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

by Constance Barker

  She knew what Riley’s frustration looked like when he didn’t have the words, and he showed it now, his face distressed as he squirmed and looked around, as if searching for some way to put his thoughts into words.

  Chloe came near, and knelt as well. “I might be able to help, if you give me your permission,” she said.

  “Look in his head, you mean?” Piper asked.

  Chloe nodded.

  God, the thought terrified her. She knew, of course, that Chloe would never intentionally harm her son. But it was just more magic. More magic touching him.

  On the other hand, how else had he freed her mind?

  It finally hit her, hard.

  Riley had magic. He would have to, in order to have done what he did.

  It didn’t matter if she left or not. Magic would go wherever Riley went. She couldn’t help but look at William, who was asleep in Aria’s gently bouncing arms.

  “Um,” Piper said, her throat dry, “yes. Okay… just, be careful with him.”

  “I will,” Chloe assured her. “I promise. I won’t do anything to harm him. Okay?”

  Piper just nodded, and gave Chloe some space.

  Riley flinched at her touch, but Chloe whispered to him, and he settled. Chloe closed her eyes, and so did Riley, and Piper held her breath.

  No one spoke, or moved, while Chloe did whatever it was she was doing, for long minutes. Finally, as if sensing her growing trepidation—and, maybe she was—Bailey moved closer to Piper and leaned in. “She’s navigating his memories,” she said, “guiding him to them. Children’s minds are… sort of difficult. They don’t have the same kinds of ordered thoughts we do. And at his age, they’re mostly images and feelings and things he might not be able to make sense of. It takes time.”

  “Is it… painful or confusing or—”

  “I don’t think so,” Bailey said confidently.

  At least she hadn’t lied with absolute assurances. “Probably,” Bailey went on, “he’s experiencing the event again, but with Chloe to help him block out everything except what he actually did.”

  “I’d rather you have done it,” Piper whispered.

  Bailey shook her head, though. “Chloe is better at this than me; she’s been doing it longer. Trust her, Piper. She’s a mother, too. She knows how scared you must be.”

  That was some comfort. It was easy to forget that Chloe was Bailey’s mother. They didn’t act much like mother and daughter, but then… well, maybe the window for that had passed. She put an arm around Bailey’s waist, and Bailey in turn tugged her close with an arm around her shoulder, and they waited.

  Some minutes later, Chloe removed her fingertips from Riley’s temples and face, and moved away slowly, opening her eyes. “He’s a remarkable child,” she breathed as she looked up at Piper. She turned her attention to Bailey then. “Come here.”

  Bailey did, and Piper watched as Chloe beckoned her close and brought Riley’s hands to Bailey’s head.

  “Just like I showed you,” Chloe whispered, and laid one hand on Bailey’s head, and one on Riley’s. “I’ll be with you the whole way.”

  Riley still hadn’t opened his eyes, but his face pinched again when Chloe spoke to him.

  Piper’s heart pounded. She checked Aiden and Avery’s faces to see if they were worried as well. Both of them looked… tense. Francis looked grim, but then she always did. Aria focused her attention on William.

  She almost called it off. Nothing was happening, and Riley’s face grew more and more distressed. She took a step forward, “Okay, I think—”

  Bailey shook. Just once, as if she’d been stung, or had a spasm, or been startled. She rocked back, away from Riley’s hands, until she sat down. Both of her hands came to her head and she seemed to be dizzy or dazed—just like Piper had been.

  Riley’s little body sagged visibly, but he opened his eyes. A moment later, he looked sleepy but otherwise none the worse for wear. He focused his eyes on Bailey, though, and gave a squeal of delight. “Bay-dee! Bay-dee!”

  Bailey struggled to her feet.

  “Bails?” Piper asked. “Are you…?”

  “This,” Bailey said slowly, and swallowed hard, “is bad.” She turned, and hugged Piper, and then addressed the rest of them.

  “Piper is right,” she said. “It all makes sense now. I know that you won’t want to believe, but you have to just ignore your instincts for the moment. All of us have been affected. And I don’t have any doubts left about who did it.”

