by Willow Mason
How to Fly a Pig
Witch Like a Boss Book One
Willow Mason
Copyright © 2021 Willow Mason
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover design © Francesca Michelon
from Merry-Book-Round
www.merrybookround.com
www.facebook.com/groups/merrybookround/
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
About the Author
Also by Willow Mason
Chapter One
The bus shuddered, jerking me awake as its exhaust sent a foul belch of oil and smoke up through the back vents. My neck had a crick in it from leaning against the window, and my shirt clung to my body in the heat of the afternoon sun. Given the time, I should have been in Briarton an hour ago, but I still couldn’t see the outline of the village in the distance.
When the bus lurched again, I pulled out my mobile phone, ready to send a quick text to my aunt. She’d promised to get out of work early to meet me, and I didn’t want her to bother if we weren’t going to get into town on time.
A winking red lightning bolt greeted me just before the screen plunged back into darkness. The battery had died somewhere in the latest leg of my trip.
I turned to the teenage girl who’d been my neighbour since Amberley—a full hour ago by my watch. “Can I borrow—?”
Halfway through my query, the vehicle bunny-hopped into a stall with such force that my open mouth banged off the seat in front of me. Ugh. Whose grubby hands or oily hair had last been touching that dirty piece of fabric?
“Everyone off,” the driver called out, walking down the aisle with his hairy gut hanging out the bottom of a sweat-stained shirt. “I need to push the old girl to the side of the road.”
My bag had wedged under the seat in front of me and when I gave it a tug, a short strip of faux leather tore off the padding. Clutching it to my chest, I tried to press the piece back into place. For a second it looked like it would hold; a faint hope soon soured.
The teenager who’d sat in sullen silence beside me for the past hour grumbled, “Now what?” She had a backpack dangling off one shoulder—the one without the giant chip on it.
The bus squatted at the side of the road like a fat metal bug, letting off a shower of riotous orange rust flakes when the driver kicked its side. He jumped back on board after one circuit of the beast, muttering horrible curses under his breath when the key didn’t start it up.
“You’ll need to wait here until I can get the company to send out a replacement,” he yelled. The desultory group on the roadside appeared as impressed by that statement as I felt.
“But we can see Briarton from here,” the teenage girl shouted back, swiping strands of greasy black hair—dyed—from her eyes. “Can’t you get it going for another few kilometres?”
Apparently, the answer to that was no. The bus door wheezed shut on old hydraulics while the driver pulled down an overhead mic.
“I’m going to walk,” the girl grumbled, hitching the pack further up her back. “Anyone want to join me?”
“Me.” I fell into step beside her, then turned as the bus doors puffed open again.
“You can’t walk,” the driver shouted, pointing behind him at the empty lane. “There’s no marked footpath along here. Any traffic’ll knock you straight off the road.”
“We’ll take our chances,” I yelled back, giving him a thumbs-up for good measure. The way he heaved his weight suggested he might come after us any second, so I turned and sped up, giving a short wave over my shoulder.
“Are you from around here?” I asked when we were ten minutes down the street. “That’s a Briarton High uniform, isn’t it?”
“If you know, why’re you asking?” The girl squinted up at me. She’d scraped the lofty heights of five feet, but no further. “I haven’t seen you in the village.”
A car swept by us and I moved on the outside of the girl to protect her. She gave a snort. “I don’t think you’re much use as padding.”
True. My mum used to call me a beanpole. Straight up and down. Of course, she’d died before my chest got going, but even still, not a lot had changed.
“Knowing my luck, a truck will come along and make the bus driver right.” I shook my head, rubbing a hand over the back of my neck where the curls were forming into clumps.
“What are you doing in town?” the girl tried again. “Where’re you from?”
I admired her dogged pursuit of information. In a small place like Briarton, knowledge was currency. Gossip thrived with only a few twigs of fact to feed the flames.
“I’ve been living up in Auckland with my boyfriend,” I said, filtering my words for TMI before it could escape my lips. “We’d been together for five years now, but in the past six months he’s turned into a bit of a monster.”
Unfortunately, monster was right. Something had bitten him when Jared was out on the town one night. Being a typical stubborn male, he’d refused to visit the doctor about it.
One month ago, he got restless around the time of the full moon. Last night, he’d sprouted a long snout and turned into a hairy, lumbering beast, salivating over my good furniture.
Well, the furniture was rented, so not really mine, but the principle was the same.
“What’d he do?” the girl asked with keen interest.
I shrugged, trying for nonchalance, but with the weight of the bag on my shoulders, it ended up looking more like Quasimodo trying to dance. “He just changed.”
