Any Witch Way
The Witch Next Door™ Book Three
Judith Berens
This book is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 Judith Berens, Martha Carr & Michael Anderle
Cover by Fantasy Book Design
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, September 2019
ebook ISBN: 978-1-64202-443-2
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Free Books
Author Notes - Martha Carr
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Other Books By Martha Carr
Books by Michael Anderle
Connect with The Authors
The Any Witch Way Team
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Dave Hicks
Jeff Eaton
Dorothy Lloyd
Deb Mader
John Ashmore
Peter Manis
Jeff Goode
Larry Omans
Paul Westman
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
SkyHunter Editing Team
Dedications
From Martha
To everyone who still believes in magic
and all the possibilities that holds.
To all the readers who make this
entire ride so much fun.
And to my son, Louie and so many wonderful friends who remind me all the time of what
really matters and how wonderful
life can be in any given moment.
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
One
“Mom!”
Lily Antony bolted upright in her bed with a raw gasp and her chest heaved.
Romeo jolted beside her and kicked and punched reflexively at the comforter. “You…what… Huh?” He finally stopped struggling with the blanket and stared at her with wide eyes from his half-propped position in the bed. “Woah. Are you okay?”
A dark shadow flickered in the corner of her bedroom for a moment before it vanished. She tasted something burnt in her mouth and smelled the same campfire smoke odor with something a little more metallic laced into it. I smell that every time I see that stupid shadow. She smoothed the hair back from her sweat-damp forehead when she finally caught her breath and released a deep sigh. “Yeah. Sorry.” She sent him an apologetic smile.
“Hey, don’t be sorry. Are you sure you’re good?”
She slithered under the covers and dropped her head onto the pillow to stare at the ceiling of her bedroom in the 2002 Winnebago Adventurer. “I think so. But I had this…crazy dream.”
He tucked her hair gently behind her ear, his head propped on his other hand as he lay sideways to face her and cupped her cheek for moment. “Do you wanna talk about it?” he asked and lowered his hand.
“I probably should, right?” She raised her eyebrows as if looking for encouragement. “If I dreamed about my mom, it might be important.”
“That’s up to you.” He smiled. “But knowing you and knowing your mom, plus the whole reason we’re out here in the middle of nowhere, it’s probably safe to say we shouldn’t ignore anything. Even a dream that makes you wake up screaming like that.”
Lily closed her eyes with a tired half-smile. “Again, I’m sorry. That’s gotta be the worst way ever to wake up.”
Romeo snorted. “Hey, it’s not even close to Julian Stephens’ ‘bang a pot with a metal spoon’ salute.”
“Oh, my God.” She covered her laughter with a hand and stared at his face only inches away from her on the bed. “He woke us up like that almost every morning, didn’t he?”
“Leave it to my dad to make camping a good ol’ time.” He studied her for a few seconds before his pursed lips pulled sideways in consideration. “Admittedly, I changed the subject. But I still wanna hear about your dream.”
She took a deep breath. “Well, there was that black shadow-bird. You know, the one that’s been…following us, I guess.”
“Not the heron.”
“Right. More like a crow or raven or something. It was still shadowy, only it was…huge. And its talons or whatever were wrapped around my mom’s arms. I’ve never seen anything so clearly in a dream, Romeo. She looked exactly like she does in all the pictures I have—like she does when she’s right in front of me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Was she… scared?”
“No.” She turned her head on the pillow to meet his gaze again. “That’s the really weird part. She was carried off by this giant shadow-bird, flying way up over the entire world, and she simply had her eyes closed. Like she was meditating or something. That thing dug its talons into her arms, and she merely looked…peaceful, even though she was all dirty and beat up. Honestly, she looked like she’d been dragged down a dirt road but she was fine.”
“Weird.”
“I know.” She let out a wry chuckle. “Normally, I’d say it’s only a dream, right?”
“But that kinda dream about your mom and that bird thing—”
“Yeah. It feels like more than a dream.”
“It might be.” Romeo scooted toward her on the bed and wound his arm around her to pull her closer. “We’ll find her, Lil. Maybe the dream is a sign that we’re getting close.”
