Page 12 of Coven of Magic
But she wasn’t being honest.
EIGHT
GABI
Gabi opened the door with a new tension to her shoulders, masking her dread and expecting Paulina, and blinked in surprise at the three witches and one fox gathered on her doorstep. Joy’s coven.
She tried not to let the sudden force of her relief show. They’d come.
Paulina had finally forwarded Gabi the missing persons report for a fifteen year old girl who matched the description of the victim. Her name was Freya Faulkner. Gabi had only had time to scan the brief details Paulina had sent—mostly notes on her family and their untrustworthiness in Paulina’s opinion because of her aunt, Ingrid Faulkner, a human married to a witch—but it had driven home the necessity of Gabi’s work. Not only to prove Joy’s innocence, but to get justice for this girl. And with what Gabi had sensed on the beach, and on the body, she couldn’t do it alone. She needed a witch to sense that astringent wrongness too, that chemical scent that had nothing to do with the usual butcher’s shop smell of a murder scene.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” Gabi said, pressing formality into her voice to cover the note of relief. If anyone had the same motivation to find Freya Faulkner’s killer as her, it was these witches.
The tallest witch came forward, an elegant black woman in her late twenties with a close-cropped afro and ivy wound around her long white dress. She offered Gabi a strained smile and in a deep, rich voice said, “Thank you for trying to free our Joy.”
Gabi just nodded, not sure how to respond. Joy was hers too, or at least she had been.
To the earth witch’s side, a tanned guy in his twenties watched Gabi with tired eyes and wariness, his denim jacket battered and his brown hair a windblown mess. He looked as rumpled and exhausted as Gabi felt inside.
She looked from the black witch, to the only male, to the girl on his other side. She was younger than the others, teenaged, and about as different from them as they were from each other. The straight-backed black woman, the scruffy, slouching guy, and the curvy young girl with her hands clenched at her sides, her jeans ripped at the knees and her eyes bright with makeup and tears.
Her aqua vest had a sketchy rendition of the peace symbol on it but the red circles around the girl’s eyes and her tear-bitten cheeks were anything but peaceful. Next to her blonde curls, the ends dyed blue, her red face was vivid. Gabi felt a twinge of guilt for asking her to come here and examine a body. It would be upsetting for anyone.
And the fox … Gabi didn’t know where to begin with this fourth stranger. But she was a girl, too, and older than Gabi according to the venomous witch waiting in the kitchen. Gabi had to remind herself to treat the fox like a witch instead of an animal. So she gave her a nod of greeting and let the fox trot down the hall, followed by the trio of odd witches. Gabi shut the door with a heavy sigh behind them, the piercing cry of a seagull making her want to cry out too, if only to release some of the maelstrom inside her.
Instead, she swallowed a breath and followed them into the kitchen where Victoria lurked like a particularly deadly reptile.
“First off,” Gabi said, taking a spot against the wall near the kitchen door while the witches squashed around the table, the fox climbing up the jeans of the only male in their group to get onto the tabletop to watch Gabi. “Can you introduce yourselves? I’m Gabriella Pride, you might know my dad, Bo. I’m taking over his position.”Hopingto take over, but she didn’t feel like explaining her trial period. There was no other option than success; shecouldn’tfail, not when it was about making her mum proudandfreeing her ex-girlfriend from prison.
“Salma Nazari,” the tall, black witch introduced herself with a mild smile, her energy grounded, calm. Not surprising for an earth witch—and the ivy around her waist was a dead giveaway of her magical alignment. Now that she’d said her name, Gabi vaguely remembered her as the art technician at school. In her late twenties, she was the eldest of the coven members. Which made her the unofficial Head Witch of the coven, not that Paulina would let anyone else claim the title in her town. God forbid.
“I’m Gus,” the guy mumbled, tracing an old scar in the table where it veined off into more scratches, evidence of Gabi’s childhood boredom. He waved a hand, lacklustre. “This is my sister, Maisie.” Gabi looked at the big girl with blue in her hair, but it was the fox that yipped. And if Gabi wasn’t mistaken, there was amusement in those black, beastly eyes.
“Are your senses the same as a regular fox’s?” Gabi asked, her mind cataloguing the next few tasks she needed to do. Still, she didn’t miss those black eyes narrowing.
“That face means she’s thinking about biting you,” Gus clarified, scratching his jaw and smirking a little.
Gabi suppressed the urge to sigh, forcing herself to explainwhyshe’d asked the question. “The smell is going to be bad enough foruswhen we go to the morgue. If your senses are more heightened than ours, especially your sense of smell, you might be better off waiting out here. You might not be able to sense any magic over the smell.”
Maisie blinked, and then with deliberate slowness, shook her red-orange head.
“Alright,” Gabi said, happy to move on. From what Victoriya had told her, Maisie was a witch able to transform her shape, but she’d shifted too many times in a short space of time and been stuck as a red fox for the past two years. Gabi pitied her, but she didn’t have time for anything other than clinical observation. Too much weight rested on her shoulders.
“I want to see her.”
Gabi turned to the youngest coven member and was startled to find tears silently sliding down her red cheeks. The witch gripped a pendant at her neck, her knuckles white, but her blue eyes when they met Gabi’s were strong—hard. She swallowed and said, “My … my cousin Freya went missing last night just after tea, and—I’m not stupid. Victoriya texts us to come see if we can sense who killed a girl you found this morning on the beach—” She pushed back her shoulders, her chest rising and falling fast under her peace shirt. “I want to see her.”
Silence—utter silence among the witches.
“I don’t know if that’s—” Gabi began.
“You didn’t tell us,” Salma breathed, more worried than accusatory. In a rush, she pushed out of her chair and wrapped her arms around her coven member, their heads touching. “You should have said something, Eilidh.”
Eilidh. Ay-lee. The name clicked—Eilidh Faulkner. She’d been mentioned in Paulina’s file, the daughter of the witch male and human woman.
Gabi sighed, closing her eyes for a long blink. She had to do the right thing, no matter how bad she felt for the girl, no matter how much of a bitch it made her. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you near her. Not until I’ve finished…”Examining hersounded too cold.
“Right.” Eilidh scrubbed tears off her face, her mouth set in a firm line. She sat stiffly, her jaw clenched so hard it might break, Salam’s arms wrapped around her from behind. “Fine, whatever, I get it.”