THE WITCHES OF DARK ROOT
(Book 1 in The Daughters of Dark Root Series)
by
April M. Aasheim
Copyright © 2013 by April M. Aasheim
Kindle Edition, License Notes
Cover art and design by April Aasheim
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Other works by this author:
The Universe is A Very Big Place
Praise for The Universe is A Very Big Place ~
“The Universe is a Very Big Place by April Aasheim is a real laugh-out-loud novel, written with pace, humour and a whole lot of charm...” (BestChickLit.com)
This book is dedicated to Shawn,
who reaffirmed my belief in magick.
Prologue: Magic Man
Miss Sasha’s Magick Shoppe, Dark Root, Oregon
February, 2005
The shop was cold and dimly lit, musty and confining.
A spider web had attached itself to the archway that separated the main room from the back and I ducked each time I passed beneath it, not bothering to sweep it down. Shelves lined every wall of Mother’s Magick shop, displaying the hundreds of candles, masks, figurines, and baubles that made Miss Sasha’s the most popular attraction in all of Dark Root.
While the oddities fascinated tourists, I hardly noticed them anymore as I went about my work. I hardly noticed anything anymore, except the clock that ticked down the minutes until I was released from my daily servitude.
“Excuse me,” said a woman who had been meandering near the book section for the last hour. “Where is your restroom?”
I responded by opening the front door.
She looked like she was going to protest but decided against it. My apathy for the shop was notorious. She would probably lodge a complaint with my mother instead.
“You need to order more peppermint,” my sister Eve said, emerging from the back room and sucking on a piece of candy. “We’ve been out for almost a week.”
“You order it,” I responded.
If she was going to eat the supplies, she could order them as well.
Eve launched into a series of reasons why I should perform the task––I was practically a boy and therefore, better at math, I had no social life and thus had far more time for work, etc. I was about to tell her that it wouldn’t bother me if we ran out of everything, that the whole place could implode for all I cared, when a crystal figurine on a low shelf caught my eye. It was an owl, an ugly thing with eyes that bulged and a beak that hooked. I wasn’t sure who had ordered it but I was certain it would never find a buyer.
“Bet I beat you out of this town,” I said, tapping its beak.
A losing bet, I realized. It had wings. I didn’t even have a car.
I checked the clock again––five minutes ‘til closing time––and glanced around the shop. It wasn’t as clean as my mother would have wanted, but then again my mother wasn’t here.
“I say we call it done,” I said, tossing my apron on the counter.
“Maggie, come take a look.”
Eve stood by the window. Her fingers twitched as she pointed to a man I had never seen before, seated by the window in Delilah’s Deli across the street.
“Who is he?” she asked. “I don’t recognize him.”
I moved to get a better view, nudging her out of the way. “Well, he isn’t from around here.”
Eve clucked her tongue. Of course, he wasn’t from around here. His sophisticated clothing identified him as a city person, not a man who spent much time slinking around a small town in Central Oregon.
“He’s handsome,” she said and I silently agreed. Though it was getting dark I could still make out his thick mane of wavy brown hair and the strong line of his jaw. He was leaning forward, talking to a gaunt young man who hung on his every word.
“We have to find out what he’s doing here,” Eve said. “It’s just not natural.” Though the town festered with tourists during the fall months when we held the Haunted Dark Root Festival, it was rare to see anyone arrive after November and before May.
“Probably just passing through on his way to Salem or Portland. Blew out a tire or had to use the bathroom.”
“You have no imagination.”
Eve chattered on about how he was probably a famous Hollywood producer. She couldn’t allow anyone a normal life; she always reached for the dramatic.
But she was right. There was something special about the stranger. He had an energy that popped and sparkled.
As if he knew he was being watched, he turned in our direction. Eve ducked but I held my position, staring back. His eyes were as grey and stormy as the Oregon coastline. He knew things...secrets and mysteries.
I felt jolted awake after a long sleep.
“We should bring him over.” Eve’s dark eyes flashed as she pushed a step-stool across the floor to gather oils and vials from the top shelf. Next, she collected an assortment of herbs from bins beneath the counter. “...Candles. I need purple candles.”
Like a fly to a spider, I thought as I watched her. She was driven when she had a mission, not the same dreamy girl who stared out the window all day talking about the life she was missing out on while she ignored customers.
“We could just walk across the street and talk to him,” I said, moving away from the window.
“Just because you’re too good for magic, doesn’t mean some of us don’t respect the craft.”
“I never said I was against magic.”
“Just practicing it. We can’t all be Wilders, you know?” Eve placed her stack onto the counter and arranged the objects into neat piles.
I felt my face redden. Wilder was a slang word, used to describe a witch who had no control over her magic. The light above us flickered.
Besides,” Eve grinned, as if she had said nothing wrong. “This is far more fun. Now, where’s the book?” She scanned the room for our mother’s spell book.
