by Alys West
“That’s because she’s a friend.” He’d forgotten how every pretty woman who smiled at him was a potential threat.
“Only a friend?” There was mischief in Cassie’s voice now as if she’d assessed the risk and dismissed it.
“Absolutely.” He looked down into his glass. He should confess. If they were to have any hope of getting through this, he had to be honest and tell her he’d kissed Jenna. But once the words were spoken the memory would be changed forever. It’d be a transgression rather than a moment of reconnection, a rekindled hope that played through his head in the half-light between sleeping and waking.
“What do you want to do tomorrow?” Hal forced a smile. “The forecast’s good so I thought we might get the ferry over to Hoy. It’s beautiful, really different to the rest of Orkney. What do you think?”
Cassie shrugged. “Can we do it another time? I just want to be home with you. Because you’ve been working I feel like I’ve hardly seen you yet.”
“Sure.” The tightness in his throat returned. Hal took a tentative sip of beer in the hope of shifting it. “Sounds good.”
***
“Rachel left it for you.” Grace kept stirring the pot on the hob. Scents of rosemary and garlic wafted out of it.
“I said I don’t want it.” Jenna’s stomach rumbled. She pressed her hand against it. She’d not felt hungry in days.
“I know you did, pet, but you don’t know what’s in it yet.”
Jenna handed the parcel to Winston. “You open it.”
“You sure?” He looked at her as he did a lot lately, as if she might shatter at any moment.
“Absolutely.” She moved across the kitchen and plucked the scissors from a pot of utensils. He took them from her, laid the parcel face down on the table and sliced along the tape. He peeled the paper away and a black folder was revealed.
Jenna’s hand covered her mouth. “Oh God!”
“What is it?” Winston flipped the folder over. On the front cover was a unicorn with a long sparkly mane.
Jenna grabbed the back of the nearest chair as her legs threatened to fold under her. “Rachel had it all this time.” Her gaze swung to Grace. “Did you know?”
Grace rested her body back against the hob. “When I was there last Monday she showed it to me.”
“How—?”
“You need to ask her that, pet. But she works all of the hours the Goddess sends so don’t think you’ll get her here tonight. If she’s not working on the ferry, she’s behind the bar at the hotel in Stromness. What’s it called?”
“The Commercial,” Jenna answered automatically. She sat and pulled the folder towards her. Winston pulled out the chair next to her. She opened the cover and Mum’s familiar handwriting curled across the page. “The Spiral Path. A magical handbook for spellworkers and druids.”
“Christ!” Winston said. “If she’d finished it, she’d have ruffled a few feathers. No one’s ever written a book for both sides of magic.”
“I know.” Jenna blinked trying to clear the tears obscuring her vision. “So did she.” She turned the pages, not worrying about reading it, simply feeling the closeness to Mum in the words she’d written.
“The pages we found in Maeshowe came from this?” Winston leaned in to get a better look.
“Yes.” Jenna reached for her tissue again. “That’s why I got so upset.”
“Fair enough.” He nudged her with his shoulder. “I was being an arse.”
There was a comeback there, a really obvious one, but she hadn’t the energy. She turned the final pages. There were two white envelopes nestled against the rear cover. She picked them up. Addressed in Mum’s enthusiastic script, one said “Graeme” and the other “Jenna”. The envelopes were grubby around the edges but they’d not been opened.
“Oh!” She stared at them, blinked but they were still there. The letters she’d looked for again and again but never found. Because Rachel had them. She should be angry, really angry only she was just too tired.
“Are they from Nina?” Winston sounded oddly distant.
“Yes.” Her chair scraped against the floor as she stood. “I’ll be in Mum’s room. Eat without me. I don’t know…”
As she limped into the hall, she heard Grace say, “Let her go. She needs to travel this path alone.”
***
After they’d eaten Winston couldn’t settle to work or read. As he paced into the sitting room with Jet at his heels, Grace glanced up from the nature programme she was watching long enough to say, “If you’re that restless, why don’t you go for a walk?”
