Liza Jane felt safe in the mountains, comforted by their closeness and wildness. Some people (read: Bryar Rose) visited the area and complained of feeling “closed in” and “suffocated.” Liza felt the opposite–she felt as soothed as an infant snuggled into its mother’s arms.
“I haven’t done too badly,” she murmured, surveying the shelves stocked full of homemade and organic body lotions, bubble baths, salves, and ointments. She’d even been able to hire Mare on a part-time basis, which had helped a lot. Liza wasn’t rich by any means but she wasn’t in the poorhouse, either, and the business was bringing in enough money to pay her bills. That was enough. For now, anyway.
“I need to work off some of this energy,” Liza muttered as she stomped up the stairs. She hated walking around, feeling bad.
Although Liza did most of her spell work at home, sometimes the ambience of her building called to her. It was old, had been around since the town’s inception, and that was important; history carried its own kind of magick.
Now, Liza set about gathering the few supplies she’d need: her hand-carved wand (not made by her, but purchased at Comic Con the month before), three black taper candles, two small white candles (all bought at the Halloween Store when they put their stock on sale–no self-respecting area store would sell black candles year round), and a book of wooden matches.
She wouldn’t need much for this one.
The black candles warded off negative energy. The white candles would help promote clarity, bring in the good energy, and offer protection.
The large area rug in the middle of her floor was one she’d picked up at an after-Christmas sale at Kohl’s. It was a colorful Bohemian print and reminded her of Hungary. Now, she rolled it back and revealed the large chalk outline she’d made of the pentagram beneath it.
“If most of the people here in the county could see this, they’d run me out on a rail,” she giggled a little as she pushed the rug to the side.
It was one thing for her to make oils and lotions and do the occasional charm (which most told themselves was nothing but another form of prayer)–it was quite another to have “witchcraft symbols” laying around. She’d lose most of her business if they knew they were getting their backs pounded on while lying underneath the “devil’s sign” (as most still insisted on calling it).
Safe in the knowledge that her doors were locked downstairs and her phone was set to “silent,” Liza slipped off her boots, vintage floral dress, and undergarments and stood in the middle of the pentagram. The sun was sinking outside, making the room dark and shadowy, and the candles shimmered on the floor. She held the wand securely in her right hand.
After casting a protective circle around herself, Liza began the chant she’d created just for herself, for the occasions when she needed a little extra help. They were her special words, and private. She didn’t necessarily have a “spell book” or a Book of Shadows, but she had a My Little Pony notebook she’d picked up at Wal-Mart and sometimes she wrote down recipes and spells she came across.
This one was not included.
With her hand raised before her, the wand pointed at the window on the other side of the room, the air slowly began to shift and change. She could feel the gentle breeze lightly kissing her nose and lifting the tiny wisps of hair from around her face. The air was cool on her body and wrapped her in a gentle cloud. Liza closed her eyes and smiled, her stress and anxiety slowly melting away.
When the wind picked up she focused on her problems and, in her mind, pretended to wrap them in a pretty package. Once they were all tightly locked away she held the package before her in her mind’s eye and then, moving the wand in a downward stroke, banished the box away.
By the time she’d finished, she was feeling a little soft, a little drunk.
Not wanting to cause an accident on the road with her fuzzy brain, Liza wrapped up in a quilt she kept behind her desk and collapsed onto the small sofa in her storage room. The candles continued to glow until the wax cooled into puddles on the floor.
* * *
“HEY, I COOKED…”
Liza was surprised to see Bryar sitting in the middle of the living room floor, fire going, and stacks of photo albums towering around her. She was flipping through the pages, taking her time to pause longer on some shots before moving on to the next.
“What did you make?” Liza asked, closing the front door behind her.
The wind was starting to pick up outside and lightning flashes had followed her home. It had been a long day at work, made even longer by the fact that she’d slept in her storage room the night before. She’d had to run out to the flea market to buy a change of clothes so that Mare, and her clients, wouldn’t see her wrinkled duds.
