by Sarina Dorie
It was five thirty p.m. on a Friday, half an hour before they closed for the weekend. The line was long. There was no way she would be able to get through it.
Plus, they would have required her to take a ticket to reserve a place for herself in the queue.
Vega strode past the long line of people waiting for a turn to be seen at the Department of Magical Violations. She now knew from experience when she’d temporarily lost her license that not everyone here was a criminal. Some of these people were there to apply for flying licenses, to take flying tests, or to renew their licenses.
People turned to look at her. She liked to think it was because she was so ravishing and fashionable, not because of the smelly corpse in a bathtub levitating in front of her.
“Son of a Fae! Is that a dead body?” someone asked.
Vega kept walking. She strode through the door of the building and parked the bathtub in front of the counter of clerks. The oppressive scent of garlic, a.k.a. arsenic, was stronger indoors without the wind to carry some of it away, as was the aroma of cherry—though she doubted other people’s noses detected a fruity aroma.
“Is that woman dead?” a troll seated in the waiting area asked.
Vega didn’t take a ticket to stand in line. She had pinned a note to the corpse’s dress with a detailed message. Vega started toward the door.
“Hey! You can’t leave that there!” one of the clerks said.
“I called the Witchkin Council’s Nonurgent Emergency Division to pick up this body on Thursday morning. I can’t have it lying around all weekend, so I’m dropping it off and saving you the trip.” She continued toward the door. “Toodles.”
“No, that isn’t the way this works. We only handle matters pertaining to flying and magical violations.”
Vega smiled, feeling triumphant. “You’re in luck. This woman crashed while flying. Probably because she was poisoned. I left a note.” Vega had even left her contact information in case they had questions. She’d addressed the note to Hildy Heathgard since she was the one person who worked for the DMV that Vega knew by name. Hildy was also the person least likely to punish Vega for the white elephant gift, but that was mostly because Hildy was aware that Vega knew Mr. Reade.
She supposed it would be appropriate to warn him that he might need to take Hildy out on another date in order to avoid provoking Hildy’s wrath.
Mostly that was because Vega had also mentioned the corpse in the handbag that she was keeping safe for Hildy to come collect.
Overall, it felt like an extremely productive day.
* * *
It was time that Vega found out more about the dead body in the purse.
After dinner, Vega retrieved Mrs. Angelopoulos’s purse in the false bottom of her trunk. It was a well-concealed interior that hid a larger storage area she could access from her purse. In this case, Vega had been careful to test the purse to see if it could handle being placed in her trunk. Mrs. Angelopoulos’s purse had used a different spell from the ones Vega employed, and it was fine.
Not knowing a better place to examine corpses and poisons, Vega went to the school cemetery. She used a glamour to camouflage herself in the forest, as she was wont to do when going to a graveyard to perform forbidden magic. In this case, she wasn’t going to use forbidden magic or eat any bodies.
She was going to try really hard not to eat the corpse anyway.
Vega used spells to detect if anyone followed her and cast extra wards to deter people. Not that the school had many people roaming around during the summer. A groundskeeper, custodian, and librarian were probably the only staff present.
But Janis would be back.
Vega lit a light to see inside the void of the purse. As she levitated the rolled-up carpet, a mouse squeaked and darted from the cover of the rug to a stack of books. She ignored it for the moment and squeezed the carpet out through the opening of the purse.
From the stain on the bottom of the carpet and the fruity aroma, she guessed bacteria had been at work for about a month.
As there were organisms within the corpse, that confirmed a different kind of portal spell from what Vega used on her purse and wardrobe. For her storage portals, she kept the spell as simple as possible, to ensure that she didn’t use too much magic when opening it—or keeping items there.
The simplicity and limitations of her portal spells also made it so that the storage space was unsuitable for life. Creatures couldn’t cross into that space safely. People couldn’t enter the portal and remain alive—at least not more than an arm or leg at a time. During the school year, Vega’s roommate, Amy, had nearly fallen into Vega’s closet storage portal and died.
