A Very British Witch Boxed Set Page 20

  Cliff raised his hand. “Vampire.”

  Ronnie raised his. “Werewolf.”

  Tarquin raised his. “Sorcerer.”

  “And Karl?” she asked.

  Karl returned, as if from nowhere. Shadows seemed to swirl around him, and he looked a little flushed. He caught his breath and sighed. “Okay, vampire.”

  It seemed unbelievable at first.

  But then she remembered…

  Those teeth. In the nightmare.

  Terror seized her. She felt the urge to cry out, but the scream caught in her throat as if someone was choking her with an invisible hand.

  “Shhh,” said Karl. “We have a bigger problem. What to do about Tim?”

  Tim?

  She suddenly felt light-headed. The darkness started to encroach on her vision. It was hard for her to breathe and her legs felt suddenly weak. It was all too much. She tried to reach out to one of them to steady herself, but then she was falling.

  The last thing she saw was Cliff rushing forward to catch her as her world went black.

  “You own me ten quid,” she heard one of them saying. “I told you she was a fainter…”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Malaprop’s Bookstore, Bicester, England

  Scarlett woke up on a cot in an office she’d never been in before. From the look of the ceiling and the stained-glass window she thought she might be in a church. When she smelled the vanilla scent of dusty old books and saw Tarquin leaning over her she realized this must be his office in the bookstore.

  There was something on her forehead. A warm damp cloth.

  Her throat felt parched and when she tried to speak her words came out in a thin whisper.

  “What did you…?”

  “Get her some water,” someone said. It sounded like Cliff. Her head was swimming.

  Tarquin turned away, replaced by Ronnie, who offered her a glass of water.

  She sat up enough to sip it, then relaxed and laid her head back against a pillow to look up at the high ceiling. She saw dust floating in the beam of light from the window. It wasn’t daylight, but a softer, yellower light from a street lamp outside.

  “How are you feeling now?” Ronnie asked gently.

  She lolled her head to one side so that she could see his face better. “What did you do to me?”

  “Nothing?”

  “Did you drug me?”

  “No, you fainted.”

  Ronnie smiled at her. He removed the warm damp cloth and replaced it with a cooler damp cloth.

  “Where am I?”

  It was Tarquin who answered. She could hear him but not see him. He was standing somewhere a little ways off. “Back room of the bookshop,” he told her, confirming her suspicions.

  What am I doing here?

  She wanted to ask it out loud but speaking was too much effort.

  “It’s okay, Scarlett. You’re safe now,” his voice continued. “And free to leave whenever you want.”

  Why didn’t that exactly comfort her?

  She struggled to sit up.

  Cliff stepped into her view. “But we hope you won’t,” he said. “We need your help. And you need ours.”

  He pressed a hand to her back and helped her to sit up straight.

  Tarquin handed her a cup of tea. It was lukewarm. “It’s been sitting for a bit,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how long it would take you to return to us, but I wanted something on hand in case you did. I can warm it some more, if you wish.”

  She shook her head, then sniffed at the warm air rising off the liquid. It smelled familiar. She took a sip and recognized the flavor. It was the same herbs her aunt had given her last week.

  “I’ve had this before,” she whispered. “My aunt.”

  Tarquin smiled and nodded, then glanced to Cliff with a look of vindication. “I was right,” he said. “That’s why she recovered from the spell so easily. Clari-tea! I always suspected that Tabitha was a witch , too!”

  “A witch?” Scarlett said, the strength returning to her voice.

  She had joked about it to her aunt, on many occasions. But to hear it confirmed by a third party was rather startling.

  “My aunt really is a witch?”

  Tarquin laughed and nodded. “And you are too. Obviously.”

  Scarlett sat there with the tea in her hands and mouth open, gawking.

  The sorcerer turned to Cliff. “That’s why you couldn’t compel her.”

  Scarlett cast her gaze at Cliff, accusingly. “You tried to compel me?” She’d watched enough Vampire Diaries to know what that meant.

  The guilty look on Cliff’s face confirmed it. “Yeah,” he said. “That night… when things got… out of hand.”

