by Helen Harper
‘Ivy, please. Just let me check. There has to be something sacred left to me. I have to have some privacy.’ Her panic was so palpable that there was nothing I could do but nod.
‘Wait, Rafe,’ I said softly. Clare stepped through the door, her spectral form passing through its solid oak veneer as if it were air. ‘Clare just needs to check on something.’
Winter gave me a confused frown but he did as I asked and took his hand from the door.
‘There’s not much dignity in death,’ I said, doing what I could to explain. ‘Clare won’t be on a metal table with her body exposed to uncaring eyes. She won’t be in a battered locker or jiggled around in a coffin. But that doesn’t mean that the next days aren’t going to involve strangers rooting through her life and passing judgment.’
‘She can’t stop that from happening, Ivy,’ he said. ‘And she can’t throw away any embarrassing pornography or secret letters or anything like that. She can’t physically touch anything.’
I stroked his arm. ‘She knows that. I think she just wants a moment to herself to come to terms with it.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘Where are your embarrassing pornography and secret letters? You might as well tell me now before I stumble across them post-mortem.’ Winter rolled his eyes and snorted. I grinned. ‘You can find mine hidden at the bottom of…’
Clare’s head emerged from the door with wide-eyed alarm. ‘Ivy! Something is wrong!’
I whipped round towards her. There was a panicked note to her voice that went beyond anything I’d previously heard from her, something that suggested dire straits and horrendous consequences. Almost unconsciously, my arm shot out in front of Winter as if to protect him from what might be about to happen while I waited for Clare to explain.
‘There’s something strange attached to the door,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is and I definitely didn’t put it there. Someone has been inside my house and has messed around.’ Her voice rose further. ‘In my home, Ivy.’
Whatever she was talking about, it didn’t sound good. ‘Take a deep breath, Clare.’ As soon as I said it, I realised how silly it was telling a ghost to breathe but Clare didn’t seem to notice. Her hands had now also emerged through the solid door and were fluttering around in increasingly frantic movements. ‘Stay calm and tell me exactly what you see.’
‘It was that bastard, wasn’t it? The one who killed us. He’s been here. He’s messed with my stuff. He’s rooted through my things and seen everything there is to know about me. It wasn’t enough that he killed me and my entire coven, he’s taken my home and my life too!’
‘Clare,’ I soothed. ‘It’s okay. Just tell me what you can see. What’s on the door?’
She rubbed her face with both hands. ‘A wire.’
I nodded. ‘Okay, good. There’s a wire,’ I repeated aloud for Winter’s benefit. ‘Where is the wire exactly?’
Clare’s head disappeared momentarily as she went to check. ‘It starts at the bottom.’ She gestured to about a foot off the ground. ‘It runs horizontally from here to here,’ she said, motioning to either side of the door frame. ‘Then it stretches up to the top here.’ She indicated with her finger. ‘And there’s something hanging there. It looks like…’ She hesitated and stared at me.
‘Looks like what?’
Clare’s eyes were wide. ‘Like a grenade.’
I did my best to keep my feet planted in one spot and not go sprinting as far away as possible. Turning to Winter, I outlined what Clare had described. He nodded grimly. ‘It’s a tiger trap. The second we open the door the grenade will fall and—’
‘Kaboom,’ I finished for him.
‘Body parts everywhere,’ Clare breathed.
I grimaced. ‘I imagine so.’
‘You and him will be blasted apart. It’ll be impossible to tell which bits belong to you and which bits belong to him. There will be fragments of flesh and blood and bone and—’
‘Alright!’ I said overly loudly. ‘Thank you, Clare.’ Winter lifted a questioning eyebrow. I made a point of ignoring it. I already had vivid visuals running through my mind; I didn’t need to compound the issue by describing them out loud. ‘Is there another way in?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She paused. ‘Security is very important to me. I always made sure I lived somewhere with only one entrance. Otherwise someone might have been able to sneak in when I wasn’t looking and…’ She faltered.
