Moonshine & Malice
Moonshine Hollow Series #2
Kathleen Brooks
Contents
Also by Kathleen Brooks
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
Also by Kathleen Brooks
About the Author
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
* * *
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locale, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
* * *
An original work of Kathleen Brooks. Moonshine & Malice copyright @ 2019 by Kathleen Brooks.
Created with Vellum
Bluegrass Series
Bluegrass State of Mind
Risky Shot
Dead Heat
* * *
Bluegrass Brothers
Bluegrass Undercover
Rising Storm
Secret Santa: A Bluegrass Series Novella
Acquiring Trouble
Relentless Pursuit
Secrets Collide
Final Vow
* * *
Bluegrass Singles
All Hung Up
Bluegrass Dawn
The Perfect Gift
The Keeneston Roses
* * *
Forever Bluegrass Series
Forever Entangled
Forever Hidden
Forever Betrayed
Forever Driven
Forever Secret
Forever Surprised
Forever Concealed
Forever Devoted
Forever Hunted
Forever Guarded
Forever Notorious
Forever Ventured (coming later in 2019)
* * *
Shadows Landing Series
Saving Shadows
Sunken Shadows (coming May 14, 2019)
Lasting Shadows (coming later in 2019)
* * *
Women of Power Series
Chosen for Power
Built for Power
Fashioned for Power
Destined for Power
* * *
Web of Lies Series
Whispered Lies
Rogue Lies
Shattered Lies
* * *
Moonshine Hollow Series
Moonshine & Murder
Moonshine & Malice (coming March 26, 2019)
Moonshine & Mayhem (coming April 16, 2019)
1
“Miss Mathers,” the quiet little voice said from the darkness.
“Go away,” Zoey mumbled as she pulled her comforter higher around her chin. The early summer nights were still a little chilly in the Appalachian Mountains. The comforter was filled with warmth as she burrowed underneath it and sighed peacefully.
Zoey didn’t know what kind of dream this was, but she was dead tired and wasn’t in the mood to wake up because of some strange dream. She had been working night and day at her bakery. She’d made so many tee-ball cookies for game day she’d even dreamed of them. And now, when she finally stopped dreaming of baseball, her dreams were trying to wake her up yet again.
“But Miss Mathers, I really need your help,” the little voice said louder this time.
“I’m not going to wake up. I’m tired and I was hoping not to dream tonight. My dreams have been bad enough lately. They don’t need to be meaner by waking me up too,” Zoey muttered.
“I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. I just knew after hearing my parents talk about how you helped Miss Maribelle and Mr. Dale, you were the only one who could help me.”
“Fine,” Zoey whined as she rolled over in her bed and prepared to be woken up by something hideous and scary. But when she rolled over she was amazed at how awake she seemed. Her room appeared just as it did in real life. She felt the press of Chance’s snoring body next to her. The little puppy wasn’t affected by her dreams. The light from the full moon glowed through the curtains she had forgotten to close. And the little boy, no more than eight or nine years old, standing next to her bed tapping her shoulder felt very real too.
So real that Zoey jerked up in bed, scaring the little boy and causing him to jump back. Chance snorted and rolled onto his back in response.
“Can you help me?” the little boy asked.
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” Zoey asked the little boy with light brown hair and big brown eyes.
“Will you help me?”
“Of course,” Zoey said, looking around her room. Her door was still shut. No windows were open. “How did you get in my room?”
The little boy looked sadly around the room. “I don’t know. That’s why I need your help. I need you to find out what happened to me.”
A chill ran down Zoey’s spine and goosebumps broke out on her arms. “What do you mean?”
The little boy looked around nervously. “Please, find out what happened to me. Miss Mathers, promise me.”
“What’s your name, sweetie? Let’s see if we can find your parents,” Zoey said kindly as if it were no big deal a little boy was in her bedroom in the middle of the night with no obvious signs of entry.
“Find my parents. Find out what happened to me.”
Zoey went to reach for him, but her hands grabbed nothing but air. The boy was gone.
Zoey Mathers loved her home in the small town of Moonshine Hollow . . . well, Holler to anyone from the small East Tennessee mountain town. She turned the key in the door to her small bakery, Zoey’s Sweet Treats, and her small floppy eared, roly-poly puppy, Chance, pushed his way into her kitchen.
It was early still. No one was awake in the pre-morning darkness. It was her time to bake and to let her mind wander to all that had happened. Chance yipped at the pantry door where his treats were kept. He was a little black Labrador puppy with big feet and a long tail that knocked into everything. It was knocking against the metal prep table in excitement. Zoey reached in and pulled out a bone. She tossed it to him, and he grabbed it, running excitedly to his bed in the corner before attacking the snack.
