by Clare Kauter
“In evidence?” I asked. What exactly was going on here? Who was this lady?
“Yes, in evidence. I’m the detective in chief of magical and post-mortal affairs in this region.”
Seriously? This ancient witch was in charge of the magic police?
She turned to me. “I’m afraid I was the one who dobbed you in for your quest. Didn’t want to have to book you for practising without a licence.”
Where had Daisy and Hecate been when the coven was trying to recruit me? If these bad-arses had shown up at my door I’d have joined in a heartbeat.
“I apologise, Dawn Witch,” said Henry. “Had I realised that was who you were, I wouldn’t have been so…”
“Much of an arsehole?” she suggested.
“Yeah,” said Henry.
“This is a bookshop-slash-café,” I said. “What’s the chief detective witch thingo doing running a place like this? Shouldn’t you be, like, at the station?”
“This is the station,” Daisy explained. “The bookshop-slash-café brings in extra revenue and acts as a cover. We don’t like to advertise who we are or where we’re stationed, so this helps us to keep a low profile. Because it’s the biggest occult store in the region, it also helps us to keep an eye on anyone who might be interested in dark magic. This is the first place they come looking.”
“It’s all registered as belonging to the coven, and anyone who’s had dealings with the coven,” – Hecate looked at me – “would not suspect them of being involved in a police operation. However, based on the events of tonight, it seems like our location might have been compromised.”
“Do you mind if we check your evidence room?” asked Henry.
“I think that might be a good idea,” she said. “I have a horrible feeling I know what we’re going to find.”
Her horrible feeling was well placed. What we found?
Nothing.
All the confiscated cones and items were gone.
It didn’t exactly come as a shock.
“Well,” said Henry. “This explains a lot.”
“I don’t suppose you have security cameras?” I said.
We checked the footage in Hecate’s office out the back of the main shop. There was a camera directly pointed at the cupboard where all the banned goods were normally kept.
“I did an inventory a fortnight ago,” said Hecate. “Everything was here then. I suppose we’ll just watch from then on.”
“Riveting,” said Ed.
Henry ignored him. I couldn’t. “Do you want us to figure this out or not?”
“You’re not talking to anyone who knew me when I was alive. All this is going to do is show us footage of someone stealing stuff that they probably sold on to the person who actually killed me.”
“Watch the video. If you don’t know who it is, we’ll talk to all the people you think might have killed you tomorrow. This is a good lead for now, so shut up.”
We weren’t watching for long. The morning after the inventory everything looked normal, until suddenly the screen clouded over. Through the mist there was a vague outline of someone emptying the drawer into a backpack. This guy was impossible. Using a clouding spell on the security camera that filmed you stealing the clouding spell? I was almost impressed.
“Well, this was pointless,” said Ed. Henry, Daisy and Hecate were hunched around the desk, discussing what authorities to alert or forms to fill out or something.
“No, it wasn’t,” I hissed. “Now we have the Dawn Witch Detective Chief Inspector and a faery helping us. This will probably be over by the morning and I’ll get my licence and you can piss off to the afterlife.”
“A faery? Seriously?” He looked disbelieving.
“I think so.”
“She did look pretty hot in that rain,” he conceded. Slimeball.
“Shut up.”
“Jealous?” he asked with a grin.
“Do you want me to vomit on you? I know I’ve already spewed once this evening, but I’m not opposed to trying for a second.”
He was about to respond but was cut off by Hecate. “Our communication lines with The Department are down due to this weather, so we’re going to keep this to ourselves for the time being. I haven’t heard anything about illegal items being sold on the street, and my whisperers are very good at finding these things out, so I think there’s a good chance our thief is your murderer.
“The fewer people we tell, the better. We don’t want to accidentally say something to the wrong person. Tomorrow we’re going to look into Ed’s contacts and see if we can find anything out covertly by sending Nessa and Daisy in undercover. In the meantime, I suggest you all sleep here. We don’t know what might be lurking in the darkness this evening.”
