3-Book Series Bundle: Wisteria Witches, Wicked Wisteria, Wisteria Wonders - Cozy Witch Mysteries

by Angela Pepper

  Zinnia spoke soothingly. "Zara, we brought you to my house because I was afraid of what the ghost in your house would do next. After we left, I had an associate visit your house to do a sweep for spells and devices."

  I gave Zoey a dirty look. "You've got your great-aunt in on your ghost prank?"

  "It's not a prank," Zoey said. "Our house has a ghost, and you are a witch."

  "A ghost and a witch," I mused. "Sounds legit."

  Zinnia frowned. "No need to be sarcastic." She did a dancing movement with her hand again, and this time I felt her will being imposed on me. She wanted to suppress my sarcasm.

  I steeled myself and fought. "If I'm a witch, what does that make you? A werewolf? No, don't tell me. You're a vampire."

  "I'm a witch, like you."

  "My mother always said you were a witch. What does that mean, exactly? I always thought it was a comment on your personality. Are you Wiccan or something?"

  "No, I'm not Wiccan, though I respect their practices. I'm a witch. Just like you."

  I snorted.

  Zinnia muttered something under her breath and moved both of her hands in a complicated gesture. The room filled with tiny sparkling lights, and the scent of sweet, sugary cotton candy. The smell pleasantly pushed away the lingering burned peppermint in my sinuses.

  I reached up for the floating sparks, grinning like a ding-dong. I'd never seen anything like it, outside of movies. The dazzling color shifted from purple to blue to teal and back again. I could almost catch the little fireflies of light but they buzzed out of reach, like the end of the rainbow. In unison, the sparks spiraled up toward the ceiling and began to spin.

  "Are you doing this?" I asked with breathless wonder. "What's happening? Am I dreaming all of this?"

  She held up one hand and whistled. The lights spun faster. My head couldn't take the sense of motion. I clutched the edge of the bed.

  She whistled again, at a lower pitch. The lights dimmed and gradually extinguished. The scent of cotton candy was replaced with the scent of ashes.

  Zoey squealed and clapped her hands. "I want to do that! Will you teach me?"

  Zinnia beamed at my daughter and explained that she would teach her, all in good time. And then she cast the spell again, this time moving her dancing fingers slower, almost slow enough for me to catch the movements.

  And as she cast the light show again for my daughter, something changed inside me.

  The little spark of desire that I'd always carried, the desire for there to be more to the world than science and physics, grew hotter and brighter, like a fireplace ember being blown upon.

  And then, all at once, the flame caught and burned bright in my heart. I was filled with white light, and all that was good. I saw my mother holding out her arms for me, my baby daughter gazing up at me, and countless rainbows and blossoming flowers and moonlit nights and crimson sunrises. I saw the smiles of every patron I'd helped locate the book they needed, and the tears of gratitude of others I'd never met, being helped by other kind souls. I saw nothing but the good in humanity, the willingness to forgive, to self-sacrifice, to be open and to love.

  Gradually, the room around me came into focus. I rubbed my fingers against the scratchy cotton of the pillowcase to pull myself back into my body.

  Having seen and felt the evidence, I became a believer.

  Aunt Zinnia was a witch.

  I was a witch.

  That actually did explain a few things.

  Chapter 14

  "Light magic is harder than it looks," my aunt said to my daughter. "When you both begin your novice training, you'll start with the basics—modulating sounds and shifting air movement. Have you studied musical instruments in school?"

  Zoey raised her hand excitedly. "I've played the harp."

  "How wonderful," Zinnia cooed. "Learning music is the perfect preparation for spellwork. If you can read sheet music, you'll find reading spells is only about ten times harder."

  The two of them continued to chatter about musical scales and sheet music, their words blending into each other as though they were one person. The whole world was blurry and swirling again, even without the magical light show. My head didn't hurt, but it did feel like a theater stage where an avante garde musical group was banging on garbage cans and stomping their feet to make lousy music.

  I glanced over at the empty water glass on the bedside table. I'd really prefer another mojito, I thought. Did I? Was that a desire of my own, or of the ghost of socialite Winona Vander Zalm?

