Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) (10 page)

“I do have other options, you know. I was thinking more of discrediting her or locking her away where she can’t say the wrong thing. I know that’s what my three watchers will be expecting me to do. I’m meant to contain situations, after all.” She spread her hands. “I know you don’t like it, Elle. Well, neither do I, but if you’re not going to give me another option, what else am I meant to do?”

Oh, so this was all on me? The trouble was that Rebecca probably had a point. I had been putting this off for the last few days. I’d been following up other things, looking into my mother’s death, talking with goblins…

I looked over to Niall. “What do you think?”

“Perhaps you have been a little distracted. If it is beneficial to our relationship with the coven to do this for them, then what does it say if you ignore them to look into your mother’s death?”

Okay, I knew I was in trouble when Rebecca and Niall started agreeing about things.

I nodded. “All right. We’re at the dig site. What are we going to do here?”

“You said before that you couldn’t find enough evidence,” Rebecca said. “I’m here to help you look. The way I figure it, either a second pass will let the three of us find something, or there’s nothing to find, and we’ll have to write it off as a job where we just contain it with a few well-chosen lies. Either way, we need to get this done.”

It was hard to argue with that, so the three of us made our way into the dig site, heading for the tents that served as a base of operations. I looked in, and found a familiar figure. Ryan, the student who had met me there last time, was in the tent cleaning off fragments of pottery with a toothbrush and bottled water.

“Ryan?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

He looked around sharply. “You? What are you doing back here?”

“I asked you first.” I sent a small flicker of power into him. Probably Rebecca wouldn’t approve, but I didn’t care right then.

“I’m just here to keep an eye on things. Professor Muir said that he was worried all this around the site might be an elaborate way for nighthawkers to get us off it, so a couple of us are staying around.”

“Nighthawkers?” I asked.

“Thieves who take artifacts from archaeological sites,” Ryan explained. “They never think about the historical information they’re damaging by taking them out of context. I’ve been trying to keep going with the finds and some of the landscape archaeology while I’m here. I know Professor Muir said we had to shut down, but I figured he wouldn’t mind if I did at least this much. When are you going to let us reopen the site?”

“Soon,” I promised. “Assuming that we don’t find anything dangerous.”

“What could be dangerous?” Ryan demanded. “It’s just a bunch of old finds.”

I did my best to project friendliness. “We’re going as fast as we can, which is why we’re here. I want to take another look at the site with my…colleagues.”

It seemed like the easiest way to describe them. After all, what was the alternative?
Hi, Ryan. This is Rebecca, a witch who used to be my friend, and this is my vampire boyfriend, Niall?
Somehow, I doubted that would go down too well.

“Well, I guess that’s okay,” Ryan said, “although I’d have to come with you.”

“Why don’t we split up?” Niall suggested. “The young man can go with me, while you and Rebecca go together.”

In other words, he was offering to make sure that Ryan didn’t see anything he wasn’t supposed to, while making sure that Rebecca and I could discuss anything we needed to. He led Ryan away, while Rebecca and I headed through the rest of the site.

“I don’t know what there will be to find that there wasn’t before,” I said.

Rebecca shrugged. “We won’t know until we look.”

So, we did. We started with the trench where the problems had occurred, and sure enough, there was nothing to be seen there but mud, a few sheets of plywood there to keep it from collapsing and some ranging poles.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You’re giving up too easily,” Rebecca insisted. “You wouldn’t have given in like this the last time we worked together.”

Back before I’d come into my full powers, in other words. What was Rebecca saying? That I’d let the powers I now had make me lazy?

“We’ll check the rest of it,” I said, leading the way back toward the tents. I let my feelings guide me, searching for anything that felt like it had the residue of magic on it, yet I also kept my eyes peeled for anything that looked even a little off. Maybe I had missed some small detail last time because I’d been focusing too much on what my magic told me.

“I’ve missed this,” Rebecca said.

“Missed what?”

“
This.
Working with you.” She didn’t say more than that, preferring to go through the contents of one of the finds trays that had been left under a table. “We need to try somewhere else. Somewhere you didn’t look the first time.”

I was quite sure that I’d looked everywhere. Everywhere in on the site, at least. “We could try checking the areas around the edge of the site. I might have missed something there, maybe.”

Rebecca nodded. “We need to be sure.”

We headed for the perimeter of the site, not that there was a perimeter, not really. It wasn’t like it was fenced off from the rest of the farmland around it. It was just a section of a field, with an area of scrub and brush behind it. We headed for that, searching the ground, trying to find signs of anything unusual.

Like the half-covered stone bottle in the earth, right where Rebecca was about to step.

“Rebecca, look out!”

My warning came a fraction of a second too late as Rebecca’s foot crunched down on the bottle. I slammed into her, shoving her back and throwing myself clear as ghostly blue flame leapt into the air, forming a spinning blue ball that seemed to crackle with power. It hung there for a second and then darted forward, almost straight at me.

I threw myself sideways, barely avoiding it in time as the creature, because it was a creature, slammed down into the spot where I had fallen. I could feel its frustration at missing me as it darted up again, power crackling from it.

I reached out mentally, trying to suck that power right out of it. I should have known better. The jolt that hit me sent me sprawling back, feeling like a thousand needles were jabbing into my body at once. I rolled up, changing direction at the last minute, but still not as quickly as the creature did. It struck me, and this blow was even worse than the first one. It felt like my whole body was on fire, as if I had just put my finger into an electrical socket or I had just been hit by lightning. I fell, rolling onto my back and looked up as it hovered over me.

Then it burst like an overripe melon as Rebecca yelled the words to a spell.

