Crown of Magic Read online

  Alex caught Avery’s eye, and gave a slight nod. “We better let you go.”

  He pulled Avery aside, and without saying another word, Emma and Josh ducked past them, leaving them alone.

  Alex looked at Avery. “Well, at least we know there’s no cursed jewellery hanging around. But did you notice the size of their pupils? They were huge!”

  “The potion!” Avery exclaimed. “Let’s try and find the bottle while we’re here.”

  “Grab these too,” Alex said, thrusting the scripts at her that had been left on the table.

  “Won’t they know that we’re responsible, though?” Avery asked, putting the new ones on the table. “And they’ll notice they’re different.”

  He shrugged. “Who cares, at this stage? We need them. Besides, I’m sure it’s nothing that a bit of glamour couldn’t soothe.”

  The next dressing room was the largest, and it was again empty, but there were a few more cursed scripts strewn across the room on chairs and table tops. With a flurry of activity, they gathered them up, replacing them with the copies, and then searched for the potion bottle. With an exultant, “Yes!” Avery saw it next to the other props, the potion still in it. As soon as she put her hand on it, though, she felt a crackle of energy behind her, and the rasping sound of Kit’s voice followed.

  “Put that down!”

  Avery whirled around to see Kit and Alex almost nose to nose, Kit’s ghostly form shimmering. Kit looked furious, his face twisted with anger.

  “Back off,” Alex said, raising his hands and starting to recite a spell.

  But before he could say barely any words, a bolt of light shot from Kit’s fingers, hitting Alex squarely in the chest and sending him flying backwards. He hit the table with a crunch and landed, winded, next to Avery. He scrambled to his feet, but Avery stepped in front of him, hoping that he’d know what she was planning to do.

  Kit grinned maliciously. “Protecting Alex? My, my, how modern! But with every passing minute of this play, my spirit becomes stronger. You won’t stop me now.”

  He looked as if he was about to strike again, but Avery felt Alex’s hands slide around her waist as the wind started to swirl around them. “I wouldn’t bet on that, Kit.”

  Within a split second, air wrapped tightly around them, carrying her, Alex, the scripts, and the potion out of the theatre and safely to her attic. Avery landed steadily, her bag on her shoulder and the potion bottle in her hands, but she felt Alex release her and fall to the floor, retching.

  She stepped away, placing the potion bottle on the table next to her bag, and then crouched next to him, her hand on his shoulder. “Can I get you anything?”

  Alex shook his head but held his hand out, and she helped pull him to his feet. “I hate that. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

  “Sorry, but—”

  “No, that was a brilliant solution!” he said, colour returning to his cheeks. “Very brilliant! He’ll be so pissed off right now!”

  Avery smiled briefly, and then her face fell. “I wasn’t sure if he could follow us, but it seems not. Do you think he’ll take revenge on the cast? Or the audience?”

  “I doubt it. Although, he might mess the room up a bit!” He shrugged. “We’ve got the potion bottle. That’s a big win for us.”

  Alex headed to the wooden table, picked the bottle up, and walked to the window, holding it to the light. “I wonder what love spell this is?”

  Avery followed him, staring at the remnants of the thick, golden potion that clung to the glass. “You have recipes in your grimoire. It must be one of those.”

  “There are lots. I may be able to narrow it down, but what would be the point?”

  She leaned on the window frame. “We could make an antidote. If we can’t counteract the spell on the scripts, or burn them all, it might at least weaken the effects of their bewitching.”

  He nodded as he thought through her suggestion. “Maybe, but we’re pressed for time. However,” he said, flashing a broad smile, “at least they won’t be drinking any more of it. It should wear off—at least a little.”

  Avery took the bottle from his hands, and headed back to her table. “We’ve got a few hours before we’re due at the cemetery. Let me see what I can do.” She placed it on the shelf, safely out of the way, and gathered all the grimoires. “Besides, if Kit’s strength is growing, for all we know he could bewitch whatever bottle they use to replace it.”

