by Tess Lake
“Harlow?” Red asked.
I felt Aunt Cass’s spell moving from behind me. In silent agreement every witch gave it power, and then it shot out towards the four writers like lightning.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Red before the spell hit and her face went blank. Aunt Cass was like a surgeon with the memory spell. We doused the rotating balls of light and heat as the writers stood slack-faced, and then marched past them, heading in the direction of our cars. It was only when we were on the edge of the field going back into the forest that Aunt Cass flung back a final spell and the writers continued their way into the cave system.
“But isn’t it dangerous? What if they fall down the hole or find all the scratches?” I asked.
“They won’t fall down any hole and maybe they’ll find something that finally satisfies their curiosity. After all, the more eyes are on this, the weaker it gets,” Aunt Cass said.
With Jack, my family and Kira around me as we trudged through the forest, I was riding the manic edge of exhaustion thinking only of what Johannes had said to me. “Why did you curse our children?” he’d asked. He thought I was Marguerite, his wife, Marguerite Torrent our long lost ancestor. The four stones that I had found had a new potential meaning: Johannes his formal name, but everyone called him Jack. Lost witch took Jack. Did it mean that Juliet Stern was the Lost witch? After all, she’d locked him and her own husband away. As we trudged through the forest I couldn’t speak, but I chewed this over with every step. He’d said he felt Marguerite still. Perhaps like the Shadow Witch she’d managed to extend her life beyond its natural end.
“Did it say anything to you down there?” Aunt Cass asked.
“The man was Johannes, Marguerite Torrent’s husband, our ancestor, and this is what he told me …” I said to my family.
And then I told them.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
By the time the writers drove up to the mansion for their final goodbyes I was mostly over my guilt about helping cast a memory spell on them.
Despite the craziness out at the caves, normality had reasserted itself… although it had seemed quite strange that I had to return to work the very next day for the closing ceremony of Writerpalooza. I’d been a bundle of nerves, half expecting that as soon as Red and the other authors saw me they’d blurt out “She’s a witch! We saw her do magic!” But nothing of the sort had happened. Aunt Cass’s spell had worked perfectly. Red even told me how they had come to be out at the caves. Their expert code breaker had indeed extracted a message from their photograph of the map which had been a series of instructions on how to find the deep dark cave. For some reason unknown to us, the creator of the map, who we assumed was Juliet Stern, had both written the instructions on it in code and also made the compass, possibly as a backup. The code had been broken and so the four writers had come out to Truer Island following the instructions until it led them to the cave where they’d run into us. We weren’t in their memories however. According to Red they’d entered the caves, explored, but found nothing more than the cavern with the scratches on the roof and the walls. The writers weren’t sure what to make of it. Now they considered that perhaps it had been a giant hoax all along. The hidden map, the code, the symbols around town, part of some incredible scheme trying to draw attention to the town.
Aunt Cass was waiting until they were out of town to start up her symbol carving and fake monster sightings that we hoped would clear Rufus and Dawn.
Although I deeply wished I could tell them the truth I simply couldn’t, so they were stuck with only half the story and an unsatisfying one at that. Red told me that Sheriff Hardy had questioned her about the museum break in. It had been the same night that Carter had filmed Rufus and Dawn and their fake monster suit. He’d spotted the writers in town. The writers had denied everything, of course, and because Jack had disabled the security system there was no footage showing anyone in the museum.
So the end of Writerpalooza had slipped by, the Town Hall being filled with vampires and other people in costumes, the writers giving their final goodbyes to the massive crowd.
It was now the next day and most of the tourists who had come for Writerpalooza were now leaving town. I was outside the end of our mansion with Kira, who had her suitcase waiting for her grandmother Hattie to pick her up. It wasn’t long before TJ’s yellow truck was spotted driving up the hill and soon he’d parked it in front of our end of the mansion and all the writers jumped out, rushing over to give me a hug.
“It’s been a wild time, Harlow. Thanks for showing us your crazy town,” TJ said, squeezing me in his giant arms.
“That’s okay,” I squeaked from somewhere within his chest. Next was Jenna who was much shorter than me and then I felt I was doing to her what TJ had just done.
“It’s been amazing Harlow,” she said. “When you finish your book, send it to me,” she said.
“No, send it to me. I want to be the one who discovers her,” Jay said, laughing. He gave me a hug and then stepped back as Red pulled me away from him and into her arms.
“No, you send it to me. You’re the one who was working for me and I want to be the one who discovered you,” Red said, squeezing me in an enormous hug. I was happy, beaming at them, but I felt a sudden pang of sadness. It had been for a good cause that I, along with my witchy family, had messed with their memories but I wasn’t feeling good about it right now. Red must’ve seen what I was thinking on my face.
“What’s the matter darling?” she said.
“I guess I wish you’d found something out at that cave, that there was somehow this made sense for you?” I said.
Red shrugged and smiled at me.
“It’s only stories that need to make sense. To have an ending, a direction and meaning. Reality doesn’t have to do anything like that. It’s full of dead ends and pointless detours, mysteries with no ending. This was one of them. Charlatans in town, a faked monster attack that turned possibly real, and I guess some time in the future we’ll hear whether Rufus and Dawn of the Mysterious Mysteries were behind it. Was a great adventure while it lasted but not everything is always going to be wrapped up in a neat little package with a bow,” she said.
“I guess,” I said, smiling back at them.
“See ya Harlow,” Kira said from beside me. I realized that Hattie had arrived.
