Shiver Me Witches

by A. A. Albright

  Sadie stared at Arthur. ‘You don’t want me to do that right now. You want to fetch me a slice of brack with butter and a glass of cola instead.’

  ‘Y’know what?’ said Arthur. ‘Why don’t we leave off the rehearsal for now? How about I get you a nice slice of buttered brack and a glass of cola instead?’

  As he moved into the community hall’s small kitchen area, Sadie bowed low and we all gave her a round of applause.

  ‘Good trick, Sadie,’ said Grace with a grin.

  ‘Thanks. And I’m even getting a treat for it.’

  Arthur was busy slathering butter on Sadie’s fruity Halloween bread, but he glanced up and said, ‘What are you on about? She hasn’t done anything.’ Understanding dawned, and he laughed and said, ‘Oh. She has done something, hasn’t she? Well, I’m an idiot.’ He finished off preparing her snack anyway, and when he handed it to her, she sat on the edge of the stage, swinging her legs while she ate.

  The children soon left the hall, and Adeline sauntered in. She was a cousin of Arthur’s, and they shared the same light red hair. She wore glasses, too – although she seemed to enjoy wearing more than one pair at once. Even though I’d been meeting with her once a week for quite some time, I didn’t think I’d ever tire of her.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘There’s an awful lot going on in the Longest Library at the minute. Reorganising the shelves. Dealing with a bookworm infestation. And don’t get me started on what the Dark Objects books have been getting up to this week.’ She broke out into a grin. ‘Who am I trying to kid? I wasn’t working at the Longest Library. I slept late! And even when I did get up I just couldn’t seem to be bothered to get my behind in gear.’ She began to fish about in her bag. ‘Pixie piddle. I think I’ve left my glasses behind.’

  Her cousin gave her a warm smile. ‘They’re on your head, Adeline. Oh, and you have a pair around your neck, too.’

  ‘Hmm? No they’re not. I think I’d know if I was wearing them. I might have left them in the Haunted Books section. Ooh, actually, here they are.’ She smiled triumphantly and pulled a pair of glasses from her bag.

  She stuck them on top of her head, not noticing the pair that was already there. Next, she grabbed the pair that hung on a string around her neck and put them over her eyes. ‘I’m ready now. But aren’t we missing someone?’

  ‘Oh, Dylan’s stuck investigating a really annoying murder,’ said Greg. ‘He won’t be joining the meeting today.’

  Adeline popped a strip of chewing gum into her mouth. ‘What a bummer. Seems like there’s always a murder in Riddler’s Edge.’

  Grace shrugged. ‘Well, it keeps the newspaper filled up. And the property prices low, too. But I have to agree with you – it is a bummer. I’d rather have a paper filled with stories about the Spooktacular Tour or the Turnip Maze. Not some boring old murder.’

  ‘I feel ya.’ Arthur squeezed her arm. ‘Anyway, let’s all sit around and get this meeting over with. I know that I, for one, have a million things I’d rather be doing.’

  There were grins and chuckles of agreement, while I just buried my head in my hands and wished for normality to return. But seeing as wishes hadn’t been granted in the area for, oh, a few months now, I doubted my latest wish would come true. So I joined the others, sitting around a table that Arthur had prepared. There were a lot of snacks laid out, so that was something to look forward to.

  ‘Okay, well I guess I’d better start,’ said Arthur. ‘But I mean, I went to an awful lot of effort to prepare for this meeting, so I kinda wish we could postpone it until I take a break.’

  I shook my head vehemently. I’d managed to convince Greg that work was fun earlier on (though I’d yet to hear if he’d discovered anything) so maybe I’d have to do the same now. ‘No, no you don’t want to do that,’ I said. ‘You … you probably had to check archives and read through old Tall Tales and … and all sorts. Things you love doing. Things that are super fun for you.’

  ‘It’s true,’ he agreed. ‘Checking archives is super fun. Reading Tall Tales is even better.’

