by Leanne Leeds
Owl’s Fair
Owl Star Witch Mysteries Book 2
Leanne Leeds
Owl’s Fair
ISBN: 978-1-950505-35-7
Published by Badchen Publishing
14125 W State Highway 29
Suite B-203 119
Liberty Hill, TX 78642 USA
Copyright © 2021 by Leanne Leeds
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For permissions contact: [email protected]
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
Keep Up With Leanne Leeds
Find a typo? Let us know!
Chapter One
Ayla stared at me with a mixture of disapproval and teenage arrogance. “But I still don’t get it.” Her loud voice echoed in the small bathroom. “It’s wrong.”
Thirteen-year-old sisters have a remarkable ability. They can start a discussion off with a premise. A question you think (mistakenly) is genuine, so you answer them in patient, meticulous detail. At the end of that explanation, you realize it wasn’t a question. You’d actually gotten roped into a circular debate in which your debate partner arrives right back where they started after all your effort—as if they hadn’t heard a word you said.
“The reason the star card is the one that glows is because Astraea turned into stars when she left the planet, so her energy is now star stuff,” I explained for the second time, this time with brevity. “I know everyone thinks Astraea’s the goddess on the Justice card. And you are right; that card glowing would be an absolutely logical card to glow,” I agreed while brushing my hair. “But that’s not the card that glows to tell me who needs my help. Because star stuff. Got it?”
“But it should be.”
“But it’s not.”
“But it should be.” Ayla’s mouth was set in a determined frown. Her dissatisfied expression reminded me of a younger version of myself. “It doesn’t make sense to have the star card be the one that glows. The star card represents renewed hope and faith, and being blessed by the universe,” she explained (as if I, the least of witches, never had an opportunity to be familiar with tarot cards). “The justice card represents justice and fairness and law. So that card should be the one that glows. You’re stopping a crime.”
“You forget that Archie was a gift from the goddess Athena, Ayla,” Althea, fifteen, said as she entered the bathroom. Pushing gently past Ayla, she smiled. “That is a blessing from the universe, and I think it must be why the star card is the one that glows. It’s not just about justice.” Althea settled on the closed toilet and leaned against the counter, elbows on the edge and chin in her hands. “It’s about the renewed hope and faith that saving someone marked for death brings about. Entirely religious, clearly. The blessing is from the universe itself interceding on their behalf so they may live.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I muttered, brushing my hair out of my face. “I do need to point out I’m trying to get ready, and I don’t need every sister in the bathroom with me. Maybe we can have this discussion another time?” I looked around the counter. “Can you hand me that lip gloss?” I pointed next to Ayla, and she handed me the tube.
“Lip gloss? Really?” Ami poked her head in the door. “Where are you going?”
“I have to run to the police station.” I painted a light burgundy color on my lips. “Emma said there’s some reporter that wants to do a puff piece about all the closed cold cases we’ve been working on.”
Althea rolled her eyes. “You know they’re just going to make a joke of the psychic stuff.” She dropped her eyes. “Don’t mention the goddess. I wouldn’t want our beliefs denigrated in print by a non-believer.”
“They’re not my beliefs, so that won’t be a problem.”
“Who cares what they write as long as they spell the shop’s name, right?” Ayla pointed out. “Don’t forget to mention the shop. If you don’t, Mom will lose it. Any press is good press, but free press is way better.”
Ami tousled Ayla’s hair and then turned back to me. “Breakfast is ready, by the way. I smell cinnamon, too,” she announced. My three sisters immediately engaged in a spirited discussion regarding whether Aunt Gwennie had made pancakes or French toast—and which they were hoping for.
Another chipper, cheerful morning at Arden House.
I stared at myself in the mirror and noted the dark circles under my eyes. I looked as tired as I felt. Spending all day working at the shop or the police station, then all evening with my sisters…it was fun, but it was taxing in a way military work had never been. My lack of “me” time was showing.
This lack of privacy baloney was getting old.
My face flushed pink even though I hadn’t said it out loud. That sounded a little bitter, didn’t it? Ungrateful. Like I didn’t want to be here.
It wasn’t that.
They were just…so much.
You would think that after fifteen years in the military, I would be used to a certain amount of communal interaction. A lot of it, in fact. And I was…or I thought I was. However, my fellow soldiers had far more respect for my privacy than my three younger sisters ever thought to show me.
I sighed as they continued their cheerful back and forth.
I knew I had no cause to complain. I was thirty-three years old and living back with my family. That family consisted of three much younger sisters—twenty, fifteen, and thirteen—and an aunt, and my mother. I should feel lucky there was a place for me to go after I was fired from the Ministry of Arcane Fugitives—oops, I’m sorry.
Laid off, not fired.
Apparently, you’re only fired if you do something wrong.
If your entire department is kicked to the curb, it’s a layoff.
