by Tess Lake
Cozy Witch
Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries Book Eight
Tess Lake
Tess Lake
Contents
Also by Tess Lake
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 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Author note
Also by Tess Lake
About the Author
Also by Tess Lake
Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries
Butter Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #1)
Treasure Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #2)
Hidden Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #3)
Fabulous Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #4)
Holiday Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #5)
Shadow Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #6)
Love Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #7)
Cozy Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #8)
Box Sets
Torrent Witches Box Set #1 (Butter Witch, Treasure Witch, Hidden Witch)
Torrent Witches Box Set #2 (Fabulous Witch, Holiday Witch, Shadow Witch)
Audiobooks
Butter Witch
Treasure Witch
Hidden Witch
Torrent Witches Box Set #1 (Butter Witch, Treasure Witch, Hidden Witch)
Fabulous Witch
Holiday Witch
Shadow Witch
Cozy Witch Copyright © 2017 Tess Lake. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.
Tess Lake
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Tesslake.com
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This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogs in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Chapter One
Vampires were lurking at the door again.
“This is so the wrong weather for those kinds of clothes,” Kira said, unfolding what had to be chair a million.
“It’s the wrong weather for anyone except maybe, I dunno, volcano monsters, full stop,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead. I set up another chair and then stretched, feeling my lower back muscles protest.
“Hey, I found ice!” Sophira called out, walking into the town hall space, carrying three glasses of water.
We stopped and drank the chilled water. My Goddess it was good. I wish I had a bath full of it I could dive into.
“He’s doing an excellent Andreas,” Sophira said, nodding to the lead vampire who was peering in through the doors, hoping to catch a glimpse of Bella Shade, superstar author of the Bitten vampire series. She hadn’t arrived in Harlot Bay yet so all the vampires were really doing was standing in the blazing sun wearing mostly black.
“That Tyra is a-maz-ing. She even has the locket Jules gave her in book three,” Kira said.
I looked, although I was unaware of who Andreas, Tyra or Jules were. I think the girl in the front in a stunning corset with a gleaming silver locket glinting around her neck must have been the “Tyra” character.
“The girl with the locket is Tyra,” Sophira said helpfully.
“Join ussssss, jooooooiiiinnnn ussss,” Kira said in her best cult leader voice and poked me in the ribs.
“Hey! I will, I’m going to, I promise! I’m trying to write my own story at the moment and from what I’ve seen, Bitten is a new super addictive drug that will suck me in and I’ll wake up months later not knowing what happened.”
“What will have happened is love and betrayal and treachery and did I mention love? Heartbreaking love!” Kira said.
“And a curse. Don’t forget the curse,” Sophira added.
“Are you talking about the one in books one to seven or that one later? Or the… you know… that other one,” Kira said, wriggling her eyebrows and trying to convey information without spoiling the books for me.
“The guy with the spiky hair one.”
“I was so sad I cried for hours,” Kira said and then wiped away a tear that had appeared at the sudden memory.
“You’re not making it easy for me to not read them!” I said, not for the first time. Molly and Luce were deep into Bitten too, and every day I was feeling the urge to start reading them myself.
“That’s the idea Torrent. Then you can learn what true love is,” Kira quipped.
“I know what true love is,” I murmured, taking a sip of my water that was now heading to tepid. The vampires were conferring, clearly debating whether to lurk near the door in the blaze of sun or find somewhere else cooler to hang out.
It was Summer, blisteringly hot, sweaty, not a drop of rain, feel like we’re living in an oven Summer. Writerpalooza had crept up on the town and then exploded. When the Mayor had announced it months ago, it was meant to run for a week. Authors of all stripes were visiting, there were workshops and talks and symposiums on topics such as “The Clumsy Girl in Modern Fiction.”
Then it had unexpectedly grown, more and more authors signing up, bigger names until the biggest name at the moment joined: Bella Shade. Writerpalooza at that point had already expanded to ten days, and Bella announcing she’d be attending blew it out to a full two weeks. Overnight, every hotel, motel and bed-and-breakfast were fully booked. The Torrent Bed-and-Breakfast didn’t have a spare room, and the moms were debating offering camping spaces for the flood of tourists and fans who would be in town (this decision was still being debated given we had some clear land but it edged on to an area of ruined cottages, empty and full wells, cave openings and Goddess knows what other witchy things there were).
Writerpalooza had grown so big so fast that the state decided to throw money into it, with the idea of making it a yearly fixture that could draw tourists from all over the country. Suddenly, there was serious money involved, and the low-paid, almost-volunteer positions were transformed into well-paying ones.
