9. Callum
Callum
I’m never going to get used to this place.
I’m walking down the main drag of a town that shouldn’t exist, watching a skeleton in an oversized tweed cap sweep dried leaves off his storefront stoop, casually waving to a pair of seven-foot-tall, moss-covered stone gargoyles hauling crates of squash out of a pickup truck.
Overhead, a broom courier cuts through the cool mountain air with a soft snap, dropping a rolled-up newspaper straight into the jaws of a copper mailbox shaped like a grinning dragon.
It feels like stepping into a damn fever dream.
And to top it all off, Winifred has somehow roped me into assisting with breaking and entering.
She’s strolling down the cobblestone sidewalk right beside me as we make our way to a local spell bookstore, where she intends to steal restricted archives or some shit that might help me get home.
In her arms, she’s casually cradling her jet-black cat—a cat that, thirty seconds ago, told me in plain, clear English that I was a “bumpkin with zero respect for feline dignity.”
I roll my shoulders, trying to shake off the sheer absurdity of it, but my eyes traitorously wander to the right.
Winifred is in a tiny, cropped white ribbed tank top with a scooped V-neck that hugs every curve, leaving her midriff completely bare.
High on her waist, a black leather belt with a bold round buckle cinches a long snakeskin-patterned skirt.
The fabric sways against her legs with every step she takes, and she has a leather bag slung over one shoulder.
And fuck. My breath hitches in my throat as my brain registers the faint, undeniable outlines pressing against the thin cotton of her top. Two tiny barbells. They’re pierced. Her nipples are pierced.
I stare a second too long, my jaw tightening as a sudden wave of heat pools straight into my gut. I wonder if this woman is ever going to stop surprising me.
“Like what you see, cowboy?”
Her smoky voice snaps me straight back to reality. I snap my eyes up to her face, finding her typical feline smirk plastered across those plush, pink lips.
Heat crawls right up the back of my neck, flooding my cheeks. I clear my throat, dragging a hand over my mustache to hide the embarrassing blush, which I find myself doing way too often around her.
“I was just wondering how you’re planning on breaking the law in broad daylight,” I lie through my teeth, hurriedly shifting my gaze to the street ahead as we pass a guy with shimmering blue fish scales along his jawline conversing with a normal-looking human woman in a cardigan.
I clear my throat again, trying to sound like the detective I am instead of the creep who just spent three seconds ogling her.
“So how did all of this come to be?” I gesture vaguely with my hand at the whole town—the floating paper lanterns, the glowing apples, the witches in cropped tops and silver jewelry.
“If I’m going to hold up my end of the deal and look into these missing people, I need to know what I’m dealing with. How does a place like this even exist?”
Winifred tucks a thick lock of dark hair behind her ear, her blunt bangs brushing the top of her dark eyes.
“You know your history, right? Back in the late sixteen-hundreds, during the Salem witch trials, women were getting burned, hanged, or pressed to death for basically looking at someone wrong. If a woman was good at math? Witch. If she was depressed? Witch. Single after twenty-five? Witch. Married with no kids? Definitely a witch. If her milk went sour on a Tuesday? Burn her.”
I faintly smile as she shifts the cat in her arms, resting her chin near his black ears.
“The actual witches who were hiding in plain sight realized it was only a matter of time before the panic wiped everybody out. A circle of powerful elder witches decided they needed to construct a permanent sanctuary—a safe haven where magic could exist without being hunted down by panicked mobs with pitchforks.”
“So they built a town,” I say, eyeing the antique iron lampposts lining the street.
“They built a town on top of a massive natural amber deposit in the mountains,” she corrects, tilting her head toward the surrounding pine-covered peaks.
“Amber is an insane natural conductor for grounding ancient spellwork. They anchored a massive, permanent Veil to the mineral veins beneath the earth, sealing the valley off from the outside world. That’s why it’s called Amberhollow. ”
I furrow my brows, stepping around a wooden crate of glowing purple mushrooms sitting outside a grocery shop. “And the magical creatures? The skeletons, the gargoyles, the kid with the horns I saw this morning?”
“They were being hunted to extinction too,” Winifred says softly, her tone losing its sarcastic edge for a brief second.
“Humans fear what they don’t understand, Callum.
Always have, always will. The elder witches opened the Veil to those creatures, giving them a sanctuary before they vanished entirely. ”
“So they just… magically built a town out of thin air?” I ask, pulling my gaze away from a pair of floating brass scissors trimming the ivy along a brick storefront.
