Witching There's Another Way: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 4) by Constance Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

to form.
    The images rushed around the house, down the road, through town. It showed the school, and the park, and the house again. Then, it drifted away from the house slowly, and began to head toward the coast.
    “Dear God,” Avery whispered, and put his hand over his mouth.
    “If the mirror can track her,” Frances muttered, “then she’s still breathing. Just watch…”
    A moment later, it was clear which direction the mirror was going; but it never made it there. Just before it began to hone in on the Caves, the water began to boil.
    Frances swore, and jerked her hands away from the dish. Just as quickly as the water had begun to boil, it froze.
    Chloe hissed, and tapped the water. “Frances,” she sighed, “you lost control. It’ll take months to prepare new water.”
    Frances shook her head and held up her fingers. They weren’t burned—the pads of her fingers looked frozen. She closed her fingers into fists at the same time she closed her eyes, and Bailey felt the stir of magic in the room again, this time just around Frances. A moment later she shook both of her hands vigorously. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “It just went off.”
    All five of them stared at the dish.
    “Does it… do that often?” Avery asked.
    Chloe and Frances stared at him.
    “No, Avery,” Chloe said patiently, “it doesn’t.”
    “Something prevented the spell from penetrating the Caves,” Aiden said. He frowned at Chloe. “Is that part of the protections on them?”
    “You can scry in the caves,” Chloe said.
    “Simplest explanation would be that someone here interfered,” Frances grumbled. She gave Avery and Aiden both a hard eye.
    Both men took a step back and raised their hands.
    “For that kind of magic, I’d have needed my wand,” Aiden said.
    “And I don’t even have a wand yet,” Avery added quickly.
    “Can’t we just try again?” Bailey asked.
    Chloe shook her head. “Not with this, and it’s the most reliable method we have. The scrying water is meant to be reused several times. We’ve only used this batch twice; but once it changes states, the magic is altered beyond repair. Until we manage to make more…”
    “Useless,” Frances grumbled as she lifted and dropped the dish of ice.
    “It’s not completely fruitless, at least,” Bailey said. “We know she was headed toward the caves, right?”
    “It’s a place to start, at least,” Chloe admitted.
    Aiden, though, folded his arms over his chest, pensive and disturbed.
    “Just say what you’re thinking,” Frances sighed.
    Aiden pursed his lips. “I’m just thinking it through carefully, thank you Ms. Cold.”
    Frances looked like she might spit, but didn’t.
    A moment later Aiden leaned against the edge of the service counter. “It seems… unlikely, given the state of the Caves as they are now but… something like this...a lost child... happened elsewhere. In Creswell.”
    “Creswell,” Avery repeated, suddenly alarmed.
    Bailey’s stomach dropped.
    Creswell. Aiden had told her about it before. Like Coven Grove, it housed a network of caves, one of several throughout the world, which, according to Professor Turner’s research, each were connected by means of another world. The world of Faerie.
    In Creswell, Aiden had explained, the door to Faerie in those caves had been breached briefly—and for just a few moments he had laid eyes on not just a number of Faerie creatures—but on what he believed was the queen of Faeries herself: Mab, queen of the Faeries. Given how it had affected him, Bailey didn’t want such an encounter herself.
    “They weren’t using a mirror to find the boy,” Aiden explained. “He had a GPS bracelet, you see. It checked his location in every so many minutes. They followed the trail he left, right up until they were within about two hundred meters of the cave. Then… the coordinates that the bracelet transmitted stopped making sense. One after the other, they showed him all over England, and then