Resting Witch Face

by Hazel Hendrix

  Once we finally were able to leave, Dot was chattering the whole way home. She definitely regretted drinking too many enhancements this morning, it certainly wasn’t the right mix for such a stressful turn of events. But mainly, she was upset about losing her edge with such a great selection of guys around.

  It was so unlike her, she’d normally be freaking out and hiding in her room for a week after something like that. Instead, the Confidence was in full force and she was planning to go out again after she dropped me off and filled our aunts in on what happened. I told her that they’d probably heard, but she wanted to give her story. A story she was sure that at least a few eligible bachelors would want to hear, especially if she wore that pretty cranberry dress she knew she looked good in, but never felt comfortable wearing out.

  I could have throttled her and was inwardly planning an intervention in the back of my mind. But all I could really concentrate on was the good probability that I was a murder suspect.

  If he was poisoned before he was hanged, I was really up a tree. There were so many lilies of the valley, oleanders, white snakeroots, and other attractive wicked plants on our property. Surely one of the witches who went away from college and was back for the annual Hettymoot visit had become a lawyer, or at least a paralegal. I became determined to find that witch.

  Gatherings of speculating witches gave way to tilled fields as we got closer to home. I had a love hate relationship with the rocky driveway to our land and the rickety wooden gate in front of my cabin. Right then I was in love and never wanted to leave, but I knew that wouldn’t last. Boredom and the constant wonder of what I was missing out there in the world were bound to creep back into my thoughts.

  Postcards from Mom didn’t help, either. I got one in the mail two days ago, telling me what I already knew. She was skipping Hettymoot this year for a music festival.

  I dropped my bag in surprise when I saw a man with white streaks in his hair sitting on my porch. My brother looked up at the clatter and didn’t say a word as he disappeared inside. He’d come back to live with me only a month ago and I still wasn’t used to anyone being there.

  Not that it bothered me. If anything, I was glad to have him, ecstatic even. Wesley and I grew up close. He used to be my best friend. He was also turning 29 years old in two weeks.

  His bedroom door shut loudly as I came in the house. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to hear my bumbling apology for forgetting he was there. According to Wesley, I shouldn’t get used to his presence anyway. I always told him that wasn’t true, but he did have centuries of history on his side to prove his point. And now a boy that everyone assumed was just another one of our doomed relations was discovered dead in town. If Wes hadn’t already heard, I didn’t want to be the one that told him.

  If I was being honest with myself, and I was very bad at doing that, I would have recognized that my brother’s return was the most likely reason that I’d been itching to drive off into the sunset, even before the potential murder charges. And though I pushed it deep down every time the thought popped up, his very existence was the reason I was so reluctant to become a mother. I’d never hook up with one of my cousins, even if he was a 100th cousin. I didn’t remember my father, very few of us did. I never wanted to know the pain of losing a son, either.

  I’d watched my brother live with the anxiety of knowing his days were numbered for a long time. I remembered the day it finally clicked for him, as my aunts were joking in hushed whispers at the death of one of Priscilla’s nephews. He’d drowned during a trip to the ocean, strangled by not one but three octopuses. Octopi. Whatever.

  I was eight and Wesley was ten. My brother was a smart boy in general, which essentially made him a genius for one of Hetty’s male descendants. He bolted out the back door and I ran after him to find him thrashing angrily through the hyacinth, only to watch the plants magically repair every stem.

  It changed him, rather drastically. The kids in Dewdrop all went to a private school run by witches. Wes was one of their star students, but it never meant much to his teachers. Once he finally figured out why, he stopped trying and never did homework again. We drifted apart when he started spending more time alone as I began studying under the tutelage of my aunts. At first he became paranoid and didn’t venture far from home. That gave way to recklessness once he hit his teens.

  Wesley didn’t go to college, he never even finished high school. He had one serious human girlfriend when he was 20, but he broke it off with her after a year so she could find someone better. I met her once at Hettymoot, basically the only time I ever saw him. My brother only worked part time at crappy jobs for party money and racked up an impressive amount of credit card debt.

  What was the point to doing things right? If his life was going to be short, he might as well live it to the fullest.

  That’s what he told me when he left home ten years ago. Now he was back and at first I was happy, but every time I spent more than a few minutes with him, the strangest chill crept across my skin. His hair used to be dark brown like mine. According to him, the first white streak appeared about two weeks before he left New York City. Now he had five. Not random gray hairs sparkling into existence that could have been there unnoticed for a while. Full on stark white streaks. He didn’t say anything else about it, but I could sense he was leaving something out.

  I offered to help him investigate the cause magically, even though I wasn’t very skilled at such a thing. He refused. Last week I told him we should go to one of our cousins, maybe one of Feather’s aunts, to test if he was cursed. It turned into a huge fight. He didn’t want to know what was killing him and why should I? He was past his sell-by date anyway and was thankful to have made it this far. The oldest living male descendant, Hetty’s oldest son Merit, our greatest grandfather, only made it to 29. The odds of Wesley going past that were slim.

