The Hearth Witch's Guide to Magic & Murder, page 2
Gideon adjusted his suit where she’d rumpled it. “Just under two hundred.”
Her eyes betrayed her surprise momentarily, then narrowed in suspicion. “Why?”
“The council saw reason to wake you before the end of your sentence.” He chose his words carefully. Remaining vague. If he could pique her curiosity, he might be able to save her from her own damn pride.
“Getting off for good behavior? Or do I just snore too loudly for the other inmates?”
He sighed, disappointed. “I see prison has done nothing to curb your tongue.”
She raised her chin in defiance. “Two hundred years, it needs the exercise.”
“Then the rest of you should also welcome a walk,” Gideon clipped before he strode from the cell and down the hall.
She didn’t follow him, not at first, but he’d expected that. She would first debate if she could make a run, then dismiss the idea as quickly as it was conceived. Avery was often prone to petulance around him, but she was too smart to make such a grave error. Eventually, he heard what could only be described as a resentful stomp behind him, the cadence broken up by a slight limp in her left leg as she reacclimated to walking.
He listened to the rhythm of her steps. The limp improved, then seemed to act up again. Only this time it was different. It was consistent, like her walk had been set to a metronome. It was not the limp of someone whose leg had fallen asleep, it was the practiced step of someone living with an uncooperative limb. She was stalling, buying time to understand her situation before he could explain it to her. “We’re on a bit of a tight schedule, I can’t abide dawdling.”
“I have two centuries’ worth of pins and needles impeding my movement,” Avery spat, but it did nothing to slow the Archfey’s pace. “Perhaps your secretary can rearrange something, so my legs might have a precious second to acclimate?”
“Perhaps you can give me the credit that I can tell the difference between genuine struggle and an affectation.”
A defeated pause. “What about my things?”
At this, Gideon did stop to glance back at her, arching an eyebrow humorlessly. “What things?”
“My accoutrements, my personal effects. Upon my release from prison, they should be returned to my person, as is customary.”
“You had no personal effects.”
“I had a sword.”
Gideon stared her down, but she didn’t so much as smirk, so he chose to answer her with sincerity. “That weapon, as you might imagine, was permanently confiscated.”
“Hm,” said Avery, pursing her lips. “Very well, but I also distinctly remember a marvelous bag of toffees in my right pocket, and a silk cravat. It may have been two hundred years ago, but I am quite certain I did not stand trial in…” She gestured distastefully to the plain cotton breeches and shirt. “This.”
Gideon began walking toward the exit again.
Avery tsked. “Two hundred years, and you have still not found the time to develop a sense of humor.”
He could hear that her walking, while not hurried, had returned to its normal unhindered cadence.
“Quick!” she theatrically called out to the office. “Stop that man, he’s getting away!”
Having heard the commotion, but not the context, a confused Balaskas poked his head out of his office.
“Balaskas,” Avery bellowed in surprise. “Two centuries of blunderous investigations, and you are still managing to pass as a police officer? I would salute your accomplishment were it not heartbreaking proof of the death of common sense.”
The kallikantzaros glared daggers and shrank back into his office.
Gideon was holding the front door open for her.
“The politician holding the door for the prisoner,” Avery observed. “If that is not a metaphor—”
“I’m in no mood for your jokes.”
“You never were,” Avery muttered, stepping outside.
The downpour startled her into stillness. It took a moment for her to comprehend what she was feeling: the rapid individual points of pressure, the chill, the way fabric clung to her skin as it dampened. She lifted her hand to observe the waterdrops fall and pool in her palm, then gazed heavenward and stretched both her arms to the sky as if to greet an old friend. She inhaled the scent of storm-soaked earth, the cool air stinging her lungs.
Gideon moved his hand as if parting his way through a crowd, and the rainfall shifted to move around him, still falling toward him but unnaturally veering off before actually touching him. He eyed her, wondering if this was one of her ploys—but then she sobbed. Animalistic, delirious, and undignified, she sobbed—a sound he hadn’t heard from her since she was just a child. He stepped up beside her, unable to keep the concern from his tone. “Avery?”
“How did I ever forget the rain?” the changeling whispered, tears lost in the downpour.
He swallowed and his hand tentatively reached for her, hesitated, then retreated. He cleared his throat, resolved. “Come.” He walked down the steps to the vehicle where his driver was already waiting, opening the door as the Archfey approached.
The automobile stumped her as Avery first followed him with her gaze. It was, as always, curiosity that drew her forward, not obedience. That was fine; he was betting on that. He had also hoped that if he could show her even a shred of evidence of how the world had changed, she would be tempted to accept the proposal they had for her before she’d even heard it.
A horse and carriage was a logical thing to replace after two hundred years, he could see her accepting that, but she never would have imagined such a design. Her hand slid over the chrome body, pushing a slick layer of rain off the surface. She was investigating it—verifying that moisture could not be absorbed by the material that made its exterior and observing how the design and shape naturally redirected the flow of water.
“Self-powered?” She directed this question to his driver.
