Suddenly we heard the sound of feet crunching on the freshly fallen snow behind us. The six of us turned around to see a younger, teenage version of myself running towards us down the sidewalk. She was breathing heavily and had on my favorite Pretty Reckless black hoodie and a backpack slung over one shoulder. She turned to look behind her as if she were being chased. It was in that instant that I knew which year of my life we were visiting.
I felt the blood rush from my body, leaving me feeling cold. “Look girls. We really don’t need to do this, do we? You all know my mom and me really well. This really isn’t necessary.” I scrambled, looking around from girl to girl, hoping they’d all agree with me as the young me sprinted towards my small house. “Morgan, we need to go. Can we go?”
Holly shook her head. “No way. We all got to see a piece of each other’s lives. I want to see yours!”
Sweets smiled broadly. “You’re just being shy. Don’t worry. We won’t make fun of you. Hurry, you just went inside. I want to see what the rush was about!”
The rest of the girls began moving towards the front step.
“Wait!” I cried nervously, shooting in front of them. My heart thudded in my ears as I knew what was coming. “Let’s go in through the back. I don’t want you to go in through the front door. My mother is a medium, remember. She might be able to see us, and I don’t want to give her a heart attack.”
Jax nodded and shot me a big smile. “Good thinking, Cuz.”
“Hurry,” I said. Holly groaned as I began ushering them towards the back faster. We began to move around to the side of the house, but before we could even get to the small sidewalk that would lead us back there, a cop car with flashing lights and blaring sirens came tearing around the corner of my quiet neighborhood. With embarrassment, I noticed neighbors on the other side of the street pulling back their curtains and peering through their mini blinds.
“Oh my goodness!” Jax cried. “I wonder what happened.”
Alba looked at me out of the corner of her eye, and after taking in the expression on my face, she raised one side of her mouth in a tiny smirk.
I looked down at my feet. This was proving to be too humiliating. “Girls, let’s go inside. Aren’t you cold out here?” I asked desperately.
Sweets held out a hand to stop me. “Wait, I want to see where that cop car is going.”
“Do we have to? Probably just one of my neighbors had too much eggnog and is disturbing the peace somewhere down the street. No big deal,” I said nervously. I tried to push Sweets towards the house, but a ghost trying to push a ghost was like air trying to push air without the benefit of wind. She just wasn’t budging.
Suddenly, as I knew was going to happen, the police car stopped in front of my house, and two officers sprang out. They moved quickly to the front door. Jax, Sweets, and Holly followed them back to the front of the house with wide eyes. Alba and I trudged along behind them. I wanted to melt into the snow.
“What’s going on?” Jax asked, looking back at me.
I couldn’t make eye contact with her. I was too mortified. So I simply shrugged.
She turned back around to watch the officers knocking on the front door. I gnawed on my bottom lip as I saw the face of my mother emerge from behind the door. She sighed heavily when she saw the officers.
“Oh no. What did she do now?” she asked, weak with disappointment.
The taller of the two officers spoke first. “She was caught shoplifting again. Store security apprehended her, but she managed to evade them after claiming to need to use the restroom. They knew who she was and called us. We were in the area. Is she here?”
The look on my mother’s face sliced my heart like a knife. “But – it’s Christmas Eve!” she responded with surprise.
The officer nodded. “I understand that, ma’am. Unfortunately, your daughter chose to shoplift on Christmas Eve. We’re going to need to take her down to the station.”
“She’s just a kid,” my mother said wearily.
“This is her seventh offense this year, ma’am. May we come in?”
My mother looked haggard as she leaned against the door unhappily. She took a deep calming breath – I watched as she counted to ten silently and then opened the door wider. “Come in,” she said. As the officers stepped over the threshold, Mom turned backwards and hollered over her shoulder, “Mercy! Get out here!”
I sighed as she finally shut the door, leaving the six of us out in the cold. The girls turned towards me.
“Shoplifting, Red? Really?” Alba asked with a bit of a smile on her face.
“I’m shocked!” Jax said genuinely, holding a hand to her heart.
