Hexes & Hot Chocolate (A Stella Storm Cozy Witch Mystery Book 3)

by Amy Casey

  But now Thomas had been arrested, the whole dichotomy had changed. Because it wasn’t me who was still in the spotlight anymore. The conversation had shifted to Thomas, and his guilt.

  I looked up at Aunt Hilda and saw her glaring at me.

  “Well,” I said, not wanting this awkwardness to go on any longer. “Are we just going to sit in here in silence or are we actually going to figure out what we’re going to do about Thomas?”

  I expected Aunt Hilda to do a few things. I’d seen what she could be like.

  But one of the things I didn’t imagine her to do?

  Shrug.

  Shrug, like it was nothing.

  “Was that a shrug?” I said.

  “He’s got himself into a mess too many times,” she said. “I’ve bailed him out enough.”

  “So we just give up on him?”

  “He killed Bernard. He knew what he was bloody well doing. The trouble he was bloody well causing.”

  “And you believe he killed Bernard? That he made such a risk like that? Really?”

  Aunt Hilda shrugged again. “The police saw what they saw. There’s no explaining our way out of that.”

  I slumped into my chair. I wasn’t liking the defeatist tone in which Aunt Hilda was talking. “I stayed here, you know? I stayed here to help. And I’m going to keep on staying here.”

  “I don’t see much point you staying here at all,” she said. “You’ve caused enough damage as it is.”

  I wanted to respond to her. But I figured I could do better than bite the bait right now.

  “My three sons. All of them, bloody well gone.”

  I ignored Aunt Hilda’s remark at first. Then I looked back at her. “Wait. Three sons?”

  She nodded. “Yuri, he was called.”

  “Nice name.”

  “It wasn’t. His father chose it. I always hated that name.”

  “Charming.”

  She ignored my remark. “My first son. Always getting himself into trouble, he was.”

  I didn’t want to push her. I could sense there was something on her chest about Yuri; something she was holding back.

  “Crossed over to the other side, he did. Decided he wanted to see the world. Only he got a taste for it. Decided he didn’t want to come back.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “It’s… it’s a simpler world out there. And as interesting as it is here, with magic and everything… there’s something about the world outside.”

  “Hmph. I think it smells like feet.”

  “Feet?”

  “Spend enough time here and you’ll know exactly what I mean when you go back there.”

  A pause. Then she stood up and continued.

  “I heard news that Yuri got himself into some trouble with some humans. Got himself killed.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Some gang or other. But… but I just remember feeling so damned hopeless. But also I felt like I was a fool for caring so much. So I dunno. Maybe that’s what toughened me up with Thomas and Curtis. But it still hurts, you know?”

  When Aunt Hilda looked into my eyes, for the first time, I saw sadness creeping through. Because in a way, it felt like she’d been so closed off from the emotion of what had happened.

  At the end of the day, one of her sons had died, another was presumed dead, and the third was now in prison.

  I couldn’t help but sympathise.

  “I don’t know what happened in that house after I’d left,” I said. “But what I do know is that Thomas was pinned down. He did what he did to protect himself. So I’m sure, somehow, the truth will come out. And we’ll make damned sure it does. Okay?”

  Aunt Hilda looked at me. She smiled. “You’re a good lass.”

  “Well thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “Do. Because it’s the last bloody compliment you’re getting from me.”

  I smiled at her. And she smiled back. And at that moment, it felt like we were connected; like we were on the same page, in unison.

  Then I heard a bang at the door.

  I froze. Aunt Hilda’s eyes widened.

  The vampires.

  Here for their revenge.

  “Leave it,” Aunt Hilda said.

  And I wanted to. I really wanted to.

  But that urge to progress. That urge to understand.

  It might be dangerous.

  But it was necessary.

  “I won’t be a second,” I said.

  “Stella—”

  But it was too late.

  I was downstairs. I’d jumped through the structure of the building, right to the front door.

  I held my breath and I unlocked it, preparing for whatever I was going to have to face.

  But when I opened it, who I saw standing there was totally unexpected.

  It was Hegathi.

  Hegathi the Syt.

  She had her hood up. But it was definitely her.

  “Hegathi?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything. Not at first.

  But then she looked up into my eyes.

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely honest with you,” she said.

  My heart pounded. “What?”

  “There’s… there’s important news. Something you need to know. About your cousin’s death.”

  Chapter 30

  You know that feeling you get when you’re onto something?

  When things are slotting together, clicking into place, at a speed you can’t even keep up with?

  That’s what it felt like was happening right now, as I followed Hegathi the Syt off into the distance, down through the streets of Nightthistle, to some unknown location.

  The night was dark, and the streets were silent. I could smell the remains of street food. Hear the murmur of conversation. There was an air of danger about this quest I was going on, whatever it was.

  I was wary enough to activate my invisibility, anyway.

