So You Think You Can Dance? (The Time Witch Series Book 3), page 1
So You Think You Can Dance?
THE TIME WITCH SERIES
BOOK THREE
A.A. ALBRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.
Text Copyright © A.A. Albright 2023
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
Website: https://aaalbright.com
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Contents
1. Long Cold Summer
2. Nine Hundred Reasons
3. Not Strictly Ballroom
4. A Perfectly Healthy Human
5. Confession Time
6. Caught Red-Handed
7. Severance
8. Secret Agent Essie
9. Lessons in Love
10. A Dance of Passion
11. A One-Woman Man
12. Those Big Feelings
13. Malnourished Mika
14. Pity Vote
15. Bad Penny Behaviour
16. Winomite Duty
17. Sink Like a Stone
18. Vital Organ
19. The Forbidden Spell
20. Decision Time
21. Saturday Sunshine
22. Ruthie’s Fish and Chips
23. Genuine Gianni?
24. Sabotage City
25. So You Think You Can Dance?
26. Something to Reflect Upon
27. Heaven in Your Arms
28. Better Late Than Never
29. A Vision of Love
30. First Date
Note From the Author
Chapter 1
Long Cold Summer
For everyone around me, the summer had been all kinds of things. It had been wild and wonderful for Kim, who’d dated a guy with eternal wanderlust. She travelled with him for a while, but dumped him in Delhi and returned home because she missed work too much.
For Rick and Ava, the season had been romantic and exhausting, as they resumed their old relationship in the midst of some hard work at Ava’s vineyard and a busy spell at Rick’s shop.
Belinda’s last few weeks with Vince seemed a little stormier, but as neither of them would talk about their problems, I couldn’t do much to help.
Seb had enjoyed the most relaxing time of us all, as he worked short hours, surfed long hours, and developed a deep, even tan.
For me, though, the summer had mostly been cold. I was working in Rickety Tock’s, McGinty’s, and even helping out at the vineyard when I could, all in an effort to keep busy, to keep my mind off the fact that I hadn’t seen Julian since spring. Of course, none of these efforts actually did anything but tire me out, and when I got tired, I caught a dose of the chills.
But I was over it now, thankfully, even if Dillis didn’t seem to think so. In her opinion, I was in need of a full checkup. But what did she know? Sure, she was a well-regarded healer, but she mostly dealt with vampire ailments, and I didn’t have fangs.
So I ignored her advice and carried on with the too-many things, because the alternative, well … the alternative was a bit self-indulgent, as far as I was concerned.
I mean, so what if the Wayfarers had sent my husband into a dangerous undercover situation, using him as bait to try and catch his evil brother? And so what if I hadn’t heard from him in months, and had no idea if I would ever hear from him again?
At the beginning, Captain Wood insisted he was not being used as bait but was in fact in witness protection. In more recent weeks, though, she had simply avoided me altogether.
As I stood in the break room at McGinty’s, sipping my second cup of tea of the morning, I was thinking up schemes to make the captain talk, to force her to be honest about how the Julian’s totally not the bait operation was going. I was also thinking that this building was freezing, and someone really ought to turn the heating up.
While I muttered and mithered and drank my tea, hushed voices drifted my way. It was Seb’s voice, and Kim’s. They were in the little patio area just outside the break room, whispering together. I could hear them clearly enough, though, because some warm-blooded person had thought it was perfectly fine to leave the window open on a freezing cold day.
I made my way over to the window, standing to the side and listening more closely.
‘You know perfectly well why I’m not asking her to come on this job with me, Kimmy,’ Sebastian said.
‘Yes, I know why, but it doesn’t solve the problem, does it? I’m not doing this with you, Seb, I’m just not. Tonight is my art class, and I’m not missing it again. You’ll have to stick with Essie or hire someone else.’
‘You know I can’t do that – it’s not as if just anyone can do this job, is it? You need training, and you need the nose for it. How long have we been looking now for a replacement for Julian? There’s just no one good enough out there. It’s you or no one else on this job.’
‘Then it’s no one – and have you ever considered that maybe you’re having trouble finding Julian’s replacement because you don’t want to replace him? Even when you thought he was a murderer you still couldn’t bring yourself to hire someone new. Look, I know Essie’s a bit … well, you know, right now. But it’s not affecting her work as far as I can tell.’
‘Have you actually seen her this morning?’ Sebastian argued. ‘She’s still got that bloody dose of the chills. She’ll probably faint on the dancefloor.’
That was enough of that, I thought, moving in front of the window, pulling it further open, and peering outside. ‘I’m perfectly capable of doing any job,’ I said (a little testily). ‘My chills are long gone.’
Kim tossed her hair, put her hands on her hips and said, ‘Uh-huh. Well, if that’s the case, then why are you wearing an enormous woolly cardigan on top of an equally enormous woolly jumper?’
