Velma Kuroda, specialist in haunted and enchanted objects, comes to evaluate the unusual estate left behind by a witch and demonologist.
Content warnings: references to & implications of forced marriage; swarming insect(-like creature)s
It had been raining since four o’clock in the morning, when Andrea had gotten the kids up and out of bed. She’d managed to get them dressed in a haze of sleepy, confused complaining, but at least when they were still half-unconscious, it didn’t occur to any of them to cry at the injustice of it all.
Aaron had sleepwalked through putting on his jeans and his t-shirt, and although he’d put his jumper on backward at first, Andrea thought it wasn’t much of a problem in the scheme of things, and he’d gone readily into the back of the car. Shannon had chosen a pair of dungarees and a little polo neck the night before, which made getting her dressed far easier than the usual.
Liza —
Well. Liza did insist on some clumsy independence, even while barely connected to the waking world, but she’d managed to wiggle into her trousers, and while the shirt and cardigan had been a bit more difficult, she’d basically allowed Andrea to do the complicated fastenings.
As Andrea worked through getting them each to eat some cereal, Sam had packed all of their bags into the back of the car, and set out their pillows and blankets so they’d be able to go back to sleep in the back. They’d been worried, the night before, that the kids would be too awake once they packed them in to drop off again, but they’d barely woken up in the first place, and by the time Andrea settled in the driving seat, all three of them were asleep again, Liza in the middle with her head leaning on Aaron’s shoulder, and Shannon on the other side, her arms wrapped loosely around a pillow, her little face mashed against it.
Fat, heavy drops came down heavy against the windscreen glass as they set off, and as they drove south, it seemed as if the rain clouds followed them.
“You think this is a sign of something?” Sam asked, leaning forward to look up at the sky, at the thick, dark clouds that seemed to cover the sky from edge to edge. “An omen, I mean?”
It would be easy to laugh it off, or say nothing at all, but when Sam asked things like this, it wasn’t intended as a joke, or as a dig. There was real anxiety in the set of her shoulders, the press together of her lips, and so Andrea spoke softly as she replied. “No,” she murmured. “Big things like the weather, they feel personal, but they very rarely are.”
It was nearly a six hour drive to Chesterton-Burnleigh, and they’d managed to get out of the house just before five. With all three kids conked out for the first few hours, they had an easy time of it — it was nine o’clock before Aaron stirred, coming slowly awake, and although Shannon remained completely out of it — that girl could sleep for England — Liza came awake as Aaron did.
Aaron sat up, wiping at his eyes and beginning to look actively out of the windows, his gaze alert and focused on the road, but Liza was a little less with it than he was — she remained with her cheek rested on her brother’s side, looking forward at Andrea and Sam with somnolent brown eyes.
“Are we going to become farmers?” Aaron asked.
Andrea glanced at Sam as they stopped at the traffic lights, and Sam, keeping her head rested against the back of the chair so that Aaron couldn’t see her face, mouthed, “One,” and held up one finger.
“No, sweetheart,” Andrea said. “It’s just a cottage with a bit of land, not fields.”
“Can we keep chickens?”
“Two,” Sam mouthed, then said, “I don’t know, Aaron, chickens can be pretty loud, and messy.”
“So can Shannon,” Aaron said.
“Nonetheless,” Sam said, “we’ll have to think about it.”
“What about a goat?”
“Three.”
“No, Aaron,” Andrea said. “Goats are a bit destructive.”
“So is — ”
“No goats,” Andrea said firmly, and Aaron sighed.
“Can we have a dog?”
“Four.”
“We’ll see.”
“What about a cat?”
“Five. Maybe, but we’ll just have to see how we settle in.”
“How many rooms are there?”
“Six.”
“Well, the cottage has four bedrooms, three upstairs, one downstairs, and then there’s also a living room-cum-kitchen, with a front porch. Two bathrooms, one upstairs, one downstairs.”
“How come we couldn’t live here before?”
“Seven. Because this is Mama’s old house from when she was a little girl, and she inherited it when Uncle Damien died.”
“But Uncle Damien died three years ago. Was the will contested?”
Sam looked at Andrea in the mirror, and Andrea tapped her fingers against the steering wheel. She inwardly told herself, not for the first time, that an inquisitive son was a good thing to have. She looked at Liza’s face in the mirror: Liza’s jaw was set, her eyes staring forward, with that sort of dead-eyed expression she tended to adopt when Aaron was talking.
“Eight,” Sam mouthed.
“Damien didn’t have a will.”
“So he was intestate?”
“Does that count as nine?”
“Yes.”
“So — ”
“Why don’t we listen to music, Aaron?”
“But I — ”
Sam flicked on the radio, and Aaron frowned, furrowing his brow, but he didn’t talk over the music.
For another fourteen minutes.
As they came closer to Brighton, the clouds rolled slowly back, leaving an expanse of bright, bright blue sky. Under the surprisingly warm light of the sun, suddenly shining in through the windows, all of the kids were wide awake now.
Aaron was reading his book, his headphones in his ears, and Shannon was chattering loudly with Sam about some ongoing plot in the universe she’d been building with her Barbie dolls. It all seemed to Andrea to involve a lot of complicated interpersonal conflict — the count of questions from Aaron stood at sixty-three, but Aaron’s questioning nature was always somehow easier to deal with than Shannon’s imaginative one. Questions from Aaron ordinarily had concrete answers — even the philosophical ones, you could point him toward particular modes of research. Shannon’s world was ever changing, and its foundations were impossible to keep track of from day to day.
And Liza…
Well. It was impossible to know what was going on in that little girl’s head.
She was sitting silently, like she always did, her arms loosely crossed over one of the pillows, looking out of the windows as they passed over green hills, bright orchards laden with fruit, and fields dotted over with sheep and cows.
They pulled up to the cottage at a few minutes after eleven, and Andrea pulled the key out of the ignition, but didn’t yet move to get out of the car, sitting still and looking up at the old house. The mover’s van was already pulled up, and they were already moving stuff into the house, being told what to do by Ella Staunton, the chairwoman of the village hall, who had offered to let the movers in if they arrived before they did.
The cottage was white-painted, covered all over in wisteria that she didn’t remember seeing any of as a child, and the peg tile roof was uneven in places, looking like the sort of roof you’d see on a house in a children’s book more than one you’d spot in the real world. She remembered it seeming so much bigger — but then, your house did seem bigger, when you were a child, didn’t it?
“You okay?” Sam asked softly, and Andrea nodded her head. “You ready to go see the new house, kids?”
“It’s huge,” Shannon said, and scrambled out of the car.
As she ran up to the open door, streaking straight inside, Aaron stayed behind, unbuckling Liza’s seatbelt for her.
“Thank you,” Liza said quietly, in that strange, solemn way she had — but the words were, Andrea couldn’t deny, clearly enunciated, and she didn’t seem to have any problem getting them out. Her general silence was an active choice, not the selective mutism they’d for a long time been worried about.
“Come on,” Aaron said, offering her his hand, and Liza took it before they walked into the house together.
“Hello, Picknells!” said the old lady as she came forward, and Andrea let Sam step forward to shake her hand first. “You must be Sam, and — Oh, Andrea, look at you! Last I saw you you were just this high!”
Andrea gave her a small smile, although she went slightly stiff as Ella pulled her into a hug. Sam looked at her in sympathy, and once Ella pulled away, she immediately caught her by the shoulder, leading her with her and away from Andrea.
“So, Mrs Staunton, how long have you lived here in Chesterton-Burnleigh?”
As Sam led Mrs Staunton away, Andrea made her way into the house. The movers had already gotten all of the furniture into the living room, and the kids’ furniture had been set aside at the top of the stairs — she and Sam were going to take the downstairs bedroom, which had glass doors that opened onto the patio, and they’d decided already that the kids could choose.
Growing up, she and Damien had had their own rooms, and their parents had shared the other bedroom upstairs — the room downstairs had been her mother’s office, and later in life, Damien’s wife had said, it had been her bedroom when she couldn’t manage going up the stairs anymore.
It had taken nearly two years for their solicitor to get into contact with Éan. Damien had lived mundane after his wife had left him and gone home, and they’d never bothered to finalise the separation on paper. It wasn’t until his solicitor had contacted Andrea that she’d even realised Éan had gone — they hadn’t gone to the funeral.
She should have gone to her brother’s funeral, but on the other side of the country, with three children and two work schedules to juggle, it hadn’t seemed feasible, at the time. And now, now…
Éan hadn’t been angry when Andrea had called her, had explained the situation, that as Damien’s wife, she stood to inherit all his assets. She’d been confused as to why she’d want them, and more confused still as to why she had to explain that to a solicitor for Andrea to take them instead.
“I’m taking this room,” Andrea heard Shannon declare as she came to the top of the stairs, and she silently moved forward, dipping her head into the room. Shannon stood in the middle of the biggest bedroom, the one that had been Damien’s as a child — the sun shone right in through the wide windows in the mornings, and the balcony connected it to the room next door, the smallest bedroom.
“Alright,” Aaron said evenly. “Which room do you want, Liza? The one next door, or the one across the hall?”
Liza didn’t say anything, but gestured with a nod of her head to the door opposite, and Aaron nodded his head, leaving his sisters be and turning to face Andrea in the doorway. She stepped back to let him past, and she followed him into the other bedroom. It was still bigger than the room he’d had back in Middlesborough, if only by a little nit — the biggest change was for the girls, not having to share a bedroom anymore.
