Royal Witch Curse

by Zoe Arden

  I could tell that she was caving. She was biting her lip and reaching for a second brownie.

  "What you want me to do?" she asked.

  "He has an office at home, right?" She nodded. "So, next time you're home alone, just look in his desk. Maybe you'll get lucky. If you find a letter, take it. If you can't find anything, then tell Mr. Rorkin to deliver any letters from Goblin Territory directly to you even if they're addressed to the sheriff."

  "Mr. Rorkin won't do that," she said. "He takes the mail very seriously."

  "If you'd seen the way he ran out of the sheriff's station earlier when I was there after delivering that letter from the goblins to Sheriff Knoxx, you'd think differently."

  Eleanor bit her lip. "I can't make any promises. I'm not going to start stealing his mail, but if I happen to find something already in the house... already open... then I suppose there's no harm in taking it."

  "That's all I'm saying."

  Trixie and my father came out of the back room just then. Their faces were covered in soot.

  My dad looked at Eleanor. "Tomorrow, I make the cookies; you clean the bakery."

  "What do I get to do?" asked Trixie.

  "You?" he said, scratching the top of his head with one blackened finger. "You get to make sure Eleanor stays out of the kitchen."

  * * *

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

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  I could smell the coffee beans roasting even before I set foot inside Coffee Cove, Sweetland's favorite coffee shop. I had Colt's file tucked neatly under my arm, hidden inside an old magazine I'd found lying around the house.

  Lucy waved when I came in. I smiled and walked up to the counter.

  "There you are," Lucy said. "I was beginning to think you were avoiding me." She giggled lightly. Her dark hair was pulled behind her head into a high ponytail. It bounced like a cheerleader's whenever she turned her neck

  "Why would I be avoiding you?" I asked, not entirely sure whether she was joking. It had been a while since I’d seen her.

  "Well, it was either that or you gave up drinking coffee. Which sounds more likely to you?"

  I giggled with her—she was joking after all—and ordered a large vanilla latte. The Cove was packed, as usual, but Lucy skipped my order to the front of the line. There were some definite perks with having a best friend who worked at a coffee shop.

  I saw her walk over to Melbourne and say something to him. Melbourne looked my way and smiled tentatively. He was one of only a few vampires in Sweetland Cove, and Trixie's current boyfriend. He was a nice guy but tended to keep to himself. He and William Carney were co-owners of Coffee Cove, though the coffee shop was Melbourne's baby. William could be found at the beach more days than not, though in a pinch he'd always come through for Melbourne.

  Lucy came around the counter, handed me my latte, and we grabbed the table in the back of the shop. I set my magazine in front of her.

  She picked up the magazine and gave it a disinterested look. "I've only got fifteen minutes for my break, I was hoping you had something more interesting than an old magazine. This is from, like, a year ago."

  "I'm a slow reader."

  She set the magazine aside. "So, what's this big secret you've got to tell me?"

  I'd texted her late last night, unable to sleep. I'd had a terrible nightmare about Colt and hadn't been able to shake it. I couldn't remember it entirely—something about him being trapped inside a snake hole—but it had scared me so bad Snowball had thought I was having a stroke or something.

  Knowing that Colt was here in Sweetland, hiding somewhere, with that mark on the palm of his hand, was too much for me to bear alone. I had to tell someone, and who better to tell than your best friend? Maybe we could talk it through, and she could tell me where my thinking was off. I was counting on her to tell me there was no way Colt could be the killer.

  My eyes shifted toward the magazine. "Open it up."

  Lucy made a scrunchy face. "You didn't text me at two in the morning because you wanted to show me a year-old magazine."

  I looked around the coffee shop. It seemed like the exact wrong place to have this conversation with her—it was busy with tons of people who could listen in to our conversation any time they wanted.

  If you knew Coffee Cove's secret, though, then you'd know it was actually the perfect place to hold secret conversations. Every table at Coffee Cove—the ones inside as well as the ones outside—were enhanced with a silencing charm. You could sit across from someone at the same table and hear them perfectly clearly, but the table beside yours wouldn't be able to hear one word of your conversation.

  You could see people's mouths moving, their lips smacking together, and knew that they were slurping their coffee, but none of it reached your ears. It had been Melbourne's idea, and it was a great one.

  "Just look inside the magazine," I told her.

  "Why, what's inside the magazine? An ad for year-old lipstick?"

  Lucy was one of those people who liked to kid around. Only sometimes she didn't know when to stop kidding and start being serious. It was the thing I most liked and also least liked about her.

  "Time's ticking," I said, indicating the clock on the wall.

  Lucy stopped with the jokes and did as I'd asked. She opened the magazine. She looked at the papers I'd placed in there from Colt's file, and her face scrunched that much tighter.

  "I don't get it," she said. "What is this?" She picked up the papers and started waving them around.

  I jumped out of my seat and grabbed them away from her. "Be careful!" I shouted. No one around us batted an eye.

  Lucy looked at me like I was crazy. There was an awful lot of that going around lately.

  "What's so secret about a stack of papers?" She was looking slightly more interested now.

