Witch Way Around

by Kate Richards

  Foreword

  Blast Off with us into the Magic and Mayhem Universe!

  I’m Robyn Peterman, the creator of the Magic and Mayhem Series and I’d like to invite you to my Magic and Mayhem Universe.

  What is the Magic and Mayhem Universe, you may ask?

  Well, let me explain…

  It’s basically authorized fan fiction written by some amazing authors that I stalked and blackmailed! KIDDING! I was lucky and blessed to have some brilliant authors say yes! They have written brand new stories using my world and some of my characters. And let me tell you…the results are hilarious!

  So here it is! Blast off with us into the hilarious Magic and Mayhem Universe. Side-splitting books by fantabulous authors! Check out each and every one. You will laugh your way to a magical HEA!

  For all the stories, go to https://magicandmayhemuniverse.com/. Grab your copy today!

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Kate Richards

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is coincidental.

  This book contains content that may not be suitable for young readers 17 and under.

  The Author of this Book has been granted permission by Robyn Peterman to use the copyrighted characters and/or worlds created by Robyn Peterman in this book. All copyright protection to the original characters and/or worlds of the Magic and Mayhem series is retained by Robyn Peterman.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  Kate Richards

  Also by Kate Richards

  Angie Baybee Jewel, is a timid soul, who never goes out on a limb and only wants to spend her life designing beautiful gardens. Her magic is of the landscaping variety, and it’s not so much magic as a green thumb. But she’s talented in that department despite her self-doubt, making her a very welcome guest at the Witch Way Inn in the High Sierras. One of the few witch-owned establishments that welcomes all magical and non-magical people, it’s a beautiful home refurbished by her cousin Karina, and Angie is considering staying a bit and taking on more duties between her landscaping jobs because it’s calm…mostly. At least she has her quiet suite when predator shifters come to stay.

  Kit Wilde is a tiger shifter. He’s hot, sexy, and daring, is the ringmaster of the circus and the operator of the largest traveling Ferris wheel in the West. He loves travel and excitement and new challenges but feels a call to return home to take up duties as alpha of his tiger streak. Meeting Angie adds a whole new level of worry to his life. The alpha tiger cannot marry a witch. But will the woman his tiger swears is his mate be willing to run away with the circus?

  Angie and Kit know they have something special when they set eyes on each other, but it seems their destinies lie too far apart to ever find one together. A witch with little or no magic and a tiger alpha who travels with the circus? Impossible? Or not.

  Witch Way Around

  By

  Kate Richards

  Chapter One

  Angie

  That song! That dreadful song my hippie witch grandmother had named me after when Mom passed away giving birth to me. Mom also did me the favor of not telling anyone who my dad was. Angie Baybee Jewel. The only blessing was that my peers were far too young to know the ear worm from the 1970s. But my cousins did, for some obscure reason and used to. Karina Jewel, my second or was it third cousin was the only one who had not teased me with it when we were children, and, today, as I mounted the steps of the Witch Way Inn, I could still hear the chanting of the others in my memory. Children could be quite cruel. Even, or maybe especially, one’s relatives.

  I hadn’t been to the old home since my childhood, maybe I was nine or perhaps ten when my family gathered for a conclave there, and my memories were of a broken-down place with a creaking front step and the glass in the door panels severely cracked, as if it might shatter onto the splintery porch at any moment. Once inside, I found cobwebs in every corner. Not the spooky kind a few of my aunties cultivated for atmosphere, but the kind that came from neglect. Dust lay thick on heavy wooden furniture, along with multiple teacups caked with dried-up herbs in the bottom and plates with dusty crumbs, and the floor was even worse. Cracked linoleum was the least objectionable type I walked over in my new Mary Janes. The stiffened hem of the petticoat under my lilac party dress was already gritty and brown from the dirt in the very air of the place.

  As the adults went about their inexplicable grown-up-type business, and my gifted cousins were settled around a table laden with the tools of magic, I was shooed out into the back to stay out from underfoot. If the rooms in the old home were in bad shape, the overgrown garden was worse. The kindest thing I’d thought was it was in need of some green-thumb type love. I followed the uneven gravel path from one sad, weed-choked bed to the next, heart breaking for the plants so desperate for reprieve from their fate.

  I’d never seen such disarray. My grandmother’s home, where I lived, was Victorian from its roofline to the cellar, with an expansive greenhouse where she grew herbs and other plants she used in her spells and brews. Her paths were immaculate and straight, the boxwood hedges framing in colorful swaths of flowers and topiaries depicting some of her favorite fantastic creatures.

  Back then, at the home I was now about to enter, there were few if any good points to mention. Even the bat house out back was too broken down to attract the winged creatures. And the overgrown plants, as I learned to my dismay, were mostly of the poisonous, itchy variety.

  I’d been told not to say anything, that not everyone could keep things up in their old age, and it would only hurt the owner’s feelings to comment, so I spent the afternoon sitting on the back porch, finding one board that didn’t tilt under my bottom, scratching at the rash on my arms and legs and waiting to go home. By the time my grandmother came looking for me, I was such a reddened, bumpy mess, it took two healers to make the rash go away.

