Witches & Words

by Elle Adams

  “Well, there’s sand and sea. Not much in the way of sunshine.” I heard voices down the corridor as another group of guests left their rooms at Xavier’s prompting. “Ah, I should go and catch up with my friend. We were told to make sure everyone gets downstairs to the lobby.”

  Blair and Nathan headed for the lift, while I went looking for Xavier. I wished I could speak to him alone, but now was not the time to have a serious conversation about the state of our relationship. Assuming we had one, that is.

  “Is it true?” A small man with curly grey hair stopped beside me in the corridor. Despite the relatively early hour, he wore a neat suit and tie as though he was on his way to an important business meeting. “Is Mr Spencer really dead?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Did you know one another?”

  “No, but we had an interesting conversation about antiques last night. I thought he might be a collector, like me.”

  “Everyone downstairs!” Frederick’s voice drifted up from the lobby as a steady stream of guests headed for the elevators.

  I met Xavier coming the other way. “How’d you knock on all those doors so quickly?”

  “Reaper, remember?”

  Right, of course. Reapers came equipped with an array of useful skills, including superhuman speed and the ability to walk through walls. You’d think I’d remember that, considering I’d seen him reap a man’s soul earlier. “Speaking of which, if you can go into the afterlife at any given time, can you call a soul back into this world?”

  “Back?” he echoed. “No. It’s a one-way trip, for humans at least.”

  A chill settled somewhere deep in my bones. Now he was speaking like a Reaper—as though he wasn’t part of the human race at all. It’d been a long shot, the notion of calling back Mr Spencer’s soul to ask how he’d died, but if I believed Blair, it was Mr Blake who had something to hide. Perhaps the other man might be able to shed some light on why he’d called the library before his death. Whether his death had been accidental or otherwise, he’d been trying to tell me something important about that book, I was almost certain of it.

  When Xavier and I reached the ground floor, we found the other guests milling around the lobby. Some looked barely awake after last night, while several appeared to still be drunk. Most of them were still wearing pyjamas or dressing gowns. A witch wearing fluffy dragon slippers and a lopsided hat lay sleeping against the reception desk, while a tipsy elderly witch held an animated conversation with the curly-haired collector.

  “I’ve called Edwin,” said Frederick. “Aurora, Reaper… you weren’t witnesses, so you should leave before the police arrive.”

  “Do you think his death was an accident?” I asked him.

  “I hope it was,” he said. “But with no direct witnesses, it’s anyone’s guess. Edwin might want to hear what he said to you on the phone before he died.”

  “He didn’t get the chance to say much,” I told him. “He just said, ‘the book’.”

  “What book?” said Xavier.

  “The book he returned to the library last night.” I felt my face heat under his stare. “You already reaped his soul. Why are you staying?”

  “I’m not.” He glanced around. “Might sound morbid, but this is the closest to normal I get.”

  I arched a brow. “Dealing with dead people?”

  “Dealing with people,” he said. “Spending the holidays with the Grim Reaper is not the highlight of my year.”

  I pushed the door open and we escaped onto the seafront. “You didn’t have to spend the holidays with him, did you?”

  “Death never takes a day off, even Christmas,” he said mildly.

  “Then why did you leave town?” I asked. “Aren’t you and your boss responsible for this entire region? I mean, you couldn’t have known nobody in town would need the services of a Reaper over the holidays.”

  “I was still in the area,” he replied. “My boss wanted me to go with him to… I suppose you might call it a conference for Reapers like me. I mentioned it, didn’t I?”

  “No.” Since when did Reapers have conferences? I’d definitely have remembered him mention one, that was for sure. “Your boss told me never to contact you again. I assume this—” I gestured between the two of us—“doesn’t count, since I didn’t actually know I’d run into you today.”

  A shocked expression crossed his face. “My boss said that?”

  “He did.” The words of his message were burned into my brain by now. “He left a note in the library warning me to never talk to contact his apprentice again. Unless he has another apprentice who I didn’t know about, that’s you.”

  “Didn’t you get my note?” he asked. “I told you I was going out of town for a few days, but I’d be back in the new year. It was a last-minute thing, so I dropped by your place during the night on my way out of town.”

  “You left a note?” My thoughts stuttered to a halt, my anger giving way to confusion. “I didn’t find one.”

  “I put it on the front desk,” he said. “I suppose the library needed tidying after that Manifestation Curse came to an end, so it might have gone missing somewhere.”

  “Maybe Sylvester or Cass hid it.” Or perhaps the Grim Reaper himself had removed Xavier’s note and left his own in his place. He’d made his feelings on our relationship pretty clear, after all. Yet the thought that Xavier hadn’t known about the note made my mood brighten considerably.

  “Maybe.” He didn’t look happy. “I’ll have a word with my boss and see if he knows.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “You’re not getting yourself into trouble on my account again. Anyway, he’ll be angry enough that I saw you escort that guy through the door into the afterworld, I imagine.”

  “I’m not telling him that,” he said. “Mostly because I don’t understand it myself. You’re mortal, as far as I’m aware.”

