Pointy Hats and Witchy Cats
(The Rhinestone Witches, Book 1)
by
Addison Creek
Copyright © 2018 by Addison Creek
Cover Design © Broken Arrow Designs
This novel is a work of fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is completely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
Contact Addison Creek
Books by Addison Creek
Chapter One
“The wedding will be perfect, darling. Just because it’s raining today doesn’t mean it’ll be raining tomorrow,” cooed the woman behind me.
That was my stepmother, Blossom.
I was intentionally looking out the window. If I closed one eye at a time, the rain coming down in sheets looked different.
“It can’t rain tomorrow. I already told you that,” said a second woman’s desperate and whiny voice. “If it rains, it’ll ruin everything. My life will be over! My dreams will be crushed!”
That was my stepsister Bailey. She was prone to drama like a musician was prone to play music.
If I’d had my way I’d have paid someone to take her off our hands long ago. Unfortunately, she was my evil stepmother’s pride and joy.
Despite the rain, the day was already incredibly hot and sticky. The back of my neck trickled with sweat.
“Jade, have you finished your to-do list? What about Mitsy?” said Blossom. She had ice-blond hair cut razor straight to her shoulders. She liked to wear belts around her bellybutton to show off just how thin she was. One meal a day will work wonders on that front.
Blossom’s daughter tried to keep up with her, but was always a little plumper. I knew for a fact that she hid chocolate chip cookies under her pillow most nights.
Also, Bailey’s hair had more waves in it than Blossom’s, and she was a couple of inches shorter than her mother. Neither of them wishing to be outdone by the other, they both wore towering high heels.
I glanced over my shoulder at Blossom. Slowly.
By the time my eyes met hers she was already getting irritated with my insolence.
“Almost,” I said.
Her eyes sharpened. She sensed blood, some that she herself would spill.
There were several other people in the room, all impeccably dressed wedding lackeys, all looking at me disapprovingly but saying nothing.
Bailey had no such reserve.
“How could you not be finished!! My wedding is tomorrow! We do everything for you and yet here you laze! Get Mitsy and finish the list at once!” She stomped her tiny foot on the perfect marble floor.
“Marble throughout!” had been Blossom’s imperious decree when she’d shown up a few years ago.
All sorts of retorts piled up in my throat.
First of all, my dad was the one with the money. Blossom liked to spend it, but that didn’t make it hers. Second of all, despite my dad’s having married Blossom and given me the worst stepsister the world had ever seen, they would never be family.
“Please calm down. You might enlarge your capillaries if you keep speaking like that,” said Bailey’s facialist.
“I’ll go find her,” I conceded, mostly so I could leave this meeting.
As I walked out of the high-ceilinged room, I glanced out the window and silently wished for the rain to continue.
Then boredom set in, and I wondered how I was going to get through the next day or so.
The dead heat of summer made my dress stick to my armpits. Absently, I pulled it away from my lower back.
My clothes were battlefield armor. They protected me from the verbal jabs, the rude looks, and anything else that might come my way during the day.
Every day.
My father knew it happened all the time, and he was sympathetic, but not helpful.
I had considered leaving town too many times, even before the wedding took over our lives. Now I wanted to leave town so desperately I had actually bought a bus ticket.
Every time I thought about leaving, it was to a different destination.
Every time the date approached, I packed my bags and I told myself that this was the time.
But Bailey always wanted something.
Or my dad wanted something.
Or something strange happened that kept me from going.
Once I was about to leave and a windstorm rose up out of nowhere.
I persisted, and as I got outside, a tree crashed over our driveway.
Blossom had been furious.
Needless to say, I had stayed put.
The good news this time was that I had suitcases ready to go. Two sets, in fact, one packed as if I were going to a cold weather climate and another if it were to be warm.
Sheets of rain were coming down outside.
Tomorrow was the wedding.
There was only one place I could go when I needed solace: the epic treehouse in the back yard. The handyman had helped me build it when I was in high school. Money had been no object, so we were able to make it as nice as we pleased.
I lived out there now, and that’s where I headed when I said I was going off to find Mitsy.
As far as treehouses went, this one was terribly fancy. My room in the house had been the one thing my dad had held his ground on with my stepmother, but even so, not long after they moved in I just couldn’t take it anymore.
