Witching There's Another Way: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 4) (8 page)

Chapter 12

The paramedics came, but it took time. The children at the bakery weren’t the only ones.

Once they’d taken the children, Avery watched the ambulances leave the curb with sirens blaring, carrying the children to the hospital and then went back into the bakery where the three coven ladies were whispering among themselves.

“What’s happening?” He asked them.

“Ave,” Thomas urged, “they don’t know any more than the paramedics do.”

Avery stifled a comment, and kept his eyes on the women.

Chloe glanced at Thomas before turning a meaningful look on Avery. Frustration was beginning to make Avery’s hands shake. “Chloe,” he said softly, “does it really matter? In the scheme of things?”

“Does what matter?” Thomas asked. He sounded nervous. “What’s going on, Ave?”

“It’s not your decision, Avery,” Chloe said. “It’s Rita’s.”

“Aunt Rita?” Thomas asked, curious. He tugged Avery’s shoulder until they were looking at one another, and peered into Avery’s face for an answer. “What does Rita have to do with anything?”

“Apparently nothing,” Avery muttered. He rubbed his neck, and then looked again at the women. “What am I supposed to do? Anita said—”

“Anita?” Thomas asked, confused. “Aunt Rita’s sister? Isn’t she… I mean… would someone just slow down and explain this to me?”

Frances scowled at Avery as he turned away from them. He put his hands on Thomas’ shoulders. “How old is your Aunt Rita, Thomas?”

He stared for a moment, and then shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s been old forever. Maybe in her nineties? Why does that matter right now?”

“And Anita? What about her?”

Thomas shook his head, “Honestly I thought she’d died a while back. But then, I’ve only met her a few times. She and Rita both came to mom’s funeral when I was still living here—you were there, you remember. But that’s pretty much the only time I saw Anita. So, she’s still alive?”

“Yes, Thomas,” Avery said slowly, “she’s still alive.”

“Avery,” Frances warned. “It’ll be no good.”

He shot her a look, and took a deep breath. “What’s going on with the children,” he said when he turned back to Thomas, “it… it isn’t natural.”

Thomas took a step back. He looked at the women, and then at Avery, and finally raised both hands. “Ah. Okay. And… you…?”

“I need to help do something about it,” Avery said.

After a tense moment, Thomas nodded slowly, and then turned to retrieve his coat from where he’d dropped it over a chair. He stood there for a long moment, and Avery’s heart seemed to have a hard time beating.

“I’ve heard stories about Rita,” Thomas said quietly. “From my mother.” He pulled his coat on. “Just… do what you need to do. I’d rather be left out of it though. If that’s alright with you.”

Stunned, Avery blinked a few times and then looked to Chloe for guidance. She offered none. He took a step toward Thomas who, at least, didn’t retreat again. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll… see you later on, then? If I can?”

When Thomas didn’t answer right away, Avery bit his lip to keep from saying more.

“I’ll be here,” Thomas said at last. “Just um… give me a call or something. Later. When you’re… you know, done.”

Avery nodded, and reached for Thomas but the man left the bakery before Avery could take his hand.

He turned to see three sets of sympathetic eyes; even Frances’, though she shook her head in disappointment. “Rita’s going to be furious.”

“Rita can stuff it, then,” Avery said. “How do you all keep these kinds of secrets?”

Frances snorted. “It doesn’t take much. No one believes in magic. Thomas’ mother was born without it, but she knew. It was her choice to keep her son in the dark about it; but it was his choice to stay there. It still is. Just you think on that.”

Avery only sighed, and leaned heavily on the counter. “So, what do we do about the problem?”

“Some time ago,” Chloe said as Avery led her into the Tour Office and from there into Aiden’s office specifically, “Aiden and Bailey worked magic together, in the caves.”

“When Gloria took the stone,” Avery said. “I remember. It was just before I started learning from Aiden.”

“How far along are you?” she asked.

