No Crones About It

by Amanda M. Lee

  No Crones About It

  A Spell’s Angels Cozy Mystery Book 2

  Amanda M. Lee

  WinchesterShaw Publications

  Copyright © 2019 by Amanda M. Lee

  All rights reserved.

  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.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. One

  2. Two

  3. Three

  4. Four

  5. Five

  6. Six

  7. Seven

  8. Eight

  9. Nine

  10. Ten

  11. Eleven

  12. Twelve

  13. Thirteen

  14. Fourteen

  15. Fifteen

  16. Sixteen

  17. Seventeen

  18. Eighteen

  19. Nineteen

  20. Twenty

  21. Twenty-One

  22. Twenty-Two

  23. Twenty-Three

  24. Twenty-Four

  25. Twenty-Five

  26. Twenty-Six

  27. Twenty-Seven

  28. Twenty-Eight

  29. Twenty-Nine

  30. Thirty

  Mailing List

  About the Author

  Books by Amanda M. Lee

  Prologue

  The wind howled like a wounded feral animal. It shook the small shack in which we’d taken refuge for the night so hard I was convinced the roof would be torn off or cave in on top of us.

  Of course, I’d just heard the story about three pigs, and there was a lot of huffing and puffing in that tale. The woman with me — she wasn’t my mother, but I was instructed to call her that in public in case anyone questioned why we were together — said talking pigs weren’t real. As for talking wolves, they were a different story.

  I didn’t understand. The woman said it was normal because I was too young. Age didn’t mean much to me. She said I was four, almost five. I could count. However, the passing of time meant very little to me. I only knew that we were constantly moving ... and hiding.

  It had been that way as long as I could remember. We never stayed in the same place for more than a few nights. I didn’t have a home. I wasn’t even sure what that word meant. We were children of the stars. That’s what she said, the woman I was with. The wolves were children of the moon and we were children of the stars.

  “Are there others?” That’s what I asked as we huddled before a fire barrel inside the shack. The windows had been opened for venting, but the smoke was still thicker than I would’ve liked.

  She shrugged as she placed a blanket over my shoulders. She wasn’t my mother, but she cared for me as if she was. She made sure I was fed — we rarely went hungry for more than a day — and she did her best to keep me warm. The chills that often pervaded my body were from fear, not cold.

  It was cold tonight, though. We were in an area thick with trees ... and wind. I couldn’t get warm. She seemed to sense that, because she sat next to me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders and lent me some of her warmth.

  “Other what?” she asked, her head cocked to the side as she listened to the wind. She kept one ear on my chatter — which she said was important because if I didn’t ask questions I wouldn’t find answers — but her focus was clearly elsewhere.

  “We’re the children of the stars,” I repeated. “Wolves are children of the moon. Are there others?”

  A small smile played at the corners of her mouth. She seemed amused by the question. “You’re getting ahead of your lessons, little one. You’re not ready to hear about the others.”

  “You told me about the wolves,” I persisted. “I want to know about the others.”

  She sighed, the sound long and drawn out. Weariness permeated her every mannerism and expression. She held strong, though. She always held strong.

  “There are vampires,” she started. “They are children of the night.”

  I knew about vampires, but I had been warned that the ones we saw in movies — a rare treat — were not real. “They can’t go out in the sun, right?”

  She nodded. “Very good.” She gave me encouragement regularly, but it didn’t feel like love. It felt like responsibility, and I could never figure out why. I saw other children playing in parks when we passed, laughing and joking.

  That was not my life.

  “And they drink blood.” I wrinkled my nose at the thought. I didn’t care how hungry I got, I couldn’t imagine drinking blood.

  “They do.” She bobbed her head. “There are also children of the earth. Do you know who they are?”

  I screwed up my face in concentration. “Witches.” I wasn’t sure how I knew that. It was something I’d picked up along the way.

  “And what do we know about witches?”

  “There are good and bad.”

  Her smile widened. “Very good. You must always be sure. The bad witches are your enemies. The good witches are your friends. You must always be mindful which you’re dealing with because good witches will help you.”

  I was still confused. “Am I a witch?”

  She hesitated, as if debating how to answer. “Yes ... in some ways. You’re more than that, though. You’re not a child of the earth, at least not specifically.”

  I was a child of the stars. I knew that. She’d told me over and over ... and yet I still didn’t understand. “What are children of the stars?”

  “They are ... more.” She shook her dark head and rubbed the spot between her eyebrows. It was clear our travels — we’d trekked a great distance the past few days — were starting to catch up with her. “You’re not ready to understand what you are,” she explained. “You’re too young.”

  She often said that. I found it frustrating. “Maybe I’m not too young.”

  “You’re too young,” she repeated. “You can’t understand.”