I’d put down my name on a list for a job, like most of the town who didn’t have permanent employment, without much hope of getting one. As Writerpalooza drew nearer, and the positions were quickly filled I was looking at a Summer of part-time waitressing work at The Cozy Cat Café (Peta had taken over the Traveler Café and rebranded it but more on that later), helping out my cousins at Traveler, the moms at the bakery and the bed-and-breakfast and Aunt Cass at the Chili Challenge, as well as my library part-time job that was down to two hours a week and sure to extinguish soon.
I was living the life of many people in small towns: try to put together fifty jobs to match a full-time minimum wage.
Yes, I could make a comment about resilience and go get ‘em and all that nonsense, but the fact was that living like this sucked
, worse than a vampire.
Ha! See what I did there? Vampires… sucked… okay, forget it.
Then someone had dropped out, Kira had put in a good word for me as a replacement and I was in!
Now, sweating in a giant hall (thanks to broken air conditioning that was being repaired), I wasn’t super happy with my job, but then I remembered the money and felt much better.
To combat the high levels of youth unemployment (and also keep them off the streets), the town had hired every high-schooler who had wanted a job which is how Kira, Sophira and me had ended up working together.
What had seemed like a lifetime ago, the three of us had ended up in a burning mansion together, would-be victims of crazed arsonist Hendrick Gresso. After that, although Sophira and Kira were friends, I’d barely seen Sophira. Part of it was, yes, she was a teenager and why would we see each other but sometimes, I felt it was the problem that arises when you go through something traumatic and extreme with a person - afterward it’s hard to be normal, although she seemed okay now so far.
The vampires retreated, and I was left sipping my warming water, staring out at the heat rising up from the road (which, by the way, was melting in the hottest part of the day. If you weren’t careful when you crossed the road you ended up with black gunk on your shoes.)
Normal, there was a word loaded down with meaning.
Was it normal to face murderers and dark entities? Was it normal to have a spell (maybe) pushing on you all hours of the day and night?
Was it normal to find stones with LOST WITCH TOOK JACK carved on them?
The stones in question were, as far as I knew, down in Aunt Cass’s lair. After Jack and I had found them there had been a family meeting to beat all family meetings for emotional displays (I’m not only talking about me here either).
Here is the thing about witches: we’re not big on doing what, as Aunt Cass might say, “the man” wants. We don’t like filling in registration forms, we don’t like lists of names, we try to stay under the radar in many ways, some subtle (mail delivered to H. Torrent), some not (mail delivered to Pablo Sanchez (Aunt Cass)).
This meant our family history was a mess.
Beyond Grandma and Aunt Cass’s grandmother, we didn’t know the rest of the family tree. The unknown Torrent witch I’d seen in a vision was still unknown. Her daughter, Rosetta, who had barely survived an encounter with the Shadow Witch couldn’t be placed. Was she the grandmother’s mother or somewhere further back?
We’d put Harlot Bay’s top researcher (Ollie) on to the job but even after months of trawling old files, ruined newspapers and other aging records, he was no closer to a good answer.
Back to the emotional displays: Jack had been at the family meeting where Aunt Cass and I had pushed for Will and Ollie to be told about finding the LOST WITCH stones. Molly and Luce had argued against this, saying that, and I quote Molly here “A super strong dose of witchy will guarantee both of us will end up single and Goddess help me if that happens I’ll curse all of you and no one will end up with grandchildren!”.
Aunt Cass had then whipped a phone out of nowhere, tapped away and said: “It’s done, they know, let’s move on.”
Molly was already planning her next curse.
So the boyfriends knew, the moms knew, Aunt Cass and I knew, and what did this produce? Not much. Sure, we’d Ollie on the case investigating at the library, but contrary to what adventure movies have taught us, it wasn’t like he’d opened a book, found the puzzle and then we were racing across the desert to steal the golden jewel. It was mostly Ollie keeping us updated saying “I’m still looking. Maybe I’ll find something.”
Molly, Luce and I had started training with the moms and then Aunt Cass learning new spells, and if you’re thinking training montage let me stop you right there. It certainly wasn’t one of those events where we were terrible at the beginning, but then as we struggled we slowly improved until the final frame was us being super fit and ready to take on the world. It was more like going out into the forest, trying to learn a spell, dealing with a few snarky comments from our moms, getting frustrated, getting into arguments, and generally all of us finding ourselves too busy to commit time to it.
