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

by Les Goodrich

  “Please Brit. Just give me a chance. I have to write an article about haunted places in Saint Augustine. I know you know tons about that. Will you walk around town with me on Sunday? So I can take pictures. We can go to all the best haunted spots that have good stories and take pics, then I’ll take you to lunch.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Brit said returning to the counter. “It’s my only weekend off in a century.”

  “Please,” Marshal begged.

  Brit didn’t want to go. She was tired and burned out from work and school and she missed Tanner and Jordan. But she didn’t want to hurt Marshal’s feelings any more than she already had.

  “What time?” Brit asked and Marshal smiled.

  “Meet me at Coastal Coffee at ten a.m. We can go from there. Maybe plan on it taking a few hours. Then lunch and you’re free to go. Okay?”

  “And you buy the coffee too,” Brit said.

  “Sure,” Marshal said. “So good to see you again Brit.”

  “Okay,” Brit said.

  “Ten a.m. at Coastal.”

  “I’ll be there,”

  “Awesome,” Marshal said and left.

  “Unbelievable,” Brit said as Carol walked up.

  “What is dear?” Carol asked.

  “Life.”

  Chapter 20

  Double Crosses

  With the painting and books stowed Tanner and Jordan said a heartfelt goodbye to Freddy. Jordan left the boy with an Avalon Spellshop business card from her wallet with her cell number written on the back and she made him promise to call her if he ever came to the states.

  They made good time and good use of the extra fuel and it got them to George Town with ten gallons to spare and they refueled and filled their extra cans as well. They took on what they hoped would be their last provisions and headed north to pick their way around the Exumas toward Andros. They were exuberant at what they had accomplished and the excitement gave them the energy needed to persist through the final stages of what had been an exhausting journey, both physically and mentally.

  The waters held a light chop and the boat made smooth work of it and rode at a level trim and a comfortable thirty-five miles per hour. They flanked many small islands and in that inexplicable way, the trip back seemed to take half the time of the trip down. Jordan sat on the console seat, and Tanner and Dan took turns driving and sitting up on the leaning post seat to look ahead.

  It was from these positions that they first saw the smoke. A decidedly out of place smoke holding lead-grey against the bright sky ahead, then pale and steamlike as they drew closer. The shape from where it issued forth was no more than a dipping and canted reflection on the water and it seemed that the very ocean itself was smoldering from a tiny focused vent. As they drew nearer Tanner, through the binoculars, made out the shifting camouflage hull of Jacob and Rich’s Cigarette boat. The two of them on the bow waving. The engine compartment opened and belching a sickly reeling unintentional smoke signal.

  “It’s Jacob and Rich,” Tanner said and he handed Dan the binoculars.

  Jordan stood and joined the guys at the helm. Dan adjusted his course and headed to the distressed boat. He slowed as they approached.

  “Are they on fire?” Jordan asked and Dan handed her the binoculars and retook the wheel.

  “Apparently they blew an engine. Or worse,” Dan said and they slowed to an idle still a good distance away. “I guess we can tow them to Andros. Not exactly what I wanted to be doing for the rest of the day.”

  “We have to help them,” Jordan said.

  “We are,” Dan said. “Just wish they didn’t need help.”

  “Boy are we glad to see you guys!” Jacob called at their approach. “We knew you’d come this way but thank God you saw us. We had you on radar and prayed you’d come about. Hoped it was you guys.”

  “Your lucky day,” Tanner said and he cast a line and they held the boats side by side.

  “You can say that again,” Rich said and instantly Jordan felt some revulsion at his voice. She didn’t know why but she moved around the console to retrieve her wand from her bag in the compartment under the console seat. Tanner held the line at the back corner by the fresh water hose. Dan sat on the opposite gunnel.

  When Jordan lifted the hatch she felt spray and heard a commotion and before she could turn she saw Tanner grabbed from behind just as she felt a wet arm wrap around her own neck.