“See you later K-Fresh,” I called out, watching the teenager walk over to her grandmother’s car. I felt an urge to go over to talk to Hattie. I remembered that I’d promised her sometime in the past that I’d go out to her farm to work with her. She’d been the one who told me to set up a lair of my own, to examine things, to find the holes and to work on them. I’d promised to go out to see her again and then avoided it for months on end.
“We have to get going now, we’ve a long drive,” Red said. I looked back at the writers and then said my goodbyes, feeling torn in the moment. Aunt Cass had appeared, helped Kira load her luggage into the trunk of the car, and then was next to Hattie’s window. I saw Hattie pass back the amulet that Aunt Cass had given her, except now it was blackened as though it had been in a great fire.
“We’ll see you some other time Harlow,” Red said and gave me a wink. “Harlot Bay has something strange going on. If you’re living here, you should write about it,” she said.
I said goodbye to the writers and they piled into TJ’s yellow truck before driving off down the road, Hattie following close behind them.
“What happened to that amulet?” I called out to Aunt Cass. She brought it over. It was melted and blackened with soot.
“I have no idea. Hattie told me it worked, but she wouldn’t tell me what she was doing,” Aunt Cass said.
“Typical secretive old witch,” I quipped.
Aunt Cass gave me a look as though she was judging whether I was being sarcastic.
“This typical secretive old witch needs to get back to the lab to finish that stone for you, if that’s okay,” Aunt Cass said and then went marching off bac
k towards the other end of the mansion. I was still frosting things up when I touched them and Aunt Cass had given me a dose of potion to help me but we didn’t want a reoccurrence of what had happened last time so she was making me another stone until this frost power wore off.
Suddenly, I was all alone out on the road. Jack was at work. Sometime tonight there was a final dinner with his parents that I wasn’t going to run away from. My cousins were at work too and so were the moms. And me? I was back to being gainfully unemployed now that Writerpalooza was over.
I was standing on the road wondering what I should do, whether I should return to town and my abandoned office, when Adams brushed past my legs winning himself a thin coat of frost for his trouble. He didn’t seem to mind. He threw himself in the dust and began rolling around. I dabbed a small amount of potion on my leg and felt a flush of heat.
“Is it another week yet? Can I have some more tuna?”
“It’s not another week,” I said. Adams may have been able to blackmail us, but as a cat he was somewhat hazy on what date it was exactly and so if he was going to pull a fast one on us, I decided I’d pull a fast one on him.
“It feels like it has been a week,” Adams said, purring and rolling around. I scratched him behind the ears and then wandered off, heading around the end of the mansion and up into the grounds behind it. I soon found myself in my lair, flicking through Juliet’s journal. There were still so many questions. Why had the map responded to me? What did Johannes mean when he said “why did you curse our children”?
Last time I’d directly asked the journal a question it had answered. I thought I may as well try it again. I put the journal on the table, opened it to a random page and then addressed it.
“Tell me what happened to Marguerite Torrent,” I asked.
I was expecting nothing would happen or, at the very most, the pages would flick open and perhaps I would see a new entry appear. Instead, the journal shot off the table and hit the wall of crazy. As it did, an enormous burst of flame came out of it and by the time the journal fell to the ground the entire wall was ablaze in magical fire. The heat of it washed over me in a wave, along with the jolt of magic. It felt like the magic from standing in that cave, dark and bitter. I reached for the journal but it was too hot, so I dived out the door, tripping on a cobblestone and rolling down the grass. By the time I got to my feet and turned around the entire cottage was ablaze, the heat radiating outwards like I was standing in front of a furnace. The roof caught fire and turned to ash as I watched, stepping back from the intense heat. I heard footsteps and then Aunt Cass was at my side, pulling me away from the heat. A moment later the fire reversed, vanishing as fast as it had come, leaving the stone wall smoking, the roof turned to ashes and everything inside the cottage reduced to dust.
“Was that you? Did you Slip?” Aunt Cass gasped.
“No, it was something else,” I said. I walked closer to the cottage, seeing that some of the stones inside were still glowing cherry red from the heat. The table was gone, the journal, the chair too. There was nothing left but the four walls of stone. But as the stones cooled from red to gray, a pale symbol appeared. It was the one that had been carved around town, appearing on doors, the one that Aunt Cass had copied and then spray painted everywhere.
“It’s not some thing else,” Aunt Cass said as the symbol appeared and then faded away.
“It’s her, the Lost Witch.”
Author note
Thanks for reading my book! More witch stories to come. If you’d like an email when a new book is released then you can sign up for my mailing list. I have a strict no spam policy and will only send an email when I have a new release.
I hope you enjoyed my work! If you have time, please write a review. They make all the difference to indie Authors.
In the next book someone lost will be found…
xx Tess
TessLake.com
Also by Tess Lake
Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries
Butter Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #1)
Treasure Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #2)
Hidden Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #3)
Fabulous Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #4)
Holiday Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #5)
Shadow Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #6)
Love Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #7)
Cozy Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #8)
Box Sets
Torrent Witches Box Set #1 (Butter Witch, Treasure Witch, Hidden Witch)
Torrent Witches Box Set #2 (Fabulous Witch, Holiday Witch, Shadow Witch)
Audiobooks
Butter Witch
Treasure Witch
Hidden Witch
Torrent Witches Box Set #1 (Butter Witch, Treasure Witch, Hidden Witch)
Fabulous Witch
Holiday Witch
Shadow Witch
About the Author
www.tesslake.com