Aconite and Accusations Read online

  I nodded in what I hoped was a sympathetic manner. The detective didn’t have an ounce of supernatural ability, but his job put him in the very literal line of fire of those who had. He’d been forced to accept the existence of forces he didn’t understand, and he had enlisted my help in an official capacity when it came to dealing with any crimes that were weird.

  “Did you get lost?” I asked as he teetered on a couple of stepping stones at the edge of the river on his way to get a better look at the corpse.

  “Hmm? No,” he replied, frowning at the man in the water. “I tried to drive my car along the road that led to Wormwood but… it seemed to be closed. I had to park up on the outskirts and walk through the forest.”

  “Did you see any signs or a barrier?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

  He did some more frowning. “No, I don’t think so. I just… knew it was closed.” He looked helplessly at me. “Something weird is happening, isn’t it?”

  I considered the detective’s serious grey eyes and grimly set mouth. “Yes. And it’s only just beginning.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sean said, his arms suddenly spiralling. I watched in slow-motion as his foot seemed to hover for a moment, before it came down, ankle-deep in Wormwood River. For some reason, I found I was holding my breath. It might have been the heavy veil of magic that hung in the air, or the strong feeling that this river didn’t enjoy being interfered with, but I feared that something terrible was about to happen.

  Sean pulled his foot back out and looked glumly at his ruined shoe. It was evident that when he’d got dressed this morning he hadn’t expected to go paddling. I discovered I was still holding my breath and released it, just as something did happen.

  With a squelching gurgle, the body rolled over and turned face up. Sean’s arms windmilled again from the shock. This time I rushed over and grabbed him to stop him diving in face first.

  “It’s probably just the natural gases,” he muttered, clearly embarrassed that he’d needed saving.

  “Oh dear,” I said, looking past him at the body.

  “Do you recognise him?” Sean asked, looking anxiously between the corpse and me.

  I shook my head. I’d never seen the dark-haired dead man before, and to tell the truth, I was glad of it. Even in death, his face had a sneer to it. Perhaps it was baseless bias, but the tattoos that crawled their way up his neck, the piercings, and the leather ensemble made me think this man was bad news. I knew you shouldn’t blame anyone for their own violent end, but I definitely wondered if this man had genuinely been entirely innocent in his own death.

  I put my prejudices firmly to one side. I’d do well to wait and see and stop judging people on their appearances. Hadn’t I myself been judged that way for so many years? At least the wedding band on the man’s ring finger gave me hope that he was in a loving relationship… and more importantly, someone must be looking for him.

  But it wasn’t any of the above that had inspired my exclamation.

  “Look at the top right pocket of his leather jacket, the one with the popper,” I indicated. “There’s a sprig of leaves poking out and what looks like a crushed purple flower.”

  “Yes?” Sean said, still looking clueless. It was understandable. He was a policeman and I worked at an apothecary. It was my job to know and identify medicinal plants, and even some of the nastier types… like this one.

  “It’s aconite - otherwise known as monkshood, or wolfsbane. It’s a really poisonous plant,” I told him.

  The detective’s forehead creased. “You aren’t implying he was poisoned, are you? I mean… he was stabbed in the back.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. The evidence for that is clear, but… when your team gets here, I would recommend they run a toxicology report.” I had a bad feeling about the presence of that flower at the crime scene. It sat there like a bad omen of dark times.

  “Seems awfully convenient,” Sean muttered.

  I bit my lip, knowing what he meant. If this victim did turn out to have been poisoned as well as stabbed, it made the presence of the aconite even more suspicious. What kind of poisoning victim carries a handy hint about what killed them in their top pocket? The mystery of how this man came to be in Wormwood River was already starting to look complex.

  “You have called for backup, haven’t you?” I asked ten minutes later when Sean was still crouching by the corpse getting a closer look at some of the tattoos.

  “I paged them as soon as I got here and confirmed the presence of the body. Standard protocol,” he said, tipping his head to one side.

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything more.

  “Well… where are they?” I asked, but I already knew the truth. The unseen boundary around Wormwood seemed designed to keep anyone who wasn’t a tourist out of the town - and that meant anyone from the police who might come here to interfere. We were looking at a long wait in the middle of the forest before anyone came to sort out this crime scene.

  I sighed and sat down on the bank again. Sean joined me a few moments later, apparently satisfied with his observations.

  I silently hoped that Aunt Minerva would open up the shop when I didn’t appear at opening time. I still felt a small stab of guilt whenever I looked at our accounts, but I couldn’t deny that the success brought by the new tourists was nice. Visitors loved my creatively named all-natural teas, and even my local interest magazine’s circulation was going from strength to strength. If I didn’t know the terribly evil end goal, I would probably want to kiss the mayor rather than curse him.

  “How has everything been going?” Sean tentatively asked as we listened to the gentle rushing of the river winding around a town that may soon be no more.

  “Everything is still on schedule,” I replied morosely.

  “That bad, huh?” Sean’s grey eyes found mine and I saw sympathy written there. He understood how much my home meant to me, and I knew we shared the same desire to do the right thing and let justice be restored. This time, I was afraid we would fail.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said, inclining my head towards the body in the river.

