by Tess Lake
Contents
Copyright
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
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
More titles
Holiday Witch Copyright 2016 Tess Lake. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.
Tess Lake
Tesslake.com
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This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogs in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Chapter 1
Exercise, as far as I was concerned, could suck it.
“Just five more laps!” Kaylee called out and jumped up and down in excitement.
I glared at her and wondered what would happen to me if I shoved a handful of wet sand down the back of my personal trainer’s top.
“Come on, dawdler!” Aunt Cass yelled and then poked her tongue out before running off. She was dressed head to foot in fluorescent yellow. I scowled at her and decided if anyone deserved a handful of wet sand down the back of their top, it was her.
A trio of frogs croaked their agreement from the dunes on the side of the beach. (Well, maybe they did. I don’t speak frog.)
I set off again, my legs burning and my ears feeling as though they were going to snap off in the cold. It was a freezing morning out on Scarness Beach and once again I was regretting my decision to get fit, be healthy, and try to stop the slip witch powers from becoming a problem.
I reached Kaylee, who held her hand up for a high five. I slapped her palm and then turned around and plodded my way back down the beach, Aunt Cass already far ahead of me.
Remember all those times I ate carbs with a side of carbs and another side of carbs and sent silent apologies to my thighs? Well, my thighs had decided they were no longer accepting my apologies. I’d only noticed this when I went to put on a pair of pants and discovered they were a little too tight for my liking. It was always one of the risks of living in a family of spectacular kitchen witches who owned a bakery and made amazing dinners, but honestly I hadn’t really thought it would happen to me. And so, after struggling to put my pants on, I looked in the local edition of the Harlot Bay Times (which was still mostly printing made-up garbage) and found Kaylee Osterman, a young, beautiful, blonde twenty-year-old who was starting her personal training business. Aunt Cass and I were her very first customers.
I reached the other end of the track and then turned around and continued plodding back the other way up Scarness Beach. To my left the grey waves murmured as they lapped at the shore. The wind was cold and cutting through my clothing. Yes, it was winter and I was a fool for running on the beach in winter. I saw Aunt Cass high-five Kaylee in the distance and then Kaylee grinned. My goddess, her teeth were so white. If you could harness the power of that smile, we would end our dependence on oil forever.
Yes, I was fully aware that I had hired her, and yes, I was fully aware that I had put myself in this situation, but right now I only had one nemesis: Kaylee Osterman.
The frogs croaked in appreciation as Aunt Cass went running back past me, poking her tongue out as she went.
Okay, make that two nemeses. Nemesi?
Apart from trying to fit into one of my favorite pairs of pants again, I had decided to start exercising in an attempt to hold back or limit any slips that might result in me acquiring magic powers I really didn’t want to have. As soon as I’d signed up for personal training, Aunt Cass had asked if she could come along too, and then a minute later, when two very happy frogs hopped over my feet, I’d discovered why she wanted to.
She had Slipped.
It happened a few hours after my Grandma April had woken up for all of three seconds.
Oh boy, what a fiasco that had been.
During the tail end of a huge storm influenced by my magic, the owners of the Magic Bean (who we later found out were called John and Tess Donaldson) had come roaring up to the mansion with a head full of fire after their coffee machine had been stolen. There was almost a full-on knock-down, drag-out fight out in front of our mansion when suddenly the magic had heaved behind us, and with a wave of her hand, Aunt Cass had knocked out not only our collective three boyfriends, but also the Donaldsons. We’d run downstairs, and Grandma April had moved before saying, “Not yet,” then returning to her frozen state. To everyone’s surprise, Aunt Cass had begun sobbing, clutching at her sister and calling for her to come back. The rest of the family had rushed in to hold us in the giant warm embrace of love.
That particular scenario had lasted about fifteen seconds before Aunt Cass told everyone to get off her and that she was fine and didn’t want to talk about it! Then she marched back upstairs, and by the time we got back, Jack, Will, and Ollie were all on their feet again, blinking slowly, with no memory of what had really happened. The Donaldsons had woken up about thirty seconds later, and I think there really would have been a fight at that point if Sheriff Hardy hadn’t come driving up to the mansion. He wasn’t on official police business but rather coming to visit Aunt Ro, his girlfriend. He told the Donaldsons to leave and to come down to the station to file a report, and that, thus far, had been the end of it. Jack hadn’t mentioned anything about being knocked out at the time, nor since, but I had a suspicion in the back of my mind that he’d realized something had happened.
“Two laps to go!” Kaylee yelled.
Two laps? Wow. I must’ve done a whole lap while I was daydreaming. Right, where was I? Oh yeah, the Donaldsons. They had filed a police report, which had gone nowhere because their coffee machine was MIA as well. Now Molly and Luce, in addition to missing their own coffee machine, were walking around like twitchy nervous cats thinking that there was going to be some kind of revenge coming.
