Wisteria Witches (Witch Cozy Mystery and Paranormal Romance)

by Angela Pepper

Zoey and Zinnia followed after me.

  “Is she drunk?” Zinnia asked.

  “She might be sleepwalking,” Zoey said. “She's been getting up in the middle of the night and making toast. Six nights in a row now. It's very strange.”

  “Six nights?” Zinnia sounded both puzzled and excited. “I suppose it's possible,” she muttered. “Maybe your gift transferred to her.”

  “What gift?” Zoey sounded frustrated. She tugged on my arm. “Mom! Stop being so weird! What are you doing?”

  What was I doing? Just filling the sink with water. Hot, hot water. Nice and full.

  Then plugging in the toaster. Pushing down the handle. Letting it get nice and hot.

  Then grabbing the toaster with both hands and plunging it into the sink full of water.

  Pain jolted through me. Someone screamed.

  The blackness rose up, and all my tension turned to black velvet waves of calm.

  Chapter 9

  I woke up in a bed, in a dimly-lit room that was definitely not my bedroom. Female voices floated in from a nearby hallway. I tried to move, but my body made a cranky refusal. I felt like I'd been taken apart and put together with staples and glue.

  Croakily, I called out, “Nurse? Hello?”

  Zoey came running in, a giant leather-bound book clutched to her chest.

  “Mom, is that you?”

  I peeked under the covers. “This part looks like me, but we can't be too careful. Bring me a mirror.”

  She flung herself onto the bed next to me. The corner of the book jabbed painfully into my ribs.

  “Mom, you had us so worried! You were totally possessed!”

  “What happened? Am I in a hospital?” I looked around at my surroundings. The soft pastels came into focus as flowers. Everything was covered in floral print. “This is a suspicious-looking hospital,” I said. “Have I died and gone to heaven? Does heaven look like an overdecorated bed and breakfast? This is the sort of thing I'd expect in hell. Uh-oh.”

  “Mom, stop talking. I have something to tell you.”

  “Did you find the freight train that ran me over?”

  “You're a witch,” she said. The book continued to jab into my ribs. She repeated the words slowly for emphasis. “You're. A. Witch.”

  “Now, now. You may be unhappy with me for drinking too much at dinner and embarrassing myself somehow, but we don't call each other names.”

  She sat up, shuffled to the edge of the bed, and opened the big book on her lap.

  “Look,” she said, pointing at an inky page. “This is you.”

  I hoisted myself upright. Stars swam in my head. I caught my breath and leaned over to look at the pages, which were yellowed and covered in swirling cursive. The drawing Zoey pointed to looked like something an ancient monk would spend his days transcribing, back in the days before the printing press.

  In the center of the page was a long-haired woman with her arms thrown high in the air. Around her floated swirls of text and beautiful, hand-drawn flowers. The look on her face was both serene and powerful. My pulse pounded in my head, but the pain in my body receded.

  Zoey poked at the page with one finger. “Don't you see? That's you, inviting the spirit of Winona Vander Zalm to enter you.”

  “Very funny. Your mother fell and bumped her head, and you've concocted this elaborate prank to make her think she's crazy.” I used my foot to push her off the bed so I could get up. I got to my feet, swayed, and collapsed back onto the bed again.

  Zinnia appeared at the doorway with a glass of water. “Zara, you should be resting now,” she said, her tone motherly and authoritative. “Drink your water and try to relax.”

  “I already relaxed a little too much,” I said. “Sorry about the dinner party and whatever I did. Was I dancing on tables? My right buttcheek feels tender, and it only gets that way after dancing on tables or bowling, and I'm ninety-percent sure I wasn't bowling last night. Please let me go, and I'll make it up to you some other time. We'll have a nice, daytime family reunion and I'll only drink tea.”

  Zinnia grabbed a wooden chair from the corner of the room and brought it over to the bed, where she sat next to me. She put the glass of water on a side table next to the bed. She gently took my hand and stroked it with her cool, silky fingers.

  “Be calm,” she said. “I brought you to my house because I was afraid of what the ghost in your house would do next.”