  “I do.”

  I shook my head. We both knew that Sean’s mortal mind would be forgiven for thinking that the road to Wormwood was completely closed, or even forget that Wormwood existed at all. The strange forces around the town wished to keep him out of it, and I wouldn’t have argued if he’d wanted it to be that way. “Unless there’s some kind of miracle, the ending is already determined.”

  The ghost of a smile appeared on the detective’s face. “Then it’s a good thing I believe in magic.” He turned to look at me, his dark hair curling over his forehead and his eyes suddenly more serious than they had been. “Have you found him yet?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  I bit my lip and felt an absurd amount of emotion rush through me. I shook my head, unable to speak for a moment.

  It had been five days since Hemlock had gone missing.

  I was starting to fear the worst.

  2

  Twisted Tourists

  It was close to lunchtime when I finally made it back to the Salem Apothecary. Aunt Minerva looked frazzled behind the till whilst a queue of ten people all clutching baskets full of tea waited with varying levels of patience. Her face broke into an expression of relief when she saw me come in.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I found a… uh… something in the forest,” I said, mindful of the customers. I knew I should probably be shouting about the body from the rooftops in the hopes that it might clear out the town, but it was nice to see the apothecary doing so well… I tried to tell myself it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I might as well enjoy it whilst it lasted - before the town became a smoking crater in the ground.

  “I see,” Minerva said, taking money with one hand and bagging up boxes of tea in a paper bag with the other. Her tone told me she’d worked out exactly what I didn’t want to talk about finding. “Anyone we know?” she added.

&n
bsp; I shook my head, before tilting my head at her. “Did…?” I started to ask, but she gave her head a single shake. I’d been asking the same question for days now. Hemlock had not returned.

  “I wasn’t expecting it to be so busy this morning, but two new busloads of tourists arrived. Linda called me to say that the bakery is overrun. She’s had to drag in one of the weekend girls to help out. Just between us, she’s had to magic up a little extra help on top of that.” Minerva raised her eyebrows to show that Linda was likely abusing magic to keep up with the demand for baked goods.

  The owner of The Bread Cauldron Bakery, my good friend Tristan Coltrain, had left Wormwood in the aftermath of the showdown outside of the town hall. It had taken several lightning bolts striking the ground in the same place for him to finally accept the existence of magic. Accompanied by the threat of doom that hung over the town, he’d agreed that it might be a good time to take a holiday.

  Tristan had tried to contact another local baker who had stores in the nearby village of Hobbling, Hailfield, and in the town of Witchwood, but January Chevalier had apparently been caught up in business elsewhere.

  In truth, I’d been glad that January hadn’t been dragged into this mess. I’d met the impressive enchanter before, and while I respected her power, I knew better than to go to her with my problems. She’d seemed like an agreeable woman, but she was undeniably formidable. I didn’t think it would be wise to end up in her debt, no matter how dire the situation got. Plus, I’d already seen that her own power didn’t extend to sewing up the tears between dimensions. If the rumours were true, she was immortal, but even if she could survive what was coming to Wormwood, it didn’t mean that she could stop it. And if I were being truly honest with myself, I needed to keep her on the outside.

  Someone had to be around to pick up the pieces if it all went wrong.

  With Tristan distressed that he hadn’t been able to find cover and not wanting to disappoint his regulars, I’d promised to look after the bakery for him and keep things running smoothly in his absence. It had been a challenge for me and my two aunts to keep everything going, but with the exception of today, with this sudden influx of tourists, we’d been managing. The only difference was I now believed that the bakery’s quaintly named biscuits and cakes, like ‘Love Potion No.9 Doughnuts’ and ‘Lucky Star Biscuits’, may actually contain a dash of real magic - courtesy of my Aunt Linda.

  Even though I shared my other aunt’s disapproval of magic being used so trivially, I was glad to have them both back in town. When my Aunt Linda had been arrested for the crime of turning the Witch Council into slime, we’d broken her out of the Witch Council’s jail. My aunts had been forced to go on the run, keeping one step ahead of those the Council sent to hunt them down. The solution had come when they’d brokered an armistice with Aleister Root, the head of the Council. The price of their pardon had been throwing Constantine Salem to the wolves, using the evidence they’d gathered which proved he’d been conspiring against the Witch Council.

  In return for handing over the traitor, they’d been allowed to return to live in Wormwood, and the past was allegedly forgiven and forgotten. In truth, I knew it was more a curse than a blessing. I was not naive enough to believe that the Council saw it any other way. The magical spyders that my Aunt Linda had planted in their headquarters had been designed to gather information against the Council - something that I strongly suspected they were well aware of. I doubted there’d be any tears shed if the three of us were swallowed up along with the rest of Wormwood. No help was coming from those quarters.

  The shop cleared as lunchtime rolled around. I flipped the sign from open to closed. These days, I could afford to be more discerning about our opening hours. I reached down and absentmindedly patted the head of the large, black dog who padded out of the kitchen now that the coast was clear. “What do you think, Erebus? Are we all doomed?” I asked the hellhound.