  ‘And … and now you’re about to tell us some of what you learned. I bet that’ll be even more fun. Tracking down Brian the Brave, one of the most famous faeries in Ireland. What a ride!’ I felt a little bit sick as I spoke. This wasn’t fun, not to me. This was the most important thing I’d ever done. I wanted to know why my mother and father had disappeared, and where they were now. I’d been told by my grandfather that my mother was dead, but I didn’t believe him. Particularly not since he’d already admitted he’d done something drastic to keep my parents apart, back when he first learned they were in love. Pru was a seer, and she was convinced that both my mother and father were somewhere nearby. If that was true, then I had a horrible suspicion that Arnold was the one keeping them hidden.

  As important as this was to me, I was going to have to suck it up, because pretending that this was nothing but fun and games seemed to be working for the others around the table. They all looked suddenly enthusiastic, and Arthur was grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘This really has been a wild ride,’ he said. ‘All that research, all that reading … there were days when I just didn’t think the excitement would ever end. Ancient files to look through. Overeating bookworms to work around. I’ve been having the time of my life. Last week, for example, I spent half of the time checking into any Tall Tales about Brian the Brave that originated in the two years before you were born. I mean, obviously we don’t know your exact birth date. But that’s exciting in itself, isn’t it?’

  Super exciting, I thought, struggling to keep my sarcasm to myself. There’s nothing as awesome as having no idea when or where you were born, or where your parents were now. Yay for mysterious me!

  ‘But going by what the doctors at the hospital where you were abandoned estimated,’ he went on, ‘and the timeline we have for when Abby was last seen, we can be fairly sure you’re somewhere around twenty-nine or thirty, so I worked with that in mind. At first I didn’t think I’d find anything. I mean, most of the sióga cut off ties with witches back in the Year of the Worm. But guess what?’

  ‘What?’ I said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into my voice. I mean, I was enthusiastic. But I was also scared. I’d needed Arthur to get on board with this meeting, but now he was a little too on board. He’d changed from a thoughtful, sensitive ally into … well … a slightly nerdier version of the way everyone else was behaving. He could be about to tell me something horrific right now, and he’d probably do it with a smile.

  ‘What indeed,’ he said. ‘Because once I started with that narrow timeframe, I realised there was even more to be discovered. Unlike the rest of the faeries, Brian didn’t step back and abandon the witches and anyone who was stuck in their enclaves. He made dramatic appearances many times after the Year of the Worm. He saved a young weredog pup from drowning back in the Year of the Zealot. Then there was an unempowered witch who was thrown out of her coven in the Year of the Kumquat. This was before the orphanage on Eile Street was established, so she had nowhere to go. Brian the Brave bought the building on Eile Street and donated it to a small charity, making sure that that young witch and others like her would be looked after.’

  ‘Really?’ I sat back, typing those years into my phone. Greg had designed a handy app for me, one that would help me decipher the names that witches used when they were recording years. Within a few seconds I discovered that the Year of the Zealot was nineteen fifty, and the Year of the Kumquat was nineteen seventy-two. Both those years were long after the sióga and the witches parted ways. So my father was in the witch-controlled enclaves at the time. Not only that, but he was something of a hero.

  ‘But the sióga can appear as anything or anyone they want,’ I said cautiously. ‘Can we be sure it was him?’

  Adeline nodded. ‘We can be fairly sure, because only sióga magic could have achieved the sorts of feats Brian achieved in the stories. There are more mentions of him than that. They�
��re sporadic, but we think it’s safe to assume he was around far more than those times mentioned in Tall Tales. Perhaps he only revealed himself when he felt the need to step in.’

  ‘Huh.’ I sat back, pouring myself a drink and trying to quell the strange and uncomfortable feeling that was welling up inside. What was it exactly? I put my glass back down on the table, and the name for that feeling entered my mind: hope. I’d felt it when Pru first told me she suspected my parents were close, and now it was growing stronger than ever. ‘And when was the last mention of him?’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Arthur. ‘The last mention of him was back in the Year of the Apple – that’s around thirty years ago – when he saved an old wizard in Riddler’s Edge who was being tormented by some witch kids. But the thing is, I didn’t find out about that particular event through a Tall Tale.’

