Son of a Witch: A Witch Squad Cozy Mystery #2

by M. Z. Andrews

  The hairs prickled at the back of my neck. I declared then and there that the minute I got home I was going to Google my brother and find out everything there was to know about Reign Alexander.

  “Holly, you’ve got a little somethin’, on your chin right there,” Hugh drawled and pointed at a little dark spot on her chin.

  Holly wiped at it, but it didn’t disappear. “Did I get it?”

  I shook my head and reached my arm out across the table to wipe it for her. But it didn’t move. “Must be a little blemish.”

  Holly laughed nervously. “That’s funny, Mercy. You know, I don’t get blemishes.”

  I shrugged and the conversation continued.

  “So what are your magic specialties, Holly?” Reign asked her.

  “Well, I’m a bit psychic, I have a lot of premonitions either through touching objects or through dreams. I’m also learning a lot about glamour spells.”

  “Glamour spells?” Reign shook his head.

  “You know, like beauty spells, vanity spells…I just did Jax’s hair coloring the other day, no dyes necessary!”

  “Oh, I see,” Reign said, nodding his head. “Like a beautician.”

  “Yeah, but with magic.”

  I squinted my eyes as I looked closer at Holly. She was starting to get dark circles under her eyes and the dark spot on her chin had evolved into a full-blown zit. “Holly, I think you and I should make a trip to the ladies room,” I suggested. Hugh squeezed my hand as if to say do not leave me alone with this guy. I squeezed it back but got up out of the booth.

  “It’s ok, I don’t need to use the restroom,” she objected with a sugar sweet smile.

  “Yeah, but I do. And you know, girls go together, right?”

  “Fine,” she grumbled.

  When I had her safely in the bathroom I took her by the shoulders and moved her in front of the mirror. “You’re breaking out!” I told her.

  “Oh my gosh!” she hollered. A second pimple had formed on her nose. “This one is HUGE!”

  She was right, the one on her chin was ginormous, but the pimple on her nose was twice as big. Holly was meticulous about her beauty regime, she always took her makeup off before bed and was careful to use moisturizers and creams to keep her skin soft, supple, and blemish free and now she was getting two zits on her first date with Reign. “Must be the stress,” I offered to her as a suggestion.

  She shook her head. “I don’t get pimples. EVER! And look at these bags under my eyes!”

  Suddenly it hit me, the brownies. This was Sweets’ doing. Of course! It had to be! I tried to suppress my laugh.

  “Ok, well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, let’s just go back to the table. I’m sure Reign won’t notice,” I told her.

  She fidgeted in front of the mirror and spun around sideways. “My dress doesn’t feel as tight as it did before. That’s weird,” she commented.

  “I hate to say it, Holl, but your boobs look way smaller,” I told her earnestly.

  “They do?” she asked and turned sideways to peer into the mirror.

  “Yeah. Did your bra deflate?” I asked her, trying hard not to burst out in laughter.

  “I will have you know that these are 100% natural,” she said and grabbed her chest. She looked in the mirror curiously. “Wait, they do feel smaller.” She looked at herself more closely in the mirror. “Do you really think they look smaller?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, they really do and they look like they’re shrinking even more now.”

  Holly panicked. “What is happening Mercy?”

  “I have no idea, but our dates are waiting for us, we should probably go back out there.”

  “I can’t go out there like this! My boobs are shrinking and I’m getting acne!”

  “I’m sure far worse things have happened on a date than that,” I assured her. Though I couldn’t think of what those things would be. Boobs shrinking and sudden onset acne seemed pretty high on my list of material for a date gone wrong.

  “Maybe we should just go home,” she suggested.

  “Now? We just got here! We haven’t even eaten yet!”

  “Look at me!” she cried as another pimple sprung up on her forehead.

  I linked arms with her and pulled her out of the bathroom. “There’s nothing we can do about it. You’ll just have to buck up and put on a brave face. Let’s go.”

