Shiver Me Witches

by A. A. Albright

  He scratched his chin. ‘Well I mean, it’s not like he’s a really bad guy. He only murdered one woman. And Bert’s gonna take him to the station now, aren’t you Bert?’

  Bert groaned. ‘Do I have to? I wanted to catch up on my cartoons this morning.’

  Dylan patted his back again. ‘Listen, I know it’s a hassle buddy, but just settle him into the cell with that Sally woman. You don’t even have to lock it. And I brought a TV in yesterday, so you can all watch cartoons together. Oh, and order yourselves something nice for breakfast too, on me.’

  Bert grinned, transferred Joe to his car, and drove away from the pier. Once he left, there was no one there except me and the two stooges. ‘Okay, this is my last and final appeal to your better natures,’ I said. ‘Because I know you have them. We’re close, right? We’re good friends, all three of us?’

  ‘Well, I’d like to think that you and I have crossed the line from friends to sexy lovers,’ said Dylan with a wink.

  I shuddered. ‘And we might not ever cross that line again, dayturner virus or no dayturner virus. Because I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get this version of you out of my mind. Anyway. You two know me well. So you know what I am. You know that I can see things you can’t, thanks to me being half sióga.’

  ‘And?’ prompted Greg.

  ‘And this is not normal. There’s weird new magic in the air, and more of it is arriving as we speak. I think that it’s responsible for the way you’re acting. I think we’re dealing with a supernatural crime here.’

  Greg rolled his eyes. ‘Not this again! How many times do we have to tell you that it’s just Halloween magic? It has nothing to do with the murders.’ He nudged Dylan and winked. ‘Hey, why don’t we go back to the Daily Riddler office and eat all of those cakes Ash bought us?’

  What was with all of these winks and sniggers and buddy-buddy nudges? Whoever created this problem was going to pay when I found them, because if there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was sleazy and dismissive men.

  ‘She actually bought snacks? At least she’s done something fun, eh?’ said Dylan, with yet another snigger and a wink.

  ‘We can hole up in my office so she’s not nagging us,’ said Greg. ‘I can stream TV in there, and I’ve got a really big monitor and some bean bags. The How to Channel Channel is doing a six hour long documentary on OAPs through the ages.’

  ‘I would love to watch that,’ Dylan enthused. ‘I mean, I have no wizardry skills whatsoever, but I find the process fascinating.’

  I felt my nostrils flare in frustration, and I pulled at my hair. ‘Y’know what? Just go. But I’ll be taking this.’ I took Greg’s camera from around his neck. ‘And this.’ I grabbed his scanner. ‘And I will be coming to nag you guys when I’ve figured out a way to stop you being the most annoying morons in the world.’

  11. An Aura Unknown

  Greg and Dylan ran off ahead of me as soon as I had Greg’s equipment. They seemed worse than ever today. And as frustrated as I was by their new and unimproved selves, the truth was that I missed them madly.

  I glanced down at the locket I was wearing. It had been a present from Dylan, back when he didn’t wink and snigger all the time. He had competed in the Protection Trials in Transylvania in order to win it for me. The locket itself couldn’t be opened by anyone except the ancient vampire who forged it, in order to protect the Impervium stone at its heart. A vampire wearing the locket couldn’t be killed, but the wearer didn’t have to be a vampire. The locket would protect anyone who wore it, from anything that came their way.

  Dylan had given it to me because he was worried that his ex-girlfriend might hurt me. I hadn’t seen Darina for weeks, but I didn’t know if it was down to the locket or not. Even so, I believed that it was a powerful piece of jewellery. When the witch who smashed Dave the genie’s lamp had thrown an enormous bottle my way, the bottle had smashed to the ground and completely avoided my face. So could my locket be what was shielding me from this influx of magic, or was it down to the fact that I was half fae?

  The reason would have to remain a mystery, because taking the locket off in order to be sure? Well, that could be a very bad idea.

  As I passed by the flower shop, I spied Hilda watering her displays. She was paying me no attention, so I lifted Greg’s camera and got to work. As soon as I’d taken her picture, I rushed to the office to check it out.