“Which one was your room?” Aaron asked. “When you were a kid?”
“This one,” Andrea said softly. I had my bed up against the window, and in the summer, I’d open the windows to the balcony and drag it half outside, so I could sleep under the moonlight.”
“Shannon’s room was Damien’s room,” Aaron said. “And the other room was your parents’, but when Granny Wendy was really old, her hips were bad and the stairs made her ache, so she slept downstairs instead.”
Andrea was silent for a moment, watching Aaron as he looked around the room, at the tan-coloured walls, the old wood boards. She didn’t think she had a favourite child — she knew a lot of parents did, that they had favourite children secretly, but she didn’t. She loved all three of them, loved them desperately, but even though none of them were her favourite, Aaron was… the easiest. They were the most alike.
She still hesitated before she asked, “You can feel that?”
Aaron glanced at her. “Not that well, I have to concentrate,” he said. “But Liza did soon as she came inside. And she said there’s monsters in the attic.”
That was oddly fanciful, for Liza. Shannon had nightmares from time to time in amongst the other dreams, had the down-to-earth, normal fears a lot of mundane children did, even if she moved on from them fast, but Liza, Liza had never had a nightmare in her life, and she wasn’t frightened of anything.
“There aren’t monsters in the attic,” Andrea murmured.
“There’s a lot of furniture, though,” Aaron said, and Andrea watched his eyes focus on something out of sight. She glanced up at the trap door that led up into the attic, untouched for years, if not decades. “And books, a lot of books. Don’t you see them, Mama?”
Andrea inhaled, slowly, and then focused as he did, was aware of everything going on in the house around her — Shannon sprawled out on her back in the next room, thinking about where she wanted the stars to go on her ceiling; Liza standing at her windowsill, stood on her tiptoes so that she could look out over the garden; Ella and Sam downstairs in the kitchen, laughing together as they rummaged through boxes in search of a kettle.
There was furniture in the attic, and books, and boxes — wooden boxes, boxes of her mother’s. Divining objects, potions equipment, magical implements. Damien had packed some of them away when she’d gotten too sick to work anymore, and packed away the rest when his wife had left him, and left him disillusioned with all the magic in the world. Ha. Disillusioned with not being able to control the world as he pleased, more like.
“Can I go up and look?”
“No,” Andrea said, putting her hand on his shoulder.
“There’s a ladder,” Aaron said. “It folds down when you open the trap door with the hook. The hook is downstairs, in the pantry — the solicitor didn’t know what it was for, when she packed the house away.”
“We’re gonna have to have someone else come in and look at it, someone who knows about enchantment, to make sure nothing’s dangerous. Sometimes, even standard enchantments degrade over time, and that can make them act unpredictably — and there could be cursed objects upstairs, too, stuff that could hurt anybody that touched them.”
“But I would know before I touched them,” Aaron said.
Andrea laughed, running her hand through his hair.
“Why are you laughing? You know that I know before I touch things, and Liza too, we’re like you are, Mama, we can see — ”
“Aaron, Aaron,” Andrea said, and she crouched slowly down to look at him properly, sitting back on the floor. “Sit down with me.” Aaron did, sitting down cross-legged on the floor across from her — steepling his fingers and leaning forward, his lips twisted in a frown. He looked so serious, for a ten-year-old — he always did. “Okay, so… Your Granny Wendy was a witch. We’ve talked about what that means before — a lot of the work that she did was ritualised, she did spells and divined futures. Now, because of the work she did, she had a lot of magical objects to use, but she also picked up cursed objects because sometimes she could use them, or to keep them safe from other people.”
“But I can tell the difference between — “
“And sometimes, cursed objects are made to appear enchanted, or as if they’re not magical at all. Even to people like us.”
Aaron went quiet, staring at her, his eyes wide. “Why?” he demanded, apparently incensed by the injustice of it.
“Well, why do people create cursed objects?”
“To hurt people, or inconvenience them.”
“Right. And you think the people that make cursed objects only want to hurt mundane people? You don’t think some of them maybe want to have a shot at other magical people, too? Fool them?”
“Is that why Granda Jules left Granny Wendy?” Aaron asked softly. “Because she had cursed things?”
“No,” Andrea said. “Granda and Granny just… had problems. Sometimes married couples do — they love each other at first, but then they don’t anymore.”
“No,” Aaron said, eyes focused on another time. “No, she shouted at him. She said he was a bad father — she said — ”
“Okay, okay, don’t exhaust yourself,” Andrea said, spreading her hands out, and Aaron stopped, looking up at her. “When I was your age, I didn’t want to be a witch. I didn’t want to learn how to do spells and rituals like my brother did, and that made Granny Wendy very angry. When Granda Jules was on my side, and said I shouldn’t have to learn if I didn’t want to, she got even angrier. So he decided to take me away, and my brother stayed here.”
“S’that why she only ever visited us, and not the other way around?”
“Yeah, sweetheart,” Andrea murmured. “That’s why.”
“What about Uncle Damien, and his wife? She wasn’t happy here. She cried every night.”
“Well, Éan wasn’t quite ready to leave her family, when Damien proposed to her. She missed her mother, and her home.”
“Why did she say yes when he asked her, then?”
“Well, Éan’s from a fae family.” This was delicate ground, and she tried to think about how she wanted to phrase it, with Aaron looking up at her, concentrated, listening carefully. “Proposals aren’t the same for fae — if you meet certain requirements, they have to say yes, even if they don’t want to.”
Damien, even as a little boy, had been fascinated with stories of fae wives, had played at stealing a selkie’s skin when they ran around the garden together: there was a sense of relief to see the expression of distaste on Aaron’s face. It was real and genuine disgust. “That’s horrible,” Aaron said.
“Yeah,” Andrea murmured. “Yeah, it is. Come here.”
Aaron fell forward, against her chest, and she hugged him very tightly, pressing her mouth in a kiss against his head.
Aaron Picknell was nine years old.
His younger sister, Shannon, was eight, and his youngest sister, Liza, was four. Recently — that is to say, in the past day — he, his sisters, and his parents had moved from Middlesborough down to Chesterton-Burnleigh, which was a village in the South Downs, forty-five minutes’ drive from Brighton.
Aaron was a boy of specific likes and dislikes. He liked to ask questions, and have those questions answered; he liked to read books and research a variety of ideas; he was interested in animals, and was especially interested in the process of domestication and its effect on both physical and behavioural characteristics.
“Did you know that dogs and humans have developed a co-evolutionary relationship over time?”
“Jesus!” hissed Mum, putting her hand over her chest and turning to stare down at him, her eyes wide. With her other hand, she leaned heavily on the kitchen counter, where she’d been in the process of unpacking the pasta jars. “Aaron, what have we told you about not appearing silently?”
“I don’t do it on purpose.”
“You gave me a heart attack,” Mum said, reaching out and curling her fingers in Aaron’s hair. “Yes, sweetheart, I know that they’ve… done that. It’s why dogs look at human faces in order to read their emotions, and why they’re so adept at reading those emotions in the first place.” Mum was a dog behaviourist. “Have you unpacked yet?”
“No.”
“Can you do that for me?”
“Okay,” Aaron murmured, and turned away from her. Walking through the kitchen and back up the stairs was strange: he had the strange impression that he was walking through other people, no matter that they couldn’t see him.
The flat on Bough Road, back in Middlesborough, since it was built, had had loads and loads of families in it. So many families, in fact, that it almost never really felt like you could concentrate on one particularly. Oh, sometimes he got snatches — he knew that the little girl who did ballet had used to have the same bedroom he had, but that she’d practised her ballet in the hall so that she had enough space to move; he knew that the old lady with the glass eye used to throw things at her husband, and he’d throw things back, but they’d laugh while they did it. But they were only little things, tiny glimpses, because everywhere else there were so many imprints of people that they all ended up fading over one another, and it ended up being as impossible to pick one out of the mess as it was to pick one signal out of static on the TV.
It wasn’t like that here.
This cottage — Crescent Gate — had been built in 1926, by Walter and Rebecca Wesson. They’d had three children, and the youngest of them had been Kenneth, and Kenneth had been Grandma Wendy’s father.
Kenneth had had the same room as Aaron, when he was a little boy, and then when he wasn’t a little boy anymore, and he married his wife, it had been his office, and when he died, Grandma Wendy had used it as her office for a few years, until she had Mama. When Mama had left, they’d started using the room for storage, and sometimes Uncle Damien’s wife, Éan, had come in here to sit on the balcony and do needlepoint, because she and Uncle Damien had slept in the room that was Liza’s now.
It was strange, that much fewer people should be louder than loads of them.
It was distracting, as Aaron put his things away, noticing the imprint of a time when Mama had done the same, or when she’d sat on the floor, looking out of the window; it was distracting, too, knowing he was standing where Kenneth Wesson had drawn complicated chalk circles on the floor, except that he’d drawn chalk circles almost everywhere, at least once, even on the ceiling.
This room was bigger than Aaron’s room in the flat on Bough Road had been. It was nearly two feet wider and longer, and the ceiling was at least a foot higher than his old room had been — it looked ridiculously big, even with his furniture put in, his bed and his chest of drawers and even the bookshelf that before had been too tall to go in his room, and had been in the hall in Middlesborough instead.
