by Elle Adams
“She’s dead!” wailed the chicken.
Mum gave me an exasperated look. “Can’t you calm that bird down?”
“Calm down.” I crouched next to the chicken. “Did you see what happened to Anne? How did she die?”
Even with magic, making someone drop dead out of nowhere wasn’t exactly something one ran into every day. I cast my mind around and found two possible explanations: poison and a deadly curse, neither of which was easy to pull off in public.
The chicken collapsed into a sobbing heap of feathers. Tansy scurried into the room behind me and gave her a thwack on the head with her tail. “Behave.”
The chicken continued to sob, so I got to my feet and joined Mum beside the table where she’d placed Anne’s body. “How did she die? Do you know?”
“If I had to guess, a maleficent curse.” She pursed her lips. “Such a curse can only be placed upon an object, not a person.”
“An object?” My mouth went dry. “Like what?”
“That is what I intend to find out,” she said. “Do call your brother, won’t you?”
“Right. I will.” I pulled out my phone, my thoughts swirling in circles, and called Ramsey’s number. “Come to the town hall. We have a problem.”
Mum arched a brow when I ended the call. “You aren’t going to tell him what it is?”
“He’s literally a minute away. I bet he already heard the noise.” I trod closer to Anne’s body despite my instincts urging me to step away. “Is she holding anything?”
Anne’s hands were folded across her chest, making it difficult to see, but Mum stepped in my way. “Don’t touch the body. Leave the examination to your brother.”
“If there’s a cursed object in here, we need to know.”
She hadn’t dropped anything, and most curses were single use only, but a curse was a seriously nasty way to kill someone. Vindictive. And definitely a witch or wizard’s work. Not that I’d suspected otherwise.
“Your brother will find out,” Mum said. “He has the expertise. It should also be easy for him to find out which contenders have a personal connection with her.”
“Right, because otherwise, they’re all suspects.” Why would any of them have had her killed, though? She’d placed second in her category, but the only gripe the others had had with her was for refusing to enter her chicken in the bird category. Hardly an offence worthy of murder. “A curse seems a bit extreme for a familiar contest.”
“Don’t underestimate what some individuals are willing to do to win.”
“Like Vanessa,” I muttered. “A curse seems a bit too sophisticated for her, though.”
She’d also thought she would be competing against me, but that might have been Grandma’s paranoia talking. All the same, what if Anne hadn’t been the intended target? If Vanessa wanted me dead, there were more direct ways to go about it… but perhaps that was precisely what she’d wanted me to think.
Their paranoia is definitely rubbing off on you.
The chicken howled from the corner, and Tansy shook her head at her. “I know your witch is dead, but if you want us to find who killed her, you’re going to have to cooperate with us.”
The chicken merely howled in response while I could hear a similar level of noise coming from the waiting room. I hoped Piper wasn’t having too much trouble keeping everyone from kicking up a fuss about being shut in there instead of celebrating making it into the contest, but I’d left Chloe in charge of the disqualified contenders in the hall, and she couldn’t be in two places at once any more than I could.
As I’d hoped, Ramsey showed up within a minute with Prickles perched on his shoulder. “What’s going on?”
“There you are.” Mum beckoned him into the room. “Anne here was killed by a curse of some kind.”
“She’s dead?” he asked. “How?”
After “how,” I heard the unspoken question directed at me: How do you always get into these situations?
I wish I knew, was the honest answer. If someone was trying to upend my first week as Head Witch, they’d certainly succeeded, but it was equally likely that someone was desperate enough to win the contest to eliminate the competition by any means possible. Everything had happened far too fast for me to know for sure.
“A curse,” Mum said. “Placed on an object, I believe. I checked, and she didn’t drop anything.”
“Let me see.” Ramsey walked over to her body at the table and pulled his wand out of his pocket. A flick caused Anne’s clenched hand to open, revealing a ballpoint pen. He then gave the pen another complex wave, and a wisp of greenish smoke stirred from the end of the pen. “Yes… that’s where the curse came from.”
“That’s what the curse was put on?” The pen looked utterly mundane, but when Ramsey checked her other hand, he found nothing else.
“Oi,” Tansy said to the chicken. “Did you see how she got that pen?”
Ramsey jumped when Anne’s familiar let out another shriek. “She—pulled it out of her coat pocket!”
“She didn’t leave it in the other room.” She’d arrived late, but the other contenders had been told to hand over any magical objects in their possession when they came in. Either she hadn’t done so herself, or she hadn’t realised it was there.
“Where are the other contenders?” asked Ramsey.
“The fifteen other finalists are in the room over there.” I pointed to the door opposite. “The others are in the main hall. Chloe is watching them.”
“I’ll give Chloe instructions to search the disqualified entrants for any hidden magical objects,” Mum said. “Is the curse defunct?”
Ramsey waved his wand over the pen then picked it up between two fingers. “Yes. It won’t harm anyone who touches it.”
My stomach turned over. “Did someone slip it into her pocket?”
“They wouldn’t have been able to touch it with their bare hands if they did,” Ramsey said. “Not without falling victim to the curse themselves. That’s the risk with those types of curses.”