“Yes, ma’am. An automobile—or colloquially a car.”5
“Well, I suppose it is a wheeled vehicle,” said Avery, “though the term has evolved much since I last knew it.”
“As you might imagine”—Gideon spoke carefully—“the world has evolved much in your absence. You’ll find most things run on a kind of bottled lightning, including this.”
“Electricity?”
“You know of it?” Of course, she did. Of course, he knew she did. And he knew she would delight in telling him how she did.
“I used to attend the Royal Institution’s Friday Evening Discourses when I could—and of course the Christmas Lectures. Faraday spoke on its possibilities on multiple occasions.” Her mouth twitched in a sad, nostalgic sort of smile. “His 1837 lecture was particularly moving…”
“Get in.”
Avery hesitated out of habit.
Gideon sighed deeply. “Please?”
It might have been the unusual presence of the word “please” that coaxed her into sliding into the seat, though she did so while deliberately smearing rainwater over the soft black leather.
Gideon followed after, sitting in the seat across from her, and the driver closed the door behind them. “You’ll want this.” He meaningfully took hold of the seat belt and made a small show of how to pull it across the body and secure it.
Avery’s brow raised and she searched for a similar contraption on her side before mimicking the process. She shifted uncomfortably beneath it, but she said nothing. Then the car started and her attention drew raptly to movement outside the window. He watched her lips part ever so slightly. Awestruck.
It was certainly far smoother than any carriage ride she would have ever had—by comparison, the passage of the road beneath them was imperceptible.
She turned around in her seat to stare out the back window, just barely catching sight of the building before they turned onto the road. Like most of their buildings, it was glamoured to appear as something else to conceal it from mortal eyes; to Gideon, who had seen the city rise to what it was, it was a rather modern office building, but to Avery it must have been strange. She faced forward once more, her form slumping as the weight of lost time began to sink in. “Two hundred years.”
“Very nearly.”
Avery inhaled slowly as she processed this. “Two hundred years,” she repeated. Something dawned on her, a flicker of worry that cleared from her face almost the instant it marred it. “How is Father?”
“Still dead.”
Avery’s eyebrows raised. Truth be told, she was not alone in her surprise, but Gideon Blackthorn would be the last to admit to anyone that something had surprised him.
“Good.” She spat the word. Her eyes cut to him. “And you?”
“Still alive,” Gideon answered wryly.
Avery pursed her lips. “You have done well for yourself in his absence.”
Gideon said nothing. She was baiting him.
“Would you say you are the Winter Council’s chief lapdog now, or do they not play favorites?”
“I am on the council now,” Gideon said quietly.
“You were not crowned in his place?”
It was an insult, not a question, but Gideon chose to answer it anyway. “I believed a more democratic approach would be better for everyone. Though I do take his place as Winter’s voice should the five courts meet in this realm.”
Avery’s curled her upper lip, fighting the urge to say something. What came out, however, was an angry taunt: “Does it bother you how much you look like him?”
He met her eyes. In so many ways, he could still see the child too terrified to so much as breathe out of turn. Every muscle was tense and poised to react, and while she appeared to be locked on him, he could tell by the minute movement of her iris she was trying to keep an eye on everything in her immediate sphere. The majority of the world secretly breathed a sigh of relief the day the Erlking perished, but two hundred years later, Avery was still looking over her shoulder. “Not as much as it bothers you.”
Avery huffed and stared out the window again. Her expression softened slowly as awe overtook her anger once more.
There were more trees in London than she would have remembered, more gardens, both in parks and crafted into the architecture itself. Climbing vines and spilling over balconies, the endless green that had been carefully cultivated into the city was reminiscent of the great city of Tír na nÓg.
Her next question was genuine, and spoken with the kind of threadbare hope you don’t dare let anyone witness for fear they could shred it with a simple word. “Are…are we out now?”
Gideon knew if he wasn’t careful, he would be the one to shred that hope. “For all intents and purposes, we are still blissfully separated from the mortals, but there have been…complications.”
The anger bubbled up again—it was her comfort and old friend in unfamiliar situations. “Too many trying to reach across the divide? Hard to pay off the dead, I suppose.”
Gideon clicked his tongue in annoyance. What humans now called “the spiritualism movement” had been one of the largest cover-ups the Winter Court had ever had to manage. It had taken years of planning and subterfuge to throw off mortal suspicion, and yet even now remnants of it stubbornly lingered. “That persevered longer than we’d have liked but was easily discredited in the end,” Gideon lied. “A few of our own masquerading as charlatans, or discrediting those displaying their true gifts and attempting to out us, as you would say… Eventually belief and suspicions died among the Mundane.” The cold arrogance she’d so often accused him of finally reared its head. “It’s a shame you missed it. We enlisted a marvelously clever warlock. He accrued quite a bit of infamy among the mortals as a great debunker of so-called magic among the humans.” He could hear it himself now and cleared his throat to try to level out his pride. “History remembers it now as little more than a bizarre phenomenon.”
“Huzzah the empire,” Avery muttered.