I shrugged. If she wanted to lure a man here against his will that was her business, but I wasn’t going to help.
“Here it is!” She held up a small, leather-bound journal in her hands. It was a rare book, Mother claimed, filled with spells and incantations that would have been lost to time were they not carefully preserved on these pages. As a result, only Mother’s direct descendants could remove the book from her store without suffering a terrible curse.
What the curse was, nobody knew, but Miss Sasha’s magick was formidable, and no one in Dark Root wanted to risk it.
Eve went to work creating a concoction of vanilla, rose petals and thyme, hardly glancing at the open book beside her. She had probably committed her man-luring spell to heart.
“Wouldn’t it be exciting if we fell in love and he took me away from this horrible town? Now that Merry is gone, there’s nothing to keep me here.”
I felt a dagger in my heart at the mention of our older sister’s name. Merry had left three years ago to marry some guy she barely knew and nothing had been the same since.
“You really think you’re going to get out of here before me?” I asked.
“Someone’s got to take care of Mom. Besides,” Eve looked at the clock on the far wall then back to me, “I have to get out of here. I’m going to be a famous actress one day. A psychic told me.”
I snor
ted, peeking out the window again. The curtains to Delilah’s Deli were shut now, indicating that the cafe was closed. I glanced up and down the street, hoping to see a sign of him or his car, but the street was empty. “Even if your spell does work and you get him to wander over here, what makes you think he’s going to fall in love with you?”
“The travel spell is only part of it,” she said. “One sip of my special tea and he’ll treat me like the goddess I am.” Eve retreated into the back room, returning with a white porcelain cup and matching teapot. “You might not have dreams, Maggie, but I do. God forbid that three years from now when I’m your age, I’m still working as a sales girl in this dump.” She dropped her apron on the floor and kicked it under the counter.
Without warning the door opened, startling us both.
The stranger entered, removing his grey felt hat. He looked around the shop, taking it in. I glanced at Eve, wondering how her travel spell could have worked so quickly.
She shrugged in response.
“Well, hello there,” she said, regaining her composure “Our shop is closed but we were just making tea. You are welcome to join us.” She slinked towards the man, offering him the teacup.
The stranger blinked uncertainly, declining the tea with a wave of his hand. He strode past my sister and stood before me.
“Actually,” he said, staring at me with mystical eyes. “Maggie Maddock, I’m here for you.”
One: Sister Goldenhair
Woodhaven Compound, Humboldt County, California
September, 2013
If I were a real witch, the kind you read about in story books with black cauldrons and pet frogs, I might have put a curse on Leah for bursting through the door and interrupting us like she did. Not a big curse––according to Michael I already have enough karmic repercussions to atone for––just a little something to teach her to knock before entering someone’s bedroom.
This wasn’t the first time I had wished ill on Leah.
Ever since she had come to Woodhaven Compound two months earlier, I had spent many afternoons daydreaming about what I could do to her: bucked teeth, crossed eyes, thunder thighs. Gout. My fantasies had gotten me through those long days when she was running after Michael, listening to his every word, praising him, pretending to get what he was teaching. She wasn’t smart enough to get anything but Michael ate it up. Men were so gullible.
Not that any of this mattered.
I wasn’t a witch––not anymore. I had turned in my hat and broom seven years ago when I had followed Michael out of Dark Root, Oregon, and into Woodhaven. Here, witchery wasn’t allowed. The only good magic, Michael claimed, came from God, and unless God had a curse clause I didn’t know about, I was out of luck.
On this particular morning I heard Leah trounce down the corridor outside our bedroom. Clitter-clat. Clitter-clat. Her sandals, one size too big, slapped on the wooden floors as she raced through the hallway.
The urgency of her steps didn’t worry me. Leah never walked anywhere; she scurried. I ignored her, thinking she would move on to one of the other bedrooms in the large house. After all, Michael and I were the leaders here at Woodhaven and she was just a new recruit. She wouldn’t dare intrude upon us in the sanctuary of our private room; that is, if she knew what was good for her.
Michael was sleeping, oblivious to her footsteps.
Perched on elbows, I hovered naked above his body, watching the rise and fall of his chest. I needed him. Badly. It had been three weeks since our last physical encounter and I was starting to feel the hole that comes from a relationship without sex grow into a deep, widening chasm. He had been so preoccupied lately, focused on the issues of Woodhaven, that physical intimacy had taken a backseat to more pressing matters. But even as his desires lessened with his worries, mine had grown exponentially. I wasn’t sure if it was PMS or the Lifetime movies I had been watching on the sly, but something had revved up my estrogen level to DEFCON 1.
Wake Up!
I willed my thoughts into his brain, boring my eyes so deeply into his skull that I was sure I had developed an aneurysm.