Mum made to leave the room, saying over her shoulder, “I can trust you to take control of the questioning?”
“Of course,” said Ramsey. “Who exactly am I talking to?”
“The other finalists, I assume.” I pointed to the opposite room. “They were near her when she died. Not that that proves anything.”
On the other hand, Vanessa was among them, and she sat firmly at the top of my suspect list at the moment.
“I’ll call the rest of my team in to examine the body,” he said. “Curses aren’t my area of expertise, but I’m not sure we have a curse expert on the team. As for you…”
“As Head Witch, shouldn’t I be present for the questioning too?” I glanced at Tansy for backup, and she scurried over to my side.
“Should she?” Ramsey, traitor that he was, looked at my mother instead of me.
“It’s up to her,” Mum said, to my surprise. “Go on, get on with it.”
I might have been relieved that she’d given me the chance to get involved, but the grim expression on her face reminded me of when she’d suspected Grandma was murdered. Did she suspect I might have been the intended target myself? Or was she giving me another chance to prove my worth as Head Witch? I’d have to ask later, but Vanessa was in the next room. Her mother had been willing to go to almost any length to wield the sceptre, and her daughter had backed her up at every step. I doubted she’d had the sudden desire to win a trophy in a familiar contest, and competing directly against me wasn’t the only means she had of undermining my authority as Head Witch.
“Did you leave the other finalists unsupervised?” he asked.
“Piper is watching them,” I said. “Don’t look at me like that. Chloe’s busy with the ones in the hall, and I had to help Mum and deal with that chicken.”
The chicken in question gave another despairing screech. “She’s dead!”
“This one is being a great help,” said Tansy. “Pity, because she might be able
to tell us something useful about how her witch died.”
“You watch her, then.” Ramsey made to leave the room.
“Me?” Tansy said. “What about your familiar?”
Ramsey turned his head. “What about him?”
Prickles stuck his head over Ramsey’s shoulder. “I’m helping Ramsey question the suspects.”
Tansy made a rude noise. “You aren’t doing anything. Come and help me talk some sense into this ridiculous chicken. Maybe threaten to sit on her if she doesn’t quieten down.”
“And someone needs to watch Anne’s body while Mum is out,” I added. “Until the rest of the team shows up. You can be nice to the chicken, can’t you, Prickles?”
The hedgehog climbed off Ramsey’s shoulder, wearing a long-suffering expression that matched his owner’s. “Fine.”
While our familiars stayed behind, I accompanied Ramsey into the neighbouring room to join the other fifteen finalists. After closing the door behind him, Ramsey’s gaze went straight to Vanessa. Maybe he’d had the same thought as me. See, I knew I wasn’t just paranoid.
Piper wore a relieved expression when she came to greet us. “Hey, Ramsey. Did you find out how Anne died?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details with potential suspects,” he said. “I intend to question each of you individually. Who would like to offer to speak to me first?”
Nobody volunteered, so Ramsey picked out a skinny blond wizard with a tuxedo cat familiar to come into the neighbouring room, which also happened to contain the wands and magical objects that had been given up by the contenders. I didn’t see any pens among them, but I gave that side of the room a wide berth as Ramsey and I pulled out a desk and a couple of chairs at the front in which to conduct the questioning.
Ramsey had been through these scenarios before, because he had a set of standard questions that he asked each contender, ranging from the person’s background to which magical community they’d come from and who they knew among the other contenders.
“Did you know Anne Rafe before you came here?” he asked the blond wizard, who turned out to be called Patrick Wellman.
“No, she came from another town,” he replied. “We’d never met before today.”
“Did you speak to each other at all?”
“No,” he said. “Though… she and that other witch got into a bit of an argument, I saw.”
“Who?” I asked. “What other witch?”
“The one who looks a bit like you.”
Vanessa. “What did they argue about?”
“How Anne refused to pit her familiar against the other birds,” he said. “Something along those lines.”
I turned to his cat familiar. “Is that true? Did you hear as well?”
Patrick blinked, looking as surprised as the tuxedo cat did. “You understand him?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “My whole family can understand animals.”
The cat dipped his head. “I didn’t hear anything else, Head Witch.”
When the pair of them left the room, I whispered to Ramsey, “We should question Vanessa next.”
“We need proof before we can accuse anyone,” he said in a low voice. “I have to question all fifteen of them anyway, just to be certain.”
If I accused Vanessa, Aunt Shannon would be furious, but doing so without any proof was liable to end badly. She might have lost out on the sceptre, but my aunt possessed enough cunning for several regular people.
Despite his obvious reservations, Ramsey called Vanessa in to be questioned next. My cousin entered the room with her sparrow familiar perched on her shoulder, a sour expression on her face.
“You’re not with the police,” she said to me.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “However, I’m Head Witch, so I’m here to sit in on the questioning.”
A muscle twitched in her jaw as she sat down. “Get on with it, then.”
Ramsey didn’t need to ask all the standard questions given that he knew her town and occupation perfectly well. Instead, he began by asking, “Is this your first time entering the contest?”
