Witching The Night Away: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 3) by Constance Barker

magic involved a lot of hand movement paired with a lot of wand flicking and drawing. Some of those hand positions were murder, and there was a whole system of exercises meant to make the hands more supple and capable of performing them, along with forms for wand use. The Seventy-Seven forms, Aiden called them, and then ranged from drawing perfect circles to sketching platonic solids in the air, on the fly.
    If Aiden wasn’t a master of the wizardly craft, then Avery very much wanted to see what a master looked like; he guessed it was quite a sight.
    As it was, Aiden was at least adept at his craft. The spell took on form and life as he finished, and the room grew momentarily darker. Then, in the darkness, there was a shape. It was Professor Turner, but this was only clear because it seemed like the shape was sitting at the chair in the room (it was overturned, in reality, so that the fuzzy figure appeared to be sitting in mid-air). He was translucent, and out of focus, but had a somewhat pale, white-blue glow to him that faded if you looked at it directly too long. It was like a trick of the eye.
    Then, another shape appeared at the doorway. This one was almost entirely unfocused and instead of a blue-white glow, it was a deep purple that was difficult to see clearly in the darkness. After a moment, Avery realized why the room was dark. The light inside it had been co-opted to produce the phantoms.
    There was no sound, but the two phantom shapes approached one another and drifted around the room, a facsimile of two people having a tense conversation. Avery could almost imagine Professor Turner’s phantom telling the other he was done. He returned to his seat.
    That was when it happened. The darker phantom drifted to the dresser in the room, and then rushed at the lighter one. They swirled around one another momentarily, and then the lighter phantom was on the ground. The darker one moved away, and then plunged down. Aiden did something, and the images almost came into focus—instead of a rough blob of translucent color, you could almost make out arms, legs, and a head. The darker phantom appeared to be shoving or pulling or… maybe rifling through the lighter one’s pockets? It stood again, its head swiveling, and it reached down toward the lighter phantom’s head or neck and then stopped. It backed away… and then came rushing at Avery so quickly that he actually flinched.
    It never made it to him. Upon reaching the threshold of the room, it simply vanished, and then the blue-white phantom of Professor Turner faded, and the light in the room returned to normal. Aiden was standing there, staring down at the stain where the Professor had lain and taken his last breath.
    “Excuse me, sir,” someone said.
    Avery startled, and spun to see the deputies approaching. “I’m afraid this crime scene is under an active investigation,” the taller of the two said. “I’ll have to ask you to move along, please.”
    “Of course, Deputy,” Avery said. He whistled. “Looks like something pretty awful happened in there.”
    Neither deputy commented—probably they’d shut down after Gloria had taken a run at them about details. They stared Avery down for a few seconds before he finally turned, and moved along as they’d suggested. He didn’t see Aiden in the room anymore.
    When he got back to the car, however, Aiden opened the passenger door and slipped in beside him, giving Avery a third shock in just a few minutes. He gripped the steering wheel tight in both hands and shook off the sudden dose of adrenaline. “Good God,” he muttered, “couldn’t you have spoken up? Whispered? Knocked?”
    “I suppose,” Aiden said.
    “How did you get out? I didn’t see you leave.”
    His teacher shrugged, and smiled mysteriously. “All in good time, apprentice.”
    Avery sighed. Naturally. “Alright, fine. What did we learn? Other than that someone died.”
    “We learned two things,” Aiden said. “Think about it. What did