A Wedding to Die For- Wedding Bells and Magic Spells

by A. R. Winters

On the other hand, I reminded myself, she had given me Wolfsbane last time, and helped me summon the spirit.

  “Not getting involved is killing my actual business,” I said firmly.

  Hazel giggled. “Kill Fletcher. Kill the business. Kill this. Kill that.”

  With a shake of my head I tried to suppress a shudder.

  “WAIT!”

  Hazel flew out of her seat and across the room to an old off-white table that looked as though it could be made of ivory, though of course there’s no such thing as an ivory table of that size. At least I hope not.

  She snatched up a pile of something and before I’d taken another breath she was sitting back down next to me again.

  “Let’s check your tarot, Whitmore.”

  I squeezed my fingers hard into my palms. Reading a tarot was almost as bad as scrying in my book, and in some ways even worse since you couldn’t actually see anything, only interpret it.

  “Okay,” I said. “And then you’ll give me some Wolfsbane?”

  “Wolfsbane, Wolfsbane, Wolfsbane,” she said, nodding to herself and giggling.

  I took that as a yes.

  “Watch carefully. You’re not as stupid as you look. You could learn to read tarot cards, Aria Whitmore.”

  Trying to be agreeable I nodded my head up and down even though I had little interest in cultivating a professional skill in tarot reading.

  Hazel’s hands flew around the stack of cards, and I couldn’t quite see what she was doing. Perhaps she took the card from the top, but perhaps it was from the middle or the bottom of the pack; she was so abrupt in her movements it was hard to tell.

  “A ten of,” she said softly, “SWORDS!” she screamed.

  Staring at the card, she ran her tongue over her lips.

  “Know what that means?” she asked me in a normal voice.

  “Well, it’s only the first card, so we can’t really take it in isolation. It depends on—”

  “DEATH!” said Hazel in a screeching voice before dropping her head back and giggling like a schoolgirl.

  Kiwi let out a loud squawk and fluttered his wings.

  “Right,” I said, trying to maintain my composure. “Death.”

  That was not an encouraging start to the reading.

  “Now, let’s see...” Hazel ran her palm over the top of the stack of cards several times.

  It was the kind of thing so-called magicians do when they’re trying to indicate that they’re magically bringing a card to the top of the pile, or performing some other magical manipulation when in fact all they did was sleight of hand. With Hazel though, I wasn’t so sure. She may well have been shifting the stack of cards underneath, merging them through each other.

  “We need two more cards,” she said.

  Eschewing the normal showmanship of dragging out the process, she dropped the stack of cards onto the table and then whipped off the top two cards, one with each hand, and dropped them onto the table beside the first one.

  “What do you see?” she asked me.

  I looked at them. There was the Ten of Swords, then the Queen of Knives, followed by the Death card.

  After running my eye over the three, I looked back at Hazel. I was pretty sure what they meant. She was tight-lipped and her eyes had lost some of their usual glint.

  “I see three cards that all portend death,” I said to her.

  She nodded at me.

  “Aria Whitmore,” she said, then stopped.

  “Yes?”

  Hazel’s voice was quiet, her tone measured, very different to when we’d first arrived. “All three cards indicate death. In isolation, it could be metaphorical. But with three of them together, we leave the realm of metaphor and return to the physical world. This world. Aria, these cards are a grave portent.”

  “They don’t look good,” I said in agreement.

  “Aria, you are going to need to use all your powers to protect yourself. If you don’t...”

  “Death! Death! Death!” shrieked Kiwi.

  “What he said,” said Hazel, nodding her head toward my familiar. “WAIT!” she suddenly shouted.

  As I hadn’t been going anywhere just yet it sent another jolt of shock—and confusion—through my already fatigued frame. “What?”

  Hazel was up and moving before the word had left my lips, already going to retrieve something.

  She zoomed across the room to the fox head she had been looking at when we arrived. With her incredibly long index finger and thumb, she reached inside the fox’s mouth and pulled out a small package. She spun around and held it aloft, her arm completely outstretched above her head so that it almost touched the ceiling.

  “Look!” she shouted.

  Kiwi tapped his head against mine inquisitively. He did that when he wanted me to explain something, but the situation wasn’t one where he could talk openly. Unfortunately, I had no explanation to give him.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She scurried her way back over, her long lithe legs somehow managing to make her look like a scuttling insect rather than the striking woman she normally seemed to be.

  “It’s your Wolfsbane, fresh from the fox’s mouth!”

  “Thank you. What an interesting place to store it.”

  She held it out in her open palm. The small plastic bag was filled with the herb.

  “Thank you. You have been very helpful,” I said to her warily.

  She carefully placed it in my hand, wrapped my fingers back around it, and then squeezed her own hand around mine tightly.

  “Ow!” I said when I felt my fingers about to break.

  Hazel shot up to her feet again, releasing my hand instantly. “You will go now.”

  I slowly rose to my feet, even more bewildered than the first time I’d visited her.

  “Right. We’ll go now, then,” I said.

  Before I could blink Hazel was by the door, holding it open, beckoning us toward her and out the door.

