Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) (19 page)

“I can’t talk about that.”

I sighed. “That’s a yes, then. Listen, they think that the coven killed their leader. There’s no time to explain. The main thing is that Niall is coming after you, and I need to get to you first if you want to live. Tell me where you are.”

“I’m at the coven offices, but—”

I was already starting toward them. “This isn’t the time to argue. Are there other witches there?”

“We’re in the middle of an operation, they’re all—”

“Then you’re not safe there. I want you to head for a public place. Castle Hill will still be fairly busy. I’ll find you there. Stay on the line.”

“Elle—”

“How long do you think it will be before Niall gets there, Rebecca? You can try digging in if you like, but I don’t think your odds are good that way. And, if you kill
him
, then it won’t just be Niall you have to deal with. Get to Castle Hill, let me find you, stay on the line.”

“Okay.” I was just lucky that Rebecca didn’t argue more. We didn’t have enough time for her to argue. Niall was coming for her, and he had to know that I would be trying to stop him. He thought he was doing what my conscience wouldn’t allow me to do.

I ran for Castle Hill, using whatever speed and energy I could find. I pulled in emotion from the crowds around me, thinner now in the evening, but still out in force in a tourist city like Edinburgh.

“Where are you?” I asked Rebecca.

“I’m just down the street from the office.”

How could she be moving so slowly? No, it wasn’t her moving slowly, it was me moving quickly. The trouble was, Niall could move just as quickly when he needed to.

“I think I can see his car,” Rebecca said, and now I could hear the fear in her voice.

“Run, Rebecca,” I shouted.
“Run.”

I ran, too, trying to keep my ear pressed to the phone, trying to get some sense of what was happening. I could hear Rebecca’s breath coming harder. I thought I could hear the slap of feet on pavement. I could definitely hear people around Rebecca.

Niall would be somewhere behind her. How would he be planning to do this? Would he simply run her over in a hit and run? No, Niall was a hunter. A predator. He’d spent decade after decade staying hidden. He would never do things so obviously. He would want to do things in a way that left fewer traces.

Which meant that I still had a chance. I sprinted for Castle Hill, fast enough that people looked around and stared at me as I ran. Or maybe that was just that I still had Siobhan’s blood on me. I hadn’t had a chance to clean it off before I’d had to run after Niall and Rebecca. I started to push away the crowd’s attention automatically, hoping that no one would call the police. The last thing we needed was some poor police officer caught between Niall and Rebecca.

I reached Castle Hill, looking through the crowds. It wasn’t as busy as it always was during the Fringe, but there were still plenty of people about in the early evening. The castle was still a draw for tourists, even after the shops had closed for the day. I looked out over the couples and the tourist groups, the students on their way to clubs elsewhere and the businesspeople trailing home late from work, trying to pick out two tall, golden-haired figures. One was the man I loved, the other, the friend he was going to kill.

“He’s behind me, Elle. Hurry.”

It was so strange, hearing Rebecca that frightened. She was a fully trained witch, and even if she wasn’t a battle witch, she had more than her share of combative magic. She’d been willing to be part of the team to hunt Niall down when I’d first met him. She’d been prepared to come after him at the castle when she’d thought he was a killer. Yet now, she was doing a good impression of a horror movie extra.

Maybe that was just down to being the hunted rather than the hunter, or maybe it had more to do with the part where Niall and I had injured and terrified her so many times. I’d beaten her, slammed her against walls, threatened her and more. I’d used fear as a weapon against her, and eaten chunks of her power, while Niall had turned whole crowds against her. We’d both had good reasons for doing all those things, but now the only question was one of whether Niall was about to do something far, far worse to her.

I spotted Rebecca first. She was well away from me in the crowd. She was glancing behind her, and I could see her with her phone still pressed to her ear. She looked smaller, somehow, standing there.

“I can see you, Rebecca,” I said. “Just stay where you are and everything should be fine.”

I started toward her, and as I did, I saw Niall. He was behind Rebecca, closing in on her quickly, sliding through the crowd with such ease that I knew he had to be pushing them away from him with his talents. Since Rebecca didn’t seem to notice him, I guessed that the effect was somehow extending to her.

Which meant that, with the terror of the chase, Rebecca hadn’t even thought to throw her mental shields up.

“Rebecca, you need to get some shields up. Protect yourself as tight as you can, and Niall won’t be able to—”

“Rebecca, I need you to come with me.” The words were quiet, away from Rebecca’s phone but still close to her. I recognized Niall’s voice instantly. “Put your phone away and come with me.”

“O-okay.” As soon as I heard that, I knew that Niall had caught her with his power. Rebecca would never have agreed to it otherwise.

I ran toward them, but for a moment, I found myself caught behind a clump of students discussing which club they were going to head over to together. A couple of big, muscular guys who were probably rugby players in their spare time stepped into my line of sight and I lost track of Rebecca for a second.

When I got past them, she and Niall were gone. Clearly, they hadn’t vanished into thin air, but they
had
vanished into the crowd. I pushed past people, trying to catch sight of them again, pushing my senses out to try to find any hint of Niall.

There, ahead of me. I could feel Niall there, and where Niall was, Rebecca would be, too. I sidestepped around a couple of tourists and briefly caught a glimpse of two tall, fair-haired figures making their way down toward Upper Bow. Niall’s arm was around Rebecca’s shoulders and she was leaning against him, almost staggering. Together, they looked almost like a vacationing couple who had perhaps overdone the entertainment in the city and were now holding one another up while they made their way back to their hotel.