  As if they couldn’t predict what she was going to say next, tension filled the bodies of the witches, wizards, and even Ryan.

  Bailey took Piper’s hand and squeezed it. “There is absolutely a faerie in Coven Grove,” she said. “And Piper’s right; it’s Mr. Dove. It has to be.”

  Chapter 20

  With both Bailey and Piper to convince them, and everyone in agreement that when they attempted to remember specific details of Mr. Dove’s history in Coven Grove, the others weren’t entirely convinced—but they had to admit one by one that it was a strange thing and they were unqualified to argue against it.

  “It’s the nature of the glamour,” Bailey told Piper when her friend became agitated with everyone. “Riley’s too young to lift it off of everyone, even with Chloe’s help.”

  “Fine,” Piper said, glancing at her drowsy-eyed son. “So, now that we know… what do we do?”

  Bailey grimaced and combed her fingers through her hair as she blew out a long breath. “That… I’m not sure about.”

  “What use is knowing, then?” Piper all but fell into a chair. “If Mr. Dove could make me almost… just think of the damage he could do here.”

  “The damage he’s already done,” Bailey said. “Two murders and another attempted one. All of them crimes of passion.”

  “And they may not even have known what they were doing in the beginning,” Piper said slowly, eyes searching something in her memory.

  “What?” Bailey asked when Piper gave a small gasp.

  “I don’t know if it’s important or not,” she said, “the whole thing is sort of… there but like a dream. But I was walking toward a specific place. I can’t really describe it… but I knew I would know it when I saw it. It was… well, it was out in the water. But it wasn’t general—I could feel a specific point I had to reach.”

  Aiden made a small noise of curiosity, and shared a look with Avery. Bailey looked expectantly at the wizards, but it was Frances who answered for them.

  “Ley lines,” she said. “That would explain why some of the murders happened in, or at least near the Caves, while others happened further away.”

  “Ley lines?” Piper asked.

  “Currents of power under the ground,” Bailey explained. “Several of them converge on the caves.”

  “They do a lot more than that,” Aiden said quietly. “They are integral to how the spell was created.”

  “And how would you know that, wizard?” Frances asked.

  Aiden gave a long suffering sigh. “I don’t wish to alarm you, Miss Cold, but I have done quite a bit of study on the Caves to date—these, and those in other places. I’m an academic. I can hardly help myself.”

  Frances only glowered, perhaps careful not to confirm or deny anything for him.

  So Aiden went on. “The Caves indeed house a convergence of several ley lines in the region. Each one has a sort of polarity, if you will. The energy in them circulates in one direction. At the convergence, some lines feed energy in, while others feed energy going out. The Genius Loci of the caves is, I hypothesize”—he cast a pointed look at Frances—“intimately tied to that convergence point. It would have to be, really, to sustain itself. It then plays a role in the nature of the energy leaving the cave and can use the ley lines going in as a source of fuel, if you will, while the lines going out are something like… communication channels.”

  “The bakery is atop one of them,” Chloe said, “an outgoing line, so that we have access to the magic of th
e Caves. It’s why the workshop is here, upstairs.”

  “Chloe Minds!” Frances snapped. “Why would you—”

  “Calm down, Frances,” Chloe sighed. “We’re past the point where we can afford to keep so many secrets.” She settled her eyes on Bailey with that.

  Bailey smiled, just a little, at the sense of agreement and even approval flowing toward her from her mother. She hoped Chloe was listening, and felt her appreciation of it.

  “I’m sorry if I’m the only dumb one in the room,” Piper said, raising her hand, “but everything you just said may as well have been spoken backwards in Latin and Greek.”

  “You are what you eat,” Bailey told her. “If it wasn’t possible to have more killings take place in the Caves, I think what Aiden is saying is that having them take place on the ingoing ley lines—the lines that feed the Caves—is the next best thing. Is that right?” She asked the last to Aiden, who nodded.