I finally reached Kaylee, gave her a very feeble high five and then stood there on the beach with my hands on my knees, gasping like a fish pulled out of the ocean. Aunt Cass was standing by the side looking cool as a cucumber, eating what I think was a muesli bar. The writing all over the package was in Japanese.
“What do you say we do a few more laps for fun, coach?” Aunt Cass said, grinning at me. Kaylee laughed it off, and for that I was thankful. I could already feel my legs turning to Jell-O, and if I’d been forced to do a few more laps—well, there might have also been two shallow graves dug on the Scarness Beach today.
“Okay, good work, everyone! I’ll see you in two days, bright and early!” Kaylee said. Another round of high fives and then she grabbed her gear and ran off down the beach, the epitome of health, youth and beauty.
I suppressed the urge to throw a handful of wet sand at her.
Standard Harlow thought that Kaylee was amazing, loved her enthusiasm, and was more than happy to have her as a personal trainer. Bu
t Exercising Harlow? She was not to be trifled with.
“Ribbit,” frogs said from near my feet and then looked up at Aunt Cass with an expression that could only be described as pure adoration.
“Time to get going, those chili sauces aren’t gonna sell themselves,” Aunt Cass said.
I grabbed my water bottle, gulping about half of it down as I trudged up the beach, following her back to the parking lot. The further away from the wet sand I got, the better I felt. I know it seems like life sucked right now, but really I was ecstatically happy. On most fronts, that is. I still had Jack, my wonderful boyfriend, and I had just gotten a brand-new job working with Ollie underneath the library to help catalog and digitize their thousands and thousands of papers and records. Not only that, but I had finally been paid for working on the movie set, so for the first time in a long time, I’d seen my bank account balance go over triple digits. Life, for me at least, was pretty good. My dear friend Peta was moving back to Harlot Bay fairly soon, I hadn’t slipped, the winter holidays were here, and Christmas was coming. All in all, I was looking forward to this holiday season.
As we reached my car, an ambulance came roaring around the corner and zipped past the beach, heading across Harlot Bay at high speed.
“Quick! We need to follow that ambulance!” Aunt Cass yelled. She pulled at the car door, trying to open it, but I hadn’t unlocked the car yet.
“What for?”
“Can you open the door? I have an intuition!” Aunt Cass demanded.
“Tell me why Grandma April said, ‘Not yet,’” I demanded in return.
Aunt Cass crossed her arms and then frowned at me.
“You’re playing a dangerous game, trying to stop me from doing what I want,” she said.
“Maybe you should use some of that chili money to buy yourself a car and then you can go chasing ambulances as much as you want,” I said. I unlocked the car and got in. Aunt Cass jumped in the other side and then quickly buckled her seat belt, urging me to go before we lost the ambulance entirely.
I could still hear the siren fading away as the ambulance raced across Harlot Bay. I guessed I could follow it. After all, I was still technically a journalist, even though the Harlot Bay Reader had sunk to new lows of readership. Apart from that, Aunt Cass had said she had an intuition she should follow, and usually it wasn’t a good idea for witches to ignore their intuition.
So on one hand I had two reasons piled up for why I should follow the ambulance, and on the other hand I had a lot more reasons not to follow it. One of those reasons was the promise Mom had finally pulled out of me after a concerted effort that had stretched over some weeks to get me to agree that I wouldn’t go off and do crazy things and get myself involved in dangerous situations. I’d tried to weasel out of making such a promise as much as I could, but the woman was relentless, and eventually I’d given in.
My current position was that, if someone forces you to make a promise, then you aren’t really obligated to keep that promise. But still, it was nagging at me. I took a deep breath, remembered once again that this was holiday season and I, Harlow Torrent, a slip witch and sort-of journalist, was going to be taking a holiday.
I started my car and headed for home instead.
Chapter 2
“I’m not getting involved!” I called out to Aunt Cass, who was marching off to the main part of the mansion in what could only be described as a huff. She’d tried a few threats out on me when I had refused to follow the ambulance and then had lapsed into a sullen silence with her arms crossed, chewing her bottom lip. I’d dropped her off at the mansion entrance, where she had given me a withering look before marching inside.
I took myself off down to our end of the mansion, left my wet shoes at the door, and went inside to an empty house. I immediately headed off for a hot shower, which after the cold beach, was about the most enjoyable, luxurious thing in the universe. While I showered, I listened to the sounds of my two cousins and cat moving around up on the roof of the house, playing a brand-new fun game called “who stole the catapult?”