Zoey had been an entertainment attorney in Los Angeles and on her way to partner when her client had gotten high and naked at a strip club. He’d called her, sobbing, from the stage of that strip club while his group of escorts battled it out with the club’s strippers in a territorial dispute. Zoey ended up fleeing LA in embarrassment after she got caught up in the fight while trying to rescue her client to preserve his four movie contract before the police arrived. The notice that she’d been fired had been delivered to her door before she made bail. Now it seemed like a lifetime ago because so much had changed since that night.
A bouncer by the name of Slade had bailed her out of jail, gotten her drunk, and convinced her that fate would tell her where to go next. That’s when Zoey had come up with the plan to be a baker for a year or two, then sneak back into the law profession after changing her name. After all, when your booking photo is on the front of every major newspaper with your hair sticking straight out and most of your shirt torn off in the epic stripper-escort fight, it wasn’t easy to ge
t a job in the legal field again. But that night with Slade by her side, she’d closed her eyes and picked Moonshine Hollow out on the map.
Zoey sold everything in LA and moved to the small Tennessee town of less than a thousand people. But it was what happened the other week that really changed her life. One, her best friend was arrested for murder. Two, Zoey found the real killer. Three, Slade came waltzing back into her life. Four, Luke, the sheriff’s deputy her friends wanted to set her up with, wasn’t indicating he wanted to be anything more than friends. On the other hand, Slade also didn’t seem to care that another man may or may not be in her life. Slade ignored Luke completely. Five, Zoey discovered she no longer wanted to practice the law, which left her in somewhat of an identity crisis. And last, but certainly not least, Zoey had accidently become a witch.
Yup, a finger-twitching, magic-making witch. She had thought she was coming to the rescue of her two elderly neighbors, Vilma and Agnes, and instead found them zapping a scary man in black leather from existence. A man who’d just happened to be a witch himself and sent by the male witch tribe, the Tenebris, to kill Agnes and Vilma and steal their powers. Instead, Zoey’s arrival distracted them when they stole the man’s powers a moment before he poofed from existence. The powers accidently went into Zoey’s open screaming mouth instead of the intended receptacle, an urn.
Since then, she’d learned being a witch had its good side and its bad. Good, she could transport herself anywhere in the world; well, she would, as soon as Agnes and Vilma taught her that particular trick. She could transport objects and even Chance after a couple weeks of practice. Plus, she could use magic to make all her desserts, clean her house, grow flowers, and help heal wounds. She’d learned she was part of a group of witches called the Claritase, derived from the power of the Goddess and placed on earth as healers. She could sense when someone was sick, she could see inside them to see what was ailing them, and then using Earth energy, she could heal them. Of course, she had to do it in such a way as to not be suspicious, which was the hard part. So she wasn’t attempting any healing beyond fixing Vilma’s ingrown toenail.
The not so good side . . . she was now a powerful witch who may or may not be the tipping point in an epic battle between good and evil between the Claritase and the Tenebris. The two groups had worked together healing civilizations throughout history until the 16th century when witch hunting became a major threat in Europe. Both groups began to lie low as danger spread around the world. However, it was then, as they were desperate to stay alive, that the two groups discovered they could take each other’s powers in a one-on-one zap challenge. Winner got the loser’s powers, and the loser died. It was then, under the leadership of the new Grand Master Alexander, that the Tenebris started hunting the Claritase.
Alexander had called for a truce meeting. Instead of a ceasefire, Grand Mistress Helena of the Claritase was killed, and her second-in-command, Mistress Lauren, had many of her powers stripped and was now stuck in the form of a cat. Ever since that night between the two groups, the war of witches had raged on.
Oh, and one last quirk in Zoey’s situation . . . Slade had the mark of the Tenebris. It was a tattoo of black swords creating a circle surrounding a drop of red blood in the center. Since Slade arrived in Moonshine Hollow, Agnes and Vilma had been trying to discover exactly who he was, but to no avail. Even Grand Mistress Lauren, the new head of the Claritase, didn’t know anything about him. Then there were Zoey’s feelings for him, which were muddled, to say the least. Especially when a normal, sexy, nice man like Luke Tanner, the deputy sheriff in town, was asking her out on casual dates. The trouble was—he talked a lot about a woman from Kentucky named Ava.
* * *
Zoey propped open the bakery’s back door and turned on all the lights and ovens. It wasn’t a large space by any means, but it was all hers. She didn’t use her new powers to pull out the ingredients or to mix them. She loved to bake and enjoyed those quiet moments where the remnants of that awful nightmare of the little boy asking for her help finally vanished.
As she got lost in the smells and creation of baking, the conflicting feelings she had for Luke and Slade fell away. And the pressure of possibly being the key to winning a war that had been waging for hundreds of years was temporarily forgotten. Instead, she was filled with warmth and love as she thought of her friends and neighbors enjoying the food she was creating for them.