  “They would be located in specific points,” Avery supplied. “We… know where most of them are. There’s one that comes in through the ocean. It originates from an underwater volcano, way out in the Pacific. Raw, terrestrial magic from the core of the world.”

  “There is another that passes under Nancy and Candi’s house,” Aiden said. “Around the area of the living room, which may be where she was headed to finish the job.”

  “If the killings were to take place there,” Chloe said, “it would be a little like a chemical spill into a river. Violent events like that have a kind of echo that gets swept up by the power of the lines, and when it gets to the convergence in the Caves, you might say the Spirit of the Caves experiences what happened.”

  “It dies a little,” Bailey finished.

  “So every time something happens on a ley line,” Piper said flatly, “it gets… circulated around? Wouldn’t that happen all the time, just by accident? Animals out in the woods must die constantly, much less car accidents, suicides, heart attacks—”

  “Every once in awhile,” Aiden said, “but if you eat just a little arsenic it only makes you a bit unwell. It doesn’t kill you until you take a lot of it in a short enough time.”

  Piper’s eyes widened a little bit with understanding. “Alright… so, what’s the fatal dosage?”

  “That is a problem,” Avery said. “We have no way to know.”

  “It’ll be more than seven, though,” Ryan said.

  Everyone turned to look at him. Ryan cleared his throat, and tapped his little notepad. “Way back in the day, there were seven murders in Coven Grove. Fairly close to one another, too. All in odd places around town and some of them in the Caves.”

  “Of course,” Avery exclaimed, pointing. “Of course! How did I not think of that before?”

  “There were nine events around the caves in Cresswell before they failed,” Aiden said. “But given that these caves are the last of the network that we know to be active… it’s possible they’re weaker.”

  “Martha Tells,” Chloe said, holding up a finger, “Professor Turner, Robert Baines, and Tori Bolton. That’s four so far.”

  “Candi would have made five,” Bailey added.

  “It was almost seven,” Piper breathed.

  “There were eight distinct caves in Cresswell,” Aiden said. He looked to Chloe. “Is it common for there to be an additional cave as well?”

  “Most likely,” Chloe said. “The Crones… well, it’s part of the whole system.”

  Whether she didn’t know exactly how, or she knew and wasn’t saying it to Aiden, either way Aiden’s face was momentarily expressionless. He recovered quickly enough. “Right… so, possibly one for each cave? That would mean this system requires eight.”

  “It’s a guess,” Avery said. “I’d rather be more certain.”

  “How about,” Bailey said loudly, staring at them all with disbelief, “it doesn’t matter because four is already too many people dying because of this?”

  Several guilty faces fell a bit.

  “Eight people are not going to die here,” Bailey repeated. “There isn’t going to be a fifth, for that matter.”

  “It’s just a matter of knowing where we stand,” Aiden said quietly. “Of course we don’t want another single person to die.”

  “Then I suggest,” Bailey said cooly, “that we treat it like the number is five. Now… if we want to stop this in its tracks, we have to do something about Mr. Dove right now.”

  “Cold iron,” Aiden suggested. “If as you say he is, indeed, a faerie or a faerie creature—we can confirm that with iron.”

  “The Crones told us faerie’s can’t lie directly,” Chloe said. “You might just ask him.”

  “They are masters of deception,” Aiden said, “I suspect the subject would abruptly change.”

  “And what then?” Bailey asked.

  Aiden rubbed his jaw. “Some faeries did come through at Cresswell. It was brief. I believe that the caves, as their last act, perhaps… did something to send them back.”

  “A kind of fail safe?” Avery mused. “It’s possible.”

  “So, if Mr. Dove is a faerie, we just have to wrangle him back to the Caves,” Bailey said. “Maybe.” She groaned, and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Great. Easy.”

  “We’ll try and figure out how to do that,” Avery said. “The first step is making sure.”

  “I’m sure,” Bailey said.

  “Be that as it may,” Aiden told her gently, “we can’t afford to make a mistake. Mr. Dove could just be a cat’s paw. It would be prudent to have no doubts at all.”

