“Borage?” Her anxiety grew. Could he have gone outside? He hated outside. He was practically agoraphobic, only venturing out whenever there were new chicks to harass. Although, a recent run-in with an irate mother hen had nipped that little caper in the bud.
“Borage?”
Here. His voice scratched at her mind, aggrieved and unsettled.
“Where are you?” She followed his call to the front parlour. It was empty.
Up here. His tone became angry.
Astral looked up and found him on top of the Welsh dresser. “What on earth?” There was barely four inches between the top of the dresser and the ceiling. He must have pancaked his huge belly to squeeze into such a tight spot. She pulled up a chair to reach for him. “How did you get up there?”
Happy thoughts made me float. What do you think?
“Well, if you’re going to be like that, then your happy thoughts can get you down again.” She withdrew her reach.
Bitzer was here. His ears twitched with impatience. Get me down. He was well and truly wedged in.
“Bitzer? Is he still here?” She looked around nervously. Bitzer was a nasty little bastard who was not averse to nipping ankles.
The bolster pounded him until he ran.
Astral noticed the bolster lying under the couch. “Come here, my little hero.” It was tattered and torn, with stuffing sticking out from the corner. Gently, Astral set it on the couch and gave it a pat. “I’ll get the sewing box and mend that tear. You’re a credit to this house,” she cooed. It puffed up for a second then slumped, exhausted.
“Was Eve Wormrider with him?” Astral turned her attention back to Borage. This was alarming. She remembered the shoe prints in the soil on the porch. Why had Eve Wormrider and her awful familiar been sneaking around her house?
He didn’t answer, not inclined to cooperate until she hefted him into her arms and placed him on the floor. Once his paws hit the polished oak, he flew out the door and headed straight for the kitchen. Astral followed and found him sulking before the fridge. His sallow green gaze bored through the door as if it would open with sheer willpower. His will to power worked—Astral popped it open and reached for the milk jug.
“Borage, was Eve Wormrider here?” she asked again. She poured out a soothing saucer of milk and microwaved it for fourteens seconds, just as he liked it. He was pretty upset, she saw, as his fur was all puffed up and his tail one big bottlebrush. He was also frothing with personal affront, though she was unsure if this was because of his run-in with Bitzer or the indignity of having her heave his corpulent body off the top of the dresser.
“What did Bitzer want with you?” Astral tried one last time using a different approach. One about him, but it didn’t work. Borage was shutting down. He buried his nose in the saucer, and that was that with the questioning until the bowl was empty and he’d had a restorative nap.
Astral knew to wait it out. She texted Dulcie and Keeva that all was well and invited them to dinner that evening. Next, she fetched the sewing box and stitched the bolster back into shape then kissed it for its bravery. And, finally, she brewed the nice pot of tea she’d been looking forward to all afternoon, and settled back with the folder that she imagined was burning a hole through the faux leather of her handbag.
Something weird was going on. Today proved it. A witch, especially a sneaky one like Eve Wormrider, had been snooping around her house, and could only do so because she knew exactly where Astral would be—at Black and Blacker. The firm not only housed a critter, but it also had Magdalene Curdle as one of their V.I.P. clients. Astral had finally found her clue, and not the one that the coven expected. The real trick was to dig into it and figure out how it all fit together.
Chapter 9
“Keeva can’t make it. She’s got emergency surgery,” Dulcie said as she breezed into the kitchen on a cloud of cold air. “Wilma Berrygood’s ferret fell out of his hammock and broke his hind leg.” She quickly shrugged off her coat and held her hands out to the wood burner. “She says it’s a fiddly op, as Pedro is so old. So, no chicken fricassee for her tonight, but you’re to keep some in a Tupperware and she’ll collect it tomorrow. And, finally, how are you?” She gave Astral a quick hug.
“Feeling a bit better. It’s been a strange day.”
“And I want to hear all about it. You’ll have to catch Keeva up later.”
Astral nodded. “Poor Pedro. Wilma told me he’s going blind.” Astral set cutlery and condiments onto the table. “And deaf.”