Hecate found us all blankets and pillows (even Ed, who didn’t need to sleep) and we laid them out on her office floor. Together the five of us cast some heavy wards over the room, and afterwards I was so drained that I could have fallen asleep as soon as the lights went out. Ed, however, chose the moment just before I fell asleep to walk over and talk to me.
“Nessa?”
I groaned in response.
“Thanks for helping me out. Like I know you’re just doing it for the licence, but you know. Thanks.”
I groaned again.
“Also, um… I just wanted to say… At the coven? How you didn’t just leave? That was cool.” And with that, he walked back over to his bed on the opposite side of the room.
Wow, I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep. Maybe his personality is only 99% arsehole.
Chapter 7
The next morning (barely – it was nearly midday) I was woken by people speaking in hushed voices. It took me a moment to remember where I was, but when I recognised Henry’s voice it all came flooding back.
“You think it might be the same people?”
“Yes,” said a voice I recognised as Hecate’s. “The bank job happened two days after the contraband was taken from here.”
My brain was still foggy and I couldn’t quite make sense of what they were saying. I knew what they were talking about, of course. The bank robbery had been all over the news, as you’d expect. With all the security on banks these days it was pretty much unheard of for anyone to be able to steal from them. The case had been especially big news because the cops had no idea who’d done it. There was video footage, but it wasn’t clear enough to make an identification. The tellers couldn’t remember what the robbers sounded like or said or even what weapons they used. None of the other people in the bank or on the street could remember it very clearly either. No one could remember the getaway car. The one piece of solid evidence had been DNA from a cut on one of the robbers’ hands as they escaped through the broken glass at the front of the building. Police hadn’t found a match.
Something told me to keep quiet – I was worried that this might be magic police/Department business I wasn’t meant to know about and that if I spoke up they would stop talking.
“We were thinking magical interference from the beginning,” said Daisy. “Now that we know that we’re missing clouding spells and a bunch of other dark items, it seems like there’s a pretty good chance this is linked.”
“So all the people at the bank were hit with an amplified clouding spell?” asked Henry.
“Yes,” said Hecate. “As well as the cameras. It’s lucky you brought Ed to us. We really had no other leads, and it seems pretty likely that his death’s connected.”
When I was sure I’d heard all the details, I pretended to wake up. “Morning,” I said.
“Barely,” they all said in unison. I ignored them.
I looked around. No sign of Ed.
“Where’s Ed?” I asked.
Henry (back in his gorilla form) shrugged. “He wasn’t here when we woke up.”
He didn’t seem very concerned. I, however, was. “With all this going on he just wandered off? And you’re fine with that?”
“He’s a ghost,” said Henry. “
What could hurt him?”
“Well something’s certainly trying! Or have you forgotten last night?”
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
Ten minutes later, Ed waltzed back in, appearing casually through the wall as if nothing had happened. “Where the hell have you been?!” I demanded.
“Well, as riveting as it was to watch you sleep,” he said, “I went out for a walk.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Ed, cowardly little Ed who ran away from the slightest hint of trouble, had gone out alone, wardless, ‘for a walk’.
“What were you thinking?”
“Nothing happened,” he said. “Calm down. You’re getting a bit clingy.”
I would have exploded at that point if it weren’t for Hecate’s interruption.
“Excellent. Now that we’re all here, we’d better get going. Ed, where’s your house?”
Ed’s address was, of course, in the next town over from Gretchen, a village called Goonoogal. It was going to take us forever to walk there, and my joggers were still wet and oozy from the night before. I was unimpressed to say the least. Just as I was about to suggest we get a taxi, Hecate saved the day. “Shall we take my carpet?”
“I thought witches had brooms,” said Ed.
“Sexist,” I said, just loud enough so that only he could hear.
“No, I – argh, fine, I’ll stop talking.”
Success.