That was, until the little boy tapped her on the shoulder again.
2
“Miss Mathers, you promised.”
Zoey screamed, jumped back, and accidently zapped a tray of chocolate drizzled croissants someplace. She rolled her eyes at the lack of control over her powers. She had been thinking about setting them out front, so hopefully they were in the display case. It would be awfully hard to explain a tray of croissants suddenly appearing in the middle of town.
“You are a dream, but I know I’m wide awake,” Zoey said, hoping the little boy would disappear again. No such luck. He had dirty blond hair with a cowlick that caused a tiny piece to fall over his forehead.
“Find my parents. Find out what happened to me.” The boy began to stomp his foot with impatience.
Zoey took a moment to really look him over. He was wearing muddy tennis shoes, jeans with one knee beginning to rip, and a T-shirt advertising Moonshine Summer Camp. Unfortunately, that description also belonged to most of the boys in town.
“What’s your name? Or your parents’ names? You gotta give me something to go on to find your parents. Did you get separated from them while you were hiking or shopping?”
“No!” The boy stomped. “I . . . I . . .” The boy was getting agitated. He was sweating so much that drops of water were rolling down his face and dripping off his nose and chin. “I don’t remember,” he finally cried.
“It’s okay. Why don’t I get you a croissant and you can tell me what you do remember?” Zoey walked to the front and found the zapped tray of croissants in the display case. She carried the tray back to the kitchen.
“Where are you?” she called out to the empty room. The sound of Chance munching his bone was all she heard.
“I’m right here,” came the response. Only this time it wasn’t the little boy, but something much more dangerous.
“Slade.” Zoey blinked in surprise at the dark figure peeling himself from the early morning shadows surrounding the door. “Did you see a little boy just now?”
Slade looked around but gave nothing away with this hard gaze. “No. It’s six in the morning,” he stated as if that explained why there wouldn’t be a little boy in her bakery. And normally that would be true. Unfortunately, normal was no longer a word that described Zoey’s life. Also unfortunately she couldn’t say anything to Slade about it, or he might find out she was a witch and kill her for her powers.
“Croissant?” Zoey asked instead as she held out the tray to him. Under the tight black T-shirt, his muscles moved like a panther slowly stalking his prey as he stepped into her space and snagged a croissant.
“Thanks. So, what’s this about a boy?”
Zoey didn’t mistake the command in the question. That didn’t mean she’d obey though. “Oh, I thought I heard a little boy laugh when I was out front. Sometimes the kids like to sneak in and steal a cupcake or something, and I pretend not to notice. I guess it was you I heard.”
Slade raised one eyebrow. “Sweetness, if I were to sneak in, you’d never hear me coming.”
Zoey knew her cheeks turned pink. She’d been listing to Vilma and Agnes talking about all they wanted to do with Slade’s hot bod—their words, not hers, although she couldn’t disagree. The images assailed her mind as if they were real and they only got worse when Slade’s lips twitched up into a knowing smile. That wasn’t possible, was it? He couldn’t know what she was thinking . . . could he? Blocking anyone from entering her mind was one of the first things that Vilma, Agnes, and Mistress Lauren taught her.
“Sweetness, I don’t need
to know what you’re thinking. I see it written all over your face. I’d be happy to satisfy your curiosity.”
Zoey blinked up—way up—at Slade. He stood at six feet five with dark hair and stormy blue eyes. “Are you serious?” she blurted before she could stop herself. “I mean, what are you really doing in Moonshine Hollow? Because we both know you aren’t just driving through or you would have left a week or two ago.”
Slade casually lifted one massively muscled shoulder. “If you promise not to tell anyone, I’m here for work. But I might as well enjoy myself while I’m here. Dinner tonight at seven?”
He was here for work? What work? To root her and the other women of the Claritase out in order to steal their powers and kill them?
“Relax, sweetness. I’m not going to eat you. I might take a little nibble though.”
By the way Slade was looking at her, she was afraid it was a lot more than a little nibble. He looked as if he would devour her. And in her position, she didn’t think that was a good thing. More like a poof you have ceased to exist type of way.
“Dinner?” Zoey stuttered out.
“Yes. Dinner. At the Moonshine Diner. I’ll pick you up at seven.” Slade vanished into the shadows as quickly as he had appeared.
“That man is so hot you could fry and egg on him.”
Zoey rolled her eyes as she turned to see Agnes standing behind her, eating a chocolate croissant. A second later Vilma wondered in from the front with a cranberry muffin in hand. The two old ladies had their white hair streaked with green and yellow so they kind of resembled Easter eggs. They were both dressed in matching tracksuits. Agnes was in neon green to match the green in her hair and Vilma in sunshine yellow that similarly matched her own highlights.
Moonshine & Malice Page 1