  “Thursday night,” said Scarlett, trying to remember everything. Only the feelings came back to her. The sights and sounds of that night seemed to hover at the edge of her awareness, tantalizingly out of reach.

  She turned back to him, her eyes narrowed accusingly. “What exactly happened that night?”

  Tarquin shuffled closer to her. “I was at the White Hart when Bill Knight showed up. I recognized him immediately. I knew his grandfather. The sight of him took me back, I must admit. He didn’t know me, of course. The Knight family had long since moved away. He would have been too young the last time he saw me, if he ever did. He was talking to people in the pub, asking questions. I overheard him and moved in to speak with him myself. He told me he was researching the history of Bicester, and that got me suspicious. I knew that the history of the town was intimately wrapped up the dealings between our… families. I mean, the Morettis and the Knights. I didn’t know how much he knew, or what was behind his questions, but when he started asking about his family’s old estate, well, quite frankly, I panicked.”

  Cliff looked sheepish. “As did I,” Cliff admitted. “I knew this guy, Bill, from before I moved here. He followed me around up in Nottingham. He’s part of the reason I moved to Bicester. He was getting too close to the truth.”

  “That you’re a vampire,” Scarlett asked, one eyebrow raised, and hearing the skepticism in her own voice.

  “Do I need to show you my teeth again?” He took half a step forward, his eyes dancing at the prospect of getting a reaction out of her.

  She shuddered, recalling the nightmare that now seemed much too real.

  “Please don’t,” she deadpanned, turning her attention back to her tea, dismissively.

  “Bill was a professor,” Cliff continued. “His daughter went missing. When the body was discovered, they found that her blood had been drained. The police attributed it to an animal attack, but he never bought it. He had his own suspicions, based on clues that the police ignored, and probably partly informed by his esoteric knowledge of ancient and medieval history. When the police report failed to satisfy him, he ran his own investigation. Somehow, he got wind of vampires, and latched onto me.”

  “Did you kill her?” Scarlett asked warily.

  He blanched. “No,” he said, sounding offended. “Heck no. I haven’t had it from the vein for… well, a long time.”

  “From the vein?” she repeated.

  “From a living person,” he explained. “That’s not who I am. Not anymore.”

  “Go on,” she instructed.

  “Well,” Cliff said, “he became suspicious of me. God knows why. I know sometimes my habits can be a bit… peculiar. To normals. And vampires, for that matter. But I do try to hide it, blend in, be social. You can’t imagine how hard that is, living in two worlds, and welcomed by none.”

  “I can imagine it,” she agreed mostly just to keep him talking, though in her mind she pictured herself rubbing her finger and thumb together pretending to play the world’s smallest violin for this self-absorbed… prick.

  “So anyway, Bill noticed something odd about me, whatever that was. He started following me around. I’d see him at a pub and so I’d move to the next, and he’d show up there right after me. Like I was pub crawling with a ball and chain
. I tried to be careful about my movements, but he must have tracked me to a hospital one day when I was buying blood.”

  “And that’s how you avoid… ‘having it from the vein?’” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s right. It’s a bloody hassle, as you might imagine, but it means I don’t have to kill to feed.”

  She resisted raising her eyes to the ceiling at the blood pun. “But you’re still taking blood from someone who might need it.”

  “I need it,” Cliff insisted. “Or I’ll die. Or worse… kill someone.”

  She frowned, letting the new information sink in.

  He went on. “One morning after I’d bought some blood from the local hospital, he came at me. He called me a monster and blamed me for what happened to his daughter. More than that, he blamed me for destroying his life. He’d lost his job. He was spiraling down into some well of madness. People called him crazy. Openly, in the pubs, behind his back and sometimes to his face. Thank goodness, because it meant no one took his accusations against me seriously, though some of them were true. I didn’t take his daughter, but I was every bit the monster he thought I was. Those were blows that landed. I tried to ignore him, and then to avoid him. But you can’t imagine how persistent he was. He nearly staked me once.”

  “Staked you?” Her eyes widened in confusion.

