What The Cat Dragged In (The Celtic Witch Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  And then she fell into the bed Dilys had prepared for her, and I spent an hour sitting with my injured animals, and thinking about what the following day would bring.

  ***

  The following day didn’t start any differently. I don’t know why I was expecting that it would be anything other than normal. Well, normal for a house full of witches. I got up and spent some time mediating in the garden while the sun rose and the frost still lingered on the bare twigs and branches. I watched a robin peck his way through the bracken undergrowth, and I mentally planned what I was going to do.

  I felt a small surge of resentment then. Maybe “resentment” is too strong a word. A disquiet, perhaps. I won’t say it was at Maddie, nor at my aunt, but I knew that whatever I planned would not happen exactly as I wanted it to, because now there was someone else in the mix. She’d want to look around, or visit places, or something, and that was understandable. But I didn’t know why she was here, or how long she was staying.

  I tried to cling to my usual routines. I needed to go shopping. I went back inside and the kitchen was still empty of other people. I put the kettle on the top of the range, to get it to boil, and picked up the brown-stained old-style landline telephone to call my friend, Adam.

  Friend … boyfriend, perhaps? Sometimes. Maybe. In my head, or in his. That was something that occupied a lot of my thoughts. In a circular fashion.

  I dragged the circular dial around with my fingers, listening to it rattle back to the starting point with heavy slowness. Yeah, this thing wasn’t even a keypad.

  He answered with a bleary tone. “Mm?”

  “Hiya, it’s Bron.”

  “Mm, shwmae,” he said, and I laughed. I always did when he tried to speak Welsh. He was a recent incomer and his accent would gnarl up the Welsh letters into something quite amusing. He used to try and say “isn’t it” at the end of every sentence, like many Welsh folk do even when it sounds quite wrong and ungrammatical. In his mouth, it always sounded wrong. I persuaded him to stop doing that, but he still persisted in trying to speak basic Welsh.

  “I was wondering if you could pop me to the shops this morning,” I said, “Or pick me up, because I’ve got lots to carry.”

  “Ahh, sorry, Bron, I can’t.”

  I felt put out. He always helped me when things were too heavy. “Are you working?”

  “Later, yes. My shift starts at two, and I was out last night.”

  “Were you on the lash?”

  “No, of course not! Too much chance of meeting my … er, punters,” he said.

  Adam was a policeman in our town. He tended not to visit any of the local pubs, in case he bumped into someone he’d later be arresting. “So what were you up to?”

  “I went wild camping with Dean,” he said. “And it was cold, and we were just chatting, guy stuff, you know, but we stayed up late. I’m exhausted and I’m in bed, catching up on sleep before I have to work.”

  I loved the fact that he was a policeman and I also hated the fact that he was a policeman. The job had to come first and I knew I could never argue against that. I didn’t want to, either.

  I also didn’t want to have to walk into town on this cold and icy day, but it was looking inevitable.

  I drank my tea, put some breakfast things out ready for Maddie when she surfaced – what did Californians eat? Toast, bacon, yoghurt, or something else entirely? In the end I pretty much emptied the food cupboards for her, hoped that it didn’t all rearrange itself into some doom-laded word or phrase, and set out on foot into our little rural town.

  ***

  The walk did me good. I replayed my conversation with Adam and felt a little ashamed of my fleetingly resentful reaction. I often asked him to take me a lot of places and he always obliged if he could. It was nice that he was spending time with Dean.

  That “guy talk” comment stuck in my head. What had they been talking about? Me? I hoped so … and hoped not. Dean was, in most ways, my best friend. Oh – not in any romantic way, not at all! The nerdy druid was not my type. He was witty, warm and friendly, but he wasn’t remotely lust-provoking. I would have dearly loved to have set Dean up with a nice girl. I longed to see him settled and happy. But unlike my aunt, I was not going to meddle and match-make.

  I was nearly in town when the first person accosted me. “Now Bron! You know my knee, like? Oh it’s beyond pain, now, love, will you stop by me and have a look?”

