by Elle Adams
Spells & Shelves
A Library Witch Mystery
Elle Adams
Contents
Spells & Shelves
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Thank you for reading!
About the Author
This book was written, produced and edited in the UK, where some spelling, grammar and word usage will vary from US English.
Copyright © 2019 Elle Adams
All rights reserved.
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Spells & Shelves
Bookshop assistant Aurora "Rory" Hawthorn thinks reality will never be as interesting as fiction. Content to spend her time escaping into a good book to escape her micromanaging boss, the very last thing she expects is to be cornered by a group of terrifying strangers hunting down a journal that belonged to her late father.
It turns out Dad was keeping a secret or two… most importantly, that he was a wizard, and that Rory has a hidden magical family she's never met. When her witchy relatives invite her to live with them in their enchanted library, it's literally a dream come true.
Until she stumbles upon a dead body hidden behind a bookshelf.
Juggling a new family and job would be enough of a challenge without also having to deal with a murder mystery, cranky familiars, and the attention of the local reaper -- even if he is the hottest guy in town.
It's up to Rory to embrace her new witchy powers to help catch a killer before she loses the new life she never knew she wanted.
1
“Aurora!” shouted my boss.
I closed the book I’d been reading under the desk. No customers had shown up all afternoon, but Abe hated me reading on the job, even though books surrounded me on every side and the shelves were positively overflowing. Who could resist the temptation? Besides, business wasn’t exactly booming.
“Yes?” I called back.
“I’m going into the storeroom,” he said. “Please watch the desk, and if I catch you reading, I’ll be extremely displeased.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I responded. Reading in a bookshop? Perish the thought.
I fidgeted, smoothing out the wrinkles in my skirt. Able liked me to show up dressed respectably, which meant plain, drab coloured skirts past my knees, neat shirts and cardigans, and my hair pulled back in a bun that made me look decades older than my twenty-five years. It fitted the place’s solemn atmosphere, but considering every other shop was bursting with glittery Christmas decorations, it was no wonder everyone overlooked our gloomy little establishment. Besides, I knew for a fact that Dad used to come to work in jeans and a T-shirt all the time. When he was around, I wouldn’t have called the place gloomy or solemn, either. But that was then.
I sneaked a look over my shoulder, made sure Abe was out of sight, then opened the book again. Honestly. Resisting the temptation was like avoiding looking at a box of chocolates directly in front of me. Nobody was out book shopping on a dismal winter day like today. The Christmas shoppers all went to the big department stores in the nearby cities, not second-hand bookshops tucked into a corner off the high street of a small village in the middle of nowhere.
I had no reason to complain. I loved working with books. I didn’t have to make small talk with customers or push sales initiatives in their faces or deal with complaints. Admittedly, having complaints would require having customers. I dusted shelves every day, set up displays to look welcoming and interesting, and put up with Abe’s grumbling about my rearranging things, but each year brought fewer visitors.
Abe had offered me the assistant job after Dad’s death in a car accident, since he’d left his entire share of the shop to his former business partner. Even after three years, Abe still paid me a shade above minimum wage. Laney kept saying he was exploiting me, and maybe it was true, but I owed it to Dad to keep the place running. The shop had been his whole life.
“Aurora?” Abe called. “You’re not reading, are you?”
“Nope.” I closed the book again.
Abe was the only person who called me by my full name. I went by Rory to everyone else, but the boss kept a professional veneer even though he and my dad had been best friends and we’d known one another for most of my life. He and Dad might have been work partners, but they couldn't be more different personality-wise. We’d already had two arguments this week about Dad’s old journal. Abe had found it in the back room and I’d caught him tossing it in the bin. I’d protested, and he’d thrown up his hands and said fine, I was welcome to any of Dad’s old junk. I’d fished it out of the bin and opened it, expecting to find an account of my dad’s courtship with Mum or even his years running the bookshop. Instead, I’d found a bunch of gibberish.
Not only was the book written in a text I couldn’t read, it didn’t match up with any language I could find either—and I’d searched the entire bookshop for possible matches until Abe had informed me the whole thing was made-up. Writing a book in code and then losing the translator document was such a Dad thing to do, but it made the journal worthless, according to Abe. I still carried it everywhere with me, on the off-chance that I found the solution to the code stashed on a shelf somewhere.
I’d been coming into the shop since before I could read. Most of my childhood memories involved toddler-me waddling among the shelves, kid-me burying her face in a book for hours to escape the outside world after Mum died of cancer, and teen-me seeking solace in a corner where none of the school bullies could bother me. Now, adult-me sat here in the same spot I’d occupied for three years, contemplating yet another reread of the shop’s paltry collection of fantasy novels. Most of them were old coming-of-age tales of farm boys embarking on grand adventures and saving the world. My birthday had brought nothing of the kind. Then again, no twenty-five-year-old bookshop assistants got Hogwarts letters or mysterious prophecies or grand destinies. Shame, because most adults I knew were in dire need of a little magic in their lives. Abe being a prime example.
