Shadow Witch

by Tess Lake

  Contents

  Tess Lake Catalog

  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

  Tess Lake Catalog

  For a complete title list visit www.TessLake.com

  Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries

  Butter Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #1)

  Treasure Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #2)

  Hidden Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #3)

  Fabulous Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #4)

  Holiday Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #5)

  Shadow Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries #6)

  Shadow 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

  Dear ChiliLoverExtreme42, I apologize for the lateness of your order. We’ve had some supply issues recently…

  I glanced over the rest of the apology and then sent it, Aunt Cass’s laptop making a soft witch cackling noise as the apology went out. I don’t know why she’d set her laptop up to do that and I hadn’t figured out how to switch it off yet, so the best I could do was turn the volume down. I’d spent the last hour listening to that witch cackle over and again as I sent out apology after apology for the late delivery of the Chili Challenge box.

  Since Aunt Cass had vanished two months ago, I’d been unofficially put in charge of keeping her business running. With the moms focused on keeping their bakery business going and also outfitting a new location for the reopening of Big Pie, and Molly and Luce working at Traveler now that they had their amazing coffee machine back, I’d been the clear candidate in the family to take over the Chili Challenge. It stung a little to admit it, but the truth was the only official paid job I had was working at the library. I was seeing John Smith once a week to see if I could help him recover his memory and move on, and that was it. The Harlot Bay Reader had dropped to new lows of readership, and although I still occasionally wrote an article for it, I was slowly coming to admit that it had failed.

  I sat back in the comfortable office chair and looked up at the advertising Aunt Cass had stuck up on the office wall. The first one said, “Can you take the heat?” and showed a variety of chili sauce bottles, baby wipes, a cowboy hat, and a stopwatch. Next to it was another poster, with “These ain’t your momma’s chili sauces” printed on it.

  “Where are you, Aunt Cass?” I groaned and flopped back in the chair, causing it to squeak in protest.

  Through the open office door that led to the warehouse where all the Chili Challenge sauces, cowboy hats, baby wipes and stopwatches were stored, Adams grumbled to himself as he slept atop a pile of boxes with Russian writing all over them. He stretched out and rolled over, making himself comfortable.

  “You and me both, buddy,” I said softly.

  Aunt Cass’s laptop made a soft gasping noise (again, I don’t know why she’d set it up to do this) as another email arrived. This one said “PAY NOW” in giant letters at the top and then the rest was in Chinese. I looked at it briefly although (1) I couldn’t read Chinese and (2) if it was an invoice, I couldn’t pay it anyway. Scrolling down the list of Aunt Cass’s emails, I saw there were ones from all over the world and I was fairly sure most of them were payment demands. There were a few in Arabic, a bunch in Chinese, some in Spanish, and a few Russian. Aunt Cass had certainly been searching far and wide for chili sauces. As I sat there, the laptop gasped again. Another angry customer. I didn’t have the heart to look at it, so I closed the laptop, sat back in the office chair and stared at nothing.

  Two months ago there had been a gigantic, magical explosion out on Truer Island. It had caused an earthquake to hit Harlot Bay and then detonated a gigantic hole about half a mile across that went down at least fifty feet.

  I’d been with Jack at the time, helping him renovate his house (it was still going and I swear looked like it was full of rubble), and the force of the magic had knocked me over into a pile of wet slush. We’d rushed down to the ferry, where’d I met the rest of my family, along with many of the residents of Harlot Bay. In the distance over Truer Island was a tall plume of dirt and dust that had been shot up into the air by the explosion.

  I came out of my reverie to look down at the pile of newspapers beside the laptop. The top one said, “Gas Pocket Explodes on Truer Island?”

  The ones below that featured Carter’s more hysterical reporting in the early days, where he’d hypothesized that there had been some sort of government military testing going on out there, possibly buried munitions from the past, before finally he’d grudgingly written that it appeared it had been a gas pocket that had exploded for some unexplained reason. The state had sent out a geologist who had concluded it had been a gas pocket, but that was really because no one else could think of a logical reason for an explosion of that size. The Torrent witches knew it had not been a gas pocket explosion…

  Something underground, possibly in the revealed cave system, had detonated, throwing tons of dirt up into the air and flattening the trees around it in a gigantic circle. We’d felt the explosion had been magical in nature and had definitely involved Aunt Cass. Despite the entire family going out to the site multiple times over the last two months, she was still missing. Finding spells didn’t work, and given that we had no clue on how to find her, we’d simply taken to going back out to the explosion site and walking around, hoping to discover something. There were times when I swore I could feel a pull, but so far it hadn’t led to anything. You might ask at this point, how did we know that she was still alive? And the answer, unfortunately, isn’t very satisfying: we just knew. We could feel it in our bones; we had an intuition; witches know—whatever you prefer.

