New Witch on the Block

by Louisa West

  “I know,” Rosie admitted, before holding her hands up in a placating gesture. “But I told you I will handle it. Okay? All of it. Things like this need to be done delicately, or else I could be run out of town.” She took a breath, her voice dropping to a murmur. “And we don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “I know the feeling,” he admitted. His expression softened when he glanced at her, and he shook his head. “Promise me that if anything else like this happens, you’ll tell me?”

  Rosie quirked a brow, which hitched itself even higher when Declan added “Please,” to the end of his request.

  “Okay,” she agreed. She ran her hands through her long coffee-colored locks and began to scoop it up into a ponytail, more for something to do than because it was annoying her. “At least I haven’t heard anything else from Randy or his cronies.” She looped her hair through the elastic band she usually kept on her wrist for that purpose. “Thankfully.”

  A shadow passed over Declan’s face, and he cleared his throat. “Yeah, we’ll count our blessings,” he said, straightening. “I better get these deliveries off the truck and into the dock.”

  Rosie blinked. “You came in to see me before you’d even unloaded?”

  Declan’s trademark cheek came flooding back onto his face as though a dam had broken. “There’s a comment in there somewhere about unloading that’s dirty and socially unacceptable, that would make ya blush and hit me if I uttered it,” he told her.

  Rosie shrugged. “But you’re a gentleman and not gonna go there... right?”

  He was still chuckling as he started for the door.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” she offered, following him. “Not like I’m inundated with customers.”

  “Great,” he called back to her. “Thanks, love.”

  If Rosie didn’t know better, she would have sworn that he fell into a swagger, once he knew she was following behind her. And then she realized, she did know better, and he definitely was swaggering for her. She smirked and rolled her eyes because the antic was so utterly Declan that she couldn’t help but find it a little funny. And then there was the flip side, where she had to admit to herself that the man filled out a pair of jeans way too well

  They began unloading the trays of fruit and vegetables from the bed of the truck. Rosie couldn’t help noticing the way the muscles in his arms bunched and moved as he shifted the crates or the way that he caught her noticing every single time she dared to sneak a peek.

  But the expected taunt about her ‘seeing something she liked’ didn’t come, and that surprised her even more than her growing interest in Declan’s biceps. After all, it wasn’t a crime to appreciate a hot guy. And the more she thought about, the more Rosie was starting to think that hot wasn't all he was.

  She grabbed one of the last trays, immediately regretting picking up the potatoes instead of the lettuce. She stepped over to the side of the truck bed and onto the dock, where Declan was coming back from a return trip. She shuffled to the left, her fingers white with effort on the handles of the tray. Declan followed before they both ducked right to pass. She smiled and huffed a small laugh, and then felt Declan’s fingers close over hers.

  “Here,” he offered, slipping his hands around and then under her grip. “Allow me.”

  She watched him, her eyes wide, as he took the weight from her. She let her hands linger, fingers over his now as he shifted to take the tray with ease. He glanced down, looking at their hands entwined, before meeting her gaze.

  “Thanks,” was all she could manage to say.

  The hint of a smile—a kind smile, and not his signature smirk—came and went. His face was solemn as he leaned forward, his eyes skipping down to her lips as she realized that he was about to—

  “There you are!”

  Ben stood in the doorway that led back into the store, smiling at both of them in a way that said his morning off had left him well-rested.

  “Sorry!” Rosie blurted, stepping back from Declan. She brushed her hands down the front of her skinny jeans as though it might rid them of the warm, tingling sensation left there by Declan’s touch. “Are there customers waiting?”

  “No,” Ben said in a slow drawl, looking between Declan and Rosie as though he was trying to come to the right conclusion but was missing a few vital clues. “I just wondered where you were. Hey, Declan—do you have a sec? I was hoping to go over next week’s inventory with you.”

  “Grand,” Declan replied a touch too quickly, and Rosie glanced at him out the corner of her eye. She was glad to know that she wasn’t the only one embarrassed by their moment on the loading dock.

