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 One
“It’s not out here,” I groaned, well aware that my resistance was futile.
Luna marched down the hiking path ahead of me with redwoods looming tall on either side. We had a rare sunny day, and my sister was determined to use it.
Luna tossed her auburn braid over her shoulder as she glanced back at me. “That dark magic is out here somewhere. We can’t just wait around for it to find you alone again.”
“But is it really necessary to seek it out here?” Callie asked from behind me.
I looked down at my hiking boots as my sisters began to argue. Honestly, I was with Callie. I knew the dark magic would come for me again eventually, but confronting it out in the woods seemed like a bad idea.
There was no telling that to Luna though. She wanted me to face my fears, so I zipped up my black down coat against the chilly morning air and kept walking.
“Meow,” Spooky intoned at my side.
We all stopped and looked down at him, wondering if his meow was a warning.
Callie hugged her yellow parka tightly around her as her light brown eyes darted around the surrounding forest. “What’s wrong with the cat?”
I watched Spooky sit down on the hard-packed mud, then he started licking one black paw.
“I think he’s just tired. He hasn’t given me any warnings since we’ve been out here.” I pulled my cell phone out of my back pocket to check the time. “It’s nearly eleven. I need to get to the cafe.”
I lifted my phone in the air, searching for better service in case Evie had tried to get a hold of me. She was scheduled to work until one, but she had a young daughter. Sometimes things came up.
Callie looked over my shoulder at the phone. “Let’s finish the loop, you’ll get service back before the end.”
I put my phone back in my pocket, then picked Spooky up to follow Luna further down the trail. We had chosen a hiking loop halfway between my mom’s house and Twilight Hollow. It wasn’t anywhere near the last places I had seen the dark magic, but we had already searched those areas high and low. My mom suspected the magic was rooted somewhere in the forest, we just had to find the right place and maybe we could figure out what it was and what it wanted.
I watched the surrounding woods as we walked, but nothing moved except for the occasional bird or squirrel. The right side of the trail began to taper off, gradually turning into a steep ledge. On our left the side of the mountain climbed upward.
I moved a little further from the edge, glancing down into the trees below, then stopped walking. There was something bright orange down there, maybe a jacket.
Not paying attention, Callie bumped into my shoulder. “Geez, warn me if you’re going to stop in the middle of the trail.” She tossed her strawberry blonde curls behind her back, searching for what has stopped me. Her eyes widened as she spotted the jacket. “Is that—”
Luna marched back toward us. “What are you two—” She spotted the bright orange. “Oh.”
We all stared, because it wasn’t just a jacket. There was a person inside of it, and judging by the bend in her neck, she was no longer amongst the living.
Callie moved a little closer to me. “Should one of us go down there? And by one of us, I mean one of you?”
I held Spooky close as a shiver marched up my spine. When I’d found Neil Howard just a couple weeks prior, I had expected that to be my last dead body for a while. “I don’t think there’s any helping her at this point.” With one arm wrapped around Spooky, I pulled my cell phone back out of my pocket, then exhaled a sigh of relief. Two bars of service.
I selected Logan White from my contacts, then hit send before I realized what I was doing.
He answered on the second ring.
“You know,” I said into the phone, “It must say something about you that you’re the first person I call when I find a dead body.”
“It says I’m a homicide detective,” he answered. “What happened? Are you okay? Your sisters?”
Spooky started struggling, so I let him down to the ground. “Sorry, I should have led with that, we’re all okay. We were just out on a hike, and it looks like someone fell off the trail. She’s pretty far down so it’s hard to tell how long she’s been there.”
“I’ll call the paramedics. What trail are you on? Do you think you could send me a pin with the GPS on your phone?”
Glancing at each of my sister’s haunted expressions, I explained where we were.
Through the phone I heard a rustling, then a car door shutting. “Send me the pin, and I’ll make the call on the way. Just hang tight. If the victim is clearly deceased, there’s no reason for you to go climbing down to her.”
I stared at the body down the edge of the sharp incline. I wasn’t sure I could make it down to her without breaking my neck too, so staying up on the trail seemed like a good idea. “Thanks Logan, we’ll wait on the trail.”
I hung up, then knelt beside Spooky as he peered over the edge.
“This was just an accident, right?” Callie asked to my back. “Like she slipped and fell off the trail?”
“Or she was pushed,” Luna said. “There’s no way of knowing.”
“Luna,” Callie hissed. “Don’t say that. This is freaky enough as it is.”
Luna shrugged. “We were all thinking it, don’t blame me for saying it.”
At a sudden thought, I straightened, then backed off the trail, further away from the drop. The trail was wide enough to fit two people side by side. The hiker wouldn’t have needed to walk close to the edge if she had been on her own, and I didn’t see anywhere that hinted the mud had given out beneath her feet.