  “Like in the movies. Dracula. A stake to the heart.”

  She frowned. “Does that even work?”

  “I don’t want to find out.”

  Karl spoke from the doorway, in a low, serious voice. “I don’t think we want to be telling her those kinds of things, Cliff.”

  The vampire nodded. “Of course, you’re right. It’s all rather theoretical. All fun and games, until someone dies.”

  Scarlett wanted to hear the rest of it. “So then what happened?”

  “Well,” Cliff said, “when I saw him talking to you that night, last Thursday in the White Hart, I was naturally concerned.”

  “Why?”

  “For your safety. I wanted to keep him away from you, in case he was carrying a stake and might try to hurt you.”

  “That seems rather unlikely,” she observed.

  “Of course you’re skeptical, and you should be, but… you haven’t seen the things I’ve seen.” He glanced to the others in the room. “And it turns out I was right, wasn’t I?”

  The others said nothing. It was Cliff’s story to tell, and they seemed happy enough to let him tell it.

  “Why?” Scarlett asked. “What happened?”

  “We left.”

  “We?”

  “You and I,” Cliff said. “But Bill was waiting for us. Well, for me really. He recognized me right off, even though I’d shaved my beard and compelled him.”

  As he said that, it was as if a mist lifted from Scarlett’s mind, and the memory of it returned to her in a rush.

  Scarlett saw the scene vividly now. She and Cliff were walking in the street, away from the pub. She heard footsteps running, coming closer, the heavy footsteps of a man intent on doing harm.

  She turned and saw Bill Knight charging at them both. There was something in his hand. A wooden stake sharpened at one end.

  He thrust the stake at her face, not straightforward but in a downward arc, aiming at her chest.

  She flinched and turned, raising an arm to fend off the blow.

  The point of the stake caught her chin, just grazing it.

  But just then she felt herself shoved aside by Cliff. He knocked her away and she fell to the ground, landing in the street on her hands and knees. The ground was wet from rain.

  When she looked back she saw Bill coming at her again, but Cliff restrained him.

  Bill then attacked Cliff, and they fought, grappling in the dark like two wild animals, Bill wielding his stake first as a spear and then as a club, while Cliff dodged the blows and tried to disarm him with a minimum of force. It was as if he were reluctant to fight at all, but compelled only by necessity. And then they locked arms. Bill wrapped one leg behind Cliff’s ankles and tripped him.

  Scarlett heard the crack of Cliff’s head on the pavement as Bill fell on top of him, with the stake out front, poised to strike.

  Cliff deflected the stake with his forearm and as Bill’s body came down on him Cliff opened his jaws wide in self-defense and clamped his teeth on the man’s exposed jugular.

  Blood spurted as Cliff rolled on top of his prey to feed.

  Scarlett wanted to scream for them to stop fighting, but no sound escaped her throat.

  She staggered to her feet and tried to pull Cliff off the other man’s body.

  Cliff turned like a ravaging beast and roared at her, his bloody teeth filling her vision.

  She freaked out, staggering back, and fell backwards.

  Cliff rose from the dead man and dragged the bloody corpse into an alley, leaving Scarlett alone in the night, too terrified to scream.

  +++

  Malaprop’s Bookstore, Bicester, England

  Scarlett remembered, but couldn’t believe it. She’d been attacked and nearly killed. Cliff had saved her by killing Bill Knight and…

  Feeding.

  That was the word for it. He had drunk Bill Knight’s blood.

  Exsanguinated him, as Tim had said.

  “I thought it was just a nightmare,” she muttered in disbelief. Her mind whirled. “Something I imagined.”

  “That’s because we gave you some tea to make you forget,” Tarquin said.

  “Only you wouldn’t,” Karl added.

  “I tried to compel you to forget,” said Cliff.

  “Why?”

  “To calm you down. You were terrified. Catatonic, almost. I wanted to help you.”

  “By making me forget?”

  “By making you unsee it. Like it never happened. But nothing worked. So I called for help.”