  “Use all your magical skills to protect yourself, Aria Whitmore. That’s the only way you’ll get through this.”

  “Thank you,” I said to her. “Thanks for all your help.”

  “Protect yourself or DIE!” she screeched into my face.

  It was with a jump that I left the cottage, the shriek in my face forcing me to leave in a manner less ladylike than I would normally have done.

  “She’s weird,” said Kiwi in my ear softly as we started walking down the path.

  SLAM!

  With a bang much louder than I would have thought possible from such a normal-looking door, she shut it behind us.

  “It better work, this time,” said Kiwi in my ear.

  “If it doesn’t work this time...”

  “We’ll move to Australia and start a new life,” said Kiwi firmly.

  “That was not exactly what I had in mind,” I said with a laugh. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that. No, we’ll use this Wolfsbane, get the spirit to speak to us, and figure out this whole mess.”

  “Nothing can go wrong!” said Kiwi from my shoulder.

  And it was with another amused chuckle we left to find out just how wrong everything could go.

  Chapter 23

  I parked the car outside the main gates to the Cypress Estate, under some trees to hide it from prying eyes. This time, I drove a little further off the road, causing a series of large cracks to ring out as the car tires shattered long-dead wooden branches.

  “Don’t go too far,” said Kiwi ‘helpfully.’

  “I won’t. I just want to make sure no one can see us.”

  “No one like Jack.”

  “Exactly,” I told him, “no handcuffs for us!”

  “Yet.”

  I pretend-bonked him on the head and then we got out of the car. It was late afternoon and the sun was peeking out from behind some clouds, dappling the large cypress trees and bringing a warmth to the air that the Estate usually lacked.

  “Let’s go and do this,” I said. “Get it over w
ith.”

  Kiwi nodded his head up and down. “I’m glad it’s not dark this time.”

  “Me too,” I said, “me too.”

  I walked out into the road to admire my parking. The car was thankfully barely visible at all. You’d have to be driving very slowly, or intending to park in the same spot, to see it from the road.

  I just hoped there would be no slow-moving patrol cars going by in the next hour or so.

  We walked toward the house, surrounded by singing birds and the warm quiet strength of the trees.

  For brief moments, I could forget that we were trespassing, and that I had promised Jack I wouldn’t do that again. I had meant it, at the time, but things had changed.

  With Priscilla now apparently working against me, I had to solve this murder or be run out of town, and I had no intention of leaving.

  We made quick progress, and soon let ourselves back into the home and started down the stairs to the basement.

  I flicked the lights on, and straight away we marched to the second smaller room where we had seen the spirit before.

  “Look!” said Kiwi.

  He needn’t have. It was obvious as soon as we walked in.

  The spirit was much more active than it had been the time before. Even without switching on the lights in this room, it was quite easy to make out the contents; the spirit in the corner was providing us with quite a glow.

  “Do you think people without any magical ability can see it?” asked Kiwi.

  I shrugged. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  He raised a good point. I wasn’t sure whether our ‘vision’ was only thanks to our innate magical abilities, or whether the spirit was actually manifesting in such a way that even regular people would be able to see it.

  “Do it quickly,” said Kiwi.

  “I’ll do my best, but we can’t rush these things. If we make a mistake...”

  Kiwi let out a worried caw. “Outside it was nice, Aria. But in here, it’s...”

  “Spooky?”

  He nodded. “Spooky and cold and dark and I don’t like it.”

  Extending a hand I rubbed his head gently.

  “I know what you mean. I don’t like it either. But hey, it was your idea again...”

  Kiwi muttered something that was somewhere in between language and nonsensical parrot-chatter.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “I’m going to keep my ideas to myself in future.”

  My laughter brightened the mood somewhat, but not enough to overwhelm the dank chilliness of the room and the mood that it brought on.

  After taking out my supplies, including the Wolfsbane we’d collected from Hazel, I got everything in order.

  “That prediction...” began Kiwi.

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t think it meant today, did you?”

  I bit my lip gently before I answered, “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course,” I lied.

  Hazel’s triple-death prediction was alarmingly ominous but she hadn’t said it was immediate. I’d been left with the impression that it was in the future, not distant, but not too close either. I hoped I was right.

  “Because if she did mean today, we should probably not do this,” said Kiwi.

  “Well we’re here now and so’s the spirit. Look. It’s much brighter, it must want to talk,” I said to Kiwi.

  He shifted on my shoulder. “If things get hairy... I’m not sticking around.”

  “Nor am I,” I reassured him. “Now let’s do this.”

  As I cast the circle and prepared the cauldron, the spirit’s light seemed to glow even brighter. By the time I’d completed the incantation and filled the room with smoke, it seemed to be bright enough to light the room almost as well as the larger room with all its fluorescent lights.

  I stared into the corner.

  “Hello! Can you hear me?” I said.

  The light seemed to pulse slightly, but there was no audible response.

  “Hello! Hello! Hello!” screeched Kiwi.

  There was a sound, like a distant voice or bird call from the corner.

  “Did you hear something?” I asked.

