by Willow Mason
“And it’s taken this long for him to tell you he was murdered?” Patrick took the revelation in his stride. “What’s different about this morning?”
“I don’t know.” Pru clenched her hands into fists, her jaw tightening into stark relief. “Up until today, he didn’t even seem to know he was dead. Now, he’s fully aware, and he’s not at all happy.”
Pru’s face collapsed into uncertainty. “He didn’t say,” she said after a long pause.
Looks like we weren’t the only ones to overlook the obvious question. “You said he joins you every morning?” I asked, pulling my phone out and opening a notes app. Pru nodded. “What’s your address? We’ll drop by tomorrow with some equipment and ask him ourselves.”
“Would you?” She relaxed in the chair, sporting a relieved expression. “Honestly, that would be wonderful. I was scared no one would believe me and I’d have to sort everything out myself.”
“Why wouldn’t we believe you?” Patrick asked.
I kept a straight face, grateful that Annalisa appeared to have sent the thought only to me.
“You can count on us,” I said, channelling my most reassuring voice. “It’ll be quite a novelty to be able to interview the victim.”
“Just don’t upset him,” she said, standing, her face whitening. “He got a bit angry this morning and I don’t think I could take it if he stayed that way.”
I left Patrick in charge of prepping for our home visit to Pru’s the following morning and walked to the café. Paisley popped her head out occasionally to remind me she disapproved of me taking the slowest form of transport possible but ducked down when I reached the entrance.
Inside, there was a solid queue of people, with one old man at the front staring helplessly at the array of options available. Judging from the frustrated expression of the rest of the queue, he’d been making up his mind for a while.
If it had been just me, I might have abandoned ship right there, but I didn’t need Paisley adding another complaint to her internal list. Instead, I readied myself for a long wait and stared out the window.
The dentist office Patrick had roped into being clients had a beautiful window display. It showcased an old-fashioned dial phone in a cosy nook that seemed pulled straight from the seventies. Fluorescent green warred with acid yellow in a chaotic battle that made me feel nostalgic for an era I hadn’t even lived in.
We’d just shuffled one person closer to the counter when a group of people spilled out the store. One young man stumbled to his knees, and a couple lifted him under the armpits until he could stand again.
Their faces were uniformly horrified, a mix of gaping mouths, sodden eyes, and slack jaws. The same expressions that people pulled from the wreckage of a car accident would wear.
A man in his twenties walked out the door, either unaffected or so used to whatever had just happened that he could fake it. He tried to shove a card into each fleeing customer’s hand, but they pushed him away.
As he turned back to the store, shoulders slumping, a large black bird swung down from overhead. Its caw marked it as a foreigner—sharp and dissonant, unlike the soft songs that most native birds used to serenade each other.
One woman shrieked as it divebombed her, pulling up just before contact, leaving a feather floating down to land on the shoulder of her T-shirt. The bird zoomed upward, then circled in the air, before selecting a new target.
It fell out of the sky so fast I imagined the shrill cry of a Stuka scream. Just above the scattering group, it flung its talons out and scraped a thin line of pain on a tall man’s cheek.
Every muscle in my body stiffened, frozen in a war between running to help and sprinting away. When a lady near the front of the queue called out, “I’m a first aider,” and exited the store, I could breathe again.
Crisis averted. There was a grown-up in charge.
“Biggest blackbird I’ve ever seen,” the man in front of me said. “I hope it didn’t have rabies.”
“We don’t get rabies in New Zealand,” the server said.
“Until now.”
After witnessing the exchange, I kind of agreed.
With the ditherer out of the way, the queue began to move, and soon I was the one stood in front of the cabinet. Luckily, my wait meant I knew exactly what I wanted. “Two large cruffins and a chocolate éclair, please.”
The friendly blonde, nametag Brianna, opened a paper bag and grabbed her tongues out of the steriliser. “Chocolate or—”
Her words cut off and her face turned blank. I gave a polite laugh and nodded. “No, the Earl Grey,” but she didn’t respond. Her gaze became so unfocused she was close to having walleyes. I waved a hand an inch from her, but she didn’t flinch.
“Something’s coming,” she whispered, as I pulled out my phone to call an ambulance. “A murderer is coming. She shouldn’t have disturbed the—”
Brianna gasped and stepped back, shaking her head. She laughed, a sound with no merriment in it. “Sorry about that. My mind wandered for a second.”
