What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1)

by Molly Milligan

  “But the tests…”

  “Oh, the genes.” He waved his hand. “I don’t have the right to be called dad, that is all.”

  “But what are you doing here?”

  I stepped to one side so I was next to the ghost. “What are you doing here?”

  “You called me here with your silly energy-raising. I just don’t understand why you can’t leave all of this alone. Look, you’ve even disturbed … him.” She nodded at Robert.

  “No I haven’t. It’s because of him that I’m here,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s been haunting me. I don’t know what he wanted but I was trying to help him,” I said.

  “You are joking.”

  “I am not! Tell her,” I said to the ghost.

  “It is true,” he said. “When my body was disturbed I was woken from a fitful sleep and I found that things were not as they should have been. So I’ve been trying to communicate with this one here. It is not easy, being a ghost,” he added, glumly.

  Rachel folded her arms. But it became a gesture of self-calm as her arms hugged her body. She suddenly looked like she needed reassurance. She said, in a small voice, “But … why her? Why did you haunt her … and not me?”

  The ghost shook his head. “Who rejected who?” he asked.

  I didn’t understand. I was starting to shake with the cold as the rain had seemed to soak through every scrap of clothing. Rachel, too, was looking less gladiatorial and more miserable with each passing second.

  Rachel stepped forward carefully. Her feet looked blue. “I never rejected you,” she said.

  “Your birth, who you are.”

  “But you said …”

  “No, you reject who you are,” the ghost insisted, its voice rising. “When were you born?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with any of this! Why are you here?” Her eyes flicked onto me as she said that, and I knew, then, that the time she was born had everything to do with this.

  Time?

  Year.

  I looked again at the woman before me and a suspicion started to form. Youngest business leader of the local business breakfast club. Youngest amateur golfer. Youngest to do this, best under-forties to do that.

  But if Robert Cameron was her biological father, and he had died in the sixties …

  “Rachel,” I said, keeping my tone light and unthreatening. “How old are you?”

  She lifted her lips in a snarl, the wolf showing its return. “That is none of your business.”

  “It’s everyone’s business when you make it so,” I said. “You’re not in your forties. You look damn good for a woman in her forties. In truth, you look better than me. But you’re in your fifties, aren’t you? It doesn’t matter, you know. It doesn’t negate any of your achievements. You’ve done so well…”

  “Done? Done? As if it’s the past, as if it’s over, as if I’m done now?”

  Oh, she had crazy eyes. I wanted to step back but I didn’t want to show her, or her wolf, any weakness.

  “It really doesn’t matter!” I said. “No one cares how old you are!” I couldn’t help but laugh. It was all so ridiculous. Had we ended up in this position over that?

  Her eyes were wide. “Everyone cares how old a woman is, and if you weren’t so young you’d know that. You won’t understand until it’s too late.”

  Was it a big deal? Really? Yeah, I was young, but I had my great aunt’s example to follow. She was an amazing older lady.

  But then, as Maddie had pointed out to me, I didn’t have any kind of real understanding of modern life. I was divorced from the strange-sounding pressures of social media. I couldn’t follow trends unless I bought glossy magazines, and really, I didn’t have time for that. Nor the money. Just because my own experience didn’t match with Rachel’s, didn’t mean that Rachel’s experience was wrong, did it?

  So I tried to be empathetic. I smiled, and showed my empty hands, and took a step forward. “Look, Rachel, I know it’s hard-”

  “You know nothing!” she yelled and flung her arms out wide as the blackness descended upon her once more. I leaped back and the ghost encircled me with grey mist.

  But it was not enough protection.

  She had one foot over the rope.

  She had four feet now.

  And she growled, “This will end. Thank you for setting up the circle … I will banish you both.”

  Thirty-one

  The ghost laid his icy hand on the back of my neck. I didn’t think I could feel any colder but I did. Still, he channelled power from the realm of the dead – my own domain as hedge-rider – and it helped me to throw a protective bubble around us both, though I knew it would not hold and the spectral energy would eventually damage me as it ran through my mortal flesh.

  Suddenly the air was filled by fur and teeth and snarling, and it was not all from the wolf-Rachel.

  Harkin was here, and it stunned me. Had Iolo got it wrong? What could a cat do against a wolf?

  But Harkin was not alone. There was no sign of Maddie, but there was a large black shape with Harkin and I recognised the Rottweiler that I had been tending earlier.

  Now, as any dog lover knows, rotties aren’t the big fierce fighting dogs that some people suppose. They were bred to herd cattle and they like to lean on people to get them to move. They also got used to pull carts. But they look mean and they can certainly bring a person down if they really want to.

  Even so, an ill rottie and an angry cat was no match for an enchanted wolf. I threw as much power and protection their way as I could spare, but it opened a window in our own protection that the ghost was struggling to plug.

  The wolf wove from side to side as Harkin and the dog attacked in random dart-and-bolt movements. Then it froze and it was staring right past me.

  I heard footsteps slamming onto wet concrete.

  “Bron! Bron!”

  “Maddie!”