  ‘Hey Malachy,’ I said as I walked past the front desk. The newspaper’s receptionist was staring down at his computer keyboard, bashing away at random keys and pretending to type. ‘You okay?’

  He shook his head. ‘Can’t really be bothered to work today. I’m a bit irritated about the latest murder, to be honest. I can’t believe it’s happening all over again.’

  It was time for a full-on gasp. I did think of leaping across the desk and grabbing him by his lapels, but it would probably be a bit too much. ‘For the love of the goddess, Malachy, what is happening all over again? Were there similar murders before?’

  ‘Huh?’ His brow creased as he gawked at me in confusion. ‘Murders like this before? Not that I know of, and I’ve lived in Riddler’s Edge for decades.’ He stopped pretending to type and leaned across his gleaming desk. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you – I know about your magic lessons with Brent.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I was a tad stumped as to what to add to that, to be honest. I knew Malachy and Brent had once been a couple, and Brent had specifically asked me – more than once – not to mention his trips to Riddler’s Edge to his ex. The main excuse for not telling people was because we wanted to keep my progress from Arnold Albright. But Brent had been extra insistent about keeping Malachy in the dark, making me think that their break-up had been raw and recent.

  ‘I could smell him on you,’ Brent went on matter-of-factly. ‘Vampires have a keen sense of smell. We’re no werewolves, but we do okay. I had an idea of what was going on, so I followed you one morning and saw him teaching you. You seem to be getting on well with the whole magic thing.’

  I lowered my voice. ‘It’s just that we’re trying to keep my skills under wraps for the moment,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it had nothing to do with him wanting to keep secrets from you. Could you em … could you try not to mention the lessons to anyone else?’

  Malachy patted his nose. ‘Mum’s the word.’

  ‘You seem awfully light and breezy about this,’ I said. ‘I thought …’

  ‘You thought that Brent and I had a painful breakup? Oh, we did.’ He sat into his high chair and spun around. ‘He has to spend an awful lot of time looking after his brother, you see. Robert might be the older of the two, but he’s a little bit different to your average witch. He tends to explode things by accident. A lot of magic, too little control. I used to help out. Spend all of my time there, in fact. But Brent worried that I was neglecting my own dreams of running a restaurant, so he started fighting with me constantly about silly things. Trying to force a row so I’d leave. Eventually … I did. Not because I wanted an easier life for myself, mind you. I left because Brent felt responsible for me putting my dreams on hold. He had enough to worry about, without feeling guilty about me as well. So I staged the biggest argument we’d ever had, and I walked out on him.’

  ‘That sounds so sad, Malachy. And yet you’re smiling.’

  He shrugged and spun in his chair again. ‘Something about the air in Riddler’s Edge this time of year. Makes things seem a lot easier to cope with.’

  If only that were true, I thought. But it seemed to me as though the air was causing my misery, not easing it. ‘I’m glad you’re feeling good,’ I said. ‘Well … I’ll leave you to it. Are those two idiots in Greg’s office?’

  ‘You mean Detective Delectable and Greg? They ran in there just before you arrived. They did seem ever so slightly more idiotic than usual, it’s true. But if you can’t be an idiot at Halloween, then when can you?’

  ≈

  When I made my way into Greg’s office to snatch
his laptop, he and Dylan didn’t even look up from the TV show they were watching. So I took his computer into the larger communal area where my desk was situated, and got to work.

  I could hear Grace upstairs, laughing uproariously at something she was watching on TV, and of course there were also the sounds of Malachy pretending to type and spinning in his chair. Other than that, the office was quieter than it had ever been. Roarke, the paper’s puzzle writer, had decided to take the morning off. And judging by the overflowing bins and the muffin crumbs all over the carpet in Greg’s office, our cleaner hadn’t been in either.

  I started with Greg’s scanner. Judging by the information stored on his computer, he’d been lying when he told me he’d checked out yesterday’s results, so I connected the scanner and ran results for the last few days.