At least in the treehouse I had a bit of privacy, and piles of books and pillows for comfort. I had converted the flower room into my own little kitchen, and when I moved out there I told myself I never had to see my stepmother again.
Now here I was doing all the work for my evil stepsister’s wedding.
My dad found me later. He gave me rueful look as he climbed the ladder and requested permission to enter.
“Fine,” I muttered.
My dad had nondescript hair and always wore collared shirts with small square patterns on them. He was the definition of boring. He was almost six feet tall and had gone soft around the middle.
Blossom was always encouraging him to eat more vegetables and exercise more. He smiled and nodded and kept eating his bagel and cream cheese for breakfast.
“How are you doing, kiddo?” he asked.
He asked this question often, since family blowups were a dime a dozen. Usually Blossom went crying to him to tell him how horrible I was. She was perpetually asking if we could ship me off to boarding school. Never mind that I was too old now; just get rid of me, that was her basic message. Then she could have the domain that was rightfully hers all to herself.
“Did you finish the wedding list?” he asked gently.
I rolled my eyes.
“Finished it a long time ago,” I muttered.
“Why did you tell Blossom you hadn’t?” he asked.
I didn’t answer.
“She’s confused as to why you were upset,” my dad tried again.
“Let me guess, she doesn’t have any idea what she said,” I said into my pillow.
The trees were blustering and blowing outside as we talked, and I found myself wondering what exactly was going to happen tomorrow if the weather was bad on Bailey’s big day.
Blossom had a chart about that.
At the top was suing Mother Nature. I was pretty sure Blossom thought Mother Nature was a hippy outfit in a California valley, with an address and an ability to retain lawyers if sued for wedding ruination.
When I didn’t answer, my dad broke the silence. “Thanks for doing all of this work. Bailey really appreciates it,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder.
He had never been much for father-daughter chats.
“She thinks it’s her due,” I muttered.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. He didn’t like to hear anything bad about Bailey no matter how poorly she behaved.
“Okay, get some rest. Tomorrow is a big day,” he said.
So big I kind of hoped it exploded.
My dad and I had a good relationship, considering. For years it had been a little strained, but I knew he loved me more than anything.
As he was leaving, I stopped him.
“Dad, what happened three years ago?” I asked.
I saw his shoulders tense. I had never asked him that before. During all my days of wondering, I had managed to refrain because I knew he didn’t want to talk about it.
But this stupid wedding had broken something in me.
I had to know.
My dad was silent for so long, I actually thought he might feel guilty enough about this whole wedding thing to break down and tell me.
“You should wish for better things for your sister. You shouldn’t wish for it to rain,” he said. And then he was gone.
Three years ago almost to the day, there had been a very strange weekend. For months leading up to it my dad had been in an utter panic, which was odd, because he was usually very calm and difficult to rattle. At first I hadn’t known anything was wrong, then I started to notice subtle changes. He would get angry easily and sometimes even yell. He was short with his business partners. Once he refused to leave a tip at a restaurant even though the waiter hadn’t done anything wrong. My dad was usually a very good tipper.
He got so bad after a while that I decided he was in a downright panic about something.
The weekend had finally arrived, and he’d nearly lost it. If Blossom hadn’t been out of town at a spa, she probably would have kicked him out of the house. My dad had been so frantic come Friday night of that strange week that I was worried for him.
Saturday had been more of the same.
Then a strange man had shown up at the door.
I say strange because he had a pile of white hair and a light-colored suit and he looked kind of like my dad. He didn’t stay long.
After that my dad had been considerably calmer, but he had refused—and had continued to refuse to this day—to answer any questions about what was going on.
The only thing to come out of it was that since then he had been nicer about my mother. He still refused to tell me any real details, but his stance on mentioning her had softened. There was also a strange sense of sadness. Sometimes I would look at him and his eyes would be filled with regret. If I mentioned it to him he’d always snap out of it and say that he was fine.
That weekend had been pivotal for me, and I didn’t even know why.
After my dad left, I fell asleep in the treehouse. The rehearsal dinner had taken place the night before, so there wasn’t anything official going on tonight. Bailey needed the evening right before the wedding to prep.