Where was Niall taking her? To somewhere away from the crowds, presumably, but even as I watched, I saw him glance back at me, obviously spotting me. He had to know what I was doing, which was presumably why he did what he did next. He spun Rebecca toward him and he kissed her.

I didn’t know which hurt more, the sight of Niall kissing someone else right in front of me, or the knowledge of what he was really doing. He was draining her there in the street. What was his plan? To drain her and then call for help, claiming that she’d had a heart attack? Certainly, no normal human would know the difference, and since Niall was still pushing away everyone’s attention, probably no one would remember enough about a man kissing her before to let the coven prove anything.

I wasn’t going to let that happen. I ran at the pair of them, hitting them with what was actually a good body check, knocking them apart through brute force. Niall couldn’t drain anyone if he wasn’t in contact with them. He staggered, but recovered elegantly. Rebecca wasn’t so lucky. She fell to her knees, gasping.

I put an arm around her. “What do you think you’re doing, Niall?”

Niall looked at me without obvious remorse. “I knew that you could never do this, and so, I had to.”

“No,” I said, “you didn’t.”

“She has done so much to hurt us, and now, she has been working to catch us up in the middle of something that could have gotten you killed. That almost got Siobhan killed. Do you think she will stop if we merely ask her nicely?”

“It’s not her, Niall,” I said, starting to pull Rebecca to her feet. “You’re okay, Rebecca. You’re going to be fine.”

Niall shook his head. “You’ve said yourself that the coven is behind this. Unless I have missed something very important, the coven in Edinburgh means
her
. Or are you going to tell me that she knew nothing?”

“Knowing something and being behind it are two different things,” I pointed out. I turned to Rebecca. “How much
did
you know, Rebecca?”

Rebecca groaned and leaned against me as she stood up. “Maybe if someone would tell me what this is actually about, rather than trying to kill me? How much did I know about
what
?”

“You see,” Niall said. He looked like he wanted to leap at Rebecca and finish the job he’d started. I carefully kept myself between them. “She’s lying, even now.”

She probably was. There was no way she could have known nothing.

“I know the job at the archaeological dig was a distraction, Rebecca,” I said. “Something to keep me from looking too closely at the goblins. Or at my mother’s death.”

Rebecca shook her head. “The idea was to keep you out of trouble. We couldn’t afford any incidents while the representatives were here. Anything that would cause more trouble. I was trying to protect you.”

“Is that what you call leading her right over to a Wisp trap when we went to that site?” Niall demanded. “The people following us? The attempt to leave us in the middle of a horde of angry goblins?”

“I don’t know anything about them,” Rebecca insisted. I could see people looking at us and I realized that I’d stopped pushing away their attention. I only hoped that they decided we were some kind of odd street performance. “What’s going on here?”

I did my best to explain. “Rebecca, someone in the coven has been working with one of the goblins. Together, they murdered the leader of the goblins. They’ve been manipulating me. They tried to kill Siobhan. They very nearly did kill her. They’ve been playing some game with me from the dig onward.”

Rebecca looked at me with obvious surprise, and then shook her head. “I didn’t have anything to do with all that. I was just told to try to keep you out of the way.”

Niall obviously wasn’t going to let it go that easily. “The Wisp—”

“In case you didn’t notice,” Rebecca snapped, “I was the one who stepped on that. I’d been told that there was evidence pointing to the goblins there.”

“Told,” I repeated. It made sense. “Just like you were told to give me the case in the first place. Just like you were told to point me back to it, right at the point where I started to look closer at my mother’s murder.”

“What does Annette’s death have to do with anything?” Rebecca asked.

“I told you that my mother was talking to the goblins before she died,” I said. “Victoria found her doing that and killed her. But how did she find her? Someone told her that my mother would be coming. Someone she trusted. Someone who would probably be very keen to see that I didn’t start talking to the goblins myself or looking too closely at the case.”

Rebecca froze. I could feel her fear as she looked at Niall. I could feel her confusion, but I could also feel the beginnings of her anger and her sense of betrayal.

“She told me that I was protecting you. That the rest of the coven didn’t trust you. That they thought you were going to turn out like…”

“Like Victoria.” I smiled tightly. “They haven’t been the only ones worried about that recently. You agreed to give me a nice case to distract me, and you helped to set up the agreement because that would make things clearer, and then you agreed to help make me suspicious about the goblins because…”

“Because that way, it would show you weren’t friendly with them,” Rebecca insisted. “No one trusts the goblins right now. Do you think a battle witch like Flora is here by accident? After what happened a few months back, everyone’s worried that they’re planning to come up and take back the surface. Of course, if it’s true that one of their leaders is dead, maybe that will stop that from happening.”

I shook my head. “It will
make
it happen. You’ve helped do that, Rebecca. Someone has been manipulating me, but she’s also been manipulating you. You’ve been used.”

“She…she wouldn’t. Elizabeth isn’t like the other two.”

“No,” I said. “I’m starting to think that she’s much, much worse than both of them.” I looked around at Rebecca, then at Niall. “I think it’s time I had a talk with her. Do you know where she is, Rebecca?” She didn’t answer for a moment. “Rebecca?”

“She’s at the Archive. But you’ll never get in.”

I smiled. “Watch me.”

The doors to the Archive buckled and then blew inward as I threw the spell I had prepared, half-tearing from the hinges as the magic hit them. They were warded against most forms of intrusion, but who would ward them against magic, when witches were traditionally the only ones with access to it?

I stepped through the wreckage ahead of Niall and Rebecca, looking around as witches rushed in to see what the fuss was about. The librarian who had been so quick to throw me out before rose to her feet, the words of a spell on her lips.