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  Vervain and a Victim

  The Witches of Wormwood Mysteries

  Ruby Loren

  Contents

  Books in the Series

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  1. The Devil’s Jumps

  2. Detectives and Drama

  3. New Me Tea

  4. High Stakes

  5. Double Date

  6. The Thirteen

  7. In an Eggshell

  8. Dead Man Walking

  9. Maddening Magic

  10. A Shot in the Dark

  11. Secrets and Spies

  12. Rehab for Wild Witches

  13. Unfinished Business

  14. Once Bitten

  15. The Cabin in the Woods

  16. You Reap what you Sow

  17. A Gathering of Suspects

  18. A Familiar Face

  Books in the Series

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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 Devil’s Jumps

  Wormwood Forest is renowned for its dramatic scenery, but the addition of a corpse probably pushed the definition too far.

  I’d decided to treat myself to an early evening walk through the western part of the forest, where the trees clung to the sides of five great hills. When it became so steep that the trees could no longer claw out a foothold, the walker was treated to panoramic views all the way across the forest to distant Witchwood. I had hoped to enjoy the view and the mild March breeze. Instead, I found a dead body.

  I’d made the grisly discovery when I finally breached the tree line that gave way to the rocky outcrop at the top of each hill. These hills were known locally as the Devil’s Jumps. The story I’d heard about how the hills came to be named was that a devil had been jumping from outcrop to outcrop to amuse himself. This had so annoyed the god of thunder, Thor, that he’d thrown a stone at the devil, causing him to flee. The stone that had been thrown was a large boulder that still rested at the centre of the circular ring of five hills.

  The tale had made a good filler article for the local interest magazine I wrote and produced, but I definitely didn’t take the story seriously. Wormwood, the town I came from, was weird… but not every fairytale you heard was true. Little did I know, I was about to land in the middle of a morbid mystery that was as far from a fairytale as you could get.

  The first thing I did when I got beyond the trees was to close my eyes and take a long, deep breath. Someone in better shape than I was would probably have enjoyed drinking in the glorious clear air. I took a long deep breath because I was in serious danger of passing out. A combination of too many treats from the bakery, and too little exercise, had finally got to me. I was starting to accept that, at the grand old age of twenty-eight, I might not be able to get away with the things I had done once upon a time.

  I was glad that no one could see me now - all puffed out and red faced. But I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought. When I opened my eyes again, I discovered another pair looking back into my own. They were eyes that I recognised.

  “Jesse Heathen… what are you doing here?” I said, ready to restart the argument that he and I had never finished, after he’d pulled a literal disappearing act on me. My next words curled up in my throat when I saw what was lying on the ground next to him. Or rather - who was lying on the ground next to him.

  Jesse Heathen looked down at the pale corpse and then back up at me. He raised his hands in the air. “This is not what it looks like.”

  I shot him a look filled with disbelief. “Really? Because it looks like you brought a woman out into the middle of nowhere in order to murder her.” I kept my body relaxed and tried to get my breath back as subtly as I could. If this turned into something I needed to run from, I should try to be ready. Running wasn’t my only option if this turned nasty. I focused on the other thing I had inside of me - the well of magical power I was still attempting to figure out how to wield.

  “Stop being so melodramatic,” Jesse said in a bored drawl. “Firstly, why would I want to kill a fortuneteller? And secondly, this is a terrible place for a murder. Anyone could stroll up the hill and catch the killer at the scene of the crime. You’ve just proved that yourself.”

  I felt my mouth set into an unimpressed line. “You’re the only one I see standing here. Fortuneteller?” I queried, before I threw caution to the wind and moved in to take a closer look.

  “People know where I’ve gone,” I warned Jesse.

  “Which people?” he asked, sounding amused - the way he always did.

  “Hemlock.”

  “Isn’t he a cat?”

  I had to stop myself from saying anything more. Hemlock technically was a cat, but he was also my witch’s familiar. This special bond meant that he and I could communicate, but I was the only one who could understand him. In terms of telling someone where you were going in case anything were to happen to you, Hemlock probably hadn’t been the best choice. I doubted he’d even notice I was missing until his food bowl was mysteriously empty at dinnertime.

  “It’s Bridgette Spellsworth,” I said, finally recognising the body on the ground.

  “It took me a while to figure that out, too,” Jesse agreed.

  We both looked at the corpse’s unnaturally pale face and a neck so mangled that her head must have nearly been severed by whatever did it to her.

  “Shouldn’t there be more blood?” I said, breaking the grim silence that had fallen.

  “She’s been exsanguinated.”