“I don’t want any lectures from you, Jax Stone. You’re the klepto here. I was just a teenager acting out.”
Jax bit on the tip of her pinky finger and looked down at the ground guiltily.
“Mercy! You were out stealing on Christmas Eve?!” Sweets chastised in shock.
I put both of my flattened palms out in front of me in self-defense. “I hadn’t done any Christmas shopping yet. I needed to get something for my mother!”
“So you stole her present?” Holly asked.
I shrugged. “I didn’t have any money.”
“Ever heard of a j.o.b., Red?”
“There was no place in Dubbsburg for me to get a job. Being a witch made my life different. Alba, you guys made being a supernatural family work for you. My mother was a medium in Dubbsburg, Illinois. That kind of thing gets around and believe me – people don’t fly the normal flag for you when your mother is a medium. They used to whisper about me behind my back. I hated it.” I turned to Morgan with a lump in my throat. I had hoped that my past would have stayed in the past and to have a few of my issues with the law brought to light hurt more than I thought it would. “Can we go now? Why do we need to go in there?”
Morgan closed her eyes slowly, patiently, and turned towards the front door as the officers removed me from my home on Christmas Eve in handcuffs. My mother was in the doorway with tears in her eyes.
“Mercy, I’ll come down there and get you. I’ll be there soon, I promise,” she hollered to me before I ducked into the backseat of the police cruiser.
My alter-ego didn’t say a word to my mother as the police officer shut the door with me inside. I remember that day. I remember sitting inside and feeling like the world was closing in on me. I didn’t know where I belonged and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. And to top it off I felt the weight of letting my mother down once again. Hearing the pain in her voice after all this time, made my heart burn. I felt my chest tightening.
“We need to go!” I insisted, looking at Morgan as I clutched my chest.
“Mercy, are you ok?” Sweets asked. I saw her face in front of mine, but it sounded like she was talking in a tunnel.
Holly hollering, “Grab her!” was the last thing I heard before everything went dark.
17
I don’t know how long it took before my eyes opened, but when they did Jax’s witchy little face was in my line of vision.
“Where am I?” I asked, moving only my eyes from side to side to try and get a broader sense of where I was. I could see a Christmas tree to my left, and I felt different than I did before passing out. I felt more – real.
“We’re at Habernackle’s,” said Holly. “You passed out.” She leaned over Jax to look down at me, her blonde hair falling around her shoulders.
My eyes widened. “We’re back? We’re not in Dubbsburg anymore?”
The two of them moved, and I sat up straight and looked around. The familiar sight of tables and chairs made me smile. I let out a deep breath. “Oh, thank God,” I said happily. I looked around. “Where’s Morgan?”
“She took off,” Alba said from the table behind me.
I turned around to find Alba leaning back in the chair with one arm draped over the side and one foot kicked up onto the chair in front of her.
“She took off? Just like
that? That was it?” I asked as I let Sweets and Jax pull me to my feet.
“Yeah, she said, my job here is done,” Sweets said in a mocking ghost voice. “And then she just disappeared.”
“Well, that seems odd.”
Jax nodded. “It was very odd. This whole thing is odd. I mean for Morgan Hartford to just show up and go all ghosts of Christmas past on us is just bizarre.”
Sweets giggled. “I don’t mind. I got to see my Grandma and my whole family.”
“You’re the only one here who was happy to see their family,” I assured her. “Poor Holly got to revisit the day her parents split up. Jax was reminded how much her mother hates Christmas and lacks in the mothering department. I got to watch myself break my mother’s heart and get arrested. And Alba got to see her father be a major jerk.”
Alba’s spine stiffened as she sat up straighter. “Hey! He wasn’t being a jerk. That’s just how he is.”
I rolled my eyes. “Exactly. That wasn’t what I would call a happy trip down memory lane.”
We all grew quiet. I couldn’t speak to what the others were thinking, but I was happy that I wasn’t in the past anymore – and not just the ghost of Christmas past, past – but my past. I was thankful that girl in the police car wasn’t me anymore. I was growing up. At least that’s what I wanted to believe.