  Part of me wanted to jump into Hegathi’s mind using my abilities. But I’d already tried that since coming to Nightthistle, and it didn’t seem as effective on non-humans. I mean I knew for certain they didn’t work on vampires, but they didn’t seem great on anyone else, either. It felt like there was a barrier erected, like people had their own internal firewalls because they knew that kind of thing was a possibility. After all, who’d want to risk having their thoughts snooped on? Couldn’t exactly blame them.

  The further we got through the streets, the more I became aware of a distance forming between me and Hegathi. I was trying my best to keep up, but she was a quick bugger to say the least.

  “Mind taking it a bit easier?” I said.

  She didn’t respond. Just kept on going, kept on zooming along.

  There was something else I was growing aware of, too. And that was that wherever we were going, it wasn’t somewhere I’d been before. It unnerved me a little, visiting an uncharted part of Nightthistle. I kind of felt like this place was full of possibilities, full of unknown secrets. And it was only a matter of time before I looked in the wrong place and saw something I didn’t want to see.

  “There any reason you can’t just tell me what this is all about before leading me to wherever you’re leading me to?” I called.

  Again, no response from Hegathi, who appeared to be moving quicker, moving further away.

  “At least slow down,” I said. Realising the irony of my request, of course. I was asking her to slow down when I was so keen on getting to wherever it was she was leading me to quickly. I really had to get a little more consistent with my demands, that was for sure.

  I kept on going, kept on moving through the streets. And the more I moved, the more wary I grew. The buildings were getting taller. The streets were getting narrower. If we kept going any further, it felt like the buildings around me would just suffocate and crush me.

  I was getting to the end of a street when I saw something to my left.

  There was somebody standing there. />
  Somebody watching.

  And when I saw what it was, my skin went cold.

  It was that figure. The faceless figure. The dark coat. The tall posture.

  I narrowed my eyes as I looked back at it. Blinked a few times. Because I’d seen this figure before. I’d heard mentions of it during the Krissy Palmer case. And I’d see it for myself during the Andy Carter case.

  But what was it?

  What did it mean?

  And why was it here in Nightthistle?

  “Do you see that, too?” I asked.

  No response from Hegathi. Typical.

  “Hey,” I said, keeping my eyes on the figure at all times so it couldn’t just drift its way out of my consciousness. “Do you…”

  But when I turned around, I realised something else.

  Hegathi was gone.

  I looked back for the figure.

  The figure was gone too.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I rushed to the end of the street. Looked left, looked right. But there was no sign of her.

  “Damn it. Damn it.”

  I started to walk to the left. But I knew she could be anywhere. So I used magic to jump to the left, check that direction, then to the right.

  But still no sign.

  I stopped in the middle of the street, the arms of defeat wrapping around me, when I saw it.

  There was a door right ahead of me. A door to another public bathroom.

  The door was swinging, to and fro.

  I narrowed my eyes. Walked towards that door reluctantly. But there was a bad feeling in my gut about it. And I’d been around long enough that I should know to listen to my gut.

  I pushed the door aside, slowly, just a little.

  “Hegathi?” I said.

  I pushed it some more upon hearing nothing more than the echo of my voice. And a cold, chilling realisation came over me. What if this was a trap? I’d suspected the Syt involvement in all this after all. What if I’d just walked into a trap?

  I pushed the door even further regardless, the urge to see controlling me, driving me.

  And when I saw what was in this room, I went totally still.

  Hegathi was in here.

  But she was lying on the floor.

  Dead.

  A rush filled my body. An urge. An urge to help. An urge to get away. An urge to just do whatever I could to get out of this place.

  But when I went to turn around, I saw something else.

  The police were surrounding me.

  The sirens that were silent just moments ago had sparked to life.

  And they were barking at me to get my hands up.

  And as I stood there, Hegathi’s body behind me, I saw Harold in the distance and I realised what this was.

  Harold walked away, smirk on his face.

  The police surrounded me.

  I was trapped.

  Chapter 31

  In my brief, embarrassing meetings with Sheriff Butcher so far, he hadn’t made me wait long. He’d been quick to see to me, quick to question me—if what he was doing could even be called “questioning” at all—and quick to let me go.

  But I’d been sitting in this holding cell, cuffed to the wall and waiting for a long, long time. It felt like days, in fact.

  And still no sign of Sheriff Butcher.

  Sheriff Butcher hadn’t been there when the police surrounded me and arrested me. I’d tried to argue I’d just got here, but they weren’t having any of it. As far as they were concerned, they’d seen what they needed to see.

  Namely, me, standing over the body of Hegathi the Syt.

  Blood on my hands from the door.

  They’d cast some kind of spell on me to stop me talking, bundled me into a van. I remembered sitting there, thinking how much I couldn’t wait to tell Sheriff Butcher about what’d happened, about how they’d treated me.

  But the longer time stretched on, the more certain I grew that Sheriff Butcher wasn’t coming for me at all.

