by Mara Webb
Copyright © 2019-2020 by Mara Webb
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Contents
A Three-Broom Circus
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
Something Borrowed, Something Broom
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
Chapter 20
Witch Things Happen at Sea
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
Chapter 20
Thanks for Reading
Mailing List
Wildes Witches Cozy Mysteries Bundle 2
Books 4-6
Mara Webb
A Three-Broom Circus
Book Four
1
It was another sunny morning in Sucré, and the daylight was beaming through the kitchen window. I loved living in this small town. As summer was approaching it was becoming more beautiful, the flowers were blooming everywhere I looked and the cats had finally stopped trying to chase chicks in the backyard, catching the bigger birds was too difficult, apparently. I took another sip of my coffee and opened up my laptop on the kitchen counter.
I had an email from the University of Awa, where I worked, inviting me to the annual summer ball that they hosted for all staff and students. The theme would be “Luau on the moon” and the message stated we should dress accordingly. I had absolutely no idea what that meant. It had been almost a year since I had inherited magical powers from my aunt Edith, and in all that time of being a witch I still hadn’t gotten used to the strange customs of Sucré’s magical community.
“Any chance you left some coffee for me? I fancy mixing some with half and half to make a drink fit for a king!” Quin said as he sashayed into the room.
My cat familiar, Quin, was one of the best parts of my witch life. He was supposed to make my general witch tasks easier by enhancing my magic and guiding me as I learned how to use my powers. In reality he spent most of his time talking about himself, eating and sunbathing.
“Yeah, there is some in the pot. Should I make another batch so that everyone can have some?” I asked. I was referring to the six other cats that I lived with. I had started last summer as a regular human, now I lived with seven talking cats in an enchanted house. Quin had taken in six kittens that had fallen asleep on a wand and turned themselves into familiars, he had volunteered to train them up before they were shipped off to other witches and wizards. To cut a long story short, they never left.
“Nora, I am sure there is plenty to go around. If you want to fry me up some scrambled eggs, bacon, a little toast, maybe a bit of grilled chicken and get started on some fresh cinnamon buns though, that would be great,” he said in a deadly serious manner. The phrase “eyes bigger than his belly” didn’t apply to Quin, he always cleared his plate. He never turned down a meal. He had grown more bulbous around the middle and I thought that maybe I should stop giving him so many treats.
“You can have a quick breakfast fuzz face; you have work to do today. You all do. Where are the others?” I asked.
“I think they are meditating; it’s hard having a full-time job you know, you wouldn’t understand Nora,” he replied.
“I wouldn’t understand? My job is a full-time job that is hard, fun but hard. You guys run a cat cafe, you get fuss and attention from people all day long, giving you little massages and tickling you behind the ear. You have the better deal here and you know it.”
Quin had been watching a documentary about Japan with the other cats, Howl, Jinx, Mark, Delphi, Echo and Chomps. They had been inspired to open their own cat cafe in Sucré called The Catmosphere Cafe and it had been a huge success so far. People were visiting from out of town and they had just started hosting birthday parties for an extra fee. Today, this meant that a little girl that was turning seven was going to arrive with some friends and have a private room with the cats wandering in and out as they chose.
The staff, three students from the University I worked at, often used their magic to help them create cakes that were carved like all sorts of different creatures. The most popular cake was a tabby cat that was sitting upright, paws over its eyes as if it was trying to hide. It had a collar made of spun sugar that glistened in the light. When the cake was cut it revealed that it was made from hundreds of individual layers, tasted as light as air and every layer that was a prime number was smothered with a fudge frosting, the rest were vanilla.
I took my coffee into the lounge and dropped my body heavily onto the couch. With a wave of my hand the TV screen burst into full color and started playing an episode of a show about a vampire slayer. A dreamy Saturday morning. I had just realized that I hadn’t questioned how much of this show might be based on reality, if witches were real, then vampires might be too. A terrifying thought. They might not all be dark eyed brunettes with ludicrously well-defined abs that wouldn’t hurt me because they are in love with me. They would probably murder me in seconds.
