Maya's Aura: The Charred Coven

by Smith, Skye

  MAYA'S AURA

  The Charred Coven

  (Book Five in the Series)

  By Skye Smith

  Copyright (C) 2012 Skye Smith

  All rights reserved including all rights of authorship.

  Cover Illustration is a part of "The Moon" by Alphonse Mucha (1902)

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Than you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Revision 0 ISBN: 978-0-9881314-5-3

  MAYA’S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith

  Cover Flap

  NOTE: This is the fifth novel in the “Maya’s Aura” series.

  This naughty novel of magic and mayhem begins with Maya’s visit to her great grandmother who lives on an island in Boston Bay. She gives Maya some family heirlooms, including a crystal pendant and an iron ring.

  The crystal causes her to dream. Not her dreams, but the dreams of the original owner, a woman from the late 1700’s. In order to find out more about these mystical heirlooms, Maya travels to Cambridge, England to track down her family’s heritage.

  While partying at the infamous Strawberry Faire, she makes friends with some local witchlets who have just come out of the broom closet. She goes with them to a Witches’ Sabbat in hopes of meeting more experienced witches who may know more about her heirlooms.

  She meets all sorts of witches at the Sabbat. Some skilled, some good, some fun, some fake, and some who are absolutely terrifying.

  MAYA’S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith

  About The Author

  Skye Smith is my pen name. My family convinced me not to use my real name because my stories are so critical of predator males. You'll understand and forgive me this as you fall in love with sweet Maya, my main character.

  For those of you who like stories about vampires, witches, and magic, you won’t be disappointed by my very different, more realistic take on it all. My vampires are parasites wearing business suits. My witches are healers ignored by the modern world. My magic is based on aura’s, and everyone has felt or seen an aura at least once in their lives.

  The novels so far in the "Maya's Aura" series are:

  1. “The Awakening" …… - published - She discovers her strange aura.

  2. "The Refining" ………. - published - She learns how to use her aura.

  3. “The Ashram” ……….. - published - She searches for answers in India

  4. “Goa to Nepal” ………. - published - She follows a quest into the Himalayas

  5. “The Charred Coven” ... - published - She fights black craft in England.

  6. “The Crystal Witch” …. - published - She learns psychic craft in England

  7. “The Redemptioner” … - published - Psychic dreams of her ancestor Britta.

  8. “Destroy the Tea Party” - published - Britta’s adventures in Boston in 1773.

  MAYA’S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith

  Forward

  This is the fifth book in the Maya series, but you can read any of these books out of sequence and still enjoy them, so long as you know the premise that they are based upon. In other words, read this forward before you read chapter one.

  Maya is a good looking twenty year old woman from Mendocino County, California who was born with an aura. She first found out about her aura while on a gay nude beach in Vancouver, Canada, where she met Erik who also has an aura.

  After living with Erik and his partner Karl for a few weeks, her aura became noticeably stronger, to the point where it would put Erik into a trance. With Erik’s help she explored her ‘gift’ and Erik tried to explain it scientifically.

  Her aura can be felt by others. Sometimes it feels like a delicious inner feeling of wellbeing. Sometimes it feels like a sensual massage. Some mistake it for the feeling of love. Some sense a white light, although not with their eyes. Some sense the perfume of Lily of the Valley, although not with their noses. It is like a super sensitive sense of touch, but without touching. It is a proximity sense that can reach out to another person, and even into another person.

  A Buddhist monk has taught her how to better control it. How to raise its strength and how to lower it. How to focus it through her left palm for far range. How to focus it through her right palm for close range, and how to cup her hands and focus it into things like crystals.

  A epiphony happened when she realized that her aura can heal sickness and cure dis-ease in body and mind. Is this what her aura is then, a healing touch?

  A good theory, until one day she killed a man who was trying to rape her. Officially he died of a heart attack, but she suspects that it was caused by her aura. Later she found out that the man had been a psychopathic sexual predator.

  Meanwhile, Maya has been recruited as an extra in a B-gradeVampire Slasher movie. The director used her as Vampire bait because she looks so much like an innocent school girl when dressed in a tight white blouse and a mini kilt. Karen, the star, befriended her.

  Through fearful experience, Maya has learned that the very touch of a psycho makes her see and smell and feel a horrible darkness that make her swoon. Simultaneously she learned that her aura has a major hate on for psychos. If she cups her hands under a psycho’s throat, her aura goes apeshit and they die instantly, as if from sudden death syndrome or from a massive coronary.

  When an Asian mystic learns of this ‘gift’ that not only identifies psychos, but also kills them, she scolds Maya for putting herself in such danger from such violent men. Publically violent psychos are not worthy of her ‘gift’, because they will all eventually be caught by the police. There are much more destructive psychos lurking in politics and big business who cause widespread evil and get away with it.

