I could see that the problem was that nerves were getting the best of him. “When danger happens, you’ll be prepared. That’s the beauty of this course. And you just need to be confident that you can handle anything in the moment. Because you can. Don’t go thinking that you need all the answers to questions that haven’t even been asked yet.” Then I added with a laugh, “Hey, I went from teaching third grade to being a detective. So if I can do it, anyone can.”
He nodded and told me he was glad we had had this chat.
I went back to the hotel early that evening, hoping to get a nap before I met Brett again later that night for our proper study session, seeing as I had no other plans that night. But I was already planning to make my hang-out with Brett short and sweet as well, to catch up on all the sleep that I had missed out on.
But then I got a surprise. And I no longer cared about getting a good night’s sleep.
Akiro was there waiting for me in the lobby of the hotel. I dropped my bag and ran into his arms.
“I didn’t want to leave on bad terms,” he said and squeezed me as tightly as he had ever hugged me. I pulled back after a few moments and held his face in my hands, taking in all the lines and textures before giving him a kiss on the lips.
“Don’t worry about all that now,” I said with a smile that was tinged with tears of happiness. “Let’s just enjoy the evening. Hey! The comedy festival is still on, and there are a bunch of shows we haven’t seen yet!”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, holding my hand as we took off into the city and caught not one but four different shows before we headed back to the hotel. I had a giddy expression on my face which I caught in the mirror when we came back into the room. What had I been so worried about? These things always worked out right in the end. Akiro and I were supposed to be together. And look, here he was—he hadn’t given up on me yet.
I completely forgot that I was supposed to be meeting up with Brett to study and didn’t even see the missed calls and texts from him, I had been so distracted. I’d also temporarily forgotten all about Eddie Ian. While I was hanging up my coat at the front door, I must have jiggled the pockets a little, and the two ice cream sticks that I had taken from Eddie’s old desk fell out onto the ground, although I didn’t realize and walked away.
“What are you doing with those old ice cream sticks?” Akiro asked me as he pointed to the ground.
I spun around and picked them up, then shoved them into my pocket of my jeans. “Nothing,” I said quickly and tried to change the subject by asking him what he would like to do for dinner the following night.
“You don’t even like ice cream,” Akiro said, not willing to drop it. I wasn’t sure why—two ice cream sticks in my pocket were hardly cause for the third degree, were they?
I frowned. “That’s not true. I love peppermint and choc chip.” Actually, that annoyed me a little, and I got my back up in response. I didn’t know why he was having such a strong reaction. “You’ve seen me eating ice cream before. How can you say I don’t like ice cream?”
“Don’t start a fight with me just to change the subject.”
“I’m not!”
Akiro crossed his arms. Then he looked at me sternly, and all the good vibes from the evening seemed to evaporate into thin air. “Please be honest with me about what is going on.”
I knew that he wasn’t talking about the ice cream sticks or the case. There was a lot going on behind those eyes. He looked troubled and hurt.
I should have put his mind at ease and reassured him. But instead, I just said nothing. Because I didn’t want to lie to him any longer. But I also couldn’t tell him the truth. It was like he had hit the mute button on me.
He nodded towards the pocket of my jeans. “Have you been seeing someone else?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What?”
“Two ice cream sticks, Ruby. That you have stashed away. Kept for some reason. And you are being awfully defensive about them.”
Wow. “You think I am seeing someone else? And we went for ice cream together? And what, I saved the sticks for some sentimental reason?”
“If you don’t tell me what is really going on, then I am going to have to assume the worst.”
I thought about it. I really did. But maybe him thinking that I was seeing someone else was better than the alternative.
“Nothing is going on.”
But nothing wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted more. But just in that moment, I couldn’t give it to him.
“Well, then. Maybe this is the end of us.”
7
We were winding up towards the end of the course with only a week and a half to go. I was pleased to have something to distract me, keep my mind off my broken heart. But it was harsh, though—I’d been through a lot of mint ice cream. Joe told us that it was time for us to stop being students and to start being real detectives now that we were at the tail end of our course. The lessons picked up steam. It was the day that we conducted “real” interrogation interviews—using other people in the class, of course, as our little Guinea pigs as we tried to get the truth out of them. The interviews would be recorded, and Joe would be watching them back later and grading us on how well we did.
The task was to interview the other person. They would tell us three things, two that were true and one that was a lie, and the interviewer had to figure out what the lie was, using various interrogation techniques.
And it just so happened that I got paired with Savannah, who was sitting directly across from me in the small, empty and stuffy room that felt like a real police interrogation room to me. I wondered if she knew all about body language as well as I did. Maybe she would purposely adjust her behavior so I wouldn’t be able to spot if she was lying.
She was sitting across from me with a smug look on her face as I reached for a glass of water and gulped it down. There was an easy way for me to get top marks. All I would have to do was lower my psychic shield and listen in to Savannah’s true thoughts. Then I would know what was a truth and what was a lie.