“Now what?” Jax finally asked, looking around. When no one said anything, she gave us a toothy smile. “Can we hang our stockings now?”
I sighed and made eye contact with Alba. I wasn’t sure what kind of mood she was going to be in after all of that. Before I could ask her how she was feeling, another ear-splitting noise shot through the restaurant. The walls shuddered as the sound filled the room, shaking everything not bolted down.
“What was that?” Jax asked, ducking instinctively.
“I’m going to guess that’s another ghost,” I said, looking around the room nervously.
“You’d be right!” Holly said, pointing towards a tall, leggy blonde in a curve-hugging red dress at the bottom of the stairs.
My eyes lit up as the young woman walked towards us. “Harper!” I exclaimed with surprise. It had been months since we’d seen Harper, after solving her murder and saving her sister from being killed. “You’re back! I never thought we’d see you again.”
“Mercy, oh, it’s so good to see you,” she said, coming towards me excitedly. I felt like our reunion warranted a hug, but I still didn’t know how to touch ghosts. I silently put that on my list of New Year’s resolutions for the coming year.
“Girls. You remember, Harper?”
“We never formally met her before,” Jax said with a giggle, “but we remember her!”
Harper gave them all a brilliant smile. “It’s nice to see you all again.”
“What are you doing here, Harper?” I asked her nervously, thinking about what other horribly sad scenes she wanted to show us from our pasts.
She let out a deep breath. “I’ve been sent here to help you girls.”
Alba shook her head. “Oh, no. We’ve already been helped,” she said, adding air quotes around the word helped. “We’re good. We don’t want what you’re selling.”
Harper laughed. “Oh no, Alba. It doesn’t work like that. Technically, you don’t have a choice,” she insisted.
Jax made a face. “I don’t want to go back and see myself as a little kid anymore. I didn’t have what you’d call a happy childhood.”
“We’re not going backwards. I’m going to show you something more interesting this time.”
Alba’s ears perked up. “More interesting? Like what?”
Harper smiled conspiringly. “Come on, and I’ll show you.” She motioned for the five of us to follow her to the front door.
“Oh no, Harper. You don’t want to go out here. Aspen Falls got a monster storm. The snow is piled up waist high by now, I’m sure,” I told her.
She smiled, but with a flick of her wrist, opened the door magically anyway. I braced myself, squinting my eyes shut, waiting for the onslaught of snow to blow in at us. When it didn’t, I opened my eyes in surprise. A cool breeze blew in, but nothing like the bitter cold we’d flown in with. There was snow on the ground, but only a light dusting and the doorway was free from snow.
We all walked outside in utter shock. “Where’d the snow go?” Holly asked as we walked outside.
Alba laughed at her. “Obviously this isn’t present day Aspen Falls, Cosmo.”
Harper’s face got serious. “Oh, no. It’s present day Aspen Falls,” she assured us.
“Well then where’s all the snow?” Alba asked her.
Harper shrugged. “The snow storm never happened.”
“How could it have never happened if it’s present day Aspen Falls? I don’t get it,” Jax asked, stumped.
Harper took a deep breath, let it out, and then explained. “Earlier tonight there was talk about the Witch Squad not being friends anymore. I’m going to show the five of you what life would be like right now if you’d never become friends.”
Jax sucked in her breath. “You mean Mercy and I aren’t roommates?!”
Harper nodded. “Exactly. Neither are Alba and Holly. I’m going to show you what life would have been like if the five of you hadn’t had that first class together either and if you hadn’t gone with your teacher to consult on the Morgan Hartford murder case.”
Jax’s eyes widened. “Wow!”
“I still don’t get it,” Holly complained. “Even if we’d never met, the snow storm would have still happened!”
Sweets nodded slowly as if she were slowly piecing the puzzle back together. “I get it. Alba was right. The snow storm was a result of Hugh messing with Mother Nature.”
