Bottling It (A Wayfair Witches' Cozy Mystery #1)

by A. A. Albright

  ‘Westerly Crescent. I hadn’t heard of it till yesterday, but it turns out it’s just a short bus ride from here.’

  His eyes rounded. ‘Westerly? In Luna Park?’

  ‘Why? Have you heard something bad about the area?’ I sighed. ‘Well, there’ve already been quite a lot of signs that it’s too good to be true.’

  He gave me a look I couldn’t quite fathom. ‘I haven’t heard anything bad about it, as such. It’s nice enough as these places go. And I’m just across the park as a matter of fact. Easterly Crescent is my neighbourhood.’

  He led the way through a sparklingly clean production area. Huge vats were chugging away – presumably an automated process – and a conveyer belt sent bottles to be filled, capped and labelled at a fast pace. This didn’t look like a factory in the aftermath of a burglary. I wondered what exactly had been stolen.

  He plucked a bottle from the line and tossed it to me. ‘Have a taste. Aunt Alice’s recipe. That’s what the thieves stole yesterday, as a matter-of-fact. Luckily, Aunt Alice knows this recipe like the back of her hand.’

  I ignored the fact that he seemed to have read my mind (because if he had, surely it just meant we were a perfect match) and eyed the label on the bottle. ‘Berry Good Go Juice.’ I grinned madly. ‘Oh my God, I just had one yesterday. Geez, no wonder someone wanted to nick the recipe. This stuff is gorgeous!’

  ‘Nice to hear it,’ came a woman’s voice.

  I turned at the sound and saw a woman of fifty or so, elegantly dressed with stunning blonde hair and light green eyes, walking down from the upstairs offices. I recognised her as the same woman who’d been answering the Gardaí’s questions the day before.

  ‘This is Aunt Alice.’ William led me towards the woman. ‘Auntie, this is our new girl. She’ll be doing the accounts on Wednesdays and Fridays, and other stuff with you during the rest of the week.’

  She gave me a wide smile, but it didn’t manage to meet her eyes. ‘So nice to meet you. As long as you like hard work, we’ll get along just fine. And what do they call you?’

  ‘Wanda,’ I replied. ‘Wanda Wayfair. I’m really looking forward to this, Alice. It definitely beats packing shelves at Bargain Bites – that’s the supermarket where I used to work.’ I was about half way through my nervous word-vomit when I noticed her face change into a scowl.

  She turned to Will. ‘A word, if you please.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Yes. I thought you might say that.’ He patted my arm and followed her up the stairs. ‘I’ll pop your bags into the locker room for you,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Go and get yourself a coffee and a muffin, Wanda. Canteen’s to your left.’

  I decided not to stress about why Aunt Alice had taken a dislike to me. She’d have plenty of time to get to know me, and by the time she was holding Will’s and my first-born in her arms, she was sure to be my very best friend.

  I wandered into a large canteen area, where a full coffee pot was sitting on a warmer, next to a basket filled with chocolate muffins. My stomach was far too nervous for food – again, absolutely nothing to do with Will Berry – so I poured myself a coffee and sat down. Over the next few minutes other workers arrived, digging into muffins and grabbing drinks, chatting easily. They were nice and friendly, but moved quickly off to their work areas, leaving me alone once again.

  At one stage I thought I heard furious shouting from somewhere above – from a voice that sounded like Alice’s. A moment after that, it all seemed to quieten down. I was on my second cup of coffee when Alice arrived in the canteen, her smile back in place.

  ‘So sorry about that, Wanda. It was a bit of a misunderstanding on my part, but Will’s explained it all now.’ She sat down across from me and lowered her voice. ‘The staff don’t know what we are, so this is between you and me. I told Will what I always tell him when we need a new accounts and stuff assistant – hire a human for the goddess’s sake. But for some reason, this time he decided he knew best. I mean, there’s driving involved. Obviously I’d prefer not to hire a witch.’

  ‘Oh.’ I tried to stop myself from reddening. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘But then he told me you’re just an Unempowered. So it’s all worked out all right, in the end.’ She stood up. ‘Well, we’d better get going. We have a busy day ahead.’

