by Nic Saint
Witchy Hexations
Witchy Fingers 2
Nic Saint
Puss in Print Publications
Contents
Witchy Hexations
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
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Excerpt from Witchy Possessions
About Nic
Also by Nic Saint
Witchy Hexations
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Encouraged by their godfather, triplets Edelie, Estrella and Ernestine decide to show the world what they’re capable of. They’re witches, and proud of their witchy heritage. And even though their grandmother warns them not to go through with their crazy scheme, they decide to ignore her advice and go big or go home. Soon their public display of witchcraft lands them on the front page of every newspaper in the country as well as… in prison.
Accused of an act of terrorism, their stunt backfires spectacularly, and even Detective Sam Barkley of the NYPD can’t help them now.
Gran has conveniently disappeared, and so has their godfather, but when things look worse than ever before, the three most inept witches in the world buckle down and decide to fight back. They have to make things right, expunge their criminal record, and find the serial killer who’s targeting young women all over New York City. Are they up for the task? Or will they crack under the pressure? Find out in Witchy Hexations, the second book in the funny Witchy Fingers series of cozy witch mysteries.
Chapter 1
I hadn’t even known it was possible to have such a great time doing nothing. It had been a full week since I lost my job at Brigham Shatwell, and I was loving every minute of it. Finally I could indulge in my favorite habit of staying up half the night and sleeping in, and I hadn’t missed my Nazi boss for even a single second. And the same went for Estrella and Ernestine. My two sisters, who’d also lost their jobs, were having a blast. After years of hard labor, toiling at the daily grind, it was great fun finally to be able to laze about all day. Almost as if we were teenagers again—minus the acne and the angst.
Of course, we all knew this couldn’t last forever, and Gran, for one, kept reminding us that sooner or later we needed to get jobs. We tried to explain to her that we were the new Robin Hoods now. That our godfather, a wizard who’d been appointed our guardian by our parents before they died, told us that from now on we’d never have to work regular jobs ever again. That our mission in life was to steal from the bad people and give to the good ones. But Gran was having a hard time with this. In her mind, the good people didn’t steal from the bad people but worked diligently to provide for their families.
“Look, Gran,” I said one morning at breakfast, “all we need to do is get organized. Figure out what this new mission in life of ours really entails.”
“Your new mission in life is the same as your old one,” said Gran primly. “To put food on the table for you and your family. So get cracking already, will you? And if you three can’t find jobs for yourselves, I promise I will.”
“But Tavish said—”
“I don’t care what that good-for-nothing said,” she shot back. “That man is a bad influence, and I, for one, want you to stay far away from him.”
“But Gran!” lamented my sister Estrella. She was the star hopeful in our family and had always wanted to be a singer, in spite of the fact that she’s got absolutely no talent whatsoever. “We need to carve out our own path!”
“Your path leads to ruin if you don’t get off your tush and start looking for a job,” insisted our grandmother.
We were all seated at the breakfast table, Estrella, Ernestine, Gran and I, though it was perhaps more accurate to call it the brunch table, as over the course of the last week we’d been getting up later and later. It drove Gran crazy. As usual, she’d been up since before six, and every hour we lay in bed sleeping she’d been getting more and more worked up, apparently.
“Look, Gran,” said Ernestine, the most serious one of us. She pushed her glasses up her nose. Once, she’d wanted to become a big shot in the world of law, but had failed at college, and then been fired as a legal secretary. She could still argue with the best of the legal beagles, though. “Mom and Dad, before they died, gave us a sacred mission to carry out. They wanted us to follow in their path so follow in their path we must, don’t you see?”
“Oh, I can see, all right,” said Gran, shaking her head. “You expect me to do all the work around here while you lie around thinking about your future. Well, young lady, enough is enough. If you don’t start pulling your weight around here I quit.”
“You what?” Estrella asked, mouth agape. “You can’t do that!”
Gran eyed her grimly. “You heard. I’m not your housekeeper or your cook or your cleaner. I’m your grandmother, and I deserve a little respect.”
“But, Gran!” I lamented, not understanding why she didn’t understand.
“Shush!” she said, collecting the leftover pancakes and wrapping them up in cellophane. “If by this time tomorrow I don’t see any improvement I’m officially resigning from my post and you can take care of yourselves. No more cooking, no more washing, and no more cleaning until you’ve figured out your futures. And let me tell you,” she added dangerously, wagging her finger, “your future will look pretty bleak if you decide to listen to the advice of the likes of Tavish Mildew! The man is a menace and a bad influence!”
“But he was Dad’s best friend,” I protested. “How can you expect us not to listen to him when he’s got so much to tell us about our parents?!”