  “Mrs Cuthbert, hello…”

  And so it went. I stopped and started, talking and listening, promising and hearing promises. The life of a small town healer in modern Wales is a curious one. Everyone knows me, and everyone believes in me and what I do; it’s just that not everyone really wants to admit it out loud.

  Still, I get paid in kind, and I don’t ask much but what people feel they can pay. I rarely buy vegetables or meat, and my shopping list on this day was for the more humdrum items like laundry powder and a new sweeping brush.

  The town itself was not so busy this midweek February morning. I made it all along Chapel Street without being waylaid, once I’d dealt with Fred and his piles. Not in the street, obviously. But I made a note to mix up some horse chestnut paste that Fred could collect from the house later on.

  Our town is a pretty one. A lot of Welsh towns tend towards the grey, due to the stone and slate that we use for the houses. We build long and low, with sharply pitched rooves to cope with the rain. The streets are narrow, with unexpected bends and turns to catch out unwary visitors with their over-large cars and caravans. But our town, Llanfair, has a wide open market square in the centre and I think that makes all the difference. There are rows of shops on all sides, and we have a wide range of small businesses, even though we have the ubiquitous supermarkets on the edge of town now. We even had an “Alternative” shop run by a fluffy, silly woman called Sian. Everyone assumed that Sian and I, being magical folk, hung around together. In truth I’d been in her shop once, stubbed my toe on a “sacred Indian carving”, got hit in the eye by a dangling “sacred Native American dreamcatcher”, nearly passed out from the smell of the “sacred Peruvian incense” and never stepped foot in there again. I didn’t even think she was properly magical. But it is good for tourists.

  I was looking forward to showing Maddie this, but also a little nervous. Everything seemed small, and plain, and not at all like I imagined California to be. She seemed like a nice person, and so I expected that she’d be polite about it, but what if she hated all this?

  “Bron, cheer up there,” said Billy, and I jumped. I hadn’t seen him outside Alston’s café, Caffi Cwtch.

  Alston the café owner was a horrible, angry, bitter man; the sort of man who worked himself into a furious rage when he saw the first Christmas gifts in the shops around November. He glared at children who dared to have fun near him. He also seemed to dislike smiling. However he was also the best maker of cakes in the whole country.

  Billy, and the rest of us, endured Alston’s spite because it really was worth running the gauntlet for his light and perfect baked creations.

  “I’m fine, Billy,” I said. “How are you?” I studied our local almost-down-and-out carefully. Billy never asked for anything from me, and of everyone I knew, I thought he was the one most in need. He sat in Alston’s café for hours, nursing one long-cold cup of tea. Sometimes he sat outside, not exactly begging, but certainly grateful for anything that people could give him. He had a small bedsit, and seemed to lurch from personal crisis to personal crisis.

  “I’m well, I’m well,” he said, nodding his thin head. All of Billy was thin. Even his skin looked ready to tear. “Hear you have a visitor, like.”

  “My cousin has come to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “I … don’t know.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Come here, has she? Here? This place is so bad, people are dying just to leave, isn’t it.” He could get away with the Welsh “isn’t it” at the end of every other sentence – unlike Adam.
r />   For a moment I thought that he was referring to a recent death. “Who?”

  “Oh, no, no, just a turn of phrase.”

  Still, a chill crept down my spine. First the message in the rice, then this. I waved him goodbye and stepped backwards, and cannoned straight into the worst person in the world.

  “Bronwen Talog,” she snapped in a voice like taut piano wire. “Will you take care!”

  Three

  The woman had elbows like screwdrivers and she shoved me hard so that I fell against poor Billy, who didn’t know what to do with himself. He smelled pretty bad and I didn’t linger up against him. I spun around but Rachel Harris, she of the sharpened elbows, was already twenty yards away, talking loudly on her mobile phone.

  I had to smile. She’d lost all reception in the collision – due to my proximity - and was now yelling, “Are you still there? Howard? HOWARD?”

