Of Time & Spells

by Jennifer Snyder

  “Because some of these places look like houses. I’m not about to peek in their windows and see if they have people sitting at tables like a restaurant would.”

  “They don’t all look like houses. A lot of them have tables outside I can see from here.” Tristan pointed to a couple that had café-style tables on a patio. “Let’s give one of them a try.”

  I wrinkled my nose, not sure if I wanted to settle for the first place we saw. We were only in Lisbon for another day, and I wanted this entire experience to be one I remembered, not one I rushed through.

  “How about we grab some ice cream from the place that clearly says ice cream on the sign while Piper walks around searching for somewhere decent to eat?”

  Tristan started walking toward the shop Jasper had pointed out. “Sounds good to me.”

  I had to admit, ice cream did sound good. The heat was almost too much. My nose was crisp feeling, and I was dripping in sweat. “All I can say is they better have chocolate.”

  “What ice cream place doesn’t have chocolate? It’s like a staple,” Jasper ragged me.

  I kept my mouth shut as I followed them, even though there were a slew of things I wanted to say. I hoped the ice cream not only cooled us off physically, but chilled our heated attitudes as well.

  “They have what looks like chocolate ice cream on the sign.” Tristan pointed to a large banner that showed a cone with ice cream in a variety of colors.

  “Oh my God, that looks so good!” I tucked my guidebook back into my satchel and pulled out my wallet, ready to hand over all my Euros just for one scoop.

  The shop was tiny but cute. They didn’t have a large variety of flavors, but chocolate was the only one I wanted. I ordered a double scoop in a cup so it wouldn’t be a melty mess all over my hand. Jasper ordered two scoops of coffee-flavored ice cream, and Tristan chose stracciatella flavored. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it looked like it had bits of chocolate folded into it so I knew it had to be good. Anything with chocolate was always good.

  “This is the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted,” Jasper insisted.

  Tristan and I both muttered our agreement as the three of us continued walking the stone-paved streets. Thirty minutes passed before we stumbled upon a cute little café.

  “This place look good to you guys?” I asked, hoping they’d say yes. It wasn’t one I’d seen in my guidebook, which excited me because it meant we’d explored the city long enough to find a place on our own.

  Tristan squeezed my hand in his. “I don’t care. I’m just hungry.”

  I laughed because one thing I was learning about him on this trip was that he was always hungry. Jasper had better be glad I was a teenage girl, because it seemed to me that teenage boys did nothing besides eat. It was amazing Tristan wasn’t three hundred pounds with as much food as he could pack away in a day.

  “I’m fine with it. It looks quaint.” Jasper winked at me, knowing that’s what I was going for.

  The three of us headed toward the entrance. Since the hottest point of the day had already passed, we opted for a table outdoors, covered by a large umbrella. After I situated myself in one of the chairs, I placed an order for a water with lemon and glanced around at our surroundings.

  Lisbon was beautiful. I could spend the rest of my life here. The buildings were colorful. The people were friendly.

  A statue of a man sitting on a rock across the street pulled at my attention.

  Shivers slipped along my spine as memories of the Vodun witches and how we’d left them rushed through my mind.

  “That thing is so creepy. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a statue the same after dealing with those witches,” I admitted, trying to push thoughts of them from my mind.

  “Where are you seeing a statue at?” Tristan asked, glancing around.

  I pointed to it. “Doesn’t it freak you out? I mean, who are we to say there isn’t a real person trapped inside there? Someone could have easily placed a spell on a guy the way Kalisa did to the Vodun witches.”

  “You’re crazy.” Jasper laughed.

  “No, I’m serious. That could be a real guy trapped in there.”

  Tristan took a sip of his water. “Well, if it is, then at least he has a good view. There’s a partial view of the ocean right there.”

  “I guess. It’s a better view than what the witches are left with; I mean we left them on their front porch.” I plucked my lemon off my glass of water and squeezed the juice into it. “Think we should have moved them? I mean they can’t stay on the porch forever like that, can they? They’re blocking the door.”

  Jasper stared at me from across the table. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried about it. I’m just thinking.” I shrugged, hoping he believed I was being nonchalant about the whole thing. In reality though, I often thought about the witches. I mainly wondered if the spell they were under would wear off without us knowing, and if they would come after us once it did.

  “You think too much.” Tristan squeezed my knee beneath the table.

  “You two can’t honestly sit here and tell me that you haven’t thought about them once since we left New Orleans. I mean, you haven’t wondered if their stupid cult-like followers would figure out a way to free them so they can come after us again?”

  “Hey, I don’t want you worrying about that,” Jasper insisted. His steady gaze bored into me with the intensity of his words.

  “Sometimes it’s hard not to.” I flipped my wrist in the direction of the statute across the street from us. “Especially when I see one of those.”

  “Let me put your mind at ease then.” Jasper pushed his glass of water away and folded his hands, resting them on the tabletop in front of him. “I spoke with Kalisa about a week after we left New Orleans. I wanted to make sure the statues would be guarded or watched over by someone besides Liam. She said she’d already sent a human who wasn’t affiliated with the witches to do so. Apparently his eyes were opened to the supernatural world a while back during a succubus’s kiss of awakening, and he went on a mission to find out everything he could about our world.”

