How to Stone a Crow (Witch Like a Boss Book 2) by Willow Mason (great novels txt) 📕

it?” Patrick pulled me aside and whispered, “And quickly before they think to call the police and shut us out of this case, too.”

It hardly seemed likely, but I stared at the words, trying to think of something useful from my high school classes. Nothing sprang to mind. I held my hand up, letting the power throb into my fingertips. Seemingly of its own accord, the sparkles jumped forward, coating the green in a shower of dazzling pink lights.

“Oh, no!” I called the magic back, but it was too late. Half the message had disappeared, leaving a cleaner wall, and partially destroying our only clue.

I pulled out my phone, ringing through to Aunt Florentine. “Hey,” I said, pulling away from Patrick and Wes so they wouldn’t know how useless I was. “Do you have a spell for finding out who wrote graffiti?”

She snorted with amusement. “That’s a bit specific. Have you tried a plain old identity spell?”

“Which would go how?”

My aunt chanted three phrases that didn’t sound like words at all. “Now apply some magic, and Bob’s your uncle.”

This time when I sent the magic out, the sparkles crawled over the surface instead of eating it away. I waited, rolling onto the balls of my feet as the seconds ticked by. “When does it work?”

“Almost immediately. You should see an image form in smoke.”

Low on patience, I counted to sixty in my head, then checked the wall clock. Forty seconds had passed.

“It’s been a minute. Is that the kind of immediately you meant?”

She ticked her tongue. “Can you show me?”

Holding the camera in front of the wall, I watched with concern as the sparkles disappeared. Job not done.

“Something’s blocking the identification or it’s not something that can be formed with smoke.”

“Like a ghost?”

“That would certainly fit the bill. Just a moment.” I heard her move away from the phone and later, the drumming of fingers on a desk. “This won’t give you much more, but I’m sending it through.”

Before I could thank her, she’d rung off, and my phone dinged as a text message came through.

“To find hidden meaning,” I read out, before reciting the words beneath it. Once again, I sent a puff of magic towards the wall, biting my nails as the sparkles flowed.

“What’s that doing?” Wes was hugging himself so hard now, his shirt pulled at the seams. “Do you need a hand with something?”

“How good are you at identity magic?”

He held his right hand out and squeezed his thumb and forefinger together. “About this good. If it’s not household fixtures and furnishings, I don’t want to know.”

Smoke puffed out of the sparkles, this time forming an image. Three figures holding hands as they surrounded a gravestone. It dispersed and reformed. Three hands resting on a Ouija board.

Wes’s face turned pale. “That’s not allowed. Not around here.”

“It’s not encouraged anywhere,” Patrick said, pulling his phone out. The moment before he snapped a photograph, the smoke dissipated, leaving him with just an image of the wall.

“Why don’t you pretend that I didn’t grow up in a coven community or have an extensive interest in the supernatural and explain what that means? Isn’t it just a child’s game?”

“Sure. If you’re human and have no trace of magic ability.” Wes shook his head, clasping his hands behind his neck and squeezing his elbows together. “If you’re a witch, that’s a sanctionable activity.”

I clicked on an app that linked me to the coven database, grateful that Genevieve had granted me access. “Let’s see the last time someone was sanctioned for it.”

Instead of finding useful information, I found that a searchable database was only as good as the search terms fed into it and the references assigned to the documents. Ouija returned nothing. Sanctions returned nothing. Summoning returned a long screed of case files, most of them involving teenagers trying to sell their souls to be attractive or smart—or both.

“There’ll only be something listed if they were caught,” Patrick said as my enthusiasm for scrolling through disappointing results faded. “The fact that someone or something is trying to communicate through the walls seems like they might have got away with it.”

“Got away with it from our side.” I tucked the phone back into my jeans pocket and sighed. “Not from theirs.”

Patrick stepped forward and touched his finger to the small traces of goop left on the wall. He gave it a light lick, wrinkling his nose. “Lime jelly.”

“Whatever our greebly is, they have a fondness for desserts.”

“Terrible desserts.” Patrick printed out the full reading from his machine. “This is weird. The whole store has a surfeit of energy inside it but this spot, near the letters, is close to blank.”

“Which means?”

He sighed and turned in a full circle. “I don’t know. There’s also a temperature spike near this wall but spirits prefer the cold.”

Wes sniffed. “Tell you that, did they?”

“Fine. If you prefer to be pedantic, the temperature is often colder where they are, whether they like it or not.”

I inhaled deeply to hide my irritation, then realised the weight of sadness had gone. “What’s the reading like now?”

Patrick stared at the monitor for a few seconds. “More energy and less heat.” He moved a few steps backwards, then retreated farther still. “And over here, it’s the opposite. The whole place is stabilising.”

“A sad feeling that likes heat and lime jello and repels energy.” The short summation made me feel more in control, though we were still just as far from an answer. “It’s a pity Evelyn shut us out of the investigation into Violet’s disappearance. If we had comparable readings, it might tell us more.”

Wes frowned at us. “Violet Baker?”

I nodded. “You know her?”

“We were at school together, though I was two years younger. Jac knew her better. Evelyn Gibbs, too. They used to be thick as thieves, getting into all sorts of trouble.”

“Huh.” Paisley’s repeated praise had never mentioned anything along those lines. “Would he know if Evelyn had some beef with the coven?”

“Not that I know of. She doesn’t