Witching There's Another Way: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 4) (10 page)

“Good point,” Aiden admitted. “So, who next?”

“Only one of the bakery ladies wanted to sell. She had something to lose if it went under. Who knows how things have changed with Cleo being gone.” Bailey sighed, certain that Fran was going to be every bit as pleasant to interrogate as her real-world counterpart would have been. Still, it had to be done. It was a lead, and that was the game.

At least, she hoped. If it wasn’t, they were going to be wasting a lot of time playing the wrong game—and who knew how long they had to win the real one.

Chapter 16

Avery rubbed his bleary eyes and pushed the papers away from him. For a brief moment, he laid his forehead on the table before he tapped his phone on—it was nearly dead—and looked at the time. It had gotten dark hours ago, but he didn’t realize just how late it was. Well past midnight.

The coven ladies were still up with him; they’d merely closed the bakery around him, careful not to distract or disturb him. Now, they gathered upstairs, leaving him to his puzzles while they presumably made their own efforts.

He’d gotten as far as seeing a connection between the thirteen parts of the music the children were humming—his papers were now littered with his painstaking attempts to chart some section of the music in order to compare the differences in tones and the lengths of them, but if there was some arcane math to discover he couldn’t tell what it was. Until he did, applying the equations he’s managed to parse out was a pointless affair—the music probably represented some variable that was left open in them, the ‘x’ to solve for; but without knowing what the music meant, he couldn’t begin to guess.

Meanwhile, across town, there were children languishing and parents terrified of what would come next.

He lifted his head from the table, and sipped his cold coffee. The formulas wouldn’t make sense when he went back to them, though, so instead he tried giving Thomas a call. It rang five times and then went to voicemail. He supposed it was possible Thomas was already asleep.

“Hey Thomas,” he said when the tone chimed, “I’m just checking in. I know you don’t want to know… anything but I’m having some trouble here and I normally get my pep talks from Bailey but, well, she’s not around so I thought maybe…” he sighed, and then ended the call. “I don’t know what I thought.”

“Any progress?” Frances asked from nearby.

If he’d had more energy, he might have been physically startled. As it stood, he only gave a slight tremble and his heart quickly settled again. He waved a hand over the paper. “Progress? Yes. In the direction we need? I have no idea.”

“Keep working at it,” she said. “We aren’t having much luck either, though there is definitely an enchantment in place. Can’t tell where it’s coming from or what it’s supposed to do, but every bit of information helps.”

“I wish I could say I’d gotten even that far,” he muttered. He stared at the papers, and sipped the coffee again.

Frances took the mug from him. “I’ll get you a fresh cup. I came down to make more.”

“Thank you,” he told her.

She left him, and rounded the far end of the counter to start working on that. After the coffee was in the machine, and the drip had started, she leaned on the edge of the counter nearest his table. “What do you have so far?”

He shrugged. “I’ve charted some of the music—I think, it’s been a long time since I was in band, but I found an app to help me identify the notes—and I know what all the main equation forms represent. As to how they're related, though, I haven’t the faintest clue.”

“And you think they are?”

“This work is all theoretical, unproven, and based on the mystical equivalent of hearsay. So it would be more accurate to say that I hope they’re connected.” He rubbed his forehead, and stared at the tip of his blunted pencil. “I’m starting to think that I’m not cut out for magic.”

Frances gave a rueful chuckle as she straightened, and came around the counter to sit across from him. “Magic isn’t something you get to be cut out for or not, kiddo. You have it, or you don’t. If you do… well, it doesn’t go away. You get what you get. At least you have enough in you to learn. Some people aren’t so lucky.”

“Aiden’s talked about this,” Avery said. “What wizards call athos. The… extent of a person’s magical potential, like the intensity of it.”

“We just call it potential,” Frances said dryly. “Wizards do love their fancy words.”

“I suppose it means the same thing,” he said. “I’ve done magic. I can do a few cantrips. Simple hand spells.”