Bryar looked up and offered a thin smile. “Well, you didn’t have much but I found some potatoes that didn’t have too many eyes and I made some potato soup. Not as good as Nana Bud’s but it’s okay. I had two bowls.”
Liza noticed that her sister was dressed in paint-stained sweat pants and a Doobie Brothers’ T-shirt. She thought the pants might have belonged to their grandfather; she didn’t think Bryar owned anything like them.
The T-shirt belonged to Liza.
“Thanks, I’ll get some.”
Tired and achy from being on her feet all day, Liza moved sluggishly into the kitchen and doled out a bowl full of the steaming, creamy soup. It looked and smelled delicious. She didn’t know her sister cooked. When had that happened? Mode had always joked that he made pasta, Liza made desserts, and Bryar made reservations. “Yes, doll,” Bryar would reply in return, “but I make the best reservations in town.”
Back in the living room, Liza settled onto the sofa and looked at the photos over Bryar’s shoulder. Most of them were old–at least twenty years, some older. Many of them were Polaroids and starting to yellow.
“This is one of those old albums that has that gluey stuff on the pages,” Bryar explained. “Most of the pictures are stuck to the pages now and can’t be taken out.”
“What are you looking for?”
Bryar shrugged. “I don’t know. Just wanted something to do. This is weird, you know? Being here without them.”
“I know,” Liza agreed. “It is sometimes. But I feel them around me a lot.”
Bryar nodded. “I can see that. I feel like I should be doing something, you know? That I’m not keeping busy enough. Any minute I keep expecting Nana Bud to burst through the door and start wielding garden gloves at me, telling me to go out and pull up some weeds.”
“You need a break. You need to unwind,” Liza said.
“I know,” Bryar sighed. “You know, I haven’t had a break, a real break, since I was in college? I mean, I’ve worked every single day since my internship. Even on vacation. My cell? It stays glued to my ear. My laptop’s always open, always ready. Hell, I dream in beats.”
Liza smiled. It was true–nobody would ever accuse Bryar Rose of being a slacker.
“I’m sorry about the restaurant. I guess that was kind of mean.”
“I guess it was,” Liza replied, trying not to roll her eyes.
She couldn’t remember the last time she and her sister had spent alone time together. Just the two of them, in front of the fire, in the old farm house with the wind now howling outside. It was kind of nice. Very Hallmark Channel. (Which was better than the Lifetime Channel her life usually resembled.)
“Hey, you remember that time Grandpa tried to take us hunting? I think you were eight. Every time he’d see a deer and would bring up his arrow thingie you’d scream, ‘Run deer! Run!’”
Liza smiled. She’d been sure that each deer was somehow related to Bambi.
“And then he took us fishing. He caught, I don’t know, maybe half a dozen. It was a lot anyway. He put them all in that bucket with the lid.”
“I remember,” Liza laughed, knowing what was to come next.
“Then, when we got ready to leave, he went to pick it up and was like, ‘This feels too light.�
�� When he opened it up all the fish were gone. You’d sneaked behind his back and tossed them back into the creek.”
“I thought I could set them free,” Liza said. “I didn’t realize they were already dead. I still remember watching them all kind of drift away, floating on top of the water. You told me they weren’t dead, that they were just sunbathing. He was so mad!”
“Nah,” Bryar shook her head. “Maybe frustrated but I overheard him telling Nana Bud later and the two of them just laughed and laughed. They were really proud of you.”
“They were proud of you, too,” Liza said. Bryar had been the pretty one, the vocal one. Liza had been the one who sat in the corner, reading her books, and taking every step her grandmother did.
“Not as much,” Bryar shrugged. “You were special to them. You wanted to know stuff, had questions about the things Nana Bud did. About how we are.”
“Witches,” Liza said. “You can say it.”
