The Retail Witches: An Urban Fantasy Witch Novel (Retail Witches Series Book 1)

by Les Goodrich

  The room was round and from the encircling shelf tops to the high ceiling center there rose pulled, pleated, and knotted dark green and black silk striped fabric that was tied in the fashion of a tent roof. Under the golden tasseled knot rope at the room’s center stood a low round table filled with crystal balls. A clear quartz ball the size of a softball. A smaller ball of amethyst. Balls of pure black onyx. And one fist-sized sphere of green marbled fuchsite with multiple ruby inclusions that had the look of some alien planet.

  Jordan moved among the sacred objects and dusted with care. She dusted under each rune and replaced them perfectly. She dusted the edge of a bookshelf although no dust was there and she looked over the book spines, some gilded, some embossed, and some with no indication nor clue. She dusted the crystal balls and she caught herself looking into the amethyst ball and the inverted images of the other balls around it swung like pale moons among electric candle stars and the depth of the crystal pulled her in and she felt her perception toggle between the physical world and the world of energy and she saw great distances of time and continents far and she saw a room in a house and she knew by the furniture and the faded portraits that the house was far away and long ago.

  She pulled out a book: a first edition of Raymond Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft.

  “Big Blue,” she said and she flipped through some of the yellowing pages then replaced it with care. The next book she pulled out was bound in black leather and it held title neither on the spine nor on the cover. The cover had only a silver embossed pentacle. The first page was blank. The first several pages were blank. Beyond that was a hand-written book of shadows and glances at the pages here and there and in the back gave no obvious clue as to whom the book had belonged, but it was clear that it was old and the writing was in fountain pen and lettered in a rich blue and sometimes purple ink and the ink remained fluid and bright.

  Jordan looked back out from the Crooked Cupboard’s arched doorway toward the front of the store to see if Brit had returned with their coffee yet. She had not. The store was still empty so Jordan sat on the ottoman in her favorite shop spot under the amber electric candle glow and the room swam with the deep nuanced drones of dark ambient music and she opened the old anonymous book of shadows and she looked at the first written pages. At once she realized the book to be deeply personal and she wondered from where it had come. Whose had it been? She read.

  When I first discovered that there were modern, valid teachings of witchcraft I looked into them with curiosity and what I found felt so natural and correct and balanced and right that I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was home. The beauty and balance and sanity of pure pagan witchcraft made any and all religious dogma I had heard up to that point sound and feel like the ravings of children. I will set forth in this book my beliefs as they evolve and what I learn along the way about the elements and magick.

  I believe that a higher power than the human intellect is at work in the Universe. I believe that when this power of intelligence and harmony manifests into the world we perceive, that it does so as complimentary male and female energies, so that it could be said that there is a God and a Goddess. It feels, to me, that God is the Universal mind and the creative fire of the cosmos, and that the Goddess is the Earth and the Spirit of Gaia herself. The myriad of pagan Gods and Goddesses arise simply because they step forward as manifestations of the varied energies of the world of experience. Like the same ocean can deliver tiny waves, washing machine shore-break, or perfectly peeling point-breaks.

  I believe in the libertarian ethic of the wiccan rede (eight words the wiccan rede fulfill: if you harm none, do what you will). I don’t consider myself strictly wiccan, but they got that part right.

  I believe in magick and the power to manifest destiny through it.

  I believe that every capable person is responsible for their own life, actions, and attendant reactions of cause and effect they create.

  I believe in the natural world’s model of abundance—not in the western patriarchal economic model of limited resources versus unlimited want, which is a model of lack and is false.

  I believe that witchcraft is a spiritual path based on balanced male/female deities, a libertarian ethic, a recognition of personal responsibility, karma, and magick, to deliberately create one’s life in a natural, abundant world.

  Jordan closed the book and slid to the archway again to confirm the store empty, then she sat back and flipped through to a section further along in the anonymous book of shadows and read again.

  Regarding the Elements. The elements of Air, Fire, Water, and Earth are all required to create growth. When they are imbued with the fifth element of Spirit, they form the foundation of true natural witchcraft and pagan magick. Remember, the word “witchcraft” comes from an ancient word meaning “wise-craft”. Without true knowledge and understanding of the elements it is not possible to work effective magick or be an effective witch.

  Air, Fire, Water, and Earth are alive, understood, and worked with literally in the physical world and your love and consciousness is the Spirit that moves them. These elements are not some outdated conception of a limited mind that had not yet discovered modern chemistry. They are symbolic energies that reflect very real physical and mental properties of our experience in the world.

  Air is our thoughts, our inspired ideas.

  Fire is our passions, our enthusiasms, the things that excite us.

  Water is our emotions, our feelings.

  Earth is our physical bodies, the physical world, and the material things in it.

  Spirit is our essential self, our consciousness, as well as the God and Goddess within and without. As above, so below.

