by Mara Webb
“So, any idea how Hannah Huxley wound up dead next to your driveway?” he asked. His abruptness caught me off guard and a piece of broccoli angled awkwardly in the back of my throat, I coughed.
“Hannah Huxley? That’s her name? I didn’t know. I don’t have the first clue as to why she’s dead or why someone would put her there. You said it might be a threat earlier, why do you think that?” I took a large gulp of water. I am bad at pretending, the whole ‘act natural’ thing I was going for did not feel like my best performance. There would be no Oscars given out tonight.
“Well, it is a bit old school, a bit mafia-style. It could be a warning to back off. Have you been getting involved in someone else's business? Her family is well known around here. Not in a good way. They are catty and bitter about the way things have changed. We don’t make huge spectacles of ourselves anymore, not like the witches and wizards of the past.
“The law changed to prevent us from using magic for personal gain. Of course, people still do it, just not as much. Not in the big ostentatious ways that the Huxley’s enjoyed. No more rigging lottery tickets, no more magic flour in the baking contests, and no more enchantments to upgrade their phone to the latest model without paying. They have been forced to play fair, and they hate it.” He took his final bite of the vegetables in his bowl and jumped up to take the tray from the oven.
“They will be sniffing around here pretty soon. The whole family. It won’t even matter who is responsible, they are going to blame you for this. I heard that Hannah was smart, but they weren’t very encouraging. They don’t value academic achievement really. They have inherited enormous wealth so in their eyes they don’t need to work, so what’s the point of learning?” He gingerly plucked the cookies off the hot metal sheet with his fingers and dropped them onto a cooling rack I didn’t know I owned.
“What am I supposed to do? I didn’t touch her earlier; I was just emotional I think.” I looked up at him. Whoops. He raised an eyebrow. I had dipped my toe into this pool of confession, should I just dive in? I heard a soft meow from the ground, Delphi was trying to communicate suggestions. Quin must have told her.
“So, you did know Hannah? What aren’t you telling me?” He stared at me while waiting for a response. He got nothing. “Okay, you can keep your secrets if you must, but just get working on a better poker face for when the Huxley’s turn up. They don’t mess around.” He brought the cooling tray over to sit between us on the counter.
I grabbed the closest one. The weight of the cookie as I lifted it caused it to droop a little, ahh gooey. He had managed to whip up the softest, most chocolate chip filled cookies I had ever tasted. Chocolate was melting on my lips, the brown lip liner made Ryan laugh and check his own mouth with his thumb.
I noticed two things at that moment. The first was that men kept baking cookies for me, such is my lot in life. The second thing is that Ryan was cute, really cute. I could imagine waking up next to him in an old country house, our kids running to our bedroom on a Sunday morning and jumping on the mattress. He would get up first and wander downstairs with the girls—I had decided we have two girls—and make waffles for all four of us.
He was thoughtful like that, always giving me a lie in because he thought I was too beautiful to get out of bed before ten. Our house would always smell like freshly baked cookies, and bread. He also likes to bake bread for me in this scenario. After the kids were asleep, he would light a roaring log fire and we would cuddle up under a thick knitted blanket, his arms around me in a protective scoop. We would watch romantic Christmas films every time it snowed.
Or not. I needed to remind myself, frequently, that just because a guy is attractive, sometimes astonishingly gorgeous, does not mean that they are the perfect guy. Just because an incredibly handsome wizard with a body like a Greek statue is standing in my kitchen cooking my dinner, in his tight shirt, wow it’s tight, doesn’t mean he is into me. Brent.
Was I that easy to sway? I had been so excited about my date with Brent this morning, our kiss. Then someone else makes me dessert and I have daydreamed about our fantasy tropical wedding, destination of course. In my mind Ryan offers to pay for all the guests to travel to the white sand island he rented for the ceremony. I don’t even remember if Ryan has any sort of fortune, never mind ‘rent an island’ money.