  "Those aren't just any papers," I told her. I bit my bottom lip. Something about my face must have looked guilty because Lucy's eyes suddenly widened. Her lips part in a half-grin, half-oh of surprise.

  "What did you do?"

  "I might've, sort of accidentally, snuck into COMHA when they were closed a few nights ago."

  Lucy's eyes nearly popped out of her head. "You broke in?"

  "It wasn't breaking in, it was... exploratory recognizance."

  She pressed her lips tightly together. "You didn't really do that, did you?"

  "I did."

  "Why? And how can you not tell me?" She looked more in awe of me than angry with me.

  "I didn't tell anyone. Or rather I wouldn't have told anyone if I hadn't gotten caught."

  "You got caught?" She was looking around the coffee shop now, the gossip girl in her dying to be set free.

  "You can't tell anyone, Lucy. No one. I mean it."

  "But if you got caught, shouldn't people already know? Dean Lampton's great at keeping secrets, but he's a monster when it comes to destroying his enemies. If you snuck into his headquarters and got caught, you are most definitely an enemy."

  "Dean let me go as long as I promised not to look into Zulubar's disappearance anymore."

  That was one thing I didn't have to explain to her. It had taken a little longer for the gossip to get around—the goblins themselves weren't gossipers as far as I knew—but now everyone in Sweetland new about Zulubar's disappearance, and everyone had their own theories. Too bad none of them were helpful. The most impressive one was that Zulubar and Kyrab had been kidnapped by aliens and were being held for ransom, even though no ransom note had yet been received.

  "And you agreed?" Lucy asked, drawing my thoughts back to her.

  "Yeah, but I didn't mean it. I only said that so he'd let me go. Have you ever been in one of their interrogation rooms?" I shuddered.

  "You lied to Dean Lampton? Tsk tsk. When he finds out—"

  "He probably already has."

  "What you mean?" she asked.

  I
pointed to the file in her hand. She looked down at it.

  "I still don't get it. What do Dean Lampton and COMHA have to do with these papers you're showing me? As far as I can tell, this is nothing but gobbledygook."

  "That's the problem. It's gobbledygook to me, too." I bit my bottom lip. "Or at least it was."

  Lucy drummed her long red fingernails on the tabletop. She took a closer look at the papers in front of her. "You mean you can read this?"

  "No, but when I was going through it, there was one thing that stood out to me." I pointed to the spot in the papers where I'd seen the mention of Mack's Bar.

  Lucy looked up. "That dingy spot just outside of town?"

  "That's the one." I took a deep breath. "Those paper's you're holding are part of Colt's file. I stole it from Dean's office when I broke in."

  The giggle that rose up from Lucy's throat was loud and almost obnoxious. If there hadn't been a silencing charm around our table, she'd have garnered several irritated looks. She was laughing so hard she doubled over in her chair and almost all out of it. The people closest to us did give her a strange, irritated look, but then they went back to their coffees.

  "Why are you laughing?"

  "B-Because... you think I-I-I'm stupid enough to fall for a story like that."

  "Lucy," I said, leaning in toward her, "it's not a story."

  Slowly, her giggles faded away. "You really stole your fiancé's file?"

  I nodded. "I did more than that. I went down to the bar to see what I could find out about him."

  "And? Did it work?"

  "Sort of." I drew in a deep breath. "I found Colt."

  Her eyes widened. "You found him? Like inside the bar?"

  "Outside. He was spying on me through the window and Snowball ratted him out."

  "What did you say to him?"

  "I asked him where he'd been. Why I hadn't heard from him. All the things that I've been moaning about to you for the last few months."

  "And did he have a good answer?"

  I shrugged. "A good answer?" I shook my head. "I would've settled for a halfway decent answer."

  Lucy pursed her lips. "That bad, huh?"

  "Worse than that."

  "Worse? Worse how?"

  This was it. No more turning back. "Do you remember when I texted you after Bisnunk died?"

  She nodded. "I'm still waiting to hear the details on that story, you know?"

  I ignored her comment for the moment and went on. "I told you about the spell that I cast, right? The one that was supposed to leave a scar shaped like a four-leaf clover on the palm of the killer?"

  "Yeah." She was looking at me warily.

  "Well, I found him. The person with the scar. Only it wasn't a goblin like I'd thought."

  Her chest, which had been rising and falling up till now, suddenly stopped. Her face went pale. "You don't mean..."

  I nodded. "Yep. It was Colt."

  Now that I'd said the words out loud, they sounded ridiculous. How could Colt be the killer? And what did any of this have to do with Zulubar and Kyrab?

  "What did he say when you asked him about it?" Lucy said.

  "I didn't."

  Now her mouth dropped open. "You saw that mark on his hand and you didn't ask him about it?" She tapped her nails on the table and looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "You think he did it."

  "I don't know what to think." I looked back at the papers I'd brought along. "Does anything in here make any sense to you?"

  "No. Whatever code this is written in is indecipherable, at least to me. You'd probably need an expert to figure it out." She put the papers back into the magazine and folded her hands on the table, waiting.

  "What?" I asked.

  "You know what."

  "No, I don't."

  "You can't go making excuses for him. You know what that mark on his hand means. There's no way around it."