  Bailey hadn’t considered that. So she nodded, and turned to take her coat back off the hook she’d hung it on. “Alright. Then I’ll go over and talk with him and see—”

  “No,” Piper said. “I should go.”

  “Not a chance,” Bailey said as if that would end it, and slipped her coat on.

  But Piper stepped in front of her as she moved toward the door. “Listen to me,” Piper said, “if something happens to you, or if he… I don’t know, dupes you a second time or something… what am I going to do about it? Nothing, that’s what. I don’t have powers, I can’t… break spells or whatever it is you all have to do. You can. If he gets me, you might be able to save me. If he gets you… I’ll just be on my own if these guys all forget again.”

  “She has a point,” Avery said.

  Bailey stared around at them, but saw only agreement with Piper in the other five faces.

  “Let me do this,” Piper said. “I want to help.”

  “It isn’t your job,” Bailey told her friend. “It’s my job. Ours. It’s what the Coven is here for.”

  “Maybe that’s why this is happening,” Piper said. “Because the Coven had been doing it alone all these years. Maybe it’s time we all started to be vigilant. It’s not just your town, Bailey—you witches. This is our home, too—everyone who lives in Coven Grove.”

  “But not everyone in Coven Grove is equipped—”

  “Bailey,” Chloe said, putting a hand on Bailey’s shoulder. “Let her do this. You and I can watch her from a distance. She’s right—if she’s compromised again, we may be able to help a second time with you to make sure.”

  It seemed everyone but her was willing to let Piper go into danger. But, if Piper was among them… “Alright,” Bailey whispered. “But be safe.”

  “Take this,” Aiden said, and produced a small length of metal, no more than a few inches long. He handed it to Piper. “Keep it in your back pocket. If something goes terribly wrong… just don’t let go of it.”

  “Try to get him to admit he’s a faerie,” Chloe said. “He can’t lie directly, but he can dodge the question. Ask him about how long he’s been in town—whatever questions you couldn’t have asked before.”

  It was obvious that Piper was terrified, but she nodded quickly and slipped the metal rod into her back pocket.

  Then she kissed Riley, hugged Piper and Avery, and took several deep breaths before she opened the
bakery door and walked with exaggerated casualness across the street, toward Mr. Dove’s shop.

  “I hate this,” Bailey muttered, her mind opened to keep just the barest link with Piper’s—the link would weaken with distance, especially once Piper was out of sight behind the door, but with Chloe watching as well, maybe they’d notice if something went terribly wrong. Maybe.

  “I know,” Chloe said. “But she may be right.”

  “About?”

  “About this being everyone’s fight,” Chloe said. “Once this is all over… if it is, I mean… we’ll talk.”

  “About what?” Bailey asked, distracted as Piper vanished behind Mr. Dove’s door.

  “About the Throne of Medea,” Chloe said. “About who your father is.”

  Chapter 21

  Piper steeled herself for a second time, her hand resting on the doorknob of Mr. Dove’s shop.

  You can do this, she thought, bolstering her confidence as best she could. Do it for Riley, and William, and Gavin, and your friends. For everyone in Coven Grove.

  She held her breath as she turned the knob, and went inside.

  Mr. Dove was there, at the other end of the shop, lounging behind the counter. He smiled when she walked in, an almost feral expression of large white teeth. How had she ever thought he had a genuine, inviting smile before? Now, he looked very much like a predator. Did he know?

  “Mrs. Spencer,” he said, bright and cheerful as he had been before, “what a delight to see you again so soon! And without your babes in tow—I do hope they’re well?”

  “Gavin’s mother has them for the day,” Piper said. Her heart was beating quickly. She realized she hadn’t come up with a reason to be here. “I… thought I might come and find something for Gavin. Our anniversary is coming up. Maybe for his mother, too. A peace offering sort of thing.”

  “A tense relationship with the in-laws, is it?” Mr. Dove asked. “Such is the price of a good marriage, no?”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Piper sighed. That, at least, she didn’t have to fake. “Of course this time I insist you let me pay you for your wares.”