Chapter 18
“What are you doing here?” Gwyn whispered from a staircase as she quickly extinguished her light spell, plunging them back into near darkness. There was a window somewhere at the top of those stairs letting in just enough moonlight to barely make him out there by the door. She’d nearly had a heart attack when that door had opened, already plotting excuses for why she was in here, so she was relieved it was Wells.
And also surprised.
And also kind of annoyed.
Apparently, mixed feelings were going to be the norm around him.
“What are you doing here?” Wells countered now, and Gwyn rolled her eyes, gesturing at the stairs in front of her.
“I was obviously about to go sneaking around because something about this place is—”
“Extremely off-putting and dubious in nature, yes,” Wells replied, and Gwyn stepped back a little, the banister pressing into her hip.
“I was going to say ‘super fucking creepy and sus,’ but I guess that’s technically the same thing, yeah.”
They stood there for a moment, staring at each other while Gwyn attempted to come to grips with the fact that A) she and Esquire were agreeing on something, B) whatever was up with Morgan and this house, he felt it, too, and C) he just smelled . . . really, really good.
Telling herself that C very much did not matter right now, Gwyn turned her attention back to the stairs.
“Why did you come up here?” she asked Wells, keeping her voice low even though she could still hear the sounds of the party in the other room. “Like, why this door specifically?”
“I’m assuming the same reason you did,” he said as he braced one hand on the stairwell wall. “Whatever it is that we’re both picking up on, it seems to be emanating from this area.”
Gwyn nodded even as she wrinkled her brow, looking up into the looming darkness ahead of them. “You know, I would’ve thought Morgan might be a little more original than this. If you’re going to do some kind of dark magic, don’t do it in the most obvious place in the whole house, right? ‘Ooh, I know, I’ll raise demons or whatever in a terrifying attic!’”
“I feel like you might be stalling a bit.”
“I am most definitely stalling a bit,” Gwyn replied on a sigh. Honestly, couldn’t her witchery go back to mostly involving tea and paint? Did she have to keep risking spiderwebs in her hair?
She started to make her way up the stairs, but Wells stopped her with a hand on her arm, that signet ring of a weight she could feel even through the fabric of her dress. “I’ll go first,” he told her, and Gwyn raised her eyebrows.
“Esquire, I’m shocked! Isn’t ‘Ladies First’ a sacred rule of etiquette?”
“Normally, yes,” he said, not rising to the bait. “But it does seem like bad form to insist on it when said lady might be the first to walk directly into some kind of magical trap.”
“Gallant,” Gwyn allowed. “But unnecessary.”
With that, she turned, making her way gingerly up the steps. They creaked underfoot as she rose higher and higher, Wells a solid presence at her back, and Gwyn told herself it was nerves making her mouth suddenly dry.
The stairs ended, opening onto a looming dark space, that one window providing a little bit of light but not nearly enough. Gwyn could make out a plank floor and several hulking shapes but nothing else, so lifting her fingers, she went to summon up a ball of light again.
Earlier, it had worked fine, but now, there was a sort of fizzle of sparks from the tips of her fingers, and that was it.
“Problem?” Wells asked, and she shook her head, wiggling her fingers again, waiting to feel the magic course through her. It was there, she could sense it, but . . . sluggish. Just like that night at Vivi’s.
Maybe it’s whatever magic Morgan has going on in here, she told herself, maybe it’s blocking me.
But that thought didn’t make her feel any better.
Once was a fluke.
Two times? That was the start of a pattern, and one she did not like at all.
“It’s probably the magic in this house,” Wells said, and she glanced back at him. He was watching her hand, brow slightly furrowed, but he wasn’t attempting a light spell of his own. He was waiting on her to get it together.
That was . . . sweet. Respectful.
Ugh.
Pushing those disturbingly squishy feelings aside, Gwyn concentrated on her spell, and after a moment, there was a sort of sputtering noise, and the ball of light flared to life, hovering just beside her.
“Well done, Jones,” Wells murmured, and Gwyn gave a satisfied—and relieved—nod.
“Figured we needed to see what we were doing,” she said, but then she really looked around and kind of wished the light spell hadn’t worked.
The rest of the house was elegant if a little—okay, a lot—over the top. But the attic?
The attic was downright spooky.
Paintings were stacked haphazardly against one wall, all of them, as far as Gwyn could tell, depicting some dark and horrible moments in witchcraft history. Burnings, drownings, eviscerations.
Heavy black trunks with rusted locks were clustered in a group toward the center of the room, and there was a pile of what appeared to be thumbscrews just beneath the window. Shelves with dusty bottles lined the back wall, and when Gwyn moved closer to those, a figure loomed out of the darkness, making her yelp and jump back before noticing that it wasn’t a person, it was a . . .
“Is that an iron maiden?” she asked, staring in fascinated horror at the person-size metal form in front of her.
“Bloody fucking hell,” Wells muttered, coming to stand next to her and examine the thing himself, his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels.
