by Willow Mason
Harriet popped her legs out straight. “As sexy as mine?”
“No one’s legs are as sexy as a library witch. That’s a grade-a one hundred percent proven fact.”
“I wish we were going to a barbeque tomorrow rather than a coven meeting. What we need is a good party to jolt everybody into having a great time. Not another examination of everything that’s gone wrong.”
With a groan, I levered myself onto my elbows. “If Glynda can restore Beezley’s memory, it’ll be worth it. It took me so long to find a boss who I got along with, it’ll be a shame to lose him like this.”
“Got along with, eh?” Harriet turned an impish smile towards me. “Is that what you call constant bickering and perpetual disagreements?”
I flopped down again, pouting. “Being snarky and disagreeable is how I show affection.”
To prove my point, I showered Harriet with sarcasm and biting wit until the sky was dark outside, and it was time to go to bed.
Alone in her spare bedroom, I stared blankly at the ceiling. To save my friend, I’d traded away my precious magic, leaving my soul bereft. If Glynda couldn’t restore his memory, Beezley would stay lost to me, too.
I wept; not sobs in a flood to wash away the sad and miserable baggage from my life but crying that ripped out of me, one drop at a time. Pulling. Bleeding. Causing damage with every tear.
A text message woke me soon after midnight. Usually, I’d have my phone set to silent but with everything that had happened, I didn’t want to miss a call. The choice seemed unwise as I peered through sleep-laden eyes at the screen. Brianna had texted me a weird message. Need help. Fairy bread.
Yeah. Cool. Like I was going to leave the comfort of Harriet’s duvet to sprinkle a slice of bread with hundreds and thousands. Perhaps Brianna had me mixed up with some local culinary establishment who’d cater to her every odd whim.
I was halfway back into a dream featuring spiders and a grim onslaught of cobwebs when I sat bolt upright. The message reformed itself in my brain, undoing the harmful effects of fat fingers or autocorrect. Not fairy bread, but fairy dead.
Had Delia just died?
I stumbled into the same clothes I’d worn that day, making a mental note to either go shopping or break into Beezley’s house to rescue my already limited wardrobe. My car was still parked in his garage, so I nicked Harriet’s keys from their hook in the kitchen and put my foot down to reach Brianna’s in record time.
When she answered the door, I didn’t have to ask about the message. It was written in her defeated expression and the tears cutting a path down her face. “She’s through here,” Brianna sobbed, clasping me in an awkward hug before leading me through into her lounge.
Delia lay flat on her back, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling. Her skin was dry and wrinkled like she’d mummified in a few hours. When I touched the side of her neck to verify the obvious, my fingers sank into her flesh like it was jelly.
“Oh, ugh.” I flapped my hand, small flecks of Delia coming off until Brianna handed me a tissue. “What happened?”
“I thought you’d know. Aren’t you meant to be an investigator?” The woman collapsed into sobs, rocking back and forth on the floor next to her dead friend. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“I’m all out of magic,” I said in a sour voice that I instantly regretted. Wrangling my emotions towards empathy, I put a hand on her shoulder and went for a softer tone. “When did your friend die?”
“Last night. This morning. I don’t know.” Brianna’s tears got the better of her for a moment, then she gave a large sniff. “When I came out for a late-night snack, I tripped over her. We’d watched a movie together in the afternoon, then I went into my room to catch up with some gaming.” The sobs sputtered out of her again like forlorn punctuation. “She. Was. Only. Alone. For a few. Hours.”
“Was she sick?” I sat back on my heels, fumbling with my phone. “Did she have a regular doctor?”
Brianna shook her head to each question. “I guess she had a doctor, but she never saw him. Dels was even younger than me!”
She might have meant the statement as a testament to her youth but in the warm overhead lighting, Brianna appeared near retirement age.
“She was thirty-ish?” I guessed kindly and Brianna nodded.
“Thirty-four but hardly the age you’d expect her to drop dead.”
My mind played back the CCTV footage from the pub when Aloysius blew a handful of magic spell into Brianna’s face. At the time, it had seemed miraculous. Look, Ma! A new set of legs. Given the trouble his memory spell had wrought on Beezley and me, the image discoloured into a jarring shade.
“Did Aloysius mix something else into the potion he gave you?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from wobbling. A fair trade, he’d said to me, then twisted what should have been a happy event into a tragedy.
Brianna wiped a handful of tissues across her face and visibly gathered herself. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “The change came at such a high price, I thought for sure it was real. Now…?” She shrugged.
“Have you taken a good look in the mirror lately?” I kept my eyes on Delia’s motionless feet as I asked, not wanting to witness the concern in Brianna’s eyes. “You should take a quick peek.”
“I’m ageing,” she said in a flat tone. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. I have wrinkles everywhere and grey hairs in places I didn’t think they’d change colour.”
“Delia—” I began, then stopped and waved my hand towards the dead woman’s face. “She looks eighty.”
“A hundred and eighty, you mean.” Brianna covered her face with her hands for a second, then shuddered. “Do you think Aloysius cursed us at the same time he changed our form?”