Once he had everything packed away, he sat back on his bed, which he’d already put sheets on, and looked up at the trap door that led into the attic. Once upon a time, there had been symbols painted on the inside, so that the things inside couldn’t be seen from the outside, but those had faded over time, just like Mama had said, and now you could see them — the shelves full of books and dust, and all the boxes all neatly stacked and labelled, and all the jars of strange things, and even some wooden things in the back, furniture, and a cool chest that was carved all over with honeycomb. Aaron loved bees, even though his parents insisted he couldn’t have any, which wasn’t fair at all.
His fingers twitched on his knees, watching the ghosts — although Mama said that it was technically incorrect to call what they could see ghosts, and had explained what ghosts were, but it had all seemed unnecessarily complicated to him — from all the decades before walk up the ladder and come back down.
Aaron looked in Liza’s room, but she was lying down on her back, looking up at her ceiling, and he didn’t like to disturb her when she was looking at things. Shannon was also staring up at her ceiling, but she wasn’t just staring — she was planning what to paint there, and her boxes were half unpacked.
“Are you going to paint the Grotto di Sella again?” Aaron asked. The Grotto di Sella was a place in Italy that none of them had ever been to, but Shannon had used to dream of it all the time, and she said that one day, she was going to go there, and swim under the full moon, but not for a very long time.
“No,” Shannon said. “I barely dream about it anymore. I’m going to paint the stars.”
“You deciding where they’ll go?”
“No, someone else did that,” Shannon said, glancing down to look at Aaron’s face. “Just don’t know which angle I want.”
Aaron nodded, and then he walked out, going down the stairs. Mum and Mama were in the kitchen, talking about what boxes to unpack to where, and so Aaron walked out of the house, into the front garden, which was quite big, and the back garden was even bigger, with stream that ran past at the end of it, through all the different gardens it connected to.
There was easily space for a chicken coop, and a goat. The Wessons had had chickens and ducks, and they’d kept rabbits, too. Aaron knew it would be hard, but he’d very much like to get his parents to let him keep bees. He liked bees.
There was nothing like the relationship between apiarists and bees, where you helped care for the hive, and the hive cared for you too, and you had to keep watch of the bee populations and everything that went on with them, and it was cool.
It wasn’t fair, not to let him just because he was allergic to bee stings.
Sighing, Aaron leaned to look both ways before he crossed the road, and then he did, walking across to Mrs Staunton’s house. She was the village hall’s chairwoman, except that that didn’t mean she unpacked the chairs — it meant she was sort of in charge.
Right now, she was kneeling on a cushioned pad printed over with flowers, and patting soil around some primroses with a trowel.
“Hello,” Aaron said.
“Well, hello,” Mrs Staunton said. “You must be Aaron — you’re Andrea and Sam’s only boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Aaron said. “And you’re the youngest of six daughters, and your mother always wanted a son, but she never had one, and when your son, Harry, was born, she cried.”
Mrs Staunton looked up at him for a moment, her lips parted in surprise, but then she pressed her lips together again, leaning back on her heels and putting her hands on her knees, and she smiled. People didn’t normally smile at him, when he said things like that. It was a nice change. “Yes, that’s right, Aaron. You’ve inherited your mother’s gift, I see.”
“Mama says it isn’t a gift, but just another sense that’s more keenly calibrated in us than others, and that therefore we have to take care not to take advantage of others, and not to hurt them with it either.”
“Well, that’s a good philosophy to have,” Mrs Staunton said mildly. “Help an old woman up, why don’t you?”
Aaron put out his hands to pull her up before leaning to pick up her kneeling pad and her trowel, and he followed her up the path to the house, putting them on the table outside of her greenhouse.
“Your husband built this for you,” Aaron said, putting his fingers on the tinted glass, smelling the scent of ozone inside.
“Yes, he did,” Mrs Staunton said. “For my fiftieth birthday.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I do,” Mrs Staunton confirmed, with a slow nod of her head. “We were married fifty-five years before he died, but we had good times together.”
“That’s good,” Aaron said.
“You see a lot, hm?” she asked, pulling out a glass from a drawer under the table and pouring him some from the squash she had out, and he took it when she offered it out, taking a sip.
“Everything’s a lot stronger here,” he said. “There’s way less than there was in Middlesborough, so everything’s harder to tune out.”
“It’s not just that,” she said, sinking down onto the padded bench in front of her house, and Aaron sat down next to her. “Chesterton-Burnleigh’s all magical people, ever since it was founded. All the things people like you are sensitive to, they’ll be a little bit stronger here. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
“There are things in our attic,” Aaron said. “But Mama said we have to wait for someone to come have a look at them.”
“Good idea,” Mrs Staunton said. “Lotta witches in that house over the years — there could be dangerous things up there.”
“Are you a witch, Mrs Staunton?”
“No,” she said. “I’m afraid not. Mrs Wickham, who works the Weald Orchard with her family, she’s a witch — she mostly does a few pieces here and there to help the local farms and orchards along. And your Uncle Damien was a witch, before he died.”
“Did you like him?” Aaron asked.
Mrs Staunton was quiet. Aaron could see the expression on the old lady’s face, the difficulty she had keeping her expression neutral. She said, after a moment’s careful thought, “You know, your uncle Damien did some good things for people, when they asked. Helped with the maintenance of the village hall, fixed little problems with enchanted objects when people were having them, did favours for people. He could be a very thoughtful man, always remembered people’s birthdays.”
Aaron was not unused to the tendency of some people to avoid answering uncomfortable questions. People did it often, although he didn’t always know why — in this case, the answer was sort of self-evident, but he asked again anyway. “What about his wife?”
Mrs Staunton thinned her lips. “Well,” she said. “You ever hear the saying, you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead?”
“No.”
“Well, we shouldn’t.”
“Even if it’s true?”
Mrs Staunton patted his back. “Why don’t you go help your parents unpack?”
“You’re just saying that because I’ve backed you into an uncomfortable conversational corner.”
“Yep,” she agreed, after a moment’s pause. “See you another day, sweetheart!”
Sighing, Aaron trudged back across the street.
That evening, Aaron sat down in the darkened living room with his head rested on a cushion, his hands over his eyes. His head hurt very badly, like it always did when he spent too long concentrating on imprints, except that when he was somewhere new, he couldn’t not look — it would be like trying to go into a new house and not looking at any of the walls.
For Liza, it didn’t hurt her at all, because she just found it easy, didn’t have to concentrate at all — but then, she also barely talked, and wasn’t entirely in tune with the rest of the world.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Mama murmured, leaning on the back of the sofa and reaching down to gently curl her fingers in his hair, stroking a soothing circle on the back of his sore head, and Aaron groaned. “You’ll get used to it.”
“Did you used to get headaches?”
“I still do, if I overwork myself, and do a lot after not doing any for a while,” Mama said softly. “You have to be careful, and do it bit by bit — it will get easier, but it’s like when I ran that marathon for charity a few years back, you remember? How I had to jog a little further every day and work myself up to it?”
“Liza doesn’t have to do that.”
“Well, Liza was born running,” Mama murmured, and leaned down over the sofa, kissing the side of his temple. “I’ll get you some hot chocolate, and then you can go to bed. It’ll go away with rest.”
Miserably, Aaron hummed his assent, not wanting to risk a nod of his head, and wrapped the blanket more tightly around himself as he sat in place.
—
“Let me go, let me go!” shouted Kaito, and Velma shifted her weight as Kaito dragged away from her, making sure she wasn’t choking him.
“You should be able to get out of this, you’re twice my size,” Velma said, and Kaito shouted something incoherent, smacking his palm against the floor. “Just hook my ankle like I taught you.”
“You’re too strong — ”
Velma’s phone started to ring, and she let Kaito go, leaving him falling to the ground and groaning against the mat. Picking up her phone, she glanced at the screen, and then brought it up to her ear.
Ella Staunton was a funny old bird — she was the chairwoman of the village hall in Chesterton-Burnleigh, a village in the South Downs a ways outside Brighton. Her husband had been a friend of her Aunt Ginchiyo’s, and the two of them had met back in the 80s: he’d been in the Cymru-Loegr postal and deliveries service for forty-five years before he’d retired, and Velma remembered always visiting with them when her Aunt Ginchiyo took them down south to Brighton. Velma had spent many a morning as a little girl sitting in Ella and George’s front room, watching Scooby Doo or reading a book, or helping Ella with her gardening while Ginchiyo and George worked on something together.
“Hi, Ella, how are you doing?”
“I’m just dandy. Listen, Damien Picknell died a few years back and his siter’s just moved into the old house, but a lot of his things are still up in the attic and they need someone to have a look at them to see what’s still good, make sure nothing’s dangerous. Do you have any openings in your schedule?”
“Sure do,” Velma said, making a grabbing motion at Kaito, and he grabbed her datebook out of her briefcase, tossing it over to her. She paged forward in it, raising her eyebrows. “Uh… Okay, I’m free tomorrow and Sunday, but I’m afraid I won’t next be available until the first week of next month.”
She heard the old lady talking to someone else on the other end of the line, and then she said, “Could you drive down tomorrow morning? I can put you up here if you need two days.”
“Gotcha.”
She scrawled the appointment down in her book, and then looked down at her brother, who was still sprawled out on the floor.
