Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 14

  But he stepped back with a look of grief on his face and said, “All right. Go.”

  I realized then that he had lost his mother, just as I had lost my dad. Regardless of what else she might be – arrogant, crazy, ruthless bitch was the term that came to mind – she was still his mother.

  However, there was no room in me at the moment for sympathy. I clutched Taylor’s arm, pulled her unresisting form toward the door, and told Donovan, “I d-don’t want to see you again. Ever! Come near me and I’ll k-kill you!”

  He held up both hands, still with that look of regret and loss on his face. He was letting us go.

  After being stuck in that other world, I was almost surprised when Taylor and I stumbled out of the guest house and I found myself back in Corpus Christi, on a beautiful evening in early November. I wasn’t sure she was in any shape to drive, so I told her, “Give me your k-keys.”

  “Keys?” she repeated. I had to ask her again before she said, “They’re in my purse…in the car.”

  We had only intended to stay for a minute, I recalled. I didn’t know how much time had passed since we got here. Fifteen minutes? An hour? I didn’t know or care.

  I got Taylor into the car, found her keys, and started the engine. I had driven her car a few times before, so I didn’t have any trouble turning around and heading out the driveway, leaving the guest house and the empty mansion behind us.

  That mansion might stay empty from now on, I thought. Sharon was gone.

  But so was my dad. He was trapped there with her…and there was every chance in the world that she might try to take her rage out on him.

  With that thought in mind, I sent Taylor’s car racing along Ocean Drive. Off to the side, waves crashed against the seawall and sent spray high into the night air.

  But that was nothing compared to the turmoil going on inside me.

  Chapter Twenty

  Several days passed. The first couple of them, Taylor spent in bed. Beth called in to her office to tell them she was sick. Given Beth’s status as a doctor, nobody questioned that excuse.

  I told Beth everything. Yes, I was doubling the amount of damage done, secrecy-wise, but I wasn’t going to ask Taylor to lie to one of her oldest friends. Anyway, I needed Beth’s help getting her through this. Beth heard about it…but Taylor had been right in the middle of it.

  I also learned how my father had found us at Donovan’s place. I had never told him Donovan’s last name. But as soon as Beth mentioned that it was Cole, my dad had started to suspect a connection between Donovan and Sharon, who he knew from the witches’ council, of course. They were old adversaries, and he knew where she lived.

  I also needed Beth’s help because I didn’t just have Taylor to look after. There was also my mother, who had to be told everything as well. She didn’t completely collapse when she found out that my dad was gone – and that I was to blame, even though that hadn’t been my intention – but the news hit her hard. Very hard. I spent a couple of nights at her house, while Beth was taking care of Taylor.

  Of course, it wasn’t as if my father was dead. That, at least, would have brought some closure with it. We would have had a funeral and tried to find some way to move on without him.

  As it was, we knew, or at least hoped, that he was still alive…but trapped with a mortal enemy in a place where he might not ever be able to get out. The witches’ council might be able to undo what I’d done, but if they did, would the whole trouble start over again?

  I had no answers to these questions. All I had was grief and loss.

  Until someone knocked on the door of the apartment, and when Beth went to answer it, Donovan stood there holding something in his hands.

  I was sitting on the sofa with Matilda in my lap, petting her and trying not to think about everything that had happened. Beth looked back and forth between Donovan and me. I wasn’t sure, even then, if she really believed everything I had told her, as well as the things she’d heard Taylor babbling about. Maybe she thought we were both crazy and was just humoring us.

  But she knew the hatred I felt for Donovan was real. I had calmed down enough to realize that not everything was his fault…but he had lied to me and used me, and I wasn’t ready to forgive him for what he’d done.

  “I’d like to talk to Aren for a minute, if that’s all right,” he said to Beth.

  “I don’t know if she wants to talk to you,” she said, ever loyal to her friends.

  “She’s right there,” Donovan said. “Why don’t we ask her?”