I thought he was sneaky enough to have done exactly that. “We need to talk to Glynda. She’ll have a better idea of what to do.”
“Lucinda will hate me if I consult her first.”
“Then how about you ring your mother while I talk to our beloved leader? Go into the bedroom so you have privacy.” So I don’t have to hear you collapse into misery while you explain that your best friend is dead.
I pulled up Glynda’s number and stared at the phone through dull eyes. This year had already gone down in history as the worst Christmas ever. Every new minute just opened the chance for a new disaster.
But ignoring the problem wouldn’t change anything. Like a good girl, I dialled my supreme’s number to tell her the latest piece of dreadful news.
Chapter Fifteen
Dr Astrid Montgomery was a lovely woman. Her fresh-faced smile stayed set on encouraging as I met her at Brianna’s door to lay out the grim discovery awaiting her inside.
We gathered beside the pool, a low undercurrent of rotting fish odour still hanging in the air and waited while the doctor examined her deceased patient. Brianna had already bitten her nails to the quick but continued to nibble despite the blood and pain.
Lucinda stood back, helpless in the face of her daughter’s grief. I would have felt sorry for her if it hadn’t been for her recent appalling behaviour. Since her distress was second-hand, it wasn’t enough for me to let go of my outrage.
“Old age,” Dr Montgomery said, striding towards us. “She appears to have suffered multiple organ failures and there might be other ailments I can’t see on such a quick examination, but that’s the root cause of everything. Age took her without a shred of pity or grace. It carved through her entire body, wearing every cell out until the entire system collapsed.”
“And her…” I waved a hand vaguely back at the house, remembering the jelly-like feel of Delia’s body.
“Her decomposition is also advanced. Even from the beginning of my examination to the end, I could see alterations that should take hours or days.”
“It’s going to happen to me next,” Brianna cried, fear screeching through her voice. “I can feel myself growing older by the second.”
“Whatever hit Delia is treating you more k
indly,” Dr Montgomery said with a blunt nod. “You’re ageing too fast but not at the same rate.”
“How long?” Brianna wrung her hands. “Today? Tomorrow? Next week?”
“I don’t know when it started.”
“When my tail changed back into legs.” Brianna rapped the side of her head with her knuckles. “When was that? Last week?”
“Do you have an image of yourself from then? I don’t have anything to compare against?”
I brought up a still from the CCTV footage on my phone and handed it over. “There’s the moment of change, although Bri appeared exceptionally young for her age.”
“Yes.” The doctor compared the image to the distraught woman in front of her. “You look in your fifties at least, but you’re what? Forty? Forty-five?”
Brianna nodded, not clarifying any further.
“This is just going to be a guess, nothing more.”
“Will you just tell me!”
“Maybe a year or two?”
“Why would this have started with their transformations?” I asked, my head full of Beezley. What cruel irony would restore him to human, only to cut his age down worse than if he’d remained a dog?
A click sounded in my brain and I held up my hand to stop the doctor answering if she’d even been going to.
“Delia was a housefly, right?” When Brianna didn’t answer immediately, I snapped my fingers under her nose. “A fly, not a fairy, right?”
She nodded. “Dels didn’t like to talk about it but someone morphed her, just like someone morphed me.”
I faced Dr Montgomery. “A housefly’s lifespan is counted in days. Thirty at a stretch but I don’t think Delia was taking care to live right.” I glanced over to Brianna. “The rotting fish in the pool, they were for her?”
Brianna inclined her head as a new wave of tears fell. “She loved them.”
“How long do fish live?”
The doctor tilted her head to one side. “Depends. Some only a few years while others can survive decades.”
“Do you know what type of fish your attacker turned you into?” I asked Brianna.
“How would I know? I’m not a fish expert.”
“You could try asking at the local pet store. If you’ve got a good image of your tail, the man there might identify your breed.”
“Great. So I can narrow down how soon I’m going to die?” Brianna crossed her arms and threw her head back. “How about we turn the conversation towards how to stop dying early rather than measuring how long I’ve got?”
“Marlon left this morning.” I checked the time on my phone. “No, yesterday morning. Harriet said he caught a bus to Christchurch and since he was travelling with a tortoise, he’s likely to be remembered.”
Brianna looked pensive. “Won’t the network cancel out the other passenger’s memories?”
“It only covers Fernwood. Even if it was operational along the entire route, he’s not performing magic, just sitting with a weird pet. People would see him regardless.”
While Dr Montgomery packed up her black bag and arranged for Delia’s body to be taken away, I jotted down notes on tracking Marlon and Binky. At each step, I could hear Beezley’s methodical voice dictating the next actions. I missed him, the old him, and tried not to dwell on whether that was influencing my conclusion.
“What makes you think this old man reversing his spell will do any good?” Brianna asked as an undertaker arrived to remove Delia’s body, gently and discretely. “He obviously twisted it the first time he tried.”
“I doubt he meant to,” I argued, then frowned. Marlon had power. His magic was strong and sure. Could this be a mistake or was it an inevitable part of the process?
“I don’t want him casting any spells on me until we’re a hundred percent sure they’ll save my life.”
