied out her bank account and taken her jewellery, he was happy to turn her back.” From the downturned lips, I guessed Marsha would have been just as pleased if the goblin hadn’t.
“This is about your father,” I said to Philip as the couple took a seat opposite. “Did you hear he’d been on a walk around town yesterday?”
His eyes widened, and he pressed a hand to his chest. “Not my father. He died a few weeks back.” Philip waved his hand at a collection of plastic flowers and memorial frames on a side table near the window.
“Yes, I’m aware. He’s now safely back in his grave but I did have a few questions for you.”
“Are the dead rising?” Marsha leaned over and hugged her knees to her chest. “Are we going to be overrun with zombies?”
“I certainly hope not.” Beezley shook his head, then his entire body got involved in the action. I tried not to see all the hairs sticking to the couch, knowing from experience how averse they were to being vacuumed away.
“So far it’s just him and we’d really like to keep it that way.” I shifted on the cushion, tucking my hands underneath my thighs. “Did your father ever speak to you about a woman who worked in the bank?”
“He liked Amber,” a small voice said from across the room and I gave a startled gasp as I saw a young boy sitting in front of a bookshelf. He’d been hidden by the shadows from the door.
“Who’s Amber?” Marsha frowned. “Is she the one from next-door at the village?”
“The retirement village,” Philip explained in response to my raised eyebrow. “And no. He did talk about Amber quite a lot in his final days, saying he’d missed his chance.”
“I think he wanted to marry her and live happily ever after,” the boy said. “Granddad always told us that on Sundays when he came over for tea.”
“Oh.” Marsha snapped her fingers. “I remember now. The one he called hot-to-trot.”
A bubble of bile rose in my chest and I swallowed it down, grimacing. “Did your father ever practice the darker arts?”
“Black magic? Never!”
I felt my powers grumble at Philip’s horrified tone. “I don’t mean using them in a bad way, just fiddling with them. Maybe casting an occasional spell here and there.”
“We don’t do things like that in our family,” Marsha said, gripping her husband’s arm and clicking her fingers for her son to join them. United, they stared at me in defiance. “If someone got Welly out of his grave, it wasn’t us.”
“Maybe Amber did it?” the boy suggested.
“Don’t be silly, James. The woman’s not a witch.”
“She couldn’t even see him come out of the grave, because of the neural network,” I explained to the downcast boy. “So even if she wanted to raise him from the dead, it’d be pointless.”
“Couldn’t she see him, even a little?”
Marsha put an arm around his waist and squeezed. “Not in the slightest. Not unless something had gone horribly wrong.”
“Is there anyone who wishes your family harm?”
Philip cleared his throat. “No one I know of and I don’t see how this would hurt us.”
“Abel from next door isn’t too fond of you,” Marsha said. “Not after you broke his chainsaw.”
“It was already broken when he gave it to me.” Philip sat back, folding his arms. “I didn’t have it running for more than three seconds before it conked out.”
“He wants us to pay to get it fixed,” Marsha said to me, then jerked her head at her husband. “But apparently, it’s a matter of principle.”
“Well, it is. He used it for ten years and I borrowed it for five seconds. I don’t know what he thinks I did to it, but I didn’t even cut through the branch.”
“Did Abel know your father?”
Philip shrugged. “Just to say hello to on the street, nothing more.”
“Who else would know about your dad’s crush on Amber?”
“Nobody. If you hadn’t asked, I would’ve forgotten.”
I shot a glance at Beezley, what now, but he didn’t say a word. Another great coaching moment in my career.
“I wrote an essay for school all about Granddad,” James said, wriggling away from his mother’s clutches. “He was in the war and helped the unit put magic spells onto the bullets and bombs.”
“Not in the war,” Philip said, reaching over to pat his son’s knee. “But he did his two years of military service for the country.”
“I’m going to do the same when I get older.”
The beaming smile on the boy’s face stopped me from informing him the military draft had been disbanded for six or seven times longer than he’d been alive. Besides, who knew? Half the world wanting to kill the other half wasn’t a problem that had disappeared. In the next ten years, perhaps James would get his chance.
“What else did you learn about your granddad?” I leaned forward, my hands escaping from their thigh prison to pull out a pen and notepad from my purse. “Did he
have other jobs as interesting as that?”