“You’re working now?”
“I was going to be working anyway,” Velma pointed out. “I was just going to be in my workshop cataloguing stuff. I thought you just wanted to spend time in London.”
“No,” Kaito said. “I wanted to spend time with Aunt Ginchiyo’s PS4.”
Ouch. “You know I don’t play with that thing, you can take it home with you if you want.”
“But it’s Aunt Ginchiyo’s.”
Velma sighed. Since her aunt had retired last year, she’d moved into the old lady’s Chelsea apartment, and although Ginchiyo had put a lot of her stuff into storage when she’d moved out, she’d left out the things she thought Velma would use. The games consoles, Velma never touched, and she only left them out for when Kaito visited — but God, if the kid wasn’t fucking stupid.
“Aunt Ginchiyo — don’t tell Mum and Dad this — is currently at a luxury ski lodge in Canada, and she has four women staying in her room with her. She is not thinking about her PS4.”
“There’s a five-bed hotel room in a luxury ski lodge?”
Velma felt her hands twitch at her sides, but resisted the urge to bring one up to pinch the bridge of her nose. Her brother, in his way, was intelligent — he knew however many ways to tie a knot, and he was good at most sports, if not at karate, and he was… good at videogames. She thought. She wasn’t a great judge. “No, Kaito,” she said slowly. “One bed.”
It took a few seconds, and then Kaito slowly opened his mouth, grimacing as he stared up at her. “Oh my God.”
“Yeah,” Velma said. “Anyway, you have three options. You can stay down here the weekend, with Ginchiyo’s PS4, or I can drive you home tonight, with Ginchiyo’s PS4. Or, if you want, you can come down south with me, no PS4 allowed. But we can go to Brighton, go out to dinner, the arcades. If this job only takes one day, we can head to the beach on Sunday. You know, just some fun time with your sister.”
Kaito considered this. “Can you drive me home?”
“Yeah,” Velma said, dropping her datebook back into her briefcase. “Go pack up the PS4.”
“Can I take the big TV?”
“Sure, I don’t use it.”
Kaito clucked his tongue, looking at her with unabashed disgust on his face. “You’re so messed up.”
“Thanks, love you too, chop chop.”
—
After a week in Chesterton-Burnleigh, Andrea was so tired coming down from upstairs that she nearly sat down on the landing and slept there, but she managed the painful walk all the way to bedroom, where Sam was already waiting.
Andrea dropped heavily into bed beside Sam, who was already sitting back against the headboard, her reading glasses on and her e-reader balanced on her knees. She gave Andrea a small smile, and once Andrea had moved up to the top of the bed and leaned back against the headboard, she raised one of her arms, letting Sam lean in and curl against her side, her head rested on Andrea’s chest.
“How long ago did you manage to get Shannon down?” Andrea asked softly.
“Oh, about forty-five minute ago,” Sam murmured, the amusement obvious in her voice, and Andrea groaned quietly, dropping her forehead against the top of Sam’s chestnut hair. Sam laughed, putting her book aside, and wrapped her arm loosely around Andrea’s waist. “He have a lot of questions?”
“So many questions,” Andrea said. “Mostly about the new school.”
They’d toured it today — Andrea had driven Aaron and the girls over that morning, and they’d been very excited meeting some of their new teachers and seeing the space they’d be going to come Monday.
There hadn’t been a school in Chesterton when she’d grown up here — there hadn’t been a -Burnleigh, either, of course, Burnleigh had been a collection of four houses and a farrier’s twenty minutes away, and now Chesterton-Burnleigh was just one big village, almost a town, and it wasn’t the place she’d known, as a little girl.
It was one of those modern schools, a fusion place — they taught mundane and magical subjects side by side, and they’d be able to choose between the mundane GCSEs or the magical skills certs once they got to the right age, or do a mix of both together. It was good, she thought, that they’d have the option, but that everyone at the school would be magical — the kids wouldn’t have to worry too much about keeping things back.
Andrea had never been allowed to go to school, when she was a little girl. Her mother had insisted on keeping her and Damien home, teaching them herself, and once Andrea got older and wanted to go to school like the other children…
She still remembered the fury on her mother’s face, the way she’d shouted, the way she’d utterly lost it, at the thought of Andrea going to school with mundies and living the way they did — at the thought of Andrea not being a witch herself.
“I think it’ll be good for them,” Sam said, curling her legs in closer to Andrea’s body, and Andrea threw the blanket further over her, tucking it in around her back. “Especially Liza — if she’s around more kids like her, she might open up a bit more, and talk.”
“Maybe,” Andrea murmured. “And for Aaron and Shannon… I don’t know. It’ll be nice to have teachers that don’t look at them like they’re crazy. You should have seen Shannon’s face when she got into their art room and got a look at the paints they have to hand.”
“And Aaron?”
Andrea sighed, and dropped her chin against the top of Sam’s head, curling her fingers through her hair. “He asked if they had a school garden — they said yes. He asked if they kept bees. They said no. He asked if they could.”
Sam groaned. “Why the bees?”
“I don’t know. I did tell them about his allergy, and all the teachers are trained in how to use an epipen, which is a good sign, but that doesn’t mean I want him keeping the things.”
“Is that what he was asking about when you put him to sleep?”
“No, not really,” Andrea said lowly. “He’s asking about the stuff in the attic again, asking if he can go up and look himself. He’s desperately curious.”
“Well, I talked to Ella earlier while you and the kids were over at the school,” Sam said softly. “You remember that consultant she mentioned, the one that sort of sorts out hauntings and evaluates enchanted objects? She’s going to come by tomorrow morning.”
“Expensive?”
“For what she does, I think, reasonable. It depends on how long it takes her to go through everything — but Ella says she can value everything upstairs that isn’t dangerous, and help us sell or get rid of anything that we don’t want to keep. I don’t know, I’d rather have her come through than have Aaron or Shannon pick up something dangerous. Turn the light off, would you?”
Andrea leaned back to flick off the light, and they laid down together, facing one another in the soft light that peeked in between the trees in the garden, a pearly white moonlight that made them both look paler than they were.
“Put up my business cards in the village hall and some of the shops in the village,” Sam murmured, reaching out and playing with one of the loose threads on the collar of Andrea’s pyjama top. “Already had a lot of people ring me about booking appointments. I’m just saying, there’s no rush to get right back into working if you want to stay home with the kids for a while longer.”
“I’ll see how we go once they’re in school. You aren’t worried about how magic-heavy the area is? More so than we expected?”
“I was,” Sam said. “But honestly, I met a lot of people today, and these aren’t the sort of old-fashioned weirdos I used to think of, when I thought of all-magic communities. Everyone’s friendly, open. Are you?”
“I don’t know,” Andrea said, lying on her back again, staring up at the ceiling. It was hard to describe exactly what unnerved her about the whole situation, and she couldn’t decide if she was unreasonable for being unnerved at all. “I expected to be coming back to the village I grew up in, but this place is different. I just feel strange knowing that everyone probably had an idea of Damien and Mum, but I don’t know any of them.”
“It’ll be alright. We’ll settle in.”
“Let’s hope so,” Andrea murmured, and let her eyes close as she curled closer to Sam to sleep.
It was a week after they’d come to Chesterton-Burnleigh that the consultant’s orange car pulled up across the road, and parked on Mrs Staunton’s driveway. She arrived on Saturday morning, which was good, because it meant that Aaron and Shannon weren’t in school, and Aaron ran downstairs as soon as she arrived.
“Where’d she drive from?” he asked, and Mum turned around to look at him, flicking her wrist on the pan and making the sausages in it sizzle louder. Mama was upstairs with Shannon, making sure the ladder was steady as she painted, and Liza was sitting down at the kitchen table across from him, making complicated patterns on her Etch-a-sketch.
“Uh, Ella says she lives in London. Try not to poke at her too much today, Aaron, and maybe don’t ask her too many questions, okay? We just want her to go over everything in the attic and make sure it’s all safe.”
“I won’t bother her,” Aaron said. “I just want to see what she does, and ask her about her job.”
“Yeah, Aaron, I know,” Mum murmured, turning around and leaning over the counter, gently cupping the side of his cheek. “But she also needs to be able to do her job, okay?”
“Okay,” Aaron muttered. What was so wrong with questions, anyway? Everyone acted like it was the end of the world if he had any.
“Here,” Mum murmured, putting eggs and sausages with toast onto two plates and pushing them in front of them before putting her head around the door to the stairs. “Andy, Shannon, breakfast!”
Aaron could hear the shift of weight on the wood boards as Shannon climbed down from the ladder and Mama ushered her down the stairs, and he was just biting into his first sausage when the doorbell rang. He liked their doorbell — Granny Wendy had bought it in 1971, and it was made of brass, and super loud.
“’ll g’t’t — ” he tried to say through a mouthful of pork, but Mum grabbed him by back of his shirt and pushed him back to the table.
“I’ll get it,” she said firmly. “Eat your breakfast.”
Aaron groaned, sitting back down, and he focused on eating as Mum went to open the door.
“Hi,” he heard her say. “Ella said your name is Velma?”
“That’s right, Mrs Picknell,” replied the woman, and Aaron turned to try to crane his neck to look into the hall. “Velma Kuroda.”
“Please, call me Sam,” Mum said.