Avery took a seat in Aiden’s office chair and shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s not like karate. I don’t get a belt each time I move up the ranks.” He pressed his fingers to the lowest drawer of the desk to his left, and focused. Intention, will, and commitment came together gradually before he spoke the formula for unlocking it. The words buzzed like bees over his tongue when he did, and there was a tight feeling under his fingers, like saran wrap being pulled too tight until it parted.

He tugged the drawer open.

“You don’t have a wand?” Chloe asked.

Wary about telling her too much—Aiden had warned him that witches and wizards didn’t share secrets about their own magic with one another—he only shook his head. Making a wand was advanced, Aiden had told him, and would take place for potentially years, unless Avery showed some prodigious talent for wizardry which, so far, he hadn’t.

“I’ve got it,” he said, drawing a heavy folio of loose pages from the drawer. “Everything Aiden’s got on Faerie magic. It doesn’t amount to much, but…”

“It’ll do. You can read it?”

Avery nodded once, and laid the leather folio on the desk. “Some of it’s beyond me, but I know enough to get a feel for the rest, I think. It’s not something we spend a lot of time working on.” He opened the folio, and pieced through the papers there. “Faerie magic is different from mortal magic in some fundamental ways. Call it a different carrier frequency. To break a Faerie enchantment, you have to tap into that frequency.”

“That makes sense,” Chloe said. “They’re from another world.”

“Precisely but that also means that working magic for them, here in our world, should require… something like a… I don’t know, think of it as a transmitter. Something to propagate the necessary frequency here—”

Chloe laid a gentle hand on Avery’s as he moved another page. It was shaking. “Try to relax,” she said.

“If Aiden were here, he would be more useful,” Avery said. “I’m just his apprentice. I’m not… I barely know anything in practice. Just theory; academic stuff.”

“You’re doing fine,” Chloe said. She straightened, and pulled up the chair on the other side of the desk. When she’d sat, she rested her elbows on the desk.

“Tell me if this sounds familiar,” she said. “Magic requires focus, and calm. If you approach it with fear, or self-doubt, it won’t obey. It’s a river—you have to be the calm, steady banks. It’s the ocean. You have to be the moon. It’s a fire. You have to be a pit in which it burns safely.”

Avery smiled weakly. “Familiar enough, yes.”

Again, she touched his hand. “Believe in yourself. We haven’t even had the chance to fail yet, okay?”

He nodded.

“Bailey’s a lot like you, you know.” He said as he peered at one paper after the other.

“Is that so?” Chloe asked. She sighed. “How?”

“Always encouraging,” Avery told her. “Always pushing everyone to be strong, one way or another.”

“She says similar things about you,” Chloe said. “You’ve been a good friend to her.”

“She’s been a friend to me,” Avery said. He snorted. “Since we were kids. She was the first person to talk to me when I was new in school. She even stuck up for me a few times when I started to… be different. Before I knew I was supposed to try and fit in.”

“Who said you were supposed to?” Chloe asked.

“My parents,” Avery sighed. It was fine, these years later. They made peace with who he was, even if they didn’t entirely approve.

Chloe was frowning, watching his face instead of the papers. “I’m sorry.”

Avery waved a hand. “It’s in the past. Bailey helped me. She… probably saved me.”

“She does that, doesn’t she?”

Avery smiled. “Yes,” he said, “she does.”

He ran his fingers over lines of text and graphs of spell formulae, looking for something that seemed relevant. Not all of the notes were made by Aiden—it was a collection of notes mostly related to the caves and their magic. Interspersed throughout, however, were older fragments that Aiden had collected from sites like Creswell and Chongquing, in China. Some of the most recent scribbles were added from passages in Professor Turner’s notes.

Somewhere near the middle of the collection, Avery thought he found something that might be useful. He set it aside, and picked through the rest. In the end, he found three pages in total that looked remotely relevant.

“This is all?” Chloe wondered. She looked over the pages but shook her head in confusion before she handed them back. “Wizard magic is… different. I’d forgotten.”

“Right,” Avery said. “Bailey’s father, right?”