I scanned the preserved footprints on the trail, but there were too many of them to make sense of, and they included several of ours.
I sighed. “If someone pushed her, we may have muddied up the evidence.”
“Now is no time for puns, Adelaide.” Callie said, though her eyes scanned the trail. “Let’s just step back and try not to make any more footprints until Logan and the paramedics get here.”
We all moved a little further off the trail, far back enough that we could no longer see the body down the incline.
With nothing left to do, I hugged my coat tightly around me and waited. I didn’t want to think that someone had pushed the poor woman, but the idea plagued me. I also couldn’t help but wonder if the dark magic had something to do with it. It had already sent one ghost after me. Here was hoping that it wouldn’t send another.
Chapter Two
Forty minutes later, Logan arrived with a uniformed officer and three paramedics. It was the first time I had seen Logan in jeans and hiking boots. Both looked good on him, and the burgundy flannel of his shirt brought out gold tones in his bronze skin. I must have caught him on his day off.
His dark eyes found me as he led the way up the trail. He looked me over, then each of my sisters, asses
sing the situation. Just three witch sisters and a feline familiar, waiting with a dead body in the woods.
Logan stopped near me and looked over the edge to where I pointed. He stared for a moment, then shook his head and looked toward the officer. “I doubt there’s any evidence down there worth preserving, but keep an eye out regardless.”
We watched as the paramedics and officer cautiously moved down the steep ledge with a stretcher and plenty of rope. The officer had a camera with him, I assumed for documenting the scene.
Logan turned to me, distracting me from the other men as they reached the body. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Ms. O’Shea.”
I gnawed my lip, wondering if he, like my sisters, had wanted me to call him for something other than a murder. “I wouldn’t mind if this was the last dead body I find for a while.”
He raked his fingers through his dark hair—it was a little longer than the last time I’d seen him— then pulled a pen and little notebook out of the front pocket of his heavy flannel. “You know the drill, start from the beginning.”
Luna was the one to explain things, though I noticed Logan occasionally glancing at me as she spoke.
“You better not be planning on accusing me of murder again,” I said as Luna finished.
He gave me a crooked smile, glancing down at the paramedics now using ropes to haul the stretcher with the body up toward the trail. “If I think you might have pushed her, I’ll give you a call, but it was probably just an accident.” He looked down toward my feet, then back up. “Do you always hike with your cat?”
I would have said more, but the first of the paramedics reached us to secure the ropes around a tree. Logan knew Spooky was no ordinary cat, did I really need to explain it to him? Or had he blocked out learning that I was a witch?
Whatever the reasons, I wasn’t the only one who had failed to call. The last time we had spoken was when I gave my statement against Ike Howard, who had murdered his own son.
Callie picked Spooky up, then shuffled a little closer to me with her eyes on Logan. “Can we go now? We’ve already been waiting here a while.”
Logan stepped aside to make room for us to walk down the trail. “I’ll call Addy if I have any more questions, thanks ladies.”
“You should call her regardless,” I heard Luna whisper as she walked by.
With an embarrassed wave to Logan, I hurried after my sisters, thinking there might soon be another dead body in the woods if they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.
I took Callie and Luna home first, then stayed parked on the street to call Evie as they went inside. I quickly told her what happened, then begged for an extra thirty minutes to take a shower and get dressed.
“Another body?” she asked. “I had hoped Neil Howard would be your first and last.”
“You and me both, but at least this one seems like an accident. Logan seemed to think so.”
“Ooh, Logan?” I could picture her grinning into the phone behind the counter at the cafe.
I rolled my eyes, though of course she couldn’t see it. “So is 1:30 okay? I’ll be quick.”
“Make it 2:30 and bring some more muffins. They were sold out by 8 o’clock this morning. Marcus is home with Sedona today.”
I felt a little thrill hearing my muffins had already sold out. I’d only been able to start baking things that were actually edible since Spooky came into my life. It was a strange trait for a familiar to bring out in a witch, but I wasn’t questioning it.
“2:30 it is. Thanks Evie.”
We hung up, then I put the car into drive and traveled the short distance to my little house. My sisters both lived in the house we’d grown up in, given to them by my mom when she retired to her own childhood home in the woods. I could have stayed there too, but I had always wanted my own place, and running the Toasty Bean had given it to me. I wasn’t rich by any means, but I got by on my own, and that was how I liked it.
I parked in the driveway, then climbed out of my little car and headed to the front door with Spooky at my heels. I didn’t sense any dark magic. I was always looking around for it these days. After getting possessed by it once, I was terrified of it happening again.
I went inside, locked the door behind me and Spooky, then headed upstairs for a shower. I would make the muffins once I was clean.
