Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) (5 page)

“Hello, Elle, finished already?”

“Barely beginning,” I said.

“So, if I were to suggest that you came back so that we could finish what we didn’t start in that stationery cupboard of yours…”

I groaned in anticipation of the prospect. “I’d say yes, so you shouldn’t ask.”

“Of course, I should ask,” Niall said, and I could imagine the look on his face then. I wanted him. Of course, I did. I always did.

“There isn’t enough time.”

“There is always time for us, Elle. We have forever.”

When he put it like that, it was hard to resist. I managed though, barely. “Tonight. Right now, I want to get on with this gig for the coven, okay?”

“All right, but be careful.”

I smiled at that. “I thought you agreed that this was a good idea?”

“A good distraction from your research into your mother’s death, I believe I said. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be careful, especially if I have to wait until tonight for your touch.”

The night came and went, with Niall beside me, touching me, kissing me. It seemed so impossible sometimes that I could ever have lived my life without him before, that I could ever have not had
this
in my life and yet, still believe that I was happy.

“What are your plans for the day?” he asked the next morning, stroking a finger down the naked flesh of my back.

“You’re just hoping that I can spend the day in bed with you, aren’t you?”

Niall smiled before placing a delicate kiss in the small of my back. “The thought had occurred to me.”

I laughed. “I wish I could, but I have a bunch of old pottery to look into.”

“It doesn’t sound like nearly as much fun.”

I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t.”

I got up and dressed in yesterday’s clothes, loving the way Niall watched me while I did it. But I’d learned to have a certain amount of immunity when it came to that look. If I hadn’t, then neither of us would have ever left his bedroom. Not that I suspected Niall would have minded. I headed home briefly, wanting to change, and found Siobhan waiting for me. That was no big deal. After all, she probably spent more time than I did at my house these days, since she was staying with me and I…well, I was mostly staying over at Niall’s place.

“I thought you’d be at the office,” I said to her.

She shrugged. “I went in. I’m just not feeling great.”

“The baby?”

Siobhan nodded, not looking exactly happy about it. The realities of impending motherhood were being made a little more complicated by things like the impossibility of going to a hospital for checkups.

“Could we…could we maybe go shopping at some point?” she suggested. “Marie and Kelly have been going through baby books with me, and there are all kinds of things we don’t have. A crib, and a changing table and…it’s all so complicated for humans.”

I didn’t ask how goblins did things down in the tunnels beneath the city. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I also knew exactly what Siobhan was likely to do if left to deal with these things alone. After all, she was a thief.

“How about if we go together later?” I suggested.

Siobhan nodded. “That would be good. Oh, and Fergie wants you to call.”

“Are you two arguing again?”

“It’s nothing like that. It’s just that we’ve had about four cases come in at once. There’s a guy who thinks his wife is cheating on him, another one who’s looking to get some expensive watch back, a woman who thinks that something strange has been done with her car, and someone who says that her dog has been kidnapped.”

I shook my head. “We aren’t private detectives. We take insurance jobs.”

“Fergie thought maybe you’d be interested in expanding, and anyway, he said these might interest you.”

Looking for lost dogs might interest me? I resolved to have a word with him about that one. Not least to ask him whether he’d lost his mind. On the other hand, we were still building the business. Maybe we couldn’t afford to be that picky.

For now though, I had other things to do. “Do you feel up to a quick trip out, Siobhan?”

“Where?”

“I need to do some research, but I figured we could go shopping for baby things on the way back.”

Siobhan nodded, obviously excited by the second part. Maybe even excited a little by the first one. She liked to know that she was useful, that I wasn’t just keeping her around out of charity or guilt after she’d been rejected from the goblins’ home for helping me…and after her baby’s father had been murdered by another enchantress.

“Come on,” I said. “I want to get to the archive before it closes.”

There are a lot of places in Edinburgh that aren’t quite what they seem. It’s an inevitability that comes from living in a city where old spaces get reused and built over. An apparently normal building could house a club or a comedy venue, a store or just about anything else, especially once a little magic gets thrown into the mix.

The archive was like that. From the outside, it looked like nothing more than a slightly old-fashioned office building. The kind of place where a brass plaque by the door generally declared that it was home to about twenty assorted lawyers and accountants, despite the façade suggesting that there should barely be enough room for one. Only this building’s plaque declared it to be the Canongate Archive and Collections. There was an intercom beside it. I pressed the buzzer.

“Yes?” the voice was female, young, and just carefully polite enough to suggest that she had turned away a dozen callers already that morning.

“I need access to the Archive. Coven business.”

That was enough to get Siobhan and me inside, into a space that would have been roughly what would have resulted if M.C. Escher had been allowed to design a library. There were shelves at impossible angles, with books covering every possible surface, and that was just the entrance hall. There were stairs leading up to the rest of the building, and a small circular counter sat in the middle of it all, behind which sat a young witch who had obviously decided to play up to the traditional image of a librarian, right down to the thick-rimmed spectacles. She stared at me over them.

“What? But you’re—”

“Elle Chambers.” I offered her my hand. She didn’t take it. Presumably, she thought that if she did, I would drag her away somewhere into the stacks to drain her slowly. Sorry, but she wasn’t my type.

“You lied to me. You said—”

I cut her off again. “I said I was here on coven business. I
am
. I’m looking into an insurance claim for the coven. If you know about me, then you’ll know I’ve done that before. You’ll know I’ve been in
here
before, occasionally.”

