Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ryan, I’ll take things from here.” The man approaching us was probably in his fifties, with short, graying hair, spectacles, and a taste in sweaters that could only be described as eye-wateringly awful. An academic, then. He looked over at me. “Are you some sort of reporter? If so, you really have no business coming onto our site without—”
    “I’m from the insurers,” I explained, again pushing that faint cloud of good feeling at the man.
    “Oh, that’s different, of course. I’m Professor Edward Muir. This is my research project.”
    “Really? Looking into what?” I asked that mostly because I could feel the small hint of pride there as he talked about it.
    “Oh, into the possibility of the presence of a large La Tene culture site, that’s the Bronze Age culture that supplanted the previous Pictish culture in Scotland. This is big enough that it has the potential to be another Traprain Law, even before we started to find evidence of Mesolithic use of the site, preceding the Bronze Age layers.”
    I could feel the excitement at that, even if I didn’t really understand the details. What mattered was how big all this was to Professor Muir.
    “Of course, all that was before yesterday’s events.” Professor Muir shook his head. “One of the students here on the dig has been injured, and now, I can’t reopen that trench until we’re sure that it’s safe.”
    Until I was sure that it was safe, he meant. I could feel the expectation there beneath the surface and I could guess what Professor Muir was hoping for. That I would wrap all this up, make sense of it, and let them all get back to working on the archaeological find of a career. Presumably, he only had so much funding. A long delay might be the difference between finding everything he wanted and coming away just short of that big find.
    “Did you see what happened?” I asked, walking with the professor in the direction of one of the large tents.
    “Not personally. I hope you won’t lend too much credence to some of the stranger stories Ryan and the others are telling. I…I’m sure that they were all in a perfectly fit state to be working.”
    And not drunk, drugged or insane in any way. Well, it was the logical assumption, wasn’t it, for a man concerned with facts and evidence? Or at least, for one who didn’t know about magic. If his students were seeing strange things, it was obviously because…well, because they were students, and thus, clearly more likely to use intoxicating substances on the job than anyone else.
    Still, it was good that he made the attempt to deny it. I could think of a lot of people who would have hung the likes of Ryan and the injured young woman out to dry immediately, especially given how tense the professor felt right then. I sent out reassuring pulses of emotion.
    “I’m just here to find out what happened. I won’t take any more time than I absolutely need to, I’ll try not to get in the way and I’m really not here to do anything to jeopardize your dig.”
    Professor Muir’s relief was palpable. At least to me. “Whatever you need.”
    What I needed right then was to walk around the site and get a sense of the scale of the problem. By which I meant finding out who else had seen what happened. The answer to that, as I worked my way around, interviewing people one by one, seemed to be at least half a dozen people, most of them students, staying on the site as much as possible, still caught up in the excitement of the potential discoveries.
    I found myself talking to a mature student by the name of Lisa, who told me without being asked that she was retraining after working in an office for ten years.
    “That’s quite a jump to make,” I suggested.
    “I just want to do something that makes me happy.”
    I could understand that. “So, did you see what happened?”
    It turned out that Lisa had been standing on the other side of the site when it happened, but that she had still had a good view of a bunch