A Witching Well of Magic: A Cozy Mystery (Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 2) (12 page)

She’d only ever been in Coven Grove for one reason, and it wasn’t Trevor Sullivan or Martha Tells.

It was exhilarating.

This, Bailey thought, was what magic should feel like. It lived in her, swelling and sweeping, and singing in her bones. More, she could feel Aiden’s magic—a lattice of stiff, gossamer threads into which her own magic flowed, filling the spaces in between and resonating along the pattern until the two seemed joined together in a tapestry that was alive, and vital, and filled with purpose.

When she finally opened her eyes, she saw that the stone in her hands had a faint glow to it. More on one side than the other.

The stone that Aiden held was glowing as well, more faintly, but in a distinct direction.

Bailey was astounded. For a moment, all she could do was stare.

Aiden, however, seemed more troubled than impressed. “It won’t do,” he said, shaking his head. “I get what it means; there is a degree of directionality, but it’s just not specific enough…” he turned experimentally, and walked around Bailey, and then rotated the stone in his hands.

After a moment he flipped it over, and then back. “Alright,” he said, “I think we can make it work. We’ll have to split up, and triangulate a direction using the median point.” He tapped one side of the stone, where the glow seemed to reach it’s subtle apex.

“
In English, Aiden,” Bailey said as she stood, holding her stone like something potentially radioactive.

“
If we’re far enough apart, and we coordinate, we should be able to pinpoint the location of the third stone,” he said. “I’ll check my GPS location, and you check yours, and I’ll do the math.”

It sounded reasonable enough. Bailey would stay in the caves, while Aiden went far enough away to make the distance meaningful.

That was when they realized there was a hitch. The moment Aiden left the cave, the spell began to weaken. Bailey was prepared to believe that it only had power inside the cave, but Aiden urged her out with him and the truth was revealed. The magic relied on them both. Too far away, and it would fail.

“
We need someone else to take one of the stones,” Aiden said.

“
Avery,” Bailey told him. “He knows… about all of this. Not about you. Well, nothing specific anyway…” she winced. “Sorry.”

“
You are forgiven, if it means we have an ally in this. Can you get him here? Quickly?” He checked his phone. “I would estimate the spell has a shelf life of approximately an hour. Perhaps less if your friend takes the stone with him.”

Bailey called Avery, muttering under her breath for him to pick up, pick up…

“
Bailey?” Avery answered.

“
Ave! I need you, come to the caves. Or, no; we’ll meet you at the tour office.” No sense in making him hike down and waste time if they were on a clock.

Avery lowered his voice. “Is this about the thing?”

“
The thing?” Bailey asked. There was only one thing he could mean, she supposed. “Yes, the thing. We might be able to find the stone.”

“
I’m a little occupied at the moment, Bee.”

“
Get unoccupied, Avery; this is important.” Bailey gave Aiden a long suffering look of apology for her friend’s resistance.

“
I’m with Piper, we’re in town,” he whispered. “I can’t just leave. She’ll want to know why and I won’t lie to her.”

Bailey wouldn’t want that either. She made a quick decision, and prayed it would work out. “Then bring her.”

“
Are you sure?” Avery asked.

“
Yes, I’m sure. Just come fast. Tour office.”

“
If you say so,” he said. “Give us ten minutes. Maybe a little more.”

They hung up, and Bailey walked with Aiden back up to the office. “I hope you won’t mind coming out to another friend of mine,” Bailey told him.

“
The fewer the better,” Aiden said. “Admittedly, I’d like the whole town not to know. Just for simplicity’s sake and all. Magic tends to ruffle feathers, for some reason. Historically.”

“
You can trust Avery and Piper,” she assured him.

“
As long as it doesn’t get to be a habit. Three is just about my limit, I think.”

Well… then he was three over. But now didn’t seem like the best time to have that talk. She would, though, she promised herself. She just wasn’t entirely sure how. Or when…

Avery had given Piper the short, messy version on the way to the tour office. By the time they arrived, they were down to about half an hour according to Aiden, who introduced himself to Piper as graciously as he could, under the circumstances. “I’m Aiden. I’m a wizard. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

Piper shook his hand, mouth open, staring from Aiden to the glowing rock in his hands. “Oh… nice to meet you… Aiden… Bails?” She looked to Bailey for some kind of guidance.

Bailey handed Avery her stone. “I promise to explain all of this at some point,” she said. “I wish I could now, but we’re on the clock. I need you to drive to the other side of town, fast, get yourself facing north, and then figure out which direction the stone is pointing.”

“
To within about two degrees,” Aiden added. “If you please. Triangulation needs to be as exact as possible.”

“
Sure,” Avery said. “Why not? Who doesn’t like some magical triangulation…”

Bailey kissed Avery’s cheek, and then gave Piper a hug, careful of her belly. “Thank you. Thank you both.”

Piper was still bewildered as Avery led her back to their car.

