Miraculous Mintwood Magic
(Witch of Mintwood, Book 11)
by
Addison Creek
Copyright © 2018 by Addison Creek
Cover Design © Broken Arrow Designs
This novel is a work of fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is completely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
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Chapter One
Spring in Maine was still cold. The nights were especially bitter; sometimes I’d wake up to a white frost covering the field. Snow was out more than it was in during the spring, but rarely was it gone entirely.
The holiday season had been a delight. We’d had a wonderful time in our winter vacationland.
After the cold months, it was time to get serious and get it together.
Which meant we had to come out of hibernation, sad though that thought made me.
Jasper and I had been complicated for the past few months. He wanted to be with me, but he was apparently afraid to act on that wish.
Time was passing, but my frustrations weren’t lessening.
As spring came on, I still wore a sweater during the day to keep warm. I loved the holidays, but I couldn’t lie, I was relieved that they were in the past, and that summer was now on the horizon.
The entire town would come alive again soon. That meant tourists visiting from away—a mixed blessing—but also flowers, and birds chirping, and roads clear of snow. There was nothing worse than driving around in a car that was always one breath away from shutting down on snowy roads.
The Beetle had served me well, but my car and I were both happier in the summer.
As the days got longer, everyone’s mood was improved by the extra daily sunlight. Charlie was hot on the trail of the secret Daily Brew meetings, loving her job and loving life. Greer was thinking more and more that she needed a change from her current employment. She knew she couldn’t bartend forever. For a while she had considered making it her profession, but eventually she had faced the fact that her mother would murder her if she did. She just didn’t think she could put her family in that position.
Greer and Deacon were on the best terms they had been on in a while. A quiet few weeks had followed our solving of the Bright Lights case, and they had settled into more peaceful times with each other.
There were plans afoot to turn Bright Lights into a cinema once again. A spare room on one side of the building would be turned into a secondhand clothing shop, which Liam would run in conjunction with the Twinkle. He would have Bridget’s help in that project.
Bridget was excited beyond words, and now working at the Twinkle to learn the ropes so that she could do a good job at the new shop.
The window display contest was going to have some new competitors this year.
Despite all the plusses, the arrival of spring wasn’t all cold sunshine, bursting plant life, and positive life changes. For my part, a very personal problem had been nagging at me, and for once it had nothing to do with Jasper Wolf.
At least, I didn’t think it did.
What was nagging at me was my grandmother’s murder.
I knew in my heart that that was what had happened: Evenlyn had not died a natural death. At first I had thought she had, but as time passed I had come to believe otherwise.
There were too many unanswered questions. The proximity and bold belligerence of the dark witch Ellie, if nothing else, strongly suggested a more sinister explanation for what had happened to my grandmother.
One night in late March I decided to do something about my theory. Charlie was working late with Lena, her editor, and Greer was at the bar, so I was on my own.
Sort of.
I went outside to find Paws who was on his crate as usual.
“Do you think we could have a serious discussion?” I asked the ghost cat.
“I’m sure there are some things we could speak about seriously,” he said. “For example, there is a distinct lack of mice around here since that fence showed up.”
The fence in question was a magical one. With the help of several other witches, I had set it up in order to protect my property from dark ghosts. I was happy to be able to report that my goal had been achieved with resounding success. Since the fence had appeared, no one had attacked the farmhouse. My own ghosts were safe, at least from outside forces.
I didn’t think anyone could ever be entirely safe from Paws himself.
“It’s the price you pay for protection. You can’t catch mice anyway,” I pointed out.
“No need to split hairs,” he said.
“Why bring it up, then?” I asked him.
“Look, you have books and TV for entertainment. I have mice. I feel as though this is fair,” he explained.
“Correction. You had mice,” I told him. “Now, I really do have something I want to talk seriously about.”
“Very well. I’m not finished with that topic, though,” he warned me.
“Of course not,” I agreed.
He sighed and shifted to get more comfortable on the crate. In the end he was sitting on all fours in a crouched position, one of any cat’s favorites, I’d found. He looked like he wanted to be ready to jump off the crate and chase me away at any moment.
“Do you think my grandmother was murdered?” I asked. “All signs point to the likelihood that she was. I have to admit, I haven’t done much about it. I haven’t even really wanted to think about the fact that somebody must have killed her. It’s hard to believe that’s how I became the witch in charge here.”
I spoke quickly, afraid to look at Paws as I laid out my worries. Knowing Paws, he might laugh or tell me to drop it. If I didn’t say everything to him right now I might not have the courage again.