Gran’s face softened and she sat down at the table again. “Listen, girls,” she began, “your mom and dad took a wrong fork in the road. A fork that led to death and ruin. And I, for one, swore when they died that I’d never let you go down that same road. Ever. Tavish Mildew has a very bad reputation and I don’t want you seeing him anymore and that’s my final word on the matter.”
I shared a look of concern with my sisters. We’d sworn that we’d follow in our parents’ footsteps. Dad had been one of the great thieves, for whom no safe was, well, safe, I guess. And Mom was a great witch. Together they’d stolen from the rich and given to the poor. We didn’t know how to follow in their footsteps, but we knew it was the right thing to do. We just needed more time to figure it out. Time, it was now obvious, we simply didn’t have.
Chapter 2
So after Gran cleared the table—with our help—and left the kitchen, we stayed put and quickly relapsed into a moody and rebellious silence.
“There has to be a way to follow our dream and still make Gran happy,” said Estrella finally. “You guys, we’re smart! We can figure this out!”
Ernestine looked thoughtful, but then she always did.
“It strikes me as ominous that Gran isn’t on board with this,” she said, rubbing her chin with a dubious finger. “I would have thought she’d have jumped for joy that her girls had finally discovered their true purpose in life.”
“Me too,” I said. “I would have thought she’d be over the moon. I mean, it’s not as if there’s a lot of future in being a barista.”
“Or a legal secretary,” Ernestine chimed in.
“Or a voice talent,” muttered Estrella, who’d had high hopes of becoming the next Celine or Mariah until her roseate dreams were cruelly shattered.
We sat staring at each other. We might be sisters, but we’re totally different. I’m on the full-figured side, with red hair, green eyes and pale complexion. Estrella is a petite blue-eyed blonde, and Ernestine is dark-haired and slender. Anyone who didn’t know us would never guess we’re triplets. Even our characters are totally different. I’m the more placid type—though Strel and Stien like to call me emo, whatever that is—while Strel is more the peppy, quirky kind, and Stien the serious brooding type, obviously.
“We need to figure out what to do—stat,” Ernestine said.
We stared at one another some more. Somehow we needed to incorporate the recent changes in our lives and channel them into a money-making venture. We’d embraced the changes wholeheartedly. Gran? Not so much.
“I’ve got it!” Strel suddenly cried out.
“What have you got?” I asked hopefully. I was at the end of my tether.
“Why don’t we start a company together, like Gran did?!”
“I, um, I don’t like flowers,” I said. “Well, I don’t!” I added when Stien gave me an odd look. Before Gran retired, she’d run a chain of flower stores that were very successful. Then she sold them and pretty much cleaned up.
“Actually, I don’t like them either,” said Stien. “I mean, I like flowers, obviously. Who doesn’t?” she added with a reproachful look at me, “but I don’t want to sell them. It’s simply not what I want to do with my life.”
“I don’t mean we have to sell flowers, you guys,” said Estrella, rolling her eyes. “I meant we could start a company. Instead of going to work for a boss.”
“What company?” I asked. “Stealing stuff isn’t legal, Strel.”
“No, not thievery, of course,” my sister said happily, stuffing a piece of leftover waffle in her mouth. I’m always amazed how she manages to eat so much and stay so thin. “We need a cover for our real business. That way we can work from home, Gran will be happy, and we’ll still pursue our mission.”
“But what can we do?” asked Ernestine. “We need to make money in this company. Real money, not the stuff we steal from—who are we going to be stealing from, by the way? And what? And once we’ve stolen it, what are we going to do with it? That part of this mission thing is still a little fuzzy for me.”
“For me, too,” I confessed. Actually everything about this was fuzzy.
Estrella was still grinning, and speaking in riddles. “Why don’t we legally do what we’ll also be doing illegally?” she offered.
“And what’s that?” I asked, on the verge of slapping my brow.
She spread her arms. “We start a bank!” she exclaimed.
“A what?!” Ernestine and I cried simultaneously.
“A bank! That way we’ll have a license to rob people blind, we’ll be rolling in money, and the best part? It’s all perfectly legal and aboveboard!”
It was a testament to Ernestine and my extreme restraint—a restraint borne from years of associating with Estrella—that we didn’t slap her senseless. Instead we merely goggled at her for the space of ten seconds, before crying out, “You’re nuts!”
“No, I’m not!” she said defensively. “Just think about it! The wealthiest companies are all banks and the richest people are all bankers. They get those huge-ass million-dollar bonuses every year. When you’re a banker people clamor to give you all their money, and all you’ve got to do is give them cents on the dollar. Then you turn around and lend that same money to people for three, four, five percent interest. It’s the biggest scam in the world! And it’s legal! The best part: you don’t have to make your hands dirty. You don’t have to produce cars, or build houses, or grow crops, or teach a bunch of snotty-nosed brats calculus or French. You don’t do diddly-squat! You just take money from Average Joe, hand it to Plain Jane and you’re done. All from the comfort of your own home. Just put up a gilt shingle and you’re in business.”