  “That was you,” Billy said. He knew about my curse.

  Sometimes, it was useful. I shrugged. “Well, she’s rude, and anyway, I can’t properly control it, so it’s tough on her, isn’t it?”

  I bid him farewell and continued on my way to the shops. Rachel Harris favoured power suits and big shoulders, sharp high heels and strident orders. She was our very own High Powered Businesswoman with the giant solid hair and attitude to match. I admired her, in the same way that I admired sharks; I didn’t want to be too close when they had the scent of blood.

  Oh, I wished Adam could have picked me up. I bought as much as I could from my list, but it was a struggle to carry everything, especially as the pavements had been imperfectly cleared and there were patches of ice everywhere. I had to call a halt once I’d bought a large box of laundry soap, a long-handled broom, a tin of outdoor paint, a tub of tahini and some twine for the garden. I still wanted to call in at Caffi Cwtch on the way home and pick up some cakes for Maddie and Aunt Dilys.

  I hadn’t properly spoken with Maddie yet. It was eating away at me, now, and I began to hurry, as much as I was able to. Did she even know I was a witch? Was she one herself? It tended to be hereditary so she would surely know of the family’s talents even if she hadn’t exhibited any herself.

  Just as I reached Alston’s café, Harkin came into my mind again. I had to stop and half-close my eyes. My cat was very distressed indeed; this was not about a mouse. My heartbeat quickened and I took some slow, counted breaths. I’d lose the connection if I got too stressed. Was this what all the portents were about?

  He had found something large. Larger than a badger. Larger than a dog? Something upset and in need. Now.

  Harkin could not communicate in words, and he couldn’t send images to me, either. But I could receive his basic cat-emotions and also his general sense-impressions.

  The cakes would have to wait. I adjusted my grip on my purchases, and walked as fast as I dared on the slippery path.

  ***

  I was about three hundred yards from home when I saw what Harkin had been so desperate to call me for.

  Ahead of me, on the path, leaning against the stone wall that surrounded our large garden, was a man. He was only wearing a loosely-tied dressing gown and slippers, and he was bending forwards. Harkin was being uncharacteristically friendly, weaving around in a figure of eight in front of the man; I saw that he was trying to keep the man’s attention. No traffic passed us. We lived on a quiet road that led to nothing but a few hill farms. I didn’t think the man had walked down from a farm, so I guessed he must have come up from the town. And who would be out dressed in bedclothes when it was so cold? I knew that he had come from of our two local care homes. I approached as carefully as I could so as not to startle him.

  “Eunice?” he said, as soon as he saw me.

  “No, sir,” I told him. “I’m Bronwen. Where do you live?”

  But his eyes were blank and his face full of fear. “Eunice, tell them I don’t like fish,” he said urgently in a high voice.

  I dropped all my parcels and went forward to take his old, cold hands in mine. Harkin stayed by our feet, offering his own kind of protection as I cast my mental circle. It was no harder out here than inside the house, though it was different. As I was close to home I could call the elementals so familiar to me from my garden, and I could draw on the earth below my feet and the cold air chapping my lips. I asked for strength to flow through me to the man, and I asked for peace for his heart and for cool clarity for his mind. I needed to know where he was from. His eyes blinked rapidly.

  “White Trees,” he said suddenly.

  “I’m going to take you back there,” I said. “Harkin … stay with my shopping.” I was glad I hadn’t bought anything he was likely to eat. He was a good cat, but even good cats have limits.

  It was only a fifteen minute walk to White Trees Care Home, but it felt like a long time to me as I continued to channel what strength and warmth I had to keep the old man safe. The staff engulfed me as I brought him into the lobby, and whisked him away immediately for attention. A nervous-looking senior nurse hovered by me, making random short statements about staffing levels, and unavoidable events, and other excuses, but I waved them away. “A full investigation…” she was still muttering as I left to get back to my shopping.

  It was still where I had left it, and Harkin was perched on the wall, overseeing it. I gathered it up and finally, finally, finally, made it back into our kitchen.