“I don’t want…” He couldn’t put into words the overwhelming need to be close to her. “She might…”
“If she does I’ll be here and I’ll tell her you’ve taken Jet for a walk.”
Winston looked down at the dog who met his gaze with solemn adoration in his big eyes. Everyone but him thought it was hilarious that Jet had started following him around. Finn joked that he’d be taking the Labrador back to Glasgow which was ridiculous. The last thing his life needed was a dog.
“Before you go—” Grace said ignoring the fact he hadn’t agreed yet “—do you know Sarah Parry? I spent some time with Rachel yesterday and she told me this Sarah has been teaching her on some online programme.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How do you know?” Somehow despite the arthritis, Grace managed to crochet. As her fingers stopped moving, the ball of wool dropped from her lap and rolled across the floor.
“I broke into Rachel’s when I thought she was involved in putting the spell on Jenna. I found some emails from Sarah Parry.”
“So that was you, was it? I did wonder.” Grace picked up the TV remote and turned the sound down. “You owe that poor girl the price of a new door.”
“Yeah, alright.” How much were new doors? He didn’t have a clue. He owed her an apology for suspecting her as well. “That morning, after I’d rung you, I looked into Sarah but I didn’t find much. Instagram and Twitter accounts about witchcraft and paganism but neither had any photos of her. I couldn’t find her on Facebook or anywhere else online.”
“There’s something that doesn’t stack up about this Sarah Parry. Do you know she was trying to get Rachel to work on air and water spells even though Rachel had told her about the storm she’d caused at the Cathedral?”
“But that’s like asking a pyromaniac to play with fire!”
“I don’t think Rachel would appreciate the pyromaniac analogy but you’re not wrong. Sarah’s invited Rachel to a summer school in Yorkshire at Mabon. She’s offered to pay Rachel’s travel expenses so she must be keen to have her there.”
“I can ask around, if you like, see if anyone knows Sarah?”
“Start with that. Rachel’s been through enough. I don’t want this Sarah taking advantage of her as well.”
“Yeah, alright.” He headed for the door, Jet ambling after him. He halted as he reached it, looked back at Grace. “Have you spoken to Rachel about teaching her?”
“Yes, I’ve asked her to come and stay with me for a few weeks but she’s worried about leaving her dad. There’s some problem with the care home he’s in but I’m going to see what I can do about that. And if that doesn’t work then I know a good lawyer who owes me a favour.”
That was one less thing he had to worry about. He wouldn’t be leaving Orkney with an untrained storm witch on the loose.
The rain from earlier in the day had cleared, leaving a bright, brisk evening. He walked through the village and out to the Point of Buckquoy, occasionally pausing to let Jet catch up.
The tide was in, cutting off the Brough. He walked down the steps and across the small beach, his feet slithering in the loose, dry sand. He found a flattish rock and sat on it. Jet wandered off, sniffing at seaweed and flotsam. Winston stared out at the ocean and let the sounds of the waves wash over him.
He didn’t know how to help her. That was the brutal truth. For no one else would he have s
tuck around to even try. It would be two weeks on Sunday since her father’s death. As he’d done every day since, he wondered if he should give her some space, move back to the B&B for a bit. Would that be better than being here and feeling utterly useless? He didn’t know. Finn had said nothing helpful. Zoe was way too free with her advice. She said he had to stick it out, that Jenna needed him even if she couldn’t show it right now.
The sun sank into the sea in a psychedelic burst of pinks, reds and orange. He’d say one thing for Birsay, it might be the arse end of nowhere but it had kickass sunsets. He called for Jet and headed back.
***
Winston was awake when she finally headed to bed. They were sleeping in the guest room because her room only had a single bed. Mum had decorated it the summer before she’d died in soft yellows that soaked in the evening light. Winston lifted himself up on one elbow. “You alright?”
