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  Mandrake and a Murder

  The Witches of Wormwood Mysteries

  Ruby Loren

  Contents

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  1. The New Witches in Town

  2. Foes and Fakers

  3. Spells and Showdowns

  4. A Nasty Piece of Work

  5. The Plague of Wormwood

  6. The Scene of the Crime

  7. The Grim

  8. Curses!

  9. Stealing the Show

  10. Jesse’s Girls

  11. Confessions of a Crooked Coven

  12. The Greater Good

  13. Cake and Corpses

  14. The See-Through Spell

  15. A Rock and a Hard Place

  16. Saved by the Bell

  17. The Squint

  18. The Colour of Magic

  19. Secrets and Shadows

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  Also by Ruby Loren

  Books in the Series

  Mandrake and a Murder

  Vervain and a Victim

  Feverfew and False Friends

  Belladonna and a Body

  Aconite and Accusations

  Prequel: Hemlock and Hedge

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  Grab your FREE copy of the exciting prequel, Hemlock and Hedge, and find out how the story began.

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  1

  The New Witches in Town

  Not many people move to Wormwood.

  The South East of England is notorious for its expensive properties, but house prices in this town have stayed stagnant - much like the people who live here.

  Unfortunately, I’m one of them.

  My entire life had been geared towards getting away from Wormwood, but, like everyone else in town, I had my roots here. And those roots had a way of dragging you back to where you belonged… no matter how many years you stayed away.

  Most of the towns and villages in the South East of England have a rich historical heritage. Many of these places have folklore that stretches back to tales of broomstick-flying witches and bets made with devils. But only one place still actively encourages belief in those old tales.

  Wormwood has been trading off all things supernatural for over a century. The town has more psychics, fortunetellers, and witches for hire per capita than any other town in the country. Even Glastonbury doesn’t come close to our level of woo-woo. All of that is a fact of life when you live here. You’ll bump into a voodoo priest gathering gris gris in the graveyard, you’ll witness the plague of black cats belonging to the town’s witches running down the streets, or you’ll happen upon druids picking mushrooms in the surrounding woods and fields. It’s the kind of place where strange things go on every single day, and yet, somehow, nothing new ever happens. Like a pond with no water flowing in or out of it, Wormwood is a gloomy puddle of stagnation.

  Or it was, before the murder.

  I’m sure no one has ever said ‘You know what this town needs? A violent murder to add some zest to daily affairs!’ but that was the effect it had. No one could stop talking about the murder, and no one was safe from suspicion. After centuries of selling fake potions and charms to the dribs and drabs of tourists who ventured (often accidentally) through town, Wormwood was getting ready to tear itself apart.

  It had happened yesterday morning.

  Lara Rivers had been out walking her dog in the woods, away from the pack of marauding cats, when she’d come upon a terrible scene. Her walk had taken her to the clearing in the heart of Wormwood Forest where druids and witches liked to meet when the moon was full. I wouldn’t have been surprised if her goal hadn’t been a little bit of petty payback (in the form of dog fouling) for the witches’ cats’ violent attitude towards her canine companion, but what she’d discovered was far worse than an act of minor sabotage.

  She’d found the body of a man, lying in the centre of the clearing with an ornate, bejewelled knife embedded in his chest. According to the local gossips, the corpse had been at the centre of some kind of magic ring, spray-painted onto the grass. There’d also been a proliferation of ominous symbols painted onto the trunks of the trees that surrounded the clearing in a circle. Depending on who you listened to, voodoo dolls, inverted crucifixes, silver coins, and all manner of other items each describer had associated with something really, really evil, had been present at the scene.

  The police were baffled. No one seemed to know anything about the dead man apart from his name: Zack Baden, that had been written on the driver’s licence he’d had in his pocket. And no one knew why he’d been killed in such a dramatic fashion.

  It was the most exciting thing to happen in Wormwood since the witch trials, more than 400 years ago.

  It was also the worst thing to ever happen to the town.

  People liked to forget that Wormwood existed. It was amazing how many major roads had been built that inexplicably curved around the town at the last moment, and newcomers to the town were rarer than hen’s teeth. But the murder could change all of that.

  A lot of the visitors to my small apothecary were concerned about the spiritual implications of what had happened so close to the town. They feared demons were going to crawl up out of the earth and lay siege. I was more worried about consequences in the physical world. Growing up in Wormwood, there had always been weird, inexplicable things that just sort of happened. There were remarkable runs of luck, both good and bad, and people even occasionally just disappeared off the face of the earth. But this was an overt display of the worst things that were whispered about Wormwooders behind our backs.

  It was going to be tough for anyone to forget about the town when it boasted a ritualistic unsolved murder. Some folks may even start wondering if there really was some kind of dark magic afoot in South East England.