  Imagine my lack of surprise when I saw that the scanner had recorded far larger quantities of magic than usual. One was standard witch and wizard magic – the amount seemed to have been increasing a little bit day by day, which would explain the golden shimmer I was seeing everywhere. But I’d never actually doubted that there was extra magic in the air at Halloween. There had to be, after all, if those ghosts were going to get their shuffle on. It was the other magic I was interested in – the magic-type that was coming up as unknown.

  I kicked the foot of my desk, quelling my frustration and fear as I read the results. For a long time, scanners similar to this one had only been able to record limited kinds of magic, for the simple reason that there were a lot of supernaturals who kept well away from witches. But since I’d come to Riddler’s Edge we’d been in contact with some of those other supernaturals, and Greg – wizardly genius that he was – had been adding to the types of magical signatures that the scanners could read.

  As well as witches and vampires, Greg could now test for chaos demons and genies. With the help of one or two controlled magical outbursts from me, he’d also installed rudimentary additions to his scanners and his aura-matching tech that could also record the sióga.

  With me being the only fae person – and only half at that – that he had at his disposal, he wasn’t happy to say that his tech was working with one hundred percent accuracy, but I trusted in his snack-munching genius.

  Seeing as Greg had been working so hard to make sure that his equipment could now pick up so many forms of magic … well, I was now one hundred percent sure that this orange magic really was something we’d never come across before.

  I set aside the scanner and began to check on what the aura-matching camera filters had picked up instead. Just like with the scanner, Greg had broken his promise to check for aura matches.

  I found myself feeling as alone as I had when I worked at the Daily Dubliner, but I’d have my friends back soon. Somehow. I’d lived too long without people I cared about in my life, and there was no way I was giving up on them now.

  As I ran Hilda’s photo, I kept my fingers crossed – although I wasn’t sure whether I hoped I would see a supernatural aura or not. If there was one, then I’d at least have one suspect to consider. And if she spent the rest of her life in Witchfield, well then she wouldn’t be in Riddler’s Edge to annoy me on a near-daily basis.

  Greg’s program finished running, and the results came up on screen: Ninety-eight percent human. Two percent unknown.

  ‘What the …?’

  I peered closer at Hilda’s aura. It looked human, for the most part. There was certainly no telling orange glow that could have connected her to the strange magic in the air. But there was something unusual in the very centre of her forehead. A small, white circle, tinged with turquoise and surrounded by black.

  Huh. This was reminding me of something I’d seen not so long ago. I pulled up the files from recent murders in the area, and found what I was looking for: Henry Kramer, AKA Dean Danger. He had been partially human, with a large portion of wizard if memory served. And he had been very annoyed when we told him about the wizard part. As a witch hunter, anything relating to magic made his skin crawl. Which was kind of funny, because everything about him made my skin crawl.

  I opened Henry Kramer’s aura photo. It looked nothing like Hilda’s, really. He had that same tell-tale glow that only Greg’s equipment could see around wizards. A witch’s Aurameter could only see the golden haze around those with innate magic, i.e. witches. As usual, Greg’s technology was a hundred steps ahead of anything else. I glanced at the percentages on the side of the screen: Forty-eight percent human. Fifty percent wizard. Two percent unknown.

  There it was – that two percent that had always confused me. Enlarging the photo, I finally saw it: Henry had the same small white circle in the centre of his forehead as Hilda had, tinged with turquoise and surrounded by black.

  It couldn’t be a mere coincidence, could it? Henry Kramer slash Dean Danger had been a witch hunter, and he had a two percent unreadable aura, and now here was Hilda with exactly the same. Sure, there was no wizardly goodness mixed in with hers, but wizard power was something that developed over time. Something a person earned through channelling magic. Henry’s had probably only arrived because he had used so many dark objects to try and trap witches.

  So could there be a witch hunter gene, something that carried down through the generations? Our last witch hunter had come from a long line of hunters, so Hilda could well be the same. Anything was possible in Riddler’s Edge. Although she had said ‘It’s happening all over again,’ just like quite a few people had said. I wasn’t sure whether that made her more of a suspect, or less of one.

  But if she was the killer, then she was just as dumb as Henry Kramer had been – because just like him, she was murdering humans, not witches.