Lucinda cleared her throat. “Bri’s right. Besides, we don’t need a reversal, we need someone to restore her to human with her lifespan intact. This would all be for nothing if he just changed her back into a fish.”
Brianna nodded, but I was shocked. “Better a live fish than a dead witch.”
“Says someone who’s neither.” Lucinda folded her arms and shook her head. “We need to wait until Glynda arrives before we take any action. She’ll have a better idea of what to do.”
The deference took me by surprise. The two women didn’t strike me as people to hand control of their decisions to another.
“Glynda won’t be here for hours,” I reminded them. She’d point blank refused to interrupt her sleep to come straight away.
“Delia will be just as dead in the morning,” she’d declared before ending the call. When I tried to phone again, it went straight to voicemail.
“No offence,” Lucinda said with a sniff, “but I don’t trust you not to hurt my daughter in retaliation for what happened to you.”
“What you did to me, not what happened.”
“See. It’s obvious you’re holding a grudge.”
“Listen, if this only affected your daughter and her dead-fly friend, believe me, I’d walk out the door and leave you to it. But in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve got a close friend with skin in this game. He might have the lifespan of a dog but that’s a lot shorter than I’m comfortable with.”
“Marlon caused this situation to start with,” Lucinda said. “I’m not putting my daughter’s life in his hands again.”
“Aloysius could have corrupted his spell as he did with Beezley’s memory. If Marlon can work out what magic was used, he might be able to restore your daughter’s life span and keep her form.”
“You watched him transform Delia,” Brianna said in a soft voice. “Aloysius didn’t interfere with his magic at all.”
“Except for keeping him chained in a prison cell and kidnapping his familiar. If Marlon’s magic had a hidden twist, perhaps that’s because he was under duress.”
“And how will you get him to fix it? Put him under duress again?” Lucinda stood up and walked in quick steps to the window. “No. Bringing that man anywhere near my daughter again puts her in even more danger. I won’t have it.”
“Then I’ll track him down and bring him back here just to help Beezley.” I jumped to my feet and stalked to the door. “Next time you want help, Bri, try calling someone else.”
I slammed the door behind me, only getting two steps down the driveway before it opened. “Wait.” Brianna caught up to me. “Listen, I agree with what my mother says but I’m happy to pay for your investigation. If Marlon fixes your dog pal, then I’m willing to let him work his magic on me.”
And if he doesn’t, Beezley would bear the brunt of my assumptions.
“Deal.” I signed into our client management system and sent her an invoice, at double the usual fee. “Once you pay the deposit, I’ll start work.”
Brianna didn’t even check the price before clicking on pay. The woman lived in a different world. “If Marlon turns out to be behind Delia’s death, I’ll expect you to charge him with murder, duress or no duress.”
The coven guidelines demanded no less. “I’ll abide by my responsibilities,” I said through tight lips. “Just because I’ve lost my powers doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my allegiance.”
“Good.” Brianna stared me in the eyes for a long moment. “Delia was a good sort, you know. Even after being transformed, she could find the hidden joy in any situation. Her company all these years was the only thing that kept me sane.”
“She sounds like a good friend.”
“Delia was the best. If Marlon can’t help us, I want him to hang for what he did to her.”
Hanging hadn’t been part of the witches’ code for as many years as I’d been alive, but I nodded. If the animus healer had done this terrible thing, I also wanted blood.
Either the situation put right or vengeance. It sounded good to me.
Chapter Sixteen
“No,” Glynda said when I explained the situation to her.
“What’s n
o? I’m going to track Marlon down and get him back here whether you agree or not.”
“Sit down. You’re making my head spin.”
I gave up pacing the room and plonked down on the sofa. My kinetic energy demanded release, so I jiggled my foot.
“What are you planning on doing if you find him?” Glynda enquired with a sweet smile. “Bring him back here by yourself? No. Wait until the meeting tonight and we’ll get a team together. This affects more than just Beezley and Brianna. The insult to our coven is a direct challenge from The Briary.”
Glynda sucked in her lips, making her cheekbones appear even higher. She sat ramrod straight in her chair, the beehive adding even more height. A regal supreme. I’d never seen her in this light before.
Then again, our coven had never been to war.
“We can’t fight against their powers,” I said as the frustration bubbled like magma beneath the surface. “White magic won’t be enough. We need—”
“I’ll decide what we need and where we’ll get it from. Now, get on home and tidy yourself up. With this new development, it’s doubly important your speech tonight go off without a hitch.”
Oh, yes. My speech.
“Is Beezley coming?” Glynda stared at me through narrowed eyes. “I hope your falling out didn’t extend to him skipping tonight’s meeting. It’s imperative he be there.”
“He’ll be there,” I said with my mental fingers crossed that DI Jonson could persuade him. “Even if he isn’t, I think the problem with ageing supersedes his memory loss.”
“It leaves us without a trained law enforcement officer.” Glynda folded her hands together on the table, leaning forward. “You’ve been doing nicely but a few months is no substitute for years of high-level training. I’ve come to rely on the two of you for help in several cases and I don’t want to flush that away because of some jumped-up familiar who thinks he has the right to perform magic.”