  It was a day memorable only in its awfulness.

  But now, good heavens. Karina had changed the old thing into a home anyone would be proud of at least on the outside, which was all I’d seen so far. Fresh paint gleamed in the sunshine, and a pair of gray-and-white wolves with thick, fluffy coats lounged on the porch. One lifted his head and blinked at me, his amber eyes gleaming with the intelligence that only a shifter displayed when covered with fur and grinning with fangs. If one was a shifter, then the other, who didn’t deign to acknowledge me, was also.

  I tiptoed past them, the memory of the last time I encountered wolf shifters too fresh in my memory. It had been a dark and stormy night, as the saying goes, the clouds obscuring the full moon, and I’d come upon a pack on the hunt. Unlike these laid-back fellows, the wolves prowling through the undergrowth had been ready to take down anything that crossed their path. I’d stepped behind a huge, ancient trunk and whispered a quick obfuscation spell. It didn’t make me invisible, more like blurred the edges and made it difficult to see me unless you knew where to look. Even that much taxed my skills. Because over the years I’d gotten a little bit going
anyway. I didn’t think it was anything inside me. More the ability to remember the words to a spell and get measurements right. Similar to following a recipe for meat loaf even when you can’t cook well.

  And those wolves scared the bejeezus out of me. I preferred to hang out with smaller shifters, of the less-dangerous variety. Like hummingbirds or mice. Butterflies were said to be nice, although I’d never actually met any.

  Because if a lion or tiger or bear, or a wolf, should decide to take me on, there was very little I could do to stop them.

  Ashamed to say, I was the least gifted in a very gifted family. Some of the other covens and clans would have put me out for adoption in the human world once I failed the testing every young witch underwent almost as soon as she could walk. But not mine.

  My kindly, well-meaning group of aunties and cousins, and my beloved grandmother, kept me close to the fold in the hopes, slim though they were, that I might be a late bloomer. They were still hoping.

  Stepping toward the door, I gave the wolves as wide a berth as possible. My reason for arriving was really ironic. I glanced behind me at the front yard. Acceptable, neat and clean but not very inspired landscaping for a home as beautiful as this one. I could picture banks of flowers and varied foliage starting halfway down the lawn and filling the slope toward the front walkway. Greens and golds of asters, some purple-flowering alliums. Even simple chives had such gorgeous flowers, and they were not only gorgeous bobbing in the breeze but tasty in a salad. I planned most of the edible landscaping for the backyard, but one of my trademarks was designing gardens that were useful and stunning.

  Before even arriving here, I’d done a great deal of research on the microclimate where the Witch Way Inn stood. Perched on a west-facing slope, it got good sun even in winter although snow could sometimes be deep, so tender perennials had to be lifted from the ground and brought inside or just written off. I knew Karina could magic the whole yard into place, as well as spell those tender leaflings into survival, and hoped she didn’t hire me just out of pity.

  No. I had projects laid out for the next two years and didn’t “need” work. I’d managed to fit this in as a favor and should stop focusing on my lack of gifts. I had skills. And while Karina could and would use her gifts to keep the garden in tip-top condition, it was my green thumb and design background that would take it from okay to amazing.

  I had that much going for me. At least.

  If the back was anything like the front, it would be less demo than I’d been worried about. Also at least.

  I rang the bell and listened to the chime from deep inside the house. Melodious but also just a little bit ethereal like something from a movie. After a moment, a voice called, “Come in!”

  It occurred to me at that point that it was an inn I was entering and, except maybe late at night, Karina and her staff probably didn’t expect people to knock or ring the bell. I grasped the knob and sure enough it turned easily. Stepping over the threshold I inhaled a breath of cinnamon, butter, and sugar before I even visually took in the home.

  But when I did, my jaw dropped. The entryway was neat and clean, with hooks for coats and an intricately carved bench where, I supposed, winter visitors might sit to remove their snowy boots. Or, at this time of year, hiking boots. A row stood below the seat now in a wide variety of sizes. At least one big enough for an ogre’s feet. Scuffed brown leather with the odd addition of pink lace, the footwear presented a contrast between femininity and klunk.

  “Cousin?” Karina appeared from somewhere deep in the house. “I can’t believe you’re here!” she squealed, racing to embrace me.

  Chapter Two

  Kit

  The towns all looked alike sometimes, at least the ones the Crash Brothers Carnival and Circus visited did. Smallish places with a few thousand inhabitants, lots of vacant storefronts on Main Street because of the big box stores only a couple of hours away in the bigger towns. Usually we were lucky if we could find a diner or mom-and-pop hamburger joint if we wanted to get away from the show for a meal…and didn’t want to eat another fast-food version of the same food.

