Witching Your Life Away: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 5)

by Constance Barker

  Just the bare glimmer of what he was thinking and feeling was enough to make Bailey’s own heart clench in her chest until she was nearly crying herself. Delbert was a beacon of regret and self loathing. It seethed in him, consuming his every thought. She had to take a step back and brace herself against the wall, and Ryan looked up at her, concerned.

  “I’m… I’ll be fine,” she said.

  He turned back to Delbert. “Tell me what you were doing,” Ryan said, “before it happened. What were the two of you talking about? Why did you go down to the Caves?”

  Delbert sucked in unsteady breaths and waved a hand like it didn’t matter. “No reason. We were hanging out. We had a couple of beers. Not too many, you know just… we had a day off together. We got to talking about High School. That we wished we’d gone to college.” He shook his head again and rubbed his eyes with his palms. “We, ah… we started talking about a girl. Robin Partridge. She moved away in senior year. I was sweet on her but… couldn’t ever get up the courage, you know?”

  His face smoothed a little, and paled. “Uh… Bobby he… he didn’t know that I liked her, you know? I hadn’t told anyone. She was kind of a spitfire and she asked him out and, well, it wasn’t like Bobby could say no to a pretty girl. I was so jealous. I was angry…” he stared at the wall of the cell until his eyes shut tight, tears trickling down his cheeks and around his nose. “It was years ago. It didn’t matter anymore. But we were walking down toward the caves. And… I got so angry… furious. Like it just happened but it was so… intense.”

  “The gun,” Bailey said, her voice so taut it came out almost less than a whisper. “The old gun.”

  Ryan nodded that he’d heard her. “Why did you have a gun with you?” he asked. “Why did you bring it to the caves, Delbert?”

  Delbert snorted. “I didn’t bring it with me I… we stopped at the antique shop. The old man talked me into it. A gift, he said. Some civil war antique with some made up story, but… I thought maybe Grandpa would like it.”

  Well, that was curious. Bailey opened her mind just a little more, but most of Delbert’s thoughts were lost in a torrent of confusion. He wasn’t sure what was real, it seemed.

  “I didn’t even realize I was pointing it until I pulled the trigger,” Delbert whispered. “And then… and he… the damn thing shouldn’t have even worked.”

  Ryan pulled a pad of paper out from his coat pocket and clicked a pen, and began to scribble. Bailey couldn’t read his chicken scratch from over his shoulder. Probably, though, he was thinking the same thing she was. Why had Mr. Dove given someone a live, loaded gun? Maybe he hadn’t known… and of course it wasn’t as though he’d pulled the trigger.

  The guard left his station and started toward them. Their time was up, it seemed. Bailey bit her lip, and opened her mind enough to get at Delbert’s deeper thoughts.

  Her blood chilled when she heard what was there. Deep down, Delbert was replaying the moment before it happened, over and over again. She even got flashes of what he was thinking, of raising the gun, of that anger and jealousy, juvenile and explosive.

  And whispers. They were in his mind like white noise behind the memory. Vicious, quiet voices urging him on, arguing with him, telling him that Bobby had known, and had done it to hurt him, that he’d never liked Delbert, that he was just Bobby’s ugly friend that made him look better by being around…

  Bailey slammed the door shut. An oily feeling was still in her own mind, and it made her sick to her stomach. She had to swallow several times to keep from emptying it. “We’re done,” she said to Ryan, and to the guard as he crossed his arm over his chest and waited for them.

  Ryan looked up at Bailey, and then to the Guard, and tucked his pad away. “Certainly. Ah… thank you for speaking with us Delbert. I… I’m sorry you have to go through this.”

  The guard led them away, and back into the main station. “Sheriff says Mike Lawrence is almost processed. Wait here.”

  They did, sitting in the uncomfortable chairs near the door to the jail.

  Ryan rested a hand on Bailey’s back. “Are you alright?”

  “No,” Bailey said. “I’m not.”

