“I do know,” Bailey said, “it’s not like I haven’t given this any thought, guys, I—”
“Bailey,” Piper chided, and reached across the table to touch Bailey’s arm, “we’re not worried you haven’t thought it through—we’re worried that you have, and that you’re not telling us what the price tag is going to be because you don’t want us to stop you from paying it.”
Bailey closed her mouth. Sometimes, she forgot just how well her friends knew her. And without even the benefit of being able to read her thoughts. Still, that was the whole problem in a nutshell. She couldn’t have them trying to talk her out of what she had to do. “This magic doesn’t work like that,” she told them, smiling. “Really. It’s primal; acausal, you could say. I’m sure there will be a reaction to it, but not what you’d call an exchange. It’s perfectly safe—this is the whole reason the Throne existed in the first place. Trust me.”
Piper’s lips pressed into a line for a moment, but ultimately she nodded, and relaxed a bit. Avery still had the look of someone silently doing math problems in his head, but he didn’t argue with her.
“It will be alright,” Aiden assured them. He squeezed Bailey’s hand. “We just have to get the stones here as quickly as we can, and try to make sure everything happens smoothly.”
Chapter 18
The first batch of new arrivals showed up much faster than Bailey honestly expected, and in much worse shape.
They were practically a caravan, and they came in long campers and stuffed SUVs. This group was mixed—a Mexican coven from around the Mitla region had taken the long way around to avoid major population centers as well as Immigration and Customs; a Canadian group who had met them in Idaho and sensed one another’s stones; a few who had, with the help of some wizards, traveled across the Atlantic from Ireland and been picked up by the Canadians near the northern border. They had brought more than one set of stones, as well—a set they had long ago recovered from France, and a set that no one now remembered the origin of.
It made twenty one stones in all, out of the thirty nine that Bailey expected—three for each of thirteen Cave systems.
They hadn’t, however, arrived without difficulty.
“It was around North Dakota,” Peter Lameaux, possibly the most curious member of the Canadian coven, explained inside the tour office that Aiden had opened up as temporary lodgings. He had bandages on one arm and his thigh. “We don’t know how they found us. There are a few different ways, but we practically covered the camper in charms. No one even looked at us at the border.”
“Our magic has been in decline for almost a century,” Peter’s mother, Sherry, pointed out. “Until the stones started calling to us, none of us had actually cast a spell before.”
“I was confident,” Peter said, and shook his head. “But the hunters knew what they were looking for, maybe.”
Bailey seethed with the news. It had to be the local hunters here, spreading the word and going on high alert. How did they know there were witches coming to Coven Grove, though? Had they realized that the arrival of Alkina’s coven signaled a wider influx?
It was unthinkable that anyone involved might have leaked information about Bailey’s call—wasn’t it?
“You’re lucky you didn’t lose anyone,” Avery said. He handed both Peter and Sherry glasses of water.
“Thanks,” Peter said. He smiled at Avery, much wider than he had smiled at anyone else so far.
Peter was the first male witch that Bailey had met. Riley might turn out to be one as well, one day, if such division existed when he was old enough to learn to use his gift. But his was potentially a special case. She wondered about what life had been like for Peter growing up, but now wasn’t the time to marvel over exceptions to what often seemed to be the natural order. And in any case, he seemed a great deal more interested in the handsome wizard than in the Queen of Magic.
There was, briefly, a generalized bowing and scraping that Bailey had quickly put an end to. But it was comforting to have them all here; there was safety in numbers, both from hunters who were apparently lying in wait, and from Faerie.
The problem was, they were already running out of places to put people.
“Our Coven is happy to camp on the beach,” Peter pointed out when Bailey and Avery began speculating about what to do with them all.
“I don’t like the idea of leaving people out in the open like that,” Bailey said. She looked around the tour office, frowning. It was already about as full as it could get without becoming uncomfortable quickly.