It wasn’t until I was sopping wet and shutting off the shower that a prickle crept up my spine. I snatched the fluffy white towel I had flung over the shower curtain rod and wrapped it around me, leaving my sopping wet ginger curls to trail water down my back.
I stayed still and listened. The rest of the house was quiet, but I could still sense another presence.
Careful to not make any noise, I slid the shower curtain open, then tiptoed out onto the microfiber rug. I waved the steam away from my face, then stumbled back, barely catching myself on the towel rod.
White mist swirled before me, too dense to be steam. I watched in frozen horror as the mist formed into a woman with shoulder-length hair. She still wore her hiking parka, though it was no longer bright orange. Her entire form was transparent white.
I loosened my death grip on the towel rod and straightened, clutching my towel around me. “What do you want?”
The ghost frowned. In life, I would’ve guessed she was around sixty, but a fit, lively sixty. The type of sixty year old who would go out hiking alone without worrying about falling. “I’m not sure. I remember seeing you on the hiking trail, then something compelled me to come here.”
I tensed, wondering if she had been sent by the dark magic, but there was no green glow nor feeling of malice. “You are aware that you’re a ghost, right?” I asked. “This isn’t one of those situations where you haven’t realized you’re dead?”
The ghost looked around my little bathroom as if just realizing where we were, then turned back to me. “Oh yes, quite dead. I’ve been dead since yesterday, so I was able to figure that out eventually. What I can’t figure out is who pushed me.”
I clutched my towel a little tighter. “Pushed you?”
She seemed to think about it, then nodded. “Yes, someone definitely pushed me, though I didn’t see who it was. I tried to follow that detective, but he couldn’t see me.” She moved closer, making me realize she was floating just above the tiles instead of walking. “I think maybe you’re supposed to help me.”
I backed away as far as the shower-tub combo would allow, then jumped as my cell phone started buzzing on the counter by the sink. From where I was standing, I could see Luna’s name on the screen.
The ghost glanced at the phone, then back to my worried expression. “What’s the matter? Expecting bad news?”
I shook my head. Keeping an eye on the ghost, I side-stepped toward the counter, answered the phone, then spoke into the receiver. “Let me guess, you had a vision, and I’m going to be solving another murder.”
“I was actually going to say that you were about to be visited by a spirit,” Luna’s voice replied. “But not a malicious one. I didn’t want you to be scared.”
I sighed. “Yep, she’s already here, the ghost of the hiker we found this morning. She says someone pushed her.”
“Oh my, you better call Logan.”
I scowled. “And tell him what, the victim’s ghost is standing in my bathroom telling me she was murdered?”
“That will do. He’s the homicide detective, let him take care of it. Now I have a client in thirty minutes, so I have to go. Good luck.” She hung up.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and glared at it for a moment before setting it on the counter. I needed to get dressed, make muffins, and get to the cafe. I did not need to solve another murder.
The ghost stayed standing near the door, watching me expectantly.
I tugged my towel closed a little tighter. “Meet me downstairs in ten minutes. I can at least hear you out.”
She smiled. “I knew you were a good soul.” She faded from existence right before my eyes.
> I shook my head as I squeezed water from my curls. Someday I might call Logan for something other than murder or the supernatural, but it was not this day.
Chapter Three
The ghost, whose name was Martha, watched me put my freshly mixed pumpkin muffin batter into the oven. Spooky sat on the floor staring at her as she crossed her arms and leaned against the countertop. I had learned that Martha was a gallery owner from Wickenburg who’d come to Twilight Hollow for the weekend to hike with a friend. The friend had canceled, so that’s why she had been out hiking alone.
“Are you going to call the detective now?”
I pursed my lips, irritated with hearing the question for the hundredth time. I shut the oven door, then turned and leaned against it. “Aren’t ghosts supposed to be patient? You kind of have all of the time in the world.”
Her transparent brow lowered. “Well assuming my murderer is still amongst the living, time is of the essence. They could be covering their tracks as we speak.”
I took the pins out of my hair and shook out my curls. They fell past the shoulders of my tight navy sweater, which I would never admit I was wearing because Max was supposed to come by the cafe later.
Martha glared daggers at me as I took my time pulling my phone out of my pocket, then called Logan. The call went straight to voicemail, so I left him a message that I needed to talk to him about something important.
I hung up and put my phone back in my pocket. “Happy?”
“Hardly. Give it ten minutes and call him again.”
I rolled my eyes. “As soon as the muffins are ready I need to head to work. Logan will call once he gets the message, and I’ll tell him that I think you were murdered.”
Catnip Cantrips (Twilight Hollow Witchy Cozy Mysteries Book 2) Page 1
