Kerry Barrett - I Put A Spell On You

In her bedroom we found a pile of witchcraft books. Esme picked up the top one and began leafing through it.

“I thought you said she wasn’t a witch,” she said. I rolled my eyes.

“She wasn’t.” I picked up a guide to incantations and flapped through it without interest. “What witch would read a book like this?”

Esme made a face.

“Well, there is a lot of magic in here and what with this and the books it looks like she was trying to learn,” she pointed out. “Can you do that?”

I grinned at her.

“I taught you, didn’t I?” I said. Esme and I were born witches, of course. But while I embraced my witchiness, worked hard at it, embraced it, developed it, even made it my career, she shunned it. It was always one of the things that annoyed me most about Esme over the years. Then, last year, when the family business was in trouble and my mum was ill, she finally realised it was time to get to grips with it. And who was there to help her out? To mould her natural ability and teach her everything she needed to know? Her loving cousin, that’s who (that’s me, by the way). She’s pretty good actually – she should use magic more often. She could do with a bit more sparkle in her life if you ask me.

Now she shot me a barbed look.

“I meant can normal people learn?” she said. “People who aren’t witches.”

“She had a go,” I said, sitting on the bed. “But there’s only so much you can do without natural talent. And it’s always dangerous for anyone to dabble in things they don’t understand.”

Ez nodded and I was grateful that she didn’t mention that out of the two of us, I was the one who’d dabbled dangerously in the past. She wasn’t so bad, really.

I picked up another book and a sheaf of papers fell out. Esme bent down and picked them up.

“Photos,” she said. “Oh god.”

She spread them out on the bed. They were mostly pictures of Star, selfies, obviously taken with her phone, and printed out onto A4 paper. And they were pretty shocking. One was a photo of her hand, covered in blood, with jagged pieces of blue glass sticking out of her palm. In another, she had a nasty bruise and a cut on her browbone. In another she had bruised knees, in another burns on her arm, and in yet another a neck collar.

“Shit,” Esme said. “Was this her husband’s handiwork?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She had this neck collar just before Christmas – she said she’d had a prang in her car. I remember her saying she’d missed spending the weekend with her best friend because of it. The burns on her arm were from the accident, too. Air bags burn apparently. Her husband’s not been around for ages as far as I know.”

I looked at the photo and shook my head.

“She said it was an accident,” I said. “Why would she take photos if she believed that?”

I picked up the book again.

“There’s some more,” I said, pulling them out. There were two more. Both of the outside of the spa. One showed a broken window with a board nailed over it. I remembered that happening a couple of months before. Just kids Xander, my deputy manager, had said at the time. The other, more shockingly, showed the front door of the spa scrawled with graffiti reading WITCH.

I felt sick.

“Look,” I said to Esme. She put her hand over her mouth in horror.

“Who would do that?” she said. “That’s awful. Did you know about that?”

“Didn’t have a clue,” I said. “Not about the graffiti anyway. “Star must have scrubbed it off before I saw it. She was protecting me, Ez. Do you think that’s why she died?”

Esme looked terrified.

“No,” she said firmly. “That can’t possibly be it. She was ill, Harry. She had a weak heart. Her bathroom cabinet’s full of medicine. No one would have hurt her deliberately.”

I gathered up the print-outs.

“But what about all these injuries?” I said, waving them in her face. “And Star wasn’t a witch – this abuse wasn’t aimed at her – what if she got hurt trying to stop whoever it was hurting me?”

“Right, well there’s nothing we can do about it now,” Esme said, all business-like. “Let’s go home and think about what we should do from here.”

She was right. I got up off the bed, and Esme did the same. After a moment’s consideration, I put the printed photos into my bag, and we left, putting everything back the way we’d found it with a quick wiggle of our fingers.

As we walked down the stairs a voice called out.

“Who are you?” A woman stood at the bottom of the steps, arms folded in front of her.

“Star’s not here,” she said.

I nudged Esme out of the way and held my hand out to the woman.

“I’m Harmony,” I said, shaking her hand and keeping hold of it. “I was Star’s boss – and friend.” My eyes filled with tears. They were genuine, but behind me, Esme harrumphed. The neighbour tried to take her hand away, and I held on.

“Were you in Star’s house?” she said. “I heard the door go.”

Gently, I squeezed a pressure point on her palm.

“We weren’t in her house,” I said. Around her the air began to shimmer. “We just came to see if we could help.”

“To help,” the neighbour repeated. “You weren’t in her house.”

Smiling at her, I let go of her hand and pulled Esme past her.

“Bye then!” I called. The neighbour raised a hand to wave, a confused look on her face.

“Well done, Obi Wan,” said Esme as we rushed along the road towards home. “But that was a bit too close for comfort.”

I ignored her. I was too busy wondering what we should do next. I thought perhaps I should phone DI Baxter. It would be tricky though, explaining what had happened without explaining exactly what had happened. I wondered if we could tell her the whole truth. She’d seemed very nice, but that didn’t mean she’d understand when I told her what we were. I really needed to meet her again to check her out.

Chapter 4

We talked about everything on the way home, except Star. I asked Esme all about how Jamie had proposed – in the kitchen while she was washing up, apparently. “How romantic,” I said, dryly. I would never understand why she washed up when she could simply do the dishes with a wave of her hand. But she claimed she liked it.

She talked a bit about how she wanted to get married back home in the Highlands, and I offered some suggestions about dresses she might suit. But we didn’t mention Star, or the horrible photos.

Wearily we made our way through the heavy door at the bottom of our tenement block and up the worn-away stone steps. As we reached our flat, a tall, lean figure uncurled himself from where he’d been sitting leaning against our door.

“Xander!” I called. I flung my arms around him and leaned against his chest. He kissed the top of my head.

“I got your message,” he said in his soft Dublin accent. “I couldn’t let you deal with all this by yourself.”

Beside me, Esme stood up a bit straighter. I wasn’t surprised. Xander was gorgeous, and very charming. He had quite a staggering effect on most women. He even had me wrapped round his little finger.

I hadn’t known Xander that long, but he’d made himself indispensible to me at a time when my business plans had been about to derail.

I’d launched my website alone, but when I’d come up with the idea of the spa, my girlfriend Natalie had been right behind me. I’d met her when I was studying business in the States and she was a high-flyer for a management consultancy. When I’d decided the time was right to expand, she’d offered to invest. I was thrilled. Not surprisingly, it was quite hard to find investors in a witchcraft-led business. You can’t just go to the bank or approach a venture capitalist and tell them you’re selling spells. Anyway, Nat seemed the perfect business partner and for a while things were really exciting. Then she went home to Connecticut for a few weeks – and she never came back. Suddenly I was single, heartbroken, and my career had taken a battering too.