Chapter 20
XX
The Bees
Too late, we realise our mistake. We protected the garden.
We strengthened our ramparts, but the Dark Presence has got Mamma in the Outside Hive.
We thought she’d be safe there because of the last witch’s protections, but the Dark Presence knows more than we thought.
We press against the glass, we kick with our legs and bash with our heads and beat our wings as fast as they beat, but we can’t break it.
We can’t get in. All our usual ways and places are blocked by magic, and not the kind of magic we like.
This magic tastes foul, and we fly away from it. We fly fly fly home to get the others.
We need to save Mamma!
But we couldn’t all leave. Some stayed behind to guard the flowers and Mamma’s house. We do our duty, we make our patrols around the edges of the Garden Wall ramparts, dancing from gerbera to buttercup, making sure that all is well.
On our patrol, we notice a dark figure emerge onto the lane, creeping like the weeds that choke out the delicious anemones. It’s Over The Fence Gerbera Daddy. He’s not normally out at night, in the dark. Mamma doesn’t like him, but we don’t mind him because his Gerberas are delicious today.
Hello Over the Fence Gerbera Daddy. We dance around him, and he greets us with a grunt.
He’s not dressed in his usual bright petals. He’s wearing black like the Black Magic roses Mamma grows down the side of her Hive, black like the brackish water at the bottom of the drain. He creepily creeps into his hive shed and wheels out his wheelbarrow and shovel.
We watch as Over The Fence Gerbera Daddy wanders up the lane, stops outside the perfect little gate, his face a scowl like a bramble bush. He mutters under his breath as he pushes up the latch and comes inside.
What are you doing? we ask him. Why are you in our garden?
He doesn’t answer us. He swats angrily at us. No no no we don’t like that.
He passes by the lavender bush, turns at the witchroot, scoffs at the buttercups where we hubbub about. He drops the wheelbarrow he’s been carrying next to the compost pile and starts shovelling.
That’s Mamma’s compost! That’s not yours!
We rise up in anger, beating our wings, flying at his face to try and get him to stop. We don’t want to use our stingers unless we have to. We need to save them for the Dark Presence. But there are too few of us to stop him. The rest have gone to the Outside Hive to fight off the Dark Presence.
“If she thinks she’s going to cheat again with her magically-infused compost, then I’m going to feed my garden with the same stuff, and we’ll see who’s crowned best garden then!”
That’s not yours! We slam into his head. Put that back! That’s food for our garden!
Over the Fence Gerbera Daddy swipes at us angrily.
He doesn’t care that he hurts us, that he’s in our garden and he hurts us.
He’s not very nice after all and Queen Mamma was very clear, she says we had to guard that compost, that we had to make sure no one touched it until it had done its job.
We’re going to have to use our stingers. We—
He grunts as his shovel hits something hard.
He pulls out his shovel, and the something rolls onto the path, stopping at his feet. Oh no, oh no, we think. That’s supposed to stay in the compost pile. Mamma said no one can ever see it.
It’s a long, lumpy thing, and it’s been in there for a couple of weeks. It smells delicious. We fly in closer, circling circling. Can we eat it? We tried to eat it before, but Mamma said no.
Over The Fence Gerbera Daddy turns the object over with his shovel, and we see that it’s a hand, like Mamma’s hands, but this one isn’t attached to a body, and it doesn’t move and wiggle and do things in the garden. It’s a hand that’s still.
He picks up the hand, and he screams and screams, and he runs from our garden and we chase him. Don’t come back, we tell him. Don’t dig in other people’s compost piles if you don’t like what you may find.
It’s a good thing he’s gone now, out of our garden, before he found the rest of what Mamma buried in there…
TO BE CONTINUED
Find out what happens next in book 2 of the Mead Witch, Buzzed and Bewitched.
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What do you get when you cross a cursed bookshop, three hot fictional men, and a punk rock heroine nursing a broken heart? Read Mina’s story in the Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries
Keep reading for an excerpt.
Wanted: Assistant/shelf stacker/general dogsbody to work in secondhand bookshop.