“Long may it reign,” Gideon added with sincerity—he couldn’t help it. He was not a fool, nor an idealist about his government, but even in the middle of a sibling spat, he would not be caught shirking his patriotism. “Now, we have made some preparations for you—”
“Why am I here, Gideon?” Avery snapped. “I know I was not released out of the goodness of the council’s heart, so why not just tell me?”
Gideon uncharacteristically hesitated. “We need your help.”
Avery thought she must have misheard. “My help?”
“Our relations with the mortals have become increasingly strained.”
“Centuries of kidnapping, enslavement, enchantments, and hexes on an entire species will do that,” came the unsympathetic response.
“Strained to the point that our way of life may be on the brink of discovery by the day.”
Avery snorted. “And the council wants to enlist my help to keep them behind the veil?”
“As I said,” Gideon confirmed tersely.
Avery ran her tongue over her right canine. “Go to hell.”
“Avery—”
“I seem to recall a large aspect of the charges leveled against me was my ‘mortal sympathies,’ as it was so charmingly put.”
“We hoped you might appreciate the irony.”
“I hope you all choke on it.”
Gideon leaned forward in his seat, steepling his hands in thought. “There has been an alarming increase in magic-related crimes in Mundane sectors. It’s causing uncomfortable questions. We need someone who can navigate both worlds. Find the root of the problems before it’s too late. We need to keep things clean, orderly—”
“Blissfully separated?” Avery sneered.
Gideon sat back wordlessly. She was either letting her anger bleed out now, or he was losing her. If he was going to win her over, he would need to pivot soon.
“Is there any sort of incentive for aiding the regime that condemned me to half a millennia of nightmares?”
“I don’t suppose duty is enough to move you.”
“It could move a bowel,” she offered unhelpfully.
“In exchange for your assistance,” the wear was beginning to filter in as he spoke, “we are prepared to allow the remainder of your sentence to be lived out in a probationary fashion.”
“Three hundred years of being a dog on your leash.”
“We’d be willing to shorten it, depending on your cooperation.”
Her interest piqued. “The leash or the sentence?”
“Either,” Gideon answered cryptically. His lips very nearly hinted at a smile. “Depending on your cooperation.”
“Téigh trasna ort féin, agus an t-asal marcaíocht tú ar,” Avery cursed under her breath.6
“Three hundred more years of endless nightmares or providing your government with an essential service is hardly a difficult choice.” Surely she could see the merit in this. True, it was not ideal, but was she so prideful as to throw this opportunity away completely?
“Different bottle, still bloody arsenic.”
She was. Of course she was. Gideon rubbed his temple delicately with his fingertips. “You always were overdramatic.”
“Must be the human in me,” came the spiteful answer.
Gideon turned to the briefcase resting in the seat beside him, opening it carefully to produce a photograph. His last resort. The one that had to work. “King’s College Hospital interns were set to perform an autopsy earlier today, yet when they examined the body, they found a rather vital organ missing.”
Avery noticeably shifted. “So?”
“In its place, they found rotting plants wrapped in straw, with no visible cuts to the body but their own.”
Avery mulled this information over. “You’re telling me the organ was missing before anyone made an incision?”
“Correct.” Gideon nodded and handed her the photograph of the body. He could see her eyes light up at the photograph itself—it was unknown, it was unlike anything she’d seen before—like the car, it was technology that had bloomed in her absence. He took in the surreptitious glances she flashed both at him and then the photograph. She wanted to ask. She was dying to ask. The true trouble being, of course, she was dying to ask anyone but him.
Avery leaned toward the window, using the illumination of the streetlight to better make out the details, her brow furrowing. “Not just an organ—the brain. Stolen?”
“I do not imagine the young woman gave it away.”
There were countless things one might do with a human brain. Those options increased when the brain was healthy, and they became even more interesting when the brain was chosen specifically because of whose it had been. “One of ours?”
Gideon shook his head. “Mundane.”
“You said they didn’t know about the missing brain until the intern’s autopsy—what was the coroner’s initial conclusion when she was pronounced dead? Aneurysm? Heart failure?”
“Car accident.”
Avery shifted her focus from the photograph, her mind flooding with new questions, new alleyways, new possibilities. “And the driver?”
“She was the only one in the car.”
Avery blinked, hard. “You’re suggesting she was driving without a brain?”
“You have been out of London far too long. Stay a while, it might not seem so far-fetched.”
Avery scowled the way she always did when trying to dissuade a laugh. “How was she driving?”
The joke, however trite he may have found making it, had given Avery away. She did not banter back, she did not accept the offered deflection, she remained honed on the puzzle he had laid out before her. “She was found alone in the driver’s seat of her car, presumably in the same state as at the time of her autopsy. How and why she got there is your department, I would be loath to speculate.”
It was working. He could see her mind spinning with the possibilities. The uses of a brain in various spells alone included divination, protection, evocation—conjuration—and that was just the list of legal uses.
Her fingers drummed, and he could practically feel her heartbeat quickening. The rain, she may have forgotten; the feeling of the earth beneath her feet, the taste of food, those she may have forgotten, but this… This, he knew, was seared into her soul: the adrenaline of the unknown.