  “When will you tell me?”

  “When I’m sure you can understand.”

  That didn’t help ease my agitation. “But ... .”

  “No.” She extended a finger by way of warning, which immediately shut my mouth. She rarely yelled and never struck me by way of punishment. But she did have her limits. “You’re not ready to understand. I hope to be there when you are ready, but if I’m not I have faith you will figure it out on your own.”

  I huddled deeper into the blanket when the wind howled again. “Why does it have to sound like wolves?” I’d been taught over and over — since before I could talk perhaps — that wolves were my enemy. They were something to fear, aside from the claws that could rip out my throat and the glowing eyes that haunted my dreams. They were more dangerous than even that.

  I’d seen wolves before. The human kind, I mean. The ones that walked as men and women during the day and killers at night. They were the creatures we ran from now. There were other creatures to run from at different times — monsters with strange names that I didn’t remember — but most often it was wolves.

  They terrified me to my very bones.

  “That’s how they hide,” my companion explained, brushing my flaxen hair from my face with gentle fingers. “They can’t stop from screaming at the night, but they cannot hide like they used to in olden times.”

  “When they hid among the Indians?” I asked.

  She smirked. “Native Americans,” she corrected. “Basically, though, you’re exactly right. The first wolf tribes in this land were born among the native people. They did not come into creation to do evil. They were good people who needed a way to protect their own
... hence they took the form of one of their spirit animals to act as protectors.”

  It was a heavy conversation for a four-year-old, but I’d been told on numerous occasions that I was wise beyond my years. I wanted to understand. I couldn’t help feeling that if I understood, perhaps I would be able to help and we could stop running. That’s all I really wanted ... an end to the movement.

  No, that’s not entirely true. I wanted a home like other children. I was fearful it would never happen. In my gut, that was the desire that haunted my dreams even more than snapping teeth and rivers of blood. Children of the stars weren’t supposed to have roots, yet I yearned for them.

  “Why did the wolves change?” I asked finally. This was key to understanding our enemy, yet I always struggled. I couldn’t understand how something could start out good and turn evil. To me, everything should always be good.

  She worked her jaw before answering. “I’m not sure you can understand.”

  “I can.”

  She patted my head. “Fine. I will try. The thing with wolves is that not all of them are bad. There are some that are good. They remember why they came into existence, the persecution they faced, and they’re genuinely good people.

  “There is a fringe element that is bad, though,” she continued. “It’s growing. The children of the moon — the bad ones, at least — want to obliterate the children of the stars so they can shine brighter.

  “Think about the night sky,” she pressed, gesturing toward the window. “The moon is the biggest element, so it immediately catches your eye. The stars, however, are numerous and together their power can eclipse the moon. The moon never wants to be eclipsed and that’s what these wolves are fighting.”

  “That’s why they chase us?”

  “Essentially. They chase you harder than others because you can eclipse the moon harder and faster than most. Your birth was foretold years before you arrived ... and the wolves heard the whispers. They are afraid of you.”

  My eyes widened. “They’re afraid of me?” My voice was a raspy whisper. “But ... why? I don’t want to hurt them. I just want to be left alone.”

  “They don’t know what they fear. They know you’re powerful and, to them, that’s enough reason to want to kill you.”

  And I was back to not understanding. “But ... .”

  “No.” She shook her head, firm. “That’s enough questions for one night. You need rest. We will leave tomorrow.”

  I feared she would say that. It wasn’t that I was overly fond of the shack — quite frankly, it was something straight out of my worst dreams — but I was sick of the wandering. I wanted just a few days of peace. We never got it. I was about to point that out to her when the howling wind shifted. This time the noise outside was different, more intense.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood on end and small bumps broke out on my arms and neck as a chill ran through me. I instantly knew we would be leaving much sooner than we planned ... and for once, I was fine with it. “They’re here,” I whispered.

  The woman was instantly on her feet, her eyes daggers of hate as she turned her attention to the windows. “Pack,” she ordered. “We must leave ... right now.”

  I didn’t own anything other than the blanket, a locket that was tucked away in my pocket and a small bag. Essentially, I was always packed. Wordlessly, I shoved the blanket into my bag and slipped the straps over my shoulders. I was used to this. The wolves always found us.

  “Will we hide the stars?” I asked. “Is that how we will get away?”

  She nodded without hesitation. “Yes. We will hide the stars. It must be fast.”

  I instinctively raised my hands. She might’ve ordered the spell that needed to be cast, but I provided the power. It was always that way these days. I was strong. I realized that. I might not have understood why or the reason for the running, but I grasped the fact that it was necessary.

  “We should go now,” I insisted, magic sparking from my fingertips. This child of the stars was ready to run even though I wanted a place to stay so badly it caused me to ache. “They’re outside. I can hear them ... and sense them ... and feel them.”