  “If you got what you needed, maybe we don’t need to talk with Michael,” he told her.

  Bailey took several shaky breaths and shook her head. “No. I can do it. I have to know.”

  “He said he got his gun from Mr. Dove,” Ryan said. “Do you think it’s significant?”

  It was impossible to think that Mr. Dove might have given someone a live weapon on purpose, but she couldn’t just ignore it, either. “I don’t know,” she told her father. “But I’ll find out.”

  Chapter 9

  Michael’s story was similar in theme, and just as difficult to hear. When they were kids, Tori’s father and Michael’s mother worked for the same engineering firm just over the border in Washington. They had worked on a project together, but when it came time to make cuts the firm kept Seth Bolton and let Amelia Lawrence go.

  While Seth got a raise and moved his family into a nicer house, and put Tori into private school, Amelia never managed to get a job as nice as that one, and ended up working for the county at a huge pay cut. She and her husband had to sell their house and move into a smaller one, and Amelia had never quite managed to stop resenting Tori’s father for not sticking up for her and helping her keep her job. Who knew what had actually happened, but the result was that Michael had born a resentment for Tori’s family at the time.

  Over thirty years later, he’d been meeting her for a drink as they’d been talking recently. Afterward, they took a walk, and ended up at the Caves. “All I could think about,” Michael had said in that hollow voice that Delbert had spoken with, the voice of disbelief and a shattered sense of self, “was that if not for her father’s choices I might have had the life she had. My mother might not have felt like she wasted her life working a crap job that she hated and… it just got worse and worse until…”

  And, again, Bailey had endured the depths of his mind, the images of his hands around Tori’s neck, and the whispers. The terrible whispers.

  That time, though, she saw something else. Something that she should have caught before.

  There was a shadow.

  Now, she and Ryan drove back toward the library, and Bailey’s mind was racing as she sat in the passenger seat, arms folded, knees drawn up to her chest. She stared silently out the window but didn’t really see Coven Grove passing them by.

  Ryan gave her that, let her keep her thoughts to herself, until they parked near the bakery. “These shadows,” Ryan said when they stopped, “you think they’re the cause of this?”

  “I don’t know,” Bailey said. “It’s an instinct. I’ve seen them before, when Aria was trying to teach me astral projection.”

  “Astral projection?” Ryan wondered.

  Bailey nodded, and turned her face toward him. “Yeah it’s… leaving the body to become aware of other planes of activity that are close to ours. There are a lot of them, maybe an infinite number. I haven’t gone very far since that day, because… well, anyway, it’s possible to get sort of lost. So I don’t do it without one of the coven ladies there. But I think that if I go back, I might be able to take another look. If I can see them, see what they’re doing, then maybe I can tell who they’re going to harass next.”

  “Is it safe?” Ryan asked quietly. He reached for her with a soft, thin hand and she took it.

  There was no sense in lying to him at this point. “No,” she said, “not entirely. But if I’m right then it’s the only sure way to keep watch.”

  His face hardened, and his eyes grew wet. “Can you promise me that you’ll be careful, at least?”

  She leaned over the console between them and hugged her father. “I’ll try,” she whispered as they held one another.

  “I love you, Bailey-Bee,” Ryan said. “I couldn’t survive if I lost you, too.”

  There were no real assurances she could give him o
n that count, so she didn’t. Instead she kissed his forehead, and after another moment she left.

  Inside the bakery, Francis, Aria, and Chloe were seeing to the after-work crowd, and gave her only cursory nods and waves as she went behind the counter and headed into the attic. Consulting the notes that she’d made with Aria, she set up the space for astral projection, and then filled Aiden and Avery both in on what she intended.

  Predictably, they both messaged her back with warnings and insistence that she wait for them, that she be careful, that there was no certainty this was the right course of action. Any moment she expected one or both of them to come into the bakery demanding to see her. It was something she had to do, though, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they did.

  She only waited long enough for one of the ladies, Francis, to come up the stairs and check on her.