“It’s hard when it’s nearing the time for them to jump back in the cauldron. Wilma dotes on that daft old ferret.”
“Was Pedro ever young?”
Dulcie shrugged. “He was geriatric when he was gifted to her. Most of us get puppies and kittens, or fledglings. But Wilma is a Dogwitch, so I suppose they can have familiars of any age and meld with them instantly.”
“My mum hatched her familiar out of an egg,” Astral said, still a little awed even after all these years. Myriad, although primarily a Fireside witch had excelled at all other magic. Witching boundaries had meant nothing to her and she magicked where she pleased. Riff-Raff had been a big brute of a rooster with wonderful red-gold plumage. He’d disappeared along with her mother, which gave Astral a maudlin sort of hope—that they were together somewhere. A witch should always have her familiar with her.
“Your mum was special.” Dulcie gave her a broad smile. “Her magic broke all the rules.”
“Perhaps a little too much.” Astral forced her sadness away. “Borage indicated that it was Eve Wormrider snooping around the house this afternoon with Bitzer.”
Dulcie tutted. “So inappropriate. I hope the Irish blues saw her off good and proper.”
“Oh, they did that, all right. They were delighted with themselves.” She began to serve dinner, and heaped plates with creamy chicken fricassee and homemade tagliatelle, along with a side dish of steamed broccoli.
Dulcie accepted her plate with genuine pleasure. “Eve would never act without orders from Magdalene. She’s too much of a runt.” She sniffed her food, and smiled again. “I wonder what she was after. I have no idea what their game is.”
“Well, I might,” Astral said grimly. “But let’s eat first.”
Like all good witches, not a word of business came between fork and mouth as they ate and drank a respectable chardonnay. Dessert followed, an apple-and-walnut steamed pudding with cream. Afterwards, they sat sipping Madeira, toasting their stocking toes before the wood burner while rain beat against the kitchen window.
Merryman snoozed, his claws clamped on the edge of a lampshade, tail feathers held high, soaking up the warmth from the lightbulb into his scrawny backside. Borage was curled in a sulky ball before the blazing stove, hogging as much of the heat as he could. He still was uncommunicative about his afternoon adventures. Astral hoped he’d come around. She really needed more details about what had happened.
“I’ve decided tomorrow is my last day at Black and Blacker,” she announced. “I’m only going back to return a file I borrowed.” She finger-quoted the last word. “That is, if I can manage to do it without a full-scale security alarm. The Cuckoo spell is a bust and the critter story is all nonsense.”
Dulcie looked over at her, puzzled. “Nonsense? What do you mean?”
“A critter isn’t the problem. It’s Magdalene. She’s got a personal account with Black and Blacker.”
Dulcie sat up. “She’s never mentioned that.”
“It’s all in the file.” Astral handed it over to Dulcie, who read through it, brow furrowed in concentration.
“I don’t understand the half of this,” she said. “It’s all gobbledy-gook to me.”
“I do,” she said as she took the folder back. “Well, most of it. This is her contract for ‘services rendered,’ except I’m not sure exactly what the services were.” Which was a common anomaly with other Black and Blacker contracts she’d worked on. They were dense, complicated, unforgiving thing
s that surrendered details grudgingly. “It’s obviously a financial package of some sort, since Black and Blacker is a finance house.”
“They loaned her money?”
Astral sighed heavily. This was the part that turned her stomach. “More like she’s invested with them, or through them…with coven funds.”
“What?” Dulcie nearly spat out her Madeira. “She what?”
“From what I can tell, she’s been filtering coven funds to stock her own portfolio. There probably never was a critter. Just her trying to hide her activities.”
“But…but, she can’t do that. That’s my pension. And your pension. It’s the entire coven’s pension scheme. I’m… I’m flabbergasted.” She sat back, slack-mouthed. “Do you think the others are in on it?” she asked quietly.
“I only found a contract for Magdalene, but who knows.” She shrugged, sad. She had little faith in the likes of Eve Wormrider or Magdalene’s other hangers-on. “Grandma Lettice must be moving like Jagger in her grave right now. To think, in less than a year, Magdalene has stolen, and it seems lost, most of The Plague Tree’s money.”
