A/N: This is a crack!fic, which means its meant to be ridiculous. This fic was originally posted on my tumblr account. There are 8 parts.


"So tell me, Detective," Richard Castle began as he matched pace with his beautiful female cohort on their way down the Manhattan sidewalk. "Does the fact that you are taking us to this magic shop mean that you believe magic could be a factor in the death of our victim?"

Kate Beckett stopped walking abruptly and turned to face her clearly delusional partner. "Absolutely not. Our victim died from blunt force trauma to the head; Lanie confirmed that this morning. You were there," she reminded him.

"Right…but was it blunt force magical trauma?" he inquired, a certain twinkle in his eye. Beckett rolled her eyes and spun on her heel to continue down the block.

Inward smile on his face, Castle followed. That bright spring Tuesday had begun just like any other, but their latest murder victim brought with him the enticing possibility of a case wrought with mystery and intrigue; Castle's favorite kind.

The body of Lucas Kennard had been discovered overnight on the sidewalk outside his apartment by a dog walker. As his partner said, their victim had been killed by a blow to the head, but they had not yet discovered the exact object that had caused the trauma. What they had found was that Kennard was killed just a half block from his apartment building. Upon examination of said apartment, their case began to grow a bit…spooky.

Kennard, as it seemed, was extremely interested in magic. This extreme interest was displayed on virtually every surface of his apartment and not through magic wands or top hats with rabbits hidden inside. No, Kennard's tastes strayed towards darker magical realms.

Sorcery and spell books lined his bookshelves. Grimy raw drawings of macabre scenes adorned the walls. There was even a cabinet that appeared to contain vials of blood (non-human, the CSU tech's confirmed).

Castle was immediately enthralled to find the previously boring, employed as an IT technical Kennard had a dark side. A very dark side, in fact. As they were having difficulty tracking down next of kin and any friends he may have had, Castle and Beckett decided to begin their investigation at Shadows, a retail shop Kennard evidently frequented given the number of receipts he had crumpled around his desk.

"Shadows is, like, the perfect name for a shop that's going to be spooky as hell. I can come, right?" Castle had asked when his partner first expressed interest in doing an interview there. She agreed (not that he would have let her turn him down) and they set off across town.

"All I'm saying, Beckett," Castle continued as they approached the shop, now a mere five hundred feet away, "is that you shouldn't close yourself off to any possibilities—magical or otherwise."

"Castle!" she snapped at him. "There is no way our victim was killed by magic, because magic isn't real."

"Ohh yeah you shouldn't say that so close to the magic shop," he cautioned. Then, he hurried around her so he could hold the shop door open for her with a grin. She passed by him with an eye roll.

Immediately upon stepping inside, Castle let out a cackle of pure glee. "Ohh this place is awesome!" On first glance, he had to say it seemed even better than the places he visited while researching Hell Hath No Fury and those places were weird. "Maybe Kennard was killed with a dark spell."

"Castle!" Beckett hissed at him.

Innocently, he arched a brow at her. "What?"

"Can you lay off the insane theories for two minutes?" She folded her arms over her chest in irritation. Honestly! What part of "blunt force trauma" was he failing to understand? As per usual, their victim had a flesh and blood killer with absolutely zero supernatural affiliations.

Castle placed his right hand over his heart and feigned offence. "Out of the box theories are my special, Detective; you'd think after two years you would understand that."

The shop, as Kate discovered five steps later, could not conceivably be up to code, as even her narrow frame struggled to slip down the first aisle. She sidled her way through overstuffed shelves lined with talismans, vials of liquid, and containers of things she wished to remain oblivious to.

Meanwhile, her partner had selected the next aisle over, one presumably wider to accommodate his larger stature. He 'ooh-ed' and 'ahh-ed' over various items she was sure she had no interested in; all she wanted to do was interview the shopkeeper and get out; whatever scent filled the shop was not at all appealing to her nostrils.

"Ooh Beckett look at this!"

Foolishly thinking he had found something of relevance, she made her way to the end of the aisle and found her partner leafing through a book displayed on a pedestal. The text was made to look like an ancient sorcery book with magical markings on the leather binding and weathered thick parchment pages.

He grinned at her when she stepped up beside him. "It's a spell book!"

"I'm sure," she commented with utter disbelief.

"No, it totally is! Let's try one out!"

"Can't; forgot my wand," she commented cynically, still gazing through the shelves in search of the shopkeeper.

"No, no; this is going to be fun—I promise." Without waiting for a second to pass, he reached down and grasped her hand too tightly for her to easily escape. "This one is for better understanding; it's perfect for us."

"Castle, c'mon. Just-"

But he cut her off as he began to recite wild, barely rhyming prose from the ancient-looking text. He added a dramatic flair to each word, but Kate barely paid attention; she was too busy trying to yank her hand back.

Finally, as he read the last syllable, he released her grip. She gave him an irritated look and turned towards the back corner of the store; she thought she heard a noise emanating from there over the sound of Castle's ridiculous incantation. Fortunately, her hearing was correct and they had found the owner of Shadows.

Unsurprisingly, he was as creepy a gentleman as she had ever met. His crimped salt-and-pepper hair sprang out from his skull at uneven angles; his eyebrow hairs grew so long they actually drooped down, nearly obscuring his vision, and his scraggly goatee brushed up against his shirt collar. His tone was vacant sounding and he spoke in a dialect that would have been more appropriate in the eighteenth century. Despite this, Beckett believed him when he said he only knew the victim as a casual customer, not in any personal capacity.

Just as Kate was about to proclaim her disappointment in their dead end, her cell phone rang displaying Detective Esposito's number. She answered it on speaker.

"Well, you can call off the search for anyone with a wooden stake."

"Those are for vampires, not witches," Castle chastised him with the shake of his head.

"Whatever. We just got a confession."

"What?!" Beckett demanded with a half-annoyed, half-disappointed squeak. "Where? Who?"

"Uhh some guy named Avery Stanton. He just walked in and confessed at the front desk. Evidently, he and our vic had argued about parking spaces on the street outside their apartment building and Stanton hit him over the head last night then ran off when Kennard dropped and didn't get up. He said the guilt was killing him, so he confessed."

"Did he say what the murder weapon was?" The detective asked, mostly out of curiosity.

"A brick he found on the sidewalk. He threw it at Kennard as he went to walk away," Esposito explained.

Beckett thanked him before hanging up the phone and glancing over to her partner. "Well…I guess case closed then."

"Yeah, how anti-climactic…but can you imagine? Killing someone over a parking space? Who does that?" Castle asked with a disgusted tongue click.

Kate arched her eyebrow at him. "After all the murders you've seen you still ask that question?"

He let out a defeated sigh. "I know, I know." Then, as they headed out of the magic shop, Castle nudged her with his elbows. "C'mon; I'll buy you a coffee for the ride back to the twelfth."


The following morning Richard Castle awoke feeling a bit groggier than usual. God, what was that sound? That shrill ring? That didn't sound like his ringtone. Alexis must have changed it again, he thought, irritated.

Grumbling internally, he clumsily moved his hand around the nightstand until his fingertips came in contact with the cool edges of the phone. Still blurry-eyed, he held the devise to his ear, and mumbled a gravely hello into it.

The response he received was forceful, infuriated, and far too loud for that hour of the morning. "Richard Castle, I swear to god I am going to kill you."