But Mrs. Angelopoulos’s purse portal differed from Vega’s closet because it had bacteria in it, which technically was alive. A mouse was certainly alive. That meant the person rolled up inside the carpet hadn’t necessarily been killed by stuffing them into the storage space.
Vega checked for curses and hexes first. When that showed nothing, she used Casimir’s Hex-Detecting Spell to search for poison. Green mist that smelled like someone’s morning breath wafted from the carpet.
There was definitely poison in that corpse.
Could this corpse also have died from arsenic? She didn’t have a spell for that. If she left the corpse in the sun, it might heat up any traces of arsenic in the body, and it would smell of garlic, signaling it was that mineral. Unfortunately, if she left a corpse this ripe out in the sun, it was also possible the aroma would be so intense, it would drown out any other fragrance, including a garlic aroma.
Vega’s mouth watered as she considered it.
Perhaps this was an opportunity to employ the skills of gnomes. They were attracted to metal. They would most likely ignore the corpse if it didn’t contain traces of heavy metals or minerals.
In order to ensure this was a true test, Vega would need to remove any metal jewelry the corpse might be wearing.
Vega unrolled the carpet. Metal jangled as the corpse rolled out. The heady scent of cherry cobbler laced with cinnamon and rum wafted toward her. Her vision blurred, and hunger cramped her belly. She wanted delicious, delectable corpse flesh.
The ghoulish instincts in Vega screamed for her to drop to her knees and gorge herself. But she wasn’t a monster. She wasn’t going to lower herself by feasting on a corpse like a lowly ghoul.
Vega Bloodmire, wicked witch and even more wicked teacher, was above that.
Vega forced herself to back away. She spun toward the trees and sucked in a few breaths of fresh air. Turning back, she saw what she’d missed during her moment of corpse lust.
She gasped.
Even though it had been rotting for a month, she recognized the corpse. This was someone she knew. The person she least expected.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Finders Keepers
Vega stared in shock. This was impossible. She opened her palm and used an illumination spell. Her eyes weren’t deceiving her. Janis Meadowcloud, wearing one of her gauzy skirts and a flowing blouse, had been rolled up in the carpet. Metal bracelets adorned her wrists.
Vega had just seen Janis on Thursday in class. But the body in this carpet—Janis Meadowcloud’s body—had been rotting for at least a month. She’d even spotted the feet sticking out from the carpet earlier on Thursday prior to seeing Janis.
The timeline of events didn’t make sense.
If Vega’s suspicions were correct, this bag had been in Janis’s hands on Tuesday during class. On Wednesday during her lesson, Mrs. Angelopoulos had been carrying the purse.
But what if it hadn’t been Janis who Vega thought she’d seen this week? Who would have wanted to impersonate her?
Doppelgänger Dana, whom she had caught trying to impersonate a DMV employee in the hope of getting the purse, might also have been adept enough at glamours to impersonate Janis, but Vega couldn’t figure out why. Knowing what Vega knew now, it certainly made sense why s
he would want the purse back.
This turn in events was a completely unexpected mystery. Vega considered whether she truly wanted to involve herself in this mess.
She thought back to Mrs. Angelopoulos’s plea for help that Vega had ignored. She didn’t want to be like Principal Gordmayer, always dismissing people as paranoid if they said they had enemies. Vega should have listened.
And now Mrs. Angelopoulos’s killer was out there, free to murder more people. Vega had no idea why the Janis doppelgänger was doing this or who else might be at risk. Her other students?
From the institutional negligence Vega had witnessed thus far from the DMV and Witchkin Council, she didn’t trust them to find the killer themselves. Just like the dead body she’d dropped off earlier, she’d have to bring the culprit to them in order to get them to do something about the problem.
In the meantime, Vega decided to continue with the task she’d been prepared to do prior to discovering the corpse’s identity. She wanted to see if Janis had been poisoned with arsenic as well.