“Witches,” Bryar said, as though trying the word on for size. “I don’t know that I like to call myself that. It always makes me think of the Goth kids in high school who acted like they were the fifth cast member in The Craft.”
“Like the girl who told us that she could turn herself invisible and bragged about her personal relationship with Satan?”
“Yep. And then I really did make her invisible for two class periods. She kept wondering why nobody would talk to her,” Bryar laughed. “Boy, Nana Bud really was mad when she found out about that. I got a good long lecture about it over the phone, about using my abilities for good and stuff. I never really did much after that. I was too afraid of doing something wrong.”
“I’m just now learning how to really use mine,” Liza admitted. “I’m still rusty yet.”
“Yeah, but it was always a part of you. You were into all that flower stuff and medicine and learning how to do things, especially when we were down here with them. I mostly just counted down the days until we could leave. I’d sit up there in the room with a stack of Teen Beats while you were out in the garden with her.”
“Do you practice?” Liza asked. “I mean, consciously?”
“Are you saying that I’m naturally a witch?” Bryar grinned.
“Well, if the broom fits…”
“I don’t do the stuff you do, not a lot anyway. I don’t keep things in stock, like candles and gemstones and herbs. If I need it then I’ll order them on Amazon. Most of my stuff is internal, I guess.”
“You kind of got the psychic stuff,” Liza nodded. “I don’t have much of that. Wish I did.”
“Yeah, but mine’s not very developed. It probably could be, if I worked on it.”
Liza let the conversation trail off. With her belly full of soup, the rain now pounding on the windows, and the fire going strong, it felt good to just lie back and enjoy the evening.
Sometimes she forgot how nice it was to have a sister, someone who remembered the person you were, as well as the person you are.
Chapter Eight
The list of vendors was spread out before her on the old Formica kitchen table. The table was starting to crack and the silver chrome around the edges needed a good scrubbing from years of grease and grime build up, but it reminded Liza of countless apple-stack cakes and chocolate chip cookies. It wasn’t going anywhere.
“Food vendors, craft vendors, and herbalists–oh my!” Liza chuckled.
She was attempting to organize them by category. None of them had assigned spots yet and that was a pain in the rear, especially since organizing them and placing them wasn’t as easy as she’d initially thought. Some of the vendors returned every year and wanted the same spot each time. Those got priority. And then there were the folks who beat the application deadline. They got the second-best spots. The late ones were last. They got whatever was left.
Even then, sorting them out wasn’t easy. There was a method to the madness. Liza wanted a variety of things for the visitors to look at and that meant making sure that vendors of the same types weren’t grouped together; she didn’t want to put three authors in a row or group the broom makers together. Not only would it make it more boring for the strollers, but the vendors would find themselves facing even stiffer competition if the guy right next to them sold a clay pot for $10 less.
“Why don’t you put this guy over there?” Bryar asked, leaning over her shoulder. She smelled like lilies. Bryar took a bath every evening and a shower each morning. She wore full makeup and perfume, even on the days she didn’t leave the house. Her nighttime rituals alone, with the creams and astringents and clay masks, exhausted Liza Jane.
When Bryar reached down to pick up the notecard with the leatherworker’s name on it, Liza swatted her hand away. “Quit it! I had a method there. He already has a spot. He’s between the photographer and the purse woman right here,” she pointed to a spot by the court house.
“’Purse woman?’” Bryar’s eyes lit up.
“Don’t get your hopes up. They’re knock-offs.”
Bryar shrugged. “I don’t care. A deal is a deal. I have quite a few Prados and Louise Vuittons.”
“I didn’t think you’d carry fake,” Liza mused thoughtfully.
“Please,” Bryar scoffed. “In some circles these days buying fake that looks designer is trendier than spending the actual cash. Chinatown is one of the main benefits to living in the city.”
“We have the outlet malls around here if you want to go,” Liza offered.