I looked at Kim’s outfit – a cute, knee-length summer dress with a pair of sandals. ‘I think the real question is why are you dressed as if it’s still the middle of summer?’
‘Because it is,’ she retorted.
‘No it’s not. It’s August, which means it’s autumn, which means you should stick a pair of tights on before you catch your death.’
She shook her head. ‘August is summer, Essie. August has always been summer. Men are drinking topless down by the canal. Supermarkets are selling out of beer, charcoal and blow-up paddling pools. Because – say it with me – it’s summer.’
‘Technically Essie might have a point, you know,’ said Sebastian, lounging on a patio chair in his typically languid style. ‘We’re in the last week of August. If we accept that June twenty-first is midsummer, and each season spans three months, then it seems to me that we’ve recently tipped over into autumn.’
Before Kim could tell her brother exactly what she thought of his interjection, I said, ‘Let’s not worry about who’s right and who’s wrong. The important thing is that I feel perfectly fine. So what’s the job?’
‘See?’ said Kim. ‘I told you she’d want to do it.’
Sebastian sighed. ‘How about this? You promise to go and see a healer about why you’re so bloody cold all summer long, and I’ll tell you a little bit more.’
‘Of course I’ll go see a healer,’ I said. ‘I’ll go see Dillis, in fact. Tonight, if you like. If it means you let me go on a juicy job with you, then I have no problem indulging your delusion that I’m sick.’
He gave me a dubious stare. ‘Well then you’ll also have no problem with the fact that I’ll go along with you, and wait outside. No matter how late you try to make the appointment.’
Well, sod him anyway. He’d seen through my ploy. Shooting him a sweet smile, I said, ‘Of course you can come with me. I look forward to it.’
A few minutes later, I sat at the patio table with Seb and Kim. ‘So? Give me the details before I go insane.’
‘Recently,’ Sebastian began, ‘an incredibly rich man named Kyle Berry died. He’d been out for lunch with his wife. He had a known nut allergy, and yet he decided, for some reason, to eat something with satay sauce. His wife had an EpiPen, but it malfunctioned, and he died quickly from anaphylactic shock.’
‘Oh, that’s awful,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing he was insured with McGinty’s.’
‘He was,’ Kim confirmed. ‘For quite a bit of money, and it all goes to his wife. The Wayfarers seem to think it’s all rather straightforward – they say they’ve checked out the EpiPen and it was a manufacturer error – but Seb doesn’t agree. Particularly because we got an anonymous call, telling us that the wife was behind it – she’d murdered her husband for two reasons, according to this caller. The first is because she wanted all of his money for herself, and the second is because she’s having an affair with someone at her dance class.’
‘Is that normal?’ I asked. ‘For someone to tip off an insurance company? Wouldn’t they call the Wayfarers instead?’
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you?’ Seb said. ‘The truth is, I don’t know if they also called the Wayfarers, because most of my contacts there are avoiding me. Maybe they’re annoyed that I quit the undercover work last month, but I just couldn’t deal wit
Kim squeezed her brother’s shoulder. ‘And a good thing, too. Those men were morons. You’re becoming almost normal again now you’re no longer spending time with them.’
‘Well, totally normal would just be boring,’ said Seb. ‘Anyway, after we got that phone call, I took a stroll to the restaurant where it all went down. It’s a carvery place, where you go up and get your meal and take it back to your table yourself. Kyle and his wife Raquel were regulars there. He was one of those super-rich guys who like to pretend to be normal, you know? That day Raquel went up and got satay chicken, which the server assumed was for her, and a roast beef meal. But somehow, her husband wound up eating the chicken.’
‘Bit of an unlikely accident,’ I remarked.
‘Isn’t it just?’ he agreed. ‘Then, as I was leaving the restaurant, I ran into Captain Wood. She told me without preamble that they’ve investigated every aspect of Kyle’s death, and there’s nothing for me to worry about. I said I’ve got literally millions of things to worry about, and I could do whatever I liked. She said fine, but if I’m going to go and poke my nose in at this dance class I ought to take Kim, not Essie, because everyone knows Essie’s down with the chills.’
‘Surprised she knows anything about me seeing as she ignores my calls and scarpers when I turn up at her office,’ I muttered. ‘So … what time does this dance class start?’
Seb glanced at his sister, a look of pleading in his eyes. ‘Come on, Kimmy. Last chance to change your mind. Come with me tonight. You don’t need some silly old art lesson.’
She snorted, before saying, ‘I think you know perfectly well that Essie’s up to the job, chills or not. You’re just embarrassed that she’ll find out you have two left feet. And maybe you’re also being a big scaredy cat – you don’t want to get on Captain Wood’s bad side, do you?’
