“Thanks,” I said to her warmly. “I’m really going to have to get a job here soon.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ellie said, waving a hand away. “The coven can easily afford it. You need to take the time to actually become a witch.”
I nodded as I watched Ceres put the items in the magical delivery box, which I knew was going to send the items directly into our living room back home.
“All right! Your items are delivered. Have a great night,” Ceres told us with a smile, and just as Ellie and I left the store, the magical “open” sign at the front of the store that shimmered from an invisible source changed to a red “closed” instead.
“I guess Amy’s test is starting,” I said, looking at my phone to check the time. Sure enough, it was five-oh-one. “How long do you have to wait for your test results in the magical world?”
“What do you mean?” Ellie replied, tilting her head.
“How long does it take the teachers to mark all your exams? A few days?”
Ellie laughed. “Oh, no. It’s instant.”
“Magic?” I asked, and Ellie nodded.
“Yes. For the classes that involve practical work during exams the professor gives you your mark right then and there, and for written exams, the professor creates a special potion that basically marks the work instantly. You hand the professor your exam, they dip it in the potion, and it comes up completely marked.”
“Wow, that would certainly save a lot of stress compared to my high school experience,” I muttered.
“Hold on one second,” Ellie said as her phone rang. She pulled it out of her purse and frowned as she looked at the caller. “Why would Amy be calling me in the middle of an exam?”
She swiped at the screen to answer the call, but before she even had a chance to say hello, I could hear Amy’s voice, more panicked than I’d ever heard, screeching through the phone.
“Ellie, you have to come over here. Now. Oh my God, I can’t believe this.”
“Amy, calm down. What’s happened?” Ellie asked, raising her eyebrows at me. I could hear the conversation almost perfectly, despite the phone not being on speaker; that was how loudly Amy was yelling. There was no way Amy would have been late to her exam and not allowed in. Amy was the type of person who would have been sitting next to the door to be let in an hour before the exam, no question about it.
“It’s Professor Lei. She’s dead!”
Chapter 3
“Whoa, whoa, hold on a second. What do you mean, dead?” Ellie asked.
“Just get over here. I need you!”
“All right,” Ellie said. “Tina and I will be there in five minutes.”
“Hurry.”
Ellie hung up the phone and looked at me. “Did you hear that?”
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
Five minutes later, we were at the coven headquarters, a whitewashed brick building with a green dome on top. This time, however, I didn’t stop to admire the grandeur of the building; instead I followed Ellie inside straight away.
I had only been down the hall to see the head of the coven before, but this time as we entered, Ellie led me to the right and up a flight of dark mahogany stairs with elaborately carved railings to an elevated walkway. About ten feet down, she turned and led me through a door, which led to another hall, but this time there were about a half dozen faces, all of which looked like they belonged to terrified witches and wizards.
As soon as we came in, Amy rushed towards us. “Oh, you guys, it’s awful!”
“Calm down, Amy. Come over here, tell us what happened.”
“Well, the eight of us, we were all waiting out here for the exam to start. Professor Lei has always been extremely punctual; she doesn’t open the door until two minutes before the start of the exam. So when that time passed, we all began to wonder what was going on. Oh Jupiter, I can’t believe it.”
“Relax, take a couple deep breaths,” I said. “What happened next?”
“Well, when five o’clock passed, and we still hadn’t seen any sign of her, we began to wonder what was going on. So I used a spell to get into the locked room, and that was where we found her. She was on the floor.”
“Has anyone told Chief Enforcer King?” I asked, and Amy nodded mutely.
“Yes. As soon as we found the body, one of the wizards went to check for a pulse, but there was none. Someone else ran off to get Chief Enforcer King. That was when I called you. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You need to go downstairs, find Lita, and tell her what happened,” Ellie said. “Do you understand?”
Amy’s eyes widened. “Oh my goodness. I didn’t even think. Of course someone needs to tell Lita.”
“Bring her up here, ok?” Ellie said. Amy nodded.
“I will. I will. Ok, I’ll be back.”
Amy rushed down the stairs, and Ellie shook her head sadly. “Professor Lei was nice. I had her for an astronomy class once, in my last year at the Academy.”
Less than a minute later, Amy came rushing back up the stairs with Lita, the leader of the coven, following only steps behind her. For a witch of her size, Lita was surprisingly agile, and as soon as she entered the room everything fell silent as every witch and wizard turned their eyes to their leader.
Despite her small stature, Lita was a very imposing force. “Thank you everyone, for staying here,” she announced. “I will ask you to stay for just a little bit longer, until Jennifer returns with Chief Enforcer King, as she may want to speak with all of you.”
“She’s in here,” Amy whispered, motioning to a thick, windowless door. Lita gave a curt nod, and stepped inside. I couldn’t help myself; I followed after her, Ellie hot on my heels.
My eyes immediately focused on the witch at the front of the room. There were two long, wide tables with benches on either side of them, papers for all the witches and wizards getting ready to take their exams sitting on top of them. The witch was in the middle of the room, between the two tables. It looked like she had simply fallen forward; there was no blood or anything on the floor. I was half tempted to make sure she hadn’t passed out. Her long, black hair splayed around her like a deathly halo, and Lita immediately made her way towards the body and checked for a pulse herself.