  “Where are the cakes?” said Aunt Dilys.

  ***

  I had not realised how cold I had got until I stepped into the warmth of the kitchen. Maddie leaped to her feet and pulled me towards the range, gasping as she touched my ungloved hands. I’d taken them off to make a better connection with the old man, and they had been lost deep in one of the shopping bags.

  “I didn’t get any cakes,” I explained. “Harkin told me there was a man down the road who’d escaped from White Trees and I had to take him back.”

  Maddie looked confused. Dilys took up the explanation – what White Trees was, how I could communicate with Harkin - while I warmed my hands enough that I was finally able to get out of my coat. By the time I sat at the table, there was a fresh pot of tea in front of me, and some hot toast. Then Dilys claimed she had to go and see a friend about a third mutual friend’s “poor choice in men” and she left.

  I was alone with my cousin.

  I looked at Maddie.

  She looked at me, and she smiled again, with that jolt of instant-ease that I realised was a kind of magic. Her own magic. Did she know she was doing it?

  It was the first thing we had to talk about. “So, well, has Aunt Dilys explained … everything … to you? She mentioned Harkin just now. What about everything else?”

  Her brow creased. “Explained everything else? Oh, the cooking range? It’s fantastic! So it heats all your water too? I love it!”

  “No, I mean, about … magic,” I said in a rush, wanting to get it over with.

  And she looked away briefly, and something crossed her face. When she looked back at me, she wasn’t smiling any longer, but she didn’t look angry or scared.

  She did look slightly uncomfortable.

  “I’ve always known about the magic in the bloodline,” she explained. “But the stuff that Great Aunt Dilys was telling me about, that’s kinda different to what I’m used to, you know?”

  “I am sure it is,” I said. “Much of my power comes from the land, from what’s beneath me and all around me. You grew up in California so your spirits and your guides will be very different.”

  “Uh, yeah, sure. My … spirits. So, Dilys said you weren’t even in a coven?”

  “Ah, no, I follow a much more solitary path. We both do. We’re solitary together. Like slightly sociable hermits,” I said. “Group stuff was never for me. And you?”

  “I asked about altars but you don’t have one?” she said, her sentence rising into a question-that-wasn’t-a-question. “Don’t all witches have one?”

  “I have a sacred space,” I said, �
��but I am not very ritual-focused. We celebrated Gwyl Fair y Canhwyllau – that’s Imbolc – recently but we were outside, in our garden, because it was all about spring and welcoming Her home.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “Are you a witch?” I asked her, flat-out.

  She half-nodded, then changed it to a shake of her head. “It is hard to explain. I guess I’m kinda eclectic.”

  Eclectic witches took the source of their tradition from many areas. “Well, I am sure you will settle in here and maybe learn some new stuff.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was an awkward silence. Then Maddie changed the subject abruptly. “Hey, you want to see my mom and dad? I’ve got some photos on my cell.”

  She dug around in her bag that was at her feet on the floor, and pulled out a mobile phone. “I haven’t worked out how to get the calls to work on this yet,” she said, “but I still have the photos, look.” She pressed some buttons and began to show me the screen.

  It flickered and some random images began to move very quickly across it.

  “Hey, no, ah! It seems to have hit slideshow or something … wait … ugh, wait…”

  I shook my head. “There’s no point,” I told her, feeling sad. “Technology hates me.”

  She laughed but cut it off when she saw my face. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Afraid not. Get up and walk to the window. Watch your phone.”

  She did so, and grinned when she reached the far end of the kitchen. “Hey, it’s working again. I’ll show you our house. See-”

  But as she got closer to me, the pictures disappeared. She stared from the phone to me and back again. “Holy … wow. Really? Oh my gosh. Is this why you never accepted my Facebook friend request?”

  “I don’t even have Facebook. I’ve heard of it. You poke each other, right? I don’t see that I’m missing much. You know, I don’t have a computer. There isn’t one in the house. I just can’t.”