by Hannah Lin
Witch In Disguise
A Paranormal Cozy Mystery
Hannah Lin
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
1
Secretive giggling alerted Arabella to the entrance of a new customer. Several new customers, from the sound of it, all young girls huddled close together as they stopped to take in the store. She’d taken the bell down four days after opening her shop, Witchy Wonders.
At a place like Mystic Falls, cult shops like hers were always busy. There were more psychics and witches than coffee shops in this small town, and although most of them had no real power, it was a huge tourist draw, and all of those psychics and witches and tourists needed ingredients for their spells.
Witchy Wonders was a hit from day one. Wanting to carry the same magical feel of the town, she’d designed it like an old-fashioned apothecary. Most things were stored in glass bottles with cork lids and labeled with the item and its magical properties.
Anise- luck, prosperity, youthful energy. Helps prevent nightmares. Barley- fertility and prosperity. Wormwood- passion and love. Shelves and shelves of herbs, plant leaves, flower petals, plus trinkets and charms, candles, crystals, and divination tools all set against dark wood with that old-fashioned oaky aroma.
Arabella was careful never to sell any potions or witch jars, but if the customer wanted to make their own, Witchy Wonders was the place to go.
Three months later, she was still enjoying her new profession. It was the perfect spot for her to hide from the horrifying debacle that her family had caused.
“Ladies,” Arabella greeted as she popped her head up from the counter where she’d been stringing up her fresh basil leaves to dry. Three blonde girls with t-shirts from the local college were huddled around a book. “How can I help you?”
“Oh!” The tallest grinned and hurried up to the register with the other two in tow. “We just got this book of hexes from Book, Bell, and Candle, and we need to hex Thomas. He was Sam’s boyfriend last semester until she realized that he’d slept with half the girls in the hall above his.”
Ah, young love gone wrong. Arabella wished she had fond memories where she could relate, but she wasn’t allowed to go to college. Not after her older sister accidentally spelled her English class to only speak Shakespearian when she tried to cheat the study process. No, it was decided that Arabella had best stay home and focus on her craft. Why get a college degree when one was a powerful witch?
Her mother had very little connection with the real world.
“It sounds like Thomas needs to learn a lesson,” Arabella said cheerfully as she held her hands out. “Which hex were you thinking of using?”
“One that makes his hair fall out,” the girl declared while the others laughed.
Tricky. That didn’t actually require a spell. The right ingredients mixed together would certainly make Thomas’s hair fall out, but Arabella had one firm rule in this shop:
She wouldn’t put real magic in the hands of amateurs.
When they handed her the book, she checked the cover and nearly grinned. Hexes for the Exes. It was one of Grant’s bestsellers at Book, Bell, and Candle, and it contained absolutely no real magic. The ingredients listed on the page would do little more than give the guy a slight case of indigestion.
“You ladies are in luck,” Arabella said. “I’ve got everything that you need right here.”
Walking them around the store, she collected everything they needed and managed to sell them each a charm bracelet. They were the last customers of the day, so once they were gone, she turned the open sign around and locked the door.
Today had been another good day, but then, most of her days in Mystic Falls had been positive. No one thought it was strange when she wore an amulet around her neck or accidentally spilled her purse filled with mojo bags on the counter at the bakery. Witchy Wonders was making money, and she adored the town.
After counting the money in the register, she readied it for the deposit. As she did every night, she checked each corner of the shop, close to the ceiling, and made sure that the small sigils she’d placed up there weren’t broken.
So far, only a handful of people had noticed them, and they’d all accepted her explanation that they were protection wards. They’d all copied them down on a piece of paper so they could go home and replicate it.
Arabella wasn’t worried. The sigils were useless without the blessed blood required to make them work, and they didn’t exactly ward the shop from danger.
No, they were a warning sigil. If anyone sharing her blood came within ten miles of her shop, Arabella would know.
Satisfied that they were still going strong, she grabbed her tote and shoved the money and a few empty jars inside. Tonight was a full moon, and she collected water every month from the base of the falls. It helped her cleanse her talismans and crystals.
At night the mystics set up candlelit booths on the sidewalk and drew in even more customers looking for love potions or needing their fortunes told. Arabella loved walking through the town at night. The atmosphere was rich and filled with excitement and wonder. It was the feeling she’d had as a child, and it was something that she was trying to recapture now. Magic had let her down more than it had helped her in the past few years and she needed to have her faith renewed. Without her family and friends, magic was all she had in Mystic Falls.
“Closing up for the day, Arabella?” Selena asked as she walked by. Dressed from head-to-toe in black, she was one of the more popular mediums in town.
“I am. Time to enjoy a little of the night life.”
“Oh! You should stop by my tent tonight. I have it on good authority that I’m going to be putting on quite a show,” she teased with a wink as she walked away.