“She told you,” Chloe said.

Avery nodded. “She tells me pretty much everything. At least I think. We had a few secrets, for a while but… I think we’re past that. I hope, anyway.”

Chloe’s lips grew thin as she looked thoughtfully at the pages in Avery’s hands. “Did she tell you… about why?”

“Why you gave her up?”

She bobbed her head once, seemingly ashamed as she turned her eyes down.

“Because of something called the Throne of Medea,” Avery said. “Right?”

Again, Chloe nodded. This time, though, she watched his eyes. He thought he almost felt the wisp of a touch against his mental shields. “I didn’t say anything about it to Aiden,” he told her. If she had tried to read his mind, he supposed he couldn’t blame her. If she asked, he would let her in.

She didn’t, however. Instead she only took a long breath and then stood. “If that’s all we can find here, then we should go back and see what we can work up.”

“Of course,” Avery said. He kept the pages he’d found, but put the rest back into the folio. “Have you had any encounters with Faerie magic before?”

Chloe shook her head. “But magic is magic. However it happens, wherever it comes from—it’s the thing all worlds have in common. It may act differently in Faerie, and be on a different… frequency, or something; but it has rules. We just have to figure out what they are.”

“Well,” Avery said, rounding the desk to leave with her. “Let’s hope we can figure it out.” He paused, and steadied his nerves.

“I mean,” he said, with more confidence, “let’s go figure it out.”

Chloe smiled at him. “That’s the spirit.”

Chapter 13

In the Faerie version of Coven Grove, Bailey and Aiden had arrived around midday. The fair was to begin in the late afternoon and would, Ryan assured them, run until late in the night. In the meantime, they were welcome to walk around town, so long as the minded the tents as the streets were taken over by the various vendors who came from all over to celebrate.

As Bailey and Aiden walked the streets of this other Coven Grove, they began to see some of the truth behind the illusion of the place. The so-called vendors did indeed come from far and wide, perhaps all over Faerie. Unlike those that inhabited Coven Grove, these outsiders appeared as themselves. When Bailey saw the first of them it froze her in her steps.

Some were tall, and lithe, dressed in garments that looked as though they were made of bark and moss and vines. Others were small, and barely dressed at all, flitting about on gossamer wings or leaping nimbly on tip toes. They were, on average, monstrously beautiful.

Others, however, were merely monstrous. Hulking beasts, some shaggy and others scaled, with great tusks and dropping jowls. They carried whole bazaars on their backs, and laid down their burdens by the tangles of tents not yet raised.

“Quite a sight,” Aiden breathed.

Bailey nodded as she watched what she imagined must be some kind of Troll swat something like a pixie away from its ear.

“Do you regret coming here?” He asked.

“No,” she said. The troll snorted, wiped something viscous and clear on its arm from its nose, and then bent to raise a tent pole. “In a way it’s… like a dream. One that I had a long time ago but forgot about, you know?”

“I do,” Aiden said. “In my case, I don’t think I ever dreamed it though. I just wanted to. I’ve chased it for so long and now, being here is surreal. Not what I expected but somehow exactly what I thought it would be. Does that make sense?”

Bailey glanced up at him. Aiden’s eyes were nearly glazed with wonder, even as they were wide with fear. “No it doesn’t,” Bailey said. “None of this does.”

He looked away from the Faerie denizens and met her eyes. “We have to make it make sense, then.”

They walked along the sidewalk, taking care to avoid some of the smaller creatures that crossed their path. Many looked up with intelligent eyes although some looked like common animals. None were, Bailey suspected.

“How can they know so much?” Bailey asked as she watched a dog trot off into the bushes—a dog she’d seen around the real Coven Grove.

“You mentioned the shadows before,” Aiden said. “Perhaps… they may not be able to enter the world fully, but they can sort of look over the edge? Peek under the door?”

“Must be,” Bailey mused. “I’ve been thinking about this… game. All games have rules, right?”

“In the stories they do,” Aiden said. “But they aren’t normally specific. Not at the outset.”