  We knew she wasn’t dead but missing, but unfortunately had no way to find her. So here we were, two months later, and I was about getting ready to close down the entire Chili Challenge. For a while, boxes of chili sauces, cowboy hats, baby wipes, and stopwatches had continued arriving at the small warehouse where Aunt Cass had set up her business. I’d found the laptop she’d been using to run it (where she’d bought it from we had no idea). Although I had access to the Chili Challenge orders, I had no access to the bank account she’d set up to collect the money, and so despite my desire to keep the Chili Challenge running, there was no way I or the family could pay any of the invoices that kept arriving.

  After about a month, the incoming flow of chili sauces had started to slow and no
w it was down to a trickle, probably because suppliers were realizing they weren’t getting paid. Because we had no money to pay staff and the moms were busy and so were Molly and Luce, I was falling dramatically behind on fulfilling the Chili Challenge orders—hence the number of angry emails from all over the country. It wouldn’t matter anyway soon. There were only about two more boxes of cowboy hats left, and some of the chili sauces were down to their last box. Once I ran out of sauces or hats or stopwatches or even wipes, there would be nothing else I could do.

  I checked the time and saw it was eleven a.m. sharp. I had absolutely no desire to continue packing Chili Challenge boxes to ship, but I really didn’t have anything else better to do at the moment anyway. Normally in this type of situation, I would wander over to Traveler to hang out with Molly and Luce, but since they’d gotten Stefano, their amazing coffee machine, back, their business had had somewhat of a resurgence. It hadn’t returned to the heady days when theirs was the only spectacular coffee machine in town, but now it was making a nice little bit of money, and as we came out of the tail end of winter and headed towards spring, the number of tourists coming through town had started to increase.

  I was looking over at the box of plastic gloves (to protect from the chili sauces) and working myself up for another hour of packing before lunch and then Aunt Freya coming to pick me up so we could go out to Truer Island to continue searching for Aunt Cass, when Adams murmured in his sleep, “There’s a girl here to see you.”

  A moment later, I heard footsteps out in the warehouse and a girl in her twenties with dark black hair and light brown skin appeared in my doorway.

  “Hi, are you Harlow?” she asked. She had a purple-and-white tote bag slung over one shoulder. Printed on it were some purple stars and the text “I believe in magic!”

  “I’m Harlow, um… how can I help you?”

  The girl bit her lip and looked around the warehouse, seeing the piles of boxes of chili sauces, the packaging, the strewn pile of wipes and cowboy hats and stopwatches. She looked in the office and at the posters on the wall as though she was suddenly unsure that she should be here.

  “I’m helping my Aunt Cass run her Chili Challenge business. She’s away on a working vacation right now,” I said, telling the lie the family had concocted. This seemed to reassure the girl, and so she hesitantly walked into the office.

  “Please sit down,” I said and directed her to a chair across from me.

  From the moment I’d seen her, I’d started to feel that tingly sensation running up my spine. It’s never good to ignore an intuition.

  “My name is Eve, Eve Navarro. A friend of my mom said I should see you because you’re a journalist and you’ve investigated some strange things?” she said. It was Carter, I immediately thought, for no good reason at all.

  “I’m a journalist, or I was, and I suppose I’ve investigated some strange things,” I said, skating over the truth of the matter.

  “I need help with my grandma. Her name is Hilda Osborne and she lives at the nursing home, Sunny Days Manor. Do you know it?”

  “On the far side of town? It looks like it’s a nice place,” I said.

  “That’s what we thought too, but now I’m not so sure. She’s been living there for the last eight years. She’s eighty-two years old. She doesn’t have any health problems apart from the standard things that happen to you when you get old, but in the last few months, something strange has been happening with her. She’s been found a few times now, miles away from the Sunny Days Manor. When they find her, she seems confused, as though she’s not sure how she got there. And she’s not the only one, either. It’s been happening to other residents, and I think they’ve been covering it up. I only found out how bad it was because I happened to bump into someone whose grandfather was there and he told me the same thing. Do you think you could look into it?”

  Somewhere during her telling me the story, I grabbed a few pieces of blank paper and started making notes, slipping easily back into a journalist’s role. What she was describing sounded something like dementia or perhaps Alzheimer’s, which certainly wouldn’t be unusual in a nursing home community. But other residents being found miles from Sunny Days Manor as well? That was a little strange.

  But first, being a good journalist who operated on facts, I had to ask some slightly tough questions.

  “That sounds like dementia or Alzheimer’s. She definitely doesn’t have these conditions?” I asked, as gently as possible.

