Page 24 of The Hearth Witch’s Guide to Magic & Murder (The Hemlock Saga #1)

“I’m sure there’s some delightful bureaucratic reason why we can’t without proper paperwork,” Avery answered.

She focused on the vague outline of shadow around the bed.

“This circle around the bed was unbroken, but it looks raised—possibly salt or ash? It wasn’t drawn, something was used to make it.

The question is… Was it keeping something in? Or out?”

“Could we just ask Rachel?”

Avery glanced at Saga to see if she was joking.

She was not. She didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know.

Why would she know? “No.” She paused, then explained.

“Unless we are certain she’s the caster, we should avoid showing our hand.

The council hired me to investigate this without exposing our presence. ”

“Mmm.” Saga nodded. “How’s that going for you?”

Avery shot her another look and spied a small grin spreading on Saga’s face.

“Not great.” Her own lips involuntarily pulled at a smile, then pressed together in an attempt to quash it.

She cleared her throat and caught sight of another shadow—fainter than the others, more a distortion of reality than anything, atop the sheets.

“Something else was here. But the echo has deteriorated too much for me to tell exactly what. I’d wager it was something living. Those signatures tend to fade faster.”

“So she did summon something?”

Avery shook her head. “I don’t know. And I don’t know how the collection of herbs figures into it. Some sort of sacrifice? Spell components gone wrong? And if so, how did they make a switch without any marks on the body?”

“In mummification Ancient Egyptians inserted a hook through the nose to remove the brain, perhaps another similar tool could be employed to…” Saga made an uncomfortable gesture like she was thrusting a stick or a poker. “You know. Stuff something else in its place.”

Avery winced at the unpleasant sensory chill that ran through her imagining what that process might entail. “To what point or purpose?”

“Motive is your department, feytective, I’m just offering what I know could be scientifically possible.” Saga pondered over this a moment longer. “What about thermodynamics? Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered… Maybe that mess is our victim’s brain. Just…transformed.”

Avery’s thoughts fell into place like tumblers in a lock. “Fates.” She straightened abruptly. “Perhaps it is a brain,” she whispered. Then, to Saga, just a few decibels louder so she could hear. “Saga, what if this is a brain?”

“Yeah, that’s what I literally just said…”

“You’re suggesting transfiguration, I’m…” Avery gestured to the shadows. “Can you sketch this?”

“I think I can do you one better.” Saga reached into her pocket and pulled out a small box.

She raised it up, aligned it with the scene before her, then tapped it.

“Oh good. Magic can be captured digitally. Sort of.” She then turned it around, showing a nearly perfect replica of the bed, and the faint shadows.

The shadows were perhaps a little harder to see than with the naked eye—perhaps a little blurrier and if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you probably wouldn’t notice it—but it was good enough for her purposes.

Avery closed the distance between them, her eyes growing wide. “What is… Does this take photographs?”

“It’s my mobile, but it can take pictures.” Saga’s head tilted to the side. “Have you never seen a mobile phone before?”

“I only half understood what you just said, as ‘mobile’ seems to have taken on a much different meaning than last I knew.”

Something dawned on Saga at that moment. “So when you said you’d been out of London for a while…”

Avery smiled sheepishly. “I wasn’t lying. I was out of everywhere for a while.”

“How long?”

“Long enough that this world is almost completely unfamiliar to me.”

Saga blinked at the ambiguity of that statement, and Avery could see her trying to work out something in her head before she considered the phone in her hand.

“So a mobile phone is…em…” Saga surveyed the room for something to aid her, then gave up.

“You know, how about I explain it later and just get a few more angles so we have a full picture of it all?”

Avery stepped back to allow Saga to move past her toward the bed. “It doesn’t need to be perfect. The images will help me re-create the scene in my mind’s eye.”

A few more snapshots. “Think I got a good view of it. As much as I can, anyway.”