“She’s Scottish,” he hissed, after hurriedly swallowing his mouthful, and Mama glanced at him, then nodded her head.
“I suppose she is,” she said.
The woman that came into the room was a little shorter than Mum was, and really young, and she had black hair and glasses and was wearing an orange turtleneck and an orange cardigan and red jeans and black shoes, and she carried a brown leather briefcase.
“Are you Scottish?” Aaron asked.
Velma looked at him for a moment, raising her eyebrows, but then said, “Yes, I am.”
“Billy Connolly’s Scottish,” Aaron said.
“He’s from Glasgow, too, like me,” Velma agreed. “What’s your name?”
“Aaron,” he said. “And that’s Shannon, and this is Liza. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six. How old are you?”
Mum pushed a cup of tea into Velma’s hands, and Velma smiled at her, murmuring a word of thanks.
“Nine. Are you a witch? Do you do magic? How do you end up being a consultant? Do you still live in Scotland? Mum said you lived in London, do you go back to Scotland often? Do you have any dogs? Do — ”
“Aaron, eat your breakfast,” Mum said, pushing his plate toward him, and Aaron sighed, but Velma didn’t seem annoyed.
“I’m not a witch, but I do do magic,” Velma said. “I’m a specialist in Victorian art and architecture, but I know a lot about different kinds of antiques. My great aunt taught me about magical and enchanted objects, and I took over her business last year, and now it’s what I do. I don’t still live in Scotland, but I visit my grandma a few times a year, and I don’t have any dogs, but my little brother has a cat called Snowdrop.”
“Aaron is very inquisitive,” Mama said.
“What about you two?” Velma asked, looking to Shannon and Liza. “No questions?”
“You wear a lot of orange,” Shannon said. “You look like Velma, from Scooby Doo.”
“Thank you,” Velma said. Shannon furrowed her brow, looking confused. “Liza?”
Mum glanced at Liza, who looked up from her food, and started saying, “Liza doesn’t really like to talk to new pe — “”
“Will you show us how you do flames?” she asked, her voice very quiet, but clear as the peal of a bell. Aaron stared at her, surprised, then looked to Velma, whose eyes had widened and whose lips had shifted up at their corners.
“Of course,” Velma murmured, and she turned her hand out, palm up. As Aaron stared at the centre of her palm, a flame seemed to flicker up from nowhere at all, and then it got bigger and bigger, until there was a ball of flame the size of a tennis ball hovering over her hand.
Aaron stared at it for a second. It looked like real fire — it was the sort of not-as-hot orange flames like you saw in a fireplace, and he curiously reached out, not trying to touch it, but putting his hand closer, and didn’t feel any heat at all.
“It’s not hot,” he said.
“I wasn’t trying to make it hot,” Velma said. “But — ” Suddenly, heat radiated off of the flame like usual, and Aaron laughed, retracting his hand slightly to feel the heat get lesser and lesser as he pulled away.
“That’s very cool,” Liza said sagely to Mum and Mama, and then looked back to her plate, acting like Velma wasn’t there.
Velma extinguished the flame with a neat flick of her wrist.
“You do much magic, then?” Mama asked as she stood to her feet.
“No, just pyromancy,” Velma replied as she and Mama started moving out of the room. “Runs in the family — although God knows my little brother never bothers to practice. We’re up in the attic, right?”
“Can I go with them?” Aaron asked, looking to Mum as she sat down again.
“Eat your breakfast first,” Mum said, and Aaron groaned.
“But they’re in my room — ”
“Aaron,” Mum said, and Aaron sighed hard, looking back to his plate.
“You’ve got some pretty smart kids,” Velma said as they moved up the stairs, holding her briefcase at her side, and Andrea gave her a small smile.
“The kids are smart,” Andrea agreed. “Sometimes a bit too smart — they can be a little difficult to keep in line. Aaron’s been desperate about the things in the attic. Pyromancy runs in your family, but the Sense runs in ours, and he’s been increasingly upset that we won’t let him up there.”
“Kids with the Sense can be hard, precocious and that,” Velma said mildly. “You know the Buttersbys, they live at the Laurels, next to Mr Hassan’s shop? Their son, Liam, he has the Sense too. He’s a good kid, Aaron’s age, they might be worth introducing. Tell you the truth,” Velma said, lowering her voice somewhat, “the Buttersbys, they’re a bit stiff, kind of up themselves. It’d do Liam a lot of good to meet a kid like him.”
“Oh,” Andrea said, not quite able to hide her surprise. It wasn’t that she objected to finding Aaron friends like himself, and was in fact one of the benefits of a community like Chesterton in the first place, but she’d never heard of the Buttersbys. She’d met Sheraz Hassan, who had introduced himself when they’d first gone into his shop, but that had been strange — when Andrea was a little girl, that shop had been the mundane post office. “Do you — Do you know Chesterton quite well? Being from Glasgow, I mean?”
“Oh, we used to come down to Brighton a lot when I was a wee girl — my aunt was dating this hellhound breeder, and she used to do a lot of work down this way. I’d spend a lot of my summers with her, learn the trade and that. That’s how I know Ella.”
“Right,” Andrea murmured as they came to the top of the stairs, and Velma turned to look at her for a few moments.
It wasn’t exactly easy to understand the expression on her face, to tell what she was thinking: her lips were loosely pursed, her brow ever-so-slightly furrowed, but she didn’t seem annoyed. “Is that okay?” she asked, finally.
“Oh, of course,” Andrea said. When Velma raised an eyebrow, she added, “No, no, it’s not… I’m not annoyed at you. Just — Trying to get a handle on everyone in the village, you know. There’s basically no one left that was here when I was a little girl, except some of the very old folks.”
Velma’s guarded expression dropped, and her shoulders relaxed.
“The village has made a lot of changes in the past few years,” she murmured. “When Ella became chairwoman of the village hall in, um, I think ’01? She petitioned the Brighthelm Council to put more money into the area, to enrich it — tax credits for new businesses, stuff like that. It was part of that big push in the noughties to have more, you know, all-magical settlements.”
Andrea felt very ignorant, all of a sudden, as they stepped into Aaron’s room, and she moved slowly to pick up the hook they’d brought down from the pantry. “Was there a — a push for that?”
“There were a few extenuating factors, but one of the big ones was anti-fae sentiment at the time — just that a lot of all-magical settlements had high fae populations, and they wanted more with all or mostly humans.” There must have been something entirely ignorant or frustrated showing on Andrea’s face, because Velma spoke in a softer, more placating voice when she talked again. “It’s okay, Mrs Picknell,” Velma said. “If you live mundane, there’s no reason you’d keep up with news like that.”
“We must seem like we might as well be mundies to you,” she said.
“No,” Velma said, taking the hook. “Ella mentioned when I came over that you guys haven’t been involved in the community the last while. My brother’s no different from you guys — he couldn’t be less interested in his magical side, or current affairs, anything.”
“My mother was a bit too on for magic,” Andrea murmured. “And Sam, she always found it overwhelming, growing up. We’ve always raised the kids around mundies, for the most part, and now we’re here in Chesterton-Burnleigh.”
“Too much?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Andrea murmured. “It’s good for Aaron and the girls, like I said. Just… different.”
She let Velma go ahead of her, picking up the hook resting against the wall, and she watched her pull down the ring on the attic’s trap door, pulling down the stairs and catching them before they folded all the way out, lowering them gently to the ground. There were bannisters on the stairs either side, to Andrea’s surprise, and they looked much more stable than she remembered.
Velma didn’t pull out a torch, but absently — as if it didn’t mean anything to her to do it — conjured a hovering ball of heatless flame to hover over their heads as they walked up and into the attic, letting it provide the light they needed.
They’d not used the attic all that much, when Andrea was a little girl — she’d remembered it as a large, lofty space with mostly beams and a limited platform of floorspace, but now the whole place had been floored in laminate, leaving a huge area for storage space. There were dozens upon dozens of haphazardly stacked boxes, full to the brim with jars, clothes, books — anything you could think of — and then, dominating one corner of the room, there was a huge stack of furniture. She recognised her father’s old desk and a few chairs, but there were plenty of things she’d never seen before — strange tools and implements made up of metal frames or glass pulleys; shelves and craft tables that looked made for specialist services; even a few boxes and chests made of wood.
“Ella said you wanted me to basically evaluate everything here and make sure that nothing is harmful,” Velma said, raising her ball of flame higher so that its light seeped into every corner of the room. “So, for me, that’ll mainly be ensuring you’ve not got any cursed objects to hand, and then going over any enchanted or magical implements to ensure their magical functions are working properly and haven’t been damaged. I’ll be able to value anything you want to get rid of, and if anything is harmful, I can remove it — depending on the enchantment, I might actually be able to get something repaired for you if there’s trouble with it, but as I said, it really does depend.”
Andrea didn’t say anything.
She was rooted to the spot, trying to do the maths in her hand — there must have been hundreds upon hundreds of books up here, and however many metal implements for ritual or divination, and so many jars and bottles, probably full to the brim with potions ingredients, and the clothes, God —
“Overwhelmed?”
Andrea nodded mutely.