  There was only one thing I was sure of when it came to Hilda – if Greg’s equipment could test for moodiness, nastiness and intolerance, then she’d get a one hundred percent match on all of those.

  I moved on to the crime scene photos. One of the weird attributes of my half-sióga nature was that I didn’t just have the ability to see magic in the real world. I could see it in any depiction – a painting, a photo, anything.

  And I could see it now as I looked at the photos of the murder scene. But I already knew that the magic was there – what I needed to do was find an aura.

  I sipped at some lukewarm coffee while I waited for it to run. Grace’s laughs were getting louder, and I could hear crinkling wrappers and slurping noises from Greg’s office. Malachy had left his desk and was in the canteen area, making himself a red smoothie.

  I leaned forward as it stopped running. Greg hadn’t managed to get a single shot where there was no one in it, so it was a bit of a mess, with auras flying everywhere. Mine seemed to be a silvery white aura, with flecks of every single colour imaginable running through it. I could see the golden shimmer of my witch power intermingling, too. It was strange to see, considering my magical aura had been invisible until very recently, thanks to the suppression spell I had been under for most of my life.

  But looking at my own shininess was a little bit weird for me, and in any case I was more interested in what was just behind me, as I was bending down to examine Evelyn’s body.

  Evelyn’s all-human match was there, but there was a trace of something else all around her. It was orange, with red and yellow licking at the sides and … black at the centre? I peered closer. Yip, this was one unusual aura. Like my own, there was a whole lot going on. And seeing as I’d been peering over Greg’s shoulder and annoying him almost every single time he ran auras in the past, I was one hundred percent sure that this was something new.

  I isolated the aura and ran it on its own, drumming my fingers against my desk as the program started to run.

  Just as it was giving its answer, Grace appeared behind me and leaned over me. She was wearing hot-pink lipstick and skin-tight jeans. ‘Aura unknown?’ she said with a frown. ‘What’s this, Ash? I just came to tell you I was taking off to go clothes shopping, and now I find you poring pictures of these murd
ers. Why? They’ve been solved.’

  ‘No they haven’t,’ I insisted. ‘Maybe Evelyn’s friend and Cora’s husband did the physical strangling, but I think something was controlling them.’ I pointed at the screen. ‘That orangey aura. We find the person with an aura like that, and we’ve found the real culprit.’

  ‘Mm hm,’ Grace said, a dubious tone to her voice. ‘Well I think you’re clutching at straws. But I get it, I do. Ever since you arrived here you’ve been sort of amazing, solving the unsolvable and saving the day. But this time, you don’t get to be the hero. These two cases are already solved, by someone who’s not you, and you don’t like it.’

  I felt my whole face scrunch up. Reminder to self: this pod person was not my Grace. ‘No,’ I said evenly, ‘that’s not what this is. I don’t care about being the hero. I care about getting my friends back to normal and finding out who’s behind this.’

  She sighed, lifting herself up onto my desk and swinging her legs. ‘Look, this is your first Halloween in Riddler’s Edge. I can understand why it’d seem strange to you. We are different at this time of year. There’s all this magic in the air. We can’t see it like you can, but we can feel it. Even humans can feel it a little bit. That’s why so many of them travel here, and that’s why everyone’s in such a fun mood.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘But … I’m a journalist, Grace. I’ve been questioning things my whole life long, and I need to question this, too. Just … let me satisfy my curiosity.’ I nodded to her purse. ‘I can see the flash drive that Adeline and Arthur gave you poking out. Let me have a look at it.’

  She frowned. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘Well, because people keep saying “It’s happening all over again.” You said those words yourself, only you can’t remember. I’ve already looked back as far as our own digitised records go, but there’s nothing about similar murders, so I think I might have to look back a little further. Which is where that flash drive comes in. Think about it, Grace. You’ve lived here for a long time, right? Well, so have Norma and Hilda, and they both said “It’s happening all over again.” Maybe the last time this happened was further back, back when Hilda was a kid and Norma was a younger woman and you …’ I paused to scratch my chin. ‘Well, you were still a witch of indeterminate age who likes to keep her secrets to herself.’