Witching for a Miracle (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 7)

by Constance Barker

  Witching for a Miracle

  by

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2017 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Prologue

  There was smoke covering a town.

  Somewhere beyond it, Aiden Rivers heard the sound of an ocean, but which direction it was coming from was impossible to say. He looked down, and saw cracked pavement under his feet.

  But… no. As he followed the lines of the cracks with his eyes, he realized that the pavement was whole—the cracks weren’t in the ground, they were in the world. They were spreading in a crooked spider web pattern from some point in the smoke that he couldn’t see.

  His feet carried him forward, with no regard to his own will, as if he were just a passenger in his body. He peered into the smoke as he walked, and saw shapes gradually resolve themselves. People he didn’t recognize loomed out of the haze as he passed them, each of them with their faces turned toward the origin of the spreading cracks. Some of them were kneeling.

  Some were almost familiar, but their names were on the tip of his tongue and stuck there. The moment they passed from his sight, he forgot about them. The smoke became thicker, until it obscured everything and clogged his nose and lungs, making it hard to breathe.

  Then, abruptly, it parted. He stood before a yawning Cave. The cracks led into it. Someone was behind him. He tried to turn, but his body wouldn’t obey and kept his eyes focused on the cracks in the world. Slow footsteps approached. He wasn’t afraid of them. But he was afraid. Maybe he was afraid for them, as if some part of him knew who it was but wouldn’t say.

  She walked passed him, her face veiled. On her head was a crown with thirteen points, made of wood and metal and stone, and fire and water and air. He tried to reach for her, to pull the veil aside, but no matter how close he seemed to be, she was always just out of reach. Where he stepped, there were bodies. A woman clutching a bar of gold; a man reaching for a pen; another woman in the arms of a sister…

  There were others, but Aiden had no time to examine them. Instead, he found himself racing forward into the mouth of the Cave, trying to catch up with the girl. He had to step over and around the cracks, and could feel some dark force from within them pulling at him, trying to snag his feet as it sang some kind of song; one of dulcet minor chords made of thousands of tiny voices. The world shook at the sound of them.

  The cove opened wide into a meadow where light radiated from a sunless sky. The girl in the veil and crown was there, standing before a throne of stacked stones, something ancient and powerful. Something lost, he knew, but where it had been lost from, or when, he couldn’t remember.

  Men and women dressed in rags approached from behind him, swarming until the meadow was thick with them and he could barely move. He tried to push his way through them, toward the girl in the veil. She lifted the hem of her gown, and turned. She was going to sit on the throne.

  Panic gripped him. In the distance, he heard the sound of a car crashing, and was suddenly torn. His parents. He knew it was them, even if he couldn’t see them. He remembered that he was dreaming, and that he had dreamed before. None of this had happened, but it would.

  He pushed his way through the crowd, toward the girl before the throne, clawing at shoulders to pull bodies out of the way, and he began to realize that they were heavy because they were dead, and that he wasn’t clawing his way forward—he was dragging himself up from within the piled mass of them. The meadow was gone, and there are the top was the throne, cracking the world beneath it.

  He needed more. He had to hold on to some detail that would be useful when he awoke. Just remember one thing, Aiden. Just one thing!

  Desperate as he was to reach her, he turned away, and willed himself to see. There was the ocean he could hear in the distance. There were the Caves, like winding tunnels into the depths of the Earth and beyond. It was a place… somewhere coastal. He could feel the dream slipping away, retreating from him as if offended that he’d seen through it. Everything became insubstantial, letters stopped making sense.

  Letters! He riveted his attention on the jumble of nonsense figures. The rest of the dream was swallowed up in darkness, and he reached out to touch the words before him, willing them to make sense with every shred of desperation in him.

  They shifted, and dimmed, but just before he felt himself shifting out of the dream and into life, he saw them briefly solidify into the proper order.

  Aiden gasped for air as he awoke. The dream was leaving him, as they always did. Details sank back into his subconscious. He turned, quickly, and reached for his notebook and the pen next to it. Hurriedly, he opened it in the middle to a random empty page and scrawled down the words he’d managed to capture this time. Writing them down was almost an effort, as if his mind new that he’d stolen away with some secret knowledge and was fighting him to get it back.

  He scribbled the message down, and then set his pen aside. It was gone, all of it, and he stared the letters with relief when they still made sense, even if he felt he hadn’t quite captured every letter. That hardly mattered, though. Finally, he’d managed to get something useful out of the vision. A message, clear as day. Whatever was coming, and whoever was responsible for it, he at least knew with some certainty where it was going to happen.

  With a sigh of relief, he ran his finger over the chicken scratch letters.

  It wasn’t a place he recognized. For that matter, his visions were often symbolic rather than literal. But it was a lead, and it was currently the only one that he had.

