by Tegan Maher
I joined her and frowned. The wind was whipping through the yard so hard that one of the canopies blew over, and not ten seconds later, the skies opened up. "I did. The radar was clear, with zero percent chance of precipitation."
She raised a brow at me. "That doesn't look like zero percent chance to me."
"Obviously," I replied, scowling as the canopy rolled again.
"Should we go out and get it?" she asked.
I shook my head. "I'm not going out in that. I'm just glad we decided to wait until tomorrow to put out the little pumpkins and whatnot. A least it's only the tables and canopies getting soaked."
As I said it, the twinkle lights we'd strung in the trees flickered and went out. I sighed. "Great. Just great."
Maisey, who'd been gone since that afternoon, popped in. "Bad juju," she said, shaking her head.
Dee pinched her lips together. "Do you think maybe we should cancel the party? It would suck for somebody to get hurt."
The thought hadn't crossed my mind, but maybe she was right.
"Let's hold off for now," I replied. "Though maybe we should reconsider the pumpkin-carving contest and bobbing for apples. Those sort of have disaster written all over them."
I'd no sooner said it than the lights went out.
She shifted her weight and the silence became heavy in the darkness. "Do you think maybe we should do an Internet search to see if there's some way to break a curse?"
I scoffed. "That's silly. There's no such thing as curses."
Lightning flashed across the sky, cracking so loudly that the windows rattled.
"Okay," I said, revising my statement. "Grab my laptop from the kitchen."
Thankfully, the computer was fully charged. We searched through several pages, but all of them included doing stuff like taking a bath with certain herbs and plants—none of which we had on hand—or burning them, reciting psalms that neither of us knew, or performing rituals during a full moon, which was still a week away.
Finally, we found one that had possibilities. It involved standing a mirror up in black salt—which we also didn't have but figured kosher salt would do—and placing her name on a piece of paper in front of it. There were also a couple chants suggested. They sounded silly, but we decided that since we didn't have the exact right salt, it wouldn't hurt to have a backup plan.
I had an extra compact, so while Dee filled a bowl with salt, I finagled the mirror out of the plastic case. The storm continued to rage. Once we had the mirror stuck in the salt, I scrawled her name on a piece of paper and laid it in the salt in front of it. Though we felt a little goofy, we recited the chant, the laptop held between us.
When we finished, we waited for a few seconds to see if anything happened. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the lights came back on, and I caught the twinkle of orange and green lights through the window. The twinkle lights were working again.
We looked at each other, then broke into nervous giggles.
"Wow," she said, her eyes wide. "I didn't think it would actually work."
"Me either," I replied, still waiting for the rain to resume or the lights to flicker out again. When they didn't, we curled back up on the couch to finish the movie. After making sure the mirror was stable in the salt and the slip of paper was weighted down with a few grains, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next morning dawned sunny and clear without a cloud in the sky. It didn't take us long to right the mess the storm had made, and after we dried the tables, we distributed the little decorations across them.
We spent the next several hours making goody bags for the kids, then I helped Dee make cookies and cupcakes and a few pumpkin and apple pies. Scout showed up around two in the afternoon, three hours before the party was due to start, with fresh hay bales to replace the ones that had broken and a new board to fix the picnic table.
Though we weren't exactly ashamed of what we'd done with the mirror and salt, we weren't eager to share our actions, either. No need to make the man I had a wild crush on think we'd gone 'round the bend. Instead, we moved the bowl to an inconspicuous place in the kitchen curio cabinet, careful not to let the mirror fall over or the paper blow out.
I snagged a candy apple off one of the trays and bit into it, relishing the crack of the candy and the cinnamony flavor as it melded with the crisp texture and sweet notes of the apple. "You outdid yourself on these," I told her, waving the apple.
"Obviously," she deadpanned. "That's your third one. I'm not gonna have any to put out if you keep it up."
I flushed with guilt but couldn't manage to dredge up any remorse.
"Don't you have eggs to devil or beans to bake while I finish wrapping these?"
She was right, so I put the eggs on to boil, then mixed up my own special combination of spices and sauces for the beans.
I was taking the shells off the last of about a kazillion eggs when Scout ambled through the door, putting his nose in the air and taking a deep breath.
"It smells amazing in here." He snagged a couple cookies off an orange plastic pumpkin tray, leaving a noticeable gap in Dee's artful arrangement.
She glared at him, then snatched the plate and moved it out of his reach, replacing the missing cookies with extras she had tucked away in a plastic container. "Seriously! Would you two stop? I swear, you're worse than kids.”
He gave her a sheepish grin as he bit the head off a black cat. "It's not our fault. If you didn't make all your stuff so delicious, we wouldn't be tempted to eat everything in sight."
Raising a brow, she shook her head. "If I didn't make everything so delicious, people wouldn't want to buy them and I'd be out of business." Giving him a cocky grin, she added, "Besides, I'm physiologically incapable of baking anything that tastes less than magical."
She cringed a little as soon as she said it, and I cast a glance toward the curio before I could catch myself. We'd both had enough magic for the week. Or the year, for that matter.
The next hour whirred by in a blur as we put the final touches on the place. A half hour before the party was due to start, folks started showing up, setting up various booths and tables. One girl was painting faces and another was dressed as a psychic and giving out tarot readings. A horse trailer pulled up, and Kerri Fox from Fox Farms led two ponies out. She'd tied orange and black ribbons in their manes and tails and had banded their forelocks with little pumpkin hair baubles.
