Magical Midway Paranormal Cozy Series Books 1-3

by Leanne Leeds

Roland and I kept our fairgrounds linked for the time being. Partly because we wanted to present a unified face to the wicked triplets, and partially because each circus was having quite a bit of fun exploring the other. I was also surprised to discover so many people had family members and friends at the Makepeace Circus.

  Roland Makepeace was still dour, but the fury I had invariably felt rolling off of him under the surface seemed to have evaporated. While his sorrow at the loss of his wife and Gunther’s mother was still present, his rage and dread over Gunther’s potential fate were gone.

  Fortuna and Mark stood in the moonlight next to Gunther. Roland, Uncle Phil and I stood in front of them. Everyone in both circuses knew of the confrontation due to take place. Though we were confident we could handle whatever came, we told anyone unnecessary to hide.

  Just in case.

  “The moon is almost in its proper place,” Uncle Phil said as he glanced up at the sky. “They should be here any minute now.”

  “In time to destroy you,” Alexa mumbled from her containment box.

  “Shut up, Alexa,” Deo told her from the box next to hers. His brother Leo remained silent and paced within the cage.

  “Did the naiad ever admit that the Witches’ Council put her up to the kidnapping?” Roland asked me.

  “No,” I told him as I shook my head. “Apparently, she can be loyal. She really didn’t tell us much. Most of the information we got was from Deo. I don’t think Leo knew much at all. He agreed because he hated Mark and wanted Serena for himself.”

  “So we know those three did it, but there is no proof at all they did it for the Witches’ Council.”

  “Pretty much,” I nodded.

  The darkness and silence were punctuated only by our low whispers. It seemed as quiet as the night I became ringmaster when the circus was transported between time and space.

  “How are you three doing?” Uncle Phil asked Gunther, Fortuna, and Mark. The three nodded, but their tense limbs and concerned faces betrayed their anxiety.

  “We covered everything, right?” I asked Roland and Uncle Phil. “I mean, we're not breaking the law, we got the people who kidnapped Mark. We’re prepared for this in every way we needed to be. Right?”

  “Charlotte, have faith,” Roland said. Uncle Phil nodded. I bit my lip and stared out into the darkness.

  They are coming, Samson said.

  “Get ready,” I told the others as light glowed just outside the border.

  The first thing Mina did as she appeared is stare at Alexa caught within the magical containment box. The second thing she did was examine the sphered protection border, eyes narrowing as she realized it was still up. Once she glanced to her right and saw Fortuna, Mark, and Gunther lined up like lambs to the slaughter, concern disappeared from her face.

  “I am pleased you decided on the wisest course,” Mina called as Mercy and Mabel flanked her. Mabel looked as haughty and arrogant as ever, but Mercy stared at Gunther while biting her nails. “Take your border down so we can get on with this.”

  “Roland and I would like to announce a few things before we get started,” I told Mina.

  “Well, hurry up, then.”

  “The Makepeace Circus and the Magical Midway are currently in compliance with the Witches’ Council statute that states humans may not live at a moderated paranormal property.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mina asked as her eyes narrowed. “I see the three of them right there.”

  “Fortuna Delphi, as of yesterday, is a full-blooded witch. She is no longer human in any capacity, and therefore her residence here is not a violation. Likewise, Mark Botsworth is werelion and fully entitled to live here if we accept him. Which we have.”

  “What poppycock is this?” Mina stomped up to the border, stopping just short of the crossing. “They look the same as they ever have. What are you trying to pull here? Roland? Your half-breed—”

  “Is also a full-blooded witch, and the unassailable, unquestionable heir to the Makepeace Circus,” Roland told her. Mercy’s eyes widened as Mina’s narrowed even further.

  “If this is some trick, Roland,” Mina warned.

  “No trick, Mina. If he was not a full-blooded witch, he could not wear the ring of the Makepeace lawgiver. If you direct your eyes to his finger, you will see he has been so elevated.”