  And she was not alone. I could see them now, in the heavily magic-charged atmosphere. She was surrounded by a cloud of Fair Folk, the Tylwyth Teg themselves, with sharpened teeth and terrible eyes, riding upon bats and trailing dark ribbons behind them. Shed of their multi-coloured glamour, they were fearful to behold.

  The maelstrom engulfed us all. I honestly didn’t think the Tylwyth Teg really distinguished who they were supposed to be attacking and the ghost’s protection covered me as I hunkered down. Maddie came to my side and we clung to one another. On my left was Harkin, hissing like a kettle and to the right of Maddie was the barking dog. The ghost stood up behind us and covered us in mist like a cloak of ice.

  The Faerie menace attacked and whooped and sang their song of beautiful destruction. The wolf was forced to dance. Then the air around it shimmered and tore as it shifted back to Rachel Harris once more, and she was broken and bleeding and her arms batted ineffectually at the fury from the skies.

  She made eye contact with me, briefly.

  “No,” I said, and stood up. “Maddie, call them off.”

  “I don’t know if I can. How?”

  “Maddie!” I shrieked. “Call. Them. OFF!”

  Thirty-two

  She put one hand on Harkin and one on the Rottweiler, and sucked in a deep breath as she rose to her feet. I don’t know what she did or said but the whirling mass of Faeries receded, spiralling upwards into the stormy rainy air.

  Curled on the ground was Rachel Harris, naked and human once more.

  She looked up, supporting her body on her arms, and she was shaking. I was soaked through but I pulled off my coat and ran to her, flinging it around her. It would give her a small protection, I thought, though certainly better than nothing.

  She glared at me but she grabbed hold of the lapels as I swung it over her shoulders, pulling it tight around herself.

  I crouched down. “Rachel, this has to stop.”

  “You can’t blame me for the haunting,” she croaked.

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said, bu
t I half-glanced over my shoulder as the ghost of Robert Cameron came to join us. Maddie was alongside him. I rocked back on my heels. “But you have a point. What are we supposed to do? You have the strength to speak now. What on earth is it that you want?”

  “I can’t believe you did not work it out,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Burial? Your finger? Rest? Your daughter? None of those things?”

  He laughed shortly. “I simply need acknowledgement.”

  “You weren’t there for me-” Rachel began to say.

  He looked down at her with a sorrowful expression. “No,” he said gently. “You have no need to recognise me because as you say, I was not there for you. I died when you were just a few years old. You’ve done me proud, though. You are a fine and strong woman and your children are a credit to you.”

  “You’ve been watching us?”

  He shrugged apologetically. “Ghosts don’t sleep, and I couldn’t spend all day haunting Bron here. It did get a little boring.”

  “Hey! What do you mean, haunting me is boring?”

  Rachel was also offended. “I don’t like the idea of you watching me and my family.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can lay me to rest now.”

  “How? You said acknowledgment.”

  “Yes. And it won’t affect you or Barry or anyone, I promise.”

  Rachel’s eyelids were fluttering and her grip on my coat was weakening. Her hand went into spasm. I put my arms around her and pulled her against me. I was kneeling down, now, the wet concrete hard against my aching knees. She was frozen stiff and as I sent my healing sense into her, I could detect that her pulse was weakening. She was hypothermic and also in shock, and there was likely to be some physical damage from the attack by the Tylwyth Teg.

  The ghost came to kneel beside us and he sent icy energy into me. It was hard to use his spectral power and it hurt, it made my insides ache like the brain freeze you get when you lick an ice-cream only this was a freeze deep in my bones and my flesh. I had to take it, though, because I could feel Rachel ebbing away in my arms.

  “We need proper medical help,” I said to Maddie. “Do you have your phone? You’ll need to put a fair bit of distance between us and you to use it right now, though.”

  She nodded. She left Harkin and the Rottweiler with us, and ran to the far corner of the building. She called back, “Uh, nine-nine-nine, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Ask for an ambulance. No, it won’t cost anything.”

  I thought she stuck her tongue out at me but then she was holding the phone up and squinting at the display as she stabbed at the keypad.

  I returned my attention to Rachel. How were we going to explain her nudity when the emergency services arrived? She was hanging on to consciousness, but barely.

  “Keep her safe,” I instructed the ghost.

  She blinked at me, blearily, as I stripped out of my jeans. I was wearing long johns against the cold air, and they would look enough like leggings. I took off my jumper, too. Getting the wet jeans onto the semi-unresponsive woman was hard but luckily I was a few dress sizes larger than her. The jumper was much easier.

  She was rallying. “You don’t have to do this,” she whispered.

  “You’re right, I don’t, but I have made a decision to do the right thing.”

  “Ouch.”

  Yeah, so I was still trying to score points, but look, the woman had been trying to actually kill me so I think I’m allowed just a little pettiness, all right?

  “I am so cold,” she said. “I can’t stay awake.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Please, just hang on.”

  Sirens sounded in the far distance. We listened to them for a few minutes until blue lights began to strobe off the windows of the building above us. The ghost and the spirits were already fading away.

  “What are you going to tell them?” Rachel whispered. She had fallen against me and I held her close in my arms. I could feel her resistance to me, even now.

