Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) (4 page)

“She’s sending me to a field!” I read through the file again just to be sure, but there was no doubting it. Rebecca wanted me to go out into the middle of nowhere to look at an accident in a field. Oh, it wasn’t quite phrased like that. The initial observations talked about an Edinburgh Archaeology dig site, and a health-and-safety incident, but it amounted to the same thing.

Why? Why was it that so many of Rebecca’s assignments took me out into the countryside? First, the one chasing Fergie all over the Highlands, and now this. Why had I even been stupid enough to agree without asking where the job was based? I knew the answer to that one, at least. I’d agreed because I’d thought it would be a good way to mend fences. Maybe if I’d known it would also involve
climbing
fences, I might have thought twice.

“This could all be some kind of trap,” Fergie suggested, from his desk at the far side of the office. He was as neatly dressed as always in a business suit and tie, but like always, some portion of his inner wolf seemed to shine through in a general sense of dishevelment. He was a good-looking guy as far as it went, although we were both clear by now that nothing was ever likely to happen between us.

“A trap where they make it obvious they’re sending you there?” Siobhan snorted at that suggestion, keeping carefully to the most shaded corner of the room. She was adjusting a little to life above ground, but her goblin eyes still found the sunlight difficult. The goblin girl was heavily pregnant by now, the maternity clothes not quite going with bone-white hair and skin with occasional patches of scales. “As if you’d know what a trap looked like.”

Fergie said, “Well, forgive me if I haven’t spent my life stealing from enough people to have to watch out for them.”

So much for them patching things up. Although by their standards, I guessed mild bickering qualified as tame. Part of me even suspected that Fergie and Siobhan enjoyed their fighting.

I shook my head. “I think this one is genuine. I’m going, anyway. Niall is having David drive me.”

I’d been a little disappointed when he’d vetoed the stationery cupboard idea, but Niall had put it simply: “You deserve so much more than that, Elle. Always.”

He’d kissed me for emphasis. Somewhere along the line, he’d learned how hard it was for me to argue with him when he did that. It was probably one reason why I’d agreed to catching a ride with his driver, rather than simply driving myself. So, I headed downstairs to where Niall’s Lexus was parked outside my offices.

David nodded to me as I got in. “Good afternoon, Elle. Where are we going today?”

The answer to that was actually a little way outside of the city, into the open countryside, to a spot that looked like nothing but slightly scrubby grazing land now, but a couple of thousand years ago, it had apparently been…well, slightly scrubby grazing land, but with a few dwellings dotted here and there. Enough to get the archaeologists interested, at least. Even from the road, I could see their mechanical diggers and their spoil heaps, their trenches and a couple of large tents. Oh, and a cordoned-off area a little way from the rest that had no one working near it.

David pulled up by the side of the field and I got out. I’d thought to bring boots, although they didn’t exactly go with the rest of my business clothes. The great outdoors wasn’t really made with dress sense in mind. The best that could be said about the boots was that at least they didn’t instantly sink into the mud the way heels would have.

“You don’t have to wait, David. I can call when I’m done.”

“Niall said to stay with you.”

I left it. I knew I wasn’t going to change the driver’s mind without doing something drastic, and I had a job to do. I looked out over the archaeologists working there as I hopped into the field. They were a mixture of young and old, men and women, although they all had the same kind of look that came from wearing clothes to work that they didn’t mind ruining in the mud.

A young man looked up as I came closer. Everything about him said “student,” albeit quite a nice-looking one. Maybe a quick snack for the vampire inside me? No, not on business.

“Are you lost? I’m Ryan.”

I sent out a small flicker of power, although I probably didn’t need to. At least, it made him smile while I spoke. “Elle Chambers. I’m from the insurers. I’m here about the accident. Can you point me to whoever is in charge?”

Ryan shook his head. “Accident? You’re calling
that
an accident? Accidents are trenches caving in, or people not looking where they’re swinging a mattock. This—”

“What happened?” I could feel the roil of emotions in him. Fear at top of the list. I reached out automatically to soothe it with power.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“I might.”

“Nina was working around the edge of trench four when it happened. Lights and noise, and we saw…you’ll think I’m crazy.”

I pushed him harder. “Tell me, Ryan.”

“We saw these images of people, dressed like...well, like all kinds of things from the past. Dancing and singing and fighting, running around people, scaring them. And the digger started to move by itself. I swear, it did. Nina…it caught her in the chest, knocked her back into the trench and she hit her head. She’s still in the hospital. We don’t know—”

“It’s all right, Ryan, I’ll take things from here.” The man approaching us was probably in his fifties, with short, graying hair, spectacles, and a taste in sweaters that could only be described as eye-wateringly awful. An academic, then. He looked over at me. “Are you some sort of reporter? If so, you really have no business coming onto our site without—”

“I’m from the insurers,” I explained, again pushing that faint cloud of good feeling at the man.

“Oh, that’s different, of course. I’m Professor Edward Muir. This is my research project.”

“Really? Looking into what?” I asked that mostly because I could feel the small hint of pride there as he talked about it.

“Oh, into the possibility of the presence of a large La Tene culture site, that’s the Bronze Age culture that supplanted the previous Pictish culture in Scotland. This is big enough that it has the potential to be another Traprain Law, even before we started to find evidence of Mesolithic use of the site, preceding the Bronze Age layers.”

I could feel the excitement at that, even if I didn’t really understand the details. What mattered was how big all this was to Professor Muir.

“Of course, all that was before yesterday’s events.” Professor Muir shook his head. “One of the students here on the dig has been injured, and now, I can’t reopen that trench until we’re sure that it’s safe.”