  “No!”

  “Yep,” Uncle Phil said. “Mina, Mabel, and Mercy, please meet Charlotte and Gunther, the two newest members of the Witches’ Council.”

  I held up my hand and showed the ring. Mina’s face twisted with rage.

  “You cannot! You cannot sit on the Council!”

  “Oh, they can, and they do!” Roland told her as he watched her twist and flail in frustration.

  “I will never allow it!”

  “Um, Mina, it’s not up to you, remember?” Mercy told the angrier, larger woman. Mina whirled on the younger woman, but the shy girl stood her ground. “It’s the law. They have the rings, and it’s the law.”

  “Shut up, Mercy,” Mabel snapped.

  “We are the law!” Mina screamed.

  “So are we,” I shot back at the angry woman and stepped toward her. Gunther raced up to intercept me before I crossed the barrier, holding my arms to keep me from moving any further.

  “Mina, get me out of here!” Alexa screamed as she banged against the sparkling box. “You promised me!”

  “Stupid naiad,” Mina told her. “Shut up!”

  Alexa whacked the box and paced like Leo.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” I told Mina as she and I stared at one another across the barrier. “I don’t want to have to constantly fight you. But I will if you keep running roughshod over your citizens and threatening them every time they turn around. Not to mention using them in plots against other people.”

  “Little girl, you have no idea what you walked into.”

  “Maybe I don’t. But I know I’m not a little girl, and I know I’m not afraid of you.”

  I looked at Gunther and looked down at where he was holding me. He let go without my even having to ask him. I walked across the barrier and stood with Mina, Mercy, and Mabel.

  “You started this plotting to take me down. To take us down. To destroy people’s homes, to kill people to make a point. I don’t agree with your leadership. I don’t agree with how you run this place. I’ve been here three months, and I’ve seen nothing positive about the Witches’ Council. Nothing.”

  “You know nothing about us,” Mina shot back.

  “I know what’s right. I know what’s wrong. I know that people shouldn’t be treated this way by those in power. I know if you’re a leader and people run from you in fear instead of running toward you to build with you, you’re not a good leader.”

  “You don’t know what good leadership is,” Mina said.

  “Neither do you,” I countered. “We are not in violation of the laws. You have no inquiry to make here. You failed in ruining us, you failed in dismantling what we stand for.”

  “There is always the next time,” Mina said.

  “See, you’re proving my point. There shouldn’t be a next time.”

  Mina stared at me, her breathing deep and loud. No one spoke.

  “We’re leaving,” Mina told Mabel and Mercy.

  “I’ll see you at the next Council session on the quarter,” I told her cheerfully as she turned away from me. “I’ll bring donuts!”

  Mabel and Mina disappeared. Mercy stood quietly looking at Roland from beyond the barrier. He walked forward and left the protection of the Magical Midway to embrace the quiet girl briefly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as they pulled away. She inclined her head and looked up into his eyes with her own tear-filled ones. “Gerda would be so proud of you. I know she would. I wish I could say she would have the same pride in me.”

  Mercy wiped her eyes, glanced at me, took a deep breath, and disappeared.

  “That didn’t feel easy, but it was kind of ea
sy,” I told the group after the Witches’ Council left. “Honestly, I expected lightning bolts and some kind of magical explosion. This whole thing seems almost anticlimactic.”

  “Bite your tongue, Charlotte,” Uncle Phil told me.

  “What was that thing between you and Mercy?” I asked Roland Makepeace, who had returned to the protection of the Magical Midway and was embracing his son. “She’s like a different person with you.”

  “I suppose she is at that,” Roland sighed, turning from Gunther to face me. “Mercy grew up at the Makepeace Circus.”

  “I thought the only witches at circuses were the ones in the bloodline?”

  “Just like in the human world, sometimes young people run away from their parents to seek fame and fortune or adventure. She arrived just before my father died, and he allowed her to stay. She’s not as young as she looks.”