  And deep down, I knew this. Everyone else accepted it, the boys included. Why couldn’t I?

  The Witches of Madison County were rather blasé about it now, but only because the women before them had done everything in their power to change things, Hetty and her daughters included. They claimed it wasn’t a curse. There was no hex to remove. Protection spells helped and were cast vigilantly.

  I’d read a lot of human paranormal literature, just for laughs. And most stories told of the caveat that all magic comes with a price. Losing our fathers, our sons, that was our price. It was simply the natural order of things. An immutable truth. Which is why no witch here was batting an eye at Thomas’s demise, even though I insisted that he wasn’t one of our cousins.

  Call it wishful thinking, but I took issue with that whole theory. Sure seemed like a curse to me. Other magical families didn’t suffer the same awful fate. Why did ours? Was it in our DNA or something? And how did magical DNA even work, if there was such a thing? Is that what made us different from humans? I could ponder these things for hours.

  In any case, my brother was special. If anyone could escape this, he could. He was so much smarter than the other boys, who once grown pretty much embodied the term ‘himbo.’ They were smoking hot and really dumb. Wes was cute enough, but missing something ruggedly masculine that the others had, which left him a little dull in comparison. Plus, he was highly intelligent.

  We didn’t have male witches, warlocks, or wizards. Boys couldn’t use magic, not in our family anyway. Wesley couldn’t exactly either, but he understood it and when we were younger, we could both see colored auras around people and things. He could recognize if something was spelled and even knew the effect better than I could, which he always said was a lucky guess. And he could sense when otherworldly danger was approaching, which was one of the main ways we lost our boys. They couldn’t tell a werewolf was approaching until it was breathing on the back of there soon to be torn out necks.

  Wesley once dodged a group of wrathful gnomes after he’d stumbled into their mushroom patch while exploring on Wonder’s land. He’d sensed an evil presence i
n New York and alerted some local cousins about a vampire that they hadn’t noticed. He knew when our flower and herb crops would do well and when they’d need some help along, just like myself, Dot, and our aunts did. Potions worked far better on him than they did on the other males, and spells stuck around longer as well. This all had to count for something, I didn’t care if it was wishful thinking. There was an exception to every rule.

  As I was drifting off to a restless sleep that night, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe I’d overheard the tourists wrong. Maybe Thomas was one of our cousins. Perhaps he just didn’t tell his friends. It would make life so much simpler if he was just messing around on the gallows and gotten strangled, even though I knew for a fact there was never a rope up there. It could have been a magical attack by some creature that we somehow weren’t sensing. Just anything, anything except a legitimate murder.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t shake the feeling that’s exactly what it was.

  ********

  I opened my eyes to the sound of a whimper and the sensation of a warm tongue licking the back of my hand. Rolling over, I pulled the covers over my head to shut out the first morning sunbeams filtering through my bedroom window.

  “Bliss, come on,” I groaned when the mutt climbed in bed with me.

  I only got to sleep past sunrise every other day. Except on the high holidays, when extra deliveries of river hyacinth were required. And on Hettymoot.

  Ah, crud. Today was Hettymoot. I sat up straight in bed and ran my hand over my loyal dog’s head. Best alarm clock ever. She even knew what day it was. Still, I was running late.

  The scent of coffee and cinnamon filled the house. That was Wesley’s signature brew and I could really use a cup, but I didn’t have time. My brother was nowhere to be seen as I stumbled into the kitchen, but I heard the creaks and groans of our grandfather’s chair rocking on the porch.

  “Morning, Gem,” Wesley said, then took a sip from his mug.

  I saw steam curling from another cup on the porch railing. Well, since it was already brewed… “Thanks.” A basket of freshly harvested hyacinth on the bottom step caught my eye. “Have you seen Dot?”

  Wes snorted out a laugh. “Dot is…” He chuckled again and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “I heard that bus rattle up here at 3:30 am. Then she sat in the yard watching the hyacinth blooms pop open. Giggling. Hysterically. It freaked me out so much I couldn’t fall back asleep. And she was texting somebody.”

  “Is she sleeping now?” I didn’t see the van anywhere.

  “She picked the flowers at record speed and went back out.”

  “I guess homemade coffee wasn’t good enough for her.”

  “Any chance you can get the twins to cut her off?”

  “Not on Hettymoot.” I finished my brew and sighed as I saw my aunts shambling out of their cottage, Maudrey carrying that white dress, Clea with a wand in hand, each flanked by two cats. “Three delivery days in a row this week. I wouldn’t exactly say that I hate holidays, but…”

  “Oh, I think you’re about to officially hate them,” Wesley predicted. “Good luck.”

  Bliss scampered around the corner of the house and the screen door slapped shut as Wes disappeared inside. Traitors.

  “Arms out, Gemma!” Aunt Clea demanded, pointing her wand at me.

  “What? Why?”