Gnomes were destructive pests and practically useless for anything, but they could help her with finding a mineral-based poison.
She needed to remove Janis’s bracelets to use the metal as gnome lures. Vega held her breath as she approached the corpse so she wouldn’t be tempted to nibble on rotting flesh and destroy the evidence. Or ingest a potentially arsenic-laced body. She resisted the urge to lick the corpse juices off the bracelets and instead used them to lure gnomes out of their holes and toward the cemetery.
Vega dissolved several sections in her wards that were low to the ground and waited to see if gnomes approached the corpse. A trio of gnomes snuffled around the carpet like pigs looking for truffles. Books claimed gnomes were sentient, but squirrels seemed to have more brain cells than they did. These gnomes didn’t communicate with each other except in grunts and by shoving each other out of the way in a territorial show of dominance.
One sniffed at the air toward the bracelets hanging in the tree before turning to Janis and licking her face. Most likely that meant she had ingested arsenic—the same as Mrs. Angelopoulos.
One of the gnomes removed Janis’s shoe and found a toe ring. He yanked it off with such force he also removed her toe. Vega didn’t like gnomes destroying the deceased, but she waited to see if they led her to more clues.
As one of the gnomes turned toward a tombstone, pickax poised, Vega used a spell of plants to bind him. He dropped the axe and thrashed on the ground. There probably wasn’t anything else to be learned from the gnomes.
Vega had seen enough to guess arsenic most likely had killed Janis. Vega bound the gnomes in vines and appropriated their tools. She would bet the gnomes hadn’t made these tools themselves. They’d probably stolen them from hobs, mountain dwarves, or a tribe of gnomes less inbred than their own.
Having nowhere else to keep the gnomes, Vega dropped them in Mrs. Angelopoulos’s purse. Since the purse wouldn’t kill bacteria and mice, gnomes would survive intact as well. Probably they couldn’t get into too much trouble in a purse.
It seemed like a good idea until she heard the gnomes snuffling around inside. She sent an illumination spell into the purse to see if they had found anything useful. Possibly they were just interested in licking the books. There was only so much damage they could do while bound by plants.
The gnomes only gave the books an investigatory sniff before rummaging through some of the other scattered junk in the purse. A gnome used the point of his cap to shove a jar of spilled eyeballs off a shelf. It knocked down a clear plastic cup of coffee, which splattered to the floor. The gnome dug his hat into the shadows, knocking a large rock the size of the gnome’s head onto the books. Prism shapes sprouted from the base of the rock, reminiscent of quartz crystals, but the color was an opaque gray with bright yellow spread throughout.
Vega recognized this rock from her alchemy book in high school. It was a giant chunk of arsenic.
The other gnomes grappled for the mineral, battling with their conical red hats for the rock. They snorted and snarled like feral animals.
If the coffee was the same one that Mrs. Angelopoulos had been drinking during her lesson, and it had been stored next to a giant hunk of arsenic, it was possible she hadn’t been intentionally poisoned. It was possible it had been accidental.
One of the gnomes bit a hunk out of the arsenic.
Vega cast a levitation spell and lifted the rock into the air. She had no idea what to do with the giant mineral once it was floating in front of her. She didn’t want to inhale its dust. She didn’t want to touch it. As it was, she was going to need to wash in order to remove any residue from herself after coming in contact with the corpse.
This was definitely one corpse she didn’t want to ingest—and not just for the usual reasons.
Vega retrieved a plastic bag from her own purse and dropped the arsenic into it. She then tied it off and found several other bags to store that one in before tying it to a tree branch.
She peered inside the purse again, careful not to inhale as she studied the gnomes within. Arsenic could be found in a solid state as well as gaseous. Vega didn’t want to breathe in dust or any other toxic air. The gnomes were growling and bumbling around without the use of their hands. Some of them had managed to make a mess of things anyway. Liquid had spilled onto one of the books. Or a gnome had marked his territory on it.