  I gave Zoey a dirty look. “You've got your great-aunt in on your ghost prank?”

  “It's not a prank,” Zoey said. “Our house has a ghost, and you are a witch.”

  “A ghost and a witch,” I mused. “What does that make you? A werewolf? No, don't tell me. You're a vampire.”

  Zinnia muttered something under her breath and moved her hands in a complicated gesture. The room filled with tiny sparkling lights. The scent of sweet, sugary cotton candy hit my nose.

  I reached for the floating sparks. The dazzling color shifted from purple to blue to teal and back again. I could almost catch them but not quite. The lights spiraled up out of reach and began to spin.

  “Are you doing this?” I asked with breathless wonder. “Aunt Zinnia, what's happening? Did I bump my head?”

  She held up one hand and whistled. The lights spun faster. My head couldn't take the sense of motion. I clutched the edge of the bed.

  She whistled again, at a lower pitch. The lights dimmed and gradually extinguished. The scent of cotton candy was replaced with the scent of ashes.

  Zoey squealed and clapped her hands. “I want to do that! Will you teach me?”

  Having seen the evidence, I became a believer. Aunt Zinnia was a witch. That actually did explain a few things about the Riddle family. I reached for the glass of water on the side table and started to drink.

  “Light magic is harder than it looks,” Zinnia said. “When you both begin your novice training, you'll start with the basics—modulating sounds and shifting air movement. Have either of you studied musical instruments in school?”

  Zoey raised her hand excitedly. “I play the harp.”

  “How wonderful,” Zinnia cooed. “Learning music is the perfect preparation for spellwork. If you can read sheet music, you'll find reading spells is only about ten times harder.”

  The two of them continued to chatter about musical scales and sheet music, their words blending into each other as though they were one person. The whole world was blurry and swirling, and my head felt like the stage where an avante garde musical group was banging on garbage cans and stomping their feet to make lousy music.

  I finished drinking the water and set it back on the table with a loud clunk.

  They were talking about harmonies and triads, threading needles of sound, and harnessing unseen forces.

  I cleared my throat and said, “I'm feeling a bit strange.”

  They stopped talking and turned to face me. Zinnia was still on the chair, and Zoey was standing next to the bed. My aunt and my daughter were separated by thirty-two years, but now that both were softly lit by the same golden glow of the bedside lamp, they looked like the same person.

  “We're the same person,” I said woozily. “The exact same. Are we clones?”

  Zinnia leaned forward and pressed her cool hand against my forehead. “Zara, we're not clones. You've had a very challenging experience tonight, and you're seeing our similarities. Trauma brings us all closer, and in special families like ours, the women are always quite similar.”

  Zoey sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest. “Mom, she means in witch families. You're a witch, and I'm a witch, and Auntie Z is a witch.”

  I turned to my aunt. “Was my mother a witch?”

  “No,” she said softly. There was pain in her expression. “Sometimes it skips a generation.”

  “Is that why she died?”

  She took my hand. “No, Zara. Your mother's passing had nothing to do with our family gift. It wasn't anyone's fault. Sometimes things just happen.”<
br />
  “She knew that you're a witch?”

  “Yes, but she didn't know about you. None of us did.”

  “I'm not a witch,” I said with a growl. “You are, and maybe Zoey is, but I'm not a witch. I'd know if I was. My whole life so far has been challenging and wonderful, but it was nothing magical.”

  She smiled. “But now your life is magical.”

  “Is that why I feel like goose poop right now? If this is being a witch, I hate it.”

  “You only got your gift on Sunday,” she said. “When Zoey turned sixteen that day, she got hers, and you got yours at the exact same time. The channels opened and the energy transferred from the Divine Bank to both of you.” She squeezed my hand. “The only reason you didn't get yours at sixteen was because of Zoey.” She glanced at my daughter. “Because of your unplanned pregnancy.”

  “Which was the best accident that ever happened to anyone,” I said, just as I had hundreds of times before.