  I looked back at the scene and I wondered what had happened and how it’d played out. Hegathi the Syt—the one who had helped the police place the werewolves at the scene of the crime, and later the vampires to me, privately—had come to my door and told me she had something to tell me. I’d followed her, only to lose her then find her dead.

  And then when I’d been arrested, I’d seen Bernard’s son, Harold, walk off into the distance, smile on his face.

  As far as I could see it, there was only one explanation. Harold had killed Hegathi. That was his revenge—not the kind of revenge I was expecting, but a revenge that put my family and me in an even more perilous position because we’d be done for killing yet another species.

  But there were things that didn’t add up about the story. Why had Hegathi come to my door? What did she have to tell me?

  But more importantly… how had she made it to my door and then been killed, all in such a short space of time?

  It was possible, of course. There was nothing logistically impossible about any of what had happened.

  But it still didn’t seem likely. It felt like I was missing something.

  I just wasn’t sure if the police were going to see things the same way.

  I thought back to that dark-dressed, empty-faced figure and I wondered what it was, who it was, and why they were cropping up every time I was in the middle of a case like this.

  And then I thought of something else. The feeling I’d got when I’d seen it.

  Fear, partly.

  But something else, too.

  A feeling like… like that figure was trying to warn me, somehow.

  I thought of Krissy Palmer. How she’d seen that faceless figure. I’d put it down to being her killer originally. But now, I wasn’t so sure.

  Maybe it was trying to warn her…

  I was so caught up in musing over what it could mean that I didn’t even see the door open.

  I looked around when it did. Saw Sheriff Butcher standing there.

  Relief washed over me. “Sheriff,” I said. “I’ve been waiting to see you for ages.”

  “And I apologise for that, Stella,” he said. “Really. Look at the state of this place. Can someone at least get the poor woman a drink of water?”

  He crouched opposite me as I sat there, cuffed up to the wall. “I wanted to tell you. I didn’t do this. The Syt, Hegathi. She came to me. She told me there was something she wanted me to hear.”

  Butcher stared at me blankly. It was a strange expression. One I wasn’t used to seeing from him. He didn’t say a word.

  “Sheriff?” I said. “I think… I think the vampires set this up. I think they did it to cause more conflict between the witches and the other species. But I didn’t do this. I swear I didn’t—”

  “Enough,” he said.

  It was cold. Dismissive. And it was uncharacteristic of the man I knew.

  “Sheriff?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, standing back up and pacing around the room. “And believe me, it’s not what I want to think. I want to think something quite different. But us police, we have to work with evidence. And right now, I’d be lying if I said the evidence wasn’t damning.”

  He looked back at me, regret in his eyes, and I wondered where he was going with this.

  “I can only tell you what I have concluded. What the vampires have concluded. What the Syts have concluded. And what even the Weres have concluded.”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat, dreading to think about what he might be about to say.

  “I think your cousin killed Bernard. But I’m starting to question whether it was really self-defence at all.”

  “But—”

  “I think he killed Curtis, too. I think he killed him and tried to frame the other species to spark some kind of conflict for whatever reason.”

  “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Oh, he has form.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t ac
tually believe the words coming out of Sheriff Butcher’s mouth right now.

  “And I’ll tell you something else, Stella.” He leaned into me. He looked both angry and disappointed. “I think you killed Hegathi because she knew about your little secret.”

  “Get a grip, Sheriff. This—this is nonsense.”

  “Perhaps it is,” he said. “But I can only work off the evidence, as I said. And right now, the evidence is saying one thing.”

  He walked back over to the cell door as I struggled against my cuffs, as I tried to break free.

  He looked at me.

  “The evidence is saying that justice must be served. And until any evidence points otherwise, that is exactly what I will do.”

  “Please!”

  He slammed the door shut.

  Darkness filled the cell.

  And no matter how hard I tried to break free, there was no going anywhere.

  This was my home now.

  Chapter 32

  As I sat in my cell and thought about all the crap that had happened to me since I’d come to Nightthistle, I wondered why I hadn’t just stayed home in Goosridge after all.

  It was cold in my cell, which didn’t help matters. I tried to cast magic to warm myself up, but there was some kind of blocker in here stopping me from doing so. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I focused, I wasn’t getting out of this cell.

  And what did that mean?

  Well, it meant I had plenty of time to sit here and mope about the unfortunate nature of my situation. Naturally.

  I squinted into the darkness, tried to make something, anything out, but with no luck. I was hungrier than ever, but my appetite was so spent that I didn’t know if I’d be able to eat anything if I tried.

  I thought about Sheriff Butcher, how much his tone had changed. One of my key allies, and he’d turned on me right at the death.

  I had to see things from his perspective, though. I was found near a dead body. And the murders and the theory he had… it added up.

  And besides. No matter how much I tried to present otherwise, I was still an outsider in this place.