“What are you looking for?” I asked Vicky impatiently, thinking that she must have some sort of a plan—some specific thing that Warren had directed her toward.
But she wasn’t digging through the wreckage or looking for anything, or so it appeared. In fact, she was just standing there silently, like she was in a daze. Warren was on full alert, his head outstretched, looking around, eyes aware Not looking like the shy turtle I was used to, but a really determined one—his eyes were laser focused, and he seemed to be guiding Vicky as she walked slowly forward through the shop.
“It’s not something physical I am looking for . . . just a feeling,” Vicky said dreamily, while I grew more and more impatient, and the sirens grew closer and closer. We were about to be sprung and arrested, all due to a feeling that a turtle was supposedly giving her.
For a moment, I considered turning and running. But I could never do that. I could never abandon my best friend. If she was going down for this, then, well, I was going down with her.
“Something happened here,” she said in a slightly breathless voice. “Something took place here, and . . . and . . .” She gasped and put her hand over her mouth. “Ruby. It has something to do with Mikhalia’s death.” She stopped, and Warren looked up at her questioningly. I was also wondering how on earth she had made that leap. She almost seemed to be channeling something as she walked over the floor. I’d never known that this was a skill Vicky had as a witch. She was usually clumsy and heavy-footed, but at that moment, she was light and ethereal—more like Geri.
Trying to speak to her was like trying to break the trance. “Vicky, what do you mean, this has something to do with Mikhalia’s death?” She didn’t say anything. Just held Warren up a little and showed him to me.
“Warren has something to do with Mikhalia’s death?” I asked incredulously. Then I looked back at Warren. “Oh my gosh. What if Mikhalia wasn’t just after witches? What if she was also hunting familiars?”
Vicky’s eyes were wide. “Ruby, we need to go to the lake.”
I nodded a little. The sirens were seconds away. “Well, can we go, like, right now?”
She breathed in sharply. “Are we allowed to use magic?”
Oh, we were definitely allowed to use magic. Constable Blue was about to pull up in his car and walk through the doors. So, Vicky grabbed my hand and transported us to the other side of Swift Valley.
Next thing I knew, I was up to my knees in mud.
It was humid, which meant mosquitos everywhere. I climbed out of the edge of the water and stumbled onto dry land in the dark. Vicky was especially prone to being bitten by them, so she was slapping herself all over and exclaiming.
“My mum always said it was because I have super-sweet blood,” she told me, scratching at the new bites as we walked along the edge of the lake, keen to avoid sinking into the mud again.
I could hear crickets and vague splashing sounds, as well as the croaking of frogs hidden there amongst the reeds.
Vicky hadn’t quite escaped the clutches of the edge of the lake, and she sank down like she was being grabbed by quicksand and then yelped when her foot hit something sharp below. “Ouch!” she cried and jumped right out of the mud. But I stayed to see what it was that she had hit.
“What is this?” I asked and pulled it out of the swampy edges of the lake. It was sleek and black. I studied the edge, holding it up to catch the glint of the moonlight. Even though it had been lost and buried in mud, I could still tell that it was high tech surveillance equipment.
It belonged to Mikhalia. Who else would have access to something like that?
Then I spotted something that wasn’t quite so high tech, there in the mud. A net on a red plastic stick.
The perfect thing to catch a turtle with. You could scoop one right up with something like that. But why would anyone want to scoop a turtle out of the lake?
And suddenly, everything was starting to make sense to me.
I knew where Warren had come from, and it wasn’t the pet shop.
“Warren wasn’t the original familiar,” I said and walked from the edge of the mud over to where there were fallen logs and branches. I got down for a better look. There was a little gap in the log where there was enough space. I shone a light in and spotted a hard shell. Just where I had suspected they would be hiding, if they lived at the lake at all. “Look!” The turtle was larger than Warren, but it had the same sort of fuzzy moss growing on the back of its shell.
Vicky looked confused. “I don’t get it.”
I looked over my shoulder at her. “He got switched. Vicky, this explains it all. Don’t you see? When you got those ‘vibes’ at the pet shop, you must have been picking up on the energy that the real familiar—the original turtle—left behind.”
“Oh my gosh.”
I took the torch away from the native turtle and switched it off. “If I had to bet, I would say that the Mikhalia realized that the turtle Mr. DeWinter had for sale was a witch’s turtle, and she tried to buy him. But for whatever reason, he wouldn’t sell it to her. Maybe he had a better offer and needed the money. So Mikhalia came here and found a turtle that she could switch the real familiar with, and hoped that Mr. DeWinter wouldn’t realize. But he did realize. One look at Warren would tell you he is no pure-bred pet turtle. He still needed the money that selling the real familiar would bring him. And so, he killed Mikhalia to try and get the original turtle back.”
I thought that Vicky was going to be shocked and probably congratulate me on my great detective work.
But I was not the one whom her compliments were directed at. She was all of a sudden overcome with energy.
She slapped her forehead and gasped. “Don’t you see?” she asked me, almost breathless with excitement as the words tumbled out of her. “The protection spell didn’t fail! Warren purposely let himself get taken—so that we could discover the truth!”
