A Witching Well of Magic: A Cozy Mystery (Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 2) (11 page)

The death of the Caves. Bailey had a sick feeling in her stomach all the way back to the Tour Office. How could it have happened in the first place? Why would the Caves let that happen? Was Aria right about Martha’s intention leaking into them, or however it worked? And did the Coven even know that this was a possible consequence? They hadn’t seemed as concerned as they should have been, if they did know, but then again it was always hard to tell with them.

Her headache faded to a dull, distant pain at least. By the time they got to the office, she could focus.

Aiden arranged the papers she’d taken pictures of on his desk; the order seemed important, but she couldn’t tell why. They just looked like random geometric scribbles to her. Except… they weren’t, really. That bit looked similar to the pattern of the writing in the first cave… another looked like the angle of some of the constellations in another. There were several similarities, but they were all overlaid on one another.

“
What is all this?” Bailey asked.

“
The short answer,” he said, and Bailey hoped he meant it, “is that these are the two dimensional representations of a three dimensional shadow of a fourth dimensional complex that is, in a sense, the matrix of the intelligence of the Seven Caves.” She wondered if Aiden knew the definition of ‘short answer’.

“
Never mind,” she said. “So, what can I possibly do? I don’t understand any of this.”

“
You don’t need to,” Aiden said. He pulled a small wooden box out from under the desk and opened it. The two stones from the exhibit were there. “Once the stone was stolen, I felt they would be better stored somewhere safe. My part of the spell will be in aiming and restricting the effect. Yours will be the establishing of a sympathetic link that my effect will leverage to find the third stone.”

“
I don’t have a spell for that,” Bailey said.

“
You can’t simply make one up?” He wondered.

She stared at him blankly. “You don’t know much about witch’s magic, I take it.”

“
Apparently not…” he pursed his lips. “Alright, plan B. We do this from inside the caves.”

“
How does that change anything?” Bailey wondered as she followed Aiden out of the office. His urgency was infectious, and she found that her heart beat faster.

“
The Caves respond to intention,” he told her. “All such constructs do, it is their nature. You will have to wing it. And I will… contend with the Genius Loci to the best of my ability.”

“
Wait, contend?” She stopped him. “What do you mean by that? Is this dangerous for you?”

He paused, and looked down at her, a soft smile on his lips. “I’m touched for your concern,” he said. “I calculate the risk to be acceptable. We should do this as quickly as possible.”

Bailey nodded once and let him pass. She followed him to the caves. Once inside, he handed her one of the stones.

She hefted it in her hand. It was heavier than it should have been, she thought. It was only about as wide as a compact disc, and no more than two inches thick, an oval with slightly rough edges. The carvings were intricate, up close, smoothed over from time. She wondered if they had come from this very place, or if they were from far away; from wherever the ancient witches in the paintings had come from.

This was a task better suited to the Coven. Trying it herself was probably even irresponsible. Dangerously so, just like Avery had said before. If she failed, and whoever had the stone actually did manage to take it far away, whatever the Coven ladies thought, it would be her fault. An act of negligence.

But they were here now. And if she needed to, she could always reach out to the Coven and try again; she hoped.

Her nerves were shaky. Her last attempt at magic that was beyond her current education had been disastrous. What if it happened again? What if it was worse? If the caves could be damaged somehow, what if she damaged them? The Coven would never forgive her; she would never forgive herself.

“
Are you ready?” Aiden asked.

She wasn’t. Not even close. “Yes,” she said, faking the confidence she didn’t feel.

“
Just feel your way through it,” he told her. “Remember; these stones are all connected to the cave, and to one another. Magic of any kind is about purity of intention.”

That was at least something familiar she could hold on to. She gave him an OK symbol with her free hand, and then shifted the stone so that she could hold it in both of her hands before her. On instinct, she got down on her knees.

Purity of intention. She needed to find the third stone. She focused on that, and tried to feel the tide of her magic rise to envelope her.

Somewhere else in the cave, probably nearby—with her eyes closed, the acoustics carried Aiden’s voice from corner to corner—Aiden began to chant softly. It wasn’t in any language Bailey was familiar with, and it wasn’t a song—not the type that the Coven had sung her before. It was clipped, and precise like… binary, or Morse code, she thought.

It wasn’t her part of the process, though. She focused on her own. Purity of intention.

She tried at first to speak simply, and in a variety of ancient languages. The pattern of most spells was pretty straight forward—they were constructed as requests, statements of symbolic intention like “let the lark descend from the sky and take up my words” to symbolize speaking a message that would be carried far away. It was all poetic and meaningful, and very difficult to come up with off the cuff. Bailey was not a poet.

So she abandoned that approach, and went instead for direct and desperate. She poured her magic out with her words, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and broken Egyptian. When that didn’t seem to be doing anything, she tried high German but was pretty sure she flubbed some of the words.

But it was no use. The spells in the spell book were covenants; they only worked because someone had made the agreement with the Caves to work them that way, even if they were carried down from other regions. She didn’t have anything like that on hand, nothing in her memory that would suffice…

It occurred to her in a flash of insight, something from beyond herself. If a covenant was what she needed, then that was what she had to get. A new spell. A new agreement with the Caves. Her intention, however pure it was, was the wrong one.

Aiden had started his part over again, she was pretty sure. He walked around her in a rough circle, and his chant had started from the beginning. Perhaps he would just keep going until she pulled it off.