  Meanwhile, my other redheaded family members were talking about harmonies and triads, and something about threading needles of sound to harness unseen forces.

  Was nobody else concerned about my recent possession? My recollection was a bit foggy, but I had a vivid memory of trying to electrocute myself with a toaster. Was I a suicide risk, thanks to this wacky ghost?

  Even as I worried, I also felt myself letting go of all fears. I was slipping away, separating from the present, sliding across time and space like a silk nightie falling off a hanger.

  Somewhere nearby, a machine was whirring to life. I couldn't have known this as a regular human, but now my consciousness was expanding, flooding outward like the contents of an uncorked bottle of smoke. I felt the vibrations of a dark and dangerous machine, one that threatened to erase me. Erase me? How could anything erase me? Unless...

  Was I, Zara Riddle, nothing more than an inky, large-boobed, doe-eyed drawing of a woman in an old, leather-bound book? I had always thought of myself as a real person, fleshed out in three dimensions, but what if I'd been wrong?

  I'm so sorry, said a distant voice. I can't ask you to forgive me for what I'm going to put you through, but I hope you'll at least understand. Zara, your family is my only hope.

  I needed to ask the voice more, but it was already gone.

  My awareness spread further, getting thinner, diluted as it spread.

  Now I was a monster who lurked in the water. Cool and dark and deep. Up on the surface, people came and went. They held my hand, they sought my mind, they stole my most precious gifts, but I felt nothing. Deeper and deeper I went, into the dark abyss. Those who have violated me will pay with their lives, I thought.

  The murderous thought, which came with the burning sensation of a white-hot fury, surprised me. From the inky depths, I felt a pull toward my body, my center. The stars streaked by. With a rush of warmth, I was back again.

  Flowers everywhere. I was back in Zinnia's room. Back? Had I left? How could I have traveled so far without leaving the bed.

  I cleared my throat and said, "I'm feeling a bit strange," which was the understatement of the year.

  The other two stopped talking and turned to face me. Zinnia was still sitting on the chair, and Zoey had taken a seat on the bottom corner of the bed. I looked from one to the other and back again. My aunt and my daughter were separated by thirty-two years, but now that both were softly lit by the same golden glow of the bedside lamp, they looked like the same person.

  "We're all the same person," I said woozily. "The exact same. Are we clones?"

  Zinnia leaned forward and pressed her cool hand against my forehead. "Zara, we're not clones. You've had a very challenging experience tonight, and you're seeing our similarities. Trauma brings us all closer, and with special families such as ours, the women are always quite similar."

  Zoey shuffled back on the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest. "Mom, she means in witch families. You're a witch, and I'm a witch, and Auntie Z is a witch. It's a family thing."

  My thoughts suddenly shifted into sharp focus around someone I'd had my share of ups and downs with. Someone I'd loved and hated and all the feelings in between.

  I turned to my aunt. "Was my mother a witch?"

  "No," she said softly. There was pain in her expression. "Sometimes it skips a generation."

  "Is that why she died?"

  She took my hand. "No, Zara. Your mother's passing had nothing to do with our fam
ily gift. It wasn't anyone's fault. Sometimes things just happen."

  "She knew that you were a witch?"

  "Yes, but she didn't know about you. None of us did."

  "I'm not going to be a witch," I said with a bit of a snarl. "No, thank you. I decline."

  Zinnia gave me a patient smile. I recognized it as the same smile I used at work to kindly let people know it was time to step away from the reference desk. It was the smile reserved for people who, even in the face of indisputable evidence, were clinging to some ignorant belief. It was the smile reserved for ding-dongs.

  "You don't have a choice," she said. "Be grateful for your gift."

  "Some gift. I feel like goose poop right now, and I feel like I'm having LSD flashbacks, even though I've never actually taken LSD. If this is being a witch, I hate it."

  "You only got your gift on Sunday," she said. "When Zoey turned sixteen that day, she got hers, and you got yours at the exact same time. I can only surmise that the channels opened, and the energy transferred from the Divine Bank to both of you." She squeezed my hand. "The only reason you didn't get yours at sixteen was because of Zoey." She glanced at my daughter. "Because of the, uh, accident."