Wake up! I thought again, louder this time, more commanding. I watched for the flickering of his eyes, the change in his breath. I raised a hopeful eyebrow.
He snored in response.
I sighed, slumping down upon his chest. Mind control wasn’t one of my gifts.
But I was a woman of many talents.
Grasping a hair on his chest––a lone, gray straggler lost in a thicket of black curls––I pulled it taut until his eyelids fluttered open. Bingo!
“Good morning, sleepy boy,” I purred, running my fingers down his arms until our hands met and fingers locked. “Did you have a good nap?”
Michael responded with a soft grunt and kissed the top of my head, wrapping his free arm around me. His guard was down when he first woke up, his mind less full of worries. I nuzzled closer, tilting my chin up and finding his mouth. His breath was warm and his lips were salty. He didn’t resist.
And that’s when Leah tumbled into the room.
“Maggie, it’s for you,” she said, thrusting a cell phone in my direction as she turned her head away.
After eight weeks at Woodhaven, she still wasn’t used to nudity. This was not unusual. It took most women three months to lose their clothes.
It took most men three hours.
“You should learn to knock,” I said, feeling Michael’s desire wilt beneath me.
He gave me a consolatory pat on my back, a pat that said we would try again later, but there would be no later. His time would be sucked up in workshops, politics, and council meetings. Being the leader of a great new religion required all of his time, as he often reminded me.
I blinked, squinting against the soft pink light that shone through the bare window.
Though I had not had a personal call in a very long time, my first thought was not ‘who would be calling?’ but rather, ‘what time is it?’
The tracking of time was frowned upon in Woodhaven, and there was neither clock nor calendar anywhere on the property. Even sundials were taboo. “Do not make time your master,” Michael proclaimed as he gathered up watches, phones and day planners at each initiation ceremony. “The Enlightened Soul lives only in the now.” Rituals like meditating, bathing and eating were done in accordance with hunger pangs, body odors and a crude version of follow-the-leader.
Luckily we had the seasons to guide us in our planting schedules, though here in Northern California, the seasons could at times be non-existent.
“Maggie,” Leah fidgeted, just inches inside the doorway. “It sounds important.”
She shuffled from one foot to the next, dancing like she had to go to the bathroom.
I took my time rising, stretching my arms overhead and dropping the white sheet that had covered me. Michael snatched it up and tucked it around his waist. He believed in weaning newcomers slowly. My approach was different. Leah didn’t need to be weaned. She needed shock therapy. Though my red hair fell nearly to my waist, long enough to provide some cover, I flung it back and marched, proud as Godiva herself, to take the call.
Leah tossed me the phone and fumbled out the door.
“Hello?” I said, looking for the hole where you were supposed to talk.
I had used the phone only once in the last seven years and that had required considerable assistance from our one-man tech department, Jason.
“Hello?” I said louder, turning the phone upside down. “This is Maggie.”
There was silence at the other end and I wondered if I had accidentally shut it off. I pulled it back to inspect it.
“Maggie! Oh, Maggie. Thank God, I found you.”
“Merry?”
I don’t think I spoke the word out loud.
I looked to Michael for confirmation but he stared blank-faced back at me. I hadn’t talked to my sister Merry since she had left Dark Root to marry Frank, almost a decade earlier. I had let go of the idea of ever hearing from h
er again.
And here she was calling me. It was almost like hearing from a ghost.
“Merry,” I said, this time out loud. “Is everything okay?”
As much as I wanted to believe that she had found and called me just to talk, I knew better.
Michael sat upright, mouthing the word speaker-phone to me.
Even if I knew how to operate the speaker-phone, I wasn’t about to turn it on. I yanked the sheet from him and covered my body, certain Merry could see me across the miles.
Michael pointed to the phone again indicating that he wanted to hear our conversation.
I shook my head and he fell backwards onto the mattress, covering his face with his arms. I heard Merry gasp on the other end, trying to catch her breath. I licked my lips and said very slowly, “I’m listening, Merry. Please tell me what’s going on.”
“Maggie, you need to come home, right away. It’s Mama. We need you.”
“I don’t want to go home,” I said, racing our white van towards Brunsville, twenty-eight miles north of the Woodhaven property line and the closest thing to a town we had.
Michael sat unbuckled beside me, his window rolled down as the wind blew through his thinning hair. His right foot hit an imaginary brake with each car I passed or curve in the road. He hated my driving, but not enough to take the wheel. In the seven or so years I had known him I had never seen him drive anywhere.
He claimed he could, but I had my doubts.
“It can’t be that bad,” Michael said, fiddling with the radio dial as he tried to locate the classic rock station.
I cringed. Having been raised in a house where every song was circa 1970-something I’d had quite enough of that music. Songs from bands like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles were “the only good songs,” according to my mother. Conversely, Michael had grown up in a quiet home where anything other than Bach and Beethoven was considered an assault on the ears.
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