But that was crossing a line. I didn’t even like to use my powers to solve cases, and using them to cheat during class was definitely an ethical no-no. The sort of thing that Maddie would do. But not me.
Savannah told me that she was the youngest of eight children. Hmm. It seemed true enough. But I already knew she was a good liar. If I had never seen her email to Eddie, I never would have realized. I asked a few questions about her siblings, and it all seemed to check out. Then she told me that she had never drunk coffee in her life. A very controversial statement. That was the fact that I marked down on my notes as a lie, even though her lips were dancing as she said it. Surely that was just a way to throw me off. “Oh, and I am a horse trainer.” Big deal, I thought and just put down that it was a truth. Why would someone lie about that? She was probably trying to double bluff me with that one. But I wasn’t going to fall for it.
Then it was her turn to interrogate me. I thought there was no way that she would be able to crack me, and I had all my answers prepared to any follow-up questions that she may have. But when she got to my lie, a little smirk crossed her face, and she made a note of what I had said. And I knew she had got me.
It took half a day for the results to come in. We had an extra-long lunch break while Joe watched the footage and tallied the results. It was the best sausage roll I’d had all trip, but I was starting to wonder how long I could survive on pork meat and pastry alone before my body rebelled and asked me to please feed it some fruit and veggies.
We all anxiously crowded around to see the results. The placements that ranked us top to bottom.
Savannah’s name was above mine. She had been lying about being a horse trainer. And she really hadn’t drunk coffee ever in her life. She must be some kind of freak.
But there was something worse than that.
Maddie had come top of the leader board.
I was quietly seething as I packed up my bags
to leave that night. “Vicky, she probably cheated! She must have used her powers to know when Brett was lying and telling the truth.” Her partner, Brett, had come right at the bottom of the board, and I just knew that there was some foul play involved.
Vicky had been very quiet towards me the past couple of days since Akiro had left on the train back to Swift Valley—for good this time. I had thought it was because of Akiro, and the fact that I had asked her to please give me some space while I recovered from my heartbreak, but she had just been plain cold to me. You would have thought, as my best friend, that she would be super supportive during this tough time. “Like you are one to talk,” she said, and then turned her back to me in a sort of huffy manner that was out of character for her.
“Whoa, I may have occasionally used my powers to solve cases, but I would never actually cheat during this course.” I kept my voice low. “I am offended that you would even suggest such a thing, Victoria.” I never called her that, but she was peeving me off a little.
She had a stony look on her face. She crossed her arms and then finally spluttered out. “Then what was that spell about last week? The one that you needed Joe’s face for. A very enlarged version of Joe’s face.”
I froze “How did you know about that?”
She looked down at the ground. “I came back to the room to grab my guitar, and as I opened the door, I heard you.”
Oh, no. “Vicky, that was a different situation. I wasn’t cheating to pass the course or to get ahead at the expense of other students, the way that Maddie is doing. I was just trying to get back on the course so that I had a fair chance of passing it. So that I can keep working in the job I love. I shouldn’t have been kicked off in the first place. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Joe threw you off the course for breaking the rules that he set. But you couldn’t handle that, could you? So you had to bend the rules.” She frowned as though she didn’t understand at all. “How is that not cheating?”
I stomped my foot a little. “Because I never should have been thrown off the course in the first place.” But I was just repeating myself like a toddler who just wanted to get her way, but had no real valid argument or logic to back up her point.
“I’ll see ya back at the hotel,” Vicky said sullenly before stomping off.
It was just me alone in the classroom. With Maddie’s name there on the top, haunting me.
Maybe it was just the fact that I was newly single and needed something to put my attention towards, but I became obsessed with proving that Maddie had cheated. I decided the next day that I was going to prove it. Or I was at least going to confront her about it.
But as the day wore on, I started to wonder if maybe Maddie wasn’t just a cheater . . . if she was capable of cheating, what else was she capable of doing?
Was I ever going to be able to get Maddie alone? Vicky didn’t need to be around to witness this—she’d only get her feelings hurt, knowing that her new best friend was a killer.
Flattery was always the best option. I raced up to her after class and stood in front of her at the door. She scowled at me like I was a bug that was in her way.
“Hey, do you have a bit of spare time to study with me?” I asked her.
She looked taken aback and even snorted a little. “Er, why are you asking me?”
“I need some help getting my grades up, so I thought, why not ask the best student to pair up with me?” I said, acting like I was all sheepishly swallowing my pride.
“I thought Savannah was your partner?” she said with a little smirk as she adjusted the strap on her shoulder bag and raised her eyebrows.
“Not like these things are set in stone.”
She looked me up and down. “And what about your precious morals and ethics?” she asked. “Won’t they be compromised if you work with a witch?”
