Something Wicked

  Something Wicked

  by Robin Moray

  a Mallory Witches story

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Robin Moray

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First Electronic Edition

  About Something Wicked

  Witches always come in threes. For the Mallory clan, those three are Artemis, Bella, and … well, Kevin.

  Disappointingly normal, Kevin has spent his life in the shadow of his siblings, one brilliant, the other staggeringly powerful. But when the killing of a witch up on Cairn Hill coincides with the arrival of a handsome stranger in their sleepy home-town, Kevin finds himself going undercover to untangle the mystery behind the murder. He knows better than to get too close to a witch-killer, but as the connection between them deepens, Kevin can't help falling under Peter's spell.

  Can Kevin keep his true nature secret? Or will he give it all to a man who can destroy him?

  * * *

  On the trail of a rogue witch, Peter never expected to meet anyone like Kevin Mallory. He can't let himself be distracted by green eyes and strong hands; he has his duty, and his duty is everything. But as tensions wind them both to breaking point, Peter finds it harder and harder to resist what his every instinct tells him to do.

  Will Peter deny temptation to do his duty? Or will he risk everything for the one thing he never knew he needed?

  Table of Contents

  About Something Wicked

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Robin Moray

  Chapter 1

  It came in the night, a great big BOOM that reverberated down Kevin's veins like a shockwave and that, really, was exactly what it was.

  Boom.

  Everything shook again. Kevin lurched out of bed and staggered next door to find his sister sitting up with her hands over her ears. When he climbed up beside her all she did was bury her face in his shoulder and moan, "Oh, God," and then, "What happened?"

  He didn't know. All he knew was that his world had shuddered and he could feel the worst of it still burning on his skin. Who would even?

  "Did Artie—?" he asked, except he knew it wasn't Artemis, it didn't taste like him and—

  BOOM. That was three, now. As his vision shook with the shock of it, the door slammed back and Artemis bolted in, up on the bed in a heartbeat, arms wrapping around his younger siblings and holding on.

  "Holy smoke!" Artemis shouted, ducking his head down and covering them both with his body and the shield of his magic, an intricate golden net spanning from him like cobwebs. He pulled it up like a blanket, tucked them all under, and it made Kevin feel immediately safe. Then, for good measure, Bella's shield came up solid as the crust of a planet to cover the three of them. There. Even safer.

  They hugged up, held on to each other, and when the crash and break of magic washed over and away they still held on, but loosened their death-grips a little.

  "Hey," Kevin said thickly, shaken and confused but wanting more than anything to know if his brother and sister were okay. "Hey."

  Carefully, Bella let her shield down. Kevin shivered, still sensitive to the aftermath of whatever-the-hell had just happened. It felt like his skin was trying to crawl away. Outside it was quiet, no bird-noise, no animals, no car-alarms the way he would have expected if it had been an actual earthquake rather than magic that felt like one. Nothing was broken. Everyone was safe. It may as well not have happened at all, except for the itchy feeling all down his spine.

  Bella cleared her throat. "Fwah. Morning, you two. What the heck was that?"

  Artemis came up, looking like a wild man with his hair in a dark halo around his head. He was glowing, magic boiling off him like steam and lighting his eyes, and it might have been intimidating if he were wearing something other than plaid pyjama pants. "Magical discharge," he said, blinking rapidly. "Two spells, maybe, reacting to each other. Like when you try to open a ward the wrong way and it backfires."

  Bella tugged the comforter up to her chin. "That was a monster of a backfire. I can still feel it, like it's burnt into my skull."

  Kevin was glad, for once, that he wasn't nearly as sensitive as the others. The quake had felt northerly, he thought, but that wasn't enough. "How far away was it?" He didn't ask 'who' because how could they tell? All the witches in the county were currently huddled together on Bella's bed. All the known witches, anyway.

  "I'd have to maths it out," Artemis said, frowning and wiggling his fingers the way he did when he was calculating. "I mean, it could have been a hundred miles, or a thousand, but the exponential increase in strength to scale it up over distance would mean—"

  Bella cut him off. "It must have been up on Cairn Hill. That would make sense."

  It did make sense. Cairn Hill was in the right direction, as far as Kevin could tell. Plus, it sounded right, and if Kevin knew anything about magic it was that magic appreciated a good narrative.

  Artemis hesitated, but he nodded. "It fits. Let me grab a few things and we can go."

  "Go?" Kevin gawped at him. "You want to just go right on up to the giant mysterious magical disaster site and, what? Instagram it? We don't even know what it was!"

  "And that's why we're going to find out." Artemis scuffed a hand through his beard, grinning like a nutcase. "For science."

  "It's not for science, you dickhead," Kevin grumbled, levering himself up off the bed. "You're not a scientist. You're a witch. It's the opposite."

  Still, he went to his room to pull on jeans and a hoodie, shoved his feet into trainers, and stumbled out to the car.

  "Can I drive?" he asked, shivering in the chill pre-dawn.

  "No," Artemis and Bella answered together, like twins. Ugh, how he hated it when they did that.