  “Not so fast witch,” hissed a horrible voice and the strong slimy arms held her immobile and she looked to see Dan in the same position. Three Fomorians had lurched aboard and sat sideways on the boat’s gunnel edges with their tails in the water and held all three of them in hateful headlocks. Their oozing green and black skins reeking of the foulest rotted fish. Their lank black hair draped over their horrid faces. Stained teeth sharp behind black lips grinning with malice.

  On the other boat Jacob leant into the engine compartment and pulled out two aerosol smoke bombs the size of beer cans and threw them into the water where they bubbled and rolled and drifted away trailing smoke. He closed the engine hatch.

  Rich jumped onto the center console’s bow then began to open compartments and ransack through belongings until he found the bag of books and the painting and he climbed back to his boat with the loot.

  “No hard feelings,” Jacob said. “This is strictly business. We tried two other times but could never outwit the ghost pirates to get this stuff.”

  “I found them easily outsmarted,” Jordan said.

  “Shut your mouth!” Jordan's captor hissed and tightened its grip and Jordan winced and could barely breathe.

  “Cute,” Jacob said. “You got it for us, that’s all that matters. We’ll be rich when we sell this junk. Fomorians have a buyer waiting for us stateside. I almost regret it. I’ve never seen a hotter witch. You should leave these two hippies and come with us Jordan.”

  Jordan fought to free herself but to no avail. She fantasized about blasting their ugly boat into a thousand pieces of driftwood. The Fomorian around her neck and shoulders only squeezed harder.

  “I didn’t think so. Oh well. Your loss,” Jacob said and he started their boat and revved the powerful engines.

  “You’ll never catch this boat in your wildest dreams so don’t even waste your time trying. Ahoy witches.”

  The Fomorians held the three for a good while as Jacob and Rich pulled away and set their fast boat into a rapid plane and skipped northwest with spray flying.

  When they were well away the Fomorians simply let go and dove into the depths and were gone. Jordan, Tanner, and Dan fell onto the deck, bodies in shock and spirits shattered.

  “I will blast those assholes to hell!” Jordan yelled getting up. “God damn pirates. I knew it! I just knew it. I never trusted those bastards from the very beginning.” She stomped to the back corner and began to rinse the slimy Fomorian funk from her skin.

  The reality of what had happened sunk in and Dan put the boat in gear. He idled to get his bearings again and he and Tanner took their turns rinsing off. Jordan just sat sideways on the console seat with her feet up and cried with her head in her knees.

  ***

  Brit met Marshal at Coastal Coffee Sunday morning and another barista named Beth was working. They took their coffee and sat outside in the courtyard chairs and Marshal circled haunted places on a tourist map flyer.

  “The article is for the Haunted Florida blog. If they like it I might get to write more.” He circled the Spanish Military Hospital, the Old City Gates, the Huguenot Cemetery, the Tolomato Cemetery, and Scarlett O’Haras bar.

  “Stogies Jazz Club,” Brit pointed to the map.

  “Stogies is haunted?” Marshal asked.

  “So they say,” Brit said and sipped her coffee.

  Once he had ten places circled they planned a route together and when they were ready they set out.

  Marshal was pleasant as always and Brit enjoyed walking the streets and they talked about recent articles Marsh
al had written and Brit said nothing of Tanner and Jordan. She did tell him that she was beginning her study of witchcraft in a formal way and they spoke of her college classes and some about her work at the shop.

  Marshal took pictures of the haunted locations they visited and Brit relayed stories of ghosts that she knew for each one. Marshal kept numbered notes in a small spiral notebook for the article. As the morning passed they talked about where they might want to eat lunch and they decided on Harry’s Seafood Bar since the building was said to be haunted by a girl from the seventeen-hundreds. They took pictures at the Tolomato Cemetery then headed down Cordova Street on their way to the other end of town to Harry’s.