The door flew open. I jumped in my seat, startled. Normally a little bell rang when someone entered, but the three people who glided into the shop made no sound at all. If I hadn’t been looking at the door at that precise moment, I’d never have heard them enter.
One of them approached the counter. He had slick dark hair and a face as pale as a piece of carved white stone. Not a typical customer. He looked like one of the wax statues at Madame Tussauds had come to life and walked into the shop.
“Can I help you?” For some reason, I had the impulse to check my bag under the desk to make sure Dad’s journal was still there.
“I highly doubt you can,” he said, in a posh accent. Not only did he dress like he’d stepped out of a Victorian novel, he also talked like it.
As for his two companions—they were suddenly right behind him. How had they moved that fast? I definitely needed a break. I'd been working long shifts for so long I'd lost track of the days. No wonder my attention span was a little rusty.
“Were you looking for a book?” I asked, since he didn’t seem inclined to break the silence. “We have a large selection of—”
He smiled. His teeth were perfectly even and blindingly white. For a moment, his face blurred, showing me p
ointed canines. Then in another blink, he looked normal.
Normal? Nothing about these three men was normal. The other two moved closer, crowding my desk. Boxing me in.
I sat completely still. I should call Abe, but my throat was dry, and my mouth felt too numb to open. My sweaty fingers dug into the sides of my wooden chair.
“Yes,” said the man. “I was looking for a book. It belonged to a man named Roger Hawthorn.”
Dad. Had Dad known these men? “That’s my father,” I managed to say. “He died three years ago.”
“My condolences,” said the man. “Yes, I know he died. I’m looking for his journal.”
My heart missed a beat. “Excuse me?”
“Did you mishear?” He enunciated each word. “I’m looking for the journal that belonged to Roger Hawthorn.”
The journal’s weight in my rucksack pressed into my leg. I might not be able to read it, but I did not want to give it to him.
“Sorry, I don’t have it,” I lied. “We only sell books, not journals.”
“You’re lying,” he said, his words precise, certain. As though he’d looked into my mind and plucked my thoughts right out. Sweat gathered on the back of my neck, and my legs itched to run. I’d just celebrated my birthday, and I wanted to survive to see my next.
I opened my mouth to call Abe, and he shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “If you call your supervisor, Aurora, he won’t come. Trust me, it’ll be much easier if you hand me the book.”
I rested a trembling hand on the desk, my fingers snagging the book I’d left out on display, titled The Beginner’s Guide to Horticulture. It’d been there for years and nobody had ever bought it.
The waxwork man’s gaze dropped to my hand on the book and he took a step back. Fast. This time I couldn’t blame my tired eyes—he’d moved faster than any human being had the right to.
“Are you sure you won’t be persuaded to give up the journal?” he asked.
My hand remained clenched on the book. Something in his expression shifted. He raised a hand and I froze, but all he did was scatter a handful of something on the desk. It looked like… sand.
“You’ll regret your decision,” said the man, as calm and matter-of-fact as though we were chatting at the supermarket. “Remember my name. It’s Mortimer Vale.”
And in a blink, the three men were gone. Only the sound of the door closing behind them showed they’d been here at all.
You’re officially cracking up, Rory.
I stared at the fragments of sand scattered on the desk for an instant. Then I got up, grabbed the wastepaper basket, and used a piece of paper to brush the sand into it. Bits of sand clung to the paper. From this angle, they looked orange-red. Kind of like—
Fire.
The paper was on fire. So was the wastepaper basket. I dropped both with a cry of alarm, and the flames leapt perilously close to the desk.
“Aurora?” came Abe’s muffled voice from the back room.
This can’t be happening. Paper didn’t spontaneously burst into flames. I looked wildly around for a fire extinguisher. What had Abe done with it? We didn’t even have a working fire alarm.
An image filled my head, of the ornate bookshelves engulfed in flames. Of Dad’s legacy burning to the ground.
No. I backed up into the desk, knocking over the Beginner’s Guide to Horticulture. A pen rolled off the desk and I caught in on instinct, and a weird tingling sensation ran up my arm. At the same time, the Beginner’s Guide to Horticulture began to glow, its pages turning gold. Please tell me that’s not about to catch on fire, too.
A second shiver went up my arm, stronger than the last one. I froze, gripped by an uncontrollable urge to scream—no, write. The pen moved in my hand, scratching out my last desperate thought onto the open page of the record book—Stop!
The fire in the wastepaper basket went out, the flames vanishing from existence. I stared, stupefied. I couldn’t have done that. Scribbling the word stop on a page didn’t make fires go out.
Right?