  “Don't be cross with me,” Zinnia said. “I'm simply explaining what happened. When your gift didn't manifest at sixteen, I assumed you'd been skipped. My sister was so relieved that you'd be normal.”

  Zoey chortled. “Normal? My mother has never been normal.”

  “I tried to be normal once,” I said. “Worst four minutes of my life.”

  “Your witch gifts have been repressed these last sixteen years,” Zinnia said. “The magic couldn't manifest in spells, so it came out in other ways. I've been up all night reading. This used to happen all the time when girls got married off as teenagers. It's not so common these days, but you had your happy accident, and now here we all are.”

  “Here we all are.” I sat up straighter in the bed and took a good look around the room. The flowered curtains matched the flowered bed which matched the busy wallpaper. The floor was wood, accented with a flower-patterned rug.

  I continued, “We're all here in my psychedelic nightmare, in a room covered in zinnias, in a town called Wisteria—a town I'd never heard of before I got the idea to apply for a job here.” I squinted at my aunt. “Do you know anything about that? Did you cast a spell on me to bring me here?”

  She looked aghast. “Of course not. We witches don't cast spells to influence each other. It's against our beliefs.”

  “What about the shoe store? I was compelled to buy boots that day when I met you. That was one of your spells!” I shook my finger at her. “Witch!”

  “No,” Zinnia said, still looking upset at the suggestion. “We simply don't do that.”

  “But it's possible, right?”

  Zoey said, “Mom, don't be paranoid. This is a magical thing that's happening for us.”

  Magical? Sure. But that didn't mean it was wonderful or even something I wanted. All the flowers in the room were starting to close in on me. What I really wanted was to be back home in my house, in my own bed, with my plain duvet cover and my plain walls.

  “Enough magic for one day,” I said. “Find my legs and the rest of my body for me. We're going home.”

  Zoey extended her lower lip in a pout. Usually, when I saw that lower lip extend half an inch, I'd tell her a bird was going to come along and poop on it, but I wasn't in a teasing mood. I gave her one of my rare bossy, no-nonsense looks.

  “You're being such a mom,” she whined.

  I answered, “Whatever this witchy family gift thing is, it can happen to us in the safety of our own home.” I pushed the blankets out of the way so I could dig my way out of the overly-soft bed. My arms felt as weak as twisty ties, and my head was still full of garbage-can drummers, but I had to get out of there.

  “Don't go yet,” Zinnia said. “There's so much I need to tell you, and tests we must do. Your powers are fresh and you don't know how to control them.” She gave me a no-nonsense look of her own, and for a moment, my mother was in the room with us.

  My mother's eyes were glaring at me. Telling me I'd made a terrible mistake. Telling me I had to give up the baby or lose everything. A terrifying anger billowed up inside me. On some level, I knew it wasn't fair to transfer my feelings about someone else onto Zinnia, but she looked so much like her.

  “You're not the boss of me,” I said.

  “I am the elder witch, so I am your boss,” Zinnia said. She flicked one hand and the lamps in the room blazed three times brighter. “There are tests,” she said coolly.

  I grabbed my daughter's hand as I stood on shaking legs. “You're not doing any tests on me, and you're certainly not doing them on my daughter. I don't know how you summoned us to this town, and I don't know what you want from us. I'll admit that the thing you did with the sparkly lights was really cool, but we should be going.”

  Aunt Zinnia said nothing with her mouth, but her eyes blazed with a fury I knew well. It wasn't just the fury of a redhead. It was the fury of a redhead with the last name of Riddle, and it was a dangerous force.

  With my daughter's hand gripped tightly, I dragged both of us from the room. We moved down a narrow staircase and stopped by the door for shoes. I couldn't find the boots I'd been wearing earlier that evening, but all the footwear was the exact same size. Aunt Zinnia and I were foot twins. I picked a pair of ankle-high granny boots and started lacing them.

  “I'm borrowing some boots,” I called over my shoulder.

  Aunt Zinnia didn't answer or come to see us out.

  Zoey's eyes were glistening. Her pouting lower lip was in danger of getting pooped on by low-flying pigeons.