“Others fail even at that,” she told him. “If they’re lucky, they simply move on with life. Oh, they always seem a bit charmed—their magic finds ways to expressing itself in art, or vivid dreams, or even some mild psychic ability. Others, though… aren’t so lucky. They’ve got enough to feel it, but not enough to use it and they invariably become obsessed with how to get to it. They make deals. Warlocks, enchantresses, sorcerers—they all have to find allies, or masters, to help them awaken that spark and put it to use.”

“Are you… suggesting I should do that?” Avery asked cautiously.

“Good lords of old, no,” Frances snapped. “I’m giving you perspective. No, those people wreck themselves in the end. There’s no good at the end of a road like that, giving up control to some other force.”

“Right,” Avery sighed. He fidgeted with his phone under her hard gaze, finding that he hadn’t, in fact, somehow managed to miss a call from Thomas. He shifted in his chair and turned the phone off to conserve what little was left of it’s battery power, just in case he needed it.

Frances was still watching him. The coffee gurgled and dripped behind the counter. For a moment, he wanted to open up to her. She seemed, for the moment, to be at least a little friendly toward him. More so than ever before. His problems weren’t the sort he could talk with his own parents about.

That, however, seemed like it might push the envelop a little too far. He didn’t want to test the limits of her patience or compassion.

Frances, though, sat back and gave him a sad smile. “I understand how tough it can be,” she said.

“What’s that?” He asked.

“Things like you and Thomas.” She snorted when Avery started to shake his head. “Don’t be silly. I was almost married once. To a non magical man. Years and years ago.”

To Avery’s knowledge, Frances wasn’t involved with anyone. Bailey probably wouldn’t have known. Then again, though, maybe she wouldn’t. Frances tended to be all business. That she wasn’t, at the moment, made him a little uncomfortable. “What happened?” He asked. It seemed like the polite thing to do.

“We’d been together two years,” she said softly. “I was training under Anita, mostly, and had been for a while. It was getting harder to hide who I was, what I could do. Not as hard as it must be for you kids, what with everything going on; but hard anyway. I wanted to show him all of me, see?”

“Yeah,” Avery whispered.

“So I took the leap. I told him. He didn’t believe me, of course.” She chuckled, shaking her head. “So, naturally, I showed him. He believed me then. Oh yes. And… he threatened to expose me, and all of us.”

Avery sucked in a breath, aghast. “But… why?”

“He was terrified,” Fran said, sad but resigned. As if it were the natural response to magic. “Once people start really thinking about magic, what it is and what it can do, they start imagining all the things that are possible. All the things they can’t protect themselves from. Fear takes over, eventually.”

“Did he?”

“Turn us all in?” Frances shook her head slowly. “No. He didn’t. He didn’t get the chance.”

Avery felt a chill creep up his spine. “What… happened, then?”

Frances sighed, and stared at the coffee machine behind the counter as it sputtered out the last bit of coffee it planned to make. “Chloe and the Crones made him forget.”

“Just like that? They just made him forget you’d told him?” It didn’t seem so awful, though in theory memory magic was pretty risky stuff—you never knew what else you might tamper with.

But Frances frowned, and touched the simple copper bracelet on her wrist. “No,” she said quietly. “They made him forget about me.”

Avery’s mouth opened, but no words came out. He couldn’t imagine. His condolences probably wouldn’t amount to much, so instead he held his tongue.

She cleared her throat and stood to get coffee for both of them. When she came back, she set his mug down within reach but away from the papers he was working on. “Better get back to work. The sooner we solve this mess, the better.”

“Of course,” Avery rasped.

She stood for another long moment though, as if she might say something more. Instead, she only clapped him on the shoulder encouragingly, and left him to his work, disappearing into the back room and, presumably, up into the attic.

Avery watched her go, and wondered if there wasn’t a very good reason that Frances often seemed so hard nosed and bitter about life.

