Wisteria Witches Mysteries Box Set 2

by Angela Pepper

  I padded over to my work space, which was a tall table so quaintly rustic it could have come from a Pottery Barn window display. The table had been there already when I’d first ventured into the basement, yet it was exactly the design I would have chosen myself. There had been some old cobwebs as well. I wouldn’t have picked those, but I had to admit they were a nice touch.

  I sat on my work stool, opened my notebook, and started writing. I wouldn’t be alone for long.

  Within thirty seconds, I had a fluffy, white cat sprawled across my papers, batting at my pen.

  “Naughty girl,” I said to Boa.

  A squeaky voice replied, “But I’m so gosh-darned cute.”

  “Oh, no,” I said with theatrical dismay. “Boa, you can talk? Great. That’s all I need. Another family member giving me their opinion about everything I do.”

  “Gotcha,” said the voice again, this time in his normal speaking tone. It was my resident wyvern. I couldn’t see him, but his nest was somewhere in the basement, and he had been there most nights when I’d come down to work.

  “You thought I was the fluffball,” he said.

  “Ribbons, I knew it was you the whole time.”

  “You did?” He sounded disappointed. Or at least that was how it came across inside my head. Ribbons didn’t technically speak, not from his throat. He communicated telepathically. We’d strengthened our connection since he’d moved into my house, and now I heard his telepathic speech as though it was actual sound coming from his scaly lips. As far as my brain was concerned, it was real speech, with varying volume and tone.

  “But you did a good job making your voice sound squeaky,” I said. “If Boa spoke, she would sound squeaky like that.”

  From his hiding place, wherever that was, Ribbons scraped his sharp talons against stone or concrete. “We could give the fluffball the power of speech, you know. If we wanted to.” The talons scratched again. “We have ways of making the fluffball talk.”

  I chuckled. Ribbons’ voice had a vaguely “European” accent, a pastiche of television Draculas, wealthy aristocrats, and Italian crime bosses.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “If Boa could talk, she’d do nothing but yell at me to leave the house and not come back without a ten-pound can of tuna, extra salty.”

  “Tuna? Now you are making me hungry, Zarabella.” He emerged from a crack in the rocky wall and hopped up to his favorite perch, a ledge overlooking my desk. “What devious thing are you working on now?”

  “Witcher-i-doo,” I said, taking back the derogatory phrase I’d heard both Vincent Wick and Agent Rob use.

  “But what manner of witcher-i-doo?”

  “Pfft. Like you care. What was it you said the day after you moved in here? Wait, let me quote you with my near-perfect recall: ‘The affairs of humans are of no more interest to wyverns than the affairs of an anthill matter to a dolphin.’ Sound about right?”

  “True.”

  “And I hadn’t even asked you about your opinion on human affairs. That was your response when I asked if you drank all the maple syrup.”

  “All true.” Ribbons used his tongue to clean one eye and then the other. Whenever he did that, he reminded me of the stereotypical English gentleman in a movie, cleaning his glasses to avoid eye contact during a potentially emotional interaction.

  “However,” the wyvern said in a tone dripping with sweetness, “I care very much about what you are doing, Zarabella.”

  “No, you don’t. And don’t call me Zarabella. That’s reserved for my mother. Call me by my regular name.”

  “Zarrrrrrrrrahhhhh. Zerrra. Is it Zar-rah or Zer-ra?”

  “Either is fine. I’m not fussy. I know who I am.”

  “But which one is it?”

  “It’s whatever you want.”

  “Zed,” he said with an air of triumphant discovery. “I will call you Zed, because that’s what your old friend Nash called you, and you liked being called Zed.”

  “Because I like Nash.”

  “You don’t like Ribbons? You don’t like meeeeeeeeeeeeeee?” He opened his wings and stepped from side to side in an awkward dance.

  “Hmm.” The jury was still out on me liking him. I did find the pint-sized wyvern entertaining. He mostly stuck to himself, but he was secretive as all get-out and probably up to all sorts of stuff I wouldn’t approve of. He still hadn’t ratted out the party who’d supplied the genie with the venom. He was lucky he had good credit with the DWM, or he’d be in a heap of trouble.

