by Kris Calvert
Text copyright ©2016 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Robyn Peterman. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Magic and Mayhem remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Robyn Peterman, or their affiliates or licensors.
For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds
Witchin’ in the Kitchen
BY KRIS CALVERT
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my editors, Meg Weglarz and Molly J. Kimbrell for always dotting my I’s and crossing my T’s. You make me look me look good.
Thank you to my husband, Rob Pottorf. No one should ever have to hear all the crazy plot lines that roll around in my head and yet, you listen—always. I love you more.
Finally, thank you to my long-time girlfriend, sister, partner in crime, fellow dance mom, fellow theatre mom, part time therapist and advisor, road buddy and roommate, Robyn Peterman Zahn.
It was a privilege to write in your crazy-awesome Magic and Mayhem world (which I titled). Who knew when we were kids, we would go from Mrs. J. Highland’s AP English class at Tates Creek High School thirty-something years ago, to this insane place where people allow us to crawl into their heads and entertain them with our words and grammatically correct sentences that have specific (thank you J. Highland, Instructor) meaning. Well, most of the time. What a crazy destiny. I love you, I adore you and I will always be in your debt for making me write my first book (which you titled).
Me love you long time and I owe you a….well…you know what I owe you. xxoo
For Belphrina Sashatay.
You know who you are.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
September 22, 1692
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Glossary
The Kamasutra Love Muffin/Kissy Cake
A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns
Other Great Magic & Mayhem Series Authors
September 22, 1692
“STOP!” I SHRIEKED. “Please, I’m begging you!”
“Look away, Deliverance,” Mother shouted. The noose tightened around her neck, causing her voice to wane. “You’ll pay for this, Reverend Hale. As God as my witness, I’ll see you burn in Hell!”
“Mary Parker!” Hale’s voice was thick with hatred and I felt it echo through my body as he wrenched me from the tight embrace I held on my mother’s leg. Tossing me to the ground behind him, he continued his rant. “The name of God on your lips is an abomination!”
“Mother, make it stop!” my sister Sarah shouted, the noose now fully around her neck as well.
“Silence, Sarah Parker!”
“A pox upon thee, John Hale!” Mother shouted the words as her body was hoisted from the tree and into the air. “May thou suffer the wrath of a thousand deaths!”
John Hale’s face was red with anger and nervous perspiration—his eyes wild with hate. “Die witch!”
I watched in horror as they were strung from the hanging tree on the hill—their feet twitching with desperate jolts—their souls gasping for air.
“Bring them down,” I sobbed. “Let them go!”
“Hush child,” he hissed. “I have enough rope to hang you too!”
Pulling my knees to my chin, I cried out for my mother and sister. The patch of barren land in Salem was quiet, save for my own muted wail. And then I heard my mother’s voice.
“It has begun.”
A collective gasp erupted from the dastards gathered at Gallows Hill to watch my family die. My mother’s eyes opened. The weight of her body no longer swung, but was still, as if captured by the black of night and cradled in its arms. “Mother!” I shouted, rising from the hard earth.
“Thunder my anger, lightning my might,” she began. “Bring to me clouds, clouds black as night.”
Rushing toward her, I shouted her name once again. She looked past me and the others there to witness her death. Her eyes glowed in the darkness, red as hot pokers. She wasn’t alive, and yet she wasn’t dead.
“Burn them!” John Hale shouted over the howling of the wind. “Burn them now!”
“Restless on earth you ever shall be. Unknowing to love, a pox upon thee!”
As quickly as the words left her mouth, strong winds came in from the north and storm clouds formed over our heads. “Momma!” I cried over the roar of the rising tempest. “No!”
Running toward him to knock the torch from his hand, I stepped into the scorching white light and wrath of my own mother’s spell.
It was over in a flash—literally. The light and hot energy from the bolt of lightning that coursed through my veins didn’t kill me. In fact, I rose from the ground—my body smoking with the strength of a thousand men and the anger of ten thousand scorned women. I was only sixteen, but felt as if I could rule the world.
“Get thee away, witch!” Hale shouted as he ran into the woods with the others.
I looked to my mother and sister, their bodies now burning into ash while the storm raged and the wind howled.
“Nice job, ox-head!” my sister yelled at me while removing the scorched noose from her neck.
“Sarah!”
“You clay-brained bull’s pizzle! You just ruined Mother’s spell!”
Their bodies exploded in a bright light and as suddenly as the lightning and thunder came, it went. The only thing left on Gallows Hill was two charred nooses and me, the smoking girl.
I stood in the silence for only a moment, and then I saw it. Coming across the meadow below, a cyclone of epic proportions was roaring toward me, kicking up dust and destroying everything in its path. Hitching up my smoldering dress and petticoat I began to run toward town then stopped, realizing there was nothing there for me. My home would be searched. Hale would surely want to hang the last witch of the Parker family. My life in Salem was over—gone.