She said the W word far too loudly, and I gulped. Joe was only just heading out of the classroom and was only a few meters down the corridor. He could have heard her. But he didn’t even stop or look over his shoulder or anything.
“I don’t care about that stuff anymore,” I said, smiling a little. Making sure to force a little twinkle into my eyes so that she would go along with it and buy it. “In fact, I’m starting to think it may be a good thing. To have two witches working together.”
She shrugged and said sure. “You can look over my notes. And I can explain the really hard things to you,” she said in a heavily patronizing manner.
I kept up the facade for a little while as I pretended to look over her painstakingly well-written notes. She had incredibly neat handwriting. And she hadn’t missed a thing that Joe had said. I actually found myself becoming a little entranced by them and got out my own notebook to take some notes from hers. Not part of the original plan.
I glanced up at her still-smug face.
“What makes you want to be a PI?” I asked, genuinely interested now.
She let her guard down a little. “I suppose I have always felt different from everyone else, you know? Like I didn’t fit in. I have all these amazing powers, these skills. But I had to hide them from everyone. The things that made me special and talented, I couldn’t even use. But if I become a detective, then I’ll be able to, you know?” She looked over towards me for encouragement, and I nodded sympathetically, because I did get it. I knew that exact feeling. It could be a pretty lonely one. Maddie sighed. “I know you don’t approve of me using my powers to solve cases, but I have to. I just have to feel like I can do some good in this world with what I have to offer.”
I gulped. Maybe I had judged Maddie too harshly. She was speaking from the heart. “I get it,” I said quietly. I sat and stared at her notes for a while, not saying anything, before I brought up the case of Eddie Ian. “It’s a shame that Eddie couldn’t teach the course,” I mused. “I think we all would have gotten a lot out of his teaching ways.” I shrugged. “I mean, he was a little laid-back for my standards, but he was a good guy. It’s a shame what happened to him.”
“He wasn’t such a good guy,” Maddie said, her voice low.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, looking up sharply.
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Just saying. Looks can be deceiving. We barely even knew the guy—we don’t know whether he was so good as he made out.”
I didn’t believe that was what she really meant. I got up and walked to the front of the room and stood in front of the desk.
“Why were you looking in this drawer?” I asked her, and she spun around in surprise.
“I—I wasn’t.”
Her face had gone white.
Finally, Maddie was shaken. I had her where I wanted her.
“I saw you. Twice.” My voice was flat. She couldn’t argue with me. “Twice you opened these drawers and riffled through them. Looking for something. But you didn’t find what you were looking for, did you?”
She went a little red. She’d been called out over her skills, and she didn’t like that one little bit.
Then she looked at the ground and shook her head. “No. Something was telling me that there was a clue in there, okay? A clue to the case. I thought it was my witch’s senses kicking in. But I couldn’t see anything. At all.”
I nodded. “I thought as much,” I said a little smugly.
She picked up her bag and rolled her eyes at me. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “You know, you could be a little more supportive towards your fellow witches once in a while, Ruby Sparrow.”
Maddie upped her game over the next couple of days. Maybe she was just trying to prove a point to me. Show me that she was not just a better student than me, but a better witch as well. She could no longer play this off as a pure fluke—she’d gone from being near the bottom of the class to now being the top student and getting one hundred percent in every test and assignment that Joe threw at us. Even Vicky, her former bestie, was starting to get a little uneasy with it, and I could see the tension between them developing, even though Vicky was
still being friendly towards Maddie, and they were still getting their lunches together.
“Never thought I’d say this, but I am getting a little sick of sausage rolls,” I said to Joe as I stared down at my flaky pastry and then slid the plate away from me a little. As usual, teacher’s pet was having lunch with the teacher because no one else wanted to sit with her. Brett had not spoken to me since I’d stood him up that night.
He looked bemused to hear this. “Never thought I’d live to see the day,” he said with a bit of a grin, but there was still that look there like he was trying to place a distant memory. Like he couldn’t quite place who I was, or he was trying to recall some important fact about me. I looked away quickly, and he shook it off. Phew. Yep, definitely my last sausage roll of the trip. We still had a week left of the course, but I was going to have to try a new meal from the canteen.
Joe excused himself, and I was left all alone at the table.
Brett was sitting at a table all alone and wouldn’t make eye contact with me, even when I called out his name. “Come on, Brett. Throw me a bone here.”
“I thought we were going to study together the other night,” he said sullenly.
“Sorry. I had other things going on. Like getting dumped by my boyfriend.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” He did look genuinely sorry.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I said, and he picked up his tray and came over to my table, sitting down across from me with raised eyebrows.
“So, I heard that you have been investigating the death of Eddie Ian.”
I lowered my voice. “How did you hear about that?”
He shrugged. “Word gets around about these things.” He leaned in a little closer. “I was thinking that to make things up to me, you could tell me what you know so far. I want to be a part of the investigation.”
Cast a Spell Page 6