  “Rosie,” he added, following Ben inside, “are you okay unloading those last two crates?”

  “Sure.” She turned to step back onto the truck, where the lettuce and celery awaited her. She was about to get the sack trolley so that she could take the delivery inside when she heard a strange sound. Like a particularly musical cricket chirping. In the middle of a parking lot?

  She froze for a moment, straining to hear it. And when she turned her head in the direction of the cab of Declan’s truck, she realized it was his phone. Trotting over to the passenger door, Rosie bent and reached through the open window to retrieve the cell.

  She hadn't meant to spy what was on his phone preview, but it was difficult not to notice the gigantic letters above the green and red phones. Father. So formal. She tried to back out of the window but got stuck—she wasn't as young as she used to be—and before she could make her exit, she accidentally spied on him again.

  The phone stopped ringing, and then after, a text message quickly popped up.

  'Any progress?'

  She frowned and shimmied back out of the window, clutching the phone in one hand, and turned to find Declan standing behind her.

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Sorry, I—I just heard your phone ringing, and I thought it might be important, so I was going to run it in to you and... and—”

  “And you thought you’d have a sticky-beak in my truck?” he asked, and the tone was so unusual for him that Rosie blinked.

  “No! I mean, I saw. But...” she floundered, and then she shrugged, as though to give up on any of the excuses she could have plucked from thin air. “Is everything okay?” she asked him instead.

  “Not really,” he told her. “But it’s not your problem.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, annoyed that it was okay for her to share her problems with him, but that it didn’t seem to be a two-way street. “Fine,” she said, shoving his phone into his chest. “Your dad called.”

  “You looked in my phone, too?” he raised his voice after her as she retreated.

  “Don't flatter yourself, moron,” she called back, heading for the counter. “It was on the screen.”

  Chapter 12

  As the afternoon wore on, Rosie could feel her funk settling heavier around her shoulders, like the arm of a shoulder-devil cuddling her closer for a pep talk. Every time she heard a noise coming from the back of the store, she turned, hoping to see Declan striding through the loading dock door with a delivery. When he didn’t appear, the thundercloud over her head darkened a little more.

  When the front doors whooshed open, Rosie looked up out of habit to see who had entered. Prissy Bishop pranced into the store, dressed in a pale pink suit more suited to the first lady than to a pastor's wife. She stomped straight up to the counter and tore off her enormous sunglasses to glare at her, but Rosie was distracted.

  It looked like the woman was wearing some kind of extreme Halloween makeup. Her eyebrows were beyond bushy and puffed out in such a way that made it look like she had a sloping caveman’s forehead. Rosie’s eyes widened as she took in the deep wrinkles around Prissy’s face, and when she spoke, Rosie could have sworn that a few of her teeth looked like they were black and rotten.

  Just the way she had sketched her on the Church magazine cover!

  “There is raw egg all over the interior of my son’s car,” Prissy
snarled, “and I’d like to know how you’re planning on fixin’ it!”

  Resisting the urge to laugh, Rosie blinked and leaned back, as though it would help her get a better perspective of the situation.

  “Hold up,” she said, holding out a hand to stave off any further outbursts from Prissy. “What you’re saying to me is you know your son egged my ten-year-old daughter and me, but you’re mad because he has raw egg in his upholstery?”

  Prissy opened her mouth to retort, and then covered her mouth with her hand to hide her teeth. “I’m mad because he didn’t put raw egg all over his own car!” Prissy pursed her lips and reached up to resettle her huge sunglasses on the bridge of her unusually crooked nose.

  “I don’t follow,” Rosie replied. “What exactly do you think I did to make eggs explode in your son’s car? From where I was standing on the highway with my daughter, dripping with eggs your son threw at us?” While Prissy seemed to need a little time to muster up a reply, Rosie saw an opportunity to set things straight, and she took it.