Over a decade ago, Luce had become somewhat obsessed with fantasy books, and this obsession had led her to, well, building a catapult. The moms had been vaguely in support of it at the time. I think in their minds, it wasn’t clear which category building siege weaponry went into. They had all the easy ones—sneaking out to see boys was wrong, underage drinking was wrong, disobeying your mother was wrong. Sitting quietly in the corner reading a book was right, doing your homework was right, obeying your mothers was right. But building a catapult? You were at home, and they knew where you were, and you weren’t doing anything illegal, so it seemed all right, but at the same time, it was a catapult—a gigantic piece of siege weaponry. Anyway, they had supported it and Luce had built it. We’d fired it off a couple of times, flinging pumpkins out into the forest before Luce had covered it up with a tarp and left it around the back of the mansion. It had sat there, unused, under the tarp for more than ten years until a week or so ago, it had been stolen by person or persons unknown.
I got out of the shower and dressed in warm clothes before grabbing a piece of toast from the kitchen, putting on a jacket, and heading back outside to climb up the ladder. I reached the roof to find Molly scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars and Luce sitting hunched up, looking in the other direction with Adams in her lap. I’m not going to lie—Luce kind of looked like an evil genius right then. Her eyes were slightly crazy and she was stroking a little black cat.
“How goes Operation Catapult?” I asked, taking a bite of my toast.
“It’s Operation Dark Vengeance,” Luce said and scowled at something in the distance.
“Operation Terrible Dark Vengeance,” Molly added.
“Operation Terrible Dark Vengeance Fury,” Adams said and continued kneading Luce’s thick wool sweater with his paws.
“Ow, be careful, your claws are sharp,” Luce said. Adams jumped out of her lap, walked over to the edge of the roof and sat down, looking out in the same direction Molly was.
“They’re out there somewhere,” he said, sounding like he was narrating the trailer for a horror film.
“I thought I saw something about an hour ago, but it turned out it was John throwing himself off the radio tower again. You or Aunt Cass are leaking magic again if I can see ghosts,” Molly said. She put down the binoculars and gave me a calculating look again.
“Are you going to use any of those journalistic skills to help us yet?” she asked.
“I would love to help you, but I’m currently on holiday,” I said, finishing my toast and then crouching down so Adams would come over to me. I picked him up and he snuggled into my neck.
“It was probably teenagers. Dark, eldritch, supernatural teenagers,” Luce muttered to herself.
I looked down at her again and realized that one of the reasons she was looking like an evil genius was that both her eyes were red.
“What happened to your eyes?” I asked.
“Aunt Cass needs to supply safety gloves for the chili business,” Luce said.
“Ah, I see.” Not too long ago Aunt Cass had started up a new business called The Chili Challenge. She was sourcing a variety of insanely hot chili sauces from all over the world, some of them no doubt illegal, and then sending them out to people who were willing to take the chili challenge. Apart from the chili sauces, they also received a cowboy hat, a stopwatch and a packet of wet wipes for the inevitable chili aftermath.
Thanks to Luce and Molly’s coffee machine being stolen, and its replacement only producing somewhat generic coffee, their business, Traveler, had shrunk down to virtually nothing. Given that it was the middle of winter, the number of tourists in Harlot Bay was at an all-time low, so they were actually shutting up the shop a few days a week and going to work for Aunt Cass, filling boxes and sending out orders. Aunt Cass could be a pain in the backside at the best of times, but having her as a boss? I shivered to myself. I wouldn’t wish that on my wors
t enemy.
Molly stepped closer and lowered her voice. “Seriously, though, do you have any leads at all that could help her?” she asked in a low tone.
“Probably a team of them working in the night. No one is safe in their beds,” Luce muttered to herself.
“I really don’t, sorry,” I said. Both the sheriff and Jack had come to investigate the catapult going missing and had come to the same conclusion. There are been some drag marks but no tire tracks. It appeared that the person or persons unknown had managed to drag the catapult some small distance before loading it up on something and driving it away. Somehow they had managed to do this without any of us noticing, which was entirely possible because the mansion was frequently empty these days.
Sheriff Hardy had told his men to keep an eye out for the catapult and had actually seemed quite cheerful that it had been stolen, saying that something so large would not be able to be easily hidden and if they found the catapult they would probably find some of the other stolen things that had gone missing from around town. But so far no new evidence of where the catapult had gone had turned up. No high-speed projectiles flying across Harlot Bay. No one using it to fling garbage at their neighbors.
No one was really saying it yet, but we were all thinking it: there was definitely a thief operating in Harlot Bay. Luce and Molly’s coffee machine had been stolen and so had the one from the Magic Bean. Now the catapult was gone. There had also been some reports of break-ins across town and small items going missing. At the moment, it was one of those things that we actually had no idea the size of. Many of the residents of Harlot Bay were retired and had plenty of things locked away in drawers that they had long since forgotten. If a ring locked in a drawer that no one had opened for eight years went missing, would you even know?
“Do you have any ideas how we could distract her?” Molly asked, indicating Luce, who was now scowling at something else in the distance.
“You guys could come personal training with me,” I said.
“In this weather? Are you crazy?” Molly said, stepping away from me as if I was about to force her to do push-ups or run laps.