  “Let’s cut through here,” Marshal said at an alleyway that ran east between two old brick walls. The walled walkway made a hard corner to the right fifteen yards in, and oak trees hung above from both sides. The backs of buildings stood beyond the ancient walls and the walk was paved with centuries-old limestone pavers.

  “Are you sure this goes through?” Brit asked peering into the narrow hall. She looked up to the trees where branches hung upon the six foot wall tops.

  “Yeah it goes through. Come on.” Marshal walked into the lane and stopped at the corner. “Come on,” he said.

  “Okay,” Brit said and she joined him and they rounded the corner and the alley turned east again and stretched ahead at least halfway across the block and made what looked to be another corner to the left ahead. At that corner Marshal stepped quicker and as he moved ahead Brit could see that beyond the second corner the alleyway opened up into the walled courtyard of one of the buildings and it was obviously a dead end. She turned to go back and opened her mouth to say, I told you so, but instead no words came out and she was face to face with Datura, wand drawn, blocking her way in the middle of the narrow path and wearing the most frightful grin.

  Brit turned instinctively back to Marshal but he had stepped to a concrete bench and was climbing out of the courtyard, leaving her. In that second she saw, as he reached to scramble over the wall, his shirt pull short. Under it was what she knew to be a Poison Apple tattoo on his side above his waistline yet below his ribs. The tattoo of a two inch apple, the hollow face of a skull upon it as if carved, and a dagger stuck trough it from above. She knew he had been their hexpawn all along. She wondered if anything he had ever said had been true. She was ruined in her heart, but in more trouble than she could imagine. Reflect-Fire she thought. To stop a physical attack.

  She pulled her wand from her backpack as she turned but Datura just huffed a scoffing half-laugh through her nose and that contemptuous puff was the last sound Brit heard. In Brit’s eyes all light fell to darkness. She felt only distance. She heard only silence. She stood upon no ground. She was engulfed in fire and yet the flames were bitter cold. She was calm yet all about her she felt touched in a thousand places as if the pressing in of blunted needles delivered some vague sensation that had no name and only lived in the recurring dreams of children where it had no explanation and no purpose except to repeat itself just when it seemed to be finally forgotten.

  She awoke sitting. A chair with no arms. A room with no windows. A lightlamp with no shade. A door with no knob. A floor that had seen no broom. And kicked up into one corner a frail collection of items and among them there seemed no agreement. A cup. A feather. A pencil. A bone. She blinked in the lamp glare and looked around the room a second time and that look told no more than the first and before she tried to move she knew she was captive.

  She stood but only in the reflex of her mind for her body stayed sitting and her arms remained composed on her lap with her hands on her knees in a way that she would have never sat herself. She wondered if she could speak. She could not. She remembered that her head could turn but she also remembered from her initial looks that there was nothing to see so she just looked ahead at the door in the wall before her. She could breathe so she did that. A long silent time passed.

  The door creaked open and Gwen slid through it and stood before Brit and the door closed behind her. Her voice was silken and distant and vacant of emotion and indeed of all inflection and it sounded like the mechanical speech of an antique bedtime story recording.

  “You are here at my request until Carol delivers to me what she has stolen. Pray that your Light Tribe friends value you, over their lust for treasures. I have no ill will toward you. Perhaps we can be friends someday. You are beautiful. You are clever.”

  Brit’s throat ached and she felt the reflex to cry but no relief came and she looked away and a thought came into her mind. They captured me because I’m the weakest.

  “Oh no, indeed,” Gwen answered. Brit was shocked. Her last vestige of privacy invaded. Her very mind laid bare. She looked to Gwen and prayed her words were a prelude to some unrelated thing. They were not.

  “A weak person inspires no loyalty among friends. People will give up on them quickly. But for a strong person, they will risk their lives. That is why you are here.”

  So Brit formed another thought. But if I am strong, then how did this happen to me?”