“Excellent.” Avery felt as if she’d been holding her breath the entire time. “Then I can clear the room.” She merely snapped again and the smoke outlines dispersed, leaving the room a little hazy but otherwise unmarked by the magic that had whirled within it just a few moments prior. “Let’s go.”

“We’re leaving?”

“Depending on Miss Walker’s answer to some simple questions, yes, we will be leaving.” Avery opened the door for Saga, gesturing for her to exit first.

Bewildered, Saga slid past her but waited for the taller woman to take the lead before starting down the hallway.

“Miss Walker,” Avery called ahead of them, and as they stepped into the main sitting room once more, Rachel was exiting the kitchen to meet them.

“Is something wrong?” By the smell coming from the kitchen and the way she was drying her hands on a towel, it seemed she had started cooking after their initial interview. Not really the action of a guilty party.

“You mentioned Valentina had sounded inebriated the night she called you. Could it have been for any other reason beyond substance abuse?” asked Avery.

Her brow knitted. “Like what?”

“Brain swelling, a concussion, an injury or illness that could potentially cause disorientation,” Saga suggested helpfully. “Did her family have any history of brain disease?”

“Uh…no. I mean, Val and I didn’t really talk a lot about medical stuff—but I don’t think anything like that runs in her family.

” Her attention bounced between the two women, and her confusion was beginning to melt into concern.

“Was she injured? Did you find something that suggests…” Her eyes grew wide, and she raised a hand to her mouth.

“Oh God. Did she hit her head? Is that why she was talking like that? Oh my God, I am an idiot, I should have called an ambulance. I should have… I thought she was drunk, I swear, I thought she was drunk.”

“Miss Walker,” Avery coaxed again. “Are you familiar with the cerebral hemisphere?”

The question felt so out of left field, it shocked Rachel into the present. “Is that like the Bermuda Triangle?”

Avery could see Saga out of the corner of her eye, pressing her lips together in order to stifle amusement.

She shook her head. “No, not at all.” She nodded respectfully.

“We’ll take our leave, Miss Walker. Some officers will be by later today to collect the boxes of Valentina’s things.

Unless you have any objection, in which case they will be by after they have acquired a warrant. ”

Rachel shook her head. “No, by all means. I wasn’t sure what to do with it all anyway.”

“If we have any follow-up questions, we’ll be sure to reach out to you. Pleasant day to you.”

The two left without further word, leaving Rachel standing in the middle of her living room, bewildered, and a pan of sautéed vegetables momentarily forgotten in her kitchen.

“You think whoever did this had to have intimate knowledge of the human brain,” Saga concluded as they reached the elevator and she was confident they were out of earshot.

“They would have had to if they wanted to get it out intact,” Avery answered simply.

“You gave me an idea back there… All this time, I’d been thinking that there were no marks on the body because they’d been glamoured, but what if there were no marks on the body because the brain and the fake brain were switched… magically?”

Saga stared at Avery as the doors opened again to the ground floor. “You would have more knowledge in the magical capabilities department there than I would.”

“Right…” Avery led them out, giving a polite nod to Sanderson Fitz as they passed by before she spoke again, lower but still audible. “Alchemy, possibly? They may have thought they could exchange the brain for something that magically was meant to hold similar properties.”

“Kind of like those adventure films where the hero tries to trick a booby trap by switching out the treasure with something of equal weight?”

Avery stopped walking, and Saga realized her mistake.

“I take it they didn’t have the cinema where you were,” Saga concluded quietly.

“There is so much of what you just said that I don’t understand.

” Avery cast a glance at the Bowery. “But the long and short of it, even if we don’t know what kind of magic they used, I’d be willing to bet, we’re looking for someone with working medical knowledge of physiology. Possibly even a doctor.”

“We?” Saga echoed, surprised.

“We,” Avery affirmed, and for a while she strode by herself.

“Wait!” Saga called after her. Jogging to catch up, she caught the crook of Avery’s elbow.

Touch-starved did not begin to describe the last two hundred years for Avery Hemlock.

