Convicted Witch: Jagged Grove Book 1

by Willow Monroe

  “She was - a havrue is the spirit of a bitter witch. Very powerful, and very likely to take her bitterness out on anyone close enough to get in her way.”

  “Okaaay... But didn’t you just spend the afternoon chatting with her? Why didn’t she kill you or curse you or...” I shrug. “...whatever it is that havrues do?”

  She looks up at me, and her eyes look huge behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “It wasn’t me she wanted. Tell me - did Angelo say how Rachel died?”

  I’m trying to think, but nothing comes to mind. “No. Only that she did, and then he asked me if I would take over. I was so shocked that I didn’t ask, actually. Does that matter?”

  “Not really. Usually witches who commit suicide are the ones who become havrues. Their unhappiness won’t allow them to completely let go, even though that’s all they want.”

  “Why would she be so unhappy, though? I mean, her home is incredible, she was evidently beloved here...?” I feel like I’m getting in deeper by the moment, and the twins look just as lost. Even as I watch, Rain scoots closer to Glade and takes his hand.

  Bilda gives me a knowing smile. “It’s always about love or money, Trinket. Surely you know that by now.” She fiddles with her supplies for a moment, then looks past me to where the twins are staring out the window. “Something else to consider - that bitterness usually lies underneath even the most beloved personality and seeps out here and there.”

  I look at them, framed in the window, then stare at her again. “You think she did something to their parents, don’t you?”

  “Blakely has told me a few stories about this place. It sounds like Rachel was busy wreaking some havoc long before tonight.”

  I look at the twins again just as a growl of thunder shakes the building. Tension sizzles through the air and the hair on my arms and neck stand up, making me shiver. The sky outside the window lights up red and throws the twins in sharp relief. I reach for them and pull them away from the glass just as bright white lightning momentarily blinds me. Rain squeaks and ducks away, dragging both me and Glade with her. “Glade, take Rain into the reception area. Close the curtains and stay away from the windows.”

  Glade nods. They both look even paler than normal, which makes them almost glow in the dim lights.

  I look at my mom and then nod toward the window. “Rachel?”

  “Most definitely. She’s getting closer. Come here.”

  I walk to where she’s still fiddling with something at the table, just as she turns to me and throws something at my face. I screech and duck, but feel some sort of grit hit all of my exposed skin. “What the hell, Mom?”

  “Hush.” She walks closer and sprinkles more stuff on my head. It goes down the neck of my shirt and makes me squirm. “You need protection.”

  “From you, maybe...” But she’s already gone, spreading the stuff everywhere - on the window sills, in the corners. It smells like some faint flowery mixture, at least, so it’s probably not dead, ground up animal parts or something gross like that. “More protection?” I ask, watching her. “Are you going to spread this stuff all over the twins, too, because you might want to ask about allergies first?”

  She shakes her head. “They don’t need it, but you do. This is Rachel’s home turf, Trinket. I’m just fixing it so that she can’t come in without an invitation.”

  I stop trying to wipe the stuff off my clothes. “Why would she come here?”

  She doesn’t answer right away, just disappears into my office to presumably mark her territory or whatever in there.

  I lean against the worktable, stare through the window just as rain comes pouring down outside, and try to think. If Rachel is a bitter witch - a havrue - what, first of all, would she be bitter about?

  I go through to where Glade and Rain are sitting in the waiting area chairs. “Would Rachel have any reason to kill your parents, guys?”

  They both look at me with perfectly blank expressions. Finally Glade shakes his head slowly. “Nooo. I don’t think so. Rachel and my parents were good friends - she used to come over for cookouts and stuff.”

  I pause, trying to imagine a supernatural cookout for a second. Weird. “OK. Why did she stop?”

  He shrugs, but Rain speaks up. “The ring. Remember, Glade?”

  I look at Glade, and his face clears a little. “I don’t know if it’s why she stopped coming, but they got into a fight over a ring one night, not too long before mom and dad disappeared. There was a lot of yelling, and even some threats, but nothing that bad. I mean, nobody threatened to kill anybody.”