  "Come on. I'm practically useless, otherwise."

  Artemis, who'd brought a leather satchel and was fussing with it, just shook his head, but Bella patted Kevin's arm and smiled one of her sympathetic smiles. "You're not useless. We need you."

  He supposed it was true. "Yeah, so let me drive."

  "Last time I let you drive I nearly had a heart attack. I'm only thirty, I'm too young for that," Artemis argued, looking ridiculously well-put-together for a man who'd just leaped out of bed in the dead of night. It was the pea coat and scarf, Kevin decided. What kind of person knotted their scarf so precisely at two in the morning? Sickening.

  Bella wasn't any better. She'd pulled boots on over leggings with a charcoal sweater-dress, and she was effortlessly
beautiful, her thick dark hair pulled into a messy knot that ought to seem dishevelled. Somehow, she managed to it pull off as 'casual disarray'. It made Kevin feel scruffy by comparison. He ran his fingers over his hair, scowling and wishing he'd put on a hat.

  And then he felt ridiculous. It was the middle of the night and they were driving ten miles out of town up a hill in the dark to screw about in the woods. No-one was going to see them. Except, maybe, whoever had tried to blow themselves up.

  Still, when he found a knit hat in the back seat of the car he put it on. "Can we just go? I'd kinda like to sleep a bit, maybe, some time."

  "How could you sleep after that?" Artemis twisted around in the passenger seat to stare at him. "The atmosphere is like chewing tinfoil."

  "Like ants," Bella agreed. She backed the car carefully out of the driveway, and started up the road that led to the turn-off for Cairn Hill.

  Kevin hunched down in his seat, tapping his fingers restlessly on his knee as they lumbered through the shapeless dark of fields. "It's pretty much faded off for me. Like it never happened. Just a bit tense, I guess." The air felt tight, as though a storm were coming, and there was a bit of metallic tang in the back of his throat. Apart from that, though, nothing.

  "You're lucky," Artemis said, rubbing his fingers against his temples as though smoothing away a headache. He'd stopped leaking magic now, no longer steaming off into the night air, but he was full of it, full to the brim, and that, if anything, made Kevin nervous. His big brother usually kept his magic to himself, but if he was holding it now, ready for anything? Then he was expecting trouble.

  In contrast, Bella was a comfort, her magic lying dormant for now. Of course, with her capacity there'd be no use in filling to bursting; she'd have no way of discharging that much energy without directing it into something big. Artemis, by comparison, was a candleflame to her roaring fire. You could metaphorically pinch out his magic with a wet thumb and forefinger, but Bella? Yeah, say goodbye to your hand.

  And then there was Kevin, who was more like the spark you got when you flicked an empty cigarette lighter. Practically useless.

  As usual.

  He didn't care. Really, he didn't, not most days. Even if he'd been stronger, or just better, magic wasn't a free pass. You couldn't use it to make huge piles of gold— Well, you could, but the price you'd pay would be staggering. Because, like Nanna Abigail had told them over and over, magic always came at a cost. And if you didn't know it beforehand, sure as hell you'd end up regretting it after.

  Which made jumping in the car and rushing up to Cairn Hill to investigate a giant magical explosion without thinking it through a really stupid thing to do. Kevin shoved his knee into the back of Artemis' seat. "Hey. You said two spells reacting to each other, right? Like one interfering with another?"

  Artemis shoved back at him, but continued staring straight out the window. As if he could see anything in the dark, anyway. "Something like that, maybe."

  "So someone casting a spell and another one on top of it? To make, like, a bigger spell?"

  "Maybe."

  Artemis sketched with his finger on the car window, leaving bright trails of light. It was one of those flashy-but-useless spells Artemis liked so much; flashy because glowy writing was, well, flashy, but useless because it was an illusion and you couldn't get it to stay permanent in any way. If you wanted permanent you might as well draw in sharpie. Still, illusions were cheap, and Artemis had always liked to boost his magic by finding cheap ways to cheat or look good. Now he scribbled out a complicated diagram that made only a little sense to Kevin.

  "Normally if you cast a spell on top of another one the second spell disrupts the first. Like walking over someone else's footprint in the sand; you can see yours, but the other one's reduced to noise. If the elements of the spell are complementary, though, you might get an enhanced effect."

  "Like blowing on coals in a fire?"

  Artemis nodded. He wiped out part of the diagram and redrew it, though Kevin couldn't follow why. "But if the elements were contradictory, the reaction could be a lot bigger. More like throwing petrol on a fire. The problem is, you couldn't control it. Unless you constructed the spells in a way that pushed their energies exactly in the direction you wanted."

  Kevin thought about it. An uncontrolled reaction, contained in a structure that forced it into a certain shape. "So … how a combustion engine works?"

  "I don't know," and Artemis grinned back at him infuriatingly. "Is that how a combustion engine works?"

  "Dammit, Artie!" Kevin kicked the back of his seat. "How do you know everything you know and not understand a combustion engine?"