  She arched an eyebrow, intrigue lighting her sharp features. “You can feel them? How long have you been able to do that?”

  “I don’t know. I ... .”

  She waved her hand to cut me off. “We’ll speak of it later. For now, you must shroud us. There are too many to fight.”

  I’d figured that out myself. If we stumbled across one wolf — sometimes two — we destroyed them. It was easier. There were at least five outside the shack. Too many.

  “We’re already under,” I informed her. “We’re safe.”

  She didn’t question me. She didn’t poke her head out and play it safe. Instead, she shoved me in front of her and we walked into a world of snapping teeth, essentially hidden from their senses, yet vulnerable all the same.

  I didn’t understand, but I knew there would be no looking back.

  I BOLTED TO A SITTING position in my bed, a light sheen of sweat coating my body. The dream was fresh in my head — there’d been blood and growls enough to cause my mind to want to implode — and like all the dreams from when I was a child, I wondered if it was real.

  “Children of the stars,” I muttered, dragging a hand through my long blond hair. “What a load of hooey.”

  Even as I said the words I wasn’t sure I believed them. The woman from the dreams — I couldn’t always remember her face as clearly as I did this evening — evoked feelings of regret and sadness. It was as if I missed her even though I couldn’t remember her.

  At some point I became Scout Randall. The little girl in the dream — if she was real at all — was nothing but a fragment. Everything from before I was found in front of a fire station was a blank. The only hints of that life came to me in dreams, and I could never be sure I was imagining what I thought must’ve happened or fighting memories that wanted to take me over.

  I didn’t understand.

  There was a war going on in my brain, and although I’d managed to fight the dreams to the point they no longer overwhelmed me — a regular occurrence when I was a teenager — they still snuck up on me more often than I liked. I wanted answers about my past, but I was willing to forego them if it meant the semi-regular dreams would end.

  All I truly wanted was peace.

  As if on cue, the wind howled and caused me to shiver. That must have triggered the dream, I rationalized as I slowly got to my feet. The cabin I called home — a perk of my job with the Spells Angels, the biker gang that fought monsters the world over — was rustic, but in much better shape than the shack in my dream. I’d been working on it steadily since arriving in Hawthorne Hollow, a hamlet in northern Lower Michigan. Before arriving here, I was stationed in Detroit. I thought I would miss the city. It turned out, I didn’t.

  Because I knew sleep was probably something I wouldn’t be able to claim again tonight, I padded to the window and looked out. The trees whipped back and forth, and I almost expected to see lightning split the sky. But it was quiet ... other than the wind.

  It howled, shaking the walls, and causing shivers to run down my spine.

  Then another type of howl joined the song. This one belonged to a wolf. How close it was, I couldn’t say. Not so close I worried, even though the dream remained at the forefront of my brain.

  Another howl joined in ... and another. There were at least three wolves in the area, hiding in the wind. I understood it on an instinctive level, and while I no longer felt fear as I did as a child, I remained unnerved.

  Something bad was about to happen. I could feel it.

  One

  Present Day

  “Duck and cover!”

  Marissa Martin used a detached tree branch to cover her head and dodged behind a large maple as a wall of water descended on us.

  I remained rooted to my spot and deflected the small tsunami with a bit of magic, re-directing it toward the lake
where it had originated. I was not amused.

  “Knock that off!” I growled, extending a warning finger in the direction of the red-haired woman standing in about two feet of water. She had weaponized the water, which seemed to bother Marissa more than me.

  “Oh, well, that’s going to work,” Marissa drawled. If it was possible, she seemed even farther away than she had moments before. I didn’t look over my shoulder to see if that was the case. “Just tell her to knock it off. I bet she’s quaking in her shoes.”

  The woman standing in front of me was a siren — which meant she essentially lived in the water — so I was fairly convinced she wasn’t wearing shoes. Of course, to be fair, I wasn’t all that familiar with sirens. During my time with Spells Angels – we’re talking years here – I’d fought many a monster. Sirens were a new one for me.

  “What are you even doing in Michigan?” I barked at the woman, who was swirling her hand in such a manner I was convinced she was about to create another water cyclone. “Don’t even think about doing that.”

  She ignored the warning. “I happen to like Michigan,” she shot back. Her hair was so red Lucy Ricardo would’ve been jealous. “Who are you to tell me where I can and can’t live? Last time I checked, it was a free country.”

  I growled as she shot another fountain of water in my direction. This time I barely managed to get my hands up in time to ward off the water. I was annoyed with Marissa’s insistence on hiding instead of helping — we were supposed to be partners on this assignment — so I felt zero guilt when I directed the water toward her.