“Lost?” Dulcie looked green around the gills. “But…but that must be hundreds and hundreds of thousands.” From her expression, she was still struggling with the concept. “You’re sure she’s lost all the money? All our money?”
“Yes.” The realization still sat like leaden weights on her shoulders.
“She can’t be that bad an investor. Wasn’t anybody managing her?”
Astral shrugged again. “I’m guessing the real reason for all this critter talk was to distract the coven from her embezzling. She took some bad hits and probably couldn’t hide the cash haemorrhage anymore,” she said. “This has been going on from the moment she took over.” Her wand had been broken for no other reason than Magdalene’s games of distraction, and Astral’s bitterness left a bad taste in her mouth.
“How ironic that the only way we found this out was because you were working there,” Dulcie said. “You’re not as daft as she thought. Have you found out anything else besides Magdalene?” She gave the folder in Astral’s lap a cursory nod.
“There’s a snarling beast. It may be a guard dog.” Astral topped up their glasses. “It’s locked up in an office on the ninth floor. No one works on that floor.”
Dulcie sipped her wine. “Isn’t that a little strange, to keep a dog locked up on a floor no one uses?”
“Very. Ping calls it Shucky. It might belong to Abby because I saw her on that floor, too.”
“Abby?”
“My boss.” Her heart gave a thump. A dull, heavy thunk, as if it had a big brass knocker. “I mean, my ex-boss after today.” Her mind prodded tenderly at the bruise of not seeing Abby again and watching her as she literally looked through Astral, then walked off down the train platform.
“The Cuckoo spell gave up in London.” Dulcie seemed a little bemused. “That’s not a bad radius for a coven spell.”
Astral blinked. “Yes. It was pretty strong. I was impressed.”
“So, there’s also a good chance it might reboot tomorrow morning.”
She tapped the folder. “If it wasn’t for returning this, I’d not set foot in the place ever again. We have our critter and it’s Magdalene.”
“Well, if the spell does reboot, be careful, especially around the person it failed on. It might not work twice on them.”
“I’ll be careful.” She had no intention of bumping into Abby. She’d be in and out before the work day had opened its sleepy eyes.
“Can you make a copy before you hand it back?” Dulcie asked. “We’ll need it to show the coven, or at least to those we trust.”
“I’ve already made several copies. It’s exhibit A. Magdalene Curdle’s time with The Plague Tree Coven is over, as far as I’m concerned.”
“So mote it be.” Dulcie raised her glass and they made a toast.
*
Against her better judgment, but accepting that it had to be done—Astral returned to Black and Blacker early the next morning. Come what may, this was her last day.
“Good morning. Welcome to Black and Blacker Finance. How may I help you?” The greeting met her halfway across the foyer. Ping’s smile shone forth as cheerful as ever, but as Astral drew closer she could see the Herculean effort going on behind Ping’s eyes. The Cuckoo spell was slowly rebooting as Ping grappled with who this oddly familiar stranger was.
“Good morning, Ping.” Astral decided to bluff her way until the reboot completed. “How’d it go last night?”
Ping’s face creased further, so Astral gave her a prompt. “It’s me, Astral. I started on Monday, remember?” she said. “Boy, they really are working you hard.”
“Of course, I remember. Our new temp.” The Cuckoo spell slipped into place and Ping visibly brightened as the false memory popped into her head. “A little birdie told me you might consider joining us permanently. I really hope so. Please consider it. Pretty please?” Her smile was sincere and Astral felt a little tug of guilt at her own duplicity. Then she refocussed the guilt onto Magdalene. She was the reason Astral was wallowing in this magical morass of secrets and lies, one of which was Ping lying to her about the ninth floor.
“What exactly is it you do on night duty?” She wanted to take her time to make sure the spell had stuck. This was not a day for magical glitches.
“Oh, nothing fun,” Ping said, brushing her question aside. “I heard you had an adventure yesterday. You went to the Big Smoke with the Big Boss.” She gave a crafty smile, which Astral parried with a weaker one, though she wondered if Ping had found out before she and Abby had left, or after. The latter would be problematic, because it would mean that Abby did remember her and had maybe come back wondering where her assistant had got to? Perhaps the Cuckoo spell might not have worn off completely.