Aiden watched them go, frowning.

“
Everything alright?” Bailey asked him.

He sighed, and shrugged one shoulder. “I’m not used to telling people my secrets,” he said. “It’s unsettling. Comforting, too, somehow, but… definitely unsettling.”

“
I know how you feel,” Bailey told him. “You can trust them, though. I promise. They’re my best friends and believe me—they can keep secrets.”

“
If you say it is so,” Aiden said, “then I believe you.”

The two of them got into Aiden’s car to wait for the call. It came soon enough. “I got it,” Avery said. “Piper, shine that light here… okay… uh… so, south by southeast… five, ten… one-hundred forty two degrees and… maybe… three minutes?” He related his GPS position as well when asked.

Aiden leaned over Bailey’s lap to reach the dash, and dug through it briefly before he withdrew a compass. He laid it on the stone, shined the light from his phone on it and then ran some quick calculation in his head, ticking off invisible numbers in the air.

“
Did we get it?” Avery asked.

“
Maybe,” Bailey muttered, and waited for Aiden to finish.

After a moment, he reached over Bailey again and pulled out a map. He unfolded it, turned it one way and the other…

“
It’s here,” he said, pointing. “Very near the highway. What’s there?”

Bailey peered. “Nothing, really. It’s just outside down. There’s a hotel, here,” she pointed to roughly where she remembered it being.

“
Guys,” Avery said. “It’s changed. Almost two minutes, further south.”

“
It’s moving,” Aiden said. “Right. We’d better move.” He pulled out of the parking lot, and floored it to the highway.

Gloria stared at road signs that didn’t make sense. She had just passed this intersection, hadn’t she? She’d taken a right, toward the highway but then… no, then she’d taken another right and and then a left but…

She shook her head. No, she’d gone around in a circle. She remembered, now. Well, then no more turns. She’d drive straight ahead.

It was the stone, she knew. And maybe the Caves themselves, or this town. She had thought Martha was being poetic when she said the Seven Caves had a life of their own but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she meant it. Gloria had a stack of reports and incidents surrounding the place. Strange goings on, the sort that ended up in the National Enquirer, where no one would believe them.

Not her, though. She wasn’t going be an ‘incident’. Gloria Olson was in control of her own mind, her own life, her own destiny, and she was going to beat this thing.

She watched the roads pass by. She saw the sign to get to the highway and paused for a long moment at that intersection to think through which turn she was taking. Right. No… ah, tricky tricky. “Nice try,” she muttered to the backpack. “No such luck.” She very carefully took the left turn. A wave of dizziness hit her. She was tired.

No, no, no. She wasn’t. It was just trying to keep her from leaving.

She was aware, distantly, that there was a part of her that qualified as a raving lunatic. She could feel the quality of her own thoughts, their erratic, manic nature. That wasn’t her. She knew that, too.

All she had to do, though, was think carefully, proceed intentionally.

Okay. The ocean was on her right, the hills were on her left. She could do this. She could beat this thing. She was Gloria Olson and she was going to blow the story wide open.

It took five minutes before she realized that the landscape had, somehow, switched on her. There was a turn in the highway and then… no. There wasn’t a turn. The highway was empty and she had made a U-Turn.

“
No you don’t…” She muttered.

Gloria pulled off to the side of the road. It was an insane thought, yes; she knew it when she had it. But if she could lower the variables and limit the choices she had to make, it couldn’t trick her up. She got out of the car and hoisted the backpack over her shoulder.

On foot, then.

Already, she was feeling more clear-headed. Maybe the further she got from the Caves, the less power they had over her. That was the ticket. Just keep moving, Gloria. Just keep moving.

“
Slow down,” Bailey said.

“
I’ll gladly pay the ticket if we get one,” Aiden told her, “but time is of the essence.”

“
No, I don’t mean that,” she held up the stone. The direction of the glow was veering sharply. “We must be close.”

Aiden did slow down, and they kept their eyes peeled. That was when they saw the car around the next bend. It was pulled off of the side of the road, pointed toward town. The lights were still on; someone had left it there in a hurry.

They pulled off the road themselves and sprinted across, but the light of the stone was pointed off beyond it. “They’re on foot?” Bailey wondered.

“
And it looks like they were driving back toward town,” Aiden added. He thumped the car on the hood. “The Caves were trying to direct them back. Whoever has the stone must think that they can just walk a straight line away to outrun it. Feel like a hike?”

Bailey did not feel like a hike—her flats weren’t made for it. But that didn’t change what had to be done. She followed Aiden up the steep incline into the wooded hills that would eventually become the mountains. It was madness for anyone to think they could hike to the next town through this unless they were well versed in survival and hiking. Then again, maybe whoever had taken the stone, was.

Ten minutes in, they knew the direction to go, but the light of the stone was beginning to fade.

“
We have to do something,” Bailey said. “Can’t you… I don’t know, do magic to make us faster, or slow them down, or… something?”