Booby-trap her front door with a damn grenade, perhaps? I shook my head in disbelief. Enchantment made more sense than this. It was as if I’d somehow fallen into a Hollywood set – except I was no Sly Stallone.
‘I need to tell the police. And the Order,’ Winter said. ‘If Clare Rees’s house is booby-trapped then the others probably will be too.’
I straightened up. ‘Yes! Get the bomb squad here to deal with this. We can check into a hotel and leave them to it.’
‘Don’t be silly, Ivy,’ he said. ‘We can go round the back and find another way in.’
Uh-oh. The bad, squirmy feeling caused by the suggestion of blown-apart body bits began to intensify. No doubt Winter was going to suggest some convoluted ninja-esque entry. ‘But Clare said there’s only one door.’
A smile crooked up the corner of his mouth. ‘Ivy Wilde wouldn’t let a small thing like a door get in her way.’
You wanna bet? I opened my mouth to argue but Clare’s dejected face stopped me. ‘Fine,’ I grumbled. ‘But when my teeth are being picked out of your splattered brain matter, don’t come crying to me.’
Clare didn’t have any garden to speak of but there was a handy alleyway running down the back of the row of houses. It was surprisingly well kept; I guessed that, like her, her neighbours were concerned with appearances and were houseproud. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. Cleanliness is next to godliness, whatever that means. But the trouble with that sort of approach to life is that it never ends. Yes, you can take time to pick the weeds from the pavement outside and scrub your skirting board and make sure there’s no dust collecting in any evil corners but you had to keep on doing it. If I had to do it all this week and then again next week and then the week after that, why not just leave it till next month? Or preferably next year?
Winter put his phone away. ‘What are you huffing about?’
I did my best to appear innocent. ‘Nothing.’
‘You have that look in your eyes.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Winter persisted. ‘Yes, you do. It’s the same look you get when you start thinking about getting off the sofa to do crazy things like answer the door or go out to work in order to pay your bills.’
I drew myself up. ‘Well, you have that look in your eyes too. The one that says you just had to speak to the Order and you secretly wish you were still with them so you could feel important and wanted, and had a nice shiny badge to wave at everyone.’
Winter frowned at me. ‘The Order don’t have badges.’
‘I bet you wish they did though. That way, when you went to talk to someone, you could take it out and flip it open.’ I mimed doing just that. Then I deepened my voice. ‘“Raphael Winter. That’s Adeptus Exemptus Raphael Winter to you. Arcane Branch. That’s Arcane Branch in the Hallowed Order of Magical Enlightenment. I take my coffee black and strong. And I glower at everyone who dares to look at me without receiving permission first. And I enjoy venturing into buildings where there’s a good chance I might get blown up.”’
Somewhere behind me, Clare snickered.
Winter tilted his head, something dangerous glinting in his blue eyes. Then he let his body sag and his shoulders slump. ‘ “Ivy,”’ he mumbled in a higher-pitched tone than normal. ‘“Can’t be bothered to form sentences or to shake hands with you because it’s too much effort.”’ He froze. ‘“Wait,”’ he said with a sudden toss of his hair, ‘“do I smell pizza?”’
I put my hands on my hips. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.’
‘“I might have to sit down,”�
�� Winter said. ‘“I’ve walked at least twenty steps already today and it’s been a bit too much.”’
I stuck out my tongue and he grinned. ‘Actually,’ he said in a low voice as if he were afraid someone would overhear, ‘I did want badges. I put in a suggestion to get them for everyone when I first joined Arcane Branch.’
I winced. ‘In the shape of witch’s hats?’
‘Not quite that bad. They needed to look official, not ridiculous.’
‘Of course,’ I smiled. ‘I once put in a suggestion that we pay a teenager to hang around our building and help with deliveries. You know, escort takeaways up to our door, that kind of thing.’
Winter’s eyes danced with amusement.
Clare peered at us. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said finally.
I dragged my attention away from Winter and glanced at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That was…’ she hesitated as if searching for the right word ‘…mean. You were mean to him and he was mean to you.’