  “I oughta report this to the Sheriff’s Department,” she mused. “I’ll bet that at least one of the shops on the highway – probably Granny’s—has security footage of your son driving past us. And I have witnesses who saw us arrive here for my shift covered in egg.” She gave a tiny false sigh. “What will people think when they find out how Pastor Bishop’s kid acts towards his neighbors.”

  It was clear from the look on the other woman’s face that this altercation wasn’t going the way she had planned it. Prissy faltered, and an idea struck Rosie. She might not be able to change the way people in Mosswood treated her, but she could deter any further eggings and get some chores done.

  “Of course, I’d much prefer to be able to handle this between ourselves like grown women, if you can stand to act like one.”

  The doors of the Go-Go-Mart slid open to admit Declan, who took one glance at the two women and wisely opted to go towards the back of the store to check Maggie’s score on Pac-Man instead.

  Prissy was too spooked to speak. She stuffed her sunglasses back onto her face and darted for the exit. Just as she made it to the automatic doors, she turned to look back.

  “I’ll pray for you, Rosie,” she huffed, before flouncing out onto the sidewalk.

  Rosie let go of a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, fighting back the urge to grin at the memory of Prissy's face.

  She glanced at Declan. His usually unruly red locks were swept to one side in a style that was reminiscent of 1930s glamor, and his typical lumberjack-esque attire had been replaced with well-fitted chinos and a crisp pale blue shirt. He looked terrific, and Rosie fought against her primal urge to drink in the sight of him.

  All the many things she had wanted to say to him flew out of her brain, leaving her mouth dry. Instead of any of the witty greetings she had contrived, what her sluggish reflexes finally decided to go with was a hesitant wave.

  His brows flickered with surprise, but he went with it and offered her a half-hearted wave back. And then he turned his attention back to Pac-Man.

  Life felt so much more complicated that afternoon, as she and Maggie rode home beside Declan in his big rickety truck. The windows were rolled low enough for the wind to tug at her ponytail, almost drowning out the awkward silence between Declan and herself. Maggie had looked between the two of them as the truck started out of town and decided her book would be better company for the ride home.

  As the truck pulled up the drive, Rosie felt her stomach turn as she took in the sight of the cottage itself. It looked as though a tornado had hit; the mailbox was knocked clear to the ground, mail and the pages of a newspaper littering the yard. Deep tire marks ran in huge rings over the lawn and through Rosie’s restored flower beds. The bay window in the front of the house stood intact, but the others were shattered. The front door had been kicked in below the handle, splintering even though the deadlock had held. And spray-painted in bright red letters from across the front of the cottage from one side to the other were two huge words.

  S T U P I D B I T C H

  Rosie gasped, then felt all the air whoosh out of her lungs. She turned to pull Maggie to her as Declan parked the truck, trying to stop her daughter from seeing the worst of the carnage, but Maggie struggled and craned her neck for a look. Declan’s neutral expression had vanished, leaving a chill in the air of the truck’s cab.

  “You two wait here,” he said in a tone that was less of a request and more of an order. “I mean it, Rosie—keep her in the truck and lock the doors once I’m out. I need to check that it’s safe.”

  He needn’t have asked her twice. If Maggie hadn’t been there, then wild horses wouldn’t have been able to keep her in that damn truck, but there was no way she would risk Maggie’s safety. Declan stepped down from the cab, and Rosie reached hastily to lock both doors.

  Declan searched the garden and woods surrounding the cottage. After what seemed like forever, he came back around front, scaled the porch steps two at a time, and then busted the front door open the rest of the way with one powerful push-kick.

  He must have been satisfied that the house was safe because he soon re-emerged onto the porch where Rosie could see, giving her a curt nod of approval. In a heartbeat, Rosie had unlocked the passenger door and jumped down onto the grass, holding her arms up to help Maggie. They walked hand in hand over the lawn to the porch and looked up at Declan.