  “We’ll work something out,” Minerva answered for the dog before walking over and looking dubiously at Erebus’ bright red collar. Hellhounds were invisible to everyone but devils and were largely considered to be a witch’s worst enemy. If you went back on a deal with a devil then you could expect one of them to come after you.

  Something about the deal my father had made with Jesse Heathen prior to my birth had left me with a few devilish powers of my own. It had resulted in Erebus deciding to become my companion. When my aunts had returned to live above the shop with me, it had quickly become abundantly clear that having a giant, invisible dog around the house led to many accidents. Minerva had come up with the idea of putting a collar on the hellhound. Now, according to my aunts, they could at least see the floating collar drifting around the place and tread very carefully. Erebus might be my friend, but my aunts had a long-held wariness of hellhounds that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

  I looked up hopefully at the sound of the cat flap opening and closing, but the small black cat who trotted through wasn’t Hemlock. It was his brother, Hedge. In truth, neither Hemlock nor Hedge were actually cats at all. They were mythical ravens who’d changed their forms, but I’d decided that I was going to forget all that and treat them the way I’d always treated the pair - with a healthy dose of suspicion.

  “Come to deliver another apology note?” I asked the silent cat, who’d recently been used as a postman by Jesse.

  He decided not to break the habit of the lifetime and just looked at me with his big yellow eyes… before trotting over to the food cupboard and pawing at it. I sighed and rolled my eyes. Jesse had probably forgotten to feed him again. It was no wonder that Hemlock had decided to ditch the man who was supposed to have been his master. To be fair, Hemlock would betray just about anyone if there was a cheese string in it for him.

  “Have you seen Hemlock?” I asked the other black cat when I poured kitty-crunchies into a bowl.

  Hedge stayed silent, but I thought there was something in his eyes that hinted he knew something about his missing brother. It was too bad I wasn’t going to get an answer out of him. We didn’t share the same witch’s familiar bond that I did with Hemlock.

  “It’s something at least,” I muttered, putting the bowl on the floor for him. Hedge had not looked worried, just shady - which probably meant Hemlock was up to no good rather than in any actual trouble.

  Minerva hummed as she chopped up lettuce for lunch. I watched her for a few moments before I spat out the question I’d kept on the tip of my tongue since my aunts had returned.

  “Why did Linda turn the Witch Council into slime?”

  My aunt looked around and unconsciously touched her neatly blow-dried hair. “You know why. They were corrupt and needed to be stopped. Aleister and the other council members had illusions of power and ruled with an iron fist. His time spent as slime will have built some character. I’m sure he’s a changed man now.”

  “You don’t believe that,” I said, knowing I was right. “I think there’s more to it than that. Why did my mother have my father keeping tabs on Aleister Root? Why did he disappear? You’re keeping something from me.”

  Minerva shifted uncomfortably. “We haven’t lied to you. It was a different time back then. I don’t know what happened to your father.”

  I frowned. “Would you care to do a truth spell and say that again in a far more specific way?”

  “Hazel…” she said weakly, confirming my view that I was not being told everything. “We should be looking at the immediate problem right now. Maybe afterwards…”

  I threw my hands up in the air. “It doesn’t seem like we can do anything to stop the immediate problem! At least I might be able to actually do something about my father. What are you both hiding from me?”

  But a straight answer was not forthcoming. It never was. In the end, I was forced to let sleeping dogs lie. The best I could do was promise myself I wouldn’t let the matter drop. I deserved to know the truth about my own history, and there would forever be a wedge between me and my aunt
s until they relented.

  The morning after I found the body in the river did not start any more auspiciously. I walked down into the shop and discovered that Hedge had slept over, which probably meant Jesse had managed to weasel his way out of town beyond the barrier. I was still thinking dark thoughts about that when I happened to glance out of the window across the street.

  When Constantine Salem had come to town, he’d opened Salem’s Spell Solutions directly opposite the Salem Apothecary, hoping to drive me out of business by using his mind-control magic to draw our customers away. In the end, Constantine had been a victim of his own games. His followers had gone beyond the devotion that he’d demanded of them in the worst kind of way.

  The shop had been left empty since he’d been taken by the Witch Council. Even though only a few days had passed, the paint was already peeling and the windows looked foggy. It was a sure sign that the smart and shiny shop had been little more than an illusion in the first place… and the illusion had begun to fade.

  Until this morning.

  “I don’t believe it,” I muttered, feeling a similar level of outrage to that which I’d felt when Constantine had moved in. I’d never imagined there could be a worse shop to be opposite than Salem’s Spell Solutions, but this new venture might just defy my expectations.

  The fresh sign above the door read:

  Wormwood Guided Tours

  But it wasn’t the idea of a tourist shop opening up across the street that boiled my blood. It was the man standing outside the shop with his hands on his hips, surveying the street as if he owned it.

  Mayor Starbright was the one setting up shop opposite my business.

  He looked over and saw me glaring through the window at him. After a second, he lifted a hand in a cheery wave before smiling at me.

  I didn’t return it.