“No. He spent the rest of his time working in accounting,” James said with a scornful expression. “And married Grandma who was much older than him and died the same month I was born.”
“Don’t say it like that, hun. It makes it seem like you had something to do with it.” Marsha sent an amused glance my way. “Miranda had been sick for a long time and fought tooth and nail to stick around long enough to see this wee scamp born.” She ruffled James hair, earning herself a death stare.
“Granddad used to go to the bank at least three times every week, just to see his new girlfriend.”
“Don’t call her that,” Philip said, his lips thinning. “Nobody would ever have replaced Mum, not in a million years.”
“No, Amber was much younger and much…” James trailed off, sounding out the beginnings of various words and finding none of them a match. “Fitter!”
I laughed in surprise and James smiled so broadly I saw all the gaps in his baby teeth. “How old are you that you’re writing essays for school?” I asked. I couldn’t remember writing much more than an occasional ‘what I did for my summer holidays’ at school. Then again, I hadn’t been the world’s most attentive pupil.
“I’m eight.” He puffed out his chest.
“James got top marks for that essay. I told Marsha we’ve got a world-class writer in the house.”
“No, I want to cast spells on bullets for a living.” James mimed an explosion. “My teacher told me I could be anything I wanted.”
“Miss Armitage probably didn’t think you’d want to go to war,” Marsha said with a tone of warning. “I’m sure she meant you could be a doctor or a lawyer—”
“Or an accountant? No thanks.” James definitely had the scorn abilities of a morose teenager. “Granddad said he’d sleepwalked through most of his life and the only time he felt alive was when he was in the military.”
When he said it, I was looking straight at Philip and saw the man wince. Yeah. Ouch. Couldn’t have been nice to know you and your sister didn’t make it onto the man’s hit list.
“Could it be someone fooling around in the graveyard?” Marsha said, wrestling the conversation back on topic. “I know when I was in high school, they had a couple of incidents with teens breaking into the grounds at night to pull a lot of spooky stunts.”
“It could be,” I said, making a doodle in my notepad. “We’ll continue to chase up leads until we find out who’s responsible.”
“Where’s your sister?” Beezley asked Philip. “Sally, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. She moved to Auckland a few years ago.”
“Any chance she was involved?”
But Philip was shaking his head before Beezley could even finish the question. “My sister doesn’t have any talent for magic, that’s why she left. In a big city, it’s a lot easier to avoid running into members of the local coven.”
Riverhead had more than its fair share of witches. The further north a person went, the lower the percentage of supernaturals fell. Despite the enormous population, the largest city in New Zealand sported a coven the same size as ours.
I could imagine how freeing it would be to surround myself with other humans instead of witches. Whether it came naturally to our kind or was learned through osmosis, supernaturals were a judgy lot.
Glynda’s stern face drifted into my mind and I flung it out again. Very judgy.
“Could I have a contact number, just in case?” I asked. As someone who’d fallen from favour with her local coven, I could understand an outsider wanting to wreak a little havoc.
Not that I would. But I had sympathy for the inclination.
As we said our goodbyes and drove away, I hoped we’d find more information at the library.
Chapter Nine
“Oh, no.” Harriet held up a hand to stop me as I walked through the library door. “You’re not welcome here.”
“I need to do some research for a case.” I leaned on the front desk, batting my eyelashes. “Pretty please? It’s for Glynda.”
“Yeah, right. Until you return what you stole from here, there’s no way I’m letting you near our other treasured possessions. And the last I heard, Glynda still hated your guts.”
“Then you haven’t got your ear close to the ground.” I walked by the desk, ignoring Harriet’s grabby hands as I sauntered into the back stacks. “I’m the coven leader’s new favourite, don’t you know?”
A snort was her only response.
“And no dogs!” Harriet yelled as Beezley stomped inside to join me. “Don’t either of you have any respect?”
“We have enough respect that we risked our lives to save your entire coven,” Beezley said, stopping her short. “And we’ll accept you letting us access anything we want in the library as your act of gratitude for a job well done.”
“Whatever.” Harriet flapped her hand, a small curve at the side of her lips the only outward evidence she was enjoying the game. “What are you after, anyway? More occult spells? A tome from Aleister Crowley?”
“Anything you have on voodoo.”
Harriet’s face turned pale. “No way. You’ve already swallowed all our occult spells. I’m not giving you the tools to access voodoo as well.”