She had felt plenty—but it had all been pain.

Nightmares took many forms in the sleeping curse, each brutal in their own unique way.

No longer accustomed to gentleness, any touch felt like violence.

The instant Saga’s hand made contact, Avery twisted out of her grasp and put several steps between them.

Her heart pounded as her hands rose instinctively to defend herself for an incoming onslaught.

But it never came.

The two stared at each other in surprised silence.

Saga didn’t move, hands at her sides. The sepia of her skin appeared a little more ruddy around her eyes and cheeks. “Please,” she said.

Avery slowly lowered her own hands and swallowed.

“I need to know what this all means,” pleaded Saga.

“Is this a personal or existential question?”

Saga laughed, but she didn’t appear to actually find it funny—it was a strange, stressed little sound.

She licked her lips nervously and swallowed.

“I don’t know. Probably both.” It was strange seeing someone who had been so incredibly capable look so lost. “I just found out my world isn’t what I thought it was. ”

Avery took this in thoughtfully before she spoke—each word deliberately chosen.

“It means… I meant what I said. I could use someone with your skill set. Finding out you’re not quite who I thought initially…

was surprising, that I will admit. However, all in all, it doesn’t change my opinion.

I have been out of London, and it has become almost completely unfamiliar to me.

I am struggling to acclimate. After today, I suspect you are now standing on the other side of this scenario with a similar dilemma.

” Avery allowed herself a moment of naked vulnerability and struggled to find the courage for her next words. “Perhaps we could help each other.”

Saga considered this. “I help you navigate what the mortal world has become in your absence, and you help me understand…fey?”

“I help you understand magic,” Avery clarified.

“How it exists in this and the Otherworld. Those innately born with it, those who have learned to harness it, and everything in between. Unless you’d prefer to forget this ever happened.

” A sick feeling churned in Avery’s stomach.

“I wouldn’t begrudge you that.” Though she knew she would feel disappointed, she could not fully explain why.

Saga took a step back as if suddenly concerned Avery might cast some sort of forgetting spell on her right then and there. “I’ve never been very good at just letting things go.”

“That’s a bad habit,” Avery remarked, but she knew she felt nothing but admiration for it. “You should perhaps check that curious look about you, it has the occasion of getting one into a lot of trouble. On my honor, you’d be safer without it.”

“Would I?” Saga asked. “Or does it just seem safer because I wouldn’t know what might be out there?”

“Ah, there’s the rub.”

A comfortable silence fell between them.

They could hear the cars on the nearby road, birds chattering faintly, and even the wind rustling through the leaves.

Avery couldn’t remember the last time she’d found a comfortable silence with anyone, at least not while still very actively engaged in conversation.

Perhaps that’s why it had been so easy to believe that Saga could not have been human.

Whether of this world or the next, there was an air of magic about her.

It set one strangely at ease almost instantaneously.

Her energy was content—not to be confused with complacent.

It felt strangely nostalgic to Avery. Like she was coming home to a place she’d never been.

“I should talk with my family,” said Saga at last.

Of course. “I imagine there is much to say.” And Avery didn’t envy that she would not be present to hear any of it said.

“But…” There was a restraint about Saga’s demeanor, though whether she was resisting saying “no” or “yes” in that moment wasn’t clear. “I’ll let you know?”

“You know where to find me.” Avery gave Saga the same respectful nod she had the porter and Rachel, and turned on her heel to depart.

She was surprised to find that she was hopeful Saga would say yes.

Perhaps it was sentimentality—a longing to re-create the camaraderie she’d once felt before she’d been locked away. Perhaps—

“Wait, hang on, we both have to get back to the tube!” Saga called after her.

Ah. That was right. Concealing a smile, Avery merely walked faster. “No, I’m afraid we’ve said our parting words. The only sensible and polite thing to do now is to pretend we’re complete strangers.”

“You’re gonna navigate back to Baker Street on your own?”

Damn it.