  “Dad and I have been talking a lot lately. Mercy was my mother’s best friend when she was alive,” Gunther added. “I didn’t recognize her because she used a glamour when she was with us to hide from her family. I knew her as Raven. Anyway, she was devastated when Mom died and left the Makepeace Circus shortly after. I’m still not clear on how she wound up with a seat on the Witches’ Council.” Gunther looked at his father.

  “Mercy is a Lawdottir. It’s an old blood royal family in the witch community. I don’t imagine it was too difficult once she went back to her family to take advantage of their political ties. And she did so, Gunther, to protect her best friend’s son.”

  Gunther stared at his father.

  “I thought her last name was World? And the three were sisters or something?” I asked.

  “No, that’s some affectation those women started,” Roland said.

  “You know, Charlotte, if Mercy has allies, we have a real possibility of changing the course of the laws in the paranormal world,” Gunther pointed out.

  “How do you figure? You and I are two people, and they are just three. There is another, what, ten members?”

  “Those ten members don’t even know what Mina is doing,” Gunther pointed out as the rest of the group nodded. “It’s common knowledge that Mina is running roughshod over the entire Council with Mabel and Mercy to back her up. The others just enjoy the palace and rubber stamp anything she does without even examining issues.”

  “You are the only two lawgivers. There used to be more. When there were many lawgivers the Witches’ Council was more like a parliamentary body. A hundred, maybe two hundred lawgivers sat as the voting body on the Witches’ Council. They could enact nothing without lawgivers,” Uncle Phil explained.

  “Now, they’ve consolidated power, but it’s not a they as in the whole Witches’ Council,” Gunther said. “It’s Mina, with Mabel as her right hand. If we can convince Mercy to come over to our side, it’s just possible we could convince the other nine to get off their duff and take back their power from Mina.”

  “I hate politics,” Mark murmured.

  “That’s because you’re a cat now,” Fortuna told him. “I imagine there’s a whole lot of things you are gonna lose patience for that you use to tolerate fine.”

  “Speaking of cats, maybe we should talk about the politics of our own circus right now before worrying about the rest of the world,” Uncle Phil told the group as he pointed toward the three containment boxes. “What are we going to do with them?”

  Leo, Deo, and Alexa sat slumped in their boxes. Their attitudes and postures had changed. Once the Witches’ Council left and you had bested them, I suspect the three of them realized they had no more allies, Samson sent.

  “I feel like I want to start practicing what we’re preaching.”

  “What you mean?” Gunther asked me.

  “I don’t want to be a dictator. Do you?” Gunther shook his head no.

  “I quite like being a dictator, young lady,” Roland Makepeace said as he crossed his arms. “Makes things easier.”

  “For you,” I told them. “Not for anyone else.”

  “Well, of course for me! I’m the ringmaster!”

  “Dad, you’re always stressed and always angry. People are always afraid of you. What about that time you banished Blake and turned him into a frog? He didn’t deserve that. You found out later he wasn’t guilty of anything.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” Roland murmured.

  “If you had help, if we enlisted the people that are already leaders at our circuses, maybe mistakes like that wouldn’t happen.”

  “We already kind of have something like that here at the Magical Midway,” I told them. “When this started we gathered all the leaders together to talk about it. If we formalize that we have the beginnings of a more democratic way of doing things.”

  “This is human hogwash,” Roland told me, waving me away like an annoying bug.

  “We are a society the same way any other group is a society. We need to treat our people as members of that society instead of subjects.”

  “Dad, you can’t expect us to go make a run on the Witches’ Council and claim they should give us more freedom to self-determine when we don’t even know how that would work.”

  “Well, I know how that would work,” I mumbled. “I lived in a society where it worked.”

  “Like I said, human hogwash,” Roland scoffed again.

  “The humans have expanded across every corner of this planet, and we have done nothing but shrink in number for hundreds of years. We’ve lost towns. We’ve lost populations. We’ve lost circuses. We’ve lost paranormal species that will never be seen again. Maybe this is why. Maybe the humans know more than us. In this case, anyway,” Gunther said.

  Roland look surprised at his son’s statement, as if he had never looked at the road paranormal history had traveled enough to follow it to its potential catastrophic conclusion. Deep in thought, the big man breathed heavily and nodded. “You sound like your mother, Gunther.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Gunther smiled. “Let’s magic everything back to where it needs to be, and meet in Charlotte’s yurt. We have a trial to put on tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t know you were so into politics,” I told Gunther as we walked along the outskirts of the fairgrounds toward our gazebo. It had taken us two hours to hammer out a process for a trial that included a random jury, witnesses, and the whole nine yards. This process was informed by the many episodes of Law & Order I had watched over the years.

  Oh, and yes, I said our gazebo, and yes, I realized I shouldn’t. Heartburn. It must be heartburn. Please, please let it be heartburn.

  “I don’t know that I am,” he told me. “What I do know is I spent so long hating the way my father ran things, wondering if it could be done differently, and fearing because I was half-human I would never get the chance to try. In one day, Charlotte, you changed all that for me. You gave me hope.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was your father and me, together. I don’t think just one of us working alone could have changed anything enough to avoid what would happen. No matter how powerful we think we are.”

  “That’s the point, though, isn’t it? You see things here so differently. You see possibilities and improvements. The rest of us have been so conditioned to just accept the way things are and to handle them within the confines of what we see as immutable.”

  “Yeah, I have to admit I don’t understand that,” I told him as we climbed up into the gazebo and sat down. “You have all grown up with magic and power. So many possibilities, so much ability to transform your own reality. And yet you’re locked into these traditions as if they can never be changed.”

  “Maybe not so much anymore,” Gunther smiled. I smiled back as my heart pitter-pattered in my chest. Gunther reached out and brushed a stray hair from my cheek. “You're incredible. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “I, um, yeah, thanks,” I said as I turned my head away. “You’re a great friend, Gunther, and I don’t know I could have gotten to this point without you.”

&n
bsp; “A great friend,” Gunther murmured, sighing. “Yes, I will always be your friend, Charlotte. I consider it a great privilege. I didn’t have many friends growing up, or even at the circus. Our relationship has been significant to me, too.”

  Oh. My. Gosh. That’s it.

  As a half-witch, Gunther had probably not had many opportunities to date anyone. If the past few days have taught me anything, it’s that the prejudices in this community ran deep. They were followed long past anyone remembering the reason for them.

  Of course, he had feelings for me. I was probably the first female he had gotten close to.

  It was just that, and nothing more.

  Now that Gunther was a full witch, his world had opened up to him. I knew as soon as we traveled to Imperatorial City, the handsome ringmaster heir would beat off single witches with a stick. I swallowed that knowledge down and tucked it in with the heartburn ball that bounced around my gut every time he looked at me.

  I think you’re—

  Samson, please don’t. On this subject, just please don’t.

  But—

  No.

  But I think—

  No.

  15

  The trial was an exciting, if weird, success.

  Alexa was banished to the prison at Democritus for masterminding the entire kidnapping. The members of the jury were not impressed with her excuse she was destroying us for her own betterment. Why she thought an explanation would impress them, I have no idea.

  “What will happen to her?” Anya asked me as Lucius Larry led her away.

  “Honestly, the paranormal prison isn’t that bad,” I told Anya. That morning, I added a door in the communications yurt that would lead to the intake area at Democritus. The prison looked like a stripped down beach resort. Their philosophy seemed more containment of villains and protection of citizens than punishment.

  “Will I be able to visit her?”

  “Yep, as much as you want. There's even a pool and some activities for you guys to do together to try and help you bond. I was surprised. Considering how lackadaisical Mina seems to be about causing people’s death or kidnapping, I was expecting something much less humane.”