  Any time that you are experiencing serious difficulty, it is likely that you are either giving too much, or too little attention to one of these elements. Be aware of your thoughts and actions and aspire to live with a balance of each element.

  Jordan scanned ahead through the hand-written book and she saw an entire section on how the witch, when casting a spell, works with the knowledge and energies of the elements and with times of the year or seasons. She read a section about how magic is aligning these natural forces with Universal Intelligence and the desire or needs of the witch. She wanted to read the entire book, and she thought about buying it. Then she decided that she already knew and agreed with a great deal of what was probably in there, and that the book could be of far greater value to a new witch.

  She decided that thinking she needed every book she found about witchcraft was the reason she had a thousand books already but she did bring the book to the front of the shop just as Brit returned jostling through the door and deftly fumbling, but fumbling still, a to-go tray with two big cups tilting as she closed the door swiftly with one foot. Brit leveled the coffee tray in her left hand, pushed something back into her bag with her right and held the bag strap to bend lower and see better through the front window as she moved sideways to the counter. Coffee down and purse slung to the table behind the register, she slowly edged the window on that side and looked as far up the lane as she could.

  Jordan put the book down on the front table near Brit’s slumped bag and began to twist her big iced coffee cup from the cardboard tray. She banged the straw wrapper off on the counter then spoke with the straw in her teeth.

  “What the fuck is with you, man?” and she sipped her iced coffee and looked to the Visitor Spell mirror.

  “You see anyone coming in that thing?” Brit asked still peering up the alley through the window display. Below orange silk flowers in a vase. Above three amethyst cathedral geodes on the knee wall below.

  “No,” said Jordan looking. “I did see that guy from Atlanta coming in it earlier. You know, the one I got together with last Beltane? I couldn’t go anywhere but at least I was able to mentally prepare.” She drank her iced coffee. Basil Iced coffee from Monster coffee and she thought about how the first sips of basil iced coffee taste odd, taste as if you have
grass in your drink. But the next sips become refreshing and after a few sips it tastes delicious and the more you drink the more you love it and she took another sip.

  Brit turned from the window and retrieved her large hot drink. She leant against the table. Jordan grabbed the book from beside her, a notepad, a pen, then moved to the customer position at the register, thumbed through the old book she had found, and listened to Brit.

  “Those two little creeps from the Poison Apple followed me here! Or they were following me. I think I lost them at the tabby wall alley.”

  “The tabby wall alley. I love that little slip,” said Jordan and she began to write her note from the book.

  “Yeah, it’s a good one. I hate those bitches! I came out of Monster and they were just there. Off to the south at the fence corner just standing on the sidewalk next to each other when I walked out, so like a block away, and they stayed a block behind me like that, all the way across town.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  “They never say anything Jordan! Have you ever heard them speak? No. They just stayed their quiet asses behind me. Creeps.”

  “Dracaena and Ella from the Poison Apple,” Jordan spoke halfway to herself as she finished writing. “The youngest girls who work there. They’re called Dracella because they’re never apart,”

  “They call them Darkspell,” said Brit.

  “Whatever. What do you think they want?”

  “Who knows but they’re up to something.”

  “No shit. They’re Shadowclan witches. Dyed in the wool. Born, bred, and encouraged creeps. Who knows what they’re up to? It’s your own fault,” Jordan added and she closed her book and sipped her drink.

  “It’s my fault those creepy bitches followed me all over town and I ditched them?”

  “They know where you work. If they’re bugging you like that, just turn around and spin them a little dizzyness spell.”

  “The dizyness charm. It’s not a full spell.”

  “My point exactly. It’s a minor banishing charm. They wouldn’t even know you did it. That shit fades like whippits.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a student. I study. I learn. I’m also student where witchcraft is concerned. I’m not a witch like that.”

  “How about a shielding spell?” Jordan asked.

  “That only works if someone is actively trying to harm you.”

  “What if they were?”

  “I could do that,”

  “Ha! See! You can’t pick and choose like that. You’re either a witch, or you’re not.”

  “Why not? You choose what spells you do. If we could only do all spells, or none, we’d all be Shadowclan.”

  “Fair enough,” Jordan conceded. She added, “But either blast them with some magick or don’t come in here bitching about them creeping you out. You don’t need magick to get them off your ass anyway.”

  Brit turned from the window, “How would you get rid of them?”

  “I’d stop in my tracks, turn around, and stand facing them and watch how fast they go away. Darkspell! Ha! That’s the difference between you and me. I’d blast their little asses off the sidewalk and they know it.”

  “And all that scary stuff about Gwen and Shadowclan is true isn’t it?” Brit said. “They’re dangerous.”

  “They’re dangerous,” Jordan confirmed. “There was a woman who used to live in an Old Town inn, a housekeeper. She was a Light Tribe witch. One of the first in this area they say.