Hecate opened a cupboard behind her desk and out flew her carpet: a neon-pink nylon weave. I don’t know what I’d been expecting – tassels like the carpet from Aladdin? Maybe some old-lady-style soft florals? – but it certainly wasn’t the carpet hovering before me. This carpet was totally pimped out with a kojak light attached to the front. I guess she must have used it for high-speed chases during her time in the Skyway Patrol division.
We followed the carpet out the back door into a small, tidy courtyard. I could tell from the slight sheen of the sky looking up and out of the courtyard that there was a cloaking spell over us. Cloaking was different from clouding – it wasn’t so much that people couldn’t see us; it was more that the spell made them kind of oblivious. Sure, they could have looked, but they would inexplicably feel like looking away. Cloaking was more of a ward than a spell, and therefore was not illegal.
No one knew about this courtyard. No one cared about it. The cloak gave the police a perfect rear exit.
The four of us with corporeal forms squeezed onto the carpet. Henry turned into a rhesus monkey to create extra room, which might sound thoughtful of him if he weren’t able to transfer into any sort of bird and fly instead of just being lazy and taking up my legroom. Daisy and Hecate sat up the front and Ed floated alongside us. Like most ghosts, Ed was able to glide along at a pretty decent speed, but unless he had a reason to fly he walked like an ordinary person. Hard to get out of the habit, I guess.
We rose up slowly. I’d expected it to be much harder to balance on the carpet, but it felt a lot like sitting on a mattress. Nonetheless, I was gripping onto the edge of that fluoro pink nylon nightmare for dear life. This had seemed like such a great alternative before, when I didn’t want to go hiking in my wet sneakers. Now, I was regretting agreeing to it. What was going to happen when we started shooting along without so much as a windscreen to protect us from being blown off?
As we rose up above the walls of the courtyard and through the cloak, part of the cloaking spell bubbled around us, sealing us off from the world and sealing the courtyard behind us. We rose up high – twice the height of the power poles, which when you’re floating on a suspended mat with no safety features is pretty darn high – and then stopped rising. I gulped. We were about to start flying.
We took off and I inhaled sharply, ready to start screaming. But I didn’t start screaming, and I had to just exhale all that extra air instead. We were not going at quite the pace I’d imagined. We were taking it pretty steady. Like, 5 km an hour kind of steady. Again, it might have been because I was spoiled from watching too much Aladdin as a child, but I was expecting a little more speed. I could feel more wind resistance coming from a gentle breeze behind us than from the front, we were moving so slowly.
“Carpet,” said Daisy, “I have as much respect for the skyroad rules as anyone, but today we’re in something of a hurry, so could we please speed it up a little?”
The corner of the carpet on Hecate’s side turned up slightly, as if to look at her. She nodded once at it. I felt the carpet begin to hum. I sucked in a quick breath.
This time, I did scream.
We were weaving and dodging all over the place to avoid birds and bats (yes, bats. In the middle of the day. Who’d have thought?) and even one crazy old lady from the coven on a broom. Somehow, Ed was managing to keep up with us seemingly with ease. Once I settled into the flow of the flying thing, I relaxed a little, still keeping a decent grip on the side. Henry, on the other hand, was looking a little green. Probably wishing he’d decided to fly there himself.
The trip took us only a few minutes, but even so Henry leapt off the carpet before we’d fully descended, transforming into a cat on the way down to break his fall. I hoped no one was watching. Henry had just jumped out of the cloaking bubble and so to the causal observer (oblivious to the existence of the carpet) it would have looked like a terrified cat was just appearing out of mid-air.
Luckily there didn’t seem to be anyone out on the street. If you could call it a street, that is. It was more like a creepy house on a hill about 200 metres from the rest of the homes. Even from outside I could smell a hint of male share house: urine, dirty dishes and weed.
Hecate parked the carpet behind a tree in the vacant block next to the house so Daisy and I could get off without being seen.
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“Follow my lead,” said Daisy, and took off.