When he didn’t respond, I finally looked up, only to see his eyes blink slowly several times and his shimmering body shake a bit. Whatever he had expected me to say, it wasn’t that.
“Yes,” he said at last. “There is no doubt in my mind that she was murdered. There are too many suspicious circumstances surrounding her death. For example, where is her ghost? Usually a witch’s ghost sticks around to an annoying degree. I know you think I have a low tolerance for annoying, but trust me when I tell you that even people with foolishly high tolerances get annoyed about this,” he said.
“
There’s also the part where she was very young when she died. She was healthy otherwise, right?” I asked.
“She was perfectly healthy. If she was murdered, that is a very serious crime in the witch world. It’s high treason to kill a fellow witch. Usually, they are just gotten out of the way; only very rarely are they murdered. Do you know who her mysterious benefactor was?” he asked.
The sudden shift in focus threw me for a moment, but I knew very well what Paws was referring to.
Once when I had been visiting Evenlyn’s grave on the hill behind the farmhouse, a fancy car had driven up. It had stopped when the driver noticed me, then turned around and simply driven away again. I could only assume that was my grandmother’s mysterious benefactor.
“Unfortunately, I know very little. I know she didn’t get along with the Wolf family,” I said.
“It’s all in the name. You can’t trust a wolf,” said Paws.
“And yet I do,” I murmured.
“You will learn. Now that we’re speaking about this topic openly, what do you intend to do about it?” he asked.
I shook my head. That was just the thing. “I had only gotten so far as asking you.”
“I am a sparkling wealth of knowledge. It’s a good place to start,” the cat agreed. “I think you need to start looking for proof that she was murdered, and I don’t think it will be easy to find. It would be easier if you could go back in time to the moment it happened. If you could see what she was doing and where she was, that might help. The only trouble is, you’re not very good at those spells, and anyone who’s good at them will probably not be inclined to help you.”
“Who is good at them?” I asked.
“It’s very difficult, because to go back as far as you would have to would require a lot of magic. In fact, I would think there are only a handful of witches who could do it, and only one of them lives in this state,” he said.
I swallowed hard. It didn’t take a genius to know who he was referring to.
“Madame Rosalie is definitely not going to want to help me,” I told him. Not after I stormed out of a coven gathering after Jasper’s name was brought up, and never went back.
“That’s pretty obvious. I do believe you’re going to have to ask her anyway. For your grandmother’s sake. And possibly for your own.”
Chapter Two
I woke up in the middle of the night after tossing and turning for a long time; the fitful sleep I had fallen into obviously hadn’t been very deep. I angrily pushed my pillow into submission to make my head and neck more comfortable, then lay back down and fell asleep again.
Unfortunately for me, the same dream started up again. Jasper Wolf wanted to speak to me. He kept trying to, but I kept walking away from him. Whenever I stopped to listen, he was saying something about my old and broken porch. He kept offering to have Tyler Spin fix it for me and I kept telling him I’d let the porch fall down first. He persisted. He kept asking me if I was okay. He kept asking me if we could talk. No matter how many times I told him no, he asked again.
I woke with a start. My room was dark and the house was cold. All around me I heard the creaks of an old farmhouse. The wind blew, the floor creaked, the house shifted and grumbled right along with me.
I wondered why dream me was being so stubborn.
Probably, I figured, it was because I wasn’t stubborn in life, and at least somewhere something was going to go how I wanted, a.k.a. in my imagination.
I slept in a room with very heavy drapes for a reason, and an obvious one: the light would bother me if it could get into my room. Still, sometimes there were enough ghosts, or they were so sparkly, that I could see them through the curtain. In the dead of this troubled night, now was one of those times.
I crawled over my bed to the window and pulled the curtain open enough to see the dark and quiet field beyond. As my hand brushed the cold windowpane, blasts of chill air spilled around the frame that had long since stopped fitting properly. Old farmhouses were drafty.
When I caught sight of my lawn, I gasped. Several ghosts were streaming toward the driveway. I quickly stuffed my feet into my old slippers, grabbed a robe, and hurried downstairs.
The living room curtains were open, so I could see outside. There wasn’t much of a moon, but that didn’t matter. The sparkling ghosts illuminated everything I needed to see.
I hurried faster, trying to be just quiet enough so that I wouldn’t wake up my friends. I knew they had come home at some point and gone to bed. On nights when Greer had to work at the bar she got home very late, usually pretty tired after keeping a rowdy crowd in line.