“I can come back another time if you like,” Velma said softly. “I can just do a quick sweep for anything enchanted or cursed, get it out of the way, and then come back — ”
“No, no, I really… I would appreciate it if you could go over everything in-depth. Erm, my mother was a witch, but our whole family has been, and my brother, Damien, he was a witch, too. My mother mainly did divination and medium work, but she did do some of the broader harvest magic the pellar couldn’t manage — deterring pests, speeding growth, you know…”
“And your brother?”
“I’m… I’m not sure,” Andrea said. “His wife — ex-wife — said he got very into demonology, and he did a lot of potions work. She said he made a lot of different poisons and deterrents, things like that. But — Truth be told, the thing I’m most worried about is that he was always obsessed with trapping things. Animals, small demons, fae — his wife, you know, he basically tricked her into marrying him. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but it’s not something I want the kids getting into. Look, I’m… I’m sorry, but I’d rather not stay up here with you, if it’s alright.”
“That’s okay,” Velma said, and she reached into her briefcase, pulling out a manila folder and handing it over. “This has my rates — now, I tend to charge a flat rate for the day for an evaluation like this, and while I sometimes charge extra for helping dispose of really big objects, there’s nothing here that’s going to be a problem for me to remove if you need it, so that’ll be included; if you do want to sell anything on through me, I’d basically take a commission, with most of the money going back to you.
“I do a lot of estate and inheritance evaluations, so trust me when I say I’m used to people not necessarily wanting to stick around while someone goes through things that belonged to their loved ones. It’s even harder when your relationship with them was, you know, strained. The way I see it, I’m just here to make this process as easy for you as possible, and my priority is making sure everything here is safe for you and your children.”
“Thank you,” Andrea murmured, staring down at the folder. “I’ll, um, I’ll leave you to it — would you like us to bring you up another cup of tea, or?”
“That’d be great, Mrs Picknell. Thank you.”
Andrea smiled, if weakly. Velma was a nice girl, thoughtful, it seemed. It was still a relief to get back down to the kitchen.
Velma had a process when she took on jobs like this.
Cursed objects came first; enchanted objects came next; third came other pieces of furniture or implements — because they were big, certainly, but also because a good deal of cursed and enchanted objects were designed so as to hide their natures, sometimes even from analytical spells.
After those, usually, came ingredients and small instruments — just from the smell on the air, the lingering scent of preservatives, dried flowers and fruits, she knew there were plenty in the room. Little tools and items would normally be in amongst them, the sort used for alchemy or potioneering, and lastly, she usually covered books.
She didn’t know that these two would want for that — there must have been at least two thousand books in the room, and beyond sweeping them to make sure none of them were magically charged, she didn’t think they’d want her to go through them all. Unlike the normal clients for a job like this, after all, it wasn’t really about determining value — it was all about determining safety.
She could do that.
She always brought a log book for estate evaluations, even if it was just one room, like this one — some people liked for her to do it on her laptop or her phone, so that they could build a little database, but that was ordinarily for much larger scales, like when she was brought in to evaluate a whole manor’s contents, or a whole office building’s.
Pulling out one of the smaller tables from the stack of messy furniture and implements, she set her briefcase on top of it, pulling out a leather-bound log book and opening it up. She’d already set in the date and address, as well as put her contact details in the front; in the back was a list of recommended contacts in and around Brighton for anything else they needed.
It was a simple classification structure — an ID number, a physical description, a description of any magical properties or functions, and an estimated value. Some people did ask for more — some people wanted the histories of every individual object as could be gleaned, or a photo library, but that was all the subject of a few weeks’ work, not one or two days.
She’d gotten better at this, in the past few years.
Working with Hamish MacKinnon, who’d sort of taken her under his wing when she’d taken over her aunt’s business, she’d learned a lot of skills in general, but he’d been very firm about her learning some magic and basic enchantment.
Enchantment was taught in most magical primary schools, so it wasn’t inherently difficult — writing a piece of enchantment really wasn’t that different to creating a piece of circuitry: the only difference was that you drew each element yourself, and the current that ran through it was magic, not anything from a battery.
Actual magic was way harder — in order to perform even the most basic spells, you had to be able to channel ambient magic or draw from a concentrated source, which was difficult enough in itself, but then you had to be able to coax it into doing what you wanted, twist it into the right shape, and that was… Difficult.
But Hamish was a good teacher, even if the man was an abject bitch — possibly because of the fact.
Ginchiyo had never used spells when she’d done this sort of work — she’d mostly used tools to judge whether items were cursed or enchanted, and she’d always told Velma that she didn’t need to do spells to be good at this work.
Hamish, a consummate traditionalist, had lectured her for thirty-five minutes the first time she’d voiced that advice.
Clapping her hands together and surveying the room, she felt the strange, tingling friction build between her palms, crackling softly on the air and softly burning her skin in a way that her inherited fire never did, and with her hands bright white with electric heat, she set herself to work.
Aaron dipped his head into the kitchen at one o’clock, and when he saw his mother cutting different sandwiches into pieces, he pulled out squash and started pouring it into two jugs. He had to stand on one of the wooden step stools they kept in the kitchen, because the counters were too high, and not at all because Aaron, Shannon, and Liza were too short.
“Thanks, Aaron,” Mum said as she kept working, and Aaron nodded his head, dropping some ice cubes into both jugs before he started to pour in the water. Mum handed him some wedges of lemon to drop in, and then had him start putting the sandwiches on big plates on the trays while she took chips off the hob and started patting them dry.
“We should have a dumb waiter,” Aaron said.
“Should we?” Mum asked distractedly, tossing the chips in salt as she dropped them into a really big bowl.
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “Because then we could put everything in the dumb waiter and send it upstairs.”
“Well, we won’t usually be eating upstairs,” Mum said. “It’s just because Shannon’s still painting, and it’s easier to go with the flow when it comes to that.”
Aaron took a chip out of the bowl before taking it on one of the trays, and he walked upstairs with it, into Shannon’s room. Liza was sitting cross-legged on top of Shannon’s bed, and Aaron could tell that Liza had made it and not Shannon, because the sheets were very flat and perfect. Mama was sitting on the rug on the floor, leaning back against the bedframe, and Shannon was on a wood board fastened to the tops of two ladders, almost touching the ceiling as she worked.
Aaron stopped short for a second, mesmerised as he stared up at the ceiling that he hadn’t seen yet since Shannon started working on it.
She must have started with a black basecoat, but then she’d painted in bits of purple and really dark blue, so that the whole ceiling looked deep, and real, like you could fall up into it. Where she was working now, he could see her using a sort of silvery-white paint and some gold stuff, and she was painting in dozens and dozens of stars. They shimmered as the paint dried.
“Lunch time,” Aaron said, after a second or two, and Shannon rolled to the side, putting her paint pallet aside and sliding back on her belly to lower herself down the ladder on one side. Mama went downstairs to help Mum bring up the trays as they all sat down on the rug, like it was a picnic blanket. The balcony doors were slightly open, letting in a breeze that took away most of the paint smell.
“She hasn’t found the monsters yet,” Liza said to Aaron as she sat down beside him, nodding up to the ceiling. “It’s going to be very bad if she lets them out.”
“Mama said there aren’t monsters,” Aaron said.
“Let’s hope Mama doesn’t eat her words,” Liza replied, and Aaron furrowed his brow at her.
“It looks very good, Shannon,” Aaron said. “But won’t it scare you, sleeping under this?”
“We all sleep under it,” Shannon said cheerfully. “I’m just making it so it feels more like you could fall in.”
“Why would you want that?”
“Just feels bigger that way.”
“Sandwiches!” Mum declared as she and Mama came back into the room, both carrying trays with heaps of cheese and bacon sandwiches, and cucumber sandwiches, and egg salad sandwiches, and the jugs, and loads of stacked glasses underneath Mama’s arm. Mama and Mum both started putting out the big plates, then handing out the little ones, and Aaron took two of them, stacking up some different sandwiches and some chips and some squash, putting it aside.
“Can I go ask Velma to come eat with us?” he asked immediately, even as he already go to his feet.
“Yes,” Mama said after looking at Mum, “but don’t touch anything, and don’t bother her too much.”
Aaron jogged into his room, and up the stairs, into the attic —
Which was huge.
“Mum made sandwiches,” he declared as he walked in between the big columns of stacked up boxes, looking around for Velma, and he found her bent over a table, writing down an entry in a big book that had this whole table in it like one of those old census pages you sometimes looked at in school, except she used a normal pen instead of a quill. “And there’s squash as well, if you want to come eat with us.”
“Oh, thank you, Aaron,” Velma said, giving him a grin.
“Are you nearly finished?”
“Mmm, about halfway there with the furniture,” Velma said. “You’ll be glad to know there’s no cursed objects.”
“What’s the difference between a cursed thing and an enchanted one?” Aaron asked, and Velma looked thoughtful for a second, furrowing her brow. “Also, do you want to come sit with us to eat? We’re all in Shannon’s room.”
“Sure I can,” Velma said. “Give me one minute, I just need to turn some of the tools I’m using off.”
As she slipped into the big pile of stacked furniture, Aaron couldn’t quite see her, but he could hear her as she said, “So, enchantment is typically something that actually performs a function, right? It’s a bit of magical circuitry that performs tasks or has useful features. A curse is a bit different — there are enchanted things that are counted as cursed, but most of the time, a curse is like… You know how there’s some really dangerous animals that if you just touch them, they’ll make you very sick? That’s called a contact poison — curses, in general, work like that. If you touch them, they do something dreadful to you.”