  The two of us walked back to our table and by the time we were back to our dates, three more zits had sprung up on Holly’s face and her boobs had shrunken a bit more. She looked almost as developed as a thirteen-year-old girl, causing her dress to hang on her limply.

  Reign and Hugh gave us a funny look when we came back to the table. Holly tried to let her hair cover her face, but it was too late.

  “Holly are you feeling – oh!” Reign said with surprise when he saw her pimple covered face. “Are you allergic to something?”

  “Noooo,” she cried. “I don’t think so, I don’t know what is happening.”

  “Maybe it was those brownies,” Hugh suggested plainly.

  Something in Reign’s brain finally clicked. “Maybe it was the brownies. I wonder if Sweets got a bad batch of flour or something.”

  Holly thought about it for a second. When it occurred to her that Reign might be on to something, she balled up her napkin and threw it down onto the table. “Ugh! Sweets!”

  { Chapter Sixteen}

  Jax and Chesney were alone in our room when Holly and I got back from our short double date. Thanks to Holly’s “allergic reaction”, we ended the date early and just grabbed a slice of pizza from the cafeteria when we got back.

  “What happened to you?!” Jax asked in shock.

  “Bad shellfish,” Holly grumbled.

  “Tell her,” I ordered. “We’re going to fix this right now.”

  “Tell me what?” Jax asked curiously.

  “Tell her who you really went out with tonight.”

  Holly shot me an evil look. “I don’t want to.”

  “You mean you didn’t go out with Hugh’s roommate?” Jax asked, confused.

  “Holly!” I warned.

  “What?!”

  “Tell her.”

  “Ugh, fine. I went out with Reign!” Holly declared as she slumped down in the chair she’d just pulled up.

  “Reign! But…” Jax looked at me for help. I could tell she didn’t know if she should admit that she’d also been out on a date with Reign earlier in the day.

  I nodded my head at her.

  Jax hung her head. “I went out on a date with Reign earlier today, too,” she admitted grudgingly.

  Holly’s eyes grew huge and her face filled with blood. “But! We said we weren’t going to go after him!”

  Jax stood up angrily. “Ugh! You went out with him!”

  “So, that’s because you’re a terrible friend. You broke our deal.”

  “Holly!” I said sternly. “You broke whatever deal you had with Jax too. Neither one of you is in the right. And I didn’t want either of you to go out with my brother anyway. He’s my brother and I’d like a chance to get to know him before either of you do anyway. This is what you both get for going out with him when I specifically asked you not to.”

  “So you did this to me?” Holly asked, training her eyes on me.

  “You sabotaged my date this afternoon?” Jax asked at the same time.

  “Wait a minute, your date got sabotaged too?” Holly looked at Jax curiously.

  Jax nodded. “Yes! My words got all jumbled up and I tripped and fell. I couldn’t speak coherently at all. And Sweets told me I had to kiss Reign, and when I did I just about killed him!”

  “Wait a minute, Sweets told you? What does Sweets have to do with this?”

  Jax covered her mouth. She had revealed more than she had intended to. “Nothing.”

  “No, not nothing. What does Sweets have to do with this?”

  Jax groaned with frustration. “She did a matchmaking spell on us for
me. She told me after Reign ate the candy potion then I was supposed to kiss him. But don’t worry, it didn’t work.” Jax’s eyes swung downward and she fell back down on the bed next to Chesney.

  “Sweets did a matchmaking spell for me too and then this happened!” Holly said angrily, pointing to her face. “I bet she did all of this on purpose. I bet Sweets sabotaged us intentionally!”

  “I can’t believe her!” Jax sighed.

  “Regardless of why this happened, I feel like Reign has been lying to me about his past,” I told the girls. I scooped Chesney up and plopped him down on my lap in front of the computer. I typed in Reign Alexander and did a little nosing around on Google. It didn’t take long to find Reign’s criminal record in black and white. He’d been in trouble for theft, aggravated assault and battery, and criminal mischief. Since he turned 18 he’d been in and out of jail on numerous occasions. My jaw, as well as my heart, dropped.

  “Jax, you were on a date with him, did he tell you anything about his past?” I asked her even though I already knew what he had told her.