  “That depends on you,” I replied.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “I know what Robert Cameron needs,” I told her. “This is what you’re going to do…”

  Thirty-three

  The two paramedics didn’t ask any awkward questions. I suppose that wasn’t their business. They focussed on the patient – Rachel.

  And me, apparently. While Rachel was carted off in the back of the ambulance, a first responder turned up in a small blue car and set about me with their big green bag. I protested.

  But Maddie held me down.

  “Stop it, Bron. Listen. You need help, too. You’re exhausted and soaked through.”

  “Shock, at the very least. And we don’t want hypothermia, do we?” the first responder said, a pleasant stocky man with a faint Liverpool accent. He turned out to be a retired doctor who now volunteered his time to attend minor medical emergencies in the area. He was full of smiles, but he was firm. He messed around taking my blood pressure and asking questions about the current year and looking at my eyelids and tutting.

  Unlike the paramedics, he also asked questions I didn’t want to answer. “What on earth were you all doing out here?” being the main one.

  What could I say? “We were having a bit of an argument. Girl stuff,” I added, hoping to get him to recoil.

  But he was a doctor. They don’t do “recoiling.” He rolled his eyes, and wrapped me in a red blanket, bundling me into the back of his car. Maddie stood outside, with the wet Rottweiler by her side. Harkin jumped up into my lap and burrowed under the blankets.

  The first responder looked at the soaking wet dog and shook his head.

  It was time for Maddie to unleash her faerie charm, and she did so. The air around her shimmered. I could tell she wasn’t controlling it fully yet, but it was enough, as she smiled and her face lit up and we heard, just out of earshot yet still there, the distant tinkling of bells.

  “He is ever so well behaved,” she said, and her accent was almost English. She certainly didn’t sound American, nor Welsh. I realised she was tapping right into the Liverpool doctor’s past and associations.

  It worked, whatever witchery she was performing on his mind. He blinked and nodded, and then we were all squeezed into the back seat, with the aroma of soggy dog filling the air. The windows misted up immediately, and I fell asleep against Maddie’s shoulder before we’d got onto the main road. My last thought was hoping that she could remember our address.

  Then the darkness took me.

  Thirty-Four

  “I’ll wear a daffodil,” Maddie said, “but there is no way I’m wearing a leek.”

  “You don’t have to wear both,” I said. I pinned a bright yellow flower to her coat. “There. Perfect. And what do you say?”

  “Diolch,” she said, mangling the Welsh word for “thanks.”

  “No, I mean, how do you say Happy St David’s Day?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you want to drown in my spit?” she said. “I tried to say it earlier, and I think I sprained my tongue.”

  We were both standing in the kitchen waiting for Great Aunt Dilys to join us. Outside, the sun was shining. The door from the utility room to the garden was standing open, and all the cages – including the new one from Barry – were standing empty. A fresh breeze wafted through. The air was still chilly but the sharp tearing freeze of winter was finally diminishing.

  “I always feel that as soon as we get into March, that it’s finally spring,” I said, breathing in deeply.

  “I know what you mean. I love the seasons here!”

  “You’ve only been here a month,” I pointed out. “You’ve not even been through one complete season yet.”

  “I’ve watched a lot of your television.”

  She had. Not at our house, of course. But the past two weeks had been busy ones for my cousin. She had been volunteering at Sian’s shop three days a week. I thought that she ought to be getting paid, but she could
n’t actually have a paid job due to her visa or something, and anyway, she assured me that what she was learning about the Tylwyth Teg was payment in kind. It made me see the dippy Sian in a new light. There was obviously more to her than just rainbow scarves, dreamcatchers, crystals and trite cultural appropriation. She really did know about the Faeries.

  And due to her charm and her glamour, which was intensifying as the Fair Folk showered her with their gifts – at least, for the moment – she was making friends. I still didn’t trust the Faeries, nor their potential influence upon her, but her path was her path. She had chosen to answer the call, and no one ever said that it was going to be easy.

  So she was socially active now, and spending evenings at other people’s houses, watching their televisions and using their wifi and basically doing all the normal things that I could not do.

  But it was fine. My life had returned to normal, which was what I had always wanted, right?

  And she still lived with us, and had not spoken of continuing her travels. She needed to stay put for a while to learn as much as she could here.

  That had pleased Dean mightily.

  “Dean will be there,” I told her, watching her face for a reaction.

  But although she liked him, she had not softened towards him romantically. “Will he? That’s nice. I suppose everyone will come. What about Adam?”

  “He’s working,” I said.

  “Have you been on any dates lately?” she asked.

  “Sort of.” I smiled. “We went to Rhyl to collect pebbles for Dilys.”

  “You did what? Why?”

  On cue, the door opened and Dilys swanned into the kitchen. “I’ve been painting them,” she said. “You can’t beat a good pebble, can you?”

  Maddie and I shook our heads. Dilys had dressed for St David’s Day in traditional Welsh dress – red skirt, shawl and of course, tall black hat.

  Yes, she looked just like the archetypal witch.

  “We had best get on,” Dilys said. “I want to make sure I’m in the photos.”