I tapped the corner of my mouth. We’d needed a moment of levity amid all this serial-killer stuff but I understood what she meant. ‘It wasn’t mean,’ I said finally. ‘It was honest. We know each other very well. I suppose what we’re really saying is that we know the worst about each other and it doesn’t matter. We accept each other for who we are, regardless of our faults.’
Winter reached across and squeezed my hand while Clare stared at me. ‘I think I hate you both.’
I beamed back at her cheerfully. ‘I would hate us both too.’ I lifted my head up. ‘Now let’s crack on. Which window is going to be the easiest?’ I pointed at one on the second floor. ‘That looks large enough to wiggle through.’
‘It’s sealed shut,’ Clare said. ‘The only one which opens is that one.’ She floated upwards until she was hovering in front of the highest – and smallest – window in the house.
Winter followed my eyes. ‘The window on the right?’ he enquired.
‘Apparently it’s the only one that will open.’ I flicked him a look from under my eyelashes. ‘We should definitely wait for the bomb squad.’
‘Clare?’ Winter said, looking in the wrong direction. ‘Can you check whether there are any more booby traps?’
She nodded eagerly and disappeared back through the walls of her house.
‘She said she can’t,’ I told him. ‘On account of the fact that her ghostly presence might upset the spiritual atoms and set them off, blowing us all to smithereens.’
Clare’s head appeared from the chimney top. ‘There’s nothing else here!’ she called. ‘It’s only the front door that’s been tampered with.’
Winter, reading my expression, smiled. ‘Great.’ He gestured in front of him. ‘Ladies first.’
I stared at him. ‘What do you expect me to do? Scale the wall? I’m not Spiderman.’ I shifted my body slightly so he couldn’t see what I was doing, then I put my hands behind my back and drew out a rune. Ever so slowly, Winter began to rise up. The best part was that, because it happened at such a snail’s pace, he didn’t even notice until he was at least a foot in the air.
‘Ivy!’
I smirked and continued raising him. I had the most amazing view of his arse from here.
Clare’s mouth was hanging open in astonishment. ‘He can fly?’
‘Nope.’
‘But…’
‘I’m making Winter levitate,’ I explained. ‘But it takes a lot of energy and I can’t hold him for long.’ We both watched as he reached the window and began to tug at it, trying to open it up. ‘Do you have any wards in place?’ I asked. If there were any, they should have been blown when Blackbeard entered but it didn’t hurt to ask.
‘Oh yes,’ Clare said proudly. ‘I have several.’
Winter finally managed to open the window and stuck his head inside. A beat later he was violently thrown backwards, somersaulting through the air and down to the ground. In the nick of time I managed to cast a rune to cushion his fall but he still groaned very loudly.
I ran over. ‘Are you okay?’
He squinted up at me, pain clouding his gaze. ‘We should have waited for the bomb squad.’
Alarmed now, I crouched down, searching for visible wounds. ‘That was a bomb? Another grenade?’
‘No.’ He raised his head then thought better of it and dropped it down again with a thud. ‘A ward. Your mate Clare might have been non-Order but she knew her guard magic.’
A huge smile cracked Clare’s face, spreading from ear to ear. Almost as quickly as it appeared, it vanished. ‘It wasn’t really me,’ she said, her head hanging. ‘It was part of the protective spells the coven put in place when we thought we were being followed. We worked together to set them up on all our homes.’
I sucked on my lip. ‘And yet Blackbeard wasn’t troubled by them in the slightest.’ The magic plot thickened.
She frowned. ‘You’re right. He’s definitely doing something to avoid being affected by magic.’
Of any sort. I sighed. If even latent spells like wards didn’t stop him, what would? The fact that he’d managed to gain entry and set up his own entirely non-magical yet death-inducing ward was incredibly worrisome.
I helped Winter up to his feet. ‘My turn,’ I said grimly.
‘You don’t want to wait?’
My mouth flattened. ‘No. They’ll be hours and I’ve had enough of this place. I want to go home. The faster we do this, the faster that can happen. No serial killer is going to get the better of us.’
I must have sounded determined because Clare looked impressed. ‘You go girl.’
