by Alt, Madelyn
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
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
Praise for the Bewitching Mysteries
No Rest for the Wiccan
“Maggie is a plucky, practical young woman coming to grips with her abilities . . . This installment is charmingly spooky, a true page-turner that will have readers looking twice at shadows and wondering if something really is moving in the darkness.”—Fresh Fiction
“Alt spins an engaging murder yarn.”
—Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
Hex Marks the Spot
“Quirky, enchanting, mystical, and addictive . . . Not to be missed.”—Annette Blair
“Madelyn Alt writes an entertaining mystery.”
—The Best Reviews
“Maggie O’Neill is back, better than ever . . . A winner from page one. Ms. Alt transports her readers to the lovely town of Stony Mill and entertains with characters both charming and sinister. The mystical elements of the story weave seamlessly throughout as the reader learns, along with Maggie, as she becomes more comfortable with and knowledgeable about her gifts and how to work with them for the greater good. This is enchanting entertainment at its finest.”—Fresh Fiction
A Charmed Death
“A magical, spellbinding mystery that enchants readers with its adorable heroine.”—The Best Reviews
“Entertaining . . . A fun mystery to read!”—MyShelf.com
The Trouble with Magic
“A fascinating ride . . . A hint of romance with much intrigue, mystery, and magic in a small Midwestern town setting.”—Roundtable Reviews
“A fun, witty whodunit . . . The characters are likable, the story flows easily, and the mystery and mystical elements are believable.”—Fresh Fiction
“This new series is going to be a winner.”
—The Romance Readers Connection
“The plotting is tight and the murderer came as a shock. The situations are funny and the characters charming.”
—Romantic Times
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Madelyn Alt
THE TROUBLE WITH MAGIC
A CHARMED DEATH
HEX MARKS THE SPOT
NO REST FOR THE WICCAN
WHERE THERE’S A WITCH
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
WHERE THERE’S A WITCH
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Madelyn Alt.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-07992-8
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For Kristy and for Jen . . .
for always being there for me,
no matter what.
If our personality survives death, then it is strictly logical or scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, other faculties, and knowledge that we acquire on this earth.
—THOMAS EDISON
Chapter 1
When a person has spent her entire life in the same small town, she starts to think she knows everything there is to know about it. That she has seen and heard and done it all, and no matter what happens, it is nothing that hasn’t been seen or heard or done before.
I believed that about my Indiana hometown. I did . . . right up until the day I met my witchy boss, Felicity Dow, and began to discover the truth about Stony Mill’s not-so-hidden dark side. Along the way, I also unearthed a few truths about myself.
My name is Maggie—Margaret Mary-Catherine O’Neill, actually, but I’m not a formal kind of girl—and one of my personal truths recently discovered is that I am an empath. A bona fide, natural-born intuitive capable of sensing emotion, both past and present, in the air around me. This means that I have a tendency to pick up strong emotional memories that linger near people, places, and things, whether those feelings are in the physical world or the world of spirit. Memories perhaps better ignored, or even forgotten. Too bad I didn’t understand all of this sooner. It would have saved me from internalizing a lot of emotional heartache growing up that wasn’t even my own.
And that was only the beginning, as I had been discovering. When I looked back over the last several months, I realized my abilities had been expanding. Whether I liked it or not—which also appeared to be a moot point. And the spirits who were making themselves known to me? I used to think ghosts and hauntings were no more than the products of an overly imaginative mind. Now, I’m not saying I’m psychic. But I will acknowledge that there is something more going on with me. No more sleepwalking through life, blissfully ignorant of the truth about the world around me.
I didn’t have that luxury anymore. Things were changing. I was changing.
And I wasn’t the only one experiencing oddities in my hometown. There were the other N.I.G.H.T.S., of course, a motley crew of ghost-hunting sensitives/intuitives I counted among my closest friends. But pay n
o attention to all the old stereotypes. You’ll find no scarf-wearing, crystal ball-gazing pseudo-mystics here, only normal people living somewhat extraordinary lives. To me, that juxtaposition was part of my friends’ charm. It proved one thing—that if none of us were quite “normal,” at least we weren’t alone in the experience. I, for one, couldn’t have done it without them.
