Romancing the Paranormal

by Stephanie Rowe

  Calla’s cheeks went bright red when Flora referred to Nash Ryder. “Shhh, my grandfather’s in the kitchen today!”

  As though that made a difference. He’d been campaigning hard for this thing between she and Nash like he was running for office.

  On cue, Ezra Allen poked his head out of the swinging double doors leading to the kitchen of her small daycare for the elderly, carrying Twyla Faye, her accidentally adopted iguana slash abandoned familiar, under his arm.

  He cackled, his wrinkled face and fluffy white beard making her smile. Well, until he said, “My girl’s gettin’ lucky tonight! Right, Twyla Faye?”

  “Gramps!” Calla chastised, leaning over to give her very reluctant pet a scratch on the head.

  Twyla Faye slow-blinked and stretched in her grandfather’s arms. “Y’all,” she drawled, slow and easy, her words hissing in a sensuous stream, “are plum batty in this town. Bettin’ on the sexin’ is unseemly. Shame on all you dirty birds.”

  Winnie giggle-snorted, wiggling her fingers at Ezra. “Mornin’, Paw-Paw! And Twyla Faye, you hush, Oh Scaly One. As I recall, you were the first one lining up to put ten dollars in the pool.”

  Twyla Faye hissed, swishing her tail and lifting her chin. “How can y’all expect me to resist temptation in a town full of heathens? It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah in these parts.”

  Hold up. The entire town was betting on whether she and Nash were going to have sex tonight? “The pool?” Calla asked, cocking her head.

  Winnie’s eyes twinkled, ignoring Calla’s question. “So I see you’re as excited as the rest of us, Ezra?”

  He winked, setting Twyla Faye on the floor, where she scurried off to sit between Calla’s feet. “Just like Christmas and my birthday, Winnie The Pooh. So you make sure you put my name in it like ya promised, you hear? And don’t forget the raffle. Don’t wanna miss a chance to win free beer for a year at Skeeter’s.”

  “Me, too!” Clive Stillwater, one of the oldest warlocks in the town of Paris, Texas, chimed from across the room, where he was eyeball-deep in an intense game of chess with Roscoe Brown.

  Calla shook a finger at him, planting her hands on her hips with a grin. “No booze. You can’t have beer, Clive, and you know it. What happened the last time you had alcohol?”

  He rasped an exaggerated sigh and sat up straight as though he were appalled. “I borrowed a broom. What of it?”

  “Now, Clive, it was more than just borrowing a broom, buddy. You stole Joellen Landry’s broom—a very powerful broom—and ended up in the middle of a cornfield in Oklahoma. You know, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains?”

  “I was headed to the casino. The blackjack was callin’. Woulda made it, too, if not for that strong wind comin’ in from the north.”

  “No beer forever Clive!” she singsonged, smiling in satisfaction at his resounding grunt.

  He didn’t always like the suggestions for a healthier lifestyle Calla insisted they follow while at the center, but he always followed her rules.

  Now, down to this business of beer for a year…

  Calla sat at one of the dining tables in the rec room across from Winnie and tapped the table with a fingernail, freshly polished just for tonight. “Hellooo? Explain the pool. Beer for a year? Someone wanna fill me in?” She looked down at her feet where Twyla Faye had swiftly settled by her sneakers. Calla gave her a nudge. “Twyla Faye?”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “What good are you to me if you don’t do your job as my pet, Twyla Faye? Aren’t you supposed to be my faithful, loyal companion?”

  Twyla Faye harrumphed. “I think you have me confused with Lassie, Sugarplum. And as I get to recollectin’, you didn’t even want me as your pet.”

  Calla rolled her eyes. “Don’t you play the ‘poor, unwanted me’ game, miss. As I get to recollectin’, Sassy Pants, you didn’t exactly give me a choice. You were just there, under the cabinets back in the kitchen. Next thing I know, you were in the middle of my bed, demanding Egyptian cotton sheets and organic kale.”

  Twyla Faye was a familiar—a failure of a familiar, as far as her prior witch was concerned. She’d left the poor thing high and dry when she’d skipped town a month before Calla moved in and took over her grandfather’s building.

  As one of the rare werewolves in a town full of witches, Calla had no need for a familiar, but Twyla Faye had followed her home that very night and they’d been together—begrudgingly so, if you listened to TF—ever since.

