Witch Perfect

by Dakota Cassidy

  Witch Perfect

  Dakota Cassidy

  Copyright

  Witch Perfect

  Published 2020 by Dakota Cassidy

  Copyright © 2020, Dakota Cassidy

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Book Boutiques.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or events is wholly coincidental. The names, characters, dialogue, and events in this book are from the author’s imagination and should not to be construed as real.

  Manufactured in the USA.

  Acknowledgments

  Cover artist: Renee George

  Editor: Kelli Collins

  Author’s Note

  My darling readers,

  * * *

  Thank you for joining me for book eleven of the Witchless in Seattle Mysteries! Please note, the Witchless in Seattle series is truly best read in order, to understand the full backstory and history of each character as they develop with every connecting book.

  There are some underlying mysteries still yet to be revealed. Though, I do promise the central mystery featured in each addition to the series will always be wrapped up with a big bow by book’s end!

  Also, please note, I’m prone to taking artistic license with locations and such, so forgive any places near and dear to your heart in Seattle if they’re not completely accurate or don’t actually exist.

  Next, during this unprecedented time in our world, I hope you and your family are safe and healthy.

  And on a final note, Witch Perfect picks up immediately where book ten left off, published in 2019 and titled Witch It Real Good.

  So here we are on book eleven! Thank you for continuing to join Stevie, Win and gang on their adventures—it means the world to me!

  * * *

  Dakota XXOO

  Witch Perfect

  Chapter 1

  “Tiiimberrr!” I yelled to Win from across the kitchen, where I’d gone to make some coffee as we confessed our sins to Dana. “Catch him, Win! Don’t let him fall!”

  Holy tree falling in the woods. We’d made my favorite Play by The Rules Officer faint.

  Like, a dead faint. Right there at the table in our kitchen.

  As the legs of the chair he’d been sitting in scraped the floor, my Spy Guy made a mad dash across the kitchen for Dana, who was tipping over like a felled oak, running up behind him just in time to catch his big frame before he hit the floor in a dead slump.

  I ran behind Win in an attempt to help soften my favorite police officer’s fall to the hardwood. Dropping to my knees, I looked down at him and bit my lip.

  Poor Dana. As I looked at his slack jaw and almost angelic face in his unconsciousness, I winced. Who could blame him? Because boy, we’d really unloaded—total word vomit. I mean, Win and I had upchucked every stinkin’ detail of our trials and tribulations since I’d met Dana four years ago.

  From me losing my witch powers, Madam Zoltar’s death, Win contacting me from Plane Limbo, my ability to talk to the dead, the funeral home debacle, right up to the events of the last few days in Marshmallow Hollow, and everything in between—we’d told him everything.

  All of it.

  And he’d listened, whiskey in hand, nodding politely the entire two hours it took to share our story, only occasionally cocking his head to the right in the way Dana did when he wanted you to know he was paying attention. It was one of the things I really liked about him—he truly listened.

  But I swear to Pete, he’d never once looked at us as though we’d gone off the deep end. Never once had he’d given us that judgmental hardening of his facial features he’s so good at when he thinks I’ve gone over the edge.

  Not once.

  Some police officers possess the notable skill of bluffing. They pretend they believe you, they pretend to be interested in what you’re saying, when all the while they think you’re a Liar McLiar Pants.

  Dana could win awards for his poker face, most especially when I was retelling him an outlandish tale, and today had been no different.

  “Wow. Who knew he’d pass out?” Bel chirped as he hovered above us, his tiny wings whirring. “It looked like he was really listening, too.”

  Listening—until Bel entered the picture, that is.

  “Dah,” Arkady agreed. “He is very good at card face.”

  I giggled. “Poker face. It’s called poker face, and I was thinking the very same thing, Arkady.”

  “All I did was say hello. Just like you told me to do, Boss, but you’d think I sounded like a demonic cheerleader with a megaphone, calling out a message from the depths of Hell.”