  “I was the last time I checked.” I took in a deep breath. “So… can you tell me what Mr Spencer said to you at the door, or whatever it was? I won’t tell a soul.”

  “I would, but it’s not repeatable in polite company. He yelled obscenities at me until I managed to get him through into the next world.”

  “Oh.” I frowned. “Is that common?”

  “Surprisingly,” he said. “Or perhaps not. Most people don’t like being told they’re deceased.”

  “It’s hardly your fault he’s dead,” I said, with a rush of indignation on his behalf.

  “No, but he might have thought I was someone else,” said Xavier. “Believe me, I’ve heard worse. When they aren’t cursing me, sometimes people think I can pass on messages to their loved ones.”

  “Can you?”

  “Generally, no,” he said. “I’m only the Reaper apprentice for this small region. It’s not like I can pop over to the other side of the world to give messages to their distant relatives.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “So you can’t travel across the world in a second?”

  “Theoretically?” he said. “Yes, I can. But finding individual souls gets tricky when there’s distance involved. A lot of guesswork.”

  “Is that why you can’t use a phone?” I queried.

  “I can use one, but my boss and I are able to communicate without the need for technology.” He looked at the clock tower. “I’d better go before he comes looking for me. I’m not leaving town, Rory, I promise. Talk later, okay?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t know what else to say. My head was in a tailspin. Not only did Xavier want to see me again, he hadn’t known his boss had left that note at all. He’d thought I’d known he was coming back.

  Note to self: convince the Grim Reaper to let him get a mobile phone. The level of control he had over his apprentice annoyed me at the best of times, but who was I to judge the Reaper by the same standards as the rest of us? He wasn’t alive, for a start. At least, he didn’t age, didn’t need to eat or sleep, and could run for miles without tiring or walk out into the sea at high tide without taking a breath.
And the Grim Reaper was responsible for all of those talents.

  And you really thought you had the chance of a romantic relationship with him? I gave myself a mental shake when I looked up and realised he’d vanished from sight, moving at a speed no human could ever hope to achieve. If ever there was proof that I’d got caught up in a severe case of wishful thinking, that was it. Xavier was the Reaper, and the role fitted him like a glove. He’d never walk away from it for my sake. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop the smile that stole onto my mouth at the idea that he’d been looking forward to seeing me after all.

  I shoved the thought out of mind and continued on my path to the library. After the trouble that talking book had given me, the last thing I wanted was to unlock its room again, but I needed to at least tell my family before the rest of the town found out.

  Besides, while I might never know why Mr Spencer had called the library, perhaps the book might shed some light on why someone might want to kill its owner.

  4

  Back in the library, I found my family members all assembled in the lobby. Judging by the unusually serious expression on her face, Estelle was explaining the situation to the others.

  Aunt Adelaide turned to me as I walked in. “Is he really dead?”

  “Are we supposed to care?” Cass wanted to know. “It sounds like he deliberately returned that book at the last minute to make trouble for us and then someone bumped him off.”

  “Whatever happened to being nicer this year?” said Estelle.

  “Did I ever make that promise?” said Cass.

  I rolled my eyes. “That would be too much to ask. Yes, he’s dead. I still have no idea what he was trying to tell me on the phone before he died, but all he said was ‘the book’.”

  “Which book was it?” said Aunt Candace. “Why did nobody tell me about this?”

  “You were hiding away from the fireworks last night,” I said. “Mr Spencer showed up just before midnight with a book which needed to be returned within twenty minutes. If one of us hadn’t returned the book to the library on time, it’d have started screaming. Now I’m starting to think I should have left it with him after all.”

  “Where is it?” Aunt Candace’s pen and notebook hovered in the air expectantly, as they always did when something story-worthy happened.

  “Really, Candace,” said Aunt Adelaide. “It’s up on the third floor. In an empty room, Estelle says.”

  “Yeah, there was nothing else in there,” I said. “The guy he was with told me it was a long-term loan. When did he take it out?”

  “We’re checking the logbook. It might have been years ago,” said Estelle. “Rory said the book wouldn’t let her read it, Mum.”

  “It bit my fingers when I tried,” I explained. “Then it turned inside-out when I tried to read the number on the spine. I got it into the room in the end, but… but the text on the cover and on the spine wasn’t written in English. It was some kind of code, I think. Or another language.”

  I caught Aunt Adelaide’s gaze, which flared with understanding. “A code?”

  “We have books written in hundreds of codes and languages in here,” said Aunt Candace. “You need to be a bit more specific if you want us to pinpoint the right one. I remember encountering one which was only readable when viewed through a particular pair of spectacles—”

  “Yes, we know,” interrupted Aunt Adelaide. “It’s not unusual for clients to take out long-term loans on books that are particularly difficult to read.”

  “Is he part of a secret agency?” asked Aunt Candace. “Were they the ones who killed him?”

  My aunt’s pen scribbled so hard in her notebook that ink splattered everywhere.

  “Candace!” said Aunt Adelaide. “You said he was travelling with someone, Rory?”

  “Kind of.” I relayed what Mr Blake had said, along with my suspicions that he wasn’t being entirely truthful about how he and Mr Spencer had run into one another. “I assume Mr Spencer had a good reason for wanting a book that talks back and isn’t nice about it.”