  When she explained herself, Francis set her fists on her hips and scowled. “That’s a damn fool thing to do.”

  “I know,” Bailey said.

  Francis glowered at her a moment longer, and then threw her hands up. “Let me get Aria. Don’t run off.”

  Bailey smiled as Francis left her and then hugged herself as she calmed her nerves. How could she not have seen it sooner? Things moving in the corner of her eyes, slipping away when she wasn’t looking—it should have been the first thing she thought of; but of course, there had been plenty of distraction.

  Well, there wouldn’t be anymore. She was going to live in the astral plane if she had to, until she figured this out.

  The witches took shifts with her, but when they insisted, during the breaks Bailey took to eat and drink, that she take a break and sleep, she refused. By the end of the first day, she had trouble walking.

  Navigating the astral planes was a matter of willpower and clarity of intention. As soon as Bailey focused on a particular detail, she moved toward it. If she let her mind wander, she could find herself drifting any random direction—or worse, zooming across town to find Aiden or Avery or Piper, or whoever happened to cross her mind. They didn’t show up clearly in the astral plane, although their auras were there in vaguely accurate shapes.

  The longer she spent there, the more she learned about subtle differences. Time, for one thing, seemed to mean something in the astral plane, or at least the lower astral. The only buildings that showed up there were the oldest ones, and mostly only those that were or had been at some point homes. Newer buildings hadn’t been around long enough, or been infused with enough living energy, the way a home was over time, to show up. But the trees and shrubs and sometimes even the land itself was still there, faded and weakening now that the physical world had changed.

  By the second day, she’d become a pro at moving around. While she was there, she wasn’t tired. Thoughts and feelings were raw substances in the astral, and while her body kept her tethered to some extent, she didn’t experience any of its needs while she was out. More than once, Aria and Chloe warned her that this didn’t mean her body did not have those needs—just that she wasn’t in it long enough to feel them. It was dangerous. Forty eight hours was the absolute cut off as far as they were concerned.

  Bailey was willing to take as much time as it required.

  Aiden and Avery both came by at different times. Aiden brought her food, but had to leave it with someone downstairs. Which was just as well. The last thing Bailey wanted was a lecture from him. Avery was allowed upstairs when he visited—he was there a few times when she came back—but he knew better than to argue with her when she was set on a course.

  By the end of the second night, every return to her body was exhausting, and she almost immediately began to drift off as soon as she felt solid again.

  And then, it happened.

  Aria was with her, ghost-like and as watchful as she was, when they both noticed it at the same moment. There, off over the north side of town—just a flicker of shadows in a featureless picture with no real light or shadow. The astral plane was illuminated by it’s own existence, which at times made it difficult to see details from any distance; it made seeing the shadows very easy when they appeared.

  Speaking from the astral was a trick Bailey hadn’t managed to pick up. So instead, she relayed the information to Aria as she followed them. Aria couldn’t go with her—she had to stay near her body in order to relay the message, which was why Francis had insisted on Bailey having a partner in the first place. But, through the astral, speaking to Aria was as simple as speaking to her in person.

  She flashed across town, popping around from place to place in a crooked path as she followed the patches of darkness. They didn’t seem to have an origin, exactly—they emerged from all over, but they were all headed to the same place.

  Bailey followed at a distance. The last time she’d encountered them, they’d terrified her into the far astral before she’d realized where she was heading, and though she was moderately more adept now she didn’t trust herself not to think of escape at the wrong moment.

  They slid across the luminous landscape like oil, things of vague shape—arms, heads, torsos, but all of it transient and shifting. They ultimately sank through the outside of a house that Bailey knew she’d seen before, probably driving past it once in awhile. She followed, relaying her position to Aria in the strange, direct way of astral communication—a kind of open line of information in the absence of mouths and throats to speak with. She felt Aria confirm—she’d conveyed it to the others.

  “Not the caves,” Bailey thought to herself and felt herself drift toward the Caves before she righted herself and pushed in toward the house.