Someone must explain the difference to me one day.
Either way, with my lifelong career (which came with room and board) in the latrine, I should be grateful I had a place to go. And I was.
Especially since my pension was still up in the air.
“Why do you think it’s been so long since the star card has flipped on anybody?” Ami asked, pensive worry lining her face as if it had spelled out “worried” across her forehead. “Do you think the goddess thought we messed up with Marianna Black?”
“What’s this ‘we’ stuff, compadre?” I joked. “I’m the one that got stuck with the taskmaster owl.”
A deeper frown. “Well, since we can hear Archie, too, I just…I mean, I felt like this was about more than you, Astra. I mean, I’m the one with the cards, right?” Ami looked even more uneasy, her voice unsure. I glanced over and saw her blink back tears.
Great.
I hadn’t even had my coffee, and I was the mean older sister already. The age difference between us sometimes seemed a vast, cavernous divide with a ledge I kept jumping off without thinking.
“Hey, hold on a second.” I put the lip gloss down and turned to look at my three sisters one by one. “I was just making a joke. Yo
u three know I couldn’t have found Marianna Black without your help, right? Ami, you’re right—your cards pointed us to what we needed to do. Ayla, your ability to talk to ghosts was instrumental in finding the location. And Althea, without your concoction, Marianna could have died.” The three of them beamed as I had never seen them shine, and they looked years younger. “Whatever reason I got stuck with this—”
“Stuck with this?” Ami asked breathlessly, her demeanor upbeat again. “Astra, I will never understand why you don’t look at this as the honor that it is. The goddess Athena—”
“Okay, back off evangelist priestesses,” I warned. “You know how I feel about the religious aspect, so let’s not—
“Hey, just one priestess,” Ayla argued, crossing her arms. “I didn’t say a thing. Don’t lump me in with her!”
Mercifully, Aunt Gwennie called from downstairs to tell us the pancakes were getting cold, and we needed to hop to it.
My mother began breakfast with the “morning greeting” to her goddess (that we all had to sit through) and a five-minute silent meditation to greet the day. After her flowery speech, my three sisters and aunt quickly bowed their heads and closed their eyes—leaving me to eye the cooling pancakes unhappily as my stomach grumbled.
It wasn’t easy being the only atheist witch in my mother’s orbit, especially when my mother’s orbit circled around devotion to the goddess Athena. A goddess, by the way, everyone at this table believed sent me a talking owl, some star power I didn’t really know what to do with (or how it worked), and an assignment to stop impending murders when called upon to do so. It was kind of like the movie Minority Report crossed with Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.
Actually, it wasn’t really like that.
I’d left home at eighteen years old, joined the paranormal military, and did my level best to ignore my pious witch family and their devotion to a goddess I didn’t believe existed. They did their level best to ignore my complete lack of belief and my choice to make a career out of something they disagreed with.
Actually, come to think of it…I didn’t know what my sisters believed. I mean, really believed. All children give lip service to their parents’ religion. That doesn’t mean that deep down, they truly believed in anything.
I glanced at my sisters, eyes closed and mouths moving in silent devotion. Ami was five when I left; Althea, just an infant. Ayla was born while I was in the military, so until I moved home? I’d barely known her.
“Now, everyone, let’s share what we thought about during our morning meditation,” my mother, the chosen high priestess of the goddess Athena (so she said) on the planet Earth, said in soft tones. Her eyes glanced around the table and landed on me. “Astra, perhaps you wish to start this morning.”
I sighed. “I just thought about the pancakes getting cold, Mom,” I responded with a shrug. “You know I don’t meditate. I haven’t started meditating. I won’t start meditating. Every time we stop to meditate at the breakfast table, I’m always going to be thinking about how hungry I am and that the food’s getting cold.” I reached out and took a sip of orange juice. “Anyone else?”
Mom frowned, and Aunt Gwennie sighed.
“You do that on purpose,” Althea chided me. The girl was half my age, and when she spoke, I would swear she was twice as old as me. “I think you practice those little speeches just to rile Mom up.”
“She asks me on purpose, so yup.” I smiled. “I don’t meditate. I exercise.”
“Nothing wrong with that. Astra, since you’re so into the exercising thing? Why don’t you sign up to run in the Forkbridge marathon,” my Aunt Gwennie jumped in—no doubt to change the subject before my practices became the topic of the morning. She picked up a plate of eggs and passed it to Althea. “Alice Windrow is a customer of Ami’s, and she’s sponsoring the marathon to raise money for Fearless Fighters. It’s a veterans organization for injured soldiers.” My aunt looked over her nose at me. “That seems like it would be right up your alley.”
“I’ve never run a marathon before.” I watched the plate make its way slowly around the table. Too slowly.
“How hard can it be? You just, like, run until they tell you to stop, right?” Ayla asked. She snatched the plate of bacon from Althea and slid half of the slices onto her plate. “This is okay, right? Most of this is for me?”