Until
I
was sure that it was safe, he meant. I could feel the expectation there beneath the surface and I could guess what Professor Muir was hoping for. That I would wrap all this up, make sense of it, and let them all get back to working on the archaeological find of a career. Presumably, he only had so much funding. A long delay might be the difference between finding everything he wanted and coming away just short of that big find.

“Did you see what happened?” I asked, walking with the professor in the direction of one of the large tents.

“Not personally. I hope you won’t lend too much credence to some of the stranger stories Ryan and the others are telling. I…I’m sure that they were all in a perfectly fit state to be working.”

And not drunk, drugged or insane in any way. Well, it was the logical assumption, wasn’t it, for a man concerned with facts and evidence? Or at least, for one who didn’t know about magic. If his students were seeing strange things, it was obviously because…well, because they were students, and thus,
clearly
more likely to use intoxicating substances on the job than anyone else.

Still, it was good that he made the attempt to deny it. I could think of a lot of people who would have hung the likes of Ryan and the injured young woman out to dry immediately, especially given how tense the professor felt right then. I sent out reassuring pulses of emotion.

“I’m just here to find out what happened. I won’t take any more time than I absolutely need to, I’ll try not to get in the way and I’m really not here to do anything to jeopardize your dig.”

Professor Muir’s relief was palpable. At least to me. “Whatever you need.”

What I needed right then was to walk around the site and get a sense of the scale of the problem. By which I meant finding out who else had seen what happened. The answer to that, as I worked my way around, interviewing people one by one, seemed to be at least half a dozen people, most of them students, staying on the site as much as possible, still caught up in the excitement of the potential discoveries.

I found myself talking to a mature student by the name of Lisa, who told me without being asked that she was retraining after working in an office for ten years.

“That’s quite a jump to make,” I suggested.

“I just want to do something that makes me happy.”

I could understand that. “So, did you see what happened?”

It turned out that Lisa had been standing on the other side of the site when it happened, but that she had still had a good view of a bunch of strange-looking characters wearing what looked very much like Bronze Age torques and jewelry running about, having some kind of battle and generally scaring people. She’d also seen the moment when the mechanical digger had started moving on its own.

“And you’re sure there was no one in it?”

“I saw it.”

“But you’re
certain
?” I pushed doubt into her then, hating myself for having to do it, but that was the job. I had to start undoing this mess before someone found out too much. Starting to make the witnesses doubt what they’d seen was always a good first step. With a little luck, they would even start to come up with their own explanations for what had happened.

“Well, I guess there must have been someone, unless there was a malfunction with the controls or something.”

“Maybe.” I smiled over at her. Maybe I could use that one. Although it had the problem of being easy to check.

I went from witness to witness, sowing doubt, even as I tried to get answers. That was the trickiest part about my job. I needed the truth. I needed to know what had happened both so that I could be sure that it wasn’t something dangerous, and so that I could stop it from happening again. Had the archaeological dig uncovered some kind of artifact that was having strange side effects? Had some supernatural creature’s space been invaded so that it was lashing out? Had something more than human simply decided to have some fun at the archaeological unit’s expense?

To answer that, I had to take a closer look at the trench and the digging machine. I went over, trying to extend my senses. I got the general backwash of magic, but it was hard to be more precise than that, so many hours after the event. A few months ago, I doubted I would even have been able to sense this much.

At least, it told me that there really was a supernatural element to the case. That it really
wasn’t
a case of mass hallucination, or simply mass inebriation. I would need to do far more work to try to pin down what had happened, of course, starting with a look around for physical evidence.

“I wouldn’t go too near the edge,” Ryan said. “It’s not that deep, but you can still hurt yourself if you fall. Just look at…” He didn’t finish that. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s all right,” I said. “It’s not like it’s your fault, Ryan. Just an accident.”

He’d corrected me so quickly the last time I used that word. Yet now, as I pushed a kind of acceptance into him, he let it go. Maybe that was the best thing for him.

“What are you looking for, anyway?” Ryan asked.

“I’m not sure. Anything I can find. Marks in the earth to show what happened, footprints…”

“On an archaeological dig? You’ll get all the boot prints you could ever need, particularly with everyone running about trying to help Nina.”

He had a point there. Layer after layer of prints had churned up the dirt around the trench. I looked down further into it, not for prints this time.

“You hadn’t found anything just before all this happened, had you?” I asked.

“Well, we had just come out with a couple of pot sherds. We’d been taking artifacts out of this level of stratigraphy all day. You don’t think that might have had something to do with it, do you?”

I laughed. “Well, I did hear an idea once that the ‘curse’ of Tutankhamen had something to do with the presence of fungal spores in the tomb.”

From what I’d heard, it actually had more to do with people assuming that a curse was there and seeing any subsequent bad luck as related to it. I was happy with Ryan believing either approach right then. I also found myself remembering my mother then. She’d once assured me as a girl that there was definitely no King Tutankhamen curse. I’d never thought to ask her how she was so certain.

I shook my head, bringing myself back to the present. “Do you still have the pieces here?”

“They’ll have gone up to the university for conservation, sorry.”

Of course, they would, which meant that, at some point, I was going to need to take a ride over there to make sure that they weren’t somehow dangerous. I didn’t
think
they were, but in a situation like this, thinking something was safe wasn’t going to be enough. Knowing that there was only so much more I could do here, I started back toward the car, stopping at each person who had seen what happened and suggesting to each of them that they shouldn’t mention it too much. A faint push of embarrassment into each of them, and suddenly, they weren’t going to be comfortable talking it over with strangers.

I started making a mental list of the things I needed to do for this case. I needed to see the paperwork for the dig. I needed to look at other, more specialized paperwork, to make sure it wasn’t impinging on anything magical. I needed to talk to Nina, the girl in the hospital. I needed to see the artifacts they’d pulled out of the soil.

I called Niall while David started to drive me back toward Edinburgh.