Aiden shook his head. “That’s beyond me, and most effects are line of sight without something personal to form a link with.”

“
What about the stone, then? Like in the cave? If we can’t do something about the person who has it, can’t we do something with this?” She held up the fading stone.

Aiden tapped his lip. “Maybe. Let me think…”

The light was very nearly out. If the thief went even a few degrees left or right, there was no way Bailey and Aiden would find them out here; not in broad daylight, much less night time.

“
I do have a thought,” Aiden said.

Bailey nodded sharply. “Anything.”

“
The same spell as before, but I can make a minor modification, now that I know there’s a visual effect. Can you do your part again?”

She would try. It was the best she could manage.

The magic was harder here. Much, much harder. Bailey reached for it, and pulled with all her will, and tried to sink and float and all the other things she was supposed to do while Aiden drew thin lines of light in the air with his wand and spoke his staccato incantations.

“
Trust your instinct, Bailey,” Aiden told her. “Trust your intention. All you need is to connect this stone to the other.”

“
I’m trying,” she muttered, irritated both by his pushing and her own inability to do this thing she’d done not an hour before.

Her irritation grew hotter the more she failed to push any kind of connection through, until her pulse was pounding and she was panicked again. She took that same raw emotion and pushed it into the stone, and chanted like a babbling loon trying to urge the right words the right intention, the right everything, but nothing seemed to be working.

The light of the stone winked out.

Bailey’s heart broke. They’d lost. They’d lost because she had failed. She didn’t know enough, she wasn’t strong enough. She’d tried to do it herself instead of trusting the Coven. Her irritation grew into anger, and she wanted to scream that it wasn’t fair; they should have taught her more, and told her about the stones, and shown her what was important so she could have been more vigilant. All the Coven’s secrets were pointless if the Caves died, weren’t they? What were they protecting?

That anger burned in her. She’d had the magic, and now it was going to go away. Just like it had for Martha.

“
Dang it!” She shouted it. It wasn’t cathartic like she thought it would be. But it did do something.

Like the last word of a spell, vocalizing her anger tripped some final gate, and the magic that had been invested into the stone trembled, and then burst with an invisible, cosmic pop that she felt in her hands.

Bailey nearly dropped the stone.

Aiden, however, gave a hoot of victory, and grabbed her by the shoulders, and pointed into the forest.

Out there, some distance away, a star had lit up in the dark.

The light took Gloria by surprise. Suddenly, the trees around her were lit as if by a small sun. She turned, looking for the source of it, but her shadow only raced ahead of her. Behind her, then. She spun as though she might catch someone with a flashlight, but she was alone.

It only occurred to her then where it was coming from. The stone. The stone was glowing. No, not just glowing—burning, like some radioactive element in a cartoon, bright, greenish white that was so intense that it shown through the fabric of the backpack.

It was magic. That was the missing piece. Actual, real, brightly burning magic. It was beautiful.

It was terrible.

She dropped the backpack as if it were actually on fire, though there was no heat, and she staggered back a few steps. All the pieces seemed to come together in her head, this one missing ingredient—and it was so obvious, right in front of her nose! How had she missed it?—bringing the whole stew of confusing chunks together for her.

There was magic in Coven Grove. Martha had known. She had known about it all along!

A cold, terrible thrill rushed through her veins. If there was magic, then there were people at the root of it. Martha; it had to be. And if she was part of it then the women she was so intimately connected to were almost certainly part of it as well. Maybe that’s what had really happened to Martha.

Oh, it was too horrible and too perfect to even contemplate. What if these women had driven Poppy mad? Driven her to kill Martha? It made sense; a twisted, awful sense, but it fit. They’d killed her to keep their secret. And made poor Poppy pay the price for it…

Footsteps were approaching rapidly. Gloria panicked, and started to reach for the stone but… no, she would be caught. There was no telling what they would do to her. Cut your losses, Gloria, she thought. Live to fight another day. Expose the secret Martha died trying to reveal.

She grabbed for the backpack, though; it had identifying articles in it. She dumped the small star out of it onto the ground, and then dashed away, beyond the reach of it’s light, to hide behind a tree. It wouldn’t be a total waste. If she could get a good look at them…

There were two. A man and woman, she could tell that much. But with that light between them, burning Gloria’s eyes, she couldn’t identify them. The woman was shorter, the man was taller, maybe… three, four inches, it was hard to say. Details, details… Shoulder length hair for the girl. A jacket, maybe for the man; the lines of his arms and shoulders were stiff and straight.

And then, they picked up the stone. The light went out. It was darker than black for long minutes while Gloria’s eyes adjusted, and the ghost of the burning stone cleared away from her eyes.

When they did, the two people were gone, and the stone, presumably, with them.

But Gloria remembered. There was magic. A man and a woman. She wouldn’t forget. And she was calling in backup.