  ≈

  I pulled out of the carpark, Alice in the seat beside me, jotting things down on a notepad. Once she’d told me where to go, she was too busy to speak. Which suited me fine. As an unempowered witch, I’d spent my whole childhood feeling ostracized. I’d run from my coven as soon as I turned seventeen, and had done my very best every day since to avoid anything supernatural. And it was all going quite well until this morning. Inwardly I said about a dozen swearwords. Outwardly I kept my amiable smile plastered on. I mean, Berrys’ Bottlers was in a human enclave for goodness sake. How was I to know it was run by witches?

  I quelled a few more silent swears. If something looks too good to be true, it usually is. And Will Berry was the perfect example. The Wayfair name was famous among witches, so there was no way he hadn’t known who I was during that interview. He knew who I was, and what I was. I wish I’d had the same privilege.

  And he’d lied to me about why his aunt wasn’t driving. Stubbed her toe indeed. He’d obviously been trying to hide the fact that he and Alice were witches for as long as possible. Why he would have wanted to hide it, though … that was what I didn’t understand.

  Most witches didn’t drive. Not that they couldn’t. Just that they didn’t. A lot of them seemed to think it was beneath them. I mean why drive when you could snap your fingers and send yourself halfway across the world? Why drive when you could fly a broom, or take a potion?

  When in the human world, they usually had chauffeurs. Humans, more often than not. But sometimes they hired unempowered witches like me. That way they could do all the magic they liked in their comfy back seat, while the schmuck up the front kept the car on the road.

  Today, I was that schmuck.

  I felt Alice looking at me, and I cast a glance in her direction. I’d been right. She was looking at me. And she was doing so with an incredibly patronising grin.

  ‘I almost envy you, Wanda. You have the best of both worlds, don’t you? Why, driving about, playing about with computers and thingimibobs … you’re almost like a human. Or a wizard. Have you ever considered wizardry?’

  I did my best not to grunt. These days, a lot of unempowered witches turned to wizardry. That way, they could learn to harness power without actually having any.

  ‘Oh no, never even thought about it,’ I lied. I had thought about it. A lot. So much so that I’d secretly studied the art for five years of my teenage-hood before realising: not only did I not have any magic; I couldn’t even fake it.

  She looked at me a little more carefully. ‘Do you see your coven often, Wanda?’

  I reinforced my smile. I’d need scaffolding to keep my lips in the right place before long. ‘Not really. Family events and things. Truth be told, I really enjoy my life here in the human enclaves.’

  ‘Oh, well … I suppose it’s probably easier. Too much time around real witches might make you bitter. Well, here we are. Take the next right and pull up at the first shop you see.’

  ≈

  Over the course of the day I discovered exactly what other stuff my job entailed. I drove Alice to a seemingly endless amount of shops and warehouses. Sometimes we dropped off small crates of Berry Good Go Juice. At other times she gave her sales pitch to the buyers, while I handed her pens and papers and whatever else she couldn’t manage to find for herself. It should have been the most boring of days. But after stacking shelves every day and studying accounting every evening for the past four years, it was actually … not that bad. If I could have taken Alice out of the equation, I might have even enjoyed myself.

  One interesting thing did happen, though. You know, if you consider a horrific nightmare that you can’t look away from to be interesting.<
br />
  Alice and I stopped for lunch in a pub just off Grafton Street. As lunches go, it was unremarkable. I had a ploughman’s, while she had a roast beef sandwich. I drank orange juice. She drank three glasses of red wine. So far, so dull. But just as I was finishing my drink, an odd tingling crept up the back of my spine. I turned around to see a tall man entering the pub. He was wearing a black coat, black hat, black sunglasses, black scarf … well, you get the picture. He was wearing a lot of black. In June. I could see very little of his face, but I guessed he was in his late forties, perhaps early fifties.