I stared down at Warren, who was peeking out of his shell with a sly look on his face. Was Vicky right? Had he actually come through and led us to the real killer?
“Oh, you are a good familiar!” Vicky said, scooping him up and holding him out so that she could gaze at him proudly. She grinned back at me. “Slow and steady does win the race after all!”
I walked over and gave him a pet on his proud-looking little head. Wow. “We were all wrong, Vicky. Warren may have taken a while to get trained. He may not be a natural born familiar, but he got there in the end. And now, you get to keep him as both your pet and familiar. No one can tell you any different.”
She was so happy. But her joy was short-lived when we heard this strange sound coming from the edge of the lake where the water had dried up due to the heat and left only mud. There was the sound of something hitting the water. Slapping it.
“Is that . . . a canoe?” Vicky asked.
I grabbed my torch out and shined it across the lake.
It was Mr. DeWinter, paddling up the shore. He clumsily but determinedly climbed out of the canoe and headed over to Vicky.
“I’ll be taking that turtle back now.” He took a step closer and reached out for Vicky. “And that’s not all that I will be taking.”
I glanced behind me at the lake and gulped.
12
We—Vicky and I—ran when Mr. DeWinter became stuck in the mud. But he had Warren. And that was all that Vicky cared about. Getting her turtle back.
Yet we were on the other side of the lake. In fact, we’d run so far and so quickly that I didn’t even know if we were still at the lake. We seemed to be on farmland nearby. There was a barb-wired fence on one side of us and a wild blackberry bush with even more prickles than the fence.
“I don’t know where we are,” I whispered to Vicky as we crouched down on dry wood and tried to figure out our next course of action. “Except that this is some kind of bridge.”
“Boardwalk,” she corrected me. “There’s dry land beneath us.”
Okay, so we were on a boardwalk. And we were away fr
om the lake. But that didn’t help me very much in the dead of night with a killer after us. I didn’t know which direction might take us out of there and which might lead us straight back into Mr. DeWinter’s clutches.
I tried to reassure Vicky that Warren would be okay. He had shown his skill, and I had to believe that if he had been taken by Mr. DeWinter, then this was all part of his plan. He still had the protection spell, so no harm could befall him unless he wanted it to. I told this to Vicky, and she nodded, though there was still some doubt there. I could see it in her eyes. So, I had to be the one who remained confident.
After all, we were still in danger ourselves. We had to be careful. Alert. Confident.
“Shh, did you hear something?” Vicky whispered. “Footsteps.”
There was someone else on the boardwalk with us. I could feel the vibration of their steps underneath the soles of my shoes.
I screamed, and someone reached out grab me.
“Stop!” A male voice said. “Stop fighting. And be quiet.”
It was Damon.
“I told you that you needed my help,” he said, still with one of his hands wrapped around my arm.
I was still trying to push him away from me. “No way! We do not need your help.”
“Yeah, seems to me like you have this all under control,” he said, shining his torch on my muddy jeans. How did he even get to the lake? Or know that we were here?
Had he been following me the entire time?
I sighed and shook my head. We were in danger. I didn’t have time to ask for the details. If he really could help us, then he needed to help us. “What’s your big plan then, buddy?”
Damon shone his torch back in the direction of the lake and pointed to where Mr. DeWinter’s canoe was heading, far away in the opposite direction. “We need to go after him. Get that turtle back. I know where they keep the spare canoes. They are locked up after hours, but we’ll still be able to get our hands on one. Sounds better than hiding in the reeds, waiting for a maniac to attack you, right?”
I gasped. “YOU. You want Warren, don’t you?”
His face went red.
“Oh my gosh, it was you in the trench coat that day, trying to steal Warren, wasn’t it?”
“Ruby. Calm down,” he tried to say. “I never wanted to hurt your friend’s turtle. I just needed him . . . for research’s sake.”
“Yeah, right!”
“You can believe me or not, but it is the truth. There are strange things going on in this town, and I am trying to get to the bottom of them!”
“This town doesn’t need you and your stupid agency poking around, Damon! We were doing fine before you showed up.”
Vicky cut into the middle of our bickering.
“We need to get back to the lake.”
Damon nodded and led the way, even though I tried to run in front of him and beat him. I didn’t know what he might do to Warren if he got there first. And I wondered—without saying anything to him—whether he realized that Warren wasn’t the original turtle that Mikhalia had been after. None of us knew what had happened to that turtle.
I reached the lake before Damon did and tried to figure out the best way to get to DeWinter. I considered jumping in and swimming. That could work. DeWinter wouldn’t even know we were after him then.
Damon jumped up and started waving his arms around. He was screaming to get DeWinter’s attention. “What are you doing!” I cried, trying to get him to stop. So much for being subtle.
DeWinter had turned the canoe around, and he was focused on Damon, who was panting.
“He won’t be able to catch me . . . Quick—you two hide, and when he gets to land, I will distract him. Then you can get your turtle back.”
But it was Warren who saved the day in the end.