“Oh, Mai. Rest in peace, my dear friend,” I heard Lita mumble quietly before she stood up and looked at Ellie and me.
“I am going to ask the two of you to leave,” she said. “Until a cause of death has been determined, this room is officially off-limits.”
Ellie and I nodded. I suddenly felt a little bit embarrassed; here Lita was mourning the loss of a friend, and Ellie and I had gone in to watch simply from morbid curiosity. The two of us shuffled out of the room, and Ellie pulled me out into the main hall.
“I think Professor Lei was murdered,” she said to me in a hushed tone.
“What? That’s ridiculous,” I replied. “What on earth makes you think that?”
“Well, the way Lita immediately kicked us out of the room.”
“She was probably just being careful. Maybe it was a heart attack, or something. It’s not like there were any signs that she was hit over the head or anything.”
“It could have been, but Professor Lei was a healthy, relatively young witch. She was in her early forties, I think. Besides, Lita must have seen something that made her think this might not have been natural, or she wouldn’t have kicked us out of the room.”
“Or maybe she just didn’t want us gawking over the body of her dead friend.”
“I guess,” Ellie admitted. “Still, you have to admit it’s weird, dying so suddenly like that.”
“Not that weird,” I said quietly. One morning not that long ago, I’d woken up expecting it to be just another day. By the end of it I had become an orphan.
Before Ellie got a chance to reply, a wizard who looked to be around thirty-five, with dark brown hair plastered to his head, came rushing into the room, completely out of breath.
“Oliv
er?” Amy asked. “Where’s Chief Enforcer King?”
“I can’t find her,” the man replied, panting. “I’ve been all over town. She’s nowhere to be found.”
Ellie and I exchanged a look. This was getting weirder by the minute.
Chapter 4
“What do you mean, she can’t be found?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. I went to her office, and was told by the wolf shifter that she went out a little while ago. He didn’t know where, so he used this stone the shifters use to see where she is, but apparently her location didn’t show up at all. So he went with me into her office. Sure enough, nothing there. Then we went everywhere we could think of that she might be, and nothing. No one in town has seen her in the last three hours.”
Amy frowned. “There’s got to be a mistake, somewhere. Chief Enforcer King wouldn’t just leave without telling anyone. She’s got to be somewhere, you must have just missed her.”
Oliver shook his head vehemently. “No. No, we didn’t. We looked all over, and the wolf said he should have been able to smell her scent around, and he couldn’t. I don’t know where Chief Enforcer King is, but she’s not here.”
“Well, she may have gone to a neighboring town for an investigation, or something,” Amy offered.
“Exactly,” Lita’s voice said. “I’m sure Chief Enforcer King is completely fine. Now, if she’s unavailable at the moment I don’t see the point in the rest of you staying here indefinitely. Please, go back to your homes, and please refrain from speculating on what’s happened here. I’m sure Professor Lei has just passed away from an unfortunate health issue. It’s a tragedy, but for the sake of her family, please don’t go spreading around unfounded rumors. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go tell her husband and daughter what has happened.”
The room was silent as Lita left, and I couldn’t help but notice as she walked past that her eyes were just a little bit on the glassy side. She was definitely not about to have an easy conversation.
After she left, the door closing with a soft sound behind her, the low hum of conversation rose up in the room once more. Amy made her way towards Ellie and me.
“I can’t believe this,” Amy said, shaking her head.
“I want to know where Chief Enforcer King is,” Ellie replied.
“It is a little bit strange, isn’t it, that she can’t be found. If she’d gone to a nearby town, wouldn’t she have told one of the other Enforcers first?” Amy asked.
I nodded. “Chief Enforcer King doesn’t seem to me to be the type to do that.”
“So what, do you guys think there might be something wrong?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe? It might be nothing. Maybe she’s just got a lot on her plate, and she decided to slip out for a minute. But I think it could be possible it’s more than that.”
“In that case, I think it might be linked to what happened with Professor Lei,” Amy suggested.
“Really? Why do you think that?” Ellie asked.
“Well, it’s just that this morning I was out running and doing equations – I always find that if I stress my body and force it to recall facts while I’m stressed is a great way to see if I’m adequately prepared, since test conditions often aren’t ideal – and I saw Professor Lei walking into the Town Hall. I can’t say for sure she was going to see Chief Enforcer King, but she does work out of there.”
I frowned. “So what do you think? Maybe Professor Lei saw something she shouldn’t have, and that person came after her and Chief Enforcer King?”
“I don’t know,” Amy shrugged. “What I do know is that I saw the two of them together this morning, so it’s possible that the death of one and disappearance of the other aren’t completely isolated incidents.”
“If they are linked, we also need to be prepared to have Chief Enforcer King’s body show up at some point, too,” Ellie said quietly, and I shuddered. I didn’t know Professor Lei at all, but I’d had a few conversations with Chief Enforcer King. I liked her. I thought she was a good head of law enforcement in town, and I really, really hoped that wherever she was, she was fine.