“No… but the hero always figures the rules out and then uses them to outsmart the Faeries, right?”

He considered this a moment. “Not always. The stories that involved successful ventures into Faerie, accidental or otherwise, are the ones that became popular I think. But there are others. Sometimes, people stumbled into Faerie and failed. Or encountered a Faerie on the road and were tricked.”

“They didn’t figure out the rules fast enough,” Bailey muttered. “So what are the rules here? What’s the game?”

“Like your… well, like this Ryan said; we just have to pay attention.”

That wasn’t quite right, though. Bailey paused again, frowning. “No, he didn’t. Well, he did but… he said more than that. He said it was a little late to be asking what game we were playing.”

“That’s a matter of perspective I think,” Aiden said. “Perhaps he meant that we should have known coming in that there would be a game to play.”

“That just doesn’t ring true,” Bailey said quietly, watching as Faeries went about their work. So far, she hadn’t witnessed any magic. She hadn’t tried any, either, though she could feel the strange presence of it in everything—a different kind of magic than she was used to; something wilder, more… alive, somehow.

As she watched the Faeries, she noticed something. One of the three from the bakery—Faerie-Frances—was having a heated discussion with another man that Bailey thought was one of the other Coven Grove dopplegangers.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Aiden wondered.

“Something serious,” Bailey said, and watched as the two finally parted. The man that Faerie-Frances was speaking with shook his head in disgust, and then took out a pocket watch to check the time, before he waved at someone and stuffed it back into his pocket.

Bailey sighed, and turned away to look in the direction of the coast—she wanted to see what the caves on this side looked like, and if there was anything there they needed to know about them here—but Aiden sucked in a sharp breath and touched her shoulder. He was pointing back toward the street.

When she looked where he was pointing, she gasped as well.

Speaking to the man—the one that Faerie-Frances had been arguing with—was another near-miss doppleganger. One with red hair, and narrow features, wearing jeans and a bolero jacket over a white tee shirt.

“Bailey,” Aiden said.

“No,” Bailey told him. “Just some other Faerie.”

“Everyone here is supposed to be someone from over there,” Aiden said. “We don’t know all the rules but we know that.”

Bailey felt sick. The girl was obviously supposed to be her. Aiden was right. And apparently she liked this other man because she was twirling her red hair around one finger and being… well, utterly ridiculous, as far as Bailey—the original, actual Bailey—was concerned.

“Well she’s a terrible copy,” Bailey muttered.

“Definitely,” Aiden agreed quickly. “What’s she doing there…?”

Faerie-Bailey was touching the man’s arm now, and she pointed at his coat pocket. He reached in, and brought out the pocket watch on a long gold chain. She marveled, and a moment later he smiled, and handed it to her. She didn’t want to take it at first, but he held up his hands and must have been insisting that she take it because she smiled up at him,  and then nodded before she put it in her pocket. She looked toward the bakery then, her lips moving, and the man turned to look momentarily as well. He waved a hand dismissively and then put it on her shoulder.

From there, it touched her neck, and then her cheek. He pulled it away quickly, though, and put it in his pocket. More muttering, and at last they parted ways.

He watched her go for some time.

“Well they’re obviously involved,” Aiden muttered. “Or at least he wants to be.”

“Thank you,” Bailey groaned, “that was clear. Floozy. Look at him. Who’s that supposed to be? He looks vaguely like someone I know, but from where?”

“Maybe he’s one of the out of towners,” Aiden suggested.

“I don’t think so…” Bailey cast about until she saw one of the Coven Grove doppelgangers carrying a sack of something—rocks? What on earth for? “Excuse me.”

The woman turned. Darla Simmons, the front desk clerk from the Sheriff’s department, looked at her from a vaguely Faerie face. “Oh, hello. You’re the visitors, right?”

“Yes,” Bailey said. “You have such a beautiful town here.”