“I’m not sure.” She kicked her shoes off, sank down on the bed and shimmied round to face him. Crossing her legs, she grabbed one of the pillows and held it to her chest.
“Want to talk about it?”
She knew he wouldn’t push if she said no. It was one of things she really liked about him.
It’d taken her ages to summon the courage to open it. Too much rode on it. Would the words which had been written to help her through the aftermath of Mum’s death be powerless to help her in the weeks after Dad’s? In the end, realising she’d never sleep until she did, she’d carefully prised the flap open. It was only two pages of lined A4. She’d read it four times. Or was it five? She’d been sobbing so hard the first time she hadn’t been able to see the last two paragraphs.
“If it’s not too late?” She glanced tentatively at him. “You’ve got work in the morning.”
“They’re Neolithic remains.” He pushed his hair back, using the hand with the twist of leather around his wrist. “They’ve been there for five thousand years. It’s not going to matter if I’m a wee bit late.”
“Okay. So I read the letter.” She put the pillow across her knees and traced the embroidery with her finger. “Mum knew she and the other members of The Order were going to die. Well, not Tamara. But she’d had premonitions about Eve, Harry and Bryn.”
“And they knew?”
“Yes, she said they were all putting their affairs in order. She made a bit of a joke about it.” She bit down on her bottom lip to stave off more tears.
“But not Tamara?” Winston shuffled back to lean against the headboard revealing the faded logo of the AC/DC t-shirt he wore in bed.
“You think she’s not dead.” It came out as more of a statement than she’d intended. She pulled a page from her back pocket and unfolded it. She’d left Mum’s letter in her room, tucked inside the top drawer of her desk but this she wanted him to see. “There’s something else. Mum thought there was a conspiracy against The Order. She said I should give this to the new Order.”
“She clearly thought we were all braver than we turned out to be.” Winston’s forehead furrowed. “It didn’t seem like a big deal at the beginning when the elections failed and no one else stepped forward to form a new Order. I thought it was someone else’s problem, someone older and far wiser. But I think now that was the problem, we all thought it was down to someone else.”
“Are you volunteering?”
“You don’t have to sound that surprised.”
“Well, you’re not exactly Mr Responsible.”
“I’ll have you know I can be very responsible. When I have to be.” The grin came slowly and made him look even more stunning. She was never going to get used to having him in her bed. She was surprised every day he was still here, that he’d not gently, yet deftly, extricated himself once it got difficult.
“Do you want to see this or not?” She flapped the piece of paper at him. “I’ve not been able to make much sense of it.”
“Of course I want to see it.” He held his hand out but she shuffled backwards until she sat beside him and angled the page so they could both see it.
“These must be the dates she had the visions.” Jenna pointed at scrawled numbers dotted down the page. There were several that had a question mark for the day of the month. “As you can see, some of them are a bit vague.”
“But they go back a long way. She’d been having these visions for eighteen months before she died.”
She’d not spotted that. Sometimes she forgot there was a sharp academic brain behind the gorgeous face. “And there’s some which don’t relate to visions. There’s a couple about misuse of magic. One’s above Maeve and this one says, ‘Report to The Order of misuse of magic by Dominic Porter.’ That can’t be the Dominic Porter, can it?”
“No way!” Winston’s gaze met hers, the shock evident on his face. “There is no way Dominic Porter has magic. The man’s a racist git.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“But still—” Winston’s hand tightened around his staff on the leather thong at his throat. “Got to be some other poor bugger who shares his name.”
Jenna reached over to the bedside cabinet for a pen and notebook. She flipped open the book, turned past the pages of lists she’d made over recent days until she found a clean page. She wrote ‘Dominic Porter’ with the date Mum had ascribed to it. “That’s the first thing I need to do then. Find out who this Dominic Porter is.”