“You were about to—”
“Earl Grey, then. That’ll be eleven dollars fifty.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? It looked like you had a seizure.”
“Right as rain.” Her eyes sparkled as she pushed the full to bursting paper bag towards me. “You’re not going to eat them all at once, are you?”
Instead of answering, I shrugged and passed my card across.
“Sorry, it’s been declined,” she said, turning the machine screen around to show me. “Do you have cash?”
I took the refused card back, feeling silly when I saw it was a Prezzy Card with only a few dollars left on the balance. “Just a sec.”
My reassurance came before I saw the credit card slot in my wallet was empty. One peek into my tote bag told me I’d have a fight on my hands if I wanted to dig around with the cat on board.
“There’s quite a queue, so if you could hurry,” Brianna replied, losing some of her twinkle.
I snuck my hand around the side of the black cat, giving a humph of relief as I felt the hard edges of my Mastercard. The transaction mercifully completed the second time, and I emerged from the bakery with my prize in hand.
Paisley popped her head out of the tote, a disapproving expression on her face.
An hour later, I wiped the crumbs off the side of my mouth and sat back, patting my stretching belly. At my next lesson, I should ask Hadyn Malone, my magic teacher, a good spell for burning off excess calories. He’d probably tell me to take up jogging, but a girl can dream, can’t she?
Pouring a large glass of water, as though that would offset my unhealthy lunch, I leant over to give our new familiar a tickle.
Nice to have you here, too. I hurriedly cloaked the words behind a mound of gibberish and tongue twisters, purposely avoiding Annalisa’s eye in case her amusement jostled the retort out. “Did you enjoy the cruffin?”
Right. Another feline to boss me around in my own home. I sipped my drink and stared out to the street just in time to see my aunt arrive, retrieving a stack of Tupperware from her back seat.
“What’s this? Have you been baking?”
“Don’t be silly. These are ingredients for potions.” Aunt Florentine swept past me and deposited the kitchenware on my counter, elbowing aside the few dishes I hadn’t yet got around
to cleaning. “Shouldn’t you make a start on those?”
I pursed my lips, waving my mug as though it gave me a reprieve.
“Come on, girl. After going to all the trouble of arranging magic lessons for you, it’d be nice to see you put them to use.”
The lessons had seemed like a treat. Learning how to use my newly amplified powers to perform simple rituals to improve my daily life. That was before I found out how much concentration it took to get even the simplest of spells right.
All the other witches in class had the benefit of growing up in households where magic had been applied at will. Each one of them had picked up more by osmosis than I had managed with six weeks of applied effort.
The big things I could handle. The small, finicky things I’d most looked forward to learning had turned out to be more taxing than I’d ever imagined. Washing the dishes was a nuisance as a physical chore—as a magic spell, it sapped my energy and willpower like an 4K video drained a low battery.
But my aunt was grumble-proof. I drained the last of my cup and set to the task of washing the dishes. Lifting each item, using magic energy to scrub away every trace of food and drink, then ensuring it made the journey to its final resting place intact soon left me needing another cup of coffee.
Or ten.
I stretched out the muscles in my back once the last spoon clinked into the cutlery drawer. “Are you sure there isn’t a shortcut? This all feels impossible to keep track of.”
“The shortcut is repeating the exercise until it becomes second nature. Once you grow the muscle memory, it’ll stay, and you can move onto far bigger and more exotic things.”
“Like the spells I’ve already used.” Although I muttered the words under my breath, my aunt heard me. Of course. If I hadn’t wanted her to, I would’ve kept them locked in my head.
“Just because you went whizz bang pizzazz as soon as you got your training wheels, doesn’t invalidate these small lessons. You’ll be grateful in the end.”
With a sigh, I reached over and smoothed down her lapel. “I’m grateful now. Just tired and grumpy, too.”
I jerked my chin at the pile of Tupperware. “Anything in there for getting rid of poltergeists?”
My aunt shrugged, her attention already propelling ahead on her gigantic to-do list. “Use the library. After spending all that time and effort getting it open, it would be a waste not to use it at every opportunity.”
Fair enough. As she departed, I checked out the stock of potion ingredients, wincing at the labels. Hopefully, eye of newt meant nothing more than some type of weird seed or I’d need the vom bucket before I got casting using that particular item.
Chapter Three
“Spirit, poltergeist, ghost, echo, or apparition?” I read out to Patrick. “Apparently, they’re all uniquely different things.”