“Strong words from Esquire,” Gwyn replied, and he looked over at her, his expression wry.
“Warranted, wouldn’t you say?”
“Oh, fuck yeah,” she replied, and there was a brief flash of white teeth in that dark beard, a Genuine Esquire Smile, which made her want to say other things that might make him smile like that again.
But given that they’d apparently stepped into Hellraiser’s lair, now probably wasn’t the time for jokes.
Instead, Gwyn gestured around them and said, “Do you think we’re just picking up on bad vibes from this stuff? Because the vibes in here are definitely bad. Vibe check thoroughly failed.”
“I don’t really know what that means,” Wells said slowly, “but I think I get the gist, and yes, that’s definitely possible.”
Then he frowned. “But why have a collection like this at all?”
Wells turned more fully toward her, the light from her spell playing over his face, his gaze serious. “How well did you know Morgan at university?”
“We were friends,” Gwyn said, “but not super close. It was . . . I don’t know, a college friendship. We had a lot of the same classes, ate lunch together in the dining hall sometimes, had a slightly drunken make-out at an Ostara celebration.” She shrugged. “You know. College.”
Wells stared at her for a beat and then said, “Right. Okay. All of that is . . . right.” Then he shook his head slightly, turning back to study the paintings against the wall. “Did she seem interested in this sort of thing back then?”
“She did not have ancient torture devices in her dorm room as far as I recall, no,” Gwyn replied, shivering a little as she looked back over at the iron maiden. “But then, we weren’t in that many classes together after sophomore year. I was majoring in Practical Magic, and she was doing . . . I don’t remember. One of the weirder ones, like Ritual Witchcraft, I think. And then our senior year—”
Gwyn stopped, and Wells turned back to her. “Then what?”
She’d forgotten about it until just now, had never really thought about it, not even when Morgan had reappeared, but now, a memory resurfaced. “She left,” Gwyn said, thinking. “In the middle of our last semester. Like I said, we weren’t close, and by that point, I hardly ever saw her, but I remember one of my friends telling me a handful of students were asked to leave for some reason. She didn’t know why, it was all kind of secretive, and I’ve gotta be honest, I wasn’t too interested in it since it didn’t seem all that scandalous. I mean, ‘asked to leave’ is not exactly expelled, right?”
Wells rubbed a hand over his chin, considering all that as Gwyn racked her brain, trying to come up with any other details. But it had been a decade ago, and like she said, she hadn’t paid all that much attention to it at the time.
She glanced around her again.
Clearly, she should have.
“I wonder if any of those other students are here tonight,” Wells mused, and Gwyn looked back toward the stairs.
“I can’t remember how many of them it was. Maybe five? But Rosa, she was definitely one of them.”
“Hmm,” was Wells’s only response, and Gwyn turned back to him, hugging herself against the chill in the attic.
“What are you thinking with that thinky face?”
He dropped his hand, brows drawing together. “All right, is that an American saying, or is it just unique to this place?” he asked, and before she had time to ask what he meant, he shook his head, waving it off. “Never mind. Before I came here, I had a visit from my brother Bowen.”
“Werewolf Brother,” Gwyn said, nodding, and Wells narrowed his eyes at her slightly before conceding, “The beard is a lot. In any case, he told me that when a place like Graves Glen, somewhere with literal magic running through it, undergoes the kind of transformation that this town did last year, it can make it a kind of magnet for other witches who might not have the best intentions.”
Well, nothing about that sounded good.
Still, Gwyn had to admit it made sense. Magic was unpredictable and volatile, and she could see where something as massive as a change in power would ping some kind of witchy radar.
“And you think that might be why Morgan has suddenly shown up?”
“I think we need to find out exactly why she was asked to leave Penhaven ten years ago,” he replied, and Gwyn grinned at him.
“So we’re going to be detectives, huh? Magical detectives.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he replied dryly, then nodded in the direction of the stairs. “And we should probably get back to that party before someone notices we’re gone.”
Gwyn followed him down the stairs, twisting her fingers as she did, the light spell vanishing. “Jones and Esquire, Magical Detectives,” she mused, and he threw her a dark look over his shoulder.
“Penhallow and Jones.”
“Jones and Penhallow.”
“Penhallow, full stop.”
“Jones and Son.”
Wells stopped just at the bottom of the stairs and turned to her, head tilted slightly to one side before his expression cleared. “Ah. The cat.”
“Sir Purrcival would be an asset to any case.”
He snorted at that and had just reached the bottom step, Gwyn coming to stand beside him, when they heard footsteps.
Voices.
Very, very close voices.
And now the footsteps had stopped outside the door, and yes, that was definitely Morgan saying, “I’ve actually been storing it up here.”
There wasn’t any time to think, but Gwyn had always preferred to be a woman of action.
Turning to face Wells, she grabbed the lapels of his jacket and yanked him close.
“What in—” he started, but before he could say anything else, she pressed her mouth to his.