Rebecca lowered her hands, the words of the spell she had just cast still echoing around the field. Burst fragments of blue fire spattered across the ground, blackening the scrub around us. I stared at it as it faded away, then looked up as Rebecca helped me to my feet.

“What just happened?” I asked, breathing hard.

Rebecca wasn’t in much better shape. I could see that she had a burn along one arm. “I think,” she said, “that we’ve just found that evidence you wanted.”

I still wasn’t entirely steady as I pulled myself to my feet. I could see burns fading on my arms, my power healing me so fast it was almost impossible to believe even after all these months.

“That was a Will o’ the Wisp,” I said, mostly because I wanted Rebecca to confirm that she’d seen the same thing and tell me I wasn’t going mad.

“Yes.” She stared at the patch of ground where the pot had lain, the color draining from her features. “It could have killed me.”

“It mostly felt like it was trying to kill me for a moment there,” I replied. “And I have the burns to prove it.”

“No, I mean when I stepped on it. If you hadn’t pulled me aside…”

“Well, you blasted it at the end there.”

We stood there in silence for an awkward moment or two as that sank in. Will o’ the Wisps were rare these days, mostly because the coven had spent a lot of time making them that way. Historically, they had a reputation for luring travelers off tracks and making them lose their way, but the truth was, the ones who survived to tell the stories were the lucky ones. Wisps were hunters, pure and simple, energetic killers who struck with fire and lightning, absorbing the life force of their victims as they burned. No wonder it had focused on me after that first second. I must have looked like a feast to it.

“What was a Wisp doing here?” I asked aloud, still trying to recover my composure a little. I saw Niall running over and moved to intercept him, knowing that he would almost certainly overreact to the idea of Rebecca throwing spells around if I didn’t.

“Elle, what happened? I heard the shouting, and the spell…” He shot a questioning glance Rebecca’s way.

“Rebecca didn’t do anything,” I said. “There was a Will o’ the Wisp. Someone left a Wisp on this site, Niall.”

“Did it hurt you?”

I nodded. “A few burns. Nothing major.”

“The question is what it was doing here,” Rebecca said.

I shook my head. “The real question is how it connects to the light show in the trench and the injury to that student.”

That it was connected seemed like a certainty. It was asking too much of coincidence that a Wisp in a bottle might randomly show up on the same archaeological site as other obviously supernatural phenomena.

“I should go back and convince the human student that nothing is happening,” Niall said. I’d forgotten about Ryan. “At least, if you’re sure that you’re all right, Elle?”

I nodded. “It will take more than one Wisp in a bottle to stop me.”

Niall froze. “In a
bottle
?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said, looking over at Niall. I could feel that she was still agitated about what had happened, even if she managed to keep her features a little more blank than that. “Left there like some kind of…
landmine
. If Elle hadn’t pushed me out of the way, it could have killed me.”

“But definitely a bottle? A clay one?”

I looked around and managed to locate the remaining pieces of the container Rebecca had stepped on. It was indeed made of simple fired clay, a few designs scratched into the surface with a reed or stylus.

“What is it, Niall?” I asked. “Do you recognize this?”

Niall glanced across at Rebecca, and I could feel her flash of anger as he did it.

“I was just almost killed,” she snapped. “I think I get to hear it, don’t you?”

“This investigation is for the coven anyway, Niall,” I pointed out. “You might as well tell us both.”

Niall nodded, taking one of the fragments of pottery. “This is an old goblin trick. They have always loved ambushes and traps.”

“But would they have the magic to contain a Wisp?” Rebecca asked.

Niall shrugged. “Witches are not the only ones with talents. They are simply stronger, and the coven has made certain that magical knowledge is not common among non-humans.”

“By ‘made certain’…”

Niall looked straight at Rebecca then. “I mean that your precious coven has always been fond of killing those who seemed like a potential threat in the name of protecting humanity.”

I looked around at the rest of the archaeological site. Could the rest of it have been down to goblins? Did they have the power? The goblin leader I’d met, Ulm, had told me that he’d tried to get my mother to teach the goblins more magic, and they’d always had a reputation as tricksters and troublemakers. Would a few lights and odd-looking costumes be so far beyond them?

I didn’t know. I did know that I’d had enough of slogging through the mud in search of answers. Thanks to my attempts to dive out of the way of the Wisp, I was covered in it. I doubted Niall was going to enjoy me heading back in the Aston Martin.

“We should check that there aren’t more surprises like that bottle,” Rebecca suggested.

I nodded. I knew she was right, but even so, I was tired. I wanted to get home. I wanted to shower.

Niall seemed to sense that. “It is unlikely that there will be more than one. Wisps are hard to obtain, and if the ground was strewn with them, Elle would have found them when she was last here. Besides, more people would have been hurt.”

Rebecca looked like she might try to argue with that, but Niall was already pulling me away toward the car. I let him. We’d gotten everything we were going to get from here.

“I’ll call you, Rebecca,” I promised her. “I’ll put together a report and get an explanation together. Oh, and you can tell Professor Muir he can reopen his site. If Niall’s sure there won’t be any more surprises…”

“I am.”

“Then there’s no point in keeping things shut down. It will only add to the suspicion.”

Rebecca seemed satisfied with that, or at least, she didn’t make any further efforts to stop us from heading back home. Niall drove me back with all the speed of someone who knew just how much I wanted a shower right then. Who might even, hopefully, be persuaded to join me.

He drove me back to my place, pulling up in front of it and turning off the engine. I practically leapt out of the car, I wanted to get inside that badly. I headed inside and wasn’t too surprised to see Siobhan there, working from home. She saw me and laughed at my mud-encrusted features, then saw Niall coming in after me and stopped.