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About this serial:
Sticky Witch is a modern fantasy tale with a mystery, myth and romance, set in Wiltshire. Rosen Pearce is a modern-day mage, capable of binding any material. She’s in high demand for fixing cracked walls and broken structures. Unfortunately, she’s also caught up in the machinations of the local covens, a magical terrorist movement and the return of the fae. In her spare time, she’s trying to date.
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Previously on Sticky Witch:
Mundane Mages is at war. So far, the firm has been targeted separately by Gia, the coven, and the fae. Rosen is in hiding at John’s house, under the dubious care of a raven. She’s doing research whilst Em builds a trap, and the guys try to keep the consultancy work ticking along.
I woke up on Wednesday morning at 5 am to an indignant croak. Pete felt I had slept long enough and that I needed to serve him breakfast. I peeled back the duvet to a blizzard of shredded paper: I don’t know how I’d slept through it, but he had destroyed the Minecraft poster on the wall.
I made a mental note to apologise and give Charlie a new one. He was John’s son, away with his mother and her wife for the Easter holidays. John juggled relationships like a jester at a play, but he’d never dated Lisa. I’m not sure how the kid was conceived, but the arrangement trundled along without jealousy, and Charlie beat me at Mario Kart every month.
I needed coffee. Brushing off my paper baptism, I stumbled downstairs to the open-plan kitchen-diner. John’s terrace house was tiny, but beautifully located in the best school catchment area in Bristol. More importantly, it had an espresso machine that required just two thumb jabs and a coffee capsule to operate. Hallelujah.
My corvus horribilus followed and started yelling. I fished in the cupboard next to the toaster for a small tin of high-end cat food. “I’m gonna kill Tali,” I muttered. I plopped the offering in a bowl, and peace ensued.
Coffee mug in hand, I unlatched the doors to the tiny garden room John had built as an extension of the living area. The important thing wasn’t the floor space. It was the floor-to-ceiling windows that I was using as research boards with chalk pens and blue-tacked pages. Call me paranoid, but Malcolm Anderson commanded the police and the UK’s counter-terrorism units. I didn’t want anything in my internet searches or on my computer’s hard drive that could be used to arrest me.
Gia and the covens had one window pane: the earthquake circles and wild magic occupied another, fae and fairy smiths the third, and the fourth focused on the Malborough Trust.
I studied the mess and took out my highlighter. Yesterday was about paper printouts at the library, phone calls, and fighting Pete over stationery. Today was about making sense of it all. “Gimme connections,” I muttered. I managed three of the four windows in blissful silence.
From behind me, Pete croaked.
“It’s like living with a toddler that can fly,” John remarked, making me jump. He was slumped in the doorway, unshaven and sleep-ruffled. I saluted him with the coffee mug.
“He ripped up Charlie’s poster. Sorry.”
John stifled a yawn. “Don’t be. I shut him in with you after he stripped the insulation off the TV cables last night. He’s an utter pest, and I’m sending him home this afternoon. We’ll find another way to protect you.”
I nodded, taking another sip of my black nectar. “P’raps Tali can pick him up.”
Pete chose that moment to bark like a dog. John closed his eyes and shuffled off to the coffee machine. A moment, he yelled: “ohyousoddingbird - !”
I raced in. On the floor was a sticky, half-eaten carton of eggs. The cardboard around it had been shredded into small, mashed puffs around the kitchen floor. Rather like my magic, which sucked at my mind like a missing tooth every time I reached for it. Like now, when I wanted to stop a mischievous bird.
John marched over, opened a window and jerked his thumb at the raven. “OUT!”
Pete responded by flying into the hallway and up the stairs. I swear he was laughing at us.
“I’ll get the mop,” I offered tactfully.
Instead, the doorbell rang.
“It’s seven-thirty,” John said blankly. “Who the hell calls at this time of the morning?”
It turned out to be Mike, carrying fresh croissants and a padded envelope.
“Any coffee?” he asked, looking almost as tired as we did.