My name is Maggie O’Neill—empath, sensitive, and ordinary girl, and this is my story.
Dragon’s breath. Well, that’s what it felt like, anyway. The air, I mean. The month of June had baked us straight on into July with little respite in the way of rain, and my temper was slowly beginning to fray. Make that fry. Maybe that’s why I was in such a black mood as I awoke that Sunday well before the alarm clock’s bleeping beeps, the damp sheet wrapped like bindweed around my ankles. The remnants of a dream were still clinging to my cobwebby brain. A stone building, water surrounding it . . . sunlight streaming down, warm and golden in the crisp air . . . the sky so blue above, as vivid as I could remember seeing it . . . and the eyes . . . oh God, the eyes, paler blue with just a hint of green . . . I knew them well. Whose were they?
It was that dream again, the one I had been receiving in tantalizing snippets. Bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam drifting through my consciousness time and again. Sometimes months separated the fragments, and sometimes they would be close enough together to actually almost, kinda, sorta make sense. “Almost” being the operative word. The bits and pieces seemed to connect, without being consecutive in any way. More like variations on a theme. It was only after years of having the same recurring dreams that I’d started to put it all together, the narrative of the story my mind was telling. Even then, I didn’t believe what it was telling me. Couldn’t believe. They were just dreams—what our minds liked to do for entertainment when the rest of the body was shut down for the night. SnoozeTube. They didn’t really . . . mean . . . anything.
Of course, that didn’t keep me from trying my darnedest to catch a glimpse of the face those eyes belonged to. It also didn’t keep me from feeling desperately disappointed every time that I failed in my quest.
But that didn’t matter. Because . . . “Dreams are nothing to worry about. Dreams are just dreams. Right?”
I posed that very question to my witch of a boss, Felicity Dow, the moment I set my things down and slid into my usual place at the gourmet tea and coffee bar I haunted at my place of employ. For several reasons: one, because as the proprietor of Enchantments, Stony Mill’s best darned gift shop and secret witchy emporium, Liss had the best grasp of all matters that lay beyond the realm of normalcy of anyone in town; two, she had voluntarily served as my mentor in all things metaphysical since the moment I walked—er, fell—through the store’s front door; three, because a part of me worried I was making too much of things; four, because another part of me worried that I wasn’t making enough; and last but not least, five, because if Liss didn’t know, who would? A rhetorical question, surely. Especially in this town.
I mean, what was the sense of working for a real, honest-to-goodness witch if you couldn’t get the inside scoop on matters otherworldly—or not—when they presented themselves to you?
Lucky for me, Liss didn’t seem to mind answering a never-ending stream of semi-intelligent questions from a struggling would-be sensitive. Liss personified grace under pressure. She was the kind of woman who never failed to take life in stride, even when she wasn’t wearing the right shoes for the job. This morning she took one look at my pale, washed-out face, dark circles, and the wavy light brown hair that sprang out in all directions no matter what I did to tame it, and immediately set to work pouring out a demitasse of her favorite medicinal potion for sleepwalkers and talkers: espresso, steaming hot, ul tracharged, and guaranteed to vaporize any remaining vestiges of cobwebs still clinging to overtired brains.
“There you are, ducks. This should do you some good.” There was something about her British accent that made me feel all cozy inside. It was like an instant shot of the warm-and-fuzzies.
Unlike her espresso. One sip of the stuff was more likely to give me a case of the nervy-and-janglies. I eyed it warily, took a deep breath, and wished it would magick-ally turn into a cup of Earl Grey on the spot. Still, I took it in hand and lifted it to my lips, determined to give it a try. “Thanks,” I muttered around stiff lips—the stiffer, the better with this stuff.
Liss waited politely and made sure that I downed every last, bitter drop. “Now, then. What dreams are we talking about here?”
“Weird ones,” I confessed. “Dreams where I’m not me—I mean, not the me that I am now, here, today, but another me. And yet it’s still me. Only that doesn’t make sense, does it.” A statement, not a question. I knew it didn’t.
“That depends. Have you been having these dreams often?”