  “They’re long gone,” he growled. Rosie noticed that both of his hands were balled into huge, hammer-like fists. “The fu—nny-lookin’ meanies,” he finished, switching out the f-bomb to something more child-appropriate at the last second. “Alright, ladies?”

  Rosie could still feel her heart rattling in her chest. The breathlessness that usually accompanied her arguments with Randy made her wheeze every time she took a gulp of air.

  And that's when she saw it. Held up by a hunting knife stabbed into the wood of the porch hung a note with large, uneven handwriting.

  “Oh, sh—oot,” Declan said as he noticed what she was staring at. Rosie tried to tear her gaze away and couldn’t.

  CAME TO SEE YOU BUT YOU WEREN’T HOME. WON’T BE LONG NOW. YOUR LOVING HUSBAND.

  Declan was at her side in an instant, reading the note that she still held in her trembling gaze. “That bastard won’t get near you or Maggie, I swear to you,” he growled in a low tone meant for Rosie’s ears only.

  But Maggie proved that children are usually much brighter than the adults around them give them credit for.

  “Dad did this, didn't he?” Both of them turned to look at her stricken little face, and Rosie nodded. “Why does he hate us so much?”

  Rosie thought her heart would break, as her mini-me looked up at her with sadness in her big hazel eyes. She could have said it was because those types of people didn’t have enough love in their lives to know how to be kind, or some other fluffy reason that would sugar-coat the situation. But none of those excuses were right, and after making excuses for Randy for years, Rosie was through.

  “Because some people,” Rosie said, “are just horrible people, Pumpkin. Some try to hide it, and some of ‘em are real open about it. Sometimes there ain’t no rhyme or reason for why they’re like that—they just wanna hurt people, and they go out of their way to do it, too.” She wrapped her arms around her daughter and hugged her. “But that doesn’t mean that we have to be like them. Not now, not ever.”

  They shared a brief but fierce hug, and then they walked up the porch steps and through the front door.

  “Is it safe for me to go to my room?” Maggie asked then.

  He nodded. “Sure is, wee’an. Maybe it’d be a good idea if you stayed in there until your mother’n I clean up all these splinters and broken glass.”

  “Okay,” Maggie agreed, bouncing back with the resilience of a child who was only glad she wasn’t on clean up duty.

  The porch was silent for a moment, even though the ghost of an ex-husband-not-quite-past
still hung in the air. Rosie lifted her gaze to Declan.

  “How did he break through the wards?” she asked. She didn't realize how much she had been relying on the promise of Declan's magic to protect her, or how much she had believed in it until that moment. But with her yard trashed and the home where Maggie slept broken around them, that trust was fading.

  The look of wariness on Declan's face didn't help matters. “Means his intent was stronger than ours,” he said.

  Rosie felt her shoulders sink as she looked around them at the mess.

  “Rosie,” he interrupted her worrying. She looked up at him, and he met her gaze. “You’re goin' to have to redo the wards yourself.”

  She took another deep breath and looked around the yard. What choice did she have?

  This time, Rosie didn’t hesitate to strip. She shed her clothes, determination building in the pit of her stomach as she stepped down onto the lawn and into the waning moonlight. Remembering that adage about the third time being the charm, she promised herself that this was it. Randy was not going to be able to bully his way through the wards this time around. She wasn’t willing to accept that his intent to harm them was more potent than her intent to protect her child.

  The nighttime chorus of insects and frogs soothed her as she strode towards the mailbox, where she stopped for a minute. She crouched down, placing both of her palms against the warm, damp earth. And then she remembered what Declan had said when he had taught her how to fix the window.

  Rosie pushed her fingertips down into the soil, letting it surround her hands. The gritty dirt held traces of feeling – loss, hope, love. The emotions were little more than trace elements, diluted by years of emptiness and longing, but they were there. She took a deep breath as she sifted her fingers through them, making sure that she felt every single one in her heart before she let out her breath in a long, steady stream.