Hexes & Hot Chocolate (A Stella Storm Cozy Witch Mystery Book 3)

by Amy Casey

  But still. I was taking all I could right now. This was a big juicy win, and I was going to enjoy it while I could.

  I looked at the discovery I’d made that was in my hands. The silver slingshot. It was unlike any slingshot I’d ever seen. It was large, heavy, and made of a material I didn’t even recognise.

  But I remembered something I heard about the slingshot. How only a Were could use it. Sheriff Butcher had told me that a long time ago, how they had this hobby and often went down into the woods to carry out—and how they were the only species strong enough to use them.

  And I’d found this slingshot there in the woods, right by where Bertie had attacked me.

  I had my proof.

  Bertie was the killer.

  He’d killed Curtis. And then someone else in his family had used it—hidden in the woods—to kill Hegathi the Syt.

  This was a werewolf cover up. It went right back to the beginning.

  I didn’t know whether the vampires were involved too. But one thing was for sure.

  They couldn’t get away with this. The truth was going to come out. The time for messing around was well and truly gone.

  As I paced towards Sheriff Butcher’s house—a small, detached building that sat just off the main streets, secluded and far away from the bustle of everyday life—there were still questions on my mind. First, the slingshot itself. Why hadn’t it been found already? The police arrested Bertie in that area, so surely they’d done their proper investigating, right?

  Then there was Bernard’s death. Where did that play into things? All I could see right now was that Thomas had killed him, because that was the only possible explanation. It was an escalation of tensions, and in an angry moment, he’d lashed out. It was explainable. He had a temper, so it made sense. He’d lost his brother. All of it added up, and at the time I’d been too blind to see and too convinced of a wider conspiracy that I hadn’t really accepted it.

  But then there was the visit from Hegathi herself that troubled me the most. She’d come to my family home and she’d told me that she had something to show me—information for me. Only she’d died on the way. And when she’d returned to me as a spectre, she’d chosen not to show me the original thing she’d been planning, instead showing me her own death.

  I hadn’t even asked her at the time her ghost had visited me. I felt stupid for not doing. But somehow, I feared I wouldn’t have got an answer anyway.

  But the fact still remained.

  What had she wanted to tell me?

  Why had she chosen to show her own death after all?

  Was it the knowledge that she was shot by a were’s slingshot that she found more damning evidence than anything?

  I thought about how I’d used all the power in my body to teleport my way into those woods. I wondered if perhaps Hegathi had a part to play in that; if she’d used the last of her energy to transport me to the weapon she was killed with.

  And as I reached Sheriff Butcher’s door, I prepared for a whole waterfall of theories to spill from my mouth.

  I knocked on the door, the rain falling heavier. I looked around, the streets still emptied. And as I heard footsteps coming down Sheriff Butcher’s hallway, I remembered suddenly and alarmingly that I was an escaped convict. I was by any accounts mad for coming here.

  But he needed to know the truth.

  He needed to see things clearly, once and for all.

  The door opened. Sheriff Butcher didn’t look too alarmed, not at first.

  Then he saw it was me and his eyes widened; a frown crossed his face.

  “Stella?” he said. “How…”

  “Never mind ‘how’,” I said, stepping inside his doorway, freeing myself from the pouring rain. “It’s about time we got to the bottom of who killed my cousin and who killed Hegathi. And I think I have just what I need to prove it, beyond doubt.”

  Chapter 36

  “You’d better explain what the hell you’re doing in my house in the next thirty seconds or I’ll have you back down at the station in no time.”

  I stood in Sheriff Butcher’s hallway and looked him in the eyes. All the things I’d learned spiralled around my mind—the murder weapon, the place I’d found it, the way I’d seen what’d happened to Hegathi.

  And my theory. The theory that had to be right.

  “Listen,” I said.

  “No, you listen. You’re putting me in bloody big danger just by being here.”

  “And I appreciate that. Truly. But deep down, I know you don’t believe I did this. I know you’re just trying to do right by this town. And I accept that. But… but just hear me out. Please.”

  Sheriff Butcher opened his mouth, like he was readying a response.

  Then he just sighed and shrugged. “Honestly, it doesn’t look like you’ve left me with an awful lot of choice, does it?”

  “Hegathi came to visit me,” I said.

  “Hegathi? But she’s—”

  “Dead. Yeah. I know. Her ghost came to me.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She told me there was something she wanted to see. And at first, I thought it might be that same thing she’d wanted me to see when she’d come to visit me in the first place. But it wasn’t.”

  “What did she show you?”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat as I let my mind wander back to that trippy turn of events. “She wanted to show me what happened to her.”

  Sheriff Butcher looked even less convinced. “And I’m supposed to believe the woman I arrested on suspicion of murdering her?”

  “Please. Just… just listen. I watched her walk to the Mudthorpe family home. I watched her race through the streets, towards the place I found her dead. And just before she reached it… someone shot her.”

  “Shot her?”

  “In the neck. With a silver slingshot.”

  “I’m not sure I like where this is going.”