The breakthrough came at around three in the morning. He’d permuted the equations every way he could think of, and was looking at the values he’d assigned each note of the music, deciding that it was possible they were simply wrong. When he pulled the sheet of compiled notes and scales to him, he realized that it was probably because he’d inverted them; these values made more sense if… but no… no, he was simply looking at it upside down.

That was it.

“It’s inverted,” he whispered. A thrill of premature excitement tickled his stomach and almost made him laugh out loud before he got a handle on himself and began scratching out the new values into their respective parts of Aiden’s equations. Bit by bit, it all fell together until he was smiling, scribbling furiously, and tapping out a new rhythm with his fingertips on the table.

When it was done, everything filled out, all sides of a thirteen dimensional equation balanced perfectly, he let out a long breath that turned into laughter and then, finally, into a sob of relief. He could almost feel neurons in his skull untangling themselves, relaxing, melting into the ecstasy of triumph.

His body had been as heavy as a sack of stones before, but now it was light, and he dashed behind the counter, through the store room and up the stairs. At the top, he had the momentary good sense not to barge into the witch’s sanctum unannounced, and instead pounded on the door.

Chloe answered it, confused, alarmed, and possibly a bit irritated—until she saw Avery’s expression, and the tears on his cheeks.

“I did it,” he breathed, laughing again. “I have it. I know what we need to do!”

Chapter 17

Bailey and Aiden agreed that it would be prudent to approach Fran carefully and, if at all possible, while she was alone. So they returned to the heart of Coven Grove, to the bakery, and watched for a while from a bench across the street as Ara and Fran seemed to be sharing a moment of mourning together inside. If the bakery here worked anything like the bakery in the real world, Ara would leave first and leave Fran to finish closing. Frances, back in the real world, always seemed to be the one most content with spending the last hours of the day alone with the place.

That plan got a wrench thrown into its gears within a few minutes, however, when Bailey’s own near-doppleganger, Braley, trotted up the sidewalk and marched into the little building. Perhaps she was simply in a hurry, but her steps seemed a little crisp.

“Is that strange to you?” She asked Aiden when she made the observation.

“I’ve seen you walk,” he said. “You have to admit, you do tend to… march, a little bit.”

“What’s that mean?” She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Well,” he said carefully, “I mean… you walk with purpose. That’s all.”

She shrugged. “Okay. I’ll admit to that. But if someone had just killed my mother, that wouldn’t be the case. When Wendy passed I could barely get out of bed. I dragged my feet everywhere; it was like the life was just sucked out of me. I felt like I’d lost everything.”

“So what are you suggesting?” He wondered.

Bailey pointed at her Faerie carbon-copy through the window. “That while she might have lost a mother, she must feel like she gained something else.”

Aiden mulled this over a moment. “Are you sure you can judge her based on your own reactions?”

“I suppose not,” Bailey admitted. “But I think now would be a good time to pop in, don’t you?”

“We can agree on that at least.”

So they stood, and crossed the street, making their way to the bakery’s door.

They stood outside it for just a moment. The sound of some heated discussion was barely audible, none of it clear enough to make out—but someone was definitely angry about something.

Bailey tugged the door open, and led the two of them inside.

Whatever argument had been taking place evaporated quickly. Ara and Fran both offered professional grade smiles to their guests.

Braley, however, spared them only a brief scowl. She turned to Fran. “I’ll come by after you close. We’re not done talking about this.”

With that, the red haired girl marched past them; Bailey barely avoided being body checked as she did.

When the door closed behind the girl, Bailey turned to look askance at Fran and Ara. “Is… everything okay?” She asked, and then thought better of it. “Sorry… of course it isn’t. I mean to ask how you’re all holding up. Braley was Cleo’s daughter, wasn’t she?”

Ara nodded, and Fran shot her a brief, annoyed look before she sighed and nodded as well.

“She’s only just met her father,” Fran said. “Ara says she told you. Not that she has a right to go flapping her lips. She’s upset, of course, and confused about that relationship.”

“Is that what you all were arguing about?” Aiden asked, passably concerned for the harmony of the women’s friendship rather than interrogating them about what had happened.