  “You can call me Zed,” I told him. “Not that you need to call me by my name much, anyway. Whenever I hear your voice in my head, I know you’re talking to me. It’s, like, duh.”

  He sighed dramatically, sending out a ribbon of orange in a spiral that twirled past Boa’s front paws. The fluffy, white cat batted at the ribbon with mild interest. It was safe enough; the wyvern’s decorative ribbons were a form of light and smoke that didn’t burn. After a few swats, the ribbons dissipated.

  Now, where was I? The rezoning spells. I went back to scribbling notes in my notebook.

  “What is that, Zed?” The wyvern hopped from foot to foot, scraping his talons on the rocky ledge. “What are you writing, Zed? Why won’t you tell me, Zed?”

  I sighed. “You really need to know everything, don’t you?”

  “I don’t care all that much about your witcher-i-doo, but I find myself rather bored this evening, Zed. Entertain me with your problems, Zed. Perhaps I may be of some assistance.” He paused and then added, “Zed.”

  “Great job breaking in the new name,” I said, and then, since I didn’t have much choice in the matter, I explained to him what I was working on.

  He listened, and commented only that it sounded like an interesting experiment. “Keep working,” he said. “I would very much like to see where this goes, Zed.”

  “Okay, then.”

  I got back to my scribbling. The fluffy, white cat renewed her efforts to gnaw on my pencil, which was not helpful. But, being a witch, I wasn’t without my own tricks. I let Boa continue to wrestle with the pencil in my hand, while I used my magic to write hands-free a couple inches out of her reach. Boa swished her feather-duster tail happily, having no idea she was being tricked. I wondered, what do people without magic do when cats try to “help” with their work? How does a cat owner even write out a simple grocery list? It boggles the mind.

  * * *

  Two hours and a mug and a half of cocoa later, I had the breakthrough I’d been hoping for. Boa, who’d been sleeping on my lap for I don’t know how long, yawned and slipped away as quietly as she’d come. Ribbons, who had been watching without comment, jumped down from his perch and cocked his seahorse-shaped head at my notes.

  “Your handwriting is abysmal, Zed.”

  “Yeah? Well, you walk like a duck.”

  He snorted a ring of blue smoke that smelled of peppermint.

  He eyeballed my notebook more closely. “The handwriting is abysmal, but the logic is solid, Zed.”

  Bolstered by his compliment, I started explaining my work. “The thing is, I thought I understood the syntax of the Witch Tongue, but I’d been learning the modern version of the language, which is an improvement in many ways over the hodgepodge of ancient tongues that evolved separately over different parts of the world. The new version of Witch Tongue would be the equivalent of Esperanto, which is an international language invented in the late eighteen-hundreds by a Polish physician named Dr. Ludwig L. Zamenhof. He proposed that—”

  Ribbons tumbled forward off his ledge, and coughed on my notebook paper, scorching a dime-sized hole in the center.

  “Hey!” I shooed him away. “You promised not to set anything on fire if I let you live here rent free.”

  “Sometimes I scorch in my sleep. I’m an occasional sleep scorcher.”

  I gave an indignant snort. “I’m sorry my talking put you to sleep.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Would you record that speech about Esperanto in case I ev
er get insomnia?” He waddled, duck-like, over to my mug of cocoa, which was half full and lukewarm. He dropped his pointed snout into the liquid and blew steam through the brown liquid, whipping up froth.

  I was speechless. I’d never seen the wyvern’s impression of a Starbucks barista.

  He nudged the steaming mug toward me and said, “Never mind my delightful sense of humor. You were saying?”

  I accepted the mug cautiously. I wondered, on a scale of one to twenty percent, how much of my beverage was now wyvern spit. The mug already contained some of Boa’s saliva, since the white cat regarded any and all cups as Boa’s Cups.

  Ribbons had his beady eyes fixed on me. I was being tested. This, like the meltdown at dinner with my mother, was something that needed to happen for us to move forward with our relationship. I took a small sip. The cocoa, which had been regular chocolate flavor before, now had a slight peppermint flavor. It was, I guessed, roughly five percent wyvern spit. And delicious.