  “No, she’s as sharp as she ever was. She does crosswords, plays games on her computer, is obsessed with technology. She didn’t go into Sunny Days because she had to. It was after my grandfather Murray died and she was getting lonely, so she moved in there so she could be with other people her own age. She even lives in one of those independent living units where it’s more like a house that she has on her own,” Eve said.

  “When was the last time she was found away from the nursing home?”

  “A week ago. She’d… borrowed, I guess… someone’s car and had been driving it out to that old lighthouse. They found her on the side of the road when she stopped and got out of the car for no reason.”

  I dutifully wrote this all down, the tingling feeling in the back of my neck growing stronger with each passing moment.

  “Can I tell you something really strange?” Eve asked. She was biting her lip again, and I realized how anxious she was. She kept clutching her hands on her tote bag, crinkling it up.

  “I’ll keep whatever you tell me private,” I promised.

  For a moment I thought, What am I doing? But the tingling down my spine made me ignore the absurdity of this situation.

  Eve looked out the door as though she was checking that no one else was watching and then sighed deeply.

  “A few nights ago I was dropping my grandmother off after we’d gone out to dinner at Valhalla Viking. It was about seven at night and it was dark. When I came out to my car and started it, in the headlights I saw a man, one of the residents, who was easily ninety years old, standing out near one of the side fences. I only caught a glimpse of him and then suddenly…”

  She stuttered to a stop and rubbed her hands on her face.

  That tingle on the back of my neck was now buzzing and I became very aware of the magic surrounding me. As usual, it was pushing in gentle waves.

  “Go on, you can tell me,” I urged.

  “He jumped over a wall at least six feet high, straight up like a rabbit. It happened so quickly! One moment he was there and then he wasn’t, and I just saw this flash as he went over the wall. I think I convinced myself I’d just been imagining it, or I was mistaken, but then two days later, when I went to visit her, my grandmother told me he’d passed away. She showed me a photo of him. He was ninety-one years old and had had two hip operations,” Eve said.

  “Ninety-one and he jumped a wall, that’s really weird,” I said, half talking to myself.

  “I’ve been going crazy trying to work out what’s happening. I thought maybe someone is drugging the residents and so then they leave the nursing home and wake up miles away, or maybe they’re giving them something else, but I’ve never heard of a ninety-one-year-old being able to jump a six-foot wall. I feel like I’m crazy even saying it,” she said and clenched her tote bag between her hands again.

  “You’re not crazy. Lots of strange things happen in Harlot Bay,” I said.

  She, of course, had no idea that I was a witch and that I came from a family of witches, nor any idea of the magical confluence that hovered above Harlot Bay. Even without knowing all these things, people were aware a lot of strange things had happened in our town over the years. People had gone missing; townsfolk out on Truer Island had been killed in the distant past. There were all kinds of stories of hauntings and other mysterious sightings.

  I made an abrupt decision.

  “I’ll look into it for you,” I told Eve. She started rummaging around in her bag until she found a wallet. She opened it and pulle
d out a handful of cash.

  “I can pay you for your time,” she said. I waved her away, although honestly I really could use the money. The lump of cash I’d received from working on Bella Bing’s movie when she’d come to town had slowly dwindled away, and I’d lost a big chunk of it when I had to replace all four tires on my aging car.

  “No, please, I really appreciate it. Please take it,” Eve said and dropped the money on the table. I tried to give it back to her but she insisted, so eventually I gave in, pushing the money to the side. We exchanged phone numbers and she told me that she would add me to her grandmother’s visiting list if I wanted to go out to Sunny Days to meet her. I promised I would help her, and then before long, Eve was gone and I was left sitting in Aunt Cass’s office, that familiar tingling feeling going right through my entire body.

  “So, are you a magical private detective now?” Adams said from the doorway.

  “No, I’m just helping her, that’s all,” I said.

  “She paid you and you’re gonna go and investigate something weird, so doesn’t that mean you are a magical detective?”

  “Look, I don’t know,” I told him. Adams yawned in response and walked off, vanishing behind some boxes. When I didn’t see him emerge, I knew he’d disappeared off to somewhere else. Adams’s question was a good one, but I didn’t really feel like answering it at the moment. No, I wasn’t a magical detective as far as I knew, but I guess I really wasn’t a journalist either given that my online newspaper was pretty much dead. I guess officially I was a librarian assistant and unofficially a postmortem therapist, trying to help John Smith move on. I suppose I was also unofficial CEO of the Chili Challenge, which was a failing business that was sure to shut down fairly soon.

  I paced around the office a few times, trying to shake off the tingling feeling that was buzzing through me, before I eventually sat down and looked over the notes again. I don’t know who had sent Eve to see me, and she’d paid me all of a hundred dollars to help her, but I knew something strange was going on, and so help her I would.