  Artemis flicked his fingers dismissively; this argument again. It drove Kevin mad.

  Brilliant Artemis, with his alchematory and his books, dissecting spells and rituals and putting them back together in newly inventive ways, and he could barely understand electricity. He could use it, certainly, he wasn't a complete luddite, but ask him to explain thermodynamics and he'd just shrug. Artemis was still at the 'try turning it off and on again' level of computer user, and the other day Kevin had found out, to his horror, that Artemis used the same password for everything and it was 'abracadabra' all in lower-case, no numbers or symbols. Worst of all, when Kevin yelled at him about it he seemed to think the whole thing was funny.

  Meanwhile, Kevin wasn't supposed to feel upset about it, about either of them. "You're special in your own way, Kevin," Nanna Abigail used to say, and, "Some people are late bloomers."

  As if anyone was this late blooming. No, Kevin knew it. He was twenty-two, technically an adult, and about as magically gifted as, well, the average person. So not really at all. It wouldn't have been so bad if the other two weren't so exceptional. Neither of Kevin's parents had been witches; neither of them had had the talent for it nor the inclination. But when Artemis was two, Nanna Abigail had declared him to have far too much potential to waste, and moved into the Cottage so she could be near enough to Take Care of Things. The way Kevin's mother told it, there hadn't really been any way to stop her. Nanna Abigail was a force of nature, and always got her way.

  Then there was Bella, who Nanna Abigail had diagnosed in the womb. Bella needed 'special attention' apparently; this was borne out when, at the age of six, she successfully grew a series of hills in the paddock behind the house because she had a new bike and wanted to 'do jumps'.

  Kevin, though, might as well have been completely normal. Still, Nanna Abigail hadn't thought it fair to exclude him from the same lessons his brother and sister were getting, so he could brew the odd potion, whistle up a breeze, and understand bird, for all the good that ever did. But beyond that? Not a whole lot.

  The only reason Artemis and Bella took him anywhere, he figured, was because they were a coven, and the only reason they were a coven was because witches always came in threes, and he was the closest thing to a witch they had handy.

  So here he was, in the back of a car in the middle of the night racing off to investigate some kind of magical explosion because Artemis and Bella needed him. If by 'needed' you meant 'couldn't do any better'.

  As they approached the hill, Kevin felt the atmospheric tension drawing out until it made his ears ache. It was unpleasant, magic pooling in the air and thickening it to bitter syrup. Magic shouldn't feel like this, Kevin was pretty sure. It never had before. What was wrong with it?

  Artemis huffed, pulling his scarf up over his nose. "Urgh. It's like something died."

  "Maybe something did," Bella said calmly. Kevin didn't think that at all reassuring.

  They pulled over at the foot of the hill and got out, and immediately the oppressive weight of corrupted magic dropped over them like a lead blanket. "Oh my God," Kevin moaned, rubbing behind his ears to try and get some relief. "Anyone got any gum?"

  Artemis gave him a weird look. "How would that help?"

  "Like on planes," Kevin insisted, but Artemis was already ignoring him, shouldering his satchel and marching
off up the hill. "You asked," Kevin muttered.

  Bella caught his hand. "Don't mind him, he's just tense. Come on."

  They went up. It was dark, but Bella wouldn't summon a witch-light and wouldn't let Kevin do it either.

  "It'll interfere with Artie's investigation," she said, reasonably enough, so they went on in the dark, and Kevin hoped he wouldn't end up up falling in a hole and breaking something painful.

  They caught up with Artemis by the Cairn itself. It wasn't, Kevin thought, a particularly good cairn. It was modern, built by Scottish settlers only about a hundred and fifty years ago, made mostly of grey stones piled up to about ten feet. The stones were roundish, fitted together like bricks, and whatever their original purpose they formed a pretty solid anchor-point for protection spells.

  Artemis had already stuck a witch-light up on the side of the Cairn; it cast a dim pool of eerie blue-green light over the stones and the short grass that ran all the way down to the trees that half-circled the base of the hill. Kevin glared at it. 'Interfere with the investigation,' yeah right. Still, he kept his peace, and peered over Artemis' shoulder. "Find anything?"

  Artemis clicked his tongue. "Not yet." He was pouring coloured sand out of little phials onto a mirror; scrying, it seemed. Ugh, that could take forever.

  Kevin wandered off a ways, to where a stone thrust up out of the grass. He sat on it, tucking his hands into the pocket of his hoodie, and tried not to feel the cold. There was a trick to it. He never could keep it up long and, anyway, people got suspicious when you went about sleeveless in winter so what was even the point? Plus you'd eventually die of hypothermia; you were still cold even if you couldn't feel it.

  Magic was so useless, most of the time. It was easier to put on a sweater than it was to spell yourself warm, easier to light a fire with matches than the 'power of positive thinking'. Kevin could, frankly, do without it. And, anyway, science was interesting. Magic rarely made any sense. Even Artemis, with his endless experimenting, generally took a trial-and-error approach to it. And Bella just 'knew' how to do things, which was worse, somehow.