  Kiwi confirmed he had with a quiet caw.

  “Hello? Are you there? My name is Aria Whitmore.”

  “...betrayal.... trust... no!”

  The words seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, the location seeming impossibly close but the voice itself sounding as if it came from a great distance away—from across a valley or perhaps through an ocean.

  As I stared into the light it began to coalesce into a shape again, and slowly the features of the man we’d seen before began to emerge. The man we didn’t know, and who most definitely was not Fletcher Davenport.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “T... I’m T... T... betrayed!”

  “We can’t hear you clearly! You’re not coming through! Who are you?”

  “To... to the end of time... ”

  “We can’t hear you!” I said again, my voice almost a shout this time.

  The spirit extended an arm and pointed to the floor again.

  “We don’t understand!”

  “Leave me be! I’ll never get justice for what they did!” The sudden clarity of the voice was jarring after how washed-out he had sounded before.

  The words rang out cleanly across the room. The fact that the voice was so clear, like he was a living breathing person in the same room, was seriously unnerving.

  “But who are you? What did they do to you?” I asked again.

  “BETRAYAL!” screamed the ghost. “I’m t—”

  “You’re what?”

  Nothing.

  Silence.

  Kiwi made an inquiring caw.

  “Looks like he’s gone, little buddy,” I said. The light in the corner slowly faded away. “It seems he used up all his energy, but he didn’t tell us anything.”

  “Not true,” said Kiwi.

  “How’s that?” I asked. As far as I was concerned this had all been a waste of time.

  “He tried to tell us his name. It began with a T.”

  I nodded. “I suppose. Maybe we should check the death records and see if there’s anyone who died in the last fifty years whose name begins with a T.”

  “Good idea!” said Kiwi.

  “I was kidding,” I said. “There are a lot of people whose names begin with T.”

  Kiwi let out a complaining caw, not enjoying being mocked.

  “He also said ‘they,’ though,” I mused.

  Kiwi gave a non-committal shriek.

  “Though that could be nothing. Or maybe there was a group of murderers, a kind of conspiracy.”

  “Wrong ones,” said Kiwi. “We need to find out who killed Fletcher Davenport, not the magic light guy.”

  I sighed. He was right.

  The hope was that the ‘magic light guy’ would help us find out who killed Fletcher—he almost certainly witnessed it, but now I was thinking about what had happened to this spirit instead of Fletcher.

  And we hadn’t even known something bad had happened to this one—until he started talking about betrayal today.

  “What are we going to do, Kiwi?”

  He stretched out and flapped his wings before deigning to respond.

  “Take me home. I’m going to have a snack and a nap,” he said like a prince ordering around a servant.

  I laughed. “Yeah. Maybe I should join you. Soon we won’t be able to afford snacks...”

  Kiwi shrieked a complaint at the injustice of the world, and I was inclined to agree with him.

  Leaving, I was pleased that there was no Jack and no patrol car on the way out. We’d gotten away with it, this time.

  At least, I thought we had.

  Chapter 24

  Three nights after our failed attempt at summoning the spirit again, I was preparing myself for a final dress fitting with Nina. It was less than a week before the big day, and we
had to make sure everything was perfect.

  I hoped she hadn’t been walking too rigorously or sticking too religiously to her lettuce diet.

  If she got much thinner, the dress would need further adjustments, and the whole thing might end up looking like it was designed for a different-shaped woman. You can do a certain level of adjusting, but if you do too much... You’re basically re-creating a dress instead of altering it and things quickly go pear-shaped like that, and with how thin Nina was, pear-shaped was the last thing we needed!

  “How does it look?” I said to Kiwi, who was sitting on top of the bookcase watching me prepare for Bridezilla as he had taken to calling her.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Fine? That’s it? That’s an eighteen hundred dollar dress, lovingly adjusted by me to make it fit perfectly, and doctored by her husband to seven thousand eight hundred dollars!”

  “Yes. But it’s still just a dress.”

  “You better not say that when Nina is here. Or any other clients!”

  Kiwi let out a horrible, raucous laugh and flew a circuit of the shop before landing back on top of the bookshelf, quite pleased with himself.

  It was fifteen minutes later that Nina arrived at the shop.

  Ding!

  The bell above the door rang only softly as she entered, a bare push of the door to swing it open.

  “Good morning!” I said brightly. I was putting on a brave face but I needed to solve this sale and make sure Nina and Rick paid up, or I wouldn’t even be able to pay the electricity bill this month.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice soft and quiet.

  “How are you!?” I asked with entirely too much cheer and energy. Tone it down, Aria.

  If I was being over the top in my enthusiasm and energy today, Nina was quite the opposite: subdued and morose.

  “Fine,” she said, “is it ready?”

  “Tada!” I said, and flew my arms open wide in front of the dress which I had displayed for her.

  “Yes. That looks fine,” she said. “I suppose we better try it on again.”

  “Right, yes. Let’s get you into it. You’re going to look a-MAZE-ing!”

  “I suppose I will,” she said, and started to walk over to the fitting room.

  Muttering to myself I took the dress and started to follow her.