Aconite and Accusations

by Silver Nord

  “You only ever cared about him,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and empty.

  I realised there was blood on his hands and on the back of his head. I remembered what Toby had said about how he’d fought back against his attacker. The hairs rose up on my arm.

  “Sean…” I whispered urgently to the detective.

  “I see it,” he confirmed.

  “No, Sean… look at that wound,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Something’s not right.” My head started to clear from the adrenaline for the first time since we’d found Hannah’s body and seen Toby appear from the bushes - allegedly having just woken up from a brutal sneak attack from a serial killer.

  “You’re right,” Sean said, the horror of dawning realisation creeping into his voice. “It doesn’t make sense. Toby’s wound was close to his temple. That’s not congruent with his story of being hit twice from behind.”

  “But Harry’s head would match that description. The blood on his hands was probably where he defended himself from Toby, fighting for his life. There were no defensive wounds on Toby’s hands because he was the one holding the stick. We’ve been played for fools,” I finished, finally seeing the truth.

  “Please, he can change. I know he can. He’s my brother! This town was going to be a fresh place for us to start. He has a new hobby. You know how much he loves ghost hunting. He promised me he wouldn’t kill any more animals,” Delia begged Harry.

  “Clearly your psycho brother has moved onto other things. I can’t believe I let myself be blinded to it for so long. He tried to kill me, and you’re still defending him!” Harry replied, releasing Delia’s wrist in disgust and walking away, gently touching the wound on the back of his head.

  “DCI Sean Admiral of the Witchwood Police,” Sean announced, stepping into view an flashing his badge. “I want both of you to come with me right now.”

  “He knows!” Delia wailed. “You don’t understand. He promised me,” she said to Sean.

  I swore under my breath. “He hasn’t stopped killing animals at all,” I muttered, remembering the posters I’d seen around town about the missing cats. Toby hadn’t turned a corner the way his blindly devoted sister had hoped, he’d taken a nosedive.

  I’d left Hemlock and Artemis with a serial killer who enjoyed killing animals.

  I didn’t wait for Sean to speak or shout the same warning about not underestimating the killer. We’d both already made that mistake.

  Please, oh please, I kept thinking as I ran as fast as my legs would carry me back through the trees, feeling as though my breath was going to tear my lungs apart. I didn’t care how much it hurt, I just wanted to be in time. Hemlock… Artemis… I thought over and over as I prayed to an unseen god that they would be okay. Perhaps Toby would have run off at the first opportunity, surely realising that he was close to being caught. Perhaps he’d still be waiting in the field…

  I knew I was lying to myself.

  I’d both seen and heard enough evidence to know that Toby had a disease. He was unable to stop himself from killing, and he took great pleasure in doing it. I doubted someone like that would pass up the golden opportunity I’d given him to indulge that pleasure by presenting him with two new victims.

  My only hope was that he’d been foolish enough to treat Hemlock like a regular, unsuspecting cat. I prayed that Toby had taken his time and shot his mouth off to a creature who couldn’t possibly understand him. Finally, I hoped that Hemlock had stolen enough hexes and curses from my spell book to be able to stop him.

  It wasn’t a lot of hope to hold onto.

  The sunlight prickled my skin as the white light made everything appear hazy.

  I couldn’t see anyone in the meadow.

  “Hemlock! Artemis!” I screamed, hearing the terror in my voice. I couldn’t lose them. Not like this. Sure, Hemlock was a huge pain and almost never did what I wanted him to do. He was the worst familiar in the history of familiars, but that didn’t stop me from loving him the way all cat owners love their pet and their best friend. I couldn’t stand it if I lost him or Artemis, who had barely even begun to live the life of the troublesome cat he was purported to be. He never even got to wreak havoc! I thought, my heart breaking as I neared the place where I’d left them.

  The smell of blood was unmistakable.

  Its coppery tang mingled with the scent of the summer grass in a sacrilegious perversion of a pleasant summer’s day.