  Partially because Maya was wanted for questioning by New York police about the suspicious deaths of some Wall Street bankers, and partially because she must find out more about her aura, Maya had journeyed to holy places in India. In Nepal she found a treasure. An ancient Tibetan book that is like an “Idiot’s Guide to Aura’s”.

  From the Tibetan book she has learned many things. For instance, how to cure psychos rather than kill them. For instance, there is a connection between auras and quartz crystals. Quartz crystals not only store and reflect auras, but also store the thoughts of the people who have worn the crystals around their necks.

  Meanwhile the suspicious deaths of a few elite ‘one percenters’ have brought Maya to the attention of a wealthy Englishman, Sir Nigel, and his executive assistant, Wendy. They want to use her ability to sense psychos for their own purposes, and they are quite willing to blackmail her into working with them.

  Okay, that’s enough, now enjoy this book.

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  MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Cover Flap

  About the Author

  Forward

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - April in Boston Harbor

  Chapter 2 - An Island in Boston Harbor

  Chapter 3 - Shopping by Boat

  Chapter 4 - Trouble on the Water

  Chapter 5 - The Missing Man

  Chapter 6 - Nana Knows Best

  Chapter 7 - Nana's Treasures

  Chapter 8 - Nana's Secret

  Chapter 9 - Farewell to Books
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  Chapter 10 - Strange Dreams

  Chapter 11 - The Mystic Crystal

  Chapter 12 - Wendy Comes

  Chapter 13 - To Windsor, England

  Chapter 14 - St Margaret's Memoirs

  Chapter 15 - The Charred Student

  Chapter 16 - Strawberry Faire

  Chapter 17 - Witches' Sabbath

  Chapter 18 - The Charred Coven

  Chapter 19 - Spies for the Foreign Office

  Chapter 20 - Saving the Angel

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  MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith

  Chapter 1 - April in Boston Harbor

  This was turning into a very bad idea, Maya thought as she hung on to her seat while the twenty-six foot cabin cruiser smashed through another whitecap. "Maybe we should turn back," she suggested in an encouraging tone to her Uncle Rob. He just looked back at her with a big grin and wiped the salt water splashes from his face with the back of his hand.

  "I mean really," she hinted again. The wind seemed to be getting stronger, and certainly the whitecaps were more frequent. She balanced herself in a squat to raise her body up and down and soften the crunch as they hit another whitecap.

  "Nah," Rob said, looking all around them. "This is the worst, then we'll be back into the lee of the headlands. You'll see." He was sure of it, he thought. Maybe. He had read too many Hardy Boys books as a kid, and it had left him with a mindset that rejected physical risk when there was a good adventure afoot.

  Maya watched for the next wave and posted again to time with it. This time the stern lifted so far out of the water on the back side of the swell that the twin outboards raced for a moment. She closed her eyes for a second, and to avoid the whine she could feel was building, tried to think about something else.

  Two days ago she had finished filming her three movie scenes that were set in Vermont. She'd finished them early. What a zoo. What a pain. All that set up, and travel, and bother just to gain some tax credits for the studio. She had told her best friend Karen, the star of the movie, to call her when they were ready for her again. That would not be until everyone was either in Hollywood or back in Vancouver, Canada. Weeks and weeks away, maybe even months.

  She hadn't seen her family that lived around Boston since her grandmother died five years ago. The fates had been cruel to her gran, because she died too quickly after her bastard second husband had been dropped into the ground. How fair is it that a long-suffering wife doesn't get at least ten good years of freedom after the old bastard kicks it? She said a small prayer for forgiveness for her thoughts. This was, after all, the boat that Rob had inherited from the old bastard, her step-grand father.

  They hit the next whitecap at exactly the wrong angle and the whole boat shuddered and almost stopped dead in the water for a second. Rob throttled back to pull it down from planing to surfing, and gave her another sheepish grin. "I came out to shake the cobwebs out, not the nails."

  Now instead of skipping mostly level across the smaller waves, they were wallowing and rocking. She focused on the horizon and concentrated on not getting seasick, and suddenly regretted the garlic-laced souvlaki she had grabbed as a snack while she waited for Rob to fill the fuel tanks. "How much further? In minutes please," she specified so he wouldn't subject her to knot or kilometer conversions.

  "Ten minutes, once we reach that flat water ahead," he pointed. His words were carried away by a sudden gust of wind. "I can't stay long at the island. I have to get back before this storm gets worse."

  She had expected some excuse or other. Nobody wanted to stay long with Nana, her eighty-eight-year-old great-grandmother. Maya was the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter. She was twenty. Rob, her mom's younger brother was only thirty-five. The two men Maya lived with when she was filming in Vancouver were both his age. Living, that is, in the biblical sense. Yes, with both of them.

  She had decided not to tell Rob, and especially not his puritan wife, that she lived, off and on, with a gay couple, and foreigners at that. Whereas her mother had been overjoyed when she'd found out, Rob would have shunned her as weird or mentally damaged. Such was the difference between the bulk of her family in Massachusetts, and her mother who, as a young woman, had run away in search of the sanctuary of hippiedom in Mendocino County, California.