“...Nora? Nora, are you okay?” Ryan was looking at my face with concern. I had been daydreaming for several minutes, apparently, he had been trying to have a conversation and I’d just zoned out and stopped responding. “I am going to have to get back, I suspect your little police officer friend is outside waiting for me to leave. I have business to attend to at home. Call me if you need anything. We have a council meeting on Friday, but I will understand if you skip it.”
I walked him to the door and my heart started to beat slower, he kissed me on the cheek and walked outside. The sensation of his lips against my cheek lingered. He had been wrong though; Brent was not outside. He must have left at some point, I thought he might have spoken to me again before going back to the station. How upset was he about Ryan?
I was concerned, obviously, but I had never been part of a love triangle before, even one like this that I had completely fabricated. It was both exciting and stressful.
I considered my options for the remainder of the night. I needed to prepare for the potential invasion of the Huxley’s. I didn’t know if their magic was strong enough to counter the protection spells Edith had placed over the house. Hannah had obviously managed to get in, maybe they could too. What if I woke up to a couple of strangers standing over my bed with a vendetta?
I needed to protect the house; I could ask Edith to whip up something a little more potent to keep intruders out. Quin could help with that too. I also had to figure out where the books had gotten too. What if Hannah was killed because she had the books? Someone more sinister could be reading through them right now, plotting all sorts of dastardly deeds. Or was this just a warning for me to leave the books alone? To stay out of their way as they use illegal magic. I needed the books back. That was non-negotiable.
“Quin, is there a book upstairs about protection spells? We need the house on lockdown,” I asked.
“Yeah, oh, there are so many! Do you want one that is for protecting property? People inside property? Protect your heart? That’s your figurative heart, that’s more of a thing to do if you start a relationship and it starts to sour. Er, what about...” He was thinking. “I think there is one about protecting your finances. That is an old one from when people kept their money as piles of gold. If someone tried to take it their hands would turn bright orange for an entire month.
“I think we have some gluten-free protection spells, not sure what that means but it was a popular trend for a while, gluten free magic. If you use enough buzzwords in a title, people just buy it regardless of how useless it might be. That is how we ended up with three of those carp shaped pillows, I don’t know what I was thinking when I ordered those. Must have been sleep deprived but—”
“Quin, can we do a spell for protecting the perimeter of the house, to prevent intrusion?” I interrupted. I often had to; he gets stuck in these… loops.
“Yeah, I will go fetch the book from the attic.” He bounced off up the stairs and I could hear the rumbling of the attic ladder as he used his magic to bring it to the ground so that he could climb up. He returned shortly after with a thin book between his teeth, dropped it on the ground in front of me and used his paw to riffle through the pages, looking for the correct spell. “Got it!” he yelled.
I read through the instructions and then took the book upstairs to the full-length mirror in the closet. I held the book in such a way that both Edith and I could read it at the same time. We pressed our palms together, somehow my reflection didn’t appear in the mirror now, just Edith. “Praesidium, praesidium, praesidium,” I chanted. Edith was unable to speak, some sort of weird rule associated with ghosts of witches.
The book informed
us that we must focus on drawing a fence around the land we wish to protect, envision a border being built that went way into the sky, a roof of safety, impenetrable. We were to imagine someone trying to walk up to the door or the windows and being turned away by an unseen force. “Praesidium, praesidium, praesidium,” I chanted again. I felt a surge as if all my muscles tensed at once, and then release.
I could see a shimmer of white light rise upwards past the window of my bedroom. The spell had worked. Edith smiled at me in the mirror, I assume Quin had explained to her what had happened.
Although the spell was successful, I felt apprehensive about sleeping. I checked outside again and again, the shimmering white light barrier was still in place, only I could see it. If someone tried to pass through it, they would forget why they came and turn away. It was safe to sleep. Hannah’s body had been moved now; the street had returned to silence.
That made the sound of someone downstairs at two in the morning all the more audible.