“God, I wish. How cool would that be?” Winifred laughs, the sound light and raspy in the cool morning air.
“No, it was a process. It took decades of backbreaking physical labor combined with high-level elemental magic, all done in absolute secrecy under a glamour that kept everything hidden. Every cobblestone, every timber frame, every spell woven into the town’s foundation was laid down by people who knew that if they got caught, they’d be executed on the spot. ”
I drag a hand down my jaw, taking that in. “And the Veil? How the hell did they pull off an invisible dome over an entire mountain valley?”
“It’s an intricate layer of ancient blood magic and high-level municipal wards,” she explains.
“The elder witches who constructed it were basically the heavy hitters of their era—witches whose power could level a forest. That’s why ripping even a tiny, temporary seam in it is no easy feat.
It’s built to resist interference. To puncture it without collapsing the whole damn boundary takes precise, high-level spellwork.
Skills that I, unfortunately, lack on my own. ”
The black cat in her arms shifts, planting his front paws against her collarbone and turning his eyes directly onto me.
“And the original spellwork was reinforced using raw amber dust,” Jett adds smoothly.
“Which means any attempt to breach the perimeter creates an immediate energetic feedback loop. If Freddie doesn’t isolate the localized frequencies first, the wards will fry her brain like an egg. ”
I stop on the sidewalk, staring at the cat in total disbelief.
Jett lets out a sigh, flattening his ears. “Look, Detective, if we are going to be accomplices in high treason, you really need to get over the fact that I possess superior intellect and vocal cords. It’s becoming tedious.”
Winifred snickers, tucking her chin into Jett’s fur to hide her grin. Typical. Of course she would have a talking cat as insufferably sassy as she is.
I shake my head, falling back into step beside her.
Looking around as we cross an intersection, I realize Amberhollow is considerably larger than I initially gave it credit for.
The main drag stretches out into winding side streets lined with Victorian-style houses, apothecary shops, and copper-roofed bakeries smelling of fried dough and nutmeg.
“Are we almost there?” I ask, adjusting my jacket.
“Almost,” she says, slowing her pace slightly as we approach a row of older, dark-timbered buildings. “We need to go over the game plan.”
“Right. The one where you want me to flirt with a seventy-year-old witch?” I narrow my eyes down at her.
“Honestly, she’s probably closer to two hundred,” Winifred says flippantly, waving a hand. “But that’s beside the point. Do you want to find a way home or not?”
I grumble under my breath, turning my collar up against the breeze.
“That’s what I thought,” she says smoothly, a victorious little tilt to her chin. “Now, there are a couple things you need to know about Aria Ravenshade before we walk through those doors.”
“Okay,” I say, leaning in slightly. “I’m guessing at least one of these things is bad news.”
“First of all, she is utterly obsessed with Mayor Brightfang’s wife, Sapphira.”
I pause. “Brightfang?”
Winifred nods. “They’re vampires.”
“Oh,” I say flatly. “Perfectly normal.”
“I’ve always thought the name was pretty cool, personally,” she shrugs, shifting her grip on Jett. “Anyway, Aria will talk your ear off about Sapphira’s local charity galas and her antique jewelry collection if you give her half a chance. That’s your entry point. Get her rambling about Sapphira.”
“Got it. And the bad news?”
Winifred bites her lower lip, flashing me a sheepish look. “Secondly, she hates my guts.”
I let out a surprised laugh. “Why the hell would she hate you?”
“When I was fourteen, I tried to brew a low-grade levitation potion behind her shop,” she says, grimacing slightly at the memory.
“I messed up the ratio of dried sage to moon-water, and the cauldron exploded. It knocked out her back window and covered three shelves of rare first-edition spellbooks in sticky, bright pink frog slime. She’s banned me from the back archives ever since. ”
“So basically, you’re making my job a thousand times harder.”
Winifred flashes me a blinding smile, her eyes sparkling with unholy mischief. “I sure hope you don’t mind a challenge, Detective.”
“What damn choice do I have? And how well do you even know the back archives?” I ask, as we slow our pace near the end of the block.
“Not that well, honestly,” Winifred admits, shifting the black cat higher against her hip. “But we won’t have long. Aria’s chatty, but she’s sharp as a tack. If I’m back there for more than five minutes, she’s going to notice.”