She tested the puddle the best she could for arsenic with Casimir’s Hex-Detecting Spell. It was difficult to tell whether the poison it detected came from the puddle or everything in the purse was coated in arsenic powder left in the wake of gnomes dirtying up the interior.
Vega tried to ignore the books being trampled and dirtied by gnomes. These weren’t her books. She should ignore everything in the purse the gnomes were gnawing on and probably smearing their excrement on. One of the gnomes definitely had wiggled out of his pants.
She forced her eyes from the books, but she couldn’t ignore these tomes of knowledge for long.
Even if these were someone else’s books, they were still books. She couldn’t let them get ruined. She retrieved them from the gnome pen. They were probably dusted with arsenic, so she dropped them onto a clean section of path.
Peering inside the purse, she found another gnome had found a coin purse, and money was scattered onto the floor. A Morty driver’s license was on the floor where the carpet had been. It was Janis Meadowcloud’s ID. Next to it was a flying license, though Vega couldn’t see whether it was Janis’s or someone else’s.
Vega came up for air and took a few breaths before gazing at the contents of the purse again. She moved her light closer to the gnomes. Some of the money spilled on the floor looked like Morty denominations. Some of it looked Witchkin. The gnomes writhed on the floor, trying to eat the coins. Some of them glittered gold.
Vega withdrew a dozen coins using a levitation spell. She threw back the ones that were pennies. There were two coins in the bunch that actually looked like they were made from real gold. She didn’t recognize the coin as a Witchkin denomination or a common American one, but it did say United States of America on it. The year it was minted was 1897. The value printed on the coin was twenty dollars, but it seemed like it would be worth more than that if it was an antique gold coin.
That might explain why “Janis” wanted the purse back. Not only was it housing a dead body whom she had presumably killed, but it also had gold coins in it.
Gold coins the gnomes were eating.
Vega cast an Elementia spell invented by dwarves working in mines to find the highest quality mineral deposits. She transformed her starlight into the essence of gold and chanted, “All that glitters is not real or gold. Show me quality that I might behold.”
The gold coins shone as brilliantly as sunlight. The gnomes lunged toward them, but Vega was quicker. She levitated those out of the purse. It wouldn’t surprise her if these were stolen. Someone was going to
want their money back.
And if they were dead, then finders keepers, losers weepers.
Vega tested the money for poison. Casimir’s Hex-Detecting Spell showed definite traces of poison. As did the books.
She could have returned the body of Janis Meadowcloud to the purse as well, but she didn’t want the gnomes to eat the evidence. Besides, if Janis’s doppelgänger did manage to get the purse, Vega didn’t want her to also get the corpse and poison that Vega intended to hand over to the Witchkin Council. That was evidence. Vega left the corpse rolled up in the carpet in the graveyard, hidden with a glamour and protected by the strongest wards she knew how to create.
Vega didn’t know how to clean books of poison without damaging the paper. When she returned to school, she left the books outside the library with a note.
Ms. Chamapiwa,
These books are probably covered in arsenic and gnome urine. Do you have a spell to clean them?
Vega Bloodmire
She hoped she wasn’t pushing her luck with the librarian.
Vega washed the money, her hands, arms, and face before checking herself and the money again for contamination. Casimir’s Hex-Detecting Spell showed the surviving money not eaten by gnomes was now free of poison. As an added bonus, the spell showed she hadn’t accidentally poisoned herself with arsenic, so she would live to see another day—whether she wanted to or not. It was hard to say, depending on what the principal’s reaction was going to be when she learned about all the destruction the gnomes had caused while she’d been away.
Vega’s next task was checking on the gnomes she’d caged earlier in the day. She dropped them in Mrs. Angelopoulos’s purse. That seemed like a pragmatic solution since she wouldn’t need to steal from her supply of magic to cage them. She ventured across the grounds to Orsolya’s cottage on the far side of the greenhouses.