‘I am not afraid of Gretel Wood,’ Sebastian insisted. ‘I’m just … suitably wary. You know that woman can shoot arrows, right? With perfect aim, no matter how fast she – or her target – happens to be moving.’ He paused for a sigh. ‘All right, all right, Essie can come with me, I suppose, seeing as there’s no one better. Tonight at eight – the KB Gym on Eile Street. I’ll wait by the front entrance for you, Ess. But afterwards–’
‘I know, I know,’ I interrupted. ‘We’ll go see Dillis.’
Chapter 2
Nine Hundred Reasons
The rest of the day was fairly boring. Kim and I went out to follow up on a guy who had reported his broom stolen. Broom thefts weren’t very common – there were many security spells to choose from if you wanted to protect your vehicle – so we usually paid out on those rare claims without question. But this particular client had claimed for another stolen broom two months earlier, so we thought we’d better check it out.
It didn’t take us long. We tailed him to the hidden enclave known as Samhain Street, where he was selling his ‘stolen’ broom to the dodgy-looking proprietor of a shop called Aim Low. The slogan beneath the shop’s name was: Our brooms might not be new, but they’re not completely useless.
We took all of the photos we needed, and headed back to the office to write it up.
We finished up at five, and I hurried to the Nine Hundred so I could help out for a couple of hours before dance class. I’d been working at the vineyard as much as I could. There was a great deal to catch up on, now that the land’s magic had been returned. The harvest would be smaller than usual this year, and Belinda and Ava needed to make the most of what they had so that their business could carry on.
I would probably sleep there tonight, just as I had every other night for a while now. The vineyard was beginning to feel more and more like home, and the more time I spent there, the more my childhood memories returned.
To my surprise, Belinda was spending most nights at home too, instead of staying with her fiancé. It was one of the reasons why I feared she and Vince might be having some trouble, but I hoped I was wrong – after all, now that she had her true engagement ring back, she was happily wearing it every day, so perhaps things between them were better than how they appeared.
The fake Vince, Jeremy Trent, had decided to ‘upgrade’ the ring while he was posing as my sister’s fiancé. What that meant was that he bought her a much too small replacement so he could make Belinda think she was overweight. Ah, warlocks. Can’t live with ’em, can’t eradicate them from the face of the earth.
The original ring had been found in Vince’s house, and Belinda had been delighted to put it back on. Although, now that I thought about it, she had been twiddling it a lot in the last few days, usually while staring off into space.
This evening, however, she wasn’t staring off into space. She was staring at Vince instead, while they watered vines together. After a quick, light meal I headed out and took a different row, determined not to endure another spot of accidental eavesdropping (I’d heard her arguing with the fake Vince once, and it had been ever so uncomfortable). But soon, Vince’s voice was so loud that I was sure the sheep three fields away would be holding their hooves above their ears and crying, ‘Give me peace!’
‘You need to ask her the question, Belinda,’ he said, sounding both urgent and frazzled.
‘Oh, come on, Vince,’ Belinda protested. ‘I think I know my twin when I see her.’
‘None of us know anything!’ he argued. ‘We can’t trust our own eyes in this place, and you know it. Please, just ask her.’
I kept my expression even as Belinda grunted in reply. Then, with a second grunt, she stomped in my direction.
‘Is everything okay?’ I asked her cautiously.
‘Mm hm.’ She forced a smile upon her face. ‘Everything’s grand. It’s just that I forgot to ask you the code word when you arrived.’
‘Oh, right. It’s lemon.’ We’d been doing this for a while now, just in case Grady Trent happened to kidnap one of us so he could impersonate us and take our place. It seemed an unlikely scenario to me – the next Trent trick would surely be different, now that we knew all about their penchant for Púca transformation spells. If Grady was going to come out of the woodwork, I guessed that he’d do so in an unexpected way. Other than Julian, he was the only brother not in prison, and he hadn’t managed to escape detection by being predictable.
And if he did decide to be predictable and impersonate one of us, well … the spell would allow him access to the memories of whoever he was drawing from, so unless the code was changed more often, it was likely he would know the current word.
But Vince seemed to need this safety ritual more than the rest of us, and who could blame him? He’d been kidnapped by the Trents, and kept prisoner in a cave while Jeremy Trent took his place. He was dealing with some sort of post traumatic issues, and I hoped he would get them sorted out. ‘Next word can be … banana hammock,’ I suggested.
She spluttered. ‘Banana hammock?’
‘Well, no imposter is going to guess that one, are they?’ I lowered my voice. ‘Bell, is Vince all right?’
‘Of course he’s all right. He’s just a bit wary, but you can’t really blame him, can you?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said, studying the tension in her jaw. I hated seeing my sister this way. ‘Is he … is he talking to anyone about all of this? A counsellor, maybe?’