  “He brought you here,” Tarquin explained, “and I gave you some spelled tea. But we still had the body to get rid of. You were… very helpful.”

  I was?

  Ronnie nodded. “You even lent us your wheelbarrow and shovel.”

  An accessory, she thought.

  If she had defended herself against an attacker, there was no crime in that. Even if she had killed in self-defense. But help cover it up? That would make her complicit.

  “No,” she whispered, trying to convince herself. “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s true, Scarlett,” Karl said.

  “I helped you get rid of the body?”

  “You did. And a good job, too.” Karl stepped further into the room and leaned against the edge of the desk. “Ronnie used his truck to move the body from the alley. We picked up the tools from the allotment. Then we dug a hole in a field that had been left fallow for years.”

  As Karl explained it, the memories continued to come back to her.

  Scarlett recalled the dilemma, slipping back to the exact moment in her mind’s eye.

  She had been sitting here in this very room, sipping tea.

  One of them had said, “We have to hide the body.” It was Ronnie.

  “Burn it,” Cliff suggested. “That’s the only way to be sure. Turn the evidence to ashes.”

  “Someone will see the smoke,” Karl countered.

  “And smell it,” Tarquin said. “The smell of burning flesh is something terrible, and it will attract bobbies like flies to manure.”

  “That’s it,” said Ronnie. “Manure.”

  “What?” Scarlett had asked.

  “I know the perfect place. It’s an old farm that’s been on the market for ages but hasn’t sold. It’s just lain fallow. There’s a home on the property but no one goes there. I know the guy, Robert Johnson. He has another place in town but mostly spends his time in London. Probably hasn’t been back to that field in three summers. We can bury the body there, tonight.”

  “Four hours before daybreak,” Tarquin had said.

  “I’ve got a shovel,” Scarlett offered. “And a whe
elbarrow. They’re at my aunt’s allotment.”

  Scarlett had ridden with Ronnie and Cliff to pick up the body and the tools. Karl and Tarquin drove separately.

  The moon was only a crescent, so the night was dark, but even that thin sliver in the sky seemed to give Ronnie an extra bit of strength, werewolf that he was. Ronnie had lifted the body in the back of the truck with apparent ease.

  Karl and Tarquin had filled gallon jugs with tap water and rinsed the blood from the street and the sidewalk and the alleyway, while Ronnie and Scarlett went to the allotment with a corpse in the back of the truck, wrapped in a bloody blanket.

  The fallow field seemed perfect. There was almost no traffic at night on the road and no one lived in the farmhouse. The property was unlit except by the stars and the crescent moon.

  They put the body in the wheelbarrow and Ronnie pushed it out into the field. There was only one shovel, so Cliff did most of the digging. He was the one who killed Bill Knight, and he insisted on doing most of the work, but from time to time he tired, so Ronnie or Karl or Tarquin would spell him for a bit until they all agreed that the hole was deep enough.

  Now, of course it didn’t seem like such a great plan.

  Ronnie shook his head, recalling their blunder. “How was I to know that Mr. Johnson was going to start ploughing his field this year – let alone this weekend!”

  “The worst possible luck,” Karl said.

  “We sorcerers don’t believe in luck,” Tarquin observed philosophically.

  “I remember the digging,” Scarlett interrupted, “but what happened after that?”

  “We barely made it in time,” Karl informed her. “With the sun coming up, we had to hurry, and we got a bit sloppy, I’m afraid.”

  “How did the shovel end up in the wine shop?”

  Karl shook his head with embarrassment. “My fault entirely, I’m afraid. I went back to the wine shop just to get my head together. My office is my safe house, as it were. It’s where I can close out the world and get my thoughts in order. Somehow the shovel ended up in my car. Not somehow–I put it there. I carried it back from the field and Tarquin and Cliff took you back to the bookshop to give you another dose of that forgetting tea. Ronnie left with the wheelbarrow before I remembered I was carrying the damn thing, and so I was left holding it in the end. It went in my car, and then I didn’t want it to be found there, in case the police looked inside while it was parked, so I brought the shovel inside, to deal with later.”