  While I was still looking in his direction, he disappeared. Honest to the goddess, he just vanished from in front of my eyes. A few seconds later, Alice ordered another drink and I excused myself and went to the loo. Unfortunately, quite a few other ladies seemed to be on the same pee schedule. The queue was out the door. But I’d been to that particular pub before, and I knew there was another ladies’ room, down in the basement.

  I did what I had to do and, just as I was making my way back up the stairs, I saw the man in black again. He was at the back of a little alcove beneath the staircase, but he wasn’t alone. He and Alice were together – very much together. It was horrible, and yet I could barely pull my eyes away.

  I ran up the stairs, finished what was left of my juice, and played games on my phone. A lot of games. When Alice finally came to join me a half hour later, she said nothing about the man and, seeing as I wished I could wipe all memory of it from my mind (does it hurt to scrub your eyeballs?) I said nothing, either. I didn’t even mention that two of her blouse buttons were undone. Nice of me, wasn’t it?

  We spent the afternoon in much the same painful fashion as we had spent the morning. When we returned to the factory, Will was already gone. While Alice spoke briefly with some of the production staff, my phone beeped. I unlocked it to find a short message from Will:

  Your bags are in locker number nine. Code is 333. Change it to whatever you like.

  I closed the message and walked sullenly towards the locker room. The message had seemed curt, considering how friendly Will had been so far. Maybe the argument with his aunt had made him reconsider his decision to hire me. Even though I was a little confused about why he’d not been completely upfront when hiring me, I definitely didn’t want to lose this job. I’d sent out hundreds of CVs, but it seemed there was an overabundance of accountants in Dublin, and Berrys’ Bottlers had been the only interview I’d landed. If I lost this job it was back to stacking shelves for half the money.

  I walked towards locker nine and punched the code in. As the locker snapped open, my face lit up. Along with my bags there was a large bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates and a card. I opened it eagerly, and read:

  Got called out on an unexpected errand. So sorry I can’t be there to see how your first day went. But if Aunt Alice was her usual self, then I hope the champers and choccie will be enough to keep you here. Oh, and sorry I didn’t tell you we were you-know-whats. I was afraid you wouldn’t take the job. Forgive me?

  ‘Best person for the job my behind,’ muttered a voice behind me. I turned just in time to see Alice stalking from the room.

  4.Home Sweet Home

  I had hoped to have another go in the shower before I confronted my coven. Such was not to be. As soon as I turned the Berrys’ Bottlers van onto Westerly Crescent, my mother was waiting at the front door of Number One.

  I pulled up in the drive, got out of the van and made my way through the weedy garden.

  My mother’s name was Beatrice Wayfair, and she looked like an older version of myself. Unlike many other witches, she eschewed anti-aging glamours, and so she gave me quite an idea of what I might look like in the future. Her curvy hips were just a little curvier than mine. Her heart-shaped face bore only a few smile lines around her warm brown eyes. Her chestnut-coloured hair was neither dyed nor glamoured, and – at forty-five – she had only a few greys peeking through.

  The suddenly-overgrown garden might seem strange, I suppose, if you weren’t accustomed to the ways of my coven. The Wayfairs, you see, rarely settled in the witch enclaves. They chose, instead, to move around in the human areas. My mother said that living close to humans was a good way to keep the coven down to earth. The Wayfairs were responsible for bringing wayward witches back into line. And how could they be trusted to notice someone overdoing things if they were too busy enjoying the trappings of the witch lifestyle?

  Well, that was the official story. The real truth, the truth that I wasn’t supposed to know, was that their lifestyle was all because of me. Not having any power, I could only access witch enclaves if I wore my Pendant of Privilege. And I certainly couldn’t go to school with other witches. So my family stayed in human areas, growing their garden wild to discourage too many human visitors. If you ever see an overgrown garden, by the way, take it as a sure sign that a witch lives there.

  Part of me was grateful that they made so many concessions for me. A much, much larger part of me hated it, because it was just one of the many ways in which they reminded me that I’d never really be one of them.

  Sometimes, love hurts. That day, all I wanted to do was rush into my mother’s arms. But years of stubbornness, of pretending that I didn’t really want to be a proper witch … it weighed on me. It made it difficult to spend time with my coven, let alone tell them how much I loved them and missed them.