  “There’s nothing like that going on here. No one’s that evil. Even the ones who like to think they are,” I said aloud, straightening some of the potted herbs I kept on the counter of the shop. I brushed strands of golden-brown hair back from my face where they had fallen loose from the French plait I’d unwisely attempted that morning, after YouTube had bolstered my confidence.

  “If you’re going to talk nonsense, the least you can do is offer me some coffee, so I can try to pretend to be interested,” a voice replied.

  “I was talking to myself. It’s the only intelligent conversation I get around here. And no coffee! We’ve discussed this before.” I narrowed my amber eyes, looking for the speaker.

  A large black kitten - well on his way to becoming a proper cat - appeared from under the counter and stretched himself out, so he looked slim and sleek. I wished the same trick would work on me. “Hazel… The whole point of having a familiar is that you don’t need to talk to yourself like a crazy person. I’m here to guide you, like cat Yoda. Cat Yoda who you should give coffee.”

  I looked down at the big kitten. He had a glazed look to his eyes that hinted he’d found his way into the catnip supply again. It was no wonder he now wanted a totally not cat-suitable caffeine fix. I would have to find a better hiding place. “But if I’m the only one who can understand you, isn’t that almost the same as talking to myself? To anyone watching, I would look just as nuts.” I considered. “Probably nuttier.” Talking to a cat (and clearly pretending he was answering back) had to be worse than talking to yourself. “I’m still not convinced you really are talking to me.”

  “Are my lips moving?” Hemlock said, jumping up onto the counter and contorting his mouth into a wide pointy grin. He’d definitely been in the
catnip.

  “You don’t really have lips.”

  “How dare you!” he said and began washing his bottom. No matter how many times I got carried away and credited Hemlock with human-level intelligence, he would always remind me that he was a cat at heart by doing something that was utterly unacceptable in polite society.

  I saw a slinking dark shape out of the corner of my eye as Hemlock’s shadow, Hedge, trotted by. Hedge had turned up out of the blue at the same time as Hemlock. But whilst Hemlock had announced that he was my witch’s familiar (and very nearly triggered a series of trips to a psychiatrist about the mental breakdown I had to be experiencing) Hedge had always remained silent. His quiet nature had been a big part of what had finally convinced me that I probably wasn’t imagining the sarcastic kitten who’d started talking to me - and me alone. If I were really crazy, wouldn’t I have imagined both of them yakking away?

  I’d asked Hemlock where Hedge had come from, or what he was doing with him, but he’d said he didn’t know. He also claimed that Hedge sometimes told him things, but I took that with a big pinch of salt. I didn’t believe Hemlock could understand Hedge any better than I could. They’d arrived at the same time but whilst Hemlock felt compelled to stay as my familiar, there was no reason, beyond free food and lodging, that I could credit with the silent kitten’s decision to hang around.

  “Have you heard anything more about the murder?” I asked the black cat, once he’d finished washing, and I’d finished ignoring the horrible slurping noises he made whilst he did it.

  “Nope. Everyone’s gone silent. Too silent, if you ask me. I think the no-brains out there finally figured out that this might be bad for tourism. Not that this place is Disney Land…”

  “Do you think it really will stop people coming here?” I was worrying about my little shop. I owned the lease and the property itself, but there were still certain costs I had to meet to make it worthwhile. Not to mention, I had to keep Hemlock and Hedge in cat food.

  “Stop them… or bring them here. You should be careful. Matters like this can turn into a witch hunt. And in this town, it will be a literal one,” Hemlock said, sounding smart and not at all sarcastic for a moment.

  I shot him a surprised look. When he’d walked in and started talking to me for the very first time, I’d had the unfortunate duty of explaining to him that there had been some kind of a mistake. The terrible truth was, in a town filled to the brim of its pointy hat with witches, I was a dud.

  I’d long believed that all ‘magic’ was merely a psychological tool used to imagine a goal into being… until Hemlock had happened. Then it had been pretty hard to ignore that there were some things psychology couldn’t explain - especially when this particular thing’s sole purpose in life seemed to be to judge me from the sidelines. Hemlock was not thrilled that he’d been assigned to a dud witch. He’d stuck around, but he loved to dish out disdain with a ladle. That was why I was surprised he seemed to be taking this murder so seriously.

  “If there’s a witch hunt, I should be just fine,” I told him.

  “Not necessarily.”

  A loud knocking sound from the front of the shop made me jump.

  Hemlock jumped down from the counter and did his slinking run across the floor. “Changes are coming to this town…” he said, by way of an ominous farewell.

  Is it the police? Are they here to arrest me? I thought, completely irrationally. Hemlock’s talk of witch hunts and changes had put me on edge.

  I knew I was innocent. I’d been tucked up in bed around the same time the murder must have been happening. But I was also painfully aware that the only person who could corroborate that alibi was furry and understood by me alone. As weird as Wormwood was, trying to claim that a cat could give you an alibi was pushing it.