  “Oh.” I nodded, like that made perfect sense. But it really didn’t. “What? Is that how she died?” I was having a hard time putting any of this together, but while I didn’t trust Jesse as far as I could throw him, I could see that he didn’t have a speck of blood on him. I doubted that removing all the blood from a person and disposing of it - somehow - was not a neat job. Not unless it had been done by magic.

  Unfortunately, that was a genuine possibility.

  “I didn’t magically drain her!” Jesse protested.

  Were my thoughts really that easy to follow? “Then maybe you’d like to tell me what you were doing out here at the scene of a murder?”

  “I was taking a walk - the same as you. Am I right?”

  I watched his face for signs of a lie, but when it came to Jesse, I didn’t know what he looked like when he told the truth. I sighed and gave up on the interrogation. It wasn’t worth the effort. My eyes were doing all they could to not return to the maimed corpse. That was how I found myself looking at the silver coin and the small pewter cauldron that lay on its side in a divot in the rock next to the body.

  “Did you bring those here?” I asked Jesse.

  “No. They were there when I arrived,” he said, sounding vague.

  I glanced at him, but his eyes were fixed on the body. Perhaps the cold reality of death laid out before him was getting to him as much as it was to me. But I certainly wasn’t above using it to my advantage. “Are you sure you didn’t kill her?”

  That seemed to snap him out of it. He threw me a disparaging look with his amber eyes. “You saw her neck. Does it look like I’ve been chomping on steak?” He bared his white teeth at me.

  I was going to make a snarky comment in return, but then it occurre
d to me what he was implying. I glanced back down at the body - regretted it - and then fixed my eyes back on Jesse. “Are you saying you think someone used their teeth to do that?” I wasn’t really asking. Now that he’d mentioned it, and I’d given the body an ill-advised second look, I did think that the mess of ruined flesh bore marks that looked like they’d been made by teeth. “Animal attack?” I suggested, now more focused on our immediate surroundings than on the man I was standing opposite. The thing that had done that to Bridgette could still be lurking nearby.

  “Relax. Even if it was, I think it happened after her death. There’s a small amount of blood leaking out beneath her back on this side of the body, and if you look at the centre of her chest, you can see a little spot of it. I’m not going to turn her over, but I’m guessing someone stabbed your fortuneteller in the back.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Can you see a knife anywhere?” He completed a dramatic spin to show off the fact that he wasn’t carrying any kind of weapon. To be fair, in jeans as well-fitting as the black pair Jesse wore, I didn’t think much could be concealed at all.

  “You could have thrown it away,” I pointed out.

  He threw his hands up in exasperation. “Why would I have wanted to kill a woman I hardly knew?”

  “That sounds like the kind of question the police will be asking you,” I said, pulling out my phone and waving it around to get signal. There was one bar on the screen, which was probably just enough to make the call. Describing the location was going to be interesting…

  “You’re calling the police on me? If I were the killer, I’d probably try to stop you from doing that.”

  I glanced across at him.

  “Which I’m not going to do,” he continued, as if that much had been obvious. “I just think it’s unfair. Come on, you know I didn’t do this.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m just reporting that there’s been a murder. Unless you’d like me to add that you’re the prime suspect?”

  “I’m sure they’ll figure that much out for themselves when they arrive,” Jesse replied, forcing his hands into his pockets and looking bemused.

  I raised my eyebrows at him whilst I waited to be put through. “Were you really just going to walk away and leave the body where you found it without telling anyone?” I was spared finding out the answer (which I thought I knew anyway) by the voice on the other end of the telephone asking me if I’d like to report an incident. I gave a description of the crime scene and my best directions. The operator then asked if it was safe for me to remain at the scene until the police arrived. I glanced across at Jesse, before telling her I thought it was probably okay because I was here with another person - Jesse Heathen. When I said his name Jesse rolled his eyes towards the heavens. He knew exactly what I was doing.

  I hung up and we looked at each other.

  “I can’t believe you still think I killed her.” He sat down a little way away from the body on the edge of a big lump of rock.

  I walked away and sat down on a different piece of rock, about ten metres further on. “Can you blame me? You gave me a cryptic speech about things you weren’t able to tell me and then disappeared off the face of the planet. The first time I see you in two months, you’re standing over a dead body. What am I supposed to think?”

  “It almost sounds like you missed me.” Jesse grinned and stretched out backwards with his hands behind his head. He could even make lying on a rock look luxurious and easy.

  “Hardly. Things have been quieter and better with you not around,” I told him, primly.

  It was true.

  Since Jesse had vanished into the shadows, things had taken a turn for the better. I’d been working with my aunts to figure out the magic powers that were allegedly manifesting within me. Disappointingly, we were currently focusing on magical theory and a few simple spells that I had yet to master. I hadn’t been allowed to do anything fun. Hemlock was still trying to persuade me to turn him green, but according to my Aunt Minerva, obvious signs of magic, like a bright green cat, were strictly forbidden.