‘The wards…’
‘You can disarm them with the password. Coventastic.’
Coventastic? Good grief. It was probably wise not to say anything aloud. If Winter realised he could have avoided being thrown out of Clare’s window at great speed by simply uttering a word, he wouldn’t be best pleased. I avoided his eyes. ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ I muttered.
Winter used the same rune I had, sending me up smoothly through the air towards the window. All the same, I could feel gravity working against me. The laws of science never enjoy coming up against the laws of magic – it’s like oil and water. At least Clare’s house was only three-storeys high. It could have been much worse.
When I got to the now-open window, I realised with dismay that it was smaller than I’d thought. Squeezing inside was going to be tough. I grabbed hold of the windowsill, whispered, ‘Coventastic,’ and started to wiggle through.
To begin with it was fairly straightforward but I was only pushing my arms and head through. My shoulders scraped painfully against the frame and, when I had to push my chest through, it didn’t seem that I was going to make it. No amount of holding my breath was going to make my breasts any smaller. Still, I managed to squash in just enough to squeak them past. Now the only worry was my hips. I shuffled forward with the top half of my body hanging into Clare’s house and my bottom half hanging out. It bloody hurt. Matters didn’t improve when there was a sudden loud shout from outside.
‘Oy! What are you doing? I’m calling the polis!’
‘It’s Pete from down the road,’ Clare said, sounding surprised. ‘Aw, bless. He was never interested in joining the neighbourhood watch before and now he’s looking out for me. That’s really sweet. At least someone cares.’ She paused. ‘Even if he is a scary bastard with facial tattoos and a vicious Chihuahua called Bruiser.’
I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the fact that having a Chihuahua meant he was a scary bastard, or whether it was the Chihuahua’s name that created that effect. Either way, this wasn’t the time to ask, not with my arse hanging out of her window. It wasn’t like I could back out now; the only way was forward, whatever Pete from down the road was doing.
I continued my slow wiggle, growing more and more uncomfortable by the second. Clare kept up a running commentary on the events outside. ‘Oooh. Winter has approached Pete and he’s looking tough. But I think Pet
e is tougher. Winter’s not acting scared, he’s doing that glowery thing that I’ve seen him do to you. Pete is growling back at him. So is Bruiser.’ She clapped her hands. ‘This is exciting.’
If she weren’t already dead, I’d probably wring her neck. ‘Tell Winter,’ I said through gritted teeth, ‘to get Pete to back off. We don’t have time for this.’
‘But Winter can’t hear me.’
Damn it; I kept forgetting that part. ‘Rafe!’ I shouted. ‘Get Pete to leave! We’ve got Clare’s permission to be here!’
‘That was good,’ she said.
I wiggled a bit further forward. If I could just shimmy my hips through, I’d manage this. ‘So it worked?’ I asked her.
Clare laughed. ‘Oh no! They can’t hear you. Probably because your bottom is in the way and it’s blocking out all the sound. But if they could hear you, I’m sure it would make a big difference.’
I cursed to myself. Grabbing hold of the curtains I started to pull, hoping I could yank myself through before I ripped them off the rail. I pushed and I pulled. Come on, Ivy.
‘Oh!’ Clare said. ‘Pete says that my brother told him I’d gone off for an extended holiday. He asked him to keep an eye on the house for me and to call him if there were any problems.’
I grunted loudly. I’d never experienced labour pains but they couldn’t be a million miles away from this. Push! Breathe! Push! I threw everything I had into one final effort and my hips finally squeezed past the frame. I popped through, landing on the floor of Clare’s upstairs hallway with a loud sigh of relief and what felt like some extensive scrapes and bruises.
As I tried to disentangle my limbs from each other, Clare pursed her lips. ‘Of course, I don’t actually have a brother so either Pete is lying or Blackbeard spoke to him.’
I staggered upwards and back to the window, peering out. Winter and Tattooed Pete were still facing each other as if squaring off. It looked to me as if things were calming down slightly. That was good – at least until Pete said something and Winter smashed his fist into his nose.