AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And sure enough, there was a knock on the door. Gus made the sign of the cross, albeit with heavy mischief and sarcasm.
“How did you know?” Joy asked her friend. “You’re not a seer.”
“No, I’m a listener. You can hear that car a mile off.”
Joy laughed at the unexpectedly normal reply and went to answer the door.
TWENTY-TWO
GABI
Gabi would have been at Joy’s house an hour earlier if she hadn’t driven past a couple violently arguing in the street. They both had to be pushing eighty, but they had someseriouslungs on them—and tempers to match. The husband had been sneaking to the pub behind his wife, Helga’s, back. Helga handled learning this fact badly; right as Gabi was driving past, Helga lifted the two-foot gnome from her shrubbery with a hovering spell and hurled it straight at her husband’s head.
Now, the woman was cooling off in a town hall cell. Her husband was in A&E, still tipsy and ranting loudly.
Speaking of the town hall, Gabi needed to figure out how to tell Paulina the conditions of those cells needed improvingASAP. Somehow, she needed to phrase it, so it seemed like Paulina’s own idea.
She’d ask her dad; he was better at cleverness and intrigue.
By the time Gabi had pulled up outside Joy’s house, she’d lost all the mental energy she needed to deal with the coven. Not that Salma, Eilidh, or Joy were difficult. But Maisie … she’d taken a liking to Gabi’s perfume and insisted on claiming Gabi’s coat for her bed. Every single time Gabi was near. And Victoriya and Gus could give her a headache in two seconds flat.
Somehow, she managed the night without snapping, only disappearing twice to the toilet for a moment’s peace.
It had been hours now since the coven left, and Gabi had lost track of the time.
With the house empty, Gabi and Joy took a bottle of wine and a Tupperware box of ginger biscuits into the living room. Salma baked the biscuits, her speciality, and gave a warmth to both Gabi’s tongue and her mood. She’d forgotten what it was like to be around witches, the special things she’d once taken for granted. Enchanted food, like Joy’s mum used to make.
God, she’d missed this.
Again, there came that tug in her belly, urging her to stay in Agedale. Her plans for a city career seemed very far away right now.
“Poor thing,” Joy sighed, swirling the rosé in her glass.
It was the first time Gabi had seen Joy put down her wand, though it remained in clear sight on the coffee table, Christmas lights catching in the facets of the amethyst.
“He was still crying when you left?” she asked, her eyes big with sympathy.
Gabi nodded, leaning back into the sofa and casting off the day’s aches. Her face was warm from the alcohol, and red from the electric fire across the small room. She wondered if her eyes were glossy too; Joy’s certainly were—they now sparkled rich chocolate brown.
“I don’t think he could hurt an insect, let alone murder his girlfriend,” she sighed. Macon had been the deadest of dead ends. Hence her exhaustion.
“You were always a good judge of character,” Joy murmured, staring into her wine. “Unlike me.”
“Hey,” Gabi said, loudly. Too loudly; she winced at her volume. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re great. It’s not your fault people are assholes.”
Joy shrugged. She was a sad drunk. If they opened another bottle, she’d start weeping.
Gabi reached across the coffee table between them—for some reason they’d forsaken the furniture, alighting instead on the carpet—and patted Joy’s hand.
“You give people a chance when they don’t deserve it. That just makes you a good person.” Gabi set her drink aside, not liking the impulse to kiss Joy that kept thumping through her blood. She took her hand back, and set it firmly on the floor, then switched the topic back to something safe.
“If anyone had a motive, it was his mother.”
“Whose mother?”
“The boyfriend’s.”
“Ohhhh.”