  “It’s all right, B-Beth,” I told her. “I don’t care what he’s got to say, but listening to him will be the quickest way to get r-rid of him.”

  “Fine,” Beth said. “I’ll go see how Taylor’s doing. She was sitting up and watching TV in her bedroom a little while ago.”

  She went into Taylor’s room and closed the door. Donovan came across the living room toward me. Whatever he was holding in his hands was wrapped up in a swath of soft cloth. I stayed where I was, on the sofa with Matilda.

  “Is Taylor all right?” he asked quietly.

  “She will be,” I told him, my voice icy. “At least you’d better hope so.”

  He ignored that veiled threat and said, “I’ve been in touch with the council. None of them were in that realm when you cast your spell, and because you said that your father and my mother and Angela were to be trapped there alone, now none of them can get in.”

  “Am I supposed to c-care about that?”

  “There are things there they need. They’re very unhappy.”

  “They’re not the only ones.”

  I could tell that he was trying to control his anger, too. He said, “Nothing happened the way it was supposed to. Everything just got…crazy.”

  “Yes, and it started with that insane fiancée of yours.”

  “I’m not denying that,” he said. “Angela wreaked a lot of havoc. But you and I did our share, too.”

  Him, maybe, I thought. Not me.

  But I knew that wasn’t really true. There was plenty of blame to go around, and some of it fell on me.

  “What do you want, Donovan?”

  “The members of the witches’ council have started studying what happened. They think there may be a way to reverse the spell. But it’s going to take a while.”

  “How long?”

  He shrugged. “A hundred years or so. Maybe longer. Maybe a lot longer.”

  That was it, then. Witches weren’t immortal. The most powerful of them were long-lived compared to humans, or so I’d heard, but it seemed certain now that my dad would never return from the place where I’d trapped him.

  I looked down at Matilda, too overcome to speak.

  “But that’s not all I came here to tell you, Aren,” Donovan went on. “Or to show you.”

  I looked up and saw that he was unwrapping the thing in his hands. It was a book, I realized as the soft cloth fell away from it. An incredibly ancient-looking book.

  “There may be a quicker way to get to them,” he said, “and it all depends on two things: this book…and you and I working together.”

  “I hate you,” I said. “Why would I ever do anything with you?”

  “To see your father again and bring him home,” he said simply.

  I looked up at him for a long moment, then set Matilda aside and stood up to face him.

  “All right,” I said. “Show me the d-damn book.”

  A Peck of Pickled Warlocks

  This is for my family, my husband James and my amazing daughters Shayna and Joanna. And a special thanks to my parents, Paul and Naomi Washburn for taking me and my brothers to the Texas coast every summer.

  Chapter 1

  I had doubts about the job when Sherry told me I would be working a bachelor party.

  “It won’t get too rowdy, I promise you, Aren,” she told me. “They’re a nice bunch of guys. I know the groom’s mother.”

  “B-but it is a b-bachelor party,” I had said. “Sometime
s those things get out of hand. And it’s at a n-nightclub, which means there’ll be lots of drinking – “

  “But it’s not like you’re going to be stripping or anything like that. All you have to do is go in, deliver your singing telegram, smile at everybody, maybe give the groom a little kiss on the cheek so all his buddies can hoot and holler, and then you’re out of there. Simple as it can be.”

  In the time I had known her I had come to consider Sherry Cathcart a friend as well as my employer. The Cathcart Entertainment Agency delivered singing telegrams and strip-o-grams (not that I went on any of the jobs that would have involved taking my clothes off), provided clowns for kid’s birthday parties and entertainment for office parties and other adult gatherings, and generally tried to entertain people, as the agency’s name indicated. Most of the time I was glad to be working for Sherry. I liked her, and goodness knows I needed the job.

  The mostly male crowd inside the Twin Palms Club certainly seemed to be entertained. And inebriated. And horny. None of which boded well for a reasonably attractive young woman who had to go in there wearing a semi-slutty evening gown and deliver a slightly suggestive singing telegram about what the groom should expect on his wedding night.