My phone buzzed in my pocket; it was a text message from my boyfriend Brent. He was a police officer, a human one, and I had recently revealed to him that I was a witch. I told him that there were in fact lots of witches and wizards around here, he had taken it surprisingly well. The part he struggled with the most was the talking familiars that I lived with. I often used to wonder what animals were thinking, what they might say if they were given the ability to speak. It turns out that some thoughts might be best kept to yourself, Quin verbalized every idea immediately and it was relentless.
Brent had text me to let me know that he planned to drop into the cafe around lunch time if I was going to be there. I was always there on a Saturday. I enjoyed being there, but I also liked to help Quin out whenever I could. Obviously as the cafe was out on the high street in Sucré, that meant that humans could come in. The cats could never speak there without checking first, just in case, so the staff had to prepare all of the food, especially the elaborately decorated confectionery, in the kitchen and out of sight of the humans.
I dropped in frequently to keep everyone's spiri
ts up, but truth be told I didn’t want to spend too much time in the house by myself. It got lonely in here and I missed the noise. After a nine-hour shift in silence, which happened frequently, they would always come home with their heads bursting with conversations they had suppressed, they shouted over each other for at least forty minutes straight every night, before having a snack and a nap.
I must have zoned out as I hadn’t realized the show had ended. The local news reporter was now sitting behind her desk, she discussed an exposé that had been published in The Sucré Sun, our town newspaper and then the screen cut to the outside of a bank. The journalist that had written the piece in the paper had his photograph in the bottom left as the voice over explained the arrests that had been made over massive fraud. The next news segment seemed to be an old story about a missing person.
My focus was broken when the six smallest cats marched into the lounge wearing bow ties. I could feel a smile spread across my face from one ear to the other and I leaned forward as they performed a ‘barber-shop quartet’ style version of the happy birthday song.
“Wow! You guys nailed the harmonies! This won’t be for the human birthday today though, right?” I asked while clapping.
“Oh jeez, I forgot it was the human one. I must have looked at the wrong weekend on the calendar, there’s a witch party next week. We’ve been rehearsing for two days, sorry guys, my mistake,” Delphi said, using her magic to untie the bow from around her neck.
They shuffled out of the room and I turned my attention back to the news. The headline about missing people had become a longer report about a pattern of disappearances and what was currently known. Family members of the missing people were featured in a collection of soundbites, pleas for their safe return and that they were missed. I suddenly recognized one of the voices.
“Ms. Jennifer Watts has been one of the loudest voices about this growing problem in Sucré. After her nephew disappeared three weeks ago, Ms. Watts immediately pushed for a wider search by police.
“Dissatisfied by the theory that he was a runaway, she has been fundraising with other worried relatives to enable the police to cover a wider area with more staff and more sophisticated technology. Ms. Watts, what makes you so sure that this is an abduction?”
“Good morning, thank you for giving me this platform today. My nephew did not run away. I am telling you, with absolute certainty, that he would not have disappeared without telling his family where he was going.
“Someone has taken him, and if that person is watching right now, I want to just say that…” Jen paused to compose herself, tears swelled in her eyes. “Cody does not deserve to be harmed; he wants to be back with his family. Please allow him to come home to us, contact us and let us know what you need in order for that to happen.”
I felt awful. Jennifer was my friend, she sat on the high council of witches and wizards in Sucré with me. We only met once a month for official business, unless there was an emergency, but we would all hang out together as often as we could. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t known that her nephew was missing, I should be helping her. That is what a good friend would do.
“Quin!” I shouted. “Quin, have you heard about all these missing people in Sucré? Jen’s nephew is one of them. Is he a wizard?”
I walked back towards the kitchen as Quin was tipping a mug back into his mouth with both of his front paws, judging by the level of coffee left in the pot, he had drunk at least three. When he lowered the cup and placed it down on the counter next to him, I could see a faint, foamy moustache on his fur.
“Jen’s nephew? Jen? Jennifer Watts? Jennifer Watt’s nephew?” he asked.
“Yes!”
“Oh yeah, a wizard for sure. He’s like sixteen or seventeen, I think I met him once. I didn’t know he was missing.”
“It’s just been on the news, I don’t think Jen can tell anyone about his magic powers, the police won’t know. I just wondered if all the missing people might have that in common. But why would someone be kidnapping witches and wizards? I’ve been hearing about it on the news for a while, but I hadn’t given it much thought,” I said. I lowered my head in shame, I had ignored a problem until it was affecting someone I knew, I hated that I’d done that.