She pressed her forehead against his bare chest and let him hold her. “I hope so. It’d be kinda nice to still have a storyteller around. I bet Amal knows all kinds of tricks for interpreting dreams. Especially since she…uh, coughed out that same bird thing during the spirit walk.”
“And another black cloud.” He stiffened against her, then pulled away so he could look at her. “Do you think that’s what the rock’s for?”
“What?”
“You know.” He released her to stretch onto the narrow shelf built into the wall over the head of the bed. His fingers curled around the heavy woo
den box Lily’s mom had left for her in Melissa Bore’s magical vault number four-fifty-two. They sat together and leaned against the headboard, and he handed it to her. The lid’s carved engraving of a lily on a long stem was impossible to miss.
Lily undid the little golden clasp and opened it. There were only two things in it now. Melissa Bore—the potions witch hiding in a Mexican werewolf den from the pissed-off vampire who’d burned her house down in Colorado—had told them she recognized the creepy-looking stone head with black holes for eyes and a mouth. “They’re everywhere at this…healing temple in Guatemala,” the woman had told them. “Ichacál, I think it’s called.” While she still didn’t know what to do with the apparent good-luck charm, it was one more clue her mom had left.
She first withdrew the large lapis lazuli stone the ancient storyteller Amal had given her before they left Santa Rosa Lake Park in New Mexico. Its lumpy shape was worn into a smooth surface that glinted even in the low light of sunrise peeking through the bedroom window. “I don’t think that’s what she meant.” She turned the stone in her fingers and glanced at Romeo. “She said when I see only darkness, this would show me what I was always meant to see.”
“That could apply to a dream, right?” Romeo stared at the stone.
“Maybe. But I honestly think she meant it literally. The part about seeing only darkness.”
He raised his eyebrows with a snort. “Yeah, she made at least one prediction that was very literal.”
“What prediction is that?” She set the lapis lazuli back in the box, frowned at the eerie stone face from Ichacál, and closed the lid.
“I can’t stop thinking about it, actually. Remember what she told me before we left? When she grabbed my arm?”
Her eyes widened with the realization of what he meant. “‘Do not let them break you.’”
“Yeah.”
“That was, what? Two days before you…” She paused and studied his face for signs that he didn’t want to keep going.
He smirked. “Before I what? Was kidnapped by a bunch of psycho werewolves in Mexico, drugged, chained to a tree by my neck, and almost forced into a wolf fight so people could bet on whether or not I’d die?”
A laugh of surprise burst from her lips, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh at that.”
“Okay, admittedly, it’s quite funny now.” He chuckled. “And I learned my lesson. There have been a few of those on this trip.”
“Oh, yeah?” she pressed her lips together and tilted her head to regard him teasingly. “What else?”
“Well, the biggest lesson so far is that you are one seriously persistent witch.”
She laughed again but this time, she didn’t try to hide it. “I would’ve thought that was a lesson you learned when we were kids.”
“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “But you’re a lot stronger now than when we were kids. I don’t think I would’ve made it out of that potion witch’s house if you hadn’t…” He frowned and tried to recall the story the way she’d told it to him.
“What, you mean if I hadn’t force-fed you poison and relieved your allergy to magic so Melissa could suck a curse out of your chest before your skin oozed green sludge?”
Romeo’s nostrils flared although he chuckled. “Yes. That. See? It’s funny when you say it like that.”
“I guess.” Lily laughed. “I would’ve done anything to not lose you in that woman’s house.” She studied the scar in the center of his chest—a purple-red imprint of Melissa Barre’s hand left there forever after the woman had more or less exorcized the curse her werewolf neighbors had put on the lone wolf who’d innocently sniffed around their territory. Slowly, she settled her hand on the scar.
“Well, you didn’t lose me.” He covered her hand with his own. “Because you did what you had to do and I’ll never forget that.”
She snorted. “You don’t even remember it.”
“You know what I mean.”
Smiling, she looked into his green eyes flecked with gold and bit her lip. “I want to find her, Romeo.”
“We will.”
“I know. But I have a feeling we’re not as close as I wanna be if that makes sense.”