  She was crusty, and difficult, and demanded only the best organic produce Calla could get her hands on, but she’d grown to love her saucy, unfiltered lizard.

  Twyla Faye tsked her disapproval with the flick of her tongue. “Oops. My bad. Surprise! You adopted an iguana. And speaking of Egyptian cotton, I’m off to take my mid-morning nap. I need to be well rested for my House of Cards binge-watch. That Kevin Spacey can whip whatever majority he wants outta me, honey.”

  With that, she scurried along the floor and through the kitchen, which led to the connecting upstairs apartment Calla shared with her grandfather.

  Calla’s eyes went to Winnie, narrowed and suspicious. “So, the pool. Explanations, anyone? Bueller?” Her gaze shot around the sunny rec room, where every one of her seniors was suspiciously otherwise engaged.

  Winnie avoided Calla’s eyes and mumbled somewhere in the vicinity of the floor. “Okay, so there might be people betting on whether you and Nash are going to make this relationship official tonight. But! It’s all from a good place.”

  “The place called free beer?” She wanted to be mad. She should be mad. But when Winnie said it came from a good place, she meant it. The people of Paris truly cared about her and Nash—and apparently, beer.

  “Okay, fine. I might as well tell you all of it. There’s chicken wings, too.” Winnie winced, guilt all over her face. “But it’s just a bucket. Not nearly as big as the beer, if you ask me.”

  “Well duh. Who in their right mind would pass up a bucket of chicken wings from Skeeter’s?”

  Glenda-Jo Ledbetter clucked her tongue from the corner of the room as she peered at her hand of cards. “I passed ’em up.”

  Calla beamed a smile at her. “Aw. For me? You’re my favorite witch ever, Glenda-Jo.”

  “I didn’t do it for you, Legs. I did it because they give me indigestion. Spent near two hours in the latrine last time I had ’em. Never again,” Glenda Jo said on a grin, to the tune of raucous cackling from the other witches she was playing canasta with.

  Winnie redirected Calla’s attention by snapping her fingers. “Forget all that. Get to the part where you tell me why you were at Miss Dottie’s for a wax. It has to be because you’re going to take this relationship to a deeper level.”

  Calla raised one eyebrow and grabbed a stack of cloth napkins to fold for the impending lunch hour. “How much ya got riding on it?”

  “Twenty bucks,” she confessed, her eyes downcast, but her shoulders shaking with laughter. “Now, the wax. It has meaning. I just know it.”

  Calla shrugged and feigned indifference, trying to hide her smile. “Not necessarily true. Sometimes we wax so we can wear bikinis to prevent people from pointing and laughing, or calling in the Bigfoot enthusiasts even.”

  “Because there’s so much ocean here in Paris, Texas, that you have a need for a bikini?” Winnie teased.

  “Well now, there’s the community pool. If I showed up looking like the long-lost relative of Sasquatch, the way people talk in this town, the ladies of the Bluebonnet Society would be taking up collections for a case of Bic razors before you could say ‘unsightly hair’.”

  Winnie scoffed. “The community pool’s been drier than the Mohave ever since little Rhoda Lipstein was practicing elemental spells and drained it. The lifeguard said there was no reason to refill it since the season was almost over. So try again.”

  Okay, so she’d gotten a wax. Guilty as charged. But when she didn’t confirm or deny the state of her wax, W
innie poked her.

  “Look here, Calla, we’ve all watched for three solid months while you and our favorite cowboy Nash Ryder have circled each other like a clumsy duo, dancing the tango on Dancing with the Stars. We’ve waited. We’ve held our collective breath until we were all blue in the face. In fact, I’m pretty sure Patsy Pinkerton did turn blue in the face at one point. One of my wayward parolee witches even did a mating dance ritual with one hand tied behind her back while she read Shakespearean sonnets on the second night of the full moon at exactly 2:08 a.m. in order to—”

  “A Shakespearean mating dance? Did it go something like, ‘How do I bang thee? Let me count the ways’?” Calla was still getting used to how close-knit this community was, how they rallied around when you were down and stuck their witchy noses into everyone’s business with the staunch justification it was for your own good, like it or not.