  “Then you won’t like it even more when I show you what I found when I broke my way out of the cell.”

  I lifted the silver slingshot.

  Sheriff Butcher’s eyes widened. “How on earth did you get hold of that?”

  “I found it buried near the tree where Bertie the Were attacked me. Right near his fur. And there’s something else.”

  I turned it over and showed Sheriff Butcher the other thing I’d found; the thing I’d been hiding, even from myself.

  “What is that?”

  I looked down at the piece of paper, read over it again and again. “It’s a manifesto.”

  “A manifesto?”

  “A… a manifesto about destabilising the peace in Nightthistle. About rising up against the establishments. About the lesser species—weres, vampires—fighting back against the way of doing things for so many years.”

  Sheriff Butcher had gone totally pale. “This… this can’t be.”

  “Then what’s the alternative? That I came here and destabilised the peace myself?”

  “That’s the strongest possibility,” he said.

  “No. No, it isn’t.”

  I stepped closer to him then. “Look,” I said. “I know you’re new to the job. I know it’s hard. There’s… there’s someone else I know. Someone like you. Younger. A bit more attractive—”

  “Charming.”

  “Sorry. But he is. But anyway. That’s beside the point. The point is… he didn’t believe in himself. And that made him jump to the safest option on a case he was working on instead of throwing himself headfirst into the real mystery, like he should. You know why?”

  Sheriff Butcher shook his head.

  “Because he was afraid of what the consequences might be.”

  We were silent for a while. And as the seconds ticked down, I got the sense that Sheriff Butcher was finally hearing me. That he was finally seeing things the way I saw them; seeing where I came from.

  I wanted him to believe me. I needed him to believe me.

  “The short-term future of this town might ben
efit from you locking me away,” I said. “But think about the long-term. Think about the future. And think about what it might mean if you allow the were’s plan to unfold just the way they like it.”

  Sheriff Butcher rubbed the bridge of his nose. He sighed. “I was hoping to have a cushy job,” he said. “I mean, there’s only so cushy this job can be. I was just hoping it’d be a lot more laid back where I was concerned.”

  “Well sometimes we don’t always get what we want,” I said.

  Sheriff Butcher half-smiled and nodded. “Seems to be the case.”

  He took the manifesto from me. Studied it, his face getting paler by the second.

  “I can only conclude one thing,” he said.

  I braced myself for whatever was coming next.

  “This is a Were concoction. They worked together with the other degenerate species to destabilise order. The very future of our kind is at stake. And you are right. I can’t just idly sit by and let this happen.”

  My heart raced. Adrenaline pumped through my chest. “Then we have to arrest the weres. We have to arrest Harold. We—we have to arrest every single one of them, find out who was responsible and we have to end this.”

  Sheriff Butcher nodded. “And we have to free your cousin.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. To be honest, I felt a little guilty for leaving Thomas out of my list of demands. But then I guessed it was because it looked like he’d killed Bernard after all.

  “Let me grab my coat a second,” Sheriff Butcher said.

  He walked off into the other room, left me alone in the hall.

  I stood there, cold. Or maybe I was just shaking with the excitement and adrenaline that this case was finally coming to a close. I didn’t know how deep the case went. I didn’t know how long it’d take to arrest everyone involved. And I didn’t know what the repercussions for the future of Nightthistle would be.

  I just knew we were finally on the right track.

  It was then that a sense of dread came over me.

  I don’t think it was because of my magic that I felt it. I think it was just… intuition. My mind subconsciously piecing things together. A possibility. A possibility I hadn’t even considered before.

  The irrational behaviour of Bertie the Were when we’d discovered him…

  Then the mystery of Bernard’s death…

  Because Thomas had been pinned down.

  He’d been pinned down and his powers had been dampened.

  And I was supposed to believe he’d just fought back?

  I was supposed to believe he’d just killed him?

  I was supposed to believe he’d used a spell that would put his whole family at risk?

  I thought of something else then, as the dread began to build inside me.

  “They worked together with the other degenerate species to destabilise order.”

  That word.

  Degenerate.

  And as I thought about it, my mouth started to go dry; my vision started to swirl.

  Because I could see it.

  I could see it and I didn’t like it.

  And I knew I needed to get out of here.

  Fast.

  I turned around to open the door when I heard footsteps behind me.

  When I turned around, I saw Sheriff Butcher standing there.

  Wand in hand.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  I tried to activate my powers, tried to spark a spell.

  But I was too late.

  “Paralius.”

  A paralysing blast flew in my direction.

  Made every muscle in my body go solid.

  And as Sheriff Butcher walked towards me, mean stare in his eyes, I drifted off into unconsciousness.

  But in that final moment of lucidity, I understood everything.

  And it terrified me.

  Chapter 37

  I opened my eyes and I felt an uncanny sense of deja vu.

  And it was a deja vu that was combined with dread.

  I tried to move my hands, but I couldn’t. My feet were just as ineffective. My chest was tight and my head spun. In my mouth, I could taste an acidic tang that was quite unlike anything I’d tasted before.