“What are you thinking then? Quin and Nora solve another big mystery? Get the old gang back together, head out looking for clues? Take a few ‘looking for clues’ snacks for the road. Yeah! A few tuna club sandwich roadies, maybe a carton of cream? Something to celebrate with when we crack the case. Wow, I’m just so excited to get back to my true passions of solving crime and eating fish,” Quin said. He was almost shaking from the amount of caffeine flowing through his body.
“That’s all very well and good, and obviously I will call Jen and see how we can help, but first of all you have an actual job to go to. Little Heidi Jones will be arriving for her birthday party pretty soon,” I replied.
I wanted to get stuck in as quickly as possible though, the more help they had, the faster they could get to Cody. I didn’t realize how much we would uncover along the way.
2
By the time I had arrived at the cafe, the birthday party for the human was ending. Quin and I had developed a spell that we put onto a light above the door so that it would change color depending if a human or a magical being walked in. This meant that it would be easier to know if it was safe for the cats to talk or for me or Quin to use our magic openly.
It was a busy Saturday lunch rush and the students working the register were run off their feet trying to make drinks quickly enough, even with the discreet use of magic on the coffee machine. People cooed over the cats, gave them an unhealthy amount of attention and small bits of their food while I sat in the back organizing receipts.
“Nora?” Brent shouted from the front of the cafe.
“Yeah, I’m back here!” I replied. I scooped the papers into a large envelope and put it back down on the desk to look at later. Despite telling Quin several times that he needed to try and keep this place tidy he had been dropping invoices and receipts onto the floor in the back office and even my magic couldn’t figure out what some of the documents were for. He seemed to have ordered twenty ‘Daruma Dolls’ from Japan, I hadn’t seen these anywhere, but he appeared to have signed for them when they arrived. It surprised me that despite these random expensive mystery purchases, the cafe was still making money.
Brent walked into the back office holding a small paper bag from a bakery up the street.
“That donut better be for me, I don’t know what I’ll do if it isn’t,” I said, smiling up at him from the office chair. We had both eaten so much food from the café since it opened that we had decided to try out some of the food from the competition, so we could know what was on offer to our customers elsewhere.
“Boston cream filled, chocolate glaze and a napkin. I know how to keep a gal happy,” he said. I had already sunk my teeth into it as he was talking. We were going to be eating lunch together but there is something about eating dessert before the meal that adds an extra level of excitement. As I sucked the chocolatey remains from my fingers, we walked together to the cafe front and grabbed a table that was being vacated by a young couple.
“The usual please Cecily!” I said as one of the women behind the counter started to make her way over to take our order.
“Coming right up!” she replied.
“So, what do you want this weekend to be? I thought maybe we could get out to the cinema tonight, that film about the underwater kingdom run by an octopus is out. You wanted to watch that, right? Or did you say it sounded like a nightmare? I can’t remember,” Brent joked.
“You know what, sure. Let’s go see the film critics are saying is “the worst thing to happen to the ocean since climate change began” and then we’ll see who’s laughing. Actually, I did want to get over to see my friend Jen later, you can come if you like. Her nephew is missing, I don’t know if you are involved in any of the missing person’s cases aroun
d town. He is...like me.”
“I have been in a few meetings about it,” Brent said, “but we have a small police station, there is only so much we are capable of. I know she has been trying to get more money to help us out, but I don’t know what good that will do to be honest. I haven’t spoken to her myself; I think another officer has been assigned to that case so I will need to make sure I’m not stepping on any toes.
“I want to help though, obviously. Is that what you wanted to do for the whole weekend? Go looking in the woods or whatever? There is this animal performance thing in town tomorrow that I thought you would enjoy, I was going to surprise you in the morning by just driving you there, but you seem bummed out so, ta-da!”
As Brent finished speaking, Quin jumped up onto our table and nuzzled against my chest. He turned to face me and stared into my eyes; I could tell he was trying to communicate something to me. As our bond had grown, I had become more able to sense what he was saying or feeling without having to say it out loud, and right now Quin wanted Brent and I to follow him.