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ONE
JOY
The wordnaughtywas carved deep into the girl’s cheek, bone-white skin peeling back to expose muscle and bone. Discarded in the sand beside her—and almost worse than the gruesome cut—was the girl’s wand. It was slim and ebony and snapped into two pieces, with jagged splinters on the ends.
As soon as Joy Mackenzie registered what she was seeing—the wand, the blood, and the fact that the girl was actually acorpse—she skittered away with a cry, tripping over her boots and falling onto her ass on the grassy sand dune. Bile rose into her throat as she looked andlookedat the girl, unable to tear her eyes away even as her stomach wrenched against her breakfast.
When she spotted the shape from across the beach, Joy presumed it was Old Josie, passed out on the beach again after one too many sherries. Not a dead girl with half her face carved off.
“Oh, god…”
Joy twisted aside as her stomach cramped, bile scorching her throat as she was violently sick into the sand.
Wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her coat and gagging as grains of sand clung to her lips, Joy looked across the beach to the blocky yellow hut of the nature reserve where she worked. It was hard sometimes to separate the structure from the sand dunes that cradled it, but a fat beam of sunlight caught the windows as Joy turned towards the building, like a divine figure sensed her desperation and sent help. But Joy was opening up the reserve today, and it was too early for even the most dedicated beach joggers to be out. There was nobody to help Joy, no one to tell her what to do about the girl rotting in the sand before her.
Clumsy, her eyes fixed on that yellow hut so they didn’t return to the dead girl, Joy climbed to her feet, her stomach roiling again as her boots slipped on the sand. What she really wanted was to go home and bolt all her locks. But she couldn’t leave the girl, the …body, here. It wasn’t right, and Joy had always tried to do the right thing, even if it was difficult and she would probably be sick again.
On her feet, she fumbled in her pocket for her phone and took deep breaths to settle her stomach as she scrolled through her contacts to a number she hadn’t used in years.
There hadn’t been a murder in this town for as long as Joy had been alive. Back in the seventies, people were killed scarily often, usually the victims of inter-species fights, fae gang wars, or personal grudges—but then Clover Pride, one of the most powerful elves in the North, decreed herself Agedale’s law enforcement, later joined by her husband, Bo. Clover had somehow earned respect fromeveryspecies that lived in town, and, with her husband, they were as close as the community came to patrol, investigators, enforcers, and problem solvers all rolled into one.
But Clover Pride died years ago—Joy still remembered the shock and standstill all across Agedale as the news spread—and Bo had been injured on the job, forced to retire a year ago. Now, the closest they came to law enforcement was Head Witch Paulina, the leader of Agedale’s only recognised coven, but she cared less about justice than having her every command followed. She was more a politician than a police officer. Joy had known the break-ins would start again, the inter-species spats, but …murder?
With the word cut into the baby-faced teenager’s cheek, so fresh and violent in Joy’s mind even as she faced away, there was no chance this was an accident.
Joy pulled the collar of her coat—a fluffy, oversized grey thing—further up her neck and ducked against the salty wind as she held her phone to her ear.
“Hi, sorry, it’s Joy—Joy Mackenzie. I didn’t know who else I should call. I’ve found a … there’s a girl on the beach near my work, the reserve on the western edge, the yellow one with the solar panels on the roof, and there’s—”
“Joy,” said Bo Pride calmly. “Breathe. What do you mean there’s a girl?”
“She’s dead. I mean—I didn’t check, I really should have, but I thought it was Josie at first, so I didn’t eventhinkto check her pulse, but there’s …” Joy took a breath, but it was little more than a scrape of air. How did she explain the word carved into the girl’s cheek? Or the gore of half her face hanging off? “I think she’s been murdered.”
* * *
By the time help arrived,Joy had moved a safe distance from the girl, and she had her arms wrapped around herself and her face buried in the sandy marabou of her coat. She couldn’t stop shivering, both with the chill howling off the sea and the colder flame of her fear.
At first, Joy saw only one figure: the scarecrow-thin frame of Bo Pride, his dark hair tossed around by the wind and his hands shoved in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. But then the shadow split into two figures, the second in a long, black coat as familiar to Joy as breathing. Her heart leapt before it remembered everything that had happened and sank, her stomach twisting into an even more nauseated pretzel than it had been after seeing the dead witch.
Which was completely mad. She shouldn’t feel sicker seeing a living woman than a dead one. And yet she was.
“You’re back,” Joy rasped when they were both close enough to hear each other. Her eyes appeared to be pinned to Gabriella Pride, refusing to move from her. Although Gabi took the opposite approach, her gaze fixed on the sea, her shoulders ramrod straight, and her lips pressed thin. Joy watched her take a slow breath and hold it before letting it out again, and as aloof as she seemed, Joy knew Gabi was as affected as she was.
“I’m back,” Gabi confirmed, without even a hint of a smile. Her eyes drifted to the body across the beach, the witch’s purple dress the single point of colour in the sand. “How long ago did you find her?”
Joy swallowed, a lump in her throat as she shrugged. She wanted to say it was because of the horror of the body, but the tears stabbing her eyes were purely because of the distance in Gabi’s voice. “I don’t know. A few minutes before I called your dad, I think.”
At this, Bo—the former Pride—stepped closer and settled an arm across Joy’s shoulders, surrounding her with the scent of tobacco and leather. “Let’s go make you a cup of tea while Gabi works.” It might have been awkward if they’d been strangers, but Joy knew Bo for years. He started angling her towards the primrose sanctuary, but a woman’s nasally voice cut through the tiny bit of comfort that had begun to unwind inside Joy.
“Not quite so fast,” the voice said. “I want to talk to the suspect.”
Joy’s shoulders slumped as she turned, all her energy seeming to drain from her as she met the narrowed gaze of Paulina Montgomery, the orange-haired, iron-willed Head Witch of their town. Leader of a coven Joy had been rejected from.
Paulina’s status was embroidered in silver thread around the brim of her hat—a sophisticated style instead of the pointed hats of old—and the cuffs and hem of her cloak.
Not good enough for Paulina, for the only officially recognised coven in Agedale, Joy and a group of then-strangers had joined together out of desperation and loneliness to make their own coven.Thecoven, Paulina’s coven, welcomed every witch in Agedale to join its twice weekly meetings, except if you were of mixed species, queer, transgender, nonconformist, or just didn’t meet Paulina’s ideal of the perfect witch. There were over two hundred witches in Agedale, and all but six were part of Paulina’s coven. If Joy’s dad had still been here, if he’d still been Head Witch,everyonewould have been accepted. Not that he was a saint—far from it—but at least he wouldn’t have kicked Joy out for being both fae and a witch, or Gus for living as male, or Maisie for being cursed into fox form.
Paulina was not a woman to be disrespected or crossed. In Paulina’s eyes, Joy had done both simply by existing in the same town as her coven. By being a witch with a fae mother. Or maybe by being the daughter of Todd Mackenzie, her lifelong rival. Or maybe by being pansexual.