The idea had occurred to her that the Hope sisters might open up their Cave—Frances wasn’t optimistic, but she’d gone to visit them. Bailey told her to go ahead and use “By Order of the Queen” if she had to; though she doubted that Rita or Anita Hope were likely to take her title seriously.
“We’ll see what we can manage,” Bailey assured Peter and his mother, and then went to meet with Aiden as she saw him emerging from his office—now a small set of temporary living quarters.
“So much for proceeding smoothly,” Aiden sighed. He had his sleeves pushed up, and was a little sweaty from having moved office furniture. Everything in the room behind him was now crammed up against one wall. “At least we don’t have a swarm of locals outside protesting.”
“Yet,” Bailey sighed. “But people definitely noticed. I tried to call Sheriff Larson but all I got was a lot of runaround and a promise to pass along a message. Apparently he’s been very busy.”
“The wizards that came with the Irish coven aren’t quite as skilled as Leander or even Avery,” Aiden said. “But it’s possible we could arrange for some kind of spatial distortion enchantment. We’d be able to expand a house to fit more people.”
“There are thousands of them potentially on their way,” Bailey pointed out. “You’d have to add acres of internal space.” It was a possibility that Leander had suggested originally, before he really grasped the scope of the problem.
“The more wizards we have, the easier that would be,” Aiden said.
“And if the local magic gets disrupted for some reason,” Bailey countered, “then I assume all those people end up occupying a much smaller space.”
He looked around quickly and lowered his voice. “Is that likely to happen?”
“Probably,” Bailey admitted. That’s all she bothered to say just then, though.
There was commotion near the front door, and they both looked up to see what was going on.
Piper, Chloe, and Alkina were all gathered there, apparently speaking with someone who wanted to come in but to whom they were denying entry. Someone from outside had demanded loudly to be let in.
“Speaking of disruption,” Bailey sighed. Aiden trailed after her as she picked her way through the crowded room and caught Piper’s attention.
“Bailey,” Piper said, “it’s—”
“Bailey Robinson?” A voice asked in a soft, cultured southern drawl. “She’s the new coven leader, isn’t she?”
Bailey’s eyes narrowed, and Piper stepped aside.
He was a tall man, with white hair that had been combed back, and a loose fitting but classy cream colored suit. He leaned on a cane, and had scars on the hand that supported him—maybe burn scars.
“I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Bailey said. “Who are you?”
“My name,” the man said, “is Richard Wheeler. I’m a guest of your mayor. I am what your people often call a… hunter. And I’m here to talk.”
Chapter 19
At once, Bailey’s blood boiled, and magic crackled at her fingertips. She stared at the hunter, infuriated at both his audacity and his calm demeanor. Did he have any idea how dangerous it was to show up like this? What she could do to him?
Beyond him, though, were several dozen others—not hunters, but people from Coven Grove, all watching tentatively to see the exchange.
She schooled her expression to something flat, and willed her magic down with an effort. When sh
e felt she could master her voice, she spoke quietly. “We don’t want any trouble with you or your people.”
Wheeler bobbed his head companionably. “Now I’m sure that’s true, Miss Robinson—or, maybe I should say ‘your majesty’?—but you see the problem as I see is that you and your… friends, you see, have no real accountability. You can’t be tried in court, there’s no forensic tests the average person can conduct to detect a magical crime; heck, you all could lay the world low and no one would know it was you. You can see how this makes some of your neighbors a bit unsettled.” He grinned, a toothy show of arrogant glee that Bailey saw for what it was.
“Our neighbors,” she said, “were just fine for ages before your people started stirring them up.”
“Is that so?” Wheeler wondered. “I seem to remember some story about some children? And if I do rightly recall, the murder rate in your little hamlet has gone up just about a thousand percent or so in the last year. But I’m sure all that’s a… coincidence?”
“What do you want?” Bailey asked flatly.