I stood stock-still. The Beginner’s Guide to Horticulture was no longer glowing, the tingling in my arm had disappeared, and the lingering smell of flames from the wastepaper basket was the only reminder that it’d been on fire at all.
I jumped when the door at the back of the shop opened and Abe walked in. “What happened here, Aurora?” he asked. “What’s that smell?”
“A fire,” I gasped. “That paper—it caught fire. By itself. But it’s okay, the fire went out.”
His steps halted. “Caught fire? Were you playing with matches?”
“What? No.”
He strode over to the bin, peering into it. “Did you think you could smoke in this shop?”
“No,” I said. “Three men, strangers, they came into the shop.” If I said ‘I think they used magical sand to set the bin on fire’, he’d think I was bonkers. “They used a lighter,” I lied. “On the paper in the bin.”
“Three men?” He dropped the bin and marched over to the door, yanking it open. A cold blast of winter air rushed in, but nobody was outside. As I’d expected, the men had vanished, leaving no trace behind.
I swallowed as Abe let the door swing shut, his face stern, demanding an explanation.
“As I said, the fire went out. No harm done.” I didn’t sound convincing. My hands shook with tremors, while the word stop stood out on the page behind me like a brand. I felt lightheaded, too, as though I was about to faint.
He shook his head. “Aurora, there’s nobody outside.”
“They left a… minute ago.” And they’d moved impossibly fast. “I don’t smoke. And I’d never risk damaging the books.”
He paced back to the desk, eyeing the word stop on the record book’s open page. “Did you write this?”
I opened and closed my mouth. Abe knew my handwriting. There was no use feigning ignorance. “I…”
He ripped the page out of the record book. I flinched at the noise. “Aurora, I’ve made a lot of allowances for you. But this—” He threw the paper into the bin—“it won’t do at all.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “The men who came in said they were looking for Dad’s journal.”
His brows shot up. “Journal?”
“The one he gave me,” I said. “I don’t know why they wanted it.”
Abe shook his head vigorously. “Aurora, you’ve been working too many long hours. Nobody was here.”
“But the first man said he knew Dad—”
“Aurora.” The word was sharp. Cutting. “You’re clearly in no fit state to work today.”
My throat closed up. “It’s the truth.”
“Aurora, take a seat.”
That did not sound promising.
I walked behind the desk and sank into the chair. Dad’s journal bumped against my legs in my rucksack. I’d never have given it up to the strangers, but how could I convince Abe I wasn’t lying when every moment that passed made me less certain that I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing?
“Aurora, the last three years have been difficult for both of us.” Abe gave a pause, and I dipped my head in acknowledgement. “Since your father’s death… I admit, I didn’t expect him to leave the shop entirely to me. And I understand why you felt the need to take his place. But the truth is, I can barely afford to keep an assistant. And when you do things that damage our reputation…”
My heart beat so fast it nearly escaped my chest. I blinked repeatedly, and a glow caught my eye. The Beginner’s Guide to Horticulture’s pages shone, their white pages glowing golden from within.
I pointed at the book. “Do you see that?”
His gaze jumped to the book, then back to me. “What is it this time?”
“Do you not see it? It’s… glowing.” I trailed off. The glow was already dying down. Maybe I really was losing my mind.
Abe shook his head. “The truth is, your father would want you to strike out on your own,” he said. “He wouldn’t have wanted
you to stay here forever.”
But I want to.
He tried a smile which was more of a grimace. “I really think it’s for the best that I let you go.”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t—”
“We’ll discuss it tomorrow,” he said. “Go home, Aurora.”
Dismissed. No—fired. Fired. Like those flames, which had vanished into nothingness.
Who set fire to a bookshop? What kind of sick monster would do that? I’d never seen the waxwork-looking man before in my life, but he’d spoken like we knew one another or were in on a shared secret. And now, thanks to him, I’d lost my job.
Abe watched as I retrieved my rucksack, checking Dad’s journal was still there. What was so important that those men had felt the need to threaten me over it? I couldn’t even read it. Nobody could.
The bitter air wrapped around me as I left the shop, cutting through my thick cardigan. I shivered, hoisting my rucksack higher on my shoulders. I was jobless. How would I pay rent? Employers in a small town like this one didn’t care about my MA. I’d have to get a minimum wage job, in which case, I could say goodbye to my flat. I’d barely been able to pay the deposit as it was. Most of my friends had moved to Leeds or Manchester or Birmingham. Big cities with job opportunities. I’d only stayed here because of the shop, and now I’d lost it.
Tears froze on my cheeks. I wiped them away, reaching in my pocket for my keys—then stopped dead.
Three men stood outside my apartment block, looking up at the third floor. Specifically, at my window. It was the same men who’d been in the shop. I knew from their heights and the eerie way they stood. Absolutely still, like they were statues fused to the pavement.