  My little magazine, Tales from Wormwood, had also seemed to turn a corner in the last couple of issues. The article I’d written on a recent murder, and my apprehending of the culprit, had definitely struck a chord with the locals, and even though I’d shared all of the insider details I could, there’d been a near constant stream of visitors to the Salem Apothecary asking for more. A lot of them had bought things at the shop, which had definitely meant my business had picked up. Better than that were the many responses I’d received from businesses I’d contacted about advertising in the magazine since its inception. So many of them had called up that I was seriously considering raising my prices.

  I wasn’t rich, not by any stretch, but this was the first month where I would be able to pay for my bills and shopping without having to live off baked beans when money got tight at the end of the month. It might not sound like a huge achievement, but for me, it was the first sign of success.

  Now that my witch powers were manifesting, and I’d finally accepted that magic was real, I was hopeful that the magazine would be that much better for it - because I’d actually believe the stuff I was writing about. The tabloids should take note.

  I was smiling whilst reflecting on it all when Jesse broke into my thoughts.

  “Daydreaming about your boyfriend?”

  I looked across at him. His amber eyes were fixed on the fading blue sky above us, but he must have been watching me. “My boyfriend?”

  “The one from the bakery who looks like a lost puppy, which apparently all the local women find appealing.” He frowned. “He is your boyfriend, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, of course he is,” I said, overcompensating. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  The amused flash in Jesse’s eyes made me wonder if my lie had been as completely obvious as I suspected. The reason I often forgot about my boyfriend, Tristan, was because he wasn’t actually my boyfriend. We were in a fake relationship that theoretically benefited us both by deterring unwanted advances. In my case, it was completely unnecessary. There was absolutely zero chance of me accidentally being unfaithful to my fake boyfriend. I’d lived in Wormwood so long that, to the local men, I was just part of the scenery.

  “I have no idea what you see in him,” Jesse said, his voice full of superiority.

  I sat up a little more upright on my rock and glared across at him. Tristan might be my fake boyfriend, but he was my very real friend - which was a lot more than I could say for Jesse Heathen. “That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. You don’t seem to value any of the same things Tristan does - like selflessness, friendship, and being honest with people…”

  Jesse looked less amused than he had done before. “I told you why I can’t give you the answers to your questions.”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t!”

  We glared at each other for several seconds, before the smile came back onto Jesse’s face.

  “Hows the magic going? I noticed you’re hiding it now. Good job.”

  “Don’t patronise me.”

  He raised his hands in mock defence. “I wasn’t! It’s a sensible thing to practice. I’m sure your aunts have told you that flaunting your power is a good way to get yourself in trouble. It’s better to hide it, so that no one knows exactly what you have up your sleeve.”

  “Spoken like a man who trades off that concept,” I commented. However, I was buying into the idea myself. When my powers had first appeared, to those who also had magic, it had shown up as a golden aura around me - the colour of my magic and the scale of it had been there for all who used witch sight to see.

  At first, it had served me well. News that Hazel Salem wasn’t the only non-magical Salem to ever exist had spread around town, and there’d been a certain amount of respect that had accompanied my change. For the first time in my life, I’d felt that I fitted in with the reside
nts of the town where I’d been born. But as my magic had continued to grow, and my aunts had become more and more excited that there might be some truth to the fabled powers of late-developing witches, they’d taught me to hide it. There was such a thing as having too much power on display. And there was a difference between ‘in awe’ and ‘terrified’.

  It was only too bad that, while I might look like I could pack a punch, the opposite was actually true. I’d shirked reading the spell books my mother had left in her will to me, and now I was paying for my lack of interest by being required to work through the backlog. Beyond that, my aunts were letting me experiment with a few things under their guidance (no cat colour changes) but my attempts at everything they suggested seemed to land somewhere on the scale between ineffective and disastrous. The more I tried, the worse it seemed to get. I was seriously considering springing for better building insurance, just in case I one day accidentally demolished a wall. As it stood right now, the only thing I could manage with reasonable consistency were illusions - the most basic beginner magic there was. It was typical. Just when I’d believed I was no longer a dud, it turned out that my magic didn’t want to behave. Why could nothing ever be simple in my life?

  My aunts were both excellent spell weavers. Whilst they claimed that my magical talents probably just lay elsewhere, and we continued to try different magical disciplines, I knew that, deep down, they were just as worried as I was that I was a big fat magical failure.

  “How’s the magical awakening going for you?” Jesse asked, as I’d known he eventually would.