Great. The plan was to take action. Right. The thing is, as much as I liked the thought of being impulsive and jumping into things, in reality I was something of a schemer. As in, I liked to have a plan before walking into a house potentially filled with murderers. I wasn’t very good at controlling my magic when I felt threatened. Sometimes it just sort of… spurted out. Like when you put pressure on a jelly doughnut. Or you trod on a tomato. I was like a magic tomato. What? OK, yes, I’ve lost my train of thought. Whatever. Anyway, I hoped Daisy was as powerful as I’d heard faeries were, or else this could all go very badly.
Daisy approached the front door of the house without a trace of fear. She strutted right up to it like she lived there. She’d removed her robes and was wearing the dress she’d had on underneath (pink, knee-length, think sorority house) and her still-pristine ballet flats. I was in mud-stained jeans and soggy joggers with a dodgy old T-shirt that now that I was looking at it had a nice yellow stain down the front. What was that? Mustard? Curry? Mmm, curry. My stomach growled. How long had it been since I’d eaten? I could barely remember. It was a wonder I hadn’t passed out. This was the longest I’d gone without food since… well, forever.
Ed had tagged along with us, and was looking decidedly nervous. I guess if you were seeing your potential murderers for the first time since you’d been killed, it might be kind of nerve-wracking. Still, at least he knew them. I did not. Meeting strangers was not my thing, and over the past 24 hours I had most definitely fulfilled my quota for the month. And as you might have noticed, ‘making friends’ was also not really my thing. Covert operations and charming information out of people? Not in my skill set.
Daisy knocked twice on the front door, turned to me and said, “This place is like, totally rad, am I right?”
OK. ‘Over-enthusiastic college girl’ was the background story she was using. I looked down at myself. I guessed I would be playing the role of ‘hot chick’s bookish friend’. I heard someone approaching the door and crossed my arms, trying to hide the (mango juice? Turmeric?) stain. I looked to my left and realised Ed was watching me.
“Honey, no one’s
going to miss that stain. Just own it.”
It was possibly the most empowering thing anyone had ever said to me. I gave him a single nod and uncrossed my arms. We both turned to the door and gulped simultaneously. The knob was turning. Great. Time to meet our main suspects.
“Hi!” said Daisy brightly. “How are you going? I’m so sorry to hear about your loss. Regina and I just wanted to come and, you know, like, pay our respects and check that you guys are OK and like, you know – oh my gosh, I’m so sorry, I just can’t stop…” She had broken down in tears. Wow. This girl was good. Well, she was probably 300 years old. She’d likely had her fair share of practice at being a spy. I realised that I was meant to comfort girls when they cried and awkwardly reached out to pat her arm. She turned and dived towards me, throwing her arms around me and forcing me into a hug. I suppressed a shudder. Urgh, body contact. See earlier comments re: hating people; not making friends.
“There, there,” I said, patting her back mechanically. I didn’t really know what ‘there, there’ meant, but that was something people said in these kind of situations, right?
“Relax!” Ed hissed. “You’re scowling! Try to look compassionate.”
I was glad Daisy couldn’t see him. The fact that I needed to be coached in normal human interaction was not something I wanted people to know. I tried to be less tense and remodelled my face into the kind of thing you see in stock photos labelled “grief”.
“That’s much better. It’s almost believable now. Just try to seem sensitive.” I sent him a slightly panicked glance over Daisy’s shoulder. Sensitive?! How? “OK, look, Daisy’s got this. Just keep quiet and think about something sad.”
Sound advice.
Daisy broke away from the hug and wiped her eyes. “I’m so sorry. Is it OK if we, like, come in? Or do you guys need your space? I totally get it if you do. Do you want us to go? We’ll go if you want.”
The guy in the doorway was wearing a singlet, boxers, and a patchy two-day-old beard. I was pretty sure we’d woken him up when we’d knocked. There was a nice big stain on the front of his singlet that made me feel much more at ease. At least in some ways, me and this potential murderer were kindred spirits. If he did lash out, maybe he’d go for Daisy first and I could get away. Yes, I actually thought that. Yes, I have issues.