  Exhausted, he set the notebook aside. They always left him drained, the visions. Probably whatever part of him produced them used his magic to do it. He felt like he’d been marathon casting. The first time he’d suffered these visions, his parents thought he’d contracted mono he was so lethargic for days afterward.

  He’d grown stronger since then, of course. He just hoped he was strong enough.

  Tomorrow, he’d find out what the words meant. Hopefully this was what he needed to find out what his visions were foretelling, and whether it could be averted or not.

  He laid back down, but threw the blankets off to dissipate some of the heat and let his sweat soaked body air-dry. While he did, he rolled the words around in his head.

  Come well to grove coven.

  That wasn’t quite right. Come to coven well grove? Well, come to coven…

  It had been a sign. He’d been looking at a sign.

  Aiden’s heart skipped a beat, and he sat up again, grabbing the notebook and scribbling down the untangled words before he picked up his phone and tapped out a quick search. That was it!

  Welcome to Coven Grove.

  A name from the search results caught his eye, and he opened the article to read. A murder, in Coven Grove, only a month ago. It was a name he’d heard before, just once.

  Martha Tells.

  He recognized her face when he saw it. She’d been in his dream, hadn’t she? The woman clutching the bar of gold?

  It was too much of a coincidence. This place, Coven Grove—it had to be where he was supposed to go.

  He didn’t go back to sleep after that. Instead, he booked a ticket, arrange
d for a car, and scanned the local listings for properties for sale. If this was where it all happened, it's was best that he prepared to settle down for the long haul.

  It looked like he was moving to the US. It wasn’t an exciting prospect, but if his visions were right—and the ones he’d managed to collect had never been wrong in the past—then it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  If he couldn’t stop what was coming, no one was going to live anywhere, ever again.

  Chapter 1

  Bailey Robinson looked into a face that she wasn’t sure was hers. She counted the freckles over the nose and cheeks, or tried to, for a third time; never quite focusing on the whole face. In a distant sort of way, she could almost see herself there for a moment—if she didn’t look at the green eyes too closely. If she reached out to the mirror, she expected that the glass wouldn’t be there—that it would prove not to be a mirror at all, but a window that was opened. The girl on the other side would pull her in, and take her place in this world, and Bailey Robinson would be gone forever.

  It had been like this since she came back from the dead.

  “Bailey,” Aiden called softly from outside the bathroom door, “are you alright?”

  “I’m fine,” Bailey said. She opened the medicine cabinet as much to turn the mirror away as to take a bottle of Tylenol out and pop two into her mouth. She swallowed without the aid of water, and put the bottle back on the shelf; she left the cabinet open.

  It was late, or early. When she opened the bathroom door, the bedroom was dimly lit by a lamp that Aiden had turned on when he realized she wasn’t in bed.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him as she slipped under the covers.

  Aiden watched her with concern. “Again? I could try another charm.”

  “They stopped working a few days ago,” Bailey sighed. “I’m… I don’t know, developing an immunity or something.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s possible to develop an immunity to magic.”

  Bailey shrugged. “Is it possible to come back from the dead?”

  “Fair point,” Aiden sighed. He was still for a moment, and then reached out to take her hand in his.

  His hesitation was understandable—Bailey was an unknown now, wasn’t she? Who knew when her new magic would blow up and level Coven Grove? Or make it rain frogs or, vaporize someone. She was surprised he even slept in the bed with her.

  She squeezed his hand, though, and was just grateful that he was willing to risk it. “Any idea what happens next?” She asked. “The Coven keeps trying to get me to meet up with them, make a plan. I don’t even know where to start.”

  “It’s not that they want to make a plan,” Aiden said softly.

  Bailey raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Well,” he admitted, “I suppose they do want to plan, but that’s not the only reason they want to see you. They care about you.”

  “I know,” Bailey said. She rubbed her eyes with her free hand. “I know they do. I’m just… I need time.”

  “You’ve had two weeks,” Aiden said. Not accusingly, not with judgment; just stating the facts as they stood.

  “Has it been that long already?” Bailey asked. “Feels like its been just a few days.”

  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “If you want need more time,” he said, “then I’ll see to it. Between the coven and the rest of us, I believe the town is sufficiently defended. So far the heuristic boundary wards that Gabriel… ah, that is, Leander… devised for us haven’t been tripped by hunters. Maybe they… just moved on.”

  Bailey snorted. “You think I scared them off?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Aiden rested their clasped hands on his lap, and stroked her fingers with his. “You know that your friends aren’t afraid of you, don’t you?”

  Bailey nodded. But she didn’t mean it.

  “Try to go back to sleep,” Aiden urged. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  She wanted to make him feel better, so she agreed and laid down again, pulling the covers up to her shoulders. She breathed deep, and tried to quiet her thoughts but they kept drawing her attention, nattering and clambering for attention, and there was the ever present hum deep inside, somewhere along the core of her being—maybe it was the core of her being now—as of a live power line, pulled so taut that it buzzed like a crackling guitar string.