Turning, I faced the storm and my mother’s book of spells magically appeared in my hands just as I was swept away in the rotating tunnel and into the heavens.
ONE
IT WAS THE same ordeal every time I blew into a new town—literally. A supercell filled with unstable air would meet a wind shear, tilting to form an upright vortex. It was like a nightmarish speed date—alarming and destructive but mercifully over in mere minutes. The product of a misplaced lightning and thunder spell, I was Deliverance Parker, the proud daughter of Mary Parker and sister of Sarah—although I’d only used my real name once since that fateful night on Gallows Hill. Immortal since their deaths in Salem, Massachusetts three hundred and twenty-four years ago, I was as old as a heap of excrement, but I didn’t look a day over twenty-five.
The first hundred years or so were tumultuous at best. Filled with survivor’s guilt, I sometimes felt grateful for my mother hiding my abilities from the others. But mostly, when I was all alone at night with only my thoughts, I wished I’d been hanged that night instead of aimlessly walking through life by myself. Still, there were plenty of things I had to figure out on my own, but what I learned in the first few years was whenever a storm rolled through my current location, I was destined to be picked up along with whatever debris might be hurling through the sky—cows, carts, carriages, elementary school roofs, barns, even the occasional human being.
It wasn’t long before I di
scovered that the spell my mother cast for another was self-powering—meaning, my emotions controlled the weather around me. If I was sad, it would rain, but if I was angry? Then in rolled a tornado ready to toss me to another town, another life, and not the Next Adventure but always a new one.
Regardless of my mood, Mother Nature was ready to pay me a visit each year when the spring storms would begin to churn. The jet stream would blow in from the west, a tornado would inevitably kick up and I was once again merely a passenger in the atmosphere with no idea as to where I would land next. The hundred years I lived along tornado alley in Kansas and Oklahoma were the worst. It was nothing but naughty cowboys, tumbleweed and cumulonimbus clouds.
Alone in the world, all I had to my name was the fortune I’d managed to amass over the years, my mother’s spell book and a gray hair for every year I’d walked the earth disguised as a human—three hundred and change. Thankfully the grays had coalesced into an attractive streak that framed my dark hair and face. The grays couldn’t be dyed or conjured away—and I could conjure up anything and everything—except something to break my mother’s spell.
The words to the spell haunted me every day: Restless on earth you ever shall be. Unknowing to love, a pox upon thee. We’d only spoken of it once, in a dream. She told me how sorry she was that her spell was cast upon me and not on John Hale, and there was only one way to break it. I needed to find a man whose love for me was pure across time and space. That meant no spells—at least no spell that I could cast. It also meant I had limited time over the years to find a man who could love me for who I was.
I’d had men—I’d had plenty of men. Some of them were famous—like the time I shared a bed with Thomas Jefferson. Although all he wanted to do was screw, read poetry and show me his architectural plans. Some of the men from my past I’d just as soon forget ever existed—like the time I smoked too much weed and ended up in the art studio of Andy Warhol. It was in fact my idea for him to paint the Campbell’s soup cans. Cooking in Andy’s kitchen, I’d laughed at what others were calling art in the Sixties and tossed the empty can to him saying, for pity’s sake, if some of that tripe is art, why can’t this be art?
As much as I’d longed for it to happen to me, and as easy as it was for me to conjure true love for others, I could never manage to stay in one place for any length of time—at least not long enough for a man or any other kind of being to fall for me. I’d dabbled in humans and even the occasional hairy Werewolf, but swore off Shifters. I’d had my heart broken by one. It was 1778 and the Revolutionary War was raging. The damn redcoats were thick with vampires but they were no match for the Shifters that had settled in Virginia and spread out through the colonies. His name was Barnabas and he spoke to me of love and the future. Forever reciting poetry, Robbie Burns was his favorite and he always recited the second verse of Red, Red, Rose for me. To this day I couldn’t read or hear the words without crying.
In 1937 at a poetry reading in Cincinnati, Ohio, someone chose the poem to read for their selection. I cried so hard I flooded places thirty miles from the Ohio River.
Still, being with Barnabas wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. He had an identical twin—an evil man I mostly wanted to strangle—Bazel. Bazel spent most of his time trying to tear us apart. If I was with Barnabas, his brother couldn’t be.
They were beautiful Shifters even though Bazel was such a miscreant. A pair of perfectly tall, dark, and handsome bobcats, I could hardly tell them apart—unless they were naked.
My heart was torn to pieces one night in Philadelphia when I lost my temper after I found him speaking with another woman—a woman I thought he was flirting with—Harriet Claypoole.
She was a beautiful girl—a young Witch with not much power, but a lot of admirers. Her mother was famous—not for witchcraft, but for making a flag—a flag she so clearly conjured up. I never understood what the big deal was. I could move mountains with my storms and this woman just enchanted a few threads and somehow became an American icon for it.