  Jax thought back in her head for a moment. “Umm, not much. He did say he grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Kansas though and he was raised by a single dad.”

  “He told me he grew up in a small town in Nebraska with a mom who the lunch lady at a school and a dad who was a banker. He lied to one of us or both of us. I really wish Mom would contact me again, I’m dying to know what he told her, because if he lied to my mother…” I trailed off, not knowing what I’d do to him, but I did know it would really push my buttons. “Has either of you seen Sneaks tonight? She was here earlier, but it wasn’t Mom, it was just Sneaks. I’m starting to get worried.”

  The girls shook their heads. “Nope, sorry,” Jax said.

  I stood up and handed Chesney to Jax. “I’ve gotta go, I need to go see my brother,” I said and grabbed my purse off the desk. “I really wish I had a car, I’m so tired of bumming rides off of people.”

  Jax shrugged. “I told you we should have signed up for broomstick riding lessons in the quad.”

  ***

  Twenty minutes later I waved goodbye to Hugh as he dropped me off at my brother’s rented room. He hadn’t wanted to let me go in alone, but I convinced him that I needed some one on one time with my brother.

  “I’ll just wait here in the truck for you,” Hugh hollered out the window as I walked up the sidewalk. “I can be there in five shakes of a lamb’s tail if you need me.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I hollered back.

  “We’re going out for ice cream when you’re done,” he yelled back. “So don’t dilly dally.”

  I waved my hand behind my back as I opened the door and quietly slid up the stairs. Reign was waiting for me. “Your message seemed urgent. You worried me, are you alright?” The worry in his eyes was apparent and appeared genuine.

  I shook my head, biting back tears. He’d lied to me! He was a criminal and I’d just practically thrown the book at another man for killing Harper Bradshaw. What if that was all a lie. What if Vaughn had nothing to do with her death, and what if my brother had done it after all? The thought made me nauseous.

  “No, I’m really not alright,” I admitted. My knees were weak and felt like they might buckle at any moment. “I need to sit down.”

  Reign gestured for me to take a seat on his bed while he pulled a chair up close to me.

  “Reign, I know you’ve been lying to me. You didn’t grow up in a small town in Nebraska or on a Christmas tree farm in Kansas. What else have you been lying to me about?”

  Reign took a deep breath and leaned back in his seat. “My life is complicated, Mercy.”

  “Does my mom know the truth about you? Or did you lie to her too?”

  He shifted in his seat. “I probably wasn’t completely honest with her either.”

  “Did you tell her about your criminal history?”

  Reign’s cheeks filled with blood and he swallowed hard. “You looked me up?”

  “I did a little digging when I found out you were lying to me about your past.”

  “Ugh,” Reign groaned as he slumped forward with his head in his hands. He rubbed his face with frustration.

  “I need to know something, Reign.” I tried looking him in the face, but he wouldn’t make eye contact. “Did you kill Harper? And don’t lie to me, because the truth will come out sooner or later and I’d rather hear it from you than to hear it from Detective Whitman when he pieces this whole puzzle together.”

  Reign’s head snapped up and he finally made eye contact. “I didn’t kill Harper, Mercy. I swear. I truly didn’t.”

  A large piece of me felt like I could believe him, but I decided to stay silent and let him explain his lies to me.

  “I did lie to you about where I came from. But I only did that because I didn’t grow up like you, with a mom that loved you. I had a rough childhood,” Reign admitted.

  “Reign, I want to get to know you. I don’t want some made for TV movie about your perfect life on a Christmas tree farm in Kansas with your single dad father. I want the truth. I want to know you and understand you and if that means that you tell me the hard truth, then that’s what it means. My opinion of you isn’t going to change because of how you were raised, although it might help me to understand you better.”

  Reign took a deep breath and leaned back in his seat, stretching his long thin legs out before him. “Ok,” he whispered. “After I was born, our dear old granny dropped me off at an orphanage in a rough part of Chicago. It didn’t take long before I was adopted by a couple. From the stories I hear, things were good for the first two years. Then my adoptive parents divorced. That was when the fun began,” he said with a little laugh.