“But we’re getting closer. And hey, after everything we’ve seen, I’m convinced she’s still out there. Screw what everyone else thinks. Whoever faked her will, whoever doesn’t want you to find her, has no idea who they’re messing with.”
She smiled and removed her hand from his chest to lace her fingers through his.
“By the way, I’m totally not talking about myself.”
“Oh, really?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Really.” He released her hand and slid his arm around her waist again. “I’m talking about the beautiful, kickass witch”—he slid her down on the bed and leaned over her—“who doesn’t let anyone stop her from doing what needs to be done.”
Her smile widened and she held his gaze and slipped her arms around his neck. “She sounds amazing.”
“She really, really is.” Propping himself up with one hand on the mattress, tilted his head, and smirked as he inched the other under her tank top. “But that’s only my personal opinion, of course.”
Lily laughed. “I’m sure she appreciates it.” When he eased forward slowly to kiss her, she ran her fingers through the dark curls at the back of his neck. With a quick snap of her fingers, she drew the curtain at the bedroom window completely closed with her magic to block out the rest of the light. Then, she forgot all about dreams and shadow-birds and unknown witches trying to kill her, at least for a little while.
Two
After a quick breakfast of the tamales they’d bought off a street vendor in Sombrerete—having decided to spend most of the day before in the small town outside the Sierras de Órganos National Park to stock up on food—they cleaned the Winnie, put everything away, and set out on the road again for their incredibly long road trip through Mexico to Guatemala.
“For a city that apparently has considerable historical tourism, at least there was more than enough space to park an RV overnight and not worry about stepping on anybody’s toes.” Romeo steered them back onto Highway 145D to head south through the brown, dry desert that stretched endlessly past a few mountain ranges.
Lily laughed and grabbed his cell phone from the cupholder in the huge center console between them. “I don’t think we’ve stopped anywhere that had many toes to step on. I’m simply waiting to get out of the desert, though. It gets more…tropical the farther south we go, doesn’t it?”
“You’re still waiting for that five-star resort, huh?”
“Hey, you asked me if I’d ever been to Mexico before and I told you.”
He chuckled. “I know. You can take the girl out of South Carolina…”
“Oh, yeah? You like this better than home?”
“Think about it, if we’re talking about a preferred method of being cooked, I’d take a dry oven over suffocating in a steamer any day.”
“Well, you and I are gonna have to agree to disagree, my friend.” She glanced out the window and made a lazy study of all the red-brown dirt and the short, coarse, yucca plants and cacti that dotted the landscape. “I still don’t think I’m into the desert. I couldn’t live here all the time.”
“You could if you were born here.”
She rolled her eyes and frowned playfully at him. “And this conversation would then be pointless. And you wouldn’t be here with me. Which, by the way, is the only thing I’m enjoying about this part of Mexico right now.”
Romeo clicked his tongue and smirked. “Well, that’s sweet.”
“You’re welcome. Hey, what’s the passcode for your phone?”
“What?” He looked quickly at her, then back at the road.
“To unlock your phone. We’re on this highway for, what? Fourteen hundred miles? You might not need a navigator, but I can at least put music on.”
He squinted at the road and held his hand out. “Let m
e do it.”
“Wow. Hey, if you don’t wanna give me the passcode, you only have to say it. I can respect your privacy.”
“No, I don’t have a problem with it.” He turned again slightly to shoot her a frown. She laughed. “I only…” His fingers wiggled in his open hand. “Let me open it.”
“Hey, it’s okay.” She handed his phone over and smiled as he proceeded to look up and down between the screen and the highway while he punched the numbers in. “I promise I’m not trying to dig through your phone or anything. It’s only that you already have music on there and it’s synced to the Winnie—”
“Lily.” With a short laugh, he handed her his unlocked phone and put both hands on the steering wheel. “I don’t care about you being in my phone. It’s not like I’m hiding anything from you.”
She grimaced but in a joking way. “It kinda seemed that way.”
“Nope. Five-four-five-nine. See? No big deal.” He glanced askance at her, then focused on the road. “That’s been the code for so long, I simply forgot the numbers. It’s all muscle memory.”
“Okay…”
He felt her staring at him from the passenger seat and laughed quietly. “Everything’s in the music app, so go ahead and pull it up.”
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