  “Thanks for the reheat,” I said, smacking my lips.

  Ribbons bobbed his head. “Any time, Zed.”

  “As for this witcher-i-doo spell research, I’ll cut to the chase. At dinner tonight, Zinnia made a joke about using a page-finding spell, one that’s normally meant for books, on a spirit’s memories. I wrote it off as wishful thinking, but then I realized that the older Witch Tongue languages have more verb tenses, including those that distinguish between internal and external.”

  Ribbons didn’t move or say anything sarcastic. I was onto something.

  “Long story short, I should be able to cast a series of spells to, uh, rezone myself as a library. Then I could categorize my ghosts’ memories as books, and then run the page-finder spell internally to locate the specific memories I want to find.” As I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I liked my plan even more. “No more fumbling around aimlessly, visiting various locations and hoping to jog something relevant.”

  The wyvern tilted his elongated skull upward twice in a reverse nod. “Do it,” he said. “I want to see you level up, Zed.”

  I slowly closed the notebook. “I really should run it past my mentor before I attempt something so potentially dangerous.”

  “And what do you suppose your aunt will say?”

  I crossed my arms. I knew exactly what she would say. “Aunt Zinnia will tell me to work on my intermediate spells and master the basics before I go barging off with my wild ideas.”

  “Bok bok.”

  I gave him a sidelong look. “Bok bok?”

  “Isn’t that what chickens say? Am I not sending the sound to you correctly, Zed?”

  “People don’t say bok bok. It’s more like this.” I did my best chicken impersonation, squawking, and even pushing my chin forward and back in a pecking motion.

  When my performance was done, Ribbons said, “My point stands. If you don’t try this spell, you are a chicken.”

  “You think I’ll do something just because you call me a chicken? I have more self-respect than to cave under peer pressure. However, I do see the value in finding out if it’s at least possible.”

  Ribbons stretched his wings and jumped up to a hanging light fixture, where he hung like a bat. “If I were you, Zed, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, knowing that only a few spells stood between myself and such tantalizing morsels of knowledge.”

  I took another sip of my peppermint-infused cocoa. Maybe it was the wyvern spit, or the late hour, or being in my underground lair, but I was feeling more confident in my abilities by the minute.

  I opened the notebook with a flourish. “Let’s give it a shot,” I said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  The hanging wyvern clapped together the small claws connected to his wings and made a gleeful clicking noise in his throat.

  I began casting the first spell.

  This is a terrible mistake. I shouldn’t have let Ribbons talk me into this.

  Zara tries to be a good witch, but her telepathic wyvern friend is a terrible influence.

  Too late for second thoughts. The first spell was already underway, flowing around me easily, as though I’d cast it countless times.

  And then, as they say in the witch business, the transformation began.

  * * *

  Thanks for reading Wisteria Wyverns, Wisteria Witches Book 5 by Angela Pepper.

  The series continues!

  The next book is called WOLVES OF WISTERIA, and it features Aunt Zinnia in the first book of her own! If you've ever wondered what Zinnia was doing before Zara arrived in town, and whether or not she's actually got a coven, keep reading in the sixth book set in Wisteria.

  The next book featuring Zara Riddle as the main character is called WARDENS OF WISTERIA. It's the eighth book set in Wisteria, in which she's teamed up with... well, you'll see.

  For up-to-date series information, check on your favorite book retailer or visit Angela's website at www.angelapepper.com.

  Or... turn the page for an Author's Note from Angela Pepper...

  Author's note from Angela Pepper

  Hey, good looking!

  I hope you enjoyed Zara's latest adventures. This is the first Wisteria Witches book that takes place outside of Wisteria, mainly in one location, Castle Wyvern. In television land, they'd call it a “bottle” episode. I find it amusing that this particular bottle episode contains genies. (This is the sort of thing that amuses authors—or at least this one, anyway!)