When I’d headed out the door this morning, Jared had grasped at the back of my neck, trying to grab hold of my shirt collar to drag me inside. He’d only succeeding in clutching hold of the thin silver chain of my mother’s necklace.
My forward momentum had snapped it, the locket tumbling down the front of my blouse and skidding across the floor. In the dim light, I hadn’t seen where it ended up and I wasn’t sticking around to find out.
The necklace was the only jewellery my mother had left me, but it wasn’t worth dying over.
My one satisfaction as I tore away from the house was Jared would have a nasty burn on his palm to remember me by.
“My name’s Allison,” the teen said, holding out her hand for a shake. “Allison Foreby.”
I cringed as I took it, knowing what would soon follow. “My name’s Desdemona Milchtrap.”
Allison stared at me, her mouth dropping open, then she clutched her stomach and gave a belly laugh. “You’re kidding!”
How many times had I wished that? I shook my head.
“Man, your parents must’ve hated you.” Allison nearly fell into the gutter at the side of the road as another fit of giggles caught hold. “Don’t you know there are deed polls to change those things?”
I carried on walking, scrunching my nose. Allison fell behind, giving me a moment of breathing space as she used all her breath on another gale of hilarity.
“Jeez, when you said you were unlucky, I didn’t believe you,” t
he teenager said, still smirking as she caught up. “But now…?”
With a sniff, I folded my arms over my chest. If this short, plump, spotty teen was going to broadcast my arrival around town, I might as well get the rest of it over with.
“I’m moving into my old house,” I admitted, curling my shoulders inward. “Down on Conker Street. It’s part of my mother’s estate. The place will be falling down around my ears.”
“Oh, yeah.” The teenager cackled in amusement. “You’re an unlucky sod all right. Heaven prevent me from ever inheriting an entire house.” She held up her hands in mock defence. “Oh, no. Not one of the enormous monstrosities with eight bedrooms on Conker Street. I can’t stand it!”
It looked like sarcasm was alive and well in Briarton, if nothing else.
“The place is ancient,” I said, defending myself as though Allison’s opinion mattered. “It’ll take all my money and more to get to a liveable state.”
“If you don’t want the house, I’ll take it. Any place will do if I can get away from my olds.” Allison squinted across at me again, this time with an accompanying frown. “You don’t want a teenage flatmate, do you?”
I shook my head, shifting my backpack from one shoulder to the other. The weight felt wrong on my left side, but I let it bump along there for a few steps before swapping it back.
“Wait a minute…” Allison grabbed my arm. “Milchtrap? Conker Street?” Her eyes widened. “That means you’re a witch!”
“There’s no such thing,” I said, trotting out the old standard for instant denial. “That’s just a myth.”
“It’s so cool you’ve come back to your birthplace,” Allison continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “It’s like your destiny or something.”
“There’s nothing destiny-like about it at all,” I said, puffing out a derogatory breath of air. “If I’m meant to live up to something like that, I’m afraid I’ve already fallen short.”
“My friend Steph went to an old witch down by the beach a few months back. She asked her for boobs and now she’s…” Allison cupped her hands out in the shape of apples, then adjusted them to melons and giggled. “I’m surprised she doesn’t topple over when she walks.”
“You and your friends should know better than to buy spells off a dodgy woman who lives down by the beach.” I shook my head, trying to think who’d been down that end of the town when I’d lived there. Considering my mum had removed me from Briarton at the age of five, it was a bit of a struggle.
“Can you do something like that?”
“If I gave you melon boobies, you’d just look shorter,” I said without really thinking. A second later, Allison burst into tears.
I chewed my bottom lip as the sobs shook the girl’s body. Oops. It looked like my permanent state of awkwardness when dealing with conversation hadn’t been left up in Auckland, then.
“I’m not powerful,” I admitted when the tears threatened to pull sympathetic waterworks from my eyes. “Even if I wanted to give you a big bosom, I couldn’t.”
“What could you do?”
I sighed, realising I’d just admitted to being something we were all meant to pretend wasn’t real. If the governing coven got hold of this disastrous conversation in their logbooks, I could lose what little magic I possessed. Not that the threat was a big deal to someone as weak as me.
“How about I give you skin a nice, healthy glow?” A safe suggestion. Chances were any spell I tried would do nothing, I wasn’t being modest about my powers—they really were poor, but in a few days the worst of Allison’s spots would probably heal on their own. She could revel in the difference so long as she patently ignored the next crop heading up close behind.
A safe spell. Nothing to it.
Without waiting for more than a nod of tacit agreement, I summoned up my powers and closed my eyes until I felt the magic settle in my fingertips. I clapped my hands together, rubbed them hard, and blew on them. Not necessary, but a bit of pizzazz never went astray.