  “She started confiding in other witches that she thought Gwen was singling her out somehow. She felt threatened more and more I guess. Then one day she told everyone she was moving back to West Palm Beach to live with her sister. The next day she was gone. At the very same time The Poison Apple became the focus of a bunch of shady shit. Even more than usual I mean.”

  “Like what?” Brit asked.

  “Like other businesses on Cuna reported hearing horrific screams of a woman at all hours of the night. Police were called a lot but they never found a thing. Tourists walking by one night heard banging so loud coming from the store that they said it shook the walls and windows and inside they heard a woman screaming and begging for her life. They ran off, called the cops, and again, nothing.

  “Then a month or so later after that housekeeper witch had moved, her sister showed up in town for a visit. I guess she hadn’t seen or heard from her sister in months. She was shattered and terrified and got the cops to turn the whole town into a manhunt but they never found the lady.”

  Brit drank her hot banana mocha and moved forward to the counter.

  “Monster Coffee is the best,” she said to change the subject and Jordan said, “Word,” and they toasted and Jordan said, “Thank you.”

  “Your turn next,” said Brit then asked, “What’s in the book?”

  “Nothing you’d be interested in,” Jordan said and she picked the book up.

  “What is it?” Brit asked again.

  “Witchcraft stuff,” Jordan sneered playfully and stalked off to put the book back.

  Chapter 4

  Declined

  Tanner woke Tuesday and made French Press coffee in the cockpit of the sailboat he lived on moored in the bay. He watched the day grow light. He listened to the electric kettle tick in the cold air. He scooped ground Sumatra into the stainless steel press. He watched two pelicans glide with their wingtips nearly touching the slick bay fetch to the north. Almost touching each other’s wingtips. The air was a cold breeze of fifty degrees and he was grateful to be drinking coffee on deck without any sandflies or mosquitos.

  He had been working on an invention, a modified burner for Jordan, that used stored solar energy and a magick-infused pair of crystals to heat water to boil without electricity and without gas flames so Jordan could make instant espresso in the store without burning it down or glitching out the circuit breaker by touching electronics with her witch static. He sipped coffee and studied his calculations trying to get the crystal gaps right. So far he had only been able to either barely warm water or melt the saucepan. Tuesday was Carol’s day off and Tanner was up early to open the store.

  At eight a.m. he rowed his dingy in and tied it up under the Eco Tours dock near Marine Street shoreline and scrambled cold over the erosion control boulders. He looked over his shouldered backpack down to the dingy. No one had ever bothered it or said anything, and he had been docking there for two years since he started to work for Carol. He confirmed it to look loose enough for the tide, then walked through the paling dawn. He drank coffee from an insulated cup as he slipped along Cadiz Street.

  He walked up Charlotte and before him neon still on from the night before in some high window seethed and stuttered in the long, narrow, black, wind-tattered puddles and twisted like phosphorescent eels where parallel depressions marked the passing of car tires on that old road. The passing of wagons.

  Tanner kept a bike locked at the marina bike rack, but the store was close and he walked most days. He had a Suzuki SV650N motorcycle in striking metallic teal that he kept in a storage unit and rode on his days off or anytime he had to travel beyond Old Town. Tanner ducked left onto Artillery Lane and was glad to be out of the north wind. He looked to the closed store. The leaden windows. The areca palm waiting. The flag unseen. They had remembered to put it up last night. Good. The day grew bright, the day to come.

  The first morning’s customers were four separate tourist families and one guy witch in his twenties who seemed to know Tanner from the store but Tanner did not recall him. Those customers found the flag flying true above the doorway, the sandalwood incense leading them in, and the interior of the shop spotless, perfectly lit and retail sparkling, and the tone of the store flowing with a lighthearted ambient soundtrack of bamboo flutes and water falling. Tanner loved to open and he loved to make the store cool.

  The witch guy bought a Christopher Penczack book and looked at an impressive quartz cluster he had Tanner brin
g out from the case but he did not buy it.

  “You could read a newspaper through that,” the guy said holding the naturally cemented group of three soda can-sized points to the light.

  “Indeed,” said Tanner and he took the crystal back, replaced it, and moved to ring the guy’s book up.

  As Tanner put the sold book into a store bag, he also included, with a brief lift, a thin folded newsletter.

  “Speaking of reading, here’s a free copy of The Last Dragon. He looked to see if the guy seemed to know of the paper. He did not so Tanner added, “It’s a local pagan magazine. Good stuff.”

  “Cool. Thanks man,” the guy said and nodded out and left.

  “He was kinda cute,” Brit said through the door as she looked back to watch the guy head down the alley and Jordan right behind her pushing her into the store and shaking her head.

  “That guy’s a mess,” Jordan said and the girls began to fill the front table with their things. Tanner watched them, feeling the cool tone of his store go all girl-sideways at least for as long as it took them to get situated.