  Speaking of things that amuse me, yesterday I spent ten minutes in the produce section of the grocery store, trying to figure out what all the weird, unidentifiable vegetables were. Have you seen celery root? It's got twisty little snaky roots, like a gorgon. So now I'm thinking about what type of vegetable relates best to each of the book characters. Red beets for Zirconia. Ginger root for Zara. Sweet potatoes for Zinnia. Zoey is a tricky one. Maybe acorn squash? I love all of those vegetables, and would happily eat up a pan of them roasted together with some maple syrup and powdered chipotle seasoning. Look at that! Now this book comes with a recipe.

  A funny thing about writing is that the inspiration goes in both directions. And not just food.

  When I started writing Wisteria Wyverns, I'd never seen a blue jay in real life. They are woven in throughout the books, but I had to watch videos online and read about them to get a sense of how they behaved. Fast forward to now, four months later, and it's a different story. If I want to see a blue jay now, all I do is look out a window. There's usually one or two sitting on my deck railing or on a tree branch, staring back at me.

  How did I become so popular? Peanuts, my friends. I saw a flash of something blue in a tree outside the house, and I went outside with the only nuts we had on hand, raw almonds, and lined them up on the railing. The bird flew in and helped itself to the snacks. What a lovely creature! The blue jays we have around here are called Stellar's Jays, or mountain jays, or pine jays. And they love to get food from humans. My husband has had them take peanuts from his hand. Mostly, we toss out a handful of peanuts in the shell. We have this neat wire hanging contraption we use. When filled with peanuts, the wire thing provides a solid hour of entertainment for us, and the whole band of jays. We started with only one or two, but word has gotten around. Our highest count so far has been nine.

  The birds all look the same. Males and females have the same coloring, but the females are smaller. I've noticed they are more vocal. I'd like to report that they have lovely voices, but when you feed them, they yell SKREEEEE! And when one gets too close to another, they yell CHIRK CHIRK CHIRK! They are such scoldy birds. Not so coincidentally, a group of them is called a scold, or party, or band. Fun fact: their feathers contain no blue pigment. It's a crystal structure that reflects light in a way so it appears blue. If you pick up a dropped blue feather and crush it between your fingers, the blue will turn gray. The blue and green colors on butterfly wings do the same thing, but not the yellow or orange. Weird, huh? Almost like magic.

  There's so much magic a
round us, all the time. The magic of blue feathers. Of a great cup of coffee paired with a perfect beam of sunshine. Of a hug to someone who needs it.

  Other than the magic and the fun creatures (like Ribbons!), my favorite part of writing Wisteria Witches is getting to be Zara. Sure, she's funny and smart and brave, and that's all great, but another perk is her indestructibility. She's strong, and she heals quickly.

  Me, I stepped on some pebbles at the beach during the summer, and now, four months later, I have to do special stretches with my toes so that the fascia on the bottom of my foot doesn't hurt when I walk. Yes, if this is the worst of my problems, I'm very lucky, but seriously! I just stepped on some pebbles! I have to keep believing in my body's ability to heal itself and do its body magic. Writing about someone who heals quickly helps, I think. I actually feel sorry for authors who write entire books where the main character gets injured repeatedly throughout the story and has to go about their adventures nursing a bullet wound or two. Every day, that author has to imagine pain radiating from their shoulder or leg or whatever. Wouldn't that be exhausting? I get sore just reading about it. I don't enjoy reading detailed descriptions of constant physical pain, because my imagination makes me feel it, so I don't write that way. Everyone has their calling, and mine is to write feel-good books. I imagine that the people who read books to escape pain appreciate that. Case in point: My sweet mother-in-law recently broke her ankle, so she's been doing more reading than usual during her recovery. (She's doing well and healing nicely.) She will be reading this soon, so... HELLO, MA! XOXO

  Since I've started talking about my pet peeves in books, I'll hit on the other major one that has shaped my plans for this series. I don't enjoy reading books with multiple POV characters. There. I've said it. It drives me nuts when I'm reading about one character, and things are getting good, and then the chapter ends, but the next chapter isn't a continuation of what happens next. It's some other person, doing something I've forgotten all about. I'm always tempted to skip forward to the next chapter, but that's not going to help much. I can't skip stuff. When I was a kid and those Choose Your Own Adventure books were popular, I always had to backtrack and read the other possibilities.