  “So what is he? A walking encyclopedia of the supernatural or a hunter now?” Tristan asked before I could.

  “A little of both I guess, but not in the way you’re thinking. He’s more like a watcher. He’s watching the house to make sure nothing like what you mentioned happens. If it does, he knows who to report to.” Jasper reached for his water and took a sip. “So, I don’t want you worrying about anything. The witches are taken care of.”

  Relief settled into my bones. I should have known my brother would have thought to check on things with the witches. He wasn’t the type to leave loose ends. “Okay, thanks. That makes me feel better.”

  Our waiter came then. Each of us ordered a sandwich. It didn’t take long before they were ready, and we were chowing down on some of the best food I’d ever eaten.

  “So, what do you think about seeing this city at night by flight?” Tristan wiggled his brows at me.

  Since his first successful flight months ago, he’d been taking to the sky any chance he could get. I didn’t blame him; he had lost time to make up.

  “Sure, why not.” I glanced at Jasper, waiting for him to pipe in with a reason as to why we shouldn’t.

  “What are you looking at me for?” he asked around a mouthful of food. “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t get in trouble.”

  “Not that you could do anything to me even if I did get in trouble.” I grinned, knowing he would take my bait.

  Jasper set his sandwich down and eyed me. “Oh, I could do plenty to you. You still technically live with me, remember?”

  “Kidding, I’m only kidding.” I laughed.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said with a chuckle.

  “We’ll try to stay out of trouble, Jasper, promise,” Tristan insisted, sounding like more of a brown noser than I’d ever heard him before. It had me glari
ng at him. “But you know what they say about trouble, don’t you?” He grinned while eyeing my brother.

  “No, what?” Jasper egged him on. He had to know there was some sort of a punchline coming. I did.

  “It always starts as fun.” Tristan squeezed my knee beneath the table and winked at me.

  The three of us laughed. It was a moment I wanted to remember forever. We were in a beautiful setting, eating good food, and laughing. God, it sounded so good to hear Jasper laugh. I’d thought he was broken beyond repair after Anna, as if his already fragile heart couldn’t possibly handle any more pain. However, he’d surprised me.

  Jasper always surprised me.

  He was resilient, and I looked up to him for it. I knew in my heart that he would be okay. He was through the worst of it, and now he could heal. We all could. Going against the Vodun hadn’t been something any of us were prepared for, but we’d survived it.

  The dragons had their magic. The Vodun witches had been taken care of. And I was sitting at a café in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, with my brother and my boyfriend.

  Life couldn’t get any better.

  Thank You

  Thank you for reading Of Time & Spells, I hope you enjoyed it! Please consider leaving an honest review at your point of purchase. Reviews help me in so many ways!

  If you would like to know when my next novel is available, you can sign up for my newsletter here: https://jennifersnyderbooks.com/want-the-latest/

  Also, feel free to reach out and tell me your thoughts about the novel. I’d love to hear from you!

  Email me at: jennifersnyder04@gmail.com

  To see a complete up-to-date list of my novels, please take a moment to visit this page:

  http://jennifersnyderbooks.com/book-list/

  Did You Know This Series Is A Spin-Off?

  It sure is! If you enjoyed the world Piper’s story was set in you might also enjoy the series it is loosely connected to Succubus Kiss.

  In the Succubus Kiss series you follow Kenna and Randal who were briefly mentioned in this book.

  Kenna Blake’s story starts here:

  AVAILABLE NOW!

  With one kiss, everything will change...

  When a mysterious letter arrives from her estranged mother, twenty-one year old Kenna Blake and her best friend, Bree, are prompted to take a trip to New Orleans at her mother’s expense.

  Cryptic messages, a hot tour guide, some Halloween fun, and a sudden new ability Kenna can't seem to explain are just the beginning of this weekend-trip and the start of her life being forever altered.

  Will the new world Kenna’s eyes have unwillingly been opened to in the mystifying Crescent City crumble her reality?

  Prologue

  “Choose your own adventure.”

  When I was a kid, I assumed my father’s motto was nothing more than a pun on the type of books I enjoyed reading. You know the kind—the type where, if you decide to go through the secret passage, flip to page twenty-two, but if you decide to bypass it and continue down the hall, flip to page forty-nine. Now, looking back on this motto as an adult, I realize that my father was the wisest man alive.

  He understood that with every choice we make our ending changes.

  The moment I opened the black envelope and read the blood red words scratched across the thick, cream-colored paper, I knew my father’s words would have suited the scenario perfectly.

  If I chose to do as the letter prompted, then I might as well flip to the farthest page in the book of my life, because an end—of sorts—was exactly what I would find in doing so.

  One

  A mountain of boxes sat before me, each of them filled with material things that wouldn’t mean shit to anyone else besides me. It wasn’t the objects that meant something, though, it was the memories attached to them—the memories that involved my father.