Bryar wrinkled her nose in disgust. “That’s okay. It’s one thing to carry fake designer. It’s another thing to buy defective Banana Republic and GAP seconds.”
“What’s wrong with Banana Republic?” Liza asked, looking down at her capris. They looked nice to her.
Bryar shook her head, as though her sister couldn’t possibly understand. Liza wondered what she’d say if she knew that Liza had been buying the bulk of her clothes at a flea market and that sometimes, when she was lazy, she even wore them without washing them first.
“Look,” Bryar began, changing the subject. “I am super hungry and you don’t have crap here. I’m going in to the store. You want to go?”
Liza looked down at the brightly colored notecards she’d painstakingly color coded and sighed. She was starting to get a headache. “Yeah, okay,” she replied at last. “Let’s go.”
The only grocery store in town could fit into one corner of a Wal-Mart Supercenter and mostly sold canned goods, cheap meat, pre-packaged frozen food, and off-brand sodas like Mountain Shout and Dr. Peewee.
Liza’s grocery bill had gone down drastically since moving to Kudzu Valley. She only wished she could say the same about her weight.
“Oh my God,” Bryar moaned as she picked up a box of macaroni and cheese that Liza tossed into the shopping cart. “Just look at all these additives and preservatives!”
“But it’s super good,” Liza said, feigning innocence.
“Cheese is not meant to be that yellow,” Bryar reported with authority.
“But it’s soft and melts right in your mouth. You don’t even have to add milk!”
“You’ll have cancer within a year.”
A younger woman with three little kids in tow paused, a box of the offensive product in hand. She scowled at Bryar before haughtily throwing it into her cart and moving on.
“No I won’t,” Liza argued. “With all the additives and stuff I am preserving myself for posterity.”
Bryar snorted.
By the time they’d made it to the meat section, Bryar had managed to complain about every single product Liza had picked out, including her new favorite cereal, Captain Crispy. With gritted teeth, Liza looked over the hamburger meat, trying to find one that was lean, Bryar-approved, and wouldn’t break her wallet.
“Oh my God!” Bryar shrieked again.
Several shoppers stopped and turned, glaring at Bryar’s outburst.
“Shhh,” Liza hissed.
If she’d been a better witch, she would have invoked an i
nvisible shield to hide her from the embarrassment. If she’d thought fast enough, she would’ve asked Bryar to do it.
“This says ‘hog balls’,” Bryar hissed back. “Hog balls!”
“Well, that’s what they are…”
“Not even ‘hog testicles.’ Hog balls. Oh my God.” Bryar artfully arranged the package of meat on a stack of pork chops and whipped out her iPhone. “I’ve gotta Facebook and Instagram this baby.”
Liza had been considering picking some up to season the soup beans she’d planned on making. Thanks to Bryar’s explosion, however, the idea was nixed. Her sister would never eat anything they touched, now that she knew what they were.
“Hello Liza Jane.” The sweet voice that came from behind her was ancient.
When Liza turned, she was nearly face-to-face with Irma Pigg, Kudzu Valley’s only post office worker. She also drove the ice cream truck every Wednesday and Saturday, despite the fact that she had to be in her late eighties.
“Hello,” Liza smiled warmly. She might not have her psychic abilities fully honed yet, but she was still capable of receiving sparks of things here and there. She was also very good at reading people. She’d received nothing but warmth and sunshine from Irma; Liza enjoyed just being around her. Some people were like that.
“And who’s this pretty young lady?” Irma asked with sparkling eyes, patting Liza on the arm.
Irma was a small woman. Liza always found herself looking down on her just a little. Today, the bald spot atop her head was covered in a light sprinkling of baby powder. A little tuft of smoke rose from her head whenever she moved, giving off the illusion that she needed a good dusting.
“This is my sister, Bryar Rose,” Liza answered.
Broommates: Two Witches are Better Than One! (Kentucky Witches Book 2) Page 6