  “Hemlock!” I shouted again, terrified that I was destined to remain unanswered… terrified by what I might be about to see if I took a few more steps.

  “Oh good, it’s you,” Hemlock said from somewhere in the grass over to my right.

  I felt like my heart might be about to burst through my chest with joy at hearing him. “You’re alive! Are you okay? I thought…” My voice trailed off. “Is Artemis with you?” I whipped my head back and forth, hunting for any trace of Toby. Had he run off?

  “Artemis is gone,” Hemlock said, chilling my blood all over again by the solemn manner in which he was speaking.

  “Gone?” I gasped, feeling like I couldn’t breathe.

  “It was a near thing,” Hemlock explained appearing through the long grass and looking up at me with his bright green eyes. “He nearly got me. I was minding my own business, thinking about going back for some more of that kebab, when he tried to sneak up on me. Luckily, I have the ears of a cat and the reflexes of… well… a cat.”

  “What about Artemis?” I cut in, imploring Hemlock tell me what had happened to the little kitten.

  “I’m sure he’ll come back,” Hemlock said with a casual shrug.

  “Back from where?” Now I was afraid that he’d been taken.

  “As I was saying, I was about to turn around and teach that treacherous teenager a lesson when Artemis got in the way.”

  I let out a small squeak of alarm.

  Hemlock nodded sagely. “It was terrible,” he agreed. “There was no need for him to be there. I had everything under control!”

  “What happened to him? Where is he?” This story seemed to be going nowhere. Every second, Toby could be getting away with Artemis! The smell of blood hit my nose again. Where was it coming from?

  “But no… Artemis wanted all of the glory. I had at least ten excellent curses up my sleeve. I was going to be the talk of the town! Instead, my own flesh and blood took that away from me by making it look like he saved my life.” Hemlock lifted a paw to his forehead to show his anguish. “I bet he’s run off to tell everyone. I’ll have to pretend to be all grateful. Urgh. Why does bad stuff always happen to me?”

  “What. Happened.” I repeated it slowly and carefully with the strong implication that Hemlock was one more moan away from having his TV privileges revoked for the foreseeable future. There would be no more reality romance rubbish and no more talentless shows.

  “See? It’s just like I said. Everyone is going to be so hung up on Artemis turning himself into a giant panther and stopping that serial killer from maybe stabbing me, they won’t stop to consider that I could have saved myself. You know… if I’d turned around in time.”

  “Panther?” I repeated, wondering if I’d misheard him. With confusion still hanging over me like a cloud of buzzing wasps, I wandered back and forth, searching for the source of that metallic smell.

  I didn’t have to walk far.

  Toby was lying on his back. His eyes stared sightlessly at the open sky above him. There was a look of surprise permanently etched onto his face. Given the large slash marks all over his body, inflicted by razor-sharp claws, I could understand his shock. You didn’t expect to bump-off a defenceless cat, only to discover the kitten you’d saved for seconds had transformed into a fully-grown panther.

  I frowned. Did that even make sense?

  “Troublesome,” I muttered, remembering Hemlock’s first description of his son. Turning into a panther at will would fit that description. I wondered what else he was keeping up his small, furry sleeves. />
  “He’s gone to Wormwood Forest to run it off. Being a panther comes with a whole lot of excess energy,” Hemlock said, looking down at the body of the teen with distaste. “I’ll be sure to tell Artemis he did the right thing. People like that, they don’t change. There was something wrong with him. I should have seen it sooner, but in this town, it’s hard to pick out the strange from the psychopathic.”

  “That’s one of the truest things I’ve heard you say,” I told my familiar.

  Hemlock reached out a freakishly-thumbed cat paw and patted my leg. “Look at us, bonding over a crime scene. Now, as I’ve been trying to say since you flailed your way over here, let’s hide the body.”

  “We’re not hiding any bodies!” I protested, gesturing to the dead teenager. “He was a disturbed young man who was killed in self-defence. There has to be closure and justice for the victims and their families. It’s the law.”