  I rolled my eyes and rasped a sigh, grabbing poor Dana’s feet to help Win carry him down the hall to the living room. “You’re a bat, Bel. A talking bat the size of a fruit fly. You scared the pants off him. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d used Glinda The Good Witch’s voice.”

  Bel puffed his chest out as he flew backward, buzzing a pattern to the living room. “I am not the size of a fruit fly, thank you very much. And Officer Rigid’s pants are still intact.”

  Win chuckled, hauling the upper half of Dana onto our couch. “Indeed, my good man. Though tiny, your presence is that of Thor the God of Thunder. Mighty and powerful!”

  “Don’t forget masterful,” Bel quipped, landing on the back of the couch to peer down at Dana.

  Heaven help us all, what were we going to do?

  “Win?”

  “Stephania?”

  “We have a predicament.”

  My handsome former 007 looked down at Dana’s limp form and dragged a blanket he pulled from the back of the couch over him with a sharp nod. “Indeed, we do, Dove. Much like the time when—”

  “We don’t have time for a spy story.” I halted his latest reverie with a stomp of my foot. “Right now, we have to focus on Dana, who didn’t even have time to process everything we told him before Bel flew in, guns blazing, and spilled the beans. We need to figure out what we’re going to say to him when he comes to.”

  “Oh, no you don’t, Stevie Cartwright,” Bel protested with a flap of his wing. “Don’t flip the script now. You said to say hello when you were done with your speech, and I did exactly as scripted. No improv.”

  “Have I ever mentioned you stink at reading a room, Bel?” I asked. “Dana was clearly unprepared. He was absorbing, the way all big brainiacs do when they find out their friend was once a witch and she has a talking bat, with a former ghost and ex-spy for a boyfriend living in her backyard. He wasn’t ready, Bel.”

  “Baloney. You didn’t ask me to read the room. You said to say hello when you were done, and now look at this big goon, resting on his laurels like a giant in a Lilliputian’s field of poppies.”

  “Speaking of Sleeping Beauty, shouldn’t we put smelling salts under his nose or something?”

  “You are so silly, malutka. This is not movie. He does not need smelling salts. He will wake on his own. Though, he might need therapist after seeing wing-ed one with guns blazing.” Then Arkady chuckled.

  Even I had to admit, it was kind of funny.

  “Oh, please,” Bel protested. “I didn’t come in guns anything. I just said hello. How many times do I have to say that? Who knew he was such a weenie. Big, strong Officer Rigid is really Officer Meek and Mild. I mean, it’s like you said, I’m the size of a fruit fly. A well-fed, healthy one, but still, not very intimidating.”

  “Now, good man,” Win chastised. “Be fair and think of this from a mortal’s perspective. I’m certainly no weenie, but had I not been on Plane
Limbo, an otherworldly location when I found you and Stephania, I surely would have thought this all quite mad.”

  “But would you have passed out like you’d just tanked a whole keg through a straw at a frat party?” Bel asked, pacing the back of the couch.

  After giving that some thought, Win shrugged. “Who’s to say, mate? We can’t know. What we do know is our friend, a man who’s been quite good to us, is in distress, and we must deal with that first.”

  I ran to the kitchen to find a dish towel and run it under some cool water, the entire time worrying about how Dana was going to handle this when he woke up.

  As I ran back to the living room, the Christmas lights Hal and Atticus had put up twinkling cheerfully, I winced again when I looked at Dana, still unconscious.

  “Do you think we should call the doctor? What if we can’t wake him up?”

  “No, my pretty peach pie, he is only in shock. He will survive. Arkady Bagrov has seen this many times in his life.”

  “Hah!” Win cackled, slapping his thigh. “Do you remember that mission in Sri Lanka, my good friend? The gentleman with the funny—”

  “Win!” I yelped, twisting my fingers into a knot. “Enough Mission Impossible! We have an unconscious officer of the law here. One we’ve just spilled our guts to, who passed out because we terrified him with our talking bat. Help me rouse him and stop playing spy games.”