  The air around me sparkled and shimmered like someone had thrown confetti. When I looked down, I saw my bare toes wiggling in the cool grass beneath the hem of the embroidered white dress. The blue jeans and sweater I’d put on this morning were folded neatly beside the hyacinth. That’s one way to save time in the morning.

  “Praeclarus Capillatora!” Aunt Maudrey shouted. Then she literally threw confetti at me.

  “What the… My hair is not this long!” It suddenly fell down to the tops of my thighs in dark loose curls that shined like glass. It was normally out of control frizz that only reached my waist.

  “It is today,” Aunt Clea said firmly. “You’d better get a move on.”

  I shook my head to get the annoying mane behind me only to see the curls magically reform as my hair crawled back over my shoulders. That’s when I noticed the dozens of tiny white roses attached. “Nuh- uh. No way I’m going to town like this.”

  A spark leapt from a rose and stung my finger when I tried to pull one off. Aunt Clea laughed jubilantly as I narrowed my eyes at her. “Good luck getting those off,” she said.

  “Oh, Gemma. You’re a vision.” Aunt Maudrey was so pretty when she grinned, the smile lines around her brown eyes traveling in circles all the way down to meet the lines around her mouth. I couldn’t deny that face.

  I tucked my hair behind my ear and it instantly untucked itself. This glamour was coming off as soon as I got to Wicked Brew. There was no way I’d be able to tolerate it through the day.

  “Where is your cousin?” Aunt Clea asked. “You should see what we have cooked up for her.”

  “Wesley said she came and went before sunrise.”

  “Came and went? The nerve!”

  The foresight. “I’ll tell her you’re looking,” I reassured them.

  “Happy Hettymoot!” My aunts tapped their wands together like humans did glasses of wine for a toast.

  I mumbled a ‘Happy Hettymoot’ myself and put my real clothes and boots into my satchel, then gathered up the flowers. The ground was just warm enough that I didn’t need to cast a heat spell for my feet. This tradition could be torturous in wintertime.

  I heard the two old gals reminiscing about dressing us all up when we were little. No wonder I have nightmares about pink hair bows. But Dot actually liked that kind of thing and Wicked Brew wasn’t even open this early. She was probably traipsing around in the woods somewhere. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was alone.

  The white wooden gate swung open as I approached. It only did that when one of us was carrying hyacinth and no one remembered who enchanted it. It may very well have been Massachusetts’s first automatic door.

  I rounded the corner and my throat tightened. Blue lights flickered far down the road and the sun caught the yellow tape as it flailed in the breeze. How could I forget? The previous day’s events came crashing back to me and I nearly dropped my precious cargo.

  It should be obvious at this point that I didn’t exactly enjoy walking to town every other morning, but the idea of making an extra trip gussied up like The Princess Bridezilla past a crime scene was excruciating. I had no choice though. If Spark and Elements didn’t get their fresh hyacinth this particular Hettymoot morning, I’d be the next one hanging from the gallows.

  A white state trooper cruiser idled at the edge of the crime scene and there were little plastic evidence markers sticking up like tents on the sidewalk. Were they just for show? I was standing on that sidewalk yesterday. I could have left something behind, like a shard of glass from my phone. Or residue of the powder I’d used to fix it. Or an eyelash. Anything!

  Captain Kavanagh hoisted himself out of the car with his broad shoulders and stared at the scene with his gorgeous blue eyes. He just thought he was so handsome, didn’t he? My nose scrunched up in annoyance, but I willed it to behave as I approached. At least I was on the opposite side of the road.

  “Your cousins kept their coffee shop open all night, Gemma!” Priscilla’s shrill voice cried out. She was already standing at her gate instead of sitting on her porch this morning. Not a good sign.

  “All night?” I said.

  “All night!”

  That couldn’t be right, though it did explain where Dot had been. Hettymoot weekend had a tendency to become more or less a mixer for single witches. One would think, you know, that a murder that brought in the human police would inspire everyone to keep a low profile. One would also be wrong.

  “Isn’t that a… a…” Priscilla stammered and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she blew out steam from her nostrils. “A noise violation? A traffic violation?” />
  “I don’t know about that…” How loud could they have been? It’s not like they had a sound system, although magic could take care of that.

  “Well, I do know about that.” No she didn’t. “It’s illegal.” Probably wasn’t. “It has to be.”

  Keeping my doubts to myself and a sympathetic smile on my lips, I slowed my pace but kept walking. Not really because of Priscilla. Listening to her complain was practically a pastime and an unofficial part of the job. But I really didn’t want to spend much time by Captain Blue Eyes. Especially now that he had turned around and was staring at us. At me. With his mouth hanging open in surprise. Did he just drop his pen?

  “I’ll tell Luna and Soleil to keep it down,” I said.

  “I already called their mother,” she informed me, rather smugly.

  “You did?” It seemed like a waste of a phone call to me. The twins were turning thirty this year and not likely to get grounded. Plus, no one wanted at least one of them to meet up with a nice boy and carry on the family line more than their mom.