  “Because I am stronger,” Gwen answered. “Do not fear death. All that suffers to be born here and to live here shall die from here. Do not confuse this with an evil act. Do not hate your god and goddess for abandoning you here, for they too are parts of this whole and the whole is what witches call the All and what Christians call God and what scientists call the Universe and since it is a whole it is pure unity. As such there is no ground for it to stand upon outside of itself, and so there is no direction from which it could ever be worshiped or hated or loved. But it can be loved when you love yourself. When you love others. If you love another, then you know that person is the true heart of god or god has no heart. When you look upon this dazzling world you know that your eyes are god’s eyes or god has no eyes.

  “This intelligent Universe is not a human personality and all of its parts are itself so it could never have any preference for the victory of any one of its parts over another. Wherever would it stand to cheer? But since it is indifferent to the notion of competition it is also infinitely responsive to all earnest beliefs. Hopes and dreams pull upward, fears and doubts pull downward, yet both do so with the same power. The Universe only ever agrees with what you believe, and to those beliefs it only ever has one response: here’s more. See yourself at home and with your friends and happy and believe it. Or see yourself in this room forever. Here in this room your body is imprisoned but your mind is not. How is that different from any other place on Earth? I will not say do not be afraid; you have come to a treacherous place. Choose your own beliefs and in doing so, choose your world.

  “And pray that, in that world, your friends will see fit to help you leave this place. We will both find out together. This room is nowhere. Datura will fetch you if your friends come compliant. If they do not we will talk again, many times, in many ways.”

  ***

  Jordan and crew headed to skirt Andros en route to the Florida coast. They could not talk about what had happened so they hardly talked at all. On their last day in Bahamian waters, after what had turned out to be a monumental waste of time and effort, they held to the leeward side of Andros with plans to cross the Gulf Stream and make landfall between Largo and Miami before dark. They would sleep in some inshore bay, then begin the journey north the next morning.

  They ran along the west coast of Andros and although the water and skies were staggering in their beauty, it all looked a bit crooked to Jordan. As if what had happened had obscured the world with some dismal and forlorn filter that would forever tint, for the worse, the way things looked. She felt like some foreign and ill mannered virus had moved into her very heart to eat away her happy memories and make irrelevant all her hopeful dreams.

  In this dejected state they moved across the indifferent seas and watched seagulls wheel and dip between them and the far shore of Andros and the island was a long time passing.

  The afternoon Sun was in their
eyes as their course veered west and they half-heartedly secured items like the cooler and a few bits of gear toward the transom in preparation for their late afternoon run across the deeper and more rough Gulf Stream that would put the Bahamas behind them and Florida on their horizon. At the north end of Andros Dan began the slow fade west and he turned in a great wide arc to intercept the GPS path that would be their course on their next leg home. Off shore and at the edge of the bank he saw what looked like a small outcropping of rocks or a low dry limestone isle. He looked to the GPS screen and zoomed in. He saw, there at that spot in the LCD map, the telltale cluster of plus signs that indicated rocks to be avoided. He glanced up again and confirmed the rocks coming into better view were well out of their path. He saw among the rocks a glance of reflected light as if the westering Sun had struck glass. He opened the small plexiglass console door in the helm dash and pulled out the binoculars from where he had stowed them for their impending deepwater run. He looked through the field glasses.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said and he turned the boat toward the rocks.

  “What is it?” Tanner asked.

  Jordan sat up when she heard the voices. “What’s wrong?” she asked back through the windshield.

  “Dan sees something,” Tanner said.

  “Who cares,” Jordan said and turned back to sit forward.

  “You’re not gonna believe it,” Dan said. “Here, look.” He handed the binoculars forward to Jordan and sped the boat up.

  Jordan looked through the binoculars and saw Jacob and Rich’s ugly fast boat high and dry on black limestone rocks edged in white where waves broke upon them on all sides.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jordan yelled and she jumped up and joined the guys at the helm. She handed the binoculars to Tanner who looked.

  “Unbelievable. How the hell do you think that happened?”