“Another memory spell?” Thomas asked. “You got the supplies for that?”
I shook my head, recalling my dwindling supplies and confiscated basket, then grinned. “I haven’t, but Gwen might even have one prepared. You know how precious her memories have become since she had them stolen.”
Chapter Ten
We all store our lives within us: every sight, sound, and smell. Every accompanying emotion is encoded and stored away for future use. The slightest trigger can take us back in time. I was a small child of four when my grandfather passed, but to this day the slightest whiff of a certain smoky, leafy tobacco and memories of him and our time together flood my mind. I don’t even know the name of the tobacco. I don’t need to. I know the smell and what it means to me.
Some memories are harder to find than others. Maybe we weren’t paying attention. Maybe the events happened a lifetime ago and the details have faded. Maybe all you caught was a fleeting glimpse, a flash of blue in the forest, and your conscious brain didn’t have time to register what it was. But our memories are all still there, locked in our brains for safe keeping, and I needed a spell to find the memory I was looking for. A simple concoction of willow for vision, and fir for clarity, plus a strong dose of determination would take me back to the forest and allow me to see what my mind had missed, but my eyes had registered.
It wasn’t long before I was reclined on the sofa in Gwen’s sitting room and dunking a chocolate digestive into a nice hot cup of tea. Despite it being almost midnight, Gwen had been wide awake and bubbling over with excitement when we first arrived. As always, her magnificent crown of fluffy white hair shot out at all angles from her head. Along with her ruddy cheeks and her ever-present apron, it gave her the air of a batty old woman. If ever there was a cliché for a friendly witch woman, Gwen was it. She sat upright and attentive, hanging on Thomas’ every word when he relayed the events of the last few days. After which, she shook her head sadly.
“That poor man,” she said. “And the forest, what will it do to the forest? The police are bound to have brought excessive amounts of vehicles with their belching exhausts through the trees. They’ll be lights, noise, thundering treads of great big boots not caring one iota for the damage they cause.”
I nodded in agreement. It would take some time for the forest to repair itself from such an intrusion, but the winter would help. Most trees were dormant and would miss the fuss.
“To make matters even worse,” I said between mouthfuls of biscuit. “The police confiscated my sample basket. We never managed to harvest any alder, but we had a good supply of the rowan you asked for.”
“I asked for?” Gwen said with a look of puzzlement on her face.
“Yes,” said Thomas. “When you called yesterday, you asked for rowan and alder.”
“Ah, yes, silly me. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on tightly,” Gwen said, but a conspiratorial look passed between her and Thomas that wasn’t hard to miss. They were up to something.
Thomas looked at me with a mischievous glint in his eye. He raised an eyebrow as though daring me to challenge them. He knew I knew something was up. He also knew I didn’t know what it was. Fine. They could play their games, but only until I find me a murderer. After that, their puzzle would have my full attention. I waggled my eyebrow back at him and smiled. Game on!
“Anyway,” Gwen said. “What can I do to help?”
“We need a memory spell to see if there was anything extra to see about the car.”
“I’ve got just the thing.” Gwen stood and headed to her magical shop attached to her house.
As soon as she’d left, I gave Thomas a friendly elbow to the ribs. “Are you going to tell me what the two of you are up to?” I asked.
Thomas pulled me in for a side hug. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said with a hint of mirth in his voice.
“Gwen didn’t ask us to harvest any samples. She’s covering your lie.”
“If you say so.”
I pouted and gave him a mock angry stare. “I will find out what’s going on,” I said.
Thomas laughed. “No doubt.”
“Okay,” said Gwen when she returned with a vial of green liquid. “This is a special blend of willow, fir, and hazel.”
“Hazel?”
“For manifestation.” Gwen handed me the vial and patted my hand. “This is my own special brew. You take it first, Summer, and then, if your memory proves lacking, we can try Thomas. The three of us should sit on the floor together, and then you can draw on the power of all three trees. The potion will project an image of your memory for all of us to see.”
I eyed the liquid suspiciously. Although I had once travelled into Gwen’s head and shared her memories with her, no one had ever looked inside my mind before. At least, not with my knowledge. It’s always possible one of the Tywyth Teg — fairy folk — had sneaked a peek.
“How does it work?” I asked while taking a seat next to Thomas on the rug. “Will you enter my mind?”
“No, no,” said Gwen. “Nothing so intrusive or dangerous. The hazel will allow your memory to manifest itself in the room between us.”
I twirled the vial between two fingers and then looked from Thomas to Gwen and back.
“Drink it down,” Gwen encouraged. “One quick gulp.”
I removed the lid and poured the potion down my throat, almost gagging on the acrid taste that burned my mouth and caused my eyes to water. “Ugh, you could have warned me,” I said to Gwen.
“Warning creates anticipation. Anticipation creates worry. Why create extra problems?”
“Cheers, then, I guess.”
Thomas and Gwen both stared at me as though I might implode at any moment. I ignored their impatient looks and called forth the power in my runes. The symbols of Saille, Ailm, and Coll blazed to life on my arms. I stretched out my hands and made them into a plate before me. A mist swirled above them and formed into a vision of the forest: bright, airy, and full of life. I felt like I was dancing in a dream.