  She’d only had her eyes closed for a few minutes when Aiden’s phone began to vibrate on the nightstand. He kept it there, and never entirely silent, ever since they got back and encountered the hunters in the mountains east of town. Now that there were two—or three, depending on how you saw Bailey herself—threats seemingly hanging over them all, it didn’t do to be out of touch.

  Aiden answered it quietly, as if maybe Bailey were potentially asleep already and he didn’t want to wake her.

  “Who is it?” Bailey asked.

  “Who are they?” Aiden asked before he answered, putting his fingers over the phone’s lower half. “It’s Aria. She says we have… visitors.”

  Hunters? Or worse. Bailey sighed, and sat up. It was fine—she wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway.

  “Alright,” Aiden told Aria, “just keep them there. If you don’t believe they’re a threat then—”

  “They aren’t a threat,” Bailey said. She already had her legs off the bed and was reaching for her jeans. “No one is a threat.”

  “We’ll, ah… be there in a moment,” he said. He hung up.

  “What’s happening now?” Bailey asked. “Some fresh new problem?”

  Aiden got out of bed as well and started to dress. “I don’t believe so,” he said. “Unless it’s a hunter trick but Leander’s boundary wards would have sensed their intentions unless they were using some kind of magic themselves to defeat them.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely,” Bailey said. She tugged her shirt on. “So, who do they say they are?”

  “Witches,” Aiden said. “Aria says they’re calling themselves witches—and they… want to see the new queen.”

  Chapter 2

  This was not the condition under which Bailey wanted to see the Coven again. Once Aria heard that Bailey was coming down to meet them, though, she contacted everyone else.

  They met at the Bakery—which, since Ryan’s article had come out, had certainly seen busier weeks—and Bailey saw them all inside when she and Aiden reached the sidewalk. She stopped there, and looked at Aiden. “I don’t want to do this right now.”

  “I can send everyone away if you like,” he said.

  He would, she realized.

  In the days following Ryan’s death, everyone had been doting, and supportive, and for a day or so that had been okay—but after a week it had become hard to breath through it. And then came the questions—what Bailey thought they should do next; how she thought the Throne would work; what she’d seen on the other side and could she be more specific? And by the way, what did she plan to do?

  There were a lot of talks about her new magic and how it worked that she was often largely quiet during their speculation.

  All of it had culminated with her practically moving in with Aiden and begging for just some time to grieve Ryan’s loss and figure some things out for herself. A few days had become a week, and then two, and she was no closer to feeling better about the loss of her father—her adopted father, anyway; she’d gained a grifter of a biological father but it didn’t seem like a fair trade—or about the unpredictable nature of her magic or the things it was making her feel.

  No, she wasn’t ready for this.

  But she was here, and already some of the people inside were looking through the window and seeing her. Chloe, especially, had a hopeful look on her face that Bailey could see even from the sidewalk.

  “No,” Bailey sighed. “Let’s just… see who these women are and get back home.”

  “You’re not the least bit curious about these witches?” Aiden asked as they approached the Grovey Goodies Bakery porc
h.

  It wasn’t as easy as all that, but Bailey didn’t feel like getting into it. The Coven, and Bailey’s friends, and even the people of Coven Grove—however distant they were at the moment—knew Bailey as herself first, and pending queen of the witches second.

  These new women hadn’t come to meet Bailey Robinson—they’d come to meet The Witch Queen.

  “Just try and relax,” Aiden said. “If you need me to extract you, just ask for a cup of tea and I’ll work it out.”

  She smiled at him, and paused at the door to kiss him. Maybe Aiden didn’t entirely get what she was going through; but some men would have gotten frustrated with her over it, she thought. Not him. He just wanted her to know he was there for her. Now that her magic worked on some other level, she could feel that in his mind even through his habitual words. “I love you, Aiden Rivers.”

  “I love you, Bailey Robinson,” he said softly. “Come on; let’s meet your new subjects.”

  Bailey grunted and rolled her eyes before she opened the Bakery door.

  Chloe was the first to rush her. Bailey’s birth mother threw her arms around Bailey and held her tight for a long moment. “It’s good to see you,” she whispered.

  “You, too,” Bailey whispered back. And it was, in a way. There was a tension already encircling them, but whatever Chloe and Bailey’s history was—and it was complicated—compassion and even desperation radiated off of Chloe.

  Don’t be alarmed, Chloe’s thoughts said in Bailey’s mind.

  You realize that sort of makes me want to be alarmed, Bailey responded. There was a time when communicating telepathically was more difficult, and required them both to be ‘looking’ at one another mentally with their shared gift. Since Bailey’s magic had changed, though, they’d both become somehow more accessible to one another. Just another reason Bailey had needed time away.

  Once Chloe withdrew, her eyes carrying the same gentle warning that her thoughts had, Bailey faced the rest of the room.