Bailey turned her intention and attention not toward the ultimate goal of finding the stone, but instead toward petitioning the Caves. She needed their help, she told them, in a melange of languages—this she could have spoken in English, she supposed, but the strain of trying to speak in other tongues kept her focused and felt right, somehow. To anyone listening, it would have sounded like nonsense.

But to the caves, it seemed, it was anything but. She finished her makeshift invocation, pressing her magic into the stone and into the walls and ground of the cave, and poured her desperation and desire to protect her home with it.

And the Caves answered her.

Gloria Olson stared at her wall. From end to end it was covered with clippings from old newspapers, pictures from local yearbooks, photos of Martha Tells from before she left Coven Grove, and pictures of her three slightly younger friends from those days.

Chloe Minds, Francis Cold, and Aria Rogers.

These women were part of it, somehow. Whatever it was that Martha came back here to reveal to the world, these three women were intimately connected to it.

And so was Bailey Robinson.

Gloria knew this in her gut. It was a wordless knowledge that had settled there days after Martha was killed and had sat inside her, churning and souring and urging her on relentlessly. What did Martha want to tell her?

Something about the caves. Something about these women. For months it had driven Gloria near the point of insanity. She’d thought, for a while, that perhaps Trevor knew. He had that look about him, like he just knew everything that was going on with everyone; like he had secrets. She quickly learned that this was not the case. He wasn’t a source, but he was a tool. It hadn’t taken almost any urging to get him to buy the paper. Gloria was convincing, when she wanted to be.

Every time since that awful day, when the biggest lead of her life had up and died—and for something as petty and stupid as money—she had been close to it. So, so close. But every time she started pushing matching pieces together something happened. It was like trying to press two magnets together at similar poles; some invisible force repelled them apart and it never quite connected.

Until it had.

She stared at the pictures, and sticky notes, and lines of yarn she’d pinned to show color coded connections—Chloe Minds was at the center of most of it, right alongside that red-headed Robinson girl. Shetried to clear away some of the fog. All of this meant something. What was it?

And what did the stone have to do with it?

It had been an accidental find. She’d walked with Martha through the tour office dozens of times before she died, and she’d gone there a dozen times afterward to profile Poppy and her business for the paper. When a new owner came along, she had been convinced that Aiden Rivers was somehow a part of all of this. When everything else seemed somehow connected to the Caves, and to these women, there just wasn’t room for some random newcomer. Oh no. She had to find out just exactly who he was and why he was here.

And in a moment of, admittedly, poor judgment—she knew that in retrospect, but then again Aiden had just let it go, and wasn’t that suspicious?—she had committed her first blatant, overt crime. The security system was a joke; she’d hacked it in a matter of minutes. Poppy Winters was every bit the cheapskate Martha said she was. And that was when she’d seen it; a room that didn’t belong, a room that wasn’t there before, a door that had somehow eluded her. Her!

Gloria was observant. She saw everything. She never missed a beat and she had the next best thing to a photographic memory. That. Door. Had. Not. Been. There.

So, of course, she had to go through it.

And there, under a cheap Plexiglas case without even a real security lock on it—just some flimsy brass pad lock you could buy at a dollar store—was the key. She knew the moment she laid eyes on it. A stone with carvings almost exactly like the paintings in the caves and in her almost euphoric elation she’d taken it. And to her amazement, and her existential confusion, it had whispered to her.

She didn’t understand the whispers, but she had no doubt they came from the stone. It was special. It was connected to all of this, somehow, and it was the answer she needed if she could just figure out the damned question.

Her hotel room was a mess, and she had to clear files and photos and printouts of microfiche she’d dug up and cut pictures from in order to threw herself backward on to the bed. She rolled onto her stomach, and pulled the worn, carved rock toward her.

“
Talk to me,” she commanded it. “Tell me what I’m missing.”

Its whispers were no more clear than they ever were. If it weren’t so precious to her, she’d have chucked it out the window.

Maybe it was time to bring Trevor in on it. She was always careful to sleep with him in his room. He’d suggested sharing one, or even getting an apartment or a house—he did live here now, he argued; owning the paper was going to mean being here a long time.

Later, she told him, every time. It was too early. She liked her space. She liked missing him, it reminded her how much she loved him. Whatever it took. With a man like Trevor, you couldn’t give him everything he wanted or he got bored. She knew his type. Oh yes, she did.

Gloria blinked, and looked down at the stone. What had she just heard? Something different. She sat up straight, and held it to her ear as though that would make a difference. What was it? Louder? No… but more coherent. Like a code. Tap, tap, tap… something inside the whispering, something like… like…

She pulled it away from her ear when the stone moved. It tugged, ever so gently, toward the back wall of the room. The wall that faced the ocean. And the caves.

Gloria didn’t know what instinct informed her, but she knew, just like she knew all of the other things, that the stone was trying, somehow, to get home. It was calling, or being called, she didn’t know and she couldn’t explain how it was possible—she literally couldn’t; every time she tried to form the thought it became slippery and tried to wriggle away. But Gloria was a journalist and she was a damn good one. She knew how to look at the big picture and see not just what was there, but what wasn’t there.

It was the missing pieces that she always paid the most attention to.

She had to think quick. She couldn’t let this slip through her fingers. Not now, not when she was so close. She had to leave. She could take the stone with her, take it back down to California, back to her old stomping grounds. She knew a few people, experts, and they would pay money to help her solve this.

She threw the stone into a back pack, and slung it over her shoulder. Trevor would be disappointed. Not that she cared.