Before I knew it, tables were groaning under the weight of countless covered dishes, and laughter and the smell of burning charcoal filled the air.
Dee and I were in the kitchen, each of us loading up on trays of food. Waiting tables sucked a lot of the time, but it did give you the skills you needed to carry five times as many dishes as any other normal human.
"Can I get anything?" Scout asked, grabbing a couple bags of buns. “I have a free hand. He reached down and picked up the trunk full of Dominga's stuff, and I rushed to put down what I was holding so I could stop him. I hadn't realized we'd left it out. Somehow, it had gotten pushed to the corner and lost among the other boxes.
He popped the lid open before I could stop him.
"Don't touch that!" Dee barked. The last thing we needed was for him to be cursed. That was not a conversation I wanted to have.
"Why not?" he asked, peering into the box and reaching a hand inside despite the warning.
"Hey!" he said as he pulled out the box containing the head. "Where did y'all find this?"
I closed my eyes and pulled in a deep breath, releasing it slowly through my nose. Did curse-breaking spells work on the object or the cursed person? We hadn't really read too far into the details the night before.
"Up in the attic," Dee said, stretching her free arm out to grab the box. "I don't really think you should—"
"This is awesome!" he exclaimed, popping the lid and pulling the head out. "I haven't seen this since I was a kid. I'd forgotten all about it!"
"Wait, what?" I said, wondering if I'd heard him
right.
Scout grinned and held the head up, letting it dangle by the string. "This! I must have left it here, and Damon's mom just stuck it in a box and forgot about it."
Dee and I just stared at each other slack-jawed while he pilfered through the rest of the box. He pulled out the red scarf, the tarot cards, and the bowls, his grin spreading wider with each new find.
"Are you saying that's your stuff?" Dee asked, her eyes wide.
"Yeah. Well, at least some of it. I got the fake head from some fair we went to as a kid. We hung it over the doorway to our clubhouse because it freaked our sisters out. The scarf's mine, too. I used it when we played pirates or Cowboys and Indians. Damon and I carved the bowls in eighth-grade shop class. His older sister went through a weird stage where she wore black all the time and thought she was psychic, so the tarot cards and candles were hers." He crinkled his nose when he got to the bottom. “Those look like mouse bones. One of them must have gotten trapped in here somehow.”
He shook his head. "I can't believe you two stumbled on this. Good memories!"
"So ... they didn't belong to a voodoo witch that worked for Maisey?" I asked before I thought.
"Uhh, no," he said, glancing back and forth between Dee and I. She looked like she felt as silly as I did.
He tilted his head and gave us an assessing look. "Don't tell me you two thought this was a real head."
Again, my gaze shot toward the curio cabinet before I could stop myself. He turned to see what I was looking at and apparently caught sight of the bowl. He laughed as he strode to the cabinet and pulled open the door.
Laughing, he pulled out the bowl and plucked the slip of paper from the salt. I knew my face was as red as the scarf he'd pulled from the box.
"You did! You thought you'd been cursed—that's ... hilarious!" He nearly bent double laughing, and it didn't take long before Dee and I joined him.
"You ... you thought all that stuff that happened yesterday was caused by some voodoo priestess who's been dead for a couple hundred years!" he gasped the words, holding his side and collapsing into a chair.
It occurred to me that he may have been laughing at us rather than with us. "It's not that funny. It is, after all, Halloween."
"C'mon," he said, struggling to catch his breath. "Admit it. It really is that funny. I'd have never taken either one of you for superstitious. You know voodoo isn't real."
Dee and I had stopped laughing, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. When he realized he was the only one still smiling, he turned his attention to where our gazes were trained.
In the little bowl of salt, the slip of paper had caught fire and was curling in on itself, slowly turning black as it burned.
THANK YOU FOR SPENDING some time at the Haunted Lodge and I hope you enjoyed the story. This story is set in My Haunted Lodge Cozy Mystery Series. If you’d like to read more about Toni, Dee, and the crew, check out Book 1, Thyme to Kill here.
Cori, Chaos, and Alex are the stars in the Cori Sloane, Witchy Werewolf Mysteries, which take place in a little town called Castle's Bluff, Georgia. Cori's the sheriff and has some wicked crimes to solve, all while keeping the peace between people who appear very different, but are in fact very much the same in many ways. Or at least the ones who aren't killing people are.
Destiny, Tempest, and Colin live in the Enchanted Coast Magical Mysteries world, listening to Jimmy Buffett and taking life as it comes—in between murders, of course.
Finally, Noelle, Hunter, Aunt Addy, and the rest of the crew are the stars of my Witches of Keyhole Lake Series, where the tea is sweet, the women are strong, and the ghosts are sassy!
About Tegan
I was born and raised in the South and even hung my motorcycle helmet in Colorado for a few months. I've always had a touch of wanderlust and have never feared just packing up and going on new adventures, whether in real life or via the pages of a great book.
I didn't want to grow up to be a writer—I wanted to raise unicorns and be a superhero. When those gigs fell through, I chose the next best thing: creating my own magical lands filled with adventure, magic, and humor.
I live in Florida with my two dogs and when I'm not writing or reading, I'm racing motorcycles, hanging out at the beach, or binge watching anything magical on Netflix.
If you’d like to hear about my new releases and good deals on books that I hear about, join my newsletter here. I promise not to spam you—I hate that, and I’m sure you do, too!
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