  The reason there had been so many shadows converging became more apparent when she hit the outside of the house. There was something holding her back, making her descent through the roof of the place difficult. As she conveyed this to Aria, the older witch’s thoughts came to her—this house was someone’s home, their sanctuary. It had a kind of natural barrier to keep spiritual forces, or a person without a body, at bay.

  Bailey gave up the effort and backed off. The shadows were getting in. How? She slipped around the side of the place and saw where they were entering, one after the other. It made a kind of… crack. Like nearly broken glass, fine lines spread out from the point where they entered. Once the last one had passed through, she told Aria she was going in.

  Aria’s warning to stay back for now fell on deaf ears—or, whatever she had in place of them here. Bailey charged the spot, and felt herself squeezed tightly as she passed through the crack. Her vision blurred and warped, until finally she found herself inside the place. It appeared empty—whatever furniture was here was probably too new to show up.

  The tail end of one of the shadows flitted up the stairs, and Bailey followed a room that was empty of furniture like everything else, but where a softly glowing, greenish aura was resting, very much like the shape of someone sitting down.

  The shadows swirled around it… no, around some part of it—and she realized that the room wasn’t really empty. Clear as day, as solid to her as they would have been in the physical world, was a pair of slippers. They were white, and made of silk. Ballet slippers, she decided, and they were resting in what would have been the lap of the person sitting down.

  Her line to Aria was gone. Bailey tried to reach out, but felt almost as though she were in a small room. The threshold of the house was keeping her thoughts contained, perhaps—which made her wonder if she could leave. She focused her thoughts back on the shadows when she started to zoom toward the wall, and quickly tried to decide what she could do.

  Magic in the astral was out of the question; she wasn’t even sure if she could make anything happen inside the barrier of the home. So instead she gathered her will, focusing until she felt a vague sort of sensation of shape rather than the amorphous cloud of awareness she had been, steeled her nerves, and reached out for the slippers.

  Her fingers passed through them, and left a shock of cold behind that made her recoil.

  Th
e shadows, however, stopped. When they did, she could see the distant reflections of eyes. They were aware of her, and she very nearly fled; she even felt the sudden jolt of movement that would have taken her right into the far astral had she not steadied herself.

  Rather than come after her, however, the shadows suddenly became a whirlwind of activity. She could hear, in a distant sort of way, a kind of white noise of whispers—the same kind of cacophony she’d heard in Delbert and Michael’s memories. This was it—this was what the shadows did, urging and insisting until…

  The aura stood, and moved past Bailey, out into the hall. She followed, panicking, and saw another aura, shades of orange and blue, taller, and more radiant, coming up the stairs.

  The whispering grew louder, or sharper—no longer soft white noise but the harsh buzzing of thousands of bees.

  The greenish aura shifted, began to darken, color leaching from it in splotches that made it look almost dirty until it began to approach the brighter, taller one. Bailey could feel the intention as clearly as if she’d read the person’s mind. It was all wrong—they were supposed to have time—they should have gone to the caves, shouldn’t they?

  She had to do something. So she did the only thing she could come up with in the moment. She charged.

  Astral beings can’t interact directly with physical beings; but the shadows seemed to be somehow native or otherwise more present in the astral plane. Bailey passed through the sickening aura of the person they had gathered around—but she struck the shadows as though they were solid.

  It was a rush of cold and thunder. She swatted at them like flies. They dodged, went after their quarry again, and she grabbed them up like sheets and pulled them away. They were flimsy, two dimensional. Not strong, but they thrashed and wiggled and squirmed out of her grip.

  They were distracted, however—or at least, some of them were. The whispering quieted somewhat as some of the voices were silenced, and the more focused on the effort Bailey became, the more solid she felt her shape become. Whatever these were, they weren’t supported by anything in the physical world. They were projections from somewhere distant, and couldn’t compete with Bailey. No wonder there were so many of them. They had to team up to be heard.