  She wondered if she should tell Nana about Erik and Karl. She probably would. Nana had been deemed mentally damaged generations ago when she preferred living in France to the USA. Now she lived alone in a ramshackle cottage on a private island in the far southern reaches of Boston Bay. To the rest of her family that just confirmed her unstable and antisocial mental state.

  Last night, once her young cousins had been put to bed, Maya had been lectured for two hours by Rob on the necessity of her spending Easter with Nana, who refused to celebrate it at all, never mind celebrate it on the mainland and in a city. Oh, and by the way, it would help if she could convince Nana that it was past time that she left her solitary life on the island and started living in a seniors' center where she would be safe.

  Yeah, right. As if. Today they would be lucky to get ashore on the island without being warned off by shotgun pellets.

  The engines changed pitch and the boat lurched into a fast plane. They had reached the calmer waters in the lee of the long peninsula and the small island. This was the dock side of the island. There was no boat tied to the dock. It would have been winched into the boat house last fall by Nana's current handy man to keep it safe from storm tides. That the launch was yet still not in the water was proof of the long winter this coast had been suffering through.

  "I should come here more often," Rob said when he finally cut power so they would glide towards the float of the dock. "It's just that with family and career and mortgage payments, there just never seems to be time."

  "Don't beat yourself up," she replied. "It's not like Nana invites company, and I know all about having a career now. Your life isn't your own." She had arranged for prime tickets so her Boston side of the family could see her first movie. They hadn't mentioned it since. It was a B-grade teen vampire movie where Maya had provided much of the jiggle. Her Boston clan was probably too shocked at her role to comment.

  She didn't care. Her name was at the top of the list of extras on the billing, and she had cleared almost thirty grand after taxes and expenses and fees. It had been filmed in Vancouver, where she had room and board with the guys, and then the post-filming work was in Hollywood, where she had room and board with Karen, the star, who had become a good buddy. In other words, the thirty grand was all money in her pocket, and not earmarked for rent or car payments.

  "Grab the bowline and get ready to jump onto the float," Rob ordered. Luckily she was wearing his wife's deck shoes and not her Hollywood stilettos. She grabbed the rope he was pointing to and got ready to jump. He was lowering fenders into place. She jumped and immediately lost her balance on slippery planks of the float, getting a wet bum as a result.

  "Tie it off," yelled Rob, but then gave up on her and stepped onto the float and took the bowline himself. "I thought you worked on tuna boats on the west coast."

  "I did," she said, regaining her feet, snatching the bowline back from him and flipping a clove hitch over the first post. "So there. Anybody can slip." He jumped back aboard, threw her the stern line and then closed everything down.

  They stepped up off the gyrating float and headed down the rickety dock towards the propane shack where the path to the cottage began. He carried her airport- style wheeled suitcase because the tiny wheels were only useful on airport floors.

  There were no wires to the island, so everything ran on a battery system that was charged by a tiny windmill. Or it ran on propane. That meant propane stove, fridge, and heater. The shack contained a collection of tall propane tanks. The main job of the part time, some time handy man was to take empty ones into the village and have them refilled.

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  Nana ignored Maya's soaking wet ski jacket and gave her a big hug. Rob did not get one. He stayed only long enough to warm himself with an English-style tea. Nana was proud of her English heritage, unlike many in Boston.

  Rob was tall, and with his blond hair tousled and his face ruddy from the weather, he looked much like Erik, one of Maya's lovers in Vancouver. The comparison made her uncomfortable, both because she missed Erik, and because she wondered if Erik was just a Freudian slip for Rob. As a child she'd had the biggest crush on Rob, for years.

  When he put his slicker back on, she followed him down to the dock and helped him to cast off. After about five minutes of waving, the boat disappeared around the point. Nana had stayed in the cottage to get the propane heater working, as she did only on special occasions. Maya waddled back to the cottage carrying two large bags of groceries that they had almost forgotten to offload. Most of the weight was the gallon of milk for her Honey Nut Oatios, her favorite Soul Food.

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  MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith

  Chapter 2 - An Island in Boston Harbor

  When Maya got back to the cottage it was already warming up. After finding an empty peg where she could hang up her Swiss-made ski jacket , forty dollars at a thrift store in Vermont, she pulled the toque from her hair and let the yellow blonde tresses fall to her shoulders. It wasn't her actual color, but close. The studio hairdressers had dyed it back from shiny black to make her look once again like prime vampire bait.

  "I hear you are a movie star now." Nana was silver-haired, a little stooped and bird-like. She fussed about, pouring her another cup of English tea with milk and sugar.

  "I was just an extra in a movie, but I'm friends with the star now, and she had me written into the sequel. We're both hoping that the studio will call me a supporting actress this time. "