“It’s not for me. There’s somebody out there already using it. I need to know more so I can find them and stop them.”
“Just wave your red hands and turn them into dust. That stuffs dangerous. It gets into your head and makes your thoughts all wonky.”
Beezley snuffled with laughter. “As though anyone could tell.”
“I’m calling Glynda.” Harriet pulled out her phone and held up a warning finger. “If she doesn’t know what you’re talking about, you’re in a world of hurt.”
“From who?” Beezley whispered as he trotted past me. “Is she going to throw her glasses at us?”
I howled with laughter, enough to earn a reproachful glare. The joke wasn’t very funny, but it was nice to see my companion happy for a change.
“Fine,” Harriet said, hanging up the call. “You’re allowed to reference the books here in the library but don’t remove them.”
“Don’t worry. I have a hard enough time cracking open a book. It’s not as though I want to line my shelves at home.”
The library books were murkier and harder to see the further back we went. Even when Harriet threw a globe of magic light towards us, the spines were difficult to read. When I’d worked here, I’d always avoided coming back this far, just sending an occasional dusting spell along the rows to keep them clean.
“Voodoo spells and practical advice,” I read off one spine, taking it out and dislodging several years’ worth of silverfish, who scuttled off the pages into the cracks on the floor.
“You might need a spell back there,” I said, my mouth pulling down in disgust as I hurried back to Harriet. “Something to get rid of disgusting scuttling creatures.”
“I’d better wait for you two to leave,” she said with a sweet smile. “I wouldn’t want to catch you as well, by mistake.”
It felt good to exchange insults with someone again. Harriet was a great stand-in for the sister I never had.
“What’s the verdict?” she asked, jabbing her finger at the old book. “Do we have a voodoo priest practising somewhere in Riverhead?”
“Give me a chance,” I muttered, turning the pages and scanning for a clue to what I’d seen. “Here we go. Raising the dead as slaves.”
Harriet sniggered. “Nice work if you can get it.”
“This says to raise the dead, they first need to ingest a special formula. Otherwise, they won’t fall under a spell.”
“Sure.” Beezley nodded. “That’ll be like the chemical spills that start all the zombie horror movies.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I always like my scary flicks to be historically accurate.”
“If there’s a chemical spill involved, does that mean we’ll soon see more shuffling corpse
s?” Harriet asked, her eyes widening.
“Perhaps.” I flicked through some more pages, still searching. “But I wouldn’t worry. From what I’ve seen, zombies only attack people with brains.”
Harriet arranged her fingers into a very rude gesture. One which, if asked, I would have sworn someone so diligent and polite wouldn’t know.
“How about you put your mind back on the job?” Beezley said, poking my ankle with his soft, wet nose. “The sooner we get the dead guy sorted, the sooner we can get back to work on the real case.”
“This is a real case. Just because magic’s involved doesn’t make it any lesser than cheating wives or false workplace injuries.”
“Is that what you’re up to nowadays?” Harriet’s voice contained a note of envy. “Sounds like more fun than being trapped in here all day.”
“Hey, I worked here for years, remember?”
“You had the spells to keep you company.”
Fair enough. “If you want something to do, you can grab another book from the shelves and start reading. I don’t know why the coven hasn’t digitised all this information so we don’t have to troll through every page.”
“Probably because a physical book is a lot harder to hack than a computer system.” Harriet chose another volume and sat down beside me. “Is it just dead people, you’re after?”
“Maybe not.” I frowned as I thought of Mrs Majors. About how her voice had cracked while explaining she couldn’t help herself. There’d been a few other weird things happening around town lately. Nothing big. Nothing I could put my finger on. Just… Weird.
“Oh!” I traced my finger across a paragraph, then read it through again. “This looks like it might fit the bill. It’s a spell to raise the dead but not as a slave. It’s a fulfilment incantation so they can complete unfinished business. Once it’s done, they have an easier time moving on to the next realm.”
“How does it work?”
“With a doll. The practitioner writes down the bucket list items left incomplete, then recites a spell to raise the deceased.” I screwed up my nose. “Whoever wrote this didn’t appear to know about embalming fluids and prepping the body for a funeral. Poor Weldon didn’t stand a chance, considering his eyes were glued shut and his mouth was stuffed with cotton.”