8
The sound was a scratching, like a sharp implement dragging across glass. I could feel my pulse pounding in my temples, my feet locked beneath the covers on the bed, refusing to move. How could someone break through the spell? Was I not strong enough to protect the house, even with Edith’s help?
The kittens had all woken to the sound too, Quin stood in front of them, shielding them from whatever menacing force lay in wait for us. I saw the fur stand up on Quin’s back, his tail as black as midnight stood upright, puffed and defensive. I have to do something. I grabbed my wand from my nightstand and convinced my body to obey me. Get up. I swung my feet out onto the carpet. Stand up. I straightened my knees to bring my body higher. Move towards the door.
This took more convincing. I was terrified. Fear was poured over me like gasoline and the sound, the harsh, piercing sound was a lit match, threatening me with its every movement. The scratching stopped. A different sound echoed through the house, the sound of weight on the stairs. It was coming towards us, whatever it was. The first step, then the second, then silence. Had they changed their mind?
Quin’s fur lay flat against his skin, he must have sensed that the danger was gone. I was still not convinced. I whispered to him.
“They might be waiting for us downstairs; it could be a trap to lure us out of the bedroom. Don’t go Quin, please.” I begged, but he walked towards the door, used his magic to throw it open and walked out into the hall. The kittens followed close behind him, they were a team of seven and a good match for any threat. It was my own abilities that I doubted.
“They’re gone, Nora. It seems they have left you a message though,” he shouted. Quin was downstairs now, yelling up through the house loud enough for me to hear. “Yeah, we have work to do.”
I crept down the hallway and to the top of the staircase with my wand raised, just in case. I wasn’t greeted by a monster, a ghost, a demon. There was nothing here. Just a message scratched into the glass of the mirror in the entryway.
I had tried to add as many mirrors to the house as possible. Edith had bought a huge supply in her final months. Due to a hex she was under, she had become paranoid, afraid that death was just around the corner. She was right, as it turned out, but the mirrors were bought because she could appear in any mirror that had been in her home when she died.
I had moved this large, gold framed mirror from a closet in a spare bedroom to the entry of the house. I investigated the glass now, expecting to see Edith with some hand signals to explain to me what she had seen. The message across the mirror was etched with care, whoever had broken into this house had come here with a purpose. The lines in the glass said, ‘Death is singing, listen carefully’ and Edith was not in the mirror.
Quin sighed. “Yeah, that’s the Huxley’s alright. They have this whole ‘death song’ thing, it’s like a family recipe for revenge. The more of them sing it, the quicker they are avenged. If they think you have killed Hannah then the whole gang is probably out for blood, they don’t fire warning shots. The quicker we get this resolved the better, otherwise you will have them singing their ‘death song’ and then that’s a mess for me to clean up.” Quin sounded put out, as if my untimely murder would be hardest on him. Cats eh?
“What about Edith? Where is she?” I asked with my nose pressed to the glass of the mirror, looking left and right to see if maybe she was hiding somehow.
“They might have banished her? Or...eesh, imprisoned her or something? This is new to me too I’ve got to be honest. I had heard rumors about the Huxley’s, but this is crazy. Silver lining, she is already dead, so what is the worst thing they can do? They have probably just moved her away from you. You are growing more powerful by the day, but Edith is still stronger even after death. They don’t want her to protect you.” Quin also looked into the mirror. He then turned to me with his face askew and eyebrows raised in a ‘your guess is as good as mine’ way.
“Right,” I paused. “So, we need to find out who actually killed Hannah first, the books thing can wait. I can’t retrieve the books if I am dead, or at the very least it will be harder.” I assumed that there would be something useful in the attic. If not, I could borrow something from the O.W.L. library. I had another assignment due soon anyway. I hadn’t started it yet or even read through the guide sheet.
“Quin, can you help me out? I don’t know what it is I’m looking for.” A needle in a haystack, a leaf in the forest. We walked upstairs, I pulled down the cord for the attic step ladder and climbed up.