“What do you mean?” Winston’s hand rested on her upper arm. She turned to him and he studied her face for a long moment. “Are you—”
She tilted her head and managed a half-smile. “You said I couldn’t walk away from this.”
“I didn’t mean like this—”
He looked terrified which she’d not expected. Seeing as he’d been pushing her to do this weeks ago, she’d kind of thought he’d be okay with it.
“Look, I’m not asking you to do it with me. I’ll have to run the tearooms until the end of the season and then you’ll be away back to Glasgow and that’s fine. But I have to do this. I need to know what happened, not only to Mum, but to the others too. If she was right and there was a conspiracy then her death is part of that.” She held up her hand as he started to interrupt. “Felicity might have paid Ewan to murder Mum but I still don’t know why. Mum hadn’t reported Felicity to The Order and Nethertown’s not enough of a reason. If it was only about Nethertown they’d have found another way, like they tried to find another way with me.”
Winston twisted until he was facing her. “Which are all good reasons but are you sure you should be doing it now?” One hand slid until it covered the plaster covering the wound on her arm, the other fastened over the scars on her left wrist. “Don’t you need time to heal? Time to grieve for your dad? You’ve been through too much already. You don’t have to do this as well.”
“I know.” The tears slipped down her cheeks and she struggled to speak over the tightness in her throat. “But don’t you see, that’s why I have to do it. I need to know why. As Dad said we’ve nothing on Felicity that’d stand up in court but perhaps if I look wider, if I look at the whole picture, I’ll find something that makes sense of why they both died.”
“I get that. But you do realise this is stupidly, insanely brave?” Winston rubbed his hand over his face. “No one, me most of all, would blame you for sitting at home and taking it easy for a while. You’ve been through hell. You don’t need to do this as well.”
“I sat at home for six years but it didn’t go away, did it? It still came back to hurt me and Mum must have known that it would or she wouldn’t have enchanted the witch bottle. I can’t risk that happening again. I need to face it, look it straight in the eye this time or I’ll never be free of it. But it’s okay, I don’t expect you to do it with me. You’ll be going back to Glasgow for the new term so you’ll be busy—”
“For Christ’s sake, Jenna—” Winston’s hand tightened around hers “—you don’t think I’m going to let you do this on your own, do you?”
“But that
’s what I’m saying, just because we’re together at the moment I don’t expect—”
“Don’t be a bloody idiot. I’m not going to let you go off on your own to face God knows what danger.”
Jenna frowned. “You don’t have to—”
“Yeah, I do. Don’t make a thing of it.”
“Is it because I’ve no magic? You don’t have to babysit me. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m not saying you can’t. But I’m still coming with you.”
“But why?”
***
There was one answer, one utterly truthful answer but it wasn’t the time to say it. He fiddled with the leather thong around his wrist for a long moment before he raised his gaze to meet hers. “Because whatever this is between us, it’s not just fun and sex. God, if I didn’t know that before Ewan took you, I sure as hell did when Zoe told me what’d happened. So yes, I’m coming with you. Don’t argue.”
“Are you sure?” She looked down for a long moment. “I mean, you’re not exactly known for sticking around and after everything that’s happened, I won’t blame you if you want out.”
“I don’t. It’s surprising the hell out of me too but I don’t.”
He risked a look at her. She was smiling. She’d not done much of that in the past ten days. Then her smile faded, her gaze dropped and the silence grew. He was about to speak again when she said, “Mum said she saw a druid in my future.”
“In the letter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, even great seers get it wrong sometimes.”
“Idiot!” She slapped his chest lightly and he used the opportunity to gather her to him. His heart thumped twice really hard and he wasn’t surprised to see a green glow pulse from his chest and spread to envelop them both.
“I want to start with Rachel. I need to know why she had The Spiral Path and the letters and why she didn’t give them to me. She might not tell me, especially seeing as how I was when she came here, but I have to try.”
“Okay. We’ll find out from Grace when Rachel’s not working and we’ll go see her.”