  I was trying not to panic, but Dana looked so helpless and out of it, I couldn’t stop myself.

  Win took the damp dish towel from me with a pout. “I assure you, Stephania, the mission in Sri Lanka was no spy game.”

  He moved Dana’s big body over enough to sit beside him, pressing the towel to his temple with careful fingers.

  I rolled my eyes at him, crossing my arms over my chest. “Yak, yak, yak, Sean Connery. I’m hearing a lot of yakking and not nearly enough ideas on how to wakey-wakey the big guy here.”

  “There isn’t much to do, Dove. We let him come to on his own. It’s a waiting game now.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “And when he does come to? What then? What if he’s angry with us? What if he wants to drag us off to the pokey? Then what?”

  Win let the towel rest on Dana’s head and braced his hands on his knees. “We did agree whatever the outcome, we would abide by the law, didn’t we, Dove?”

  I nodded, my eyes scanning the room in all its cheerful Christmas décor. A stark contrast to the predicament we were in right now—which, if Dana so chose—could be dire.

  “We did agree, but now that I’ve said everything out loud, I’m not sure I’m cut out for prison garb and shivs made of toothbrush handles. Maybe I was hasty…”

  “It’s a little late for that now, don’t ya think, Boss? You really let it all hang out—complete with sound effects and that cute diagram you drew on the whiteboard when Dana didn’t understand the different planes in the afterlife. You really wailed him with all the info.”

  I blanched. I really had gone all the way. Once I’d opened my mouth, once all the words fell in line, I sort of upchucked everything. It felt good to finally come clean with Dana rather than keep so many secrets. Call it a cleansing, if you will.

  “I was only trying to be thorough, Bel. So he’d have all the information he needed. We do have a pretty involved origin story, don’t we? The diagram was necessary.”

  Okay, maybe I didn’t have to describe all the planes in the afterlife—some can be a bit frightening if you dwell too long, but he needed to understand how they work, didn’t he?

  Win grabbed my hand and gave it a light squeeze. “And all the while, our good man Dana sat quiet as a church mouse, listening raptly, nodding his head in all the appropriate places. I was quite impressed with his mettle. He was taking it all in with a fair amount of stoic coherency until…”

  “Until all the outlandish things we told him became a reality and Bel talked to him. Maybe it was too soon to introduce Bel? He really is the only proof we have that our story is true. I mean, I can’t cast spells to prove I was a witch, and there’s no way we can prove I see ghosts and Win hears them. Bel was the answer.”

  Yet, Arkady reminded me of something that could work in our favor. “But Dana always wonder about you and your talking ghosts since his pretty Sophia died. You give him message from her, remember? You tell him something no one else can know, malutka. That is more proof. I think it all catch up with him and he was on information loaded.”

  “Overload,” I corrected with a small smile. Maybe that was true, but I had my doubts. If there was a way for Dana to logically explain away what we’d told him, he’d do it. “Well, maybe jail isn’t so bad. I mean, it probably won’t be maximum security, right? It’s not like we whacked someone. We were just sort of caught in the middle of a crime. Victims of circumstance, right? We’ll get light sentences for sure, and if we do, you know what that means. That means minimum security. Martha Stewart-type jail. I hear in minimum security you can even get a library card. I love to read. Don’t you love to read, Win?”

  He narrowed his eyes and sucked in his lean cheeks. “While I’m reassured by the notion I might catch up on my Tolstoy, I don’t cherish the idea of prison food. It is, quite possibly, the most heinous of all slop.”

  “Bah!” Arkady said with a hearty signature Arkady laugh. “You have never been in Russian prison, Zero. You know nothing of slop until you are prisoner in Siberia.”

  As Arkady and Win laughed over the memory, and I was about to scold them because going to jail was pretty serious, quite suddenly, Dana popped upright. His face a tense mask of confusion.