Arabella had no doubt. Selena always leaned toward the dramatic. A week ago, she’d insisted that someone with the initials CL was trying to reach out to Arabella. A crowd had gathered, so Arabella had played along, and the next thing she knew, everyone was giving her advice about how to move on after the death of her beloved cat.
Except Arabella’s allergy to cats meant she’d never had one, or any pet for that matter. Still, it was that kind of love and warmth from the town that made her adore it here.
Locking her door, she stilled only when she heard heavy footsteps descending from the stairwell by her shop. There were two apartments above the shop. She rented the one on the second floor, and Lukas, the anti-social mystery, had rented the space on the third floor for the past four weeks.
Dark hair. Green eyes. The kind of body that made most women salivate. Lukas was a hard man to forget and yet he did almost nothing memorable. Arabella had tried to be neighborly, but she got little more than monosyllabic answers from him. He’d only been in her shop once where she managed to sell him a Tree of Life talisman.
Lukas didn’t seem to have a job. He wasn’t haunting any particular mystic here. As far as Arabella could tell, he wasn’t doing much of anything except walking around.
“Evening,” Lukas said quietly as he reached the base of the steps.
“Evening.”
Arabella tried to tell herself that it was the mystery surrounding Lukas that made her pulse race and not the fact that she was attracted to him. She wasn’t here to find a man. She was here for some peace and quiet.
Not that it mattered. Lukas didn’t even have the decency to give her a smile before he walked away. Most gorgeous men had learned the art of flirting by the time they were in their thirties, but Lukas didn’t seem to have a charming bone in his body.
It made crushing on him all the more humiliating. Luckily, Arabella was good at keeping secrets.
After dropping the deposit off at the bank, she headed to the falls. It was quicker to drive but there was a gorgeous walking path through the dense lush woods that surrounded Mystic Falls and made the town seem that much more magical. The closer she got to the falls, the thicker the low hanging mist grew. During the full moon, the properties in the mist were stronger and made her skin tingle as she walked through it.
Inhaling deeply, she took a moment to revel in magic. Arabella had practiced hundreds of spells and compiled a hundred more potions, but nothing compared to the magic in nature. It charged the senses and filled her with peace.
Until the icy fingers of something dark and powerful wrapped around her throat and squeezed. It was the living residue of a powerful spell.
Gasping, she stumbled back and instinctively drew on her magic to form a protective field. The freezing tendrils withdrew, and Arabella closed her eyes.
Her memories took her back to when she was twelve and searching for her birthday presents. When she’d checked under her parents’ bed, she’d found the books on black magic. She’d spent days reading and absorbing the information before her mother caught her. Ever the optimist, Evelyn had told her that dark magic didn’t exist and there was no reason to study it.
No reason except to ward herself from it.
When Arabella was fifteen, she’d first felt those icy fingers when a warring witch had tried to curse her mother. Powerful magic, especially dark magic, could linger and wreak plenty of havoc before it dissipated. The curse had failed, but her mother’s stubborn denial of it had been all Arabella needed to dive into the subject in her own time.
Arabella had never cast a dark spell or had a dark spell cast on her, but she could recognize the trace of something horrible. If she was smart, she’d head back in town. She could survive a month without moon water.
But Arabella couldn’t ignore the danger. Someone nearby had been involved in a dangerous ritual, and the traces it left behind had Arabella reeling. If there was a real practitioner in Mystic Falls, she needed to know.
One foot in front of the other. She could do this. Just follow what used to be the soothing sound of rushing water.
The grassy terrain gave way to rocky shores when Arabella finally reached the falls. It was heavily covered in grey and white mist, but when she opened up her magical sight, evidence of black and purple magic glittered in the air.
It came from the other side of the falls, where the parking lot was situated.
“Of course I wanted to walk,” she grumbled to herself. She needed to get to the other side. Despite the No Playing on the Rocks signs, Arabella had seen plenty of kids crossing and if they could to it, she could. Right?
Tentatively, she hopped to the nearest flat rock she spied. “Risking a broken neck to check out something that isn’t any of my business. There are plenty of reasons to use black magic. Like testing the mysterious man who lives above the shop to see if he wants to do you harm.” Or has a girlfriend.
Okay, she didn’t need to be mentally straddling a fence while she was literally straddling sharp jagged rocks.
Kids had a lower center of gravity. This was why they could easily skip across while Arabella was teetering dangerously as she made her way across the swirling water.
Arabella didn’t even realize she was holding her breath until she exhaled in relief when she reached the other side.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she closed her eyes. Her intuition whispered in warning. When she turned around, she was going to see something horrible. This was her last chance to just mind her own business and go back to her shop and pretend that this never happened.
No. Mystic Falls was her home now. She needed to protect it.
Turning around, she opened her eyes.
And her gaze fell on the body sprawled out on the rocks. She didn’t need her witchy senses to tell her that he was dead.