  Adeline took the chair. ‘We em … we found out in the coven archive. It was slightly adventurous of us, if I do say so myself. We had some crazy fun that day didn’t we, Arthur?’

  I had no doubt that it was crazy fun to them. The Albright coven, the coven in which my mother had grown up, was a coven of chroniclers. They liked to write and record pretty much anything that ever happened, or was said to have happened, or probably didn’t happen but they’d better make a note of it just to be sure …

  And even though there were magical and technological ways to compress all of that information, I knew for a fact that they liked to keep a hard copy of every little thing – even the reviews they left on Amazon. There were rumours of a massive archive in the catacombs below Warren Lane. And seeing as absolutely everyone in the coven had the initials A.A. (they had yet to move onto the Bs) I doubted those archives were easy to search.

  Now that I thought of it, maybe that was where the paper’s archives were stored. Arnold Albright did own the Daily Riddler, after all.

  ‘It’s em … it’s a pretty big deal, actually,’ said Arthur. ‘What we found. We could get into a lot of trouble for it.’

  Greg frowned through a mouthful of brack. ‘Trouble? For searching through a bunch of dusty old files? That doesn’t sound like fun, guys. Trouble sounds like … well, like trouble.’

  Sod you anyway, Greg! I glared at him, then rearranged my face into a nonchalant smile and said, ‘Nah. It’s just all part of the crazy fun adventure. It’s totally chilled. Right guys?’ I paused, thinking about what I’d just said. Did people say chilled or chill now? I had no idea.

  Relief flashed over their faces. ‘Yeah. Yeah it’s totally chilled,’ said Adeline. ‘Except … except it might not be if Arnold finds out. We em … we found the very last mentions of Brian the Brave in his private section of the archive.’

  I swallowed. That really could mean trouble. My grandfather had an unhealthy hatred for anyone who wasn’t a witch, but his feelings about the sióga went way beyond even that. It was why we were keeping our search for my father a secret from him. It was also one of the many reasons why I’d been reluctant to admit he was actually my grandfather for so long.

  Arthur moved to a locker in the hallway, returning a moment later with a large box file. A sticker on its spine said: Arnold Albright’s Daily Riddler Edits, The Year of the Apple to the Year of the Singer.

  ‘Edits?’ said Grace. ‘Arnold liked to throw his weight around when he first bought the paper, but I was there long before he ever owned that paper, and no doubt I’ll be there many years after he dies. He doesn’t get to make edits.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Adeline. ‘This is just one of many box files full of edited or unprinted articles. It seems he’d been having journalists submit their work to him long before this.’

  Grace spun to face me, and I shook my head. ‘He’s never interfered with anything I’ve written,’ I assured her. ‘And you know that if he tried I’d tell him to go jump in a pit full of dragons.’

  ‘It all seems to have ended with, well … with Abby,’ said Arthur. ‘By the looks of it, he had Abby and the journalists before her firmly under his thumb. It seems they sent him everything they wrote before they ever showed it to you. We were risking our behinds by just taking this file. We’ve left a doppelganger file in its place, but we will need to return the original as soon as possible. We em … we only took it because we thought it would be of specific interest to you, Aisling.’

  I stared at the dates on the file and keyed them into my app. The Year of the Apple was nineteen eighty-seven, and the Year of the Singer was nineteen eighty-eight. If I was twenty-nine now, then that could mean that these stories were between the year my parents met and the year that I was born.

  ‘You’ll probably want to read these alone, Ash,’ said Adeline. ‘I mean, there’s some seriously emotional stuff in here. In fact, it’s a whole box full of buzzkills. And let’s face it – no one around the table wants to be put on a downer right now, do they?’

  There were murmurs of agreement, and Greg said, ‘Oh boy, no. A downer is the last thing we want at Halloween.’ He clapped my back. ‘Y’know, maybe you should put off reading it until after the holiday. Because it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.’

  ‘But on a lighter note,’ said Arthur. ‘While me and Adeline were down there, we went to painstaking efforts to digitise all of the older Daily Riddler articles we found in the archive – and also every single article that Arthur suppressed. Now that really was a whole lot of fun.’