“You’re going to give yourself a heart attack,” my mother told her.
“Yeah, but not for years, right?” Ayla said, her mouth full of bacon.
“A marathon is a bit harder than just running until you stop,” I told Ayla as she chewed blissfully. “You have to start training for a marathon months before it takes place because it’s a test of endurance.” I turned to Aunt Gwennie. “When is it?”
“Is that true? I didn’t know.” My aunt frowned. “I believe it’s just a few weeks away. I suppose that’s not enough time, then?”
“I could do it,” Ayla announced emphatically. “It’s just running, right? That doesn’t sound so hard.”
“It doesn’t, does it?” I asked, my eyebrow raised.
“Nope. I run all the time for fun. I could do it, no problem.”
“Well,” I told her, smiling. “I’d need more time to prepare and train, unfortunately.”
Ayla looked at me with a cocky eyebrow raised. “I guess I’m better than you, then?”
When I first got here, my youngest sister was intimidated by me.
Apparently, those days were over.
“I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow morning, you get up early. You and I will go for a run. If you can make it three miles without stopping? You can have the moonstone earrings I got from Imperatorial City that you drool over every time you come to my room.”
Ayla’s mouth dropped open—which was disgusting, considering it was filled with half-chewed bacon. “You’re kidding me,” she said, sounding like she had marbles in her mouth. “Don’t you tease me, Astra! You know how much I like those earrings!”
“Ayla, don’t talk with your mouth full,” my mother scolded her.
“And you know how much those earrings cost me,” I responded. “No, I’m not kidding. But you have to get up early in the morning, and I will try and wake you up once. Not twice, not three times—just once. If you don’t get up, you forfeit the earrings.”
Ayla chewed fast and swallowed loudly. Then she shouted, “You really mean it?”
I stood up and spat in my hand. Holding it across the table, I stared into my sister’s eyes. “I oath that if you run three miles tomorrow without stopping, I will give you those earrings upon our return to the house. On my honor as a soldier.”
She eyed me warily. “You’re not a soldier anymore.”
Ouch. “On my honor as a witch, then.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and Ayla stood up quickly. I winced as she spit tiny pieces of bacon into her hand and shook mine emphatically. “Deal!”
“You’re never going to get those earrings, little sister,” Althea murmured with a half smile. She and Ami shared a glance and a chuckle.
Ayla’s nostrils flared. “Oh, yeah? You just watch me!”
My phone buzzed while I was helping Aunt Gwennie with the breakfast dishes. We had no problem using magic to accomplish things, but apparently, someone decided a dishwasher was out of the question. “Where r u?”
“Finishing breakfast,” I texted back.
“Hurry…reporter here soon.”
I slipped my phone back into my utility belt.
“Is that Emma?” Aunt Gwennie asked me, handing me a freshly washed plate. I nodded as I took it and dried it with the dishtowel. “You two did an amazing job closing all of those cold cases. My friend Gertrude was ecstatic to get her lawn frog back after so many years.”
Detective Emma Sullivan and I met a few weeks after I returned to Forkbridge, Florida. Our worlds rapidly collided when she was assigned to find the missing Marianna Black, and I was assigned (by the “goddess”) to stop her murder.
&nbs
p; Through the case, we became friends—helped, no doubt, by the fact that her brother was a vampire and had shared information about the paranormal world with her. That I was a witch and could get images from objects didn’t faze her. In fact, she utilized my gifts better than the Ministry had.
“Some reporter from the Forkbridge Gazette wants to do a puff piece on us.” I rolled my eyes. “I tried to beg off, and she didn’t want to do it, either. I think her boss is making her do it. I don’t want to leave her to deal with that on her own.”
“You’re a good friend, Astra,” Aunt Gwennie said warmly. “I do wish the two of you would do more social things. Go out to a movie, maybe head into Orlando and go to one of the amusement parks. See a show. You know, have some fun.” She scrubbed the skillet. “You two work too much.”
“I like work.”
Aunt Gwennie was still in her nightgown, her hair up in curlers. She gave me a warm smile, barely able to see me through her fogged-up glasses. “I know you like work, Astra, but that’s not all there is.”
“That sounds ridiculous coming from you, Aunt Gwennie. You and mom never do anything but priestess stuff and shop stuff and taking care of kids stuff.” I put away the rest of the food into Tupperware and stored the leftovers in the fridge. There was, of course, no bacon left over. “When is the last time you went out to a movie or an amusement park? Or on a date?”
Aunt Gwennie looked surprised, and then she laughed uproariously. “Oh, Astra, darling, my dating days are long behind me. I’ll be sixty before long. Sixty-year-old women don’t date, dear.”
“Sixty-year-old women date all the time, Aunt Gwennie. You’re ridiculous.”