She poured herself a cup of tea. Simple, neutral, non-traumatic tea that soothed one’s system more than jolted. I gazed at it longingly as I shook my head in the negative. “Not often. Every once in a while, I guess.”
“Is it a recurring dream? One that you have over and over again?”
“Well . . . I have had it—I mean, them—more than once. It seems to be part of a string of dreams that somehow feel as though they belong together if I can figure out how to put them in the right order.”
That faint, neutral smile still hadn’t left her lips. “And are you always the same you in them, this string of dreams?”
I bit my lip, remembering. “Always. A young woman. Blond, I think, with my hair in a long braid. Only it doesn’t seem to take place in the here and now. And that’s the crazy part.”
“Not crazy. Not if you’re remembering yourself from before this life.”
That brought my chin up sharply. Not a good idea, when one was nursing a migraine and fighting sleep deprivation. “You mean . . .”
“You suspected it yourself, didn’t you? Another lifetime? Another existence? Unless we’re speaking of spirit contact through dreams here,” she amended, her brow charmingly furrowed in deep thought. “It can at times be tricky to tell the difference.”
Another surprise gift from the Great Beyond. Was I ready for this? I didn’t even have a handle on the first ones yet. Wasn’t being empathic and occasionally telepathic and newly aware of the spirit world enough? “Hm. I’m not sure I like either option. Do I get a choice?”
Liss laughed softly and reached out to cover my hand with her own. Her rings flashed in the focused beams of light from the recessed lighting, tastefully hidden in the rafters over our heads, which made the coffee bar glow like an oasis in the middle of the overflowing aisles. “I rather think we are the chosen ones,” she told me, “not the other way around.”
I’m afraid the face I made swung a bit toward the wry side of the spectrum. “So that’s a no, then.”
“Take heart, pet. Perhaps it is nothing more than dreams after all. Maybe there is no hidden meaning. Go with what your instinct is telling you.”
That was just it. There was something different about these dreams, something very vivid and compelling that made me remember the details. Enough to recognize the fact that I’d had them before, more than once, and enough to fit them together like so many puzzle pieces. Something about them felt . . . important.
From the floor beside my bar stool came an insistent, chirruping Merch! that made me jump. “Minnie!” I leaned down to reach for the soft-sided pet carrier that was my constant companion these days. “I’m sorry, sweet pea. I wasn’t thinking. I should have let you out first thing.”
“I was wondering when you were going to let our dear girl out of there.”
“Our dear girl” would be my beautiful kitten, Minnie, who had found her way into my life mere weeks ago and had instantly taken over. It wasn’t just me, though—Liss seemed just as charmed by the little fireball of black fuzz, and had insisted that, as she was too young to spend her days alone in my apartment, Minnie should be the store cat while I was working. She did
n’t have to ask me twice. Minnie had accompanied me every morning since then and really seemed to be settling into her role. She spent her days learning how to walk on shelves without bumping things out of the way, which windows were best for viewing the birds and passing pedestrians, and, most important, where I hid her litter box. All the vital things in life.
I unzipped the carrier. With another funny meow Minnie scolded me for my forgetfulness as she climbed out onto my lap, all righteous indignation as she arched her back in a long stretch. I ran my hand down her back by way of apology, smoothing the gleaming fur and then scratching behind her ears. My reward was a motorboat purr, larger than life, as she lifted her face toward me. Her bicolored eyes, one blue, one green, sparkled like gems beneath the lights before she took a flying leap from my lap to the middle of the aisle and walked nonchalantly toward the back office.
One blue, one green . . . “Maybe that’s what it meant,” I mused, half to myself. Maybe Minnie’s spirit or energy was coming through in the dream as the mystery individual. Maybe the dreams were simply an entertainingly symbolic confirmation that the two of us belonged together, she and I.
“What’s that, dear?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. Nothing important, that is.”
I was saved from having to answer any more questions when Evie Carpenter and Tara Murphy, our two young protégés and both sensitives in their own right, strolled through the front door. “Hi, Liss! Hi, Maggie! What do we have on the plate for the day?” That was Evie, an angelic blond ray of sunshine with a lightness of being that could rival any daisy blowing in the summer breezes.