“What on earth is going on here?” I burst out when I got outside. I heard the creak of the porch as I walked over it, and winced. My dream was still very fresh in my mind.
Jasper looked at me and held up his hands. All I could think was that for somebody who didn’t want to be around me much, he sure showed up at the farmhouse unannounced an awful lot.
Jasper was standing in the middle of a ring composed of two small but formidable-looking ghosts.
“We have made an arrest. We were merely waiting for you to come out and confirm the suspect. We have been keeping an eye on him,” said Tank.
For once Tank and Paws appeared to be in complete agreement. The rabbit was hopping back and forth around Jasper, forming a ring of sparkles as he went and Paws moving in unison with him. They were both keeping a very close eye on Jasper (the perpetrator). They were also keeping him within their own circle.
“What is this? I thought you and Tank don’t get along! Why have you arrested Jasper?” I asked Paws.
“A marauder in the middle of the night is something you should be taking seriously,” said Karen, wafting toward us.
Karen was another ghost, the leader of the tea ladies. She was also in charge of the ghosts on my property in general, having taken the duty over from Mrs. Goodkeep.
“Thank you for sharing. Don’t you all know Jasper?” I asked Paws. While the cat made a show of pretending that his nails were fascinating, I turned to Jasper and asked, “You can see the ghosts, right?”
“There are more than these two?” he asked.
Looking around, I realized that he could only see Paws and Tank. I had no idea why.
“No, there are just two,” I said.
“People have been counting me out my whole life,” opined Karen.
“I can’t imagine why,” said Mr. Bone, who had also come to watch and was now sitting comfortably on the porch chewing a piece of straw.
I tried to focus. So often the ghosts’ jabbering sent me off kilter.
“What exactly is it that you’re doing here in the middle of the night?” I asked Jasper.
“I don’t know. Next time I won’t come unannounced. Clearly it’s dangerous,” he said, looking at Paws and Tank.
“You better believe it’s dangerous,” sputtered the rabbit. “You think you can just come here and attack our boss. Think again. You think this house is defenseless. Think again. You have another think coming if you don’t think that the Witch of Mintwood is always on guard.”
“My apologies for doubting you, good sir. I have every faith that you are more than capable of defending this ground,” said Jasper.
“Oh, spare us. He’s no more capable of defending this ground that I am of catching a real mouse,” said Paws.
“No need to be jealous,” said Tank.
“Just ignore these two. They’re harmless, unless you’re looking for headache,” I told Jasper. “What was it you said you were doing here?”
He sighed and looked at me, and suddenly his whole expression changed. His face looked so sad. In the ghostly light, even his beautiful eyes were dark.
“I wanted to see you before tomorrow. I know I’ve been very cryptic and confusing lately. I wanted to come by one more time to try and clear something up.”
I frowned at him. “That may be the biggest understatement I’ve ever heard in my life. You have definitely been th
ose things. I don’t know if it’s necessary or not, but I’ll throw out uncommunicative, too.”
“I’m sure you could go on about this for a long time. I know I’ve hurt you. I know I’ve been confusing. It’s been killing me, too, but since it was my decision, I’m not asking for your sympathy. I know you could have any one of a million guys and be better off,” he said.
My mouth fell open a little bit. Given that it was so dark, I knew he couldn’t see my surprise, and I was thankful for small blessings.
“This guy is really good with the one-liners. Can I kick him off our property now?” Tank asked.
“I promise I’ll help,” said Paws.
“I don’t think that would do any good,” I said.
“You haven’t been kicked until you’ve been kicked by a rabbit,” said Tank threateningly.
“I know I hurt you, but please don’t leave me at their mercy,” said Jasper.
“Everyone just stop it. I’m going to let Jasper say what he has to say. Tank, I highly doubt I will then let you kick him out. You never know, though.” I gave Jasper a warning look. He nodded as if he understood.
“I came to ask you to have patience with me for just a little longer. I know this situation can’t continue. I promise I’m trying to figure it out. I’m worried that you aren’t going to hang on. I just want you to know that you are it for me. Our months together were the most incredible of my life. I have never been happier. That’s what I wanted you to know,” said Jasper.
My mouth felt dry. If we hadn’t had onlookers I might have forgotten to ever say anything in response. As it was, two pairs of ghost eyes stared at me until I found myself nodding.
“I don’t know how long I can go on like this. I haven’t really been thinking about it as the end of us, though. I can’t imagine us being over. I suppose people have said that before right after they’ve been dumped, though,” I whispered.
Even saying the words hurt, but I needed to be honest.
If only he would stride forward and wrap his arms around me.
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