Gwen laughed. “I feel much the same when I visit woodland areas. The cleansing peace of the ancient trees reminds us how small and insignificant we are. Such knowledge washes the pressure of human existence away.”
The image in my hands contained me and Thomas walking through the forest from a third person perspective.
“Connect with memory more,” Gwen said. “We need to see what you saw, not you.”
“You also need to move forward in time a bit. We need to see what happened after we found Lee’s body, not before.” Thomas added.
I connected with my surprise at finding Lee’s body, listened for the roar of an engine and then felt the wind blow through my hair as I chased after Thomas. Then I saw it, the flash of blue. I froze the picture, searching every last detail for something that might help.
“It’s no good,” I said at last. “I just didn’t get a good enough view.”
“Wait,” Thomas pointed at the image. “This is useful. That’s LeMans Blue. It means the car’s a BMW.”
“Seriously?”
Thomas shrugged. “It’s a nice colour.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I think you’d better try.”
“It’s a shame you didn’t see anything else,” Gwen said. “Are you sure there wasn’t something that led you to the body in the first place.”
I thought for a while and remembered the flash of movement, I’d readily dismissed as a bird and completely forgotten with everything that had happened in the time since then.
“There might be something,” I said, and moved my memories back to the time before we found the body. I explored the emotions of the moment. My happiness, the heat radiating through my body at Thomas’ touch, the fluttering in my stomach as I recalled the first time I introduced him to magic, the all-encompassing sense of peace and connection. The viewpoint changed. I concentrated harder, focused on the tightening in my chest, the flutter of my heartbeat. The image swirled to display the fli
cker of movement from my moment of confusion, then froze.
We had to look closely to spot the large figure. Half the body was covered by a tree trunk, but the remains on display were camouflaged a mottled green and brown, with the texture of bark. Long, droopy arms connected to oversized hands and hung down to the creature’s knees. Its round face was shrouded with long, dark hair, and the only feature on display was a large bulbous nose.
“What is that?” asked Thomas. I shrugged in response and we both turned to Gwen.
“If I’m not mistaken,” she said. “That’s a troll.”
Thomas peered closer at the image. “I thought trolls were grotesque giants. With a shirt, this guy could pass as human, if you excuse the freakishly large nose and the strange colour of his skin.”
“The question is, what the hell is he doing here? Have you ever heard of a troll in these parts?” I asked Gwen.
“Never.” Gwen shook her head. “But there is one person who might know something.”
From her deep, reluctant breath, I knew exactly who she was talking about. “Dureth,” I said, ignoring the tension building in my stomach.
“Seriously, the Tywyth Teg?” Thomas glided his hand through his hair and shook his head. “I hate dealing with those guys.”
I nodded in agreement. “Everyone hates dealing with the fair folk.”
Chapter Eleven
Cardiff was buzzing when we entered the city. The late night revellers were still out en-masse, moving from one bar to another with all the grace of panda bears on skates. Many bars and clubs stayed open until three in the morning, others until six.
All too soon, we parked the car and joined the crowds on the streets. The night was getting colder and as I looked up, I reached out and caught one of the first snowflakes of the season.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we have a white Christmas,” I said to Thomas.
“It would be the first in a long time, and we have to see if this picks up first. These small flakes won’t make much of an impact.”
“But if it does pick up, they’re likely to settle. The ground has been frozen for days. Can you imagine, our first Christmas in the cottage being a white one? The forest is magnificent when covered in snow.”
“The forest is always magnificent.”
“I know, but covered in snow it’s doubly so.”
My excitement grew. Everything was going to be alright. I finally felt like we had a decent clue to solving Lee Page’s murder. Although, a small part of me worried how we would be able to connect our supernatural case with DI Owens’ human case. I, at least, felt confident we were on the right track, and we moved along the street with renewed purpose.
“You alright, love,” said a drunken guy with beer spilled down his shirt. “You fancy ditching that dude and coming home with me.”
I smiled when Thomas turned to him and said, “You couldn’t handle her, mate.”
We were both secure in our relationship. No other man had turned my head since the day I’d met Thomas, and no girl had turned his.
A few minutes later, we reached our destination. Tales of old have fairykind dancing by lakes or frolicking in ancient woodland, but like everyone else, they’d moved with the times, and Dureth could best be found in his club. Fay Magic was hidden in a dark alleyway. The noise of traffic and partygoers travelled from the main street, but no one else was around. A simple spell concealed the entrance of the back alley club, warding it from discovery by normal humans. Only the magical or desperate stepped thought these doors. With the first flakes of snow flushing me with a flurry of optimism, I tried not to think which of those categories we fell in to.
“You sure about this?” Thomas asked when I hesitated with my hand on the door.
Getting information from Dureth would be the easy part. It’s what he’d want in return that worried me. I took a deep breath, nodded to Thomas, and entered the club.