Not only did the storm I created take me away from him, but also the chance to break the spell and live a normal existence. All I ever wanted was to be a regular Witch with her Shifter love, hiding out in a world full of senseless humans.
It was a simple dream and one I thought of each time I found myself in a new place, with a new name, a new life and a brand new beginning. This time will be different. I said it to myself each time I was tossed into a new town. The reality was, it was the only way of keeping my spirits up. Even though I had plenty of money—the online banking system made it seamless to travel from place to place—and endless amounts of time—a witch could live forever—all I really had was hope. Hope that each new adventure would be my last.
When my body rolled to a halt on the open highway, it took me a few moments to get my bearings, brush off my designer jeans and t-shirt and ask the universe the question I always began a new adventure with, “Where the hell am I?”
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
I responded with a wave as a family of four climbed from under the highway overpass.
“I’m fine. Are you guys okay?”
The man and his dazed band of rug rats walked to the highway, watching the tornado twist along the farmland before disappearing into the sky just in time for the sun to shine.
The disheveled man looked me over from head to toe. “Where did you come from?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Same as you.”
“Did you lose your car too?” A young boy stared up at me, still clinging to his mother’s pant leg. The deep cut on his forearm looked bad and I could tell by the expression on his face he was in pain. Nonchalantly twirling my right index finger in a circle, I healed his arm and watched him go from crouching behind his mother to standing up straight.
I squinted, looking up and down the road for a sign to point me in the right direction and lied. “Yeah, yeah. I got out of my car to take cover and got caught up in the storm. Where are we anyway?”
“Highway two-nineteen.”
“I meant what state.”
“West Virginia, of course,” the man replied.
“West cockin’ Virginia,” I sighed.
“Are you sure you’re okay? Did you hit your head or something?”
“Nope,” I replied with a sarcastic grin. “No, I’m just turned around. Which way is town?”
“Closest town is about five miles that-a-way,” he said pointing in front of my chest. I ducked his aim and stepped away, unimpressed with his manners.
“I guess I should head that-a-way.”
As I began to walk, my one possession—the book of spells from my mother—magically appeared in my hands. It was always a little late, but the enchanted book somehow made its way back to me without fail. I turned to ask one last question of the man. “What’s the name of the that-a-way town?”
“It’s Ass—mumph.” The small boy tried to speak as his mother slapped her hand across his open and dusty mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shielding my eyes from the bright sun. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Just head that way ma’am. You’ll walk right into town—can’t miss it.”
“Yeah,” the little boy shouted now that his mother had removed her hand. “You can’t miss it because it smells.”
I tilted my head to acknowledge his remark and kept walking. “I’m sure I’ve smelled worse, kid.”
* * *
IN THE HOUR and a half it took me to walk to the next town, I powered-up and made my usual mental checklist of what I needed to set up my life—again. One of the worst parts about the curse was that after the storm tossed me wherever, my powers were depleted, but only for a short while. I’d learned to use the time wisely in the past and today was no different.
The main street was littered with debris, no doubt from the storm, but there was no damage to any of the buildings. I began my first task—finding a place to set up shop.
I’d had many careers over the last
three centuries blowing from place to place—a seamstress in St. Louis, a librarian in New York City, a student at Harvard, a gold prospector in California, and even a frontier doctor. But my favorite thing to do was to bake. And so for the last fifty years I did just that.
Little towns like this one had always been good to me. The people were friendly enough, but not so nosy as to check into my past. I could make up just about any story I wanted and people would believe me. If they didn’t, I simply put a spell on the meddlesome snit and all was right with the world again—at least until the next storm kicked up.
I knew I’d stepped foot into the right place when I smelled something vile and rank wafting toward me. “Pee-yew,” I coughed. The kid wasn’t lying. I hadn’t smelled anything that bad since the bubonic plague hit New Orleans in 1914.
On the edge of town, the Welcome to Ass—sign was torn in half. I shook my head. I had no idea where in West Virginia I was but one thing was for sure, it did its name justice. It truly smelled like week old ass.
“Where’d you blow in from?”
I turned to look behind me and found a man perfectly dressed in a three-piece suit and bow tie. Not a hair out of place, I had a hard time believing he was a storm survivor. Maybe he was from the famous weather channel—a storm chaser who popped a chubby when someone even mentioned the word, supercell.
“Sorry,” I said turning on my heels and waving off the the manicured man with the salt and pepper hair and gray soul patch. “I’m not interested in giving an interview.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Facing him again, I realized he was beautiful to behold and found myself a tad short of breath. “I said—”
I had to pause. My chest expanded, but somehow I wasn’t getting any air. “I’m not going to give you an interview and tell you it sounded like a freight train coming through the front door of my trailer.” Wheezing through the words quickly, I tried to get them all out before taking a covert breath.