*
The envelope contained three new Nokia phones. They reminded me of children’s toys with their large buttons and lack of screens.
“Are we in a full-on spy movie now?” I asked.
Mike shrugged. “We’re being tracked somehow,” he replied. “They’ve got magic we can’t counter and people we won’t recognise as dangerous until it’s too late. I’d rather be embarrassed than dead. They are all charged, and we can swap numbers now by calling each other. Em’s already got hers, and I will pass one onto Latika” He stared at me. “Why do you have luminous green fingers, Roz?”
I winced and reflexively touched my face. “Is there anything around my mouth?”
“No, you’re clear”, John said, his lip lifting as he tried not to grin.
“Oh, good. I’ve been up since raven o’clock, looking for patterns and connections.” I pointed towards the garden room that now looked like a crazed bat cave. “I found one between Malborough Trust and Gia. The Trust has been sending out uni grants for years, but I couldn’t see a connection to Malcolm Anderson. However, when I looked at who approved the money for each category, the same name always came up for the medical sciences: a Mr A. Spillane.”
“Go on,” Mike said, rocking his coffee cup.
I hesitated: partly to organise my thoughts, but mostly for the drama. I’d spent hours on this: I might as well enjoy it.
“Um, when you go through Malborough’s records, they only offer eight grants a year. Most of them are for small amounts for archaeology, and they’re all approved by different people. But four years ago, Mr Spillane agreed to a massive donation in magic genomic research, and did the same again for the next two years. I went looking for more information about him, and he was one of the charity directors for the Wellspring Magic Association, which was around at the same time.”
John stared vaguely over my shoulder. “I think I remember them.”
I made a face. “Mark mentioned them once or twice, but the whole group collapsed before he joined. However, it’s important because the group didn’t die on paper. It just changed its name.”
I strolled over to the first window and tapped on the Charity Commission printout. Formal notice given for Wellspring Magic to change to The Gia Association.
“Interesting,” Mike said, “but not that useful.”
Spillane was a non-executive director until last year. Then he gets cold feet and leaves both of the organisations at the same time. I can’t find anything more recent about him.”
John chewed on his thumb, staring at the document. “Roz, do you have a picture of Mr Spillane?”
I brought up Malborough’s past board of directors on my phone, tapping my toe at the sluggish speed of the web search. It was being routed through a VPN - Mike wasn’t the only paranoid one. Mr A. Spillane turned out to be a middle-aged chap with dark hair, glasses and a beaver’s tooth gap.
“Oh, it’s Andy!” John exclaimed.
“You know him?” I asked.
“Knew him. We met at the pub moots. Poor bastard. He went missing for a few days, and his neighbours found his headless body in the garden. No one’s ever been caught for his murder, but I always thought it was Gia.”
“Why? And why couldn’t I find anything in the local papers?”
John shrugged. “Andy lived over the border in Wales with his partner. There was a piece on the BBC news at the time, but they called him by her name. And I’m telling you it’s Gia because there was no head.”
I stared at him, baffled. “Like someone chopped it off?”
“No, Roz. Someone had popped off his head, like one of those Lego figurines and smoothed his skin over the wound. There was no blood or gore anywhere. It was just a neck, sticking out of his shirt. I thought it was a prank when I saw his body at the morgue.”
Mike pushed back his chair and started to pace around the kitchen. I felt sick myself. That could’ve been any of us in the past thirty-six hours. “How did you hear about him?”
John stared down at his mug. “His partner reached out. She was desperate to bury him with his head, and none of the police searches had found it. I tried every trick in the book, but I couldn’t find it either.”
“What type of magic did Andy do?” I asked, pulling paper and a pen towards me.
John shrugged. “He was a generalist. No great shakes as a witch, but he knew how to network. Glenda used him all the time.”
I dropped the pen and glared at him. John had the sense to look sheepish. “He was in Glenda Hale’s coven?” I said, enunciating each word.
“I’m afraid so.”
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The plot thickens!