The Cold Kiss of Death

Chapter Four

It was snowing inside Tomas’ Bakery, a blizzard of dust-fine flour that whirled and eddied like a maelstrom, making the interior a complete white-out. I stood outside, pushed my hands through my hair and groaned. Tomas’ ex-girlfriend had sicced another of her malicious spells on him again. Now I was having visions of Tomas and whoever else might be inside slowly suffocating from a lungful of ground-up wheat. But even his ex couldn’t be that stupid, could she? Still, she’d gone too far this time. Tomas was going to have to stop being so nice and forgiving and report this to the police; if he didn’t, then I would. It wasn’t as if he’d done anything to deserve her vindictiveness either; he’d only gone out with the witch a couple of times, not jilted her at the altar. But Tomas was six foot of blond Nordic muscle-bound weightlifter, and a lot of the market witches had their eye on him. And trust me, bunny-boilers have nothing on witches when it comes to acting out their jealous fantasies.

Damn. Just what I didn’t need after the night I’d had.

Not that the night was officially over yet; there was still nearly an hour before sunrise. But an hour’s hard running had worked off the amphetamine so I’d come for Grace’s doughnuts. The bakery is down a side street crammed in between a secondhand book shop and a fancy florist’s, and on my usual morning run route. When I’d sprinted past it earlier nothing out of the ordinary had snagged my attention, but now I realised what had been missing. There was no smell of baking bread. I should’ve noticed that; Tomas had asked me to sort out so many of his ex’s nasty little spells over the last couple of weeks that I’d made a permanent date to pop in at the end of my run whether I wanted doughnuts or not. But the conversation with Grace, my other problems and what I was going to say to Finn when I saw him had been on constant replay in my mind as I’d been pounding the pavements ... I blew out an annoyed breath at myself for missing something so obvious, and focused on the bakery.

The dizzying flour-storm shone with magic, as if each individual grain had been tagged with whatever spell was causing the blizzard. I needed to find the heart of the spell to crack it but the stuff glittered so much I couldn’t see past it. I closed my eyes briefly and upped my concentration, but the centre of the spell was still too elusive; whatever magic animated the flour was hidden within it. I frowned, trying to think—

‘You’re that faerie, aren’t you?’ A lad around seventeen poked his spiky head of black hair out of the florist’s. ‘I saw you earlier when you ran past.’

I picked my way through the obstacle course of black-painted metal buckets and cardboard boxes packed with sweet-scented blooms to speak to him. ‘Do you know if anyone’s in there?’ I pointed at the open bakery door.

‘Tomas is. He waved at me when the boss dropped me off with the flowers.’ The lad’s tongue slipped out to taste the silver hoop piercing his bottom lip. ‘Oh, and there was this woman, she went in just before all the flour started flying around.’ He came out and stood next to me, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his baggy cargo pants. ‘Then I heard some shouting and yelling like they were fighting, then there was this big noise like someone falling over, then it went all quiet.’ His tone was offhand, as if the whole thing bored him, or maybe he was just trying to be cool. ‘Haven’t seen neither of them since.’

I pressed my lips together. What if Tomas’ ex really had done something stupid and he was lying in there hurt? Tomas was a friend; not only that, he was soft as faerie moss. No way would he defend himself against a woman, never mind that when magic’s involved all the muscle in the world isn’t going to help. I reached for my phone, then realised I’d left it at home. Damn gremlins and their hex.

‘Ring the police,’ I told the lad, ‘and tell them just what you’ve told me. Tell them there’s a witch involved, and to send the magic squad, you got that?’

He bent and snapped open a pocket near his knee and pulled out a tiny silver phone attached by a chain. ‘Sure, if you say so.’

I gave him the number and he punched it in. ‘You going in there?’ he sniffed.

Was I? I had a moment’s hesitation, then decided waiting outside wasn’t for me, not if I could do something. ‘Yeah, just tell whoever gets here first that I’m in there too, okay?’

‘Sure.’ He twisted his lip-hoop with a nail-bitten finger. ‘Gotta sort the delivery until the boss gets back anyway.’

I pulled off my sweatshirt and dunked it in the water in one of his black flower buckets, then caught the lad staring intently at me, phone clamped to his ear. I ignored him—after all, I’d just stripped down to a black Lycra cropped top in front of him, and okay, I’m more the slender-verging-on-skinny type, nowhere near as endowed as a Page Three model, but hey, put any half-naked female in front of most teenage lads and staring’s what happens.

I wrapped the sweatshirt round my head as a face-mask, shivering as cold water trickled over my shoulders. Breathing shallowly through the wet cotton, hands stretched out in front, I launched blindly into the flour-blizzard. The magic buzzed around me in a way that had my stomach roiling with nausea and I briefly wondered if the spell was doing more than animating a sack-load of flour. I walked slowly forward, going by memory, sliding my feet cautiously from side to side so as not to trip over any prone bodies. Half a dozen steps had me bumping into the counter. I felt my way along it, the flour-storm itching over my skin like tiny insistent insects trying to burrow beneath my flesh.

I gritted my teeth at the mental image and stifled the urge to scratch.

The end of the counter took me by surprise and I stumbled. I did the foot-slide-and-walk thing again, thankfully finding nothing, until I reached where my spatial memory told me the door to the bakery kitchen should be. I slapped my hands against it, feeling around for the handle, then shuffled back to pull the door open. The light filtering through my sweatshirt brightened. I stepped through the door and the sudden absence of the itching sensation had me hoping I’d left the flour-storm behind. I dragged the wet, flour-caked material from my head and dropped it. White-gold light hit my face and instinctively I squeezed my eyes shut. Then as I blinked away the negative afterimage, the bright-blurred edges of the kitchen gradually resolved themselves into something recognisable and my mind finally caught up with what my eyes where looking at.

Tomas lay flat on his back on the long stainless-steel table that he used for making the bread.

He was naked.

He was evidently very excited.

And just as evidently, very, very dead.