“It would be great if you could get a couple of clues, right? Like if there was some sort of cheat spell that would point you in the right direction.” Quin sounded enthusiastic as he spoke, like he was remembering something useful.
“That would be great! Amazing, actually. Which book would that spell be in?” I asked.
“No idea! I just made it up, that would be great though. It’s a real shame it doesn't exist. Just going to have to do some good old-fashioned detective work. Not sure how to do that either really, but hey, we solved one murder already. How hard can it be?” Quin was grinning with anticipation of another adventure. I was less eager.
He used his magic to cause a large white board to appear in the center of the attic. It was on a stand held up by small wheels, it was the type you might find in a police station in the seventies. A cat-sized deerstalker hat now rested on top of Quin’s head. I wondered why he had gone to all the trouble of training to be a teacher when solving crime was his true passion.
“So, what do we know so far?” Quin asked. A black marker rose up from the tray of pens along the bottom of the board, the cap clicked off and fell back to the tray and it started to write. “Hannah Huxley is dead; she is super-duper dead. Could not be less alive if she tried,” he said. He looked at me. “Anything else? That’s all I have.”
“Well she broke in and stole a bunch of books. That must be significant. She is on the worst cheerleading squad of all time. Write that down too.” I searched my brain for information that might be relevant. It was hard to focus when a death threat had been delivered to my house in the dead of night. “The angry teacher? She seemed to have a problem with the whole group. Don’t know why she would kill Hannah and leave her here though.”
“This is all great.” Quin took a deep inhale from a tobacco stuffed pipe he had acquired. “We need to speak to some people to get more deets, that’s short for details. I think we should use words like this to save time. We have a lot to do and not a lot of time, do you know what I mean? Like, abbreviations, all the cool police lingo. So instead of police, we should say cops, or maybe the ‘boys in blue’, or what about ‘the heat’? I saw that one on a UK procedural I was hooked on last week. Wait, that isn’t an abbreviation, give me a minute.” He paused to think. This was going to take all night.
Quin walked round to the reverse side of the white board and populated it with abbreviations that would make our investigation more ‘efficient’. After twenty minutes of that he walked back
to sit beside me and gaze at the ‘clues’ side. He was now wearing a pair of thin, wire rimmed glasses. “We don’t have much to go on just yet, but these things take time. The old blank page staring you in the face, the hardest part is the first step, slow and steady like the tortoise.” He was now mixing fables and clichés about writing and running, trying to seem wise and mysterious.
“It is the middle of the night so we can’t go back to the University right now. We can try in the morning. We should probably make a short list of people we need to speak to. Do they have CCTV at the campus, or something similar to that, to track student’s whereabouts? See if anyone had any animosity towards Hannah, anyone other than me obviously.” I paused; a realization hit me.
“Will we be allowed back in? We got kicked out of the building this afternoon, what would we need to get back in?” I asked Quin, hoping he would be able to stop playing Holmes and Watson for five minutes and give me a straight answer.
“We can get back in, sure. It shouldn’t be that hard. We just need a disguise, a fake ID and the ability to remember our fake names when the seagull is screaming at us. Not that hard. There is a book on acting in here somewhere, in it there is a chapter on ‘adopting an alternative identity’ and it’s full of spells to change your appearance. We can skim over it tonight and after a hearty seafood breakfast we can get to it. Capiche?” Quin was trying out some ‘cool guy’ poses in a mirror as he spoke.
I walked in the direction that Quin pointed and searched the shelves for a title that would hint at the spell we needed. Quin couldn’t remember exactly what it was called. I picked up a book titled ‘Break a Leg’ but this turned out to be a horrific manual on the many magical ways to break a human bone without physical contact. ‘Opening Night’ was an autobiography written by a witch that witnessed the opening of a gateway to an alternative dimension and all the strange creatures she saw trickling out of it.