“You’re nuts,” I grumbled. “Nobody’s going to let us start a bank! We don’t know the first thing about banking and I’m sure there’s rules and stuff.”
“Not to mention starting capital,” Ernestine put in. “You have to have money to make money, right?”
“Right,” I said dubiously. This conversation was way over my head.
“That’s the easy part,” said Strel. “We get the money… from the banks!”
“Fat chance,” I scoffed. “They’re never going to give us any money. Not if we’re going to start our own bank and compete with them.”
“We’re not going to ask them, are we?” she asked with a cheeky wink.
“What do you mean?” Ernestine asked. “We have to ask.”
“Not if we’re stealing the money,” Strel pointed out.
“Stealing?” I asked, my voice skipping an octave. “What do you mean?”
Estrella grinned widely. “Why don’t we rob a bank? That way we’ll have the seed money we need, plus we’ll use it as a practice run. We need to start somewhere with this stealing business.”
“You’re crazy,” I repeated, shaking my head. “Absolutely batshit mad.”
“I don’t like your plan either, Estrella,” said Ernestine with a worried frown on her face. “We’re going to get caught and spend the rest of our lives in jail. No, we are,” she stressed when Estrella groaned. “This is real life, Estrella. Not Ocean’s Eight or Nine or however many there are now.”
“Yeah, and we’re not Sandra Bullock,” I added. “Or Anne Hathaway.”
“We won’t go to jail!” cried Estrella with the pretty enthusiasm that was one of her best—and annoying—features. “We’ve got witchy fingers, you guys! Nobody can catch us. This is our destiny, remember?! Our future!”
“I thought we were supposed to steal from the wicked?” asked Stien.
“Bankers are the wicked,” said Strel. “They’re the real thieves here.”
I was shaking my head. “I don’t know…” Though I did know. I was pretty sure that when Mom and Dad gave us this sacred mission they weren’t thinking about robbing banks. “That money belongs to someone, Strel,” I pointed out. “We can’t just steal it.”
“Oh, come on. Do you know where banks get their money? They print it! None of it is real. Just a bunch of numbers on a computer screen. So all we need to do is get our hands on some of those numbers and we’re in business! The best and most lucrative business in the history of the world!”
“No,” I finally said. “I don’t like it and I don’t want any part of it.”
“Me neither,” said Ernestine decidedly.
Estrella rolled her expressive eyes. “So what would you have us do, then? What business can we go into that would act as the perfect cover?”
“Something legal?” Ernestine suggested.
“Yes,” I said, pointing at my sister. “More specifically something that doesn’t involve donning the mask of a dead president and robbing a bank.”
“Oh, I loved that movie,” said Estrella. “Point Blank? Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze? I wouldn’t mind joining those guys on their sacred quest.”
“Spoiler alert. Patrick Swayze died in that movie, and Keanu was an FBI agent,” Ernestine pointed out. “He only robbed banks to catch Patrick.”
“They still had a lot of fun together,” Estrella grumbled.
I was thinking hard, trying to come up with a way to reconcile our newfound purpose in life with a way to make money and ma
ke Gran happy. I didn’t want to go back to life as a barista, that was for sure. I’d been an awfully terrible one. And I knew for a fact that Ernestine and Estrella didn’t want to go back to their old jobs either. But what could we possibly do?
The idea to go into business for ourselves was a solid one. Gran could provide us with some seed money to start the business, and we would be able to work from home. And, most importantly, we’d be able to control our schedules. To go on the kinds of missions that were going to be our new reality. We had no idea what kinds of missions they would be but we knew they’d involve righting wrongs somehow. And then it hit me… Righting wrongs. “What profession rights wrongs more than any other?”
“Police?” asked Estrella. She frowned. “You don’t want us to go to police academy, right? I’d make a lousy cop, Edie. Though I wouldn’t mind training with those boys in blue,” she added dreamily. “I’ll bet they’re just fine.”
All three of us stared dreamily before us, and I knew for a fact that we were all thinking about the same guy. Detective Samuel Barkley of the NYPD, the man we’d met when Gran had been attacked not so long ago. He’d helped us catch the bad guy, and had earned our respect and admiration and… perhaps something more as well.
I tapped the kitchen table smartly. “No, of course we’re not going to be cops. What we are going to do is start a private security company.”
They both stared at me, eyes wide. “Wait, what?!” cried Estrella.
I nodded. “It’s the perfect cover! We’ll provide security to the kinds of high rollers and VIPs that we’ll be targeting, covering parties, receptions, corporate events and such, and while we’re at it, we can go about our real business. Completely undetected. Who would suspect the bodyguard?”
“But we’re not security people,” Estrella argued.
“Yes, we don’t know the first thing about it,” Ernestine said, looking positively bewildered now.