  “A ring?” I can’t imagine killing anyone over a piece of jewelry. Bilda might be wrong this time. “Is that all?”

  “Not a ring.” Bilda comes up behind me, making me jump. “A circle.”

  “A circle?”

  She ignores me and looks at the twins. They’re nodding. “They were all members of the same coven, weren’t they?”

  Glade thinks about this, then nods again, curly hair bouncing. “Yeah, they were - I think. I was too young, but that sounds like what was going on. Even when I got older, I didn’t pay much attention to them.”

  “They kept shooing us out of the room,” Rain spoke up in Glade’s defense. “Especially when Rachel came over.”

  I think about this for a second, then look at Bilda. “So you think there was a problem within the coven?”

  “Most likely. Women can get catty when it comes to assignments. I’ve seen it happen many times.”

  “Assignments?”

  She raises an eyebrow at me. “Like who gets to be High Priestess. Things like that. I’ll bet that Glade and Rain’s dad was High Priest, wasn’t he?”

  They both shrug, but I get the picture. “OK, so that happened. Then what?”

  Nobody answers me, so I go to the reception desk and lean against it, trying to think. I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot of witchy stuff, but I also can’t imagine a murder-suicide thing over coven politics. Maybe I’m sheltered.

  I realize that I’m looking at the exact spot where we found Maggie. At the same time, I see a glimpse of something yellow sticking out from under the leg of the tall coatrack that stands off to the left, near the door.

  I had noticed it before - a big wooden, old-timey thing with about ten curved arms sticking out - but I didn’t really pay attention to it. Now I do, and see that the base is about a foot in diameter, and plenty big enough to hide something. Coming back around the desk, I drop to my knees and reach for whatever it is I’ve spotted.

  The floor in this corner is so dusty that I sneeze twice just getting the thing out, and when I finally do, I’m disappointed. It’s just a cup. One of those flimsy plastic ones that people use at picnics. Usually they’re red, but this one is bright yellow.

  I sniff it, and catch a whiff of the odor that permeated the room when we found Maggie. “Ick,” I say, dropping it onto an accent table and standing up to dust the dirt off my clothes. A little of Bilda’s grit falls off my head at the same time, and I’m relieved to see it looks like dried herbs and something granular, like sugar.

  The cup smells like Maggie’s death, and also like the mayor’s home brew, if Jones is to be believed. “I still think she was poisoned or something,” I mutter.

  Bilda sweeps past me and grabs the cup, then carries it carefully back through to her worktable. I follow more slowly, trying to get a cobweb out of my hair. “Bilda, what are you doing?” I ask.

  Just then thunder rocks the room again, followed closely by a pounding on the door. I look at Bilda, since I’m spooked and she seems to know more than me about what’s going on here. She nods.

  “Glade, you wanna get that? It sounds like we’re open for business.”

  He leaves Rain in her chair and goes to unlock the door. When he comes back, he’s half-dragging a skinny man who is soaking wet and holding a bloody rag to his head.

  “What happened?” I ask, going to him. “I’m Trinket, by the way. I can help-.”

  A comm
otion at the door makes me stop. Three more people - no, four - run inside, all of them dripping and groaning and clutching wounds.

  “This town’s being ripped apart,” one man shouts over the nose of the others.

  I’m listening and nodding, but I’m also trying to remember what it was like, back when I healed simple cuts and bruises for fun. How did I even begin? How did I begin earlier, when Bartholomew got hurt? I don’t remember, and it’s frustrating me. My recent healings were more life and death, so my magic sort of took the lead. This time, though, I don’t feel that familiar pulse of power. I don’t feel anything.

  I’m staring at him, and he’s staring back at me, when Bilda hurries over to us. She pinches the skin above my elbow.

  “Ow,” I say.

  She reaches past me to take the man’s hand. “I’ll take care of him. You go help the others.”

  I open my mouth to tell her that I can’t, but her eyes narrow. “Intention, Trinket. Be intentional.”

  The man shoots me one bewildered look and then Bilda is dragging him away.