And there had certainly been a lot of adventures yesterday, including stealing the folder, abandoning Abby in London, and the intruders at her house. They all jumbled through her mind like a knotted fishing line—with too many hooks.
“Oh, it was all a bit of there and back again,” she answered. “Nothing short of a U-turn. Boring, really.”
For all of Ping’s proffered friendship, seeing her on the ninth floor talking to the Shucky thingamajig made Astral a little leery of the happy-go-lucky receptionist. Then again, after yesterday, the whole building and everyone in it had taken on a sinister aura. Black and Blacker was working hand in hand with Magdalene Curdle, helping her, unwittingly or not, to empty The Plague Tree Coven’s pension pot.
The clatter of new arrivals moved her on. Today, her job was going to be easy because all she had to do was dump Magdalene’s folder on Fergal’s desk, then head home for a cuppa and a slice of fruit cake. In and out, ninja style. She didn’t want to meet anybody, especially not Abby. A reboot might work on Ping, but as Dulcie had warned, Abby had been the person the spell had failed on. There was no guarantee it would reboot with her. Once the elevator opened on the thirteenth floor, she had no idea what would happen. Abby could turn up at any moment and say, “Who the hell are you?” Then she imagined Abby saying, “Someone call security, please.” And being searched with Magdalene’s folder in her bag, and…I am but a simple girl.
The elevator doors slid open on the thirteenth floor, and onto a morning much like any other early morning. Rows of empty desks, partially lowered window blinds, a lonesome phone ringing somewhere far, far away. It all seemed perfectly normal—except for Fergal Mor pulling his desk apart.
Drawers hung open. Pens, paper, folders, all manner of stationery lay strewn across the floor. His desktop looked like a bomb had hit it, bounced, and hit it again with Fergal caught in the cross-blast. For a dapper guy, he was in complete disarray. He muttered incoherently, his normal spritely self shrunk into a dishevelled mess of twittering anxiety. Tufts of bright red hair stuck out at all angles and his shirt collar stood on end while his impeccably knotted tie lay across his chest all askew. His
waistcoat hung open, and his tweed jacket was crumpled on the floor to be trodden on as he darted here and there with no logical sequence or sense to his actions. Sweat patched the underarms of his wilted shirt. At her arrival, he stopped his demented scrabbling and mopped his forehead with a large handkerchief. “Oh, Astral, yer heaven sent, the answer to me prayers, me little angel.” His Irish brogue was thicker than ever, indicating his stress level.
“Fergal?” Astral was shocked. For an instant she considered stepping back into the elevator, dumping the file on the floor for someone else to find, and walking straight out of the building.
“Jaysus, Astral. She’s going t’kill me, I tell ye. I’m a dead man. Dead as a coffin nail.”
“What’s going on?” She compulsively stepped forward, volunteering herself to help like any good Fireside witch.
“Have you seen a file like this?” His shaking hand held up a manila folder with a red V.I.P. stamp. The hope in his voice was pitiful. Her stomach shrank. It was a replica of the one she had taken, only this one had the name of the ex-Nigerian Minister of Finance on it.
“For him?” She stalled.
“No, no. not for—ach, it’s a different name, but it looks just like this. Have you seen it?”
Astral’s mouth filled with sawdust. “Um. No.”
“Ach!” With an anguished cry he flung the folder away, adding to the litter around his feet. “She’s going to skin me alive. Freckles and all.”
“Who?” Though she already knew.
“Abby.” He mopped his brow again and the hanky came away stained. “I was late for a meeting with her yesterday. I shot straight up to London chasin’ her, but when I got there she was a folder short and somehow it’s all my fault.”
His petulance hardened her heart slightly, he was such a lazy, useless little git with his Gentleman Jim act. Then guilt melted all her hard edges away. It was her fault he was under Abby’s cosh. She had to figure how to slip the file onto his desk unseen and make things right for Fergal and his freckles.
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