  I tipped my hat over my eyes and tried to get a little more sleep before we arrived at our next stop. This was a new one for us, a place in the High Sierras that boasted an actual fairgrounds with hookups for the trailers and trucks and some other amenities that sounded pretty good to me. Hookups meant water, so I could make use of the shower in my trailer for more than a minute or two at a time. And as hot as it was, I’d want to take several long, cool ones over the weekend.

  The big tent had no air-conditioning, just big industrial fans, and my ringmaster outfit could be downright stifling. Sometimes I wondered why I even did this. Every time I talked to my dad, he hinted that I should return to the streak and take up his position as alpha. I still found the name for a group of our kind odd. Some preferred streak but either one was odd. When I talked to Mom, she more than hinted.

  “Son, you’ve been playing around long enough. It’s time to take up your duties.”

  No matter how often I told her I wasn’t playing around, that I had no intention of returning to the family hunting grounds in Montana, she brushed my protests aside. “Now, Son, if you take too long, your cousin will usurp your place, and that will kill your father.”

  No guilt there.

  I had the life I wanted, wandering the country for nine months of the year before retreating to the winter training grounds on an island off the Florida coast that somehow never appeared on a map. Or a satellite image.

  That did make for some near misses with passing ships and some not quite misses. Despite our location nowhere near the shipping lanes. There was always some captain who thought he knew better than all the rest and took his ship off course.

  Sometimes late at night, as I was tossing and turning on the hard-as-a-sack-of-concrete mattress in the trailer I shared with three other carnies, I wondered if I’d made the right decision to leave the streak and strike out on my own. Technically and tritely, I had run away with the circus, off to see the world, and had seen many places, none of which were in any major travel guidebook.

  I’d helped change tires on a semi in the rain, chased down runaway non-shifter snakes in a cornfield, and shared beers with some of the best companions I could imagine. I’d put out fires, stacked sandbags against flash floods, and helped an acrobat give birth on the platform over the center ring.

  Without a net.

  And all of those things were interesting, some fun, some a little terrifying, but none of them seemed good reasons to continue on with the show. It didn’t pay much, and if I was honest with myself, missed my family, missed running the lands with the rest of the streak. The show’s owners, The Crash Brothers, did not allow us to shift and prowl very often. Ernie Crash, the younger brother had confided in me once over a cold one that they’d lost members to hunters in the past, and once two wolves had “acted out” in a way that led to the entire show having to pack up and leave before dawn. And while the act-outers were no longer part of the troupe, Ernie didn’t intend for something like that to happen again.

  They were good guys, the bosses, but I’d begun to feel nostalgic for the comfy home I’d left behind, the one my parents would turn over to me when and if I returned to take up my duties as alpha. And the bed I would buy…the California King size of the mattress sold exclusively through a resort I’d spent a weekend in once, courtesy of a lovely lady who slipped me a note after the show.

  Ringmaster fantasies…they happened more than most people realized.

  And so did fantasies of comfortable sleeping accommodations.

  I drifted as the truck rumbled along, half lost in dreams of high grasses, some memory held by my cat that surfaced from time to time. The sun warming our fur in a way it never did even in the humid Deep South. But as the semi downshifted, slowing, I pushed my hat back for a look at where we’d be for a week, and golden heat suffused my skin, traveling through my bo
dy and softening the tension I almost always had in human form.

  I inhaled and exhaled, long and slow. “Where is this place?” I asked more to myself, but the driver, Stan who also did duty as a clown as well as the setting up and taking down of everything most of us did, answered.

  “This, my friend, is our next stop.”

  We pulled in through the fairgrounds gates and from the moment I hopped down from the cab, I was in love with the light, with the way the sun cast its rays on this little town in the valley between two towering mountain ranges. It caressed my skin, and I paused, tensing, as the shadows of a cloud bank passed overhead, blocking the solar bliss for just a moment. A low rumble started in my throat, just about to roll out of my mouth when—

  “Kit, you just gonna stand there all day and stare at the sky or what?” Stan tossed over his shoulder as he passed me with a bundle of steel rods over his shoulder.

  “What?” I blinked, bringing my chin down, cat suppressed just in the nick of time. “On my way.”

  Setup took most of the afternoon and into the night, so by the time we were finished, we were all sweaty, filthy, tired, and sore. I could only speak for myself, of course, but the complaints from those around me indicated as much. At least with the hookups, showers were an option. Although the trailer in the shower was not big enough for someone with my shoulder breadth to even turn around in, I’d be clean before I fell into bed.

  There would be the usual tweaks to this and that tomorrow before the public arrived in the evening, but most of the work was done. I stopped beside the huge Ferris wheel that was my pride and joy…also my job to run when I wasn’t being the ringmaster. It had refurbished over the winter break, taken apart and polished, every part checked for safety, the chrome polished, even re-dipped where it had thinned and dulled, and the colorful seats given a bright new paint job. One of the large rides received similar treatment every year, and the others were given a thorough check and cleaning. Our safety record reflected the pride the Chase brothers took in their equipment. Also, we attracted a lot of magical types for our late-night hours, and some of them weighed far more than they appeared to.