  Avery decided to investigate Alex’s grimoire first, as it seemed the most logical place to find the original spell, and while she looked, Alex reached into Avery’s bag, pulled the scripts out, and started to count them. “Ten - so with the ones we already have, that’s twenty. I wonder how many we might be missing.”

  “Perhaps Stan counted them,” she suggested. “It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

  “If we use a part of one of the scripts in a finding spell, it might lead us to the others.”

  Avery paused and looked at him. “It works with blood and personal items, so it should work—in theory. We could use a map of White Haven.”

  Alex turned decisively and threw a ball of fire into the logs stacked in the fireplace, and with a flash they caught fire. “In the meantime, I’m going to burn all of these, except for a couple. That should weaken the spell, too—and Kit, seeing as he’s bound to it.”

  He separated a couple of scripts from the pile, and leaving them on the table, marched over to the fire with the rest. He was just about to throw them on when Avery yelled, “Stop!”

  “What?” he said, frowning at her, the scripts mere inches from the flames.

  “What about Yvonne’s spirit?”

  “What about it?”

  “Her spirit is bound to the play, too. What if burning it before we find the ring and release her leaves her in some sort of ghost purgatory—trapped in the theatre forever? With Kit!”

  Alex straightened up, scripts still clutched in his hands, and groaned. “I have no idea. Why the hell is this so complicated?”

  “It might not be,” Avery said apologetically. “I might be overcomplicating it. But we need to make sure.” She put her elbow on the table and leaned on her hand. “I’m really confused,” she admitted, finally...to him and to herself. “I understand how you can curse a play so that the words take shape and become reality for the actors involved. I understand how that could magnify over time, so that the spell becomes more powerful. I even understand how he can curse the potion bottle to turn anything in it into the potion! What I don’t understand is how he has bound himself and Yvonne’s spirit to the play, too. I think we’re missing something, and until we know what it is, we should keep everything safely together.” She paused a moment, and then voiced what had been troubling her for the last few days. “I also think we need to find out how Kit died. Maybe he planned this well ahead of time and bound his spirit to the play at the time that he cursed it, but maybe not. We don’t know enough yet.”

  Silence fell, and the only sounds in the room were the chattering of the birds outside and the crackle of the flames in the grate. Alex sat on the sofa, placing the scripts beside him. “I need to phone my dad now, don’t I?”

  “If that’s the best way to find out about Kit, yes.”

  He fell silent again and Avery watched as a myriad of emotions chased across Alex’s face. He looked weary all of a sudden, his stubble thick on his chin and across his cheeks, his hair tangled, and his eyes haunted.

  Avery stood up and went to sit next to him, taking his hands in hers. “What’s going on?”

  He eventually looked at her and squeezed her hands. They were always so warm, Avery noted, even on the coldest days. Everything about him was warm. He was like a giant hot water bottle.

  “What are you smiling at?” he asked softly.

  “You. I was just thinking how warm you are, and how lucky I am.”

  “You are very lucky,” he said, nodding seriously. “I’m an awesome boyfriend. And I guess you’re an okay
girlfriend.”

  She smacked his arm playfully. “I’m very awesome, too! Now stop avoiding the question. What’s going on?”

  “My dreams have been really bad the past few nights, particularly last night. I think seeing Kit has worsened my visions, but they’re also jumbled and confused. I’m still seeing the actors—I presume that’s who they are—in the woods, and I see the mist across the sea. But I’m starting to feel real anger in them...anger, frustration, and an edge of violence. And Kit’s voice seemed to echo through my dreams all last night. I barely slept, if I’m honest.”

  “I’m sorry that happened,” Avery said, stroking his hands again. “You could try a sleeping potion tonight.”

  “No. I hate doing that.”

  “You don’t want to phone your dad either, do you?”

  He looked guilty and sighed. “Not really. He buggered off to Scotland, and we haven’t spoken in years. He pretty much let me fend for myself once I hit sixteen.”