“Oh, why thank you! Just wait till the fair starts.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Bailey told her, ignoring the oddness of hearing Darla be cheerful or remotely friendly. She pointed to the man who’d spoken with both Faerie-Frances and Faerie-Bailey. “That man, he looks so familiar. What’s his name?”

“Who, that?” Darla asked, peering in the direction Bailey pointed. “With the yellow button up? Why that’s Marcus Carson. He owns the carpet depot on the other side of town. And a couple of antique shops. Maybe the bakery soon. He’s a handsome fellow, isn’t he?”

“Sure,” Bailey said. “I can see it.”

“Why ever do you want to know?” Darla asked, some of her familiar suspicion creeping into her voice.

“Just curious,” Bailey said. “Trying to get a feel for the locals. Thank you so much. You must be… Darla, isn’t it?”

“That I am.” Darla winked at her.

“Pleased to meet you,” Bailey said. Aiden followed up, and when all hands had been shaken, Darla went about her business.

They watched her go until it seemed she was far enough away, and then Bailey tapped her foot and chewed her lip while bits fell into place. They didn’t quite make sense, but there was something… familiar in the air. It all seemed directed. Staged. What were they supposed to be paying attention to?

“Come on,” Aiden said gently. “Let’s keep exploring. Perhaps the game is to find Isabelle, look for clues to her whereabouts.”

“Like hide and seek?” Bailey asked.

“If you like.”

She followed him some way, and found herself looking for something as obvious as footprints or a stitch of cloth hanging from a thorn. Of course it wouldn’t be that simple. The game was supposed to be rigged against them, wasn’t it? Faeries, all the stories said, were tricksters. It couldn’t possibly all be what it seemed.

Hours of searching yielded only further proof that the Coven Grove of Faerie was, with a single exception, identical to the one from their world. That exception was a major one. There was no counterpart to the Seven Caves.

The tour office was there—though, no one was inside, and the doors were all locked. Aiden’s key didn’t work, however. That curiosity deflected, they made their way ultimately back up to main street where the fair was beginning to make noise. Nowhere in their exploration did they find any indication of Isabelle’s presence, and by the time they realized this Bailey was convinced that simply finding Isabelle wasn’t the ‘game’ they were supposedly playing.

That meant it was something else, but what that was had become, now, somewhat less clear.

Bailey wondered what was happening back in the real world. Or at least, the other world. Was time passing slower? Faster? Was it passing at all? She’d meant to ask the crones about that, but never gotten around to it. Now she wished she’d asked a lot of other questions.

The fair was in full force when they arrived, and they were greeted with cheers from everyone who saw them—including Marcus Carson. Bailey noticed him standing close to her off-kilter doppleganger, who didn’t seem to notice the fact they were almost the same person.

There was a parade, with a marching band that played that same familiar music but with trumpets, drums, and tubas. Somehow, the tune seemed to twist the sounds of those instruments into some shape they weren’t meant to take. Two of the women from the bakery where there—Faerie-Frances and Faerie-Aria—but Faery-Chloe wasn’t with them. Perhaps she was with Rita and Anita’s Faerie counterparts.

When the parade was over, the vendors began calling their wares. At first, Bailey ignored them—they hadn’t brought any Faerie cash with them—but after she observed a few sales she realized they weren’t using money. They used random objects instead. Stones—normal, everyday stones from the ground—sea shells, sand dollars, even grass and flowers. Vendors began to amass crates full of ‘currency’ and handed off their wares in exchange for them with no rate of exchange that Bailey could observe. They might as well have been using monopoly money.

“That’s it,” Bailey muttered. “That’s the game.”

“What?” Aiden asked. “Did you see something?”

“Yeah,” Bailey said, waving her arms around. “All of it. This is the game. Being here, being in Coven Grove. This isn’t a fair, it’s… I don’t know… a game board. Set dressing.”

“You think just interacting with the town is… the game?” Aiden asked. “But then what are the rules? What’s the goal?”

“That I don’t know,” Bailey said. “But at least we know what the game board looks like. We just need to figure out what the game pieces are.”

Just then, from far down the street, someone screamed.