Very
occasionally. Mostly, I’d kept clear, preferring to trust to my instincts and my abilities. There were some things that called for more research though.

“I need to look into the possibility of historical magical artifacts or aftereffects being present on a site near here. You have maps of that kind of thing, don’t you?”

“We have maps, but I’d have to check—”

Another voice cut in. “What are you doing here?”

I looked around and found myself staring at Flora Duggan. The battle witch was coming down the stairs toward me, looking at me with obvious suspicion.

“I’m looking into possible areas of magical activity as part of a case Rebecca sent my way,” I said as she got closer. “I was hoping to use some of the resources here to do that.”

“And you brought a goblin with you.” Flora’s tone didn’t improve.

I strove for friendliness. “This is Siobhan. She works with me. Siobhan, this is Flora Duggan, who works for the coven.”

They both nodded at one another warily.

“I wouldn’t have thought I’d see a battle witch in a library,” I said, trying for small talk.

“I wouldn’t have thought I’d see you or a goblin in this one.” Flora looked around, her gaze settling on the witch at the front desk. “I’m assessing how secure it is. Which isn’t very, if you can just walk in. I’m meant to be meeting the others in a minute.”

“I’m sorry,” said the witch on the reception desk. “I could ask them to leave if you—”

Flora waved that away. “They’re here now. Let them do their research this once, if it’s coven business. The others tell me we’re meant to be building bridges.”

That seemed to be the best we were going to get, particularly when Flora followed that up by walking out of the door we’d just come in through. At least the receptionist waved us up the stairs when I asked again where the maps were.

Siobhan and I found what we were looking for up on the third level, where a couple of researchers were working away quietly in one corner. On a shelf at the far end, there was a big book full of maps, each closer to the ones one could find in an old Victoria County History volume than to the latest Ordinance Survey editions. Their one advantage was that OS maps didn’t usually come annotated with accurate ley line drawings, notes on the sites of magical duels, contour lines noting local power levels and all the other things that might prove useful to a witch looking for a site for her next ritual. Or, in my case, trying to work out if there was any natural reason for the things that had happened at the archaeological dig. Naturally unnatural, at least.

“What are we looking for?” Siobhan asked, and then lowered her voice as the researchers glanced across at us. “I mean, what should I be trying to find?”

I got out my phone, calling up a modern map so that I could show her where the dig was. “This is where the incident happened that Rebecca has me looking into. Bright lights, apparently, and ghostly figures…things were moving about. We need to go through these maps and see if there is anything there that could possibly explain that.”

“So, what if I start on one book and you find another?” Siobhan suggested.

I nodded, but even as I did so, something else occurred to me. I was in the archive, a place that held records relating to just about anything in the country that had to do with magic. Including things like notes of the more open coven meetings and those records left behind by former coven leaders. Leaders like my mother.

I’d been in the archive before, but how many other chances would I get to look around here, now that I knew what I was? It had taken the interference of one of the coven’s triumvirate of inspectors to get me in this time. This was one of the few places that might conceivably hold more information about what had happened to my mother. Was I really going to spend what might be my only chance to get in here just looking at old maps?

“Actually, Siobhan, can you take care of the maps? There are some other things I need to look for.”

Siobhan didn’t argue, the way a lot of the other people close to me might have. Instead, she just nodded. “Sure.”

I set off through the bookcases and the stacks, not quite sure what I was looking for. I started with a collection of coven minutes from official meetings. The contents weren’t exactly forthcoming, in a kind of shorthand that seemed to come more from the natural boredom of meetings than from a need to keep everything secret, yet, I could at least get a vague feeling for what had been going on at each meeting, the points made and who had made them. A couple of minutes’ reading told me that the first volume I grabbed was too early, but with the second one, I found the traces of my mother I was hoping for. A witch noted as “AC” was there in most of the meetings.

She was apparently quite vocal while she was in them, too. I found myself reading about AC as she talked about reforming some elements of the coven’s structures, about the strictures of the tolerance directive for non-humans, about everything from the minimum requirements for entry to the coven’s ranks to details of talks with other covens around the world and other powers.

It was so strange, reading about my mother like that. This wasn’t her as I had known her, as simply my mother, or even as the most respected witch in the coven, powerful and quietly authoritative. Those dates I could find in the book of minutes suggested that this was mostly earlier, and it seemed that she’d been something of a firebrand in her youth, constantly arguing with other members. I could pick out Lucille Forrester’s more staid voice in the minutes, and the constant, placating presence of Elizabeth McCallum arguing for sense and restraint.

As I moved to later volumes, I could start to see patterns emerging in the things they talked about, but I could also see some of the gaps. I wasn’t mentioned. Other things, trips my mother had taken, weren’t expanded on. It felt like I could see this great tapestry of coven business, and I could see the holes where things had been but not the things themselves. What did that mean? What—

“What do you think you’re doing here, goblin?” In the gentle silence of the archive, that seemed far too loud. Far louder than Siobhan’s mumbled beginnings of an explanation as I started back toward her.

“You have no right to come in here. What are you, some kind of spy? What are you even doing above ground? You should be in a hole, like the rest of your kind.”

The man who was saying it was about my age, and was dressed casually in jeans and an open lumberjack shirt over a T-shirt for some band I hadn’t heard of. He had short blond hair and what I could see of his unshaven features would have been good if he hadn’t been busy insulting my friend.