“Of course, they are.” He turned in a circle, staring at a library shelf with a strange intensity. When it scuttled aside a moment later, I understood why. The library wasn’t just full of books and old artefacts, parts of it were alive.
“Don’t do anything to upset the shelf and it’ll leave you alone.” I pulled him away when he stayed fixed to the spot.
“How am I supposed to know what makes a shelf angry?”
A good question. “If you avoid overstacking it, things should be fine. Now concentrate.” I snapped my fingers in front of his nose.
“Just check out the volumes you need so we can get out of here.” Patrick shifted his weight from foot to foot. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“Not calling all the animated parts of the library creepy could be a good way to avoid upsetting them.” I sighed and showed him the passage in the encyclopaedia. “First, we have to know which flavour of undead person we’re dealing with, then I’ll be able to work out what books we should check out.”
“If Pru’s worried about Andrew getting angry, I’m going to say poltergeist.” He took the book out of my hand and quickly scanned the entries. “She wouldn’t be scared of something without a physical presence.”
“They’re all physical. It’s just a matter of degree.”
“Get everything, then.” He sidled closer to me as the shelf scampered sideways. “Anything to ensure we don’t have to pay another visit.”
I followed his lead and checked out a stack of books that seemed fitting. A spell learned at school soon had the volumes reading themselves aloud to us as we drove back to my house.
“It sounds like he was an echo,” I said, pulling into the curb outside my house. “Following a routine every day until he changed into something more malevolent.”
“So a spell to change him back might be all we need.”
I laughed at Patrick’s optimism, walking through the open front door that hadn’t managed to sort out its own security. “If that was all it took, I’m sure Pru would be more than capable of handling it herself.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“She just ate a few hours ago.”
I stared at the two felines, not sure if this was a hill I wanted to die on. “You’re going to have to start contributing to the household finances if you keep eating this way,” I said in surrender. “I certainly can’t afford this on a single person’s salary.”
“You’re taking a salary?” Patrick’s mouth fell open. “Since when?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” I hurriedly assured him, trying to remember if the work kitty and the household kitty had ever crossed paths. “And you said we could draw funds out as soon as we got another client.”
“Pru isn’t a client until we’ve agreed on payment terms and issued an invoice.”
“Details, details.”
“The kind which ensures you end up getting paid.”
I ignored him for a minute, setting a couple of replenished bowls onto the floor and adding the old ones into a new stack of dishes—a pile that would horrify Aunt Florentine if she came back.
Once Annalisa sat back on her haunches, the initial onslaught on her food over, I asked, “What did you mean about Pru being mentally ill?”
Nope. Even the deepest crevices in my mind held nothing. “Do you mean she’s depressed? If my fiancé died, I’d get that way.”
I relayed the information to Patrick. “Hardly evidence. She might’ve been streaking because her favourite rugby team was in town.”
“That doesn’t even make sense. Who gets ticketed in Briarton? It’s not like the main road is packed bumper to bumper.”
“How long ago was this?” Patrick asked when I dutifully kept him up to date.
“Eccentric, I guess.” Patrick shrugged. “Still, it didn’t seem like she was lying.”
“Poltergeists can be dangerous if provoked,” the nearest library book recited with unca
nny timing. “If you have one active in your house, an exorcism is the only sure way to prevent damage.”
“An exorcism? I don’t think so.” Patrick hefted his cardboard box of tricks onto the kitchen table and began sorting through the machinery. “We needn’t call in the clergy until we’ve had a chance to evaluate the situation ourselves.”
I pulled the book close and silently read through the passage. “It’s not talking about a religious ritual. This appears to be something witches can do.”
Annalisa and I stared at Paisley in shock. “When was this?”
She coughed into her paw as though I should be aware of the matter she was delicately avoiding.
“And it worked?”
The cat stalked out of the room, preening a little under the attention. I couldn’t wait to find out her story and made a note to call Genevieve later if she didn’t remember to fill me in herself.
“This is what we need,” Patrick—blissfully unaware—announced, holding up a device that looked like a remote control welded to a metal detector. “This will track down an evil spirit even if it’s hiding under a mountain of camouflage.”
“Do poltergeists dress in camouflage?” I asked idly, barely listening.
My phone rang, Genevieve’s name popping up on the screen, and I excused myself, moving to the hallway. “I hope this is about Paisley because that’s one cat with a gigantic Violet-shaped chip on her shoulder.”