  I reached out and put a hand on his knee. “You don’t have to make light of it for me, Reign.”

  He nodded and blinked quickly several times. “My adoptive father took off. I’ve literally never seen him since I was two. My adoptive mother took the split kind of hard, she moved us to Nevada where her sister was living at the time. She started drinking. People tell me she dated quite a bit, but I really don’t remember any of the men. By the time I was five, she was an alcoholic and had married Paul. Paul was a plumber with anger issues. He used to get so angry with me, and my mom,” Reign added. His face was transforming while he spoke. His jaw clenched and his eyes appeared to be in a trance, as he recalled his troubled past.

  “Paul was abusive, to say the least. He used to knock both me and my mom around from as far back as I can remember. My mom was too scared to leave of course. She didn’t have enough money for us to go anywhere far enough away from Paul and on his good days, she’d decide it really wasn’t that bad, she could stick it out, he’d get better. Paul would buy me a bike or a football and he’d promise he was sorry for smacking us around, but then the next week, a switch would flip inside of him and he’d break his promise to me.”

  Reign’s eyes glossed over as he looked up at me. “I used to pray, Mercy. I’d pray to a God that I didn’t even know that he’d help me and my mom and he’d make Paul disappear. For years nothing happened. Mom stayed with Paul and I couldn’t just run off and leave my mom alone with him when I became old enough to go out on my own. I was her protector. By the time I turned 16 I was able to at the very least keep her safe. If he came home in the mood to fight, I let him take it out on me. Sometimes I would fight back, but Paul was bigger and stronger. And then I turned 18. And something happened to me. It was like something inside of me that had been sleeping for eighteen years woke up.”

  “The next time Paul came home in one of his moods, it happened. I fought back, but it wasn’t just me fighting back anymore. It was my powers, Mercy. I didn’t know I had powers. I had never known I had powers. I didn’t know who my real parents were, or what my lineage was. I had discovered I was adopted a few years earlier, but I didn’t know about Linda or my father. And so my powers took me by surprise and they took Paul by surprise too. I unleashed them on
him. I nearly killed him, I had so much pent up rage inside of me that once I had him down on the ground, I just couldn’t stop hitting him.”

  Tears were falling freely down Reign’s cheeks as he spoke. I didn’t know if the tears were from the recollection of what he had done or the recollection of what he had been through or that he was admitting it to me, but my heart went out to him. It crushed me to realize that my brother, my own flesh and blood, had grown up in such miserable circumstances. I slid over on the bed, right next to his chair, and put my arms around him.

  “I put him in the hospital and it took him months to get out. He’s got some permanent damage to his body, he’s got some brain damage and his knee is messed up. He’ll live out his life in an assisted care home for the rest of his life. And you know what, I have a hard time regretting what I did, Mercy. I’m sure it’s wrong that I don’t, but mom and I were his punching bag for 13 years! He deserved everything he got! And I paid for my actions. The criminal record you found was a result of all of that and then when I got out of jail, I had a few anger issues I had to work through myself and I got in a bit more trouble, but I’m finally feeling like I’m in a place to move past all of that and move forward.”

  “That’s why you decided to come find me and Mom?” I asked him quietly.

  He nodded and took both of my hands. “Yes. I need to have good people in my life and I need to know about my powers and my family and where I come from. I need to feel like I have a purpose.”

  I wiped away the tears that I hadn’t even noticed I was shedding. Finally, I had what I had been longing for. I felt like my brother was telling me the truth. I felt like I was actually hearing the true him. While I was happy to feel like my brother was finally being real with me, it broke my heart to hear about what his life had been like without my mother and I. “If my mother had known for a second what was going on with you…” I began.

  He stopped me. “No Mercy, she had no way of knowing. I understand she didn’t give me away, I was taken from her. I know things would have been different if I had been raised in the same home that you were, but I can’t be angry at her for that and I can’t be angry at you.”