2
It was a long night, and when Arabella woke up the next morning she’d only slept for three hours, most of that interrupted by nightmares of the dead. Despite the ongoing issues she had with her family, she found herself wishing that her mother was there. Evelyn never needed a spell to help make Arabella’s nightmares go away when she was a child.
Yawning, she struggled to wake up. It was another two hours before she needed to open the shop, but there was a jar on her counter that was calling her name.
Arabella had been too tired to brush out her hair last night so her blonde curls were still tangled up in a hair tie. After painfully tugging it out, she managed to pull it back into a messy bun, climbed out of the bed and walked to the cabinet.
There they were.
Three strands of hair that Arabella had plucked before she called the police.
She’d felt guilty taking anything at all, but the small police force at Mystic Falls wasn’t equipped to handle dead bodies. They’d concluded quickly that he’d slipped on the rocks. Complete accident. That made the whole stealing evidence thing a little easier.
And it wasn’t really evidence, right?
If they needed his hair, they had a whole head they could take from, and she had several spells that she could use on that hair. Spells that could tell her just what had happened to Steven. The death of that poor man was no accident.
Arabella had overheard the cops talking. The dead man was an out of town tourist, which made them nervous. If it got out that a tourist had been murdered in Mystic Falls the town would take a hit, so it was no wonder they were jumping to conclusions.
That didn’t mean Arabella could let it go.
The chilly floorboards creaked under her feet as she dressed. Jeans and a t-shirt. One of the best things about owning her own business was that she could wear whatever she wanted.
Well, almost.
She didn’t think the tourists would handle her coming into the shop in sweat pants. Most of the other women in town favored flowing skirts and large chunky jewelry, so Arabella stood out.
Grabbing the jar, she headed out of her apartment and down the steps.
Mystic Falls was easing into the fall, her favorite time of the year. Crisp mornings and leaves that were just turning golden. Soon it would be time for sweaters, cider, pumpkin, and bonfires.
Unfortunately, she was too distracted to enjoy it. Hurriedly unlocking the shop, she slipped inside.
What most people didn’t realize was that the scary names listed in old spell books were old names for commonplace items. In the front they were labeled eye of newt, but in the back, they were labeled mustard seeds.
Black mustard seeds which were mixed with her own blood were kept in the locked closet in her storeroom, along with the other highly magical ingredients that she only used for her personal spells.
Unlocking the closet, she pulled out the other things she needed. Hands shaking, she crushed them with her mortar and pestle. Since she’d moved to Mystic Falls she’d only performed some of the more basic spells, but this would require the use of her heritage magic, and it wasn’t the kind of magic that she called on often.
Slowly unscrewing the jar, she reached for a pair of tweezers when a noise caught her attention. Was someone in her store?
Performing real magic with someone in the store might be good for business, but magical residue sometimes did funky things to non-magical people, and causing hallucinations would probably not be a good thing.
Then again, she could cater to a whole different clientele.
Opening the stock room door, she slipped out and blinked. Maybe she was the one hallucinating. “Lukas? How did you get in here? I’m not open yet.”
“Door was unlocked. I didn’t realize you weren’t open for business.” Lounging against the counter with the register, he reached out and lazily moved his finger over the carousel of good luck charms. “I just wanted to check on you and see how you’re doing.”
Now he
wanted to be neighborly? That wasn’t suspicious at all. “I’m just doing some inventory in the stock room.”
“I heard about last night. Dead body by the waterfall. Weird, right? I heard you were there.”
Narrowing her eyes, Arabella stepped out of the stock room and shut the door firmly behind her.
“Since the police finished with me several hours ago, and the town isn’t awake yet, I’m thinking the grapevine hasn’t quite reached you. So how did you hear about the death, and what are you doing here?”
Instead of trying to come up with another lie, Lukas just smiled slowly, and boy did her heart flip. What was wrong with her?
“I think that’s the most you’ve ever spoken to me.”
“Not true. I talked you into a protection amulet.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled it out and held it into the light. “It must be working since no harm has come to me yet.”
Lukas kept it even though they both knew that it was a fake. He made that clear while he was in the shop, and Arabella hadn’t pushed the idea of magic on him. She never did. Most would never truly understand the concept of magic, and those who did would have their lives changed forever.
“Glad to see you’re a happy customer. How do you know about the death of the tourist?”
“I didn’t come here to talk about that.”
Pushing off the counter, Lukas slowly strutted towards her until they were just inches away. A different kind of spell weaved around her and she stood rooted to the spot.
“I stopped by your apartment, but you didn’t answer when I knocked. I had hoped that you were still sleeping until I saw the light on in your shop. You should take the day off, Arabella. Something like that isn’t easy to see.”
He really was concerned about her. She tried to file it away under things to obsess about later, but she had a feeling it was going to slip out sooner than that.