  “Don’t be such a hypocrite! Just yesterday you sent a monster in to clear up your mess. Hey, could you open a gateway to the dark dimension and toss the body in? That would be much faster than digging a hole.”

  “What I did was a spur of the moment mistake. And it’s one I’m going to come clean to the detective about.” I’d decided that earlier around the same time as I’d accepted other feelings. I knew I had to tell Sean about what had happened in the forest with the Scorpions and Minerva because I was well aware of what happened when you kept secrets from those you were close to. Wormwood was full of cautionary tales that followed that exact trajectory. I was going to come clean and face whatever the consequences would be.

  “Just make sure he’s not recording it when you tell him. He’ll never be able to prove what happened in court without the bodies or any kind of murder weapon - in your case, a kraken. You should only worry if he gets the Witch Council involved,” Hemlock said, offering his unwanted advice on the topic.

  “Either the Witch Council will storm Wormwood and take me away to a prison cell, or they’ve decided to leave Wormwood alone to its fate,” I said, having fully accepted that Aleister Root must already be aware that his hired muscle had failed to bring him the weapon he so desired.

  I’d have to wait and see where the dice fell. I knew that if I was the corrupt ruler of the Witch Council, I’d probably wait to see what came out of Wormwood after the dust had settled.

  “What happened?” Sean said, arriving at the scene with Harry and Delia following behind.

  “Did he…?” Sean pointed from Hemlock to the newest corpse.

  Hemlock showed his white pointy teeth and looked thrilled.

  “Actually…” I started to tell Sean the truth and then stopped. Did it really matter which cat had done the deed? “Something along those lines,” I said, knowing it would make Hemlock happy.

  “A perfectly logical magical explanation,” Sean agreed, looking from the body to Hemlock and back again with a perturbed expression on his face I knew Hemlock would be talking about for weeks. He scratched his head. “How am I going to explain this one?”

  “Told you we should have got rid of it,” Hemlock said to me.

  “I can’t think of anything that might explain it without the need for a wild animal hunt. That would be bad for everyone,” I said, thinking of the shifters who roamed Witchwood Forest. “However, I can tell you that I am certain it was done in self-defence.”

  Sean nodded his agreement. Given the trail of death and violence this young man had left behind, I didn’t think it was too hard to believe.

  He stopped nodding and frowned. “Wasn’t there a kitten here before?” he began before shaking his head. “You know what? There are some questions I don’t want to know the answer to.”

  We stood in silence looking at the destruction of human life and thinking about the other two victims - both caught up through no fault of their own in the killer’s murderous path. As rational humans, attaching a motive to murder was usually a sure-fire way to catch the culprit. People mostly killed for reasons relating to love, money, fear, hate, or even a mixture of the above, but there was usually a reason - good or bad. That was what made it so terrifying when there was an absence of any logic or reason at all, beyond the desire and drive to kill. It was the only thing that separated us from monsters.

  And soon, there’ll be nothing separating us at all, I thought pensively, contemplating the thin layer that separated us from the terrible things that lurked in the dark dimension. Toby had been a taste of what indiscriminate murder looked like. Tomorrow, we would be engulfed by it.

  “What a waste,” Sean said bitterly, expressing everything I felt. Even as we were looking down at the body with grim horror seizing our minds, Delia’s anguished cries broke through and brought us back down to earth with a bump. No matter what might be on the cards for the town tomorrow, this sorry situation needed to be brought to a close today. And with no police to call on without a many-mile trek, it was down to us to sort out the awful aftermath.

  “Bet you wished you’d pushed him into the other dimension now,” Hemlock commented as we made our plans and got to work doing a job that no one could possibly enjoy.

  Death was a dark business, but with the assistance of the more agreeable members of the coven and my aunts, it went as smoothly as anyone could have asked. What’s more, it revived a fragile seed of hope that when we worked together, we could pull through even the worst of times.

  16

  Footprints Of A Killer

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said to Sean when the cleanup was over.