How he moved that fast, I will never know, but he jumped out of Mr. DeWinter’s hands and landed with such force at the very tip of the canoe that it caused the craft to lose balance. Mr. DeWinter tried to straighten it, but the small canoe toppled over. Mr. DeWinter cried out as his arms flailed—and he was dumped sideways into the murky water.
The sirens that had sounded so ominous before, now made me sigh with relief. The police were there to fish him out of the water while Damon explained everything to them. And Warren swam toward Vicky and I.
Blue cast me a glance and asked why I always seemed to be around when things like this happened. I pulled a floating plastic bag out of the lake and held it up to him. “It’s because it always falls to me to clean up the mess in this town.” I threw it in a nearby garbage can. “And you are always five minutes behind.” If I had the power to file charges, I wouldn’t need the Swift Valley Police Force at all. As it stood, I still felt like they needed me more than I needed them, even if they technically made the arrests.
But Constable Blue remained suspicious of me.
And I was left wondering who our enemies really were.
Mr. DeWinter was led off, and Warren ran over the shore toward us. Well, he didn’t exactly run. He was moving so slowly that you could barely even see the movement.
Vicky ran over to him and hugged him.
“So, somewhere out there, there really is a magic turtle,” I said, staring out at the lake.
“Warren is magical,” Vicky said proudly. And I agreed.
She finally had a familiar that she could trust. And one that was her very own.
The sun was starting to rise.
Damon cleared his throat behind me, and I spun around, seeing that he had this weird, expectant look on his face. “What?” I asked him. Just for once, I would have loved him to drop the smug grin that he always carried.
“Well, didn’t we have a deal?” he asked me.
“What was that?”
“I save your turtle, and you come and work for me.”
I smiled at him wryly. “Warren saved himself. In fact, he saved all of us. I think that you owe him some gratitude. He solved this whole case for you.”
Damon sighed and crossed his arms. He’d failed. Warren wasn’t his, I wasn’t his, and Mikhalia had gotten herself killed trying to solve the paranormal mysteries of this town.
“There really isn’t enough work for the both of us in this town,” I said to him. “And I was here first. You’re in out of your depth.”
He shrugged. “I dunno, I think maybe I might stick around.” He nodded down at Warren. “I think there are still a lot of mysteries in this town that need to be uncovered.”
Vicky and I looked at each other. Maybe. But slow and steady always won the race.
Epilogue
As I packed up my desk at The Agency, I glanced around and spotted Damon pouting in the corner.
“You’re gonna miss it here,” he said.
“This empty place?” I asked him, echoing his own words regarding my office back to him.
The rest of The Agency had relocated to the city, but Damon was lingering behind like a bad smell.
He shook his head and asked me to meet him in town instead. He called it my “exit interview,” and I rolled my eyes.
At the coffeehouse, I reminded him that I had never actually worked for him. But I had to admit, I’d stayed on for a few days after the lake incident, longer than I technically needed to. I’d been filing the paperwork. Some things we hadn’t been able to tell the police. Like the fact that the much-wanted turtle had been mistaken for a witch’s familiar. But Damon had asked me to include all those details in his notes.
“So, when do you leave?” I asked, pressing the point, hoping that this would be our last meet-up. “Don’t you need to join the rest of the guys back in the city?”
He shook his head.
“Thinking of going freelance,” he said and ordered another almond milk latte. “I don’t think that my work in this town is done.”
I tried to keep my face still. But the lingering question of what he meant by that would still be with me for days afterwards. I would continue to feel watched.
&n
bsp; “Can I ask you something?” Damon said finally.
“Sure.”
“Why don’t you use your powers to solve cases?” He looked genuinely curious as he leaned forward. “What makes you so scared of doing so?”
“I never said that I was scared.”
He glanced over his shoulder at Akiro. “So why is it that the people closest to you don’t know who you really are?”
Was it fear? Or was it just me trying to protect the people that were the closest to me?
My phone rang, and Damon asked me to ignore it. But I couldn’t. It was my mum.
“No, really, I have to take this call,” I said and excused myself from the cafe. My mother had been overseas on a vacation in Peru for the past five months, “finding herself,” and I had a lot of questions for her. This was the first time we had spoken since I had discovered I was a witch.
And my witch bloodline had been passed down through her. She had to have come from a long line of witches.
After we had said hello, I cut her off. There was only one thing I needed to say to her.
“I know, mum.”
There was silence on the other end of the line while she collected herself, I could only assume. “Ruby, I can explain everything . . .”
I thought she meant that she could explain it all right then and there, on the phone, but she had a shock for me.
“I’ve just booked a flight back to Australia. I will see you in a few days. And I can tell you everything that you need to know. That you deserve to know.”
I glanced back over my shoulder. Damon was still watching me intently. His eyes followed my every move.
But I had a bigger problem to worry about.
My mum was coming to town.
Thanks for reading This Spells Doom. I hope you enjoyed this story, and all the stories in the Private Eye Witch Cozy Mystery series. If you could take a minute and leave a review for me, that would be really awesome.
The next story in the series is called Mis-Spelled and you can order it now on Amazon.
This Spells Doom Page 9