  Even with all that going against me, things might have been all right if I hadn’t looked so much like Brandi. Now, I don’t know Brandi, you understand, and I don’t know if I really look like her or not. But evidently she was once married to Grady, who was friends with Jason, the prospective bridegroom. I’m aware of this because when I came into the club, made my way to the long table where the bachelor party guests were seated, and started to sing, Grady lurched up drunkenly from his chair and yelled, “Oh, my God! It’s that tramp ex-wife of mine, Brandi!”

  If I’d had any sense I would have ignored him, hurried through the song, and got out of there. Another friend of Jason’s who couldn’t make it to the party had paid for the singing telegram to make up for not being there and to wish his buddy good luck, albeit in a somewhat risqué manner.

  But the song had a slow, sultry tempo to it, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that normally would be rushed. I stuck with it, determined to do a good job, and didn’t look at the guy who’d shouted at me. I heard one of the other guests say to him, “Sit down, Grady. That girl’s not Brandi.”

  That bothered me a little – I’m in my mid-twenties, which means I’m a full-grown woman, not a girl – but I let it go. I mean, a bachelor party is hardly a bastion of sensitivity to begin with.

  In a loud voice that competed with my singing, Grady said, “No, no, it’s her, I tell you. It’s Brandi. I’d know that cold-hearted bitch anywhere!”

  For all I knew, Brandi might really be a cold-hearted bitch. Or maybe she’d just gotten tired of Grady being a loud-mouthed boor and left him. None of my business either way. I was halfway through the song for Jason, and I found myself sort of enjoying it. Until recently I hadn’t sung a note in more than two decades, and I had discovered that I liked singing and had a decent voice. Even though it was well into the 21st Century and this was an upscale but still slightly sleazy club in Corpus Christi, Texas, not some swanky nightspot in a 1940s movie set in Hollywood or New York, in this get-up, crooning this song, I felt a little like a torch singer. It was fun.

  It ceased to be fun when Grady pulled away from the guys trying to get him to settle down and came storming up the length of the table toward me.

  “Brandi, you bitch, what are you doing here?” he demanded. He was close enough for me to smell the booze on his breath. “I always knew you’d wind up peddlin’ that cute little tush of yours.”

  “Grady, shut up and let the lady sing,” Jason said. “She’s not Brandi.”

  Grady flailed an arm in the air. “Oh, you’re all just trying to cover up for her,” he insisted. “Well, it won’t work! What is this, Jason, did you hire her to spend the night with you before you get married tomorrow? One more night to sow your wild oats? You always did have the hots for her!”

  Despite my determination to finish the song and get out of here, I was getting pretty tired of him being so loud and obnoxious. I reminded myself that it wouldn’t be very professional of me to stop singing and give him a piece of my mind, even though a part of me wanted to do that.

  A part of me wanted to turn him into a frog, too, but we can’t always give in to our impulses, no matter how tempting they might be.

  I admit, I rushed the last few lines of the song a little. When I was done with them, I said, “Good luck and congratulations on your marriage from Steve Cheney, Jason.” I bent over and planted that quick kiss on his forehead, like Sherry had suggested. Despite being annoyed at Grady, Jason looked pleased. It was hard to tell in the dimly lit club, but I thought he might even be blushing a little.

  The kiss was a mistake, though. It really set Grady off.

  “You whore!” he shouted as he grabbed my arm. “Why don’t you just give him a freakin’ lap dance?”

  Even under the best of circumstances, I wouldn’t have liked being manhandled like that. The way my life had been going lately, I was really in no mood for it that night. But I tried to keep my cool anyway. I tugged on the arm he was holding and said, “P-please, sir, let me g-go.”

  Unless good old Brandi had a stammer, you would have thought that would have convinced him he’d made a mistake. Maybe he just didn’t hear me very well because there was a lot of noise in the club to start with and by now some of the other bachelor party guests were yelling at Grady to leave me alone. Whatever the explanation, he didn’t let go of me. In fact, he grabbed my other arm and jerked me closer to him.