  “I have to tell you something, too,” he said, frowning in that thoughtful way that made my heart flutter. I gritted my teeth. I needed to have some serious words with my emotions about what did and didn’t constitute good timing.

  “I’ll go first,” I said hastily. “The Witchwood Scorpions met an unfortunate end. A kraken from the dark dimension ate them.”

  Sean looked concerned… and then suspicious. “And you just happened to be walking past when all of this happened?”

  I blushed. “They may have kidnapped Aunt Minerva and threatened to kill her if I didn’t hand over a weapon my father invented. I went to meet with them hoping that distracting the group would mean I could spirit my aunt away with no harm done, but… it went a bit wrong.”

  “I see,” Sean said without any inflection.

  I risked a look up at his face to see if he was horrified. What I saw surprised me. It was resignation - resignation that what I’d described was possible and resignation towards the decision I’d made on the spur of the moment.

  That was somehow so much worse than horror.

  “I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I’ll do anything I can to make it up to you. I didn’t know there was a kraken waiting on the other side of the tear I opened up, but I had planned to throw them into the dark dimension - which would have constituted a death sentence anyway,” I confessed.

  I took a breath. “If it’s any consolation, I know Amber wasn’t there.” I glanced past the door of the kitchen and into the shop. “I’m surprised she hasn’t already come gunning for me.”

  Sean shook his head. “I don’t know why you seem to think I value Amber’s safety over anyone else’s. But… I will admit that you were right about my accommodating spirit towards her not being without a motive.”

  I looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  His gaze moved to the table top. “I thought that if I showed her that the police can be kind, and that she had a friend in the force, she might change her ways… and perhaps persuade others in the gang to change with her.”

  My eyebrows lifted up even higher. “You thought you could make a law-abiding citizen out of her?”

  “I know. It was foolish,” Sean said, looking annoyed. “I just thought that whilst we’re here telling each other about our mistakes, I’d pitch in. In case you’re wondering, it was a total failure. She even stole my wallet whilst I was comforting her as she pretended to cry.” His expression was p
ained.

  I smiled before I could help myself and then covered my mouth. “Sorry, but you should have known,” I told him with a more apologetic smile. “A leopard never changes its spots.”

  “Hey… your kitten’s back,” Sean said, looking past me at the backdoor. I deduced that he must be back to normal size and proportions if Sean wasn’t asking why a panther was trying to squeeze through the cat flap.

  Artemis bumbled past us, looking every inch the sweet kitten. I walked over to the kitchen cupboard and cracked open a can of tuna, placing it down in front of him. “Thanks for saving Hemlock. Also, don’t tell Hemlock,” I whispered to the little kitten, rubbing his small head.

  “It begins. Just as I feared!” a voice floated down from on top of the kitchen cabinets, followed by a cry of anguish.

  I rolled my eyes and hastily opened another can. “Yours is a reward, Artemis. Hemlock’s is to avoid blackmail.”

  It was only then that I remembered Sean was sitting at the kitchen table. I turned around to see him watching me thoughtfully.

  “You know, I used to think it was strange that you talked to your cat, but even if I pretend that the big one isn’t talking back, it’s not that weird. The, uh, little one doesn’t talk, does it?” He pulled nervously at the collar on his shirt. Sean had evidently not forgotten the time when Hemlock had briefly managed to make it so that he could communicate with all humans.

  “Not to me,” I told him. “He does some other way scarier things” I’d meant it as a joke, but Sean looked unnerved. To be honest, that was probably the correct reaction.

  He cleared his throat. “Hazel, there was something I intended to tell you before we went to look for the missing teenagers. We may have solved the case, but I still think it’s important…”

  The shop bell clanged as someone entered.

  I looked into the shop but couldn’t see anyone. “We’re closed for the day!” I called out, suddenly uneasy. Someone had come in… hadn’t they? With growing suspicion I scanned the room, until I discovered the tell-tale trail of a magical aura. Someone was creeping around.