  “I remember you telling me,” Avery said, thinking back to one of their conversations from when she first began to know him. “I thought you said his visions chased him away.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t really excuse him.”

  “He did send a Christmas card last year,” she reminded him.

  Alex had just rolled his eyes when it arrived and put it on the shelf. The message was brief, Avery had noted, but he had written a phone number in there.

  “If I phone him, I’ll have to explain what’s going on.”

  “So? What does that matter?”

  “We don’t share our lives anymore, and I don’t particularly want to now. And,” he said, levelling an accusatory glare at her, “you’re the same with your mom. You barely talk, and you certainly don’t talk about magic.”

  “That’s because she turned her back on it.”

  “And my dad did the same.” Alex gave her hands a final squeeze and then pulled his phone from his pocket as he stood up. “I’ll head downstairs to call him and put the kettle on. Want a drink?”

  “Tea please,” she said, smiling, and watched him go with a heavy heart.

  What was it with their families and magic? El and Briar’s were the same, as was Reuben’s wider family—a result of being shut out of the council for years, and being lost in the magical wilderness. Her friends now had to rely on each other—they were her family. And then she thought of Caspian and his dad. The fact that his family hadn’t turned their back on magic hadn’t seemed to have improved his relationship with his father, though. Caspian was a changed man since he’d died—well, to a certain degree.

  Avery rose to her feet, too. This wasn’t getting an antidote to the potion found, so she had better get on with it.

  21

  As agreed with the other witches, Avery and Alex met the group in the back room of The Wayward Son that evening to discuss their plans.

  “That’s brilliant news!” El said to Alex and Avery after they’d ordered their food and settled around the table with drinks. “How many scripts did you get?”

  “Ten,” Alex told her. “So, we now have twenty in total. It’s difficult to know how many original scripts there were without asking Stan, and he might not have noticed the difference between the new copies and the old.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Anyway, there are twelve main characters, a few minor, a few extras, and the director and the backstage crew.” He shrugged. “Maybe twenty-five or thirty in total are needed?”

  Reuben was leaning back in his chair, cradling his pint, his long legs stretched out to the side of the table. “Shit. That’s not very accurate.”

  “It also depends,” El added, “on how many were in the theatre company at the time, or how many scripts Kit could get hold of. He might have thought twenty was enough to catch all of the main characters and a few extras.” She shrugged. “Who cares if the director is bewitched or not, or the lighting crew! What matters are the performance and the main characters. We need to remember Kit’s intent, and it sounds as if it was purely to have revenge on Yvonne.”

  Hunter nodded in agreement. “But in order for that to be as effective as possible, the whole play had to be affected, and consequently the audience was swept up in it, too.”

  Alex shook his head, and his hair fell over his face for a second before he swept it back out of the way. “I’m pretty horrified by his behaviour right now, to be honest. I would never have thought someone in my family could have done something so horrible.”

  Briar looked as worried and tired as Alex. Her hair remained slightly wild, resisting all attempts to brush it into tameness, but the green ring around her eyes seemed to give her a twinkle of mischief. She’d been leaning back, listening, with Hunter’s arm casually resting on the back of her chair, but now she edged forward. “Alex, don’t worry about that. Some of the spells in our grimoires are pretty grim, and we all know magic can be used for lots of horrible things. Most witches choose not to, but some do. That’s an unfortunate fact of life.”

  “And it seems Kit was one of those,” Avery said, trying to prompt Alex into sharing the information he’d learned from his dad. The conversation had left him depressed and annoyed.

  Alex looked at her and exhaled heavily before turning to the others. “Yeah, my dad confirmed it. It seems Kit wasn’t a nice guy. He was a short-tempered, vindictive man for most of his life, and as he got older, he got worse.”

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” Briar said softly. “That’s a horrible thing to find out. How was your dad?”

  “It’s okay. It’s like Avery said, we are not responsible for our relatives’ actions. And my dad was well.” He smiled briefly. “We actually had a half-decent chat. Unfortunately, at the time of these events, my dad was just a kid. He doesn’t know anything about the play. However, he does remember Yvonne!”