  6. Totes Frustrating

  After we left Riddler’s Cove, I called Dylan to check how the investigation was going. Actually, I called because I wanted to be sure there still was an investigation, and that he wasn’t just kicking back and watching TV.

  ‘Hello beautiful,’ he said the moment he answered the phone. ‘Hey, I was just thinking about you. Well, I’m always thinking about you if I’m honest.’ He let loose one of his husky laughs. ‘Anyway, I was thinking you and me could take a stroll over to the Fisherman’s Friend round about now.’

  ‘Because some of the victim’s friends are there and you want me to help you interview them?’ I questioned hopefully.

  There was a beat of silence before he said, ‘Y’know, I guess we could do that while we’re there – if it’s not too much of a downer. But I was really just asking you because it’s lunchtime.’

  ≈

  Frustration didn’t begin to describe how I was feeling as I walked over to meet Dylan at the Fisherman’s Friend. Sure, he’d been frustrating from the moment I met him, but back then he’d been frustrating in a whole different way. He was obnoxious when we first clashed on the train from Dublin to Riddler’s Edge. He also had tunnel vision – convincing himself that the murder on the train had been carried out by an elitist vampire gang even when I offered him evidence to the contrary.

  And every moment since then he’d been just as difficult. He was nearly as stubborn as me, that was the problem. We’d butted heads from the moment we met. But we’d also liked each other, and grown to develop a deep bond and a great deal of respect.

  Now? Now I had to pray that the real Dylan was still in there somewhere, because this devil may care Dylan was not a guy I could get on board with. As I neared the tavern, I saw him standing with one bent leg propped against the wall, blowing an enormous bubble from his mouth and – by the sound of it – playing Hungry Dragons on his phone.

  I stood still for a moment, examining the area. We were close to Pirates’ Pier, but I could see that the crime scene had been completely abandoned, the blue and white garda tape blowing in the breeze. As for the beach surrounding the Fisherman’s Friend, though – well, that was party central. People were barbecuing, skinny dipping, and enjoying themselves in many more inappropriate ways. Sure, the school kids were on their midterm break, but why was every grown-up in town taking Monday off? And did those poor, impressionable kids really want to see their grandparents dive naked in the chilly Atlantic Ocean?

  Both colours in the air were increasing – the familiar golden shimmer of witch and wizard magic, a
nd the strange orange glitter I’d never seen before. For all I knew this really was what Halloween in Riddler’s Edge was like. I mean, there had to be some reason why hundreds of tourists descended on the sleepy town each year – although I sincerely doubted it was so they could get murdered by an unknown supernatural force. Still, the autumnal orange did make the decrepit old tavern look slightly better than usual, even if I was the only one who could see it.

  I was now up to needing thirty deep breaths before frustrating confrontations, so I took them in slowly, and resumed my walk towards Dylan.

  ‘Ash.’ He gave me a flirtatious (if slightly lazy) grin as I met him at the entrance. ‘You look so sexy in that outfit.’

  I looked down at my clothing, frowning. I was wearing a typical Aisling outfit: a sweater dress teamed with warm black tights and knee-high, flat-soled boots. It was many things – comfy, forgiving – but I wasn’t so sure about sexy. ‘Em, thanks,’ I said. ‘So what’s the status with the investigation?’

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shuffled awkwardly on the spot. ‘Oh, you’re not going to get on my back about this, are you? I know I said I’d have it solved by lunchtime, and it’s lunchtime now. But investigating is hard Ash. And kinda boring.’

  I sighed. By the time this was over, I figured I’d be able to write a guidebook on how to deal with teens, because that’s what was standing before me right now – a lazy and bored teenager. ‘Boring?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Man, you’re some downer if you think investigating crimes is boring. It’ll be like being on one of those American cop shows, that’s what I think. It’ll be totes cool.’

  Okay, so I might have to rethink writing that guidebook for teenagers until I actually had a clue how they talked. But despite what he might be thinking about himself right now, Dylan was just as out of touch as I was – therefore, he seemed to think I was speaking his lingo.