  His entire life—everything he’d ever worked for, everything about him—rested inside cardboard boxes printed with liquor brand names across the sides. Gazing at the boxes before me, it somehow seemed disrespectful to have placed his belongings in something used to ship alcohol.

  My father didn’t even drink. Ever.

  Unsure as to why this thought had situated itself front and center in my mind so suddenly, I chewed my bottom lip while thinking of a way to justify my box choice. “They have sturdy bottoms, Dad,” I said into the air, just in case my father’s spirit happened to be around.

  While I wasn’t a religious person by any standard, that didn’t mean I couldn’t hope there was some sort of an afterlife. Brushing a few strands of my dark hair away from my face, I hoped that my father’s afterlife consisted of something far more enjoyable than watching me all sad-faced and teary-eyed as I packed up his belongings.

  Afterlife, what the hell? How was it possible that my dad was gone?

  Sinking down into the recliner, my eyes skimmed the living room. The walls were now naked, and the entire room seemed eerily empty. My vision blurred with impending tears as I continued to gaze around the vacant-looking space. Zeroing in on the prescription bottles sitting on the end table beside me, I finally lost it. The tears I had been holding back spilled from my eyes as I thought of how painful my father’s final moments most likely were.

  Dead at forty-eight. Even in my twenty-one-year-old mind frame, forty-eight seemed so young.

  William Blake’s health hadn’t been top notch for years, but it still wasn’t horrible enough for one to think he would pass away anytime soon. Then again, that all depended on who you asked. Dr. Brenner would mention his various health issues—including the stage his lung cancer was currently in—when asked. Most likely, he would talk about my father’s poor lifestyle choices, like smoking and his not-so-healthy diet. Then to lighten the mood, Dr. Brenner would state that my father should have kicked the bucket a few years ago, but he’d held on a little longer than expected just to piss off the man upstairs. But, if you asked a friend or a coworker about my father’s death, they would all tell you how unexpected it seemed. One of them would probably mention how they’d rarely ever seen him take time off, and how he always seemed so chipper and happy, never once leading them to believe he had stage three lung cancer.

  The one thing no one would say, but I had found myself often thinking, was how William Blake was apparently a damn good actor, because even I didn’t know how bad everything was until a few months ago, when he decided to stop treatment. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about his cancer, because I did. I had been the one to take him back and forth to his appointments, to feed him applesauce or Jell-O when nothing else sounded good and he was too weak from the radiation to lift his arms. I had been there when he decided to shave his head completely bald so no one would be the wiser when it all fell out anyway. He never complained, so I assumed he was fine. I assumed he would pull through, unscratched and smiling.

  The good guys are supposed to win. Always.

  But he didn’t. My father was stripped from this world too soon, leaving behind a hole in my heart and boxes filled with his things nobody besides me would even give a damn about.

  And now here I was, packing up his belongings because his assets weren’t enough to cover the remainder of the mortgage on the house, and I damn sure didn’t have the money to pay it off myself. The property was going on the market immediately.

  While I had been told I still had a few weeks until I needed to clear the premises of his things, I didn’t feel as though it was right. If the lenders were that fucking heartless and greedy when it came to such things, then I wanted my father’s belongings out of there as soon as possible.

  Wiping my damp cheeks and sniffling, I straightened my back. It was time to stop moping and pack up more stuff. I’d decided the week after my father passed that I would only allow myself five minutes a day to breakdown and mourn him, because he would be pissed at me for anything more. In fact, now that nearly two weeks had passed, he would tell me to get over it. My father was loving, but he also didn’t care for
a whiner. God, I missed him.

  Hoisting another box into the air, I started up the stairs toward my old room. It was the only room I had left on the second floor to go through. Oddly enough, I’d started in my father’s bedroom. My mind enjoyed working backward apparently. At least that’s what my best friend Bree had said. She claimed she would have saved his room for absolute last, because it would be the hardest. Me, I wanted to get the hard part out of the way as soon as possible. So far it had worked out for me.

  Gripping the doorknob, I turned and then stepped inside my old room. Flipping on the switch, the room became bathed in light. It reflected off the mint green walls and white furniture. The hint of a smile twisted the corners of my lips as I scanned the room I hadn’t set foot inside in so long. I’d moved out a few years ago, right after high school graduation, and unlike some of my peers, I hadn’t ever been forced to move back.

  Setting the cardboard box on my old bed, I turned toward the bookshelf that still harbored some of my childhood favorites. As I skimmed through my tattered copies of R.L. Stine books, my cell vibrated from in my back pocket. It was Bree.

  I’m here. Where are you?

  I hung my head back and sighed. Shit. I was supposed to meet her for a late dinner, but I’d gotten caught up in packing and lost track of time.

  I’m sorry. I forgot. I’ll be there in fifteen. ~ Kenna

  Thursday nights were always our girls’ night out time. I wasn’t sure how this little tradition had slipped my mind. Bree had sent me numerous text messages checking on me all day and reminding me about dinner. She wanted to help me pack my father’s things, but I’d declined every offer as nicely as I could. It was something I preferred to do alone.