  “Really?” El asked, intrigued. “How come? There must have been quite a few bar staff!”

  Alex nodded. “There were, and he and my uncle knew all of them, but of course what made Yvonne memorable was the fact that she was so pretty, and that she died. He said it upset him at the time because she was always so friendly and sweet with them.” He laughed. “Apparently, my uncle had a crush on her!” Alex’s smile was brief. “My dad said he remembers her death being in the news and the local gossip for weeks, and at the time he struggled to understand how she could have killed herself. He also said it was at the same time that my gran left after a furious argument.” He shrugged. “Maybe that prompted it.”

  Avery squeezed Alex’s hand. “It must have been huge for your gran to walk out when your dad was so young.”

  “I think that was part of the argument. She wanted to take the kids and Kit wouldn’t let her.”

  “Men can be such shits sometimes,” Briar said angrily, her face wrinkling with disgust. “Did your dad lose touch with his mom? That’s awful!”

  “He reconnected when he was older,” Alex told her. “But I think he never really forgave her, and neither did my uncle, who apparently went off the rails a bit for a while.”

  Reuben had been listening quietly, but now he sighed. “Sorry mate, that’s crap. Did you find out how Kit died?”

  Alex nodded. “He had a massive heart attack in his early sixties and passed away immediately. He was a hard drinker and smoker by that point, so it wasn’t a surprise, really. My dad ran the pub for a while, and then my uncle took over.” He smiled wryly. “It was his idea to rename it The Wayward Son.”

  Reuben laughed. “Nice one. So if it was a sudden death, Kit must have linked his spirit to the script at the time he bewitched it.”

  “Wow,” El said, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’d have thought he might have relented over the years and stopped the spell, but obviously not!”

  “Unless he forgot,” Hunter pointed out.

  “You couldn’t forget that, surely,” El answered.

  Reuben drained his pint and thumped his glass back on the table. “Well, at least we have a bit more backg
round now. But it doesn’t change the facts, or what we need to do tonight.” He looked around the table. “Are we still intent on getting Yvonne’s ring?”

  “We have to,” Alex said. “If we’re to save her spirit.”

  “I’ve been thinking about tonight,” Briar said, “and Yvonne’s grave, and I should be able to lift the coffin out with magic, which would make this a lot quicker.”

  “Good,” Reuben said decisively. “I wasn’t looking forward to digging for hours.”

  “What are you going to do with the ring once you find it?” Hunter asked. “I mean, do you know how to break the curse on it?”

  “I have a few ideas,” Avery told them. “I’ve been looking through the grimoires and collecting a few spells that might work. At least once we get it we’ll have a few days to try some spells out.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to,” El said, looking hopeful. “My knife that cuts through metals should destroy the ring.”

  Avery felt a weight lift from her shoulders. “Of course! Fingers crossed.”

  “And what will you do about Kit’s ghost?” Briar asked Alex.

  Alex grimaced and rolled his shoulders. “I’m going to banish his spirit to whatever dark hole I can—or use the Empusa’s sword. One way or another, he’ll never be able to return again. But unfortunately, that won’t be tonight.”

  ***

  Avery parked her van down the lane from the White Haven Cemetery, and looked over her shoulder at the witches and Hunter sitting in the back. “We’re here, guys.”

  White Haven Cemetery was situated on the hills above White Haven and had been in use since the 1920s when the existing graveyards attached to the churches had been too full to accommodate any more burials.

  It was clean and well maintained by the council, but it was also large and meandering, the graves spreading across the hillside, overlooking the bay below.

  Briar stretched as she jumped out of the van and sighed with pleasure as she looked over the view. “This really is a lovely spot to be buried.”

  Avery turned and followed Briar’s gaze. Below them were the lights of the town and the houses that clustered around it. Beyond, the sea was a lighter patch of grey stretching to the horizon. It was a cloudy night, and a stiff breeze blew off the coast, making Avery shiver in her jacket.