  I think we all gasped, but he simply looked at us with that calm, rational, steady gaze he had. “I think I must have passed out,” he stated quite matter-of-factly as the cloth from his forehead fell to his shoulder.

  “Indeed, mate,” Win assured him, with a pat on the back and a warm smile as Dana swung his legs over the couch to slide forward, handing the cloth to me. “You did, and we take full responsibility for that. Our story was quite outlandish, and you’d had a bit of the hair of the dog. Certainly that contributed to your current situation.”

  Belfry stood stock still on the back of the couch, almost afraid to move.

  I knelt in front of him and grabbed his hands, which were quite warm. “Dana? Are you okay? I know what we told you sounds crazy. I know it’s a lot to process, and if you want to take us to your superiors so we can hash out the whole Seattle—”

  “Story?” he asked, looking me dead in the eye, squeezing my fingers before letting them go. “What story?”

  I licked my lips nervously and cocked my head in confusion. He didn’t hit his head when he fell out of the chair, so what the heck was going on?

  It was then I decided to remind him. “The story we told you about us. You remember. It was chock full of witches and ghosts and a talking bat.”

  “That’s me!” Bel chirped from behind, but wrinkled his tiny snout when I gave him the death stare to remind him, he was the reason Dana had passed out in the first place.

  Yet, Dana only tugged at his ear in response and stretched his neck. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Miss Cartwright.”

  He planted his hands on his knees as though he were going to leave, but I gripped his wrists. “Dana, you had some whiskey with Win. Maybe it’s addled your brain. Do you remember a few days ago when you came by?”

  He nodded his perfectly groomed head, nary a hair out of place even after almost falling to the floor. “I do. I came to talk to you, and you said you had a cold.”

  Jabbing a finger in the air, I smiled and nodded. “Yes! That’s exactly what happened. And then…?” I prompted.

  His lips thinned as he pondered. “And then after you sent me packing, you texted me a couple of days later and told me you had to talk to me and asked me to come back.”

  “Winner-winner-chicken-dinner! And then…?”

  “And then I came over to talk to you,” he said with a smile and a
tone that sounded as though he thought I was being silly. “By the way, for someone who was so sick, your Christmas decorations look awesome. But you’d better put something on that tree. It’s naked.”

  Win and I looked at each other, both obviously trying to hide our surprise. “Forget the Christmas tree, Dana. Let’s go back to when you came over the second time and Win, my boyfriend who currently resides in the guesthouse in back, poured you some whiskey and we all sat down to have a chat.”

  Dana paused for a moment, his eyes locking with Winterbottom’s before he held out his hand. “Dana Nelson. Nice to meet you. I’m sorry if I didn’t say so before, but you know, I sort of dropped like a rock. I don’t know what came over me. I’m not the kind of guy who takes to fainting.”

  Win took his hand with a grin and shook it firmly. “No harm, no foul, chap. Just glad you’re okay.”

  Scratching my head, I pushed off my knees and stood up to gaze down at my favorite, albeit very lost police officer. “Do you remember meeting Win, Dana? I mean before today?”

  “Of course not, Miss Cartwright,” he bristled. “Why else would I introduce myself and shake his hand? And did you say boyfriend? Congratulations, friend. I’m happy for you.”

  Um. Were we in an alternate universe? Because this wasn’t adding up. He must remember meeting Win that day in the driveway wearing that crazy Christmas sweater. How could he forget?

  “Uh…thanks, Dana,” I muttered because I didn’t know what else to say.

  Win came to stand by me, placing a hand at my waist. “I trust you’re feeling better then, Dana?”

  “I am, and I think it’s time I go.” He rose, pulling the blanket from his legs and neatly folding it before throwing it over the back of the couch, almost knocking a sputtering Belfry over as though he wasn’t even there.

  Win and I looked at each other again, totally bewildered. But I realized, I couldn’t let this go. We couldn’t just send him out into the world with all the crazy information we’d given him and hope he wouldn’t remember. Could we?