I still had my wall of crazy up in my secret lair, which only Jack knew about. I went out there as often as I could, but every time I tried to focus on it I found my mind drifting, which is probably the reason I managed to have written about half of my ghost story. I’d sit down and look at the wall, turn my laptop on and suddenly find myself inspired to write. Sometimes in the back of my mind I realized that it was the spell pushing on me but it had a good outcome so, hey, why not go with it?
“Hello… Torrent?” Kira said.
I came back to the here and now and found the two teenagers watching me.
“Sorry, daydreaming,” I muttered and gulped down the last of my water which did absolutely nothing to relieve the temperature in the hall.
“Daydreaming about getting married?” Kira said with a smirk.
“When is Jack going to pop the question may we ask?” Sophira said.
“I was daydreaming about whether there was a spell that turned teenagers into frogs,” I replied.
“Definitely thinking about her upcoming wedding,” Kira said.
“I wonder if she’ll wear white?” Sophira said with a grin.
“Oh really, Sophira, who I have seen down the beach hanging around that van that sells ice creams. I wonder why you could have been down there?” I said.
“No reason. Maybe I wanted an ice cream.”
“And Kira, Miss I’m-going-out-to-visit-the-Torrents-on-a-weekend and then it turns out you didn’t visit the Torrents and isn’t it interesting that you would tell your grandmother that you were coming to visit us when in fact you weren’t. I wonder where you could have been?”
“Oh gosh, did my Grandma ask you?” Kira said, her face turning pale.
My jaw fell open and I laughed. “My Goddess, I got you so bad! You confessed. No, I haven’t spoken Hattie in months but you confessed to me because you thought I had. Didn’t me, Molly and Luce teach you anything?”
We continued setting up the chairs, the hall seemed to grow even hotter as we did, trading snarky yet humorous comments back and forth.
I discovered the boy that Sophira had a crush on was named Tony and he was indeed working in the ice cream van over the Summer. He was two years older than her and, according to Kira, had luscious blue eyes that Sophira couldn’t help herself gazing into.
Sophira gave as good as she got though, teasing Kira about her boyfriend Fox whom she’d met during the play The Taming of The Shrew some months ago.
We worked and sweated and laughed, and yes, it was fun hanging out with the teenagers. Their lives were simultaneously deadly serious but also lighthearted and shallow.
They had problems like everyone else did, but they had a complete absence of problems that everyone else had like, say, trying to pay your rent or buy food or get your ancient car repaired before it broke down for the fiftieth time.
We saw another flock of vampires come and go from the door as we continued to set up chairs.
We were getting close to finished when one of the organizers, Angela, appeared at the end of the hall and came rushing in.
“Oh Harlow, it’s so good you’re here! You’re a writer, right?” she called out as she approached.
We all took this interruption as a chance to take a break, Sophira going off to grab more glasses of chilled water.
“I used to be a journalist and I guess I am sort of writing a book at the moment,” I said, feeling incredibly awkward to be confessing to writing a book. I don’t know why though. You don’t feel awkward telling someone you’re baking a cake or cleaning your house. But tell someone you’re writing a book? It feels weird.
Angela zipped around the end of the chairs and came to a halt in front of me before wiping the sweat from her forehead.
“Wow it’s hot in here. I hope that repa
ir gets done soon,” she said.
“I think the guy is working on it now,” I said, still a bit confused as to why she would ask me if I was a writer.
“I need to know if you want to be the personal assistant to Red Forrest.”
“What happened to… was it Meredith?”
“She’s dead.”
I had that plunging feeling in my stomach and a burst of goosebumps, but then Angela laughed, clapping her hands at her own joke.
“Or she has a broken leg.”
“What happened?” I said, still trying to recover my balance.
“She was trying to do that dance move… what was that movie where the young girl goes to the resort and there’s the sexy dance guy? Anyway, they tried to do the lift, it didn’t work, Meredith broke her leg, her husband Rex fractured his arm, it’s a mess. She was going to be PA to Red Forrest, but obviously she can’t do that now.
“Who’s Red Forrest?”
“She writes cozy mysteries with a detective in them who’s called Red as well, has a trench coat and bright red hair. All the books have red in the title like Red Wine and You, and Red is the Color of Murder. It’s an extra hundred dollars a day plus there’s a rental car that Meredith has already picked up. It’s at her house. You essentially need to guide Red around, make sure she gets to all her events, help her with anything she needs. You’re on call. I don’t think she’s going to be ringing you at two in the morning for muffins or anything… although if she does… make sure you get her muffins because we want Writerpalooza to have a great reputation for treating the writers well and to grow bigger and bigger each year. I figure since you’re a writer, you’d get along well with her. Can you do it?”