“Just a simple demonstration,” Wheeler said, his voice overly reassuring. “We of course have time honored methods of detecting and identifying people of a certain predisposition. None of that useless old-world mumbo jumbo like floating or sinking in a river, I assure you.”
She doubted it was that simple. “And you want to do this, why?”
“Why? Well, to put to rest the suspicions of the people of Coven Grove, of course.” Wheeler turned and gestured at the crowd behind him. “You see they aren’t entirely sure that you all have been one hundred percent truthful about how many unnaturals—ah, beg your pardon, supernaturals—are living among them. Once they’re certain there’s no one hiding in the flock, you see, they’ll feel quite a bit better.”
“We’ve already told them about all of us,” Piper pointed out. “At the town hall meeting Lydia tricked us into going to.”
“Tricked?” Wheeler put his hand to his chest. “My dear, you don’t have to trick someone that’s willing to speak openly, now do you? I believe you’ve just proved my point.”
The crowd behind Wheeler was beginning to grow impatient. Bailey could sense their irritation, fear, and a kind of solidifying… something around them—as if witnessing the exchange, whether they could hear any of it or not, were somehow bringing them to their already foregone conclusions that the witches were dangerous.
Whether she liked it or not, Wheeler had effectively cornered them.
“Fine,” Bailey said. “If it will make them feel better.”
“Bailey,” Chloe warned, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“It’ll avoid a riot,” Bailey said. “For now. Those people out there are already primed for it.”
“Fear is a powerful tonic,” Wheeler said sympathetically. “I’ve no doubt this will go a long way to helping allay their mistrust.”
He said the word like it tasted good, though, and she doubted very much that was what he had in mind.
Still, she walked out of the tour office, and kept pace with the hunter as they approached the crowd.
“As I promised,” Wheeler told them, gesturing to Bailey, “they are of course more than willing to cooperate. Now, if I may have a few volunteers from the crowd, please—just three or four, for now.”
Two young men, a middle aged woman, and an older lady that Bailey had seen in the Bakery dozens of times came forward, hands raised.
“Now I assure you that what you are about to see is not precisely supernatural,” Wheeler began as he fished a pouch out of his coat pocket. “It is, rather, a natural phenomenon which reacts to the presence of the supernatural. This was passed down from my daddy, and to him from his mama, and so on going back into the ages. Do hold my cane, if you would, young lady.”
The middle aged woman shuffled forward to take Wheeler’s offered cane. He poked his fingers into the pouch and plucked from it a chunk of some plant material. It smelled acrid, but sweet—some mix of tobacco and other herbs. He held it up. “It is a proprietary blend, the contents of which I am not at liberty to reveal to the general public, but rest assured it is not in short supply. We have only to get it smoldering, like so…”
Wheeler flicked a zippo lighter open and rolled the gummy mix between his fingers into a roughly conical shape, and then lit the end of it over the flame. “Just a pinch will smolder for some time, like incense, you see, and the smoke… there it is, have a look.” Thick, viscous smoke oozed up from the glowing tip of the mixture. “Now, the specifics of how this reaction takes place are perhaps beyond the scope of this small demonstration but I would like all of you to note the direction of the wind this very moment.”
The crowd appeared to do so, some of them looking at branches of trees, others sticking their fingers or hands up in the air above them to feel the slight, constant breeze that came almost perpetually off the cool Pacific.
Bailey watched as Wheeler passed the smoking lump before the four volunteers. It did what anyone would have expected—drifted away on the breeze. He made a show of showing this to the onlookers, pointing to the smoke as it dissipated on the wind.
“Now, observe,” he said, and approached Bailey.
She stiffened slightly, and her heart beat sped up. Piper had described something like this from when she’d been abducted by Seamus during his possession and delivered to the hunters on the mountain. An acrid sweet smoke that seemed to prevent her from engaging her magic, even her harmless witch-radar.