“No.”
“You don’t enter every year?” I asked.
She gave me a withering look. “Is this relevant?”
“Yes,” said Ramsey, with a better poker face than I’d ever achieve. Admittedly, he didn’t necessarily enjoy making her squirm. He was just doing his job. If she’d tried to wreck my first day on the job by murdering someone, though, then she deserved more than a little discomfort.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “Anything else?”
“I heard you had an argument with Anne Rafe before she died,” I said. “About her chicken not qualifying as a miscellaneous familiar.”
She tapped her manicured nails on the desk. “So what? A chicken is a bird. She was ridiculous to claim otherwise.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong, only that she died right after your argument.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You want to kick me out of the contest, don’t you? You’re scared I might actually win.”
“Hardly,” I said. “I think we both know you don’t care about the prize either way.”
Ramsey shot me a warning look, but Vanessa spoke first. “Unlike some people, I follow through on my commitments.”
Okay, that was underhanded. I might have turned my back on my coven several times in the past, but I’d made the conscious decision to do my best with the hand I’d been dealt despite wanting to do anything but take on the title of Head Witch.
Ramsey cleared his throat. “To return to the subject at hand, do you have anything else to say about your argument with Anne Rafe?”
“No,” she said. “If she thought I was being mean to her, then it’s her problem.”
“Not now she’s dead, it isn’t,” I said.
A flush spread across the bridge of her nose. “I didn’t kill her. Unlike some people, I can keep my magic under control.”
“It wasn’t magic. It was a cursed pen.” I ignored the jab at my magical prowess. “Expensive and rare. Can most contenders afford it?”
Her flush deepened. “You don’t know anything about the others. You didn’t even read the file, did you?”
“I did, despite spending my morning in a council meeting,” I said. “Lady Wildwood was displeased when both you and your mother failed to show up.”
“Was she now?” said Vanessa. “My mother and I had an urgent appointment with our lawyer, since you corrupted my sister into taking the money from our inheritance before she left our house.”
What? “I thought she inherited the money for herself.”
“No, we received it jointly,” she said. “She took her share without telling me or our mother, so we had to check with the bank and with our grandmother’s lawyer to make sure she hadn’t taken more than her fair share.”
“And she hadn’t?”
“No, but she had some nerve going behind our backs like that.”
More like no choice. Rowan had been backed into a corner, but I hadn’t realised how thin a line she’d walked. If she hadn’t left when she did, life in Aunt Shannon’s house would have got even worse after her mother had lost her bid to become Head Witch. Rowan had already had her allowance cut off, so she’d been dependent upon working for the coven to earn a living and was consequently trapped under her mother’s roof. The money Grandma had left her had been her only way out, and I refused to feel sorry for Vanessa or Aunt Shannon for the way she’d been forced to sneak around behind their backs.
“If you have a problem with what she did with Grandma’s money, you’re free to consult Grandma herself,” I said.
“What?” she said. “She’s not still here.”
“Yes, she is,” I said. “Her ghost never left, so feel free to pay her a visit. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.”
I’d assumed she already knew about my incorporeal office companion, as did Aunt Shannon. The upside to Grandma’s presence was that Vanessa would have to think
twice before breaking into my office for any reason, but I hadn’t realised Grandma had kept herself hidden from everyone except me.
“Maybe I will,” she said. “I’d like to hear what she thinks of how you’re handling the job.”
I refused to be goaded. “I’m sure she’ll have words to say about you and your mother skipping the council meeting this morning.”
A muscle twitched in her jaw. “My mother would appreciate it if you remembered who has done the most work for the coven over the last few years, because it’s never been you.”
“That’s enough,” Ramsey said. “We’ve heard all we want to know.”
“Good.” She got to her feet and left the room, the door slamming shut behind her.
I breathed in and out, aware of the fluttering in my fingertips as my magic reacted to my mood. “What do you think of that?”
Ramsey gave me a sideways look. “I think we ought to finish questioning the others before we jump to conclusions.”
“It’s hardly a big leap to make,” I said. “Besides, she did skip out on this morning’s meeting.”
That didn’t mean she’d spent the morning procuring a cursed pen, but for all we knew, she’d made up the story about visiting lawyers as an excuse. I’d need to ask Rowan for the details on how she’d gone about securing her inheritance. But either way, I’d royally ticked Vanessa off this time.
Did she really want to win the contest? I doubted it was a priority, but winning and humiliating me would be an appealing prospect. Still, the fact remained that I had no proof of her guilt. Not yet.
I’d see if any of the other contenders had anything more to add before I made a judgement call.
4
After Vanessa, the next contender to enter the room was Piper. Ramsey insisted on going through the standard list of questions, but they didn’t faze her in the slightest. No surprise given that she’d mostly entered the contest to act as moral support for me, and she didn’t expect to win.
“What did you say to Vanessa?” she asked. “She looked pretty mad.”
“I reminded her that she skipped this morning’s council meeting.” When Ramsey gave me a sideways look, I ignored him. “Did you hear anything suspicious when you were with the others?”