  As I finished lacing the boots, which fit perfectly, flashes of memory came to me. I remembered being led into Zinnia's house hours earlier. Before that, there'd been a ride in a car. I'd woken up in the car, so I must have been unconscious prior to that. How long was I out for? I pushed open Zinnia's front door and stepped outside, where I had my answer. The sun was coming up. I'd been knocked out most of the night.

  I grabbed Zoey's arm and pulled her with me down the sidewalk.

  “You're ruining everything,” she cried. “My whole life, I've always wanted to be special. And now that I find out I'm a witch, you're wrecking everything.”

  “You are special! But more importantly, you're my daughter, and it's my job to look after you. That woman might be family, but we don't know anything about her. There's a reason she hasn't been in our life all these years. We didn't even know she lived in this town.”

  We were walking quickly. I glanced around at our surroundings. I was absolutely, positively sure we were heading toward home, but how was I so certain? I felt like every cell in my body was a compass, telling me which way to go to find my house. Maybe I was a witch and that was my special skill. An amazing sense of direction. A built-in compass. The sort of thing you could install on your phone for a dollar. What a waste!

  “You can't stop me from seeing her,” Zoey said.

  “Sure, I can. We'll move back to Chicago. I can get my old job back, or I can get another one.”

  Zoey expressed her displeasure with a wordless whine.

  I begged her, “Will you give me a minute to think? What happened to me last night? Did she put something in my drink? A knock-out drug? The last thing I remember, we were all enjoying our dinner.”

  “You were possessed, Mom. You went into the kitchen and tried to kill yourself.”

  “Everyone knows I'm not the world's greatest chef, but that seems a little harsh.”

  “I'm not exaggerating. You filled the sink with water and tried to toast yourself.”

  The toaster! That dirty rotten appliance! It had been in the kitchen when we moved in, quietly pretending to welcome us while plotting my murder.

  I'd been electrocuted. A strong jolt would explain the soreness I had in every muscle, as well as the shakiness in my chest. It also explained my anxiety and agitation, and why I couldn't sit around in my aunt's house and calmly accept this giant bombshell. I'd taken quite a shock. My hands didn't show any visible burns, but some of my fingertips were numb.

  “That wicked toaster has to go,” I
said. “We've discovered the source of evil in our house, and it's the toaster. The minute we get home, I'm throwing it out, and then we can get back to our normal life.”

  “As normal as life can be for two brand-new witches.”

  We walked in silence for a block while I digested the information.

  Finally, I admitted, “We are going to make excellent witches.”

  “Do you really believe it? Can I start studying spells at home? Or are you just saying that to keep me from running back to Auntie Z?”

  “I'm a witch,” I said. The words sounded good and right and true. Maybe it was simply the aftereffects of electrocution, but I did sense something new running through me. “My name is Zara Riddle and I'm a witch.”

  Zoey giggled. My name is Zoey Riddle and I'm a witch.”

  “Shush,” I said, glancing around the still-sleeping neighborhood. “Not so loud. We don't want the whole town to know, or they'll be beating a path to our door to get love spells and pimple potion and whatever else it is witches make or do. What do you think witches do?”

  She shrugged. “I guess we'll find out.”

  “We need books. I'll check the library, but they didn't have anything on sleeptoasting, so don't hold your breath.”

  “Was great-grandma a witch?”

  I inhaled sharply. “She must have been! Wow, this explains so much about our family. I wish she was alive so I could talk to her about this.”

  “We could ask her ghost,” Zoey said.

  “Let's start with the basics before we hold any séances, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “What are the basics?” I asked. “You must have been talking to Zinnia for hours while I was unconscious.”

  “The basics are things like finding lost objects and influencing a coin flip.”

  “That sounds so boring. What about flying?”

  “We're not superheroes. You can't go around flying over people's houses on a broomstick. That's how people get burned at the stake. Most of what we talked about was her warning me to keep my powers hidden from the outside world.”

  “They don't burn people at the stake anymore. I'm no lawyer, but I don't think witchcraft is anywhere in the criminal code.”