“So what happens now? I mean, with Professor Lei and everything?”
“I guess Lita will take care of everything,” Amy shrugged. “She’s the head of the coven after all. Chief Enforcer King does have other enforcers around; I’m sure one of them will take over the investigation.”
“We need to get into that room,” Ellie said. “After all, isn’t there a spell that you can use to determine what a cause of death was?”
Amy crossed her arms. “Absolutely not. I’m not doing that. I liked Professor Lei, and I don’t want to ruin any dignity she might have left. Besides, Lita told us she’s going to take care of it, so let’s leave it with her.”
“Fine,” Ellie replied. “Let’s head home then. But I don’t like this. I don’t like this one bit.”
I was definitely with Ellie on this one. It might’ve been due to the paranormal world, but I knew one thing: Chief Enforcer King was reliable, and a great cop. If she was missing, then something was very wrong.
The three of us headed home, and I quickly put my new purchases up in my room. However, this time, my mind was on other things. Where was Chief Enforcer King? Had Professor Lei died of natural causes? If not, was the death and the disappearance linked? I had a ton of questions, and virtually no answers.
When I made my way down to the living room once more, I found the other two girls catching Sara up on what had happened.
“That’s absolutely awful,” Sara said. “Let me find out from my mom which Healer they’re going to send to look at the body.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked. “Do they just send a Healer? You don’t have a medical examiner who specifically deals with dead bodies to establish cause of death?”
Amy smiled. “No, there is no real need for that here. The Healers learn special spells, at least, the witch Healers do, which allows them to determine cause of death much more easily than a human examination would.”
“What about things in a murder that a medical examiner would normally look at?” I asked. “Things like stomach contents, or any old injuries that might be relevant to a murder investigation.”
“Well, the thing is, there usually aren’t all that many murderers here in Western Woods. The last couple have certainly been the exception rather than the rule,” Ellie explained. “So, most of the time there is no real need for that sort of investigation. But, if there is, I believe that all of the Healers are trained in the examination of dead bodies as well as live ones.”
“That’s right,” Sara confirmed. “My mom always tells me how her least favorite topic when she was learning to be a Healer was the examination of dead bodies. She can do it, but she really hates it. She feels like it’s such an invasion of privacy, and that the dead deserve more dignity than that.”
“I think the bigger indignity would be letting a person’s murderer go free because the Enforcers didn’t have enough evidence to solve the crime,” Amy said. “Anyway, I’m sure this is all just a misunderstanding and Chief Enforcer King will come back sooner rather than later. She might just be visiting with another coven or something. Now, since my exam has been put off indefinitely, would you like to do an extra lesson with me, Tina?”
“Sure,” I nodded. As much as Amy could be neurotic and a huge know it all, I very much enjoyed my lessons with her, and now that I had lived in Western Woods for about a month, I was finally starting to feel like a real witch from time to time, thanks to the spells she had been teaching me.
“Good,” Amy said. “Why don’t you go and grab your journal? I’ve realized that we haven’t done any lessons about the different planets, their elements, and how they link together. There’s a lot of magical history that you need to learn about as well as the practical aspect of doing spells.”
I nodded, running to my room and grabbing one of the journals I’d bought that was still blank, bringing it back
to the living room with a pen. To be honest, I was actually looking forward to this sort of lesson. The more I learned about how magic was connected to celestial beings and their various elements, the more interested I became in that sort of thing. Plus, a part of me was really excited to potentially learn more about where my parents came from. After all, I knew absolutely nothing about them, and that included what coven they were from. We were fairly certain that I was a descendent of a water-based coven, but beyond that we didn’t know.
When I got back, Ellie was busy reading my copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with her face completely buried in the book. Sara sat on the other couch with her legs brought up to her knees, and she smiled at me when I came back into the room.
“Do you mind if I listen in on Amy’s lesson?” Sara asked. “After all, I could use a refresher course on a lot of this stuff.”
“Of course,” I said. “If you want, you can borrow my notes that I take as well.”
“Thank you so much,” Sara beamed. “You never know, maybe really getting this stuff engrained will help me with my spells.”
“It absolutely should,” Amy explained. “Especially when performing spells that originate with other covens. I know you rarely do it, but sometimes it is a necessity.”
“I’ll settle with being able to perform Jupiter’s spells without messing anything up too badly, first,” Sara replied. Her magic definitely had a unique quality to it – in that whenever she tried a spell, it was a mystery what was going to happen, but it usually wasn’t what the spell was meant to do.
“Your confidence level will increase the more theoretical knowledge you have,” Amy said. “So yes, absolutely sit in on this. Now, I want to start with a basic lesson in which covens are governed by which elements. There are hundreds of covens out there, each governed by a different element, but there are about twenty important ones which all witches need to know. Which ones do you know already?”
“Well, obviously the coven of Jupiter is thunder,” I said. “And, um, Mercury is water, and Io is fire. Those are the only three I remember.”
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