  Aunt Adelaide pursed her lips. “Like many of our rarer items, that book has various protective spells on it.”

  “But you still let him check it out and run off with it for months?” I frowned.

  “I can’t recall when it was.” Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps if we find the record in the logbook, it’ll prompt my memory… unless it was you who handled it, Candace?”

  “Really, you can’t expect me to remember every person who checks out a book from here,” said Aunt Candace. “Especially long-term loans. I can’t even remember who we dealt with last week, let alone a year ago.”

  “He was a guy wearing a long, hooded cloak,” I said. “It would have stuck in my mind if I’d seen him before.”

  “Are there any collectors of dark mystical artefacts who don’t wear hooded cloaks?” said Cass. “I thought it was part of the dress code.”

  “I wrote a book where they wear pink, just for variety,” supplied Aunt Candace.

  “Thank you for that contribution,” Aunt Adelaide said. “Candace, if it was you who dealt with him, then you ought to have looked into his background before you handed him the book.”

  “I assume I did.” Aunt Candace plucked her notebook and pen out of the air. “He wasn’t that suspicious-looking, aside from the cloak, was he?”

  “I didn’t see him without the cloak until after he was dead, so I don’t know,” I said. “It was dark last night, even in the library. It’s not that weird that he kept his hood up considering how cold it was, either. He didn’t sound sinister at all. He just sounded like he wanted to get rid of the book.”

  “He’s hardly the first secretive individual to visit the library,” said Aunt Adelaide. “We tend to be careful when it comes to collectors of rare books, since so many of ours are one-of-a-kind. There would have been a background check involved, whoever dealt with him. I can’t say anything stood out to me about his appearance that gave me any warning signs last night, either.”

  “Shouldn’t there be a rule against loaning books to people who might want to steal them?” I asked.

  Cass snorted. “You’d think so, but everyone here has more faith in the good of humanity than I do.”

  “You do realise the book is cursed to start screaming at full-volume if it isn’t returned to the library on time?” said Aunt Candace. “There are other nasty curses on all our books which kick in if they’re given away, or sold, or kept too long past their due dates. If I valued my life and sanity, I wouldn’t want to check out a rare book from our library without carefully planning when to return it.”

  “Exactly,” said Aunt Adelaide. “Besides, he must have taken the requirements seriously if he came here just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. If he’d planned to keep the book for himself, he wouldn’t have come back to Ivory Beach at all. Where does he live, do you know?”

  “No idea,” I said. “Maybe I should have asked Frederick, but he told me to leave before the police showed up.”

  “Yes, that was probably the best course of action,” said Aunt Adelaide. “There’s no obvious link between him and us… except for the book.”

  “Yeah.” I looked down. “When he was on the phone, he sounded… scared, I think. He was whispering, as though he was afraid of being overheard. And even if his death was an accident, he wouldn’t have called us for no reason.”

  “People think his death was an accident?” said Cass. “He was a lone traveller wearing a hooded cloak who returned a rare book to the library right before he died. Not one part of that isn’t suspicious.”

  “He had friends,” I said. “One of them was staying at the hotel. Mr Blake. He and Mr Spencer knew one another, and he admitted they argued this morning. He also said they used to travel together.”

  If Blair’s lie-sensing powers were as accurate as she claimed, there was more to it than that. Unless it was Blair herself who was being less than truthful, but she’d have no obvious reason to deceive
someone she’d never met before. The question was, what was Mr Blake trying to hide?

  “Who else is staying at the hotel?” asked Aunt Adelaide.

  “Uh, there was this woman, Blair Wilkes, and her boyfriend Nathan,” I said. “They were here on holiday. There was also this older guy… he said he was a collector of some kind. He had a conversation with Mr Spencer about rare artefacts the night before, he said.”

  “Collector?” said Aunt Adelaide. “Of what?”

  “I didn’t get the chance to ask,” I said. “Edwin showed up to talk to Frederick, so I had to leave before I got roped into the questioning. I came straight home.”

  “After talking to half the guests?” Cass gave me a suspicious look that implied she knew I hadn’t told them everything, but I wasn’t about to bring up the Reaper in front of her. Not until I’d had the chance to process his return.

  “Frederick asked me to knock on their doors, since I was there,” I said. “Everyone was sleeping off their hangovers. Almost everyone.” The collector had seemed pretty alert compared to the rest of them, but I didn’t know anything else about him.

  “Was he a collector of rare books as well as other artefacts?” said Aunt Candace. “Collectors would certainly be interested in getting their hands on some of our titles. It wouldn’t be the first time one of them showed up in town.”

  “Are you forgetting Mr Spencer already returned the book to the library before he died?” said Estelle. “If anyone wanted the book, they’d have come here, not gone after him.”

  “They might not have known he’d already returned it,” said Aunt Candace, undeterred.

  “Don’t be absurd,” said her sister.

  “She has a point,” I said. “I mean, he slipped out at midnight wearing a cloak and hood and blended into the crowd celebrating the new year. If he ever brought it up in conversation, it’s not like he’d have mentioned the exact time and date it was due back.”