  I looked around, but my vision was blurry. And even though I was fully aware of what had happened, my waning consciousness made everything seem… well, out of focus somewhat. Like I hadn’t fully faced up to the ramifications of my discovery.

  And my discovery was big.

  It was very bloody big.

  I blinked a few times, wanting desperately to rub my watery eyes, when I saw him standing at the other side of the room.

  There was something I’d learned about people who weren’t being entirely honest in my time working at Witchy Delights—and long before that, in fact. Their demeanour was prone to a sudden shift. It was like they were holding up a fake version of themselves for so long, and suddenly, once they were found out, everything about them totally fell apart.

  Sheriff Butcher was like that now. The expression on his face, the way he was standing… it was like he was wearing a costume for all the time I’d known him. And now, now his secret was out there, he was a completely different person entirely.

  “I’m sorry I had to do this to you, Stella. Truly, I am. But… but if you’d just stayed in that cell, you would’ve been fed a nutritious meal two times a day. You would’ve been granted a shower every two days. Really, it’s a nice life in there. Far nicer than the prisons back in your world, anyway. Think about it as… rehabilitation. Alas, it can’t be that way anymore. Unfortunately.”

  I tried to speak, but my throat was tight. I cleared my throat, took a few sharp inhalations. “I should’ve known. I should’ve seen it. All this time and… and you were right in front of me.”

  “The thing is, you’re an outsider too. So you won’t understand, not really. You’ll never understand what it used to be like to live in this place. It used to be much more peaceful back in the day. Witches, wizards… we were the predominant kind. But then the vampires came here. Then the Weres. All of these different cultures, all poisoning this place with their presence. And even worse, species were marrying one another. Do you understand how devastating that is to the bloodline of witches and wizards, Stella? Do you understand how much our entire way of being is threatened?”

  “So you kill my cousin, one of these ‘pure’ ones, to prove a point. Sounds logical.”

  “That’s the thing. I couldn’t just sort out the other species myself, as powerful a position as I am in. It’d breach all protocol. But if I could just start something… if I could provoke a war… well, then I’m confident that the witches and the wizards will prevail. And when they do, the world can go back to the way it was.”

  “You keep talking about ‘the way it was’,” I said. “But the peace agreement was made long before your time.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? If it really were respected, maybe my poor daughter would’ve have been killed by a filthy were, would she? Maybe she wouldn’t have been found dead—dead by the hands of one of those slingshots. No. The world has gone too far. And the truce… the truce protected her killer. So this was the only way. The only way to make things right. The only way to change Nightthistle—for good.”

  He leaned closer towards me then. Put a hand on my shoulder, which made me flinch.

  “Your cousin died for a great cause. And he wasn’t stabbed, by the way. The knife was just something I used so I could plant it and implicate the vamps and the weres. Much like the way I cursed Bertie and had him acting irrationally for days before the great event, let’s say. But as for your cousin… I made it really swift and really peaceful for him. He was a sacrifice for the greater good. He’ll go down in history as a brave martyr. I’ll make sure nobody forgets him.”

  His eyes glazed over, just for a second.

  “And I’ll make sure the same thing happens to you.”

  There was a flash, then. A sudden burning sensation. And
then before I knew it I was outside somewhere. The wind was raging. Rain was lashing down from above. I could hear water splashing somewhere nearby.

  When I looked ahead, I realised exactly where it was coming from.

  I was on a cliff edge. I was still paralysed, still unable to move my hands and feet.

  And Sheriff Butcher was right behind me.

  “You fall off this cliff, into the water, and nobody will ever know. Not with the Sea of Creaton. You’ll likely drown. And if you don’t, you’ll wash up on the Isle of Giants. They’ll… well. Let’s just hope you’re gone before then.”

  I felt his weight pushing against me, edging me closer and closer to the cliff.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  Sheriff Butcher sighed. “That’s the thing, Stella. I do, I’m afraid. I like your family. I respect them dearly. They are so, so pure. But your cousin… well, he wasn’t as pure as he wanted you to believe anyway. Dating a Syt, I believe. Imagine the power those two could create. Imagine the danger. So no. I had to pay Hegathi off. I had to make sure she stirred the pot some more. It’s just a dear shame she had to find out what happened to her sister. If she hadn’t, maybe she wouldn’t have come to grass to you. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to die.”

  My head spun. “So it was you who shot Hegathi.”

  “Bingo,” he said. “She was… a threat. A real threat. And I saw a window of opportunity to deal with you.”

  “But you said the silver slingshots could only be used by weres.”

  Sheriff Butcher smiled. “And you didn’t think to check that little nugget of information with anyone else?”

  I looked out to sea and I realised, well and truly, the kind of person I was dealing with here. “You’re evil,” I said.

  Sheriff Butcher frowned. “Evil? That’s… harsh. After all, I just want things the way they used to be. I just want to preserve Nightthistle in all its glory. Alas, you can’t be a part of that anyway. You’ve clearly been too tainted by the outside world. But never forget, I offered you a window of opportunity. I tried to give you the tickets back to your filthy home. What a dear shame you didn’t take it.”