Aaron was looking around, and he saw the yellow chest that he’d seen when he looked right upstairs. Velma had put a little tag on it like the sort of yellow ones you saw in shops, and it said #37: she’d written the number down in the book, but she hadn’t put any description of it, except that it was a wooden chest inscribed with a yellow hexagonal pattern.
Stepping closer to it, he looked at the heavy edges of the chest, which was hexagonal shaped, and was carved all over with the honeycomb pattern he really, really wanted to have in the wallpaper on his walls, except that instead of there being bees or honey dripping out of some of the segments, they looked funny and weird, like someone had dropped little sugar crystals on them, shiny and transparent.
“Do you know what this yellow chest is for?” Aaron called.
“Don’t touch it,” Velma called back immediately, and Aaron pressed his lips together, staring at the shiny golden surface. “It’s a storage chest I haven’t been able to open yet, and I think it might be blood-locked to your family line, so I want your mother to open it for me. It could be dangerous.”
“But I could open it,” Aaron said as Velma came out from the furniture with a gem on a chain wrapped loosely around her fist. He saw the look on her face, saw her run toward him, but he moved really quickly to press the release catch on the chest’s centre, so that the top of the chest opened and fell back.
He cried out at the loud, chittering noise that suddenly filled his ears so much that it hurt, and ducked away from the storm of flapping wings that filled the air.
They were not bees.
Velma covered the kid’s body with her own, not letting him crawl out from underneath her as he started crying, and she spread her palm over their heads, sending out a hot burning flame that the swarming demons initially swam through, then screamed and rushed away from when she adjusted the sort of fire she was working with.
Aaron was sobbing and shaking in his place, but she didn’t let up until the swarm had flown out of the attic, rushing down the stairs.
Picking the lad up and throwing him over one shoulder, she grabbed her briefcase as she ran to follow them, turning right instead of the left they took down the stairs and bringing Aaron into the other bedroom, where the rest of his family were.
“Aaron!” Andrea said, taking the boy as Velma passed him over, and Velma slammed the door shut, grabbing an enchantment pen out of her bag and hurriedly scrawling symbols on the back of the closed door.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just wanted to see what was in it — ” Aaron was sobbing.
“Yeah, I know, I know, don’t worry,” Velma replied, putting her palm over the scrawled symbols until they lit white under her palm for a second, and then she dragged one of Shannon’s painting ladders up against the air vent that led into the corridor, climbing up it to rapidly write the same symbols on the vent.
“What happened?” Sam asked.
“There was this box and it looked like it had a bee pattern on it and I just wanted to see what was inside, I didn’t mean to — ”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Velma said, wincing as she heard something smash downstairs. They’d be swarming against all the walls — they wouldn’t be able to get out of the house because of the pest charms intended to keep creatures like them out, and in the meantime, they’d bounce off every wall.
It was not, in any sense of the word, okay.
“I told him not to touch this particular chest,” Velma said, climbing down from the ladder and looking at Andrea and Sam. “It was blood-locked, so that only someone in your family could open it, but he was curious and opened it anyway. It looks like some sort of insectile demon, six legs, wings… I need to get them contained to one room before they can do any more damage.”
“Wait, wait, aren’t they dangerous?” Sam asked, holding Shannon in her arms.
“Yes, but I can’t let them tear your house apart,” Velma said. “You’ll be safe in here anyway — I’ve laid enchantment on the doors and vent so that they won’t be able to get in.”
Aaron was shaking in Andrea’s lap, wrapped up in her arms, tearfully mumbling apologies; Shannon was leaning against Sam’s side, her eyes wide. Liza was sitting up straight, her expression solemn.
“Told you,” she said to Aaron, who started crying louder.
“Told him what?” Velma asked.
“That there were monsters in the attic.”
“I couldn’t get a good look at them,” Velma said, dropping into a crouch to look at her. “Could you describe them for me?”
Liza hesitated, biting her lip, but then she looked to Shannon. “She could draw them,” Liza said. “I can push what they look like to her, and she can draw them. Right?”
“Right,” Shannon said, nodding her head, and Velma watched her reach with a shaking hand for Liza’s colouring pencils and a piece of paper.
“Okay,” Velma said. “You guys stay here, and I’ll be right back.”
—
“I have a problem,” Velma said, keeping her phone held in the crook of her shoulder and her ear. “I’m on a job doing an estate evaluation, and this kid opened a chest in the attic. Huge swarm of insectile demons shot forward.”
“Well, didn’t you tell him not to?” Hamish asked.
“Yes, Hamish, I told him not to,” Velma snapped, keeping her back to the wall of the downstairs corridor and listening for the sounds of the demons. She could hear the chittering sound of their swarm moving back and forth, a noise made up of weird vocalisations and the leathery flap of their wings.
“What sort of demons are they?”
“Not sure, haven’t been able to get a good look at them. They sort of move as a great black cloud, though, and they came out of a trunk painted yellow, with a stylised hexagonal pattern, like a beehive’s. It was blood-locked.”
“And what do you expect me to do?” Hamish asked, and Velma risked dipping her head into the living room. The demons moved way too fast for her to get a good look at them, but they weren’t destroying anything just yet — they were bouncing off the walls and windows and into one another, chattering loudly.
“Help me. I don’t know how to get them back into the box.”
“My dear, are you very up on your Greek mythology?”
“I don’t have time for your Pandora jokes, Hamish.”
“It isn’t a joke. If you opened the box, you might well not be able to get them back in. One doesn’t ordinarily blood-lock things one wants opened again willy-nilly.”
“Oi!” Velma called out, conjuring a ball of very hot flame, and the demons immediately rushed for it, trying to wrestle to get into the middle of it. Not all of the demons were cooperative, though, and some of them tore at her jumper and her hair as she led the swarm into the confined space of the porch, tugging the door closed behind her. Stuck in this confined space, with three stone walls to contend with, the sound was so loud she thought it would make her ears bleed, and she went as fast as she could to scrawl the right enchantment on the back of the inside door, even as some of the demons tried to grab at the pen as they rushed past her.
Hell wasn’t exactly what mundane people thought it was — rather than an afterlife, or whatever it was really just a different dimension. There were a few different dimensions accessible from Earth, and Hell was probably the one least hospitable to your average human, mundane or magical — it was scorchingly hot, with an atmosphere much more like Venus’ than Earth’s, but while no Earth animal that anyone knew of had ever managed to make the transition over to living in the inferno, plenty of demonic species had made the opposite journey, adjusting to the cool temperatures of Earth, but still being drawn to heat sources like moths to a —
Well.
“Can you describe them?” Hamish asked.
“They’re grey.” Velma said, pressing her palm to the written enchantment and activating it with a flare of magic. She scrambled to the other side of the door, landing down hard on her arse on the other side, and she looked at her arms, at the scratches and cuts all over her arms. “And… Huh.”
“And huh?” Hamish repeated.
“They don’t bite,” Velma said.
“That is interesting,” Hamish said mildly, and Velma stepped into the living room, looking over the sofas, the furniture. Some of the sofas had scratches in the leather from the demons’ claws, but nothing looked as though it had intentionally been torn, and the crash she’d heard, apparently, had come from a fallen hat stand. Picking it back up, she set it upright again.
Most swarming demons were fundamentally very destructive — it wasn’t anything to do with morality, because most small demons weren’t any more intelligent than your average sparrow, and in swarms, they were out of control, often searching desperately for food or heat sources.
The living room wasn’t pristine, but it didn’t look at all as though a demonic horde had just rushed through it.
Ascending the stairs, she voiced the thought, and when she came back into Shannon’s room, Shannon had a piece of paper held out for her. The demon Shannon had drawn — Christ, she drew well for such a little girl, it was like she’d drawn a photograph — was the leathery grey she’d spotted already, its chitinous flesh separated into segments, with six legs, and dome-shaped wings.
“Um,” Velma said to Hamish, “I think they’re a form of alastora. They look like yours — ”
“Alastora domestica.”
“But they’re grey, not black, the wings are dome-shaped, like a ladybird’s. They have six legs, with grasping hands at the end of them, um, diagonal edging on their heads, which is sort of square.”
“Sounds like alastora adamantina,” Hamish said. “They’re very rare, but they’re an agricultural strain — they build their hives out of concentrated crystal, and people harvest gemstones from them.”
“Oh,” Velma said. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Certainly,” Hamish said. “But a swarm of alastora like that can still strip a bull’s carcass to bone in approximately four minutes, so I wouldn’t leave them alone with any of the children.”
Velma tried to keep her expression completely neutral, watched as she was by the Picknells and their children, feeling desperately glad that none of them could hear Hamish’s voice on the other end of the line.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said. “So — What do I do with them?”
“Well, with adamantina, you usually bind them to a bloodline. They probably won’t harm anybody in it, but if they didn’t bite you, I don’t imagine they were trying to harm you, either. I expect they’re rather overwhelmed.”
“Can you — Have you got a guide for them?”
“I believe I can find one,” Hamish said mildly. “I’ll email it to you.”
“Thanks, Hamish,” Velma said, and hung the phone up.
“They attacked you?” Sam asked, and Velma shook her head.
“I don’t think so. Let me just go grab their box, and I’ll see what we can do.”