My memory scrambled, trying to recall the simple spell I’d applied to no avail back in my teenage past. After two months of coven night-school, I’d dropped out to get a job in retail—a choice everyone had agreed was a better use of my time.
With my upper body swaying back and forth, I chanted some rag-tag bits of nonsense underneath my breath. “Geronimo. Maxima. Bartholomew.”
Just as Allison’s mouth began to twist with doubt, I waved large circles in front of her face, recalling the last of the spell in perfect detail. “Presto. Skin glow. Spots be gone!”
I ended with jazz hands, of course. Showmanship was mandatory. To my astonishment, an enormous cloud of sparkles shot out of my fingers and landed in a swirling mask over Allison’s face. They dissipated in a second, but it still thrilled me. Maybe I wasn’t as useless as I’d thought, after all.
“And that’s it?”
Given how amazed I’d been by my performance, the doubtful twist of Allison’s mouth brought me back to earth with a thump. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Steph said her witch gave her a potion and waved a wand over her entire body before casting a spell that lasted for a good ten minutes.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a size difference between spots and breasts, isn’t there?”
Teenagers were harder to impress now than they had been in my day. A decade ago, my eyes would have fallen out of my skull at the burst of sparkles. I suppose that’s what you get for having high-speed internet. Nobody cares when something incredible happens right in front of their face.
As Allison rubbed her hands over her cheeks, I leant closer. “It takes a day or two. It won’t happen overnight…”
“But it will happen,” she said with a smile, reciting the old television shampoo ad.
“That’s the one.”
During our conversation, we’d walked closer to the village and now we passed by the feed store—the first official shop in town.
“If you’re going to Conker, you need the turnoff up there,” Allison said, pointing.
I thought she was trying to be helpful, but a peek at her face made me realise she was sick of my company.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, just like my mother had taught me. “I’ll see you around the village, maybe.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Allison replied, in a tone that clearly stated, not if I see you first.
I glanced over my shoulder, checking the road was clear of traffic despite having only seen one vehicle in all the time we’d been walking. I snorted as I saw our bus trundling along at half speed, chock full of passengers.
If we’d waited, we would have arrived at the same time. Typical. My feet felt like they weren’t going to let me forget that lesson anytime soon.
The driver tipped an invisible hat as he rode by, and I saluted him. Who cared how I’d got here? The important thing was after a day of travelling, I’d arrived in my new home.
A hand tapped my shoulder, and I turned to see my aunt standing with a welcoming smile on her face.
The flood of tears that burst out of me probably wasn’t the response she’d expected.
Chapter Two
Florentine Willoughby wasn’t my true aunt. Back in the day, the title had been applied to any adult who visited the house more than once, but Florentine had certainly earned the endearment.
“Auntie,” I managed to blurt between atrociously loud sobs, clasping her into a shoulder hug. “It’s so good to meet you again.”
She’d been my mother’s next-door neighbour when I was little, and when I saw her name on the real estate papers, I hadn’t thought much of it at all. Decades of bottled-up emotions came flooding out. The sobs were as much for the loss of my parents as they were a response to my aunt’s welcome.
“No need to cry, dear,” she responded with clipped vowels. A forceful pat on the back was her signal the hug was done. “You’ll have half the village thinking I’ve done something dreadful.”
“I’m just so happy to see a familiar f
ace,” I choked out, wiping a sleeve over my eyes and giving a surreptitious wipe to my nose. No matter how often I thought I should carry a pocket pack of tissues, they never made it into my bag.
“If that’s how you react, then goodness knows what you’ll be like when you see the old house.”
As if a house was a greater thing than a person in her mind.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, though she hadn’t asked. I waved a hand and shifted my bag to the wrong shoulder again for a while. “It’s been a long day.”
“How was the flight?”
It had been delayed for an hour and a half before the airline cheerfully announced it had been cancelled. In the race to get space on the next available flight, I’d ended up settling for a middle seat, bung between two strangers.
Bad enough, but when one stranger had fat rolls that spilled over the armrest into my chair and the other was an overtired eight-year-old, it made things ever so much worse.
Once we were all safely buckled into our seats, the captain had announced we’d have a long wait for a slot in the take-off schedule. Something they hadn’t calculated before loading us all on board.
The steward steadfastly ignored the growing agitation of the kid sat next to me, even though he had a bright orange tag on his cabin baggage to signal he was an unaccompanied minor. It’s a good thing I wasn’t of dubious character. Well, not that much.
“It was fine,” I said, determined to put the horror behind me. And the flight hadn’t been the worst part of the journey, any more than the bus’s mechanical failure. It was the long pauses between each stop in my travels that added up. With no distraction, my mind had grimly autopsied every mistake I’d ever made in my life—detailing the journey from childhood to now with gleeful disdain.