  But just as I was about to swallow my pride and hug her, my mother narrowed her eyes, put her hands back by her side and glared at the van I’d parked in her drive.

  ‘Berrys’ Bottlers?’ She raised a curious brow at me. ‘That’s your new job?’

  ‘Nice to see you too.’

  ‘Oh, Wanda!’ She put her arms out again and pulled me tight. ‘It’s the best thing in the world to see you again. I was just surprised, that’s all. But … you do know that the Berrys are witches, right?’

  ‘Yip,’ I said through a mouthful of woolly cardigan. Did I mention that my mother’s hugs are rather enthusiastic? ‘I do now.’ I sniffed the air. ‘Is that apple tart I smell?’

  She laughed. ‘You could smell an apple tart from the other side of Ireland, I’ll bet.’

  She pulled away and pushed me inside. As we entered the old familiar hallway, something else familiar wrapped his way around my ankles. It was Mischief, a tabby tomcat, my mother’s familiar. He jumped up into my arms, and I snuggled him tight.

  Normally, familiars do not like to be petted. But for me, Mischief always made an exception. If it was because he pitied the fact that I would never be a real coven member, well, I didn’t care.

  Oh, yes, I did say the old familiar hallway, didn’t I? Well, that’s because it was. On the outside, my coven’s house might look like it was Number One, Westerly Crescent. No matter where they lived, they always made sure the façade matched the other houses on the road. But inside, now that was a different story altogether.

  While it might seem like I was walking into my coven’s latest rental, I was actually walking into the same house I was born in: the large, rambling house called Wayfarers’ Rest. The real Wayfarers’ Rest was still in Riddler’s Cove, a witch enclave on the south-west coast.

  I passed by the usual photos on the wall. There were rows of my coven’s achievements – the wayward witches they caught and brought to justice, and the Magical Law degrees of all of the Wayfair women. There were photos of me as a child, in my parents’ arms. There were photos of my father on his own, winning awards for broom making and flying competitions. There was the photo I loved and avoided in equal measures – of his last day alive, posing with his latest broom design at the foot of Mount Everest, before the competition that killed him.

  And then there was the biggest picture of all. Not a photo, but a portrait of the original Wanda the Wayfarer, my namesake. A namesake of which I was undeserved. The first Wanda had been the one who began the Wayfairs’ foray into magical law. She’d wandered from place to place (hence the name Wayfare
r, which morphed over the years into Wayfair) tracking down wayward witches and supernaturals and bringing them to justice. Her exact powers were unknown, but according to legend she had too many powers to count. She was revered by witches far and wide, and brought about a golden age for all supernatural beings. An age in which she and her kin made sure that the world was a happy and safe place for all.

  Or so the legend went. If there really had been a golden age, the history books hid it well. And as I entered our large, cosy kitchen behind my mother, I knew that even if there had ever been a golden age for the Wayfairs, it was long, long in the past.

  Christine sat on the opposite end of the oak table, a scrying bow before her, her long auburn hair hiding whatever vision she might be seeing. Her daughter, Melissa, sat next to her, a Magical Law book open in front of her.

  There was no one else in the room. Because these days, there were no more Wayfairs. These days, upholding the law was done mainly by the Wyrd Court’s Peacemakers. Wayfairs had jurisdiction over witches, only. The Wyrd Court’s Peacemakers were in charge of every other supernatural criminal. Very few witches wanted to be part of a coven with so little sway, and no one new had joined our coven for years.

  Melissa looked up from her law book, her green eyes widening in joy. She rushed from the table and squeezed me almost as tightly as my mother had done. Mischief jumped out of my arms just in time and settled in his basket in front of the wood-burning stove. Christine soon joined in with the hugging, and my mother went to the oven to take out the apple tart.

  By the time I finally managed to pull away and catch my breath, a large plate of apple tart was on the table, with ice cream melting on top.

  I suppressed my drooling just long enough to take a seat. ‘Oh my stars,’ I said between mouthfuls. ‘It’s been soooo long since I had anything this good.’