  I move to the group of people who just came in and kneel down in front of a heavyset woman with hard eyes and a huge new bruise darkening her face and throat, just as the window behind the reception desk explodes. Glass rains in, followed by the downpour and a cold wind that crawls across the back of my neck. I need to get her out of this room, first of all.

  I take her hand. It’s cold, too. “Come with me. I’m going to help you.”

  As I say the words, some tiny thing shifts in my mind. I feel it, but can’t quite place it, I speak again, pulling her along with me to the exam room where Bilda is putting a poultice on the first man. “I’m going to help you,” I say, putting emphasis on the going part of my little mantra.

  Another shift in my mind, more perceptible now, and my hands begin to tingle. I can’t help but smile a little, but I bite my lip to hide it. Can’t have anyone think that the doctor has gone bananas.

  I direct her to sit on the exam table, which she does, and then run my fingertips along the edges of the bruising. Her lip is busted, too, something I couldn’t quite see before. I touch it and watch it knit together. Not completely healed, but enough that there won’t even be a scar.

  When the bruising starts to fade I ask her to swallow, but she shakes her head. In a croaky voice, she whispers, “It hurts.”

  I place my palm across her Adam’s apple. “Swallow for me,” I say. In my mind, the images come unbidden, like slides from a Viewfinder, and I know I’m building intention. I see her tissue clear and strengthen. I see her blood vessels rearrange themselves. I see her bruises fade away, leaving behind a surprisingly pretty smile.

  The effort makes me lightheaded, but when I pull away she looks a million times better. I stare at her with a goofy grin, which she doesn’t return.

  “Better?” I ask finally. “Try to talk.”

  She does, hesitantly. “I’m afraid it will hurt,” she whispers. Then, surprised at her own strong voice, she rubs her throat and says louder, “I think you fixed it. Wow.”

  The bruising is just a shadow now, but I make her feel her face for tender spots before I let her go. “Find shelter,” I say, following her out to the reception room. “Stay out of this storm.”

  I’m still smiling as I go get my next patient.

  Eighteen

  The trickle of people becomes a steady flow that keeps both me and Bilda busy for the next two hours. As I work with patient after patient - my patients! - I slowly piece together what is happening.

  It seems the docks were the first to go, although no one knows why. The pretty seaside setting that welcomed us to Jagged Grove is gone now, for all intents and purposes, and the levees are beginning to creak and crumble here and there. “If that goes,” says one old fisherman to me as I reset his shoulder, “We’ll all be ass over teakettle.”

  I smile at Bilda over his head and she smiles back. Her hair, curled to a frizz, is sticking up all over and I see a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She’s being amazing, knowing exactly which of her concoctions fixes what problem, and never complaining about how tired she must be getting.

  We’ve developed an unspoken system, of sorts - she manages the smaller cuts and bruises, while I handle more serious open wounds and injuries with my magic. Rain keeps everyone in the reception room calm, and Glade is busy boarding up windows against the storm that still rages outside.

  We make a fantastic team, if I do say so myself.

  When I send an injured man out and no one comes in to take his place, I finally feel like I can sit down for a minute. Bilda is just sending her patient out with a pat on the shoulder when I take his place, sliding my ass up on the worktable. It’s the first I’ve sat down, and it feels really, really good.

  She turns to me. “What can I do for you, girlie?” she asks.

  “A bottle of bourbon. Can you conjure one of those, please?”

  She chuckles, then looks closer at me. “You’re pale.”

  “It’s hard work. Harder than I thought it would be,” I admit. My blood is still buzzing, though. “I got woozy there a few times.”

  She nods. “A lot of your energy goes into this sort of work.”

  We both jump as a tree cracks and falls nearby. It sounds like it barely missed our office.

  “You think Rachel has something to do with this?” I ask. “Seriously?”

  “Yes. I do.” She points to the far corner of the worktable and I see the cup I found earlier, but it’s glowing an odd washed-out blur color. “What is it?”

  “I checked it out. It’s been spell-cast.”