  I gave my daughter a loving smile. "Getting pregnant with Zoey was the best accident that ever happened to anyone," I said, just as I had hundreds of times before. "Thank you very much."

  "I didn't mean to offend you," Zinnia said. "I'm simply explaining what happened. When your gift didn't manifest at sixteen, we assumed you'd been skipped. My sister was so relieved that her daughter would be normal."

  Zoey chortled. "Normal? My mother has never been normal."

  "I tried to be normal once," I said. "Worst four minutes of my life."

  "Your witch gifts have been repressed these last sixteen years," Zinnia said. "This used to happen all the time when girls got married off as teenagers. It's not so common these days, but you had your..." She paused, perhaps considering the least offensive way to state the facts. "You got your other gift, Zoey, and now here we all are. Three Riddle witches."

  "Here we all are. In my psychedelic nightmare, in a room covered in zinnias, in a town called Wisteria—a town I'd never heard of before I got the idea to apply for a job here." I squinted at my aunt. "You did that to me. You must have done your hocus pocus to bring me here."

  Zinnia jerked her head back, looking aghast. "Of course not," she said vehemently, shaking her head so hard her red hair whipped like red snakes. "We witches don't cast spells to influence each other." She bit her lower lip. "Except when safety is at risk," she added quickly.

  "What about the shoe store? On Monday, I was compelled to buy boots that day, and then I just happened to run into you. That was one of your spells. You all but told me as much when you made fun of me for believing in coincidences." I shook my finger at her. "Witch!"

  "No," Zinnia said, still looking upset at the suggestion. "We simply don't do that."

  "But it's possible, right?" I pointed to the big book sitting on the bed next to my daughter. "Is there a summoning spell in that book?"

  Zoey rested her hand on the book possessively. "Mom, don't be paranoid. This is a whole magical thing that's happening to us. Forces beyond our comprehension."

  Magical? Sure. But that didn't mean it was wonderful or even something I wanted. The air in the small room felt burned and stagnant. I wanted to be back home in my house, in my own bed, with my plain, non-flowered duvet cover and my plain, non-flowered walls.

  "Enough magic for one night," I said. "Sweet child of mine, help me out of this bed. We're going home."

  Zoey extended her lower lip in a pout. Usually, when I saw that lower lip extend half an inch, I'd tell her a bird was going to come along and poop on it, but I wasn't in a teasing mood. I gave her one of my no-nonsense looks.

  "You're being such a mom," she whined.

  I sounded even more like a mom when I answered. "Whatever this new thing is, it can happen to us in the safety of our own home, during daylight hours." I pushed the blankets out of the way so I could dig my way out of the soft bed. My arms felt as weak as twisty ties, and my head was still full of garbage-can drummers, but I had to get out of there.

  "Don't go yet," Zinnia said. "Your powers are fresh and you don't know how to control them." She gave me a no-nonsense look of her own, and for a moment, my mother was in the room with us.

  In an instant, the image of her eyes overlaid a memory of my mother's eyes, glaring at me the same way. Telling me was too impulsive for my own good, and I'd made a terrible mistake. Telling me I had to give up the baby or lose everything. A terrifying anger billowed up inside me, then and also now. On some level, I knew it wasn't fair to transfer my feelings about someone else onto Zinnia, but she looked so much like her.

  "You're not the boss of me," I said, practically growling.

  "I am the elder witch, so I am your boss," Zinnia said. She flicked one hand and the lamp in the room blazed three times brighter. "There are protocols," she said coolly.

  I grabbed my daughter's hand and stood on shaking legs. "I don't know how you summoned us to this town, witch. And I don't know what you want from us. I will admit that the thing you did with the sparkly lights was really cool, but that's beside the point, and we will be storming out now."

  Aunt Zinnia's hazel eyes blazed with a fury I knew well. It wasn't just the fury of a redhead. It was the fury of a redhead with the last name of Riddle, and it was a dangerous force.