  Winnie threw a hand up and shook her head, strands of her dark hair falling from her ponytail to brush at her jawline. “That’s Browning, and don’t deflect, werewolf.”

  Living in a small town full of witches had taken some getting used to as a werewolf. But when her grandfather had decided to give up the building he owned, complete with an enormous four-thousand-square-foot storefront in the center of town, she’d jumped at the chance to return to the place she’d spent so many amazing, if not hotter-than-Hades summers.

  Because she’d desperately needed a fresh start. Because the grind of Boston and her job as a personal assistant to the Dark Overlord, aka Reed Redding—famous local talk show host and all around anus-head—had sucked the will to live right out of her. She’d come here for a simpler, quieter life, and she’d gotten it in spades.

  In the process, she’d reconnected with Nash Ryder, the mad crush of her teenage dreams. Tall, dark, handsome, sexy, funny, panty-melting warlock Nash—who now owned his family’s ranch just on the outskirts of town.

  And a cowboy hat. He owned one of those, too. Oh, that cowboy hat did things to her she couldn’t quite describe.

  There weren’t enough adjectives in the land to depict the extent of Nash’s yumminess.

  They hadn’t seen each other since her last summer here, when she was eighteen, almost eleven years ago. Yet, the moment she’d seen him again when he’d come in to pick up his ranch hand’s mother for his surprise birthday party, it was as though only eleven seconds had passed rather than over a decade.

  Winnie nudged her shoulder with a pink-tipped fingernail. “Hello in there. Deflection. You’re doing it.”

  “Me? Deflect? I wasn’t deflecting. I was changing the subject.” Because it was sore. So sore.

  Winnie clucked her tongue, brushing her long, dark ponytail over her shoulder before throwing one of Ben’s bibs across it. “Well, maybe that’s how all you fancy Bostonians avoid a straight answer, but here in Paris, we demand the right to stick our busy noses in where they don’t belong, don’t we Mr. Wiffle?”

  George Wiffle sucked air between his dentures and dipped his graying head to hide his laughter, folding his hands over his round belly. “A-yup. ’Specially if we’re gonna get some beer.”

  Winnie’s eyes twinkled. “Now, we all want to know. Are you finally going to do poor Nash tonight and put us out of our misery?”

  Calla toyed with the plastic-lace tablecloth and continued to pretend not to know what Winnie was talking about. “Define ‘we all’?”

  Winnie rolled her eyes and tapped the table. “You know damn well who ‘we all’ means, but if you want a list, I can oblige. First, me, every employee at Miss Marjorie’s, including Miss Marjorie, me, BIC aka Greta, me, all of the seniors here at the center, me, Daphne and her husband Fate, not to mention every employee who’s ever worked at the hardware store since 1952, me, the Paris High School marching band, and pretty much anyone else with a pulse—and again, me. We all want to know if tonight’s the big night when you two seal the wookie-wook deal.”

  Calla swallowed hard, shaking off the bad she’d left behind in Boston and replacing it with the good she’d found here in Paris—in a town full of witches and warlocks where she was only one of four or five werewolves, including her grandfather.

  She was a nervous wreck about tonight. The walking, talking embodiment of neurosis—because, in fact, tonight was the night.

  Winnie’s little girl Lola came up behind Calla and asked, in all her six-year-old innocence, “What’s wookie-wook?”

  Lola was one of Calla’s favorite visitors to Hallow Moon ever. Before her uncle Ben had married Winnie, Calla had heard she was quite a handful of toddler witch, out of control, but you’d mostly never know it these days.

  She pulled Lola to her lap and tweaked her pert nose with a grin. “It might be a new name for one of my super-duper cupcakes, Lola-Falola. Will you be my taste-tester if I make a batch of wookie-wooks?”

  The pink in her cheeks heightened, and her sweet smile went wide. “Uh-huh. But I think we better find a new name for ’em. Wookie-wook is stupid.”

  “Out of the mouths of one of the most powerful up-and-coming witches in the universe,” Winnie muttered under her breath with a shake of her head.

  Lola, a witch in training, was a tiny powerhouse of magic and a direct descendant of the great Baba Yaga, who just happened to be Winnie’s aunt by marriage.

  Calla smoothed one of Lola’s long braids and chuckled. “It kinda is a stupid name. I’ll let you think up a new one. How’s that?”