  “Who would cast a spell on an empty...?” My voice trails off as I realize that the cup probably wasn’t always empty “Oh. You think Maggie was poisoned.”

  “I think - and this is just conjecture, mind you - that Rachel was a jealous witch. I think she set her sights on the twins’ dad and did some harm when she didn’t get her way. Then I think she went after Maggie for the same reason.”

  “Wait - was Maggie part of the coven?” I was following until this last, but now I’m confused again.

  “No. Think about what Jones said to Angelo earlier. I’m going to find you some juice or something before you keel over.”

  I do think about it, right after I lay back on the table and groan for a full minute because it feels so good to straighten my spine, but I have no idea what thing he’d said. I mean, Jones is hot and all that, but I don’t go around memorizing our conversations. So I try approaching it another way.

  If Rachel was jealous enough to kill, who would she kill Maggie over? Obviously somebody who was a threat, but from all I’d heard, Maggie was the sweetest person around. Nobody has a bad word to say about her.

  Jealousy.

  Rachel. Maggie.

  Maybe Rachel had a lover hanging around the office and Maggie started flirting with him. Even worse, what if she took him away from Rachel? It seems silly, because these were grown women instead of high school girls, but it makes sense if Bilda is right. I glance at the cup again. And somebody cast a spell on that cup, which I’d be willing to bet was Maggie’s. The position of it under the coatrack told me it could easily have rolled from her hand as she died.

  But this all seems too much like conjecture, and I’m too tired to care, to be honest. “Bilda!” I call out, wondering where she went. The office isn’t that big. “Just tell me who Rachel was screwing, already. My head hurts.”

  A female giggle answers me from the doorway.

  “Rain?”

  “Sorry. No. Just us.” This voice is male, and I sit up so fast that I get dizzy again. Putting a hand to my head, I look to see the beautiful Wisp, clutching the hand of a Land’s End model. He’s all decked out in corduroy and hiking boots, with closely cropped blonde hair. Even from here I can see the professional highlights and bright white teeth. This has to be the one and only Scott Trevine.

  The two of them look completely untouched by the storm.
r />   “Oh. Sorry. Can I help you?” Neither of them look injured, and it’s got to be close to midnight.

  Scott picks Wisp up and carries her to my exam table. She looks at him, batting her eyelashes and cooing something I don’t want to hear. I swallow a smirk, because I guess she’s hurt, after all. “What’s the problem?”

  “I think Wisp twisted her ankle earlier on some steps. Can you see to it?” He has moved down her practically swooning body to cradle her ankle gently in both hands, like it’s the Hope Diamond.

  “Sure.”

  I bend over the table to take a look, but there isn’t much to go on. I don’t see any swelling, and she doesn’t flinch when I put pressure on it. A couple of times this evening, my intuition has told me where to look for an injury, but I’m getting nothing there, either.

  I look up. “Can you show me exactly where it hurts?” I ask.

  She pulls her foot out of my hands and giggles again, but this time the sound makes my skin crawl. “I’m not hurt, actually. I just had to open the door. It’s time for you to leave, Trinket.”

  She jumps up from the table, takes Scott’s hand, and disappears through the door again. Actually, disappear is the wrong word. They ooze out of my sight and, presumably, out of my office. I wonder where in the hell Bilda, Glade and Rain went.

  Behind me, near Bilda’s table, I hear laughter. It’s a woman’s laugh too, but not the smug little twitter that belongs to Wisp. This is the full-throated laugh of a grown woman, and I know without even thinking about it that it belongs to Rachel.

  A new kind of pressure fills the room, or maybe I should say that it fills my head. Suddenly I can’t breathe, and then tunnel vision closes in, followed by a nausea like I’ve never felt before. I taste seawater, somehow.

  From the doorway, Angelo says, “Leave her alone.”

  I can’t see him. I can’t see anything.

  “Ooh, how pretty. Coming to her rescue is so gauche, Angelo.” Her voice comes closer to me, as if she’s turned in my direction. “He’s always been the knight in shining armor type, though. You would have eventually found that out.”