I was glad to fall sleep, because I wanted to see if I would dream of the man. He had been in my dreams the night before, and I’d woken up . . . all hot and bothered, shall we say, and I was hoping he’d come back tonight. My dream the night before had been especially vivid; I had never had a dream like that before. To be more specific, he had been especially vivid.
If only a guy who strode around like that really did exist! He looked like he could pick up a whole tree trunk, throw it over his shoulder, and walk up a hill with it.
In the dream, he was strolling around my dad’s property, tall and broad-shouldered, his hair close-cropped and his clothes all black. The only thing to mar his perfection was that he walked with a limp. How such a big, powerful-looking guy ended up with a limp I didn’t know.
The night was almost as hot as the day, and that feeling carried over into the dream. I felt sticky and I wondered how a guy that big and wearing black jeans could pull off not sweating. But he looked entirely comfortable.
Light was coming from somewhere, and I realized that it was from Blossom’s “burglar lights.” I had wanted to put up fairy lights, but she had said absolutely not. They weren’t safe enough.
So here we were with ugly floodlights in the back yard.
At least they let me see this hot dream guy.
“Where was I?” I wondered in my dream.
An outdoor pavilion had been set up for the wedding, beneath which was a limitless supply of tables and chairs. This setup carried over into the dream, with the man strolling through the tables as though he was looking for something. The name tags hadn’t been laid out yet, and in general there wasn’t much to look at, so what was he doing there?
And furthermore, where was I watching from? This wasn’t one of those dreams where I was floating above it all. I glanced around and realized that I was in the bushes, with a twig tangled in my hair.
My nerves zinged, causing me to move suddenly, and revealing me to the big guy, who started to stride my way.
Just as he did, a small plump woman in her fifties came forward. She was wearing a strap across her shoulder that stretched downward to her waist, and she looked official. The man stopped and bent his head to speak with her. It was a long way for him to go, but he seemed to be listening intently as she spoke. She pointed her hand as she talked to him, and he nodded as if she was saying something that he thought was important. She was clearly his sidekick.
I just wished someone would listen to me that way, as if there was nothing else in the world more important than what I had to say.
I strained to hear what she was saying, but I couldn’t catch any of it. Anyhow, with all of his focus on her, this was my chance to get away!
As slowly as possible, I started to pull back from the bushes.
As I eased away from the last grasping twigs, a groundhog munching on grass stopped to gaze at me. I gazed back but stayed very still, and the groundhog went back to munching. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I had a feeling he was shaking his head at me for whatever reason.
Questions jumbled through my mind.
Who was that guy? Was he part of the wedding? Who was the woman and why were they sne
aking around at night?
Then something sharp jabbed into my toe and I looked down.
Why hadn’t I worn shoes?
Chapter Two
Something sharp and painful stabbed into my shoulder, making me whimper. The object stabbed again and I opened my eye a crack. Blue fluff swam before me, and I realized that I was looking into my treehouse pillow.
The point poking into me was so sharp, I wondered if someone had gone to a high school to steal a javelin. Then I saw that it was just one of my stepmother’s shellacked nails.
“It’s your sister’s wedding day and you’re in bed!! She’s going to think you don’t love her,” Blossom shrieked.
She was wearing a tinsel-colored silk robe and had rollers in her hair.
I stared up at her stupidly.
“Get up!” she bent over me and hissed.
Okay, yes, Bailey was my stepsister, I couldn’t argue with that. If love and hate were the same thing, you might be able to say I loved her. From that vantage point it was my most dearly held wish that I did love her.
Blossom’s mouth worked above me as I fought to shove away sleep. It was just as if I hadn’t slept well.
You know the fairy tale of the wicked stepsisters?
For my part I always wondered if evil stepsisters were evil because they fed off each other. Alone they might have been tolerable.
They might even have been nice.
Or so I had foolishly thought, until I met Bailey.
Bailey didn’t need a sister to play off of. She managed evil all on her own.
She looked down her pert little nose at me and said, “My goodness and wash your feet before you dare put on that dress! It cost three hundred dollars!”
Silly me. I had always thought money would buy me pretty things, but my bridesmaid’s dress was the most stunningly ugly thing I had ever seen in my life.
I glanced down at my feet and saw a couple of grass stains, plus a twig stuck between two toes.
That was strange.
How had that happened while I was asleep in my bed?
My stepmother clearly didn’t care.
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