The acrid smell of sweat and alcohol filled the air, and some genius had turned on a smoke machine. The fog created combined with strobe lights that pulsed with the rhythm of the music and bathed the inhabitants in a surreal glow. I’d had my fill of clubs for the night, but at least this one, although busy, wasn’t packed as full as a can of sardines, and the revellers were far from human.
Thomas didn’t hesitate to link his elbow in mine and lead me through the shifting crowd. We headed to the private booth at the back of the club. Dureth spotted our approach and motioned his companions to leave. Like all the fair folk, he was stunning, with glassy, blue eyes and blond-white hair, but his good looks belied his dishonest and mischievous nature. He also had a radar for the desperate and needy, and right now, I’d didn’t like falling into that category.
I plastered a smile on my face and headed over to his table. When we arrived, Dureth rose to greet me. “Summer, my fierce, bright light. How lovely to see you.” He reached for my hand, pulled it towards him and gently brushed the skin with his lips. He held it there for a few seconds more than necessary before releasing it. “And Thomas,” he said, although a look of dismissal crossed his face.
The air thickened with the tension between them. “Dureth,” Thomas said.
Dureth turned his radiant smile back on me and motioned for me to sit. After ordering a round of drinks, he clasped my hands in his and looked into my eyes. “You must share whatever is troubling you, my dear,” he said. “Your essence is all out of sorts.”
I thanked him for his concern and relayed the details of our finding the body and seeing the troll, deliberately leaving most details out to see what Dureth came up with.
“My, this is perplexing,” he said after a while. “You understand, of course, that I am all too happy to help you.”
“Of course.”
“However, I will need something in return.”
“What is it you require?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing grand.” He waved his hand dismissively in front of his face. “Just a small favour of my choosing when the need arises.”
“What sort of favour?” Thomas tensed next to me, so I stilled him by placing my hand on his.
“If I knew, dear man, I would tell you. But requirements can change on a whim. I’m sure you understand.”
Thomas all but growled, his reluctance mirroring my own. I studied Dureth’s refined, innocent looking face. “I won’t do anything illegal,” I said. “Or hurt anybody.”
“No, of course, not.” Dureth said, with mock affront. “I would never ask you to do such things.”
“Then I’m sure you won’t mind giving her your oath,” Thomas said.
A brief flicker of hatred flashed through Dureth’s eyes before he put his hand on his heart. “I Dureth Mallyn, proud and noble member of the Tywyth Teg, Lord of the Mynydd y Garth, do swear to you, Summer Daniels, mystical rune-witch of the Ogham faith, beloved by humans and welcomed as one by ancient trees, I will not ask you to perform an illegal act under human laws or hurt a subject of the human realm, and in return, I will provide you with the information required to find the killer of the poor unfortunate man you discovered this morning. Do you accept these binding terms of our arrangement?”
I sighed, noting the carefully worded oath, but knowing it was the best I could hope for, I agreed. Magic surrounded us in a flurry of blue light, seeping into our souls and binding our agreement.
This better be worth it.
“Well, the first piece of information I can give you is simple.” Dureth waved his hand vaguely. “The name of the poor man whose body you found is Lee Page.”
“That we already know,” Thomas said.
Dureth scowled.
“What else do you know about him?” I asked.
“Nothing more than you would know from the news. Lee Page was nineteen years old, lived in Caerphilly, and is survived by a distraught mother who declared him ‘a cheerful lad who brightened everyone’s day’.”
“I hope you don’t consider that sufficient information to honour your side of the bar
gain.” Thomas glared at Dureth. “As you said, we could have easily discovered that for ourselves by listening to the radio.”
Dureth lifted his chin and a look of indignation crossed his face. “I’m surprised you have been so lax in your investigation to have not discovered this for yourself. A better detective would surely have thought to do such a thing.”
“Who said we didn’t,” Thomas said.
“Whilst the information you have provided is useful,” I said, interjecting. “The main clue in finding Mr Page’s killer is the troll. Do you have any information that will lead us to the troll?”
“There is a rumour circulating,” said Dureth. “A new private club. I believe it is near the reclamation yard, possibly on Tide Fields Road. I am sure if you head in that direction, you will find signs of the place you are looking for. However, I do believe venue opens at two, so you have a little time before you need to rush over there.”
“You seem to believe a lot of things,” Thomas said.
Dureth smiled. “I make it my business to find out what I can of the supernatural world I live in.”
“Do you know who runs this private club?”
“I believe,” said Dureth, making a point of accentuating the word ’believe’ and smiling sardonically at Thomas, “the witch Manon is the proprietor.”
“The self-proclaimed Queen of the dark arts?” I’d heard of Manon, but our paths had never crossed. It made my skin boil to think that any human could use their craft for evil. But some witches, indeed many humans with magic or not, can come to possess an overinflated sense of their own power and often disregard the lives of those around them. As Lord Acton said, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ and when you hold the power of magic in your hand, you must always remember that it makes you no better or worse than anyone else. Maybe in a way runic tree-witches have it easier than others, our connection to the trees allows us to share in their intimate connection with the elements and the world around them, and in turn, helps us to stay grounded.
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