  "There could be another reason though, something we're not thinking of."

  "There's only one reason. Colt killed Bisnunk and then tried to kill you."

  "I was afraid you might say that."

  "There's no other way to say it."

  "I haven't even heard his side of the story yet."

  "Whatever it is it will just be lies." Lucy pulled on her ponytail and her long, dark hair sprang free. It flowed down past her shoulders, where she promptly scooped it all together and pulled it back behind her head once again.

  "Do you really think Colt could be a killer?" I asked.

  "Anyone could be a killer given the right circumstances."

  I cocked my head to the side. It was my turn to look at her strangely. "That's kind of a dark thing to say."

  "It's a true thing to say."

  I let out the breath I'd been holding. "I just don't know. I can't see him killing a fly let alone a goblin. Or me."

  "If all you want to do is kid yourself," Lucy said, "then you can count me out. She rose from her seat and headed back to the counter.

  "Lucy!" I called after her.

  She stopped and turned around. "When you're ready to face the truth, text me."

  I wasn't sure who I was angrier at, me for confiding in Lucy, or her for telling me precisely what I was afraid she would.

  I threw the rest of my latte in the trash and walked out the front door, keeping my head down and my mind in a cloud. I walked straight into Perx.

  "I'm sorry," I said as he rubbed his long, pointed nose. A tourist walked right past us, but they didn't even seem to notice him. He must have been using some kind of charm.

  He glared up at me, still rubbing his nose. "I was just on my way to the Mystic Cupcake. I've come for your report. I hope you have good news."

  I sighed. This was going to be the shortest report in the history of reports. I had no new information, no new leads, and nothing but a series of unanswered questions.

  "I don't want to speak here," he said. "Let's get to your bakery. I'd like to talk to your aunts as well."

  At least I wasn't going to be alone in this.

  * * *

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

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  Perx was looking at us, unimpressed. I felt my cheeks redden and shot a look to Eleanor, whose cheeks had also gone about five shades of pink. Trixie was the only one of us whose face remained neutral, though I noticed that she kept looking away from Perx. Even my father looked embarrassed at the situation.

  We had turned the open sign around so that it read closed, but had stayed in the front of the store. It was just too hot in the back room today. Our conversation had already grown stagnant; in the back, it would have been ten times worse. The ovens were running overtime, working to kick out several special orders we'd had come in all at once, and they wouldn't have a chance to cool down till the evening.

  "I don't understand," Perx said. "You've had almost a week and you have no new information for me?"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "We're trying."

  "Apparently not enough."

  He was staring harshly at us; his eyes were dark, his face darker. "I ask for your help, I humble myself by coming to, and you fail me." A strange sound, like a broken dishwasher, came from his throat.

  Eleanor's eyes narrowed. They turned from embarrassment to irritation. "Now listen here, we're doing the best we can. It's not as though you and your people have been exactly forthcoming with us."

  Perx puffed out his chest, reminding me an awful lot of Sheriff Knoxx when he got upset. He rolled his shoulders back and his eyes grew from a light black to an all-consuming one. "To what do you refer?"

  "You know perfectly well to what I refer," said Eleanor snarkily. It was an unexpected side of her that she normally reserved for close friends and family. Her head swiveled on her neck, turning in my direction. Perx's eyes followed hers.

  He glared at me. "You are saying negative things about me, Ava Fortune."

/>   "No, I've only told my aunts the truth. When Bisnunk was killed, you refused to speak with me."

  "I was quite busy at the time; would you not agree?"

  "Yes, but you're the one who asked for our help. Then you blew me off like you were hiding something."

  "Hiding?" Perx's ears stood up like a cat on alert. His eyes widened to saucers. "I'm not hiding anything. I never hide things. What could I possibly be hiding?"

  Eleanor and I exchanged a look. I saw Trixie and my father exchange one as well.

  "Are you hiding something?" I asked, suspicious now. It was the old adage of protesting too much.

  Perx shifted where he stood. "If I were keeping something from you, it would not be hiding. It would simply be... conserving my kingdom's secrets." He nodded as if agreeing with himself. "King Zulubar would not wish for me to disclose everything to you. You are witches, not goblins. Now, if Sheriff Knoxx were to become involved in this investigation as I've requested, I may be able to supply you with previously unknown information."

  I felt my own temper begin to flare. "I was almost killed that night with Bisnunk. Your king is missing. His girlfriend, who could be your next queen, is missing, too."

  I noticed that Perx's face took on a disgusted look when I mentioned Kyrab becoming queen. Apparently, he didn't think much of her. I had no idea why, though. She'd always struck me as a particularly nice goblin, and I got the feeling she'd have loved Zulubar whether he was king or not.

  My father cleared his throat. "If there's something you're not telling us that is crucial to this investigation, then it will be on your head if anything happens to Zulubar or Kyrab, not ours."

  "Would you really risk Zulubar's and Kyrab's lives just because my husband won't do as you ask?" said Eleanor.

  Perx sighed. "There is one thing I have kept from you, though I hardly think it matters." His pointy nose, which ran several inches out from his face, quivered slightly as he spoke. "Zulubar is not just our king; he is the last of our kings."