  Winnie handed Lola a napkin and pointed to her mouth, indicating she should wipe the crumbs from the corner. “Why don’t you go finish that picture you were drawing with Miss Gertie so Miss Calla has something nice to hang on her kids wall, nugget? And when I’m done we’ll go get Uncle Ben.”

  Winnie’s husband Ben was technically Lola’s uncle, left to him to raise after her mother and father were killed in an accident. But you’d never know it by the way the family had blended so beautifully or by the way Winnie and Lola felt about each other.

  Winnie was Lola’s mother in every sense of the word, aside from biology.

  Lola grinned and hopped off her lap to head back toward the area she’d designated especially for the children in town when they came to visit their relatives. Calla loved nothing more than to see the pictures they colored for the wall or the dinosaurs they built with Legos when she entered the center each morning.

  Winnie leaned closer, her raven eyebrow raised. “Now, about that wookie-wook…”

  “What’s so special about tonight that would lead you to believe anything is happening between me and Nash other than the usual dates we’ve been going on regularly?”

  Winnie giggled, settling little Ben against her shoulder and patting his back. “The Harvest Dance, of course. Duh.”

  Calla barked a laugh. This town and their celebrations and their gossip were all part of the reason she’d grown to love Paris so much. “Does the Harvest Dance have some special magic that inspires sealing the wookie-wook deal?”

  “It did for Beulah-Mae and Ed Kowalski. They did it right on a bale of hay on the side of the gazebo just outside the VFW hall in the square during the fall festival of 2013, and had their triplets nine months later. Three little witches in training. Two girls and a boy. Just ask Miss Marjorie. She almost saw it. Also, there’s Nester and Rhonda Goodwin. Their seal-the-deal story is still bandied about in hushed whispers to this day, mostly because I’ve heard rumor it was a pretty raucous event, and that happened way back in ’82. Thus, I conclude, the Harvest Dance really is magical. So you tell me?”

  Calla laughed again, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Okay, so just between you and me and the Paris High School marching band, BIC, and anyone else who’s interested,” she paused for dramatic effect and drew in a breath, “it’s no one’s business but mine and Nash’s.”

  Winnie made a pouty face, her pink- glossed lower lip thrusting forward. “Boo-hiss. How about if I pinky swear not to tell a soul?”

  “Oh, for sure if you pinky swear, I
’d give up intel that sensitive. Pinky swears are sacred and bound by horrific punishments if broken. Or not.”

  Gus Mortimer shambled up to them, stopping to lean down near Winnie, a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, his grin wicked. “You want me to whip up one of them tell-all spells? We’ll have her singin’ like a canary in no time.”

  Calla pointed to the air-hockey table. “You, go get your air hockey on with Miss Maisey and mind your P’s and Q’s or you only get one vegetable with dinner tonight, pal, and absolutely no fruit cup,” she teased.

  He stuck his tongue out at her, the flaps of his old pilot’s hat bobbing. “You’re the meanest old-geezer babysitter in the land.”

  Winnie reached for her hand and grinned when she patted it. “You do know I’m just razzing you, right? That I would never pressure you to tell me if you’re finally going to commit to Nash by making his eyeballs roll to the back of his head unless you really, really, really wanted to share.”

  Calla loved Winnie—from the second she’d come into the senior center at the very end of her pregnancy and brought four dozen cupcakes for the seniors. Cupcakes she’d sworn she was going to eat all on her own in an effort to crowd little Ben out of her uterus via cake batter and a rush of sugar.

  She loved that, to hear people in town tell it, Winnie had overcome some huge obstacles of her own when she’d first arrived in Paris. But what she loved most about Winnie was that she helped others with their obstacles, too, by continuing the legacy Ben’s sister had begun, running a halfway house for witches who were on parole for magic abuse—the very position Winnie had been in just a little over a year ago.

  Calla treasured their almost immediate friendship, but this night with Nash was a touchy subject for her—almost too touchy even for girl talk with Winnie. She’d never confided what happened to anyone, but it would be the first intimate encounter she’d had with a man since…

  “Oh, you would too pressure me.” But it wasn’t malicious pressure. It was done in the spirit of girl-bonding, and Calla knew that in her heart.