Holly looked at Sweets inquisitively. “So … because we aren’t friends, Hugh didn’t go home for Christmas?” Holly asked.
“He likely went home for Christmas. He just never met Mercy,” Sweets explained.
My heart dropped at the thought. “He never met me? But what’s that got to do with us being friends?”
Sweets let out a deep breath. “The five of us went to that mixer during the first week of school – together. That was when you met Hugh. And then he helped us find Evan, which led us to find Jax.”
Jax rose her eyebrows in shock. “Wait. So. If we weren’t friends – then you wouldn’t have rescued me from Evan. Am I – dead?”
Sweets considered that thought for a moment. “I wouldn’t think so. Evan abducted you after you ran off because Mercy let you have it for lying to us about being a witch. I’m going to guess if we weren’t friends, you never ran off and therefore he was never able to abduct you.”
“Way to reopen old wounds, Sweets.” The reminder of how I’d treated Jax when I found out she wasn’t a witch after all, made me feel bad.
Holly looked confused. “Let me get this straight. So because we weren’t friends, Mercy didn’t go to the mixer, which means she didn’t meet Hugh. But why wouldn’t she have gone to the mixer just because we weren’t friends?”
Goosebumps rippled across my arms and legs. “I didn’t go to the mixer because I didn’t have anyone to convince me to go,” I explained. “I certainly wouldn’t have gone by myself.”
“Exactly,” said Sweets with a triumphant smile on her face.
“Well that’s sad to think about,” I said with a pout. The thought of not having Hugh in my life suddenly made me feel sick to my stomach.
“So because you’re not Hugh’s girlfriend anymore, he let the weather do what it wanted instead of keeping it at a perfect seventy-seven degrees for his lil darlin’,” Alba said bitterly. “The storm is your fault. Told you!”
“Alba! No blame!” Sweets instructed firmly.
“Yeah, Alba,” agreed Jax, coming to my rescue.
“Alba, I – I didn’t know this would happen. And I didn’t know he was keeping the weather like that for me. I thought he liked it that way. I mean yeah, it was nice, but I didn’t have to have
it like that or anything,” I told her honestly, splaying my hands out in front of me. I really didn’t know. If I had known that Hugh had been doing it just for me and that it was going to cause such problems, I certainly would have insisted he just leave things alone. I looked down at my feet with tears welling up in my eyes. I swallowed hard and bit my bottom lip, fighting the tears back. “I’m sorry, Alba. I’m sorry all of you. This is all my fault.”
Jax rushed to encircle my waist with her small arms. “You didn’t know, Mercy. I don’t blame you.”
“I don’t blame you either,” Sweets assured me. “You had no way of knowing any of it.”
“I’m not mad either,” Holly assured me.
The three of them turned their eyes on Alba, who had her arms crossed across her chest and had all of her weight on one foot. She refused to make eye contact with any of them. She was too bitter about missing Christmas with Tony.
“There’s more,” Harper assured us. “Come on. Let’s go see what else has changed in Aspen Falls.”
Grudgingly, we followed Harper out the door. I, for one, wasn’t looking forward to finding out what other problems we’d inadvertently caused. I just wanted to stay at Habernackle’s, go to sleep, and forget everything that had happened in the last 24 hours.
As the five of us walked outside, a gust of wind came up from out of nowhere and slammed the door shut behind us. I turned around to look back at it and found the door looked different. The perfect color of red paint that Reign had painstakingly selected wasn’t on the door anymore and the Habernackle’s sign that Reign had hung over the door wasn’t there either. The old Jimmy’s Bed & Brew sign hung in its place and the paint chipped door was as it had been months earlier.
“Jimmy’s!” I said with shock. “Where did Reign’s sign go?”
“My father didn’t give your family the bar,” Harper told us as we walked down the street.
Jax’s jaw dropped. “What? Why not?”
Harper grinned coyly. “You’ll see.”
“So where’s my mother?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“She’s staying at a motel across town.”
A Very Mercy Christmas: A Witch Squad Holiday Special (A Witch Squad Cozy Mystery Book 5) Page 10