The smoke slithered up from the now ash-laden tip of Wheeler’s substance, curling randomly on itself and blowing away on the breeze. As he came closer to her, however, the stream of smoke began to lean ever so slightly in her direction. When at last he was holding the material no more than a few inches from her, it ceased to blow away all together, instead hanging in the air around her.
A whiff of it brushed her nose, burning and creating a numbness there that alarmed her. Magic coursed up in response to the emotion and Wheeler took a quick step back, pointing.
“See how the smoke moves? It follows the magic. What we can tell here is that Miss Robinson has, in fact, begun preparations for a spell of some sort.” The crowd gasped, and instantly there was a chorus of angry murmurs.
“Which,” Wheeler said, raising his voice as he held up both hands to calm them, “I personally assure her is not necessary. I mean this only as a demonstration.”
Bailey waved the smoke away, but it clung stubbornly around her for a moment longer. She looked around at the crowd. “What Mister Wheeler has failed to mention,” she said, “is that this smoke is poisonous. It does more than identify people with magic—it was used to incapacitate Piper Spencer two weeks ago when she was forcibly abducted by these people.”
Wheeler whistled, and then shook his head slowly. “Now, Miss Robinson—I believe it has become more or less common knowledge that it wasn’t one of ‘my people’ as you say who abducted Missus Spencer. Was it not, in fact, one of your own local deputies—one Seamus Jackson—who perpetrated that surely traumatic crime against Missus Spencer?”
Bailey’s nostrils flared, and she looked at the faces of the crowd. This wasn’t, apparently, news to any of them. Seamus had disappeared after the ordeal; hearing that he’d been responsible for it had probably answered more questions than it created, and Bailey guessed these people had already been told.
It highlighted a significant tactical disparity between Bailey’s people and the hunters. She had only the neighborly trust of Coven Grove in her favor—Wheeler had the animal fear that was already awake and trembling at the unknown in his. It wasn’t an equal match, no matter how much she wanted it to be.
Wheeler spread his hands, and accepted his cane back from the woman he’d given it to. He pinched out the end of the smoking cone, and stuffed what was left back into the pouch, which he tucked away again. Then he turned to address the crowd. “There; as you can see, we have a means of identifying those with supernatural abi
lities. I assure you, we will be distributing sufficient amounts of our blend to everyone who comes to us, and we will show you how to use it properly so as to avoid making any unfortunate mistakes.”
“Mistakes?” Bailey snapped. She stared at her neighbors, people that should have known her but clearly didn’t. She flung a hand at Wheeler—who didn’t flinch, though several people behind him did. “This man’s people, these hunters are responsible for the deaths of witches and people like them. They’re killers! And you’re inviting them to protect you against the people who’ve been saving you all for longer than you know from threats that are very, very real!”
“Now, now,” Wheeler said, dangerously calm. “There’s simply no call for such grievous accusations, Miss Robinson. All we wish to do is ensure that the people of Coven Grove are properly… armed against such things as they have no other means of combating—should the need arise, of course; and only then.”
A chill ran down Bailey’s spine, and she stepped slowly away from Wheeler and the crowd.
He watched her go, and Bailey was careful not to turn her back on him entirely until she was back inside and the crowd had begun to disperse, following Wheeler back up to the street as he no doubt informed them where they could collect their witch-hazel smoking blends to immediately start testing their friends and loved ones to route out any hidden witches.
Which, they wouldn’t find, of course.
But somehow, that didn’t comfort Bailey in the least. If anything, it meant that the situation would quickly become a great deal more dangerous.
Chapter 20
The trickle of magical people grew steadily over the next three days. Witches, wizards, and even several shaman arrived in cars, or on foot, or, in one case, in the form of a raven. There was one nervous looking warlock, who came under scrutiny the moment he arrived and swore his allegiance formally to Bailey when they met, apparently to mitigate the open disgust and even aggression some of the others displayed around him.
Witching for a Miracle (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 7) Page 9