  With my daughter's hand gripped tightly, I stormed out of the room. The house had two stories, like ours. We went down a narrow staircase and stopped by the door for shoes. I couldn't find the boots I'd been wearing earlier that evening, but all the footwear was the exact same size. Aunt Zinnia and I were foot twins. I picked a pair of attractive, ankle-high granny boots and started lacing them.

  "I'm borrowing some of your boots," I called over my shoulder. "And if you don't like it, you'll have to witchcraft them off my feet!"

  Chapter 15

  I worried that perhaps I'd gone too far in daring my aunt to witchcraft her boots off my feet. But a minute passed and nothing happened.

  Aunt Zinnia didn't even come downstairs to see us out the front door. I could hear her talking to someone—presumably on the phone with someone. It was a person named Viv, or Finn, or maybe Winnie.

  Zoey's eyes were glistening as she stood by the front door. Her pouting lower lip was in danger of getting pooped on by low-flying pigeons.

  I listened to the snippets of conversation floating down from my aunt's second floor, and then asked my daughter, "Did I just hear Aunt Zinnia call someone Winnie? Do you think she's communicating with the ghost of Winona Vander Zalm?"

  "It sounds like she's on the phone," Zoey said.

  "Can ghosts talk on the phone?"

  "We should wait around and find out."

  Wait around? My heart was fluttering in my chest, the way it did when I took a mega dose of vitamins on an empty stomach, or when something was really wrong.

  "No," I said. "We're leaving now."

  I pushed open the front door and looked outside. The sky was red. The sun was coming up. I'd been unconscious most of the night.

  I grabbed Zoey's arm and pulled her out of the house and down the sidewalk.

  "You're ruining everything," she cried, walking at the slowest speed possible without standing still. "My whole life, I've always wanted to be special. And now that I find out I am, you're wrecking everything."

  I yanked her to speed up. "You are special! But more importantly, you're my daughter, and it's my job to look after you. That woman might be family, but we don't know anything about her. There's a reason she hasn't been in our life all these years. Several reasons." Reasons my mother had never explained.

  Zoey relented to walking at a normal pace. I glanced around at our surroundings. I didn't know this neighborhood. I barely knew our own street, and yet I was absolutely certain we were heading toward our home. My body felt tuned i
nto to some sort of global positioning system, as though every cell in my body had a compass pointing to my house.

  Was that one of the side benefits of being a witch? Direction skills? What a waste of magic, I thought. Direction skills could be recreated with modern technology, and there were probably phone apps that didn't even cost a buck.

  "You can't stop me from seeing her," Zoey said.

  I hadn't said anything about never seeing Zinnia again, but her sass got under my skin. "Sure, I can. We'll move back to the city. You never wanted to come here in the first place."

  Zoey expressed her displeasure with a wordless whine. Not my favorite tune.

  I kept walking with my lips pressed tightly together.

  Before I had a kid, I thought children would be pretty easy, maybe because I was still a child myself. I knew what I wanted, after all. But I underestimated how complicated children's emotions could be, and how their unhappiness doesn't always have a quick fix. Some problems can be solved with a nap or a sundae, but those aren't the ones that break you.

  No matter how many times I told Zoey she was special, she was always looking for something more. Even as a loving and devoted mother, I was only one person. I couldn't give her everything. I couldn't pluck the stars from the sky and put them in her hands. I couldn't even find a stable male role model other than the various bachelors who lived in our old apartment building, and even then I never trusted alone with her. I couldn't make my beautiful, innocent, sensitive daughter happy at all times, and that was painful.

  Now she wanted to embrace being a witch. What was I to do? Give her as much guidance as possible, and trust that she'd be safe and smart about it, the way she was about everything else?

  Or did I have to get on board as well?

  She'd stopped making the whining sound, but I could still hear it inside my head as a phantom tune of unhappiness.

  I broke the silence, speaking gently. "Will you give me some to think about everything? I don't even know what happened last night. I was having a great time, and the food was perfect, and we were all having a lovely time. My aunt was asking about family gifts, and then something took over me. I was still aware, but I wasn't in control. Like stage fright, but without the fright." I remembered how loose my mouth had felt. "Was I speaking in tongues?"