  When I looked out of the door of my still-closed shop, I discovered it wasn’t the police calling. Not unless the police had recently changed their uniform from black kevlar vests and white shirts to pink feather boas and tartan scarves.

  I unlocked the door and opened it up. Out of hours customers were an occasional occurrence. Usually, they happened at the tail end of the day when a witch or a magician was prepping for a night of spell-work and realised they’d run out of an essential ingredient. Morning visitors were something new - especially morning visitors who looked like they’d packed for a long trip.

  “Hazel Salem?”

  I nodded.

  “Look at you! You’re all grown up. We knew you would be… otherwise we wouldn’t be here,” the woman on the left said, talking as if she knew me. She was the one wearing the pink feather boa. It complemented the peroxide blonde Hollywood curls that clung to her head the way Marilyn Monroe’s had. The bright pink lipstick was surely chosen to match the boa, and the rest of her outfit was equally ostentatious. It included an expensive looking cream coat and, most surprisingly of all, a pair of pink Doc Martins.

  After all that, I’d expected stilettos.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, smiling in what I hoped was a polite manner. I couldn’t fight the feeling that there was something strange going on.

  “Linda, she doesn’t recognise us,” the other woman said, looking at me over the top of her stylish glasses. Her hair was also blonde, but a far more mature and less ‘look at me’ champagne tone. She wore a sensible black trench coat and the only thing that jumped out at me was her bright green eyes and the tartan scarf she wore.

  “I know she was just a baby, but I thought I made a really good impression!” the Marilyn-alike said.

  “I’m sorry but… who are you?” I was fast getting the impression that this pair were not customers… and the suitcases they had with them were starting to alarm me.

  The tartan-scarf wearer lifted a hand to her chest. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am your aunt, Minerva.”

  “And I’m Linda. Also your aunt,” the other supplied.

  “I didn’t know I had aunts.”

  “That’s just Freya all over, isn’t it?” Linda rolled her eyes at Minerva. “She leaves her only child all of her problems to deal with but doesn’t tell her about her family.”

  “Linda! We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Your mother was a very interesting woman. She was wonderfully talented,” Minerva said, addressing me. “We were very sorry to hear of her passing. I only wish we’d been able to come sooner, but we had some urgent business to attend to.” Here she paused to give Linda a significant look. By the way Linda avoided making eye contact, I gathered that it was a silent instruction to keep quiet about whatever their ‘business’ had been. “The main thing is, we are here to help you now. How are your powers coming along?”

  I did some rapid blinking. “Powers?”

  The two women on the shop doorstep exchanged another glance.

  “You do know you’re a witch, don’t you?” Linda ventured.

  I started to nod and then turned it into a head wobble as I dithered. “I do. I mean… in the traditional sense of the word. My mother definitely believed she was a witch. A lot of people around here go in for that sort of thing.”

  Their expressions filled with horror.

  “You haven’t seen any signs of powers manifesting? How old are you?” Minerva’s forehead was creased with concern.

  “I’m twenty-eight. And no… no powers. Unless you count Hemlock, my cat,” I added, hoping that might be something to lift their obvious dismay.

  “Leave me out of this,” Hemlock muttered from some unseen vantage point.

  “Stop spying on us!” I called out.

  “What did you expect with a mother like Freya? She never told any of us who the father was. He could have been anyone! Perhaps he was so normal that his genes stamped all over ours. She doesn’t even have the Salem green eyes,” Linda said, looking ready to pull her hair out.

  “Hang on a moment. Are you talking about your familiar?” Minerva looked hopeful.

  “I think so. He says that only I can understand him. Is that correct?
” I was still on the fence as to whether or not I really was nutty.

  “She’s got a familiar, Linda. She must have some magic in her. They only appear when things are about to change. How long have you had this cat?”

  “He arrived when I moved back to Wormwood, about six months ago.”

  “When your mother passed away,” Minerva observed.

  I nodded. “She left the shop to me in her will. The will also said that her last wishes were for me to carry on the family business.”

  The will had put a spanner in the works of the life I’d planned out for myself - that and the colossal guilt I’d felt for not even realising my mother had been unwell. She’d hardly seemed to age at all when I’d been growing up. When I’d left home to pursue my writing career, she’d been supportive. We’d never been particularly close or shared many secrets together. Looking back, I supposed that was the reason why she hadn’t called me back from my travels until it was too late. That, and I now suspected she’d wanted to guilt trip me into running the shop after she was gone.

  It had worked.

  “She had a good long life,” Minerva said, smiling understandingly.

  I nodded, knowing it would be impolite to correct her. My mother had been in her fifties, but had looked twenty years younger when I’d last seen her. It wasn’t a particularly long life by any stretch, but I knew it was just one of the stock phrases people said when they wanted to express sympathy. It didn’t mean anything.