Later that evening, Aaron sat on the sofa, watching as Mum dressed some of Velma’s wounds. She had quite a lot of them, although they weren’t very deep, which was really very good, because Mum’s first aid kit was made for dogs, not people.
They’d managed to get the alastora back into their case, after trying with them a bit in the garden, except that it turned out that they were not very trained at all, and even though they didn’t bite or scratch Mama or Aaron or Shannon or Liza, they didn’t really follow commands, or calm down, they absolutely attacked Velma, and they thought that they would attack Mum if she’d been outside, where they were.
She’d done all the furniture and stuff, and apparently she was giving Mum and Mama a discount, even though it was Aaron’s fault that they’d gotten out.
She left her business card, when she left, and Mum and Mama said they’d call her back to help sell some of the furniture they didn’t want in a few months, and then go through all the books.
She couldn’t sell the alastora, she said, because they were bound to their family, but she said if she did some research, she’d be able to see if she’d be able to anyway, and if not, there were demonic rescue centres.
“But,” Aaron pointed out at dinner, “the whole reason you didn’t want me to keep bees is because I’m allergic, but I’m not allergic to alastora, am I? And Velma said there’s books about them and if you let me have them I won’t ever ask for a dog or a chicken or a goat, and we could be rich.”
Mum looked at Mama, who looked back at her.
“We’ll think about it,” Mama said.
Aaron grinned.
Instead of driving home to her flat, in London, Velma drove straight up to Nottingham. By the time she arrived, Saturday night had given way to Sunday’s very early morning, which was only part of the reason she unlocked the door of MacKinnon’s Antiques instead of her parents’ home, and walked up to Hamish’s flat.
As she crossed the threshold, she was swarmed by alastora — alastora domestica, although their name was a joke, quite frankly, because they were stupid, feral things in most circumstances, and not domesticated at all. Hamish’s demons weren’t domesticated, and they weren’t blood-bonded to anybody — in actuality, the man was possessed, although she knew he was picky about the language used for it.
Possession usually led to some kind of symbiosis, in the end, and Hamish did better than most.
These demons didn’t claw or scratch at her because they liked her, viewed her as friend, and they landed all over her, tugging at her bandages and plasters and trying to drool over the scabbing little wounds, even as she laughed and pushed some of them off, gathering them in her arms like stubby little pets, stacked one on top of the other.
“Velma?” asked Hamish, coming in from the kitchen. He was dressed in pyjamas and his dressing gown, obviously about to go to bed and irritated about being interrupted, but seeing her, her jumper shredded to pieces in places, her hair a mess, he softened. “They weren’t very tame, then?”
“They didn’t attack any of the family,” Velma muttered. “But me, I was fair game. They didn’t obey orders very well, but I expect there’s notebooks or something, about how he came into possession of them, the guy who left them behind. The kid is obsessed with them, wants to keep them anyway, because they won’t let him keep bees — he’s allergic.”
“What a funny child,” Hamish said, gesturing for Velma to sit down, and after a moment away, he came back with a mug of cocoa for her, pushing it into her hands. A few of the alastora scattered over the sofa beside her, curling against her side and up in her lap: most of them settled in Hamish’s lap instead.
Hamish MacKinnon was an old man, had grown up not that far from Aviemore: he was a fat man, rosy-cheeked, his blond hair thinning on top, and although he was naturally a snide and sarcastic man, judgemental and disapproving, often very discerning when it came to choosing whether people were worth his caring about or not, he was —
He was Velma’s friend, now, besides being her teacher, a mentor of sorts. Despite herself, she rather liked him.
“Well?” Hamish asked, expectant.
“What’s well?”
“You drive from Brighton up another few hours to reach Nottingham instead of Chelsea. You’re exhausted, but you came here instead of going home. I presume there’s some reason.”
“I didn’t want to sleep in my flat. There’s no one else there.”
“I’ve never known you to be a girl prone to nightmares.”
“The estate I was going through belonged to a man named Damien Picknell. As well being interested in demonology, he was interested in fae. He was married to a sidhe woman named Éan for years before she was able to get away from him. She didn’t want to marry him in the first place — he had some, um, some notebooks. Planned which woman he’d take, which contract he’d trap her in. It was all he ever wanted, apparently: a fae wife who had to obey him, and wouldn’t be able to leave. Once she managed to leave after all that, he gave up on magic — didn’t see the point anymore.”
“We don’t live by the same rules humans do,” Hamish said in a quiet voice, but it wasn’t an unkind one. “We’re bound by contracts, governed by strict rules — it’s in our nature in a way it isn’t in yours.”
She resisted the urge to argue with him on that point — Velma knew she’d never understand fae like she did humans, and that Hamish himself, specifically, was difficult to understand. She didn’t know why it bothered her so much, but it really did, someone using magic to control other people: she’d never been raised to so much as think of things like that.
“And the fact that some freaky human spent his entire life trying to figure out your contracts so he could keep a woman under lock and key?”
“She left him,” Hamish said. “He’s dead now. Explain to me what it is about the situation, as it stands in the present, that should keep you up at night.”
“The situation doesn’t upset you?”
“Why should it? I didn’t know anybody involved.”
Velma sat back on the sofa, clenching her teeth, before focusing on her drink, taking a sip. Hamish hesitated for a moment, but then said, “But… I see it upsets you. What can I do, Velma?”
“I just don’t want to go… I don’t want to wake up Mum and Dad, and Kaito might be up playing games, I don’t… I don’t want to be on my own, but I don’t want to have to explain it to them. Can I stay here?”
Hamish’s eyes were a very cold, blue colour, always a little bit distant — they were watery in colour, but there was something in them that she’d found very unsettling when they’d first met, but now, his gaze was no more unnerving than the rest of him.
“Of course you can,” he said, standing to his feet. “Come, the spare bedroom — ”
“The sofa is fine.”
“Nonsense. Come.”
She’d never seen the spare bedroom before, but she was fairly certain that before she’d met Hamish, it hadn’t had a Scooby Doo fleece blanket spread out over the surface of the bedspread, and nor, she expected, had there been plush cushions of the Mystery Machine and the Scooby Doo logo, let alone stuffed toys of Scooby and Scrappy.
“No likes Scrappy Doo, you know,” she said, picking up the toy.
“Don’t they?” Hamish asked. “Why do they make toys of him, then?”
Holding the toy loosely at her side, she turned and wrapped her arms around Hamish’s neck, hugging him tightly. She’d hugged him before — as usual, he was a little bit awkward about it, patting her on the back as though no one had ever hugged him before, although she knew she’d hugged him at least half a dozen times, by this point.
Hamish did have friends, she knew that. Not many of them. Not any close friends, not really. He couldn’t go out much, with the alastora — they were mostly alright, at home, but out in public, they tended to tear everything apart, get overexcited, scratch people up. Hamish didn’t really go out in public, anymore — or at all, actually, if he could avoid it. He didn’t have any family — last Christmas, he’d spent his morning alone, and come to theirs for lunch.
“How long has your spare bedroom been my spare bedroom?” Velma asked.
“There are new toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet,” Hamish said primly, moving across the room. “Dental floss, some spare combs. You know where to get water and whatnot, of course. All those wounds have already been disinfected?”
“From a dog first aid kit.”
“Oh… good?” Hamish said, but not without giving her a funny look. “Well, I’ll, ah, leave you to it. Unless you need some sort of further…” The old man looked visibly uncomfortable, his mouth twisting, as he went on, “Talk?”
“No, I’m okay,” Velma said. “We don’t have to talk anymore about my feelings.”
“Good,” Hamish said, briskly, and then amended: “I am glad you are feeling… alright.”
“Good night, Hamish.”
“Good night,” Velma replied.
Velma woke up, the next morning, to six alastora tugging at her hair with their teeth. It wasn’t, she was vaguely aware, intended to hurt her — she and Hamish had worked out that they liked the texture of her hair, because they never did it to him, and nor did they actually bite through any of the strands, or tug any out.
It didn’t even hurt, not really — it just stung a bit.
Rolling over, she started plucking each of the alastora, holding them loosely around their middle, and she held the six of them crammed together in her palms, watching their stupid little faces, looking up at her owlishly.
“No,” she said, firmly.
They chittered amongst themselves when she let them go, but they didn’t go for her hair again, instead dropping against one another on top of her chest, and she wrapped her arms loosely around them, smiling at the way they crammed herself against her bare skin, wanting to feel the warmth of it.
“The day is wasting away,” came a call from the corridor. “Are you ever going to rise from bed?”
“No!” Velma called back. “I’m going to sleep here forever.”
She heard Hamish’s laugh, but he didn’t keep shouting to her — the smell of fresh eggs, sausages, and bacon began to waft into the room, however, and as the alastora scrambled off in search of their breakfast, Velma’s stomach gave a sympathetic rumble.
Grinning, she pulled herself out of bed.
At a breakfast table on the other side of the country, Aaron Picknell coaxed another alastor — this one larger, lighter in colour, and no doubt markedly more intelligent — into his hand, where for the first time it sat placidly, not struggling or making a good deal of noise.
Who needed bees, anyway?
Thank you for reading! This is the first episode in a planned series about Velma and her adventures, Kuroda Antiques.
Johannes Evans is a writer, photographer, and bug enthusiast from the South of Wales, now living on the West Coast of Ireland. He loves playing with humour, contemporary fantasy ideas, and fae lore.
Find him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply