I really didn’t know anything about her other than her name and address, I reminded myself as I parked. My battered little subcompact looked out of place among the fancier, more expensive vehicles. Maybe it wouldn’t get towed for lack of pretentiousness.
Actually, I knew a few more things about Angela, I thought. I knew she’d had at least one one-night-stand, with Ronnie Holt. They had probably met in a club somewhere. Not that I was judging her for that. I wasn’t going to claim any sort of moral high ground, despite my own lack of experience brought on by my shyness.
And I knew that when she got mad, she got even. Or at least she tried to.
The complex of condominiums was three stories tall and sprawled over the entire block. Each place had its own outside entrance. I had to look around for a while before I found Angela’s condo. It was on the third level. Probably she was at work at this time of day, I told myself. She was bound to have some sort of career. She might be a lawyer or a doctor, like Taylor and Beth, or a real estate agent or an accountant or any number of other things. People who were unemployed, or who worked at temp jobs like I did, were usually the ones who were out and about at this time of the morning.
That was me slipping back into self-pity, I told myself sternly. No need for that. Things were different now. I was actually a very, very powerful witch, according to my mom and dad. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t actually do anything with those powers.
Not without singing, anyway. Despite the promise I’d made to my dad, I’d already been tempted to experiment again with another spell, and I knew the temptation would return.
I put those thoughts out of my mind and forced myself to concentrate on the reason I was here. I had gone to all the trouble to act like a spy and find out Angela’s address, and then I had driven across town to get here. The least I could do was ring her doorbell before I gave up and decided that she wasn’t home.
As it turned out, though, someone inside the condo jerked the door open practically as soon as I pressed the button. The woman who stood there was tall and elegant, dressed in a pair of black slacks and a silk blouse in a brilliant shade of azure. Her blond hair was long and straight and hung far down her back. She stared at me with ice-blue eyes that widened in surprise.
“You!” she said.
Then she lunged at me, slender hands with long, brightly painted fingernails outstretched toward my neck.
Chapter Ten
This was the second time I’d been physically attacked in the past twelve hours or so, but I wasn’t exactly getting used to it. In fact, Angela Vandermeer took me just as much by surprise as Gene the Monster had. She grabbed me by the throat, and even though she probably didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, she had enough momentum to force me back against the railing on the third floor landing.
I had a horrible vision of her pushing me over that railing so that I plummeted three stories to the concrete sidewalk below, splatting there like a dropped watermelon. Fear shot enough adrenaline through me that I was able to get my left hand on the railing to brace myself while I planted my right hand in the middle of her chest and gave her a hard shove.
One of her hands came loose from my throat as she stumbled back a step, but she hung on grimly with the other one. I struck at it, bringing my forearm down on the inside of her elbow. That finally made her let go.
I had no idea why she wanted to hurt me, or even kill me, but I sensed that this was no time for questions. I shoved her again, this time with both hands, and sent her flying backward through her open door.
I turned to run, thinking maybe I could make it down the stairs and back to my car before she came after me. But she recovered too quickly and I had taken only a couple of steps before she grabbed my shirt collar from behind and jerked me to a stop.
She went for my hair next. I yelled in pain as she got a handful of it and pulled. Twisting around, I backhanded her across the face. That made her let go of me again, but by now I was too mad to run. I was ready to fight instead.
Growing up with an older brother who was used to getting his own way and didn’t mind bullying me to do it, I had learned in a hurry that slapping, biting, and hair-pulling weren’t the most effective tactics in a fight.
So I doubled up my right fist and punched Angela Vandermeer in the face instead.
The blow wasn’t what you’d call a haymaker. It packed only a small fraction of the force of the punches thrown by Donovan and Gene the night before. But it popped Angela on the nose pretty good, and she howled in pain and clapped both hands to her nose as she staggered back toward her door.
I went after her, and this time I was the one who did the grabbing. I got both hands on her neck and shoved her back into her condo.
I had a half-formed idea of closing the door and hanging on to the knob from outside so she couldn’t get at me while I tried to get my phone out and call 9-1-1 to say that I was being attacked. That might have worked, or it might not. I didn’t get the chance to find out because she stumbled and went over backwards while I was still hanging on to her, and I tripped over her and sprawled on the floor, too.
She tried to wrestle with me, but I outweighed her by five or ten pounds and was able to get on top of her and pin her to the floor with both of her arms securely in my grip.
“St-st-stop it!” I yelled at her. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
“Let me go!” she cried. “You…you witch!”
So she did know, I thought, then realized that maybe she was just calling me a name in anger. I hung on to her and raised my head to look around her place, hoping something in it might give me a clue as to which it was.
The first thing I saw was a bookshelf full of thick, leather-bound volumes that looked incredibly ancient. They were spell books, I realized, knowing that because I had seen similar books in my father’s study while I was growing up. In fact, according to what I now knew, it was in one of them I had found the spell that had caused the Apocalypse Incident when I was three.
But the books weren’t the only significant things I saw. The condo had an open floor plan, so I could look across a counter into the kitchen, where mortars, pestles, and assorted earthenware vessels with mystical sigils and designs painted on them were spread out across another counter. My mother had never been much of a potion-maker, but she had those same sort of implements in her kitchen, too.
Of course, a lot of the humans who fancied themselves witches but really weren’t used the same sort of things to whip up their so-called potions. The fact that Angela had them didn’t have to mean anything, although coupled with the presence of the spell books, it was starting to add up.
The clencher was when she glared up at me and snarled, “Let me go, now make it so!”
My hands flew up from her arms as I was powerless to resist the spell. That left me sitting on her, but not for long. She drove both hands into my belly, causing me to double over in pain, especially on the side closest to where I’d been kicked the night before. That allowed Angela to grab my shoulders and shove me to the side so she was free.
She rolled away, came up on her knees, and pointed a finger at me. “To the nether regions go – ” she began.
I didn’t know what nether regions she was talking about, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go there. So I grabbed a sofa cushion – the closest thing at hand – and smacked her across the face with it, hard enough to send her over backward again.
If she was a real witch, and all the signs certainly pointed to it, I couldn’t hope to overpower her physically. I was desperate enough to try something else.
“Fly away like a bird,” I sang, “into the sky so blue. You can’t hurt me anymore, now that I have made it true.”
Yeah, it was pretty lame. You try composing a song, even one with just a few lines in it, when you’ve got an angry witch trying to blast you into oblivion or whatever it was Angela had in mind for me. It’s not easy.
But it worked. She barely had time to let out a yelp before
the spell sent her shooting out the door and over the railing around the landing. I scrambled to my feet and ran outside, grabbed the rail and looked over, expecting to see her on the sidewalk below.
But there was no sign of her. I looked up instead and could barely make out her dwindling shape as she flew straight up, higher and higher into the sky.
I had killed her. The shock that coursed through me at that realization was so strong I had to grab the railing to keep from collapsing. I had actually killed Angela Vandermeer.
Unless…
“What was done is now undone,” I sang, “return the one who flew. Bring her back to earth unharmed, and so I plead, make it true.”
Angela was so high I couldn’t even see her anymore. It was too late, I thought. She was gone.
But then a dot appeared in the sky, high above Corpus Christi, and it began to grow larger as it descended with dizzying speed. Angela was coming back to earth.
Great, I thought as I swallowed hard. She was falling so fast she was going to hit like a rocket and obliterate herself.
But as Angela dropped lower and lower, the rate of her descent began to slow, almost like she had opened a parachute. She angled toward the condo, and I realized the spell was putting her right back where she had been when she started. I had to leap out of the way as she streaked past me, through the door, and into her condo, where she crashed on the floor.
“Angela!” I shouted as I leaped to her side. I dropped to my knees beside her. “A-A-Angela, are y-you all right?”
That sounded like we were friends when we were anything but, but I didn’t want her death on my conscience. She rolled over, gasping for breath. In between the gasps, her teeth chattered violently. She had what looked like frost on her hair and face. She had soared so high she had reached the stratosphere, on the edge of the frigid airlessness of outer space. Another few seconds and it would have been a toss-up whether she died from lack of oxygen or froze to death.
She hugged herself like she would never be warm again and scooted across the floor away from me. “Don’t…h-hurt…me!” she moaned. “D-d-d-don’t hurt me!”
I wasn’t the only one with a stammer now, but hers was temporary, at least, caused by her being so cold. I held a hand out toward her and said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I just w-wanted to find out if you’re r-really a witch.”
“Wha-wha-what do you think?” She managed to snarl, even in the shape she was in.
I leaned closer to her. “Did you m-mean for me to do that to Ronnie Holt?”
All the fight hadn’t gone out of her, and it was my mistake for thinking so. She reached out to a glass-topped coffee table beside her, grabbed a snow globe that was sitting on it, and crashed it against my head. I yelled in pain and shock. The force of the blow knocked me off my knees and sent me rolling away from her.
I tried frantically to gather my wits because I figured she would attempt to press her advantage, but instead she scrambled to her feet and ran out the door, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll see you again, bitch!”
At least I think she said “bitch.” It might have been “witch.”
Either way, she was gone, leaving me there in her condo, too stunned and shaken for the moment to even get up.
I lay there gathering my strength until I felt like I could stand up again. My hair was wet, and I thought it was probably blood from the cuts the snow globe had opened up when it shattered.
But when I ran my fingers through my hair and explored my scalp, I didn’t find anything except the liquid that had been inside the globe. I wasn’t bleeding, and there were no cuts. I’d been lucky.
If you could call it that to get attacked and almost killed by a vengeful witch.
I had almost killed Angela, too, I reminded myself, so it seemed that we were pretty evenly matched.
I looked around the condo. It was expensively and tastefully furnished, except in the bedroom. The things that were in there were probably expensive, too – I had no way of knowing – but tasteful was another matter. Whips, shackles, things that I didn’t know how they were used and didn’t want to know…It looked like Angela had quite the alternative lifestyle. Ronnie Holt must have taken her back to his place instead of coming here with her, I thought. If this was where he’d spent the night with her, he would have been afraid not to call her again. Either that, or he would have moved away and changed his name so she could never find him.
None of which really answered all the questions I had about her. I still didn’t know if she’d been aware that I was a witch when she sent that singing telegram. It didn’t seem possible she could have been – she couldn’t have known who Sherry would assign to deliver the telegram – but she had recognized me immediately when I opened the door. Something was going on here. I just didn’t know what it was. Instead, I had even more unanswered questions than before.
I went back into the living room. The door still stood open. I supposed that all I could do was leave. I couldn’t accomplish anything else here.
I was back in the parking lot, about to get into my car, when I heard a pathetic mewling sound that made me jump a little. I bent down, looked under the car, and saw an adorable furry face looking back at me.
“Wh-where did you come from?” I asked the cat. I turned my head to look up at Angela’s condo. I had closed the door after me, but it had stood open the whole time I was looking around. If this was Angela’s cat, it could have gotten out then and taken refuge here under my car.
Of course, it was just as possible it was a stray or belonged to someone else who lived around here. To coax it out, I put my fingers down, wiggled them, and said, “Come here, k-k-kitty.”
The cat emerged from under my car, bumped its head against my hand, then began rubbing against my legs the way cats do. It seemed very friendly, and it was obviously too well-fed and well-cared-for to be a stray.
Like I said, I’m not really a cat person, but this one looked at me with such an adorable expression I couldn’t help but be touched. She was a long-haired, multi-colored calico, mostly shades of black, brown, and tan, but she had a creamy blaze on her forehead in the shape of a star. Don’t ask me how I knew she was female. I just knew it when I looked at her.
“Hello, girl,” I said. “Are you Angela’s k-k-kitty?”
She just looked at me. That’s what cats do. You can’t read them like you can a dog, or at least I can’t.
“Don’t worry, she’ll be b-back after a while to take care of you.”
But would she? I asked myself. The way she had taken off out of the condo when she fled, she had looked like she was never coming back. Surely that wasn’t the case, but if it was…what would happen to the cat? I didn’t know for certain that she belonged to Angela, and I couldn’t get back into the apartment anyway, since I’d locked the door when I closed it on my way out.
The cat stopped rubbing on my legs and looked up at me. A soft little “Mmmrowww?” came from her. I would have sworn it was a question.
Like What, you’re just gonna leave me here, lady?
“I’m sorry, but you’re n-not my cat. I can’t just t-take you with me. That wouldn’t be right.”
But I couldn’t leave her here, either. What with traffic, dogs, and who knew what else, she would be in danger.
This was crazy…but that seemed to be the new normal for me. “All right,” I said. I scooped her up in my arms. She didn’t struggle at all, but rather nestled against me as if she and I were old friends.
I think she even started to purr.
I put her in the front seat of the car and climbed in after her, hoping that I wasn’t going to regret this.
Chapter Eleven
I was driving back to the apartment with the cat on the front seat beside me before it occurred to me to wonder how my roommates would feel about somebody else moving in, even somebody as fuzzy and cute as the calico. The apartment didn’t have a no-pets rule, as far as I knew, but the lease, like the phone, was in Taylor’s name so I w
asn’t sure. I hoped the management wouldn’t give us any trouble. It wasn’t like I was trying to move in a whole menagerie.
I wasn’t going to take her to the animal shelter, though. If worst came to worst, I’d see if my parents would take her in, at least temporarily.
I started thinking then about what else I needed to do. Maybe I could find out something about Angela Vandermeer on the Internet. I’m no hacker or anything like that, but these days you don’t have to be to uncover info about people.
I knew I wasn’t going to feel comfortable until I found out why she’d attacked me like that. As long as she was on the loose, there was always a chance she might try to come after me again, now that she knew I was interested in her.
On reflection, trying to find her might not have been the smartest thing I’d ever done.
Getting on the computer and poking around in Angela’s life was going to have to wait, though, because when I pulled into the apartment complex’s parking lot, the first thing I saw was Donovan’s Jeep, with him leaning against the back of it.
He straightened and came toward me with a smile on his face as I parked. I got out, hauling the cat along with me, and he stopped.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“I’m, uh, sort of l-looking after her…for a friend.”
Even if the cat belonged to Angela, that witch was no friend of mine. But that was ’way too complicated to try to explain to Donovan.
“Well, she’s a cutie, I guess. I’ve never been much of a cat person.”
He had no way of knowing that he was echoing my own thoughts. I said, “What are you doing here?”
He grinned. “No ‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Donovan’?”
After the battle with Angela, I wasn’t in much of a mood for banter, but he was hard to resist. “It actually is w-wonderful to see you again,” I said, “but what are you doing here?”
“Won’t allow yourself to be distracted. I like that in a woman. Come to think of it, I like just about everything about you, Aren.” He held up a hand to stop me when I opened my mouth to say something. “All right, I’ll stop flirting. The truth is, I’m here because I wanted to check on you. I got your message saying that you were all right, but I found myself wanting to see that with my own eyes.”
Misadventures of a Tongue-Tied Witch: Boxed Set Humorous Witch Series Page 7