Must be fluent in classical literature, detest electronic books and all who indulge them, and have experience answering inane customer questions for eight hours straight.
Cannot be allergic to dust or cats – if I had to choose between you and the cat, you will lose.
Hard work, terrible pay. Apply within at Nevermore Bookshop.
Yikes. I closed the Argleton community app and shoved my phone into my pocket. The person who wrote that ad really doesn’t want to hire an assistant.
Unfortunately, he or she hadn’t counted on me, Wilhelmina Wilde, recently-failed fashion designer, owner of two wonky eyes, and pathetic excuse for a human. I was landing this assistant job, whether Grumpy-Cat-Obsessed-Underpaying-Ad-Writer wanted me or not.
I had no options left.
I peered up at the towering Victorian brick facade of Nevermore Bookshop – number 221 Butcher Street, Argleton, in Barsetshire – with a mixture of nostalgia and dread.
I’d spent most of my childhood in a darkened corner of this shop, and now if I played my cards right I’d get to see it from the other side of the counter.
It was the one shining beacon in my dark world of shite.
I don’t remember it looking so… foreboding.
Apart from the faded Nevermore Bookshop written in gothic type over the entrance, the facade bore no clue that I stood in front of one of the largest secondhand bookshops in England.
A ramshackle Georgian house facade with Victorian additions rose four stories from the street, looking more like a creepy orphanage from a gothic novel than a repository of fine literature.
Trees bent their bare branches across the darkened windows and wisteria crept over grimy brickwork, shrouding the building in a thick skin of foliage.
Cobwebs entwined in the lattice and draped over the windowsills.
There didn’t appear to be a single light on inside.
Weeds choked the two flower pots flanking the door, which had once been glazed a bright blue but were since stained in brown and white streaks from overzealous birds.
A pigeon cooed ominously from the gutter above the door, threatening me with an unwelcome deposit.
Twin dormer windows in the attic glared over the narrow cobbled street like evil eyes, and a narrow balcony of black wrought iron on the second story the teeth.
A hexagonal turret jutted from the south-western corner, where it might once have caught sun before Butcher Street had built up around it.
When I used to hang out as a kid, the first two floors were given over to the shop – a rabbit warren of narrow corridors and pokey rooms, every wall and table covered in books.
The previous owner – a kindly blind old man named Mr. Simson – lived on the remaining two floors, but for all I knew, the new owner used that space as an opium den or a meat smoker.
At least the flaccid British sun peeked through the grey clouds, which meant I could make out these finer details of the facade.
The buildings on either side of it were cloaked in the creeping black shadow that now followed me everywhere.
I squinted at the chalkboard sign on the street, hoping for some clue as to the new owner’s personality, but all it had on it were some wonky lines that looked like chickens’ feet.
This place is even more drab than I remember. It could use a little TLC.
That makes two of us. I squinted at my reflection in the darkened shop window, but I could barely make out the basic shape of my body.
At least I knew I looked fierce when I left the house, in my Vivienne Westwood pleated skirt (scored on eBay for twenty-five quid), vintage ruffled shirt, men’s cravat from a weird goth shop at Camden market, and my old school blazer with an enamel pin on the collar that read, ‘Jane Austen is my Homegirl.’ Combined with my favorite Docs and a pair of thick-framed glasses, I’d nailed the ‘boss-bitch librarian’ look.
That is, if you ignored the fact that I pushed my nose up against the glass to see my reflection, and twisted my head in order to see all the details of my outfit because of the creeping darkness in the corners of my eyes.
Please, Isis and Astarte and any other goddess listening, let me get this job. I can’t deal with any more rejection.
I smoothed my hair, sucked in a breath, pushed open the creaking shop door, and stepped back in time.
As the shop bell tinkled and the smell of musty paper filled my nostrils, I became nine years old again – the weird outcast kid whose mother was banned from school events after swindling the chair of the PTA with a Forex trading mastermind program that was really just a CD-rom of my mother comparing currency trading to doing the laundry.
(It was his own fault for getting swindled. Who even uses CDs anymore?)