  The anger disappeared from his face and he started to blubber. “Oh, Brandi,” he said, “you gotta come back to me! You just gotta! I can’t live without you, baby! Please just give me another chance!”

  Then he kissed me. It was a sloppy, painful, embarrassing kiss that should have humiliated him. It certainly repulsed me. I tried to pull out of his grasp, but that just seemed to urge him on. He started pawing at me.

  I finally succeeded in getting my mouth away from his, and I was about to open it and sing something else, something that he wouldn’t like at all, when one of the other guys latched on to his shoulder, hauled him around, and punched him in the face.

  “Hey!” another guest said. “You can’t do that!” He jumped up and hit the guy who had tried to come to my rescue.

  I had seen more than enough movies and TV shows to know what was going to happen next. It was inevitable. Once a punch is thrown in a bar, there can be only one result.

  Chaos.

  Or what passes for it in this human realm, anyway.

  Grady got hit again and went flying onto a neighboring table. The people sitting there took offense at that. They threw him back into the rapidly spreading fight and charged after him. The bachelor party had broken into two roughly equal factions, one pro-Grady and one anti-Grady, and they were already battling fiercely. The addition of the newcomers just made things crazier.

  One thing the movies get wrong about brawls like that: sure, a lot of punches were thrown, but they were hardly what you’d call clean, well-timed blows. Most of them were wild and missed by a mile. There was a lot of shoving and mostly awkward and ineffective wrestling going on, too. The fact that they’d all been drinking before the trouble started probably had something to do with that. These were all grown men, but if you’ve ever seen a bunch of elementary school boys fighting on the playground, it was an expanded version of that.

  It would have been funny if there wasn’t a chance that somebody might really get hurt.

  I felt a little bad about trying to sneak out with all that going on, since it was my alleged resemblance to Brandi that had started everything. But this wasn’t my fight and I’m not exactly built for brawling. One of those mixed martial artists, I’m not. So I started circling around a couple of guys who were slapping at each other like rejects from a Three Stooges movie. My eye was on the door.

&nb
sp; Because of that, I wasn’t watching out behind me. I didn’t see Grady coming, didn’t know he was even there until he grabbed me from behind and wrapped his arms around my waist.

  “Don’t go, baby!” he wailed. “Please, Brandi, don’t leave me again!”

  I twisted but couldn’t get out of his grip. I said, “Grady, listen to me! I’m n-not Brandi! My n-name is Aren!”

  “No, no, you’re Brandi, I know you are! You look just like her! Remember that time out on Padre Island when we – “

  Whatever he and Brandi had done out on Padre Island, I didn’t want to hear about it. I’d taken a self-defense class once, but the only moves I really remembered from it were stomping on a guy’s feet and hitting him in the belly with an elbow. So I did both of those things.

  I was wearing high heel stilettos, of course – you can’t wear sneakers with a slinky dress like that – and that spike must have hurt when it came down hard on his instep. He yelled in pain. The elbow didn’t do much damage, but it knocked him back a little and gave me room. I finally succeeded in twisting out of his grip. He lunged after me and caught hold of my dress by the left shoulder strap, causing it to break. I had to grab the neckline to keep it from falling. Grady still had hold of part of the shoulder strap. He used it to swing me around, and even over all the commotion I heard the fabric ripping.

  That did it. I could put up with being leered at, insulted, and mistaken for some tramp named Brandi. I could even put up with Grady groping me and kissing me, because I just wanted to get out of here and put this dreadful evening behind me.

  But when he damaged the dress that belonged to Sherry, the dress that would cost her money to have repaired when her business was already just skating by in this bad economy, it made me furious. I hung on to the front of the dress for decency and dear life and pulled away from Grady, who stumbled after me pleading again for me to take him back. When I looked past him I saw that the fight was still going on, and I realized that most of those guys who were punching and kicking and slapping at each other had no real idea why they were doing it. It was just booze-and testosterone-fueled craziness, and I was sick of it.